The Death of Friends Read Online Free PDF

Chris?”
    “It’s wrong for me,” he said.
    “Maybe I should leave.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t.”
    “You’re a very confusing guy,” I said.
    “Are you so sure of yourself?” he asked me.
    “No,” I said, and I stayed.
    After I talked to Captain Closet, I called Josh, but his line was busy. I tried again a half hour later, but it was still busy, so I decided to drive to West Hollywood and check on him. My route took me past Azul, the restaurant where Zack said he worked. I pulled into the empty parking lot. A handwritten sign on the door said “Closed Due to Act of God” and there was a number for emergencies. I jotted it down and headed west on Sunset.
    The light glittered through the warm, hazy air and I pretty much had the road to myself. The traffic lights were out and businesses were shuttered, but the only visible damage from the quake was a few cracked walls. This hadn’t been the big one, the cataclysm that was supposed to drop us into the Pacific, leaving only wisps of smog as a memorial to the city of the angels.
    No doubt, a few thousand people would move on to stabler ground, and for a while those of us who remained would be more conscientious about our earthquake preparedness kits. Eventually, though, new residents would take the places of those who’d left, and the rest of us would forget to change the batteries in our flashlights. You need a short memory to live in L.A. That, and a blithe indifference to your own mortality. But for me, it was a city of death.
    In the past few years, a dozen friends of mine had died from AIDS. I’d sat the watch with many of them. It sometimes seemed to me that I was living in one of those South American countries ruled by colonels, where people disappeared from the streets into the backseats of blue Fords, never to be seen again. The streets were haunted with their absence and there were rips in the fabric of my reality that could not be mended by grieving or the passage of time. And now the cars were coming for Josh.
    Josh Mandel was the friend I thought I’d found in Chris Chandler all those years ago. I’d had to wait a long time and stumble into a lot of blind alleys before I found him. I’d been thirty-six, a recovering alcoholic fresh off his last binge and trying to get back the legal career I’d very nearly succeeding in drinking away. He was twenty-three and HIV-positive. Definitely not your traditional family, more like a couple of outcasts. They say love is blind, but only to convention. We saw each other clearly enough. Then he started to get sick, and decided I couldn’t understand, and he left me for someone who could, and now he was even sicker, and his friend had died, and we could see each other again.
    I pulled up in front of the brightly painted apartment where Josh lived. The front wall was orange, the beamed walkway to the street purple. Josh called it the HIV Hilton, because it had been built by the county to house people with AIDS. I rang the bell to his apartment, and a second later, a buzzer let me in. I crossed the courtyard and climbed the stairs to the third floor; inside the building, the colors were more subdued, pastel greens and blues. There was, as usual, little apparent activity and the quiet had the lassitude of a sickroom. Not all the tenants were sick, but, like a home for old people, a certain mortal inevitability hung in the air.
    The door to Josh’s apartment was ajar. I stepped inside and called out, “Josh.”
    He came to the door in a heavy robe. “Have you been trying to call me?”
    “Yeah, but your line was busy.”
    “I know,” he said. “My parents called, then my sisters, then my second cousin twice removed. Everyone was rallying around the fag.”
    “Are you all right?”
    “Bushed,” he said. He embraced me. I felt the lightness of his body beneath the robe. Had he lost more weight? It was hard to tell. Over the past year, his T-cell count had dropped into single digits and he had suffered from