I first heard Klaus Nomi’s “Der Nussbaum” when I was nineteen, and though it fascinated me, the song didn’t become an obsession until two years later. It was a chaotic time in my life: My first serious girlfriend dumped me after a few years together. Then I got fired for stealing from the record shop where I worked. Between these two dismissals, I lost many of the friends I’d made since moving to Minneapolis after high school. Rather than getting my personal life in order, or reckoning with the cause of my aberrant behavior, I opted to leave town. Next stop: Seattle.
For a certain type of person, there is nothing as thrilling as being alone in a new city. Young and malleable, I took the opportunity to forget who I had been and imagine who I might yet become. There was more to this identity crisis than the carnage I’d left behind in Minneapolis. After getting a job at a restaurant in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, I grew increasingly curious about its abundant gay bars. What really piqued my interest, though, was a bathhouse where men hooked up — something I knew about from reading the book “And The Band Played On,” by Randy Shilts, a journalist who chronicled the early years of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco’s gay community.
It’s impossible to overstate how omnipresent AIDS was for Americans born in the 1980s. Like Coca-Cola, Whitney Houston and Chernobyl, it was part of the zeitgeist: It conjured its own universe. One corner of that universe was dedicated to figures like Klaus Nomi, who died at age 39 of complications related to AIDS. The virus killed so many talented young artists, so quickly, that it became its own pop-culture trope; and yet, however close it came to being a cliche, it was impossible for me to separate the tragedy of Nomi’s death from the melancholy closing notes of “Der Nussbaum.”
In high school, I’d once read a magazine article on so-called “bug chasers,” and found it hard to believe anyone might actually want to become infected with AIDS. What I started to understand after moving to Seattle, though, was the extent to which the AIDS crisis had become my generation’s way of fixating on the unfathomable void — late at night, after a closing shift at the restaurant, I walked by the bathhouse on Capitol Hill and wondered whether Nomi had frequented places like it. Had he died chasing some more potent version of the same thrill I had found being anonymous and unknown in a new city? Once, after opening the front door for a quick peek inside, I walked home with the scent of the bathhouse in my nostrils.