These essays only are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
On Sunday, April 12, 1992, James Nicholas Bucci was one of ninety people to die that day from AIDS-related infections. He was seventeen days shy of his thirty-first birthday. Originally from L.A., Nick had moved with his lover Sammy and friend James first to Atlanta and then New York, where I first met him at a midtown legal publisher. We worked together there as copy editors in 1986 and 1987. After a while, a core group of about seven of us—copy editors all—started hanging out together. We went out on Friday nights for drinks, went to each others’ parties, ate lunch together, collected and covertly “published” a massive volume of legalese bloopers, and plotted ways out of the dead-end jobs we were in. We developed a kind of foxhole camaraderie. Eventually, we moved on to other jobs, but stayed in touch. Nick stayed on at our original place of employment and got promotions until he was forced to leave after his first bout of PCP.
For the next four years, Nick shuttled between his family in L.A. and his friends in New York. We became his second family to varying degrees, moving him and his ever-decreasing amount of possessions from apartment to apartment, visiting him in the hospital, doing whatever needed to be done as he got sicker and sicker. He gave James his power of attorney, and together, he and Jennifer were there when he needed someone to take care of medical and legal details for him. Collectively, we took care of the funeral arrangements, of scattering part of his ashes here and sending the rest to friends in Venice, California, of packing up his things and sending them back to his mother, Jackie, in L.A.
Nick’s death stunned me completely, more than I expected it to. After all, I’d had four years to prepare for it and we weren’t close friends. Regardless, for four months after Nick died, I did nothing but sit and play solitaire, finding myself oddly devastated by this loss. If Nick and I had been closer, this depression would have made sense in some way. Losing him felt like losing someone who was more than just the casual friend he was. I began to wonder how others got through the grief for people they really loved a great deal. I began to wonder how my gay friends coped with watching their friends and lovers disappear this way, over and over and over again.
I started writing these letters to Nick on the advice of another friend who had lost her only child, a son, in a car wreck some years before. She too had gone into a depression after his death and had only managed to get out of it by writing daily letters to him. I took the first three to my friend Laurie, who sat patiently through them as I read them between sobs. After she urged me to continue writing them, I was astonished at the rate at which the letters began to pour out of me.
I suppose in some way, these letters are conversations that we might have had if Nick had lived and we’d become better friends. I started writing in part to explain to myself and other friends how I felt my life had changed, how I had changed personally because of Nick’s sickness and death; I hope someone else might read this and find some affirmation of their own experiences here, because nothing brings quite as much relief as knowing you’re not the only person who’s enduring something catastrophic. They’ve been a form of therapy, too—a way of figuring out what happened, why it hurt so much, of why I was grieving so much for someone I hadn’t known that well. They’re also a way of honoring Nick and others who’ve died of AIDS, and of acknowledging the losses of those left behind, acknowledging that life is like this now for so many people, too many people all over the world, gay and straight.
I’m not a PWA myself, and can’t possibly begin to write about that experience with any kind of authority at all. I wish Nick could have written his own story; I think he would have been a fine writer if he’d hadn’t been robbed of both time and mental ability by this disease. I wish he could have written any story but that one. But this book isn’t just about Nick, either. It’s about some of the people who came to love him here in New York, about how our lives were changed by him and gutted by the disease from which he suffered. Quite a lot of it takes place inside my head, because that’s what I know best. I’m certainly not the first person to have lost a friend to AIDS; I wish I were the last. But I’m not, and I hope this might help others make some sense of what happened to them and their friends, too.
These essays/letters are also about the issues that surround AIDS, at least in this country: health care, prejudice, discrimination, grief, research, politics, and activism. I think many people resist the notion that dying of AIDS is different from dying of anything else. It’s one of the top five killers of young people in the country. The others—heart disease, cancer, accidents and violence—have been around for a long time. AIDS has only become a killer in the last decade. It’s like having a war break out and not only never stopping, but having no end in sight. We’re in a war zone now, one that’s killing kids and teenagers and adults, women and men, people of all colors, as indiscriminately as shelling and air strikes do. I hope that reading about what this disease does from the point of view of someone like me—a white, straight, female, morally conservative Christian—might wake some people up before their grandchildren, or teenagers, or another loved one is hit by this particular bombshell and they find themselves eating not just crow but one of those horrible potluck funeral meals.
-1996Since I started writing these essays a decade ago, treatment options for AIDS and HIV have changed for the better, making it a somewhat less dangerous and fatal disease to contract than when Nick died of it. Alarmingly, this seems to have made people more careless about getting it, as though it were no more harmful than, say, diabetes or high blood pressure. This makes me frantic for my younger friends, and it makes these essays seem unfortunately relevant again.
After more or less completing them in 1996, I’d let them sit on my hard drive, occasionally dragging them out to take to a new writing group to read, hoping somebody might be able to tell me what to do with them. They didn’t seem publishable in much of any format, at least not in print, and though I’ve been online and computer literate almost from the start, this is the first I’ve really had need of a website. Thankfully, the Web is a forgiving medium, and here they are, at last, in a very public forum, available to more readers than I could ever have hoped would see them. I would much rather they were far more irrelevant than they seem, in the new reading I’ve given them, formatting them for the Web.
Instead, though some of the media events mentioned are obviously dated, the underlying ideas still need to be talked about. The war’s not over. We have new weapons, but they’re of limited value if we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Of course, I’m ten years older and wiser now, and it’s easy to forget how immortal we all felt in our 20s. Bad stuff always happens to someone else at that age. In view of that, I’m putting these essays out here, hoping they might strike some new but too-familiar notes in the next generation coming up behind us.
Please, learn from our mistakes. Be safe. Live long.
-2002
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Dear Nick,
I think you should know that you died at a really inconvenient time. I mean, my God—Saturday night? You, of all people, should know better. Have a little consideration. Why couldn’t you have dragged us all out of work or something? (“Oops! Sorry, gotta go, boss. I’ll be back when he’s dead. This shouldn’t take too long.”) We could have at least gotten an afternoon off. And if you’d planned it for the middle of the week, we could have milked it for a long weekend too. Death leave and all that, although I guess they don’t give you that for just friends. Well, it would have been worth a try, anyway.
But, oh no, not you! Ever the drama queen, you had to go into the hospital for that last great scene on a Saturday afternoon, upstaging everybody’s recreational plans. Your timing for Jen and me couldn’t have been better. We had tickets to see the Public Theatre’s production of “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” (fondly known as “Too Bad She’s a Slut,” and noted for a plot worthy of a spot on Oprah), but instead, we spent the evening with you, alternating between bad dialogue on the phone and terrible acting at your bedside. You have no idea how hard we worked to get you a good audience, either. It wasn’t easy, you know. People do have social lives, especially on a Saturday night.
And what did we get in return? The privilege of sorting through your dirty sheets and underwear the week after. I mean, it’s not like you left much. There was more medical equipment than anything. Some college kids in your building really cleaned up (we gave them your Armani suits and the furniture, such as it was) but all Jen and I took away were some photographs, one shirt each and some of your tapes. And I know you must have told all our friends—behind my back!—to let me take your color TV. That’s exactly your idea of a bad joke. You knew what a video idiot I’d turn into if I owned a tv that had to have cable. It’s your fault I’m addicted to “Hometime,” the Cartoon Channel, and “Forever Knight” (I can just hear you: “A vampire series set in Toronto? Get real, girlfriend! Who’d wanna bite anemic Canadians?”). I suppose that’s your idea of a ten percent agent’s fee. And after the publicity work we did for you, too.
