USA Today
Pedro's message lives on
September 18, 2000
By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — At the foot of this city's most sinuous street sits a house where The Real World got far too real.
The year was 1994, and MTV's trend-anticipating reality series had assembled seven urban castaways for its third season. One was Pedro Zamora.
Zamora was a child of the 1980 Cuban boatlift. He also was an HIV-positive AIDS activist. Viewers shared Zamora's slow suffering, his joy during the commitment ceremony to his partner, and his death mere hours after the season finale aired. He was 22.
Zamora's story might have ended there. But his life and death changed the fates of housemates Judd Winick, now 30, and Pam Ling, 32.
Winick, who was Zamora's roommate and is a cartoonist with DC Comics, has penned an illustrated return to his MTV experience called Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned (Henry Holt and Co., $15).
Ling, who helped Winick care for Zamora during his final months, finished medical school and now does research on HIV.
They have launched the National Pedro Zamora Project, hoping to finance grass-roots AIDS education programs. Oh, and they're engaged, the first such union between housemates from The Real World, whose episodes go into syndication next month.
"This book is a good-faith effort to keep what Pedro started going," says Winick, wrapping his arms around Ling in the couple's rented apartment, which is filled with PEZ dispensers, kites and other kitsch.
"Of all these reality shows, from Survivor to Big Brother, so far he has been the only person to sign up not for personal gain, but to try to make a difference," he says. "And that certainly includes me."
Winick grew up on New York's Long Island, a self-described "big weenie liberal."
After losing a cartooning contract and moving back in with his parents, he jumped at the chance to join the MTV cast: "Free rent."
When he was told by producers that his roommate was HIV-positive, "of course I said that didn't bother me," he says. "I soon realized that wasn't true."
Over the six months with Zamora, the cast and crew learned to live with a person dying from AIDS at a time before life-prolonging drug cocktails were available. Millions watched anxiously each week.
"Pedro used to be the messenger," Winick says softly. "Now he's the message."
Winick says his book was less than honest in the beginning. But Ling, whom he fell for during the show's taping, kept him focused.
"He refused to draw Pedro as anything but a handsome young man," Ling says.
Eventually, Winick's drawings included shingles marring Zamora's gaunt pen-and-ink face.
Winick plans to lecture at high schools during his book tour and will direct part of the book's earnings to the foundation and to Zamora's family. Ling sees patients once a week, carrying on Zamora's educational legacy.
"The new approach is abstinence, which is fine, but that doesn't answer the very specific questions kids inevitably have about AIDS and sex," Ling says. "Education is key."
With its teen-friendly format as a comic book, Pedro and Me may play an enlightening role. It already has helped its author "find emotional closure."
Not long ago, fate offered Winick and Ling another way to close this chapter: Fire gutted their MTV group house on Lombard Street.
"I went inside and asked where the fire started, and turns out it was a candle that tipped over right where Pedro's bed used to be," Winick says.
Silence. A moment passes.
"Those were the best and worst times of my life. The worst, because this kid was supposed to make history with his activism, not die on us. The best, well, because I never would have fallen in love or met this man named Pedro."
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