The AIDS years have been on my mind of late.
Last week I finished reading Just Kids, musician/poet Patti Smith's autobiography. Her first lover, the seminal artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, succumbed to AIDS in 1989. The two met when they were twenty, and lived and worked together in the swirling art scene of the late sixties and seventies New York City.
In this quote from the 2008 film Dream of Life, a documentary about her, Ms. Smith talks about living even today with Mr. Mapplethorpe's memory:
Robert Mapplethorpe got AIDS. We were the same age. We knew each other since we were twenty. And he was forty years old, just starting to get success. His work was growing; he still had a million ideas. He really wanted to live. He was handsome. He had every, every reason on earth to live. All things, in every part of his life, were looking up. And he fought till his very last breath. Never gave up. I watched this man go through inconceivable horrors and humiliations, and still try to take photographs—you know, take a photograph, and vomit, and then take another photograph. Right to his last breath he was trying to work.
And that, again, taught me a lesson. So after he died, and a sequence of other deaths—my piano player, who was very beloved, my husband, and my brother, and some other people—I kept, as low as I felt, I kept thinking of this person who struggled with all—every fiber of his being to live.
I think about that every day.
In an excerpt on pgs. 275-276 of Just Kids, Ms. Smith, a fine writer, offers a pitch-perfect picture of her last visit with Mr. Mapplethorpe, in his New York loft. Everyone who lived through the '80s, or at least who lived in the firestorm of AIDS, remembers days like these:
There was no one present save his nurse and she left us to ourselves. I stood by his bed and took his hand. We stayed like that for a long time, not saying anything. Suddenly he looked up and said, “Patti, did art get us?”
I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. “I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know.”
Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint. Robert beckoned me to help him stand, and he faltered. “Patti,” he said, “I’m dying. It’s so painful.”
He looked at me, his look of love and reproach. My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. It was the first time that I truly knew he was going to die. He was suffering physical torment no man should endure. He looked at me with such deep apology that it was unbearable and I burst into tears. He admonished me for that, but he put his arms around me. I tried to brighten, but it was too late. I had nothing more to give him but love. I helped him to the couch. Mercifully, he did not cough, and he fell asleep with his head on my shoulder.
The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying; creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.
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