This is a story about the unique evils of the 80's.
Leading up to my terror of the plague, I had given almost no thought to disease or viruses and I thought “Pandemic” was a shop at the mall. I was in the Fifth Grade, which meant I had other things to worry about. For instance, one of my most pressing concerns was the over abundance of Satanic cults in my suburban neighborhood.
From what I had come to understand, it was a foregone conclusion that a fair number of the people that pushed shopping carts past my Mother and I in the Schnucks Supermarket, probably the entire management staff at the Chi Chi’s, and a good third of teachers and policemen were secret Devil worshipers who had altars to their Dark Lord in the basement of their ranch houses. Apparently, while my mother was warming up left over spaghetti, at least a few of my fellow classmates were dining on the freshly carved and stewed meat of their infant siblings. One assumes you don’t get too attached when your little brother is conceived as a blood offering during a coven orgy. Really, don’t play with your food.
No one, not even Donahue, seemed to know exactly how to identify who was in league with demonic forces. But I will say this: if Mommy is staying at home and having sacrificial babies like the Devil’s own convection oven and serving them up hot and fresh, not warmed over, then we are clearly talking single income family and Daddy has done well. If you want a guide as to which families are in a cult, it’s the kid whose Mom drives him to school and he arrives wearing brand new parachute pants not more than a month after Thriller comes out. So, two reasons to hate that kid.
This is Satan's minion.
Of course, it was no joke at the time. I walked to school everyday. Suburban sprawl had not yet turned the eastern half of Missouri into the elaborate Olive Garden parking lot it was destined to become. At this point the subdivisions were separated by bands of darkly wooded areas. It was those lonely stretches of road where the black van was going to pull up and a bank officer who owed eternal allegiance to Lucifer was going to grab me and haul me off to a cage in the corner of his rumpus room next to a never used exercise bike.
That was what they were telling me at Church, anyway. Shortly after the Reagan Revolution my family had joined The Silent Majority who firmly believed that morning in America was the first day of the End Times. If you didn’t believe it, clearly you hadn’t read Michelle Remembers. That book laid it all out. Entire towns had turned into Satan worshipping murder clubs that raped their youngest citizens as a warm up to slaughtering them. And if it had been an isolated incident, one town going over to the dark side, in Canada of all heathen places that would be one thing. But reports were coming from all over our own country. From North Carolina to Oregon people were going into psychiatrists’ offices with a little vague anxiety and, after staring at a watch for a few minutes, they were coming out survivors of all kinds of depravations. This had been going on for decades and now people from every walk of life were remembering that they had been the victims. Their minds had blocked out the trauma. Who even knew it could do that? You could be sodomized by anyone anytime and you might now know it for years, if at all! This might have already happened!
The Devil had done a better job setting up franchises than Ray Kroc. The eighties were just when it was reaching a crescendo. Now we were getting reports that there was a preschool in California that had been systematically molesting children at a rate of hundreds. If that wasn’t a sign that we were on the road to the Apocalypse, what more did you need?
Of course, it wasn’t clear yet if the McMartin Pre-School was actually a ring of Devil worshipers. But that was just the thing. There weren’t just the outright Satanists you had to worry about. There were plenty of just run of the mill perverts out there who liked to touch kids. The nightly news was full of stories of child molesters, and on Sunday morning Jerry Falwell would explain how they were servants of the anti-Christ, whether they meant to be or not.
It was all in the book! I hadn’t read the book. But someone in my family had. Or a friend of the family. Or one of my sister’s classmates.
It didn’t matter because it was also in another book. One called the Holy Bible. I hadn’t read the Bible either. But Brother Farmer, minister at the Church Of God Of Prophecy where Mom and Amy and I went, he certainly had and he agreed with Jerry Falwell. And for Brother Farmer to agree with a Baptist meant the end times had definitely arrived.
I didn’t want to live through the Apocalypse. There was the Rapture, but I couldn’t figure out when that was supposed to happen. And anyway, it didn’t seem like you got out of the entire Armageddon but just part of it. And if Occult child rapists were running pre-schools and that was one of the signs that we were in the last days and no one had been raised up to Heaven yet… OK, but when do you get out? Is it before or after the seven headed serpent lays waste to Western civilization as we have been assured will literally happen, possibly as early as Thursday?
