by Paul Monette
I don’t know what the twenty still in the dark were thinking by that point, but when I stood up, all I wanted to do was say it out loud at last. I knew then I had called home to get Roger’s permission. First I volleyed the compliment back to Sheldon and said I loved him too. Then I said I’d always thought turning forty would matter, and here it was and it didn’t. I said I wished Roger were here, and then I began the poetry lesson, giving the whole background for the conspiracy to a group half of whom probably hadn’t cracked a poem since high school.
The poem is all about dying at forty, and its main figure is Robert Louis Stevenson, dead in Samoa at forty-four. The poem is forty lines, and after the bit about the wasted generation of World War I, it goes on with the nerve-racking business of waiting to die:
ask any phobic it’s not the heights
it’s the edges that get you that weird thing
of being drawn to the precipice do it
the time has come to take the plunge and none
of your youthly coy and basket shots will
save you time doesn’t give a fuck oh but
we planned such plans if the war hadn’t come
and the weather had held and life had cleared
like a late Manet…
Stevenson died half a world away from his native Scotland. Now here we were, a world away from being young, “bone-thin and sunburned, blown like a sailor.” The poem ends with a wish windy enough to blow out forty candles, a wish that in the end was granted:
… if I
must go early give me please one friend one
year but nothing’s enough and the cliffs at Thera
where the old world ended tomorrow my love
is a stolen kiss but we sail together
if we sail at all hey 40’s kid stuff.
Sheldon gave the waiters a little nod, and they came around with little icy wedges of chocolate cake drenched in raspberry sauce. I sat down again with the family, and one of Sheldon’s sisters-in-law observed that she hadn’t understood a word of the poem, and one of the half-brothers grinned at me and said, “Not a lot of money in poetry, I’ll bet.”
We were all out of there punctually by midnight, the catered syncopation never wavering. Bob and Brenda and I swept home through the rain, talking nonstop, and woke Roger up with the details. My brother reminds me the next day was a good day. Roger was up and around, animated with Bob and Brenda and loving the closeness of family. Good days are such a mysterious gift that you dare not question them much, and the only problem is they give you a false sense of security. That night we had dinner at Cock ‘n’ Bull, and Roger put away a plate of prime rib, leaving us all daft with merriment. When we got home there was a message from Ted Hayward in San Francisco, a friend of Cesar’s and mine who’d been very close to the case. I thought Ted must be calling to give me birthday wishes from Cesar. When I phoned the hospital and was told Cesar wasn’t there, I assumed they’d negotiated the move home. Denial doesn’t get much deeper than this, but please, it was a good day.
Monday wasn’t. Roger was feeling awful and could barely get out of bed to come into the living room when Merle dropped over with Sheldon to say hello. There was a long discussion, I remember, about telling Roger’s parents. I knew Roger wanted to now, and when Sheldon made a last attempt to preserve the secret, I shifted the conversation to “what Roger wants to do.” Eventually we got a consensus that it would have to be Roger’s decision. Then I took Bob and Brenda down to The Source for lunch, feeling a wave of irrational guilt that the clouds and rain were so persistent. As we waited for the food, I went over to the pay phone and tried Cesar’s number again. Ted answered.
“Between a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder,” he said when he heard my voice.
“What? Is he home?”
“Saturday night, just after midnight.”
I went totally blank. Then I groaned with frustration—no, annoyance—and said: “Oh Christ, how am I going to tell Roger?”
Cesar died on my black-tie birthday, within an hour of the poem and in the thick of the same thunderstorm. I don’t recall any of the details after that, except that Dennis had had to go out of town, and by the time he landed in the Midwest there was a message summoning him back to San Francisco. I got off the phone as quickly as I could. As I walked across the restaurant, the seventeen years of friendship ended. I told Bob and Brenda, who were starting to look numb from all the ravages of war. We went home, I told Rog, he cried, I didn’t. I never cried for Cesar.
