Night Life in the Age of AIDS

Are you afraid of AIDS? If you're straight and you aren't, it's probably only a matter of time. This past spring, after a series of events--the deaths of Liberace and other celebrities, the controversy over AIDS testing and condom ads on TV, the passing out of free Trojans at a New England church and reports of increased AIDS cases among heterosexuals--people who'd rarely talked about the disease were suddenly talking about it constantly, in health clubs, in singles bars, at the office. In cities across America, local TV news crews turned their lights on in churning discos and asked heterosexuals, "Are you nervous about AIDS?" If they hadn't been nervous before, being asked the question made them think twice. And simply seeing those reports on TV made people wonder if they were in danger. Could making love to a stranger, or even a longtime lover, be an embrace with death?

It was bad. Then it got worse.

"You haven't heard or read anything yet," Health and Human Services Secretary Otis R. Bowen said in February, predicting that AIDS might make the black plague, smallpox and typhoid epidemics "pale by comparison."

"I think the risk groups should be abandoned," Dr. Robert Redfield of the Walter Reed Institute of Research in Washington said that month. "There's really only one risk group--that's someone who has sexual ... exposure to the virus" that causes AIDS.

Just weeks after those reports came out, I traveled to New York, Denver and Los Angeles, talking with heterosexuals about AIDS. I went to places where single people meet--discos, parties, restaurants, neighborhood bars--and I heard some amazing things. Some people blamed AIDS on gays or a Commie plot or the wrath of God. Some wouldn't go anywhere without a condom. Some were angry; most guys joked about it. But nearly everyone felt the danger looming on the horizon, and worried that it might only become greater with the passage of time.

New York City

I lived in New York two years ago, right in the heart of Greenwich Village, where there may be more AIDS cases than any other neighborhood in the country. But like most heterosexuals, I hadn't worried about it personally. But this trip, there was no avoiding the subject--there were screaming AIDS headlines in the Post and the Daily News almost every day. Even the staid New York Times checked in--albeit in a mild-mannered way--with an amazingly frank Jane E. Brody column about condoms. It included such advice as "For disease prevention during anal sex, use the toughest condoms you can get, since ultrathin ones may not hold up."

I visited some of my old journalist friends. "You know what I think?" said a woman at Cable News Network. "It's only going to get worse. And as long as we live, it's never going away."

An editor at Newsweek said it wasn't fun anymore to go out in Manhattan. "Heterosexual angst has settled over every suck palace downtown," he said.

•

At midnight Friday night, the Limelight disco on Sixth Avenue had a waiting line 50 feet long. The crowd inside the converted 18th Century church was a microcosm of Manhattan: stockbrokers in Versace suits, coolly sipping Scotch; tough Brooklyn kids in suede jackets; Jersey girls applying lipstick in the half-dark; models and cabbies and nobodies and maybe a star or two, watching out for paparazzi. They moved around the dance floor, sat on the floor of a haremlike lounge and smoked cigarettes at tables in a quiet bar near the back.

In the quiet bar near the back, I noticed four women sitting at a low table, drinking and laughing, watching men walk by. They were eager to talk about AIDS. This is the same way every woman I talked with in every city reacted; I think women find it difficult to talk with men about AIDS, and they were glad to have the chance. One of the women asked me to sit down.

"I never worried about that stuff before, but now it's on everybody's mind," she said. She told me that her name was Irene, she was 26 and she and her friends were all in advertising. "You hear about more and more people dying of it, and then all this stuff about the condom ads. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should carry some around with me."

"Before, people would go out, they'd meet someone in a bar and they'd go home together," said Colette, a 23-year-old who was visiting from Chicago. "Now you think twice about it. Jesus Christ, I go to the bathroom in a public place and I worry about it."

"And when you think about all those wild times you had in college," said Denise, 25, "you're, like, 'Fuck!' You just go, 'Oh, those one-night stands!' You think about them now and it's scary."

I asked them if AIDS had changed the way people met and dated, and they all nodded.

"My mother's generation, the way they waited for marriage, that's coming back," said Colette.

"A few years ago, you might've just slept with a person and had a good time and that was it," said Irene. "Now more people are just starting to think, Stop it. Because you don't know."

They admitted that they'd done little to protect themselves from the disease short of holding guys off, since it's hard for them to ask men about their sexual histories or get them to wear condoms.

Colette stabbed my chest with her index finger. "Let's say you and I just met tonight. How would you feel if I said to you, 'Have you ever slept with a man?' Or if I said, 'Hey, let's go get some condoms.' Wouldn't that be insulting?"

She took a sip from her drink, rubbed a knuckle across her lips. "There was one time when I dated a guy"--she looked at her girlfriends--"I didn't tell you guys, but now that it's come up ... I went out with this guy a couple of times. And the first time that we were going to sleep together, he got up and got a condom. At the time, I was really dumb about it. I was impressed, because (continued on page 130)Night Life(continued from page 84) I thought he didn't want me to get pregnant. Then, the very next day, I read an article on AIDS. And I remembered he knew I was on the pill. So I called him and said, 'You son of a bitch, how dare you assume I'd have something you could catch?' I was very insulted. To me, that's dirty. I never saw him again."

Wendy was 22, sweaty from dancing, maybe a little tipsy. "I think guys are hard up and wanna have sex. And a lot of girls won't care. What are you gonna do, ask a guy if he has a doctor's note? Guys wanna get laid. You think a guy who wants to get laid is gonna tell some girl that he has AIDS? No! And they won't wear condoms because it feels ... whatever."

Colette sipped her drink and leaned closer to me.

