Poets and Dancers

I keep thinking about Paul Monette. I think about him because he’s probably the most eloquent writer I know, a man whose prose soars with the lyrical freedom of poetry. And I think about him because he has AIDS.

What brought him to mind recently was the announcement by Magic Johnson that he was HIV positive and was leaving the Lakers.

Every sportswriter and sportscaster and sports fan in town, hell in the world , wept bitterly over such a fate to befall such a man . . . a slam dunk, as it were, gone silent.

I wished Magic no pain, but I found myself wondering why we weep for the athletes who fall when the poets and dancers die unsung?

That’s when I began thinking about Paul. I wrote about him two years ago when he was HIV-positive, and wondered how he was doing now.

I didn’t telephone right away because I’m not good at sitting with those staring death in the eye. I thought about him but did nothing.

Then a kind of media countdown began for a meeting of the L.A. Board of Education that would consider the question of condom distribution on high school campuses in an effort to stop the spread of AIDS.

In those days prior to the board’s ultimate approval of the program, I heard from parents enraged at the very notion.

They said preach abstinence, not prevention. They said God, not a school board, would watch over their children.

Then I talked to a teen-age boy about condom distribution and he said, “What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that AIDS has killed 300,000 people in the world since 1980, and the death toll is mounting with every passing day.

But death is a concept difficult for the young to perceive, a foreign country they doubt they’ll ever visit. It becomes easier to understand as we age.

I don’t have much in common with this particular teen-ager, except that we’re both mammals, but at least he got me thinking about Paul Monette again and I knew I had to see him . . . so eloquent a man defined so shabbily in the abstract by a kid who wondered what the big deal was.

The big deal in this case is that a poet among us is suffering.

He sat pale and drawn the other day in the garden of his West Hollywood home. The afternoon was bright and chilly, and winter lay over the patio like an unsettling memory.

When I met with Paul two years ago it was in the spring, and his yard was alive with a rainbow of pastels. Now the leaves of the Chinese elm are strewn over the ground and the garden has assumed the somber tone of a cemetery.

It made me aware of passing seasons and of the disease that has afflicted the man who sat across from me at a patio table telling me his immune system was dying.

The Centers for Disease Control say anyone with a T-cell count under 200 has AIDS. The T-cell is involved with regulating immunity. Early last year, Paul’s T-cell count began slipping: 500 to 350 to 200 to 195 to 150 to 40.

He turned to me that day in his winter garden and said in a tone of grief and indignation, “I could die this year.”

Paul wonders aloud if he will be as good an AIDS patient as he was a HIV-positive patient. He’s handling it all right now, he says, “but how will I be if I go blind?”

Five years ago he lost his “beloved friend” Roger Horwitz to AIDS and wrote about it in a sad, angry book called “Borrowed Time.” Last September, another friend, Stephen Kolzak, died of the same disease.

“Hearing another call in the middle of the night from a hospital telling me a lover has died was beyond surreal,” Paul says. “I have no tears left.”

His life today is rounded with the chemistry of medicine that attempts to make comfortable whatever time he has left. Opportunistic infections plague him. A rash covered his body and stripped skin from his mouth, lips and eyelids. “It left me,” he says, “broken in half emotionally.”

He adds: “Sometimes I wonder where did Paul Monette go? I remember friends asking that about themselves. You become the disease after awhile, and the you-person disappears.”

He assured me as our hour ended that he was not planning to die soon. He’s written five books in the past five years and is working on a major television project about AIDS.

“I have a life that works,” he said as we parted. “I’ve made a difference and I honor myself for that. But it doesn’t make one any less hungry for more.”

I drove down Sunset toward the ocean. I thought about Paul and the angry parents and the kid asking me what the big deal was.

The big deal is we’re losing our dancers and we’re losing our poets, and we’re beginning to lose our children. When the final count is made, that may be the biggest deal of all.