Non-fiction / Positive Days
There’s a sore on the back of my tongue. I look in the mirror and stick my tongue out as far as I can and I still can’t see it. I can feel it though. Every time I swallow it feels like someone is squeezing my tongue with a pair of pliers, and there’s a sensation of trying to swallow hair – like the hair-covered mole on your grandfather’s neck, the one he never shaves. There is a constant burning, itchy pain, which starts at the back of my tongue and radiates down the left side of my neck and into my shoulder. I smoke too many Marlboros every day, so it could be cancer. I engage in unprotected oral sex on occasion, so it could be syphilis. I am HIV+ and take Viramune, so it could be a side effect of my newest medication. I have a Dr.’s appointment on Wednesday and we’ll once again start the process of determining what’s going on with my body. It’s not like I haven’t been through this before with different pains in different spots, improper body temperature, kidney stones, extreme unexplainable fatigue, mood swings, and a two and a half year stint with constant diarrhea. This is just the little shit that we who live with HIV are faced with on a regular basis. I feel pretty healthy on most days; and I stay too busy to get all tangled up in my mind as I am now. Then the next little sore pops up or my stomach turns upside-down for no apparent reason and the mind-fuck starts all over again. One more time I am face to face with the Reaper wondering how long I will manage to keep ducking his scythe.
It’s a sobering thought to know that one day I will not duck fast enough – I am going to die. AIDS may not be the blade that penetrates my armor, but some blade will get through. I am thirty-six years old. I am not supposed to think this kind of shit. I am supposed to be worried that my hair will fall out in the next five years. I should be going into debt to buy a Porsche in the hope of impressing a good-looking man fifteen years younger than me. I should be wondering when I would have to check into the adverse effects of Viagra and balancing the pros and cons of maintaining the hard-on from hell. This is the stuff of mid-life crisis – not wondering how long these wonderful antiretroviral cocktails are going to keep working, or if they will keep working long enough for some lucky bastard to find a cure so I can stay alive and he can build a fifty room mansion on Martha’s fucking Vineyard.
Now don’t get me wrong, not every thought is filled with this much bitterness. Right now, for instance, I’m more concerned than bitter. I am concerned for my seven-year-old nephew, Jesse. My mother has adoptive custody of Jesse because my sister found drugs more comforting than the company of her son. My mother has her little problems too, emphysema, bronchitis, asthma, a heart condition which necessitated a triple bypass a few years back, and a calcium deficiency which causes ribs to break when she coughs to strongly. She carries around a little oxygen tank, which she turns off whenever she lights one up from her pack of More Menthol throughout the day. I’d like to be able to raise Jesse whenever our cowled friend decides to take my mother, but I have to consider the ‘what if’. What if this smart little virus decides to resist any and all medication I take and I get sick. And, I die. People who do not have an incurable disease don’t have the responsibility to consider death when making decisions that may affect the lives of others. Those of us living with HIV do have that responsibility – if we choose to accept it. Do I have the right to take a child that was abused and forgotten by his mother, who will be traumatized by the death of his grandmother (which will almost certainly happen before he reaches adulthood), and subject him to the possibility of abandonment through premature death by yet another guardian who is supposed to love him? I don’t know. If I were raising him, I’m not sure how much more intense the mind-fuck might be when the next little sore pops up.
Another day a few months later . . .
I’m not writing. I’m not reading. I’m not returning my friends phone calls. I can’t seem to remember why it was that I was so happy to be alive a few months ago. I wake up with this feeling of inescapable despair. It’s a feeling that makes your soul seem smaller than it really is. I just go back to sleep most of the time. The only thing that seems to keep me out of bed for any length of time is going to work. Even that doesn’t seem to fill the void any longer. I used to revel in the thought that I was saving the world – one client at a time. Now I can’t wait to get home and turn on the babble-box then get to bed early. I started taking Sustiva a couple of months ago. The first article I remember reading about it pretty much said take Sustiva and HIV might not kill you but you might. That hadn’t occurred to me until I realized not too long ago that I hadn’t been out of the house on a weekend in over two months. I’ve been working with clinically depressed clients for almost four years now. It’s just not something that is easy to recognize in yourself. Depression just kind of crawls up on you and before you know it the world has lost all its color, all its flavor, its presentation. A filet mignon with a bottle Chardonnay shared with Leonardo Di Caprio sounds just as appetizing as a Big Mac with a coke shared with Ronald McDonald and those little french-fry muppet wannabes, and you don’t really care if you have either one of them. The world would be ok if you just didn’t wake up tomorrow.
I talked to my doctor about it after I realized what was going on. He asked me if I had considered counseling. I asked him what good counseling was going to do if the Sustiva kept interfering with the Seratonin levels in my brain. The only thing in my life that had changed prior to the onset of this depression was the new medication. I loved my job. I had been happily single for quite some time. My finances were better than they had ever been; I was about to buy a house. Nobody had died and it didn’t look like anybody was going to anytime soon. So what good, pray tell, was counseling going to do? Doc capitulated and decided we would try ten milligrams of Prozac. It’s working quite well. I’m back into my keyboard, my library, my passion to save the world, and my life. It’s just a bit irritating sometimes to realize that I have to take one more pill everyday just to counteract the side-effect of a medication that is, hopefully, saving my life – but might otherwise have me wanting to get it over with a little bit earlier.
