Poz
Carey calls me. Since the latest outbreak, and self-quarantine, he now uses the phone to talk, we have conversations on the phone, like in the old days.
“How you holding up?” he asks. A glass with ice tinkles. He’s already into the vodka, and it’s barely 11 am.
“Meh. How are you guys?”
“Please. Both of us working from home. He’s driving me nuts. Everything smells like bleach. Do not mess with a Virgo during a Mercury in retrograde.” In the background, the vacuum cleaner roars to life. Carey sighs. “And since he’s read some twitter tweet about the death of facial hair in the era of the mask, he’s bullshit. The new beard balm our company launched is not moving. No one is buying. He’s freaking out.”
“Ugh.” That’s all the sympathy I can muster.
“If you ever have to spend the end of days with Van, do yourself a favor and shoot yourself instead.”
“Is it the end of days?” I have yet to shower, or clean the apartment. It doesn’t seem to make much sense to tidy the magazines.
“Who knows? After watching CNN for five fucking straight days I feel doomed.” He takes a healthy swig of his drink.
“Let’s just hope alcohol has some medicinal uses.”
“Amen twisted sister.” He’s sloshed.
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
I tell him, again, about my recent date with a kid named Kenny, a few weeks ago pre-quarantine. The good thing about Carey, he is frequently drunk, which means I get to tell the same stories over and over and it’s still news to him. Kenny was a little weasel. In the middle of our date, when he asked me if I was “Clean” and I told him my HIV status, he freaked out, bolted. That rejection brings up a déjà vu of emotions for me, and now that we are living again in a time of disease, it’s amplified. That old fear. The shame. The anxious wariness. The concepts of clean, and dirty. In so many ways, this time of Covid now feels like such a replay of those early AIDS days.
Carey says, “Now that it’s not just a bunch of fags and Haitian immigrants who are doing the dying, maybe the response will be different this time.”
“The other day, I’m walking through Cambridge Commons, it’s impossible to understand how such a lovely spring afternoon could feel so foreboding.”
“Foreboding. Exactly. That’s the word.”
“Blue sky, cloudless, beautiful. Sunlight bouncing off every shiny surface. The first daffodils trembling in the breeze. And yet—no kids playing in the playground, no sounds of their laughter and incessant happy chirping, no lovers kissing on the new green grass. No traffic sounds. No city noise.”
“ Sunday quiet, every day.”
“A woman coming in the other direction had her head down, lost in her own thoughts. You see a lot of that now. When she looked up, saw me, I made a smile, I nodded. She stopped, stepped off the sidewalk, and crossed the street. Maintaining social distance. Made me feel, weird I guess.”
“We’re all possibly contaminated. If you aren’t wearing a mask and gloves 24/7 it’s like you’re socially barebacking. Taboo.”
“The mask is the new condom.”
He laughs. “How is this affecting your social life? Weren’t you just getting your feet wet again in the dating pool?”
“Social life? No more Grindr. No more dating. No more going out. But honestly, after Kenny, I kind of got turned off with meeting guys that way. These young guys don’t get it.”
“Can you believe we went to all those ActUp rallies just so smug kids can call us Boomer?”
“Fuck them.”
“Yea,” he slurs, “fuck them all.”
“We’re totally Gen X.”
“Totally.”
And we laugh. But, this generation, like ours, will have their history shaped by the events that are happening now, as we did in our time, when AIDS was the fear that gripped us. This government will do too little too late, like before, while people will become needlessly infected, and die. People will lack the information they need to protect themselves. This generation will see their friends and their lovers get sick. They will know the fear that we knew. It sucks.
I say, “you know, in spite of my bitching about being single, and over 50, this all sort of puts my shit into perspective. There are bigger issues than one old lonely guy, worse things than being alone in quarantine.”
“Like being with the wrong person?”
“A Kenny would make me ballistic in three days. How would Robert and I have fared in all of this? Hard to tell. Maybe a little thing like a new virus would have exposed all the cracks we thought were sealed? Mere speculation now. But being alone is not the worst.”
“At the moment, it sounds like heaven to me,” his voice lowers, “you know I love Van, I do, I really, really do—but I’d sell him for a handful of magic beans right now.”
“It is weird though, how this feels so eerily familiar.”
“You mean like the old days? When all we had was Jerry Falwell and Nancy Reagan, pretending we didn’t exist?”
“Yea. It brings up all of that.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I keep thinking about the day I got my diagnosis.”
