Peptide T is also supposed to be good for mental alertness. I think it’s failing universally because it has done absolutely nothing for my neuropathy and I keep forgetting to take it. I assume it would make a good dance-floor drug: Hang your inhaler on a chain around your neck and sniff it as the mirrored disco balls turn round and round and as Marky Mark fails to remove his shirt for the fiftieth time.
Having given up ddI and ddC, I’m stuck with AZT, which I’ve been taking for the past three years. It looks as if I’ve exhausted the current supply of FDA-approved drugs. My extremely good friend Jan, who gives the very best advice on absolutely everything and has incredibly bad judgment when it comes to his own relationships, has been in an observational database study for the past four years. Every six months he tells a tough gray-haired grandmother how many times he has jerked off in the past six months; how many times he’s had cluster sex at a sex club or in the bushes at the Fenway in Boston; how many fingers he’s inserted into anuses (others’ and his own); how many partners he has had; how many steam-room erections he has produced and/or inspired; and so on. Surprisingly enough, quite a few of the subjects are still around after four years. One of the benefits of the study is a seminar on advances in AIDS care held by the physician leading the study. At the last seminar, the doctor stated that AZT was effective for from eighteen months to two years, and after that point it may serve only to increase the likelihood of getting lymphoma, which sort of terrifies me, especially after reading Paul Taylor’s obituary in
The New York Times.
This was Paul Taylor the irritating art critic as opposed to Paul Taylor the talented dancer and choreographer. Paul died of lymphoma. He was supposed to outlive me. I always assumed that he would dance on my grave, or, at the very least, write an irritating critical appraisal of my work. The last time I saw him was at Ron Vawter’s performance piece about Roy Cohn and Jack Smith, which has received countless accolades, although for the life of me I can’t understand why anyone would want to see a performance piece about Roy Cohn, the most evil homosexual in all history, although James Woods’s performance on HBO did intrigue me and I probably would have seen it if I had premium cable, and I was exceptionally rude to Paul. The Jack Smith portion of the evening was important and historical and relentlessly dull to me, and I was appalled, even though it was my best friend John Weir’s birthday and a large group of us had gone at his request, and when I saw Paul Taylor as the performance was letting out, he smiled and I just shrieked and left.
I knew he was positive. We were boyfriends for approximately three weeks several eons ago; I think it was sometime during the Jurassic era, shortly before the invention of fire and high-fidelity stereophonic sound. After encouraging me to accelerate the course of our relationship, Paul dumped me abruptly and completely, claiming we were “from different milieus,” a locution that proved tautological; unregretfully I have absolutely nothing in common with someone capable of using this locution without irony. Paul Taylor was infinitely inventive and infinitely cruel: He was the first person with call-waiting to put me on hold and then forget about me. But it was too late to reconcile my own personal difficulties with Paul Taylor and attain closure: Now he was dead from lymphoma.
Jan also found out at the seminar that patients generally get neuropathy after a year of ddC or ddI. I had probably taken in various doses and formulations bogus ddC, ddC Classic, and New ddI for about a year, so this seems to be par for the course. According to Rich Lynn of Treatment Action Group, reporting on the 1992 International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, “I would swear that some of these investigators were happy when they discovered that their drug caused neuropathy. Neuropathy seems to be regarded as a surrogate marker for efficacy.” Surrogate markers are not what fake law-school students use to highlight their stolen textbooks; they are alternative methods of judging a treatment’s effectiveness. The only direct marker used in the earliest studies of AIDS drugs was the clinical endpoint, otherwise known as death.
