It is alphabetic from the start, as if the full name were too terrible to be spoken, or because we don’t want to know the elaboration that would cause a true and necessary engagement with its nature; prefer a modest, even pleasant-sounding acronym to keep it hidden: AIDS. And so it remains a shark fin disease, barely indicated above, red maw gaping beneath the sight line—for those, that is, who live—marginal—beneath the infested sea. If you live here, you know it. If not, have you heard the drowning screaming your names? If not, what constitutes your privilege, and how will you receive my anger?
I am not, here, talking sex, though certainly that sublime loss of self has been threatened with—at least—self-consciousness. I have been immersed in a more quotidian terror, its brunch and coffee dialogues, or dream analogues, or telephone weepings; in community (the Gay, though clearly others are affected—all are affected—the community of affected I know are Gay) conversation, its local pits and searing elevations. So, a cloud of attendant issues and their griefs. Among friends—dead, dying, or scared, the sorrowful healthy—testimony: what I have seen that you must now know, see, for I have been surrounded and among my friends in adversity creating a life, their rising and falling beauties, deaths and tests and imagined fulfilled acts that have unleashed instructions upon us, the uninitiated.
*
For this, reading the world, new language events by which we measure grief and fear; how the virus has made us talk about it—forms of disclosure, witness, vocabularies, stories. A new literary structure I feared becoming master of: the obituary. One’s sense of the vanishing, people and—struggle against it as we will (buried alive!)—era. How what we look for first, almost perverse in eagerness, in the Gay weekly papers are the names and photos of those who’ve died this week. Who and how many did you know, numbers as stripes of honor. “I knew five people this week.” And I didn’t even know T had been sick till I saw his photo in the obituaries—a thrill with which one engages the paper, surprise building toward their appearance on page 12, to see how much sorrow one can translate into endurance. And cry, continually, because some lover used a nickname for his dead friend—and direct address—and it’s hard to be impersonal when people are calling each other sweetie across that gulf. (I can’t—don’t want to—say the names of endearment here; I/thou is their only proper usage; what signifies is that the form functions while including the dead.) And, as adjunct language, there are lists: how as a young man—a baby homosexual, I say—I kept a tally of the first men I laid, on one hand (with names), two hands, too many for fingers and toes, finally uncountable. Then, around 1982, the list began of who had died, who sick, who sero-positive—soon, too, uncountable. Another fear: the fear of forgetting. With its shadow: the desire to forget.
I’m infected by a vocabulary, a prisoner of its overspecialized agenda. I know OK-T4 helper cells, macrophages, lymphadenopathy, hairy leukoplakia; I know the syntax—the route of congregation—more than the definitions. By how they appear in the sentence I can pretty much tell what the end is going to be. I read their appearance on the body of a text and get its message. I see a sign which means one of these words is going to insist on being used: He’s walking with a cane—probably had pneumocystis; what’s that spot on his neck— Kaposi’s sarcoma? He forgot what he just said—dementia? His hair has that peculiar thinness, he looks weak, pale, lost, tired, ruddy. (He looks better—taking AL721? He’s gaining weight—from AZT?) Did I have a night sweat, a cough, a fever; am I weak, tired, pale, out of breath; what’s that white stuff on my tongue—thrush? Am I in or out of control? I’m learning this alien vocabulary by sight—it’s symbolic—but I don’t understand the grammar. I can’t apply it to any other situation; it’s a purely local dialect. Desperate, I use these medical words as markers, to chart the distance between my body and absolute fear, or my body and the hope of health—represented as control by the command of Scientific Terminology and its promise.
