by Paul Rudnick
When Eric got sick, Chris took care of him. Chris and Eric shared an apartment with two other guys, and Chris eventually looked after all of them, bringing them to the doctor, making sure they took their medication, comforting them, and, when necessary, changing their sheets and their diapers. Chris never abandoned his trademark perspective: “Oh, my dear,” he told me, as his apartment became a ward, “it’s just like running a daycare center. After you finally get one of them to take a nap, another one starts spitting up.”
At this time there were no effective treatments for people with AIDS. Almost nothing was known about the disease, so some hospitals refused to admit patients with AIDS, and some doctors and nurses refused to touch them. When Eric, who had no money and probably no health insurance, became seriously ill, he was put into an ambulance and ferried to a suspiciously deluxe hospital suite on the Upper East Side. Chris explained it: “They gave Eric this gorgeous room because last week the hospital had an AIDS patient who jumped off the roof, so they’re not taking any chances. And they’ve posted an armed guard outside his door, just in case. It’s fabulous, they’re treating him just like Sunny von Bülow.”
My friend William and I went to visit Eric, and at the reception desk we were issued surgical gloves and face masks, and told to put them on before entering Eric’s room. This seemed unnecessarily cautious, so we carried the gloves and face masks as if they were dance cards and feather fans and we were attending a Mayfair ball. I hadn’t seen Eric in a few weeks, and the disease had progressed. The effect was unnervingly theatrical, because Eric now looked like a handsome young actor who’d been artificially aged for a role, with heavy makeup and spray-on hair coloring. His skin was gray, his cheeks were hollow, and he’d lost half of his usual body weight. “How do I look?” he asked, and then, “Don’t answer that.”
“You look better,” said William.
“Oh, please,” said Eric, “but do you know what I love about being sick? I take these walks, dragging my IV pole, and I smoke in the hallway. And these nurses keep coming over, and just as they’re about to tell me there’s no smoking, I glare at them. And they scoot.”
Eric was not a Hallmark Hall of Fame model patient, and who could blame him? AIDS had given him all sorts of horrifically uncomfortable ailments, with names that sounded like an English law firm: hives and shingles and thrush. He was emaciated, but he had no appetite, and his sores and aching bones made every position, in and out of bed, pure torture. And all of this made him cranky: “I told that idiot nurse that I wanted a Fresca, and she brought me a Sprite. Then I told her that I wanted cherry Jell-O and she brought me lime Jell-O, and I just said ‘Listen, bitch, if you bring me lime Jell-O one more time you’re gonna leave this room wearing it.’”
“The nurses love Eric,” said Chris. “They’re going to buy him a puppy.”
“My dears,” said Eric, “this place is a hellhole. The doctors don’t want to come anywhere near me, and the wallpaper looks like projectile diarrhea, which, by the way, I have.”
“Good to know,” said Chris.
“And it takes forever to get anyone to change my gown. I told her, Nurse-whatever-your-ass-is, I’m just asking for another clean, hideous mint green smock, not a fucking Dior for dinner at the White House. And I need lozenges and some decent slippers, and maybe a nice robe. William, can’t you get me a decent robe, maybe cashmere, in camel, it’s not like I’m hard to fit, and some nonsurgical shampoo, and some lotion, and on your way out could you tell that nurse that I’d like some ice cream and a sponge bath and a Valium, if she’s not too busy microwaving her fucking NACHOS!”
After an hour or so, William and I left the hospital and threw ourselves onto a nearby park bench. “Now, you know I love Eric dearly,” said William, “and I will do anything for him, and I know that he’s dying in torment…”
“But he’s such a pain,” I agreed, and we became hysterical with laughter, because New York was overrun with smart, enraged men, who if they couldn’t get a cure, or a pillow, or a second’s recognition from any politician, or even a phone call from their parents, well, at least someone could bring them a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Rocky Road and a copy of the Architectural Digest with Cher’s latest beachfront estate on the cover. “We will bring Eric anything and everything he wants,” William decreed, “and then we’ll slap him.”
