Bloggers Unite for World AIDS DAY - Novel Extract
With all the excitement, doing my first guest post (for copyblogger), finding out that I was a clue in a crossword yesterday (Sunday Tribune) and being awarded a “Blog of the Day” award, I almost forgot that I had promised to blog for Bloggers Unite for World Aids Day.
So I’m 20 minutes late posting. Sorry folks!
My post is two extracts from my first novel, Lovers’ Hollow, that describe what it is like for the narrator, Jo, to see her best friend, the wisecracking, lover of life, Richard, develop AIDS in 1980s San Francisco.
It’s a long one — you might want to get a cup of coffee.
—–
1986
‘So I like fucking strangers. Call me old-fashioned.’
I’ve heard Richard use this quip before. He still wants to be Mr Entertainment but he hasn’t the energy to think up new lines. He hasn’t the energy to do anything much, which is why he is lying here in a hospital bed. George, one of his nurses, is holding his wrist and Frank, another patient, sits on the bed beside his. It’s for them that he has delivered his line, though it’s addressed to me, and they respond with the requisite laughter. In the AIDS ward, good humour is an imperative.
I put his GQ and Esquire onto his bedside locker and lean low to kiss his forehead. His rash is inflamed, a flash of red blazing up his neck and face from beneath his white linen pyjama top. ‘You’re wearing that look again,’ he says. ‘You really must try to be more tactful.’
His nurse, George, releases his wrist, makes a mark on his chart and hangs it back on the bed. ‘Make him rest,’ he says to me, on his way out of the ward.
George and the other nurses know me well. I spend long hours here: because of my schedule I can visit at odd times, when Gary and other friends are at work. I bring in good soups and salads, the ones I know he likes. I coax him to sleep, chide him out of self-pity, ensure he takes his medication. Often, I sit silently beside him while he sleeps: more like a wife than a friend.
Today he doesn’t want to rest: he has something to tell me. ‘Marcus was in yesterday after you left.’
Marcus is a friend and another PWA, as they are coming to be called. Person With AIDS. ‘How’s he doing?’ I ask.
‘He brought me a present. I kept it to show you. It’s in the top drawer.’
I open the bedside locker, take it out. It’s a book, a Bible. ‘Oh-oh,’ I say.
‘I know.’
‘He meant well, I suppose.’
‘Meant well, shit.’
‘Come on, Richard, it’s not like you to be so tetchy.’
‘Tetchy.’ He giggles. ‘Tetchy.’ It’s been a long while since my vocabulary tickled him. ‘I’m tetchy, my dear, because I was looking forward to a real conversation with somebody who knows what this damn thing feels like. Instead, he brings me this born-again booby present and an evening of sermons.’
He’s not joking, he’s offended. Deeply.
‘What did you say to him?’
‘I sent him packing.’
‘Poor Marcus.’
‘He deserved it.’
‘But, Richard, if it gives him comfort . . . ’
‘Comfort? Hasn’t he registered that the Bible-brigade has us all down as damned, whether we believe their hooey or not?’
‘Do me a favour,’ he says when I don’t respond. ‘Put it in the bin.’
I’m surprised at his vehemence. Marcus isn’t even that close a friend. I look at him to make sure he means it then drop the Bible into the wastepaper basket and go over to sit beside him.
‘He actually asked me to repent. Can you believe it? The guy used to be queen of the pleasure dome and now he’s turned into one of those freaks who hawk God from door to door, trying to sell Him.’ He shudders. ‘I mean, how insulting is that? Do they really think any God capable of creating this foul and fabulous world is going to be flattered at being marketed like a household gizmo?’
I don’t know whether to laugh or pat his hand, so I do both. ‘Come on, cut the guy a break. Whatever gets him through the night, and all that?’
He lies back, feeling better for his outburst, closes his eyes. Under the rash, his skin is colourless as water. We’ve seen two close friends go already, Joe and Lucien, and others we loved a little less. Richard knows what this disease’s cocktail of assaults can do. Will do. He has faced what’s ahead and has no patience with those who console themselves with what he believes to be fantasies.
‘The Afterlife . . . ’ He shudders, theatrically. ‘Ugh.’
