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Living on the edge

 
Published June 5, 1991|Updated Oct. 13, 2005

While homosexual men have so far born the brunt of the U.S. epidemic, the disease is now spreading most rapidly among intravenous drug abusers _ who pass the disease by sharing contaminated syringes. In 1986, 66 percent of AIDS cases came from homosexual activity and 18 percent through intravenous drug use. Now, homosexual liaisons account for 55 percent and IV drug use is blamed for 24 percent.

A physician who volunteers in an AIDS clinic was speaking about the difference between middle-class gay patients and poor IV-drug abusers. The middle-class patient compares AIDS treatments, says the physician, wondering, "Should I go on DDI or should I stay on AZT? What am I going to be doing in two or three years?"

Then an addict comes in who's living in a cardboard box, and he's sort of embarrassed, because he doesn't know when to take his medicine, because he doesn't have a watch, and even if he did have a watch, he doesn't have any water, so how could he take it anyway? What he's really thinking about is, "Where am I going to get a meal tonight?" Not "Will I be able to finish my book five years from now?"

For the drug addict, AIDS has given the term "living on the edge" a whole new meaning.

Miles Joyner says two things saved his life:

One was his HIV infection, which made him realize _ as nothing ever had before _ that he had to get off drugs. The other thing that saved his life was God.

A 38-year-old survivor of New York City's streets, Joyner says he began shooting drugs as a 10-year-old, the day his mother died. In 1970, at the age of 17, having been convicted of selling drugs at eight city high schools, he was told to choose between enlisting in the military and spending 15 years in state prison.

His Air Force enlistment took him to Vietnam and ended in 1972 with a "general discharge under honorable conditions" after, he says, he "went crazy." He returned to New York and the drug life, but he managed to hold a series of jobs and marry twice.

This is how Joyner discovered he was more likely to die of AIDS than of an overdose:

"I was in rehabilitation in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Veterans Center in Montrose. My wife was pregnant with my youngest child. We had spoken so much in rehab about taking the test, taking the test, and the importance of looking out for your loved ones. If you cared enough about them, that you would take the test. And so I took the test out of fear, and not even fear for myself. It was fear of knowing that if I destroyed one of the lives of someone that I loved, I was finished as a human being. Well, I took the test and ... three weeks later they gave me a call that I came up positive.

"I immediately called my wife _ we were still married at the time _ and I said, "Please, go get tested, have the baby tested, because I need to know.' And she said, "Well, if it's going to make you feel any better, we've been tested, and we're fine.' Because of my track record, she had already had herself and the baby tested. By the grace of God, they were negative, so now I could go ahead and kill my fool self.

"That's all I needed to know," Joyner says, "so I went back out again for six months, and and it was six months of pure hell. During the six months my drug addiction took off in such a way. I was totally homeless now, living on the streets. I would bounce from shelter to shelter; I've been through the entire city shelter system. I got really reckless. Now I didn't care, because I hadn't been educated. To me at that time, I was HIV, I was going to die of AIDS. That was all I knew. So why sit around and wait for it to happen. Let me just go ahead and end this and get it over with. Take out insurance policies on myself and make sure everybody was taken care of. I tried to literally kill myself with large, serious, deadly doses of heroin and cocaine, but I'm still here."

And this is how Miles Joyner found God:

"It was on Mother's Day in 1989. I was living in the men's shelter on Ward's Island. It was comical, really. I was looking for a woman to give these flowers to. I was in an exceptionally good mood, and this was the way that I was going to remember my mother, by giving flowers to someone else's mother.

"I was walking up East 105th Street ... and I heard this woman preaching. I just stood there; I looked in and she was preaching about drug addiction and what it was doing to the black man and what the black man needs to do. And I said, "This sounds like somebody who knows what the hell they're talking about; I really need to get to know this woman.'

"And I stood in the doorway, and she just reached out to me as if she had known me all of her life and said, "See, you ain't got to stand out there. Come on in. Sit down. Have a seat.' She fed me, and I said, "These are your flowers, these flowers were meant for you.' And I have been a member of Little Mount Calvary Church ever since.

"That was the part that was missing. I had denounced God. I had lost most of my faith and belief in God."

"To me," Joyner says, "it's like it took something as dreadful as HIV to calm me down. Because as much as I like living on the edge, now I can do it naturally, because I'm HIV-positive. I'm on the edge. God knows, I'm on the edge."

_ Information from AP and Newsday was used in this report.