G-9

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.