Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  It wasn’t such a necessity after all—the Vicodin seemed to have a cumulative effect in me; if I took the pills as directed I felt better in the afternoon than in the morning. So really, all I needed was a little chaser to even things out. A few sips, maybe the equivalent of a shot glass midmorning. I tried to take it as medicine, with a teaspoon and all, realized how absurd that was—fuck it, I was an alcoholic—so I just took little sips from the bottle, then put it in the back of the bathroom cabinet, behind the Vicodin bottle and the cold remedies and the iodine and the dental floss.

  I’d also convinced myself that Vicodin and the other drugs I’d had at the hospital were the reason for my “dreams” about Wayne and Connie. Imagine; they’d never let a dog into the operating room. And wasn’t it just like Wayne to rub it in their faces by some outrageously sensual act like French kissing me on the gurney.

  Please.

  * * *

  We arrived at Billy’s around eight. It was cold, dry and incredibly clear, the lights of the tram station atop the mountain that loomed over Palm Springs sparkling against the deep blue desert night.

  The deal was, Jake would make sure I was settled in and had food and anything else needed for recuperating for an extended time; then we’d get him to the airport for his flight back up north.

  “I’m going to lie down for a bit, just a few minutes,” I said, walking inside Billy’s condo, where Jake unpacked in the kitchen.

  “Just rest; you should rest,” he said. “I’m going to make soup, something very nutritious, something you can just heat up whenever you get hungry.”

  Jake always seemed to me to be a light version of latent hippie. If he were a woman, he’d be a sexy, earth-mother type who’d bake marijuana brownies, perhaps, and light candles and a stick of patchouli incense every day at four. He’d have long, angelic, naturally curly hair that haloed over his head and a smile that promised cosmic knowledge and serenity.

  As it was, he was intent on making his cut-up boyfriend soup. Not surprisingly, it looked delicious and thick and—orange. I didn’t catch all the ingredients, though I assumed carrots were essential.

  By the time Jake’s orange soup was ready we were already sitting together in front of Billy’s TV. Trading Spaces was on.

  Large chunks of the crusty bread Jake brought with him from Roggio’s in North Beach were stuck in my teeth and I imagined they’d turned orange, like the soup. The chubby yet preternaturally energetic house renovators from somewhere in Missouri didn’t motivate me. Watching them simply made me tired.

  I hated for this beautiful, vibrant and sexy man to see me like this, and for maybe the first time ever, I felt old and very, very mortal. I was sure he was figuring out, silently, in his head, how to leave me without giving up his choice San Francisco flat.

  That night we slept together for the first time since the operation. Billy had a queen-sized platform bed in a room where two walls were mirrored. He hadn’t changed this fun eighties touch, but I’d long been over seeing my naked reflection when I didn’t officially want to deal with it. Tonight the image to my right registered me lying face up on the bed, pee bag on the floor, the telltale hose snaking its way under the five-hundred-thread-count Moroccan down comforter to its secret attached location.

  Jake was fast asleep, and his breathing settled in deep and peaceful, almost hypnotic. My penis hurt like a son of a bitch as I waited for the drugs to kick in.

  * * *

  We hugged outside the Palm Springs airport terminal, then kissed, somewhat aware of the police and other security dying to catch some malcontent with a car bomb surely intent on destroying this quiet icon of American resorts.

  “Move that car or we’ll tow it,” a voice from nowhere barked. How convenient. Cover your homophobia with not even mildly creative security guard bluster.

  “When you coming back, again?” Jake asked for the fourth time.

  “In three weeks; I’ll see you in three weeks, Jake.”

  “You going to be OK?”

  “I have all that orange soup, I have the pain pills, what more could I want?” He really was sweet and hot in his leather jacket, and I had to smile, while the morning coffee ran right through me and filled the pouch around my thigh, the heaviness indicating it was time to dump it.

  He walked away, his brown hair flecked with the red that showed up in morning light like this, wispy in the desert breeze, the old backpack slung off his shoulder.

  “Move that car. Now, sir.” The guard stepped into my view, blocking Jake, as a jet roared skyward above me.

