San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Friend lost before magic reach of cyberspace
The question haunted me for years, all the more so as the magic reach of Google, Facebook and Zabasearch had reconnected me with so many friends and acquaintances of the past.
Whatever happened to David Lull, nowhere to be found in cyberspace? We had developed a kinship in the freshman dorms with our mutual interests in sports, music and politics. As sophomores at Humboldt State University, we were roommates in an offcampus apartment. When David transferred to San Diego State as a junior, we kept in touch with occasional letters, which gradually became less and less frequent.
And then, nothing, not a word, for more than four decades.
Until last Sunday, when an email from his older sister, Summer Lull, popped up in my inbox, as if it were a bottle washed ashore across a vast, dark ocean.
“I am David Lull’s sister,” it began, snapping me to attention during a pause on my leisurely bike ride on a sunny winter’s day.
“I was going through his things, as I do every 5 or 10 years, and I found the letter you wrote him after he transferred to San Diego State,” she wrote. “David did not keep a lot of personal effects, and I was sure I would never find anything I hadn’t seen before, but there was your letter before me for the the first time.”
Summer sent photocopies of the handwritten letter and envelope.
It was dated Jan. 22, 1976. I was telling David about my evolving appreciation for jazz ( citing Stanley Clarke, Billy Cobham, Chick Corea) and an upcoming concert on campus with Elvin Bishop ( whom I would end up interviewing). I was bemoaning the threatened move of our beloved San Francisco Giants to Toronto, sharing highlights of the latest Glenn Dickey zingers in the Sporting Green and bringing him up to speed on our HSU friends and my involvement in the student newspaper and radio station.
I don’t remember whether he ever wrote back.
Summer delivered the heartbreaking news.
“I am not sure you are aware that David died of AIDS in 1992,” she wrote. “He was only 37 years old, a talented photographer, and it was when I was going through his photography for the thousandth time, that I found your letter.”
She went on: “This is a tragedy which has followed me the rest of my life, and I continue to grieve this profound loss of my brother, my best friend.”
Her email was a gift to him, and to me, whom she readily located through Google.
David and I spent so much time together that I assumed I knew him well. As I wrote back to Summer: David was a kind, smart, creative person with a wonderful dry wit who always made life more interesting for those around him. But I did not know everything. Summer asked if I had an idea that David was gay during our friendship. I did not. Neither did she at the time.
In retrospect, I wish we could have stayed in touch to share the joy of a friend finally able to be open about his sexuality and to offer him comfort during his deterioration from a hellish virus made all the more insidious by the stigma and government inattention of that grim era.
Summer and I exchanged emails all week. She filled in the blanks on David’s life from 1976 to 1992. He graduated with a major in German, traveled to Eastern Europe, was into backpacking and a master of photography ( as he was when I knew him), worked as a systems analyst for Wells Fargo for many years, loved the poet Rilke and was a bit of a loner who never had a longterm relationship.
“David ‘ came out’ by accident, in the late seventies ... when my dad found some gay magazines in his room,” Summer recalled. Their parents were accepting, though it was a source of strain. Summer had already figured it out, and also revealed to him that she was a lesbian.
She learned he was HIVpositive in summer 1985 when she suggested he should be a sperm donor to a lesbian couple who were friends of hers. He told her about his status and swore her to secrecy, which held for six years until he received a pneumonia diagnosis and “it was suddenly all in the open.”
On Oct. 17, 1989, David was running late for a bus back to the East Bay. The driver stopped, allowing him to board. David’s lack of punctuality may have saved a busload of passengers from a watery death. The bus came to an abrupt halt on the Bay Bridge, just a carlength away from the fissure created by the Loma Prieta earthquake. Summer still has the voicemail from him that evening.
“I came within an inch of my life today,” he said, with his characteristic calm.
Summer had a timelapse experience of her own with her onceclose friend Philip, a neighbor in Orinda. He had moved to the East Coast when his father was transferred there. Philip, Summer and David got together a few years later during his visit to California. Philip told them he had an experience in college dramatic enough to change the course of his life.
“I can’t say any more than that,” Philip said.
Silence. They did not press him. For years, Summer was on a mission: Whatever happened to Philip? “I searched old telephone books. I browsed the internet. I wondered how you were. I wondered how we came to lose each other,” she wrote in an essay, “Chance Encounter.”
Thirty years after they lived next door as teens, in that chance encounter with a hospital coworker — read her essay; I won’t give away the details! — Summer learned what happened to her friend. He, like David, died of AIDS.
There is so much about these stories that draws us back to a time when another pandemic was sweeping the country, taking so many vibrant young lives. It was before many men and women in certain circles could openly pursue their loves and desires, let alone imagine the possibility of marriage to a partner of their choosing. It was a time when the absence of internet search and social media would allow a friend who could be such a central part of one’s life for a relatively brief period to vanish from our daily consciousness without a footprint to follow.
Thank you, David, for saving that letter. And thank you, Summer, for sifting through his photographs, 28 years after his death, for one last discovery that allows those who knew him, and many he never met, to learn how special he was.