by Cleve Jones
We will count the days, and we will bring you down.
The next day ACT UP and others created a human chain around the Ellipse and began to sing, “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye,” loud enough to be heard by George and Barbara in the White House.
I ran for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that fall. District elections had been repealed in the aftermath of the Milk/Moscone assassinations and the “White Night” riot. There were so many issues I wanted to fight for, and I felt my time was running out. I ran and almost won in the expensive citywide race. It was a narrow miss and I was sorry to lose my race but happy to see Bill Clinton win his.
Ricardo went back to Houston for what we both called a break. I visited him twice; he came home once. We spoke on the phone every day. I suspected there was a secret he was keeping.
Gus Van Sant came to town to make a movie about Harvey Milk. Craig Zaden and Neil Meron, who had acquired the rights to the Randy Shilts biography The Mayor of Castro Street, had hired him. Their first choice to direct had been Oliver Stone but he was controversial and perceived to be homophobic by many activists, who protested his involvement. Stone dropped out and recommended Van Sant, one of very few openly gay directors at the time.
Gus and I went to visit Randy Shilts at his condominium in Diamond Heights. I was shocked by how frail Randy looked. Eventually the project fell apart and Gus went back to Portland, but we stayed in touch. He was beyond enigmatic, but I liked hanging out with him and the brushup against Hollywood.
My poor, sweet, beautiful Ricardo took his own life in Houston. I don’t remember the date. I don’t remember much at all. I remember a package arrived, filled with his Pisces trinkets and a brief letter from one of his friends explaining that Ricardo’s health had declined and he had decided to end it. They said it was peaceful. I shut down for months.
My lab results came back. My T-cells had dropped again, now to below 200, well into the danger zone for the deadly opportunistic infections. I wasn’t surprised.
In early 1993 I left San Francisco and moved into a small cabin I rented on the banks of the Russian River in a little village called Villa Grande, a community of about forty homes with a small store, a Laundromat, and a post office deep in the redwoods. I rented my place from a crazy hippie couple named Ben and Marigold Hill. Marigold was a jazz singer. Ben painted and assembled collages.
My health declined rapidly.
The NAMES Project threw a party for my 40th birthday at a big club in San Francisco on October 11, 1994. My old friend Judith Light was there and it was great to see so many of the volunteers, but I felt so much older than 40.
Back at the river the next day, I walked slowly down to the riverbank and watched the brown water swirling past. A passerby might have noticed me, a bent and broken old man leaning on a tree branch.
My parents gave me some money. It was just enough for a down payment on a small house across the street from Ben and Marigold’s place. It was comforting to know that I had control of my living space and room for friends to visit or a caregiver to live. I missed the city but was glad that my friends there would not witness my depression and illness.
One morning I woke up barely able to breathe and a neighbor drove me to the hospital in Santa Rosa. I had Pneumocystis pneumonia and less than 50 T-cells. The prognosis was predictably grim. Complicating the situation, I was extremely allergic to Bactrim, the most effective medication against the killer pneumonia. For many months my neighbors drove me into Santa Rosa three days a week, for a two-hour infusion of a drug called pentamidine. It was awful but kept the pneumonia at bay.
One day in October 1994, Dr. Conant called and asked me to come see him when I could. I got a ride into the city and he told me about a new clinical trial that combined a low dose of AZT with two other drugs, ddC and 3TC. The side effects were dreadful and I moved pillows into the bathroom, where I spent most of my days and nights. It was hard to keep the pills in my stomach. Shep Mishkin, a friend from the old days, came to stay with me and did his best to keep me eating. I was touched by Shep’s willingness to help. His own lover of many years, John-John, had died recently after a very long struggle. I’d had a crush on John-John since way back on Polk Street when he worked at the Grubstake.
Late one night Shep heard me vomiting and came into the bathroom with a lit joint. I waved him away but he insisted, “Smoke this, you’ll feel better.”