Then there was the Heaven we were supposed to be trying to get into – Brother Farmer would have you remember that it is “trying” and don’t even think you have sealed that deal, sinner – the way they described it did not sound good. They said it was good, but they also said it was constant praying and singing. It did not sound good to me and that alone probably meant that I wouldn’t get taken up to Heaven. My Mom would. The last I would see of her would be the disappointed look on her face as she rose into the sky. Then the Anti-Christ’s Army of 200 million would flay the skin from my bones and feed me to locusts, but honestly, after you have gotten “the look” from my Mother, what more can they really do to you?
I was becoming a nervous child.
Fifth Grade was not going well. I was more or less sleeping through it. Mainly, because I had stopped sleeping at night. I was having some trouble relaxing. Until I sat down at my desk and the teacher started to talk about math. Then I was off to the first quality rest I had gotten since the previous day at math time. Long division was like a lullaby. Something about my total disinterest in what the teacher was talking about, but still having someone else’s voice in my head besides Tom Brokaw’s or Brother Farmer’s, just threw my brain into neutral and I was finally able to relax. I was not, however, able to stay awake or do any kind of long division.
Tragically, I always seemed to wake up for the social studies portion of the curriculum. This inevitably meant discussion of the Soviet Union. There were other countries in the world, but not really. There was the Soviet Union and the US of A and all of the little nations on our side that required our protection and all of the little nations the Communist forces of Atheism and mind control had enslaved to be on their side. Between the only two real countries in the world there were enough Nuclear Missiles to completely wipe out all life on the planet five times over. The fact that the Russians had more, they could do three of those global annihilations to our meager two, seemed in some way important and frightening rather than just redundant.
You know, it had been a hard day already. It was a long walk to school for a fat kid on no sleep. Not to mention that I had spent that time cataloguing the various ways I might be sexually assaulted and tortured as a pre cursor to the end of the world. Now this.
It wasn’t like I had been over looking imminent Nuclear war. It usually just hadn’t occurred to me yet that day. But I was definitely aware of the issue. The Day After had premiered the previous year and done a number on the entire nation, not least of all me and Ronald Reagan. Of course, it would be a decade or two before I knew that the President was also lying awake thinking about Jason Robards watching his family get vaporized with the rest of Kansas City. And I am not sure that knowing the leader of the free world was as freaked out as I was would have helped.
After the broadcast, the chatter at school had been about what would happen if there was a war. There had been all these scenes with people being incinerated so fast that all that was left was their shadow burned into a wall. Others lived to have their flesh fall off in sheets. Somebody’s Dad worked at MacDonald Douglass and he had said that St. Louis would be a major target because their headquarters was there. There was kind of a twisted pride in that. We lived in a place that was so important we would all have to be destroyed instantly.
This was definitely going to happen.
I went home after school, still exhausted and jittery. I laid down on the couch which sat in front of a big picture window. Looking out that window I could see the sky, which was blue and clear. Then a plane flew past and I had a small panic attack because I knew it was a Russian bomber and this was the end.
If the Russians destroyed us before God got to, would that mean there was no God or that he was just full of crap?
Definitely not making the Rapture now that I let myself have that thought.
My anxiety was becoming exhausting. I was up all night, lying in the dark, layering disaster upon apocalypse upon cataclysm. My body had gotten used to vibrating like a tuning fork from the internal tension. My eyes had burned a hole through the ceiling. Staring. Grinding my jaw. Waiting for the heavenly trumpets that announce Armageddon or the air raid sirens that told you the nuclear disaster was here.
Sometimes I couldn’t take it anymore and I would wake my Mom out of a dead sleep.
“What if the Russians drop a bomb?”
“What if I haven’t been good enough to get into heaven?”
“What will happen if you die in the Nuclear war and I don’t?”
I can’t imagine anyone would have kids if they knew it would turn into the world’s most existential final exam.
Who names a kid Carole Anne, anyway?
