The Medicine Burns

by Adam Klein

  But something about our sex didn’t sit right with me. Somehow I’d forgotten my fears of seroconversion while ejaculating into his willing and appreciative throat. Nothing, however, indicated Alan suffered any reservations. There’s a kind of certainty about our individually accepted safe-sex parameters. The problem is meeting someone whose parameters are wider than yours. This, of course, could apply to any ethical concern, to any ideology. The more you encompass, the less adjustment you need to make.

  I put it out of my mind, and hung his clothes as he stepped out of them. He lay on my mattress on the floor, and I put on a tape. He’d brought a small toiletries bag, arranging a number of prescription bottles on the carpet. They looked like brown colums. “Is that your model of the Parthenon, or the design for a new NIH?” I asked.

  “The Ritalin is for my attention deficit disorder, Elavil for depression, and this,” he said, dropping two pills into his palm, “is Halcyon—for a good night’s sleep in a strange place.”

  “I guess you have no reason to shudder at my heroin addiction,” I said.

  He swallowed the pills with the Calistoga then opened his briefcase and drew out a paper by a colleague of his we’d be meeting the following morning for breakfast. I liked his willingness to include me in his life—the simple but comprehensive acceptance he had of mine.

  The paper was a statistical evaluation of the rate of HIV transmission in three artificially distinguished groups: call boys, street hustlers, and those who worked with escort services. While I read the researcher’s specifics for each category, I found myself becoming more and more exasperated with the paper. It seemed to have no ultimate aim beyond its tabulations and tables—the boys were already lost to this researcher; they’d become the raw data of their acts, desperate or otherwise.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I believe in good old intervention.”

  “Well,” Alan answered, “how do you design a good intervention plan without the necessary data?”

  “When someone’s hit by a car, you don’t design a study to get them out of the road.”

  But reaction to this disease wasn’t about haste anymore; it wasn’t about responding to an emergency. Now it was about design and implementation, competitive proposals and salaries. The escalating numbers were not emergencies, but time lines and spreadsheets.

  The way my friends had described AZT to me, it reminded me of methadone maintenance: methadone keeps junkies sick and dependent on the government. AZT keeps people sick and dependent on the pharmaceutical companies. I didn’t want to sound cynical, but I suppose I was. It seemed simple minded, like conspiracy theory or something, and I’d always liked complexity, something more challenging than greed, sloth, wastefulness, or just plain ineptitude.

  The next morning we had breakfast with the “call boys’ researcher,” someone I had hoped might show signs of a previous history as one, or a pervert obsessed with them. His home was near the top of Twin Peaks, unassuming from the outside, but with a sprawling and impeccably designed interior. He was obviously proud of the place, judging by the sweeping hand gesture he used to welcome us inside. He eyed me without the slightest discretion, and I eyed him back. He was middle-aged, with a face that presented no disturbing or extraordinary features, like the strain of genius, or even ordinary struggle. It was a full and contented face, and the body seemed to match, buffed but not lean, mostly genetic mass and little work. Alan had described him as a “knockout.” He guided us through a large sunken living room with its smart leather couch and track lighting aimed upon the framed international safe sex posters, some quite risqué for a room as tidy as this was, and one which showcased the most benign treasures: a vast fish tank with its solitary puffer and sunken Japanese garden, and a cabinet displaying china. We walked up the steps to the kitchen where we met Ken’s domestic partner, aproned and busy at work like a simple domestic.

  “This is Danny,” Ken said, introducing us. “And your name again?”

  “Adam,” I answered.

  “Where’d you meet Alan?” Danny asked, a quizzical look on his face that might have been dull-wittedness.

  “In a back room,” I answered, before Alan squeezed my arm.

  “Well, we weren’t in the back room exactly,” he corrected, “but at the back of the bar. Adam was telling me horror stories.”

  “Did Alan share any of his own?” Danny asked.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if several of his horror stories were right there in the bar,” Ken said, “and let me guess which one it was…My Place?”

  “How’d you know?” I asked, amused but concerned. Alan had told me it was his first time there.

  “Alan always has someone new to introduce to us. He has a man in every port,” Ken answered. “Every neighborhood’s a port.”

  Danny, watching my face, turned toward the sink and started washing potatoes with a brush.

  I went outside where the lovers had built a deck. They’d set a table outside, but the sun was so bright we had to sit with our hands visoring our eyes. The yard was so well kept, the trees so cut back, that there was no shade. They brought out omelets with pancetta, fresh tomatoes from the garden, and jack cheese.

  “The hash browns are on their way,” Danny said.

  Alan lavished praise on the garden, their craftsmanship on the deck, and Danny’s breakfast. They’d been friends for years, but we all sat stiffly at the table.

  Then Ken said something interesting that troubled me.

  “I got incredibly sick in Brazil,” he said. “Deathly ill.”

  He dabbed his mouth with his napkin, “The doctor told me I was going to die. I’m actually surprised I didn’t. They moved me from a hospital to a care home run by nuns. A priest presided over me. I think they were ready to bury me in the cemetery out back.”

