fran lebowitz

In late September of 1987 as they prepared for DC the following appeared in the Sunday paper:

The Impact of AIDS On the Artistic Community

BY FRAN LEBOWITZ

Fran Lebowitz, the author of ``Metropolitan Life'' and ``Social Studies,'' offers a dozen short reports from a world attempting to cope with pain and loss.

1.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that when a 36-year-old writer is asked on a network news show about the Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community, particularly in regard to the Well-Known Preponderance of Homosexuals in the Arts, she replies that if you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be left with "Let's Make a Deal."
    The interviewer's lack of response compels her to conclude that he has no idea what she is talking about, and she realizes that soon many of those who do know what she is talking about will be what is generally regarded as dead.

2.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that on New Year's Eve Day, a 36-year-old writer takes a 31-year-old photographer to get a chest X-ray and listens to him say with what can only be described as a certain guarded hope, "Maybe I just have lung cancer."

3.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer has a telephone conversation with a dying 41-year-old book editor whom even the most practiced verbal assassin has called the last of the Southern gentlemen and hears him say in a hoarse whisper, "I'm sorry, but I just hate old people. I look at them and think, 'Why don't you  die?' "

4.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that an aspiring little avant-garde movie director approaches a fairly famous actor in a restaurant and attempts to make social hay out of the fact that they met at Antonio's and will undoubtedly see each other at Charles', and Antonio's and Charles' are not parties and Antonio's and Charles' are not bars and Antonio's and Charles' are not summer houses in chic Tuscan towns—Antonio's and Charles' are funerals.

5.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer is on the telephone with a 38-year-old art director making arrangements to go together the following morning to the funeral of a 27-year-old architect and the art director says to the writer, "If you get there first sit near the front where we usually sit and save me the seat on the aisle."

6.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 24-year-old-ballet dancer is in the hospital for 10 days following an emergency appendectomy and nobody goes to visit him because everyone is really busy and after all he's not dying or anything.

7.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-yer-old writer takes time out at a memorial service for the world's pre-eminent makeup artist and a man worth any number of interesting new painters to get angry because the makeup artist's best friend and eulogist uses a story she has for years been hoarding for her book which she can't write anymore anyway unless she writes it as a historical novel because it's about a world that in the last few years has disappeared almost entirely.

8.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer runs into a 34-year-old painter at a party and the painter says to the writer that he is just back from Los Angeles and he says with some surprise that he had a really good time there and he asks why does she think that happened and she says it's because New York is so boring now that Los Angeles is fun in comparison and that's true and it's one reason but the real reason is that they don't know the people who are dying there.

9.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer has dinner every night for eleven nights in a row with the same 32-year-old musician while he waits for his biopsy to come back because luckily for her she is the only one he trusts enough to tell.

10.   The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year old writer trying to make plans to go out of town flips through her appointment book and hears herself say, "Well, I have a funeral on Tuesday, lunch with my editor on Wednesday, a memorial service on Thursday, so I guess I could come on Friday, unless of course Robert dies."

11.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that when the world's most famous artist dies of complications following surgery at the age of 61 it doesn't seem like he really died at all—it just seems like he got off easy.

12.    The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that at a rather grand dinner held at a venerable New York cultural institution and catered by a company famous for the beauty of its waiters a 39-year-old-painter remarks to a 36-year-old writer that the company in question doesn't seem to employ as many really handsome boys as it used to and the writer replies, "Well, it doesn't always pay to be popular."

___________________________________________________________

DC 87 - preparation

I N the Workshop the machines drum round the clock now as the deadline for DC approaches, the sounds rise and fall in overlapping waves as eight people hunch over the tables and sew.  They had made a promise that quilt panels received by the deadline would make it to Washington.  No matter what hour people are pulling cloth under a pulsing needle, talking or concentrating or singing mindlessly.  At three a.m. all the shops on the commercial strip outside are dark, the sidewalks and streets empty, stools are upended on the bar tops awaiting the swamper.  At the wide intersection where Market and Castro intersect the bank of stoplights appear abandoned as they rotate through a purposeless cycle.  In the distance downtown San Francisco dims away to smudges under the fog cover of August but from in here light pours out the glass front wall, music pounds, people move and laugh, in here there is life.

The deadline date was arbitrary, they just assumed that giving themselves a one month lead they'd have time to get panels received by mid-September sewn into the quilt to be part of the March for Lesbian and Gay Rights.  They didn't know.  In early August they barely had one hundred, were hoping for 1000 and and the idle comment was made that it would hardly be noticed on that enormous length of grass mall that stretches from Capital Hill to the Washington Monument.

The Neiman Marcus at Union Square let them display quilt in its main windows, by 1987 the store had already lost too many young employees to the epidemic.  Some days a few volunteers would trek down from the workshop just to watch how people responded, none of it had ever been publicly shown and they'd never even seen it outside of the workshop.  Cafe Flore hosted a small opening which generated some local interest but not what they'd hoped.  The whole quilt, the panels sewn into 12x12s, could at this time fit in the bed of a small pickup and was stacked in a closet space at the rear of the workshop.  Some afternoons Cindy would go back there and lay on it for a short nap.  But volunteers showed up, each day someone new found the workshop, they'd stand just inside the doorway with that distant stare of one who had cared for a lover alone in those last months as that person decayed and now has nowhere else in life to go.  They want to help, they're willing to do anything for however many years or weeks or days they themselves have left.  This space would become their home, the people here their family, loss is a great unifier.

Still, packages would arrive postmarked from out in the hinterlands and someone on their way to the workshop would check most afternoons at the Castro branch Post Office on 18th.  The parcels would be hand carried the few blocks to Market Street.  Throbbing machine sounds trail off as people stop sewing and gather to watch them opened.  ``Kansas, this one's from Kansas!'' marveling that anyone in Kansas or Ohio or Georgia had even heard about their effort.

