Ryan White - My Own Story (15 page)

Mom rolled her eyes and threw her hands up in the air like she’d really had it.
“Ryan,”
she said. “You walk outside, and the whole neighborhood is looking out their window to see what you do, where you go, who you’re with.”

“Every time I see Mitzi Johnson on TV,
she’s
smoking,” I retorted. “I think I’ll go ask her if she wants a puff on mine.” But I couldn’t; I was grounded. I guess I had to be grateful no one had spotted Heath and me the night we mooned cars and went skinny-dipping in his family’s pool.

Still, sometimes it was neat to be recognized. When Mom and I walked off the set when we were on
The Today Show
, there was Tom Cruise in the green room. That’s where you wait for your turn to go on the air. Tom Cruise was going on after us.

He stood to shake my hand as soon as I came around the corner. I looked at him. I couldn’t believe he was real. I’m really very shy, so I just stared. Very sophisticated.

Lucky for me, he spoke first. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Ryan White.”

“I know
you,”
I countered. “You’re Tom Cruise.”

“Yeah,” Tom Cruise said loudly, “but you’re
Ryan White.”

Then all three of us cracked up. It was funny and nice at the same time—even better than the surf shirts Mom bought me at Macy’s or the comic-book store, which did have the Batman I was hunting for. In New York you can find everything you’ve been wanting.

But it wasn’t the same as going to school with my friends. The yearbook said it all: My photo was set off on a page by itself. “Ryan White, Homebound Instruction.” I missed racing for the bus with the other kids. I was bummed when Mrs. Samsel dissected a grasshopper I couldn’t see. It was good to meet up with Heath in the afternoons, but I missed eating lunch every day with him. January dragged by.

Western had appealed to the State Department of Education to ask them to ignore the hearing officer and keep me out of school. But the wind didn’t seem to be blowing their way. Mom and I had a good laugh when we read in the paper that the Western school board was having trouble finding a doctor who would side with them. Just about the only one who was willing to speak for them was personal doctor to Lyndon LaRouche, a right-winger who was a big fan of conspiracy theories and once fingered Queen Elizabeth II as a drug kingpin. I don’t see how a queen can be a kingpin, but maybe I lack imagination.

Mr. Colby could see the handwriting on the wall. He and the school nurse talked to Dr. Kleiman, and then started prepping everybody at Western. Kids in junior high got a class on AIDS, and first aid kits for their classrooms. Plus every night the whole school was going to be disinfected. The rate they were going, I’d be surprised if anybody caught so much as a cold the whole school year.

Mom thought Western wouldn’t be so petrified if we agreed that we’d go along with some extra precautions that Mr. Colby had thought up. They went farther than the state guidelines.

“They’re ridiculous,” I complained. “I’m not going to infect anyone anyway.”

“I think we should make the effort,” Mom said. “If they’re going to let you go back, let’s meet them halfway.”

So I agreed to skip gym. I really wasn’t supposed to go at all, because of my hemophilia, but I never admitted that. I said that in the cafeteria I’d use paper plates and trays and plastic spoons and forks that could be thrown out when I was done. Mr. Colby thought I should use a separate water fountain, and a private toilet, so I went along with that too.

One of Mitzi Johnson’s favorite fears was that I’d chew on a pencil—and then some kid would chew on it after me. Just another way you can’t catch AIDS. So I told Mom, “I dare Western to think up anything else.”

In early February the state threw out Western’s appeal and said I could go back to school. But first, because of that old law, I had to get a medical certificate from Dr. Adler, the county health officer, to prove that I was healthy enough, physically and emotionally, to go to school.

When I went to see Dr. Adler, he threw in some free advice as well. “You’ll be watched all the time,” he told me. “You’ll have to behave yourself.” So much for smoking, I thought.

I got the okay from Dr. Adler the day before Valentine’s Day, but the school wanted me to hold off for a week. Mr. Colby thought I should start on a Friday and come for just half a day. That way, everyone would have the weekend to adjust. I spent the week debating what to wear on my first day back, and bouncing off the four walls of my room. Finally it was Friday, February 21, the day I was due at school.

