as fate would have it, the judges responded, and my brief essay was awarded first place in the literary category. so, yesterday, sandwiched between lunch and an impromptu job interview, i went to the Student Union to read what i wrote. once there, i came across this artwork:
"Time to Get Tested" by Mona Hassan (i think)
which was not the winning piece, but was my favorite. what appeals to me most is the simplicity of its design, and the safety pin metaphor is pure genius. a different piece by this same artist (who lamentably was not there) won second place in the visual category. but this is beside the point.
the point is that i read my piece, and with substantially less nervousness than times past. perhaps it was because i had been going nonstop all day, or maybe because i had a French presentation looming 45 minutes in the future. whatever the reason, i was glad to share my essay, which was written with less effort and pretense than the academic writing i've been immersed in for the past three months. and so, without further ado...
Untitled
My cousin Landon and I were raised like brothers in a small town in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains. He was a year younger than I, but taller, stronger and more confident even from a young age. Our grandmother took care of us as kids, and we spent summers outside in the woods – hiking, playing soldier, and hogging all the ripe blueberries while my younger brother Sam was left to scavenge for the minuscule green orbs that populated the inner regions of the bush. Years passed in this way, and when summer vacation came to a close each August, the two of us would return to elementary schools on opposite ends of the county.
We saw little of one another until the end of October, when we would reunite at his parents' home dressed as a vampire, movie star, or superhero. His stepfather was a highway patrolman, a hard man who had never healed from his own poverty-stricken upbringing and childhood filled with abuse. In spite of this, he did his best to raise my cousin, treating him like his own and trying to instill a sense of right and wrong, even if it came at the end of a hickory switch.
Each Halloween he would take us trick or treating, and Landon, my brother and I would pile in the back of Uncle Moe's red pick-up truck. We would have contests to see who could keep his mouth open the longest as the truck lumbered from one home to the next, and I still remember how salty and foreign my tongue tasted as the frigid mountain air dried the saliva. I don't remember who won these tests of endurance, but I do recall that Landon and I would run inside as soon as we got home, pouring out our candy in the floor and then segregating by type, texture and taste. Sugar Daddy was our favorite.
The snowstorms of winter often made the county's gravel roads impassable, and classes would be canceled for all of December. While our classmates looked forward to Christmas, Landon and I would count down the days until our annual holiday shopping in Kingsport, Tennessee. It was nothing more than an aging industrial town with a third rate mall, but to us it was like shopping on Fifth Avenue. When we got old enough, our grandparents would allow us to go off and explore the stores on our own. By the time we reached adolescence, though, these opportunities came less and less often. Landon was on the football team, the basketball team, the baseball team, and never had any trouble finding a date on Saturday night. I remember how much I envied his ease with women, how he never seemed embarrassed or worried when our grandmother or aunt would tease him.
I left home when I was sixteen, and Landon and I fell out of contact, seeing each other only on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. I would always try to show up late enough to miss Uncle Moe's blessing over the meal, and to this day I don't know whether to call it an exceptionally long prayer or a relatively short sermon. Either way, the food was cold by the time he was done, and Landon and I would have to choke back laughter as the family members' eyes peeked open to watch the steam billowing up from the mashed potatoes. He would tell me stories about his sexual conquests – girlfriends and casual encounters and one-night stands – after dinner, and I listened with a mix of embarrassment and envy.
Landon came out his freshman year of college, and the family went through a painfully stereotypical transition as they tried to cope with their expectations and prejudices being challenged. My brother and I seemed to be less effected than the others, and I remember us laughing to one another, "He used to dress up as Wonder Woman for Halloween – does this really come as a surprise?"
But it did for our family: the county we grew up in didn't even have a synagogue or cathedral, much less the cultural space for any sort of non-heterosexual expression. Time continued to pass, and occasionally I would come across old friends who told me that they had heard rumors about Landon back in high school. I considered for the first time what it must have been like for him to hide his desire, to hide himself, to sneak around in a town where everyone knows everyone else's business. I imagined the freedom he must have felt when he left for college. It was only forty-five minutes away, but clearly far enough to begin expressing the person he had always been inside.
Landon tested positive for HIV in 2003, and the news of this diagnosis rippled across the family grapevine. I found out from my mother as I was driving between Deep Gap and Boone, halfway between the county we grew up in and the college where he came out. I didn't know what to say or do, so I did nothing, paralyzed by sense of impotence. My cousin and I hadn't been close in a decade, but he was the first person I ever knowingly knew with HIV.
Over the past five years his T-cell count has bounced up and down like the rubber bouncy balls we used to throw off the walls of the garage when we were eight. I've never discussed it with him, and I have no idea if the drug use came from the virus, or the virus from the drug use, or the drug use from the sex, or the sex from the virus, or the virus from the sex, or the sex from the drug use. A person could go crazy spinning these thoughts around inside his head, and no matter how many times we ask the question, no matter how many times we demand an answer – there's really no way of knowing why some of us end up lucky and some of us don't.
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