Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (20 page)

BRAD
: It’s so sad that we’ll have to leave each other. I love you more than ever.

HOWARD
: I can’t believe I won’t be in your life.

When I walked out of the overly lit hospital, the night was dark, gray, and cold. I was now officially alone. Endless cars were turning the finite street corner just up ahead.

It was the angriest of times. I remember an editor at one of the shelter magazines I was writing for calling one evening and saying, “The black limos are out tonight.” Those black limos were one of the symbols of that anger, as they whizzed past all the homeless people. In this Dickensian world of cartoonish injustice, these limos might as well have been running over these people, their windshield-wiping squeegees seen as weapons, as angry-villager-pitchforks. Everyone was angry. Tom Wolfe’s
The Bonfire of the Vanities
came out around
then. I was reading it during Howard’s deadening and repetitive hard-to-tell-apart visits and revisits to St. Vincent’s. Bonfire was a good image for the emotion that was burning and was everywhere reflected, and deflected. Clubs were citadels. If you were turned away from Nell’s, on Fourteenth Street, you clomped or clicked off into the night, pissed.

There were economic strata, but also medical strata, not based on cash in the bank but on viral count and numbers of T cells. The response to the AIDS crisis progressed from animal fear and terror, the phase of the night sweats, to animal outrage and lashing out. ACT UP had begun. Larry Kramer, who had been one of us, a gay novelist reading books published by little gay presses, at podiums in little gay bookstores, was suddenly turned into a living megaphone by the forces of history, and wound up having been right in his early warnings to stop having unsafe sex, and in much else. (He had published his first wake-up article, “1,112 and Counting” in the
New York Native
in 1983.) I heard news of Richard Elovich, who introduced me to Howard, and had been all art all the time, a kind of rarefied intellectual, almost an art snob, chaining himself to a barricade or a balcony on Wall Street and elsewhere in those years, screaming truths. Keith Haring was not stenciling “Clones Go Home” on East Village streets now. He was making “Safe Sex” banners, and then its next iteration, the ACT UP motto, “Ignorance = Fear, Silence = Death.” Small teams within ACT UP were consulting with doctors, like Barbara Starrett, to do drug running as well as guerrilla actions aimed at pharmaceutical companies. I felt as if many of my friends had been transmogrified, like Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.

I never attended an ACT UP meeting during the Howard
years. I avoided that important stress point, and in retrospect felt diminished. But, without thinking, I stayed my course, like someone in a lifeboat trying to rescue myself and my family while the luxury liner was going down. I’m afraid that when some tried to climb into my lifeboat, I pushed them off. I felt as if I had only enough emotional space to care for Howard. I felt, with some guilt, my inability to visit other hospitals, or to take on the bigger cause. I was made brave only by my love for Howard, and otherwise was rather cowardly. My friend Shipen, of the monastic community at the cathedral, was in the hospital, but I didn’t visit him, saved by not having seen him in years. I did crowd into his funeral at St. Luke’s in the Village. Chris Cox’s lover was sick and dying, but I didn’t visit him. Eventually Chris Cox died, too. I called him once in the hospital but he let the phone slide from his hands. I did speak at his memorial service, not mentioning my lapse. Lots of guys who hadn’t been to church in years were buried after unruly, Scotch-taped-together memorial services.

What did I do with my jagged, raw anger in those last days? I stashed it away, like bills from Con Ed or the phone company, in crumpled envelopes on a top closet shelf, for later. Eventually the bills came due, and I paid—but in the upcoming years, not then. I paid out my full expense of anger on the cusp of the decade ahead: drinking way too much; being late, being careless, knocking glasses and steaks off the table at expensive restaurants; putting potential suitors through forced marches around and around the same memories and catalog of medical and political horrors; making cutting remarks. While Howard was alive, I kept it together, and stayed insulated within the cocoon of grief and despair, shared with his family and our friends, and appreciating the great clarity of having
just one thing to do, one swinging gold watch of depleting time to become hypnotized by, almost intellectually curious about this new event: death and dying on a battlefield scale. Yet behind my premature widow’s veil, I was crackling with fury.

