Emergency: Help Me Afford Life-Saving Medical Supplies
Our move cost us everything we had and now I don’t have money to buy colostomy bags. I just put the last one on yesterday. With luck, it will last a week. So, I’m begging everyone reading, even before you finish this post, to please help me. Because I can no longer buy from Amazon US, I have to buy here in Mexico. The bags cost twice as much here, even factoring in shipping/muling fees and import taxes — $200 instead of $100. I’m desperate and with no other options. Please help. Although the feeling of this existential threat is nothing new — I’ve lived with it since the cancer days — I’m more frightened writing this now than I’ve been in a long time. The only thing close to that is the dread of exposure in finishing this post.
The original post is on one of my substacks.
After months of hardship, abuse, and sacrifice, my son and I are finally moving into a new home. But I’m out of colostomy bags, and your support could save my life.
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My son and I are finally moving into an apartment that will be all our own. It doesn’t have a stove or a fridge or beds or any other furniture really or even hot water — totally normal in Mexico, by the way, at any price point we can afford — but it’s private and away from a large thoroughfare, unlike where we are now with truck traffic nearly 24-7.
The new place is situated adjacent to a large ecological preserve — we’re 25 feet from a canal — it’s also free of most people, particularly people like the shitty, entitled, ratfink, unfriendly busybodies we were living with.
Boy howdy, it’s been a long road, full of assholes, but we’re finally seeing some progress and experiencing some distance from those who’ve wanted to harm us or degrade us.
I had to vacate my last room in a nice neighborhood in CDMX about nine months ago because my flatmate of three years was dying and had to have a live-in nurse. (The only person I’ve known who’s ever died until that point during my sojourns has been me.) I made the decision to find a place with Luis (Román to everyone else; Lulu when we’re alone) because worrying about him and the inexplicable and sometimes imperiling decisions he makes had become too much for me to bear at a distance. I obsessively check his last-seen notices on WhatsApp just like I’m continually checking to see if he’s still breathing when he’s sleeping and I’m still up. I’ve been told this is typical for a new dad.
The fact that Luis is HIV+ and that I’ve already been to the hospital with him for one near-death experience (sudden onset of an opportunistic bacterial infection because the HIV drug combination was not working and the moment I first felt the terror of being a parent who can’t control everything that happens to your kid) and one half-hearted attempted suicide, I’m always, and justifyingly, I think, paranoid about his health and safety.
But it was a risk to live together. We’re two grown-ass men. Two strong-willed, independent, grumpy, grown-ass men. (I’m undoubtedly grumpier, but then, I’ve had more practice.) But since no one else can tolerate us and we don’t like being far apart from each other, we decided to give living together a shot.
Our first attempt was easier because we had separate rooms in a kind of flophouse for immigrants. It was … all right, but we were not welcomed — in fact, we were lied about on the very first day. The bitch next door to me claimed we were smoking pot in my room, which I never would have allowed Luis to do. He would have; I just would not have allowed it. This woman, who was either homophobic or anti-gringo or both, had it in for us and was always reporting us for something. Worse, the owner of the building was the most troublesome sort of asshole — the kind that has power over you.
He would come into our rooms without being invited, using his key, and claim we were doing shit we absolutely were not doing, like drinking in public areas. Once he found out I had a fan, he said he had to charge me $500 MXN more per month. I couldn’t live without a fan, especially in a room with no windows to the outside, so I agreed, even though the price was ridiculous — one fourth of the rent itself.
Finally, he and Luis got in a little tiff over Luis’s shitty little fan — he refused to pay extra — and so he asked us to leave. In Mexico, if you don’t have a lease (and these crappy little places with shady owners never want to give you one) the landlord only has to give you 15 days to move out. We’d only been there 6 weeks.
Wherever I’ve lived outside the States, I’ve never expected to get my security deposit back and I knew this guy, known to Luis and me as Pedro the Asshole, was unlikely to give us anything. Turned out that he did give us a little something, but deducted half of what we originally gave him because he “had to,” whatever that meant. He could not tell us specifically what it was he deducted for. Plus, he showed up without exact change so we got shorted an additional 200. He smiled as he said it as if he thought we’d understand his predicament.