I took the tiniest hit, which made me cough harshly, but I stopped vomiting. I took another puff and was able to hold it in my lungs for a moment without coughing. I felt the nausea ease. I leaned back against the bathtub and took another hit, exhaled slowly, and smiled up at Shep. “Dude, I’m hungry.”
The pills began to work. One morning a few weeks later I awoke early to a light mist filtering through the giant redwoods that surrounded my house. I could hear birds singing and my stomach growled. To my great surprise, I had an erection for the first time in many months. It felt like a miracle. I put on my boots and raincoat and walked carefully to the little market down the way and bought eggs and bacon and muffins and marmalade.
A week later I was in Guerneville, shopping at the Safeway. Halfway down the produce aisle I saw a friend named Jeff who was also a patient of Dr. Conant. Jeff had been ill for months and while still gaunt, he looked better and I told him so. He was enrolled in the same study and taking the same meds I was on.
“So I guess we’re not going to die yet,” he said.
“No,” I responded, “I guess we’re going to live.”
He looked at me and put some vegetables in his cart. “But we’ll never be happy again, will we?”
“No, we’ll never be happy again.”
CHAPTER 31
The President Sees the Quilt
I HADN’T KNOWN ANYONE LIVING AT THE RUSSIAN RIVER WHEN I FIRST moved up, but within a few months I became part of a tight-knit community of people living with AIDS who, like me, had fled the city for the peace and natural beauty of the redwood forests and Sonoma coast. We were mostly gay men, but our weekly potluck dinners soon grew and included women and children. We looked after each other, carpooled to medical appointments in Santa Rosa, and made sure everyone was well stocked with food and firewood when winter came and the flood season began.
I was strong enough to travel some and spoke at various Quilt displays around the country. The NAMES Project hired a new executive director named Anthony Turney. I had some reservations about him but was thrilled when he told me he was determined to see the entire Quilt on the National Mall again in October 1996.
On October 11, 1996, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded on the Mall. It stretched from the Capitol to the Washington Monument and finally matched the image I had carried in my mind since that cold November night in 1985 when I first envisioned it. President Clinton and Hillary Clinton walked on the Quilt with us while thousands watched in silence. They found panels that had been made for their friends and colleagues. I told the President of the dramatic recovery I had experienced and that many of my friends had also left their deathbeds and returned to work. I begged him to seek additional funds to make the life-prolonging medications available to everyone who needed them.
Back home at the river, most of our group continued to gain strength but some did not. Larry Larue lived about a mile upstream from me in Monte Rio. He had been the DJ at the old Stud bar on Folsom Street and had a great collection of vinyl records from the disco era. The meds gave Larry diabetes and while he remained cheerful, we could see that he was getting weaker. I’d taken him with me to Washington for the Quilt display and noticed that he was having trouble walking. But he still drove up River Road every day to shop in Guerneville and frequently hosted elaborate dinner parties in his house, which was finally raised up on stilts after flooding twice in 1995.
We had some pretty fancy dinners that winter in 1996 and did our best to keep each other laughing. Every now and then someone would speak wistfully of past ho
lidays spent with some long-dead lover, and Larry or another neighbor, Marvin Greer, would look up and say, “Girl, don’t go there.”
One of our neighbors and friends was a gruff butch dyke named Sal who lived with her girlfriend and worked as a carpenter. Sal was very much a part of the local lesbian feminist scene and we were all taken by surprise one evening after dinner when she announced her decision to transition. She plopped a jar on the table and growled, “It’s gonna cost you a quarter every time you call me by the wrong pronoun.”
I’d known several transgender women before, but Sal was the first transgender man I had met. That first month of his transition the jar filled up with quarters, but once his beard grew in we pretty much forgot he had ever lived as a woman. Some of his lesbian friends were disappointed with his decision, and during one of our potluck dinners one said, “I don’t understand why Sal has to act like a straight man all the time.”
Marvin Greer chuckled, “Because he is one, Blanche. He is one.”
