Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [69]
Do I remind him and encourage him to take the medicine? I asked myself. Do I trust his doubts or intuitions; do I trust my own? Uncertain, I did nothing most of the time, and then sometimes went on little crusades of advocacy for the snowy, scientific magic in its inscrutable packaging. You’ve got to try, I said, and he did for a while, till the tingling and numbness returned. A flyer arrived which said DDI’s toxic to the pancreas, that people have died from mixing the drug with even a little alcohol, a glass or two of—wine, was it? The letter was from the drug manufacturer, a hedge against liability, but it read more like one of those threatening chain letters which promise dire consequences to the recipient who breaks the chain: loss, disaster, death, if you don’t do things just right. Admiral Y., of Lisbon, ignored this letter, and three days later…
New support groups were starting up, as more HIV-positives and people with AIDS appeared in Vermont. The groups—one for people who were positive, one for their partners and families—met in rooms at the Unitarian church in our town. Because there was nothing else like this in the whole northern half of the state, people drove an hour or more simply to be with people who knew how they felt. Our friends were all empathy, and even graciously acknowledged the limits of what they could understand. They couldn’t have done better, and yet we longed to have our reality mirrored back to us by someone in the same situation, simply to know that someone saw the world through a lens like our own.
Especially those who were themselves positive; there were enough of them to form a cohesive group, and Wally began to look forward to the weekly meeting in which six or seven men and one woman sat together and talked their way through each week’s topic, comparing notes, laughing, weeping, beginning to air the transfiguring knowledge distorting and remaking their lives.
My support group consisted, usually, of myself and one woman, our friend Robert’s mother. Peg had moved to town to be near Robert, who already had some minor infections. Robert himself was in Wally’s group, which met upstairs at the same time, so there was an odd sort of feeling when we all entered the building, through the side door, for confidentiality, and then split apart to go our separate ways. Peg and I’d go downstairs, to a little Sunday School room which looked out over a narrow, muddy river cutting through the center of the tiny New England capital; Victorian rowhouses, built as housing for granite workers, hung over the edge, yellow paint peeling from the spindles and eaves of the rickety balconies, half-frozen laundry flapping like poverty’s own banners. The room where we met had tiny chairs, for the Sunday School classes. It seemed odd for Peg and I to have a facilitator to ourselves, a lesbian counselor employed by Vermont CARES who conducted herself in a tentatively professional way, cautious, careful about maintaining her distance. This was Peg’s and my time, which seemed a luxury, although two people do not make a group and therefore there wasn’t the sort of energy or spirited exchange I heard Wally talk about in his group. Sometimes, after we’d each talked about our week and had a bit of exchange, we would wind down and not know what to talk about next. Sometimes while we were meeting I’d hear them upstairs, laughing, and feel a little twinge of jealousy that I wasn’t with all those other gay men talking and feeling through their common lot. I knew it wasn’t my lot, exactly, and that they needed the sense of permission that being with other people in the same boat presumably gives, and yet I still felt left out. Perhaps I needed a group of other lovers, other partners, but there weren’t