Death by AIDs, 1992, by Jay Blotcher

From MemoryArchive

Who: Jay Blotcher
What: AIDS Memorial Service
When: September 1992
Where: New York City, Central Park

When Michael insists that he sees Bette Midler perched on the wall clock across the room, I know we're totally screwed.

I really mean "he" because he's the one with dementia. But I mean "we," too, since I'm part of a group of friends caring for this man who is slowly vanishing from a hospital bed at Beth Israel on First Avenue, body bruised and rawboned. I'm here for two reasons: the obligations of friendship (we've known each other since 1980) and a marked susceptibility to high drama—especially of the deathbed caliber. So, I'm helping Michael die. And with the surprise appearance of Bette Midler in his hospital room—Michael doesn't say what she's wearing and I don't press the issue—I know that Michael is losing ground.

It is a rotten coda to a wonderful spring afternoon. April, 1992. We've just shared a joyride through the West Village. Michael has acknowledged the inevitable with a list of stubborn final requests. On the top of the list was a hamburger. So, I pushed his wheelchair across town to this saloon on West 4th Street where the windows are caked with years of grease. Michael eats the oozing burger, his face creased with that "what the f**k" expression that has become indelible during months of being holed up at Beth Israel. On the way back, he insists that I push faster, faster, and he laughs like a madman as some rascally spring breezes whip up his hospital gown. He keeps laughing, his usual basset-hound face glowing, even though every bump in the sidewalk under his wheels is grinding bone against bone in his wasted frame. So I push faster to keep the laughter alive as smug, satisfied, healthy New Yorkers dodge out of our path. But not before they get an eyeful of the Incredible Dying AIDS Patient.

I am helping him back into his hospital bed when Michael points at the wall. "There she is," he says, voice mumbly with fatigue. Bette Midler is sitting on top of the clock in the ward. HIV is turning my pal's brain into Swiss cheese.

Every birthday-boy gets a wish. It is a week later and Michael is about to announce his. We're all here: Patrick, Dennis, Jackie, Pia, and me. Final birthday, final wish. Jackie has brought a birthday cake and we've wheeled Michael out into the dayroom. And we eat, even though the stink of hospital room disinfectant permeates every crumb.

The presents are brought out. We have all shown a measure of diplomacy. The gifts are guarded gestures, not evidence of false hopes. No appointment books, no new clothes, no watches. Nothing to suggest a future, because time is now measured in weeks.

Sometimes I think the worst thing about dying for Michael is dealing with the hospital color scheme. White, beige, and silvery metal. It insults the peerless taste he cultivated as a Parsons grad student and fashion plate. Michael was a walking history of alternative culture, dressing in punk, new wave, and finally Goth styles. We all craved a friend who was amusing and colorful. We wanted a larger-than-life Manhattan character, so we egged him on. Then we duly feigned shock, through ten shades of dyed hair, safety-pin earrings, kilts, and bondage pants. But now Michael's hair is dirt-brown and limpid, and it gets washed maybe once a week. But what does it matter, since the disease is sucking the life out of his hair, as well? Michael seems like a statue with hairline cracks along every inch of his frame.

We wheel him back to his room. We take turns tucking him in, surrounding the bed. We are Red Cross diagrams of stoic people carrying an invalid. But we have exhausted every official position for carrying the wounded. We are eager to pull back, to find a current of air not poisoned by the odor of medication. That stench of hopelessness. We pretend to make hospital corners. Anything to avert our gaze. But Michael motions us to move in closer. He has always been our most sadistic friend. There is the unfinished matter of a birthday wish. So we hover, unwillingly.

"Here's how I want my funeral done," he whispers, not so much for dramatics but because he shares a room with another man. "Oh, come on, Michael," Pia pleads. She is a slim young pagan with mascara-rimmed Betty Boop eyes and usually dressed in miniskirts. She comes across as flaky, yet possesses a strength that shames the rest of us. Pia has been the one who visits every single day, carrying him to the bathroom when Michael warns her in time, and cleaning his sheets when he doesn't.

But Michael is right. It's time to plan the goodbye party. After all, he's been leaving us for months, slowly, like the afternoon sun retreating in burnt orange shadows from a patio. I was there two weeks ago when the doctor explained quietly that he would never walk again. My breath stuck in my throat. There was no upside to this news. After a few minutes, Michael looked up at me, an odd pride in his voice. "Well? Did you ever think I'd be so calm? Didn't I handle that well?" And for the fifteenth time that month, my heart broke.

