I fled from Waco in terror. The longer I stayed the more helicopters were flying overhead. And Army men and scary Texans. It was like the end of the world there. All for what?
I’m on a bus out of town, Waco to Austin. The traffic is moving very slowly, and there it is, the Branch Davidian Compound. It has to be.
Yes, somebody on the bus just said it. Not to me. People are talking.
It’s up in flames. Oh my god! That’s crazy! They did it. I don’t know if it was the atf or the Branch Davidians, but somebody caught the place on fire. I would say there’s a 50/50 chance of it being either of them.
For some strange reason, I’m thinking about the kids. Lots of them. Did they get out? It doesn’t really matter if they are David Koresh’s kids or not, they’re kids. It makes me think of those kittens I tossed in the pond back home. Just discarded them like they didn’t matter, like they didn’t deserve a chance at life. Jesus, I feel bad about that now!
How did I get here? How did I get to Waco, and why?
I left Columbus on Saturday, March 20th. Myrtle and Turtle picked me up at the Budge In. It was 4 a.m., or a little after because I couldn’t figure out how to work the alarm clock and woke up when Myrtle came tapping on the motel window. I had to get all my shit together quickly. I threw it all in a garbage bag and ran. The sun wasn’t even up.
Turtle is 12 years old, he has his mother’s black hair and big, frightened eyes. He’s gregarious and awkward, and probably gay. I liked him. They dropped me off at Uncle Bud’s ranch on the north side of town and he was waiting, tapping his foot because we were late. We were all apologetic and eager to take the blame.
Uncle Bud has leathery skin (his neck brought to mind a 3-d road map!) and a shiny sliver pompadour. He is a barrel-chested good ol’ boy type of man. He was only pretending to be mad then just broke out laughing. They hugged hello, we hugged goodbye, then Uncle Bud and I headed on down the road pulling an empty cow trailer behind us.
He told me to sleep if I wanted to (and I did) but said he would talk anyway like he always does to keep himself awake during the dark hours of driving. I faded in and out of consciousness while he jabbered incessantly about everything from cattle to deer hunting, pickup trucks to religion. I had nothing to add. We had nothing in common. I just nodded my head when he caught me awake.
The one subject we had a shared interest in was the Branch Davidians. At first I was surprised by how non-judgmental he seemed to be about it. Then it dawned on me that he thought I knew somebody in the compound. Maybe Myrtle even told him I was related to one of the Branch Davidians.
We stopped at a diner two miles outside of Waco. It was at the crossroads where he normally turns off to go to the cattle auction. He was rushing through his breakfast and I felt like I had already made him late, so I suggested he go on without me, said I would catch a ride with somebody or that I could walk. Either way, I assured him, I would be fine.
Uncle Bud didn’t protest much, so I felt like I had made the right decision.
I lied to him about catching a ride. The diner was full of sourpusses who I could feel looking at me when I wasn’t looking at them. I walked. It was a beautiful morning, but two miles is a lot farther than I thought it would be. My left leg was bothering me. It felt numb, cold on the inside, hot on the outside, weird.
When I finally got to town, I walked into the first big building I came to, which just so happened to be the hospital. My intention was to ask for directions to, I don’t know, a motel? The Branch Davidians? But before I was able to get my question out, before I even made it all the way to the information desk, I passed out cold.
I woke up fully a couple of days later (the time in between was filled with fever dreams). I was visited regularly by aliens. They all looked the same in their pastel yellow Tyvek hooded jumpsuits and shoe covers and latex gloves, which they took off before they stepped out of my room (transforming themselves back into human nurses).
I tried to see my room number, thinking I might be in Room 105 (how Twilight Zone would that be?!), but there wasn’t a number on the door. In its place was a handmade sign with the letters pwa. Person With aids. The Twentieth Century Plague!!! So new in this part of the world that I actually heard a nervously giggling female voice outside my room saying, “Oh! I thought it stood for ‘Prisoner of War’ or somethin’.”
