Craft Analysis- Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving. ~Martin Amis

The 1980s is considered the “beginning” of AIDS, as it affected more and more people. It was also the nascent stage of AIDS awareness, as people could understand the main reason behind the growing number of incurable opportunistic diseases like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Till then, no one had any clue regarding things like; how the disease transmitted, who can have the disease, or how can a person acquire the disease. AIDS was, and still is in many ways, a life-changing event. 

Memoir does not begin with an event but with the perception of applying meaning to that event.  Memoir is looking at your past in retrospect and how through my present “lens” has my past changed, after I have taken a step or two back to gain perspective.  Thus, Monette was able to discern the possibility of hidden patterns within his own life.  These hidden patterns that, if he could unearth and understand them, he could then possibly explain his own life as well as Roger Horwitz’s life. Monette wrote because he knew Roger was dying, as well as himself. Monette wrote, at the time, for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. He just had to figure what he was going to write knowing he would die.

“The fact is, no one knows where to start with AIDS.  It comes slowly like a dawning horror… you cobble together a weapon out of anything that lies at hand, like a prisoner honing a spoon handle into a stiletto.  You fight tough, you fight dirty, but you cannot fight dirtier than it” (Monette 2)

On June 5, 1981, the virus that would become known as HIV was mentioned for the first time in a medical publication. The thirty-third anniversary has come and gone. No honest story of AIDS can be told without first recognizing and honoring the generation of people who fought so hard to build organizations, tools, and the scientific and political support we all but take for granted today as the framework for confronting the epidemic: “The story I want to tell is about heroism and sacrifice and love, but I will not be avoiding anger” (Monette 19).  The LGBTQ communities and our supporters should be forever acknowledged for their immediate, aggressive and humanitarian response to AIDS. For it is them who left a legacy:

“There are very few fine points when people are screaming in clinics and shutting out friends and leaping thirty stories roped at the waist with their lovers” (Monette 44).

Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir perhaps is the most famous AIDS Memoir –– that would fall into the category of AIDS Literary Canon –– ever written in my opinion. 

“…Choking with pain and a wave of tears… staring dully out across the milky city awash with the old year’s sun, and I didn’t know what to say to sooth him.  The furious dance of the perfect week was over, and now the terror of what lay ahead came back in its full blankness” (Monette 45).

For many, HIV marked the end of what has been called the "Golden Age of Promiscuity." After the Stonewall riots of 1969, when gays fought back against a police raid at a bar in New York's Greenwich Village, gay activism exploded across the country, and social life became more open. And with birth control pills available, abortion legalized and antibiotics developed for many sexually transmitted diseases, the risks of all forms of sex seemed more minimal than ever before.

                        “Finally he broke through: ‘He’s got it.’

                        ‘Got what?’

It’s not until you hear first attached to someone you love that you realize how little you know about it… They’ve caught it early; you’re fine; there’s some kind of treatment… You fling these phrases instinctively, like pennies down a well” (Monette 8).

            Borrowed Time was the first narrative about AIDS to become a national best seller (Eisner).  Borrowed Time in its detail, accounts the author's final two years with his companion Roger Horwitz, who died of AIDS in 1986, personalizes the epidemic's appalling statistics with heartbreaking clarity.  Monette himself wrote that it would be “those of us who are ticking (who) will tell our stories (Monette 6).   Monette has etched a magnificent monument to his lover's bravery, their commitment to each other and the plague of hatred and ignorance they had to endure.

“I can see us so vividly side by side in bed –– reading, dozing, roaming –– always coming around again to that evening anchorage, no matter if the day had been a hurricane… I’d be tucked up against, my little friend, perfectly still, and thanking the darkness for what we had –– the ten years, the house, the dog, the work” (Monette 48-49).

