How the ‘red eye’ to Harlem gave me an STD

(You can listen to this story in ModernPodcast) Seven hours after I boarded the red eye flight to New York, I was pretty sure I had an STD.  Everything hurt; everything felt ‘heavy.’  Imagine weights between your legs, only, the weights are you.

This must have been four or five years ago, when I was around twenty-three, back in the time when I felt it was important for a young man-of-the-world to travel as much as he could.  I had planned roughly a week in New York and had, as I recall, six or seven friends I was going to visit.  Of these friends, most were girls.  Of these girls, a few were especially friendly, and so, as a young man’s mind does wander, I had imagined it might be a week of exploring, and enjoying all things twenty-three.

I had been sleeping for most of the flight and, as the landing gear went down, I realized something was definitely up, you know, ‘down there.’  Quickly my face is stricken in agony and shame.  I’m an emotional car accident, freaking-out about how I might have contracted something, feeling the shame and utter dismay at what that would mean for my carefree, potentially promiscuous week.

The real trouble was, I had already had an STD.

I think I was maybe nineteen the first time my balls hurt for a pathological, non-kick-related, no empathy involved, reason.  It was Chlamydia.  Without going into too much of that particular story (and, as I suppose with any STD, there’s so much more story to it), I’ll highlight a few of the medical details:  For a male, at least in my case, Chlamydia means that your testicles become paper weights, and seem to weigh about as much as one might need for a good shoulder workout.  Besides that, there’s a discharge.

‘Discharge’ is the exact word to describe the mix of emotions, the shame, the terror, and the sheer discomfort of an STD.  I can’t fathom the rigid constitution women must possess to have developed the comfort they seem to display with this word.  “Discharge,’ as I see it, is about the grossest, least comforting word in the English language.  Take anything beautiful, flower, puppy, bit of Mozart, give it a discharge, and watch the peasants flee for their lives, or carry it away, en masse, torches ablaze.  Frankenstein’s monster probably had Chlamydia.

It is important to note, at this point, that I am also, at times, a mild hypochondriac.  It’s not that I generally think that I’m ill but, rather, that when something is wrong, I tend to skip over hiccup and go straight for cancer.  WebMD, the medical resource, and its internet ilk, have perpetuated this nervousness of mine, as they typically suggest that whatever troubles you report are actually either a minor headache or, potentially, something like Maumbergs Syndrome, which is so rare and terrible that you couldn’t possibly have it, unless, of course, you do, which they are professional enough to mention only your doctor, who can’t see you for another three days, is qualified to determine.  So sets the stage for my paranoia that morning on the plane.

Achy testicles of this magnitude mean one of two things, generally.  I had already done my research years ago with the prior Chlamydia, had practically become an expert in all things socially contracted, so I knew what I was facing, the testing, the diagnosis, and the inevitable doses of penicillin.  It was around six in the morning and, as I left the plane, momentarily distracted by the novelty of snow outside the airport, a decision was made.  I’d have to get this fixed, immediately.  There wasn’t even a possibility for consideration or choice or patience.  If I had to get to an ER and claim African tuberculosis of the genitals, I’d goddam do it.

This was just like me.  When problems come, I fix them, quickly.  I don’t do worry; I make phone calls.  On the train into Manhattan, I started dialing numbers, trying to see what there was in the way of New-York-doctors-who-treat-infected-genitals.  It was a Saturday morning, and I knew my options for getting checked out were slim.  My plan was to head towards the friend I was meant to stay with, a dear friend who went to Columbia University.  As a campus, I figured they would have a health clinic and, liberal school that I supposed it to be, they’d probably be fairly sympathetic to a student, even an outside student, who’d apparently been a bit irresponsible.

Sitting was painful, and I shifted in my seat on the train, crossing my legs this way and that, uncrossing them, feeling too exposed, too heavy, and finally recrossing them again.  Out of the Subway, on the surface, walking towards the school, my feet sank deeply into the snow, and I laughed at myself sardonically, imagining it was my testicles pulling me down.  It was a desperate chuckle.

The clinic at the school wouldn’t see me.  To this day, I’m still confused by the circumstances.  The clinic wasn’t open.  I know that because the nice lady at the front desk told me so.  Students seemed to be going in and out of it, and getting attention from a great many white-coated, smiling people, but she assured me it was closed.  One of the smiling, white-coated people gave me a sympathetic look, and I lowered my eyes, trying to explain my down-there problem from a probable range of fifteen feet.

