Michael “Foy Boy” Mitchell and Kathie Hiers in 1998.
The south is losing one of its greatest HIV champions, Kathie Hiers, who has announced her retirement as CEO of AIDS Alabama after more than 30 years of dedicated service.
In this first-person telling, Kathie shares one of her favorite memories from her years of national leadership – but it has very little to do with the work and everything to do, hilariously, with an odiferous crisis during her early years of HIV work.
Enjoy the tale, and keep reading for a surprise ending. Here’s Kathie:
In my younger days I ran a small non-profit agency, Mobile AIDS Support Services, in my Alabama home town. These were the dark days before life-saving medications were available, and the HIV epidemic had taken its toll. AIDS was a death sentence.
We think stigma is bad today, and it is, especially in the South, but the fear around AIDS back then was truly dreadful and pervasive. But I had a wonderful staff of about 15 or 16 folks incredibly devoted to the cause and our clients. Working alongside these amazing people gave me my first taste of a job that I loved and that changed lives for the better. Back then we couldn’t save lives, but we could give people the dignity they deserved — mixed in with as much fun as we could muster!
My two main lieutenants were my right-hand man, Michael Foy Mitchell, whom I called “Foy Boy,” and my ex from a lifetime ago, Anne Noantay, whom I called “Anne E.O.”
Both were brilliant, and helped me run that agency full of zany characters and whacky clients.
We came in one Monday morning to the familiar sounds of Ben, our receptionist, bitching. “Who took my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup? I am not the candy vendor for this agency!”
Immediately our Prevention Coordinator, Feaunte’, chimed in. “You’re not the only one, Ben. Someone stole my vanilla mints.”
Feaunte’ was not happy about the disappearance of her mints. We decided that a hungry client probably needed these food items more, and went back to start our week’s work.
In Mobile, everyone calls me Katfish or Fish or Fishie or some derivation of the nickname that I had been given when I was four years old.
Around mid-morning Anne E.O. poked her head into my office and asked, “Fish, do you smell that smell?”
I thought something smelled a little funky, but our building was old, Mobile is very rainy, and I figured it was the dank, wet smell that permeates many buildings and houses in our city.
By afternoon the stench had grown. We came to work the next morning to find the smell had gotten even more potent.
We propped open the doors to allow fresh air in. We had to do something. We vacuumed, we mopped, we scrubbed, and used every good-smelling cleanser we could put our hands on.
At some point, Shelly, our nurse, came to me complaining that someone had taken her favorite pen. The pen wasn’t valuable, but she liked the way it wrote. I assured Shelly that we would find her precious pen.
Sadly, deep cleaning didn’t seem to help, so we started looking for dead things. In a little while I heard Feaunte’ yell, “I found it! I found it, y’all!”
She was standing in front of the HVAC unit with the door open, excitedly pointing at a dead mouse. I laughed and shook my head. “You’re probably on the right track, Feaunte’, but I don’t think that little mouse could possibly cause this kind of stink!”
I decided to call for help.
Kathie Hiers in her AIDS Alabama office.
I called several cleaning companies. One agreed to come that afternoon. When he arrived, a slow-moving, southern gent, the problem was pretty obvious to him. He informed us that he would need to look in the upper crawl space in the front of the building.
We had drop-down ceiling tiles you just push up to remove, so the fellow sluggishly got up on his ladder and pushed up a tile. When he did, a cascade of small, nasty fecal matter poured out into his face and all over his head.
I saw just how fast that man could move! “No, ma’am! No, ma’am! I ain’t having no part of this! No ma’am!” He grabbed his ladder and ran out.
Foy Boy, Anne E.O., and I called every company we could find in the phone book, and were able to get two of them to agree to come out in the morning to give us a quote. We decided to give everyone the day off while we tackled this odiferous problem.
On Wednesday morning, Foy Boy, Anne E.O., and I met the first of the two contractors at the office. The smell was now unbelievable. The guy was young and cute, but the expression on his face when he got a good sniff was one of disgust! I give him credit, though. He wrapped a bandana around his face, covered his head with a towel, and charged up the ladder.
He wasn’t there long. After a quick descent, he told us that he would send a quote to clean up the attic. Shortly thereafter, the second fellow came, and the process was repeated. Once the contractors were gone, the three of us went to lunch at our favorite meat and three, the Tiny Diny. You just had to love their slogan: “Get your hiney to the Tiny Diny!”
In those days we couldn’t check emails on our phones, so I had to go back to get the quotes. When I opened my mail, much to my surprise, both quotes were already there. I opened the first bid… $24,000! Was he nuts? We were a little, bitty non-profit. We chalked it up to the fact that the guy really didn’t want the job, and I moved on to the second bid. $13,000! Oh, my god! We simply couldn’t afford it!
Anne E.O. got a funny look on her face, but I was floored when she said, “We can do it!”
“Are you serious?” I asked. I could see determination on the faces of both employees.
“Absolutely!” replied Anne E.O. and Foy Boy simultaneously. “We can go to Homo Depot and get hazmat suits.”
So we did. We discovered the suits, which covered us from head to toe, even came with filters that you could breathe through.
Thursday morning we set to work. We stood out in the parking lot and geared up.
Even through the hazmat filters, the unmistakable aroma of death was mighty. Foy Boy, who was adorably gay – his email was Mickey McMuffin, after all – butched it up and declared that he would go first.
Fecal matter rolled off his suit as he pushed the tile upward. Soon his head disappeared into the stinky abyss.
In a minute we heard him laughing. Now I was puzzled, but Foy Boy reappeared with a Reese’s Cup wrapper and a pen.
“There’s a giant squirrel’s nest up there, and lots of small, shiny stuff from the office is in it!” Well, one mystery solved! Our thief was a squirrel…or two…or three.
Foy Boy went back. We could hear him gagging above us, and he yelled to get a trash bag ready. Anne E.O. and I climbed partway up the ladder and held the bag up as best we could.
Foy Boy rolled this giant, bloated blob that was once a possum into the waiting bag. All of us were gagging through our hazmat filters! We ran toward the door, dragging that bag behind us. Outside, we dropped the bag and ran to get away from the smell.
Back then we all smoked. We were desperate to get that “dead thing” stench off us.
Foy Boy passed around his Marlboro Reds. For smokers, the smell of the cigarette is a pleasant thing, and we enjoyed having a different scent in our nostrils.
Then we noticed a car slowing down as it passed us. It buzzed on by, when another car slowed to a snail’s pace and then moved on. In a few seconds, a third car almost came to a complete stop. A guy leaned out of his window and asked in a southern, country drawl, “Y’all havin’ an outbreak?” I looked at him in bewilderment, and he asked again, “Y’all havin’ an outbreak?”
A look of horror passed between Foy Boy, Anne E.O., and I, as the stranger’s meaning dawned on us. Here we were, completely covered head to toe in hazmat suits, looking like a CDC team just dispatched from some horror flick, standing right by the Mobile AIDS Support Services sign!
Then we all burst into laughter. While going way above and beyond in our jobs, we had furthered the very stigma we fought!
We hurriedly stripped off the hazmat suits. Our educational efforts that day left a little to be desired, but at least we could all go back to the work that we loved.
My friend Foy Boy just retired from managing the federal government’s health care website. He often reminds me that we gave him the first and last “2001 Opossum Award.”
The plaque still hangs on the wall of his study in his home in Atlanta.
Michael “Foy Boy” Mitchell with his “Possum Award.”
(Special note: Michael “Foy Boy” Mitchell attended a reception at the International AIDS Conference many years later, in 2012, where he met a certain HIV writer, Mark S. King. They were married on June 6, 2015.)
