Tim Dlugos

The Republic lies in the blossoms of Washington. —Robert Bly White petals drop into the dark river. Heedless of political significance, they ride out to the sea like stars. I'm the space explorer. I travel to a planet where there are no plants or animals. Everyone lives in harmony. I don't want to go home. I'm the pioneer man and the pioneer woman, both at the same time. I build my house with my own hands, and it's beautiful, with simple, perfect lines. I'm the farmer waiting for the vegetables to grow, so I can eat. I'm the hunter aiming at the bear. I don't want to shoot it, but my family needs meat. The bear gives me a long dumb animal look. We'll use his skin for blankets, his fat to light our lamps. Our cabin will stink all night. I'm the cabin boy who graduates to captain. Shipboard sex is rough, but it suits my taste. I'm the man on the steps of the house where the President's widow lives. All night I wait for the stranger to get out of his car so I can flash my look of recognition. I'm the cowpoke who sleeps with his horses. I'm the man who loves dogs. I'm the cranky President sneaking away to swim in the Potomac. I'm the black man. I close my eyes and it gets dark inside. I feel the sun on my face. I see the light through my eyelids. It's bright, intelligent free of all cares. I'm the heir of a great American family. My success is guaranteed. Unexpected tragedy is all that can stop me. I'm the popular senator teaching his son to shave.

Every time I use my language, I tell the truth. A cat in a white collar, like a priest with calico fur, walks across the dead grass of the yard, and out through the white fence. The sun’s strong, but the colors of the lawn were washed out by the winter, not the light. February. Stained glass window of the house next door takes the sun’s full brunt. It must look spectacular to the neighbor in my head, a white-haired woman with an air of dignity and grace, who through pools of the intensest colors climbs the flight of stairs. I’ve never seen it, but I know it’s there.

Talking to my friend Emily, whose drinking patterns and extravagance of personal feeling are a lot like mine, I’m pretty convinced when she explains the things we do while drinking (a cocktail to celebrate the new account turns into a party that lasts till 3 a.m. and a terrific hangover) indicate a problem of a sort I’d not considered. I’ve been worried about how I metabolize the sauce for four years, since my second bout of hepatitis, when I kissed all the girls at Christmas dinner and turned bright yellow Christmas night, but never about whether I could handle it. It’s been more of a given, the stage set for my life as an artistic queer, as much of a tradition in these New York circles as incense for Catholics or German shepherds for the blind. We re-enact the rituals, and our faces, like smoky icons in a certain light, seem to learn nothing but understand all. It comforts me yet isn’t all that pleasant, like drinking Ripple to remember high school. A friend of mine has been drinking in the same bar for decades, talking to the same types, but progressively fewer blonds. Joe LeSueur says he’s glad to have been a young man in the Fifties with his Tab Hunter good looks, because that was the image men desired; now it’s the Puerto Rican angel with great eyes and a fierce fidelity that springs out of machismo, rather than a moral choice. His argument is pretty convincing, too, except lots of the pretty blonds I’ve known default by dying young, leaving the field to the swarthy. Cameron Burke, the dancer and waiter at Magoo’s, killed on his way home from the Pines when a car hit his bike on the Sunrise Highway. Henry Post dead of AIDS, a man I thought would be around forever, surprising me by his mortality the way I was surprised when I heard he was not the grandson of Emily Post at all, just pretending, like the friend he wrote about in Playgirl, Blair Meehan, was faking when he crashed every A List party for a year by pretending to be Kay Meehan’s son, a masquerade that ended when a hostess told him “Your mother’s here” and led him by the hand to the dowager—Woman, behold thy son—underneath a darkening conviction that all, if not wrong, was not right. By now Henry may have faced the same embarrassment at some cocktail party in the sky. Stay as outrageously nasty as you were. And Patrick Mack, locked into memory as he held court in the Anvil by the downstairs pinball machine, and writhing as he danced in Lita Hornick’s parlor when the Stimulators played her party, dead last week of causes I don’t know, as if the cause and not the effect were the problem. My blond friend Chuck Shaw refers to the Bone- crusher in the Sky, and I’m starting to imagine a road to his castle lit by radiant heads of blonds on poles as streetlamps for the gods, flickering on at twilight as I used to do in the years when I crashed more parties and acted more outrageously and met more beauties and made more enemies than ever before or ever again, I pray. It’s spring and there’s another crop of kids with haircuts from my childhood and inflated self-esteem from my arrival in New York, who plug into the history of prettiness, convincing to themselves and the devout. We who are about to catch the eye of someone new salute as the cotillion passes, led by blonds and followed by the rest of us, a formal march to the dark edge of the ballroom where we step out onto the terrace and the buds of the forsythia that hides the trash sprout magically at our approach. I toast it as memorial to dreams as fragile and persistent as a blond in love. My clothes smell like the smoky bar, but the sweetness of the April air’s delicious when I step outside and fill my lungs, leaning my head back in a first-class seat on the shuttle between the rowdy celebration of the great deeds to come and an enormous Irish wake in which the corpses change but the party goes on forever.

