2001: When Everything Blah Blah Blah

[Is anyone else tired of reading and hearing about how 2001 was When Everything Changed? The references, of course, are to the terrorist attacks of September 11th. For me, everything started changing at the end of 2000, but if you want to know, When Everything Changed was about two and a half months before 9/11.]

[For the sake of this diary’s symmetry, it really starts the last time I saw or spoke to my friend Susanna, with whom I’d been friends since junior high and with whom I went to Mexico in 1996. In May 1999, she was visiting San Francisco for the day (math teachers’ conference at Moscone Center), and we went to dinner at Puerto Alegre, a Mexican joint in the Mission with delightful margaritas. She and I ironed out a couple of long-held misunderstandings about that trip and other things, and I believed we were back on track to the odd but comforting friendship that has been a part of my life for so long. The day after, I couldn’t get out of bed, except to stagger to the bathroom to expel what felt like every innard from every orifice imaginable. I missed almost two weeks of work, lost about fifteen pounds, and the glands on both sides of my neck swelled up alarmingly. I hadn’t been to a doctor since my negative HIV test two and a half years before, and was forced to choose, quickly and pretty much at random, a new doc on my new employer’s insurance. I was given the name of a cobwebby geezer with offices in the Outer Sunset, a good 45-minute streetcar ride from home. He diagnosed me with an unspecified virus, possibly linked to a nasty case of tonsillitis, loaded me up with antibiotics, and sent me on my way. I saw him one other time while I was still sick - he didn’t have much more advice for me but to wait it out, with lots of rest and liquids. The symptoms finally went away, though the sides of my throat have never gone completely down. I consulted an ear-nose-throat doc regarding the tonsils; he didn’t recommend that the tonsils come out, and he said he didn’t know what the swelling was either. Eventually I got used to having a neck just a little fatter than before, and the occasional sore throat.]

[In August of that year, I got a job in the property management office of a large office building in San Francisco’s South of Market area, epicenter of the dot-com boom that was in its final expansion before the pop. Landlords were in a race with prospective tenants to see how high commercial rents could go, and many of our tenants spent foolish amounts of money on very glitzy digs. The building sold in the summer of 2000, and almost immediately, things began to contract. The new landlords were dismayed to discover that, not only could they not find new tenants to gouge at the astronomically high rates that had been the crux of their business plan, the companies that were already in the building were folding faster than (insert clever poker reference of your choice). As the new year dawned, the real estate industry knew what it would take the rest of the business world a few more months to figure out: the party was over.]

[Me, I never really liked the industry much, and my new boss and I clashed on an almost daily basis. He knew I didn’t want to be there, and he wasn’t the type to let even the lowest rung on his petty little ladder of an office do just enough of the menial labor to get by. I spent much of the last half of 2000 and the first half of 2001 complaining about my job, and finally, my friend Violet convinced me to do what she had done the previous year: get the hell out, and join her at a tiny, progressive law school where the atmosphere wasn’t about how much you could get, but about how much you could give.]

[When my employers changed health insurance carriers in the spring, I decided not to accept coverage, and went on John’s plan instead - except for the joint checking account, maybe our most concrete evidence of domestic partnership to date. At about the time my LSAT scores were being sent to New College, a minor condition occasioned my first visit to a doctor at the big, impersonal-but-thorough Kaiser clinic; almost as an afterthought, I got tested a second time for HIV.]

[June 27, 2001. John and I went back to Kaiser together. We talked a bit about the possibilities, but knew that this was a big enough deal that we wouldn’t know how to cope until the moment. He waited in the lobby, and I saw the nurse practitioner. She talked to me a bit, looked straight into my eyes, and said, “I’m sorry, but your test came back positive.”]

[I was calm. I asked if she could get John and explain the full ramifications with both of us present. She brought him in and he held my hand as we talked about the next steps. It’s hard to remember my exact emotional state at that moment: I recall feeling like the room was receding before me, and there definitely were tears in the corners of my eyes. John looked very solemn, and listened calmly and quietly to everything the N.P. had to say. We determined that I most likely got it shortly before I was so sick in 1999, and that it was imperative to get John’s and my full clinical pictures as soon as possible. The N.P. (it feels weird labeling her that way, as we are now on a very comfortable, first-name basis) made the immediate arrangements, gave us some support suggestions (San Francisco Kaiser, not surprisingly, has a fairly extensive HIV/AIDS program), and we left.]

