DUCK SOUP
Fish opened the Barbershop at noon, six days a week, not one minute sooner. Brent would show up every day around two, after a few hours at the office. He’d grab a beer from the back and pour it into a large Styrofoam cup, then he would take a seat up front and watch Alva doing nails through the window. There was always a large thermos of real coffee next to the huge coffee urn which had an “ALCOHOL” sign hanging on the front. Fish explained to curious strangers that he bought rubbing alcohol in bulk for sanitary purposes, but the in-crowd knew it was mead, “the nectar of the gods.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“Fine, thank you.”
God, that’s absurd. “Hello.”
Are you speaking to a human being or a Robot? Is there a connection?
“My community, the hemophilia community, is lost over this HIV thing,” Brent said while slugging a beer from a cup and staring through the window at Alva doing the nails of the mayor’s wife.
Fish cut the hair of the mayor of Carolina Beach, an Italian fella from Jersey. The mayor sipped from a Styrofoam cup. Nobody gave a shit, but Fish gave a good duck’s ass.
“AIDS is an industry contrived by that Doctor Gallo who stole the virus from the French,” Brent said. “HIV couldn’t hurt a fly.”
It sounded as though he was going though some awesome denial, but he seemed healthy and if it worked for him, why not. But it was the blood thing, the hemophilia that struck me. Blood! I had been a regular blood donor for years, feeling that it was healthy to have the blood drawn only to replenish itself in the marrow, keeping the engine well oiled and functioning. And maybe it would help somebody out. At least, I knew it wouldn’t kill them unless someone were to spike the punch when I wasn’t looking. My behavior didn’t eliminate me from the donor pool. The promiscuity of the seventies was long gone and latex was always close at hand if the occasion should arise.
Blood, those semi-solid corpuscles suspended in plasma, circulating through the heart, conveying materials from one part of the body to another–The food of vampires and mosquitoes.
I recall tasting a Polish soup made from the blood of Ducks, “CZARAINA.” My father had sacrificed that duck which had been raised from a duckling by my cousin. The meat was good too. Busha cooked the duck and the soup. You gotta eat. Good gravy!
I limped around the shop and apartment for days from the gout and helping Fish carry a large air conditioner I hurt my back. Brent would come in at two o’clock, limping because of severe joint damage from internal bleeding, carrying information and stacks of papers by a German doctor, one of the world’s foremost retro virologist. His name was Doctor Dunesburied or something like that. Brent knew him personally. The doctor wrote that AIDS was caused by lifestyle and poverty and AZT, not HIV which he claimed was harmless. He was considered a dissident in the world of science and could no longer get funding for his work. I thought that this might be the guy who created HIV in the first place, and he was simply trying to cover his tracks. Possibly he was in some awesome state of denial that it was the virus which he had innocently created in a Petri Dish, gave it up for adoption and the cute harmless baby turned out to be a real son of a bitch. But that just didn’t figure. It would be easier to cover up the origin of something than to create a concrete myth out of nothing and have it believed by millions of people. After all, everyone knows that the earth was created in seven days and Eve came from Adam’s rib and everything is her fault.
Brent also gave me a book entitled “JOURNEY,” which was about a family living with hemophilia through the 50s and 60s, before factor concentrates came out. The modern treatments for hemophilia had been plasma and cryoprecipitate a concentrate derived from fresh frozen plasma from single donors. Advanced clotting factor concentrates were derived from pooled plasma from up to 20,000 donors and maybe more, and carried HIV to the hemophilia population in the late 70s and early 80s. Hepatitis was another gift of the concentrates, besides controlling the internal bleeds of the hemophiliac. The concentrates were put on the market in 1967, opening up a whole new world for the person with hemophilia. After reading “Journey” I realized the gift of my life and all lives, including those of pigs. I knew it was pork that made me lame, gave me the gout, the other white meat. I drank black cherry juice and eventually got rid of the gout. Black cherries had been killed to make that juice.
After a few days of getting to know one another at the barbershop, Brent picked me up in the morning in his little red convertible. We took the 30 minute drive along the inter-coastal waterway into downtown Wilmington to his cave situated in an obscure corner of an office building, Wilmington’s historic Cotton Exchange. The window in Brent’s office was close blinded, blocking out any natural light. Boxes and papers littered the entire closet-sized space, and the only other chair besides Brent’s contained a bear’s head, with missing teeth. I could identify with that bear, having been decapitated at school just a month earlier. Brad, the bear and me decided to make a movie, a truthful movie, whatever we found that truth to be, the naked truth. We formed a company and called it Bear Naked Productions. The movie was going to be about hemophilia; we decided to call it A DROP OF BLOOD. Brent was going to raise the money and be the main character, and I was going to create the film, a documentary film about hemophilia. It was that simple.
We began the quest. I still didn’t know diddly about hemophilia, but Brent did. He’d lived with it all of his life. Brent began writing down, on three by five cards, his personal relationship with hemophilia, how it had affected his life, how he believed the world saw him. I’d review the cards and if any questions came up, I’d ask him and he’d write his answer on a card along with any questions he wanted answered about hemophilia. It was coming from his perspective: a hemophiliac born in 1967, when the new treatments had become available. A lot had changed since the book “Journey” had traveled through the fifties and the sixties, the era of blood drives to treat a single patient.
Brad had a younger brother who didn’t have hemophilia. Go figure. All this stuff began to sink into me. Like the fact that the hemophilic gene is carried by the mother and there’s both a fifty-fifty chance that her sons would have hemophilia and her daughters would be carriers. I’m a little bit slow. But it was like standing under a hot shower—if you stand there long enough and do a little bit of scrubbing here and there, eventually you get clean. I had to do a lot of scrubbing and reading and re-reading to see what patterns would emerge, what kind of story we could come up with. Then there was the money problem. There was none. I was hoping for the stipend from up North in early summer from the fascist who had bought my business, but he was such a dick I didn’t know what to expect. Fish thought I would get the money, so the living accommodations were cool, for a minute.