Monday, November 15, 2004

 

First, a lite intro...because it will be necessary, given the following entry.


On Saturday night, MzOuiser accompanied me to Bob's going-away party at his apartment in Chelsea. He and his significant other, Larry, are relocating to London, and I'm sorry for it, since they're both super people and since Bob is one of the highest-spirited bloggers I've ever met. On the way, MzOuiser and I had dinner at a Cuban place on 14th Street called La Nacional, which is hard to find but worth finding. Seems to be a well-kept secret. I ordered the paella, which a Times review I'd read had raved about, and it was absolutely delicious. I cleaned the whole huge plate. MzOuiser's garlicky chicken dish was, she assured me, extremely good. In between mouthfuls we talked spirituality and life-drama and high-school Spanish teachers.


Then, we waddled on to the party. It was well-attended, in both senses of the phrase, and I was glad to see many of the usual suspects. I shall leave it to others to detail the debauchery. Suffice it to say, my nipples were the subject of at least one conversation this time, but not my sideburns.


During the party, Bob and Larry held a short trivia contest to give away some of their household appliances that they weren't taking with them to England. Glenn, a great fellow Texas expat with whom I've struck up a nice little acquaintance (and his boyfriend Derrick is an absolute dear), won the electric mixer, which somehow ended up in my hands at the end of the night when Glenn, Derrick, MzOuiser, and I headed for the uptown subway.


Mixers have an obvious resemblance to pistols, and I had great fun exploiting that underground in the early-morning hours. After MzOuiser had departed from us at the 96th Street stop, we waited for the local train while I talked loudly and waved the mixer in the air like a crazed gunman. Finally we decided it would be better to catch a cab rather than wait and wait and wait some more. I darted down the stairs toward the exit well ahead of Glenn and Derrick, and made the classic "stop-and-wait-for-me" hand gesture while, mixer upheld, I peered around the corner before jumping out into the open with both beaters blazing.


No one was in the underpass. I dashed toward the stairs at the end of the corridor, skidded precariously through a puddle, and took the steps two at a time, the mixer pointed straight ahead. All clear.


Glenn and Derrick caught up with me, and proceeded to suggest that I might get shot by the NYPD if I kept acting like I had a firearm. Point taken.


Upon emerging aboveground, we were lucky: there was an available taxi right across from us, and we piled right in with no problem, even though I was packing beat.


Sometimes you need to toss out the intellectualism. Sometimes it just does your heart good to act like a fucking idiot.


ENTRY 153: BLOOD SIMPLE





There is a romantic relationship in my past that has probably affected me more deeply and profoundly than any other I've had, and I haven't blogged about it at all. In a strange way, I guess, its repercussions have been so profound, and its effects so ingrained, that it seemed too obvious to write about specifically. Why would one write about the experience of drinking water, or of spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread, or of putting one foot in front of the other when walking?


Yet I realize lately that it is a part of my past that I feel compelled to reexamine, because elements of it are resurfacing insistently and pointedly and, yes, frighteningly. And I also recognize that I was afraid to talk about it, for fear of its resurfacing, and that those things we ignore for fear of their returning are precisely the ones that do.


I came out to my parents in the summer of 1994, shortly before my sixteenth birthday. It was a terribly difficult time for them and for me, and I found myself yearning for someone to take care of me, someone whom I could love and who would love me without judging the way and the gendering of my love. Of course, Corpus Christi wasn't the place most conducive to a gay love affair, and I swiftly realized my choices were limited.


So, in the end, I did what any typical sixteen-year-old kid would do: I opened up my own P.O. box, then went down to the local newspaper and took out a classified ad for a nice boyfriend.


I will spare you the epic tale, the litany of losers and nutcases. I will refrain from telling the whole gory story of the guy who invited naïve little me to his house, answered the door shirtless, showed me porn, talked disturbingly about how he liked the power he felt when carrying a gun, and tried to prevent me from escaping.


One of the last letters to arrive in my P.O. box was from an 18-year-old senior at another high school. He sounded like a nice guy, and I wrote him back, and we talked on the phone, and I met up with him, and we began to date, and it was all a secret from my parents--and I can still recall the heady excitement of it; the vaguely Montague-and-Capulet illicitness; the astonishment I felt about another man's actually being attracted to me; and the newness that would never again be so new, and certainly not so innocent.