But I tried to be there for Roger about it, because he took it hard. I remember him saying in the car one night, “Is he going back home to Uruguay?” It was the first time I ever thought of the separateness of the remains and how they could get lost again in Uruguay, the place from which Cesar had finally escaped. Bob and Brenda left on Tuesday, and I began a round of condolence phone-calls—to Dennis, to Jerry, to Diana Cobbold in Massachusetts. Dennis said he felt as if he’d lost a lover, then added that he’d have liked to pour the final urinal over the doctor’s head. I reminded Jerry of a dinner party at his house five years earlier; he and I were the only two of the seven in attendance who didn’t have AIDS yet. Diana, who’d introduced me and Cesar and was writing a novel about him, was as stupefied as I was. “He never had his great love,” she said, and I thought: At least he had the beginning of it.
How sick was Roger that week? I don’t know that I noticed anything very different. We were still struggling to hold his weight—he’d lost six or seven pounds now—and I kept taking comfort in the thought that there were people who’d lost sixty and eighty pounds. He managed to work that week too, but fewer and fewer hours. The symptoms—nausea, lassitude—remained stubbornly nonspecific. The AZT was on the way; it would be available within two weeks. If all you have to do is hold on, you let the details go.
Midweek I had a call from Chana. She was on her way out to a meeting, and there was no one to stay with Bruce. Could I please come over? She was frantic. It was only a block away and only for an hour, so I said yes, even though I hated giving up my late afternoon with Rog. As I trotted over to Hedges Place I didn’t quite understand why someone had to be with Bruce all the time. Didn’t he just sleep a lot, like Roger?
The air was eucalyptus sharp after the storm, the view from Bruce’s terrace clear to Catalina. Alpha Betty Olson, a writer friend of his, had dropped by unexpectedly and said Bruce was in his bedroom and would be right out. She and I laughed to think how eagerly Bruce had always wanted the two of us to meet. “He gets his way eventually,” she said. Then I raided the kitchen for nosh, because Bruce had a lot of friends who brought up very high-toned takeout.
Suddenly he appeared from the bedroom end of the house in a long robe, stamping in in a fury. He seemed to be mad at everything, but for a moment I couldn’t take it in because he looked so awful, drained and thin and frail, much worse than when I’d seen him at the hospital two weeks before. He was angry at Chana for leaving for her meeting. Then he segued into a great rage against doctors, till he had to lie down on the sofa, exhausted by his own upheaval. Alpha Betty and I tried to engage him about one thing and another, but it was the sole occasion when he didn’t want to hear about AZT or anything else positive, so I just shut up. And thought: Why am I here and taking all this abuse, when Roger’s waiting at home and wants me there?
But something else was going on—something was slightly off center about this fit of anger, as if Bruce himself had gotten lost in the fire. I wondered if they were worried that he’d kill himself, and was that why he shouldn’t be alone? Or was there some kind of viral static in the brain? Nothing scared me more than the brain. When I got up to leave, Bruce had calmed down, and he said, wearily but himself again, “I’m glad you came, Paulie. I’ll be better next time.” I never saw him after that.
Did things get worse and worse that week? I suppose they must have, but Cesar was dead and Bruce was in terrible shape, so worse compared to what? Roger’s parents were the
next hurdle. The night he called them in Chicago, I didn’t want to be in the bedroom with him. Did I think he wanted the privacy, or was I afraid we’d be punished at last? I hovered in the hallway, dreading to hear the tears, always thrown when the stoic lost it. “I’m not getting better,” he said, and then he started to cry.
“Do you have it, son?” his father asked gently.
It had always been on their minds, though they’d wished it away when they saw us in August. They told him how much they loved him and said they’d be out the next week. Once Roger had told Al and Bernice, it was my parents’ turn. My brother and I agreed it would be better for him to break the news in person, so he and Brenda drove up to Boston three days after they got back from California. My mother said she’d suspected something was wrong ever since we left in August—not that Roger had looked sick, but when I’d call to check in on Saturday nights she’d ask where we were going, and I’d say, “Oh, we’re just staying in tonight.” Curious, the inadvertent clues you leave. My parents had lived our Saturday nights vicariously for years. Now they were generous and supportive, telling Roger he was like a son to them. By the end of the week we had both shaken families on our side.
