by Simon Doonan
When I met Mundo, I was already known for my outré displays at a store called Maxfield Bleu. I had evolved considerably from the pedestrian fashion vignettes of my City à la Mode days. My windows now regularly included such things as coffins, suicides, and mannequins juggling taxidermied cats.
Mundo came along and made me look like a lightweight. His window displays—in sharp contrast to his mild manner—were completely insane. He was, for some reason, infinitely less risk-averse than even I. This may have been due to the fact that I had a green card and he did not; i.e., he had nothing to lose.
Together we reached new heights of provocation. One of the windows for which I am best known, a vignette inspired by a local news item, depicting the abduction of a newborn baby by a vicious coyote from a suburban home, was one such collaboration. After complaints from individuals claiming kin with the abductee, we removed the window.
When we worked together, I was a moderating influence. When Mundo went off on his own, he really went over the top. One day I stopped by a store where he was working to see what he was up to. Even I was taken aback. Somewhere in the bowels of some far-flung studio prop rental warehouse, he had managed to find a series of stuffed warthog heads. He had mounted them on large, shocking pink plywood panels and juxtaposed them next to fluorescent-hued Norma Kamali dresses. I arrived just in time to see the apoplectic store owner gesticulating wildly in front of the window, while an oblivious Mundo—a can of hair spray in one hand and a ratting comb in the other—lovingly coiffed the tufty heads of his warthogs.
His ideas were very proto Damien Hirst. Unlike Mr. Hirst and many of the new post-skill artists of today, Mundo was an accomplished painter. He used this skill to earn extra money, painting commissioned portraits.
Having no such talents, I augmented my window-dressing earnings with a T-shirt business. I silk-screened and hand-painted garments with designs of my own making and sold them to Melrose Avenue stores. When I needed a bit of extra cash, I would park on a side street, near my retailers, and sell them out of the back of my truck. This guerrilla salesmanship often yielded as much as five hundred dollars on a busy Saturday, which seemed like a fortune at the time.
As I look back on this entrepreneurial, skip-along period of my life, I realize what a huge role my T-shirt business played in all aspects of my personal growth. The organizational and interpersonal skills which I acquired, through trial and error, transformed me into a fully functional human being. I’m not joking. I have absolutely no idea why people bother going to fancy colleges: everything you will ever need to know about life and more can be learned through the operation of a T-shirt business.
Example: the first time I delivered a bunch of T-shirts to a store, I shipped them out with an invoice tucked neatly inside the package. I felt very efficient and businesslike. When, thirty days later, I had received no payment, I became irate. I called the accounts office.
“Oh, you must be the brain surgeon who sent an invoice without a return address. Honey, your check is sitting right here. You do know what a check is, don’tcha, honey?”
I genuinely feel that prior to operating a T-shirt business I was a mentally subnormal, incompetent, trend-obsessed fool. And after three years in the T-shirt business, I became—without a hint of exaggeration—a world-class sage.
* * *
One day Mundo stopped by the studio where I silk-screened my garments. We chatted. He smoked a joint. Before leaving, he showed me a purple lump on his neck and asked me for a diagnosis.
“It’s just an ingrowing hair,” I said, instinctively playing it down and thereby doing a total Terry Doonan.
A couple of weeks later Mundo and I and a couple of friends, including his current boyfriend, Jef, were lolling round our glamorous oval-shaped pool. It was an evening of giggling and synchronized swimming and cocktails with little umbrellas in them.
“A woman in the elevator told me Lana Turner once cracked her head on the bottom of this pool,” said Mundo, looking like a young Xavier Cugat in his vintage resort shirt and straw hat.
We all got fairly plastered and started making glamorous Lana Turner head-injury turbans out of our towels, climbing the palm trees, and taking snaps of each other. I still have those photographs. When I look at them I think, These were taken the night before our happy, silly, trendy Hollywood lives changed so irrevocably and horribly.
The next day.
Hungover and exhausted from the previous night’s capers, I came home early from work. I found Mundo sitting on the couch, staring out at the Capitol Records tower. He looked puffy-eyed.
