Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood (12 page)

With four weeks to go, Shannon was diagnosed with acute preeclampsia, a serious condition most often experienced in the last trimester of first pregnancies. As a precaution, she was hospitalized for complete bed rest until delivery. This became, in essence, a forced seclusion. While its precise cause is unknown, current thinking is that preeclampsia is an autoimmune response; the mother’s body suddenly becomes “allergic” to the developing child. This reaction triggers the release of chemicals that can raise the mother’s blood pressure to dangerously high levels, which can then damage blood vessels in the placenta (the organ that transfers oxygen and nutrients from the mother’s blood to the baby’s) and possibly lead to seizures and premature birth. When one of my sisters, meaning well, dropped by to visit, Shannon’s high blood pressure shot up practically two floors. Thereafter, she was allowed no visitors, save for one or two close friends, an arrangement not unlike living behind the grille at a Carmelite monastery. The nurses on staff, like a community of nuns, took care of her. And at the end of June, Shannon delivered a healthy baby boy, whom she privately named Daniel, though this was never entered into any paperwork. She had four days with him in the hospital before a nurse took him away. She never saw his new mother. My sister prayed that her child would have a good life.

Shannon took time off to heal and rest, scarcely venturing from her studio apartment. Two months after the delivery, she finally accepted a girlfriend’s invitation to go out for an evening, her first time out in forever. Before leaving her place that night, Shannon told herself,
Tonight I’m going to meet someone I will never give away.
And she did. They’ve been together ever since and were married twelve years ago. His name is Daniel.

When I stayed with the two of them in their bright, new Seattle home last year, I noticed a small photo on their dresser of a dark-haired infant, a tiny wrinkled wonder in a bassinet. Shannon stepped closer to me as I picked up the frame. It took me a moment to make the connection: “Is this Daniel?”

“Yeah,” she said, beaming. She’d put it out for a special occasion: The following day would be his birthday. This photo had been taken in the hospital. “He’s going to be fourteen tomorrow. Fourteen—can you believe it?” Her eyes misting, I wrapped her in a hug.

We continued talking downstairs in the kitchen. “Anytime I look back on that situation,” she said into the steam of her coffee, “I know that I made the right choice. But it was heartbreaking.” Understandably, his birthday has always been rough for her, as are the four days that follow it, the span between the delivery date and the finalized adoption. Her son may feel something similar. Psychologist Nancy Newton Verrier, in her book
The Primal Wound,
explains that this is a recognized phenomenon among children adopted at birth or shortly after: “There seems to be a memory built into the psyche and cells, an anniversary reaction (also felt by the birth mother), which sends many adoptees into despair around their birthdays.” Rather than celebrating a birthday like other kids, they may experience for several days the pain of having been relinquished, feelings formed long before their capacity to remember or understand them. Furthermore, Verrier notes, the emotions that well up on a birthday will often lead an older adoptee to wonder about his or her birth mother:
Is she thinking about me today?

In years past, Shannon never “sensed” her son thinking about her, but that’s changed dramatically, as if a psychic intercom has been switched on. “Now that he’s a teenager, I’m sure he has an awareness of me. I’m sure his mom has told him about me, and I just feel him out there—here—someplace. I’m much more aware of his presence as he becomes more aware of mine.”

Her talking so openly about her child is new. Only in recent years has she given herself permission to do so. The buffers around her emotions have eroded, it seems to me, as she’s watched her nephews—our two sisters’ sons in particular—going through puberty. Every time she sees Sam and Dylan, they appear to be an inch taller, a little huskier, more mature. Naturally, she can’t help thinking,
What kind of man is my boy becoming?

Shannon would welcome meeting him one day, as she indicated on the final adoption papers. However, she would never initiate a search for him, and if he chooses never to seek her out, she can accept that. Intuition tells her that he will, though, when the time is right for him. I hope it happens. I would love to meet him, too.

“I’m really curious about his voice, about hearing his voice,” she admitted to me, smiling.

“It’s probably deepening right about now,” I pointed out. “Or cracking.”

We both laughed, and I couldn’t help but think of Shannon at that transitional age. When she was a scared young girl, whispering her secrets to me as we hid in the yellow bathroom, blood was so frightening to her. But today it carries such a different meaning. Now blood is a knock at the door, her son coming back to find her.

S
IX

Vital Staining

WHETHER OR NOT THE NEED IS GENUINE, TRACKING down medical history is often an adult adoptee’s stated rationale for instigating a search for his or her biological parents. This explanation provides an intellectual context for what’s likely to be an emotionally raw experience for all involved. A woman considering having a child may first wish to learn if serious illness runs in her family—instances of childhood cancers, for example, or blood disorders such as hemophilia. Is there need to worry? In another case the search may be vital but unwanted: A middle-aged man, content to leave the past alone, must nevertheless locate a compatible organ or bone marrow donor. For others, the reason to search may seem silly when put into words—to find a relative who has, say, the same catsup-colored hair; finally, what made you stand out all these years helps you fit in. Despite the spoken purpose, however, adoption experts say that a search is usually driven by a deeper yearning. No matter how good one’s health, how blissful one’s upbringing, nothing may quiet the desire to know the people to whom you’re related by birth, your true blood.

As I see it, the successful mapping of the human genome has done horrendous harm to the romantic notion of blood kin, a phrase that first entered the English language during the early Middle Ages. Medieval doctors believed that the act of conception was a mixing of “pure blood” from both the mother and father. This rarefied fluid originated in the heart and was carried by semen, a substance thought to be contributed by both sexes. This feeds into the emotionally satisfying idea that bloodlines are blood-made, ceaseless crimson tributaries reaching back thousands of generations. Even in the intimacy of the womb, however, circulatory systems are independent; blood does not cross over from mother to child. It is genetics that trickle down generation to generation, determining everything from hair color to blood type to a predisposition for certain illnesses. That’s all well and good, but cold. The fact that I share DNA with my great-grandfather William, for whom I was named, does not have the same ring as hearing that we share the same Irish blood. Blood is tactile, warm, we are bathed in it at birth, whereas a spiral of DNA is clinical, invisible to the naked eye, the proof of something denied—a suspect’s guilt, or paternity.

What we commonly learn as children is that we’re part of a family tree, each of us related to a number of great-great-long-dead people through a lattice of births and marriages. Steve’s parents have spent the last several years digging into his family’s roots, a project they’ve pursued with a degree of passion that might even make them honorary Mormons. Six months ago Millie and Ted sent us the product of their detective work, a computer disk with records accounting for six generations on both sides of the Atlantic. Where I thought the screen would sprout in a grand visual, all branches and leaves, instead a single name popped up, the current youngest member of the Byrne clan. By entering a number command, we could advance person by person, jumping back limb to limb, just a generation at a time. Once we got to Steve, we found me, listed as his partner. I should not have been so surprised to be included; his folks have always treated me like another son.

The program Ted had whipped up was deliberately simple; it boiled down lives to beginning and end dates with occasional footnotes—so-and-so had died of such-and-such, for example, or this cluster of family had immigrated from thereabouts to hereabouts at around this time. We poked around for other bits of information. We scanned the various branches for those births that had
oops
written all over them—the “Irish twins” born less than a year apart, the consecutive siblings separated by a decade or more. Steve and I also gave his family tree the gay inspection, looking for the curiously unwed, those “confirmed bachelors” and bachelorettes who might have had secret lives, secret families. Steve proudly pointed out several individuals around whom lavender suspicions had arisen. As we headed back in time, it did my heart good to see that so many of his ancestors had lived to ripe old ages, ninety and more. That he has such genetics can only help. Going through the document was continually unnerving in one respect, however. Between entering a command and the results appearing, the screen would go black, a disconcerting two-beat delay during which my mind would speed to worst-case scenarios: The program had been corrupted, a whole generation deleted.

