I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

Hank’s black eyes come straight across at me.

  “Okay, Napalm,” Hank says. “I’m following you.”

  SOMETHING HAPPENS THEN. Just as Hank and I start to move away from the bar toward the back room. We’re just entering the slow circling Ouroboros, just about to be swept away into the crowd, when, for some reason, Hank and I stop and both of us look down on the floor. What makes the tall guy so tall is that he’s standing on a plastic milk case, Dellwood along the side. Hank and I both, our eyes, travel up this guy’s body. Just when our eyes are at the skull tattoo on his pink arm, the tall guy raises his beer to his mouth. Where his arm and the skull tattoo used to be, framed between his chest and belly and his arm in the air, Hank and I see it. On the bar, his fly open, his ballsack spread way out and thumb-tacked to the wooden counter. Stretched out ball flesh, a many-pointed hairy star, pink thumbtacks, and a nub of circumcised cock sticking up out of it.

  Hank. The shock of seeing that guy having a quiet beer while tiny beads of blood well up around pink thumb tacks is a blow to him as if he’s been kidney-punched. He puts his hand on the bar, steadies himself.

  “You all right?” I yell.

  Hank’s a battering ram through the crowd, an offensive lineman plowing through, headed for the door. That quick, the crowd fills in where Hank has pushed. I can’t see him anywhere. Getting my body through that crowd isn’t as easy for me. I push and push. It takes forever. Outside, when I finally catch up to him, Hank’s bent over in the gutter, big vomits splash out of his mouth into the curb.

  “Hank,” I say before I touch his back. “It’s me.”

  IT’S JUST AS hot outside, only different. For about a minute. Then the wind whips off the Hudson and I’m froze solid. My thermal sweatshirt goes on quick. My ears still pound with disco. In the cold night air, my body’s happy to move free again. The West Side Highway, speeding bright white headlights of cars and trucks and cabs, yellow numbers on their roofs, red lights, orange lights, their blink and blink. Above at the intersection, the traffic light down and up, green, amber, red. The night is a blur, a loud long roar and blur. A big truck blasts past and the hot air and exhaust blows against us, hot ghosts onto ice. Hank’s up, putting on his thermal, and walking. We take a cross street east. In the city we love, we’re walking again. When things have gone bad, when things have gone good, when things have dumped shit on your head, when you’re in the stars, when you’re fucked up, when it’s too hot, when your ass is freezing, when you’ve just heaved your guts out into the curb, walk, just walk. Keep on walking. Our breath pushed out just ahead of us.

  “Good thing you didn’t bang into that guy,” I say. “He’d be dangling.”

  Hank doesn’t laugh, doesn’t look at me. He just keeps walking, shivering, his hands fists in his Levi’s pockets. Even in the dark, I can tell. The way his face is pale. We keep on walking. Side by side, not one in front of the other, not Hank stepping back in the narrow spots so I can walk first. Just walking. It’s quiet enough we can hear our footsteps break the ice. At the next avenue we stop for the Don’t Walk. In the neon, Hank’s face looks green.

  “The wind coming down these long bright avenues at night,” I say, “fucking freeze your nuts off, man.”

  Just then a blast of wind so cold it blows right through us to the bones.

  “I didn’t throw up because of the sex,” Hank says. “I got a weird thing for needles.”

  Passes out easily, Hank, throws up if anything gets too far out of kosher. Makes my heart cry out. Hank and his cancer. All those days and nights, all those years in and out of hospitals, the biopsies, the chemo, the radiation, bed pans, the throw up, the IVs, the incisions, the needles, the shits. Hank in Florida, me in Oregon. All those years, I was never there. Couldn’t brush back his hair. Didn’t hold his hand. In spirit, yes. But my body, well, my body was having some problems of its own.

  The first deli we come to, Hank stands under the heat lamp in the doorway outside. I go in.

  “Pepsi,” Hanks says, “and some peanuts maybe.”

  Hank rips open the bag of peanuts, chucks the whole bag of them into his mouth. His bare hands in the cold night. Chews like he’s way too hungry, then downs the Pepsi, two big gulps. We’re way too young, too healthy, to know about blood sugar. Above us on the left, the top of the Empire State Building is Christmas red and green.

  “I’m glad we went there,” Hank says. “It’s always cool to see the world with different eyes. But that wasn’t what I was looking for.”

