My Winter Coat

My mother and I have always had a pretty good relationship. She and I have, for the most part, been very open and honest with each other. When I began to come out a lot of this changed. For those of you reading this who do not know my mother, she is an avid fundamental Christian that believes that most of our sins are caused by demons that have inhabited our souls. I think this goes without saying, but our religious views diverge quite a bit here. Now I want all of you to know that I love my mother and I understand and forgive her for being who she is. At her core she is a kind and loving woman and she means well, but her beliefs are ingrained and not about to change overnight. That being said she has come a long way and I am confident that she will continue to grow in acceptance of my current romantic and sexual interests.

I also have not made this easy on her. I tend to hold this “Fuck Everyone” view of the world and often do what I want to do as long as I do not foresee it causing harm to another person. I have probably caused my mother some emotional harm with my antics. This blog post will outline one of those instances.

It was December 2012 and one of my good friends, Hillary, was visiting from way out of town. We ate dinner at Houlihan’s, where I came out to her, and we discussed the fact that we were both dating men who were 37. After dinner Hillary didn’t have any plans, so I invited her to go to Feathers, this divey gay bar/club in North Jersey. She of course was delighted. I had my other friend, Hugo, pick us up because we anticipated getting intoxicated. Sure, I had work the next day, but since when did work ever take precedence over intoxication?

I took this belief to heart, that night throwing back more drinks than I could count and getting to a level of obliterated that few people have ever seen. I believe I made out with four people at the bar that night, one of them being the ugliest woman that I have ever seen. She kept complimenting me though and saying how much she just wanted to take me home that I had to throw her a bone or two. I mean all I did was make out with her for a bit, it's not like I aggressively ate her snatch or anything.

At some point it was time to leave Feathers and I can't remember if it was because the bar was closing or we were entirely too drunk at this point to function, but we left. The three of us clambered into Hugo's BMW coupe and headed home. We almost made it to the exit when Hillary began throwing up in Hugo's car. Hugo pulled over and Hillary and I clambered out. Hillary threw up on the side of the road several times and I took a whizz. I then took off my shirt for her to wipe down Hugo's seats with (I still own and wear this shirt). At this point a cop pulled over behind us and I almost shit my pants. I wasn't entirely certain that Hugo was too drunk to drive, but I was pretty sure he was, and Hillary and I were clearly a mess. The police officer was nice and told us to exit off at the next exit and get home. We obviously obliged him and were home in a Jiffy.

At this point I was still living with Mommy dearest and she was thankfully asleep and in bed. I have this tendency to take my clothes off normally, but the urge is even stronger when I'm drunk. As soon as we walked into my house I began to disrobe in our entry foyer and scamp around. At some point Hillary disappeared into one of the spare bedrooms and I was left naked with Hugo. Now I am not a huge whore, but I tend to be more of a sexually free person. There aren't too many friends that I haven't hooked up with in one way or another and tonight in my drunken state Hugo was going to get his chance, I mean I was already naked after all.

At some point while prancing around my house nude I became aware of my nakedness and decided to cover myself with my winter coat that just barely covered my ass. So now I was completely naked except for a navy wool coat with a hood. After partially clothing myself I began making out with Hugo and I don't remember how or why the making out started, but my tactic is to usually just grab your face and force my lips upon you. This was a tactic that I began using in college and is still a running joke with my friends. I am a face rapist if you will. My friends would constantly have to apologize after my face rape advances were often shot down. I don't have very good flirtation skills and I have no idea how to "pick up" someone, but I do know how to kiss and I would pretty much make out with anyone. If you have the balls to just lean in and kiss a stranger why not go with it and enjoy the moment. If it ends up being horrible well at least you have a great story to tell your friends the next day.  This tactic even almost got my ass whooped once when I tried to face rape some dude at a gay bar. He literally grabbed my arm and ushered me out of the bar and hurled me onto the street and into a pile of garbage bags. It was not a moment I am proud of, but I can assure you that my intent was harmless and in my defense I am a very good kisser.

