Towards the end of his stay in hospital with the Salmonella infection in his knee, when he’d been placed in the general part of the hospital with AIDS infection warning signs outside the door of his room, Damon was visited by a member of a charismatic religious group “witnessing” for the Lord. I should add that what followed would not, I believe, have happened in an AIDS ward where the religious counsellors we encountered were non-judgmental and compassionate people doing a marvellous job. The woman visiting Damon implied that God was ready to forgive him and take him, despite his condition, as his born-again child. All he had to do in return was to repent and accept the Lord Jesus into his heart.
Damon, who had listened patiently to what turned out to be a rather long-winded oration, finally managed to halt the flow of God’s messenger by asking her if he could ask questions. She immediately agreed. And, I suspect, in self-defence against the Niagara Falls of verbiage, he asked her whether she would try to answer his questions with a simple yes or no. Once again, the Lord’s witness agreed readily. No doubt, in the witnessing business, questions mean progress on the path to salvation. A bit like a salesman closing a sale in a used car lot: when the prospect starts to ask questions you can begin to wind him in.
“Do you believe homosexuality is a sin?” Damon asked.
“Well, the Bible is quite specific about this, it says sodomy…”
“Please, a simple yes or no, ma’am.”
The lady at his bedside paused momentarily, then made a little expostulating sound to thump home her conviction, “Yes!” she said.
“If it is a sin, then is AIDS God’s punishment for this sin?”
“God’s mercy and compassion is everlasting and His understanding…”
Again Damon cut her short, “Ma’am, please, just yes or no.” Damon always fancied himself as a bit of a lawyer and secretly took pride in his logical and incisive mind.
“Well, yes! I have to say that I believe it is.” She took another sharp breath, “As I was trying to say, the Bible is quite explicit about sodomy, it is a sin and, God says, ‘The wages of sin is death!"’
“Well if sex between consenting adults is a sin for which God has sent AIDS as His terrible punishment, what do you think about sex between an adult male and a non-consenting child?”
The lady was clearly shocked at the question, but Damon rammed it home. “Particularly incest, sex between a father and his daughter. Would that not be an even worse sin in the eyes of God?”
The lady witnessing for the Lord, shocked at Damon’s directness, failed to see the all-too-obvious trap, “Well yes, of course it’s a sin! A terrible sin!”
“No, that wasn’t my question, is it a worse sin? A bigger sin in the eyes of God?”
The lady paused, looking down at her hands, conscious now that she’d been led into a trap. Finally she looked up, “Yes, I suppose so!” She appeared to be angry. She had lost control of the situation and was unable to find an apposite quote from the New Testament to cover her confusion. Her training obviously hadn’t covered incest.
“Well then, why doesn’t God send a terrible disease down to infect the father rapist of the sexually assaulted child?” Damon asked.
The woman had already started to gather her tracts together and dipping into her handbag she produced a boiled lolly wrapped in a twist of cellophane and, first putting a tract down on the bedside unit, she placed the lolly on the tract. Then she tucked her Bible under her arm and left with the words, “Goodbye, Damon, I will pray to the Lord for you.”
“Thank you,” Damon said. “Thank you for coming.” He was not being a smart arse, though he was probably feeling quite pleased with himself. As a mark, she was too easy and he could afford to be charitable.
The Lord’s hospital witness wasn’t quite through. She paused at the door, her lips pursed, “’I am not mocked,’ saith the Lord!” She turned and was gone, her heels making a squeaking sound on the rubber corridor as she retreated. Her first brush with AIDS no doubt confirmed her attitude towards homosexuals.
Damon understood completely that gay men, by being rejected by the community and sometimes even their families, carried an extra load of emotional pain. He wanted to make people understand that their rejection was cruel and senseless.
It is one of life’s ironies that the terrible guilt some AIDS victims feel and the fear of the consequences, when they tell their family of their plight, is sometimes only in their imagination. Conventional wisdom suggests that in many cases the declaration of their HIV status leads to acceptance and compassion from family members, some of whom have been alienated from each other for years. Underneath everything, love is a powerful reconciling force.
