Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Strub Sean

Author:Strub, Sean [Strub, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Unexpected Expire

I lost several close friends between 1987 and 1989, but 1988 was particularly difficult, beginning with the drawn-out agonizing death of Bobby Barrios in January. Bobby and I dated briefly in the early 1980s, and he moved into the building on West Fifty-eighth Street where I lived. He was a beautiful olive-skinned, almond-eyed Princeton grad. When he wanted to join the Foreign Service, he carefully orchestrated a referral tree for his background check so they wouldn’t find out that he was gay. After posts in El Salvador and Portugal, he took a copyediting job at The New York Times.

The last time I saw him at home was in the fall of 1987. Michael cooked for the three of us at Bobby’s apartment. Bobby was lying on his couch but able to sit up to have dinner. Though he was in pain, he seemed glad to see us. However, moments after Bobby complimented Michael’s cooking, his face turned an odd shade, and he vomited up the entire meal in a series of painful spasms.

The next time I saw him was right before the holidays, in the intensive care unit at Roosevelt Hospital. He had been unconscious for days and had no idea I was there. There were tubes running in and out of his nose and mouth, and another poked through a hole in his stomach. His body was yellowish-green and purple. No memory haunts me more than seeing Bobby for the last time. It reminded me of my own fragility and how quickly and painfully life can change.

Bobby died on January 7, 1988, while I was in Iowa helping to highlight AIDS issues in the presidential campaigns prior to the precinct caucuses. My mother and her close friend Karlen Fallows organized a fund-raiser for the Washington-based AIDS Action Council at the University of Iowa Art Museum. Karlen’s brother, Burleigh Sutton, was sick with AIDS in San Francisco and would die later that year. Such a strong and public expression of support from my parents, and their friends, in my hometown, meant a lot to me.

Bobby’s death gave Michael and me the urgent sense that anything we wanted to do with our lives, we needed to pursue immediately. After years of enduring an insufferable boss, Michael quit his job in early summer and turned his attention to opening a small antique shop in Piermont, New York, where I had bought a house after selling the one in Bucks County. Piermont is fifteen miles north of the George Washington Bridge on the west side of the Hudson River, a quick commute to the city. It was enjoying a revival, spurred in part by Woody Allen having recently filmed The Purple Rose of Cairo in its quaint downtown.

It was a huge step for Michael to go into business. We leased space on Piermont’s small main street and left for a buying trip throughout the Midwest with a ten-thousand-dollar budget. We scoured antique shops, flea markets, and yard sales, buying furniture and paintings and bric-a-brac for inventory, packing tight a U-Haul trailer we dragged behind my Saab.

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