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

friends down below. Here, where the VD clinic used to be, where I learned, to my surprise, that I’d been exposed to hepatitis B. Here, where Charles Ludlam finally found a permanent theater—at One Sheridan Square—though the sliver of piazza immediately before it has been renamed in his honor. Here, where the Stonewall Riot occurred. Here, where George Whitmore, whose book about AIDS was called Someone Was Here , lived at Number Thirty-nine. Here, where the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore has operated for years. Here, where a single street, Christopher, runs the gamut from the tony apartment building at the corner of Greenwich Avenue to the drag queens from the Bronx, and the AIDS hospice Bailey House, at the west end. Here, where it has all come down to these wan, dough-colored, expressionless zombies George Segal has made to commemorate gay men and women and their struggles.
    Some struggles! I met Jeff when he was twenty-two, still a student at F.I.T., so young, with such high spirits, he seemed ready to pounce when he shook your hand. Even at the Tenth Floor, that tiny dance club where we met, there was an intense energy about him which found its minor expression in the way he walked, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet, and smoked one cigarette after another; a young man who loved fashion, nightclubs, and the serial romances he had with the older men he called Daddies. Jeff, who loved Fire Island and Flamingo, whose best friend used the computers of the law firm he worked for at night to compile a directory of men with big dicks in cities all across the country, a sort of Baedeker the two of them used when they traveled. Jeff, who finally moved to the gayest city of all, after he met the porn star/landscape gardener from San Francisco at a sex club off Tenth Avenue: a somber, almost religious place with long hallways of cubicles with communicating glory holes, where one night the porn star dropped his pants and revealed himself, Jeff said, to be “all dick.” Jeff, the Irish American Catholic, who translated the devotion he’d felt as an altar boy to an adult preoccupation with the male form, and never lost his desire for ecstasy, transcendence. Jeff, who, when he said good-bye at the airport to the hot Italian he had ended up with in Connecticut, had gone into the men’s room to stand beside him at the urinal and take one last look at each other’s penis. Jeff, so health-conscious he would write paragraphs about the beneficial properties of broccoli in letters after he moved to San Francisco, letters that I had never been able to throw away because they were so full of hope and excitement and engagement with life, with their exclamation points and underlined words, their ten handwritten pages on a yellow legal pad, written when he was perpetually about to go out. Jeff, who was so aware of the importance of skin care he put cucumber slices over his eyes to banish wrinkles, who now lay beside me on a bench covered with purple spots, still full of some residue of nervous energy, essentially out of his mind.
    The arm across his eyes is the most eloquent pose he could have adopted: the age-old gesture of a grief, or horror, beyond one’s ability to comprehend. Outside the fence, on the other side of Jeff, I see a blond man with a crew cut who looks no more than twenty-five walking slowly down the sidewalk with a cane, in jeans and white T-shirt. He is very handsome. And, like Jeff, out on the street, despite everything. Bravo . Suddenly the beautiful drunk with the canal-green eyes lurches to his feet and walks out of the park, with his beer in a brown paper bag. Four queens get out of a cab. In a few hours people will be converging on The Monster. The friend who lives on this block, on Christopher Street, does not go out at all. He stopped looking several years ago. “Because I’ve had sex,” he said, when I asked why. “Because what I want now isn’t sex, it’s emotional.” Ah, I think, the old