When My World Was Young 1956-60   The Yellow Brick Road 1956-60    What a Wonderful Town 1960-61    
Wonderful Town (pt. II) 1962-66    The Gay Sixties 1966-71    The Juicy Life 1972-76 
  Juicy Life (pt. II) 1976-80   Losing Alexandria 1981-87   Losing Alexandria (pt. II) 1987-1990's
CONTINUATION:  Part II of Losing Alexandria (1987-1990's)

[This page is to some extent still under construction, as one section is unfinished.  But in the interest of bringing the site to a conclusion for those who have said that they are reading it through, I have put this page up as-is, for the time being.]

                                                                                                    Front page of NY Post Oct. 6, 1987
THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS:  THE CURSE OF "PATIENT ZERO"

There was a growing climate of fear and hatred across the United States born of ignorance and government lethargy, and it was eagerly fanned into hysteria by hate mongering political and religious conservatives and extremists – in no small supply in the U.S. population.  The hostility of the Reagan administration and the timorous attitudes of mainstream religious groups meant that hatred of HIV-infected people and of all gay men swept the United States as two of the most potent obstacles to it stood aside.  The wildest exaggerations and lies were circulated concerning the ease of HIV transmission, draconian measures were called for against gay men, infected persons should be quarantined or tattooed or both, infected children were thrown out of school and their homes attacked, funeral homes refused to take the bodies of deceased persons who had died of AIDS or demanded exorbitant fees and on and on and on it went wherever one turned -- and the mills of hatred, financed largely by the followers of evangelical Christian groups, disseminated an endless virulent spew of distortion and lies in the media and the Internet. 

The nation boiled with fear, misinformation and hate.

Into this climate was born a beast more terrifying than Bram Stoker's invention of Dracula, with the publication of Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On  in 1987.  Shilts gave a name to "Patient Zero," the supposed central patient in the HIV crisis – indeed, perhaps the first or index case in the epidemic.  He was Gaetan Dugas the world was told, a French-Canadian airline flight attendant, and he was a monster:  Dugas was diagnosed in 1980 with "gay cancer," and had been charming but uncooperative with medical authorities, and he had then crisscrossed the United States with a fiendish mission to infect as many men as he could.                                                                                                                                            

This demon had died in 1984...which conveniently allowed for no direct refutation of the story.                  Gaetan Dugas

If the media became obsessed with Shilts's "Patient Zero" -- Gaetan Dugas the gay man who brought the AIDS virus from Paris and ignited the epidemic in North America, and then went on a killing spree before he died -- the hate mongers embraced him with an enthusiasm they usually reserved for the Anti-Christ or Communism.  Here was all the "proof" anyone would need to accept their most extreme attacks on gay men.  The hatred was volcanic now, and then too, "Patient Zero" was a great moneymaker all around – St. Martin's Press pumped up sales by emphasizing the shock value of "Patient Zero."

A large ad ran in the August 23, 1988 New York Times and in the leading advertising industry trade paper, Ad Week promoting California Magazine's publication of  an excerpt from Shilts's And the Band Played On," dealing with Gaetan Dugas, "Patient Zero."  Illustrated with a photo of Dugas, their ad claimed, "The AIDS Epidemic was not spread in America by a virus. It was spread by a single man."     The magazine crowed, "While everyone was searching for a cure for AIDS, we found the cause."  It also credited Dugas with infecting "up to 250 men a year."  None of the statements were true.

Gaetan Dugas was not "Patient Zero."  There was no "Patient Zero."  

In 1984 Dr. William Darrow and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published the results of a study they had conducted in The American Journal of Medicine. This epidemiological study from San Francisco showed how 'Patient O' ("oh," the letter, for "Out of California") had given HIV to multiple partners, who in turn transmitted it to others and rapidly spread the virus (Auerbach, Darrow et al in The American Journal of Medicine, No. 76, 1984, pp. 487–492).  At least 40 people of the 248 diagnosed with AIDS by April 1982 were thought to have had sex with him or with someone who had.  The purpose of the study was to verify the transmissability of the unknown cause, not to find the ultimate source of the epidemic.  The press mistakenly interpreted the designation as Patient 0 (i.e. zero) rather than O.  Shilts used this information, naming Gaetan Dugas, as the basis of his sensational creation in ATBPO, supporting evidence for his supposed career as a premeditated killer was never forthcoming.

The belief at the time the data for the study had been gathered was that the period from infection to the manifestation of the disease was one year.  And on the basis of that belief the cluster was constructed which had Gaetan Dugas as its center.   An incubation period of less than two years for the manifestation of AIDS was, in fact, known to be rare by 1987, and the usual period was closer to a decade.  None of those for whom data were given in the study could have been infected by Dugas, and there was no reason to assume that those for whom no data was presented had been infected by him either.

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1986 reported that in 1980 over twenty percent of the Manhattan gay men in a Hepatitis-B experiment were HIV-positive. This 20% infection rate was discovered after the HIV blood test became available in 1985, and after the stored blood at the New York Blood Center was retested for HIV antibodies.  Clearly, the retrovirus was already well established in New York by 1980. 

A 1983 study of about half of the first five hundred cases among San Francisco men had produced the fact that about one-third of them had had sex in New York City in the late 70's.  Any one of them or many of them could have brought the disease to their city. 

As for Gaetan Dugas, the man supposedly intent on what virtually amounts to murder, Dr. William Darrow, who conducted the study upon which Shilts based his character and characterization, found a very different person than the one encountered in the Shilts' book.  According to Darrow, "He [Dugas] felt terrible about having made other people sick.  He had come down with Kaposi's sarcoma, but no one ever told him it might be infectious.  Even at the CDC we didn't know that it was contagious."  [Emphasis added.]

Like myself, and millions millions of other people, Dugas had been educated to understand that cancer is not transmissible. 

Dr. Darrow pointed this out when he said, "It is a general dogma that cancer is not transmissible.  Of course we now know that the underlying immune-system deficiency that allows the cancer to grow is most likely transmissible."  One should remember that Dugas died in 1984, and the discovery of the HIV retrovirus was not announced until April of that year. 

Gaetan Dugas's panel from the Canadian AIDS quilt, he also has a panel in the U.S. quilt.

Shilts' book ignited a wildfire of hatred, but neither he nor his publisher repudiated its "Patient Zero" in light of the clinical evidence or historical facts.  St. Martin's Press continued to capitalize on the Gaetan Dugas furor to promote the book.  Shilts was lauded by reviewers at the time, and religious conservatives and hate-mongers adored him, here was the good homosexual giving the lowdown on the tribe of bad gays who caused this horrible plague.  He did not, of course, make his own activities in San Francisco's baths and sex clubs a part of his book.  And Shilts – despite being a gay man, and one infected with HIV, though he kept this latter fact private for some time -- never made a high profile statement in an effort to check the horrific train of damage he had set in motion, nor did his publisher.  He, thus, remained Mr. Squeaky Clean, investigating gay reporter, in a world of depraved "gay clones."  Randy Shilts' own very profitable band played on. 

During the late Eighties, when the negative impact of the Shilts' book was at its height, I was working as a volunteer with PWA clients of GMHC, taking care of three friends while they died, and spending enormous amounts of time in hospitals and in AIDS-related activities, including the Internet newsgroup sci.med.aids.  In those years it was not unusual – in any of these situations -- to be faced with Shilts' "Patient Zero" several times a day, many times a week.  If the Beatles had been better known than Jesus in the Sixties, as they once said, then the fiendish "Patient Zero" was better known than the Devil in the final years of the Eighties.  Even at work, I had well-disposed but upset straight people quietly bring up this monster for discussion.  The Shilts' portrait of the non-existent "Patient Zero" was a curse that dogged gay men for years.                                                                         Randy Shilts' AIDS quilt panel    

In calmer times ATBPO would be reappraised, and Shilts would be criticized - sometimes harshly - for omissions, slanted writing, invented conversations, and factual errors in the book.  But the damage had been done, and Shilts himself was deceased.  To this day, however, his portrait of "Patient Zero" is quoted as fact across the Web and is a standard weapon in the Religious Right hate arsenal.  And there is savage irony in the fact that there is a literary award for gay non-fiction named after Shilts.   

 

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

At the turn of Fortune's wheel, one is deposed,
                  another lifted on high to enjoy a short exaltation.
                                                          Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, Carmina Burana
 

Although I had resigned from an active role in my CIW buddy team when Chuck's illness reached crisis proportions, I remained as team secretary.  After the death of John, my first client, I had also trained to do clinical intakes of new clients – the number of people looking for services had become like a tidal wave, the numbers were so great that limits had to be set on the number of new people that could be seen each week.  Almost everyone who called GMHC for help got an in-depth intake interview, which was intended to allow the person to talk about his needs and consider possible future situations, and for the interviewer to explore how GMHC might be of help. These were done at GMHC's new quarters on several floors above a bar on the corner of West 19^th and Eighth Ave, or if necessary at the person's home or in the hospital.  I continued to do these regularly until 1995.  During those years I met with gay men, of course, but also lesbians, straight drug users, drag queens, women who had been infected by their husbands, and even a blood drinker.

When doing buddy work as a CIW or CMP I was frequently bothered by feelings that things were not going well - that somehow I wasn't making the right connections.  But the intake interviews were something that I just seemed to have a knack for, they were the best work I ever did for PWA clients at GMHC.   I still have vivid memories of some of those many people.  And even now, a decade and a half later or more, some of these people appear in my dreams once in awhile.  I can remember times at the end of a three or four hour "interview" conversation when the client and I stood up and put our arms around each other as we said good-bye – moved, emotionally exhausted, sad and happy – both feeling that something good had happened.  And this was not an experience limited just to the gay interviewees.     

