That’s when Ursula Crohn, Mistress of Ceremonies, gets up and says, Why don’t we hear from Ben Grunewald?
Clapping. I look around. It’s Randy giving me a big smile. He’s waving his big fist in the air and he calls out an affectionate grunt. David and Gary and Lester say yah!
Fuck. I haven’t even checked what I’ve brought to read, or even if I have all the pages. I sit my ass down on the stool on the Persian carpet in front of the fire with all those young cool Jeske New Yorker people looking at me. When I look down there’s my big toe sticking out of my stinky sock. The green glitter. Really, the fear literally clogs up my throat and I can’t think straight. Thank God I have text in front of me. Without text I’d be totally fucked.
My voice: Catholic Boy with a big apology. Trembling and shit. I read my story about the jerk-off club and the guy in the stupid underwear and the little weenie. When I finish, there is that long pause and silence again. A big turd in a crystal punch bowl. Randy, David, Gary, and Lester clap a couple of times and stop.
Ursula Crohn gets up and tells us about the avocado dip and invites us to partake of the refreshments. Randy’s the first guy up to the table with a plate.
That’s where I am sitting. On that stool on the Persian carpet in front of the fireplace one thousand stories up. Everybody else over at the table pouring glasses of wine, grabbing slices of pepperoni pizza. Hank walks right up to me. Big and beautiful. His chest pumping up the way he does. Maroni’s body – when his body gets close to mine, it gets too close. Propinquity.
“You see what you did?” Hank says.
Some kind of mint aftershave. His eyes that should be blue but aren’t, they’re black. His straight Roman nose. Mustache. Those sweet lips that someday I am going to kiss.
“What?” I say.
“We had to break,” Hank says, “After what you read, none of us could breathe, let alone speak.”
2.
First date
SOMETIME IN THE NEXT WEEK FOLLOWING URSULA Crohn’s party, Hank called me. At first, I couldn’t believe it was the Maroni. I didn’t have anything written down, so I didn’t know what to say to him. I’m lost without text. Plus telephones freak me out. At a certain point, I took a deep breath and pictured myself back on that stool a thousand stories up on the Persian carpet in front of the fireplace at Ursula’s artist’s loft and looked right into Hank’s black eyes as he spoke to me. What he had said that night had really shocked me. The fact that people couldn’t speak or even breathe once I had finished reading was preposterous, and I’d looked hard into Hank’s eyes for bullshit. But there was no bullshit.
Usually we have to hide a little when we risk saying something true to someone we don’t know. So I looked for Hank to make himself distant, for irony, for where he would go in himself so he could say something raw like that and still have protection. Propinquity. But it wasn’t only his body that was too close, the spirit inside him that made him say what he said was way close, too. It was a feeling I’d never felt before. Hank’s black eyes, the way they took me in. How looked at I felt. Suddenly I was a child and Hank was a real old man with cataracts and mostly blind so he was unaware of himself looking, or I was a child and Hank was a child too, and since we were children we could simply look. Felt big. The way Buddha, or Jesus, or Rumi might feel.
Then less than a week later, there we were on the phone, and Hank and I were just two awkward guys who didn’t know each other, trying to have a conversation. So I suggested he come over to my apartment that Friday.
Silence on his end of the phone. Then:
“I’ll have to talk to Mythryxis,” Hank said.
“Ma … what?”
“Myth … rix … is,” Hank said.
“Who’s that?” I said.
“She’s a fellow traveler of mine,” he said.
MYTHRYXIS, HANK’S GIRLFRIEND. I never got her real name. And I never met her. All’s I knew was she lived in New Jersey and she was a nurse. The whole time I knew Hank he always had a woman, and it was always just one woman, until, that is, he found another. For some reason, though, I got the feeling that Mythryxis was the girlfriend, maybe his first love from college, and she was waiting for Hank to marry her.
