I Loved You More (61 page)

It's all sad, Gruney. If we let ourselves know how sad it really is, there wouldn't be anything left of us
.

THE GUY ON
the stoop walks off New York Drop Dead Fuck You. I'm walking too. It isn't long before I know it. A ghost in this place. That's what I am. Or I'm real and Manhattan is a dream.

Fish Bar. When I open Fish Bar's stained wood door and go to step inside, my body just won't let me go in. Too crowded. Barely room to walk in there. But maybe inside, that's the place where I must go. To find what I need to find, so I can feel what I must feel. Grief and panic, man. My body has never known the difference.

I press my face against the window, making my eyes see everything. On the jukebox, “Soul Makossa” is playing. At
my
spot at the bar, in the corner next to the wall, on the same stool my ass used to sit in drinking dirty Bombay martinis up, there's a young man sitting there alone drinking from an up glass. Fourteen years ago, he could be me. Fourteen years ago, in the bathroom on the right, on the aqua blue wall, the piece of graffiti that used to be just above the toilet:
AIDS Schmaids – just shoot that cum all over me
.

Walking. Second Avenue is still Second Avenue, I mean most of the buildings are the same. But it's different. Love Saves the Day is gone. The Greek diner on the corner of Second and Fifth – turkey sandwiches on Thanksgiving Day, gone. Optimo Cigars, gone. Le Culot. Café 113, gone.

Night Birds,
you go first, no, you go
— gone gone gone.

Schacht's Delicatessen, man.

An hallucination of bright fluorescence. The smell of old wood, weird cheese, and chicken soup. Hum of refrigeration. At the back aisle cooler, Hank opens the cooler door and all that cold air comes rushing out. Hank swings the door back and forth making a breeze. It's a miracle night, all right, and the miracle is taking in the whole world
.

Schacht's is fucking gone.

WALKING. TOMPKINS SQUARE
Park. Now that place is a
trip
. All duded up. You wouldn't even know it was the same place. Respectable manicured lawns, authentic lighting, wrought iron fences and shit – at one o'clock in the morning jogging yuppies talking on their cell phones. Man, we used to call this park
Dog Shit Park
.

On the corner of Seventh and A, it takes me a while to figure, but after careful consideration I'm sure it's in the exact same spot. The skinhead dude with the red, white, and blue mohawk is standing up, his back to me and Hank, waving his arms. He's yelling, trying to get the attention of his twenty skinhead cowboy dudes. That loud loud music.

You need to watch out who you're calling a Republican
.

That night, the night I'm a ghost, not a mohawk in sight. Pyramid Club's open, though. Recently made into a
Drag Landmark
. Now there's progress for you.

The Lower East Side. Everywhere I look, everyone seems rich, young. I mean, not just because I'm not rich and not young. When I lived here, a stoned white teenage girl in low-slung tight pants and ass crack just would've made it across the street. It's safer all right. But safe from what.

HOUR AFTER HOUR,
that night, early into the morning, I'm walking. Back and forth on every street from Tenth to Houston, between Third Avenue and Avenue C. Same way Hank and I walked that night, walking side by side, back and forth up and
down, under a miracle umbrella, through the Lower East Side. 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're old and sick and your lungs are sore, when you're heart's beating too fast, when your ears are some kind of fire alarm, when you're sweating like a pig, when your knee hurts, just walk. Keep on walking.

Maybe now that Hank is dead, I don't have to go through Ruth to get to him.

ON EAST FIRST
Street, Dixon Place, the whole damn block is gone. I just stand and stand. Maybe a new muscle will develop in me, or my whole body will become a new muscle with super computer powers that if you just hit
save
I can soak in everything, how things smell, the muggy air against my skin, the sweat running down the inside of my arms. Store every detail in one forever accessible file that never changes.

The dark heat of the night, the six-story walkups, every window open. I stop in a bright Korean market, buy a fucking bottle of water for three dollars. It's the first time I've thought of my body. Me, Mr. Hypersensitive about my body. But I'm a ghost. A ghost haunted by a dream. As if I'm on acid, this night, even at three a.m., in a part of the world that fourteen years ago was only night and dark, the world is bright and loud and full.

