Your Face in Mine (10 page)

—

How else can I say it, other than to say it? That he remade me in his own image. Or that he wanted to, and succeeded, for a while: there was a version of me that
was
Alan, a provisional, experimental second self,
that knew all his jokes, all his stock phrases, anecdotes, and allusions. I could have been his Charles Kinbote.

Or is it nothing more than a dodge, a kind of metaphysical excuse, to say that I failed him because I was him? Instead of saying that I failed him by taking my life away and moving on. For the last year of his life, from the time he entered rehab to the day he died, I became terrible at paying
attention
to him. My own trajectory, I suppose, was too absolute for that. I was admitted early to Amherst, my first choice; I won a merit scholarship that, in the end, as my father never tires of reminding me, paid for half of one semester; I gave up playing the drums and started reading and writing poetry every free moment, fascinated by James Merrill and John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. How’s Alan? people asked me, constantly, and that was all that reminded me that he was still alive. You could say that I wrote elegies for him starting in the winter of 1992, that he became
useful
to me before he actually died.

—

It was the third-to-last day of winter vacation the following year; I was due back at Amherst on Sunday night, with a paper on Giordano Bruno in hand. Alan and I hadn’t seen each other since the previous weekend; he was working eight-hour shifts at Borders in Towson and going to NA meetings nearly every night. Called in sick today, he said, when I finally took off my headphones and picked up the receiver. I’m feeling crappy. And we’ve hardly seen each other at all, have we? You’ll be back at school in a minute and I’ll be leaving anxious messages on your machine.

There had been times, that year, when he acted like a jealous, left-behind high school girlfriend, sending me long letters and calling three times a week, wanting to know about my life, my new friends, and I’d all but ignored him, and then long stretches of silence in between, when
I’d been the anxious one, calling Cheryl at work—a number I still had memorized—to make sure he was all right.

As far as I knew, as far as I had seen, he was solidly in recovery, after a month of rehab, a relapse in the summer, after graduation, and another month of rehab the previous August. He’d been in methadone treatment but had stopped, abruptly, claiming it was just the same high, that it felt wrong, and then he’d gotten seriously into NA, going night after night, spending hours at coffee with his sponsor, Charles, an ex–Hells Angel and ex-con. It was at Charles’s insistence that he’d gotten a full-time job. His letters to me were full of jargon I barely understood:
Working the steps. Having a day. Crazymakers. Restitution junkies.
And—not surprisingly, I guess—his tastes in literature had changed:
The Road Less Traveled
,
The Courage to Heal
,
Fire in the Belly
,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
,
Be Here Now
,
Awaken the Giant Within
. Recovery lit, he called it. When I tried to bring Bataille and de Sade with me to rehab the second time they just chucked the books in the trash. It’s like North Korea in there. But over time, hey, you get to like it. It speaks to you. It’s sweet and medicinal. Like Charles says, you’ll have plenty of time to read later if you can only stay alive.

I have this memory, though it was January, of parking my car with leaves overhead: black-leafed oaks and elders and gum trees, their branches blocking out the sullen sky. I walked across the street to his house in a tunnel of imaginary leaves. The door was open; no one answered my knock. Cheryl was at work, of course, and Rebecca was spending her senior year at a prep school in Colorado. The house felt loose and creaky underfoot, full of odd drafts, barely inhabited. Alan, I called out. Hey, man, put some clothes on, I’m coming up, okay?

Okay.

He was sprawled over the enormous overstuffed couch we’d found abandoned down the street, years before, and hauled upstairs, unscrewing the hinges of his bedroom door to fit it in. There was a slash across
one of the arms I hadn’t seen before, the stuffing flowering out like a corsage, and hundreds of cigarette burns, as if he’d gotten into the habit of using it as an ashtray. And Alan in a Victims Family T-shirt with a blue-and-white afghan coiled around his waist. Sorry, he said, I would have come down, but I’m sick for real. All out of sorts.

What, the flu?

Who the hell knows. In any case, keep your distance.

You want something? Should I make you some soup?

He fixed me with a one-eyed stare. No thanks, Mom.

I mean
from a can
. It’s not rocket science.

What I need is your company, he said. I need your advice on an important metaphysical question. He produced a book with a streaky brown cover from underneath the afghan, a bark-colored cover.

What the hell is that?

