In the Shadow of the American Dream (32 page)

It's so odd trying to write about the past based on memory: the landscape and human particulars fall to the odd logic of time and emotional impression. The landscape of memory is as affected by time and personal structure as is landscape affected by light or darkness. At night when sources of light are curtailed, shaped, bent, deflected, erased, the distances can suddenly be elongated or shortened, physicality of self or landscape expands or contracts in the dark. 8th Avenue in memory can be a location or landscape no one else has ever traveled.

[No date]

Having this virus and watching guys having sex and ignoring the invitation to join in is like walking in between raindrops.

[No date]

AIDS IS NOT ABOUT DEATH. IT IS ABOUT PEOPLE LIVING WITH AIDS
. This is bullshit. I understand the concerns about media and how it has manipulated images of this virus which can affect public perceptions and funding for research and health care. But AIDS is not just asymptomatic muscle boys and kick-boxing dykes leading the public fight against this virus. Those of us dealing with manifestations of this virus need room to embrace and look at the very real possibility of Death. Having seen many friends go through horrifying illness and die, having fevers and night sweats for the last two months, feeling horrible and fragmented, I demand that we don't slip into denial about Death as an aspect of AIDS.

In the paper today I read a story about a woman in an animal park who tried to stop a fight between two 5,500 lb. elephants. She died. Phil kept saying there's something in the paper that was hysterical. I tried to find it. The first story I read was the elephant story: “She loved elephants too much.”

[No date]

So I get on the plane and everyone looks like a Kennedy and some weird excessively aggressive man sits next to me across the aisle. It's an empty plane but he's thrashing around slamming overhead doors throwing his seat belt out of the way to sit down and generally looking like he's in a rage. I imagined him a hijacker. I imagined my death at his hands or his death at mine. I must be anxious. What is all this? My hands are so sensitive, my whole body is so wound up I feel again like I want to puke or scream. I wish I was rid of this body. I wish I could leap out of this skin and run away or explode or disintegrate. I can't stand the feeling of air let alone my clothes against my skin. I have these images in my head of ripping out my veins my nerves my skeleton. People are so weird, so unconscious. The waitress is giving us pretzels with too much salt, a ginger ale that tastes like benzene. The agitated man says an obvious prayer. Will his prayer keep the plane from plummeting? I make a decision that I don't have anything or anyone to pray to. I wonder if that means I am the only one who won't survive a crash. More Americans than ever believe in the Archdiocese version of Hell. Even Protestants. That's funny until translated into politics, into research for AIDS, into funds for starving people in those concentration camps we politely refer to as ghettos. There goes my brain again—

So I'm supposed to leave for a round-the-country car trip to do readings for Random House.
*
I must be crazy but I can't bring myself to cancel the trip. It's like some Disney pill where I'll magically regain all my energy—physical and mental—to make a driving trip like years ago when my body was preinfection. That life will stretch like a blank screen of sky on the horizon to be filled with all my desires, articulated or not. I still want to puke. I've been feeling this way all week I think from the penicillin. Yes, from the penicillin. Otherwise I have to think it's something new growing in size in order to kill me.

[No date]

I think I got kicked by a tiny mule in my sleep. Got that bone marrow biopsy. All I can remember is the sunlight. Lying on a doctor's table while she is pulling from trays all forms of equipment, rustlings of sanitized packing clink clunk of tools and a wave of late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the thin blinds across the walls, counters, and her moving white-clothed body. I tried to think what it was about sunlight. What I was always drawn to comment on to myself yet never have anything to say about it other than its presence or lack of presence.

