Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (18 page)

Some other night, the next, or the night after the next, he was scheduled for an enema, and after the procedure needed to hurry into the bathroom in his room, another confined space that created panic. I rolled his legs off the mattress and pulled him up. He looked about worriedly to make sure that there were no chairs or tables in his way. He liked to have them pushed way back so that he didn’t fall into them. He tried to rush into the bathroom, one leg practically useless, pointing askew, as he slid along in his tan moccasins. To get seated on the toilet took five minutes. I grabbed him so he’d be facing the right direction. The actual sitting was the difficult maneuver, with one leg refusing to bend. “Go away!” he ordered. He was standing, lifting his bad arm in a weird akimbo pose, like a shaman delivering a difficult spell, trying to sway down into the sitting position, with me moving in at the last second to grab him so that he did not fall against the wall and split open his head. As usual, the maneuver failed, and he got stuck midway, and started with the aslant arm again, psyching himself down toward the toilet seat.

When I returned to my apartment that night, just as stressed as I had been in the hospital ward, I resolved that Howard must do something constructive. He’d already been in the hospital for two weeks with no departure date in sight, and no friends yet, just me, and his family. Maybe he could talk into a tape recorder, for a script. I wondered if that were possible. Maybe we could do it together. Work on a script, with me writing it down. I was so convinced about my brainstorm that I called him right then. Howard said, “What about
The Golden Age of Promiscuity
?” a gay historical novel I’d been discussing possibly writing. We eventually decided on something called
Roller Coaster
, a movie to be based on Howard’s life, on our life together, of a young man coming to the city, as in so many novels, like
The Red and the Black
, trying to find his fortune, having a kind of marriage with another guy, traveling through a labyrinth of gay bathhouses and sex clubs, contracting AIDS, and then traveling through a labyrinth of doctors’ offices and hospital wards. I called Joy, full of excitement, the next day. “Wonderful,” she agreed, placating.

When I walked into Howard’s hospital room the next evening, though, I knew in a second that our planned script was never going to happen. What had I been thinking? Josh was there when I arrived. He informed me that Howard had lost the brain function to give himself commands. He ordered, “Stand up!” but Howard couldn’t stand up. Then he said, “Go to Brad!” and Howard sprang up and came toward me. “The springing up is a reflex,” Josh explained. “When the brain short-circuits in the command function, Howard often relapses into a primitive reflex.” Springing up was one reflex, cowering another. The shamanic arm gesture of the
previous night was Howard lapsing into a cowering reflex when his command to himself to “sit down” on the toilet was short-circuited.

After Josh departed, Howard needed to pee. The nurse was there, and she and I helped him, but the forceful pounding of his heart scared me. When he got back into bed, he told me, in broken signals, that he had this fear when he had to walk to the bathroom. I suggested maybe he didn’t have good balance, so he was afraid of falling. No, he said, not a fear like that, a “big fear,” and he motioned with his two hands expanding outwards, as if defining the size of a log in front of his face. It was the most scared he had ever been, he said. I remembered Josh’s tutorial and suggested that when his brain short-circuited perhaps a primitive reflex of fear set in. He was thrilled when I said this. I had “hit the nail on the head,” he said. His thrill was at finally communicating, since he spent most of his days frustrated at not being able to have the conversation he meant to have.

The pleasure of solving a neurological puzzle, of course, was minor, a kind of game played on a board of sickness and fear of death. Underneath, still the crying, and the shock of the new real. I didn’t know how we were all passing through this valley of the shadow of death and not simply shedding our skins to try to escape. I sat that night, after I tucked Howard in and turned off all the lights, waiting the five or ten minutes for him to fall asleep, attempting to sink into his experience of trying to sleep in that hospital room—the eerie ghosts of screens and curtains and other whiteness, the beeping of the machines, like in
E.T
., a movie we had seen together, and the horror, Howard’s facing of pain and loneliness, as well as that “strange bed” that he had feared. I walked out past other half-lit dim rooms, like Stations of the Cross, some more like agonizing crucifixion scenes.

