+of+IMG_9264.jpg)
I am someone who does not have AIDS. I have, however, tested for and placed on the Autistic Spectrum Disorder scale. I mention these two different facts because I have had four friends with AIDS. Three have died and one has effectively pushed everyone who he has loved, successfully out of his life. Moreover, I am just now beginning to understand why it is that people cry when people they love die, especially from AIDS. Yet, these are not the only people who cry because of AIDS.
They say that people like me who, although having the same emotions as everyone else, nevertheless must contend with how those feelings will generally take a more roundabout route to expression. Therefore, until January 2009, I always knew there was something about me that was just a little bit off. I always knew I had more trouble than most when it came to saying what I meant "right now" instead of eventually. Even to this day, my ability to focus my thought and behavior into a sequential phrasing of easily recognizable patterns remains a struggle I sometimes do not win.
Ric, for instance was a friend of mine with whom I worked as an actor in a children's theater troupe, almost 27 years ago. When he first told us about his diagnosis of AIDS, the whole troupe began to cry. I was sad, but couldn't cry. I thought I understood why everyone else did, but in retrospect, I have to confess I didn't.
On the other hand, maybe I did: I actually can't say for sure, and that fact sticks in the back of my throat as the most frustrating part, even after all this time.
Nowadays, I honestly can't say if it is the Autism or merely a characteristic of personality, but when I first found out about Ric, having AIDS, I kept asking myself: why isn't there a cure? Why isn't there an effective treatment? I don't know why, but I persisted in believing that tears were useless. "Find and effective treatment, find a cure," I continually repeated to myself.
And even when, for the last time, I saw Ric on the inbound #4 bus from Ypsilanti into Ann Arbor and his body looked like it had dissolved into its bones, I kept arguing inside my head: "This does not have to happen, why can't someone understand?"
I am not so Autistic, so locked inside my world of interpretive imagination, that I didn't know what empathy or compassion were. Nevertheless, that indeed was the last time I saw Ric. He even made a pass at me. I smiled and calmly said good-bye. When I heard from his sister that he had passed, I immediately convinced myself that the tears his sister shed as she informed us were natural, but I didn't have to let myself feel them
I thought to myself "I'm not crying. There is a cure for this thing and I am only going to think about that." However, Nowadays, I know now that, although I may not have been wrong, I was way off about the most important part of who Ric was and what he meant to those he loved and loved him. Contrary to what I believed I knew then, I did not understand why AIDS makes people cry. I know now it is much more than a disease in need of a cure.
Am I so aloof, so haughty and removed from the world of human feeling that I see crying in general as something that "I" just don't do? Possibly. But if that were the case, would I have taken time to ask that question? This is not my first time at self-questioning I do wonder however about self-doubt.
The second person I have known to die from AIDS directed me in a play about John Coltrane here in town at the old Performance Network. I consider Vince a friend; frankly, because he cast me as the young John Coltrane and at the time remember thinking how "cool." Nevertheless, when I first met Vince, I had no way of knowing that three weeks later, he would be dead from complications due to AIDS. Again, I did not let myself feel what others felt. I don't think I hid my feelings. But from what I know now about Autistic Spectrum Disorders, I did let my feelings wander about: perhaps even more so than usual.
Then I met a cross dresser named Tina with whom I worked in another play. Ironically, this play called Drag, written by a playwright who had recently died due to AIDS related complications wasn't about AIDS as much as it was about love, another thing about people I have never quit understood. In retrospect, Tina may have had a crush on me, but she was one of the stars of the show and at the time, I had a hang up about mixing with other actors who had lead roles. Self Doubt no doubt.
In the play, I portrayed the role of Mistress of Ceremonies, Chalandra. Yet, what I remember most was how Tina took me under (her) wing. I even appeared with her on stage during one her shows at what used to be the Nectarine Ballroom. I was "her man." However, Tina, like so many people back then, had AIDS. And not too long after "Drag" ran I learned from the director Jim Posante, that Tina had died due to an AIDS related illness.
The single thing that amazes me about those days was how I appeared to float through it all: all the friends, acquaintances, and people in general whom their families, friends and lovers cried for as they passed became an integral part of how I felt I grew to understand the world. So much so, that I remember thinking at the time "I may not have known before, but now I know why AIDS makes people cry."
Yet, I have to back away from that memory, because in retrospect, I didn't understand a damn thing about why AIDS makes people cry especially those who are left behind in its wake.
It is not without some irony that as all these people around me were dying, I continued to view their deaths as if I could understand them without actually taking part in remembering their lives. I don't think this is due to a personality characteristic. Instead, I believe I constructed it from something much deeper than personality.
I believed back then that I thought, behaved and acted from instinct first and personality second. Thus, I thought I constructed a perspective based on what I felt was an instinctive awareness of the lives these people led, without actually experiencing the profound loss of their passing. In other words, I thought I didn't have to cry in order to understand why AIDS hurt those who remain as much as those claimed by the disease.
I cannot remember there being a single event over the past two decades that helped evolve my thinking from a self-centered position to whatever it is today. And yet, on the day I was told I placed on the Autistic Spectrum of Disorder I do recall something happening I don't think I've found the words for.
When the two University of Michigan psychologists who tested and evaluated me, brought me into their office and told me the news, I didn't feel much one way or the other. That was January of this year. Since then I have entered and gone through a couple of phases about what do with this information now that I am a 48-year-old African American male with a lot of education.
I am at a place right now where I at least am beginning to understand some things I thought I knew about being with people and why things like AIDS makes people cry.
The range between Asperger's Syndrome and Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) is an unchartered territory, according to most of the current thinking. For me what the jargon translates into are years of isolation in public; always feeling one-step behind of a crowd where you never quite fit; mostly feeling abandoned and never actually knowing why.
It's that word, abandoned that, as I write this, takes me back to the eighties when Vince, Tina, Ric lived and died. The word also conjures memories of Ted, who also has AIDS and yet, the last I heard, was still alive. I'm not saying that my experience is anything like what any of these people lived and in most cases, died with.
Nevertheless, I do know the feeling of not being able to find a friend, of always being alone especially in a crowded room. I know the of feeling of being trapped inside a plastic bubble, floating in a pool of water, slowly sinking while all those around you nod their heads and wish you well. I know what it is like when you try to call for help and can't because there is no air
I also know that when I do cry, it is always because the feelings of always being alone every now and then catch up with and surprise me. I cannot begin to imagine what it was like for my friends who died from AIDS or for Ted who has had AIDS since I knew him at the Y.M.C.A here in Ann Arbor back when it was on 5th Street years ago.
However, I do know what it feels like to feel ostracized like an alien from another planet, whispered about or more often than not, completely ignored. Although I don't know what it is to feel sick all the time and so weak you can barely stand, I do know what it is feel the constant knot of anger I the pit of your stomach: anger at God, family and all those who pass judgment as quickly as a fart fowls a passing breeze.
As I said, I do know what it feels like to feel as though everyone you ever loved, everything you ever knew and trusted, abandons you and leaves you completely and utterly, alone. I know that feeling well. Moreover, if my friends who are still here with AIDS feel this way, then I wonder if they have ever for a moment thought that: "Hell on Earth is a stillness where the sounds of life are no longer a friend?"
Nowadays, here in the age of our first African American President and so many "effective" treatments for AIDS, I feel as though it is excessively easy to believe that AIDS is no longer a problem of great concern. I even heard a rumor recently that more than a few high school boys and girls no longer bother with condoms when having sex.
Afterall, it's "so yesterday."
I remember "yesterday." But you know what else is easy: looking at AIDS as if today only poor uneducated African men get it because they aren't smart enough. AIDS is as much a problem today as it has ever been.
I could quote a boatload of statistics from the CDC (Center for Disease Control), but I do not think that is necessary. The fact remains that AIDS along with a few other diseases remain those kinds of viruses that do and will continue to change in much the same way they did when they made the leap from infecting animal to human blood.
I did not write this article to preach a doomsday litany of fire and brimstone 2009 style. The title, "I Know Why AIDS Makes People Cry" of course refers to the parallel reasoning I have already developed and illustrated. However, implicit in the development of this article is the unspoken argument that those who turned their backs and or made lucrative careers out of condemning the different and the damned, did so not out of hatred but fear.
For those of us who consider themselves normal, not homosexual, not sinful: whole and decent folk who go to church every Sunday and pay their fair share of taxes, AIDS scares and repulses because it reminds us of our old yet still constant fear of death. In other words, AIDS makes the "normal" of us cry because our definition of what "normal" is, remains just as outdated and inherently inhuman today as it was throughout the eighties, and much of the nineties.
AIDS makes all of us cry. AIDS still concerns all of us.
"Ignore me, go on, I dare you. Ignore me and I will dance on your grave."
AIDS can never be ignored.
A Few Thoughts from,
Tom
Posts
