The world was changing. My world was changing. It was a time of men in Cuban-heeled boots and peacock-hued finery. It was a time of doors opening to closets and doors closing on lies, both intentional and inadvertent. It began as a time of famous clubs like Studio 54 and other venues less savory, like the Continental Baths, where Bette Midler and Barry Manilow had their starts amid the toweled gay crowd and avant-garde. I never made it to either of them, but knew many folks who were regulars at each.
Toward the river that was not that far from my West Village apartment were more notorious venues like the Ramrod on West Street, Badlands nearby on Christopher Street, and the Anvil at the end of Fourteenth Street. The notorious Mineshaft was located at 835 Washington Street around the corner from Sam’s house. It was considered the most hard-core of the unsavory Meatpacking District’s S&M clubs. There, impersonal sex and “glory holes,” a golden shower tub, and other over-the-top reveling in the newfound gay sexual freedom were evidenced nightly. I skirted the perimeters of these places, dimly aware of them and understanding little of the shorthand of my gay friends who spoke of them in front of me with knowing nods and lowered voices.
In the beginning, there was no hint of the fast-arriving plague years: the times that would signal the end of an era. Then, in 1981, the underground network of information began to spread talk of a type of pneumonia that affected homosexuals. By 1982, the word had spread, as had the illness, which was given a name, AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). The term replaced GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), as it was discovered that the illness affected not only gay men but also intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and, for some reason, Haitians. That year it was determined that the illness could also be transmitted by blood transfusions. By 1984, the retrovirus that caused the illness was isolated, and the world became familiar with HIV. The plague years were fully upon us.
By 1986, there was widespread panic: a sore that didn’t heal or a fever blister in the wrong place could signal the end of a relationship and the beginning of a journey down dark and unexplored corridors that could leave scars that would result in inconclusive tests and often a ten-year waiting period with a death sentence hanging over your head. It was a time of uncertainty and difficulty. Safe sex was urged; condoms became commonplace. AIDS crept onto the scene slowly, at first a looming spectre that lurked in the cobblestoned streets and dim alleyways. We all learned about Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystic pneumonia. Rock Hudson died of AIDS in 1985 and Ricky Wilson of the B-52’s succumbed the same year.
Living in the West Village, I was at the epicenter of it all, albeit on the periphery. Slowly but with the inexorability of fate, it entered our lives. There were rumors and tales and talk. Once when the discussion had turned to what had become known as “safe sex,” Baldwin opined that there was no such thing: sex had always been dangerous and there was no more danger than ever before. It was an interesting perspective. I thought of it and of how it really didn’t quite capture the new fear that I saw in the eyes of my other gay friends. Living in the West Village, I watched as their lives changed and as they became pariahs in the world they had only just claimed as their own. Gay I knew about. I lived a life tangential to the arts and reveled in the company of actors, artists, writers, dancers, and more. I had, after all, gone to the High School of Performing Arts and sat next to Teddy, a dance student, who wore bright blue eye shadow in biology class. I counted myself as reasonably sophisticated. I knew more than most of the members of the Saturday-night sinners and had myriad friends who loved to push social envelopes in multiple ways. They challenged. They fought. They were the avant-garde of a new social and sexual consciousness whose behavior placed them squarely in the crosshairs of the coming scourge.
I adored the arts and was tangential to theater folk and so knew many gay men and had more than a few close gay friends. There was Darrell—my Asian brother—my travel-writing colleague and sometimes mentor. We’d met on a press trip to Zambia and had recognized each other as neighbors in the Village when we both referred to the neighborhood deli as “Tiffany’s” for its astronomical prices. I’d certainly known he was gay; we’d joked about how a gay man from Salt Lake City, Utah, could make it in New York. We were fast friends, and one birthday he’d surprised me with the gift of a gorgeous jade fish and a card that read, “For the Chinese, jade is the cement that bonds friendship.” We were kindred spirits with the keys to each other’s apartments so that we could take on cat-feeding duties when one of us was out of town. I’d met several of his partners and was pleased when he seemed to have found a permanent link, even if his new partner had truly shocked me on one notable occasion by answering the door wearing a brightly hued Pucci ensemble and full makeup and looking better in it than I could have. Then one day Darrell called me in a panic and asked me to accompany him to the emergency room. I did, and as we waited on the impersonal plastic benches, I could sense his inner turmoil. He needed nothing more than palliative care for a nonfatal ailment. Darrell was fine that time, but a few years later, they buried him clutching his teddy bear. His parents from Salt Lake City didn’t know what had hit them.
