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I loaned the truck to local in the film business. He told me he had hired a few fellows from a half-way house to help him move stuff and one of them had been unhappy with the pay. I asked him why he didn’t hire me and he said I wouldn’t have been happy with the pay. He gave me fifty dollars for the use of the truck. When I got the truck back Iris was a bit smoky out her rear. I believe I was as burnt out as Iris or I would have volunteered to drive the truck. My judgment was shot.

Kay Eager, the Doctor Brinkhaus connection, called and asked me to move her furniture to Charleston, South Carolina. Her furniture included a piano. Need I say more. The truck had no brakes. I had the brakes repaired at a garage on the corner while a cop from the Motor Vehicles office up the road watched. I figured I would make the run on Sunday morning when they were closed. The deal with Kay was for a hundred sixty dollars but only a hundred when I got to Charleston and the balance at a later date. Her next month’s storage would have cost her another ninety dollars. I loaded the truck on Saturday myself, including the piano. The truck was blowing blue smoke to fill a block, but Iris kept me on the road and I felt I owed Kay Eager big time for the introduction to Doctor Brinkhaus. With keeping everything plugged in, that money from the homecare company was dissipating rapidly. My blood plasma donation income of thirty a week was my main cash flow. We continued to send out proposals and film festival entries. Nothing had changed. Everything was exactly the same as it had been for 18 months. And we didn’t even have a perfect print. The settlement offer for the hemophilia community was still in limbo with no hope for any money for anyone in the near future. I drove the smoking truck with a load of furniture, leaving before dawn, to Charleston, passing through Myrtle Beach and arriving at Kay’s house by 10:00 a.m. She had a doctoral student living with her. He was large enough to help unload the truck and the piano. The truck had eaten more gas than it should have due to the blue smoke and whatever was wrong with Iris. My paranoia helped me recall Rooster’s death tangled up in blooms in front of the house I was living in and enough people knew I had been working with people with AIDS. The film guy I had allowed the use of Iris mentioned a disgruntled halfway house inhabitant and I thought maybe someone put something in one of the two gas tanks. I didn’t know.

Kay was still doing bio-feedback with a few people for pain and stress relief and preaching as a minister. The doctors at the Chapel Hill screening had asked about Kay. I told them that she was preaching. They looked disappointed as Doctors will do when someone leaves their profession even though they drove her out of it. Kay had worked for Doctor Brinkhaus in the early 70s and besides washing dishes had written some very famous papers and the doctors acknowledged this to me and I told Kay. She said they never told her and had taken the credit. While the puffy student and I finished unloading the truck, Kay drove to Macdonald’s for coffees. The student that was renting a room from her was involved in research for diabetes as Kay had been in research for blood. Kay’s house had been nailed by Hugo the Hurricane, but it was all repaired, with fallen trees and debris removed because the house had been hit and damaged by debris. I had no idea what was going to happen to the tree in Saint’s yard. I had no power, no money and my honor had been thrown out with the dishwater.

I returned to Wilmington in a puff of blue smoke, using most of the 100 dollars for gasoline. I made one more trip to the storage facility to pick up a sofa bed that originally didn’t fit on the truck with the piano, hoping that Kay’s daughter would find the way and time to pick it up at a later date. I left it in the back of my truck, good OLE Iris the water truck. The trip was a net loss but the brakes were fixed and I was looking at the possibility of escape.

The relentless pursuit of funding continued along with the gratification of writing this story as a novel while sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the fallen tree in the yard which generated its own life and energy and escape from reality of failure. The last thing I wanted in the story was a lot of anger that I attempted to shake off in my fingers while performing tai-chi in the mornings.

In speaking to Dominic Bono about the new prints for the film, he suggested that we go for a new optical track and two good prints. This seemed to be a good direction to head since the prints that were intended for other markets were not only unfit for viewing, but unused since several avenues and possible contacts had not panned out. I called the lab and ordered the prints being certain to add that I didn’t expect to pay for them since they obviously screwed up. My main contact at the lab had become Howdy Doody, a kindly kid who was the main colorist at the lab. He was in jail the first time the prints were run and the owner, who only saw the bottom line, ran the prints. Color Lab billed me for the prints so I called Dominic and reminded him about his leaking roof after it was repaired by professionals and his feelings about professional responsibility, and he said he would take care of it.

