Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (19 page)

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Authors: David B. Feinberg

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Memoirs, #Gay & Lesbian, #Nonfiction, #Literature & Fiction, #Essays & Correspondence, #Essays, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Social Sciences, #Specific Demographics, #Lesbian; Gay; Bisexual & Transgender eBooks, #LGBT Studies, #Gay Studies

BOOK: Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone
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HIV-positive people can be stable for years. I was probably infected ten years ago. I’ve been HIV-positive for more than a quarter of my life. So far, aside from a few minor dermatological problems, I’ve suffered only side effects.
There’s a part of me that knows that I’ll never die. There’s a part of me that knows better.
8. Good Vegetable/Bad Vegetable
 
Toward the end of
Catch-22,
Yossarian has a telling conversation with Major Danby:
“I think I’d like to live like a vegetable and make no important decision.”
“What kind of vegetable, Danby?”
“A cucumber or a carrot.”
“What kind of cucumber? A good one or a bad one?”
“Oh, a good one, of course.”
“They’d cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad.”
Major Danby’s face fell. “A poor one, then.”
“They’d let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow.”
“I guess I don’t want to live like a vegetable, then,” said Major Danby with a smile of sad resignation.
 
Here are my options: Do I want to die a slow, protracted death, ending up on life support in some sterile hospital, half-man, half-machine? Or do I want to die instantly, an absurd death, run over by a laundry truck, suffocated in my own vomit, overdosed on morphine, taunted by Gary Indiana lisping bad reviews of my books?
Quite honestly, neither.
Do I want to be buried six feet underground in a coffin and slowly decompose and end up as food for worms? Or do I want to be cremated, consumed by fire in a preview of hell, have my flesh destroyed beyond recognition and end up in an urn on someone’s mantelpiece or tossed into a body of water and eventually fertilize the floor of the ocean?
Let’s face it, both alternatives suck.
The final wishes of an atheist are ultimately meaningless. I mean, I would like to be cremated after any salvageable organs have been donated to right-wing Republicans and religious fundamentalists (because I’m really not bitter after all).
But ultimately it isn’t my concern.
9. Vegetables
 
I definitely don’t want to end up a vegetable.
Perhaps my greatest fear is the loss of lucidity. Initially, writing is an extremely private act. Not even boyfriends are allowed to look over your shoulder when you’re typing that first draft. Unconditional approval is necessary at the early stages of the work. I’d rather not have anyone read what I’ve written until the paperback has been reissued twenty years after initial publication: Criticism can cast a pall on one. In any event, for the first several drafts, the work must undergo the subjectivity of self-examination. No one else can really help: not the writing group from Bennington, not the dyslexic therapist, not the former best friend from high school who now lives in Portland, and not the writer’s mother. Reading your own work can often be surprising: Work that seems excellent on one day may seem execrable on another. Humor is particularly subjective.
But when I lose the ability to examine my own work critically, it will be time to stop writing altogether. You ultimately can’t depend on anyone but yourself to review your writing.
10. Conclusion
 
