by Mark Merlis
His voice trailed off, so I am left wondering how he might have finished that sentence. Go back to the way we were, so long ago? No, Mickey is too wise for that. And--if I had never brought the serpent into the house--we couldn’t have stayed the way we were. He would have grown away. Become the stranger with hair on his chest who may be on his way to war.
“We can …” See what life is like on the other side of your longing, that might be what he meant to say. And, whether he meant that or not, we are living on the other side now.
I put an arm around him for a second. He didn’t flinch, but I pulled away before I overstayed my welcome.
We’d gone another block or so before he said, “So I’ve been wondering. I mean, ever since I read your poems. How come you like sucking cocks?”
I squeaked, “What?”
“Cause, you know, the couple girls who’ve done it to me, they seemed to hate it.”
“I can’t talk about this.”
He gave me a look that seemed to say: what are we going to talk about the rest of our lives, the weather?
“Okay. I don’t like it, exactly. I mean I don’t like the act itself. I like the idea of it, I don’t know why. You understand?”
Mickey pondered a little. “No.” He laughed, and after a second I joined in. Because what I said really was pretty funny, what I’ve chased after my whole life seems funny just now.
Again. You mattered more to me than anybody. Mom doesn’t look at me, I’m all alone. Is this how it winds up, I’m the villain, living with me was so awful he’d rather let his father suck him? Why, because I occasionally hinted that he ought to get off his ass, while his father just had happy dope parties with him?
Even if Mickey said any of these things, even if Jonathan didn’t color it all somehow, even if Mickey felt that I had turned from him: Mickey could have taken a walk with me, too. Our shadows could have mingled, he could just once have told me what he thought and given me some kind of chance to explain or fail to explain.
It isn’t fair. I feel like the unfavored child—like Bernie, watching his big brother get all the praise. It isn’t fair that Mickey forgave Jonathan everything, laughed with Jonathan about the ugly things he wanted and the filthy things he actually did.
It isn’t fair that they were buddies, after everything.
It isn’t fair that Jonathan wrote everything down and I didn’t. So Mickey’s story, Mickey’s life gets to be told only by Jonathan. And my choice is to let Jonathan tell it, or never have it told at all and let Mickey sink with me into oblivion.
Yes: Mickey is clinging to a blue binder as if to a lifeboat, waiting for Philip Marks to rescue him. But Philip can’t save Mickey without, at the same time, preserving forever some bitch named Martha.
April 19, 1972
I have been reading through the old journals, and I was struck by the fragment of Hopkins that came to my mind the day I was writing about touching Mickey, that one touch on the sofa that broke things. Mickey was out this evening, smoking with friends or wheedling girls to blow him or whatever he’s doing, so I could go to his room and get the text.
From “The Lantern Out of Doors”:
Men go by me, whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.
Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot
I can follow them with my eyes, or even touch them, I cannot be in them. Of course, if I could be in Mickey at the end, then he wouldn’t be in there, would he? I would have replaced him, like--what were the little crabs Mickey used to catch at Truro? He told me about them, hermits, I think; they have soft bellies and live in the forsaken shells of other creatures.
We couldn’t both dwell in the shell of Mickey, to be in him I would have had to obliterate him.
Which you did, I want to shout, which you did, which you did. But: insidiously, Jonathan has made me feel that I am merely insisting on this. Perversely insisting on something I am no longer sure of.
SIXTEEN
April 2O, 1972
I didn’t tell Martha I’d spoken to Bernie. I suppose because I hoped he’d come up with something and then I could spring it on her: look, I don’t think raising Mickey is a joke, I made the enormous sacrifice of talking to Bernie and I rescued our child, etc., etc. Writing this, I see it suggests that the opportunity for gloating meant more to me than actually rescuing our son. Of course this isn’t true, it would just have been the icing on the cake. Academic, now, because I don’t think we’ll get the cake.
This morning, the phone rang when I was in the bathroom. Martha got it, said “Hello, hello,” then hung up. “Nobody,” she said. When it rang again a couple of minutes later, I raced for it.
“Johnny,” Bernie said. “I’ve got an idea. Let me just tell you about it, and we can talk more when …”
“Okay.”
“Myasthenia gravis.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s what we call an autoimmune disease--the body attacking itself. Well, I won’t explain all that, but the way it works, the nerves that are supposed to make the muscles move sometimes stop getting the signals through. You get muscular weakness--drooping eyelids, double vision, trouble walking sometimes, trouble chewing. And then it can just go away, the patient goes into remission and there are no symptoms at all for months, years.”
“So that’s what he should have?”
“We admit him. I got this resident owes me favors big time, so he’ll do the admit, get the symptoms and the diagnosis into the record. It’s easy to fake--there aren’t any lab tests or anything, and if Mickey’s anything like Alan he’s not going to have trouble pretending his eyelids are drooping. Then a few days, he gets better, we spring him. But he has a documented history of MG. Guaranteed IV-F the minute an army doc lays eyes on the record.”
“Would it … what would it mean for his … ?”
