Shitting and shitting and shitting. My asshole gets so sore I can no longer use toilet paper. I wash myself off in the shower.
My body can actually feel itself dying. Every night sleep is one long nightmare.
Stubborn, dutiful, get what you need to get done. Be strong. Don’t complain.
That’s denial for you. Big Ben had decided I wasn’t getting AIDS so I wasn’t getting AIDS. It was an imperative from High Command. All the psychics had said so, the Native American Medicine Man said so. The I Ching said something different every time I threw it. Forget the tarot cards. But that’s all I do. Throw the I Ching, lay out my tarot cards. Count every breath, every heartbeat.
That’s fear for you. The fucking epidemic of fear. There’s no asking for help. I’m the Running Boy and no place is safe.
Once a week, arbeit macht frei, Big Ben sits in front of class and demands I be a teacher. Finally, at Halloween, Little Ben just can’t anymore. I take a couple weeks off to get some rest.
ON THE MORNING of December 1st, I call Ruth Dearden. I don’t remember much. Ruth helps me get out of bed. I can’t walk alone. We get lost in her Honda Civic on the way to the hospital. Fucking Ruth Dearden, man. I’m half dead and we’re lost in the West Hills and I’m laughing. At the hospital emergency room I weigh in at 162. The on-call doctor is a young man wearing green scrubs. He says I probably just have the flu. Ruth grabs my hand and squeezes my hand when the doctor says that. Her hair’s a mess and she’s wearing what looks like pajama tops and sweat pants. Clogs.
“We’ll give you some antibiotics and then we’ll let you go,” the doctor says. “But first we need to take a look at the X-rays of your lungs.”
I have to pee. I walk down the hallway. I guess I’m walking alone. In the hallway I go past an open door. Inside the room, there are doctors looking at a chest X-ray. The beautiful white lines, hundreds of them, fluorescent long white worms, flowing down beneath the rib cage.
I’m on a gurney. They’re wheeling me off. I don’t recognize the on-call doctor because his face is upside down.
“Mr. Grunewald,” the doctor says, “we’re taking you to ICU.
“You have AIDS.”
THEY WHEEL YOU across a long skybridge and put you in a blue room all alone. Quarantine, the sign on the door. Doctors all around you. Insurance people trying to get information. I don’t qualify for the Oregon Health Plan because I’ve made too much money the year before. Twenty thousand is too much money. Doctors, nurses, ask me my name, ask me to subtract seven from ninety-three. I’ve got tubes up my ass. I’m under an oxygen mask. There’s an IV in my arm. I’m skin and bones. I’m sweating like a son of a bitch.
Later on the doctor will tell you, we almost lost you.
But I don’t tell the doctor, tell anyone, about the night they almost lost me. Things were sketchy and the dream world was not far away.
The night orderly was a big guy, heavyset. Round glasses and a lot of talk. He asked me to subtract seven from eighty-six and keep subtracting for as long as I could. It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that since I’d been in the hospital. But it was three in the morning. I don’t know how, or why, but I did it. Little Ben always does what he’s told. While I’m subtracting, in the middle of the night, they almost lost me, the heavyset night orderly puts on rubber gloves, tells me he needs to check my prostate. I’m subtracting and subtracting. One finger is up my ass and I’m subtracting. Two fingers and I’m subtracting. Three fingers, they’re way up there up in my asshole and the pain is so great I think I stop breathing.
16.
The promise
THE DAY I GET HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL, THE WALL Street Journal publishes an article about the new AIDS cocktail, which I’m taking, which is making me sick. But I don’t know from sick.
Hospital rules, they have to wheel you out in a wheelchair, but at the curb you’re on your own. At the curb, Ruth is waiting in her silver Honda Civic. I’ve practiced walking in the corridors of the hospital, but this is the first time I’ve been outside. Of course it’s raining. When I stand up from the wheelchair, Ruth is right there. Her arm around my back is strong. I know as soon as she touches me if I start to fall she can hold me up. The umbrella, the rain, standing up, taking the step off the curb, getting my long body to fold up into that tiny car, I have no idea how we do it.
