Ryan White - My Own Story (14 page)

4

How I Got Back in School—But Had to Leave Town

A
fter Barney died, I waited about a week. Mom hadn’t said anything about another dog. Maybe she thought I felt there was no substitute for Barney. Probably there wasn’t, but I wanted a companion anyway. So I started lobbying her again: “Mom, can we get a new dog? How soon?”

Now, not everyone in Kokomo hates us. Every week or so, some family in town would send us a card or a letter saying, “Hang in there.” After the story about poor Barney spread around, several neighbors offered us puppies. But I decided I wanted a dog that would have been put to sleep if we hadn’t taken him.

So Mom drove Andrea and me down to the pound, and I picked out a full-grown dog who looked like Barney—same soulful brown eyes, same questionable pedigree. But when it came to naming him, I was stuck. This dog had a goofy personality—he wasn’t as sharp and intelligent as Barney. When anyone except me called Barney, he wouldn’t budge. My new dog thought he belonged to the whole family. He was a reliable watchdog with impressive muscles. I thought of calling him Wally, but I wasn’t sold. One of the TV newsmen who kept coming around had an idea. “Your dog needs a last name,” he told me. “Why don’t you call him Wally Waldondo?”

I looked at Wally and repeated the name a few times, sort of rolling the sound around. Wally looked at me expectantly and started wagging his tail. “Okay,” I told him, “this is who you are now.” I put on his leash, took him out on the sidewalk, and started training him to pull me along behind him on my skateboard. That Christmas, Mom gave Andrea a beautiful fluffy black-and-white cat. I came up with her name, Chi Chi, after my favorite Mexican restaurant. Later on, a friend of Mom’s gave me a funny-looking little Pekinese named Gizmo—Gizzy for short. So when you came over to our house, animals followed you everywhere. And if a pet wasn’t trailing you, a reporter was.

By that time, we had been in the news so much that reporters were practically part of the family. They came from all over the place, even Japan. I felt like I was growing up with some of them. They followed us into the bathroom to see if we were telling the truth when we said we shared toothpaste and glasses. They stood by the kitchen sink and asked Mom if she was doing dishes by hand so she could use bleach on mine.

“The dishwasher has been on the fritz forever,” Mom explained. “Tell the whole world I wash all my dishes the same way everybody else does.”

Grandpa had found out that something like seventy percent of all the hemophiliacs in America had gotten infected by their Factor. We knew that there were at least a dozen other hemophiliacs in Howard County, and we found out that I was the second one to be diagnosed with AIDS. But no one else was speaking up about going to school. The others just faded away like ghosts. Maybe they moved out of town. I didn’t like the lonely feeling I got when I thought about them.

We talked to some reporters more often than we visited with our friends and relatives. One of these reporters was Chris MacNeil, who wrote about us all the time for the
Kokomo Tribune.
Seemed like he was always perched on a chair in our kitchen. Chris got nearly as many nasty letters and phone calls as we did—so many that he ended up moving away and getting out of journalism. One television reporter, Carrie Jackson Van Dyke, was like Dr. Kleiman—when we met first met her, she had no children, but while she was covering our school fight, she had a daughter she named Lindsay. I used to bug Carrie to bring me pictures of her new baby. Looking at them was the next best thing to actually holding Lindsay.

Andrea hated reporters calling up and coming around. Usually she disappeared into her room until the interviewer had gone. I let Mom do the talking to the press most of the time. They took up hours and hours, and I had a life to live. I didn’t have time for everybody. But I liked Carrie. One day I said to her, “I just can’t believe the way complete strangers like you treat me so nicely. People in Kokomo, people I’ve known all my life, treat me like dirt.” It was true: Sometimes we felt like reporters were the only company we had. They helped us make new friends too. Like the time Italian TV called. They had read about us in their newspapers and they wanted to fly all three of us to Rome before Christmas to be on a very popular interview and call-in show called
Italia Sera.

Normally I can’t stand long trips in airplanes. My ears hurt, and I get nauseous. Plus I hate being closed up in a small space for hours and hours—I guess it comes from doing so much time in hospital rooms. Besides, nine times out of ten, there’s some delay, and you don’t get home when you thought you would. I
really
hate that.

Ryan is pulled along by Wally outside his new home in Cicero.

But Mom told me,
“I’m
never going to take you to Rome, working at Delco. Let’s go.”

