Collisions 5

Almost everybody who was involved in the AIDS world in 1996 knows someone who pretty much came back from the dead. Those were the "bad years" of AIDS, the years when every week at the ACT UP meeting, a slot was set aside for remembering the members who had died since the previous week's meeting. Those were also years when we were fighting hard, using death itself in our activism. We marched with bodies of our friends and comrades through the streets of NYC, and we threw the ashes of people with AIDS over the fence onto the White House lawn. I'm not sure anybody even knows how many people's ashes we threw - there were the ashes that were planed, but word had spread and as we marched to the white house, people started passing ashes forward through the crowd to the people doing the throwing at the front. I remember it as a warm still day, with huge AIDS quilt blanketing the capitol mall with grief in the form of fabric and thread. But when we got to the White house and the action was under way, the weather became unsettled, and a wind kicked up, blowing gritty ashes into the mouths and eyes of activists, and reporters, police and their horses. And then came the rain, soaking the ashes into the lawn. But in 1996, my last year of college, things began to change. I was away,in Massachusetts,jumping on the Peter Pan bus back to NYC every chance I got for actions and memorial services. I was racing the clock to finish my degree in three years, piling physics on top of linear algebra on top of microbiology, not for any thought out reason, but just out of a sense of time running out. In particular, time was running out for two people I cared deeply about, both caught in the whirlpool of opportunistic infections and hospitalizations that I had seen so many times before as lives flgtvickered and went out. One of them was Bob. Unlike my other friends with AIDS, he was not an activist - I had met him years before, in the choir loft of a Catholic Church. I was 9 years old, ripped from my comfortable if sometimes awkward life as a scolarship student at a progressive private school in Manhattan, and dumped in a Brooklyn public school so alien that I didn't even know my own name. Katherine? No one had ever called me that. I was lost in a lot of ways. I didn't know how to turn a paper bag into a book cover or how to recite the pledge of allegiance every monday,or anything about the catholicism that was part of the lives of my new italian classmates. At that time, the blocks around the school were filled with families whose grandparents had arrived from Italy. You could hear Italian spoken in the streets, especially on warm evenings when families set out tables on the sidewalk for meals that lasted long past dusk. I missed a lot about my old school, but one of the things I missed the most was chorus. The music I had grown up with, Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary, was as foreign to my classmates as their Hail Marys were to me. Pretty lost herself, my mother asked around the neighborhood, and I don't know what made her take their advice and sign a kid who had never set food in a church up for a Catholic children's choir. So there i was, up the narrow wooden stairs, standing in the alto section to the side of the organ, feeling like an alien that had plummeted to earth and landed in a girl's body. But there was Bob,sitting at the organ, doling out directions and jokes, gently corralling a choatic herd of children into harmony. Although the overall ambience of a catholic church, with its incense and genuflecting, was overwhelming, I felt safe up there with Bob. When the church school closed a few years later,the children scattered and I was promoted into the adult choir. Rehearsals were later, and when we finished it was dark, especially in the winter, so Bob drove me the not very long distance home, and in the car, we talked. I didn't know then, but Bob was my first gay friend. My parents had their gay friends, especially my Dad -his friends were actors, and poets, a painter, and other teachers. They were men of a certain age, WWII vets and Beat poets, guys he had gone to Black Mountain with. They would go shopping with my mom, and have dinner parties with my Dad, who would show off his french cuisine, along with cases of french wine. But to me, they were just partof the scenery, part of the background of life. I don't know when it dawned on me that Bob was gay, but I know when he realized I was. I sometimes brought a friend along to mass on sundays, mostly on our way somewhere, and one day in junior high I brought a particular girl and Bob looked at us for a few minutes and said, "I didn't know you were part of the family." It wasn't like a new connection, because we already had a bond, but it felt like something clicked into place. As I got involved in AIDS activism in high school, Bob would listen with interest, but I knew he could not get involved himself without risking his job. When I went away to college, I would drop in and sing whenever I was in NYC for the weekend. One sunday, I showed up and Bob wasn't at the organ. His friend Maria was playing the mass, and it was all strangely vague. It was 1993, and I was deep into AIDS acivism, and my worlds came crashing together. In my gut, I knew he had AIDS but my mind kept telling me it was just because I was so involved, I was making assumptions. And then I found him, at NYU, in co-op care, the special program for people with AIDS and their caregivers. I walked into his room, and he smiled and said, "I've been waiting for you to get here." He knew I would figure it out. He got better that time and came back to work. It was still officially a secret, but my AIDS activism was not, so I started pushing the boundaries. I convinced the pastor, a kind, rounnd, probably closested man to let a local italian mother who had lost her son to AIDS to speak from the pulpit on World AIDS Day. I got the whole choir,which by then had added several more queer members,to wear red ribbons our our blue robes. The biggest thing though, was a large quilted banner that Kate S and I sewed on her grandmother's antique sewing machine in Maine. It had a red AIDS ribbon in the center and was flanked by two roses with green stems and had the words, "Until the Cure, there is Love". Bob hung it from the choir loft so that if you faced away from the altar you saw it. None of this could change the fact that Bob's health was declining, pounds were disappearing from his already small frame, and his face was becoming thinner. When I came back for the weekend, more and more often I would find Maria at the organ and Bob in the hospital. Sitting in my dorm room, typing out the chapters of my huge final project, about HIV+ youth's experiences with the health care system, I was dreading getting a call that he was gone. Right at that moment, as he was teetering on the edge, the first really effective anti-retrovirals became available and people started coming back from the brink. Bob texted me yesterday. "I'm going to drop off a duvet and some bedding for your clients," he said. "Will you be around?" And just as suddenly as my choir world and my AIDS activist world collided back then, my worlds collided again, and there was Bob, older but still impish, perched in the chair by my desk, dishing about the priests at his current church, while my Assistant hung on every word in amused astonishment and I thanked the universe for a lull in clients.