Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

by Paul Monette

  On September 10, Craig arrived from New York for a week's visit, primarily so he could go to Mexico to get a supply of ribavirin. It was the one antiviral that was available over the counter, though the counter was across the border. Craig was impressed and delighted to find Roger looking so much better than four months before. By now Craig and I were accustomed to the two-tiered policy of talking nonstop about AIDS when together but not around Roger. Next morning the two of us got up early and headed south, taking the Datsun rather than the Jaguar so as not to be conspicuous at the border, where we would be bringing over a thousand dollars' worth of drugs. In theory one was allowed to carry back enough for "personal use," but the area was very gray. There was talk in the underground of detention and confiscation. The mind reeled at the challenge of avoiding germs in a Tijuana jail.

  "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" was our nickname for the drug that day. So many have gone over now to get it that the ribavirin buy has become a kind of reflex. Everyone knows which pharmacies can be trusted, which are rip-offs. There is such an elaborate system of mules that I can usually obtain the drug these days with a single phone call. A friend who keeps a fair stock on hand meets me on the corner of Western and Santa Monica, outside Fedco, to make the swap. But in the fall of '85 there was still a quality of the unexpected about the smuggler's journey. It only reinforced our sense of being outlaws, and for once there was a tinge of romance to it.

  We had the names of four pharmacies, and decided to go to one outside the city center, which involved a rattlesnake drive along the Mexican side of the border. For a space of several miles we saw illegal immigrants pouring through holes in the chain-link fences, seven or eight in a family with trash bags full of their worldly goods. Taxis would screech to a stop at certain gaping holes, and the refugees would tumble out, wide-eyed at the port of entry as if Liberty herself had cut that fence.

  The pharmacy was in a dusty town across from a bullring, in view of the green sluggish southern ocean, raw with the smell of kelp. We bought all the ribavirin and isoprinosine they had, chatting amiably with a couple from San Francisco who were buying cancer drugs. I realized then we weren't the only ones being driven underground by the FDA. We were part of the nether world of the sick, trying to get some control, taking risks the government wouldn't sanction, and all in the same boat.

  We soaked up miles of atmosphere and were giddy as we waited in line at the border, trying to look proper and nonaddictive as we gestured toward a trunkful of drugs. We were waved on through and drove home into full gold sunset, exhilarated and in charge of fate. By the time we spun the story out to Rog it was already part of our history, something we had won.

  Craig had asked if a friend could visit from San Francisco for the weekend. I agreed because I wanted to have some quiet time with Rog, figuring his friend would be a diversion for Craig, whose assurance that Peter was bright and charming was sufficient pedigree. The reality quickly proved how unpredictable was the moon. Peter was a banker, about thirty—harrowing good looks, rigorously sculpted pecs and no love handles, the full body armor. He thought it either cute or original to affect a mock horror at the tack and sleaze of Southern California.

  Even in a good year the attitude factor got my blood up: either strain, the northern or the Manhattan, imperious and contemptible but with certain common features—"How do you live without opera?" for instance. It all used to be terrific material for a fight, but now I saw the attitude thing as a form of self-ghettoization, locking us all in plague cells like separate masques of the Red Death. Anyway, this arch kid with the pecs appeared to be unaffected by AIDS. His conversation was full of Wilkes Bashford and radicchio, career and money. I prickled at the sight of him and gave him a wide berth. I realize, of course, that he was trying to be "up" for Craig. He was also diagnosed with ARC within a year and has taken a quiet demotion at the bank, off the fast track. Today I wish him Wilkes shirts in every stripe and color.

  Friday night Roger and I went to a Writers Guild screening of Kiss of the Spider Woman, where I became so unraveled with grief at the end that I couldn't leave the theater till I'd composed myself. Anything with love and death together was unwatchable. "Too stimulating," as Roger always used to say about the horror movies I dragged him to. The next day I took Craig and Peter to the Getty and almost lost it when I showed them the grave relief of the warrior binding his friend's wound.

