I Loved You More (50 page)

“Look,” I say, “I have AIDS and I'm being treated for depression. This morning was especially bad and I yelled and broke a cup. I saw my neighbor make the call on his cell phone.”

“Where are the pieces to the cup?” General MacArthur asks.

“Under the sink,” I say. “In the garbage can.”

General MacArthur gets on his walkie talkie.

“Check under the sink in the garbage can for a broken cup.”

That static sound. Above and behind me, I can hear the squeak of the cupboard door opening to under the sink.

Static sound again. Something over the walkie talkie.

“What color is the cup?” General MacArthur asks me.

“White,” I say. “With an Otis Café logo on it.”

From behind and above me, I hear:

“Check on that white Otis Café cup, sir. There are broken pieces in the garbage can.”

“At ease!” General MacArthur says.

The clatter of guns and rifles and
Star Wars
weapons, the entire SWAT team puts their safeties on. Cops relax, start moving around, talking to each other.

“Routine maneuver when a firearm is reported.”

That's what General MacArthur says over my shoulder as he takes off my handcuffs. He hangs the handcuffs on his leather belt.

Efficient, silent, quick. The way the SWAT arrived, they leave.

I pull up my pants.

IT'S RAINING CATS
and dogs, cougars and wolves, in the Pioneer Cemetery. Tony Escobar is still naked but he's wearing a Chinese hat and sitting under a colorful umbrella in a lounge chair with a cocktail in his hand. The big hairy chest of him. I sit on my grave, he sits on his. The world is spinning and my body hurts all over.

Fear and trembling, man.

Fuck the rain, Tony and I, we go through it all over and over about the fascist SWAT team and what America is turning into and who the fuck are they to handcuff me and let me stand naked and what the fuck is Bill Clinton up to allowing fascist shit like this in our country and civil rights and human rights and bullies with guns and the quality of life and what it is life and death dreams and waking nightmares and what is fear and why do I fear so much. Did AIDS get to my adrenals? What is AIDS dementia and how do you know you have it? Is it my pituitary gland, the Catholic Church, or my mother or my father or my sister the
school bully, whatever the fuck that's been stressed to the max, where is there comfort, even the Portland cops are after me.

Tony tells me to hold on. Tony tells me to call my doctor.

FOR DAYS AFTERWARD,
a Portland City cop car keeps driving up and down past my house. It's the Clint Clone. One day, out on the sidewalk, the whole time I'm doing my tai chi, he just sits in his cop car there on the corner of Morrison, the engine running.

FINALLY, I GET
a hold of my nurse practitioner, Madelena Papas. I haven't seen her in months.
Seven and a half months
, she says. I try and sound like I'm not crazy. She prescribes me more Xanax, but I can't drive to pick it up. I tell her I have no car and the buses freak me out.

“I'll have it delivered,” she says.

“Today?”

“Are you still having trouble sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“Are you still seeing Dr. Hardy?” Madalena asks.

“Avenue of fear,” I say.

“What?”

“He opened an avenue of fear,” I say. “He's a bullshit doctor and I won't go back to him.”

“Ben,” Madalena says, “that was over a year ago. You promised you'd go back. Are you seeing another doctor?”

“No.”

“Are you taking your antidepressants?”

“They're like taking speed. Do you know any other doctors?”

“Your health insurance won't cover anyone else,” she says. “Have you been sleeping?”

“But what if I pay?”

There's a moment of silence on the line. I mean not silence, all the wires the way my ears always sound.

“Give me just a minute,” Madalena says.

Then: “Do you have a pen and paper?”

I uncap my black grease pen.

“Her name is Dr. Shelley Roth,” Madalena says. “She's a psychopharmacologist and has her own practice.”

Across the Mediterranean sunset, across Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, in black grease pen I write:
Dr. Shelley Roth
. And her phone number.

“Ben?” Madalena says, “I know Shelley. I'll call her myself.”