I went to see a highly publicized New Age preacher at Town Hall. She was an attractive, boisterously spunky woman in her thirties, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that she’d once been an actress and an aspiring nightclub chanteuse, as she did everything but sip a highball and fling the microphone cord over her shoulder. “Welcome,” she began, to the packed house. “How are ya? And what are we gonna do about this world, am I right?”
She went on: “We’ve got disease and war and crime, and some days, I’m tellin’ ya, I don’t even wanna get out of bed. Because on top of all that, what about my hair?” She paused, and the crowd laughed appreciatively, at the woman’s folksy, what-the-hell-do-I-know bonhomie. “And I’m not saying that I’ve got any answers—no way, José—but you know, you can feel better. We can all feel better. We can feel blessed.
“But it’s all about your attitude, people,” she added, a bit later, now using a drill-sergeant, tough-love, kwitcher-bitchin’ vigor. “If you have a negative attitude, well, then, my friend, you’re gonna attract a negative energy. You’re gonna attract bad hair days. Fights with your significant other. Illness. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, kiddos!” This last thought bothered me, because she seemed to be blaming people for getting sick, as if a sunny outlook was your best antibiotic.
Still, she was doing her self-actualizing rah-rah best, and if I was being honest, I’d really gone to see her because I’d been told that she had a large following among both male and female models. It was true: as I checked out the crowd, I saw a definite abundance of intimidatingly gorgeous people with long, employable legs and tiny little Prada backpacks, which I was pretty sure they’d received as gifts from the designer. As I watched one knockout thoughtfully and carefully writing down everything the preacher said, in a little Prada notebook, it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t rely on models, at least not as moral guideposts, because I’d only end up asking myself: what would Jesus wear?
I wasn’t satisfied, so I started going to ACT-UP meetings. ACT-UP was a guerrilla group that was using aggressive tactics to force the government into acknowledging the AIDS crisis, and into funding and fast-tracking medical research. ACT-UP was known for its zaps, which were high-profile, media-friendly demonstrations where ACT-UP members would chain themselves to the front doors of drug companies, or toss fliers from a balcony overlooking the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, while wearing black T-shirts with the ACT-UP logo in hot pink, reading “SILENCE = DEATH.” The group’s meetings were held in a low-ceilinged hall on Thirteenth Street, and they were jammed with doctors and lawyers and dog-walkers and colorists, with all sorts of people who were scared and pissed off and fed up with being ignored. These meetings were exciting, both for the rhetoric, and for the many cute guys wearing plaid flannel shirts with the sleeves hacked off, to expose their angry, tattooed, gym-hardened biceps. Most of the guys with the biceps and the trucker caps and the biker wallets were really design assistants and publicists, but that was fine, because that way you’d get the snarling ex-con fantasy without the smell.
These meetings were led by elected facilitators, and the first night I attended, one of them was a young, sideburned guy wearing a faded gray, fashionably corroded T-shirt and a drab black denim skirt fastened up the front with tarnished industrial snaps, as if he were in serious-minded, neo-Stalinist drag. He was adamant about following Robert’s Rules of Order, which meant that anyone who had signed up before the meeting was allowed to speak.
“Okay,” said the facilitator, consulting his clipboard, and trying to quiet the room, “first up, we’ve got representatives from the United American Socialist Party.”
“SHUT UP!!!” shouted the ACT-UP regulars, and the Socialists sat back down; they seemed extremely used to this response.
“Julie Felder?” asked the facilitator, and a frantic woman with rippling, Amnesty International hair jumped up and began screaming, “I’ve just returned from a small village in El Salvador where the lesbian community has no access to dental dams or any other form of safe sex! We must buy dental dams for the lesbians of El Salvador! Where is our humanity?” As Julie made her plea, I began wondering, just how big is the lesbian community of a small village in El Salvador? Would maybe one box of dental dams pretty much cover it? Would it be cheaper to just fly the lesbians here and let them shop?
