Close to the Knives (11 page)

An hour later we reached a suburban street filled with fat wet trees hanging over quiet sidewalks. The street was also lined with no-parking signs so I pulled up in front of the doctor's house, an anonymous-looking place with a high plank fence around its backyard. I let Anita and Peter off on the sidewalk. You go in and I'll be right back. I drove a few blocks and found a nursery-school parking lot, parked the car and walked back feeling relieved that the ride was over. In the distance I could see Peter staggering on the front lawn flailing about in rage. He staggered toward Anita then turned and teetered to the roadside. She stood there with her small hands clasped together, traffic whizzing by. Peter disappeared behind a big hedge—the kind they shape into hippos and elephants at kiddie parks. By the time I reached Anita, he was in the distance, a tiny speck of agitation with windmill arms. I asked her what happened. “I don't know, one minute he was complaining how long the ride took and when I said that maybe you did the best you could he went into a rage—he threatened to throw himself in front of the traffic. The saddest thing is that he's too weak to throw a proper fit. He wanted to hit me but he didn't have the strength.” Where's he headed? “He said he was going to the train station to go back home.” We walked after him. He was staggering alongside a chain-link fence which separated him from a group of schoolkids kicking a dented soccerball around. He turned briefly, saw us coming, tried to cross the street, changed his mind, started walking toward us, changed his mind again, turned around and started walking back toward the train station. I shouted his name and he hesitated for a moment then resumed walking. When we caught up with him he turned and started talking angrily. “Look,” I said, “just forget it—none of this is important … we came to see the doctor. We're here, so let's go see him.” He calmed down a bit and the three of us walked back to the gate and followed the path to the side door.

Up a couple of steps inside the screen door was what looked like the interior of a trailer: fake wood paneling, functional desks overflowing with papers and some rooms to the left where the patients moved in and out, and where a tall man in a white lab coat occasionally appeared to wave them in. To the right were a couple of doors lining a short hallway and beyond that a waiting room, Leave-It-to-Beaver comfortable filled mostly with men. Just next to the entrance a pale boy leaned against one of the desks waiting to pay his bill. Peter recognized him from the office of the doctor both had been seeing for most of the last year and whom both had decided to stop seeing—some scientist uptown in Manhattan. The scientist was working with nontoxic antiviral drugs he'd developed. He'd been treating cancer patients for years until the government brought a case against him for malpractice on numerous counts. He is now on a five-year probation. The fact that the government entered the scene was one of the things that convinced Peter that the doctor might be a genius. All of us hoped it was true. Over the past nine months he'd collected a drawer full of brown bottles each containing the most recent “cure” developed by this man. Some of them required injections which I administered. The deciding factor for many people to leave this doctor was a vaccine he'd developed from human shit which each person was eventually injected with. When Peter told me about this treatment I figured that because shit was one of the most dangerous corporeal substances in terms of passing disease (check the statistic on Belle Glade, Florida, where there are no adequate sewage facilities) maybe this guy figured out something in the properties of shit to develop a vaccine. After all, the bite of a rattlesnake is treated with a vaccine made of venom. But I also assumed that the doctor had at least made a vaccine for each patient out of their own shit. Later we found that one person's shit served as a base for all treatments. Almost all the patients treated with this became extremely ill. Each one who mentioned this fact was told privately that he or she was the only one who reacted badly. This turned out to be the case many times. There were regulars to this doctor's office that Peter would ask the doctor about. There was one young man in particular who everyone immediately fell in love with; the one all of them pinned their hopes on as an example of the possibility of success with the doctor's treatments. When Peter asked how this or that person was doing he was told: fine, fine. Recently he discovered this was not true at all, many were dead and buried and the young man everyone loved had died as well.

