Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (14 page)

Over the weekend before Rog came home I called both Cesar and Craig and told them what was going on. I realize I don't sound very good at secrets, but I'd neglected to call either of them in over two weeks—unheard of. I hadn't even responded to Craig's letter announcing his diagnosis. Because both were being highly selective themselves as to whom they told, because both had a certain awe of Roger, I knew they'd respect his silence. I also needed to let them know I couldn't be counted on for optimism anymore, or to be a main line of support as I had been. My arms were full. And another reason, still only partially formed: I could lie to everyone out there, but not to my fellow exiles on the moon. Within three months this sense of separateness would grow so acute that I really didn't want to talk to anyone anymore who wasn't touched by AIDS, body or soul.

Cesar was on his way to Uruguay, to visit his family over spring break. It was his turn to do the bracing and buoying up as I fell apart, and he spoke with a conviction that wasn't feigned. "Paul, he's going to get better, you'll see. Don't be afraid." You only listen to such bravado from those who are there. Other people say it, and you stare out the window and wait to get away. You prefer the despair to hollow shows of strength. "We're all tough," Cesar said fervently. "It's not so easy to kill us."

Craig, on the other hand, was my research associate. He had two years' worth of the epidemic behind him in New York. There the death toll was running amok, like Flanders in 1916, while we in L.A. were still flinching from the gunshot at Sarajevo. What was the longest anyone had survived after PCP? What were these drugs the gay press was making noise about? Craig was my conduit to the AIDS underground, where every rumor was run to earth and codified before the mainstream press ever raised its head from the mire.

Monday night before Roger's release was Oscar night. I ordered dinner in 1028—another of the decencies of 10 East: $14.50 for a guest meal, and they took Visa. I got there in time to see Dennis Cope, who said everything was set for tomorrow, and meanwhile who did I think would win? Win what? I had to backpedal to recall what civilians were doing that night. I went into an automatic routine about the Nobel level of self-love unleashed by the Oscars, which made Cope laugh. Then I handicapped the race for him, earnest as Siskel and Ebert. We were actually talking about something else for once.

Roger and I had a lovely lazy evening watching the show, hooting at all the clunky grandeur. On the way home after midnight, exhilarated and scared about how we would manage by ourselves, I was stopped by a squad of cops on the Strip. They were holding traffic at bay while a line of six limousines turned in at Le Mondrian, Prince and his entourage in the lead in a purple stretch. I watched numbly as the glittering prom queens poured from the limos. Behind the tinsel in Hollywood, they say, is the real tinsel. But who were the moonfolk here—we or they? I felt it as a kind of physical pain, to think that life on the surface still went on in its gaudy rounds.

Next day Roger and I bristled with anticipation, as we waited impatiently for the pharmacy to send up the medication to see us home. For two hours we cooled our heels, until a young woman walked in carrying a shopping bag of drugs. Explaining how unfamiliar the pharmacy was with Pentamidine, she showed us how to have the visiting nurse mix it. I don't think I registered that the nurses wouldn't have even heard of it. Then there was an unguent for the herpes, a tablet to suck for the spot of thrush on his tongue, and a supplement of some amino acid because an AIDS patient's body no longer manufactured it.

When she left we stared at each other, and Roger gave out with a groan, suddenly overwhelmed. We weren't going home scot-free at all. But you either turn a moment like this into a black joke you can laugh at, or you'd never get out of 1028 at all. When we were told we would now have to wait for a wheelchair escort to take us down to the parking garage, we crowed our independence. Roger declared he was strong enough to go on his own power, thank you. We gathered up the bags and went down ourselves, laden the way we used to be in airports. As we left the elevator and made our way through the crowded lobby, I had my first experience of protective helplessness, lest someone should sneeze in our direction. I wouldn't let Roger touch the door going out.