Not seemingly such a big deal, unless you have heard all the stories from the other side. Craig’s mother cut him off one night as he complained about the blood tests and the circular doctors’ appointments: “Listen, this whole thing is your own fault. I don’t really want to hear about it.” That turns out to be rather mild, and at least it’s honest. The real hell is the family sitting in green suburbia while the wasting son shuttles from friend to friend in a distant place, unembraced and disowned until the will is ready to be contested. And even that is to be preferred to the worst of all, being deported back to the flat earth of a rural fundamentalist family, who spit their hate with folded hands, transfigured by the justice of their bumper-sticker God.
Either the symptoms didn’t seem to be getting worse, or they took second place to the drama of our parents’ arrival on the moon. Saturday, November 17, was the Gay Community Center dinner at the Beverly Hilton, and I decided to go and host the table Roger had put together from his hospital bed the previous month. In the Hilton I ran into Rick Honeycutt, no longer impish and surferlike, looking tired and old as he told me he was off suramin. Eagerly I gushed about AZT, but he didn’t want to hear about it. Several people came by the table and asked where Roger was, none of them having any idea that he had AIDS, and I said defiantly that he was doing fine and waiting for AZT. Nobody knew what the acronym meant, but they got the picture.
Charlie Milhaupt drove me home, and we went in to see Rog, who woke up in a smiling mood and said, “I just had a dream. There was this green liquid. And all I had to do was drink sixteen cups of it and I’d be fine.”
The elixir dream. We laughed at the lovely fantasy of it and went to bed that night with nothing more on our minds for the week ahead than awaiting his parents’ arrival and then the drug. We’d given both families a full measure of hope when we broke the news, for we had our pharmaceutical ace in the hole. But Sunday it was glaringly clear that we couldn’t just sit and wait. The nausea was intensifying, the fevers were back and the fatigue had reached a stage where Roger could hardly get out of bed. We went over to UCLA for tests, and they admitted Roger, again just overnight, but by now we knew what a euphemism “overnight” could be.
And suddenly my memory is as blank as my calendar for almost the whole of the next two weeks. I remember only the bitter disappointment, to think that Al and Bernice would have to find us in the hospital. I know they arrived on Monday night, four days before Roger’s forty-fourth birthday, by which point we knew he had hepatitis, of the type called NON-A/NON-B, noninfectious and probably drug-related. That would explain the nausea and lethargy, as well as the sunburned cast of Roger’s face, which began to take on a dull gold flatness.
But the real point is that he nearly died that week—closer than he ever came in the whole nineteen months—and I don’t even know when. You’d think the shadow of death would have your nerves screaming to imprint it. Richard Ide says he talked to Roger from Washington on Sunday night, soon after we checked in, and Roger was terrified and started to cry. “I love you, Richard,” he said. And Richard knew in that instant that Roger was dying, that this was a call to say good-bye. Scrambling, Richard said he’d be on a plane and be in L.A. by Friday, so Roger had better hang on till then. Yet the fever point of the crisis had apparently passed by the time Richard landed on Friday night, so it must have been Tuesday or Wednesday Roger almost died.
But what exactly does “almost” mean? It wasn’t until the next summer that I could even admit how bad it had been during the days of late November. At the time, anything anyone said about dying, however veiled, I simply didn’t hear. Because he couldn’t die, not with the drug just a week away. For this was precisely what was so tantalizing in the rumors of AZT, that it was turning people around even from the verge of nothingness. I recall wanting everyone to let us alone with the hepatitis—no treatment for that but time, the doctors said. We would take care of the time. Just get us the fucking elixir.