The conference, which was to feature Laureen Kelley and hosted by the Boss’s homecare company, gave me the opportunity to see the queen in action and touch base with many of my friends from the hemophilia community. The possibility of hitting the boss up for some additional money for distribution was also high on my list. I had spoken to Richard Atwood from the treatment center in Winston-Salem about distributing the video through the treatment centers to schools and other avenues. Richard was the South-East regional administrator for treatment centers. There had been a major conflict between the hemophilia Community and the hemophilia treatment centers in the early 80s and a lot of bad blood still flowed. Many members of the community felt that the treatment centers could have prevented the contaminated blood products from being distributed because they were the ones who actually did a lot of the work and saw the proliferation of AIDS but simply followed orders in most cases and continued to distribute the tainted blood products. The treatment centers had come a long way, however, and frequent blood product recall notices were now the order of the day.

I made it to Dominic Bono’s house in Vienna by Thursday night. He knew that people had fucked up. There were five scenes out of sync on the film and the video master. He called Nelson Funk and I made arrangements to get his corrections the following day. I dropped the corrected sound track at the lab in Rockville, knowing that someone had fucked up and I needed good prints to compensate for the several bad prints that I had already paid for. Dominic also made arrangements for me to meet with a woman in downtown DC on Sunday for corrections to the digital master, plus additions to the credits. I briefly visited with family and friends to make sure I still had some friends not affected by blood disorders. I had tried to keep the entire thing objective so my outside contacts and their general lack of interest with anything that didn’t concern them personally helped me keep a real perspective about the human animal keenly in check. No one really gave a duck’s ass anywhere, unless the duck’s ass was on their own red neck. No one could figure out why I was doing what I was doing since there was no real money involved. I was living and doing what I wanted to be doing was my delusional mantra. I had to have the car back to Triangle by noon the next day, but I did have a corrected digital master and dub master in tow to take back with me. There were high hopes of additional screenings for the film. Since we had been sending out out-of-sync VHS tapes to film festivals those early hopes were dashed. After all, it was a film about sickness and death and a touch of compassion. That was hard enough to sell, let alone ventriloquist’s puppet speech patterns. On my final leg down 95 with the dog leg on 40 to Wilmington I did my mileage check. I clocked in at over 7,000 miles in two weeks. The car rental was for unlimited mileage. Oobladee, OOOObladuh. I found a woman on the banks of the Cape Fear River and capped the caper with a cookie.

The next morning I immediately dropped in to give blood for money, dropped the dub master off at the studio for fresh VHS copies and returned the car, filling out the check for two-hundred-eighty dollars. Chanter picked me up at the car rental office and took me home to die. Instead I was immediately on the phone to Dublin, Ireland looking for that worldwide distribution.

“Get it funded,” I was told.

These bloody guys were driving me nuts. I sent out another ten proposals and learned that the Boss was having a conference for hemophiliac families in the next few weeks featuring my main dancing partner, Laureen, the funded queen. He was flying her into North Carolina, renting a hotel and feeding the troops for a one day session. He didn’t get the far reaching implications of a definitive film/video—mass media product about hemophilia that featured a few of his clients. I pestered the Hawaiian/Asian Yamaguchi in Las Vegas and sent him a copy and he loved it. He had become a millionaire several times over because of the hemophilia community. He finally said that he doesn’t fund projects, but after the first of the year he would make a contribution directly to the chapter and leave it up to them whether they wanted to do anything. I figured that my relationship with the chapter was officially over since the group at the National Meeting didn’t even offer me floor space to crash on. I was stuck in a giant Riddle and there was a tree in the back yard that FEMA wouldn’t remove because it didn’t hit the house.

The Sunday drive up Coastal Highway was just that, a Sunday drive avoiding Southern California forest fires. I stopped off in Huntington Beach to see some old friends from back East in Baltimore. We had stopped off to see Frank and Kandy when I was out there with Glasseye who died of lung Cancer. Frank had just been diagnosed with prostate Cancer, so when I tried to hit him up for gas money after showing him and Kandy the film he said that he would contribute if it was about Cancer. And the preacher said, “In sickness and in health till death–Or to quote Kierkegaard, “Sickness unto death.” When I got closer to LA I called the treasurer of Hemophilia of North Carolina to tell him to expect a check from the homecare company. I told him my situation about having to stop off in Rockville and Vienna to deal with a few problems and he agreed to make a direct deposit to the Bear Naked account as soon as they got the check, withholding the Chapter’s 5% plus any transfer expenses incurred. I drove to downtown LA and looked for the company where I sold plasma for eight bucks a pint back in 1987 while I was homeless in LA. They were supposed to have screened donors since 1985. I recalled speaking to another homeless guy with visible needle tracks on his arms who had been a regular donor at the center.

