In a Rose Garden

I was wandering through the rose garden of the Huntington complex of museums and gardens on a day laced with gold when the thought occurred to me.

What if I knew I was dying?

What if this walk through a garden of radiant beauty was my last? What if the petals I touched, as soft as a child’s dream, would soon vanish with love and memory into a final enfolding darkness?

What if I had AIDS?

These aren’t the kinds of thoughts that normally bounce around in my head. I don’t spend my days in a dialogue with death. I’m too in love with life and those dazzling moments life sets before me to ponder in shadow its somber dissolution.

But still. . . .

I find it necessary to project myself into another’s role occasionally in order to brush emotions I could not otherwise perceive.

I force myself to glimpse the fear of darkness, the pain of sickness and the anguish of leaving in order to touch the reality that surrounds me.

And I wonder now, alone in a quiet room, why Los Angeles County Supervisor Pete Schabarum hasn’t done the same.

What got me thinking about all this was, in fact, Pistol Pete’s comment last week that hardly anyone out there on the street cares about AIDS or about AIDS funding and, presumably, about AIDS victims.

Never a sensitive or perceptive man, old Pete fired off this conclusion at a Board of Supervisors meeting disrupted by AIDS activists demanding the immediate opening of a special hospital ward for AIDS patients.

It wasn’t as though they were asking for the whole damned hospital or even a wing. They were seeking a corner of the world where, when treatment failed, death might come softly.

Pete must know we aren’t untouched by the killing sickness that sweeps our world. There have been 7,000 people in this county alone who have been afflicted with AIDS. Five thousand of them have died.

The figures climb worldwide with the rising intensity of a silent scream. I want to think Pete knows that and is concerned.

I’ve got to figure it’s the noisy activism he doesn’t like. He works in grayer circles. He’d rather the fear and the anguish were more . . . well . . . businesslike.

“But if we didn’t yell,” a member of the protesting group said later, “who would listen?”

Not Pistol Pete last Tuesday. He was angry about graffiti attacks on county buildings by AIDS activists and said, hell, we ought to teach them a lesson and make them pay for it out of the AIDS budget, and hell, who cares about AIDS anyhow?

Later, his press secretary, like a circus hand sweeping up after a messy elephant, tried to tidy Pete’s wake by saying he was quoted out of context and what he meant was. . . .

I thought about that all weekend. In the lobby of a Pasadena hotel. In a Glendale restaurant. Outside a Santa Monica theater. In the Huntington rose garden. And whenever it seemed right I’d ask, “Do you care about AIDS?”

Unlike the kind of people Pistol Pete presumably has in mind, the people I talked to do care, and they care a lot.

I suspect that Pete--an aging ex-jock and land developer--knows too many homophobes. Talking once about a friend in San Francisco, he lamented, “Poor guy. He’s got to fight faggots all day.” Then he winked.

“Asking that kind of question,” a woman said to me, “is like asking someone in 17th-Century London if he cared about bubonic plague.”

She was sitting on a bench near a cascade of climbing roses called “Liverpool Echo” in the Huntington gardens. Each flashing pink blossom was a metaphor for life.

She said, “How can you not care?”

In Fresco Ristorante I leaned over and asked another diner the same question. He was a stranger, but our tables were close and we’d been talking.

“I think everyone cares,” he said. “I just don’t think we care enough.”

“I read Schabarum’s comment,” a young woman said outside a movie house, “but maybe I’m not the ideal person to talk to. I care more than most. My brother died of AIDS.”

No one I talked with didn’t care.

Pistol Pete must live in a world without dimension, without empathy and without the sensibility to know why activists shout; a world under siege by new imperatives.

One can imagine his pal up in San Francisco lamenting even now, “Poor Pete. He’s got to fight reality all day long.”

And then he’ll wink.