June 14, 2007 - Issue 233

The Other Side of the Rainbow
Visiting A Friend Who Has AIDS
By K. Danielle Edwards
Guest Commentator

And it wasn’t the first time I plotted my steps, counting in my head as each landing was completed – heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe. I felt outside of my body, beyond my natural self, and viewed myself as bumbling brashly with the careless and uncoordinated steps of a toddler. I was teetering on a tightrope, rendered transparent by the muted cold tiles, the color of marsh. If I had been in the wilderness, my footing would have been of much less certain. I would have been plodding through swamps, my feet caught by vines, my flesh punctured by thorns and my psyche beaten by defiant reeds.

But this wasn’t the first time. It was all so uncomfortably familiar. It was the feeling I wanted to forget. It was something I had come to know but of which I had wished and begged for ignorance, untouchability, innocence. But the innocent life isn’t worth living. Isn’t that what they say? Oh, no, it’s something else, but that sounds much more fitting. It wasn’t the first time I had walked down a corridor that was either dark and dank or tragically resplendent from the beaming, high-wattage, industrial bulbs. The paradox was discomfiting, yet amusing at the same time. It was as though the expectation was that people walking these hallowed halls must be 1) depressed and downtrodden without a hope for recovery or redemption or 2) exceedingly optimistic in the face of opportunistic, chronic and incurable adversities.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been here. In this hospital. Or that hospital. This particular time was the most physically repugnant. The stench of sickness was the ether that embalmed this place. Entombed within it was the disinfected, sanitized scent that acted as a cover-up to one of the greatest crimes in human history. The funk of bed sores on unchanged sheets, poorly wiped asses, shock-treated malignancies and discarded IV bags proliferated. It was pungent and apologetically offensive. It reminded me of what people really are: blood and guts, interchangeable moving parts and pieces that will eventually die and decompose into their original, elemental essence.

It was a sweet sense of sickness. The air was tinged with saccharine sweetness. A fake confectionary sense, like sugar-free candy. Nurses dressed in blue frocks or scrubs emblazoned with cartoon characters feigned preoccupation with tidying up supplies, staring into computer monitors or rushing past, eyes fixed straight forward, on anything but me. I reason they knew I was looking at them, looking into their eyes, but their avoidance made the day easier, more livable. After all, it’s easier to look at the swollen-bellied babes from the other side of the world on TV than right before your eyes, within arm’s reach.

But on this day, the health horrors of indie films, debatable documentaries and doled-out dramas was real. Face-to-face. Touchable. Breathable. Palpable with a pulse. Today, I felt fortified, like this visit would be easier than the others. This was not old hat, but I had been here before. I had read enough, perused enough, researched enough to get through this. I had looked up anti-retrovirals and naturopathic therapies. I had found a Web site that had the registered patent for the cure and contacted a man who claimed he had saved himself with it. I scrolled through message boards and online chats. I … I … I … had done it all. All that I could. Or so I thought, with selfish selflessness that the well impart when dealing with the acutely ill.

This is what AIDS does to people. The uninfected and the diagnosed both go through hell. No one is left untouched by the whips and chains of this sadist dolled up for the 21st century.

Again, this wasn’t the first time I had been here, taking calculated, measured steps and repeatedly checking the time on my cell phone before I entered the room. It was a quiet quarantine. Of course, they would never call it that. But the sign hastily taped to the door made its own declaration: “WARNING. No pregnant women. No women of child-bearing age. No children. No people with contact lenses. Extra precautions required. Please see nurse before entering room.” I looked for a nurse but could find none. I walked back down the hall and turned two corners before I found one, busy doing nothing.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I am here to visit a friend and there is a sign on the door. It says to see a nurse before entering the room.”

“Um, yeah. Well, you need to put on a mask,” the nurse with frizzy extension braids said and turned her back to me, callous and cold.

It was as if she already knew why I was here: whom I wanted to see and which affliction he had.

Friends and family of AIDS patients are just as stigmatized as the harborers of the pestilence themselves. We get looks of sympathy and words of approximated empathy from those who remain untouched by this disease. The closest many people have come to this, the ebb and flow of hope and despair, the high and low tides of life and death, are public service announcements, headlines in the news and movies like Philadelphia and And the Band Played On.

