AIDS : FIFTEEN TALES OF COMPASSION AND FEAR : ONE YEAR LATER, RELATIVES AND FRIENDS REFLECT ON THOSE WHO DIED

“What do you want?” the woman asked. Her voice was alarmed.

She was inside her apartment, speaking from behind the door. And though not a word had been said about her sister, she knew what had prompted the visit.

For the next 10 minutes, the woman moved frantically between the door and a curtained window. “Go to the window,” she would say suddenly. Then, “Come to the door.” But the roar of traffic made it hard to understand what else she was saying. Finally, after repeated pleas to talk face to face, she opened the door.

She was a small woman whose dark eyes never left my face. She was wearing a blue-checked housedress and slippers and was eight or nine months pregnant.

She assumed the doctor had betrayed her family, and she was distraught.

“The doctors weren’t supposed to tell,” she said. “How did you find out?”

“From her death certificate.”

“But we don’t want that in the papers,” she said.

“Why?”

“For many reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“I’m not going to tell you.” She paused. “Because of family and friends. Many of them don’t know.”

“But more women are getting AIDS, and it would help them to know.”

She was silent for a moment.

“It won’t help my sister,” she said finally. “She’s dead.”

THESE ARE THE STORIES OF 15 people in Los Angeles who died of AIDS in the fourth week of August one year ago.

People die of AIDS every day; according to the federal Centers for Disease Control, the epidemic has killed more than 23,000 people in the United States. But their lives and deaths remain veiled, a nonexistent tragedy, hidden among statistics. Looking back at a single week, it’s no longer possible to regard people as anonymous. They had lives, children, dreams and disappointments. And they did not want to die. Many stories are written about people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Most deal with those who willingly talk about the disease; or they deal with the celebrities, the public figures, the people who do good works. The individuals included here--some of whose names have been changed at their families’ request--were found by searching through death certificates in the L.A. County Hall of Records. They did not volunteer their stories. They are young and middle-aged, black, Latino and white, and they come from neighborhoods all across Los Angeles.

But these are only some of the known deaths; it is certain there were many more. Because of deliberate masking of the cause of death on death certificates, and a lag between the time deaths occur and are reported, information on the precise number of AIDS casualties per week is almost impossible to come by. Although the county Department of Health Services routinely releases monthly and yearly AIDS statistics, it does not provide weekly figures.

“A weekly report of deaths is meaningless to us because it cannot be gathered with a high degree of accuracy,” says Dr. Shirley Fannin, associate deputy director of disease control programs at the department. “These 15 deaths are the tip of the iceberg.”

In recent months some politicians have been calling for expanded testing for AIDS. But for some people in this story, testing failed to tell them enough. Some who tested negative had been ill for months, and in one case for nearly three years, before they realized that they had AIDS. One man--the father of two children--tested negative twice. His condition was diagnosed four months before he died.

But according to Dr. Marjorie Bernstein-Singer, a hematologist / oncologist who treats AIDS patients at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, “The failure rate of the AIDS test--called ELISA, for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay--is actually very low. It has been refined and is now much more specific than when it was introduced in 1985. Furthermore, testing is now much more uniform.”

Much also has been written about ordinary people’s fear of talking about AIDS. But that doesn’t begin to prepare you for it. The abruptly ended telephone calls. The doors that are slammed. The addresses that turn out to be fake. What people feel is more than fear; it is terror:

If you print his name, you will ruin my children’s lives. We want to keep it closed. We don’t want to discuss it with anybody. Because it’s not a good feeling. His father would have a fit. He swears his son did not die of AIDS. When his father sent me a copy of the death certificate, AIDS was whited out. Just leave her case alone. Just forget about it.

Still, other friends and relatives feel just as strongly that there is a need to talk openly about AIDS. In doing so they believe that perhaps they can convey a message of comfort and hope to families confronting the disease.

IN HIS GRANDMOTHER’S WORDS,Randy Lee Wagoner had a “hard road.” And he coped with that road by running from it.

After his older brother was killed in a motorcycle accident and his parents were divorced, he dropped out of high school in Modesto and left home. When an acting career didn’t work out in San Francisco, he decided to become a makeup artist and moved to Los Angeles. Whenever life’s ambiguities got to be too much, Wagoner simply moved on.

“He was never happy with where we lived,” recalls his former lover, a slight, blond man who asked that his name not be used. “We always had to move.”

“He seldom came up” after he moved to Los Angeles, his grandmother in Modesto says. “We didn’t see very much of him.”

In the winter of 1985, at age 28, when Wagoner began to suspect that he had AIDS, he ran from that, too. Leaving behind his lover, he moved to a small town near Yosemite, where for a time he lived with his mother.

“He was just starting to get his foot in the door at the studios,” his lover recalls. “He had appointments at 20th Century Fox and Paramount, but he never followed up. The next thing I knew, he wanted to move to the mountains. I think he sensed there was something wrong, and he wanted to go where he felt he could be happy, to spend his last days.”

To his grandmother, Wagoner was a “sweet boy,” and “smart as a whip.” “He could play a piano. He could eat a piano up.”