And back to the present story, Hugo and I were swapping spit in the foyer and then I ushered him into my kitchen and onto the sink counter. At this point I lowered his pants and dropped to my knees. I'm gonna let you all infer what I was doing on my knees here. This lasted for a few minutes until this became tedious in my incredibly intoxicated state. I led Hugo to the couch in my living room and we began to fool around and I began to undress Hugo. It was at this point that I heard movement upstairs and I knew that my mom was awake. My mother has a bathroom in her bedroom, but she is a hoarder and her bathroom is unusable because it is filled with random shit. Her bathtub is filled with clothes and assorted goodies and her sink and counter is covered in junk, so she often comes downstairs to use the main bathroom. My mother then made it to the second floor landing and peered around the corner to observe Hugo and I canoodling on the couch. At this point I was naked except for my winter coat and Hugo was dressed, except for a shirt. My mother then quickly jolted into the bathroom and I rapidly attempted to make the situation seem more appropriate by having Hugo put his shirt on and straightened up the couch. As my mother exited the bathroom she came down the steps to the living room level and began telling Hugo that he needed to leave. My mother does not approve of my homosexual activities and definitely opposes my casual sexual trysts. With this in mind I'm sure this experience was particularly jarring for her. Hugo quickly excused himself and ran out into the night, while I was left to face my mother wearing nothing but my winter coat (which at this time I had buttoned). I was still very intoxicated and could not even formulate a good enough lie to make my mother think that I had been doing anything else other than fornicating with someone she didn't know on her couches. I went to bed feeling slightly embarrassed and mad at myself for not exhibiting more restraint.

In the morning I awoke with a terrible headache and a fuzzy recollection of the night before. I chugged several bottles of water, got ready for work and drove Hillary home. I'm almost certain I spent that day locked in my office with my head on my desk. Later when I came home my mother confronted me and I believe our conversation went a little like this:

Mom: "You know what happened last night really disturbed me, and was not something that I wanted to see."

Now I was ready for her, and had formulated what I believed was an immaculate response.

Me: "I know mom, but you see when I get drunk I just happen to take my clothes off."

My mother provided a household that did not make clothes a requirement. Now I'm not saying that we walked around naked all the time, or really ever, but I did spend most of my time at home chilling in underwear. And my mother thought that undergarments were basically just an option, meaning she pretty much never wears a bra or underwear unless she is going somewhere that requires her to be presentable (the mall is not one of those places". The best example of this belief of my mother's is one day in the summer she was out in our front yard gardening and she was wearing her summer "uniform," which consisted of a purple wife beater and blue nylon short-ass running shorts. She became very hot from all the gardening and folded her wife beater up to that she thought was the top of her abdomen to cool off. In actuality she pulled it up above her breasts giving our entire neighborhood quite the show. I do not know how long this lasted before she realized her indecent exposure. My mother was also often guilty of trying on clothes sans panties.

This is the climate in which I grew up and this environment allowed me to become very comfortable with my body and allowed me to develop a healthy self-image. My mother bought my explanation and it appeared that she had not seen anything explicit and had not even noticed that Hugo was at one point shirtless. My mother was still ashamed that she had a son that wore nothing more than a winter coat in front of his friends and her, but this belief was a lot better than if she knew what actually occurred that night. I hope that she will never find out and be spared from the trauma that would undoubtedly follow. My mother and I still don't see eye to eye, but I believe that we are becoming more comfortable with each other and our differing beliefs and life styles.

Vials

So now I’m going to conclude my HIV diagnosis story. I guess it’s taken me the better part of four months to get there because I wasn’t really finished dealing with it. I think I needed to really finish processing what it meant to me before I could put it down on paper, well technicological paper.

The next morning Jaime and I went to my favorite brunch place, Red Eye Café, in Montclair, NJ. I ordered eggs Benedict with pork belly. Eggs Benedict is my go to comfort breakfast and I needed some comfort that morning. I was still barely more than a zombie at this point, so I’m sure adequate social functioning was not happening.

After an awesome meal we went to my favorite park in Montclair (clearly today was a day of favorites), had some cigarettes, and shot the breeze while eating Bavarian cream donuts. We then went and picked up my friend Jarek from the bus stop. He somehow felt compelled to come in from New York City to help comfort me at this terrible time. Now Jarek is this super anal, super organized, kind of neurotic person who just makes you hate yourself because YOU are a lazy Son of a Bitch, and of course he pulled no strings here. He was on a mission to find me a doctor and get the ball rolling. I was not in a place to get the ball rolling. I was still continually praying to Jesus on the regular that this was all just a terrible, terrible nightmare Finding a doctor and talking about a cocktail of toxic pharmaceuticals was the last thing on my mind, but that was the beauty of Jarek he was always prepared to make you face things that were intimidating and most likely overwhelming, he was quite the sobering friend.

Anyway, we picked Jarek up from the park and ride and as he came Jaime had to leave to go back to Philly and her marathon nursing program. Jarek and I spent the day schlepping to Central Jersey to pick up my Z-pack from Nelson’s house and then into the city we went to take Jarek home. I then went food shopping with him at Whole Foods, said goodbye to Jarek, packed up my car with groceries, and began the drive home through the Lincoln Tunnel. This was the first moment that I was completely alone since I was diagnosed and I could not handle the silence, and then Sam Smith came on and I was a goner.

There are songs that without fail will leave you feeling vulnerable and teary eyed. Sam Smith has a song, Like I Can, that automatically makes me well a little. The fact that Sam Smith is a bonafide homosexual and I can relate to pretty much all his songs made this song even harder to listen to. Being diagnosed with HIV made me question whether or not I would ever find love, more than I already do, and this song was not helping at all at the moment. So alone in my car, listening to Sam Smith, while driving through the Lincoln Tunnel I began crying, sobbing even. I cried tears for me, for all the obstacles I would have to face, and the judgment I would face from others. It took about two seconds before I was using my car phone to find someone who was available to hang out with me, and in the meantime I went home, got drunk, and watched the Big C. My coworker Nikki came over later and spent some time with me, and life continued to get a little easier, and that was the end of day 2, and I, my friends, was still standing.

Over the next few days I found out I had health insurance, booked an appointment with a doctor Jarek found me, and then having to call the office and admit to them that I was diagnosed with HIV in an effort to get an earlier appointment. I mean I was diagnosed with a potentially life threatening disease, I should be accommodated. Once I uttered the words HIV the doors opened and I was given an appointment for the next day.

On Wednesday morning I went in to the see the doctor and although he was very experienced with LGBT issues I felt like not too much was explained to me. We went through my entire sex history, and he probed my sex life for intimate tid-bits. Top, bottom? Protection? Whips, chains? Anal probes? Size of anal probes? You get the picture. It was clear that this was a gay doctor’s office once the doctor’s medical assistant, Ryan, made his appearance. He was wearing trendy New Balance sneakers, a flashy button-down shirt that looked like it came from A Night at the Roxbury and heavily whiskered medium-washed blue jeans. I was kind of appalled at this get-up. Not only was it not professional, but it wasn’t even cute. I’m pretty sure my deceased grandfather could have put together a cuter outfit consisting of pieces all from Old Navy.

After all the assessing was done it was time for the real fun to begin! They needed to take 15 vials of blood. As I sat there with the IV in my arm and watching vial after vial being filled and my head feeling lighter and lighter the magnitude of the situation really began to sink in, not to mention that after all these vials were filled Ryan was going to need to swab and scrape the interior of my rectum for HPV and the Clap. After all the probing was done I put my clothes back on and went back to my life.

On Friday I got a call from Planned Parenthood that they had the results of my HIV blood test and that I needed to come in to get them. I was pissed at this point because why would I need to go and get re-diagnosed all over again. I begrudgingly left work and headed over, but when I arrived I was greeted with the news that my blood test was negative! Negative!!!!! I hugged the NP that relayed this news and had she been hotter I probably would have made out with her a bit. I really didn’t know how to handle this news. Did this mean I was negative? Which test had been wrong? Planned Parenthood left me with the advice that I was most likely negative, but should use condoms during sex and get retested in three months. This seemed like less than stellar advice at the time. I was completely numb and didn’t know what to do. I then called my doctors office and told Ryan the news. My doctor called me back quickly, and told me that a negative blood test was a good sign, but I was far from out of the woods.

The next morning I received an email from my doctor reporting that my viral load came back and the virus was undetectable in my body. This is when things really started to brighten up. We still needed a few tests to come back to be certain that I had received a false positive reading the rapid test, but things were definitely looking up.

It was upon hearing this news that I decided to get ridiculously intoxicated on gin and lemonade to celebrate. I had my good friend Peter come over to keep me company and entertain my drunk ass. Unfortunately, he was forced to put up with my drunken antics, like watching me strip on my back deck while lotioning my genitals and watching episode upon episode of Girls, a show that he now thoroughly despises. Later in the evening my friend Todd joined us and we were going to go out and grab a bite to eat. I suggested we go to this little restaurant and bar in Montclair, Egan and Sons. It’s one of my all-time favorites, mostly for the Carrera marble countertops and sexy bartenders. I could do without the mostly white, straight, and often douchey and entitled college crowd, but it’s a cross Egan and Sons patrons have to bare.

Upon arrival at Egan’s I was given a t-shirt to wear because men aren’t allowed to wear tank tops. So now I was stuck toting my ass around in an oversized, white Hanes T-shirt with a huge Bud, Miller, Coors, insert another white trash watery beer bottle on it. I was mortified. I pride myself in the way that I dress and now not only was I intensely intoxicated, and still severely fragile from my potential HIV diagnosis, but I was forced to wear a hideous t-shirt. Egan’s was just asking for it. However, I held it together and attempted to be as nice as humanly possible to our pig-faced trollop of a waitress. After dinner Peter bid Todd and I adieu, and Todd and I went to the city to gay bar hop. I don’t really remember anything from that night and I’m ok with it. Life, in general, was pretty blurry for a few weeks, and not remembering my moments of psychological fragility is ok with me.

Fast forward a week and a half I met with my new doctor to go over my lab results and obtain a full physical. I was super anxious to hear his thoughts and get the final yay or nay on my status, but first I had to sit through a gamete of prods and pressures to hit the finish line. The worst of all these tests was the Spirometry test. This test assesses your lung function and capacity by having you breathe out into a tube. I sucked at this test and could not do it properly. I could tell that Ryan was becoming irked by this and politely apologized, and his response (classically gay) was “ Oh, I’m not mad at you. It’s just that there are other things I NEED to be doing, other than watch you breathe.” Thanks a lot douchebag, maybe you should wear tighter white denim to work next time?

This test indicated, assuming I did it right, that I had the lungs of a 68 year old. This seemed pretty unlikely because even though I smoke cigarettes I try to combat this with routine cardiovascular exercise, so I'm just blaming Ryan for skewed results.
After Ryan huffed out of the room the doctor came in to assess me in my very fashionable blue paper gown. He listened to my heart, looked in my ears and then it was time to look in my eyes. Now I have awful vision, like without any kind of corrective lens I'm technically legally blind (I'm still waiting on my seeing eye dog), so the doctor was having a hard time seeing into my eyeball. It was during this examination that his genitals brushed against my thigh and well he was aroused. Either that or he had a cigar in his pocket. I didn't really know what to do at this point. I mean I was attracted to him, I mean I routinely went for the "Daddy" type, but this was my doctor and I didn't even know his favorite color, so I just choked it up to another hilarious life experience.

After the examination the doctor took me into a separate room and we were going to redo the rapid test. It was the only test that I had yet to test negative to, and I guess in many way this would finalize my negativity. The Little Imp, Ryan, came in and administered the test, and what seemed like a billion years later my doctor came in to give me the good news that it too came back negative. It was an amazing moment and I felt like so much weight was lifted off my shoulders. I spent the car ride home calling my friends and telling them the good news.

This experience was a huge emotional rollercoaster and something that I will never forget. It changed the way that I think and feel about HIV/AIDS, casual sex, and the way I treat stigmatized people. I definitely think harder about who I sleep with and value sex more than I used too. I realized I didn't really value sex at all as of the summer of 2014, and that was something my younger self would have been disappointed in. With all that being said I am four months out from this false positive and I'm happy, healthy, and definitely wiser. I don't know that I'd want to do it again, but I can say for sure that I've learned from it.