At the time, I worked as a bookkeeper, essentially, at a mid-sized company in the Nashville area. I matched vendor invoices against computer reports of products received. I had a ruler, a highlighter, and an adding machine, and I used all three of them all day long in a grey cubicle that smelled of the cigarette smoke hanging in a blue cloud over my part of the building.
This was the kind of work one was normally incredibly eager to finish for the day. But during those two weeks, when overtime was approved, I stayed late whenever I could. Not for the money, but for the beautiful, soothing distraction that tedious work can be.
In other words, my perception of the passage of time was already gigantically fucked.
Waiting for the HIV test results meant wading through the daily waters of inane discussions with people I passed in hallways and break rooms. Yet those stunningly still moments somehow survived intact. They echo through the memory of the sixty-five-year-old me as tangibly as moments created this week.
Nobody knew.
The days themselves seemed to disappear almost instantly. I would wake up, go to work, come home, sleep, and suddenly another day was gone. Then another. Somehow an entire week passed.
Yet individual moments could become stunningly still.
Every motherfucking one.
Before the blood was drawn, an African American man in the clinic waiting room had started talking to me about sports. He looked to be in his thirties, average height and build, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.
I nodded and smiled in my best Southern gentleman manner, the one that says, I am deeply engaged in this conversation with you while not really listening to a word you are saying.
It is called manners.
After a couple of minutes, he looked at me.
“You don’t watch sports, do you?”
“Why?”
“I asked you about so-and-so, and he doesn’t play for that team.”
I have no memory now of the player or the team. For all I know it could have been Mr. T.
“If you wanted to know if I was gay, why didn’t you just ask?” I said, as genteelly as any Southern boy has ever said such a thing.
He smirked and nodded.
Then they drew my blood.
For the next two weeks, I went about my normal routine while privately planning what I would do if the test came back positive.
Reports—good reporting—about what life was actually like for people with HIV and AIDS were not nearly as prevalent then as they are today. As best I could tell, there were only a handful of cities where someone might find experimental treatment, knowledgeable doctors, and some kind of community in those ghastly times.
San Francisco was the first city that came to mind.
I was twenty-four and owned very little. What I needed could fit into my white 1978 Mercury Bobcat. With the little money I had, I could drive west to a city where whatever hope existed might be found.
I had no intention of telling my family that I was HIV positive or even where I was living.
As much as the suffering of the men who had already become sick and died had scarred me, the suffering of their families haunted me too. I was not close to most of my family then, but I knew enough to understand that an HIV-positive test and whatever illness followed would bring none of us anything but additional, knife-twisting pain.
These were not merely thoughts. I began making plans.
I took clothes to Goodwill because I thought I might not need them.
I considered what I would take with me and what I could leave behind.
I did these things in what I used to call the moments in between the moments—those strange intervals that seemed to exist outside ordinary time.
You can summon them if you need to.
I certainly could then.
I used them to escape the tedium of the day and to write, in my head, a possible end-of-life story for myself.
So I worked.
I matched invoices.
I ran adding-machine tape.
I dragged a ruler down computer printouts.
I highlighted numbers.
And I waited.
My memory of the day I got my test results is as clear as any I will likely ever have.
I pulled into an open space in the parking lot on that beautiful fall day knowing I was facing the rest of my life.
The crisp air grazing my cheek seemed incredibly, almost unnaturally real. It was like seeing your first high-definition television—something that did not exist then—and discovering a picture somehow sharper than daily life.
My brain seemed to be steeped in details it would otherwise have made little note of.
When my name was called, I was escorted into a physician’s office.
He was quite handsome, taller than me, perhaps six-foot-one, with high cheekbones, light brown hair, and the most disturbingly blue eyes.
“Why did you get tested?” he asked from his side of the desk.
For a moment, I allowed myself to be puzzled by the question. Isn’t knowing the answer to a question always better than not knowing? I thought, rather naively.
“Were you exposed? Do you have a partner?” he asked.
“Oh, no. Neither, to my knowledge—in the case of the first,” I replied.
“Let me cut to the chase. You’re fine,” he said, almost in passing.
“What does that mean? I need to hear the words.”
“Negative. Non-reactive.”
I must have let out a sigh for the ages.
“I take it you’re relieved,” he said.
I am not quite sure how I managed not to reply, Of course I am, asshole.
Instead, I merely nodded in my best Southern-boy manner once again.
I was then escorted to what I was told was a social worker’s office. He, too, asked why I had chosen to get tested.
This surprised me, and I said so.
“What surprises me is how people react,” he said. “Earlier, I had a woman sitting in the chair you’re sitting in now, crying because she was HIV positive.”
Then, smirking, he added, “Why are you surprised? You’re a needle user and a prostitute,” recounting it in the way one might tell an anecdote at a cocktail party.
I gathered the written test results and the literature they gave me and left the building.
I drove home.
Interestingly, relieved as I was, I did not feel that I had somehow “made it”—that I was guaranteed to remain HIV negative for the rest of my life.
What I understood instead was that remaining negative was now much more a matter of what I had some control over, and not simply a matter of having been born into this very strange and particular point in history.
I drove that white 1978 Mercury Bobcat for another two years and several thousand miles before trading it.
More than enough time and miles to have made it to San Francisco.
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