I get HIV, part III.

"I'm so sorry to hear it.."

"you've broken our hearts D."

"We've been looking into it, you're going to be ok."

"..."

"Jesus, I guess I should get tested."


and they did. All of them, it was still a little blurry to me just how inbred my social circles were. From tip to tip, Brevard county was grasping desperately to ensure their safety. All under the pretense that my dick was far reaching enough to contaminate their drinking water.

Or the shared crotch of central Florida.

Nights grew longer. Daytime became the time that I either slept or crawled to the mall to piss my time away hawking costumes in a seasonal halloween store. Days were when Mary went to work at her clinic to afford us the ability to pack our faces with veritable cornucopia of narcotics and cheep beer. Nights were spent stealing coldpills from wal-mart. The Disbelievers were numerous in the beginning. As the months wore on and my health deteriorated from drug abuse and malnutrition, they became fewer and less vocal. Once confident, "he's a fucking liar," became, "Oh, that whole thing just sucks man." But the party raged on. Nightly raids of whatever party we could find turned up a treasure chest of stolen underwear, tales of our friend chris hitting another roommate's equally hideous girlfriend in the face with a full beer and the like. More and more people granted me a quiet, if subtly spiteful, veneration.

Sure I was never going to get laid again. But I'll be damned if I hadn't crafted a surreal new world for myself.

The last of the true detractors, a close friend while drunk, punched me in the face and gave me a big open mouth kiss while I was bleeding. A show of solidarity I suppose. Or maybe he thought I would cave and tell him I was bluffing.

I Didn't, but it was certainly romantic to feel an overwhelming affection for a person who I typically wanted to kill for washing our dishes in the bathtub and leaving them there. While wandering around the high school campus whacked out of my mind on goofballs and penny-whistles, I saw one of my old teachers.

"Hey, I heard somethi.."

"Yup!"

"Thats awful, what are you going to d."

"Nothing!"

and I ran as far and as fast I could away from campus. I was ready to die from complications from my illness. I wanted pneumonia, kidney failure, something, anything to take elevate me from what was rapidly becoming my Leper village of an apartment. The smell of rotten food and an honest to god landslide of garbage falling from the kitchen had set an atmosphere. Someone had kicked the front door off its hinges and paint-balled our living room. There were more strangers sleeping on the wrap-around couch than friends. One night I ate a handful of Dramamine with one of the last representatives of the apartment. 30 or so pumpkins filled our living room. I stood up to make my way to my room after saying good night. Then I fell face first over a pumpkin, the sound of my teeth clicking like an ice cube bouncing off the tile. I stood up, my friend trying to comfort me but unable to make the walk himself.

I fell many more times before I gave up.

Mary came to steal my roommates possessions the next day. Not thinking, I helped.

Then I got into another car, and fled laughing with my mercurial douche baggery.

I slept on a floor with Rhino and 4 other people in a 20 x 20 studio apartment on the beach. Cool beach air and a mason-jar filled with a C+C+C/Dramamine cocktail.

I hid from Mary. I hid from HIV. Not many came to visit. We wandered around. An old friend stabbed me with a blow-dart in the thigh. I got into an argument with one of the roommates.

so I left. I stood over my pumpkin friend and his girlfriend in what had been my room, from just before dawn til just after first light. I watched them sleep. I breathed to match their breathing. I sat and looked out the window over the somehow beautiful lawns of our crack village. I smelled rotten pumpkin all around, the pungent smell of a halloween aborted before the first doorbell was rung. I looked through my desk for my switchblade which someone stole from me in my week or so absence. I packed my backpack. I washed. My friends all woke up. They asked where I was going.

"North."

I rode north through truck-stops with people named Bernie, Clyde or Peacemaker.

regardless of that story.

when I came back, I had finally seen New York.

I wasn't dating Mary.

I didn't live in a hole with rotten pumpkins on the floor.

and

I didn't have HIV.

now all i had to do was convince everyone else.