  Sunday was Rosh Hashanah, and Roger went to the Orthodox home of a fellow lawyer who didn't understand we were lovers. It was one of those once-a-year situations where it didn't seem worth waging the battle, and I wasn't that needful of a new year's dinner. But Bruce had decided to have a Rosh Hashanah dinner, in large part because his roommate, Chana, was willing to pull it together. When Peter left, Craig and I took a walk over to Bruce's and peeked in the window from the bushes. One of the Manicurist principals was supposed to be there, and I didn't want to cross paths with him. Fortuitously he had already left, and we headed into the gathering of Bruce's baroque circle of friends, from every angle of show business. We all could have gone in the garage and put on a show at the drop of a hat, like Mickey and Judy.

  Bruce was basking in what he did best, bringing people together. I guess by that point everyone there must have known he had AIDS, but I liked being his special pipeline friend, and he was particularly nice to Craig as a fellow warrior. I didn't much think about whether Bruce was looking well or not, though I do remember him holding court after dinner from the sofa. I had so bought into his own enthusiasm about suramin that I didn't think any dark thoughts, or anything final about the holiday. There was a moment later on, however, when Bruce and I were talking, and his friend Jimmy came up and put his arms around Bruce's shoulders. They were only four or five years apart, and suddenly Jimmy looked so much younger, and Bruce so frail.

  Before he headed up to bed that night, Craig told me he had to spill a secret that was killing him. For months he'd been referring on the phone to a friend who was diagnosed but didn't want anyone to know, fearful he would lose his job. Now Craig revealed it was Paul Popham, one of the founding members of GMHC, of whom it was said that the death of his lover in 1980 constituted the first recorded AIDS death in New York. Paul was one of the towering AIDS activists; he had a kind of heroic status in New York, with a rectitude and sense of decency that were legion. I'd met him through Craig several times, and now I held Craig as he sobbed with terror and the pain of the secret. He figured he could tell me because I was three thousand miles away.

  When Craig left for New York we made a date that he would come back for Christmas, a very remarkable leap into the future, consonant with Cesar's swimming at Thanksgiving. We were learning how to make plans again, and if we neglected to add the zinger—that is, if we're still alive—this was because it was understood so well it was time to defy it. Then right after Craig left I was stricken with a bout of diarrhea, so intense that I called the Ferrari doctor. He said that since I was at AIDS risk they had better do tests for cryptosporidiosis and other exotic parasites. Crypto, as we call it, is one of the wasting agents that can halve your body weight in a matter of months. I freaked out as Roger drove me down to the lab to leave stool samples. Afterwards Roger put in a call to Peter Wolfe, who assured me the infection would probably be gone before the tests were back, which proved to be true. But for three days I was terrified that I'd pass it on to Rog. We slept in separate rooms, used separate bathrooms, and I tried not to even breathe near him.

  On September 19, when that episode had passed, I had a session with Sam, the central motif of which was: "What if we both get sick?" I brought up the difficult matter of how best to commit suicide when in dire pain. How did one help someone else to die? What if that person got too sick to ask? There were so many stories now of desperately sick men being cared for by lovers who were just a hairs-breadth behind. I had this image that wouldn't go away of Roger and me on the phone, talking between two hospital rooms—me at Cedars Sinai with Ferrari, him at UCLA.
Another image had taken root in my mind like a bad whisper years before, something I never wanted to stare full in the face. Roger's mother had had a friend in Chicago who was dying by inches of cancer, in terrible discomfort, everyone just waiting for it to be over. And one day her son went into her room at the hospital, took out a gun and killed her. Where did one summon the wherewithal for that?

  If desperate measures had to be taken, said Sam, if I had to find a shot of insulin or a handful of Nembutal to end myself or help Roger to die, I would find the way. As always, I would protect the two of us at all costs and do the right thing; I mustn't worry that I would flinch. The problem was, if I became morose and obsessive about these thoughts I would also destroy the present, where week by week we were finding pleasure in life. In this stark and hyperreal world of the war, I had to focus on our enduring love, for it was every bit as actual as the horror. Meanwhile Sam urged me forward with the conspiracy poems. Writing about AIDS was a small measure of power over the nightmare.

