Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (19 page)

14.

I
N THE FALL
of 1985, my sophomore year of high school, I transferred out of French American Bilingual School into George Washington, a public school in the Richmond district. During my last year at French American I’d been more interested in friends than studies. Though I excelled in music, art, and drama, my report cards were otherwise mediocre. Disappointed with my grades, my grandparents announced they’d no longer foot the bill for my education. Dad couldn’t afford to keep me at French American, and his journals reveal that he started substitute teaching there in order to pay off unresolved bills. That same year, my friend Andrea transferred to Urban, a local private school, Niki and Anne-Marie both moved away, and our band of girls dissolved.

Relocating from a private high school of fifty to a public high school of three thousand was a big adjustment. During my first year I was slow to make friends and preferred to spend lunch breaks doing homework in hidden corners of the school hallways and stairwells to facing the social dynamics of the football bleachers or “the Wall” behind the school, where students broke into cliques. Instead, after school, between the hours of 3:30 and dinner, I roamed the Upper Haight, bouncing between bookstores, boutiques, record stores, and most of all the coffeehouses—Chattanooga, Double Rainbow, and For Heaven’s Cake (formerly Kiss My Sweet)—and the friends I found there.

There was sixteen-year-old Rudy di Prima, son of famed Beat poet Diane di Prima, Carlos with his red-rimmed eyes (always in trouble), and Father Al Huerta (always trying to keep Carlos out of trouble). There was long-haired Lara, who went to Urban but who lived with her hippie parents only a block from me. There was twenty-one-year-old Eddie Dunn, whose father ran the local recycling center, and his best friend, an Andrew McCarthy lookalike who’d take speed to meet his deadlines programming for Apple computers. And there was towheaded Christopher, a teenager who lived in a van at the end of the park, panhandled on the street (“Spare a smile? Spare a smile?”), and sometimes showered at Lara’s. Some of my friends were students from the local private schools: Lara and Andrea (Urban), Camille (French American), and Red Head Jed (University). Others were high school dropouts who worked in the local cafés (Jeff). Many dealt drugs, like Steve (pot), Aragorn (mushrooms), and Andrea’s boyfriend, Colin (acid). Others were addicted to drugs, like Creature (speed). But everyone was up for the ride, open for conversation, or just hanging out over coffee or a joint. There was among us, it seemed, a shared expectation of curiosity and tolerance.

We saw old movies at the Red Vic, holding hands across threadbare sofas that stood in for theater seats, wooden bowls of buttered popcorn (yeast optional) balanced on our laps. Sometimes we dated. Lara dated Eddie Dunn for some years. I dated the Andrew McCarthy look-alike for ten days. Sometimes we smoked pot and then frolicked in the playgrounds of Golden Gate Park or groped each other after hours in the Tactile Room of the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s science museum, where friends of friends worked as “explainers” and got us in for free.

With the freedom I had, I could have been shooting heroin or turning tricks in the Tenderloin. But I was never that kid and my father knew it. After witnessing all the NA craziness with him, I wanted always to maintain at least a veil of control. Sure, I tried speed—the night of Red Head Jed’s high school prom, I stayed up all night, chatting the ear off of anyone within reach. And I took mushrooms a couple of times, once at Double Rainbow with Andrew, Eddie, and Lara, all of us stumbling back to Lara’s bedroom afterward to marvel at her soft skin and “baby hands.” But I was, for the most part, a good kid. I never did acid. I never touched a needle.

Many of my teachers advised me to take my work more seriously. “Alysia would do better if she just applied herself” was a frequent refrain in parent-teacher conferences at French American. But by the time I graduated from George Washington in 1988, I had several AP classes under my belt and a 3.5 GPA. Besides, if I flaked on my term papers, which I did too often, I was getting an education in the cafés of Haight Street. Dad was frequenting many of these same cafés, with friends (such as Father Al Huerta, who helped Dad get a job teaching expository English at the University of San Francisco) informally keeping an eye on me.

Ultimately, Dad wanted to give me the same freedom he himself enjoyed, the freedom to live a public life, that of a flâneur, where we could trade the boring concerns of home for the intellectual gymnastics of coffeehouse banter, the unpredictability of the street. This was our chosen life.