James was already there when Jen and I arrived, and so was Sammy. For being a couple of former crackheads, you’d have thought they’d have been out doing something better than waiting around for you to go into the hospital for the last time. Well, I guess they had to be there, as your former roommates. And Sammy couldn’t really not show, as your ex- lover. Anyway, I guess your social life kind of diminishes with Kaposi’s and ARC. (James’s lesions weren’t really obvious though, and Sammy still looked pretty good, if a little thin.) Steve and Joel arrived as I was coming out of your room, and I know those two had something else planned, probably involving performance art, leather, and nipple clamps. Fran and Dave weren’t home when I called them, but I left them a message and they showed up later, after dinner and a movie. What a way to cap off an evening. (“Oh, honey, listen, I’ve got this great idea: let’s go to that new restaurant in the Village, see that film at the Angelica and then go down to Beekman and watch Nick die. What do you think?”) Even your mom, in L.A. with a three hour time difference, was hard to find. Once we did get hold of her though, she was ready to just hop that plane right out to New York to catch your shtick. What a jet setter. We told her not to bother because by the time she got here, she’d have missed the last act anyway. We gave her an hourly synopsis instead and told her we’d ship her the proceeds. But Susie—forget it. I don’t know what Susie was doing. It was all just too fraught with fraughtness for her, I think. She’s always liked comedy better than high drama.
Can’t say I blame her. Face it, you weren’t really up for it. It wasn’t one of your finer efforts. I’ve seen better death scenes on soap operas. But I know it was a tough room and you were winging it. On top of that, the script wasn’t the best and none of us knew whether to laugh or cry. We cracked a lot of really bad jokes too, like the one about you going out just the way you’d have liked: stoned. But the curtain calls—Geeze. Give it a rest. We were there from two in the afternoon until after eleven, well after the waiting room closed. When the house management finally threw us out, we’d no sooner gotten home than they called to tell us the encores were over. You couldn’t do it while we were all there, could you?
I still wonder if you did that on purpose. I mean, did you think we were going to applaud?
Yours, really pissed.
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Dear Nick,
It’s been almost a year since Sammy and James scattered your ashes in Times Square and Venice Beach. This is the first I’ve really been able to sit down and think about you without being swamped by inertia; for four months after you died, the only thing I could do was sit playing solitaire. Whenever Jen and I got together, all we talked about was you, and how we were always seeing you on the street. The man we saw wasn’t the one in that hospital bed, though. The Nick I kept catching glimpses of was 6 feet tall, weighed 180, and could have swum the Narrows. There wasn’t much life left in the 98 pounds you weighed when I last saw you. You died a couple of hours later, just shy of your 31st birthday.
I hope you know I was there, even when I wasn’t. It was so painful to watch you deteriorate—a year younger than me, the flesh sliding from your bones like wax from a candle—that I couldn’t often bear to be with you in the flesh. But you were never far from my thoughts. I wish now, as one always does, that I had been more attentive, stopped by more often, called. When I was younger, I would have, but it shreds my insides now to watch people suffering. It makes me angry, which is what I do to keep from being scared.
It made me angry that you had to die the way you did, full of tubes, isolated from your friends and family, alone, in pain. And I’m scared—not that I’ll die that way—but that others I love will, that my parents might. When I went in to see you in intensive care, they made us put on surgical masks, an absurdity which only astounded me later, when I’d had time to think about it. I mean, how our germs possibly could have harmed you then, when you were dying, I can’t imagine. In retrospect, it seems more like a ritual performed even though its significance has been lost, as though we might once have put on those masks to shield us from the presence of death, to disguise ourselves from it, so it wouldn’t take us too. But we no longer believe in death as an entity in itself, and like everything else in our mass-produced society, they weren’t even masks we had created for ourselves with that purpose in mind, for this particular ceremony. It’s all done very badly now, in a very slipshod, cold, misdirected manner, hiding us from the wrong person. Worshipping Science, we’ve lost the instructions for this ritual. If anything, this sanitized distance makes us more afraid of death.
Which is not to say I think death is anything but an outrage. Just the fact that almost all of us fight it so ferociously says to me that we weren’t really meant to die. If the afterlife is so wonderful, why does getting there scare the shit out of us? And if there’s nothing at all after death, which I think more likely, how much more appropriate that we fight tooth and nail to avoid disappearing into oblivion? If it were possible for the dead to ask for anything, wouldn’t it be more life? I know the living would ask that for them. I would ask it for you. At 33, I’m just beginning to feel I might be gaining some wisdom and maturity. You died before that process could progress very far. How can that be right?
In saying this, I’m assuming that the universe makes sense, has some kind of logic behind it, if only because it works so well without anybody’s intervention. Even chaos is not what we thought it was. So how does death make sense? How can it, without faith? Not dogma, not religion in its original sense, because faith doesn’t bind. It releases. But Biblical faith, the “assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld. ” And the only way death makes sense in this sort of universe is as a travesty of the original purpose of human life.
I know that, nominally, you were a Catholic, and this is something else I wish we’d talked about. In the year you died, Nick, five other people I knew died too. An old friend of mine from my childhood watched both of her parents die within a two months of each other, her father of a stroke, her mother of cancer that was already devouring her when her husband died. Two more of my friends back home lost their father to a heart attack, and another’s dad died of a chronic lung disease that probably was due to being in Hiroshima after the A-bombing. And Tom, a faithful man in my home congregation, died of hypothermia after wandering lost for several hours, a bit addled at 83.
I’ll miss Tom the most of all these other deaths. Like you, he was very funny, and very intense, and he had always been a bit preoccupied. He once mailed a banana and didn’t discover it until he looked for the lunch his wife had packed and discovered an envelope in the bag instead of his dessert. He was a foot-in-the-door evangelizer, who often embarrassed the people who accompanied him; I always figured he had earned the right to be fervent, having been jailed for that faith in World War II. We called him Jehu the chariot driver because he drove like a man in battle—a little in-joke of the kind Bible students tend to make. The only thing that made his death—and yours—bearable at all, is the faith I have that I’ll see you both again, and that when I do, you’ll be healthy and laughing and will probably even have hair. If I’m lucky enough to be there, I might not recognize you. Wouldn’t that be funny?
The night you died, I had a dream I was dying myself, and that my friend John, who has introduced me to some wonderful music and to many ideas that have shaped my thinking, was helping me pack up and distribute my things to the right people. Then he took me out to the beach, wrapped me in a blanket, and sang to me all the songs we’d ever sung together. I woke feeling loved and serene. That dream came from a couple of places, I think, besides my own horror of seeing you die that way. As we were sitting in the intensive care waiting room, Steve told us about a friend of his who had himself kidnapped from the hospital by his friends when he was dying, and taken to the Grand Canyon to die looking out over its rim. And it came from having never been at a deathbed in adulthood.
My grandfather died of cancer when I was about seven, and when my Mom and I went over to see him at home before they took him to the hospital, my uncle—the one nobody in the family liked—called me in to see Grampa, saying he was asking for me. I was his favorite grandchild so I suppose that might have been true, but by the time I saw him, he was just barely conscious and drooling. My mother was so angry at my uncle for making sure this was my last memory of my grandfather that she drove away at 90 miles an hour and didn’t speak to my uncle again for five years. But I don’t remember my grandfather only in that deathbed; memory is a good editor. At least at his bedside, none of us had masks and I could kiss him goodby without the intervening taste of cotton.
I won’t remember you only in this way either, eventually. I’ll remember you sitting at the White Horse Tavern with Fran and Dave, me, Susie, Steve, and a bunch of other people from Bender when we all went out to celebrate my getting a new job. You were drinking and smoking and talking with Susie about going out to find some grass in Washington Square. I guess the two of you stayed out half the night looking for hash. Susie confessed later that the two of you almost went to bed together just because you were curious about what it was like to sleep with a woman. Susie hadn’t had sex in four years at that point and probably would have slept with anyone for whatever reason. And even then you were carrying the virus that killed you.
You were hilarious that night, a consummate storyteller playing your audience, drinking gin-and-tonics and getting wittier and more cynical with each one. You bought drinks for everyone, throwing away your thin paycheck for the sake of fun. The next two weeks you borrowed money and lived on Bucci-family-recipe spaghetti. The predominant joke after your memorial service was that, having grown up in L.A. and moved to New York, you’d now be truly bicoastal with your ashes scattered in both places. It’s the kind of joke you would have made yourself, if you’d been around to. I’m surprised you never did. You joked about so many of the other awful things about having AIDS.
