“My dirty little secret,” Hank said, “– hell, it hasn’t even been a secret. You have to think about it for it to be a secret.”
Hank’s dark eyes were two deep black holes in the world.
“Gruney,” Hank said, “you’re the first person I’ve ever told.”
WHAT HANK SAID next, it took my ears a while to hear what he was saying. Strange when that part in you is touched how quickly you can fall apart. It’s as if the words that are being said go to the deepest place, the place in you that’s become the way you’ve become so you can keep on going. The helmet you put on when you were a kid that grew into your head and now someone is saying you have a helmet on your head.
“That first time I heard you read at Ursula Crohn’s,” Hank said, “it was as if the skies opened, or my soul opened, whatever, shit just opened. Your broken voice saying it is I who am broken, and it is human to be broken, and we are all broken, and it changed my life. I’ve never heard anything so beautiful.”
“It was you who taught me, Gruney,” Hank said, “to be authentic.”
“It’s you who taught me to be a real man.”
5.
The women
THEN THERE WAS THE NIGHT HANK AND OLGA AND I GOT thrown out of Seville.
That’s where we were going to meet that night, at Seville – a Spanish restaurant on Perry in the West Village. Hank said Olga said it was the best Mariscada de Salsa Verde in town. I didn’t even know what Mariscada de Salsa Verde was, other than it was green. But I didn’t care. It could’ve been fried green goat brains and I’d have gone. In the year I’d known Hank, besides Mythrixis, of all the girlfriends Hank had only mentioned now and then, Olga Rivas was different. She was from Nicaragua. Into Santeria. Her long thick curly black hair. Her eyes, her eyes, Hank couldn’t stop talking about her eyes. Her English. The way she adorned herself with jewelry. And that night, I was finally going to meet her.
It was summer again and hot like only Manhattan can get. Humid hot with nothing green around to suck it up. Heat waves bouncing off concrete. I started out from East Fifth Street an hour early. Those days, my vacations were walking. My favorite route was to cut across Cooper Union Square to Broadway, then window shop Eighth Street with its cheap chic, shoes, and salons de belleza eres. To Fifth Avenue. My favorite corner. There was always a guy drawing with chalk on the wide sidewalks, wonderful drawings that looked like da Vinci or van Gogh. I always watched where I stepped so I’d never step on his drawing. And something else I loved to look at. One Fifth Avenue. That building was what my eyes always went to.
More often than not, that corner was my destination. There was a Hebrew National on Eighth, my favorite dinner out. Two hot dogs with sauerkraut and a Coke. I’d take my dinner to across from One Fifth, sit on the curb, eat my hot dogs, drink the Coke, stare up at the building. The Spanish terra cotta tiles, the mullion windows. The little round windows at ground level that looked like windows on big ships.
There I was, Ben Grunewald, so close I could reach out and touch it.
It. What George Plimpton had, what it takes to be Truman Capote. The penthouse apartment with the arched tall corner windows. The crystal chandelier you could see in there at night. Sometimes the curtains, like clouds those curtains. Vacations on Lake Como. The Paris Review. The New York Review of Books. Miles Davis. Sailboats. Those blue plates people hang on their kitchen walls. Pressed starched linen. Chablis Grand Cru. Truffles. Café de Flor. Museo de Chocote. Havana, Cuba. People to love you like Hemingway.
The myth of van Gogh coursing through my veins. One painting. He’d only sold one painting. So happy with my Kosher wieners and my Coke. Sitting there my ass on the curb, my feet in the gutter, next to me the guy chalking out Starry Night.
I’m looking up, always looking up.
I knew it was far away. That world. But no fucking idea how far.
If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t. I’d find someplace sunny. Always have tanned feet. Drink clear clean water from a thick green glass bottle. Find a big Catalpa tree to love. Eat dirt.
