‘I Am Fighting for the Other People’ : Paul Gann: AIDS Victim on a Crusade

SACRAMENTO —  I am here to start what may become the last campaign of my life .

--Tax crusader Paul Gann,

at a June 9 press conference,

announcing he has AIDS.

For miles he had slumped in the front passenger seat of his white Cadillac, uncommonly quiet. It was nearly midnight, and Paul Gann was being driven home from yet another television appearance. The radio was tuned, as it always is, to a public affairs call-in show, yet for once the nightly chorus of strident opinions did not hold Gann’s interest.

He was plotting his salvation, and that of the nation.

“Ted,” Gann said abruptly, sitting up and turning toward his aide, Ted Costa, “I want to meet with the President. Who should I call to get through the red tape?”

Costa, both hands on the wheel, glanced over at Gann and raised his eyebrows.

“I need to get through,” Gann said.

He wistfully recalled a time when he could “just call up the White House and get right through.” That would have been nearly a decade ago, back when Gann and Howard Jarvis were beating taxes with Proposition 13. Now Gann was trying to beat death--more specifically, death by AIDS. He had a notion about how to do it, and he believed that the President could help.

Costa promised to contact the White House scheduler the next morning. Gann suggested that if this tactic failed, they might try “the old around the horn,” seeking out mutual acquaintances to petition the President for an audience.

Satisfied, the old man sank back into the leather seat.

“I used to,” he repeated, softly, “get right through.”

The next day Costa did not call the White House.

He did not try the old around the horn.

He sensed what Gann could not. He sensed futility.

Paul Gann has a plan. Not only does he want to be the first to defeat AIDS--a dream he no doubt shares with anyone who ever contracted the fatal disease--he wants to defeat it with a drug or technique now forbidden by federal regulators.

He is convinced that such a cure is out there, somewhere, and he wants to find it and, with his own body, prove its worth. Then he wants to tell the world.

It would be, he said, “the story of the century.” He could roll into Washington like Lazarus and, as he has put it, “twist the tail of those bureaucrats and end this thing.” He could sit down with the President and talk about “getting some laws changed.” He could “go national.”

Many are the cures that have been volunteered to Gann--barley green, alpha interferon, colostrum, a jar of the Miraculous Life-Giving Water, metallic devices to realign his atoms with “magnetic north,” liquid protein, homemade capsules and power pyramids. A medium reported that a long-gone faith healer had arranged his recovery from the beyond. Several have promoted Vitamin C, but none so earnestly as a young man who, in order to demonstrate it would work, sought a blood transfusion from Gann.

One day in early July, the 75-year-old Gann stood in the threshold of his office and assumed an awkward stance--shoulders stooped, elbows pinched in tightly, palms turned out. He understood only that this was how Brother E of Boulder City, Nev., had instructed him to stand.

Brother E had promised that he could heal Gann by performing unexplained ministrations on a photograph. Initially, an old campaign shot showing only Gann’s face was sent to Boulder City. This was not enough. Brother E reported back that a complete cure would require a full body shot, precisely posed.

Gann’s secretary squinted at him through a Polaroid.

“Smile,” she said.

Gann complied, and the picture was taken.

“These people keep trying to cure me,” Gann said. “And I want to be cured. Some admit that if they could cure me it would help them. I was not born yesterday. But what do I care if their motives are selfish, or are not selfish?”

Most of these would-be saviors are quite sincere, and with them Gann is politely patient. Nonetheless, all are screened and only those few who Gann deems most promising actually make it through his door.

Revealed His Plan

Gann first publicly revealed his plan for salvation at a small press conference in Chico.

At the time, his hope was invested in a man--Gann thought he was a heart surgeon--who had emerged from a television audience in San Diego and had given him a lift to the airport. Gann could recall vividly the man’s long limousine. What he did not notice, on a business card, were the letters Ph.D. after the man’s name.

This man was promoting an outlawed drug. He claimed to be treating several AIDS patients. He claimed also that he could improve Gann in 10 days. If the remedy took, Gann would be obligated to employ his political talents to persuade the federal drug regulators to lift their ban.

