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HIV, AIDS and Spinners of Web
They looked on as she removed the dental dam from a plastic
bag. She held it up by two corners, blue and diaphanous like a veil.
"For oral sex, for safety," said Judy Howell, "one of the things
you can do is cut a condom right down the middle. Cut it in half."
The men, black and white, young and not-so-young, nodded and grunted in
agreement.
"Lay it on the vaginal area - that's one way to do it," Howell
continued. "Or, get you some non-microwaveable Saran Wrap."
She explained how most other kinds of cling wrap are porous, which won't
prevent HIV. It is deep into her presentation now, near the end. The homeless
men shift and grumble as much as they listen.
"Here comes the dental dam," she raised her voice and paused dramatically;
held high, the indigo square caught the light squeezed through the clouds
outside and shimmered, "and it's just about the greatest thing in the
whole wide world."
The homeless men laughed.
Howell has gone through this routine over one hundred times.
By her estimation, she speaks to more than 2,000 people each year across
southern Mississippi. She frequents schools, prisons and clinics - wherever
they will have her. She is not blindly idealistic about what she does; she
knows how large the battle is and how small her weapons are.
The enemy is ignorance. In Howell’s world, it manifests
itself as HIV, the retrovirus bent on destroying the human immune system, and
AIDS, the syndrome left behind after HIV has laid waste to the lymphocytes the
body needs to ward off infection.
This day, she spoke with her principal audience - men with
little left to lose, little reason to be cautious. The dental dam is a favorite
prop for Howell. Many people have never seen or even heard of them before. The
flat patch of latex was designed to assist dentists in isolating teeth from the
inside of the mouth. Howell wants her audience to use them before going down on
questionable womem.
One man in a wheelchair, his hair and beard as wild as reeds
in a pond, excused himself to take a phone call on his cell. Vincent, a gaunt
and angular black man who wore a dapper hat and crisp dress shirt to better
thumb his nose at homelessness itself, kept interrupting Howell to explain to
the others how AIDS had long since been cured, but the government was keeping
it a secret.
Howell listened to his rant, and then she went on to talk about saliva and how
to pinch the air out of the tip of a condom.
Vincent leaned back in his chair at the long table standing at the center of
the meeting room as if he was a wizened traveler listening to a circus barker.
The other men were propped up against the walls. A dry-erase board hung across
from a bank of windows, and outside, behind the low-rent apartments and all the
children making noises, the sun had all but disappeared.
"I saw this huge muscle-building guy pull a condom up his arm and up over
his shoulder," Howell said as she pretended to do the same. "Then he
reached over and put a dab of Vaseline on his finger and rubbed it on there. It
dissolved before our eyes."
The shelter she spoke at smelled like a gym, but was clean the way nursing
homes are clean. This place was hidden deep among the poorest of neighborhoods
here. Sponsored by a local hospital, it was once a dilapidated hovel amid a
throng of homes sagging just out of sight.
Hattiesburg is one of the larger towns in Mississippi, one thriving in the
depths of the Deep South. It is both a college town and a retirement community
- an oasis of franchises and mini-malls in a state covered by a pox of
poverty. This is a place where chicken houses and golf courses rub shoulders.
The cost of living is dazzling low. So, the mildly affluent eat and sleep well.
At the other end of the spectrum, the homeless of this city are more invisible
than most, more homeless than most. Many live in the wilderness though no one
here knows it, or won't admit to it.
Howell is a representative of Haven House, a place where Hattiesburg's homeless
who are also stricken with HIV and AIDS can come to get their lives back on
track. It is a place where those who are looking toward an inevitable future
can buy time, reenter society, get a job, an apartment, and turn their backs on
what got them here.
As Howell asked the men to raise their hands if they believed one can get HIV
from a toilet, she conjured up images of a teacher at the center of one-room
schoolhouse.
At first glance, she comes across as an aging hippie, but soon casts her spell
on you, convincing you of her true form - sad sage. Perhaps all those speeches
and dour audiences have formed her into this, but she overflows with
information about AIDS and HIV. She calmly articulates both local and national
statistics as well as prevention strategies, visiting each topic with her
wooden whistle of a voice. She laughs often, a raspy staccato, breaking off the
ice shelves such themes tend create over people's hearts.
As she spoke to the men, it was clear some of what she was doing had become
automatic - a play she had performed so many times the words were came out
as sing-song. Still, when the audience was willing to talk, to interrupt, she
was willing to be candid.
A sleepy, slow-blinking man against the wall told her people in Hattiesburg
were so promiscuous it wasn't feasible for everyone to keep up with testing and
sexual histories.
"If you know someone well enough to stick it in them," she told him,
emphasizing each syllable, "by God you ought to know them well enough to
talk to them about it."
When she goes out into the world to give these presentations, she often brings
along one of the people staying at Haven House, someone close to leaving who
has gotten as much as they can out of the experience. Today, it is a black man
with overlong arms and legs wearing thick-rimmed hipster eyeglasses who is not
named Troy, but will be known as such for this story.