Dale told me after three days that he loved me, and I believed it, and I said it back even though I knew better, because I so wanted it to be true, and thought that it would be true someday. The first time he came over, I measured my bedroom doorframe beforehand, because he was 6'4" and I was afraid he might bump his head. And it was in my bedroom that I first kissed another man, with my parents watching TV in the next room until my mother, who must have suspected something, barged in with the ostensible purpose of serving us popcorn and we pretended to be looking through my sophomore yearbook.


We held hands over the gearshift of my old Honda Accord, and I kissed his strangely cold mouth after he'd eaten a sandwich with mayo, and I made fun of him about the way he pronounced "aunt" like ont, and he talked about how much he wanted to sleep with me, and I replied that I didn't feel ready for that yet, and I can still remember all these physical sensations as though they occurred yesterday, my body all electric.


And it brings tears to my eyes even now to remember what he told me, that I was the first person he'd been with who hadn't tried to have sex with him immediately, who had treated him with real respect.


Dale had lost his virginity at the age of 9 or 10 to his older brother's friend, who was 17 or 18. By the time Dale was in junior high school, he was cruising the park on the way home every day, until, when he was 14, he was arrested for soliciting an undercover officer. When his absentee parents received that terrible phone call, they felt guilty, bailed him out, and bought him a stereo. A couple of years later, Dale's older boyfriend gradually evolved into his pimp, and he became ensnared in the underworld of male prostitution.


In the ensuing years, as I've grown older, I've tried to imagine having had all those things happen by the time I turned 18. I can't, and I'm not sorry I can't.


One time Dale showed me his own yearbook, and I asked him about all the stars he'd drawn next to various guys.


"Oh, that's everyone I've had sex with," he said nonchalantly, as I stared at pages and pages that contained constellations.


"How many guys have you slept with?" I asked, with the serious frown that I so often employed in those youthfully cynical days.


He honestly seemed to consider the question. "Maybe a couple hundred."


I didn't know how to comprehend that order of magnitude. Sex was still so very mysterious to me, and being in the arms of someone to whom the subject was so intimately familiar both terrified and titillated me.


Sex was something I very much wanted to know about, and I had determined that I would share my body with Dale, would let him be the first to explore me, despite the misgivings I had about the damage he must have sustained. I wanted to help him heal from the exploitation he'd suffered, even as he helped me explore myself in possibly dangerous ways.


And then Dale dumped me for a friend of mine he'd met only once, and proposed marriage to him with a real ring a week later, right before my friend moved away to Atlanta, and none of it made sense, and I was heartbroken, and then I met Dale's ex-boyfriend and became close to him, partly as a means of retribution, and then Dale's ex-boyfriend metastasized into my stalker.


The next autumn Dale went away to college. And then, a month later, he was back in town. He invited me over to the apartment where he was staying with a friend, and I went, curious, and he told me how he'd thought he only needed to take the math portion of his college placement exams, and thus scored a zero on the reading part, which he didn't bother to take, and how they put him in a remedial reading course for people who didn't even speak English, and how he said "Fuck this" and dropped out and came back to Corpus Christi.


Then he put the moves on me, and I let him kiss me until he pinned me down and wanted to go much further and I was frightened because he was so much bigger than I was, and I extricated myself and went home. And after a period of some months Dale vanished, fled the state to avoid the law because of all the bad checks he'd written, all his credit trouble. And on some level I wasn't really surprised, because he'd always had these addictions, whether it was drinking or sex or spending money or lying. But it was the lying that would cause me the most and the most lasting damage, even though the harm to me hadn't been fully realized yet. But it was half-buried in me already, dormant but ticking, waiting to detonate.


When it happened it was the summer after I graduated from high school, a long, deadening stretch of months in which I couldn't find a temporary job to keep me occupied, in which I realized I wasn't close enough to anyone I knew to find any kind of emotional comfort beyond an impersonal game of pool or a casual chat with the male prostitutes who used to hang out down by the waterfront, who'd offer me sexual favors for free because I was cute enough to do it for them, even though they knew I'd always turn them down.


So I started to volunteer again at a local HIV/AIDS organization where I'd been an active worker a year or so before, only to realize the place was too badly run to put me to any kind of real use. But this time they had a definite task for me: to input numerical data into their computer system in preparation for a series of reports that they were required to submit to the state.


I spent long hours that dripping summer in the cramped but air-conditioned file room, tapping away at the same droning sequence of keys, feeling a dumb sense of progress at the end of every page. Every once in a while, a girl I was friendly with would also be working in the file room, pulling client folders for the caseworkers and then refiling them later. It was during one of our casual chats, in which she often shuffled through dozens and dozens of files--not one of which I so much as glanced at--that my eyes happened to fall on a particular folder she was just about to slip onto a shelf of hundreds, back into its sea of manila. And it was labeled neatly with Dale's name.


