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I found a parking space about a mile from the airport in Winston-Salem and slowly made my way with the throngs of people still arriving. I felt a twinge in my knee from an old football injury but quickly laughed it off after seeing Paul on crutches and remembering young Brent always dragging his leg behind him. I covered the mile quickly, paid money to get in and followed the wires through which Dale’s voice was coming over the public address speakers as vintage war planes soared overhead. It was a strong, confident voice, delivering information to the thousands of people present. He had them in the palm of his hand. It may have helped a bit that Chuck Yeager, THE Chuck Yeager of “The Right Stuff,” was beside him. But Dale didn’t need any help to carry the show; without his narration no one would have known why they were looking up. I recognized Dale from a picture on a flier he had sent. He had good strong features to match his authoritative voice. When he got up to have his picture taken with Chuck Yeager, I saw that Dale used a cane. There was that limp, and that million dollar smile with great teeth. Wherever Chuck Yeager moved to have his picture taken, Dale managed to hobble over and stick his face in the picture. Only when he was called back to continue the show was Yeager able to get away from him. I wedged my way through the crowd when the opportunity presented itself. I got Dale’s attention, introduced myself and shook his hand.
“I don’t know who has the bigger ego, me or Yeager. He’s a bear to work with,” Dale told me.
“You seem to be keeping up with him.” I said.
“Like I said, it’s a toss-up,” he said. “I’m sorry I missed the camp. Gotta go, duty calls.”
He switched on his mike and took control. I made my way back through the crowd, out of the airport, the mile to the car and then I drove immediately back to Camp Carefree. I had had the contact I needed. Now, when we spoke on the phone there would be more of a connection. I was gathering an army, at least in my mind.

In the late 1940s Dr. Brinkhaus had been the first president of the Medical And Scientific Advisory Committee for the National Hemophilia Foundation. In the late sixties, Dr. Brinkhaus convinced an executive from Hyland Industries to begin manufacturing concentrated factor VIII, in order to get it to all the people who needed it. This had been a hard sell since the hemophilia community was only a small portion of the population. Once Hyland was in production, another factor concentrate, which had been developed by the Red Cross, was withheld from production on the grounds that the Red Cross shouldn’t be permitted to compete with private industry. Producing the amount of factor concentrate needed by severe hemophiliacs and fractionating plasma into valuable products such as hemoglobin soon developed into a major industry. Hepatitis B was a common contaminant of whole blood. With the advent of pooled plasma, Hepatitis B had become a given for the hemophiliac. Technology was available as early as 1978 to eliminate Hepatitis B from blood clotting products, but it was considered cost prohibitive to the industry. This technology, heat treatment, also would have eliminated HIV which turned up in clotting factor products as early as 1978.
With the advent of AIDS the hemophilia community was devastated by the magic bullet, factor concentrate, which had once given mobility and a normal lifestyle to the hemophiliac. Many hemophiliacs chose to keep their hemophilia a secret from the community in which they lived because of the stigma of AIDS. When the companies began screening and purifying products, the costs skyrocketed. The home-care delivery system was set up in order to serve a community in need because it became profitable, and in many cases the government paid for it. The delivery of AIDS drugs also greatly increased the profits of the home-care industry.
The National Hemophilia Foundation had given a voice to the community even though individuals often disagreed with what that voice said. Eventually, many thought that the Foundation betrayed its trust and allowed the industry and the doctors, who had become gods, to take over. There were many doctors on the medical and scientific advisory committee that testified on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry against the community they were serving when it came to court battles regarding the blood contamination of the late seventies and early eighties. There was one in particular. Call him Aledort.
Susan Resnik had worked very hard on her social history of hemophilia, and I had read it, but still I was perplexed as to the nature of the Beast, but not because of any limits to her storytelling and research. I urged her to seek out a publisher for her manuscript. The hemophilia story had sucked me into the pool of blood, with death lingering and imminent, allowing me to drink from the cup of the vampire to keep myself alive. It was nothing but a blood thing. The pain and frustration of being at the mercy of bean counters and blood suckers just to make it through the day was the plight of the hemophiliac. Still, they had come a long way from the days of Rasputin in Russia, given access to the royal court because hypnosis seemed to help the young Crown Prince with his bouts of bleeding.

Speeding across the state at dawn, I came to the great conclusion that it isn’t necessarily what you get that gives value to your life, it’s what you don’t get, those close calls in personal relationships that were sure to lead to nowhere. Life is precious, no need to waste time on the superficial and uncommitted.