After a month of this weirdness, multiplied by isolation, I finally
talked him into letting others in on the secret, in on his life. So far the rhythm was: family during the afternoon, me at night. His concern was the film. He worried that if word got out, the producers would take the film away from him, have someone else edit. That fear was realistic, not simply a primitive reflex. But the convincing finally took hold, and friends began to trickle in. Madonna came one afternoon, creating a stir in Cronin, as she visited some other patients, too. She climbed on his bed and kissed Howard full on the lips, batting away all fears. Out of the initial flurry, a few regulars settled in. Sarah, her hair more disheveled since the last time I had seen her, about a year before, was like a stand-up comedian with a big heart. She had obviously reached deep inside herself and made a commitment to this final project with Howard. Phyllis, his assistant from the film, was the most devoted and hardest-working, like a nurse. But I found her fantasies about him overblown, young. She’d make remarks like, “Oh, you can have your Fassbinder scene on the beach,” referring to his notion of finding a summer place. Sean appeared, too, a welcome charmer, with his own raw responses. He didn’t own a clock, so his appearances and disappearances were serendipitous, but mostly he fell into my time slot.

I was happy to have Sean there, as was Howard. He evened out our intensity, as third parties often had in the past. We needed him. One night Howard was going on at length—well, in short lurches that added up to length—about losing what he called his “fantasy function,” a corollary of the “command function.” He said that he could start a sex fantasy in his head, picture a scene, but then he would freeze. He would be unable to push through to the climax. Sean in his rough, gravelly, Irish-construction-worker-meets-Edmund-in-Eugene-O’Neill’s-
Long-Day’s-Journey-into-Night
voice suggested
porn magazines, but Howard said that he couldn’t jerk off with his one good left arm and also turn the pages. I suggested a page-turner. Sean filled in by telling the plot of a soft porn paperback he had bought at the airport that wound up with a boy fucking his mother.

Sean was a true actor. He liked to tease. He liked to invent. He liked attention. When the time came to put Howard to bed, we hobbled him to the bathroom, then closed the drapes, drew the white entry curtain, lowered the bed, tucked him in, and turned off the light. A dim white glare from the full moon lighting up the skies outside registered on the drawn curtains. Howard kept complaining about his short-circuited fantasy function. “It’s frustrating as hell,” he said. “It’s maddening. . . . Tell me a story,” he implored both of us. I got up to leave, but Sean groaned and we sat down again in the dark. He began to comply by telling a true-ish tale, as Howard pulled down his sweats and started breathing heavily.

Sean told a story of working in high school at some restaurant in the summer, like a beachside clam house. One night he was down in a basement kitchen area, with another waiter and waitress. The waiter pulled out his cock. He told the girl to go down on it. She did. Then he told Sean to take out his. He did. The guy told him to take off his shirt. He did. Then he started to play with Sean’s nipples. The sensation spun his head. “I had never done anything with a guy at that time,” Sean added, in a low moan. Then the guy started jerking Sean’s dick, and—Sean was now shouting at full voice—“I STARTED TO CUM,” just as Howard was shooting. The mood in the room was exultant. “Thanks God,” said Howard from the darkness, in his brain-damaged way of misspeaking, as I handed him a food services napkin to clean up.

On our walk back up Seventh Avenue, I told Sean about Molly
Bloom’s soliloquy at the moment of orgasm in
Ulysses
, as it related to Howard’s climax moments before in the hospital room. “I want to get that book,” he mumbled. “Howard talked about that a long time ago.” That evening in the hospital room laid bare the nature of our three-way dynamic. Sean’s relationship with Howard was palpably sexual, while mine was now something else, with more tenderness. Howard and I were both voyeuristic, and Sean was an actor, so that worked. Howard’s fireworks of an ejaculation, and all that preceded, took place at a perfect pitch of collaborative sexuality and compassion, rare and amoral, like the hustlers Howard and I heard about at a dinner party years before, who came to hospitals to let ill patients suck them off. “Terminal hustlers,” we’d called them. I gave Sean a long, lingering hug at the corner and off he walked into the moonrise.

March rolled into April, which turned into June and then steamy July (for July Fourth we wheeled Howard onto a terrace to watch the fireworks). He, incomprehensibly, unbelievably, inexplicably, was still in the hospital, still in that room on the seventh floor of Cronin, still deteriorating. Sean and I visited almost every night, although the time we spent entertaining Howard had shrunk, and the time we spent hanging out together in the post-hospital-visit respite was expanding. On one of the more energized of those nights, after we had sprung free from St. Vincent’s, we walked up Seventh Avenue in a wild wind, sharing a firefly of a joint. The more stoned I became, the more I eased into being around Sean, hearing his odd observations, dipping deeper into the ocean, gingerly at first, then plunging. We decided to check out Obsessions, a funky, dimly lit, alluring in a shadowy way transvestite club that was located just down the block from my apartment.