There was Patrick Kelly—my wonderfully crazy friend from Vicksburg, Mississippi, who took on the world and transformed his grandmother’s button box into a fashion empire. I’d met Patrick in New York through my friend Elaine Evans, a hairdresser. We clicked on a mutual love of luxury brands. He remains the only man other than my father to give me a Hermès scarf, and I gave him a Loewe agenda. We giggled together and exchanged recipes and I was one of the last people to buy the clothing that he then sold in ensembles he called “groups” before he decamped to Paris in 1979. He left me with a bottle of the Evening in Paris perfume that we both remembered buying for our mothers in long-forgotten five-and-ten stores, and I treasured the small, tasseled cobalt blue bottle.
In Paris, Patrick spread his wings and took the world by storm, infusing French fashion with his own down-home brand of humor. He fried chicken and served it at his early shows, decorated his showroom with black dolls and golliwogs, and appeared in baggy overalls with his trademark red, white, and blue Paris cap. He was in France building his business and becoming the first American and the first Black to gain admittance to the prestigious Chambre Syndicale du Prêt à Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode. He avoided AIDS in New York City, but like the man in the biblical parable, had his appointment in Paris and succumbed to the disease there.
There was Lowell Todd, Sam’s neighbor who stepped into the role of my big brother. Lowell had worked for the board of education and had left it all to become a cabaret musician. He lived across from Sam on Horatio Street in a small apartment where the upright piano on which he practiced endlessly seemed to be the only piece of furniture. Lowell prided himself on his resemblance to and friendship with Bobby Short, and he sort of looked like him in all but the piano playing. Lowell was teaching himself to play the piano and had learned the chord progressions for his jazz and cabaret offerings, but at times the renditions were a tad labored. Somehow, though, Lowell got gigs at various small restaurants around the Village. I went to one fairly regularly and kidded him that he should play “Satin Doll” whenever I entered. Sweet man that he was, he indulged me, although sometimes the chords were not always those that would have been recognized by the Duke. I loved the acknowledgment, and for a while I reveled in that minimal notoriety for the duration of his run at that restaurant. Lowell was a quiet constant. He was also my protector and often ran interference with Sam. Once, I called him frantically when a bottle exploded in my kitchen, and I found myself looking down at an open wound that revealed my ankle bone.
Lowell didn’t show up. Instead he called Sam, who arrived and rode in the ambulance with me the few blocks around the corner to St. Vincent’s, our neighborhood hospital. There, we were met with all of the skepticism emblematic of the inherent racism in the hospital system. A Black couple arriving with something that clearly was a wound from broken glass brought raised eyebrows and the unspoken subtext of domestic violence. For once, thank goodness, Sam was quiet and let his concern for me override his desire to tell off the smirking intern who read a whole different story into the accident.
The accident, though, proved what I somehow intuited: although we’d not been a couple for several years, Sam was and would always be there for me in his way. He was there when my father died in 1985. The memorial service marked his first time back in my parents’ house in a while, and I recall him on the back porch at the subsequent repast surrounded by the adoring audience of folk he still always drew and regaling them with tales of my father.
In the aftermath of my father’s death, we again lost track of each other. Our relationship had dwindled down to a thing of affection and friendship and of occasional meetings broken by long periods of seeing each other only at school. In the fall of 1985, he wasn’t there. I now suspect that he’d absented himself from school on either a sabbatical or sick leave. I was therefore a little surprised when he called me in early 1986 to ask me out to dinner. I’m not sure if it was a birthday treat for our Piscean February/March birthdays or just a let’s-get-together-and-catch-up dinner, but delighted to hear from him, I accepted.
Celebrating our mutual love of things French, we decided on Quatorze, a French bistro on Fourteenth Street not too far from our apartments, and set the time. Since our last meeting, my first book, Hot Stuff: A Cookbook in Praise of the Piquant, had come out and I took him a copy. I inscribed it, “To Sam, You knew I had it in me before I knew I had it in me.” He was delighted with the book and thrilled at the inscription, crowing about just how accurate it was. Dinner progressed without incident. The food was wonderful; I’m pretty sure I had the choucroute, which had become a culinary theme in our relationship.