The Bergman image of a game of chess with Death, though not in a dreamscape black-and-white as melancholy films clanking with symbols, but in a garden in Provence with goldfish in the fountain and enormous palms whose topmost fronds cut into the eternal blue of sky above the Roman ruins and the dusty streets where any door may lead to life’s most perfect meal: that is what I think of when I remember I have AIDS. But when I think of how AIDS kills my friends, especially the ones whose paths through life have least prepared them to resist the monster, I think of an insatiable and prowling beast with razor teeth and a persistent stink that sticks to every living branch of flower its rank fur brushes as it stalks its prey. I think of that disgusting animal eating my beautiful friends, innocent as baby deer. Dwight: so delicate and vain, his spindly arms and legs pinned down with needles, pain of tubes and needles, his narrow chest inflated by machine, his mind lost in the seven-minute gap between the respirator’s failure and the time the nurses noticed something wrong. I wrapped my limbs around that fragile body for the first time seven years ago, in a cheap hotel by the piers, where every bit of his extravagant wardrobe—snakeskin boots, skin-tight pedal pushers in a leopard print, aviator’s scarves, and an electric- green capacious leather jacket— lay wrapped in a corner of his room in a yellow parachute. It's hard enough to find a parachute in New York City, I remember thinking, but finding one the right shade of canary is the accomplishment of the sort of citizen with whom I wish to populate my life. Dwight the dancer, Dwight the fashion illustrator and the fashion plate, Dwight the child, the borderline transvestite, Dwight the frightened, infuriating me because an anti-AZT diatribe by some eccentric in a rag convinced him not to take the pills with which he might still be alive, Dwight on the runway, Dwight on the phone suggesting we could still have sex if we wore “raincoats,” Dwight screwing a girl from Massapequa in the ladies’ room at Danceteria (he wore more makeup and had better jewelry than she did), Dwight planning the trip to London or Berlin where he would be discovered and his life transformed. Dwight erased, evicted from his own young body. Dwight dead. At Bellevue, I wrapped my arms around his second skin of gauze and scars and tubing, brushed my hand against his plats, and said goodbye. I hope I’m not the one who loosed the devouring animal that massacred you, gentle boy. You didn’t have a clue to how you might stave off the beast. I feel so confident most days that I can stay alive, survive and thrive with AIDS. But when I see Dwight smile and hear his fey delighted voice inside my head, I know AIDS is no chess game but a hunt, and there is no way of escaping the bloody horror of the kill, no way to bail out, no bright parachute beside my bed.

