I LOVE Canadian communists.

I am no hero.

I am out here in the barn so I don’t have to be in the house with Denny who clutches the thing they call his heart when it hurts which is almost all the time now.

I know I will write about him. But his dying is killing me. The only way I can hold on to whatever humanity is left in me is to do that writing, but to deliberately not put it on the Medium,

Or. Maybe. Not put it anywhere.

I struggle with the whole public versus private issue ENORMOUSLY.

If I have custody of a kid, then how much goes public and how much doesn’t, is up to me. I decide.

It is agonizing.

On one hand, no one is telling their stories. And I don’t blame that on anyone.

Am I crazy for thinking no one really wants to know. I have no idea. My world is pretty insular, and pretty remote. I honestly don’t know ANY normal people.

If I give away the secrets of the tribe — the medical community is a tribe — and I really flay that fish that is the sexual abuse of a child who acquires HIV, am I violating that child’s right to not have the fact that his parents burned his penis with cigarettes kept as another secret secret. If I tell the story about how the same child was catheterized with an adult-size catheter because the medical boys and girls didn’t have any pediatric catheters, and they couldn’t really be bothered, is that violating the child’s right to keep another secret secret secret.

I don’t think I can put Denny on the Internet. The other boys love a video they made with him. Denny was the director. He told them what to do. But they had to bring him home from the river where they were filming (OMG, the GoPro is to fucking die for, BTW) because he was crying his heart hurt so bad.

I am no hero.

I never even connected HIV in prepubescent boys to heart disease. Or ARVs in kids to heart disease.

I am ignorant. A fool.

And I thought I knew so much about HIV as to be an advocate.

I can’t even go into the house to kiss him goodnight.

Me. The expert on HIV. It’s hubris.

I have to confront: does Denny die here at home surrounded by people who love him, or does he die in an institutional setting.

If I ask Denny, he will say: at home.

But I know it will be so fucking hard to not to hit 911 when I am overwhelmed.

At the last minute will I hit 911. I don’t know.

All the medical people say, and there are hundreds of them, there is nothing more they can do, and it was being hospitalized in the first place that so marked that point when he went downhill.

I. Am. No. Hero.

I am putting off the conversation about burial, cremation, and now all the fucking mommies are going to write to me and say it’s too much for the child to decide these things.

But he has to have a say. His birth, his life, and his death belong to him.

What will happen is that the boys will just continue to do art with him, and it will be through that art where I will learn what Denny wants. Because he will lead me like he has always led me back to art.

Hero is not a crown I want.

I am the man who cleans the stables.

I get to talk to horses.

I am going to talk to the cemetery people tomorrow. Families dig their loved one’s graves here. This is Appalachia, and digging a grave is a visceral, sweating experience. Death is no stranger doing that.

I am taking the GoPro.

I am thinking of doing a series of videos and calling it Talking to the Dead.

Fun title.

I will just start talking to all of them surrounded by gravestones.

The big ones. The little ones. The dead. I can tell them how sorry I am that it was too late for them but we have better meds now.

Like they give a fuck.

I give a fuck. If we had the meds to save Denny, but we don’t.

Young gay men think AIDS is over.

None of them have been to the Caribbean. And if they have been there, they never drove through Kingston. They never left the car. They never went to the market.

And they never dug a grave.

Even if I do it, I’m never sure what I will put on the medium.

I get enough hate mail.

Trig is in charge of deleting it.

I’m more like Wonder Woman.

The fatter I get, the bigger my tits get.

I kinda want her boots though.