Read Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir for Free Online

shone through all his irreverence. Though he was surely in his mid-forties, he looked about twenty-five. He'd blurted out in a formal oration at his public school in the ninth grade the fact that he was gay, and still bristled with pride to recall the headmaster's rattled dismay. Roger, who'd tracked john down, beamed at the two of us trading shoptalk, and by the end of lunch John was committed. We'd do the play in the winter, spring at the latest.
    John would be dead of AIDS eleven months later. He knew his diagnosis when we met him, but was single-mindedly forging ahead and planning new work. He was eager for us to see his production of Saint Joan at South Coast Rep, which we thought very sharp and elegant, despite a Joan who seemed to want to lead her army to Glendale. One critic observed that it wasn't up to John's high standards, and a year later I understood exactly the way his mind wasn't quite on it, the vigor not up to the passion.
    Over and over I've watched those who are stricken fight their way back to some measure of health and go on working—those who are not let go, that is. Perhaps the work is especially important because AIDS is striking so many of us just as we're hitting our stride at work. I mean of course the American AIDS of the first half-decade, before it began to burgeon in the black and brown communities. Most of the fallen in our years were urban gay men, and most of these were hard at their work when the symptoms started multiplying and nothing would go away. They wanted to hold on to their work as long as they could.
    Roger was no different, and neither am I. With him gone, there is just what work I can finish before it overtakes me. Again there are friends all around me, meaning well, who say I don't have to feel so cornered: New treatments are coming down the pipeline every day; the antivirals data looks better and better. Et cetera. Perhaps it is just very human to want to die with your boots on. I don't know if that's a cowboy or a combat metaphor, but both are perfectly apt.
    After six years in the house on Kings Road, we'd fallen into a pattern of optimum tranquility. Our most consistent time together—though we'd pick up the phone all day and call—was evenings seven to eleven. Some tag end of the workday might spill over here and there, but we usually ate at home on weeknights, did some reading and went for a walk. My whole life is like one of those weeknights now, plain and quiet and, here in the house at least, close to Rog. A stucco thirties cottage high in a box canyon above the Sunset Strip. There's a view of the city lights through the coral tree out front and between the olive and the eucalyptus across the way. In square footage it's about the size of a two-bedroom on Seventy-ninth and West End, the sort people kill for. Out back is a garden court shaded by Chinese elms and a blue-bottom pool that catches the sun from eleven to three.
    There was always a sort of double clock to the evening, because Roger was asleep by midnight, never a night's insomnia, and I didn't go to bed till three. I typed like a dervish once the phone couldn't possibly ring. But I'd usually loll in bed with Rog for a half hour—Ted Koppel too, if the issue was ripe—and he'd nod off curled beside me, the two of us nestled like a pair of spoons. By way of trade-off I'd be half aware of him getting up at seven-thirty, padding about while I burrowed in for the morning, to rise at eleven like Harlow. Between us we covered the night and the morning watch.
    I realize now how peaceful it was to be writing while Rog lay asleep in the next room. I can't describe how safe it made me feel, how free to work. I think mothers must feel safe like that, when it's so late at night you can hear a baby breathe. We had gone along this way for so many years that when I had to do it for real—watch over him half the night, wake him and give him pills, run the IV, change his sweat-soaked pajamas three different times—it