Thing of Beauty (55 page)

“But Gia knew I have very strong feelings about rape. I always said I would rather be dead than have to live with
that for the rest of my life. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. And she knew that. So probably she just said it to me for shock value, to vent her anger.” Even after all the years of her daughter’s drug addiction—or perhaps because of it—Kathleen still had a strong, motherly capacity for self-deception.

After whatever happened on the sidewalk in Atlantic City—hours later, Gia thought—she got to a phone and contacted her father. He cleaned her up as best he could and put her on the bus back to Philadelphia so her mother could take her to the hospital.

Although the hospital had had several patients on the medical side with AIDS, they had never had an HTLV-III positive psychiatric patient. It was the first test of their ability to counsel a victim of this new terminal illness and get her better medical information than what the doctors had—provided by the local AIDS task force. Patrick Kenney was becoming a national figure in the drive to educate nurses about AIDS. He had served as the American Nurses’ Association representative to a conference sponsored by the Surgeon General in 1985 and was writing a book for nurses to use in preparing AIDS plans. Subsequently, there were at least a few nurses on the psych side who were acting appropriately around Gia.

“Her reaction to our reaction was odd,” recalled one nurse. “She thought she was going to be treated like she had the plague. She knew she had AIDS-Related Complex (ARC) and would go into AIDS and just expected more people in space suits. I sat down cross-legged on her bed. She said, ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ I said, ‘Are you going to have sex with me? Are you going to share needles with me?’ I think she was kind of shocked and surprised that we were willing to touch her.”

Gia was put on lithium to battle her depression. After it began to take effect, she called Rob Fay and asked him to come to the hospital. They had been out of contact for close to a month, which he assumed meant that Gia was using again and couldn’t face him. When people disappeared from the rehab and meeting community, the recovering people feared the worst. Rob had just buried one of his best friends
from the program, who had committed suicide by jumping in front of a moving car after returning to drugs. He was thrilled to hear that Gia was still alive.

“I knew something was really wrong because she came toward me like she was going to hug me and then she sorta turned sideways,” he recalled. “I said, ‘What the hell is this kinda cheese hug here?’ And we went off into a little side room, where there were a few other nuts and their parents, and a radio was playing kinda quiet. She said she had been diagnosed with ARC, and I made some bad joke because I didn’t know what ARC was, y’know. And she told me, ‘No, listen to me,
this is it!’
She told me about AIDS-Related Complex and we just sat there and cried.

“And it was funny as shit, we used to have this song in rehab, ‘Don’t Forget About Me,’ or something like that. It came on the radio. We’re sitting here with all these people in similar situations, all these people with their parents who are fairly distraught, and she just kicked in. She cranked the radio up real loud and we started dancing and, y’know, it was a real special moment right there. One guy started making an advance toward the radio, and I just looked at him and he knew it was the wrong move.”

While the psychiatric staff was heartened by the presence of this outside friend, they were still trying to make sense of the relationship between Gia and her mother—which had been made even more complicated by the diagnosis. “Patient very verbal about frustration, anger, guilt,” read her chart for June 22, 1986, “uncertain in ability to make future plans … feels hurt by mother’s reactions and feeling that mother is acting like she has it, too.” Then the staff learned the reason for Gia’s uncertainty about her future plans. She suspected that she wouldn’t be allowed to move in with her mother after her discharge, which was only a few days away.

“At that point, I didn’t know much about AIDS,” recalled Kathleen, “and I had to accept the fact that my daughter was dying. And, of course, they were treating us like we had the plague. When I walked into that hospital, whereas nurses are usually very compassionate, nobody spoke to me. Just whispers. They stayed away from me, walked on the other side of the hall when I passed. So, I’m trying to deal with all this and get my shit together and try and support her
and it’s freaking me out. And then Henry says he’s worried he’s going to lose his job if Gia comes to live with us. ‘If she has that, she can’t come back here,’ he said, ‘I’ll help you, she can stay in a hotel, but she can’t come back here. I might lose my job.’ It was hard for me to hear that. I didn’t feel that I could really go against him. I knew that, given enough time, I would be able to get him to let her come home. I didn’t know what was going to happen if my neighbors found out.

