Between Men

by Richard Canning

  I had a brief acting career—commercials, soaps, summer stock. I lack a middle initial. I’m five foot five. That’s small, for a masseur. It’s difficult for me to get leverage.

  Current favorites: Aeneas, Killer 69. Patients, protégés, friends.

  My mother used to say, “You have no sense of humor!”

  What stern, authoritarian handwriting I have! Like a religious studies scholar. Which religion?

  I’m a Marxist, Sexually Speaking

  I’m single. Sexually, I discombobulate inherited structures.

  I’ll undergo this self-analysis for five months.

  Momentarily my suicidal tendencies and my hypomania have abated.

  Don’t Jab My Balls with Your Umbrella

  My treatment room: purple velvet tacked to its walls. A small electric waterfall, always in motion: white noise machine. Massage table. Two Eames chairs.

  My curly red hair: attractive feature. Not dyed. I don’t look like a freak. My patients trust me.

  Just now I pressed my ear to the floor to hear the shouting and smacking (spanking sessions) in my downstairs neighbor’s apartment: Benjamin Levi, sadist.

  Once, he told me, “Don’t jab my balls with your umbrella.”

  I wasn’t holding an umbrella.

  Smack Smack

  During sessions, I must sometimes assume a mime’s silence, to allow the patient’s verbiage to fill the room.

  Smack, smack, again resounds: Benjamin Levi’s hand on some navvy’s buttocks.

  Here’s My All-Purpose Eulogy

  Max, drug dealer in the house next door, was found dead—OD—in his kitchen. Body left there to rot for a half week before discovery. Light-skinned black guy, messianic gaze, nimble on his dirty-sandaled feet: I never forget a dead man, even if we weren’t close. Minor acquaintances who die—their disappearances prove most wounding. Where’s the pockmarked woman with Carmen Miranda flip-flops—the one I’d see daily, holding her ratty pooch, in the park? Cancer? Dementia?

  For Dinner: Chicken Legs

  Variety Springs, New York: small town with a big-city density. High percentage of gays. Loose morals. History of countenanced prostitution. Absence of police action. High percentage of Jews. One orthodox shul. Not my scene. Many of my patients are Jews: fine with me.

  Aeneas owns a used-CD and -record shop, Miracle Music.

  Or chicken thighs?

  Future Topics

  my psychiatric training (keep it sketchy)

  sadness of being an only child

  my libertarian philosophy

  my illustrious namesake, Siegfried Kracauer

  I Jumble Chakras

  I stepped into Miracle Music, empty of customers. Aeneas did my astrological chart. My “Sun Q” is in Sagittarius, “by ecliptic,” Aeneas says, which explains my cheerfulness. My S is “in Scorpio H,” which means, says Aeneas, that I am secretive, reclusive, and easily hurt by imagined or actual rebuffs.

  Aeneas is thirty years old, 163 pounds, from Lisbon. Some days his voice usurps mine.

  “Have you visited Karl Marx’s birthplace in Trier, the oldest town in Germany?” Aeneas asked me, after doing my chart.

  Massaging his feet in our last session, I noticed incipient hammertoe, right foot.

  His brother has cerebral palsy. Aeneas feels guilty for pursuing an independent existence in Variety Springs, thousands of miles from Baton Rouge, where his brother and their widowed mother live together. After Aeneas’s father died, the family, seeking opportunity and amnesia, emigrated from Lisbon to Louisiana. Aeneas’s mother loves a tornado sidetracked and dissipated before it can lay waste to the city, as the inept Cassandras of the weather channel had foretold.

  O Aeneas, your horror vacui is only exceeded by my own.

  Hair patch above Aeneas’s butt: sweat marks the spot.

  Aeneas told me that his father’s spirit, postmortem, overtook the son’s body and ruled it for weeks. A turquoise glow outlined the boy’s torso. Eventually the aura faded and the family left Lisbon.

  My lot: unlikeability. Quoth Benjamin Levi, downstairs. (Why trust a sadist? Because he has freckled shoulders: visible in tank tops.)

  Aeneas’s penis: not overlarge. Often erect. My bush is red; his, black.