Which are the magic moments in ordinary time? All of them, for those who can see. That is what redemption means, I decide at the meeting. Then walk with David wearing his new Yale T-shirt and new long hair to 103. Leonard and Eileen come, too. Leonard wears a shark’s tooth on a chain around his neck and long blond hair. These days he’s the manager of Boots and Saddles (“Bras and Girdles,” my beloved Bobby used to say) and costumer for the Gay Cable Network’s Dating Game. One week the announcer is a rhinestone cowboy, sequin shirt and black fur chaps, the next a leatherman, etc. Eileen’s crewcut makes her face light up. Underneath our hairstyles, 23 years of sobriety, all told— the age of a girl who’s “not so young but not so very old,” wrote Berryman, who flew from his recovery with the force of a poet hitting bottom. It’s not the way I choose to go out of this restaurant or day today, and I have a choice. Wanda the comedian comes over to our table. “Call me wicked Wanda,” she smirks when we’re introduced. Why is New York City awash in stand-up comics at the least funny point in its history? Still, some things stay the same. People wonder what the people in their buildings would think if the ones who were wondering became incredibly famous, as famous as Madonna. Debby Harry lived in Eileen’s building in the Village in the early seventies, and she was just the shy girl in the band upstairs. Poets read the writing of their friends, and are happy when they like it thoroughly, when the work’s that good and the crippling sense of competition stays away. Trips get planned: David home to California, Eileen to New Mexico, Chris and I to France and Spain, on vectors which will spread out from a single point, like ribs of an umbrella. Then after the comfort of a wedge of blueberry peach pie and cup of Decaf, sober friends thread separate ways home through the maze of blankets on the sidewalk covered with the scraps of someone else’s life. Mine consists of understanding that the magic isn’t something that I make, but something that shines through the things I make and do and say the way a brooch or scrap of fabric shines from the detritus to catch Leonard’s eye and be of use for costumes, when I am fearless and thorough enough to give it room, all the room there is in ordinary time, which embraces all the people and events and hopes that choke the street tonight and still leaves room for everyone and everything and every other place, the undescribed and indescribable, more various and cacophonous than voice can tell or mind conceive, and for the sky’s vast depths from which they’re all a speck of light.

when I no longer feel it breathing down my neck it's just around the corner (hi neighbor)

were the last words of Goethe on his deathbed as the darkness closed around him. But Mayor Licht was also the chief executive of Providence, Rhode Island in the early Eighties. I’m dreaming of the best political commercial of all time— Weimar in the

The Professor and Ginger are standing in the space in front of the Skipper’s cabin. The Professor is wearing deck shoes, brushed denim jeans, and a white shirt open at the throat. Ginger is wearing spike heels, false eyelashes, and a white satin kimono. The Professor looks at her with veiled lust in his eyes. He raises an articulate eyebrow and addresses her as Cio-Cio-San. Ginger blanches and falls on her knife. * * * Meanwhile it is raining in northern California. In a tiny village on the coast, Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are totally concerned. They realize that something terrible is happening. Each has been savagely attacked by a wild songbird within the last twenty-four hours. Outside their window thousands of birds have gathered in anticipation of the famous school- yard scene. Tippi Hedren is wearing a colorful lipstick. * * * Ginger stares back at the Professor. His sullen good looks are the perfect foil for her radiant smile. The Skipper and Gilligan come into sight. The Skipper has been chasing Gilligan around the lagoon for a long time now. Gilligan holds onto his hat in the stupid way he has of doing things like that. The Professor’s lips part in a sneer of perfect contempt. Ginger bares her teeth, as if in appreciation. * * * Jackie Kennedy bares her teeth. Behind and above her, the muzzle of a high-powered rifle protrudes from a window. A little man is aiming at Jackie Kennedy’s husband. The man is wearing bluejeans and a white T-shirt. There isn’t a bird to be seen. As he squeezes the trigger, the little man mutters between clenched teeth, “Certs is a candy mint.” The hands of Jackie Kennedy’s husband jerk automatically toward his head. * * * The Professor is noticing Ginger’s breasts. He thinks of the wife he left at home, who probably thinks he’s dead. He thinks of his mother, and all of the women he has ever known. Mr. and Mrs. Howell are asleep in their hut, secure in their little lives as character actors. Ginger shifts her weight to the other foot. The intensity of the moment reminds the Professor of a Japanese city before the end of the war. * * * In his mind he goes down each aisle in his government class, focusing on each face, each body. He is lying on his bed with his white shirt off and his trousers open. Dorothy Kirsten’s voice fills the room. He settles on a boy who sits two desks behind him. He begins to masturbate, his body moving in time with the sad music. At moments like these he feels farthest away. As he shoots, his lips part and he bares his teeth. * * * The Professor and Ginger are watching each other across the narrow space. The Skipper and Gilligan have disappeared down the beach. The Howells are quietly snoring. The Professor and Ginger are alone. From the woods comes the sound of strange birds. From the water comes a thick and eerie tropical silence. The famous conversation scene is about to start. Clouds appear in the sky, and it begins to snow.