Doing intakes meant that I was at the GMHC offices more often than in the past, and I got to know some of the staff members in Client Services better.  Bob Cecchi (who was now the clients' Ombudsman at GMHC) and Gino both worked in the administration and through them I met more GMHC staff and volunteer team leaders.  So, while I experienced the changes at GMHC in these years from the viewpoint of a volunteer on a team – a position at quite a distance from the formal administration, of course – I was also aware of the concerns and feelings of the men and women on the staff who were closer to the personal conflicts and organizational upheavals at GMHC in those years.  

Just how badly some GMHC departments needed to be overhauled was tragically illustrated by something that happened on our team during 1987.  One of the CIW buddies had as a client, Sam, an immigrant to the U.S. who had had a series of low paying jobs, and had no insurance nor savings. He was referred to the Financial Department, whose job it was to analyze what benefits a client might be eligible for ( e.g. Social Security Disability, Medicare, Medicaid, NYC welfare, etc.) and to prepare the complicated application forms, check to be sure any required backup was included, and then send the application package to the proper agency – and follow up if problems developed.  It was the most utilized service that GMHC provided as persons with AIDS were often quickly pauperized by the cost of medications and hospitalizations. 

Problems were being encountered more and more often in dealing with GMHC headquarters as the number of people seeking services increased.  However, the Financial department had become notorious among volunteers and clients for foul ups.   

Sam had completed his paperwork and left it with the Financial department.  He heard nothing from any government agencies, but inquiries with Financial produced reassurances that things had been taken care of, help was on the way.  Sam's lover, fortunately, had a good job and savings and he began footing Sam's increasing frequent medical bills.  There were more inquiries, and more reassurances from GMHC Financial.  Sam had more serious complications, requiring more medications and hospitalizations.  Months had gone by, the inquiries from the Sam and his buddy got more frequent and more insistent. Sam became sicker, the buddy and the team leader appealed to the Financial department head.  The problems weren't with GMHC they were told.  The costs to Sam's lover were staggering, he and Sam were torn with anxiety about the financial situation, in addition to worry over Sam's increasingly poor health.  Sam died.  It was over a year after he had gone to GMHC for assistance getting his financial entitlements.  Sam, his buddy and the CIW buddy team had received a stream of reassurances from Financial, and they had meant nothing.  The team felt humiliated and betrayed.

Our team leaders complained, and Sam's lover sought legal advice.  And then it became apparent that yet another client assigned to the team was encountering similar problems – and he had the same financial advisor in the department as Sam had had. Stories began surfacing about other problems with this same person.

The members of our team decided that only a desperate act of brinksmanship could bring the situation to a head.  They agreed that as each buddy's client died, moved or for whatever reason was no longer assigned to the team, that buddy would not take another client.  The time would come, of course, when none of the buddies would have a client, and at that point the team would resign from GMHC as a group, citing the crumbling level of service.  (It is probably worth emphasizing that this was not a group of hot-head "kids going off half-cocked," but men and women who were deeply, even passionately, devoted to GMHC and their work as buddies.)  At the next team leaders' meeting at GHMC headquarters our team leaders informed their peers and the GMHC administrators who ran the meetings of our decision. 

Nothing like this had ever happened before – and coming as the epidemic was cresting it was a sure sign that the honeymoon was over.

There was some fast footwork -- the head of Financial was shunted to another post and immediately replaced on an interim basis by another staff member, the financial advisor in question was fired.  Our team was informed that he had had eighty complaints lodged against him during his first six months on the job, and yet his supervisor had protected him.  Furthermore, in his work space were found many financial application packages that he had never completed and sent out, and unresolved problems put aside.

The new broom swept furiously and well.  Over time – a relatively short time considering the backlog and problems – the new supervisor had things running far more efficiently.

I have no recollection now of hearing what Richard Dunne's reaction was to this – the extreme level of incompetence and ass-covering on one hand, and the active and dangerous (in regard to bad publicity) loss of confidence on the part of an entire volunteer team.  But it could only have spurred him on, I assume.  He had already embarked on a campaign to "professionalize" GMHC.  And he created a bureaucratic structure staffed with credentialed recruits that replaced the traditional grassroots gay leadership at GMHC, which began to isolate the GMHC administration from those they represented – as well as from many of its buddy volunteers.

Under Dunne's direction GMHC seemed strangely insensitive to the fact that events within the organization had a particular impact on the morale of the gay male population of the city.  Staff and volunteers certainly talked to their friends about what was happening at GMHC, and I remember that PWA clients of GMHC were very vocal about their experiences.  And their news and opinions spread through the gay male population of the city to a surprising degree.  Somehow – in my estimation - there was a puzzling failure to appreciate that many gay men had a very sensitive emotional attachment to GMHC – it was their hope, it might be their salvation and at the very least was a kind of psychological touchstone in frightening times. 

Three specific occurrences, which I wrote down in a journal, aroused concern from friends or acquaintances outside the circle of the formal GMHC organization. 

The first concerned Diego Lopez, who was the Clinical Director, or perhaps he was called Director of Client Services.  In any case, he was a Vietnam vet and had been one of GMHC's earliest volunteers.  He conducted part of the training session which I took part in – and it has been my understanding that he designed the training program, which became a model for other AIDS organizations.  Diego was certainly at this time one of the more recognizable names/faces of GMHC.   

I'd met Diego socially through my friend Bob Cecchi.  The last time was in the Pines in '85, as I recall.  I found him to be a very self-confident guy with a lot of energy and a sometimes overwhelming sense of humor.  He made a strong positive impression on me at the training, and Bob said that Diego was deeply committed to the issues that affected the clients.  I also heard from a couple of people that he and Richard Dunne were often at loggerheads, and that Diego was inclined to stick to his guns where the clients were concerned and not defer to Dunne.   

Diego became ill with AIDS.  The next thing I heard was really shocking news, which came from several staff members.  Diego had been hospitalized, and when he returned to work he found that his things had been moved out of his office.  It was not long after that he was out of GMHC.  The interpretation that I got was consistent no matter who did the telling, and it was that he was being given the message that it was time to leave whether he thought so or not. 

The story that traveled on the grapevine was terse and ugly:  Diego was a longtime GMHC member who was sticking up for the clients.  Dunne was a ruthless "outsider."   He used Diego's illness to get him out of the way.  (Many people seemed to know of Richard Dunne only as someone who came to GMHC from city government, and had forgotten or were unaware of his long association with GMHC.)  A gay neighbor from down the street, David, who knew I volunteered to GMHC, asked me if it was true what happened to Diego, and repeated the story.  I was dumbfounded that the story had come through the grapevine to David, and not from someone who was associated directly with GMHC.  The effect of the story, whenever it surfaced, was poisonous.  Diego died in late September 1986.   

I would have rather believed that perhaps Diego really had not been physically or mentally capable of doing his job as a result of his illness, and had been eased out for those reasons.  However, a couple of years later something happened which supported the assertion of ill-will in the original story. 

Someone who admired Diego's work and commitment asked a professional artist to do a painting to memorialize him, which he would then donate to GMHC.  (I knew the artist at the time, and saw the painting as it progressed.)  Instead of doing the usual portrait, the artist painted a still life of objects, each one representing a segment of GMHC's client population – gays, women, blacks, etc.  Among the objects was painted a framed photo of Diego.  The finished work was beautifully executed, and a tribute to the PWA clients of GMHC as well as Diego.  The organization was notified of the intended gift and asked to come and see it.  However, no one ever contacted the artist.  Other calls were made over months; finally someone did appear, who allowed as how the painting was indeed very nice, and GMHC would be back in touch to arrange for receiving it.  It never was. 

The painting was finally offered to Bailey House, which graciously took it.  Perhaps it may still be there.  I would like to think that Diego is still being appreciated, even if only passively by a painting hanging on a wall somewhere.       

The "professionalizing" of the GMHC staff was a more complex affair of organizational policy.  Ostensibly the goal was to fill positions that became vacant and new positions with individuals with credentials from the fields of social work, health, psychology, etc.  There were two hitches in this that caused demoralization among many of the staff.   

First, was the issue of what is usually called "grandfathering."  What this term means is that existing personnel/practitioners are excepted from the impact of changes in rules and requirements that would otherwise prevent them from advancing at work or practicing in a field of endeavor in which they were already active. As far as I heard, nothing was articulated about this when Dunne's goal of "professionalizing" was announced.  And I can clearly recall the profound negative effect this had on many staff members who did not have the degree requirements or previous experience in social work, psychology – but had been serving effectively at GMHC for years.  As one employee put it when I bumped into him at a coffee shop, they were going to end up being "squeezed out."  Another staff member sitting beside him said, "A polite way of saying dumped."  

Second, some of the initial new hires in this drive to "professionalize" looked to be far less qualified than staff members who were passed over.  Several, while having the desired academic credentials, had had only one or two post-college jobs and these did not involve AIDS.  They would for all intents and purposes be performing at a trainee level while in positions superior to the proven veteran employees who were passed over.  Three of these (now "not qualified") veteran staff members that I can recall found positions with other organizations or hospitals and left GMHC – taking their first generation experience and spirit away from the organization, and creating a sense of loss and uneasiness among the volunteers who had known and worked with them.    

How much unpleasant stories filtering out of the ranks of GMHC staff and volunteers disturbed the general gay male public I cannot gauge, but in regard to each of the incidents cited above I did have gay men who knew I volunteered at GMHC ask me about them.  However, there was one event which did have an unequivocal highly negative impact on gay men.   

GMHC had donation cans in every gay bar in town, I think.  And these cans – if Boot Hill and other Upper West Side gay bars are indicative – were a primary connection that many gay men had with the organization. Maybe you knew someone who used GMHC's services, maybe you knew a volunteer, maybe you read something about it in the Native - maybe - but nobody could miss the collection cans.  The collection cans stood for GMHC, they were – in an actual sense, I think - GMHC sign posts in the neighborhood. 

