Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  But this kid was so disarming, so ebullient, loved to laugh so much, that I made an exception and found him room in the inner circle. It probably had a lot to do with the imminence of our two diagnoses. Tony might not have AIDS officially, but I for one wasn’t buying that. When they first brought him in he had second-stage syphilis; and he’d suffered a stroke since then, having to learn to walk all over again. He was subject to “bleeds,” which sounded like spontaneous eruptions from the magma of his tainted blood.

  I got into the habit of calling him late at night, after Winston had gone to bed, because I knew they only slept in snatches in Tony’s house. I got to know “the body mechanic,” as Tony called him—a doctor friend who’d moved into the Johnson household for the duration, bearing the kid to the emergency room sometimes three and four times a week. Gayle’s husband had meanwhile been called up from the Reserves and was mostly incommunicado. Tony would talk for hours about how lucky he’d been to land in such a loving home, where he actually had his own room, the first bed he’d ever slept in. A pair of sisters came with the deal, who bragged about having such a supersmart big brother. Indeed, he was exceedingly bright, finishing high school with tutors before he was thirteen. We’d talk until the grate came clanking down, announcing that the bar across the street had closed for the night. It meant to Tony Johnson that he’d made it through another day.

  Then, it must’ve been a month later, he finally broke through with an AIDS infection—no news to anybody in his inner circle, though the family were devastated all the same. I said all the appropriate hollow things, but at least convinced Tony that now we were “moonmen” together, refering to the exile Roger and I had felt in Borrowed Time. Mostly to distract him, I proposed with his permission to use him as the model for a character in Trials. He eagerly accepted, demanding copies of every outline and memo, then every scene direct from the computer. He was the one who helped me, if you want to know the truth, not the other way around. When he confided that he’d always wanted to write himself—an ambition second only to being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame—I encouraged him to start keeping a journal. The least he’d be able to do was leave something behind for the people who loved him. Who knew how many others he might help?

  He was skeptical and uncertain, too sick most of the time to hold a pen. He’d already lost the sight in one eye, and during the next several months would be diagnosed with TB and lose a leg to lymphoma. They were living in quarantine now. Tony was on the losing end so much that he could hardly keep track of it all. Happily, one of his growing circle of lifeline friends—which now included Mister Rogers from the TV Neighborhood—had the foresight to contact the Make-a-Wish Foundation on Tony’s behalf.

  After all the paperwork was done, all the doctors’ signatures concurring that the boy was on his way out, the Foundation came through with a computer. Tony got so wrapped up in it that in a matter of weeks he could practically get the machine to make peanut-butter sandwiches—whereas I have always compared my own ten years’ progress with computer technology to teaching a slow monkey how to tell time.

  Throughout most of the winter and spring of ’92 he worked like a demon, instinctively discovering a form for himself in the short personal essay. Tales of life on the meanest streets, filtered through the strays and throwaway children who constituted his outer world. What was so unusual right from the start was a rare consistency of tone, at once plucky and philosophical, racing against his own clock to try to figure out what it all meant. But here again, no self-pity, so that when he waxed sentimental he’d earned it. Somehow he had survived his tormentors with his heart intact, and he had a gift for the quick study of character, the David Copperfield eccentrics who crossed his path. As his battle with AIDS intensified, he saw the rank intolerance and dehumanization that went with it, refusing to be seen as an “innocent” victim. He had a lot to say about prejudice.

  Not that every insight didn’t come with a struggle, for he had to husband all his strength to get through the 106° fevers and the treatments to drain his lungs, a surgical procedure performed without anesthetic. Nurses would grab the toys he’d brought from home and toss them in with the infectious waste. Doctors would leaf through his chart and irritably inquire, “Isn’t this kid dead yet?” Just loud enough for the kid to hear.

  Swamped as I was myself by then with the tortures of the medically damned, it was all I could do to hold onto a couple of hours a day to write Trials. Our check-in calls to one another grew more infrequent, though Tony would always call when he had a new piece finished. He read each one over the phone, in that pre-adolescent voice that stubbornly refused to deepen—the only thing among all his troubles that seemed to bruise his vanity. At the end of every recital I’d tell him what a good job he was doing, but now go on to the next one. No time to bask in it yet.

  When at last he had a presentable manuscript I told him I would send it along to my agent, Wendy Weil. But I cautioned him not to get too invested in publication, because the market forces were out of our hands. I was hard put myself to figure who the audience was, and certainly hadn’t a clue how the Young Adult sector worked. In any case, I knew I was far too close to his work to judge its merits. Fortuitously, Wendy responded with enthusiasm, submitting the manuscript to David Groff, my editor at Crown. And after an agonizing interval, building support in-house, David came back and said yes. Amidst the ensuing blizzard of contracts and revisions, I consciously pulled back, allowing Tony the full measure of an experience he’d hardly dared to dream. He turned out to be quite a skilled negotiator, actually, absorbing the arcana of the system as quickly as he did the rest of the world, with a street kid’s smarts.