  * * *

  I wanted to be alone to feel sorry for myself, but this tactic loses traction quickly when there’s no one else to join in the drama.

  Dr. Kim insisted on a fairly aggressive regimen of physical activity. At this point in my recovery, this meant walking.

  It was impossible to arrange my dick and the tape and the tube effectively enough to thwart the natural movement of my right thigh when I walked. Every tentative step forward on my right foot, therefore, ended with me up on tiptoe while I winced as the catheter scored my urethra and the medi-tape strained against the hair on my skin.

  About a block from Billy’s was a rocky wash, which carried snowmelt from high up on the mountain through the town and deposited it conveniently onto a golf course down valley. There was virtually no traffic on the wash frontage road. Those days post-Jake I struggled to walk down that road alone, each day for a few minutes more.

  Spring comes early to the desert, and the wash was alive with birds and lizards and frogs and other wild things. One day a roadrunner popped out from behind some brush and crossed in front of me. It stopped, as if curious, and looked at me—then turned and hopped away.

  During daylight I halfheartedly finalized Sydney trip plans on the phone with Karen. I’d always wanted to go to Australia. My fantasy had been fueled by an unproven stereotype that all Aussie men were as hot as the photos of bare-assed lifesavers on Gold Coast beaches, which had been reinforced by several gay porn movies made with “authentic Ozzie models.”

  This sex fantasy was currently useless. I looked at my shriveled penis, willed it to stiffen around the catheter and was mocked. Nothing, not even a slight twinge of recognition. According to the schedule laid out by Dr. Kim, I’d have the fucking tube removed by the time I left for the festival, but I’d need to wear “pads” for incontinence “until that sphincter muscle strengthens again.” It could be several months, perhaps more.

  Karen was focused on the rollout of Hell for the Holidays and could no longer tolerate either the ongoing cancer story or the self-pity she found me in.

  “Talk to me, Ben. Stop moping. You’re taking more of those pain pills than you should, right?” She was discussing Australian PR tactics for the festival premiere—we’d do radio; we’d do a couple of the publications there.

  “I’ll be ready, I promise.”

  “When are you coming up here again?”

  “Next week, to get the tube out and the staples removed. It’s sad—I’ve become attached to the Frankenstein-iness of it all,” I said.

  She laughed. “Did you take a picture? You have your video camera down there?”

  “If there’s one thing I don’t want documented for posterity, it’s—”

  “There’s my funny Ben again. I want him back, OK?”

  Out the window in the real world, a man without a catheter wearing a tight black Speedo dove into the pool. A few drops from the splash sizzled on the pavement outside Billy’s door.

  * * *

  My trip to San Francisco for Dr. Kim to remove the catheter and staples was going to be a marathon overnight affair, up north one morning and back down the next day. I could pretend that I didn’t even live there, that Safe Harbor Software was just some bad dream I’d had once, that the Slog was an invention of my imagination, that Jake’s garden didn’t really have those inverted trumpet flowers and I couldn’t trust my memory to be accurate.

  The now sand
-encrusted Mercedes sat in the half-empty lot in front of the Palm Springs Airport terminal. I’d decided to be up-front and honest with the newly paranoid security about what was underneath my clothing. Something similar to martyrdom was the intended approach—theory was, if I could inspire sympathy, maybe they wouldn’t have to actually look.

  But they did. I tried explaining: “You see, I’m a cancer patient, I’m catheterized, and I have a urine collection bag taped to my thigh, right there under these baggy pants. I also have staples in my abdomen, so that may be the reason, if your metal detector goes off…”

  Two security guards with an infectious, “hey, we got a live one!” excitement ushered me into a room with four white walls, a table, a chair and a door with a small two-way mirror. They made me show them. I pulled down my pants, then my clean Joe Boxer underwear—anticipating this, I wore some that were nicely bleached—and they saw I wasn’t kidding.

  “Jesus H. Christ, what happened?” the younger one screeched.

  How very unprofessional.

  “I told you. I have cancer. I had a prostatectomy,” I said, not offering any further explanation. Look it up, retard.

  The other guard turned away, perhaps disgusted, perhaps disappointed that the plastic pee bag was not a bomb after all but contained the most banal of all substances.

  “Go ahead and dress and come out when you’re ready, sir,” he said. They left and closed the door quietly. I looked up at the ceiling. Sure enough, there was a camera in one corner watching my every move.

  I had one last Vicodin. As the pills dwindled in number and repeated attempts to get more failed miserably, I’d saved them for when the catheter pain was acute, usually late in the day. As the jet took off thundering north, I swallowed it with orange juice and the Dramamine and a chaser of cocktail peanuts.

  Dr. Kim, through Soren, had refused me more pain medication because they didn’t want me to become “addicted.”

  Ha.

  My pleas, bordering on a convincing imitation of hysteria, were met with indifference or “Have you tried Ibuprofen? We can prescribe a five-hundred-milligram pill—you can’t buy that one over-the-counter…”

  Fuck that. I wanted Vicodin, Percodan, Percocet, morphine, codeine, Oxycontin! What good was cancer, anyway, if you couldn’t get the drugs you wanted—more importantly, the drugs you deserved?

  My anger rising, I was about to finally order a nice cocktail, bourbon rocks, when the announcement came that we’d begun our descent into the Bay Area.

  * * *

  Jake didn’t know the exact date of my quick jet-set adventure to have the catheter removed, and somehow I forgot to follow up with him.

  He’d been in the flat. The mail was piled neatly but stylishly, as an artist would, the magazines and large envelopes at an angle underneath the bills and smaller letters. I scanned for checks and anything handwritten, but the waiting cabbie honked, so I’d have to finish it later.

  In a few minutes the catheter would be gone and theoretically—theoretically—drugs would no longer be necessary. But would they still be prudent? Certainly, the lingering malaise from the monstrous insult would require continued pharmaceutical intervention.

  Soren checked me in. Had he given me an odd look that inferred I’d crossed that Rubicon into drug addiction? This unspoken communication surely hardened any ambivalence he’d had to being my advocate for scoring more pain meds.

  “Good to see you, Ben. How’s it all been going?”

  Had he called me Ben before? Was this a subtle sign of disrespect, a way to reduce me to a child?

  “I can’t wait another second to get this damn thing out of my dick!”

  He didn’t give me the slightest impression of a smile to reduce my discomfort. “Have a seat and the doctor’ll be with you in a sec.”

  I was sequestered in the same bank of exam rooms overlooking that area of the Outer Sunset I’d been in for the biopsy procedure, and that Chinese American high school gymnast crossed my mind. I was certain that any second he’d actually emerge from one of the hundreds of pale marina-style homes below—

  “Mr. Schmidt.” Soren was right; today I didn’t have to wait.

  Dr. Kim had seen me gazing out the window. “Beautiful for January, isn’t it? We’ve had rain every day for the last week, but today there’s that sun. You brought it with you.”

  “Actually, it was cloudy this morning in Palm Springs,” I said.

  He kept smiling. “Stand up for me and drop your pants. You brought a pad or two, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  I reached into the pocket of my jacket to make sure I had it. The Defendor wasn’t exactly a diaper. It was an oblong disposable pad you placed into your briefs to cover your cock, designed for men who were incontinent. It looked like a sanitary napkin.

  “This will just take a second,” Dr. Kim said, clamping off the out-of-body end of the catheter tube.

  I looked outside and felt him pull. Oddly, it didn’t hurt but was more of an internal giggle. Before I knew anything was amiss, he said, louder:

  “You’re leaking on the floor, get the pad out.”

  * * *

  The joy of having that fucking tube finally out of me—as well as the staples, which he plucked out with a tweezer like device—was tempered by this new situation. Not having to worry about peeing at all for the previous three weeks suddenly gave way to constant urination over which I had no control. They’d told me to expect this, but the reality was a lot worse than the prose or the diagrams in the entertaining Surviving Prostate Cancer manual.

