I was worried that a good friend might have a tumour. He went for an MRI, and we found out that he was fine; but the next day a different friend tested positive after his visit to the Clinic; so it is his life, instead, that has been turned inside out. What a bloody mess.
The world gets rearranged so quickly. He is not very old, my newly positive friend. He is, in fact, quite young; and foolish in the way that the very young are, out in the world on their own recognizance for the first time, getting into trouble and making bad decisions. Confusing distinctions like sex and love. Confusing them, and spinning like a needle at a magnetic pole, as you can; as you do when you can feel your attention being pulled outwards by all the things so worthy of attention, the beautiful things on the horizon. And now he doesn’t know where to look at all. The horizon isn’t where he thought it was. Negative and positive not just words, but actual polarities.
I received a phone call the day he found out. He left a message asking me to call him back. It was just a few words, but you can hear the tone in the voice, something bad enough that it makes your heart skip a beat in panic. I’m a terrible one for returning phone calls in a timely fashion, but I dialled him immediately. “I got some bad news,” he said, and my soul shrunk a little. I collapsed a little inwards as I tried to think.
He (Midway, let’s call him) is the first friend I’m aware of to have been diagnosed during the course of a friendship. It’s hard to know what to say, especially to someone so obviously still assembling their abilities and tools to deal with life and the world. You don’t know what they’ve already thought of, what they’ve sorted out for themselves; and you don’t want to patronize, or drown someone in cliché; but there are also things that you need to say, and things that people need to hear, after a doctor detonates bad news from behind a desk, sitting in a sterile office. This is not the end. Things are not what they were. You’re not going to die today.
But the diagnosis is a fatality. It kills that certain mystery that wanders about, haunts especially the gay man’s life. The spectral question that swings over the consummation of all those sexual fancies, it gets released; and you suddenly know what’s most likely to do you in, in the end. If you ignore the likelihood of buses and trains, or terrorist explosions mid-air, the seal of your death gets stamped on your passport out. It becomes something to hold and look at. Stare at. Something very heavy indeed.
So what do you say? Illness is so arbitrary, so moral-less, that unless you can believe in a vengeful God, there’s nowhere to really point the finger. Everyone can be careful, and take precaution, cover penises in latex -- or every piece of furniture in cellophane, wear Kleenex boxes on your feet -- but you cannot take a hold of all the variables; the microscopic world is beyond our ability to manage. Ultimately, you can only play the odds, imagine the likelihood of running into unfavourable circumstances, and hope for the best. Worse things happen, I could say that. Worse things happen to better people, all the time; and something’s going to kill us all, in the end.
“Honey, I’m so sorry,” was what I settled on. “What do you need?”
“Hugs,” Midway said.
It is heavy, whatever it is or turns out to be: skulking tumour, broken part or invisible virus. It’s a dense presence warping the field, drawing the fabric down like that lead marble on the sheet, showing us where all thoughts go; the gravity-well of a designated future. You have to do things differently, now. Every time you think of the future, there is a point you get drawn to, unavoidably. That’s what can ruin a life. If you can’t find a way to accommodate the change, the weight of probable cause can make you lose it. You can fight the fact and lose it.
It was such a sunny day for bad news. Somewhere, someone is cheerful, I thought.
The spectre of the degenerate alphabet had to make it in here sooner or later. I have sat down to write about the stacked letters (stacked in the senses of connotation and fairness; loaded in the sense of how dangerous three characters can be, how three characters can lead to four, and how you are tested on them); yes, been at the computer a few times, and the attempts have not come off well. It’s a morass in there, all the stigmas interlaced with fear and confusion. These are viruses that are identified with morality, and so many self-righteous opinions in the way, secular and non.
You can’t avoid HIV in the sex industry. You have to think about it all the time. You have to worry about it all the time. We are all cautious, or say we are. I only really know what I do, the care I take when I’m working and playing. I go through condoms like water. I use them for friggin’ everything anal – but I’m not obsessive, double bagging or fretting over a little oral-genital contact. My threshold of concern hovers around what I see as the likelihood of infection, from all the things that I’ve read, the advice of my doctor; and I also have an unwillingness to live a life paranoid – I prefer to live it practical. Others have different lines drawn. I worry about the really young ones, those that believe that they don’t have to give it a concern, because it hasn’t touched them yet. They don’t know, and no one has died; and they make some foolish decisions. I’m dumbstruck when some of their ideas fall out of their mouths, the misguided illusions that appear sometimes when you’re both naked, and they just tell you to forget it. I’ve made it a point now to highlight how stupid they’re being.
“You’re going to encounter it, sooner than you’d like to.” And fervently hope that it won’t be you that gets unlucky, that you’ll play the odds, stack them in you favour, and get to walk away with just some stories and a few hickies, not unwanted visitors in the blood. We influence random chance with pragmatism.
Unless you believe in a vengeful God. I sometimes do when I’m sleepless, staring at the irrational labyrinths on the ceiling, and trying and trace a path out of the worst convolutions and dead ends. Those nights, I can’t help but picture Him with a handful of feathered atrocities, carelessly practicing His aim. Throwing darts at the human board.
Although Toby over at Vividblurry has the subject of body-dysmorphia all sewn up, I would like to say this: travelling about the globe, staying here and there, and living out of a suitcase is not the way to keep to a strict diet and gym routine. Worse, while I have no scale to measure myself on and therefore can't obsess directly about my weight, I have been exposing myself naked to strangers for money, which I figure is bound to make even the most avid gym-rat to cast a more critical eye on their own body... and I'm not anything like a gym rat at present: I haven't looked in a mirror for two weeks, and I haven't approached a barbell in four. 
