to urinate. I did a little online research before I had to leave for work, and that’s when I figured it out.
Mike had given me an STD.
Which meant he’d been with somebody else, when we’d agreed to be faithful to each other. We’d used condoms for any penetration, but because the chance of transmitting something was so slim with activities like blow jobs and rimming, we’d been less careful with those.
I’d had this romantic ideal when Mike and I were dating, but now I saw that I’d been foolish. It was the first real relationship for both of us, and we were both feeling our way along. How much time did we want to spend together? How much did we have to share about our past, and about who we saw and what we did?
Mike was stingy with details. I told him about every guy I’d slept with, each bad date and embarrassing rendezvous. But all he said was that he’d gotten his first blow job from another guy in college and that he’d fooled around with a couple of men he’d met online-nothing serious.
I see now that he wasn’t ready to commit to a serious relationship. He still had wild oats to sow; he had to date a bunch of jerks in order to recognize a keeper. He was still figuring out what he liked in bed, too, as I was, and we both needed more experience before we settled down to monogamy.
Sitting at my computer that morning, with the evidence on my screen in front of me, I was so angry with Mike I was tempted to drive over to Fire Department Headquarters and out him. But hell, I didn’t even know what I had. And then, fear jolted through my body. If Mike had passed me an STD, was there was a chance he’d passed me HIV as well? Had I ruined my life by trusting a guy who couldn’t be trusted?
All I wanted was to curl back up in bed and cry-out of fear for my life, out of sadness that Mike had cheated on me. Out of general despair that a world that had seemed so happy and full of possibility the night before had suddenly turned dark and deadly. My limbs felt heavy, as if I could barely stand up, and I kept imagining tiny viruses circulating from my dick throughout my body.
But I had to go to work, and I wasn’t going to create an audit trail on my office computer that showed me visiting gay Web sites or googling STDs. All day long, it felt like the bottom had dropped out of my stomach, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Ray made a couple of cracks about my grouchiness and distraction, and I wanted to confide in him, but something held me back.
We were working the homicide of a teen-aged girl who had also been raped, and the sense of violation I felt pushed me over the edge as Ray and I interrogated the suspect, a lowlife friend of the girl’s mother who already had two convictions for sexual assault under his belt. When he refused to answer and I raised my hand to smack him, Ray grabbed my arm.
I turned on him, vicious as a caged animal. “Don’t touch me!”
Ray dropped my arm and held up his hands. “Cool down, Kimo. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”
“It’s too late for that,” I said, but I recognized I was out of control. “Can you finish this up? I need to get out of here.”
Ray agreed and I signed out a couple of hours before the end of the shift, telling Lieutenant Sampson I needed personal time. He was busy with a funding request so he just nodded his head and I hurried to my truck.
By the time I got there, my hands were shaking, my throat was parched, and I felt like I could burst into tears at any moment. All the way home, I gripped the steering wheel and repeated “maintain” to myself as a mantra. I nearly knocked the computer off the table trying to get it turned on, and kept fumbling the keys as I typed.
I remembered Mike had told me his parents volunteered at an STD clinic out near Tripler, the Army medical center where they both worked. His father was a doctor, his mother a nurse, and I thought it was poetic justice that I go out to their clinic to get tested.
It was like the planets were lining up. I checked the clinic’s Web site, which listed the doctors and their schedules, and found his dad was scheduled that day. I drove out there, my stomach in knots the whole time. I just missed hitting an SUV that darted in front of me on the Moanalua Freeway, and yelled my fool head off at the driver, even though he was cocooned behind tinted glass.
I pulled up in the parking lot of the clinic and sat there for a couple of minutes, scared to start the whole thing in motion. What if I was HIV positive? How would my life change? I’d come out of the closet two years before, and every part of my world had shifted, from my relationship to my family and friends to how I acted on the job. What would another shift do to me?
Ever since I told people I was a mahu, the Hawaiian word for a gay man, I’ve faced the things that scared me-whether it was chasing down an armed suspect or telling Mike that I loved him when I didn’t know how he’d respond. So I knew I had to get out of my truck and find out what was wrong with me.
Inside, I filled out a sheet of paper that I was assured was confidential, and I was assigned a number-1423. There were three other people in the room, and I took a seat next to a middle-aged Hawaiian woman in a blue Wal-Mart smock. Across from us were two men: a long-haired young guy, and an obvious military type, from his brush cut hair to his erect posture.
The woman was called in first, then the military guy. I figured the longhair was next, but the receptionist called “1423,” and I went up to the door, where a middle-aged nurse who looked Korean led me back to an examining room. As I followed her, I realized that she had to be Mike’s mother, and my decision to come to the clinic where she and Mike’s dad worked started to look really stupid.
When I was sitting on the white paper sheet, she took my medical history. “Have you experienced any anal discharge?” she asked me, and I thought, not for the first time, how glad I was not to work in the medical field. I’ll take dead bodies any day over anal discharge.
“No,” I said.
“How about pain or swelling in the throat?”
“No.”
“How many partners have you had in the last six months?”
“Just one.” I took a deep breath. I could out Mike to his mother. But that would be childish and hurtful, and I just couldn’t do that to him, even after what he’d done to me. “I did see some discharge around the head of his penis once, a few days ago. I didn’t think anything of it until I had the same problem.”
She smiled. “It sounds like gonorrhea. But I’m going to need throat and rectal cultures, and a urine sample, too.” She must have seen my evident discomfort. “Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle.”
She stuck a swab down my throat and gave me a kit for a rectal swab and a urine sample. “I have a son just about your age,” she said. “I can just imagine how he’d feel in your circumstances.”
Back in the waiting room, the housewife and the longhair were gone, but the brush cut was waiting for his results, and we were joined by a teen-aged Japanese girl. It was getting late, and the clinic was closing soon. I hoped I’d get my results before then; I didn’t want to wait days to find out my fate.
I had enough time to read two different People magazines, both a couple of months old, and learn more than I needed to know about the drug and alcohol habits of the rich and famous, before the receptionist called “1423” again.
The nurse I thought was Mike’s mom led me back to the examining room, and said, “The doctor will be with you soon.”
A few minutes later, a tall, handsome man in a white lab coat came in. I knew immediately that he was Mike’s dad, even before he introduced himself.
I thought Mike’s parents didn’t know he was gay-but what if they did? What if he’d mentioned my name, or described me? How stupid was I to have put myself in this soap opera situation?
But Dr. Riccardi didn’t appear to make the connection. “There are a number of different tests we can do. Here in the clinic, we’re only equipped to do the gram stain test, which showed that you have garden variety gonorrhea. That’s good news. The infection is localized in your penis, but you should refrain from any kind of sexual activity until the medicine has had a chance to work its magic.”
He smiled, and I could see Mike in his eyes and the turn of his mouth. He was clean shaven, where Mike had a mustache, but his lips were just as full as his son’s.
“We’ll give you one oral dose of Ofloxacin to kill the gonorrhea bacteria in your body.” He smiled again. “That is, unless you’d prefer Ceftriaxone. We administer that as an injection in the buttocks.”
“The oral dose will be fine,” I said, my voice rough and a little squeaky. I still couldn’t get over the fact that he was Mike’s dad, that I could see Mike’s face in his.
