Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

by Paul Monette

  But August in my mind was mostly Plato. Those were the hours when we sat in the hurricane's eye together. We knew full well we had reached a summit, just as we'd known at Delos, facing the row of stone lions that guards the lake where Apollo was born. When you have the time to read a little Plato, when the other half of you wants to do it as much as you do, nobody wastes a moment worrying that he's wasting time. For the moment, no numb distractions are required, no maddening details to attend to. Jaimee sighed to Michael one night when he asked her how she was: "Fine. I watch the soaps all afternoon, and Paul reads Plato to Roger."

  We used the blue-cloth Oxford volume called Portrait of Socrates, comprising the Apology and the two last dialogues of the philosopher's life, edited by the aforementioned Livingstone. Being good students, we started with the introduction, which took us nearly a week to read because we'd stop and talk about it so much. Livingstone's elegant sketch of Socrates' place in his own culture, and thus in ours, turned out to be a sort of lightning rod for us, who had profited all our lives from the gifts and whips of the intellect. Please, we were the only Harvard/Yale marriage on our block.

  That Socrates was unpretentious almost to a fault, never believing wisdom was his alone or made him superior, but that everyone possessed it if one could only talk it out. That his method was conversation—this alone gave a sort of romantic burnish to the running Platonic dialogue the two of us had volleyed for twelve years. That he lived in a time of "official" gods, the golden age of his people seizing up as Athens fell under the wheels of war. It all made a certain Mediterranean sense, of connection if you will, which ought to temper my stridency toward those who contrive their essential self from the Bible, or indeed from Warren Beatty's sister. Livingstone imagined what a threat Socrates must have been to established ideas and self-important men. The more we thought about him, the more he seemed a first principle of all our own reading and travel and yearning for definition.

  Then we turned to the Apology, Socrates' defense, delivered in the agora below the Temple of Hermes. Two years before, we had wandered the very spot, our guidebooks out like dousing rods, trying to make a city out of fallen stones. Socrates says—but you know all this part already, or at least you're supposed to. Or maybe you don't really need it till you're right at the edge of the cliff, as we were. "It's miraculous, isn't it?" a fellow poet, Sandy McClatchy, said to me on the phone one day when I was waxing on about Plato. There was nothing to figure out or understand at all. Just the clarity of it, unfiltered by vanity or bullshit or the need to kiss ass. And how tough Socrates is as he goads the pompous and self-deluded and dares them to put him to death.

  "He sounds like Cesar," Roger would say after some effortless parry or thrust of rhetoric. And we laughed to remember our friend, the wagging finger in four languages as Cesar browbeat culture and self into his wayward students.

  What direction were we going in? All downhill? It felt like a kind of stasis as the summer perceptibly ripened. Not that I have forgotten the times when Rog would cry out in pain, "Paul, I'm blind!" Or how, stirred by an aching nostalgia, he would shake his head and choke back tears and say, "I miss Cesar." But now was also the time when the drenching sweats would leave him awake and curiously refreshed at 1 A.M., and he'd ask for the tin of cashews and a glass of lemonade, and we'd talk and read aloud till three. I remember our friend Gordon came through from Canada and spent a couple of days doting on us, cooking gourmet dinners and reading to Rog, taking me to the beach for a swim. And that was all fine, but I could see how far gone Roger was in Gordon's eyes, in the year since they'd last been together. It only made me feel that our safest time was the two of us alone, when the shorthand kept us utterly in balance.

  On Wednesday, August 20, Roger had blood transfused, about three units, as I recall. Though the white count is most consistently affected by AZT, the red count is also a problem. Many full-blown AIDS patients on long-term AZT have become transfusion-dependent. They have also gotten fairly blase about the vampire part; but we still thought of transfusion as a grave and unsettling procedure. Yet the new blood perked Roger up considerably for several days, animated and energized him for work. He even talked with Esther Richmond about getting a new will written, the matter unbroached since we'd tucked the '80 version in a drawer.