ON THE PHONE,
Dr. Shelley Roth can hear it in my voice. She gives me her address and tells me to come the next day at one o'clock. I ask her how much she'll charge and Dr. Roth tells me we'll talk about payment after she sees me.

The next day is another gray day, cold, but that's June for you. I'm in my kitchen, showered, shaved, in my pressed white shirt.
My good white shirt
, as Hank Christian would say. At my waist, my pants bunch up khaki drape folds under my black belt. My black loafers spit-shined and dark socks. My shiny blue suit jacket that fits a 42 long. I'm swimming in it. Hair product in the gray fuzz that used to be my hair. In my wallet, I've got one hundred-dollar bill left. Two twenties, a ten, three fives, and a bunch of ones. I'm waiting for the Radio Cab to honk outside.

There's a knock on my door. I cuss that I didn't hear the cabbie honk, open the door. There on my porch stands Ruth. We both put our hands up to our throats.

Beautiful, according to Hitchcock, skinnier than ever. Her hair is pulled off her face into a bun. Strands of blonde in the red. Those ultra blue contact blue eyes I never got used to looking into. No drag that day, no feather boa, no leopardskin, no vintage. Just her sweater. Pearls on the breast of her creamy white sweater. A flowered cotton skirt, no underslip. Red ballet slippers.

“My God, Ben,” Ruth says, “you look horrible.”

“I'm waiting for a cab,” I say.

“I'm your cab today,” Ruth says. “We're going to the psychopharmacologist.”

“How'd you know?”

“You put me down as next of kin,” Ruth says. “Madalena Papas called me and asked me to drive you.”

“No,” I say. “No, the cab will be here any minute. It's best I go with a cab.”

Ruth reaches out, puts her hand on the shoulder of my shiny blue jacket. Ruth's biting her lip and her eyes are starting to tear. Her touch makes me jump.

“Ruth,” I say, “we can't keep doing this.”

“I totally agree,” Ruth says. “Believe me. All I'm doing this afternoon is taking a sick friend to the doctor.”

“Ruth,” I say, “you've helped enough.”

“You'll never be able to repay me,” Ruth says. “Now hurry up. We've only got ten minutes.”

“Don't tell me to hurry up, Ruth,” I say.

The standoff on the porch. Ruth's got a red Chinese clutch bag she's holding in front of her. My hands are folded over my crotch.

Ruth could be Doris Day, Tippi Hedren, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly.

“Come on, Ben,” Ruth says. “You need some help. Please.”

DR. SHELLEY ROTH'S
office is in a yellow Victorian house in Southwest, just off First Avenue. Ruth and I sit in a small area under the stairway that maybe used to be the pantry. Some designer has tried to make it look like a waiting room. Matching small overstuffed burgundy chairs. Matching burgundy pillows. Burgundy panels on the window. A round spindly wood table with magazines. Old
People
magazines. Monica Lewinsky. Madonna on tour. Weird Michael Jackson.

It isn't long, though, and a door opens. Footsteps down the hallway.

Dr. Shelley Roth is a small woman, looks like Frida Kahlo, only Jewish. Her brown hair is long and going gray, pulled back in a barrette. I'm thinking about the last Jewish doctor I went to on 83rd Street. But there's something about the way Dr. Roth
moves. The way her clothes fit her. Like she's really comfortable in them.

Then she smiles. Wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. It's a face that has smiled a lot. My heart stops beating so hard. I take a long deep breath.

“Good afternoon,” Dr. Roth says. “I'm Dr. Shelley Roth, and I presume you are Benjamin Grunewald.”

I smile, start to say something, but Dr. Roth has already turned.

“Please follow me to my office,” she says.

I know Ruth too well. No way she's not going in. I give her the go-ahead nod and Ruth and I follow Dr. Roth down the hallway, past the stairway, and into the front office. The office was once the front parlor of the house. Behind Dr. Roth's desk, a shiny new wall where once there was probably a sliding pocket door. A painting on the shiny wall. Just a big black rectangle framed behind a glass. Maybe a Richard Serra. Shelves and shelves of books, and books piled up on her desk, piles of papers. Ruth and I sit down on the loveseat in the bay window. There's room enough on the seat that we don't have to touch. Sunlight coming through the clouds right then. My God, sunlight.