Not that our deep-throat sources weren’t moving heaven and earth to acquire it. Word was that thirteen or fourteen patients were on it now, but every single one was back east and close to the National Institutes of Health. Superpower threats had to be made to coax the drug to California, and even so the manufacturer had all the time in the world. Meanwhile I had to deal with a pugnacious, cocky little intern called Runyon, barely five foot seven, who wouldn’t stop running tests because he wasn’t satisfied with hepatitis.
I grew maddened with all of Runyon’s probing, but he managed to convince Dennis Cope that they ought to go one step further. Now came the first spinal tap, the first bone marrow biopsy, both tests as awful to contemplate—much less undergo—as medieval tortures. I remember Roger curling up in fear of the marrow test, holding my hand as Runyon, utterly lacking in bedside manner, explained the procedure in ghoulish detail. Yet where would we be without Runyon, bless him, who wouldn’t stop brooding over certain ambiguous numbers, and who finally figured it out: Roger’s adrenal glands were failing. I don’t even remember why that is fatal; I only know it’s treatable. When you live on the moon, treatable gets to be the holiest word in the language.
How Runyon crowed with triumph! He was easily five foot nine by the end of the week. And within an hour of his diagnosis Roger was on medication—Florinef, a terrific little lilac pill, one a day for the rest of his life—that would do all the adrenal functioning that needed doing. It wasn’t until a week or two later that reports began to filter in through the AIDS underground that four suramin patients out of a hundred had lost adrenal function. So it was just an unlucky side effect, that grim companion of healing.
As for the suramin—water under the bridge, which seemed more lethal with every report that came in—of course I anguished to think how much we had wasted on snake oil. There’s a moment in Sunrise at Campobello when the Roosevelts have been tirelessly giving some vigorous treatment to Franklin—rubbing his legs for hours for the circulation—and the doctor tells them they’ve been doing precisely the wrong thing. The sinking feeling is indescribable as you reach the dead end and realize you can’t even go back to the fork in the road where you took the wrong turn. I felt ridiculous and ashamed, I who had pushed suramin all summer as practically a miracle cure.
But if I was gullible, there were others who knew exactly what they were doing. Though UCLA quickly moved to dismantle its suramin study as soon as it became clear the drug was too toxic, several other suramin programs were still going full force, with hundreds of patients clamoring to get in. Within a few weeks this moral blurring to protect the experimental data began to seem criminal to me. There was one doctor who kept his patients on suramin through the winter, even when we knew how lethal the side effects were, and even as the patients died off one by one.
It is mostly myself that
I can’t remember that week, perhaps because my panic wasn’t manifesting as anger or depression. It was all fear, pure as oxygen off a line. Al and Bernice were there, of course, and they tried very hard to defer to me. Roger and I would talk through the day’s numbers every night with Cope, who would calm us down merely by talking about it all as an ongoing process. Now and then Al and Bernice would join us for that session, and once Bernice went into a state of suppressed rage—exploded later in the corridor—when I talked with Cope in front of Roger about the chances that some horror or another might develop. Bernice came from the school that didn’t talk about the dire stuff in front of a sick person. In retrospect I agree—Roger didn’t need more gloom and doom—but at the time I felt we had to go through the fire together, that all we had to squeak us through was the fact that we were one. I remember Cope taking me aside one night and saying carefully, “This is the most unstable I’ve ever seen Roger.” Then he asked if Roger and I had ever talked about life support systems and a living will. Still I would not hear the knell of death in all this. I think I thought I could disbelieve it away.
In any case, I was a better combatant that week than I was an observer. Fifteen hours a day I’d either be on those interns and nurses like a rash or be plugged into my sources all over the country, wired for sound. Perhaps Roger is the better witness here. Most of what I know of the blackness came out of a long talk we had, late one night the following summer, when things were quiet. Those were the nights when I used to read Plato aloud, and Roger could barely see.
“Oh, Paul,” he said, “I had to fight so hard to keep from going under.”
