It can be very hard to stick to giving up, much harder than persevering. The reason for persevering is often clear—as it was for the British and Churchill in 1941. And sometimes it’s clear on a much more modest scale—I’m not giving up because I don’t want to and I don’t have to. That’s as good a reason as any.
But the reasons for calling it a day (and keeping it called) are frequently less obvious. Perhaps it’s plain old fear, as experienced by our first prospective bungee jumper. Or boredom and irritation, as it so often is when I put down a book or leave a show. The world demands an answer. Often we don’t have one.
Literature gives remarkably little guidance to those of us who constantly grapple with the urge to quit—but we do have Bartleby the Scrivener in the short story of the same name, which Melville published two years after Moby-Dick. (The subtitle is “A Story of Wall Street.”)
Bartleby’s tale is told by the head of a law office who has two clerks (law copyists, also known as scriveners) and an office boy working for him. He brings in a third clerk, the enigmatic Bartleby, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.”
As our narrator describes, “At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.”
Bartleby works quietly and steadily for two days until he is asked, on the third, to perform a routine task: his boss needs help comparing a brief document with its copy. “Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation,” the narrator writes, “when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”
That’s just the start of Bartleby’s insubordination. Bartleby refuses more and more tasks, again with that phrase, though he does continue diligently copying documents. Other odd behaviors emerge; it seems Bartleby is living at the office. Eventually, after attempting to reason with Bartleby, our narrator gives up and decides he must fire Bartleby, albeit with generous severance. But he is unsuccessful in that: Bartleby would prefer not to leave. Our narrator then moves the office to another building to rid himself of Bartleby. But even this doesn’t work: Bartleby refuses to leave even when the old office has new tenants. And always with that phrase, “I would prefer not to.” Finally, after Bartleby has defied all entreaties to vacate the premises, the police are called, and he is hauled off to prison, where he prefers not to sustain his own life.
What makes Bartleby so radical is not that he refuses to do what’s asked of him; it’s that he refuses to give a reason. He refuses to tell the narrator a single thing about himself, not where he was born, not anything. He even refuses to give a reason why he won’t say anything. Bartleby has quit explaining himself solely because he prefers not to. And this is the most irksome and revolutionary act imaginable. As our infuriated narrator observes: “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”
Sure, Henry David Thoreau quit the world of possessions to retire to a cabin in the woods—but he then wrote a whole book, Walden, explaining why and what he found. That’s the model. If you quit your job, you are likely to have an exit interview. Sure, you are free to answer, “I would prefer not to.” But most people bow to the pressure and wind up explaining themselves. If I quit Facebook for even a few days, I feel as though I owe the world an explanation and usually give one.
There’s a noble history of resigning in protest. Everyone understands that—the noisy, principled exit, where you announce the reason that you can no longer participate or even bear to have your presence count as an endorsement. But just plain quitting? That frays the fabric of society.
There are some things that I probably quit too early. I would love to play the piano, but I couldn’t be bothered to practice and soon gave it up. And there are things that I probably should have quit far earlier than I did. I’ve made some terrible business decisions in my time and have been guilty of pouring good company money after bad because I was too stubborn to admit even to myself that I had made a mistake.
Admittedly, Bartleby may not be the most appealing model of resistance, and yet the purity of his stance, and the confidence with which he manages to maintain it, offer a weirdly refreshing touchstone in a society that is terrified of people who can’t be threatened or induced to participate in activities they don’t like. I don’t worry that the world will ever suffer from a lack of piano players or people like me to applaud them. But I do worry that we don’t offer one another enough support when we just want to quit what we are doing for no reason other than that we would prefer not.
The Gifts of the Body
Losing
WHEN A WRITER DIES, all the books she or he might have written die, too.
I first heard about AIDS in an article in the New York Times on July 3, 1981. I was soon to be nineteen and had just finished my freshman year of college. The headline was “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” Scary. But not too scary. I mean, after all, it was only forty-one.
So I didn’t give it much thought. The next year, I took a break from college. I went to Los Angeles in what would have been my fall term junior year to make my fame and fortune in television. I found work as a temporary secretary, a substitute English teacher, and a production assistant for a television show; then I landed a job as personal assistant to a director. He needed someone who could type and drive. My driving isn’t nearly as good as my typing. In fact, it’s terrible. But he didn’t seem to mind.
I was twenty, living on my own in Los Angeles, and I went a little wild. I had a boisterous group of pals, and we would meet nightly at a bar called Motherlode before heading off to dance at Studio One (which had the motto “For the Eighties”). To the intoxicating beat of “Muscles” sung by Diana Ross and “Searchin’ ” by Hazell Dean and “State of Independence” by Donna Summer and “Mickey” by Toni Basil and “Maneater” by Hall and Oates, we would gather, dance, gossip. It was a motley crew: a larcenous kept boy with shoulder-length blond hair; a gorgeous dancer I adored (he is still one of my favorite people), who could hold a pencil between his pecs; the dancer’s volatile roommate, who had a wickedly caustic sense of humor—these were a few of the gang. We had endless time for one another and never seemed to have to buy a drink: they simply appeared. In our crew there was also a blandly handsome fellow named Edward. Edward and I weren’t particularly drawn to one another, but if the lights came up and there was no one else left around we might just go home together. Or at least we did five or six times, and wound up doing just about everything two guys could think of to do.