So on the one hand I’ll continue to procrastinate, pretending that I don’t have a potentially life-threatening illness. This is known as denial. On the other hand, I’ll write as fast as I can, as if I had only one year to live. Anxiety is the best fuel for me. Everyone should write out of desperation: as if there is only one year to live, except, of course, for the high priestesses of style like Edmund White, who should take as long as necessary to perfect their sentences. I don’t think I’m likely to write a TV sit-com pilot on spec in the near future. But then again, if I ever get that elusive Chelsea co-op, I may end up writing copy on the back of Post Toasties.
My silly data-processing job provides health care and enough money so I don’t have to worry about the fact that
QW
pays four weeks after publication, and I can basically write whatever I want, contingent upon the fact that it may or may not get printed. I feel a constant low-level guilt that I should quit my job and work full-time to end the AIDS crisis and volunteer for AIDS organizations in all my spare time and stop that narcissistic gym-going and pathological flirting and burn out and do research for ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee, and even writing is a waste of time, because writing doesn’t have the power to save a single life. I should be out there on the front lines like Larry Kramer founding activist organizations and denouncing them in due time.
In Screening History, Gore Vidal mentions that there is no such thing as a “famous novelist” because “Adjective is inappropriate to noun. How can a novelist be famous, no matter how well known he may be personally to the press, when the novel itself is of no consequence to the civilized, much less to the generality?” Why persist in writing, a hopelessly bourgeois act, an act of vanity?
I write because it’s the most difficult thing that I know how to do. I write because I feel I have something important to say. I write because it’s arguably the only thing I can do well.
I wrote this for a gay and lesbian writers’ conference organized by the Publishing Triangle and CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. The topic was “AIDS Time.” This panel was slapped together when the organizers realized they had forgotten to include an AIDS panel. I spent a few weeks refining this piece. I want to thank Joe Keenan for inspiring the title of John Preston’s anthology. I felt hopelessly pseudointellectual by citing Joseph Heller, as if I were pretending to write a piece seriously grounded in the literature. Why not Sontag? Why not James? Why not Proust? Luckily I had just stumbled onto Gore Vidal’s latest essays. I was extremely annoyed when I discovered that I was the only one on the panel who had prepared specifically for this session. James Turcotte, who had reminded me that I had read too long at George Stambolian’s memorial reading, read from his diaries. The other panelists spoke off the top of their heads. One of the editors of Art & Understanding was on the panel. He asked if I would submit my essay. It was run in the January/February 1993 issue, and later reprinted for the Berlin Conference issue.
I learned tht James Turcotte had died when the Publishing Triangle reprinted his address posthumously. John Preston died of AIDS-related complications on April 28, 1994.
Warts From Hell
 