As we drove home along Sunset, he sighed with pleasure at the open window, feeling the green of spring rush by. There are moments of reprieve that are happier than anything else in life. It's true the homecomings tend to merge as well—the dog turning himself inside out squealing, Roger making his slow way up the steps past the coral tree in front, collapsing with exhaustion in the bedroom by the pool. That's the best room to convalesce in, with the morning light and the bougainvillea. Our own room was shaded by the coral, perfect for my late rising but too dark for somebody stuck in bed. What I remember most clearly about that trip home was Roger sleeping the first twenty-four hours, practically straight through, so that all my plans to stuff him with baked potato and protein shakes went into abeyance. It was partly sheer exhaustion from the transition, partly the codeine, which he had to take to ease the pain of the Pentamidine injections.

For they'd made a mistake sending us home with intramuscular instruction. Pentamidine doesn't diffuse into the veins very well. It goes in like a protracted hornet's sting and collects in a painful bubble between the muscles. The discomfort was so great he needed his Tylenol laced, which nodded him out the whole next day. I'd wake him up every couple of hours to make sure he was all right, frantic at realizing we were all alone, with no hospital staff to ask for advice.

But in fact it was an extraordinarily peaceful sleep. Roger kept waking with a smile and telling me not to worry. It was such a luxury, he said, to doze away the day in his own bed, uninterrupted by the hammering routine of 1028.

But within two days we were begging Cope to let him come off the Pentamidine. By then Roger had welts from the shots on both cheeks of his buttocks, so sore that he had to lie on his side. The last straw was the Saturday dose, administered by a rattled male nurse who injected 2.5 cc instead of 2.0. Roger gritted his teeth against the pain as I ran out to Thrifty to buy a heating pad. It was not the last time I wanted to open up with an Uzi in the long line at a drugstore.

Yet when I wrote that night in my journal, the first dispatch from the moon, we had managed to leave the mess of the treatment behind us. Apparently even I could sometimes see the bright side:

Lying next to Rog in the guest bedroom. We went out for supper to Cock and Bull and took a walk down Cory St. I never thought I'd write in here again, I never thought I'd do anything again, but I record with gratitude and a sense of calm that we stepped out tonight for a plate of prime rib.

Here it breaks off because the jiggling of the pen was bothering him. In fact we were both rather purring, maybe even a trifle cocky, having the evening off like that. It is something you never expect to be a great strength, the talent for small pleasures. Of course it only gives you the inch; the mile is another matter.

Cope finally allowed us to stop the drug, on the fifth day home. By now Roger was out of bed longer and longer, champing the bit to get back to work. Though I thought it was too soon—he was still so gaunt and weak—we made plans for him to start going in at least part of the afternoon. Meanwhile, on April 1, Al and Bernice finished their two months' sublet in Palm Springs. As they planned to be in town overnight, we invited them for dinner, which Bernice insisted on cooking. Roger was lying down when they came, and his mother went right to the kitchen to put together a meat loaf. I remember getting Roger up, and as we came through the study to the kitchen door he was right behind me. Bernice stood at the sink with her back to us, kneading the ground meat, when suddenly I realized Roger had disappeared. I followed him back to the bedroom, closed the door and found him in the bathroom, weeping.

"My poor parents," he cried as I cradled his head in my arms. I rocked him and soothed him and said the right thing, but now I only hope I let him cry enough. Considering the sea of tears that I produced, Roger never cried much at all. Even then it was only a wail and five seconds' squall, which always made the occasion that much more intolerable and wrenching.

Once he'd composed himself, it turned out to be an easy family evening, plain as the meat loaf, and next day the parents left for Chicago, satisfied we were on the mend. I began driving Roger over to Century City in the afternoons. For the first few days I hovered there, as if I might be needed to keep people from getting too close. I was like the hall monitor, trying to root out who might have a cold among that whole suite of attorneys. Roger had been doing work for a couple of high-powered types in the suite, both straight. AIDS to them was still page 48 of the second section, so I don't think they even wondered. They liked Roger and were glad to see him back, and meanwhile when could he have the documents done?

