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A LAST LETTER

"It's like war time now," my aunt told me a few weeks ago. She lived in France during World War II. "You young people are losing friends and relatives just as if it were bullets taking them away."

She's right, it's a war zone, but it's a different battlefield. It's not bullets that catch these soldiers, and there's no bombs and no gunfire. These people are dying in a whisper.

In 1982, my best friend died of AIDS. Since then there have been so many more friends I've lost. We all have. Through all of this I have come to realize that the most painful tragedy concerning AIDS death has to do with something much larger than the loss of human life itself. There is a deepening horror more grand than the world is yet aware. To see it we have to watch closely who is being stolen from us. Perhaps there is no hope left for the whole of humankind, not because of the nature of the epidemic, but the nature of those it strikes.

Each friend I've lost was an extraordinary person, not just to me, but to hundreds of people who knew their work and their fight. These were the kind of people who lifted the quality of all our lives, their war was against ignorance, the bankruptcy of beauty, and the truancy of culture. They were people who hated and scorned pettiness, intolerance, bigotry, mediocrity, ugliness, and spiritual myopia; the blindness that makes life hollow and insipid was unacceptable. They tried to make us see.

All of these friends were connected to the arts. Time and history have proven that the sensitive souls among us have always been more vulnerable.
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My friend Gordon Stevenson, who died in 1982, was a filmmaker. His insights turned heads. With his wife, Muriel, who starred in his low-budget films, he was on the road to a grand film future, one that would serve to inspire and influence a lot of people. When Muriel died in a car accident in Los Angeles, it wasn't long after that Gordon started getting sick.

We thought it was mourning that was wasting him, until he was eventually diagnosed and admitted to the hospital with AIDS. He demanded that I didn't visit him there, and I honored his wish, so we talked on the phone every day and he wrote me one letter. 

It was written on his own paper, with his designed letterhead: a big black heart, inscribed with the words Faith, Hope and Charity on a background of 

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orange. It was the last letter I received from him. He died the day I got it. I still have it, it's all frayed but the message is crisp.

Dear Cookie,
Yesterday when I talked to you on the phone, I didn't know what to say...Yes you're right, all of us "high riskers" have been put through an incredible ordeal -- this is McCarthyism, a witch hunt, a "punishment" for being free thinkers, freedom fighters, for being "different."

I think if you told kids that measles was caused by excessive masturbation, and were made to wear T shirts to school that said "contaminated" so that no one would sit near them or play with them, and then put in a hospital ward with other measles patients to have swollen glands ripped out, spots cut off, radiation bombardment, and tons of poison to kill the measles, all the while their parents telling them it serves them right, masturbation is a sin, they're gonna burn in hell, no allowance, no supper for a week, and the doctors telling them that it's the most fatal disease of the century...I think you could produce a large number of measles deaths.

Instead the child is kept at home, given ginger ale, jello, and chicken soup, and reassured by a loving mother, whom they trust absolutely, that it's nothing serious and will go away in a few days -- and it does.

Our problem is that we are all alone in the cruelest of cruel societies with no one we love and trust absolutely.

All we really need is bread, water, love, and work that we enjoy and are good at, and an undying faith in and love of ourselves, our freedom and our dignity. All that stuff is practically free, so how come it's so hard to get -- and how come all these assholes and "professionals," friends and foes, family and complete strangers are always trying to convince us to follow their dumb rules, give up work in order to be a client of theirs, give up our freedom and dignity to increase their power and control?

I still don't want you to visit me here. I'm much worse, visually, than when you saw me last, so until I'm feeling stronger and looking better, let's leave it this way.

I hope this letter finds you in good spirits. I hope you're not upset that I don't want you to visit me. I wish you happiness, love, prosperity, and a limitless future.

I KNOW, I KNOW, I KNOW that somewhere there is a paradise and although I think it's really far away, I KNOW, I KNOW, I KNOW I'm gonna get there, and when I do, you're gonna be one of the first people I'll send a postcard to with complete description of, and map for locating...

Courage, bread, and roses,
Gordon

COOKIE MUELLER

Cookie Mueller's essay first appeared in City Lights Review: No.2, 1989, pp.51-52 and is reproduced here courtesy of City Lights Books, San Francisco.

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