Troy waited his turn to speak as Howell released a fistful of brochures on the
table at the center of the room. For most of the hour she has been speaking,
Troy handed her props and encouraged her in the way Ed McMahon would when
Johnny fell flat.
She explained to the men homosexuals were less likely to have HIV and AIDS than
heterosexuals. She told them homosexuals had been grappling with the problem
since the early '80s and had learned to protect themselves. The truth passed
over them for a moment, and then she used her hands to mime the bar graphs she
had forgotten to bring. She ended by addressing the necessity of clean needles
and honesty. She urged them all to get tested for HIV. She introduced Troy.
Troy cleared his throat. There was a fresh silence in the room. He started by
explaining T-Cells and the immune system in the most basic of terms. Then, he
bluntly segued into his own history of drug use and careless sex back when he
was a truck driver. He seemed articulate, but was no public speaker. He
stumbled often, getting lost in the logic of what he was trying to tell. When
he felt the crowd warm to him, his native slang kicked in; the tone of his
voice became more aggressive.
"In September of last year," he said, taking a breath, "I got
gonorrhea from a young lady."
He explained how he went to health department for treatment and how they gave
him pills. Then, he returned to both the street and crack cocaine. Eventually,
he was arrested in a complicated drug bust where the cops handcuffed all the
people at the scene and sorted them out later.
The morning before this presentation, Troy and Howell sat behind coffee and
cigarettes and looked on as one of the residents of Haven House left for the
real world.
Haven House is hidden in plain sight. To the casual
observer, it looks like any of the aging homes in the city's downtown. There is
a nice front porch with a swing hovering above blue wooden floors. Plants sit
near wicker furniture, and delicate wispy shades sway behind the window
screens.
Howell's other duty at Haven House is one shared by her husband Jim and the
director of the Aids Service Coalition of Hattiesburg, Kathy Green.
Jim, a large man with hair so white it looks edible, coordinates the daily
activities of the residents and helps them figure out the bureaucracy of modern
life by training them to perform well at job interviews, filling our paperwork
and managing a budget. He sets goals; the residents meet them and are ready to
go out on their own in under two years.
Green is the politician and the business manager. She is blunt and insistent
and seems as though she would fit in well on the floor of a stock exchange. She
deals with the government and finds grant money to keep Haven House afloat.
In Green's office, photos of her partner and their 6-year-old child line
a fireplace mantle. A spent typewriter teeters on the edge of a filing
cabinet. Paperwork hugs a computer in the corner; above it a child's drawing
shares space with a sign that reads, "If you smoke anymore you will be
switched, if you stop you will get some candy."
Green speaks with a sharp and clear vocabulary. She is the mother brain of
Haven House and fears for its safety while also dictating who can and cannot
come there for help. She once ran a consulting firm and was director of
planning for the city, so she has something many people devoted to helping lack
- objectivity. Green knows she is running an institution devoted to the HIV and
AIDS-positive homeless in a state where a city council member recently
denounced a $2 million community development block grant because some of the
money might reach the kind of people she looks after.
"He said people with HIV and AIDS should die," said Green. "But,
with all the people like him I have met, I see it is more about ignorance than
meanness."
Green said when she first took on the responsibility of Haven House she also
had a two-dimensional view of both homelessness and HIV.
"There are 5,783 reasons a person might have HIV or become homeless,"
she said. "Sometimes they are homeless people who just happen to have
AIDS. Many come here who became homeless because of AIDS - the family was
unwilling to deal with them. Sometimes it's substance abuse or poor education.
You can't say it's X, Y or Z that brings them here."
Independence is the goal of Haven House, said Green. The people who make it
through the application process, which involves sobering up and meeting a
number of requirements including age, health and criminal record stipulations,
run the house on their own. The employees leave every afternoon and usually do
not come in on the weekends. Residents make meals in the kitchen and grow
vegetables in the garden. They share a dog and an aquarium filled with fat
goldfish.
Kathy and her employees make sure the pantry is stocked, the roof isn't leaking
and money for electricity and property taxes flows in.
"I feel inadequate and overwhelmed just about every day," said Green,
who added she wakes up most nights around three in the morning worrying about
random problems like if she ordered enough drug-testing kits. Sometimes she
gets out of bed feeling guilty for something overlooked like running a resident
to the store to buy underwear. Then, on top of all of this, there is the looming
presence of the intolerant Bible-belters who have yet to come around to why
Haven House persists. Unlike cancer, AIDS is preventable, and typically results
from a series of poor, sinful choices. Sometimes this gets in the way of
charity.
"We've all done risky, stupid things," said Green. "The question
is, do people who do stupid things deserve to die or be ostracized?"
According to Green, Haven House is only just back on its feet. Katrina dealt
$90,000 worth of damage to the building. Green remembered how some people were
turned away from shelters when they admitted to having AIDS. She lamented how
people in Mississippi can legally be fired for being homosexuals.
