A light drizzle fell from the darkening sky onto a narrow street in Hayes Valley where I stood before the tumbled-down, uninhabited, nineteenth-century cottage where Hugh Paris had lived. My lover. A recovering junkie, ex-rent boy, the black sheep of a wealthy family, whose murder remained officially unsolved. When I’d first returned here after leaving rehab, it was for evidence that Hugh had really existed and not been simply a figment of my alcohol-soaked imagination. In my mind, I walked myself up the creaky steps, through the door and the oddly barren living room into the bedroom. There, on a mattress on the floor, Billie Holiday crooning in the background, the damp sheet twisted around our feet, we had what was now called unsafe sex but which, at the time, I had thought of as making love. Standing there in the drizzle, I wondered if, in our heedless exchange of fluids, one of us had passed the virus to the other. Not that it mattered to Hugh. He lay beneath the snow in a Boston graveyard. He was twenty-six when he was murdered and I remember thinking, how can that be? Who dies that young? Now the city was filled with gay men wondering if they would live to see thirty.

What if I got sober just so AIDS could kill me, I asked Larry one particularly anxious morning. Have you been sick, had any of the symptoms? he asked. No, I said, but—He cut me off. If you start down the road of what ifs, it’s going to lead you back to the bottle. I’m afraid, Larry. Afraid of what? A possibility? Something that might never happen? It’s more of a probability, I said. Is it happening today, he demanded with an asperity I realized later was a measure of his own anxiety. No, I said. Then stop these fantasies and learn to live in your body. What? You heard me, he said. Your mind lives in fear and regret but your body can only live right now, in this moment. So, take some deep breaths and live in your body. It’s a safer place to be than in your head.

The drizzle turned into a cold, pelting rain. I opened my umbrella and headed home.

5.

5.

In the days following Bill’s arrival in San Francisco, Waldo waved off his offers to move out with, “Where would you go, hon? Stay as long as you want.” In gratitude, Bill washed the dirty dishes, cleaned the apartment, used his dwindling stock of cash to fill the refrigerator and otherwise tried to make himself helpful to his friend. Waldo, returning home from work one evening, found Bill on his knees scrubbing decades of grime from the clawfoot bathtub and observed, “I guess you are gay.”