Tamra Parrish thought she was going to die immediately. She started using heroin and smoking crack cocaine every single day. She shuttled in and out of treatment programs, waiting to die, turning her back to life.
On Tuesday in Wilder, she and three HIV positive men told their personal stories, of how they contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and how they’ve come to terms with their own lives.
“I went through treatment programs, and in a couple of months I was back on heroin,” Parrish said. “I realized I was afraid to live with it.”
But she finally found treatment, both for HIV and for substance abuse, and found herself wanting to give back.
“I started wanting to help, to do something…if I could make some good out of it,” she said. She heard someone talk about a program where they went out to middle schools, educating students first-hand about living with the disease, and she took to the schools.
“They were hanging on to every single word,” she said. “From that day on I saw that this was my mission.”
Parrish also spoke about telling her children. Her mother had told them that she had cancer, but Parrish realized that she’d have to tell her kids before she told middle-schoolers. She told them.
“I told them that they could ask me any questions that they wanted, and the first question was, ‘Are you gonna die?”
She said no. “I have what everybody else has, and that’s today.”
Bruce Jones was a director of a resident treatment center in San Francisco, and he says he’d had an awareness of AIDS for some time. He said that just having the information isn’t enough to keep you from contracting HIV.
To him, HIV has sometimes meant silence.
“I had 15 friends die,” he said. “Those people who were my clique — they’re all dead. That’s gone, that’s a missing piece.”
It’s also meant a financial burden, if not for him, on the system.
“Think about being forced to buy a new Honda Accord every year,” he said. “The meds are $15,000 a year. I take eight pills a day and a shot of testosterone every week.”
“Every time I take a pill, I’m reaffirming that I’m sick,” he added.
Jones said he came out as gay in 1976 in San Francisco, and got sick upon his return to Cleveland some 20 years later. Being gay — and HIV positive — in Cleveland has been no easy task.
“It’s particularly hard in Cleveland where there’s so much homophobia and denial,” he remarked. “It was such a radical difference from San Francisco.”
When he first got sick, he didn’t know he had HIV, but wasn’t surprised to hear that he did.
“I came home one Friday and on Saturday I couldn’t get out of bed,” he said.
The next day, doctors told him he had full-blown AIDS. The following day, they said that he had six T-cells, cells which are instrumental in maintaining the body’s immune system. A normal T-cell count is in the hundreds.
He spent 17 weeks in the hospital. When he got out, he said he had to work his way back, day by day. When given the opportunity to educate kids about HIV in the classroom about his disease, he too became involved.
But for him, his work as an educator is waning, as he’s decided he needs to focus more on taking care of himself.
Another man, who goes only by “Ramizz,” told of his homelessness, recovery from alcoholism and a narcotics addiction, and living with HIV in prison.
Ramizz said he discovered he had HIV in 1985. “At that point of time in history there was not a name,” he said.
While concurrently wrestling with alcoholism and his marijuana use, he found the courage to call a friend in New York City and tell him of his condition.
“There was a long pause, and he said, ‘Welcome to the club,’” Ramizz said.
He stayed asymptomatic until 1987, when he contracted tuberculosis in a county jail in Georgia. There, he was quarantined for having HIV.
After serving his sentence, Ramizz took up crack cocaine, and in 1990, contracted another opportunistic infection, herpes zoster. He said he was also living with “drugs, alcohol and homelessness.”
“We lived our lives doing drugs and alcohol,” he said.
In 1995, Ramizz contracted a form of meningitis, and quickly became comatose. Near death and attached to machines, he fought to stay alive.
“My mother convinced the doctor to keep me on life support,” he said.
But he miraculously recovered. Paralyzed, and without the use of one ear, he became dependent on others for his survival. He spent some time wheelchair-bound in a Wisconsin nursing home, which, he said chuckling, is far worse than any Oberlin student can say about Ohio.
Coaxed along by a relative, Ramizz managed to start learning to love life again. He began to make use of his legs, traipsing up and down the fire escapes of the nursing home.
“One flight at a time, every day,” he said.
With the help of medication, paid for by the state, his viral load is nearly undetectable. “My T-cells have risen from a low of 17 to 775,” he said.
“Today,” he remarked, “is where I go from here. Today, I have a lot of hope.”
Ray Allmond, the last of the four speakers, started by saying that HIV/AIDS is not the cynosure of his life. “HIV or AIDS is not who I am,” he said.
Allmond said his life has been framed by dualities, with swings from near-failure to remarkable achievement. After completing his high school degree, he attended Case Western Reserve University. During his first semester, he nearly failed out of college, and in his second, he scored the highest of any black student in his class.
“I did real good in school, when I went,” he said. He noted that it was hard for him to get to school since he lived with three working mothers and 17 children in a single house.
“I grew up in very adverse circumstances,” he remarked.
He became involved at Caramel House, which he said is the oldest interracial theater in the country, in Cleveland. There, he explored his sexuality as a same-gender loving man. He also spent some time in the fire department.
“I eventually got back into theater, but the drugs and alcohol basically set in then… and I became very promiscuous,” he said. “The drug addiction grew and by 1990 I realized that I got to leave Cleveland or I’m gonna die.”
“I bought a one-way bus ticket to LA,” he said, “and ended up in Las Vegas.”
In 1994, he returned to Cleveland, and his health started to decline.
“I assumed it was the drugs and alcohol,” he said. “I had been basically celibate for 12 years because I thought that would help me from getting the virus…that was my stupid thought.”
“When I was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS it was a relief,” he continued. “Finally, I knew what was going on.”
“It put the brakes on the drugs and alcohol,” he said. “For the first time in 10 to 12 years I felt like Ray.”
Allmond stated that he wants to write a play about AIDS today. While many plays surrounding AIDS were written at the onset of the epidemic in the early ’80s, few have dealt with the experience of African Americans.
“I want to write a play that’s going to help tell the story,” he said. “There’s really nothing out there that’s telling the story now… The ball is shifting squarely in the hands of the African American and minority community.”