I was in the Waco hospital for a week-and-a-half. The doctor in his latex gloves and blue facemask pointed out the Kaposi’s sarcoma (ks) lesions, the one on my back that I already knew about, plus one on my inside left thigh and another on my left calf. I asked if that was why my left leg was hurting so much and he said he didn’t know. “It could be a lot of things,” he said. He even suggested it could be one of the medications they were giving me. When I told him it was bothering me before I got there, he just shrugged and recommended I see my regular doctor when I got back to New York.
He had a pleasant enough bedside manner (I can’t remember his name) and gave me prescriptions for the azt and a new drug called Didanosine that they had been giving me since I arrived. I haven’t filled the prescriptions. Not because I can’t afford them. (One smart thing I did in my life was to continue paying for my healthcare insurance after The Sink folded.)
But of course, I didn’t have my insurance information with me. You would think I would have had a card in my wallet or something, particularly when I left nyc for an unspecified amount of time. “Six months maybe.” I had some savings and credit cards, I thought that was all I needed.
So anyway, I had to call Anita and ask her to fish out my insurance papers, so she found out about my health issues. She wanted to come to Texas to see me, to be with me and help me, but I forbid her from coming. “The stress wouldn’t be good for the baby,” I told her, and she agreed.
She told me she stopped drinking and doing drugs when she found out she was preggers. I told her I stopped drinking and doing drugs when I landed in a dry county. We got a laugh out of that. I told her I wasn’t taking the aids meds they prescribed me either. She totally supported my decision. She’s read lots of reports on the epidemic, and a writer friend of hers had heard at a conference that people were actually dying from taking azt. “The cure is worse than the cancer,” she said.
After my hospital stay, I took a cab a little deeper into town to a Motel 8 (no funny jokes in that name, maybe I should have taken it as a warning). This was on the 29th or 30th of March. Anita sent my mail to the motel. In it was a check from an insurance company in the amount of $12,537. I thought it was a scam at first, but the letter accompanying the check said it was payment on a life policy taken out by Mona Reardon with me as the beneficiary.
That wacky, deranged, evil bitch who squirted me out actually did have a morsel of love deep inside her little charcoal briquette heart.
And what happened then?
Well, in Whoville, they say
That the Grinch’s small heart
Grew three sizes that day!
Also in the mail was a lease renewal contract for my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. I was feeling quite charitable in that moment, so I checked the 2-year box, signed it and mailed it back to Anita to do with as she pleases.
I spent the next two-and-a-half weeks holed up in my motel room (#327) waiting to die. I was sure it was coming soon. I watched news around the clock, always searching for the next bit of information about the standoff, which only added to my fatalistic view of life. All the Army trucks and sightseers didn’t help things. It was all around me. I was right in the middle of it. The hospital was right down the street so there were sirens going off at all hours of the day and night, speeding past the motel. That didn’t help at all.
I ate the free pastries that were offered in the mornings (which sometimes gave other guests reason to eat breakfast out), ordered lunch to be delivered late in the afternoons then ate leftovers for dinner. I ordered from every restaurant in town that delivered, except Chinese. I will never eat Chinese food again!
This morning, I snapped. Army personnel staying at the Motel 8 made all kinds of noise way before dawn. I was awakened from my sleep. Civilians in regular cars, some with out of state plates, rushed out of the parking lot behind the Army convoy going down the middle of Main Street. I turned on the tv. At one surreal moment, a news helicopter flew over the motel, I saw my Motel 8 on the screen and simultaneously heard the sound of the chopper blades overhead.
I packed all of my belongings (including my unfilled prescriptions and uncashed insurance check) into the garbage bag I had gotten at the Budge In, put that in a paper grocery sack I had come across, hobbled to the Greyhound station (there were no cabs to be hailed) with the cane they gave me at the hospital, and got a ticket for the very next bus leaving the station.
That’s the one I’m on right now, headed for Austin, Texas.
I don’t know thing one about Austin, Texas. I don’t have any business there. I only hope I can find a tv soon and see what happened in Waco.