Each new panel would be unfolded and held out for view and the accompanying letters read aloud.  The people became real, a name, a little something about their life, about how they had touched other humans.  Letters would explain why various design elements were chosen—why a bag of foam rubber french fries (his restaurant in Amsterdam had been famous for them) or why dozens of brightly colored birds strung alone wires (his favorite hobby) or why a yellow rose (he'd arranged for one to be sent to each of his coworkers upon his death).  Letters described talents of the individual, letters were written by siblings, sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, letters were from coworkers, neighbors, too many letters told of the enormous suffering at the end and most gave a date of birth and death so that simple math told how young they were when they died.

One letter, after describing the final days, ended simply, ''At last there was peace.''

These were the people, the ones whose names were on these bolts of cloth, that they'd promised to carry to DC.

I

nitially the work load seemed manageable with the small group they had, with almost two months until the march people could do their day jobs and still find time to put in a few hours at a machine stitching eight panels together into twelve foot by twelve foot sections and handing them off to volunteers who would fold and pin long strips of heavy canvas around the perimeter.  This edging would be sewn on and the 12-by-12 would get a number and the names and panel maker data would be filed.  This gave a master list so that anyone wanting to see a specific panel could find it.  During the day other volunteers would pound metal sail grommets into the edging so that on the mall four 12x12s could be mated and layed flat between a walkway allowing 32 panels to be viewed at a time.

They'd given little thought to a procedure to open it for display or even how it would transported across America, they had enough to do just sewing.  If no other option appeared they'd rent a large truck or put it on a train or form a car caravan.

Jack had come up with the idea of folding the corners of four mated 12x12s to the middle and then repeating from the resulting corners until they had flat bundles about four feet square.  These could then be packed for transportation and the process reversed as an opening ceremony.  Once they figured out how to get it to Washington, DC.

They had planned to have the full quilt sewn by the Castro Street Fair, the first Sunday in October, and use the fair as draw for help in getting 7000 pounds of cloth itemized and folded and boxed.  And then packed onto a rented truck or put on a train or carried in a car caravan.  Or something.

Q

uilt that had not made the deadline was hung as a backdrop to the stage of the Fair, it was behind Buck Naked and the Bare Bottom Boys when they played their set that Sunday.  Singer/ guitarist Buck, his drummer brother and another guitarist had recently moved from Omaha, they felt that in quirky San Francisco they might find an audience for their Cramps-style rockabilly, that ``Teenage Pussy from Outer Space'' and ``Bend Over Baby and Let Me Drive'' might find an audience, unaware that this quirky San Francisco had been dying for about five years.

In 1992 Buck was a bartender at the Paradise Lounge (he arrived in SF too late to have ever been in FeBe's) and he'd walk his dog in the Panhandle by his apartment in the wee hours after closing the club.  This eight block tree filled stretch bordered by high Victorians was a City Parks Department designated pigeon-feeding area where tourists find quaint photo-ops and where the Health Department fined the neighbors because their yards and homes and drives and sidewalks are covered in pigeon shit.  Typical San Francisco, one department says come feed our pigeons, another makes money off residents because of it.  Seems that a little Pigeon Man would bring ten-gallon pails of seed and toss it to the now enormous flocks that waited daily.  He would threaten to shoot people and dogs if they bothered his birds.  He was out there at 3 a.m. when Buck's dog took out after some so Pigeon Man shot and killed Buck.

M

iracle of miracles, through friends, the kindness of strangers, the Flying Tigers air freight service would ship the whole thing to DC and back for free.  Only everything had to be packed and ready a week earlier than they had allocated for.  As if they didn't have enough to do.  Now with one less week to sew than scheduled things became even more hectic.

Those already working overtime put in overtime, Cindy and Evelyn and others used day job vacation time, young men on disability who should have been pampering their immune system stayed all night, the quilt had to be sewn and packed and gone now before the upcoming Castro Street Fair.

They had hoped to have at least 1000 panels to take to DC but with three weeks until the deadline had received only about 400.  Most were single panels sent in by individuals but gay groups in some cities organized sewing events and collected them to mail all at once, they wanted to keep their friends as long as possible.  Houston did that and sent 240 as a batch, waiting until the very last.

The Monday of that deadline week, swamped with work now, with unsewn panels piled and waiting by each machine someone walked from the workshop to the P.O. like always to ask if there was any mail.  He stood by the little metering scale as the postal worker looked up and said, ``Lemme check.''  The postal worker turned to the doorway that lead to the sorting room and called, ``Any packages for the Names Project?''  Another worker came to the opening and peered out, ``Yes I do believe we have some packages here for the Names Project.''  He then looked straight at the guy at the counter and grinned real big, ``You didn't by any chance happen to bring with you a very large truck?''

I

n the workshop the machines drum round the clock now as the deadline for DC approaches.  They had made a promise.

___________________________________________________________

5A

D an can't tell if he's breathing.  It doesn't matter, ability even to ponder the question means he must be breathing.  It is a bother to open his eyes even a small bit, that must require more effort than breathing.  He can raise his eyelids slowly raise a few millimeters and then they slowly shut, vague outline of a curtained window, a dark room.  There is cool fresh air entering his nostrils without him even breathing.  Nice.  Pleasant.  Relaxing.  A nice, pleasant, relaxing room.  He could stay in this place a while, a little nice, pleasant, relaxing vacation.

Funny how breathing is barely necessary if you don't move at all.  Dark shapes float against what little light seeps around the curtain edges.  His eyes must not have completely shut.  Too much effort.  The first shape has stopped and moves aside like a guide presenting, ``Here you will note how the members of this ancient culture used deep mediation to lower their metabolic rate and survive the long, long winters.''  One of the other shapes leans over, a closeness Dan associates with familiarity.  ``Danny, it's your mom and dad.  How are you feeling?''  Dan takes a breath through his mouth and exhales, his way of saying, ``Hi mom, hi dad.''