Other, more practical-minded people began to speak. An oncologist asked about finding money for three more beds in an AIDS unit, and someone else needed the loan of a van, for delivering posters. Then the leader of one of the many ACT-UP committees stood up and talked about a project his group had been planning: Jesse Helms, the North Carolina senator, had been a vociferous foe of any AIDS funding, and had blamed gay men for the disease, so “We tracked down his home address, and next week we’re going to drop this huge condom over his whole house, and we need volunteers.” There were cheers, and while I didn’t participate, ACT-UP actually did this, using industrial plastic to create a Mount Rushmore–scale rubber, and the event got airtime on just about every news show in the country, and probably allowed a lot of frat boys to insist, “Yeah, that’s the size I use.”
People were dying in droves, and the effect became unreal, and impossible to process. There was a young, wickedly talented novelist named Christopher Coe, who had the air of a whimsical, slightly scattered classics professor. I’d see him on the street, in a flapping tweed overcoat, with an Oxford don-style scarf trailing behind him, and our gossip would range from Aeschylus to deciding exactly how painful it would be to get your balls tattooed. After Christopher got sick and I didn’t run into him for over a year, I assumed the worst. Then one day I was in my local supermarket, and he came sauntering around the corner of a pyramid of Cheerios boxes. My jaw dropped and he smiled, asking, “You thought I was a ghost, didn’t you? Haunting the cereal aisle!”
He died a few months later. When I was little, I’d hated hospitals, with their toxic smells and waxy linoleum and hallways piled with pastel metal equipment that always looked exhausted and out of date, beaten down by inflating one collapsed lung too many. Now I was at ease in hospitals, and I’d glide through these buildings, telling strangers that you followed the green line on the floor to get to Radiology, and that the purple line led to Outpatient Care.
3.
As AIDS prowled its way through Manhattan, and everywhere else, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. While this was terrible news, it was bizarrely unsurprising, since illness was everywhere.
My father was a Depression baby, raised in a Jewish family in Middle Village, Queens. He had two strong-minded sisters, the older being Lizzie, who never married and had spent much of her life working in a necktie factory, and who wore black lace dresses and heavy white rice-powder makeup, with scarlet lipstick, as if she were always about to attend a bar mitzvah in a kabuki drama. Lizzie, unlike her sister Pimmie, always seemed to be enjoying herself. Pimmie was a birdlike worrier who instinctively sought the tsunami lurking just behind the sunshine. Pimmie was often bedridden, and my mother continually tried to cheer her up, mostly for sport. When my mother congratulated Pimmie on the birth of a grandchild, Pimmie sighed heavily and said, “I’m sure it’s a very nice baby, but I’m too weak to pick it up.”
My father married into a clan of even stronger women, and his choice became a battleground. From the time I was about four years old, Pimmie would phone me and ask, as if she were ready to dial 911, “How is your mother treating you? Are you all right?” When I’d tell her I was fine, she’d always sound disappointed, so one day I whispered, “I don’t know if I can take it here. Last night my mother bought a gun and started waving it around.” “Really?” said Pimmie, with triumphant interest, until I told her I was joking. “Oh,” she said, “but if she ever did buy a gun, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Pimmie is really lovely, and I know she’s only concerned with everyone’s well-being,” my mother would tell my father, “I just think she needs a little fresh air.”
My father became an ace diplomat, refusing to take sides and soothing all wounded egos. He’d been a math whiz, in both college and graduate school, and he’d become a physicist. Because, especially in these areas, I was hopeless, we didn’t have all that much in common, but because my father was so devoted, and because he believed in the mystical power of continuing education, he kept trying to help his little moron.