He was also strikingly handsome and charismatic. “He could get you to do anything he wanted,” says his lover.

As a makeup artist, Wagoner specialized in glamour shots of models and celebrities. He was so proud of a picture that a photographer had taken of him and actress Heather Locklear that he had copies made for all his friends. “He lived and breathed makeup,” says his lover, fingering the pages of Wagoner’s portfolio. “If Randy couldn’t create, he wasn’t happy.”

But there was a dark side to Wagoner. He was moody and insecure, prone to self-destruction. During the time he lived in San Francisco, he was an IV drug user and was sexually promiscuous. “Randy always told me what a wildcat he was,” his lover recalls. “He would go to the bathhouses in San Francisco. He probably knew that’s where he got it.”

His lover says he and Wagoner never talked about his illness, in part because it took Wagoner three years to learn that he had AIDS. “He didn’t really understand what was happening.”

“We didn’t communicate well at all,” his lover says. “Randy dealt with it greatly with denial, and I think I probably played along with that, too. I didn’t want to believe that’s what it was.”

In the spring of 1982, Wagoner had a lymph node removed and was found to have AIDS-related complex, a condition with some of the symptoms of AIDS. In 1983, he tested negative for the AIDS virus after having another lymph node removed. Still feeling ill, he went to another doctor. “They still didn’t know what was wrong,” his lover says. “The AIDS tests kept coming back negative. So he just threw up his hands and said, ‘I’m not going to the doctor anymore.’ ”

In April, 1986, Wagoner tried to commit suicide on his and his lover’s third anniversary. He ended up in the mental ward of a hospital. It had been two years since his last AIDS test and he was exhibiting symptoms of dementia, so the doctors tested him again. This time it was positive. “I remember when he called and told me,” says his lover. “He said it almost with a sense of relief.”

For most of his last year, Wagoner lived alone. His lover, who supported him, stayed with him on weekends. “I would ask him what he did during the week,” he says. “He just sat in the apartment all day. He didn’t even have TV. It was really sad.”

In July, Wagoner returned to Los Angeles because he was too ill to take care of himself. In August, he was admitted to a hospital with pneumocystis pneumonia. Against Wagoner’s wishes, his lover notified his mother and older sister, who came down from Modesto. Ten days later, on Aug. 27, he died at age 29.

“Randy was always in search of himself,” his lover says. “I think he came to the realization that he wasn’t going to find happiness because he was always looking for it to come to him.

“One thing he said to me over and over was, ‘I’m tired of being sick.’ He just wanted it to be over.”

CLEON JONES DIED AUG. 25, after suffering from AIDS at least six months. It is not clear how he got the disease. In fact, nothing about Jones’ life is clear, except what is revealed on his death certificate: He was 49, divorced, shared an apartment with his father and had worked for 26 years as a surgical technician at Midway Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles. A letter addressed to his father, who moved to Kansas shortly after Jones died, was not answered. Others either refused to talk about him or didn’t have much to say.

“I really don’t know that much about him,” said his former upstairs neighbor. He was standing inside an apartment, a two-story unit among run-down buildings and cheap motels on La Brea Avenue near the Santa Monica Freeway. He was talking through a black-mesh security door.

“I heard he was sick just before he went back into the hospital,” he said, “but it’s really nothing I knew about. They ( Jones’ family) came out for the funeral and left right after. No, I don’t have the address where they moved. I wish I could help you.”

“I spoke to a couple of people,” said a young woman who worked with Jones and who described herself as a friend. She was hostile and abrupt. “Everybody came up with a mutual agreement that we wouldn’t talk about him. We don’t want it out in public.” Then she hung up.

IN THE SPRING OF 1985, when William Brink called his mother to ask if he could move back home for a while, Joyce Brink was delighted.

A secretary for a ceramics manufacturer, Joyce Brink and her husband, Cliff, a former service station manager for Getty Oil, had just retired and were planning to take a trip that summer. Though Bill Brink was 28 and had lived on his own since age 18, he had remained close to his parents. The Brinks are the kind of people who take camping trips and celebrate birthdays together and enjoy each other’s company. Once, when Bill and some friends went disco-dancing, Joyce went too. Joyce and Cliff have lived in the same stucco tract house in Torrance for 31 years. Their home is filled with photographs of Bill, their older children, Ralph and Mary Lou, and their five grandchildren.

Bill was something of a model son. Responsible, good-natured and thoughtful, he loved fixing things around the house. The Brinks learned that Bill was gay when he was in high school. They struggled at first, but soon came to accept it. “Of course you do a lot of soul-searching,” Joyce says. “ ‘What did I do wrong?’ But my husband and I talked about it, and he said, ‘It’s just something inside of him. Bill can’t help it. We can’t turn our backs on him. He’s our son.’ ”

The summer his parents were away, in addition to working full time at a deed and mortgage company, Bill painted their house and refinished the kitchen cabinets. He also bought his mother a new dryer and his father a new bathroom cabinet.

