Stories of Rage
Tested
Story & Recording by River Huston
I’m River Huston and this is my HIV story, which I call “Tested.”
Claude taught people how to sing. He was charming and sweet. We started to hang out. We did not have sex. But we did make out a lot.
One day he asked me if I would be willing to go with him to take an HIV test. It was in a flirty way, like if we take this step together, we would be making some kind of weird commitment.
I didn’t know anything about HIV, but I couldn’t possibly have it. At the time, I’d been clean and sober five years. I could run eight miles without any effort. I did yoga every day and ate brown rice. I knew what AIDS looked like from the guys in the Village. I saw the emaciated men, covered in sores, walking with canes and toting oxygen tanks. I knew people from Narcotics Anonymous who had had AIDS, but it was a secret thing. No one talked about it. I had never heard of a woman who had AIDS.
I said yes. It was May 1990. We went to the Department of Health and had our blood drawn. We joked and were relaxed. They told us to come back for our test results in ten days.
I sent up a few prayers to cover my bases. I had struggled with God most my life. I had grown up agnostic. I made up a God that I called Harry when I was a child. He was useful for when I was in trouble. I decided there was no God when I started using drugs at 12. It was simpler that way.
Later, in recovery programs, they talked about a higher power. I never understood it. It was silly to believe with such abandon in what seemed to be a fairy tale. But I needed something to hold onto. I made a decision to just have faith. I didn’t believe in anything specific, but I had faith there was something.
The 10 days preceding our test results were filled with a simple prayer, “Please do not let this test be positive.” I hummed it silently like a mantra. And as Claude and I headed up to Harlem on the A train to the Department of Health, I hummed, “Please do not let this test be positive.”
We were excited and nervous. I was ready to go further with Claude than with anyone else I had met. He seemed real. He was not an addict, had a loving family. He was normal. I was almost normal, or I could appear normal. I worked, I went to college, tried to learn social skills, participate in society.
I had spent most my life living on the edges of civilization, not exactly legal, but not hurting anyone. I grew weed in the ’70s in Humboldt County, I lived in a van, played music in the streets. I roamed the country, selling my body along the way since I was 15. I made the leap into the world of conformity when I got sober at 25. I often felt like an interloper in the so-called real world.
We took our seats in the clinic. The testing had been anonymous. I fingered the piece of paper with my number on it as if it was a winning lottery ticket. We were the only ones in the waiting room.
They called his number first. I waved, “Bye, honey.” Then it was my turn, and I followed the doctor into a small room.
She smiled at me, but looked tense, almost scared. I sat down. She was sitting across from me staring at the folder. Finally, she looked at me and said, “Your test came back positive.”
I couldn’t quite grasp this.
“Is this good?” Knowing it wasn’t.
She said “no” and explained to me that I was HIV-positive.
Then my denial kicked in. My voice trembled when I said, “They make mistakes, right? We should take another test. I’m sure this is mistake.”
She explained they had done both the Western Blot and the Eliza test. “You have this virus in your bloodstream.”
I felt like I was in a horrible car accident where the car rolls over and over and all you hear is the sound of metal against metal, then silence. And somehow, you get out of the car. Physically, you have survived, not even a scratch, but the world as you see it is no longer the same. I couldn’t hear a word she was saying. I stared out the window at broken glass that littered the asphalt beneath an empty swing set.
“Why did you ever think it would get better? You don’t deserve anything. You’re a piece of shit, and you’ll always be a piece of shit. Damaged goods, garbage, a pariah.”
These thoughts paraded along with, “You will never have children, you’re going to die alone, diseased and untouchable. I fucking hate you, you stupid piece of shit.”
The doctor broke through my barrage of self-loathing when she said, “Listen, according to everything you told me in the last visit, you have a good few years left.”
I started to cry. I cried the way you do when you can’t stop. After a few minutes, I looked up. She handed me a box of tissue with a sad face. I felt dizzy and sick. The walls seemed to close in on me. I couldn’t stand to be in that room another second.
I pulled on my sunglasses and I walked out without another word. Walked right past Claude. I couldn’t even look at him, I felt so ashamed and dirty. I headed for the door, went down the stairs to the street, and started to run.
I cut through the kids on the sidewalk that were getting out of school and the moms with their baby carriages. I just wanted to get to the train. I wanted to go home, I wanted to hide under the covers. I wanted to forget this day ever happened. I finally reached the train as it pulled into the station. I got on and the doors slid shut. I stared straight ahead, shaking, numb, nauseous. I felt someone slide next to me. I turned my head, and it was Claude.
He had this look on his face. The fucking look I would come to dread for the next 30 years, the look of pity. He was out of breath from running.
He leaned over and said, “River, it’s going to be okay.”
I wanted to scream. “It’s not okay, and it will never be okay, and okay is over.”