My mother’s solution was to give me the blandest, most neutral reading material she could find. Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Signposts. When I had worked through the entire back catalogue, which didn’t take long given that I was pulling all nighters, she started buying me paper back nature stories, Jack London, Tom Brown’s Tracker series. At the best of times, these would distract me enough to allow for a couple hours of sleep before it was time for school. But it was hit or miss, and more often than not I was arriving at the eight o’clock bell with purple bags under my red eyes and my hands shaking like I was a sales rep for an 8 track company two weeks after the Walkman hit the market.
In the end, the books, school, even TV for God’s sake, became a temporary diversion. But the end of the world was always hovering there. Waiting.
Then AIDS came.
When AIDS first popped up they thought it only affected gay men. I was young enough to be unclear on the details of the gay lifestyle, but I knew that it involved men having sex with men and I was pretty sure no one in Missouri was doing that. As such, there was this tone in the air that the queers in some way had this coming for being so uppity and flaunting their perversions. Everyone knew this kind of car wreck must have been on the way and all any of us normal citizens could do was rubberneck from a safe distance.
Then things got complicated. Drug addicts started getting it. Well, just lump them in with the gays and… what? A straight woman came down with? Then they started to understand, scientists started to figure it out. They were calling it the gay cancer because clearly you got it from having gay sex. Then they figured out that it wasn’t the sex, it was the exchange of bodily fluids. And the world came to a sudden stop. Which bodily fluids? How much had did you have to exchange? Palm sweat is a bodily fluid. Can you get it from shaking hands? What about kissing someone? Screw that, what about a sneeze? Then a transfusion patient got it – a kid my age, in fact. They found contaminated blood in blood banks. This was around the same time that people with the disease began to appear in places that were not New York or California. It quickly became clear that anyone could have AIDS.
Anyone who was exposed to other people’s bodily fluids.
Just so happens, there were vials and vials of strangers’ bodily fluids on our dining room table. They were scattered in piles. There was probably some kind of order. If I had to guess, I would say it was by date, the various urine and blood specimens gathered together according to when they were ejected or extracted, warm and viscous and with that brown coppery scent that your insides have. On the dining room table. By the hutch where my Mom’s wedding china looked on and gathered dust. True, this was an area some families might reserve for special occasions. This is where my family kept its quarts of foreign blood and piss.
The urine came in opaque plastic screw top containers. All you could really make out was varying shades of yellow to brown, but even across the room, just looking at where the pee containers were lined up like passengers at an airline counter, you could sense that cloying warmth that piss gives off.
Our house had an elevator!
The blood came in glass vials. The black on red liquid was very clearly seen through the glass, nothing obscured. You could really study the way blood clings to a surface, kind of spreading in fractal branches cohered to the smoothly curved interior. It stretched out from the inky depths of the coagulated lagoon below, towards the rubber stopper that kept it all trapped in there. These vials were rounded on the bottom. If the pee waited in line, the blood lay prone like hostages on the third day of a siege at some third world airport during a doomed coup d’etat.
My sister really enjoyed Prom!
It was certain that each of these containers teamed with viruses and diseases that, if freed, would wipe out not only my family, but possibly the entire sub-division. There would be sweats and fevers as a short lived pre-cursor to the black boils and flesh rot that would quickly set in. Death would come only after you had suffered in agony, as much from the Doctor’s desperate probing and ad hock solutions, as from the ravages of the mysterious plague’s advance on all of your body’s vital functions. Finally, you would just be a corpse lying in an undammed pool of your own corrupted effluvia. Then the entire medical staff that had tried in vain to save you would be exposed and summarily wiped out as well.
I was absolutely certain that this was how the end would come. I can’t tell you what a relief that was.
I don't know what Blood Car means!
That is why our dining room was covered entirely in other people’s bodily fluids. Which according to the nightly news were full of a virus that we were going to get. It was only a matter of time. When we did, our neighbors would shun us, if not try to burn us out. That had started happening in communities around the country that didn’t want “the fag disease” in their town. Of course, by that time you would probably be blind and delirious from the cancers eating away at your brain so you wouldn’t know that your best friends had turned against you. This was going to happen.
Now I even slept through social studies, because sleeping even the two hours a night I sometimes got, that was a dream of a bygone era. And at school the teachers weren’t allowed to talk about AIDS. Farting phobias and the impending Soviet invasion sure, but they weren’t touching the Gay Plague. If they weren’t going to feed my panic attacks then it was time to catch a nap. Because, honestly, fuck the Soviets. The Soviets weren’t in my house. When the Russians bivouacked on the dining room table, fine, but until then I was going to be spending my precious final minutes on this earth focused on the immediate danger.
