Sunday, December 22, 1996

Christmas party at the House this afternoon. Maxine made the eggnog with no rum in it and then a second bowl with rum in it, and labeled them RESIDENTS and STAFF, and nobody paid the slightest attention to the labels.

We have two empty beds. I want to write that down plainly, because I don't think I have ever seen it. Two made-up beds with the corners tucked and nobody in them, not because a man died in the night but because nobody has been sent to us this week. Maxine says the social workers are seeing fewer people who need us. She said it carefully, the way you carry a cup that's too full.

Sonny ate two plates of ham. He's putting on weight with the new drugs, and his mother, who drove down from Bakersfield with a tin of fudge, kept touching his arm as if to check it was still there. He's talking about going home in January. Home, as in leaving. People don't leave the House. That's the whole point of the House.

I don't know what to call what I felt standing in the kitchen doorway watching him eat. It was joy, I think, but with something wrong at the edges, like a photograph that got light in it. Philip would have known the word. He'd have said it in a sentence I'd have been annoyed not to think of first.

Merry Christmas to the people who write to me. There are more of you than I expected. Thank you.

Sunday, October 13, 1996

The Quilt is on the Mall in Washington this weekend, all of it, every panel, and I am in West Hollywood with the television on and the sound off.

Gil went. He called me last night from a pay phone near the Washington Monument, on his calling card, shouting over the wind. He had an index card with the names of everyone we know who has a panel, and he'd found eleven of them. He read them to me one by one. Tom and Bernard. Stephen, whose sisters sewed his cowboy boots onto his. Mark. The other Mark. He said you can't see the end of it. He said people walk the canvas paths between the panels in their socks, and whisper.

Then he asked, not for the first time, when I'm going to make one for Philip. I said I had a client call in the morning, which was true, and was not an answer.

Three and a half years, and Philip doesn't have a panel. I design things for a living. I could design it in an afternoon. I've started it in my head perhaps two hundred times, and I always stop at the same place, which is where I have to letter the second date.

Tuesday, September 17, 1996

Mr. Hollis died Sunday morning, a little after six. Maxine was with him. I was not; I was asleep in my own bed, which is where you are, most of the time, when things happen.

He was sixty-four, the oldest man we've had. Thirty-one years with the phone company, a wife who died in 1980, and then, late in his life, as he told me once, "a few years I didn't expect." He never said more and I never asked. Since April I've read him the box scores every Tuesday night. He was a Dodgers man but followed the Angels too, out of what he called Christian charity.

Here is what I want to note. He is the first man to die at the House in three weeks. Three weeks. When I started volunteering in the spring of '94 we lost someone nearly every week, sometimes two, and the bed would be stripped and made up fresh before the family had driven home. Nobody at the House says anything about the three weeks. It's like a bird that has landed close to you. You don't look straight at it.

Saturday, July 13, 1996

Everyone at the House is reading the paper. There's a big AIDS conference in Vancouver this week, and the stories coming out of it are about the new combinations, the protease drugs taken together with the older ones, and blood-test numbers dropping down to where they can't be measured. The word in the headlines is hope. I've learned to distrust that word. I've watched it come to the door every year since 1985, wearing a different coat.

But Sonny is on one of the new drugs, and something is happening to Sonny. He's thirty-one, from Bakersfield, and when he came to us in March he couldn't walk to the bathroom. On Tuesday he walked to the corner and back with me holding his elbow, and complained about my shoes the entire way.

His pills have to be taken on an empty stomach, with water, lots of water, so we keep a row of bottles on his windowsill and he's supposed to finish them all by bedtime. He calls them his soldiers. I lined them up for him Tuesday and he said, "Russell, you're lining them up like a designer." I said I am a designer. He said, "Then design me a beer."

I'm writing this down so I remember that I was afraid to hope, and that I did it anyway.

Wednesday, June 5, 1996

Gil started the new drugs this week. Three of them, one of the new protease ones and two of the old ones, on a schedule that runs his whole day. He bought a watch with an alarm and it goes off in restaurants. We had dinner Monday and it beeped over the soup, and he took out a pill case the size of a tackle box, and the waiter looked at the two of us with enormous pity.

