I Loved You More (5 page)

Then there was the Monster. A piano bar. The men there didn't all look like G.I. Joe. Sitting at the crowded bar, you could actually talk to men. But it didn't take me long to figure out it was the cocaine. Really, I had some of the most bizarre conversations you could imagine in that place. Men making absolutely no fucking sense at all. For example, there was this one guy one night. He was a black guy, good looking. I introduced myself and that quick he's talking about the night and the stars and somehow then he's talking about the trademark porcelain stamp on the men's toilet in the bathroom,
Porcelana
, then he's talking about Burt Reynolds's party tricks, then how the more fruit you eat the more sour your cum tastes – all of it, all at once, spoken in one long breathless sentence. Fuck.

The secret code. I think what being gay really means is that
you understand the secret code. I never got the secret code. For example, I walk up to a guy in a bar who's carefully prepared himself to look like he's been digging fence posts all day. I say,
Hi, hello how are you
and tell him my name is Ben. More often than not this guy won't speak, he'll just look at me up and down, checking me out, what's important, what's wrong, and then he'll walk off.

Now if you know the secret code, you know to follow or not to follow. Sometimes when you follow, the guy's in the bathroom with his dick hanging out. And there's just no way in hell I'm going to kneel down in all that piss and take some dick I've never met into my mouth.

Then sometimes when you follow the guy, you aren't supposed to follow the guy, because in secret code he'd just told you to fuck off. Yet sometimes when you follow the guy who'd just somehow magically communicated to you to fuck off, that's the right thing to do. And I guess that's because that means you
want
to be told to fuck off, and if that guy is in fact a guy who gets off on telling guys to fuck off, then that's the right move to make. Otherwise it's a staredown from hell.

And that's just if you gets the balls to walk up to someone and start talking. Mostly I just stand and wait for someone to talk to me. Yah. Good luck.

Then the whole top and bottom thing. How men just know that stuff. So many times, in the bathroom, there isn't a dick hanging out waiting for you, it's a guy bent over stretching out his ass crack with his hands. I mean really, I love men's asses. I've followed men's asses all the way across Manhattan. But to just have that hairy stretched out purple crack there hanging under some bad lighting, really no matter how hard I tried, my dick just don't work that way.

Then of course, seems like every man in these friendly bars had a dick the size of Godzilla. Really what do you do with something that big? It can't fit in your mouth and it certainly can't fit up
your ass. So I guess the old joke is true: all you can do is throw your arms around it and weep.

HANK WAS HAVING
his own troubles. The beauty of a friendship like Hank's and mine is that shit like this comes out and months later, years, and you're laughing your ass off.

Hank was freaked because he didn't know what the fuck. He knew I was gay and he figured since I was gay and since all of a sudden I was always on his mind, then he must be gay too. And that was perplexing. Gays wore tight pants that emphasized their crotches, wore rings on their pinkie fingers, had special colored hankies they wore in their back Levi's pockets, and exhibited an insatiable desire to suck cock. Personally, Hank had never even remotely experienced any of these traits in himself. He'd tried it once and couldn't even get one finger up his asshole, so what was this desire to get next to Grunewald? Maybe this was how gay started. One day you're thinking about some guy and the next day you're on your knees in a XXX sex parlor with a red handkerchief sticking out the back left pocket of your tight Levi's 501 jeans. Or was it the right pocket? Fuck.

FREAKIN' WILD THE
way the city feels on a summer Friday night. Late June 1985, just before sunset, Hank Christian presses his thumb against the buzzer of apartment 1A, 211 East Fifth Street.

