Woman in the MG, What is Erotic?, February 2014
Storytelling tip 6: You only get a few hooks, so use them wisely
Category Archives: Memoir
A Great Disturbance in the Force
NOTE: I first performed this piece on Feb. 6, 2013 at Fireside Storytelling in San Francisco. The theme was “Bad Medicine.”
One morning many years ago, I was standing over the sink, getting water for my coffee, and I was overcome by the sudden bout of sobbing—that shoulders-heaving, unable-to-fill-my-lungs, abdominal-muscles-cramping, random-guttural-sounds-escaping-from-my-throat kind of sobbing. As my tears splattered in the stainless steel sink, I tried to figure out where this was coming from. My wife and I had been having a hard time and work was stressful, but nothing I could think of explained this. I finally composed myself, set up the coffeemaker, and went out on the porch to get the newspaper.
A neighbor was walking by and said, “Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Turn on the TV.”
And I did. Just in time to see the second plane strike the second tower.
This will sound fantastic to many of you, delusional, grandiose. This is the stuff of movies. How does it go? “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”
Perhaps a few of you will take it at face value because you know from your own experience that one reality just isn’t enough. (You know who you are, don’t you?) For the rest of you, all I can ask is that you suspend disbelief and trust me when I say that these things are not uncommon in my world.
When I finally pulled myself away from the TV, I remembered the last time I had cried like that. It was May 8, 1996, the night I drove home from the Business Resource Center and Sertoma Bingo Hall in Chehalis, Washington. That was the night I understood the scope of another tragedy, one whose death toll was twice that of the World Trade Center attacks.
Those of you who have heard my stories know that I have hemophilia, a bleeding disorder, and I also have HIV. I contracted it from the medicine I stick in my arm. Like a diabetic injects insulin, I inject something called Factor VIII, and in those days my medicine was made from human blood.
The virus nearly wiped out the hemophiliacs of my generation. Only about five percent escaped infection, and those were probably exposed but were immune because of a genetic defect that occurs in about five percent of the population.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, I buried a lot of friends, some gay friends (I lived in the Castro at the time), a couple IV drug users, and a lot of friends with hemophilia. At the time, the “hemophilia holocaust” as it was called by people prone to hyperbole, was widely considered to have been unavoidable. People figured we needed our meds to survive, and it took the manufacturers time to figure out what was happening and to find a way to produce clean medicine. But then there were the crazies.
I went to the Business Resource Center and Sertoma Bingo Hall to see my friend Cory. We met when we shared a hospital room, and had a lot in common. We were both investigative journalists and shared similar political viewpoints. He was a news director at Pacifica Radio and I was a news editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. But Corey was one of the angry ones, the ones looking to assign blame. I was too Zen to get caught up in that, but Centralia was near my home and I wanted to say hi.
Corey was there to promote the work of a group he cofounded call the Committee of Ten Thousand. If you took the 7,000 or so infected hemophiliacs in the country and added in sexual partners and infant children, that’s the number you came up with. Unfortunately, to see Corey, I had to sit through the paranoia. I should have known better. Corey is a very good investigator and by the time I left I was a conspiracy theorist, too.
If you want the full details, you can read Randy Shilts book “And the Band Played On.” The last time I saw Randy, he looked at me and said, “You’ve put on a lot of weight.” I forgave him because he did a great job explaining what happened and it was true, I had put on a few pounds. The people with AIDS were so thin. It felt protective.
Here’s the thumbnail version: During the sixties, the drug companies refused to adopt technology that would kill viruses in our medicines. We all got hepatitis C in the seventies. The companies wanted blood from people exposed to hepatitis B to make the gamma globulin serum given to travelers, so they collected blood from skid rows, prisons, border towns, and neighborhoods like Christopher Street and the Castro. They weren’t supposed to use the hepatitis-infected blood to make our medicine. But they did. They would mix something like 20,000 pints together in a huge vat, pretty much guaranteeing that each batch was contaminated. When they found out HIV and Hep C are transmitted the same way, they didn’t act. When the CDC reported the extent of hemophiliac infections, they got their tame watchdog, the FDA, to tell the CDC it was full of it. And when they couldn’t deny that their medicine was tainted and finally figured out how to purify it, they sold the remaining contaminated doses overseas.
