Plague Years

by Ross A. Slotten, MD

  From Sydney we flew to the South Island of New Zealand, once again renting a car and driving on the wrong side of the road from one picturesque town to another. In one the proprietor of our small hotel guided us to our room and said, in a vaguely threatening tone, “Two beds, which are essential, of course.” Some antigay stories in the newspaper didn’t reassure us that New Zealand was a tolerant country.

  Our final stop was Bora Bora. Our hotel sat on the lower flank of the two-thousand-foot craggy, double-pronged peak that dominates the island. At night, under a bright moon, the mountain looked eerie, like Dracula threatening to envelop you in his raised robed arms. During the day it looked less menacing but no less formidable with its tangle of trees and vines and patches of bare rock. Along the flat road that rimmed the island we rode bikes one afternoon, passing little shacks with roofs of corrugated metal, pandanus palm leaves, or wood; clothes and trash strewn in the gnarled tropical greenery; and women who could have modeled for Gauguin, a flower tucked behind an ear and colorful tunics wrapped around their bodies. Remote and exotic, Bora Bora almost made me forget my anxieties.

  When I returned to Chicago, the first thing I wanted to know was the result of my second AIDS test. I arrived at the office early, before anyone else, and waded through a pile of charts and papers on my desk, mostly laboratory and pathology reports, or notes about what happened to various patients during my absence. Buried somewhere among all this was my test result, which confirmed that I was definitely negative. That confirmation closed a chapter in my life; and the cord that tethered me to Art had now been severed. I could now move forward unencumbered in my role as an AIDS doctor.

  : 6 :

  Known Knowns (1985)

  In August 1985, just one month after Art’s death, Rock Hudson finally admitted that he had AIDS. For months there had been rumors about his declining health, which he and his publicists denied. Gavin and I watched him in an episode of the television series Dynasty and commented on his “AIDS look”—the hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and wasted frame. The passionate love scenes with his costar Linda Evans created a sensation in the press, with accusations that he endangered the lives of Evans and other cast members. That was before it was established that kissing doesn’t transmit the AIDS virus.

  Hudson was the first major celebrity to announce that he had AIDS. Although he claimed that he’d acquired the infection through a blood transfusion, his homosexuality was an open secret. His death in early October raised awareness of the disease and doubled federal funding, though it was still far below what was needed to combat an epidemic. But the stigma of AIDS persisted, and AIDS forced many gay men out of the closet.

  Not long after Hudson’s confession, one of my patients, Gordon, a fifty-year-old professor at a state university, pressed a hand to his forehead in despair when it became clear that he had AIDS. Slumping in a chair in my exam room, he frowned with disgust as if smelling something foul or passing moral judgment on a murderer and exclaimed, “How ignoble! Why AIDS and not cancer?” That could have seemed pretentious, but Gordon was an erudite, dignified, and proud man, the opposite of ignoble. From his perspective, getting cancer was a matter of bad luck, but everyone knew how you get AIDS.

  That word ignoble stuck with me. It perfectly captured how many of us felt about ourselves as gay men, how the world defined us, not by our accomplishments but by what we did in bed, which was considered dishonorable, base, shameful, and contemptible. Gordon was a perfect example. Most unbearable to him was the humiliating thought of revealing the secret life he’d led for decades to his evangelical Christian family in Kansas. For years he had lived quietly in a small university town in northern Illinois, where only his friend Louise, also a professor at the university, knew his true identity as a gay man. Now he feared that was all anyone would know about him.

  Gordon had become my patient on the recommendation of Louise’s mother, a nurse in the psychiatric unit at St. Joe’s. A short, dowdy woman in her early sixties, she still wore a white uniform, white platform shoes, and the classic white nurse’s cap over a hairstyle that hadn’t changed since the 1940s. Arcs of black eyeliner replaced her eyebrows, makeup brightened her aging cheeks, and red lipstick clearly outlined the twin peaks of her upper lip. She was almost a caricature, a squat Nurse Ratchet from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Yet she was a motherly, tolerant, and caring soul who loved her daughter and wanted to help her daughter’s best friend.

  As Gordon’s health deteriorated, Louise assumed more responsibility for caring for him. But the drive from the university, more than two hours from my office, was soon impractical once he could no longer get in and out of a car unassisted. And hospice care, which was still a nascent movement in the 1980s, didn’t exist in their town. Louise cried when she admitted to me that she was overwhelmed. Without a larger circle of friends who could relieve her, he had no other choice but to return to his birthplace. It was a dreadful day when he closed down his apartment and headed back to Kansas.

  But Gordon’s elderly parents defied our expectations. If they had any faith-based prejudices against homosexuality, they cast them aside and cared for their son in their home until he died. Their dedication and devotion flew in the face of reports of AIDS patients being forced into homelessness by families who rejected them. From newspapers and magazines you could get the impression that the majority of families washed their hands of their AIDS-infected gay sons.

