Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

by Paul Monette

  Besides, we were clearly holding the line. A year into his diagnosis, and he'd still never been in the hospital. His doctors kept telling him there were drugs in the works nearly ready for testing. Research was galloping. Keep taking the chemo, they said, even if it didn't seem to be doing a thing. I don't recall seeing his leg naked during that brief visit. We'd dropped the fiction of the rural virus in the terminus at Benares, but only because AIDS was proving manageable. Management skills were what we needed now.

  The obverse of this optimism was the hair ball of fear at the pit of my stomach. I'd convinced myself by this point that I was more than likely in the direct line of fire. I can't say what was hypochondriacal here. It was certainty born of dread: The glands in my neck and armpits were no bigger than almonds; they didn't hurt; they were nice and soft. Moreover, they didn't appear to be growing, but oh they were most definitely there.

  My doctor's little speech about them, reiterated for two or three years now, came down to the same bland assertion that they could be anything. Dozens of things make the lymph nodes swell—stress, for instance, the blanket diagnosis of the age—but now the news was getting very specific about the lymph nodes being a flashing amber sign. Pre-AIDS. We still had that word then. Certain gay men I knew, in fact, were becoming obsessed with the notion. How deep exactly did pre go? Could you see it in a person's face? And how much time before pre burned down like a fuse on a keg of powder?

  I tried not to talk nonstop about it; it sounded vain even then. I simply redoubled my efforts to mount a holding action. Lifecycle at the gym, vitamins, writing in bed, monitoring my almonds like a sort of DEW line. I vividly saw the process as a struggle to keep it from breaking through—a wall of-water behind a dike, or the mangled son pounding on the door in Kipling's "The Monkey's Paw." "Breakthrough" was not then commonly used to describe the onset of fullblown infection, but the word has just the right edge, chilling and paranormal, like the breakthrough of alien life out of John Hurt's belly.

  I knew all the warning signals now, rote as the seven danger signs of cancer that I carried on a card in my wallet in high school. Did I think I'd forget them? Night sweats, fevers, weight loss, diarrhea, tongue sores, bruises that didn't heal. None of the above. But I'd run through them every day, examining my body inch by inch as cowering people must have done in medieval plague cities, when X's were chalked on afflicted houses. I didn't even want to eat Asian food anymore, because it shot my bowels for a day after.

  Any change, any slight modification... even a bruise you remembered the impact of, you'd watch like an x-ray till it started turning yellow around the purple. KS lesions do not go yellow. They also do not go white if you press them hard with your thumb. A whole gibberish of phrases and clues was beginning to gain currency. A canker sore in the mouth would ruin a day, for fear it was thrush—patches of white on the gums or the tongue. I read my tongue like a palmist before I went to bed at night.

  In none of this paranoid fantasy did I have the slightest worry that Roger was at risk. I hadn't forgotten the flu in '81, or the assault of the wrongheaded drugs for amoebas. There were shakes and fevers that winter, and for a week or two Roger would break out at night in hives the size of silver dollars. It had been an awful siege, but that was all three years ago now. Never a complainer about his health, he didn't mention losing weight till the end of November, and even then it was only a couple of pounds. He was tired at night, but a wholesome kind of tired, with a long untroubled slumber from twelve to seven-thirty like clockwork—what the French call le sommeil du juste. And his cough was still such a minor two-note matter. He'd be putting on his pajamas, and I'd turn from Nightline and tease him: "What are you coughing for? Stop it." That was how ordinary it sounded.

  Is that denial? If it was, it was warring in me with a doomed acceptance, as I struggled to figure how I would bear the sentence myself. Late at night I'd walk in the canyon and think about Roger watching me suffer. I was already riddled with guilt: None of this would be happening if I'd never had sex with strangers. I suppose I felt there was something innately shameful about dying of a venereal disease. All the self-hating years in the closet were not so far behind me. And any brand of shame lays one open to the smug triage of the moralists, whose vision of AIDS as a final closet is clean and efficient as Buchenwald. Of course we didn't deserve this thing, but how do you go up against them when you're suddenly feeling wasted by every lost half hour in bed? After all, the very qualities that used to recommend such aimless sport were its junk-food suddenness and its meaning nothing.

  My therapist, Sam Dubreville, reeled in every tortuous loop of self-flagellation. All right, so I couldn't deny the dread. The menace was real as the man with the .38, swinging it wildly back and forth between my head and the gray Mercedes. It might be true that all of us were trapped by the careless time before we heard the first siren. But the disease wasn't drawn to obsessive sex or meaningless sex. Sex itself, pure and simple, was the medium, and the world out there was ravenous for it. Straight and gay alike, they wailed like Patsy Cline, rubbing up against their home screens. Don't personalize the illness, Sam said, don't embrace it with obsession. Live now, in other words, sobered and alert. Relish the time Roger and I are whole, because something is going to beat the door down someday. Live now sounds simple enough to be carved on the temple at Delphi, except they preferred to chisel instead: Know yourself.

  I did what I could with my panic, riding the energy like body surfing, turning its intensity to consciousness of now, where Roger was. I started making plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas before Halloween. In this regard Ned Rorem recounts a crystalline remark of Jean Cocteau's. When asked what one thing he would carry away from a burning house, Cocteau replied, "I would take the fire." There's something in there about the fire of inspiration, but I choose to see it the other way, carrying out the fire to spare the house. I made time happy. I worked at it. And when Roger and I would saunter through the County Museum or run out late for Häagen-Dazs and a stroll in Boys' Town, the thought of him all alone without me—alone in our house, in this city where he came to be with me—would vaporize like a bad dream.

  On November 7 we had dinner with Rand Schrader, municipal judge and past president of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, which mouthful was the premier channel of local good works for those on the bus. The Center was a national model for a kind of gay sanctuary for the troubled, lost and burned. It was the yearning to be free to love that appeared to bond us as a people, a bond that turns out to be as strong as land or language. Roger and I were part of a growing core of gay professionals who helped to fund social services for runaways, alcoholics, the banished of all persuasions. The Center occupied a building that had the motel air of cheap dentistry, but proudly wore its long name ribboned across a lintel on Highland Avenue.

  We were together to talk about the Center's annual dinner, where Abigail Van Buren was being given the Ambassador's Award. I was to write introductory remarks for Julie Harris, who would make the presentation. What you have here is practically the textbook definition of thankless writing. But I had a particular memory of reading Dear Abby as a kid. In a straight New England town, out of reach of therapy, Abby's column in the Hearst rag was the only consistent forum for the radical notion that gay people could be happy despite the hate and discrimination. Love and let love was more or less the way she put it. The effect is incalculable, to finally hear somebody say it isn't wrong.

  Rand was probably Roger's closest friend in L.A., a passionate, unguarded man who was out in every quarter of his life, with a decade of therapy behind him to prove it. Roger and I always sponsored a table at the Center dinner, though Roger was the one who gently badgered our friends to fork over the two-fifty for the ticket. Gay people have had to be taught to take care of their own, having grown so accustomed to taking care of themselves. I couldn't bear the drone of self-congratulation at these affairs, but Roger said it was boredom in a good cause, so we always went and I helped
with the speeches—shortening, shortening.

  It is in fact very moving to hear Julie Harris read your lines, and she pulled off every laugh and stirred the place too. AIDS was a growing subtext at any community gathering now, but it was salutary to recall that as a people we were still making progress, countering hate. My first year as a teacher, twenty-two and stuck in a prep school run by Dickensian colonels in Connecticut, I had a student called Styler, by turns diffident and shyly charming, working to please, wouldn't swat a fly. I was in the closet and never thought twice about him, until three years later when he killed himself, and his sister wrote to tell me. Oh, I thought with a knot of hopeless sorrow, so he was gay. I hadn't thought to help him, because I couldn't even help myself then. Anyway, I knew we were sitting in tuxes at these gelid chicken dinners for Bob Styler's sake.

