Bleeder (7 page)

Through the June heat and into July, I sweat over the steak grill, and every few days, my ankle flares up, and I must treat. Tonight, my ankle pounds pain, and I’m limping severely as I slice ham, grill steak, and heat meatballs. Hopeful that I can leave when we close at eleven, I start the cleaning list:
Take apart meat slicer and wipe; Windex display case; store extra meat, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and cheese in freezer; scrape grill; clean countertops; scrub toilets; mop floor; take out trash. And at 10:50 as I heft the last bag of garbage into the dumpster, a Caravan cruiser circles into the empty parking lot and a six-member family unloads and lobs toward the restaurant. If I let them in, I’ll have to reclean everything, and it’ll be another hour before I can clock out, so I act quickly: I rush the door with the keys, secure the lock, and scurry away to cower behind the counter. A man yanks on the door. Then again, louder and with more force. My heart palpitates. He pounds the glass.

“I know you’re still fucking in there,” he huffs. “You ain’t supposed to be goddamn closed. Your sign ain’t even off.”

His anger echoes throughout the sub shop while I massage my swollen ankle, praying for him to leave.

“Goddamn, you. Goddammit.” He pounds again, beating the glass front in rapid-fire succession with the neon open sign flashing beside him. Hairs lift along my arms. I pull my legs to my chest and pray again for him to leave. Then I hear the scruff of retreat, doors slamming, a vehicle coughing to life, and the skid of tires pealing off.

I count to twenty and, feeling safe, ease my head above the countertop. The parking lot glows from the streetlights and, save that weak yellow light, is black and empty. I slowly rise and, scanning the lot to reassure myself he’s gone, I scurry to unplug the open sign, noticing then the smear of handprints and boot-marks on the glass; so I fetch the cleaner and hastily scrub away these marks before locking up and limping to my truck.

At home I infuse and then comfort my ankle atop a pillow and gently rest it against an ice pack. I lie back on my mattress and exhale deeply. Upstairs, Mom calls down.

“Your dad and I are going to bed,” she says. “What time do you work tomorrow?”

“Early. I have to leave at ten.”

Then the house quiets. The night chirps, and I drift off.

The next morning, I wrap my ankle in an Ace bandage, and I fit on my shoe as best I can. I swallow several Tylenol and pocket a handful more. Then I leave.

When lunchtime arrives, the Caravan returns and my heart seizes with panic. In overalls splattered with white paint, the man saunters in and motions to my manager, and they talk. The man smiles a large mouth of yellow teeth when I am told to make him a free meatball sub. I return his smile, but neither of us speaks. When he finishes eating, he balls up the wrapper and tosses it toward the trash, missing the hole and spilling food.

“Oops,” he says. “Guess you’ll have to clean that up.” Then he leaves.

After lunch, my boss corners me around a boxed fortress of sub rolls and tells me I won’t get my monthly raise and that, additionally, he’s knocking my pay down by ten cents an hour. He debases my qualities as an employee, and I lowly hang my head, offering my subservience.

Angry, I huff outside and slump against the stairwell. The hot air chokes me and sears my lungs. Sweat beads on my forehead and dampens my work shirt. Leaning across the railing, I think of what to do and decide that I should quit. The job is wearing me down and I need to heal.

So I limp inside, and I find my boss at his desk, leaned back with his feet propped up.

“I’d like to put in my two-week notice,” I say.

He glances up. “No. Don’t bother. You can quit now.”

“Okay. I quit then. And here’s the shirt for your next employee,” I say, tearing off the shirt and throwing it at him.

He jolts up and aims his finger at me. “Don’t ever ask me for a recommendation! You won’t get it from me!”

“Fine!”

“I mean it. Ever!”

“Fine!”

When I leave, he slams the door and my restaurant career ends forever.

COLLEGE

S
EPTEMBER 1991.
A
NA AND
I
HAVE BEEN SEEING EACH OTHER EVERY
other weekend since school resumed, but that’s getting harder to manage. I’m busy; my workload has increased threefold; consequently, I’m in the library every evening and now need the weekends for study.

