(A side note here on the town of Lake Placid. It turned out that the rest of the town was just as confounding as the arts center. It gives one the impression that it was once very chic, yet now it seems like a budget vacation destination. Nearly everyone we met in town was very rude and could sense that we were outsiders, with the exception of a morbidly obese little boy who looked right in my eyes at a local restaurant, singing Rihanna’s “Umbrella” in a precious falsetto. He was awesome. I was instructed to avoid using Grindr during the residency, because apparently homophobes in Lake Placid use it to lure men into their homes to kill them. I’m absolutely certain they fuck them first, though. Tackiness abounded: during one donor event at a local “rich” person’s house, all the dancers were made to wear spray-painted, glittery Burger King crowns, supposedly so we could be distinguished from the other guests. The food was truly terrible, too. There was a restaurant next to the Bunker called Desperados that served MexiQuinn food, which they defined as Irish Mexican food. We tried it and can confidently say that this is a thing that should not exist.)
After spending our first night in the Bunker, it was time to get to work. Unfortunately, we were alerted by Jackie Oranges that we would not have a studio to work in for the next three days because of children’s dance classes.
“Well then, WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING HERE?!” we asked.
In response, he gave us a detailed schedule that would allow us to work for an hour here, an hour there. The issue was that we had dozens of props and set pieces, and the point of the residency was to make a show in one room for a month. Finally, we managed to work it out so we could remain in one studio while not inconveniencing the four-year-olds of Lake Placid too much.
* * *
—
We worked for about a week and a half without incident, eating lovely group dinners and playing rummy while drinking copiously into the night. But one night, during the second week, my throat grew sore and I began to feel feverish. Much like when I had gotten sick during the workshop process, I felt as if I were underwater. Earlier that day, we’d happened to be working on the scene in The Tenant in which Trelkovsky gets an intense fever, begins shaking uncontrollably, and drags himself to the doctor. We rehearsed it over and over again. I’d fall to the floor, begin shivering, and rush out to the pretend doctor. My life was becoming Trelkovsky’s life.
I went to sleep, hoping I’d wake up feeling better, but awoke around one a.m. and ran to the bathroom. I forcefully vomited everything I had eaten that day, then turned around and forcefully ejected diarrhea directly into my vomit. I was like a supermassive black hole, expelling matter in opposing relativistic jets damn close to the speed of light.
Then the fever came. I began shivering. I would take two-hour naps between trips to the restroom for black-hole matter expulsion. I found myself sitting on the high-pile toilet mat, face inches from the moldy shower curtains. Trelkovsky was very ill indeed.
The next morning I was driven to the local urgent care center. I was barely conscious. An indeterminate amount of minutes, hours, or years later, a doctor shuffled into my small examination room. He was middle-aged and wore gray sweatpants instead of scrubs. On his feet were Skechers sneakers, the ones that are curved on the bottom and marketed as “diet shoes,” and he had a bursting-at-the-seams fanny pack on. A doctor . . . with a fanny pack. It was as if Robin Williams’s reanimated corpse was about to diagnose me.
He took my temperature, which was nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit, did a rapid strep test (which never seems to work), and checked my vitals. My rapid strep test came back negative, even though I knew I had strep. He prescribed me penicillin and sent me on my way.
The bottle instructed me to eat a full meal before taking the medication, and there was a McDonald’s next door, so I tried my luck. I was in good spirits. I was sick, but I held the cure in the palm of my hand. All I needed was a biscuit sandwich and an orange juice and then I’d be right as rain.
After wolfing down my biscuit and taking my pills, I was so optimistic that I decided to venture to celebrate somebody’s birthday that evening. I don’t even know whose birthday it was. I slept most of the day, but tried to reanimate for the evening’s festivities. It was hopeless. I went right back to sleep and woke up like clockwork, vomiting and shaking from fever.