  Mr. Appleton returned on the Friday of Dose 18, and we were glad to see him fit enough to go on with the program. At this point I think they were figuring thirty weeks of treatment in the first phase, so Roger was very much in the forefront still. The difficult thing about Appleton was that he went to every seminar and gathering he could find of people with AIDS, and he would go into excruciating detail about everybody's symptoms, how quickly they all careened downhill. Roger and I didn't have it in us to indulge in gallows humor with him about other men's spiraling misfortune. It was easy enough for Appleton, chipper again and still so early. He was the grasshopper, shrugging off doses when he was indisposed, and we were the ants, punctual at nine every Friday, holding the front line. It was as if the Appleton subtext was Look how well I'm doing—better than so-and-so. We weren't fooled for a minute. We knew how easy it was to say to the next listener that he was doing better than Roger Horwitz.

  That weekend we went to a polo match at the fairgrounds in Griffith Park. The last place anyone would have expected to find us, but yet again the feisty group at Room For Theatre was having a benefit, a picnic at the polo field. As soon as we parked the car and I caught the rank animal smell, the dust swirling with horse shit, my microbe radar went on red alert. I kept imagining the worms and antigens borne aloft on the stable air, kept thinking of Tom Kiwan, now confined to his house because, as Alfred said, "it's hit his brain." When the polo teams came thundering out to limber up, the beasts and the pounding noise frightened me. I couldn't wait to get us out of there.

  I think it was all jumbled up with whether or not we should keep the dog. Cats were definitely out, because stories abounded of people with AIDS getting encephalitis from cat feces. You must never empty a litter box without protective gloves. Not that we had a cat, but I'd become quite leery of the neighborhood cats who dozed on our garden fence and switched their tails at Puck. Even the goldfish—Schwartz—was suspect. I told Rog not to change his water anymore, I'd do it. Schwartz in turn was mixed up with a story we'd heard of someone who caught a brain fever from eating too much sushi. There were levels and levels of wrongheaded myths and paranoia, even among us graduate students. Is it any wonder that the ignorant think they can get it from a toilet seat?

  Yet all through September I don't recall any worsening of symptoms—no cough, no tenacious fever. Well, there was a slight cough, but nothing more than usual. Besides, we were constantly monitoring and reporting to Cope to be reassured. A cough to clear the throat, we said a hundred times, not deep from the lungs or bringing anything up. But then Roger never coughed at all without my stopping to listen, frozen in midgesture, whatever I was doing. It would be so much less unsettling to say the signs changed over the next two weeks, that the symptoms began to gather toward another bout of Pneumocystis. But it wasn't so.

  On September 28 we had dinner with the Perloffs and Susan and Robbert in an oddball Polish restaurant, to celebrate Marjorie's birthday, and we were all very merry. I look back on those early-autumn evenings and want to set them down defiantly as evidence of how stable things had grown. Among the shifting veils of magic, this one takes its power from the belief that every lighthearted occasion was proof we had come back to life for good. The full Cinderella version of this illusion was a party being planned by Sheldon for my fortieth birthday. Invitations had gone out to fifty people—Saturday, October 19, black tie, no gifts, to be catered by Trumps. There had been a certain tug-of-war between Sheldon and me about the guest list. He wanted more movie people and power types, while I wanted friends who would find it a hoot to attend a big deal in the ice palace at the top of Bel-Air. Still, I was touched that Sheldon had followed up on his casual offer months before of a party. I even managed a strained laugh at the dark humor of his subsequent remark to Roger.

  "How old are you going to be this year?" asked Sheldon. "Forty-four? Well, we'll have one for you on your forty-fifth—if you're still here."

  October began hot, shimmering with smog. On Wednesday, the second, Rock Hudson died, about four weeks after his shy and unadorned statement was read at the first AIDS Project Commitment to Life dinner. His death had been imminent all summer, but still it was one of those shocks that said no matter how much money you had, how quality the care, the virus had its own grim timetable. Sheldon called Roger with the Hudson news, and Roger groaned as if a friend had passed away. That same day Bruce phoned to announce a horrific statistic that would soon crop up as gospel in worst-case news accounts. Typically those who'd broken through with PCP lived an average of thirty weeks following diagnosis. Roger had been diagnosed twenty-seven weeks before. We said all the usual things—that the figures had their base in the early years, when so many died at the first onslaught, that IV drug abusers died quicker because they started weaker—but the number thirty burned like sulfur on the white October air.