"Look, I'm here for the weekend," she said quietly. "And, yeah, you go to another state, you meet somebody and, sure, you jump in the sack. You're on vacation; what the hell? It's not a big deal. But now it is a big deal. Because you may take something home with you that you're gonna live with, or die with."

Back out on the dance floor, three guys in suits surveyed the action. I cornered them in a hallway and asked if I could interview them. They laughed, scratched their heads, joked around.

"Well, I'm nervous about it and he's nervous about it," said one of them, a 25-year-old attorney from Long Island named Mitch. He hooked his thumb toward one of his friends. "He's actually gay." They all laughed.

"Yeah," Mitch said, trying to keep a straight face. "I think most people are aware of it. Everyone jokes about it all the time now, because if you're not going to joke about it, the alternative is to live in fear. There's a lot of hype in the paper, and you wonder about the legitimacy of it all. Nevertheless, I'm concerned."

"But it's not a major topic of conversation, really," said Steve, 25. He was from Long Island, too, where he worked for a car dealership. The third guy was a 24-year-old named Frank, who lived in Queens and worked in the Garment District.

They said no women had ever asked them to use condoms, and they didn't seem to have the inclination to try them.

Would they be insulted if a woman asked them to pull on protection?

"I wouldn't be insulted, because I'd probably be worried the same way," said Mitch. "I might be a little disappointed, a little taken aback. But in the heat of the moment, you know...."

"Condoms make it less pleasurable for women as well as men," Steve offered.

"Unless you use those big studded suckers," Frank said. "They're tough to carry in your wallet, though."

They didn't sense much change yet in the New York singles scene.

"I think it's going to take a few years until AIDS really hits home--with people who are close to people, their friends, their families," Mitch said. "Then maybe they'll listen up. But until then, I doubt it."

•

The next night, I was in my old haunt, the East Village. It's a strange, raw neighborhood full of old Polish immigrants and tough young punks, weirdo artists and transvestite junkies. It also has some of the best clubs in town.

I decabbed at Avenue A and Seventh Street, site of King Tut's Wah Wah Hut. A knot of punks jammed against the door, trying to get past the huge black bouncer, but he was counting heads--firemen had been coming around lately to enforce the club's capacity limit. I paid the one-dollar cover and squeezed in. It was seething inside, packed to the gills, but the drinks were cheap and the music great. King Tut's is a long, narrow bar that gets louder and hotter the farther back you go, and that's where I was going.

"I've sworn off sex for 1987," said a guy leaning against a column by the bathrooms. He had long black hair combed back from his forehead and wore a few black O rings twisted around the watch on his wrist. Very cool, very New York. He said his name was Chris; he was 24, lived across the Hudson in Jersey, worked as a cable-TV production assistant, and he was kidding about swearing off sex. But he was being careful.

"Bohemian girls in these downtown clubs are no go," he said. "Totally. Any girl with an artistic slant you have to stay away from, because she's definitely slept with bisexual guys. I'm only interested in a girl if she's from the suburbs."

I asked him about condoms.

"Even before the whole AIDS thing, I was always a big believer in condoms," he said. "I made up a little poem today for my friends. I'll tell you how it went." He pushed back his hair, concentrated. "Don't stammer and stutter/If you need a rubber/Ask Chris for a loaner/For something safe for your boner." He twirled around his beer, pleased. "I was shaving this morning, and I made that up. I always carry condoms with me for my friends, or for anybody."

Were his friends as worried as he was?

"My friends aren't that worried. They're much more cavalier in their attitudes than I. They're like, 'Oh, she's clean,' those clichés, you know? They really think a girl who might be kind of conservative is OK, but that's ridiculous. There's a little more animosity toward gays now, too. Something's wrong, something's kookie now. I'm an atheist, but there's some bad karma going on in the gay community."

At that point, a friend of his came up with a beaming Nabokovian vixen, who just might have been 18. She wore a brown bomber jacket, black tights, red Keds. "Hey, Chris, this girl wants to talk to you," his friend said.

"OK." Chris leaned toward me and slapped me on the back. "I'm gonna go hang around teenagers," he whispered. "They're safe, too."

Near the fire exit, I ran into a girl I had met at King Tut's last year--a beautiful, fragile, tough little girl in a big Nazi leather jacket. Lisa was 25; she led a very wild and often dangerous life, yet she managed to go to work each day as a receptionist uptown. She had had the unbelievably bad luck of being exposed to every single AIDS-risk group: She used to shoot up coke on the street; she had lived with a junkie for three years; and she had spent a summer in a SoHo loft with a bisexual who had a Haitian boyfriend.

"Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable," she said. "The only thing I haven't done is get a blood transfusion."

Lisa has known more than ten people who've died of AIDS, half of them gays, half drug addicts. The night we talked, two of her friends were close to death from it. I asked her if she was afraid.

"I don't know." She downed a little gulp of vodka. "There's so many other bad things that can happen to you, you know? It's, like, getting sick with some dreaded disease is not as bad as everyday stuff."

Lisa had been up for 48 hours; she'd hooked up with a punk band two nights before and had been partying with them since. "I think I may have gotten married last night," she said. "I remember I had to go back to my place for my white veil and my Nazi coat, so I could go to a wedding. But I don't remember much after that." She lifted up her sleeve to show me a large red wound. "Look, I got branded last night. I'm such an idiot. We were in this kitchen, and they were making sandwiches on this plate on the stove, and I said, 'Why don't you just burn me?' And I got it. That's what happens when you open your mouth too much."