  After three weeks in Palm Springs, everything in my San Francisco refrigerator had become a microbiology experiment. A trip down into the Castro to get something to eat was the agenda—a distraction, if only for a little while, from the unwelcome paper bulge in my pants.

  Locking up, I looked around back cautiously. Jake was still nowhere to be seen, not in the garden or on the back stairs. Then Tommy pulled up in his truck, directly in front of my door.

  “Ben! Bunny said you’d be here today,” he said, smiling from ear to ear as he slammed his driver’s-side door.

  “Guess I did say that. Just today; it’s a quick trip into town.” It came out almost a whisper, uneasy suspicion telling me that Jake lurked behind his heavy drapes above. I glanced up to his dining room bay window. There was no rustle of fabric, no face, no shadow.

  Tommy pulled a roll of chicken wire out of the back of his pickup and tossed me a big package of steel wool.

  “This’ll do the trick with them rats. Those sharpie little claws won’t get through this!” His silver tooth glinted in the sun.

  He went into the kitchen and began his ministrations: Wherever he found an opening, a hole, an air gap of any kind, he’d plug it with his pliable metal concoction. I could hear him alternately working, grunting and humming to himself from my bedroom, where I went through things to take with me to Sydney.

  There were the pale blue, high-leg, tight boxer-short bathing trunks I’d picked up in Laguna the year before. These looked pretty good on a man of a certain age, because if they were adjusted just right on the hipbone, they failed to push up that inevitable extra flesh around the waist. They were placed, along with a few other warm-weather items, into a backpack. At least it was summer there.

  The computer was on, and I’d finished answering the few e-mails there. They’d dwindled considerably since my last day for Safe Harbor. I resisted an urge to call Jason, to find out what Paul had been up to. He must’ve co-opted them—Jason and Kelly—and that’s why I hadn’t heard anything from them in almost a week.

  Abruptly, an instant message from Eric popped onto my screen, accompanied by a loud metallic gong and a photo of a cute WASP-ish guy in Benediction glasses, who had his head semi-buried in what was quite obviously another guy’s crotch.

  Eric: Dude, where u been?

  The cursor taunted me. Tommy stuck his head in my bedroom doorway.

  “Gonna check under the ho
use, see if I can find that big momma rat,” he said, with utmost seriousness, a twelve-year-old on today’s superhero task.

  Nonchalantly, I typed a couple of keys and switched screens so the stark porno image disappeared. “I’ll be surprised if she’s still there,” I said, smiling and lying, since I never believed his rat theory in the first place.

  The creatures inhabiting this building along with us are MICE.

  Tommy enthusiastically slammed the door behind him and again all was quiet, or at least muffled. The wall bulge had, as expected, grown slightly larger during my Palm Springs adventure, and I’d left another concerned message for Bunny.

  Eric: Ben, u there?

  Little gray particles of dust had fallen to the floor from the crack that formed as the bulge had itself grown. It worried me that this was somehow connected to the rodent issue.

  Eric: Ben?

  Me: Hi Eric, sorry, I was away from the computer. How are u?

  A knock from under the floorboards made me jump. Tommy was crawling around below me.

  Eric: What U doing?

  I hesitated. How to explain this, how to finesse, that I couldn’t have sex with him right now, this minute—yet leave open the tantalizing possibility for sometime in the future.

  Me: Just checking some e-mail. I’ve got the flu!

  The screen didn’t change, indicating hesitation on his part. I was going to disappoint, and I hated to do that. He’d go look for someone else.

  Eric: OMG, sorry to hear that! Anything you need?

  Hard to believe this was the same Eric who’d left me in that wet clearing in Buena Vista Park just a few weeks earlier. This time it was me who was the lying jerk. Since I’d already ventured down that path, might as well go big:

  Me: U know, I’m in pain! U wouldn’t happen to have any decent pills like Vicodin or Percocet or Oxycontin or anything like that?

  Another pause. The streetlight on Douglass outside my window switched on and emitted the usual electronic buzz. Perhaps sleeping near this source of radiation had caused my cancer in the first place. I’d sue PG&E—