Previously on The Real World, Rachel was ignorant.
Shots of protestors somewhere downtown. Randy Shilts, a famous wrier with AIDS, has died, and people are protesting at his memorial. How sick is that? I mean it's not like they were protesting at his funeral, but it's still in exceedingly bad taste.
Back at the house, Dudd is telling the roommates about the events and that it "really bugged" Pedro. Cut to Pedro and Pam sitting on the couch. Pedro wonders aloud how "someone who doesn't even know [him could] hate [him] so much." Pam points out that it's easier to hate someone you don't know. Pedro jokes that when he dies, he wants people to take notice. The adage "Be careful what you wish for" springs to mind. Then all of a sudden, we get Pam's confessional. She's upset and has obviously been crying recently. She says, "I can hear something ticking. Something bad is going to happen. Neither of us wants to think about it. I certainly don't want to think about it, but I'm thinking about it." Has Pam been dipping into the pharmaceuticals at work? The general lack of coherence and jittery, clipped speech patterns make me wonder. And, I'd just like to point out that even though we're supposed to think this comment was in reference to Pedro, she really could have been talking about anyone. Perhaps her boyfriend. Anyway, Pedro says in an interview that he needs to take care of his health more than he does. So we see Pedro going to an acupuncturist. The woman puts a needle in his ear and while generally I'm open to solutions beyond traditional medicine that makes me squirmy. Acupuncture is now out of the question for me. It's a needle! In your ear! [Insert Sideshow Bob shudder]
Pedro is in the living room with Rachel, Dudd and Puck. He's telling him about his experiences with acupuncture, and then Puck takes the conversation ball and runs with it, going on and on and on about tattoos. Pedro and I roll our eyes simultaneously and then Pedro gets up and leaves. I don't have that luxury. I have to sit through every stupid minute of this.
Puck, Cory and Rachel go hiking somewhere in Marin. Much running with the elk in the hills. What is this? The Real World Moose Jaw? Then they go down to the tidepools and Cory practically creams her jeans at the sight of all the anemones and starfish. Now I know why she's never been in love. She's like Troy McClure from The Simpsons who can only love fish. Anyway, they find an abalone and decide to eat it for dinner. Now, abalone is really very tasty, but I'd be a bit shy about eating one I caught myself what with the general polluted nature of the oceans. Rachel, Cory and Puck cook and eat the abalone for dinner, interspersed with shots of interviews with Pedro, Pam and Mo all saying how much time Cory and Puck are spending together. If my esteem of Cory could drop any lower at this point, it would. Cory plays with her food at the table and Puck says, "You are so seventh grade." Well, if that isn't the Puck calling the kettle black.
Okay so now Pedro is getting off of a plane...somewhere. Thankfully, the Pedro voice-over explains, "The AIDS co-ordinator for the White House was going to be doing a show and they wanted me to be a part of the show. So it was pretty much in a rush, and I had to fly to L.A. pretty quickly," over shots of Pedro getting dolled up for the camera. Then we're on the widely acclaimed show Real Personal with Bob Berkowitz. Yeah, I've never heard of it either. In the studio, Bob asks Pedro how he contracted AIDS and Pedro says that it was through unprotected sex. Bob then follows up, "And you are gay?" When Pedro confirms that he is, Bob says, "Okay," and then gears up to say something else and while he doesn't come right out and say it, his attitude makes it clear that, in his mind, being gay and having AIDS is pretty much a cause-and-effect type deal, as if AIDS is somehow Pedro's punishment for being gay. Pedro doesn't rip this guy's head off and serve it to him on a platter like I would have done but rather says, very calmly, "I did not get AIDS because I am gay but because I had unprotected sex," before Bob can continue with his line of questioning.
Then Pedro is back at home in San Francisco. He walks upstairs and then we jump immediately into the middle of a conversation in the blue room, between Pedro and Rachel, about AIDS. Rachel's point of view is that she wouldn't have a sexual relationship with someone who was HIV-positive. Pedro thinks that she's letting her fear control her because we know how the infection is spread and how to protect ourselves from it. Normally I agree with Pedro but I don't think that I'd have sex with someone who had HIV either. But maybe we shouldn't listen to me since I hate being sick so much that I don't let anyone with a cold get within ten feet of me. It drives my co-workers nuts but it gets me out of a lot of that pesky human interaction stuff. So Puck walks into the room and sits down on the couch to Rachel and starts blathering on about his day at work. Rachel gets up and walk off. This is a recurring theme.
