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With the summer season fast approaching I had to move the truck off of the main drag. I parked it near Brent’s house, on a side street, and fixed a way for Toots to come and go. She had always been an adventuresome cat, able to take care of herself. And we had a deal. If either one of us ever went out on an adventure and didn’t come back, that’s just the way it was. “Let bygones be bygones.”
Then Cleo’s neighbor died. They said that he had hung himself. It’s amazing how secretive people are about things. No one had really known where Rooster lived, he just showed up at the barbershop. They say it had something to do with the way his old friends had turned on him when he said he was HIV positive. He didn’t want anyone to know where he lived, and Cleo never told anyone that Rooster lived next door to her. His knees were bent when they found him hanging from a magnolia tree, tangled up in blooms, at the end of a black rope. Someone must have found out where he lived and taken him home. They still marked it as a suicide and dropped the issue further than Rooster must have dropped. The old rigor must have tied him up long before the tree. He had a big funeral. There were over a hundred cars, a lot of motorcycles, and a ton of fragrant magnolias. They buried his ashes. It was an event. It was over. Zippideedoodah.
I came up with some money. Cleo introduced me, over the phone, to the woman who owned Rooster’s house, Saint Januarius. Cleo said that she personally wouldn’t rent anything that her family owned to me, but she wouldn’t mind having me for a neighbor. Saint lived up North in Illinois and kept the house in Carolina because her parents had died there. The house had a very large yard and a driveway, a place where I could park the truck off the road. The magnolia trees dominated the yard and wisteria dominated the periphery with a smattering of crepe myrtle. On one side of the house, Rooster had planted a fine organic garden; raised beds in full sun. Wow. The house was across the street from a cypress lake with geese and ducks, and lots of tiny lizards, Toots’ favorite game. A five story brick tower was next door, across a moat, on the other side of fifteen-foot shrubs laced with wisteria and honeysuckle. Firemen occasionally practiced squirting hoses and climbing ladders and repelling down the side of the tower. Cleo was the other neighbor, with a very large hedge between the houses. Rooster’s house was very secluded and private, but only a short bicycle ride from downtown Wilmington. I could be alone there with my buddy Toots the cat. And I could do my work there. I could visit the barbershop for haircuts at the beach.
A few days before I was to move in, Toots was run over by a car. I found her still warm body with her eyes bulging, and I wrapped her in my bandanna. I think she committed suicide. I carried her three blocks to Brent’s house and buried her deep in the rose garden underneath some blooms. She was food now. I moved into Rooster’s old house in June. That’s that. Oh.

In a novel by Jerzy Kosinski called “The Painted Bird,” the narrator comes upon an old bunker where he uncovers a sea of rats consuming one another. What a metaphor for the business world—“The Rules of the Bunker,” the vermin of competition. Anyone who blinks in the bunker is eaten to the bone. And so on with the game.
The film making thing wasn’t about making a film, it was about raising money. We had to get to point A before we could go to point B. And there’s a mighty long alphabet that we had to go through and put the letters together to spell words, like “money.” Yeah. And it takes money to make money. So Brent gave me a lift up North to Washington, DC, where I confronted the man Mr J who had bought my business. He told me he was going to sue me because the person he hired to take over the area he took over from me wasn’t doing the job; naturally it was my fault, since he could afford lawyers and I couldn’t—The Rules of the Bunker. I’m a bit of an idiot when it comes to such things so I attempted to follow one of those silly bullshit rules of successful people and offered a win/win proposition. I took fifty cents on a dollar. I let him have fifteen thousand dollars in exchange for the same amount, just so I wouldn’t have to waste any more time with him. I needed some money to raise the money to make a film about blood. I had opened up an entire area for that man’s product, bottled water from Hot Springs, Arkansas. I built a business from nothing so I could maintain independence and continue my writing. But it wasn’t independence–the business took over my life. The supplier I dealt with, the one actually responsible for the area, kept me tied up by controlling product and price whenever I got a little bit ahead.
I thought I saw a way out and I took it—selling him a good business with which he was very familiar in exchange for money to finance more education. We had negotiated a fair deal so he could keep the territory, and all the boy had to do was deliver. I was on my way to follow what I thought to be my true path, that burning passion of art. I was shedding my skin like a snake and the businessman still had me by the tail. While I had been involved in the business I had given it my all and created a customer base where there had been none and he never wanted to let me escape. I was still drowning in a business that I had nothing to do with anymore, still under the control of a man who had tried to control me for many years.
I needed to escape. It had been bad enough that because of his ineptness that I had to divert my attention from my education and work full time when the promised payments had stopped. I had let down my guard at school, altered my focus because of the work load. I couldn’t afford to let him continue controlling my ability to act. This time the project would die if I didn’t come up with some money. It was too good a story to pass up. He played my weakness and felt proud that he had got me. It was the game of business. And so it goes. But it didn’t end there. He rubbed my nose in it. He gloated over his victory.
