Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (13 page)

I managed to be as positive around Roger as he was with himself.

In the afternoons we'd go over legal matters and household bills; then I'd drop a packet of work by his office in Century City, telling everyone there he'd be back directly, flashing a tight smile. I see now the only place I could fall apart was my work. Within a day of the diagnosis I became convinced it was over for good. My novel
Small Powers,
benign and didactic, my shelter from the earlier storm of Cesar, had overnight become an eccentric joke. I would not be going past page 223 after all.

This sounds ridiculously self-important, I know. I can only say it felt like a proper reaction to the life of self-importance writing itself suddenly looked to be.
Just the Summers
would never be put on now: no time and nothing to laugh at. All I could do was steel myself to finish
The Manicurist
so I could pay the bills, but the yucks were delivered with a skull's grin, and the whole enterprise filled me with loathing. Roger tried to help me through this minefield of self-denial, but I only dug in deeper.

Somehow it wasn't an option to write about the fire storm itself. For a while my journal stood frozen around the two-word entry for March 12:
the verdict
. No reason to keep a record of what was over now. Again Roger gently tried to steer me back on track. I should log my old journals onto the computer, something I'd wanted to do, just to be doing something. So one day I flipped on the PC and opened a creaky ledger to August '71. I read the first dewy-eyed page and wanted to throw up. Scratch that idea.

Of course I couldn't breathe a word to the producers and executives involved in
The Manicurist.
They weren't paying studio wages for hysteria, not in the urban comedy division. It happened that later that week I had a letter from the Alley Theater in Houston, praising a melodrama I'd sent to them months before with regards from John Allison. They weren't sure exactly how they wanted to proceed—staged reading, workshop production, main stage. I forget all the ramifications, but it was the sort of letter I used to megaphone to Rog the instant I tore it open, the rare Irish Sweeps among the pink slips. Roger was pleased as ever to hear about it, but I wouldn't move an inch. The play needed cutting, I'd have to be in Houston, and I couldn't go anywhere now. Sure you can, he said. Oh no, I couldn't. That part was finished.

If this all sounds like an excruciatingly unsubtle way of getting mad at Roger for being sick, I'll concede the point for what it's worth. My anger was surely growing more and more unmanageable. But I thought I understood the difference—then, anyway—between being mad at him and being mad at AIDS. Sam was persistent, saying that Roger must have a towering rage in him about being ill, and my own was just as understandable. Moreover, the anger was useful because it drained off a lot of the stress and would help me voice my most demented thoughts and thus get them behind me. Sam wasn't waiting for me to discover the answers here. We had reached the triage stage of overload, and he helped me work my way through the whole scenario. Roger and I must both get over the horror that we might die so we could begin to see we weren't dead yet.

Easier said. The only one I felt like being angry at was Paul. Self-recrimination filled up each successive vacuum as I tossed out work, friends, books, the world at large, one thing after another. The through line of my guilt, as an overdetermined actor would have it, went back to Joel and the unhappy months of 1981. If I hadn't had the deadborn affair with Joel I wouldn't have collapsed the way I did. If I hadn't been so full of havoc, Roger would never have gone east alone in October, never gone home with the freshman lawyer he met in Cahoots after seeing
Nicholas Nickleby.
He'd come back from that trip to the run of ambiguous viral misery that ended up misdiagnosed as amoebas.

We both agreed it must have been that contact. Since Cesar's diagnosis, I'd brought up the idea three or four times that as long as we weren't exposed during the bad patch in '81 we were home free. I think I said this not with dread but rather to prove what a needle in a haystack AIDS had to be to get us. Magic, magic. No way of knowing with certainty if any one encounter was the source, though it's remarkable how many I talk to have a sense of who and when. In any case, Roger expended none of his spirit on guilt or shame, ever that I could see. But I made up for both of us in spades, this despite his saying again and again that I mustn't look at life that way. "Paul, we got through all that," he would say about Joel, quieting me down even from his sickbed. Fate was the issue, if anything; not guilt. But at the beginning I wanted to die of the squandered life that was all my fault. What if I hadn't met Joel? Would Roger be well now? It took me months to work through the scalded cosmology of who and when. It took two of us, the sick one soothing the well one.

