THIRTEEN

Daniel

One evening at dusk a young man approached the pew and called Lizbeth by name. I did not recognize him and I did not know how he came to know my dog’s name.

He explained that he had roomed with Jerry. Lizbeth was supposed to have been Jerry’s dog. He adopted her when he lived with me at the shack on Avenue B, and when he moved out he woke me from a nap to say that he could not afford a pet deposit at his new apartment, but he would take Lizbeth to be destroyed if that was what I wanted.

Jerry now lived somewhere that Lizbeth and I passed often. He had pointed us out to this young man. In fact, the young man said, he had just come from Jerry’s place. He had hoped to spend the night there, but Jerry had not come to the door. Whether Jerry was avoiding him or was sleeping, the young man did not know. Jerry is a sound sleeper.

The young man told me his name was Daniel. Lately he had been staying at an apartment he had supposedly vacated. The manager had not changed the lock and Daniel had been letting himself in with a duplicate key. But at last Daniel had been discovered and he did not dare return.

Daniel said he was on the waiting list for admission to an AIDS hospice in Houston. He expected to be admitted within a matter of days. In the meantime he had no place to go.

I nodded. Daniel looked as if he had AIDS. I never knew it if I had met anyone before with full-blown AIDS. Daniel had the hollow cheeks and the emaciated look about the neck that I had seen in photographs of people with AIDS and otherwise only in photographs of concentration-camp survivors. I asked Daniel what the local AIDS agency had done for him. He said they were mostly burned-out on him.

Although I had donated what I could to the AIDS agency, I did not have much confidence in them. I could see, however, that Daniel was a hard case, a prickly pear.

Most agencies, and especially their volunteers who do so much of the real work, want cuddly, warm clients. In the case of AIDS, that means the volunteers are best prepared for people who will lie down and die quietly. Many people who apply to work with persons with AIDS envision themselves as ministering martyrs among the lepers. They imagine the work will involve many tender and touching moments as their patients struggle to express eternal gratitude before expiring gently. Such scenes are filmed through gauze and Vaseline.

But what if the client was not a model citizen before he became ill? What if having AIDS really pisses him off? What if suffering silently is not his cup of tea? What if he resents the hell out of having to have things done for him? What if he feels entitled to steal five dollars from Florence Nightingale’s purse?

And even when the client is a saint, there is a great deal more to being of real service than fluffing pillows and holding hands.

I asked Daniel whether it really had come to the point that the agency would do no more for him. He said he was afraid that it was so.

They had discovered he had been trading his hard-won food stamps for marijuana. That was, I gathered, only the last straw. In the present crisis, the agency had given Daniel the name of a man who supposedly had a standing offer to put up people with AIDS. But the agency had made a point of saying they did not recommend Daniel call the man, but passed the name along for Daniel to do with as he wished.

Other than to make this rather peculiar referral, the agency would do no more. Having no better plan, Daniel called the number in spite of the agency’s disclaimer. The man invited Daniel to stay with him and gave Daniel directions to a house in Hyde Park.

When Daniel got to the address, the man offered him a sofa bed, and Daniel, being by then very tired, lay down. He said he had almost fallen asleep when the man began to massage him. Daniel did not want this attention, but he was too weary to make an issue of it until the massage reached his crotch, whither it arrived with uncommon haste.

Daniel asked the man to stop, but the man had not. And thus Daniel left.

I recognized Daniel as a manipulative sort of person. That someone would open his home to people with AIDS in order to make passes at them seemed incredible.

But Daniel mentioned the man’s profession—which was an uncommon one for men—and the neighborhood of the man’s home. These rang a bell with me. Daniel had not written down the man’s name and had forgotten it. But he had the slip of paper on which he had recorded the man’s telephone number. I wanted to take the number to the telephone book at the convenience store across Twenty-ninth Street to see if I could confirm my suspicions. But as I questioned Daniel, he remembered the man’s name in a flash. I knew the man.

