209: Fear
It started as the echo of a ghost of a rumor, I don't remember where I heard it first. Passed around at tables serving fashionable little cocktails, or traded over the open mouths of pints of reclaimed urine masquerading as beer, or scratched onto the stall walls of the bathrooms below phone numbers and lewd drawings. If it was spoken it was said in whispers. Have you heard? People are getting sick.
People are getting sick, and they're not getting better.
In the context, in those locations, 'people' meant us, honey-child, Marys, friends of Dorothy and all the other fucking terms that I have always despised. Fags and fairies and cocksuckers and rent boys and queens of all stripes, from the camp assholes to the leather daddies.
Have you heard the news, dahling?
Names came in the coming months, "people" became Jack A. and Joey T. and Brian K. and Marty R., you remember him dahling, you went home with him at that party that Lewis threw...
I don't remember the first time I heard the rumor or the first names I heard tossed around, but I do remember the first funeral I attended. Robin Cole, his name was. It was held as a fucking closed casket, because his face was a mess of the purple lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, and because people were running scared. Can you get it from the dead? Who knows? Not I, said the Fly. Not I.
'It.' It didn't have a name yet, but pretty soon it had gotten itself a capital letter. Did you know that Jose has It, dahling? He's sick. He's really sick.
From rumor to fact to epidemic in three easy steps. In a handful of months.
Time flies when you're having fun, children.
***
By 1982 It had a name. By 1982 I had also been to nine funerals. Three had been Kaposi's. Three had been pneumocystis pneumonia, PCP as we grew to call it to spare ourselves syllables in casual conversation. (There were many such abbreviations, a secret language for the doomed.) One had been tuberculosis. One had been suicide. One had hemorraghed to death in an emergency room after an automobile accident because the nurses wouldn't treat him. Of the nine, four had gone blind due to the additional contraction of cytomegalovirus (CMV in our secret tongue). Six could no longer swallow due to the swollen lymphs in their throats.
All of them were killed by AIDS. In forensic terms that would be the secondary cause of death.
By 1982 I had been working homicide in New York City for nearly three years. Solving murders, chasing down leads, investigating evidence, analyzing the ruined things men leave behind when they leave this world. Writing up case reports. Things like that.
One day: go to the crime scene and draw conclusions about the hand that had crushed the back of a woman's head and robbed her of her money. Formulate a theory, find a suspect, get some justice. The next day: go to the funeral of someone I had known, or slept with, or knew somebody who had slept with, and know what had crushed in that man's chest and robbed the weight from his bones and the sight from his eyes. And do nothing.
Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
With my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
***
In New York then, if you were a part of the crowd at all, you could go visit a friend in the hospital, walk through the AIDS ward, and see two other names you knew on the doors. It got so that if you hadn't seen a friend in a few months, you were essentially afraid to ask mutal acquaintances how he was doing, in case it turned out he was now pushing up daisies or blowing in the wind.
Who saw him die? I, said the Fly,
With my little eye, I saw him die...
And Jesus, the hospitals... even by the time when they should have known the fuck better, known you couldn't catch it just by breathing or touching, there were still nurses and, yes, even fucking doctors, who wouldn't come into the room of an HIV positive without a surgical mask on. They would throw away the towels that these people used, burn the bed linens. A drop of blood was enough to cue a fucking hysteria. Patients threatened to sue the hospital if they were kept in the same room with a positive. Positive, pos, pozzy. More of the secret words of those who were being told that, hey, this was God's judgment upon them, the deathly wages of their sinful ways, repent and give glory to Him for the hour of His wrath is come.
I stopped watching a fucking lot of TV for a while there.
Who caught his blood? I, said the Fish,
With my little dish, I caught his blood.
Who'll make the shroud? I, said the Beetle,
With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud.
