PASSIONATE RATIONS

I remember the varying sized vials and bottles that filled the top shelf of the refrigerator door, the labels bearing the name of my landlord. I saw him only rarely. He didn’t routinely stay at the D.C. townhouse he owned, choosing, instead, to rent it out to a motley crew consisting of myself, two gay men and a straight man (whom, the rest of us were convinced, was gay but just hadn’t realized it yet).

The townhouse lay between the beating heart of D.C.’s Adams Morgan district, with its colorful ethnic restaurants and funky shops, and a park known for its crack dealers and cruising scene. More than once in the approximately four months I lived there—one of the thousands of interns who descend each semester on our country’s fair capitol—I saw cops chasing people down my street. The townhouse kitty corner to me was rumored to be a crack house.

Oddly, though, I never felt unsafe in that neighborhood. The street was lined on both sides with rows of townhomes, all with front stoops that were often occupied by a spectacular display of diversity, the memory of which often makes my current life in western New England seem drab by comparison. There was the grizzled older Eastern European woman who told fortunes, the five pre-teen African-American boys climbing the balustrades, the quiet white female student with the cool hair. We greeted each other daily with raised waves and shouts of “Hey! How’s it going?” It was exhilarating. It was alive.

But in the midst of the colorful chaos, death walked too. Death always walks undaunted wherever there is life, but this was a specific kind of death. I have never forgotten the wasted frame, sore-covered face, and desperate eyes of the man who sat on the sidewalk propped against a wrought-iron fence with a sign that read simply and horribly, “I have AIDS. Please help.” It is a memory that makes me feel, as I felt then, nothing but a desolate helplessness.

Indeed, the fear, horror, and helplessness concentrated into a palpable undertone, particularly in that D.C. district which was home to so many gay men, for whom the disease had become epidemic. It was inescapable. Even while relishing a showing of controversial filmmaker Marlon Riggs’ film, Tongues Untied, and listening to the filmmaker speak afterward, you knew he was dying. That fear and horror was brought to the surface daily for me personally with each opening of that shared refrigerator.

I was young. I was not close to my landlord, since I only saw him on occasion. I left the city and (regrettably) lost touch with my housemates and my landlord and the thrum of that Adams-Morgan neighborhood, but I have thought of them—and the man on the sidewalk—many times since. I wonder if my former landlord managed to stave off the onslaught of his disease with the medical advances since. I hope so. Marlon Riggs did not. I am certain the man on the sidewalk did not.

It is for them, and for everyone affected by this disease (including the young hemophiliac, Ryan White, about whom I wrote my first newspaper editorial while still in high school decrying his treatment at the hands of the fearful and ignorant), that I write today, on the 20th Anniversary of World AIDs Day, and donate to the cause.

Lest we forget, the disease lingers still.