by Craig Moody
“Nothing,” I stated firmly, silencing any further questions with the sound of my voice.
Gauge stared a moment before moving toward the Indian. Together, we secured the oversized knapsack, Gauge gawking at me the entire time. I took my place behind him on the bike, turning my head to view the community hospital as we accelerated through the parking lot. There, at the front door, was Dr. Hembold, her face pinched, her lips suctioned into a disapproving scowl, her magnified eyes obvious in their condemnation. I turned forward, resting my head against Gauge’s back, certain she would see.
I didn’t think as we sailed onto the highway, a sign listing Los Angeles as less than 120 miles away. My heart beat easy, its rhythm finding sync with Gauge’s. In the stillness of my thoughts, I could hear my inner voice clearly, its wave of warnings washing over me like an incoming tide.
***
Our first full day in Los Angeles was like a dream. We had rented a small motel room for the week, just below Hollywood Hills, the iconic Hollywood sign dominating the hillside above us. The motel was old and small, but obscenely charming.
An older couple owned and operated the building. Both tended to the guests as family, their care and concern for each person a warm and welcome experience.
Gauge was eager to explore the city, but my health was struggling.
Gauge didn’t know it, but I was not holding anything down. Just as before, even water slipped through my system as quickly as it would through a mesh stocking.
On the third night, he found me nearly unconscious next to the toilet.
I dreaded yet another hospital visit, but I knew I didn’t have much choice. Glimpsing myself in the mirror, I was shocked at how gaunt and thin I appeared. My usual healthy glow had faded into a dim lifelessness, as though I were merely walking skin and bones.
Gauge sat beside me as we waited our turn in the emergency room.
Unlike Barstow Community Hospital, the UCLA Medical Center Emergency Room was grand and elaborate, a multicolored sea of people filling each seat like a carefully-constructed quilt.
Gauge had to help me to the examining room once my name was finally called.
“Hmm,” the nurse mumbled to herself as she took my vitals. I noticed she changed rubber gloves after every time she touched me.
She left the room without saying a word, scribbling rapidly over a clipboard.
It was nearly another half an hour before the doctor finally appeared.
“What seems to be the problem?’ the man questioned before even gazing up at me. He flipped through the forms on the clipboard as if in a methodical trance.
“Oh,” he said when he finally looked at me.
“How long have your symptoms persisted?”
I briefed him on my history, detailing the last few weeks as though describing some grotesque horror flick, amused at how he didn’t react to any of it. The doctor examined my ears, nose, and throat, he too switching gloves with each contact.
“So you’ve been tested for HIV?” he asked, turning his attention back to the clipboard.
“No,” I replied. “The hospital I was at before didn’t have access to the test yet.”
He peered at me over his bifocals, his silver- tinged, neatly-combed mane gleaming in the fluorescent lighting.
“We can test you here,” he announced, moving his eyes to Gauge.
“Are you his partner?” he asked, his voice stale and emotionless.
“Yes,” Gauge choked out, his voice heavy with worry.
“We will test you as well. Have you shown
any symptoms?”
Without waiting for a response, the doctor moved to Gauge and began performing the same examination. Gauge sat perfectly still, appearing as though he thought the doctor would somehow harm him if he so much as flinched.
“We see more and more cases every day,” the doctor stated as he concluded with Gauge. “I am sure you are both aware of the seriousness of such a diagnosis.”
Gauge and I looked at each other, his terrified expression causing my heart to skip.
“Not really,” I answered for us both. “I just know it requires a lot of treatment.”
The doctor darted his eyes between us, removing his bifocals and wiping his brow.
“There is no cure for AIDS,” he responded in a monotone voice. “As of now, it is a deadly virus.”
I looked over at Gauge, who remained still and silent. I had never before witnessed him so overcome with fear.
“What does that mean?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Gauge.
The doctor hesitated before laughing nervously.
“It means,” he started, replacing his glasses and adjusting his white lab coat, “that if you get it…”
His words trailed into silence, his face now shadowed with concern.
“It means death. Every patient who has entered this hospital with it has not survived.”
I didn’t react as I watched Gauge’s face flood with tears. He wouldn’t look at me, though I knew he could sense my eyes staring at him.
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” the doctor added, turning toward the door. “Until the test results come back, there is no confirmation of anything.”
I kept my eyes fixed on Gauge, watching as he lowered his head into his hands.
“I will send in the nurse to draw blood from each of you.”
I could sense the doctor exiting the room, but I never took my eyes off Gauge. I waited until we were alone before speaking.
“Gauge,” I said calmly. “Look at me.”
He didn’t.
“Gauge!” I said louder. “Look at me!”
Slowly, he lifted his face, his eyes red and swollen from crying.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I continued, surprised at the ongoing calmness of my words. “I haven’t had the test yet. We don’t know anything until we get the results.”
Gauge shook his head, his eyes unblinking as he stared at me beneath a worried, furrowed brow.
“The bathhouse,” he whispered, his voice cracked and broken by the weight of his tears.
“What?” I questioned, certain I had heard him correctly but completely lost as to why he said it.
