Finally, one day, I couldn’t stand it anymore: I walked into the kitchen, laid my head on the table, and asked my father, “How are we supposed to live every day if we know we’re going to die?” He looked at me, clearly pained by the dawning of my genetically predestined morbidity. He had been the same way as a kid. A day never went by where he didn’t think about his eventual demise. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, unable to conjure a comforting answer. “You just do.”
My father can get pretty existential. “You’re born alone and you die alone” is a favorite of his that I particularly hate. Ditto “Perhaps reality is just a chip implanted in all our brains.” He has a history of staring out into nature and asking, “How do we know this is actually here?” I guess I inherited it. I thought about Gram, about how long and complicated her life had been, and how it had now been reduced to a Dumpster full of old canned goods and a vintage Pucci sweater I had already spilled tomato sauce on. I thought about all the things I hoped to get done in my life and realized: I better get cracking. I can never spend a whole afternoon watching a Singled Out marathon again if this is what’s going to happen.
The fact is I had been circling the topic of death, subconsciously, for some time. Growing up in Soho in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was aware of AIDS and the toll it was taking on the creative community. Illness, loss, who would handle the art and the real estate and the medical bills—these topics hovered over every dinner party. As many of my parents’ friends became sick, I learned to recognize the look of someone suffering—sunken cheeks, odd facial spotting, a sweater that no longer fit. And I knew what it meant: that person would soon become a memorial, the name on a prize given to visiting students, a distant memory.
My mom’s best friend, Jimmy, was a swarthy gay fetish photographer who was dying by the time I was born. One of my earliest memories is of a pale, feeble man reclining on the couch by the front windows of our loft, joking weakly with my mother about gossip, and family, and fashion. He was charismatic, talented, darkly funny. My mother helped him get his affairs in order, reached out to friends who hadn’t seen him in a long time to say goodbye, navigated New York with his mother when she came to be with Jimmy in his final days. I still have a lot of guilt for screaming at Jimmy when he ate a banana I had been “saving,” especially since he died a few weeks later.
The summer after sophomore year of college I became convinced I, too, would die of AIDS. I had ill-advised intercourse with a petite poet-mathematician who, afterward, removed the condom, placed it under his pillow, and wiped his penis clean on his own curtains.
“Can I tell you a secret?” he asked as he returned to bed.
“Lay it on me!” I said.
“Well,” he said, “last week I was walking around late at night and I accidentally wandered into a gay bar and I met this Filipino guy and let him come to my house, and he fucked me in the ass and the condom broke and then he stole my wallet.”
I paused. “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” I said.
It was about a hundred degrees out, the kind of New York heat that chafes your thighs and makes the murder rate spike. I spent the rest of the summer in a hell of my own creation, imagining the virus taking hold, the things I’d never do, the children I’d never have, the tears my mother would shed as she lost yet another loved one to this pandemic. I had done enough research to know that, were I infected, it wouldn’t show up on a test for several months, so I simply waited and asked myself questions: Was I strong enough to be an activist? What would it feel like to be the face of AIDS in the industrialized world? Or would I simply hide until I died? I asked to have my wisdom teeth removed, just so I could be unconscious for a few hours. I tried to enjoy every bite of Tasti D and every laugh shared with my sister, knowing things would soon change. I made out with a computer programmer and wondered if I had exposed him to the illness. By the end of the summer I was officially “living with AIDS.”
Spoiler alert: I was fine.
As much as I wanted to believe the universe punishes you for fucking a minuscule bisexual, I had not contracted the virus. But the chilling specter of my own death had been so all consuming, I’d required dental surgery.
“I don’t mind the idea of dying,” my friend Elizabeth says, “but I’m stressed out about the logistics of the whole thing.”
If we are reincarnated, as my mother promises, how long do we have to wait around before we get inside that new baby? Is it a long line, like the Japanese girls lined up outside a newly opened Topshop? What if that new baby has mean parents? If we follow the Buddhist logic that we are becoming part of the glory of the universe, one huge consciousness, well, that’s just too much togetherness for my taste. I couldn’t even do a group art project in second grade. How am I going to share an understanding with the rest of creation? If this proves to be the case, I’m too much of a loner for death, but I’m also scared of being lonely. Where does that leave me?