Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

by Paul Monette

  I even began to work at something, queer and tentative though it was, and not for public consumption. I'd been pissing and moaning for months now that nothing I'd written would survive. It was all out of print, and altogether it seemed a mere curiosity of the larky years between Stonewall and the plague. Since I couldn't seem to read anymore either, the irrelevance of books would sometimes sweep over me like nausea. How it began I don't recall, but I grew more and more fixed on a memory from Greece: those broken slabs and columns lying in the fields, covered with Greek characters erasing in the weather. I remember turning to Roger on the high ledge of ancient Thera, pointing to a white slab tilted in the earth, the lines of Greek barely visible now, and saying: "I hope somebody's recorded all this." And suddenly realizing the fading block of marble was the recording. How would committing the words to paper or floppy disk keep them longer than marble? Soon I was brooding that nobody left written artifacts anymore to slab the fields of the future. Out of some disjointed longing for ruins, I decided to make an artifact of my own.

  I scoured secondhand furniture stores till I found a nice low table with sturdy legs. Then I went to Koontz to buy some paint, and only there decided it had to be blue. Aegean blue, I called it, remembering the window frames and shutters of the white stucco houses of the islands. I bought the most indelible felt-tip pen I could find. Then I set myself up in the garage and painted my Aegean table two coats of blue. When it was dry I began to write all over the surface, neat block letters stark as Greek, even on the bottom and up and down the legs.

  Though the subject of the table appeared to be that poetry left nothing in stone, the content was scathing and rather antic. I spent three days on it, loving every stroke of the physical labor. I ended up giving it to Marjorie Perloff, who uses it now as a stand for her copying machine. Right away I embarked on a second, for Susan Rankaitis, an Aegean bedside table, with a pull drawer and a scallop detail. I envisioned a whole motel room full of blue furniture, with a continuous poem running over every square inch, no beginning or end.

  On the Fourth of July we packed a hasty picnic and headed out to the Palisades in Santa Monica, arriving just as the fog burned off.

  We spread out on the lawn under the palm trees, jogger madness all around us. In the pictures I took there, Roger looks a bit puffy and rather peaked, but the puffiness must have been genuine pounds, since he wasn't on any medication that would've retained water. On the way home we stopped off to see the Perloffs, and Joe took pictures of us laughing. Seeing the two of us side by side, I can tell right away that Roger's laughter is genuine and full, while mine is a kind of mimicry, as if I don't quite get the joke. It makes me want to turn and wrap my arms around him, so I can feel the quick of the real thing even as it wells from him.

  Our last stop was Bel-Air, where we had a brief visit with Sheldon. He'd always been difficult to pin down for a visit—after half a dozen attempts to set something up by phone, one usually gave up for months. That was the rhythm of not seeing Sheldon for as long as we'd lived in California. We tended to glimpse him as most people did, at public events. Yet we would sometimes catch the wind right and manage to get him alone, and he'd ramble for a couple of hours, sharp and funny. Roger loved such occasions with him, but July 4 wasn't one of them.

  Aggressively Sheldon kept asking questions about our careers, about which I for one wasn't interested in the least. I probably would've talked about my blue tables, I may even have tried to, but money was the only career Sheldon fully countenanced. For a while he simply deflected my AIDS questions, but at one point I brought up Bruce. He turned on me and hissed: "I don't want to talk about it, don't you understand? I've had enough of it!" I can't express how icy cold I went inside. This was the asshole who'd fenced us into our secret, and now he wouldn't share it with us? It's a battle scar I can still feel, and we saw almost nothing of him for the rest of the summer.

  That week we heard about Barry Lowen, a TV executive and art collector whom I knew only casually. A year and a half before, I'd sat next to him on a plane, talking his ear off about vintage photographs. He had the sort of vivid, cocky good health of a tennis player in his late forties, not an ounce of fat on him. You hear about someone like that being sick, and your mind starts to waver, like the sketch they show you in Psych 101 that can be seen as either a young girl or a hag. There is the image remembered from life, a man in his prime just off the tennis court. Then something in your vision shifts, and you see the Other: housebound with the shades drawn, emaciated, breathing hard. Out of gossip and your own fear, you imagine the terrible changes. Roger and I were browsing one night in a bookstore, when an actors' manager we knew stopped to chat. He bragged about being one of the small circle Barry Lowen was willing to see in person. "The way he looks now, he's very selective," the manager remarked with a self-satisfied air. Always another rung of cachet in Hollywood, and always another arbitration for credit.