So, before we left, we conducted some minor sabotage on his building, at least enough to cover what he took from us, including but not limited to my flushing a used colostomy bag down a toilet and supergluing our keys into our door locks.
This is a nation defined at least partially by impunity, and so I contend we responded rationally if not ethically.
Our next room, which you can see in the video above, Luis paid the deposit for with his ass, the first of many humiliations. I write this with tripled anxiety and guilt, at recalling the moment when he confessed this to me, long after we’d moved in, and my resultant murderous rage, but also at exposing Luis, my precious son whom I would defend with my life and my freedom, to the judgment of people who have never had to face such choices. I also felt helpless to protect him, as I had when he laid in my arms convulsing from high fever and I thought I was losing him forever.
Middle-class and above Americans, and not just Americans, simply have no experience with how poverty bares everything in your life not just to sacrifice, but to scrutiny and surrender — of anything and everything someone with more money and power than you can take.
Luis is already a survivor of multiple childhood abuses, which, before I took responsibility for him, I thought I understood, at least a little. I didn’t know the half of how it affects, delimits, tortures, denudes the paths you take for the rest of your life. Those stories are his to tell.
This is my part:
I believe the first words out of my mouth at uncovering this new abject truth were: “I’ll kill him.”
I meant it, or at least felt it, in the moment and I relive that promise every time I think of that fat, ugly faggot taking something from Luis that he hadn’t freely given. I’m not using the other f-word carelessly; this sort of exploitation is far too common in gay male life, especially in closeted men.
“Papá!!!” he shouted. “This is why I don’ told you! It doesn’t help! See!!”
It turned out that the first time was not the last time. For every infraction we made — reported by the rats who lived with us, whether it was forgetting to flush or not sufficiently cleaning the stove — Rey, who was the landlord’s boyfriend, supposedly, had extracted some kind of sexual cost from Luis so we would not be kicked out.
Had I known, of course, I would have put a stop to it in any way possible.
After I’d calmed down a bit, I said, “Don’t let him do that to you again, Luis. No matter what. I’d rather live on the street or in jail than have that happen to you again.”
You see, survivors often feel that abuse is just how the awful world works, especially when you’ve encountered abuse as a child and from family members. So, the world works cruelly anyway, so why not for this? Why not always? I thought I could protect him by staying with him. I was so stupid.
Luis believed, probably correctly, that law enforcement would do nothing. Regardless, he refused the idea when I mentioned it.
“Let’s just go, papá. Let’s just leave.”
And so we did eventually, four months later after saving up, but not before Luis sent his abuser’s incriminating text messages to the landlord, his boyfriend, and not before I told the landlord to warn Rey never to speak to me. His flat-cleaning and repair visits tapered off, thankfully, and he never approached Luis again. It was a test of my control every time I saw him.I honestly didn’t know what I would do to him if he opened his mouth or came near Luis again.
OK, that’s it. I’ve had enough. There’s more to tell, like being called “disgusting” and “infectious” by our flatmates, but I’m angry, exhausted, and desperate in the telling of it all.
Luis has started nursing-assistant school, and they are nickel-and-diming him to death. I need colostomy bags (and adult diapers, come to think of it; thanks, radiation treatment), or else I’ll die. We have $76 MXN to our names, two kilos of potatoes, and not much else.
We deserve a fucking break.
Do with those facts what you will.
While I was writing the first paragraphs above, Luis texted me about his excitement at moving into the new place:
He was looking forward to our sitting outside in the garden on the bench together in the mornings drinking coffee. No one bothering us. No one all up in our business. No one talking behind our backs and making assumptions. No one able to take those moments from us.
Also, no one stealing our spoons, whatever that was about. No more pissing into deli containers waiting on the women in the flat to get out of the bathroom. (I’m old and incontinent. When I have to pee, I have to pee.)
It’s the simple things.
I don’t even remember exactly when he started calling me papá — it just sort of happened — but now I can’t imagine his calling me by my given name, which I’ve always wanted to get rid of anyway, and I’m so proud and fulfilled to be his dad.
