I Loved You More (19 page)

The bartender who finally looks at me, looks at me because of the five dollar tip I've left him last time. He has the kind of face that needs to shave twice a day. Sweat dripping off him. Big silver loops in his nipples I'm afraid he'll catch on something. His eyes when they look into mine are surprisingly innocent.

“Two Buds! A shot of tequila!”

I give him a ten and a five, wave my hand so he knows to keep the change.

Hank downs his beer and I hand him another. I down the
tequila. My head is an airplane and Hank's shoulder is the runway. The way we're diving and bobbing, I'm thinking of cranes making love or maybe giraffes.

“Ever sodomized a woman?” I say.

The Judy lights from behind us light Hank's face up from the bottom. Like when you were kids and you put a flashlight under your chin. Just as Hank's about to dive in with some Disco Speak, in the crowd there's a thrust, men are pushed and then push back. For a moment I'm third class on a bus in India. Thank God for the tequila shot. In no time at all, the two chap guys got Hank and me pinned to the bar. My chap guy's got his ass pushed right into my crotch. Hank's guy's got him too. Hank's arms are in the air and his head is pushed back. Hank's face, for a moment, I think he's going to split. Then, as I'm watching him, Hank looks over at me. I catch him checking me out to see if I'm getting off with this guy's ass in my crotch.

That's when we turn, the both of us into the bar. Our backs to the chthonian hurricane, the marketplace, the waves. The extra tall guy next to Hank doesn't move. We dig ourselves in there like a World War and it's the trenches. Somewhere a high-pitched wail. Then suddenly, magic again. Hank Magic. And it's just Hank and me heads down, the wet hardwood counter of the bar, our hands on the bar around the long neck Buds, the ice scoop and the glass-clink of the bartenders somewhere around the tops of our heads. We're shoulder to shoulder to each other, and ass to ass with our chap buddies.

“So,” Hank says, “sodomy.”

“You like it?” I say.

“Hell yeah,” Hank says. “You have to be rock hard to get in.”

Hank lifts his bottle, takes a drink. I can feel the muscles in his arm move, we're that close.

“Secret's in the preparation,” I say.

“K-Y,” Hank says.

“And your mouth,” I say.

Hank's beer bottle goes down hard. His arm, those muscles that were so close, now there's space between us.

“Seriously?” Hank says. “You put your mouth down there?”

“In there,” I say. “My tongue.”

I'm afraid a little for what Hank's face does next. A look my father gave me when he caught me in a dress.

“You eat
ass?!
” Hank says.

A grossed-out frat boy now, Hank's face. Shame is Deadly Nightshade blooming in my heart. But I'm determined. I move my body slow, back in again, just barely, my shoulder against his shoulder.

“He's got to be clean,” I say. “Fleet clean. Sometimes, before I go down on his ass, I spit in whiskey or tequila or whatever I got.”

Hank stands up from leaning in on the bar. It takes me a while, but I stand up too. Tall as I can get. Which is taller than Hank by a half a head, but the tall guy on the other side of Hank is still a head taller. We take up less space standing. Nature fears a void and the bodies move in. Hank's black eyes look inside my eyes, in deep.

“You little ass-eater!” Hank says.

Hank tips his bottle up, pours the beer down his throat.

Then: “Yeh, I've et it too,” he says. “With a woman down there it all becomes just one big
place
, you know, asshole, cunt, clit. I just love eating pussy and sometimes I get so carried away, it ain't just pussy I'm eating, it's ass too, it's everything. It's the whole fucking world.

“It's all good,” Hank says.

“I'm a good friend of Edith's too,” I say. “Or used to be.”

“Edith?” Hank says.

“It's a joke,” I say. “Edith gives good.”

“Huh?” Hank says.

“Head.” I say, “You know Edith Head.”

Hank obviously wasn't married to a feminist in the
seventies. We go back into our huddle, crouch down, elbows on the bar. Men all around us push.

“Olga said you were good at it,” Hank says. “Eating pussy.