Yet that is a false picture of what life on the moon was like, hour by hour in room 1028. Though Roger slept a fair amount and curled up to wait the infection out, a lot of plain talk passed between us as we strategized this alien place. The ordering of meals, the hierarchy of staff, the byzantine complexity of the numbers. It all required a sort of continuous Platonic dialogue on the nature of us and them. Then I'd massage his neck or his flat feet—he used to say he fell in love with my arches—and we'd be as close as we were at home late at night, when everything was shorthand.

A hospital room is above all else intimate; you have no choice. Bullshit stops at the door, and the Hallmark sentiment of gratitude for the present turns out to be right on the mark. A precious ordinariness is the province of those who have loved a considerable time. So long as you are together, foxhole or detention camp, you make yourself a corner and make it work. In this enterprise we were fortunate to have privileges: we knew the right people and had enough money. Consequently we had a rare experience throughout of the very best of medicine, but especially here at the level of primary care, nurses and physical plant and patient skills. Ten East wasn't swamped and never had the uncontrollable feel of a state of emergency.

My friends in New York talk about food trays left in the hall because no one will bring them in, nurses with shaking hands, masked and gowned like astronauts, sweat beaded on their foreheads. We, too, were under the weird strictures of isolation, requiring ornate procedures for bagging trash and taking specimens. But almost nobody acted spooked at UCLA. I watched one or two nurses wrestle with it and get to the other side. As a fierce IV nurse put it eight months later, recounting a lecture she'd given a conference of her peers: "If you don't like AIDS get out of medicine, because this is where it is." That was the front-line sentiment in white, and otherwise we had the incalculable safety of a private room. The privacy alone gives you light-years of time.

Then, just as we were getting into a sort of rhythm, when it seemed we'd weathered the shock and the brute intrusion of medicine men, everything took a turn. Roger had been on Bactrim eight or nine days when he started to spike a fever, 102 and no explanation. They may have mentioned it could be a drug reaction, but the interns tended not to hazard a guess out loud. They scurried away and paged Cope. The fever put Roger flat out, and I went into a tailspin, sure the drug had stopped working and something new had flared. I know I risk the tale growing hoarse whenever I speak of a new level of terror and anxiety. But if I had an objective measure, on the order of the Richter scale, that fevered day in March was an 8.0.

While we waited for several consulting physicians to have a look, I must've been doing some paperwork to keep from going nuts. Roger and I had seven separate bank accounts, and somehow we fell to talking about me not knowing what half of them were. He began to explain how they worked—methodical, patient—and I scribbled notes on the check register till I realized this was what I would be left with if he died, just notes on being alone. I started to choke with tears, and Roger said from the woozy peak of his fever, "I guess you don't want to do this right now."

Kathy Hendrix had asked me to dinner that night, and since she lived a scant ten blocks from the hospital I ran over there while Roger dozed. I had to make contact with somebody I could trust, and I couldn't wait till midnight, when I began the long insomniac hours talking to Sam and my brother. Kathy is a reporter for the L.A.
Times
, and if there's a common thread to her work, it's the issue of conscience: no priest crosses a nuclear line in Nevada that Kathy doesn't cover the event. I walked in stark and staring and talked nonstop for an hour, spilling the secret and everything else I could think of, as if to break a fever of my own. I remember I asked her if she prayed, and she, who is no more religious than I, tried to compose me an answer. What was good about prayer, she said, was how it centered the mind.

I careened back to the hospital and found Roger asleep in the semidarkness. The enormity of our loneliness gripped me like angina as I looked out the wide plate windows over the city, west to where the lights froze on the ocean's rim. I stroked my friend and talked gently to him. I don't know if that sense of vigil went on for two days or three, but the helplessness was unendurable. And when early one morning Roger called to say a man from Infectious Diseases had been in and detected a faint rash on Roger's chest, pointing to a drug reaction and nothing more, the wild relief surged between us like adrenaline. We laughed as if we had heard an old joke from a distant country. The full roller coaster overnight—we experienced it eight or ten different times in the course of the war. Each time it was as if he came back from the dead.