Gann was eager to get started on the treatment, but he first wanted the opinion of his family doctor. Meanwhile, everything was to be kept hush-hush, off the record. But now there was a knot of reporters gathered before him, notebooks open, pens scratching, and he could not resist.

“I am guaranteed a cure,” Gann declared.

“A well-known heart surgeon,” he said of the man in the limo, had assured him that “if the virus has not gotten to you mentally . . . I can cure you. Quote. If it turns out to be true, I will fight very hard for this; I will go on national television, on a weekly basis.”

The reporters did not ask follow-up questions.

One of Gann’s first forays into public life was the creation of a bumper sticker. “Don’t be a minority,” it said, “be an American.” Risking cliche, the medium is as instructive as the message.

Gann is a master of making ideas simple. He can reduce his views on civil rights, or property taxes, or AIDS, into tidy slogans that fit nicely on bumper stickers. Also, he is a rare populist, willing to travel to any backwater radio and television station to reach a constituency of people who believe that government has lost its way, and also has lost them. Put another way, he not only appears on call-in shows, he also listens to them.

“One of the greatest things that ever happened was this type of program,” Gann was saying one hot night in July. He was seated in a darkened television studio, again in Chico, flanked by doctors. They were there for a call-in show. Gann sat stiffly, earpiece in place, makeup lightly applied over his gaunt face. He looked drawn and tired and he was not expressing himself well. His throat was sore.

As the show finally began after a long delay, Gann visibly gathered himself, cleared his head and for the next hour dominated the program with folksy anecdotes and bumper-sticker wisdom. On the long ride home he slept to the drone of insomniacs, 50,000 watts strong, speaking out on Ollie North and other great issues of the day.

A salesman by trade--first cars, then real estate--Gann did not become a California political force until he reached retirement age. The self-proclaimed “people’s advocate” had been dismissed as something of a government gadfly until Proposition 13 came around. Afterward, he lent his name and his grass-roots political organization to other successful anti-government initiatives and ran, unsuccessfully, as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Massive Transfusions

Then, in 1982, came heart surgery. It was complicated and massive transfusions of blood were required; not all of it was clean. For five years, the virus that causes AIDS coursed Gann’s body undetected, surfacing this summer in the form of extreme weight loss, crippling fatigue, pneumonia and night sweats.

The first thing Gann asked his doctor was whether he posed “a menace” to Nell, his wife of 55 years, his children and grandchildren, or anyone else. He was prepared to “go off to the desert and get a cabin somewhere, close enough to a grocery store so I could get food to eat and supplies.”

The doctor assured Gann he was not a threat, especially since the heart operation had ended his sex life--an intimate detail he would soon be sharing, though shyly, with television audiences.

Gann decided to go public. “I decided if this is going to kill me,” he said, “I want to die with a plus and not a minus. And if I sit on my tail, it’s going to be a minus.”

He was instantly in demand. Television appearances, talk shows, interviews. These first outings served as fact-finding missions. Gann gleaned anecdotes and facts from doctors impaneled as his co-guests. These he would refer to subsequently as “medical science,” as in, “I’ve been told by people in medical science. . . .”

Soon he had his litany on AIDS, a ready supply of stories and applause lines to carry him through any appearance and around any question.

On the threat that an AIDS epidemic poses: “If we don’t do something about this, I’m told by medical science, we could become the second Africa.”

On AIDS testing: “Being American means being free and with freedom comes responsibility. Freedom isn’t free.”

On passing the disease knowingly: “I think anyone who does that is lower than a snake’s belly. He is worse than Al Capone, the No. 1 gangster of my time.”

On AIDS-related civil rights issues: “What about my civil rights?”

And on hope: “I have another doctor. I call him God.”

He would tell of dealing with anger: In 1982, there was no way to test for the AIDS virus, so the donor who passed along tainted blood could not have known. And without the transfusion Gann would have died in surgery: “So, this person gave me five years.”

And he would tell, though less frequently, a story from his Arkansas boyhood.

When he was 5, Gann developed a crippling bone disease. It later became known as osteomyelitis, but at the time it was a diagnostic mystery. Gann’s leg would swell horribly and bend back. For seven years he could not walk at all, and even in early adulthood he was hobbled for months at a time. Doctor after doctor--medical science, Gann might now call them--examined his leg and all concurred: Cut it off.

