Sunday, December 14, 1997

The board met Thursday night in the dining room at the House, and the volunteers were invited, which usually means the news is bad. It wasn't bad, exactly. Starting in February we'll be eight beds instead of twelve, and some of the eight will go to men who aren't dying. Men who are too sick to be alone and not sick enough for the hospital, who need a few weeks of meals and pills on time and somebody to notice. Maxine called it "a place to get strong." One of the board members called it "transitional care," and I watched Maxine decide not to say anything.

Places like ours have closed this year. I know of two. You'd think we'd be dancing in the street, and in a way we are, but the money follows the dying, and there are fewer dying, and so there's less money. I understand it. I'm a man who sends invoices.

I'm keeping Tuesdays and giving up Fridays. The honest way to say it is that there aren't enough men to go around. Too many of us sitting in the living room with our hands in our laps, waiting to be needed.

Driving home I kept thinking: for almost four years I have been useful to dying men. I know how to do that. I know where the extra blankets are and which hymns the Baptists want and how to shave around an oxygen tube. I don't know yet what I am to the ones who are going to live. Maybe nothing. Maybe that's the good news.

Sunday, September 7, 1997

I stayed up for the funeral, which in Los Angeles meant the middle of the night, with a pot of coffee and the lamps off.

I don't follow royalty. Philip did; he had opinions about hats. But all week I've been thinking about one photograph from ten years ago: her in a hospital ward in London, shaking a man's hand, no gloves. In 1987 there were orderlies in this city who left the trays outside the door. People forget now how small a gesture that was, and how much it cost everyone else not to make it.

Elton John sang, and her brother spoke, and then the car went away up the long road with people throwing flowers at it. I went to bed at dawn and slept through a meeting with a client, and when I called to apologize she said, "Oh, honey. Me too."

Tuesday, July 8, 1997

Gil's viral load is undetectable.

That's the word. It doesn't mean the virus is gone; his doctor was very clear, Gil says, very clear, almost stern. It means the test can't find it in his blood, and the test is good.

He called me at the office at eleven in the morning and didn't say hello. He said, "Guess what I am," and I said, "Late for something," and he said the word. Then neither of us said anything for a while. I could hear his fax machine.

He's having a party Saturday. He wanted the invitations to say UNDETECTABLE in raised silver letters, and he wanted me to design them, and I did, and I'm proud of them. Then I went out and sat in the car for a few minutes.

All weekend the television was the little car on Mars, crawling down its ramp and nosing up to rocks. Gil watched it at my place Sunday with his feet on my coffee table and said, "Look at that. Everybody's getting a second chance." He's bought a couch. That's the part I can't get over. For ten years Gil wouldn't buy anything that came with a warranty. Now he has a couch with a ten-year warranty, and he read it to me over the phone.

I'm so happy I don't know where to put it. There's no room. Everything in me is still full of the other thing.

Thursday, May 1, 1997

We watched Ellen at the House last night. Maxine had the big television moved from the dining room into the living room, and one of the Friday volunteers brought a sheet cake that said YEP in blue icing.

Seven residents were well enough to be in the room at once. I don't think we've had seven in that room since I started. Two years ago there wouldn't have been seven in the whole House who could sit up for an hour.

One of them, a retired schoolteacher, sat in the good chair in his bathrobe. When the moment came everybody whooped, and he didn't. He said, to nobody in particular, "Well. There it is." Then, a minute later: "Thirty-four years I taught. Never once."

I don't have anything to add to that. I don't think he did either.

Friday, April 11, 1997

Four years. It fell on a Friday, which is a House night, so I went. I thought about calling in and didn't.

Nobody has died at the House since the middle of February. Eight weeks. I have now written a sentence like that twice in my life and I still don't know what face to make.

A new man asked me tonight whether I had someone. People ask that at the House all the time; it comes before "where are you from." I said I had, and that he died four years ago today. The man said, "Then what are you doing here on a Friday night?" I said, "Where else would I be?" He thought about it and said, "That's the saddest thing I ever heard," and we both started laughing and couldn't stop, and Maxine came down the hall to see what was wrong.

I brought ranunculus again. They're in a coffee can on the dining room table.

Sunday, March 30, 1997

Easter. Gil and I drove up into Griffith Park last night and parked with a few hundred other people to look at the comet. You can see it from my front steps, honestly, even with all the light in this city, but Gil wanted it done properly, with a thermos.

It hangs low in the northwest after sunset like a smudge somebody made with a thumb and meant to wipe off. If you look long enough there are two tails, a white one and a fainter bluish one. Gil said it won't be back for more than two thousand years, and then said, "I'll be here," and I told him he'd better be, I wasn't looking at it alone.

After the week's news out of San Diego County I almost didn't want to look at it at all. We looked anyway.

Philip would have painted it wrong on purpose. He always said a real sky looks fake on film, and you have to paint it the way people remember it.

Sunday, February 23, 1997

The word at the House this winter is Lazarus. Men are getting up. Not all of them, but enough that it has a name.

And it turns out getting up is complicated. One of our men from last fall had sold his life insurance policy in 1995 for a check to live on (there are companies that buy them), and given away his furniture and his car, and told his landlord he wouldn't be renewing. He called Maxine last week to ask if she knew anybody who needed a roommate. He's thirty-eight, he needs a job, and he has a hole in his résumé that says, in effect, I was busy dying.

Gil says Lazarus had it easy. Nobody asked Lazarus about his credit history.

I've been moving furniture. People who have a spare bed or kitchen table call me, and I borrow the van from my printer, and on Saturdays two of us carry things up the stairs of apartments in Hollywood and Silver Lake for men who never planned on needing a kitchen table again. It's the best work I've done in years. My back disagrees.

I don't have the words yet for what this feels like. I think it's joy. It keeps turning around to look at me.

Sunday, January 19, 1997

Sonny went home Thursday.

His mother came down from Bakersfield in her brother's pickup, with a blue tarp over the bed and a thermos of coffee on the seat, and we carried out what he had. After ten months at the House it came to two suitcases, a lamp, a box of paperbacks, and his soldiers. The water bottles. He insisted. They rattled around in the back under the tarp.

The whole House came out on the porch, residents who could and staff, and a couple of us volunteers on our day off. Somebody carried the parrot around front. When the truck pulled away the parrot said "Hello, beautiful," and Sonny's mother put her hand out the window and waved at it.

Afterward Maxine stood in the doorway of his room with her arms folded. She said, "Nine years I've done this work and I never once stripped a bed for a good reason." She didn't sound the way you'd think.

I went home and washed the dishes, which were already clean.