This nasty schedule continued for days, with no sign of improvement. It actually worsened. My appetite diminished to practically nothing, and I found drinking even water repulsive. Arthur and Nina tried to help by giving me “teas” that consisted of boiled garlic, ginger, and apple cider vinegar. I’d sit in my dark room in the Bunker, shivering, sweating, and trying to force yogurt down my gullet. My room smelled like laundry you forgot to put in the dryer, body odor, and farts. When I’d soak one of the beds in my dungeon with sweat, I’d hobble over to one of the others. It was a cycle of sickly, sweaty, wetness. It was time to revisit the doctor.
Instead of going back to fanny-pack Frankenstein, Will took me to the emergency room. I recall being alone for a long time in a cold metal examination room, barely conscious and muttering “I’m so cold” to myself over and over again. The doctor finally entered, made a scrunched-up face, walked over to the window, and opened it. He asked me if I took any medications regularly.
I said, “Yes, I take PrEP. Truvada.”
He didn’t know what it was. The doctor didn’t know what PrEP was. Another red flag. Truvada, aka PrEP, is a daily pill that greatly reduces the risk of contracting HIV.
“So, you have AIDS?” the doctor said.
“No, I’m trying not to get HIV,” I replied.
He barely understood. He looked at my throat and said, “Looks like herpes.” I thought to myself, “He only thinks it’s herpes because I’m a gay man who’s taking an HIV preventative.”
I knew it wasn’t herpes, as tests later confirmed, and asked him to look at the penicillin I had been taking. “This is for kids,” he said, and laughed. I had been taking medication intended for a forty-five-pound child. “No wonder you’re not getting better.” I was close to tears. He prescribed me a new, higher dosage of antibiotics and I was on my way.
I remember very little of the next few days in the Bunker. My fever did not subside, and my shivering and vomiting worsened. In between Tylenol naps, I’d read chapters from Roald Dahl’s Boy, which actually ended up being the inspiration for writing this book.
I began to hallucinate. While lying in my Cheeto-colored linoleum tomb, I would hear my alarm going off. It was maddening. I could see that my phone was silent, clearly not going off in any way, but I heard my alarm swelling in my mind. I spent days trying to ignore the sound. It was as though my subconscious mind was saying, “Get up! You’re supposed to be making a show, goddamn it!”
I spent a lot of time on the toilet, as I suffered from what my mother called “eeyahdeeyah.” She didn’t like saying the word diarrhea. While seated on the porcelain throne, I would stare at the door to the stall, and in its wooden grains, I saw two lovers, locked in a kiss. I visited them often and their positions moved and swayed. They’d release their lips from one another to turn to face me on the toilet, struggling with eeyadeeyah, and say in unison, “Quit shitting and get back to work.”
My condition only worsened. Cassie, Nina, and Arthur decided it was best for me to get out of the Bunker. How was a person supposed to get well in a moldy, windowless room? They moved me into a motel across the street called Wildwood on the Lake. I don’t know how I got there and I don’t know who packed my things. I was in my bed shaking in the Bunker, and then I was in my bed shaking at Wildwood.
I woke up from a hallucinatory alarm-clock nap and went downstairs to the reception desk, which was staffed by a girl who appeared to be in her late teens and who was wearing the native costume of the region: jeans and flannels.
“What’s the Wi-Fi?” I asked her quietly.
She looked at me long
and strange and replied, “It’s how you get on the internet.”
I stared back at her. “No,” I said slowly, “I know that. What’s the network and password?”
“Ummmm, oh, I get it. It’s right here on this card.”
“Thanks.”
“Ummmm, like how long do you think you’re gonna be here?”
“In this hotel? I’m not sure. Why? Do you need the room by a certain date?”
“Ummmm, no.”
“Then what does it matter?”
“What?”
“Why do you need to know when I’m checking out if no one else needs the room?”
“Well . . . I’m not sure.”
I skulked back up to my room. My beloved room! With windows! I nearly cried. After weeks of being very, very ill in a dark, musty, windowless room, I had made it topside and was greeted by a room with windows and cable television. My mood swung up in a wonderful way and I thought to myself, “I’m going to get better now.”