Peter talked with the pale boy inside the door for a while. The kid said he had been at the edge of death with T.B. and Kaposi's sarcoma which extended all the way down his spine and up into his ass. A couple of months after taking the typhoid treatments he was feeling better, “Just a touch of T.B. and most of the cancer has disappeared.” The front door opened and an elderly gentleman who the boy had been living with in the Hamptons, came over to the desk and laid out a pile of personal checks. He proceeded to fill out and endorse each one to the scientist running the clinic. Check after check after check. After awhile a short seedy guy with lots of white teeth came over and introduced himself to us. He was the brains behind the typhoid treatment. I immediately felt uncomfortable with him. He reminded me of a guy who'd sell you dead chameleons at a circus sideshow. He told us to fill out the forms and sit in the waiting room until called. The waiting room was filled with people who recognized Peter, all former patients of the doctor in upper Manhattan. This cheered Peter up. Anita and I looked at each other in disbelief. Here was an office filled with people who were searching for “the cure.” The grapevine brought them from one end of New York to the other to test out different therapies, sometimes combining them, sometimes improving for short periods of time, sometimes dying from them. What amazed us was that most of the people in this office had found this treatment independent of each other. To me, the idea that this treatment might help out with Kaposi's made a bit of sense. The introduction of a foreign element to the body sometimes sparks the immune system into momentarily working properly. Outside of New York, I'd read about some people who had done work with certain photo-chemicals, painting them on Kaposi's lesions which after some time dried up and fell off the skin. But in the few studies done, none of these therapies did much to stop the advancement of the more than three hundred other opportunistic infections.

One guy in his mid-thirties, a sad looking blond, asked Peter if he remembered him from fifteen or so years ago. He used to go by the name of Dorian Gray—apparently they'd had an affair back then. Peter suddenly did recognize him. “Of course I dropped the name some years ago.” Peter asked him if he was on AL7-21 and he said, “No; I just have ARC not AIDS so I'm not worried; I don't think I'll need any of that stuff.”

The room was filled with AIDS-speak for the next half hour. One of the guys was a sexy Italian man who'd developed AIDS from intravenous drug use. He and his girlfriend joined the conversation comparing different therapies and how each combined this or that treatment in different ways. Everyone was emphatic about his or her chemical or natural agenda. Talk swung to the typhoid doctor and half the room tried to convince Peter he shouldn't tell the doctor he was currently taking AZT. “He'll refuse to treat you; he wants you to give up everything but the typhoid shots; something about his research …” Finally the brains behind the business called us into his personal office. It looked like it had been decorated by Elvis: high lawn-green shag carpets, K-mart paintings and Woolworth lamps. Lots of official medical degrees with someone else's name on them. Anita had come along to help Peter describe his medical history because lately he was a bit slow; words came in small clusters after much hand movements; he confused easily. The doctor asked him how he knew he had AIDS: “After all, you may not have it.” Peter tried to describe the last year's medical events. His description was disjointed and unrevealing. Anita tried to step in at some point to help and Peter waved her angrily away. The man said, “Fine, fine. Now you must stop having sex …” Peter said, “I've been celibate for two years.” The man rambled on about how he must stop having sex, or if he did, he must use rubbers. Then he suddenly said, “Okay—go in and get your first shot.” He got up to usher us out of the office but pulled me back into the room just as I was passing through the door. “Are you homosexual?” “Yeah,” I said. “Have you been tested for the HIV antibodies?” “Uh, no,” I said, “and I haven't any plans to.” “Oh,” he said, “but you would be perfect for us—get the test and I'll start you on the treatments right away …” I cut him short, “Thanks … I'll think about it.”

