Between Men

by Richard Canning

  What happened next was that a couple of men scaled the fence and reached their arms down to us. The hero act is catching: there was lots of We got ya’s and Here comes the cavalry’s on the part of the men, lots of Look out’s and Careful’s on the part of the watchers, but even with all the acting it was only a moment before they’d clasped the man’s limp hands and pulled him off me. He had begun to cry, a mewl of shame and chagrin, and the sound only reinforced the idea that I’d made a mistake, that I hadn’t saved this man but condemned him to a fate worse than drowning. The man’s crying became a wail as the men on the shore slung him over the fence’s barbed top like a sack of animal feed; his sobs were all I could hear as they reached to help me. I tried to avoid his eyes, but they were all I could see. He was hung over the fence like something already dead, but still his head lifted up and he fixed me with a sad stare and he said, “You shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have.”

  For the first time I looked at him. His hair was dark and he was about forty and although he could have been my father I knew he wasn’t and would never be. As I backed away from him I felt hands on my back and shrugged them off more successfully than the man who wasn’t my father had shrugged off mine. When I’d backed all the way through the crowd and felt the space empty out behind me I turned and, shoeless and sodden, ran for home.

  By the time I made it back to Dutch Street I was nearly delirious. My bare feet were blistered and bloody, the cut on my thigh had opened up again, and closed, and a long thick brown streak showed where the hairs on my left leg were stuck to the fabric of the jumpsuit. What was worse was that it was dark, and it had still been morning when I’d jumped in the river. Where had the time gone? Where had I gone? My keys were missing from my pocket, also my wallet. I entered the building through the shop and screamed Nellydean’s name until she materialized from one of her secret dens. In response to my demands for another key she walked to the box of ostrich eggs I’d found on the long-ago day I’d gone looking for a touch-tone phone, and when she cracked the egg open a key as rusty as its predecessor fell into her palm. I snatched it from her, stumbled upstairs, and the first thing I saw was that Trucker’s computer had finally found its way to me, sprung up on the vast surface of my mother’s desk like a pox that had been incubating for weeks. My impulse was to throw the boxes out the window. “Fuck you, Trucker!” I screamed into the empty room. “How could you do this to me?” But what had he done? What was his fault and what was mine, what had I done and what had simply happened? What had happened? It was all confusing, and it was all I could do to lift the computer boxes to the floor, all I wanted to do was sleep, to slip if I could into the lush psychedelic comfort of a fever dream. I climbed onto my mother’s desk and closed my eyes; the stone was hard but the coolness was like a pillow cushioning my hot body. Like the last, this chapter ends with a disembodied voice delivering a cryptic message. But this time, at least, I knew it came from a dream. It was just a gurgling at first—or was it crackling? Was it a fire, or was it the river, or was it the voice of the headless statue in the garden? I strained to make it out. I opened my ears as if they were my heart itself, and the words fell into my soul like medicine from a dropper:

  You’re safe here.

  Neorealism at the Infiniplex

  John Weir

  My friend Dave died of AIDS in the fall of 1994. I had planned to be sad about it, but it turned out I was relieved. I’m not proud of this. In my fantasy, he would have died in my arms and the screen would have faded to black, like in a movie. It was an Italian neorealist ending, a grim death but a noble one, suffered in a time of war, or shortly after war. What happened instead was that he was so mean for the last three months of his life that I stopped liking him. Not just at the time, but for all time, both in the season of his death and retroactively, forever. His dying wasted our five years of friendship, and I lost him in retrospect. I don’t remember what I ever liked about him. People say they can’t believe their beloved husband, mother, son is gone, but I had another feeling. I couldn’t convince myself that I had ever known and loved someone named David. That was the worst thing that happened.

