Lay Your Sleeping Head

by Michael Nava

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think I’d need a Plan B. Hey, Gold, do I drink too much?”

  “We both drink too much,” he said. “It’s a good man’s weakness.”

  I touched his glass with mine. “I’ll drink to that. I saw Hugh Paris again.”

  “Hugh Paris? That gay guy you talked to in the jail?”

  “He showed up at my place a couple of weeks ago.”

  Gold stared. “Don’t tell me you—”

  “Yeah, I slept with him.”

  “A client, Henry!”

  “He was never a client. It’s fine.”

  “Fine? Whether he’s a client or not, he’s a criminal, Henry. You’re having sex with criminals.”

  “He’s not a criminal,” I said. “He wasn’t even charged.”

  “Don’t split hairs, counselor. You have to know how this looks.”

  “Tell me something, Aaron,” I said, helping myself to a potato skin. “How old were you when you had your first girlfriend? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  He grinned over the top of his glass. “Sixteen.”

  “You remember her name?”

  “Deb,” he replied. “Debbie Abramov.”

  “I bet you held Debbie’s hand when you walked her to algebra and made out with her in the rec room or whatever and you pinned a corsage on her and took her to the junior prom and all the other boys and girls said what a cute couple. Did you fuck her, Aaron?”

  “I think you’ve had one too many, my friend,” he said.

  “Humor me, Gold. Did you lose your virginity to her?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Because that, counselor,” I said, feeling the booze now, “was how you learned the proper order of things. First love, then sex.” I picked up my drink, swirled the whiskey, tasted it. “My Debbie was a boy named Mark. I was his best friend. He was a lot more than that to me. I wanted to hold his hand in the hallways between classes, hang out with him in the senior quad after school, feel each other up in the back seat of his crappy car. I wanted to make love to him. If I had so much as hinted any of that to him, he would have been disgusted with me. So I kept those feelings to myself. The first time I had sex was in a bathroom at the university when another freshman gave me a blow job in one of the stalls.”

  “I could have gone all my life without hearing this,” Gold muttered.

  I reached across the table, grabbed a fistful of his jacket and dragged him toward me. “If I have to hear about the size and shape of the tits of every shiksa you lust after and how what you really want is to meet a nice Jewish girl and settle down, you can hear me out for once.”

  “Let go of me,” Gold said quietly. I released him. He straightened his jacket, and sipped his drink. “So, you’re saying you want to take this Hugh Paris to the junior prom?”

  I laughed. “Fuck you,” I said. “Yeah, something like.”

  “Counselor, I think that ship has sailed.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Anyway, Hugh isn’t really prom material.”

  “You’re not going to see him again, are you?” Gold asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it was a one-night stand.”

  “Good,” Gold said. “That’s good.”

  I woke up the next morning inhaling the fumes of the previous night’s liquor: Gold and I had closed down the bar arguing whether Reagan was as stupid as he seemed or if it was an act that concealed his political genius. “He’s an asshole either way,” I said on the sidewalk after we’d been 86’d. “I saw ‘im once,” Gold countered. “Purple hair! Total dye job. Shows up brown on TV.”

  I got myself into the bathroom, puked, rinsed my mouth and splashed my face with cold water. In the kitchen I swallowed four aspirin, brewed a pot of coffee and scalded my tongue on my first cup. I took my second cup to the couch where I sat in my boxers as someone tightened a thin wire around my temples and reminisced fondly about my twenties when I could close down a bar and show up for my 8 o’clock Contracts class no worse for the wear. The aspirin wasn’t working, the coffee wasn’t working; drastic measures were in order. I went back into the bedroom and pulled on my running clothes. I gulped the last of the coffee, went outside, stretched creakily, and then set off at a slow pace toward the university.

  Summer was a wistful time of year in Linden, when the great engine of the university was stilled. I knew those summers well from the ones I had spent there, as an undergrad and then a law student. The summer after my freshman year I went home to the small Central Valley town where I’d been raised. I worked construction alongside my macho father who teased me brutally about being a college boy and mocked me for still being a virgin. (I was a virgin only by his definition, not that I dared correct him.) The other guys on the crew, mexicanos like him, took up the cudgel and bullied me mercilessly. I could have endured that but when they started putting me in dangerous situations, I bailed and hitchhiked back to Linden where a sympathetic professor let me sleep on her couch until school started. I never went home again. Holidays I stayed in the dorms; summers I rented a room in town and worked at whatever job I could find. Those undergrad summers were lovely and long and lonely. I biked around the vast, empty campus, exploring its obscure corners and hidden niches. For all that, the university never felt like home to me. I was grateful it had taken me in but I had more in common with the maids who cleaned my dorm room than my classmates.

  I ran through the quiet town and reached the university entrance gates, stopped, and threw up again. Before me was the mile-long prospect of University Drive, marked on either side by a row of Queen Palms that lifted their shaggy heads against the pastel sky. On either side was the Arboretum, a forest of trees from every continent, a carefully designed wilderness that had once housed the stud ranch of the university’s founder, the nineteenth century magnate, Grover Linden. Glittering at the far end of Palm Drive was the gilt mosaic of Jesus that decorated the front of the immense chapel at the center of the Old Quad, a collection of somber buildings, arches and covered arcades fashioned out of buff-colored sandstone and roofed with red tiles; the university’s original hub.