Inside the car, my knees are almost poking me in the chin. Ruth has to reach down between my legs to push the lever so my seat will go back. Her hair smells of Herbal Essence shampoo. Inside Ruth’s car is like everything of Ruth’s. Chaos. I’m an everything-in-its-place kind of guy. My mind is chaos, so my world is ordered.
Ruth’s dashboard is an altar. Two Wonder Woman action figures. An old peace symbol. Feathers and dried flowers and rocks. If you’re not mad you’re not paying attention. A Barbie doll head hanging on a chain from the rearview mirror. In the gearshift console below the radio and CD player, the little box for change, in the box Ruth’s got dried Rosemary and Lavender. And change, mostly pennies. On the floor is a beat-up copy of Zyzzyva, Antioch Review, an Elle magazine, a bubble gum wrapper, and a tin of Altoids. CD cases and CDs all over creation. A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle taped across the glove compartment.
With my index I tap the woman fish sticker and look over at Ruth. I can tell underneath it all she’s nervous, but she’s determined to get my ass home in one piece. The flush on her neck and on her cheek. I tap the woman fish sticker again. Ruth’s eyes, under her bangs, under the oversized plastic contraption covering her eyes, are blue. She gives me a big smile. It’s a smile a kid would give you.
“The divorce came through,” Ruth says. “You’re looking at a free woman.”
With that, Ruth punches in a CD. It’s David Bowie and Queen singing “Under Pressure” way too loud. She pulls up on the emergency brake, lets it down, rides the clutch, shifts into first. We’re on a hill and she pulls off without a hitch. Just a tiny screech of tires. Already I’m laughing.
RUTH HAS CLEANED my house from top to bottom. I’ve never seen my kitchen floor so clean. She’s even dusted. Fresh flowers in every room. When I ask about the flowers, Ruth tells me they’re from friends and students. But there are so many. Later on I get the real story. Ruth is stealing the flowers from the cemetery.
“The people are already dead,” Ruth says. “And I don’t ever take more than a half dozen from one grave.”
Those first three months, if you can make it through them, they say you’ll make it the rest of the way. The first three months don’t look so good for me. I can’t stop shitting. I have an appointment once a week that Ruth drives me to. About the fifth week, my new doctor, who isn’t a doctor, is a nurse practitioner, Madelena Papas, decides to give me medication for a yeast infection of the stomach. It’s not a week later and things are back to normal. Or as normal as they’re going to get. But it does my spirit good not to always be on the toilet.
Ruth’s always there. I mean she’s not always there but she’s there pretty much every day. Ruth got alimony for two years in her divorce settlement. Don’t ask me how she got that. Thank God for the both of us. Her alimony gives Ruth two years to figure out what she wants to do.
The Oregon Health Plan decides I’m eligible because the last three months I had no income. So I get Medicaid and Medicare, and Social Security says I’m disabled and I get a disability check every month. I’m so whacked out I don’t know any of this. Ruth does. Ruth gets it so my disability check is automatically deposited in my checking account. She pays my rent and my utility bills. I’d imagine there were months that Ruth paid some of those bills herself but she never copped to it.
My medications. You can’t believe the number of pills I have to take a day. At certain times of the day. Some with food. Some after not eating food for three to four hours. Some in the middle of the night. Ruth organizes my pills into a weekly pill dispenser. These pills in the morning. These in the afternoon. These in the evenings. These
in the night. There’s a list for me thumbtacked on the wall which pill to take and what color the pill is and what shape the pill is and when to take it.
For someone who seems like walking chaos, Ruth Dearden sure as hell knows how to organize a world.
After seven weeks, I can get up in the mornings and scramble eggs. For lunch, a lunch meat or tuna sandwich on spelt bread. Sardines at four o’clock. Ruth makes dinner or delegates someone to make dinner. I eat as much of my food as I can.
In fact, it’s Ruth who figures out that so much of my stress level is due to my diet. That I need protein, that I’m allergic to wheat, that I need to stay away from caffeine and sugar.
My bed is set up in my old lean-to office just off the living room. That way I don’t have to walk up the stairs. Ruth has hauled my old TV in and set it up at the end of my bed. After dinner some nights, she sits on the bed with me and we watch a movie she’s rented. Always something upbeat. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World, Some Like It Hot, The King and I. One night Ruth rents The Heiress and at the end when Montgomery Clift is knocking on Olivia de Havilland’s door, Ruth and I, our hands are gripped into one fist, rooting for the Heiress.