Mythryxis only lasted maybe those first six months I knew Hank. I always tried to get Hank to talk about her, but you know Hank. Kept his cards close to his chest. When he did talk about her, she sounded more like a student of his – not a writing student but like somebody broken he’d taken under his wing and was taking special care of. Then one night, after I asked, Hank just up and said that Mythryxis had moved on. Said it like she’d graduated. Like she was a doctor now instead of a nurse. I turned to look at Hank when he said that, into his black eyes. By six months, I thought we knew a lot about each other, and so when he said that I made a special point of looking at him, because right then I realized I didn’t have a clue about him and Mythryxis. We were sitting on the stoop of 211 East Fifth Street. The night was muggy and from under the stairs you could smell the piss. McSorley’s was just two blocks away and the way those boys drank they never could make it very far. The air was so thick in the mercury vapor light you could damn near set your beer can on it. Hank and I were brown-bagging a couple Rolling Rocks. I had my boombox in my window and we were listening to those eighties tunes that still can stop my heart. Sussudio, Blondie’s Rapture. Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you. Hank is sitting on the step just above me. We’re stripped down to loose fitting T-shirts and shorts, sandals. My whole body feels like crotch rot. Every once in a while, Hank’s bare knee touches my bare arm and it sticks. I’m on my third or fourth beer and Hank’s still nursing his second. Hank usually didn’t drink more than a couple beers. He didn’t get marihoochied either. That’s what Hank called it, marihoochy.
On the stoop, when Hank said that about Mythryxis, I had to turn and look up at him, and the porch light was right there, so I had to put my hand up to shield my eyes. Hank’s black eyes again. It never ceased to startle me the way he and I could look at each other. They were kind of misty, his eyes, as if the whole Mythryxis thing was a whole lot tougher than he’d ever let on.
“Are you sad about that?” I said.
Hank rolled the bottle in the brown bag around in his big hands. Looked at that bottle the same way he’s looking in his author’s photo on the back of his book.
“It’s all sad, Gruney,” Hank said. “If we let ourselves know how sad it really is, there wouldn’t be anything left of us.”
Just after he spoke, I swear a big gust of wind blew by. Like a semi truck on the freeway. It was hot wind – but still it was moving air, and it blew back our sweaty Eighties hair and then made a mess of the garbage all the way down East Fifth Street.
Sometimes I think Hank Christian, the Maroni, was magic. Or we were. Really, I loved that guy so much.
SOMETHING I’D LIKE you to notice, though. The Enigma of Hank Christian. When I asked Hank about Mythryxis, he did something he always did. He answered with something pithy and true and in such a way that it makes the saying beautiful, but after you think about it, he actually hadn’t told me one specific thing about himself or Mythryxis or the situation he was in with her.
There are two ways I feel about this. Now that I am old and sick and Hank is dead, sometimes I wonder if I knew Hank Christian at all. Before his death, all those years we didn’t speak. No deathbed reconciliation. Nada. Believe me, the shit that went down with Ruth could tear anything asunder.
Years passing can do other things as well. Shit that before I didn’t know even existed, let alone try and understand, I’m beginning to make sense of now. Which I’m thankful for. Still, change like that ain’t easy, especially when you’re sixty.
Hemingway called it the black ass. Virginia Woolf put herself in the hospital after every one of her books. Except the last one. And the book about New York and AIDS I was writing was, on purely a physical level, only prolonging the horror of the Eighties one decade
further. Once is enough with depression like that.
THE SECOND WAY I feel about the Enigma of Hank Christian is fuck it. So I didn’t understand it all. The glorious mystery of the man who touched me in a place that wasn’t there before he touched it. I want to dance my ass off in some naked-pagan-by-the-bonfire drum chant, screaming thanks at the universe for the blessing of that hole his black eyes burnt into me. So what if he didn’t spill all his beans. So what if he was a persistent, obdurate, goddamn goat. I’ll never be the same after Hank Christian, and thank God for it.
THAT FIRST FRIDAY night Hank came over felt like a blind date. Hank and I both were freaked. Neither one of us knew what the fuck we were going to say or do with the other. I was freaked because of what I did know. Hank because of what he didn’t.