  He was coughing again, but even my radar wasn't especially flashing red. It was more than anything a clearing of the throat, and though in the past that very quality had been part of the ominous slippage toward PCP, I would not see it that way. Or perhaps I couldn't and still go on giving IV twice a day, not to mention keeping up food and fluids and twenty-two pills and Plato.

  After one of his Wednesday sessions with Dr. Martin, Roger reported that he had admitted he'd had a good life. I remember how lucidly he repeated the phrase, amazed almost to be saying such a curiously final thing, and with no foreboding of death in the tone, or nothing gloomy at least. But I can't be sure, for I was behind in the death department. Even now, when I'm all caught up, it bewilders me to try to figure what he knew and I didn't. I had an appointment with Martin myself a month after Roger died. The first thing he said was: "He loved you greatly." Then he explained how Roger had gotten beyond the fear of death. Toward the end, he said, Roger's world was one of constricted hopes—Will I have enough energy to work with Fred? Will I be able to eat my supper? "It's impossible to conceive of ourselves without ego," Martin said, but that is where Roger arrived. I can't, of course, know what he must have thought in the hours when he lay there quietly, all but blind. I only know we never seemed any different, not between ourselves. And I felt no shadow of death when he said that his life had been good. Mine too, I thought with a pang of pride.

  Near the end of August he spoke of being disoriented sometimes when he woke up, because he never knew in the darkness whether it was night or day. He spoke of this so precisely that I took it at face value. Martin prescribed the antidepressant Haldol, saying that many AIDS patients had found it helpful. Only he didn't just mean blind patients, did he? I never really picked up on the possibility that the disorientation might be organic. I didn't like Haldol and didn't see why it was needed on top of Xanax, but Roger stopped complaining about the problem, so I figured it must be working. Then one night at four or five, after I'd gone to bed, Roger got up and walked out the back door. He felt his way along the back of the house, skirting the lip of the pool and ending up by the pool equipment. When he finally came to himself and realized where he was, he called my name as he thrashed at the ivy. A neighbor shouted irritably from a window, "Go around to the door; you're in the bushes!"

  I never heard Rog calling. Somehow he was able to retrace all his steps and come in and find me in the front bedroom. I shot awake and held him, scratched and wet from the bushes and so glad to be in my arms. He told me the whole story as I put him back to bed, and to me it was more of a dream disorientation, compounded into sleepwalking. If in fact it was dementia, it came on him for fractions of seconds only. The night by the ivy was the one extreme moment, but now I see it's like a dozen other stories I've heard of AIDS people wandering outside, very late on in the illness, sometimes into the ice and snow. With us it wasn't a pattern, and there was nothing to compare it to—except perhaps the lapse of speech in February, the so-called false alarm.

  I cannot somehow put together those nightmare cries with the lazy Sundays talking with friends in the back garden, or the evenings reading Plato. Thus if things were darkening I did not see, and that is one of the cruelest ruses of the virus, letting you think the good times are the real times. Besides, I was locked in a true romantic's presumption now, with every page I turned. No matter how scorched the earth became, no one could take Plato away from us, not what we'd managed to read together. And I did think it consciously, even when he made the ironic comparison with Cesar, that it was Roger who was like Socrates.

  He, of course, would have groaned with distress to hear such an outrageous exaggeration. Whenever I'd tell Cesar a Hollywood stor
y thick with prices and salaries, Roger would always murmur, "Divide by three." But I don't especially mean that his mind was as fine as Socrates', or his integrity so unsullied. I only mean the honesty and simplicity, the instinct that he wasn't better or wiser than anyone else. I was too shy to say it out loud, but then, from here on, there was much that would have to go without saying. Whoever Socrates was, we read the blue book for the same reason, to see how a man of honor faces death without any lies.

  8/25 Monday

  V. difficult weekend, esp yesterday—we did not move from the house except a little walk up Harold Way. I lay on my bed at 4 PM & thought I'm just waiting to get sick.

