THE BLOOD COLLECTOR
Brad picked me up everyday on his way to the office where we seemed to be working in vain, most of the proposals and letters we were sending out, unanswered.
“You’re living next to HER,” he said.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“I can’t imagine living next door to HER.”
“Rooster lived next door to her for three years,” I answered.
“He hung himself from a magnolia tree and his body was ravaged by drugs.” That was what most people believed about the circumstances of Rooster’s death.
But all in all, the work-place seemed to be more pleasant. Cleo greeted us in the morning with a genuine sense of welcome. I began to venture out into the other offices and found Kay, the woman who had worked with a prominent researcher back in the 70s, to be very forthcoming with valuable information concerning hemophilia. It was serendipity doo da. As it turned out, Chapel Hill, North Carolina had been a major center for hemophilia research and treatment for fifty years. And Kay had worked for the King, Dr. Brinkhaus. She hated him. As a Ph.D., she had written several papers about hemophilia, some published and others stolen by other doctors.
“They made me wash the dishes,” she said of her male colleagues.
Kay worked for the King for a couple of years before escaping to Charleston, South Carolina. She finally ditched the male-dominated research field all together to become a free-lance Lutheran minister and a practitioner of bio-feedback in her little office down the hall from Brent’s office in Wilmington. She had been married, no kidding, to a member of Sadam Hussein’s personal staff. The marriage had broken up when he went home to Iraq. I saw her as a grandmother to some corporate women like Cleo who had to become the way they are because a bunch of old guys made her wash dishes, brilliant mind and all. The Jungle had eaten her up. Her next husband, another mideasterner, was also a control freak. She was in continual revolt against all the male domination she had encountered in her life. She was pissed. Menopause ravaged her physically. Her leads were gold. She gave me a list of who was who in hemophilia research. Brent finally woke up to the name of the King, Dr. Brinkhaus and saw Kay in a whole new light.
“The dogs,” he said.
I had read about the dogs and the King, Dr. Brinkhaus, in “Journey,” the book by a somewhat famous family with hemophilia. The story of the dogs was vague to me at that time, but I knew that they had hemophilia and were housed in Chapel Hill. I’m a little bit slow, and the deluge of the material was just that, a deluge. Part of my job was to separate the wheat from the chaff to come up with a good story that would make sense to anyone, let alone make them want to watch it. We had contacted the family who had written the book, but of course they didn’t want to be bothered. The mother was off in Russia helping hemophiliacs, the kid had run for Lieutenant Governor and the old man was writing about royalty. We had also contacted a former Executive Director of the National Hemophilia Foundation. I later learned he had been the Exec during the blood contamination of the eighties. He gave us another good lead. There was a woman who had written a doctoral dissertation about the social history of hemophilia, based on several dozen interviews. Susan Resnick, a Manhattan Goddess, born to a French father and Jewish mother, who reveled in her Jewish heritage, actually returned our phone calls after several weeks of persistence. We sent her money, and she sent us a copy of her BOOK. I was blown away by the insight and readability of the thesis, something academic but still interesting. It surprised the hell out of me.
I had a place to live. I was cooking, for the dog mostly, but things began to improve. On the other hand, I lost touch with Brent over the weekends. In the converging of commitments the woman usually wins, and there was no way Brent was going to let Brenda go because of any work. He was HIV positive, and even though he claimed that it was harmless, he knew it couldn’t improve his marketability to women. I revised and refined everything I knew about the project we were trying to raise money for. And I didn’t know very much. Brent was still the only practicing hemophiliac I knew. The “mild” didn’t infuse himself, and I had been relying on Brent’s point of view. I never did see a mailing list for his newsletter. Up until the time I learned about the Chapel Hill Center I had no reason to believe that he wasn’t the only practicing hemophiliac in the entire state. Chapel Hill had to be a focal point. I was hoping for a gathering of experts.