The closest thing I have to a family tree is a collection of old address books, each one documenting a period of my life over the past two decades. They contain not just names but evocations of places, households—and also of the swath cut by AIDS. They are pieces of evidence, books I could never part with—proof of lives made, of family created then wiped away.

Of course, it’s a rare person nowadays whose family fits into a perfectly traditional structure. Most of us have something less like a single tree and more like a “family orchard,” a concept introduced by adoption educator Joyce Maguire Pavao. Whether you are adopted or a foster child or come from a blended home of multiple marriages—no matter how unconventional your household may be—Pavao’s model acknowledges that your true family is often tied not just by blood or law but by circumstance and choice as well. It is this orchard that nurtures, feeds, and shelters those with whom you’ve found genuine kinship. Now, granted, a gay gym may seem like the last place for such an orchard to have thrived. But for twenty years, one did.

WHEN I GOT WORD OF THE CLOSING OF THE LEGENDARY SAN FRANCISCO gym Muscle System on Hayes Street early last year, it was like learning an old friend had died and wondering,
Is it too late to pay my respects?
I hadn’t worked out there in five years, not since I’d deserted it for a shiny new club that had opened near my home, but I regretted not having been around for the gym’s final days. After getting the news, Steve and I made a trip down to Hayes Street to view its remains.

A café that shared the building remained open, so it was possible to stand inside the foyer and peer into the vacant space. It looked as though a tsunami had hit, flooding the gym and sweeping away all the weights. Left behind were the scattered skeletons of a few broken weight machines and tanning beds. The jade-green carpeting had been torn out (the very idea of a tastefully carpeted gym suddenly seemed like the epitome of gayness), exposing the raw concrete beneath. Prevented from going farther in by a wooden gate, Steve and I stepped up to the railing that overlooked the lower level and leaned over, as if on the prow of a ghost ship. All we could see in the shadows below were garbage cans where the stationary bikes used to be parked. One thing before us, though, remained unbroken and unchanged: the enormous wood-framed mirrors—covering every wall, floor to ceiling. Straight ahead, we could see our reflections in the wall opposite. Steve said, “We look farther away than we actually are.”

I had joined Muscle System right after arriving in the city, even before I’d found a job and despite living nowhere nearby. At the time, it was
the
place to work out. It had such a mystique that Armistead Maupin wrote about it in his
Tales of the City
series. Every beautiful man in San Francisco had a membership to this gym, it was said. Luckily, I later met one there: Steve, who’d moved here from Illinois in 1987. Muscle System functioned as the heart of the community, even though it was located a good mile from the Castro district.

Monday evenings, after work, was Muscle System at its crazy best—150 guys, popping out of muscle T’s, pumped. Within the human form, blood, it’s been said, moves in figure-eights—from heart to body to heart to lungs; to heart to body to heart to lungs—circulating oxygen, nutrients, and heat, in endless loops. Exercise, of course, revs the cycle. By seven o’clock on a cold winter night, the furnace of bodies would raise the gym’s temperature at least ten degrees. The street-front windows would steam over, and the place throbbed with endorphins and testosterone. At times, working out at Muscle System was more like being at a club: The towel boys behind the front desk danced as they fed the sound system; the floor teemed with all kinds of men—pups and bears and daddies; and guys fresh from the tanning beds vogued along the runway overhead. But moments like these, which seemed to recapture something we knew we’d lost, the innocence of pre-AIDS San Francisco, lasted about as long as one good song.

The impact of AIDS on the larger community could be seen in microcosm at Muscle System, where night after night we all came together, the grizzled veterans and the fresh-faced arrivals to the city. At the front desk, notes taped to the counter announced memorial services for fellow gym members and employees who had died. The notes often appeared before the obituaries were published in the local gay weekly, the
Bay Area Reporter.
I remember one for Mark, a congenial thirty-two-year-old southerner who, nearly every night for years, made a grand entrance after work. Although I never knew him well, I noticed when Mark was there, and his absence if he wasn’t. Always arriving impeccably dressed in a suit, tie, and full-length camel-hair coat, with briefcase and gym bag in hand, he would throw a towel across his shoulder and sail to the locker room, waving “Halloo, halloo” to everyone in his path, adding each man’s name if he remembered it.

