The Passion of Keith

I had heard Keith’s name many times long before I met him, spent a fair amount of time with him before I actually knew him and, by the time I finally knew him, he was already on his way out of my life.

In 2018, I left a catering firm I’d worked at for ten years and joined an established team of old school pros at another. On my first day, I made the rounds introducing myself to each of my new colleagues. A slim older man with soft grey hair cut stylishly short kept his back turned away from me. Sitting straight as a pin, Keith clicked away on his keyboard and, with a swift flick of an eye and a curt hello, I sensed that he was determined to dislike me.

I stepped into my new office and began getting my things in order. Suddenly, the door swung open. With one hand pressed against the doorframe and the other planted firmly on a cocked hip, Keith looked like he was about to do the Cell Block Tango. He was even skinnier than I’d first thought. His long body, accentuated by spindly arms and bendy legs, looked like a paper straw that has overstayed its welcome in a cocktail.

Before I could say anything, he marched in and nimbly threw a leg across my desk. For twenty minutes straight, Keith talked at me. In a singsong lilt, he spoke of his career and reputation in the business. “I’m all about relationships,” he said with a snap of his wrist. He rattled on for awhile longer and then, in an instant, he was gone.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Keith in those first weeks. He would vacillate between an almost callous indifference and a distinct affinity for me. He would interrupt or condescend to me in a morning meeting and, in the afternoon, pull me into a private room to gossip over coffee. It was confusing but we were starting to grow on each other.

Soon, he was sitting on my desk every morning. He’d wait until I was settled and, with a Dolly Levi flourish, appear in my doorway. Some days, he’d sit for a minute or two and sometimes, after forty minutes of gab, I’d eventually have to break it to him that I needed to start my day. He would tell me funny things his parrot, Dante, had recently learned to say. He loved to shock me with wild stories of weekend-long binges or dalliances he’d had decades before. Sometimes he would come in holding a stack of printouts: memes he’d made on Photoshop over the weekend. One of my favorites was his face on the body of the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey. The caption read: I am never wrong. Perhaps delusional, but never wrong. He would hand me the papers and, with pursed lips, wait for my reaction.

And then, one morning, he stepped into my office and asked if he could close the door. He sat gingerly on my desk and told me that he was sick. He’d already told me he had been living with HIV since the early 1990s (about which he was quite publicly vocal), so this was something else. Something new. He’d beaten cancer several years before but it was back for an encore. We shared a quick tearful moment and then, with a playful nonchalance, he wiped his face and grinned. “I’ll be fine. This body has been through so much over the years. Not to worry.”

Not worrying proved hard to do. Over the next couple of weeks, Keith’s weight dropped rapidly. His treatment was zapping his energy and strength so much so that he reached the point where he could no longer come into the office.

One afternoon, my boss, Michael, asked to speak with me in private. He told me that he’d been taking Keith to and from his doctor’s appointments but something had come up that day and he wasn’t going to be able to make it to Keith’s apartment. I could tell he was uncomfortable asking me to help but there was no one else.

I remember arriving at Keith’s uptown apartment building and thinking how quintessentially “New York” it seemed, like a movie set. Some city blocks look so much like itself, like New York, that it makes my heart ache with a piercing nostalgia.

Keith was waiting for me on his stoop like a kid whose parents had forgotten to pick him up after school. I helped him into a taxi and, as we headed downtown, we started to talk. At one point, I asked Keith about growing up in Virginia. He looked out the window for a moment, then back at me. He told me he’d always felt like a country mouse destined to live in a big city. He spoke lovingly about the family and friends he still had there and, from the photos he’d had on his desk, it was clear that he cherished them.

He then told me a story that has stayed with me so vividly that it sometimes feels like a memory of my own. When Keith was in high school, it was almost time for the annual talent show and he was determined to perform. For weeks, he sat at a sewing machine making a costume to wear in the show. I imagined his determined face pushing fabric through the machine, grinning to himself at what was sure to be the showstopper of all showstoppers. The big night arrived and it was Keith’s moment. The curtains opened, a spotlight pooled in the center of the stage and Keith stepped into its glow wearing a brown sack-like garment. A familiar musical vamp rang out. Keith opened his mouth and began singing “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story. As he sang, he unfolded the pleats of brown burlap to reveal radiant butterfly wings, splashed in bright colors and patterns.

This is the story he chose to share with me on the way to the hospital that day. A young man, primed to leave his small hometown, stood in front of his entire community and showed them exactly what he intended to do with his life and he’d do it while feeling pretty, witty and, oh yes, gay.

I sat in the waiting room at the hospital and, when he was finished, Keith and I made our way back to his apartment. It was then that I understood why he’d been waiting for my arrival earlier that day. Keith lived on the fourth floor of a walk-up. Together, we climbed: with little strength, Keith sat on the stairs and scooted up each step, one by one. It took us half an hour to climb the four flights up to his apartment.

Once inside, I was enchanted. Everywhere I looked there was a marvelous surprise. His massive bookshelves were organized by color. Though his parrot, Dante, had been sent to live with another family that could take care of him, the bird’s intricately ornate cage still towered in the corner. The living room looked like a gothic museum glittering with religious artwork made of broken glass and tile. Keith explained that he’d commissioned several pieces of work from a dear friend and pointed to a smaller framed piece on the wall. “That’s my favorite,” he said. Behind the glass, a Holy Rosary was splayed out. “It was my first prescription of AZT.” I peered closer and saw that the beads were not beads but, rather, tiny pills.

Keith’s doctor soon decided it was too dangerous for Keith to keep climbing up and down the stairs at home and that he should remain in the hospital. After only a few days, it was clear that he would not remain with us for much longer. It hurt for him to speak, so our visits were peaceful and quiet. One night, as I was leaving, Keith reached out and held my hand. We looked in each other’s eyes for a measured moment and then I left. He passed away in the early hours that next morning.

Tomorrow is Easter. Growing up Catholic, my family always went to the Stations of the Cross which is basically a guided tour during which the priest leads the congregation around a dimly-lit church, pointing to different decorative plaques depicting Christ’s suffering and describing the pain and sorrow he experienced in his final days or, The Passion. I once asked my mom why we did this and she told me that, for her, it was important to walk side-by-side with Jesus in his time of ultimate need while carrying his own fate in his arms — alone in the middle of a crowd.

Keith wasn’t alone, of course. He was beloved by many and, in the days following his passing, I watched countless messages of love pour in on Keith’s social media. I’m not a religious person but I can’t shake the feeling that I was meant to share those final days with Keith. I still think of him every Easter, not as the man I knew for a short amount of time but as that young boy in Virginia that he told me about on a sunny afternoon in the back of a taxi cab. Radiant under a spotlight, wings unfolded, voice uplifted. Reborn.