There was a certain sense of well being, driving the Intrepid in the early morning hours of late summer. I had packed for a journey that would take me North to get money from the German water man, and then to meet with The Prince in D.C. I had stayed behind the scenes long enough, now I had no choice but to become a visible target.
I had learned much of the terminology of hemophilia from Brent, and some of the psychology and physiology. He was funny. He thought he was special. He had a great limp and bad hair. And his ego was much bigger than my own; I didn’t have to totally relinquish my own, because his self-absorption kept him from noticing anyone else. And he was pissed off like everybody else. “I hate everybody,” he said. He cheerfully suggested that we should end the film that way—all of the participants proclaiming one by one, “I hate everybody.”
Fish had confided in me, on one of my side trips to the barbershop. “Sullivan, nobody likes you,” he said.
“So?” I answered, “I do.”
There it was, the cosmic conundrum of like and dislike, echoing with the background music of a fine stereo in a fine car. Driving across a state, where Jesse Helms had been elected term after term for years, with the sun at my back, the grand statement of the wise Fish that nobody liked me. Of course it was an issue, but the bigger issue is that nobody seemed to like anybody anymore, at least for very long, except for Senator Helms, who I didn’t particularly care for one hell of a lot. He was a major reason, besides a temporary place to live, that I had moved to North Carolina—to vote against him the first chance I got. I had been deemed unlikable by everybody in the present tense on more than one occasion which basically means forever. So what? I was at the edge of the abyss, so I jumped. It all seemed logical and clear. I was dead meat anyway.
I didn’t have any idea what to expect at Camp Carefree at the gathering. I expected Wayne Ward from the home-care company to be there, and Paul Vess. Paul had been great to talk to over the phone. He was closer to my own age than Brad, another generation of hemophilia. Through the fifties, when Paul had been a child with severe hemophilia, the principal treatment had been plasma and trips to the hospital, and generally missed school and immobilization at home.
Cryoprecipitate from single donors became available in the sixties because of a discovery by Doctor Judith Poole at Stanford University. Cryo was the result of a mistake in the freezing and defrosting of fresh frozen plasma. This discovery later led to concentrated clotting factors made by pooling of plasma from thousands of donors. When Paul finally got to the advanced concentrated factor he developed an inhibitor, an antibody to the treatment so he couldn’t use the convenient factor concentrates that were continually being pushed into the community, even after it was known that the blood supply had been contaminated. That’s how Paul escaped the HIV bullet of the late seventies and early eighties. He was pissed off anyway, again in a remarkably cheerful manner. This was something that I was growing familiar with from time with Brent and phone conversations I had had with Dale, Paul and Craig Epsom Nelms: that seething anger covered over with a great, cynically intelligent sense of humor.
I arrived midmorning at the camp and cruised over the gentle rolling hills, past a few small homes along the marked path, and found a parking space on the side of the narrow blacktopped road. There was a llama in a small corral up on the hill, and a swimming pool down below, with low cropped buildings and cottages throughout the compound. There was just a good feeling about the place, down to the covered picnic area and brick barbecue on the side of the hill near the llama. I could hear the songs of children playing in the distance, though the swimming pool seemed deserted. I walked toward a building that looked like a meeting hall, crossed a small wooden bridge and entered what seemed to be a cafeteria. About thirty people were seated listening to a panel at one end of the room. I saw Wayne in the audience and nodded. I took a seat and began listening to what happens when a joint space fills with blood in a person with hemophilia, how eventually the joint deteriorates and sometimes joint replacements are in order. Whoa.
Well, there were several members on the panel, each adding new revelations, most already known to many in attendance, but definitely eye-openers for me. Of course, once again, there was such a deluge of information, I picked and chose what I personally felt would be relevant to an audience.
About half way through the panel, a tall gangly guy who could have passed for somebody in my immediate family ambled in the side door of the cafeteria on crutches. He was accompanied by a very attractive younger woman and a few young sons. He took his seat quickly, swinging his large leg with the swollen knee, extending it under the table, all the while wearing a bright engaging smile. His teeth were better than mine. I knew this was Paul Vess. Back in the days of the cabdriver in the 1930s, any dental work had been very risky for anyone with hemophilia, but advances in clotting procedures had allowed better teeth. From what I had read about the early days of hemophilia, and bad teeth being a given, I made it a point to look out for older hemophiliacs with bad teeth, mainly because mine were like shit and I couldn’t afford to have anything done about it. I was spending every dime I got to research the blood thing. Knowing the astronomical cost of the blood clotting products, I wondered how anyone could afford dental work too. Where did the money come from? Brent was a professional hemophiliac with a salary from the pharmaceutical company. Looking around this small gathering, I saw tables lining the walls, covered with signs and brochures from all kinds of businesses—home-care businesses, drug delivery systems, dealers. Eureka, Wayne was a drug dealer! And he was as pleasant as any drug dealer I had ever known. There were more drug dealers at that gathering than there were people with hemophilia.
