About the Sister Sledge we were listening to, Jeff said, “An oldie but a goodie.”
I decided not to ask him if he’d hung on to his “Disco Sucks” T-shirt from back in the day.
It didn’t matter because we were getting sloppy.
I took him to a Thai restaurant I thought was all right, though he said it was the best food he’d eaten in New York so far. I was happy that he was happy. I should be happier, I thought. I had made it to New York. I wasn’t who I’d wanted to be, but I wasn’t the cowering gay kid back in a redneck ’ville. I didn’t want to hate them anymore. I didn’t feel like bothering to hate.
We were eating cake back at the apartment when he began talking about his job. By far it was the most interesting part of our time together. He was describing one call to a house fire.
“Most calls have to do with cooking fires, grease. The lady was frying something and her clothes, a housedress made out of polyester or nylon, caught on fire and wham! We get this call from a neighbor seeing the smoke. We know it’s domestic and we ascertain from the description that it’s probably from cooking, thick and black. So we arrive and I go in ahead, and as soon as I enter I can hardly see a thing. Right at the front door, I fall into a hole. I’m wondering what I’m on top of. It’s her, only now she’s a greasy charred skeleton. Obese, fuel for fire, and before she could get out of the house she burned right through the wood floor. And I’m sitting on this shit.”
We laughed, and I recalled the gross sense of humor that kids, especially boys, shared. He and I had shared that humor a few times, but I reached through into my memory. Nothing.
Firefighting was what he’d always wanted to do. His other story had to do with a woman who was a former porn star, who occasionally came by the fire station and said, “Is Charlie here?”
For three dollars the captain could take her behind the station and feel up her bare breasts.
“With three dollars,” said Jeff, “she can buy a couple of forties. A forty’s a buck-fifty.”
We laughed, and Jeff said the fire captain had later told him, “Man, her tits are so hairy!”
We started talking about our father—and at first I wasn’t comfortable with that, either.
He said, “Dad is seventy and at seventy the body starts breaking down. Shouldn’t be any big surprise to any of us, things start happening then. He’s lived a full life, worked hard—and, as should be the case, Dad’s been amply rewarded. And for everything, man, there is a season.”
He spent the next few days wandering around Manhattan on his own, seeing Ground Zero and crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. He wasn’t interested in museums. He had tried to get a conversation going with some of the local firefighters, but they’d had to hurry out on a fire call.
“Overall, I find the people here nice,” he said, “just always in a hurry. Constant hustle.”
He was staying in the bedroom where I normally stayed with Perry sleeping in the bigger room. Jeff was in there with everything I owned in the world, my books, my CDs. Jeff was now me for a few days. I hoped I hadn’t left any evidence of my weird arrangement with Perry.
He asked, “Would it be all right if I took some of these CDs back home to download?”
“Sure,” I said, “but keep them as long as you like. Take as many as you want. Really.”
He took some of the ones I’d been buying in the last twenty years when we did not speak.
A month later the CDs came back to me Express Mail, insured. It was all the same music he had bought on vinyl with his Albertsons pay while he was dating Deanne then destroyed after getting saved: music he’d listened to on his pricey Realistic turntable when I was still listening to bubblegum on my cheapie—when I was giving my first blow jobs and living in my own world. I was my own kid then, too— dreamy, frightened, and, I’d thought, self-contained. Only much later had something led me to buying and collecting and listening to my brother’s high school music.
Led Zeppelin, my favorite now, and the Stones, and the Who. Hard, resentful rock.
admissions
All through these horrible weeks—in the cath lab where their journey had begun, in ICU, then on the so-called stroke step-down floor, and now finally in Perry’s physical rehab facility just off Stuyvesant Square—Scott would invariably be asked what his exact relationship to the older Perry was, and each time the younger Scott would have to stop and consider. He was raised in demure politeness, but his anger would rise, then he’d tamp it back down again because Scott didn’t want to make a fuss. Still, in each case, Perry’s situation was a fucking emergency.
“Sorry, sir, I have to ask,” he heard. “But are you Mr. Knight’s son?”