But I am proud of Michael for broaching the subject, pushing aside our awkward playacting. How odd that he spoke first. For practicality and Michael have been infrequent companions. Michael would sooner go on a shopping spree at the Salvation Army or score a bag of weed than respond to the polite reminders left on his door by his Alphabet City landlord the fifth day of every month. Michael was a gifted graphic artist of Italian working-class lineage from Syracuse. But he'd been born without a work ethic. And thanks to his sharp tongue, jobs were kept with alarming brevity. He had a knack for shredding superiors when it came to defending his artwork. "I'll find another one," he'd reassure us. And he would. During college at Syracuse, where we had met, Michael was an amusing self-creation. But in Manhattan, Michael had become a monster. To be a genial drunk, one requires polo mallets or a townhouse or a country house. Michael had neither, and his carousing had grown acrid, spiteful. At a gallery opening one evening, where the top-shelf vodka was free, I watched as Michael knocked them back, and then was too late to catch him as he fell over.

But we come to New York City to know people like this. In the novels we write in our heads from our sweet, stupid young lives, we cast characters like Michael. What we don't admit is when the amusement wears thin. Eventually. Inevitably. And even when we'd like to move on, we don't, for reasons that sound logical after a few blistering tokes. I had prayed that Michael would somehow become amusing again—or less sloppy in his pursuit of joy.

Over the past four years, I had actually distanced myself from Michael. I'd traded in my nine-to-five work clothes for a T-shirt, jeans, and boots and learned to lie down in the streets with ACT UP. For me, it was far more bearable to yell at bureaucrats than to empty a bedpan. But then the call came that Michael was sick, so here I am.

"This is what I want," Michael says, looking each of us in the eye, our sadistic pal. "Take my ashes and put them into white balloons and let them go over Central Park. That's what I want, okay?"

White balloons? The resident cynic of our group? The man whose notion of romance was scarring himself with razor blades, because true love requires pain? Michael is going Hallmark on us? So we merely nod to the man on the pillow. There will be time to scale back his fanciful notion, like pruning an oversize bouquet whose insistent beauty reminds you more of funerals than flower shows.

But with his deathbed request, Michael has set the inevitable into fast motion. His decline is swift and the AIDS monster is giddy in its victory. It is now a sunny day in late June. I sit next to Michael's stretcher on a four-seater, jittery with air turbulence. I want to fly Michael to his version of eternity: a cloud-bedecked version of Studio 54, where a velvet rope allows in only the A-list deceased. I want to bypass the teary, fatal homecoming awaiting us at Syracuse Airport. His family rushes out to the tarmac, as if to catch the shards of Michael falling from the sky. They wear identical masks of dumb, dense grief, his mother Vicki, his father Mike, his sister Marie. Tears are shed. Platitudes dispensed. At home, Michael's wheelchair ascends the front stairs with an awkward bump noticed by every last neighbor peeping from behind their stained lace curtains.

Michael's father says little. He declares his love through his Instamatic. Michael is home less than two hours when his dad insists on photos in the backyard. So, we wheel him out. Michael in his wheelchair near some malnourished shrubs. The overcast afternoon echoes the bloodless look of his face. His hands are laced together in shame, this man who preened for hours before allowing a camera near him. Marie and her daughter stand behind him, offering forced Kodak grins.

I stay for dinner and later talk to his mom in the darkened plywood den. Vicki is a pious Italian woman with a huge middle and an expansive heart. Her eyes are ringed with sadness. She talks of her son’s comic-book collection. His younger days, sitting high on his Dad's shoulders. She pauses, looks to me helplessly, eyes gone liquid, begging for another topic. I want to convey the exhilaration of those first years in Manhattan. The endless nights that left us dizzy during the day, so that we sometimes couldn't distinguish when we were high and when we weren't. The number of men we slept with and then pledged undying love, only to watch them walk out in the morning. I want to offer a portrait of life on the edge that reeks of bravery, not mere excess. But her son is dying in the room upstairs, undermining my argument.

The next day, I have to return to New York City, I tell myself, to prepare for an AIDS conference in Amsterdam. But I am a coward, more suited to street demos than to sitting by a bedside. Michael is in the plywood den, dried bits of breakfast in his beard. He is looking at the window, although his mother has lowered the shades. Through the blinds, diffused sunlight bathes him. Wounded warrior. Dying god. His wheelchair is now fused to his body.