I have a horrible streak of that discomfort sensation around my neck, the fear of touch, the anxious nausea of having the cloth of my T-shirt having contact with my skin. The doctor is going on about her business not turning around finally she asks me to turn over lower my underwear and she probes my lower back, my hip, and selects a spot. Invasive procedures scare the shit out of me, actually it's not so much fear as revulsion at the idea of marriage between body and machine and horror at it being me who all my life lived in fear of a rough death by exclusion, isolation, starvation, homelessness, untreated illness. Something about a steel tube pushing into my flesh and further into my bone and clipping a piece of that bone. It's an issue of privacy in the worst sense. I have never in my life thought of my bone marrow except in the idea of giving it to others who need it. But that's been abstract, that was more about sadness and needing to fulfill someone's desperate needs, to break their physical isolation. Like my intestines are extremely private, so are my bones, the marrow inside them. I'm embarrassed at having someone accompany me in moments like this. My body feels like a third person in the room, my mind a second person, my friend a first person, the doctor absolutely necessary. I'm self-conscious for my body. I'm still in disbelief at my condition walking into these invasive tests like a man under a spell having horror but propelling my body forward despite it, a slight sense of maybe losing myself forever down a road that leads to endless illness and suffering and eventually a shutdown of my body as in death. Like in a time tunnel that telescopes and contracts life and civilization outside its transparent sides going on at an excruciatingly slow speed, slow in purpose, slow in awareness or ignorance.

It's done, not so painful but excessive in horror. She lays the little 1 2/3-inch length of extracted marrow onto a large glass slide. It's pinkish with blood and looks fibrous like the texture of gristle. It immediately looks like marrow even though I've never seen it before, its qualities are in magnification even though I'm two feet away and it's immediately identifiable as marrow. With a lot of effort she slices it in half with a scalpel, it will travel in two directions for different tests. Cutting it in two creates a sound against glass, a sound, a grittiness. So tiny but powerful. Next day I'm still in specific pain, manageable but still a thread of nausea and horror.

I'm thinking, I'm here. This is the chair, the bed, the shelf, the television, the lamp. I'm still here. Isolation is preferable even if I feel I'm dying of loneliness and of this thing in my blood. Being out helps for a moment but the whirl of fear and need and the pressure to decipher it all and not know what it is, causes me to want to go back into isolation—At least the bed won't disappear, the television won't die even though it is essentially death.

I've been depressed for years and tears since Peter died and Tom's diagnosis and my own diagnosis.
*
When I was younger I could frame out a sense of possibility or hope, abstract as it was, given my life felt like shit. I've lost that ability. Too much surrounds me in terms of fears, attempts to confront others and myself for clarity, to confront death or illness or loss of mobility or my brain rotting or shrinking, the recent loss of mobility in that I am too terrified to go long distances for fear of death or illness in unfamiliar environs. Knowing I've been depressed, realizing the extent recently makes it all more confusing because I don't know, I can't separate what in my fatigue and exhaustion and illness is from depression, what is from disease. One feeds on another until I want to scream.

When Peter talked for months about something feeling wrong, feeling like he was underwater, some acquaintances of his, one a shrink, said it was classic signs of a depressed immune system. She was stupid.

It's
A.M.
in Bakersfield. I think this is the town/tiny city where some cop got shot in an onion field and then they made a movie that made millions of dollars. San Francisco for a couple of days—odd thing to be in a city after Death Valley. Doing the reading [Outwrite panel] and its aftermath was heavy. I mean the people whom I spoke to and the heaviness of their private lives—One guy started to cry and said something of his lover home in bed ill and another guy had to cancel his trip to Europe to go the next day to get an operation on his eye for CMV retinitis. What a fucking horror. There were others, all of it made me sad around the end of the night.

One guy showed up that shocked me. In 1985 I came through San Francisco and tried to look up a guy who worked part-time at the desk of the YMCA I had lived in. He was long gone. He was a guy I was friends with along with a whole cast of eccentric characters at sleazy Embarcadero hotels. We'd all meet at this coffee shop and talk all night. Richard was the most stable. Anyway, he showed up looking great and said he still had all my letters (I was twenty-one) and little notes and drawings I'd sent him back then. Then he was gone.