Shut up, he said. It’s important. Listen to this:
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle, / A drop from the oceans; who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?
What do you think that means?

I’d have to hear the whole poem.

Why?

Because, I said, a line like that out of context could mean almost anything. It’s all fuzzy metaphors. Are we talking about the tree of knowledge, carnal knowledge, scientific knowledge? For my taste it’s a little too vague. And condescending. Who’s the
who
? Who are we talking about?

I could hear myself talking, snappy and dry, squeaky, an irritable pedant already at nineteen. No less of a shell, in my own way, than he was. He stared at me out of dark eye sockets that now looked perpetually bruised. At some point, without my fully registering it, a capillary had burst in his right eye, leaving a red blotch just outside the pupil. Otherwise, oddly, his face looked better, plumper, than it had a year earlier. He was finally putting weight back on, I thought, at long last.

All right, he said. I get it. Due diligence. Okay, the poem sucks
as a poem
. But that’s why I read it to you. I’m taking it as advice.

And what kind of advice would that be?

He flipped the book back open.

Young men,
he read,
when lifted up may become white swans, grandiose ascenders, “flying boys,” just as young women when similarly lifted up may become flying girls, and make love with invisible people at high altitudes. The Jungian thinkers have done well in noticing and describing this phenomenon, and the phrases
puer aeternus
and
puella aeterna
are familiar to many.

I’m reading this, he said, and I’m thinking, this is about me. This is
my
life. Don’t you see that?

Dude, I said, Alan, have you been making love with invisible people at high altitudes? How come you didn’t tell me? I want in on
that
action.

He closed his eyes.

I’m not going to respond to that, he said. You know why? You know what I think the problem with college is?

You’ve never been to college.

I had a summer, he said. Telluride. College teachers, college courses, college texts. I had my taste. And you know what the problem with it is? It’s an extension of adolescence. It’s just
camp
. It happens too late in life. You know what Charles said to me? By twenty-two every human being should have spent one year in the army and one year doing manual labor.

And how much time flogging Deepak Chopra at Borders?

Don’t mock me.

I’m not mocking you. I’m calling you on your BS. Didn’t you tell me that’s what an addict’s friends are supposed to do?

You’re not my friend.

What the fuck are you talking about?

I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it as a factual observation. I
honor you. As a former friend. I mean, really, come on, can you see it another way? This is our polite visit in the museum of our friendship.

I’ll believe that, I said, when I meet your
new
friends. When there’s someone I can hand you off to. And I don’t mean Charles.

We’re getting off track here, he said. I was telling you something about who I really am. I’m sorry if you don’t want to hear it. There’s a word for it: that’s what I’m learning.
Puer aeternus.
The eternal boy. Peter Pan. Icarus. Et cetera. Listen: the name of this chapter is
The Road of Ashes, Descent, and Grief
.
I’m
grieving
. But here’s the thing: now I know I’m grieving! And what you know, you can control. What you recognize you have to re-cognize.

Okay, okay. I get it.

You don’t get it yet. You think this has nothing to do with you.

Why does it have to have anything to do with me?

Because you’re more like me than you want to admit. Because a person only has one chance to get it right in life.

No, I said, I don’t believe that, and I’m sorry if this sounds arrogant, or condescending, or whatever, but neither should you.

For example?

For example, you aren’t dead, I said, though you probably should be, and if that isn’t a second chance, what is?

Would you do me a favor? he asked. Go in the bathroom. I have to take my diabetes shot. There’s a couple of new syringes in the cabinet. Get one out for me, would you? I’m feeling so dizzy I can hardly get up. And then maybe you can make me that soup you were talking about.

The syringes were on the top shelf inside the cabinet, still in their sterile packaging; they were bigger than the ones he usually used, which were no wider than pencils, and their labels, oddly, were printed in Chinese. Did it matter? Maybe adults used larger syringes. What was the other presumption: that he was back to shooting up? I was so angry, so shut out, and wounded, in the way that only nineteen-year-olds home
from college can be wounded, that I thought, fuck him if he is. Live and let live.

Where’s the insulin? I called out to him. Doesn’t it come in a little bottle?

I have it here.

Alcohol pad?

Yeah. One of those, too. Man. All of a sudden I’m
starving
.

All right, I said, all right, dropping the syringe into his waiting hand, I’m going down, I’m on my way.