  “What was the doctor’s diagnosis?” Alan asked.

  “Cryptococcus,” Ken answered.

  “That’s horrible,” I said. “My friend Eddie died of crypto. How’d you regain your health?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe the influence of all those nuns.” He laughed.

  “Well, did you get checked out when you got back to the States?”

  “I was fine,” he said. “I’m miraculously fine.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t crypto after all,” Alan suggested.

  Danny came out of the kitchen, and the conversation went back to home repairs and garden prospects.

  Later that day, as Alan and I prepared ourselves for the APHRA party, I asked him if he didn’t think Ken was a little evasive about the crypto.

  “He’s committed to his research, Adam. I hardly think that’s someone in denial about AIDS.” Alan looked at me crossly, then leaned forward and kissed me.

  “I don’t think they liked me much,” I said.

  “Of course they didn’t,” he answered, kissing my neck.

  I pulled him down to the mattress on my floor. “Everything about my life is amateurish to you, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “One of these days you’ll get it together,” he said, opening my pants. While he sucked me, I looked at the white ceiling—a white doctor’s coat, a flat hard emptiness.

  “Hurry up and get dressed,” he said, licking my cum from the corners of his mouth. He looked through my closet and asked, “Do you have anything to wear tonight? It’s formal.”

  “What about a tap in my throat?” I asked, still lying on my back, delirious from the sex, which while quick and mechanical, paradoxically assured me of our intimacy and knowledge of each other.

  “They’re not vampires,” he said. “They’re M.D. Ph.D’s.”

  I followed him into the bathroom, “I want to know what your friends said about me.”

  “One of them asked if I was going out with a bag person,” he said, lathering his face and talking to my reflection in the mirror.

  “Well that just goes to show how removed from the real world these people are. I’m sure they’d shit themselves at the sight of r
eal poverty.”

  “They merely commented,” he said. “You shouldn’t be surprised about that. You’re obsessed with sharing your demons first—you practically demand a reaction to them.”

  “Are you talking about my behavior with you or with them? I don’t remember sharing demons with them, and I don’t think their comment has anything to do with my past. It’s really just about money, isn’t it?”

  I thought of how Danny had hung my jacket, beating it out before placing it in the closet.

  “Why don’t you borrow one of mine,” Alan said, pointing to a jacket he’d draped over the bathroom door handle, “and let’s drop the subject.”

  “Fine,” I answered, looking at myself in it, remembering the nice clothes I’d had, but sold for drugs. I could still appreciate beautiful things.

  His friend Matt picked us up that night in a rusted VW Bug.

  I’d seen Matt before—at the gym and at ACT UP events. He leaned over and kissed Alan deeply, knocking the ancient Woodsy Owl air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. I could see the red burn on his arm where he’d applied DNCB. He was wearing a tank top that showed off his muscular arms and a perfectly rendered tattoo of Caravaggio’s Medusa.

  “This is the best you could offer me?” He asked. “A quick ride to your dinner party before you’re out of here?”

  “I tried to call you,” Alan said, “but you never called back.”

  “You know how it is. I have a lover now.”

  “When don’t you?” Alan asked.

  “What about you?” Matt asked, turning to look at me for the first time. “Still with Jim?”

  “This is Adam,” Alan said.

  We shook hands. He turned to look ahead and started the car.

  “You should tell me what to talk about and what not to talk about,” he said.

  “Why?” Alan asked, perturbed. “Talk about whatever you’d like. You do anyway.”

  “Still with Jim?” he asked again. I felt some relief at hearing the question come back.

  “Of course,” Alan answered.

  Then he asked, “How’s the KS?”

  “They’re treating him with interferon.” Alan looked out the window, and his profile was clearly unhappy.

  “My CD8s look great,” Matt said after a while. “The fatigue isn’t nearly as bad.”

  “The fatigue,” Alan groaned.

  “How’d you two meet?” I asked, oddly compelled to rescue the situation, and not sure for whom.

  “We met at the San Francisco AIDS Conference,” Matt explained. “Alan promptly seduced me.”

  Still seduced? I wanted to ask, but kept silent.

  “A man in every port.” Ken had said it, but it seemed petty. Not knowing who to trust wasn’t something new to me. It had become a way of life while I was using. It goes without saying—never trust a junkie. There were little dishonesties. At the time I considered them discrepancies: a little less dope when you halved it, a few extra bucks when you copped for someone who didn’t know what you could get it for. Even with Jayne, the photo I’d bought for cheap that I thought I would sell later. Something made me keep it. My friends who were long-term survivors of AIDS insisted that they couldn’t trust their doctors, researchers, or the pharmaceutical companies. “Save your own life” was their call to battle. They formed motley coalitions, guerrilla clinics.

  Matt embarked on a litany of offenses the medical establishment had committed.

  “The research is there,” he said of DNCB, “but because it’s not patentable, the pharmaceutical companies want nothing to do with it. They disregard therapies that might really prove effective in favor of the long-standing antiviral therapies that limit people’s life expectancy.”