Amy was great. Something about her. When I first met her and subsequently I felt those old feelings of instant deep connection like you recognize someone you once knew a long time ago. But you really know nothing. So what is all this? She's beautiful and sexy and smart. Those words are stupid because it's all something much deeper than that. If she were a guy I'd maybe marry her. It's some emotional trust even though I don't know from where—

Another fight. I'm sick of this. Marion and me going through heavy times in Bakersfield. I arrive at a feeling that I want to cut off and go for a while by myself but then we're stuck in this town, this car, this hotel room, etc. We were driving all day. In the morning before we left San Francisco, she called Amy and asked her to join us for breakfast and for some reason I didn't say no when she asked me if this was all right. The night before at the reading and then the candlelight march for AIDS I felt happy to see Amy and when I went back to the hotel I wanted it to stop there, not see her again until next time, whenever that is. But in the
A.M.
I figured if Marion wants to see her there's a connection there and she deserves to. But then she started torturing me with the possibility of taking photos of Amy and me. I had been sitting at a restaurant in the Phoenix Hotel, dozens of people around the morning before, and she began taking pictures of me and I told her it made me uncomfortable. She didn't stop. It makes me crazy to have someone photograph me in public. Always has. I hate being photographed in general and the only rare times I have felt okay was when I was comfortable, when I felt a bond or trust between me and another person and we had privacy, sometimes in a group of people if those people were all friends or friendly.

So anyway Marion starts telling me she is going to photograph me and Amy at breakfast and I start getting uncomfortable and tell her she can't take pictures of me and a tension grows. She says I make her feel like a paparazzi. I tell her I don't like to be uncomfortable having my photo taken in a public place. She says she'll just photograph Amy. Fine, I say. I was tense all through breakfast, which read as having fun by Marion as she told me later. So I can mask my tension. I don't think so. I figure anyone can see my tension but Marion says she didn't. I was glad when breakfast was over. I just wanted to get out of San Francisco, maybe back to the desert just driving barren roads all the empty sky like a sponge or in worse times like an enormous mirror to tiny things and circuits like emotions.

So in San Francisco, I went to a porno movie house and jerked off. It felt kinda stupid and human. An Asian guy sat next to me, was putting his hands all over me. I was lost in the darkness of the seats. I felt a little weird. You know, having the virus and feeling like my body is filled with the virus and having a strange kid playing with my arms and chest and a straight porno on the screen whirring away in the dark and feeling like I'm sitting miles away watching myself in all this.

I told Marion afterwards, told her the intimate details of the physical stuff and all the complicated things going on in my mind as well. In the end the whole experience went from casual, where I thought, So what, to seeing it as vaguely interesting or that maybe it was good to have a sexual moment since it's rare that I do something sexual. It's been months since jerking off. Maybe twice in three months. Some switch fell off months ago maybe while I was feeling so sick. I couldn't give a shit about sex. It seemed stupid and boring, at times the idea of it, the complications of it made me think: nausea.

But in the course of telling her the story it all changed emotionally by degrees and by the end I was sad and feeling a little jittery. The kid wanted to suck my dick but I wouldn't let him. He kept trying in the most ridiculous ways but I kept refusing silently, just with hand gestures or by grabbing the back of his neck and pulling him away. He finally said, Why not? I said, It's not a good thing to do. It makes me nervous.

I couldn't talk about AIDS. I just wouldn't let him do it. He wrestled with my fingers, slapping my hand as if to knock it out of the way. There was something sweet and sad about it.

When I tell Marion intimate things like this experience I have sometimes weird feelings about speaking candidly about details but then I tell myself that she makes no judgment and why should I feel odd speaking about details of sexual contact? I push myself to open the book I guess to show trust or what I believe is a trust between us. I don't know what trust is if I try and look at it closely. I always look into a physical/mental communication expecting to see a physical shape as if trust were a physical shape and it is not. It's invisible and it is delicate and it balances like a thin wire suspended between two points.