“He gave me an address to forward his mail,” she said. She got up and went to a secretary in the corner of the room. She returned with a slip of paper. “Here. It’s his parents’ house, I think.”

“Thank you, Peg.”

“Waldo and Billy, both gone,” she said. “Gone so young, their whole lives ahead of them. And me still here at eighty. Does that seem right to you?”

The mist had turned to rain as I walked back to my office. On the side of a building on 18th Street near Castro someone had written in red spray paint, Where’s the outrage! The first time I saw someone dying from the disease was shortly after I got out of rehab. I’d met some men at a Thursday night AA meeting in the Castro who invited me out to coffee afterward. Still feeling fragile, I would have passed except that I was under orders from Larry to accept such invitations.

You’re an isolator, Henry. I don’t even think that’s a real word, Larry. Don’t be a smartass. If someone reaches out to you, you say yes. I’m no good at small talk. This isn’t small talk, my friend, this is recovery. Alcoholism is a disease of isolation. You need to put as many sober people as you can between you and the bottle. So, go have a damn cup of coffee with these guys.

Larry was right. There wasn’t much small talk with these guys; coffee was a continuation of the meeting as they talked about their fears and their hopes and the road they were trying to construct that would take them from one to the other. One evening, one of them said, “Chris’s in the hospital and wanted us to bring a meeting to him.” That’s how I found myself with six other men encircling a hospital bed at SF General. We all wore gowns and masks and plastic gloves. Jack was probably in his late twenties, though the disease had leeched the youthfulness from him. I remember, especially, that his hair was lifeless and brittle and he stank of piss and medicine. His face and hands were covered with purple lesions, the mark of Kaposi sarcoma, one of the more common opportunistic diseases. His tongue was covered with a fungus. He was going blind from CMV. The informal leader of our group, the man who had brought us here to have an AA meeting, asked Jack to pick a topic for discussion. “Gratitude,” he whispered.

When I got home to my apartment from the hospital, I stripped naked and inspected every inch of my body for lesions. I did not sleep that night, thinking about the man dying in the hospital bed. Would I be next? Where’s the outrage? Most of us had yet to arrive at outrage. We were still traveling through horror.