  The night before Thanksgiving, Cesar arrived, and within five seconds of lurching in he fell in a chair, near hysterical. Not crying or raging, just letting it all tumble out—the circular talk of the doctors, the brave front at school, the pain and rot of the swollen leg. The dog went up to sniff at him in the chair, just the regular sort of canine radar work, and Cesar cried: "See him smell it? I can't stand it anymore!"

  It was his leg.

  We just let him talk till midnight, apologizing even as he spilled it—how could he bring this misery on our house? We reassured him over and over, gently easing him off the panic, sorting out the players around his Lear, finally comprehending how much he'd been bottling up ever since school began in September. Still fighting not to depend on anyone, he who always seemed to have half a dozen shoulders to prop up all his friends.

  Through the whole four-day weekend we forced him to rest—allowed him to, really. Ten, eleven hours a night he slept, and seemed to get stronger and laughed again. But the leg was really repulsive now, twice its proper size, raw and mottled, the lesions clustered at the groin angry and blood-blistered around the wound, which sagged open and wept. It had been that way for a year now.

  Yet at Thanksgiving dinner in Robbert Flick and Susan Rankaitis's studio, his social grace was mesmerizing as ever. I could see how drained he looked, his hair beginning to thin from the chemo, circles under his eyes. He told Roger and me how he would sneak naps in the storage closet off his classroom, curling up on the floor during his free periods. But over dinner he scintillated and coaxed out people's travels, tossing a few doubloons from his own. And when it came to books and films, the irrepressible passion was undiminished, pleading with people to read Sentimental Education or go rent Gilda. The dinner table was Cesar's stadium, no doubt about it.

  You walk in a daze through days like these, working to keep life normal for your friend, trying to give him a respite; that much you can still do. But the frailty of life has got its hooks in you, and a lot of the cheer is hollow and ventriloquized. My journal says we laughed, though. The three of us went to The Terminator on Friday night and loved it. The first good movie since The Last Metro, we decided. Or maybe what we said was that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Catherine Deneuve of violence. That was the way we jockeyed culture, keeping it aloft like balls in the air.

  Saturday night we had about ten people in for the evening, including Cesar's friend Jerry, who'd driven him door to door and was staying the holiday with his family in L.A. Cesar was visibly pleased to have his companion near, though Jerry himself was a wreck. His mother was dying of cancer, and he'd been out of work for months. Yet he seemed so loving of Cesar, so glad to be with him and hear him talk. There was no doubt that the two of them were racking up lost time like pinball, no matter how little there was to play with.

  And with the party in full swing—just the size Roger liked, conversation one on one—we seemed for the moment safe again. We would fashion our own reprieves. In the good hours, I still had an almanac faith that the proper doses of rest and love would bring things back to stasis. Before we all went to bed we struck a deal whereby Cesar would come for a week at Christmas. Meanwhile Jerry was picking him up early Sunday morning for the long drive home, and Cesar promised he'd peek in to say good-bye before they took off. On Sunday I woke to him lightly touching my shoulder and saw he was kneeling beside our bed. "Good-bye, darling," he said, smiling through a glaze of pain.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I just threw my back out." He was literally bent double to the floor, trying not to gasp.

  Cesar's back. I remember when it was the worst problem we had—Cesar's bad back, mine, Roger's, in descending order of magnitude. (Craig, last summer: "Remember when all we worried about was whether the melon was ripe?") By dint of the vaunted Williams exercises, Cesar had brought his back into supple shape again, but the weight of the swollen leg threw him off balance. When Jerry arrived, Cesar could just stand up and hobble down to the car, me with his kit bag. I stood in the ludicrous morning sun, trying to wish him Godspeed, and he just kept shaking his head.

  "They've got to do something," he said. "I can't go on like this."

  He meant the doctors at San Francisco General, still convinced they could alchemize the optimum dose of chemo. I didn't know what the drugs were; it was the last case before my pharmaceutical residency at UCLA. In addition, we were getting all our information about the treatment from the patient. Despite Cesar's fluency in four tongues, there appeared to be a language barrier here, because he couldn't seem to tell us what the course of the medication was or what the data said. We were intellectuals. We needed an idea.

