ABSTRACT
https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315783833/9b642a27-02d4-4242-ae9c-0d752b0d8158/content/Fig92_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> © 2001 by Laurie Toby Edison The doctors seemed to belong to the “all life is sacred/save the fetus at all costs” school. They did this because to do anything else would have been a sin. The doctors did all this until my mother developed toxemia, which caused her to swell up and practically killed her. They did all this, they said, because being a mother was her function as a woman. Or at least that is the story that they told her. And then of course there was Red Skelton. One day when I was about two I saw something funny on The Red Skelton Show. I don’t remember exactly what it was. I only remember that I laughed so hard I fell backwards in my chair. The seat of the chair hit me in the face and that was the end of me. At the emergency room my father refused to spend money on X-rays. The doctors who supposedly knew everything said everything was OK. This was the first of many lies that the doctors were to tell me. I found out later when I was much older after all the damage had been done that I had suffered a lateral fracture of my upper jaw. This led to other complications all because nobody bothered to take an X-ray. Or perhaps because my father, who worked in a GE plant, couldn’t or wouldn’t spend the extra money Everything healed up but in a very strange way. Years later when it was very obvious that something was very wrong with my face everyone said one or more of the following: It’s the Lord’s will. Just learn to live with it. It’s all in your imagination. Don’t be so self-centered. Shut up and do your homework. Other people are worse off than you. So many years later after I begged them to do something— anything— I was sent to the high-priced hospital in the busy City of Death many miles away to figure out where they had gone wrong. The doctors in the high-priced hospital in the busy City of Death said that they could help me but that because I had no money, that is, not enough to be a private patient I had to go through a clinic frequented by the poor. And when I got there something went very wrong, you see and now here I am telling you this story. Because I had no money I had to do it their way. I had to beg to be helped. I had to insist on it. And as I was to learn over and over again, after the damage was already done, nothing flies in this fucking world unless you have money or until you get angry. And there’s one more thing: Everyone tells me that I asked for it. Leave well enough alone, they said. You don’t look so bad. But I knew better. I knew it wasn’t all in my imagination. I knew every time I looked in the mirror that something was very wrong. But because I was a child nobody would believe me. It took me many years to get the help that I needed and then after I was butchered by the doctors in that very busy hospital in that very expensive City of Death it took me many more years to fix it again. I know what some of you are thinking. You think I’m just dramatizing or exaggerating for effect or crying in my beer or feeling sorry for myself. All right. Maybe my imagery is exaggerated. But I don’t think so. Not by much. I remember very clearly what it was like in surgery there in that busy hospital in the City of Death. They had shaved my head the night before the way they do in prison movies about condemned murderers headed for the electric chair. Before they knocked me out I remember how cold it was. It was so cold that it made me want to pee. There were bright lights and classical music playing from somewhere. (You see, the doctor who butchered me had very sophisticated tastes.) And rows and rows of surgical instruments. Scissors and pliers and all kinds of things. And something called a Stryker Saw which I later learned is used for cutting up corpses in medical schools. Later on I read somewhere that when Joseph Mengele sent people to the gas chambers in Auschwitz there was always somebody playing classical music in the background just like in the movies. Just like in those surgical suites in the very busy hospital in the busy City of Death. I laughed when I heard that. I don’t know why. I couldn’t see because my eyes were swollen shut. I couldn’t hear out of one ear because it was full of blood. I couldn’t walk because without any prior consent of mine they had taken some bone out of my hips and used it to put my face back together. So they doped me up and cleaned me up and sat me up in intensive care with a lot of pillows. I didn’t feel any pain. Because my head was swollen up to such outrageous proportions. It was like something on Outer Limits, Fright Theatre, or one of those horror movies I used to watch. Edema, they called it. My mother came in. I knew she was there even though I couldn’t see her. For a long time she was very quiet. I remember that because I couldn’t talk I had to spell things in her hand. Two minutes later I