Then Edward stopped showing up night after night at Motherlode, and eventually I called him. He felt terribly ill, he told me, but he wasn’t sure what was going on: he kept losing weight; his glands were swollen; he woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. He was a little scared, if only because no one could figure out what was wrong with him.
I offered to take him out for a meal if he was up for it, and we went to IHOP, the International House of Pancakes. I made him eat their chocolate-chip pancakes—to put some weight on him, and also because they are so delicious. That was the last time I saw Edward. He moved back to Hawaii.
During and right after our IHOP meal, I didn’t give Edward’s illness much thought. He could have had a flu or a stomach bug or any one of a million ailments from which one soon recovers. But later word came that he had died, and no one knew why. It was all very strange, but none of us had been that close to him.
When I returned to college in spring 1983, I reconnected with my parents’ friend, and by then mine, the writer Larry Kramer. He was devoting all his time to a group he’d cofounded, Gay Men’s Health Crisis. More and more people were dying of what was first called GRID—gay-related immune deficiency.
Talking with Larry scared the hell out of me. Especially when I realized that Edward had almost certainly died of what is now called AIDS.
Larry convinced me that this disease that was affecting hundreds of people would soon affect thousands and then millions. But no one was doing or saying a thing about it. A Tylenol poisoning that killed seven people had been front-page news day after day; so had an outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease a few years before that had killed twenty-nine people. But here was a disease affecting gay men, for the most part, and because of that no one seemed to care.
When eventually AIDS did start to get press, the result was hysteria. Fifteen percent of the country thought people who had AIDS should be tattooed to identify them; more than half the country thought everyone with AIDS should be quarantined. The atmosphere was more horrible than it is possible to describe. Hospitals turned away dying people at their doors. Those lucky enough to be in a hospital often weren’t brought food—it was left outside the room door. People with visible lesions were shunned in the streets and turned away from businesses. So were people who just “looked” or “acted” gay.
The disease subsumed my last two college years. I staged fund-raisers and volunteered for the newly formed AIDS Project New Haven, leaving the campus one or two evenings a week to work as a volunteer on their hotline. It was challenging to reassure callers when there was no reassuring information to share. I certainly didn’t feel reassured. In my head, I did the math. Everyone who had this disease was dying. There was Edward. He was dead. There were so many others that I’d been with, in Los Angeles and before. (Even before “officially” coming out at age eighteen, I had been making up for lost time.) And so many of them were sick.
I figured it was likely I wouldn’t see thirty, or even twenty-five. And there was also the dread-filled thought that perhaps I had unwittingly condemned others to the same fate, a fear that was so intense that I shared it only once, with David Baer, and never mentioned it again to anyone. David was one of the few people in whom I could confide; he had the same fears.
Being at college during this period was surreal: my days were spent in dining halls and classes with people whose biggest care in the world appeared to be whether they would or wouldn’t pass a certain test or get a paper in on time or land a part in a play; many of my evenings and weekends were spent talking with young men who were dying.
Volunteering was how I staved off panic.
So I also volunteered for Gay Men’s Health Crisis (now referred to mostly as GMHC) when in New York on vacations—occasionally as a buddy bringing groceries to those homebound, but mostly on the hotline. The hotline was run from a tiny room in a brownstone building in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. I had a routine: work as a temporary secretary during the day; then buy a burrito from a shop called Kitchen in Chelsea; then scarf down bites of it as I sat for hours answering call after call after call.
My supervisor at GMHC was named Barry. He was tall, gangly, mostly bald, and had an acid tongue. That was all I knew about him; Barry wasn’t one for small talk. Or at least not with me.
Night after night, I fielded awful calls. And what made it more awful was that we still had so little information and so few resources. There was often almost nothing we could do other than listen.
Then, one night, I reached my limit. I had talked to a young man who was sitting at home with the corpse of his lover and couldn’t get a single funeral home in the city to take the body away. I’d helped him dial his way through our list until finally we found one. Another call was from a guy who was in NYC illegally and wanted to know if he could be deported for being sick. He was sobbing. Or maybe he was having trouble breathing from PCP pneumonia. I could barely hear him. I kept having to say “Excuse me” and “Could you repeat that?” We had a lawyer who might have been able to help him, but I couldn’t get the guy on the phone to trust me enough to leave any information or visit during the day. Another call was from an older man, gay but not out of the closet, whose glands were swollen and who was having terrible night sweats. Was it AIDS? This was still years before there was any kind of test, before anyone knew what caused it, before anyone really knew what it was. All I could tell him to do was to see a doctor. I had one I could recommend.