  I Am Pink

  Death of Jed, owner of Tunnel Traffic Books, in Variety Springs. I never deeply cared for him, though he could forecast my reading tastes. Jed vanishes: in response, go to the pharmacy for a refill. Adelle, druggist, who looks like Sylvia Miles in Midnight Cowboy, says, “Siegfried, take these pills with food.” She forgives in me the retrograde dreamer who chooses what Soviets call “inner exile” over the pioneer rigors of nation-building.

  I am communist at heart. I am stilted in verbal expression, nasally clogged. I am a peony somewhere between white and red.

  Two o’clock appointment with Stavros. A newish patient. Aeneas’s longtime lover, friend from childhood. So far it’s been mostly talk. Today we might proceed to lightweight erotic healing. His nonverbal connection skills (eye contact) are excellent, but his speech is disorganized and he shows avolitional tendencies—unwillingness to open the treatment-room door by himself, unwillingness to call the dentist to make an appointment to clean his decaying teeth. I will tell Stavros, when the session begins, as I tell each of my clients, “Be aware of what you want from me, and why you want it, and from whom in the past you have wanted the same.”

  A Characteristic of Stavros’s Speech Is Over-elaborateness

  In today’s session, Stavros said, “My childhood friend’s father, Mr. Petrucci, drove ninety miles an hour on the highway through Baton Rouge, Interstate 10. His speed—and his hairy forearms, oyster blue shirt rolled above the elbows—didn’t bless me, but ushered me into unpleasant vertigo. I was frightened by Mr. Petrucci’s speed and hirsuteness, where Interstate 10 fails to mollify Interstate 12, or fails to conquer it absolutely, like Catherine the Great. I prayed that he would take the Prairieville exit, but he kept speeding on Interstate 10, and my vertigo took the alarming, exciting form of a wish to relieve myself. He eventually arrived in Gross Tete, where, at a taverna, while Mr. Petrucci and his son Lonny ate gyros, I found my first glory hole.”

  A Heavy Concentration of Healers

  Variety Springs is stained (but not fatally) by former industry; is capable of utopia; is one hour from the Atlantic; is a pocket of economic idealism in a nation headed toward ruin. Here, home attendants make as much money as lawyers. Not a litigious community. Zen centers, Korean restaurants, Kosher butcher, leftist newspaper, a tradition of grassroots philanthropy and low-level activism. History of accidental electrocutions (live wires). Variety Springs, where amorality reigns. Our mayor sticks up for transgendered rights.

  My income comes from private practice and guest gigs at healing institutes. I do not seek a permanent appointment at Variety Springs Community College. Nor has their search committee approached me.

  Family History

  Father: Jacob Kracauer, psychoanalyst. Mother: Bettina Kracauer, psychoanalyst. Sliding scales. I was born in 1964. Only child. Mother had a hysterectomy an unspecified time after my birth. Mother’s maiden name: Gold. The one independent gesture I ever made was to leave the Upper West Side, fortress of Kracauer and Gold, and emigrate to Variety Springs.

  To discuss: why Tom Cruise’s penis has come up in several of my patients’ sessions this week.

  At Least I’m Not a Victim (Today) of Hypomanic Flight of Ideas

  Last year Benjamin Levi’s lover slashed his wrists in the shower and died. Benjamin’s freckled shoulders, light (clipped) hair on upper arms and chest, preference for tank tops, long penis (I’ve seen it at Baby Snooks Baths).

  I need nonstop touch. My father, Jacob Kracauer, hates to be touched. When we hug, he raises one of his shoulders, like a raptor in flight. I inherited none of Bettina Kracauer (née Gold)’s empathy. Presence of a nuclear power plant in Westbrook, fifty miles away, gives me nightmares. Bettina would love me to be polit
ically active. I’ll work (slowly) toward the political. Maybe I’ll become an antinuclear activist. Bettina wasn’t certain she wanted a child (me); Jacob forced the issue, she said. I can’t imagine Jacob forcing.

  Killer 69 is my most dangerous client. Dangerous to himself, dangerous to others. Travels with bodyguard. But I don’t let him bring the bodyguard into the sessions. I’m trying to talk him out of his paranoid insistence on being accompanied by Bernard, fat bruiser. I’m trying to steer Killer 69’s erotic fixation on me into therapeutically useful directions. I limit hands-on erotic work. He trades used vintage sports cars for a living.

