I am not someone who likes to talk on the telephone very much. My idea of a good talk is walking with a friend and talking as you walk. But my friend Curtis was an exception. Partly he lived uptown and I was down so there was the distance. We worked together for many years. When Curtis came down with AIDS, he didn’t get around like he used to. We talked a lot and often about art. Curtis was an artist and an art historian who’d been through every museum in Europe. He hid in the Cathedral at Chartres when they closed it for the night so he could spend time there alone. When Curtis became very ill, he asked me to be his health proxy, the one who pulls the plug. Curtis rebounded from a lot; he went blind for awhile and then got back his sight. He had been near death several times. His kidneys failed and he underwent dialysis, which he hated. A few months before his death, Curtis was in a coma and I thought about stopping everything, but then his kidney doctor talked me out of it, saying Curtis might rebound again. He did come out of his coma whispering, “I’m fucked,” to Loretta and me bending over his bed to hear him. Curtis was trying to be funny, but his life wasn’t fun, and I sometimes wondered how much more money the kidney doctor made from my July decision to not pull the plug until my friend died on the afternoon of September 7, 2003?
from New York Chronicles, October 2000
After twenty years I have very few friends who have AIDS. Curtis is like the best saved for last. Curtis lived in Germany and speaks the language fluently and speaks fluently about many things because he is always thinking. His kidneys are shot—grueling dialysis three times a week—and he’s gone blind, which has been hard because the visual sustains my friend. Curtis has fabulous art books around his bed but their consolation has come to an end. Or has it? Now he is remembering his favorite works of art and there are perspectives to them he is seeing for the first time. He had a bout of pneumonia, a wracking cough. I would hold his hand during dialysis as he twisted turning trying to catch his breath. He told me, “Don, there are angels all around the bed.” I couldn’t see them. “Are they like Botticelli angels or more like Giotto’s?” “Giotto’s,” Curtis informed me with a gasp.
7
You weren’t the sort of friend to come and go.
Then one day the spit dribbled down your chin
And your chapped lips that never stopped talking
Of Raphael and Michelangelo
Grew silent. I knew that you had suffered
More than I could know though I know one day
Perhaps I’ll know. Right now I don’t. I’d say
Do you want us to say The Lord’s Prayer
Together? It seemed to give you comfort.
Oh the nonsense of this world! Who can’t see
That we all come to this, both enemy
And friend? It is so absurd not to love
Love till the end. In my pen when the ink
Runs out, are my thoughts somehow diminished?