I meandered down the hall in careful, yet speedy steps. I walked cautiously, as if I was trying not to fall down. I couldn’t really tell if it was because my heels were too high to be trying to maintain austerity on the slick floor, or if my heart just couldn’t take it. And being methodical was the only way to prevent passing out. Slow and speedy. Speedy because I needed to get back to work? Or speedy because I wanted to get this over with, to just have this nightmare end? This nightmare that keeps me bug-eyed and bloodshot during waking hours.

I entered the wing where he was stationed. The wing was somehow tucked away, distanced, from the rest of the floor. It was its own nook. This effect could have resulted from architectural license lending ingenuity to an otherwise staid structure. Or it could have been at the request of the moneymen and backers of this hospital. Perhaps they said to each other, “Well, you knew we have to have a place to put them. We can’t throw ‘em in a closet. So this is the next best thing.” I imagine them patting each other on the back and puffing cigars and guffawing with expressions of intense mirth, as they pretended to pore over the pre-construction blueprints.

The door leading to the two-room wing quickly closed behind me. It was one of those heavy steel doors that required some effort to push open, but its weight rushed it to close. I felt like there was trickery at play, a real mind f**k, like visitors to these people would never get out. They, too, would be quarantined. I saw a cart loaded with assorted medical supplies, and I fumbled for a mask. First drawer: bandages and dressings. Second drawer: tourniquets and tape. Third drawer: masks. Finally, the masks. Eureka. Which one was I supposed to choose? There were the standard blue ones and others with a tube attached that looked like oxygen masks. I’d watched enough medical melodramas to figure this out: go blue. I stretched and pulled the mask over my nose and mouth. I wiggled it to make sure it was fixed and firm. Then I took a deep breath, the last I’d take before the air became thick and hot from wearing the mask. Oh, how we wear the mask! Paul Lawrence Dunbar was really onto something.

I touched the door handle lightly and gingerly pushed it. The door opened just as tentatively as I felt. And I saw him, the luminescence of my old life, my non-blood brother, my friend ‘til the end. His back was facing me. He was so … small. Delicate and thin. The cheap, thin hospital sheets enveloped him. It reminded me of a murder mystery, as if there wasn’t a real body lying in those sheets, but a fabricated decoy, instead. Here he was. This was not how it was supposed to be. I was glad he wasn’t facing me.

He was going to be a nouveau riche writer. He was going to have a fabulous studio apartment in New York. He was going to have a column in The Village Voice and be featured in Black Issues Book Review. His weekends would be booked with spoken-word performances and critical readings of his works. Bookstores would host invite-only meet-and-greets for him. And he’d be the composer of the hottest anthology of Black gay mini-memoirs about the struggles of double-consciousness, the blight of being a two-fold minority and the specter of continued rejection and denial.

He and I would be tight like unrelenting might, tight as in totally together, in our personal and professional lives. I was going to be the sexy siren of new Black literature. Maybe a professor with waist-length dreads, a big ass, perky tits and the coolest spectacles ever created. I would write essays about the role of erotica in The Color Purple and the connection between Salvador Dali’s surrealism and the ethos of hip-hop born out of disenfranchisement.

Yes, our projections were lofty. Our forecasts were grandiose, but possible. But this is the story of Black boys forced to the fringes, the ones with too much shimmy and shake to be openly loved, accepted and embraced by the insular Black community. The ones whose eyes glint too much and whose smiles make them a girl’s best confidant. And here he lay. His eyes were closed. His expression was a cross between peace and pain. I couldn’t think rationally, didn’t know what to say, but in my mind, this played:

You were there during my formative years
Not when I learned to sit up, crawl, walk
But during the formative years that formed
The foundation of my frame
The pulp of my personhood
The synthesis of my soul!
Don’t go!

He turned around. I hadn’t made much of a sound. Maybe it was those African ancestral sixth-sense sensations that let him onto my presence.

“Hey, baby,” I said. I walked over the chair next to the bed. “You sleep?”

“Hey …” he said sluggishly. “How you doin’?”

“Alright. It took me forever to find your room. This hospital is like a city.”

He nodded and softly smiled.

“How you feelin’?”

“Oh, I’m alright,” he said. “I might be going home today. I need to call the nurse.”

“For what?”

“Medicine for nausea.”

“Oh.”

