A Story of Love in a Time of AIDS

Paul Monette sat on the terrace of his hillside home, pondering the Big Questions: Life and Death. Love and Hate.

Life has taught Monette a lot about love and death lately. But the subject of hatred, which he seems to be encountering more of, still leaves him at a loss for words.

That morning he’d read a newspaper column by James J. Kilpatrick, in which the syndicated writer posed a “hard question” about AIDS: “What’s the big deal?”

Kilpatrick scoffed at those who have recommended “compassion and understanding” for victims of that disease. “We are supposed to be moved by the ‘tragedy’ of AIDS, which is to put a good word to very poor use,” he wrote.

But Monette has also been writing about AIDS recently, and he found tragedy too weak a term to describe what he has seen. Calamity, nightmare, holocaust are among the words he chooses.

In the just-published “Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), the poet, novelist, and screenwriter details the physical decline and agonizing death of his lover of more than 10 years, Los Angeles attorney Roger Horwitz. He wrote the book, he said, to add his own testimony to the stories and myths and opinions that are already accumulating around the AIDS epidemic.

Monette’s Legacy

His goal, he said, was to make sure that 50 years from now, when people look back on what AIDS was all about, they’ll find some love stories mixed in with the sort of analysis that papers across America printed that morning, Kilpatrick’s view that “AIDS victims deserve about the same ‘compassion’ that society extends to those who smoke themselves to death or drink themselves to death.”

“I can’t do anything about the hate-mongers,” Monette, 43, said, leaning into a slice of sunlight. “I can’t do anything about James Kilpatrick. You have to let these people spew their bile and hope that decent people . . . are going to care enough to learn that there’s another side of this.”

“Borrowed Time” immediately raises comparison to last year’s big book about AIDS, journalist Randy Shilts’ “And the Band Played On.” The books even share some of the same real-life characters--Sheldon Andelson, who was Horwitz’s brother and one of the leading political power brokers in Los Angeles’ gay community, and who also died of AIDS, and UCLA immunologist Dr. Michael Gottlieb, for instance.

But, while Shilts’ book was a panoramic expose of the epidemic, Monette uses that ghastly landscape as only the backdrop for his intimate close-up of one gay couple and one small circle of friends contending with a very personal crisis.

“I don’t want to appropriate the term from the Jewish people, but I feel that this is our holocaust,” said Monette, who, like many gay activists, looks at the epidemic as a sort of passive genocide. “And if Randy Shilts has written ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,’ I think what I wanted to write is ‘Anne Frank’s Diary.’ ”

“No one has really given a full, loving portrait of what I knew to be going on all over the place--which was remarkable, courageous people fighting against all kinds of discrimination and against the medical bureaucracy in a terrifying and horrible scourge. The fear and the torment and the rage that is being experienced by the gay community is not being tapped into. . . . It is not very well understood.”

The First Alert

Monette’s story begins, in essence, on Interstate 10 to Palm Springs in February, 1982. As Horwitz drives, Monette reads aloud a pivotal article in a gay newspaper: “Is Sex Making Us Sick?”

Three years later, doctors tell Horwitz that the HIV virus swims in his veins. In the next year, time becomes twisted into moments of relative sickness and health. The couple acquaint themselves with spinal taps, bone marrow biopsies. They tote shopping bags full of experimental drugs and learn a new language of terms such as T-cells, Compound S and AZT. Their emotions go haywire, Monette finding himself, for instance, suddenly sobbing as he waits to buy a sack of dog food at a Hughes supermarket. They came to call this period “life on the moon.”

Monette has cast his story with subtly defined heroes and villains. The villains are passive: Medical bureaucrats who fought among themselves instead of fighting the disease; the seemingly lackadaisical Reagan Administration--”Reagan did not mention the word AIDS in the first six years of his Administration,” Monette said.

The heroes, on the other hand, are people who quietly displayed the compassion that Kilpatrick and others are so quick to dismiss, he said.

