Writing Degree Zero

Steve Smith steps onto the stage at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Ahmanson Auditorium. He is a tall, elegant man with thinning hair and a long, expressionless face. When he reads, his lips barely move. But every word drops clearly into the listening silence with the rhythmic precision of an automatic gun:

Donald was tired. After more then half a decade on the HIV treadmill, he was tired of hospitals and specialists and waiting rooms and visiting nurses and food banks and case workers. He was tired of being biopsied and dilated and infused and transfused and refused. He was tired of insurance forms, disability forms, social security forms, doctor bills, hospital bills, pharmacy bills . . . He was tired of neuropathy and bony shoulder blades and stomach cramps and lesions and warts and encroaching blindness and the smell of his own s --- . Most of all, he was tired of loss. The loss of independence, of privacy, of meaningful work. And, of course, the loss of most of his friends.

Smith, a former CBS broadcast journalist, is one of 18 people reading at this two-day event, the fifth annual reading of the AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers Workshop. Not all the workshop members are natural writers. But they have all clearly paid attention to the advice of Irene Borger, the workshop’s founder and director, who urges her students to be true to their own voices and to write about the particular. The result: powerful stories--humorous, sad, celebratory, bitter, the kind you never forget--about what it means to be human under great duress.

Dave K. is a shy, broad-shouldered man who attended school so infrequently that when he did professors would ask: “You’re in this class?” Now in his 30s, he’s something of a philosopher--his story a puzzled meditation on the deadly effect of a casual act. “All I did was have sex,” he says of a brief encounter with a male bartender in those experimental college days. Was this the moment when the virus entered his body? Is that man sick now? How about the girlfriend he was seeing then?

Smiling still comes easily to Darian Walker, whose handsome face is hollowed by the disease, and he reminisces with gusto about pre-AIDs era parties, friendships and “platform shoes . . . the only fashion statement I fell off.” Photographer-poet Stephen Jeromm underscores the loss of the carefree life with a melancholy image of his sick neighbor’s sports car, “sunken, now, and dust-brown/with four flat tires.”

Next year, Simon & Schuster plans to publish an anthology of the workshop’s writings, along with an audiotape based on an event next spring produced by two APLA board members.

As the reading draws to a close, Borger and two workshop members read the names of 37 members who have died--one only yesterday. She starts to cry, blows her nose and reads a 1,000-year-old Japanese poem by Izumi Shikibu:

It is true the wind/blows terribly here--

but moonlight also leaks/between the roof planks

of this ruined house.