It was just like Lisa. She's gone home to find Puerto Ricans murdered on her (continued on page 164)Night Life(continued from page 130) stoop, she was nearly strangled in a disco once and another time, she was walking to work when a car being chased by the police flipped over a cab and nearly landed on her. She attracts trouble, but she always seems to come through it OK.

Lisa knows nothing about safe sex; she's seen a condom only once in her life, when a guy she met at Danceteria used one with her. Usually, when she has sex, she's too far gone to think about such things. Anyhow, she thinks condoms are too weird.

I asked her if she ever thought about getting AIDS.

"No. This girlfriend of mine sometimes mentions it. We just, like, joke, you know? We believe in reincarnation and stuff like that. We believe we used to be together in a past life and everything, so we just keep on going, whatever happens."

I wanted to throw a blanket around her and take her away from New York, to some peaceful little town in the Carolinas, to a life where she'd be healthy and safe. But for people like Lisa, there's nothing you can do. They can't survive outside Manhattan. I like to think they're tough enough that nothing can ever really beat them. I know that's naïve, but it's something I try to believe in.

I'd done the discos and braved the East Village--now it was time to check out the singles scene on the Upper West Side. Clark Kenowitz is the bartender at Amsterdam's at 80th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, which has long been one of the hottest pickup spots in Manhattan. When I got there, it was still warm from the lights of a TV news crew. "They were doing the same thing you're doing," Clark said. "All the people they talked to said they think about it now."

So the fear of AIDS had reached Amsterdam's?

"No doubt about it," he said, rubbing a twist around the rim of a glass. "In fact, we were half joking about putting a condom dispenser in the bar on Friday and Saturday nights, when this place is unbelievably crowded and there's a lot of 'Hi, what's your sign?' things going on."

Do people talk with the barkeep about AIDS?

"Yeah. People will be standing around bullshitting, and it'll come up. It never did before. It's really been just the past six months. When I'm speaking with a guy, he'll be a little more open about it. A woman won't say, 'Yeah, I've been screwing Tom, Dick and Harry, and now I'm only screwin' Tom.' But a guy will say the equivalent of that."

Lucy's Retired Surfer café was only a few blocks away, but there was a ten-below wind-chill factor to consider, so I hailed a cab and made the short, careening trip. Lucy's gets a younger crowd; it's a bit of California on Columbus Avenue, with "Hey, dude" bartenders and marlins and surfboards on the walls. I shook off the frightening March cold and encountered four handsome lads clutching beers near the door.

Three of them--Tim, Doug and Chris--went to Villanova. The fourth guy, Mark, went to Georgetown. They were all from Brooklyn.

"At Villanova, the girls aren't that liberal," Tim said. "If we were going to school here, I'd be worried. But it would be pretty easy to tell which girls potentially had AIDS. Pigs are pigs. You have to know how to tell the pigs from the nonpigs."

How do you do that?

"A pig is someone who looks like a tramp. Someone who's easy to pick up. Which is, of course, what you're looking for." His friends all laughed. "It's a double-edged sword."

I asked them about condoms. This being the Upper West Side, Chris pointed out, "That's good stock to invest in."

"I agree," said Doug.

"I read an article in my school paper two weeks ago that talked about heterosexual AIDS cases," Tim said. "They were warning that you should use protection. And for a Catholic university, that's--" We all paused. We were clogging the main artery toward the bathroom, and a luscious young blonde needed to squeeze through. When she was past, Tim said, "Now, she is the type of girl who wouldn't have AIDS. And even if she did, I don't think I'd think about it."

So, were they scared of AIDS? Did they worry about it?

"It's like we're almost convinced that middle-class white Americans don't get girls pregnant," Tim said.

"You don't think it's going to happen to you until it happens," Mark agreed. "You know there's nothing you can do about it, so the best way to cope with it is to try to deny it."

I thanked the guys and went to talk with the blonde, the one Tim was sure did not have AIDS. She was sitting with a girlfriend at the bar; the bartender had given them little rubber whales and they were playfully batting each other with them. I ordered a screwdriver.

"Oh, do you want your mermaid?" the blonde girl said.

"Nope. It's yours."

She took the little plastic mermaid off the edge of my glass, licked the screwdriver drips off it and added it to her little mound of souvenirs. She said her name was Sarah; she was 21 and went to Columbia. Her friend Julie, a girl with flowing brown hair and amazing hazel eyes, was 21, too; she was a student at the Parsons School of Design. They were lifelong friends from a small town, who'd been sent to the big city for an education. And now their folks were worried.

"My parents have been sending me information about AIDS," Julie said. "They'd rather I be celibate. They'd rather I hadn't lost my virginity at all. But they know I have, so they're really, really hyper. They don't want a dead daughter on their hands. If you sleep with just two people, you can get it, because sleeping with one person can be like sleeping with 20 people. Who's to say? I've had a lot of boyfriends who slept around a lot."

"Plus, a lot of people around here are actors and dancers and stuff," Sarah said. "There's a high percentage of them who are bisexual, and that's a scary thing."

"I've pretty much abstained for the past month," Julie said. "I mean, my boyfriend left town and I stopped sleeping around. Before I had a boyfriend, I slept with whoever struck me. Now I'm waiting for another boyfriend, and even then, I would use condoms."

Like the guys across the bar, Sarah and Julie have friends who think their higher station is a barrier against AIDS.

"They don't worry about it," Sarah said. "They think it's a junkie-and-fag disease from downtown, and they're uptown, so it doesn't affect them. So they continue sleeping around."

When the girls left, they waved their whales at the bartender. "Thanks for the fish," Sarah yelled. Then they were out in the cold, and a cab appeared like magic to sweep them home. I sat at the bar. There were pictures of surfers on the wall, crates of Mexican beer stacked on the floor, blond guys with sunglasses doing shots for the hell of it. Shades of things to come.

