Fallen friend’s colorful life, activism left indelible mark
I met Tim in 1985, a week after meeting my now husband, Brian. Tim was one of Brian’s roommates in the apartment off Newark Avenue.
It was hard to keep track of how many people Brian lived with: There was Lees, the fellow dancer; Sarah, the inspirational speaker; Gary, the set designer; Freddie (who would eventually process this whole bohemian life together and use it when she opened in the original Broadway cast of “Rent”); and Sister Bertrille and Meep, two cats who both refused to use the litter box because the bathroom was always cold. Tim was a downon-his-luck poet.
Because I wanted to be just as starving, I moved in. The coldwater flat was above a funeral parlor, so the neighbors were nice and quiet. From the roof, we could see the backside of the Statue of Liberty. Tim, lighting a cigarette, would say, “Now we know why she faces southeast.”
Because I could afford luxuries like say, rollers and brushes, we repainted the walls in a color that Brian had found on Christopher Street: Paris Pink. Tim said it was the same shade as Pepto Bismol.
Brian danced, sometimes on Broadway, sometimes on Skid Row. I worked in Macy’s accessories department. (That’s right, folks. I went from handbags to handcuffs.) Tim had a hard time holding down honest work and made the bulk of his rent writing straight pornography for “the family.” He never explained who that family was. Whenever we had a fight, he’d give a starring role to my mom, Nurse Vivian.
On the last night that we lived there, we took apart the waterbed. The frame was easy, but we learned that it was impossible to shove a waterbed mattress up the stairs. An hour into it, Tim had had enough. He took a kitchen knife and stabbed it until the stairway looked like Niagara Falls.
That done, we sat in the empty living room. Halfway into a farewell bottle of wine, Tim grabbed a marker and signed his name on the wall. Before I could object, he shrugged: “The landlord’s gonna paint over your Paris Pink walls the minute we move out.” Brian joined in, and they wrote the names of every artiste who had ever so much as spent the night in our pied-aterre. Tim then connected the dots of who had slept with whom. Brian was the only one with a line to me. Tim had lines going everywhere.
This was before the days of cell phones, and our camera had been packed, so the moment was lost to time. But a good third of the persons whose names were scribbled on that wall have passed away. AIDS cast a bitter shadow.
Tim was one of those all-ornothing kind of guys. Diagnosed with AIDS himself, Tim transformed from Reagan Democrat to ACT UP activist, dragging me along half the time to protests. When Brian and I moved to San Francisco, he followed.
He got a degree from the New School. He enrolled in law school and met his second-to-last husband while in rehab. But AIDS caught up with him. Wasting syndrome. On one of his last few nights, Jon, Brian and I sneaked Tim out for a cigarette on the openair deck of what was then called Davies Medical Center. As I unplugged Tim’s cannula, Brian struck a match. Tim said: “Don’t let me be like your Paris Pink walls. Don’t let them paint over my years on the planet.”
Tim may not have been directly responsible, but all that activism mattered. They never did find a cure for AIDS, but they did find a lot of therapies. And the scientific methodology that was used helped lead to some of the vaccines being used in our current crisis.
Terry, our friend who runs Cliff ’s Variety, never knew Tim. But she grew up working at the store and so had a front-row seat for the AIDS epidemic. And now that we are on the downside of the pandemic, Terry and her husband, Rich, volunteered for the AIDS/ LifeCycle, a 545-mile bicycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
Wednesday, Dec. 1, is the 33rd annual World AIDS Day. Neither epidemic is over. Some 36 million people have died from AIDS, and nearly 38 million are living with HIV. If you want to remember Tim, or any of the others, go to www. aidslifecycle.org. Look up Terry Asten Bennett. The Paris Pink may be gone, but Tim’s spirit is not.
A good third of the persons whose names were scribbled on that wall have passed away. AIDS cast a bitter shadow.