—

When I came back into the room I smelled something odd—something sweet, a burnt-sugar smell, out of place. And thought that I must have dropped something on the stove by accident. I left the soup with him and hurried down to check, and then came back, and he had taken a few sips of the soup and fallen asleep. He looked good. He looked happy. I say this not to excuse myself, but because it is merely, entirely, true: there was color returning to his cheeks, or at least that was what I saw. I pulled the blanket up around his chin. I didn’t wake him. I watched him for a minute, and then I left. He was only sleeping.

Recording #1 (41:32)

Source: TDK Chrome cassette tape, 90 minutes, condition ++

Labeled side one “Tape 1 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY”

Digitized to .flac with ProTools noise reduction

Note: Speaker frequently pauses for intervals of :10 or longer. To preserve consistency, all such intervals are marked in the text with a space break.

I was four years old before I ever met a black person. Can you believe that?

I remember it so clearly—my clearest childhood memory of all. I guess that’s not really surprising. She was sitting at the picnic table on the back patio, where we had meals in the summer. In a caftan, a bright orange-and-red print. She had an Afro. Lots of silver bangles on both arms. I imagine she must have been about thirty. I had no idea where she’d come from. It was the morning; she’d arrived overnight. I came out to ring the dinner bell—it was a big iron triangle, the kind they use on ranches—and I startled her, but then she looked over and saw me and smiled. She had been crying. There were tracks of tears on her cheeks. But when she saw me her mouth split into this enormous grin, the widest mouth, the friendliest
mouth, I had ever seen in my life. A slice of the sun. She laughed, and she said, where did you come from? And I just wanted to run to her. Hell, maybe I still am running to her.

You know what the sex-change therapists say? Begin at the moment you knew. But in my case, it’s more complicated than that. Nature versus nurture: I’ve been playing that goddamned chess game my whole life. Out of context, or out of nowhere? Out of them, or out of me? By which I mean, of course, good old Mom and Dad. Or Dad, I should say, since she’s just a shadow, an afterthought. I was born, wasn’t I? Though sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. It seems almost like something to mention in parentheses.
Oh, yeah, her.

Sometimes, sometimes I wish I didn’t remember her, but I do. Just barely. She was incredibly pale, with that light, light blond hair, eyebrows, everything, and the one image I have of her is in our kitchen, this enormous kitchen—it was the conservatory of the house before the commune converted it. She’s standing against the windows, her back to the windows, and it’s as if the sunlight is coming through her. I remember I was terrified of that. And fascinated. In any case, there’s my one memory, and then she was off. Untraceable, unidentifiable, or so my father claimed. I have no record of her whatsoever, not even a picture. I used to beg him to tell me whether I had her nose, or her ears, anything, and he would say, sorry, but as far as I can tell, you’re all me. More’s the pity. Well, it was the Seventies, wasn’t it? On a commune, in the Seventies? Nobody was keeping records.

Big Love. That’s what the place was called. It’s near Baltimore, actually. Edgewater. I went back there once, a few years ago, out of curiosity. The owners tore down the old house and built this gigantic Venetian palazzo. Circular driveway, tile mosaics, fountains, the whole thing. And a Maserati out front. But the barn was there: the barn I played in. That’s the only
way I recognized it. The barn, and the trees, and these little hills looking out on the Severn.

Toward the end we were the only ones there at all. All I ever knew, in those days, was people leaving and never coming back. That black woman—know who that was? Shirley O’Dell. She was a backup singer for Ike and Tina, and later had a disco hit, “Give Me Someone to Love.” Her boyfriend, her ex-manager, had come out to Big Love and said he was never leaving. She showed up and they left the next day.