``Can he hear me doctor?  Does he know we're here?''

``Most likely, though he needs to be kept sedated.  He had a seizure and was in a lot of pain when they brought him in.  And the CMV has destroyed most of his vision.''

I

n the earliest days of the epidemic political gays opposed a separate AIDS ward fearing it would be a quarantine area, an inhouse leper colony, maybe even with a separate elevator.  But it quickly became obvious that consolidation of resources was medically sound.  The initial AIDS ward on the 5B quickly became swamped and was moved over to the larger 5A unit where the chalkboard behind the nurses station displayed first names only for privacy.  The less severely afflicted were placed on the other fifth floor wards in rooms with the traditional hospital patients.  And had their full name displayed.

That was how one afternoon while passing a doorway a visitor heard, ``Lee, get in here and congratulate me!  I made it to the big time this trip—5A!''

The visitors lounge was called the Liz Taylor room, because the actress would show up unannounced, with no publicity, and chat with patients.  She'd donated a piano and others brought in stereos and VHS players and televisions and record collections, expensive top quality items, the best, possessions the owners no longer would need.  The room was decorated for the various holidays, Rita Rockett gave Sunday brunches and visitors and the mobile patients communed there.

Others were just bitter and became even more so in late December hearing piano and singing from the lounge, ``. . . home for Christmas . . . if only in my dreams.''

The second wave of the epidemic brought a new type of patient, the IV drug users from the Tenderloin, and their visitors had different priorities from those of the first wave.  They might look in at the patient but their interests were focused on other things.  Visitors were allowed onto the ward round the clock, 24 hour access with little oversight, hmmm, an IV drip bag of morphine connected to a comatose AIDS patient?  No problem.  Soon everything of value in the Elizabeth Taylor room had disappeared.  After that the TVs and radios and video players were all locked down with thick metal cables.

S

eizure, Dan heard the doctor say, such a pleasant sounding word.  Sei-zure.  Sea-azure, an azure sea.  To float in a nice warm blue ocean, pleasant, relaxing.  Sea-azure, a warm azure sea.  He was four years old, he wanted to play in the yard but his mother said no.  ``And you can't go outside barefoot, it's too cold and I'm not going to put your shoes on for you.''  He stood there holding his little red sneakers and glared at her, frustrated, chocking tears.  He moved to in a chair in the den and placed the little canvas shoes by his feet and looked down.  He took a laces of one in each hand, crossed them, pulled, looped, four year old Dan figured it out.  ``Alright you can go,'' she said when he returned to the kitchen to show her, ''but stay in the back yard where I can see you.''

``What son?  Say that again, I couldn't hear you.''  Leaning over the bed, her ear tilted towards his face,  ``Shoes?  You want your shoes?  Is that what you said?  You want your shoes?  You have to stay here darling, you can't leave the hospital until you're better.''

T

ess awoke frightened.  He couldn't find his glasses, he didn't know where he was and he became even more frightened once he realized.  He did not want to be alone when he died.  He didn't want to die of course but that part he had little control over, the being alone part, well, now he saw that Larry was there, Tess had just missed him.  ``It will be alright,'' Larry said, ``if I can't be here I'll have one of our friends fill in.  Promise.''

Pinky swear.

That was why there are three guys in chairs in the hallway by the room door, soda cans and white Chinese take out boxes at their feet, and two others in the room.  Someone there at all times.  Tess would not be alone.

When he had awoken in panic that first day Larry had found his glasses and said, ``Always put them on the same spot on the bedside table so you'll always know where to find them.''

Tess gazed at him, myopic eyes through the thick lenses imploring, ``Always?  You mean I'm always going to be here?''

W

arm water.  The first time Dan vacationed in Hawaii that's what he remembers the most.  The warm water.  And the cute guy he saw each afternoon lying in the sand at Queen's surf that stared at him.  On morning Dan awoke with a rash across his back and down his thighs that sent him to the ER, with no immune system you never know, there the guy was at the main desk.  ``Go in that room,'' pointing, ``remove your clothes and put this on,'' handing Dan a folded pale green gown.

The air conditioned room was chilly as he waited, barely covered by the thin fabric of the open back robe.  The guy came in and shut the door and told Dan to lay on his chest so he could examine the rash.

After the inspection the guy said, ``OK, I'll go get the doctor.''

Dan raised up, ``You're not the doctor?''

``No, I'm admissions, but I've been staring at that cute ass of yours at the beach all week and just had to know what it looked like.''

R

andy  told his lover to bring the address book and he sat up in the hospital bed as they went through the names to find those still alive that he wanted to come visit, all on the same afternoon.  Seven met in the Liz Taylor room and discussed what this request must mean before they walked the hallway together to find Randy asleep.  They debated, then Terry gently shook him awake, ``We're all here Randy.  We're all here.''

Randy pushed the button that winched him upright and looked at his friends crowded into his little world.  ``I'm so glad you came.''

Randy smiled looking to the one nearest, ``Terry,'' he said, ``remember that time we . . .''  He chuckled at a memory, smiling even more before fading.  ``I'm so glad you all are here.''

Terry took hold of his hand, ``It will be all right Randy, we're here.''

Randy shut his eyes and relaxed, still smiling.  ``Go to the light Randy,'' someone in the room said and it was echoed by others, ``Go to the light Randy, go to the light.''

Randy opened his eyes wide and sat up when he understood what they were doing.  Everyone was now in a circle around him and seemed to be performing some ritual, ``Go to the light.''

``Hey!  I'm not dying just now!  Is that what you thought?''  He shook his head, ``I just wanted all of you together so I could tell you how much your friendships have meant over these years, how much I've loved all of you, how much fun it has been just knowing each of you.''

Randy shook his head again as he lay back, ``I may have AIDS but you're not getting rid of me that easily.''

D

an floated back from his Hawaii vacation to hear his mother, ``He's smiling doctor, he must know we're here.''