New Year’s Eve arrived, and with it a massive storm that sent the river surging over its banks. There were about six of us at my place when the power went out. I kept the woodstove stoked and we ate by candlelight as the wind and rain battered the house. The sound of the storm was interspersed with occasional sharp cracks that sounded like gunshots as giant widow-maker branches broke and fell from the towering redwoods around us.
“It just doesn’t feel like New Year’s Eve without a disco ball,” said Larry sadly. Steve and Marvin and the others agreed.
“I wonder if they have power in Guerneville,” said Marvin. Steve perked up.
“Do you think the bars are open?” Larry dragged his IV pole into the kitchen and poured a cup of tea. He was being treated for some new infection and had an IV port in his chest to deliver the medication.
“Girl, you know it takes more than a little storm to close down gay bars on New Year’s Eve!”
Larry hooked his IV drip to the rearview mirror and we all piled into his VW bus and drove east through the howling storm towards Guerneville. Redwood trees were crashing down around us and the wind whipped the cold brown river water up to the pavement. Guerneville was dark, but one of the bars had a generator; we could hear music and see the flicker of the disco ball through the windows.
It was almost midnight and we ran inside to grab glasses of champagne. Muscular young men with big squeegees kept the river off the dance floor just long enough for us to toast each other as the hour hit and the year ended. Then the music stopped and the bartender yelled out, “Happy New Year, now go home and be careful out there, bitches!”
Larry hung his IV bag back on the rearview mirror and we set off again, driving west back to Villa Grande. I lit a joint, which we passed back and forth as we marveled at the waves of river water that were now washing across the road, which was barely passable due to landslides and falling trees.
“Uh-oh,” said Larry, and we all looked up to see the flashing lights of a California Highway Patrol car behind us. We slowed to a stop and the officer approached us. Larry lowered his window and a small cloud of marijuana smoke rolled out into the officer’s face. He peered in at our gaunt grey faces, saw the IV bag hanging from the mirror and shook his head. “I don’t even want to know… just please be careful.” He waved us on.
There were a lot of stray kids living on the river and many of them found their way to my little house. There was a gangly boy named Glenn, whose mom ran the little market in the village square. Glenn looked like a skinhead thug but was a gentle soul. He was seeing a sweet girl named Estrella. Down the road was a house with a bunch of kids, including a precocious 6th grader named Josh who took me to his middle school to speak. Mark, a copper-haired kid with freckles and crooked teeth, lived with Josh but they weren’t related. There were also a lot of kids living on their own, whose parents had moved up from Haight-Ashbury in the ’70s to grow weed or cook meth in the woods.
On August 13, 1997, I was shopping in Guerneville and stopped at the Rainbow Cattle Company to pick up a copy of the Bay Area Reporter. The headline took my breath away and I grabbed a stool, sitting down hard. There it was, in big red letters just below the masthead: NO OBITS. Others wandered in to have a drink and get the paper. We wept.
In September, NBC began airing a new sitcom created by David Kohan and Max Mutchnik called Will and Grace. It was just about the gayest show ever broadcast and became hugely popular.
The winter of 1997–98 was an El Niño event and it rained for months with little relief. The river rose but didn’t inundate Guerneville. My house and clothes and car smelled of mildew and mold. My lungs couldn’t handle the damp, and it seemed like every month brought some new health challenge.
Mark had started high school and gradually spent more nights in my little guest room. He was a skinny kid but ate voraciously. I enjoyed cooking for him and the other kids who would show up, often cold and drenched by the rain, with empty bellies. They also helped out. Mark chopped kindling and kept up our only source of heat, the woodstove.
At Kaiser Medical Center in Santa Rosa an RN named Terry Winter coordinated the HIV care team, looking after several hundred AIDS patients. He streamlined the referral process and, along with a pharmacist named Sabahat Imran, made sure we all had access to the latest medications.
Still, it rained all winter and I kept getting sick. The doctor said I had to get out of the damp or my lungs would fail. I decided to move to the desert and dry air, and rented out my house to a woman named Deb and her adopted son Dillon. Dillon was born with HIV and barely survived infancy, but Deb’s hard work and fierce love for the child kept him alive. Larry Larue died.