Gil has been positive since 1986. He was Philip's friend before he was mine; they worked on the same scenic crew at the studios in the seventies. After Philip died Gil simply decided I was his now, the way you'd take in a dog someone left on the porch. He's forty-one, he sells condominiums, and he is the most frightening optimist I have ever met.

At dinner he said, "I'm going to be the oldest queen in West Hollywood and you're going to push my wheelchair." I said I'd push it into traffic. He laughed so hard the alarm went off again.

Friday, May 17, 1996

Three men have died at the House since I started writing here in March. I'm not going to write about each of them. I promised myself when I started this that it would not turn into a list. There have been enough lists.

I'll tell you one thing instead. One of them, whom I'll call Leon, had a parrot. Nobody can remember how the parrot came to live at the House or whether it's allowed. Maxine says it was there before her, and she's been there four years. It says "Leon" in Leon's voice, and "Hello, beautiful" in somebody else's. After Leon died the parrot kept saying his name for about a week. Then it stopped, and that was worse.

The parrot lives on the back porch now, in the sun, saying hello, beautiful to the gardener.

Thursday, April 11, 1996

Three years today.

I took the day off. I drove to the flower market downtown at six in the morning, because that's what Philip did on Saturdays, and bought ranunculus in every color they had, and then didn't know what to do with them. We didn't bury him. His ashes went into the ocean, off a boat Gil and I hired out of Marina del Rey, and flowers seemed wrong for the ocean somehow. So I brought them home and filled every glass in the kitchen.

He died on a Sunday morning, in the bed by the window, with the radio on low. I was holding one hand and Gil was holding the other, and the radio was playing Patsy Cline, which he would have found very funny. That's all I will ever write about that morning. The rest is mine.

People told me the third year is easier. People tell you a lot of things. Here's what's true: I don't hear his key in the door anymore. For two years I heard it every evening around seven. Now I don't, and I miss hearing it more than I ever minded it.

Sunday, March 24, 1996

Tuesdays and Fridays, six to ten, I'm at the House. That's what everybody calls it: a big old two-story house in Hollywood with a porch and twelve beds and a kitchen that is never quite clean. It's a hospice. The men who come to us are dying of AIDS, and most of them know it, and our job is to make it as decent as it can be made.

I started in the spring of '94, a year after Philip. My grief counselor suggested it, or rather she suggested I "find a way to be useful," and I took her more literally than she meant. The first night I washed dishes for four hours and didn't speak to anyone. Maxine, the nurse who runs the volunteers, told me later she had me pegged to quit inside a month.

What I do: I wash dishes. I read aloud. I shave men who can't shave themselves. I sit. Mostly I sit. You'd be surprised how much of it is sitting.

A note about this journal. The men at the House, and their families, didn't ask to be written about. I change their names, and I leave out anything that would let someone recognize them. If you think you recognize someone anyway, you're wrong, and please be kind.

Sunday, March 17, 1996

My name is Russell. I'm forty-five, I live in West Hollywood, and I'm a graphic designer: book jackets, restaurant menus, the occasional logo for a man who wants a lion in it. I learned the trade with a T-square and a pot of rubber cement, and now I do it on a Macintosh, like everyone.

For fourteen years I lived with a man named Philip. He painted scenery for the studios. Skies, mostly. If you saw a sunset through a window in a movie in the 1980s, there's a fair chance Philip painted it. He died of AIDS in April of 1993. He was forty-one.

I'm HIV-negative. I've been tested more times than I can count and it always comes back the same. I don't say so because it's the interesting part. I say it because you'd wonder, and because it's the part I understand least.

I lost Philip, and I've lost, by a count I stopped keeping properly in 1992, about thirty friends. Some of them I loved and some I only knew from parties, and all of them are gone.

Gil, who is my friend, says I should write. He has a theory that I talk to myself too much and it would be healthier to do it where people can hear. So here I am, on a free page on the Internet, which Gil also set up, because Gil sets things up.

I don't know who this is for. Maybe for whoever is next.