It was the week between the holidays, December of 1999. I got tested that time at the insistence of my then-boyfriend James, who refused to go past first base with me if I didn’t. Even though he was a dismal kisser, he was cute, and I was young enough then to be optimistic, so I went and did it. Back then, getting tested was still scary shit. Waiting for those results. Knowing that the answer might change everything.
When the nurse called me to come into the office to speak to the doctor, I knew.
Whoever designs medical office space is a sadist. Impersonal. Square. All the shades of beige and gray, all the starkness and coldness, the smells of disinfectant and isopropyl, the posters of diseased lungs and livers. Then the temperature is like a refrigerator. These are the thoughts I had while I sat perched on the exam table naked except for a paper gown, waiting for my doctor. So much easier than thinking about the other thing.
A gentle, but firm knock on the door. Dr. Alma peeped her head in. “Hello?”
She came into the room, a white lab coat over an Anne Taylor suit. Infectious disease pays well, apparently. Her hair was in a severe blunt cut. She seemed no nonsense, which proved to be true.
She sat down across from me, her eyes looking right at me. Her hand on mine. “It’s positive,” she said.
I hung my head.
“You Ok?” her voice sounded far away.
I nodded. I didn’t know what I was. My first thoughts were how to tell James. My mom. My second, was how ashamed I felt, the deep unabating shame that only a recovering Catholic can feel. A leper from out of the Bible, someone diseased, unclean. I was being punished.
“I’m going to do a quick exam on you, if that’s OK, nothing too strenuous. Just a look-see.”
She donned gloves, shone a light down my throat and in my ears and in my eyes.
“Any fevers? Cough?”
She checked my temperature and my blood pressure and my pulse, said “Hmmm” and “Ah-huh” and “Good.” Her deft hands palpated for swollen glands in my neck, my armpits and groin. She put the cold stethoscope on my chest, listened. On my back. “Breathe. Deep Breath. Again. Again. One more time. Ok, just breathe normally now, relax.” She was efficient, brisk. No chit chat. When she was done, she made notes in my chart. “Do you need a psych referral?” she asked, her ballpoint pen hovering over an empty box on the form.
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you want a referral to see one of the psychiatric providers? A therapist? Case manager? They can help if you need to apply for disability, or housing.”
“Disability?”
“I’ll have the nurse go over the contact information if you need it.”
“Thanks.”
“Listen,” she said, “we can manage this. Every few months I want to see you, we need to monitor your T-cells. Right now you’re at 432.”
“Is that good?”
She frowned. “We’ll keep an eye on it, if you get below 350, we’ll need to talk about starting you on meds. There are newer regimens being trialed right now, better tolerated, more efficacious, so that’s hopeful.” She didn’t look so very hopeful.
“Ok.” Frigid air blew straight on me from a vent overhead making a tick tick tick sound. I shivered. The paper gown crinkled beneath me.
Before she left the room she placed a box of Kleenex and a pamphlet on condoms next to me. “I’ll give you some time to get changed back into your clothes. See the receptionist on the way out to schedule follow up. Call me if you develop any fevers or night sweats.” She handed me her card. “Nice to meet you.” And she was gone.
Alone, I just sat. It was like someone took my body and turned it into something toxic, my cells, my soul, I was something tainted, my blood poisoned.
I say to Carey, “My biggest worry was how am I going to tell my mother? It’ll kill her. She still hadn’t gotten over Rock Hudson.”
Carey sighs deeply. “I can’t even imagine. My mother will not accept Van’s ‘minority status’, as she calls it. What did you do next?”
“What did I do? You know, I can’t even remember. I think it was snowing when I left the doctor’s office. I remember walking in the new falling snow and thinking how beautiful it was, how ironic that life should be so beautiful, when we’re dying a little every day.”
“You do skew poetic. It’s one of the things we love about you.”
“Hmmm. I know I went home, opened a bottle of scotch, and sat by the fireplace all night, just me and a Duraflame log and the snow coming down.”
“Whatever happened to James?”
“He dumped me. The minute I told him. His exact words: ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’ That was the last I heard of him.”
“What a dick.”
“Yea.”
“We were lucky,” Carey says, adjusting himself on the couch. “We survived. That’s something.”
“I suppose.”
“Ironic. Here we are again.”
“Exactly. Here we are again.”
“Listen, the husband is making faces at me, and I better scoot. Talk to you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Love you.”
“You too.”
We hang up, and I get ready to head out to the store to pick up a few things. My face covering sits on the counter, a converted piece of fabric from one of my old ActUp T-shirts, black, with “Don’t Panic” on the front. It’s a relic, a fashion statement from a long ago era, now re-purposed for the new fashion statement: we’re all possibly contaminated, we’re all of us unclean.
Don’t Panic.
