by Paul Lisicky
But something else consumes my grief. What have I done? I’ve failed my largest assignment: the management of feeling. I’ve failed at being a man, failed at being a queer man, failed at holding myself together when there are so many actual horrors and tragedies, not just far, but hundreds of feet from us in Town. And I still feel it as failure even when I should be feeling proud for saying, No, don’t do that to me, when I know that queer people are always being told, You’re shrill, lighten up, get over it, move on, don’t take yourself so seriously, look at that little drama queen.
We’re the best students of hurting ourselves, and I know that and still manage to use it against myself and others.
Polly and I sit on the step of the broken-down cottage across the street. I’ve dropped my bike in high weeds and everything around my shoes is glittering, hard: things a crow would notice if it were closer to daylight: cigarette butts, a sheet of chewing gum foil, a fishing hook, an orange peel. I fix my eyes on them because I cannot lift my head. I will not lift my head or say a word because the world cannot be larger than this.
The bass line keeps booming, muffled, from the walls of the club across the street. It’s an amplified human heart gone bad, like the two-story heart inside the Franklin Institute of my childhood, so vast and revolting you could take a walk through it.
34
Sixty Days
When it comes to being sick, I’m a professional dating back to childhood. So many speculations about diseases—leukemia, cystic fibrosis—that the speculations, and the dread surrounding them, became sicknesses in themselves. The surrender not just to my body but to the gravity of others surrounding it. My mother’s anxiety, her legends: the people around her never stuck around. Even my pediatrician, Doctor Boguslaw, lost his own daughter. Every time a mysterious symptom presented itself in me, he must have been thinking of Nancy, and communicated that to my mother, even if it was just through the set of his mouth, a glance. His worried glance, kind. Doctor Boguslaw.
The bedroom of my childhood. The heat—dry, papery tongue. Too dark in the room to see—what time? My mother sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning over me: “The doctor’s going to test your wee-wee.” That isn’t even her expression; she’s always hated childish words for bodily functions, and now she is making a fool of herself, her fear so acute it’s consuming her actual language. I see just what they want of me: trapdoor opening in the ceiling, beige, blocky machine lowering upon my midsection. A lens and—an attachment? A crenulated hose from the vacuum cleaner at the car wash. The machine will embarrass me, the machine will poke inside me, hurt me in order to come up with some answer about whether I have to live or die—and the bad news of it will make my mother cry. When I find out I only have to pee into the Dixie cup she holds out for me, I’m so relieved I practically curl up like a grub.
Now it seems surprising that I survived those sixty days, how they came and went like a dream. My throat hurt, my head hurt, my eye sockets, my uvulas, my joints. High fever that wouldn’t break. It was hard to sit up, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. In fact, there were benefits in being the center of attention, center of the house, a humming stove in the bedroom, staying all day in my rabbit-patterned pajamas, no one to scare me, no bigger child to make fun of me, or follow me down the hall asking me a simple question over and over as if the whole point had always been to flatten me.
Are you a child or a monkey?
Are you a child or a monkey?
Once I was sent back to school, they’d forgotten I was ever gone, except when it came time to deliver the books from Scholastic. The covers were yellow, shiny, with Curious George’s body on the front. Kind and funny George, interested not in being the boss of anyone but in standing alongside: that’s what I wanted. I never thought I was a ghost until the day the books were delivered. There I was, at the back of the room without a book, and no one in the room thought to hide that, not even the teacher. Back when I was sick my classmates made get-well cards, thirty-two sheets of construction paper folded in half, sketched with the most livid crayons in the Crayola box. Most looked like they were done by children trying to be childish, children who didn’t look like they’d meant it. I looked at every one, every day during those sixty days. I thought about each person, how long they spent on each card, how realistic their drawings looked, and gave each one a grade. Only Andrea Fowler got an A+ for her drawing of a clown holding a clutch of red balloons. The lines were straight; she meant them. She wanted me to get well; it wasn’t just homework. Or drawn by a child who needed to look like a child in order to please adults. “That isn’t nice,” my mother said with an expression that couldn’t mask her smile. I didn’t have the language to tell her I needed to make my own school, because the school out there wasn’t made for the likes of me.