The wait staff performed without incurring Sam’s wrath. It was like old times, with none of the fits of rage and accusations that had marred our latter years. All of our chemistry was at full bubble, and for a nod or a gesture, we’d have probably fallen back into bed and into our old routine, but somehow we did not. Restraint was never our thing, so I guess that should have been the first hint that something profound had shifted. Something was up. The evening would have been a perfect first date; it was equally memorable as a last one.
Lowell was the one who called. He was brief and cryptic: “Sam’s in St. Vincent’s!”
“What? I just saw him a few weeks ago. I’ll go over and see him.” I headed over to Saint Vincent’s, a five-minute walk from my apartment. It took all I could muster; I am a hospital coward and hate going to them because my father had agonized in and out of hospitals for a decade before dying at home less than a year before.
St. Vincent’s Hospital was located at the corner of West Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue. I’d been there with Darrell, and I’d been there with Sam when I cut my leg a few years prior. The hospital had been founded in 1849 and was one of the few charity hospitals in the city. It treated the surviving victims of the Titanic sinking and of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and Edna St. Vincent Millay was named for the institution after it saved her uncle’s life. The building occupied the city block on which it stood: stolid, massive, and, seemingly indestructible—a comfort to those who turned to it in times of need. In the 1980s, Saint Vincent’s housed the first and largest AIDS ward on the East Coast and one of the oldest HIV treatment programs in the country. Located in the West Village and near Chelsea, it was ground zero of the AIDS epidemic.
No hospital is welcoming. It’s about negotiating the front desks, getting the visitor’s pass, and finding my way to the room hoping that I would see nothing horrid or hideous or excessively painful on the way there. I managed it. No matter how designers may labor at making hospitals seem less foreboding, there are not enough cheerful paint colors or pleasantly neutral framed prints or comfortable plastic chairs to make them anything other than hospitals. The light is too intense, the smell of antiseptic too caustic, and the pain absorbed by the walls all too palpable for me. I braved it for Sam.
There he was in bed, fully conscious yet diminished as only a hospital gown can diminish someone. He seemed to have folded in on himself, to have shrunk. He must have known that he was dying. He frequently used to say that his father had died at age fifty-four and he knew that he wouldn’t pass him in years. Here, though, Sam was frightened and had entered the hospital system in such a way that in the words of his best friend’s book title, nobody knew his name. He had been admitted to the hospital as an indigent; no one knew just how he got there or in what state. It seems he was simply admitted as an unknown Black man without any identification about his status in life. They seemed to know little about him and nurses and interns alike were shocked at my telling them that Samuel Clemens Floyd III was a respected English professor at Queens College.
Sam, although apprehensive and in discomfort, was being his usual cantankerous self, and I tried to pour some oil on the troubled waters that his hair-trigger temper had already managed to roil. I also explained that not only was he a professor at one of the city colleges, he was also a close friend of Maya Angelou and James Baldwin. As a result of my father’s multiple bouts of illness, I had more experience than I wanted with the functioning of hospitals and wanted to be sure that Sam had all of the care he deserved, so I pitched a very sedate hissy fit and let all know that this was not human detritus simply because he’d arrived without fanfare. This was an individual with family, professional status, and a world of friends (some of them world famous) who loved him very, very much.
In all of the scurrying and hurrying, I did notice that the nursing staff was being particularly careful with their handling of Sam. When I initially visited him, he was in a two-bedded room and there were no indicators that something very serious was wrong. There, small and diminished in the hospital bed, he remained the North Carolina gentleman until the end, covering himself with the thin blanket and using what strength he had left to play host, offer the occasional bon mot, and generally entertain as though seated in his high-backed chair a few blocks over on Horatio Street.
He recognized me and looked at me through half-closed eyes and seemed to relax back murmuring, “I knew you’d come; I knew you’d be here.” He was parched with lips chapped from fever, and I swabbed his mouth out, got him some ice to suck on, sat with him for a while until it was evident that he was too tired for company, and then left, saying that I’d see him the following day.
I alerted the circle of friends. We didn’t visit en masse. Rather, we each journeyed to the hospital to visit and be astonished into realizing how sick he had become. We each had our private and personal moments of good-bye. More than thirty years later, Louise Meriwether could still recall the look of bereft shock on David Baldwin’s face as he stared at Sam through the closing doors of the isolation ward for one last time. No one had expected this. It wasn’t happening.