  While most gay men with AIDS weren’t homeless, now and then Tom and I did struggle to find a shelter for a patient, but not necessarily because his family refused to taken him in. Often these men needed twenty-four-hour care. Bedbound, they lost control of their bowels and bladder and developed bedsores or muscle contractures, which bent them into stiff pretzels; or, in the throes of dementia, they became combative and violent. Such care was more than some families, lovers, and friends could handle. What amazed me most wasn’t the frequency of rejection and abandonment—it was the relative rarity.

  For the first few years I didn’t tell my parents about my work with Gordon or other AIDS patients. Not only did they not know about my relationship with Art, they knew nothing about the horrendous day I spent with him just before he died. My silence was about more than simply shame about being gay. I had long kept them in the dark about nearly every aspect of my life.

  For the most part I’d had a happy childhood. My situation at home soured in adolescence, and not just because I was the typical sulking teenager, worried primarily about the pimples on my forehead. Our middle-class life had begun to crumble. My father and uncle had owned a small neighborhood store in Old Town called Economy Grocery. But in the 1960s, as supermarkets with endless aisles of food, copious bins of produce, and rock-bottom prices, threatened to drive friendly family-run stores out of business, economical it wasn’t. Seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, they closed their city store and bought one in a northern suburb, where there was less competition. I helped out every Saturday, sweeping the sidewalk, stocking shelves, arranging an alluring display of apples in the front window, and using magic markers to create colorful advertising signs. Although promising at first, the move turned out to be disastrous. The previous owner had manipulated the books and swindled his sister investors, which an accountant had failed to catch until it was too late. Vendors hadn’t been paid; taxes were owed; and my father and uncle were saddled with the debt to the sisters. My mother had become the store bookkeeper and was soon poking fingers into endless holes in a vain attempt to prevent the enterprise from imploding. They never caught up. Were it not for emergency loans from my grandfather and mother’s brother, my father would have had to file for bankruptcy and give up our house, I learned years later.

  My father, ordinarily mild-mannered and polite, turned irritable and snapped at me at the slightest provocation. I never seemed to be able to do anything right, which made me resent him and my ruined Saturdays. After a decade of struggle, the store failed. All the stress took a toll on my parents’ re
lationship. Its effects on me were subtler. I developed an insecurity centered on money that persists to this day, which I believe is less about money than about the uncertainty of life itself. And my career—caring for men my age who were dying—had exacerbated that sense of instability and vulnerability.

  In my teenage years my parents fought constantly and bitterly. Tables were overturned, plates and glasses crashed to the floor, and my father stormed out of the house, almost always over something minor. At one point I decided to assume the role of a mediator, but, as if trying to tear two dogs apart during a fight, I was chased away. After a while the fights happened so often we ignored them, although we spoke in hushed tones so as not to inflame my mother further. My father always returned after driving around the neighborhood for hours. The grinding sound of the garage door opening beneath my bedroom never failed to wake me up. After the fiftieth time, it was no longer reassuring; it was sad.

  To calm her nerves, my mother started drinking two martinis every night, on the recommendation of her doctor. It was either alcohol or Valium. This was the heyday of tranquilizers, when the pharmaceutical industry touted medications like Miltown, Librium, and Valium as wonder drugs that offered chemical panaceas for what the feminist Betty Friedan referred to in The Feminist Mystique as “the problem that has no name,” or the malaise of housewives. My mother, who never trusted doctors or their prescriptions and suffered not from uxorial malaise but the threat of homelessness, chose what she thought was the lesser of two evils. I wish she’d taken the Valium—at least she would have slept. In the evenings she often retreated to our home library, a martini glass in one hand as she thumbed through a magazine with the other. The shelves of the library contained a good number of Modern Library literary classics, which I cataloged after the Dewey decimal fashion, and an artfully displayed complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia. Most of the time it was my father’s hangout, where he paid bills and swore at the TV when the Chicago Bears fumbled a football or the Cubs suffered yet another humiliating defeat.

  I’m not sure what drew my mother to that room so regularly, but after two martinis it became a lair. When my brothers and I dashed down the stairs after finishing our homework to play pool or ping-pong in the basement, she’d stop me midstride, beckon me into the room, and urge me to answer a question, usually centered on whether or not I loved her. She didn’t believe me when I affirmed that I did, perhaps because my answer seemed insincere to her. And maybe it was insincere, because I didn’t like my parents much in those difficult years. We were not an openly affectionate family, even in better days. “I love you” wasn’t a phrase any of us ever said to each other. I don’t recall if she also stopped my three younger brothers to ask them a similar question, although I imagine she did. The drinks made her argumentative—and children never win arguments with mothers, even sober ones. As I endured her drunken accusations about my lack of respect for her (“You’d sell me down the river if you could,” was one of her favorite jabs), every nerve in my body twitched violently.

  My father, who had started drinking too, confided in me one afternoon while we were cleaning out the garage that he wanted a divorce. It could have been the perfect moment to bond and have a mature conversation about a momentous topic. Instead I looked down at the broom, probed for trash, and pretended not to hear him. They didn’t divorce.