Ruth’s nickname for me is Queen Lowlighta because of all the small atmosphere lamps and lava lamps with soft glows I’ve got all around my room. The night she called me that, we were both a little surprised. After all, I was her teacher and she was my student and there she was calling me Queen.
Fucking Ruth Dearden, man.
One Saturday night in March, I’ve asked Ruth to rent Last Tango in Paris. Upbeat it’s not. But I’m ready for some art. Big Ben shows up and says I need some art. Ruth’s never seen the movie, so when the movie’s over it’s just Ruth and me in my little space in the lean-to that used to be my office that’s now my Queen Lowlighta bedroom fixed the way Cancers can make little homes out of nothing. It’s close to midnight. Outside, it’s raining buckets. I’m lying in my bed under a blanket and Ruth is lying on top of the blanket next to me. Really, we’re so under the spell of the movie, we aren’t at all uncomfortable lying close the way we are. Besides I’m under the blanket and she’s on top. That evening I’ve showered and shaved and I’m in fresh pajamas. So I don’t smell the way I think I usually smell. Ruth’s in jeans and her Peruvian sweater. Her shoes are off. Long slender white feet.
All of a sudden, Little Ben is trying hard to say something to Ruth about how much I appreciate her and all she’s done and how close I feel to her and how thankful I am for her generosity of spirit. It’s all coming out awkward and full of clichés. Horribly fucking wrong, really stupid, and so I kiss her. On the lips, soft. Like Saint Bernadette would kiss you. The way Hank and I used to kiss. A kiss full of love and appreciation and respect and agape. That kind of kiss.
Ruth doesn’t kiss back. I mean her lips just stay flat and let my puckered lips touch hers. Something happens in the room. But it’s not in the room, it’s in Ruth. Ruth’s up off the bed and has her socks on, and her shoes and she’s out the door. As she leaves the room, she calls back:
“Thank you, Ben,” she says. “Goodnight.”
IT’S TWO WEEKS before I see Ruth again. There are dinners frozen that I can eat and groceries that show up on my doorstep, but no Ruth. I think I’ve lost my friend for good. How is it that when I get close to a woman I always fuck it up? It’s a hard two weeks, being alone. I’ve become so dependent on her. Some part of me is happy, though. To be on my own. To be well enough to be on my own. Even though deep down what a joke it is to think that I can make it on my own. I’m barely walking and I haven’t left the house.
That’s when it first starts to settle in. The enormity of what has happened to me. I’m forty-eight years old and my youth is gone and my health is gone. That’s all I asked for, that I wouldn’t get AIDS. All the positive thinking and Indian dancing and psychics and I Ching and the secret is to believe. That whole thing up in Atlanta about human beings being stuck in a form and if we could just see that we are who we think we are we’ll be able to change who we are. And then what was it? We’re not a form but an idea of a form and so since we are ideas of ourselves then change the idea.
Yeah, well, change this, motherfucker. My T-cell count was seven and my viral load was over nine hundred thousand. Believe that it hath been given and it shall be given unto you. Yeah, well, I believed. Way down deep, I believed. Every particle of me believed. I couldn’t have wanted something more, believed more. Believing more wasn’t fucking possible. And there I am. Either it’s fucked up to believe that it hath been given or else it’s back to being your fault and you just didn’t believe that it was given enough.
Fuck this Secret Shit. The secret is hold on to your balls because what you’re in is a pinball machine and when you rack up enough points you either win or go tilt.
For me it was tilt. You attract what you radiate. Which means I got AIDS because I was looking for it. I had no fucking say at all in the something that meant everything to me, my life.
Big Ben is so full of shit.
THAT’S WHEN I stop sleeping. I mean I barely sleep. Three or four hours a night. I didn’t know what the deal was then. But I can tell you now. The spirits, the guardian angels, I thought were in charge of my fortune and well-being had never even existed. All there was, was me and I’d better keep an eye on me. And how can you keep an eye on things if you’re not awake.
The lightbulb in the middle of my chest, the filament always flickering.
The Running Boy couldn’t stop running.