  Killer 69 Is Making Progress

  A stranger whose arm he slugged on the street said to him, “That hurt my arm, when you slugged it.” I told Killer 69 to repeat that statement aloud three times. To integrate Killer 69 into polite society without compromising his radicalism is our therapy’s purpose.

  Sheet, Draped over Killer 69’s Buttocks

  Killer 69 had a surprising island of insight this afternoon: as I reached my hands beneath the sheet, he said, “Abandon me.” For Killer 69, the combination of abandonment and intrusion is aphrodisiac, and is his closest approximation to what pedestrian minds call “home.”

  Our Town Bears an Indeterminate, Pregnant Relation to Vaudevillian Pleasures

  I write these reflections not to advance the cause of arts, letters, or science, but to remain alive (against contrary, seductive, entropic tide of self-annihilation).

  DJ’s Ass

  Killer 69 told me in his session this morning: “I tricked for the first time with DJ.” I pretended impassivity. I didn’t tell Killer 69 that I’d had a similar encounter with DJ, a year ago, and that DJ had also told me, “You are exactly my type.” I’d wanted him to specify why I was his type. He never did.

  Sometimes I feel an eviscerating nostalgia for redheads who are cuter versions of me.

  Killer 69’s Ball-Sac

  I am neither a quack nor a malcontent. Notice that my syntax is growing vortex-happy. I am qualified to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, disruptive behavior disorders, communication disorders, mood disorders, depression disorders, and sexual and identity disorders. I will never send these meditations to the Centers for Disease Control or to the Orion Massage Academy in New Fayetteville. My eagerness to hold Killer 69’s testicles gives me an adrenaline rush so powerful I’m nearly incapable of completing this sentence, or the next.

  How Did Siegfried Kracauer Die?

  One week without medication! I’m going cold turkey off my “tranquilizers.” Don’t be so inhibited. My parents wanted me to be charming. The purpose of writing is to stave off suicide; my sentences must remain cheerful, factual. To buck up, I should list my good deeds. I’m not a rapist. I give $200 per year to the Variety Springs Jewish Community Center. I don’t call the police when I hear Benjamin Levi, downstairs, spanking one of his navvies. Does he rent them, or find them on the streets? How exactly did Pasolini die? Killer 69 suffers from Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

  Sophie Tucker Played Valhalla Palace

  Vaudeville took root in Variety Springs because no other town in the region (New Fayetteville, Sayreville, Standish, Valhalla Port, Freehold) would tolerate or house it. Only Variety Springs was spineless enough to accept vaudeville’s imbecility. Variety Springs had no identity until vaudeville bestowed one on it. The major vaudeville house in town, Valhalla Palace, gave employment to a wide spectrum of social types, and girded the loins of Variety Springs as a boomtown. If Variety Springs ever had a boom, Valhalla Palace was its center. Sophie Tucker played Valhalla Palace. Fanny Brice played Valhalla Palace and haunted the nearby mineral baths. Valhalla Palace, with its pleasing Egyptian-Teutonic exterior, still exists, on Devereux Street, across from the statue of our town’s founder, Alexey Devereux. For generations, admission to Valhalla Palace remained a nickel. Now Valhalla Palace is a convention center, but no conventions have seen fit to use the facilities. Valhalla Palace once showed first-run features; then it showed kung fu pictures, and porn; now Valhalla Palace hosts the occasional politician, revival meeting, or craft fair, but mostly remains dormant, waiting for a new function.

  Happy Twentieth Anniversary of First Coitus

  Twenty years ago, today: how glad I was to enter a vagina, finally—to experience its fortress, after years of propaganda and mystification. It’s difficult to write on graph paper. Sounds of spanking downstairs. Last night I put my ear to the floor and heard Benjamin Levi babbling (on the phone?) about terrorism. Either he is planning some terrorist action, or he is having a phobic reaction to recent U.S. history. Benjamin Levi ignores my desirability. On Devereux Street I saw him wearing Birkenstocks and white socks. He has not once made an appointment with me for a massage. I began taking my medicine again last night, unfortunately, so I am once again under the control of Dr. Pellegrino. We’ll call it a tranquilizer: a white pill, with a seam down its center, like an incised gut. Chalky taste. The pill gives me a sound sleep and no dreams. My parents don’t approve of medications. They are old-fashioned talk therapists.