  At Dose 7, a new man entered the study—Rick Honeycutt, a psychologist in his mid-thirties with a classic surfer's grin and the energy to match. He looked better even than Appleton, and considered himself in luck that he'd made it into the program so early. He had been with a lover for seventeen years, but he freely admitted he'd done a lot of playing in his time. Thus he figured he might as well be philosophical about the consequences. Those who are still early talk a different game from those who are not so early, and philosophical is a state of flux. I have a friend who's seropositive, on AZT and stable so far. He said to me last week, "You and I are close now because we're both in the same category. If I get really sick I'll just be bitter that you're still well." Too cynical, I thought, too lonely and bleak—but I know what he means. It was that sort of feeling that made me want to tell Honeycutt to shove his philosophy.

  Though I have to say, we were a cheery little band now in the room that looked out on the banyan tree. Appleton at eight, Roger at nine, Honeycutt at ten, with enough of an overlap for us all to compare notes. The only consistent reaction to the drug seemed to be fatigue and a slight fever over the weekend. The nutritionist had come to know us all so well that she brought me lunch too.

  On July 8 I called TWA and checked on flights to Chicago and Boston for the beginning of August. The trip would have to be engineered to the decimal point, so we could leave after a Friday dose and be back before the next one. My parents had been asking me to come home to Massachusetts for several months now, and I'd pretty much run out of excuses. Roger wanted to see his niece and nephew," and Sam had been urging that we get away, if only to prove we could. We ran the idea by the doctors, and they saw no reason we shouldn't go. Still, it was a very big step to take, booking those reservations, freer than we'd dared to be since the verdict. I think I was too excited about the prospect, too awestruck by the logistics, to waste any time wondering if this was the farewell tour.

  On July 11 the Ferrari doctor called to break the bad news. My blood-test results showed that my T-cell ratio was reversed in the classic fashion, indicating exposure to the AIDS virus. I had not elected to have the antibody test specifically, because the sense of the community was so strong about the civil rights issues that might ensue. What if somebody started keeping a list? Lists were the first step to protective isolation, the polite term for camps. And what if insurance companies started red-lining those with the virus? If your numbers are in bad enough shape, you don't really need the antibody test. Or to put it another way, Ferrari no longer had a lot of bullshit to explain away my swollen lymph nodes.

  My ratio of helper to suppressor cells was .5, where normal ought to be 1.0 or higher. I had 590 helper cells per cubic milliliter of blood, and though this was considered to be in the low normal range, it was nothing to write home about either; 1,000 and above was normal. Instantly I called Roger at the office to tell him, and he calmed me down and said he'd run the numbers by Peter Wolfe. We never really knew what Roger's own T numbers were, though at one point we were given to understand his T-4 was under 50. Best not to press
the point, we decided. We had enough angles on Roger's bad news already.

  I went ahead and had lunch that day with Carol Muske at Bistango, and though I didn't blurt my numbers, she recalls how wired I was. Carol was in the same position as Dell Steadman and several others, suspecting Roger had AIDS but talking around it, letting me say what I needed about the awfulness of things in the abstract. Carol had just put her third book of poems to bed, while I hadn't written a line of verse in ten years. We got to talking about who the audience was out there, and I told her about the tables, addressed to no one at all. Carol was suspended in that fugue state after a major push of work, numb and deflated, such that her own doubts about how to go forward happened to dovetail with mine.

