by Bill Hayes
SIX
Vital Staining
WHETHER OR NOT THE NEED IS GENUINE, TRACKING down medical history is often an adult adoptee’s stated rationale for instigating a search for his or her biological parents. This explanation provides an intellectual context for what’s likely to be an emotionally raw experience for all involved. A woman considering having a child may first wish to learn if serious illness runs in her family—instances of childhood cancers, for example, or blood disorders such as hemophilia. Is there need to worry? In another case the search may be vital but unwanted: A middle-aged man, content to leave the past alone, must nevertheless locate a compatible organ or bone marrow donor. For others, the reason to search may seem silly when put into words—to find a relative who has, say, the same catsup-colored hair; finally, what made you stand out all these years helps you fit in. Despite the spoken purpose, however, adoption experts say that a search is usually driven by a deeper yearning. No matter how good one’s health, how blissful one’s upbringing, nothing may quiet the desire to know the people to whom you’re related by birth, your true blood.
As I see it, the successful mapping of the human genome has done horrendous harm to the romantic notion of blood kin, a phrase that first entered the English language during the early Middle Ages. Medieval doctors believed that the act of conception was a mixing of “pure blood” from both the mother and father. This rarefied fluid originated in the heart and was carried by semen, a substance thought to be contributed by both sexes. This feeds into the emotionally satisfying idea that bloodlines are blood-made, ceaseless crimson tributaries reaching back thousands of generations. Even in the intimacy of the womb, however, circulatory systems are independent; blood does not cross over from mother to child. It is genetics that trickle down generation to generation, determining everything from hair color to blood type to a predisposition for certain illnesses. That’s all well and good, but cold. The fact that I share DNA with my great-grandfather William, for whom I was named, does not have the same ring as hearing that we share the same Irish blood. Blood is tactile, warm, we are bathed in it at birth, whereas a spiral of DNA is clinical, invisible to the naked eye, the proof of something denied—a suspect’s guilt, or paternity.
What we commonly learn as children is that we’re part of a family tree, each of us related to a number of great-great-long-dead people through a lattice of births and marriages. Steve’s parents have spent the last several years digging into his family’s roots, a project they’ve pursued with a degree of passion that might even make them honorary Mormons. Six months ago Millie and Ted sent us the product of their detective work, a computer disk with records accounting for six generations on both sides of the Atlantic. Where I thought the screen would sprout in a grand visual, all branches and leaves, instead a single name popped up, the current youngest member of the Byrne clan. By entering a number command, we could advance person by person, jumping back limb to limb, just a generation at a time. Once we got to Steve, we found me, listed as his partner. I should not have been so surprised to be included; his folks have always treated me like another son.
The program Ted had whipped up was deliberately simple; it boiled down lives to beginning and end dates with occasional footnotes—so-and-so had died of such-and-such, for example, or this cluster of family had immigrated from thereabouts to hereabouts at around this time. We poked around for other bits of information. We scanned the various branches for those births that had oops written all over them—the “Irish twins” born less than a year apart, the consecutive siblings separated by a decade or more. Steve and I also gave his family tree the gay inspection, looking for the curiously unwed, those “confirmed bachelors” and bachelorettes who might have had secret lives, secret families. Steve proudly pointed out several individuals around whom lavender suspicions had arisen. As we headed back in time, it did my heart good to see that so many of his ancestors had lived to ripe old ages, ninety and more. That he has such genetics can only help. Going through the document was continually unnerving in one respect, however. Between entering a command and the results appearing, the screen would go black, a disconcerting two-beat delay during which my mind would speed to worst-case scenarios: The program had been corrupted, a whole generation deleted.
The closest thing I have to a family tree is a collection of old address books, each one documenting a period of my life over the past two decades. They contain not just names but evocations of places, households—and also of the swath cut by AIDS. They are pieces of evidence, books I could never part with—proof of lives made, of family created then wiped away.