Shortly after he’d pressed the button and made his request, the nurse came in. She was jolly and blonde, happy to be helpful. She, too, wore a mask.

She loaded the liquid into the IV. “Sweetie, let me know if you need anything else, okay? Oh, what’s this?” she said, picking up a plastic, measured specimen cup. “You got something in here?”

“Yeah, it came up earlier,” he said.

They were collecting sputum to determine which kind of pneumonia he had. Her gloved hand picked up with vial. “I’ll send this right down to the lab,” she said and slid out.

There we sat. The TV was on. It was on what I call “hospital TV,” which is a package of channels people never watch when they’re at home. It was like forced viewing. There were few options and no alternatives, other than to turn it off.

I talked about my job, mentioned my daughter and Black men in the closet. He was much more engaged than I had expected. I appreciated that. But I always felt like he tried to be a buffer. He tried to protect me. I thought he didn’t let me know how good, or how bad, things really were. I thought he played down his symptoms or lightened up the opportunistic infections. But the cover-up was crashing down.

The food tray was practically untouched.

“Ugh, that food, just ugh …” he said.

He was still recognizable. In fact, he still looked mostly like himself. He’d always been thin; we had jokingly nicknamed him “Stix” in our preadolescent days. But now he was skeletal. And this was punctuated by his 6’3” height. His normally bushy head of recalcitrant natural naps was shaved down into a mohawk. This mohawk was not dizzying and defiant; instead, it was a lone, soft, feathery tuft of hair, like down. The pallor of his face was pronounced by foreign blotches on his normally smooth-like-lacquer, brown-sugared, buttery-Black, skin.

But the eyes had me.

In them I saw injustice, unfairness, irreverence at this sham and resignation. Then I looked over and saw a copy of the latest issue of Vogue and knew that he still had it. Whatever it was. It was that “it” that he and only he could ever have. That indescribable, indefinable thing that coursed through his veins and made everyone always take notice, whether they wanted to or not.

As much as things had changed, they were still very much the same. He was my comfort zone, the ever-ready reminder of who I really was. He knew my innards and the chemical composition of the underlying neuroses that still haunted me. He could read me like a book. And he could read me to put me in check.

I recently watched Paris Is Burning again. They were talking about what it meant to “read” someone. It was so funny. My husband wondered why I loved that film so much. I’d grow giddy and smiley whenever I saw it. I had formerly been a fag hag, and I guessed it still was nestled in the nucleus of my being. I used to say that every straight woman needs a good gay friend. And I suppose I still felt that way.

Paris Is Burning also made me sad. Beyond the posing and posturing, there was pain. Beyond being fabulous and fierce, there was famine of the heart. Beyond being bold and beautiful, there existed brokenness. The movie reminded me of my friend. So much glittering potential turned down to simmer and slowly snuffed out.

It was time for me to go. I looked longingly at my friend and touched his leg.

“You are so … small,” I said. It wasn’t what he needed to hear, but it was honest. I was not antagonizing. I was empathizing, for I truly felt just a fraction of what he felt. I was an observer; he was the experience, or maybe even the experiment. I felt so powerless and pitiful and just plain f**ked up that I couldn’t do anything about this.

I left, my soul rejuvenated because I had seen him, yet languishing to spend time with him doing something else. Like drinking cocktails or downing chilled coffee confections at the bookstore that people frequent to see and be seen. Or maybe we could go shopping. I needed to get some new slacks for work. And then he could derail my purpose and encourage me to buy something truly fantastic and impractical instead. Or we could go get something pierced just for the hell of it. We’d quote Walt Whitman and Essex Hemphill. Maybe we could gallivant downtown and paint the town red, Black and green; No, we wouldn’t stop there. We’d airbrush hues of pumpkin, sunflowers, indigo, plums and aquamarine, too.

We would be in bliss. Never wanting for anything or needing anyone else. All of our dreams made real on this, The Other Side of the Rainbow.

K. Danielle Edwards is a Nashville-based writer, poet and communications professional. She is the author of Stacey Jones: Memoirs of Girl and Woman, Body & Spirit, Life and Death (2005) and is the founder and creative director of The Pen: An Exercise in the Cathartic Potential of the Creative Act, a nonprofit creative writing project designed for incarcerated and disadvantaged populations. Click here to contact Ms. Edwards.

 

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