by Michael Nava
I’d grilled the cop for an hour, but he hadn’t even bothered to conceal his smirk as he calmly repeated his lies.
Still, I’d felt encouraged by the judge’s body language, the impatient shifting as the cop went on and on, and the drawing together of dubious eyebrows, but the speed of her decision was bad news. Joan Ipswich was a decent judge but, in the end, there was no way she was going to go on record taking a drug dealer’s word over a cop’s, whatever her private reservations about the cop’s truthfulness.
“The motion is denied,” she said.
“Aw shit,” my client said. “Judge, I want a new lawyer. This one don’t know what he’s doing because that cop was lying.”
“Mr. Mendez, your lawyer did an excellent job, but that’s my ruling.”
“Then I want a new judge,” Mendez shouted across the well of the court. The bailiff’s hand went down to his gun. “I want a new fucking system.”
She turned her attention sharply to me. “Mr. Rios, control your client.”
“I don’t know, Your Honor, I wouldn’t mind a new system myself. One that doesn’t automatically defer to police officers no matter how clear it is they’re committing perjury.”
“That’s enough, counsel. Your motion’s denied. Your client’s remanded and we are adjourned.”
She hurried off the bench, and the sheriffs came to take my client back to county, but before he left he said with grudging respect, “Thanks for telling off the bitch.”
And as he left, the cop muttered to me, “Asshole.”
I remained at the counsel table, gathering up my papers and stuffing them into my briefcase. Another day at the office. I shook off my frustration. There was no time to indulge it. I had a meeting in a few minutes with a desperate stranger trying to save the life of his son.
••••
The call had come a few evenings earlier. The caller, who had declined to identify himself, asked for Larry. I knew from the anxiety in his voice he was calling about the drugs Larry smuggled in to treat HIV. There had been a few other such calls since Larry’s death. I told the callers Larry had died, gave them the names of some other people to call, and wished them well. When I told this man Larry was gone, he began to sob.
“Hey,” I said, “it’s okay.”
“No,” he said, “it’s not okay. My son is— he’s sick. Can’t you help me? Please.”
“You’re calling about the drugs.”
He pulled himself together. “From Mexico, yes. I heard Mr. Ross was helping people get them.”
“He was,” I said. “There are other people involved. I could give you their names and numbers.”
“Do they really help? The drugs, I mean.”
“In some cases, I’m told there’s been improvement, but I don’t know the details. I wasn’t involved with Larry’s project.”
“Did he die from AIDS? Did the drugs fail him?”
“Larry was killed by a brain aneurysm,” I said. “Not AIDS. Do you want those other numbers?”
“Look, sir,” he said, “it took all my nerve to call you. Please, help me. Please.”
“It’s your son?”
“He’s my only child. He’s still a boy.” The caller broke down again. “He’s only nineteen. Please, help us.”
The rawness of his plea made it impossible for me to turn him down. I told him to meet me in the courthouse cafeteria two days hence.
“I’m Henry,” I said. “What’s your name?”
After a long pause, he said, “Call me Dan.”
“Okay, Dan, I’m going to bring another guy with me named Jim. He and Larry worked together. Jim will be able to answer your questions about the drugs far better than I can. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes,” he said. “God bless you, Henry.”
Later, it occurred to me that maybe I was being set up by the FBI but if Dan was a federal agent, he deserved an Oscar. I called Jim Mulvaney, explained the situation to him, and he agreed to join us.
••••
Jim was waiting outside the cafeteria when I came down from the courtroom. He was a tall, shambling, long-haired man with a ready smile and the soothing manner of a nurse, which he was. Jim was gay, but HIV-negative. He’d become an AIDS activist after watching a couple of dozen men, including his best friend, die from the diseases that preyed on them after the virus had knocked out their immune systems.