A week after I cut the deal, which essentially gave him back fifteen thousand dollars and he still wasn’t obligated to pay me all at once, the relative running the business went out and bought a new motorcycle. The kid should have been fired, and he was rewarded instead for doing a bad job. Let it go—let it go—let it go. I learned that in practicing tai-chi. I was ready to accept this wonderful concept. Oh, what the hell, I wished him harm on this physical plane. I channeled all of my anger, channeled my thoughts to make him suffer, and felt good about it. I felt no remorse when the boy died in a motorcycle accident. Ironically the boy had been passing a municipal Ocean City water truck and hit a Mercedes head on, a particular type of car that Mr. J owned. I had become a cosmic killer—so much for compassion. Like the American eagle with olive branches in its talons on the right and arrows in its talons on the left. Kindness should never be taken for weakness, and the arrogant dragon is sure to fall. Blood is thicker than water. And I really never did anything at all. And the bunker works in mysterious ways.

Downtown Wilmington had been going through a spurt of revitalization. Every day I would walk to a coffee shop to do my research reading to give Brent time to work in the office. The number of beautiful women on the streets never ceased to amaze me, and they all had a wonderful walk. In some of the larger northern cities women had begun to hold their hips stiff so as not to invite any politically-incorrect looking. In Wilmington the female ass moved in an inviting rhythm that seemed to make its own music. It was eye candy. It simply felt good to look. Uh-huh.
Since I walked in and out of the building frequently, the girls at the front desk began to get used to me, as did Cleopatra, the queen of the jungle. I mentioned to her that I was looking for a place to live in the general vicinity. She said she would keep her eye open. Her family owned several patches of the jungle, commercial and residential. Of course, I didn’t have any visible means of support, so she wasn’t about to offer up any of the vacancies she ruled over. I just stayed focused on the task, following my bliss, so to speak. I also made arrangements for a trip up North to deal with the fascist water man.
I found the local office of the company, NABI, that had sent $5,000 for the development of the film, and I registered to begin selling my plasma. I had to prove residency. Brent and I had had a new phone line put in for the project, so I had a phone bill to show. There was a ton of stuff to read about HIV and AIDS and risk groups, so literacy was essential. At least literacy had to be feigned. I could see people following lines with their fingers as though they were reading but I imagined the process could be faked. My arms and veins were checked and then my picture was taken. I was given a brief physical, and then sent into the men’s room to piss into a plastic cup with instructions to leave the filled cup in a chamber in the hallway wall. I wondered how many cups of piss had passed through that wall. And then I signed a form stating that I didn’t fall into any of the risk groups. “How many cups of risky piss have passed through that wall?” I repeated to myself. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was ready cash if you were accepted.
I had sold plasma once before, in LA for eight dollars back in 1987, while I was staying in homeless shelters on a short trip for some appointments about one of my earlier screenplays. I recalled it being much different then. For one thing, the blood was separated manually before being re-infused. And there was certainly no need to prove residency. The center was a block away from a Mission on a street where people were living in cardboard boxes, BIO-MEDICS LABORATORY PLASMA CENTER. One of my fellow donors had shown me tracks on his arms. He said it was from traveling around to different centers and selling his plasma. Those were the Reagan years when everyone found out that it was important and acceptable and patriotic to tell lies, so everybody lied. The only thing that mattered was the money. No one knew nor cared what the plasma was to be used for. I didn’t have a clue. I needed a few dollars for tobacco. It was a very cold January and a Super Bowl was appearing in LA. The shelters were opened to clean up the streets for the Super Bowl. One of the places I had slept was the floor of the City Council Chambers of LA City Hall. Muchas Gracias, “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles.” That’s the full name of LA. Kicky. Supposedly, the blood supply became safer in 1985 because of donor screening and purification. Ya, sure, you betcha. Uh-huh.
Though I had occasionally donated whole blood before, after my trip to LA I became a regular donor of whole blood at blood banks and hospitals and the Red Cross, for a cup of coffee and a donut.
