All those years, it had been easy to take for granted how different our lives were because I’d taught myself not to think about him. He’d naturally slipped out of my mind. It came home to me that I would never know work and life travails nearly as hard as he had, and I told myself now that I owed this visit to him. I was spoiled, a housewife in a Joni Mitchell song, and he was more a country and western persona singing from the end of a bar. I’d begun to respect that. He had opened his life to me, the way those singers did, but I was covert, saving myself as a writer.
His mediation was scheduled for the week before his projected visit. I congratulated him and gave him directions from the airport and said I looked forward to seeing him, too. Perry left town but before he left said, “You’re going to have a good time. I’m going to feel fat around all the Europeans. I love our life but I was talking to somebody the other day and it just came out of my mouth. I said, ‘Everything’s great. I have a wonderful lover. But it can’t last forever.’”
I was not a great lover, but we had understandings that I could only discuss with friends.
And that was the frame of mind I remained in that summer. Life with Perry—who was a year older than my father—was privileged but could be hectic, a real adventure. Anyone, family, friend, or colleague, who met him could easily understand our connection. But our arrangement, no. That wasn’t for the Baptists I’d left behind in Florida. Some of those Southern Baptists had gone nuts on drugs and drink in college but eventually returned to the fold. My brother had done it all and was just now coming out the other end, and in a way I envied him.
Either I was just learning about him or the guy had the power to surprise.
By the time he came to New York Jeff had already met somebody new: the mother of a younger colleague at the fire station back home. From emergency-crew reality shows, I knew that first responders talked in carefully composed euphemisms. In court they might call a homicidal crack fiend “a gentleman approaching with a potentially lethal weapon.” To reality cameras they said, “The gentleman approached at a rate and in a fashion I considered menacing, and I could see that he was carrying what I knew from fishing avocationally to be a Rapala fish-gutting knife. When he got within an uncomfortable and, as I was able to ascertain, a dangerous range of more or less a yard, I was then able to make out in the adequate overhead lights of the parking lot the handle of a partially concealed pistol projecting from the front pocket of his hoodie. From there I quickly decided, judging not to mention from the wildness of aspect in his eyes, to draw my sidearm.”
Divorced several times, Michelle had grown kids. I liked the sound of her. No-nonsense, unspiritual. Jeff said that Michelle just always wanted to have a good time. Also promising. He had barely set down his nylon carry-on duffel and backpack on the dining table, looking around.
“And man, we fuck,” he said freely. “Last night we stayed up fucking like bunnies.”
“Well, well,” I said, “and good for you, bro. No, great!”
“No question,” he said, on a roll. “We’re pretty much compatible, in bed and out.”
“I was sorry to hear about the Jeep. Yeah, your reward for being good and playing by the rules is to end up driving a vehicle Deanne did her best to run to hell and back and destroy.”
“And you know what?” he said. “I don’t even give a bald rat’s ass. We are done.”
I wondered if I’d overstepped by interpolating motive in that awful woman.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been too available,” I said. “I’ve been busy getting ready to see you, finishing up some work on Perry’s papers, getting them ready to sell.”
“What does that mean, getting them ready to sell? You mean publish?”
“It means a university wants to buy them but first they have to be organized, cataloged.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, stepping into the photo-lined hall, “so this is a New York apartment.”
“This is my New York apartment,” I said. When Perry and I moved in I’d said I was tired of wandering the planet and that I planned to be taken out of here for the last time on a gurney. I had since begun to daydream about living on the Carolina shore, gardening in upstate New York.
“Not exactly like in Woody Allen,” he said, hands on his hips. “But I like it. Roomy.”
We had not shared Woody Allen. We had not shared reading. In high school, he’d taken late shifts at Albertsons, or he’d lied about some of his shifts to go out with Deanne. My father went to bed by ten and was up by five to get to the plant by seven. On Cinemax I watched slow foreign movies full of sex, or took advantage of the quiet to read when nothing good was on.
“I noticed on my way down from Penn Station,” he said, “and you were right, it was easy taking that train from Newark—I noticed some buildings I might have seen on Law and Order? Interesting. A guy I know from the department’s from here, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, I don’t remember, and when I said I was coming up he told me I could have New York, for all he gave a shit.”
“He doesn’t ever want to come back, your colleague?”
“I think he still has an aunt and cousins here, but he couldn’t wait to get the hell out. I’m going to walk, that’s my plan. Walk, see stuff.” He nodded vigorously. “Want to go out now?”
On the subway, which was crowded, we had to stand. He watched the people but kept his expression poker. We got off at Columbus Circle and waited at the light to enter Central Park.
“Man, I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I don’t think I could live around so many people. That was interesting, that train experience just now. A real menagerie,” he said and laughed, and he went into an impersonation of our mother and her old pet idioms. “Menagerie” was one. Jeff and I, when we were about to get close in high school, before the disaster struck, used to imitate her constantly, and not only behind her back. I cringed at the possible damage we’d done to her ego.
We slipped right back into it now, though, impersonating her mincing, eye-raising style.