Los Angeles

I used to think of L.A. as a crazy, sun-soaked land of Porsches and palm trees, surf punks and motion-picture executives. I've added another impression: Of all the places I've been in the past year, it's the most frightening place to be a sexually active heterosexual. It may not be statistically more dangerous than New York, but for some reason, the level of hysteria in L.A. seems strikingly higher. From the moment I touched down at LAX, I was inundated with the AIDS issue. It was on page one of the Los Angeles Times ("S.F. Leads Way in Tracing Partners of AIDS Patients"). I'd barely turned on the radio in my rented Pontiac when I heard a promo for a report on Eyewitness News about straights and AIDS. ("I like sex," a woman's pained voice said as I tooled down La Cienega, "but I'm not willing to die for it.")

•

After the freezing weather in New York, at least it was warm in L.A. I had dinner that Friday at a Thai restaurant in a rather rough section of Hollywood with my friends Tom and Barbara and a friend of Barbara's named Diana. Diana was single; she was involved in myriad film and video projects, with acting credits that included a role in the film Reform School Girls. She was wildly beautiful, with jet-black hair and the most striking eyes. Barbara had told me she had a very funny, caustic sense of humor. But it was hard to work humor into our talk that night.

Tom and Barbara had recently lost a friend to AIDS. They'd visited him over the months, as he died a slow and agonizing death, and they described how their friend, who was a homosexual, had wasted away before their eyes. I was struck again by how differently people feel about AIDS when they've known someone who died of it; in a strange way, they're not as hysterical about it. They're more compassionate, more serious.

"I've had seven friends die of AIDS," Diana said. There were many gays in her business--actors, singers, artists--and she'd forged close friendships with a lot of them. She's been aware longer than most people of the dangers heterosexuals face.

"I'm extremely nervous," she said.

"Did you used to have sex with anybody without even thinking about it?" Barbara asked her friend a tad jokingly.

"Yes, in the olden days," Diana laughed back. "Sex any time, with not just anybody, but, you know ... when it was my choice. I mean, my tastes are peculiar."

"Do they run to bisexual men?"

"No, I hope not. The thing is, I'm more concerned about the partners of my partners than my actual partners. There are only a few men that I'm nervous might have been really wild men. I'd be real surprised if any guy I ever slept with was bisexual, and I just hope that people they've slept with have the same history."

An amazing thing about L.A.: Almost every woman with whom I talked had taken an AIDS test or was about to take one. Diana was on the brink.

"Well, someone was saying how inaccurate the test is. And how you can be free of the virus now and two months from now, it'll show up. I've thought about taking the test, but when I heard that, I figured...." Diana gripped the edge of the table so hard her knuckles got white. "Just hang on and hope. I mean, it's not permeating my every thought."

I asked her if she'd changed her sexual practices, if she used condoms, had cut out casual sex.

"To be honest with you, Dave, I haven't gone out this year. And next time, I'm going to try something new. I'm going to employ the old-fashioned courtship before sleeping with somebody. Women look at sex a whole lot differently than men do. I don't know many women who take it casually and just think of it as something to say, 'Hey, guess what I did last night?' Barring AIDS, I also just want to make sure the next time around, somebody feels strongly about me--not just here today and gone tomorrow.

"It's interesting how many heterosexuals have at this point not even thought they could get it," Diana added. "I spoke with a friend six weeks ago, and she'd been seeing this guy who was real sexual. After they'd gone out for three months, he wanted to introduce another man into their sexual situation. And I said, 'Casey, are you kidding me?' She said, 'I wasn't interested.' 'Well, this guy has had male relationships!' 'I think he's had only one or two,' she said. So I asked her if she used condoms, and we talked about AIDS a little bit, and she completely, totally freaked out. She was convinced she had it. They've since broken up, and she took an AIDS test last week. But, you know, it could still show up."

Later that night, I went to a party at a movie producer's house in the Hollywood hills. It was an amazing stucco house built into the side of a steep, high hill. The lights of L.A. were spread out like a winking carpet down below. My friend Tom, who's a screenwriter, wangled me into the party, and I became one of its themes: Go off to a back bedroom and get interviewed by Playboy. People treated it almost as a lark out by the bar, by the chips and dip, by the stereo booming a Los Lobos tape. But when I talked with people alone, they were, without exception, serious, concerned and worried.

"The other day, I was driving," said a 30-year-old shiatsu-massage technician named Jill. "And I suddenly felt this wave of fatigue. And I thought that maybe I had it." She noticed my surprise and laughed. "Really! It passed through my mind. I'm very aware of my immune system, and I felt something coming on. And I thought, Oh, God, it could be a possibility."

"Do you and your friends talk about it?"

"Yes. All the time. It's a terrifying notion that if you have an affair, you can get it. I think a lot of people are hesitant about getting into new sexual relationships. I am. I haven't bought condoms, though. Some of my friends have--both men and women. The responsible ones."

Jill said that single life in L.A. had definitely changed.

"It seems like there's just less of a sexual vibe being put out, by everybody. It's kind of neat, because people may show their childlike side, or their intellect, before they show their sexuality. It adds mystery. It's getting back to a kind of romantic innocence before having sex. I just wish we could have taken this turn without having a disease cause it."

Had she been tested for AIDS?

"I don't know where to go, and I hate getting needles in my arm. I want to get one, kind of. Everybody should have a test. They should have block parties and have tests, if only to lessen people's panic."

She said she was in a relationship right now but that if she had to start a new one, she'd be very careful.

