Excerpts

I took the prescriptions with me as I headed home. I decided to go into Arturo’s on the corner of 85th and York Avenue; I passed it every day but had never gone in. I did not want to go home to the empty apartment. Jamie had gone back to work. I walked in and said, “Table for one.” They sat me in the window table next to the bar. I ordered a red wine before I was even seated. “Make it a bottle of red.” I placed the small bag of medication on the table. Such a small bag, and it was $1200.00. I felt like I had been shopping at Tiffany’s. This was a small bag, but it represented something enormous, monstrous, and evil. I had to remove the bad of medication from the table, and put it in the seat across from me where it was hidden from my view. I wanted to just sit in this window, at Arturo’s, and never leave again. I wanted to hide. I had not eaten alone in a while; I enjoyed sharing my meals with Jamie.

Then horror hit me, “Oh, my God, when he dies from this, I will be eating alone.” Then right away I went into denial that everything was going to be OK, that I was going to find a cure. There was not much to offer at this period. AZT was just out, and people were dying every day from it. There were no life-sustaining drugs that I had heard about. The media talked about the horrible deaths that came from this disease. The words the doctor spoke earlier in the day came back to haunt me. “You are a very sick man.” “You have zero T Cell Count.” What the hell is a T Cell count? I was soon to find out. The word T Cell count would become part of my everyday vocabulary. There was still a fear and stigma upon people with AIDS during the mid 90’s. Maybe there still is. I hated the jokes, such as what does G.A.Y. stand for. Answer “Got AIDS yet”? It was in the media now all the time. Celebrities were dying. Nothing positive was in the news. It was a death sentence. It was like I had a child, and I was trying to prevent him from drowning, although I did not know how to swim myself.

Before I realized it, I had finished the bottle of wine. I ordered another one, and realized I had better eat something. I saw Clams Casino on the menu. I ordered it. ... How can I afford Jamie’s doctor? He needs the best. Chicken Françoise looks good, I will get that. The doctor said he is surprised this was the first incident. What does that mean? Are there going to be more? He cannot be having seizures at the salon where he cuts hair. They will fire him. Damn, what if he gets fired? I cannot support the two of us. Maybe pasta on the side. But, I like meat sauce, not marinara. I will request it. Who do I tell? Will people back away from me now? I give parties for a living, I am in catering, what if someone finds out I am living with someone that has AIDS? They might think they can catch it from the food. I will be fired also. Damn, Damn, Damn. And why is this red wine glass so small? I want a large bubble glass. I can’t believe I am sitting on my corner, watching the world go by. The Clams Casino arrives. They have bacon on top-- regular bacon, I have always preferred it with a bit of proscuitto, but it does taste good. He is seeing the HIV specialist tomorrow, he has no insurance, and how are we going to pay? How sick is he, how long does he have? Why are people in this restaurant laughing and having a good time, when such horrible things are happening outside this window at Arturo’s? This thin glass in this restaurant window and the glass in my hand were my shield from the outside. I have the urge to call my mother. But I have to wait until I get home. I cannot call on the restaurant pay phone and talk about AIDS--the taboo thing to have. Don’t want to be classified as a leper. He needs to se a mental health professional also, I have to protect him. How will he cope? I remember how we have been putting money into our home; he has not been buying clothes. They are a bit worn, and droopy, actually. He has lost weight. I need to buy him clothes that fit. He has AIDS; he deserves to have clothes that look good on him. That will make him feel better about himself. He is dying, he deserves these nice clothes. I am taking him shopping. He will feel better, and therefore he will get better faster. If he looks great then nobody will suspect what lies below the superficial layer of designer clothing. And he is dying, damn it, he is going out with a bang. He needs to live life to the fullest. His last remaining time left will be well-lived. But, shit, I have no money. I will put it on the corporate card, and deal with it later.

The Clams Casino were not bad at all. I will have to have them again sometime. I finished the second bottle of wine sitting in Arturo’s Window. I order Tartuffo and Spumoni for desert, and the waiter offers me a port, which I readily accept before he even finishes the entire sentence. I have to go home, Jamie will be home soon. I pay the bill; grab the horrible little bag that holds $1200 of medication and head down the ½ block to my home. How sad it is now when I walk in my home. I dread the scenes that might start taking place. What does the future hold for him, for us? I pick up the phone, and dial, and after a few rings my mother answers.

“Hi Mom, I have bad news. I am OK, nothing is wrong with me, but Jamie has AIDS”

“Are you sure you do not have it?”

“Yes, I am sure.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I am going to find a way to make him better, there has to be a doctor out there. I don’t care what it takes.”

“Does he have insurance?”

“No, I don’t care, I will take care of it, I will find a way, he needs me.”

“How can you do that?”

“I don’t know, I will figure it out. Don’t tell anyone right now, I don’t want anyone to know.”

I pick up the phone, and I dial my friends Diana, and then Eileen and have the same conversation.

