I Loved You More (40 page)

Yeah, well, change this, motherfucker. My T-cell count was seven and my viral load was over nine hundred thousand.
Believe that it hath been given and it shall be given unto you
. Yeah, well, I believed. Way down deep, I believed. Every particle of me believed. I couldn't have wanted something more, believed more. Believing more wasn't fucking possible. And there I am. Either it's fucked up to believe that it hath been given or else it's back to being
your
fault and you just didn't believe that it was given enough.

Fuck this Secret Shit. The secret is hold on to your balls
because what you're in is a pinball machine and when you rack up enough points you either win or go tilt.

For me it was tilt. You attract what you radiate. Which means I got AIDS because I was looking for it. I had no fucking say at all in the something that meant everything to me, my life.

Big Ben is so full of shit.

THAT'S WHEN I
stop sleeping. I mean I barely sleep. Three or four hours a night. I didn't know what the deal was then. But I can tell you now. The spirits, the guardian angels, I thought were in charge of my fortune and well-being had never even existed. All there was, was me and I'd better keep an eye on me. And how can you keep an eye on things if you're not awake.

The lightbulb in the middle of my chest, the filament always flickering.

The Running Boy couldn't stop running.

It must be all the Catholic stuff. That if you pray hard enough the Virgin will hear you. I mean, my mother, if my mother didn't have her faith she couldn't have existed. With all the Catholic shit I tossed out, I'd held on to a very precious belief. A belief that is the most essentially Catholic. Jesus can save you. If you can't get to Jesus, talk to his mother. I'd just turned Jesus and his mother into Don Juan and Louise Hay.

At my next appointment, I take a cab to the hospital. It's really weird being out in the world alone. I'll say it again. It's really weird being out in the world alone. I tell Madelena, my Nurse Practitioner, that I'm having trouble sleeping. She refers me to a Dr. Mark Hardy, a psychiatrist.

DR. MARK HARDY'S
office is in the basement. Dark,
film noir
dark. I'm standing in the reception area waiting to sign in. I notice the bright yellow tape on the gray carpet but I don't know what the tape is for. In a moment, a big bald security guard walks up to me, grabs me by the arm. He's yelling
always remain behind the yellow line
. He pulls me by the arm to the back wall.
Sit down along the wall with everyone else until you hear your name called
.

I want to protest. I'm not just like all the rest. I'm Ben Grunewald. I've published two novels. I've been reviewed in the
New York Times
. But then I don't. I'm shaking so bad all I can do is sit down on a gray folding chair.

That moment, so much in that moment. The bully guard, that I don't stand up to him. Maybe I'd lose my insurance. Or the doctor won't see me. They'll put me at the end of the line. Fuck, when you're weak like that, when you need so much, how overwhelming it is. There's no fight left, and all you can do is cower.

But the guard was right. I did think I was better than those people sitting along the wall. Those people were crazies on public assistance. Homeless, drug addicts, drunks, dirty bag-people.

As I sat down. On one side of me was a heavyset woman with no teeth and long stringy hair. An orange parka and stains on her T-shirt. The young man on the other side was gothed-out, some kind of strong perfume, spiked hair dyed black. Full of piercings. Music so loud on his earphones I could hear the punk rock noise.

DR. MARK HARDY'S
office has a window that is a window well. Spiderwebs and spiders and leaves and shit fill up the window well. The smell of walls that have just been painted. There are bright colorful posters on the wall. Bright colorful posters that pretty much say you're fucked.

Dr. Mark Hardy is young, just barely thirty, and beautiful, I mean radiant fucking beauty. This guy isn't just movie star beautiful, he's surfer dude beautiful. Long brown wavy hair as long as Roger Daltrey's. He reaches across his desk and shakes my hand. His hand is meaty and dry and his large square fingernails are shiny as if he polishes them.

He asks me to sit down. I sit. My elbows on the arms of my
chair poke my shoulders up. My neck is stiff. My lips are dry. I'm going on ten hours of sleep max in the last three days. Doctor Mark sits with his one leg crossed over the other. The shin of his right leg making a ninety degree with his left. He holds his hands like pictures of Jesus' hands, the tips of his index fingers at the base of his nose and his third fuck-you finger on top of his nose. Thumbs on his chin. Now and then he plays with the blotter on his desk. Lining it up with the edge. He asks me ridiculous questions – my mother, my father, my sister, my education – straight from the textbook. I answer him as if these questions are important. Finally, he says out loud, like it's suddenly just dawned on him:

“Paxil!” he says.

Just before I walk out the door of Dr. Hardy's office, I ask him:

“Have you ever been depressed?”

Dr. Mark Hardy is surprised. He gets huffy. Coughs a couple times. His face turns red the way Ruth's neck does.

“Once,” Dr. Hardy says. “When I broke up with my girlfriend in high school.”

Then he asks me, after all the textbook questions, he looks at me like I'm a guy, and not just another patient who's got AIDS. He flat out asks:

“Why are
you
depressed?”

“Failure of spirit,” I say.

PAXIL FOR ME
is like taking speed. My body is flushed and it feels like I can't keep up with my breath and I can't sit still, let alone lie down. I call up Dr. Mark Hardy, seems like dozens of times, but I either get the receptionist or his voicemail.

My message is always the same.

Are you sure this stuff isn't an upper? I'm a total speed freak on this shit. Please call me. I'm in a terrible predicament
.

Dr. Mark Hardy does not call back. I have to wait two weeks
to see him again. In the middle of the first week I get a letter. It's from Ruth.

The envelope is off-white and the paper is soft with a nub. A postage stamp of James Dean. My address in Ruth's penmanship so perfect as if she'd gone to Catholic school. Just like Ursula Crohn's letter. The stamp, the stationery. The penmanship. The fancy paper. Who is it that can get their shit together to create a letter like this?

Ruth Dearden. I expect the worst.

Inside are three pages handwritten on the same paper as the envelope. The written lines don't slope or slant or go awry.

Dear Ben
.

Ruth starts her letter with the first moment she sees me. Sitting in a class room at the Sitka Center at the beach in Otis, Oregon. I walk up to her wearing a red ballcap and a white T-shirt and Levi's, look her right in the eyes, take her hand and introduce myself. The way I look at her, the way I speak, something new comes alive in her. It's a way of looking at herself. And she falls in love. Just like that. A big funny man she knows she'll never have a chance with. Tall and handsome and a New Yorker. Such an exotic creature. Profane, irreverent, passionate in a way she's never known a man to be. It's how I smell in the hot classroom that gets to her more than anything. Gay, but the rumors say there'd been lots of women. So there is hope.

I'm so unlike her ex-husband, her fucking perfect older brother Phillip, so unlike any man she's ever met.

The night of the White Party dancing under the moon. When I ask her to dance, how clumsy she gets as if her body has never danced. The song we sing to the moon, a moment so profound she doesn't go home 'til dawn.

Over the years, around the writing table, how her love changes. The way I support her, give her room to speak and argue and state her opinion help her have the strength to leave her husband. Along with her therapist, Judith, I'm the one to thank for her new freedom.

Then about a year ago, she begins to see in me another man. Fragile, afraid, wounded, aloof, impenetrable really. The day in class I cry. She wants so much to give back all that I have given her. She'd give her life if only I could only let her love me. Then the kiss. It pisses her off, the kiss, because it means so much more to her than it does to me. She's had two weeks to think it over, though. And she's decided. She hopes someday I can love her back. But whether I can love her or not, whether I can love her at all isn't important. And then she promises. To love me forever without conditions. Just being around me, taking care of me is all she wants.

THAT NIGHT I'M
lying on my bed vibrating, trying to watch a Cary Grant movie. I think I hear a knock on my door but I'm not sure. Since the Paxil my ears have been ringing. Then it's Ruth standing in my bedroom doorway holding a vase of purple and yellow flowers. My freaked out body is so startled it slams against the wall, which startles Ruth, who drops the vase of flowers. Broken glass, water. Purple and yellow flowers all over.

The fiasco. So many fiascos with Ruth. She tells me to stay in bed, she'll clean it up. My feet are bare but I get up anyway, careful where I walk. I'm leaning down, picking up glass off the floor. That's the second time Ruth hits me. Knocks me the fuck down. With the broom in the side of my head as she walks in the bedroom. Blood again from a cut on my ass where I land. The cut isn't bad, it just bleeds a lot. Then it's Ruth standing in a puddle of water, posies all over the place, me leaning across the bed, fucked up about the blood and AIDS and Ruth. Made her put on rubber gloves. Ruth trying to put one of those large square Band-Aids on my hairy ass. The rubber gloves. Fuck.

Really, what else can you do but laugh? At least at that point with Ruth and me. Years later, the third time she goes to hit me it won't be funny at all.

ONLY TO GO
to the doctor do I get out of my pajamas. That night, though, I put on my walking shoes, my khaki pants, a white T-shirt, and my black sweater. My wool overcoat. A red knit cap. My God these old clothes, how they don't know how to fit. Ruth thinks I'm trying to get away from her. She says,
No, I'll go. You don't have to go. I'll clean this mess up and then I'll go
. I don't tell her what I'm doing because I'm laughing. Ruth thinks I'm laughing at her, and I am, but not just
at
her. It's like that song in
The Sound of Music. How do you solve a problem like Maria?

What Ruth doesn't know is what a relief she is. Even with all the mess and the broom upside the head and the pain in my ass, the way I'd been shaking with that Paxil shit, how my bedroom and my bed had started to look like a horror movie, what Ruth doesn't know is how happy I was to see her.

Ruth is doubled up on my couch, crying, her back to me, thinking she's the clumsiest piece of shit ever. I get the flashlight from under the sink, walk over to the couch. I touch her on the shoulder. Just a touch at first, then lay my palm down flat there.

“Come with me,” I say. “Walk with me. I want to show you something.”

RUTH TAKES A
long time in the bathroom. When she comes out her face is fresh. A bit of lipstick. She tries to smile but it's not really a smile. Outside it's not raining. At least for now it's not raining. I show Ruth where the tent tarp is on the back porch and we walk, Ruth and I. Ruth with the bundle of tarp and me with the flashlight. I still don't know how to walk so good. So I'm holding on to Ruth's arm real tight. The night is partly cloudy. Partly clear. Stars over the city center. Dark clouds over Mount Hood. What a place of sky Portlandia city is. A new moon. Just a little slipper of a moon. Fresh air off the ocean dries the tears and mellows the Paxil buzz.

Pioneer Cemetery is surrounded by a cyclone fence with barbed wire at the top. I know a place though. At least I think I do. At the gate between a stone pillar and the cyclone fence,
there's a spot so skinny they figure no body could make it through. Believe me, I've tried. But that was before I was walking skin and bones.

I shut the flashlight off. Put it in my back pocket. There's enough light to see. Ruth steps into the palm of my hand, by that time we're laughing like hell, and I lift with all my might. Ruth's a powerhouse, a fucking athlete the way she climbs up the pillar and a little scream when she jumps down. Then me, I slide through the skinny spot with an inch to spare.

We walk in the dark. We're giggling and we're kids, and it feels good to be walking in the place of the dead. I show Ruth where to spread the tarp. I lie down first and then Ruth lies down beside me. At first we lie there strict and straight as corpses. We don't touch. I take a deep breath and finally:

“This is my spot,” I say.

I don't tell Ruth how much that spot really is mine. That I've bought that spot and right in that spot one day my ashes will be under us right where we are lying.

Tony Escobar. I start to tell Ruth about Tony Escobar. Tony lying right over there, no farther than two shovel lengths away. But I let the dead be.

Instead, I start talking about Hank Christian. Over the years, Ruth's heard so much about Hank Christian. He is to her, like he is to me, a Magician, a Titan, a constellation in the sky. The Beloved.