gazzamie:

When he was 24, my best friend was diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex. This was before the era of the current treatments, and ARC isn’t even a diagnosis anymore. His life began unravelling pretty rapidly. He lost his job as a cook, not because of AIDS itself, but the risk from the secondary infections. His relationship with his boyfriend, who also had been diagnosed with AIDS, had already been falling apart (for different reasons), and it simply withered away as they both got sick. His health declined. He got infections like amoebiasis and thrush. He used to be lean and athletic, and now he had trouble standing up.

Eventually, he had to move back to his parents’ place in our hometown, so his family could help take care of him. I visited as often as i could. One time, he asked me to drive him to Burger King, although he was too weak to get out of the car, so i brought the food back to eat in the car. But that little bit of getting out cheered him up.

There was a gap of two weeks when i hadn’t seen him - i’d spent the weekend in-between visiting another friend. When i got to his house, this was early December, many of his family members, most of whom i didn’t know, were in the living room. My friend was upstairs in his bedroom, too weak to come down. I had to wait to see him. His father kept telling me what a good friend of his i was - before his father had barely spoken to me before. It was an awkward and excruciating experience. When i finally got upstairs, i couldn’t believe how much he’d declined in those last few weeks. He could barely move his head. A 6’4” man now weighed less than 95 pounds. My first thought was that he looked like the photos of rescued concentration camp victims, except cleaner. He looked like a corpse. I didn’t know what to say - it was hard to talk about ordinary stuff in that situation. As selfish as it sounds, i really didn’t want to be there. I tried to be cheerful, to be the normal he so desperately wanted.

I left, and started balling as soon as i got to my car. I don’t think i’ve sobbed like that before or since. I wished he was dead, not because i didn’t love him, but i did. I railed against a universe that could make a person suffer so much.

Within a week, he got an emergency spot at Casey House, the AIDS hospice in Toronto, and when i visited him there, it was like a transformation. He was still very sick, but he was so much better, so much more alive. Unfortunately, it was just a temporary spot, so he got moved to our hometown hospital, which just wasn’t equipped for the kind of care he needed, but he was stuck there until a “permanent” spot opened up at Casey House, which sadly meant someone else had to die. I spent New Year’s Eve that year sitting with him in a hospital room, as he cried because the nurses were slow with the morphine.

Luckily, for him, he was soon back at Casey House. It would be the last place he lived, but as places to die go, it was a good place to die. He got along well with the staff. He looked forward to seeing our other best friend, who’d been living in Montreal. He talked about the little psychedelic visions he got from the morphine when he closed his eyes.

One day, he phoned me at work, asked me to pick up a new pair of glasses from his optometrist. He said to me, “Thanks, you’re a pal.” A few days later, on January 19th, i got a call from one of the staff at Casey House, that they couldn’t wake him up. A few hours later i got the second call. ‘Thanks, you’re a pal’ would turn out to be the last thing he’d ever say to me.

I went over to Casey House after work. The staff were very kind (i can’t imagine the steel they must have). They took me to see him. As i looked at him, i got the prosaic thought that when people say the light goes out of someone’s eyes, it’s really just the eyeballs are dry. In some way, i wished i hadn’t seen him, because then i could pretend he wasn’t dead. They gave me a box of his effects to take back to his family that night. I really regret not taking the silver neck chain our other best friend and i had bought him a few years back, and he’d worn until that day. It even dropped to the ground when i got to his family’s place, but i put it back in the box. When i got home, my mother told me the optometrist had phoned to say the glasses were ready. I never did pick up them up.

As sad as i was at his passing, and having to tell all of our friends, and my mother, who’d grown very close to him over the years, i’d done the bulk of grieving earlier, and those last few weeks were a reprieve.

thestrangelands:

All my life, I felt trapped. As long as I can remember, I woke up feeling like I couldn’t breathe.

All my life, I been scared. Scared of people, I guess, I guess that’s what it boils down to.

