Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (30 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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I just saw my doctor on Wednesday. I asked about the possibility of transinterdigitoanal verrucae. I may have stuck my finger in someone’s anus in the bathtub. Okay, okay, I know I should have worn finger cots, sterile surgical gloves, or at least Playtex Living rubber gloves. He replies, it’s a different virus. You’re more likely to transmit it to someone’s penis by jerking him off. More good news for modern man. The doctor proceeds to inject an entire bottle of alpha interferon, twice what he has done before, directly into the warts on my hands. I stay home from work the following day with faux flu, a common side effect of the drug.
So of course I don’t call my doctor for a few days. It just might go away.
 
 
 
Where did I get this bug? I wonder whether I have eaten brown foods. A big mistake. Shit can blend into the scenery. I wonder how I managed to avoid hepatitis last summer when everybody else seemed to get it. It’s true, I have been a certified rim-free zone since January 23, 1982.
I have a confession to make.
I have never rimmed.
I may have lapped some Saran Wrap once or twice. But by the time I had conquered my cultural heritage of 5,762 years of Jewish prissiness, the moment of relatively carefree analingus had passed. Yes, I have been rimmed. And undoubtably I will spend another 10,000 years in Purgatory for not reciprocating.
Could I have been infected from the gamma globulin? Haven’t most of my ill effects been bad reactions to drugs up to this point? I remember back in the early eighties when people were blaming AIDS on the hepatitis B vaccine. When I finally call my doctor the following week, he admits that the alpha interferon could cause mild diarrhea for a day, but certainly not for the duration of my current affliction.
A week later I shriek “Are you clean?” at my boyfriend when he offers his metallic-tasting penis for my inspection, which I suspect he has been wrapping in aluminum foil until I realize that the Flagyl or maybe the pentamidine is altering my taste buds.
 
Dear Diary, Saturday was queasy. I swallowed my quota of Imodium tablets and feasted on toast and bottled water. On Friday at work I had promised my friend Tom I would help work on the sets of his new play. A promise is a promise. Armed with two tablets of Imodium, I stagger to the bus stop. I pick up a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale. I do my requisite twenty-seven minutes of work (I have an alarmingly short attention span) and then I sit with Tom and watch a run-through of Act One. I seem okay. I pick up a muffin on the way home.
Sunday night is a repeat of Friday.
Monday I’m okay. Breakfast is a plain toasted bagel with bottled water; lunch is chicken soup. I clutch my stomach through the Monday-night ACT UP meeting, feel my complexion grow several shades paler. Why on earth do I force myself out on nights like these? Is the activist addiction that great?
Tuesday is bad-news day. I stay home from work. I’m rapidly using up my sick time. I call up my doctor. The possibility of being tested for amoebas looms its ugly head. I think I might as well get tested that very day. I wouldn’t even have to take the horrifying amoeba-test laxative that I have written about in nauseatingly excruciating detail elsewhere.
I feel a little better on Wednesday. Staying home is so intensely boring, and there is nothing particularly engrossing on television. So on Wednesday I take the Perilous Journey to work.
I saw the Disney movie The
PerilousJourney
during my Wonder Bread years. A cat, a dog, and maybe a canary traveled thousands of miles to return home. My walk to work is a random walk, fraught with peril. At each intersection I either turn or go straight, depending on the traffic-light status, the intensity of the sun, the sound of street cleaners, car alarms, fire-truck sirens, and jackhammers, and the ambient presence of cute boys. I try to avoid Fourteenth Street. I almost always end up walking by Bed Bath & Beyond. GMHC’s main office is all too frequently passed by. I don’t want to be reminded on a daily basis of my future status of clienthood. If chance has me in front of Michael’s Muffins on Seventh, I’ll generally pick one up for breakfast; otherwise I’ll steer myself toward Giant Bagels on University and Thirteenth.
But what was once a serendipitous perambulation has been transformed into the Perilous Journey. Will I make it to work, underwear intact? With each step, pressure builds up inside me and I have no idea whether it is shit or just air. Will I release noxious fumes to plosive sound, or will I soil myself with a slightly liquid fart?
It takes exactly thirty minutes to get to work, and there seems to be no way of ameliorating this situation. By bus it takes exactly thirty minutes, including the wait for the Broadway local at Twenty-third. By cab it takes exactly thirty minutes, given traffic conditions at rush hour. What do I do if the urge to evacuate strikes en route? It isn’t so much an urge as a compulsion, an uncontrollable purgative.
There are no public toilets in New York City. Last year a company from France set up four experimental public toilets. Although they were a great success (clean, safe, and well stocked with toilet paper), unfortunately they were not wheelchair-accessible, and the City Council had to nix the idea of separate but equal toilets. I could plan a route leapfrogging from one coffee-house to another. Bars generally don’t open until noon. The Community Center is closed, and the facilities are less than ideal. The gym is a convenient pit stop: My membership card is worth its weight in gold.
 
A few words of practical advice:
1. Always carry a few Imodium pills in your backpack.
2. Toilet paper is always useful. Facial tissues are even better. Tucks are best.
3. That extra pair of underwear is crucial.
Dazed with hunger, I walk through Balducci’s on the way home, looking at the assorted gourmet meals I can’t eat, available at ten dollars a quarter-pound. Let’s see: Will it be boiled rice and boiled chicken tonight? Or perhaps I should try the boiled-chicken-and-boiled-rice combination. There’s always Campbell’s chicken-and-rice soup, if only it didn’t contain so much sodium and MSG. As an aperitif, I’m leaning toward bottled water, a domestic brand. Perrier is awfully tempting; unfortunately, it is a bit too effervescent for my present mood. Warm, flat ginger ale is always a treat. Unfortunately, the bottles in the supermarket are all properly sealed. I don’t know if I could wait the requisite time for the ginger ale to air.
 