Tonight, I recline in my favorite chair—the one tucked against the large window that stares out upon the campus walk—and my heavy bookbag rests at my feet, yet instead of reading my coursework, I thumb another medical journal in the hope of understanding more about me. In college I’ve learned about research, about finding answers to things you don’t understand. But today the news isn’t promising. Long-term studies of AZT indicate that side effects such as nausea and muscle contractions develop, or worse, that HIV becomes resistant to AZT.

I let the journal slip into my lap while my gaze drifts outside to the longleaf pines blowing in the campus breeze. I think of a night not long ago when I awoke with a muscle spasm in my calf, another when my foot curled itself inside my shoe and required coaxing to return to normal. And then there is my nausea. Sometimes in the early morning as I eat breakfast, or later in the evening during dinner, it comes. I ignore it, blame it on a steady diet of coffee, and cure it with slow steady breathing or perhaps by lying down, or if nothing else works, I rush to the closest toilet and unload my
insides. I have thought that HIV caused this, but now I wonder if it’s AZT. And if so, what can I do? It seems I am moored to illness. My stomach sinks.

In my chair as the sun descends behind the campus lawn, I recline in the casual pose of a college student caught up in deep thought. I have now carried the knowledge of my HIV for a year. My only confessions have been to William and to Ana. Still, I hide it. And I suppose, too, that I am still dying, a thought too difficult to conceptualize with any honest attachment.

Here I’ve stumbled too close to reality, and I must let it out. This is not uncommon. Tears spill forth in the quiet of an untraveled book row, or in the morning shower, or in the cotton sheets I sleep beneath. And when I’ve folded my torn heart over and wrung it dry of ache, when I’ve embraced mortality and squeezed it hatefully and lovingly and hatefully again, I must then move on.

October 1991. Friends persuade me to join the crew team as a coxswain, and today is my first morning of practice. As I wait in front of my suite for my roommate to return with his car, the cold bites at my gloved hands, so I cup them to my mouth and breathe heat into them. Last night was the season’s first frost. The campus lights shine through the pines around me, and the crackle of a frigid wood sounds from that cold darkness. I rub my hands together, breathe on them again, and place them in my jeans’ pockets. Eventually, from the other side of the woods where the incoming road lies, headlights shine, and when my roommate pulls to the curb, I get in. Neither of us speaks as we drive down Market Street through downtown Wilmington and toward the Cape Fear River. The sky lightens, and by the time we unlock the boathouse and lay out the paddles for the rowers, the morning is a pale gray.

When the rowers arrive, we lug the boat to the riverside. The rowers grab underneath the shell’s hull, and hoist it and carry it to the water where—there being no dock—it is rolled over and gently placed in the river while I give commands and follow along nearby. My bare toes sink into cold muck, squishing the sand, slime, and slick grit of the polluted river bottom, and the river soon numbs my feet beyond sensation. They feel thick as they knead the doughy river floor. I lower myself into the coxswain’s position,
knock my feet gently on the boat’s tender side to shake mud from them and revitalize some feeling. Then we push out into the river that fogs with cold.

We row a four-man. Old, wooden, and not like the newer and lighter fiberglass models, it is heavy, but still we stroke through the smooth-top river. I call out the commands hastily taught to me, and the rowers laugh when I get a few wrong. But we row, and from the river’s center I marvel at Wilmington’s downtown streets and her historic waterfront.

As the temperature rises from frigid to just cold, plumes of vapor hover just above the river’s surface while, nearby, the tread of cars crossing Memorial Bridge breaks the quiet. On the opposite shore an egret dives for food, dipping its beak close to where the battleship is permanently docked. Then there is the barge: moving heavy in the water, heading downriver on a course set to collide with our fragile skiff.

“We’ve got to get out of its wake,” one of the rowers yells, panic visible on his back-turned face.

I shout out power strokes that require the men to use all their might, and, trying to outpower the other ship’s mechanical motor, we stroke feverishly to the other shore. As the barge passes, the men use their oars to balance atop the large waves that curl from its bow and churn whitely from its stern. We rock dangerously, but keep our bodies centered, our minds focused, and soon the river calms again and the skiff no longer bobs. We are safe.

