Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [49]
When I’d last seen him about six weeks earlier, he appeared to have lost fifteen pounds. He actually looked good, his face as chiseled as Montgomery Clift’s. I never saw him again. How could he have gone so quickly? It was as if one night at the gym—working out, as always, in fluorescent, confetti-colored bike shorts and a tank top—Mark had simply walked right through the mirrors and disappeared.
I remember thinking in the days that followed, Now his ghost is here, behind these mirrors, together with all of the city’s most beautiful dead. They watch us as we stare at ourselves, all lined up, clutching the weights.
“COME ON, LET’S GO IN,” I SAID TO STEVE. THE GATE’S SIMPLE LATCH gave way with a press of my finger.
The girl behind the café’s counter called out, “Um, ’scuse me, you’re not supposed to go back there!”
But we’re members here, I wanted to say, lifetime members. “Don’t worry, we won’t touch anything, we’ll just be a minute,” I said. Steve and I certainly couldn’t have made the place look worse, more vandalized, than it did.
Careful steps took us along the familiar path back to the locker area. Although the sauna had been deconstructed, the banks of lockers stood unchanged—row after row, like two hundred metal time capsules. I half expected to find them filled with members’ clothes. One after another, we opened every locker and collected what little we found: a penny, a key, a video rental card. Inside every door, though, was a sticker, which he and I had surreptitiously put there, visit after visit after visit, a dozen years back. We laughed in amazement—of all things to have survived! We had slapped them up in defiance of the owners’ prohibition against distributing AIDS educational materials on the premises. BE HERE FOR THE CURE, the stickers read, the words above a luminous painting of the globe. One was scribbled over and read, ACT UP FOR THE CURE! Another, probably scrawled more recently, said, WE’RE STILL WAITING.
At the time of our stickering, both Steve and I worked just a couple of blocks away at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, he on the hotline, me in the education department. I had been charged with creating a media campaign to promote the then novel strategy of seeking out early medical care if you were HIV positive and asymptomatic and had come up with the “Be Here for the Cure” theme. The idea behind it was that the sooner you got tested, saw a doctor, and started treatment, the better were your chances of longevity. The message spread throughout the Bay Area on T-shirts, buttons, stickers, posters, and billboards, in treatment packets, ads, and PSAs, in multiple languages. What I’d learned from extensive interviews and focus groups was that, despite the number of AIDS deaths (twenty-six thousand in California by the end of 1991), many in the gay community still had hope—not always for themselves, but always for the next generation. I know I felt it. If asked back then, I’d have said with certainty that the cure would eventually arrive in some form of magic bullet, perhaps as a wonder pill or a single shot in the arm, a so-called therapeutic vaccine. The very notion of a magic bullet, entrenched in the lexicon of illness, would’ve required no further explanation, no translation. Thinking about it now, though, the phrase strikes me as one of those familiar word pairings that seems more a product of free association than of deliberate coupling, like friendly fire or drug cocktail, nonsense made meaningful, light bent to gravity.
In fact, the term magic bullet was coined in 1908 by a brilliant fifty-four-year-old German scientist named Paul Ehrlich, who that same year received a Nobel Prize for, in the committee’s words, his “immortal contribution to medical and biological research,” work that laid the foundation for the emerging field of immunology. Today Ehrlich is probably best known for being the first scientist to propose using high-dose chemical compounds to destroy specific pathogens or cancerous cells