Monday, December 21, 1998

Christmas party at the House yesterday. Two years ago I wrote here about two empty beds as if they were a comet. Yesterday there were six men in eight beds, two of them going home after New Year's, and nobody stood in any doorway feeling strange about it. You get used to anything. That's the blessing and the other thing.

Sonny drove down with his mother and the tin of fudge. He works the counter at his uncle's auto parts store in Bakersfield now, and he's filled out in the face, and he complains about his customers like a man with a future. He brought the parrot a little mirror with a bell on it. The parrot ignored it and said "Hello, beautiful" to the fudge.

Gil came with Neil. Neil is a dentist, and Gil introduces him as "my dentist" to see who flinches. They've been together since June. Neil is quiet and kind and watches Gil the way you'd watch a kite on a windy day, pleased and a little nervous.

The House of Representatives impeached the President on Saturday, and one of the residents, Harold, kept trying to bring it up. Maxine finally said, "Harold, it is Christmas," and Harold said, "That's what I'm saying. It's a gift." Even Maxine laughed.

Later, by myself in the kitchen, I caught myself counting the people in the room who were positive and the people who weren't. Old habit, like checking the stove twice. I don't know when I'll stop doing it. Maybe when I stop being the only one on my side of the count.

Tuesday, December 1, 1998

World AIDS Day. Some of the galleries on Melrose draped a painting in black for the Day Without Art, and I walked past one on my way to a client and stood there in front of a black sheet longer than I've stood in front of most paintings.

I called the NAMES Project in San Francisco this morning, which I'd been meaning to do for weeks. A young man with a very patient voice looked it up and told me Philip's panel has been sewn into a block with seven others. Eight panels, twelve feet square. He couldn't tell me who the other seven are; I didn't really expect him to.

I'd like to know, though. Philip always wanted to know who he'd be sitting next to at dinner. He'd walk into a party and go straight to the place cards and move them around.

So he's in a block with seven strangers, and somewhere there are seven families who don't know he's there. I find I like that more than I thought I would.

Thursday, October 15, 1998

I didn't know him. Nobody I know knew him. He was twenty-one, a college student in Wyoming, and he died on Monday in a hospital in Colorado, and I have thought about almost nothing else all week.

Last night I stood with a great many people and a candle in a paper cup. Nobody made a very good speech. It didn't need one. There was a woman next to me with a little boy asleep on her shoulder and she held her candle out away from him the whole time, her arm shaking by the end.

What I keep coming back to is this. For fifteen years I've believed the thing that would take us was the virus. And I'd started, God help me, to think we might be getting the better of it. Then this. As if to remind us there's more than one way.

I'm forty-eight years old and I was afraid walking back to my car.

Sunday, August 16, 1998

We lost a man at the House on Thursday. I'll call him Danny. He was twenty-six.

The drugs didn't work for him. Or they worked, for a while, and then they stopped, which happens. We say that at the House the way you'd recite something you learned in school: the combinations work for most people, not for everyone. Not for him. He's the first man we've lost since March.

I'll write the thing I don't say out loud. It's worse now when one of them dies. In 1994 you could believe it was the weather, it was everyone, it was the times. Now it's one young man who drew a short straw in a year when most of the straws are long, and I sit by the bed, forty-eight, negative, with my perfectly good blood, and I would give it to him if I could, and I can't. That's all of it. There isn't any more to it than that.

The counselor calls it survivor's guilt. It's a real thing, with a real name, and naming it helps about as much as naming a dog helps it stop barking. But I keep going every other Thursday, and I keep writing here, and I keep going to the House on Tuesdays. I'm told that's what you do.

Tuesday, May 19, 1998

I mailed Philip's panel to San Francisco this morning, folded in tissue paper in a box that once held a lamp. It cost more than I expected and less than it should have.

They ask you to send a letter along with it, about the person. I wrote four drafts. The first was a résumé. The second was a love letter. The third was angry, at nobody in particular, at everybody. The fourth said who he was and what he painted and what he sang while he painted, which was Sinatra, "Summer Wind," with the same wrong note in the same place every single time for fourteen years. It said he was loved. It said he'd have hated the lettering on the panel, because he never once liked my lettering. That's the one I sent.

Sinatra died last Thursday. Philip would have worn black for a week. I wore black, but I always wear black, so nobody noticed.

Saturday, April 11, 1998

Five years. I finished it tonight, on the living room floor, at about a quarter to ten.

It's three feet by six feet, which is the size they ask for. Roughly the size of a grave, which is why.

It's a sky. Of course it's a sky. I painted heavy cotton with fabric paint, pale gold at the bottom going up into the deep blue he always called "the last color before the stars." I did it the way he taught me in 1981 on a drop cloth in our garage, wet into wet, and it came out streaky, and I left the streaks.

The letters are white cotton, cut out and sewn on by hand. PHILIP ANDREW MORAN. Under that, 1951 – 1993.

I wrote here in 1996 that every time I started this in my head I stopped at the second date. Tonight I didn't stop. I sewed the 1, and the 9, and the 9. Then I sat there on the floor for a long time holding the needle. Then I sewed the 3, and that was it. That was all it was. Four numbers. Five years to sew four numbers.

Gil came over at eight with Chinese food and didn't say anything, which for Gil is a gift about the size of a car.

Sunday, March 8, 1998

I've started it. Philip's panel.

Friday nights have been mine again since the House went to eight beds, and I've spent most of them sitting at the dining table not doing anything in particular. So yesterday I drove downtown to the fabric district and bought canvas and fabric paint and white cotton for the letters, and Maxine lent me her sewing machine, which is older than I am and weighs about as much as a Buick.

I'm not a sewer. Maxine gave me a lesson at her kitchen table in Glendale. After ten minutes she said, "You hold that fabric like it's going to bite you." I said it might. She said, "Everything might, baby. Sew anyway."

Thursday, January 22, 1998

I went back to see my counselor this afternoon, the one from 1993. I hadn't seen her in three years. She's cut her hair short and moved to an office in Santa Monica with a fern that's doing better than any fern I've ever owned. The radio in her waiting room was going on about the President and the intern, and she came out and turned it off, which I appreciated.

I told her I feel bad about feeling good. Gil is well. Sonny is well. The House has empty beds. That's what I prayed for, back when I prayed, and now that it's here I walk around like a man who's been let off a charge he knows he's guilty of.

She asked what I'm guilty of. I said: of being negative. Of still being here. Of every party in 1982 and 1983 that I left early because I had a deadline in the morning.

She didn't tell me it wasn't my fault. She's too good at her job for that. She said, "All right. Then let's talk about the parties." So we're going to talk about the parties. Every other Thursday, for a while.