  No, the worst thing was that he left me some money that took a long time to clear. In 1997, three years after he died, I got about three thousand dollars, and I decided to rent a place in upstate New York. Because I teach school, I have my summers free, and so I sublet my East Village apartment, bought a used car at a police auction in Jamaica, Queens, and signed a three-month lease on a converted chicken coop. It lay on the grounds of an old Dutch farm, and it was vast and cheap, with a high ceiling and a sleeping loft. There was no furniture, so I bought a futon and a table. I put the table in the kitchen in front of a window with a view of the mountains. On the tabletop, I set a borrowed laptop computer and a stack of books I had never finished reading: Paradise Lost, Proust, The Naked and the Dead. I was going to read the classics, write things, eat right, go running every afternoon on the back roads and country lanes, and finally lose the weight I had gained while Dave was dying.

  Of course, I hate back roads and country lanes. How had I forgotten that? I hate views. I especially dislike chicken coops. Mine still smelled faintly of chickens. When I looked up from my work, through my kitchen window, I could see an open field, trees in the distance, and the sky everywhere. Not the reassuringly man-made chemical sky of lower Manhattan, but an intimidating sky so awesome and inhuman that, in order to explain it, you were forced to invent God.

  When I fell asleep over Paradise Lost, sitting outside in an Adirondack chair that had bark clinging to its arms and legs, I woke scraped and sunburned and covered with bug bites. A mile down the road at the food co-op, the cashier was so vegetarian she wore rope-soled shoes, and she would not sell me bug spray. Within days, I was aching for anything lethal or synthetic. I was nostalgic for pizza and car exhaust and Avenue A. Of course, there were people living in my apartment—German students on summer holiday—and I couldn’t go home. Twice, I drove down to the city and paid eighty dollars to sleep in the Jungle Room at the Kew Motor Inn. Obviously, I couldn’t spend the summer traveling back and forth every day between a New Paltz chicken coop and a by-the-hour motel off Grand Central Parkway in Queens.

  So I loaded Proust and Milton and Norman Mailer into the trunk of my car, and I went to the movies.

  I moved to the multiplex. To many different multiplexes, which are so abundant in the wilderness that I began to think of all upstate New York as a vast infiniplex. From late June to early September, I went to every several-screen movie theater from Kingston to Yonkers, listening to Billy Joel songs on the car radio and crying because I was old enough to remember liking them without irony. When I was not in my car, I was seated front row center with a bucket of popcorn and a Coke watching Bruce Willis in Armageddon. You see how entertainment was not the point.

  If I kept going back to Armageddon, I thought, it would eventually turn out to have a plot. I saw it six times, and it never did. Of course, I was grateful. It was a relief to be spared the pain of cause-effect. Thank God for a plotless world. Watching the scene where Bruce Willis, draped in an American flag, waves good-bye to the world from the floor of a crater in a huge piece of orbiting igneous rock was the most satisfying emotional experience I have ever had. I’m through with stuff that really happens, like, people die and you don’t. Or, they die and you don’t feel bad in the way that you want.

  Which is how I got in trouble with Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s D-day massacre movie. I saw it twice a week for two months, like short-term therapy or a lover who beats you every time you go back, despite your insane faith that one of these days it will end differently. Saving Private Ryan is more believable than Armageddon, though this, for me, was not the point. I didn’t care about World War II. Isn’t it a film about a bunch of gay guys who take a summer house in Fire Island in 1983?

  Look at the evidence: it opens with a few hundred handsome young men in expensive outerwear sq
ueezed into a boat approaching the shore of a famous beach, where people casually speak French and stern Nordics are lurking in the dunes with their hands on their weapons. We meet eight guys, just enough for a half share in the Pines. Most of them are midwestern. Once ashore, they go from house to house in uniforms, carrying accessories, singing Duke Ellington songs—“In my solitude, you haunt me”—and listening to Edith Piaf, all the while searching for just one cute boy. And every few days, one of them dies.

