Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath by Andrew Holleran

scene. It’s theatrical. It’s sad. It’s like going to a restaurant with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal .
    Now he’s at rest—lying down on the bench, his skinny, skinny legs dotted with lesions, some of them covered by his Ralph Lauren shorts. Or are they Banana Republic? Whatever, he is, and has always been, the most acutely perceptive person I know on the subject of fashion, which he studied years ago at F.I.T., before going to work at Saks, before deciding he despised retail, before meeting a porn star/landscape gardener and moving to San Francisco, where he went to work for AT&T, and then, after the lover died, developed AIDS himself and came back east to be with his family. His arm lies across his eyes. His other hand is on his chest. On his legs are two large scabs where two lesions were lasered; on his hooded sweatshirt is the word COLUMBIA. The night before, at Spaghetteria, he put the hood on and ordered the waiter to turn down the air-conditioning because he had AIDS. Incredibly, in a restaurant filled with other people, the waiter complied. PWA power. It’s still potent in New York. My friend’s a sacred totem. He’s also somewhat nuts. But then this city has had that on its streets for years and years now, and to its great credit, we can sit here in this park in perfect freedom.
    Quelle collection: in this little park. I’ve been studying people on the subway this visit, wanting to go up to each one and say, “How did you get here? What section of what immigration law—what jet plane—when, and why, and where were you when you made the decision to come here?” We are beyond the United Colors of Benetton at this point. Which is more startling—the ubiquitous nightmare of AIDS, or the sense that the city is just a turnstile people rush through, to be succeeded by other groups? I sit, slack-jawed, bouche bée , at history’s unfolding. Who’d have thought any of this in 1973? No wonder I plotz this afternoon, grateful to be sitting between my friend and the drunken beauty with the beer can in a brown bag in this park with its two monuments—one to the Civil War, one to gay people. Perhaps the George Segal sculpture makes sense in the end, because, amazingly, everyone on these two long benches is a George Segal sculpture. That’s the point of a George Segal sculpture—and the history of art, and politics, for that matter: from the heroic, elevated (General Sheridan) to the mundane, pedestrian (the people on the benches). Just pour the plaster right over us. What the iron fence of this paved-and-planted triangle has momentarily captured from the city’s teeming sea this afternoon would serve as a sculpture just as well. We’re a collection ourselves, I’m thinking as I sit beside the friend I last shared New York with in the mid-seventies. Our friendship has a sort of epic sweep. The sort you find in thick paperback novels, or films like The Way We Were : individual fates worked out in a current of history that becomes apparent only after the lives are lived. Who’d have thought there would be a monument to gay people in Sheridan Square, and Jeff lying on a bench beside it covered with KS? I couldn’t make this up in a novel, I think as I sit there. We’re all that’s left of a certain time; washed up in a park we never sat in all those years, grateful we can sit here now, out of the rushing stream, permitted, here in the heart of things, to be utterly out of it. Oh, the humanity of parks!
    Or at least this particular enclosure. How many times, in a city so big, so gay, one never thought it needed a gay focal point, one has ended up here, after all. Here, where the Sheridan Square Gym used to float above Tiffany’s, the coffee shop, not the jeweler, where one could eat beside a plate glass window and watch gay men go by beneath the weight-lifters who used to take their breaks between sets at the windows of the gym, their beefy, pumped-up arms on the windowsills, waving at their