For years Gann fought them. Sometimes the leg would swell so badly Nell would have to slice it open with a razor and draw out the pus with a poultice of heated corn meal.

It was unbearable, and Gann was about to submit to amputation. A doctor asked him, though, if he would as a last resort try a new, highly experimental drug. The drug was penicillin. Within months Gann was walking, and he has walked ever since.

Unlike many AIDS patients, Gann has not delved into the disease and become an expert on his own decline. For a time, though, he tracked closely what he thought was a measurement of his immune system, the body’s natural defenses broken down by the AIDS virus. He understood, correctly, that a count of 400 was normal and anything below 200 could be considered dangerous.

He first registered a 73. But there was a misunderstanding, and Gann began to mix results of another test. He thought his immune system was improving measurably, climbing to 75, 77, 89.

“If I could just get over 200,” he would say. “Oh, wouldn’t that be something?”

Actually, the count was going the other way.

Actually, it was 12.

“I’ll talk to him about that,” said Gann’s doctor, Dennis Ostrem.

The 41-year-old physician is the chief of internal medicine at the Kaiser hospital closest to Gann’s office here, and Gann has been his patient for five years.

Ostrem said in an interview that Gann’s busy schedule is a positive note in an otherwise bleak prognosis. The most practical way to measure the disease’s progression is to observe how much it has affected the patient’s attitude and life style: Gann’s spirits are high and he has been working nearly as hard as ever.

Nonetheless, Ostrem said, “His prognosis is very poor, extremely poor, and I am astounded he has done so well. . . . He could go down very rapidly, and at any time, any day.”

Ostrem said his plan is to keep giving Gann the experimental drug AZT and hope that no side effects develop. “Hopefully,” Ostrem said, “we will keep the disease in abeyance, and he won’t get a serious infection that is life-threatening, and something else will come up that we can treat him with. . . .

“That’s the kind of battle we wage. We sit and wait.”

Of Gann’s searching for a remedy outside the realm of established medicine, the doctor was succinct: “Wouldn’t you?”

He has agreed to meet with anyone pushing a cure that Gann thinks has promise, and to render an opinion. Ostrem said his first concern is to ensure Gann that does not hurt his condition with a questionable remedy. Also, he said, he does not want to see Gann’s credibility destroyed.

Ostrem examines Gann nearly every Friday. During a visit in late July, he directed most of his questions to Nell, while Gann sat on an examination table in his undershirt. There had been a little fever in the past week, she told the physician, “and he did have the night sweats one time.”

Gann asked the doctor what he had thought of the man with the long limousine. This was three days after the Chico press conference. Ostrem had spoken to the man the day before by telephone. “He calls it a kind of interferon,” Ostrem said of the illegal drug. “I have got some skepticism about it.”

‘Iron Door of White House’

Gann left it at that, and asked about taking a trip to Washington. “We’ve been trying to get through that iron door of the White House,” he said, adding that he needed to go before Congress adjourned in early August. Ostrem said the journey should not jeopardize Gann’s health.

Later, as Gann rode down the hospital escalator with Nell, he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

“I’m happy,” he said.

At the bottom of the escalator, in the crowded hospital pharmacy, pleasure awaited Gann in the form of a heavy-set, bald-headed stranger. He was sporting a cane, double-knit slacks and a cowboy shirt. His eyes registered concentration.

“Are you . . . ?” he asked.

“Yes,” Gann said, “I’m Paul Gann.”

The stranger shot out his hand. “You’re a great man,” he said. “I never thought I’d have the opportunity to shake your hand. How come there aren’t more men like you?”

Folly of Congress

He and Gann sat together on a bright orange vinyl couch and discussed the folly of Congress, the passing of Howard Jarvis and the plight of Jim and Tammy Bakker. The stranger mainly listened as Gann talked, but he did manage to interject that Congress should be deported to Cuba. And then he stood up, shook Gann’s hand again, and thanked him.

