The whole house built out of concrete block. Like a fortress.
And he’ll have his own place extending out into the garden, so he can spend weekends in East Lansing where the fun is, all the plays and movies and stores, Michigan State University—more than fifty-thousand students—always something going on. When he has classes at Lansing Community College, OK, he can stay downtown, walk to class in the morning.
He wants to study film-making, is totally obsessed by horror-films, especially zombie films. Has been since he was a kid. Either that or computer graphics, get into the video-game business. Still up in the air, undecided.
When Nona and I got divorced and he was taken away from me and Bernadete and brought down to Kansas City, it was a huge trauma for him—in fact all the divorce-crap has had a huge effect on all the kids.
Him being diagnosed as having ADD was a real bummer. Attention Deficit Disorder, so he was put on Ritalin. Which is another bummer. Lyn Lifshin has a whole book of anti-Ritalin poems, and she ought to know: she took it for a long time.
He was put in special schools for “deficient” kids down in Kansas City.
So he got labeled: SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH ME; I’M NOT UP TO NORMAL THINGS.
So when he came up to Michigan after his mother had cracked up after her girlfriend had “stolen” her house away from her, he went to a normal middle school (Hannah Middle School in East Lansing), but when it came time for high school, we put him in a special branch of the East Lansing high school: Towar.
Especially designed for drop-out/fuck-up types.
So again the classes weren’t “normal,” but aimed at people with learning and behavioral problems.
And the label WIERDO-ABNORMAL soaked into his psyche, so he felt odd, an outsider, an almost-dropout.
While he was still in high school he and Bernadete took a couple of night classes at Lansing Community College in workworking of all things. And then Bernadete, Chris, and I took a couple of courses in home-repair, learning how to do drywall, electrical work, glass cutting, all the kinds of things you need to know about to semi-professionally fix up your house.
When we got involved with the architecture department and started taking courses in the history of architecture, local architecture, old houses, etc., Chris didn’t come along for the ride, but he enrolled in the college and was told (rather expectedly) that he was deficient in reading and writing.
So that’s what he’s taking now, make-up classes to get him up to top reading and writing levels.
Which I think is great.
The problem now is: what next?
There’s a whole film program at LCC, and that’s where he’s going next.
But he’s still hanging around with his pals from high school, guys and gals who are kind of perennial dropouts, won’t go to plays, film-festivals, won’t get involved with the whole artsy-crafty theater-film world that surrounds him at LCC and Michigan State, Lansing, and East Lansing themselves. Like the Boardshead Theater in Lansing which has a whole program set up to get younger people involved with acting and directing, set design, etc.
But slowly, slowly, slowly I see him getting more serious.
Give him time, I say. He’ll be 21 this month but give him time; as long as I’m around, Bernadete is around, why rush him, push him out into the cold to be
“on his own,” as if being “on your own” ever solved anyone’s problems.
Patience, patience, patience: that’s the one thing I’ve gotten in my old age as my body has started to whisper to me, “Not much time left now, my friend, almost, almost, almost ready to go elsewhere, Lord knows where that elsewhere will be.”
My main problem for the last few years has been my prostate. Beginning when I visited Marcella in Portugal. Impotence.
When I came back to Lansing/East Lansing, I must have gone to five doctors before anything really got solved.
My family physician, Dr. Hatten, was my first try.
“Impotence? A trip to Portugal. Sudden onset of the problem. It must be psychological. I have a neighbor-friend who is a retired psychologist. German. Very ‘deep.’ Let me talk to him about your case . . .”
I just didn’t go back.
Now Hatten is retired.
So I tried this doctor and that doctor, they gave me antibiotics, all sorts of endless examinations. I met one doctor over at MSU who was just about ready to take his bar exams and become a lawyer:
“We have a special machine here, only a few like this in the whole world: it ‘microwaves’ the prostate. You have hyperplasia. No question about that.”