‘Come on, I don’t believe in it either but I can see the attraction.’
He opens one eye. ‘Honey, you’d be miserable there. We both would. With the God squad in charge of the guest list? And the entertainment? Can you imagine? We’d hate every minute of it, believe me.’
Thanks to a visa amnesty I am no longer an ‘alien’. Instead of teaching aerobics to the public for cash, I now franchise my routines to teams of instructors. Now, thousands of people do a Rí Rá workout each week, in gyms and halls and studios all across the Bay area and beyond. I even have a small slice of fame through my exercise video and the fitness features I contribute to newspapers and magazines. I am moving from facilitating health and exercise to writing about it. The Chronicle has approached me about doing a column. So has Fitness World.
I make a good living now: I have an agent and an assistant, a bank account and health insurance, a payment just put down on a two-bedroom apartment in the Haight. I eat at Mani’s, buy my clothes at Mary Coles, drive a European car, a Saab. All things that might catch me occasionally with surprise or even pride if I were free to think, if my friend did not have this disease that is going to kill him. Instead I find I’m going about like an aged English lady who lost her beau in the Great War, or an American who was a flapper in the 1920s and hungered in the Depression, forever looking back in awe. Oh, that younger me! The way I went about my youthful business all unknowing! The way I had nothing to worry me but my mind’s mindless worries!
The breach came the night I called to his apartment to hear the results of his test. As soon as he opened the door, there was my answer, in his eyes, in his face, in the stoop of his shoulders: positive. It was what we had been waiting for, we did not expect good news – how could we, with his night sweats and his weight loss and his history? – but still I looked at him and said those stupid words we always seem to say at moments of crisis: ‘No. I don’t believe it.’ As if he were not a promiscuous gay man, as if we knew nothing about AIDS and its predilections.
I held him hard, there in the doorway, held him for far too long, like I’d never be able to let him go. Then we went inside and waited together for Gary, who came home steely, well prepared. I made dinner in the little white kitchen while they had their words and when the meal was prepared, they made me stay and eat with them. Over the food we talked ourselves out of disbelief so that by the time coffee came round, Richard was able to look at the man he loved, for once not joking, and say with true, discerning knowledge: ‘We’re all going to die.’
AIDS punched a hole in our liberation theories. No wonder some thought initially that it was a CIA conspiracy to obliterate the community. Who could believe in a disease that targeted only gay men? Those were the days before we realized it was practices not populations that nurtured the virus. Now we know, and now the people who were the front rank of my sexual avant-garde are floundering around the Castro, open-eyed with horror. You bump into somebody you haven’t seen for a while and feel a flood of relief that he is still alive, followed by a wave of dread that he might tell you he has it. So many are afflicted that those still testing negative are beginning to suffer survivor’s guilt.
The Castro men have become like women, Susan says, now that their pleasure comes edged with danger. Women have always known what it is like to live with worms in the bud: unwanted pregnancy, sexual violence, fatal childbirth . . . That, she says, is why women are responding so generously to their brothers’ cause, though the same brothers were so dismissive or even hostile to them in the Castro’s heyday.
Susan is one such, applying her formidable skills and energies to the crisis, organizing fund-raisers and aggressively lobbying for political and medical attention. Her indignation is voluble: men like Richard are dying not just because they have a medical condition but because Ronald Reagan’s administration doesn’t give a god-damn about a disease that, in the main, kills gays. This homophobia that keeps the government from investing in medical research, that keeps our B-movie cowboy president from being able even to say the word AIDS: that is what is killing people, every bit as surely as the virus. And it isn’t just AIDS, she storms. You can see the work of the Republican vandals everywhere: in her project for recovering drug addicts, now failing her clients because of axed funds. In the growing army of the homeless people on the streets, shouting half-crazed at their phantom enemies, or hustling for money or food or some other, nameless need that isn’t so easily granted.
The surprise is that, through all this, she and Richard have reached a tentative liking. At a time when he felt he was losing everything – his job, his insurance, his good-time friends – Susan turned up regularly to visit and wouldn’t be jibed away. When he is hospitalized, she shares visits with me and Gary and helps with the practicals. Richard accepts services from her, as from me, that he won’t take from Gary: grumbling at our ‘fussing’ but acquiescent. Something in him makes him recoil from such solicitude in a lover. We all know that nicety will have to go with time, that he will have to learn to accept his dependence, but for now we indulge him.
