by Adam Klein
He worked silently.
Finally he said, “This will hurt. But when you’re well, you will thank me.” I saw the nurse nodding, reverent.
With the first prick, blood flashed across the dull green wall. My nails sank into the red balls. I felt his fingers pressing down the boil.
“It is the problem of evil,” I thought I heard the doctor say.
I remembered the video we all had to watch in the crowded lobby. The doctor’s only child born with cystic acne all over its innocent body. The German doctor mournfully narrated, “my wife and I wept when our child was born to us with cystic acne. He screamed constantly as an infant, unable to lie in one position for very long.”
Hundreds of before-and-after photos of patients were flashed on the screen while the doctor talked his theory of enzymic reactions, postules, and scarring. Everyone was standing around the TV with their arms folded over their chests; they were secretly looking at the faces of the others, measuring the severity of their problem against everyone else’s condition.
I remember staring constantly at a mirror. For me, the mirror was like skin, always healing itself, always getting better. Though I wanted nothing but the truth about my face, the mirror could never reflect it accurately; I saw only the desperate effort to heal.
My eyes were searching the doctor’s. He was the only one who saw my condition the way I did, and he was punishing me for it. I saw my blood arc across his coat. He did not stop at my weeping. He did not hear my screaming. If he heard it, it was a tiny scream; I sounded like an infant to him. He would have strangled me if I didn’t bear that resemblance to his son.
The nurse saw I was about to pass out. Perhaps she heard it in my breathing. If there was a soul in there, I physically forced it out.
The doctor peeled his glove off. As I slowly began to sit up on the table, an assistant entered the room and snapped a Polaroid.
There is a light drizzle, so we put the baby, swing and all, into a plastic garbage bag, and carry it to the house. I make Lawrence carry it, it’s his gesture.
I stand up in the park, behind the oak tree where I’d first seen Ray’s home. We both wear ski masks. Before Lawrence takes the baby down to the house, we look at each other, and it seems that for the first time we can really see each other, desperate eyes and faces sheathed in wool. The drizzle persists. I wish I could feel it on my face, but this mask lets nothing through.
I watch Lawrence furtively make his way up to the door, strip off the garbage bag, and hang the baby up under the porch light. It swings eerily and misshapen as Lawrence comes off the porch.
We stare at it from the park.
“Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to my studio.”
When we enter his studio, he grabs both my hands. “Can you believe how that thing looked?” he asks excitedly.
“So beautiful,” I assure him, “his beautiful little baby.”
Lawrence puts up tea. While I sip it, I think about Lawrence staying here until he finds another place. It is small and smells like paint, and it’s cold, but nothing a space heater couldn’t improve. I would put him up too, if it comes to that.
Suddenly, there is an oppressive weight all around us, as though the walls of the studio are closing in, and I notice we are sitting, facing one another, our knees touching. Lawrence’s face is twisted with confused sadness. Maybe it’s our touching, our close proximity, that enables me to feel it, too.
“He’ll know it was me?” he asks, as though everything had suddenly dawned on him.
I feel his tearful shaking rising up from my knees, like we are two old trees that have grown together.
“How will I ever explain it to him?” he asks, clutching me.
And though I know it will never suffice, I draw him close and forgive him.
Keloid
The bodies came together, separated, reconnected with others. Alan and I were both distracted. We watched, looked at each other, and watched again. We moved closer to each other until our arms touched. That’s all it takes, usually, to move you from spectator to participant. When he brought a beer to his mouth, I ventured to look at his face: dark rings around his eyes, prominent nose, goatee. He reached over and felt my dick. It was hard, but I took his hand away from it. I walked toward a covered pool table and sat down on it. He followed. “Did you want me to join you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered, “but I didn’t like standing there. I felt I was on the edge of something.”
“You don’t like that feeling?”
“I used to.”
He reached for me again, and kissed me this time. I savored the taste of beer on his lips. I was a recovering ex-junkie, coming up on a first birthday without drug or drink. Or sex. The kiss felt familiar and dangerous. “I prefer equilibrium now,” I told him.