Like that time you and I moved Jennifer out of her illegal fifth-floor walk-up: She was leaving for Ireland the next day, had just found out two days before that she was being evicted, and just barely found a new apartment to move to. Jen didn’t have much, so it only took us a few hours, but the climb was murder and we drank gallons of water. Halfway through, at about 2 a.m., I remember you standing on the curb saying in your best melodramatic, bitchy queen voice, “I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m a sick man. I have a terminal disease,” even though you’d been asymptomatic up to that point. About six months later, you went into the hospital with PCP for the first time. That was the first slip.
You got much closer to Jen than to me after that. The two of you had a lot in common: painful childhoods, moves to New York to start new lives, a spirit of experimentation, sexual and otherwise. It was Jen you called first when you went into the hospital, Jen and James who claimed your body. It wasn’t you, she said, lying in the morgue, just some inert organic compounds wearing your face. It seemed to surprise her.
Then there’s the night you and I went to that little cafe somewhere in the West Village—8th or 9th Avenue, I think, and sat around until late, drinking cafe au lait at a window table, watching the rain and talking. That was the night I discovered you—like me—loved Chandler’s detectives and old jazz: Miles, Bird, Coltrane, Billie and Sarah. We seemed to have the same vision of The City, having come to New York looking for the 40’s, when men wore fedoras and took their dates to the Stork Club. I can’t remember what else we talked about, and you weren’t your usual manic self. It was the first time I saw your serious side. That flip attitude hid a very intelligent romantic.
You know, I’ve never been able to find that cafe again. I think it’s a noddle shop now.
Lewis Thomas wrote in one of his essays that death is probably more painful for the living who are watching than the dying who are experiencing it, although if we’re not just making that up remains to be seen. Are all the things the living tell one another about dying lies? I guess only you can answer that now. Whatever the truth, we tell them to make ourselves feel better, not to comfort the dying. In dying, you were already somewhere beyond any comfort we could give you, except the comfort of love. I hope that was how you ended: surrounded by love and at peace, knowing you were secure in the memories, not just of your friends, but in the memory of the person who can remember you so well that you live again.
Yours, looking for truth.
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Dear Nick,
Your death in April was the start of one of the hardest years of my life. I’ll get you for this. So will the rest of my friends. In the weeks following your death, I called all the ones most at-risk, including Paul and Rob, and fiercely demanded they practice safe sex. The night you died, at one o’clock in the morning, I was on the phone to Chicago with Paul, blurting out that you were dead. He didn’t even know you, except second hand, but that didn’t matter. Everyone in my circle of friends here already knew it, and we were all too busy hurting to comfort one another much. The two bonds I was counting on then were the one that stretched between me and Paul back to first grade and the one that grows between two people who’ve lost friends. A few months before, he’d called me at a similar hour from his friend Scott’s wake, drunk on champagne and in high hilarity, the kind that’s so fragile it turns to tears like a switch has been thrown. It scared me, because I was too far away to do anything about it, and because I knew I’d be doing it too, sometime soon.
As luck would have it, I missed your wake. I came down with a vicious sinus infection (probably from crying so much) and had a 103° fever that day. I didn’t think it would make that much of a difference, but it has. I wish I’d been there. Jen told me later there were some great Nick stories floating around, and I wish I’d heard them. Not just for the sake of hearing them and remembering you in better days, but in that atmosphere, with friends, for the value of the ceremony itself. I’ve always thought wakes were a great idea. Forget the solemn funeral crap. Get a keg of good beer, as many pitchers of margaritas as it takes, play the Stones and the Spin Doctors and tell rude stories about me. (“That bitch was always sobbin’ at somethin’” “Yeah, even a AT&T commercial. She was too much.”) I wanted to be with people who knew you and could show me sides of you I had never seen. And I wanted to forge those bonds like the one between Paul and me. You can’t do that without some sort of ritual, even if only one of you is participating in it.
For about a week after that Saturday night, I wanted nothing so much as a fireplace to smash cheap glasses in. I wanted to dance, to shout, to do something, anything. Right after Jen called me with the news, I felt compelled to give you a last salute with a shot of tequila before calling Sammy. Afterwards, I really wanted to throw the glass at something. It had become a ceremonial object, something that should never be drunk out of again, that should end its usefulness as you had ended your life.
I remember feeling that way when Jim Henson died too, a few years before you did. I don’t know why—I didn’t even know the man—but it really put a gash in my psyche. I wrote a whole long riff in my journal about why his death was such a loss, but it was completely inadequate. In another life, he would have been a Master Bard, and there aren’t many of them left; that’s as close as I can get to it. It still makes me sad to see Kermit the Frog and hear him talking with someone else’s voice.
The year he died, I spent New Year’s out at my friend Laurie’s beach house in Quogue with her and a mutual friend. (Okay, okay, I know that would get me one of those “Miss Thing” looks—but you’d like Laurie and her folks, trust me.) We didn’t do much but hang out, walk on the beach in the bitter cold, cook for each other together, and watch old movies, but it was one of the best vacations I’ve had in my life, right up there with Europe. On New Year’s Eve, as the year turned, we lit a fire, drank Bloody Marys and a little champagne, wrote plans for the coming year, and performed a ceremony I proposed. We wrote down ten things we wanted out of our lives on slips of paper, and one by one, alternately, said them aloud and threw them into the fire. Jim Henson’s death was one of the things I threw into those flames and, you know, I really felt unburdened after I’d done it. I wish I could think of something similar to do for your death, Nick.
The year before you died, I went to the first annual AIDS Dance-a-thon at Javits. I only brought in about $400, but I was glad I did it. I felt then like I was dancing for your life, for Steve’s life, maybe for Paul’s, for who knew how many of my other friends. Although officially you didn’t have to dance continuously the whole four hours, I did, pretty much, for at least 3 ½ . I danced myself into a sort of trance state, or at least I was trying to. I think I actually achieved it at some point, because I don’t remember much about it and it was a hell of a big party. I wanted to do it again the year we lost you, to try to put some closure on it all, but couldn’t raise enough money to get in the door since I wasn’t working in an office anymore. So I wound up sponsoring the bartender at Telephone, who seemed surprisingly impressed that I gave her $20. That doesn’t seem like much, even now, when I’m broke.
For several nights running after you died, I found myself putting Seal on my CD on repeat and dancing myself into exhaustion. It was the only way I could sleep. I’d drop into bed and cry and wake up stupid and puffy-eyed the next morning. No wonder I got sick. But I had to do something and dancing always seems so life-affirming, like sex used to be. I’ve been a dance fan for years (even actually took lessons—ballet and tap—as a kid, believe it or not), and even when it’s tragic, like Giselle, or some of Martha Graham’s work, the sheer beauty of the movement, the fact that there is movement, links it irrevocably to life. I was dancing, I think, not to call you back, but to remind myself that I was still here.
I still keep finding ways to say goodbye, because somehow it doesn’t feel quite final yet. Maybe that’s good, or maybe I’m just in denial. Anyway, when Jen and I were cleaning out your apartment, I took a pair of your jeans for the quilt I’ve been making for years and drew up an embroidery design for it: a pink triangle filled with satin stitched cranes, and your name and dates below it and The Big Sleep (Chandler—remember?) above it. I haven’t done the embroidery yet though. I’ve been thinking about making a piece for the AIDS Quilt for you too. And when I was up at St. John the Divine last week to hear the Monteverde 1610 Vespers, I stopped by the AIDS chapel and said goodby there too. I even almost bought a candle. But you’re Catholic, I’m a Jehovah’s Witness and it’s an Episcopal church; somehow it didn’t seem right.
And of course, I’ve been writing which, along with crying, are my two main functions in life. I’ve written you poems, and these letters too. Maybe that’s the best goodbye I can give you.
Yours, still dancing.
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Dear Nick,
Well, Jen’s in love. I can hardly have a conversation with her that doesn’t focus on the Polish Physicist. (Yeah, she’s still in that stage of it.) I don’t think you ever met him, but I think you would have gotten along all right. He’s more uptight than you are, but I think you’d have been good for him. This has got to be the longest courtship in Jen’s life. They’ve been “dating” for a year now, and he’s just worked up to kissing her on the lips and maybe lingering a little. It’s a novel situation for Jen, to go for a whole year without sleeping with whomever she’s dating.Anyway, this means that once again, I’m the only one of our group who’s not seeing anybody.