You tell this to people and they say, well, yes, Paul, but people were scared, scared people do stupid shit. Yeah, no fucking really? Here's news: I was fucking scared too, assholes. We all were. Especially before they figured out how it transmitted and nobody really knew. Sure, you'd used a condom, but what if kissing alone had done it? Nobody knew. Nobody knew, we were all running shit-scared to death, afraid to touch, afraid to breathe. The symptoms of HIV contraction were fever, and headache, and sore throat. So imagine fucking that for a bit, why don't you: you feel a little hot and stuffy, a little phleghmy-- could be a cold, could be your goddamn death warrant. Every time you take your temperature and it's running three degrees above normal you feel sudden ice race up your spine and no matter how goddamned fucking careful you think you've been you can't help that voice that says, guess what kid, the lotto just rang your number. And you're afraid to go to the doctor and find out for sure one way or the other, because what if they refuse to help you?
We were all scared. Some of us used that as an excuse to be fucking monsters, and by this I mean both those who cut off the people they'd been best of buddies with a month before, and those who said screw it and partied unprotected like the Masque of the Red Death was upon us. Goddamn animals.
And the rest of us said, okay, and we went to the funerals until it was pretty much a social thing, see you next week? I'm sure I will--
Who'll be chief mourner?
I, said the Dove, I mourn for my love,
I'll be chief mourner.
There's a man as lives in New York, name of Charles St. Paul. A friend of mine. Once upon a time more than that, once upon a time someone who took me under his wing (dahling, honey-child), and showed me how to have a Good Time in the Big City when I was young and mildly impressionable.
(Charles is the sort who would here make an awful pun about my ass having been impressionable, anyways.)
Charles is a Queen of the Old School, Her Majesty incarnate. He speaks with a British accent, which is possibly fake, and says he used to be an actor. Or a writer, if you ask him on a Tuesday. Or perhaps it was that he was a painter, if you ask him again next week. He can't keep it straight himself who it was he was supposed to be and is always mildly offended if you bring up the disparities in his biography.
The important part, love (he will say, sipping his tea with pinky finger out), is that I was somebody.
Charles is fifty-eight now, a slight shell of a man in this old-fashioned cast-iron wheelchair from another century that he bought at some estate sale somewhere. He insists on being dressed in a velvet smoking jacket (moth-eaten now, shabby and napping, but his eyes are milky white and he doesn't know this), a thick blanket spread over his matchstick legs. He insists on once-weekly trips to Broadway, to see whatever's running, mostly so that he can deprecate it all the way home and wax nostalgic about a show he may or may not have been in thirty years ago. When I was in New York I would sometimes go with him on these trips, bitch the entire time about what a stupid old cunt he was and how outdated his opinions were. Charles smiled on those occasions, reached out and patted my hand with fingers cold as ice, and told me that I was a dear boy but an uneducated Philistine.
He was an asshole long before he had HIV. A vain, self-centered, melodramatic man, out of touch with the real world and lost in a New York where he was on first name terms with Barbara and Julie and God knows who else. And he hasn't gotten any wiser or better or less shallow in the sixteen years he has been living with It.
But he does continue to live with It.
He continues to hide the sores and sarcomas and lesions beneath the dressing gowns and smoking jackets, continues to make sure the wisps of gray hair that he's losing in chunks are neatly combed, continues to read the paper each morning and drink his Earl Grey and insist he once played opposite Noël Coward no matter how many times I point out that that was Laurence Olivier.
There is an ungodly strength in that, which only those that have seen what It does can perhaps appreciate or understand.
I haven't talked to Charles in a while. Haven't called or wrote. Busy, don't you know. One can always find reasons to not call, not visit. Case load too heavy, not enough hours in the day. But the more time goes by that I don't call to say hello, to make sure he's still threatening the sanity of modern playwrights everywhere (to say nothing of his day nurses), the harder it is to pick up the phone and dial, because the more afraid I am that I will encounter only the chorus of the disconnected line, the operator's fluid voice telling me that The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please hang up and try again.
There's so many who'd like to, lady.
And I'm tired of going to funerals.
Who'll toll the bell?
I, said the bull, because I can pull,
I'll toll the bell.
And all the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.
fandom: boondock saints
muse: paul smecker
word count: 1765
OOC: Paul is speaking here of the 1980s, but AIDS remains a lethal and incurable disease today. 33 million people worldwide are currently estimated to be HIV positive. If you find yourself in a position this year to help out financially, the AIDSResearch.org website is an A-ranked charitable organization seeking a cure. Money's not the only way you can make a difference-- many organizations desperately need volunteers who can give a little time. And failing that, we can all take a moment to remember, even in the midst of our happy fandom lives, that for hundreds of thousands of people, gay and straight, white and black, rich and poor, this is still a desperate, life-consuming issue.