But Curious George: I knew all about lost puzzle pieces: I was the lost puzzle piece in the room in which everyone seemed to be connected, everyone knew each other’s names. The day I returned I was reminded it was better to be sick. The teacher scratching Kevin Navins’s face, children hiding behind rubber raincoats in the cloakroom, a red-haired girl named Leslie eating an American cheese sandwich in her pee-swamped tartan skirt. Everyone hungry for a fight, the pressure so strong I couldn’t even go to the bathroom. When my mother learned that a full sandwich was too much food for me, she found the smallest bread possible, Pepperidge Farm party slices. “Look at that little sandwich!” cried some boy across the table. “It’s a sandwich for a baby. What else is in that bag? Give it up.” It didn’t occur to me to say no, refuse, and he hated me even more for my compliance. I reached in and found a Tastykake Krimpet. Short, pale, tasteless, frosted the color of a Band-Aid. Didn’t my mother know I hated Krimpets, especially butterscotch Krimpets, which were the color of my sick skin? Why did she put me in this position? I can’t—I thought, and practically retched. The Krimpet passed from hand to hand till it wasn’t even food anymore. No one would eat it after it had been mocked, scorned, laughed at, touched. Another boy jammed it into the spout of his milk carton with such glee that it felt personal, but I was transfixed, I couldn’t look away. The Krimpet was me, my sick body. The Krimpet was the lost puzzle piece. The Krimpet was love and optimism and kindness and delight, and now he was shaking the carton so hard I knew it was going to explode all over the table.
Plague Is Your Sister
The pairing of sex and death in human life is a pairing of intimacy with betrayal, love with violence, and giving of oneself with the taking of life.
WALT ODETS, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS
She’s careening toward me, lurching, if such a small person could be said to lurch. Is she weeping? The two of us are on Commercial Street, somewhere near Town Hall. I’ve never seen Lynda in such awful shape, and when she puts her arms around me she gives me her full weight, though there isn’t so much of her left. I feel love, but it is love in its most broken form. Love not just for me—she barely knows me, really—but love for Town, for the people who are sick, the people who are gone. I don’t know enough about heroin to say she might be high, or well past that, for if I did I’m sure I’d pull away, say good-bye with a little fear. She says Mark wouldn’t let her into the house, and though she is crying about that, she’s crying about herself, too, and the force of that pain has enough velocity to break her bones.
I see her as one would see a painting, surreal. Her body breaking itself open, from the inside out.
God
All the photographs and paintings that attempt to represent Town. The same few sites again and again: the ships of MacMillan Wharf, the Pilgrim Monument rising over the trees. Sure, the light might shift on the harbor from Monday to Tuesday, but it’s missing the point to make too much of those subtle changes. Looking at those changes straight on? Imagine trying to look at God, and if you think you can do that, God will find a way to break you.
No wonder I hit a point when my ability to speak runs out. And I’m as brea
thless as if I’ve been running around the circumference of the world 365 times.
Thirty-five million dead, 1980 → 2019.
Project for a Recurring Dream Starring the Dune outside Town
Sand filling up the backyards, sand covering up the houses, the bicycles, the roses, until Town’s cut off from the Cape, encased below the surface like a new Pompeii. Then a wind coming from the other direction and sweeping the beautiful thing clean. Like the whistling of an enraged inferno.
2018
Afterlife, Notes
At first I felt shame because I had entered through the door marked Your Death.
FRANK BIDART
“I was going to talk to you about that,” Steve, my GP, says when I tell him I’d like to go on PrEP. I fix my eyes on a single window of the building across Fourteenth Street in an effort to keep casual, even though my blood pressure tells me the true story. The reading is high, when I’ve always been told my blood pressure is low. In two months, it will be back to low, the next time that cuff constricts my arm.
Steve is giving me the full rundown. I’m listening, but it also helps to concentrate on the action transpiring inside that apartment window across the street: the electricity humming the refrigerator, the modem. The pipes leading to the showerhead. The preoccupied face of the man in the window.
We talk about possible side effects—bone loss, kidney trouble—and though I’m concerned about all that, I’ve already made my decision. I won’t be taking this drug for decades, like younger men. I don’t have that much time left, though I’m not planning on going away anytime soon. There’s still enough young left in me.