But I didn’t say anything. I stared straight ahead. The train stopped and went, and stopped and went. The wall I started to build around me was impenetrable. Claude lapsed into silence. We exited together at Union Square. We climbed the stairs to the street.
With a weak smile, he said, “If you need anything …”
He gave me a quick, awkward hug. He went his way, and I went mine. End of my relationship with Claude, beginning of my relationship with HIV.
At 61, HIV has been the only constant in my life. I’ve done amazing things, wrote books, painted paintings, traveled the world, did a one-woman show. I also spent many years sick, in beds, in hospitals, poked and prodded, alone, depressed, in enormous physical and psychological pain.
I tried so hard to not define myself by HIV, even if the world continues to define me as diseased. I have walked this journey alone with as much kindness and love I can muster for myself. But mostly I’m just waiting to die.
Jimmy Breslin
Story & Recording by Kevin Breslin
My father, the late New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, was a champion of New York City and its citizens.
He leveled the powerful and helped the powerless. He wrote defining stories on JFK being shot. He was the only reporter in the ballroom when Malcolm X was killed. Breslin tackled Bobby Kennedy‘s assassin and wrote a heartbreaking account. Breslin broke the biggest stories from John Lennon being shot to Son of Sam.
Breslin said: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”
The AIDS Monument’s stories include stories about rage. In one of his columns that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, titled “The Gay Life and Death Go Hand-in-Hand,” he focused on a single man, David Camacho, to humanize the AIDS epidemic, which was widely misunderstood at the time:
Camacho was a young, handsome, bright guy who had the guts to be out about his disease. He had two good weeks in July and then the fever returned, and he was back in the hospital for half of late August. He got out again and returned to the street, the date this time doesn’t count. By now, he measured nothing
around him — weeks, month, day, night, summer heat, fall chill, the color of the sky, the sound of the street, clothes, music, lights, wealth – dwindled meaning.”
David put on a sweater and an army field jacket and went downstairs. He waved into the open doorway of a clothing store and the two women at the counter, smiled and called out to him. Then he went down the front steps and into Eighth Street. David was fighting for his life.
My father called him on one of his last days:
“And then I called David up on Friday to check on a couple of things and he answered the phone with a dull voice.
“‘You’re not laughing,’ I said.
“‘No, I just got off the phone with the doctor. He told me the test results came back and he thinks the cancer has spread to the lungs. I just got off the phone with him.’
“I said nothing.
“David said, ‘I’m trying to keep myself together by washing the windows.'”
Breslin said nothing.
David succumbed to AIDS shortly after the column.
My father met Nick Dante, one of the creators of A Chorus Line and the subject of my father‘s column in your AIDS Monument STORIES. My father said, “Just listen … all you have to do is listen” as Nick spoke….
“I grew up in the ’40s a Puerto Rican kid on 125th St. and Broadway and obviously gay. No one would hang out with me. I was terrified to go out where anybody would see me. My greatest fear was to walk with my mother and father and have somebody whistle at me.”
My father always said, “In my time, in my city, it all starts with the shoe leather, with the climbing stairs for work. You can tell how you do it in your feet. If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it. You write it in scenes with dialogue, and then somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinion.”
My father taught me that each day there should be a word or a gesture that would cause someone else to smile over the life about them. His contempt was reserved for those who would not attempt this.
He wrote for 50 years and 5,000 newspaper columns. Forty-Second Street and Third Avenue in New York City is named “Jimmy Breslin Way.” Say hello if your wander by.
Pride Tirade 2021
Story and Recording by John Kelly
Happy as I limp my wrist in pride for us — the outcast, the maligned, the persecuted, the entrapped, the murdered, the sweated, the followed, the avoided, the violated, the blackmailed, the serial-tattooed, the sneered, the ostracized, the erased, the hated, the invisible, the raped, the tolerated, the patronized, the parodied, the joke, the denigrated, the evicted, the diminished, the emasculated, the de-promed, the expelled, the therapized, the shock-treated, the lobotomized, the numbed and the drugged, the lost, the dead, the erased, the removed from tangible history, the persistent dwellers in blessed proximity, the survivors, the warriors, the steadfast, the persistent, the inclusive, the non-ageist, the color blind, the expansive, the essential, the imaginative, the true, the warriors, the activists both stewing and shout spewing, the long term survivors demanding to be honored, the generational glue that is gold, the striving and striding toward our place in the sun that demands to be respected, and the imperative that we acknowledge that the AIDS pandemic ruptured our inter-generational dialogue, and our personal, systemic, collective and more generally cadenced growth.
This/MY generation of artists — and OUR audiences — disappeared.
YOU are standing on our generational, grave–like, culturally curtailed, and tribally intrinsic sinkhole. You may be afloat and faring ok on the gravitas of a vast family of ghosts and heart shattering loss, of dead young unresolved spirits. Advance, as we had done, in your own way and manner, and as you continue to grow and transform the world, please aim to bless the ground on which you re-trace our analog step.
WE walk the very same path.