For most parents and families the most traumatic issue is not the fact that a son is gay, but that he is dying. Sadly, however, in smaller communities, a loved one often cannot come home to die, because the dreadful reality is that the parents still have to live in a bigoted community after their son’s death. The disapproval of a small community is likely to make the victim’s relatives secondary victims of the disease. AIDS is proving to bring out the very best in families and the very worst in the community.
Bizarre as it may be, the biggest threat from AIDS may not be the homosexual community, but the heterosexual one. Despite growing evidence to the contrary, the heterosexual community seems confident that AIDS won’t happen to them, that it will remain a gay disease. This naivety, no, plain stupidity, is terribly dangerous.
Casual homosexuality, “butt rustling", has always been a part of our social structure. That is, men who do not describe themselves as homosexual but who, several times a year, steal across the sexual border to indulge in a homosexual act. The pubs around Darlin-ghurst and Oxford Street attract these “butt rustlers"; the “meat market” in these so-called heterosexual pubs is alive and doing a roaring trade. Drunken football teams and bucks’ nights as well as lone rangers often end up in places like this.
Liaisons are usually hasty and often take place when partners are drunk, so that sex usually occurs without a condom. These casual assignations are fraught with real infection opportunities that present problems far more difficult to confront than those posed by openly gay men. Both male partners in these casual acts of sex would, if they were confronted, vehemently deny being homosexual or even bisexual. The most common response in research is the reply, “When you’re pissed you do lots of bloody stupid things.” These outwardly heterosexual men won’t disclose that they’re having clandestine sex with a male occasionally or even frequently. If they become infected with HIV, this may not be discovered for years, during which time the infection is allowed to spread widely through the community, with the virus not only being passed to other males, but also to girlfriends, wives and children.
In fact the gay community has responded magnificently to AIDS education and has readily adopted the precautionary measures designed to lessen the long-term deaths in the AIDS pandemic. In Australia eighty-seven per cent of homosexuals take proper prophylactic precautions before sex, while the figure for single, heterosexual males is only fifty-seven per cent. In country towns and some working-class communities, the figure is considerably lower.
In the long term, AIDS may yet prove to be a predominantly heterosexual disease where ignorance, stupidity, bigotry and secrecy are the components which most often combine to cause the human immunodeficiency virus to be spread through the community.
* * *
Damon had survived the Salmonella infection which his doctors all agreed should have killed him and now the despair he had begun to feel when he’d entered hospital during the crisis had changed. He was once again adamant he could beat AIDS. He felt he’d seen the worst, faced death, and now was ready to conquer his affliction with the sheer force of his will.
Damon sincerely believed he could make his body grow new T-cells until his blood would once again contain the required number to fight off infection. He’d go to the Haemophilia Centre for a T-cell count convinced
that there would be an increase in numbers; when this didn’t happen he simply told himself that he hadn’t given his mind sufficient time to do the required trick. After all, who knows how long it takes to generate a new T-cell?
This absolute conviction worried his friend Tim who had seen AIDS victims, buoyed by false hope and then suddenly confronted with the certainty of their death, give up and die in a matter of days. Tim thought of himself as “living with AIDS” rather than dying from it, a way of regarding this terrible disease which is both useful and positive. He insisted it was only a matter of time to their certain demise; that Damon should get on with living. Damon became all the more positive that, while the clock might be running out for Tim, it was only a matter of exerting the correct amount of willpower before he, Damon Courtenay, would be on the road to ultimate recovery.
Tim also persuaded Damon to look to the Prince Henry Hospital for his AIDS care. The AIDS section of this grand old hospital was in a separate part of the grounds, in a building named Marks Pavilion with a lovely view over Little Bay, a rugged aspect of heath-land and rocky coastline seen from most of the windows. Here, too, the nursing staff were sympathetic and highly trained and this was where Damon was to meet Rick Osborne, a senior nurse, who took a special liking to him and proved to be a wonderful friend through many of the difficult times to come.
