Parachute

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.