Women found out that their husbands had been seeing men—only when their husbands were dying. Parents learned that their young male children were dying before they knew (or had figured out) that their kids were gay.
Only a few women friends of mine were infected—not many. I was terrified about Elaine; she’d slept with some men I knew were bisexual. But two abortions had taught Elaine to insist on condoms; she was of the opinion that nothing else could keep her from getting pregnant.
We’d had an earlier condom conversation; when the AIDS epidemic started, Elaine had asked me, “You’re still a condom guy—right, Billy?” (Since ’68! I’d told her.)
“I should be dead,” Larry said. He wasn’t sick; he looked fine. I wasn’t sick, either. We kept our fingers crossed.
It was still in ’81, near the end of the year, when there was that bleeding episode in the wrestling room at the New York Athletic Club. I’m not sure if all the wrestlers knew that the AIDS virus was mainly transmitted by blood and semen, because there was a time when hospital workers were afraid they could catch it from a cough or a sneeze, but that day I got a nosebleed in the wrestling room, everyone already knew enough to be scared shitless of blood.
It often happens in wrestling: You don’t know you’re bleeding until you see your blood on your opponent. I was working out with Sonny; when I saw the blood on Sonny’s shoulder, I backed away. “You’re bleeding—” I started to say; then I saw Sonny’s face. He was staring at my nosebleed. I put my hand to my face and saw the blood—on my hand, on my chest, on the mat. “Oh, it’s me,” I said, but Sonny had left the wrestling room—running. The locker room, where the training room was, was on another floor.
“Go get the trainer, Billy—tell him we’ve got blood here,” Arthur told me. All the wrestlers had stopped wrestling; no one would touch the blood on the mat. Normally, a nosebleed was no big deal; you just wiped off the mat with a towel. Blood, in a wrestling room, used to be of no importance.
Sonny had already sent the trainer to the wrestling room; the trainer arrived with rubber gloves on, and with towels soaked in alcohol. Minutes later, I saw Sonny standing under the shower in the locker room—he was wearing his wrestling gear, even his shoes, in the shower. I emptied out my locker before I took a shower. I wanted to give Sonny time to finish showering before I went anywhere near the shower room. I was betting that Sonny hadn’t told the trainer that “the writer” had bled in the wrestling room; Sonny must have told him that “the gay guy” was bleeding. I know that’s what I would have said to the trainer, at that time.
Arthur saw me only when I was leaving the locker room; I’d showered and dressed, and I had some cautionary cotton balls stuffed up both nostrils—not a drop of blood in sight, but I was carrying a green plastic garbage bag with the entire contents of my locker. I got the garbage bag from a guy in the equipment room; boy, did he look happy I was leaving!
“Are you okay, Billy?” Arthur asked me. Someone would keep asking me that question—for about fourteen or fifteen years.
“I’m going to withdraw my application for lifetime membership, Arthur—if that’s okay with you,” I said. “The dress code at this place is a nuisance for a writer. I don’t wear a coat and tie when I write. Yet I have to put on a coat and tie just to get in the front door here—only to get undressed to wrestle.”
“I totally understand, Billy. I just hope you’re going to be okay,” Arthur said.
“I can’t belong to a club with such an uptight dress code. It’s all wrong for a writer,” I told him.
Some of the other wrestlers were showing up in the locker room after practice—Ed and Wolfie and Jim, my former workout partners, among them. Everyone saw me holding the green plastic garbage bag; I didn’t have to tell them it was my last wrestling practice.
I left the club by the back door to the lobby. You look odd carrying a garbage bag on Central Park South. I went out of the New York Athletic Club on West Fifty-eighth Street, where there were a few narrow alleys that served as delivery entrances to the hotels on Central Park South. I knew I would find a Dumpster for my garbage bag, and what amounted to my life as a beginning wrestler in the dawn of the AIDS crisis.
IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER the inglorious nosebleed had ended my wrestling career that Larry and I were having dinner downtown and he told me he’d heard that bottoms were more likely to get sick than tops. I knew tops who had it, but more bottoms got it—this was true. I never knew how Larry managed to have “heard” everything, but he heard right most of the time.
