Oh, THERE'S thy sting...

[It's not all about me. It's not even slightly about me. Then why am I so damn tore up?]

[After the exhausting Brenda visit, punctuated by Jenny's mini-visit, our apartment officially had a "No Vacancy" sign on it. Stupidly, I read the augurs wrong; I thought they said "celebrate" when they actually said "rest, it ain't over."]

[We'd made a commitment to help Maria Gomez move her life into a big wooden storage box in preparation for her trip to England on Saturday. It was a good Outer Mission afternoon of hauling, pizza, wrapping breakables in newspaper, Sheryl Crow, beer, Kylie, Billy Idol, chatting, and Duran Duran, but after having no sleep the night before (those damned augurs...), we were exhausted.]

[There was a cryptic message on voice mail when we got home from Malcolm, saying that he had serious news and he needed us to call him right away. "Oh, shit," we thought, "Patrick." Malcolm and his wife Lisa are the adopted straight couple of a bunch of clubby queens with whom John and I have a passing acquaintance. Passing, except for two members: Patrick, our ex-roommate who we had to ask to leave a few months ago (and John's best friend from the sixth grade); and Harvey, his friend, who I've mentioned here a couple of times. Patrick and Harvey were the people who greeted John as he stepped off the Greyhound bus from Rochester over six years ago, and who were John's best friends in S.F. until their lives started to diverge (wilder and crazier in their case, increasedly domestic in ours.) We hadn't seen either of them to speak of since Patrick moved out in March.]

[John asked me to call Malcolm to find out what was going on. "I can't deal with this. I'm going across the street to get some cigarettes." With Patrick's diagnosis having preceded ours by a couple of years, and his druggy, give-a-fuck lifestyle, we had been dreading a call like this for some time. I called Malcolm, got the info, and sat in a living room chair in shock.]

[John returned home, I sat him down on the couch, and said, "It's not Patrick...it's Harvey. He's on been on life support at UCSF since Thursday, has no brain activity, and they're shutting it off on Monday." We cried on each other, got it together to go tell Leah (who had run with that crowd a bit when she first moved to the city), and went over to Malcolm and Lisa's.]

[M. and L. have been fulfilling their usual role, but in extremis: providing some sort of safe haven for Harvey's myriad friends and acquaintances to gather. I can't imagine how they've been doing this all week. Anyway, Malcolm sat us down and told us in excrutiating detail about Harvey's spinal meningitis, his three heart attacks on Thursday, and how his family has flown in from the Midwest. I met Harvey's dad and sister on my birthday four years ago - I remember a cholesterol-laden breakfast and lots of no-crap, mid-American friendliness.]

[Anyway, it's been hell. Harvey and I were by no stretch tight, but he was never anything but pleasant to me. He and John were very close for a while, and had a drama or two over the years, as close friends do. He was my age, and now he's gone. As I think I've written before, I haven't had to deal with death very much; if it's this hard with an acquaintance, what the hell is it like with close friends or family?]

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