A DAILY MEMORIAL

Sometimes it’s all I can do to breathe shallowly. This is one of those moments. My laptop is having some issues and, no, the breathing issue is not about that. Not directly. It’s been on its last legs for a year and a half now and, although I backup my work regularly, I know I should switch to the new one I finally bought last month. It would be worth it just for the fact I’d have an “e” key that actually works. (On this device, I have to copy an “e” from existing text and then press Control-V on those rare occasions that I use an “e” in my writing—gosh, only fourteen times in this sentence.) Last night, my laptop once again shut down unexpectedly so I took it as a sign that I was done with writing for the day. I braced this morning, powering it up again. Would it work? Would all my open documents pop back up? Would the sixteen open tabs on my internet browser still be there?

Yes, the laptop is functioning. None of my documents show up, but I’d saved all my work and I just have to open them up again. When Firefox asked if I wanted to restore my last session, I clicked the button to do so but, alas, it retrieved the open tabs I’d had from last October instead of from last night. That’s where the shallow breathing comes in. Not because I’ve lost some needed sites that had been open so long that they don’t show up on recent history search—I can search anew or just move on—but because one of the tabs staring at me anew is about an actor who, as I read it with my sleepy eyes at six o’clock this morning, “succumbed to AIDS.” Of course, I knew his fate. I’d stumbled upon the actor and researched him last September. Still, it’s a jolt each and every time I read about someone dying of AIDS, especially when the coffee hasn’t kicked in. All that gone-too-soon loss of life. I’ll never get past that. It would be easier if I did, but I don’t want to. Like veterans who served in war, I feel a duty to remember those who didn’t survive the AIDS crisis. Never forget. Even as I sense that so many have done just that. Even as I wonder if queer people who are younger than thirty have any sense of what those years were like.

Reminders of AIDS are all around me as I sit in my home workspace, a windowless room that I suppose was intended to be a dining room or maybe a walk-in closet. Just to the left of my laptop, at the edge of my desk are three playful block figures copyrighted by the Keith Haring Foundation. Think I bought them years ago in a shop in Portland. One of those charming spots filled with eclectic trinkets that will never cover the rent. Haring’s creations are always colorful and fun, the figures captured in motion. They make me smile. I think I bought these blocks to remind me to be playful with my writing (maybe not at this particular moment) and to celebrate simple things like an impromptu dance or a chance to pet and perhaps calm a barking dog.

But Haring’s art also represents my gay identity. I used to have a Keith Haring backpack, a look-at-me-I’m-a-proud-fag symbol. People would stop me in the streets of Amsterdam or at a hip cafe Seattle and comment on it. “Keith Haring, right?” Yes, yes. They’d smile and offer a knowing nod. Translation: You’re gay. It was my old-school version of Grindr. Gay man two metres away. (That’s what Grindr does, right? I’ve only seen it while peeking over a friend’s shoulder years ago as he looked at his phone while we were in a gay bar in West Hollywood. “Oh, my god, everyone in here is on Grindr!” he said with a sense of excitement I found odd. As with most technology, I didn’t get it. This was a gay bar...why did we need an app to tell us that the guys around us in too tight t-shirts or no shirts at all were queer?) Alas, my backpack had its glitches as a Grindr substitute. The people who stopped and commented were always artsy women. I suspect the gay men always crossed the street as I approached.

My beloved Keith Haring backpack is long gone. One morning, as I was writing in a regular cafe—sigh, I miss writing in cafes—my backpack disappeared from the foot of the chair where I was sitting. A homeless person who’d come in ostensibly to use the restroom brushed past me and took off with it. I suppose he needed it more than I. Maybe he even got lucky a time or two.

I’ve always loved that Haring’s art is so accessible. He knew this and used this to create iconic messaging during the AIDS crisis, making people look when they preferred to look away. Haring died of AIDS-related complications in 1990, thirty-one years ago this month, for him an entire lifetime ago since he was thirty-one at the time. Googling that fact right now feels like a sucker punch to the gut. I’m winded. Again, short breaths. That’s all I can manage.

To my right are four Post-its, their non-sticky parts rising up from my desk surface. A small blue one has the name of the actor/director who’d succumbed to AIDS. I wanted to write a blog post about him. I might not have noticed my scribbled note for another half year. For me, I see a Post-it for a day, maybe two, and then it loses its intended powers of reminding. Little thoughts, things that spark a creative idea in the moment, can quickly be forgotten. Not so, the big things. Like AIDS itself.

There are also a half dozen notes written on torn off pages from three different notepads—a note about querying, a writing to-do list from a month ago (the items still not done), an idea for a novel that I must have thought was brilliant when I jotted it down but now it seems like not much at all. I keep it in the open, hoping that, whatever sense of genius I had felt when I madly wrote it, circling words and adding explanatory arrows (which now explain nothing), will miraculously return on a later glance. Not today.

One of the other pages lists possible ideas I could write about for a regular essay column about relationships in an American newspaper. The first idea is about Stephen, my assigned buddy when I was a volunteer with AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA). Had he not died of AIDS-related complications at twenty-nine in 1992, he’d be fifty-seven today. Sweet, sweet man with big, big dreams. Dreams unfulfilled. The second essay idea on the list is about my dear friend Richard whom I met as an APLA volunteer, who talked me out of wanting to commit suicide when my first love cheated on me with a friend of mine and these two dickheads decided they wanted to make a go of things. Richard often marveled at how he made it through the AIDS crisis as so many friends and lovers around him died. Sadly, Richard died five years ago of brain cancer, still much too young, but he knew the extra quarter century he got was a blessing.

On the side of my four-drawer filing cabinet—yes, I still have such an outdated storage device—is a much crumpled note tacked up with a magnet. It lists background facts and passions of my friend Farrell, my tennis and margarita pal from my days in Dallas. I remember the time I showed up on court after margaritas—happy hour with the nuns I worked with—and, after five minutes of hitting the ball, he just stood on the other side of the court and laughed. Apparently, margaritas are indeed an energy drink, but in all the wrong ways. I dutifully retrieved the two cans of balls I’d managed to send over the fence and we sat and talked on a bench until it got dark. Back then, I didn’t know Farrell was gay and he didn’t know I was. He came out in a letter after I’d moved to Malibu, sensing a coldness when he flew out for a visit and concluded that it had to be because I’d figured out he was gay. We are so sensitive and so capable of misreading signs when we’re closeted. That coldness was law school stress that I stupidly hadn’t shaken, a nice visit unduly compromised.

That crumpled up piece of paper is supposed to help me design an AIDS quilt panel in memory of Farrell, the sizing and required materials written on the back. He died in 1995. I found out when a card I’d written to him was returned unopened to my address in Vancouver, a red postal stamp reading: DECEASED. I hadn’t put things together until then and Farrell didn’t share with me. I knew he’d lost his accounting job in Dallas, which could only have been due to illness or discrimination. Farrell was the most dependable person I knew. He’d shared that he was volunteering with the Dallas AIDS Resource Center. That’s the last I heard from him. A very reserved, proud man, I fear Farrell died alone. He’d been adopted and all his relatives in New Orleans had predeceased him. I don’t really have the means of making a quilt. I don’t have the craft gene. I don’t even have the holding scissors safely gene. This project intimidates me. The desire is there along with the sense that, if I don’t remember and honor Farrell, no one will.

Yes, AIDS is still all around me. The reminders are small and quiet. Some days, I don’t even see them. On other days, like today, I’m hit first thing and I know its shadow will hang over me until bedtime.

Small breaths. I’m so lucky I can do just that.