“Blow jobs aren’t too terribly risky, Bill—just so you know.” Larry was the first person to tell me that. Of course Larry seemed to know (or he assumed) that the number of sex partners in your life was a factor. Ironically, I didn’t hear about the condom factor from Larry.
Larry had responded to Russell’s death by seeking to help every young man he knew who was dying; Larry had an admirably stronger stomach for visiting the AIDS patients we knew at St. Vincent’s, and in hospice care, than I did. I could sense myself withdrawing, just as I was aware of people shrinking away from me—not only my fellow wrestlers.
Rachel had retreated immediately. “She may think she can catch the disease from your writing, Billy,” Elaine told me.
Elaine and I had talked about getting out of New York, but the problem with living in New York for any length of time is that many New Yorkers can’t imagine that there’s anywhere else they could live.
As more of our friends contracted the virus, Elaine and I would imagine ourselves with one or another of the AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses. Elaine developed night sweats. I woke up imagining I could feel the white plaques of Candida encroaching on my teeth. (I admitted to Elaine that I often woke up at night and peered into my mouth in a mirror—with a flashlight!) And there was that seborrheic dermatitis; it was flaky and greasy-looking—it cropped up mostly on your eyebrows and scalp, and on the sides of your nose. Herpes could run wild on your lips; the ulcers simply wouldn’t heal. There were also those clusters of molluscum; they looked like smallpox—they could completely cover your face.
And there’s a certain smell your hair has when it is matted by your sweat and flattened by your pillow. It’s not just how translucent-looking and funny-smelling your hair is. It’s the salt that dries and hardens on your forehead, from the unremitting fever and the incessant sweating; it’s your mucous membranes, too—they get chock-full of yeast. It’s a yeasty but, at the same time, fruity smell—the way curd smells, or mildew, or a dog’s ears when they’re wet.
I wasn’t afraid of dying; I was afraid of feeling guilty, forever, because I wasn’t dying. I couldn’t accept that I would or might escape the AIDS virus for as accidental a reason as being told to wear a condom by a doctor who disliked me, or that the random luck of my being a top would or might save me. I was not ashamed of my sex life; I was ashamed of myself for not wanting to be there for the people who were dying.
“I’m not good at this. You are,” I told Larry; I meant more than the hand-holding and the pep talks.
Cryptococcal meningitis was caused by a fungus; it affected your brain, and was diagnosed by a lumbar puncture—it presented with fever and headache and confusion. There was a separate spinal-cord disease, a myelopathy that caused progressive weakness—loss of function in your legs, incontinence. There was little one could do about it—vacuolar myelopathy, it was called.
I was watching Larry empty the bedpan of our friend who had this awful myelopathy; I was truly marveling at Larry—he’d become a saint—when I suddenly realized that I had no difficulty pronouncing the myelopathy word, or any of the other AIDS-associated words. (That Pneumocystis pneumonia, for example—I could actually say it. Kaposi’s sarcoma, those terrible lesions, gave me no pronunciation problem; I could say “cryptococcal meningitis” as if it meant no more to me than the common cold. I didn’t even hesitate to pronounce “cytomegalovirus”—a major cause of blindness in AIDS.)
“I sh
ould call your mother,” I told Elaine. “I seem to be having a pronunciation breakthrough.”
“It’s just because you’re distancing yourself from this disease, Billy,” Elaine said. “You’re like me—you’re imagining yourself as standing on the outside, looking in.”
“I should call your mother,” I repeated, but I knew Elaine was right.
“Let’s hear you say ‘penis,’ Billy.”
“That’s not fair, Elaine—that’s different.”
“Say it,” Elaine said.
But I knew how it would sound. It was, is, and will always be penith to me; some things never change. I didn’t try to say the penis word for Elaine. “Cock,” I said to her.
I didn’t call Mrs. Hadley about my pronunciation breakthrough, either. I was trying to distance myself from the disease—even as the epidemic was only beginning. I was already feeling guilty that I didn’t have it.
THE 1981 ATKINS CHRISTMAS card came on time that year. No generic “Season’s Greetings,” more than a month late, but an unapologetic “Merry Christmas” in December.
“Uh-oh,” Elaine said, when I showed her the Atkins family photo. “Where’s Tom?”