  I gathered myself and ran briskly down the drive, remembering the story of how, when he was told by his architect that it would cost no less than ten million dollars to build his university, Grover Linden turned to his wife and said, “I think we can manage that, don’t you, mother?” Like the fortunes of most of his fellow robber barons, his was blood money, made over the corpses of the miners who perished in his mines and the Chinese workers who died constructing his railroads and the suicidal farmers ruined by his financial speculations. Some maintained the university was Linden’s atonement, like Andrew Carnegie’s libraries or Alfred Nobel’s peace prize. I’d always thought it was a monument to the self-regard of the man who was buried in the woods in a mausoleum guarded by sphinxes.

  I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into the expansive courtyard of the Old Quad. Grover Linden hand-picked and legendarily hen-pecked the architects who built his university, demanding opulence and solemnity on a vast scale. What they had accomplished in the Old Quad was a gloomy magnificence that never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic. Along the north and south ends of the courtyard were arched corridors and buildings characterized by roughly hewn stone walls, cavernous door openings and deep window reveals. These buildings housed the departments of English and History where I had spent much of my undergraduate years in capacious classrooms distracted by the carnal scent of freshly cut grass drifting in through the nineteenth century windows. Anchoring the quad was the Romanesque pile of stone called Memorial Church. Its glory was the golden mosaic of Jesus that covered much of its façade; a blond, blue-eyed and distinctly Nordic appearing Jesus who looked more like a young titan of industry than the prince of peace. Hard to imagine him healing lepers and consorting with whores.

  I jogged through the quad, where a busload of Japanese tourists wandered around taking pictures, and p
ast a small subterranean stone building. Steps led down into a marble chamber, the infamous men’s toilet where, at seventeen, another freshman pulled into one of its commodious stalls and demonstrated that a blow job involved no actual blowing. Heading toward the foothills behind the campus, I ran past one of the old dormitories, a sprawling Mission-style edifice built around the lovely courtyard, where an Argentine engineering student had completed my sexual initiation on a narrow bed in his monastic dorm room. He was a grad student, older and more experienced and a patient teacher after I told him the entire sum of my experience was the sloppy blow job in the bathroom. Ricardo. He was the first boy I kissed. I remember the shock of amazement and pleasure when he slipped his tongue into my mouth. I remember how puzzled I was when he told me to kneel on the bed between his legs and then lifted them to my shoulders. He reached over, took my rigid cock and began to guide me inside him. My body shook with excitement and disbelief—he was really going to let me do this to him? At the moment of penetration, I looked into his gray-green eyes and everything inside of me assented. Yes, this was what I had been waiting for, to make love to another boy and to feel his flesh close around mine.

  The memory quickened my pace as I reached the edge of campus, crossed the road and reached the rolling, oak-tree covered hills behind the school. I entered through an open gate and sprinted up a hill crowned by a radio telescope that everyone called the Dish. The grass on the hillside was dried to its summer gold, and in the near distance cows grazed. Singularly or in groves, the oaks spread their broad canopies of dusty leaves. Fields and oak trees—this was the landscape I had grown up with in the Central Valley; this was my California. I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath. My clothes were soaked with sweat, and my hangover had been replaced by endorphin-induced euphoria. The morning had heated up and I stripped off my T-shirt. In the northern distance I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky.

  When I was a boy, San Francisco seemed like Oz—the magical city of domes and towers at the end of the earth. I had my first experience of the place in high school when some of my friends got cars. On weekends we’d make the ninety-mile drive from our stifling valley town for free concerts in Golden Gate Park, or to join the moratoriums against the war in Vietnam or to hang out on Haight Street, the fading epicenter of the counterculture where a baggie of pot went for ten dollars and a topless girl stood on the corner of Haight and Asbury selling the Berkeley Barb. Even then, though, despite my excitement at being in the big city, something about the place unsettled me. The often vaporous gray air could turn abruptly into a cloak of wet, white, bone-chilling fog. When I walked its old Victorian neighborhoods, what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but dropped from angles, darkening the corners of things. I would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle instead of the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city was filled with such shadows as if it were a living thing with secrets and troubled memories.

  Standing beneath the Dish and looking at the city, guileless and serene beneath the crayon sky, I thought about Hugh and the thought became tangled with my memories of the boy on his knees in the toilet stall and Ricardo, naked on his back, eyes fluttering, as I entered him. Why this trip down memory lane and what did it have to do with Hugh Paris? A voice in my head hinted, They were all your firsts. My firsts—first sexual encounter, first time making love—what did that leave? The same voice suggested, first time in love?

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said aloud. “I barely know the guy. I’ll probably never see him again.”

  But now the thought was in my head, and running as hard and fast as I could through the foothills and back to my apartment, I could not dislodge it.

  When I returned home, my neighbor Karen, a red-haired medical student at the university, was knocking at my door.

