Tuesday, Jul. 29, 2003 - 2:31 p.m.
Check-Up

Last night I saw my regular (hunky, gay) doctor for the first time since this happened. He’d been on holidays until just a few days ago, so in his absence I’d had a check-up from one of his colleagues a week after I got out of hospital.

He told me about his vacation as he opened my patient file on his computer screen.

“It says here you were assaulted?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you had to have a hemothorax put in?”

I nodded.

“What on earth happened?”

I told him: I picked a guy up on a Wednesday night, brought him back to my place for a casual sexual encounter. The guy (I’ll call him Diego), a nineteen-year-old up here on a student visa for the summer from a Latin-American country, was friendly and nervous. He said it was his first time, that he was a virgin. Over a couple hours or more of pre-and-post-coital conversation, we connected. I was moved by him. We had another tentative date lined up for the weekend: Diego was to call me on the Saturday. Thursday night, however, he returned to my apartment unannounced, said he was confused and needed to talk. I invited him in. He talked about his anxieties and guilt about being gay. I counselled him, shared my own coming-out story. The connection deepened. Minutes later, we stood in my hallway looking at art on the wall when, out of the blue, Diego offered an impromptu massage. Bemused, I let him turn me around so that he could rub my back.

Instead, he slashed my throat.

Shocked, I turned around and there he was, eyes frightened and maniacal, brandishing a butcher knife—mine—in his hand.

“Oh no!” my doctor exclaimed.

“Yeah,” I said. “By the time I managed to get him out of my apartment, I had twenty stab wounds and a punctured lung. He fled, but my neighbors had heard my screams for help so the cops picked him up running out of the building.”

“You are lucky to be alive,” he said.

“I certainly am.”

I pointed to the visible scars. I’ve grown a goatee/beard to cover up both that initial throat slash and a cut on my chin. The gash on the left side of my neck—right over the jugular—is the most noticeable one. If Diego hadn’t been so timid at first, either of of the neck wounds would have done me in. The cut on my nose has almost disappeared, as has the gash in my right cheek. A particularly nasty slice through the top of my right ear, the only wound that still has stitches. The scars on the left side and back of my skull aren't visible at all.

The doctor had me take off my shirt so he could examine the rest: three or four on my left shoulder, the one on my left side that pierced my lung, and a small one an inch above my right nipple.

“They’re all healing well,” my doctor said. “But what a terrible thing. Why would he do this?”

Why, indeed.