Toxic Cocktail Party

An associate in Albion, Captain Fathom, who knows that I tested HIV positive in 1989, has asked me more than once why I think I’ve lived through it all while so many others we’ve known with the virus have long since gone, from San Francisco and from Mendocino. This question has caused me to pause and reflect upon my 14-year odyssey.

I’m jotting down here a few of the reflections. This is not a success story but the fact that I’m alive and doing what I want to be doing does smack of the miraculous.

During the mid-1980s a fierce and mighty fear and panic epidemic was generated in San Francisco by the medico-scientific establishment and the mainstream media. It led to AIDS overkill. HIV positive people were told that they probably didn’t have much longer to live. There was no cure in sight on the dark horizon.

AZT was then promoted as one of the pharmaceutical drugs that might keep one alive until a cure of some kind could be found.

Some HIV folk shot themselves through their temples. Some overdosed on booze, pills, and with needles. Many died from fright, panic, shame. Some, probably the majority, opted for AZT or some other toxic pharmaceutical.

I remember running into an old friend/lover on Polk Street at the height of this fear epidemic. Bill had been a public school teacher who had retired after a triple bypass. We hadn’t met for a year or so. While we were exchanging stories (Bill had tested HIV positive) a high pitched electronic beeper in his pocket pierced our speech and momentarily silenced us. It was his AZT alert beeper that, five times a day, warned him to take his pills, there and then, that very minute, or else! Bill thought that it was his only shot at survival. I felt an aversion to that deafening noise. I recall thinking that if I should take the test and test positive I wouldn’t want to subject myself to the urgency of such a strictly regimented ritual without any guarantee or evidence of success. 

That was the last time that Bill and I met. I do now know what happened to him. 

However, I do know now that it was the drug AZT that nearly did me in shortly after I tested positive in 1989 in San Francisco. I started taking it upon the strong recommendation of my MD. Soon I became severely anemic. I was barely able to climb the one flight of stairs to my hotel room. What I didn’t know at the time was that AZT was a failed drug that had been manufactured for a different ailment prior to the advent of the “deadly” HIV virus and that the testing for its safety and effectiveness for HIV was flawed somewhat for the sake of big money profits. 

I rode the city bus to San Francisco General Hospital Emergency. In my weakened state I signed all the papers put before me. I was detained for nine long days and nine long nights. I received a blood transfusion and in my bed I became a demonstration showcase for groups of medical students. A surgeon chucked a piece of bone marrow from my hip while I clung to the mattress in ferocious pain, bare-assed naked before the med students with their clipboards. Whatever it was that the surgeon injected me with prior to commencing his dig — it had absolutely no anesthetic effect. The purpose of the operation was to see if it would reveal why my bone marrow was not producing the necessary blood cells, but to no avail. It was to be a couple more years before it was generally acknowledged in medical circles that AZT, not the virus, was the culprit. 

However, to this day I still suffer pain in the hip area that sometimes keeps me from entering into sound sleep.

Another erroneous assumption that was afloat at the time was that kaposi sarcoma, the awful pinkish skin lesions that many HIV men manifested, was caused by the virus, when in fact it was the result of an overuse of “poppers” (amyl nitrates) which were a huge profit-making business success in the 1970s and early 80s, especially in gay men’s clubs.

Not very long after I was diagnosed HIV positive, I had the good fortune to meet Richard Weiser, a clinical psychologist who worked part-time at the San Francisco Department of Social Services on Harrison at 10th Street. I went there to apply for general assistance. What a madhouse that was, with armed guards, loud shoutings, and scuffles. I was not a very happy man, being there in that big, packed room, having difficulty hearing the numbers called and other announcements over the loudspeaker. The application process took two days. It was on the second day that Richard Weiser appeared. A redeeming angel in the midst of chaos. 

At that time I was occupying a room at the Arlington Hotel on Ellis Street on the fringe of the Tenderloin district. I remember well the room or rather the tall red-brick wall of the neighboring building that faced my window just a few feet away, with a slight sliver of sky at the very top. I was not ready to write, not even short letters in response to ones I had received and tucked away somewhere there. I wasn’t at all interested in reading Henry Miller, whose work I often indulged in. I remained beneath sheet and blankets most of the day, most days and nights. Uselessness, worthlessness and guilt were my forlorn bed companions. As far as I can recall, I had only two visitors during my months there. The poet, Fritz Hamilton, who was himself a rock of suffering, got me out occasionally for a meal at the Lafayette Cafe down Hyde Street near Eddy.

My brother Conn came from Northridge in LA to visit me. He too probably remembers the room for its tall brick wall — he used to be a bricklayer — and for the lack of light with the electric light turned off in the room. Conn likes bright rooms. The large windows on his house let the garden in as well as the tall palms that reach for the sky. He took me out for fresh fish dinner at the Pacific Cafe on Van Ness Avenue. 

Food was almost the only thing that got me up and out those days.

On the second day at Social Services, Richard Weiser gently asked me if I would consider having some therapy sessions with him at his private office on Sutter Street, without having to pay any immediate fee. The only stipulation was that I would not drink booze nor use pot in between our bi-monthly sessions. 

