When Is Cultural Approbation Survival

I still get death threats. Death threats are stupid, and stupid people make them. Bring it on, bitch.I opened my eyes. A small group of people in scrubs were looking down at me and they were uniformly grim.

Obviously, this was a hospital.

Tubes. Beeps. Machines that wheezed.

I keep wondering if the HIV was from the rape.

Which one. Quid pro quo.

Rape is cyclical, but you don’t want to hear that. You want it to be a one time gig. That way you can say: get over it. Rape is so yesterday.

I will never get over it.

Boys get raped all the time, but it’s not something nice people talk about. But I write. And I write. And I write.

Around it. All the time. Repeatedly.

Writing is all I have ever had. I just don’t call it writing. I call it: Mainly a Waste of Time.

It’s only writing if you get paid for it. I know. I know. Vast hordes of people who call themselves writers will send me death threats. But that is how I see it. It’s only writing if it makes money. And I don’t mean five bucks from Medium. I mean money.

So, what would you be willing to do in order to survive.

“You’re going to die.” This prognosis from an older man wearing a surgical mask. Apparently, I was dangerous.

I have always been dangerous.

“And we need to know how we are going to get paid.”

I knew I would be caught. It was not about being caught. I knew it was wrong. It was about how much time did I have. Before the vultures would descend.

You would never do what I did. I know that. The reality is that most people have no idea what they would be willing to do if it was a matter of life and death.

Oh, sure. You would never break the rules.

Jesus fucking christ. I would break the rules and break them and burn them to the ground. To live. I have done all of this and more.

I never called myself a Native American although the media screamed I did.

I did not. You will find no claim to that in any of my books. Because I never said that.

I called myself a mongrel. I am a mongrel.

Back then, mongrels did not get health insurance because the health insurance companies considered mongrelism to be a previously existing condition. It’s terminal. In publishing, it’s just not done. Publishing closes for the summer. Always. Publishing needs cocktails in the Hamptons. Do you know of any other industry that closes for the summer. No. Because there aren’t any.

This breaking of the rules was all back in the dinosaur days. This was before insurance companies were compelled to cover people with previous conditions.

I had nothing. I was a writer. But I did not want to die. I wanted to fight for my life if I had to.

The cost of HIV meds are beyond your wildest fantasy.

I would use the word GREED for Big Pharma, but I will get death threats.

If I am the cultural criminal, WHAT THE FUCK IS BIG PHARMA. In America, it’s okay to extort everything a person has — including their lives — in order to create immeasurable wealth for a handful of old white men.

Always, always.

Who is the criminal. They are the criminals. They will squeeze the life from you with absolute impunity. America cannot take its culture back because isn’t smart enough to do it, and America is one big dog whistle for a moral punishment that defines everything. The hierarchal patriarchy of America will kill you and wash its moral hands of even your memory.

Sit back and let the minorities and the marginal fight it out. Down to the last idiot standing. Okay, you win. The rest of us are inferior. Yawn. What the fuck. Quid pro quo.

As long as we are willing to play LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT take a wild guess around who wins. The white rich win. How many times does it need to be spelled out. The white rich win. Time after time after time. Like any other institution, the white media loves to play this scenario to the motherfucking hilt. You need us, we are the media, and you need us to play judge, jury, and executioner. You need us to make sense for you in the topsy turvy world because you are the marginal, and you don’t have enough goddamn sense in your little heads to arrive at the correct conclusions.

Sit back and let the fights begin. Does this mean him. Yes. This means him.

The cost of HIV meds are beyond your wildest fantasy. They will cost you literally everything you could possibly make — every dollar, every penny — until the day you die. Personally, I went formally and steadfastly bankrupt. I went to Federal Court where I explained I cannot pay for this because it simply is not there. Going bankrupt only helped a little bit. After bankruptcy, Big Pharma was still there. Since then, health care costs have soared. Drug prices have make billionaires of fourteen people. And yet, they want more. More and more. And they will lie, cheat, steal, take everything you have, and shit in your mouth to get what they want which is more and more.

Yet I am the literary criminal.

The literary reservation is this place where writers are allowed a voice. As long as they use that voice to sing hymns to the choir. All our second selves. We allpretend to be things we are not. 