  Of course I was thrilled for him, proud as a stepfather once removed. Sometimes after all, it seemed, there were motions of grace in the fallen world. Yet I couldn’t imagine how he’d ever survive long enough to see it in print. On the hustings last summer with Becoming a Man, I referred to Tony often, especially as an example to illustrate the glass walls of the pharmaceutical cabal. What had saved my brain from toxo that very month was a new drug, still experimental, which was also a good last-ditch treatment for the AIDS pneumonia. And yet, though Tony’s lungs were in shreds by then, he proved ineligible for “compassionate use” because he was too young or didn’t weigh enough or some other idiotic Catch-22.

  Whenever Winston and I were in New York, of course, Gayle would ask us to come visit Tony. But I was too scared of being exposed to TB, no amount of reassurance quite convincing me that all I’d need was a mask and gown. I did write a foreword for the book, however, now officially titled A Rock and a Hard Place. By that point I was deep into my own volume of essays, and didn’t doubt that Tony’s example had helped to crystallize the form for me. Perhaps it’s I who don’t exist, and Tony Johnson’s the ghostwriter.

  His book was scheduled for publication in April of ’93. I didn’t have any input with Crown’s publicity engine, though I understood Gayle’s passion to protect the boy’s privacy. Of course he couldn’t go out on the road, couldn’t even leave his oxygen tent. Gayle agreed to let him be interviewed by telephone, unless it took too much out of him. He couldn’t have his picture published because there were still people out there who could retaliate, criminals who’d abused him. Tony was understandably terrified about any further contact with the source of all his nightmares. This wasn’t just paranoia on the Johnsons’ part; but even if it had been, I didn’t blame Gayle for standing firm.

  In February I was diagnosed with CMV retinitis and had to submit to a daily IV drip. I was also going to radiology five times a week, to try to zap the swelling in my leg. My brain was beginning to misfire again, despite the new drug. For a while I pulled back from a good deal more than Tony, sick of giving status reports on the breakdown of my mortal flesh, frightened that the juggle of meds and treatments was starting to feel unacceptable.

  Even so, I followed Tony’s literary progress. Generous quotes had come in from the likes of Bernie
Siegel, the wellness guru, and Marva Collins, distinguished advocate for children and founder of Westside Prep. The movie rights were grabbed up by Lorimar while the book was still in galleys. With that windfall Tony bought himself a jukebox. The early reviews in the trade publications were excellent, and the book-chat press seemed comfortable with the rules laid down by the publisher—no pictures, no face-to-face, all interviews by telephone. The only advice I remember giving Tony at the outset was the Didion caution: journalists aren’t your friends, however cozily they may present themselves.

  A reporter for the Associated Press, Leslie Dreyfous, sent out on the wire a sympathetic story that ran in several papers across the country. A poignant feature about Tony appeared in USA Today. He made a phone appearance on one of the afternoon talk shows in New York. He was already receiving mail from other abused kids, applauding his courage and example. A teacher in Pennsylvania wanted to use the book in her middle school health classes. Winston said he was going to sell more books than all of mine put together.

  But at the same time, gremlins began to rear their heads. In the Midwest, a self-important booby who called himself a doctor (which in fact he wasn’t) took it upon himself to mount a one-man disinformation campaign, calling up reporters at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Associated Press. He contended that no fourteen-year-old could have possibly written such a sophisticated book as A Rock and a Hard Place. There was clearly no Tony Johnson at all, but the booby had figured out the scam. The actual author of this meretricious book was Paul Monette, a homosexual writer whose own work about AIDS had failed to garner sympathy from the straight world. Therefore I had made up a pediatric case to get attention for the cause—which of course was that old right-wing bugbear, the homosexual agenda.

  The first word I had of it came from a reporter at The New York Times. She asked me if this slander bore any truth at all, and when I said no, she warned me there was a troublemaker out there who wanted my scalp. He had pestered Crown for proof that Tony existed and had been rebuffed. It only made him more fanatical, as he contacted reporters who’d written stories about Tony and demanded they expose this fraud. I wasn’t too concerned about it, wondering idly if I’d drawn the vengeful wrath of some balletomane. But from the snippets that reached my ears, I began to suspect we were dealing with a Christian fundie. They can’t bear that the truth be told about child abuse, because they’re at the top of the list of perpetrators. The Bible tells them to beat their kids.

  Thus flippantly did I ignore the rising slime. I was stable again, and had just finished “Mustering” in the latter part of May. Then, one Saturday afternoon, I had an ashen call from David Groff, who told me Newsweek was going to press on Monday with a story that Tony didn’t exist and I was the ghostly author. David hadn’t yet seen the story himself but expected to have it in hand by nightfall. In the intervening hours I thought first about poor Tony, who’d spilled his guts to tell the hard truth, only to have it dismissed as a fairy tale. And I of course was the fairy in question. Backed into a corner by innuendo, forced to issue denials, a classic no-win case of Do you still beat your wife?

  Then David called back and read me the full allegation. Under the title “The Author Nobody’s Met,” the reporter triumphantly detailed the results of her personal sleuthing—Nancy Drew and the Missing Wunderkind. The burden of it was that none of us had ever met Tony Johnson in the flesh—not me, not David, not Wendy, not Mister Rogers, not Make-a-Wish. We were all being deluded by a telephone voice, “a soprano that could belong to a woman as convincingly as to a boy.” I’d been talking to this boy two or three times a week for almost two years; it was dumbfounding to hear it all reduced to the level of a cheap thriller. And the tone of the piece? Mocking and sardonic: “Trying to find the real Tony is like getting trapped in a page of Where’s Waldo?”