After the panel broke, I was approached by a beautiful woman with blonde frizzy hair. I was welcomed and gave her a small check for the cost of food and the overnight retreat. Craig Epsom Nelms had been unable to attend, I learned. But I did have plans to go to the Winston-Salem Airport for the air show and meet Dale Brisson in person for the first time. It was important that I make as many personal flesh and blood connections as I could. I wanted the hemophilia community to know that I was seriously interested in their stories. Simply hanging out might be overly intrusive. I did, however, state my business—the film—to anyone willing to listen. I didn’t have anything to hide; this was a worthwhile project. Paul was a big help there with his enthusiastic presence, and his seething anger at the bloodsucking hemophilia industry. Because of the cost, many families had been driven to financial devastation and public assistance. Others had become professional hemophiliacs. The industry provided employment for those it served, in many cases.
“Who’s on first?” I asked.
“What’s on second”
“I don’t know.”
That was it. I didn’t know. After lunch I drove over to the Winston-Salem airport.

I set up an appointment with Muffy at a Wilmington coffee shop and we negotiated. She was more of a high school preppie than a woman. She seemed enthusiastic and intelligent and safe, just a wee bit on the cute side. I was so engulfed in blood by this time that there was nothing on my mind other than the project. I told her that there was very little money and that there were no guarantees. Her mother had mentioned that Muffy might be willing to intern. The mother had started her own business of organizing other businesses. She had one of those Christian Pisces symbols on her business card, sort of a secret handshake. That symbol always appeared as though the bloody fish had been sucked dry.
This film wasn’t business, it was a quest. There’s no other way to put it. I was after money to perform, to create the art. The selection of principals for the dance in the film was also my task, and Brent had opened few doors in that direction. Any project is a dance. Brent was the fund-raiser. That was the deal and he danced away. He did agree to appear in the film when the time came to actually shoot something. He had also been the link to the community, the expert. If he had jumped ship before Dr. Brinkhaus and Susan Resnik and the three new leads in the community had developed, the project would have been burnt toast, history. But the enthusiasm of my three new contacts, Dale Brisson, Paul Vess and the Super Duper Queen of the May, Craig Epsom Nelms, two HIV negatives and a positive from the hemophilia community, greased me up, flipped me on the griddle and kept me cooking.
I knew I still had my work cut out for me with Brent gone. I needed someone to bounce off of intellectually, but no one had expressed any interest in becoming involved with the subject of hemophilia—nobody gave a good duck’s ass. I explained to Muffy that I really needed someone to do some leg work at the library in the Foundation’s Giving books, and also some organizing of all the paperwork we had generated. I told her that I didn’t expect her to work for free, but that she wouldn’t be paid right from the start. I was four months into the project and the initial funds were dissipating rapidly, as were the re-negotiated monies from the fascist water man up North (which would appear only when I made the trip and confronted him). I felt like a Guido, but I wasn’t about to cast any more spells. One death was enough. That negative shit took me away from my focus, the task at hand. When Brent pulled out, there was an opportunity to get organized and move forward. I thought, with the support of Dr. Brinkhaus, funding would be forthcoming. And he enthusiastically supported the project.
“See if it works, and then we’ll work with it,” I told Muffy.
“It seems like a worthwhile project,” Muffy said enthusiastically.
It was refreshing to see that enthusiasm again, as Brent had shown at the beginning of the project and when we visited the dogs, but I thought something had happened with his employer, the pharmaceutical company. Brent was open to outside influence, worrying about what others thought about him. I had often asked him, after we had gotten negative responses for funding for the film from his employer, if they wouldn’t be better off if very little was known by the public about hemophilia, since it had become such a money tree and they had killed so many people to get there.
“Armour’s not as bad as the other three,” he said.
“I thought they made hot dogs,” I answered.
The other three were Miles/Cutter/Bayer, Baxter/Hyland, and Alpha/Green Cross. Armour was a subsidiary of Rhone Poulenc Rorer, the company that had made those marvelous Quaaludes back in the seventies. Of course, Brent wasn’t on the payroll of the other three.