My radar for Hank – something, I figured, that overwhelming could only be sexual. Don’t get me wrong, that was good, way good, in fact dream come true good. But dream come true good, the very perfectness of Hank Christian and his buff Italian body and black eyes, his Maroni status with Jeske, his beautiful sentences and the way he uttered them; instead of a dream come true, the prospect of sitting face to face with Hank Christian in my tiny apartment with the bed right there – I couldn’t imagine. As soon as I hung up the phone after I invited him over, I couldn’t fucking imagine. That’s when the nightmare started. My body morphed into a skinny, zitty, gawky, tongue-tied Idaho teenager. A complete fucking flaccid fraud.
MY BROKEN DICK. Such a long sad story. It started when I was born and just never got better. I thought after leaving my wife things would change. And they did there for a while with Bette. When I started walking on the other side of the street, though, I thought that would solve the problem. I had high hopes for my hard-on. But the Brotherhood of Homosexual Men I’d been yearning to find turned out to be me standing solo in bars with loud disco music. Bars with friendly names like Hell Fire, Rawhide, or The Anvil. They were all the same. Dark with dramatic lighting and shadows. Every man wearing the same outfit. Like we were all straight guys on a construction crew who were having beers after work. Or we were miners. Or we were cowboys. Nobody talked because the music was too loud to talk and if we talked we’d no longer be the hardwired sex machines we were posing as.
Then there was the Monster. A piano bar. The men there didn’t all look like G.I. Joe. Sitting at the crowded bar, you could actually talk to men. But it didn’t take me long to figure out it was the cocaine. Really, I had some of the most bizarre conversations you could imagine in that place. Men making absolutely no fucking sense at all. For example, there was this one guy one night. He was a black guy, good looking. I introduced myself and that quick he’s talking about the night and the stars and somehow then he’s talking about the trademark porcelain stamp on the men’s toilet in the bathroom, Porcelana, then he’s talking about Burt Reynolds’s party tricks, then how the more fruit you eat the more sour your cum tastes – all of it, all at once, spoken in one long breathless sentence. Fuck.
The secret code. I think what being gay really means is that you understand the secret code. I never got the secret code. For example, I walk up to a guy in a bar who’s carefully prepared himself to look like he’s been digging fence posts all day. I say, Hi, hello how are you and tell him my name is Ben. More often than not this guy won’t speak, he’ll just look at me up and down, checking me out, what’s important, what’s wrong, and then he’ll walk off.
Now if you know the secret code, you know to follow or not to follow. Sometimes when you follow, the guy’s in the bathroom with his dick hanging out. And there’s just no way in hell I’m going to kneel down in all that piss and take some dick I’ve never met into my mouth.
Then sometimes when you follow the guy, you aren’t supposed to follow the guy, because in secret code he’d just told you to fuck off. Yet sometimes when you follow the guy who’d just somehow magically communicated to you to fuck off, that’s the right thing to do. And I guess that’s because that means you want to be told to fuck off, and if that guy is in fact a guy who gets off on telling guys to fuck off, then that’s the right move to make. Otherwise it’s a staredown from hell.
And that’s just if you gets the balls to walk up to someone and start talking. Mostly I just stand and wait for someone to talk to me. Yah. Good luck.
Then the whole top and bottom thing. How men just know that stuff. So many times, in the bathroom, there isn’t a dick hanging out waiting for you, it’s a guy bent over stretching out his ass crack with his hands. I mean really, I love men’s asses. I’ve followed men’s asses all the way across Manhattan. But to just have that hairy stretched out purple crack there hanging under some bad lighting, really no matter how hard I tried, my dick just don’t work that way.
Then of course, seems like every man in these friendly bars had a dick the size of Godzilla. Really what do you do with something that big? It can’t fit in your mouth and it certainly can’t fit up your ass. So I guess the old joke is true: all you can do is throw your arms around it and weep.
HANK WAS HAVING his own troubles. The beauty of a friendship like Hank’s and mine is that shit like this comes out and months later, years, and you’re laughing your ass off.
