Excerpted from memoirs

by Malcom Gregory Scott

“Scott? Petty Officer Scott. Would you like to follow me now, Scott?” The corpsman stood at the door of the exam room. While waiting, I had wondered why he had left me alone there after taking my vitals, instead of returning me to the waiting room until the doctor was ready, the usual procedure. Now, even more unusually, he led me to an exterior door, pointing down a covered sidewalk to a one-story annex. 

Lieutenant Commander Leiby’s tidy, crowded office smelled of surgical hand soap and Florida sunshine, which streamed through the blinds covering the large window at his back. He was handsome, older than the CO’s at Orlando’s training commands, and I saw no wedding ring, although arguably a doctor would have many reasons not to wear one in clinic. 

He waved me to sit down before I could come to attention and report as we’d been taught to do when entering a superior officer’s space, and introduced himself as Dr. Leiby, just as a civilian doctor might. He sat back onto the corner of his desk, and picked up a chart he did not open.

He looked right at me, and our eyes met for a moment before some profound shame overtook me. I quickly lowered my eyes. 

I loved men like him, these Navy men, better than I even knew them. My brief tours at less than two training commands had perhaps done little more than to loan flesh and bones and name tags to the idealized sailors of my imagination who had beckoned me to join them, to flee the perils of plague and find refuge in the fleet, and  if I could have known them better, it wasn’t for lack of trying, but for lack of time. And I tried to know them because I loved these men, these intrepid men, my peers and superiors alike, for their ready courage in the face of the terrifying idea that real meaning derives from sacrificing oneself to something outside oneself, something greater than oneself. After years of trying to fit in, and failing, the Navy gave me no choice but to belong, to sacrifice myself as ordered, and I loved the other men who had surrendered to the same choicelessness, surrendered like so many consensual bottoms, bottoms for Uncle Sam, and I couldn’t help but love them all.

Even through the ordeal of my discharge, I was saddened by the prospect of a life away from them, and warmed by their occasional messages of support, whether subtle or outright.

No break-up had ever felt worse. Even as I sat in Dr. Leiby’s office two months after the die was cast, I still stung with rejection.

“Petty Officer Scott.” the doctor’s words were firm, and direct, and his voice was so gentle, together creating the effect of a stainless steel instrument he had warmed in his bare hand lest his patient flinch from cold. “I have something very important to tell you, son.” He stood up, placing the chart right back in its original place. 

Did I know? I think I must have already known. How I’ve played the moment over and over in my head, trying to remember how I could not have already known, how this moment in which everything changed could even be a moment if I already knew, if I had already made peace with the day’s dread, and how could I not have already known, and had I not already somehow made my peace?

But no, I hadn’t really known, and I hadn’t made my peace, however impossible it may now seem as I strain to remember that… moment. Because it was a moment. One second I was, employment challenges aside, just a normal fag, with a normal fag’s life, and the next second I wasn’t, and in that moment everything changed for me.

 “You have been diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV,”  he paused before he said it, “the virus that causes AIDS”

I looked up at him again and once more our eyes met and this time the shame was his.

“Do you know what AIDS is?”  I nodded.

“So you know there are no effective therapies.” He wasn’t asking, but I nodded nonetheless.

“I see you’re awaiting discharge.” Again I nodded to the non-question, and this time, he nodded along. He lowered his voice again, gentler even than before, but the words were anything but.

“I advise that once your discharge comes through, you go directly home and get your affairs in order, sailor. We’re still learning how this thing progresses, but it will probably make you very sick very soon, and possibly kill you within the year. There’s really no time to waste. Go home. As soon as you can. Spend some time with your family.”

Advice was one thing. Orders were another. Before I could be processed for discharge, the Navy required I travel by medical evac flight to Naval Hospital Portsmouth, Virginia, where my immune system and overall health could be properly assessed and I could be “educated” about living with AIDS. I would leave the next day. That night, I stood in the passageway of the TPD barracks and used the payphone to call my mother and tell her that one of her worst fears had come to pass. 

The next morning’s medical evacuation flight, for which my uniform was adorned with a stiff manilla tag announcing “HIV Disease” in large handwritten letters, confirmed my worst fears, presaging as it did the stigma and shame promised by whatever remained of my future. As I boarded the no-nonsense Vietnam-era troop transport plane, the flight officer shoved a caddy of cleaning supplies into my hand, then briefed me on “blood and bodily fluid precautions,“ which entailed disinfecting the head after I used it. He spat under his breath, “Most faggots figure it’s easier to hold it.”

Naval Hospital Portsmouth maintained two AIDS wards, one for the dying, and another for the living. Perhaps it was the mere knowledge of the former that enlivened those of us who were assigned to the latter; for whatever reasons, the large open-bay ward where we were poked and prodded and bled and instructed for an entire week boasted an incongruously party-like atmosphere. Our primary duty seemed to be surrendering vials and vials of our blood every morning, followed perhaps by a class on the immune system, or nutrition, or Louise Hayes style visualization and meditation. After that we were free to go to the gym, hit the pool, or just nap. After their stay on the HIV ward, most of my ward mates would be returned to full duty, although probably reassigned to shore billets, so, for them, the week of light duty must have felt like liberty. Some of them were surprisingly open about being gay, others insisted they must have contracted HIV from a prostitute, still others told stories of being harassed aboard their ships, one had nearly been thrown overboard after scuttlebutt of his diagnosis spread through the crew. On Saturday night, a half dozen of us shared a taxi van into Norfolk, for a tour of the gay bars there, already familiar to me from summers past, when my family vacationed at Buckroe Beach in nearby Hampton.

The next week, the day before my scheduled return to Orlando, my mom drove down to Portsmouth with my younger brother. The three of us shared a bench atop the seawall on the historic hospital grounds, staring out across the Chesapeake Bay, and I explained what I had learned about AIDS during my week on the HIV ward, and how, for now, I would talk about living with AIDS, and not dying of AIDS, but should the time come to face dying, I would do so unflinchingly. It was not a conversation utterly without hope. “I don’t know how yet, but it’s going to be okay,” my mother insisted. “I just know it. They’re going to figure something out, Greg. A cure. Something.” But it was a thin hope, and, like my shallow promises to be brave, no less meaningless than the continuous syncopated lapping of the bay’s chop against the wall below: just the things people always say at times like this, sentiments as necessary as our very heartbeats, and surely no less fragile.

Mechanical problems diverted my return flight to Orlando, taking me instead to Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, where I was admitted to the base hospital and accommodated in a private room marked by a large biohazard symbol and a sign enjoining all who enter to first don protective clothing. From behind the clear plastic face shields of their biohazard suits, the nurses treated me as if I were dying, although my chart plainly read “asymptomatic”. To lay in that hospital bed, sucking on ice chips while feeling perfectly well, was to lay along the extreme edge of a precipice. How easily I might just roll a bit to my left, and over the cliff, free-falling into the identity of the “patient”, hard-landing into the morbid paradigm wherein disease altogether defines me, takes me. So easy! The gravity of it all was relentless. The pull of it was almost irresistible. Laying in that hospital bed, surrounded by monitors and call buttons and high-fauceted sinks stocked with anti-bacterial hand scrub, all the indicia of sickness, I first foresaw the struggle ahead of me, and it was to be, first and foremost, a struggle of the mind.

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