The phone rang just as I was getting ready to head out.
“GMHC Hotline, can I help you,” I said.
The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to a young woman.
“How do you know if you have AIDS?” she asked.
“Well,” I answered. “There’s no test, but it’s diagnosed when you have one of the opportunistic infections associated with it. There are some symptoms that many people have, though. Night sweats, swollen glands that have been swollen and stay swollen for several weeks, weight loss. But those could be other things, too. In fact, if you check your glands too often, you’ll make them swell. They aren’t made to be constantly prodded.”
There was silence on the phone.
“Do you have any of those?” I asked.
“No,” the young woman said.
“Any other physical symptoms. Lesions? Anything?” I then was sure to add, “You know I’m not a doctor. So I can’t diagnose anything, and even if I was, I couldn’t do it on the phone. If you’re worried, you should really just go see your doctor. If you don’t have a doctor, I can give you the name of one.”
“Okay,” she said. “But how do you get it?”
“Well, we don’t really know. But it seems to be sexually transmitted. It also seems to be passed among IV drug users sharing needles.” As trained, I didn’t press.
“Well, I’m scared that I got it. You see, I think my hairdresser is gay.”
Suddenly, I had a sense where this call might be headed.
“Okay,” I said. “That wouldn’t be unusual. There are a lot of gay hairdressers.”
“Yeah,” she repeated. “I’m pretty sure he’s gay. And I just came back from the salon. And he washed my hair. And now I’m thinking that he might have given me AIDS. You know. He had his hands in my hair.”
“Oh my God,” I said, unable to keep that to myself. I then went way off script. “Look, I have to ask you a question.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Do you have a pen and paper nearby? And a small suitcase?”
“Yes,” she said.
Barry seemed to appear from nowhere. I don’t know how he knew what I was going to say next, but he grabbed the phone from my hand and calmly reassured the young woman. After he was done, he turned back to me.
“And why, might I ask, even though I think I know, were you asking that caller if she had a pen and paper and a small suitcase?”
I fessed up. I was about to tell her to write a note to her family saying goodbye, scribble a quick final will and testament, and then pack some small items in the suitcase and go right to the nearest emergency room to spend the short time on earth she had left.
“That’s exactly what I feared. Maybe you need a night off.”
“But really, Barry! From her hairdresser? Because he might be gay? What an idiot! What a hateful idiot!”
I was furious. At her. And at Barry.
“Take your burrito, and get the hell out of here. I’ll see you tomorrow. Less hysterical and more compassionate, please.” As I closed the door, I think I heard Barry laugh. But he never admitted to me that he thought it was funny.
—
For decades, I tried not to think too much about that time, mostly because I couldn’t. It’s as though it all happened to someone else, somewhere else. I couldn’t remember how I felt. I remember the common phrase people would share, that it was like some of us were at war, and we were surrounded—at work, on the subway—by people who were at peace. Even though I was in my twenties, I just got used to the fact that friends got sick and died: after Edward, there was Hugh and Stan and John and Jim and Craig and so many more. It didn’t stop being sad, horrible, terrifying. But it stopped being weird. It just was.
One book I read recently brought it all back: The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown, the sixth book by a writer who has gone on to write six more; her work includes essays, a memoir about her mother’s death, plays, and story collections.
The Gifts of the Body is a slender novel in eleven connected stories, narrated by a home-care worker as she describes her visits to various people with AIDS. Each chapter is named for a different “gift”—the gifts of sweat, wholeness, tears, skin, hunger, mobility, death (yes, death), speech, sight, hope, and mourning. Perhaps the author had been reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea when she decided on this structure. And there is something similar in tone: both are quiet and thoughtful books.
But the subject matter is totally different. The Gifts of the Body is a book that captures not just the horrors of the early years of the AIDS plague but also the toil, drudgery, mundanity of it all. There are stories here of women with AIDS, though most of the people the narrator visits are gay men.
Brown was a home-care worker. I know this only from her bio on the back of the book, but I think I would have been able to guess it regardless. The observations throughout the book aren’t just convincing—they have the immediacy of entries in a diary.
“I cleaned the bathroom,” she wrote. “I shook cleanser in the shower and sink and cleaned them. I sprayed Windex on the mirror. When I was wiping it off I saw myself. My face was splotched. My t-shirt had a dark spot. I put my hands to it and sniffed them. They smelled like me, but also him. It was Rick’s sweat. I put my hands up to my face and I could smell him in my hands. I put my face in my hands and closed my eyes. I stood there like that a while then I went to the kitchen.”
She also wrote: “He wasn’t getting any better. He was just getting worse more slowly.”
And: “His sores were dark purple and about the size of quarters. The edges of them were yellow and his skin was dark brown. The sores weren’t running or oozing or scabs because they always had this salve on them…I changed gloves several times when I was doing the salve because my gloves got coated with it, and also with his hair, which was very tight and curly and fell out easily, and with flecks or patches of skin. I think he felt embarrassed to have it done except it would have been worse not to have it done.”