``It's difficult to say, most of his eyesight is gone and he's not responding to the pentamidine so there's really no way to tell what he's aware of.''

``You mean there's nothing more you can do?''

``I don't want to get your hopes up, some people do recover briefly, but he only weighs about eighty pounds and he'll never walk again or see again and the pain will probably just keep increasing.''

She looked at gaunt form, barely recognizable as a human, lying there in a nest of tubes: breathing tubes and feeding tubes and infusion tubes, and she tried to match what she was seeing with the lifetime of images of her son.  ``There's really nothing more you can do?'' she asked.

Dan tried to laugh when he heard the word ``stopcock,'' the infantile snicker in high school science lab, as the doctor, before leaving them alone there, explained its function, how it regulates flow.  ``You turn the valve to here and he will be out of pain for a while, you turn it to here,'' he paused, ``and he will be out of pain forever.''

F

ranz checked in at the nurses station when he came on for the evening shift and then made first rounds, the floor quiet, a hospital settling in for a hopefully uneventful night.  That's how most of them go, quietly, uneventfully, a graceful transition from one world to another.  Forms to fill, discharge papers, but rarely urgency or crisis.  The ordinary sameness of one day routinely following the next, this methodical efficiency of the epidemic.  Sometimes a patient might rally and appear in the dark hall pulling his drip bag pole, moving towards the light, ready to go home.  And sometimes Franz will come on to see a nurse stand to face the chalkboard, reach to smear out a name and write in a new one.

The flat green chalkboard every schoolkid spent years staring at, first names and room numbers over the palimpsest smudges of previous patients, dead or recovered enough to go home to die.  AIDS roulette, pick a number, the house always wins.

It's the Filipino nurses that get him, you volunteer to be here, they could be on any other ward, house staff is never forced to work 5A.  Franz knows these patients, these women don't.  They sit quietly conversing in Tagalog, above them the endless supply of names San Francisco provides, first names only just like the chalkboards you used to see on entering the baths.

The wheel never stops, barely past childhood, these innocents rushed to the circus that was San Francisco before , the glorious midway, all in fun, place your bets folks.  ``We were too young for this,'' Franz wants to scream down into the empty hallway.  The house always wins.

He turns the corner to see a lanky blond woman midway facing the wall with her head bowed.  He's seen her up here before.  Gert had stopped by to visit a friend and while looking in the rooms found that she knew two other people on the ward.  Now she's gently banging her head against the concrete in a slow methodical rhythm.

As Franz passes behind her holding the clipboard with this night's list of names he mutters, ``Feels good doesn't it.''

___________________________________________________________

workshop

T ypical June day  for the Pride Parade, luminous fog overhead, jacket weather chill, basic summer in San Francisco.  On Market Street the parade continued but she wanted to beat the crowd to the underground so was cutting across wide Civic Center plaza when she saw it.  At the far end of the enormous open space surrounded by granite buildings a smudge of color leaked over the City Hall facade.  Hung from the outdoor balcony was quilt and there was David, her David.

Cindy hadn't heard anything more from these people after that first meeting.  She stared above the tall doorways where large cloth squares billowed and flattened with the gusts.  Eight panels in each square—so this is how they would do it.

Someone told her they'd seen Roger at a booth back across the plaza and she headed there.  A wood frame braced panels mounted behind a table.  The guy she'd sat next to at the meeting, Jack, was standing there staring as well.  ``Sure we remember you two,'' the person at the table probably thinking they were a couple.  ``We just signed a lease on a storefront on Market Street so have a place to sew to get ready for the march in Washington.  Stop by, we can use all the help we can get.''  Handing a flier headed with a phrase she'd never seen, ``The Names Project.''

By Pride day in 1987 the epidemic was a permanent fixture, the playful insouciant  joie de vivre  that was everywhere a decade before was gone, as irretrievable as the people whose names now hung from the balcony.  You were aware of it not just in the twenty or more obituaries, small headshots of young men in prime of life, that ran each week in the BAR  or in the framed photos of faces displayed in shop windows on Castro Street, employees everyone had known, or in the increasing number of memorials but in every little aspect of daily life.  You were surrounded by the epidemic.

It was there in snippets of casual conversation you might overhear, ``He moved back home, someplace like Indiana.''  Or ``I should have known something was wrong, if there was a choice he always bought the cheapest; this time he didn't bother.'' Or simply, ``He was diagnosed.''

It was there in the exchange of friends upon running into one another,  ``Tom, love your new look, you've trimmed down, lost weight, that shirt looks fabulous  on you.''  Tom all but shouting, ``I Have Not Lost Any Weight!''

It was there on the sidewalk as you move aside for the scrawny guy coming towards you, baggy wrinkled clothes, matted hair, who halts as head turns and deep-set eyes lock in a long stare that follows as you pass.  You hear a weak rasp that almost sounds like your name.  A few more steps before you stop, Larry ?  That can't be Larry—I just saw him a few weeks ago.  That's when you realize the guy must still be behind you gawking.  By the time you turn he has continued down the sidewalk leaning a bit unsteadily on a cane.

The Castro Street Doubletake.

She had a day off the following Wednesday, standing there in front of this booth where Roger was displayed she and the guy Jack made a date to check out this new place on Market Street.

I

n 1979 a contingent representing San Francisco charted Amtrak to carry them to that year's March on Washington that commemorated the tenth anniversary of Stonewall.  A piano was installed in the bar car and essentially they planned to take the San Francisco party through the hinterlands, singing and drinking as America slid by outside the windows.  The train had barely crossed out of Nevada into Utah before they completely ran out of booze.  Fully stocked at departure and now nothing, not a drop.  Then true divine intervention, in Ogden a fundamentalist lay on the tracks to block their passage.

``The Lord works in mysterious ways,'' was yelled as they piled out running to the grocery across the tracks, guys in leather chaps raced guys with mascara smeared eyes, feather boas elbowed ahead of lumberjacks, all with a single destination: the liquor aisle.