“That guy in the bathhouse,” he continued, his stare unwavering.
“What about him?” the year-old memory resurfacing within my mind.
“He did this to you.”
My head began to shake as I realized the connection he was making. I was a virgin before entering that Fort Lauderdale bathhouse. Gauge was the only person I was ever with sexually, voluntarily speaking. My innocence had been torn from me that dreadful summer day.
“We don’t know anything. Until the test comes back, we—”
“I know it,” Gauge spoke firmly, his eyes welling with more tears. “I know it, Dustin.”
He began to weep, his shoulders heaving from the sudden rush of uncontrolled emotion.
I started to move toward him, when he lifted his head and screamed.
I fell from the examining table, my knees cracking against the cold tile floor like two fragile seashells. I looked up as Gauge fell from his chair and crawled toward me.
“No, no, no,” he whispered, his words reminiscent of my mother’s similar cry when I confirmed to her that I was gay. “I can’t lose you.”
I couldn’t cry, I could hardly breathe. Instead, I pulled Gauge’s face further into my chest, resting my head on his hair.
At last, the prompting of my inner voice became clear. Gauge was right, the attack in the bathhouse had resulted in a silent ghost that haunted the blood-filled chambers of my veins. Despite the absence of medical confirmation, I knew, as well as Gauge, that nothing in our world would ever be the same.
III.
Winter, 1984
I watched as the morning sun slipped through the small opening in the curtain, the sparse décor of the motel room slowly revealing itself in the slow crawl of light. The polished chrome of the Indian, which rested in the c
orner of the room, began to gleam and glitter in the soft sunlight like abandoned silver rings lost in a barrel of discarded wire.
I looked at Gauge, asleep beside me, his soft, gentle face now becoming lined and creased from worry. The sound of the distant morning traffic as it clogged the streets of Hollywood echoed around the room like tuneless instruments seeking a melody. I turned to the nightstand, a collection of pill bottles of all shapes, colors, and sizes littering the surface like a pharmaceutical skyline. It was when I removed one of the bottle caps that I realized the dampness that surrounded me.
Once more, I had wet the bed, an occurrence that seemed to happen more and more. Nearly six months after my diagnosis, I was deteriorating fast.
I had lost count of the amount of times I had been in the hospital. The AIDS ward at UCLA had become such a familiar place to me that I recognized more of the nuances and detail of the rooms there than the motel room we had been renting for months.
Thankfully, the elderly couple who ran and operated the motel had been kind enough to give Gauge a job helping to maintain the place. With the couple becoming more feeble and weak by age, Gauge’s youth and vitality were a welcome addition. When he wasn’t changing light bulbs or clearing clogged toilets, he was dusting lampshades and scrubbing bathtubs. Gauge was a one-man show, and his labor granted us a free room and a small income.
The cost of my vast array of medications commanded nearly every cent Gauge earned. As of now, there was no effective cure for AIDS, though many in the medical community promised of one on the foreseeable horizon. In the meantime, those affected relied on an array of existing medications for other illnesses, nutritional supplements, and a bit of experimental remedies you heard about through other patients or progressive and unconventional-minded doctors.
Gauge did not test positive. He was routinely tested during each of my ongoing hospital stays, but his blood continued to show no signs of the virus that afflicted mine.
I placed my feet on the floor, the ache of my muscles as they clung weakly to my bones weaving through the fibers of my nervous system like lightning traveling a tree root. My knees popped and cracked as I stood to my full height, the urine-soaked pajamas dripping their excess to the carpet below.
I stared at myself in the mirror as I shuffled my way to the bathroom. My face, once plump with a boyish youth, had suctioned away to the gaunt lifelessness of a cadaver. Sores covered my jawline and neck. Every orifice bled and oozed.
Though I ate, what I didn’t vomit or immediately shit out wasn’t enough to sustain a healthy weight. I was wasting away to nothing, each day revealing another bone, each week detailing the loss of yet more muscle, replacing it with another eczema patch or sporotrichosis blister.
The doctors were horrified yet amazed at the rapid progression of the illness within my system. Given the timeline of my likely exposure, only a year and some months had passed, my immune system was depleting faster than an old tree shedding its leaves at the start of winter.
They were learning that most people’s symptoms did not appear until years after exposure, some lasting a decade before succumbing to the virus.
I was not so fortunate. For whatever reason, the disease ravaged through my body the way a forest fire hungrily devours an acreage of trees, leaving behind only the hollowed remnants of what was once vigorous and resilient. In the shadows of the dark room, I appeared in the mirror as some walking skeleton, blackened and charred by the flames of mystery and sickness. I felt like one of the victims of the Black Death as depicted in a Renaissance painting, my body littered with flesh-eating sores, my youth stripped from my bones, leaving only a fragile skeleton to be disposed of in the shallows of the mass graves that collected those of the same fate.
I made it to the toilet just as the contents of my bowels expelled into the water. The churning presence of the liquid I had just sipped to down one of my pills was enough to stimulate and irritate my digestive tract, forcing what lingered at the entrails to evacuate my body without urge or warning. Many times, I failed to make it to the bathroom, forced to crouch beside the bed, leaving a mess that Gauge would dutifully clean, yet a stain that scarred the carpet.