The front desk lady called to me.  She typed at her outdated computer, careful to adjust the monitor so that I couldn’t quite see, and continued to explain things.  What was clear is that non-students weren’t welcome.  I tried to explain that I was a student, just not at Columbia.  This didn’t sway her.  Policies were stated and, besides, they weren’t open, a fact she repeated, still typing away.  As I left, I caught sight of a student eyeing a ‘closed’ sign.  The lady at the front desk waved her in, no doubt to explain the sign’s meaning.

Walking back out into the campus, dismayed but not beaten, I caught my reflection in the window of a closed office.  It was an ironic vision.  I was wearing my wool, three-quarter length Italian walking coat, the same I’d worn in Paris and London a couple of years earlier.  My jeans, new, expensive, and scandalously tight, were a recent addition I was proud of because I had never worn any that fit so well.  My hair was cut close, trimmed, I suppose, in a sort of English man-about-town fashion that accented my sharp hairline.  I looked good, except for the expression on my face, which was a touch more depressed than a model, in the same pose, would have been allowed.  Vanity, and the suspicion of an STD, gives one an ugly expression not easily settled upon in reflection, and so I trudged back out into the morning chill, relieved that there were no more shiny surfaces along the avenue.

There had to be an open clinic.  I dialed information, got some numbers, and made some calls.  Nothing.  Situations like this are unbelievable to me.  My mother has always criticized me for my expectation of getting what I want, immediately.  I always reminded her that, as an only child, it was her fault.  She should have had another child, or doted on me less.  She reminds me that that’s just what an only child would say.

I remember making appointments with doctors when I was still a teenager.  She would be in the same room, hardly pretending not to pay attention.  She would always chide me for requesting anything they had available ‘today.’  “People don’t make appointments for today,” she would say with a definite, motherly tone in her voice, as though it was just not the way things are done.  “It’s just not the way things are done.”  And it wasn’t that she was wrong, but that I resented the system.  Why not, I always thought.  I have a problem today, why shouldn’t there be someone to fix it today.

So I stood in the snow, in all respects and mood a teenager still, cursing the adult world for the absurdity of no one being available to examine my genitals, trying hard to understand why it just wasn’t the way things are done.

An hour later, after walking, and walking, a break.  Sort of.  After finally getting someone on the phone from some place, they suggested I go to this men’s clinic that was set up to run six days a week.  It was in Harlem.  Let me say that again for all the indoor-cat, aren’t-planes-a-scream, white ears out there. Harlem.  This was new territory for me.

Limited as my experience was, I had no better reference than, maybe, Eddie Murphy’s: Coming to America (supposedly took place in Queens, but seemed to befit my naive image of what was to come.)  Harlem is almost the exact opposite of where I grew up.  I’ve never kidded myself about my privileged, white, relatively wealthy upbringing.  Newport Beach, California is a town where the homeless are arrested for being homeless, where hard-work and poverty are more often the punch lines of a distasteful joke then conditions to be acknowledged thoughtfully.  I was mature enough to recognize this about myself, but that gave me little comfort in having to face an environment that seemed altogether foreign.

An enclosed, neon lit room, filled with black men, mostly older, many with faces that foretold a hard life, was the setting for my wait.  When I had entered the clinic an older gentleman with a cane and red ball-cap smiled in my direction.  I had sat down opposite him, and smiled back, only to realize he was looking at the television above the entrance which was running reruns of Full House.  I sat there, taking it in, and tried, so disgracefully, to not think of the word ‘cracker.’  I felt like I was invading, like I didn’t belong, like I was mocking everyone there.  I was wearing a four hundred dollar coat, had just flown in for a holiday, was distinctly white, and, though I’m sure it was entirely in my ignorant, paranoid little head, had clearly grown up in a family that owned no fewer than two boats.  I felt self-conscious in a way that made me really think about what it must be like to be the one (some color guy) in a place of all (some other color people).  ‘Embarrassed’ is the word.

The wait staff there were tired, frustrated, and ranked in helpfulness somewhere between the DMV and your average San Francisco Chinese restaurant.  It was in speaking with them that I realized I would have to take an AIDS test.  AIDS was evidently on a lot of people’s minds.  I know this because, as it was explained to me, this was, first and foremost, an AIDS clinic.  AIDS was sweeping through Harlem in striking contrast to many other areas of the country where it was on the downturn.  I read this in a notice on the wall.  Indeed, the walls were plastered with signs and posters warning about protection, getting tested,  and being a man.  Every wall was a warning about some Harlem plight, all directed towards the men in the clinic.  There was one sign that said a real man doesn’t beat his woman.  The model featured in the ad gave an expression that left an observer wondering if he had learned this lesson or had just finished a fresh beating.  Other posters showed happy fathers with happy children, fathers that, according to the headline, stuck around.  Another, more stringent poster, read “Real men don’t rape.”  Everywhere you looked were messages of responsibility, and in every face (I think mine included), were downtrodden eyes, their gazes hovering uselessly in their air, dismally, purposefully unfocused.