Tim had been chosen as one of the experimental group to be placed on AZT, a drug which was showing some success in America in inhibiting the progression of AIDS. Through Tim, Damon applied for selection in the AZT trial and, to our joy, he was quickly accepted. This was definitely a step in the right direction; provided his health didn’t deteriorate Damon was convinced he could fix what was already wrong with him.
The AZT treatment placed an extra burden on both Damon and Celeste; like everyone else on the test dosage it was largely a matter of guessing. This was a brand new drug which hadn’t gone through the elaborate testing procedures common for a new drug. Those on it were the guinea pigs, doses varied from patient to patient and so effects of the drug differed widely.
Damon was required to take two tablets every four hours and he was given a beeper box which was loud enough to wake him up at night to take his AZT pills. He’d wake up too stiff from his arthritis to get out of bed and Celeste would have to get up to fetch him a glass of water and make him something to eat. In an attempt to lessen the toxicity of the drug, he was required to eat something solid prior to taking the medication. This meant that Celeste was sharing Damon’s disrupted night and having to put in a full day of uni study the next day as well. Nonetheless, they both felt that it was worth it – even if he had to wake up every four hours for the remainder of his life, it was worth it.
It had soon become apparent that AZT didn’t suit Damon. It made him feel sick and he had become anaemic. But at first his spirits remained high. AZT was going to halt his AIDS until someone found the cure; he told himself it just didn’t matter how he felt, what his reaction was, it was worth it. The determination he showed during this period is remarkable. AZT is a highly toxic drug and it was to prove especially so for Damon. Yet he hung in and whenever he wasn’t too sick he worked at his desktop publishing company which he’d called “The Desktop Pub". Damon’s natural charm had earned him several regular customers and, if he wasn’t exactly dependable, they seemed always to forgive him and to extend his deadlines. And, while he certainly wasn’t making a fortune, he was paying his way.
Damon had also met a remarkable haemophiliac from America, a man in his early fifties named Conrad Masterton, who had been semi-crippled in his late twenties by constant bleeding into the knee joints and had only recently had artificial knees put in. “My stainless steel knees,” he called them, although they were made of titanium. Conrad’s knees proved to be quite miraculous. He was able to walk all day with regular small rests; the joints behind the knee cap seldom created a bleed and were infinitely better than the originals had ever been.
Damon talked to us of going to the States and having his own stainless steel knees put in. As always with him, he could see the instant and splendid result in his imagination. The freshly kneed Damon spoke of going on bush walks with Celeste and being endlessly mobile, practically the same as anyone else. AZT was going to get him so well that he’d be able to go over to America and have the operation before the end of the year.
In the meantime he decided he’d build himself a fish tank. Not the usual expanded goldfish bowl – Damon didn’t think about crawling if he could walk in the fish-keeping business – he wanted an aquarium choked with piscean exotica. Conning me for the money to buy the tank, he explained, “Fish in a tank are a lot like me. You see, Dad, aquarium fish are in the same situation as I am, they have to make the most of their immediate environment because it’s just about all they’ve got. I’m going to build this great fish tank with all the fish mod cons, luxuriant weeds and rocks and grottoes, real habitats for big and baby fish.” He looked up at me, “When you’re aching and in pain and can’t read a book or concentrate on anything else you can watch fish in a tank. I don’t know why it helps but it does, the way they move their bodies you just can’t imagine a fish in pain.”
Celeste for once refused to accommodate him and allow the over-large fish tank into their tiny living room. So it had to go on to the glassed-in verandah leading from the main bedroom.
