Satvrclay, March 1"th1 Diminishing supplies at a I*stern Beef supermarket in Queem.close-ordered entanglement of the
city abandon it in its hour of need, or
dread, but they do. Still, who would
not decamp to a remote island if she
had one? uBoccaccio-ing," someone
calls this business of fleeing the city,
in honor of the Italian author, who
wrote of fleeing Florence during the
Black Death, and telling stories with
his companions for ten days up in the
hillside villas of Fiesole.
I
n West Harlem, Sam Rivera cer-
tainly can't leave. At a residential
&cility run by the Fortune Society and
known as the Castle; his job is to over-
see the rooms and the souls of about
eighty-five men and women, almost
all released from prison not long ago,
some as recently as this month. They
come in and out of his office all day,
seeking help and solace. it's crazy, but
the system is still churning," Rivera
said. He is a huge man, with a beam-
ing, steady smile. uThey're still dis-
charging people from Rikers and else-
where, even as we go through all this.
So we have a steady infl.ow of people
coming home, even while we're try-
ing to lock down the people we al-
ready have."
This is Rivera's second plague. In-
carcerated himself when H.I. V.I AIDS
hit New York's state prisons, in the
nineteen-eighties, he still remernben
the shock of working in the isolated
wards where those who fell ill with
the disease were sequestered: "Every-
one was so frightened that they pretty
much put on a hazmat suit to go into
those places. Except me." His cxperi-
eru:e led him, once he was out of prison,
to join the AIDS-care movement, where
he met and worked with Anthony
Fauci, the current director of the Na-
tional Institute of Allergy and Infec-
tious Diseases. Now that Rivera is re-
sponsible for the residents of the
Castle, he thinks hard about what to
do. His memories of the AIDS epi-
demic are strong, and they give an
oddly positive cast to his take on to-
day's crisis.
"We've stockpiled three weeks'worth of food, and we're sending staff
to screen visitors at Rikcrs," he said.
(City jails have since suspended in-
person visits.) "But it's not a deadly
virus for most people-it's not as
deadly as AIDS. I think we'll get to the
point where the next announcement
will have to be, What are we doing for
people who have to manage the elders
and those with compromised immune
systems? I'm coping two ways. I'm not
overthinking it. I expect to get it one
day. I'll feel sick, and I'll manage it,
I'll come through it, and my body will
build immunities to it. And that will
be a blessing."
Despite his brio in the face of the
virus, Rivera worries about the vul-
nerable residents in his charge. "We
have a number of people in the Cas-
tle who are living with HJ. V., and
we're really monitoring where and
how they are," he said. "The problem
is that they don't like following up.
Most of them have had bad experi-
ences with the medical system, or
sometimes no experience with it. But,1l£ NEY )()MfR, MAl\01 30 , 1020 -4-3