When the Brinks returned in September, their daughter told them that Bill had been sick. In 1983, Bill’s lover had died of AIDS, but at the time a doctor told Bill that because the incubation period was 2 1/2 years, he shouldn’t worry. By January, Bill was vomiting and having night sweats and diarrhea. Soon after, when two red sores appeared on his shoulder and another on his nose, he went to the doctor.

The day he got his test results, Bill sat down at the kitchen table, where Joyce was preparing dinner. He told her that he had Kaposi’s sarcoma, a form of cancer frequently found in AIDS sufferers, then broke down and cried. “To me,” Joyce says, “it was as if my son had just received a death sentence.”

Still, Joyce was far from resigned to that fate. Outgoing and cheerful by nature, her immediate response was to find out what could be done. Over the next few months, the Brinks learned everything they could about AIDS. So did Bill’s sister, Mary Lou. “Though Bill was her brother and she loved him and wanted to help,” Joyce explains, “she said she had to protect herself and her children. When she found out there was no danger, her children were right there in the room with him.”

In April, after Bill was hospitalized for the second time, the Brinks made the decision to care for him at home. They were infuriated by the treatment he had received. Among other things, Joyce says, “his food trays were left outside the door. I guess the people from food service expected the nurses to carry it in. It was fear. Then, around 3 one morning,” she recalls, “I got this call. He was crying. He had started vomiting and having diarrhea. Somebody had put the bell cord behind the bed and he couldn’t reach it. He screamed and carried on, but nobody came. The next day we made arrangements to bring him home.”

About the same time, Joyce became involved with Mothers of AIDS Patients, a support group founded by three women in San Diego whose children had died of AIDS. “I wanted to get into something that gives families an idea of what they’re going through,” she says. “These gals were sort of leading me through this. They said: ‘Look, one day he’ll withdraw, he’ll be hateful, he’ll want you out of his sight. The next day he’ll say, ‘Mom, I need you.’ ”

With Bill hooked up to an IV unit and a respirator, the Brinks found their lives revolving around his illness. Lying in bed at night, they would listen for the timer that indicated when Bill’s IV bottle needed changing. One or both of them would suddenly get up to check on Bill’s breathing. “It’s like when you have a new baby,” Joyce says. “You’re constantly keyed up.”

On Aug. 29, four months after his parents brought him home, Bill died. He was 29.

The Brinks--who grew accustomed to sleeping only three or four hours a night when Bill was ill--still have trouble sleeping. But as Cliff Brink, who tends to be a man of few words, puts it, “I’d take care of him again.”

Since Bill’s death, Joyce has dealt with her grief by counseling other families of AIDS victims. “I never dreamed when Bill first became sick,” she says, “I’d be doing all the things I’m doing now. I’m just on the go constantly, meeting with people, calling people, writing letters.” She has also become an “adopted mother” to a few young men with AIDS. “People have asked me, ‘Don’t you feel you’re going to get it?’ No, I don’t. And all of our mothers feel like that. You can’t be afraid of it. You have to fight it.

“A lot of these kids are being turned away by their parents,” she says. “For parents to turn their backs on their children at the most crucial time in their lives, I just can’t fathom that.

“When we were making the funeral arrangements, the mortician said to my husband: ‘We’re going to be putting your son’s obituary in the paper. What do you want to say he died of ?’ My husband looked at him like he had a hole in his head and said, ‘AIDS. We saw the hell he went through. There is no way we would deny it.’ ”

THERE ARE THINGS ABOUT Yvonne (a pseudonym) we will never know.

Why she came to this country and what she did for a living. How she got AIDS and how long she suffered. Whether her husband had AIDS and whether she had children.

Her family doesn’t want to talk about her. As for Yvonne’s husband: “He’s very difficult to get ahold of,” Yvonne’s sister says. “He lives in another state. I won’t give you the number.”

Although Yvonne’s death certificate says she was employed as a registered nurse for 23 years at Adventist Hospital, there is no hospital with that name. And calls to Glendale Adventist Medical Center and other Adventist hospitals in Los Angeles turned up no record of her employment. Nor was she licensed with the California Board of Registered Nursing.

Yvonne died at home, a small apartment in an unremarkable neighborhood of central Los Angeles, on Aug. 24. She was a 45-year-old Haitian immigrant.

ROBERTO (A PSEUDONYM) WAS A 53-year-old Mexican national who came to Los Angeles 24 years ago to visit a brother and seek work. During the years he spent here, he worked as a chef in Mexican restaurants, never married and, until he died on Aug. 29 at County-USC Medical Center, lived in a whitewashed stucco bungalow in Pasadena with his brother and two sisters.

On a warm afternoon in late spring of this year, the roses and gladioli that Roberto had planted were in bloom, and his brother was in the living room watching “The Bionic Woman.” A small, slight man with soft brown eyes, he was 50 but looked a decade younger. His face was still and sad and, during the few moments he spoke, he seemed to be struggling not to cry.

Sitting on the couch, his hands clasped in his lap, he politely explained that he could not talk about his brother. “Nobody knew,” he said. “Even my sisters. It was his last wish.”