I inspected the motel further. Everything looked to have been built in the 1970s. There was burnt-sienna wall-to-wall carpeting, plaid burnt-sienna curtains, and plaid burnt-sienna bed linens. The television was obviously found at a tag sale in 1987. I turned it on and there was a marathon of American Dad!, which I adore. I was on the second floor, and the windows opened onto an unofficial terrace, which was just the flat roof of the first floor. I peeked out and there was an upstate hillbilly sitting on a woven fabric lawn chair. He was wearing what looked like a redneck costume: a trucker hat, a plaid button-down shirt with the sleeves cut off, boot-cut jeans, and flip-flops. In his right hand was a Coors Light and in his left, a cigarette. He looked directly at me and we locked eyes. By this point I resembled some sort of convalescent Skeletor (from He-Man), and I could see his mind working out a question: “Is that one of those queers come here to die?”
Even with the window, my illness worsened. My fever continued and I was unable to eat anything. I was literally wasting away. I could see the hillbilly creepily sitting outside my window, peering in every now and again. The weird girl at the front desk called me every day to ask, “Ummm . . . are you leaving today?” Cassie texted me to ask if she could bring me anything. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this, so I said no. Thankfully she ignored me and knocked on my door that evening. She had brought a pizza and was determined to make me eat something. I sat bundled on my bed, looking like a little sea cucumber, and tried to eat a bit of the pizza. I found it nauseating and slipped back into my feverish shakes. Cassie was really rattled by my condition, which had worsened over the last few days. She kept bringing me cold, wet towels to put on my forehead. I fell asleep and she vowed to return in the morning.
The following morning she showed up with a blueberry muffin and said, “You have to eat.” She fed me a bit of the muffin, which I chewed in my dry mouth for what felt like a month before saying, “I can’t.” “Oh, yes you can,” she said and guided a straw into my mouth. “It’s water,” she said. I macerated a bit of the blueberry muffin into a muffin smoothie and barely got it down before my shakes began again. I began to sob, “What is happening to me? It’s been weeks.”
Alarmed, Cassie called Arthur and said, “I don’t think James can stay here.”
When I awoke from another hallucinatory fever sleep, Cassie was still there. She said, “You’re going back to the city.” I said, “OK. I can take the train. I’ll be fine.” I spent the rest of that morning in and out of consciousness, with Cassie efficiently packing my things into my suitcase to the sound of American Dad! playing quietly on the eighties television. I awoke only to vomit or shake uncontrollably. I heard Cassie call Arthur again. “There’s no way he can be alone on a train.” After she hung up, she sat down next to me and said, “Will is going to drive you back to the city.”
I said feebly, “No. I can’t make him do that.”
“Well, that’s what’s going to happen. I’ll wake you up when it’s time to go,” she whispered.
I was awakened by Cassie, Arthur, and Will. They dressed me and helped me down the stairs to where Will’s SUV was waiting, with the rest of the cast and crew. They had removed the seats and packed the prop mattress into the back, creating a makeshift ambulance. There were pillows and blankets and everything. I had my hood pulled tight over my head and was wearing dark dad sunglasses because the light made my head throb. As I scooted back onto the pillows, I began to weep. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can’t believe how kind you all are. I can’t believe you did this.” I was moved by their tenderness and am still so grateful for their care.
After the six-hour drive, during which I was barely conscious, Will and I dropped my bags off at my apartment. I was fully reenacting the “Thriller” music video by this point. My desiccated corpse was being led by my sheer will to live. I hailed a taxi, which took me to my doctor’s office. “Dr. O,” I call him. I feel that he’s the first doctor I’ve had since childhood who actually cares about my survival. His knowledge is extensive and his network vast, and he’s had his own practice in the East Village since the big bang. This gentle, kind man has had the unpleasant misfortune to be my primary care physician.
I am a fragile little queen. I get strep throat all the time, as I’m too lazy and stubborn to get my tonsils out. “But how will I rehearse?!” I ask incredulously whenever anyone suggests it. As a result, Dr. O knows me well, so when I walked into his office looking like a goddamned feather in the wind, he nearly had a heart attack.