To many people, Paul Gann represents the first palatable AIDS patient. He is not ejected from airliners or refused service in restaurants. His desk is littered with stacks of condolences. Television preachers, who might otherwise glory in the AIDS epidemic as testimony to God’s terrible, swift sword, hold hands with Gann and bow their heads in prayer. Conservative politicians embrace Gann, something one suspects they might not do with a gay AIDS victim.

AIDS Hysteria

All of this raises the question about how much all the AIDS hysteria and loathing in this country has to do with a disease, and how much it has to do with a life style.

Gann himself is at his crudest discussing homosexuality. He describes it as “going into the septic tank,” and says: “I don’t understand homosexuality myself. In fact, if I had just eaten a full meal and then thought about it, I’d throw up.”

Some AIDS activists were upset when Gann went public. As one told a newspaper, “Someone with little knowledge is now a chief spokesman for the cause. We need the right answers to the AIDS crisis, not the Far Right answers.”

Gann’s entrance into the public debate, however, has come at a time of reevaluation of how society should deal with AIDS. Positions that once were the province of conservatives are being advanced, if cautiously, by more moderate or even liberal voices.

National Debate

Gann advocates criminal prosecution of people who knowingly spread AIDS, greater freedom for doctors to report to health authorities the names of patients who test positive for the virus, and mandatory AIDS testing of immigrants, prisoners, prostitutes, drug addicts and applicants for marriage licenses. All of which sets him to the right in the national AIDS debate, but not drastically so.

Gann fairly stormed into the office, a stack of mail under his arm. “Ted,” he said, “we need to send off a telegram to the Washington Post. We need to show what hypocrites those congressmen are.”

He had been listening to the Iran- contra hearings again. Or at least that is how he explained his ill temper. There were other reasons as well.

Over the past few nights, furtive telephone calls had been placed. Something about the man in the limousine. Certain papers had never arrived; certain meetings had been canceled. There were questions about credentials, conferences with lawyers and maybe even with a district attorney.

“He lied to me,” Gann said.

It was a bitter, bitter disappointment.

August, and the end of the congressional session, was edging closer.

Another Cure

Another “cure”--as Gann’s office staff call these people--happened to be scheduled for a visit that very morning. He was a self-made chemist from Greece. He wore a beige suit, bright orange tie and white socks. He was either growing a beard or needed a shave.

He had pills concocted from fruit pits. “It’s my secret,” he said. “I’m the only one in the whole Earth with it. People say to me, ‘You have the whole world in your hands,’ and I say, ‘You are right.’ ”

There were brown capsules and green capsules. He explained to Gann how the AIDS virus sits in the tip of the nose, “like a flu.” He grabbed his own nose to demonstrate. He presented letters written to various government officials. They contained the sentence: “I HAVE THE CURE.” He was disturbed by the lack of response.

He had left a bottle of the capsules, and asked Gann if he had taken them.

Gann had.

“My white count has gone up from 73 to 89,” Gann said, repeating his mistaken interpretation of his weekly blood test. “What would it be if I took 10 of these pills a day for 10 days.”

“One hundred and fifty,” the man answered.

“Oh, my God!” Gann exclaimed. “If that happened I would fight for you until the day I die.”

Chronic Arthritis

He happened to mention that Nell had chronic arthritis. “I have something in my car, a juice,” the man said. “I will give it to you, free. Just tell her to put it on her arthritis and in 10 minutes it will go away. If it doesn’t, tell her to take the brown capsules.”

Later that morning, as he eased into the Cadillac to drive for lunch, Gann offered another reason for his sour disposition. Someone had put him on a new diet the weekend before. It required loads of fruit juice, freshly blended with the peels thrown in.

“The grapefruit made me sick this morning,” he said flatly. “I got to do it, because I don’t want to die of AIDS. But if I do do it, then I’m going to die of throwing up. I threw up everything but my inner toenails.”

Paul Gann finally went to Washington on Monday, Aug. 3. The trip was not on his terms.