“Future? Nothing, that’s the beauty part. I mean, I probably wouldn’t hire someone with MG as an airline pilot, but it shouldn’t do anything to his life. He’ll have a life.”
“Okay, that’s brilliant,” I said.
“Just happened to hit on it,” Bernie said modestly. Maybe he’s been waiting his whole life to hear me call him brilliant.
“We’ll … we’ll get back to you.”
“You better hurry. It’s going to look funny enough, him getting it just now, you don’t want to wait until he gets called up or something.”
“I understand.”
“Who was that?” Martha said as I hung up.
I didn’t want to say yet. As there was one more little hurdle.
Mickey was, amazingly, awake. Sitting up in bed and looking out his window at the weed tree that’s grown up in the courtyard. On one branch sat a pair of those ugly little brown birds, whatever they’re called, the kind you see everywhere in the city, picking at pizza crusts and scattered french fries.
I sat down on his desk chair and explained Bernie’s scheme. Mickey listened without comment and turned back toward the window. “So I go to Boston and pretend to be sick,” he said. “And then they write up these fake records and I take them to the draft board.”
“Um … essentially.”
“I don’t think so.”
I guess I had known this was coming. “Look, Mickey, this is an evil, stupid war. Doing anything you can to stay out of it isn’t dishonorable.”
He didn’t answer. I said, as if I were explaining to an infant or a schizo, “If you get called up you could get killed, do you understand this?”
“No shit,” he said. “Look, this isn’t happening to you, it’s happening to me.”
“I know that.” Though of course it was happening to me. I caught myself feeling that it was happening to me more than it was to him. “It’s a ch
ance to save yourself.”
“No, it’s a chance for you to save me.”
Is that what this was about, getting back at me somehow? “Actually it’s a chance for your Uncle Bernie to save you.” Then, improvising, “He could get in trouble. He’s taking a risk because he wants to help you.”
“He shouldn’t. I’m glad he cares, but he shouldn’t.”
We were silent a minute, then Mickey flashed a wry smile. “Uncle Bernie used to say he had Mom and me up to Truro every summer because any kid deserved a month or two away from you.”
“He said that?”
“It was just a joke.” He swallowed and went on, “I had fun up there, but I didn’t like being away from you.”
I would have hugged him, but I’m still a little wary, our armistice is so new. “Listen,” I said. “Uncle Bernie really won’t get in trouble. I can promise you, he never does anything that will get him in trouble.”
Mickey turned toward me at last. “Pop, look. Maybe I’ll get lucky and I won’t get called. Or maybe the war will end, or maybe I’ll go and get hurt. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I just know I’m not going to do stuff you plan for me anymore, you or Mom or Uncle Bernie.”
“So instead you’re going to do what Richard Nixon plans?”
“I--It’s hard to explain.”
“Okay,” I said. Not giving up, postponing.
“Richard Nixon doesn’t have plans for me. He doesn’t even know who I am.”
“True enough.”
“Everything that goes on in the world isn’t personal. Sometimes it’s just what’s going on.”
This struck me as--who would have thought I’d ever write this word? UnAmerican. A fatalism utterly at odds with the way we Americans hack our path through the world. Me included. Of course everything is personal, for me all of history is personal.
I waited for him to say a little more. When I’d waited long enough, I said, “We’ll talk later.”
“All right,” he said. Meaning, no, we won’t.
So I am left to work it out for myself. I guess I’ve always done this. Because we have had, his whole life, a dialogue which consisted of audible me and Mickey dropping hints I never listened to. I must really, this once, try to understand him.
Here is the closest I can get. For years I loomed over him, he felt my wanting, and the only way he could live with it without despising himself was to take it as something that just happened, that nobody could help, neither he nor I. And from there maybe it is just a little way to thinking that nothing can be helped, but just endured. I know this isn’t quite right, people don’t live in neat analogies like the ones on the SAT. But I somehow taught him to be helpless and resigned, maybe Martha and I both did.
Or maybe that is all wrong. Maybe what I’m calling helpless and resigned is merely stoical. Maybe after all my years of preaching about a new kind of manhood I am encountering it. And it has nothing to do with me.
That is what he said, as clear as he’s ever been. This isn’t happening to me. It’s happening in front of me and I can’t make it stop.
Bernie could have saved him. I never knew about any of this. Of all the awful things Jonathan did, this may be the worst: keeping this from me, keeping this decision about the life of my son a little private affair between buddies. While I slept through everything, Jonathan let Mickey kill himself.
We could have saved him—if I’d known I would have made it happen, we would have marched his helpless and resigned little butt to Boston and weighted down his eyelids with pennies if we had to. But Jonathan let him go, because of all this hogwash about autonomy and manhood and Great Refusals. As if he weren’t even real to Jonathan, just a character in the sequel to JD.
Jonathan kidnapped my baby. Like one of those fathers who, denied custody, swoops down one day and seizes the kid. Years later the child shows up on milk cartons, with a sketch showing how he probably looks now, after all the elapsed time. Except Mickey’s carton would show how he looked that morning when he lay in the white-tiled basement at Williams-Cabell and I let myself be taken away without seeing him.