Later Rachel is sitting on Puck's bed trying to explain to him that if he he's rude to other people, other people are going to be rude to him. Puck, of course, denies all culpability and blames it on the fact that Pedro "always talks about having AIDS...Educate the public? Cool. But give me some human." I shiver at the thought of feeling that I would have to educate a public that included Puck. At least Rachel tries to listen, but talking to Puck is like talking to my boss.
Pedro is on BART, "going to get the results from [his] bloodwork." Pam explains that a T-cell is a "cell that is destroyed by the AIDS virus." A normal level would be "around 500. 100 is low, and if you have around one or two hundred you'll start getting sick." Pedro is ushered into an office and sits at a desk with a woman to go over the results of his bloodwork. Pedro's T-cell count is 32. Pedro looks concerned. The woman looks concerned. America looks concerned. The woman says, "This doesn't mean that you should walk out feeling worse than when you walked in this morning. The numbers can't tell you how to feel. On the other hand, this is a warning that you need to take really good care of yourself." Pedro nods, but you can tell he's shaken.
On a date with Sean, Pedro listens as Sean says how guilty he feels for having more T-cells. At the house, Pam and Dudd are talking about how upset they are. Pam: "The first patient I ever had died of AIDS. It's still not the same. It's not the same as having Pedro living in our house."
Pedro is picked up by a taxi because he's going to speak at Stanford. I hope he's not taking a taxi the whole way. That's expensive. Anyway, we get a view of the highway from a vehicle and then thanks to the magic that is editing we hear Puck's voice. He, Cory, and Rachel are on their way to visit his mother in Burlingame. Puck's mother seems nice enough. She jokes around with Rachel and Cory and in no way seems like the demon I would have expected to have spawned Puck. Everyone is amazed at how normal and clean Puck's house is. In a voice-over Puck says, "My mom is my balancer." Well, she's obviously not doing the whole job. Might I suggest some LITHIUM, perhaps?
Judd and Pam take an old white car down to Stanford to go see Pedro speak. Didn't Dudd come from Long Island? Where did he get this car from? Why was he complaining about money when he has a vehicle and free lodging? Such is the mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a whiner wrapped in a tortilla that is Dudd. Dudd is a whiner wrap.
Cory, Rachel, and Puck are standing by a car in a parking lot somewhere. Puck is making a big deal about the time because it's 3:30. Cory and Rachel want to go hear Pedro give his talk at 4:00. While they walk to wherever they're going, Puck says, "I know enough about AIDS to not go to Pedro's functions because he didn't go to mine so I don't need to be educated by Pedro." I have the feeling that what Puck knows about AIDS could fit into a miniature thimble. Puck proves my theory by saying that if he had AIDS he would spend his time partying it up in France rather than "whining." I guess there's not much there to educate. Now we're in some sort of skate shop and the trio is watching one of Puck's friends on the ramp. The camera lingers on the clock and we see it's five minutes to four.
Cut to Stanford. Pedro is speaking to a group of students in a common room. Pam and Dudd are in the audience. A girl asks Pedro a question and I guess I missed it when all of Stanford University signed up for the Semester at Sea program, because the camera is bobbing up and down and making me seasick. Somebody batten down those hatches, okay? Since this is probably the first time in the history of The Real World that they've presented three consecutive minutes of worthwhile footage I'm pretty much going to just transcribe Pedro's Q&A session.
On a date with Sean, Pedro listens as Sean says how guilty he feels for having more T-cells. At the house, Pam and Dudd are talking about how upset they are. Pam: "The first patient I ever had died of AIDS. It's still not the same. It's not the same as having Pedro living in our house."
