Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (6 page)

You walk in a daze through days like these, working to keep life normal for your friend, trying to give him a respite; that much you can still do. But the frailty of life has got its hooks in you, and a lot of the cheer is hollow and ventriloquized. My journal says we laughed, though. The three of us went to
The Terminator
on Friday night and loved it. The first good movie since
The Last Metro
, we decided. Or maybe what we said was that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Catherine Deneuve of violence. That was the way we jockeyed culture, keeping it aloft like balls in the air.

Saturday night we had about ten people in for the evening, including Cesar's friend Jerry, who'd driven him door to door and was staying the holiday with his family in L.A. Cesar was visibly pleased to have his companion near, though Jerry himself was a wreck. His mother was dying of cancer, and he'd been out of work for months. Yet he seemed so loving of Cesar, so glad to be with him and hear him talk. There was no doubt that the two of them were racking up lost time like pinball, no matter how little there was to play with.

And with the party in full swing—just the size Roger liked, conversation one on one—we seemed for the moment safe again. We would fashion our own reprieves. In the good hours, I still had an almanac faith that the proper doses of rest and love would bring things back to stasis. Before we all went to bed we struck a deal whereby Cesar would come for a week at Christmas. Meanwhile Jerry was picking him up early Sunday morning for the long drive home, and Cesar promised he'd peek in to say good-bye before they took off. On Sunday I woke to him lightly touching my shoulder and saw he was kneeling beside our bed. "Good-bye, darling," he said, smiling through a glaze of pain.

"What's wrong?"

"I just threw my back out." He was literally bent double to the floor, trying not to gasp.

Cesar's back. I remember when it was the worst problem we had—Cesar's bad back, mine, Roger's, in descending order of magnitude. (Craig, last summer: "Remember when all we worried about was whether the melon was ripe?") By dint of the vaunted Williams exercises, Cesar had brought his back into supple shape again, but the weight of the swollen leg threw him off balance. When Jerry arrived, Cesar could just stand up and hobble down to the car, me with his kit bag. I stood in the ludicrous morning sun, trying to wish him Godspeed, and he just kept shaking his head.

"They've got to do something," he said. "I can't go on like this."

He meant the doctors at San Francisco General, still convinced they could alchemize the optimum dose of chemo. I didn't know what the drugs were; it was the last case before my pharmaceutical residency at UCLA. In addition, we were getting all our information about the treatment from the patient. Despite Cesar's fluency in four tongues, there appeared to be a language barrier here, because he couldn't seem to tell us what the course of the medication was or what the data said. We were intellectuals. We needed an idea.

I still didn't fully understand—nobody I knew did—the difference between KS and infections like Pneumocystis. Three months later we would learn that the scythe fell one way or the other, lesions or the lungs. This was the crude half-picture at the end of '84, before we knew about lymphomas and the brain. Men with KS were seemingly the lucky ones, because they appeared to have the strain with a slow progression. But I could see myself now that KS was something a good deal more dire than skin cancer, its lesions rooted deeper than bruises. They looked like exploded blood vessels under the skin, and sometimes they boiled to the surface like stunted orchids.

We were helpless, Roger and I, six hundred miles away. We felt like calling the doctors ourselves, to affirm somehow that we were Cesar's family here in the States. We worried that he was going to a hospital already bursting at the seams with AIDS cases. More to the point, Roger had always been alert to Cesar's difficulty with father figures. He was a charmer, not a demander. We could imagine him being passive with his doctors, politely letting them experiment. You don't need cautionary tales like the
Titanic
to know how many survive in steerage and how many on the boat deck. Unless you have a private doctor with privileges, which is another way of saying you'd better have money, you are lost like Hansel and Gretel
in the
system's
beige-flecked corridors. The peaks of insurance pale beside this Everest of a condition.

