I know someone who has HIV

There’s a little absurdity in witnessing a grown man shed tears for Clint Eastwood. Gran Torino, Eastwood’s latest — and maybe, last — stand as the ultimate man-o’-rightful-war (an anti-Mr. Rogers who wasn’t the friendliest of neighbors in his’ gook’-populous town) incited his audience’s silent reverence, even if he’d be grumbling through most of his lines. Had the former Dirty Harry seen this grown man getting all choked up, he’d sneer at him, tersely citing why he doesn’t care much for “pussy boys” like him. But the man slouched and sniffling beside me in that cold cinema wasn’t much for keeping his sentiments on the down low or pinning his machismo on his sleeve, anyway.

I’d met him in one of the most dubious methods you could meet people and actually keep them as friends: on a press trip to Boracay, covering the island’s annual wind ‘n’ water sports competition a little over a year ago. It could have been a vacation disguised as work, but for me, it was as if I was still in the grind of pushing pen to paper, just that I was doing it in a place where sand and cement, perpetually sunburned expats and tropical trannies came together. From the first beers we had together as we surveyed the traffic on the sea through our first night clicking through cable TV as roommates, the Unburdener always seemed to emphasize how he had nothing to hide. 

Normally, when a childhood, drunken, or just any story recounting a generally embarrassing experience is told to a new acquaintance, there is the concession of shock-masked agreement — of ‘oh my God, are you serious?” but with a smirk of knowing. When the Unburdener regales you with his tales of shame, care of his family circus, high times under the influence, or gay growing pains, he’d beam his probing eyes at you and wait for a reaction, ready to laugh or momentarily simmer with you in scrutiny of what he’d just divulged.

This sort of sharing ‘til it hurts (most of the time, the pain’s from the laughter) was how I discovered the Unburdener’s past life of ransacking the land of easy lays. That when he was a poetry teacher in his early 20s, a pack of young ‘n’ hungry homos had taken him under their wing, transformed him into a ruthless social climber, and gave him a “friendly” push towards the speedy baggage carousel of men screwing men — oftentimes, over.

Used Somebody

I had come to know the Unburdener about a year since he’d neutered the sexual beast within. He would no longer sit around with his co-conquistadors, each one tallying how many men they’d done the dirty deed with, calling out numbers from the 60s to the 100s.

That was the way it had always been in his heyday of wham-bam-thank-you-sir — a game of gay predator and prey, from drawing glances by a club’s bar to gripping the headboard of a grimy motel bed. In fact, he didn’t even need to park himself amid a clubbing throng of sweaty, gym-slaved torsos swelling enthusiastically to Madonna or Kylie. The meet ‘n’ meat market spread out to profile picks online so he could expect a speedy delivery to his doorstep with the click of the “send” button; an assortment of men — short, tall, discrete, abominable — shooting the Unburdener messages with the sole purpose of shooting their loads.

When the Unburdener declared that he was done “with all the stuff that didn’t work, with all that bullshit,”, you could see an overshot inner fury from the intensity in his eyes—someone reborn with a vengeance to stave off his life’s dramatic nonsense. He unflinchingly told me all of his past’s dirt ‘cause he was no longer rolling in it, no longer lingering in the rejection of his love by heaping other’s flesh upon his flesh. No longer a mere receptacle bending over to take it — condom, no condom — the way his partners liked it. Because that one time he’d ridden a bus all the way to Cavite just to jump into the sack with two strangers he’d met online, he realized that all the sex he craved corresponded to all the love he was parched for. The man I met in Boracay had rebuilt himself, and not in the way college kids do when they visit the island for a couple of days, peeling away their reservations for the hot-temp, high-temptation reality show that plays in their heads.

‘Course, I decided I was done with a lot of the bullshit around me as well. His approach towards men was my approach towards work — a lot going in and a lot going out, another assignment, another means to validate myself. The way the Unburdener unflinchingly spoke of his misdemeanors and misadventures made me feel like we were two travelers meeting in life’s airport terminal, leaving no details out about our journeys. We shared where we’d been, which places to avoid, and where we’d be heading — later realizing we were going the same way.

Positive Tension

Months drifted by like a friendly breeze, the Unburdener and I becoming close colleagues in the art of living out loud — along with some friends of his who rolled their eyes at people who couldn’t do the same. Our weekly cleansing ritual of downing rum cokes and drowning out crowds with a live band-backed karaoke tune or two was all about that. Human absurdity was always a topic of choice — of the celebrities we’d written about, of the soulless night lives we’d left behind, of how sneaky it was for us to be so self-aware amid a society so deluded.

It had been almost like a sitcom, those six or so months that the Unburdener and I had become suspiciously inseparable. Like that show Perfect Strangers, where a lot of that good ol’ absurdity unfolds between cousins Larry and Balky, but you were always guaranteed laughs ‘til the credits rolled. 

Until he called from the hospital, that is — his usual exuberance slightly faded yet still present as he told me he’d be spending a little time there for his migraines. Some time extended to four months, pigeon crap blamed for some sort of brain infection caused by the toxic air he breathed living on the top floor of his building. Every call I made to check up on him was just a means for the bird brain to brandish his signature brand of humorous self-deprecation, never to tell me what was really wrong with him; that he had HIV, as a mutual friend had confessed to me later on.

That he couldn’t find the right time to tell me doesn’t matter anymore. His history of hook-ups came to bite him in the ass and I couldn’t let it punctuate the life he’d salvaged. I don’t know about HIV statistics in Manila or how people get infected and why they do. All I knew was that he was still the guy I’d met on that windy afternoon in Boracay: the man who earned his name by never holding back the person he decided to become, urging the same of people around him —of me, even.

He certainly wouldn’t hold his tears back in that cinema, three months having passed since he’d left that hospital and walked back to a life he lived feverishly, as a sort of retaliation against the virus. Besides, he wouldn’t cease living as he had: to know who you are enough to let go of what doesn’t work in your life.

As we parted that day, I realized there were a few traits the Unburdener had in common with Clint’s anti-heroics. He could take a smattering of bullets and still stand firmly — resolutely — with his weapon of choice in hand. Since I’d known him, love was always the ammo he used, having finally found enough to leave for himself and surrender his body no more. That’d go a long way, I thought, as I watched him get into a cab and ride off into the rest of his days, armed and somehow vindicated from the sins of his past. Maybe even Clint had nothing on him.