There was no meeting arranged with the President. Costa had resisted calling the White House until late in the previous week. “‘What are you going to say?” Costa asked, explaining his reluctance. “ ‘Hi, Mr. President, my name is Paul Gann and I have AIDS and I would like to do something about it?’ ”

Costa spelled Gann’s name three times to the appointment clerk, and described Proposition 13. He was told there was a six-week waiting list. Costa explained that Gann and Reagan were “personal friends.” The aide put Costa on hold, and then returned to say Gann should call when he was in Washington. Maybe something could be worked out.

No Cure to Share

Gann also went to Washington with no cure to share with the world, no reason to “go national,” to “twist the tails of bureaucrats.” In fact, he went in declining health.

On the Saturday before the trip he had grown pale, weak and nauseous. The AZT was attacking his red blood cells. He was taken off the medicine and spent the night in the hospital, receiving three units of fresh blood.

He felt flashes of anger again toward the donor who had first passed him this test. “I became a little upset at about 3 o’clock yesterday morning,” he said, “watching that blood drip, drip, drip, verly slowly, into my veins.”

Still, Gann went to Washington full of purpose.

“To me,” he said grimly, sitting beside his wife in the coach section of a commercial flight, “this is the most important thing I have ever been involved with. Even though it is going to kill me, I will fight the devil to my death.”

Shouted a Rebuke

Washington was swampy hot. Gann held a press conference on Tuesday and 10 reporters attended. He shared the stage with a couple of conservative congressmen. One of them, Rep. Robert Dornan, an Orange County Republican, shouted a rebuke to those who argue that mandatory AIDS testing will drive underground those who most need to be tested.

“People are being driven underground already,” he thundered. “Six feet underground.”

Gann apparently liked the line. Before the week was over he was using it himself.

There also were calls exchanged with a White House scheduler. “I’m trying to squeeze you in,” she told Gann. Every few hours he would call the hotel, hoping for a confirmation that never came.

He was having trouble with steps. Somehow he couldn’t seem to coordinate his eyes and his feet. He kept tripping. This was new and troublesome.

Try Treatment Plan

On Wednesday, he received an express package from a group of West Coast physicians. Now that he had been forced off AZT by the side effects, they wanted him to try their treatment plan.

And on Thursday morning, Gann testified before Congress, addressing a subcommittee that has begun to evaluate proposed AIDS legislation.

“I am Paul Gann,” he said, his voice pitched with emotion, “and I have AIDS. I resent the fact that I have been given a death sentence.”

He called for more testing, for criminal laws to prohibit spreading the disease, for less reporting restrictions on doctors. The hearing room was packed but, until Gann spoke, the testimony had been a bore. Now all the smartly dressed congressional aides, all the reporters and all the committee members--they all stopped their shuffling of papers and their whispering and they listened closely to this old man in the neatly pressed gray suit.

‘Fighting for Other People’

“I am here,” Gann said, “because I have the disease. I am not fighting for myself. I have it. I am fighting for the other people.

“Please, for God’s sake, let’s do something about it.”

Who could say if Gann changed any minds that morning; at least they had listened.

That afternoon Gann decided that it was time to go back to California. He is a smart-enough politician to realize that, despite a last call on the appointments office, it was not his time to meet with the President, and he accepted it gracefully.

Reflecting at the airport coffee shop, he allowed that it had been “a good week.” He had told his story. Now it was up to state and federal governments to find a way to conquer AIDS. If they failed, he said, he would “go to the people” with an AIDS initiative.

And for one rare moment, he stepped from behind his protective cocoon of slogans and standard stories. He talked about his concern that this last great hurrah could be robbing him of time with his family, hurrying his departure. “I have been running a little too fast,” he said. He talked, too, of a need “to think and prepare.”

Made All Arrangements

Paul Gann is no fool; he knows he could be dead any day now. He has purchased the cemetery plot--”the property,” he calls it--and he has made all the other arrangements. All his family needs to do, he said, “is call the undertaker.”

He even has given thought to an epitaph:

“I would like to have it very simply say, ‘Born free. Lived free. And died free.’ ”

Gann and his wife changed planes in Chicago. The walk through the sprawling terminals of O’Hare was hard on his frail legs. He stopped by a snack shop to rest them and wanted to talk about the doctors who had sent him the new treatment and with it his latest reason for hope.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” Gann asked, “if they could cure me?”

It would be, he promised, the story of the century.