We started to talk about the bar, then about the sex going on across the room. “I’m amazed they let this go on,” he said. “But then prohibition didn’t stop drinking.”
“It’s almost mundane though, don’t you think?” I asked. “This kind of backroom sex doesn’t seem as celebratory or radical as I used to think.”
“So, what brings you here?” He kept his hand on my leg.
“Habit,” I answered, and the word saddened me for a moment. “And I was looking for something unusual, like conversation.”
“Let’s steer away from the confessional,” he said. “I’m a psychiatrist, and I’m not working until Monday.”
“What’s not confessional?” I asked. “Lies?”
“Stories.”
I begin to tell him one I remember reading as a child, without recalling its origins and freely embellishing its simple plot:
“A man wanders through a strange town. Everyone he meets tells him he better get himself indoors before sundown. He wanders from place to place but can’t find a room. He finally finds a large, old-fashioned supper club, someplace like after World War II, where there’s music, old music—you know how creepy nostalgia is—and a lot of couples in formal wear in arched, almost positioned situations,” I looked at Alan, smiling patiently despite the jostling of the club around us. “The man makes his way to a table and sits alone. He notices the heavy, burgundy velvet theatre curtains covering the walls. No wonder the place feels so muted. The people around him are discreet, formal even.”
Alan interjected, “They’re not discreet here.” He looked over his shoulder where inky black shadows amassed in a corner. We both watched long enough and in silence until we could make out a pale boy at the back of the bar and the numerous hands running over him obsessively, either building him from nothing or taking pieces of him away.
I went on with this story: “He senses something—a lack of eye contact, an almost chilling sense of personal space. The waiter arrives at his table, and comments with disinterest, ‘You haven’t been here before,’ while placing a glass of red wine before him. The man says, ‘You must be mistaken, I don’t drink alcohol,’ and looks around to see who might have ordered it for him. ‘It will warm you,’ the waiter laughs like Richard Widmark, whom he resembles. He turns away from him like all the other eyes.
“The man looks at the glass of wine before him and he knows that this glass contains his past and his future. Maybe he sees himself leaving his wife and family, losing everything in seeking out its one spectacular comfort. It is probably what brought him here, to this place where nobody looks at him.
“He thinks, the waiter is right, it’s the only thing that warms me, and his hand reaches for it with the heaviness that is supposed to be something of the heart, and he puts it to his lips.”
Alan raised his bottle as though in a toast. He toasted without me because I was not drinking. I noticed Alan’s eyes seeking out the boy at the back of the bar, now completely naked, languishing in the arms of three leather-clad men. I continued, “The drink strangely fortifies him; he feels more himself than he ever has. He empties the glass quickly and asks the waiter for more—for a carafe. He drinks unt
il he’s happy to be left alone, to be at the center of a room full of people gathered away from him, watching him with less discretion now. The waiter has placed a second and third carafe on the table. He drinks because he’s hungry, alone, tired, without accommodation, without wife, faith, or ambition. The people he sees from the corner of his eyes are raising glasses, empty glasses, in his honor. They draw the curtains back on mirrored walls in which the whole room is dizzyingly reproduced. It takes a moment before he realizes he is the only person reflected in the mirrors. The imperious others stand not far from him, now openly watching him. ‘Fuck off,’ he says to them, raising his own empty glass and tossing it at the mirror before blacking out.
“When he awakens, his head pounds more fiercely than from a normal hangover and his throat is aching. He looks down the length of his body, his head weakly turning upwards to glimpse his feet. He realizes he is hanging, naked, upside down from a noose burning his ankles. He sees it in the mirror suddenly—a tap implanted in his throat. He is unable to see the reflectionless guests who gather around him with their glasses full, closing in on him. He wants to scream but feels the pressure of someone’s finger on the tap, filling their glass with the silent, inarticulate draft of his life.”
“No one’s ever tried to seduce me with a vampire story,” Alan said, leaning over me and pressing his lips, his teeth against my throat. I didn’t resist him. The movement of his hands on my bare arms brought me back to my own body, without the fear and distrust of pleasure my addiction had taught me.