Pedro is picked up by a taxi because he's going to speak at Stanford. I hope he's not taking a taxi the whole way. That's expensive. Anyway, we get a view of the highway from a vehicle and then thanks to the magic that is editing we hear Puck's voice. He, Cory, and Rachel are on their way to visit his mother in Burlingame. Puck's mother seems nice enough. She jokes around with Rachel and Cory and in no way seems like the demon I would have expected to have spawned Puck. Everyone is amazed at how normal and clean Puck's house is. In a voice-over Puck says, "My mom is my balancer." Well, she's obviously not doing the whole job. Might I suggest some LITHIUM, perhaps?
Judd and Pam take an old white car down to Stanford to go see Pedro speak. Didn't Dudd come from Long Island? Where did he get this car from? Why was he complaining about money when he has a vehicle and free lodging? Such is the mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a whiner wrapped in a tortilla that is Dudd. Dudd is a whiner wrap.
Cory, Rachel, and Puck are standing by a car in a parking lot somewhere. Puck is making a big deal about the time because it's 3:30. Cory and Rachel want to go hear Pedro give his talk at 4:00. While they walk to wherever they're going, Puck says, "I know enough about AIDS to not go to Pedro's functions because he didn't go to mine so I don't need to be educated by Pedro." I have the feeling that what Puck knows about AIDS could fit into a miniature thimble. Puck proves my theory by saying that if he had AIDS he would spend his time partying it up in France rather than "whining." I guess there's not much there to educate. Now we're in some sort of skate shop and the trio is watching one of Puck's friends on the ramp. The camera lingers on the clock and we see it's five minutes to four.
Cut to Stanford. Pedro is speaking to a group of students in a common room. Pam and Dudd are in the audience. A girl asks Pedro a question and I guess I missed it when all of Stanford University signed up for the Semester at Sea program, because the camera is bobbing up and down and making me seasick. Somebody batten down those hatches, okay? Since this is probably the first time in the history of The Real World that they've presented three consecutive minutes of worthwhile footage I'm pretty much going to just transcribe Pedro's Q&A session.
A girl asks, "Finding out you're HIV-positive. How did that change your views on the future and what you wanted to do?" Pedro replies, "When I found out I was HIV-positive, I thought I was going to die, so I graduated a year earlier from high school...because it was something I wanted to do before I died." A stoned-looking guy asks, "Is there ever any time that you forget that you're HIV-positive? "No." responds Pedro, "there is not one second of my day that I am not aware that I am HIV-positive. But that doesn't mean that my happier moments are less happy because I am HIV-positive and I don't want to forget that I have AIDS and I don't want you to forget that I have AIDS. You have to understand: AIDS is part of my life. It's my reality. It's who I am. I will probably not see the age of thirty...of course that's statistically speaking, and I have to remind myself constantly that I am not a statistic, I am a human being, and somehow you have to find some type of meaning to your life. I have to believe that there is a sense to all of this, that all the pain that I'm going through, that [despite] all the anger and all the frustration, that there's something bigger than that." Cut to Pam and Dudd in the audience with glum faces. "My reality today is that I am a person living with AIDS. I'm not dying. I am living with it. And until my last breath I will be a person living with AIDS," finishes Pedro. The music lets us know that we're ending on an upbeat note. I have to say, though, that if I dedicated my last months of life to a philanthropic cause and then MTV had the gall to use freakin' Yanni over their footage of me, you can bet that I'd reach right down from heaven and smack the shit out of them.
At the house Cory feels guilty about not going to Pedro's function. Pedro reassures her that there will be more presentations and that he hopes she will go to at least one of them. Well so much for that MTV-induced drama there earlier.
Establishing shots of life around San Francisco. Old women doing Tai Chi in the park. Everyone is laughing and smiling. Pedro, Judd, Pam, and Chris (!) go to Golden Gate Park. So obviously the other clip that aired earlier, showing them at the park, was taken from this day. I'm prone to migraines so I'm not even going to try to figure out the timeline except to note that, once again, Bunim-Murray is up to their old tricks. If the human race ever successfully figure out how to manipulate the space-time continuum, I guarantee they will be the folks to do it. So anyway. It's a nice day. Everyone is enjoying themselves. Judd and Pedro race to the sidewalk. Judd gives him a head-start and maybe even lets him win. For one brief moment I do not totally hate Judd.
week: Puck and Pedro throw down.