What I Took or Did Not Take to the Potluck

Of AIDS and forgetting: A survivor's apology

What did I make for Jay’s potluck? Maybe the cold noodles I learned to make at Greens, a Barbara Tropp recipe: shitloads of sugar and black soy; julienne strips of cucumber, carrot, and scallion; matchstick strips of marinated and grilled tofu. The noodles speckled your white tee shirt, if you were dumb enough to forget you shouldn’t have worn one, because you would suck up the long egg noodles so they snaked in the air, flicking dressing as they disappeared between your lips.

Jay was dead, by the way.

He was one of 49 people AIDS killed in San Francisco that month in 1986, the same month 80 new cases were reported to the Department of Public Health. Since July 1981, when number collection began, the disease had taken 1,379 lives in the city. Jay was a guy I worked with, a waiter. He was dead.

His name was Jay.

I began to think about Jay on the first day of this month, when my Instagram was flooded with International AIDS Day posts. Began to think about the memorial potluck his boyfriend and roommates organized back then. I started to write this then, but couldn’t. I started and stopped again. It’s taken me almost three weeks, and still I’m balking. For me, the time of AIDS, the first wave of sickness and death I lived through in San Francisco in the 1980s, is a deep hole of forgetting. AIDS is too big to think about. I survived then by numbing myself: not letting myself feel the awful weight of it, distracting or distancing myself. I had plenty of enablers, believe me. The first years, 1981 till, I don’t know, ’85? The years before a test for HIV existed, and long before a treatment that worked. Before ACT-UP. Before acknowledgment of the epidemic from Washington.

Ben, the first guy I knew who died—we’d actually slept together maybe a year before he passed away. He had a dog he was always with, a leggy, droop-eared kind of setter, and they were both gentle, and lived in a basement apartment on Haight Street, sort of a converted garage, still pretty raw, with low ceilings and walls Ben had covered with hippie fabric between the studs, like cotton Indian bedspreads. (Almost everyone I knew then was an aspiring artist or writer or environmental activist, like Ben, and didn’t make enough to rent a bougie place.) Anyway I went over for dinner and then spent the night in this sleeping bunk he’d built within a little alcove.

We didn’t click sexually, though we tried. It was a relief when we gave it up and just settled down and went to sleep. I remember feeling warm and safe in Ben’s semi-underground place. And then gradually, I guess, I stopped seeing him and his dog around the neighborhood, but I only noticed in retrospect, after another friend, Mark—someone a lot closer to Ben than I was—told me, when I ran into him on the street, that Ben had died of AIDS.

That his memorial was small, because that’s how Ben wanted it, maybe just his sister, as I recall, and a couple of really tight friends like Mark. His sister took the dog.

Because, back in those early days, AIDS was so heavy with shame, so shadowed by fear and disbelief that silence was its almost inevitable witness. People vanished. For Rent signs appeared in apartment windows. Statistics were compiled. (They were also part of the silence: a bureaucratic rendering of something incomprehensible to any ordinary human reckoning.)

“The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent,” Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings. “And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.”

And so I’ve forgotten. Lately, I find myself almost desperate to remember.

Jay and I weren’t close, we barely knew each other. He was just another waiter at the restaurant where I cooked, a face at the cold station to pick up plates; rest his forearms on the high counter as I finished his Caesars or wiped a plate rim clean before hoisting them up to the pass. He had gorgeous, wide-set eyes of black onyx; a delicate mouth beneath a mustache he wore like bristly protection. I read his short obituary in the digital archives of a gay weekly and wonder why I didn’t bother to find out more about him at the time.

I feel stuck between numb forgetting and the guilt of not being able to remember more.

I once pitched an editor for a story about how AIDS deaths in restaurants in the ‘80s and ‘90s altered the nature of food in New York. “This is interesting and worthy,” the editor wrote back, “but it's just too ephemeral for us to cover, in that there are some many people whose life and legacy were forgotten or misremembered after they died of AIDS-related illnesses. We could only DO stories like these, and maybe there should be a section . . . doing that, but it's sadly just not really a fit . . ..” And so we’ve chosen, as a culture, to forget.

In the midst of Covid, a journalist writing about what and how people cooked during the shutdowns called to ask me how it was in the early time of AIDS. I just broke down: found myself weeping, barely able to talk, all of my silenced trauma released into my lungs, my shoulders, my face. The particular malevolence of AIDS includes a genius for burrowing into survivors; an ability to plant fear and grief into the bodies and psyches of those of us who lived. I learned to carry it, accommodate and enable it, like some excoriating family secret that only I could feel the pain of.

Cookbook author Claudia Roden quotes an old Arab proverb: The dancer dies and does not forget the shaking of his shoulders. I think it means that the things your mind has allowed itself to forget—those things never leave your body. I still remember the way Ben’s bed smelled: like dog, and the fresh-rain sweetness of clean skin.

I think if only I could recall what I made for Jay’s potluck, I might be able to make sense of what happened, the scale of loss. I’ve transferred the horror onto the problem of not remembering the details. AIDS is a master of this—tricking you into thinking all you need to do is gather up a few details in the past in order to be at peace. To give AIDS permission, as it were, to deploy its evil, as long as you’ve made an accommodation for it by remembering the smallest details of what happened: where you were, what you did. What you ate and how you moved on. And if your body won’t let you remember, how you convinced yourself of what you did; how you searched the drawers in Jay’s former kitchen to find a container to transfer the leftover noodles into; how you gave your bowl a quick rinse, hugged his boyfriend, and left; how you walked home through Dolores Park on an afternoon when you were granted the blessing of sun on your neck and on your arms, looking down at your shirt to see where the noodle dressing would have left its spatters.