Sunday morning not too long ago . . .
I wake up next to him. We’re in the same, spooned position that we collapsed into late last night. My left hand is under his arm; my fingers unconsciously rake his chest hair. He nestles his chin more firmly in the crook of my arm as my index finger traces the outline of his pecs. My ear is pressed against his back and I hear the beat of his heart. Thump thump, thump thump. I feel the rise and fall of his chest with his slow, easy breath. I feel protected – full. I close my eyes and snuggle a bit tighter as I run the last twenty-four hours through my mind. We connected in a local chat-room on gay.com. We had a private virtual conversation. I was impressed by the fact that he typed complete sentences instead of that cyber-speak crap that irritates the shit out of me. We were at the Park Pantry eating breakfast in less than an hour. We both had bacon and eggs, crispy hash browns, well done sourdough toast, a side of gravy and coffee with two sugars, no cream.
We walked along the shoreline after breakfast, the backs of our hands occasionally brushing, sending little whispers of hope up my arm into the pleasure centers of my brain. We watched the pigeons basking in the morning sun, picking on each other, stealing edible bits that washed up on the shore. We commented that life should be so simple. And we talked. God did we talk. We spoke of how we would fix the world, how we were helping to fix our little parts of it. We spoke of the intense, inside work we had done in order to attain some semblance of self-acceptance. We spoke of the omnipotence of love in all its forms. We went window-shopping on Fourth Street. Neither of us wished to afford anything in the ridiculous little shops along this futile attempt at a Melrose re-creation. We just seemed to have an unspoken need for this time not to end. We made small talk, we cruised the guys, we dished fashion trends and hairstyles. After a dinner of pasta Provencal and chocolate mousse at the Pizza Place Garden Café on Broadway (we shared the mousse) we strolled on over to his condo on Second Street. And now I’m lying here next to the oh so cliché man of my dreams thinking about tomorrow.
Thinking about tomorrow – the only way it could be any better is if the sex were a little more wild, if the fires could rage to a blinding crescendo. But he’s HIV negative. I feel some inherent obligation to maintain control, to keep everything within the acceptable confines of safe sex dogma. My mind screams “But sex isn’t safe!” Sex is giving in, letting go, taking and using, stripping passion down to the bare root of recognition, sex is about screaming his name when you’re right there at the top of the mountain and him hearing you when bestial urges have deafened him and you haven’t said a word anyway. But I can’t seem to get to the top when my partner is HIV negative. I always stop at a safe plateau, the top of the mountain just in sight, knowing I dare not let out enough rope to get there. How long can I stand here looking up through that empty space?
A five-minute chat . . .
I was in a chat-room and a profile popped up that read “HIV-negative bottom looking for HIV-positive top to fuck me bareback.” My stomach did a flip-flop kind of like Ritanovir used to do me about ten times a day. I knotted up like a bad perm. I had discounted the rumors of people who were intentionally trying to get infected; I couldn’t conceive the possibility, the reasoning. Now I had actually seen it on my computer screen and I was floored. I typed, “Do you think living with HIV is so fucking simple?” He didn’t answer. One by one most of the fifty or so people in the chat-room logged off. In less than a minute myself and three other people were still in that sector of cyberspace. I typed in “Gee that went well.” One more logged off, the last two never responded. This two-minute lack of interaction weakened my libido. I pulled weeds for the rest of the day. And, I hurt.
Many years ago . . .
When I was around nine or ten years old we got a puppy. She was a cream-colored, German Shepard and Greyhound mix. She wasn’t a huge dog, but when you’re a little kid any dog seems huge. So, we named her Ho-bunch, cause she was a ho-bunch of dog. She was full of life and love; she protected the family like a Soprano. Ho-bunch loved to chase cars. I would watch her sometimes chasing the old beaters that most of the folks in our neglected end of Tulsa, Oklahoma drove. I remember telling my mom one day that Ho-bunch was the fastest dog in the whole world. Mom said I was probably right. One day she chased the wrong car and her hip got crushed. The vet said we had to put her to sleep or pay a few hundred dollars to get her hip fixed. I don’t know where Mom got the money but she did, and Ho-bunch came home with a metal plate and a couple of screws in her hip. Ho-bunch limped around for a couple of months and then things seemed just like old-times, mostly. She still loved to chase cars, but every once in a while she’d chase a really fast one and that slightly off-kilter hip would throw her flat on her face; and, she’d come up to the porch and lay her head in my lap and look up at me with those eyes. I knew she was sad, that she somehow missed those more carefree days. I would pet her and hug her and she’d start feeling a little better and go find another car to chase. During those cold, damp, snowy, Oklahoma winters she would curl up on the couch with her head in my lap. Sometimes we put the heating-pad on low to warm up her hip a little so it wouldn’t hurt so badly. Then, summer would come around again and she’d be back chasing those cars.