It must be all the Catholic stuff. That if you pray hard enough the Virgin will hear you. I mean, my mother, if my mother didn’t have her faith she couldn’t have existed. With all the Catholic shit I tossed out, I’d held on to a very precious belief. A belief that is the most essentially Catholic. Jesus can save you. If you can’t get to Jesus, talk to his mother. I’d just turned Jesus and his mother into Don Juan and Louise Hay.
At my next appointment, I take a cab to the hospital. It’s really weird being out in the world alone. I’ll say it again. It’s really weird being out in the world alone. I tell Madelena, my Nurse Practitioner, that I’m having trouble sleeping. She refers me to a Dr. Mark Hardy, a psychiatrist.
DR. MARK HARDY’S office is in the basement. Dark, film noir dark. I’m standing in the reception area waiting to sign in. I notice the bright yellow tape on the gray carpet but I don’t know what the tape is for. In a moment, a big bald security guard walks up to me, grabs me by the arm. He’s yelling always remain behind the yellow line. He pulls me by the arm to the back wall. Sit down along the wall with everyone else until you hear your name called.
I want to protest. I’m not just like all the rest. I’m Ben Grunewald. I’ve published two novels. I’ve been reviewed in the New York Times. But then I don’t. I’m shaking so bad all I can do is sit down on a gray folding chair.
That moment, so much in that moment. The bully guard, that I don’t stand up to him. Maybe I’d lose my insurance. Or the doctor won’t see me. They’ll put me at the end of the line. Fuck, when you’re weak like that, when you need so much, how overwhelming it is. There’s no fight left, and all you can do is cower.
But the guard was right. I did think I was better than those people sitting along the wall. Those people were crazies on public assistance. Homeless, drug addicts, drunks, dirty bag-people.
As I sat down. On one side of me was a heavyset woman with no teeth and long stringy hair. An orange parka and stains on her T-shirt. The young man on the other side was gothed-out, some kind of strong perfume, spiked hair dyed black. Full of piercings. Music so loud on his earphones I could hear the punk rock noise.
DR. MARK HARDY’S office has a window that is a window well. Spiderwebs and spiders and leaves and shit fill up the window well. The smell of walls that have just been painted. There are bright colorful posters on the wall. Bright colorful posters that pretty much say you’re fucked.
Dr. Mark Hardy is young, just barely thirt
y, and beautiful, I mean radiant fucking beauty. This guy isn’t just movie star beautiful, he’s surfer dude beautiful. Long brown wavy hair as long as Roger Daltrey’s. He reaches across his desk and shakes my hand. His hand is meaty and dry and his large square fingernails are shiny as if he polishes them.
He asks me to sit down. I sit. My elbows on the arms of my chair poke my shoulders up. My neck is stiff. My lips are dry. I’m going on ten hours of sleep max in the last three days. Doctor Mark sits with his one leg crossed over the other. The shin of his right leg making a ninety degree with his left. He holds his hands like pictures of Jesus’ hands, the tips of his index fingers at the base of his nose and his third fuck-you finger on top of his nose. Thumbs on his chin. Now and then he plays with the blotter on his desk. Lining it up with the edge. He asks me ridiculous questions – my mother, my father, my sister, my education – straight from the textbook. I answer him as if these questions are important. Finally, he says out loud, like it’s suddenly just dawned on him:
“Paxil!” he says.
Just before I walk out the door of Dr. Hardy’s office, I ask him:
“Have you ever been depressed?”
Dr. Mark Hardy is surprised. He gets huffy. Coughs a couple times. His face turns red the way Ruth’s neck does.
“Once,” Dr. Hardy says. “When I broke up with my girlfriend in high school.”
Then he asks me, after all the textbook questions, he looks at me like I’m a guy, and not just another patient who’s got AIDS. He flat out asks:
“Why are you depressed?”
“Failure of spirit,” I say.
PAXIL FOR ME is like taking speed. My body is flushed and it feels like I can’t keep up with my breath and I can’t sit still, let alone lie down. I call up Dr. Mark Hardy, seems like dozens of times, but I either get the receptionist or his voicemail.
My message is always the same.
Are you sure this stuff isn’t an upper? I’m a total speed freak on this shit. Please call me. I’m in a terrible predicament.
I Loved You More Page 28