Despite all my protests, they wouldn’t just give me the test for Chlamydia.  I had to have an interview first.  Part of the clinics mission, and how it maintained its funding, was to take a census of everyone who came in.  They wanted to track the plagues of Harlem, to account for their demographics and their corollaries.  They wanted to know who I was and where I lived.  Besides my age and occupation, they had more personal questions.  The last time I was with a woman, yesterday.  The last time I was with a man, never.  They ask this second question twice, and I take it as a standard interviewer’s precaution and nothing to do with the tightness of my pants.

The interviewer, who I now saw seemed just as tired as the staff I had already seen, looked up, I suppose, to see if I had any hesitation about this last question being asked a second time.  Apparently, some men do.  How many partners had I had in the last month?  Three, no, four, well, okay, four.  Did I use a condom? Yes.  Again, a look up from her.  I knew what she was asking.  Did I use one every time?  But she didn’t state it that way.  I’d like to think it was the rising pain in my groin that made me revert to such passive aggressive behavior but the truth is I hate the imprecision of questions like these and chose petty intellectualism over direct, considerate, interaction.  Did I use a condom every time?  (Got me!)  No.

I had already gone through this in my head all that morning.  Who the hell gave me an STD?  There was probably one, maybe two possibilities, timing wise.  I knew from experience that it would really have to have been someone within the last week.  Neither girl was a serious relationship, but I knew them well enough to suppose that they weren’t sleeping around too much, with too many high risk partners.  I think I recalled using a condom almost every time.  It really didn’t seem probable that they had given anything.

I still wonder what my face must have looked like as I sat there, pretending to listen seriously to her questions, trying to argue my way out of an STD.  Despite all the asinine logic I could muster, the evidence was the inflammation in my jeans.

The interviewer, meanwhile, had carried on with the questions.  I was asked to wait for a few more minutes once she was finished, for the counselor that would be right in.  Counselor? Part of the deal, along with the census, was speaking with a counselor, before I took any tests.  The truth of the situation finally became real for me.  I was in an AIDS clinic.  They weren’t concerned for my testicles; their job was to help slow or, at least, understand, the epidemic of AIDS in Harlem.  I wasn’t from Harlem, but I had gone there to get tested for an STD, and so I would have to go through the process, same as everyone else.

I tried to explain to the counselor that I understood a lot of things about the disease, that I had done my homework, how it was contracted, which cells it affected in the body, in short, that I didn’t have AIDS in virtue of my education.  At one point I found myself trying to work Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome into an explanation, as though with a wink, I could show her how smart and in-the-know I was about AIDS.  People who know the acronym are definitely not the people who contract the disease, I said with a gesture.  “How do you know?”  She asked plainly, trading my charm for skepticism.  And, of course, she was right, in that way that it’s generally really hard to ever be wrong about asserting the unknown.

“I know, I know.  I don’t know for certain.  But I think it’s highly unlikely, and I’m fairly comfortable with that.”  I was still shifting uncomfortably from the pain in my groin, however, looking anything but comfortable, and tried to subdue it by speaking louder, at least while I was making an argument of things.

The counselor was a heavyset women, probably mid forties, and had large, inelegant hands that she used dramatically as she explained to me what I’m sure she’d had to explain a dozen times already that day.  “The point is, sir, that you don’t know.  It says here you haven’t been tested for AIDS in three years.”

“One, actually now that I think of it, I did get everything checked out a year ago, you know, just to be on the safe side.”

“Mm Hmm…” she scribbled away a few notes.

It dawned on me how useless it was to argue the probabilities of AIDS with an AIDS worker who has to deal with it every day, so I dropped my case.  “Well, look, I know it’s important, so I’m happy to get tested.”

“Good, thank you.  Now, would you please give me the names and the telephone numbers of your partners for the last year.”

Huh…My face isn’t the type to react purely with eyebrows but as I sat there, stunned, I think that’s about all I could manage.  “I’m sorry, you want the names-“

“-and telephone numbers,” she reminded me.

“…and telephone numbers, of all the girls I’ve slept with in the last year.  I mean, that’s, well, I mean, what for?”  I leaned back, giving myself some room.  She leaned closer and brought one of her big hands up to introduce her next point.

