Los Angeles on fire, April 30, 1992. Photo by Ken Lubas, LA Times
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Acacia Quartet plays the world-premiere of this brief work at Armidale Town Hall on June 27, 2013. I’m grateful to them for devoting the entire second half of the concert to sections from my AIDS memoir quartet. My thanks also go to the University of New England for hosting this concert.
Below is a studio recording from the complete AIDS Memoir Quartet played by Acacia Quartet and released by Vexations840. You can hear it if you are logged into Spotify.
This section of my string quartet was sketched in May 1992, following Part 1.
It was my second year in Sydney. I was some 10 months into running the ‘buyers club’ for AIDS drugs. By then, nearly all my clients wanted ddC to use in an illicit combination with the AZT they were legitimately getting from their doctors.
My supply was sourced from Los Angeles. On April 29, 1992, that city suddenly erupted into the worst riots the United States had experienced for decades. Looting and arson piled on top of death and injury, all sparked by the acquittal of the 4 white officers in the court trial alleging them of police brutality against a black man, Rodney King.
I had calm but desperate phone conversations with Jim Corti, my supplier. Los Angeles was in shutdown. The National Guard and the Marine Corps had been mobilized to stop the riots. Jim and I tried to come up with a way to get my shipment out of the city while keeping him safe. I knew Jim lived in south-central LA. He told me he had to make hair-raising U-turns driving to and from home to avoid the street confrontations. He was a white man living in a predominantly black neighborhood. Not only was it plain foolish to venture into the streets, but FedEx, the messenger company that innocently transported our packages, was understandably out of operation. Freeways were closed. There was a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Public transport, needless to say, was cancelled. We had no idea how long the riots would last, nor what further destruction would occur. Rodney King himself appeared on TV to appeal for calm, but the riots had worked up a momentum that needed to run its course. Finally Jim just left town until it was safe to return. Our clients in Sydney – and Jim’s other clients elsewhere in this clandestine worldwide network – just had to wait for their ddC.
It was a reminder that for all the problems faced by people with AIDS, there were other crises in the world. The Rodney King riots were proof that the USA was a tinderbox of race relations. And the distrust and discrimination at the heart of the riots were the same distrust and discrimination that made AIDS a stigma. No problem is an isolated problem.
The Rodney King riots ultimately lasted a week. Over 2000 people were injured, and some 60 were killed, including people like John Henry Willers, a tourist gunned down after he ventured out of his motel to help the injured in a vehicle collision in Mission Hills.
I sketched this music thinking about the ddC itself, the chemical molecules that had to cross not just the oceans to get to my friends in Sydney, but first a city tearing itself apart. The music is the sound the chemical molecules made in my head, darting in space, colliding with one another. Dispassionate, elegant, regal, sure of its chemical properties regardless of how humans behaved to each other.