“And that's a little confounding,” Hank says, “that Olga can know something like that.”

“Psychic,” I say.

“She's a witch,” Hank says, “and you better not be eating her pussy.”

Hank and me with the same woman. The way we laugh then has so much force, we push the bare-assed chap guys away. In fact, the whole fucking crowd has to step back. I'm stupid laughing so hard I start to cough. After a while, I don't even know what I'm laughing at. I'm just trying to find breath.

The good old days. When we didn't know. If you laugh like that the gods will hear.

Ruth Dearden.

Got to go pal
.

For what no man doth believe / the gods can bring about
.

Hank and I lean down, dive back in. Hank's burp is long and extra loud. The burp bounces against the bar, comes up smelling beer piss.

“Still though,” Hank says. “Going from women to men. And then back again. I don't know how you do it.”

“I touch them, but they don't touch me,” I say. “No one touches me, so it doesn't matter what sex they are.”

Just as I speak these words, pirate laughter, a big burst, way too loud. Hank doesn't hear a word I say.

“This one time for a prostate check,” Hank says, “the doc had me hold onto a metal shelf. When he stuck his finger in, I pulled the fucking thing off the wall.”

Still I try one more time: “It's like required reading,” I say. “You read Virginia Woolf because everyone says you should. So you read her. But she doesn't touch you.”

“What?” Hank yells.

I wave my hand,
forget it
. Hank dives his head down in again.

“How you get it up there,” Hank says. “I can't imagine.”

Back to Disco Speak. This time I'm so close to Hank's ear, my lips touch his fat ear lobe.

“Your girlfriend got it up there.”

“What?” Hank says.

“That's different,” Hank says.

“What's different?”

“She's a girl,” Hank says.

“Assholes got no gender,” I say.

“No,” Hank says. “Assholes are
female
. That's why guys say
I got your back
.”

My hand is high, my gesture broad and Judy lit, a sweep across the room.

“Not all guys,” I say.

Hank's face looks drunk and in the drunk way I've only seen Hank look a couple other times. Something pissed off, maybe even mean. His black eyes look around the room.

“You can see this anywhere,” Hank yells. “Men hitting on men is no different from men hitting on women. You don't have to go to the Spike to see men act like assholes.”

What I say next surprises me. Not that I say it, but how. Directly into Hank's ear. It's a challenge.

“We can see a lot more if you'd like,” I say, “in the back room. Men fucking.”

Hank's black eyes come straight across at me.

“Okay, Napalm,” Hank says. “I'm following you.”

SOMETHING HAPPENS THEN.
Just as Hank and I start to move away from the bar toward the back room. We're just entering the slow circling Ouroboros, just about to be swept away into the crowd, when, for some reason, Hank and I stop and both of us look down on the floor. What makes the tall guy so tall is that he's standing on a plastic milk case,
Dellwood
along the side. Hank and I both, our eyes, travel up this guy's body. Just when our eyes are at the skull tattoo on his pink arm, the tall guy raises his beer
to his mouth. Where his arm and the skull tattoo used to be, framed between his chest and belly and his arm in the air, Hank and I see it. On the bar, his fly open, his ballsack spread way out and thumb-tacked to the wooden counter. Stretched out ball flesh, a many-pointed hairy star, pink thumbtacks, and a nub of circumcised cock sticking up out of it.

Hank. The shock of seeing that guy having a quiet beer while tiny beads of blood well up around pink thumb tacks is a blow to him as if he's been kidney-punched. He puts his hand on the bar, steadies himself.

“You all right?” I yell.

Hank's a battering ram through the crowd, an offensive lineman plowing through, headed for the door. That quick, the crowd fills in where Hank has pushed. I can't see him anywhere. Getting my body through that crowd isn't as easy for me. I push and push. It takes forever. Outside, when I finally catch up to him, Hank's bent over in the gutter, big vomits splash out of his mouth into the curb.

“Hank,” I say before I touch his back. “It's me.”