  We wondered if it was possible to write a poem that never thought about being published at all, or about reaching an audience. But then who would you be speaking to, just yourself? I don't know which of us first proposed the idea, but I know the phrase was Carol's. What about a "conspiracy poem" that would pass back and forth like a secret between two voices? We played with the notion, at one point considering telegrams, at another using a code. It was purely a lark, no pressure at all, just saying we might toss a few lines back and forth. Nobody else need ever see them. Though we left the project so wide open it could have ended right there, it made me think for the first time about putting a toe in the ice water of the imagination again.

  When I got home Roger had already talked with Peter Wolfe, and he reassured me that I was in no danger. Peter had cited a study showing that 98 percent of those with a T-4 count of over 300 had not progressed to full-blown symptoms in eighteen months of tracking. This equation would prove to be very fluid indeed as the months sailed by, a kind of litmus test of not yet: For a while doctors considered an opportunistic infection to be imminent if the count fell below zoo, but some people proved tenacious, and the low-range theory fell apart. Meanwhile there were men breaking through with KS at 600 or 700. The numbers as always are gibberish. What I remember most about that day was the rock-hard certainty of Roger's voice, and the flood of love I felt at his loyalty and concern, assuming control the minute I started to flail. In that glimpse of him I think I see something of how he must have looked at me over the next fifteen months, whenever I stepped in to fight for him.

  Saturday, Dose 8. Roger having slept away most of Friday, we took a drive up through Beverly Hills to Franklin Canyon, where the tract chateaux leave off and the chaparral begins in earnest. We were trying to find the reservoir, an amoeba of blue on the map. It was a fiercely hot day, and all the scrub hills were straw and sage, no rain since April. The reservoir proved elusive, fenced off so effectively as to prevent even a flash of water. What we found instead was the tiny headquarters of the Santa Monica Mountains National Park, a bungalow with a ranger lady, grass snakes in glass cases and crayoned Smokey the Bear posters. We were the only visitors that afternoon, drifting among these mud-plain exhibits, absorbed as if we were combing the Athens Museum.

  Later we went outside and sat in the shade of a sycamore. There we both had a rush of the throat-tightening sweetness of things, the perfection of time in which nothing at all was happening except that we were together. Wouldn't it be grand, said Rog, if it could all just stay like this? Sleeping it off dose by dose, gathering back to life and willingly giving up any claim on the Nile or the Left Bank, only to sit and listen to the dry leaves of a sycamore clattering in the breeze.

  I had turned in The Manicurist over the Fourth of July, and there was a brief flurry from one of the producers about how perfect it was, especially its plot points. I had delivered in spades on page 26 and page 90, so for the moment the whole enterprise was judged to be hilarious. When you go unproduced long enough, you know that this is the only time a script is still warm, before the studio starts the autopsy and heart transplant. I remember when it left my desk the desk itself seemed to heave a sigh. My work had already taken a sharp turn, though I was hard put to categorize the medium. I'd never worked in the garage before, or back and forth in the mail.

  Conspiracy: literally, breathing together. Every week or two now, a poem would go in the mail to Carol, and one from her to me. We began in completely different places, shooting in the dark, but quickly felt our way to a workable form of address, a courtly sort of confessional. My conspiracy lines—like my table thoughts—were all about the calamity, though for a while I couched my terms. I wrote about the white-stripe snake in Franklin Canyon and his "one medium mouse a month." About being allergic to bees, and the cloud of killer swarms advancing toward Texas. Shot through every fragment are undigested references to those who died young.

  Van Gogh was 36, Poe 40

  Also Champagne Scott

  and Frank O'Hara one of ours

  no art news there

  I was writing with a very blunt instrument, but groping at last toward leaving a record—"to say we have been here."

  It wasn't exactly a conscious choice to write about AIDS, yet the privacy of the bargain with Carol gave me the freedom to close in on it. And there was an unexpected return: Gradually there began to reassert itself that delicious balance between Roger and me, home for the evening after work. Looking back now, I realize I am selectively shrugging off the countless moron meetings Alfred and I were having at the networks, being turned down in thirty-one flavors. But I was inured to all of that now. If it used to require learning not to flinch when someone spat in your face, I didn't even feel the spray anymore. The bracing thing about this new work was Roger's enthusiastic response. He'd been asking me to go back to writing poems for a decade. He put no value judgment on anything I was doing—never did—he only tried to convince me it was work, tables and secrets and all. It didn't matter to him if I got another studio deal, for he was doing the nine-to-five work every day. I think that must have made him feel terrific, like the old days in Boston when he'd walk across the Common to Herrick & Smith, while I sat home shadowboxing a novel.