I remembered that Italy has race cars that you could say were okay. So we flew to Rome for five days. We felt timid because we’d never been to Europe, and there had been a lot of terrorist attacks recently. When we landed, the airport was full of soldiers with machine guns, on the lookout for terrorists and hijackers. For a minute we thought we were going to be attacked!

While we were being interviewed on the show, it didn’t matter that none of us could speak Italian. We all had special earphones so we could hear what callers were saying translated into English. Then when I spoke into my mike, what I said was translated back into Italian. Everyone who called in said, “Stay the course” in Italian. Someone even offered to lend us a house in Switzerland. At the end of the show, the hostess kissed me on the air.

Off the set we still got treated like stars. Some people from CNN and NBC took us sightseeing. Andrea collected postcards, stamps, and Italian money for a scrapbook on Italy that she was putting together for school. She wrote in it that we saw “a lot of old buildings, famous fountains, beautiful scenes”—and we did. There seemed to be statues everywhere, even in the middle of the street. I snapped a load of pigeons, some pretty great cars, and some terrible drivers. Italians park anywhere they feel like, even on the sidewalk!

The rest of the time, no one paid any attention to us, except to be friendly. We walked and walked, trying to ask directions in sign language. Once we stopped in a pizzeria, and some American servicemen recognized me and came over to say hello. And an Italian lady spotted us on the sidewalk and hugged us, crying,
“Italia Sera! Italia Sera!”
She knew us from the program. No one in Rome seemed to be afraid of us.

Ryan, age fourteen, appears on
Italia Sera
in Rome.

“In Kokomo we’ve lost practically all our friends, and we get funny looks everywhere we go,” Mom sighed. “Rome is so different.” We’d almost forgotten what it was like to stroll around a place like anybody else.

Andrea, Jeanne, and Ryan during their trip to Rome.

Our two trips to New York were even better. The first time, we were on the CBS
Morning News.
Andrea even got to bring a skating friend along. The second time was to be on
The Today Show.
New York! I’d wanted to go there ever since I was little and saw
Miracle on 34th Street
for the first time. It was still my favorite Christmas movie. I watched it every year. On the other hand the flight to New York was pretty long.

“I’ll go if I can get to Macy’s,” I told Mom. Macy’s is a huge department store in New York on West 34th Street; it’s where most of the movie takes place. “And see if we can go to that comic-book store I heard about.” My collection was up to 400 comics, but I was looking for the issue of Batman where Robin dies. That’s the one every collector wants.

Mom called
The Today Show
back. “The comic-book store is in a basement in a bad neighborhood,” she told me. “But they’ll drive us there in a limo and the driver will go in with you.”

“Tell them we’re on our way,” I said.

Mom had to call Mr. Vaughan to let him know we were going away. “Ryan is going to be on
The Today Show
?” Mr. Vaughan said. “Ryan is going to meet Jane Pauley?”—She’s a big deal around here because she grew up in Indianapolis—“And all Ryan’s talking about is comics?” For once, Mr. Vaughan couldn’t think of anything more to say.

While we were in New York, we went to a hospital so I could have some blood tests to see if I might be eligible for an experimental drug. We sat in the clinic waiting room, and I opened a comic to pass the time.

A man who had been sitting on the opposite side of the waiting room got up, walked over to me and said, “Aren’t you Ryan White?”

I looked up and said, “Yeah.” I was a little startled. The man was very thin. He must have been at the clinic for the same reason I was.

The thin man said, “I’m really happy to meet you. I’m gay. My whole community is torn up over this disease. And here
you
are, reading a comic book. I just think that’s so great.”

I never thought much about gay people until I got AIDS. Now I had a lot of respect for them. So many of them were fighting AIDS, but they’d given
me
tons of support—not to mention the latest medical information. In fact, I was at the clinic because we’d heard about it from a gay group.

After he walked away I turned to Mom and said, “I really know how he and his friends must feel. We’re fighting the same disease.” I figured I had to keep my priorities straight. Being famous can get in your way.

The trouble with being on television is that wherever you go, everyone knows what you look like, and you can’t get away with anything. Like the day I met Heath after school, and he gave me a cigarette.

When I got home, Mom told me right away, “You’re grounded. You can’t go roller skating on Friday night.”

“What?” I blurted. “How come?”

“You know how come,” Mom said. “I can’t believe what you did. I must have gotten four phone calls from people who saw you. Smoking’s bad enough, Ryan, with your lungs the way they are—but you had to go do it in front of Mitzi Johnson’s house.”

“How’d anyone know it was me?” I demanded.