“Sir, if you test positive for AIDS, the people that you’ve been in contact with need to be notified.”  She folded her hands on the desk in front of her and held her gaze.  Her eyes were the most tired of them all.  I couldn’t imagine the difficulty of her job, or how hardened it might have made her.

“Uh, yes.  Yes of course,” I suddenly felt very nervous about the whole situation.  I understood the principle of what she was saying but it went entirely against my ethics of discretion and, well, I was not going to give her a goddamn black-book of my personal life.  “Look, if it’s all the same, I’d really rather not.  I mean, yes, of course, god forbid I test positive.  But if I did, I’d really think it best if I contact them, myself, in person.  Besides, I’m just in here for this possible Chlamydia thing, not really for AIDS, and I really don’t think I have it.”  I was right back where I started.

“Sir, I understand that, but as I’ve said, you cannot be sure until you’re tested.  In my experience it’s really best if a counselor discusses the matter with your partners.”

What matter?  There’s no matter, I thought.  My balls hurt, fine.  Balls are not a matter.  They are a subject, at best an issue.  This ball thing, I’m not proud of it; I know how damning it is to my assertion that I am an otherwise responsible, sexually active male, but hell, lady, fuck’s sake. In protest, my testicles flare, and I bounce upright, hoping the maneuver looks natural.

“I’d just really rather not, thanks.  I mean really, thanks.”  I wanted to tell her that I thought what they were doing was great, that it gave me hope for people and all, and how much I appreciated the effort they were all giving, but it didn’t seem any use.  All my hopes for her and her good cause were inextricably mixed in with my own insecurities and, by this time, I just wanted to be done with it.

They drew some blood for the AIDS test and, finally, I got to pee in a cup to see if I had Chlamydia.  You’ve never seen anyone so relieved to get tested for an STD.  The results, they said, would be back in a couple of days, probably Monday or Tuesday.  After that they would phone me with the results and, if necessary, I would have to come back for an AIDS consultation.

The fiasco of getting tested over, I dragged myself out to the street and hailed a cab.  I learned that no matter how certain you are that you haven’t got AIDS, it is still emotionally draining to seriously discuss the possibility of having it.  When I got to my friend’s flat I changed my clothes immediately and, while having a shower, shouted some made-up story about having a last minute appointment with someone, or maybe a doctor, for something entirely unrelated to an STD.

Two days later, and much better rested, my testicles didn’t hurt so badly.  I was still nervous as hell, a condition I now attribute to how potent my hypochondria can be, because they still didn’t feel quite right, either.  When the phone call finally came, it was quick, professional, and without charm or absolution: Negative.  I didn’t have AIDS.  “Yes, well, that’s great news,” and was surprised to find I actually felt a little relieved.  “But what about the Chlamydia?” I asked, stepping out into the street so as not to draw the attention of my friend.  “That’s really what I was being tested for.”

“Oh, yes,” the woman on the other end said, pausing to check the records.  “Negative for Chlamydia.  All results were negative.  You’re fine.  Have a nice day.”

I hung up the phone, amazed, confused, and felt suspicious of my relief.  It was relief I was feeling, but a disconcerting sense of mystery too.  I couldn’t have dreamt the whole sensation.  So what was it?

The riddle of my mysterious, sudden, and altogether false STD, was finally solved at the end of the trip, as I flew home, this time departing at a more reasonable hour, when I was happy to stay awake and contemplate what all  had happened.  After a few hours of sitting there, bound for San Francisco, still well dressed, I might add, a now familiar feeling came over me, came over my testicles really, and it was then that I realized it.  It was the jeans.

It had been the goddam outfit.  I knew then, because the same, swollen feeling started up again on my flight home.  This time, I had caught it in the act.  As I mentioned, the jeans had been brand new.  The first plane ride out to New York was my first time wearing them, a way of setting the tone for the trip.  They were a size smaller than I normally wore, following the fashion of the time and, it turns out, wearing these snug, ball squeezing, unstretched testicle clamps for a six hour plane ride, while not moving as you sleep the whole way, is exactly the sort of set up that leads to a painful, enduring inflammation of the testicles.  I understood then what had happened at the beginning of the trip.  I had awoken that morning at the very peak of my testicle’s torture and, having had, at that point, more experience and understanding of STDs than of the potential complications of tight jeans, made my own, educated, and wholly false assumptions.

My fancy jeans led me to reflect on my sexual habits, my relationships, my privilege, my responsibility as a man, and my place in a society.  The contracted disease, the pained expression, wasn’t in the body.  It was in the vanity.

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