They took him off Bactrim immediately. We lucked out here, because a new drug had just come on line to treat Pneumocystis. Pentamidine was so new it wasn't listed in any of the reference systems yet. Even the hospital pharmacy couldn't find it on the computer. As soon as Roger went on it the fever disappeared, and he began to get better again. I didn't think then of the thousands in the first five years who turned out to be allergic to Bactrim before there was something else. I guess they all just died. They didn't get the nineteen months' reprieve that Roger and I would hoard coin by coin.

An offensive strategy began to emerge on the island of 1028, especially as I took an increasingly hands-on role, pestering all the doctors. Together Roger and I became postgraduate students of the condition. No explanation was too technical for me to follow, even if it took a string of phone calls to every connection I had. In school I'd never scored higher than a C in any science, falling headlong into literature, but now that I was locked in the lab I became as obsessed with A's as a premed student. Day by day the hard knowledge and raw data evolved into a language of discourse.

We were Cope's pupils first, of course, and he understood immediately that we wanted the closest involvement in the process. Every intern, every nurse, was detained for a lesson: on catheters, lymphocytes, antivirals. Eventually the interns had more to learn from us than we from them, for we had a data base larger than theirs. I had taught school for the ten years of my twenties, and I knew the gold stars always went to the most skilled balance of brains and charm. So I charmed the pants off everyone. I might not ever sell another story, but I sang and danced up and down 10 East like Zorba at a wedding. Nobody left that room without being engaged by one or the other of us. Picasso once said that if they put him in jail and took away all his paints, he would draw with his spit on the prison walls. At our best, Roger and I were the talking equivalent of that irrepressible force. Tell us, we said, tell us everything there is to know, and we'll do the rest.

Sometime during the second week Jaimee and her husband, Michael, arrived in Palm Springs. On Saturday they left the kids with the grandparents and flew up to visit Roger. Once again we agreed I would stay away, since Michael had not been told the truth. Was I such an open book as not to be trusted to carry it off? Didn't I field half a dozen calls a day and calm the multitudes? I was the Gielgud of reassurance. So it wasn't that Michael would divine the truth from the hunted look in my eyes, but rather that Roger chose to take the field himself and give me a breather. All alone on that hot Saturday, the smog like a film of milk on the city, I kept calling 1028 from pay phones as I ran my aimless errands. When I stopped to get dog food at Hughes, I started to cry in line. Supermarkets are bad for grief; any widow will tell you.

Jaimee phoned from Palm Springs nearly every day thereafter, relating how she would squirm at the pool with her parents, listening as they talked about Roger regaining his strength, relentless on the bright side. That's what drew Jaimee and me so close, the smile we had to flash to the world at large. With one another we could let it crack.

We had already targeted Tuesday for Roger to come home, since Cope and the other doctors felt the third week of treatment could be administered by injection rather than IV. A visiting nurse would have to come in once a day. Much gearing up was required to engineer the change of place, but Roger was chafing now to get out of there, and the eagerness alone appeared to quicken his recovery. He was pale and exhausted from the battle, with an angry sore at the corner of his lip that was diagnosed as herpes and treated locally. But I found myself responding in kind to his air of urgency, feeling a rush of renewal at the thought of bringing him back to full recovery. I ached to fatten him up.

Yet this sense of being equal to the fight went hand in hand with the blackest conversations every night—my brother at midnight, Sam at
1 A.M.
The actual suicide thought came during the vigil of the Bactrim fever. I was home from the hospital every day between afternoon and evening to feed the dog and rest, clenched and wide-eyed on the unmade bed. I would cry for a while with bitter despair, till one day I was struck with the notion that I could make the pain go away by dying.

No, wait: I had to be here for Rog. It became unthinkable the moment I thought it. Yet at the back of my mind the easiness of death stayed with me, mine if not his, in the raging blanks of the next two months. When you are gay and alone and want to be a poet, suicide crosses your mind at twenty-two like an impresario's cape. It is not the real thing, any more than the lightly stroked razor Joel had drawn across his wrist at New Year's. By contrast, this particular kiss of death was as lucid and merciful as putting down an animal in pain.