It was a beautiful day and when we got away from the Indians trying to rent us bikes, and he’d remarked on that—“Boy, they sure didn’t want to let us go, without first taking some of our money!”—I steered him into Strawberry Fields. He shook his head at the piles of dead bouquets left for John Lennon. Since I’d gotten tired of New York, emotionally detached from it, I was no longer embarrassed by the tourists, pilgrims, and mourners. He wanted a look at the plaque in the sidewalk, but too many people were bumping his shoulders trying to get at it, see the artifact.
“First dead Beatle,” said Jeff.
“And already forever ago,” I said nodding. This wasn’t hard at all.
“I remember when I found out,” he said. “I was in sociology.”
“I was in AP chemistry,” I said, then wished I hadn’t mentioned advanced anything.
The trails were packed and we made our way to the lake filled with rowers in rowboats.
I said, “Do you want me to take a picture of you on your phone in front of the lake?”
“Now that’d be good to send Michelle. I need to tell her I made it here safely anyhow.”
I took the picture then handed the phone back to him, and he said, “Michelle does worry.”
Already to me, while hardly knowing him at all, he seemed dead drunk in love, eaten-up.
We crossed the bridge and entered the Ramble. I didn’t say it was an old cruising ground.
We topped a hill and his phone went off, and he stopped to check it. He giggled—a teen, I thought, musing on the excitement of just starting dating. I’d dated girls in high school, too.
He was red in the face and he said, “I asked her if she was taking good care of my pussy.”
“Ah.”
He read out loud, “‘Pussy misses you. Have fun but you stay away from other pussies.’”
This went on back and forth as we crossed the park then reached Park Avenue, a deserted canyon just then. I said I thought the rich peop
le would all be in the Hamptons for the weekend.
“I’ve heard of the Hamptons,” he said. “I do notice it’s appreciably cleaner along here.”
After a while, a walk of twenty-five city blocks past the buildings and Russian doormen, we entered Grand Central and went down to the food court for Chinese and took it to a table.
“For one thing,” he said, “they sure don’t stint on the noodles and rice. It wasn’t clear to me at first they understood what I was ordering. Guy just looked at me, but he got it right.”
A man shabbily overdressed for the season rooted through a nearby trash barrel.
“Is that usual?” he said, grimacing sheepishly. “I mean, is that typical for around here?”
His phone chimed and he got it out. The screen’s bluish light seeped into his wrinkles.
“Deanne,” he sighed, “wanting to know if I got here all right,” then powered it back off.
I said nothing. I was going to maintain a cool ambiguity. He nodded. That was it.
Before we left he said that he couldn’t finish his meal and that he wanted to give some of his food to the homeless man—who’d moved farther away from us, on to the other trash barrels.
“What would be the protocol for that?” he said. “Just leave it somewhere he can see it?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” I said. “I’ve never done anything like that before.”
Then I worried that my ambivalence meant I was a terrible person. I did now respect true Christians, the ones who cared about others and made such gestures. But New York had allowed me to indulge the hardness in me. It was a city for the rich, young, or famous, or all three.
After a time, he got up, carried the closed Styrofoam container to the trash barrel and left it on the top, where if the man turned around he could clearly see it.
Jeff turned, red in the face, and giggled. He said, “Let’s get out of here!”
We went to my neighborhood bar, the local queer Cheers as I described it. We got in early, right at the start of happy hour. The bartender, Mark, was playing one of his mixes. Happy hour there was Mark’s show—his personal taste the same music my brother had liked, that I now liked.
Mark was tall and leaned over the bar, offering his hand, and asked Jeff what he wanted.
“You know what I recently just tried and liked,” said Jeff, “was a white russian.”
“I don’t have any cream,” Mark said. “But tell me what kind of liquors you like.”
“You know what I really like is Kahlua. What can you make me that has Kahlua in it?”
“How about a mind eraser, that’s Kahlua and soda. Try it and tell me if you like it.”
Gym-built, Mark wore a flattop, like a pump boy at a fifties filling station. He made a sample of the mind eraser. My brother tasted it and said, “I like it. I’ll have one of those.”
Recently they’d installed video monitors over the main bar. Mark would do things on his computer, compile clips of old movies he got off the internet. And some were ancient homemade porns, black and white, often explicit. Mark would bring them in and play them in a great mash-up with old TV commercials and safety demonstration spots, eroticizing the vintage past I guess.
We were sitting at the corner of the bar near the door. On the screen, two guys fucked.
“Anyway,” Jeff said and turned to me stoically. “Tell me what else. Tell me about you.”
I said, “Well, this is where I hang out. This is my social life. I guess it’s weird for you?”
“Not really,” he said, “but what do you call Mark’s haircut, a flattop? Is that a flattop?”
“I think so. I can’t imagine Mark without one now.”
The Kahlua and soda did seem to relax him, and he said, “I think I said already, but we’ve got these great places at the beach where they have live rock bands and you can dance along …”
“You said. I wish I could be there, I just don’t have the money to come down right now.”
“Michelle likes going. I hope she and I’ll get into this thing where we go regularly, since she likes to dance, too. She gets wild—the girl gets wild. I end up the designated driver.”