“That’s OK. I don’t like the sound of ‘microwaving’ anything. I prefer to use the microwave for dinner, just keep it that way.”
He gave me some antibiotics, which I took, and I started getting these enormous erections, my baby colt ding-dog suddenly becoming a roaring stallion.
Bernadete and I had a relatively decent sex life. No insertions, just sex-toys, a couple of sessions a week, but very nice.
I’d dress up as Connie, she’d come home from work and we’d go out for something to eat, then come home and she’d put on a special sex outfit, lots of garter belts and black Lycra stockings and bras with the nipples cut out.
Beautiful woman.
Next to zero personal problems.
We’d moved out of our house on Forest Street in East Lansing.
Student noise.
When I’d first bought the house twenty years earlier the houses surrounding it were inhabited by mainly old folks who maybe would rent out a room to a student. But it was very laid back, beautiful, on the highest hill in East Lansing.
When they died off, the houses mainly got sold to rental agencies and it became Partytown.
Three AM a million times more noisy than three PM.
And no one could leave a party without honking and screaming.
“So long, assholes . . . hey, hey, hey . . .”
Honk, honk, honk.
The house on the corner next to my bedroom had belonged to a great artist named E. Edick, but he sold it, moved out; threw out a lot of his art, which I salvaged from his garbage.
Then, instead of one car (his) being in the parking lot next to my bedroom window, there would be ten . . .
So we moved out, got a house over on Melrose. East Lansing, but more “rustic;” huge backyard, just a block away from huge forests.
Little did we know it was literally a piece-of-shit house.
The sewer had been backing up for decades, and every time it backed up it flooded the basement with human shit, so it was all over the walls, under the crappy wood-sheet covering . . .
I mean you could see something was wrong with the walls, but who could have guessed that the air was full of E. coli spores.
It was only after we decided to leave (after adding on a room, Chris occupying the whole first floor, Bernadete and me stuck up in the tiny Cape Cod slanted-ceiling rooms on the second floor, me making a bedroom out of the basement) that one particularly rainy, snow-melting day, the sewer backed up and flooded and we discovered the truth about the history of the house.
All my manuscripts and letters either on shelves or in waterproof, plastic boxes with nice tight covers on them. At least I thought they were nice and tight.
Then came the water. Shit-smelling.
And all my plastic boxes began to float, tip over, open up.
Letters from Bukowski, Lyn Lifshin, Harry Smith, Richard Kostelanetz, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, hundreds and hundreds of collectable letters, all floating in shit-filled sewage.
When the city of East Lansing sent their men out, the boss said, “ So where’s the lawyer?”
“Lawyer, what do you mean?”
“Well, for the last fifteen years, every time this has happened the lady of the house had a lawyer waiting for us, wanting to sue the city of East Lansing . . .”
The last fifteen years? Was that a court case or not, her not telling me? The city of East Lansing cleaned up the
whole basement and we had some sort of work done on the sewer—and put the house on the market.
Out. I just wanted out, out, out.
Still, it was hard to leave the house. Bernadete had performed miracles in the backyard, turned the swimming pool into a gigantic pond that, in the spring, suddenly was filled with singing frogs. She’d lined the pool with flagstones, built stone planters for roses and ringed them all around the pond, bought a Princess Tree, which grew miraculously tall in a very short time.
We’d go over to the gardens at Michigan State (which as a university began as mainly an agricultural college—MAC, Michigan Agricultural College—and which specialized in landscaping) and take down the names of exotic, beautiful flowers, then the landscape department told us where we could buy practically anything in their gardens, from a place called Arrowsmith out in Fowerville, in the middle of the country.
So the whole backyard was right out of a textbook on gorgeous gardens.
We even had a room added, all Anderson doors and windows. The place was becoming a classic. But we left anyhow, bought this classic Victorian house in downtown Lansing. Which reminded me a lot of the house we’d had on Forest in East Lansing.