In a way, for me, this was a vast improvement over God, Communists, and the Devil worshipers, all of which remained vague and distant threats whose world ending powers were a little abstract. AIDS was right over there, in those vials, and it would kill everyone in the world, one vital organ at a time. This was kind of a relief. At least in the fact, that it gave my anxiety a white-hot focus.
My Mom did not experience this sense of relief. I proceeded to present her with a whole new set of questions at three in the morning. She took this with resignation layered over desperation. She seemed uncertain how it had come to this, how I had come to this. I had been so quiet and calm as a baby. Somewhere between taste testing my Legos and wanting to be a Jedi, I had taken a wrong turn and become a paranoid neurotic. Makes you wonder what they put in Legos.
But, she had made me and now she was stuck with my nightly dissertations on the number of ways we were all going to die. And really, the amount of information, and misinformation, in relation to the end of the world that I was keeping track of and organizing into a pretty convincing set of reasons to take your own life rather than suffer with the rest of humanity… If you could just point that capacity in the direction of long division, I could actually pass the Fifth Grade.
My Mom tried everything to reassure me that she would not get AIDS from performing insurance exams. I would not get AIDS from the blood and urine on the dining room table. Neither would Amy or the dog. We both knew enough to skip whether my Stepfather was in danger, it was best to keep this friendly. She explained to me all the precautions and guidelines that had been issued and how she observed all of them and so she was in no danger. She never had direct contact with anyone’s blood, she wore rubber gloves all the time, and the needles she used to draw the blood were immediately capped with a plastic sheath so she wouldn’t stick herself should one be contaminated. She was a medical professional, she knew how to handle this kind of material, and she always followed all the rules and she was always very careful.
Then one day she said, “Ow!”
I turned around. My mother was sitting at the dining room table with an exposed needle in one hand and drop of blood beading up on the index finger of the other. She stared at the finger for a long time. Then she looked up at me. Of all the people who might be in the room when she made this mistake, it had to be the little Jim Jones of Hawthorne Elementary.My mother said she would administer a test, “just to be safe,” and I would be the first to know the results.
Officially, the least of my worries.
I knew the results. As I faced my Mother’s certain death all my anxiety tripled. I tacked nausea and diarrhea onto the insomnia and jitters. I didn’t even sleep at school now. Not even during math. I still was not actually learning anything, but I was wide awake. I walked through my days with my eyes open, but all I saw in front of me was the skeletal, soar infested corpse my Mom was going to become before she died in agony and left us to my Stepfather’s care. When I was at home, I would sometimes just stop, kneel down, and hyperventilate. Sometimes that came with panicked sobs.
Then after a couple of weeks of this, my Mom came in and told me that she had given herself an AIDS test and she wasn’t sick and everything was fine.
And that was it. There was this sudden winding down. My adrenal gland downgraded from DefCon 4 and my anxiety attacks came to an end. Not just over AIDS, but also over the Apocalypse, and the Satanists, and Nuclear War. I don’t know if that was the end of it entirely, if it burned itself out, or if there was a more gradual period where it drifted away and I started getting full nights’ sleep again. I honestly can’t remember what happened after that mind searing period of terror. It was as if the worst had happened and we had come through in tact so it just seemed to stop being important, no longer central to every single day.
What I do know now, is that my mother was lying to me. There was no way, especially in the mid-eighties, to get any kind of conclusive AIDS test back two weeks after getting stuck with a needle. I also know, that AIDS was still a medical mystery at that time, even to the professionals. It was still a ways off before it was known exactly how much danger doctor’s and nurses were exposed to and whether or not the precautions they had cobbled together on the fly were doing anything to mitigate that danger. I know now is that my Mother told me whatever she had to tell me to get me to sleep calmly through the night. What I don’t know is how much fear she felt, how confident she was in her lie, or how many nights, after I had finally drifted off, she lay awake wondering and scared, full of anxiety, waiting for the end of the world.
Spoiler: My Mom did not die of AIDS.