How much money was collected from this source I have no idea, certainly not enough to fund the organization, I'm sure.  And the job of collecting the cans and counting the money must have been labor intensive, even with coin counting machines. These statements are conjecture on my part, but they would explain why the new GMHC with the growing demands on it for services might have decided to do away with them. 

Whatever the case, one day they were gone.  "Where's the GMHC donation can?" was asked over and over again.  There was no official GMHC explanation offered at the bar level that I ever heard, and bartenders were left to parry with some very surprised men.  I remember the disbelief, and then the resentment and hurt.  It was like a light went out. "They took them away!" and the GMHC headquarters as a They became a sign of gay men's feelings of alienation.  In our neighborhood, which for a time had the second highest rate of AIDS in Manhattan, this was an ugly slap in the face.  "What's the matter, didn't we give enough"  In a real visual sense GMHC had withdrawn from the neighborhood.  Now it was "me" and "us" - and somewhere downtown "them."

The feeling tone (and the illusions) in everyday gay male life that had grown since the early days of the epidemic were running head on into the reality of mainstream demands for formalism and hierarchy - and the need for Big Bucks.  The people who had founded, volunteered and staffed GMHC in its first half dozen years were disappearing at the same time.  Organizational needs and death were producing a new GMHC. 

Regrettably, it was and remains my impression, that the executive director never seemed to sense, or wished to address, the disillusion at the grass roots level. 

In the closing years of the '80s there was a growing sense of disaffection among those volunteers who did buddy work too.  And this was communicated to the organization, I know, by the network of team leaders.  The "us" and "them" perception in regard to the GMHC headquarters was more pronounced in those men and women who had been volunteering since the mid-Eighties or earlier, than among those who had joined and trained under the changed organization.  Gino made the remark, "Next they'll take the G out of GMHC."  I thought the comment was his, but I soon heard those same words expressed off and on by many people in the closing years of the decade.   

At one of our team meetings at a low point in August '87, a volunteer had declared, "We don’t need them for anything but client referrals!"  And his remark was well received. It was a hyperbolic statement, of course – the buddy volunteers did need the GMHC headquarters for more than being assigned to client PWA's and then going on their own way with them.  Without the resources of 20^th Street volunteers would have wasted a great deal of time hunting for the information and leads which allowed them to help their clients resolve a multitude of problems.  Nevertheless, the PWA client's primary bond with GMHC was the relationship with their buddy, and for longtime buddies, at least, the relationship with the client was more meaningful than their identification with the organization.  And it was not unusual, in my observation, that the PWA-buddy pair shared a latent or low-keyed adversarial perception of GMHC headquarters. The view on the buddy teams that they were semi-autonomous islands was pervasive by this time in my experience, and expressed in exactly that geographical metaphor. 

 1987: AIDS MOMENTS

Five hundred thousand people marched in Washington, DC for gay rights.  Black actress Whoopi Goldberg referred to Ronald Reagan as "the fucking president" in a speech criticizing the administration's slow response to the epidemic. 

The AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed for the first time and it covered an area the size of two football fields.  If ever displayed in its entirety again, the quilt would stretch from the Capitol, past the Washington Monument, to the Lincoln Memorial.

Senator Jesse Helms, in presenting his amendment to curtail AIDS funding that presented homosexuality positively, referred to the civil rights demonstration as a "mob" and a "disheartening spectacle."

In 1987 there were 29,105  new cases of AIDS in the U.S., and 16,488 deaths.  Almost half still in New York and San Francisco. 
 

It is undeniable that GMHC's overall efficiency had improved under Richard Dunne's administration after its early slump, but at the price of an atmosphere of increasing formality and distance, which became substantial after the organization moved to slick new quarters in 1988 in a six-story building on West 20^th Street. The sense of GMHC as a place mutated into GMHC as a space.  Anyone who remembered the reception room on 19th Street - and William who worked the desk - knew when they encountered the reception area on 20th Street with its grey industrial carpeting and a receptionist behind a counter that it was a whole new ball game.  
                              West 20th Street

A new atmosphere of carping and disappointment was often in evidence at 20^th street.  Some staff members referred derisively to others as using GMHC as a rung on their "career ladder."  Standing talking to someone in the Client Services area and looking over a roomful of cubicles each with its occupant bent over a desk, it was a clone of the university computer center where I worked.  And the cynicism in the air was familiar.  I had been surprised, sometimes even shocked, in my early days working at the CUNY Central Office at how prevalent pettiness and feuding were at all levels there.  It seemed a long way from that lofty ideal, Education.  However, it was a part of it, and what I had in mind as Education still did occur on the campuses and in the classrooms, despite what I saw at the Central Office.  (Perhaps it doesn't need saying, but for someone who had been "around the block" more than a few times, I was still sometimes inexplicably juvenile in my expectations of people and institutions.)

In 1989 I wrote after a visit to 20th St. to do an intake interview: "See and hear too much when hanging around 20^th Street. Must disengage myself from that kind of contact and stick to doing intakes – and leaving.  I have reached the point of wanting to know nothing of what is going on there."

GMHC headquarters had taken on the appearance of the classic white collar factory.  But changes were inevitable and necessary, and there is a virtual inevitability in the growth of organizations that includes the development of  from-the-top-down attitude and an increasingly ham-fisted management style.  And, yet, the volunteer teams managed at the same time, even if very stressed by these changes, to maintain and communicate the spirit of personal compassion, people caring for people.  (Way back in my college years at Syracuse U., I had taken a course in the area of Industrial Sociology.  Looking at these years in GMHC now with what remains of the insights I gained from the course, this transformation seems quite typical and unremarkable from an academic viewpoint.)

It is lamentable, though, that the organization seemed to lose respect/confidence in the value of its grassroots and they for it.  A more reflective (and humble) look at the spirit of gay comradeship of the early years would have been salutary during this era of change.   And something as simple as a cadre of a dozen volunteers doing informal and no-bullshit style PR and information spreading on the streets and in the bars might have made a positive impact too.  However, time is an inevitable steamroller, and it must be said that as the earlier ranks of volunteers thinned considerably from death, burn-out and the need attend to personal commitments, the later volunteer recruits who replaced them accepted the changed organization as they found it.  In part this might have been due to the fact that many more of the new volunteers were straight women 

In the mid-Eighties City officials had been publicly saying that they shuddered to think of what would have happened in New York if gay men had not formed the Gay Men's Health Crisis and other organizations to care for the sick, educate the public and lobby for attention and funds.  And under Richard Dunne's leadership GMHC had developed new approaches in response to the changing nature and scope of the epidemic.  It expanded services to provide recreational opportunities and an in-house meals program for clients, and to inform them about experimental therapies and promote these therapies.  It also developed a more active public face.  GMHC began to lobby city, state and Federal agencies – often to good effect, and it was very active in creating and disseminating accurate information about HIV/AIDS – particularly important in light of the virulent homophobia and fear of AIDS unceasingly manufactured by political and religious spokesmen.  

Richard Dunne resigned as Executive Director at the beginning of September '89, and he died of AIDS-related causes at the end of December the following year. 

THE AIDS SPECTACLE

The charnel house atmosphere that had settled down over gay life in New York is what I remember most clearly – the nauseating stench of shit and puke combined with the piercing, tear-inducing odor of chlorine disinfectants, a shaded light next to someone sitting a death watch, ravings of the demented...closed bars, closed stores, empty apartments...ravaged faces and corpselike bodies...the unceasing spew of evangelical Christian hatred from television and the Internet and the homophobia and obstruction of New York's Cardinal O'Connor...the incredible weariness of trying to cope with it day after day.   

The crucial political battles and the desperately needed medical breakthroughs, and the pivotal, transforming activism of ACT UP in Washington sometimes seemed like bulletins from a distant front coming back to a city under the blitz.

17th cent. "plague doctor  

But there was another aspect to the plague that was as close and inescapable as the death and dying – a kind of midway of hope and promises - the AIDS spectacle of researchers, activists, conspiracy theorists, demagogues, good guys and bad guys, gurus and poster boys...chemical cures, talismans, herbs...creeds and messages, and healing crystals and books...and tapes, tapes, tapes by every channeler of spooks from other spheres.  Empowerment and quackery were hawked with equal vengeance.

My life during these years was taken up with caring for friends, and doing buddy work as a volunteer for GMHC.  These activities became a second job, and my contact and involvement other organizations was minimal.  As I said above, what else was going on in this era often had the quality of news from another front.  For that reason I have put information and anecdotes about these groups together on a sub-page, and here and there in the main pages there are internal links that will take the reader to sections of it.  If you wish to check out that page from the beginning (it has material about the PWA Coalition, Michael Callen, Louise Hay, Marianne Williamson, ACT UP, "innocent victims" - the Ray brothers, Ryan White and Kimberly Bergalis, etc.) the following link will take you to the top of that page (use your browser's Reverse arrow to return to this point): The AIDS Spectacle.

                                                                                                                    CHUCK

This human form, his friend's....was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of pestilence,
and he could do nothing to avert the wreck.
                                                                                                                             Albert Camus
                                                                                                                             The Plague

My friend Chuck and a mutual acquaintance, Billy, who was a close friend of his were working together in '83.  Both were "not feeling well" with similar complaints; finally they bolstered each other's courage and went to an HMO on West 79^th for an examination and blood tests. (There were no tests specific for the HIV anti-body at this point.)