Yet he continued to say more. He said he didn’t know how his brother got AIDS, but believed it was from a blood transfusion. “About two years ago, he started having a tumor in his stomach. He had an operation.” He said that during the two years his brother was ill and he cared for him at home, Roberto “never complained. He was very strong.” He said his brother, who normally weighed 160, weighed 99 pounds at the time of his death, and that he had not wanted anyone to come to the hospital. “Nobody saw him when he died,” his brother said, “because nobody would recognize him from the way he was before.”

When asked if he had a photograph of his brother, he rose slowly from the couch and walked over to the mantel, where, along with pictures of Jesus and family photographs, was a small, unframed, black-and-white snapshot. He picked it up and fell silent. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said suddenly. “He suffered alone.” Gazing out at the yard, he said his brother loved to garden. And though he doesn’t much enjoy it himself, he said, he will continue to tend the garden for his brother.

“There isn’t a day I don’t think about him,” he said.

CHARLES BLACK, 54, was a sixth-grade teacher at a school in the Los Feliz area. Born in Knoxville, Tenn., he divorced shortly before moving to Los Angeles in the early ‘60s and was the father of a grown son. When he was in the hospital, students showered him with get-well cards and flowers. “Which would always make him cry,”says Mitchell Bower, his friend and executor of his estate. “His whole life was dedicated to teaching children. Those kids just adored him.”

A candid, sensitive man of 55, Bower initially declined to be interviewed because “I’ve been through so much with his family and being executor.” When asked how Black got AIDS, he hesitated because he was afraid Black’s students might feel differently about him knowing he was gay. “Charlie meant so much to so many children,” he says. “I didn’t want them to feel upset or confused or betrayed.”

Black first became ill in late September of 1985. After 10 days in the hospital and “every possible test,” Bower says, doctors found nothing wrong. Then, in April of 1986, while driving along Highland Avenue, Black had a seizure. Doctors suspected that he might have a brain tumor. They operated within a few days. Eventually, he was found to have toxoplasmosis, a crippling brain infection associated with AIDS. “What was so heartbreaking,” recalls Bower, “was to watch him lose his mind. Because he would say, ‘Mitchell, hand me the car,’ when he meant, ‘Hand me the coffee cup.’ His greatest fear was that he would never teach again, which he didn’t.”

“He’d always had an extreme fear of AIDS,” recalls Chris Henderson, Black’s son, “and read everything about it he could.” Henderson, who is 31, was adopted by his stepfather when he was 9 and didn’t know his natural father until just a few years ago. “When we first met and he told me about this epidemic, he was scared to death. He said he’d been celibate and planned to remain that way.”

In July, after another seizure, Black was back in the hospital. After a month, the doctors told him there was nothing more they could do and discharged him. Bower and Henderson called around to nursing homes, none of which would take a patient with AIDS. After a few exhausting days of caring for Black at his home, they hired a private nursing service.

Bower and Henderson are still infuriated that the hospital would not keep Black. “The hospital sends you out on the street to die,” Bower says. “Then they say, ‘This is not a recovery home.’ It was up to me to figure out what we were going to do.”

Henderson says he was shocked when it happened. “I administered his medication, his IVs,” he recalls. “It was a real chore to be given that responsibility. He could have gone into a coma. He could have existed off of IVs for six months or a year. I thought, ‘My God! How long is this going to be?’ You almost find yourself rooting for your own family member to die, against your morals.”

Black died on Aug. 29, at his home in Laurel Canyon, 17 days after being discharged from the hospital. Bower, who was at his bedside, says Black’s death left him “emotionally wrecked.” “He was probably the most honest person I’ve ever known. He made a terrific friend.”

On April 30, Black’s school held a memorial service, which many of his former students attended. A magnolia tree was planted in the schoolyard, and a bronze plaque dedicated to Black hangs in the school entry hall. “It was rather dear,” says Bower. “They invited me and his son. They planted this beautiful . . . .” He drops his face into his hands and begins to cry. “His life was really given to those children, and it just breaks me up. That would have meant more to him than anything.”

EMIL STEPHEN SCHOTT,a truck driver, died Aug. 24 at Kaiser Permanente Medical Care in Hollywood. He was 55, never married, and lived alone in an old stucco apartment building in the hills above the Hollywood Freeway. His mother also lived in the building. Attempts to locate her or anyone who knew Schott were unsuccessful.

“She’s no longer my tenant,” said Joseph Moizel, the owner of the apartment building, when asked about Schott’s mother. “She moved about two or three months ago.”

He described Schott and his mother as “good people. They paid the rent on time. I never had any problems with them.” But he does not know where Schott worked or very much about him. “When I bought the building a couple of years ago, he was already living here. When he was in the hospital and very sick, his mother told me he had AIDS. After a week or so, she told me he died.”

“I wish I could give you more information,” he said finally. “She was a very nice lady. If I had a vacancy, she would show the apartment. She just disappeared. She didn’t tell me where she was going.”