"At this point, if a man told me he was a fabulous lover and he thought I was the cat's meow, I still wouldn't sleep with him. I'd want to like him. You know, his essence. So that when we got out of bed, we'd still have something. I wouldn't be embarrassed or hesitant to get an AIDS test with that person. My ex-boyfriend actually did that with this girl he wanted to have an affair with. The Red Cross people were at UCLA for a blood drive, so they gave blood and got tested together."

Robert, a 27-year-old carpenter in the film business, had a special insight about AIDS. And people kept saying to me, "You should talk with Robert." "Go talk with Robert." So I went and talked with Robert.

"I'm worried, because my brother is gay," Robert said, smoking a cigarette as he sat on the edge of a bed, away from the noise of the party. "He's been active in the AIDS Project L.A. program. In my social circle, I know two people who've died of AIDS and another one who tested positive for it. My brother has worked with ten or 11 people who've died of it. We're going into retrograde homophobia. All of a sudden, it's back again: queer bashing, guys beating up guys just because they're gay. And now you're hearing jokes about gays and AIDS in regular conversation, from people you wouldn't expect to hear that from. I'm working on a movie right now, and the whole cast and crew, you can hear it in the way people are speaking."

Robert said he wasn't sure whether or not to be personally afraid of AIDS. He's wary of the media hype and he said he doesn't sleep around.

"The religious fanatics say that it's a plague that was predicted and will start and have no finish," he said. "I've heard people say that once it's on the college campuses, it's all over. The whole population will have it. It's like the Red scare all over again."

Do his straight friends worry about AIDS?

"No, it's sort of over there in the gray area. They aren't using condoms. It's like, 'Yeah, it's in the news, and it's topical--let's talk about it--but it's not going to affect me.' It's even like that in the homosexual community--people see their friends dying, and they still carry on the same lifestyle. All you have to do is go up and down Santa Monica Boulevard and you can see it's just a meat market, a mess. It's a place where people go, they fuck somebody; the next night they go, they fuck somebody else.

"I think that once it gets across to heterosexuals, it's going to be hard to stop. Because sex is the most powerful drug. Sexual attraction is like fire. And it's amazingly evident among my straight male friends that sex has to do with being virile and strong."

But Robert thought women were different. And he expressed, better than any woman with whom I'd talked, why women and men may be reacting differently to the threat of AIDS, why women may be so much more serious about it.

"Women have an innate sense of their physical being," he said. "They menstruate. They have these serious things going on in their bodies that men don't. We have this thing between our legs that doesn't change--it doesn't put us through any cycles; we don't have to have contact with our bodies. But women have to deal with their bodies all the time. Birth control generally falls to the women. And it's going to be women who put the brakes on, especially since it seems that it's the women who are being infected by the men, more than vice versa.

"I have a friend who has the best attitude about sex: He just says, 'Listen, I don't want it to fall off. You've only got one--it doesn't grow back. And I'm gonna know the girl before we have sex.' And he stands by it. It comes down to just being responsible for yourself."

I talked with others at the party: people who'd had an AIDS test, people who hadn't because they "didn't want to know," someone who'd heard rumors that the Russians introduced AIDS into the U.S. as germ warfare, a woman in her 20s whose father had given her a box of condoms and said, "If you're going to have sex, use these."

•

The weekend I was in L.A., carnaval was raging in Rio de Janeiro. I went to a local version of carnaval: a pre-Lenten Mardi Gras extravaganza held at the Palladium on Sunset Boulevard. Tickets were a whopping $25 a person, and still the cavernous night club was jammed with thousands of revelers.

There were scores of women walking around in dental-floss bikinis, with boa feathers rising from their hair. Dozens of musicians kept up an incessant samba beat, with whistles and cymbals screaming and crashing in the air. Everyone was drunk and dancing, gripping the hips of strangers and making long conga lines on the dance floor. It was hot and sweaty, but something was missing. I'd been there for an hour before I realized what it was: carnality. There was an amazing absence of sexual vibrations in the place. Sure, there was lots of flesh. One woman strolled around, a six-foot-tall blonde with only an excuse for a skirt, which blew off her ass with the slightest breeze, and a black-fishnet top that offered a glimpse of her large, firm breasts virtually nude. Fat Latin men followed her around, showering her with light from their flash cameras. But all they did was look--the safest sex of all.

I noticed two women cruising the place, dancing slightly as they took in the spectacle around them, and I asked them to talk with me. They said they were both high school teachers in their late 20s and, yes, they were afraid of AIDS.

"My friends and I talk about it a lot," said Carmen, a blonde in shiny black tights and a bright-red shirt. "Because you don't know about the past of someone you sleep with. I've been very careful. I haven't been with anyone, unless it was a boyfriend, for eight months."

Her friend Stephanie said it was difficult to take steps to protect herself.

"I was going out with this guy, and I asked him if he was bi or a homo or if he'd ever had a relationship with a man. And he was quite pissed, insulted. He said, 'No, don't worry about it.' But he got over it, and then he asked me the same question, if I'd ever been with a woman. And I ... got pissed." She laughed. "But you have to ask that."

"Yeah, you have to now," Carmen agreed. "Because of the incubation period, I think more and more people are going to find out they have it. I can have it. Anyone can. I'm having an AIDS blood test next week. I'm paranoid. I mean, I've had nine lovers in the past two years. I counted them, just because of all I've been reading. So I'm taking the test, just so I can be at peace with myself."

Her friend looked at her, stunned. "They have a blood test for AIDS? I didn't know that."

"It's to see if you carry the antibodies," Carmen told her. "My best friend just had hers. It takes two weeks to get the results, so she doesn't know yet. I'm getting it at the free clinic in Santa Ana."

