When I was 19, taking a lot of Afro-Haitian dance classes at San Francisco State and selling bad marijuana under the student union, I started dating a guy I’d had a crush on for years, ever since high school when I saw, carved into his locker, the words “I SURF ON YOUR FACE.”
“James” looked like Paul Newman, according to his mother. Actually, his blue eyes were bigger than Paul’s, and he was so muscular and ripped his tawny body made him look like a Soloflex model. He was so genetically gifted, he’d never had a cavity in his straight white teeth. He was keeping his head shaved, right then, but when it grew out, I remembered, it was in angelic, dirty-blond ringlets. He drove a Cadillac with no muffler that he had roller-painted with McDonald’s logo colors in industrial sign paint — yield sign yellow, all over the body, with the Landau roof painted stop sign red. “Loud and proud,” he called it. The sport-fishing bass decal in one of the rear windows really classed up the whole package. He was 24, and exclusively wore flat-front Dickies work pants and wifebeater shirts. A working class God, and a bona fide weirdo. I was crushed out.
He was quite brilliant: a terrific writer, and an exquisite skateboarder, capable of rolling down the extremely steep Green Street in North Beach, in another friend’s words, “like a falling leaf.”
We were broke, but inseparable. Once, apropos of nothing, he set up an elaborate treasure hunt for me all around his neighborhood with typewritten clues and string and all manner of effort. It took me about 45 minutes to get to the end, and when I finally did, there was a pair of vintage cowboy boots I had seen in a shop window and lusted after but couldn’t afford. I had no idea how he managed to afford them. I wore them literally to shreds.
This was the height of AIDS paranoia in San Francisco. Many of our friends were sick or had already fallen — and I had spent my 17th summer shooting meth with gay prostitutes, so I was in an atrocious risk category. This was still early days for AIDS — there was no cure, at that point, and nothing that could save you. You just got real skinny and died pretty quick. Sometimes really quick.
We’d been together for a few months, and I was scared shitless, so I urged him to come with me to a clinic in the city to get tested, in the name of being responsible adults.
To my great surprise and delight, my test came out negative. James was being tested in another room, and I sat in the waiting room for him to come out, to tell him the great news. And I waited. And I waited.
When he finally emerged from the room, he clearly had been crying. His hands were full of pamphlets. Counselors were tending to him gently.
This was a completely unexpected outcome. James was the clean one.
I ran into the bathroom and threw up. We hadn’t been safe with each other. The counselors from the clinic told me that I was negative now, but that there was a ten year incubation period, and I wouldn’t know for sure for another ten years.
For the rest of the day, I was in an altered state. My suddenly traumatized mind responded by giving me something like a mescaline trip. I stared at a lawn and literally thought I could hear the grass growing. I could see every individual green blade, and feel the moisture and life in them, and I envied them.
I figured, at age 19, I had about 6 years to live. It would be several years before medical science would catch up enough to disabuse me of this belief.
James handled the news his own way. He attempted suicide several times. Once I knocked on his door, and he opened it wearing his best suit. He told me that his head was in the noose when I knocked, and my knocking was the only thing that stopped him.
The truth came tumbling out. James, when he was a mop-haired freshman in high school, had been kidnapped along with a friend of his and repeatedly raped by a huge black ex-con over several days. After that, since high school — nobody knew it, but he had found occasion to be a gay male prostitute at the local gay hotel. The night in question, he told me — the night he knew he had become infected — he had sold his ass for a 12-pack of beer.
I was ready to tough out an HIV-positive life with James, but I wasn’t ready for his suicidal behavior. I left him and felt horrible about it, but he was also pushing me away.
A couple of years later, a mutual friend told me what had become of him. James, one of the single most unblemished human beings I have ever seen, had bought himself a tattoo gun, and went to town on himself.
James - who always had a flair for the poetic, had tattooed harsh, black old age lines all over his face, so that “his outside would match his inside.” I had been in occasional touch with him, but decided to let go, at that point. I didn’t ever want to see that face defaced.
The tattoos would come as a source of regret, but only much later. To this day, over 30 years later, James is still alive. He is the last person who would have believed this. I heard through the grapevine that he had gotten married, and had also gotten a professional tattoo artist to integrate the lines he made into a spiderweb pattern, all over his entire beautiful head and face.
He went on to become a superstar in the wellness community. Another friend of mine, an alcoholic, credited James with saving his life. I heard through another friend in recovery, recently, that he had seen James in an AA meeting, and mentioned my name to him. I was told James shivered a little, at the memory of me.
I shiver too. I don’t keep in touch with him. We went through too much together. We survived, barely. There’s a lot of PTSD between us. But I am really glad he’s alive.
Cintraw@gmail.com
Artwork: “Toy Car,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2019
Those were some messed up times. Being in NYC I saw alo of my friends from dance clubs start to fade away. When I meet my now husband we decide to pay for the test when you'd get the results in an hour. It was the longest and sweetest hour of my life. Pledging no matter what the outcome that we'd love each other and could weather any storm. We were lucky. Thanks for sharing this story.
Can’t believe he survived all of it and has gone on to help others. Talk about a testament to the human spirit. This is yet another example of how one should never assume anything about the future.