Once Brandon got over the rush of being able to have meaningless sex in parking lots whenever he felt like it, he settled down and got a regular girlfriend. Or, actually, two regular girlfriends in a row. The first one was named Jane, and the second one was Jane’s best friend, Meadow.
Meadow and Jane were a couple of private school kids from the east side of Capitol Hill who, for administrative reasons I didn’t pretend to understand, happened to be on Garfield’s speech and debate team. Brandon started out with Jane around the middle of our junior year. I knew almost nothing about her or their relationship, except that she bit him. Hard. Every couple of days he’d show up for school looking like he’d been mauled; dark red tooth marks on his neck, his arms, his shoulders. Everywhere. They were together for a few months, and he professed to be very happy with her. Then, one day while we were sitting on his porch, he admitted to me that he’d made out with Meadow, at a debate tournament that Jane hadn’t attended.
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Meadow’s … very pretty.”
Never having seen either girl, I had no basis for comparison.
“Well, what are you going to do?” I asked.
“Not much I can do,” he said. “Meadow and Jane are best friends. There’s no way Meadow will keep it a secret. She’s already feeling guilty about it. The best I can hope for is to end up with Meadow. There’s no version of this where I get to stay with Jane.”
“Which is what you want to do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m kind of in love with her, actually.”
“Well, then why the fuck did you mess around with Meadow?” I nearly screamed at him.
He put his head in his hands and sighed.
“I have no idea,” he said.
64
Dad started taking AZT that year, the year I was fifteen. It was the latest thing in AIDS drugs. It was supposed to slow the replication of the virus. It didn’t seem to do much for Dad’s health, but it did mean he had to get something called a PICC line, which was basically a catheter that went from the inside of his left arm, through his brachial artery, to his heart. Drugs of all sorts could be injected into the catheter through a rubber gasket that hung out of Dad’s arm near the bend of his elbow. A nurse came by a couple of times a week to administer the AZT by connecting the PICC line to a machine that would then spend a few hours slowly pushing this ridiculously toxic material into Dad’s system. The PICC line was necessary because the AZT was so poisonous that it would burn his veins if it was injected directly into them. It had to be administered in such a way that it was able to mix with the large volumes of blood near his heart, to dilute its effects.
AZT was originally developed as a chemotherapy drug, and it hit Dad like chemotherapy hits cancer patients. Every time he got a treatment, he would spend the next twelve hours in the bathroom, throwing up and crying. Sometimes he’d talk while he was in there. He’d say things like “Oh, Jesus Christ, please make it stop! Help me! Fuck, someone, Jesus.” It would come out between sobs and horrifying bouts of retching. And it didn’t stop. It wasn’t like a few minutes of that, then silence, then a few minutes. It was twelve solid hours of that kind of thing. It was like listening to someone being tortured to death. Or what I imagined it would be like, listening to someone being tortured to death.
I tried not to be around for it. If I was home, it was usually because I needed to sleep. Which didn’t really work. I’d end up lying in bed, staring at my ceiling reminding myself that, as unpleasant as it was to listen to, at least I wasn’t the guy in the bathroom hugging the toilet and praying to a God I didn’t believe in for salvation that wasn’t coming.
* * *
At some point during eleventh grade, I noticed that Dad wasn’t really Dad anymore, and hadn’t been for a while. He was never fully present. His hair was stringy and dirty and his eyes were clouded over. Even when he wasn’t stoned, he was exhausted and sick all the time. It was easy to forget there was a person in there. That he was dangerous. He couldn’t keep track of time. Sometimes he’d suddenly get mad at me about something I’d done two years ago and try to ambush me—hit me with a broomstick or a bottle, or try to punch me. But mostly he just staggered around. He didn’t eat much. He couldn’t cook. He was down around 120 pounds. When he held his arms out I could see both the bones in his forearms.
Amid all the general deterioration, it took me a while to notice that something more specific was happening. He was sleeping harder than he used to. He was falling over a lot. He’d spend two or three days in agony, then he’d spend two more days in a drug coma. I just figured it was the disease. He was having good days, and bad days. Or something.
Finally, one day in January of 1988, when I was fifteen, I came home from school and he was standing in the kitchen in his underwear with his back to me. Every bone in his body was visible through his skin. His briefs hung off him. He had the gas stove on, and he was doing something in front of the stove. A gesture I recognized—his left arm was extended, and his right arm was curled in front of him. Head forward, focused on what he was doing. I was only a few feet from him when he realized I was there and turned around to look at me with an expression of naked panic on his face.
“Shit!” he said. He dropped the syringe he’d been holding, ran into his bedroom, and slammed the door.
I stood there, looking the situation over. There was a spoon on the stove with a few empty gelatin tablets lying next to it. The spoon had a clear residue in it, from whatever he’d been cooking down. The bottom of the spoon was scorched. The syringe was lying next to the rest of his works.