I started to wipe myself when Gauge entered the tiny bathroom.
“You make it?” he asked, his eyes still heavy with sleep.
“Yeah,” I whispered, always embarrassed that he had to endure the foul odors that now so often emanated from my body.
“You want to take a bath?” he asked, wiping away the remaining evidence of slumber from his eyes.
I nodded.
I waited as he stripped off his briefs, carefully removed my still-soaked pajamas, and lifted me into the tub. I sat silently with my knees against my chest as the cold water began to fill the space around me, slowly warming as it inched up my thighs.
Gauge sat behind me, allowing his legs to wrap around my body. I closed my eyes as he pulled me toward him, the subtle movement nauseating and painful.
Neither of us spoke as he bathed me, gently tending to each inch and crevasse of my skin. I rested against him, the constant pounding of his heart comforting and peaceful.
The bathtub ritual had become so common and routine that I no longer saw the romantic significance of it. Many of the orderlies and nurses in the AIDS ward refused to touch the patients, leaving many to wallow and suffer in their own filth, most only finding relief by the hands of some fearless family member, friend, or volunteer. The ward administrator allowed Gauge to remain with me during my extended stays as long he promised to feed and change me. Many of the common hospital rules concerning visitors and family members were broken in the ward to accommodate the paranoia and at times downright cruelty of the caregivers. They were willing to allow anyone to do the dirty work of their jobs if it meant not having to come into any form of close contact with those who wasted away before them.
“Have you thought any more about what we talked about?” I asked, my voice dry and hollow from sleep.
Gauge didn’t respond.
“I’ve thought a lot about it, Gauge. It’s something I need for you to understand.”
“I can’t…” his voice broke with emotion. We both remained silent as he continued to rinse my skin, the warm water burning my flesh like lava under the sense perception of my illness- frayed nerves. The skin of my scalp throbbed and ached as he softly washed my hair, each follicle signaling pain from just the touch of Gauge’s fingertips.
“Gauge,” I continued, using all my strength to summon my voice.
“I can’t, Dustin,” he whispered. “I can’t do that for you.”
I had been reading about patients overdosing on sleep medications, the massive doses easing their hearts into an unconscious cardiac arrest, releasing the person of the constant pain of their horrific existence. It was rumored that certain doctors were silently prescribing the medications, fully aware of how they would be used, but turning a blind eye in the hopeless reality of what modern medicine could not provide.
Day in and out at the ward, I saw countless lifeless bodies being transported from their rooms to a makeshift morgue just for AIDS victims.
Seconds later, another skeletal soul on the brink of death was wheeled in to take their temporary residence in the newly-vacated room. I didn’t want to go this way. I didn’t want to be just another corpse lying in the AIDS morgue waiting for one of the few mortuaries brave enough to collect my remains.
I heard the sobbing and wailing of those on the verge of dying, many isolated and alone, abandoned by everyone they ever knew to face a lonely passing.
Gauge tried ruthlessly to contact my parents. Despite my father’s warmth and acceptance during our phone call from Las Vegas, he now refused to speak to me, breaking down one time on the phone with Gauge before hanging up in sobs. Gauge didn’t know that I knew, but I heard him one night during one of his many secret telephone missions. He would often call my parents’ home in the middle of the night, hoping the repeated, unexpected late night intru
sion would cause one of them to answer. It worked. Late one night, I heard him on the phone with my mother, her distinctive voice cold and emotionless through the receiver.
“He chose this for himself,” she stated. “You can only live so long against God before He sets you right.”
Gauge only listened, too stunned to speak.
“Or strikes you down,” she concluded, hanging up the phone before Gauge could muster a response.
I watched him as he wept that night, his fear and frustration so palpable that I swore I could taste the salt of his streaming tears as they evaporated into the room around us.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t even mention to him that I heard the phone call. Instead, I would only smile and nod when he would lie to me that he had heard from my parents, rattling off various details about how they were organizing a trip to LA. He even went as far as to say that they were making the cross-country trek, along with Aunt Mert, the three of them piled into Aunt Mert’s giant silver Cadillac and westward bound. Deep down, I think he knew that I knew he was lying. Still, I let him, fulfilling his need to somehow comfort me with fabled tales of the care and concern of those who had abandoned me months ago. I accepted the reality, but I never forced its sharp and stark existence onto Gauge. Pretending that my parents cared that I was wasting away to some incurable disease on the other side of the country somehow eased his anxiety. Who was I to take that from him?
Gauge continued to write Aunt Mert. I would see him up late into the night, feverishly scribbling in his notebook. I never knew if he sent any of the several-page-long letters he scrawled out. Perhaps he only continued to add to the ones he had written previously, journaling or keeping a diary of sorts with everything directed to Aunt Mert. I was too weak to ever try to find them, deciding it was best that he keep his personal thoughts and feelings private within the letters.
God knows, I am sure he needed the written therapeutic release.
“Come on,” Gauge said softly, snapping me from my thoughts and back to the present. “Let’s get you dried and back into bed.”