There’s a lot to be scared of, when it comes to people.

They’re mean, see?

They say mean things, they do mean things. They hurt you.

All my life, I been a fat kid. All my life, I been stupid. I’m only twelve, but when people are so hateful it seems like a lot longer.

My dad, he used to get drunk a lot, he’d say all kinds of mean stuff. His favorite thing to say was the day I was born, he looked at the doctor and said, I never seen anything like that—a pussy come out of a pussy.

He didn’t need to be drunk to say stuff like that, but when he was drinking, he’d say it a lot more, and laugh a lot longer.

It was about the only time I ever saw him laugh, was when he was saying things to hurt me.

Kids at school, they wasn’t any better. You’d think having my dad say all the mean stuff he did, that’d make it easier for me to take it from the school kids, but it didn’t. If they couldn’t get me to cry from the things they said, they’d hit me, or dunk my head in a dirty toilet, or a million other things.

Sometimes the teachers would find out about what-all the kids was doing, and they’d try to put a stop to it, but that just made it worse.

I’d come home, clothes all tore up, my lip busted or my hands bloody from being pushed to the ground, and my dad would call me names and tell me I deserved every bit of what I got, and he’d tell me how if he would’a known what a faggoty little piglet he was gonna have, he would’a cut his balls off before he knocked up my mamma.

She was long gone, my mamma was. My dad said it was because she couldn’t stand the sight of me, but I think he might have had something to do with it, too.

All my life, I been scared.

So this isn’t as bad for me as it is for some folks.

That first day, that day they let school out early because it was a state of emergency, all the kids hurried home to their parents, but not me.

I did like I always did when school let out—I snuck out the back way, and crossed across the field behind the Martin place.

Mr. Martin killed his self there on the porch eight years ago. The kids on the playground saw him come out, and he sat down in his old wooden rocker, and put his shotgun in his mouth and used his toe to pull the trigger.

He didn’t have no family or anything, so there was nobody to do much cleaning, even though they was trying to sell the place. Nobody ever bought it, and you can still see the stain up on the top of the porch, where his head splattered and nobody bothered to climb up and wash it.

The kids all say the house is haunted, so they won’t go by there, unless maybe it’s real quick on a dare. I went by there the first time because I figured the ghost of Mr. Martin isn’t able to do anything meaner than the kids who’d catch me if I went around the front after school.

I’d never tell any of the kids, but the Martin place isn’t haunted at all. I go there all the time, when I don’t feel like going home, which is most days. The windows are all busted out, and you can get into the basement real easy. Sometimes there’s skunks or stray cats, and the whole place stinks of mildew and pee, but it isn’t haunted. I go there and read books. Sometimes I sit there in the living room and I try to imagine what it was like when people lived there, like Mr. Martin, and his wife, before she died of the cancer.

I imagine them happy, and pretend like they like it when I come visit, and we have talks about what I’m gonna do once I get away from my dad and the other kids and this whole town.

That’s what I did that day they let out school early because of a state of emergency.

I didn’t understand what that meant, state of emergency, and none of the teachers would explain it to us, just told us go home and ask our folks about it.

I thought about that, about going home and asking my dad, but I knew he’d call me stupid for it, so I went to the Martin place instead, and I listened to the radio I kept there.

They didn’t have much news about what was going on, but they acted like they did, talking about the state of emergency instead of playing any music. They kept saying don’t leave your house, just stay there with your loved ones until the government said it was okay to come out.

I thought about that, about being locked inside the house with my dad until someone said it was okay to come out, and you know what? The stuff they was talking about on the radio didn’t sound any worse than being there with him.

I stayed there, up in the attic until the sun went down. That’s where I spent most of my time, was up in the attic. I looked out the big window, the only one that wasn’t busted out, because it was way too high for any of the kids to hit it with rocks.