  Hank takes the Pepsi bottle by the neck between his second and third fingers. A quick thrust of his arm and the bottle flies into a vacant lot, breaks against the cement. The broken glass, little pieces of light, fall onto a flat of old linoleum floor with other bits of broken glass and ice.

  It spooks me, the Pepsi bottle. How quick it happens, and violent. My body jumps. At the sternum. In the middle of my chest, a lightbulb that you can see the filament flickering. Fear. The beaten boy in the world of men, running. Their strange sudden inexplicable violence.

  We don’t stop, keep walking as if the Pepsi bottle never happened. It takes me a while but then I get it that I’m a child who’s walking with his fucked up father, and I need to say something.

  “So what was it,” I say. “Exactly. That you were looking for?”

  ALL THE WAY across town, to the Flatiron Building, to Union Square, to NYU, past Tower Records, Eighth Street, to Astor Place and the big metal square you can push against to make it move, Cooper Union, down to East Fifth Street, not a word. We walk, our heads down, our hoods pulled tight, our hands in our sweatshirt pockets, frozen snot in our mustaches, right past my apartment and keep walking, not a word. To Second Avenue, to Sixth Street, five in the morning, the Indian restaurants, masala, curry, lamb vindaloo. Past the Pyramid. The skinheads. Not a word.

  At Auden’s house at #77 St. Mark’s Place, we’re staring up at the poem Wystan Hugh Auden wrote that’s under the second-story window. We’ve been standing there for I don’t know how long. Daylight’s making shadows where it used to be only dark. Wind like to knock us off our feet. I’m so fucking cold I’m numb. That poem. How very perfect that poem is. True the way truth can make you wince, make you cry, make you proud. The guy standing next to me is the old Hank again. He undoes the string around his hood. Takes off his cap. He’s got hat hair. It’s the poem that has made Hank, Hank. His shoulders are going down, his chest going up. For a moment, I think he’s crying.

  “So,” Hank says, “sodomy. You haven’t said. Do you like it?”

  “I mean,” Hank says. “Do you like getting fucked?”

  AUDEN IS SMILING. I’m sure of it. Probably laughing out loud. All of Homosexual Heaven in an uproar. My queer forefathers and mothers, a hierarchy of pederasts, sodomites, dykes, fags, queers, sissies, bisexuals, fairies, trannies, old maids, butches, poofs: Homer, André Gide, George Sand, Christopher Isherwood, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Coleridge, Gertrude Stein and Alice, Cole Porter, Leonardo da Vinci, Sappho, Stephen Spender, Robespierre, Sir Isaac Newton, Oscar Wilde, Molière, Bayard Rustin, Walt Whitman, St. Augustine, Michelangelo, Socrates, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, Yukio Mishima, Jean Genet, E.M. Forster, Proust, Henry James, Aristotle, Cavafy, Christopher Marlowe, Billy Strayhorn, Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Rumi, the simpatico, the martyred Garcia Lorca – we’ve all had to answer the question: homosexual? It’s always a fucked struggle, fought in isolation, even for Auden, even for Tchaikovsky. Just look at Oscar Wilde. Homosexual, self with the self, the battle, can be so internal that we can live our lives never being able to look beyond ourselves to see there are others like us.

  New York City 1987. To know what is right in the dark night of your heart and pursue it with clarity during the day. I’m lucky enough to be born into a time and a society that I can say this chthonic, deep down thing out loud. I am a proud gay man. Although proud is a work in progress. Hell, I can’t even get it up.
<
br />   At Auden’s door, Sunday morning early at 77 St. Mark’s Place a proud gay man at the Gates of Homosexual Heaven, I’m standing half dead from exposure to ice and cold before the poem that breaks my heart. Breaks it open. My friend, My “April in Paris” Friend, what have you done to my heart Hank, is standing next to me. His hair’s a mess, greasy, his breath is bad, and he looks like he feels. A long shower and ten hours of sleep will do him good. He’s just asked the second question after the first question – homosexual? – that follows sooner or later: do you take it up the ass? And do you like it? This is right after maybe only an hour before he’s said: Assholes are feminine. That’s why guys say I got your back.