Today, I am tired, and I no longer give a fuck. I am no longer a writer.

Publishing will kill you, too. Be careful about what you wish for.

I didn’t know who these people were. Looking down at me in the hospital bed. I didn’t know where this hospital was. I had no memory of being admitted here. I had been in a medically induced coma for months.

It was another year. Fucking shrugs.

I could not speak. I could barely breathe. I could not close my mouth because my tongue had swollen to three times its normal size.

I knew this: I wasn’t going to need hugs. I wasn’t going to need emotional support. I wasn’t going to need a cheerleading team. I wanted to live. I was going to need money.

Antiretrovirals are a king’s ransom.

The words writer and money are not analogous.

Anyone who is in the writing biz understands what that means. It means hand-to-mouth. It means maybe, maybe, maybe enough money to buy food this week. It means no health insurance. I wrote most of my books on picnic tables in places like national parks where I was living in my truck.

Other Writers who call themselves journalists contend I was raised in a middle-class home. They are wrong. We were poor. I had a full-time job at twelve because my parents made it very clear they could not pay for things. Like clothes. Food was bare bones.

I was going to have to write something that would save my life. If I couldn’t prove some kind of income, I would be thrown into the street. That was quite evident.

I wrote until my balls fell off.

Quid pro quo.

It was not a stretch Being Him. Being Him meant I could buy that medication.

In time, I could show them — the great and powerful them the them of them the hospital bill collector police them — a letter from Esquire Magazine that indicated I was going to get paid for the writing I had so recently done.

There was no time to slack off. I was sick as a dog. I could barely see. But I pounded the fuck out of my Sears manual typewriter inside the camper shell of the truck I was living in. It was quiet even when the wind screamed in. I did not care. I was writing. I was mean to save myself. My dog, Navajo, was my companion. She never left my side. The dog I wrote about was the dog I lived with. The piece I had sent Esquire had to become a book. If I could not do that, I was going to die. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t stand on my own two feet. I had lost half my weight.

All I had left was a writing in the wings. It had to prove itself worthy. It had to make money so I could get my hands on some of that medication. There were no charitable programs for fuck ups like me who lived in trucks.

This was going to have to work. No one could know who I was. No one could know what disease I was struggling with. People who were suspected of having HIV were being murdered. You don’t remember that because you were not fucking there. You could appropriate my culture, but I don’t have one. Stigma is very, very real. I started doing sex work in the seventh grade. It’s not about morality. It’s about poverty. Stigma means you can’t get a job. You can’t find a place to live. You can’t make a living. Anyone who says that times have changed has not walked in my shoes.

The only people who were going to help me were the loosely-knit family I was surrounded by. Junkies, poets, artists, photographers, drug dealers, whores, dancers, actors, playwrights, and marginalized mad people who knew all about disease and death.

And money. None of us had any. Not a goddamn dime. The writing, too, would have to wear a mask. My world has always been filled with people who wore masks. It was no big thing. It only was. I have written other books no one knows I wrote. I would kinda like to keep it that way.

“You have to write,” I was told. “This time like your life depends on it.”

Because it did.

I had lived among the dead and dying now for so long, I knew exactly what the future had in store. It’s not about disease. It’s about identity.

The plague is over but the infections are not.

Another generation is now at-risk. These young people do not know what we know. Our shoes will fit, and they will walk in them. It is up to us to teach them how. This is not about publishing. It’s not really about me, either. I am simply attempting to draw you in. Into a world you absolutely do not know. What you know are stereotypes.

The kid at-risk is a big stereotype. I know him and all my second selves know him. We know his sweat. We know his swinging dick. We know his skid marks. This kid will test you even as all other men like him are hanged. Here comes a set of very strange and yellow eyes for which in all tongues would be called fools except for him. He’s living the life. That is not a testament for Instagram. It is a testament for survival.

I still get death threats. Death threats are stupid, and stupid people make them. Bring it on, bitch.

I was him once, and too much of me is him now.

I will show you who he really is. It is not unlike rape. Nice people don’t talk about at-risk kids because stigma still has us by the testicles. It isn’t done.

I closed my eyes and became someone else.

https://medium.com/@timotheebarrus/i-opened-my-eyes-80939561c66a