The doctor assured them both that there was no reason to believe that they had "it."  However, both continued to be bothered with various symptoms.  Billy decided after a while to go to another doctor, Chuck wasn't interested.  This time Billy was told that he was definitely symptomatic for AIDS.  Chuck angrily refused to see a doctor, and seemed to resent Billy's second visit and what it disclosed.   When I saw Billy in October '84 he looked good.  Billy was sometimes called "Billy Sunshine."  He was quite tall and had a head of thick, very curly golden blond hair - I could always spot him on the crowded rush bus we both took across 79th Street - and although he was sometimes a bit shy, he had a wonderful grin, which pretty much reflected his disposition.

Billy left the city and went back to the Boston area where his mother and sisters lived, and where he could get medical treatment as good as he could get in New York.  He was down on a visit to Chuck a year later, and I stopped over.  He had lost weight and was pale, but most startling to me was the Hickman line hanging out of his chest.  (The Hickman central line is a tube or catheter placed into a large "central" vein close to the entrance to the heart for patients that need repeated and long term IV medications)  He was sitting on the couch, I knelt in front of him and held him.  A month later he was dead.

His mother and sisters came down to New York at the middle of the month for a memorial service in Chuck's apartment.  The number of people crowded into the place must have pleased his family, and that fact that many of them were not younger people Billy's age (he was in his late twenties), but middle aged people that he had worked for or known.  I had made a music tape Chuck asked for, and the "service" consisted of people recounting anecdotes about Billy, or reading selections that reminded them of him.

One man read ee cummings' poem on Buffalo Bill, which ends with the line:

		and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death 

Several people gasped.

When everyone who wanted to had spoken, one of his sisters talked about a notebook that Billy began keeping after he returned home.  I had not known him
as a studious sort of person or even very introspective, but his journal showed a curious – and courageous – individual looking at his life and oncoming death.  
Some of what he wrote suggested he may been reading about Gnosticism and the Persian Muslim mystic Rumi.  She read one of the last entries, perhaps it was the
very last.  I have unfortunately lost the copy I made, but it was similar to this translation from Rumi that Karol Szymanowski used for the vocal part of his Third 
Symphony: Song of the Night. 

I and God, alone together in this night!
What a roar! Joy arises,
truth with gleaming wing is shining in this night.                          

In the months after Billy's death Chuck became almost a recluse and very unwilling to talk even on the phone.  It was impossible to know how much was "not feeling well," and how much was depression.  Finally, one day late January '86, he surprised me when he telephoned to say he was dropping over, and when he showed up he was in a much better mood than he had been for a long time.

By early June he was full of his usual piss and vinegar again, and out of the blue he gave me what was nothing less than a glowing tribute for "all your support for a year and a half."  I was really flummoxed by this!  Much of our contact during that time had consisted of telephone calls or visits marked by long, excruciating periods of silence, during which I desperately wanted to be anywhere else but where I was.  I had come to fucking dread getting in touch with him.  I certainly appreciated what he said, but I felt a bit guilty because what he felt as "support" I had experienced as something I dreaded. 

In late July he went on a short selling trip to the Hamptons, when he came back he said he was feeling horrible again. After six weeks of delay seeing a doctor, he had an appointment and was diagnosed with chronic active hep and anemia in late September. My life became frazzled. My GMHC client, Kevin, was declining at this time, and Chuck's health continued to get worse – just as my GMHC client Kevin died, Chuck had to go into the hospital. Once back at home his life shrunk to his apartment again. He was often overcome by lethargy and nausea, but then sometimes he had brief periods of feeling better – or at least "better" relative to feeling shitty. (Having experienced a prolonged period of what was diagnosed as autoimmune hepatitis, I did not question the diagnosis he received for his symptoms.)

The bottom fell out in February '87. I had accompanied him to the hospital for a test - he was diagnosed with CMV (cyclomegalovirus,) a member of the herpes family which can attack the linings of internal organs or the optic nerve.  To me this had to mean AIDS. He was hospitalized, and the next day he emerged from a discussion with the doctor looking horror-stricken. The doctor had said it – AIDS.

Chuck was in the Co-op Care unit of NYU Medical Center. This is a special facility where you stay in a motel-like room, eat in a common dining room and go to a treatment floor for many of your procedures – providing you have a live-in care partner or partners with you during your stay . Pete (a friend Chuck had taken as a roommate to help stretch his money), Mack (an old friend of Chuck's who just kind of showed up) and myself took turns staying with him. Several weeks later he was released and had to have daily visits from a nurse from the Visiting Nurse Service (VNS.) His nurse, Barbara, was terrific, and she clicked with Chuck immediately.
                                                                                                                                                      NYU Medical Center
When he was released and back home, he called me over one day.  He abruptly announced that he had given me his general power-of-attorney, as well as his medical power-of-attorney, and I was to be the executor of his will.  Furthermore, he wanted to take any cash he had in the bank and open a joint account in both our names so that I could write checks to cover his expenses if he could not.  I was used to Chuck's  peremptory way of dealing with people, and his streak of almost indomitable stubbornness.  This time, however, I sensed he was springing things on me without any discussion out of fear I might refuse rather than bossiness.

I accepted, of course, though I started to say that I wasn't comfortable about the joint bank account aspect of his plans.  But he suddenly leaned toward me and grabbed my hand, and tears ran down his face.  "Please promise me ," he pleaded.  "Keep me at home."

Pat asked me to ask Chuck if he could come over to visit.  They had once been good friends, until Pat had caused a rupture in their relationship by walking out on a job with Chuck's boss without saying so much as a kiss-my-ass as soon as he got his first paycheck.  Chuck caught the shit for this stunt, of course.  Pat had never apologized, and they hadn't spoken for years.  Chuck was quiet for awhile before he answered my question, then he said, "Tell him no, the time for him to talk was three years ago."

It was mid-April when I realized that I couldn't juggle – physically or emotionally – my GMHC client at the time ( Ralph + his crackhead girlfriend) and Chuck. I took a leave of absence from being an active CIW buddy.

Two days later Chuck was back in the hospital: pneumonia this time - the lung-shreddng pneumocystis carinii. After almost a month things are looking up; they are telling him he will be able to go home in a couple of days. When I go back the next day – catastrophe! Enormous changes at the last minute. Instead being homeward bound, they are going to remove his left eye! Like what? The CMV had infected it, and since he would soon be totally blind in that eye they want to remove it ASAP in hopes that the infection will not travel up the optic nerve to the other eye. His vision had always been lousy and he wore a very strong prescription, so this meant that his remaining vision would be very poor.

This is probably the appropriate time to mention Chuck's doctor, the thus far unmentioned man I shall call Dr. X.  He was a specialist at the hospital who had been called in on consultation early on, and by virtue of his area of expertise and the fact that he had an office on the Upper West Side, Chuck picked him to be his personal physician.  The nursing staff were very contemptuous of Dr. X - and their demeanor was so cold when he engaged them it was like watching the iceberg approaching the Titanic.  One of the nurses told me that when Dr. X first begun dealing with AIDS patients he used to stand in the patient's doorway in full hospital drag, including a mask, talking to patient from a distance, while all the time nurses pushed past him, going in and out to deal with the patient's needs.  I found him very remote the two times I saw him with Chuck.  The woman who was Chuck's GMHC buddy took him to Dr. X's office on his rare visits and was present during the consultations, she told me that the visits were extremely brief, and that he never discussed Chuck's treatment with him but simply gave him terse orders and dismissed him.  I suggested to Chuck that he should consider changing.  He angrily refused to even discuss his relationship with Dr. X. 

Why, when there were many doctors - gay and straight - who were well thought of by their patients did he stick with this uncommunicative man?  I never really found out, but over the time of Chuck's illness some things came out which may have pointed to why:  For one thing, medical information seemed to terrify Chuck, so the less the better.  And then one day, out of the blue, he began sobbing when we were in his apartment talking.  He said that he had been never appreciated how much Billy had suffered until now, he had been unsympathetic and hard on him when he was sick!  I got the message that Chuck felt that his misery was a kind of pay back.  (I had had just a couple of fairly brief visits with them together after Billy had become ill, and nothing I saw - or that Chuck said to me during that time - prepared me in the slightest for Chuck's "confession."  I have continued to think that under the pain and pressure of his own illness he might have been misjudging things with Billy very badly.  Finally, there was the fact that Chuck was strong-willed and could be a bully.  One prolonged standoff between Chuck and I several years before had shown me that he would only get hold of his overheated emotions when he was faced down with an iron will.  Maybe he needed Dr. X's brusque, authoritarian manner to keep a grip on himself - just shut up and obey.

Except as the occasional dispenser of prescriptions, Dr. X. really was a non-player.

The one thing Chuck had held onto between his aborted release and the loss of his eye was the offer by a friend to use his room in a house in the Pines for a week, if he is able. Chuck had vowed he will be able, and I had promised to go with him if he is...almost convinced that it could never happen. He's released in late May, and in a month at home he slowly regains some vigor. Now it's D-Day, and we are heading for the Island. 

Chuck has a Hickman line implanted in his chest by now, and we are carrying more IV bags than luggage. But we go.  (And a voice in my head is saying, "I don't fucking believe this.  Who do you think you are?  The Lone Ranger?") 

After we arrive, while Chuck is resting, I sneak off to the doctor to check out the lay of the land in case of an emergency. (The community customarily gave  doctors the use of a house for vacation time in return for their holding office hours while they were out there.) I go in, we shake hands and I sit down across the desk from him. This particular doctor was so straight he smelled straight, and as soon as I mentioned being there with a friend who had AIDS, he gets up from the desk and goes to stand on the other side of the room, leaning against a file cabinet. I sniffed under my arms, certain that I must have suffered sudden and massive deodorant breakdown. All I wanted was info on emergency resources, in the unlikely event something super-bad should happen; all he wanted was for me to get off the Island with my friend - NOW!  Now, please...now, now, now, he urged.  He was obviously terrified that he might be called upon.  The visit was obviously pointless; so I left, with our medical stalwart on the verge of pissing his pants.