When I hear my buzzer, I flutter. Everything about me flutters – my hands, my fingers, the breath in my chest. I take a deep breath, look into the old, peeling mirror.
Hank Christian is buzzing my buzzer
. I unlock the locks on my apartment door, open the door, take two big steps to the front door, put my hand on the knob that always smells of the musk oil the lesbians upstairs bathe in, swing the door open. All day, the sun has baked itself into the cast iron steps. No shade, just beating down sun onto the stoop, onto the alcove of the doorway. The bright and heat blast in. The smell of the street – exhaust fumes, piss under the stairs, garbage. I blink and blink and raise my hand to block out
the sun. Hank is a hazy dark object in a vat of hot bright. I go to speak, but suddenly Hank's hand pokes out into the shadows of the hallway, right at me. It is the hand of a Caravaggio and appears as if out of another dimension. I look and look and look at the hand, then grab it, Hank's hand, and I pull him in as if Hank was burning up in a cauldron out there. Both Hank and I laugh a little the way I've hauled him in. When we can see into each other's eyes, I quick pull my hand out of Hank's, and my hand falls down against my leg, fluttering.

Hank and I maneuver our bodies through the do-si-do of the front door closing, through the apartment door of 1A, then the closing and the locking of the apartment door without touching.

The apartment is a studio and right there by the door when the door is closed is one of two places in the apartment where there's room enough for two to stand. Too close really for two men. Propinquity.

Hank's black eyes assess my home, my den, where I write my abuses and murders. A writer's eyes, Hank's – must see must look must know – every detail, but careful not to get caught looking.

What I see Hank see: the fan in the window, the dark rust-colored Levolor blinds closed tight, the big red metal writing desk. No computer, not yet. A big ass typewriter that can self-erase. The lamp and the crooked shade colored with red and yellow and blue Crayolas. The exposed brick wall. Stacks of papers and books and books and books. The skinny white stove, four burners and an oven. Two white metal cupboards above the stainless steel sink. A cutting board on top on a hip-high refrigerator. In the back of the apartment, darkness, a staircase, the loft bed.

The whole time, as Hank and I speak to each other, our hands and arms move up and down, each of us on our own bodies – hands on hips, fingers in armpits, one hand on hip, a hand that pops the knuckle on the other hand, both hands
hanging down at the sides, a quick cover of the crotch, then hands that wave around, fucking hands, man, two men standing too close front to front, flutter flutter, fucking arms, folding and unfolding over our cocks, over our bellies, over our hearts.

In the mirror leaning against the brick wall, its layers of silver peeling off, Hank Christian and Ben Grunewald, a dream of them, their reflections, like this story is a dream only different, standing inside in there.

My arms finally settle their flutter into a place crossed just over my nipples, my right hand up, open-palmed, rubbing the stubble of my chin. My nose is trying to sniff up the chicken and rice and garlic I'd cooked the night before. Hank's mint smell. Maybe it comes from his shampoo. I'm sucking in my gut. Hank is pushing out and raising up his chest, pulling his arms down, shoulders down, the way he does.

On our lips, smiles of course, the both of us. Our lips, what they speak. What they do not speak. How the voices inside us come up and out.

“Hank,” I say, “How ya doin', man?”

“Sorry I'm late.” Hank says, “Number one was running slow.”

“I always take the R.” I say, “Hot, ain't it?”

“Fucking hot!”

“Too hot in here,” I say. “What do ya say we find some air condish and have a beer. There's a place over on Second Ave called Le Culot.”

“Frenchie's always pricey,” Hank says. “I'm on a budget.”

“I know the bartender,” I say. “The first round is free.”

YOU CAN TELL
a lot about a man by how he walks down the street with you. Most men don't ever have to think about shit like this, how you walk, but with me, with the father I had, I always had to be sure I knew how close or how far that guy was from me. Out of nowhere, my father's right hand could reach out and cuff me. Make my ear bleed. Or my nose. I'm a grown man now, and have been for a number of decades, and I understand that a
grown man should overcome these kinds of fears. Call it what you want. Paranoia. Post-Traumatic Stress. Hypervigilance. Faggotry – for me there's always a circle my arm's length around me, and if anybody breaks into that circle, the searchlight goes on and the sirens go off.

Propinquity.

You'd think that somebody with an arm's-length rule wouldn't move to New York City. The truth is I didn't think about it. I wouldn't let myself. What I mean is I couldn't stop thinking about it.

THERE'S THIS THING
I do: I call it Big Ben and Little Ben. Big Ben is the Big Voice, the authority. He makes the decisions. You don't brook Big Ben's dicta. He's the man and what he says goes.

Big Ben decided to leave my wife. Big Ben decided to leave Idaho. Big Ben decided he was going to have sex with men. The problem with Big Ben is he doesn't stick around for very long. He just drops in, pronounces how things are going to be, then he's off.

Little Ben is who's got to carry out the instructions. He's the guy who's got to do it. Little Ben is mostly who I'm stuck with.

Little Ben had to sit down with my wife in our beautiful three-bedroom home in Boise, Idaho, and tell her I didn't want to live my life with her anymore. Little Ben had to pack his shit into his used Datsun pickup and drive across the United States alone.

Little Ben had to figure out how I'm going to touch another man, when I can't even let another human being closer than an arm away.

Little Ben had to figure out how to live in a city that is a constant assault on my propinquity.

The way these three first converged – Big Ben and Little Ben and Little Ben's arm-away rule – all came together that first morning in September when I had to get on the subway to get to Columbia University. Sober.

It was late morning and I was the only guy on the bright platform. The Number One was a huge monster screaming out of darkness. It came to a stop. The doors opened and a couple people got off. Inside, there was a space, just barely, for one normal human being without propinquity problems to stand. I went to get on but couldn't move. A short Latina woman in a red scarf and gold bling looked out at me. The way she looked at me, she knew. The subway car did that subway car pushing-out-air sound and the two-toned bell ding-donged and the doors started to close. Fucking Big Ben, man.

Little Ben jumped on. The subway car lurched ahead and from all sides the arm-away rule went bust. Crushed into me were four or five people. My chest was smashed into a tall black guy's bare arm – my eyes only inches from his smallpox vaccination, somebody's suitcase was poking me in the ass, a Chinese schoolgirl with earphones on was so close I could hear the Madonna song, and the white guy in a suit was wearing Polo. Little Ben was about to pass out. My lungs were pumping overtime trying to find air. A heartbeat off the charts. I found my feet, tried to stand them square. My hand was at the silver pole and I wrapped my hand around it tight.

With each station, more people got on, then some got off, then more got on. By the time we got to 116th, I was still alive.

I may cuss him a lot, but without Big Ben I'd still be baling hay for my old man.

And by the way, yes. Little Ben's the one with the limp dick.

Big Ben says enough of this shit – all this ancient Icky Familial Catholic my mother my sister sex shame guilt. Little Ben agrees. Believe me he's trying.

SO I'M WALKING
down East Fifth Street between Third Avenue and Second on a hot summer night in 1985 to Le Culot. One of the two men in my life who I could say truly loved me, Hank Christian, is walking next to me. The old Sinclair Station on Fifth and Bowery is behind us. Behind us too are the garbage cans in front
of my building. We're just passing where Fish Bar's going to be, about to the corner of Second Avenue and the Greek diner where I always ordered a turkey sandwich on Thanksgiving. Hank's wearing a white T-shirt and cutoff jeans, white socks and white tennis shoes. There's something just-showered about him, even though he's been on the subway. His long hair is a charcoal color. That Roman nose. His black eyes.

THERE IS SOMETHING
going on. What my arm-away rule is telling me was that something's up with this Hank Christian guy. Something about the way Hank's body is moving. I can't tell exactly what it is. I mean it isn't like Shit Sandwich Bill, a guy I dated once. Shit Sandwich Bill walked ahead a step, sometimes two, the shoulder closest to me hunched up, like I was the
AIDS
virus and we were in a dead heat to get the rubber on right. Who knows who was more afraid, him or me. During dinner one night, I took the chance and tried to explain to Bill about the arm-away rule, how it goes from propinquity to intimacy. I thought maybe this guy would understand. But he wouldn't have any of it.