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) is when people at very high risk for HIV take HIV medicines daily to lower their chances of getting infected. PrEP can stop HIV from taking hold and spreading throughout your body. It is highly effective for preventing HIV if used as prescribed, but it is much less effective when not taken consistently. Daily PrEP reduces the risk of getting HIV from sex by more than 90%.
CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION WEBSITE
Steve calls in the prescription to Duane Reade, but he tells me not to take the first pill until my blood test says I’m negative. I’ve been tested so many times, since a flare-up of shingles ten years ago, that I’ve almost forgotten how to be afraid.
All those years I was afraid, and now I look at the filling syringe as if it’s a dream of blood, an art project fed from my vein.
I take the elevator down to the lobby. Out on West Fourteenth, light hurts my eyes as if it’s shining on snow, even though there’s almost no snow left: only dirty, hard crusts. This is no small thing: I’ve made a pact to stay around. I couldn’t have done that previously. I should be eating a magnificent dinner for all the times I’ve lost my appetite, out of worry for my health.
How many times did HIV fear masquerade as other fears, fear of friendships, fear of my family, fear of relationships, fear of fucking up?
I start toward Hudson River Park, where men a few years ahead of me once wandered the piers, years before they were demolished to become part of a privately funded park of berms, benches, grass, trees. It was their wonderland, their dream of night above dark water. Mouth went to mouth, and strangers, for a little while, became known to one another.
Now money sweeps the park clean, along with any traces of lust and rebellion.
I don’t tear open the bag and stare at the bottle until I’m back in my apartment. A month’s supply: Your insurance saved you $1,995 dollars.
The absurdity of that figure. I shove the bottle to the back of the upper shelf, behind the vitamins and teas, as if that move alone could keep the drug and its price in correct perspective. I’m truly appalled by it, in awe. I saw too much of how powerful drugs scoured others when those drugs were brand-new: AZT, Crixivan.
And now I can’t ever quit my job. Or more than ever, I’m held hostage by my prescription plan.
Maybe freedom isn’t something I’m ready to contend with yet, even though I’ve bent my life toward freedom.
Am I a top? Or a bottom who’s always pretended to be a top? A top out of a shame so deep I can’t even feel it in my seat, the shame I grew up attaching to illness? Am I a passive top, or an active bottom? Am I reluctant to give up the status some confer on a top?
Am I still a bottom if I’m ninety-five percent of the time a top, because that’s who the people I hook up with manage to conjure up out of me?
The questions of a twenty-two-year-old in his fifties.
An email comes in from the doctor’s office informing me that I can access the results of my physical through an online portal.
Only one result strikes my attention: contact with and (suspected) exposure to HIV.
Cold surges. I’m positive? Aren’t I at least owed a phone call, as in the olden days? I fix on my jade plant across the room, its fleshy leaves, oblong, stained pink-bronze. I don’t move from my sofa for an hour. It can’t be. But I don’t know that for sure until two days pass, and I get a voicemail from Steve, who ticks off my results, including HIV-negative, from part of a long list of tests.
HIV doesn’t even fall at the top anymore.
Contact with and (suspected) exposure to HIV: recommended ICD-10-CM codes.
A whole month passes before I tap the first hard blue capsule onto my palm.
After I swallow there’s a surge of vitality—my body certainly registers change. It’s like taking an antidepressant for the first time, or a double espresso for the blood cells. I wait for some other reaction—a stomachache, bloatedness, nausea, a tiny needle of a headache? Should I drink extra water? Eat a snack? But nothing.
And on the second day, I register as much difference as I do when I take a multivitamin. Then my body gets used to it, as the body gets used to almost anything new.
When people in their twenties swallow this pill, they take a different story into their body. And that doesn’t mean I feel higher in rank, or resent them for coming into the world at a later time.
But you don’t understand, I want to say.
The HR person on the other end of the line sounds casual and almost indifferent when I bring up my concerns about prescription coverage. I’m about to do a visiting semester at a university in Austin and I’m trying not to panic about cost.