“She forced me to tell her over the phone one day that Henry wouldn’t let her come home. They put pressure on her to force me. She trapped me into saying it. Finally, I told her what Henry said and she hung up. I called back and talked to the nurse and they calmed her down.”

The hospital support staff was astonished by the unfolding family drama. “I had to unofficially sort of soothe things over,” recalled one nurse, “I just finally said to the mother, ‘She’s your daughter, you can’t turn your back to her!’ And she had no response, she just kind of had a blank expression. She said
he
wouldn’t let her come home,
he
didn’t want her home.”

The nurse was incredulous. “I don’t know, to me, unconditional love is unconditional love: no matter who they kill,” she said. “I never had it. I’m an adult child of an alcoholic myself. When your child has a fatal disease and no life of her own how can you turn your back on her? Unconditional love
has to be there.
That’s what got me so riled up. I feel I overstepped my bounds, in saying all that. I made a judgment call but I’m supposed to stay neutral. I just had a hard time comprehending the dynamics of that family.”

Besides her discharge plans, Gia was also upset about the treatment she had received on the medical side. She asked to be given a copy of her medical records, which the hospital refused. She also asked for an afternoon pass from the psych unit to go to Norristown to look for a place to live, and called Rob Fay to see if he could help. He called Dawn Phillips, who only knew Gia from their conversation after her self-disclosure at Eagleville but had become friendly with Rob during her recovery. She saw him at Norristown meetings, which she attended at least once a day.

Dawn was less wary about AIDS than whether Gia could
stay off drugs. Assured that Gia was clean and would be attending meetings, she offered whatever room there was in her tiny Norristown apartment. There was no bed to offer, because Dawn was sleeping on the floor on a foam mat herself—or sometimes on the couch. She told Gia they would figure out something.

In the meantime, Kathleen had forced Henry to reconsider. “I said, ‘I cannot live with this, this is her home, she has got to come back here,’” she recalled. “He told his bosses what the story was, and they were really good about it. They said, ‘Look, Henry, your trouble is our trouble. It’s okay.’ Henry came back and told Gia she could move back in. I called her back—the whole thing had taken less than twenty-four hours. But she had already made arrangements to stay with this other person. She thought it would be better for her to go to the meetings. But I wanted her here.”

Gia was discharged June 26, 1986, with a prescription for more lithium, a referral to a local mental health center and the AIDS task force, and a prognosis of “Fair.”

Sharon Beverly had moved back to Philadelphia from New York when her mother took ill in 1984. She had remained the only friend from the old days with whom Gia stayed in contact. “We usually talked on the phone,” she recalled. “She had always called to tell me she was in one of these drug centers, then she’d call to tell me she was clean and working. It was like that when she was in New York, and it just continued. She called me from Eagleville, then she called and said she took a job at the mall selling jeans, which seemed pretty weird. But she felt that’s what she had to do. They told her in therapy that she had to humble herself.

“From that point on, she was never the same. She just lost that glow, that fun side of her. She was losing it little by little, but by this time she was drained. The last time I saw her, she looked really different. They had her on lithium, she just looked like a different person. Her hair was different, it was thin and dull, and she didn’t have that glow. She kind of was like a zombie.

“Gia always said she wanted to be a guitarist. I was telling her that I was getting ready to move back to New York,
and I was doing some singing at the time and writing. So I asked her, ‘Do you know how to play guitar now?’ And she said, ‘A little bit.’ And I said, ‘Come on, y’know, we’ll do something together, you play guitar and I’ll write the songs.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s too late for that.’

“She’d call me and we’d do silly things on the phone like watch
Friday Night Videos
together and talk about life. At that time she had become spiritual. She was reading the Bible. She was reading a lot of things. She was saying, ‘I think God has a big plan for me, but I don’t think it’s in this life.’ She said one thing that I couldn’t believe. She said, ‘I can’t believe you’re still my friend. You’re the only person who’s been through all this with me. I can’t believe you’re still my friend.’

