“Undercurrent” is the title for this segment. It’s based on the death of my father. He was one of the first three or four victims officially diagnosed as AIDS sufferers. How he contracted it, I don’t know. He asserted that he wasn’t “one of those,” meaning gay men, I expect. I found that statement a bit incongruous, given that he once walked into my bedroom very late at night, two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, drunk and naked, sat down on my bed and started rubbing my leg. I do know that my father was enraptured by the pursuit of intoxicated pleasure of various sorts, though the specifics were vague. He held fast to his ego and defenses to the bitter end, so much so that neither of his children would come to see him in his final hours. Before I left him, in the hospital, in his final days, I looked into his face and a voice told me that, if there’s a hell beyond this life, that’s where he’s headed. True or not, the statement rang loud and clear in my head, almost like another voice that a schizophrenic might hear. LINKED HERE is the story.