We have conversations in various forms whose essence is disclosure. One is sero-positive or negative, another has just been diagnosed. The build-up to announcement along a route of suspense: Sit down, I have some bad news, X got …, or Did your hear about …; more and more minimal overtures to stage the news, down to a single dolorously inflected, “Well …” (I told J about L and—as I expected—he cried hard. D said, “You got to bust his cherry.”) We terrorize each other with the news, we get giddy and push our desperation toward the small comfort of The Absurd, staged as impossible excess. We take tests, and friends hold our hands as we receive the word which threatens to define us, to force us into the duty of its own replication. It’s dry; the word burns out of control. His news precedes him: scent on the wind. (I’d heard about S but I hadn’t seen him yet. When I did see him I asked him, “How are you feeling?” He looked at me—about to disclose his diagnosis—tilted his head quizzically—then realized because I’d asked not How are you but How are you feeling, that I already knew.) Sometimes we know things about each other we didn’t want each other to know—whispers and hand-me-down disclosures—and we are even friends—but we know that vocabulary in the hands of others creates stigma, grows in the social body as the virus grows in the physical. “Positive” and “negative” becomes signs not just for our physiological trials but for civil restrictions, and in these matters we are rarely wrong in trusting our deepest paranoias. (On our first date, W—handsome, warm, mature, sexy—told me he had mild symptoms of ARC [AIDS-related complex]. My desire was confounded, cauterized at the source. He left feeling embarrassed and somehow guilty; I left embarrassed, guilty, and ashamed.)
And the demand to hear the voice of concern, magic words, from my—especially—“straight” friends, and to voice back, continually, to those I know are ill: How are you (feeling)? To care to ask; dare to find out. And be prepared to listen to the litany of fear, rage, loss, disease; to be an open ear, organ of sympathy. And if someone passes, be witness, give testimony, tell stories, name names. Yes, I am well, but I am surrounded by a quilt of names (The Names Project—over 8,000 commemorative panels sewn together)—a comforter—creating among a congress of the dead a community of the bereaved. First names and last names, nicknames and drag names (“We miss you girlfriend”), alongside the artifactual evocations of kinship and culture: ball gowns, leather jackets, teddy bears, rodeo boots, political buttons, snapshots, and glitter—and the interpolation of desire read as care, the carefulness with which a quilt my many hands is being stitched into a poetics of loss. This, on a panel:
His love came at me like a river. I felt so inadequate as though I were trying to catch it all in a tin cup.
God bless you Luis. May god allow me to stand before you when next you open your beautiful Spanish eyes.
*
Some are able, we have seen, to tell: to live out their evictions as full tenancy and shock us with what they understand of what we can barely see. In the midst of this all I saw my literal father die, faint expirations, fainter than any he’d ever before taken, round little puffs he blew like smoke rings from his cheeks, five or six only, lighter than air. The macho bull exited like the sweetest ballet fairy, relaxed at last, softspoken, delicate. Some men I’ve seen—how do they do it?—I don’t know—and only some have—live sharper, richer, after diagnosis, become bigger, more generous (and not just the context) as they become thinner and weaker, have found a calmness unsettling but calming to those around them, so fine is their strength and so little do the rest of us know about death, bereft of ritual, corpse, and interment, surrounded by our fears projected as the grotesque.
Eric was my good friend T’s sometime lover, hence in proximity to my daily life if not exactly of it. We’d seen each other dozens of times over ten or so years, but had never really spent time together, just the two of us. He got sick and died slowly, the first I knew well to transform, to metamorphose along the disease’s route of thin, thinner, thinnest. A possessor of erotic power most of his life, he never let go of it, by which I mean to say that his body never became an ugly thing, though he was radically disfigured. His desire to charm outpointed his powerful adversary. A small army of friends were his defenders, scheduling precisely his daily meetings, meals, sheet-changes, medicines, and “dish” sessions. Eric’s dying was a site of empowerment. The server and the served were connected by the line of interdependence that constitutes a meaningful act. As he got sicker, T tried to draw me into this nexus of exchange; he knew the degree of care needed, knew I could be useful, and recruited me—it was for him I did it, as if he were the one in need of care (as, of course, he was.) I committed to feed Eric lunch on such and such a day.
I was nervous, hadn’t yet confronted anyone head-on who owned the disease, wanted to be correct, polite, less fearful than I was, more comfortable than I anticipated being. First we tended to functional details, then Eric and I got down to the serious business of being casual. Almost immediately, he showed me the way. “You know,” he said, “one of the nice things about being sick is that I get to see the people I like, but wouldn’t ordinarily spend time with.” With a swift lunge of graciousness he’d assumed the position of caregiver by putting me at ease, making me feel good. By turning the occasion away from illness and towards sociability, he located himself as a giver as well as a taker—a liver instead of a dieer. Eric was living of AIDS.