All those communes had the same trajectory—some of them just took longer to follow it all the way through. The guru, the big buildup, high times, donations, crowds, then the scandal, the blowup, people start to defect, the guru takes off, or dies, or whatever, then it dwindles down to the diehards, then the land gets sold for tract housing. Soon there’s nothing left but an old farmhouse, or a Home Depot, and a bunch of kids with names like Kali and Starflower Moonbright scattered around the county. But at least—and it’s a huge at least—there was no sex at Big Love. Or, I should say, at least, no sex I ever saw. At some of those places it was open season on the kids. Beneficent may have been downright crazy, but he was no Jim Jones. Should I give you the history, the whole rundown? Silpa wasn’t too interested. And maybe it’s tangential. But still, it’s culturally important. Beneficent Walker, the founder, that was his real name. Ex-Mormon, ex-seminarian, claimed he could speak fifteen languages, started the Church of Universal Holy Kindness. CUHK. He published a book, too, a bestseller:
The God of Now
. No one remembers it these days, but if you ever meet a boomer ex-hippie, chances are they’ll have it on an old dusty shelf somewhere, next to Ram Dass and the
Tao Te Ching
. That paid for Big Love, and kept the power and water on for a couple of years, but it wasn’t meant to last—he died the year I was born. Spinal cancer, claimed he could cure it through prayer, then changed his mind and decided God wanted him back. Of course, I never knew any of that until later; all I
knew at the time was that there was with Beneficent, which was all happiness and harmony and light, and then there was after Beneficent, which was now. We had a shrine to him behind the house, in a Quonset hut, which was supposed to be temporary, until they raised the money to pay for marble. For a while it was Dad’s job to keep fresh flowers on the altar and keep the universal flame going. Which meant a new Sterno can every six hours on the dot, day or night. He had me doing it instead, toward the end. Popping off the lids with a screwdriver, flicking a rusty Bic lighter. Five years old.

My mother—she was a devotee from the beginning. Sat at Beneficent’s feet, transcribed his talks from reel-to-reel tapes, mimeographed the newsletters. Her name was Katherine; she never told anyone her last name. Straight up refused. It’s not even on my birth certificate: Katherine Doe. Like a nun. A bride of Christ. And here’s the thing: ordinarily that would just mean she was the guru’s secret girlfriend, but Beneficent was celibate, actually celibate; he believed women were serpents, channels of sin. On the other hand, he was a student of religious history. Think of the cults that proscribed sex: the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Shakers. Self-erasing. He understood the value of procreation, but his compromise was to make it impersonal and assigned, and my parents were his experimental model. Dad already knew he was gay. And Katherine never wanted children. To say the least. Dad used to say I was a product of pure faith. A prototype.

And Dad? He was a fairy. A flaming queen of the first order. I mean, look, I suppose he could have disavowed me outright. He could have given me up for adoption or abandoned me. He did his duty, but that doesn’t mean he was what I would call a family-oriented person. I had to pry the details out of him with a crowbar, and that was just before he died, when he was too weak to resist and I was the one feeding him Ensure through a straw. But the thing about me, the distinguishing feature, you could say, is that I never really cared that much about my genes. Past a certain point. To me it’s the
absence that makes the difference. I had the lightest dusting of mothering one could ever imagine. Ostensibly the reason was that after Beneficent’s death she was completely shattered, and she spent my first few years in and out of a catatonic depression. It doesn’t really matter. Somehow I was kept clothed and fed and sane. There were other women around, though I don’t remember them, either. Shortly after she left, we left and moved into Baltimore. Big Love was sold; my father got some of the money. I was never quite certain how that went down. He had already finished his Ph.D. at Hopkins—Russian history. And was kept on as a lecturer for a few years. Then somehow, I don’t know exactly, he moved into being a librarian. And that’s what he was, for life. The Slavic languages librarian. Which is like being the priest of some obscure religion no one actually practices. For some reason you’re kept on. You’re a relic, but a relic with a continually renewed contract. I mean, this was the tail end of the Cold War. Russian studies was going the way of the LP record. Who would be in there looking for volume thirty of Mayakovsky’s collected works? But universities are like that, right? I mean, what is a university, otherwise, than a kind of giant pack-rat collection, betting that all this stuff is one day going to be useful?

So that was his life. It didn’t pay much, but what did that matter? Our house was practically free. It was a dump when we bought it, not much more than a shell. Enrique rebuilt it from the ground up. That was Dad’s boyfriend, his first one. They really made a go of it, too: seven years. These days they might have been married. As it was, he didn’t even live with us—not officially. Dad was afraid the neighbors would object, or at least that’s the excuse he gave. None of the boyfriends ever lived in his bed. They were always bickering about toothbrushes and borrowed underwear. It was all part of his generalized paranoia, and of course that’s why none of them stayed, in the long term.