Then he’d have to correct them. Admissions people, nurses, whoever at the moment was attending them: understandably, each needed to know. With quick, efficient, flashing concern, or else with a rueful officiousness, they looked at Scott amid some emergency or another transfer of Perry’s tired, afflicted self, and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but who are you again? Friend or family?”
And each time it still surprised Scott to stop and reply, “His partner. His fiancé, actually.”
“Oh, hey!” they inevitably said, but every time. “When’s the big day?”
This was New York, after all.
The whole thing was disconcerting, from Perry’s sudden medical reversal to the recently passed fact of gay marriage. Imagine, in the state of New York now, a man could marry another man. Meanwhile, as a teen a long time ago coming to terms with the fact that he preferred men, Scott had thought, well at least I’ll never have to get married. He’d grown up in the evangelical South, right at the historical intersection of religion and politics, Reagan pandering to the Moral Majority, the now non-Eisenhower Republicans in bed with the Jerry Falwells. It was enough to make Scott flinch back then, reading Romans and Corinthians, that terrifying sentence Man shall not lie with another man as with a woman—and he flinched now when hospital workers reacted so generously and even ecstatically to his frank reply: “Congratulations! Holy cow! Awesome!”
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, here they were, looking for rest and finding no rest.
“Congratulations,” said the female EMT, grinning. “So what are you guys planning?”
Perry was being transferred to a facility for his recovery and to be taught how to walk and talk and pick up the smallest objects again. A semifamous writer, Perry could barely hold a pen. Partially paralyzed, and once stubbornly independent, Perry had become a compliant weight (his phrase), a hopeful burden, a ward of the country’s spotty insurance industry. Without complaint, he settled stiffly into his new situation, wanting to get better, terrified of becoming a vegetable.
Meanwhile Scott’s heart was breaking, a moist bloody mess. Everyone was so nice. He wanted to follow orders, do everything he could, whatever that might entail, and he was grateful to everyone. They’d just had the ambulance ride downtown from Columbia Presbyterian, where Perry’s simple diagnostic procedure had gone terribly wrong. Scott was in the mood to sue, rail and rant, but the EMTs were being so cheerful and patient, waiting with Perry on the gurney and Scott standing by waiting for more orders. Actually it was an ambulette. In this situation, Scott was learning a lot, and one of the things he was learning was patience amid tedium. Meanwhile, Perry didn’t fuss. Of all things Perry became a model of behavior, but at the same time was not Perry. His eyes bugged, or else shut for a quick infant’s slumber. He had a sweet, sloppy smile.
They were standing on the first floor of the rehab center waiting for the paperwork to go through. Scott had presented the chirpily administrative woman on duty with Perry’s photo ID and the document designating Scott as health-care proxy. The EMT who had driven them from Columbia Presbyterian down to the building opposite Beth Israel east of Gramercy Park was an obese Queens Puerto Rican. As she and her quiet colleague—a small and well-knit black man—were wheeling Perry in on the gurney, she and Perry began discussing diets. Perry had just asked h
er how Weight Watchers was working out for her, tending to believe obese people would always be obese—as Perry had been for a while, starting the climb to over three hundred pounds back in Paris, the city of the famously thin French. The driver was still pretty hefty herself, although she said she’d lost forty pounds and was losing still at a rate of three or four a week: the ideal. They didn’t want you losing it too fast. Too fast and you’d just start putting it back on. Lifting her end of Perry’s gurney she didn’t let out a single grunt. Perry gazed up at her like a cribbed infant and spoke, and when he spoke his speech was more or less still panting and slurry, still stricken.
“And—you’re—you’re—so—so—struh—struh—strong,” he said to the young woman.
“Weight Watchers is awesome,” she said confidently in the hallway, raising the gurney or cot’s back to help Perry sit up and looking to Scott as though she might want a sandwich or at the very least a cigarette. The ambulette, Scott recalled, had reeked of tobacco smoke. “See, I can eat what I want,” she went on, nodding. “Eating’s not the issue. Food’s not the issue at all.”
