The Smash Street Boys and I wrote a book called JUST BEFORE THE CURE.

We put the thing on Medium. One person read it.

Sex, violence, and post-apocalyptic resistance were the project’s main themes. My original idea was that it could raise the awareness of the adolescent boys themselves as to how such a project is by necessity a creation by committee. I wanted them to have that instructive experience. Films, plays, art exhibits, and, yes, books, too, are projects by committee. Don’t kid yourself.

We didn’t do it for an audience. We did it to do it.

I would articulate something called balance to a group of adolescent boys who have no context to put a thing they might make into a process where balance is the first thing to go out the window.

I could attempt to point them in certain directions, but it didn’t mean anything.

People ask me: who does this shit, you or the boys.

Both. Get over it.

But people never get over anything.

We deleted the book.

Art does not duplicate life and life does not duplicate art. At their core, the boys are optimistic. Anyone who even looked at the project briefly could not get past the sex and violence.

Like there is no sex and violence in mainstream media commercialism, and Netflix sells Bibles.

But how could young boys know such things.

Maybe from the tricks who fuck them.

What do you think AT-RISK means.

The only thing I found amazing about the project was the fact that the boys think there will be a cure — someday. But then they weren’t around in the eighties, and they weren’t around in the nineties, and in 2005, some of them were infants in foster homes. How could they know. Anything.

By 2010, were they learning to read.

Maybe a little.

Maybe not. The moving around they did, bouncing from one place to another, one abuse to another abuse, doing sex work trick to trick, would be enough to undo even the most secure among us.

They argued a lot about what comes next. No one fucking knows what comes next. Extinction comes next.

I never thought I would live long enough to see it. But here we are.

Where does their optimism come from.

I have no fucking idea. I do not think it’s real. I think it stems from fear.

The fear that there really is nothing to live for.

They ended the book in Hiroshima.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. What is hopeful about Hiroshima beyond the fact that it is there.

Today, the Smash Street Boys don’t even remember making this project. Too many things can happen in one day.

The project failed. It made no impression. No imprint.

Failure is mainly what they do. It’s their ability to move on that keeps them alive as much as any antiretroviral does. Just Before the Cure forced them to work together. They have no history of working with anything or anyone. So far, it’s an intimacy they have not abandoned.

None of them focus on a cure like I do. I cannot expect this from them. It’s a success when they haven’t committed suicide by the end of the day.

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Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus Blog

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