When I’d last seen him about six weeks earlier, he appeared to have lost fifteen pounds. He actually looked good, his face as chiseled as Montgomery Clift’s. I never saw him again. How could he have gone so quickly? It was as if one night at the gym—working out, as always, in fluorescent, confetti-colored bike shorts and a tank top—Mark had simply walked right through the mirrors and disappeared.

I remember thinking in the days that followed, Now his ghost is here, behind these mirrors, together with all of the city’s most beautiful dead. They watch us as we stare at ourselves, all lined up, clutching the weights.

“COME ON, LET’S GO IN,” I SAID TO STEVE. THE GATE’S SIMPLE LATCH gave way with a press of my finger.

The girl behind the café’s counter called out, “Um, ’scuse me, you’re not supposed to go back there!”

But we’re members here,
I wanted to say,
lifetime members.
“Don’t worry, we won’t touch anything, we’ll just be a minute,” I said. Steve and I certainly couldn’t have made the place look worse, more vandalized, than it did.

Careful steps took us along the familiar path back to the locker area. Although the sauna had been deconstructed, the banks of lockers stood unchanged—row after row, like two hundred metal time capsules. I half expected to find them filled with members’ clothes. One after another, we opened every locker and collected what little we found: a penny, a key, a video rental card. Inside every door, though, was a sticker, which he and I had surreptitiously put there, visit after visit after visit, a dozen years back. We laughed in amazement—of all things to have survived! We had slapped them up in defiance of the owners’ prohibition against distributing AIDS educational materials on the premises.
BE HERE FOR THE CURE,
the stickers read, the words above a luminous painting of the globe. One was scribbled over and read,
ACT UP
FOR THE CURE!
Another, probably scrawled more recently, said,
WE’RE STILL WAITING.

At the time of our stickering, both Steve and I worked just a couple of blocks away at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, he on the hotline, me in the education department. I had been charged with creating a media campaign to promote the then novel strategy of seeking out early medical care if you were HIV positive and asymptomatic and had come up with the “Be Here for the Cure” theme. The idea behind it was that the sooner you got tested, saw a doctor, and started treatment, the better were your chances of longevity. The message spread throughout the Bay Area on T-shirts, buttons, stickers, posters, and billboards, in treatment packets, ads, and PSAs, in multiple languages. What I’d learned from extensive interviews and focus groups was that, despite the number of AIDS deaths (twenty-six thousand in California by the end of 1991), many in the gay community still had hope—not always for themselves, but always for the next generation. I know I felt it. If asked back then, I’d have said with certainty that the cure would eventually arrive in some form of magic bullet, perhaps as a wonder pill or a single shot in the arm, a so-called therapeutic vaccine. The very notion of a magic bullet, entrenched in the lexicon of illness, would’ve required no further explanation, no translation. Thinking about it now, though, the phrase strikes me as one of those familiar word pairings that seems more a product of free association than of deliberate coupling, like
friendly fire
or
drug cocktail,
nonsense made meaningful, light bent to gravity.

In fact, the term
magic bullet
was coined in 1908 by a brilliant fifty-four-year-old German scientist named Paul Ehrlich, who that same year received a Nobel Prize for, in the committee’s words, his “immortal contribution to medical and biological research,” work that laid the foundation for the emerging field of immunology. Today Ehrlich is probably best known for being the first scientist to propose using high-dose chemical compounds to destroy specific pathogens or cancerous cells—what’s now called chemotherapy. Like “magic bullets,” Ehrlich explained, such compounds would fly through the body, “straight onward, without deviation,” and “find their target by themselves,” causing no harm to surrounding tissue. The concept was radical because, up till then, chemical agents had been used principally to treat symptoms—fever, pain, sleeplessness—never to eradicate disease.