People are getting sick, and they're not getting better.
In the context, in those locations, 'people' meant us, honey-child, Marys, friends of Dorothy and all the other fucking terms that I have always despised. Fags and fairies and cocksuckers and rent boys and queens of all stripes, from the camp assholes to the leather daddies.
Have you heard the news, dahling?
Names came in the coming months, "people" became Jack A. and Joey T. and Brian K. and Marty R., you remember him dahling, you went home with him at that party that Lewis threw...
I don't remember the first time I heard the rumor or the first names I heard tossed around, but I do remember the first funeral I attended. Robin Cole, his name was. It was held as a fucking closed casket, because his face was a mess of the purple lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, and because people were running scared. Can you get it from the dead? Who knows? Not I, said the Fly. Not I.
'It.' It didn't have a name yet, but pretty soon it had gotten itself a capital letter. Did you know that Jose has It, dahling? He's sick. He's really sick.
From rumor to fact to epidemic in three easy steps. In a handful of months.
Time flies when you're having fun, children.
***
By 1982 It had a name. By 1982 I had also been to nine funerals. Three had been Kaposi's. Three had been pneumocystis pneumonia, PCP as we grew to call it to spare ourselves syllables in casual conversation. (There were many such abbreviations, a secret language for the doomed.) One had been tuberculosis. One had been suicide. One had hemorraghed to death in an emergency room after an automobile accident because the nurses wouldn't treat him. Of the nine, four had gone blind due to the additional contraction of cytomegalovirus (CMV in our secret tongue). Six could no longer swallow due to the swollen lymphs in their throats.
All of them were killed by AIDS. In forensic terms that would be the secondary cause of death.
By 1982 I had been working homicide in New York City for nearly three years. Solving murders, chasing down leads, investigating evidence, analyzing the ruined things men leave behind when they leave this world. Writing up case reports. Things like that.
One day: go to the crime scene and draw conclusions about the hand that had crushed the back of a woman's head and robbed her of her money. Formulate a theory, find a suspect, get some justice. The next day: go to the funeral of someone I had known, or slept with, or knew somebody who had slept with, and know what had crushed in that man's chest and robbed the weight from his bones and the sight from his eyes. And do nothing.
Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
With my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
***
In New York then, if you were a part of the crowd at all, you could go visit a friend in the hospital, walk through the AIDS ward, and see two other names you knew on the doors. It got so that if you hadn't seen a friend in a few months, you were essentially afraid to ask mutal acquaintances how he was doing, in case it turned out he was now pushing up daisies or blowing in the wind.
Who saw him die? I, said the Fly,
With my little eye, I saw him die...
And Jesus, the hospitals... even by the time when they should have known the fuck better, known you couldn't catch it just by breathing or touching, there were still nurses and, yes, even fucking doctors, who wouldn't come into the room of an HIV positive without a surgical mask on. They would throw away the towels that these people used, burn the bed linens. A drop of blood was enough to cue a fucking hysteria. Patients threatened to sue the hospital if they were kept in the same room with a positive. Positive, pos, pozzy. More of the secret words of those who were being told that, hey, this was God's judgment upon them, the deathly wages of their sinful ways, repent and give glory to Him for the hour of His wrath is come.
I stopped watching a fucking lot of TV for a while there.
Who caught his blood? I, said the Fish,
With my little dish, I caught his blood.
Who'll make the shroud? I, said the Beetle,
With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud.
You tell this to people and they say, well, yes, Paul, but people were scared, scared people do stupid shit. Yeah, no fucking really? Here's news: I was fucking scared too, assholes. We all were. Especially before they figured out how it transmitted and nobody really knew. Sure, you'd used a condom, but what if kissing alone had done it? Nobody knew. Nobody knew, we were all running shit-scared to death, afraid to touch, afraid to breathe. The symptoms of HIV contraction were fever, and headache, and sore throat. So imagine fucking that for a bit, why don't you: you feel a little hot and stuffy, a little phleghmy-- could be a cold, could be your goddamn death warrant. Every time you take your temperature and it's running three degrees above normal you feel sudden ice race up your spine and no matter how goddamned fucking careful you think you've been you can't help that voice that says, guess what kid, the lotto just rang your number. And you're afraid to go to the doctor and find out for sure one way or the other, because what if they refuse to help you?