I'm at a double wake in Springfield, for a childhood friend and his father who died years ago. I join my aunt in the queue of mourners and walk into a brown study, a sepia room with books and magazines. The father's in a coffin; he looks exhumed, the worse for wear. But where my friend's remains should be there's just the empty base of an urn. Where are his ashes? His mother hands me a paper cup with pills: leucovorin, Zovirax, and AZT.  "Henry wanted you to have these," she sneers. "Take all you want, for all the good they'll do."  "Dlugos. Meester Dlugos."  A lamp snaps on. Raquel, not Welch, the chubby nurse, is standing by my bed. It's 6 a.m., time to flush the heplock and hook up the I.V. line. False dawn is changing into day, infusing the sky above the Hudson with a flush of light. My roommate stirs beyond the pinstriped curtain. My first time here on G-9, the AIDS ward, the cheery D & D Building intentionality of the decor made me feel like jumping out a window. I'd been lying on a gurney in an E.R. corridor for nineteen hours, next to a psychotic druggie with a voice like Abbie Hoffman's. He was tied up, or down, with strips of cloth (he'd tried to slug a nurse) and sent up a grating adenoidal whine all night. "Nurse . . . nurse . . . untie me,please. . . these rags have strange powers." By the time they found a bed for me, I was in no mood to appreciate the clever curtains in my room, the same fabric exactly as the drapes and sheets of a P-town guest house in which I once—partied? stayed? All I can remember is the pattern. Nor did it help to have the biggest queen on the nursing staff clap his hands delightedly and welcome me to AIDS-land. I wanted to drop dead immediately. That was the low point. Today these people are my friends, in the process of restoring me to life a second time. I can walk and talk and breathe simultaneously now. I draw a breath and sing "Happy Birthday" to my roommate Joe. He's 51 today. I didn't think he'd make it. Three weeks ago they told him that he had aplastic anemia, and nothing could be done. Joe had been a rotten patient, moaning operatically, throwing chairs at nurses. When he got the bad news, there was a big change. He called the relatives with whom he had been disaffected, was anointed and communicated for the first time since the age of eight when he was raped by a priest, and made a will. As death drew nearer, Joe grew nicer, almost serene. Then the anemia began to disappear, not because of medicines, but on its own. Ready to die, it looks like Joe has more of life to go. He'll go home soon. "When will you get out of here?" he asks me. I don't know; when the X-ray shows no more pneumonia. I've been here three weeks this time. What have I accomplished? Read some Balzac, spent "quality time" with friends, come back from death's door, and prayed, prayed a lot. Barry Bragg, a former lover of a former lover and a new Episcopalian, has AIDS too, and gave me a leatherbound and gold-trimmed copy of the Office, the one with all the antiphons. My list of daily intercessions is as long as a Russian novel. I pray about AIDS last. Last week I made a list of all my friends who've died or who are living and infected. Every day since, I've remembered someone I forgot to list. This morning it was Chasen Gaver, the performance poet from DC. I don't know if he's still around. I liked him and could never stand his poetry, which made it difficult to be a friend, although I wanted to defend him one excruciating night at a Folio reading, where Chasen snapped his fingers and danced around spouting frothy nonsense about Andy Warhol to the rolling eyes of self-important "language- centered" poets, whose dismissive attitude and ugly manners were worse by far than anything that Chasen ever wrote. Charles was his real name; a classmate at Antioch dubbed him "Chasen," after the restaurant, I guess. Once I start remembering, so much comes back. There are forty-nine names on my list of the dead, thirty-two names of the sick. Cookie Mueller changed lists Saturday. They all will, I guess, the living, I mean, unless I go before them, in which case I may be on somebody’s list myself. It’s hard to imagine so many people I love dying, but no harder than to comprehend so many already gone. My beloved Bobby, maniac and boyfriend. Barry reminded me that he had sex with Bobby on the coat pile at this Christmas party, two years in a row. That’s the way our life together used to be, a lot of great adventures. Who’ll remember Bobby’s stories about driving in his debutante date’s father’s white Mercedes from hole