However, there was an angel waiting. The house was large, with a pool, and was shared by two owners and two (or three) other guys. Plus there was an additional roommate, Mike, who had a room for the summer in return for being a sometime "houseboy." He was a good looking, well put together guy just under his mid-twenties - and he had never spent any time with someone with AIDS I was to learn later. Except for Mike, the other occupants had already departed to the city for the week.  Aside from introductions Chuck and I spent the evening alone the first night. The next day Mike came in to talk while I was in the kitchen making sandwiches -- the poor guy was clearly walking on eggs, not sure what to do, what to say...etc. At some point I went for a walk, and when I came back Mike was sitting and talking with Chuck, who had moved to the living room to lie next to a heater. He watched while I hitched up the IV, and was (understandably) taken aback when Chuck lifted up his shirt and he saw the Hickman line hanging out of Chuck's chest. The next time, he said, "Show me." (The fucking doctor can't get far enough away, and this "kid" is saying, "Show me."  Go figure.)  And from then on, except to sleep, he hardly left Chuck's side. Chuck was not holding up well, and stayed on a chaise lounge in the living room by the stove, even sleeping next to it.

A few times when I got up in the middle of the night to check on him, I heard him and Mike talking. Late Friday afternoon he saw us off at the ferry, and we waved to Chuck's friend who was just arriving for the weekend. We boarded the ferry. It chugged around and headed slowly to the entrance of the harbor, as we passed out into the bay Mike was standing alone at the harbor entrance, waving goodbye.

I was still doing Client Intake interviews for GMHC (one of the interviews was with a guy who had been a Sunday night dancer at The Saint like myself) and I was acting as team secretary.  But these activities seemed like a furlough from what was now "real life." For the rest of the summer Chuck was better than he had been on the Island.  Pat came to his terrible end in July, and I had to tell Chuck. Chuck sat down and with some help was able to slowly and carefully write a note to Pat's sister, whom we both had known, even though he could now barely see with his remaining eye.

Late in the spring Gino had gone with me when I stopped in to see Chuck, despite working for GMHC he didn't see people in Chuck's condition coming into the office. He began to cry on the stairs as we left. As Chuck took up more time in my life, I thought I sensed a change in the relationship with Gino. Sometimes I felt that he was treating me with a strange kind of "politeness." In August it became clear why: he ended our relationship as he had started one with someone else he met on a holiday shortly after I had gone to the Island with Chuck.

Chuck began to slide rapidly down hill. He said the light bothered him, and had Pete nail dark cloth over all the windows - now once you entered the apartment there was no outside world.  Chuck was practically blind in his remaining eye, he developed a huge ulcer in his mouth, and at one point he doesn't even have the stamina to take the entire four units of blood he is scheduled for at the hospital.... On one visit we could only hold each other. Another day when I thought he was too tired to talk, he said, "I am weak – not tired – I can listen." He was no longer always aware when he was urinating or defecating. I got plastic sheeting and diapers from Alan, who had been a neighborhood pharmacist as long as I could remember. A fine man, and a kind one to many gay men in these years.

October 18th, coming home late from Chuck's, I wrote:

"At last I see Chuck dying, and I feel in myself his dying for me. He is in pathetic condition: practically physically helpless, devastated with fever attacks, too weak to be able to take care of his basic needs, BUT totally free of any outside concerns or hassles, no anger now. Clinging and filled with gratitude for the smallest things."

One Saturday morning, just as his sister from the suburbs arrived to visit, Chuck pitched into a crisis.  Barbara the VNS nurse and I had to call an ambulance when his doctor didn't answer our emergency call, so Chuck and his poor sister and I had a Wild West ride to Beekman Downtown Hospital at the bottom of Manhattan.  He rallied. In two days Chuck checked himself out of the hospital, and the doctors called me at work, telling me he's dying, there's nothing they can do for him that the three of us can't do.     

I had started hiring home health care workers just two days before this happened, and swung into high gear on that again. I told the agency that a "candidate" had to pass three tests: Chuck had to like them, they had to be able to deal with the turnstile appearances of the three of us, and they had to be willing to let Chuck do absolutely anything he wanted that was not going to cause immediate harm or pain to himself.  The acid test turned out to be sitting on a kitchen chair in front of the open refrigerator door with Chuck for an hour, while he held your hand and rhapsodized over the beauty of ketchup bottles, tuna salad leftovers, yesterday's soup, Chef Boyardee spaghetti cans, etc. – a kind of Andy Warhol meets Steven Levine approach to death and dying.

And such people did exist: first, Ruth – full of razzmatazz and good humor (Chuck called her "Pearl" because she reminded him of Pearl Bailey, and sometimes I think he thought she was her); then Betty – solemn, agreeable and imperturbable. And, finally, the woman we were waiting for, the magical – if somewhat far-out – Rosa. With these three incredible black women the day was covered. Pete lived in the apartment, and Mack and I started staying overnight off and on too. One Tuesday night he toured the apartment, as if in a trance, sometimes seemingly not aware of us at all, picking up objects – talking aloud about what they were, sometimes talking to them. "He's saying goodbye to his home," Rosa said. From that night on he was delusional most of the time. Thursday he said at one point, as if it were a comment about the weather, "I'll last two days." Late on Friday night, the three of us were there and Rosa too. His bedroom opened through an arch onto the living room. He asked for music, Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert.  In fact, he insisted on it – it played all night on auto-reverse; every time we stopped it, thinking he was unconscious, sooner or later he would say he couldn't hear it. He got up, carrying his pillow. He wanted all the lights out. We lit a couple of small votive lights to be able to see each other. Later he went and lay down on the floor, blocking the front door of the apartment. We covered him with blankets and let him stay there.

Rosa had seemed a most unusual person – with a very streetwise manner in some ways – and she handled Chuck perfectly, no matter how sunk in delusion he was. She had asked a lot of peculiar questions of each of us and had made some disturbing observations, all of which seemed to point in the direction of something psychic, for lack of any other appropriate label. I found out she had a "sanctified church" background, but had left to be out on the street where she found less "calling down" of people and more "teachers" in unexpected persons. Several times during the night she began to tremble violently, and spoke in an awed voice of powers coming and going in the room. I sat beside her, thinking, and decided that I had failed Chuck: I had been postponing the natural and merciful end that I had promised he would have.  Tomorrow, after the nurse came, I would stop all IV medications and hydration. At that very moment Rosa seized my hands in hers, and shouting, said, "Your hands are going to do great things!"

It scared the piss out of Pete and Mack, and I really could have used a cup of Valium just then.

Waves of incredible tension and calm alternated all night - and that fucking music never stopped. From time to time we would creep over to the door to see if Chuck was still alive, and then hold his hands for awhile. At dawn – it was Halloween - he abruptly got up, walked into the living room and lay down on the couch.

The Visiting Nurse, Barbara arrived, she did her stuff, and then I called her into the dining room to talk.  I was "taking over" the medical decisions, I told her,  as I had the Medical Power of Attorney and Chuck was clearly not competent.  I told her that I had decided to terminate all mediation and hydration.  Rosa left, Betty came and we sent her to the laundry with the last of the sheets.  I asked Barbara to call the VNS supervisor, who could not have been cooler and nicer, I asked VNS to call Chuck's doctor (as I hated his guts.)  Chuck was completely incontinent – but it was all blood and tissue, he was lacking platelets. Barbara said goodbye.  I unhitched the IV, and we sat there.  After awhile I took his pulse.  There was none.  When Betty came back we asked her to come and look at him.  She stopped at the doorway and looked in.  "He be dead."

After some time to collect ourselves, we got busy.  Chuck's sister called from the airport, where she was meeting her parents who had come up from Florida - I had to tell her that her brother had just died.  Pete went from window to window, pulling off the dark cloth coverings that had been stapled to the frames, and throwing them open.  The funeral home had to be called, and then the doctor, who had to agree to sign a death certificate before they would come to pick up the body.  Pete and Fred crawled out the living room window and sat in the sun on the roof over the building entrance.  Barbara, the VNS nurse, called to see how Chuck was doing.  Rosa called - she said, "I knew he would go today."  I heard Pete shouting my name from the other room at the top of his lungs.  I ran in.  He was horrified.  We had not pulled the blanket up over Chuck's hands and face.  Flies had come in through the open windows while we were doing other things, dozens of them covered his face.
 

                  LOST

A month after Chuck's death (October 31, 1987) , all of the busyness that comes with death – the funeral, paying bills, lawyers, breaking up a home – was pretty much out of the way.  I had moved out of the old Upper West Side neighborhood earlier in the year – after twenty-seven years there - part of a gay attrition caused by the death and disruption of the epidemic.  Mack lived north of NYC in the country, and Pete had decided to move up there with him - these were the two other guys who had helped take care of Chuck.  I was now in a furnished studio apartment on the top floor of a (literally) crumbling Federal house right off Stuyvesant Square, just a bit north of the East Village.  It was a historic and very pretty patch of the city, though after dark the park was populated not only by dog walkers, but addicts and dealers too, and some nights you could hear burglars walking across the roof and testing the trap door to the top floor.   
     View of part of the Square.

Anti-gay graffiti had popped up around town after the "Disco Sucks" riot.  On my rare daytime trips to the East Village I had thought there was more there than elsewhere, which I attributed to the fact that the neighborhood attracted many young white visitors.  "Hate gays" and "kill fags" seemed to have become a graffiti fad.  With the epidemic, scrawlings about "AIDS fags" had joined the hate parade.  Now that I lived in the Stuyvesant Park neighborhood I was often in the East Village, or I often went down Bowery to Chinatown.  I realized that the homophobic graffiti was thickest around the area of CBGB, a famous rock club on Bowery -  I used to wonder how many of the customers would have liked to bash me.  Each time I passed that area it felt like it was bad juju!
                                                                                                                                                              Chinatown

Gino made attempts to be supportive, but his new relationship was already proving a contentious one, and he was by nature very fearful of any emotional deep water besides.  Our phone calls and occasional visits really hadn't much substance, and I was rapidly drifting into psychologically bleak terrain.  I was physically and emotionally lethargic, sleeping or just lying under the covers in a numbed out state of mind, as often as I could.   