[In the next few weeks, we both had lots of blood drawn, John got a positive diagnosis as well, and I was put on a combination of three different drugs. My viral levels dropped almost at once (John’s were such that he didn’t need any drugs), and, as of the last test, I’m at that target level called undetectable. I’m due to go in the next week or two for more tests, as is John. I haven’t felt any ill-effects, except for very vivid dreams from one of the drugs, which the N.P. says is typical.]

[We don’t know who gave it to whom, or when; we know that there’s been opportunity on both sides, and the absolute foundation of our everyday coping is there is absolutely no blame. We’re in this together, and it just doesn’t matter. The thing that has surprised me most, I suppose, is how it still hasn’t been the major psychic catastrophe that I always thought it might be. While of course I think about it one way or another every day, the sense of otherness that has always surrounded People Who Have It has failed to materialize when I think of myself as being HIV-positive. Part of it, of course, is that about a week after I found out, I got my acceptance to law school. As my tone suggested when I wrote about it back then, I was thrilled to be going back to school, and this (maybe absurdly, in the long run) counterbalanced the bad news. I was still riding high from doing much better on the LSAT than I expected, and, so far, law school has been a hugely rewarding experience. I needed that, especially after the inglorious way I ended my undergrad years, and it’s been everything I hoped it would be, and more.]

[My close friends, a couple of people with whom I’ve corresponded as a result of this journal, and our N.P. have all given me variations on the theme that this is a bump in the road, but the road still stretches in front of me. (I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the other friends I’ve met via this diary in the last couple of years for not being able to come out and tell you about this sooner (you know who you are.) I just didn’t have it in me to write about it until now. Better late than…oh, never mind. I still haven’t told my family, and that’s going to be huge.)]

[I’ve been tremendously lucky not to have faced death very often in my life. I remember the deaths of both my paternal grandparents, and my mom’s stepfather (who was Grandpa to me), but they all lived to ripe old ages, and their deaths didn’t affect me that much. I have been tremendously lucky not to have lost friends to AIDS or anything else; I know there are plenty of people reading this who have faced this crisis again and again. In the abstract, the flashy, Doc-Marten’d, ACT-UP/Queer Nation attitude of the early 90’s mostly earned a shrug from me; while I was aware of the issues and the outrages, and agreed with the goals of the activists, I was never deeply moved to participate. In 1996, I did try to date, briefly, a guy who I knew ahead of time to have AIDS (read all about it), and still believe that the viewpoints I had then about the segregation between those who have it and those who don’t was surprisingly mature, especially looking at it from the other side, as it were.]

[So. 2001 was indeed the year that everything changed. However, this damned police action that calls itself a war (as opposed to Korea and Vietnam, which were the opposite), has left me more numb than anything. I deeply disagree with the way our government has handled almost every step of its response to the attacks of 9/11; I’m still not clear on what our objectives are in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, or the rest of the Arab/Muslim world; I’m not entirely sure what Giuliani did that was so damn fantastic in New York (is being mayor really only about simply being here, there, and everywhere? If so, Willie Brown is just as good as Rudy…); and while al-Qaeda were obviously deeply, tragically, evilly misguided in their actions, the U.S.’s casual neglect (on one end) and malicious activities (on the other), not just in the Middle East, but around the world, have earned the enmity of a great percentage of the human race. No amount of star-spangled benefit concerts will make me feel otherwise. The only differences between the 9/11 attacks and the thousands of other terrorist deaths that have occurred throughout the world are the audaciousness of al-Qaeda’s acts, the number of people who were felled in one stroke, and, of course, that it happened to Americans, in our major cities.]

[Death always comes one to a customer, and if I’ve learned anything this year (and this has been a major coping mechanism for me), it’s that any of us could go at any moment. As I wrote about James Wicklow back in ’96, “he’s just as alive as I am.” I’m just as alive as you, right this very moment; any of us could step off a curb and be killed by a bus; it’s what we do, and how we live, every moment of our lives, that counts. I hope that what I’m doing at New College will prove that, however long I’m here.]

[So, good-bye, 2001, you fucker. I can’t say I’m sorry to see the last of you, but you’ve taught me a lot, and I’m a better person for having been thru you.]

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