I did talk to my old boyfriend, Rob, the other night. We dated when I was in grad school in East Lansing and broke up after a trip out here during which he finally decided he was gay. I slept and cried most of the way home, lying in the back seat while he and Brian—the guy he had the hots for—sat in the front seat. I wasn’t ever really in love with Rob, I guess, although I thought I was at the time. After all, he was a great kisser. We both were terribly infatuated with each other and flirted shamelessly. I guess that’s why I couldn’t stay mad at him after we broke up. It was only a little hurt, not like the big one that came later and left me angry and bitter and hollow. In fact, it was kind of nice the other night to flirt with flirting again and be able to laugh about it. He asked if I was seeing anybody and when I said no, told me he’d found the perfect guy for me. I asked him how he knew I’d like this guy and Rob said cheerfully—“Because I want him, but he’s straight!” Needless to say, I cracked up. I probably would like him, whoever he is, in the same way I liked Joel immediately. Not that I was infatuated with Steve, but I did and do like him an awful lot.
I first met Joel, Steve’s lover, when I came out from your hospital bedside Saturday night. He was the only person standing in the hall then, and I was crying (my official function at any social event). I was, in fact, crying so hard that I could barely see, and I almost mistook Joel for Steve, they look that much alike. They’re practically twins physically—same height, same wiry build. Then there’s the multiple earrings, beards, long hair, boots, jeans and penchant for leather. Anyway, I managed to choke out “You must be Joel, I’m Lee,” and the next thing I knew, he’d wrapped me up in a hug. It had been a long time since I’d been held by anyone then, and it felt really good, even from a stranger. And Joel was so sweet. Here I was, some person he knew only as a mutual friend of yours and his lover Steve, and he’s holding me like I’m someone he really cares for. I could have stayed in his arms all night, and it had nothing to do with sexual attraction.
I don’t really remember, but I think he must have said something like “it’s okay to cry,” which is something I don’t hear very often, probably because I do it so much all my friends get sick of it. I cry at everything, which makes me into sort of a girl who cried (wolf). After seeing me choke up at a sitcom I’ve seen twice already, people stop paying attention to the fact that I’m crying. My friends who know me really well don’t even bother to comment when I get misty eyed, it happens so often. But I can’t help it. There’s just something about being the witness of other people’s pain or acts of kindness that chokes me up.
One of my friends who’s just getting to know me said to another friend that I’ve got this shell of steel around a core of marshmallow, and I suppose that’s true. All too often lately, I feel lacerated by other people’s pain. That’s why it was so hard to be in that room with you. Oddly enough, I don’t think I ever cried in front of you, before that night, probably because I was always too busy laughing at your jokes and stories. No, that’s not true—I cried the first time I saw you in the hospital when you had PCP, and it was you who told me it was okay. But I don’t know if you saw me crying this time behind the surgical mask or not, you were so far gone. I just kept saying, “I love you, Nick,” and crying and holding your hand.
And I felt—and was—so completely useless, too. I’m not used to being quite so lost anymore. Living in New York has given me the courage to do a lot of things I couldn’t do before, to speak up in a way I couldn’t before. But that night I was too wimpy to argue with the nurse about giving you morphine, too dazed to find the doctor to argue with him, too busy steeling myself to stay in that awful room with you—to make myself be there—to think about anything else but the fact that this was it, the moment we’d all been waiting for for the last four years. The hardest thing I’ve ever done is to be in that room with you, watching you suffer. It was such a relief when Steve arrived and I surrendered my mask to him, because we were only allowed in two at a time. And there was Joel, outside.
I always forget how much larger men are, until I’m held by one of them. It’s a nice feeling, to be in the arms of someone larger and stronger than you, in that kind of embrace. I really needed that comfort because I’ve always been the hard-ass for everyone else and this was suddenly—wham!—far beyond my coping capacity. Joel just stood there and held my head against his shoulder with his hand in my hair and rocked me a little. I was unutterably grateful for someone’s arms around me, someone who’d let me cry. Even so, as much as I needed that affirmation and comfort, the uptight WASP in my genes got hold of me and pulled away from Joel’s extraordinary gift. After all, he was a stranger, not even someone I knew. How could I continue to cry on him, much less completely break down and sob the way I wanted to? What would he think of me, for Christ’s sake? “You hysterical asshole, get a grip,” I told myself, apologizing to Joel for having the audacity to cry on him, to need that embrace and accept it from him, a total stranger. I’ve never thanked Joel properly for it, but I can’t help but think that that kindness will come back to him someday, either from me or someone else.
And anyway, why shouldn’t I have cried for you? What’s wrong with grief? When I lived in East Lansing, my friend John took me to see “Fanny and Alexander,” and the scene I remember most vividly was right at the beginning, where the wife is mourning her husband, walking up and down beside the coffin and actually wailing with grief. I remember one of my cousins-by-marriage doing the same thing at the funeral of her husband, although she’d known when she married him that he wouldn’t live long with the hole in his heart. My mother was completely disgusted with the “show” she “put on,” throwing herself across the coffin and weeping. I didn’t understand why then, and I don’t now. What makes her think such a show of emotions isn’t genuine? And who decided that it’s unseemly to wail—to howl—at death? The same people who decreed you can’t wear white after Labor Day? It’s like yelling “Stop! Thief!” We have, after all, been robbed, no matter what our beliefs in an afterlife or resurrection are. I’ve been robbed of your sense of humor, your wild tales, of the writer that might have bloomed inside you, Nick. I wouldn’t be writing you these fucking letters now, if I didn’t feel I’d been robbed of the opportunity to share things with you.
And all I can think now is that Steve, and Joel, are both HIV positive, and I’ll probably lose them both too, in the not-distant-enough future. Who’ll hold me then? And who will I have to hold? Where are you when I need you?
Yours, still sniveling unapologetically.
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Dear Nick,
I saw you again yesterday, in the lobby of my friend Steven’s apartment building, talking to a woman I didn’t know. My heart actually stopped for a split second and I got a dizzy adrenalin rush out of it. Cheap thrill. No doubt the state I was in contributed to it, but it was still a shock to see you standing there laughing, that expanse of shiny baldness reflecting the fluorescent lights.
Remember Steven? We spent our last Christmas together at his apartment, even though he didn’t know you. That’s the kind of guy he is. That year, he was volunteering at a food drop for homeless PWAs at the church across the street. He kept asking me to come down and help hand out bags of groceries with him, but I just couldn’t. I could barely cope with the thought that you were a PWA and getting sicker all the time.
Then, when you came back from California and went into the hospital again, Jen found you an apartment just a couple of blocks from Steven’s building, in Gramercy Park. She lied spectacularly to the landlord, telling him you were an exec on the road a lot, which was why she was getting the apartment for you. We knew he’d never rent a Gramercy apartment, even the not-at-all-posh one she found for you, to a PWA. She even put the security deposit on her credit card, knowing she’d probably never get it back because your dad had filched so much from your Social Security checks and bank account. We collected furniture, linens, a beautiful oriental rug from Carole—who’d only met you once—pots and pans, the works, and set it all up before you got out of the hospital. We spent a weekend cleaning it up and moving everything in for you. I was glad you had a nice place in a good neighborhood because we all knew it would be your last apartment.
And when Christmas rolled around, Steven invited you up to his duplex on Park with the motley assortment of his other friends who were at loose ends for the holidays: me, Jen, his Japanese neighbors Eiko and Wadi, and Guiseppi the Italian food critic, who lives alone and doesn’t cook. The food was great: boned turkey, glazed ham, two quiches (my contribution), salad, chestnut stuffing, spuds, and good wine. Having never celebrated Christmas, I’m not much of a critic, but it was a lovely evening, and you really rallied for it, sick as you were. It was a great audience and you worked it like old times. Shticks on the home shopping club, insomniac TV, tequila, crack. Steven wasn’t sleeping well himself at that time, and laughed more than the rest of us did. Should have been a clue, I guess.