Though I sometimes met up with Dad at For Heaven’s Cake, or Café Picaro or Café Macondo in the Mission, his main stage was, and would always be, Café Flore. The Flore, as it was also known, was a sunny, foliage-infested patio café with a corrugated tin roof located at the corner of 16th and Market. Since opening in 1973, it had become the social and intellectual heart of the Castro district. At the Flore, men and women, young and old, black and white, gay and straight (but often young gay men), would go to meet friends and make friends with interesting-looking strangers. Deep inside the café, behind the bar, an illustrated circus poster of Kar-Mi, a fortune-teller in turban and moustache, surveyed the colorful scene, acting as a calming presence.

Dad would spend full days at the Flore, filling spiral-bound notebooks on the café’s copper tabletops. When he started working as a weekly columnist for the
Sentinel
in 1986, and a sometime essayist for the
B.A.R.
,
SF Weekly
, and
Bay Guardian
, he found many of his ideas there, amidst the conversations he took part in, or overheard, at neighboring tables. The finest of these articles helped get him nominated for the Cable Car Award for Best Gay Columnist and were later assembled in his essay collection,
View Askew
(1989). He was always chatting up younger men at the Flore, trying to find out what creative work they were doing and then recommending books to read and people to meet. He sometimes hoped these friendships would develop into romances. They rarely did. Nevertheless he loved playing an avuncular role in the community. Some believe this was among his greatest contributions.

I’d often find myself at the Flore, meeting Dad or visiting with a cute band of twenty-something gay boys who always sat at the same outside corner table and who counseled me through my ill-begotten crushes and occasional flare-ups with girlfriends. I had the unfortunate habit of pursuing cute guys who were more interested in fooling around than in commitment. I confided my problems to café friends like Aboud, so striking with his olive skin, black hair, and green eyes. He’d tell me that these high school boys were threatened by me. “Female empowerment.
That’s
what it’s all about, honey.” Then he’d laugh—a joyful burst—and I felt I was let in on a secret.

Although I still spent the bulk of my social time in the Haight, I loved these afternoons at Café Flore. I’d been going to the café since I was little, and it always felt safe to me. There was no real threat, no feeling of awkwardness or competition as I sometimes felt among my girlfriends. I was always the kid, singularly young and straight, simply a member of this peculiar San Francisco family.

Soon the young men at the Flore would age before our eyes, shrinking beneath thick layers of scarves and sweaters and wool caps. They walked with canes or were pushed in wheelchairs, their vitality snuffed out, feathers plucked clean. Between the years of 1983 and 1985, the numbers of Americans with AIDS went from 1,300 to over 12,000, but San Francisco was the first city to experience epidemic levels of the disease. By the time the first HIV test was introduced in 1985, close to half the gay men in San Francisco were already infected. My father was one of them, but neither he nor I were talking about it.

FOR MOST
of the country, AIDS was still something that happened out there to other people. That changed in the summer of 1985, only a few days after Dad mailed me his letter equating childrearing with writing a poem, when Rock Hudson ended months of speculation by announcing that he had AIDS. By October he was dead. That same summer, thirteen-year-old Ryan White, an Indiana hemophiliac who’d contracted AIDS while receiving injections of a clotting agent, was barred from his school. These high-profile cases changed the face of the epidemic. AIDS was no longer dismissed as the gay plague, the disease of deviants—drug users and promiscuous gay men. It happened to famous people, to “innocent” people, to people you might know.

That summer and the months following, AIDS made the cover of
Life
(“Now No One Is Safe from AIDS”),
Time
(“How Heterosexuals Are Coping with AIDS”) and
Newsweek
, which after running a picture of Rock Hudson on its August cover put AIDS on its September cover with the headline “The Fear of AIDS” and a picture of schoolchildren holding up signs that read “No AIDS Children in District 27.”

The problem with all this media attention was that there was so little known about the disease, even among experts. On one episode of the
CBS Morning News
in 1985, a doctor from the University of California said that straight men rarely contracted AIDS from women; moments later, a Harvard doctor said they could. In late 1985, the Reagan White House blocked the use of CDC money for education, leaving the US behind other Western nations in telling its citizens how to avoid contracting the virus. Many Americans still thought you could get AIDS from a toilet seat or a glass of water. According to one poll, the majority of Americans supported quarantining AIDS patients.

