Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (33 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 go back to bed and caress Binky’s back. He groans in his sleep and greets my touch with affection and rolls over and begins snoring. Perhaps the most successful moments of our relationship occur when one or both of us is unconscious. I decide to set my alarm for later to make up for the missing hour of sleep.
“You would know if you had appendicitis,” says my friend Tom later that day. “Your appendix is on the right, halfway between your dick and your belly button.” But I’m left-handed. Maybe it’s transposed.
 
After my last attack, I was convinced I had developed a highly specific allergy to freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese. I had had two attacks after eating pasta. It could have been the sauce; it could have been the pasta. But I had ceremoniously thrown out the sauce. It lay in the trash, next to the mocha-fudge cake that rose only two centimeters because as usual I got some yolk in the egg white and didn’t whisk it for twenty-four hours so it would be hard and fluffy and my boyfriend found the frosting too sweet and it ended up in the trash in a minor hissy fit after I guess we had another minor domestic squabble when he came home to find me watching the Tony Awards and clutching a friend, but not the friend he expected.
 
A week later I have another attack just as I am about to leave for work. I call in semi-sick; I figure I’ll be in later. I figure maybe my stomach is empty, a vat of boiling acid, screaming, “Feed me! Feed me!” I eat a piece of bread and swallow a cup of milk. I throw it up in the toilet. I rest. I wait. Sure enough, an hour later, maybe a little queasy, maybe a little weak, I’m ready to roll to work. Cautiously I order a mocha-almond muffin at Michael’s Muffins. Five minutes in the door at work and I’m back in the bathroom, throwing up mocha. I clutch my legs at the ankles. All color leaches from my face. I limp back to my office and shut the door. I take several deep breaths. I send Terry C. out on a mission of mercy: Mylanta. I reschedule my Tuesday appointment for 2:30 P.M. I wait.
 
It’s not an ulcer. It’s not colitis. It’s not kidney stones. It’s not appendicitis.
It’s gas. Gas in my colon.
My doctor recommends Mylanta Gas or Gas-X, three or four times a day. “Relieves gas pain, pressure, and bloating,” according to the package insert. Plain Mylanta might cause diarrhea.
Once again I feel like a capital I Idiot.
Gas. That’s it?
He tells me to avoid carbonated beverages. I practically live on Canada Dry seltzer. My options are already grossly limited when it comes to barroom fare. Beer is already off the list. A single beer will give me indigestion for the night. You might as well forget hard liquor completely. I used to think it was ludicrous to order seltzer at a bar. At least beer has some substance. Seltzer is free from the spritzer. I know, I was brought up cheap. Now scratch the simple carbonated beverages, including soda water. Now I can’t even order Shirley Temples. I guess I’m stuck with cranberry-juice cocktails and other assorted citrus juices.
He also says avoid yeasty foods. Watch out for beer, onions, and beans. Eat yogurt. He won’t prescribe cramp medicine, because by the time it takes effect, my attack is over anyway.
What am I left with? Is cheese good or bad? Should I avoid citrus and tomato products? Will my stomach ever regain its flatness? My choices are limited. I feel like a cow, producing enough methane from my four stomachs to raise the temperature of the planet five degrees. How do you remove gas from gastronomy?
 
Three weeks later, when my liver enzymes go through the roof as a possible side effect of d4T, my doctor casually suggests that this may have played a role in my gastric discomfort of the past.
 
Six weeks later the city declares a water emergency in my neighborhood. Don’t drink from the tap! By the time I make it over to the local D‘Agostino, there’s nothing left but a couple of six packs of 11.2-ounce bottles of Evian at $4.49. I buy two.
 
I decide I’m over tap water, carbonated beverages, and nucleoside analogues. I have had some rather unpleasant nights due to eating fried food after eleven, but cross my fingers, no stomach-clutching attacks since then.
 
 
 
Perhaps I spoke too soon. For most of August, I’ve awakened every night at approximately 3:15 A.M. for an urgent bathroom visit, which, more likely than not, will consist purely of air. After, I lie down. A rock is anchored at the base of my stomach. I turn to my side. I lie on my stomach. I mimic an advanced position from Twister, arms splayed and legs crossed, in an attempt to find a comfortable position. My center of gravity is out of kilter. The rock weighs me down. I feel dizzy and mildly nauseated.
Some nights I try another Mylanta Gas, or a few swigs of Mylanta. Some nights I take an Ativan. Some nights I twist and moan until dawn, without ever losing consciousness.
My doctor offered the new! improved! take-home stool test. I produce samples at 1:15 A.M. and 2:30 A.M., which I store on the condiment shelf of the refrigerator. I take a cab to the lab the next morning. I discover I need to produce one more sample. I find the greasiest spoon in ten blocks and order the special. Twenty minutes later, I am back at the lab.
A week later I find out that I am parasite-free. My doctor gives me a daily ulcer pill, which doesn’t seem to work. “Are there any foods that seem to irritate you particularly?”
“Everything,” I reply.
“Maybe it’s your gallbladder. Try a low-fat diet.”
There is something suspiciously random about this. I imagine my doctor pulling down an anatomical flip-chart hinged on springs, then tossing a dart at it at random, only to find it land on the gallbladder.
I have always produced phenomenal amounts of gas, but only recently has my alimentary canal developed a few new cul-de sacs, and there is no easy method of egress anymore. Perhaps a simple chiropractic session would straighten me out? Perhaps a plumber’s helper?
I easily spend entire nonproductive afternoons at my office hunched over my desk, half-asleep from the previous night, attempting casually to reshuffle the paperwork should someone enter the door with more mail. It’s only a matter of time before I get caught.
Ethical Suicide Alternatives
 