The other night, the three of us sat around him, Susan sprawled across the end of his hospital bed, while Gary spoke of how lesbians are so ahead of gay men in so many ways, especially in their sense of cooperation and interdependence. Lots of men are now getting this message, he believed, beginning to look anew at ideas of love and intimacy, beginning to make different choices. ‘The party is over,’ he said. ‘The “Me generation” has been replaced by the “We generation”.’ Susan was visibly delighted with this, keen to believe that AIDS might have some redemptive meaning beyond the horrors, but Richard would have none of it.
‘Oh, my,’ he protested, ‘it’s the 1950s again. Except now it’s gays peddling myths and getting “married” for all the wrong reasons.’
The Faggot Mystique, he called it, and even Susan had to laugh.
He is out, taking pleasure from things that he wouldn’t have noticed before, making me stop to look at a garden crowded with primroses and orange California poppies, or a baby crawling across the grass. Everything is dear because soon he won’t be able to see them; the virus is chomping at his retinas. Already the light in his left eye is dimming. He leans on me, so frail I feel no burden.
Back in again, another pneumonia. This afternoon, he is sleeping or perhaps lying still with his eyes closed. His breaths are short and shallow, like little sniffs. Beads of sweat form periodically and crawl like insects down his forehead until I wipe them away. I sit in the chair near the window, reading. Everybody is quiet today. Bill and George are talking to Patrick in the corner bed, acting out for him some bureaucratic drama with hospital administration, trying to cheer him up: he got results yesterday and the news is the worst.
Steps approaching from the hall make us all look up: something new has arrived. Steps in an AIDS ward are usually tentative, not this stamping tread. Richard opens one eye when he hears the footfalls. ‘She’s here,’ he says and he begins to haul himself up his pillow. The doorway of the ward fills with a large middle-aged woman in red pant-suit. Only North America could have produced her. Richard’s mother. He finally got round to telling her two months ago; now she has finally got round to coming to see him.
Mothers are moving in their droves to San Francisco, to care for dying sons who have been left alone. Gary’s friend Lucien’s mother left a disapproving husband and a job in some upstate New York town to move west. She lived in his apartment until he died, both of them broke, managing to survive only through the kindnesses of friends who kept them supplied with gifts of food and money. Richard’s is a different type of mother: if I had never heard a word about her, I would know this from the way she holds herself in the threshold of the door, taking in the scene, rigid with umbrage. Her eyes come to rest on George and Bill, two nurses, engaged in their camp pantomime with Patrick.
Hurling her eyes heavenwards, she alights on her son’s bed. ‘This is unbelievable, Richard. Beyond belief.’
‘Hello, Mother.’
‘Who is responsible, that’s what I’d like to know.’
‘Mother dearest, what are you talking about?’
She puts her handbag down on the bed. Distress contorts her face. ‘Can we close this curtain?’ she says.
‘Sure. But first let me introduce you to Jo, one of my very best friends.’
I get up from my chair near the window, hold out my hand. She barely takes it, then lets it drop. ‘Is she one too?’ she asks Richard.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I think you know what I mean.’
‘Jesus, Mom!’
‘Well, Richard, you’re the one who said it’s no big deal. If it’s no big deal, then what’s the problem with asking?’ Her double chin is half the size of her face, a cushion on which the rest of her face – her pursed mouth, the hard line of her jaw – reclines.
‘Shall I close the curtain for you, Mrs Burke?’ I enquire, pulling it across before she has time to answer. I toss Richard a sympathetic face but he doesn’t see me. He is terrified, like an animal on its way to the abattoir. I take my seat a discreet distance away and sit, in case he needs me.
Inside the cubicle, Mrs Burke whispers loudly. ‘What are those people doing here?’
‘Who?’
‘I must say, they are the last people I expected to see here.’
‘Who, Mom? Who?’ Richard’s voice is lined with pain. I don’t know if he is playing dumb or whether she genuinely has him confused. I know that it’s George she objects to and Bill: the two nurses who are so obviously gay. ‘It’s a disgrace. They’re the last people who should be here. They did this to you.’