It is also imperative to have doctor friends to run things by, to provide little crash courses in hematology. Even a nurse can steer you around so you know which way is north. Fortunately Cesar had Lucy, a nurse who worked part time at a high-toned white-bread hospital, the Pacific Heights wing of medicine. It had taken fifteen months, but finally Cesar said
Help.
And as soon as he went into Lucy's hospital, he suddenly wasn't another dumbstruck face in the Kafka crowd at the clinics. They put him on intravenous chemo right away. The bullet wound from the biopsy was part of the KS, light-years more evolved than a mere bruise. Cesar's new doctor told him the clinic had been treating him with a dose of chemo that was far too low. Yet the doctor wasn't blaming anyone, since he knew the free clinics were swamped like a field hospital at Verdun. The good news was that the higher IV dose would push the cancer back, and Cesar would be out and down for Christmas as planned.

There's a great harp-string moment in
A Christmas Carol
when Scrooge leans out his bedroom window after the nightmare—George C. Scott did anyway, but maybe this was a rewrite—and begs to know what day it is. "Why, Christmas," a boy tells him, stunned that somebody wouldn't know. And Scrooge clutches his hands and gasps: "There's still time!"

That is how I went around for the next four weeks, building Christmas like a fortified town, even though I was down with a cold within hours of Cesar's wrenched departure after Thanksgiving. A cold that lingered: I slept a week in the guest room so I wouldn't pass it on to Rog. Even that unpassed cold gave me a sort of subliminal relief, for it seemed to prove that Roger's resistance was strong. He was swamped at work as a blizzard of legal matters converged on the end of the year. But we still had time to spare, and I meant to spend it on our friend. Roger, who'd grown accustomed to the jingle of bells in December, may not have noticed the pitch of frenzy that attended these preparations. I stopped short of stringing popcorn and cranberries, but just barely.

Meanwhile I got lucky the first week of December. After six months of serious hustle—being "encouraged to death," as Pauline Kael puts it—I managed to put
The Manicurist
into development at a studio. "Development" is the Hollywood term for suspended animation, but at the beginning at least there is the deal. I knew that once the negotiating was done I'd have my next year's work cut out. I even managed not to worry how I was going to write jokes in the fifth year of the plague.

I spent my afternoons shopping, a blur of packages mailed to the four corners, mounds of presents for Cesar and Rog. Cesar had been with us for the holidays half a dozen times, falling into a cooking mania that went on for days before Christmas Eve. I knew how Cesar would glamorize his visits to L.A., especially back up north, where he found the curled lip of superiority as to the lowness of L.A. deliciously provincial. Nobody understood the provinces like Cesar. He had a raft of Madame Bovaries in his life, one in every port. So I determined to make him a perfect week, a fresh doubloon to fling on the table when people acted as if there was nothing real about him anymore except his diagnosis.

I know I saw John Allison during December, because I remember telling him how undone Roger and I were by Cesar's November visit.

John nodded gravely, explaining he had a close friend who was ill. Then, as we talked about scheduling for my play, he said something very odd: "Of course, I could always decide to toss it all and take off."

"Take off where?"

"I don't know. Doesn't really matter. Maybe I've had enough of theater and all this la-de-da."

Did any of that shiver through me like an echo? "I've had enough of traveling," Cesar had said. Frankly, I was more concerned just then about my play—that I might have a flake on my hands who'd disappear in the middle like a pouting Prospero. John reassured me with an easy laugh that we'd mount my play first, no matter if he ended up in Fiji. But he might have a musical coming along, so we probably wouldn't do
Summers
till late spring. That was okay by me. I figured I'd be up to my neck in
The Manicurist
for the next several months.

Chris Adler, the New York composer, died ten days before Christmas. I note in my journal that Chris and Cesar had both had to suffer "the grossest misdiagnosis." Chris had been dying by inches for six months, bombarded with drugs for lymphoma, at one point requiring removal of his spleen. Yet at no time would anyone call it AIDS. I was close to a heartsick friend of his, and it didn't seem to be a case of stonewalling the truth. Rather, we were still stuck with the CDC's narrow definition. By the time Chris died—at twenty-eight, his family of strangers circled about him, his lover banished from the room—there was no doubt in my mind. It was the first time I wondered how many died and had never made the CDC list, which was hovering now around seven thousand.