“This is my friend,” I say, “Ruth Dearden.”

“Hello, Ruth,” Dr. Roth says. “Thanks for driving Ben here today.”

Ruth and I give each other a look.

“Ms. Papas told me she called you, Ruth,” Dr. Roth says. “I've been expecting you.”

Dr. Roth opens a manila envelope, puts on a pair of tortoise shell glasses, reads for a while, then sits down.

“So, Benjamin Grunewald, tell me something about yourself.”

I MEAN, WHERE
do you start? I don't know, so I look at that big black painting and I start talking. I start with my mother and my father and my sister and Catholicism, Idaho. Go straight to being
homosexual, New York City, AIDS, sleeplessness. Dr. Mark Hardy, SSRIs and his Avenue of Fear. I talk for a long time. A couple things I say I can tell Ruth's never heard. She doesn't know about my mother, or my sister. Not really. She's totally surprised when I tell Dr. Roth that I haven't slept in eleven days. I keep talking for a while longer but then I stop. Feels like I'm babbling and I'm afraid Dr. Roth will think I'm crazy. Have me committed.

There's a long time in Dr. Roth's office that nobody speaks. It's as if the three of us forgot how to breathe. Ruth uncrosses, then recrosses her legs. Her red ballet slippers. The sun goes behind the clouds, comes back out again. We're just reflections on the glass of the big black rectangle.

Dr. Roth gets up from behind her desk. From where I'm sitting, she looks much taller. Small bones, tiny wrists and ankles. She walks around her desk and sits in the chair closest to me. Her knee pops when she sits. She takes off her glasses and looks straight at me. When Dr. Roth finally speaks, her voice is low. And there's a hitch in it. A warbly sound the way when some women sing.

“Benjamin,” she says, “according to your records, from talking to Madalena, and from what you've told me here, I can tell you with all candor that I have never met anyone who has been so deeply anxious for so long who has lived through it. Most people's bodies would have simply failed them. Then there is suicide. I must tell you, the suicide rate for anxiety like yours is phenomenal. I don't know how you have managed to stay alive.”

My body, in that moment. I'm so proud of my body – Big Ben, Little Ben, The Running Boy. And something else. When Dr. Roth stops speaking, I know for sure. That's the closest I'll ever feel what it's like to have a mother.

DR. ROTH STARTS
writing prescriptions.

“Take as many Xanax as you need to stop the anxiety,” Dr. Roth says. “Whatever you do, stop the anxiety. You're used to the Xanax, so you might try the Valium. It's the strongest of the
benzodiazepines, just be aware of that. For sleeping you should try the Klonopin. It doesn't peak so quickly. The trazodone will keep you asleep. Before you go to sleep, start off with one milligram of Klonopin and fifty miligrams of trazodone. If you aren't sleeping eight hours a night within a week, increase the dosage by a half. I'm putting you on an antidepressant that's just come out. It's had a lot of success. It's not an SSRI and its side effect is sleep.”

When Ruth and I get up to go, there's a long back and forth between Dr. Roth and me. Finally she accepts my hundred-dollar bill.

AT THE DRUGSTORE,
it takes about an hour, but I get all the prescriptions. It's in Ruth's car in crosstown traffic that I open the container of Xanax. As soon as I see the pills, I know in an instant. Fuck. That all along I've been taking fucking steroids. As fast as I can, I pour four white pills out into my hand and put them in my mouth.

Instant relief. The world is a little bit more
my
world, twenty minutes tops.

In front of my house, so many dramatic scenes in front of my house, Ruth and me. Ruth stops the car and pulls up on the hand brake. I gather up my bags full of drugs. It takes a while for my big body to get out of Ruth's little car. Just before I close the door, we grab each other's hands quick, then let go.