           

Roger Horwitz (left), Paul Monette (right

Monette mined his entire lifetime with Roger in a million different ways and then linked that to the whole of his memoirist sense of using true scales of measuring what mattered.  It is the voluntary memory that is the mechanical retrieval function that gives us access to our amassed pictures of the past, and then allows us to focus in on the events and sensations (Birkerts 11).  Following any trauma, it is really your thoughts about the event that make you feel upset or afraid —you can only change your response once you have changed the way you think about it. A negative emotion is often the result of a positive intention: the positive intention of fear, for instance, might be an instinct to protect yourself. While you don’t want to ban fear from your psyche, since it plays a good role too, you might want to replace it with an alternative state that serves the same purpose. Loss. Grief. Mourning. Anger. Disbelief. Emotions are in abundance when a loved one passes away.  “What am I going to do without him?’ I asked in a hollow voice, and Cope replied immediately, with great force and conviction, ‘Write about him, Paul” (Monette 341). 

People need to find a way to cope with the situations and often need to express them-selves by writing their feelings down in order to get them out. This is exactly what Monette did in his book while remembering his companion Roger.  

“Roger looked over and tried to see me, as if from a train pulling out of the station.  That was the first time I suffered dying, and I can’t even say what death it was. Roger’s and mine both, to be sure, but something more as well.  I understood then that the tragedy of parting was deeper than death” (Monette 311).

Through writing Monette describes his exasperated emotions and the events that occurred during Roger’s battle with AIDS.  “The passing of the crisis, the giving back of time –– people with AIDS will tell you about that tidal shift, how it happens over and over.  Now Roger would need all the positive feelings he could muster” (Monette 213).  Monette’s transitioning through different emotions, the reader begins to understand the pain the author is brutally dealt. One can be easily reminded of Kubler-Ross’ five stages of death, which, includes: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Monette transitions rapidly through all of them in multiple facets at multiple times due to Roger’s decline in health.  There are many tonal shifts throughout. Monette transitions from one emotion to another quite rapidly and often without any warning to the reader. He goes from being depressed and angry one moment to sharing a happy memory with Roger. Most often Monette is in anger and denial.

Paul Monette (left), Roger Horwitz (right)

This book is an ode to his lover is taking a journey into a love story that will both move and inspire you.  

“Roger looked out through the coral tree –– no, not so much looked as turned to the breeze –– and he said, ‘We’re living on borrowed time aren’t we?’

                        ‘Yes.  Except lately we seem to borrowing an awful lot” (Monette 285).

The love between the two men, rather than on the terrible disease, which brought their relationship to an end on this earth, is the entire focus of Monette’s memoir. The book can certainly be read as simply another work about AIDS, but when one sees first that the author is writing out of a focus on love for Roger and for their time together rather than out of a focus on the disease which tore them apart and killed Roger.  It is this pain that Monette draws us into whether we want to or not, and it is this pain he makes us viscerally feel to our bone.

            Of course, it is especially difficult to focus on the love when so much that goes on between Paul and Roger has to do with the disease and its effects. This is especially true when the reader realizes that the book's beginning and end refer to the fact that the author himself is carrying the virus that killed his lover.

“I don’t know if I will live to finish this.  Doubtless there’s a streak of self-importance… but who’s counting? …All I know is this: The virus ticks in me. And it doesn’t care a whit about categories –– when is full blown, what’s AIDS related, what is sick and tired” (Monette 1).

A desperate cry, now amongst long-term survivors of AIDS, “How you do know when it is time to give up?” Usually the person asking is in a really painful and desperate place.  Am I brave or am I stupid? Is it perseverance or is it obsession?  To get back to the question of when is enough, I think the answer is when the pain of trying is worse than the pain of giving up. For me, the pain of stopping is way greater than the pain of trying.  There is no doubt that there is psychological stress due to the AIDS crisis and this has, in many cases led to physical and mental issues.

In several occasions, Monette explicitly links this increasing awareness of time and mortality with the AIDS crisis, remarking two-thirds of the way through that “The dread-of-AIDS . . .is a focusing factor”. During this trying period, Monette describes taking refuge in his significant other Roger Horwitz (Monette, Online Archives of California 109).