The only awkward moment was when we were moaning about the economy and Steven mentioned converting his assets. Jen and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes. You were on welfare, Social Security, and Medicaid by then, I’d been laid off, and Jen had just started making over $30,000 for the first time—which ain’t much in this town. But you made some wise crack and the moment passed. You went home early, and we all more or less left when you did. I got you a taxi, kissed you goodbye, and headed home, feeling better about seeing you than I had in a long time.
So I guess it sort of made sense to see you there, in that particular lobby. As I say, it was probably my state of mind, at least in part. Having just poured an entire bottle of expensive champagne down Steven’s kitchen sink, I was on my way two blocks up the street to talk to Legs—remember Legs, the one who dumped Jen for Sinead O’Conner?—to get the number of the nearest AA meeting for Steven, who was drunk and crying at 1:30 in the afternoon. It’s been a bad year for him too. Actually, a bad couple of years, since his mom died. Before that too, I think. Hell, maybe it’s just been a bad life. Sometimes it is. But it beats the hell out of being dead, doesn’t it? I don’t believe any of us want to die—you certainly didn’t—but I’m amazed at how many people seem terrified by the idea of not doing it.
Science writer Timothy Ferris thinks that with all our ancestors living, we’d never be able to make a decision without consulting them back to great, great, great, great grandmother Muriel. With all these living relatives, “no person is whole,” he says. “No person is free.” I can only assume he thinks we are whole and free now, with the people we love dying around us. Looking at the state of my friends, I can’t say I agree. Examining my own heart, I know it’s not so.
If it comes to that, none of us will ever be free the way he seems to imply. And what a tragedy if we were! To be free of the influence of our relatives is truly to cease to exist. The Nature vs. Nurture debate is an old one, and we still don’t know which is more influential (I suspect both about equally), but genetics, at least cannot be disregarded. Coded into us are the traits of all our ancestors, as undisregardable as the shape of our face, whether we actually express those traits or not. Sometimes we only need the right catalyst, like the presence of an allergen, to make them evident. You could no more disregard the centuries of Italian relatives in your gene pool, than I can the generations of German peasants and minor Scottish nobility in mine. No more than any of us can deny safely our interconnectedness with the other people sharing our planet. The past already weighs heavily on most of us, but it is only the immediate past of our own short lives. If the vast memory of immortality were behind us, perhaps we’d gradually quit making the same mistakes over and over every generation. Then we would be whole and free.
Then I wouldn’t be seeing your ghost in building lobbies or comforting friends who are afraid of finding out who they are.
Yours, under the influence.
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Dear Nick,
It’s time to tell your doppelgangers to go home, especially since they just ignore me when I see them. Today on the train, on my way into NYU to post flyers for my business, you got on at Ninth Street and sat down in the seat right in front of mine and didn’t even say hello. Some nerve. It was your bald, bristly head, that robust swimmer’s physique, and those slightly sunken, haunted eyes. I was reminded of how handsome you were. Really, it was uncanny how much this guy looked like you. I think he was a little taller and bulkier, but with a pair of glasses, he could have been you in our Bender days.
He was wearing one of those J. Peterman canvas coats, jeans, a T-shirt, and boots and sat in the seat perpendicular to mine with his back against the wall. You’d probably give me one of your patented “Miss Thing” look for this, but I had my sunglasses on, in part because it was a nice day upstairs and I was too lazy to take them off, and in part because—if they’re dark enough—nobody knows you’re studying them. So I stared, shamelessly and undetected. He’d shaved his head, but from where I was sitting—on the outside seat facing forward—his five o’clock shadow revealed the same, typical “male pattern” baldness you had. He looked good as a skinhead. You would have too, if you hadn’t been so sick then. After a while, he leaned forward so his head was about two feet from me, in profile. I got absolutely fascinated by the shape of his ears, the way the top of it whorled up and over and around from his skull and curled into the inside of his ear in a curve that was almost geometric. Beautiful, really. I wanted to reach out and trace it with one finger. I wondered what he’d do or say if I did.
A while ago, after I got hooked by The Joy Luck Club, I read a book by an American woman about her experiences teaching for a year in China. Although it was depressingly negative (Mark Saltzman’s Iron and Silk was a good antidote), I remember her describing two of her students, two men sitting side by side with their arms around each other in a very casual manner, one of them absently tracing the curve of the other’s ear. She said that in China, it’s not uncommon to see young women holding hands with one another walking down the street, or young men leaning against each other in conversation. It was very shocking to her, but the image it conjured up for me was lovely. That unabashed physicality was one of the few things I liked about Paris too.
When I was a kid, my cousin and I used to have that sort of relationship. We were both only children, just 2 months apart in age. From the time we were about eight, we spent six weeks of the summer and a week at Christmas together. She was the closest thing I had to a sister. We brushed each other’s hair just for pleasure, sat up against one another, held and hugged each other, undressed in front of each other, gave each other back rubs, sometimes we got in bed together and snuggled. We had a comfortable familiarity with each other’s bodies. I guess this is what sisters do, but I wouldn’t know—none of my close friends had any very near them in age when we were kids. Anyway, for a long time, we measured the depth of our friendship by how honest we could be with one another about our bodies: “You have crotch odor. ” “That big zit on your nose just popped.” And the dreaded yet ubiquitous, “You’re getting fat.”
She didn’t come over the summer I was home from my freshman year at college. Instead, she called me up to tell me how guilty she felt about all that touching, all that closeness, all that familiarity, as though it had been wrong. Suddenly, that closeness had become tainted with sexuality to her and she drew away. It caused a huge rift in our relationship. She’d always been kind of embarrassed by sex anyway; it was one of the few things we didn’t really talk about, even though we went through all those horrible hormonal changes together. There’s still none of that “girl talk” between us. At the time, I felt like she was accusing me of being a lesbian because I was the one who wanted to hang on to that physical closeness we had. I’d only just met any lesbians that year at the women’s college I was attending, and didn’t have a real good grip on what it was all about anyway, so her guilt made me feel guilty in a way it wouldn’t now. In hindsight, I think she was just as afraid she was one because she liked it too, and even more clueless about it than I was.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Laurie (who went to college with me) read me a poem that contained a line about getting into bed with a female friend. We were critiquing each other’s work and she suddenly looked up and said, “Is somebody going to read that like we were, you know, in bed together?” Truthfully, I’d thought that too, at first, and it saddens me that I did. It’s not at all what she meant, and it was perfectly obvious from the context. But now that I’m a grown-up, everything has been sexualized: kissing, touching, holding hands, snuggling under the covers, hugging, even a back rub. My cousin’s guilt was only the first manifestation of an attitude I realize is way too common. My freshman year at college, the rumor mill ground out that my friend Cathy and I were having a gay affair because we’d been seen hugging one another on the Commons during Spring Weekend. The truth of the matter was that we were in the early part of our friendship and realized that we’d found soulmates in each other, and it was a marvelous feeling that needed an embrace to express it. All these many years later, we’re still soulmates and good friends, but not lovers—and I still hug her in public.
This attitude toward touching each other drives me crazy, Nick. I used to be a really touchy-feely person, always ready with a hug, always willing to hold anybody for the sake of a little human comfort. I hate the fact that holding someone or even just putting your arm around them or holding hands is reserved in this society for lovers and children. It’s made such a mess of our relationships to each other, whether friends or lovers. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about being with Mike and Pablo. As South Americans, they’re not squeamish about hugs and kisses like North Americans are. They’re affectionate with each other, their friends, and their lovers, and unembarrassed expressing that affection. I’m not sure they even think about it. They make it seem the most natural thing in the world—as it is—to kiss and hug at greetings and partings, or any other time. In case you didn’t know, this is also one of the things straight women like about being with gay men. The sad thing is, it’s been so long since I’ve been treated to any casual affection that I almost cringe from it now. I’m so wary of being misinterpreted (as often happens) that I’m really reticent about giving anybody a hug.