This heightened awareness set off waves of anxiety across the country, which was often expressed through jokes (Q: What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair? A: Roll-AIDS!) and violence. Between the years 1985 and 1986, anti-gay violence increased by 42 percent in the US. Even in San Francisco, where Greyhound buses still dropped off gay men and women taking refuge from the prejudice of their hometowns, carloads of teenagers would drive through the Castro looking for targets.

In December 1985, a group of teenagers, shouting “diseased faggot” and “you’re killing us all,” dragged a man named David Johnson from his car in a San Francisco supermarket parking lot. While his lover looked on in horror, the teenagers kicked and beat Johnson with their skateboards, breaking three of his ribs, bruising his kidneys, and gashing his face and neck with deep fingernail scratches.

As a teenager, I heard about this attack and it haunted me. Returning on a bus home from Café Flore one day, I saw graffiti spray-painted on a billboard that read “Kill Fags!” Riding home from school another day, I saw a message scrawled in black marker on the back of a Muni bus seat: “Gays, get help—not AIDS!”

I knew it was only a matter of time before my father became a target. It turns out he already had been. I just didn’t know it.

IN THE 1980S,
Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn started a magazine called
Rolling Stock
. In issue number five, published in 1983, there appeared, written in collaboration with the poet Tom Clark, “The AIDS AWARDS FOR POETRY—In recognition of the current EPIDEMIC OF IDIOCY on the poetry scene.” The page featured a large illustration of a test tube of reddish liquid, presumably infected blood, which was the “prize.” The recipients of this “award” included Dennis Cooper, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and my dad.

Dorn’s homophobia was no secret. In his 1984 poem “Aid(e) Memoire,” he warned those who “screw and are screwed” by everyone all day and all year that they’ll get a disease so they might as well go and “drink directly from the sewer.”

My father was deeply wounded by the personal attack of the “AIDS award” and a few years later wrote about it in the epilogue to
View Askew
. “They mock us as we die, knowing full well that anti-gay humor leads to anti-gay violence.”

His friend Kevin Killian was so pained by the incident that, after Dad died, he wrote an open letter to the editors:

I write on behalf of one on whom a beaker of poisoned blood was poured by the talented staff artists of “Rolling Stock,” one who on his deathbed, still strove to understand the motives behind this attack, one who tried to forgive, one who tried so hard to forgive it broke my heart. He is no longer alive, but I am, and why shouldn’t I say exactly what I feel? . . . A great wrong has been done and memory will never be silent. Memory persists in squawking its fool head off trying to make sense of the evil done to innocent sufferers. I’m hysterical today, let my hysteria explode inside the great white apex of Ed Dorn’s heart.

I don’t remember ever talking with Dad about the “AIDS award.” In fact, I can’t recall talking with anyone about AIDS while I was in high school—not with friends, teachers, or family.

The strange thing is—and I find this really curious—I have no recollection of learning that my father was HIV-positive. With everything that I do remember about my life in San Francisco and our life together, all the hundreds and thousands of details I have had to cut when writing about him for the sake of flow and sense, why can I not remember this most important of moments?

My father’s journals reveal that he twice tested positive for the AIDS virus while I was still living with him in San Francisco—the first time in the summer of 1986 and then again in the summer of 1987. But I’ve no memory of finding this out, or even of discussing AIDS with him before I left for college. I can imagine how a conversation might have gone, maybe over one of our dinners in front of the
CBS Evening News
. Dad could have turned to me at a commercial break, plates of tuna and noodle casserole balanced on our laps: “This is something we should talk about. I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. Here’s what we’re going to do about it.” But I can remember no such exchange.

Does that mean it didn’t happen? Or does it mean that I’ve blocked the memory?

What I remember instead is a moment when I still thought he might never get AIDS. In November 1987, the fall of my senior year, I was selected to represent my high school on a ten-day trip to Israel sponsored by the American–Israeli Friendship League. In my application essay, I wrote about my mother, about how she’d been Jewish but how I knew nothing of Judaism since she’d died in a car accident when I was a small girl.