The Medicine Burns (10 page)

“I was working in a gay men's health clinic at the start of a major Hepatitis C study. Later I began a protocol involving two of the hottest drugs on the market, AZT and Prozac. In every situation, putting two and two together amounted to more than I'd bargained for.”

“Well, that's something this disease has taught us,” I said, thinking casualties, not careers.

Alan said he remembered small articles in the paper, the nameless gay cancer, treating the confusion and indignance around the sarcoma or swollen lymph. There were tricyclics, answers. His research suddenly timely: the interaction of antidepressants with AZT, the effects of grieving, relapse into unsafe practices, the reluctance of disclosing HIV status. He initiated protocols almost a decade ago still being re-created with modest changes in the variables today. There was no escaping it, AIDS or death, so easily equated early on. There was only escalation, data, and statistics. Opportunities, too.

He began to unbutton his shirt, and I went into the kitchen and brought out a bottle of Calistoga and two glasses. He called after me, “I've got a party to attend tomorrow. I'd like you to come. I can't promise it'll be interesting, though.”

“What kind of party?” I asked.

“Mostly doctors and researchers. Some of the big ones: Conant, Volberding, Don Abrams…”

The names were familiar. I knew they were the so-called leaders in the fight against AIDS, but I had little knowledge of their work, or the media surrounding it. The unshakable junkie in me was already intimidated. I imagined myself like a page from
Gray's Anatomy
where every damaged vein and floating organ would be observed. I told myself that it wouldn't be me they objected to, but the fact that I didn't know who they were, let alone understand or value their research. Nonetheless, it was a world I found intriguing, and, I imagined, not overtly hostile. A raised eyebrow here and there was nothing compared to the company I'd found in shooting galleries in the Mission.

“I'll go,” I said.

We made love like survivors, without the fears and petty encumbrances that might have made us afraid of deep kisses. I treat everyone as though they're positive, so I needn't ask and they don't have to tell. This approach was my fortification upon returning to San Francisco - this, and, of course, the testing that was part of the drug study. I had six AIDS tests and came up negative each time. Each time I feared and doubted the results. I could always seroconvert safe sex was still a personal thing, each person with his own idea of what it meant. My formulations were simple—one thing I remembered from a science class was that
science loves the simplest solution
, something I no longer take for granted. I decided to make simple changes: no unprotected anal sex, and no swallowing semen.

Alan slipped to his knees in my living room. He unbuttoned his own pants while he sucked me with abandon, glancing up at me as though desiring instruction—which I offered. He was wearing the Versace suit he'd worn earlier to a benefit. It was clear this was how he wanted to get off, sucking me while I bent over him, forcing myself down his throat. I told him I was going to cum. When I orgasmed he swallowed hungrily and came himself. I was more amused than surprised by the irony. Doctors are people after all, and no one who gives advice lives by it, at least as far as I can tell. But Alan assured me swallowing semen was reasonably safe, citing the stomach acid argument. Everyone nowadays seems to have perfected their justifications for the acts they prefer engaging in—those that are possibly unsafe seem to bear a benign warning, like the surgeon general's on a pack of cigarettes. “I'm negative,” I told him, “so you can drink as much as you can draw and no apologies.”

But something about our sex didn't sit right with me. Somehow I'd forgotten my fears of seroconversion while ejaculating into his willing and appreciative throat. Nothing, however, indicated Alan suffered any reservations. There's a kind of certainty about our individually accepted safe-sex parameters. The problem is meeting someone whose parameters are wider than yours. This, of course, could apply to any ethical concern, to any ideology. The more you encompass, the less adjustment you need to make.

I put it out of my mind, and hung his clothes as he stepped out of them. He lay on my mattress on the floor, and I put on a tape. He'd brought a small toiletries bag, arranging a number of prescription bottles on the carpet. They looked like brown colums. “Is that your model of the Parthenon, or the design for a new NIH?” I asked.