AT SEVILLE, THERE’S a line, and even though Olga has made reservations we have to wait. We’re standing in the shadows the leaves make. A Mimosa tree I think. Soft lacy shade. Hank does the introductions. I don’t look too closely at Olga at first. Something makes me not look right at her. When she takes my hand I can feel the bones in her hand. How she holds my hand a moment too long. The lacy shade on her arms and face. Her famous long black curly hair, her beautiful brown skin. Black eyes that make Hank’s look brown. Small boned, like her body has been reduced down twenty percent. Makes me feel oversized, clumsy. Her light see-through blouse is red. No bra. Pockets on the blouse so you can’t really see her nipples. Gold bracelets on her wrists, lots of gold bracelets, a gold ring on each hand. How gold sounds rubbing against itself. Bright yellow shorts. Gold sandals with fake jewels on them. Toenails like her fingernails, so clear and shiny they didn’t seem real. The way she says Mariscada de salsa verde.
The maître d’hôtel, a tall guy with slick black hair and a Don Ameche mustache, offers us a free cocktail. Olga orders a margarita – maargaareeta – margarita for me too. Then Hank orders a margarita. I look over at Hank real close when he says margarita. I’d never seen Hank drink hard liquor.
My eyes can’t stay on Hank for long, though. They move with Hank’s eyes to where he’s staring. The way he looks at her. His eyes beholding her. As if she is something newly formed, precious, and as we stand, his breath is breathing life into her. And if he stops looking, if he skips a breath, if he looks away, Olga Rivas, this dark angel of a woman he has conjured up will disappear.
I don’t like her at all.
Don’t trust her. Women or men – doesn’t matter. When they’re beautiful the way Olga is beautiful, they know they can get away with anything.
There’s a simple test you can try on beautiful people. You know how they look as if they know they’re always being looked at? Well, try catching them off guard. And if you can’t ever catch them without that looked-at look on their faces, if you can’t ever catch them picking their nose, slumped over when they sit, belching, sneezing, yawning too wide, God forbid a fart – then you know you’re in trouble. Stay away from these people like the plague because they’re really not human – not until their beauty fades. And when it does, their beauty a blossom that has burst, when they realize they’re no longer always being looked at, stand away because there’s going to be a meltdown.
Believe me, I am watching Olga. She is ten, twelve years tops away from being human.
THERE IS A moment at the table. We are in one of the booths in the back, sitting in a half circle of red leather. Darkness and points of soft light hanging in the air around us. In the center of the round table, a votive candle in a red glass. Above us on the wall, a kitsch painting of a peasant woman with large breasts balancing a jar of wine on her shoulder. Olga in the middle, under the painting, facing out, Hank and I on the ends. We’re somewhere between our second and the third margaritas, high enough that the regular world has shifted just enough to let the shine come through. The all-important shine. Light – it feels like light – creeps into your body and things get clear and you know shit, important shit, and you speak easily because you’re shining with what you know.
That’s what I’m doing, shining, speaking easily. Who knows what I’m saying. Something important. Something about me. Going on and on and on. Pretty soon I get this feeling and I stop. I come back into my body back from out there wherever it is I was. Hank’s staring at me. Olga’s staring at me.
Olga reaches over and takes my hand. Her hand, a way that only a woman can touch. A touch that says she knows she’ll never know you but still she’s curious. From the other side, her touch, female. Tender even. The way an oncologist touches a cancerous tumor, or maybe in the zoo the way you see on TV a baby tiger playing with a monkey. The candlelight on the smooth brown skin of her arms, her gold bracelets. The sound of gold again
st gold.
“My buddy Gruney’s really something,” Hank says, “isn’t he?”
Olga’s right hand grasps my hand solid. Across the table, Olga’s left hand is solid in Hank’s too.
“I’d love to read your cards sometime,” Olga says. “I don’t know how to describe. You’re like a feral.
“Feral?” Olga says. “Is that English?”
“Latinate,” Hank says.
“Is okay?” Olga says.
“Says it perfect,” Hank says.
“A feral child,” Olga says, “who nobody ever listened to.”
IT’S A GOOD thing I’ve had two maargaareetas. It’s a good thing a third was coming. All that attention would have made the normal ordinary Ben Grunewald go tilt. Made my toes curl up in my shoes, made my balls pull up, poked up my shoulders. Showing off again! Making a spectacle of yourself!
Hank takes hold of my right hand. His hand, only a way a man can touch. A touch that says he knows that men haven’t really got a clue. It’s only an attitude. But fuck it, we can play and not get caught the way women can. The red votive light on his thick wrist, his smooth forearm.