I invited Muffy over to the office, which was now essentially the house, to see if she had the courage to make that next move beyond speaking and intent. I didn’t expect her to show up. She was doing kitchen work in a restaurant. She had recently moved into her mother’s house after getting a double degree in communication arts and sociology at some snooty northeastern college. But then she actually came by the house. Maybe she would be a real find, I thought. I needed a local ally.
I also needed a desk for the office. We found a good deal at a Sam’s Club, had lunch—Dutch treat—and then ventured back to the office to put the desk together. I filled Muffy in on as much information as came to mind. I wanted her to know what blood was all about, the historical aspect of Chapel Hill, the dogs, AIDS, Susan Resnik, the Film Foundation, the whole nine yards. I was so overcome with enthusiasm about having another enthusiastic person to work with, I only sensed enthusiasm in her. And I figured if it wasn’t there, I’d sure the hell scare her off quickly, because I certainly didn’t want to waste her time or mine. I gave her books to read and my tai-chi ch’uan video.
When Muffy returned the second day, I sent her off to the library to get a list of possible funders. She returned in a couple of days with the list and decided it was time for her to talk about money. The meeting in western North Carolina was approaching, and I wasn’t sure what would happen there, but I had learned that besides members of the hemophilia community, members of the business community would be there. Wayne, from the home-care company, was the only person Brent had given me direct access to. There was no where to go but up; I had to attend that meeting. Two of my other three new contacts were also to attend, Paul Vess and Craig Epsom Nelms. Dale Brisson was working as the announcer at an air show that weekend, so he wouldn’t be at the meeting. Brent’s departure from the production end of the project was still our little secret, since he was to be the thread of the entire film, sharing, on screen, the history and the nature of the much misunderstood blood disorder. I asked Muffy if she wanted to jump into the project with both feet and go to the meeting. I offered to pay her for the time she missed from her regular job in the kitchen at the restaurant.
I didn’t know if Muffy was the one I needed to help get this thing moving, but I thought I needed an assistant. I guess I wanted a maid more than anything else. I offered her a maximum of fifty dollars a week for expenses to come by a couple of days a week and get the office in order. She had said it was a worthwhile project. “I have a degree and a college education,” she said. But she agreed to go to the meeting. To keep things on the up and up I called her mother and made an appointment for the following Monday to help organize the business end. And then I didn’t hear from Muffy the entire week. I called the chief lobbyist for the National Foundation, The Prince in Washington, D.C., and set up an appointment to meet with him and talk to him about the film the following Tuesday, when he would be available. I had written Muffy off. The night before I was to go to the meeting in Western North Carolina, she left a note on my front porch.
“When are we leaving?” the note read. I left at 4:30 a.m., Saturday morning. The next time I saw Muffy was in court. Ooobladee.

I called a film-maker friend, Steve Yeager, in Baltimore who agreed to act as director of photography. Fabio arranged for a meeting with an independent film-maker in Charlotte, and I made an appointment to get together an itemized budget. We continued to send out proposals within the hemophilia industry and finally began to go the foundation route. Brent was beginning to get cold feet about the project when no new money was coming in and money began to go out for expenses. His weekends became extended and his interest wavered. I still didn’t have any direct contact with anyone in the community besides the creative leads I had established by luck and persistence.
Then we got a call from Wayne Ward, who worked for one of our initial contributors HRA, Hemophilia Resources of America, a home-care company out of New Jersey with a strong customer base in North Carolina. We set up a lunch meeting. My older brother died of lung cancer that had traveled to his brain the morning before the lunch meeting—the same day that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead died. I went to the meeting and acquired three names and numbers of people in the North Carolina hemophilia community that Wayne felt might be interested in participating in the film. He also told me about an upcoming gathering of people in the blood community in the western part of the state. I left Brent and Wayne with the check and immediately drove up to Baltimore to view my brother’s closed casket, attend the funeral, drink single malt scotch at the wake, and participate in the passage of life in a gathering of the living. I also visited the fascist water man who owed me money, so I could continue to focus exclusively on the blood community.
Brent was called out of town by the pharmaceutical company he worked for, to help with a market study on packaging in three different cities. That was his bread and butter. While he was away, I contacted the three people on Wayne’s list. They were all interested and excited by the prospect of telling the blood story. Argo was picked up by the dog catcher on one of his runs around the lake while I was at the office. The dogcatcher left a note on my door. I hadn’t changed the tag Rooster had given him. I showed the note to Cleo the next day. I told her there was no way to keep him fenced in, that I had done all that I could do.