The holiday season that month was a bizarre rendition of the usual rituals. Howard was out of the hospital, so we went for our eleventh year in a row to visit my parents in Pennsylvania. This time we hired a car and driver. Tony came along, and Howard’s wheelchair. Howard wanted to say goodbye, without saying goodbye. My mother had a pained expression on her face the entire time. She took me aside, in a rare show of acknowledgment. “I always thought I would have Howard to depend on to kind of watch out for you,” she said. “He would know how to contact us if you got sick, or in an accident. These are the things mothers worry about.” My father looked paranoid. He wasn’t convinced that AIDS wasn’t contagious by daily sorts of contacts, and he wasn’t sure what the black drag-queen nurse sleeping on the couch meant. Both were worried, of course, about how my health status fit into the equation. But, blessedly, as Howard had long ago noticed, they never talked much about these glaring realities. We all sat in the living room and watched
E.T
., a holiday TV broadcast, Howard and I next to each other on the couch. My father questioned why we were watching a movie for children. Howard’s left arm and hand were in a splint to control spasms, but whenever the “E.T., phone home” motif recurred, he would move his encased hand over, so that we could do a banging version of holding hands. With those knowing eyes, he resembled E.T.

New Year’s Eve, a few days later, was a party for twenty friends, in Howard’s apartment, mostly
Bloodhounds
cast and crew, and family. Howard’s filter for what to say and what not to say was now entirely obliterated. For a long, spiraling part of the evening he loudly shared with an innocent angel face of a film grip the more intimate subtleties of our life together. “That’s Brad,” he was saying, or wailing, his default tone of delivery by that time. “He’s my boyfriend. I mean he’s my official boyfriend. But we haven’t had sex for four years. David Rephun and Donnie and Keith have sex with me. But Keith lives in London.” Another Keith, Keith Haring sent over a big
HAPPY NEW YEAR
1989 card/drawing of a lineup of his jive red silhouettes, simultaneously joyful and like crime-scene outlines of bodies on a sidewalk. Sarah constructed a huge surrealist Dalí clock out of colored paper with a moving hand on the wall that she kept adjusting to inch toward midnight. I had a hard time carrying my end of any conversation I found myself in, and walked around with my jaw leading the way, gritting my teeth, feeling strained, and readying, steeling myself, for the year I sensed ahead.

Within the month, Howard received bad news—well, it was all bad news, but here was the kicker. The movie studio had made the inevitable decision to take his film away and give it to one of their editors. He was on some conference calls with Dawn Steel, the new studio head, whom he liked, but she was not in a position to be as placating as Joy. He had seen a rough version of the final cut that was to be distributed by Vestron and was unhappy with the results. They added voice-over. Missing was the film beneath the film, the continuity that only Howard’s eye and humor could contribute: of course that eye was unavailable, even to him. When I finally saw the film I was pleasantly surprised, and there were lots of cool touches and beautiful shots. But he had decided that this was, for him, the moment when the last leaf was going to fall off the vine, and so it fell. He had seen it falling from a long way off. At an early contract negotiation, when his condition was still a secret, Howard asked Lindsay Law, the producer from American Playhouse, “What do we do when Columbia wants final cut? You never allow that, do you?” Lindsay answered him, “Howard, this is the first feature film of a long career. You can’t expect a studio to give you final cut.” To which Howard abruptly replied, “But what if this is my only film?”

