Where Dragons Go to Win

They lay like children frightened by imaginary dragons, the terror in their eyes bearing witness to creatures that roam forests beyond our comprehension.

In a way, they are children, because the disease that has brought them to the edge of the dark woods has rendered them as helpless as infants.

They are only moments from death, and the roar of the dragon is seldom beyond their hearing.

I write today of these people with AIDS, because a real giant has entered into the periphery of their world and they wonder about him.

His name is Magic Johnson, and he looms over their fading lives as largely as he loomed over a stricken audience the day he announced he had tested positive for the AIDS virus.

I’m one of you now, his image on a television screen said to the 25 patients at the Chris Brownlie Hospice, in a small forest of its own just over the hills from downtown L.A.

I am the Magic Man and I’m going to tell the world about us!

Heroes rarely fall alone. Millions crowded to the public bedside of this stricken giant. Sportscasters choked up reporting his travail. The mayor of Los Angeles said he has not been so affected since the murder of John F. Kennedy.

“Tears,” as one newspaper put it, “are falling all over the world.”

We empathize easily with the peril of celebrities.

We fell to our knees when Lucille Ball died, suffered along with Sammy Davis Jr., cried over the plight of Michael Landon and named an airport after John Wayne.

Perceiving pain from the safety of distance is always better than feeling its claws at our own flesh.

Not that Earvin Johnson is undeserving of our empathy. His illness is more than just a metaphor for life’s ebullience brought crashing to the floorboards. He was, and is, a deliberate icon for the young, and a good one.

But I felt an uneasiness at the tears wept for a basketball star when so many with AIDS lie beyond the rings of light that warm the famous.

More than 100,000 Americans have died of the disease in the past 10 years, 10,000 of them in L.A. County alone, and not one has faced the dragons with the kind of support a sports hero is being accorded.

So I went looking for those who, without trumpet sounds, slip quietly into their dreams. I found them at the Chris Brownlie Hospice, into whose rooms they come to die.

Ramon is one of them. No plaza will ever be named after him. He has led no ticker tape parades, brought us no championships and gathered no crowds. Ramon has never even had a visitor during his three-year illness.

Like a leper from the past, he dies alone.

“How do you feel about Magic Johnson as a famous spokesman for those with the AIDS virus?” I asked. “How do you feel about the attention he’s getting?”

We were sitting on a patio at the rear of the hospice on a day as warm and sweet as music in autumn.

Ramon is a 52-year-old laborer. The disease shows on his face and in his eyes, where terror lurks.

“He has everything and I have nothing,” he replied, “but now he has the sickness and I’m sad for him. Because he is famous, it might help others, but for me it’s too late.”

“What’s your prognosis?” I asked.

He smiled quizzically. “I have none,” he said.

I spoke with a man named Charles who drifted in and out of consciousness and a man named Steve whose 95-pound frame is tortured by endless coughing and a woman named Conchita who prays for Magic Johnson.

Their compassion toward others is a lesson for us all.

“It’s not just the physical pain he will have to suffer,” Conchita said to me, her voice a tiny whisper through the calamity of her own anguish. “It’s the emotional pain that’s so terrible.”

I asked if she felt resentment at the attention the world is giving Johnson and the loneliness with which she must bear her own dying.

Her reply was simple. “In the end,” she said, “God makes no distinctions. We are all one.”

The same question angered a man named Marshall.

“To feel resentment would be hateful and evil,” he said, his voice rising.

It was an odd flash of emotion from someone whose frail and withered appearance belied the energy rage requires.

“Parents need to know AIDS is a deadly, hideous, ugly disease and anyone’s son or daughter can get it. If Magic were in this room I would say, ‘Keep talking, man. Don’t ever stop talking! ‘ “

I could feel the presence of dragons among those whose names will never be remembered. But I could also perceive a quality of human spirit that is without rancor, even in the terrible loneliness of their dying.

Not even a fear of dragons could conquer that.