“She still couldn’t imagine someone just loving her for herself. She was really mean to me at times, said really mean things to me. She stole from me. I didn’t care. I forgive things like that. She wasn’t herself when she did those things. I always knew that she had a really good heart. Even when she was ruthless, she had that kind of innocence about her.”

When Gia moved back to Norristown, word spread quickly among the Eagleville community that she had been using and was dying of AIDS. “She came back here and everybody heard she had AIDS,” recalled Rob Fay, “and they were all … one minute, ‘Oh we really care about you,’ and then she’s got AIDS and nobody’s around. I was real upset. I would confront people if I saw them on the street. A lot of people were afraid they were going to get the disease. The rumor got out that I was gay with AIDS. I got tested. I hadn’t slept with her and I never shot drugs with her, but I didn’t know anything about AIDS, really. I was just as naive as all the other people. And we had spent a lot of time together, you know, used the same chopsticks, the same fork and glasses. I didn’t know any better, and I just didn’t want to be surprised all of a sudden. Then the first test came out positive. It was a false positive, but once it was on the street as a rumor—well, we’re all a bunch of junkies.

“Her mom was strange about the whole thing. The day
Gia was moving into Dawn’s apartment, we were sitting out front—Kathy, Gia and myself. And Kathy was talking to me, asking me things like ‘Are you afraid of Gia now because she has AIDS?’ And she was asking like she was talking to a three-year-old, you know? And that was the only time I heard her mention that Gia had AIDS.”

“You can’t imagine if you haven’t lived through it what it’s like to have a child diagnosed with AIDS,” recalled Kathleen, beginning to cry. “It’s just, you just can’t imagine the nightmare. Henry couldn’t handle her having AIDS. My mother didn’t come see her the whole summer. She wouldn’t let my nephew come see her. Gia was here and she was
dying.

“I was afraid to tell anybody what was wrong with her. People didn’t know much about AIDS back then—neither did I—and
nobody
ever talked about women getting it. I didn’t know if I was more upset because I was losing her or more upset that she had AIDS. I took her one day for a ride in the car. We were in the Corvette. I pulled over into a little park area, and I said, ‘Gia, I could just pull away from here and hit the gas pedal and let go of the wheel of the car.’ And she just sat there and looked at me. And I realized I couldn’t do it to her, as badly as I wanted to do it to myself. But that’s the way I was feeling, that my life was over, too.”

Dawn Phillips was working full-time and going to numerous AA and NA meetings while she and Gia shared her tiny apartment. But she still had an opportunity to see how Gia was struggling with her illness and her relationship with her family. “I remember coming home one day and Gia’s mother was there and I had just seen a movie, it was a lesbian movie,
Desert Hearts, “
recalled Dawn, who was also gay. “This woman in this movie [a beautifully tomboyish openly gay woman] reminded me to a
T
of Gia. That woman was like Gia, especially the way she was about being gay. And I said, ‘Gia, I saw this movie, you have to see it,’ and as soon as I started saying what the movie was about, her mother got out of the conversation completely. She didn’t want to talk about
that.

“Her mother wanted her to move home, and Gia didn’t want to go. But what was happening was she was getting
sicker and sicker, and I wasn’t really able to be there to take care of her. She would go home more often, and finally she just moved back, although we still saw her.

“There weren’t a lot of people around for her. Just me and Rob, Cheryl, a couple of the counselors from Eagleville she still called. She had one other friend I took her to see one day, that girl she lived with in New York, Sharon. I remember, on the way to Sharon’s she wanted me to take her to a place that has these great steak sandwiches, Dellesandro’s. We went for a cheesesteak.

“Rob stuck with her. I think that Rob sincerely liked Gia as a person and a friend but, let’s face it, Rob also wanted to go out with Gia. Desperately, he wanted to be with her. She knew that. She was thinking about somebody else. She was still talking about her counselor from Eagleville. Gia told him that. It wasn’t a secret between them. I don’t know if he totally believed her when she said she wasn’t interested in men. He could believe she wasn’t interested in him: he just couldn’t believe that she was totally gay. Or maybe he just hoped. But, I’ll give him credit, even if he could not go out with her, Rob was close by, being her friend.