We knew there’d be a media mob, so Andrea was going to take the school bus, like it was just another day. Steve said he’d drive me. On Friday morning I woke up at six o’clock. It had snowed in the night, so I began to worry that school would be closed. Not enough snow, said the radio.

So when Steve arrived, we gingerly picked our way out to his car. Steve had on a leather jacket and looked like my bodyguard. Those reporters were waiting. Everywhere I turned, there was a camera or a microphone in my way. Whenever that happens, I’m always tempted to make a face or an impolite noise. But I stayed cool.

Someone was asking me, “How does it feel, Ryan?”

There you go again! Actually, I felt wonderful. “I’m real happy—real happy I’m going back,” I said.

As we started out for Western, a bus driver yelled out his window, “Good morning, Ryan!” It did seem like a pretty good day. But my heart sank as Steve pulled up to Western. There must have been a hundred reporters out front. Mr. Colby had said he would be prepared for us at the front door but I had Steve whip the car around to the side entrance so that I could sneak inside. Right away the press people realized they’d been duped, and came stampeding around the building, cameras and all. I could hear kids snickering as reporters racing each other for an exclusive started slipping and sliding around in the snow. Well, if they couldn’t see me, they could grab a few shots of the demonstrators. Some kids were marching up and down outside with big picket signs that said, “Students Against AIDS.”

Since we hadn’t moved back to Kokomo all that long ago, I was pretty much the new face in school. A lot of kids only knew me from TV. I tried hard to fit right in and act no different from everyone else. If a kid came up to me and said, “I saw you on the news last night,” I answered, “Really?”—like it was nothing to get worked up about. Some kids stared at me. Still, no one was unfriendly to my face.

But Andrea overheard a kid say that I was a murderer, because now that I was back, other students were going to die. With all the reporters around, I barely noticed that almost half the school was missing. Their parents had kept them out. I guess they agreed with the kid who called me a killer. It turned out that all the extra precautions Mom and I had said I’d take at school had backfired. Some parents were asking, “Why would he have to do that if he’s not contagious?”

Before I knew it, I was out of school too. Only my first day, and already I had to go to the principal’s office. I got pulled out of class and told to see Mr. Colby. He said I had to leave Western right away and go back to court. Mitzi Johnson and some other parents who called themselves the Concerned Citizens and Parents of Children Attending Western School Corporation were carrying out their threat—they were suing my family, Dr. Adler, and the school for taking me back, in the names of three students I barely knew, two boys and a girl.

The Concerned Citizens even tried to have our county’s welfare director declare Mom an unfit mother, take me away from her, and make me a ward of the court. Then, they figured, the court would keep me out of school. They said that by letting me go to school, Mom was allowing me to kill other kids—and even to be killed myself if I picked up some illness from them! But the welfare director squelched the parents’ plan. He said they had no evidence Mom was unfit.

So Mom came and got me, and we found ourselves sitting with Mr. Vaughan in front of another judge. The courtroom was packed with Concerned Citizens. I wondered if I was having a recurring nightmare. The parents claimed all over again that they were worried about their children’s safety. The doctors on our side answered all over again that I was no threat. But the judge decided I had to stay home. “I hereby authorize a restraining order,” he said.

I was too stunned to say anything. For a few seconds so was everyone else. Then all the Western parents started clapping and cheering, like they’d hit the ball right out of the stadium.

I felt like
I
was being hit. I struggled not to cry. I turned to Mom, who was already weeping. “They’ve ruined
everything
,” I managed to whisper.

We hustled out the back door of the courthouse, and rushed home. I went straight to my room and slammed the door. If I was going to cry, I wanted to do it in private. Am I ever going to win at anything? I thought. Tom Cruise and regular people in New York and Rome could look me in the eye and not be afraid, but my whole town seemed to think AIDS was God’s pest control. I put on my favorite Springsteen album.

Son take a good look around
This is your hometown
This is your hometown

Bruce wasn’t a big help. I switched over to Huey Lewis. Later that night, Kris, my old girlfriend, called. Even though her parents didn’t want her near me, she could still hang around with Andrea.

“Hey, Ryan,” she said. “Sorry I missed your first day back.”

“Yeah, what happened?” I muttered. “I wondered where you were.”

There was a pause. “My parents made me stay home,” Kris said sheepishly.