I also recall thinking, when Chris's spleen was taken out, about a psychologist I knew whose lover had died in 1980 of liver cancer. That one had struck me as curiously coincidental with somebody else—a best-selling novelist, in the closet of course, who'd died of a fast liver tumor around the same time. And now that I thought of it, a mad and gaudy screenwriter who rode high for seven and a half minutes, with a sweet tooth for porn stars, had also withered and died in the fall of '80, again of liver cancer.

Were they all drinking the wrong kind of vodka? Or was there something we weren't being told about the organs? There was growing frustration—rage in New York—as to what we were and were not being told. Was anybody pooling this data? Sometimes you felt that your own journey and your own circle would give them the full etiology of it, if they would only factor in all these horrible coincidences.

One night in mid-December, Roger came home in great distress from yet another dinner, Lawyers for Human Rights. Rand Schrader had told him that one of the group's officers was dying of AIDS and his family didn't know. They also didn't know he was gay. This was our first encounter with the double closet of the war, the
Early Frost
division.

Roger processed the constant upheaval differently than I did. He anguished for people in pain, moved as he was by solitary lives and the cruelties of fate. A month after I had met him in '74, I came by his Sacramento Street apartment, and he was listening to
Kindertotenlieder
—Mahler's songs for dead children. We were in love, and I was more of a mind to listen to Linda Ronstadt. But if Roger internalized the tragic, it wasn't by way of suppressing it; he could weep openly too. He simply contemplated more than I did what people went through, while I got manic and whipped myself up to
do
something. That's why it's harder to piece the whole of Roger's inner story in those months, for I was furiously acting out, over the top and full speed ahead. Being as we were the same person, happily it all balanced out.

Cesar arrived December 23, spirits high. His back was better; the chemo had checked the cancer for the present; and he felt enthusiastic about his new set of doctors. He was ready as ever to cook up a storm. To our friends who came over on Christmas Eve—last and best of our parties—there was something enormously comforting about seeing Cesar going strong a year later. He was utterly himself that night, the vivid exhilaration fine as silk, for he had more to celebrate than we did. He had pushed the enemy back. The border was barely secured, the truce uneasy, but here was a man returned from the front lines.

During the next few days I orchestrated the time so he could appear and disappear to rest whenever he needed. I knew the rhythm now of what he could do and what it cost. During the down times I'd sit on his bed, which looked out on the pool, and talk the past with him back and forth, never tired of analyzing the strange behavior of the shadow folk who still lived in the closet. When his strength returned we'd go find Roger and off to the next party, where we'd scarf a plateful, make the rounds, then duck out and home to open another present.

Roger, Cesar and I: the Chicago Jew, the Uruguayan lapsed RC and the hollowed-out Episcopalian lost at Delphi. I used to tell the two of them Scrooge's nephew had the proper text for Christmas:

The only day I know of... when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely... as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

I bore no particular animus toward Baby Jesus; he was welcome to the Sunday side of it all. Our own celebration had its fix on the year's end, druid-like, tuned to the solstice glow of pinlights on a Douglas fir. That is to say how it felt in the time before the war, years that ended gliding into a sunset harbor, the three of us out on deck watching the sun sink in the wrinkled Pacific.

In '84 the celebrating had to be danced on one leg. I can see Cesar in his nightshirt, stretched out on the sofa with his whale of a leg, so visibly glad to be doing nothing as long as he was here with us.

I remember one morning he called his mother in Montevideo. He bragged about the party and catalogued all his presents, as if to make her see that things were the same as ever. She told him she felt relieved whenever she knew he was in L.A. I can't imagine what her picture of Roger and me must've been, but I'd trust her version of us sight unseen. I never even wrote to her after Cesar died, because Roger and I were on the beach in Normandy by that time. I can't think who might have her address. How can a man be so dispersed? I guess what I'd like her to understand is that the past he always bragged about was true. The melon was ripe for years on end.