“Are you high? You lazy Mexicans and your pot!” I mocked affectionately. (I always think the real purpose of a relationship is to provide a “safe space” for the voicing of such un-P.C. thoughts.)
He did not laugh. He kept on staring at Capitol Records.
“The doctor says it’s cancer. I have AIDS.”
I screamed. I did not cry tears. I just let out this weird, womanly wail. Over the next few months Mundo would try to imitate the noise I had made. He would laugh and tell me how like an outraged English matron I had sounded.
These were early days in the history of the Plague. I had heard about AIDS. I had read the landmark Village Voice piece a few months before. I assumed this disease was something which afflicted the sexual outlaws of West Hollywood, Castro Street, and Greenwich Village, where excessive practices had somehow created a new affliction. I never imagined it could strike someone who did things like dressing up as a Fellini clown or buying Mexican pastries and then spending all weekend painting gorgeous still lifes of them while listening to his parents’ old La Lupe records.
After I let out my Lady Bracknell scream, I panicked. Then I got mad.
“This doctor is obviously a lunatic!” I said, channeling my inner Betty Doonan. “I will personally make sure he is struck off the register for misdiagnosing people and giving them nervous breakdowns.”
We would show him!
I badly needed to persuade myself that we had been the victims of some kind of hoax. The insidious nature of AIDS, with its long gestation period, meant that Mundo’s diagnosis was my diagnosis. Maybe I had given it to him or he to me. Who knows? Either way, we were all doomed. In the back of my mind I realized that the dreaded Scorpio horoscope had come to pass. Though AIDS was not technically a disease of the nether regions, it seemed to fit the bill.
A week later I accompanied Mundo to get the results of his biopsy. I had moved out of denial mode into a permanently nauseated mode. While I sat pretending to read magazines and trying not to vomit into the snake plants, I observed the other people in the waiting room. One in particular sticks in my memory. He was a middle-aged man with an enormous amount of bleached hair. It was a horrid, brassy-greeny-blond color, exactly the shade against which my mother had inveighed for so many years. With great skill he had combed and swirled his tresses around various parts of his face in order to hide the lumpy purple lesions which afflicted him. His hair was yellow and his sweater was yellow and his face was violet-colored. His terrified, depressed eyes peered through the swirls of hair.
Mundo came out of the doctor’s office looking bleak. The biopsy had confirmed that his skin lesions were Kaposi’s sarcoma. The doctor told him there was nothing he could do for him. AIDS was a terminal illness.
Being cut loose from the medical profession produced a very strange free-falling sensation. We did not quite know what to do next. When your cure is left up to you, you don’t know whether to run into the woods and start looking for healing berries or jump out of the window of your apartment. AIDS was clearly beyond the scope of Harpic.
Feeling decidedly unhinged, I drove Mundo to the health food store in West Hollywood. It was called Erehwon, which is nowhere spelled backward, which is precisely where we were.
Still channeling Betty, I raged through the store, buying sacks of wheat germ and nuts and brewer’s yeast. Betty was a health food devotee, as was Aunt Phyllis. We regularly ate n
ut cutlets and homegrown bean shoots. Betty was, like the overdressed romance novelist Barbara Cartland, a believer in the mystical powers of organic honey. I picked up a couple of vats for good measure. Mundo was starting to look at me as if I had gone bonkers, which of course I very nearly had.
On the bulletin board of the health food store, I saw something which caught my eye. It was a notice advertising a macrobiotic healing center. I let out another womanly shriek. The macro flyer claimed success treating people with AIDS!!!!
I drove home at about ninety miles an hour and called. Before you could screech “tofu stroganoff!” we were both having macrobiotic cooking lessons and chomping on chunks of seaweed. Though not the trendiest, most amusing people on Earth, the crunchy hippies at the East-West Center were, unlike Mundo’s doctor, full of hope and encouragement. Here Mundo read all about the macro founder George Ohsawa’s triumph over tuberculosis. He even had a consultation with the grand macro poobah, a bloke called Michio Kushi, who put him on a rigorously ascetic diet.