© Keith Haring Foundation
Used by permission

Propped on a TV tray by the couch during the weeks of the phone conferencing with Hollywood operatives (I found it hard not to cast them all as villains) was a note Madonna had written to him on a card, in green felt-tip pen: “I hope you are not angry w/me for keeping the V.H.S. of Bloodhounds for so long. It was difficult to find time to watch without the peering eyes of my ever curious husband. . . . I’m sure the new editor has made many improvements and look forward to seeing them. I’m going to try & visit you on Fri. and at this time I will be in possession of a tray of RICE KRISPIE TREATS—sorry for the delay—Hi Sarah—I know you’re reading this to Howard. All my love to you & Howard. OXOX. Madonna. OXOX.” Howard had a connection of the heart with Madonna that broke through the barriers of celebrity. She always felt to me like his collaborator on the film, not just an actor. So a truly dark omen, a failing vital sign was his refusal to take any phone calls—including hers—for days following the hard “No” about the final cut.

Howard’s condition worsened, but this time he resisted help, refusing to go to the emergency room of the hospital. I visited to try to talk him into going. No luck. He did respond to me, though,
cracking a big smile when he heard my voice at the front door. He laughed a bit when I yelled at him and told him that he was being ridiculous. But he would not reverse his stubborn decision. He could not walk at all anymore, and needed pushing in his wheelchair to the couch, where he weakly ate a bowl of Cream of Wheat.

“Why is it so hard to die?” he said.

“Because you’re young and strong,” I said.

The next day turned macabre, with a memorial service for Bob Applegarth, Robert Wilson’s assistant, who had figured in the documentary, always fielding Bob’s calls at any hour from anywhere in the world. A car was hired and Tony and Howard and the wheelchair went. Luis’s memorial service had taken place during the sad and pink days of the “honeymoon phase.” Bob was being buried in the midst of a crisis phase that was more like a human pileup accident on a foggy highway at night. Howard had a crying jag at the funeral, drank a couple flutes of champagne, and threw up in the back of the Town Car on the way home.

He told me about it that night on the phone. His parents were now acting as watchdogs. He decided that he did not want to see anyone. He was angry to some terminal degree, but usually agreed to talk, or whisper faintly, whenever I called.

HOWARD
: I want to die but they won’t let me.

BRAD
: That’s because we care about you. And the doctors care about you. That’s why Barbara Starrett came over to see you.

HOWARD
: Why do people care about me?

BRAD
: Because something about you makes people feel good when they come to see you. That’s an important service.

HOWARD
: It’s hope. I give them hope.

BRAD
: That’s why you got so many visitors in the hospital . . . because you give something to people.

HOWARD
: That’s why I’m a film director.

BRAD
(not following exactly): Uh-huh.

Then we talked on and on, mostly waves of nothing, banging every so often into an abrupt rock of meaning sticking up out of the continuum of sounds and pauses.

HOWARD
: Why do these things always happen to me?

BRAD
: Howard. They don’t. You’ve had a charmed life. Just this has happened. And you could still get better.

HOWARD
: It’s too late for me. I’m in a wheelchair. Everything is a struggle for me.

BRAD
: But they could find something tomorrow that would kill the virus.

HOWARD
: I’m brain-damaged.

BRAD
: People with strokes regain their faculties. I don’t know if it’s different with people with brain lesions. But you might be able to come back.

HOWARD
: But I’m crippled. And I’m so depressed. It was Bob Applegarth’s memorial service that did it to me. I went berserk.

BRAD
: I know. But I want to get this book to read,
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
, written by a rabbi.

HOWARD
: I can’t read.

BRAD
: I’ll read it to you.

HOWARD
: I have a headache.

BRAD
: I don’t even have the book yet.

Two years had passed since I’d had the impression that Howard and I had crossed a street to the other side, and that we were living in a kind of half-light, with much of the color drained out of the landscape, in a steady rain. I had grown used to that emotional climate, made easier and sometimes even fun by being there, holding hands with Howard. That day I received the results of the HIV test that they were finally saying was sensible to take, could make a difference. It turned out that I had tested negative for the virus. I immediately felt thrown, with a loud whoosh, back to the other side of the street. Howard was not with me, and, surprisingly, I didn’t know that I wanted to be left there alone, ambling on the sunnier side of the street, but without Howard next to me.