Atkins wasn’t in the picture. The names of the family were printed on the Christmas card in small capitals: TOM, SUE, PETER, EMILY & JACQUES ATKINS. (Jacques was the Labrador; Atkins had named the dog after Kittredge!) But Tom had missed the family photograph.
“Maybe he wasn’t feeling very photogenic,” I said to Elaine.
“His color wasn’t so hot last Christmas, was it? And he’d lost all that weight,” Elaine said.
“The ski hat was hiding his hair and his eyebrows,” I added. (There’d been no Tom Atkins review of my fourth novel, I’d noticed. I doubted that Atkins had changed his mind about Madame Bovary.)
“Shit, Billy,” Elaine said. “What do you make of the message?”
The message, which was written by hand on the back of the Christmas photo, was from the wife. There was not a lot of information in it, and it wasn’t very Christmasy.
Tom has mentioned you. He would like to see you.
Sue Atkins
“I think he’s dying—that’s what I think,” I told Elaine.
“I’ll go with you, Billy—Tom always liked me,” Elaine said.
Elaine was right—poor Tom had always adored her (and Mrs. Hadley)—and, not unlike old times, I felt braver in Elaine’s company. If Atkins was dying of AIDS, I was pretty sure his wife would already know everything about that summer twenty years ago, when Tom and I were in Europe together.
That night, I called Sue Atkins. It turned out that Tom had been placed in hospice care at his home in Short Hills, New Jersey. I’d never known what Atkins did, but his wife told me that Tom had been a CEO at a life-insurance company; he’d worked in New York City, five days a week, for more than a decade. I guessed that he’d never felt like seeing me for lunch or dinner, but I was surprised when Sue Atkins said that she’d thought her husband had been seeing me; apparently, there were nights when Tom hadn’t made it back to New Jersey in time for dinner.
“It wasn’t me he was seeing,” I told Mrs. Atkins. I mentioned that Elaine wanted to visit Tom, too—if we weren’t “intruding,” was how I’d put it.
Before I could explain who Elaine was, Sue Atkins said, “Yes, that would be all right—I’ve heard all about Elaine.” (I didn’t ask Mrs. Atkins what she’d heard about me.)
Elaine was teaching that term—grading final papers, I explained on the phone. Perhaps we could come to Short Hills on a Saturday; there wouldn’t be all the commuters on the train, I was thinking.
“The children will be home from school, but that will be fine with Tom,” Sue said. “Certainly Peter knows who you are. That trip to Europe—” Her voice just stopped. “Peter knows what’s going on, and he’s devoted to his father,” Mrs. Atkins began again. “But Emily—well, she’s younger. I’m not sure how much Emily really knows. You can’t do much to counter what your kids hear in school from the other kids—not if your kids won’t tell you what the other kids are saying.”
“I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” I told Tom’s wife.
“I always knew this might happen. Tom was candid about his past,” Sue Atkins said. “I just didn’t know he’d gone back there. And this terrible disease—” Her voice stopped again.
I was looking at the Christmas card while we spoke on the phone. I’m not good at guessing young girls’ ages. I wasn’t sure how old Emily was; I just knew she was the younger child. I was estimating that the boy, Peter Atkins, would have been fourteen or fifteen—about the same age poor Tom had been when I’d first met him and thought he was a loser who couldn’t even pronounce the time word. Atkins had told me he’d called me Bill, instead of Billy, because he noticed that Richard Abbott always called me Bill, and anyone could see how much I loved Richard.
Poor Tom had also confessed to me that he’d overheard Martha Hadley’s outburst, when I was seeing Mrs. Hadley in her office and Atkins had been waiting for his turn. “Billy, Billy—you’ve done nothing wrong!” Mrs. Hadley had cried, loud enough for Atkins to have heard her through the closed door. (It was when I’d told Martha Hadley about my crushes on other boys and men, including my slightly fading crush on Richard and my much more devastating crush on Kittredge.)
Poor Tom told me that he’d thought I was having an affair with Mrs. Hadley! “I actually believed you’d just ejaculated in her office, or something, and she was trying to assure you that you’d done nothing ‘wrong’—that’s what I thought she meant by the wrong word, Bill,” Atkins had confessed to me.