One weekend late in November I thought a lot about Chuck, not the time he was ill, but the many years before.  I wrote down how much he had helped me, and ended by saying, "He is the person I would go to now, but that is part of what I have to come to terms with."

A few days later I wrapped up a half dozen things in brown paper and put people's names on them, just small things I'd had for the past few decades. The next night I took out a large bottle narcotic painkillers, plus some stomach tranquilizers, that I had taken from Chuck's place when we cleaned up.  I called up Pete in the country, and in the course of a wandering conversation, we suddenly fell into the middle of what had been going on with me.  And though I didn't say exactly what point I had reached that night, he hit on the right on track and provided enough impetus for me so that I put that stuff away when I hung up.  I lay awake all night; there were no great changes with the sunrise, it just seemed a matter of having the will to plug away with what was at hand.  But I felt that I did not have that will.     

However, what was most "at hand" was obvious.

I told GMHC that I was ready to take another client. In truth, I was probably no more "ready" for that than I was to be midwife to a whale.  But I was relatively healthy and able at a time when thousands of gay men were dying; it seemed shameful now (even evil, perhaps) to throw that away when so many others around me were perishing. 

For some little while I did feel better about where I found myself, when I had thought I might read myself out of it.  I started by returning to the Meister Eckhart book I'd bought a decade and a half ago, and then that seemed to point to another Medieval mystic, Hadewijch the Beguine. (Her name almost always conjured up the image of Beulah Witch from the 50's Kukla, Fran and Ollie TV show!)  And from there briefly to a fellow named Ruusbroeck, until I lit on an anthology of Friends' writings – John Woolman and Thomas R. Kelly may have had something to say that I was really capable of grasping.  And then something there pointed me toward Ouspensky – a difficult read, to say the least, and I only made it about a quarter of the way through one book.
     Beulah Witch, not Hadewijch

But this "uplifting" reading wasn't really doing me as much good as I wanted.  Of course, what I wanted was a "magic pill" that would make me feel "all better," and I was working a con, making myself believe that this esoteric reading would produce an equivalent effect.  However, I wasn't together enough to realize (or admit, perhaps) that I was resorting to this spiritual reading program with a hocus-pokus attitude more appropriate to astrology.

I had neither the aspiration, nor the grace of these people I was reading – and in the case of the Medieval mystics, especially, not their belief in a God either.  All too often I found myself, particularly with Hadewijch willfully twisting meanings to fit my own dealings at a very mundane and selfish level. And yet I didn't doubt the truth, whether it was about Divine Love or human love, that one is only fully committed to the beloved if you are ready to give him/it up.  That struck a resonant chord, at least, in that whether it was Chuck with AIDS or the port-in-the-storm relationship with Gino, this was at the crux of the matter.  I did ignore with determined effort, though, the acceptance of desolation which the mystics were also so emphatic about.  Hadewijch was particularly annoying in this respect, and I finally decided that she was entirely too smarmy to deal with and needed to be put in her place - which was back on the bookshelf. But then, she and the rest of the Medieval cohort were having ecstasies over the ineffable Divine, whereas, truly, I wouldn't have been disappointed with the consolation of a big thick pec just to rest my weary head against.  Clearly, I was not in their league.    

However, I wasn't ready to give up on my spirituality-for-an-atheist reading program.  I had gotten bogged down with Ouspensky, who while interesting, was a pisser to read.  In discussing his own thoughts, he made remarks several times to the effect that the Buddhists had almost gotten it as right as he did.  And I thought, well, if they only "almost" got it, maybe they are only almost as enervating to read.  I browsed around the old Weiser's book store on Lex and 24^th, and picked up a copy of what looked virtually like a Buddhist primer, What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula. 

Turned out this book has never been out of print since it was first published, and had become something of a perennial beginners book.  I read it, and for me, it was - okay, the train stops here.  A great deal of it made sense to me, and I felt I'd gotten ahold of something that just maybe I might turn myself around with - or maybe just go ahead with as I was. 

There were several Buddhist centers near my neighborhood, and at the first meeting I ventured to I met Ludis, a gay Latvian-American guy, and we hit it off as friends.  He was deeply attracted to the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism, though I was not – it was too far from the simple Theravadin tradition that originally struck me in Walpola Rahula's book. Nevertheless, about a year later I did later accompany Ludis upstate in July '89 to stay at a Tibetan monastery for the weekend, and I scattered part of the ashes of another friend there.  I also "Took Refuge" while I was there, which is a simple rite of commitment to attempt a Buddhist lifestyle, the equivalent to joining a Christian religion. 

Later on I began attending a Korean Zen center that was close to my furnished digs at Stuyvesant Square.  I liked meditating with a group, and the people – all American whites, Hispanics and blacks, no Koreans – were totally accepting of me as a gay person.  I was a member for a couple of years, and participated in most of the activities of the center.  And I found the people very warm and friendly, which certainly helped turn things around for me. 

The Zen traditions and ceremonies, like the Tibetan, did distract from what had attracted me in the beginning, and in late '91 I began to meditate on my own and attended a couple of  retreats at a "plain vanilla" center in Boston.  Finally, the journey that may have begun with buying the Meister Eckhart book to read on my lunch hour many years ago seemed to have found a direction, if not an end.

1988 - 89

MARK AND JAMES - AND WELCOME BACK TO THE AIDS EPIDEMIC 

In mid-January '88 I was assigned a client, Nessim, a very self-possessed, sophisticated young man of Coptic descent.  He had a lover, Erik, a handsome Swedish model, who was recognizable as having been the billboard and magazine face for a famous vodka.  Erik was often busy with work, and my role seemed to be mostly to run a few errands before the stores closed and listen to Nessim, who could hold forth intelligently on almost any topic it seemed – and would then quiz me afterward. It was an enjoyable and not very demanding relationship. 

Despite having an emotional life that ran a gamut from depressed to more depressed, being committed to seeing Nessim and helping out kept me putting one foot in front of the other.  Chuck's sister and I were in touch occasionally, and so were Pete and Mack, and these contacts, even though they were from a distance helped a lot. A "friendship," with increasingly less substance, sputtered along with Gino, and when he moved to another city with his boyfriend I found, not unsurprisingly by that point, that it left no hole in my life.   

At work had been moved out of our pleasant, modern quarters at the Computer Center on West 57^th Street to some grotty windowless space at Baruch College created out of former storerooms.  This was great for me as the college was located only about fifteen minutes from the Stuyvesant Park area where I was living now.  However, the move was an indication that our department had fallen out of favor, and my boss (the head of Management Information Services) was summarily dropped after years of service to the University, with hardly as much as a kiss-my-ass.  The department was in a state of turmoil; I was without a boss – and had lots of free time. 

The newsgroups on the Internet were beginning to be in a furor over the AIDS epidemic and some groups, sci.med.aids in particular, were full of important information – provided you had computer access.  And in these days many – most, I suppose – did not.  I decided to cull sci.med.aids and John James's unbeatable publication, AIDS Treatment News, and anything else helpful that I came across, and make it available to my team members in hard copy.  I had my terminal, an office alone and Ventura software...so every month I put together a pretty spiffy looking personal publication I called AIDSinfo Digest, ran off copies on a laser printer and gave them to our team leader to distribute.  (All the material was fully credited, though for articles that were basically interchanges from  newsgroups I deleted the computer ID's and usernames.)  

Things seemed to be lightning up a bit in my life. 

One of my friends from my former West Side neighborhood was a younger guy, Mark.  I'd met him earlier in the 80's when I'd been making tapes for the Golden Ass café – and wooing their cook, with some success.  Mark had been the waiter.  The Ass closed, and I hired Mark when we needed a temp in our office,  then later I got him an interview in the CUNY Computer Center where I had worked and he was hired there full time.  After a relatively short time he left, he was given all the work formerly done by another employee who'd quit, in addition to his own.  But no increase in pay, in spite of the fact he'd done both jobs extremely well, and streamlined his part of the operation.   
                                            Mark
We had become friends, and sometimes I had gone to The Saint on Sunday nights with him and his friends.  A friend of mine, Bill, had panted for an introduction to Mark one night after Mark came over to chat while I was in Boot Hill.  And to my great surprise they ended up going together very soon after I introduced them – it was a combination something like Tabasco sauce and cherry-vanilla ice cream, in my estimation. What did I know, I wasn't Dr. Ruth.   

One day in mid-February Bill called to tell me that Mark had had to be admitted to Roosevelt Hospital because he had developed an extremely serious infection after a dental procedure. A day or so later the hospital told him that he had tested positive for HIV.  He was abysmally depressed, and Bill, I thought, seemed strangely removed from Mark, considering the circumstances.  But Mark pulled it together and returned to work as a waiter in a bar/restaurant up the street from Boot Hill. 

Things went along well enough.  Nessim, my GMHC client, while very weak was otherwise okay, and Mark's life as far as I could tell went back to at least the appearance of normal. 

The morning of March 16^th, a red-headed guy peeked into my open office doorway, grinned and said, "Hi, do you work at GMHC?"  