I hear the key in the door, it is Jamie. I go to him, he looks so alarmed and frightened, like a small child. There is nothing I can do. I told him I had already eaten at Arturo’s, and that I had bought him take-out from there. Linguine with Meat Sauce. I felt guilty as soon as I said it, as we always had dinner together. I would not want him to think I did not want to eat with him. He said no, he was not hungry and that he was nauseous. I gave him the bag of pills. The tears started flowing down his face. He looks beaten.

Jamie says, ‘ John, maybe I should move out, I can’t do this to you.”

‘Stop the horseshit, I am going to find a way out of this.”

Jamie went to the bathroom, and I heard him throwing up. His gagging gave me the dry heaves. Was this the beginning of the end? He took the pills and went into the bedroom and turned on the TV. It was a small TV, I knew he would spend a lot of time in bed in the coming months or whatever. I had to get him a larger TV. He deserves it, he is dying. I want to make it as comfortable as possible. I will get a 27” TV tomorrow. I poured myself a glass of the cheap red wine. I did not even attempt to hide the glass when Jamie entered the kitchen to say good night. We embraced and he went to kiss me good night on the lips, and turned my face so his mouth hit my cheek. I was mortified, he was mortified. I cannot believe I did that. I will always remember that look of horror and hurt on his face.

“I am sorry, Jamie, I have been drinking red wine, and I didn’t want you to smell it on my breath.”

I doubt if he bought that. He just said “Good night” and walked away like a wounded, emaciated prisoner of war. It broke my heart.

Why had I turned my face? Was I afraid of the man I lived with now? The man who made me so very happy? Was this the way it was going to be from now on? Was I going to cringe quietly when he touched me? Was this part of our lives over? I loved the man, but now was afraid to be in love with him. I wanted to be with him in so many ways, but was afraid now. He was going to be taken from me. I had to stop thinking like that. I had to find a cure. Maybe it was the red wine, maybe it was the memory of the look on his face when I turned my face away from him, maybe it was sinking in, he was dying. I slid down the wall in front of the refrigerator, with my red wine glass in one hand, and the bottle in the other, and just sat on the floor. Unable to move, unable to get up. And a deep cry just came out of nowhere. I don’t know if he heard it or not, or if people passing by in the hallway heard it. It was a deep cry; my throat hurt from it.

That was the last time I would ever cry or show emotion for the rest of Jamie’s life. I shut down that part of me. I was afraid to feel. I had a mission that was more important than what was killing me inside. My needs were no longer important.

Copyright c 2006

John Loan/Elizabeth T. (Betsy) Gilbert

All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,

rewritten

or redistributed.

  The law doesn’t look kindly on thieves or make much distinction between them. The corporate CEO who knowingly cheats thousands of trusting stockholders is just as guilty as the looter who runs out of a store with an armful of home electronics or the welfare mother who steals food to feed her hungry children. There are no gray areas, at least not in the unseeing eyes of Lady Justice.

  I admit to being a thief. As someone who has always believed what a wise person told me years ago—that children are victims and adults are volunteers—I don’t make excuses for it. I volunteered, I got caught, I went to jail. But the journey is the story and I’m the only person alive with the facts to tell it the way it happened.

  That journey started on January 4, 1995 when Jamie Nesky--the man I fully intended to spend a long and happy life with--got the diagnosis we had feared and dreaded and denied for weeks: he was HIV positive and he had no medical insurance. We’d made it through a Christmas holiday that turned from joy to anxiety as we waited--not knowing, afraid to say aloud what we were both thinking, keeping thoughts to ourselves that we had always shared before. Jamie paced endlessly through the apartment and worried. I drank too much and worried. Neither of us slept.

  The official news put an end to the waiting, but started a desperate search to find a cure for Jamie that would take me down a road I never could have foreseen. We hadn’t told anyone about Jamie’s HIV test and we both put on a great act for the friends who stopped in over the holidays. It was tough to wear those happy faces but although we found ourselves resenting the high spirits of our friends, we couldn’t blame them because we had chosen to keep the secret until we actually knew something.

Our apartment was thick with anxiety, clouding the air between us as we waited for the results. The fourth of January finally came. I arrived at the hospital first, spied the doctor who had administered the test and had just walked over to remind him who I was when Jamie came through the

door. Although I saw him every day, I was struck by how tired and thin he looked. He insisted that he wanted me in the room with him and the doctor didn’t object. We went into an office where the doctor gave us

the blunt news we knew was coming but had denied for weeks.

  “ I wish I could give you the answer you want to hear, but I can’t, “he said, sympathy creeping into the professionally clinical voice. “Your test came back positive for HIV.” The world stopped, my life stopped, everything stopped. The heavy silence that followed his words was finally broken by Jamie.

  “Am I going to die?” he asked, dread making his voice tight.

  The doctor regained his detached face. “I recommend that you see a specialist right away, Mr. Nesky. You’re a very sick man and you need to see a physician who specializes in HIV. Your T-cell count is down to zero and frankly, I’m surprised that this is your first incident. I can’t stress enough how critical it is for you to see someone immediately…today if at all possible.”