In the end—a year or so of abstract fear, a year of diagnosis—Chuck and I were great friends. This after twelve years of community association—shared podiums, rallies, cultural events, meetings; do-gooders in our mutual minds, busybodies, respecting each other but never actually—yet—friends. But something cut through as he got sicker, a relief, release, that led us together as if we’d really known each other during the twelve years we sort of had. We grew old together in a year and a half—with the shared vision of ethnic cultural kin—like East Coast Old World Jews in our Miami rockers. We laughed a lot (given the situation), criticized and critiqued, argued, and basked in the easiness of our longterm newfound alliance. How did he make me continue to feel he was cute—“a doll”—I did—even as he grew frail, emaciated, at once bony and soft—like a monkey, I said—his evaporation process seemed sweet even as I cursed it.
This is the very tiny part of the story I want to tell: M said he thought Chuck was beginning to show signs of dementia—final terror down the road of struggle when you can’t even form the idea of “courage” to bear you forward—and this was a rumor that prickled all our skins. It was Thanksgiving; on my way to the country I was to drop off for Chuck some of my Turkey Day prizes: Viennese Marzipan Bars, with homemade almondcake bottoms, apricot jelly layers, and bittersweet chocolate tops. I didn’t want to be feeding them to Chuck-who-wouldn’t-know-where-he-was. I was scared, though I hadn’t myself seen any indications to confirm the rumor—but really how many space-outs would it take to signal the onset? Ah, my doll, my girlfriend-in-arms from the old days anyway, my honest dignified teacher, as I trepidatiously entered your room that day not knowing what to expect—this weird ironic American harvest ritual—you called to me from across your bed, your boat out in a few days, with full holiday spirit called to me cheerily across the room, “Bird-Girl!” By which I knew you knew it was the day of stuffed turkey, that it was a good and a horrible day, that we were “dolls” together speaking in code, and that you were a “queen” in full un-demented possession of her essential ironic distance.
Then—O True Bird Girl—you flew away.
Long blond hair, flowy clothes—this was in 1974 when I met him—an impeccable sense of colors and their dream coordinates, handsome with real bone structure, and even literary smarts. Everyone knew, could see, Jackson was a renaissance man; he could do everything (except maybe relax)—at that time weaving hand-spun and -dyed clothing, and writing a little poetry. But Design would cover my sense of his power: the ability to place things in juxtaposition—objects or threads—so that their uniqueness was set into resonance—like a tuning fork—each unit or strand or line brought into active consonance with the others, a poem. I should say that when he died a year ago, after struggling with AIDS lymphatic cancer, and he had long since ceased to be the modelly beauty of yore—though testimony to his personal power and insight even increased (and I saw it in his person which I couldn’t name a “corpse” only hours after he died—he was strong, present—electric even—his constellation absolutely in order)—I gazed at his body floating in bed, but couldn’t help noticing, also, the books on the nearby shelves—how they were arranged, some on their side, some standing, some leaning—in a precise balance—the objects on the side table too—and I admired, envied that order which nailed the exact image of casualness, composition, and serenity: the material world in luscious objectivist presence.
But his wound had opened—unhealed open “mouth” on his neck from a gland that hadn’t quite been excised (the “mouth of hell” I thought) that he wrapped in his own famous scarves but couldn’t keep closed. Once and then twice it ruptured that morning, hemorrhaged so that he could see he would be swept away in its profusion of blood. And so he asked C, his lover and primary caregiver, to carry him into the garden so he could “bleed into the earth.” “Let me bleed into the earth.” Jackson was able to arch over his death this worshipful poetic figure, to guide as communion a passing that others would read as being taken away. Blood streaming around him like a heroine’s hair, Jackson arranged his last words, and put the world in order. Who knew that a man could have such precise integrity in that particular moment, could engage his death actively—with cognizance and will—as a life image, could make of his final moments not a destruction but a creative act?
*
My friends reading these drops on paper, of this, now I am sure: We can die with our hats on, we can die with our boots on, we can call ourselves by name as we enter the rolls, we can pierce the ground and draw in the dust—in the dust of ourselves!—on dissolving knees—the complex design of our presence and release.
(1988)