  On July 18 I had lunch with Susan Rankaitis, whose abundant cheer was glowering now as she worked through a transition between one body of work and another. She'd had a major show at the County Museum a couple of seasons before, huge photographic pieces layered with shard images of jet aircraft. She was openly in a state of turmoil, questioning all previous ideas, and wanted to hear about the dead end I'd been in. Haltingly I explained that I needed to find a voice to witness the nightmare, trying to tell her all the truth I could but keeping it focused on Cesar and his two years at war. Then I talked about Marjorie's table and the collaboration with Carol, and over coffee we began to speak of a collaboration of our own. Susan had been wanting to work with a human figure and explore the image of Icarus falling—the earliest manned flight in the books. I offered to do some lines on the same theme, then found myself agreeing to pose for the piece.

  Five days later Roger and I went over to Susan and Robbert's for dinner. Susan had been mugged that afternoon as she was getting out of the car with the peach pie she'd bought for dessert. Though her window was smashed and her purse snatched, the pie escaped unscathed, and we polished it off. Then we repaired to the studio, and I posed naked as the plummeting boy. A man of forty running to flab, his youth beached like a whale, makes a very unconvincing boy, but Susan assured me that I would do fine. She works by manipulation of photographic imagery, exploding things for their shrapnel value, the surface effect metallic, positive and negative at once. Mostly she wanted the right silhouette pose as the winged boy feels the burning sun and his wings fall away.

  Roger and I would watch the piece grow monumental over the next several months, but I recall the evening of the photo session as the opposite of the night two years before with Jack Shear. I could feel the lumpish dislocation of my body, ticking away as I did these Isadora Duncan tableaux, my arms up in front of my face. I had broken through to Diane Arbus status, and I didn't care. Meanwhile Roger worked quietly as Susan's assistant, adjusting lights and holding equipment, placid as he had been at th
e previous shoot.

  At the end of July a couple of friends were in town from Philadelphia. Joe and Stuart were both comfortably ensconced in chairs of English, and they'd been together forever. They reported that a mutual friend—Ed Tompkins, a Washington lawyer—had been unable to join them on the trip to L.A. because he was down with a virus, something to do with his nervous system. My face went blank as I stared at the diagnosis, but neither of them appeared to recognize the naked truth. Apparently there had been tests that proved nothing conclusive, but Ed was probably covering up. He was a shy and closeted man, with only the most tentative experience and a single love gone bad. He'd had the dubious distinction of being pursued by a member of the White House staff, that closet within a closet, but Ed had turned him down because the man was married. When Ed died three months later, Joe and Stuart finally admitted it was AIDS, but still in the face of the ghastly denial of Ed's family, who kept the gay friends away and let no calls through as he lay dying.

  By Dose 10 we had put in the good word for Bruce, and he'd been accepted into the program. Roger and I simply asked if he could be scheduled for some other day than Friday. Bruce was so eager to start he was beside himself, and he kept up a flow of good news from all his various sources. Bruce was really Suramin Central, much more than I. His sister Carol came out from New York to visit, and we had the two of them over for Saturday lunch. It was the first time I'd seen Bruce in four months, and he looked okay, if a little thin. We mostly talked about other things. Carol told me months later how thrown she was that weekend; that lunch with us had been a kind of haven from the nightmare, proving that she and Bruce could still laugh. After lunch we sat in the garden, and Bruce waded in at the shallow end of the pool. He had been my gym buddy for years, strong and street tough and speeding with energy. Thus there was something terribly poignant in seeing him balk at a swim, saying he was feeling a chill and wouldn't go in any further. He seemed suddenly modest in his body, he who always crowed and darted about. It was all going to be fine, though, once he started on suramin.