``Thank you Baby Jesus!''

Clark was one of the first in line, honey blond curls nestling on his shoulders, rainbow tie-dye tee, a quart of vodka in each hand and he heard the woman in front of him say to the cashier, ``MayBelle, you should have seen what just got off of that train out there!''

Maybelle paused her ring to lean over, ``Don't look now but they're all  in line right behind you.''

These were the Baby Boomers, children of people who had lived through the Depression and then the War and wanted little more than an uneventful life, a peaceful Leave It To Beaver existence.  Job, house, family, the little black and white images on the set that dominated the living room was all the excitement the parents needed.  Stability, if June said, after vacuuming the already spotless rug in her heels and pearls, ``Ward, I'm worried about the Beaver,'' you knew it wasn't going to be anything like, ``How so, dear?'' laying down his paper to look up.

``He's been trying on my lipstick and jewelry.''

``It's just a phase honey, went through it myself, he'll outgrow it.''

These Boomers didn't outgrow it, their war, the one that tore America apart, Vietnam, had finally ended, and they were in the extended liberated celebration.  Growing up with only three TV network stations almost all of them had the exact same experience most nights no matter where in the country they lived.  Most could remember when color came into the living room and all could remember where they were when they heard Kennedy had been shot.

C

indy met Jack at a bar down the street and after a drink they walked to 2362 Market.  They stood in the glass doorway and peered into the empty room, a wide area with a floating staircase at the far end leading up to a mezzanine level.  The space had been an apartment furnishings store, a business that couldn't compete now with so many Everything Must Go sidewalk sales.  The walls and carpet were gray (the color taupe if you were gay), track lights crossed the ceiling and the mezzanine ran around the left side above them.  ``Well, what do you think?'' Jack said.  ``Sure seems big,'' she answered.

In the weeks that followed, as word got out and panels began coming in for the display in Washington the room filled, with sewing machines, with piles of cloth, with volunteers working at almost all hours.  People just showed up, John Anthony appeared one afternoon, he'd left his home at the River forever with no place to stay, nothing but his plaid shirt, construction boots and jeans, waving about twenty Post-Its, ``Anybody want to help me make panels?  These are names of all my friends, they're all dead.''

He wasn't the only one.  Outside this room the epidemic had circled and settled, a harsh gray world, four or five young men died each day, the realization that everyone was infected and had next to no hope.  Inside there was laughter (``We who are about to die. . .''), color, enthusiasm; where death was so present here was life, for how ever little of it they had left.  Just to be able to do something, anything, in the face of this enormity was enough.  For many who would sew there this place would be their last real home, it became a warroom, here they were mounting a campaign and this place was the Alamo.

___________________________________________________________

first meeting

E ARLY EVENING IN MAY, so pleasant one could almost forget how chilly summer would soon be, so quiet one would almost forget how vibrant these streets once were.  Two young men walked down 18th on their way to the Women's Building.  Approaching Moby Dick's one realized, ``We got time for a drink.''

A friend sat at the nearly empty bar and they went over.  ``We're getting a group together to make a quilt to memorialize AIDS victims,'' partially unfolding a cloth bundle he carried and holding it out, ``Why don't you come with us?''

``A what?''

``Each one of these will depict someone who's died, then we'll sew them all together into a quilt.''  A pause, ``And take it to Washington, D.C. this October.''

How do you explain something that had never been done before?

The guy looked at the cloth and then back to his drink and shook his head, ``Well good luck, hope you're not wasting your time.''

A 

flyer had caught Cindy's eye as she waited for the bus over the hill after work, the chill of winter still in the air.  There are flyers on poles all around the Castro Muni station, why did she pause to read this one?  It announced a meeting to make a memorial for the people who had died of AIDS, cloth quilt panels with the name and some details of the person's life, each to be three feet by six feet.  The flier gave a date six weeks away, a time, a place–the Women's Building on 18th.  She mouthed the words to herself, memorizing them.

She borrowed a sewing machine, set it up in the living room of her apartment and began.  By May she had two of these cloth panels finished, one for Roger, his name in large pink and black angular funhouse letters and another for a coworker with whom she'd watch morning reruns of the ``I Love Lucy'' show, sitting together on his bed on their days off giggling and bouncing.  As she hunched over the machine she would smile, something she'd almost forgotten how to do, hearing an exasperated Desi exclaim, ``Lu-ooo-cy!''  The panel showed the show's opening logo, a large heart with the ``I Love'' in cursive letters but Lucy  replaced by David.

As the May meeting date approached she began to worry about things, how maybe hundreds of people would bring panels and they would all be fabulous (this was, after all, the Castro) and how hers might just get lost in the mix.  She wrote her name and address on both so that after they were taken to DC she might be able to get them back, they had become Roger and David for her.

T

he Women's Building began life as one of those ``sound body, sound mind'' exercise clubs, this one built by the local German community after the 1906 earthquake; at four stories it was taller and bulkier than other buildings on the street and seemed to dominate its block.  In 1935 the Sons and Daughters of Norway purchased the building, renamed it Dovre Hall and converted the gymnasium into an auditorium.

There had been a substantial number of Scandanavians living in Eureka Valley and even with the gay gentrification of the 1970s one could still run across that only in San Francisco catholic school mix of a half Mexican, half Norwegian who grew up there.  Or still be entertained by an eighty year old Norwegian play accordian on a weekday afternoon at the du Nord downstairs from the Swedish American Hall a few blocks away.

A women's group bought the building in 1978 and gave it the current name but allowed a small bar with a separate entrance to remain at one corner.  The Dovre Club was run by an Irishman so that most people thought the word Dovre had something to do with the Emerald Isle unaware that it was a mountain range in Norway.

