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For a couple of years they commuted twice yearly between Colorado Springs and Las Vegas, moving to Vegas when it would get cold, to the Springs to escape the heat.
But, Helen notes, "after a while, you get tired of driving."
So they headed toward the San Francisco Recreational Vehicle Park, where the weather's usually nice, you can walk to Macy's, and then stroll over to the symphony hall.
"I like Wagner, though his operas involve sitting for long periods of time," Helen says, standing in a loose T-shirt, checked shorts, and tennis shoes in the doorway of her aluminum trailer. "But it's dramatic music, and I like that. I obviously don't go to opening night. That hasn't been part of my retirement dream, going to opening night.
"It's just being able to go."
A half-dozen spaces to the east and one row over is an old red Datsun pickup that is piled high with cardboard, parked next to a tiny day-trip trailer. Most park residents don't know the occupants, but they've seen them. They're the thin gay couple. The ones who recycle trash.
By any ordinary assessment, Jeffrey and Al suffer a life of misery. Al was diagnosed with AIDS five years ago, about the same time Jeffrey was diagnosed as HIV-positive. Their sedan-length trailer is the smallest in the park, and to pay for its space they spend their days scrounging for cardboard, cans, and bottles. It's a big change from a decade ago, when Jeffrey worked as a well-paid New Jersey mechanic and Al was a San Francisco bookkeeper. Drug habits, crime, and their diagnoses have put those days firmly in the past.
But Jeffrey says he's the happiest he's ever been. He's pulled himself and his ailing partner from Skid Row, and now they dedicate their lives to caring for each other. It took an enormous act of will that included fleeing the Tenderloin and quitting heroin cold turkey. Now, though, they've left behind the humiliation and dependency they once seemed destined to die in.
"We have an advantage, an opportunity to live better than we've ever lived," Al says.
Jeffrey and Al met in January of 1992 at a bus stop. Al was mourning a lover he had lost to AIDS, and Jeffrey had just moved from New Jersey only to learn that his crack-addicted girlfriend had become pregnant. Jeffrey and his girlfriend were on the verge of putting the baby up for adoption, and Jeffrey felt like he was drowning.
Jeffrey and Al chatted awhile, went to lunch, and soon became a couple.
"I kind of liked the way he was outgoing," says Jeffrey, a muscular man with a graying, four-day beard, a Roman nose, and ironic eyes. "He was nice."
During those early years their relationship was based on a mutual melange of petty criminal schemes, drug addiction, and figuring the angles of life in the Tenderloin slums.
They both feared that they had been infected with the HIV virus, but Al didn't want to be tested. Jeffrey had to pester him for months before they both went down to have their blood looked at.
"I knew he had to have it," says Jeffrey. "I said, 'Have you been tested?' And he said, 'I'm not gonna get tested, I'm not gonna go get tested. I'm not gonna go get tested, I'm not gonna get tested.' I had to talk to him a year before he got tested."
The diagnoses at first provided Jeffrey and Al an excuse to embrace their addictions. Occasional crack use bloomed into $60-a-day crack and heroin habits. For emergency fixes, they borrowed money from loan sharks. To pay them back, they worked for a dollar an hour cleaning rooms for slumlords. To fill in the gaps, they'd steal.
This life in the Tenderloin fast lane was Al's version of a last hurrah. It was a hedonistic goodbye to a life doomed by his AIDS diagnosis.
"I just threw the towel in," says Al. "For me it was just time to party and have a good time."
Jeffrey and Al's good time turned very bad when, after getting kicked out of a hotel for theft, the two found themselves homeless and collecting scrap with a shopping cart to survive. Strung out on drugs and without shelter, they remember counting the days before Al would die.
Then a miracle happened. Al's dad, who had shunned him after the AIDS diagnosis, woke up in the middle of the night amid a dream. "Mom says he sat up on the bed and he was shaking," Al recalls. "My grandmother appeared and asked him, 'Why aren't you helping Al?' "
Al's parents bought Al and Jeffrey a camper trailer to live in, and got them a spot in a mobile home park in Keys, Calif., near Modesto. It was an improvement, Al says. But a mild one. Keys trailer residents weren't all that welcoming of a pair of gay men from San Francisco, particularly when one of them displayed AIDS symptoms.
"You talk about being in the middle of nowhere. This was hicksville redneck nowhere," says Jeffrey.
But the isolation and change of scenery allowed the two to focus on kicking their heroin and crack habits. Which they did. After regaining their senses, they noticed that their new home was sweltering hot.
The valley heat made Al unbearably weak. He had to spend his days lying inside the trailer next to a swamp cooler, holding still so as not to break a sweat.
"The valley tore him up," Jeffrey says. "He couldn't function. You wake up in the valley at 5 o'clock and it's 80 degrees. At 9 o'clock it's 90 degrees and at 12 it's 105."