I told Howard the news the night I heard. I went over to his apartment because he was refusing to eat, swallow his pills, or get out of bed. I was trying to talk him down, down onto the ground of living. And then I told him the news, in an awkward way.

“You’ll never guess what happened. I appear to be HIV negative. I mean, they say they want to do the test again, in a few months, because it doesn’t make sense, but . . .”

When I told Howard, he was visibly suffused with joy. I saw his sallow skin begin to glow some. He was so happy that he laughed. Then I began to cry. So for an unreal stretch of ten minutes, without exaggeration, he was giddily laughing, and I was crying.

“What are you crying about?” he asked.

“Because I wish you weren’t sick.”

The disparity hurt. I would be alive, yes, but without Howard.

By the next night he had reconciled himself (because of his response to the news of my health status?) to returning to the hospital, for just one night, to have a catheter inserted in his chest, under the
collarbone, so that he would be able to receive medication at home from a Mediport machine. “Maybe the morphine will help, nothing else will,” he was saying, reminding me of my promise to help him get his drugs, the medical version of heroin, when the time came. I don’t think living wills were common practice at the time. He certainly didn’t have one. His voice was garbled, harder to understand, like throat cancer patients speaking eerily through microphones touched to their throats, like magic wands.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked me, as I paced the room in zigzags.

“I’m wondering why the antiviral medicine isn’t listed on your chart for tonight. And if Dr. Josh is going to answer the page. And whether your brother will get in touch with him. And why you don’t want to see people.”

“Because I can’t talk.”

“But people will understand that. They can just sit with you. They don’t have to talk.”

“It’s too difficult for me to explain that I can’t talk.”

“I could explain for you.”

A long flat line of ticking silence ensued, for about twenty minutes.

“It’s such great news that you’re negative. Every few hours I think about it and I feel happy.”

“I wish you were negative, too.”

“So do I. . . . But I fucked you for years.”

“You must have been exposed to the virus after we broke up.”

“Thanks God.”

Then I stood there for a while with my palm on Howard’s chest, near his heart. I felt a new kind of imaginary strength because of
my negative status, or, more likely, because of Howard’s attitude toward my negative status. I no longer felt that I was looking into a mirror when I looked at him, seeing myself in a few seasons. Freed from my own concerns, I tried to experiment, to see if I could now pull him back across the street with me to the other side, zap him with healing energy, call down guardian angels from the walls, and through the plate-glass windows that looked out on a twinkling Greenwich Village, where, as Nurse Tony had said earlier, “All those queens are flying around.”

Howard returned, for the last time, to Twenty-fourth Street. That next week he was still healthy enough for us to have what I fondly remember as our last fight—not that we actually had many racked up. We were far from George and Martha, far too beat or cool or punk of heart, even in death. The indirect cause, funnily enough, was Madonna. I was sitting bedside one night, with only Tony otherwise in the apartment. Madonna sent Howard an advance release of her new CD,
Like a Prayer
, and Howard kept telling Tony to turn up the volume, turn up the volume, until the entire apartment was filled with overwhelming sound. I was on deadline for an article and had brought along page proofs, my plan having been to keep sick Howard company while editing. Priggishly, I started complaining about the music. “Turn it off!” I yelled. “I looooove her,” Howard insisted, just as loudly. “I loooove this album. It’s just like her. She gave me five thooousand dollars.” He was referring to a contribution Madonna made to a hospital fund. “Then I’ll leave,” I threatened. “Get ooooout!” he countered furiously. I did. But by the time I arrived at my own apartment, those few blocks away, I realized
what had happened and called up immediately. “I’m sorry. I love you,” I said. I skipped sharing with him my insights into the linking of rage, sorrow, and frustration. “I’m sooory,” he sweetly mimicked me, his syllables much elongated. “I loooove you.” I was glad for the fight, for its freshening up our spirits, and its reminder of sillier, pettier, more innocent times past.

