Entry 001
So Adriance Caruso wasn't really born with the disease, in fact when I had met him I didn't know he was sick at all (and I don't really want to call it a sickness because I do feel there's a difference between a sickness and disease as far as Adriance Caruso was concerned). When I met Adriance Caruso in 1995 he was still shorter than me and his parents made him side part his hair and his lips bulged with his ugly braces and I can say that because I had a terrible overbite and my bulging braces looked even worse. I want to say that he wore black a lot, but he didn't, and his neck was offset at a weird angle that skinny guys have where their Adam's apple is excessively pronounced right under the soft meat between their mandibles. So he looked like someone someone else might punch out for fun but not really someone that had a disease. I guess most people look like that.
Anyways, Adriance only told me he was sick at all in like July 1996, which I try not to hold against him. He told me that he was hanging out with his cousins sometime in 1987, he was eleven or twelve or a little kid "right on the cusp of manhood" (he used this term because he thought it sounded cool, but I've seen his elementary school pictures and I knew girls his age with more hair on their upper lip at that point), and they had travelled to the beach in Staten Island and being a whole bunch of idiot kids taking turns getting thrown around in the surf by their oldest cousin, a twenty-year-old guy named Jess (WASP x Italian marriage, I was told), Adriance got pulled out by the tide and poked and inculcated with God knows what. When he came out and told Jess and whomever what had happened, Jess figured he messed up real bad and Adriance was shipped off to the best hospital money could buy in the tri-state area.
Adriance hooked me up with all the gossip of what it means to be a truly chronically ill kid, playing it up like he had cancer or AIDS even though I knew for a fact he had neither, but he for sure did get some kind of hepatitis. He said the hospital food was better than the food at our high school, but his parents would bring him takeaway sometimes. The worst part of it, he said, was that the nurses were not nearly as hot at Animaniacs made them sound but at least they were nice. Maybe they wouldn't have been so nice if they knew he was gonna be a chronically sick and disappointing fuck-up for the rest of his life, because I can't picture them being so nice to someone they felt might have known better a decade later or something.
He felt weird when he was there and was a little ambivalent about having skipped school for so long, because at that point he was still getting his face slapped around for the crime of being alive and in middle school. He was instilled with values of tryhardiness though and felt sick at the idea of missing his super important school classes which I think he really only felt so nervous about because his mommy told him he should be nervous about it. Or he overheard her or something.
For posterity's sake, Mr. and Mrs. Caruso were tough old bitches, the both of them. Adriance was their darling IVF baby-we bonded about being mutual wastes of money-and both of their tryhardiness stemmed from the fact that they were some of the best lawyers in New York at this point in time, having drudged their way out of their ethnic enclaves and the ultimately talc-ish grip of their taxi driving grand-daddies while still continuing to be white trash in the way that only Catholic immigrants seem to be. Honestly they should have been happier that Adriance got his Disease, but they always sucked at "trying to bring out his potential," which is an axiom that basically never happens on purpose. I never saw his father wear a t-shirt, not once, and I've literally lived at Adriance's house. I don't even think he owned any.
Suffice to say Mr. and Mrs. Caruso lived, breathed and shat lawsuits, and this would be incredibly helpful for their loser son who called them from a payphone crying one afternoon during which he was walking to the bus stop from school and some ugly fat kid (Adriance's words) pulled his hair. Adriance always tested how long he could keep his hair, which as a child in a crew-cut, super white sort of neighborhood usually meant that he was asking for a solid tug, and this happened more than once until he got big enough for people to think twice about it. Adriance threw such a measly little punch that the kid only came to when the blood and probably also cranial fluid was leaking so heavily into his windpipe from his nasal cavity that he had to cough it up right on the girl who went running to ask if he was okay, which just so happened to be a girl Adriance at some point wished he could have impressed. In the middle of crying to his parents, he realized this was surely a lost cause.