After the first signs of neuropathy I immediately stopped ddC. I switched back to ddI, the less-desirable drug, because it had to be taken on an empty stomach and ground up into powder with a mortar and pestle that I sometimes neglected to carry with me in my backpack (I hear Hoffmann-La Roche is currently working on a new formulation that’s smaller and fizzes like Alka-Seltzer), but the tingling remained. I waited a week, and then a month, for the ddC to wash out of my system. I tried a lower dose of ddI. No dice. My fingers and feet still gave off these tiny flashes as if I were being attacked by Disney-animated sprites. I tend to doubt that AZT is doing anything other than transforming my internal organs into some toxic-waste dump: I’ve clinically progressed in terms of dropping below 200 T-cells, although I’ve never looked better.
In the words of Huey Lewis, “I want a new drug.”
Ideally, I want to take an antiretroviral and an immune modulator in one, sort of like Certs, the breath and candy mint.
The next nucleoside analogue that is currently in expanded access, d4T, can also cause peripheral neuropathy. Looks like a dead-end street to me.
FLT might be the next drug. I met Jeremy at the gym a few years ago before he switched to Better Bodies and then switched back to Chelsea Gym. He told me he was taking FLT, but he wouldn’t return my phone calls because he was “emotionally unavailable” because he was in some twelve-step program: Does this make sense? I would like to find out how he’s doing on FLT, since he obviously doesn’t want to have sex with me, but it doesn’t look too likely, since I haven’t seen him at the gym for five months, which incidentally is not a good surrogate marker. I subsequently learned that he had died.
At this point I’m ready for anything: I’m ready for acupuncture. I’m ready for aromatherapy. I’m ready for meditation. I’m ready for arcane Eastern therapies. I’m ready for shark cartilage and bitter-melon enemas. I’m ready for deep-tissue massage. I’m even ready for therapy. I’ve always been ready for therapy; there just doesn’t seem to be any time. I feel that I’m getting crazier and crazier. When I threw up in the middle of the new Woody Allen movie, I’m sure it was a combination of eating a natural cereal from Los Angeles that had enough undigestible natural fiber to create a ream of recycled paper and those extremely rough camera angles.
Husbands and Wives
was not unlike a ninety-minute ride on the Cyclone at Coney Island; I thought it was the beginning of the end.
I’ve had the beginning-of-the-end feeling at least once a week for the past seven years. I’ll have a mild sore throat that doesn’t go away and I’ll think, “This is the beginning of the end.” Or I will be a little congested and find that I don’t have the full seventeen-gallon capacity in my lungs and I’ll be convinced that I fucked up the last time I inhaled pentamidine and I have a PCP breakthrough. Or I’ll get anxious and nervous and start to doubt my sanity and wonder if this is me or perhaps the first foreshadow ings of dementia and I’ll think, “This is the beginning of the end.” Or I’ll read an obituary in
The New York Times
of a playwright named Scott McPherson who died at thirty-three, younger than I am now and I’ll think, “This is the beginning of the end.” Or my hands will buzz and maybe I will get a brief stabbing pain in my feet and I’ll think, “This is the beginning of the end.”
Peptide T seems useless. My doctor recently suggested taking Elavil, an antidepressant, before I go to sleep. It may reduce neuropathy ; the mechanism is unknown. I’m totally paranoid about antidepressants because my father was a manic-depressive who took lithium carbonate and my deranged friend Richard in San Francisco is on Elavil: For some bizarre reason, I associate the medication with mental illness, not a pleasant association at all. I think I’ve figured it out: You don’t get rid of it, but you just don’t care anymore. In which case, maybe a postprandial pitcher of vodka stingers would work just as well.