Of course, it’s a rare person nowadays whose family fits into a perfectly traditional structure. Most of us have something less like a single tree and more like a “family orchard,” a concept introduced by adoption educator Joyce Maguire Pavao. Whether you are adopted or a foster child or come from a blended home of multiple marriages—no matter how unconventional your household may be—Pavao’s model acknowledges that your true family is often tied not just by blood or law but by circumstance and choice as well. It is this orchard that nurtures, feeds, and shelters those with whom you’ve found genuine kinship. Now, granted, a gay gym may seem like the last place for such an orchard to have thrived. But for twenty years, one did.
WHEN I GOT WORD OF THE CLOSING OF THE LEGENDARY SAN FRANCISCO gym Muscle System on Hayes Street early last year, it was like learning an old friend had died and wondering, Is it too late to pay my respects? I hadn’t worked out there in five years, not since I’d deserted it for a shiny new club that had opened near my home, but I regretted not having been around for the gym’s final days. After getting the news, Steve and I made a trip down to Hayes Street to view its remains.
A café that shared the building remained open, so it was possible to stand inside the foyer and peer into the vacant space. It looked as though a tsunami had hit, flooding the gym and sweeping away all the weights. Left behind were the scattered skeletons of a few broken weight machines and tanning beds. The jade-green carpeting had been torn out (the very idea of a tastefully carpeted gym suddenly seemed like the epitome of gayness), exposing the raw concrete beneath. Prevented from going farther in by a wooden gate, Steve and I stepped up to the railing that overlooked the lower level and leaned over, as if on the prow of a ghost ship. All we could see in the shadows below were garbage cans where the stationary bikes used to be parked. One thing before us, though, remained unbroken and unchanged: the enormous wood-framed mirrors—covering every wall, floor to ceiling. Straight ahead, we could see our reflections in the wall opposite. Steve said, “We look farther away than we actually are.”
I had joined Muscle System right after arriving in the city, even before I’d found a job and despite living nowhere nearby. At the time, it was the place to work out. It had such a mystique that Armistead Maupin wrote about it in his Tales of the City series. Every beautiful man in San Francisco had a membership to this gym, it was said. Luckily, I later met one there: Steve, who’d moved here from Illinois in 1987. Muscle System functioned as the heart of the community, even though it was located a good mile from the Castro district.
Monday evenings, after work, was Muscle System at its crazy best—150 guys, popping out of muscle T’s, pumped. Within the human form, blood, it’s been said, moves in figure-eights—from heart to body to heart to lungs; to heart to body to heart to lungs—circulating oxygen, nutrients, and heat, in endless loops. Exercise, of course, revs the cycle. By seven o’clock on a cold winter night, the furnace of bodies would raise the gym’s temperature at least ten degrees. The street-front windows would steam over, and the place throbbed with endorphins and testosterone. At times, working out at Muscle System was more like being at a club: The towel boys behind the front desk danced as they fed the sound system; the floor teemed with all kinds of men—pups and bears and daddies; and guys fresh from the tanning beds vogued along the runway overhead. But moments like these, which seemed to recapture something we kn
ew we’d lost, the innocence of pre-AIDS San Francisco, lasted about as long as one good song.
The impact of AIDS on the larger community could be seen in microcosm at Muscle System, where night after night we all came together, the grizzled veterans and the fresh-faced arrivals to the city. At the front desk, notes taped to the counter announced memorial services for fellow gym members and employees who had died. The notes often appeared before the obituaries were published in the local gay weekly, the Bay Area Reporter. I remember one for Mark, a congenial thirty-two-year-old southerner who, nearly every night for years, made a grand entrance after work. Although I never knew him well, I noticed when Mark was there, and his absence if he wasn’t. Always arriving impeccably dressed in a suit, tie, and full-length camel-hair coat, with briefcase and gym bag in hand, he would throw a towel across his shoulder and sail to the locker room, waving “Halloo, halloo” to everyone in his path, adding each man’s name if he remembered it.
When I’d last seen him about six weeks earlier, he appeared to have lost fifteen pounds. He actually looked good, his face as chiseled as Montgomery Clift’s. I never saw him again. How could he have gone so quickly? It was as if one night at the gym—working out, as always, in fluorescent, confetti-colored bike shorts and a tank top—Mark had simply walked right through the mirrors and disappeared.
