Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  I’d often find myself at the Flore, meeting Dad or visiting with a cute band of twenty-something gay boys who always sat at the same outside corner table and who counseled me through my ill-begotten crushes and occasional flare-ups with girlfriends. I had the unfortunate habit of pursuing cute guys who were more interested in fooling around than in commitment. I confided my problems to café friends like Aboud, so striking with his olive skin, black hair, and green eyes. He’d tell me that these high school boys were threatened by me. “Female empowerment. That’s what it’s all about, honey.” Then he’d laugh—a joyful burst—and I felt I was let in on a secret.

  Although I still spent the bulk of my social time in the Haight, I loved these afternoons at Café Flore. I’d been going to the café since I was little, and it always felt safe to me. There was no real threat, no feeling of awkwardness or competition as I sometimes felt among my girlfriends. I was always the kid, singularly young and straight, simply a member of this peculiar San Francisco family.

  Soon the young men at the Flore would age before our eyes, shrinking beneath thick layers of scarves and sweaters and wool caps. They walked with canes or were pushed in wheelchairs, their vitality snuffed out, feathers plucked clean. Between the years of 1983 and 1985, the numbers of Americans with AIDS went from 1,300 to over 12,000, but San Francisco was the first city to experience epidemic levels of the disease. By the time the first HIV test was introduced in 1985, close to half the gay men in San Francisco were already infected. My father was one of them, but neither he nor I were talking about it.

  FOR MOST of the country, AIDS was still something that happened out there to other people. That changed in the summer of 1985, only a few days after Dad mailed me his letter equating childrearing with writing a poem, when Rock Hudson ended months of speculation by announcing that he had AIDS. By October he was dead. That same summer, thirteen-year-old Ryan White, an Indiana hemophiliac who’d contracted AIDS while receiving injections of a clotting agent, was barred from his school. These high-profile cases changed the face of the epidemic. AIDS was no longer dismissed as the gay plague, the disease of deviants—drug users and promiscuous gay men. It happened to famous people, to “innocent” people, to people you might know.

  That summer and the months following, AIDS made the cover of Life (“Now No One Is Safe from AIDS”), Time (“How Heterosexuals Are Coping with AIDS”) and Newsweek, which after running a picture of Rock Hudson on its August cover put AIDS on its September cover with the headline “The Fear of AIDS” and a picture of schoolchildren holding up signs that read “No AIDS Children in District 27.”

  The problem with all this media attention was that there was so little known about the disease, even among experts. On one episode of the CBS Morning News in 1985, a doctor from the University of California said that straight men rarely contracted AIDS from women; moments later, a Harvard doctor said they could. In late 1985, the Reagan White House blocked the use of CDC money for education, leaving the US behind other Western nations in telling its citizens how to avoid contracting the virus. Many Americans still thought you could get AIDS from a toilet seat or a glass of water. According to one poll, the majority of Americans supported quarantining AIDS patients.

  This heightened awareness set off waves of anxiety across the country, which was often expressed through jokes (Q: What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair? A: Roll-AIDS!) and violence. Between the years 1985 and 1986, anti-gay violence increased by 42 percent in the US. Even in San Francisco, where Greyhound buses still dropped off gay men and women taking refuge from the prejudice of their hometowns, carloads of teenagers would drive through the Castro looking for targets.

  In December 1985, a group of teenagers, shouting “diseased faggot” and “you’re killing us all,” dragged a man named David Johnson from his car in a San Francisco supermarket parking lot. While his lover looked on in horror, the teenagers kicked and beat Johnson with their skateboards, breaking three of his ribs, bruising his kidneys, and gashing his face and neck with deep fingernail scratches.

  As a teenager, I heard about this attack and it haunted me. Returning on a bus home from Café Flore one day, I saw graffiti spray-painted on a billboard that read “Kill Fags!” Riding home from school another day, I saw a message scrawled in black marker on the back of a Muni bus seat: “Gays, get help—not AIDS!”