I have approximately six hundred and forty-seven warts on my left hand, and four hundred and seventy-two warts on my right. This has absolutely nothing to do with my masturbatory practices. My extremely good friend Jan, who is better than Dear Abby, Ann Landers, and Susie Sexpert rolled into one, would say that I’ve been kissing a lot of frogs trying to find my own Jewish-American Prince, and maybe given one or two handjobs too many in the process. This is not the case. HIV is not the only virus I harbor. To be truthful, the actual number of warts on my hands is closer to forty-nine, which nonetheless is still enough to make strong men grow pale.
I’ve been plagued by warts on my hands since I moved to New York in 1979. I assume this predates my HIV, but I could be wrong. I used to wait until four or five of them had reached a certain, shall we say, size, and then have a delightful visit with my dermatologist, an epicene rice queen who kept photos of his estranged wife and three daughters on his desk. Dr. Q lived in a large one-family unit in Nassau County that he shared with an ever-changing set of Oriental college-student boarders. He had a sense of humor drier than his own parched skin; he would burst into drunken tears at Uncle Charlie’s and show pocket-size copies of the photos on his desk at work to any stranger who would look. After a wry comment, he would anesthetize the area of my hand and then burn the warts out with an instrument that I expect Laurence Olivier used to rehearse his Nazi film roles. This in turn stimulated several all-but-invisible wartlets on my hands, which soon grew to take the place of those eradicated. For years the number of warts on my hands remained a scientific constant, akin to the speed of light or the sum-total mass of a closed system. Now it’s out of control.
More recently, Dr. Q preferred to dip a Q-tip into a Styrofoam cup he had filled with liquid nitrogen and then press the Q-tip on the wart..Oddly enough, this produced a burning sensation. Later a blister would appear. When this healed, unfortunately, the wart generally remained. Some say my warts will end in fire, some say my warts will end in ice.
In my present state, I am so wart-besotted that I fear I would do damage if I inserted any single digit up any ass, even my own: At this point I don’t have a single wart-free finger. I am loath to shake a stranger’s hand, except of course a business associate, for fear of contagion. Have my hands become the literal embodiment of my generalized fear of HIV infection?
Surprisingly, they are less of a pain than an annoyance. They generally don’t interfere with touch-typing or gym workouts—although for a while I had two warts on the side of my fourth finger, two large ones, and this caused moderate pain when I was holding hands with various strangers in my capacity as a marshal, blocking nonexistent traffic during David Wojnarowicz’s memorial procession through the East Village. Those warts magically disappeared, perhaps giving some credence to the concept that they could be willed away, although the rest have remained, and redoubled.
I hold the mottled portrait of Dorian Gray in my hands.
When I would visit Jan, the first thing he’d ask is, “How are your hands?”
“Fine,” I’d reply.
“Let me see them,” he’d demand. I’d offer Jan my hands, placing them palms up in his. He would inspect them with mock seriousness. “A little better,” he would attest.
“Actually, I think they’re a little worse.”
“As long as they’re not interfering with your workouts.”
“Sure. I pretend I get them from pull-ups.” They are occasionally mistaken for calluses.
I suppose I’m just as vain as the next male homosexual who goes to a gymnasium one short block away from Barneys, a store so intimidating that I have yet to actually enter this haberdashery for fear of inadvertently buying a $1,075 Versace knit shirt marked down to $850. Don’t ask me why, but this is the piece I didn’t want to be published during my lifetime. For some reason, I’ve always viewed my warts as the outward physical manifestation of some deadly character flaw I should have long ago eradicated through a concentrated act of self-control. My warts shame me. I hold my hands tightly balled up, as if to deny their presence. I willfully ignore them, as if by ignoring them they would cease to exist. It took me two weeks to tell my boyfriend about them (although he already knew). I told him I was HIV-positive fifteen minutes after we met.
Is it because the warts are the most visible symptom of my declining immune system? Is it because I fear they may be wildly contagious (although it seems their contagion is confined to myself)? Or is it because they are
not particularly appealing
and might constitute a sexual
turn-off?
I communicate sexually primarily by touching and kissing. With warts, my hands are rendered useless, two contaminated vessels with all the appeal of a rotting octopus. And before I adopted nightly cleanings with the Water Pik and Peridex, my gums from hell seemed to bleed spontaneously at the mere thought of arousal: How was I to kiss without dread? What was I left with: a buttoned-lipped peck on the cheek and a rubber-gloved full-body massage? Now that I’ve almost completely removed the possibility of human contact, am I left to fend for myself alone fully encased in plastic?
Perhaps my hands are only contagious to someone else with an even lower immune system. What am I to do? Ask for a T-cell count (are there home methods like home pregnancy tests?) before continuing without the same latex gloves that the cops wear when they’re planning on arresting us?
There were long periods when I would visit my doctor every other week to get treated for my anal warts. My former physician, who purchased his condo with my insurance payments (my warts were listed as lien-holders on the deed), was totally bereft of a bedside manner. He died abruptly of AIDS, no doubt leaving his unknowing patients with an acute sensation of dislocation. My last two dentists are dead. In the nineties, divulging HIV status takes on a new perspective: The urban gay male worries less about transmission from his physician than whether or not he will survive him.
My doctor offered me various methods of treatments for the warts on my hands. One was salicyclic-acid plasters. Every night I was told to soak my hands in hot water, dry them, and then cut up pieces of the acid plaster to stick on top of my warts overnight. I could never find the tiny-spot Band-Aids at Duane Reade to cover them. If it’s something I have to be vigilant at, chances are that I won’t follow through. I’m just no good at anything more complicated than popping poisonous pills three or four times a day. I’m sure that injections, should they eventually become necessary, will be a major problem.
In December 1990 someone gave a presentation on human papilloma virus at an ACT UP meeting. HPV causes venereal warts; it is also linked to cervical cancer. The presenter suggested it was a good idea to get rid of anal and genital warts because of the risk of cancer. I had assumed that I still had some, because my warts always returned. Clearing up my anal warts seemed an exercise in futility, adding a few stitches to a Jacquard-knit shirt that was unraveled every night. My anus was in a semipermanent state of sexual retirement at the time. But learning of the threat of cancer, I decided I might as well invest in a brief bout of spring cleaning.

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