Fighting Heat and Sharing Stories of Loss

Monday, Day Two, 89.5 miles

from Santa Cruz to Greenfield

*

Just after 5 a.m., the 2,275 cyclists of California AIDS Ride 3 rub sleep from their eyes, sniffling with hay fever in the high pollen count, and crawl from their tents.

We stream toward the showers, the chemical toilets and then the food lines for a hot breakfast of eggs, hash browns, sausage, cereal, danish and more, served up by volunteers.

Barbara Quattrocchi, 67, sips a cup of coffee. She laments the fact that she rode only 51 miles on Day One in memory of her son Ted’s death from AIDS in 1991. Her bike--flown to San Francisco the day before in a crate--was reassembled wrong and she spent the day on a saddle that was first too high, then too low. Exhausted, she let a support van bus her into camp. “I’ll do better today,” she vows.

Muscles ache, but we stretch, strap on our helmets, saddle up and roll out into rush-hour traffic.

Santa Cruz falls away behind us as we cruise across the Monterey Peninsula, heading into a cold, stiff breeze. Skirting south of Watsonville, we cut across farm country, dodging slow-moving tractors and swallows that zoom after bugs like dog-fighting jets. A few knee-grinding hours later, I roll into the lunch stop and squat on hot grass with first-time rider Brian Vatcher, who is wolfing down a sandwich.

“The phrase is, ‘I’m living with HIV,’ ” says Vatcher, gay, 34, lanky, cordial and blunt. “I’m not dying from it.” He found out his status in 1990 at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, which will receive some of the $7.9 million he and other riders have raised. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation is another major recipient of the fund-raising effort.

“The woman gave me my test results, and the first words out of my mouth were, ‘But I have plans,’ ” Vatcher recalls. “And she said, ‘Keep ‘em.’ And that’s stayed with me this whole time.”

The news snapped his priorities into sharp focus. His friendships suddenly became far more important, his daily living more intense. He refuses to count his friends who have died of AIDS, from the first in 1985 to his grade-school best friend a few weeks ago.

The latest, a friend who had planned to make his third California AIDS Ride, succumbed suddenly last week. “Something with a 16-syllable name” swiftly destroyed all his red blood cells, Vatcher says.

Undaunted, Vatcher was determined to do the ride. After doctors said his T-cell count and other blood chemistry were safe enough to risk the strain of up to seven hours a day of hard pedaling, he is now two days into it.

He wants to somehow repay the center for all the medical and psychiatric care he receives. So in addition to asking for donations from friends, he faxed letters to nearly 100 celebrities seeking pledges, but only Janet Jackson responded, with a $1,000 donation, he says. That helped push his total to about $7,000.

Stretching out before he hits the road again, Vatcher explains why he carries only a list of his sponsors, not the snapshots or stuffed animals other riders carry to commemorate dead friends. “I don’t like to dwell on death,” he says. “I don’t want to put myself in that category.”

Back on the road, I glance at the picture I carry in the map case atop my handlebar bag. It shows Steve Marquez, a short, humble, savvy Philadelphia Daily News reporter and one of my best friends, who died in 1987 of AIDS.

Steve smiles from the snapshot, inside the massive model of the human heart at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute museum, his feet crossed atop the left ventricle, that look on his face that said he was ready for anything.

He was not ready for AIDS. He told one gay friend he was sick, no one else. His mother found out while making funeral arrangements. His friends learned in the raucous din of a reporters’ hangout called the Pen and Pencil Club, at his wake.

Maybe Steve would have told more people had he lived until 1996, now that AIDS is slightly less taboo a topic. Maybe he would have lived longer, instead of wasting away to the 75-pound husk that I said goodbye to after he died, as machines kept his body breathing. Maybe not.

Tuesday, Day Three, 76.5 miles

from Greenfield to Paso Robles

*

Today, the hammer comes down.

Last year’s AIDS Ride enemy was a drenching rain, two days’ worth that left roads slick, tents soaked, riders miserable.

This year, we fight heat. As we cycle out of our mobile tent city, past the southern Salinas Valley’s rounded foothills, the morning comes on teasingly cool.