  “Oh,” she said, seeing me. “Here, this letter got put in my mailbox by mistake.”

  I took the envelope from her. My name and address in unfamiliar handwriting, postmarked from San Francisco. No return address.

  “Um, thanks,” I said.

  “Secret admirer?” she asked, smiling.

  I smiled back. “That would be a first.”

  THREE

  Querido Henry,

  Is that the correct salutation? I took a semester of Spanish in prep school but I don’t remember much of what I learned. I think querido means beloved but if it doesn’t that’s what I wanted to say. I was never much of a student. Never much of anything, really. Another junkie with a gilt-edged name called me a “wastrel.” We were up in a shooting gallery in Harlem waiting for our connection, exchanging life stories. “You’re a wastrel,” he said, when I finished mine. I had to look up the word. It means someone who is good for nothing, who has wasted his potential. Old-fashioned word, the kind of word my great-great-grandfather might have used if he had met me. That guy—the guy who called me a wastrel—he overdosed and died. Not that time, but later. I’ve overdosed, too, more than once, but I survived. I wasn’t always happy that I did.

  There was another time back in New York when I’d run out of money and needed a fix. You know what that feels like? Your whole body is throbbing and aching and your mind is running like a hamster on a wheel and your skin crawls and you’re one breath away from a panic attack. I was walking around the Village, desperate for money, and I remembered the piers. I don’t know if you know New York, but there are some abandoned piers on the Hudson at the edge of the Village where all the gay guys cruise. Some of them were hustlers and I thought maybe I could turn a quick trick. It was the dead of winter, Henry, the piers were deserted. I wandered around, freezing and sick from withdrawal. Finally, I walked to the edge of a pier and looked at the river and thought, I should jump in; it was so cold I knew I’d be dead in minutes. But then some guy tapped me on the shoulder, big guy, middle-aged, not a clone, some closeted blue-collar worker wanting to get off. He handed me twenty dollars and I let him fuck me, standing against a rotting wall in a dark corner of a pier. It was so cold we didn’t undress. He unzipped and I pulled down my pants and briefs, just enough to give him access. He slammed me against the wall and came in ten grunts, then left me there, the money for the fix in my pocket, his come running down my thigh.

  This is who I was—a wastrel, a junkie, a whore. I’m trying to be a different person now, I want to be a different person, but it’s hard to resist getting pulled back into that black hole inside of me that nothing ever filled except opiates. When we were in your bed, I looked into your eyes. I saw myself in them and I felt forgiven. I know that doesn’t make any sense. How could you forgive me for things you didn’t know I’d done? Why would you forgive me if you did know? But the feeling was so powerful, I thought it must be real and not just my imagination. Then, afterwards, when you said you wanted to know me, I panicked. I knew if you did know me, knew everything about me, you wouldn’t look at me with those eyes again. So I ran away.

  I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you, Henry. I want to see you again but I can’t unless you know who I am. Now you do. Here is my phone number. If, after you have read this, you still want to, please call me. Also, because I wasn’t always a junkie whore, here is a picture of me before any of that started. I am 15 in this picture. I was confused and sad but a good kid. Someone who might have grown up to be a good man. I want to think I still can.

  Love,

  Hugh

  I took the Polaroid from the envelope. Pictured were two boys standing against a brick wall, identically dressed in blue blazers, baggy gray trousers, white shirts and rep ties, striped green and yellow and blue. They wore straw boaters, straight out of the 1920s. A costume party? No, he’d mentioned prep school. That explained it. One of the boys was maybe seventeen or eighteen, dark-haired, broad shouldered, his face already settling into its adult lines and angles. He had his arm protectively around the other boy who was shorter, slighter and paler.
Fifteen? Hugh looked twelve, his features soft, delicate and unformed; the face of a beautiful child. I turned the photo over. Someone had written, “Grant and me” and a date ten years earlier.

  I dialed the number he had given me.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “I got your letter,” I told him. “I’m waiting for you.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” he said.

  “You can ask me five questions,” Hugh said.

  We were back in my bed, the sheet beneath us twisted and damp, the top tangled at our feet. He was on his side, his head cradled in his arm, regarding me with his sky-blue eyes. I slowly ran my hand along his naked body, from shoulder to flank, letting its warmth and smoothness suffuse my fingers, my palm. I lifted my hand to his face and he kissed it.

  “Just five?” I told him I wanted to know more about his past. “You do remember I’m a lawyer. Asking questions is my job. It’s how I get to the truth.”

  “I’m not hiding anything, I’m trying to start a new life.” He pressed my hand to his chest, above his heart. “Five questions for now.”

  I nodded. “Who was the man who raped you when you were a child?” I asked quietly.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.

  “Five questions,” I reminded him. “And no secrets between us.”

  “My grandfather,” he said.

  He looked at me warily, expecting, it seemed, that my judgment would fall on him rather than the man who had perpetrated this horror. I stroked his face and said, “Men who do that to children should be locked up and the key thrown away. Where were your parents?”

  “My dad died when I was ten. My mother fell apart and left me with my grandparents. I lived with them until I was sent to Boston to prep school.”