HE WAS YOUNG, ambitious, and he loved America. For the six years that he lived in this country, Jose Montalvo had one enduring wish: to bring his parents and younger brother here from Cuba.

On Aug. 31, Montalvo got his wish. His family flew into Los Angeles--four days after his death and two days after he was buried in a Glendale cemetery.

Montalvo, 30, came here seeking freedom and a better way of life. Like thousands of other Cubans, he arrived in Key West, Fla., by shrimp boat in the spring of 1980. His lover, whose mother and sister were already living in Los Angeles, followed on another boat. “When I arrived 12 days later,” his lover remembers, smiling, “he was more part of my family than me.”

Although Montalvo did not speak English, he learned quickly. “He was very smart,” his lover says. They both got jobs at a bank downtown, working the graveyard shift. To save money, they would walk to work instead of taking the bus. They bought their first TV together. They moved into their first apartment together.

Two months before he died, Montalvo was fired for taking too much time off work. “His family was in Panama,” says Montalvo’s lover, “and he had a very big stress about that. He started taking sleeping pills. He didn’t eat very well.” He also had several colds. “But I didn’t pay too much attention,” his lover remembers, “because he had asthma.”

In mid-August, Montalvo began having trouble breathing. A doctor diagnosed it as a heart condition and prescribed medication. It never occurred to Montalvo that it might be related to AIDS.

One weekend, Montalvo’s breathing problem worsened. On Monday he saw a different doctor, who told him he had pneumocystis pneumonia and urged him to go to the hospital immediately.

Before checking in, Montalvo insisted on going home. He took a long look around the condominium that he and his lover had shared for two years. “He was sitting here with me,” his lover recalls, “and he said, ‘I know I’m going to die.’ ”

Four days after entering County-USC Medical Center, Montalvo went into a coma. Five days after that, on Aug. 27, he died.

A gentle, emotional man of 41, Montalvo’s lover sits at his dining-room table, talking for more than two hours. It is a warm evening, and cries of children playing on the lawn outside can be heard. “He loved children,” he says suddenly, his voice breaking.

Last September, Montalvo’s lover tested positive for the AIDS virus. Although he says he feels fine and has yet to develop any symptoms, he is seeing a doctor. “I live a normal life,” he says. “But I feel very alone.”

He says he does not blame Montalvo. “I always remember him with good feelings,” he says, smiling. “When you love someone, you can forgive everything.”

Montalvo’s parents and 15-year-old brother never saw him after he left Cuba. After he died, they obtained legal residence and now live in Miami.

IN THE NOTEBOOKS LEFT BEHIND after his death, Jon Henrick wrote of his dreams.

“He wanted the two of us to go to Paris,” remembers Ken Newelt, Jon’s best friend. “He wanted to live in a sprawling stucco house in New Mexico and have Georgia O’Keeffeover for tea and ask her what she thought was so damned interesting about cow skulls. He wanted to write. He wanted to get into music again. He had pages and pages of things he wanted to do with his life.”

Somewhere in those pages, he also wrote of what he would do if he contracted AIDS: “I will write notes to the people who really matter, share special moments with very important people, make arrangements for a cremation, have people dispose of my belongings, and then cleanly and quietly commit suicide.”

Sometime in the early morning on Aug. 29, three days after he entered County-USC Medical Center, Henrick did just that. Soaking tissues in the ice water by his bed, he wedged them inside his nose and mouth and asphyxiated. He was 28 years old.

“Jon and I went to Hunter College together about eight years ago,” recalls Newelt, a 33-year-old marketing manager for the Advocate, a gay newspaper. “He was studying music, but I felt he should go into advertising or writing. He was so clever and witty.

“Jon kind of looked like a preppy Mick Jagger but with redder hair. He worked for a time at an ad agency in New York, then came to visit me in Los Angeles. He hated it. But within a month he was living with me,” Newelt says. “I have bundles of letters he wrote to me before he moved here in 1982, comparing L.A. with New York, how we would search for the perfect avocado when he got here.

“He was born John Gallagher, but he always hated the name Gallagher. When he was a kid he was rather effeminate, and his classmates called him ‘Gallagirl.’ His middle name was Henry, so he had a fantasy about being Jon Henrick because it sounds so classy. So he became Jon Henrick when he came out here.”

For a while, Henrick worked as a copywriter for a large Los Angeles advertising agency. “He put together a book of ads he created,” says Newelt, “and they were fabulous, like one for a cosmetics company’s soap: ‘When you’re playing the field, keep your nose clean . . . and your chin . . . and your ears.’ He just never realized his potential.”

Henrick was found to have AIDS-related complex in the spring of 1986. “He called me at work one day,” says Newelt. “It was the first time I had ever heard him cry. He said, ‘Kenny, I’m really sick. They think I have Hodgkin’s.’ He had had Hodgkin’s disease as a child, but it went into remission. Anyway, I said, ‘Jon, relax, you’re going to get a second opinion.’ It turned out he had some AIDS-related disease of the lymph system. By May, he was really taking a lot of medication.”