  Then Cesar called from San Francisco to say he was back in the hospital. The cough that had worsened through the summer, the breathlessness as he made his way to outpatient for chemo—he'd finally hit the wall. Yet at first it didn't appear he'd been admitted for PCP. From the sketchy picture he gave me, always trying to minimize, it was his tree stump of a leg that had finally gotten critical. For a week or so it was just a minor hospitalization—for tests, for observation, nothing dire—and Cesar and I talked inanely about what a lovely hospital it was. Nice rooms, nice nurses, all very nice.

  On Saturday, October 5, Dose 20, we took it easy and went over to Sheldon's to discuss the birthday menu. Veal chops, we decided. That night we had tickets to an opening at the County Museum for the Cone collection of modern art, and as usual these days I'd crossed it off the calendar because I didn't want us in a crowd. But after supper that evening on the terrace it was wonderfully balmy, with Santa Ana winds, which always either electrify or jangle. On a sudden impulse, we rushed to the museum to see if the crowd had thinned by 9 P.M. When we got there we had the place virtually to ourselves and cavorted among the boiling Matisses, grinning with delight and dragging each other excitedly from canvas to canvas. The attendant documentary material, lush with Left Bank trivia, evoked irresistibly the Paris of the perfect feeling.

  The Cone opening is my trump card, my high ace. For Roger was fine that night, completely fine, no illusion. What I hadn't learned yet was the hairline disparity between being fine and being secure. There was the wedge where the nightmare incubated. When we got home from the museum we lay in bed listening to the swirling of the wind in the trees. I called Craig in New York, and he happened to be in a terrific mood himself. He'd met a psychologist during the summer, and things had flowered in the weeks since Craig got back from California. Craig and I laughed carelessly, startled by our own good humor, as if we might have to pinch ourselves before the night was done. Sometimes you manage to bring off a moment so astonishing you can't even say how you did it. You even pretend you can do it again.

  Next morning Roger and I went down to Pennyfeathers for a late breakfast of pancakes. We were reading t
he Sunday paper, Roger leafing through the "Calendar" section, when suddenly his face crumpled. "Oh, no." I looked at him. "John Allison's dead."

  There was a picture of John, his smile a Shakespearean imp's, and a moving obit by theater critic Sylvie Drake. She spoke of a call from John during the summer, when he'd said, "I'm in the last stages of AIDS." My emotions were all chaotic—what did he mean by last?—but everything fell into place now. That odd talk about giving it all up and going away. What had been his final vague excuse about not going forward with my play? We'll put it off till the fall, he'd said. And Roger and I were so busy with suramin and staying alive that I hadn't ever got back to him. In theater you have to get back to people, keep the energy up. Though we had scarcely known him, we were both blown away by the news. John represented the felicity of life before the moon, as Roger and I recalled the lunch at Trumps, a year ago almost to the day. At the end of my play, when the boy Tom leaves Julian—Joel is Tom, I am Julian—he asks: "Does it all go too fast?"

  "You mean life?" says Julian. "Just the summers."

  But where were the symptoms? What was the red flag? All we did was come back for a quiet Sunday, brooding on too many deaths, worrying about Cesar. Monday we went right back to work. I kept an appointment at Paramount, though the only note I have from the meeting is a scribble about John Allison's death. So what was it sent us over to UCLA on Tuesday morning? I can't remember. A fever, I suppose, or the cough in the throat, but nothing out of the ordinary. If the doom was very intense, colliding like ions in the heat-swollen sky, it was only because of all the bad news the previous week. It wasn't us.

  Cope must have ordered a blood-gas test, and the oxygen level must have been low, so they decided to admit him for a bronc. Within twelve hours we knew the Pneumocystis was back. But all I remember anymore is the bewildering shift of seasons, from laughing among the Matisses Saturday night to the fever three days later and Roger overwhelmed. And they took him off suramin. When we pleaded for them to give it back, they said not while he was on Pentamidine. I remember Gottlieb coming up to me in the fourth-floor corridor. We hadn't bothered to check into the penthouse, thinking we'd be in and out. "I want you to know," said Gottlieb gravely, "we'll do absolutely everything we can." He meant to comfort me, but I just kept beating myself: How did it get so bad so fast? What did we do wrong?