Sacramento Bee
'Real World' AIDS agony told in type

Judd Winick was rooting for Richard, the winner of the reality TV series "Survivor," all along.

"He was playing the game, he was always playing it, he didn't make any bones about it," Winick says. "He probably didn't have to be as smug about it, but he knew what it was all about. It's just TV bull."

Winick, 30, has earned his right to an opinion on the recently concluded series. As an alumnus of the 1994 season of MTV's pioneering series The Real World, he knows just what those castaways had to go through.

Thrown together in a house in San Francisco with a half-dozen other young people, Winick and his housemates were followed by cameras their entire waking lives for six months. The results were edited into a Generation X soap opera with real conflict -- and real tears.

"Of course, we didn't have to starve, battle snakes and run obstacle courses," he says. "But we were sort of the granddaddy of reality television."

Winick, who was a struggling cartoonist at the time, says that their experience affected them deeply. It has certainly affected his life: He stayed in San Francisco (he's from New Jersey) and lives there with his fiancée, Pam Ling, who was one of his The Real World roommates.

There was another roommate who also had a huge impact on Winick, and it is that relationship -- with the gay, HIV-positive Cuban immigrant, Pedro Zamora -- that inspired his first book, the just-published Pedro And Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learned (Henry Holt and Co., $15).

Zamora was Winick's roommate in the house. He was also the first person Winick knew who was HIV-positive. And he was the first person Winick loved who died.

"He was my friend, and I learned so much from him," Winick says by phone from the Haight Ashbury apartment he shares with Ling, 32. "A lot of people learned a lot from him."

Zamora, who came to the United States as a child on the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba, discovered he had AIDS as a teenager, and set out to educate other teens about the dangers of AIDS and to help them with the difficulties of being young and gay.

Charming, intelligent and handsome, Pedro was a hit with audiences before he joined The Real World, and he was a hit on the show. He is probably the most memorable cast member of the show's nine seasons.

And that makes Pedro And Me all the more affecting. It works in part because anyone who saw the original show already knows the characters, which makes the educational aspects of the book easy to take. And education was what Zamora was all about, something Winick has taken on as his own goal with this book.

"On the simplest level, I learned everything I know about people with AIDS," he says. "But it was more than that. I learned about how not to judge people. I thought I was open-minded, but I found out that I wasn't, which ended up making me more open-minded."

"I'd like to pass on what he taught me."

The story does not have a happy ending. Unbeknownst to many viewers -- and even to the people at MTV who were filming the roommates' lives -- Zamora was already getting sick with AIDS-related illnesses while the show was being shot.

He died just a few hours after the last episode was aired in November 1994, Winick says. He was only 22 years old.

"It's a hero's story, which is incredibly sad but very uplifting at the same time," Winick says. "I'm surprised it hasn't been made into a movie, which is another reason why I wrote the book."

Winick has had his dreams come true. Now a professional cartoonist, he is drawing for DC Comics (he is the monthly writer of "The Green Lantern") and has his own comic book series, The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius (Oni Press).

But it is his The Real World experience that has lingered.

"It was the best and worst experience of my life," he says. "Losing Pedro was the worst. I'm not an overly spiritual person, in general I'm pretty angry about it, but it made me a better person."

"But," he adds, "I could still be a better person if he hadn't died. It wasn't necessary."

Winick, Ling and Pedro's sister Mily Zamora have formed a nonprofit foundation to fund other AIDS-education nonprofits. And for that, Zamora's memory serves the world well, Winick says.

Still, he says, "The world has enough martyrs. The world needs flesh-and-blood heroes, and we had one in Pedro."

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