Carlos and James, Part I

The awning reads “139.”

There is no marquee, no mention on the façade about any of the AIDS organizations housed in the building, just the address on the awning as both a welcome and a promise of anonymity.

Downstairs, James Suber sits is in a circle of men in a room owned by the AIDS Alliance for Faith and Health. Like the men he serves, the 55-year-old social worker is HIV-positive.

Upstairs, Carlos Johnson, 28, is volunteering with the AIDS Survival Project, answering the telephone and doing odd jobs. He’s been doing this for more than a month now. He was just diagnosed with HIV himself and he carries a secret with him as he performs his duties.
Johnson is Suber’s son. They haven’t seen each other in 14 years. Suber has no idea his son is in the same state, let alone the same building. Neither knows the other has HIV.

Johnson yearns to reveal himself to his father, but instead steals glances at him in the hallway, cataloging every detail from the broad shoulders to the shining pate of his father’s head.

He’s not sure he’s worthy of his dad, not sure he’s ready to deal with Suber’s possible reaction to him, to his status as HIV-positive, or as a recovering drug addict. So Johnson watches and waits.
Within the world of 139, Suber and Johnson represent not only the present of the HIV epidemic, but it’s past and future as well, Suber likely infected in the 1970’s, Johnson within the last few years.

HIV is not the killer it once was. Powerful drug combinations keep many AIDS patients alive. But the virus is still spreading, and has reached a new generation, one divorced from the scourge of deaths that cowed men and women into safer-sex practices in the 80’s and 90’s.

Between increased survival rates and new infections, the line representing the number of Americans living with HIV in the new millennium crawls upward, year by year.

While the country moves on to other issues, those with HIV cling to what life boats they can, the newest generation learning from the survivors how to live with hope and dignity in the face of the world’s deadliest virus.


Part I.
It was 1978, a different era.

The year that Johnson was born, Suber was a former Ohio State defensive end, still working on his degree, sporting an afro held up with hair spray, popular with the ladies.

Despite a scuba accident in 1974 that required several blood transfusions, Suber was the pinnacle of health and virility. He had three kids from a previous relationship and was now expecting a fourth with a girl he’d known since high school.

Suber wanted the two of them to stay together, but her parents had other plans. Suber watched as they drove away, daughter in tow.

And so Johnson was born in small town Mississippi and found more trouble in his early life than he was equipped for. His mom abused alcohol. Her boyfriend abused her. Johnson began drinking at age 12.

He talked to Suber on the phone but didn’t get much out of the relationship.
“He would ask, ‘How was school?’ and, ‘Do you like any girls?” said Johnson, who is gay. “I was just hoping he would stop talking about it.”

At 15, Johnson dropped out and moved away from home.
When Suber learned Johnson had left, his heart ached, but he didn’t try to find him.
By then he had another problem on his mind.
.


Suber found out he had HIV in 1991. The call came on his birthday while he was standing alone in his house.

“We just discovered you’re HIV positive,” the voice on the phone said.

Suber looked around the room for someone to tell, someone to talk to, but there was nobody. So he called his mother.

“O.K. baby, you’re gonna be O.K.,” she said. “Just be still, and you are going to be O.K.”
Suber tried to think how he could have contracted the disease. Finally, he remembered the transfusions back in ’74.

But, of course, it didn’t matter how he got it, he had it. Not only did he have the virus in his system, he’d had it for 17 years, seven years longer than the national average lifespan of an untreated person after contracting HIV.

Suber felt sure of two things. One, he was about to die. Around him, he saw AIDS patients dropping every day.

Two, he didn’t want anyone to know he had HIV. Before he’d been infected, Suber had mocked people with AIDS. Now, his own words haunted him.

Beyond his mother, Suber told no one, too ashamed even to seek treatment. He walked into a facility only to see “HIV Clinic” posted over the waiting room.

“Oh, I am not going to go sit in there,” Suber thought.

He turned and left.

Instead of getting medical attention, Suber moved to Atlanta and enrolled in seminary. But divinity school felt more like an academic exercise than the salvation he was seeking. Surrounded by people he thought would judge him, Suber alternated between hiding in bathroom stalls to read a magazine for people with HIV called “Poz” and attempting to live in denial.

Meanwhile, Johnson continued to face his own set of challenges.
After moving out, Johnson got his GED and attempted college, but alcohol and drugs got in his way. He found himself wandering from place to place, finally moving to Atlanta in 2004.

Ask Johnson about sex and he will be straight with you. He’s had lots. And up until he was diagnosed with HIV, he never used protection if he could get away with it.
“Who likes condoms?” he asks, as if the question were rhetorical.

Since the spread of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment or “HAART,” which debuted in 1995, paranoia in the gay community about the virus has cooled. A CDC fact sheet cites studies pointing to the rise of these drugs as a factor in declining caution about sex among some gay men.

And while a national study by the CDC suggests that young men who have sex with men are more likely to use condoms than older men who have sex with men, Kevin English, who works for the AIDS Survival Project upstairs at 139, says he’s noticed an alarming attitude among the young people he tests for the virus.

“They are out there having sex like it’s never ending,” English said, adding many young people believe taking medication for HIV-AIDS is no big deal, unaware of the side effects of the drugs.
“They don’t understand what’s wrong with that pill and that they’ll be taking it for the rest of their lives,” he concludes.

Beyond unprotected anal sex, or “barebacking,” another factor hurled Johnson into the red zone for risk of HIV infection: methamphetamine use.

Meth, or Tina as it’s sometimes referred to in the gay community, produces highs than can last up to 24 hours. It also serves as a stimulant for sex. In cities, including Atlanta, one of the fastest growing meth hubs in the country, a whole vocabulary has grown up around meth and gay sex, expressions like “crystal dick” and “party and play.”

Along with feelings of invincibility and increased libido, meth tends to bring on recklessness.
Johnson remembers going into the video booth section of the Peekaboo pornography store in Lindbergh to meet up with men and not coming out for days.

He knew his father was in the area, but didn’t contact him. Drugs ruled his life, and, as he explains it, he wasn’t in the business of reaching out to others.