So he was cooking down his pain pills and shooting them into his PICC line. Of course he was. Why wouldn’t he be? And suddenly I understood the weird cycles I’d been seeing. He was stockpiling the meds. He’d spend a few days in agony, then a few days slamming the drugs, stoned to the gills. Agony, ecstasy. Back and forth, no in-between.
* * *
Dad’s doctor was a well-known local AIDS doctor that everyone called Dr. Barton. Dad had been referred to him shortly after he was diagnosed, but I’d only recently started to have a lot of contact with him. He was hooked into the whole community, trusted and respected. Once I got to know him I started going to him for my medical needs as well—like the HIV tests I took once or twice a year, just in case Dad used my razor by accident, or if it turned out the virus was transmittable from cleaning up puke after all.
When I saw what Dad was up to I called Dr. Barton and told him what was happening. He gave me a choice. I could either have Dad admitted to the hospital, or I’d have to start administering his pain meds to make sure he didn’t overdose.
“What do you mean, administering?” I asked.
“You’ll separate them out into daily dosages. Make sure he takes them. Don’t let him stockpile them like he’s been doing.”
Dad had been in and out of the hospital the whole time he’d been sick, but that wasn’t really what Dr. Barton was suggesting. When he was talking about admitting Dad in this context, he was talking about hospice care; he was talking about checking Dad into the hospital for the last time.
“I’ll need to ask him what he wants,” I said.
“Sure,” Dr. Barton said. “Of course.”
I already knew what Dad wanted. I just needed to be sure.
* * *
The first week of me administering his drugs, he tore my room apart while I was at school, looking for his dose. He didn’t find it. The next week he tore my room apart again. Still to no avail. I’d stashed his pills down inside my weight set, knowing he was too weak to get to them.
He started out complimenting me on being so good at hiding things. I told him it was a skill I’d learned back when he used to steal money out of my piggy bank to buy cigarettes at the end of the month, when we were low on cash.
The second week he told me the prescriptions weren’t enough. He ne
eded more. Especially during his AZT push. Surely I could see that.
“Dr. Barton sets the dosage, Dad,” I said. “Take it up with him.”
“What the fuck does he know about pain?” Dad wanted to know.
Seeing as how the overwhelming majority of Dr. Barton’s patients were AIDS patients, I guessed he knew quite a bit about pain. But I didn’t see the point in saying so.
The third week, I came home one day, and Dad and Kris were in the kitchen with a jar from my room on the table between them. The jar had been on the table next to my door. It was full of odds and ends—bits of string and beads, gears and pieces of toys. And, at the very bottom of that jar, I’d had one of my dad’s daily doses.
“Son,” he said as I came into the kitchen. “We need to talk.”
“Mark,” Kris said, trying to interrupt him.
“I think you have a problem,” Dad said. “And it’s my fault. You were too young for this kind of responsibility.”
I stared at him for a minute, then looked at Kris.
“What’s he talking about?” I asked.
“You’ve been stealing my meds,” Dad said, jumping in before Kris could answer.
“I’ve been trying to get him to put it back,” Kris said. “Before you got home. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Jason,” Dad said, “I know what it’s like. But you shouldn’t have to suffer for my shortcomings. Give me back the meds. I’ll administer them myself. You can get help. You can get treatment.”
Kris got up and went back to her apartment, giving me an apologetic look as she left the kitchen.
“I’ve called Dr. Barton’s answering service,” Dad said.
I looked at the ceiling and sighed. Then I started putting all the junk on the table back into the jar. I put Dad’s meds in my coat pocket.
“Jason,” Dad said. “This is serious.”
“I don’t take aspirin,” I said, without looking at him.
“What?” he said.
“I don’t take aspirin,” I growled at him. “I don’t take Tylenol. I don’t drink. I don’t even drink coffee. I never have. Never. Not once. Can you guess why?”
“I…”
“Yeah,” I said. “So here’s the deal. You can make this decision yourself from now on. I’ll keep doing this for you, if you can get your shit together and let me do it. You pull something like this again, I’ll tell Dr. Barton to admit you to the hospital. Do you understand?”
“Jason, I—”
“Do you fucking understand?” I hissed. “Do you fucking understand what I’ll do if you pull this again?”
I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at the table. I stood there for a long time with my knees locked, leaning on the table and thinking about breaking it in half with my bare hands.
“I understand,” Dad said.
“Good,” I said.
I went to my room and put my junk jar back on the table next to the door. Then I stood in the middle of my room for a long time. I heard Dad go into his room and close the door. A muscle in my face was jumping. Finally I walked over to the corner next to my closet and picked up an ax handle I kept there. We’d brought it up from Eugene. It was a long, thin piece of hickory, the handle from an old felling ax. I looked around the room for a minute and my eyes settled on my bedroom door. I walked over and swung the ax handle maybe a dozen times, exhaling on each swing. The aged hardwood smashed the hollow-core door to pieces, cutting long horizontal gashes in the thin plywood. Then I walked over to my bed and beat on the mattress with the ax handle until I got tired. When I was gasping and sweating, I sat down on the bed and leaned on the handle to catch my breath.