When we left the tranny bar, its interior like an Elks Club, with
wood paneling, but sadly empty that night, we walked back to my apartment. I sat on my flimsy futon couch in the dark, and he leaned against a pillow on the floor. We drank vodka and beer and smoked yet another joint, while suitably watching a Paul Mazursky movie about a three-way (with Margot Kidder) made around 1980. Sean confided some secrets about his life that supposedly even Howard didn’t know, bonding our separate friendship. Then he started saying, doing sexy things. He took off a sock so that one bare foot was showing, with one dirty sock left on, and said, “It’s too bad you’re not a girl, Brad. You’d make a great girlfriend.” We discussed how we couldn’t do anything because of the delicate situation with Howard. Then he was lying on top of me, kissing me. Then I was telling him that he couldn’t stay. Then he was throwing up, bent over the toilet. Then I was missing him later, after he’d left, realizing that I now had a messy crush on Sean.

The next night we both showed up at the hospital again. Howard was registering less clearly on me, perhaps because I was avoiding his still intense eyes, while Sean was outlined quite clearly every moment in my mind. I was wondering if Howard’s brain damage extended as far as not picking up anymore on subtle interpersonal emotional signals, but that did not seem to be the case. I imagined that he was suspicious. I imagined many things, and felt pulled many ways at once, and then ten or eleven o’clock came around and Sean and I left. We might even have done something corny like him leaving a few minutes before and then waiting for me outside on Seventh Avenue. On this walk he told me about feeling that he had messed up our friendship last night by his insistence, and he told me how he threw up again on Lexington Avenue in the forties walking home. I apologized for making him go home, but said I didn’t trust myself. I
told him that he hadn’t fucked up the friendship at all. He had made it. Of course I invited him to stop by for an hour. He spent three hours, calling a heterosexual phone sex line, then left.

Subsequently, on some night, we did confess to Howard our evening of phone sex, Sean’s calling and talking to a woman, a phone prostitute. Phone sex was on a curve upwards with the dissemination of the HIV virus, or news of the HIV virus, and Howard (to my relief ) loved the story. So much so that his eyes began to glitter. Gripped by a special excitement, he suggested that he should call one of the gay dating phone lines from his hospital bed, a favorite pastime during his first, more or less asymptomatic, year. The wish took some rigging to fulfill, but we did. I think I just used my account, entering my credit card number, and Howard settled in. The flat-line tone indicating hang-ups occurred quickly, one after another, as he tried to simulate being a jock, talking about his (true) years on the high school varsity wrestling team, but in his brain-damaged wailing siren of a voice. Then he bravely took a new tack. A line or two into the clichéd sex talk, he’d say to his interlocutor, “My name is Howard. I’m in the hospital. I have AIDS.” Weirdly those talks went on much longer, a testament to shocking truth. That night on our walk up Seventh, Sean kept walking, didn’t stop by, nor did I ask him. It was as if a fever broke. We’d got to the edge of something and peered over and decided not to. From my side, I was finding our romance interfering with the sweet consolation that I felt only when concentrating entirely on the profound aura around Howard and his dying.

By fall, Howard was finally out of the hospital. He was far from the creature who had entered months before, and certainly was not
capable of going back to the loft, or taking care of himself. His parents had sublet a one-bedroom apartment for him on the eleventh floor of a corner building of London Terrace, at Twenty-fourth and Tenth Avenue, and furnished the place, with no expense spared. The style was modernist, minimal, and everything was black and white: dishes, clocks, chairs, dining room table, lamps, and leather couch. “It’s just perfect for him,” Elaine sang, proudly. “You know Howard and his black and white!” She set about making the place a home away from home, not only for Howard, but for all his friends, as we were transported back into a kind of teenage den house complete with a mother who kept the refrigerator reliably stocked with Corona beer and Absolut vodka, pistachio nuts for Dr. Josh, and lots of food, lox, knishes, matzo ball soup. The apartment was thoughtfully situated just six or seven blocks from mine. Finally, ironically, we had found a sensible living situation for us, with Elaine’s help.