I remember thinking in the days that followed, Now his ghost is here, behind these mirrors, together with all of the city’s most beautiful dead. They watch us as we stare at ourselves, all lined up, clutching the weights.
“COME ON, LET’S GO IN,” I SAID TO STEVE. THE GATE’S SIMPLE LATCH gave way with a press of my finger.
The girl behind the café’s counter called out, “Um, ’scuse me, you’re not supposed to go back there!”
But we’re members here, I wanted to say, lifetime members. “Don’t worry, we won’t touch anything, we’ll just be a minute,” I said. Steve and I certainly couldn’t have made the place look worse, more vandalized, than it did.
Careful steps took us along the familiar path back to the locker area. Although the sauna had been deconstructed, the banks of lockers stood unchanged—row after row, like two hundred metal time capsules. I half expected to find them filled with members’ clothes. One after another, we opened every locker and collected what little we found: a penny, a key, a video rental card. Inside every door, though, was a sticker, which he and I had surreptitiously put there, visit after visit after visit, a dozen years back. We laughed in amazement—of all things to have survived! We had slapped them up in defiance of the owners’ prohibition against distributing AIDS educational materials on the premises. BE HERE FOR THE CURE, the stickers read, the words above a luminous painting of the globe. One was scribbled over and read, ACT UP FOR THE CURE! Another, probably scrawled more recently, said, WE’RE STILL WAITING.
At the time of our stickering, both Steve and I worked just a couple of blocks away at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, he on the hotline, me in the education department. I had been charged with creating a media campaign to promote the then novel strategy of seeking out early medical care if you were HIV positive and asymptomatic and had come up with the “Be Here for the Cure” theme. The idea behind it was that the sooner you got tested, saw a doctor, and started treatment, the better were your chances of longevity. The message spread throughout the Bay Area on T-shirts, buttons, stickers, posters, and billboards, in treatment packets, ads, and PSAs, in multiple languages. What I’d learned from extensive interviews and focus groups was that, despite the number of AIDS deaths (twenty-six thousand in California by the end of 1991), many in the gay community still had hope—not always for themselves, but always for the next generation. I know I felt it. If asked back then, I’d have said with certainty that the cure would eventually arrive in some form of magic bullet, perhaps as a wonder pill or a single shot in the arm, a so-called therapeutic vaccine. The very notion of a magic bullet, entrenched in the lexicon of illness, would’ve required no further explanation, no translation. Thinking about it now, though, the phrase strikes me as one of those familiar word pairings that seems more a product of free association than of deliberate coupling, like friendly fire or drug cocktail, nonsense made meaningful, light bent to gravity.
In fact, the term magic bullet was coined in 1908 by a brilliant fifty-four-year-old German scientist named Paul Ehrlich, who that same year received a Nobel Prize for, in the committee’s words, his “immortal contribution to medical and biological research,” work that laid the foundation for the emerging field of immunology. Today Ehrlich is probably best known for being the first scientist to propose using high-dose chemical compounds to destroy specific pathogens or cancerous cells—what’s now called chemotherapy. Like “magic bullets,” Ehrlich explained, such compounds would fly through the body, “straight onward, without deviation,” and “find their target by themselves,” causing no harm to surrounding tissue. The concept was radical because, up till then, chemical agents had been used principally to treat symptoms—fever, pain, sleeplessness—never to eradicate disease.
