Billy’s Last Heartbeat

She remembers it now, every detail, as though it were yesterday: the stillness of the night, the muted light of the room and the soft, fading beat of her brother’s heart. And she remembers the silence when his heart stopped.

Only hours earlier Billy Fucile had said to his family that he loved them and then, as though in final recognition of his own emotions, whispered, “How powerful those words are.”

They were his last words. His body ravaged by AIDS, he slipped into unconsciousness. His sister, Tricia, sitting next to him on his bed, lay her head on her brother’s chest.

It was after midnight on Aug. 10, 1992. The night passed slowly. Tricia dozed. Then at 4:45 a.m. their father, who had watched Billy’s breathing grow shallow, awakened her to say he thought the end was near.

It was then that Tricia Hopper, her head still on her brother’s chest, became aware of the fading beat of his heart . . . and then the silence.

“In some ways it was special,” Hopper remembered recently, her voice catching. “He died so gracefully and left us with such a powerful feeling.”

Two years later she translated the power of that emotion and the compelling memory of her brother’s last heartbeat into a play that has been performed before thousands of high school students throughout L.A. County.

Its message: AIDS is an equal-opportunity scourge.

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Billy Fucile, who was gay, was 32 when he died. A clothing stylist and AIDS activist, he was especially close to his “big sister” Tricia in a family of four boys and three girls. She was six years older.

They shared a love of music and movies and talked for hours on the phone, exchanging as well their joys and their problems. When Billy was found to have AIDS, Tricia was devastated. When he decided in the fading days of his life to end all medication, she understood.

When he died, she was there.

Afterward she sought help through therapy to guide her through her grief. A therapist suggested she do something in Billy’s memory using her creative talent. An actress, she began studying writing. After two years she had created a one-act play, “The Closet.”

It’s the short, powerful story of a family not unlike her own. A central character is the ghost of a boy named, appropriately, Billy, whose presence adds both humor and high drama to the performance.

Billy has died of AIDS and his remaining family--a mother, father and sister--and his friends must deal with it in their own special way: with love, with guilt, with memories and with a need to do something!

Messages and warnings are intertwined with very human reactions in a play that could have only been written by someone who was there . . . listening to that last beat of her own Billy’s heart.

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“The Closet” was first performed at Hopper’s neighborhood church in Palos Verdes, then, months later, for educators and AIDS workers at a community theater in Torrance.

By then, Hopper and her husband, who owns an engineering company, had created a nonprofit organization called Timeless Educators Inc. and proposed producing the play before high school students.

The request won Los Angeles Unified School District approval and since then the play has been performed 200 times at 75 high schools. Actors trained as HIV/AIDS peer educators play the six parts and discuss the play and its subject with students who attend the performance.

“High-risk behavior, abstinence and HIV prevention discussions are taken as far as each school will allow,” Hopper said. “The optimum is to discuss all facets of sexuality.”

The actors are paid minimum wages from small grants and from funds either supplied by the Hoppers or donated by those who have seen the play.

Tricia was Billy’s big sister in life and identifies with the mother, Karen, in “The Closet.” Both the real Tricia and the fictional Karen lived through each moment of Billy’s decline, the Billy in life and in the play.

Tricia was with him when he visited friends dying of AIDS, knowing that was his future. She was with him when he worried that God would reject him because he was gay. She was with him when, nine days before he died, he said, “I just don’t want to do this anymore”--and stopped his medication.

What gives the play strength is not only its subject but its underlying reality. It takes the beating of a single heart and empowers it to become a message meant to fill the hearts of us all.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.