Courage and Dignity Won’t Give In to AIDS

The first time I saw Vince Chalk was two years ago, in the library of Irvine’s University High School. There were lots of cameras around, network television crews and reporters with notebooks at the ready.

We were all staring at Vince Chalk. We all wanted to know how he felt.

On that day, good was how Vince felt, almost buoyant. He’d just won a landmark case in federal appeals court that gave him the right to return to his job counseling deaf students.

This was a right that the court had to hand back to Vince Chalk, as it might a criminal seeking redemption, because he has AIDS.

People are afraid of AIDS. They have reason. No one has more reason to fear AIDS than Vince Chalk does.

It is killing him, cruelly.

I went to see Vince last week, not in a hospital--where he has spent a lot of his time--but on the job in his small, cluttered office at the high school. Three days a week, work is his therapy.

“I love to work,” he told me. “It’s real depressing to me not to have this. If I can’t work, then I’ve lost my quality of life.”

But on some days, Vince expends nearly all his energy on the drive to school from his home in Long Beach. Then he doesn’t have the strength to drive home.

“I’m trying to be real honest with myself about how I feel,” he says. “It’s taken me a long time to admit that I don’t feel well, that I shouldn’t always come in.”

Over the months, I’ve been calling Vince on the phone, asking him how he has been feeling. I consider him a friend.

Bad, mostly, is how he has been feeling. Usually we’d set a time to see each other, but at the last minute, he would cancel. He wanted to feel good, he said. He wanted to be up. He wasn’t.

Vince Chalk will be 45 years old on Sunday. He tested positive for the HIV virus four years ago, but a year before that he was hospitalized with a form of pneumonia common among AIDS patients. He believes he’s been ill with AIDS for at least five years.

It’s getting harder to remember how good once felt.

“In my mind, all my plans are tentative,” he says. “I’d like to be positive. I’d like to plan to go to the ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ But I can’t.”

But today in Irvine is not an especially bad day, not for Vince. He is down to 140 pounds, 25 less than what he likes, but three weeks ago, he weighed in at 135. Our conversation is interrupted by his coughs and later by the beeper that commands him to take his pills.

This time there are five.

The drugs aim to treat what the medical specialists call the “opportunistic infections” that prey on people carrying the HIV virus. These predators have names that Vince Chalk had never even heard of a few years back. Now he pronounces them with the sad authority of someone who knows them too well.

There’s the cypomegalovirus, for one, usually treated by medication injected directly into the veins. But that interferes with the AZT, which he has been taking for 2 1/2 years, so that means he takes still more pills.

“I’ve had friends who have had it,” he says of this latest virus. “Most of them are dead.”

Vince pauses after that, then a humorless laugh slips through his lips. “Not a very comforting thought,” he says.

One of Vince’s goals these days is to avoid discomforting thoughts. He doesn’t always succeed.

His intellect tells him he is deluding himself, that he will soon die. Then his emotions allow him to hope. He believes in the power of positive thinking. Maybe, he says, his mother is right. That miracle drug will save him yet.

Then he will have a bad day, or week, or month.

“There are times, if I’ve been feeling bad, if I can’t leave the house, when I don’t know if I want to put out the effort,” he says. “I feel like maybe I should just throw in the towel.”

Others have suggested as much to Vince Chalk. Just before school started last month, he told his doctor that he wanted to feel well enough to return to work. The doctor suggested that he take a disability leave and spend his time at rest.

“What he was saying was: ‘You’re dying. Why don’t you use your last few days doing something else?’ ” Vince says. “That kind of attitude I don’t need from a doctor.”

Vince has since changed physicians. Now he talks about developing his immune system, getting more exercise. He calls other AIDS patients to offer them some hope. It is in such short supply.

Just thinking about Vince Chalk makes me very emotional. I wish I could will him to health. When I hear about the discrimination that he still suffers, court victory or no, I nearly shake with anger.

Teachers tell queer jokes, high school boys call him a fag.

“They do this because they don’t know me,” Vince says. “They don’t give themselves a chance to find out who I am.”

AIDS, he tells me, is not like cancer. Nobody implies that cancer patients deserve to die.

When I left Vince Chalk, he gave me a firm handshake and a smile. He said he wouldn’t have done anything differently, even though fighting for his rights, and those that go after him, has certainly taken its toll.

I have my own selfish reasons to be glad for that. If Vince Chalk were not a fighter, I would have never met him.

Dianne Klein’s column appears on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.