started hemorrhaging all over the place. After it was all over we wanted to sue the doctors but by that time they had dispersed or disappeared to other parts of the country to work in other very expensive hospitals in other very busy Cities of Death. The lawyers in my hometown up North in the hinterlands said that I probably did have a case. But they wanted five hundred dollars for retainer fees, they said, before they could initiate proceedings. My father didn’t have five hundred dollars. Or at least, if he did, he wouldn’t spend it. Instead of spending money he went down to the cellar and turned on the ham radio and started talking to strangers about the weather in Wisconsin. Somewhere around this time I quit going to church. Everyone in the church told me: We are meant to suffer in this life. It’s God’s will. Just learn to live with it. Surely I was being punished for some great sin. But I figured any god who would allow a thing like this to happen to me can’t be worth too fucking much. And I still think so. Because every time I read the newspaper every time I watch the news on TV I hear a story about somebody else. Somebody else who went into that high-priced hospital in the busy City of Death and never came out again. And I realize I am lucky to have gotten away with my life, even as mangled and misfired as it is. To take my mind off all of this surgery I went to the movies. And on the movie screen I saw all kinds of people: crippled people, deformed people, paralyzed women with pretty faces, drug addicts, homosexuals, criminals, and women who were raped. They were all lumped together in one huge category called Undesirable. Years later I went to a major university in the high-priced City of Death to find out how these movies were made. Five years and twenty-five thousand dollars later I still don’t understand anything. Every once in a while somebody gets an Oscar for playing one of these undesirable people and everything seems to be all right again. Look, look, the undesirable ones say, everything is getting better. They’re paying attention to us. But not for long. Because up there at that high-priced hospital in the busy City of Death business goes on as usual. I’m not the only one, you see. I’m not the only one. I know this because while I was stuck at home recovering, while I was traveling around the world, while I was hanging around in bars in the City of Death learning all too well how to drown my sorrows I began to hear stories. There was the young girl who went to the emergency room of that big high-priced hospital in the City of Death. She had a series of known allergies but nobody in that emergency room bothered to look at her chart so she was given drugs in strange combinations which caused her to have seizures and die. And then there was the famous artist, the one who made art out of soup cans. Everyone loved the pictures he made of ordinary household objects and beautiful celebrities. He went into that big high-priced hospital in the busy City of Death for routine gall bladder surgery and never came out again. Finally there was the man who liked to make puppets and made millions of dollars. Everyone thought he was wonderful because he made people laugh. They said he had pneumonia and when he died they said it was all his fault because he should have come in earlier. This is an increasingly familiar tune. They blamed it on the nurses, all of whom were women, or they blamed it on the patients, all of whom were powerless. They blamed it on everyone but the doctors. And in the meantime at that very high-priced hospital in the busy City of Death business goes on as usual. And now everyone asks me Why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you rubbing your nose in it? Because I know now that I am not exceptional. I know now that my situation is not unusual. Because I’m not the only one, you see. I’m not the only one. I have no identity now as anything other than a disease carrier. The language which other people use to describe my predicament has been simplified over time so that now I am no longer “HIV positive.” I simply “am HIV.” As if there were no distinction at all between the disease and myself. We are one and the same, inseparable. Someday I’m gonna make my own goddamn movie. It’ll be a Technicolor extravaganza full of faggots and lesbians and whores and drug users and blacks and Hispanics and AIDS patients and HIV positives and homeless people. The discarded of the universe who comprise every level of society’s junk heap. They’ll glitter up there on the silver screen wearing their rejection like a badge of honor and in the final reel they’ll turn their guns on Washington and the doctors and the lawyers and all the other bullshit shovelers whose laziness and money grubbing have perpetuated this disaster. The complacent, flawless, perfect ones will go down in a hail of gunfire and all those who have been abused and thrown away will rise up as one and live happily ever after if only for one more minute. Amen.