I moved to Palm Springs because I’d heard that many older gay men were making it a home. Compared to the Bay Area, housing was very affordable. Mark’s mother asked me to take him with me and gave me a notarized letter giving me permission to enroll him in school and get him medical care if necessary. I only had to take him to the doctor once, when he kicked a barrel cactus while showing off and ended up with several long spines embedded in his leg. We rented a condo in a large complex on Avenida Caballeros near downtown Palm Springs. It was a big two-bedroom place with a loft and a deck with views of the mountains. It was cheap, too, just $600. At night we could hear the coyotes hunting rabbits in the large empty lot next door.
Mark enrolled at Palm Springs High School and we settled into a routine. I’d make his breakfast and send him off to school. After school we’d usually hike in the mountains or walk around town before making dinner and tackling the homework. Before we left the river I had begun collaborating with a guy named Jeff Dawson on a book about the NAMES Project. Stitching a Revolution was published in 2000.
The desert was good for my health, so I sold the house at the river and bought a place in the Warm Sands neighborhood of Palm Springs. Mark dropped out of high school and headed up to Mendocino County to work with his father. I was disappointed that he had not graduated but I knew he was homesick.
A neighbor of mine gave birth to a little girl. They lived in a small apartment with two other adults. I could tell the mom was overworked and I was concerned by the baby’s constant crying. One day I just took her home with me, changed her diapers, and gave her a bath in my kitchen sink. She was so tiny. Her mother seemed grateful for the help and I was glad to get the baby out of that apartment that was often filled with cigarette smoke.
I turned Mark’s old room into a nursery. Another neighbor gave me a crib and blankets and toys. I was goofy in love with this little baby and spent as much time with her as I could. Soon she was old enough to take out in a stroller and we spent hours most days just walking around Palm Springs. Babies are easy—you love them and they love you back. My parents came to visit and my mother was touched by the baby’s sweet little smile. “You should adopt, Cleve. Maybe not this child, but there are so many who need homes.”
I called the county office for foster care and adoption, got the information packet, and made
an appointment for a preliminary interview. I was also keeping an eye on the baby’s mom, aunt, and grandmother. They were struggling to get by, and I was not going to let the baby get hurt.
Riverside County shot down my dream of parenthood pretty quickly. The woman who interviewed me went over my preliminary application. The form asked applicants to list all prescription drugs that were in the household. I left that part blank and asked why it was necessary.
“We need to know about anything and everything that the children we place might be exposed to in order to protect them.” I listed my medications and she asked me what the medications were for. It went downhill from there.
I felt like a dinosaur. There were lots of older gay men moving to Palm Springs, many from San Francisco. The younger generation, those who came of age during the darkest years of the epidemic, wanted nothing to do with people like me. The local bars were filled with men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies except on weekends when the Twinkie boys from West Hollywood would drive out to party and maybe find a sugar daddy. I was very happy when Gilbert Baker came to visit for a few weeks.
On September 11, 2001, I was scheduled to speak at Alma College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan. I let Gilbert sleep in as I got up early, packed, and showered. The phone was ringing when I got out of the shower. It was my booking agent telling me my flight was canceled. “Why?” I asked. He tersely replied, “Turn on the TV.”
Gilbert and I huddled on the sofa and watched the towers fall.
In the following weeks, it became clear that Bush and Cheney were determined to lead us into war. I rented out one of my rooms to a couple named Mike and John. Every Saturday we’d stand at a corner in the center of Palm Springs with signs reading “NO WAR.” Some people spit at us, but many joined us. I started hosting weekly potlucks at my home following the vigils. UNITE HERE had some staff in town, trying to organize workers at the casinos operated by the Agua Caliente tribe. Every Saturday my home and yard was filled with peace activists, Latino hotel workers, union organizers, and LGBT people. Millions protested around the world to stop the war, but it was all in vain.