The media love M.C. Mars' gritty memoir—except the HIV part
A year ago, in a previous installment of this column, I anguished over
whether to include a story in my memoir of 25 years as a taxi driver,
Don’t Take Me the Long Way. In the story—about my fellow drivers
raising $672 for me during a period of extended illness—I disclose that
the illness was AIDS and that I almost died from PCP pneumonia. I
decided to risk including it, and I’ll never forget when I knew I had
had an impact. One evening, under the harsh fluorescent lights of the
Desoto Cab garage, my mostly Muslim and Hindu coworkers were counting
their money at the end of a shift as a Christian evangelist ranted on
TV (the channel hadn’t been changed since the ball game ended). A tall,
stoic driver approached me. “Hey, man, I loved your book,” he said.
“You just put everything out there.”
My colleagues have become
some of Don’t Take Me the Long Way’s loudest promoters. A laminated
advertisement for it hangs over the backseat of a half-dozen taxis; 600
copies have been sold from cab trunks, almost twice the number as in
bookstores. All this scrappy self-promotion has paid off: A big
mainstream men’s magazine featured me and my memoir—from backseat shenanigans to a psychopath who tried to kill me—in a three-page spread
for its August car issue. Other interviews have followed. The funny
thing is, now that I have the opportunity to be a high-profile HIVer,
the disease is the last thing anyone seems to really want to talk about.
It’s
true that the first subject the men’s magazine reporter brought up was
my HIV. Though the interview topics ranged far and wide, I felt from
the very beginning that he genuinely cared about my health. But his
lengthy article made no mention of the virus. I can understand why AIDS
doesn’t fit in a men’s magazine centered on stratagems for picking up
hot chicks. Still, seeing the topic deleted from an article all about
my ability to survive what life has thrown at me, all from behind the wheel of a cab, brought home how, for the mainstream media, AIDS is always a disease that afflicts “others.”
This
past summer, I did an interview at a black radio station. The
interviewer, a friend, gave me 30 seconds to define the state of the
plague. I said that the medications work well—but come with a price: an
addictionlike pill habit and some gnarly side effects. He concurred,
then deftly steered the conversation back to the beef between 50 Cent
and the Game. I did a phone interview with a cable-TV producer who
hadn’t read my memoir and didn’t know I had HIV. As I told him about my crusade against the virus and determination to raise money to
fight it, I started feeling uncomfortable—I realized there was dead
silence on the other end of the line. For a moment, even I thought I
might be sounding a little melodramatic. But then I remembered how,
when I had PCP, I spent two weeks in a hospital bed using a nebulizer,
weak as a kitten, sucking down oxygen. Melodrama be damned, I
continued my speech, explaining how psyched I was about a big
Philadelphia AIDS benefit concert that had happened a couple of weeks
prior.
I can’t blame either of these journalists—one was
keeping his audience happy, the other keeping to a schedule. The plain
truth is, one man’s burning issue is another man’s ashtray. And don’t
get me wrong: After so many years scribbling in obscurity, I’m
loving all the attention. A couple of cute Korean waitresses in a restaurant recognized me. Passengers —readers of the magazine
interview—have said: “No way, dude? Is that you?” But as long as I’m
getting known for being me, I want my HIV—and the battles that go with
it—along for the ride.