to hole of the golf course at the poshest country club in Birmingham at 3 a.m., or taking off his clothes in the redneck bar on a dare, or working on Stay Hungry as the dresser of a then- unknown named Schwarzenegger. Who will be around to anthologize his purple cracker similes: “Sweatin’ like a nigger on Election Day,” “Hotter than a half-fucked fox in a forest fire.” The ones that I remember have to do with heat, Bobby shirtless, sweating on the dance floor of the tiny bar in what is now a shelter for the indigent with AIDS on the dockstrip, stripping shirts off Chuck Shaw, Barry Bragg and me, rolling up the tom rags, using them as pom-poms, then bolting off down West Street, gracefully (despite the overwhelming weight of his inebriation) vaulting over trash cans as he sang, “I like to be in America” in a Puerto Rican accent. When I pass, who’ll remember, who will care about these joys and wonders? I’m haunted by that more than by the faces of the dead and dying. A speaker crackles near my bed and nurses streak down the corridor. The black guy on the respirator next door bought the farm, Maria tells me later, but only when I ask. She has tears in her eyes. She’d known him since his first day on G-9 a long time ago. Will I also become a fond, fondly regarded regular, back for stays the way retired retiring widowers return to the hotel in Nova Scotia or Provence where they vacationed with their wives? I expect so, although that’s down the road; today’s enough to fill my plate. A bell rings, like the gong that marks the start of a fight. It’s 10 and Derek’s here to make the bed, Derek who at 16 saw Bob Marley’s funeral in the football stadium in Kingston, hot tears pouring down his face. He sings as he folds linens, “You can fool some of the people some of the time,” dancing a little softshoe as he works. There’s a reason he came in just now;Divorce Court drones on Joe’s TV, and Derek is hooked. I can’t believe the script is plausible to him, Jamaican hipster that he is, but he stands transfixed by the parade of faithless wives and screwed-up husbands. The judge is testy; so am I, unwilling auditor of drivel. Phone my friends to block it out: David, Jane and Eileen. I missed the bash for David’s magazine on Monday and Eileen’s reading last night. Jane says that Marie-Christine flew off to Marseilles where her mother has cancer of the brain, reminding me that AIDS is just a tiny fragment of life’s pain. Eileen has been thinking about Bobby, too, the dinner that we threw when he returned to New York after getting sick. Pencil-thin, disfigured by KS, he held forth with as much kinetic charm as ever. What we have to cherish is not only what we can recall of how things were before the plague, but how we each responded once it started. People have been great to me. An avalanche of love has come my way since I got sick, and not just moral support. Jaime’s on the board of PEN’s new fund for AIDS; he’s helping out. Don Windham slipped a check inside a note, and Brad Gooch got me something from the Howard Brookner Fund. Who’d have thought when we dressed up in ladies’ clothes for a night for a hoot in Brad (“June Buntt”) and Howard (“Lili La Lean”)’s suite at the Chelsea that things would have turned out this way: Howard is dead at 35, Chris Cox (“Kay Sera Sera”)’s friend Bill gone too, “Bernadette of Lourdes” (guess who) with AIDS, God knows how many positive. Those 14th Street wigs and enormous stingers and Martinis don’t provoke nostalgia for a time when love and death were less inextricably linked, but for the stories we would tell the morning after, best when they involved our friends, second-best, our heroes. J.J. Mitchell was master of the genre. When he learned he had AIDS, I told him he should write them down. His mind went first. I’ll tell you one of his best. J.J. was Jerome Robbins’ houseguest At Bridgehampton. Every morning they would have a contest to see who could finish the Times crossword first. Robbins always won, until a day when he was clearly baffled. Grumbling, scratching over letters, he finally threw his pen down. “J.J., tell me what I’m doing wrong.” One clue was “Great 20th-c. choreographer.” The solution was “Massine,” but Robbins had placed his own name in the space. Every word around it had been changed to try to make the puzzle work, except that answer. At this point there’d be a horsey laugh from J.J. —“Isn’t that great?” he’d say through clenched teeth (“Locust Valley lockjaw”). It was, and there were lots more where that one came from, only you can’t get there anymore. He’s dropped into the maw waiting for the G-9 denizens and for all flesh, as silent as the hearts that beat upon the beds up here: the heart of the drop- dead beautiful East Village kid who came in yesterday, Charles Frost’s heart nine inches from the spleen they’re taking out tomorrow, the heart of the demented girl whose screams roll down the hallways late at night, hearts that long for lovers, for reprieve, for old lives, for another chance. My heart, so calm most days, sinks like a brick to think of all that heartache. I’ve been staying sane with program tools, turning everything over to God “as I understand him.”  