I found downtown LA before the sun went down. The homeless delegation was not as prevalent as it had seemed in 1987. I got a couple false leads to where some homeless guys thought that they remembered where the plasma collection center had been located. At first I thought it had been turned into a parking garage across from the Ronald Reagan Building which would have been appropriate since Gipper was at least partly responsible for setting up the climate for the AIDS epidemic since he never even spoke the word as though it weren’t there. But it was all too vague. I figured I should spend another day of research since things seemed a little screwy. I drove to Coastal Highway and North of Malibu before I found an appropriate spot to park and sleep until daylight.

The next morning I called Dominic Rodriguez Sepulveda who had kicked me out on the street in 1987 and set up an appointment with him for later that afternoon. He was no longer in ladies lingerie. I had all morning to find the building of blood. I questioned a guard at City Hall where I had spent a couple of nights in 1987 and he directed me to a building a short walk away, and there it was, the sign was still on the building at 263 Main Street, BIO-MEDICS PLASMA CENTER. I bounced from one City or County Agency to the next, finally being directed to the Business License Division. The Plasma Bank had been in business from 1982, at the height of blood contamination, until 1992. And in 1987, two years after screening was to have begun, they were operating full force to an inflated population of 35,000 homeless people in LA for the Super Bowl, out there in the COMBAT ZONE. I called the owner of the building who had the vacancy for rent and got stiffed after he told me that there was an operation in Long Beach and another in Nevada, owned by his former tenant. The same private operator was still in business.

I was worn out and went to see Dominic Rodriguez Sepulveda so I could hit him up for gas money and show him the video of the film. Dominic had been a major manufacturer of Easy Now in the late 70s and early 80s. It later became known as Estacy. He was no longer in his house in Westwood and no longer had his Mazerati. He had lost everything. He was going to NA and AA meetings at least once a day. He looked at the film and commented how he believed that the hemophilia community should be allowed to die off because they were inferior.

“You’re Jewish. Didn’t Hitler say something like that about the Jews?”

“I’m Jewish only on my mother’s side. That was different,” he said.

“Shalom”

I made my way to HOLLYWOOD and picked up a few cigars for the long ride and headed for Las Vegas, hoping to get up with the Hawaiian/Asian who consulted for the huge homecare company. The hour grew late and I heard an advertisement for rooms for 20 bucks a night at Buffalo Bill’s Resort across the California State line in Nevada. I blew right by the slot machines and took a room on the ninth floor where a roller coaster passed by the window. I showered and slept like a baby in a real bed, not one of acrylic, not one of straw. I called Yamaguchi from the really big homecare company the first thing in the morning and he was leaving on a plane for Salt Lake within the hour. He blew me off. I expected to have to keep the long distance calls rolling at the usual feverish pace. I was locked in. The money raised was once more being used to raise money. I called the treasurer of the Chapter and they had gotten the check for two thousand and deposited it into the Bear. I called the bank and had money transferred into my personal account which I could squeeze from a bank machine but that wouldn’t take effect until midnight. The Black Jack tables looked inviting downstairs but the money was tight enough that there was no room for funding in that direction.

I headed in the direction of Las Vegas, having lived there in ‘70 and passed through on several occasions, including the trip with Glasseye. Las Vegas loomed on the horizon like a giant Spoon in the desert, gleaming in the sunlight.

“Ain’t no Fairy Godmother for Duda,” he said aloud to himself, and turned hard right toward Boulder, Nevada. I picked up hitchhikers outside of Boulder. They were headed to Albuquerque after going broke in Vegas, losing the truck and everything else they had. I dropped one passenger at is home and the other in a trailer park where he discovered his girlfriend had changed the locks on the trailer. “I’ll stay with a neighbor till morning,” he said. I kept on truckin’. I was out of money and low on gas before the bank machine coughed up in Tucumcari on Wednesday morning. A Chicken Fried Steak for breakfast in Amarillo Texas, at the Blue Front Diner and nothing could be finer with two thousand miles to go.