This was a huge burden to put on someone, but Anthony didn’t balk. A couple of weeks after Easter he drove over to my parents’ house to tell them. Dad broke down crying, freaking out with sadness. Mom turned out to be the strong one. She was like a rock. I guess as long as she had other people’s problems to focus on she could handle anything.
We had planned to get together on Memorial Day. My father called me early in the week to let me know he’d be picking me and Steven up in the city on Saturday morning. He casually mentioned that he had tried calling Steven, too, but no one had answered. By Saturday morning, before he left Long Island, my father called me again to tell me that he still hadn’t been able to reach Steven. “I’m coming to get you first,” he told me. “So we can go check on him together.”
My father was a brave and strong man who had earned medals in World War II, but he feared the worst when he didn’t hear from Steven. He had been in this situation before.
When I was very young, too young to remember, my grandfather developed throat cancer and had to have his larynx removed. But he refused to break old habits, like chewing tobacco. He’d walk around his apartment on the Lower East Side with a wad of chew in his mouth while carrying a real glass spittoon, like something out of the Wild West.
For years my dad would drive into the city on weekends to pick up his parents and bring them out to our house for a weekly visit. But as my grandfather grew ill, he became too tired and uncomfortable to make the trip. He’d stay home while my grandmother came out. One Sunday afternoon, while dropping my grandma back at home, they realized they didn’t have the key, but they couldn’t get my grandfather to open the door. They banged, they rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. My father walked downstairs, walked up the fire escape, and climbed in through a window. His father was lying facedown in the living room. There was blood everywhere. He had fallen. His glass spittoon had shattered. His neck had been cut and he’d bled to death. This was one of those strange family secrets that I didn’t know of until many years later. I always thought my grandfather had just died of cancer.
We didn’t know why Steven wasn’t answering his phone. But my dad didn’t want to be alone when we found out. When we arrived at his building in Chelsea, I rang the buzzer downstairs, but there was no answer. We waited and then we tried it again, but there was still no answer. We stood there wondering what we should do when, finally, we heard Steven yelling from his window, “I am sick! I can’t buzz you in!”
My brother lived alone in an old building and often the buzzer to let people in didn’t work. When that happened, Steven would put the front door key in a sock and toss the sock out the window. I yelled back to him, “Throw down the sock.”
“I can’t,” he said. My only option was to climb up an old, rusty fire escape to his fourth-floor window.
I slowly pulled myself up, with my dad eyeballing me from the street. As I reached Steven’s window, I stopped. There was Steven, naked and curled up in a ball on his comforter in the middle of the living room. There was vomit all around him. He had been there for nearly two days, too weak to move or even to answer the phone.
I threw down the sock with the key to my father and he raced upstairs. We lifted Steven and put him in the shower to clean him up, holding him the whole time. We took him to a diner to get some food in his system, but he threw up all over his plate. Then we rushed him into the car and, for some reason, decided to take him to a hospital in Long Island rather than in Manhattan. To this day I don’t know why we thought that was a good idea; the hospital didn’t know what to do with him. Steven was given fluids, and the doctors told us that he’d be more comfortable at home. That night he slept in my old bed in the room we used to share.
My mom became his nurse, twenty-four hours a day. This was her greatest trait: mustering energy for tragedy. She had the strength of an ox. Steven was incontinent so she changed him. He was too weak to eat so she fed him. A routine was established and they existed in a kind of AIDS purgatory: He was too ill to take care of himself, but hadn’t deteriorated to the point that being in a hospital was better than being at home. This went on for several weeks.
Then I came home one weekend to visit and found Steven looking especially bad. As he and I were talking, his eyes rolled back into his head. His body went limp. We panicked and called 911. A part of me was thinking, Okay this is it. This is where he is going to die. The ambulance arrived while he was still conscious and my parents jumped into the back with the paramedics. As they raced off to the hospital with my brother, I was alone in the house. I walked out to the backyard and began to cry.
At that moment, believe it or not, the person I was mad at was Nancy. She had been a good friend after I found out Steven was sick. She was a medical technologist who worked in hospitals. She understood how AIDS patients were treated and had seen how the disease progressed. We had just had a fight and stopped talking a few weeks before they took my brother away. Now I wanted to call her so badly and tell her what was happening. I was in the yard talking to myself. “I fucking need you for this and you are fucking me over,” I said. But I couldn’t bring myself to reach out. What was there to say? I believed that was the last time I’d ever see my brother.
Somehow, Steven survived that day. When he was admitted to Nassau County Medical Center it was as though he had the plague. The building had a floor designated for people with AIDS, but he had mistakenly been taken to a different unit where no one wanted anything to do with him. The disease carried such a stigma; there was great fear and ignorance about how it was spread. For a week my mom railed against doctors, nurses, and administrators to have him transferred to the AIDS floor. God bless her for being so tenacious. As soon as Steven was moved, his life got better. All of the attitude he had been getting disappeared. The nurses on that floor were there because they wanted to be. They knew how his life was going to end and they treated him with dignity.
