Why you should have an HIV test

Reason One: You've been human. \nI've witnessed a wide variety of personalities as a test counselor during the last few weeks: A young girl whose predatory sexual nature is expressed as if she's the narrator of a 13th-century morality play; another woman, this one with a boyfriend who tells her she is responsible for contraception and disease control; a celibate whose partner dangles just over the western horizon in St. Louis; the man separated, the woman divorced.\nThere are infinite varieties of basic plot -- stories that fall between fictionalized crime and suppositional truth. Man, woman, boy, girl in a kaleidoscope so crafty one can't predict the next crystalline combination. The unexpected color of a self-identified slut, the primness of new lovers listening carefully to one another's answers to a battery of questions on past behavior. \nReason Two: It's goal-directed therapy.\nOf great surprise to a test counselor: You are empowered to answer bedrock fundamental questions of right and wrong on a variety of topics. Resist all urges to do so. This is about genitals, needles and choice. You are not a divorce lawyer. You are not closer to Christ, even if you think you're doing God's work. \nFor the people testing, the interview before the test may be one of the few times sex talk hasn't been heating the room, clouding the senses or just a casual brag. Some grab the opportunity to spill the beans, some keep their cards continually close to their chest. \nThese interviews reveal that sex is not an evolutionary force -- we seem to be doing the same things that have been done throughout time. A few Eleanor of Acquitaines come drifting through, a Borgia and a Beatrice; several Henry VIII's show up; a few J. Edgar Hoovers. \nInterviews are sexual Darwinism, though they rarely reveal anything approaching truth if one follows the questions closely. You have to, like a Galapagos sparrow, branch off into the underbrush to find the food source, then develop the tool to extract it. This can only take 15 minutes -- we don't have time for an epoch to pass. \nReason Three: It's educational for me.\nI never understood why I liked Zola's "Nana" so much -- it's to French literature what "Dallas" is to television. It's gaudy, tawdry and winks foreshadows like a drag queen doing Streisand. It is utterly fabulous. Thus I was surprised as I met a Nana or two, an Undine Sprague, very Whartonish, and imagine my delight at a Wife of Bath! \nI never fully understood my choice of an undergraduate literature degree until now. \nReason Four: Fight the stereotype that heterosexuals are boring.\nI admit it -- I believe it, or I believed it. I thought I could decorate better, entertain more earnestly and have sex just a little kinkier than your run-of-the-mill hetero. My, my -- I stand corrected.\nReason Five: HIV Sucks Like Hell On Fire.\nReason Six: I promise I will try to tell you the truth.\nI hedge on the promise associated with this reason -- how could I not? Haven't you taught me at least one thing the last two years I've been a counselor? Absolutely. Truth is the story that is told by the comatose tornado victim on the Kansas farm about a wonderful place she went to while she visibly vegetated on her bed. Nobody believes an eyewitness. \nThe other promise I won't even try to make is I won't judge you. Of course I will, I'm sorry to say. But I promise you, before every interview my mantra is: I've been every buffoon you could possibly be. If this were baseball, baby, I'd be looking for the pitcher's heat. \nIt is baseball and virtually every other metaphor. Stories of lives inevitably yoke disparate elements together with violence -- that's why we still read Andrew Marvell and John Donne. We are perpetual walk-ons to our favorite soaps, with plots that soar into statistically unlikely cul-de-sacs. I keep thinking Karen from "Knot's Landing" will be next through the door. \nUnless it's particularly pertinent, you don't have to discuss my life with me, and I rarely offer the fact of my serostatus unless I need a Nosferatu to liven up the zombie quality of the conversation. Yes, like the narrator of Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus," I eat men like air. Yep, I'll play the AIDS card. Judge my crime by intent. \nI use metaphors for testing because there is no Axis Mundi, no cylinder of universe running through the heart of a Taino village. The relativists have triumphed! The idea of separate dimensions existing side by side is tantalizing but poorly evidenced by the mere verbal. \nI try to think of a word or a phrase that will fit in your pocket, a Chairman Mao primer for a sexualized world. Stock aphorisms skirt sex, diseases of sex, all the clutch and throttle that fills the engine of a typically sexual life. \nWhere words fail, actions don't. After my first week of test counseling, I started jettisoning rules that were suggested by my State Department of Health training. Not that it wasn't helpful, but that's just what one has to do with such training. I began to see that people deserved more than rules, they at least deserved information. Sometimes it isn't about the open-ended question, that conversation laxative. \nIt's about patterns traced through yes and no, the revelation of a life spent looking for love, the torturous or virtuous paths of that two-faced Venus. And not the classical version -- this little vixen is pure Botticelli.