The bar became hangout both for the remnants of the Mission Irish and for a new group that sought the asylum of the city's sanctuary policy.  Over the doorway a sign, ``Let's drink to the final defeat of the British army in Northern Ireland.''  Money donated at the bar would find its way across the Atlantic to the IRA.  After the 1983 Maze Prison break four of the inmates made their way to the Bay Area and late in the evening you might hear about some of how, Pogues on the jukebox, MacGowan's Jameson and cigarette rasp the perfect background to the story of how three guys drove from Frisco to Mexico to smuggle one of those escapees into the US.

He had taken the commercial Aeroflot Moscow flight that refuels in Shannon on its way to Havana.  From Cuba into Mexico and Tijuana where the three picked him up.  Just another trio Americans with hang-overs coming back from a weekend of frolic South of the Border, Riley could best hide his Paddy accent so he drove them through the customs toll booth.

The guard holds Riley's fake license and uses one of the old tricks, ``Oh, you're from San Francisco,'' he says real affable like he knows the City well, a faraway look as if fond memories are returning.  ``Where'd you go to high school?''

Riley has a sudden panic, in the UK tube stations the Wanted posters with the face of the guy they have under a blanket in the trunk read: ``IRA Terrorist.''  Looking up through the car window, hot wind on his shoulder, the guard's face now with an intent stare, no more smile, Riley remembers the locals back at the Dovre, standing at the bar, how they'd bitch, brag about school days at,  ``S.I.'' he says quickly, ``Went to S.I.,  Saint Ignatius.''

The guard returns the card and waves them on.

T

he night of the meeting she took the two panels and hung them side-by-side on the wood fence in front of her apartment building so that a friend could make a photograph.  She wasn't certain she'd ever see them again.  This was the first time any sections of what would become the Quilt were ever displayed together.

After being photographed she took them back into her apartment, paused to look at each one more time and then carefully folded the two panels.

The auditorium in the Women's building seemed so large when she entered with her package, imagine what it would take to fill up a space like this.  A folding table was mid-room where two men sat facing the long wall.  The first to arrive had placed themselves along the wall directly across from the table, as others came in they had sat next to the previous person so that the line stretched away from table in one direction only.  The eight young guys seated along the wall when she got there turned to stare at the lanky blond, sheepish, still in her workday makeup.  She sat at the folding chair at the end and after a bit it became apparent no one else was coming.

The two at the table displayed the cloth panel they had brought and one told of their hope to have hundreds of these produced and stitched together for the gay rights March on Washington come October.  The silent prayer was that if the rest of the country could see the enormity of what was obvious every day in the Castro it might ignite a groundswell demand for the government to mobilize its resources.  Six years into the epidemic and all they'd produced was AZT.  And a lot of obituaries.

Then they asked if anyone had brought a panel.  After no one answered Cindy replied and went over to the table.  She held Roger open and told how he had already been in DC, in 1983, testifying in front of Congress about the disease.  Then she showed them David, explaining the Lucy part and humming a snippit of the theme song.  She and another coworker had visited David in his hospital room the week before Halloween, pulling clusters of orange and black helium balloons they tied to the bedrails.  The ward was quiet, essentially deserted even though this highest of gay holidays approached.  David lay in the bed smiling at the thoughtfulness and thanked them but added, ``Did you need to bring the black?''

They talked about work, catching him up on the gossip, trying to make him feel a part of the world outside, telling how some woman had stood across the counter and just talked, ``You know the type, she wasn't going to buy anything but just wouldn't shut up, she must of talked to me for half an hour.''

David had propped himself up now and his face got a far-away look as he listened.  When she finished he said, so quietly they almost didn't hear, ``I wish someone would talk to me for half an hour.''

Before the meeting adjourned a clipboard was passed down the row and everyone wrote their name and address for further contact, hers went on last, just below a guy named Jack who had been sitting last until she arrived.  When she got home the apartment seemed more empty than usual, the sewing machine had little use now and would need to be returned, the living room floor needed to be cleaned of the squiggles of thread, end pieces of cloth and scattered shirt pins.  But tomorrow.

F

ull night now as the two men walked back to the Castro, the darkness greater than just an absence of light, the quiet was murmurs from the thousands who had crowded here just five years before.  They stopped in Moby Dick's again, the friend was still at the bar and he swiveled on the barstool, ``So how'd your sewing bee go?''

``Nice crowd, maybe a dozen or so.  It wasn't a sewing bee, it was an organizational meeting to make a memorial quilt for AIDS victims.''

``So how did your little quilting bee organizational meeting go?  Did anybody bring sections for it?''

``Two.  Some strange blond woman brought two quilt panels.''

``A woman brought quilt?''   The guy on the barstool chuckled before turning back to his drink, ``A woman—now you guys are really going to have to do this thing.''

___________________________________________________________

jack day one

J
ack got his first view of San Francisco where I-80 finally ceased its westward thrust to curve south past Berkeley.  Four days earlier he had given his mother a goodbye hug on the porch of the Craftsman bungalow where he grew up, walked the strip of concrete that divided the front lawn early on an already muggy August morning and drove away from Kokomo on a dim promise from Wade, almost a rumor too unbelievable to be true.  A bit after 2 p.m. his Oldsmobile and the U-Haul that had trailed it those four days curved west one final time to merge with the freeway arteries that led onto the Bay Bridge and into the City.

In the distance before him across the quicksilver shimmer of the bay the image of a tight cluster of office buildings backed by low hills rose into a bright haze.  The connection took no leap of imagination, exactly like the movie, up ahead was Oz.  Jack paid at the toll booth, slid his foot from brake to gas pedal and as the car moved onto the bridge proper he became a cliché, yet another new arrival.

From the bridge he merely had to follow the directions given over the phone and he would arrive at his new home.  ``It's on 16th just across Market from the main block of Castro Street,''  Wade's voice coming thin and tinny out of the Bakelite receiver, ``Jack, you'll be amazed.''  Then Wade laughed, ``And get a haircut, the sixties are over, it's a new decade out here.''

