In One Person

surrounded himself with. But Larry was a poet—poets don’t make any money. Why shouldn’t poets, and other artists, have patrons?
    PCP was the big killer—a pneumonia (
Pneumocystis carinii
). In young Russell’s case, as it often was, this pneumonia was the first presentation of AIDS—a young and otherwise healthy-looking guy with a cough (or shortness of breath) and a fever. It was the X-ray that didn’t look great—in the parlance of radiologists and doctors, a “whiteout.” Yet there was no suspicion of the disease; there was, at first, the phase of not getting better on antibiotics—finally, there was a biopsy (or lung lavage), which showed the cause to be PCP, that insidious pneumonia. They usually put you on Bactrim; that’s what Russell was taking. Russell was the first AIDS patient I watched waste away—and, don’t forget, Russell had money
and
he had Larry.
    Many writers who knew Larry saw him as spoiled and self-centered—even pompous. I shamefully include my former self in this category of Lawrence Upton observers. But Larry was one of those people who improve in a crisis.
    “It should be
me
, Bill,” Larry told me when I first paid a visit to Russell. “I’ve had a life—Russell is just beginning his.” Russell was placed in hospice care in his own magnificent Chelsea brownstone; he had his own nurse. All this was new to me then—that Russell had chosen not to go on a breathing machine allowed him to be cared for at home. (Intubating at home is problematic; it’s easier to hook a person up to a ventilator in a hospital.) I later saw and remembered that gob of Xylocaine jelly on the tip of the endotracheal tube, but not in Russell’s case; he wasn’t intubated, not at home.
    I remember Larry feeding Russell. I could see the cheesy patches of
Candida
in Russell’s mouth, and his white-coated tongue.
    Russell had been a beautiful young man; his face would soon be disfigured with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. A violet-colored lesion dangled from one of Russell’s eyebrows where it resembled a fleshy, misplaced earlobe; another purplish lesion drooped from Russell’s nose. (The latter was so strikingly prominent that Russell later chose to hide it behind a bandanna .) Larry told me that Russell referred to himself as “the turkey”—because of the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions.
    “Why are they so young, Bill?” Larry kept asking me—when “they,” the sheer number of young men who were dying in New York, had made us realize that Russell was just the beginning.
    We saw Russell age, in just a few months—his hair thinned, his skin turned leaden, he was often covered with a cool-to-the-touch film of sweat, and his fevers went on forever. The
Candida
went down his throat, into the esophagus; Russell had difficulty swallowing, and his lips were crusted white and fissured. The lymph nodes in his neck bulged. He could scarcely breathe, but Russell refused to go on a ventilator (or to a hospital); in the end, he faked taking the Bactrim—Larry would find the tablets scattered in Russell’s bed.
    Russell died in Larry’s arms; I’m sure Larry wished it had been the other way around. (“He weighed nothing,” Larry said.) By then, Larry and I were already visiting friends at St. Vincent’s Hospital. As Larry predicted, it would get so crowded at St. Vincent’s that you couldn’t go to visit a friend, or a former lover, and not encounter someone else you knew. You would glance in a doorway, and there was someone you hadn’t known was sick; in more than one instance, Larry claimed, he’d spotted someone he hadn’t known was
gay
!
    Women found out that their husbands had been seeing men—only when their husbands were dying. Parents learned that their young male children were dying before they knew (or had figured out) that their kids were gay.
    Only a few women friends of mine were infected—not many. I was terrified about Elaine; she’d slept with some men I knew were bisexual. But two abortions had taught Elaine to insist on condoms; she was of the opinion that nothing else could keep her from getting pregnant.
    We’d had an earlier condom conversation; when the AIDS epidemic started, Elaine had asked me, “You’re still a condom guy—right, Billy?” (Since ’68! I’d told her.)
    “I should be dead,” Larry said. He wasn’t sick; he looked fine. I wasn’t sick, either. We kept our fingers crossed.
    It was still in ’81, near the end of the year, when there was