It was inexcusable, unethical, inevitable that I read through the file. How could I not? And it was then that the bomb finally detonated, that a hole was permanently blown in my foundation of trust toward other men, that I realized why he had really come back so suddenly from college: he'd tested positive while he was away at school, and he'd lied to me about it, and he'd tried to sleep with me even though he knew it would be putting me at risk of exposure. And now he had vanished and I could never ask him why he'd done what he had done.


All of this has had an immense effect on how I relate to men, of how I feel about sex. My mother once looked me in the face and said, "If you're gay and you have sex, you'll more than likely get AIDS." What does a 17-year-old kid say to that? "Oh, I'm not afraid of AIDS. No biggie." But I was, in fact, terrified, and to a greater extent than I would ever have admitted (defiant as I always was), I bought into the notion that there was something immoral about having too much sex, or the wrong kind of sex, or sex with too many people. Disease and death was the price exacted for such things.


These issues were all very much in play this summer, during the period in which I slept with a number of people I didn't even know. And I knew that I did it out of a sense of loneliness, and I tried not to judge myself for it, and I stopped.


But there was still the possibility of the ticking time bomb. Of course I'd taken "precautions." I'd also been fairly forthright about what had been happening, had told friends about my little series of escapades, and that I'd decided it wasn't really the thing for me. But what I hadn't told anyone, not even Peter, was that there had been a particular incident in which there was a possibility that the prophylactic had been compromised.


I always felt that the cruellest part of HIV/AIDS is the waiting game. It used to be that you had to wait six months to know for sure whether you were infected; now it's three months, which is bad enough. Even worse was the two-week waiting period for test results. Why should any medical test take that long in the modern era? Now, thank God, there is the rapid HIV test. In less than an hour, you can know.


Today was the end of my three-month incubation period. I'd been celibate for exactly that long, and it was time to get the truth about my blood, about my health and future and what would happen to me. My mysterious illness of a few months ago had left me shaken and uncertain about myself, about the world and its fairness.


I made an appointment for this afternoon, and it wasn't until a couple of hours before that I started to really feel the gravity of it, with my hands shaking and my mind unsteady and papers shuffling meaninglessly on my desk. All at once I had the startling realization that it was ten years to the day since I had first met Dale.


From work I walked to the testing site. It was a stupefyingly beautiful afternoon, all blue and breeze, and I almost hated the facile irony of the juxtaposition of the weather with my state of mind.


I'd thought about what I'd do if I tested positive. Whom would I tell? What would I say? How drastically would I change my life--where I lived, what I did, how I functioned? Would I date anymore? Would I withdraw from the world, or find another part of it in which to expand and expand and expand?


The testing counselor was very nice, and I was glad, and I wanted him to hurry the fuck up and get my blood and spit out a fucking answer. I had never been this uncertain about an HIV test, and it was not a feeling I relished.


At last, the phlebotomy accomplished, they deposited me in a waiting area where the radio was tuned to an easy listening station and the magazines were six weeks old. I couldn't possibly have read anything. Instead I stared outside at the apartment building across the street, seeing my mother's face in every window, darkness behind every door. Somewhere nearby, my blood was testifying something about me that could be either acquitting or damning. I felt like a defendant waiting for the verdict of a jury. A jail cell terrified me much less than my own blood cells at that moment.


I tried to relax, to empty my mind, to let the minutes propel me forward as they so unforgivingly and inexorably would.


And then they came for me. It was time. And I wasn't ready, and I immediately sprang up and followed the counselor back to his office, where he shut the door and faced me and I faced him, all uncomfortably fast. And the answer he gave me was one I had dreaded.


He told me I was negative.


There is something that can be just as hard as facing your own mortality: recognizing your own uncertain life as it spreads obliquely before you, with all its roots in the resilient pain of your past, but then nevertheless taking that next hesitant step out of an HIV clinic, out of a job that grinds you down, out of a relationship that isn't working, and into a new and confusing and tingling beyond. It isn't always easy to choose to live.


Yet I felt, in some way, ready, and without looking back I walked out the door, my mind full of problems that no medical professional could identify or treat, but whose resolutions would be the only way to achieve the kind of wellness I have sought all along. I did not go ungratefully.


I don't know if Dale is dead. All I know is that his legacy needs to be; that the death I absorbed from him needs to die; and that I have no excuse not to be adamantly, relievedly, and unguiltily alive.

7:42 PM

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