I try to take my lessons from Ho-bunch. I spend a lot of time in this heavenly California sun chasing cars, but every once in a while . . . my friends have to pet me and hug me and I start feeling a little better. And, summer comes around again.
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Goddamn, I wanted to cry reading this, especially the end, because the story of Ho bunch tied in nicely with the rest of the piece.
Once again, your delivery is poetic, whether discussing your life versus the life you think people your age should live, or your take on the effects of depression, or that passionate description of sex, or your ending paragraph. I can’t think of anything to say about your wording.
But again, your issues are technical, such as sentence structure and punctuation (you have a tendency to place commas after “and” when they would be appropriate before it).
Besides those, another incredible read, man. I wish I could do it like you.
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God, the ideas behind this peice are completely fantastic, and something lightly touched upon. Which is a shame, becuase it’s a very interesting read and something I think many people would want to read. But the fact that you took it and ran with such a great concept says a lot about your talent. So good job with that. Being original in writing seems to get difficult becuase of the fact that much of what we write has already been done.
But you did a really good job, I loved this. And the only thing I would suggest for you to possibly change would be to brush-up some of your language. There are a few places in which it seems a bit fragmented and the vocabulary doesnt tie together very well. Maybe you should look it over and use some more colorful choices of words. That would really make this perfect.
Other than that tiny detail, I adored this peice. It is a very fresh, and original idea to come up with.
Very good work!
Farrah.
Well this was very well done. I am impressed with your command of the conventions of written English, and your ideas are well organised. The essay flows through a series of connections to finally make the point. The best part is that you had no need to tell your reader what your point is, if I understand your piece.
I take the theme of this piece to be that whatever life is left is to be enjoyed, no matter what it throws at you. I also get a little bit of the ‘don’t go looking for trouble’ as an aside, but even if trouble finds you, live life to the fullest possible extent. I hope that was your message, it came through loud and clear for me. The way your dog brings that lesson home was a sweet addition to the whole.
I enjoyed your discriptive language, and was delighted at your use of personal reflection to carry the overall tone and theme of the piece. These are the marks of truly good creative nonfiction, and are rare here at urbis. Very nicely done.
I would like to suggest, and this is just my humble opinion, the discription of your Sunday morning in bed with your friend was a bit much for me. I am a conservative, and while I have many friends who are gay, I don’t want to know personal details like that. I would put the remark about unprotected oral sex into that same catagorie except I believe that was germaine to the overall essay. This is too important a piece to let it escape the attention of people like me, or worse, gay bashers and hate filled people who will miss the message trying to find ways to slam you. It may be a good idea to keep “shocking” things like that to a minimum.
Overall a great piece, and very well written. Thank you!
This was a very well written piece of work. I like how you spliced all these different times together. It’s rather heavy, but you manage to not bring the reader down completly, mostly with the ending and Ho-bunch. Dogs are just great.
I don’t have a criticism for this work. I think it is well-written and worth reading.
I liked the ending, and how the family dog has taught you one of life’s most important lessons.
I wish you the best of luck with your writing and your life. Thanks for sharing with us.
You lived one hell of a life. I can relate to some of the things you’re going through. This is a very well written acount of the kinds of things you go through. If anything I’d like to see more.
i can’t favorite this, but i need more time to digest it. it’s good. friend me?
Nicely descriptive and emotive. I liked the point of view in different times of your life although I didn’t think the five-minute chat segment really added anything.
The “swallow hair – like the hair-covered mole” simile didn’t work for me. You are trying to describe swallowing hair, not a mole.
A couple of grammar/spelling points. Spell out “doctor’s” instead of “Dr.’s”
Change “to strongly” to “too strongly”.
This is powerful stuff. It takes a truly gifted writer to write about something like HIV without relying on over-dramatics to beat the reader over the head. You bring the reader into an unfamiliar life by talking about the little things that actually make life what it is: a journey of little happenings that usually mean something big—things like a chat room in cyberspace, a sore on the tongue, ecetera. A person would learn much more about life with AIDS from reading this essay than they would from watching some godawful after-school-special type TV movie.
The honesty of this essay is amazing and it’s so well-written. I love the closing line. I also love: “I pulled weeds for the rest of the day. And, I hurt.” People who write to teach others about life usually forget to write about one thing: Life.
I don’t really have anything constructive to say; I thought this was beautiful. Thanks for sharing it.
Raw, honest and beautifully written. The time-separated sections (not sure what else to call them) is an inspired idea – all the more so for being out of chronological order. Ending with “Many years ago…” is brilliant. Cannot think of any better way to end this wonderful piece.
I’ve almost no advice to offer you, except perhaps to spell out “doctor’s” in “Dr’s appointment” in paragraph 1.
Excellent writing. Thanks for sharing this.
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