  For refuge during these tumultuous years before my father’s business collapsed, I fled to the house of my friend Doug. I spent almost all my free time with Doug, listening to records, experimenting with a chemistry set, or riding bicycles. My mother disliked Doug, an only child who had a learning disability, and felt I spent too much time coaching him through his homework. (Doug was highly motivated and eventually became an emergency room physician.) She also wasn’t fond of Doug’s parents, although they were always nice to me and treated me as a second son. Doug helped me through a difficult time in my life, boosting my self-confidence by lending an ear when I complained about how trapped I felt at home and giving the best advice a teenager could offer. Where I was timid, he was bold. He’d climb the tall elm tree in his yard and hang upside down from a branch, much to his mother’s consternation (I can still see her clasping her hands at her bosom in distress), while I waited at the base, chicken that I was, ready to break his fall.

  Doug spoke frankly about sex, which embarrassed me. When he told me that his father explained to him how to use a condom, I was taken aback. I couldn’t fathom asking my father about that, or my father asking me if I wanted to know. He also told his mother about the petting he and I engaged in once in his bedroom one afternoon. Although she accepted such adolescent explorations as normal, she thought it best we stop. And we did. At first I was embarrassed. Then I was ashamed and angry at what felt like a betrayal. I’d never been in the habit of sharing my deepest emotional thoughts and experiences with either parent. I didn’t feel a need for an intimate relationship with them, and my parents didn’t seem to know how to have an intimate relationship with me.

  Luckily, I felt, I’d gotten into college in California, as far away as I could arrange to go. I spent five years there—flying back to Chicago was too expensive to do more than once a year—further distancing me from my parents. During my freshman year a few of my dormmates cried because they missed their families, but I stared at the ceiling without emotion, wondering if there was something wrong with me because I didn’t feel sad. I dug deeply into myself, searching for something to make me cry. I couldn’t find it. Two thousand miles from Chicago, the membrane that had begun to envelop me in adolescence as a response to turmoil at home hardened into a carapace. That sense of isolation, reinforced by complete financial independence from my parents—scholarships, loans, and a twenty-hour-a-week job in the food service covered tuition, room, board, and other expenses—had nothing to do with being gay because I didn’t know that I was.

  Returning to Chicago for medical school in 1977 brought me no closer to my parents. Getting to their home by public transportation involved a twenty-minute hike to the L and another forty-five minutes to travel to the end of the line. From there I could walk another hour or wait to be picked up. Once I was there, we talked about the weather, food, politics, national news, and the doings of my brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles, but when it came to my personal life I was more evasive and uninformative than ever. By this time I did have something to hide, my sexuality. That subject never came up in conversation.

  Eight years later, not much had changed. Until one September afternoon in 1985. It was cool and cloudy, and the three of us sat in their dimly lit dining room with its white shag carpeting, wood-paneled walls, and tasteful contemporary and midcentury modern furnishings. By this time my parents had turned their lives around, the grocery store dumped at a loss and their loans repaid. They’d both obtained real estate licenses and now made enough money to go out for the occasional dinner and even travel abroad.

  My father, a handsome sixty-year-old with a head of hair a thirty-year-old would have envied, relaxed on a wicker sofa in one corner, his left foot curled under his right knee. In another corner I stretched out on the black-leather armchair with my feet on the matching ottoman, slowly swiveling from side to side. My mother rested her elbows on the teak dining table, reading a magazine. She was an attractive woman in her late fifties, petite with chestnut brown hair and a minimum of makeup. Closing the magazine, she looked at me over the rim of her reading glasses. A beaded chain hung from the glasses’ arms like the outline of jowls, which made her look like a prosecuting attorney about to cross-examine a witness. It was an expression that often put me on edge, triggering the metaphorical walls to rise in a flash and protect me.

  “Your brother J. has good taste in women,” she said, for no obvious reason. “But they only look at him as a friend.”

  Thoughtlessly, I made an unflattering remark about his appearance that related to some of his persistent eccentricities, which I thought explained why women weren’t attracted to him. I
immediately felt small and petty, but it was too late to retract. My mother’s eyes narrowed and her lips flattened, the top one pressing down onto the other as she rose to his defense. My apology did nothing to mollify her. A decade earlier my brother had plunged into a major depression after discovering his college roommate in the throes of a mental breakdown. He took a leave of absence for six months to undergo psychotherapy before returning to complete his studies. I’d steered the conversation into dangerous territory, like a soldier in war who’s forgotten that he’s driving over a minefield.

  In a bold and quizzical voice my father suddenly asked, “Do you think you’ll ever get married?”

  The question caught me off guard. I broke out in nervous laughter. Blushing angrily, I looked at both my parents for a brief moment before turning away. My mother was still scowling, and my father raised his eyebrows in genuine curiosity. I felt like a warthog on the African plain, stalked by lions—defiant but vulnerable, possibly standing his ground but prepared to flee. Thoughts flitted through my brain: Should I tell them . . . no . . . well, yes, here’s my chance . . . I dare not . . . they know more than I think . . .

  “I suppose someday,” I lied, convincing not even myself. “But there’s so much else I have to do. I don’t have time to date. I’m too busy building a practice.”

  My mother wasn’t going to let me get off that easily. “Are any of your friends married?” she asked.