I am strangely constipated for the stool test on Thursday. I take only half the laxative. I assume that the mere sight of the noxious phosphate chemical would cause me to purge. But half is not enough. I read through New York magazine’s twentieth-anniversary issue, cover to cover. No dice. I should have come on Tuesday, when a sip of bottled water would cause me to run to the john in moments, when an apple went through my system in twelve minutes flat.
After an hour and a half of senseless waiting and a futile walk around the block, I assume the classic enema position, which is not that different from the classic post-nuclear-holocaust duck-and-cover position. I lie curled up in the fetal position, staring at the gutter drain on the floor, clutching my legs, slowly squeezing the plastic bottle into an orifice rarely used for intake of any sort. It soon enough has the desired effect. The moment I return to my apartment, I explode.
On Friday I call my doctor to find out that results will not be complete until Monday. That leaves an entire weekend of uncertainty. I’m convinced it’s cryptosporidiosis, and I will be hooked up to an IV in some hideous hospital while a hundred people come to the housewarming scheduled for Sunday.
I continue the bran diet: bananas, rice, apples, and toast.
 
There’s that mad moment when I realize that my diet consists of nothing at all. Once the gastrointestinal tubes have been cleared, food slides through them as fast as a particle accelerator. Whatever I eat is gone in a minute. So I reduce myself to the jailhouse diet of bread and water. But my doctor tells me that preliminary tests have indicated I have yeast in my stool. I should avoid yeast.
Aaaaaaacccccchhhh!
A yeast infection! I realize I really am a lesbian. So scratch the bread. Just water. But my latest Advocate warns me against drinking tap water. There was an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Milwaukee last April. No treatment exists. Sixtyfive percent of Milwaukee AIDS Project’s seven hundred clients exhibited severe conditions connected with the cryptosporidiosis outbreak. Most vulnerable are HIV-infected people with T-4 cell counts of less than 100. That’s me. I have all the major symptoms: watery, chronic, profuse diarrhea, often worsened by eating; dull, crampy upper abdominal pain, often worsened by eating. I am advised to act as if I’m in Mexico and brush my teeth with bottled water.
Yet even filtered water bottled in Poland Springs, Maine, produces a flood. Okay. I’ll do the new diet: just air. And then I realize that even air isn’t safe, what with airborne microbacteria that cause TB and MAI.
 
I find out that Dennis is coming to the housewarming with Julio, and his friend Danny is dead.
“How are you?” I am repeatedly asked by concerned friends.
I don’t know. I’m functioning. I think I’m better, but I can’t tell for sure. I haven’t been to the bathroom in twenty-four hours with any results. What do I say? “I’ll let you know when I have a solid bowel movement.” Such discourse is not appropriate for a party where food is being served.
Two hours later I have my answer. Hindsight, glorious hindsight, tells me that I shouldn’t have gone out for a tuna-salad sandwich after the party.
 
The tests find nothing, as usual. My doctor tells me that Giardia can be missed.
Perhaps it’s just a spastic colon.
 
I have a feeling that I am being shortchanged on my pills. I had a script for two hundred Zovirax and the pharmacy was running low, so it gave me fifty on Friday and I had to pick up the rest on Monday, but on Monday the delivery hadn’t come, so the pharmacy gave me another fifty and I picked up one hundred the following day. This didn’t involve two extra trips because the first day I was also picking up Mycostatin for my yeast infection, a delicious yogurt-smooth liquid in suspension, which means if I take it to work, chances are it will mess up my backpack. I prefer pills and IV solutions. And on Tuesday I was picking up Flagyl because I still have the runs and I may have
Giardia.
So I went and counted one of the fifty-pill bottles and I only got forty-eight, and I have no idea if this was because I miscounted or because I had already taken a dose of two or if the pharmacist was cheating me. Well, cheating my insurance company, although I do have to pay $7.50 for every prescription, and that means four pills are worth fifteen cents, which might buy a single banana on the street in certain neighborhoods, and of course it means I would have to go to the pharmacy more often, but in fact I’m going so frequently anyway that one more prescription would merely mean I could consolidate my visits.
 
 
The pills are a scythe in my belly, a dagger to my heart.
There is a thin metallic taste on everything I ingest.
After a few days of Flagyl, I begin to think I’m losing it. I can no longer shit. Period. Bile is accumulating. It has to have some method of egress. My stomach continues gurgling like a just-opened bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale, my stomach continues roiling like some wide Sargasso Sea. The anal orifice is completely blocked for the time being. Hence, I am left with only one alternative.
To my surprise, suddenly, belief in a higher power returns as I soundlessly retch on hands and knees into the toilet. I realize I am in the bargaining phase of diarrhea. “Please please please let me get better,” I plead to some invisible deity or force of logic. “Just let me get better. I promise never to eat anything more complex than bananas or applesauce. Just please let me get better.” Rational thought decrees that in order to bargain, a higher power must exist with which to bargain. Perhaps all religions are predicated on bargaining and rational thought. Then I remember: I am an atheist. It is all futile. There is no God. If there was, He died in the first reel, and I have a feeling we’re rapidly approaching the Act Two finale.
 
 
 
Could this be the day? I sit on the toilet and imagine myself surrounded by fans, waiting in anticipation. Good or bad? Loose or solid? Aqueous or corklike? Floater or sinker? The buzzer will go off if this specimen fails the rigid criteria and exacting standards of the panel of experts who sit in judgment. I’m a contestant on “Jeopardy!” who has bet everything on that final category, deduced the correct answer, but forgotten to formulate it as a question. I’m approaching an emotional epiphany through the process of elimination.

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