  The lightbulb in the middle of my chest, the flickering filament. Run. Just get the fuck out of there. But mostly always I run, then fall, stumble, trip, crack, break, then try to get up again, try to put it back together. That morning, though, looking up at that plaque, I’m staring at my history and all the lives that have gone before.

  The deep down part of me, Big Ben, that part of me that’s never really ever let me go, no matter how fucked it is I’ve got to bring into the light of day my dark and dreary soul. Always the breath, first, before I speak – the breath I can actually see that night – the inhale, the exhale, the constant proof that life’s a miracle. I call on Homosexual Heaven for help. Their answer is a garbage truck that pulls up, stops. The hiss of brakes and the roar clunk of the huge truck eating garbage. It takes me a while for my teeth to stop chattering.

  “I liberated my asshole,” I say. “That’s why I moved to New York City. I used just go out with guys and tell them that’s all I wanted. No kissing, no hugging, no foreplay. Just lube and get it in there. Hurt like hell. Every time. I punched a guy once. Damn that pain is like nothing else. Pain that can fucking overwhelm you.”

  Manhattan garbage trucks are the loudest in the world. Metal cans banging. The huge hydraulic shovel arm that smashes all the shit in. How the cold makes it all the louder. Hank steps away from me, not in fear or revulsion, I think, but just with the impact. My words, how they come out of my mouth, I always overdo it when I know it’s going to be difficult.

  What happens next, all the while I’m talking, I stand myself close to Hank. The way we were huddled at the bar even though now it’s outside and daylight. After his first step back, Hank doesn’t try to move away, although I sense he wants to. In a way, though, it’s like a train wreck the way I’m talking and Hank doesn’t want to miss the gore. For me, the whole world becomes only Hank’s black eyes – that and a quality of light. The early sun and the cold sky blue and pink and orange. Light that doesn’t shine, that glows.

  “It happened one night,” I say. “The restaurant where I worked was having a staff party. We started out at the Monster on empty stomachs and drank a bunch of cocktails. Then we all piled in cabs and drove across town to this Cuban restaurant that had our table waiting for us. We’re all totally drunk and starving when we sit down. In front of us is the normal place setting for a nice restaurant, a napkin, fork, table knife, wine glass, water glass, you know the set-up – well, along with the table setting, at the top of each of our plates was a little blue paper plate with a big oatmeal raisin cookie on it. What none of us knew, and not even the people at the restaurant knew, this guy named Stephen Something, a friend of the owner’s, had put a very special ingredient into those oatmeal cookies. Hashish. Fuck. Of course, we all wolfed down that oatmeal cookie as if it was a speck of dust. I was the first one to get up from the table. They hadn’t even served the first course yet. Later on, I found out that nobody made it all the way through that dinner. Everyone got so stoned they left the planet. So I’m walking home, and really I’ve forgotten how to walk. I’m that high. So I just put it all on autopilot. When I wake up, I’m lying naked in my apartment with my big ceiling fan on high. That fan was spinning. My undershorts were on one of the blades of the fan and all I could do was lie there and watch my panties go around and around. Then I realize the radio is on and somehow the radio can control my thoughts. Some part of me knows that none of this is normal, so I figure I’ve got to get to the phone. Then I realize I don’t have a phone and I have to walk across the street, go into a bright laundromat and call the only person I know to call. His name was Dick, if you can believe it. Dick had taken way too much acid, was a total splotchy alcoholic, and all he ever wanted to do was merge. I never did fully understand what merge was, but believe me, I’d tried. So I call up Dick, who’s asleep because it’s something like four in the morning and he’s got an attitude, but I tell him please he’s got to help me, I’m real fucked up.”

  Over Hank’s shoulder, the garbage truck driver comes round to the back to pull a lever. He is big and dirty and black in heavy duty orange Carhartts. Hank and I are standing too close. The driver sees us, wants some attention too. He throws a metal can in our direction. Hank doesn’t notice. His black eyes are too busy tracking my story. He’s ticking off every detail as if each one is his own.

  This next part, before I speak it, the ghost of air I suck into my mouth. The miracle of it. When you get close to the vein that’s pulsing truth, when you open that vein, you can scrub your soul clean with the blood.

  “So we go over to Dick’s apartment because mine is freaking me out, and it was that night, totally stoned out of my fucking mind, that Dick works his cock inside me.”

  Hank’s eyes go a little off as if all he can hear is garbage truck.