“Oh?” said Perry, though it came out more as a Santa Claus Ho!
Every behavior control system was a mind control system and had mottos like, “Food is not the issue. Drugs weren’t the issue. Alcohol, not an issue. It was all in the head, see?”
Scott had come from religious territory, and everything in America was religion anymore.
“Portion control?” said Scott hopefully, encouragingly. Perry needed portion control.
“Doesh Hweight Hwatchersh deliver huh-mealsh?” said Perry, smiling lopsidedly.
“It’s mainly portion control,” she said. “I go to the gym two hours a day, which is great. My daughter notices the difference. And they teach you little tricks, like, they say if you’re not hungry enough for an apple, you’re just not hungry. You guys going to get dressed up or what?”
“You mean for the wedding,” said Scott.
Perry grinned and said, “Ish been put off, hyou shee?” and chuckled hoarsely.
The other EMT smiled at Scott. He said, “I can swear I’ve seen you someplace before.”
He was handsome and appealingly small and tightly knit; Scott would have noticed him.
“I bet we don’t hang out at any of the same bars,” Scott told him. “Or maybe we do?”
The elevator bell went ding. At the time, Scott had no idea he’d be returning here for the next several weeks. He just went with it. He was terrified but tired, yet how selfish of him. The little black EMT winked at him. Hospitalization posited a different time zone—a far dimension.
The nurses on the ninth floor were all from the Caribbean or African countries. Claudette took them in and told Scott, “Listen, we’re liberal. This is not like those others. Here, we are open.”
“But visiting hours?” said Scott.
“It’s not like that, I’m saying. See? We’re not like other facilities. We’re not like them.”
“I have health-care proxy.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I know you’re the proxy. You gave a sheet. Now there’s no staying overnight, but listen. Come anytime— don’t come at nine in the morning.” She regarded Scott earnestly but with a code-like grin. “He’ll be busy see, and you can sleep. Sleep as long as you like, then come in. Nobody’s checking—it’s just in the morning, he’s busy with things …”
The second nurse, who came in then, and whose name Scott had not gotten, was tinier but broader and said, as Claudette was undressing and washing Perry on his new bed, “Here we are!”
Claudette said, “Girl, you don’t even know.”
“Now don’t even start.”
“This is my man, and you don’t even know yourself with this man. This man is mine.”
Perry laughed even as he was presented fully naked and looking yellowish. His skin was dry and shiny, and the main shining was like lemon rind. He looked haplessly at Scott, and Scott wanted to go out into the hall and choke. Just since Tuesday his Perry had been through a lot.
“Now girlsh,” Perry muttered, smiling proudly, gamely, being a good boy.
“Don’t even listen to him,” said Claudette, “because he needs me and he knows it.”
“He don’t need you.”
“You get away from him now, I said.”
Scott received Perry’s balled dirty boxers from Claudette. She soaked a cloth in a plastic basin of soapy water and squeezed it out and began scrubbing Perry gently, starting on his legs.
“Does that feel good?”
Perry said, “It nuzh, ackshly.”
“Stop looking at him, girl. Now you just deceive yourself.”
“You need to drive that demon of self-deception out of yourself.”
Before he was getting ready to go home, late that night, Scott saw Claudette in the hall.
“I’m leaving,” she said, her stylish bag strapped over her shoulder. “Lord, listen to me. I won’t see you for a while. I’m normally at night, when you’ll be at home in bed. Anything—but anything—you just ask. Don’t worry, they take good care of folks here. He is in good hands.”
“I just wanted to thank you.”
“Don’t. That’s why we’re here. I’ve got to go. I’m tired. And you take care of yourself.”
Scott went back into Perry’s room. Perry was sharing it with a Korean man who was sat up for part of the day in an orthopedic chair wearing a neck brace, his spine inclined back just so. Mr. Park stared at the ceiling. Mr. Park had the window side of the room. His wife and daughter talked to him in Korean, encouraging him. Then there’d be a moment or two of reflective quiet.