I agreed. Something about him attracted me beyond the suit and tie, and we were about the same age — 50-ish.

During our sessions we sat across from each other, sometimes through stretches without conversing, sometimes exchanging pieces of our respective meandering stories, our perceived successes and failures, and the tragic elements that had at times engulfed us along the way to our current spot in time.

Richard Weiser was the first therapist, per se, to reveal himself to me. With him I felt strong empathy. We each had death sentences, he with severe asthma. In the meantime we needed to know how best to live.

I gave him some of my published (and therefore legible) poetry. He strongly suggested and finally convinced me to apply for SSI since my writing was not yet earning me a living. He wrote an effective letter to Social Security on my behalf. Soon after sending my completed application in I began to receive $700 a month. Quite a raise after $300 a month on general assistance.

He also introduced me to Prozac, which most certainly opened my eyes and ears to a new and brighter side of life than the dark gray road I had been hitherto trudging for long enough. After three months or so of meeting with him I was ready to make plans and willing to fulfill them. I was able again to play a part in creating a future.

I rented a van. Silvio, a co-resident at the hotel, helped me load my boxes and bags and a couple of plants. I picked up a big black and white cat called Ziggy at Paul’s place and off we drove north through the bright lights of a freeway night with Ziggy stretched out on top of the dashboard mesmerized. We arrived safety at the vacant cabin on North E Road, Albion, across from the Castillo de Leonardo Cirino. 

Discarded slabs of candle tallow helped keep our fire flaming in the stove that cold damp February night.

I continued to get blood transfusions (may the donors be richly blessed) about once a month for nearly a year until my hemoglobin blood counts returned to normal. Meanwhile, of course, in consultation with Dr. Don Hahn in Mendocino, I had discontinued using the toxic AZT.

Now when I hear on the radio that the pharmaceutical giants are about to sell AZT and other cocktail drugs at discounted prices to African countries it makes me wonder and it makes me sad. For what is really most needed is nutritious food, uncontaminated water, and clean air to breathe. The lack of these basics is what kills. Their presence heals.

In the mid-90s the HIV cocktail was uncorked with champagne parties as part of the victory celebration. The mainstream press ran front page stories with photos of men who had been wasting away near death’s open portals. Upon faithfully downing one or other of the various versions of cocktail combinations they were soon back at their corporate computer jobs and looking good and doing well. Drug pushing blossomed once again in the West. Even when HIV persons had no illness symptoms, many medical “experts” recommended the highly toxic cocktails. Early intervention, they proclaimed, was key to saving lives. I resisted this trend for a few years, reluctant after my AZT misadventure. 

My nephew Thomas Donohoe, is a specialist in the AIDS prevention field at UCLA. A doctor friend of his worked with the same project and was HIV positive and on the cocktail. They greatly influenced me to go on it. Fear of death is a powerful convincer. The cocktail I started taking soon caused face and neck fat to fall down to my middle. Peripheral neuropathy ensued in my feet and lower legs which interfered with getting a decent night’s sleep. 

Furthermore, the cocktail’s side effects, collateral damage as it were, necessitated the use of additional drugs to counteract same. I was slowly becoming one of those people whose every medicine cabinet shelf was fully occupied with little plastic drug containers. My containers were strewn all over my desk within easy reach. 

It was the late 90s. My oldest sister, Kathleen, and her husband, Noel, came from New York to visit with me in my Fort Bragg apartment on East Redwood. Kathleen was amazed and shocked at my scene. “You gotta get rid of them” — that’s what she said. That’s what a neighborhood friend of hers in Somers, New York, had done and was doing ok, day by day, without them. 

Now I, too, am currently cocktail-free and not any worse off than I used to be when on them. 

I’ve also ceased running to and fro for bloodwork. And what a relief that is. I frequently go walking on the beaches up here and I get invigorated and refreshed by a short swim in the cool Pacific. I appreciate the sun’s great heat on my body from chest and shoulders to the soles of my feet. But I do keep a hat on to shade my pinkish face from direct sunlight. When I was nineteen I severely damaged my facial skin trying to get a tan in Hollywood. When Man Tan failed, a sunlamp did me in. What a fool I’ve been.

I follow the sun and the birds south for winter. The sun and the fresh air have been instrumental in seeing me through two bouts of shingles after initial pharmaceuticals including painkillers got me over the brunt of it. 

Locally, I walk and cycle quite a bit. My brother Conn attributes my being well to that fact. He himself is a marathon runner at age 65, a year and three months older than I.

Yesterday, I baked a batch of chocolate chip marijuana brownies for myself, and then another.

For an Irishman, I eat a lot of garlic and I rub it on my skin to deter the mosquitoes attacking in the evening garden.

I know no better place to be than here in friendly Albion this summer. And, most important, I’m less afraid of death and dying than heretofore. 

Ulsterman, the recently released CD, is also doing well. Twenty-nine original poems from USA, Mexico and Ireland. It is available for $10 to AVA readers from:

I have not read any follow-up stories in the newspapers about the HIV “cocktail” successes. Have you? I hope that this piece will encourage others to write on the subject, including personal experiences.

Last, but certainly not least, I’ll mention that the writing of poems, letters, stories and plays have been a saving grace for me for many years.