Hank was freaked because he didn’t know what the fuck. He knew I was gay and he figured since I was gay and since all of a sudden I was always on his mind, then he must be gay too. And that was perplexing. Gays wore tight pants that emphasized their crotches, wore rings on their pinkie fingers, had special colored hankies they wore in their back Levi’s pockets, and exhibited an insatiable desire to suck cock. Personally, Hank had never even remotely experienced any of these traits in himself. He’d tried it once and couldn’t even get one finger up his asshole, so what was this desire to get next to Grunewald? Maybe this was how gay started. One day you’re thinking about some guy and the next day you’re on your knees in a XXX sex parlor with a red handkerchief sticking out the back left pocket of your tight Levi’s 501 jeans. Or was it the right pocket? Fuck.
FREAKIN’ WILD THE way the city feels on a summer Friday night. Late June 1985, just before sunset, Hank Christian presses his thumb against the buzzer of apartment 1A, 211 East Fifth Street.
When I hear my buzzer, I flutter. Everything about me flutters – my hands, my fingers, the breath in my chest. I take a deep breath, look into the old, peeling mirror. Hank Christian is buzzing my buzzer. I unlock the locks on my apartment door, open the door, take two big steps to the front door, put my hand on the knob that always smells of the musk oil the lesbians upstairs bathe in, swing the door open. All day, the sun has baked itself into the cast iron steps. No shade, just beating down sun onto the stoop, onto the alcove of the doorway. The bright and heat blast in. The smell of the street – exhaust fumes, piss under the stairs, garbage. I blink and blink and raise my hand to block out the sun. Hank is a hazy dark object in a vat of hot bright. I go to speak, but suddenly Hank’s hand pokes out into the shadows of the hallway, right at me. It is the hand of a Caravaggio and appears as if out of another dimension. I look and look and look at the hand, then grab it, Hank’s hand, and I pull him in as if Hank was burning up in a cauldron out there. Both Hank and I laugh a little the way I’ve hauled him in. When we can see into each other’s eyes, I quick pull my hand out of Hank’s, and my hand falls down against my leg, fluttering.
Hank and I maneuver our bodies through the do-si-do of the front door closing, through the apartment door of 1A, then the closing and the locking of the apartment door without touching.
The apartment is a studio and right there by the door when the door is closed is one of two places in the apartment where there’s room enough for two to stand. Too close really for two men. Propinquity.
Hank’s black eyes assess my home, my den, where I write my abuses and murders. A writer’s eyes, Hank’s – must see must look must know – every detail, but careful not to get caught looking.
What I see Hank see: the fan in the window, the dark rust-colored Le
volor blinds closed tight, the big red metal writing desk. No computer, not yet. A big ass typewriter that can self-erase. The lamp and the crooked shade colored with red and yellow and blue Crayolas. The exposed brick wall. Stacks of papers and books and books and books. The skinny white stove, four burners and an oven. Two white metal cupboards above the stainless steel sink. A cutting board on top on a hip-high refrigerator. In the back of the apartment, darkness, a staircase, the loft bed.
The whole time, as Hank and I speak to each other, our hands and arms move up and down, each of us on our own bodies – hands on hips, fingers in armpits, one hand on hip, a hand that pops the knuckle on the other hand, both hands hanging down at the sides, a quick cover of the crotch, then hands that wave around, fucking hands, man, two men standing too close front to front, flutter flutter, fucking arms, folding and unfolding over our cocks, over our bellies, over our hearts.
In the mirror leaning against the brick wall, its layers of silver peeling off, Hank Christian and Ben Grunewald, a dream of them, their reflections, like this story is a dream only different, standing inside in there.
My arms finally settle their flutter into a place crossed just over my nipples, my right hand up, open-palmed, rubbing the stubble of my chin. My nose is trying to sniff up the chicken and rice and garlic I’d cooked the night before. Hank’s mint smell. Maybe it comes from his shampoo. I’m sucking in my gut. Hank is pushing out and raising up his chest, pulling his arms down, shoulders down, the way he does.
On our lips, smiles of course, the both of us. Our lips, what they speak. What they do not speak. How the voices inside us come up and out.
“Hank,” I say, “How ya doin’, man?”
“Sorry I’m late.” Hank says, “Number one was running slow.”
“I always take the R.” I say, “Hot, ain’t it?”
“Fucking hot!”
“Too hot in here,” I say. “What do ya say we find some air condish and have a beer. There’s a place over on Second Ave called Le Culot.”
I Loved You More Page 3