“I ran around the bed and clutched Roger’s hand. ‘We’ll fight it, darling, we’ll beat it, I promise.  I won’t let you die’… This is the liturgy of bonding.  Mostly we clung together, as if time still had the decency to stop when we entwined” (Monette 77).

Paul Monette

Thus the book begins with Paul and Roger's love affair, in Paul's words, and in Paul's recollections. In other words, the book begins after Roger has died, after Paul has himself acquired the virus, and after the prevailing factor in Paul's own life has become another imminent death--his own.

“I’d been there a few minutes, setting up command, when Roger began to moan.  It was the saddest, hollowest sound I’ve ever herd, and loud, like the trumpet note of a wounded animal.  It had no shape to it, noting like a word, and he repeated over, and over, every few seconds.  ‘Why is he doing that?’… I assumed he must be roaring with misery and anxiety… It wasn’t until ten week later, that I understood the trumpet sound.  I was crying up at his grave, and started to mimic his moaning, and suddenly I understood what he was doing (he) was calling my name.  Nothing in my life or death to come hurts as much as that, him calling me without a voice through a wall he could not pierce” (Monette 339).

The author's description of Roger being ravaged by the dreadful disease AIDS - at a time when it was considered mostly a gay plague and to the idiotic, as God's punishment - is a painful experience. His devotion to easing the love of his life to a pain free and, under the direst circumstances, the most dignified death as possible is a true testimony of their great love. “In this stark and hyperreal world of war, I had to focus on our endearing love, for it was every bit as actual as the horror” (Monette 178).  One gets wonderful insight into the character of his lover, his "laughing man", and kind of heart and beautiful of spirit.

“Then he (Roger) started to cry, and the burst of tears sent one of his contact lenses awry.  So instead of holding him I had to cup my hands under his eye while he worked the lens back in, swallowing the scald of tears.  That specific helpless moment, the soft dick swimming out onto his cheek, stuck with me like a pivot of agony… how in that moment I died inside.  As if I would not live in a world without my friend” (Monette 67).

Paul Monette- months before dying

How lucky they were to have found each other and to share this special love through their seventeen-year partnership.  However way we swing it is a love we all want, and wish for ourselves, and those that we love.

“If Roger had great patience, I have none… I am the weather, Roger is the climate… What ever happened to roger happened to me, and my numb strength was a crutch for all of his frailty… I am only saying that I loved him –– better than myself, no question of it” (Monette 65)

I could not put this book down. Normally a speed-reader, I forced myself to slow down to savor the writing as well as the tribute. I sat with him through the terror, the confusion and anger. He invited me there. He raged, he loved; he quaked with the terror of watching death. I have been in his seat and he captured it all in beautiful phrases.

“This is where survivor’s guilt and helplessness merge, because you start to think if only there were fewer errands… of I’d only picked up the Wednesday meeting, he wouldn’t have gotten so run down.  Maybe he would’ve been able to hold it back two months.  That way madness lies, I know, but you find yourself far down such paths in the woods before you know it.  Then darkness falls and your lost” (Monette 58).

Monette grounds his political and ethical arguments in a profoundly personal and painful story about the last year and a half of the life of his lover Roger Horwitz, after Roger is stricken with AIDS. The love of the two men for one another, and the suffering they endure together and separately, are the cornerstones of the author's efforts to expose the political and ethical realities of the wider, social, and global struggle against AIDS.

          

  “Now I see well why with such dark flames

Your eyes sparkled so often.

O eyes, it was as if in one full glance

You could concentrate your entire power.

Yet I did not realize - because mists floated about me,

Woven by blinding fate -

That this beam of light was ready to be sent home

To that place whence all beams come.

You would have told me with your brilliance:

We would gladly have stayed near you!

