June 28 A young friend’s band played at the Pride Parade in San Francisco today—their first paying gig! I didn’t share my memories with them. How could I convey the fear that pervaded the city in the 1980s and ‘90s? You can report the facts of what happened, but not the mood.
It wasn’t until 1983 that scientists determined that AIDS was caused by a virus transmitted during unprotected sex –and possibly by saliva, and maybe even by droplets in the air… I stopped visiting Dennis Peron because I didn’t want to share joints with him and his friends. One day I ran into him on the street and asked right off if he was okay. He said he was. “Oh, you know me. I always hear the latest. Right at the start, when my friends in LA started talking about ‘the gay cancer,’ I decided from then on to have only safe sex.” I still stayed away, even when he started the Cannabis Buyers Club, because I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings (and joints were always being passed around Chez Dennis.)
Fear still prevailed in 1996 when a “three-drug cocktail” of anti-retroviral medication was introduced that would ultimately prove to be effective. ’96 was also the year that California voters legalized marijuana for medical use (by passing Proposition 215). I had an assignment to cover the Prop 215 campaign for the NYer, which meant frequent visits to Dennis’s club at 1444 Market St. I developed an awkward method of pinching joints so they wouldn’t touch my lips. Later I learned the “chillum method,” and published a how-to-do-it in O’Shaughnessy’s, with an extended caption by Drew Foster.
“I take my left palm and leave it open. I make a loose fist with the right hand and slide a joint between the index finger and middle finger. You cover the bottom of your palm and wrap your fingers to form a cup with your two thumbs touching. Your other hand should be solid and you’ve got this hollow spot which causes a vacuum when you suck. The smoke will go through the only open spot, around your thumb and index finger.
“A chillum is a simple pipe —a small clay funnel that Hindu priests used for smoking. If you look at the East Indian population, and Jamaicans, they smoke chillum-style, usually putting the pipe between their fingers. They didn’t have papers. They’d often use damp herb and put a coal on top so it vaporizes and they’re not sucking butane. It’s very reverent, too (putting the joint up to his forehead). Offering a hit to the deity.My friend —White Dog— stopped smoking to qualify for a liver transplant program. He was someone whose life centered around the herb and he gave it up to get on this program because he wanted to live. Liver disease is terrible and if cannabis is helping people, they should not be pressured to get off it. My friend gave it up and his quality of life started to dip immediately, which affected his other organs. He died one week after his gall bladder shut down. I had to be the one to send him off. He was so tied to this and so devout as a vegan, even, he really walked a straight line. He died on 4/20. White Dog —he gave the most to our movement and took the least. That’s how he lived. The man never had a house or a car but it never stopped him from getting around the world. He got to pray in places where religious leaders aren’t allowed.”
David M.
In May, 1990, I was working at UCSF and sending “Notes From the City” to the AVA. David M. worked down the hall in the Accounting Department. He was in his mid-30s.
David M. was planning to see “Longtime Companion” Thursday night, but on the way his friend Susan’s car broke down. “I said ‘Let that be a sign.’ Several people had said it might be a little too intense for me at the moment. We went out to dinner and talked about how it was for her, knowing that I had AIDS. She’s still in denial… I was in denial until I was in the hospital last week. I could barely say it. And it moved out of the realm of having one mark on my arm to having a real illness --pneumonia.
FG: What’s happening at work?
We’re looking for someone to take my place. Savannah, my boss has been amazingly generous --she’s accomodated me in every possible way, and then some. Disability here is based on your last month’s salary. A month ago she told me to draft my upgrade. In a matter of 48 hours I was reclassified and got a 15% raise, which will determine my disability pay.
Immediately I have short-term disability --70% of your salary--which lasts for a year. The only taxes taken out is FICA on the first $600. In about six months I have to start picking up my own medical insurance, but that should remain at the rate the company pays for 21 months. Longterm disability kicks in after a year and that’s 50% of my salary. Also, Social Security kicks in after six months of being out. So I’m not terribly worried financially. I don’t expect this to be a long term illness for me.
As soon as it starts getting really rough I’m going to take things into my own hands. I was ready to do it the day I came home from the hospital and I took a little snapshot of what it would look like had I gone that day and it wouldn’t have been right. My papers are really not in order --my life insurance would not have been dispersed the way I want it to. My theory is to leave enough money to people who are never going to have much money so it might make a difference in their life. I have a few friends like that, who have always struggled, who I love dearly, so I want to get that in order… After that I kind of feel like I’m ready. Like, I’ve done my bit here and I don’t want to go through another round of losing three friends in four months. December through February I lost this guy who I’d grown up with, Barry, who was my musical director from back in Brooklyn. He was the last to be diagnosed and the first to go. He was not as sick as the other people. Paul and Jimmy had many bouts of pneumocystis, KS all over their body, they deteriorated terribly. I lost Paul, my gym buddy in November, and that I went through with him, I was in the hospital the entire time. That experience was really good for me in that it made me less fearless about death.
In December my friend Jimmy in Texas passed away. That was the hardest one, that’s the one that haunts me, because we were lovers and he was the symbol of me finaly getting what I wanted, the relationship I had always waited for and wanted…
FG: How did it end?
He got AIDS and didn’t want to be with anybody anymore. So we ended the physical aspect of our relationship. But right through until two days before he died we had the best part of our relationship which was our communication. We talked incessantly on the phone. We’d always been able to do that. I spent my entire new year’s eve this year on the phone just talking for hours and hours… He held my heart. I miss him the most. (Cries)
I don’t want to go through another round of watching people go. I could lose another three of my close friends.
I went in on a Friday afternoon. I had really intense pain on my side from the pleurisy --from the inflation of my lungs pressing against everything. My doctor had thought that I should perhaps take care of myself at home and I insisted that she put me in the hospital. That Saturday I woke up in the middle of the night I woke up and experienced the most intense, long sustained pain that I had ever felt in my life. I was screaming and woke up the entire floor. I couldnt’ even lift the cup with the pills in it to my mouth. It was like my whole body had cramped. I couldn’t breathe. She gave me something to calm me down, then she gave me percodan and the doctor came and gave me a shot of morphine, which enabled me to lay down and fall back asleep. Two hours later I woke up and the same thing happened again. So I was on morphine every two hours through Monday morning.
And it scared me. I don’t know what I would have done if I had been home. As I was in the pain and taking each breath I did this little thing where I talk to whoever it is I talk to, I don’t know if it’s God or whoever, and I just said if it’s now, let’s go. And that’s kind of where I am every night when I go to bed. I kind of do this little practice thing. Of saying, “maybe I won’t see another sunrise.” I practice trying to experience what that’s going to be like. And I often fall asleep crying.
I miss people now. And probably cause I’m going to miss a couple of things I still enjoy. Music, I’ll miss that. The idea of not hearing the next Pretenders album or the next rickie lee jones seems wierd to me. But who knows, maybe I will hear it.
A few days later I visit him in Pacific Presbyterian. Over the weekend David says, his pleurisy got so painful he woke up screaming, too weak to get a pill to his mouth. “I woke up the whole floor,” he reports with an embarassed smile. (Two months ago the only symptoms he was acknowledging were “thrush” and fatigue). At the hospital he got morphine. He grins and wiggles his thumb sideways in the “so-so” gesture. “As highs ago, I was disappointed. I felt a slight warm tingle around my neck and then I was out.”
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