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Chapter Six

Strangers to Ourselves

[Portland, Oregon, April 1994]

On Tuesday, I met Jerald in a small private dining room at the downtown Heathman Hotel. “I thought this would be more intimate,” he said. “And so people don’t stare.” He was dressed fashionably, but the clothes hung loosely, as though he were a human clothes hanger. The servers were all, Yes, Mr. Sherwood. Of course, Mr. Sherwood. Whatever you need, Mr. Sherwood. As they scurried to get our drink order, Jerald said, “I admire obsequiousness in people, don’t you? Everyone knows me here. Everyone knows me everywhere.” Then he added, “I tip big.”

I picked up the menu, but he told me not to bother. “I’ve ordered for you.”

“Oh. What did you order?”

“All my favorite dishes.”

“All?”

“Yes, everything I love here. I can no longer eat them, so I’ll enjoy them vicariously through you. That’s how I enjoy most things these days.”

“I tend to be a light lunch eater.”

“Do it for me. Please? I sense this is going to be a long lunch.”

And it was. Three hours. I now remember that marathon meal and our discussion (or really, Jerald’s monologue) by the courses I was served. Jerald took an occasional sip of broth and nibbled on half a roll. Over my Caesar salad and warm, fresh-baked sourdough bread, he summed up his life, like some opening symphonic overture, setting the tone for what was to come.

“If there were to be an epitaph on my grave, it would read ‘He was a jerk’— only because no self-respecting cemetery would allow ‘asshole’ on its tombstones.”

Buttering the bread, I said, “I don’t recall you being a jerk in high school.”

“I was a jerk-in-training back then.”

I put down the butter knife. “I do remember hearing rumors that you got Betsy Morton pregnant.”

“Now that’s not true. It was she who got me pregnant. Try to set the record straight at the class reunion, will you?”

“Jerald, you know I don’t go to class reunions.”

“Just as well. It would probably be too much of a shock to their middle-aged systems to see you.”

“I doubt they’d even remember me.”

“There you are wrong,” he said. I looked up from my salad. “I think they held you in a kind of awe. I know I did. You were one of those unapproachable people made for pedestals. So serious. Always so serious. And so self-contained. You didn’t join any club, didn’t belong to any group. It was like you didn’t want to belong, like you didn’t need anybody. How strange was that to the rest of us for whom belonging was all that mattered? I mean, what’s the point of being part of the in-crowd if the important kids don’t want in?”

“I don’t think I was an important kid,” I mumbled.

“You were one of the leaders at school, though more like the independent congressman with immense credibility and standing and no party affiliation. You seemed to rise above the politics of adolescence.”

“I remember high school . . . differently.”

“I always thought you were destined to be alone.”

I stopped eating. “Looks like you were right.”

“How on earth did you ever allow yourself a partner?”

“There was enough space in my relationship with Gray for me to be a loner when I needed to be.” I resumed eating. “Anyway, I’m more interested in hearing about your life.”

“Ah yes. So where was I?”

“You were a jerk.”

“That’s right. I was a real jerk. I married after college and cheated on my first wife with other women and blamed her. Then I married again, but it seemed my second wife had the same problem as my first. It took me three marriages, looking for the perfect woman, to realize it wasn’t a woman I really wanted.”

“How could you not know?”

“Believe me, if we could only harness the power of denial, we’d have a new and perpetual energy source. All those years I thought I was a heterosexual guy who occasionally got it off with men. Sure, I cheated on my wives with men. But I cheated on them with other women, too. Like I said, a real jerk.”

Some things don’t change. I remembered “Jerry” in high school as a charming, funny raconteur, always quick with some witty commentary: on Mr. Skylar’s hairpiece (“I’ve seen healthier looking road kills”), or which cheerleaders should not be wearing the school colors with their complexions. So, I suppose the signs had been there from the beginning. He was still the entertaining raconteur, though his observations had become less frivolous, his commentary more piercing and trenchant. The tone, too, had changed, from the lighthearted take of a youth with his life stretching before him like an endless horizon to the tired old man sitting across from me now hurtling toward that horizon. Over soup he told me about his coming-out years.

“That’s when I found God— the god Eros, I mean. It was quite exhilarating. This is what I had been missing! I became a real party boy, and my parties were legendary in the West Hills, my life one continuous round of sex, booze, and drugs. No kidding, if it weren’t for AIDS, I’d be dead by now.” He laughed, which turned into a coughing spasm.

“Some water?”