The apartment key was under the mat, a welcome note was propped on the entry hall table, ``I get off work a bit after six, wait and we'll get a drink to celebrate your arrival.''  Jack couldn't wait, couldn't bother unloading, he had to get out into it, had to see what Wade meant by ``you'll be amazed.''

The wide traffic lanes of Market Street were a last boundary in his journey.  The light became green, the stream of cars parted and Jack crossed the intersection.  As he stepped onto the far curb a group of pigeons hesitated, shuffled and then flared into the air a few feet to settle back to the sidewalk under the plate glass windows of the Twin Peaks bar.  Inside old guys sat sideways on the barstools to stare out.  Shit they must all be at least forty, thought Jack, old queens.  A bit further and Jack became aware that all around him now were young men, smiling and gawking at one another, young and vibrant, reminded of his first Indiana State Fair, the excitement from disorientation at trying to take in too much too quickly.  Without the smell of sawdust, damp straw and cow manure.  All these guys out and this just a random weekday afternoon—doesn't anyone in San Francisco have to work?

He paused in the pleasant gloom under the theater marque to read the Now Playing poster, his own image, stringy hair, baggy pants, reflected pale over the frozen embrace, Audrey gazed up at Gary Cooper.  Odor of buttered popcorn, a siren pull he had to resist, there was too much out here to see, he had to continue on.  Humming ``It Was Fascination I Know. . .'' as he moved away from Love In the Afternoon.  Wade had been right, Jack needed a haircut, not even half a block and already he could tell there was a prevailing style, short cropped hair, moustaches, tight faded jeans, trim and healthy.  Making him feel even more obvious, out of place, more aware of his current status: new in town sailor?

Up ahead at the street corner he could see Hibernia Bank, remnant of the Irish influx, now Hibernia Beach, a row of shirtless guys preening against the granite wall, getting some sun while showing off.  Every shop window he passed was a carefully decorated enticement, even the hardware store.  At 18th St. he stopped, which direction?  A deep steady bass sounded from his left like the approach of a parade.  He turned that direction and stood outside a doorway covered by two heavy black leather curtains.  Seemed a little early for a drink but it was three hours later back home, so . . . OK, a drink.  The bass throb increased as two guys came out through the curtains, laughing, looking at Jack one said, ``Step right on in, always room for one more,'' as he held back the curtain.

Inside blaring disco pounded as he squinted while his eyes adjusted to the darkness.  Human forms coalesced, slowly he could see that the long narrow barroom was jammed with bodies, they looked like the same young men he'd just seen on the street.  Every barstool was occupied and people stood two and three deep behind.  Those attempting to talk over the music were tilted towards one another, mouth close to ear.

Two guys who faced the door with their backs against the bar moved aside enough for Jack to squeeze in.  When the bartender finally noticed, Jack stretched across the bartop and shouted, ``Gin-tonic.''  He watched the drink being mixed: ice, gin, more gin, and finally a little a splash of tonic.  Jack pushed some bills across and shouted that he'd just moved here, confiding, ``This is my very first drink in San Francisco.''

The bartender shut off the stereo, faces turning his direction as the amplified music faded away.  ``This is on me,'' he said to Jack placing the drink and then he announced to the room, pointing, ``Another New One Here!''  And to Jack, ``Where you from?'' then loudly again to the crowd just before turning the music back up, ``Representing the Great State of Indiana.''

Someone was patting Jack on the back as he reached for his glass and before he got one sip it seemed that people were trying to elevate him as if to show him off.  The music was blaring again, he was being grabbed under his shoulders and then from behind his knees and suddenly he became airborn, spun in a whirlwind of hands, tilted on his back into a cushion of raised arms.  The noise level alone seemed enough to bouy him aloft as he began to be passed feet first in celebration down the length of the bar.

Bewildered, hovering above these strangers, this was not the kind of attention he sought, then he relaxed and flowed with it.  Everyone was laughing, arms rose automatically in an undulating wave to support him as he body surfed this curl of hands.  He saw himself full in the mirror as he was borne floating amidst cigarette smoke and odors of cologne.

Around midbar the uplifted hands began tugging at his clothing, people giggling at his helplessness, he felt a shirttail slide out, a shoe went, a button popped.  Fingers groped his flesh as he slid past, someone was tugging at his belt buckle, Wait a minute here!  When the last hands let Jack down on a concrete floor in the rear of the barroom in a garish red, yellow and violet glow from pinball machines he was laughing giddily and completely naked.

What the hell was this place he'd come to?

San Francisco, 1977

___________________________________________________________

wash that man

D
an parked his car in the lot where the road ended near the top of Mount Tam to meet a rocky trail that circled to the peak.  This is what Jerry wanted, the kind of thing some New Age tourist would want done, but Dan had promised.  He looked towards the summit and saw a red tail hawk float in a lazy circle against the blue as he hiked up into a dusty odor of wild fennel in the Indian summer heat.  Two people on their way down nodded pleasantly when he stood aside for them to pass.  As he made the top a breeze came up and Dan saw that he was alone, perfect.  He undid the band at the back of his neck and bent slightly to let the wind shake his pony tail loose and protect his neck from the sun.  Jerry had hated that long hair, ``The Summer of Love was twenty years ago, get over it.''

A 360 degree view, off to the west a haze that would be the Pacific ocean, to the north the country ran clear up to the redwoods, south was the City and east was the Central Valley and all the rest of America.  Dan stood there and gauged the wind as he pulled a plastic bag carried in a brown paper one and held it above his head and away, trying to think of something to say that might add meaning to the act, to make it something more than mere littering.

``So long Jerry,'' as he shook the contents into the air.  Gray ash dropped and sifted and rose to stream away in a rapidly disappearing cloud.