That moment is one of the big moments of my life. When everything comes together. I feel a way I’ve only dreamed of. Too high really to ever remember it well. Only a trace, a thin drunk thread of memory going back over the years to find that guy, me, who was sitting there at that table, who let himself be seen. The three of us, on the red leather, darkness and points of soft light hanging in the air around us, the votive candle in the center of the white round table, the red glow of glass, between our second and the third maargaareetas, Hank’s hand in Olga’s, Olga’s hand in mine, my hand in Hank’s.
I’m about to make a joke, say something, anything, that will make the precious moment stop. I know I can do it. Move my shoulders, tilt my chin, laugh a little laugh. And I’m just starting, just past the shoulders, and in the middle of the chin tilt, when:
“Don’t deprecate,” Olga says.
“Deprecate?” I say.
“Latinate,” Hank says.
“Yourself,” Olga says.
“You must be careful,” Olga says, “of what you say in front of yourself.”
SOMETHING INSIDE ME, something ancient and infant, that hasn’t looked out of me in a long time, looks out and over across the table at Olga. She is so perfectly doing that beautiful people looked-at look. Part of me wants to punch her, wants this all to stop, a big baby torpor, where is the fucking waiter with the tray of maargaareetas.
Then that looked-at look, I let it come out of me. Let my own beauty gaze back straight into hers.
Olga. Maybe it’s because it’s the first time I’ve seen Hank make his nod to hard liquor. Maybe it’s because Hank’s told me about Olga’s Santeria, maybe it’s because she’d asked to read my cards, maybe she is a witch, her beauty, maybe it’s her black eyes that make Hank’s look brown, maybe it’s the gold, all the gold on her. The sound of gold. Maybe it’s the three of us in a dark place hand in hand in hand around a flame. What scares me most is the secret I couldn’t speak in Jeske’s class. Can she see my shame? I watch Olga’s red lips, ready for the brutal truth, but then she speaks.
“You’ve been with many women also,” Olga says.
Maybe Olga’s been talking to Hank. Thing is though, I’ve only told Hank about Evie, my ex-wife.
Maybe it’s simply women’s intuition. Or maybe what happens isn’t because of anything other than it is. Hank scoots in closer, his hand a big bear paw around mine. Olga leans in too. Her hand in mine is like she’s hanging onto a cliff.
The fact is Olga can see. In that moment, in that place, I have no doubt. She can see inside me. All of my whole long history. And as she’s looking, it makes me look too.
Many women also.
That look of Olga’s. There’s the okay, he’s gay look, but then there’s the other look – he sleeps with women too. That look. Women and men both, when they find that out, there’s usually a long long look like they’re trying to figure out how somebody – a guy – if a woman walks on both sides of the street that’s somehow not surprising – but a guy, a man sleeping with women and sleeping with men too – that look is: how can he switch gears like that. And more specifically: how can his cock switch gears like that.
It’s simple. Survival. For me it’s been survival. The generous vascular congestion filling my cock with life while I’m touching, holding another human being, for most men an act as natural as blood flowing in and out of their hearts, for me, has always been elusive. A mystery. And by that point in my life, nonexistent.
No, there were no accidents as a child, no blows to the groin, no slip of a blade to the penis. But there was a wound. Most definitely there was a wound.
MY MOTHER, MY SISTER.
The Paradoxes.
There’s one day that sticks out in my mind. My sister, Margaret, and I are going to 4-H camp. I’m maybe seven, Sis is ten. I’m excited to leave home, to go to some new exotic place. My sister and I hug mom and we get into our blue and white ’57 Buick. My sister in front next to dad. Me in the back seat.
As my father drives out the driveway, I turn and look out the back window. My mother is standing alone at the back door of our skinny white house. She’s in her red housedress and she’s holding the iron frying pan. She’s just scraped the food scraps out for the dogs. My mother looks up. That far away I can see it. Inside her almond-shaped hazel eyes, the deep loneliness she usually keeps so well hidden.
