During her last days, she was in the hospice. I had just gotten a Harley, my first Harley. I rode up on one today. I love motorcycles. She came out and saw it, and she got upset. She was angry at me and she went back inside all pissed off. This gay dude that worked there— That’s a group of people that, without them I wouldn’t be alive. Gay men fucking saved my ass. The AIDS organizations, they’re all run by gays. The hospices, the nurses were all gay guys. They’ve got some deep well of love within them that’s just incredible.
So she goes inside, and she was pissed off that I had the motorcycle. This gay guy, let’s call him “Bill.” I say, “Why is she so mad at me?” Bill says, “Well, she just feels like you’re moving on with your life and you don’t love her anymore, you have this motorcycle. You don’t need her anymore.” That was a strange thing, and I realized how much I did need her. I loved her, she was my best friend. What I did was, I went home and I brought some of my work shirts back to the hospice, and I brought them into her room and said, “Franny, my shirts are a fucking mess, I need you to iron them for me.” She got all, “Fuck you, I’m in hospice,” you know. I left, I come back twenty minutes later, all the shirts are ironed, she got up, and then she’s like, “Where’s the motorcycle?” Now she’s excited about it. I guess that guy was right. She just wanted to know that I still needed her, like I loved her, you know what I mean? People don’t know they’re dying. They feel like, “I’m alive right now.” Dying is an event, they pass away at one moment. Up until that moment, they are alive, and they want to be loved, and they want to give and share in that case.
Now she wants to see the motorcycle. I take her out. She wants to sit on it. I put her on it. She wants to start it up. She’s wearing a paper dress, essentially, she’s got her morphine pole next to her and she’s sitting on this Harley; I’m worried about her burning her frigging leg off. She says, “Can you just take me for a little ride around the parking lot?” I’m like, “No, I can’t.” Then it just hits me, I’m like, “No, you have to. You’re in this moment, you have to do this motorcycle ride.” Fuck, of course I will, yeah. I’m riding around the hospice parking lot, and then my friend comes barreling in in this van who’s a cripple in a wheelchair, laughing, saying, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m riding Franny around.” Franny’s like, “Can we just go out on the street a little bit?” She’s holding the pole! It was a pole with four wheels on the bottom, and we’re riding around this hospice! You can hear the goddamn wheels clanging and banging. It was insane.
I pass the front door and all these nurses are standing out front and they’re all crying. They’re watching us and they’re fucking crying. I didn’t know why they were crying. I was like, “Why are they crying?” I didn’t get what they were seeing. I didn’t know, because I was just in it. I was living it. I knew my wife, who had suffered, the suffering that she had been through in her life. She was a prostitute, she was a fucking heroin addict, she was beaten by fucking pimps, and this is her past, you know? Then she ends up with AIDS, and she’s dying. All she wants is a fucking ride on my motorcycle. What a gift, you know?
Next thing you know, we’re on I-95. Women, it’s never enough for them. We’re on I-95, she unhooks the fucking pole, and she’s holding the morphine bag over her head, with her gown on that’s flying up in the air. You could see her entire fucking naked, bony body, with the morphine bag whipping in the wind, and we’re passing by these guys in their Lamborghinis and shit, and I’m looking at them like, “What kind of life are you living? Look at me! I’m on top of the world here!” That was the last thing I did with her. I feel so blessed and lucky. You can’t ask for a better moment and memory than that.
It’s beautiful stuff. The biggest things that we’re afraid of really can be the most beautiful if you look them right in the fucking eye and you don’t flinch, because there’s something really beautiful behind it, you know?
AMAZING JOHNATHAN—COMEDIAN, MAGICIAN
About six years ago, I got diagnosed with a heart condition. Cardiomyopathy. It’s degenerative. They said it’s because I might have had a virus when I was a kid.
Now I’ve been given a time stamp. Two years. Maybe a year to two years. Right now, my heart is failing, and they can’t get me a transplant because I’m diabetic and they won’t give it to a diabetic.
I have a whole thing I got to wear that is a defibrillator that’s over my heart. It’s a real pain in the ass to wear it. I got electrodes all over the place. If I pass out, this thing will detect that, and I have thirty seconds to shut it off. If I don’t shut it off, it shoots this blue jelly all over me, conductive jelly, and zaps me.
It warns people, stay away from me. People will start to touch you and shake you, “Are you all right?” It will stop their heart and start mine.
It’s kind of like the ultimate practical joke.
If you ask me if I’m partying, fuck yeah, man. If I can get my hands on anything right now, I’d do it. The pain level in my hands and my feet right now, it’s so bad. From my heart not pumping blood to my extremities. My hands are always tingling. I can’t walk more than twenty feet.
You’ll see me looking for heroin in about two months. Wouldn’t you, if you were dying?
MIKE DESTEFANO
I’ve got to be honest, part of this having HIV, and my wife dying of AIDS and, there’s this one part of it that I love, that I can look at anybody and say, “Really? Is that your fucking problem? Fuck you!” You know what I mean?
“What do you got, herpes? You fucking cunt. Get a real disease!”
“I got hepatitis.”
“Give me your hepatitis, I’ll give you what I got.” There’s something cool about that, having the worst fucking disease.
I’m in a hospital, I ended up with pneumonia, had nothing to do with HIV. I end up with this double pneumonia. My wife’s still alive; she’s home very sick. I’m fucking worried about her, lying in the hospital. She decides to get in the car and drive to come visit me, crashes the car on I-95. They tell me, “Your wife’s in the emergency room.” Downstairs of the hospital that I’m in with pneumonia. My wife’s down there, my wife who’s dying of AIDS is in the hospital from a car wreck that flipped over. Then the phone rings again, my mother tells me, “Dad got a brain tumor.”
This is all in a ten-minute fucking period. This is a bad day. If someone says, “Oh, I’m having a rough day,” yeah, tell me about it. Let me fucking hear about your bad day, you fuck. I love having that power. I don’t know why, I just do.
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON—WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
I remember talking to an oncologist on the phone who was essentially telling me that there was no way my dad was going to make it, and one of the first things that popped into my mind was, “You’re telling me that frogs are falling from the sky.” I remember that kind of popping into my mind. I thought hearing that your dad is going to die is as bizarre as hearing that frogs are falling from the sky.
SAM SIMON—WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTIVIST, PHILANTHROPIST (1955–2015)