Bleeder: A Memoir

College

45 college September . Ana and I have been seeing each other every other weekend since school resumed, but that’s getting harder to manage. I’m busy; my workload has increased threefold; consequently, I’m in the library every evening and now need the weekends for study. Tonight, I recline in my favorite chair—the one tucked against the large window that stares out upon the campus walk—and my heavy bookbag rests at my feet, yet instead of reading my coursework, I thumb another medical journal in the hope of understanding more about me. In college I’ve learned about research, about finding answers to things you don’t understand. But today the news isn’t promising. Long-term studies of AZT indicate that side effects such as nausea and muscle contractions develop, or worse, that HIV becomes resistant to AZT. I let the journal slip into my lap while my gaze drifts outside to the longleaf pines blowing in the campus breeze. I think of a night not long ago when I awoke with a muscle spasm in my calf, another when my foot curled itself inside my shoe and required coaxing to return to normal. And then there is my nausea. Sometimes in the early morning as I eat breakfast, or later in the evening during dinner, it comes. I ignore it, blame it on a steady diet of coffee, and cure it with slow steady breathing or perhaps by lying down, or if nothing else works, I rush to the closest toilet and unload my Shelby Smoak 46 insides. I have thought that HIV caused this, but now I wonder if it’s AZT. And if so, what can I do? It seems I am moored to illness. My stomach sinks. In my chair as the sun descends behind the campus lawn, I recline in the casual pose of a college student caught up in deep thought. I have now carried the knowledge of my HIV for a year. My only confessions have been to William and to Ana. Still, I hide it. And I suppose, too, that I am still dying, a thought too difficult to conceptualize with any honest attachment. Here I’ve stumbled too close to reality, and I must let it out. This is not uncommon. Tears spill forth in the quiet of an untraveled book row, or in the morning shower, or in the cotton sheets I sleep beneath. And when I’ve folded my torn heart over and wrung it dry of ache, when I’ve embraced mortality and squeezed it hatefully and lovingly and hatefully again, I must then move on. October 1991. Friends persuade me to join the crew team as a coxswain, and today is my first morning of practice. As I wait in front of my suite for my roommate to return with his car, the cold bites at my gloved hands, so I cup them to my mouth and breathe heat into them. Last night was the season’s first frost. The campus lights shine through the pines around me, and the crackle of a frigid wood sounds from that cold darkness. I rub my hands together, breathe on them again, and place them in my jeans’ pockets. Eventually, from the other side of the woods where the incoming road lies, headlights shine, and when my roommate pulls to the curb, I get in. Neither of us speaks as we drive down Market Street through downtown Wilmington and toward the Cape Fear River. The sky lightens, and by the time we unlock the boathouse and lay out the paddles for the rowers, the morning is a pale gray. When the rowers arrive, we lug the boat to the riverside. The rowers grab underneath the shell’s hull, and hoist it and carry it to the water where— there being no dock—it is rolled over and gently placed in the river while I give commands and follow along nearby. My bare toes sink into cold muck, squishing the sand, slime, and slick grit of the polluted river bottom, and the river soon numbs my feet beyond sensation. They feel thick as they knead the doughy river floor. I lower myself into the coxswain’s position, Bleeder 47 knock my feet gently on the boat’s tender side to shake mud from them and revitalize some feeling. Then we push out into the river that fogs with cold. We row a four-man. Old, wooden, and...