Paranoia. That was his native condition, his MO, even before he got sick. I’ve never met a person who could read more into less. He’s stopped using
my shampoo. That kind of thing. Maybe he’s washing his hair at someone else’s house. At work he had two officemates, Janice and Philip—the three of them must have worked together for fifteen years—and I don’t think they ever stopped fighting. Not one day. He would come home in tears because Janice refused to water his Virginia creeper. That bitch has the blood of my plants on her hands. It was all theater, only sometimes not. And as a child, how could I tell the difference? I thought grown-ups were that way. I looked forward to the day I could use foundation and Pond’s Cold Cream.

This house we had, this house Enrique built for us, for my dad’s specific requirements, had no windows to speak of. It was a row house, of course, but the front window, too, was blocked off; there was this huge built-in bookshelf there instead. You had to have the lights on twenty-four hours a day. I had a window, in my bedroom, the front bedroom, upstairs. But Dad’s were covered with velvet drapes, always closed. I’m not kidding. It was cliché piled on cliché. Richard Simmons on TV? Remember him? For a while I thought we had to be related to him. There was no one else I could imagine. This was in the Eighties, after all. No gay men in wide circulation. No Nathan Lane, no
Will and Grace
. And apart from boyfriends, Dad had no friends to speak of. No meals on Friday nights, no Thanksgivings, nothing. If you want one fact about my childhood that matters, there it is: I was alone. But it’s too easy to say that. Those words are meaningless, really. There’s no adult language for what it means to be alone as a child. Those first years in Baltimore—it was like I was the only child on earth.

Shabazz. I went to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Elementary. I was the first white kid to enroll there in eight years, since they’d changed the name from Paul Revere. Too much, isn’t it? But here’s the thing: all those horror stories, those urban-pioneer, reverse-gentrification stories, the white kids getting picked on, beat up, you know the drill, none of that happened to me. I wasn’t a curiosity, I was a nonentity. I was invisible. Even my
teachers hardly remembered I was there. I always sat at the back, I paid attention, I did all the worksheets on time, and in between, when the fights happened, when someone threw a chair through a window, or broke another kid’s nose, or whipped out a box cutter, I took cover, mostly. There were always a few of us at the back taking shelter; sometimes we turned the desks over and made ourselves a little foxhole. At lunchtime we hid in the cloakroom or in the bathroom stalls. Those were my friends. The hiders. This was the Eighties; there weren’t police in the schools yet. No metal detectors, no security checking bags at the door. And the school itself was new—new carpets, new paint on the walls, new lockers. But no windows. That was my daily migration, from one cave to another. And you know what? I didn’t hate it, at the time. I had no grounds for comparison; I made a life out of it. Frankly, I was glad to be out of the house. I’d never been to school before I entered the first grade at Shabazz. I’d learned to read—somehow I’d always been able to read. I could add and subtract. But I’d never played with a basketball before. I’d never had a lollipop. Never listened to Michael Jackson. For better or worse, that was my gateway into the world. And then, lo and behold! I had a friend. William Thurgood Marshall Hayes. Willie.

As I said—you have to always bear this in mind—
I wasn’t a threat. I wasn’t a symbol of anything, at least not as far as six-year-olds were concerned. In that place, at that time, I was simply odd. Willie kept saying, You’ll grow out of it. That was his theory. Eventually, he said, your hair will fall out and grow back, you’ll get darker, you’ll be just like the rest of us. Small kids anticipate everything adults will ever imagine. Isn’t that what Picasso said, return me to the mental world I had when I was five?

Willie was the best. A little kid, like me, small for his age. Small and wily. His father was a wrestling coach at Dunbar; he had a practice mat in the basement and used to put us through self-defense drills. How to get hit. How to fall. Arm blocks and pressure points. To give us inspiration he let
us watch
Enter the Dragon
and
Kung Fu Action Theater
. God, we spent hours down there, eating Cheetos and pretending to be Bruce Lee. Willie had two older sisters, much older, teenagers, and they ran an unlicensed hair salon with his mom in the back of the house. His mother was half Cape Verdean, and that was the food they ate. Cachupa. Jagacida. Canja.
Canja, especially. It’s a thick chicken soup—thickened with rice, like
avgolemono
. Almost like a porridge. The world’s best comfort food. Robin learned how to make it. It was either that or keep making pilgrimages to New England. No Verdean restaurants around here. Anyway.