"Oh," Stephanie said, shaking her head. "I wouldn't want to know."

By the end of the night, the star of L.A.'s carnaval--the amazing blonde with the see-through fish-net top--had decided on a man. She'd been dancing for hours with him--a tall, very young guy with rumpled brown hair and a face as chiseled and perfect as something you'd see on a Greek statue. He seemed almost bashful, dancing with that statuesque, erotic woman--he must have known that every man in the Palladium wanted to be in his shoes. When I last saw them together, they were at a table off in a corner, mauling each other; her hands glided through his hair; her white breasts were painfully visible even from 100 feet away.

And then I saw her leave alone, stamping out in a huff. I looked around and saw the young man walking by himself. If I was going to talk with anybody, anywhere, for this story, it would be with him.

He told me he was 18 and his name was Egas. He'd moved to L.A. from Brazil three years before and had just graduated from high school. And, yes, he couldn't believe his good fortune when that woman picked him up.

"Not bad, huh?" he said, ducking his head shyly and looking around. "Everyone was looking at her--everyone. I don't know why she picked me."

I asked him if he was nervous about AIDS.

"Yes, I'm nervous about it. I first heard about it one year ago. I thought it was just gays. Now I know it's dangerous. I know if you wear condoms, it reduces the risk, but still, it's dangerous."

"Would you wear a condom?"

"Yeah. I think everybody would."

I asked, as delicately as I could, what had happened with the blonde woman. Why hadn't he gone with her?

"I'm kind of scared," he said, shrugging. "She's ... too anxious to have sex. Maybe she's got AIDS; I don't know. I just got her phone number. I'm gonna think about it."

Everywhere I went in L.A.--the beaches, the restaurants in Westwood, the comedy clubs in Hollywood--I heard the same things. Everyone was scared, many people were thinking of getting tested and condoms, if they weren't being used, were at least the talk of the town. My last night there, I went to Pizazz, a singles bar in Marina del Rey. It was your basic "Hi, what's your sign?" disco--in previous incarnations, it had been called Popcorn and Big Daddy's. But it was still the same: polished bars, a dance floor, revolving lights, blasting Top 40 dance hits. I leaned against the wall near the dance floor and watched a young couple dance. She was a cute blonde; he was a handsome young guy with a tan and a John Travolta dance technique--very flashy, with lots of spins. They ruled the dance floor and even had a table that was connected to it, like a throne.

Now, throughout my research for this article, I'd avoided going up to a couple in progress, sticking my recorder in their faces and saying, "Hey, what about AIDS?" It seemed a sure-fire way to ruin a guy's line, to quell a burgeoning romance. I didn't want to bum out young lovers. But that night, I figured I'd do it. The worst thing that could happen was that I'd get knifed. I went up to the guy the next time he sat down and asked if I could interview him and his girlfriend. "Well, is there money involved?" he said. "Because if there's money involved, you'll have to go through my agent."

I broke the news to him--no dough--and he called his girlfriend over. His name was Jeff; he was 21. His girlfriend, Katie, was 22. We talked about the basic stuff: how some people were afraid of AIDS, how others continued to screw around without precautions, how it was hard to think about AIDS and safe sex in the heat of the moment. And then our talk took a sudden turn.

"If you're going to be promiscuous enough to sleep with anybody who comes your way," Jeff said, "for sex and not love, then you deserve to get it and you deserve to die."

I was stunned; I just kind of nodded.

"This is going to sound off the wall," he went on, "but I've done a lot of thinking about it. And I think that God has done this, because AIDS is contracted not only by people who are sexually promiscuous but by drug abusers--and people who abuse drugs heavily are thieves, prostitutes, rapists; they will do anything for money to buy drugs. God is doing this to eliminate homosexuals and drug abusers and people who are sexually promiscuous."

Katie disagreed.

"What about babies?" she said. "Babies are getting AIDS. That would be like God being like Hitler--killing people who aren't perfect. That's not right."

"But say I had AIDS, and I was sleeping with you and guys and everybody. And what if you got pregnant? That baby would have AIDS! That baby would be deformed; it would have one arm, whatever."

"But why would God kill that baby just because you were bad? It's not fair."

"It's like, Why does God allow abortions? Why does He allow miscarriages? Being gay is against God; it's against the Bible. And I think He started it by making it just in the gay populace, and now He's taking it to sexually promiscuous people. There are people who are bisexual--as disgusting as that sounds--who will go to a gay bar one night and sleep with a guy and come here the next night and sleep with a girl. And I think the people who are dumb enough to sleep with a guy like that ... should get it."

I told him it sounded almost as if he were glad about AIDS.

"I'm thankful for it," he said. "Because I've never been sexually promiscuous--I've slept with only three people in my life. And I think something should be done about people who are."

"I don't," Katie said. "It's going to kill a lot of innocent people, and I don't think it's fair at all."

"How can people be innocent if they're sleeping with a different person--"

"Because," she interrupted, getting angry, "if my husband went out and had sex with someone and brought it home to me and I got AIDS, and my children got AIDS, I'd be an innocent person, and my children would be innocent."

I sat back and watched them argue. Only a while ago, they'd been dancing, holding hands, looking into each other's eyes. Now they were shouting over the music about Hitler and rapists and anal sex, and this guy was espousing the kind of gay-bashing, fundamentalist attitudes I'd heard about at that party my first night in L.A. Jeff and Katie raged back and forth for maybe half an hour. I hadn't said anything in a long time. Then Katie looked at her boyfriend with a kind of resignation and said, "Honey, let's dance." And so they stood up, and they went back to dancing.