From the beginning, I was the one responsible for her sadness. I mean it was my job to stop it. Nobody told me to save her, nobody made me. I just knew. It was simple. My mother’s sadness was something that happened inside my own body. How my mother was, was how I was. I had no choice. A pain too much to bear. And even if I wanted it to stop, my mother was what made life, life. I only kept her happy so I could survive.
Looking out the back window of the Buick that day, when I see my mother’s eyes, I start crying. Really crying. My father hates that I’m crying. He thinks I’m crying because I miss my mommy. He doesn’t know that I’m crying for her. That she is alone. That now that I’m gone she’ll be alone with him. The man who doesn’t see her.
My father’s big arm, his hairy hand comes through the slot between the front seats. Knocks me across the back seat.
“Stop crying!” my father yells. “You damn crybaby.”
Later, on the bus on our way to 4-H Camp, when I’m alone with my sis, Margaret makes sure that she and I sit in the same seat next to each other. Me inside by the window, her on the aisle. She has my lunch. She holds my hand safely in hers.
When the bus takes off, she whispers only so I can hear: you damn crybaby.
Margaret says it as if she’s victorious, like she’s the Grand Chooser and the only one who knows the truth. She whispers: you need to grow up and start acting like a man. So your father can be proud of you.
My sister, the paradox, who’s bigger than me, who’s always in control, who’s the only one around to play with. The one who protects me from them: my mother, my father.
My crazy depressed mother and her mood swings, her insane rages, her migraine headaches. Her obsession with hell and damnation and fire and praying the rosary, praying the rosary. Pray for us. Have mercy on us. Lord I am not worthy. I who am the most miserable of all.
We hide under the bed when mother goes crazy. Margaret lies down in front of me, makes a sandwich of me between her and the wall. She tells me to close my eyes tight. She pulls my arm around her and holds on tight. And we sing real soft our favorite song. “Over the Rainbow.”
More than anyone, though, who my sister protects me from is my father. My sister Margaret is the only one who knows my terrible secret. Except my mother, and only she knows some of the time. But really, it’s my sister, and only my sister, Margaret, who holds the key.
If my father catches me playing dress up, the wide world will open up a huge crack and I will fall in alon
e. Banished from the world of men.
My sister, Margaret, is the only one standing between me and that hell.
Yet when my father isn’t around, and mother isn’t watching, it’s Margaret who puts dresses on me, curls my hair, colors my lips cherry red, hangs earrings on my ears.
If Margaret tells Ben to jump, my father always said, Ben will ask how high.
And something else that day on the bus. My sister Margaret does the thing she knows will hurt me the worst. She leans over, whispers in my ear: Benjamina. The girl name she knows I hate.
And all the while, as my sister whispers her betrayals, calls me the girl name, she unfolds my sandwich for me, she opens up my juice, she holds on tight to my hand. In my sister’s eyes, so much like my mother’s eyes, the way she looks at me happens inside my body too.
I’m protecting him because he’s mine.
But what can I do.
The paradox.
I’m the only one she has.
Years later, when I’m twelve, maybe thirteen, the paradox of mother, the paradox of sister has only deepened. It’s a fact. I am powerless. I am their slave.
In the sixth grade, during religion class, for the first time I really look at a drawing in my Baltimore Catechism. It’s of a naked man at the very bottom of hell. He’s in the deepest, hottest place in hell, the most miserable of all.
He has no cock hanging down there between his legs.
That’s all the proof I need.
If I sin, if my cock gets hard, if my sister finds out, it’s only a matter of time before she’ll tell my mother. When my crazy mother finds out, she’ll cut off my cock at the base, throw it in an unmarked grave.
My mother, my sister.
Fascists in the night come to kill my Lorca.
If the dictatorship is a success, I’ll never get to say I miss it.
My mother, my sister.
Women I have loved.
And Olga sees it.
MY WIFE, EVELYN. Seven years of trying to make my Catholic promise work.
Idaho State University, 1967. Evelyn Marie Firth, Evie, is eighteen years old, blonde and tall and standing between the wall mirror and the staircase of my fraternity house holding a plastic cup of foamy Coors. She’s so unlike the other helmet-haired sorority girls at the kegger. She looks like Twiggy.
I Loved You More Page 8