Volunteer, not work at – but who was he?  His name was James, and he was an undergrad at Baruch, though he was thirty-three, and he'd heard about me from someone I'd done an intake with, as I recall.  He was HIV positive and had questions about various things.  He continued to drop by, and a bit diffidently one day asked if we could have lunch, and another day dinner when his afternoon classes were done...and very soon he had established this as a routine.  He was the one who was initiating the socializing, however, as I said in my journal, "...he makes me feel good and that's good for me."
                                                                                                                                                                                                        James
April is my birthday month, a fact I have not been sentimental about since age ten; nevertheless, it was a good omen, I thought, that it started off well.  James and I had Easter dinner with Gino and his friend, and another guest. And it was a very relaxed and pleasant evening. The following Wednesday we went to hear Marvis Martin, a singer who had gone to school with James's former lover (now deceased), and afterwards we stood in line to congratulate her.  She was very warm with James, and this meant a great deal to him. We went and had dinner in Hell's Kitchen, where he lived, and then went to his place and watched TV for a while.  As I noted at the time, it was the first time in almost a year I had been "able to let go and just be part of what was happening without some intense, if small, part of me held in watchful reserve."                 

And then April took a swan dive into an egg beater. 

A couple of days later Bob Cecchi told me that he was going to resign as the Ombudsman at GMHC – a function that he had perceived a need for in the early days of the organization, and which he had created and strengthened so that it was the organization's second most used department by PWA's.  Bob had been diagnosed in '81, and had been with GMHC since its earliest days.  This work – this service – had turned Bob's life around.  It was an achievement that had been honored by the City and by the governor.  Bob – and his two staff members, Bob and Catherine – had made a major difference in how people infected with HIV were treated in New York State.  But he told me he did not feel strong any longer and felt he might only have a year to live.  He wanted "one last summer."  

A week later I Bill...and then Mark.  Bill sounded as if he were actively behind Mark, which hadn't seemed to be the case when he was diagnosed.  But when I saw Mark, though, he looked very "distressed."  And very pale.   

James and I developed a close relationship, but not a sexual one.  We had a busy social schedule -- he'd gotten free theater tickets from GMHC for us for several shows, he came over to use the large table in my apartment to do taxes (this was one of his sources of income) and we were going out to the movies.  I noticed when I visited that  he had a copy of the book A Course in Miracles in his apartment. 
         A show James and I saw, lots of fun! 
He got a "cold" late in the month.  It got worse, and one day he came into my office having terrible breathing problems.  I took him down to my place to rest, and I was sure he was getting PCP.  His doctor said he would schedule a broncoscopy, but nothing happened.  I slept over at his place with him for two nights, and he spit up blood.  His apartment was one large room in a seedy old building on Tenth Avenue with drug addicts for fellow tenants, and only enough space in it for a fold-out futon bed that doubled as a couch when closed up.  To sleep next to someone, especially someone I cared about would have been wonderful, if it had not been for the fact that I got almost no sleep lying awake anxiously listening to his breathing and his coughing.  But remarkably, he started getting better. 
               
Then I got a frantic phone call from a woman I didn't know.  She was a friend of my GMHC client, Nessim.  Erik, Nessim's lover, had had a seizure while on a photo shoot – he was in a hospital in a coma, not expected to live. 

I spent the next week busy as a bicycle messenger.  Someone managed to get Nessim to the hospital once. James got worse again.  Nessim's friend called to tell me Erik had died.  When she told me what day, it was my birthday.  I'd missed it.  I helped James get to a specialist at St. Luke's Hospital for tests.  He had pneumonia and asthma.  Welcome back to the AIDS epidemic.   

However, by the 10^th of May James was doing much better, but on that day I got a frantic call from Nessim.  He had run out of oxygen which he had needed off and on because his lungs were so damaged.  I ran over and stayed with him till late in the evening, and by the next weekend his friend, Barbara, had convinced him that it would be better if he went to stay with his mother in the Bronx, instead of living alone.  I went over and said goodbye. 

The rest of May was very pleasant.  I spent a lot of social time with James, and we event went up the country and visited Mack and Pete for a weekend.  Mack was long-term house-sitting in the ritzy town of Katonah for a celebrity couple and while the house wasn't palatial, it was large and comfortable and set on a big piece of land with a large pond and stream.  Both James and I enjoyed it very much.  I had told my GMHC team that I would take another client as Nessim had probably relocated for good, but I wanted someone who didn't require a lot of attention. I heard nothing back.   

James and I continued to go out here and there, there was work, of course, the monthly GMHC team meeting, intake interviews at GMHC, and I went uptown and saw Mark, who looked good - I was truly beginning to feel that in the midst of what had clearly become a plague, my life was attaining an approximation of a pleasant normalcy nevertheless.  

The last week in June I got a call from Bill:  Mark had become weak enough that his doctor had decided to put him in St. Luke's Hospital for tests and observation.  This was kind of a pain in the ass as far as visiting went, because it is way up on the Upper West Side, next of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and a long couple of bus rides from where I was living.  I went up there every other day after work; he was becoming bored and untalkative.  Another week passed.
                                                            Vintage photo of St. John's Cathedral & St. Luke's Hospital.
It was on a visit during the day on Saturday that I ran into another guy.  His name was Rick, and he said he was a friend of Mark's.  He wasn't one of the gang of guys Mark had gone dancing with at The Saint some Sunday nights, and I couldn't recall Mark mentioning his name.  Turned out that he had met Mark and Bill in Boot Hill.

I marched in the Christopher Street Liberation (Gay Pride) March on Sunday.  I'd marched in the GMHC contingent in '86 and '87, and both times it was a high as the crowds lining the route often broke out in loud cheers when GMHC passed.  We went by St. Patrick's Cathedral and most marchers shook their fists and chanted, "Shame! Shame! Shame!"  Almost across the street cordoned into a space by Rockerfeller Center were the usual nest of hissing vipers – Orthodox Jews, Evangelicals with their placard and some Catholic wingnuts, the cream of New York's religious life shrieking, shouting and spitting, their faces twisted with hate like frenzied beasts in a cage. The GMHC contingent wasn't getting as much applause as in the past two years, but I took this as a sign that for lots of people we were becoming an expected part of the scene – which I saw as good thing.  At Madison Square the march stopped to observe silence for those who had died in the epidemic, and then a huge cluster of balloons was let go into the sky -- always a very tough moment for me, for everyone, probably.  But as our contingent moved below Twenty-third Street something really shocking happened.  A few people booed as we passed.  I was walking next to our team leader, and he turned white and looked stricken.  A few blocks later it happened again, and there was some hissing.  And a third time in the Village. (This happened again the following year as well.)  There was a lot of talk about it by team members afterward, and the consensus was that these outbursts had probably been from friends of guys who felt that they'd gotten fucked over by GMHC in one way or another – like the client our team had who never received any benefits because of some jerkoff in the Financial department.  But the organization was working hard to tighten up the bureaucracy.  Or maybe it was just guys who resented the changes in GMHC, the bureaucratic distance that had replaced the informality of the early years.  Maybe it was Act Up zealots.  Didn't know what the reason was, but it was a bummer.  I took the train uptown and visited Mark again.   

Monday he was the same, Wednesday he seemed confused.  Thursday after work when I stopped by, I was certain there was a big change.  Mark was very out-of-focus, illogical and restless – it seemed too extreme to be cabin fever.  I talked to a nurse, but according to her he hadn't been diagnosed with anything specific.  Friday, July 8th, Bill called me. Mark had had a massive seizure.  He was in the ICU in a deep coma and I wouldn't be able to see him. 

I decided to go up Saturday anyway, and I was able to see him in the ICU.  And see it was.  Just a few days ago I came across a description in David Wojnarowicz's book, Close to the Knives, of a hospital visit to a friend of his.  He shows the scene almost perfectly: 

There he is propped up in the white sheets with all the inventions of his day leading in and out of his body in the form of tubes and generators and pumps and dials and hisses and his eyes are bare slits with pearly surfaces glimmering inside them like somehow they've stopped reflecting light. 

The only note I would add was the regular high-pitched peep from one of the monitors.  As I sat there, I could not help listening to it, wondering if its pattern of sounds was changing.  Was it slowing down, speeding up?  It drove me nuts, and I couldn't stop looking at the jagged lines of light that bounced up and down across the screen. 

I came up Sunday, and Rick did too.  Monday part of Mark's family arrived – two of his sisters, who lived in New England, and, Mary, his very frail mother, who came up from Florida.  (She had great difficulty breathing in the NYC air.)  I liked them very much right away, really straight-from-the-shoulder working class folks, and very courageous. I thought Mark was done for, and no one of us had any reason to think otherwise.  Monday I went directly to the ICU before going to the visitor's lounge to see Mark's family. I sat down beside the bed and took his hand.  Mark opened his eyes and looked at me...his expression changed, he may even have smiled, I can't remember.  He was going to live.  I rushed outside, and his family were sitting together, looking relieved – he had begun responding earlier in the day.  On Tuesday he was even more responsive, and he was going to be put into a room on a floor devoted to AIDS patients.

Mark was like a beached shipwreck after a hurricane.  One of his arms was very weak, and the hand on that arm kept curling up in a fist.  One leg was weak, and he had no control over the foot.  His esophagus did not function at all well, so that he was receiving nutrition through an IV so he wouldn't choke to death.  He was also incontinent, and seemed to have only occasional awareness of the fact that he had had a bowel movement or urinated.  Where formerly he had been a very quick-witted and articulate guy, now his reactions were very delayed and vague.  While he said very little, his voice was clear, if very soft, and what he said was logical.

Mark's doctor was as big a problem as his physical situation.  I remembered several years before when Mark had been working for me, he complained that his doctor at the time (a successful A-gay) treated him brusquely and had made some remarks that Mark felt were dismissive of him.  I had been surprised because of this to discover when his AIDS problems began that he was still seeing this same guy. 

Rick and I talked things over with the family, and we agreed that we would visit him and take care of him physically, and Bill would manage all the paperwork connected with insurance, Medicare, etc.  When he became better enough to be released from the hospital, we would see what "better" allowed him to do at that point.  Mary, his mother returned to Florida, his sisters to their lives in New England.  Rick and I came every day.  He worked at night, so he came in the morning and left in the afternoon; I came up after I got out of work at five and left when visiting hours ended at night. 