Meanwhile, Mundo’s mother was doing her bit. She was nonjudgmental, kind, and quite eccentric. In predominantly Mexican East L.A., Mundo’s mamacita was known as something of a local healer, a woman with special powers. At all hours of the day and night, the locals picked their way through the gnomes on her front lawn seeking advice and herbal remedies.
She prescribed for Mundo an ancient regimen of healing rituals. He boiled handfuls of strange herbs in caldrons of water. He was then obliged to sleep with a bowl of herb-infused water under his bed and a glass of the same water on a shelf over his bed. In the morning he had to drink the water over his head and toss out the water under his bed. He did this religiously for months.
While this hocus-pocus seemed to have a positive effect on Mundo, the same could not be said for his diet. The whole macro thing was, in retrospect, not such a great idea. The switch from the fatty, meaty Latin American diet to a Japanese regimen caused Mundo to lose loads of weight quite rapidly. He was skinny to begin with. As his body weight dropped, the lesions proliferated. One night at the movies he showed me a lesion which he was convinced had appeared during the previews.
Any time he went to get help from Social Security, he was treated like a leper. This was before Rock Hudson or Freddie Mercury or Liz Taylor’s fund-raisers. The official Ronald Reagan attitude at this time was that a small number of gay men had contracted this self-inflicted disease because of their disgusting practices and that they should go away and die before infecting anyone else. In fairness to Ronald and Nancy, this was also my attitude and that of many gay men before coming into direct contact with the disease.
And what of Mundo? you are no doubt wondering. How was he coping? Magically is the word which springs to mind. He was calm and dignified and barely twenty-five years old. Despite the physical disintegration, the lack of money and medical support, he never complained. He cooked his grains and braised his tempeh, painted, watched movies, and scoured the Goodwill for modernist furniture. He and his boyfriend, Jef, fought and made love like a regular couple.
I, meanwhile, was lonely, grief-stricken, and prone to bouts of hysteria. I thought about death and disease twenty-four hours a day.
* * *
After two years of relatively good health, Mundo started to deteriorate. His lesions became horribly disfiguring. “I’m turning into the Elephant Man,” he said, not without a certain amount of accuracy.
Mundo got sick of trying to explain his ghastly affliction to probing friends and neighbors. He and his devoted Jef moved to the other side of the railway tracks, near Glendale.
One night I descended on him to take him out for dinner. It was his birthday. Jef was out of town. He asked me to bring a tin of Pan-Cake makeup. Painstakingly, he sponged it on, covering his swollen face and his lesions. Before he got dressed, I gave him his birthday present. It was a trendy and not inexpensive outfit by a Japanese designer. Having just finished working on the movie Beverly Hills Cop, where I designed the notorious gallery scene, I was flush with cash. My generosity was motivated by guilt: I felt bad that Mundo was missing out on these fun jobs which had come my way as a result of our window collaborations.
Our date was surreal. The maquillaged, emaciated Mundo somehow looked even stranger than usual, like an alien with a beige apple head and a limp rag-doll body. We drove far into the San Fernando Valley and found a froufrou French restaurant where we had a candlelit dinner. His ability to enjoy silly, simple things was completely undiminished. Even though he had lesions on his feet, which necessitated the wearing of huge sheepskin scuffies, he insisted on going out dancing. We asked the obviously gay waiter to recommend a local hot spot. After dinner we drove to a turgid disco called Angles or Spangles or something like that. We began to dance. Before the end of the first song, Mundo’s insane appearance had virtually cleared the dance floor. He laughed about the way he looked and at people’s horrified reactions. It was like a horrible negative version of that scenario where Fred and Ginger clear the floor with their expertise. We did it with a disease.
“Thanks for the great birthday!” he said, without any trace of cynicism, when I dropped him off.
* * *
Mundo was much better at dying than I was at watching him die.