And I finally got to Dr. Zuckerman, a urologist who, after examining me, said, “All these drugs you’re taking, they disguise whatever it is that you really have wrong with you. I’m taking you off everything, OK?”
Serious guy, radiated knowledgeableness, a great deal of simpatia between us.
“OK with me.”
So I stopped taking everything I was taking and two days later I got up in the morning and started to shake and shiver, my teeth grinding against each other. Like an epileptic fit, really.
I somehow managed to drive over to Zuckerman’s office (my wife was at Sparrow Hospital, behind her pathologist’s microscope) and he took all sorts of blood and urine samples and within hours had the answer.
“E. coli. Which can be very serious.”
Gave me a wide spectrum antibiotic and in a couple days I was fine.
But I still had trouble urinating, so, almost as an afterthought he did a transurethral laser ream-job.
High PSA, but a biopsy revealed no cancer.
The PSA is an indicator of prostate cancer. If it’s high you probably have cancer, although irritation can also bring it up, which is what he concluded. That it was just irritated.
And for a while life returned (almost) to normal.
Chris started getting into all sorts of trouble and before we knew it his girlfriend, Clarice, was living with him on the top floor of our house downtown. Then her brother, Troy, moved into the house with his girlfriend.
And we, like the tolos, tontos, idiots we were, just supported them all.
I was at retirement age, so I retired and started devoting myself to writing full-time . . .
But the noise upstairs?
It wasn’t just Clarice, Troy and his girl (Andrea), but a bunch of pals of Chris’ from his oddball-dropout high school. Like Nate, this enormous hulk of a guy who looked more like a rhino than a human being. Nate and his girl, Christina, another human rhino . . . more and more and more . . .
We went out and bought another house downtown, about half a mile away from the house on Seymour Street. Over on Sycamore.
Innocents.
Beautiful yellow brick house. I never saw a stronger-built house in my life. Whenever we had to go into a wall to fix something (like wiring), you’d see the metal framework under the plaster and brick.
But right across the street from a whorehouse/drug-house.
Beginning to get the picture of the reality of downtown Lansing.
Houses boarded-up all over the place. Whenever a house was a drug-house, it got boarded up. Punish the druggies, punish the house. So downtown was filled with these old nineteenth century boarded-up houses. Not exactly tourist territory.
Twice we got hit for big cash because of Chris’ fooling around with these young girls.
One time he sent a video of himself masturbating to some girl he’d met through another pal of his from high school, Chris Hilton. A girl who lived in Grand Rapids. Her father saw a chance to make a little money out of the situation, and we got a call, then a visit from him:
“Your son is going to jail. Period. I’ve talked to a lawyer, and he’s going to jail.”
“How about ten grand?”
“Grand?”
“Ten thousand. And you write a note saying that that is it.”
“OK.”
So we gave the guy ten thousand.
Next we were told that Clarice was pregnant and Clarice’s brother’s girlfriend’s stepfather had us come over to his place.
“Chris is going to jail . . . getting a minor pregnant.”
“But her mother let her live with him.”
“No difference. I’ve talked to a lawyer . . .”
“How about five thousand?”
“Ten. You gave ten to that guy in Grand Rapids, why should we get less.”
“OK, ten.”
Another ten thousand gone, and within a week Clarice was gone, had an abortion. Ein, zwei, drei: kaput.
And there I was with my bleeding prostate, every piss an agony, at the end of every piss the wounded, surgeryized walls of the bladder squeezing together like sticking knives into my groin.
It went on for months. Until one day I read something on the internet about eating a high protein diet and healing, started eating steak all day and within three days the bleeding had stopped.
Those little things the docs forget to tell you. Or simply don’t know about, bother themselves about.
Chris finally shaped up, all his “guests” upstairs left, and once I was “cured” Bernadete and I got back to a little sex life together.
We had our second house on Sycamore, right? Well, on our sex days I’d get up in the mornings and dress up as Connie, work as Connie all morning, my Lycra legs and bra (with the nipples cut out, nice breasts what with my taking female hormones for years and all) and chiffonish long dresses and high heels, my hair always long and bleached blonde.