  As if needing to explain Mart’s passion, Alan turned to me, “Matt was diagnosed with lymphoma several years ago—and just look at that body now.” He put his hand through Matt’s curly hair.

  “I had a life expectancy of weeks, maybe months. They knocked out my immune system before the cancer with every nucleoside analog produced. And after the chemo I had skin like glass, no hair, no eyebrows, no lip color. I had to paint my face in like a doll and wear a shroud.

  “Alan thinks it’s funny; he thinks I sprang back to life like a plant cutting. Well, the lymph nodes don’t grow back after a biopsy. You’re just left with the scars of their invasive curiosity.”

  “I have nothing but respect for you,” Alan said. “If DNCB saved you, then I’m thankful you found it.”

  “Education saved me, and a lack of trust. What I don’t understand is why you started AZT in the first place.”

  Alan didn’t respond right away, and when he did it was whispered and accusatory. “Do what’s right for you, Matt, and let me make my own decisions.”

  “Whatever—” Matt said, “you trust your colleagues and I guess that’s good. I wish I could—but I love life too much.”

  “What do you do?” Matt asked, turning his attention to me.

  “I’m a student,” I lied, “in psychology.” I realized I was lying to Alan, as well, who hadn’t even gotten around to asking me what I did, probably assuming I earned a paycheck being creative, or arrogant, or in recovery. In his world, people got paid for what they did. I’d been out of work for the past eight months and living on GA. The hustle I’d been respected for as a junkie, looking good enough to stay employed, had run itself out.

  “Why psychology?” Matt asked.

  “To be quite honest,” I answered, “I’m interested in what people are willing to tell me about their lives.”

  “There are a lot of uninteresting people out there,” Alan said. “I hope you’re not disappointed.”

  “The truth is what they don’t tell you,” Matt added.

  Many of the doctors and researchers were at the City Club when we finally arrived, holding up their glasses to Alan as we entered the vaultlike, marble lobby—a toast where those honored weren’t provided a drink.

  “There’s Don and Selma,” Alan whispered. “Did you see And the Band Played On?”

  “No,” I answered, “no television.”

  “Don Francis is played by Matthew Modine and Selma Dritz is played by Lily Tomlin. They’re the heroes of the film.’’

  Selma, a short woman with brown eyebrows drawn on and a beige sweater—bearing no resemblance to Lily Tomlin that I could see—reached around Alan’s neck and hugged him.

  “I saw your movie,” he said, “and I thought Lily did a great job. She has your feistiness down. What did you think of it?”

  “Well, I liked it,” she answered. “But a lot of it never happened—or it happened for Hollywood. I for one would never kiss the owner of the baths.”

  She smiled at me, so I introduced myself.

  “This is your friend?” She deferred to Alan.

  “Yes,” he answered, “he’s a psychiatry resident,” embellishing the lie I’d hoped he’d forgotten.

  Other doctors converged around us, and spoke of ski trips, research funding, and colleagues who’d died.

  They seemed to love the surface of things, talking about who was in, who was out, who was funded, and who wasn’t. There was a lot of talk about the movie—almost a nostalgia for the difficulties and horrors it chronicled. The history of the epidemic looked good in its encapsulation. It felt finite. And the past seems safe when you haven’t a clue to approaching the future. We’d all read about the Berlin conference—the revelations of the Concorde study, not particularly startling, about the ineffectiveness, even danger of early intervention with AZT and other antivirals. The heroes and the newcomers at this gathering all seemed suddenly hopeless to me, and I could recognize it now, from my own addiction. In recovery they say, “doing the same things over and over hoping for different results.”

  Alan asked me to go meet people, work the room—a skill I knew he took seriously. The crowd, almost all men, and almost all doctors and researchers, seemed to coalesce around me. These were men I’d be embarrassed to r
aise my sleeve for, the veins still reluctant to surface. Alan was gone, but they crowded closer, sensing the outsider. I imagined their derision, like his friends we’d had breakfast with. I imagined myself reduced to the anonymous blood sample of an IV drug user.

  I went silently to the bar and ordered a glass of wine, where I struck up conversation with the bartender.

  “Not a doctor?” I asked him.

  “No,” he answered, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “I’m a bartender.”

  “An anesthesiologist,” I suggested.

  “That’s one way to look at it,” he laughed. “Having a nice time?” he asked. “You look lonely.”

  “Just thinking,” I said. I was staring out at the crowd, as though I were pretending to look for someone. Just then, at the catering trays, I saw Jayne, standing lopsided on her broken heel and filling her plate obliviously. I watched her walking through the crowd, blouse open, and the keloid healed over like a peach pit. She sauntered toward me, unacknowledged by the doctors who seemed to clear a way for her unconsciously.

  “This is a great party,” she said, putting a deviled egg in her mouth.

  “Do you really think so?” I asked. “I’m not really sure we belong.”

  “We’re all connected here,” she answered, her mouth full. “Bloodlines.”

  “Your friends wanted me to contribute to your obituary, but I couldn’t. It seemed wrong. I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.”