“Wh-wha-wh-what ha-ha-happened?” he asked. I forgot to mention that Dr. O has an adorable and very charming stutter, like a genius toddler.
I informed him that I had been mistreated. “I’ve been locked in a basement where the internet was bad!” I started crying, wincing each time a magma tear oozed over my knifelike cheekbones.
He took my temperature, which was approximately 105 degrees, no hyperbole. He then took me by the arm and shoulder and walked me the two short Manhattan blocks to Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital. I remember how bright the sun was and how I knew it was bizarre that such bright sunlight should make me shiver. Extreme sickness makes common occurrences seem brutal and alien.
When we entered the hospital, I was put in a wheelchair, and Dr. O demanded that I be helped immediately. He told the doctors on the floor that I had a blood infection from a persistent throat infection that had been treated incorrectly. His tone was so sure. I was grateful to finally have an idea of what the hell was wrong with me. I was put in a room and immediately put on intravenous antibiotics. Dr. O went back to his practice and said he’d return after the workday.
The hospital doctors crowded around me. They each, in turn, shone a bright flashlight in each of my pupils, noting how I shuddered and blanched. They looked like hand-drawn charcoal monsters, twitching and writhing above me. I’d see flashes of their hideously distorted physiques between flashlight assaults. They aahed and hmmed each time I shrank away from the light. Sinking down over me, their faces pressed together like the petals of a hellflower, they said in multitonal, demonic unison, “We’ll need to do a spinal tap. We think you have meningitis, and in that case you’ll be dead in a week, if not a few days.”
Half-conscious, I managed to croak out, “No. Please, no. Dr. O. He’s right. I know it. Wait until the IV starts working. What’s a few hours if I’ll be dead in a week?”
The wraiths obliged the shriveled husk under their piglike snouts and dispersed.
I laid there, wondering if it was true. I saw and heard things, still a victim to fevered hallucinations. I imagined needles snapping in my veins and piercing through my skin. I heard screams from other hospital beds, unintelligible gibberish.
Only one thing outweighed my fear of death, and that was my reluctance to tell my loved ones that I was dying. Even on the precipice, I wanted to protect my facade of strength. During my time in the hospital, I never once called or t
exted my father. I didn’t want to scare him, which is unbelievably selfish of me. I didn’t tell anyone—not even my boyfriend, who was doing a drag show in India, of all places—except my friend Jeff, who visited daily and brought me clean clothes and delicious orange Gatorade. I didn’t post about my illness on social media, even though I know many people who jizz at the thought of garnering internet sympathy.
Dr. O was correct: my blood had become infected because of the lack of correct treatment for my throat infection. I’m grateful to the hospital demons for heeding my decrees to leave my spine untapped. On the fourth day of my hospital stay, after much sleep and convalescent hours gratefully watching Peg Bundy mince about in syndicated reruns of Married . . . with Children, I was ejected back into the bright Manhattan sunlight.
I stepped out onto the East Village sidewalk weak and grateful. I even chose to forgo popping in my headphones and listening to music on my walk home. I wanted to hear the sounds of the city that I was robbed of during my time as an inmate at the Lake Placid Dungeon. New York City seemed more vibrant than ever. The taxis streaked by a vibrant mac-and-cheese yellow, and the sky vibrated azure like a 1980s neon nail salon. All the passersby had ravines of worry marking their preoccupied faces, and walked at a pace that would equal a suburban sprint.
I thought of my mother, who spent close to a year dying, and ascertained that I’d like to spend as little time dying as possible. I thought about how much more life I wanted to achieve, the first goal being the completion and performance of The Tenant, which I had worked so hard for, only to be derailed by illness. I would NOT suffer the same fate that befell my character, Trelkovsky.
I thought of my morbid sentiments from just days before, when I was sure I’d perish in a week due to meningitis. I thought of my choice to keep my illness a secret. If a television or film character had done that, I would have shouted at them. “I did it to protect you,” they’d say. Fuck that nonsense. I did it to protect myself. How would I tell someone I was dying? My fear and shame outweighed my desire to include another in my demise.
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