Though Henrick was aware he was seriously ill, he rarely said anything about it. “Jon kept people at a distance,” Newelt says. “I was his best friend for so long. He still didn’t confide in me.

“Quite frankly, I had also demonstrated a terror in dealing with this disease. One day he said to me, ‘You know, Ken, if I did have AIDS, I don’t think I would tell you because I don’t know if you could handle it.’ He made me deal with this disease and how it was affecting our lives.”

In August, when his cough got so severe that he could barely breathe, Henrick had a neighbor take him to County-USC. “That night I went to see him,” says Newelt. “He didn’t even have a room--he was on a gurney in a storage area. It was a horror.

“When I left his room, a nurse backed away, as if she was afraid of me contaminating her with the gloves they gave me to wear. Another nurse said, ‘Don’t come out here with those gloves on!’ And I answered, ‘Who are these gloves supposed to protect?’ The gloves are to protect the patient, because the patient is so susceptible to infection. But they had no idea how to handle the situation. One day they had the visitors wear a mask or gloves, and the next day they didn’t. I conveyed the staff’s attitude and fear to the head of nursing at the facility, and she was mortified.”

Although Henrick’s family knew he was gay, he never told them he was ill. “It was all part of his not wanting to be dependent,” says Newelt. Two days before Henrick’s suicide, Newelt called Henrick’s younger sister, Mary, in New York City, to tell her that Henrick was in the hospital. She arrived in Los Angeles the day before he died.

“When I went back (to the hospital) Thursday night,” recalls Newelt, “Mary was there. Jon said, ‘I’m so glad she was here today.’ He had made a decision to do something, but I didn’t realize it. When I said goodby to him, he said, ‘Make sure Mary gets home OK.’ And I thought that was kind of strange.”

On Saturday, the day after Henrick’s death, Newelt and Henrick’s sister cleaned Henrick’s apartment and sold his belongings. “I was watching people walk out with his cookbooks,” Newelt remembers, “and his new keyboard, which he’d just bought a week before.” He is crying now. “I could see the markings on the wall where his favorite piece of artwork used to hang. I stood in that empty apartment and I just couldn’t believe it. By Saturday night, everything that was Jon was gone.”

WHEN WESLEY (A PSEUDONYM) died on Aug. 24, it appears that a decision was made. Who made that decision is unclear. What is clear is that Wesley, a 29-year-old actor from Corpus Christi, Tex., had AIDS. But the disease is not mentioned on the death certificate filed at the Hall of Records.

“I don’t remember that,” says one of the doctors who treated Wesley at County-USC Medical Center, when asked whether the family asked him to omit AIDS from the death certificate. “On the certificate that I saw there was PCP ( Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia), AIDS and Kaposi’s.”

“I would appreciate very much if you wouldn’t do the profile,” Wesley’s father says from his home in Texas. He speaks with great calm, but there is anguish in his voice. “His wish was that no one know the problem he died of. None of my relatives know.”

“They’ve taken it awfully hard,” says another of Wesley’s relatives. “His mother still cries about it, and his father is very depressed. He was their baby.”

How long Wesley suffered from AIDS is unknown. “Probably for at least two months,” his doctor says. “In him, I remember it was very fast.” But in June, when Wesley visited his family in Texas, he seemed perfectly healthy. In August, when he checked in to the hospital, his parents were apparently stunned to learn he was seriously ill.

“Basically, I had him in my service three days,” says Wesley’s doctor. “He had a very short stay. He was in the hospital about 10 days. He was dealing great with it. He knew he was going to die. He basically just wanted to talk to people most of the time. He was very affable, very friendly.

“The outstanding thing in his case was the family. They were very close to this young kid. They’d bring him things to read, things to eat. They’d bring him flowers. He had pictures of his family. I remember his father was wearing a big Texas hat.

“The family knew he was gay,” he continues. “It wasn’t a shock that he was gay. They were shocked at how soon he went. I remember telling them he could die within a couple of days or weeks. Right after I told them that, the next day he died.”

“No one loves their child more than we loved him,” says Wesley’s father. “But there’s still a lot of stigma attached to this. Texans are very conservative in their thinking. It’s not like dying of measles. My family--my brothers and sisters--there’s never been any kind of blemish regarding their name. When my friends find out about it, it will do nothing but hurt my family.”

DOUGLAS (A PSEUDONYM) was a 36-year-old self-employed accountant. He was white, unmarried and a Canadian citizen. Exactly where he lived is unknown. No address was listed on his death certificate. He apparently had no drivers license.

Douglas left so few clues about his life that it was difficult to find out anything about him.

Even more mysterious is that while there is no mistaking that he died of AIDS--it is there on his death certificate, along with the date, Aug. 24, and his doctor’s signature--there appears to be some confusion about it.

“You say that he died of AIDS, but he didn’t,” says his father, reached by telephone at his home in Canada. He says the last time he saw his son he was in the hospital and unconscious. “As far as we’re concerned, he died of a diabetic coma. The doctor said it was diabetic coma.”

“I’m not going to speak about that matter,” his doctor says when asked to explain the discrepancy. Pressed further, he apologizes, then hangs up.