But we all need to be able to hug or hold someone, or be on the receiving end, without thinking about sex all the time, to just get a little comfort, to just reassure each other that we’re alive. I remember reading about a study that found people had a better attitude toward cashiers and clerks who just brushed their hands in returning change. That’s such a small gesture, almost unnoticeable and certainly unremarkable, but I don’t doubt it’s true.
One night a bunch of us came up to your apartment on the Upper West Side near Birdland (that place with the amazing black bathroom). You had this little tiny room with a futon on the floor, books all around and a tv—and not much else. I think we were all there for your birthday or something else that you were too sick to celebrate by going out. In my usual obsessive way, I was the first one there. Crashed on your futon in jeans and a T-shirt, you asked for a back rub. After you got sick, you lost any reticence you might have had about asking for contact like that. “Hug me, hold me, give me a back rub,” you’d say. I don’t know whether it was fear of being abandoned that prompted it, or just need, but you could never get enough affection from us.
When Jen, Mike, Pablo, Maggie, and Steve arrived, we ordered pizza and flopped down on the futon with you. We were watching “Boy’s Town” with a very young Mickey Rooney, complaining about how sappy it was (I, of course, was sniveling). You fell asleep in the middle of everything, with us sprawled around you in a warm circle. We laughed about you falling asleep at your own party, but all of us being there together was as good for us as it was for you, I think. The next time any of us were together like that again was in the intensive care waiting room, and we were all hugging each other. It shouldn’t just be crises that bring out that warmth in us.
I guess remembering that—and his striking resemblance to you—is what made me want touch this guy on the train today. After a while, he rested his cheek against his fist, his elbow on his knee, so two Hispanic women could talk over him. It scrunched up his face a little and made him look sad, and I really wanted to touch him then, and ask him if he was okay. With so much space between us, I wonder if any of us are okay.
Yours, feeling touchy.
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Dear Nick,
I keep thinking about the night you died, and wondering why I remember so little of it. I know, it sounds like I really remember a lot, but that’s one of the strange things about memory. We spent a long time in the intensive care waiting room, and beside your bed that Saturday night, almost twelve hours, but most of the evening is just kind of a vast, grey expanse in my mind. Only the little things remain, what Virginia Woolf calls “moments of being.” I don’t usually do that with significant events. I remember the day of the week, because Jen and I had plans, but I don’t remember what the weather was like. I don’t think it was raining—that would have been too stagy for me not to remember, and I recall other rainy days I spent with you at the hospital. I don’t remember any particular sense of urgency in getting there either. I guess we knew you weren’t going to go quite yet, and you did wait until we’d all seen you, didn’t you?
I can’t even remember very well who was there. James and Sammy, of course, and Jen and I; Joel and Steve; Fran and Dave; the guy you’d spent the summer with on Long Island, whose name I can’t remember now. He seemed like a really nice guy, but he didn’t say much. I guess that was understandable, being with a group of people most of whom he didn’t know. Neither your mom nor dad were there, your mom because she couldn’t afford it, and your dad—well, who knows why your dad wasn’t there. I’m not sure I ever knew why. Maybe I’ve forgotten that too.
And Susie was pretty conspicuous by her absence. At the time, I think I was a little angry about that, but I really can’t remember, to tell you the truth. I was too numb myself most of the time to pay much attention to anyone’s reactions, including mine, until much later. Even the writer had shut down, the part of me who observes and stores as material for future stories what people say and do in the most awkward of situations. At least I thought she had. Now, as these stories pour out of me, sometimes at the rate of three or four in a day, I realize she was there all along, recording silently.
Writers are really awful people, sometimes, Nick. I’ve come to realize that about myself. But there are extenuating circumstances; you might call them occupational hazards. The fact that our brains tend to filter out the rough times we’ve been through makes it hard on the writer. That’s often the best material. Of course, remembering them makes it hard on the human being. So I guess we have the choice sometimes of being a writer or a human being. I’m not sure the two are always compatible.
I let Jen read a couple of these letters a while ago and, of course, they
depressed her; concerned, her boyfriend (no, not the Polish Physicist—the
Youngster) wanted to know if she thought I was just doing this for the sake of
drama. Jen told me later, “He doesn’t understand that
writers—”
“—do everything for the sake of drama,”
we finished together. We were both laughing about it, but it’s not all
that funny. We do tend to go into things with the idea that it’s all
fodder for our work. People around us know this, and it makes a lot of them
wary, with good reason. I keep saying that it’s the peril of being friends
with a writer, but that’s not much comfort. It’s also not an excuse
for what we do. When my cousin and I were talking about reconciliation, she
tried to exact a promise from me that I wouldn’t write about anything that
happened when and if we started speaking civilly again. You can see how far that
went. And look what I’m doing with you, Nick. This is about as self-reflexive
as it gets, just a step below metafiction. Everything is material, everything
gets filed away for subsequent analysis and use.
Except major parts of that night in the intensive care waiting room in Beekman Downtown Hospital. I remember really stupid things about it, like taking my journal down with me, and a book, as though I’d really want or be able to either read or write there. (My journal! God Almighty, even then I was thinking about getting all the details down.) I remember not being able to tie up that asinine surgical mask and wondering how I looked in it. I remember being relieved that Fran was crying also, so I wouldn’t be the only one.
I remember more serious bits of it, too. I remember the man in the cubicle beside you—another AIDS patient—dying alone. Standing by your bed, holding your hand, I caught myself observing all the tubes and wires and machinery, where they were hooked up, what the read-outs looked like, what the cubicle looked like. When I realized I was looking at the expression on your face, the pain and frustration there, noticing how the respirator tube was taped down and thinking how I’d describe it all, I knew it was time to get out of the room. I’d become a voyeur and I hated myself for it.
Sitting in the waiting room again, I kept asking myself why I was there. Had I come down to be here with you, with Jen, with the rest of our friends, for mutual support? Or had I come down because this was a better source of material than any play could have been? This was the real thing, this was real life. It wasn’t “Thirtysomething,” or “L.A. Law,” or even “Torch Song Trilogy.” It was “Nick’s Last Night On Earth.” It was a much richer lode to mine than “Unrequited Love” had been, or “Falling For a Gay Man,” or “Going to Europe Alone.” I’ve led a pretty uneventful life, mostly devoid of pain and suffering, for which I’m very grateful. I had parents who loved and respected me, a good education, no major losses or traumas in my life, until you came along. I read somewhere about one writer who’d told a famous Eastern European author that she envied him the ready-to-hand store of serious subjects living under Communist rule gave him. My first reaction to her statement was “What a jerk!” but I had to admit to myself later that I understood what she meant. That’s the kind of people writers are. Suffering may not be good for the soul, but in our view, it’s great for the plot outline and character development.
So here I am, turning myself, turning all of us inside-out, on paper. Do I feel ashamed of what I’m doing, sitting at my computer? A little, I suppose. I’ll probably feel more so, if I happen to make any money out of it. But that’s my job, I’ve concluded, to turn myself and others inside-out for a good story. Guilt’s one of the hazards.
But you’re not just a story, are you? None of us are. You were flesh and blood, you died horribly and too young, and we loved you, and that’s the other reason I’m sitting here in front of my computer right now, typing these words.
Yours, still writing.
Dear Nick,
You know, I discovered a lot of things about myself the night you died. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who was able to cope with pretty much anything. I was always the person who did things that had to be done. People were always telling me what a strong person I was, moving to New York or going to Europe alone; what a good friend I was going to the Rape Crisis Center with a roommate or pouring their liquor down the drain, always doin’ the right thing, that’s me. I’d started to believe them too.
But I don’t think I came up very well on the score card this time, and my only consolation is that I’m not the only one.