“I’m Adam,” I said, which in a place like this is offering up a lot. I wanted to do it, if only to differentiate myself from the man in my story, who’s content to be alone, isolated even from his past. I don’t like my own, but I feel crippled somehow without it. “Telling you about me would probably have been less confessional,” I assured him.
“It’s not that I don’t want to know about you—”
“I’m a heroin addict with ten months clean,” I told him. “Does that bother you?”
He asked me if I’d shared needles, and I explained I’d begun using after I’d heard about AIDS, and never took that risk. I told him I was negative, a fact I’d discovered through the mandatory testing that was part of a drug study protocol at UC. I told him I’d finally gotten my libido back, with a vengeance.
“I see,” he said, his hand disappearing into my opened pants.
I’d had some rough years, but I wanted him to believe I wasn’t that person anymore, so I invited him home to meet the person I’d become.
The activity in the bar had a strange pull over us; we kept looking back as though we’d left something behind.
Once home, he directed his attention toward the artwork on my walls. He stood scrutinizing an unframed Joel Peter Witkin photograph, Penitente, in which my friend Eric is crucified between two monkeys, also stretched on crosses. They all bare numbers on their chests.
“Was he really crucified?”
I recognized his perversity, a shared prurience. Relationships are built on so much less, I thought.
“He was a masochist and an exhibitionist; he had all the saintly attributes.” I remembered one night when Eric arrived at my door in his drag persona, Jayne Mansonfield, tottering on a broken heel and wearing a soft suitcase on her head she’d modeled like a beret. I couldn’t imagine how she made the bus ride without being harrassed. I’d always done drag with others and here she was alone and not exactly passing. She was part of a performance group that did body manipulations. She seemed sort of dazed at the doorway after a performance in which they’d taken a chunk of skin from the center of her chest with an exacto knife then packed it with ash. A keloid, she called it. I realized when she opened her blouse to show off her wound what she’d used to keep potential antagonists at bay. I could imagine her swaggering through the bus, exposing the hole they’d gouged, created just for its healing, like the upraised scars that pattern the backs of certain tribal peoples.
“Jayne was my protector on the streets of the Tenderloin,” I told Alan, “She wasn’t only tough in her performances. I remember her threatening a gang who’d circled us, reaching for our skirts, and calling us men—the most stinging and ignorant comment you can make to a drag queen. Her heel was off in no time. She threatened the most belligerent of the group, insisting she was going to take some brain home on her heel—and she would have, had she needed to.”
Alan looked closer at the photograph, the body bowing out from the cross. I assumed he was looking at the feet where the spike was driven, but he turned to me and said, “not a bad cock.”
The keloid—which never completely healed while she was alive—came to resemble the KS that toughened her skin and swarmed her internal organs. “I’ve always had to push my body,” she wrote, “test it’s capacity to heal.” Her doctors provided new ways for her to test her body—ways that rivaled the witches’ cradles and suspension hooks of her performance troupe. She went from heavy doses of AZT to interferon. She said she could always feel the chemotherapy burning beneath her keloid.
She wrote letters from home, a place that had never been her home before, one of her mother’s degraded properties in Albuquerque. She’d described it as a “shit-encrusted, three-floor basement.” She got sicker and it didn’t seem to matter as much. “My home is in my body,” she wrote, “and I’ve never rested there.”
I didn’t write back. I kept her letters by my bed and read them when I was high so the words had no voice attached, just text that could have been written by anyone, a kind of ephemera, coaxing only a memory of her—as though she’d already been buried.
I didn’t tell Alan that I’d once left San Francisco in an effort to get away from AIDS. Jayne left after a series of inner ear infections so disabling she was fired from her bakery job and evicted from her apartment. That’s how I got the photograph, no doubt worth a great deal in a gallery. I think I bought it for a hundred dollars. Jayne used the money for an emergency plane ticket.
