Fuck The Pope But Use A Condom (Pt. 4)
A Scary Morning … Some Damn Fine PR.I was still stepping on it like a gangster whose pompadour had been grazed by a bullet—I mean, can you imagine the chaos that would’ve ensued had Heidi hopped into the backseat of my car and reached out her hand to meet Laurence Chalmers, BSc (Psych)?—when my mind began to connect the dots and, in quick succession, rendered two immensely satisfying and exciting possibilities.
The first was that it was Heidi who had informed Layla of Daniel’s whereabouts that evening, precipitating Layla’s surprise appearance at Crazy Joe’s. After all, as you may recall, Daniel had mentioned to Pierre that he had seen Layla’s flatmate in the piano lounge, so it only makes sense that it was the flatmate—namely, Heidi—who contacted Layla. What’s more, this all likely went down mere moments after Heidi and her cronies had concluded their slanderous chant. For one thing, the little ensemble had bundled up there and didn’t re-emerge until at least after Yvonne and I had parted ways.
The second possibility—and this one got me especially giddy—relates to the evening on which Daniel and Layla overheard her flatmate having sex. If the flatmate was Heidi, so my reasoning went, it was probably me who ravished the little maniac! Think about it: as Layla was feeling up Daniel, her flatmate—Heidi—stormed into the room and kicked up a fuss about some perceived wrong on the part of her lover. And you remember what happened between us, right?
Now, granted, Heidi probably runs into trouble with just about every lad who makes the potentially life-wrecking blunder of sleeping with her, so such a scene could not have been unprecedented. And yet, by comparing Daniel’s timeline of events with my own, I determined that my tryst with her almost certainly occurred within the same week as Daniel and Layla’s washout. What were the odds of another guy fucking her over in that period? Tiny, I’d say. But, even if it hadn’t been me, I thought with a thrill, I’d make it appear so. Yes, the people would like that.
As you may tell, I planned on writing something autobiographical about that evening. Not strictly autobiographical, as what I’m doing now (I think you’d agree, that would’ve been foolish). No, I’d do so from under the cover of fiction, allowing me to smudge and twist the truth to my heart’s content, but in such a way that my story would nevertheless seem autobiographical. That was key.
Just one thing bothered me. And when I say it bothered me, I mean to say that, when the snag first occurred to me, later that evening, as I lay in bed, smiling up at the whirring ceiling fan, I leaped like a frog.
I realized I would have to get tested for HIV. There were no two ways about it.
Let me explain: back at Daniel’s place, as he was scolding me about my inadequate notice of warning to the Danish nurse, I pretended to have an ethical insight of my own: I briefly made my number-crunching face, then dropped my head in shame and said, “I see your point, old boy.” I followed this up, a few minutes later, by banding together with Daniel when he tried to convince Pierre that they had to get tested. “Yes,” I had said, stepping forward, looking all sorry and shaking my head, “we have to. This has gone on for too long—way too long. It’s time to do the right thing.”
Now, unless they could read minds (like your average literary critic can, apparently), no casual bystander could reasonably have claimed that I was merely acting during these episodes, and neither, therefore, could any future reader or theatergoer—unless, of course, they were to find out that I never ended up getting tested. And they would! It would be the very first thing a journalist worth their cynical salt would look into. And once the fact had been uncovered, I’d be fucked, well and truly—denounced and ostracized.
There was no way around it, then: I had to get tested. Or drop the project, of course, but, to be honest, I never truly considered the option. The story was too good, the potential upside too dazzling. I mean, just think about it. Imagine I got tested at the break of dawn and wrote that up. Imagine how that would make me seem. Like a goddamn hero, I tell you! A beacon of principle and courage! A man among wimps! A man who, like Daniel, had simply been blind to the recklessness of his behavior until it got pointed out to him and then did the very best thing he could to redeem himself.
It would be beautiful, too beautiful for me to deny it to the world.
Don’t get me wrong, though: if I hadn’t felt reasonably confident that the test would come back negative—with hazards like Heidi, I had always been adamant about the use of protection, regardless of how passionately they begged me to do otherwise1—I might very well have denied it to the world. I certainly would have done so had I thought my chances of testing positive were good. But I didn’t.
Accordingly, the following morning, after only about two hours of sleep, I stumbled down to the pharmacy. It wasn’t even open yet when I arrived, so I loitered outside for a few minutes until some Larry-David-looking Jew came around the corner and let me in.
He led me to a wooden chair at the back of the shop, sort of hidden behind an upright (to spare the occupant embarrassment, I assumed), and told me to wait there while he fetched the test. When he returned, test in hand, he asked whether I had been through the ordeal before. I stammered out a “no”, to which he said that, depending on when last I had had unprotected sex, I might have to return for a follow-up test, as it could take up to three months for the virus to become detectable.
I stammered out an “Oh, okay”—as you must be able to tell, I was nervous as hell—after which he swabbed my index finger with alcohol and pricked it with a needle. Having sucked up an incriminating drop or two of blood, he pressed it into the tester, which he had placed on the little wooden table next to me, and explained that, in about ten minutes, if I saw only one red line in the tester’s rectangular slit, I was fine. If I saw two red lines, on the other hand, I was fucked, and would do well to get out of town. He then draped a tissue over the device, imparting the procedure with a seriousness that I could’ve done without, and suggested I get some fresh air.
I took his advice and wandered up a nearby sunny street. I took a seat on the curb and endured fifteen minutes of wild, paranoid thoughts and the barks of a vindictive dog before I got up and, my foundations wobbling dangerously, took the plunge.
I stumbled into the shop with a let’s-just-get-it-over-with urgency and, without bothering to wait for the pharmacist to join me, stormed to the tissue and lifted it with a trembling hand. The image hit me like a pillow, making my head reel. The pharmacist arrived shortly thereafter.
“Right,” he said, looking up from the test. “You’re fine. You can settle upfront.”
Thank fuck, I thought.
When I got home, I jumped straight to work. Guzzled down a pot of coffee and began to transcribe my voice recordings. That done, I documented everything else that had happened—the events at the City Hall, my tryst with Heidi, the squabble with Yvonne, my run-in with the hookers—following which I went into PR mode, shaping the thing to make me look like a flawed but ultimately well-intentioned and fuckable hero. A good example of this crafty work would be my alterations to the second-to-last scene: the one in which I’m convincing Layla to let me give her a lift home.
Instead of telling her, as I did, that my utterances in Daniel’s drawing room had been mere lies designed to help him see the error of his ways—thus denying not only the validity of my story about the Danish nurse but also of my own supposed ethical breakthrough—I’d simply (and humbly) offer to make a clean breast of it, to tell her everything she wanted to know about both Daniel and myself. I only had one condition: that she’d let me take her home, because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if, god forbid, something had to happen to her on those dangerous, dangerous streets.
I also made some changes to the story about the Danish nurse—I had spoken a little too flippantly there about big black cocks and whatnot—but, on the whole, I let things be. Big lies are more palatable when seasoned with little truths.
Following this, I spent about a week dollying the thing up, and then it was off to the market! Pitched it, sold it, landed the role of, you guessed it, myself—well, rather, Richard, the heroic sexual dynamo based on me. And three months later it was opening night! Proceed!