From: Jack Carroll <SECBH@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject:      All Over
Note: Copyright 1992, Dan R. Greening. Non-commercial reproduction allowed.
Archive-Number: 6753
Organization: unspecified
Date:         Tue, 12 Jan 93 09:09:57 EST

Last week a friend, Bill, died.  He was my last longtime friend and
the twenty-fourth of them to die of AIDS...leaving out of
consideration the guys I have been a buddy to in working with GMHC,
and casual acquaintances.

In the late 70's and early 80's there were a group of twenty-six
of us who used to hang out in the same local bar, give parties,
go to Fire Island, dance at The Saint and sleep with each other
sometimes.

It began early with us in that one of our number was among the
first handful of cases diagnosed and identified by the CDC.  It
spread slowly among us at first.

All sorts of folklore began to grow concerning the causes and cures
of what was now AIDS.  Poppers were the cause.  Various peculiar
nostrums were going to be the cure.  Ribaviran was the answer.
Go to Mexico.  Bootleg it into the U.S.  I read Defoe's "Journal
of a Plague Year".  It was actually comforting.  Nothing had changed
in the intervening four centuries.  It was strangely reassuring, people
were quite the same. When no one knows anything, then everyone knows
everything.  When there are no answers, there are no end of solutions.
And the disease would be gone forever by whatever season or month was
just a bit ahead of us.  Simply because it would _have_ to be.

1986 was the last magic year in my mind.  Many, many people still
went barring in my neighborhood, the crowd at The Saint wasn't
thinning so noticably to make you _that_ uncomfortable and the Fire
Island Pines was as beautiful and fun as ever even if for the first
time in memory there were unrented houses.  The great party which
had begun in 1975 - in large part on Fire Island - was still
going on with that special joy which has since been lost in gay
entertainment, though there was the raw razor mark of desperation
cutting into the music and the atmosphere.  But very quietly and
at a point I don't recall I put 1986 on a private shelf in my mind
to be brought down sometime, shaken out and worn again in
better weather.

After a night at The Saint I used to drop my boyfriend off on the
East Side at dawn and then have the taxi drop me off on the West
Side, a few blocks from my apartment.  I would be soaked through
my levis, even my shoes would be wet through from the dancing and
I would walk up the street with my shirt off in the soft morning
light.  Everything was quiet and it provided a small opportunity
to try to depressurize from The Saint.  It seemed as if everything
were at rest and as if life were just as it should be.

But when I turned the corner of my street, I had to forget that
within the two blocks between Central Park West and Amsterdam
Avenue there were 15 people sick with AIDS or dying of it while
I walked past their apartments.  The Upper West Side had a case
rate second only to that of the Village.

After going to The Saint one night in February 1987 my friend
refused to ever go again.  I never went either.  At the end of the 1988
season The Saint closed and that was the very last gasp of a lifestyle
that had been unwilling to die for most of the decade even as its
creators were dying by the thousands.

At first AIDS crept among our crowd and guys died one-by-one but by
early 1987 deaths came rapidly in twos and threes:

Billy.....Miguel....Robert......Tom......Skip.....Robin....Hal..
.......Billy.....Gary...Chuck..Tom..Bill...Frank..Charlie...
Mark, Bob, James, Michael, Samson, Bob, Rick, Skip, John

And then a couple of years ago there were only Chris, Bill and I.
Chris left to take care of a friend of his in California and Bill
said rather wryly one day: "You know, Jack, there aren't too many
of us left."  Very much his sense of humour.

I had to go into the hospital briefly a few weeks ago, Bill went
in for the last time during that period.  When I got out I went
and sat by him every other day.  Only once did he know I was there.
But I had said he would not die alone.  On the second day I came
in as soon as I reached the door he looked at me and said, "Hi
Jack, how are you?" in his normal voice, but when I went over to
him he had receded again into his unfocused dementia.  I was told
it was the only time he had spoken or appeared to recognize anyone
in a month.  Ave atque vale.  He slipped into a coma and was heavily
morphined to hasten the end.  I sat by him still because there
was no one else to sit by him and however childish it may be
in this great cruelty it just seemed too unfair that he should be
the unlucky last of us and die alone.

And yesterday Bill died.

I have never truly faced the fact that since the dying, as experienced in
my life, became a juggernaut - around early 1987 - that it was not only
friends that were passing away, but an entire lifestyle and time itself
that was hurtling irrevocably forward.

In those moments when I allowed myself to imagine a respite, it was
always in my imagination a re-creation of the times which were ineluctably
gone.  Yet I did not acknowledge that fact.  Somehow, when I became
disencumbered of this plague I expected to simply pick up 1986 from
the shelf where I had put it, and move - at double time surely -
through those years I had "missed" since then.

It may be something as simple as the fact that this has all
been so incredibly horrible that I could only go through it by pretending
that it would someday be possible to pick up the familar things again
and they would unfold in some "natural" process of "catching up".  Now
the reality is inescapable:  This _was_ the natural process and there is
no "catching up" to do.  What seemed too real to be true, is in fact
exactly what is.  It is neither too real, nor too true - simply real
and true as a stone or a yawn.

I am very fond of the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.  He
was gay and lived during the turn of the century.  This is from his
poem "The God Forsakes Antony".

       When suddenly at the midnight hour
       an invisible troupe is heard passing
       with exquisite music, with shouts --
       do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now,
       your works that have failed you, the plans of your life
       that have all turned out to be illusions.
                       ...
       approach the window with firm step,
       and listen with emotion, but not
       with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
       as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
       the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
       and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.

After the past twelve years I do not think that it is possible for
me to feel any more deeply personal grief over this catastrophe.
Finally, it is burned out in my life and is all over at last.  More
than anything I feel a kind of pain of relief as much as any
sadness.

As is no secret among many in this group and other netgroups I
have nothing but distaste for that part of the Christian tradition
which would make itself out as especially exemplary, much less
unique in meaning.  But there are some parts of its traditions
and scriptures which look beyond the usual parochial mirror to
those experiences all men have and seek with such difficulty but
unceasing earnestness to express....and in these places Christianity
has some fine expressions of our great confused, godly, yearning,
wondering, striving, giving humaness.

One such instance is from one of the Christian Old Testament books,
_Hosea_.

"I will entice you into the desert and there I will speak to you in the
 depths of your hearts."

This epidemic, this plague has been such a time for me -- and certainly
I am not alone in this experience.  Now most especially with Bill's
death making the past something of a varnished icon, I feel this
strongly.  But through these last thirteen years all my sense of
direction, my attempts at making new maps for my life have come from
just these places.  And in some way that I cannot explain it is
appropriate and even peculiarly comforting to recognize that once
again I am in such a place listening.

Jack Carroll
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids