I Loved You More (36 page)

After Tony reads my novel he's convinced it's love. I'm convinced too. He wants me to come live with him. I want to come live with him. We set the date for the end of June the following year.

Tony leaves for Portland in early December.

For Christmas, he sends me a Fairy Drag Queen ornament to put on the top of my tree. It's a Ken Doll dressed up as Christmas Angel Barbie, only Christmas Angel Barbie's got a black beard and hairy legs. Her lopsided halo you can plug in. Under his dress is a red jock strap. A wired connector on his asshole so he can sit, a proper star, on the very top tip of the tree. In his Christmas card, Tony tells me he bought the Fairy Drag Queen at a benefit for AIDS on Christopher Street.

By April Tony is dead.

Systemic non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

AT PORTLAND'S PIONEER
Cemetery, I stay away from the crowd of mourners. Look hard to see which woman is his mother. Which man his father. Lots of young people gathered. Students, I guess. A young man plays his guitar and sings. “
Ne Me Quitte Pas
.” Fuck.

When everyone leaves and the dozer has filled the grave, I just sit there on the wet grass among all the flowers. It's a beautiful spring day. The tall trees. Everything so quiet. Green like I've never seen green.

Big Ben finds a house for rent not more than a block away.
Three hundred dollars a month for a whole house and backyard. On the
FOR RENT
sign it says:
See Horace next door
, and then an arrow. Next door in the front yard there is every kind of blooming flower there is. Horace is about sixty. He's bald and wears a red T-shirt. His pants held up by red suspenders. Those wild kind of eyebrows old men got and spectacles.
Spectacles
, I think as soon as I see Horace's gold-rimmed glasses. The way Horace's bloodshot eyes look at me he can tell I've been crying. In Horace's hand a copy
of Moby-Dick
.

“Good book,” I say.

“Have you read the feminist version?” he says.

I don't know what to say. I clear my throat or some shit like that.

“Moby Pussy,” he says.

Horace doesn't laugh when he says this, so I don't laugh either. Really, I'm afraid to start laughing. I take my wallet out, take two hundred cash out and give it to him and tell him I'll send him the rest when I get to Manhattan.

“Manhattan?” Horace says.

I start to apologize for the missing hundred then stop.

“Grew up on Orchard and Delancey,” he says.

Then Horace goes in his house and closes the door. I can hear him in his front room rustling around. When he opens the door again he hands me two keys.

“Same key opens the front door and the back,” he says. “You've got two there. Duplicates.”

“Full rent is due by the fifth of every month,” he says.

At Tony's grave with all the flowers I tell Tony about my new house and ask him if he's read the feminist version of
Moby-Dick
.

A WEEK LATER
, back in New York, Little Ben thinks I can't possibly leave New York. Who am I if I'm not a New Yorker?

One morning I get up, throw on my work clothes, grab my broom and dustpan, open and close and lock my apartment door, walk out the front door of my building. Down on the street,
some asshole has ripped open the garbage bags and there's shit all over creation. The night before I'd spent a couple hours bagging up that garbage. So I set myself to the task at hand. Get the mess cleaned up. All the while people are walking past. One guy in a black Armani overcoat hacks up a loogie and spits right at my feet. It's nothing personal. It's just that I'm invisible. But it's the backed up sewerage in the basement of 39 East Seventh that's the last straw. I leave my white Key West shrimper boots on the bottom basement stair.

If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.

THE DAY I
leave Manhattan, Hank is up from Florida getting the last of his shit out of storage. We meet at #77 St. Mark's Place, at Auden's door. It's the afternoon of
Cinco de Mayo
. Already hot. After this day, I won't see Hank for eleven and a half years. Hank's in his gray hooded sweatshirt and Levi's. Still wearing the straw cowboy hat Gary gave him from Atlanta. His new white tennis shoes. His hair's cut short and his beard shows gray. The Eighties are about over. I'm wearing the green coat Gary gave me with Idaho Dairy Association on it. Levi's, my Red Wing boots. Sal's red baseball cap. I've brought an old bike along somebody'd left in one of my basements. Hank said he could use the transportation in Florida. It's one of those stripped down bikes with ten gears and knobby tires that's good for dodging through traffic. Hank's standing on one side of the bike, me on the other.

THOSE BLACK EYES
that should be blue but they're not. Hank looks tired. But I do too.

I don't tell him about Tony. I try to but I can't. But I do tell him about the house I've rented in Portland. I make up some shit about going back to the Pacific Northwest. Hank's still going on about Barry Hannah.

When we embrace the bike is between us. We're front to front and Hank holds onto the bike, keeps the bike right there between us.

I wonder why that bike is there.

But then I got to figure. It's been eight months since Atlanta and the wedding ring bed. And Hank Christian, The Enigma of Hank, The Warrior Ghost, is back to holding his cards close to his chest.

Hank Christian, man. Fucking Hank Christian.

I'm trying not to cry, but I cry.

Fucking Auden's poem gets me every time.

THAT FIRST YEAR
in Portland I spend more time in the cemetery than anywhere else. There's a huge old cedar tree I like to lean against. Smells great under that tree. Pioneer Cemetery. Mostly poor people buried there. Couldn't find a spot for myself right next to him, but I got one close by.

Tony Escobar, man. Fucking Tony Escobar.

AND THAT'S HOW
I got here, Portland, Oregon, on the second step. The sun is warm on my face, my shoulders, my hands. Five years and three months since Tony died. Five years and two months I've lived in Portland.

It's my birthday and people are coming to my house for a birthday party and I have enough money to buy the food and the booze. I have two books published and I have a contract for a third and the third book is busting my balls but I love it. I'm writing about what only there is I can write about. AIDS and New York.

Something else that's important to know. Not a day has gone by in these last seven years that Little Ben hasn't woken up afraid. AIDS. That bright flickering filament in the middle of my chest. Every day at Bikram's College of India, with every drop of sweat I think of AIDS. I quit smoking, quit drinking. Every day when I want a smoke I think of AIDS. Every day I want a smart cocktail I think of AIDS. My organic breakfast, the organic vegetables for lunch and dinner, the naturally grown meat I can't afford at the fancy grocery. Every night I put myself to sleep
reading Louise Hey and other self-help books. Flip the
I Ching
. Do the tarot cards. Trying to keep the Fear Giant at bay. One spiritual book tells me my urine is my own secret personal medicine cabinet, so every morning I drink a cup of my urine. Every morning with my cup of piss I remember AIDS. It's not so bad, just tastes like piss. The secret is to believe. Not one moment since that day I lay on the floor in Penn Station, not for one fucking moment have I let myself forget what the doctor on East 83rd had said.

Positive = Sick = Death.

Then there was Montana. Just the week before, as a birthday present for me, Ephraim arranged it so that I could dance with a sacred medicine pipe. Me, the only white man that's danced with that pipe. When the old native man asked me why I wanted to dance with his pipe, I looked into his dark eyes. They were the eyes of a child, nothing in between. I've never felt so looked at. I told him about my friends who died and the virus called AIDS and the test that I had that showed I was infected. I told him I was dancing with his pipe so I wouldn't get AIDS.

We can do that
, the old man had said.

ON THE SECOND
step the sun is almost gone. I take another breath, a deep inhale.

It's that day, in the patch of sun, in Portlandia. All that Montana sacred pipe spirit flowing through me. That moment there on my forty-seventh birthday, I decide.

My thumb is on the no fear spot and I move my thumb away. It's time to let the fear go. My birthday gift to myself. Big Ben steps up and declares: I am healthy and I'm going to stay healthy and I'm not going to get AIDS.

As if it were up to me.

The patch of sunlight is gone. That breath is a difficult breath to let go of, but when I do, it's the first time in years. No fear. Clear and clean and smooth and as soon as I finish my proclamation of health, the phone rings. It's Hank Christian.

“Dear sweet man,” Hank says. “Happy Birthday.”

“How's Barry Hannah?” I say.

“We're armwrestling,” Hank says. “Three to two my favor.”

“Dr. Christian,” I say, “if you ever graduate you should come teach with me. What a team we'd make. Just like the old days at the Y.”

“Hey, I'm serious,” Hank says. “I'd love teaching with you. Nobody else is doing what you're doing.”

“There wouldn't be any tenure,” I say. “But that doesn't mean there ain't no benefits.”

Hank's big laugh coming up and out of him.

“You could say
motherfucker
all you wanted,” I say.

“And no freshman comp,” Hank says.

“I ain't much at armwrestling,” I say.

We laugh some more after that. Then we talk as long as we can but neither one of us are good on the phone. So we make our usual promise that we'll visit one another. But I have my new book to work on. And Hank has to find a job. It will be five years before we talk to each other again.

IT'S THAT NIGHT
I have a gin and tonic, two. I smoke some reefer too. Weird. I'd completely forgotten what a funny fellow I can be. Of course, you can't smoke reefer and not have a cigarette. Before I know it, I'm completely stoned and I'm Big Ben and there are so many people in the house it's hard to move. Most of the people are from my class. It's when my favorite song comes on, “Got to Give It Up,” that I look around for someone to dance with.

Ruth Dearden's been dancing all night, nonstop, as if the back patio was a place of magic. Sometimes alone, mostly with other women. Ruth is completely unselfconscious, and often the way she moves is quite dramatic. For a moment I think she's high, then I remember her husband.

Ruth always leaves right after class. Most students hang out, have some wine. Usually someone lights a joint. Later on,
Ruth will tell me it was because of that joint that she left early. She was afraid her husband would find out and he'd make her stop class because there were drugs.

At first, I dance alone next to her. The last time I'd danced to this song was with Hank that night before we went to the Spike. All around Ruth on the patio are puffs of chiffon that all night she's been tearing off her dress.

The moment when Ruth sees that I'm close, she smiles way too big. I take her hands and we begin to dance. Jitterbugging I guess is what you'd call it. My sister taught me the steps when I was in the fourth grade and I've been doing them ever since. Modified the steps with Bette Podegushka for the disco years.

“Oh my God!” Ruth says. “My teacher is dancing with me and he's in his long johns!”

Some women just know how to follow. Don't ask me how they do it. I can't do it. Ginger Rogers as good as Fred Astaire only Ginger did it backwards and in high heels.

Some women Ruth ain't. As soon as I touch her hands and begin dancing with her, the unselfconscious, dramatic dancer that was Ruth Dearden, all of a sudden loses her rhythm. It's like she isn't listening to the music at all. She actually begins to clown, throwing her arms and legs around. I'm surprised she makes fun of herself like this. Then in a moment I get it. Ruth Dearden has a propinquity problem. I quick let go of Ruth's hands and we dance together without touching.

On her chest, just above the chiffon bodice of her white dress, her skin flushes scarlet. Ruth knows her skin is doing that, so she puts her hand at her throat. She's looking for something to say, anything, so she says:

“Happy Birthday!”

“You look like you're having a good time,” I say.

“My husband isn't here,” she says.

“Your dress is falling apart.”

“I'm ripping it apart. It's my wedding dress,” Ruth says. “I've always hated it.”

“A little girl's dress,” she says. “Or a doll's. So puffy and so First Communion. I don't know what I was thinking.”

What I say next. You got to be high to say shit like I say next.

“If you keep at it,” I say, “you'll be like Shingli-shoozi.”