“I take a very expensive prescription,” I say in a ragged voice, as a way to instill alarm, a wake-up call. I don’t say, It is keeping me alive, but I want to because it is.
The HR person is unflappable, not to be drawn into my feelings. I don’t understand till much later that my anxiety is also about another matter: I’d forgotten I wasn’t positive.
Now that I have freedom, it’s more complicated than I’d ever expected it to be. HIV never stopped me from having sex, but now that I can have any kind of sex, I don’t know exactly what I want. I sign on to Scruff, look at the faces I’ve seen a hundred times from Brooklyn. Look at Pornhub, scroll through so many titles I get overwhelmed to the point of distraction and fall asleep with the laptop open on the covers: Beefy Homo Dog Relaxed with Passionate Toe Sucking, Muscle Daddy Gives Proper Breeding, Real Straight Dude Made a Gay Porn in Spite of Him, Pig Boy Meets His Daddy, Lending a Hand and Mouth to a Guy in a Cast.
Abundance might be an enemy to desire, but that doesn’t mean I would want to be back in the 1990s. Nostalgia, especially nostalgia of that kind, is murderous.
Note: AIDS isn’t the good old days.
What I could have made out of the fear I held back.
By which I mean: How many brain cells were burned up, extinguished? His breathing quickens, eyes tighten, I tell him to come into me, “Yes, you can come inside,” and he does so with a groan, and we’re scorched. I tell him not to move, tell him to stay still, yes, just like that, and we lie quiet, curling into each other, his chest rough and electric against my back. In a little while, I want to pull away, can feel him falling asleep, but then I must too. When my eyes open, an hour’s passed. The room in Broo
klyn alight like a cabin in the woods, but with the sounds of a dog out on the street, howling in imitation of an ambulance.
These could be golden years, like the first years after Stonewall, when the Village swarmed with vitality, when sex was a Political Act: the making up of a community, encounter by encounter, and no one was (yet) contending with a plague.
But we have other matters to fight for these days.
Linda Villarosa: “In certain pockets of the country, unknown to most Americans, H.I.V. is still ravaging communities at staggering rates.” Jackson, Columbia, El Paso, Augusta, Baton Rouge
Danez Smith: “he left me his blood / & though he is not dead / i miss my husband”
A wildly handsome bearded man in his twenties lies on a circular table. The room is almost dark, lit only by a red bare bulb in the ceiling. He doesn’t behave like a handsome young man who’s learned the power of withholding. He’s anything but withholding—sex with four men at once. Every orifice packed and filled. There’s no fear in his face or body, no resistance. No hand raised to say pull out when one man’s face tightens in ecstasy. No fear about being interpreted as a slut, none of those worn-out cares about self-destruction. He’s simply a young man who hasn’t had to take the costs of a plague into his blood. He isn’t rebelling, isn’t saying fuck you to the parents who could have disinherited him, kicked him out of their house, said unforgivable words. He’s not hiding. Not envisioning a premature death, not contending with the deaths of ten friends, twenty-five friends, keep going. I’m in awe. When he gets home he’ll toss some green vegetables into a clear glass bowl.
Solitude is the scent of the man ahead of me, his hair, his shoulders, his cuffs. That scent involves a combination of cigarette smoke, adrenaline, light sweat on denim, cedar beard oil. I’m sure he thinks he’s passing as someone who isn’t traumatized, isn’t hurt. I’m sure he doesn’t think his secret’s out, but it’s all over him. I sound like I’m talking about someone disheveled, down on his luck, but he’s impeccably presented, beard trimmed, his cuffs folded to show off an inch of tangerine sock above his shoe. Even though he’s a handsome man, others are giving him a wide berth. They speed up when they catch themselves walking beside him. I can practically sense his antennae—he jumps when a hubcap scrapes against the curb. What terrible thing has happened to him? Which wound tearing into his psyche? It’s devouring him, taking him whole, as he attempts and fails to heal it. I watch how he watches—his curiosity suggests he’s queer, not accustomed to disappearing into himself. For the briefest instant he makes eye contact with me and turns away, as if his gaze stores voltage. His gaze would be easier to take if I didn’t believe he saw the same voltage in me.