aren’t required to talk about condoms, much less give them out, but on Super Bowl Sunday five children from a family of religious zealots were in a county emergency room with bruises and both old and new fractures. The five-year-old with the broken nose said she got hit for not sweeping the floor right.
“The family? I think it’s like a balloon that you keep blowing air into, and it’s holding more and more, but at a certain point it can’t hold any more and it just explodes.” Nancy Glatz, a practical nurse and a caseworker for Early Head Start in Jamestown, was talking about how everything has changed—the role of the city, the economic base, expectations of work and generational progress, the responsibilities of government. And everyone acknowledges there’s no going back. When it comes to the family, though, there’s only going back—to a Lucy–Desi ideal that was never true in the first place.
It’s common these days to hear talk of the Golden Age of the working class, when the household was strong, the factory secure and upward mobility seemed certain. This is the happy-family working class I came up in back in the 1960s and 1970s in Buffalo. I was hardly alone. But beside all of our happy families there were always unhappy ones, in which work was unsteady, violence came easily, and mothers and daughters and their daughters too lost their youth in vows of love that never turned out as they’d hoped. No one likes to remember those families, not even the children who come from them. They are the people who lost at a time when the country’s story admits only of winners. But someone always did the low-wage jobs, always got on the slow track in school. “I never wanted to be like my mother,” a young Jamestown woman told me, speaking of one of my contemporaries. “She had me when she was fifteen. I got pregnant at sixteen and ended up doing exactly what I never wanted to do.”
About seventy-five families—most with two adults—participate in Nancy Glatz’s Head Start program. She describes the general scheme of their lives as chaotic, constantly on the edge of want, dangerous in so many ways beyond the physical. Often there is no phone; there is no car, or one car and it’s the man’s car. Having control of so little else in life, he carries the Medicaid cards and every other family document, and he decides who is welcome in the house. Sometimes when he goes out, he takes the rest of the family’s boots and coats with him. But every time the caseworkers first visited these families, the women said that except for a few small problems everything was fine. It was only later—sometimes years later, when they began to trust that any revelation would not automatically call down Child Protective Services to haul away their kids—that they opened up. Still, there’s the shame, the fear that in a small town to say you need help because of alcohol or violence or mental illness or just the awful narrow limits of your life is to risk being branded sick or something worse.
When Wendy went on national television and stated that Andrea had been abused, all kinds of people in Jamestown responded bitterly, And where were you? No one seemed to know or care what this crime must have cost her, a woman who’d left her good-for-nothing husband, who’d hoped she could “save” the man who hurt Andrea and broke with him right after it happened, who says she was molested herself as a child, whose hit-and-miss strategy for dealing with this multiple horror was to shut away her own past, cart her daughter to a series of (as it turns out, dubious) therapists, throw herself into such Good Mother roles as scout leader, and never, ever allow herself to be touched by a man again. Nothing she did saved Andrea from HIV, and the nasty truth is that there are harder cases than Andrea’s. They’re the married women with HIV, the women in committed relationships, the ones who wouldn’t have dreamed of asking their men to use a condom, and whose very existence upsets all standard notions about HIV.
“I see people come in here, and it kills me,” Rose Torres said one afternoon in her office at AIDS Community Services. “I’m twenty-five, and I think, ‘Okay, it can happen to me, but not to my mother,’ and then these ladies my mother’s age walk in. People don’t want to talk about that.” Indeed, Rose’s colleague, Kathleen Whitmore, didn’t.
“What about women in relationships?” I asked Whitmore. “If you’re a ‘bad girl’ maybe people think you have no right to safety, but if you’re a ‘good girl’ you have no need for safety. How do you deal with that, since statistically the majority of women with HIV got it from a partner, not from a one-night stand?”
“What do you mean when you use the word relationship?”
“Married women, people who live together—a month, a year, twelve years. How do you ask a guy to use a condom when asking suggests he’s cheating, and cheating suggests you’re failing?”
“Well, I kind of think you can tell when someone’s cheating, don’t you?”
“Do you ever use a condom?”
“I’m married.”
There have been fifty-two cases of full-blown AIDS in Chautauqua County since the epidemic began being tracked in the US in the 1980s, but most of those, Dr. Berke said, “have been secret.” The county women with HIV whom nurse Margaret Geer has been visiting to help with insurance claims, social services and the like all thought marriage or commitment was a prophylactic until someone in the family got sick. Only one of their men was an IV drug user, and only one had clandestine homosexual encounters from what Geer has been able to determine, though the men might not tell everything. (Did they ever share a needle? Did they ever have sex in prison?) What they do admit to is sex with other women. One called it “my sport.” And what strikes Geer about the women she visits, all working-class, is their isolation, their lack of confidence, the huge degree of control they ceded to their men, and the silence that, until HIV was added to the mix, covered it all. Lately she’s begun visiting one of Williams’ partners.
Nationally, two of the top known concentrations of women with HIV are in Newark, New Jersey, and Macon, Georgia. In Newark the profile of “women at risk” fits those most at risk of any torment of poverty in a hard city. In Macon it’s different. Women there learned they were HIV positive when they went to give blood for Desert Storm at Robins Air Force Base. Many of their husbands are vets who years earlier had had trouble with drugs, cleaned up and came home to set their lives right. They didn’t talk much about the past, not at all about HIV. The CDC estimates that anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 people don’t know they’re positive, and the majority of the public that thinks HIV is someone else’s problem grows bigger with every poll. Almost every straight person I talked to before leaving for Jamestown, most of them well-educated grown-ups in New York, said there must be some secret I’d have to unearth about these girls. “It’s almost impossible to get it just from sex between men and women,” they said, even though sex between men and women is the fastest-growing mode of HIV transmission.2 Amber Hollibaugh says that when she started the Lesbian AIDS Project some gay women said she’d never find more than a dozen cases—Everyone knows we don’t get it!—but now the project involves 400 women in New York City alone. In Jamestown some of Williams’ friends said they believe him when he says he thought the authorities who told him he was positive while in jail were just trying to scare him into leaving town. But his friend Amber, who was with him on and off for nine months, now thinks that he was mostly in denial: “When I went to visit him, he said, ‘Do I look sick? I don’t feel sick.’ I think he convinced himself that it wasn’t true—and, you know, you can convince yourself of anything.”
Watching Williams escorted out of a Bronx courtroom, giving a half-smile and two-fingered salute to someone in the gallery, I thought of Ohio. “That was his big dream,” Amber said, “to move to Ohio and make a life. He went there when he was younger; his dad used to live there—now, I don’t know if that’s true but it’s what he said—and he loved it.” By now the rough sketch of Williams’ biography has been drawn often enough, and it contains precious little of the stuff of dreams: born in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his mother addicted to crack, his father jailed when he was four; a sweet kid attractive to females from an early age, an angry teenager who was in special