He waved his hand as he recovered. “My goal in life was to sleep with every handsome male in Portland, regardless of race, age, or sexual orientation. I would have made it, too, if my time hadn’t run out.” He leaned back in his chair. “I know, looking at me now, it’s hard to believe I was once handsome and desirable.” It wasn’t. I had envied Betsy Morton in high school. “But you should see the magnificent painting of Dorian Gray I have hanging in my attic. He’s still young and beautiful.” He reached for his glass of water. “Fuck him.”

I had only made it through the soup and salad, and I was already full.

“You’ll love the first entrée,” said Jerald as a waiter removed my bowl and another refilled my water glass.

“The first entrée?”

“Be sure to save room for dessert. It’s delish!”

Over the first entrée, his party life abruptly came to an end. “AIDS was my wake-up call. I don’t know how long I’d been infected. With all the screwing around I was doing it never occurred to me that I could get HIV. I knew, of course, the virus was out there, but like most of us, I guess I just thought it didn’t apply to me. I didn’t get tested until I was in the hospital with my first opportunistic infection. That’s when they told me.” He stopped to take a sip of his broth, his third so far. “And that’s when I met Cal. By the way, how’s he doing?”

“In Providence. Next stop, hospice.” With others, I would have tacked on unfortunately or sadly or something like that. But with another veteran, we tended to dispense with such sentimentalities. Likewise, Jerald didn’t engage in the socially appropriate How sad or I’m sorry to hear that. It was all understood.

“I met Cal at the first AIDS fundraiser I ever attended. I could still hide my status then and pretend I was spurred from some altruistic motive, which, to say the least, would have been out of character for me. Cal was the first person I told. It was he who got me involved with CAP, saying I could still make a positive difference in my time remaining. That was five years ago.” He said wistfully as if to himself, “I hope I have.”

A waiter removed the remnants of the broiled salmon as another placed a roasted pheasant with sautéed vegetables before me. I stared at it.

“You know, you don’t need to eat all of it. I meant for you only to have a taste of my favorites.”

That was nice, but as a member of the Clean Plate Club since childhood, I had fully imbibed that peculiar mother logic that if I didn’t eat everything on my dish, poor children in China would somehow starve. Over the pheasant, Jerald told me about his life change.

“So, I set about cleaning up my life. Gave up the sex. Gave up the drugs. Gave up the booze. Remained a jerk. I needed to hold onto something of my previous life.”

There is this need to tell one’s story. I have seen it many times before as one senses the end approaching. I expect it accounts for the plethora of memoirs we see in this self-centered, self-publishing age. It’s as if in the telling, people are trying to understand what it was all about, this life they lived. I realized I was the excuse for Jerald to express his thoughts for himself to hear and ponder.

“My diagnosis and meeting Cal shifted something in me. My life was no longer about just pleasure and getting high. I wanted it to matter before it was over. Maybe I could do something good with my money and my time. So, I became a volunteer, still pretending my motives were wholly altruistic. I raised big bucks. Even served on a care team and saw firsthand what awaited me.

“And you know, what was most surprising was I didn’t miss my former life. It was more like, What a waste of my time! Now it all seems like so much fuss and bother. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best people are those dying. Or maybe it’s that people are at their best when dying, although that’s not altogether true either. I’ve known some real assholes who were determined to remain assholes to the very end.”

Over the third and fourth entrees, he told me of his experiences on the front lines of the epidemic, and how they changed him. Eventually, as the lesions had started to appear a couple of years ago and he began spending time in the hospital, he could no longer pretend. Over dessert, an extremely creamy crème brûlée, he brought us up to the present.

“My volunteering days are almost over.” He paused. “My days are almost over.”

In earlier years, when someone said that, I would demur, “Oh, no, you’ve got plenty of time left,” or “I hear they’re coming out with a new drug. The trials sound very promising,” or whatever I could think to say. I had stopped some time ago after I’d found the person was almost invariably right. My words had been to comfort me rather than him.

He paused. “AIDS made me slow down and think about how I was living. I know it sounds trite, but AIDS has given my life meaning.”

“From my experience, there’s nothing trite about AIDS.”

“I’m now working on humility. That’s a tough one. But Cal inspired me.”

“Cal has inspired many.”

“Yes. Unfortunately, we can’t all be saints. You need to have some of us sinners to balance the human equation. Actually, a lot of us sinners. I would say 100,000 sinners for every saint. Those are the odds.”

He looked fatigued as a waiter cleared the table and I drank my cup of tea.

“I’m ready,” he said. “I think Kübler-Ross needs to add another to her stages of dying. After Acceptance, add Fatigue. One gets to the point of just wanting it all to end. No more goals. No more desires. No more struggles. I have no illusions of a heaven or afterlife. The ‘peace of the inanimate’ sounds pretty good to me these days.”

I put down my cup and folded my napkin.