This was what Han Solo would do. The door, rather than the sick old man. The doses, rather than the hospital. I could be a better man than my father. If I couldn’t do anything else, I could do that.
After I’d collected myself for a few minutes, I got a roll of duct tape off the top of my dresser and used it to piece my bedroom door back together again.
* * *
When Dr. Barton got my dad’s message he called our house, and I picked up. We talked about what had happened, and the likely outcomes if we kept doing what we were doing.
“This shouldn’t be your problem,” he said.
“It shouldn’t be anyone’s problem. But life doesn’t work like that.”
“No,” he said. “But it really shouldn’t be yours. This whole thing was a bad idea.”
“What’s the alternative? Put him in the hospital?”
“No. That was a bad call on my part. He can administer his own meds. I won’t admit him. I’ll see if we can get the same nursing service that administers the AZT to handle the narcotics. Or maybe we can give him the heavy stuff with his AZT, but leave him some Valium to help him sleep. One way or another, it shouldn’t be something you have to deal with.”
“What should I do in the meantime?”
“Just check him every so often when you know he’s pushing the meds. If he doesn’t breathe at least once every two minutes, go ahead and call an ambulance.”
After I hung up the phone, I wondered if I’d actually call an ambulance when the time came. But it never did.
65
Alexis and I broke up after about a month. I broke up with her because I was tired of feeling like I was walking through a minefield. She talked me out of it, waited ten days, then broke up with me. I gathered that it was kind of a face-saving thing.
Luckily, I had a shoulder to cry on. Marti and I had started spending a lot of time together. At first she was there for emotional support, but then we got to be better friends—and then we moved on to the late-night telephone confessions of mutual attraction. We knew we were on course for a cliché, but we were willing to be predictable. We spent a few months playing the “No, we can’t—it’ll hurt Alexis!” game, but at the end of the school year Marti called me to tell me that Alexis had announced she was dropping out of Garfield.
“She wants to move out on her own,” Marti said. “Get an apartment.”
“I guess that’s mathematically possible,” I said.
Like most of my friends, including Marti, Alexis had a part-time restaurant job. I got left out because I was still only fifteen years old. But I suspected Alexis would be in for a rude awakening if she tried to go from working ten hours a week to fund her perfume habit to working full-time and trying to pay rent and buy groceries and all that other crap.
“It might work or it might not,” Marti said. “But she’s not going back to Garfield. She’s a hundred percent sure about that.”
“So what does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It still feels wrong.”
We sat there for a while, just breathing into the phone.
“Why would she care though?” Marti said, finishing the argument for me. “If she’s not going to be around school. I mean, if we’re not all going to see each other every day. It shouldn’t matter. She’s back with Marshall anyway.”
That was news to me, but not really surprising. Marshall was one of the band geeks Alexis had dated the year before. After they went out, he became the captain of the swim team, and now he was a hot ticket in the high school dating scene. He was six-three, he had washboard abs, and he was half Jamaican so he was always this offensively healthy light brown color, even in the dead of winter. If Michelangelo had sculpted in milk chocolate, he probably would have produced something like Marshall. I kind of hated him and wanted him to die, but cattiness between straight dudes wasn’t socially acceptable in the 1980s, so I tried to keep it to myself.
“I don’t think it will last,” Marti said. “But I guess it means her grieving period is over.”
The next day after school, Marti and I went back to my place. Having had a lot of time to think about what I’d done wrong with Alexis, I was ready when things heated up. Or I thought I was. I at least had a plan for pretending I was ready. Either way,
we ended up having sex by the end of the week.
* * *
The lead-in to my first sexual encounter was, unsurprisingly, kind of weird and awkward. Marti came over to my house three nights in a row, and every night we went a little farther, but on the last night I just couldn’t close the deal. I blamed it on my dad being in a drug coma in the next room. Since we certainly couldn’t do it at her house, Marti took me camping that weekend.
The drive out to the country was inauspicious. The trip took longer than we thought it would, so it was past dark as we were nearing our destination. The road went through a series of valleys, curving left and right, rising and falling. Which was why we didn’t see the two cats that were sitting in the middle of the highway eating roadkill until it was way too late.
We both screamed. We both jammed our feet into the floor of the car so hard we nearly stood up in our seats. We both closed our eyes. The noise was like someone hitting a bag of celery with an aluminum baseball bat. When it was over I eased down into my seat and turned to comfort Marti, but she still had her eyes closed, her elbows locked, and her feet off the pedals. Which was concerning to me, since we were still going forty down a two-lane stretch of winding blacktop.
“Marti!” I shouted. “Pull over!”
“Okay,” she whispered, peeking out of one eye and easing the car over to the side of the road. She relaxed back into her seat as the car slowed.
“Are you okay?” I asked after we’d come to a complete stop.
“Yes,” she said. Her face was streaked with tears, but she seemed calm.
“Okay,” I said, reaching into my backpack and taking out a hunting knife I’d brought with me. “I’ll be right back.”
“Whoa!” she said. “What are you doing?”
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 32