Daniel Moeshing, veteran of all five Tanqueray-sponsored AIDS Rides held across the country to date, blows past me astride his feather-light carbon-fiber Softride. I shout his name and pump furiously for three minutes on my clunky, off-the-rack mountain bike to catch up because I have not seen him for a few days.

The Swiss bank he works for flew him to New York at the end of Day One to give him a new assignment. Moeshing, a blond, HIV-positive alpine skier and relatively new cyclist, has been made a traveling ambassador for the cause of AIDS care and prevention.

At our next pit stop at Fort Hunter Liggett, 33 miles later, Moeshing clowns around on an old Army tank, where some wag stuck a cardboard sign reading, “Tank Array.” As he jokes with old friends and makes new ones, his spectacled eyes fairly glow. He is in his element.

By noon, the road shimmers with heat.

We toss bottle after bottle of water down quick-parched throats, our butts numb, legs cramped and tires turned gummy on griddle-hot asphalt. People stop needing the bathrooms.

Pit Stop 4 is like a fever dream. Volunteers in grass skirts and Hawaiian shirts spray us with water, dole out fresh fruit and ice and sing for us in the courtyard of Mission San Antonio. I wander into the church, where it is 20 degrees cooler, kneel for a minute and ask God to watch over this crazy endeavor.

By 2 p.m., heat-dazed riders are weaving off the shoulder and into the slow lane of U.S 101. Crew vans pick them up by the dozens, ordering them to hand over bikes and be driven back to camp or face expulsion from the ride. Word is the temperature hit 110 degrees today.

Quattrocchi was among the riders bused back to camp. The day before, she rode all 90 miles and then some, because of a wrong turn. Today, she recalls, they were just sweeping everybody up, and I said, ‘Oh well,’ and came in. “It was so hot,” she says, puffing a cigarette in the cooling night. “I was thinking of old boyfriends and I’d think of things with the kids,” she said. She tapped the photo badge of her smiling son Ted. “And I’d talk to this one once in a while.”

Wednesday, Day Four, 80.9 miles

from Paso Robles to Santa Maria

*

Ride organizer Dan Pallotta announced at last night’s camp gathering that six riders went to the hospital with heat exhaustion, and one is still there. Ride staff lecture, wheedle and order us: drink water, even before thirst hits. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

We head for the coast, and cooler air. A long grind up the backside of the coastal mountains rewards us with seven miles of curving, speeding downhill through a damp green tunnel of overhanging oaks.

Two riders wipe out in sand and potholes that hide in the shadows, but word comes back that they survived with only nasty cases of road rash and will continue the ride. Bracingly cool fog hugs the hilltops. I hop off to take a photo of riders crawling up an incline in the fog. They look like ancient warriors in an Akira Kurosawa film, and again I spot Moeshing, cruising past slower riders as if they were standing still.

Moments later, I spot him hunkered over a flat tire. “Wasn’t that great? That was so nice compared with yesterday,” he says, grappling with tire irons in the lifting fog. He is the picture of health, just another athletic guy out on an awe-inspiring bike ride, no hint in face or voice that he has been living for 12 to 14 years with the AIDS virus.

There are many more like Moeshing riding, some diagnosed with AIDS itself, others just touched by the pall it has thrown over human relations, its effect on brothers, sisters, parents, lovers, friends.

All of us have our stories of loss. As I sat and wrote Tuesday night, I asked Oakland rider David McDevitt to spell his name for a brief mention of the reasons he is here. He wound up pouring his guts out to me about how he visited his estranged sister’s deathbed with her HIV-positive son, Dillon, who is 6.

She was unconscious, wasted to 80 pounds. Dillon’s two cousins gave Julie McDevitt’s forehead a goodbye kiss, but he would not go near her.

They all went for coffee later, and as McDevitt carried 35-pound Dillon across the street, the boy asked, “Who’s gonna take care of me, are you?” “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” McDevitt told me. And as he described the grueling training rides he endured, the $12,000 he raised for AIDS care before the ride, and the sense of tight community he has savored every day of the ride, McDevitt began to weep.