Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  Eric: god Ben I never took you for a druggie. Aren’t you in that AA or something?

  Shit. I must’ve mentioned that to him at some point or another.

  Me: No. I’m not a druggie, Eric. Just sometimes I think they made those kinds of pills so that they’d be used when people are in pain. Like I am now.

  Eric: Actually, my mama—

  Tommy climbed back up the stairs and entered through the kitchen, his heavy boots scraping the ancient linoleum.

  Me: Mama what?

  “No sign of anything down there, Ben,” Tommy said. “I closed it all up with the wire again, just in case.”

  “Tommy, you’re a…lifesaver. Got an invoice for Bunny?” He’d already opened the door to the sidewalk and I heard the clank of his toolbox as it landed in the back of his truck.

  “Tommy?” His engine revved up and the truck pulled away. He’d left the front door wide open, a welcome invitation to any mouse, rat or serial killer who might happen to pass by. I closed the door and latched it.

  Eric, oblivious to all this, happily typed away.

  Eric: I meant my cleaning lady, up from South America, brought some pills with her on the last trip. They’re over-the-counter in Ecuador.

  Me: What kind?

  Eric: She’s got Tylenol with codeine. Not quite Vicodin, but not bad. A liaison with Eric seemed like not such a bad idea after all.

  13

  Eric thought I was meeting him for sex.

  My goal for this interaction was to score the aforementioned painkillers without telling him I’d just had a prostatectomy and was wearing Defendors and had a plane to catch.

  Before we logged off I told him I’d have to meet him somewhere other than my flat because it was being worked on. Even though Tommy had gone and wasn’t coming back, this was not really a bald lie because he’d actually been there during most of our IM session.

  We arranged to meet at Dolores Park Café. If you timed it just right, you might see Mission shirtless gangbanger wannabes on skateboards, showing off their latest tattoos. Besides, Tommy had interrupted my lunch quest, so I was ravenous.

  Eric sat outside in the far corner. A gray beret covered his shaved head, and he’d looped an iridescent blue-green scarf loosely around his neck, keeping his black leather jacket unzipped, and in the process offering up a tantalizing glimpse of his dark chest hair. So very Parisian.

  As I crossed the street, he raised his hand like some shy kid in the back of class. Like I would miss him. His net worth had increased exponentially since he was now officially a hot sex partner who could also be relied upon to provide drugs.

  The café served breakfast constantly, so that’s what we ordered even though it was midafternoon. Eric got some herbal tea.

  “You look like an artist.” I smiled.

  There was that grin and his characteristic look to the side. “If I was, I’d be covered with paint and unable to leave my apartment,” he said.

  “Or you’re just taking the afternoon off. Everybody deserves that sometimes.”

  “You think?” It sounded like his BS detector was warming up. He massaged one hand with the other underneath the glass-topped table.

  The waitress dropped off my food, a thick slab of toasted bread topped with a scrambled-egg mixture.

  “I could’ve just come over, Ben.” He put a pinch of sugar into his tea.

  “I wanted more choices for my slide viewer,” I said. He squinted.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I leaned in close. “The slide viewer, my memory bank of images. I conjure them up sometimes when I’m just horny or lonely and, see, I need more of you.”

  “What might help me is for you to get under the table and suck me off.”

  Some of the egg mixture fell out of my mouth. “You’re so incurably romantic.”

  “Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  I put down my fork and swallowed, allowing for dramatic pause, and kept my poker face.

  “I have cancer, Eric. I was out of town recuperating, and I’m leaving tonight to recuperate some more.”

  “What?”

  * * *

  The story, or parts of it, came tumbling out. Eric’s jaw dropped lower and lower, as if he wasn’t sure if this was maybe a lie. I dismissed the illness as an inconvenience—the cancer was very small and totally contained in the prostate, though this was yet to be determined. We didn’t discuss the catheter, the scar, or the Defendor, which I could feel getting heavier.

  He wanted his blow job, and in return I’d get the twenty-three tabs of Tylenol with codeine he’d stolen from his cleaning lady. We did it in the dingy men’s room in back. I got out of pulling my pants down by saying I was in a hurry to catch the plane back to Palm Springs and didn’t want my scar to be exposed to cold air, which made sense in some medieval, airborne-germ-theory sort of way, and which Eric bought.