Perry’s own bed was slightly inclined up. He looked so tired. Scott pulled up a chair and put his arms over the guardrail. Perry was in a minutely patterned gown. He took Scott’s hand.
“That poor hman,” said Perry, gasping. “I heard them talking, just a little, in Henglish.”
Perry’s articulation came and went, but he had no idea of modulating his voice.
Scott tried to suggest a lower tone for them by muttering, “Yes, darling. I understand.”
Perry said throatily, groggily, “He can hardly talk, but—he—said, ‘Cold, cold!’”
“Room’s too cold for him?”
“Hi guess.” Perry sighed, relaxing back a little. “Hi’m—I’m— worried about you.”
“Don’t be, sweetie, I’m fine. The important thing is for you to get better. All right?”
“Hi was thinking,” said Perry, swallowing, Adam’s apple bobbing, eyes revolving. “Hin a couple days, not tomorrow, bring hin the bills hand the checkbook, hand hwe’ll go over them.”
“Not yet. There’s not a lot yet,” said Scott, thinking about the apartment, their home.
“Hokay. But watch it for me, hokay? Hi want hyou to go soon— darling—hall right?”
Scott squeezed his hand. Scott said, “Are you comfortable, sweetheart?”
“I—ham!”
After Scott had left, Perry lay there thinking a lot of things. Finally Mr. Park’s wife and daughter—Perry had learned the man’s name from the nurses—had left, and Mr. Park was lifted out of the chair and eased back into his bed. Why wouldn’t they draw the divider curtain at such a tenderly vulnerable moment? It seemed Koreans were not as embarrassed as Perry would have felt. Every few minutes or so, Mr. Park barked up phlegm. The divider had been drawn, finally, by the nurses, and it was night outside. The room got dark and Perry couldn’t see the window; it was like an aquarium in here now with just the fluorescent lights going at a low visual hum. Mr. Park was watching a sports network. The hish and sudden cheering wildness of a crowd at some soccer match intermittently erupted. There was nothing now from Mr. Park but phlegm-barking.
Hearing the barked phlegm, Perry wondered about his own functions. He had no control.
Perry was exhausted remembering the ride in the ambulance, quite peaceful. It had been a beautiful day and much of the ride was do
wn Park Avenue, sunny and leafy out the two narrow vertical windows of the ambulance’s twin back doors. He remembered something the lady EMT had shared with Scott as they were wheeling him out on the cot—gurney—what did they call it?
They were leaving Columbia Presbyterian and Scott had said to the driver, “My brother’s an EMT, part-time. His regular job’s firefighting, but for extra money he drives an ambulance.”
“Fires rock,” she’d said, swiveling a bit of her heft and nodding fast. “We like fires.”
At first Perry had thought she was saying that the fires firefighters put out rocked. He’d only recently learned that “rock” as a verb was a Thing—and that a Thing was a phenomenon.
In the room now, he waited to be alone, but people kept coming in, waking him up.
“Mr. Knight? I need to take your blood pressure now. We need a stool sample.”
A while later he’d fallen asleep without reaching around to pull the long cord of the light switch, which was extended by a length of gauze tied at the near end to one of the handles on his heavily handle-outfitted bed. He fell asleep dreaming he was in court as the defendant about his driving record. He hadn’t driven in years and didn’t generally need to drive in New York, but he wanted this power back, without which he felt old and useless—as whenever he and Scott rented a vacation house. The year before he’d had his cataracts out. He thought that he was exonerated of all possible driving offenses. He wanted a license; he had medical proof of his worthiness. The judge in the dream with his powdered wig said that of course there were other considerations.
“You’re old,” the fat-faced, periwigged duffer said. “Go home and consider this hard!”
Sometimes when he was enamored of a pretty boy he’d met, Perry would believe himself to be much younger, at an age that still made him presentable, and yet mirrors frightened him and he avoided them or else laughed at the image staring back at him. He felt his eyes getting wet, so he was still alive, still human. He could use this as part of his appeal. Perry wanted his freedom.
He was in the court, and then he wasn’t, and then he woke up crying in court again.
Little Reef and Other Stories Page 18