“They will kill him,” she said.
“He won’t stay in the yard.”
“Chain him up,” she said.
I found this a little bit much. I had built the fence up and cooked his meals, and I wasn’t even supposed to have pets.
“Enough,” I said.
When Brent returned from his trip for the pharmaceutical company that had infected him with HIV back in the early eighties—he said he could no longer participate in the film project. I wondered if Cleo had anything to do with getting me thrown out of her building or if Brent’s funding by Armour Pharmaceuticals was put into jeopardy because of his connection with the proposed film. I had to move the office into my house. I had phone lines added and I called Muffy. I needed an assistant. I was communicating with people in the blood community, a community in hiding. I had finally retreated whole-heartedly to the cave. I dug in and waited for a further onslaught from Cleo. But I was free from the dog. I took down the extended fence barricades and felt released from a great weight, and I still had my balls. I don’t know what happened to Argo, my focus was people. Well…

Brent and I made another trip to Chapel Hill where we once again met with the King, Dr. Brinkhaus. Stephen Pemberton took us to the kennels to visit the dogs.
The original dogs had been Irish Setter female carriers of the hemophilic gene. The Doctor had purchased them from a woman who raised show dogs in New York several decades ago. They had become an Irish Stew of sorts. There didn’t seem to be any trace of the Irish Setters left in the well “cared” for dogs which were now more beagle and mutt. Stephen and the handlers took us on a grand tour of the kennels, showing us the blood disorder dogs and then the healthy blood donor dogs. I offered Argo as a blood donor, assuring them that he would be good for several pints a day. My offer was declined because even the donors were of a very carefully scrutinized, disease free, bred dog. We also visited pigs that were as big as a small car. We spoke of the possibility of filming at the kennels since the dogs and pigs had provided so much knowledge to the research community in the diagnosis and treatment of blood disorders.
“Maybe,” we were told, “but as soon as there is any publicity, the animal rights people set up a picket line outside.”
“Oh, yeah.”
In reading Dr. Brinkhaus’ interview with Susan Resnik, he recalled how in the 1930s it was customary for the emergency room to call the blood guys from pathology whenever a hemophiliac was admitted so they could draw blood for research. The Doctor came upon a feisty cab driver with hemophilia who had confronted a customer who wouldn’t pay. The cab driver ended up in the emergency room. Dr. Brinkhaus offered the cab driver a job as a lab assistant in exchange for regular blood samples. At one point when the cab driver was getting dental work, they almost lost him because they were still unsure what worked and what didn’t in blood clotting for hemophiliacs. That’s when Dr. Brinkhaus became convinced that working with animals was more practical and ethical than working on humans. He had zero tolerance for loss of human life. Finding the dogs was part of his journey. Visiting them was part of ours.
Stephen capped off the visit to the kennel with an exciting slide show about gene modification therapy, the next step in hemophilia treatment.
“Stephen, enough already,” I said after about twenty minutes of an hour long presentation.
“Dr.Brinkhaus, thought that you would be interested in the work being done here.”
“Our film ain’t for a bunch of old guys in white coats. I don’t think I need to know all this gene stuff. We’re doing a film about the hemophilia community, about how people affect other people, the work they do, not necessarily a how to thing, but an, oh yeah, results of thing.”
“I knew that,” Stephen said, “but the King…”
“Oh yeah.”

The daughter of the woman from the networking luncheon, Muffy, called and was curious about what we were doing. Things were beginning to hop, but there were two of us. There still wasn’t anything for another person to really do, since Brent was dealing with the hemophilia community, I thought. I was continuing to pursue Susan Resnik as a creative resource. We had gone so far as to shuffle a contract back and forth with her as a story consultant and possibly a historical narrator to fill in what wasn’t covered by our multi-generational interviewees who would be telling their stories. She had moved from Manhattan to Southern California, which didn’t seem like a major problem if we were able to get the thing off the ground at all. The hemophilia community is spread out around the country, and the plan was to go to them. Brent not being able to handle a full day on a movie set did, however, raise quite a few doubts as to whether he had the stamina to participate fully in our own production.
In July, 1995, a Senator Mike Dewine of Ohio and Bob Graham of Florida introduced the Ricky Ray Relief Act, a billion dollar bill that would compensate HIV positive hemophiliacs $125,000 each. In 1986 Ricky Ray an HIV positive hemophiliac from Florida and his brothers were banned from attending school in Arcadia, Florida. A court order reinstated them and wonderful Floridians burned their house down. When I heard this, Full Sail Center for the Recording Arts made perfect sense and I really felt like an idiot.

