THE BEER SLAYER
After a month’s growth of new beard I took time to pack Iris the truck carefully and clean the house in Oviedo and settle my accounts. I told the landlady my situation and she seemed to understand. With Toots the tortoise shell Cat in the cab of the truck we drove all night to Carolina Beach, North Carolina.
Fish owned a small business at the beach and an apartment building next door where he lived. The divorce made the accommodations available. Fish was a ruddy Irishman who squeezed a nickel tighter than a lime in a bottle of Corona.
Fish and I had been roommates ten years earlier just before his marriage to a woman 20 years younger than himself, and now it was over. The truth is she left him because she had grown tired of his farts. He already had another woman 20 years younger than himself waiting in the wings. He said the new one had no sense of smell and they didn’t live together. Fish greeted me with a breakfast of thick country bacon, eggs, grits and an English muffin. Toots had to remain in the truck, but she now had cat food to eat. After a general purification of the system, a month of vegetables and rice not counting the crispy critters, I had a real breakfast. I was in a safe harbor.
That first day in Carolina Beach I was introduced to “The Beer Slayer”, Brent Runyon, the first person with hemophilia I had ever knowingly met in my life. He was HIV positive. He had been infected with HIV in the early eighties because of the contamination of the blood supply. Brent was of English-German heritage.
“I’m not going to bleed all over the floor,” he assured me.
Well, this was news to me. What I believed about hemophilia was that if a hemophiliac is cut, he’s going to bleed all over the floor and die unless something extraordinary is done to stop the bleeding. Even the name “hemophiliac” had an ominous tone to it, like “leper.” I knew enough not to think that way about HIV or even AIDS. Now old ignorant me could add a new word, “hemophiliac,” to his “fear not” category. Manipulative, psychotic, fearful, back-stabbing people, on the other hand, still greatly concerned me after being under the thumb of one such person in the water business for nearly ten years, the one I basically gave it to. And then the FOOL SALE thing went down. I was an outcast, a social leper, and a bit paranoid. So what? Brent could relate to that because of his medical moments.
I was given a tour of the honky-tonk bars of Carolina Beach by Brent and his house-mate, Brenda, a registered nurse. Fish was quite the gossip and he had filled me in prior to our meeting. Brenda was an attractive feisty woman, ten years older than Brent. She swilled beer like a professional bar fly, not knowing when to quit, which—according to Fish—should have been before she started because her eye began to rove when she was under the influence, Fish told me. But on the whole they had a comfortable situation with her income from nursing and Brent’s as a consultant for a very large pharmaceutical company, the company that had infected him with HIV in the early eighties. Brent put up with her blatant flirting, because when she was sober she was quite a lovely lady. We drank quite a few beers that night, but nowhere did I detect Brenda’s wandering eye. Brent seemed like a tough little kid from New Jersey and his limp gave him more the aura of a street hood than a hemophiliac. Not that I knew what a hemophiliac was or was supposed to be. Brent told me a little, but mainly he spoke of the giant scam of HIV infection, how he believed that HIV didn’t cause AIDS. He had been found positive when the test came out. He believed that AZT, not the virus, was the true culprit for killing everybody he knew in the hemophilia community.
“Sheep, they’re all sheep,” he said.
Except for the limp, Brent seemed perfectly healthy. He was also a registered nurse. I told him about the screen play IMMUNE and the origin of HIV, germ warfare against the body, intentional or accidental, no matter which way you look at it, we had something in common, cynicism.
Fish fixed a dinner of pork chops and potatoes, a shot of whiskey, cold beer and a comfortable couch. I was naively still expecting a lump sum payment in a couple of weeks from my old business. Though the payments had dwindled I still had a guarantee in writing though Mister J had drawn up the agreement. I had basically broken a new territory for him at my expense and he let it get shaky. There was work to do around the shop, so Fish was very hospitable. The next morning Fish cooked up pepperoni, eggs and cheese. After breakfast my foot began to throb—the blasted gout–So much for purification.
Brent was a regular at the barbershop. Occasionally he got a haircut, but mostly he studied beer, he talked beer, he drank beer and hung out. Brent fermented mead at home for Fish, from yeast and honey and water and a variety of herbs, bringing it to a rich alcoholic content. The mead was discreetly dispensed at room temperature from a large coffee urn into Styrofoam cups on weekends when the tourists were in town. The money went into the cigar box. Brent said that Fish paid him for the materials to concoct the mead, but he still charged him for his haircuts and beer. Brent was an isolated sort, living with hemophilia and HIV in a small redneck town. Fish was one of the few people he had told about his condition. Of course, Fish told everybody else, but I was the first outsider who talked to Brent about it in a receptive, fearless manner. And the juices flowed. And I was under the impression that he spoke openly about it to everyone.
I had seen the film, “And the Band Played On,” the story by Randy Shilts about AIDS. I recalled the hemophiliacs dying from some strange disease early on in the film, but it had had no meaning to me at the time. Now a face was on hemophilia, a bright, intelligent face, and it had the bug, the bug I believed was created in a laboratory.
Brad had three places in his life: Fish’s Barbershop, his office in Wilmington, and his apartment with Brenda. Toots the cat now had one place, the cab of a Ford Econoline Van. Toots had traveled thousands of miles with me, living everywhere I landed and adapting much better than I did. Whether in the mountains, on the beach in the Keys, or at the riverfront, she had always found places to hunt and hide. I visited the van regularly with food and water, and she took it all in stride, maintaining the perfect litter box, or lounging on the dashboard in the sun. Fish knew Toots from the past, but wasn’t open to sharing his little pad with two other beings at this stage in his life; one on the couch in the hall was enough.
July 25th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
[...] THE BEER SLAYERNow a face was on hemophilia, a bright, intelligent face, and it had the bug, the bug I believed was created in a laboratory. Brad had three places in his life: Fish’s Barbershop, his office in Wilmington, and his apartment with Brenda. … [...]