I

n retrospect the China trip was a mistake, it had the opposite effect from that of bringing them closer.  The long flights, stuck, squirming in their seats, the time changes, the round the clock companion became an ordeal as emotionally exhausting as the evening a year before when Jerry told Dan he was positive and had to tell him why.  They sat up all night talking, just talking; they had been so careful for so long.  Or at least one of them had.

Dan could remember their first night together.  They met at the River, Dan should have realized at check-in when he glanced across the lobby through the sliding glass to the pool deck where burly men with trimmed beards wearing Speedos and construction boots stood around holding drinks, hairy bellies protruding from unbuttoned leather vests, that he might want to spend the next two days at some other resort.  A Bear weekend, having to listen to their nauseating word plays in a Folsom Street bar was bad enough but you could easily leave a bar;  here Dan would be stuck.

He overheard ``Looks like someone could use a hug,'' before he was able to order a drink, caught the snide observation from men down the bar that ``There are other animals in this zoo,'' and nearly gagged when one grizzled guy growled, ``Come to pappa,'' because Dan mentally inserted the word 'bear' into each sentence.

If he had a gun Dan thought gazing around, he'd make himself a bearskin rug.

Jerry was not the kind Dan ever would've imagined he'd become involved with, but for a weekend fling sure why not.  Fate put them next to one another out by the pool, Jerry making catty remarks about everyone that passed by,  ``Jeeze, does that queen really believe anyone would believe she's a top?''  Introductions were unnecessary.

Dan couldn't tell exactly when he began warming to the guy but the next afternoon sitting in the sun again they ordered drinks, ``My treat,'' Jerry grinned as he looked over to wink, ``Honey.''

The obviously new waiter, swamped, visibly flustered, took forever to bring the two drinks and, after asking for three dollars and seeing the twenty Jerry held out, apologized, ``I'll have to go back inside to get your change.''  Jerry raised his head from the deck chair to peer up at the kid.  ``Keep it,'' he said as he rolled away, ``Maybe you'll be a little quicker next time.''

Reclined there on the wet concrete surrounded by sounds of splashing and carousing Dan saw the cub behind that gruff burly exterior.

So a weekend turned into weeks and then it made no sense to keep two apartments, Jerry enjoying the redecorating (``A place to hibernate, you know.'') and Dan plotting trips for him and the homebody.

But in time the playful curmudgeonly quips that had once made Jerry seem so personable and quick witted, that made you forgive him even when he overstepped bounds, became caustic and crude; eventually Dan moved out.  ``I'll make you regret this!'' Jerry snarled.  So when Dan got the phone call that Jerry was in 5A at SF General he joked to friends, ``I didn't realize the lengths Jerry would go through to make those words true.''

After that first crisis Dan stayed at Jerry's overnight, listening to him come awake from some terror; Jerry was so afraid to be alone, some tough guy.  But as the trips to General became more common, the priest coming in the room, the last rites, holy water and solemn incantations, maligna discordia, then Jerry pulling out of it and being released.  Dan would try to go back to his own place, ``Jerry the doctors said you're stabilized, they can't do anything more for you, I want to go home and get a good night's sleep for work.''

He'd take personal leave during the day to drive Jerry to the various appointments, the aerosal pentamidine, exams, counseling, the waiting rooms, he'd clean the fridge, toss out the foil containers, their white cardboard tops penciled with the contents, unopened, uneaten, delivered each day by Open Hand.

Dan remembered that last night with Jerry, once again last rites, the priest gone, after they discharged him, after they'd gotten back from the hospital.  Dan helped Jerry get into bed and then went to the doorway and turned.  ``I'm going home, I've got to work tomorrow, the doctors said you're OK.''

Jerry was adamant about Dan staying, begging, ``I'll do anything, just stay here with me this one night.''

``Do anything?  Anything, Jerry?''  Dan was overwhelmed by what he felt, exhausted mentally, physically, how many years now had they both been part of this?  ``Anything?  You're never going to get better.  If you'll do anything for me then you'll just die.''  Jerry's face contorted into a fierce scowl and then he realized how Dan meant those words.  Dan watched as the glaring face softened, as Jerry let go of his fear and lay back relaxed, at peace.  Jerry smiled at Dan as he closed his eyes and settled in for a long winter's nap.

A

s Dan watched the remains spread off into the blue above Mt. Tamalpias it seemed like Jerry got back at him one last time.  The wind shifted, whipped around to reverse its flow as the ash suddenly buoyed with spirit.  Dan screamed ``You fucking asshole!'' into the enormous sky overhead as a hard grit blew across his face and eyes, scattered into his hair and covered his clothing.  He drove back across the bridge working his mouth to clear the dry gravel irritant.  When he got home Dan stood in the shower looking down at his bare feet on the enamel of the tub, the water flowing sleek over the back of his neck and splatter to a swirl of shampoo suds pooling into the drain.  ``Right out'a my hair,'' he sang, ``Gonna wash that man right . . . right . . . right.''

❖       ❖       ❖

Dan was left to clean Jerry's apartment, toss out the last dinner boxes in the fridge, pack up personal mementos to send to his mother; he kept all the amber bottles of pills because you never know.  On the floor of a closet shoved to the back he found a box of porn videos, most showing a blond surfer type on the cover and thought, ``Thank god I dyed my hair before going to the River that weekend.''

You hold the yard sale, watch the posessions go to strangers because friends don't want to take advantage, what doesn't sell goes to Community Thrift, then you carefully pull the door on the empty room.  That's it, that's a life, end of story.  Next to nothing to show that this one person had ever existed on the planet.

Dan kept the apartment key for few months more, he just liked the feel of it in his pocket.  He made a quilt panel using a borrowed sewing machine and when he previewed the three foot by six foot blanket of cloth spread out on the living room floor Dan felt something was missing.  He got a pair of scissors, reached behind his head and cut off the pony tail that Jerry always hated.  Then he pulled a corner of the cloth back up to the machine, folded an edge over that length of hair and sewed it into the lining.

__________________________________________________________