Human source clotting factor products are derived from thousands of plasma donors. With life depending on all that mixing, I doubt if you’ll ever find a hemophiliac who is a true racist. Since I needed the money and the center was right up the road from downtown Wilmington and modern, I had the needle stuck in my arm to draw blood, separate the plasma by aphaeresis on a properly cleaned machine, and automatically re-infuse with a bag of saline, without the blood being taken into a back room, as had happened in LA. Most newbie donors squeezed a sponge. The regulars pumped their hands and some shook their legs, while inclined on the curved, vinyl couches. It was a dance, like Casey would dance. The first donation was for twenty bucks, with follow-ups of twelve. I began going to the center twice a week. I was weighed and questioned. My arms were checked. They took my blood pressure and pulse. A pin was stuck in my finger to draw blood. The middle and ring fingers bleed directly from the heart. It gave me an income. It was still considered a donation: I was being paid for my time, not my plasma, I was told. The questions were automatic, so were the answers: A “yes,” a bunch of “no’s” and a “yes”. It’s like truth or consequences, except the consequences are usually for the beneficiaries of the donation. This is sad. Many states had blood shield laws, where blood products weren’t considered a product, but a service. Huh? Anyway, like I said, I had an income.

The gang went to the North end of the beach for a sandy cookout and a swim on Sunday. I stayed in town and contemplated how long it would take to get enough money to do what we had to do. Brent had gotten together a list of possible subjects for the story we wanted to present. And we had sent out some letters to see who might be willing to participate in the film. At that point I was still very much behind the scenes as far as the people we were contacting were concerned, just a name on a proposal. I had a lot of questions about the personal side of hemophilia, and Brent was the key. And I really didn’t know if anyone else was truly taking our project seriously even the two companies that sent money. I was as serious as a heart attack.
We had a rough outline of what and possibly who besides Brent we hoped we would be covering pretty early on. “Fix the hair. Keep the limp,” I told Brad. I played with the idea of the film being through the eyes of a child, not only to cover up my own ignorance, but because I was so fascinated by it all. It was pure discovery, getting inside of a lifetime physical ailment that had such a fascinating dramatic history. I was objectively observing the experience on a compassionate, empathetic level, without going through any of that excruciating physical pain. That’s a part of the deal, the lifetime of pain.
Did I choose the project or did the project choose me? This was development at its most basic, not knowing anything, not having any money to work with, not having any kind of a track record in film-making, not having a heck of a lot of support, and sweeping out a barbershop in order to have a couch to sleep on. I was just getting the gist of the blood contamination and the major multinational pharmaceuticals involved. Heck, I even felt that they might finance the deal. Why not? I really had to get my hands on some money and a place to live.
Brenda’s attention to Lemon did have benefits. It made Brent feel that he had to prove himself to his woman. Come Monday, after we dropped Lemon at the airport, a newfound enthusiasm sparked Brent’s drive to make the film.
The word slowly got out around the Cotton Exchange about what we were trying to do. I was from out of nowhere, the new kid in town, so basically I was given the benefit of the doubt. Besides, I had talked Brent into keeping his office in the same building instead of moving out, and he did pay his rent. He had a sweetheart of a deal from the pharmaceutical company, where he wrote a few funny articles for a hemophilia magazine and did some market research in the hemophilia community. In return, they gave him money and the clotting factor which he used about once a week, factor VIII. He used a purified mono-clonal factor, derived from pooled human plasma, which would have cost him about sixty thousand dollars a year. That was another fascinating aspect of hemophilia, how much it cost to treat. Brent was considered a “moderate” hemophiliac, or to be politically correct, PWH, person with hemophilia, Hon—whatever.
I had met one other person in the area with hemophilia. He was a “mild” and very seldom used factor—only when he was injured, or had surgery or dental work. It wasn’t quite the same, especially since he had escaped the bug. To him, especially since he had escaped the bug, hemophilia was simply an occasional nuisance. But hemophilia definitely was a major influence on Brent’s life. That lifelong pain and constant need for treatment is like the commitment of an artist. Is it real or is it a hobby? Does it rule your life, or is it a diversion? Are you working at something else so one day you can do what you want to do, or are you doing what you want to do, and sacrificing everything else: family, friends, money, prestige, food, sanity, conformity and so on. The question was, are you a mild, a moderate or a severe? Whether it’s art or hemophilia, nobody really gives a good duck’s ass. Well, if you paid Fish, he did. So far, I hadn’t met anyone else linked to the hemophilia industry, but I made certain that my name appeared in all correspondence about the film.
Kay operated a biofeedback business in an office down the hall from Brent in downtown Wilmington. When she heard about our hemophilia project she mentioned the King, Dr. Brinkhaus, a blood doctor she had worked with in the early seventies. It didn’t seem to have any significance when she first brought it up because Brent didn’t take her very seriously. He didn’t seem to take anyone or anything seriously. Everything was a joke. That little needle he had to frequently stick in a vein had a point to it, however. When the skin on those knees and elbows stretched and got puffy from the blood, what stopped the bleeding and eased the pressure came through that needle. Kay mentioned that the King, Dr. Brinkhaus was one of the people responsible for the development of factor concentrates. Brent did know who the King, Dr. Brinkhaus was, a legend in hemophilia research. We saw Kay practically every day during the week.