I have a shadow of a memory of going out with David to buy a Christmas tree one cold, overcast afternoon in December. We’d been sitting in the apartment, spending a weekend day in the usual way, when I decided that we had to get a tree for the apartment, and that we had to get it right away. David, always game for anything that would give him a chance to regain his bearings in a world in which simple little pleasures like holiday traditions were permitted and possible, followed me out the door and over to Essex, where we picked out the tree, and then helped me carry it back home. It would have had to have been a fairly small one, but I would have insisted that it be real so that the apartment would smell like Christmas. I seem to remember that David was too tired by the time we got home to help me decorate it with the cheap ornaments and lights that I’d bought in the discount stores on Delancey Street, and instead sat on the bed watching me do it with that happy, bemused little expression on his face as I hung ornaments and no doubt chattered on about Christmas. It was important to me that he at least have a tree for Christmas.
I was obligated to spend Christmas Day with my family in Connecticut, as I did every year, but David and I did spend Christmas Eve together. We’d spent the day on Suffolk Street, doing whatever it was that kept us happy and occupied back then. In the evening we went to my mother’s apartment in Peter Cooper Village for dinner. David was nervous; we all were. He wanted to make a good impression. It had been, I think, a long time since he’d made a good impression on anyone other than me.
When we arrived, my mother was watching a show about tuberculosis on T.V. For a few minutes, we all just watched. No one knew what to say, or had the sense to turn it off. Other than that, the evening went fairly well. My mother gave David a green button-down shirt as a Christmas gift. (Years later, my mother told me that she’d worried about eating from the plates and using the utensils that David had used afterwards. I was shocked to hear it, even thought that kind of thinking wasn’t at all unusual at that time. Still, I was, and will always be grateful that she invited him to dinner that night.)
On New Year’s Eve I know that I was with him. I remember the apartment being dim and vaguely festive, still scented with the pine-smell of the tree, lit either with candles or Christmas lights, or both. Late that night I sat on the bed and tried to call one of my favorite clients, a very young gay man named Jon, who was blessed with the most loving, supportive family I’d encountered in my time working with people with AIDS. His father answered, and told me that Jon was either sleeping or in the hospital–I don’t remember which. Weeks later, I learned that Jon had actually died several weeks earlier. His father didn’t want to upset me on New Year’s Eve. The family had come to think of me as a friend, as Jon had.
Tagged: addiction, AIDS, book excerpt, books, Christmas, HIV, New Year's Eve, New York, tuberculosis
Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS' Wildfire Days 
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