Mark had carelessly never designated  Bill, or anyone else to have his medical power of attorney in the event he was unable to make decisions, or he may have indicated on his admittance forms that his mother was his primary contact.  (I no longer recall which.)  Mark's doctor insisted that he, therefore, had to clear all medical decisions with Mark's mother.  (In any case, Mark's father and sisters all worked during the day.)  Mary was very ill.  She had had TB, and though she had recovered from it, it had devastated her and she was extremely weak.  When the doctor began calling her, she requested that he consult with Bill, who had more knowledge and was closer to the situation.  For whatever reason he would not do this. (This guy was an A-gay with a very "lofty" demeanor, and it struck me that he had no respect for Bill or any of the rest of us.)  He continued to call Mark's mother, and his calls were having a bad impact on Mary's emotional and physical health.  And he continued to insist that he could not consult with Bill. 

The IV nutrition would be not sufficient to keep Mark functioning well over a long period of time, and his ability to swallow without choking showed no great improvement.

An unlikely deus ex machina appeared in the form of Carl. 

This was another friend of Mark's whom I had never met until now.  He was a cute fellow in his late twenties, with a Texas accent and a motor mouth, matched by a manic energy that didn't quit - until after two or three days as a human whirlwind he would disappear back to the studio apartment he shared with his father in the neighborhood and sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch.  Unbelievable as it seemed, he was HIV positive and had had some minor opportunistic infections.  Because of his hospitalizations at St. Luke's, and the fact that he had never stayed in bed while he was there, but roamed the entire building day and night, he knew everyone and everything about the place. 

He promptly informed us about Dr. C., his own doctor, who had been convinced early on that many PWA's died as a result of malnutrition as much as from disease.  He had published articles on his work in this area, and seemed the perfect guy to consult.  But how to do it without crossing swords with Mark's doctor, and without having this guy put Mark's mother on the rack again?  Leave it to Carl.  He explained to his doctor what the situation was, and the doctor agreed that if Bill would ask him to visit Mark, he would drop in the evening when Mark's doctor would not be around, but we would be. 

He proposed fitting Mark out with a gastro-intestinal tube, and then a prepared mixture of concentrated nutrients could be pumped into his stomach over a period of several hours two or three times a day.  It would require quite minor surgery in which a small incision would be made in Mark's abdomen and stomach for a small length of tube to be inserted, which would then be taped in place so it didn't fall out.  A longer line of tube coming from the pump would be attached to this for the feeding mixture. 
       
There was always a certain amount of mystery about what happened next.  But Mark's doctor was receptive evidently, though I gather that all the subsequent arrangements must have been in the hands of Dr. C.  Shazam! One afternoon when I entered the room, there was Mark with a tube sticking out of his belly, and a mechanical gizmo and a bag of feeding mixture on a metal pole beside the bed. 

But if we had now entered the Age of Medical Marvels, we had also entered the Age of Liquid Shit...an endless river of it.  Mark's incontinence had been a problem before, but as he ate almost nothing a diaper contained what little feces he produced. He had had to be checked, washed and changed mainly because of urination.

The nursing staff on this AIDS floor, and perhaps the nurses aides too, all volunteered for duty here, I was told.  Of all the hospitals in the city that I became familiar with during these years, the staff at St. Luke's was consistently tops.  They knocked themselves out to provide attentive care, and were consistently sensitive to the patients and their loved ones.  They – and the medical staff - welcomed Rick and I, and allowed us to take over as much of Mark's care as we were capable of.  And Carl sometimes stayed in the room well into the early morning hours, and even all night.   

At first most of our work was changing and washing Mark, and remaking the bed – time after time each day.  And then there was the ordeal of trying to see if he could eat small amounts of food – in the hope that eventually he would recover the ability to eat enough that the artificial feeding could be dispensed with. Communication with him was extremely difficult.  His response to even simple questions was very delayed, as if he needed to think about each and every word, and his answers were limited to three or four words.  He did, however, seem to recognize and remember everyone in his life.  But, to be blunt, he was hardly more than a zombie.  

EXIT DOCTOR

Somewhere along the line, perhaps after Bill had spoken to Mark's mother in Florida one day, I discovered that she had not been consulted by the doctors prior to the minor operation required to make the incisions in Mark's abdomen and stomach to receive the feeding tube.  Bill had certainly not signed any papers...which meant it must have been Mark whose permission had been asked. 

A light bulb came on. 

If Mark had been able to give his consent for this surgical procedure, then why couldn't he consent to giving Bill his medical power-of-attorney?  Two problems: Would any notary, when she saw him, believe that he knew what he was doing, and as he was so physically impaired would he manage to sign a document with a recognizable signature.  It was a very unpromising scenario. 

I found out through Carl that there was a very nice lesbian social worker on the staff, and I made an appointment with her and just dumped the whole truth on her about the problem with Mark's doctor and his mother.  And I told her that it looked like Mark himself had given consent for a surgical procedure. (I had never dared to try to locate the consent form for fear of arousing suspicions that we thought there had been a fly in the ointment.) Now we wanted, with the wholehearted agreement of Mark's mother, to get Bill into the picture.  She agreed to be a witness to the document, providing the notary was convinced that Mark knew what he was doing.

I then went to talk with the hospital notary.  I got the immediate impression that I should not look for an ally here, and I presented it as a simple case of Mark wanting to appoint Bill as he was located in the city, whereas Mark's mother was far out of town, very ill, etc.  (Hindsight says that it was crucial, of course, that she didn't know that Mark's mother was already being used to clear the medical decisions rather than Mark himself.) 

An appointment was made for the notary to come to Mark's room to present the document for signature and put her seal on it.  I told Mark this is what his mother and Bill wanted, and asked him did he want it...his response – delayed as usual – was one word, "Yes."  And I asked him several more times, and more – I was desperately hoping that this verbal routine would sink in enough that he would not be thrown when the notary, a woman he would never have seen before, would ask him. 

The moment of truth arrived. The notary tried to make a bit of chit chat with Mark, and his unresponsiveness clearly made her skeptical.  I asked him did he want to give Bill his medical power-of-attorney.  He said, "Yes."  I could have applauded, the social worker was beaming.  The notary droned through the whole document, and I watched Mark drift off into outer space. I told him it was time to sign, and he looked like he was drawing a blank.  I gave him the pen, but his writing hand was the one which was impaired and he couldn't hold onto it.  This notary was not going to buy an "X," I was certain, even if the Twelve Apostles witnessed it.  I explained what was obvious, that he had difficulty using his right hand, and I kept encouraging him to grasp the pen.  But he couldn't manage.  He looked more confused now. 

I put the pen in his loose fingers, and kept telling him to hold onto it as I tried to wrap his fingers around it.  "Sign your name."  And then,  I just closed my hand tightly around his, and began pushing his hand into an attempt at a signature.   

I expected the notary to scream, "Foul!" 

The result was a reasonable facsimile of his name as signed by a drunk.  I picked up the document and looked at the notary, and she was not buying this, I saw.  She did not reach out for the paper.  Certain we were fucked, I asked Mark, "Do you want to give Bill your medical power-of-attorney?" 

Mark looked at me with a furrowed brow – like what is it with you and this question?  But he said, "Yes." 

The notary nodded her head. She took the document, glanced at it and gave it to the social worker to witness and it was sealed. 

Revenge was sweet.  Quite by accident I was with Mark when his doctor came in a few days later.  He announced that some tests or something were going to be done, which he would have to consult Mark's mother about. 

I told him that Mark had signed a form giving Bill his medical power-of-attorney.  He looked at me with abject contempt and said – standing at Mark's bedside – "He's not competent." 

"When did he become incompetent?" I asked. 

"Since the day he had the seizure," the doctor said with an affected weariness, as if he were talking to a three-year-old. 

"Then that means he wasn't competent when the operation was done to insert the tube.  Who authorized that, no one asked his mother?" 

He looked at me with hatred.  "You son-of-a-bitch!" he said, and left the room. 

The next day Bill asked Dr. C., to be Mark's doctor, and he and Dr. D., a very communicative and agreeable younger gay doctor, looked after Mark as long as he was in St. Luke's. 

 

Nessim was still living with his mother, so my obligation to him had ended.  GMHC had another client, Andrus, who lived in Alphabet City, not too far from my apartment in Stuyvesant Square, and he seemed to want nothing more than an occasional visit, so I agreed to take the assignment.

The major question with Mark was "What next?"  And given his condition that question was really probing in the direction of How much time?  Dr. C. response was a question: Is there one thing that Mark wants to do more than anything else?

And there was.  Bill had a tiny, ticky-tacky house north of the city in a woodsie rural area very close to the Shawanagunk ridge near Dwaarkill.  Dr. C. said, "Okay, let's get him able to go there at least once."

Rick and I kept up our same schedule as when Mark had been in the ICU, and Carl appeared and disappeared like Tinkerbell with a Texas accent.  Rick was determined to get Mark walking again, a project that I was dubious about. Mark, I noticed, though no more spontaneously communicative than before, was definitely crabby when I arrived after work.  After crossing paths with Rick a couple of times on Saturdays, and seeing the interaction between them on this rehabilitation project I understood why.  It was a major contest of wills.  Rick was practically a drill sergeant, and Mark was resisting the drill with all his might – or did he really not grasp what it was about maybe.  I wasn't sure. 

It was clear to me that if I continued the drill when I arrived in the evening that Mark might well end up hating us both.  In any case, the fact were that I was tired when I arrived after work, and Mark was also much less "with-it" than he was when I arrived earlier in the day on weekends. So, I created the role o