Late in the night city, waiting for the last of the old streetcars to stop and take me out to the beach, and home. Warm light glowed in windows at the back of the small apartment buildings lining the edges of the park. If I missed the last streetcar, I’d have to catch a slow moving midnight bus, riding in the cold light of its reflections, dreaming wistfully as the darkened storefronts went by.

I drifted back and forth along the curb next to the tracks. Cars passed quietly at the corner, pausing for nothing and moving on. I waited for the sound of the train rising from the tunnel. I waited and thought hopeful thoughts, reflecting on the night I’d had. I waited and caught a hint of movement out of the corner of my eye.

Someone waved from one of the windows. I looked around me. I was alone in the cone of light that fell from a lamp. I looked again, and again the figure waved.

I did not respond. This was the big city, after all. The oddest behaviors surface in the night.

I drifted back toward the bench where the streetcar would stop, closer to the corner, closer to the few other people out on the street. When I shuffled toward the park again, a man was standing across the tracks, looking up at the sky.

“Lovely night,” he said, “isn’t it?” His form was small, slender, shadowed.

I looked up, too, as always intrigued by the few stars one sees in the sky over the city, through the lights and the shreds of fog that floated in during the night. “Yes,” I said, “it is.” It was too dark to make eye contact. He was too far across the tracks.

“Want a cigarette?”

“Um,” I stumbled, “I don’t smoke.”

There was a pause.

“Superman is on TV tonight,” he said.

A big movie on broadcast TV could still be a big deal back then.

“Smoke some weed?”

This was more inviting, but I felt a slight hook tugging at the back of my brain.

San Francisco in the early 1980s was an exuberant place to be a teenager. Punks and literati in North Beach, leftover hippies and Bohemians in the Haight, the lofty wealth of the postmodern eighties, the risks of the Tenderloin, the buoyant charge of the Mission, sleepy residential neighborhoods that went on for blocks and blocks, and the bright, not to say gay, colors of the Castro and Polk Street. The brutality of the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone was just a few years back, but the experience, the vigils and riots, had further unified a gay community that had established its cultural capital. It was a landscape of liberation that makes today’s hook-up culture look like a church social. San Francisco in the 1980s was also a mysterious landscape in which to be a teenaged boy.

“I said I don’t smoke. “ My voice more firm, the penny finally dropping on what was going on here.

“Oh,” he said, and there was disappointment in his voice.

“Just waiting for my train.”

“Ah.” His silhouette faded into the darkness. In the distance I finally heard the approach of the last streetcar as it came through the tunnel.

Light appeared, the hissing sounds of brakes, and the squeal of metal wheels on metal tracks. The last of us climbed aboard and the car rumbled into the night.

I worked at a science museum in the city, one of a few dozen high-school docents who helped keep the place running, and who also enlivened the place with a hormonal energy that warmed the steel rafters in its cavernous space. I would change my idea of a career there, fall in love there, and endure the regular stabs of awkwardness that came with being a teenager, with all the uncertainty that entailed. Anyone old enough to look back upon their teen years knows what it is like to reflect upon improbable confidence, a self-assuredness regularly checked by reality. Some of us handled it better than others. Some of us experienced more liberty than others. I was never sure what to do with it.

The museum was a youthful place, but it nevertheless had its hierarchies. It was the job of the kids to break through that, assert their own value and independence. To stand out. We were kids. It didn’t always work out that we knew what was what and who was whom. But to get the help we needed, we approached a slightly older cohort, small rooms full of college-aged people and graduates, the ones who created the museum and kept it going.

“You’ll have to talk to Richard. He works in graphics and he can work up some text, design a label for you,” said one.

We were encouraged to pursue our curiosity by coming up with projects. We just couldn’t expect to give the staff too much to do for us that wouldn’t pan out. A teenager’s ideas are mercurial, at best. I had some ideas. One of them seemed to be going somewhere.

“Rick? Um…” said another.

“You know. Rick.” I said, not sure I knew who I was talking about. “Kind of good looking guy. Graphics?”

“Oh, you mean Richard,” said a third, casting a cool gaze from over his drawing table.

“Good looking? You think?” I met his wry smile and looked away, blushing. I blushed easily. Some thought it endearing. It made me a terrible liar. But the meaning here, really, was something else that ran underneath the conversation. The guy leaning over his table wanted to imply something that was supposed to be obvious when a teenaged boy said a young man was good looking. Me, I just thought I was being honest, descriptive.

“No, Richard… is not here,” he said. “Not sure when he’ll be back.”