  Well, there it was. Jamie began to cry quietly as I stood beside him, unable to speak, barely able to breathe, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing. What the hell did I know about T-cell counts or anything else involving this killer disease? I felt anger and hatred pumping through me—for HIV, for AIDS, for the doctor and for God.

  “Mr. Loan,” the doctor said loudly, maybe for the third time, I don’t know. “Here’s are some prescriptions and the name of an excellent HIV specialist.” He handed me several slips of paper. I looked at them as he edged us toward the door.

  “I wish you the best of luck,” he said solemnly as he motioned for the next patient to enter his domain.

  Jamie and I walked out to the waiting room, then he stopped, turned and stared into my face.

  “Are you going to leave me, John?” Amazing that such a simple question could break my heart into a million pieces. It brought me back to the stark light of reality.

  “Of course I’m not going to leave you,” I almost shouted, putting my arm around his thin shoulders. “I love you. We’re going to beat this thing and we’re going to do it together. “ But that wasn’t what I was thinking. Going through my head like a perverse mantra was when is the man I love going to die and leave me? How long do we have?

  I slammed the door on those thoughts, at least for the time being. I knew I had to save Jamie. The disease was not going to win. There was a cure out there somewhere and I was going to find it. How immature and egotistical that sounds now, but that’s what desperation does to people. A child carries an adult to safety in a life-threatening fire. A healer touches the leg of a crippled woman and she can walk again. I would find a way to make Jamie well.

  He took the doctor’s advice and called the specialist, making an appointment for the following day. Then I told him to go back to work.

  “After what he just told me?” He looked at me incredulously.

  “Yes,” I answered in my most authoritative tone. “We have to keep on moving. I’ll take care of this and you’re going to be okay.”

  Say what you will about denial. Sometimes, it can be your best friend in the world. I sent Jamie off to work, jumped into a taxi and got out at the corner of 85th and York. There were three choices in front of me: a pharmacy, a very inviting liquor store and a small restaurant that had a full bar. As the 12-steppers say, I was thirsty. While I won’t say I needed a drink, I wanted one in the worst way so I headed toward the restaurant, got as far as the entrance, then changed course and walked into the pharmacy. There would be time to self-medicate later. I gave the woman at the counter the paperwork—six prescriptions in all—and waited. She asked about insurance, I told her the medications were for a friend and watched as she rang up the total. Then she looked up at me.

  “It’s…uh…expensive,” she mumbled.

  “How much?” I asked brusquely, knowing that the ninety dollars in my pocket wouldn’t come close to covering it.

  “It’s $1200,” she said, looking down as if embarrassed at the amount.

  I only paused for a second. I knew what I was going to do, what it was inevitably going to lead to, how I was about to break one of the commandments that had been such a big part of my Baptist upbringing and what the punishment for my sins would be. And even if God happened to blink and miss my transgression, the law sure as hell wouldn’t be caught napping.

  “Put it on the card,” I said, slapping down my corporate American Express plastic savior with the name ‘Alliance Capital’ boldly embossed on the front.

************************************************************************

  It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. At least not in the dreams about life in New York City that got me through a childhood and adolescence I don’t look back on with a lot of fondness. New York was my Emerald City. It was—at least in my unsophisticated adolescent mind--everything Richmond, Virginia wasn’t. The town that clucked disapprovingly at the sissy boy, then showed its disapproval of the obviously gay young man he became in much darker, more violent ways had never felt like home and I wanted out. To me, Richmond was just a stop along the way to my real life. New York was where it waited.

  But the wait seemed like a lifetime to the boy who was, as Paul Simon sang, “itching like a finger on the trigger of a gun” to get out. Shuffling from school to school, living at various times with my mother and stepfather and my father and stepmother, looking for acceptance kept me always on the edge of anxiety. The Boy Scouts and paper routes I threw myself into never felt right and it was only during my sophomore year in high school that I finally came into my own. I got a part in the school play and that was that. Overnight, the outsider became popular, acting in every production and planning for a life in the New York theatre. When I was elected president of the drama club and won both Outstanding Theatre Student and Thespian of the Year awards my senior year, I figured I was on my way.

  But I needed a plan. Lying to my mother that my class was taking its trip to New York, I flew there on my own, got a room at the Edison Hotel in Times Square and knew this was where I belonged. Sitting alone in the Radio City movie theatre, watching “Mame” with Lucille Ball, I felt at home for the first time in my life and knew that I’d be back for good. Soon.

  Like a lot of my classmates, I cried at high school graduation. I would miss the friends I’d made and the acceptance I’d finally found, but this chapter was closing. I packed my bags, said my goodbyes and headed for my real home: New York City.

  “I’ll pay it back before anyone notices,” I told myself as I left the pharmacy, clutching the paper bag that held Jamie’s salvation. “It’s not that much money. Alliance Capital moves millions of dollars every day. Twelve hundred dollars is a drop in the ocean.”

  Funny how easy it is to rationalize and justify when we’re bullshitting ourselves. And how hard it is to ignore the chorus of voices--guilt and doubt and fear—that scream incessantly from all sides.