Walking. My lungs feel like when I used to smoke. My body, one big crotch rot. On the stoops, swarms of pierced and tattooed kids. Every now and then a big muscle guy in a stretched-out T-shirt, standing in front of a velvet rope. Some black dude loud inside rapping away
mother fucker mother fucker
.

Walking. At 39 East Seventh Street, its shit flood basement, on the bottom step, where I left my white Key West shrimper boots, the entire building is gone. The mimosa tree, gone.

Walking. Every once in a while, a restaurant with gold stars and black limos parked out front. On top of the street smell –
exhaust and garbage, sweaty bodies – the thick smell of
marihoochi
. And a new smell. Never a part of my New York. The designer smell of money.

The narrow streets crowded with cars, honking taxis, loud hip-hop music I'll never know. The later the night gets, the earlier the morning, the more it's humid. I'm out of breath. My chambray shirt, my baggy striped bermudas, my underwear, my ballcap, even my new black tennis shoes are soaking wet.

I'll buy you a soda
.

A BLISTER ON
my right heel. My knees. My hips. But where I must go I haven't found it yet.

On the cab ride across town, to the West Side Highway, the cab driver is from India. Hindu. On the dashboard, the incense, the plastic flowers around a statue of Ganesha. I ask him if he knows the Spike.

“On Eleventh Avenue,” I say. “Somewhere in the Twenties. Next to the river.”

Napalm. Behind us, the bar back with its bottles, glowing green, glowing blue, clear, amber, glowing Wild Turkey dark brown. From underneath the bar, Judy lights from down low so the bartenders can see. In front of us, three men deep. Beyond, the bar is dark. Smoky dark. A foggy night, an ocean of men, dark waves
. The tall guy with his balls thumbtacked to the bar.

In front of all of Homosexual Heaven I tell Hank about getting fucked in the ass. Hank, that fucking guy, man. I don't see Hank for over three months. Whenever he wanted to, that motherfucker could totally disappear.

“You mean the Life Saver Lofts?” the cab driver says. “In West Chelsea?”

When the cab driver drives past the Spike, out the window of the cab, out of the old Plutonian darkness, the napalm cloud opens. From out of the bones of the building that used to be the Spike, a strange new sleek tower has risen up and out, shiny bright. Another spaceship that's set its ass smack down on my
history. Aliens from the spaceships, man. The Life Saver Lofts. Twelve million dollars for the penthouse apartment.

You know all those crazy fuckers who used to walk down the streets talking to themselves? Now they have cell phones.

THE CAB RIDE
up to Columbia, 116th and Broadway. If I can stand in that doorway of the classroom where Jeske taught, the place where I first really looked at Hank, Saint Hank Christian, Guardian of the Portal, maybe I can finally find it, feel it.

Hank Christian is dead.

But the iron gates are locked. Of course they'd be locked. But still I stand at the gate, my hands around the wrought iron. Dodge Hall, the corner of it, just right there. I'm shaking the gate, cussing. I guess I'm screaming too. The cabbie thinks he's got a real crazy and starts honking and yelling in Hindi. A lot of really strange fast words and every other word is fuck.

DRIVING FAST IN
the dark. My hand's in the plastic handle above the window. I'm hanging on. For dear life. Bright lights flash by. The city that never sleeps. The night sky is no longer black. Light, just barely.
Entre loup et chien
.

Columbus Circle. Wednesday nights, after teaching at the West Side Y, that goddamned burger joint and Silvio. Cheeseburgers and all that hope. In that booth where Hank and I dreamed our writer dreams, another strange sleek tower. A gigantic glass and steel spaceship. The ass on my history on this corner is concave. Bloomberg. Aliens, man. Billionaire aliens.

“
SAINT PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL
,” I say.