“The Ritalin is for my attention deficit disorder, Elavil for depression, and this,” he said, dropping two pills into his palm, “is Halcyon—for a good night's sleep in a strange place.”

“I guess you have no reason to shudder at my heroin addiction,” I said.

He swallowed the pills with the Calistoga then opened his briefcase and drew out a paper by a colleague of his we'd be meeting the following morning for breakfast. I liked his willingness to include me in his life—the simple but comprehensive acceptance he had of mine.

The paper was a statistical evaluation of the rate of HIV transmission in three artificially distinguished groups: call boys, street hustlers, and those who worked with escort services. While I read the researcher's specifics for each category, I found myself becoming more and more exasperated with the paper. It seemed to have no ultimate aim beyond its tabulations and tables—the boys were already lost to this researcher; they'd become the raw data of their acts, desperate or otherwise.

“I don't know,” I said. “I believe in good old intervention.”

“Well,” Alan answered, “how do you design a good intervention plan without the necessary data?”

“When someone's hit by a car, you don't design a study to get them out of the road.”

But reaction to this disease wasn't about haste anymore; it wasn't about responding to an emergency. Now it was about design and implementation, competitive proposals and salaries. The escalating numbers were not emergencies, but time lines and spreadsheets.

The way my friends had described AZT to me, it reminded me of methadone maintenance: methadone keeps junkies sick and dependent on the government. AZT keeps people sick and dependent on the pharmaceutical companies. I didn't want to sound cynical, but I suppose I was. It seemed simple minded, like conspiracy theory or something, and I'd always liked complexity, something more challenging than greed, sloth, wastefulness, or just plain ineptitude.

The next morning we had breakfast with the “call boys' researcher,” someone I had hoped might show signs of a previous history as one, or a pervert obsessed with them. His home was near the top of Twin Peaks, unassuming from the outside, but with a sprawling and impeccably designed interior. He was obviously proud of the place, judging by the sweeping hand gesture he used to welcome us inside. He eyed me without the slightest discretion, and I eyed him back. He was middle-aged, with a face that presented no disturbing or extraordinary features, like the strain of genius, or even ordinary struggle. It was a full and contented face, and the body seemed to match, buffed but not lean, mostly genetic mass and little work. Alan had described him as a “knockout.” He guided us through a large sunken living room with its smart leather couch and track lighting aimed upon the framed international safe sex posters, some quite risqué for a room as tidy as this was, and one which showcased the most benign treasures: a vast fish tank with its solitary puffer and sunken Japanese garden, and a cabinet displaying china. We walked up the steps to the kitchen where we met Ken's domestic partner, aproned and busy at work like a simple domestic.

“This is Danny,” Ken said, introducing us. “And your name again?”

“Adam,” I answered.

“Where'd you meet Alan?” Danny asked, a quizzical look on his face that might have been dull-wittedness.

“In a back room,” I answered, before Alan squeezed my arm.

“Well, we weren't in the back room exactly,” he corrected, “but at the back of the bar. Adam was telling me horror stories.”

“Did Alan share any of his own?” Danny asked.

“I wouldn't be surprised if several of his horror stories were right there in the bar,” Ken said, “and let me guess which one it was…My Place?”

“How'd you know?” I asked, amused but concerned. Alan had told me it was his first time there.

“Alan always has someone new to introduce to us. He has a man in every port,” Ken answered. “Every neighborhood's a port.”

Danny, watching my face, turned toward the sink and started washing potatoes with a brush.

I went outside where the lovers had built a deck. They'd set a table outside, but the sun was so bright we had to sit with our hands visoring our eyes. The yard was so well kept, the trees so cut back, that there was no shade. They brought out omelets with pancetta, fresh tomatoes from the garden, and jack cheese.

“The hash browns are on their way,” Danny said.

Alan lavished praise on the garden, their craftsmanship on the deck, and Danny's breakfast. They'd been friends for years, but we all sat stiffly at the table.

Then Ken said something interesting that troubled me.