  It was two days before I had the magazine in hand, so the full-bore tabloid breathlessness didn’t hit me until then. But Nancy Drew, in her mind anyway, was clearly on the trail of a Pulitzer:

  Who’s the author behind Tony? One possibility is Monette, 47, whose moving works about AIDS Tony seems to mimic and who declared in a New York Times interview last year, “I’ve become a very political creature.” He couldn’t be reached [they never tried], but Weil, his agent, denies Monette scripted Tony. Still, both know baseball and books. Both find themselves in Connecticut. Both loathe book reports and love plush afghans.

  It was ludicrous. So fiercely do I detest the National Pastime that one of my strongest memories of growing up is fleeing the house at the mere sound of a baseball game on the radio. Baseball represents to me all the hetero torment of being forced to be “normal.”

  But how do you issue that kind of denial? Obviously Nancy Drew had only looked at one book of mine—Halfway Home, a novel about two brothers, one gay and one straight, whose backstory paints the straight one as a jock hero while the gay one’s mocked as a sissy. The brothers grew up in Connecticut. I was furious at this bald manipulation of my work, the slur on my reputation, but my reaction was as nothing compared to Tony’s. He left a sobbing, guilt-racked message on my machine: “I never wanted to hurt you, Paul. You were just being my friend.”

  He simply couldn’t understand how this woman could have talked and joked with him and praised his grit, then shifted gears and spewed this wretched travesty. At his own peril he’d forgotten the Didion rule of engagement. My own phone was already ringing double time. I savaged Newsweek’s irresponsibility. It was just what abused kids feared the most, that no one would believe them. Nancy Drew’s text was riddled with AIDS-phobia. I told The Wall Street Journal that I’d never met Philip Roth either, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that he didn’t exist. I told The Washington Post that I couldn’t very well have written Tony’s book, so busy was I writing Vikram Seth’s.

  I told David that he had to convince the Johnsons to let a reporter come and meet him. Reluctantly they assented, inviting Leslie Dreyfous from the Associated Press. She spent an hour talking with Tony, assuring herself that this was the very kid she’d interviewed over the phone. AP prepared a story refuting Newsweek’s, detailing the visit to the Johnson home. By week’s end other news organizations had distanced themselves from Newsweek. One of the magazine’s editors remarked offhandedly to the Post that they no longer believed I had written the book, but that was the sum total of their retraction and apology.

  I was advised by my lawyers not to say a word to Newsweek in my defense, but to wait and see if the libel would go so far as to merit a lawsuit against them. All parties assured me that the magazine was being inundated with outraged letters. Newsweek had so far made no direct attempt to contact me, but I had a call that week from David Ansen, an old friend who served as the magazine’s film critic. Him I called back. He was clearly red-faced with embarrassment and swore he hadn’t heard anything about this flap till now, because he’d just flown back from Cannes where he’d been covering the film festival.

  “David,” I declared in a withering tone, “you realize how nuts this whole thing is. Why the fuck would I want to write under a pseudonym? It’s all I can do anymore to finish my own work.”

  Harrumphing sympathetically, not really wanting to get into it, David admitted he’d been asked to call by the editors, who hoped I would be willing to talk to one of their writers. It didn’t have to be Nancy Drew herself.

  “They’ve got to be kidding,” I retorted. “You think I’m going to dignify this National Enquirer bullshit?”

  Yes yes, he understood. He was more eager to get off the phone than I was.

  We had to wait three weeks—till the June twenty-first issue—to hear the upshot, what turned out to be the second bowl of Eisenhower’s snots. Indeed, Newsweek had printed several scathing letters. Amy Amabile, executive director of Northern Lights, an AIDS empowerment organization:

  Your article is a perfect example of why there are laws to protect the confidentiality of minors and people with AIDS
: many so-called journalists are willing to expose and exploit people with AIDS and victims of child abuse for the sake of a story.

  She went on to describe her own two-year friendship with the young man, adding that Tony was serving now as editor of the Northern Lights newsletter. The director of the Make-a-Wish Foundation assured the magazine that they didn’t just arbitrarily grant wishes, that they didn’t act without painstaking documentation. Best of all was Tony’s letter, a fierce declaration of his reality:

  I exist; prove to me that you do! There is something unreal about a reporter who can joke and laugh with a person and then turn around and suggest that person does not exist.

  But Newsweek gave no quarter, upping the ante of its pitbull tactics, as if this story were as big as Watergate. They pointedly dismissed the AP account of Leslie Dreyfous and her visit to the Johnsons. “Paul Monette, who did not return calls for Newsweek’s story, has since publicly and vehemently denied Newsweek’s suggestion that he might have written or helped write Tony’s book.” The only call ever made to me was David Ansen’s, which I returned. But by now the little lies were blown off the board by new heights of investigative gobbledy-gook: