After a couple of weeks the Transfusions and the Needle Sticks stopped coming.
It began when the nurse talked about how unfair it was that she, a mother of two, had gotten Hepatitis C through—no fault of her own—a needle stick.
A former junkie interrupted, "I got it from a needle stick too."
People laughed loudly, but the nurse pretended not to hear. "I don't understand why this happened to me," she said.
A tall, thin man with dozens of tattoos stood up. "If I have to listen to another second of this I'm going to kill myself before my liver has a chance." He dragged his chair across the basement floor, to the corner. "This is a closed meeting for," he looked at the nurse sarcastically, "Mainliners." We formed another circle.
Without the Transfusions and the Needle Sticks to keep us in line, we started going to Grumpy's after the meeting.
"To my liver," was always the first toast. As the night went on there were others:
"To car crashes."
"Homicides, a nuclear holocaust!"
"To living hard, dying young, and leaving a corpse worthy of defilement."
"Necrophilia!"
"To taking milk thistle with a shot of vodka," a Vietnam vet said, passing around a bottle he got free from the VA Hospital.
Bridget, a stripper who'd turned tricks when she was still getting high, said, "To being thirty times more infectious than H.I.V," and we all cheered.
I wasn't unhappy.
But at some point I decided I couldn't be quite satisfied until I had lain on my back with the tattooed man's sweat dripping off my skin. I'd imagined our bodies in concert together—doomed, writhing, and beautiful—every day since we'd formed another circle. I'd carved a heart with our names inside it into a maple tree outside my apartment building.
I tried my best to lean against him one Thursday night as we were leaving Grumpy's. It wasn't easy with how much I was stumbling. It was my idea to start going to Grumpy's after the meeting so I didn't mind setting the pace. I don't like drinking alone.
"Hey," he said, catching my arm to steady me, "Congratulations. You probably at least doubled everybody's blood-alcohol level."
His keen attention to my selflessness was all the encouragement I needed to make my pitch, "We have the same strain. We wouldn't have to use a condom."
He looked surprised for a split-second before recovering his ironic detachment. "You're dangerous," he said. He had a playful sneer that accounted for at least half of my attraction to him. "But sadly misinformed. Everyone knows it's not spread through sex."
I thought he was going to turn me down, in which case I would probably spend the next couple of hours fantasizing about suicide. Oh, the romance of being ill-fated! But then he said, "Your place or mine?" Up close I could see dozens of shadowy little pock-marks along his jaw.
"Yours."
I got onto the back of his motorcycle, wrapped my arms around him, and thought: I'll do anything.
And I would have too, except that as soon as I lay down I passed out.
Before rushing to work the next morning I forced a laugh and willed the blood not to rush to my face. I'm not one of those people who thinks blushing is charming.
"Whoopsie."
"Don't worry about it," he said, "a little anticipation is nice."
We met that night at Grumpy's. This time when we went back to his place I didn't pass out when we lay down.
Afterwards, we were as excited as tween girls at their first dance. He told me the stories behind each of his tattoos, including my favorite-a zig-zaggy bare-branched tree that wound around his shoulder. "I was on the front page—no shit—of the Minneapolis Tribune when I was nine, for winning my hometown's 'National' Tree Climbing Championship."
I told him how before I dropped out of college I'd been a triple major in Psychology, Sociology, and English. "My very first semester I discovered 'study aids.' By the second semester I decided swallowing the white crosses was too slow. Same with the pills I took to come down. I started snorting all of it."
"Did you stop there?"
"No."
"I'm glad you're not one of those people who claim they got Hep C from a straw," he teased. "Hey, if I end up in community college someday, will you be my tutor?"
That was the thing about Jay. He liked to compliment me and make my small accomplishments seem much bigger, without being conspicuous about it. He was the archetypal tough guy—a cornball at heart. "I'm sure we can work something out," I said.
I was lying on top of him and neither of us seemed to want to get up. Sunlight was already streaming through the blinds, falling in long lines across our pale skin. I gently stroked the branches of his tree, as if I could soften them, and asked "So how high did you get?"
I'd assumed he would know I was referring to his championship tree-climb, but he let out a short, angry laugh, and said, "Very."
We were quiet for a few minutes, then he asked, "You?"
"Oh, also 'very' for awhile, and then… you know…"
"Yeah, I do." He rolled us so we were side by side, facing each other, and said, "I'm either still drunk or a little bit in love."
I was suddenly so disgustingly bashful and happy I couldn't look him in the eye so instead I looked at the clock. "Eight a.m. Saturday," I said. "Bloody Mary time!"
Although I no longer got high, sometimes I still liked to run a little water in my veins. I longed for the sense of purpose I'd had when I was always either getting the money to score, scoring, or high. A month into our relationship Jay noticed a couple of fresh tracks. He didn't embarrass me, he just said, "Maybe it is good we have the same strain."
"Why, do you plan to keep me?" I'd been wanting to know, and it seemed a safe way to ask--as if I might be kidding.
"I plan to try. I don't know any other girl who enjoys peanut butter-banana-sandwiches and cheerleader porn as much as I do." I surprised myself by saying, "Good, because I love you." We were cuddled up on his couch and I felt his chest tense beneath my head. I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.
Then he said, "I love you too. Do you want to get married?"
I hadn't taken him for the type of guy you could nail down so easily. I looked up into his face to see if he were serious. He explained, "We have to-no, excuse me-we get to live our lives a lot quicker than everybody else. Especially us fun types." He was looking at me so intensely that I knew he meant it
"Yes," I said. "I do."
He took my face between his hands and kissed me long and hard. "I'll go get the cheap champagne," he said, sliding out from under me and turning to leave. Then he spun around on his heel and fell to his knee so deftly anyone watching might have thought that he would live forever. "I'm sorry, I forgot about this whole kneeling business," he said, and asked me again.
That night while Jay snored lightly beside me, I still couldn't believe that I was going to get married. I'd never signed anything more than a few forms at the doctor's office, not even a lease. My landlord and I had a month to month agreement, because who knew what could happen? I could be downsized out of my ability to pay rent, I could win a year-long MLT world vacation, some rich person could ask me to housesit for a few years while they vacationed in their second home in Italy.
Before Jay came along I'd never really wanted anything except to be high. "I want to be as with you as possible forever," I said into the dark.
The next Thursday the group threw us an unofficial engagement party at Grumpy's by buying us way too many drinks and encouraging the vet to toast us with each one. "May you always enjoy the company of many friends and many more drinks!" was the first toast. The last one was a bit slurred: "May the wind be always atch er back… unless yer cold."
We both lived in shitholes, but Jay's shithole was more conveniently located. Stumbling home from Grumpy's one night, I counted four-hundred-and-seventeen steps to his apartment. We also had to take into account that he'd signed a lease. "Your place it is!" I announced. Soon after, I brought my goldfish over and the three of us were terribly happy until I went to my gastroenterologist.
"You can kick it if you want to," he said. I laughed and then he gave me the figures from my last blood test. My viral load was lower than it had been in my entire Hep C career.
"Are you sure you have the right results? Those are mine?"
"I'm sure," he said.
"But I have one-A." One and four were nasty and, I had assumed, unkickable.
"Yes, I'm sure," he said.
"But I'm not taking Interferon, why would I be getting better?"
"Get plenty of rest, and keep taking your milk thistle," he said.
Get plenty of rest? I would have to quit my job or my life. I entertained a montage of myself working hard to get better, the Rocky theme song playing in the background while I slept eight hours a night, ate organic food, and took my milk thistle. I couldn't deny that it held a certain appeal.
"I've been drinking."
The doctor didn't look up from some writing he'd begun on his clipboard. "Stop," he said.
Jay came home that night with Chinese take-out. "What the hell is that?" he asked, gazing into our frying pan.
"Tofu," I answered.
"Okay, anything for you," he said, then kissed the back of my neck and put the take-out in the refrigerator.
I'd hidden some milk thistle in a pair of boots under the bed.
That Thursday I told Jay I wasn't going to the meeting.
"You lured us down a path of drinking and debauchery and now you're just going to abandon us? What about the greater good? I'll buy you a vodka Red Bull," he said.
"Sorry, not tonight."
The next week he was even more insistent. "You have to come, everyone's asking about you."
I missed our friends from group, but I still wasn't going to go and drink away my chance of kicking Hep C. Since seeing my gastroenterologist, I'd been imagining the cells of my body mending themselves and suiting up to fight all the crimes I'd committed against myself; I imagined them lifting blood like weights inside my veins, racing importantly through long dark tunnels.
I'd also been thinking about drinking. I missed it, badly, but I still wasn't going to do it. "No thanks, I'm going to get a good night's rest."
"A good night's rest? So you can be the best receptionist ever?"
Jay had never insulted me before. I forgave him. "You can wake me up when you get home," I said.
I didn't let go of him that night when he couldn't keep it up. I massaged his back until he let his weight crush me against the bed. "I love you," I said over and over, until he grew hard again. Sex with Jay usually convinced me that by a strange and unfortunate means I'd arrived at the place at which I'd always wanted to be. The startling feeling I'd had the first time—that everything was just right—started to come back to me. I was about to tell him that I'd do anything for him, but the feeling didn't fully wrap me up like it usually did.
Afterwards Jay was quiet and I quickly fell asleep. I had to get my eight hours in.
The next day he came home with McDonald's. "Please eat a cheeseburger," he said, "You're really starting to scare me."
"I'm not hungry," I replied, then added "Thanks, though."
He stood staring at me with the cheeseburger in his hand. It smelled good and I wished he wouldn't stand so close to me with it. "You're not taking that 'Chinese Magic Herb,' shit, are you?" I shook my head. Then he asked, "Interferon?"
How could I explain to Jay that even if he couldn't get better I would try to take him with me back over to the other side, so we could run about freely in that big happy segment of society where people lived long, stigma-free lives and drank without having to toast their own deaths? We could be like characters in a television show the whole family can watch. I never liked those shows, but I was young, and I saw the value in keeping my options open. And maybe, if he really wanted to, Jay could kick it.
But as I looked at him his tattoos and sneer stabbed into focus, and all I said was, "My body is clearing it on its own."
"I was thinking of being in this study at the U of M," he said, "I was going to ask you if you wanted to too…" He looked so frightened that for a second I wanted to put my arms around him and tell him I'd stay sick. "So will you be immune to getting it again from me—after you kick it?"
"I don't know."
He sat down on the couch and at some point took the cheeseburger out of its wrapping and threw it at the television. Then he slammed out of the apartment and didn't wake me up when he got home.
The next day I stood naked in front of the mirror, staring at the body I'd inhabited for twenty-seven years—a body that would carry me into a time that my friends from the Hep C support group would probably never experience. Especially not now that, thanks in part to me, they'd begun drinking like Irishmen.
I swore a couple of times, then tried to tell myself they'd be okay, then told myself it wasn't my fault if they weren't, then tried to put it out of my mind. I had other things to think about. There, in front of me, stood a woman who was so unscathed it seemed like she couldn't possibly be me. She had relatively good skin and clear, attentive eyes. She was clean and she wanted big things for herself. And the only thing bigger than love is possibility. Every time I'd smacked a vein up from the surface of my skin that's what I'd been thinking of-nothing in particular, but everything, vaguely.
I pulled on a pair of slacks and a sweater patterned with pink flowers. If Jay had been there, and if I hadn't been leaving, if I'd only been going to my grandma's house or something, we would have laughed at how ridiculous it was for me to be wearing that outfit. I hadn't worn it for nine years. Yet I hadn't thrown it away. I gave myself one last incredulous once-over. Then, with my fishbowl under one arm, and my milk thistle deep inside the suitcase I held with the other, I left. I started to hurry when I got close to the windows outside Grumpy's. As I passed, the door opened and I heard voices and laughter from inside.
"Hey!"
I looked back and saw Bridget, the stripper from the Hep C group. She was looking at my suitcase.
"Want to come inside and talk? I owe you at least a few drinks." She quickly added, "Jay's not here."
"No, I've really got to go, but thanks." I turned back in the direction I was going.
"Hey," she called, "Hey! Stop a second!"
I ignored her and kept going. I wasn't really surprised when she shouted, "You suck!"
Guilt, shame, remorse—I felt them all, but I wasn't going to let them stop me from leaving Jay and Bridget and the Vietnam Vet and the rest of the Hep C crew. I'd already moved on to something new and I couldn't have reeled myself back into my old life even if I'd wanted to. But that's a lot to enunciate from half a block away, so instead I turned around and made sure they wouldn't miss me. "Yeah, but at least I'm going to suck for a long time!" Then I gave her the finger and continued down the street.
Sometimes now, when I replay the scene in my mind, I go into Grumpy's with Bridget. I stand at the head of the table. The Vietnam vet is there, and everybody else from the group, even Jay. I tell them, "I'm going to get better, not for any particular reason, but just in case. You know, for the future. It's actually kind of exhilarating. You should come with."
Everyone stands up and follows me out. We walk along Washington Avenue in a single-file line. We get on the 16A and nobody sits—we all stand—because we are in a hurry to get to where we'll get better. When the bus comes to the end of the route I go up to the bus driver. I've got $50, which I hand him. "Can you take us to Burnsville?" I ask. "I have an aunt there and she's going to let us live in her basement and get better."
The bus driver doesn't ask any questions. He takes the money and puts it in his back pocket. Then he puts both hands on the wheel.
And that is how Jay and all of my friends from the Hep C group got here, to my aunt's basement in the 'burbs. I go to work, and when I come home I pretend they're all waiting for me. They're sitting on my bed or on the carpet reading, talking, laughing—happy. Jay is never on my bed, but at least he's here.
"Thank you for showing us how to get better," they say.
"Yeah, thank you for going straight," Bridgette says, "so we could too."
But then one day when I come home they're angry. "Bring us something to drink!" they demand. "We're bored to tears and the beer ads make us cry harder. You can live for the future, but we have to live in the present, and the present is better with a few drinks."
I remind them of how bad drinking is for their livers, and how people with Hep C who drink are more likely to get cirrhosis.
"No shit," the vet says.
"No shit and," Jay adds, "who cares." He's sneering quite becomingly, so that for a moment "no shit and who cares," are my feelings about cirrhosis too. I wish I could touch him.
"Don't you remember," he asks, "how we thought we were all going to die, and we had so much fun?"
I don't sleep very well that night.
The next afternoon I leave work early. I pick up a few bottles of wine, and a couple twelve packs. It's a start, and there's plenty of time before nine p.m. to re-up. When I get home and open the door to the basement it's too quiet. It smells like a long stillness—dust and more dust and maybe a little mold. I rush down the stairs. No one's there, even when I close my eyes.
"Bridgette?" I call. Everything is exactly how I left it that morning: the bed is made, the carpet is vacuumed, and there's a vase of lilac on the crate I'm using for a dresser. "Jay?"
The room is silent. I want to cry but I don't.
Instead I lug all the liquor back up to my new clunker. I drive to the Basilica of St. Mary's in Minneapolis and drop it all off under a bridge where I hope thirsty homeless people can find it before the cops do. I don't drink it; I don't like to drink alone.
"Thank you," I tell Jay and all my friends from the Hep C group, wherever they are.