Light dawns for Richard. He raises his voice, addresses us outside the curtain. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he says. ‘My mother.’
‘There’s no need to get fresh, young man.’ She scrapes the curtain open again and steps out. ‘I don’t want you here,’ she says to George. ‘Or you,’ to Bill.
Their faces freeze.
‘You needn’t stand there smirking. I’m going to see what can be done. I am his mother, you know.’
She walks out.
‘Oh, God,’ Richard groans. ‘Why did I ring her? Squirrel, get in here.’
I go to him, try not to laugh at his crumpled expression. ‘Poor Richard.’
‘What did I tell you? See, mine wins.’
He means our mother competition. I try to imagine Mrs D. here and find I can’t. I don’t know how she’d be: lost, I think. I think.
I take a tissue and wipe his forehead. ‘I’m not able for this, Squirrel. She didn’t even say hello.’
‘She’s upset. She’ll come round.’
‘What’s she trying to do down there?’
‘Shhh, Richard, it’s OK. Nobody’s going to pay her much attention. They’re going to realize she’s upset.’
He groans. ‘You have the right idea, Squirrel. Cut off. Don’t look back. I should never have rung her. Why did I? Why?’
1989
Richard dies on the evening of October 17th 1989, a date known to every San Franciscan, and when he dies I am not there. Gary has called me. Susan has called me. I know his time is getting close. I know I have not seen him for weeks. I know, I know . . .
I am at home in my apartment, alone, doing not much, certainly nothing that can’t wait. Sitting at the kitchen table making notes for a magazine feature titled, somewhat ironically, ‘Urgency Addiction: Why You’re Not As Busy As You Think’. It is a perfect October afternoon, blue and balmy. I have an orange juice – freshly pulped from my new juicer – before me. I am wearing my favourite, most comfortable T-shirt, my best and fastest pen is between my finger and thumb, filling my page with words and phrases I know are just what my editor wants. All is as it should be, except for the awareness of my failure underlying every thought and feeling and act.
I haven’t been to the hospital for weeks. Weeks. In August, the disease started in on his brain. For the longest time before that he had seemed to us too fragile to last. Just skin on a shrunken skeleton, everything that made him Richard, including his sense of humour, gone. He was just a sick man, full of sickness’s self-pity. And after that came the dementia.
I push on with my work. ‘The stress addict has the same troublesome dependence as any other addict,’ I write. ‘Just because your mood-altering drug of choice is the physiological responses of your own body doesn’t mean you are safe. Surging epinephrine or glucocorticoids won’t get you in trouble with the law or leave you bankrupt, but like any addictive substances they trigger side effects that can wreak havoc with your health and happiness . . . ’
Though I am getting proficient at this writing, learning just the right tone of certitude, part of me despises it, especially magazine-land’s breezy conviction that life is eminently fixable, just a matter of tweaking the right buttons. I won’t be able to do this forever, I say to myself, not for the first time. As I write, the table begins to vibrate beneath my notebook and I feel – or is it hear? – a subterranean growl, like a deeply buried tummy rumble. The windows rattle, making me look up. Quake. I set to sit the tremor out, as I always do, but then the earth growls and everything is wobbling, violently. The floor jerks and screams rise from the street outside, flying in through my open window. This is not the usual, could it be the long awaited ‘Big One’?
So, I think, it may not just be Richard. We may all go together.
The thought leaves me strangely comforted. At the same time, facts I have heard or read about old concrete, new concrete, stress levels, earthquake procedures are flashing through me, each more useless than the last. There is a low-roaring snarl underfoot then the world bucks. Books come crashing down off my shelves. A second newsflash from my mind asserts that I don’t, in fact, want to die and for the first time since I came to San Francisco, I go to stand in the doorway. The steel L-shape shelving unit that lines one corner of my living room is flapping back and forth violently, trying to tear apart. Crockery is falling, smashing against tiles and more books tumbling down in heaps. Oddly, my television, atop another shelving unit, doesn’t budge.
It goes on for what seems like a long time, though it can only really be seconds, then the world slowly settles to stillness. I wait. Yes, it is still.
