It's March 25, 1999 – the day after my birthday. Exactly a dozen years ago back East I was told I had two years to live. Now, a decade past my expiration date, I do so in San Francisco where I have no ghosts, only the irony of living to 40 and having to worry about wrinkles. Of course ghosts cross continents with ease, but it's my birthday weekend and I decide just this once to spend it with the living. And so here I am, one of them, speeding on my way home from my boyfriend's house in the full sun of a California afternoon.

The freeway makes a great shortcut from Drew's place in Miraloma Park to my loft South of Market.  Me go fast! Motorcyclists do these things, seduced by the industrial romance of fine German engineering. I've been known to leave Drew in bed, ride home, and call to wish him something unspeakably filthy in less time than it takes him to fall asleep. The bike is canted at a fine, adrenaline spiked angle as I take the sharp, steep, elevated curve toward my exit. The view is spectacular, but I'm thinking of the romantic dinner we had the evening before. And of the subsequent night of knocking over furniture, spraying champagne on the ceiling, and otherwise frightening the horses. I'm grinning so hard my cheeks squeeze against the pads of my helmet. I'm anticipating bruises, and wondering if the earth people know why queer men so seldom bother with any contact sport other than the one we're best at. The right back pocket of my jeans has gone missing at some point in the previous night's wrestling and it's a bit drafty on the highway. This being the Homeland, I not only don't get arrested for indecent exposure but a car full of guys honks and cheers.

I'm turning so steeply my knee is almost touching the road. As Oakland, the Bay Bridge, and the high rises of downtown each takes a bizarrely tilted panoramic turn across the face plate of my helmet, I think “Not bad for a dead guy.” When every meal for ten years has been gravy, the thought that any one of them might be the last is more amusing than anything else. There are worse ways to die than on a motorcycle, and worse ways to live, too.

Still, as I reach the light at the bottom of the ramp and turn sedately onto my block, I think I'm due for a nap. Later Drew will come over and, turnabout being fair play, we'll get boot prints on my sheets and entertain the cat. Then out to eat again. I'm glad I haven't showered. Today I just want to be a happy animal.

—

It doesn't last. By 2:00 pm I've called to cancel all plans for the evening. I have a pounding head, a miserable stomach, and am pissed off to be stuck in bed but too weak to whinge about it. I want more life and I want it today, but I haven't survived the plague this long by being virally cavalier. I tell Drew I probably have the flu, hope I haven't shared it with him, and assure him that I don't need anything. I go to sleep, grumpy but patient. At least I still smell good.

I wake sometime later, vaguely aware that something's wrong. The feeling and the vagueness are familiar – lots of somethings have gone wrong in the last decade, and the first thing to go is usually being able to think clearly. It's clear, though, that I should be in the bathroom and I knock things over getting there – a macabre recap of the previous night's good time. My feet want to curl up toward my knees, my hands won't work, and my neck keeps pointing my head at the ceiling. I fall onto the toilet not quite in time. It quickly becomes apparent that what's happening to me requires the largest possible container, so I slip to the floor and try to crawl into the bathtub. I fall trying to get over the side and hit my head. When I come around, things have gone all strange.

My arms are trying to roll up backwards from my fingertips, and every muscle from the waist down seems to be trying to touch my toes to the back of my head. My neck is cooperating in this effort, which strikes me as a good idea since I'm now up to my chin in last night's four-star dinner. I'm distracted from drowning in my own puke and shit by my left calf muscle, which seems to have caught fire. My right hamstring gets a similar idea and then the entire right side of my body tries to curl back onto itself. I scream. My muscles are burning, shaking, and trying to bend my skeleton in directions in doesn't want to go. My feet slam into the glass shower doors which vibrate like a drum. My face turns into the bottom of the tub against my will, and what gets in my mouth is so foul I vomit again. I start to cry, first in rage, then in terror, and then in some terrible state where all the words run out into black.

—

I am floating and my head feels like a balloon. The room is moving and nausea cramps my gut. There's a bright light that hurts my eyes and then a man blocks it out – a big guy with a shaved head and a full red beard. Strawberry blond hair curls over the v-neck of surgical scrubs and sunburned freckles cover big forearms below massive tattooed biceps. His hands are on my shoulders and he leans over me, pinning me down, keeping me from flying off to someplace bad.

He says, slowly and clearly, “Do you know where you are? You're in an ambulance.”

He's obviously some Celtic God, talking to me like I'm an idiot. I say, slowly and clearly, “You're beautiful. Are we having sex?”

His eyes crinkle, “Not today. You might want to get washed up a bit first.,” I'm abruptly aware of a stench mythic in its awfulness, and that I feel just as awful.