He was nodding in his thoughts. “Strange where life brings us, isn’t it? Sort of makes you wonder what it’s all been about.”

I have often thought back to that distant lunch. We spend this short time on earth— for some, even shorter— and hardly have time to think about our lives as we’re living them. And then, seemingly suddenly, seventy years, or eighty years, or thirty-seven years, and it’s over before we know it, and we depart like Jerald, wondering what it was all about. He was just more witty and entertaining than most, and perhaps more self-insightful. But then maybe not. I suspect most of us die strangers to ourselves.

• • •

Steve had been impressed that Jerald and I were friends in high school. That was Jerald’s recollection; I would have said we had a few classes together. He was eager to hear how our lunch went after I waddled back to the office, slumping into my desk chair and renouncing food forever.

“He really is one of our largest donors,” said Steve.

“I know. He told me. Several times.”

“And he’s not as much of a jerk as he likes to pretend. He not only makes large donations to the organization, but he’s also personally paid for others’ meds when they couldn’t afford them. Cal knows that if there’s someone in need of help, he can call on Jerald. Are you going to get together again?”

“Probably. But not to eat, I hope.”

And we did get together every few weeks as I checked in on how he was doing. One of the last times was in Providence Hospital a couple of months later. I was with Janet, his sister, at his bedside. Jerald had been largely unconscious for the past two days. It was growing late and, at my urging, she’d finally left to go back to her family. “I’ll call if anything happens,” I promised her. By then I had kept a number of these solo vigils and made a number of calls when something had finally “happened.”

I sat in his room, reading, remembering, reflecting on this old, withered man who was my age as I listened to his raspy breathing, and I could still recognize the handsome boy from high school. It seemed like only yesterday. Then around 4:00 a.m., I was dozing when I heard a stirring and jerked awake, opening my eyes just as Jerald was opening his, both of us groggy. He looked around the dimly lit room, appearing confused. Seeing me, he asked, “Am I in heaven?”

“No. Providence Hospital.”

“Thank God. I would have been seriously disappointed if this were heaven.”

“Would you like some water?”

He nodded. I held the cup as he sucked from a straw, then smacked his lips. “Well, since I’m not in heaven, I might as well eat. I’m hungry for once. See what they have on the menu, will you?”

“Jerald, this is a hospital, not a hotel.”

“At what they’re charging me, I can order whatever I want whenever I want it.”

“I think you have a little more work to do on the humility bit.”

“Oh, fuck humility. What good did it ever do me anyway? By the way, what are you doing here? You’re not family or any of my many fawning beneficiaries.”

“I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“You just happened to be in the neighborhood. I find that hard to believe.”

“And I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night.”

“Now that I would believe.”

“Screw you. So maybe I just wanted to see an old friend off.”

He suddenly teared up, his bottom lip quivering, and he whispered, “Now that I would believe, too. Thank you.”

Feeling our combined embarrassment at his emotion, I rose from my chair. “I’ll go see what they can rustle up around here at four in the morning.”

“Yes, do,” he said as he dabbed his eyes with the top of his sheet. “Use my name. Tell them I tip big.”

He died a week later at home, between one caregiver’s leaving and the next caregiver’s arrival, several weeks after Cal. Saint and sinner. In the end, they die the same.

• • •

There’s a coda to this memory. It was a number of months later, in early September, that I was at the front desk helping our receptionist Connie prepare files for an upcoming county audit, when we heard the familiar ping! of the elevator and Brandon Chittock stepped out from its doors. I would have bristled had he not appeared as he did— dark circles around his eyes, obviously hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, disheveled, dressed in wrinkled shirt and slacks looking like he’d slept in them. He was shattered. He came to the front desk and asked for “the priest who works here. I’ve forgotten his name.” He didn’t meet my eyes. Either he didn’t remember me, or was too ashamed to remember me.

“Father Paul,” said Connie.

“Yes, Father Paul.”

“I’ll see if he’s available.”

Father Paul came out from Client Services and greeted him warmly as an old friend, and they went into a counseling room. Connie and I had just finished the files an hour later when they emerged. Clearly Chittock had been crying; his eyes were puffy and red, but he was now calm, his posture once again erect; he was back in control of his emotions, if no longer in control of the universe. Father Paul walked him to the elevator where they exchanged final words and shook hands. Once the elevator doors closed, Father Paul turned and saw me staring. He walked over and said, “Yes.”

All my rage and detestation for the man had drained away. I whispered, “He’s become infected?”

“No. Not Brandon. His partner.”

He handed me an envelope. “You might be interested in this. Then perhaps you’d give it to Franklin.”

I opened the envelope and peered inside. It contained a personal check for $100,000. I looked back up at Father Paul.

He said softly, “It’s his time.”