Chapter 3
I sat in the waiting room of the STD clinic—trying but failing to distract myself by reading a dull article on the sss rain forest in a frighteningly out-of-date issue of National Geographic.
Ten minutes earlier, a tall, broad man with short hair and a beard called out, “Jim Smith, please.”
Mark had decided to use his old street name. “After all,” he reasoned, “if I’ve got it, it was when I was Jim.”
We’d rung up early in the New Year and made an appointment for the following Friday afternoon. Both Mark and I had got the time off work. We’d decided—not that it took long to make the decision—that we wouldn’t tell anyone where we were going. Apart from Tom and Cliff.
In the week before the appointment, I’d gotten some leaflets on HIV and AIDS from my contacts at the main l