Like all Damon’s projects the fish tank and the fish that lived in it were not without disaster. The first tank they bought from an advertisement in The Trading Post cost one hundred dollars. The guy who sold it to them explained that he was a truck driver, that things were going crook for the road-hauling business in New South Wales. “The big companies, mate, they play us off, one against the fucking other!” He was fed up and moving his rig to Perth to get into the wheat-hauling business. He must have been a relation of Bob the carer of cripples who sold Damon the Fiat 124, for he swore the tank had been running, “Like the bloody Taronga Park Zoo aquarium, mate!’ He painted a mental picture of a tank swarming with tropical fish just two days before he’d put the ad in the paper. “Pity, if I’d ‘a only known, I’d ‘a sold youse the bloody lot cheap!” When Damon asked him who’d bought his magnificent collection, for a moment the truck driver looked bemused, then flicking the ash from his cigarette on the kitchen floor, he said, “Dunno, mate, some Jew bastard who come up from Kogarah!”
When they got home with the tank Damon, with Celeste and Adam doing all the heavy work, located it on the glassed-in balcony on the rusty stand ("Whack a bita Kill-rust on it, mate, be as good as gold!") which had come with it for an extra twenty-five bucks. The fish tank seemed to take hours to fill with Adam and Celeste carrying water from the bathroom in two small cooking pots Celeste owned. Finally it stood resplendent, filled with water, ready to be art-directed with weed and rock and shell, and then grandly occupied with what Damon saw as a major collection of fish, not dissimilar to a small, but not insignificant, corner of the Great Barrier Reef.
But alas, the rubber seals which had dried out from months, perhaps years, of lying in the truck driver’s backyard in the sun burst open at two in the morning flooding the entire flat and leaking through the wooden floor boards to awaken Steve in the apartment below, by means of a steady drip landing on his chest as the water slowly destroyed the ceiling above him.
The next fish tank, just as big, but this time brand new and purchased at a cost of one hundred and ten dollars, complete with five-year warranty, was installed without mishap. After which Damon went shopping all over metropolitan Sydney for the world’s truly exotic fish. He naturally avoided any of the mainstream commercial aquariums, on the basis that they’d be over-popular and frequented by mere amateurs and therefore would be unlikely to carry suitable stock for the true cognoscenti of the fish world. Instead, he would visit strange places with faded signs which told of once having been pet shops, their dusty windows still containing sun-faded pet food posters of kittens playing with a ball of wool, burs
ting packets of birdseed which rising damp had caused to grow and subsequently die in pathetic patches of faded straw. Some windows contained cans, their labels long since rusted off, as well as old bottles of mange solution, which told of a time when it truly had been a dog’s life in the local canine world. Inside, Damon would have deep and earnest conversations with old men in short grey coats who hovered over rows of fish tanks and who produced well thumbed books and ancient exotic fish catalogues and who talked of blood worms and fish influenza.
That was the thing about Damon – he could go from nought to one hundred in a matter of minutes when it came to gathering information. He had a knack of seeming to be an expert, when he knew practically nothing about a subject. It was the way he listened and asked questions and, with no effort, seemed to produce jargon in the correct context, which he’d only minutes before heard for the first time. He could also isolate the information needed, gathering only what was important for him to know. In a matter of a few days he had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the most exotic tropical fish, while knowing practically nothing about aquarium fish in general or the more common and therefore hardy and likely to survive in an amateur fish tank variety.
Damon as usual wanted only Ferrari fish and his earnings from The Desktop Pub went straight into the fish tank. Unfortunately, like the high-octane performers they were, the beautiful specimens he brought home didn’t always take kindly to their new environment. He was constantly fishing out dead piscean exotica which had only the previous day cost him double digit money and, of course, had come without a guarantee from the previous owner, who must have kept them alive and flipping just long enough for Damon to arrive and purchase them. Often he would discover that one expensive and rare fish was the natural sworn enemy of another equally expensive specimen and a fight to the death would ensue, until both fish ended belly-up in the tank. Once, he saw a whole school of baby Angel fish devoured in ten minutes by his latest multiple-finned, dance of the seven veils, Black Egyptian fish.
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