To begin with, Jen and I had tickets to a show that night. We were going to see “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” at the Public Theatre—a Joanne Akalatis production. I hadn’t been to a play in ages, and this had s gotten such good reviews that I was really excited about it, and I think Jen was too. I really wanted to see it in part because I wanted to tell Rob about it. He’s a Renaissance lit scholar and it’s one of his favorite plays; living in East Lansing, he doesn’t get much of a chance to see work like this performed. The tickets were relatively expensive on my freelancer’s budget and it was a splurge I hadn’t allowed myself in quite a while. I’d bought them, but Jen had put them on her credit card (mine was at the limit, as usual), so she needed to be at the theatre with me to pick them up. Then she called me up about two that afternoon and said you were in the hospital and things didn’t look good. I could tell by the way her voice sounded you were worse than “not good.” “I’m going to the hospital,” she said. “What do you want to do about the tickets?”
Just the fact that Jen asked doesn’t speak too well of my character, and I have to admit I was torn. I really wanted to go to the play. It’s full of strong, dark emotions, taboo subjects and passion, and I love stuff like that. I always think you see what people are really like in the grip of those kinds of feelings, in sordid situations. What could it hurt? I thought. I can’t save him, if this is IT. A split second later, I couldn’t believe I’d actually thought that, but I had. I still don’t know whether it was fear, selfishness, a self-protective pain-avoidance thang, or just plain denial of the imminence of your death that prompted it, but there it was. “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Screw the tickets. I’ll meet you at Beekman.” And I went.
I was glad I did, of course. I never would have been able to face myself or Jen again if I hadn’t gone. Jen and I have been friends for a long time, and this was no time to desert her, or you, or the rest of the ol’ Bender gang. We all needed each other and you needed us, especially since your mom didn’t have the money to get out from L.A. and your dad didn’t really care about anything except the embarrassing fact that one of his sons was gay. The large number of people there said something about your character too. Just about everyone in the immediate area who cared about you was there.
Except Susie. Party girl extraordinaire, she wasn’t home when I called her either, so I had to keep trying. Jen asked me to call because Susie’d never really liked Jen much (I think the feeling was mutual if not equally hostile), and I knew Susie better. She and Fran had been the first two new “friends” I’d made in New York, and part of the whole copy editors’ circle of Bender hell that also included you and Steve and Jen. We met in part because we’d both gone to Michigan State (Susie as an undergrad, I for graduate school), in part because she was the most senior copy editor in the group when I arrived and showed me the ropes. We hung out quite a bit for the first six months or so after I moved here, until I started to get to know you and Jen and Steve. After I worked with Susie for a while I wasn’t sure how I felt about her either. By the time I moved on to a new job, I realized how self-absorbed and overbearing she could be (coming from me, that’s no idle description). We drifted apart because neither of us was very bossable and we threatened each other a little, I think, but we kept up a semblance of cordiality.
She was way too obsessed with sex and drugs for me too, but I guess you had that in common. Before she met her current husband—a tall, silent guy named Alex who was a friend of Dave’s—she spent a lot of time moaning about how she hadn’t had sex in four years. It got really tedious, to the point where we were all ready to buy her a dildo just to shut her up. No wonder she and Alex, who you always called “Thing,” were doing the nasty in Fran and Dave’s bed five minutes after the party at which they met ended. The party had, in fact, been thrown by Fran and Dave at their house for the express purpose of introducing Alex and Susie. Fran and Dave were convinced they were made for each other and, in an uncanny show of prescience, they were right. From the moment they were introduced, Susie was draped over Alex’s lap. Not a very subtle tactic, but he didn’t seem to mind. When they were the only two guests left, Fran and Dave went out for a looooong walk around the neighborhood at three in the morning, Fran trying desperately to keep Dave awake. Either Susie or Alex broke a zipper or lost buttons in the process, too. I only know all this because I got the dirty details from Fran on Monday at work. It made a great story, but after that party I knew for sure I was with the wrong crowd.
But you and Susie always liked each other. It was only right that she know how you were doing that Saturday.
Like me, Susie kind of stayed away from you after you developed full-blown AIDS. We both visited you in the hospital whenever you went in, but not with any frequency (although I think she showed up more often than I did). Once you moved home, I don’t think she dropped by as often as I did—which was pretty seldom, I’ll admit. Like me, it wasn’t fear of catching anything from you that kept her away; she just couldn’t stand to watch you dying either. I’m still wondering how I managed to get through it. When I finally got hold of her late Saturday evening, I said something like, “You might want to come down to Beekman and see Nick. It’s probably your last chance.” There was this long silence on the other end of the phone, and you can bet your ass I knew what was going through her head. We were a little too much alike for me not to know. When she spoke again, her voice was all whispery and frantic. Not near tears like I would have been (okay—actively sobbing), but panicked, terrified. “I can’t,” she said, “I just can’t,” and she started to make some sort of excuse that we both knew was a lie.
I don’t really remember whether Susie’s unwillingness to come see you made me mad or not. It doesn’t now. You were just my friend, Nick, not even a really close one, but your death sunk me into a four-month-long depression. That night, I couldn’t bring myself to see you more than twice, and justified it by saying I was letting people who were closer to you be with you more. The truth is I’d finally run up against something I didn’t have the strength or means to cope with. I can’t imagine what your death would have been like if I’d been Jen, or someone else who really loved you. In some ways, I wish I hadn’t been there either. I wish I’d gone to that damn play. Seventeenth Century incest and murder couldn’t possibly have been as wrenching as what I saw in the hospital that night, and I could have gone home and forgotten about it.
Yours, paddling away.
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Dear Nick,
I’m starting to get pissed at all these people running around with red ribbons on their clothes. It’s as bad as those stupid yellow ones that people wore during the Gulf War (yes, Saddam’s still in power). I’m not objecting to the symbology at all, but it’s become a matter of political correctness and peer pressure now, and somebody needs to get a grip. When Elizabeth Taylor was on the Academy Awards last year, and dared to come out not wearing a ribbon (the only star all night who didn’t), one of the people I was watching the show with was shocked. I’m sorry, but I lost it.
“She founded AMFAR, for Pete’s sake. She doesn’t have to prove anything to anybody,” I snapped. “Neither do I. Wearing that stupid red ribbon doesn’t mean squat. You’d have to live in an arctic cave to be unaware of AIDS. Even Jesse Helms knows about it.”
Nonetheless, I must admit to having given in to the icon craze myself. I’ve got a cool little collection of buttons I picked up at the Dance-a-thon (little gems like “Men: Use Condoms or Beat It”). At this very moment, I’m wearing a red, anodized aluminum bracelet engraved with the words “until it’s gone.” It’s like the POW bracelets a lot of people wore during the Vietnam War (good thing we name these wars, we have so many of them). You were old enough to remember those; they were really hip about the time we were in junior high. When you received your bracelet, it came with a little bio of the guy whose name was engraved on it, and you weren’t supposed to take it off until you were notified he’d been sent home, dead or alive. Every now and then, I see someone still wearing theirs. I never had one because, much as I felt for the guys who were missing (as a sort of vicarious army brat, some of them could have been my friends’ dads or brothers), the whole war was a travesty (as they all are) and those bracelets felt too much like symbolic support of it. Diseases, however, are apolitical and indiscriminate. Buying this bracelet felt right, especially since the proceeds went to AIDS organizations in the area.
I haven’t taken it off since I got it, although I contemplated doing that to engrave your name on the back. Then I thought if I started doing that, I’d have to keep doing it, and I knew there would eventually be too many to fit on the bracelet at all. It’s three of you now with Sammy and James gone; and my best friend’s cousin who died of the same weird fungal infection that killed Bruce Chatwin; Laurie’s friend Scott; and more dancers in ABT than either Adrienne or I like to think about. You’re still the only one I’ve really watched it eat alive, and believe me, that’s plenty.
What bothers me about the ribbons is that they’re starting to appear everywhere, in places that don’t seem quite appropriate. They’ve evolved from bits of red frippery with a safety pin through them to Tiffany jewelry. I saw a set of dishes with loops of red ribbon on them for sale at Conran’s not long ago. They’re attractive dishes—white with a thin gold rim and the red ribbon in the center—and, again, the proceeds go to AIDS organizations, but it just reminds me too much of the Burger King glass syndrome: Jurassic Park, Jack the Pumpkin King, and AIDS ribbons. Your choice, only 99¢ with the purchase of any Whopper.