While Peter was getting his first shot Anita and I decided to ask the doctor to explain the theories behind his treatments. When we told him we want to discuss the treatment, he brought us back into his office. He immediately launched into some monologue about money: “… if the patient hasn't any money … well … we can work something out—I'm not in this just for the money … but, if they have money, they will pay. Oh, will they pay!” Anita told him we were just interested in how the typhoid treatments worked. We asked that he not spare us the medical jargon. He started off talking about how all the other doctors were quacks and how the government was trying to stop him from doing these treatments. He said he wasn't really a doctor but a research scientist with degrees in immunology. He'd hired a certified doctor to administer the shots. He went into a lengthy monologue about the immune system that made very little sense and ended up with talking about the thymus gland—only, when he gestured to his own body to indicate the location of the thymus, he pointed first to his stomach, then to his chest, then to his head saying, “Or wherever it is …” While we were recovering from that disturbing bit of information, he went into his research on various viruses and how he had settled on typhus as the virus that would successfully spark the immune system. When we asked him to elaborate further he took out a piece of paper and drew a series of circles on each side of a dividing line. “Say ya got a hundred army men over here; that's the T-cells …” We were interrupted by his assistant who told him he had to interview new patients.We left the office and looked around for Peter but he was nowhere to be found. The assistant eventually told us he was outside looking for a ride back to the city. Anita and I then realized that Peter had been in the doctor's office for merely ten minutes. We grabbed our coats and rushed out to find him standing on the sidewalk in front of the place. He looked confused. “Oh … I thought you went home without me …”

Before heading back to New York City we stopped at a diner along the highway and ordered food. Peter was agitated and demanded to know what we had thought of the scientist and his treatments. I explained what Anita and I had learned from the man in terms of his theories and how unsettling it all was. He looked sad and tired. He barely touched his food, staring out the window and saying, “America is such a beautiful country—don't you think so?” I was completely exhausted from the day, emotionally and physically and looking out the window at the enormous collage of high-tension wires, blinking stoplights, shredded used-car lot banners, industrial tanks and masses of humanity zipping about in automobiles just depressed me. The food we had in front of us looked like it had been fried in an electric chair. And watching my best friend dying while eating a dead hamburger left me speechless. I couldn't answer. Anita couldn't either. He got angry again, “Neither of you would know what I'm talking about …” Finally I said, “Peter, we're just very tired. Let's go home.”

On the ride back you could cut the tension in the car with a buzzsaw. Fighting late afternoon traffic, we finally arrived back on Second Avenue and just about had to carry him up the stairs. “Don't touch me, don't touch me.” He staggered over to the bed and crawled in with all his clothes on, lying there with two eyes peeping from beneath the covers. “Is there anything you need? Anything we can do for you, Peter?” An angry “NO!” So we left. Later, talking on the telephone with Vince, I heard that Peter had talked with him minutes after Anita and I had left his house and Peter said, “I don't understand it, they just put me in bed and rushed out.”

Dream. Night before Peter died
. In this sleep I end up on a late-night street near a building awning like a garage port or hotel overhang and there are two thugs, street guys, tight white t-shirts, sexy thick arms and faces of possible violence: jail faces. There's a small glass box. I look through its lid and see a short fat snake with desert or jungle markings. The two guys tell me it's a pygmy rattler but there is no rattle on its tail. I lift the lid or they lift the lid and the snake jumps and fastens its teeth to the side of my nose. There is no real pain but it's there for a long time, each guy trying to pull its shiny jaws apart to free me. I'm bending over in a semicrouch waiting patiently, thinking of its poison flowing into me but no real fear of dying or anything. I'm amazed at how patient I am.

Standing in the street next to the curb, water runs like from some hydrant in the summer. There's a small blue-and-white boat like a ferry, a child's toy bobbing in the water. I crouch down to look into its tiny front windows. A voice (like from a P.A. system) says, “One of the passengers died before the ferry arrived this morning … none of the other passengers were aware …” The ferry suddenly becomes an enormous boat, a life-sized ferry, and it is bobbing on the ocean or river and I'm staring through the windows at what looks like a scene from an E.C. comic. The first person, alone in the front seat, stares straight ahead unmoving—obviously dead by the look in his eyes and by the shape of his skull pushing against the flesh and the almost gray-green pallor of his skin. The other passengers sit like stick dolls, some with missing teeth or hair. They're alive but not moving, staring at the back of the dead passenger's head.