“What an idiot you are!” I’d told him; now I felt ashamed.
I asked Sue Atkins how Tom was doing—I meant those opportunistic illnesses I already knew something about, and what drugs Tom was taking. When she said he’d developed a rash from the Bactrim, I knew poor Tom was being treated for the Pneumocystis pneumonia. Since Tom was in hospice care at home, he wasn’t on a ventilator; his breathing would be harsh and aspirate—I knew that, too.
Sue Atkins also said something about how hard it was for Tom to eat. “He has trouble swallowing,” she told me. (Just telling me this made her suppress a cough, or perhaps she’d gagged; she suddenly sounded short of breath.)
“From the Candida—he can’t eat?” I asked her.
“Yes, it’s esophageal candidiasis,” Mrs. Atkins said, the terminology sounding oh-so-familiar to her. “And—this is fairly recent—there’s a Hickman catheter,” Sue explained.
“How recent is the Hickman?” I asked Mrs. Atkins.
“Oh, just the last month,” she told me. So they were feeding him through the catheter—malnutrition. (With Candida, difficulty swallowing usually responded to fluconazole or amphotericin B—unless the yeast had become resistant.)
“If they have you on a Hickman for hyperalimentation feeding, Bill, you’re probably starving,” Larry had told me.
I kept thinking about the boy, Peter; in the Christmas photo, he reminded me of the Tom Atkins I’d known. I imagined that Peter might be what poor Tom himself had once described as “like us.” I was wondering if Atkins had noticed that his son was “like us.” That was how Tom had put it, years ago: “Not everyone here understands people like us,” he’d said, and I’d wondered if Atkins was making a pass at me. (It had been the first pass that a boy like me ever made at me.)
“Bill!” Sue Atkins said sharply, on the phone. I realized I was crying.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t you dare cry around us when you come here,” Mrs. Atkins said. “This family is all cried out.”
“Don’t let me cry,” I told Elaine on that Saturday, not long before Christmas 1981. The holiday shoppers were headed the other way, into New York City. There was almost no one on the train to Short Hills, New Jersey, on that December Saturday.
“How am I supposed to stop you from crying, Billy? I don’t have a gun—I can’t shoot you,” Elaine s
aid.
I was feeling a little jumpy about the gun word. Elmira, the nurse Richard Abbott and I had hired to look after Grandpa Harry, ceaselessly complained to Richard about “the gun.” It was a Mossberg .30-30 carbine, lever-action—the same type of short-barreled rifle Nils had used to kill himself. (I can’t remember, but I think Nils had a Winchester or a Savage, and it wasn’t a lever-action; I just know it was also a .30-30 carbine.)
Elmira had complained about Grandpa Harry “excessively cleanin’ the damn Mossberg”; apparently, Harry would clean the gun in Nana Victoria’s clothes—he got gun oil on a lot of her dresses. It was all the dry-cleaning that upset Elmira. “He’s not out shootin’—no more deerhuntin’ on skis, not at his age, he’s promised me—but he just keeps cleanin’ and cleanin’ the damn Mossberg!” she told Richard.
Richard had asked Grandpa Harry about it. “There’s no point in havin’ a gun if you don’t keep it clean,” Harry had said.
“But perhaps you could wear your clothes when you clean it, Harry,” Richard had said. “You know—jeans, an old flannel shirt. Something Elmira doesn’t have to get dry-cleaned.”
Harry hadn’t responded—that is, not to Richard. But Grandpa Harry told Elmira not to worry: “If I shoot myself, Elmira, I promise I won’t leave you with any friggin’ dry-cleanin’.”
Now, of course, both Elmira and Richard were worried about Grandpa Harry shooting himself, and I kept thinking about that super-clean .30-30. Yes, I was worried about Grandpa Harry’s intentions, too, but—to be honest with you—I was relieved to know the damn Mossberg was ready for action. To be very honest with you, I wasn’t worrying about Grandpa Harry as much as I was worrying about me. If I got the disease, I knew what I was going to do. Vermont boy that I am, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I was planning to head home to First Sister—to Grandpa Harry’s house on River Street. I knew where he kept that .30-30; I knew where Harry stashed his ammunition. What my grandpa called a “varmint gun” was good enough for me.
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