So who is right? Probably both and neither. People burdened by fears have always sought to make something of a romance or swagger-dance of their life, and others have sought to deny them their contradictions and protective deceptions. I met Killer and Queen in a flat occupied by a group of teenagers and young-twenties, a driftway of bare rooms with almost bare mattresses on the floor for which they paid rent in cash or product or IOUs (this was kept vague) to an older woman with whom they sometimes sat around watching TV in the afternoon. They were poor and young and groping for home.
I have not spoken with Nushawn Williams. His court-appointed lawyer in New York, William Cember, turns away journalists’ requests for interviews and has warned Williams that anything he says will be used against him, by somebody. Cember is not wrong, but the protective effort is another form of capture, leaving Williams visibly invisible. There’s no reason to suppose, though, that Williams alone among men must be one-dimensional. It’s regularly assumed, for instance, that every present he gave, every gentle thing he did, was a ploy to exploit a young woman. Now, he might not be a “good man”; he might be a little crazy (psychiatrists report he is competent to stand trial, but that doesn’t mean he has no problems); and he certainly was wrong not to tell his partners about HIV. But at least sometimes might not a gift have been just a gift, a gesture of feeling and a bid for notice? How many ways are there for a street dealer with scars all over his body and a heavy rap sheet to express eligibility, even if some girls say they “go for thugs”? Isn’t it possible that he too might have been “looking for love,” that in the exchange of tokens and physical desire the trade in “self-esteem” might have gone both ways?3
It was the way he “carried himself,” Amber said, that first attracted her to Williams. “Like a millionaire.” I grasped something of that allure one Saturday after 2 a.m. at an all-night downtown diner called Mattia’s. Jamestown’s fifty-odd bars had just closed, and the restaurant welcomed the broken figures of what’s left of white working-class culture. I’d seen such faces earlier at the Ranch and the Bull Frog, faces joyless and worn and just a little menacing, just enough to shame you for the freedom of your life and the outsider’s curiosity that made you assume the right to impose on their dignity. At Mattia’s they were joined by a few soft drunks, a few frisky matrons, a few creamy prep-types and the drug dealers or drug-dealer hangers-on, who alone laughed and walked proud and with every flirtation or quick remark to a table of young women proclaimed, Life!
Girls who spent time with Williams say he was funny. He improvised songs and told silly jokes and put on accents. He could also be cruel and demand that they take off their clothes and get fucked when that’s not exactly what they had in mind. Amber describes a life of alternating sweetness and brutality, in which she would hit him and let him cry in her lap for his childhood; in which he would choke her and put his arm around her in the dark and let her cry for hers—for her girl-hood rape and all the pain behind her toughness. He cooked her spaghetti dinners, putting “his own spices” in sauce from a jar and lighting candles on the table, and in the afternoon he had quick sex with others whom she tried not to think about or not to believe. About the violence, which she remembered casually, almost as one would the events of a summer vacation, she said, “Obviously I believe in second chances … I guess the reason I didn’t leave is that I’m a violent person too. He just had to say something smart and I’d hit him. I don’t know, my dad used to hit me, my mom used to hit me, I fought with my brothers. I thought it was normal.” She bargained for what safety she could—denying him sex, leaving town for a while, taking a blow, giving one back, demanding respect, not getting it, then getting it, provoking him, evading him, insisting on a condom, not insisting, not even wanting to insist, trusting, not trusting, and never once assuming that protection might rest with persons who were as much her oppressors as his. Finally she’d had enough.
When I first met Amber I asked her about danger, and she said that before all the posters and the panic, HIV wasn’t anywhere on a scale of one to ten for her. She hasn’t been sheltered from AIDS. A cousin and her boyfriend died of it; Amber’s stepsister’s uncle died of it; his boyfriend was either positive or had AIDS when he moved away after the uncle died. She just didn’t worry about it for herself, not in Jamestown. Her biggest fears, she said, were being in jail and being alone. Now she was both, not having heard from her latest man, the one whose name is tattooed on her stomach, the one to whom she could tell anything, the one who would not hit her. They had a fight, he doesn’t write easily, has no phone—couldn’t afford to accept the charges, wildly inflated, if he did—and no ID. No one visits at the jail without ID. Somehow it seemed too small to be talking about risk, but we talked about it anyway.
“What would life be without putting yourself out there sometimes?” she said. “I tell this to my mother. My mother’s life is this: she goes to work, goes to the bar—she’s not a drinker or anything, she just goes there—goes home. Every day: go to work, go to the bar, go home. I asked her, ‘What’s the point, Mom? What is the point of your life?’ What could she say? There’s nothing she could say. That’s why I have to get out of Jamestown. It’s not anything about the town; it’s me. It makes me unhappy to be here. And I don’t want to be unhappy.”
“But do you think there are things you could do to protect yourself more from hurt?”
“There’s no way. No way. Because whatever you do, as long as you’re alive, there’s a scale of hurt. There’s the kind of hurt you get from loving someone, and the kind of hurt you get from keeping just to yourself and not letting yourself love nobody. So either you’re gonna get hurt because of someone you love, or you’re gonna be lonely. Either way, you’re hurting yourself. The point is, you’re doing it to yourself. You’re making the decision.”
In a time of epidemic, every woman has to decide for her own safety, and every man for his. Out of New England recently came a report that four out of ten persons who are HIV positive don’t tell their sex partner, and two-thirds of those don’t always use protection. Somebody didn’t tell Nushawn Williams—some woman, he says—and maybe somebody else didn’t tell her. The cascade of recrimination for all the anguish in Jamestown, as in America, is endless if you want to go that route; and many do. Almost thirty states have laws criminalizing the behavior of people who are HIV positive. Without disclosure, consent is no defense, and in most places neither is the use of a condom. More than 300 persons have been prosecuted for reckless endangerment, or assault with a deadly weapon, or attempted murder. Many of these are prisoners who spit at or bit corrections officers (often in the course of being beaten), even though there’s no known case of HIV transmission by those means. And many are people who didn’t tell the truth.4
The truth? Suppose Nushawn Williams is prosecuted for sex as proposed. Imagine two “victims.” Both of them consented, neither insisted on protection, both engaged in the same act of vaginal intercourse. Suppose, just to complicate matters, that they both enjoyed it. But one of them is positive and one is negative. The same “crime,” the same “weapon,” but one conviction could bring almost 250 percent more jail time. Proponents of this scenario say it’s no different from murder and attempted murder, except in