In any case, Douglas’ father, a minister, does not want to say more about his son. “I’m not going to go into all this,” he says, “because he had been away a long time.

“I’ve written you a letter. Thank you--no, I don’t want to thank you. Goodby.”

The letter never arrived.

TWO MONTHS BEFORE he died, James Roddy choreographed a musical for the San Diego Civic Light Opera. Three weeks before he died, he was sightseeing in London. The weekend before he entered the hospital for the last time, he taught at a dance convention in New Orleans.

Roddy, whom everyone called Jimmy, died in Century City Hospital on Aug. 25, at age 38, after being ill for 10 months. He was an accomplished dancer and choreographer who began dancing as a child in his mother’s studio in Omaha. He performed in Broadway shows, the first national company of “A Chorus Line” and in several television specials and films, including “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” His obituary appeared in Daily Variety.

Roddy loved movies, plays and museums. He loved the Dodgers. He was fascinated with British history. By the time of his trip, he was having difficulty breathing and was barely able to sleep. But he was determined to go anyway.

Friends and family say Roddy was the sort of person who listened to others’ problems and did not dwell on his own, particularly when he had AIDS. “He spent a lot of time helping his friends,” remembers George Hayes, Roddy’s roommate and friend, “making sure that we were OK.”

A member of the Church of Religious Science, Roddy not only believed in life after death but in the notion that there is a time to die. “It was an acceptance of what is,” Hayes says.

When Roddy was found to have AIDS-related complex in November, 1985, “he was very positive about the outcome,” says Patrick Roddy, his 28-year-old brother. “I just got this feeling from him that everything was going to be OK.” When he learned he had AIDS and pneumocystis pneumonia in February, he continued to be optimistic. Recalls Patrick: “He still said, ‘My doctor tells me I’m doing very well.’ He was just going on with life, trying to be as strong as he could.”

Almost from the moment he became ill, Roddy fought to live. He took dance classes and exercised. He made himself eat to maintain his weight, even though he often felt nauseated. “The fact that he was in good physical shape,” says Hayes, “and was aware of his body had a lot to do with how he dealt with AIDS.”

He got counseling through the Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center and, when he was in the hospital, through AIDS Project / Los Angeles. He regularly attended church. He spent time with Louise Hay, a Los Angeles faith healer who counsels the terminally ill.

Roddy spent time with people he loved and stopped seeing those he didn’t. He made a special effort to celebrate holidays and friends’ birthdays. “It was as if whatever was going to happen had to be quality,” Hayes says. “We never let AIDS have more power than it already did. It was taking his physical life. So we made up our minds it wasn’t going to take over the rest of his life.”

Roddy’s parents knew he was gay. The one thing Roddy had hoped to do before he died was to see them and tell them he had AIDS. As his mother, Jeanne Roddy, recalls: “He was going to tell us when he came out to his 20-year high school reunion. He wanted to tell his father and I together.” As it happened, he called them shortly before he went into the hospital.

When his parents and sister arrived at the hospital from Omaha, Roddy was barely conscious. When he saw them, he managed to smile. Shortly after that, he slipped into a coma.

“He really did love life,” Hayes says. “And I believe that he died loving himself.”

JOSEPH (A PSEUDONYM), A MAINTENANCE worker and divorced father of two, died on Aug. 25 at age 41. He served in the military from 1963 to 1969. He was treated for AIDS and pneumocystis pneumonia at Veterans Administration Medical Center in West Los Angeles.

But this is not really about Joseph, a “good guy” who cared about his neighbors, a “strong, good-looking” man of medium height who, as one neighbor put it, resembled a “survivor of Dachau” toward the end of his life. It is about truth and consequences.

“I do not want to be involved,” said the woman who lived with Joseph. At first, she had agreed to talk about Joseph if his name was not used, but she had changed her mind.

It was an agonizing, difficult conversation, a dramatic reflection of terror and pain.

She said she understood the need to talk about AIDS. “But there would be nothing I could give you, even if done anonymously, that would not reflect on my children and myself.”

She said that she and her children had received counseling, and “I was told not to tell them (the children) at this time” that Joseph died of AIDS. What’s more, she said, she is also worried about her own health.

She was determined to protect her children. AIDS health-care workers have been beaten and harassed, she said. “Are you prepared to deal with it if people get hurt? If children get physically hurt?”

She was furious about what she called the lack of testing facilities. Joseph, she said, had tested negative twice for the AIDS virus, and his condition was not diagnosed until April of last year.

“I really don’t know what to tell you,” she said finally, adding that perhaps she would be able to speak about the experience in five years. “I have two children who are always with me. I work full time. I take classes two nights a week.

“I’ve had a lot of upheaval in my life,” she said, crying now. “I’ve gone through a lot of difficult problems myself and with my children.”

ON AUG. 23 OF last year, the day he turned 41, Robert Johnson talked about his future with a few close friends.

“He told us that he was going to die,” says one of those friends, a gay man who did not want his name used for fear of losing his job. “He asked that I get power of attorney and take care of everything.” Two days later, Johnson died at County-USC Medical Center. He died less than two weeks after coming down with pneumocystis pneumonia, only three days after entering the hospital.

