The Poz Closet

I found out my buddy died via Facebook … not that I’m complaining that I was robbed of the worst kind of phone call or anything. That’s just how I learned, after two years of not talking to me for reasons I wouldn’t be privy to until he was dead, that Billy was … well, dead.

“How?” my tiny voice wept into the phone when his sister answered my late-night call. My soul was an emotional oil spill, and I muted my phone as she spoke so she wouldn’t have to hear my sobbing. After a winded round of apologies that she didn’t call me directly:

“He died of complications from AIDS.”

I stopped crying, suffocated by terrible revelation. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t f*cking believe what she just said.

“Berlin? You there?”

Sort of. I remember the “no no no!” crying business that we humans get up to when stuff like this happens. I remember the blubbering and the gasping and the snot on my pillow that night … but I couldn’t conjure any memory of him telling me he was poz. All this time — not a word. We’d known each other for a decade plus, lived together for three years, man! We cooked together, painted the deck together, rolled on shitty ecstasy together, spent countless evenings creating weird toys for the cat — we were best buddies … right?

I must’ve called him an asshole post-mortem for the next three days. I wrote his obituary in a flurry of rage-tears, hammering at the keys like he’d feel my thunder in the Great Beyond. “I’m gonna kick your ass when I get there, Billy,” I promised him many, many times. “Why didn’t you tell me, man?”

He’d known since he was 18, which means he’d lived with the disease for 16 years. I searched my database for any memory of Billy taking medication and there was none. We’d traveled together and all he’d cart around in his duffel bag were clothes and his contacts case. His bathroom was never tinted orange with pill bottles, and he never spoke of going to the doctor. I mean to say: Billy had HIV and he didn’t fight back.

“HIV isn’t a death sentence anymore,” my good buddy, Dr. Ansel, said to me one afternoon. “He could’ve gotten treatment, and there’s a good chance he’d still be here.” That lit the rage and sadness anew. He could still be here.

I’ll be frank: It’s taken me longer than it should to process that I’ll never speak to him in this life again, and I’ll admit now that my rage was mostly outta line. He wasn’t obligated to tell me a damn thing, and who am I to think his problems were mine to know? So I’ve let it go. He had his reasons for hiding from me and I’ve let it go.

But what I want to release into the wilds of your minds, my other buddies, is that we’re closer and closer to wiping this bastard of a disease off the face of the earth. We’re gonna have setbacks and speedbumps, but giving up is bullshit. HIV isn’t a death sentence and I want you to remember that. As well, I’d like to request that you don’t shame yourself and go through this alone. You are not a problem, you are not a bother, you are not defined by your illness.

I found out my buddy Billy died in a twin bed in his parent’s basement, alone and deeply depressed, legs blackened by Kaposi’s Sarcoma. He had a phone by his side the entire time, and why he never dialed my number to say goodbye is a question I’ll have to learn to stop asking.

Here’s where I’m going with this:

If anyone out there reading this is HIV-positive and hiding from those who love you, I beg you to let us hold you up when you’re down. I beg you to let us love you through this shit, and to grow old with us knowing we won’t let HIV/AIDS win. Not on our watch, baby. That’s really all I want, on behalf of the people who will always be Team You.

I know Billy isn’t the first (or the last) to throw in the towel needlessly and float away from us without goodbyes — I just kinda hope it’s rarer by the day. We need exactly zero more asses to kick in the Great Beyond.