I cannot say that Daniel’s story was true, but only that, whether fiction or fact, it captured the salient features of the man’s character better than any other single anecdote might. I believed Daniel then and all the more because he could see I could not give him any money.

What Daniel did want was to sleep on the pew as Lizbeth and I watched over him. He proposed to take a number of Valium and he perceived that the bench was not the safest place in the world. I sat on the curb beneath the pew. As the evening was growing cooler, I offered Daniel my sleeping bag. He threw it over himself and, after being reassured I would not leave him until morning, took some pills and promptly fell asleep.

Lizbeth was upset to lose her place on the pew. She paced for a while and then curled up under the pew, where she was hidden by the drape of the sleeping bag.

Daniel left his pill bottle standing on the pew near his head. Without disturbing the bottle I could read its label. The patient’s name matched the one Daniel had given me. The doctor was one of two in town I knew to have a large AIDS practice, and even before the AIDS crisis he was known for prescribing drugs like Valium with a free hand. I saw Daniel had exceeded his prescribed dose, but not to an alarming degree. Eventually I nodded off to sleep, my back braced against the pew.

Lizbeth roused me three or four times when men approached the pew. The adult arcade, which was in the storefront next to Ramblin’ Red’s, stayed open all night, and any of its patrons might have inquired of us, since late at night the pew is usually occupied by hustlers or other available men who cannot or will not pay the two-dollar admission.

Occasionally when I worked late into the night, the staff of the arcade came out to investigate complaints of a possibly dangerous vagrant. But I enjoyed the favor of the clerks on the night shift at the arcade, for I had once seen a number of magazines fall from the pants leg of an inebriated shoplifter as he stumbled away from the arcade. I knew inventory of the display items was taken every shift and the clerks must make up any deficit as much as if the cash drawer were short, so I had returned the magazines.

We had nothing to fear from the staff of the arcade or its regular customers, but perhaps one of the men who approached us in the night had meant us harm. All of them were surprised when Lizbeth leapt from concealment to announce them.

Daniel woke shortly after dawn. He was to go to some agency that would give him a voucher for a bus ticket if the hospice was ready for him. I told him I would leave the sleeping bag under the steps at Sleazy Sue’s in case he had no better place to stay that evening and I was, for some reason, elsewhere.

When Lizbeth and I returned to the pew that afternoon, Daniel was wrapped in the sleeping bag although it was an hour before sunset and still very warm. He had taken a chill and what is more he had not got anything to eat all day. Lizbeth and I had eaten as we came to things. Our reserves were exhausted.

I left Lizbeth with Daniel and my gear and went around to the Dumpsters to find what I could while there was light remaining.

These were bleak days at the Dumpsters. We ate orts from the dormitories. I did not think I could give anything of the sort to a person with AIDS. I stirred through the Dumpsters with little hope of finding canned goods or other sealed items such as I had taken in better times to the AIDS food bank. I found a few open things that I would have eaten myself. But I had a recollection that one of the more perilous opportunistic infections to which PWAs are subject is transmitted by cat shit, and few Dumpsters are entirely free of used cat litter. I found nothing I could give Daniel.

At the end of the line of the best Dumpsters I turned and retraced my steps. I sifted through the Dumpsters again, determined to make them yield something.

When I reached, save by one Dumpster, my starting point, a college woman came down the back stairs of one of the apartment buildings. She carried a paper bag that I believed she was going to discard. I returned to business, taking as little notice of her as I could for fear of alarming her. “Do you want something to eat?” she asked, startling me slightly. I had not realized she had approached me. She handed me the crisp brown bag. “I made some sandwiches,” she said.

I was not speechless but nearly enough that I said nothing intelligible. I do not appear much in need of food. The woman meant to do a little good by feeding me, but had done much more than she meant by feeding Daniel. Unfortunately I tried to tell her so all at once and she understood not a word.

The sandwiches were freshly made and not her leftover lunch and she had put a nice apple in the bag. Daniel made quick work of the food and I could believe he had not eaten all day.

We spent the night at the pew as we had the night before. But the next night Daniel did not return and I assume he went to Houston.