Few people can recall the darkestays of the AIDS epidemic in New York with such painful personal detail as Marc Rubenstein. Rubenstein is a doctor. He also is gay. As an idealistic 36-year-old physician who opened a private practice in Manhattan's Gramercy Park area in May 1979, Rubenstein was staggered by the scope of human tragedy that played out against the grim backdrop of city streetscapes withering away. Entire rows of stores shut down in some neighborhoods after their owners were ravaged by the mysterious plague. When he began his practice, he had no idea a deadly new disease would soon plunge the city - and his life - into turmoil. "I got a lot more than I bargained for," said Rubenstein, now 63. By June 1987, the year the death toll in the city hit 3,298, Rubenstein had had enough. He packed in his practice. "I just couldn't deal with it anymore. I couldn't deal with the dying young every day. I had a lot of friends, ex-lovers, people I knew, dying. I had to get away from it. It was just too much," he said. Although the number of New Yorkers dying of AIDS continued to climb until 1994, reaching an annual peak of 8,040, many who lived through the epidemic said the mid-'80s were the bleakest, partly because they felt so helpless. The miraculous "cocktail" of anti-AIDS drugs was still a decade away. "People came in with lymph nodes the size of golf balls on their necks," Rubenstein recalled. "Nobody could give them an answer. They would recover from pneumonia only to get something else, or get pneumonia again." What truly crushed Rubenstein, however, was the death of his former partner, Donald. "It was very wrenching. I mean, I had already seen it in other people I was close to, but Donald was very special. He was really the great love of my life," Rubenstein said. Hospitals in the city were overrun with patients. Many spent days on stretchers in emergency rooms because all the beds were full. Some AIDS patients even starved to death - partly because hospital staff who were terrified of the illness refused to enter patients' rooms. In the gay community, attending funerals became a daily affair. They were more heartbreaking when some parents refused to even acknowledge a son's death, recalled Hal Moskowitz, 52. Moskowitz's photo albums are packed with snapshots of friends who fell victim to the epidemic. Leafing through one album recently, Moskowitz pointed to face after face in quick succession, whispering, "He's dead. He's dead. He's dead." Rubenstein eventually returned to medicine, but at first he chose to see only non-AIDS patients. "I didn't want to get too involved," he said. In 1994, he joined the William F. Ryan Community Health Center, a Manhattan clinic that treats low-income patients. Today, he has returned to treating patients with HIV. "It's like that saying, if it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger," he said with a wry chuckle. "It was the awareness that something could be done." pshin@nydailynews.com