Ryan White - My Own Story (22 page)

“Why don’t you come to a taping?” Alyssa asked. “You could be my guest. You’d get to see where they place the cameras, how they get different shots, where we have to stand and move around on the set.”

“Wow, I’d love that!” I told her. “What was your all-time favorite episode?”

Alyssa laughed. “Samantha getting a hickey!”

“Mine too,” I said. “That was a good one! Did you have to go out and get a real one for the camera?”

“My hickey was the magic of Hollywood makeup,” Alyssa answered, rolling her eyes and smiling.

“Did you get teased anyway?” I asked.

“No, because the script was about dealing with peer pressure.” She looked at me. “I guess you know something about that.”

I nodded. I did know what it could do to people.

Alyssa had about a million silver bangles clinking up and down her arm, along with a friendship bracelet—one of those bands of multicolored woven threads with long, loose ends. She took it off and tied it around my wrist. She told me to leave it on until it wore off. Then she shook my hand good-bye.

I was ecstatic. Still, there was something missing. I wasn’t sure whether I was doing the right thing, so I needed a go-between.

“Mom,” I said, “do you think I could ask Alyssa for a kiss good-bye?”

“Well,” Mom said, “she can only say no.” Alyssa was about to walk out the door, but Mom caught up with her. They huddled for a few seconds, and then Alyssa came marching back, grinning from ear to ear. She gave me a giant hug and a big kiss.

“I’ll never wash that cheek again,” I told her. I felt eight feet tall.

“You certainly can talk to anyone,” Mom marveled. “You could make the President of the United States feel comfortable.”

I didn’t say anything. I was much happier I’d made Alyssa feel like I was an ordinary kid. After she left, I started to untie her bracelet.

“Ryan, what are you doing?” Mom exclaimed. “Aren’t you going to keep it on forever?”

“I want to
keep
it forever,” I said. “I don’t want it to get dirty.” When I got home, I hung Alyssa’s bracelet on my bedroom wall.

I
N
D
ECEMBER
I turned sixteen. Right away John Riser gave me a job, working at Maui Surf and Sport on Saturdays and weeknights. My first paycheck! Most of John’s customers for boards were kids about my age. Usually they knew what they wanted. We had a whole wall covered with boards, all of them different shapes and designs in cool colors. The more of a concave your board has, the more tricks you can do. We had wheels in different colors too—but what counts with wheels is how hard they are. I’d talk to each customer, try to find out how much skating he did and how well, and then match his board and wheels to his style. The harder your wheels, the easier they slide. That’s important if you spend a lot of your time practicing tricks on a half-pipe, which is a laminated ramp. For a street skater like me, hard wheels aren’t as important.

“There’s nothing we can’t get,” I’d tell customers. “If it’s hot on the West Coast, we have it.”

John liked to find obscure lines of clothing and gear from small outfits, so Maui would stay unique. Just to show you what I mean, we sold roller blades, but they weren’t the big fad they are now. We kept up with trends, and stayed ahead of the pack.

Once I’d matched my customer with the right components, I’d custom-build his board on a workbench in front of him. First I’d cut the grip tape to fit the board’s shape. Then I’d put the wheels on the truck—that’s the mount for the wheels. Then the mount goes on the board, and you’re set. The whole job takes about ten minutes.

Now and again I heard people gasp when they came into the store and spotted me walking around or back at the bench. I guess John took a chance taking me on. But nothing went wrong. When people spoke to me, they usually said something nice or wanted to know if it was really me. They’d go, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere? You look
so
familiar.” I just talked to them in a down-to-earth way, like I wasn’t anyone special.

One day I was waiting on someone, and all of a sudden a kid who’d come in with his parents said, “Hey, Ryan!” I turned around. There was one of the two boys in whose names the Concerned Citizens had sued to keep me out of Western.

We didn’t say anything memorable to each other, just the usual—“How’re you doing, man? Good to see you! What’s going on?” But he seemed really glad to see me, and so did his parents. By then I’d been out and around enough to know when someone was faking. This time I thought the whole family was saying, “Let’s forgive and forget, okay?”—like they meant it. I was real pleased that they had seen me on the job.

John Riser and I had gotten to be good friends. We skated out back quite a lot. “Pretty good vigor there,” he’d tell me. Afterward we’d go wolf tacos. Now that I was an employee, I had a discount, so I gave John some business myself. I’d finally gotten my learner’s permit. When a group of Indiana car dealers gave me a black 1987 Chevy Cavalier with gray interior, sunroof, and stereo, I drove it over to Maui right away to show it off to John.

I told him I had a fuzz buster—a police radar detector. That was a secret I kept from almost everyone. It kind of made up for the pillow I had to keep on the driver’s seat so I could see over the wheel. Having the car made me more interested in school games and parties and made me feel I now really looked sixteen. Someone who already had a license had to be in the car with me. So I’d offer to take a bunch of kids to whatever was happening over the weekend.

