“Call them and ask,” he said. “I am psychic. I know you’ll figure it out.”
Figure it out, Ruth. Memphis was right across the river. If they were doing AIDS stuff there, I could get them to come here. I went to the library and wrote down a bunch of numbers for the American Psychological Association, and I eventually got to an events coordinator. “It’s two hundred fifty dollars for nonmembers,” he told me.
“Well, I don’t have that,” I said. “I can pay in information, though. What I’ve seen here. My patients are living longer than—”
“I’m afraid not,” he said.
“Who again is organizing this? I had it written down but I seem to have misplaced it.”
“Dr. John Anderson,” he said.
“Do you have his number?” He gave me a number with a 202 area code—Washington, DC—to get rid of me, and I called it right away and left a message.
“I would love to come, but I need a scholarship,” I said. “I don’t have two hundred fifty dollars to come to this meeting. If you waive the entrance fee, I can handle getting there and a place to stay.”
I called four more times, and when Dr. Anderson finally picked up, he sounded caught. He did not understand why I couldn’t afford the two-hundred-fifty-dollar registration.
I set aside all pride. “Do you have a hardship thing?” I asked. “I promise I will be no bother. I can stand if I have to, and I won’t use more oxygen than anyone else. I’d like the chance to talk to people about coming to Arkansas. We need you.”
He sighed. “I have to go in to a meeting.”
“It’s just my name on a list,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
I closed my eyes. “Ruth Coker Burks.”
“I have it,” he said. “You’ve left several messages.”
“Thank you, Dr. Anderson.”
He softened slightly, like a pressure was lifted. “See you there.”
“I will look for you!”
“Uh-hmm,” was all he said.
I called Owen, and I told him it was a go. I mentioned that I needed a sitter for Allison, and he said he and Bill would be happy to look after her. “She’s safe with us.” I knew he was right when we walked in. Bill was a slight guy who looked like the country singer George Jones, and he seemed so kind. They’d never babysat before, and I could tell they would have been great parents if they’d only been given the chance.
When I got to the conference, it was like angels singing. I had felt so alone doing my work, and here were people who cared. Still, I didn’t meet anybody like me. There were people who had cared for one or two people on a professional basis. The deaths happened off-screen, somewhere else.
When I met Dr. Anderson, I saw why he was so reluctant to make a wave by bringing me on. He was already twisting so many arms to get a conference on AIDS and mental health. He was tall and completely bald—not a hair on him because of alopecia. He said we could all call him Dr. Smooth and joked about how he lost it suddenly while in school in Texas. He used to have long, luxurious hair, and the rednecks would drive by and yell, “Boy, when you gonna cut that hair?” And then one day, it fell out. “My hair, my eyebrows, my eyelashes, just gone,” he said. “And then the rednecks drove by and yelled, ‘Boy, when you gonna grow you some hair?’”
Dr. Anderson was a clinical psychologist looking to train health professionals and educators to show compassion for people with HIV. He called it the AIDS Community Training Project. I cornered him at lunch and gave him the same speech I gave to everyone: “Please come to Arkansas. There’s plenty to help. Y’all can each have ten patients, just please come over.”
He was sitting there trying to figure out how to get away from me, but I had wrapped my ankle around his chair leg, and he didn’t know that he was not moving until I got him to commit to coming to Arkansas. I was desperate.
“Well, we need funding,” he said.
“Who gives you that?”’
He explained it was the Arkansas Department of Health. “Can I take your info to them?” If I could get testing kits and condoms from them, why not try?
As soon as I got back to Arkansas, I drove to Little Rock with the packet, along with a long letter that Bonnie had proofread for me twice. I wanted it to matter if I had to leave it.
I went in through the loading dock, like always. The head of the Arkansas Department of Health was Dr. Joycelyn Elders, so I had to get to her. I knew the floor she was on, so I got on with a group, looking like I knew where I was going. I rehearsed a speech for her secretary. People slowly got off, floor after floor, until it was only me.
When I emerged on her floor, I looked around, still trying to look like I belonged there.
“Hello,” said a voice. I turned to see a man with close-cropped, neat, dark hair. He was wearing a white shirt and suspenders. “I guess you’re looking for Dr. Elders’s office.”
“Yes, yes, I am.”
He had folders and papers in his hand and looked like he was headed somewhere important. But he smiled. “Come this way,” he said.
I followed. It was nice to be led. It was what I had done so many times for people. He brought me right to the receptionist. “She’s here for a meeting with Dr. Elders.”
The receptionist was flustered. “I don’t think she has an appointment.”
“I’m sure it’s a mix-up,” he said, more to her than to me. I held my packet of paper. I knew that if I said, “I can just leave this . . .” then it would be over. Let this play out, I thought.
“What is it?” called Dr. Elders.
The man turned and smiled at me, then went through a door. His work was done. The receptionist grimaced, like she was going to hear about this.
