I’m going to lay it all out for you. About 2 years ago, I was about as miserable as I’ve ever been. I was working in a great position for a great company, but my day-to-day life was a tedious hell. The office always had some plot festering, some bruised ego exacting revenge, some shortsighted passion going on and I was left to figure out how to control it, deflect it, or eat it.
That January I decided enough was enough and I booked a quick flight out of Newark to Puerto Rico. Literally the moment I got out of the plane, my phone started to ring. It was the office again. Again. I don’t specifically remember the ‘crisis’ I needed to be brought in on, but by the time I hung up the phone, I felt physically ill.
So I left the airport and in minutes I was in downtown San Juan. I had that tourist-white skin on. I walked beneath a ceiling of cloud puffed blue and signs atop buildings that read For Rent or For Sale. At that moment, I thought, why not? Why not move to PR for part of the year and live the other half in the NE at my farm? Others managed to do it. I only had my needs to meet, no others. Why not?
That evening, there was a festival in the Colonial portion of the town. Within the tight streets, the balustrades above, revelers danced while loud music pulsed. I followed the group from a distance for a while before plunging in. The music and singing were so loud that it drummed through me. I felt exorcised. I remember a wave of happiness and release mounting over top of me. I felt inundated with air.
That night, I walked slower and more contentedly. I found a bar, noted for it’s male hooker trade, off the beaten path of the more popular Condado. As soon as I sat at the bar, I noticed a beautiful, exotic man sitting to my left who within seconds dropped some pocket change that we both tried to retrieve. It was a great opening to a conversation. His voice was beautiful. He had a Middle Eastern accent and he was putting together mannered sentences that were free of the typical snarking we Westerners trade back and forth. Soon we were very close, our mouths bent around the other’s ear so we could talk and be heard against the music. He had thick black hair that I remember feeling beneath my hand as I pulled his head closer to my mouth. He had the face of a ball player. Looked like he could have handled a chew in that full mouth of his. Looked like line drives and home runs. Like SMACK, right in the old catcher’s mitt.
We went back to his apartment and he presented a cocoa colored, perfectly round, hairless ass. I remember he tilted his pelvis up a bit so that it lifted off the mattress slightly. He was drunk and I mounted him like I’d hired a whore.
I didn’t stay the night yet somehow, and I can’t remember how it happened, we found a way to reconnect the following day. We went out on a proper date, but before we did, we made love again. He was over-the-top insistent that I wear a condom when fucking him. At the time, I did not know my HIV status, but had been dabbling in unprotected sex as a top here and there. I had gotten through so many instances without catching anything, that I assumed the risk as a top was low…so here’s what I did.
I tore a hole in the condom before putting it on. He liked to get fucked from behind, so I would grab the condom that he insisted I wear, open the pack with my teeth, but before putting it on, take another bite out of it and put a hole in the top. Then when I slipped it on, the head of my dick popped through and I could experience the feeling of fucking him bare back. Because he faced away, he never knew.
Hate me now? Well, that’s what I did. What’s life without honesty, right? And I didn’t just do it that way once, I did it several times. We were hot for each other and it wasn’t uncommon for us to fuck 4 times in one day. I didn’t think I was giving him HIV (or the Hi Five as my friend in LA calls it), because I was convinced I was negative. And I didn’t think I was doing any harm to myself, because I assumed that such a prig couldn’t possibly be positive.
Well I was wrong. We had an overblown romance. The kind you can only have while on vacation. No obligations, only recreation and cocktails and scenery and new love. I left after a few days, but as soon as I got back to NY, I called him and we spoke every night for the next few weeks.
His name was Ibrahim. Did I mention that? He was an Egyptian who worked for the American University in Cairo and for reasons he never quite made clear, he was working for a month in Puerto Rico. Something to do with finance, but he kept his business life a little on the murky side. Later when I told this story to my friends, they told me it was because he had a wife and kids back at home and wanted to make sure that there was a certain distance kept. I talked to him about my concern that he was ‘keeping something from me’, but he insisted that I was the reason why he kept himself secret. When he felt he could trust me, that my affection for him was real, he would reveal all.
I decided I would return to PR and see him again. This was about 3 or 4 weeks later. I booked another flight and almost from the moment I landed, I started to get a headache. It was sick headache, like the kind you get when you’re coming down with something. It wasn’t unmanageable, but it was present and at times insistent, like a hand grabbing me from the back of my head and holding onto me.
We had a great few days together. A rented car, a day at a beautiful nearly-deserted spa, a trip through the interior of the island, early dinners and whole evenings where we were wrapped up together in bed. By the time I left him on the fourth day, we both had felt as though we had gone too far, too fast. Still we must have called each other a dozen or so more times…in the taxi on the way to the airport, while checking my luggage, while waiting at the airport. Over and over again. The same professions, the same promises. I arrived back in NY to a frigid landscape that had recently been buried (once again) in blizzard-proportions of snow. The headaches continued and there were times when I felt light headed and dizzy.
For the next 2 to 3 months, I flirted with mononucleosis-like symptoms. I was in fact experiencing my worse dream come true. I was sero-converting. The thought of it turned me off to Ibrahim and I stopped calling him. This was the secret that he had held off telling me and because of my selfish behavior, of choosing to lie to him and screw him unprotected without his permission, I infected MYSELF with HIV. One year later, I was sick enough to go to a doctor and finally get the bad news. After an adjustment period, I contacted Ibrahim on Yahoo and told him everything. He corroborated my story, but unsurprisingly wanted nothing to do with someone as selfish as me. I live with regret for it. Not because of my HIV status, which thanks to the inroads of the countless dead before all of us is manageable. No, I regret what my experience proved me to be: an animal, a coward.
There has been a reprieve of a kind. I am no longer saddled with fear and I experience sex with all the abandon that got us into this mess to begin with. I am part of a bigger psychological orgy that I am made more and more aware of every day. Other HIV positive men and younger negative men who crave no-holds barred sex, sex to the point of self-abuse, invite me to their lairs. I am privy to a world that seems at times to take its cue from Vampires, a world in which the innocent are drawn to a relationship that puts their lives at risk. Since admitting to the world that I am HIV positive, I have had many people ask me to put my ‘pos’ load up their ass, invite me to make them ‘pos’. I have also experienced the more desperate love of the marginalized. Both given it and received it. My status has brought me to a very basic part of my and all of our existences: raw need. I am now part of a group that is stripped down to the bone, that gives itself over to love or romance or sex as though lying before an altar. Whatever we are giving ourselves over to; we are giving it as though our life depended on it.
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