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Martin (see Tuesday) turns out to love golf. I learned this today in a bar on Ninth Avenue, where he had promised me "one drink and then a walk" and instead watched the Americans come back in the Ryder Cup with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. When the big putt went in, the whole bar yelled. I yelled too. I have no idea what happened. I'm told it was historic.

My watch beeped at two and I took my pills with a club soda, and he didn't look away and he didn't make a thing of it. You would be surprised how rare that combination is.

Then we did walk, over to the river. He fixes old chairs in a shop in Brooklyn, and he says the trick is never to hide the repair, just to make it strong. I said that's a little on the nose, Martin. He said he'd been saving it.

Came home and wrote the October rent check. Third month in a row I've paid it with money I earned. I sat and looked at the checkbook for a while, like it was a letter from somebody.

Joel's picture is on the bookcase. I told him about the golf. He'd have hated it too.
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Last night was our dark night, and I had dinner with Martin.

For the record: Martin is 50, has a gray beard he is vain about, and was in the audience Friday because he's cousin to Tess, our stage manager, and she made him come. He was at the stage door afterward with a program and a pen, which he claims was a joke. He asked me to dinner right there in front of the whole company, and Danny, who plays the son, whistled, and I said yes before I could think of eleven reasons not to.

We went to a Greek place on Eighth. I told him before the bread came. I said: I'm positive, since 1988, I'm healthy now, I take a lot of pills and carry a lot of water, and if that's a problem, this is a very good moussaka and we can just be friends. He said Tess had already told him. He'd asked her whether he should pretend not to know, and she'd said, don't bother, he'll tell you before the bread.

I'm going to have to kill Tess. Right after I thank her.

We talked till almost one. His divorce, my mother, Chekhov, the Mets. I took my ten o'clock dose over coffee, two hours after the moussaka, and didn't think about it until the cab home. First time in three years it wasn't the main event.

At the corner of 22nd Street he kissed me once, like a question, and went down into the subway. I stood there like a teenager. At 45. In a raincoat.
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I went on.

Friday, ten past four, I'm in line at the drugstore for my refill and my beeper goes off. It's Tess. Gil, the actor I cover, has a daughter who has gone into labor in Philadelphia three weeks early, and Gil is on a train. "You're on," she says. "Don't eat anything weird."

I've understudied this part since July, for an audience of Tess and a folding chair. I know the lines the way you know your own phone number: perfectly, until somebody asks.

So I did what I do. I drank my water. I got to the theater at five-thirty. Wardrobe let out Gil's trousers in about four minutes, which I am choosing not to take personally. They sprayed my hair gray, and I sat in front of the mirror looking at a man who had lived long enough to go gray, and I had to go stand in the hallway for a minute.

My ten o'clock pills went in a paper cup on the prop table, stage left. Tess put a bottle of water next to it with a sign: STEPHEN - NOT A PROP. In the second act there's a blackout while they turn the kitchen into the barn, and in the dark I took the pills that have kept me alive for three years and walked back out into the light.

I dropped a line in the first act, and Leon, who plays the uncle, caught it and tossed it back so smoothly nobody knew. In the last scene, where the father sits on the porch and tells his son he was wrong, I looked at Danny and thought about every man I've loved who didn't get this far. I got through it. So did Danny, barely.

Curtain call. A hundred and ninety-some people clapping. I don't know what my face was doing.

Gil called at midnight. It's a girl, and everybody's fine. He's back tonight, and I'm back in the basement with the crossword, and that's exactly right. That's the job.

But I went on.
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Rain all day like the end of the world. The hurricane that scared Florida half to death came up the coast and emptied itself on us. Understudy rehearsal at two anyway: Tess, me, the folding chair, and water coming in under the loading door. Gil stopped by for his mail and said his daughter isn't due till October, and first babies are always late.

Went home soaked to the knees. Drank my six glasses of water anyway. The irony is not lost on me.
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Paid the bills today. All of them. At the kitchen table, with the good pen and Sinatra on the radio, because some occasions need a soundtrack.

Nobody warns you about this part of coming back from the dead: paperwork. From 1993 until this spring I lived on disability, a small, exact amount of money I planned my life around like a garden in a window box. I let the credit cards go. I learned which pharmacies would wait.

In May I wrote Social Security a letter that began, "I am writing to inform you that I have returned to work." I rewrote it four times. It is the strangest sentence I have ever composed, and I once had to say "forsooth" in Central Park in August.

Now there's a theater paycheck every Thursday and a proofreading temp job three mornings a week, and today there were checks for the rent, Con Ed, the phone company, and the last of what I've owed my dentist since 1994. Thirty-three cents a stamp. I licked every one of them like a prayer.

Then I went to my friend Terry's and we watched the Emmys and were terrible about the dresses. She said, you look different. I said, I'm solvent. She said, that must be it.
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Raymond would have been 47 today.

He died in January of 1996. That spring the new drugs came, and by summer I was eating again, and by fall I was walking to the pharmacy instead of taking a cab. He missed it by months. Joel, my Joel, missed it by four years. Luis, Kenny, Paulie, both Davids. I keep the old address book in a drawer. I've never crossed anybody out. I couldn't find a way to do it that didn't feel like the second time.

Last night in the dressing room Danny was talking about a friend of his who just tested positive, and he said, kindly, the way you'd talk about the weather, "But it's basically just a pill now, right?"

I did not throw Leon's orange at him. I want credit for that.

I said: it's a fistful of pills three times a day, on a clock, with water, forever. It's a blood test every three months to see if it's still working. It's side effects you learn to call "manageable." And it's a pill a lot of beautiful men never got. I said it quietly. He went red and apologized, and I said no, I'm glad you think it's a pill. I'm glad you get to think that. I meant it about halfway.

I'm grateful every single day. I'm also so angry I could spit. It turns out those can both be true in the same body, in the same dressing room, fifteen minutes before places.

Happy birthday, Ray.
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People ask what my day is like. My day is like a train schedule, and I am the train.

And all day long, water. Six big glasses at least, more in August, because Crixivan can give you kidney stones, and I've had one, thank you. I know every public restroom between the Village and Lincoln Center. I could give tours.

The capsules come in a bottle with a little canister of desiccant you're not supposed to throw away, because they don't like humidity. Neither do I. We have that in common. I carry that bottle in my bag like a saint's bone.

Four years ago I gave away my winter coat. Now I own a watch that tells me when to stay alive. Some nights when it beeps I say "thank you" out loud. Tess, our stage manager, thinks I'm talking to her. She says, "You're welcome."
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A report from the basement.

For anyone new: I understudy two roles in The Wintering, a new play about a Minnesota farm family that has been running downtown since May. I cover Gil, who plays the father, and Leon, who plays the uncle. Their last understudy left in July for a tour, and I got the call. That's how most of my luck comes lately: sideways, and by phone.

Gil is 61 and hasn't missed a show since the Carter administration. Leon eats an orange in the wings every night for his voice. They are both, as far as I can tell, immortal.

The job is this. I sign in at half hour like everybody else. Then I go down to the green room, which is neither green nor a room, and do the crossword in pen while the show plays on the monitor. If Gil or Leon can't go on, I go on. If they can, I go home at the curtain call like a man who has spent the evening in a very nice bus station.

At intermission one of the crew came downstairs to announce that McGwire had hit his five hundredth, like a town crier. The carpenter said something in Polish that I will never forget and can't print.

I'm not complaining. I may be the only man in the building who knows what a gift it is to be bored.
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If you've just found out you're positive and you're scared, write to me. I remember.

If you know me from the business: hello, and please don't forward this around. It's my diary. It just happens to have a door.

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