“Hi, I’m Ruth Coker Burks,” I said, handing Dr. Elders the packet. She looked like she wanted no part of me. She brushed past my letter to the data in Dr. Anderson’s material. She had been the health director since 1987, and I’d read an article saying even she was shocked that Arkansas had the second-highest teenage pregnancy rate in the world. She was hated by politicians and church folk in Arkansas, who fought her at every turn on sex education in schools. “We’ve taught them what to do in the front seat of the car but not the back seat,” she famously said. Trying to teach heterosexuals was bad enough, and here I was looking to get her to help my guys.
She was reading as I talked, and I realized I should probably be quiet, but I was afraid to miss the opportunity. “Should I be quiet?” I asked. “Can you read and listen too?”
She stiffened but did not look up. “How do you think I got to where I am today?” she asked. “Certainly, I can.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t mean it that way.” I paused. “Of course you can.”
She read through the packet and set it aside. I started to speak, and she cut me off.
“Thank you,” she said, blunt and abrupt. That must have been the signal to the receptionist, who was now at the door.
“Thank you, Dr. Elders. I appreciate what you are doing for Arkansas.”
When I left her office, I figured I should pop my head into the door the suspendered man had gone into and say my thanks for his guidance. But I couldn’t find the door. I could have sworn it was right there.
“Do you know where that man went?” I asked.
“What man?” the receptionist asked, in a tone that said if I asked for one more thing she would send me to my car by way of the window. What man? I said to myself. I don’t know what happened, but I was grateful to that angel.
Dr. Anderson’s program got funding. And the American Psychological Association would eventually have a team touring hospitals in Arkansas, offering advice on how to treat people with HIV with the only things I had actually seen work so far: compassion and hope.
Chapter Nineteen
My dedication made an impression on Dr. Anderson, and he
invited me and Allison to come up and use his town house in Washington, DC, for six weeks that summer. He told me his roommate was a photographer for CNN and would be on assignment. “We need to find you a job up here in DC,” he said. “Some place where you could do some good nationally.”
I made a bunch of copies of my résumé, packed all my professional clothes, and tried to line up as many meetings as possible. Nonprofits and bureaucracies had already started to answer the coming gold rush from the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act that Congress would pass in August 1990. The CARE Act was set to give money not only to states but to public or private entities that said they helped people with AIDS. I hoped to get a position where I could bring what I knew to bear on real policy. I decided that while I looked for a job, I would volunteer at Food & Friends, a wonderful organization started in the basement of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in southwestern DC. They had a volunteer army delivering meals to people with AIDS all over the district. I liked that they kept a lean staff, with about six people in the kitchen. I did this kind of thing myself anyway, so Allison and I got right in there, peeling vegetables, cooking food, sorting the meals, and packing everything. Then all these great people came in on their lunch hour to grab the bags of food and deliver it.
The first day, I kept hearing one of the dispatchers ask, “Is anybody delivering to Anacostia today? Anacostia? Will anybody deliver to Anacostia?”
We were done cooking, so I said, “I’ll deliver.”
“Oh, okay. And your daughter too?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Oh, okay.”
I didn’t know Anacostia was considered the most dangerous neighborhood in DC. But I didn’t see any of that when we went. It was a predominantly black neighborhood, and everyone was kind to us. Elsewhere in DC, when I nodded and said “hello” to passersby, people looked at me like I was crazy. But in Anacostia they smiled back at us, even if they looked a little puzzled as to what we were doing there. Delivering there became our routine, and I liked it because I found a lot of people in the neighborhood who were in the same shape as the men and women I delivered food to—but who didn’t have any connections to call Food & Friends or realize that they even qualified for help. There was nothing better than delivering food to someone you’d met by chance.
I spent afternoons that summer focusing on getting a job. When I applied to work in positions with any kind of authority or salary, however, I would get the runaround. I didn’t have a college diploma, and my experience meant nothing. “If you only had a degree, we could hire you,” was what I heard over and over. It was true that I left college when I got married. I was just shy of graduating, and back then I had time but no money. Now that I had a little bit of my own money, I had no time. I was too busy taking care of people.
One prospect seemed promising after the administrator put my résumé in his top drawer. He said my work sounded very valuable. I thanked him, but the only time I ever saw him again was at a lobbyist meeting about what should go into the Ryan White CARE Act.
“You know it really surprised me that I never heard from you,” I said. “I thought you were going to hire me.”
“Oh, no,” he said casually. “I knew that I would want to sleep with you, and then I would lose my job.”
“Oh, no,” I said, echoing his tone. “You would have been perfectly safe with me.”
There were other indignities to the meetings of advocacy groups and lobbyists deciding what to push for when putting the bill together. There were some activists from New York who interrupted me when I spoke about the importance of social security to families of people with AIDS. “That way these men and their kids are taken of—”
“Honey, gay men don’t have kids,” one huffed at me. “Are you out of your mind?”
They dismissed me—and the lives of so many men in the South who had complicated lives. Who didn’t have the luxury of living out of the closet safely. Who were pressured as teens to have sex to prove their manliness, in areas where the teenage pregnancy rate was astronomical. Or who didn’t fit into the pigeonholes of gay or straight. No, I was the crazy one not worth listening to. What did I know about the lives of gay men?