After a while, Mark came over and pointed at Jeff and said, “Same thing?”
“This shit’s starting to grow on me,” said Jeff. “Thanks for hooking me up, man.”
On the screen, a guy in a posing strap was spanking a guy in a posing strap, too. A close-up of the guy being spanked: mugging pain, he bit into the heel of his hand, eyes swimming. An old Cascade dishwashing commercial, then two naked beefcakes mounted like horse and knight.
In front of Mark I said to Jeff, “But you’re getting the house back.”
I wanted him to know that I was caught up on everything, this time through Mom.
“Five thousand dollars for a new roof,” he said, sipping. “Yeah, I’ll be rolling out dough for the next five years just to bring her up to speed. And it’s in terrible shape. I’ll just say that.”
I didn’t want to talk about any of it, not the time I’d come home from my first semester of college and they’d gotten saved, and not the time I was in Paris and got the letter purporting to be from Jeff reminding me of any injunction against homosexuality in Romans and Corinthians. I’d been working my way up to discussing it with him before he arrived, then thrown that idea away just as I had the letter. I’d decided that it probably wasn’t his handwriting, and that I didn’t care.
I hadn’t smoked all day and had a hankering. I said, “Be right back.”
I went out to have a cigarette—and then Mark joined me. Mark would sometimes do this if there weren’t too many customers inside. It was too early still for the much younger guys who came in toward the end of Mark’s shift, but I was always sure to be long gone by then, buzzed.
“He’s nice, your brother,” said Mark. “I could see the resemblance when you walked in.”
I said, “He is nice, right? I just barely know him. But here we are. How are you?”
He laughed and inhaled. “I could see his discomfort when he looked up at the screen.”
The little bit of alcohol swam through me and I said, “Yeah, I forgot about the videos.”
“But he’s straight, right?” said Mark.
“Yes. Straight and getting a divorce. How are you doing, man? How’s your writing?”
Mark had been writing a novel for a while. I romanticized guys like Mark, with his skill serving drinks but also his dream. To me he was New York; I was suburbia still. I loved hearing about his life, but whose life did any of us envy? I was just glad I wasn’t in my brother’s place.
Mark gasped and inhaled and said, “My writing would be fine if I was doing any. All I ever do’s worry about money, but I want to show some of it to you, later, when you have time.”
“I always have time. You know that. You see how I spend my after hours.”
“Thanks, babe. I’ve just got to take care of some things first. How’s your visit going?”
I said, “Before, New York had nothing to do with my family when I still romanticized it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then Perry and I moved here and it was great, a climax. But you’re always yourself.”
“That’s true,” he said and put out his cigarette as people entered the bar. “See ya, babe.”
I was alone for those two or three minutes, enjoying those puffs. I’d given myself away to my brother by saying I was going out for a smoke. I trusted him not to say anything to Mom and Dad the way I’d given him a pass when we were teenagers and he snuck out in the middle of the night to see Deanne. I felt guilty and finished up and went back inside. Jeff looked content.
He sipped from the thin red straw and propped his elbow on the bar and leaned against it.
He said, “Some of my colleagues have flattops like Mark. Well, they do look practical.”
“I don’t know how it would look on you,” I said, and then I remembered once when I was in college having lunch with hi
m at Wagon Wheel, and Jeff asking me if there were any “militant homosexuals” on my campus trying to “recruit” young guys. I didn’t indulge him that particular line of inquiry. I had never met a militant homosexual and wouldn’t have known how to identify one, but I was sure there probably weren’t any in Tallahassee, Florida. Since no one at the time, who wasn’t on MTV, had worn a flattop, I decided he must have thought of flattops for starters.
Mark made his way down to us from the gay guys and their girlfriends at the other end. I was aware of how hard it was to make a living in New York, anywhere. Jeff nodded at him. Jeff was friendlier than I was, I then realized. I just hadn’t known that before now, when we’d ended up in New York together. I started thinking about this, not feeling guilty but self-conscious.
Mark said, “You guys all right?” and Jeff said, “Man, I am just starting to feel all right.”
I nodded at Mark as though I hadn’t just seen him and said, “How’s Danny doing?”
Mark’s lover Danny had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. Danny was already in his fifth year with the disease, according to Mark outstripping his doctor’s expectations. He should have been dead two years ago, but Danny had opted for alternative therapies, acupuncture and massage.
“Oh, you know,” said Mark, and then he stopped and filled my brother in on the situation.
Jeff told him, “As an EMT, I had a client with that whose heart stopped.”
“A client,” said Mark and laughed. “So you work as an EMT. So does my sister-in-law.”
Before long they were into it like two old old friends catching up after a long separation.
“We brought him around, he was fine,” my brother said. “I was amazed how long he said he’d had it, seven years. I think the record we know of’s that famous physicist, Hawking?”
“Ten years after diagnosis,” said Mark. “But the record is either thirty-two or thirty-nine years, depending on how you define onset. But lots of people have it more than seven years. It’s controversial, between the ALS community and the medical community. Another round, boys?”
Little Reef and Other Stories Page 17