Ryan in his room decorated with his
Max Headroom
poster, 1988.

I was out of work for a while in January because I got my second bout of pneumocystis pneumonia—something everybody’d been waiting for since I was diagnosed. Still, I spent only eighteen days in the hospital—no big setback. According to the press, I was officially no longer dying. In fact,
People
magazine ran a lot of photographs showing the world how well I looked. In one of them, I was sprawled on my bed, doing homework.

The next week I got a funny phone call. “Helloooooo, Ryan,” Matt Frewer said. “I like your
Max Headroom
poster.” He spotted it on my bedroom wall in the
People
photograph. Matt has sharp eyes and a sharp sense of humor. Even his answering machine is funny. “I’m not here,” he says. “Well—you know what I mean.” He called up regularly, just to see how I was doing. I really wanted to look him up in L.A. He said he’d come out to Indiana too. One day I was in the family room watching
Doctor Doctor,
and there Matt was in an episode about a patient with AIDS. I shouted for Mom to come downstairs. At the very end we saw Matt come on screen and announce that the preceding episode had been dedicated to me. “He was treated badly by people who didn’t know better,” Matt said. It was Matt’s little surprise for us—and it had been a big one!

Then I had to ask John for some extra time off. I was going to have a chance to talk to the President of the United States—at least, to his Commission on AIDS. They were inviting me and Mom to Washington to talk about prejudice against people with AIDS. And they wanted Jill Stewart to tell them about Hamilton Heights’ crash course in AIDS education.

I got my time off—along with a strong dose of teasing. John didn’t want me getting a swollen head. He would tell me, “I’ll never say you were the best worker I ever had.” Sure enough, he hasn’t.

But now I was in major trouble. I had to write a statement to read to the Commission. Like I said, I never have done well in English. I did get an A on that one paper I wrote about Mom when we were back in Kokomo. It was the brief, very brief story of my life, one page exactly. And still I took two weeks to come up with something halfway presentable.

My paper for the Commission had to be around three or four pages long.
Aargh!
Mom had a good idea, though. She said, “Why don’t we go see your English teacher, Mrs. Reeves? Maybe she can help.”

When we got to Mrs. Reeves’ office, she had a pile of essays she’d just marked sitting on her desk. We explained my problem.

“Well, Ryan,” she said, “you just got an A on this last paper you wrote, the one called ‘My Odyssey.’ I think it can get you started.”

I looked over my paper, which had been about moving from Kokomo to Cicero. There
was
a lot of stuff I could use. I knew I had to mention the bad old days in Kokomo, and things like Ryan White jokes and rumors about my biting and spitting on people and the day my locker was vandalized. The Commission needed to know what went on.

But I also remembered Mom’s approach to Dick and Charlie. You always have to live with what you say. It’s important to be dignified—especially when the President might read what you write. So I planned to concentrate on how much my life had changed. Cicero and my new school had worked hard not to be like Kokomo.

Mrs. Reeves understood what I was after. I came up with an outline, and she and Mom helped me polish three and a half pages that seemed reasonably okay. Jill was used to giving speeches, being a student politician. But even she was nervous about our trip. I think she felt a little funny. This was such a good thing for both of us, but it happened because of a bad thing—my disease.

Jill, Mom, and I flew to Washington and took a look at all the famous buildings and monuments—even the
other
White House. I really liked the Vietnam memorial, the way you could see all the soldiers’ names written on shiny black marble and your own face reflected among them.

Ryan and Ted Koppel on
Nightline
before Ryan’s appearance at the President’s Commission on AIDS, March 1988.

The night before we were going to speak to the Commission, Ted Koppel had all three of us on
Nightline.
He’s famous for asking questions nobody else asks. Sure enough, he said to me, “Here you are, sixteen years old, when most youngsters really don’t have to think about death at all. That’s something way down the road. How have you come to terms with it?”

“Well,” I said, and took a deep breath, “I believe that when you die you go to a better place. And I believe in God and everything, and I’m not really afraid of dying.”

You don’t hear people telling Ted Koppel stuff like that every night. So he asked, “Are you a very religious person now?”

I simply said, “I’m very religious.”

“Have you always been?” Koppel persisted.

I had to say, “Not as much as I should have been.”

So then Koppel wanted to know what turned my head around. Had it been fear of dying, or prejudice, or what?

“Well”—I hadn’t thought much about that. I don’t talk about my faith unless I’m asked about it. It’s just there when I need it—“I think it’s a little bit of everything,” I finished.

I didn’t regret what I’d said, but I was afraid my answer sounded lame. Being thankful for each day and hopeful about the future was such a habit with me now. But I didn’t know exactly how to explain it on national television.

The morning after, I was even more worried about going up before the commissioners. Who knew what
they
would come up with?

Ryan and Jill Stewart sightsee at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 1988.