I threw the phone against the wall.

Rumors about me even appeared in the paper. The
Kokomo Tribune
ran editorials supporting me, but the other side made up for them by writing letters to the editor. Someone who signed off as “A 1983 graduate of Western High School”—in other words, a teenager like me!—wrote in, “Would you want your little brother, sister, cousins, or friends’ siblings to be with a young man who constantly threatens to bite, scratch, or spit on children if things aren’t done ‘his way’? How about eating food from a local store where his family was asked to leave because he was spitting on the fresh produce? Or using a restrain where he urinated on the walls?”

I guess the writer was talking about my private toilet at Western. The day that letter was published, Mom called Mr. Colby at Western to make sure he hadn’t fallen for it.

“Mrs. White,” he assured her, “I know Ryan has always behaved well. I’ve never had any complaints about him.” So let me come back to school!

Then came Easter Sunday. Normally, at our church, the whole congregation says “Happy Easter!” to each other this way: Our minister steps forward to the front pew, shakes a few parishioners’ hands, and says “Peace be with you.” Then those people turn to their neighbors and shake
their
hands, and so on, all the way to the back of the church, where we were sitting.

The family in the pew in front of me turned around. I held my hand out—to empty air. Other people’s hands were moving every which way, in all directions away from me. No one in the whole church wanted to shake my hand and wish me peace on Easter.

My family and I filed out of church in silence. “Maybe I should run after a few people and grab their hands, just to shake them up,” I said to Mom. You could tell nothing was going to make Grandma feel better. She looked devastated, like she was going to burst into tears any minute. Grandpa said grimly, “I’m never going back.” And he didn’t.

It wasn’t over yet. As Mom, Andrea, and I turned out of the church parking lot, our transmission died on us in the middle of the traffic lane. Grandpa and Grandma had already gone, so Mom tried to flag down some other cars leaving church. But no one would stop. A half hour or so went by, and then finally a man in a truck pulled away from the auto-parts store across the street, nosed up behind us, and pushed our car over to the side of the road.

Our rescuer climbed out of his truck and asked Mom, “Need a lift home?”

Mom took a deep breath and said, “First I better tell you who we are,” and she did.

The truck driver shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said. He drove us home. A couple of months later he stopped by and invited me hang gliding.

G
RANDMA COULDN
’
T
get over the way I had been shunned at church. She went back and forth between wanting to kill half of Kokomo, and crying nonstop.

Mom got a call from Aunt Janet down in Birmingham. “Look, Jeanne, I’m really afraid for Mom,” Janet said. “I’m scared she’s going to have a nervous breakdown.”

“I know,” Mom said. “She worries about Ryan, and she worries about me too. She thinks she has to change everybody’s minds all by herself.”

“Please, Jeanne,” Janet said, “please stop fighting. Give up your case.”

“I can’t,” Mom said.

“Stop for Mom’s sake,” Janet said. “This is so hard on the family. Let Ryan go to school at home.”

“He’s my son,” Mom said. “It’s his life. I have to fight for him. It’s what he wants.”

Then the next Sunday something truly awful happened. We still went to church, because it helped us to pray as a family. In church I thought about how much hope I had for the future. We’re all going to die of something, and I was so much healthier than some AIDS patients I’d met in the hospital. I felt that God had a reason for that. I had a purpose in life, to keep up my fight.

When we got home, there was a bullet hole in our front window.

Andrea had been having nightmares ever since all our Christmas presents had been stolen while I was in the hospital. “Mom,” she said, “I don’t want to live here anymore. What if we’d been home?”

“It only happened because we weren’t home,” Mom said. “They’re trying to scare us. We won’t let them.”

But Mom had problems of her own. Some joker let all the air out of her back tires in the Delco parking lot. Kids biked or drove by our house practically every day and threw beer cans, whiskey bottles, and garbage on our lawn, or egged our windows or our car. They’d yell “Bitch! Bitch!” or “Ryan White’s a fag!” Blair Brittain told me his family could hear them in their living room, across the street. Once Mom, Andrea, and I were walking back to the car at a mall. A kid on a bike whizzed right between us, laughing and shouting, “Ryan White’s a faggot!”