Denver

By the time we were circling two miles above the Mile High City, I would have given anything for a break from AIDS hysteria. I'd have preferred to be on a tropical island, sipping rum from a coconut, flirting with native girls who'd never heard of safe sex. But I figured Denver would be at least a relief compared with New York and L.A. I'd picked it as my third city to visit because I'd heard that AIDS paranoia hadn't yet spread to the Rocky Mountains. Denver represented to me something robust, healthy, butt-kicking. It was a mountain town, a town of the West. It wasn't a media center or a place one associated with junkies or gay-pride parades. As we made our approach, I looked at the lights of Denver and hoped all was calm down there.

•

My first stop was Rick's Café, a restaurant/bar in the Cherry Creek area. Rick's had a healthy crowd for Thursday night--people stood around the long bar unwinding from work, smoking and drinking, a vaguely Yuppie crowd. At the tables, people were eating such things as salmon steaks with juniper berries, beef stew served in hollowed-out bread loaves--mountain food. Near the bar, two young women sat at a table, having a drink and talking.

"AIDS concerns me, but it doesn't concern a lot of people," said Beth, a 25-year-old account executive for AT&T. "One of my real good friends just broke up with his girlfriend, and we were talking the other night. I told him, 'Hey, you'd better be careful.' And he said, 'Oh, I figure I have another couple of years to be promiscuous before I really have to start worrying.' So there are a lot of people out there who are aware, but it hasn't really sunk in yet."

Beth's friend Kim was also 25; she worked for AT&T as a technical consultant. She said they both had steady boyfriends, but that didn't entirely ease their concern.

"Even when you start dating someone, you worry," Kim said. "You see these commercials they're showing in Europe that say, 'You didn't just sleep with her, you slept with the last ten people she slept with and that they slept with....' I think about that."

But their fear didn't seem to be a major force in their lives, as it was for women in New York and L.A.

"If I knew a guy, if I really trusted him and respected him enough to have a sexual relationship, I probably wouldn't ask him to use a condom," Beth said.

Not far down the road, I checked out the Pearl Street Grill. It was a wood-paneled pub, a cozy place to drink with friends or watch Broncos games. It was also a little artsy--writer types hang out there, and a foreign-film house operates a few doors away.

At the bar, a guy named Wes sat drinking an enormous glass of Watney's beer. He was 22, a student at Denver University, and he tore himself away from the hockey highlights on ESPN to talk with me.

"The media play AIDS up so big," he said. "I don't know if it's as big a problem as they play it up to be. It's like drugs--when Reagan was after them for those short months, they played that up real big and made it more of a problem than it was. But AIDS is definitely a problem--we should be concerned about it. We're a little more sheltered out here than other people are, like in New York."

But Wes admitted that it was hard to ignore the hype completely.

"If I'm going out with a girl and I know her pretty well, I won't give it a second thought. But if I've just met her, I'll definitely take precautions, maybe by abstaining for a while. A couple of years ago, I would've been more likely to jump into the sack."

While I was talking with Wes, two women came in and claimed a table near the bar, causing quite a stir among the men in the place. I was the first one who got to them.

Maren, dressed in black, with a hammered-silver brooch at her neck, said she was a flight attendant. Her friend Jill worked in retail sales; they were both 23.

"People are starting to talk about it," Maren said. "A friend of mine just died of AIDS. He was a hemophiliac--he got bad blood. That was the first time that it struck anybody I know. I don't do any drugs and I don't sleep around, so I don't have to worry about it that much."

"I don't know anybody who's really concerned about it," Jill said.

"I don't, either." Maren took her drink from the waitress, took a sip. "I think when you're around people your age in college, and everybody's like you, it's probably like, 'Naw, nobody has it.' I think the only way to learn is the scary, hard way. People in New York and L.A. are a lot more afraid because they've had so many more people die of AIDS than Denver has."

By the end of the night, I felt an almost euphoric sense of relief. The people with whom I'd talked were aware of AIDS, but it wasn't a horrific abyss at the edge of their consciousness. I felt--reassured. I felt safe.

The next day was perfect: The sky was a solid sheet of blue, it was 60 degrees and I had the keys to a friend's Suzuki. I rode up into the mountains, went hiking, poked around some gold mines, paid my respects at Buffalo Bill's grave. I felt as if I'd escaped to a safer world.

But I was fooling myself. Within a few hours, I would talk with women who wished they could live on another planet, with men who had condoms burning a hole in their wallets. In a few hours, I would be at Neo.

•

Every city has its strips of singles bars where bright, hopeful young people meet to drink, dance and pick up tropical sex diseases. In Denver, most of these clubs are in a small inner-city suburb called Glendale. My friend--the one who had lent me his Suzuki--said I had to go there, that I'd gotten the wrong impression. Scott was a news writer for the CBS affiliate in Denver, so I'd discounted his theories. Too many hours spent watching the satellite news feed, I figured.

We pulled up about a mile from Neo--that's how far it seemed we had to walk past parked cars to get there. It was a three-story boxlike place rising from a parking lot, with the letters Neo spelled out against it. Inside, everything was stylish: Italian lamps, black TV monitors, splashy New Wave art on the walls. Neo was packed with a Friday-night crowd that probably numbered around 1200; it was shaking and mingling to the thump of Prince's Kiss. Everywhere--outside the bathrooms downstairs, on the edges of the dance floor, on carpeted steps near the ceiling--people were on the prowl. I felt those strong sexual vibes, that raw sense of carnal possibility, that had been so lacking at the Palladium in L.A. It was like a time warp to 1979, this atmosphere. Wolf packs of single guys moved through the crowd, their eyes flicking from one girl to the next. Women in slinky dresses crossed their legs at the bar, tonguing the straws in their drinks and smiling. It was invigorating, unbelievable.