We row to a spot upchannel, an artery of the Cape Fear that is even calmer than the river herself. Here the men practice shifting in their seats, rolling to the catch, and flipping their oars for a smooth and strong pull in the water. We are silent: I hear the splash of water, the grunt of the rowers, the click of wooden oars slapping against wooden boat, and then the quiet flow of the river as we slip through it.

November 1991. It is after Thanksgiving. I’ve just returned from the family holiday and have been busy with papers and prepping for final exams. Sean—a freshman who rooms down the hall—sits across from me underneath Krispy Kreme’s “Hot Now” sign as we both take a needed study break. His dark brown hair curls from the humidity and his amber eyes widen and dart around in a twitch. We eat doughnuts, sip coffee. Often this semester,
we have come here: to sit, to eat, to talk. And though we have said much, I have not said enough. At least not until now.

“I’ve got something to tell you.” And I begin: tell of my hemophilia, my HIV. Sean stops eating his doughnut and brings both hands to his coffee cup’s lid, where they fidget abstractly. Save for the sound of our breathing, it is quiet. I hear the rasp-heavy voice of a smoker ordering at the counter, the mellifluous trickle of a cup of coffee being poured, the click of a metal car door outside, the strain of the glass door being opened, the quiet laughter of a couple entering. I sip my coffee.

“That’s heavy,” Sean says. “Really heavy.”

His finger traces the napkin’s Krispy Kreme symbol as a child just learning to write. He stares into his coffee, looks outside the window, runs his hand through his hair, and breathes out heavy. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you told me . . . I’m not sure that I can help any, but if my knowing helps then I’m glad.” He pauses, sips his coffee, sets it back on the tabletop. “But I’ve got a million questions, and I don’t even know where to start. But one in particular is just nagging at me, and if it’s too personal you can just tell me to go to hell.” He stammers. “Ana? Does she know?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Wow. Okay. That’s what I thought.” His eyes roll around in thought. “You two are . . .” He hesitates, tilts his head. “You know . . . ?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s safe, right?”

“It’s safe.”

“Wow. I mean damn. I don’t know what to say. What should I say? Is there anything to say? Hell, I don’t even know how to act. This is really fucked up, you know. It’s all fucked up.” He looks to me. His eyes grow large with excitement and are bright and earnest in the fluorescent light. “You got fucked,” he vociferates loudly. “You know that? I think I’d be in someone’s face or something. I’d have to react. This is way too fucked up to not do something. I mean damn.” Another coffee sip. “I always knew I’d learn about the world in college, but I didn’t think it’d be like this. This is just plain fucked up. Damn.” He sips again. “Sorry, man. This is just fucked up and I don’t know what else to say but that.” Slurp. “Fucked up.”

The following afternoon when I return from my classes, I find Sean watching TV and smoking Camels. A big blue haze puffs around him, and as he turns to me, I can tell that he has not rested well. The dark skin beneath his eyes sags, and his disheveled hair appears as if his hands have been running through it all night, all day. Clothed in beer-mug boxers and a Charlotte Hornets T-shirt, he leans back into a chair marked by cigarette burns and beer stains. He nods hello as he shakes a cigarette out of the pack and tosses this onto the table where a pyramid of empty beer cans remains on display.

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” he says, lighting his cigarette. “I thought about you.”

I drop my backpack and sit across from him. “I guess that you weren’t expecting that kind of news about me last night.”

“
That
. . .
That
was not what I expected.” He pauses. “At all.”

“I know.”

He presses his cigarette butt into the ashtray and then flips another from his pack, taps it on the coffee table in front of him. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say about it.” He brings the cigarette to his lips, lights it, and, when he exhales, I watch as smoke plumes from his mouth, clouding the distance between us. The scent of tobacco wafts toward me. “I’ve been smoking a shitload of these,” Sean says, gesturing to his cigarette. “I don’t know what else to do, so I just smoke and smoke a fuckload while crazy shit runs through my mind. A of all, I think about you and your having to deal with this shit and how fucked up that is, and then B of all I think about me, and, well, I’ll be honest . . . I get a little scared.”