  I knew it was only a matter of time before my father became a target. It turns out he already had been. I just didn’t know it.

  IN THE 1980S, Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn started a magazine called Rolling Stock. In issue number five, published in 1983, there appeared, written in collaboration with the poet Tom Clark, “The AIDS AWARDS FOR POETRY—In recognition of the current EPIDEMIC OF IDIOCY on the poetry scene.” The page featured a large illustration of a test tube of reddish liquid, presumably infected blood, which was the “prize.” The recipients of this “award” included Dennis Cooper, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and my dad.

  Dorn’s homophobia was no secret. In his 1984 poem “Aid(e) Memoire,” he warned those who “screw and are screwed” by everyone all day and all year that they’ll get a disease so they might as well go and “drink directly from the sewer.”

  My father was deeply wounded by the personal attack of the “AIDS award” and a few years later wrote about it in the epilogue to View Askew. “They mock us as we die, knowing full well that anti-gay humor leads to anti-gay violence.”

  His friend Kevin Killian was so pained by the incident that, after Dad died, he wrote an open letter to the editors:

  I write on behalf of one on whom a beaker of poisoned blood was poured by the talented staff artists of “Rolling Stock,” one who on his deathbed, still strove to understand the motives behind this attack, one who tried to forgive, one who tried so hard to forgive it broke my heart. He is no longer alive, but I am, and why shouldn’t I say exactly what I feel? . . . A great wrong has been done and memory will never be silent. Memory persists in squawking its fool head off trying to make sense of the evil done to innocent sufferers. I’m hysterical today, let my hysteria explode inside the great white apex of Ed Dorn’s heart.

  I don’t remember ever talking with Dad about the “AIDS award.” In fact, I can’t recall talking with anyone about AIDS while I was in high school—not with friends, teachers, or family.

  The strange thing is—and I find this really curious—I have no recollection of learning that my father was HIV-positive. With everything that I do remember about my life in San Francisco and our life together, all the hundreds and thousands of details I have had to cut when writing about him for the sake of flow and sense, why can I not remember this most important of moments?

  My father’s journals reveal that he twice tested positive for the AIDS virus while I was still living with him in San Francisco—the first time in the summer of 1986 and then again in the summer of 1987. But I’ve no memory of finding this out, or even of discussing AIDS with him before I left for college. I can imagine how a conversation might have gone, maybe over one of our dinners in front of the CBS Evening News. Dad could have turned to me at a commercial break, plates of tuna and noodle casserole balanced on our laps: “This is something we should talk about. I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. Here’s what we’re going to do about it.” But I can remember no such exchange.

  Does that mean it didn’t happen? Or does it mean that I’ve blocked the memory?

  What I remember instead is a moment when I still thought he might never get AIDS. In November 1987, the fall of my senior year, I was selected to represent my high school on a ten-day trip to Israel sponsored by the American–Israeli Friendship League. In my application essay, I wrote about my mother, about how she’d been Jewish but how I knew nothing of Judaism since she’d died in a car accident when I was a small girl.

  Each of us traveling to Israel was called a “young ambassador,” and for ten days we toured the country by bus. We visited Haifa in the north, worked on a kibbutz in
the south, sipped tea in Tel Aviv, and floated in the slimy waters of the Dead Sea. At night we stayed with host families. During the day we took guided tours of sites. In Jerusalem at the end of the trip, we made plans to visit the Wailing Wall, the renowned prayer site in the holiest of holy cities.

  On the bus ride over, our guide explained how the 187-foot wall, believed to be the sole remnant of the Holy Temple, had been a place for Jewish prayer and pilgrimage since the fourth century. She said, “The sages state that anyone who prays in the Temple in Jerusalem, it’s as if he has prayed before the throne of glory because the gate of heaven is located there.”