In the words of the Dinah Washington that he so loved, what a difference a day makes. By my visit the next day, they’d obviously taken some tests and made some diagnoses. The nurses still gave no indication of what might have been wrong, but they were guarded as they were with all patients at this time. Sam had been put in isolation, a sign that they were not sure what he had. From the protocols that had been put into place, it was obvious that they thought he had AIDS. AIDS! How could that have happened! Less than a month prior, we’d been acting like old lovers and but for a nod and an unusual tug of restraint would have tumbled back into bed. AIDS? How could that be? Sam wasn’t gay; we’d slept together, after all, and reveled in each other’s bodies. He wasn’t an IV drug user, he certainly wasn’t Haitian, and he wasn’t a hemophiliac. Gay?
Gay I knew. Jimmy was gay. Darrell was gay. Patrick was gay. Lowell was gay. Any number of my other friends and acquaintances were gay. Bisexuality . . . that I didn’t understand. I took things and people at face value and as they told me and as they acted. Sam had been my lover; he’d been Maya Angelou’s lover and friend and had boasted of his relationships with Diana Sands and others. I knew all of this, and in my naiveté there was no reason for me to think otherwise. There had been hints. A report that he’d been seen coming out of one of the notorious clubs and a look at the male friends with whom he’d surrounded himself. Baldwin had tried to alert me. At one gathering, he’d looked over at me and commented cryptically to my mother, “Tell your daughter that which I cannot tell her.” My mother, the Baptist minister’s daughter from New Jersey, had no idea what he was trying to say or what point he was trying to make. She dutifully reported the brief exchange to me. I’d actually been there and had heard him, but try as we could to parse it out, neither of us had any more of an idea what he was saying than the other, so we discussed it and then buried the thought. His was the only hint, the only warning alarm. What had happened? What had I missed? What markers had I ignored? It was a massive question mark. What had begun all those years ago after the meal at my friend’s apartment in SoHo, lived itself out so joyfully with trips and complicity and genuine affection and, yes, love, ended badly with tears, questions, and confusion.
Sam died of AIDS on April 1, 1986, in what was clearly a cosmic April Fool’s joke. Others took over, and I did what I had become very good at doing: I eclipsed myself and disappeared into my own world. Sam was cremated; few would embalm those with AIDS. In fact and indeed, Sam’s funeral arrangements were not up to any one of the friends. Sam’s next of kin were his sisters, who did appear and collect the ashes, and whatever life insurance and death benefits he had. Sam’s mother was also alive when he died, and I like to believe that his ashes made their way home to his quietly sedate mother in North Carolina and found rest in the town that he loved so much.
• • •
Maya at one point had called to ask me how I was, and from her, I heard that there were some plans for the friends to have a memorial of some sort at some time. I demurred, chafing at being considered the “grieving widow” when Sam and I hadn’t been a couple in quite some time. It was a toxic combination of grief and denial; I had stepped away to adjust to the lightning bolt strike of Sam’s bisexuality and the fact that I seemed to be the only one in the crowd who didn’t know. Other than Jimmy’s mention to my mother, no one over the years had said a mumbling word. I withdrew; it was the only way that I knew to distance myself from Sam’s death from AIDS, come to grips with my own feelings of insecurity about it all, and acknowledge just how closely the angel of death’s dark wing had again passed to me. The two formative men in my life gone in less than a year: my father and now Sam, my spiritual “other.”
The only memorial Sam had was a quiet one at Queens College in a small room in the Student Union. It was attended by a handful of colleagues, and it was the best that could be given by those who were mourning the loss of a colleague. A few words were read. Claiming the relationship that many at the school did not even know existed, I publicly read Maya’s poem “To a Man”
My man is
Black Golden Amber
In the poem, Maya had revealed her deep love for Sam: his love of good brandy, his enveloping scent of Gitanes and Chanel Pour Homme, his southern manners, and his teasing, huggable plumpness. She had presented the man I had known, been intimate with, and loved with all of the passion that a twenty-something could muster. She’d also nailed him as ever changing. Indeed, he was like water: elusive, impossible to hold, and never to be contained. I now knew that.
Our Queens College colleague Corrine, who had been instrumental in organizing the memorial, spoke eloquently from her own grief about a man she had always loved but who could or would not reciprocate, and a small chamber music group of students and faculty played “Amazing Grace.” It was sad not just because of the bereavement, the few attendees, and the program, but because it was an inappropriate finale for someone who had walked with the icons of music, literature, and the arts of the second half of the twentieth century and indeed been their equal. The informality, lack of style, and drab, unremarkable surroundings were totally inappropriate to Sam’s life as he lived it.