Within a week I was leaving him off outside the Century Park towers at one and picking him up at four-thirty or five, with several frantic calls between to make sure he wasn't too tired. He was so glad to return to a semblance of normalcy, though it frustrated him not to have more energy. He had two lawyering friends, Ackerman and Comden, with whom he was glad to be joking again, bemoaning the plight of the sole practitioner. I remember that time as so peaceful now, waiting in the Jag at five o'clock, parked at the curb like a Connecticut wife, as various three-piece men and women revolved in and out of the building, hyper with energy, meters ticking. At last Roger would emerge, looking a little rocky, but with his tie neatly knotted as ever and his briefcase firmly in hand. I felt such a flood of love for him then, and wagged like the dog and happily chattered as I drove us home to safety.

I have the evidence in hand that I laid down two or three pages of
The Manicurist
each day, but I scarcely noticed. In fact I would sit at the desk wanting to leap out of my skin, counting the hours till I could go pick Roger up. The role of the solitary scribe had become insupportable, but Alfred and I had nothing in the works together. And they were breathing down my neck at the studio. One of the rabid executives—they of the twenty-hour barracuda days—scheduled a 7 A.M. conference call, where I was shrilled at and all my pages spat on. I just watched the clock and waited to go back to bed next to Roger. I realize it isn't a matter of great suspense whether or not
The Manicurist
ever got made. It was clearly doomed from word one. But at the time I was under the same gun as any writer with a high concept:
Get it done now, make it like everything else, and this time make it funny.

My real work, as far as I was concerned, was to find out all I could about this disease. I talked to Craig nearly every day and thus kept up with the early word on HPA-23, the antiviral drug at the Pasteur Institute that was starting to draw to Paris desperate men from the U.S. If the main thing that got Roger on his feet was getting back to work, what fired me was tracking down a cure. It became a kind of compulsion, and gave me the best shot at a positive attitude as I reported my findings every night at dinner. Besides, it was all we had to hold up against the fearful statistics. We had a follow-up appointment with Gottlieb in the AIDS clinic at UCLA, during which Roger asked him how well his other patients were doing. Gottlieb said with a certain pride that he'd kept some alive as long as three years. The stricken look on both our faces was exactly the same. Three was the
good
news?

It was a constant battle against doom and gloom, as each new journalist stumbled morbidly into the ravaged arena. In April an article in
Rolling Stone
quoted the records of a monastery during a plague in the Middle Ages. The single entry for one year—in Latin, one assumes—was "More dead." I didn't read the piece, but Roger perused the first page of it, waiting for me to get ready to go for a walk. As I came into the study he let the magazine fall to the floor and said in a quavering voice: "I don't want to die."

"You won't die," I said forcefully. "You can't die." Always there to buck him up, if not myself. We'd follow every lead, I told him, and be knocking on the right door the minute they found the answer.

We always took our walk up Harold Way, which starts across from the house and runs along the brow of the hill from Kings Canyon to Queens. Both are steep box canyons, sparsely built because of the precipitous angle of repose, and covered with a tangle of chaparral as old as the mountain it grizzles. At the bend where Kings turns into Queens Canyon, out on that point is where Liberace used to live; he'd brought a brief flurry of publicity to the neighborhood when he tried to convert the house to a museum. That was before our time, and he'd settled on Vegas for archival purposes, but the wrought-iron gates still bore two curlicued L's. Those were the days when the Hollywood Hills were known as the Swish Alps.

We must have taken that walk a thousand times in the six years we'd lived up there, but especially late in the evening. Often we made it a full circle by hiking uphill to the next street parallel to Harold, where there was an empty lot covered in century cactus, with the full
Star Wars
view, from the San Bernardino Mountains in the east to Catalina in the west, maybe seventy or eighty miles wide-screen. We'd had so many temperate moments there as we lingered to drink in the view from the eagle's perch. The first couple of months after the verdict we could still go the full walk every now and then, but at least some portion of it was his major form of exercise as Roger worked to build his stamina again.

One day early on, we were pacing ourselves up Harold Way, and the city below was smoky blue under the marine layer, the so-called Catalina eddy that is common on late-spring afternoons. Long before there was smog, the Indians had called the place Valley of Smokes. "Isn't it beautiful?" I said with a rhetorical nod. I think what I really meant was how delicious it felt to be walking together again. Roger stopped, still a bit hunched with fragility, and looked out over the city: "But this is the place where I got sick."