This one's for Gary

January 1998, I'm on the futon in Chuck's apartment, reading. Between Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine) and the admission materials for the School of Library and Information Science, I read drug labels and information materials from my excellent pharmacists at Kroger Seminary Square. \n I log on to the Web and cruise through The Body (www.thebody.com), the extraordinary resource site for the positive, the negative and the untested. I've picked up new words for my vocabulary; now I have to learn to use them in a sentence. This isn't easy ' say "I'm positive" in conversation sometime ' there just never seems to be a propitious moment.\nThe information that accompanies my drugs is daunting, but I read it through. Kidney failure, liver damage, lypodystrophy, anemia, the on-set of diabetes ' whatever happened to good old nausea and diarrhea? Oh, they're listed, just down the page. At this time, I learn that I will hurl coffee with cream if I try to drink it too soon after pill time. Another side effect to note. \nFor a couple of weeks, I have had every side effect at least once. \nFeeling better seemed like a big cheat, like the suitcase aria that I had to sing on life's stage was a little too long for its own good. Shouldn't I be dead? And if not, then what next? \nI had spent a couple of weeks in the hell of other people's emotions. I'd been hugged too much, saw too many misty eyes and said too many times that I'd be just fine. I didn't believe it either. \nI told people to talk to Chuck, because it was like he no longer existed. He was the worst sort of widower, the one who had nothing official to grieve.\nBecause I looked bad, or so I thought, I stayed in Chuck's apartment most of the time, walking to my place to feed the cats, or sending someone else to do it. I played pretend OK with everyone but Chuck. \nWe climb in and out of misery constantly. It's like the dun tank at a charity event ' the money's for a good cause, so why not? I'm trying to remember how tightly I clung to my misery, and to be honest, I can't promise you I didn't whine to someone. My misery played out at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. ' and then the doctor gave me a pill to help me sleep. \nThese days, my misery is a whisper of its former self; I'm generally so ungodly happy that even I can't stand it. I'm on pragmatic cruise control through a section of my life that looks a lot like Kansas when I view it in the round ' no bumps, no curves, no steep hills. \nPeople talk to Chuck as much as they do to me, and the acronyms, the drug stories, the questions of mortality are almost never mentioned. When they are, it's relaxed, calm and rational. \nI get together with a friend of mine who remembers the people I remember, and then some, who are gone. We sit in his backyard and talk about Gary and inevitably look skyward. We've toasted him with French champagne and a piquant Italian white ' I think Gary enjoys the attention.\nThese are the clothes that misery now wears in my life ' it's a celebration of it all. The days of January 1998, the almost maniacal search for information, to the days of summer more than two years later.\nI didn't know I would reach, if not peace with myself, then at least a ceasefire with friendly intentions. I wouldn't have guessed in January what I would be able to forgive within myself, and what I would learn to accept. \nIt didn't appear to me in January that Mark Version 2.0 (with Viral Action!) would ever be someone I would be comfortable being ' rather, at first I was two people in one body. Pre-Mark and Post-Mark and who would be stupid enough to choose the latter?\nEventually, I did. My life during the Spring that followed was a blind date with this new me, a continuous series of gaffes and missed steps, a viral stumblebum.\nJulie Bolin is my care coordinator at Positive Link, the person with the unenviable job of keeping my officially positive life on track. She was also the care coordinator for Gary, and she has filled me in on his later days, his decline and his lonely death ' at least as much as her commitment to confidentiality would allow her to say. The end came for him in a room where the drapes hadn't been opened in a long time, in a wreath of marijuana smoke. \nI knew Gary as the best no-strings sex I'd ever encountered in my life ' and I've encountered that quite a bit, so it's no small honor. For him, I suspect, sex was how he felt acceptance, sex was his act of love for life. We had that in common.\nI wrote this column today because I thought about Gary, what I know of his life and death with AIDS. He wasn't intellectual. In fact he was just like me and most people I know and love ' a little off, a brick shy, not a full deck. The life he had, though, he seemed to enjoy. I wasn't so deep into his circumstances to tell you much more. I've learned about his misery through some deep communication with my own. \nI owe it to Gary to grab at all the happiness I can, enjoy a steak dinner, lift a glass of obscenely good wine to the sky. Because of Gary, the clothes my misery wears are more Hawaiian shirt than funeral shroud.\nYou might have liked Gary if you'd met him ' during September, do me a favor ' lift a glass and say "This one's for Gary" once or twice.