We were all scared. Some of us used that as an excuse to be fucking monsters, and by this I mean both those who cut off the people they'd been best of buddies with a month before, and those who said screw it and partied unprotected like the Masque of the Red Death was upon us. Goddamn animals.
And the rest of us said, okay, and we went to the funerals until it was pretty much a social thing, see you next week? I'm sure I will--
Who'll be chief mourner?
I, said the Dove, I mourn for my love,
I'll be chief mourner.
There's a man as lives in New York, name of Charles St. Paul. A friend of mine. Once upon a time more than that, once upon a time someone who took me under his wing (dahling, honey-child), and showed me how to have a Good Time in the Big City when I was young and mildly impressionable.
(Charles is the sort who would here make an awful pun about my ass having been impressionable, anyways.)
Charles is a Queen of the Old School, Her Majesty incarnate. He speaks with a British accent, which is possibly fake, and says he used to be an actor. Or a writer, if you ask him on a Tuesday. Or perhaps it was that he was a painter, if you ask him again next week. He can't keep it straight himself who it was he was supposed to be and is always mildly offended if you bring up the disparities in his biography.
The important part, love (he will say, sipping his tea with pinky finger out), is that I was somebody.
Charles is fifty-eight now, a slight shell of a man in this old-fashioned cast-iron wheelchair from another century that he bought at some estate sale somewhere. He insists on being dressed in a velvet smoking jacket (moth-eaten now, shabby and napping, but his eyes are milky white and he doesn't know this), a thick blanket spread over his matchstick legs. He insists on once-weekly trips to Broadway, to see whatever's running, mostly so that he can deprecate it all the way home and wax nostalgic about a show he may or may not have been in thirty years ago. When I was in New York I would sometimes go with him on these trips, bitch the entire time about what a stupid old cunt he was and how outdated his opinions were. Charles smiled on those occasions, reached out and patted my hand with fingers cold as ice, and told me that I was a dear boy but an uneducated Philistine.
He was an asshole long before he had HIV. A vain, self-centered, melodramatic man, out of touch with the real world and lost in a New York where he was on first name terms with Barbara and Julie and God knows who else. And he hasn't gotten any wiser or better or less shallow in the sixteen years he has been living with It.
But he does continue to live with It.
He continues to hide the sores and sarcomas and lesions beneath the dressing gowns and smoking jackets, continues to make sure the wisps of gray hair that he's losing in chunks are neatly combed, continues to read the paper each morning and drink his Earl Grey and insist he once played opposite Noël Coward no matter how many times I point out that that was Laurence Olivier.
There is an ungodly strength in that, which only those that have seen what It does can perhaps appreciate or understand.
I haven't talked to Charles in a while. Haven't called or wrote. Busy, don't you know. One can always find reasons to not call, not visit. Case load too heavy, not enough hours in the day. But the more time goes by that I don't call to say hello, to make sure he's still threatening the sanity of modern playwrights everywhere (to say nothing of his day nurses), the harder it is to pick up the phone and dial, because the more afraid I am that I will encounter only the chorus of the disconnected line, the operator's fluid voice telling me that The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please hang up and try again.
There's so many who'd like to, lady.
And I'm tired of going to funerals.
Who'll toll the bell?
I, said the bull, because I can pull,
I'll toll the bell.
And all the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.
fandom: boondock saints
muse: paul smecker
word count: 1765
OOC: Paul is speaking here of the 1980s, but AIDS remains a lethal and incurable disease today. 33 million people worldwide are currently estimated to be HIV positive. If you find yourself in a position this year to help out financially, the AIDSResearch.org website is an A-ranked charitable organization seeking a cure. Money's not the only way you can make a difference-- many organizations desperately need volunteers who can give a little time. And failing that, we can all take a moment to remember, even in the midst of our happy fandom lives, that for hundreds of thousands of people, gay and straight, white and black, rich and poor, this is still a desperate, life-consuming issue.