Walking into the bedroom was a jolt. When was that? That weekend, a Friday night, walking into the bedroom was a jolt. Howard was lying in a jigsaw position on the bed, with his head at an angle, body in another direction, arms splayed, oblivious to his body angles, and feeling nothing. His skin was yellow, his jaw slack, and his breathing heavy. He looked like a junky, overdosing. The silver evening light illuminating him through the window seemed much too bright, too natural for the eeriness of the scene.

He was still suffering from the dehydration of the preceding week. He had slowly been losing his ability to eat, then to swallow. I had been feeding him nights with a dropper filled with pink guava juice. He parted his lips, and I would drop in thick liquid, like feeding an injured bird. Eventually they brought a bag of liquid for intravenous.

I slept over that Friday night. It was our last night sleeping in the same bed. Howard was very quiet. Every so often the intravenous machine would sound a chime if an air bubble became trapped in its tubes. I would get up to fix it by pushing a few buttons. No longer any droning talk in the middle of the night, no demands for shifting his legs. I listened closely to the sound of his breathing, hanging on every soft exhalation.

The next morning I was awakened by a visiting nurse. I was barely out of bed, had just splashed my face with water and was on my way back into the bedroom when she hit me with the slam of news that Howard had a temperature of over 106 degrees.

“He probably won’t last through the day,” she said. “Is the family committed to keeping him at home?”

“What’s the advantage of the hospital?”

“Distance.”

We did keep him at home. His younger brother, Steve, who lived in Miami, was visiting, staying at Andy’s. Both his parents were at an apartment nearby. I called them and they were quickly over. I remember his mother walking in wearing a brown trench coat and she looked, for the first time, like an old Jewish lady. She was kissing Howard over and over, cooing, “My baby, my baby,” pretending to understand what the nurses were saying, but not really listening, just nodding her head in time to the sounds.

We moved Howard from the double bed into a single hospital bed. I carried him, together with Anthony—a Columbia philosophy student volunteer, a bit out of his depth. Howard was a dead weight, sagging in the middle. The rest of the day we waited. I sat by the bed, writing his obituary for the
New York Times
on a long yellow legal pad. I had spoken with film critic Steve Holden and he suggested I do the writing, and he would retouch, and sign for publication. So I haltingly started jotting down journalistic facts: Born 1954. Grew up in Great Neck, Long Island. Attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Columbia University, NYU Film School. The
Times
also wanted a snapshot I’d taken of Howard on vacation in Maine for a feature, “A Director’s Race with AIDS Ends Before His Movie Opens.” While I was writing, Sean and Sarah
moved his CD deck and speakers into the room. I put on John Lennon’s “Imagine,” remembering how Howard had disconsolately walked the streets of Paris when Lennon was assassinated, and how much he loved him. While the song was playing, rough, maudlin, yet sinuous, Howard opened his eyes and looked at me with a “This is really happening to us now, Brad, and I get why you’re playing this song” look, the last full zapping I remember from those dark eyes.

He did not die that Saturday. The bag of liquids began to revive him some. He had been like a dry twig ready to snap. Now he started to open his eyes, to communicate by blinking “yes” to answer questions, though the Morse code from the operative slit of his eyes was disconcerting.

Alertness became an issue. And camps were set up. Sean, Sarah, and I were adamant that Howard should get super-shots of morphine. We knew his wishes. But his parents were behaving like parents trying to keep their kids off drugs. Especially for his mother—the mother instinct so powerful, so intent on reviving and keeping alive, was at war with what felt so clearly to me to be the reasonable tack in this situation: to start to move Howard out through the black door, gradually, and as painlessly as possible. I tried to enlist Andy to our side, so that he could use his authority as doctor. But whenever he went in to talk to his parents, he returned empty-handed. Even bumpier was the discussion of taking Howard off intravenous nutrients. “You cannot expect a mother to agree to stop feeding her child!” Elaine shouted. With Dr. Josh present, a resolution was eventually, achingly, reached: no tubes; a small dose of morphine, to ease the pain.