Matthew Aquilone

Author’s Note I find it very difficult to write about myself and avoid it whenever I can. This is exactly what I did for many years while writing the larger memoir from which “Palladium” is drawn: five Brooklyn brothers raised in the eighties, three infected with HIV and two lost to AIDS. My family, crowded, Catholic, and in large part queer, had been blindsided by an epidemic at once excruciatingly personal and explosively political.

When we were young and wild, my older brother Vincent taught me how to walk in Manhattan. It was after all the way the city is best lived, at street level, step by step, face to face. He trained me to match my pace with his, to adjust our speed so we were never left standing at a red light but moved unimpeded towards our inevitable dreams.