In the year following his Nobel Prize, Ehrlich did indeed create the world’s first magic bullet when he invented an effective cure for the most hideous plague of his day, syphilis, the sexually transmitted, blood-borne disease that, for centuries, had been as stigmatizing as AIDS would one day become. He formulated an injectable arsenic-based drug that was later called Salvarsan by the German manufacturer. (Salvarsan would eventually be replaced by penicillin as the first-line syphilis treatment.) Ehrlich’s original name for the medication was “606,” for the simple fact that it was the six hundred sixth preparation he had tested, the number also quietly acknowledging his sheer persistence even after 605 failures. While the discovery made Ehrlich world famous, it also marked the beginning of a new set of difficulties, placing the scientist at the center of an ethical debate. From one camp, Ehrlich was vilified for his willingness to save “immoral” people who, some believed, deserved to die. And from another, he was held personally responsible for the drug’s adverse side effects, including numerous fatalities, most of which resulted from doctors’ errors—incorrect dosing and poor administering. In reality, the magic bullet was not magic for all. Produced as a powder that had to be carefully measured then dissolved in sterile water prior to each intravenous injection, Salvarsan was also difficult to manufacture. Ehrlich, in an effort to minimize the risks, had taken the extraordinary step of patenting Salvarsan (one of the world’s first therapeutic drug patents), not for personal gain—in fact, he never directly profited from the drug—but to enforce a consistent quality in its production. What made this whirl of difficulties bearable, he later confessed, was the first postcard he received from a cured patient.
Twenty-five years after his death in 1915, the doctor’s life story was dramatized—no, make that melodramatized—in a Warner Bros. film, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, starring Edward G. Robinson in the title role. Hollywood—and hindsight—treated him kindly. The 1940 movie, with an Academy Award–nominated screenplay by John Huston, is notable for being the first to address the taboo subject of syphilis. Ehrlich is presented as a selfless, courageous German Jewish doctor with an American accent to set him apart, I presume, from the vaguely anti-Semitic government bureaucrats, all of whom have heavy German accents. (This reflected the politics of World War II more than the reality he’d faced.) Robinson, best known for portraying gangsters, gives Ehrlich a saintly aura, culminating in the near apotheosis of his deathbed scene. Looking and sounding robust—though the funereal piano score leaves no doubt whatsoever that he’s about to kick the bucket—Robinson-as-Ehrlich summons his scientific disciples to his bedside: “The magic bullet will cure thousands,” he tells them. “But there can be no final victory over diseases of the body unless the diseases of the soul are also overcome.” A pause and a benevolent smile as the master musters his final strength. “We must fight them in life as we fought syphilis in the laboratory. We must fight! Fight! W
e must never, never stop fighting!” His eyes close as violins swell above the piano, then bells ring as if signaling Ehrlich’s entrance into heaven. And the screen goes black.
By all published accounts, Paul Ehrlich’s real life did lend itself to this kind of glorification. Most glowing of these works is a memoir written by Martha Marquardt, who served as the doctor’s devoted secretary during his final thirteen years. (Her loyalty to the man continued long past his death, as it turned out. At the risk of imprisonment, she smuggled Ehrlich’s private letters, scientific papers, and original manuscripts out of Germany at the height of Hitler’s regime, thus saving them from certain destruction.) In point of fact, Marquardt wrote two versions of her memoir: the original, a slim volume of reminiscences from 1924, and a substantially revised, English-language edition from 1951, incorporating the documents she’d rescued. In this latter work, the additional material allowed her to write more of a full-fledged biography. But there was another compelling reason for the new edition. As Marquardt noted in the preface, all but a few copies of the original were burned by the Nazis.
The moment she entered the lab first thing in the morning, she wrote, Ehrlich would nod courteously then start rattling off correspondence. Midsentence, though, he’d often abruptly halt, as if listening for something just out of range of human hearing, and then begin rummaging through the cork-stoppered bottles atop his immense worktable. Not finding what he sought on top, he’d open the cupboards underneath. Here were still more bottles—“innumerable they seemed, filled with rare and precious chemical substances.”
Marquardt recalled that the doctor might remain squatting for a good quarter of an hour, his knees pressed to his chest. The sound of his rifling was the tinkling of a tea service. He’d then pick up with both hands a particular bottle, turn it around and around, and smile as he read the label. With the grunts and groans of repositioning, he again stood. At such moments, she remembered, “All written work was forgotten for the time being and he would begin experimenting. Test tube after test tube was taken out of the little box near the Bunsen burner, and minute quantities of various chemical compounds were put into them, solutions were made and heated, alkalis and acids added. Now a delightful violet-blue resulted from the experiment, then it was a bright red; now green, then orange. If he found an interesting reaction he called out: ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ and showed it to me as though I understood all about it.”
