Free Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette

it was announced that a retrovirus had been isolated as agent of the AIDS infection.
    Bernice had been a dancer as a young woman, a showgirl whose mother had sewed her costumes, and she still moved with a dancer's tensile strength. She'd never been hooked like The Red Shoes , though. Having given herself five years to make it, bound and determined not to stay too long at the tinsel fair, she gladly gave up her dancing to get married. Yet Bernice was surely the source of Roger's passion for high art. She painted, she read, went to concerts, didn't miss a beat at the Art Institute, and adored all manner of dance, from the clubs where she'd worked herself to the princess arc of ballet.
    On January 20, 1985, Roger took her to the Joffrey on one of our season tickets, while I ate standing up in Sheldon's kitchen with Al. Bernice and Roger came home exalted, and we sat around having ice cream. Roger was fine. How is it I remember those moments sharp as a Kodachrome and see him perfectly healthy when I know now it wasn't so? I've got two pictures from January that spook me so much I can't even look at them now. One is Sunday the sixth, a birthday party for a relative once removed, in the parking garage of an office building, with every guest in a plastic hard hat coyly atop evening clothes. Roger looks ashen and drawn, though in truth I look pretty beat myself. Cesar had left only a week before. In the other photo, at the Forty Deuce cast party a week later, he's grinning and looks more himself, but I can see those shed three pounds in his face. Roger was built no-nonsense solid, five feet nine, 143 on the button, skin quick to take color, and never looked his age. In the cast-party picture he's older—not old, just older than I remember.
    Roger must have mentioned to his brother that he'd lost some weight, because I recall Sheldon telling him one night to eat the fattening stuff, rattling off a merry list: potatoes, avocados, sour cream. Was it all dismissed like a joke because we were still in the age of lean-is-in? After all, there were body-mad men at The Sports Connection who would have paid equal weight in gold to lose three pounds. Not for very much longer, though. Within six months, lean—let alone thin—would become synonymous with the flashing amber of AIDS. In Africa they call AIDS the "slim disease." And even the impulsions of vanity don't hold up to fear. Thus in a year you would start seeing men at the gym who had chiseled themselves like Phidias now suddenly running to fat, the empty pounds accumulating in the waist and buttocks, evidence of the late-night binges on Oreos and Ring Dings that had replaced the faster food of bathhouse sex.
    I'm not saying Sheldon's caloric list was a form of denial, not at that point, but it was very difficult to understand what Roger's brother thought about AIDS. In Chicago at Al's birthday in '83, I remember him saying he'd talked with a doctor who predicted they'd have a cure within a year. I took comfort in that for a while. Now, it the beginning of '85, he made it clear he didn't want to talk about Cesar. This mattered to me because Sheldon was openly gay himself, one of the few older men of the tribe I could talk to, who had seen the whole history of the movement, from the closets tight as Anne Frank's hideout to the broad daylight of liberation. I wished he didn't keep changing the subject whenever I mentioned AIDS.
    He was a power broker who lived on a hill of money, who had made a huge reputation as a lawyer in the gay community when there was no community to speak of. Meanwhile he bought up bungalows and apartments in West Hollywood like Monopoly, and in the intervening years the mortgages were all paid off and the rents quadrupled. In the last few years he had opened Trumps, a watering hole on Melrose in which "foodies" gathered deliriously to graze, an overnight sensation, and had become chairman of the board of the Bank of Los Angeles. This last, in a former Rexall Drugs