June 19, 1972
The President of the United States,
To Michael A. Ascher,
GREETING: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States, and to report at …
Greeting. That is the word that makes this form letter, that has changed the lives of so many millions of young men decade after decade, so macabre. As if the guy with the sickle and the black shroud were to cry, Welcome! Or perhaps what matters is the word right after that. You. The president is speaking to you, Michael.
The one summer Mickey went off to camp, the letter was addressed to Martha and me. Please have Michael at gate 29 at Grand Central, ready to board the train for Thule, New York, where our bus will take him to Camp Cost-Plenty-Wampum. You should pack for him six pairs of socks, six T-shirts …
Mickey is ordered to pack for camp by himself now. He is supposed to bring enough clean clothes for three days and enough money for a month. For cigarettes, I guess, or drugs if he can find them. Past that, the president will provide. This is all between the president and Mickey, it isn’t happening to me.
The president perceives Mickey as an entirely separate person. All that being Mickey Ascher means now is that he will tend to be summoned early in roll calls.
While Jonathan was busy subjecting the induction notice to a little explication de texte, I was trying to find out how Mickey could prepare. Most of our friends had contrived to keep their sons home one way or another, but Claire Winter did have a nephew who had gone in. She had one piece of advice: Mickey had better go to the dentist. Army dentists were terrible, she said, better to have any problems taken care of before he went in.
So Mickey went, and returned with the news that the dentist thought he’d better have his wisdom teeth out. We were at dinner when he told Jonathan.
“What for?” Jonathan said. “Is there something wrong with them?”
Mickey just gaped at him. I answered, “I suppose it’s just that they’re the most likely thing to go bad.”
“Well, if they do, the army can take care of it. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest dentist to pull a couple of teeth. I don’t know why we should pay for some distant possibility.”
I thought, almost said aloud: you Jew.
I hadn’t ever thought that, not in all our years of prudence and frugality; it just came from somewhere, wherever my upbringing had tucked it away for just this moment. You tight, squinting old Jew, he needs to have it done now because the army doesn’t go in for luxuries like dental anesthesia. I was trying to calm myself enough to formulate some less ethnically fraught response when Mickey stood up.
Mickey looked down at Jonathan, shook his head slowly. “Okay. If you don’t think you can afford it.” If this was sarcastic, he managed to keep any edge out of his voice.
“Jeez, I wasn’t talking about the money,” Jonathan said. Though it sure sounded as though he were.
“It’s okay,” Mickey said. “I’m not sure I want to do it, anyway.” He left the room, left the apartment.
I remember this so clearly because of what happened next. Jonathan cried. As many times as he writes about crying in these journals, it wasn’t something I saw very often. That night he cried, and the sight was ugly to me. I thought he was crying out of self-pity, because no one understood his perfectly reasonable position, or because his son had so deftly made him look like a louse.
I think now his resistance wasn’t about the money at all, he couldn’t really have cared that much about the money. He just didn’t want to think about the dentist, didn’t want Mickey to go, even if it was the practical thing to do. He was crying because they were already starting to take his Mickey apart, tooth by tooth. I was the practical one, or I would have cried with him.
July 8, 1972
Last night Mickey was in his room. Holding an ice bag to his jaw, as instructed, t
o stop the swelling from the extractions. We smoked some grass, which helped his pain, but after a while he said, “Maybe you could just leave me alone.”
I sat with Martha in the living room for a while, each of us trying to read. Finally I said I was going out. If Martha was annoyed or disappointed, she hid it quite well. I didn’t go to Virgil’s--not that I wasn’t a little horny, but whatever I needed I wasn’t going to get in ten minutes in the alley. I went to the Poplar, with the vague idea that, somewhere among all the gay people, there might still be somebody I knew.
Nobody, not when I got there, but there was one empty stool at the bar. I decided to just relax and try to practice not scowling at gay people, as it doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere and maybe one of them might actually put out. I tried to assume the kindly but neutral expression of a Unitarian minister. I didn’t verify my success in the mirror above the bar. But I did find, after a couple of bourbons, that I really was starting to feel a little more kindly toward the people around me. I guess it isn’t, objectively, any sillier to talk about Bob Fosse and Barbra Streisand than to talk about Catfish Hunter and Pete Rose.
Geoffrey walked in. Dennis O’Grady’s widower. He isn’t a kid anymore, he’s bulked up, but his face is still boyish, if a little tautened by grief. A hunk, in his late husband’s word.
I didn’t wave, but he saw me right away, stood still for a moment. Deciding whether to talk to me or to move on to some other bar, where he could go about his business of auditioning Dennis’s replacement without my watching.
He came over. “Hi, Mr. Ascher.”
“Jonathan.”
“Jonathan. It’s been a long time.”
“It has. I was sorry to hear about Dennis.”
There was a considerable silence. At last he said, “You know, I never know how to answer that. Thanks? Me, too? What are you supposed to say?”
“Search me. Do I look like Emily Post?”
“Who?” he said. “Listen, can you buy me a drink? Things are a little tight.” So that was why he had come over. I bought him a drink.