  Kneeling on the scuffed, red concrete floor, I sucked his cock and thought there were probably easier ways to get good drugs but few more enjoyable. It was over quick, undoubtedly some combination of my prowess at such things and his horniness. He pulled me up off the floor and looked into my eyes.

  “You OK?” he said, a level of concern in his voice I hadn’t heard before.

  I zipped up his jeans and fastened his belt for him. “It just hurts a little,” I said, lightly rubbing my stomach. Eric fished the baggie of pills out of a back pocket and held them out to me. He pulled back when I reached for them.

  “What?” I sighed.

  “You can have them when you show me the scar.”

  I really wanted those pills; besides—the clock was ticking. I pulled up my sweater and pushed down the waistband on my jeans about an inch. The top half of the purplish scab was visible, along with the staple marks, tiny little vampire bites in a nice vertical row, disappearing into the nether regions.

  Eric’s big brown Latin eyes widened like I’d never seen before.

  * * *

  The good weather must’ve been just a fluke, as it started raining in the taxi back to SFO. I hadn’t said anything at all to Jake. Guilty, guilty, guilty. I made a cursory attempt, walking up the back stairs, knocking three times lightly on his door, but I’d hoped—and was right—that he was working. Maybe it was the Defendors—maybe it was more—but I couldn’t handle him today.

  That first twenty-four hours post-catheter I changed Defendors five times. The drip must’ve been constant, though I couldn’t really feel it, realizing only when I felt heaviness in the pad or a sudden cold dampness on my thigh. The front of my black pants were soaking wet by the time I shoved the last Defendor into my briefs at the Palm Springs airport men’s room when we landed.

  One bright window in all this was that, finally, I could try out Arabia Lanai’s Jacuzzi. It wouldn’t matter if I leaked into the swirling waters because they were loaded with chemicals to prevent Grandma and Grandpa from getting sick when young children did the same thing.

  As usual, the courtyard was empty. The desert air stung cold, as the steam rose up into the blackness. I sank down into the water, inhaling deeply as the first exquisite flush of heat enveloped me up to my chin. There was that sense of liberation that comes only when tickling bubbles race through one’s legs and into the most private crevices, now unencumbered with tubing.

  The black sky was picture framed by the tall palms. Through the steam the stars jockeyed for their customary show. My body relaxed into the moment of the wet heat; then my legs and arms floated freely. I tilted my neck back onto the rim of the pool to anchor me, and closed my eyes.

  The bubbles gurgled while a breeze picked up. I could taste the chlorine in the tub and still got a whiff of the Confederate jasmine that overgrew the adjacent walkway.

  It was almost imperceptible at first, but from somewhere close behind me came the familiar clickety-clack of paws on polished tile.

  I smelled dog.

  Feeling the hairs on the back of my neck stand u
p even though they were soaked, I turned around with a sudden splash and saw Connie sitting there, inches from the water, inches from my face. Her tongue hung out happily, her tail brushing slowly back and forth across the pavers, scattering a few leaves.

  “You didn’t ever invite me down here, so, how come?” a man said from somewhere out in the dark.

  Connie turned her head to the voice. So did I. My old friend Mark appeared through a steam cloud, sitting on a stone bench that lined the walkway.

  The apparition-like quality of my view was entirely appropriate, since Mark had died the year before last. He’d hung on fiercely to watch the clocks turn over to 2000—then he’d bought it. He’d been a bag of bones, a skeleton inching down the street, the result of a decade of neuropathy in his feet. However, he never lost his impish grin or his incisive New York City wit, though close to the end it had trouble making its way out of his increasingly useless body.

  Mark looked like he’d gained a few pounds in death. Good thing. His hair, which always appeared to be a different shade of brown or red, had turned thick and silver, and it glowed like a old-style disco ball.

  “What are you doing with my dog?” seemed the most appropriate thing to say.

  Hard to believe I was still jealous of Connie’s affections. Hell, she was long dead, just like my friends that kept showing up—Bernard at the river, Wayne in the hospital, now Mark here in Palm Springs.

  “She hangs around sometimes,” he said. This made perfect sense, a quite reasonable response. If Connie had to be dead, I liked it better that she hung with friends rather than strangers.

  “Answer my question. You don’t get off so easy by changing the subject,” he continued.

  This was precisely the scenario I’d feared when Jake left to go back home.

  “Help! Help me! There’s a burglar, a thief!” I shouted, my voice struggling to override the Jacuzzi’s motor hum. Connie hid behind Mark’s legs.