  It’s the same plot as Longtime Companion, one of the first films about AIDS. A bunch of men with no special talent or need for intimacy or closeness have to deal with the fact that everyone they know is dying all around them all the time. Sometimes they abandon their dead. Sometimes they mourn them. They do what they can given their uneasy sense that the next person dead could be you. Later, the dead men are buried far from their hometowns, out of sight of their folks, gone in a way their parents can’t, or won’t, understand.

  When Dave died, his mom and dad came up from Florida in a rental car. He died on Wednesday and was buried on Friday. They left their house Thursday morning and drove, they said, straight through. Nonetheless, they were two hours late for the funeral service at Riverside Memorial Chapel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The service had to be finished by sundown, because he was Jewish, it was Friday afternoon, and the parents had insisted long-distance—even though David hated God or even the mention of God—that there be religious last rites.

  So we waited in the chapel. It was the fifth time I had been there for a dead friend. And we went through two rabbis. Each of them stayed an hour and then had to leave. The place was rented, it was full. David was naked in a pine box loaded with ice to keep the body from stinking. The coffin was sweating as the ice slowly dissolved. We had a bucket under the corner to catch the drips. I thought of Dave floating inside this cocktail like a lemon wedge. All the mourners, David’s friends and co-workers and cute guys from the Chelsea gym, were sitting quietly in the pews listening to the drip, drop, drip into the bucket.

  The stage was set, in other words, and the effects were starting to melt, and we had no parents, and now suddenly no rabbi.

  Try finding a rabbi free on Friday afternoon on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I made an announcement in the chapel, really a plea. “Does anybody know—?” How would I ask it? I felt in need of Mel Brooks. He would have struck the right tone. But it turned out that somebody had a cousin who knew somebody, who knew . . . And I made the calls. “You don’t know me, but I need a rabbi.”

  It took ten calls. The sun was setting. Thank God some Jews are not observant; people were answering their phones. Finally, we got a rabbi. I never said “AIDS.” I didn’t know what to say about AIDS. I wasn’t sure he’d do it. I said nothing. I said, “Dead guy on ice,” which sounds like a hard-core band. And he understood, he came to the chapel. Why wasn’t he busy on a Friday night? I didn’t want to know. Cut-rate rabbi. Though in fact he cost just as much as the others. We paid for three, we used one. Not the star, but the road-company replacement. We started with Nathan Lane, ended up with Steve Guttenberg, it’s better than nothing. He’s available.

  He showed up five minutes ahead of Dave’s parents. Their rental car had broken down in Philadelphia. Never mind that the quickest route is not through Philadelphia. That’s why God gave us the New Jersey Turnpike, it’s a straight shot from Jacksonville to Bayonne on I-95. Why tour Philadelphia? Whatever. I had avoidances of my own. Just before the parents appeared, the rabbi took me into a small room and said, “Quick, tell me about your friend. Say what he was like. Say three things. I don’t need more than three. Add some color, make it personal, and make it fast.”

  And all I could think of was, “Well, he spent a lot of time at the gym.” It was an awful thing to say, that he was a gym-going muscle queen, a gay cliché. Though it was true, he went to the gym the way Baptists go down to the river. Still, there were plenty of other things to say about him, and why was this my first thought? He was a writer, he had published several books, what prevented me from listing these accomplishments? Grief is sneaky, not sobering, it refuses to suppress your worst impulse.

  Then the parents appear.

  So there is the sudden attention to the parents. Who presumably have precedence. Though they had not visited David even once, had not in fact seen him in more than a year, hadn’t called except when the rates were low on Sundays, and had sent, as a token of their concern, only a package of home-baked chocolate chip cookies. For a guy who could not digest so much as a piece of dry toast without soiling his shorts. David made me eat the cookies in his hospital room while he swore at his nurses. Then he swore at me. Then he died, and we had a ten-minute funeral service where the parents got front-row seats.