“I got incredibly sick in Brazil,” he said. “Deathly ill.”

He dabbed his mouth with his napkin, “The doctor told me I was going to die. I'm actually surprised I didn't. They moved me from a hospital to a care home run by nuns. A priest presided over me. I think they were ready to bury me in the cemetery out back.”

“What was the doctor's diagnosis?” Alan asked.

“Cryptococcus,” Ken answered.

“That's horrible,” I said. “My friend Eddie died of crypto. How'd you regain your health?”

“I don't know,” he said, “maybe the influence of all those nuns.” He laughed.

“Well, did you get checked out when you got back to the States?”

“I was fine,” he said. “I'm
miraculously
fine.”

“Maybe it wasn't crypto after all,” Alan suggested.

Danny came out of the kitchen, and the conversation went back to home repairs and garden prospects.

Later that day, as Alan and I prepared ourselves for the APHRA party, I asked him if he didn't think Ken was a little evasive about the crypto.

“He's committed to his research, Adam. I hardly think that's someone in denial about AIDS.” Alan looked at me crossly, then leaned forward and kissed me.

“I don't think they liked me much,” I said.

“Of course they didn't,” he answered, kissing my neck.

I pulled him down to the mattress on my floor. “Everything about my life is amateurish to you, isn't it?” I asked.

“One of these days you'll get it together,” he said, opening my pants. While he sucked me, I looked at the white ceiling—a white doctor's coat, a flat hard emptiness.

“Hurry up and get dressed,” he said, licking my cum from the corners of his mouth. He looked through my closet and asked, “Do you have anything to wear tonight? It's formal.”

“What about a tap in my throat?” I asked, still lying on my back, delirious from the sex, which while quick and mechanical, paradoxically assured me of our intimacy and knowledge of each other.

“They're not vampires,” he said. “They're M.D. Ph.D's.”

I followed him into the bathroom, “I want to know what your friends said about me.”

“One of them asked if I was going out with a bag person,” he said, lathering his face and talking to my reflection in the mirror.

“Well that just goes to show how removed from the real world these people are. I'm sure they'd shit themselves at the sight of real poverty.”

“They merely commented,” he said. “You shouldn't be surprised about that. You're obsessed with sharing your demons first—you practically demand a reaction to them.”

“Are you talking about my behavior with you or with them? I don't remember sharing demons with them, and I don't think their comment has anything to do with my past. It's really just about money, isn't it?”

I thought of how Danny had hung my jacket, beating it out before placing it in the closet.

“Why don't you borrow one of mine,” Alan said, pointing to a jacket he'd draped over the bathroom door handle, “and let's drop the subject.”

“Fine,” I answered, looking at myself in it, remembering the nice clothes I'd had, but sold for drugs. I could still appreciate beautiful things.

His friend Matt picked us up that night in a rusted VW Bug.

I'd seen Matt before—at the gym and at ACT UP events. He leaned over and kissed Alan deeply, knocking the ancient Woodsy Owl air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. I could see the red burn on his arm where he'd applied DNCB. He was wearing a tank top that showed off his muscular arms and a perfectly rendered tattoo of Caravaggio's
Medusa
.

“This is the best you could offer me?” He asked. “A quick ride to your dinner party before you're out of here?”

“I tried to call you,” Alan said, “but you never called back.”

“You know how it is. I have a lover now.”

“When don't you?” Alan asked.

“What about you?” Matt asked, turning to look at me for the first time. “Still with Jim?”

“This is Adam,” Alan said.

We shook hands. He turned to look ahead and started the car.

“You should tell me what to talk about and what not to talk about,” he said.

“Why?” Alan asked, perturbed. “Talk about whatever you'd like. You do anyway.”

“Still with Jim?” he asked again. I felt some relief at hearing the question come back.

“Of course,” Alan answered.

Then he asked, “How's the KS?”

“They're treating him with interferon.” Alan looked out the window, and his profile was clearly unhappy.