I could see the fires in the distance. Maybe Pampa, maybe even all the way from Amarillo—on cloudy nights, you could see the lights reflecting in the clouds from there, and I thought if the fires were big enough, that’s what I was seeing.

The people on the radio had talked about the fires. They weren’t sure how they started but they said there was no emergency personnel available to put them out.

I heard screaming, sometimes, from far away. Sometimes a little closer.

Then I heard other noises, like a hurt animal, a little. Like something dying.

I would have stayed there, even with the noises, but the batteries in my radio ran out, so all I had was those other noises, the scary ones.

I ran home, and it wasn’t much different than any other time. Sometimes I saw some of the dead folks, and I stayed away from them, just like I always did when I saw alive people.

My dad was on the couch when I got home. He looked sick. He had a bottle of Pepto on the coffee table in front of him, and his pistol was right there beside it, and his rifle was across his lap.

He jerked when I opened the door, and tried to point the rifle, but it slipped out of his hands and fell onto the floor. Everything smelled like throw up and crap. I saw his pants was stained, and his shirt had upchuck on it.

He goes, The hell you been?

I told him they kept us late at school because of the state of emergency.

He said, I figured you was dead, you seem like the type that’d be the first to go in a time like this.

I told him I was fine, but he looked pretty sick.

Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, I’ll outlive you, if I do anything. Since you’re here, make yourself useful, go get me a sandwich. Grilled cheese, and don’t burn it or I’ll woop your ass.

I went in to make him a sandwich. He tried to tell me about how he got bit by this Mexican at the gas station, but he kept falling asleep. His voice would fade in and out.

That’s what’s wrong with this country…I punched her right in the mouth, she won’t be bitin anyone else real soon…been shittin all evening, she prolly had some special germ from south of the border.

He was talking to my mom for a little bit, telling her he never should have married her, telling her how good his life would be if he’d stayed in the service.

By the time I came back with his grilled cheese sandwich and his beer, he was dead.

I sat down on the chair and looked at him. I didn’t know what else to do. I figured I should toss him outside, just in case he came back from the dead, like they was saying on the radio, but I didn’t want to touch him. Sometime while he was talking to me and dying, he had thrown up some more.

In the light of the lamp, I couldn’t tell if it was black or dark red, but it smelled like rot.

It didn’t take long for him to wake up, and as soon as he did, he came for me.

I jumped up and ran to the kitchen. It was like when he had too much to drink and beat on me, except he was moving slower than even when he was bottom-tank drunk. I circled around him and got the revolver off the coffee table.

He was always telling me not to touch his damn guns, even though he knew I hated them. He made me learn to shoot a couple years ago, I think because he liked how much it scared me, and he liked to watch the kick of the guns knock me down.

I did just like he taught me, and squared up my shoulders, even though I never really knew what that meant, and I took a breath, and I squeezed, not yanked the trigger.

He went tumbling one way, and I went tumbling the other, and I couldn’t hear anything but ringing, and everything smelled like crap and burning, and I thought I was going to throw up.

But I held it in, and I got to my feet and watched to see if he was gonna come at me again, just like all the scary movies I’d seen. He didn’t, though. Just stayed there dead.

I got all the canned food I could, and all the bullets that my dad had put out on the coffee table, and I took all the batteries I could find.

I went back to the Martin place, because that felt safer than anywhere else. Felt more like home, too.

There was a ladder you had to use to get into the attic, and once you got up there, you could just pull it up there with you. And that’s what I did.

These days, most folks have took off, I guess to find bigger cities where the government says to go for help.

I don’t want any help.

The dead, they don’t tease me about being fat, and they don’t want to eat me any more or any less because I’m dumb.

They don’t want to hurt me any more than they want to hurt everyone else, and you know what? There’s something nice about that. And the folks who want to hurt me, well, now I can hurt them right back. Ever since the dead started come back to life, I wake up feeling different.

I wake up feeling…I don’t know. Free, kind of. Like maybe I’ll be okay.

This week’s theme:

relief, release