A Measure of Heroes

“The heroes that I see in the AIDS calamity are people who have, within the scope of their jobs and relationships, given some extraordinary extra measure.” For instance, Al and Bernice, Roger’s parents and Monette’s “in-laws,” an elderly couple who ran a small restaurant on a side street of downtown Chicago, who were perplexed and unsettled by their son’s sexual orientation, but who stood by their son in his life and as he slowly fell ill, went blind and died at age 44. They were “unflinching on the front lines,” Monette writes.

So were so many of the medical professionals he encountered, including the tough nurse who told a conference of her peers, “If you don’t like AIDS, get out of medicine because this is where it is.” She is, Monette writes, “one of those remarkable people we’d meet occasionally along the way who was passionately committed to facing the calamity, who wouldn’t rest until she was part of the solution.”

Also, all along the way, there were moments of existential warmth, flickers of shared humanity among strangers: A dying friend booked himself a single seat on a tour in Rio de Janerio, then stood alone and wept on a beautiful beach. “Don’t be sad,” a tour guide said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “Come join us for lunch.” That was enough.

House Has Empty Feel

Monette now lives with his dog, Puck, in a clean, well-lighted hillside house in one of L.A.’s lesser-known canyons. The way he guides the tour, pointing to the photographs that he and Horwitz collected and the books they read, the place has an empty, museum-like feel, even out to the pool shimmering in the David Hockney back yard.

In the room Monette uses as an office, the answering machine clicks on and off, voices from around the country checking in to offer praise for the book. It’s the same machine that announced that “This is UCLA Medical Center calling. Mr. Roger Horwitz died at 5:24 a.m. . . .”

A large crystal sits on Monette’s desk, beside the computer and piles of paper. But he has no faith in the New Age notion that rocks can cure. The miracle he anticipates is a foot away, in a glass of blue capsules and white pills, the “cocktail” of experimental anti-viral drugs that he gulps down daily in hope that it will keep the virus that’s constantly “ticking” in his body from exploding into full-blown AIDS.

For Monette, the signs so far are good. His body seems to be resisting. But he’s recovering from bronchitis, and every little cough reverberates with anxiety, he conceded.

Monette downplays his own courage in the battle. “Roger to me is a great hero. He fought forcefully and with extraordinary dignity and unflinching sense of self that he never lost, even the day before he died. I do not feel that I was particularly heroic. I was thrust into a situation with someone who was heroic and I learned from that.”

They learned from each other, in fact. First off, and early on, they learned about death, a lesson that keeps repeating itself in the gay community. “I would say that my phone rings with a new case at least once a week, with a death at least once a week. What Roger and I went through, I’m beginning to see dozens and dozens of cases like that,” he said.

They also learned about life. “The burning away of the superfluous, the sheer pleasure of an ordinary afternoon--does anybody ever get taught these things by anything other than tragedy?” Monette writes.

Value of a Hug

But what they learned the most about, perhaps, is love, and how important a simple hug and the words I love you, can be even as one lover becomes blind, disoriented, unconscious. “Everyone always said hearing was the last to go, and I didn’t want him to miss a syllable of me before he left, even if he only heard it in a deep and thoughtless dream,” Monette wrote.

It’s love, Monette said, that keeps his voice fairly calm, even as he describes a photograph he saw recently of a woman with a T-shirt declaring: “Thank God for AIDS.”

“I wrote (“Borrowed Time”) from the perspective of not knowing whether I would live to see it finished. And, when I did, I was so relieved that I’d gotten the love story across so well that it made me temper somewhat the rage.

“There’s no nonsense in the book about what is wrong about homophobia. But, rather than being on a soapbox about that . . . , I just try to show what loving people the gay people in my life have been. Roger and I were incredibly happy, we were incredibly good for each other.”

Just before Roger died, he said to Monette, “We’re the same person, aren’t we? When did that happen?”

“The best thing in life, if you can have it, is to love well,” Monette said. “But the burden of life is to open yourself to love and help other people be open to love.”