Carlos and James, Part II

Part II
The Atlanta AIDS Alliance is near the back of 139, down a flight of stairs. It’s a basement, but it’s not a dungeon. — there’s light and air, and even though a duct hangs from the ceiling in the main room, someone has burnished it so it shines.

About 25 men are in the room today, gathered in a circle on sofas and chairs. There are the usual jeans and slacks among the crowd, but also the man in the “Button Your Fly” sweatshirt and the guy in the woman’s cardigan.

The speaker is talking about empowerment, but soon, a voice from across the room cuts in. This idea of the group as a family is a load of bull as far as the man’s concerned. He’s put off by their response to the death this week of Roy, a group regular.

“Some of this family didn’t even participate in that boy’s funeral,” he says. “My God, what will you all do when it comes to me?”

No one blanches at the accusation. Suber tells him grieving takes many forms. Another participant, a man with a tooth missing from his smile, pipes up to thank the man for reminding them of their duties to one another.

“You just acted like a family member,” he says.

After leaving seminary in 1994, Suber finally saw a doctor who told him he didn’t need to take medication yet. Suber’s feeling of doom passed. He cut red meat and exercised to stay healthy. But as he moved through social work jobs and a stint at IBM, his HIV status remained a secret.
It was only after Suber took a job with the Alliance that things began to change. Suber found something with the men in this support group he hadn’t felt before, a sense of community around the virus.

“They need an example of somebody surviving and doing something with their life,” Suber thought.

And so without planning it, Suber told the group what he had told only two people other than his doctors in his life.

“You know…I’ve got HIV,” he said.

In the summer of 2006, Johnson found himself at the bottom of his arc, strung out and showing up at a place that fed the homeless for a free meal.

After meeting with Johnson a couple of times, a caseworker from the agency asked him if he’d ever considered that he had a drug addiction.

Johnson was stunned. He said he’d never thought about it before.

The caseworker replied, “Well, maybe you should think about it.”

Johnson enrolled in a free rehab program run by the Salvation Army. At first, he suffered because he was going through withdrawal. For alcohol, it was jitters, depression and a feeling like bugs crawling on his skin. The feeling would wake him up sometimes in the middle of the night thinking he had gone insane. With meth and cocaine it was depression again, plus anxiety, paranoia and cravings.

Then Johnson discovered he had HIV. The results came as a surprise, although now he thinks maybe he knew all along.

“I felt like a leper,” Johnson says.

He remembers weeping.

Nonetheless, sober for the first time in over a decade, Johnson decided he wanted to do something for someone other than himself. He started volunteering at the AIDS Survival Project, upstairs from the Alliance. Johnson knew his father worked below, but he didn’t announce his presence to him. He feared that any rejection he might face would set back his addiction recovery.

It wasn’t until a month and a half passed and a friend suggested they check out the Common Ground group that Johnson decided he was ready to face his father. Coming down the stairs, Johnson worried about what Suber would think.

“I got HIV, I don’t have anything to show for my life, so what is there to be proud of?” he asked himself.

When they arrived downstairs, some of the facilitators tried to shoo them away. Rules were rules, and latecomers were not to be admitted. The two were about to leave, when Suber’s voice boomed out, “Wait, y’all can come in.”
Johnson took a seat.

Nine months later, Johnson and Suber are resting on the couches in the same room where Johnson first met his father. Seated next to each other, Johnson and his father have a few things in common. There’s a similarity in the arcs of their noses, in the sheen of their skin.

After their first meeting, Johnson kept coming back to visit Suber. They began chatting on the phone and getting to know each other.

But in the middle of all of this came the disclosures.

First, Johnson explained about his drug addiction and HIV.

Suber didn’t let on he was upset but was struck with pain that his son would have to face what he’d been through.

“Oh God, let him have a happy, healthy, whole life,” Suber prayed to himself.

But as much the news hurt him, Suber had fallen hard for Johnson from the moment he walked through the door.

So he told his son, “Wherever you are right now, this is where we are gonna go from.”

Later, Suber told Johnson, he too, had the virus. Johnson had trouble facing up to the truth. Yes, he worried over his father’s health, but it was also that HIV didn’t fit the image he’d conjured of his father, invincible and untainted. It all felt like a double stigma. He could already hear the taunts: “Hey you’ve got HIV, and so does your dad.”

But at the same time Johnson learned his father’s status, he was also discovering how ready his father was to spend time with him.

They went to plays together and walked in the park. Johnson often found himself at his father’s house in Lithonia where his father would help him strategize about pulling together a new life.

When Johnson got out of rehab in May, he moved to a transition house in a drug-infested neighborhood and watched as one by one, friends he’d been through rehab with dropped back into using.

But instead of falling back too, Johnson started showing up to the Common Ground program nearly every day.

“I was getting a lot of solid information about how to live,” Johnson said. “What could I learn from those other people except how to relapse?”

Now, nine months later, Johnson has a job at a bookstore and comes over to the AIDS Alliance only on Thursdays, his day off.

He has been sober for over a year now.

And he has come to understand that HIV isn’t a death sentence, although it helps motivate him to stay away from illegal drugs and stay healthy.

Suber tells his son never to let a virus stand in his way.

“HIV lives with you, you don’t live with it,” he says.



It’s Saturday night, and a fever of sorts has arrived at Suber’s home in Lithonia.

A disco light plays over palms fronds and paintings, swirling red, yellow, blue, pink and green across the carpet and over the guests…oh yes, the guests – Suber and Johnson have invited just about everyone: men from the Common Ground group, a friend or two from rehab, from the 12-step program, colleagues from 139 and some buddies of Suber, even a man whom Johnson invited to perform free HIV tests at the party – they are all here, sitting on the sofa and ottoman, leaned up against the walls, laughing and talking.

There’s punch, but no beer or wine, just foil trays pilled high with spaghetti, meatballs swimming in sauce, line upon line of deviled eggs, and pies, cream and fruit pies, including the sweetest, tartest cranberry-apple pie that Sam’s Club has to offer - everything but the fatted calf.
That’s coming later. It’s been 15 years since Suber’s been around for his son’s birthday, but this time, by golly, he is making up for all those lost years.

As Johnson tears through his presents, Suber stands by, arms crossed, a half-smile playing across his face until Johnson opens Suber’s gift. From the moment he pulls the laptop from the box, he is a kid again, springing into his father’s arms.

Johnson and Suber hug once, then again, Suber crushing his son in his embrace.

“Happy Birthday, baby,” he says.

Johnson covers his face. He can’t stop smiling.

Someone turns the music back up as two of the Common Ground facilitators head out to the center of the room - elbows back, shoulders rolling, hips swinging, feet shuffling the carpet, like it’s still 1978, like no one’s heard of a virus called HIV, only this is the twenty first century re-mix, and in place of the old chorus, bumping along with the base beat is the updated hope - not just staying alive, but living.

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.