Middle age threw me a wicked curve

HIV-positive since the '80s, I never expected to grow old -- and I really didn't expect to end up with a crooked penis.

By Peter Kurth

Read more: AIDS, Health, Peter Kurth, Life

Mignon Khargie / Salon

Sept. 28, 2007 | In 1968, when I was 15, my best friend and I swore to each other that we would never grow old. We even pricked our fingers and exchanged blood in the pact. True to his promise, Jon died at the age of 41.

Yet here I am, still. I jumped about 5 feet in the air the first time I stepped out of the shower, reached for the towel, and -- looking in the glass -- saw my 83-year-old father's body staring back at me: the same narrowed face, the same pigeon chest, the same skinny legs.

Aging is a bit more shocking to me than it might be to someone else, because I was never supposed to live this long. I've been HIV-positive since the AIDS epidemic "officially" began in 1981 -- although those of us who were first hit by it know that it started some time before then. In 1980, already, I was worried about what I'd read in the New York newspapers about "the gay cancer," which mystified everybody and seemed to have no origin or solution. I remember being alarmed because, in 1981, I burned my fingers on a cigarette, and the burn took forever to heal -- weeks and weeks, it seemed. From that time on, I haven't had a single day that wasn't lived at some level of trepidation, and, for many years, in a state of acute anxiety and fear.

Suddenly, in 1996 -- when my "clinical profile" was sinking swiftly to the grave -- medications came along that could, if taken properly, as prescribed, save your life, or at least prolong it. For all the relief I felt to be "saved," it was still a shock; after all, I had grown used to expecting an early death. Before the miracle of protease inhibitors and the "AIDS cocktail," I was on my way out. Then, in a split second, I was "Lazarus" (literally -- I was "Lazarus" columnist for Poz magazine).

I confess: I became an angry, agitated, irrational, bona fide, in-your-face, fuck-you, pain-in-the-ass agitator and activist (which I can still be -- watch out!). But mainly, now, I'm tired of it. All I notice are the skinny legs and the wasted muscles and a body that has aged beyond its years. Frankly, I think this is a bad joke, in poor taste. I think the least a person could do, after a quarter-century under the Sword of Damocles, is die, already. Only I don't want to die. I never did. If I flatter myself into thinking that my survival is due to stubbornness -- "piss and vinegar," as my father would say -- I still remember the others: Jon, of course, and so many of my friends. They didn't want to die, either, but they did. Forever young.

In the old days of "AIDS activism" we all compared the thing to a war -- not necessarily in the sense of two "sides" fighting each other, but in the sense of battling random, useless death. The Canadian novelist Timothy Findley wrote in his masterpiece, "The Wars," about an old lady who lived through the First World War. Looking back, she remembered the feeling of death all around her: "Every day another friend. And what I hate these days is the people who weren't there and they look back and say we became inured to it. Your heart froze over -- yes. But to say we got used to it! God -- that makes me so angry! No. Everything was sharp. Immediate. You met and you saw so clearly and cut so sharply into one another's lives. So there wasn't any rubbish."

Which still leaves me with the question, How did I get so old -- I, who was supposed to die with the rest, who never even imagined entering middle age? Indeed, when I was still living in New York, the therapist I had there -- who was himself HIV-positive and died not long after I left the city -- asked me if I thought I would live to see the age of 50. I said, truthfully, that I did not, not really understanding the question, as it seemed so far beyond possibility.

HIV-wise, I'm doing fine, superbly, these days -- "stunning results," no "detectable" viral load, "perfect CD4's," "wonderful percentages." My last lab report was so good that the doctors wrote me to say, "You are going to live for a long time yet, and have plenty more opportunities for misery!" I am, it appears, no different from anyone else. And, crazy as it sounds, this is very hard to accept when you've banked half your life on being a "special case." To find that you've wasted so much time worrying, and making excuses for yourself, when, in the end, you're just going to drop dead like anybody. If I ever get around to writing my memoir of the plague years, I'm going to have to title it "So, You're Not Going to Be a Tragic Hero, After All! Poor You!"

Now, after 11 years of "HAART" (Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy), I find myself in the same position any man of my age would be -- "Monitor your cholesterol, don't smoke, don't drink. Eat right. Exercise. If you need help getting it up, we've got pills for that," and so on. OK, so I do suffer a few uncommon ailments: the nausea, for one thing, whenever I swallow the gallons of rarefied rat poison I need to take every morning. Then, too, there's a definite, proven "cognitive impairment" caused by both the virus and the pills. But could the same not be said about any person on chemotherapy? And if my body has aged and fallen apart to a large degree, it's because I never thought it would be worth it to "pump up" at a gymnasium. "Why?" I asked myself. "For whom?"

By the time I realized that it was for me, it was too late: The doctors had diagnosed me with gout. "Who am I?" I wailed to my doctors and friends, "Benjamin Franklin? Queen Anne?" The disease had such an antiquated sound, something that befell a stout, old historical character, not an HIV-positive literary biographer in the 21st century. Everybody laughed.

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