"When people condemn what we do, we turn the other cheek and hand them a
brochure."
As Green arrived for work, Howell and her husband Jim stood outside sipping
their morning brew, laughing and talking about upcoming business both personal
and professional. Troy lit a Black and Mild cigarillo. This was the Aids
Service Coalition on a Tuesday.
Howell, dressed in denim from head to toe, headed inside to plan out her month.
Her office is one of several cavernous rooms inside the old home. Itsmells of
wood and creaks with every footstep. The occasional soft lamp lights the
corners of the hallways and the living room, but a colossal morning sun blasts
through three tall windows behind her desk. A DSM-IV sits idle beside a
coloring book on a bookshelf stuffed with pamphlets with titles like "How
To Find The Right HIV Combo for You," "Managing Diarrhea for the HIV
Positive," and "HIV and AIDS Information for Inmates." These
pamphlets are bright color, bold print endeavors usually featuring a series of
cartoons and lists of facts. Most of them are produced by the Mississippi State
Department of Health.
"There is more HIV out there than I first thought," said Howell as
she looked through her calendar. "There is more work to be done."
Howell originally thought she would go into hospice work after caring for her
parents throughout their final years, losing her mother to Alzheimer's and her
father to cancer. When she heard the position of house manager was open at
Haven House, she leapt at the opportunity.
"In this business you tend to look for small intrinsic rewards. If a
client doesn't work out, you're just happy to know you gave them a bed and a
roof over their head for a little while," she said, adjusting her heavy
glasses and smiling. "We're all free men."
Howell retrieved a poster from behind a stack of cardboard boxes, boxes filled
with female condoms. The poster was covered with images of healthy, beautiful
people - men with rippling muscles, women with long necks and shimmering
hair. She explained how people could have HIV for more than a decade before
showing any symptoms. She pointed at the images clipped from magazines saying
any one of these people could be infected, and people would love to have sex
with them.
"With the education I do, the rewards are similar. You may talk to 100
people, but you can tell only three of them heard you. But, those three will
hear and heed," she put the poster away, "There is no instant
gratification with my work."
After Howell takes Troy to his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, the rest of her
day will be filled with phone calls to set up appointments. She will speak in
front of nurses, inmates and social workers throughout the week.
She will tell them about a retired English teacher who spent several lonely
years biding her time after the death of her husband. She drank herself into a
dark place, but eventually started dating again and started to embrace
life. At 70-years-old, she broke her hip, and at the hospital she discovered
she had AIDS. She had not been sexually active since her late 50s.
She will tell them how one of the residents last year who had full-blown AIDS
called her in the middle of the night after injuring his head. She cut her hand
on the door of her car before holding his head as he went into shock. His blood
ran over her wounds, and she took 30 days of HIV medication before testing
negative. She will tell her audience what one month of pills feels like for an
HIV patient. She will tell them about screaming in her sleep and fainting
without warning. She will tell them what it feels like to linger in an empty
hope that this is not happening to you.
Howell will tell stories like this with a Zen calm and a matter-of-fact tone
calculated to drive the point home like a nail to the forehead.
"There is this saying I love. I don't know where it came from, but it goes
like this: When spider webs unite, they can tie up lions," Howell splayed
her fingers then interlocked them. "If I can weave a spider web of
education, I'm doing all I can do. I'm one more spider out there trying to
spin."
At the presentation before the homeless shelter, Troy had the crowd captivated.
They were connecting to him. His honesty was crippling.
In jail, a representative from the health department told
him he had tested positive for HIV. When he was released, he told no one. He
returned to crack, falling deeper into depression. By the time he got up the
courage to return to the health department, his condition had changed.
This was the big reveal, the twist - the healthy, straight and
respectable man sitting inches away from a captive audience had AIDS. This
was the sort of education Howell intended, and as Troy told them about his
weight loss and struggle to get off of the streets, the men gained hope. If he
could do it, so could they - and they had a head start of sorts if they
were willing to do what Howell suggested in order to remain free of disease.
Troy looked into Vincent's eyes, "Look, I was like you. I heard about
Magic Johnson and wondered if there was a cure. I'm here to tell you - there is
no cure."
Vincent said nothing.
"Here I am now, I'm living with this disease and have no symptoms. I was
having unprotected sex and getting high the whole time not knowing."
The men were all leaned in, listening.
"For a long time, during my drug-using, I used to pray to God to help me
to do something, to help me get off drugs. And this..." his arms were up
and his hands wide, "I don't want to confuse ya'll or nothing. But, I
thank God today for AIDS, because if it wasn't for AIDS, I'm 90 percent sure I
would be out there with a crack pipe in my mouth and a fifth of liquor in my hand.
That was me."
The room was a tomb.
Troy said, "Do any of you have any questions?"
Vincent raised his hand.
This article is pending publication.
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