When I went back to work that week I sat down with Howard, Fred, and Robin individually and told them, “My brother has AIDS. He’s in very bad shape and was admitted to the hospital this weekend.” That’s when I realized: No one yet knew my brother was gay. They all tried to figure out how Steven had become sick without bluntly asking, “Is he gay?” I sat with Robin for an especially long time. She told me she had a relative who was gay and their biggest fear was getting this kind of news.
I didn’t say this to anyone, but I worried what kind of impact my situation might have on the show. We made gay jokes on the air all the time, and I didn’t want the others to stop or feel uncomfortable because of me. It would have been patronizing. We received so many hate letters that began “I was always a fan of the show until you made fun of people with cancer, because my sister had cancer and …” My attitude was, if a bit was funny before it became personal, it should still be funny.
But once everyone knew, their support was comforting. Shortly after I told Howard, he rushed into my office. He had been reading a cover story in the Daily News about a guy who had just appeared on Joan Rivers’s late-night talk show who claimed he had beaten AIDS. Howard said, “We have to get a hold of this guy; maybe he can help your brother.” So he called Joan and asked her to make the introduction for us.
Another day, Howard had me call a well-known local doctor with a show on public radio in New York. This guy had potions and powders and preached healthy living. We spoke for more than half an hour about how to cure my brother of AIDS.
The problem was, nobody knew anything. The guy on the Joan Rivers show was full of shit. We never heard from him. The doctor’s advice: Take massive doses of vitamin C to destroy the virus. All there was was fear and ignorance. One afternoon I was on the subway coming home from work. The train was packed and I leaned against a pole. At this point I always had reading material about AIDS with me. I pulled out a pamphlet and, as I read, I noticed a teenaged girl leaning against the pole, too. She was dressed in a gray sweater and black skirt, a typical New York Catholic school o
utfit. When I looked up I realized half the train was filled with girls who went to this school. I didn’t think about it, but after I put my head back down I could see over the edge of the pamphlet that she was reading the other side of it. Her eyes moved back and forth quickly.
Then she screamed. “He’s got AIDS!” She was pointing at me.
Everyone stopped and stared at me. What do I say? No, I don’t! Inside the car all activity seemed to come to a halt. I dropped my arms and let them hang at my sides. A small circle of space cleared around me. A guy in a suit gave me the eye. A businesswoman, too. In a packed subway car, just for that second, it felt incredibly lonely.
The people who understood the alienating effect the disease had were the ones who helped my brother the most. As much as medicine, he needed comfort. My mom was at the hospital every day, from eight in the morning until eight at night. As the months went by and my brother’s condition deteriorated, she became more ornery, fighting with doctors and nurses who were powerless to do anything. Finally a social worker told her she was going to lose her mind. She had to pick an hour or two to come, not twelve hours every day.
I would go to the hospital by myself. Once I got there, Steven and I had a ritual: I’d fill a basin with warm water, pull on a pair of rubber gloves, lather his face with shaving cream, and then give him a shave. I didn’t know how else to help him.
One afternoon Richard Simmons called me at home and told me he was going to be in New York the following Sunday morning and he wanted to visit my brother. “I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty and we will be in Long Island by nine,” he told me.
Richard and I had grown close over his many appearances on the show and we talked regularly. I remember one afternoon, after Howard had been particularly rough on him, he appeared in the lobby of my building on the Upper West Side, crying. He was wearing his usual outrageous outfit—red and white striped shorts, a red tank top, white gym socks, and white sneakers—and I sat on a couch with him for half an hour, my arm draped around his shoulder, as he sobbed. We were sitting right in front of the elevator, and every time the door opened someone started to walk out and then stopped short, looking at me cradling Richard Simmons, probably wondering what the hell was going on.
The truth is, Richard is one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. He has a list of hundreds of people he calls regularly to check in on as they struggle with their weight or difficult times. There was a receptionist in our office who was overweight and really sad. Richard made a point of talking to her and sent her all of his videotapes. One day when he came in to do the show he asked her how she was doing and if she was watching the tapes, and she started crying. She said, “I can’t afford a VCR!” He wrote her a check for three hundred dollars on the spot.
So I wasn’t surprised he wanted to visit my brother. He pulled up to my building in a stretch limo. He was in the backseat, wearing his striped shorts, tank top, and sneakers, eating half a bagel with cream cheese and drinking orange juice. When he finished he flipped over the cards in his Deal-A-Meal book, because he was keeping track of his calories.
He clearly knew what he was doing when he picked early Sunday morning as his visiting time. The hospital was quiet, and he was there to bring it to life. As we walked to my brother’s room we passed a black nurse in a too-tight white uniform wearing bright red underwear you could see from down the hallway. The woman weighed close to three hundred pounds, and as Richard got close to her he said, “Girl, I know you are wearing your special red underwear today.” And she just started cracking up. He was carrying laughter with him. As he walked into my brother’s room, Steven’s face lit up.
Richard talked with him for an hour. He had a way of bringing levity to the most dire situations. For once, it didn’t feel like we were just there waiting for Steven to die. Richard took pictures with everyone, and a nurse asked if he would visit the half-dozen other patients on the floor. He tore the place up, saying hello, teasing, encouraging, laughing. After we left that day he put my mom in his rotation of people that he called every few weeks, just to check on her. He didn’t have to do any of that, but he did.