Not to mention the fact that you need to wear a veritable rainbow of them to be considered socially acceptable: yellow for the war, white for domestic violence (I like the irony that one supports violence and the other symbolizes speaking out against it in a different context), pink for breast cancer, and red for AIDS. We’re going to be color-coding all our crises and diseases soon. What’s next? Green for the rainforest, purple for heart disease? Will we go bi-color? Black and white for bigotry? Or tri-color? Red, white and blue for voter apathy? Oops, I guess that’s been done.
True to form, wearing those red ribbons has also become an indication of one’s political enlightenment.Wear one, and you can look down your nose at the rest of the raving conservatives and politically incorrect cretins. “See? I’m wearing a ribbon. I’m aware of the AIDS crisis. Why aren’t you?” If you don’t wear one, obviously you’re a gun-toting, racist, agist, lookist, homophobic, misogynistic, ranting neo-Nazi. Just what we need too: something else to make a small group of people feel superior. And face it, in New York City if not most of the country or world, it’s overkill. Back in Oscoda, Michigan, it might still elicit some curiosity, but here? Please. It gives me cramps just thinking about it. Whether it was intended that way or no, that ribbon has become a symbol of hipness. Try getting into a club without one.
What I want to know is what good those little ribbons ever did anybody? What good did they do you? The last four years of your life you wore more obvious indicators of the presence of an AIDS crisis than any ribbon or bracelet could ever be. It didn’t accomplish anything. I realize that a lot of the people wearing them are also actually doing something about the epidemic—volunteering time, giving money, speaking out. But you can do all those things without a badge. It reminds me too of what Christ warned his followers about self-aggrandizement: “Hence when you go making gifts of mercy, do not blow a trumpet ahead of you, just as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be glorified by men. Truly I say to you, they are having their reward in full. But you, when making gifts of mercy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, that your gifts of mercy may be in secret; then your Father who is looking on in secret will repay you.” (Matt. 6:2-4, New World Translation). In other words, do the right thing because it’s the right thing and then just shut up about it.
So why did I buy the bracelet? Because I haven’t been able to raise much for the GMHC Dance-a-thon in too long, and haven’t been able to send them money either. Volunteering time is too emotionally wrenching for me yet, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to. Buying the bracelet was a small thing I could do in your memory. It was a way to keep myself from forgetting you. I don’t imagine that it’ll do anyone any good, or that everyone should own one. Besides, there are a lot of other equally pressing problems and diseases in the world. I don’t believe political correctness will solve any of them; I don’t believe anything human will. It certainly won’t bring you back. No symbol or dogma is that powerful.
Yours, in knots.
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Dear Nick,
I was walking through the Village the other night, on Christopher Street, and passed one of the Catholic churches with a sign over one of the doors that read, “AIDS Memorial in the Village.” In one of those “Aha!” moments where lightbulbs go on, it suddenly struck me what the real meaning of that sign was: Life has changed irrevocably in the wake of AIDS. God knows I’ve read plenty of essays and heard plenty of people saying the same thing, as most of us have, but for everyone, there’s a pristine moment of truth when the sheer enormity of consequence becomes aggressively apparent. For me, it wasn’t even your death that did it. It was walking by that church and seeing that sign.
I suppose my personal epiphany was a little delayed because the whole possibility of me coming down with AIDS is pretty remote, unless the thing becomes much more contagious. Drugs have never attracted me, especially those involving needles. I won’t take blood transfusions either, so that avenue of infection is pretty well sealed off. I won’t have sex before I’m married, and the community of faith into which I’ll probably marry—if I do at all—doesn’t sanction it either so, barring marriage to a recent convert or rape, the chances of me getting it through sex are pretty small too. Even with the number of gay and HIV positive friends I have, the consequences of AIDS have been fairly peripheral in my life. None of my relatives have it (so far) and aren’t really that much at risk for it. You’re the only real friend I’ve had who’s died of it, and we weren’t that close. Not that it hurt any less to lose you because we weren’t.
So I can’t tell you why that sign set me off, but it did. At the west end of Christopher Street in the early evening, I had this sudden vision of walking through a plague city, like Camus or Boccacio. That far west, near Washington Street, Christopher is pretty quiet at that time of night, with a few large apartment and church buildings. There’s some traffic, but not a lot, and there weren’t many pedestrians either. The silence and dark were somehow more chilling than bodies piled in the streets would have been. Where was everyone? Were all those unlit apartments empty?
I’ve been reading apocalyptic science fiction novels since adolescence, and I suppose they’ve shaped my view of the world somewhat, as has my faith. A Canticle for Leibowitz, The White Plague, Dhalgren, The Drowned World, Bladerunner (more the movie than the book)—all contain vivid descriptions of decimated populations and abandoned cities. When I lived in the country, the images didn’t mean that much to me—it was always quiet and dark at night—but living here, they seem not only more real, but more possible. Especially now.
Health officials in Uganda estimate that one third to one half of its population is infected with and will probably die from HIV/AIDS. The parallels between AIDS and the Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages are terrifyingly obvious, it seems to me, but death on that scale from non-violent means apparently isn’t conceivable to people now living in the Western world. The last time any epidemic near this scale swept through this country was the Spanish influenza in 1918-20, and who really remembers that? Twenty-two million people died then, worldwide. Of course, many other diseases were killing lots of people then too: tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, polio, even dysentery, but not in such great numbers in such a short time. All but TB were relatively quick killers. Victims became ill, and in a week or ten days, sometimes less, they were dead. TB took longer, often years, to finally do away with its victims.
In that sense, the TB and AIDS epidemics are much alike. Once called “Captain of the Men of Death,” TB killed 34 million people during the 19th century. Like AIDS, TB was intially considered a disease of a particular and ostracized population, in this case, the poor. Later, it became an “artists’ disease,” because so many of them died of it (Keats, Byron). Eventually, it was even romantic to be consumptive, a tragic badge of hipness. And like us, people in the 19th Century, even privileged people, lived with TB without giving it much thought. Loved ones and friends died of it, but there were no TB memorials. It was too common, too accepted, too much a part of daily life. We’re becoming equally blase about AIDS. We may walk and dance for it, build monuments around it, but it’s not always in the forefront of our minds unless it directly affects us. Like those 19th Century plague survivors, we now toss around phrases like “living with AIDS,” treating it almost as though it were an unwanted houseguest we couldn’t evict, instead of death squatting in our midst.
Despite our growing and sometimes feigned nonchalance, we walk about with our behavior consciously or unconsciously modified by this plague. We’re fearful our loved ones will get it; we wonder if we’re carrying it, or might get it; sometimes, we wonder which people sharing the street, the bus, the subway, or our work space with us have it. We’re fearful of public restrooms and fountains, of sending our kids to school with others who have it, more terrified of the homeless than we would be without it, worried even about our own doctors and dentists. We talk about quarantines, mandatory disclosure laws, forced testing. I doubt Jack Kevorkian would have gotten as much support as he has if the spectre of AIDS weren’t walking the world. For the first time, blood is a toxic chemical. Surgeons operate in moon suits, rubber gloves are everywhere. When we meet someone new, or date, or go to a bar, we have to consider asking questions that fifteen years ago would have seemed the apex of rudeness. How many sexual partners have you had? Do you use condoms regularly? When was your last AIDS test? A lie can be not just a betrayal of trust, but murder.
It’s the fact that AIDS is a relatively slow killer that works against our continued outrage. If people were dropping like flies from it, not 90 a day, but 900 or 9000, we’d be in a continual panic. Society would break down, probably the way it did in the Middle Ages, where groups of flagellants went from town to town beating themselves to try to win God’s forgiveness, or people let the crops rot in the fields because they were sure they’d all be dead in a week. But we still discretely tuck away our dead. The graveyards and crematoria can still handle the influx. Nobody’s lying in the street yet. There’s no sudden glut on the housing market. So we learn to cope with it, the way we learn to cope with an acre of rainforest disappearing every hour, a rape every 3 minutes, a child dying every hour [check these stats].
On top of this,