  I decided that I would pray when we got to the Wailing Wall. I descended from the bus and walked down to the dusty base of the wall. Standing amongst Hasidic Jews draped with prayer shawls, all bobbing back and forth, I peered up at the Wailing Wall’s uneven surface. The midday sun, reflecting off the white stones, forced me to squint, but I could still make out hundreds of tiny papers—other people’s prayers—folded and rolled, poking from the cracks in the layers of sediment above.

  On the bus, I’d written out my wish in pencil, earnestly hoping that sticking a prayer into the holiest wall in the holiest city on earth really meant something, that there was a reason so many people were swaying and bobbing and kneeling in front of this sacred place.

  So, standing amongst scores of murmuring strangers, I felt along the rough stone above, found my spot, and jammed my tightly rolled prayer inside the crack. I pushed it deep, deep inside the wall so that it wouldn’t fall out, and as I did so, I repeated my prayer, under my breath:

  Please don’t let my father get AIDS.

  Please don’t let my father get AIDS.

  Please don’t let my father get AIDS.

  Since traveling to Israel, I’ve enjoyed visiting and praying in many of the world’s most venerable holy sites. I’ve prayed in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque barefoot and completely prostrate. I’ve kneeled in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, lit candles in Notre-Dame in Paris, and climbed the thick stone steps of Buddhist shrines in Kyoto, thighs burning, beads of sweat running down my back. Sitting in a plain wooden pew, I’ve enjoyed the extended silence of a Quaker service in a Brooklyn Friends Meeting House dating from 1857. I’m always moved by these different expressions of faith, these nuanced forms of prayer, the alternating grandiose beauty and powerful humility of these different houses of worship, all built and sustained by believers. But I’ve never been able to attach myself to any single faith, nor have I felt moved to believe in a single, all-knowing, all-powerful god. After that blinding day at the Wailing Wall, after all the senseless devastation that’s been known in our community, I can’t believe in a divine plan.

  IN FEBRUARY 1988, three months after my return from Israel, Dad received a call from Kevin Killian. Sam D’Allesandro had died of AIDS. Sam was the first friend we lost: beautiful Sam. He came to my sixteenth birthday party and then disappeared. After a few months of not seeing him, I asked Dad if Sam could join us at the movies and he told me that Sam was sick. I said we should visit him but we never did. And then, some months later, the phone call. In his journals Dad wrote about how shocked he felt: “I thought he was better.”

  Sam’s boyfriend, Sean, later told me that Sam had been diagnosed only six months before he died. But he’d been sick for more than a year. He had CMV retinitis, an AIDS-related condition that causes the retina to detach from the eye, blinding its victims. He had tuberculosis in his adrenal glands. He had HIV pneumonia many, many times. But he refused to go to the doctor. Outside of Sean and Sam’s roommate, Fritz, nobody saw him. Nobody. When Sam started to go downhill, he retreated, quitting his job at the travel agency, never leaving his apartment. For a long time he refused to believe that he had “it,” even if a diagnosis meant more services and better treatments. “If I have AIDS,” he told Sean, “I don’t want to know about it.” Sam was only thirty-one when he died.

  Sam was one of many men in the city who, after becoming sick with AIDS, disappeared from view. The gifted poet Karl Tierney, a colleague of Dad’s from the Small Press Traffic gay men’s writing group, dropped out of the scene once he was diagnosed. Karl had been twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a Yaddo fellow. In 1995 he rode his bicycle to the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped off. He was thirty-nine.

  Sam’s denial about having AIDS didn’t absolve Dad and me from our responsibility as friends to visit, to say goodbye, but it felt as if we inadvertently did the right thing. I can only remember Sam as full-lipped and beautiful, with that thatch of soft blond waves, an eighties Adonis. Maybe that’s how he wanted to be remembered.

  But then, when I recently did an image search for him online, I found, amongst the beautiful shots, a photo taken by Robert Giard. After seeing A Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s play about AIDS, Giard took hundreds of portraits of gay and lesbian writers. In this portrait, Sam looks gaunt, with hollowed-out eyes, like a grinning skull in a wig and sweater. When I found it, tears sprang to my eyes and I turned away. It pained me to look. Why did he pose? Kevin Killian thought Sam might have been thinking of the big picture . . . that he wanted, not his own peers perhaps, but future generations to know something of the horror of AIDS.

