40 years ago, another virus swept America and hit home
Almost daily during the pandemic I’ve thumbed through my books searching for Ron Doyle.
I can see him the moment he showed off a T-shirt someone sent to our newsroom. He held the shirt under his chin to determine if it would fit. That’s when I snapped a photo.
It was sometime in the mid-1980s when you developed your photographs on paper in a bath of sour chemicals. I kept the photo and remember tucking it into a book for safekeeping.
Was it in Mark Twain’s “Mysterious Stranger”? I flipped through those pages one night this past year and couldn’t put it down. “In most cases,” the story tells, “man’s life is about equally divided between happiness and unhappiness.” Unhappiness, sadly, “predominates.” No photo.
“So it goes,” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. repeats, often, in “Slaughterhouse Five.”
No photo in that classic either.
I turned to Vladimir Nabokov and his “fancy prose style” in “Lolita.”
No photo.
“The Razor’s Edge”? It had to be in W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece. What else could sum up the year we just had?
No photo.
“A God that can be understood is no God,” Maugham writes. That seems about right.
Who can comprehend a pandemic? That’s what has kept me hunting for Ron’s photo. A friend asked a friend who turned to an aunt who sent along a picture so I could see him again. Ron Doyle was just 33 and living in the South End when he died of AIDS on Dec. 11, 1990.
His whole life was in front of him. Boston Magazine had named him the city’s best TV critic in 1986. We said goodbye as the virus was roaring. More than 700,000 people with AIDS have died since the beginning of the epidemic in 1981. There’s no vaccine, but it’s no longer a death sentence. It was for Ron, and I watched him fade away.
“Ron was just a wonderful personality and talent,” our former editor at the Middlesex News, Ken Hartnett, said Friday. “He died before he developed, and he could have been great.”
Now we mark a year when the coronavirus has killed 2.6 million people worldwide — 531,276 in the U.S. as of the start of the weekend. The fatalities are predominantly among the elderly, but too many voices have been silenced.
There are parallels between the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. Early misinformation proved harmful. Blame and political bickering didn’t help either. Some very heroic medical professionals worked tirelessly then and now to keep people alive.
I don’t know what Ron would say today about this health crisis. I know he’d be among those digging for any breakthroughs and quickly criticizing those he felt deserved to be called out.
But there’s a feeling of deja vu that’s difficult to shake when you think about AIDS and the coronavirus. Randy Shilts hit upon that in his landmark book “And The Band Played On.” He writes “the future will always contain this strange new word. AIDS would become a part of American culture and indelibly change the course of our lives.” The same will be said of the coronavirus.
Randy Shilts died of AIDS in 1994.
But he was right. AIDS remains part of our lives and COVID-19 will, too. We can thank mRNA technology and Johnson & Johnson for vaccines that will help flatten the curve and open up the economy. It won’t bring back those lost, though.
That’s why if we can “escape these lands of darkness and see the lovely stars,” as Dante wrote in the “Inferno,” we need to “remember” those who didn’t make the journey. It’s the least we can do.