I have no goodbye speeches. We have known each other for 12 years and shared too much. The sheer joy of nightmarish boyfriends, when we mistook martyrdom for romance. Visits to sex clubs, all-night drug parties. I have no stomach for the truth, and Michael tightens his grip on my hand. He lets out a "hmpphh” which is as emotional a response as I will ever hear from my pal. His eyes scan and scorch my face. I stammer, choking back the sadness that makes my mouth taste like it’s full of blood. I resort to offering a wordless hug. On the way to the airport, I shut down completely. I have no recollection of returning to Manhattan. Three weeks later, Vicki calls me in Amsterdam to let me know.

She also tells me from her small, cluttered, warm kitchen thousands of miles away that Michael has shared his birthday wish. She promised she would. It is scheduled for a Monday afternoon in late September. I promise Vicki I will explore the mechanics of Michael's request.

The day before the goodbye party, I walk up five flights in the West Village to visit my ex-boyfriends Theo and Dave. Theo sells balloon bouquets and fights to hide his disdain for customers. He keeps a helium tank in his living room closet. As Dave looks on, we experiment with peat moss. An unworthy stand-in for the bone chips of cremation. We fill a single balloon with peat moss and helium. It barely rises from the living room floor. I ask to use the phone, long-distance. "Vicki," I say, "you've got to do me a favor." She had been sitting at her kitchen table, spooning her son into white balloons. "You've got to empty each balloon by about halfway. Otherwise, they just won't fly."

The next afternoon, Central Park is gripped in a raw, icy drizzle. Dusk collides with the fog hovering at knee level. Vicki and her husband, joined by Aunt Leeza and Uncle Louie, have flown in and stand across from the Dakota, swollen with plane travel and grief. We are all there: Dennis, Jackie, Patrick, Pia, and several others. The bereaved family searches our faces, eager for some indication of how to prepare for the party.

"Here," Vicki says, quietly, extending a plastic bag. I look blankly, then quickly take it. Inside is a clear Tupperware container. Within that, lying side-by-side like sardines, are 30 balloons. Each contains a bit of Michael.

Within 15 minutes, 20 of us have gathered. Jackie arrives in a sleek black pantsuit, lugging a helium tank. Her brother Dennis, who sprays cologne at Bloomingdale's, wears a tailored suit. George comes, too, dressed in tie-dyed linen. He is either an aged hippie or a madman. He has the white beard of a prophet and the wild eyes of a zealot. I wear an AIDS -activist T-shirt and jeans. Michelangelo, a fellow Syracuse alumnus and AIDS activist, says too loudly that he will take control of the inflation process. This is his attempt at making amends. He'd been closer to Michael than all of us, had lived with him at college and during their first years in New York City. But when the call for help had come, he'd brushed it off like cobwebs, declaring that he owed no debt to the past. But he is here, his face bruised with guilt.

We persuade the family to stand around the bend, out of sight. Then we commence the operation under a gathering of maple trees. Michelangelo suggests a practice balloon, without ashes. It fills with an impulsive whoosh and bursts, like a slap across the face. The damp afternoon air blunts the sound. It's already too much for us. A suffocating sense of piety gives way to nervous laughter that we try to squelch, jaws aching, like bratty kids in church. Tears squeeze from the corner of my eyes and mingle with the acid rain. I try to catch my breath, but Michelangelo suddenly elbows me. "You'd better go tell his family it's okay. You know—that Michael wasn't in that balloon."

We eventually achieve assembly-line precision. Extract balloon from Tupperware. Hook to helium tank nozzle. Inflate with a gust of helium. The bone chips dance in a mad circle. Unhook from nozzle. Tie. Every four balloons are strung together in a bizarre bouquet. The sense of loss has been replaced with liberating absurdity, heating the blood in our cheeks. Only once do we err in the process. Michelangelo fumbles as he unhooks a balloon from the nozzle, and we watch it flail spastically, spitting ashes through the air before it comes to rest on the pavement. George lunges forward. “I’ll take care of that,” he announces, and, before we can protest, his sandaled foot rubs the tattoo of ashes into the ground. Usually George takes a cabinet of medications to even out his anxiety, but no amount of pills can soothe his nerves today, and he alternately mutters to himself and barks at the rest of us.

