On the Monday morning my parents left New York, I called in to work, said I was sick, and I was; I was almost nauseous, thinking about them leaving, thinking about what might happen to us. I rode with them in a taxi to the airport and stayed with them until their flight was called and they boarded, despite my mother saying I should go on to the office, that my boss was going to be angry. I wanted them to remember me staying, waiting with them until the last minute. I cannot remember how I got back home, but for the rest of the day I was in bed, willing myself to feel nothing, trying to hold back the feelings. My room was dim and I lay there even after it was dark outside and I heard my roommates home from work, not realizing I was there.
In articles now about AIDS, there are always the photos of the crowds, the men in combat boots and T-shirts that say SILENCE EQUALS DEATH. I believed it. I believed in every act of protest, taking action, every instance of someone standing up, speaking out, and venting their rage. Yet for me those years were not about the silence of repression or cowardice, but other silences: the stillness of the room where I found myself, hiding, hearing Italian words filter through the walls; the quiet of neighborhoods in the Village; the faces of men in the windows of clubs that were often empty; the rooms of apartments hurriedly cleared out, their contents left on the street because no one could quite bear to sort through them. Silence did equal death to me, but not in the way that the protesters meant it. To me it was the silence of empty, the silence that arrives when there are simply no words to cover the situation, the silence of retreat. I wasn’t trying to figure out how to live anymore; I was trying to figure out if I would die and how that would work. The silence I heard was what surrounded what could not be expressed, the sound of shutting down because there was only so much we could take in.
We were young and I wish I could have been one of the ones who went to the barricades, but instead I went to work very early in the mornings and stayed late at night and tried to avoid all the sadness, to push it away, because it was so unfathomable. Other people screamed in rage. I got quieter and quieter, and when it came time, as it always did, to talk about those who were sick, I excused myself because I had to, and if someone’s parents were mentioned, if there was some story of so-and-so’s mother or father flying in, or not coming, or leaving with ashes, or maybe staying until the moment when it was over for their son, I went out the door and back to my room, that bed, that silence. I excused myself, as my mother would have, in the face of this. For me, AIDS, those years, was that room where I read books and felt scared. At Easter, that first year it all started, when the Italians came down the street with their crèche in its long glass case, I mistook the celebration of resurrection for a funeral for someone who had grown up in this neighborhood that was really so much like the village I might never return to.
. . .
When the AIDS tests came out, a friend and I went to take our place in line. Contemplating the signing of a living will, I moved slowly through the three-week wait time after they drew my blood, but registered negative when we got the results. My friend was negative too, but because the test’s effectiveness was uncertain, he was not relieved. He had been with a lot of men and could not shake the belief that he had AIDS, whatever the test showed. For years, he dissolved with the discovery of every mark or pimple. It turned out that he had also written his parents a letter, and when he found out I had too, he gave me his to hold on to, just in case. It already had a stamp and I wondered why I had not thought of that. It was a city of letters waiting.
. . .
We are getting on a bus to go to the AIDS march in Washington. I remember the trip. Almost everyone I knew from New York was going. It seemed for many a necessity, a last chance to have all their friends gathered around them before they got really sick.
Thanks to Steven, I rode on a bus with the Gay Men’s Chorus, which he and the doctor had joined. All the way they sang. When I looked at Steven and made a face, he looked offended, but I didn’t care. It was too early in the morning for anything from Sweeney Todd.
From a friend, I had learned that Eric was back in D.C., working for a senator. From directory assistance I got his number and called him up. He agreed to see the AIDS quilt on the Mall with me on the afternoon before the march. I didn’t know what to expect, but after I had settled in at the hotel I made my way to Dupont Circle, where Eric had an apartment. When he came to the door, he looked skinnier than I remembered and I thought he was about to tell me something terrible, but he said nothing about being ill and I assumed I was just paranoid. I thought everyone was sick. Of course, everyone was.
Things were a little awkward. When it came down to it, I did not know Eric well, despite the full and interesting life we had led together in my imagination. Unable to hide my curiosity, I asked if he still had girlfriends. He replied that he was a “full-time homosexual” now, as if it were a difficult job he has accepted somewhat reluctantly.
“Great timing, huh?” he said.