I don’t understand him. Thank God I read so much Calvin last spring; the absolute necessity of blind obedience to a sometimes comforting, sometimes repellent, always incomprehensible Source of light and life stayed with me. God can seem so foreign, a parent from another country, like my Dad and his own father speaking Polish in the kitchen. I wouldn’t trust a father or a God too much like me, though. That is why I pack up all my cares and woes, and load them on the conveyor belt, the speed of which I can’t control, like Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times or Lucy on TV. I don’t need to run machines today. I’m standing on a moving sidewalk headed for the dark or light, whatever’s there. Duncan Hannah visits, and we talk of out-of-body experiences. His was amazing. Bingeing on vodka in his dorm at Bard, he woke to see a naked boy in fetal posture on the floor. Was it a corpse, a classmate, a pickup from the blackout of the previous night? Duncan didn’t know. He struggled out of bed, walked over to the youth, and touched his shoulder. The boy turned; it was Duncan himself. My own experience was milder, don’t make me flee screaming from the room as Duncan did. It happened on a Tibetan meditation weekend at the Cowley Fathers’ house in Cambridge. Michael Koonsman led it, healer whose enormous paws directed energy. He touched my spine to straighten up my posture, and I gasped at the rush. We were chanting to Tara, goddess of compassion and peace, in the basement chapel late at night. I felt myself drawn upward, not levitating physically, but still somehow above my body. A sense of bliss surrounded me. It lasted ten or fifteen minutes. When I came down, my forehead hurt. The spot where the “third eye” appears in Buddhist art felt as though someone had pushed a pencil through it. The soreness lasted for a week. Michael wasn’t surprised. He did a lot of work with people with AIDS in the epidemic’s early days but when he started losing weight and having trouble with a cough, he was filled with denial. By the time he checked into St. Luke’s, he was in dreadful shape. The respirator down his throat squelched the contagious enthusiasm of his voice, but he could still spell out what he wanted to say on a plastic Ouija board beside his bed. When the doctor who came in to tell him the results of his bronchoscopy said, “Father, I’m afraid I have bad news,” Michael grabbed the board and spelled, “The truth is always Good News.” After he died, I had a dream in which I was a student in a class that he was posthumously teaching. With mock annoyance he exclaimed, “Oh, Tim! I can’t believe you really think that AIDS is a disease!” There’s evidence in that direction, I’ll tell him if the dream recurs: the shiny hamburger-in-lucite look of the big lesion on my face; the smaller ones I daub with makeup; the loss of forty pounds in a year; the fatigue that comes on at the least convenient times. The symptoms float like algae on the surface of the grace that buoys me up today. Arthur comes in with the Sacrament, and we have to leave the room (Joe’s Italian family has arrived for birthday cheer) to find some quiet. Walk out to the breezeway, where it might as well be August for the stifling heat. On Amsterdam, pedestrians and drivers are oblivious to our small aerie, as we peer through the grille like cloistered nuns. Since leaving G-9 the first time, I always slow my car down on this block, and stare up at this window, to the unit where my life was saved. It’s strange how quickly hospitals feel foreign when you leave, and how normal their conventions seem as soon as you check in. From below, it’s like checking out the windows of the West Street Jail; hard to imagine what goes on there, even if you know firsthand. The sun is going down as I receive communion. I wish the rite’s familiar magic didn’t dull my gratitude for this enormous gift. I wish I had a closer personal relationship with Christ, which I know sounds corny and alarming. Janet Campbell gave me a remarkable ikon the last time I was here; Christ is in a chair, a throne, and St. John the Divine, an androgyne who looks a bit like Janet, rests his head upon the Savior’s shoulder. James Madden, priest of Cowley, dead of cancer earlier this year at 39, gave her the image, telling her not to be afraid to imitate St. John. There may come a time when I’m unable to respond with words, or works, or gratitude to AIDS; a time when my attitude caves in, when I’m as weak as the men who lie across the dayroom couches hour after hour, watching sitcoms, drawing blanks. Maybe my head will be shaved and scarred from surgery; maybe I’ll be pencil- thin and paler than a ghost, pale as the vesper light outside my window now. It would be good to know that I could close my eyes and lean my head back on his shoulder then, as natural and trusting as I’d be with a cherished love. At this moment, Chris walks in, Christopher Earl Wiss of Kansas City and New York, my lover, my last lover, my first healthy and enduring relationship in sobriety, the man with whom I choose to share what I have left of life and time. This is the hardest and happiest moment of the day. G-9 is no place to affirm a relationship. Two hours in a chair beside my bed after eight hours of work night after night for weeks … it’s been a long haul, and Chris gets tired. Last week he exploded, “I hate this, I hate your being sick and having AIDS and lying in a hospital where I can only see you with a visitor’s pass. I hate that this is going to get worse.” I hate it, too. We kiss, embrace, and Chris climbs into bed beside me, to air-mattress squeaks. Hold on. We hold on to each other, to a hope of how we’ll be when I get out. Let him hold on, please don’t let him lose his willingness to stick with me, to make love and to make love work, to extend the happiness we’ve shared. Please don’t let AIDS make me a monster or a burden is my prayer. Too soon, Chris has to leave. I walk him to the elevator bank, then totter back so Raquel can open my I.V. again. It’s not even mid-evening, but I’m nodding off. My life’s so full, even (especially?) when I’m here on G-9. When it’s time to move on to the next step, that will be a great adventure, too. Helena Hughes, Tibetan Buddhist, tells me that there are three stages in death. The first is white, like passing through a thick but porous wall. The second stage is red; the third is black; and then you’re finished, ready for the next event. I’m glad she has a road map, but I don’t feel the need for one myself. I’ve trust enough in all that’s happened in my life, the unexpected love and gentleness that rushes in to fill the arid spaces in my heart, the way the city glow fills up the sky above the river, making it seem less than night. When Joe O’Hare flew in last week, he asked what were the best times of my New York years; I said “Today,” and meant it. I hope that death will lift me by the hair like an angel in a Hebrew myth, snatch me with the strength of sleep’s embrace, and gently set me down where I’m supposed to be, in just the right place.

The city and the continent trail off into cold black water the same way: at the western edge, a flat stretch with precipitous planes set perpendicular and back from the beach or beach-equivalent, a blacktop margin where the drugged and dying trudge, queue up for Hades. Bolinas had its junkie lady with gray skin, gray sweater, stumbling through the sand with the short- burst intensity and long-run aimlessness of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers. Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years before I saw it. I’d huddle at the foot of the cliff in a cold wind late at night, wrapped in Indian blankets, waiting with strangers as the tidal wave or temblor hit. Tonight I walk with old friends in a new dream past a vest-pocket park of great formality and charm in the far West Village. My disaffected former confidant has grown a pony tail and cruises up the street on a “hog,” a “chopper,” which seems a perfect locomotive choice. I walk out to the quay where gondola after enormous gondola departs for “the other side,” not New Jersey anymore, anymore than something prosaic as another mass of land past the bright horizon could function as a mirror of the chopped-away Bolinas hill. O western edge, where points of interest on maps of individual hearts and bodies disappear in waters of a depth unfathomable even in a dream, I had thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness, not to hone and polish with the lapping of the hungry waves of Lethe.