  I still didn't fully understand—nobody I knew did—the difference between KS and infections like Pneumocystis. Three months later we would learn that the scythe fell one way or the other, lesions or the lungs. This was the crude half-picture at the end of '84, before we knew about lymphomas and the brain. Men with KS were seemingly the lucky ones, because they appeared to have the strain with a slow progression. But I could see myself now that KS was something a good deal more dire than skin cancer, its lesions rooted deeper than bruises. They looked like exploded blood vessels under the skin, and sometimes they boiled to the surface like stunted orchids.

  We were helpless, Roger and I, six hundred miles away. We felt like calling the doctors ourselves, to affirm somehow that we were Cesar's family here in the States. We worried that he was going to a hospital already bursting at the seams with AIDS cases. More to the point, Roger had always been alert to Cesar's difficulty with father figures. He was a charmer, not a demander. We could imagine him being passive with his doctors, politely letting them experiment. You don't need cautionary tales like the Titanic to know how many survive in steerage and how many on the boat deck. Unless you have a private doctor with privileges, which is another way of saying you'd better have money, you are lost like Hansel and Gretel in the system's beige-flecked corridors. The peaks of insurance pale beside this Everest of a condition.

  It is also imperative to have doctor friends to run things by, to provide little crash courses in hematology. Even a nurse can steer you around so you know which way is north. Fortunately Cesar had Lucy, a nurse who worked part time at a high-toned white-bread hospital, the Pacific Heights wing of medicine. It had taken fifteen months, but finally Cesar said Help. And as soon as he went into Lucy's hospital, he suddenly wasn't another dumbstruck face in the Kafka crowd at the clinics. They put him on intravenous chemo right away. The bullet wound from the biopsy was part of the KS, light-years more evolved than a mere bruise. Cesar's new doctor told him the clinic had been treating him with a dose of chemo that was far too low. Yet the doctor wasn't blaming anyone, since he knew the free clinics were swamped like a field hospital at Verdun. The good news was that the higher IV dose would push the cancer back, and Cesar would be out and down for Christmas as planned.

  There's a great harp-string moment in A Christmas Carol when Scrooge leans out his bedroom window after the nightmare—George C. Scott did anyway, but maybe this was a rewrite—and begs to know what day it is. "Why, Christmas," a boy tells him, stunned that somebody wouldn't know. An
d Scrooge clutches his hands and gasps: "There's still time!"

  That is how I went around for the next four weeks, building Christmas like a fortified town, even though I was down with a cold within hours of Cesar's wrenched departure after Thanksgiving. A cold that lingered: I slept a week in the guest room so I wouldn't pass it on to Rog. Even that unpassed cold gave me a sort of subliminal relief, for it seemed to prove that Roger's resistance was strong. He was swamped at work as a blizzard of legal matters converged on the end of the year. But we still had time to spare, and I meant to spend it on our friend. Roger, who'd grown accustomed to the jingle of bells in December, may not have noticed the pitch of frenzy that attended these preparations. I stopped short of stringing popcorn and cranberries, but just barely.

  Meanwhile I got lucky the first week of December. After six months of serious hustle—being "encouraged to death," as Pauline Kael puts it—I managed to put The Manicurist into development at a studio. "Development" is the Hollywood term for suspended animation, but at the beginning at least there is the deal. I knew that once the negotiating was done I'd have my next year's work cut out. I even managed not to worry how I was going to write jokes in the fifth year of the plague.

  I spent my afternoons shopping, a blur of packages mailed to the four corners, mounds of presents for Cesar and Rog. Cesar had been with us for the holidays half a dozen times, falling into a cooking mania that went on for days before Christmas Eve. I knew how Cesar would glamorize his visits to L.A., especially back up north, where he found the curled lip of superiority as to the lowness of L.A. deliciously provincial. Nobody understood the provinces like Cesar. He had a raft of Madame Bovaries in his life, one in every port. So I determined to make him a perfect week, a fresh doubloon to fling on the table when people acted as if there was nothing real about him anymore except his diagnosis.

  I know I saw John Allison during December, because I remember telling him how undone Roger and I were by Cesar's November visit.