The last two months of his life were like watching a crucifixion. His lungs would fill up with water every couple of days. The doctor would draw out the fluid with a long needle, while Mundo was fully conscious, filling massive surgical bottles. He never complained.
Between agonizing procedures, he would demand to be driven to the Beverly Center where for some unknown reason, he insisted on buying toy Godzillas in various sizes. This remarkable impulse demonstrated, more than anything else I have ever witnessed, the magical, life-affirming power of shopping. Long after his appetite for television or food or music evaporated, Mundo retained the impulse to shop for a Godzilla or even a pack of tube socks.
Soon his condition worsened and he became bedridden. There were no more trips to the Beverly Center.
While everything I ever learned about the practicalities of Life came from my T-shirt business, everything I have learned about death and dying came from Mundo.
Before Mundo’s demise, I had no deathbed skills whatsoever. I cringe when I recall my silly bedside manner. My first impulse was to try to compensate for the dire situation by talking too much, acting in an animated and “hilarious” fashion, and bringing him snuggly toys and other irritating crap, which clogged his hospital room. I was like a manic version of Shari Lewis, minus Lamb Chop.
One day a chatty nurse in white clogs dropped by to draw blood.
“Hi, hon. My feet are killing me. I had to park miles away. No room because of the blood drive,” she said, indicating the large tent set up in the car park where conscientious citizens were donating their pints.
“I think I’ll stop by on the way out,” I said, hoping to sound worthy and upstanding.
“No offense, sugar-dumplin’, but I don’t think anyone wants your blood,” she said and busied herself with Mundo’s chart.
This blunt, Nargesque comment caused me to become a little teary and histrionic. Mundo glared at me through the swollen purple hell that was formerly his lovely handsome face.
“Calm down, daughter!” (Naturally, I had taught him to daughter!)
He sighed and patted me on the head. “Why can’t you be like Rudi?”
Rudi was my new Japanese roommate. I do not mean to imply that I had a series of Japanese roommates. Rudi was my new roommate who happened to be Japanese. We were sisters.
When Rudi came to visit Mundo, he would serve him takeout sushi from the restaurant where he worked. Then, for the next half hour, he would sit as still and quiet as a waiting geisha. Considering the lack of sizzling banter, I was surprised by how much Mundo looked forward to Rudi’s visits.
The next time I went to see Mundo I tried the Rudi technique.
I walked quietly into the room and gave Mundo a quick hug
. I then sat down and said nothing.
This proved to be far more difficult than my previous jabbering and mugging. I went through several stages of social discomfort and panic. The clock ticked. Mundo wheezed. Embarrassing moments passed.
Gradually I got used to the quiet. Slowly, very slowly, I lost track of time. A nurse came and went. Mundo dozed. The clock ticked. Mundo woke up.
He finally broke the silence.
“There are crowds of people waiting for me,” he said, staring straight ahead.
“There are?” I said, mystified. “What do they look like?”
“They are Indians,” replied Mundo, who had a distinctly pre-Columbian look about him. He was proud of his Tarahumara Indian roots and often, especially after a couple of joints, painted pictures of haunting Aztec-looking dudes.
There was a long pause, during which I reflected on how godless I was and how lucky Mundo was to actually believe in something.
“They are weaving a banner.”
“What kind of banner?”
“It’s a welcome banner.”
“Oh.”
“As soon as the banner is finished, I am going to join them.”
* * *
Two days later he went into a coma. Then, on February 11, 1985, Mundo went to join his new friends.
CHAPTER 16
CREVICE NOZZLES
Just call me Dora Doom.
I never expected that I would survive the Plague. I spent most of the 1980s going to memorials and waiting to be struck down. This was a dark and horrid time. Loony obsessions dominated my thoughts. It was impossible for me to look at my skin without seeing the shadowy beginnings of a deadly cancerous lesion. When I tested negative for HIV, I was convinced that it was a mistake and that I would still get sick.
And then I didn’t die. I survived.
My survival is not the result of anything other than the fact that I’m a prissy sissy. My prissiness saved my life. With my germ phobia and a smidgen of good luck, I eluded death.