On our sex days I’d write and submit manuscripts and all, but I’d also manage to find some porn sites on the Internet, always involved with transsexuals—not slightly transsexualized like me, but the real thing; all the way.
Have a little sexual fun alone, and then get “normal” for lunch, usually over at the hospital cafeteria at Sparrow. Two cafeterias, actually: one in the basement of the old building that was basic working-man’s Amerikanski food: meat and potatoes, fried fish, roast beef, stews, boiled baby carrots; reminiscent of the old days in Kansas City with Nona’s family. And then there was the other cafeteria in the new building across the street (separated from building one by a beautiful glass-ceilinged walkway from which you could see the capitol building down at the end of Michigan Avenue) that had this snobby, upper-classish, bistro kind of thing: all sorts of things wrapped in gorgeous dough-wraps, Frenchified cuisine full of strange sauces, from squid practically to bird-tongues—you know what I mean—roast beef, ham, whatever transferred into Cuisinart miracles.
Then in the afternoon, after spending some time with Chris, driving him to Best Buy or CompUSA to look at CDs or computers, to some cheapo tobacco place where he’d buy a carton (against all my lamentations and prophecies of early death) of cigarettes, I’d drive over to the Sycamore House after re-becoming Connie, and spend some hours waiting for Bernadete to finish up at the hospital.
Lots of makeup (after a super-close shave), eyes like a lynx, skin like white velvet, long black coats and boots in the winter, chiffon prints in the summer, everything always long and loose and gorgeous.
And when she’d arrive off we’d go to—say, Beaner’s, a local coffee place, or Hill of Beans (another coffee place out by the Lansing Mall), more wraps, little yummy pastries—then back home. She’d turn herself into a whore, and I’d put on some transsexual porn, just to get us into the mood, and off we’d go, he
r first taking care of me, then taking care of herself with a huge vibrator, while I sucked on one nipple, played with the other, and afterwards would collapse for a while and sleep in each other’s arms. Then I’d re-become Hugh, and in summer we’d go for a ride in the Michigan countryside with all its hills and valleys, rivers, forests; in winter go over to Michigan State University for a cello or voice or piano recital.
Something on almost every night.
Tons of Koreans studying at Michigan State. Koreans and everyone else from all over the world.
You never knew what you’d find, but it’s always nice to top off an evening with a little Milhaud or Bloch or Beethoven, Shubert, Debussy, nicht wahr? MSU isn’t exactly Harvard or the University of Michigan, but close, close, close, and I think the music department has to be one of the best in the world.
Not a bad life.
And then came the kidney stones.
Which, I guess, I’d had for years.
One removed by lithotrypsy, litho- as in lithography, “stone,” trypsy- as in “breaking up.”
One zapped, and then another couple of months later, another one started coming down the left ureter.
I was on my way over to Zuckerman’s office one afternoon to get an x-ray of the stone, pinpoint it exactly. Zuckerman always careful, interested in minute details, never leaving a stone (especially a kidney stone) unturned.
Going north on Coolidge, when suddenly a guy in front of me decided to turn left, stopped quickly (a car coming toward him on the east lane). I slammed on the brakes, didn’t touch him.
But the car behind me didn’t make it. Chinese girl from Hong Kong. Not used to this kind of high-speed, sudden-stop driving; didn’t stop. Must have been going forty-five or more; ran right into me. Totaled out her car, but my Ford didn’t do too badly.
I called the police on my cell phone.
Totally shook up. Mainly my back. Chris was in the front seat next to me, seat-belt on and everything, but somehow he banged his knees on the dashboard, was moaning and groaning with pain, so I got an ambulance out, too. The cops and ambulance came and I gave them all my documents. The Chinese girl very beautiful, very repentant, and I told her, “Don’t worry about it, it happens to the best of us,” and we parted as friends.
Who, Me? Page 25