  The Suicide of Isaac Gold

  I was silent for an entire year as a child. During my silence, I plotted strategies for changing my personality and my curly red hair, resembling Grandfather Isaac Gold’s, whose death was a frequent dinner-table conversation subject—how to live as survivor of a vaudevillian suicide. I never knew exactly what vaudeville was—that mysterious art at which Isaac Gold had excelled, the art whose obsolescence provoked his suicide. Behind a bathroom door. Push open the door, try to push it open, can’t push it open, because Isaac Gold’s body, heavy with vaudeville’s disappearance, lies behind it. His wife, Ludmilla Gold, née Kantrowitz, took the death in stride. If I end up killing myself, that’s OK. What voice, raised to a certain pitch, doesn’t approach suicide?

  Marlon and Liz

  As a youngster I met Marlon Brando. He had begun to get fat. He was sitting in a folding chair in the Poconos—a luxurious resort, where psychotherapists, intellectuals, and actors commingled. Across from him sat Elizabeth Taylor, though this fact was never proved to my satisfaction. They were rehearsing The Glass Menagerie—running through a scene, not embarrassed to be overheard. Brando’s face seemed contorted in throes of thespian ecstasy. Soon afterward I saw on TV their live-broadcast version of Glass Menagerie (not preserved on tape, it vanished—a great lost performance, Brando playing Tom, Liz playing Laura, though both were too old for the roles); few sources mention their Glass Menagerie, which I had the good fortune to see in rehearsal in the Poconos, though Brando might have been rehearsing not with Liz herself but with Liz’s stand-in, who looked like Annette Funicello.

  Vaudeville Is Not Dead

  Behaving like a lunatic won’t undo Isaac Gold’s suicide. His upper and lower lip weren’t aligned, which gave him a shy demeanor, despite his bossiness. “Vaudeville is like Latin,” he’d say, “a highly constructed language.” “Do you mean that vaudeville is a dead language?” I’d respond. “Nonsense,” he’d insist; “vaudeville is eternal.” “Just like Latin,” I’d say. We could go on like that for hours—useless stichomythia. He wanted me to revive vaudeville, and even though I said that “psychotherapy was today’s vaudeville” (Bettina agreed), I disappointed him by not “going into” vaudeville, even if going into vaudeville was impossible because it was dead. Shortly before his 1984 suicide, the knowledge of vaudeville’s death finally came home to him via a TV broadcast—archival footage of Sophie Tucker’s funeral, 1966. He’d attended the ceremony, as had my mother, but he hadn’t realized in 1966 that Sophie Tucker’s passing was more than the death of the last of the Red Hot Mamas; it was the death of vaudeville, concentrated in one fat body’s demise. For the eighteen years separating Sophie Tucker’s decease and Isaac Gold’s, he never watched one of her movies, even when Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry or Gay Love showed up on the late show. He said, more than once, “It’s tragic, that Sophie Tucker never made it as a
major film star.” “But Isaac,” I’d say, “isn’t vaudeville superior to cinema?” “Of course,” he’d say, “but Sophie Tucker deserved film stardom.” Sophie Tucker and my grandfather might have been lovers, though I have no proof; as Bettina put it, “Father kept vaudeville matters under wraps.” Indeed, vaudeville specifics were not dinner conversation. “Keep vaudeville vague” was Isaac Gold’s motto, and it became Bettina’s, as well; vaudeville grandeur was a given, but my grandfather’s significance—his place within vaudeville’s cosmopolitan yet claustrophobic swirl—remains uncharted, like a vision of the Indies in 1489.

  The Ego in Bits

  “Do you know,” Bettina Kracauer once said to me, “my revered Melanie Klein died only six years before your grandfather’s beloved Sophie Tucker? I’m not sure that Melanie Klein and Sophie Tucker met. Though Melanie Klein probably knew of Sophie Tucker’s existence, it’s unlikely that Sophie Tucker knew of Melanie Klein, though Klein’s work on the psychoanalytic play technique might have had a trickle-down effect on Tucker’s rendition of—or her self-perception while rendering—‘You’ve Got to Make It Legal Mr. Siegel.’ When Melanie Klein writes, in 1946, ‘The various ways of splitting the ego and internal objects result in the feeling that the ego is in bits,’ was she not mourning Sophie Tucker’s underpaid labor at the German Village, on Broadway and Fortieth, in 1906, for a mere $15 a week?”