But it is refused by Fate” (Mahler).

 If memoirists are at some level philosophers of being, meaning they literally love the truth –– the truth of living –– then some would argue that the technical details of their recollecting of these mined gems are in where life of not only the memoirist soars but so does those of his/her characters.

When Roger and Monette visit with Dr. Dennis Cope, the book shifts gears. The book reads, “The verdict.” From that point on, the majority of Monette’s entries grow frantic and grief-stricken.  Monette alternates between despair and a resolve to help Roger fight through his illness. Monette also expresses a strong and complex sense of guilt. While Roger ponders Mahler, “Internaliz(ing) the tragic, it wasn’t by way of suppressing it; he could weep openly too. He simply contemplated more (Monette 41).

          

  “Often I think that they have only stepped out -

And that soon they will reach home again.

The day is fair - O don't be afraid -

They are only taking a long walk.

Yes: they have only stepped out

And will now return home.

O don't be anxious - the day is fair.

They are only taking a walk to those hills.

They have simply gone on ahead:     

They will not wish to return home.

We'll catch up to them on those hills.

In the sunshine the day is fair” (Mahler).

He worries throughout the book that he will not be patient enough as a caretaker, that he does not deserve to be healthy, and that he might have in fact infected Roger. Monette relays Roger’s fear of becoming a burden to Monette, a viewpoint Monette vehemently counters time and again within the book.

“It’s only lately that I’ve begun to understand… his pride, tenacity, modesty, all of them denial perhaps, but one mustn’t forget that some are virtues.  I comb back over these motives now with fine teeth, because I want to be as strong” (Monette 120).

            On July 14, 1985, Monette learns that he too is seropositive. However, Dr. Peter Wolfe reassures Monette that his T-Cell count indicates a low level of imminent danger. Subsequently, Monette relates his struggles to gain access to a number of experimental drug therapies, such as Suramin and AZT (or Compound S), keeping his finger on the anecdotal pulse of the efficacy of these drugs with the assistance of his friends Craig, Peter Mansell, and Bruce Weintraub.

Throughout, Monette grapples with the massive impact of Roger’s illness and the AIDS crisis have on his career. He frequently expresses a concern that in the face of these painful realities he will not be able to continue writing. He seriously raises the question of what else he could do with his life. Disease split his time into the life before and the life now and it will inevitably take his life as a tribute to its devastating power. Not knowing if he will survive long enough to finish his book, some would argue that Monette accepted his fate and gave up the hope of getting cured. Still taking his medicine and waiting for a medical breakthrough mostly as a matter of habit, he recognizes that the disease wiped off holidays from his calendar and left only one date to remember – that of his beloved lover’s death.

 Oh to be loved. How I long for that experience: to be needed and desired, to be chased and to know without a doubt that I posses someone’s deepest affections. I long to be folded up in their arms of a man like that and know that I too am safe. Embarking on a great adventure with a companion who will never fail me would be utterly wondrous. The things we would conquer. The heights we would reach. The depths we would explore and the love that would be forever ours

“This is UCLA Medical Center calling.  Mr. Roger Horowitz died at 5:42 A.M. this morning, October twenty-second’… I swam back to bed… putting off as long as I could the desolate waking to life alone –– this calamity that is all mine, that will not end till I do” (Monette 342).

Works Cited

Birkerts, Sven. The Art of Time in Memoir. 5. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2008.

Eisner, Douglas. "Liberating Narrative: AIDS and the Limits of Melodrama in Monette and Weir." (1997): 213.

Mahler, Gustav. LiederNet: The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive. Ed. Emily Ezust. 2 November 2014 <recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?LanguageId=7&SongCycleId= 107&Contribid=1>.

Monette, Paul. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. First. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1988.

—. Online Archives of California. Ed. Dan Luckenbill. 1997. The Regents of the Univesrity of Califonia. 31 October 2014 <pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/ucla/mss/mone1707.pdf>.