Or, How to Get Someone Else to
Do the Job For You
 
 
 
 
The implements of violent death must be in plain view and easily accessible even to the most obtuse and physically unfit. A loaded gun is best. It is helpful to have handy a pair of gloves of appropriate size, along with a lint-free cloth to wipe off fingerprints. A plastic bag from the cleaner’s should be accompanied by a length of rope or wire, a telephone cord, or a heavy-duty rubber band. Butcher’s knives are generally too messy, and require an unnecessary amount of personal involvement.
It is best not to wait until you are hospitalized. Some of the following plans require considerable time and preparation. They may be impossible to implement from a hospital bed. Furthermore, members of the medical profession who have taken the Hippocratic oath have a tendency to attempt to revive you.
Keep in mind that the best plan is the simplest. Complicated long-range plans may not succeed. You may not have the luxury of time. On the other hand, simply letting nature take its course is ultimately the most effective, albeit frustrating, method.
1. Invite all of his exes to a cocktail party and surprise him.
2. Certain albums, such as Bob Dylan’s
Self-Portrait,
the soundtrack to
The Coneheads,
or anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber, can do the trick. Personal taste here counts mightily; some people, although invulnerable to show tunes, will find operatic arias intolerable. It helps if the doors are locked and there is no easy method of egress.
3. Casually mention to him that you’ve tricked with his ostensibly monogamous lover of seventeen years. You may find it necessary to add that you think the condom may have broken. As a coup de grace, try: “That’s funny, I got hepatitis, too, around the time Ernie got it last summer.” Then blush profusely and attempt lamely to change the subject.
4. Ply her with high-caloric junk food, such as Hostess Twinkies.
5. Have an ill-advised affair with him. Break it off abruptly. Call up his machine nightly and play Whitney Houston’s rendition of “I Will Always Love You” in its entirety.
6. Timing can be everything. Pay particular attention to high-stress periods in his or her life: career pressure points, mid-life crises, and sudden dietary changes. Be sure to chart his or her biorhythms, astrological sign, and menstrual cycle.
7. Give him an unrecoverably bad haircut under sedation before a public testimonial dinner involving his parents, his high-school drama teacher, and his boss.
8. Tickle him until he loses control of his bladder on his brand-new Persian rug that cost more than four months’ salary.
9. Put arsenic in his fish tank. Shoot up his cat with heroin. Feed cocaine to his parakeet. Put his poodle in the microwave. Marinate his pet iguana overnight in a basil-and-salsa sauce and feed it to him as a cocktail appetizer. Kill his dog. Feed his parrot to his cat. Sexually abuse his gerbils. Leave a discreet note of apology on the bureau.
10. Masturbate on the white-linen Armani suit he recently scored from Barneys’ Labor Day sale.
11. Discuss certain of his more arcane sexual practices with his mother.
12. Invite him over for Sunday brunch. Feed him a delicious spinach-and-bacon salad with clams
oreganata.
Slip a few laxatives into the brownies. Call to tell him about your amoebas the following Tuesday.
13. Borrow his videocassette of the Tonys and tape “Married with Children” over it.
14. Order any twelve items from the latest Undergear catalog to be sent to his address under his name. A discreet inquiry a few months later will confirm that it was you.
15. Get involved in a summer share with him on Fire Island and be yourself. This is the slowest, but surest, solution. I guarantee he will kill you, if you haven’t killed him first.
Political Funerals
 
I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demon stration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of
AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover,
friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or
neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a
car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast
through the gates of the white house and come to a screech ing halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on
the front steps.
—David Wojnarowicz,
Close to the Knives
 
 
 
 
 
This past year, it seems that ACT UP is coming to terms with death.
 
David Robinson initiated the Ashes Action from San Francisco. His lover, Warren, had died that past spring. At first David was thinking of mailing Warren’s ashes to the White House as a private gesture of anger, grief, and protest. Upon reflection, he decided a public forum would be more appropriate. There was strong support for the concept of an ashes action on the floor of ACT UP/N.Y. The Names Quilt was going to be displayed for the last time in its entirety in Washington, D.C., during Columbus Day weekend in October 1992. We decided to have the demonstration on Sunday of that weekend. We were going to shower the White House lawn with the ashes of our loved ones.
I remember seeing Warren and David dance together in a bar in Atlanta, when ACT UP/N.Y flew down for a series of demonstrations against the CDC and the sodomy laws. Warren was gorgeous. He wore a white tank top. David Robinson had been a facilitator for the Monday-night ACT UP meetings for several years. He frequently came to meetings in postmodern drag: a skirt and a beard. David was a trained dancer. He was strong and passionate.

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