From the circle of friends, there was nothing. There was a telephone call from Maya checking on the whereabouts of Sam’s ashes and quietly asking if I was all right, but other than that nothing, only shock and astonishment that Sam was gone from a plague that had blindsided them all. At some point, Jimmy returned to town, and I saw him once, but a year and a half later, in December 1987, he, too, would be gone, memorialized in a service at St. John the Divine that contained all of the pomp and majesty that he deserved: African drumming and all of the pageantry of New York’s nonsectarian gothic cathedral underpinned by his mother’s mourning moans. I didn’t know; I didn’t go. Darrell died earlier in 1987, and death had been too much with me. I couldn’t handle another memorial. I’d also disappeared from the group. The fragile, tenuous bonds that I’d had with them had dissolved at Sam’s death, or so I thought.
• • •
Weeks after Sam’s death, Corrine and Ruth, colleagues from Queens College, obtained keys to Sam’s apartment from Lowell Todd with the hope of going by to begin to clear it out. I was called to join them and did. The sorry task was arduous. Sam, like me, was not a minimalist. It had been years since I’d visited 81 Horatio Street, although I still lived only a few blocks over, and the years had not been kind. Blues, the cat, had preceded Sam in death by several months, and left to his own devices with an illness that was ravaging him, there had been no housekeeping. What had been professorial disarray had turned into a cluttered pit of stuff without the central illuminating soul that was Sam. Books tumbled off shelves in the entrance, the bedroom, and the living room. The ladder-back, cane-bottomed chair still sat at the window, no longer a vantage point from which to view the world but, rather, a lonely memorial to what had been. In the kitchen, never pristine at the best of times, pots stood unwashed in the sink, coffee mugs awaited a good scrub, and the roaches were having their way. In the living room, the fireplace ashes were unhauled and papers overflowed from the coffee table from which Sam used to ceremoniously extract his latest pieces of writing. We read a few; this time, though, there were no compositions or snippets of character portraits or observations about life. They were revealing, painfully so, as though reading the diary of a long-time friend or parent in which deep secrets are told. There were instead letters to God and to an older church “sister” recalled from his youth, beseeching them to save him from whatever demons he felt were pursuing him and begging for relief. There were Fingerhut catalogues with strange, small items circled, nonessential trivial items of the sort he would have once derided as useless trash. The house had become a house of pain, isolation, and increasing dementia.
While we were doing this, Sam’s sister Bernice called, cursing the colleagues out and telling them to leave everything and get out of her brother’s apartment. I’d met Bernice and gone to visit her in her apartment in the Bronx a few times with Sam. He’d delighted in regaling folks with tales of his two sisters, who were his protectors and who were, in his telling of it, serious-drinking women who knew how to take care of themselves in the world—pistol-packing mamas for the twentieth century. Volatility clearly ran in the family, and Bernice also had the family hair-trigger temper. When they told her I was there with them, she was somewhat mollified, a testimonial to our kinder relationship and to her perceptions of my relationship with Sam. Nonetheless, we packed up what we were doing and left.
I had shared a good part of my youth with Sam and we’d lived in dual-apartment symbiosis with items shared back and forth between our conjoined households. I looked for none of the things that I had loaned him: the signed books, first editions, and galleys from my book-reviewing days were crated up and eventually went to Corrine. The cooking utensils that journeyed from one apartment to the other for dinner parties and suppers remained in the cabinets and on the shelves. I left the apartment with a few items, the scant detritus of a formative time that would never be repeated: a silver stuffing spoon, a carving knife, a Blue Willow turkey platter, two service plates (one from Chez Garin and the other from Le Lingousto), an unopened bottle of Chanel Pour Homme (the fragrance that I will forever connect with Sam), and one large black-and-white photograph of Sam with an unknown man standing by a motorcycle. I did not know the man, nor did Corrine or Ruth; he looked a bit like a blond biker type. Sam is smiling and looks sublimely happy and connected to him. I did not know the man, but I did know the shirt that Sam was wearing: one of the batik ones that he had gotten from his Barbadian friend, Stella St. John. I kept the photo to remind me that things are not always as they seem and that face value may not always be all that there is. My Sam Floyd period had ended with revelations and confusion. The final coda, though, would not come until more than fourteen years later.