I knew that I was supposed to study and work hard, in order to get into college and not embarrass all of the Jews all over the world, who were not only monitoring me every second but who were eternally poised to call my parents and cluck, “So we heard that Paul got a C on his geometry quiz. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about putting him in a group home.” Jews, I was taught, excelled in all academic fields, but had little aptitude for sports, except for Sandy Koufax, the saintly Dodgers pitcher who refused to play on Yom Kippur, and Jews did not, under any circumstances, drink, practice adultery, or commit crimes, which were all activities that Gentiles customarily pursued, while jotting down fresh ways of persecuting the Jews. When I was in college, I came across a newspaper story about a distant cousin of mine, a teacher who’d been arrested for selling Quaaludes to his students in the high school parking lot. “And he’s Jewish!” I yelped gleefully. “He’s a Jewish criminal!” My father laughed, and my mother said, “You don’t know, maybe he’s only half Jewish. Maybe it was the Protestant half that was selling drugs. Or maybe he’s innocent. And why do you think it’s so funny? Do you want to sell drugs in a parking lot?”
“As long as you stay in school,” said my father, and my mother swatted him.
My father tried to teach me math. We’d sit at the kitchen table, with my textbooks open and some freshly sharpened pencils and a pad of graph paper nearby. My dad was an excellent and sympathetic teacher, carefully and scrupulously explaining things like tetrahedrons and variables and how to use a protractor to outline a proof. I would stare at him and try to focus, the way a dog looks at his master, hearing only nonsense syllables and hoping for a biscuit and a walk.
“So x equals y, with the triple coordinates of z, w, and t,” my father would say, as gently as possible, as if by his speaking slowly and distinctly, my dormant brain cells would burst into intellectual flower. “Do you understand?”
“Yes!” I would answer blankly, wagging my tail.
“You didn’t understand a word I just said, did you?”
“Yes!” I would say. “I understood the words ‘the’ and ‘you.’”
“I wonder if it would help,” my mother would suggest, in passing, “if you hit him in the head with a hammer. Maybe just a tap.”
I looked at my father eagerly, because this hammer deal sounded much more promising than all of those numerals and squiggles in the math books.
“Don’t listen to your mother,” my father said. “I know you can do this. We just have to figure out a way for you to hook into it.”
“What if I ate the pages?”
My father stared at me with Vulcan determination; he did everything but grab my hand and use his index finger to write the equations on my palm, while shouting, “It’s called algebra, Helen! It has a name!” But he was too nice to confront me with what we both knew: “You are not my son! You are a
hubcap!”
Things only got worse when my father tried to teach me to drive. I did fine on the written test, and received my learner’s permit. I then sat behind the wheel, in our driveway, with my father beside me, in the front seat of our mustard-colored Oldsmobile sedan.
“Okay, what’s the first thing we do?” my father asked.
“Change places.”
“What’s the first thing we do?”
“Call a taxi.”
“Paul?”
“The first thing we do is…to put on our seat belt.”
“Very good!”
“And then we start screaming uncontrollably.”
“Paul?”
“And then…” I tried to stumble my way through the thick fog of my total disinterest and ineptitude. “And then we…put the key in the ignition?” I was just guessing, from having watched cartoon characters drive cars.
“You’re close, you’re getting very close…”
“We…adjust our mirrors?”
“Yes! Excellent! And why do we adjust our mirrors?”
I resisted the urge to answer “To check our lipstick,” or “To smooth our bangs,” and simply replied, “So that we can aim at people?”
I got the car started, and with the engine humming I asked, “Isn’t this enough for today? I don’t want to overlearn. I want to grow into driving.”
“That’s not a problem,” said my dad. “But I tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. We’ll just drive around the block once, just for starters, and that’s all we’ll do for today. How does that sound?”
“What if a deer jumps out at us?”
“There are no deer in this neighborhood.”
“What if a foreign government has tampered with the brake linings?” I had no idea what brake linings were; perhaps they came in coordinated fabrics or fur.
“The brakes are fine.”
“What if I lose control of my vehicle and plummet into a ravine?”