Maybe I wanted to leave San Francisco because no one was dying quietly or courageously in clean hospitals with attendants to apologize for their anger, to explain their irritability, or just to take care of them. My friends were dying in squalor and addiction, and I kept thinking, “Where is the romantic San Francisco of Hitchcock’s Vertigo?” After a year, I returned to San Francisco, fortified. I expected AIDS. I didn’t expect heroin, the shooting galleries, the casualties of addiction, those slow deaths, that particular dementia.
“I’ll be speaking at an American Physicians for Human Rights conference on Monday, then it’s back home to New York,” Alan said, stepping out of his shoes and dropping onto my battered sectional. He seemed surprisingly not worried about his presentation, not pressed to prepare, and I thought of that as one of the first differences between us I should take note of and learn from. Without knowing the content of his speech or even the parameters of his scientific specialty, I’d taken him as a mentor.
“How did you get into AIDS Psychobiology?” I asked, sitting beside him.
“I was working in a gay men’s health clinic at the start of a major Hepatitis C study. Later I began a protocol involving two of the hottest drugs on the market, AZT and Prozac. In every situation, putting two and two together amounted to more than I’d bargained for.”
“Well, that’s something this disease has taught us,” I said, thinking casualties, not careers.
Alan said he remembered small articles in the paper, the nameless gay cancer, treating the confusion and indignance around the sarcoma or swollen lymph. There were tricyclics, answers. His research suddenly timely: the interaction of antidepressants with AZT, the effects of grieving, relapse into unsafe practices, the reluctance of disclosing HIV status. He initiated protocols almost a decade ago still being re-created with modest changes in the variables today. There was no escaping it, AIDS or death, so easily equated early on. There was only escalation, data, and statistics. Opportunities, too.
He began to u
nbutton his shirt, and I went into the kitchen and brought out a bottle of Calistoga and two glasses. He called after me, “I’ve got a party to attend tomorrow. I’d like you to come. I can’t promise it’ll be interesting, though.”
“What kind of party?” I asked.
“Mostly doctors and researchers. Some of the big ones: Conant, Volberding, Don Abrams…”
The names were familiar. I knew they were the so-called leaders in the fight against AIDS, but I had little knowledge of their work, or the media surrounding it. The unshakable junkie in me was already intimidated. I imagined myself like a page from Gray’s Anatomy where every damaged vein and floating organ would be observed. I told myself that it wouldn’t be me they objected to, but the fact that I didn’t know who they were, let alone understand or value their research. Nonetheless, it was a world I found intriguing, and, I imagined, not overtly hostile. A raised eyebrow here and there was nothing compared to the company I’d found in shooting galleries in the Mission.
“I’ll go,” I said.
We made love like survivors, without the fears and petty encumbrances that might have made us afraid of deep kisses. I treat everyone as though they’re positive, so I needn’t ask and they don’t have to tell. This approach was my fortification upon returning to San Francisco - this, and, of course, the testing that was part of the drug study. I had six AIDS tests and came up negative each time. Each time I feared and doubted the results. I could always seroconvert safe sex was still a personal thing, each person with his own idea of what it meant. My formulations were simple—one thing I remembered from a science class was that science loves the simplest solution, something I no longer take for granted. I decided to make simple changes: no unprotected anal sex, and no swallowing semen.
Alan slipped to his knees in my living room. He unbuttoned his own pants while he sucked me with abandon, glancing up at me as though desiring instruction—which I offered. He was wearing the Versace suit he’d worn earlier to a benefit. It was clear this was how he wanted to get off, sucking me while I bent over him, forcing myself down his throat. I told him I was going to cum. When I orgasmed he swallowed hungrily and came himself. I was more amused than surprised by the irony. Doctors are people after all, and no one who gives advice lives by it, at least as far as I can tell. But Alan assured me swallowing semen was reasonably safe, citing the stomach acid argument. Everyone nowadays seems to have perfected their justifications for the acts they prefer engaging in—those that are possibly unsafe seem to bear a benign warning, like the surgeon general’s on a pack of cigarettes. “I’m negative,” I told him, “so you can drink as much as you can draw and no apologies.”