That was just a couple of months before Steven died. Every week he was more out of it and less able to communicate. At Christmas we were all at my parents’ house while Steven was in the hospital. We all knew it would be the last holiday that he was alive. Howard would say, “Science is changing; the cure could be right around the corner.” But we realized that even if they found a cure for AIDS tomorrow, Steven was too far gone.
He died on a Monday night. I had just gone to bed when the phone rang. I didn’t feel like answering it. When the machine picked up I heard my father’s voice. “Hello, Gary, it’s your dad. I wanted to let you know that Steven passed.” When I called him back he told me that my mom had felt the end was near. She had cut her routine down to visiting once a day, in the mornings. But that night after dinner she decided she needed to go back. She was sitting by Steven’s bed when his life ended.
He was thirty-four years old. People always talk about funerals being celebrations of life, but this was no fucking celebration. His life hadn’t even happened yet. He was one of the good guys, the kid who managed to stay above the fray in family dramas, the one who didn’t fight with anyone but had a tack-sharp sense of humor. So many people came for the funeral—Howard, Robin, Fred. All my guys from Long Island. Mary, who was then my girlfriend, was there, Nancy, too. We were all shell-shocked.
Anthony and I were both to deliver eulogies. But when it was time for us to speak, Anthony looked at me and said, “I can’t do it. You have to do it alone.” I talked about how Steven had given me his record collection when he moved out. I told everyone that it was Steven who taught me to love New York; he actually made me a New Yorker—taking me to concerts and dinner whenever I visited from Long Island—because he loved the city so much.
Mary says I spent that day in producer mode. We had just started dating when Steven went into the hospital and she stayed close by my side, gently rubbing my back in case I broke down. I just tried to keep things moving. I wanted the funeral to be organized and made sure everyone was in the right place at the right time. That was my way of dealing with it.
I held it together at the funeral, but I’d break down when I’d see a TV show or a movie or heard a song that reminded me of him. Elton John’s “Last Song” always brought me to tears; it’s about a man dying of AIDS who didn’t share a lot with his family because he was always afraid of what their reaction would be. There’s a line that goes, “I guess I misjudged love between a father and a son.” In the video for the song the dying man’s father visits him in the hospital and he holds his hand. They’re shot in silhouette and I thought, That could be them, that could be my brother and my dad. I had gone to visit and seen them looking just like that. My dad was devastated when Steven died. The Christmas after we buried Steven I went to visit his grave in Queens, where he lies next to my grandmother. When I got back in the car and headed for home, “Last Song” was playing on the radio. I lost it. I had to pull over. Every time I hear that song the visual of the father and the son is in my head.
A year later we were talking on the show about what makes us cry and I was dumb enough to mention this experience. They played the song and I started bawling midway through the first verse. Years later, at Sirius, someone recalled that conversation and they played the song again, to the same effect. They told me if I ever needed to make a movie and had to cry on cue, I had this song in my back pocket.
It wasn’t just that song, though. The movie My Life, where Michael Keaton is dying of cancer and his father shaves him while he’s sick, leveled me. The parallels are uncanny and yet, whenever it’s on, I can’t ignore it.
The NYPD Blue where Jimmy Smits died crushed me when I saw that, too. At Steven’s funeral I cried, but I never really let go. I never had that moment people always talk about in grief where you completely break down and it all comes rushing out. In this episode, e
veryone in the cast comes to visit Smits as he lies dying in the hospital. I couldn’t stop thinking of Steven. And not just because a young man was dying too soon. Jimmy Smits had been healthy on the show a month earlier. Now he was on his deathbed. I watched that episode in the fetal position on the couch and completely let go. Mary and I agreed that it wasn’t because I was so attached to the Jimmy Smits character. Years after my brother died I was finally, truly grieving.
I always knew that I wanted to get involved with a cause that would honor Steven’s memory, but it wasn’t until I saw the movie Philadelphia that I was finally moved to act. My friend Peggy and I were both blown away by the movie and went out for coffee after. We decided we were going to do something; we were going to call places dedicated to helping gay men who were sick and in need. There were only two in the city: Gay Men’s Health Crisis and LIFEbeat.
GMHC was a prominent organization, well funded with lots of volunteers. But LIFEbeat was smaller. It reminded me of a scene from The Mary Tyler Moore Show where Mary asks a candidate’s campaign director why she is helping that candidate. “Well,” the director answers, “I got letters from all the candidates. But his was the only one in crayon. So I went where I was needed.” At LIFEbeat, I felt I was going where help was needed; it was an all-hands-on-deck situation.
I read PSAs for them on K-Rock. One year I raised two hundred thousand dollars on the TV show Don’t Forget the Lyrics. The reason I was doing this, I soon realized, wasn’t to help me heal. It was to honor my brother. That became clear to me one afternoon when I spoke at a LIFEbeat event in Manhattan. Mary and our infant son, Jackson Steven, were in the audience. I wanted him to know that he had an uncle. And that he had been loved.
They Call Me Baba Booey Page 14