A Remembrance: Giving Voice to Those Haunted by AIDS

In 1946, the great stage director Peter Brook visited postwar Germany and found that in the midst of devastation, there was still theater.

In the burned-out shell of the Hamburg Opera, he saw a performance of “The Barber of Seville.” In the ruins of Dusseldorf, he saw an Offenbach comedy. And at a nightclub, he watched two clowns send an audience into squeals of laughter with a routine about what they would make for dinner.

But as the clown routine went on, the performers resorted to naming foods, one after another in a long list, foods no longer obtainable in the city.

A “deep and true theatrical silence” came over the nightclub, Brook would later write, as the audience had to confront--just by the recitation of a simple list--all that they had lost.

Forty-five years later, another group gathered on a Friday night in West Hollywood in a small, spare auditorium and contemplated what had been lost. The city does not resemble a war zone--except to the extent that combat gear knock-offs are now a fashion statement. But there is devastation.

There is also, in the form of public readings, theater.

It was a reading by the members of the first AIDS Project Los Angeles Creative Writing Workshop.

“I’m going to read a piece called ‘What I Have,’ ” said Marc Wagenheim as he stepped up to the podium and began to recite from a hand-written manuscript. He was haggard and thin, but the look on his face was one of determination.

I’ve just turned 34 and I’ve got things in my life I never imagined I’d have.

I have a doctor--internal medicine and infectious disease--a gastrointenologist, a radiologist, an oncologist/hematologist, a home health care nurse, a hospital I’ve spent so much time in that I know which floor and wing to ask for.

Nine months ago, Irene Borger, a writer and a teacher at UC Riverside, started the class for people with AIDS or AIDS-Related Complex, or who were infected with HIV, the virus thought to cause AIDS. The class attracted a varied group of 20 people, mostly gay men.

Some dropped out along the way. Four died.

I have a golden retriever, who I’ve had since he was just a fluff ball, who I adore and who will be 10 years old this summer . I tell people that he and I have the same life expectancy, although his blood work looks a lot better than mine.

Even in West Hollywood, a city devasted by AIDS, the audience laughed. Indeed, the reading was a kind of coming-out party for a group of people who have discovered they love to write.

After the reading, Wagenheim said his condition was diagnosed as AIDS five years ago. “I had been through all the fear and denial,” he said, “and when I saw the flyer for Irene’s class, I thought, ‘I’m going to do something creative now.’ ”

Robert Murphy, 48, had worked as an actor, singer and dancer--pursuits he had to abandon when he became sick. “I just didn’t have the energy,” said Murphy, who was wearing a monogramed blazer with a handkerchief folded artfully into the pocket. “But I needed to create. I didn’t want my brain to go to sleep.”

That lack of energy was evident as he slumped forward in his chair, waiting for his turn to read. But when he read a tender piece about a friend who disappeared into the Midwest after being diagnosed as having AIDS, his delivery was clear and forceful:

Sometimes I feel guilty because I haven’t tried to contact him, but fear has stopped me--fear for my friend and fear for myself. That unspoken fear of losing someone special.

Fear that his death will force me to face my own mortality. To me, his death will mean that I am next. . . .

Joe Hogan, a strikingly handsome 30-year-old man who is HIV-positive but asymptomatic, read an angry piece that included the line, “Death can be so humiliating for the vain.” Philip Justin Smith delivered a monologue from his play in progress, “Chosen Family.”

The reading that got the most laughs of the evening was “Chemical Man.” Robert Hilyard, 36, started the autobiographical essay when he was hospitalized in December with pneumocystis pneumonia. He chronicled his adventures in taking dozens of different drug therapies, including the many that didn’t work:

He has seen his medical record and it never says, “This medication did not work for this patient.” It always states, blamingly, “patient failed drug.”

Like computers, he figures, modern medicine is incapable of making errors. It is the human in him that has failed. . . .

He puts so many pharmaceuticals into his body that he no longer feels quite human. He’s evolved into Chemical Man. He knows he’s not alone. There are others like him. Is this the future of mankind? he wonders. Are they the first of a new race? Homo pharmaceuticus.

Not all the readings had to do with AIDS. Elaine Hill read a fantasy about meeting the devil on a train, David Gardner wrote about the reaction in his Southern town when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and Jeff Markus read pieces that were frankly erotic and political.

The program went on for more than 2 1/2 hours, but almost no one in the audience left.

Toward the end of the evening, Jerry Terranova read his “Hospice Diary,” which chronicled the death of a friend at Christmastime. He read quietly, seldom looking at the audience.

His friend looked good one day, bad another. He had moments when he was lucid, then spoke in non sequiturs and then not at all as dementia took its toll.

Terranova’s prose was spare but had enormous power. He was a true storyteller, a careful observer of the scene, his friend and himself:

You wipe the crust from his lip, tenderly, you wipe his forehead--clean, white, wet washcloth against his black, withering skin (“the corrupt body,” he called it once). And you feed him water through a syringe and you talk from time to time, saying anything to penetrate the awesome, horrible silence. Your skin is saying “I love you” with the helplessness and terror and force that you didn’t think was in you.

The end was coming.

You wonder how you will react to his death . Wonder what death will look like.

The auditorium grew so quiet as he read that the only sound other than Terranova’s voice was the soft whoosh of the air conditioner. The audience was so still that the only movement was when people wiped away tears.

Perhaps that is what it was like to be in that night club in Hamburg. Once again, a performer had made a painfully vibrant connection to the way we live now.

No one in the auditorium, other than Terranova, knew the man who was in the hospice. They never learned his name. But because Terranova decided to write about him, he will be long remembered.