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After 18 months of debilitating heat and neighbors' scorn, Jeffrey and Al gave up on the rural life. They rented a U-Haul and headed west, towing their trailer across the Bay Bridge, down Townsend Street, and into Space 244 of the San Francisco RV Park. Dope-free, they spent drug money they'd saved on a $200 pickup. After a few months using it to haul scrap to the recycling center, they traded it in on a $400 pickup. Later still they traded up to the $600 Datsun pickup they now own. It's the main asset of J.A.M. Recycling, named after Jeffrey, Al, and their Shih Tzu, Ming.
With their own business and their own home, Jeffrey and Al are more deeply in love than ever.
Jeffrey, with his forest of tattoos, storied past, and New Jersey accent, is the ruffian of the two, and he becomes fidgety when Al talks about their personal life. But when he's alone, away from Al, he speaks of his partner in tones so tender they describe a romance of 1940s cinematic proportions.
Jeffrey now remembers his life's most dramatic turn as the moment he and Al vowed to look after each other following Al's diagnosis. He's never cared for anyone so much, he says, and that caring has been his life's greatest solace.
Al, a former piano teacher and bookkeeper, has kept his profession's earnest, meticulous manner. He now talks about someday buying a new piano to replace the one he pawned a few years ago, about getting a bigger trailer, another pickup truck.
The 10 blocks from the RV park to the Tenderloin hotels now seem like light-years of distance.
"We had a few debts we had to pay off, which we've done. We've now got ourselves to a point where we can start saving," says Al. "We own our own home, we own our own business, we own our own truck. We're not doing dope anymore. Our life is turning around."
And it will continue to. Until Al gets his first serious infection.
As much as Jeffrey and Al deny its presence, Al's disease looms over every day of their new lives; over the thrill of independence; over the joy of being in love.
Al cut his knee the other day crawling around inside a garbage bin looking for cardboard. It's a deep gash stretching three inches across the bottom half of his right knee. It looks to need stitches, but Al wouldn't go to a doctor. The broad, healing gash now takes on an outsize appearance on his emaciated body much like the outsize danger it represents to his embattled immune system.
On a recent Saturday night, less than a week after he was cut, Al got sick to his stomach -- diarrhea and vomiting -- after he and Jeffrey ate roast turkey sandwiches at a greasy spoon near the RV park.
"It didn't bother me much, but you know my system is a lot stronger than his," Jeffrey says.
Al resists seeing doctors anymore. The last time he did, a couple of years ago, he was put on AZT, which Al says made him impatient, cranky -- not his regular self.
"When they put him on that stuff, it turned him into a fucking monster. AZT made this guy crazy," Jeffrey recalls.
"I was forgetting things, my temper was real short, and I'm not that way. So I discontinued taking it. I haven't taken anything since," adds Al. "But I've had no opportunistic infections at all. The only thing I've been bothered with was a little fatigue, a little diarrhea, and a little weight loss. My weight kind of comes and goes."
It mostly goes.
And by Jeffrey's private reckoning, his partner will go at around the time the park will.
When the Mission Bay development begins and the San Francisco Recreational Vehicle Park comes to an end, Jeffrey's neighbor to the east, Helen Robbins, wants to look for an apartment. Or maybe she and her husband will find an RV park in the East Bay.
"It just depends on what's available when the crunch comes," she says.
Rickey Schaller and Alyson McKellar are already thinking about driving their Gillig school bus to an RV park in Castro Valley. The rent's a lot cheaper there, and it will be just as close to Telegraph Avenue, Rickey says.
Jeffrey doesn't have plans of that sort. He was never one for thinking about the future, and he'd just as soon they keep the park where it is.
"Do you remember the other week when it was raining, pouring out? It was so comfy and warm in that trailer," Jeffrey says.
"There was rain beating on the roof," adds Al.
"And you could just cuddle up in bed, turn on the TV," Jeffrey says. "It was like a cave in there.
