[Author’s Note: About a decade ago, I started work on a book about Paul Monette. I’ve interviewed more than a hundred of his friends and associates, and I’ve been given access to his as yet unpublished diaries. Finally, all these years later, the project is beginning to come to life. This essay uses his diaries and a couple of the interviews to revisit one of Monette’s most important books.]
“I DON’T KNOW if I will live to finish this. Doubtless there’s a streak of self-importance in such an assertion, but who’s counting? … All I know is this: the virus ticks in me.” When Paul Monette (1945–1995) wrote those words, the average life expectancy of someone diagnosed with AIDS was less than two years. His lover of more than a decade, Roger Horwitz (1941–1986), survived nineteen months. Relatively speaking, then, his melodramatic opening foray in the remarkable memoir Borrowed Time (1988)—one of the earliest and best books we have from inside a gay relationship devastated by AIDS—was an accurate assessment of reality. Monette lived another few years, when he did the most important writing of his career.
Half a year shy of his fiftieth birthday, Monette died in February of 1995. His was an eloquent voice in those terrifying, infuriating first years; he used poetry and prose to tell the stories of gay men’s lives and deaths, loves and losses. To commemorate the sixteenth anniversary of Monette’s death, an L.A.-based glossy magazine called Daeida published a story titled “Unforgetting Paul Monette.” Almost accusingly, author David Nick Ybarra maintains that “if we forget about Paul Monette, we dishonor a warrior of our collective history, a hero of our hard-won victories, and the memory of one of our greatest casualties.” Monette’s best work will live on, ensuring his memory and his legacy. Significantly, Borrowed Time now stands as a time capsule. I taught it this semester in a course called “Queer Los Angeles”; my oldest students were born the year the book was published. Because AIDS has changed so much, it is perhaps ironic that a memoir which was so “of the moment” in its time might strike younger readers, especially, as ancient history today. Monette knew and understood history. Educated at Andover and Yale, he studied Classics and literature. He taught at a couple of prestigious prep schools in New England, but he aspired to much more. One evening early in 1975, like hundreds of millions of people across the globe, he watched the Academy Awards. That night, Monette, a dedicated journal-keeper, noted enthusiastically, “Oh, I want an Oscar terribly!” Who doesn’t? He resolved to leave Boston and head for L.A., where he would take his shot. Up to that point, he had published one slim volume of poetry, The Carpenter at the Asylum, and one novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll. He was not exactly the hottest new writer in town, but he and Roger, who had been his partner for three years, made the move so that Monette could pursue his dream. It’s an old story: in Hollywood, success didn’t come easily. Monette took a lot of meetings, made a few big paychecks, and was mostly frustrated in the city of (broken) dreams. His own work morphed into potboiler novels with titles like The Gold Diggers and The Long Shot; he wrote novelizations of such films as Nosferatu and Scarface; his poetry collection, No Witnesses, got no notice, and his show business career was not taking off. In the early 1980’s, Monette was having what he thought was a midlife crisis. If only. It was not just a personal crisis, though. Something else was in the air. Monette was not exactly in denial about the first inklings of a new disease. In the opening pages of Borrowed Time, he sets up the context: “The fact is, no one knows where to start with AIDS. Now in the seventh year of the calamity, my friends in L.A. can hardly recall what it felt like any longer, the time before the sickness.” He remembers reading a cover story in The Advocate, from early 1982, “Is Sex Making Us Sick?” Ever the hypochondriac, Monette was aware of danger a few months before that. In his diary on December 19, 1981, he wrote: “The horror of the sickness. The visit to the doctor’s. … The gay cancer scare.” A month or so before that journal entry, according to the man he calls “Joel” in Borrowed Time, Monette was already talking apocalyptically about the future. In our interview, “Joel” (with whom he had an affair) told me: “We used to take walks near Paul’s house on Kings Road. Once, he started talking about some new disease, saying that we were all going to die. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He was glum and melodramatic, a little over the top. He went on and on, so I just pretended like I knew what he was talking about. I said, ‘Oh that,’ you know, just to get him to shut up because I didn’t want to hear any more. That was the first time I’d ever heard about it.” By April of 1983, after both Paul and Roger had had a few viruses and flu-like illnesses, Monette’s diary shows even more awareness of impending doom. He contemplates some of the changes: “How does one live sexually in the AIDS world? To what degree am I willing to put all the rest of it at risk? To what extent playing the roulette wheel, & to what extent choosing to. … Until you figure the risk, limit the kind of contact, not the numbers or the frequency. Taking the preventive stance re the epidemic. Waiting & thinking it through, what the risk level is.” One of the more poignant moments in Monette’s journals before illness came to Kings Road appears in August of 1983: “I had an anguished moment when I thought: Oh what if I get to be 50, 55 & think I haven’t had enough? Dear, dear. There is no other choice but to go forward & be filled by life. R & I both in exciting times, in the middle of life—& yes there are fates, from bombs to glands, as Anne Sexton says—but god, the chances of life are so rich.” Many of the people I’ve interviewed about these years have told me that they all expected to die. Anyone diagnosed in the 80’s or early 90’s without a strong reserve of health didn’t make it beyond 1996. But that year, the antiretrovirals started to appear and HIV was no longer an automatic death sentence. Monette’s dear friend Cesar became his first intimate acquaintance to be diagnosed, in September of 1983. Borrowed Time tells us: “The profile of AIDS continued to be mostly a matter of shadows. The L.A. Times wasn’t covering it, though by then I’d come to learn how embattled things were in New York. The Gay Men’s Health Crisis was up to its ears in clients; Larry Kramer was screaming at the mayor; and the body count was appearing weekly in the Native.” Then the news hit home, with a call from San Francisco: “Roger met me gravely at the door. ‘There’s a message from Cesar,’ he said. ‘It’s not good.’ Numbly, I played back the answering machine, where so much appalling misery would be left on tape over the years to come, as if a record were crying out to be kept. ‘I have a bit of bad news.’ Cesar’s voice sounded strained, almost embarrassed. He left no details. … I kept picturing that swollen gland in his groin, thinking: What’s that got to do with AIDS? And a parallel track in my mind began careening with another thought: the swollen gland in my own groin, always dismissed by my straight doctor as herpes-related and not a ‘significant sign.’” Here, especially, the memoir reminds us of the days before the HIV test, when diagnosis was based on a collection of symptoms. Monette’s journal from 1983-84 actually concludes in February of 1985, just a few weeks before Roger’s diagnosis. Here he writes a kind of benediction, trying to find a little calm and hope for the future: “Let this journal end here then. … The dog is sleeping in a curl beside me. … May this house be safe from tigers. … R & I both struggling w/ viruses.” When Roger was finally diagnosed, in March of 1985, Monette’s journal, which at that point is littered with notes for a Whoopi Goldberg film project called “The Manicurist,” simply states: “The verdict.” That felt, to Monette, like the end. One of the truths that Borrowed Time records—and now reminds us of—is just how stigmatizing AIDS was in those years. And how little anyone knew. Those were the days when patients educated their doctors about illnesses and possible treatments, when the “social network” was late-night phone calls to friends and friends of friends around the world, desperately seeking any prophylaxis. Trips to Mexico for a magic elixir were part of Monette’s routine in 1985 and ’86. Six weeks after “the verdict,” his journals reflect Monette’s battered state of mind: “PM the writer is severely compromised, bloodied—I’m almost afraid to write how bad that feels. … I know the question I’ve got to answer is ‘what’s left?’ The only answer I can come up with is that the last & best & only Paul Monette that I care about is the Paul of Paul & Roger. … I can’t be real. I’m scared shitless.” Much of Monette’s life at this point involved driving fast down Sunset Boulevard, frantic. Roger was treated at UCLA Medical Center. Borrowed Time is dedicated to his primary physician, Dr. Dennis Cope. In the book, Monette records a conversation with the doctor just hours before Roger’s death: “Dennis Cope, who had fought with us in the trenches for nineteen months, came in and stayed the longest. ‘What am I going to do without him?’ I asked in a hollow voice, and Cope replied immediately with great force and conviction, ‘Write about him, Paul. That’s what you have to do.’” (May 7, 1985.) Borrowed Time gives us an intimate, lacerating view of a time to which no one would return, but in the year of the thirtieth anniversary of the discovery of what became known as hiv/aids, revisiting Borrowed Time is a moving, devastating experience. It is a personal remembrance of a great love lost—and it is the sort of story that too many people know all too well. Chris Freeman teaches English and Gender Studies at USC Dornsife College in L.A.