Brad and I had signed up as extras on a made-for-TV Civil War movie about the Rules of the stockade, or bunker, or what have you. Andersonville had been an overcrowded Confederate prisoner of war camp for Yankees. Within the stockade the prisoners consumed one another. It’s as simple as that. The story goes, the film had already been made and several rolls of film had been lost by an airline. Several million dollars had been anted up to reshoot the lost footage. An actual stockade was reconstructed on a farm outside of Wilmington. John Frankenheimer, the director, was brought in along with the original cast. Over nine hundred extras were signed on, for forty dollars a day and lunch. Among those extras, were Maxwell Beauregard Rules, and about four or five hundred boys in their early 20s. Most of us were pretending to be Yankee prisoners of war.
“They made me a Yankee,” Beauregard said, over morning coffee and donuts.
“This is Andersonville,” Brent said, “Yankees ripping off other Yankees.”
“It’s still that way, ain’t it,” Beauregard chuckled.
The heat was unbearable in the wool uniforms. They hadn’t been able to find a wool coat to fit me so I got off rather easily. I winced every time I saw Brent dragging his leg from one scene placement to another in his full woollies. I knew I had made a big mistake in talking him into signing on for the internment. By lunch he was experiencing a severe knee bleed and totally drained. His factor concentrates were a good half mile away in the car in the makeshift parking lot. I raced around and got him signed out with the casting outfit. The medics drove him back out to his car, and he drove himself home. Brent was never without his limp and always in pain. I could never understand what kept him from getting a handicapped parking sticker. He stubbornly refused to consider himself disabled, yet his joint damage and internal bleeding limited his physical capabilities. Though he was only in his late twenties he was still considered one of the older generations of hemophilia, with the limp as the defining characteristic.
“You lift and carry, I think,” he said.
Beauregard was also dressed in full woollies and maintained the dignity of a Southern gentleman throughout the day never complaining even as the other troops began to murmur. There was the sound of mutiny in the ranks. It actually fit the nature of the historical film. We only had a glimpse of our historical inhumanity to man. Yet history is ignored for the most part, as something that could only happen “then.” For most it was their first stint in the undignified role of extra. I wasn’t surprised to see the greatest murmuring among the young and healthy, who felt that they were being taken advantage of, though the nature of the work had been explained beforehand. The wise director took care of the filming of the masses on that first day.
When the workday had ended, and the extras were in the changing tents, the complaining reached a crescendo. The glamour of the movie industry had been tarnished in the eyes of many, even though they had been participants in the making of magic, in re-creating history, as contrived as it may turn out to be, an art still the same. The plan was for one or two more days of shooting. Many who had signed up for the full shoot were making plans to spend the next day at the beach, the true calling of the 400 or so boys in their 20s. Beauregard gave me a ride home on his way back to the Beach. I knew that he would pick me up at dawn the next morning, to return to the set of Andersonville and wear woolen clothes and stand around in the hot sun to allow the director and the crew to make a movie. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but a deal is a deal.
Argo was waiting outside the fence, with a smile and a wagging tail, when I got home. I ushered him back into the yard and cooked his dinner of pork-neck bones over dried bits, and wondered about the deal I had made with Cleo about keeping the dog, and the deal I had made with Saint about not having any pets, and the deal I had made with myself about attempting to maintain some sense of integrity while making a film. I didn’t really have any integrity, I gathered. I survived the moral dilemma and slept like a dog.
Beauregard picked me up at the house in the morning. We were once again Yankee prisoners in “the Bunker,” passing judgment on other Yankee prisoners who had tried to survive by bullying others to their will. There were plenty of extra sandwiches on that second day of filming since so many extras had not returned in lieu of surfing. It was just as hot that day as it had been on the first day. We were only food for the camera, most of us to be disregarded as waste on the cutting room floor.
I saw the King of research funding grants, Dr. Brinkhaus as our link to history, a living history in the research aspect of hemophilia. He had spanned 60 years, through pre-treatment to the present. He didn’t have to be recreated, he was there and still vigorous to a point. He was like Dustin Hoffman in “Little Big Man.” I read the transcript of the interview the King, Dr. Brinkhaus had given to Susan Resnik, and associated him with the character in her book. I dwelled on the stories Kay had told us about what kind of a slave driver he was. I re-read about him in the book “Journey.” I called and made a follow-up appointment to visit the dogs.
“The dogs,” Brent said, “we’re going to see the dogs.”