“The docs kept saying there’s no cure,” he had told me once, “and I said, what do you mean, no cure? This is a public health emergency. If there’s no cure, it’s because someone doesn’t want a cure. Then I watched that guy, Reagan’s press secretary, Speakes? When someone asked him about AIDS, he turned it into a joke. I thought, aha, that’s who doesn’t want a cure. No one’s going to help us here. We’re on our own.”
“Henry,” he boomed, enveloping me in a bear hug. “This is the saddest cafeteria I’ve ever been in, and I’ve worked at hospitals.”
I glanced around the room— scuffed-up walls and linoleum, over-bright fluorescent lights that flattered no one, chafing dishes filled with dispiriting displays of overcooked scrambled eggs and greasy bacon.
“Yeah, it’s not the Ritz,” I allowed.
He grinned. “How are you, handsome? The last time I saw you was when you dropped off that bag of money from Larry.”
“Which I assume you accounted for in your tax returns,” I said, extracting myself.
“It wasn’t income to me,” he said. “It was a charitable contribution to start up a new AIDS organization that’s running trials on ribavirin.”
“Private drug trials? Can you do that?”
“We are,” he said, “since the feds refuse to. We’re setting them up here and in San Francisco. So far, no one’s tried to stop us.”
I mentioned my visit from the FBI agents looking for drugs.
He shrugged. “That’s different. Technically, it is drug smuggling, which is, technically, illegal. Nothing illegal about drug trials as long as they follow established guidelines, which we do.” He glanced around the room. “So, this guy, Dan. How will we know who he is?”
I consulted my watch. “We’re a few minutes early, so he may not be here yet. Let’s go in and sit somewhere conspicuous and let him find us.”
We got coffee and settled at a table in the center of the room. As Jim told me more about the ribavirin drug trials, a man entered the cafeteria and paused, as if searching. He was medium height, dressed in khakis and a gray V-neck sweater over a light blue shirt. Fortyish, good-looking white guy in a suburban dad sort of way, the edges of his nicely barbered hair beginning to gray, crinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes. Those eyes— blue I saw once he was near enough to tell— fell on us questioningly. I motioned him over.
“Dan?”
“Henry?”
“Yes. This is Jim. Have a seat. You want some coffee? I’ll get it for you.”
“No thank you,” he replied, sitting. He looked around at the shabby cafeteria and asked, “Why are we meeting here?”
“I’m a criminal defense lawyer,” I explained. “I had an appearance this morning upstairs, and I have another in an hour in the same courtroom.”
“Ah,” he said. He gave us a searching look. “Are you both homosexuals?”
Jim laughed. “Are we what?”
“Homo—”
“Yeah,” Jim said, “I heard you the first time. It was the way you said it, like you wanted to know if we’re unicorns. We’re both gay, Dan. I’m guessing you’re not.”
He shook his head. “No.” Then a moment later. “I think I will have a cup of coffee.”
As he stepped away from us, Jim asked, “Think he’s going to make a run for it?”
“He does seem a little spooked.”
••••
But Dan returned, foam cup in hand, and sat down. Whatever doubts or reservations he had had about us he had resolved on his coffee run. He asked, decisively, “What are these drugs you’re bringin
g in from Mexico? Are they a cure?”
Jim answered. “There is no cure, not yet, but these two drugs have helped some PWAs get better.”
“PWAs?”
“People with AIDS,” Jim replied. “Not victims, not patients, but people.”
This drew a puzzled, “I don’t understand the difference.” from Dan.
“Victims and patients,” Jim explained, “are passive recipients of whatever treatments the medical establishment decides are in their best interests. We’re not passive anything. We’re fighting for our lives here. That means challenging the doctors, the drug companies, and a government that would just as soon let all the queers go off and die.”
The force of his words pushed Dan back in his chair a bit. “Oh, okay. People with AIDs. What about the drugs?”
“Ribavirin is a broad-spectrum antiviral agent. That means it belongs to a class of drugs used to treat various diseases caused by a virus. It’s an over-the-counter drug in Mexico that people take when they get colds, but it’s not approved by the FDA for us in the US.”
“The FDA?” Dan asked.