  The rabbi ripped cloth from their garb in honor of some tradition that did not include my dead friend, who had wanted to have his wrist tattooed at the last minute so he couldn’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Kaddish was said, and the rabbi made some remarks. He said, “David was a man who loved sports, especially at the gym.” And a roomful of people, not his parents, burst out laughing, because he was famous, at the gym, for cornering cute boys in the steam room and asking them to lunch.

  The Kaddish was endless. I don’t know when I’ve hated God so much. I had tracked down the last photograph of David taken before he went into the hospital, and we got it blown up, and it was standing on an easel next to the rabbi. An awful picture. Dave looked shrunken and rabbity and pale. He had shaved off his ’70s-era Christopher Street gay clone mustache, and though I always hated that mustache, he was unrecognizable without it. He lost almost half his body weight in the two months before he died, dropping from 150 pounds to a little less than 90, and this photograph was how I would always remember him, now: barbered and desiccated, a huddle of bones under sacked skin, which happened to be my dying, now dead, friend.

  His body had nothing to do with him. His funeral service had nothing to do with anyone who cared for him. It was an appalling farce. I had to be polite to his parents, who, if they loved him at all, nonetheless could not manage to visit their dying son. They knew he was dying. If he were my son, I would have moved into his hospital room. I would have postponed my life to be with him, which is basically what I did. And they were his parents, they sent cookies, I despised them, I wished they had died instead, I hope they die soon, lost and alone and uncared for by their own flesh and blood.

  Afterward we talked like I thought they were human. They barely registered my humanity or my closeness to Dave. They had me down as “good friend,” official funeral parlor role. I was not family. It was their loss, not mine, and I had exactly a minute to cry. It happened in a closet. No kidding. I was not going to cry in front of someone’s suddenly visible parents. I found a coat closet, oddly empty for November. I thought, Well, as well here as anywhere else. I thought, This is where it turns out I was always going to have my private sorrowing moment. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the fated emptiness of coat closets and private moments of sequestered grief. I leaned in a corner, folding myself into the crease of a papered wall as if the angle of the building could hold me.

  In a minute, I was going to have to walk out into the reception room and answer questions, give directions, to the cemetery in Queens, to the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center. That’s what the parents wanted to know. They had driven all the way from Florida and they were not leaving without seeing the sights, buying souvenirs, “MY SON DIED OF AIDS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.” But for now, avoiding them, crouched under coat hooks, I cried, it was almost the only time I cried about AIDS. Half the people I knew when I was twenty-five years old are dead, and I cried while Dave’s parents waited, and I cried at sixteen different showings of the last scene of Saving Private Ryan.

  The scene that Amy Taubin of the Village Voice called “creepy.”

  I thought that was the whole point.

  Actually, the popcorn was the point. It
was my steady diet. Every movie theater in upstate New York sells a version of the Supercombo Special—a huge bag of popcorn and a giant soda—always served by an underpaid teenager who stares at a point slightly to the left of your head and slowly asks, “Do you want the special it’s only fifty cents more than the medium size the soda comes with free refills—”

  And I say, “Yes. Now. Immediately. Please. I want, I want, I want,” I say, interrupting them, slapping money on the counter, exact change. God forbid I should have to wait for them to make change. Give me a giant-size popcorn, I say, soak it in butter to ruin my heart and salt for my tears, so I can taste it on my face hours later when Steven Spielberg makes me watch an old guy walk through acres of white crosses—a military graveyard in France—and drop to his knees in front of the headstone of a friend who died in battle instead of him.

  It’s the end of Saving Private Ryan. World War II’s over, we won. Spielberg has returned us to the framing device, a scene taking place more than fifty years after the war, in the present moment, a summer day in 1997. Private Ryan, who was saved by his buddies, is now an old man, no longer played by Matt Damon. He is white haired, slow moving, unglamorous. Since the beginning of the film, and presumably all through the two-hourlong flashback to World War II, he has been walking with his family—his wife and son and his son’s wife and his grandchildren—up and down the rows of headstones in the military graveyard.