I went back to Hot Springs a little broken. I’d prayed for the cavalry to come for so long, and now they were starting to show up with Executive Director titles and six-figure salaries. Meanwhile, the people they were supposedly helping couldn’t afford a week’s worth of AZT.
It was even happening in Arkansas. There was money in AIDS patients now, or at least saying you did something for people with AIDS. I got a nice letter from a woman asking if I could get her into churches. At first I was excited, because I’d been so overwhelmed. But then she went in with sob stories about what she’d “seen”—“innocent victims” who’d been infected by dastardly villains. Then she’d pass the collection plate. I knew a con artist when I saw one.
An organization started that was on a constant search for “speakers” to go to churches and schools. They marched in with some poor sap, saying, “Don’t end up like this.” They stressed abstinence education and didn’t mention condoms. When the speaker died, they just got another one. People sitting behind desks getting paychecks sent AIDS patients out to do their bidding on a volunteer basis.
I had poured my rage into a letter to Governor Clinton, telling him how upset I was about the rampant mismanagement of funds. He wrote me back a letter telling me I was wrong. There were good people working through the system. I tore it up in anger. But later, when one of the main offenders I complained about suddenly went on leave, I wondered if maybe he was listening to me after all.
In October, I got a call from one of the people with letters behind his name. He wouldn’t hire me, but he was happy to put me to work on their behalf in the field, dealing with the “complicated cases.”
“It’s a girl,” he said. “She sounds like one of yours.”
I didn’t know what that meant, so I cleared my throat. “What’s her name?”
“Dolly,” the man said. “Teenage hooker in Little Rock. Pregnant.” She’d been getting treatment and stopped showing up at the hospital. She was already in a downward spiral, so now she was either dead or knocking on the door. They gave me an address in Little Rock, where she might or might not be. It was an awful neighborhood, so I knew that’s why they called me. “Call Ruth.”
When I got to the apartment complex, I saw it was worse than I’d remembered it. Crack had really gotten a hold of the area. But I had to find her. I went and knocked on the door of the apartment I was told to try. There was no answer.
I knocked again, more insistent this time. The door swung open, and a great big huge man stood in front of me.
“What the fuck do you want?” he yelled, mustering every cell of his body to intimidate me. My heart skipped a little half a beat. That was all I was giving him. I kept a smile on my face.
“Well, I’m looking for Dolly.”
He tried to hide the flicker of recognition going across his face. “If she’s alive, she’s in big trouble with her health,” I said. “If she’s not, then—”
“She’s alive.” He went to close the door on me, but I stuck my left foot forward and leaned back on my heel to create a wedge. He was so surprised he looked down, but he didn’t force it.
“She’s gonna die,” I said, still smiling. “She’s gonna die if I don’t take her to the hospital right now. And then the police are gonna come here, and I don’t want that to be big trouble for you. So if you would help me get Dolly’s things together and put her in my car, I haven’t seen anything. I don’t know anything. I’ve never seen or met you. I’ll forget the whole thing.”
He stood there, looking at me, but I wouldn’t back down. I finally whispered, “I know she’s here. Come on.”
He stepped aside, letting me in. “I’m Ruth Coker Burks,” I said.
&
nbsp; “Name’s Tank,” he said.
“Well, that suits you fine,” I said. The place was a mess, but I only had eyes for a closed bedroom door. I knew she was in there. I marched to it.
Dolly was in bed, very sick. She had strawberry-blond hair, a pixie cut, but there were patches of hair missing from her scalp. She had the freckled face of a little girl, but her frail body had this enormous bump, probably about five months. She had a fever and seemed not to know where she was.
“Okay,” I said, more to calm myself than Tank, who couldn’t look at me. “Let’s get her to the car.” It was almost rush hour, and my brain was already on to wondering whether I should take Interstate 30 to 630 and take it across, or 430 and then 630. Because she and this baby needed help right away.
Tank lifted her up as I threw her belongings into a suitcase. There were clothes all over the floor, and I grabbed them all. As we raced to the car, I repeated my name to Tank. “I don’t know who Dolly was to you,” I said, “but if you ever come across this type of thing again, find me. You’ll see I am trustworthy.” He nodded, laying her across the back seat.
I raced to the hospital, parking right at the ER entrance in the back. I lifted her myself and carried her in. Dolly had Hepatitis B and C, herpes, syphilis, and HIV. Thankfully, she responded to treatment quickly, and when I went to check on her a couple of days later, she was already out of the ICU and in a regular room.
There was life in her again. Tomboyish, with her strawberry-blond hair brighter for being washed. Her cheeks were starting to fill out, and she had light eyes, hazel in the sunlight making it through the windows.
“How long have you been positive?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Dunno,” she said. “Well, I was diagnosed when I was fifteen.”
“Wow,” I said. “How old are you now?”
“Nineteen,” she said. “I only found out I was positive ’cause I got stabbed.”
I nodded, like this was a common form of detection. “How’d you get stabbed?”
“A guy,” she said. “He didn’t want to pay me, so I guess he thought he’d just kill me.” She pulled down her gown to show a big long scar down her chest. “Stabbed me in the heart and in my head,” she said, waiting a beat. “Nothing I needed.”
All the Young Men Page 20