“Food and Drug Administration,” I said. “The federal agency that approves all drugs in this country.”
“Why hasn’t it approved—” Dan began.
Jim cut him off. “Because the drug companies don’t think they can make money off it, so they’re not going to spend their money to do the testing the FDA requires before it okays a drug.” With a sour grin, he added, “Look, Dan, you got to understand something. The big drug companies aren’t in the business of curing disease; they’re in the business of making money.”
“Don’t they want to help sick people get well?”
“That’s what they say but it takes millions of dollars and years for the drug companies to run the kinds of trials the FDA demands before it signs off on a drug as being safe for human consumption,” Jim said. “The drug companies want that money back in sales and then some.”
“But,” Dan said, “if ribavirin is already being used in Mexico, then hasn’t it already been found safe for people to take?”
“Fair point,” Jim said, “but the FDA has its own protocols for drug safety, and the fact that some other country says a drug is safe doesn’t carry any weight with it. Plus, the FDA is heavily influenced by whoever’s running the federal government. The guy currently in charge isn’t a friend of gay people.” He sipped his coffee. “Okay, back to the drugs. The other drug we’ve been bringing in is called Isoprinosine. It’s what’s called an immune modulator that may boost the body’s immune system. What we’ve seen is that some PWAs using the drugs individually or in combination have seen some real improvements in their condition.”
“What kind of improvements?” Dan asked, cautiously.
“People report it’s helped relieve the major symptoms of AIDS, wasting, fevers, sweats, loss of energy. That might be evidence the drugs are helping boost the immune system to fight off the virus. How sick is your son?”
Clutching his untouched coffee, Dan said, “He had the pneumonia.”
“PCP?” Jim asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” Jim said. “And bad.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s at an early stage of the disease, but it also means his immune system is very compromised, and he may now be-come susceptible to other infections.”
“Can these drugs help him?”
“There haven’t been any formal studies on whether the drugs work,” Jim said. “The anecdotal evidence is mixed. Some people say they helped; some say they didn’t. I can’t tell you whether they’ll do your son any good.”
“Will they hurt him?” Dan asked.
Jim shook his head. “The one thing I can say is that no one’s reported any kind of serious side effects.”
“Is there anything else?” he asked. “Any other drugs?”
“There’s only one drug that’s currently being tested as a treat-ment for HIV,” Jim answered. “It’s called AZT. The FDA recently approved Phase II trials.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means the drug worked in the lab and on animals and now it’s being tried on people. There are trials in San Francisco and LA, though as far as I know all the slots are taken.”
“Slots?”
“People volunteer to be enrolled in the study,” Jim told Dan. “There are only so many slots.”
He absorbed the information. “Who decides how many people can enroll?”
“The people conducting the trial,” Jim said. “Here it’s at UCLA, and up in San Francisco I think it’s at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.”
“Does the government have any say?” he asked.
“What do you mean, the government?”
“If someone in the government wanted to get someone into the study, could he?”
Jim narrowed his eyes disapprovingly. “Are you asking if someone with juice can pull strings? That’s the way of the world, but it’s not fair.”
“I can’t worry about what’s fair,” Dan replied. “Not if it means keeping my son alive.”
“What do you do for a living, Dan?” I asked, curious about his implication that he had friends in high places.
“I’d rather not say,” he replied. He stood up and extended his hand. “Thank you, gentlemen. God bless you and the work you’re doing.”
Surprised at the abrupt termination of our conversation, Jim said, “Don’t you want to know how you can get the drugs we’ve been talking about?”
Dan said, “As I understand it, bringing those drugs in is illegal, but this other study with AZT, that’s government approved. I can’t— well, I’d prefer not to break the law if I can avoid it.”
“What if you can’t get your son into the AZT study?” I asked.
“Then you’ll be hearing from me again.”
Jim pulled a business card out of his pocket. “Call me directly,” he told Dan. “We can cut out Henry.” He grinned. “We’re saving him for when the feds bust us and throw us into jail.”