“A good friend of Bob’s and a friend of mine were there in the room,” says Johnson’s friend about the morning he died. “He would joke, ‘Are you still here?’ And I’d say, ‘I’m here to make you miserable. ‘I’m here to tease you.’ And he’d say, ‘Get away, you’re bothering me.’ Yet he did it with repartee.

“In seeing him that last day, I think he was at peace with himself. He had done what he could do, and this was it.”

As a free-lance writer, Johnson had written for “The Waltons,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.” and other television shows. He lived alone in Hollywood and drove a new Thunderbird. A former journalist, he came to Los Angeles from Arizona 19 years ago to--as his friend puts it--”make his fame and fortune” as a screenwriter. But his main source of income was packaging erotica for soft-core pornography magazines.

“It was fantasy,” says Johnson’s friend of the content of the magazines Johnson produced. “Male erotica in every sense of the word. He started with a very well-known one called Touch. Bob got them to be a little more classy, with nice covers, nice paper. Sure, a little smut was thrown in, but it was done in good taste.”

Although Johnson was close to his family (“There wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do for each other,” his friend says), and they flew here to see him when he was ill, “as far as they’re concerned, he had pneumonia.” Apparently, they never knew he was gay. “You have to remember,” his friend says, “that Bob didn’t know he had AIDS until the last 48 hours. There wasn’t any need for him to tell his parents he was gay.” In any event, the word AIDS does not appear on Johnson’s death certificate.

“He very rarely would discuss AIDS,” his friend says. “He knew his life style had made him vulnerable to the disease. But he said, ‘I’m not going to stop living.’ While he was not (promiscuous), he could have been more choosy. The people he did associate with six months prior to his death were IV drug users. In a couple of cases he didn’t know until afterwards, then he got them out of the apartment.”

Johnson was cremated, and his remains are in a box in his friend’s garage in the San Fernando Valley. “We’re sort of used to having him around,” his friend says with a laugh. He’s also saved the bottle of Champagne they bought for the day Johnson sold his first movie script. “When we decide what to do with his ashes, we’ll probably drop the bottle in the same hole.

“He was an interesting and fun person,” he continues. “A true friend. From the day he got sick, I cussed him out the whole time. I chastised him when he was alive, and I chastised him when he was dead. And that’s the way he would have wanted it.”

IN MANY WAYS STEVE (a pseudonym) seemed a solid, middle-class Southern Californian. He was an outgoing schoolteacher, a resident of the San Fernando Valley, married with one daughter. By all appearances, he was not leading the life of an alcoholic and IV drug user. But that’s what Steve was.

“He died on his 40th birthday,” his wife says in a cool and detached tone, as if trying to control long-suppressed anger. “I don’t really know when he started doing drugs. I didn’t know he had an alcohol problem. He was very careful to keep home and whatever else he was doing separate. It was almost like he had a split personality.”

Although Steve quit using drugs in 1982, he didn’t develop symptoms of AIDS until the spring of 1985.

“He found out at the end of 1984 that two of his drug dealers had died of AIDS a year or two before,” his wife recalls. “So he knew he was at risk. He got involved in APLA (AIDS Project / Los Angeles), working the buddy hot line, so he had a lot of access to correct information.

“We were married 20 years. We didn’t tell our daughter right away because she was starting finals for her junior year in high school. Then we just sat her down and told her the facts. We felt she was old enough to handle it. Sometimes the truth is less frightening than the imagination.

“Once he said, ‘One thing strange about having it is you don’t have to fear getting it. In a way it’s a relief to know what’s wrong.’ ”

During the 15 months he was ill, Steve developed pneumocystis pneumonia and had his gall bladder removed. He eventually went blind in his left eye.

“We had him on a home-care program,” his wife says. “Steve was afraid that in the hospital they would resuscitate him. He didn’t want to be kept alive by extraordinary means.

“The last week and a half he got very disoriented. I could almost tell you the hour his mind went. He turned worse on Saturday night. When I got up Sunday, he was in a coma. The nurse said he would probably not last the day, and she was right.”

Steve died at home on Aug. 24. His ashes were buried in Oklahoma in a rural cemetery plot donated by friends.

“Steve and I had specifically discussed cremation,” his wife says. “We discussed where he wanted to be buried. We discussed losing each other. . . . Sorry,” she says as her voice breaks for the first time. “It certainly made the AIDS issue a lot more real. It’s not just something you hear about in the paper and think, ‘It won’t affect me.’

“Steve was very open with his family and friends, but I chose not to be. It’s not a socially acceptable disease, and I don’t want my associates to know. It’s none of their business.

“I have my ups and downs. At any given moment I can put up a front. I took about a month off and then decided to go back to work. As hard as it sounds, you have to go on because you are still alive. Even though I didn’t want to and still don’t want to.”

She says her daughter is dealing with the loss of her father “very well. She started college right after he died. When you’re 17 or 18, you think you’ll live forever.”