The Day I Went Back To CARES Before Hosting Another Bonfire

CARES (the Center for AIDS Research, Education & Services) is across the street from the Townhouse, which is quiet at 4:00pm on a Monday afternoon long before they open up for Open-Mic night. I walk there after my obligatory after-work nap, still a little groggy, stopping at Old Soul for a mocha to keep my hands warm and bumping into customers who find it strange to see me on the other side of the counter. Mocha in hand, I’m heading across Midtown through the alleyways and wondering if the sun-turned-overcast sky is going to turn to rain, which would put a damper on the bonfire plans I’ve set in motion for later in the day. Over at 21st, I make a right and tell a homeless man I’ll help him out with a cigarette on my way back, then follow some fellow into the CARES building with its reflective front windows and No Smoking signs posted on the pale brick walls.

It’s a miniature hospital. Think linoleum floors, Top-40 turned Elevator Muzak playing from the radio, hard plastic waiting room seats with outdated magazines splashed about like an afterthought—Hurricane Katrina on the cover of a National Geographic, posters that say “Compliance is Not A Crime” and rotating towers of pamphlets marked “Women’s Support Groups” and “Addiction Recovery,” a defeated, yet hopeful feeling among the patients waiting in slow-moving lines at the Pharmacy, people idling at the Check-In windows waiting for someone to wave them forward. I check in and fill out my HIV/STD Test form, the same form I filled out last time, and wait for a while near the elevator and watch people come and go, old friends, usually, who catch up with each other in the Pharmacy line. I see a kid getting the same test as me (“My girl, she wants me to get the test, she don’t trust me. I tell her I love her but she don’t believe me,” he tells the Check-In nurse), a woman who tells her entire life story to another nurse, as well as a man who is worried about “Mother missing her appointment.” In the back of my mind I can’t help but think that most of these people, mostly middle-aged men, have HIV or something. They’re here for something, and that makes me sad. Then I realize that they’re probably thinking the same thing about me: Poor guy, so young. I’m glad they—we—have a place like this to go to.

I mean, where would I go? 

With no health insurance, what would I do?

I’m eventually led upstairs to the same little room where I was taken last time, where I took my cotton-swab HIV test (negative results, thank goodness), and have to explain that I’m not here for another cotton-swab. I'm here to feel good about knowing I'm clean of STDs, and this is the first time I've been tested. My nurse leaves to put my information in the computer, again, I guess, and while I wait I grab a couple more condoms from the party bins in the bookshelf and read about post-Katrina New Orleans, which makes me sad, though the photographs are phenomenal. My nurse comes back and tells me to follow her downstairs, down to the bottom floor.

Now this part of CARES looks even more like a hospital. More official. Here there’s a white-coated doctor off to the side, stuffed away in a cubby full of biohazard signs and computers and centrifuges and urine sample cups and boxes of gloves and a sign that says “Warn Your Phlebotomist If You're Allergic To Latex.” When I arrive, I sign in on a sheet outside of his window and take a seat in the waiting area across from the bathroom. I read a magazine about Sacramento and don’t learn anything new. Makes me want to write for a magazine about Sacramento… Then my name is called, I go into the doctor’s cubby, sit in a padded chair with one of the arms lifted while he looks up information about me in the computer. Nothing shows up. He asks me, twice, my phone number—he was off by a digit—and my date of birth, but there are no results. Like I snuck in or something. So he sends me back upstairs to confirm with the nurses that yes, I was in the system, and the nurse is confused and tells me she’ll take care of it for me. Within twenty minutes, the information has been processed.

So I get my blood taken. Reminds me that I should get back into donating blood again. The Doc takes just a little bit of blood—a little glass vial, “Still warm,” he laughs—and then I hold gauze against my elbow to keep from bleeding out all over the floor. Wouldn’t that be terrible? Next thing, Doc gives me a urine sample cup with my name printed out all official-like on the side, and I pee into it. Good thing I drank that mocha. I leave the warm sample on the metal cabinet near the Doc’s door. Test over.

“When do I hear back?” I ask him. “If you don’t hear anything by Wednesday,” he says, “then that’s a good thing.” 

Afterward it was dinner at Hot Italian with Jenny. The Magnini with a carafe of Peroni and some chocolate-orange/white-mint gelato in a cone to finish. We tried to back out of the bonfire plan to see Biutiful at The Crest instead, but were swayed with s’mores to start up a blaze in the backyard anyhow. Jen and Nick came over. We listened to my Most Played soundtrack and toasted marshmallows until Jake arrived—Jake, who I happened to meet at Old Soul when he and Nick (different Nick) were talking outside the coffee-shop last week—and we all talked about poetry and politics and music and the Railroad Revival Tour and drank Red Stripe and Pabst. The bonfire could—and should—become a weekly Monday Night thing, and we talked about having a band play and getting more Christmas lights. Jen and Nick left for Open-Mic (at the Townhouse) and Jake wandered home down the alley. Jenny and I stayed up to watch Adaptation and fell asleep halfway through, at around midnight, on my tiny sardine-case mattress which pales in comparison to hers. The best news of all is that Jenny and I are doing great. It feels nice to be open with her about the blog and the reaction has been nothing but positive. So there's that, and that is good. 

- Left to Fry