IT'S JUST AS
hot outside, only different. For about a minute. Then the wind whips off the Hudson and I'm froze solid. My thermal sweatshirt goes on quick. My ears still pound with disco. In the cold night air, my body's happy to move free again. The West Side Highway, speeding bright white headlights of cars and trucks and cabs, yellow numbers on their roofs, red lights, orange lights, their blink and blink. Above at the intersection, the traffic light down and up, green, amber, red. The night is a blur, a loud long roar and blur. A big truck blasts past and the hot air and exhaust blows against us, hot ghosts onto ice. Hank's up, putting on his thermal, and walking. We take a cross street east. In the city we love, we're walking again. When things have gone bad, when things have gone good, when things have dumped shit on your head, when you're in the stars, when you're fucked up, when it's too hot, when your ass is freezing, when you've just heaved
your guts out into the curb, walk, just walk. Keep on walking. Our breath pushed out just ahead of us.

“Good thing you didn't bang into that guy,” I say. “He'd be dangling.”

Hank doesn't laugh, doesn't look at me. He just keeps walking, shivering, his hands fists in his Levi's pockets. Even in the dark, I can tell. The way his face is pale. We keep on walking. Side by side, not one in front of the other, not Hank stepping back in the narrow spots so I can walk first. Just walking. It's quiet enough we can hear our footsteps break the ice. At the next avenue we stop for the Don't Walk. In the neon, Hank's face looks green.

“The wind coming down these long bright avenues at night,” I say, “fucking freeze your nuts off, man.”

Just then a blast of wind so cold it blows right through us to the bones.

“I didn't throw up because of the sex,” Hank says. “I got a weird thing for needles.”

Passes out easily, Hank, throws up if anything gets too far out of kosher. Makes my heart cry out. Hank and his cancer. All those days and nights, all those years in and out of hospitals, the biopsies, the chemo, the radiation, bed pans, the throw up, the IVs, the incisions, the needles, the shits. Hank in Florida, me in Oregon. All those years, I was never there. Couldn't brush back his hair. Didn't hold his hand. In spirit, yes. But my body, well, my body was having some problems of its own.

The first deli we come to, Hank stands under the heat lamp in the doorway outside. I go in.

“Pepsi,” Hanks says, “and some peanuts maybe.”

Hank rips open the bag of peanuts, chucks the whole bag of them into his mouth. His bare hands in the cold night. Chews like he's way too hungry, then downs the Pepsi, two big gulps. We're way too young, too healthy, to know about blood sugar. Above us on the left, the top of the Empire State Building is Christmas red and green.

“I'm glad we went there,” Hank says. “It's always cool to
see the world with different eyes. But that wasn't what I was looking for.”

Hank takes the Pepsi bottle by the neck between his second and third fingers. A quick thrust of his arm and the bottle flies into a vacant lot, breaks against the cement. The broken glass, little pieces of light, fall onto a flat of old linoleum floor with other bits of broken glass and ice.

It spooks me, the Pepsi bottle. How quick it happens, and violent. My body jumps. At the sternum. In the middle of my chest, a lightbulb that you can see the filament flickering. Fear. The beaten boy in the world of men, running. Their strange sudden inexplicable violence.

We don't stop, keep walking as if the Pepsi bottle never happened. It takes me a while but then I get it that I'm a child who's walking with his fucked up father, and I need to say something.

“So what was it,” I say. “Exactly. That you were looking for?”

ALL THE WAY
across town, to the Flatiron Building, to Union Square, to NYU, past Tower Records, Eighth Street, to Astor Place and the big metal square you can push against to make it move, Cooper Union, down to East Fifth Street, not a word. We walk, our heads down, our hoods pulled tight, our hands in our sweatshirt pockets, frozen snot in our mustaches, right past my apartment and keep walking, not a word. To Second Avenue, to Sixth Street, five in the morning, the Indian restaurants, masala, curry, lamb vindaloo. Past the Pyramid. The skinheads. Not a word.