Part 5: “The AIDS Floor”
Fifth in a six-part series
In the autumn of 1988, Louis Fulgoni and Michael McKee flew to France, met friends and embarked on a self-guided, month-long tour of gothic cathedrals. It was something they had talked about for a long time, and the moment seemed right to finally make it happen. In one photo from the trip, Louis pets a stray dog in Chartres while a row of miniature gargoyles look on from a souvenir stand. With his jaunty beret and his manicured beard, he looks every bit the bohemian tourist.
Untitled, magazine clippings on board, early 1970s.
At the beginning of 1989, however, the relative normalcy of Louis’s post-diagnosis interlude would be shattered. On New Year’s Day, he and Michael hosted a packed open house at their apartment. Louis prepared a gourmet fondue and several other elaborate dishes. When the guests arrived, he was still wearing the jeans and white T-shirt he had thrown on when he started cooking that morning. The fondue pot was set up in Louis’s home studio, a converted spare bedroom. He spent most of the party in there, stirring the rich molten Gruyere to keep it from curdling. I wandered in at one point and glanced in his direction. What I saw stopped me cold: a middle-aged man who suddenly looked tired, old and shrunken inside the shirt that hung from his bony shoulders. At that moment, the illusion that Louis was different – that he would be the exception to the rule of sickness and suffering that had bent the will and taken the lives of so many others – fell away.
In the following months, Louis began to have trouble keeping food down. He lost more weight, and chronic diarrhea left him weak and dehydrated. After multiple rounds of testing, he was diagnosed with Cryptosporidiosis, an intestinal parasitic infection that can be dangerous for anyone but is potentially lethal for people with suppressed immunity.
By April, he had already been hospitalized for severe dehydration, and the doctor advised admitting him again. At first, he got into NYU Medical Center’s Cooperative Care unit, a hotel-like wing for ambulatory patients that had become the temporary home of many gay men and others in the early stages of wasting from AIDS. As his primary caregiver, Michael was allowed to stay in the room, but there was no hiding Louis’s severely depleted state. After a few days, partly because he needed a feeding tube, the staff said he would be transferred to the adjoining Tisch Hospital, where a bed had opened up on “the AIDS floor.”
An orderly arrived with a wheelchair to move him. Michael and I followed, rehearsing the doctor’s assurances that Louis could return to the hotel wing once his weight stabilized. It didn’t help. Our procession through the bland white hospital corridors had the distinct, antiseptic scent of a last mile.
The indignities piled on as spring turned into brutal summer. Michael was omnipresent, and I visited as often as I could while keeping the business afloat. The parasite was relentless, and Louis’s strength gradually gave way. His expression became vacant much of the time. He looked as though he was resigning himself to the inevitable. But then, in July, his symptoms seemed to abate slightly, and a test confirmed that the parasite count in his gut had marginally decreased, possibly due to an experimental drug he had begun taking. Buoyed by the news, he recovered a measure of his fighting spirit. He even asked for some decent solid food. I brought in a pasta dish from an Italian restaurant in Kips Bay. Louis nibbled at the penne and set down the takeout container. “Not very good, is it?” he said, ever the critical gourmand.
I stayed well past the end of visiting hours that night, and we watched a Bette Davis movie on the tiny television suspended above Louis’s bed. I can’t remember which film; it may have been “Dark Victory,” though that tale of imminent, inescapable demise seems too on-the-nose to be right. In any case, drinking out of Dixie cups, Michael and I polished off a bottle of Chianti that he had stashed in a drawer and forgotten. Louis got tired and faded in and out, but he seemed almost jolly when he was awake. It was nearly eleven when I left. I got off the hospital elevator with the guarded sense that we had bought some more time. I was wrong.
At a client’s office the next morning, I received an urgent message: Louis was struggling to breathe. When I arrived at the hospital half an hour later, he was wearing an oxygen mask but his chest was still heaving and there was panic in his eyes. Michael and I and a few close friends and relatives took turns holding his hand. Within the hour, he was on a ventilator in intensive care, heavily sedated.
For more than a week in the ICU, Louis was repeatedly probed and punctured as one organ after another failed. He briefly regained consciousness just a couple of times: once when he was alone with Michael, and again the night before he died, when he momentarily opened his eyes and scanned the faces around him. He seemed to be saying goodbye, or imploring us to forget ourselves and finally let him rest. And then it was over.