Vicki and I have both misjudged. The balloons are still too heavy. The gravity that Michael lacked in life has suddenly arrived with unfortunate timing. We tie extra helium-only balloons to each bouquet. But they hover with uncertainty. Just then, Michael's father appears from behind the hedge with his Instamatic. He coaxes us to gather together for a photo, holding the balloons up high in the rainy sky. And, yes, he asks us to smile.

The leaden balloons are tumors in our hands. Malignant, spiteful. More people have arrived and encircle Vicki and Michael Sr. protectively. We rejoin them in the middle of the mosaic of Strawberry Fields. The air is silent, save for the staccato beat of icy rain on the leaves. George orders everyone into a circle and barks, "It is time to release the balloons." We each let go of the blue twine holding each cluster of balloons and stare upward with forced optimism. Every group of white balloons falls, one by one, to the soggy ground, like a clumsy pallbearer falling into an open grave. We are ashamed. But then slowly, one single bouquet, a haphazard equation of helium and bone chips, begins to inch itself upward into the dusky sky. I smile and see my grin mirrored in the others. Today, obvious, idiotic symbolism is a welcome thing.

But our attention is wrenched back to the reality of the ash balloons writhing on the ground. "A change of plans, folks," George says too loudly, glazed eyes suddenly shimmering with power. "We're gonna release the balloons down by the pond." A drenched line of mourners follows the madman down the sloping path to a mossy oval of water beneath a copse of trees. Any pretense of grace is abandoned, and we dig our nails into the balloons, to burst them over the pond. Small showers of Michael float on the surface of the water. When Michelangelo explodes his globe, a gust of wind stirs. He yelps. I hold his head and with my fingers I tweeze bone chips from the corner of his eye. "That's Michael," he says, grateful for the rebuke. "He got me back."

A mourner who favors the traditional gesture pulls a bottle of Dom Perignon from her raincoat and distributes plastic cups. Pia lights a bundle of sage to purify the clearing where we stand and recites a prayer of Hindu rebirth. The rest of us stand silently, sipping Dom from plastic cups. I don't know when champagne stuck in my throat before. Into the clearing comes a man in ragged clothes, a tentative smile on his face and under one arm a threadbare lawn chair. "Hello, folks," he says, then peers at us through slitted eyes, decides we're a suitable audience, and begins singing the '70s soul ballad "You Make Me Feel Brand New." His falsetto voice is oddly soothing. He finishes, flashes a practiced smile, and juts out his palm for spare coins. I take him aside to explain why this isn't the proper crowd to hustle. His features twist. He sputters loudly, "Well, why dincha tell me? I wouldn't of done that. Not if I knew what's going on. What kind of person you think I am?" I try to hush him, but his character has been impugned. Just then, Michael Sr. approaches us and coaxes him into posing for the camera. It is his chance to make amends, so he quickly agrees with a nod and a wide, toothless smile. He slowly shuffles off.

The afternoon's events have attained a level of absurdity that mere coincidence cannot accomplish. We began the day hating Michael, for putting his parents through this loopy sendoff. And we still hate him, for being sloppy enough to get HIV. But we're starting to get it. The goodbye party, which seemed like one last spastic burst of AIDS dementia, is Michael's gift to us. I watch the realization wash over people's faces. Pia, Jackie, Dennis, Patrick. We smile and laugh for a moment, even though the laugh catches in my throat.

The icy rain redoubles its assault, hitting our skin like a fleet of penknives. Nothing remains of our fragile bravado. Michael's folly had been carried out. We say our goodbyes to Vicki and Michael Sr., to Leeza and Louie. The group parts mechanically to allow the bereaved family to leave the leafy chapel first. Then, the rest of us hug one another, our eyes rimmed in sorrow, and our weary, ironic laughter echoes through the empty park. We have finally achieved a level of numbness suitable for a funeral. Michelangelo, Pia, and I head toward the subway across from the Dakota, knowing that no taxi will collect us in the rain. On the way, Pia produces a joint and manages to light it between raindrops. For us, this is piety. We eventually arrive at a sushi bar on Avenue A, its interior bathed in blue neon. We hoist cups of sake and toast an absent friend, clinking together the porcelain with so much helpless fury that we can't believe it doesn’t smash upon impact.