  The story of how we lost Sam troubled me long after he died and I left San Francisco for college. In that fall’s freshman composition class I wrote an essay about him that dealt with homophobia and AIDS, about how the loss of Sam turned me into someone who’d speak out whenever a cousin or a classmate yelled, “Don’t be a faggot!” But in this essay about my newfound bravery, I never mention that my own father is gay. I never mention that he could be HIV-positive and might die of AIDS himself. Just as Sam didn’t want to admit that he had “it,” I didn’t want to admit that Dad might get “it.” The fear and shame wrapped up in the diagnosis was too powerful to shake. Given my own level of denial about my father’s illness, in all likelihood my feelings about Sam were encased in worry about my father.

  AFTER MY TRIP to Israel, I set my sights on how my life would evolve post–high school. I started to adopt what I considered to be sophisticated habits. I took to wearing a beret and walking down Haight Street carrying an antique cane or a single long-stemmed white rose symbolizing peace and spirituality. I started to patronize a café that had just opened in the Lower Haight called Ground Zero. The café hung large abstract paintings on its walls and attracted a clientele of pale college students in thrift-store trench coats clutching beat-up black portfolios. I liked that Dad didn’t go there and that no one I knew in San Francisco yet went there. I returned to Ground Zero every week, always ordering Earl Grey tea with milk (another “grown-up” discovery) and reading Tama Janowitz’s collection of short stories Slaves of New York, which fed my fantasies about the city.

  I’d become infatuated with New York en route to Israel. Visiting the city for the first time, I took the subway from our midtown hotel to Astor Place in the East Village. I wandered along St. Marks Place and down Lafayette, eventually finding my way into Keith Haring’s Pop Shop. The t-shirt I bought there—Haring’s radiant baby in orange on a gray background—became a staple of my wardrobe. Keith Haring would later illustrate the famous Silence = Death poster for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) before dying of AIDS himself in 1990.

  Back in San Francisco, with my nose deep in Slaves of New York, I dreamed of the life Janowitz depicted: making jewelry, loft living with an artist boyfriend, wearing a neon-green and orange coat, living a quirky creative life informed by the history of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

  In my final year of high school, San Francisco felt provincial to me. Dad was plugged into the vibrant “Queercore” community, playing elder statesman at Klubstitute, Club Chaos, and Uranus, underground scenes he’d later describe in his Pynchonesque novel The Lizard Club. But I powerfully longed for my own life, apart from Dad and relieved of my past. I knew I wouldn’t find it in S
an Francisco. I couldn’t walk down Haight Street without running into a classmate, ex-coworker, ex-fling, or someone I knew through Dad. I felt an itch to grow and stretch, to walk unfamiliar streets in the great throbbing heart of bohemia, which I then believed to be New York City. Thanks to my “big sister,” Dede Donovan, I got there.

  My father was pretty hands-off when it came to my school plans. He had a vague idea that I should attend college but was too busy with his own work to focus on the efforts needed to make that happen. Once Dede emerged as someone who would help me, he simply stood aside and let her do it. She wrote to several schools requesting applications. She tirelessly worked on these applications with me, redrafting essay after essay over pots of peppermint tea at For Heaven’s Cake. She secured recommendations for me from lawyer friends I’d met at her Christmas brunches. When I was accepted by New York University, I was thrilled. I didn’t consider going anywhere else. Dede even secured me a summer job working as a nanny for a pair of her college friends who lived in the city.

  Dad was happy for me too, though sad that I’d be moving so far away.

  BEFORE I LEFT San Francisco, we took a sauna together. I remember both of us naked except for thin white towels wrapped around my chest and his waist. We chatted a little, but it was too hot to chat more so we decided to play cards instead. Gin rummy was our game.