Oh, the vagaries of publishing! By the time
QW
published “Cocktails from Hell” (pp.109-14) the piece was obsolete. The delightfully scatter-brained AIDS editor asked me for a contribution shortly before her vacation. I dashed off a first draft from my nefarious and multitudinous notes over a weekend and faxed it to her. Before she left for two weeks in Ireland, she told me vaguely that the piece was too digressive. I asked for specific advice on where to cut. When she returned, she had more pressing matters to take care of. A week later, I went to Montreal for a week’s vacation. I returned to find that she had been dismissed. The files were a shambles. The new AIDS editor, a pleasant-enough fellow who was a little high-strung (he was rumored to hum “I don’t like Mondays” as he butchered pieces and inserted the correct political slant), had lost the original. I dropped off another copy. By then QW was covering the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam. The new AIDS editor recalled going over the piece once. When pressed, he also had some oblique criticisms. Unable to get anything specific, I told him I would cut it down to a thousand words. I figured the full-blown version with its full-blown AIDS anxiety would eventually appear in some Chapbook from Hell. He appeared pleased with the results. Then, of course, one day before deadline, seven weeks after I had originally submitted the piece, he called me with a thousand and one useless questions. He was treating it like a serious science piece, as opposed to a touchie-feelie-hysterical spasm of nerves. I had a typically deranged author hissy fit and QW finally ran the piece two months after I’d written it. And I was extremely pissed because by the time the piece eventually reached the light of day it was obsolete because I was off ddI and ddC because I had developed minor neuropathy.
“Needles and Pins” never made it into QW. By the time I finished it, QW itself was obsolete.
Ron Vawter died of AIDS-related causes on April 16, 1994.
Notes on Sex
The worst thing about being a celebrity is that anonymous sex is no longer possible.
Gore Vidal once said never turn down an opportunity to have sex or be on television. Keep this in mind the next time Robin Byrd invites you to be on her cable show.
Always be aware of your physical placement in relationship to potential sex partners: on the checkout line at the Food Emporium, on the E train, and especially at a Queer Nation Kiss-In.
It is bad taste to make a date at a memorial, especially with the deceased’s ex-lover.
Never have sex with your boss during your annual review, unless you are a prostitute and he is a pimp and this is a performance review.
Don’t get annoyed when you find your two best friends had sex while you were on the telephone, unless, of course, you are only annoyed that they didn’t invite you to join in.
In sex, quality is more important than quantity. And I’m not a size queen.
When someone tells you he doesn’t like blowjobs, that’s just a nice way of saying he’s not interested. If this happens, one is advised to rise from a kneeling position.
If someone tells you he is attracted only to uncut dick, he is not necessarily anti-Semitic. He is, however, politically incorrect to the nth degree, and you can feel free to call him on it, loudly, in public, especially if he is sitting in the next pew at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah during the High Holy Days.
Sex is a good way to kill half an hour while your Lean Cuisine is in the oven. With the prevalence of microwaves, such so-called “fast food” sex has reached frenetic and exhausting proportions.
The more sex you have, the more you want.
Boring sex is better than no sex at all.
Sex can be used to reduce anxiety while waiting for election-night returns, to see if your co-op bid has been accepted, or to find out if you had a bad reaction to Septra.
Sex with a stranger is more exciting than sex with a known quantity.
It is considered rude to take a phone call in the midst of a sexual encounter, unless it’s your agent, your crazy friend long distance from San Francisco who is threatening a suicide pact with you unbeknownst to you, or the pizza delivery man who can’t get into your apartment because the downstairs door is locked. Your mother, however, should leave a message on the machine.
Don’t forget to introduce the trick that you met at the leather bar to your roommate before you go off in his two-door convertible Chevy to a place you’ve never been before so your roommate can identify the trick in a lineup.
The wonderful thing about same-sex relationships is that it is possible to be attracted to both members of a couple simultaneously. There are n factorial possibilities and combinations of couplings and jealousy all leading to disastrous results.
Don’t invite someone over for a threesome without first checking with your partner to see if he is interested.
The advantage of going to his apartment for sex is that you can leave whenever you want. If he comes over to your place, he could be there indefinitely. Some people don’t pick up on subtle hints: an obvious yawn, changing into pajamas, going to the corner bodega for a quart of milk, walking him to the subway. Also, if the guy from the phone-sex line turns out to be an axe murderer, he will be left with the problem of how to dispose of the body. If he comes to your apartment, he can simply leave it there.