  I kept telling Sam late at night that I wasn't exactly depressed, I was frantic, and I liked that better, I could neither hold to nor project a future anymore, and the consequent dread and rage had left me wildly manic. Sometimes I could feel my heart pounding as I counted out the day's pills from eight different vials, or ventriloquized a smile in order to talk business, Sam thought it was partly to do with the news I'd had about my active viral status. If I dared to slow down or think too much I'd end up looking blankly at the ceiling as I did on the twenty-fifth, staring into the coming storm.

  Yet I don't recall that Roger and I were arguing or using each other as punching bags. We were much more drawn to comforting now, and curling like spoons to rest, talking softly of nothing much. If I suddenly panicked and told my fear of the calamity falling on me—the old horror of the two of us in separate hospital rooms, dying the same death—Roger would quickly force me to take a cold-eyed look at the reality: "You're fine." As if he would not countenance any moaning about an abstraction less savage than blindness. I am the same way now myself, ready to jump out of my skin if someone gets testy or whiny about anything less apocalyptic than AIDS.

  Sheldon had been pushing for some time about selling the apartment house on Detroit, and now he grew insistent. I couldn't believe he was engineering yet another way of cutting himself off from us, and he seemed to have no feeling at all for how thrown we were by matters that smacked of final payments. His argument was that Roger and I could no longer keep up our end of the maintenance, and he simply wasn't of a mind to pick up the slack. I could see what a blow it was to Rog to lose the property he'd invested so much pride in. It all just seemed unnecessary, since Sheldon had a whole organization to manage his properties, but he apparently saw it merely as a business proposition that was going down the drain.

  Roger didn't try to evade his nagging, but struggled to ask the right questions about the market, whether it was a good time to sell. After all that work he didn't want the investment to be a bust. He'd laid out five thousand once on a stock tip that went in the toilet, and he always worried afterwards that he might be dumb with money. I never indulged this brand of fretting. "Don't worry, darling," I used to tell him. "I'm a terrific investment."

  Roger decided himself that we ought to get rid of the Datsun, since we didn't need two cars anymore and insurance in Hollywood was hopeless. I didn't really care, though I felt a certain sentiment for the gray 280Z, which we'd bought the month we arrived in California and which Roger had kept in mint condition. But a friend who worked at Sheldon's bank offered to try to sell k for Roger, so one afternoon I delivered it to her. I spent twenty minutes rooting under the seats and in the glove compartment, turning up ticket stubs and Stim-u-dents and quirky notes in Roger's hand, till I was overtaken with sobs. I had an irrational fear that if we gave up things like this, got rid of too much that bore his imprint, Roger would surely die. I was therefore limp with relief a few weeks later when Jennifer had to admit she'd had no offers, and we took the Datsun back. We stored it in the garage and cut its insurance to the bone. Six months later, when I finally got rid of the accursed Jaguar, I put the Datsun on the road with the strangest sense of joy, as if Roger were suddenly near again.

  I scored my first batch of ribavirin that week from Jim Corty, an extraordinary hulk of a man whose passion for fighting fire with fire was as obsessive as mine. Jim was a nurse who cared exclusively for people with AIDS, and he personally drove a van over the border into Mexico every couple of weeks to haul back great quantities of ribavirin, supplying dozens on both coasts. His own lover, John, had been diagnosed in the spring, and Jim was constantly monitoring Roger's experience with AZT, eager to get it for John once the protocols were expanded. Jim always made me feel we would beat it, and never failed to rekindle my excitement about AZT. Ribavirin of course was a much less certain drug, but I went on it anyway, because there was no other game in town for me. I had been too vocal for too long that people ought to be getting tested so they could demand medication early, and it was time for me to put up or shut up.