But it didn't mean that people weren't afraid of AIDS.

"I'm scared to death," said Kristi, 23. She worked at a financial company in Denver with her 21-year-old girlfriend Elise; they were sitting on one of those carpeted seats high above the dance floor, watching the goings on around them.

"I'm so scared of AIDS, I'm not even scared of cancer anymore," said Elise. "My whole family's had cancer--my mom, my aunt. I had cervical cancer when I was 16. But I don't think anything about that now. It doesn't frighten me at all. But I'll tell you something, if I had AIDS, I don't know what I'd do."

"Let me put it this way," Kristi said. "We're pretty good girls. It's not like we go to a bar and we take every guy home. But even if you do it once in three years, it stops you from doing that. Like that guy right there in the striped shirt, talking to that girl"--I looked over at him--"he could have AIDS right now. And it just really terrifies me."

Elise told me about the time, a month before, when she had slept with her boyfriend's best friend on the spur of the moment. It was something that happened once, but it's still affecting her.

"For three weeks afterward, I was so paranoid that he had diseases. I don't do it that often, but all it takes is once. And I thought, God, maybe he has this disease and he doesn't care."

"People are going to use AIDS to get back at other people," Kristi predicted. Then she told me this horrifying story. A guy she knows--the friend of someone she works with--met a girl at a club named Josephina's. He flirted with her, she responded; and before he knew it, they were at his place, having sex. He couldn't believe his good fortune. The next morning, he woke up alone, went to the bathroom and nearly fainted. There, written in lipstick on his mirror, was a note the girl had left him. It said, Welcome to the AIDS Family.

"That's murder," Kristi said. "That girl murdered that guy. He knows her name. I think he should take her to court. Two days later, he was scared and he took an AIDS test, and he had AIDS. He just sat in his apartment after that for three days. He said, 'I might as well kill myself. I don't want to go through it.'

"You know how they talk about the atom bomb? If AIDS really spreads, I think it'll kill us off before the bomb does. Why make bombs? By the time you use them, there may be only 30 people left on earth. I wish that I could get into a spaceship and go to another planet and start over. This world sucks, it really does."

Shaken from that talk, I went to the bar and did a shot. Jesus Christ. I looked around at the hundreds of people and began to feel scared again. Maybe more scared than I'd felt the entire time in New York and L.A.

Later, near the d.j.s' NASAlike control center, I talked with a blond guy named Jake. He was 25, very handsome and stylish-looking, and worked for a movie theater. He wore a black sweater, gripped a cold beer. We had to shout over Big Audio Dynamite's Bad Rock City.

"Condoms are a big thing now," Jake said. "I know girls who never even saw one before, and now they want you to have one before you even talk to them. That's no lie. It's pretty damn recent, too, just in the past couple of months. I never heard of a woman carrying a condom, but they are now. I am, too. It's something I never had to deal with before. You're insulted at first. But I understand why after talking with some girls. I think women are more worried right now. I don't see any problem with it. If they don't mind, I sure don't."

Was the fear of AIDS changing things?

"Oh, definitely. People are being a lot more cautious, a lot more discriminating. If you don't look your cleanest, your best, they make a prejudgment right there."

So people were having casual sex less often?

"I think so. Unfortunately." He smiled. "But a place like this, I don't think it makes much difference. People are here for basically one reason. They take as many precautions as they can--they know the risks in coming to a place like this. But other places, and as far as dating goes, I think it's getting a lot more cautious."

I asked him if he was trying to be careful. He gave his head an aw-shucks scratch.

"Well, you know, old habits are hard to break," he said. "A man needs a woman; you know what I mean?"

I had a troubled sleep that night and woke up Saturday morning to this lead headline in The Denver Post: "AIDS Testing Clinics Swamped by Calls." I read the story over my coffee:

AIDS-testing clinics in several cities, including Denver, are being swamped by heterosexuals who fear they have been exposed to the deadly disease, health officials said Friday.

In Colorado alone, the number of AIDS tests administered state-wide has doubled since December, officials said....

Health officials in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston and Florida concurred. They told The Associated Press that the trend probably is the result of stepped-up education programs and wide publicity about Liberace and other victims of acquired-immune-deficiency syndrome....

"We're swamped here on the phones," said the executive director of the Boston AIDS Action Committee, Larry Kessler. "For February, we had more than 4000 calls; 3000 were asking about the test. It's a whole different scenario, because 80 percent were calls from heterosexuals, highly anxious people."

I went to a party my last night in Denver. It was no different from parties I'd been to in L.A. and New York--I tried to talk with people about AIDS, and it got out of hand. Within ten minutes, half the party was in the kitchen, arguing about AIDS testing, about how you could get it, about whether or not gays who have the disease should be quarantined. I heard that lipstick-on-the-mirror story again, not once but twice. Later on, I would hear that the same story was circulating around New York and Texas. It's an urban myth, like alligators in the sewer system--an expression of people's deepest fears. It's also a perfect illustration of the way things stand right now for heterosexuals in America and their fear of AIDS. They may be nervous, they may be scared, but the vast majority of them lead lives untouched by the disease. They have to make up strange, quirky stories to feel some connection to the deadly illness, which has already claimed 30,000 lives in the U.S. I guess that all we can do is hope things stay that way, that we never reach a time when we all have true stories of our own to tell.

"Lisa had had the unbelievably bad luck of being exposed to every single AIDS-risk group."