  “Suddenly,” I say, “my ass sucks in his cock as if his cock is life and I’m a dying man. Fucked me like I’d never been fucked. A fist jammed through my burning ass, reaching up to my heart, holding on tight, cradling me like a baby. Everything is exploding. Merge. There’s no other word for the way I come. I go away, far away, then come back, then realize I’m something, someone, who can go far away and then come back again, so I go far away again. To the very top of a tall tall tree. I’m stuck with a root from deep in the earth up my ass, its branches wrapped around my heart. I’m dripping sap, swaying in the wind.”

  Hank doesn’t blink. The way his black eyes look, I know something’s changed. The garbage truck is loud, loud. All of Manhattan, a hissing, whirring, banging, crashing, colliding, crunching, freezing, fucking garbage truck.

  “To tell the truth, Hank,” I say, “Just talking about it I could come again.”

  PART TWO | Idaho

  8.

  The most miserable of all

  OVER FOUR MONTHS GO BY AND I DON’T SEE HANK. AFTER all that going on about getting fucked in the ass, I figured if there was anything left to say it was Hank’s turn to say it. I didn’t call him.

  And damn. During those four months so much happened. Winter to spring, a whole season passed. Hank’s book got published and my book got published. Pub dates, my reading at Dixon Place, reviews, that’s a lot to happen. You need a friend more than ever during times like that.

  Sometime in there, Ursula Crohn called and proposed a combination book party for Hank and me, but I never heard anything more. Probably just too gay. Hank and Ben: The Book Party.

  After our night at the Spike, at Auden’s door, the sun coming up big, yellow, and freezing cold, when the garbage truck drove off, how silent it was on St. Marks Place. Big old snowflakes falling. Hank walked uptown and I walked down. Both of us knew something had changed. Neither one of us was for sure what. A sick feeling in my chest that went up and across my shoulders. Atlas. I was carrying the world. I’d got in too close to my friend Hank. The kind of big mistake you make when you love and because you love you get in too close. The kind of sick you get only after a mistake like that.

  You put your head down and just keep going. While I swept sidewalks, shoveled snow, unplugged toilets, fixed door locks, replaced broken window panes, servicing the boilers. My insides hurt. Couldn’t get away from it. In my apartment, walking the streets, sitting on the frozen stoop, coffee in a Café 103, at my typewriter, I was lonely the way you can only be in this city. Sur
rounded by a million other lonely motherfuckers. You’re just another one of them. You’ve put your time in, worked hard for it, you’ve claimed your right. That’s the way it is for New Yorkers. You wear loneliness on your sleeve. Anywhere else you’d just be alone.

  One evening sometime in February, I take the R uptown and press the button for Hank’s apartment. No answer. I leave a note on his mailbox to give me a call.

  A couple weeks later, I call Hal Taylor. He’s especially interested why I’m asking about Hank. What’s the matter, you two break up? No surprise there.

  At St. Mark’s Bookshop, there are two copies of Hank’s book. The cover is Jupiter golds and reds. $15.95. On the back cover that photo of Hank. He’s in profile, not looking at the camera. The background is gray and his hair and his body are black. His body is hunched forward a bit, like it’s cold behind him. Like he’s Atlas too. The light is all on Hank’s face, his eye in shadow, and he’s got that look, sad, faraway, but the way he holds his mouth you know.

  Over the next four months, sitting at my desk in my little circle of light, I read Hank’s book four maybe five times. Strange, I’d listened to Hank read the stories, read them myself, critiqued them, proofread. But those nights alone with Hank’s sentences, I felt such an intimacy. The actual pages, the feel of them, an old map to a lost treasure.

  A LATE AFTERNOON the end of May. Summer hot already though. At the Strand Book Store, Hank Christian and I run into each other. It’s a big town, New York. On days like this it ain’t so big.

  The Strand, in the basement, jammed to the ceiling with books, aisles and aisles of notched steel posts that hold up platforms of books on wide plywood shelves. Way back in the corner, dark back there. Bare lightbulbs, the kind you can see inside their bright wires. Lightbulbs like that hanging down every six feet or so just above your head. As you walk on the cement floor your shadow runs into you, then into inside you, then long out behind you. Shelves of books going way up high on each side, over and over your shadow on the cement as you walk.