Dan looked alarmed, but took the card and tucked it into his pocket. We shook his hand. He had the firm handshake of a man used to shaking many hands, a politician’s handshake.
“So,” Jim said as Dan disappeared. “Who was that masked man?”
“No idea,” I said, “but he carried himself like he’s someone who matters.”
••••
Josh’s last name was Mandel. He was twenty-three years old, the youngest child of three, the only boy. He’d grown up in Encino, dropped out of UCLA halfway through his sophomore year, worked as a waiter at a trendy restaurant on Robertson, and lived in Hollywood on a street named after a flower.
Those were the bare biographical facts of the young man who had doctored my head at the Gay and Lesbian Center. He had revealed them in our late-night conversations— while he lay in his bed and I lay in mine. Tonight, I was heading to a bar at the edge of West Hollywood to meet him after his shift.
“I’m not much of a drinker, either,” he hastened to add when I said I didn’t drink, “but sometimes I’m too wired to go straight home from work, so I stop for a beer. We could meet somewhere else if bars make you, um, uncomfortable.”
“I’ll see you there at ten,” I replied.
Although we had talked almost every night, I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since we’d first met, ten days earlier. Our schedules were incompatible. He went to work about the same time I was calling it a day, and during the day, when he was home, I was rarely in one place long enough to call. Two years after relocating from San Francisco, I was still putting together my practice. My bread and butter were 987.2 appointments. That provision in the penal code authorized judges to appoint a private lawyer for indigent defendants when, for whatever reason, the Public Defender’s office declared a conflict and couldn’t take the case. The appointed lawyer was paid by the county. The rate was considerably less than I woul
d have charged a private client, but it was a steady source of income while I built up my private practice. Each of the forty-seven courthouses in Los Angeles County kept its own 987.2 panel of lawyers and I was on half a dozen panels, so I spent a lot of time running from one courthouse to another.
All that travel was exhausting but useful. Armed with my five-hundred-page Thomas’s Guide— the city’s comprehensive street map— I learned the geography of the city, not simply the physical layout but the economic and racial layout, too. LA was an east/west and hills/flats town. The farther west and higher into the hills you went, the richer and whiter the city got. The air was better the closer you got to the ocean; the hills offered privacy. The intangible benefits of wealth. The flat neighborhoods of the east side were crammed with working-class and poor people, most of them Black or brown. Their disadvantages— from potholed streets to overcrowded schools, gangs, and drug dealers— were all too tangible.
My physical office, in a small, three-story run-down building on Sunset near Highland put me dead center in this geography, in a kind of no man’s land. In the city’s complicated schema, I was neither fish nor fowl. My fancy law degree, nice suits, and inherited house in the hills assigned me to the professional classes, but my brown skin and mestizo features marked me as an outsider in those almost entirely white precincts. Plus, I was gay. In 1986 Los Angeles, no one, rich or poor, white, brown or Black, eastsider or west, threw out the welcoming mat for queers. So, I belonged . . . to myself. The insider as outsider or the outsider as insider. I belonged to a world that had not yet come into being but was struggling to emerge. A world where people were not deformed by baseless hatred and fear because they were variations on the human theme.
I told some of this to Josh as night lapped at our windows and our conversations drifted from shallow into deeper waters. Larry’s house was on a cul-de-sac perched at the edge of a canyon carpeted with chaparral, the native low-lying, thorny, fragrant gray-green woodland of Southern California. The nights were so quiet at Larry’s I could hear not only bird song but the whirl of their wings as they swooshed though the air. The dusty smell of sage and manzanita seeped into the bedroom through the open door. On the other end of the line I heard police sirens and car alarms and the neighbors’ music blasting through the thin walls of Josh’s Hollywood apartment. Two entirely different landscapes. Two very different lives. Two men, each lying in his bed, talking, voices light with laughter or serious, silences that were comfortable or pendent, the stories sometimes linear but often not as we wound our way toward each other.