Each individual decision could be rationalized, but start stringing them together and the most generous thing you could say is that it was an extreme example of cognitive dissonance—people who wanted to make money were able to convince themselves that their choices were defensible. But when I looked at the entire pattern of events, I could only reach one conclusion: The drug companies were willing to watch people die as long as they made their money.
Interstate 5 north of Chehalis is pretty much a straight shot and the northbound lanes were empty at ten o’clock that night. Looking back, I am grateful for both those things, because instead of steering, I was pounding both fists on the top of the wheel. Fortunately, I was also blessed with dry weather. I could barely see the road through an outpouring of tears—rain would have made things that much worse. At one point, driving seventy miles an hour, I lowered my head against the steering wheel for several seconds, closed my eyes, and sobbed. I should have pulled over, or at least slowed down, but in that moment that I didn’t really care whether I died.
At one point, I rolled down the window to let the cold air dry my tears and yelled to the empty highway. “They tried to kill me. The fucking bastards tried to kill me. They did kill me; I’m just not dead yet. They murdered me for money. They decided that my life didn’t matter. They decided I didn’t matter. Fucking assholes. Fucking, fucking, FUCKING assholes.” I was still crying when I walked through my front door forty minutes later.
Over the next few years, I collected stories. About the people infected needlessly well after the insiders knew what was happening. About the daughter that school officials didn’t want in class. About the sick and disabled man who came to San Francisco to protest outside the law firm that was defending the manufacturers against a class action lawsuit. The lead attorney had once said the best strategy was to “wait us out.” The man tried to talk to the lead attorney as he was heading toward his car, and the attorney turned and snarled, “Get a job.” Eventually, I had to conclude this wasn’t about cognitive dissonance, it was about greed. It was about immorality.
I don’t know exactly what happened to me on the morning of September 11. Perhaps I was aware of 3,000 lives being extinguished, or maybe I was just picking up on the vibes of my anguished neighbors. But perhaps what set me off was an allergic reaction to the evilness of it all.
I can’t speak for Obi-Wan Kenobi, but is it possible the disturbance in the Force wasn’t about the extinguishing of souls but about the full exercise of unmitigated evil? Isn’t that what Darth Vader represents in the early Star Wars episodes, and what the Sith lords represent throughout?
When I was crying, driving blind, on my way home from Chehalis, I had already buried my friends. I had already mourned my own death. That wasn’t the source of my pain. What set me off wasn’t grief, it was the sure and certain knowledge that here, now, on this very planet, the Sith lords walk among us..
One morning many years ago, I was standing over the sink, getting water for my coffee, and I was overcome by the sudden bout of sobbing—that shoulders-heaving, unable-to-fill-my-lungs, abdominal-muscles-cramping, random-guttural-sounds-escaping-from-my-throat kind of sobbing. As my tears splattered in the stainless steel sink, I tried to figure out where this was coming from. My wife and I had been having a hard time and work was stressful, but nothing I could think of explained this. I finally composed myself, set up the coffeemaker, and went out on the porch to get the newspaper.
A neighbor was walking by and said, “Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Turn on the TV.”
And I did. Just in time to see the second plane strike the second tower.
This will sound fantastic to many of you, delusional, grandiose. This is the stuff of movies. How does it go? “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”
Perhaps a few of you will take it at face value because you know from your own experience that one reality just isn’t enough. (You know who you are, don’t you?) For the rest of you, all I can ask is that you suspend disbelief and trust me when I say that these things are not uncommon in my world.
When I finally pulled myself away from the TV, I remembered the last time I had cried like that. It was May 8, 1996, the night I drove home from the Business Resource Center and Sertoma Bingo Hall in Chehalis, Washington. That was the night I understood the scope of another tragedy, one whose death toll was twice that of the World Trade Center attacks.
Those of you who have heard my stories know that I have hemophilia, a bleeding disorder, and I also have HIV. I contracted it from the medicine I stick in my arm. Like a diabetic injects insulin, I inject something called Factor VIII, and in those days my medicine was made from human blood.
The virus nearly wiped out the hemophiliacs of my generation. Only about five percent escaped infection, and those were probably exposed but were immune because of a genetic defect that occurs in about five percent of the population.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, I buried a lot of friends, some gay friends (I lived in the Castro at the time), a couple IV drug users, and a lot of friends with hemophilia. At the time, the “hemophilia holocaust” as it was called by people prone to hyperbole, was widely considered to have been unavoidable. People figured we needed our meds to survive, and it took the manufacturers time to figure out what was happening and to find a way to produce clean medicine. But then there were the crazies.
I went to the Business Resource Center and Sertoma Bingo Hall to see my friend Cory. We met when we shared a hospital room, and had a lot in common. We were both investigative journalists and shared similar political viewpoints. He was a news director at Pacifica Radio and I was a news editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. But Corey was one of the angry ones, the ones looking to assign blame. I was too Zen to get caught up in that, but Centralia was near my home and I wanted to say hi.
Corey was there to promote the work of a group he cofounded call the Committee of Ten Thousand. If you took the 7,000 or so infected hemophiliacs in the country and added in sexual partners and infant children, that’s the number you came up with. Unfortunately, to see Corey, I had to sit through the paranoia. I should have known better. Corey is a very good investigator and by the time I left I was a conspiracy theorist, too.
If you want the full details, you can read Randy Shilts book “And the Band Played On.” The last time I saw Randy, he looked at me and said, “You’ve put on a lot of weight.” I forgave him because he did a great job explaining what happened and it was true, I had put on a few pounds. The people with AIDS were so thin. It felt protective.
Here’s the thumbnail version: During the sixties, the drug companies refused to adopt technology that would kill viruses in our medicines. We all got hepatitis C in the seventies. The companies wanted blood from people exposed to hepatitis B to make the gamma globulin serum given to travelers, so they collected blood from skid rows, prisons, border towns, and neighborhoods like Christopher Street and the Castro. They weren’t supposed to use the hepatitis-infected blood to make our medicine. But they did. They would mix something like 20,000 pints together in a huge vat, pretty much guaranteeing that each batch was contaminated. When they found out HIV and Hep C are transmitted the same way, they didn’t act. When the CDC reported the extent of hemophiliac infections, they got their tame watchdog, the FDA, to tell the CDC it was full of it. And when they couldn’t deny that their medicine was tainted and finally figured out how to purify it, they sold the remaining contaminated doses overseas.
Each individual decision could be rationalized, but start stringing them together and the most generous thing you could say is that it was an extreme example of cognitive dissonance—people who wanted to make money were able to convince themselves that their choices were defensible. But when I looked at the entire pattern of events, I could only reach one conclusion: The drug companies were willing to watch people die as long as they made their money.
Interstate 5 north of Chehalis is pretty much a straight shot and the northbound lanes were empty at ten o’clock that night. Looking back, I am grateful for both those things, because instead of steering, I was pounding both fists on the top of the wheel. Fortunately, I was also blessed with dry weather. I could barely see the road through an outpouring of tears—rain would have made things that much worse. At one point, driving seventy miles an hour, I lowered my head against the steering wheel for several seconds, closed my eyes, and sobbed. I should have pulled over, or at least slowed down, but in that moment that I didn’t really care whether I died.
At one point, I rolled down the window to let the cold air dry my tears and yelled to the empty highway. “They tried to kill me. The fucking bastards tried to kill me. They did kill me; I’m just not dead yet. They murdered me for money. They decided that my life didn’t matter. They decided I didn’t matter. Fucking assholes. Fucking, fucking, FUCKING assholes.” I was still crying when I walked through my front door forty minutes later.
Over the next few years, I collected stories. About the people infected needlessly well after the insiders knew what was happening. About the daughter that school officials didn’t want in class. About the sick and disabled man who came to San Francisco to protest outside the law firm that was defending the manufacturers against a class action lawsuit. The lead attorney had once said the best strategy was to “wait us out.” The man tried to talk to the lead attorney as he was heading toward his car, and the attorney turned and snarled, “Get a job.” Eventually, I had to conclude this wasn’t about cognitive dissonance, it was about greed. It was about immorality.
I don’t know exactly what happened to me on the morning of September 11. Perhaps I was aware of 3,000 lives being extinguished, or maybe I was just picking up on the vibes of my anguished neighbors. But perhaps what set me off was an allergic reaction to the evilness of it all.
I can’t speak for Obi-Wan Kenobi, but is it possible the disturbance in the Force wasn’t about the extinguishing of souls but about the full exercise of unmitigated evil? Isn’t that what Darth Vader represents in the early Star Wars episodes, and what the Sith lords represent throughout?
When I was crying, driving blind, on my way home from Chehalis, I had already buried my friends. I had already mourned my own death. That wasn’t the source of my pain. What set me off wasn’t grief, it was the sure and certain knowledge that here, now, on this very planet, the Sith lords walk among us..