In the evenings, after work, cool San Francisco nights closed in around the museum. A score of high school kids drifted out into the streets, heading for home, looking for fun, or both. My long ride home took me miles across the city, one bus, a streetcar, a walk. On many evenings I would make these into long walks through the neighborhoods, downtown, through the Tenderloin’s grit to echoing subway stations, waiting on lonely streets for the last streetcar of the night. None of the city’s dark menace fazed me much. I was immortal. What was happening in the city at the time, though, proved entirely otherwise for thousands of gay men and others in the mysterious early days of the AIDS epidemic. The headlines of the newspapers I had delivered months earlier expressed baffled confusion and a sense of bleak foreboding. It was still called GRID at the time, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Gay Cancer. The Gay Plague. So much of what little I knew about San Francisco’s gay community had until then been defined by its defiant assertion to exist, its independence, its freedom, all of it punctuated by its blazing rainbow flags, the sound of dance music in the streets, and a kind of mildly threatening assertiveness on one street corner or another.

Now it faced a mortal threat, one which so many wanted to deny. It was a judgement, the comeuppance earned through sexual freedom, the freedom to touch and to love whomever you wanted. Not for the penurious moralizing of those who claimed to know how it was supposed to be. This much I knew. Over the coming years I watched a community born in love, come to experience the ultimate mortal meaning of love, far too soon for so many. It was a community that found intense intimacy in grief, loss, anger, and resistance.

I was back again, looking for a little help with my graphics project.

“Rick,” said the artist. “You’re still looking for Richard?”

“Yeah, has he been in?” I asked.

“Oh no, not Richard. You haven’t heard?” He paused. “Richard died.” He winced slightly at the news he delivered, as if I didn’t really need to know.

“Yeah, some kind of cancer,” said someone else, from across the room.

Rick was too young to die. And I knew that my sense of who he was, my impression of him as a good looking young man, was connected to the sense I had of whom he loved. No one could explain how he had contracted a rare form of cancer. I knew his death was a part of the greater mystery of the plague. We all sensed it, but recoiled from talking about it.

AIDS would eventually kill twenty thousand San Franciscans, thirty million men and women worldwide.

The San Francisco Columbarium is a baroque wedding cake built in 1897 and houses the remains of thousands of San Franciscans, including many that predate the building’s decades of decay in the middle of the twentieth century. Its rehabilitation coincided with the worst years of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, and its somber glory became the resting place of many victims of this very modern plague. A visit to the columbarium, one of the last places in which human remains can be interred in a city that once banished the dead to the suburbs, is a visit to gilded age post-gold-rush funereal opulence. It is a meditative space in which one is surrounded by the ashes of those who have come before, sometimes long before. But it is the recently departed that pull at us, niches containing photographs and artifacts of the dead, along with their urns, emblems of life displayed with the desiccated reminders of our own mortality.

These people, mostly these men, were so young. They lived in an era of a thriving vitality in San Francisco. Their lives ended in gripping pain, lesions and wasting, lingering goodbyes long before their time.

There is nothing pretty about a death like that. It doesn’t end with the gorgeous corpses of Hollywood dramas. Being drawn to a community experiencing a paralyzing disaster from disease because of how that community was able to draw together in the face of its own mortality was merely my own romanticism. I longed for community and envied this community, even in the face of death. But that was my own loneliness, my own isolation, my inability to find a place I belonged in the city that I loved. I had no real claim even to the fringes of a community whose struggles I hadn’t lived, whose defiant life and very grim private deaths I had not experienced.

I received a message late one afternoon. A colleague had contracted the COVID-19. I needed to know that I may have been exposed, that I, too, may come down with the disease, to join the pandemic. I am old enough now, and fragile enough that it could well make me very sick, even threaten my life. But it is no certain death sentence as GRID once was and as AIDS still often is, though for the lucky ones now, who can manage the medications, HIV is chronic rather than necessarily terminal. The era of coronavirus doesn’t spawn the same drawing together of community as AIDS did for the gay community around the world, remembering, too, that AIDS can be equally indiscriminate. Our political moment isn’t easily open to that kind of communal feeling, though it could have been. The opportunity was there, but slipped through our sloppy fingers.

The notion of finding community through an epidemic is necessarily skewed. We show our best natures in times of crisis. We are drawn together, but togetherness and community feeling shouldn’t depend upon tragedy or disaster. We take each other for granted in the easy times. I sought a sense of belonging by standing on the fringes of a community exuberant, tragic, and tied together in love. I have not lived a life alone, but that sense of greater community has eluded me. And the notion of a lonely death haunts me still, in the frightening isolation of an intensive care unit, on a ventilator, struggling for every breath.

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