The cabbie rips a quick left around Christopher Columbus. He hardly lets up on the gas. Four in the morning, we're the only yellow Plymouth screeching through. Destiny, fate, fucking fortune, the way the earth is spinning spins the cab. Just me and a Hindu man. I'm in the back seat, sweat soaked and smashed against the back door, hanging onto a plastic handle. On the
dashboard, incense, pink and white plastic flowers, his beloved elephant god. It ain't long and we're driving down the most expensive street in the world. St. Patrick's smack in the middle of it.

Hell is your Virgin Mother got inside you. The thing you dreaded most, the fucking worst way to fuck up, you fucked up. You got fucked in the ass and you were banished from the world of men.

The man who doesn't know he's a man, is hiding from men because he's afraid of men, because men are his father who he hates, and all he knows, what's left to do, is weep in the dark as an infant weeps.

The weeping and the gnashing of teeth. The epidemic of fear, the purple sores, the wasting, the dementia. All of heaven pointing at you, laughing.

God's special little bitch.

AIDS.

And yet I am still alive.

Really alive. I mean look at me. I'm sixty years old and it's four in the morning and I've been HIV positive for over twenty-two years. Hope. The worst thing isn't that you can't find it. It's that you'll stop. And I'm roaring down Broadway in a cab in Manhattan, the hot wind through the open window blowing against my arm, my face, and I am not dead.

When you get close to the vein that's pulsing truth, when you open that vein, you can scrub your soul clean with the blood.

Years ago, in the hospital in Portland,
Mental Health
, the security guard who told you to stay behind the yellow line like all the others. You were nobody special.

No connection to a special intimacy.

It was just me, only me, down there in the dark lobotomy basement on the Avenue of Fear.

With everybody else.

I never thought I'd say it.

Thank God I got AIDS.

Made me like everybody else.

Human.

THE CLOCK ON
Cooper Union. 4:55. The acid clarity of the night has turned to speed and even though I'm a ghost my body's shaking. I find my glasses. Pay the cabbie his fare. Tip him extra. Leave a dollar bill on the dashboard for Ganesha, Patron of Letters, Remover of Obstacles.

I'm ready to call it a night. Maybe tomorrow I'll find it, the next day. Room 19-3 and my firm four-hundred-and-thirty-dollar bed waits for me.

But I'm hungry. At a time when I'm not supposed to be hungry. Then when was the last time in Portlandia I was up at two o'clock in the morning?

Café Orlin on St. Mark's Place. That's the ticket. Tony's
huevos rancheros
at Café Orlin.

ON THE CURB
in Portlandia, by the sun on the red brick wall of Stumptown Coffee, after the day Dab told me Hank was dead, all the calls I got, the condolences. Lucy, Ruth's good friend called me, and we hadn't really talked since Ruth left, so we were catching up. Then in a moment, Lucy, her voice suddenly soft, in almost a whisper, she said: “You know Ben, Ruth was there for Hank until the very end.”

We all have a right to love and the real prayer is that each of us will find it. Hank found it. I hope Ruth did too. And on his deathbed, beloved Hank was in the best of hands. Ruth's hands.

WALKING OUT OF
Café Orlin, three steps up to the sidewalk of St. Mark's Place. The
huevos rancheros
were, as Tony promised, delicious.

The sun is rising. Through the smog, a bizarre peach and violet sky. Light that doesn't shine, it glows. The buildings to the south in shadows that are navy blue. The air, almost cool on my skin.

My belly is full and I'm no longer a ghost. My body is right here and my awareness is here and so is my spirit. It's been a long time since the three of them have been altogether at the same time. My thumb is in the no-fear place.

I'm walking.

And my body knows exactly where to go.

#77
ST. MARK'S
Place. When I get to that piece of sidewalk, I'm just about to look up, when it hits me. How very perfect that poem is. True the way truth can make you wince, make you cry, bring you to your knees. I'm on my knee, a genuflection, then both knees, then my elbows too. My upper body rolling out repeated bows. Wystan Hugh Auden. His slum apartment
was so cold that the toilet no longer functioned and he had to use the toilet in the liquor store on the corner
.