It seems to be over.
It seems I am to live.
Now I have a good excuse for not being at the hospital. Crossing the city becomes an impossibility, I give up even pretending that I might go. I stay home, listening to the news reports come in on my battery operated radio. The upper deck of Bay bridge has collapsed onto the lower, squashing hundreds of cars. A building has collapsed here, a gas-main has flared into fire there. Of the inhabited areas, the reclaimed land in the Marina district and parts of the inner Mission are worst hit. Liquification, they call it, when earthquake dissolves reclaimed soil, so that it temporarily acts like a thick, viscous fluid. Like quicksand. Those with power still up get to see it all on TV – history’s first real-time disaster movie – available on three major networks, thanks to the World Series football game that was in progress when it struck.
Sixty-seven San Franciscans die that day from being in the wrong place, at the flashpoints of the quake. In the weeks that follow, the whole city is in mourning, which feels fitting for Richard. But I, I am not good at grief. I cannot cry and I don’t want to. I go about my days, aghast. Stunned by what it is to know that he is dead. Dead. His mouth was covered in ulcers and his body, inside and out, in excruciating KS lesions. He was blind in one eye, only barely sighted in the other. He couldn’t hold his own coffee cup, his own medicine, his own shit. A time ago, I heard him writhing through the night, pleading with no one: ‘Please . . . please . . . ’ And it got worse after that. Dementia. That last day I arrived to the hospital and he screamed at me from the bed about stealing his food, I looked at his face disfigured by KS and rage and thought: you are not Richard.
But who, then, was he, this crazed stranger in Richard’s bed and body?
I couldn’t bear it. By the end, Susan was going into the hospital more often me. There: that is how loathsome I am.
Death was a release. That’s what I tell others, at the funeral. Not Richard’s mother’s Episcopalian cremation but afterwards, at the memorial we hold for ourselves and all his friends. Mozart’s Requiem and Judy singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. Gary reading Thom Gunn and Oscar Wilde and me reading my own poem: (‘ . . . We thought the laughter would roll on and on / But we were young and we were wrong’). The horror of scanning the room, seeing those who were going to die next and all the other missing faces, those gone already. And afterwards, everybody talking about Richard’s enthusiasm for life, his humour, his irrepressibility.
He would never have let us away with it, I find myself thinking, even as I cling to the compliments. Death was a release, that’s what I tell all those people who so kindly try to comfort me, and it’s true but it’s no consolation. Really, I am outraged, outraged by his loss.
Sometimes I dream about him, dreams where he is fleshed out again, his old self. He is usually silent but once I dreamed that I answered my buzzer and his voice said, ‘Hello.’
When I opened the door, there he was, standing on my step, looking sheepish. ‘Hi! I’m back!’
‘But you’re dead,’ I said to him. He turned his eyes away from me, evasive. ‘Richard, you’re supposed to be dead.’
‘I went to Ireland.’
‘No, you didn’t. You died. I was at your funeral. You were cremated.’
‘Hmmm,’ he said, ambivalently, smiling a maddening, unanswerable smile.
Everyone tries to be kind. Susan goes into motherly mode and I have to pull out of her grasp. Maeve sends a surprisingly thoughtful letter. Deirdre too tries to help but she’s at a loss; Richard was sick before she arrived out here and she never knew him well. She is getting impatient with me, can’t understand why I’m taking it so hard.
I don’t fully understand myself. He was my friend and I loved him and I miss him. But why do I feel like it is my own life that has ended?
What Gary finds hardest is that he wasn’t there for the end. He rang Richard’s mother in Telport to let her know and she thanked him by arriving and making him leave so that it was she, not Gary, who saw Richard out of this world. The hospital let that happen because she was next of kin. The rule has since been changed to allow the patient to nominate their own person. Richard would have wanted his lover, the person who had loved him best from the moment they met. Instead Gary’s last sighting of him was of his face muzzled by the ventilator, his eyes rotating wildly, unable to see, unable to object.
Gary can’t shake that image out of his head.
The two of us see a lot of each other, sit together in slumped silence. Is it worse for him? Everybody says it is and I suppose it must be but I cannot imagine how worse might feel….
….