His big hands on my shoulders are the foundations of the universe, and I'm coming around enough to be scared of how out of it I am. I say, "If we aren't having sex, why are you on top of me?” This is a test: I have a sick horror of being in any way helpless and at the mercy of straight men.

“You seemed to want to bang your brains out against the side of my nice bus, and since we're almost there, I didn't bother to get out the straps.“ I see he has a massive steel ring through each ear, and relax. It occurs to me that I'm very confused, and if I'm this confused, I must be very sick.

I feel badly about banging my head on his wall, so I say, “I'm sorry. I feel horrible.” As I say it, it becomes true. Everything from my nostrils to my asshole burns like I've been torched, and my pulse is hitting every muscle in my body like a hammer. I realize my fingers are still bending backwards, trying to touch my wrists. My hips seem to want to fuck the ceiling and I can't stop it no matter how much it hurts my back.

“You had a high fever, but it's a little better now. You're going to be all right.” And since he is a big red haired bear with pale blue eyes and earrings, I believe him. I have a lot of experience of him, after all. He's the one who makes it ok to pass out in a chair while the other guy is dying. He's the one who “accidentally“ lets you know the lock code to reprogram the morphine pump. When you finally can't take it any more and do something stupid, he's the one who loses your blood work so the suits who run the psyche ward have no evidence and have to let you go. He's my people and I'm with him, and if he says I'll be all right then I will be, even if I die. It's like when the minister says, "I now pronounce you man and wife.” Sometimes when the right person says the words, that makes them so.

I try to smile, but something vicious and hard grabs me by the gut and lifts everything but my head and heels toward the roof, in some awful parody of orgasm. I hear something crackling and think it's my spine or my jaw or maybe just starched sheets. It gets me by the feet and cracks me like a whip and a scream rips out of my mouth. My nose starts to bleed, it gets in my eyes, and that burns too. The smell gets worse.

It hurts a whole lot but I'm not scared. I'll be all right right now, even if I can't live anymore. The red bear has looked at me and seen me and knows me, just like I know him. So long as somebody knows you, you can be all right.

—

I won't remember much of the next day or so. Drew , having beat me to the hospital, will hold my hand the entire time and I'll know that. Nothing else will make much of an impression. Much later he'll tell me that I spiked a fever of 107° twice and that I was iced down several times. (I apparently disliked this process, and kept screaming about attempts to “make me a blended margarita because if I want a fucking girl drink I'll order a Cosmo.”) I'll learn that I became so dehydrated that they couldn't pump IV liquids into me fast enough, and that the electrolyte balance that nearly killed me also caused me to hallucinate freely and loudly. He'll tell me how impressed the staff were at my ability to continue vomiting 24 hours after my stomach was completely emptied. They'll have to mop my sweat up off the floor.

There will be an interesting moment when a misguided fire fighter enters the cubicle where I'm being treated, and I croak “Just what I need right now! The world's hottest fireman! Take off your shirt and get out!,”and then throw up. Paradoxically, this will convince Drew that I've not suffered permanent brain damage, and that will make him cry, sure that nothing short of death will ever shut me up.

I'll be delirious when I'm not unconscious, and will recite a long list of names over and over again. Drew will know without asking that they're all dead. I'll tell him to tell my living ex-lover I'm sorry, and to thank my mother for being my mother. He, no stranger to these situations, will take notes. In their attempts to control my fever and convulsions, the doughty folks at Davies Hospital will pump so many different drugs into me that I'll lose most of my vision for several days, but in the end they'll succeed in preventing me from becoming another name on my own list.   

I'll remember hardly any of it, and despite a thick scheaf of test results, no one will ever really know what happened to me.

I'll return home to find that it was my gorgeous neighbor next door who happened to hear me collapse through our adjoining bathroom walls. She will turn out to be responsible not only for having saved my life, but also for having cared for my cat, changed my sheets, and cleaned my bathroom while I was away. Eventually, between the magnificent pies she bakes and my own furiously stubborn gym habit, I'll regain the 30 pounds I've lost.

One day I'll have to let Drew go because I'm not the marrying kind and he is. Because of who and what we are I won't have to go without his love or friendship, but I'll miss his body in a way that hurts as much as our time at the hospital. I'll hate myself for what I'm not, and refuse to let anyone console me for a long time. Eventually I'll recover, and sometime after that, forgive myself for having recovered. Eventually he'll marry a friend of mine, and when I speak at their wedding I'll regret only that I didn't have sense enough to introduce them.

Drew will never think to ask why I spent that particular night in hell babbling about his red beard when he's blond and clean shaven, and so I won't explain about muscled red haired care bears and why, so long as their blue eyes see us, we don't have to be afraid. After all, he is me and I am like that too and we are all of us in this together, and we survivors know all that already.