  I know I was growing increasingly desperate about Roger's cough, and if he suddenly had a jag I'd find myself getting irrationally angry, though I could usually swallow it. But I would have sworn there were no other ominous symptoms, no shortness of breath or overwhelming fatigue. This is not to say he didn't sleep a good deal, but between Scott and me we were very skilled at getting him up and going so he didn't sleep the day away. When he was up he was animated and alert, especially when anyone visited. The summer days were so lambent now, even as the summer waned—mornings in the garden while I read him the paper, evenings reading Plato, the smell of anise when we walked at night. These brief, immediate goals of the day-to-day we had come to cherish, no matter how constricted our movements.

  It was Friday of Labor Day weekend when Scott asked me as he was leaving the house, "What does the doctor say the prognosis is?" I suppose I knew he was asking about the timetable of death, but that didn't seem to me the appropriate question at all. "The doctor says he's doing fine on the AZT," I replied, a bit defensively. Not that Cope had really said as much lately, but it was implicit in Roger's survival for nearly ten months now since he started the drug. He was the miracle man, period. He had to be, because thousands of our brothers were about to follow him on AZT.

  A series had begun to run in the L.A. Times, a portrait by Marlene Cimons of an AIDS person in Boston. Jeff, his name was, and he'd been chosen to be in the AZT double-blind study being funded by NIH. It wasn't hard to get reanimated over AZT as news of its efficacy began to break in waves at last. We were thrilled by the Times story and very moved by the passion of the man's doctor, who reminded us in his patience and dogged persistence of Dennis Cope. So I tried not to overreact to the first bad news about AZT, which was Roy Cohn.

  The press had uncovered the fact that Cohn was being treated at NIH in Washington, and the rumor was that it was AIDS, despite Cohn's drone of denial for the last two years. We had known through the grapevine for nearly a year that he was among the first AIDS people to go on AZT, after Nancy Reagan intervened in his behalf. The press was stumbling all over itself getting the story wrong about Cohn's demise, but I had a nearly day-by-day update from Craig, whose friend Donald was getting AZT intravenously on the same floor in Bethesda. "He's going to die in the next couple of days," said Craig, and I tried to keep the thought from racing in my mind: But no one's supposed to die on AZT.

  CBS did a big report one evening that week about crack cocaine, the report we kept feeling they ought to be doing weekly about AIDS. Don't you understand? friends in New York would say, hoarse from screaming at the press for coverage. Cocaine wasn't a problem till it started turning up among the children of media dons and the Washington power elite. This at a time when I would hear at least every other week about the discreet death by AIDS of one or another rich man, the cause of death fudged on the certificate or otherwise unreported. Every gay man I know has stories of married bisexual men who died in the secret enclaves of family, town, church, and local GP, all without saying the "A" word. Even certain gay doctors, we heard, would blur a death certificate if the family was mortified enough.

  Saturday before Labor Day we took the dog up to Laurel Canyon, and Rog was feeling well enough to walk all the way around the perimeter of the six acr
es, where it falls off steeply into bone-dry chaparral. Puck nosed among the trailside bushes, where the fleas are epidemic in the fall. Roger and I were arm in arm and slightly huddled, as we always were these days, but no one stared at us, wrapped up as they were in volleyball and holiday picnics. We'd reached the far edge of the park when a man with a pair of German shepherds came sauntering by, barking commands to his dogs. Puck preferred people to other canines and thus kept his distance, but on some mangy whim the two shepherds suddenly turned on Puck and grabbed him. I had to leave Roger to go hollering into their midst, and it almost came to a fistfight between me and the shepherds' Prussian master. Roger stayed calm, but I saw him straining to listen and separate the snarling of dogs and owners.

  I couldn't let it escalate any further without causing Roger problems, so we left the field. I broke down crying in the car, overwhelmed by anything harsh or disruptive. Roger was very good about me crying now, where he used to get impatient and tell me to pull it together. He would let me weep it out, soothing me but offering no contradiction of the tragic. "My poor little friend," he'd say tenderly. "So many things to worry about. Come on, let's go home and have a spoon."