  All the darkened windows around me stayed that way. If anyone heard, they weren’t coming.

  “Are you afraid? Why, Ben?”

  Really. I just wanted an explanation.

  Mark rose a few inches off the bench, reinforcing the fact that he was floating. “So many things we could have done; we only needed to say yes to possibilities. I don’t know why we always said no,” he said.

  Connie pissed me off by looking at me through Mark’s feet, which were now off the ground as much as his ass was off the seat. Goddamn dog; you feed them and water them and then this…

  “Looks like that small detail didn’t stop you. Why are you here?” I said.

  A toothy smile beamed through the steam. “You were thinking about me, so here I am.”

  Had I been thinking of him, specifically? My dead sometimes whirled around me on what seemed to be a continual basis, that ethereal merry-go-round, sometimes individual faces visible, most times just a vague sense of longing.

  “I have places; I have recommendations for Sydney.”

  * * *

  Before he and Connie vanished, Mark told me about Den’s Delight, a sex club up in Kings Cross, and several restaurants in Sydney’s gay area of Darlinghurst he’d frequented on one of his around-the-world jaunts several years before. When he’d been diagnosed with the plague in 1987, he’d cashed out, took the inheritance and the insurance money and flipped off his everyday world. If he was going to die soon, he’d see the world and to this very posthumous day he insisted he’d been to every country on the planet except Iran and Iraq (“they were at war with each other when I was in that area”).

  He didn’t die right away and thus remade his life into that of world traveler, photographer, journalist. How he knew I was going to Sydney didn’t occur to me, but, then, ghosts would know these things. The wind kicked up and seemed to quickly and appropriately blow the spirits away.

  I sat back in the water and tried to remember ghostly details—not so easy since I was now high on Eric’s stolen codeine.

  Seeing the ghosts of my dead friends hadn’t been especially scary—despite my recent outburst—and didn’t seem terribly odd at the time. In fact, the visits were rather pleasant—Wayne’s in particular.

  14

  None of that otherworldly material seemed to matter much as my jet slowly descended into Sydney. The festival had sent me packets of instructions, which I didn’t bother to read until we taxied up to the gate. Hell for the Holidays would have two screenings, the premiere and then one day-time catch-up viewing. I had tickets to parties and an admonition in bold capital letters to call “Anna, publicity coordinator,” as soon as possible after arriving at the hotel.

  I was to be met by a volunteer driver, and sure enough, a short but not altogether unpleasant young man in brown-framed glasses held up a sign with my name on it as I emerged from passport control.

  Oliver was from New Zealand, he said, with what I took to be a sniff. Interesting. I wondered whether his slim nerd silhouette, topped in a short-sleeved shirt with pocket protector, disguised an amazingly etched physique—

  “If you two don’t look like fag filmmakers, then I don’t know!” The shrill interruption came out of the crowd and belonged to a grinning young man, about thirty, with dark brown hair and an ocean of shiny white teeth.

  Oliver laughed. “This one’s the movie guy, a neighbor of yours to the south, I think,” he said, indicating me. “Ben Schmidt, this is Christian Banner from Saskatoon. He’s in the festival, too.”

  I shook Christian’s hand. He was a couple of inches taller than me with a firm grip and confidence right out of Dale Carnegie, gay version of. Sexy, but not intimidating, more on the order of “Come with me; I will show you the time of your life.”

  “I made a feature for $243.57,” he said, “and I mean Canadian.”

  “Wow,” was all that came out after my thirteen-hour flight from L.A. Christian absolutely glowed. Clearly, no acknowledgment of mortality had ever crept up behind his smooth brow.

  Two-hundred forty-three dollars? I wasn’t sure we’d have been able to feed anyone for a half day’s shoot on Hell for the Holidays for that amount.

  I didn’t believe a word he said.

  “Crime Brothers. You’ll see it in the festival.”

  Christian chattered nonstop all the way into Sydney in Oliver’s car. We learned, among other things, that he’d been voted “most talented emerging gay or lesbian filmmaker in Western Canada” by a film festival panel in Whistler; that he was a top (“most guys can just tell, but I like to get it out there right away”); and that he was planning to solicit donations for his next film project from among everyone he met while in Australia, including us.

  Thankfully, Oliver dropped Christian off first, at his homestay in the Woolloomooloo neighborhood overlooking Sydney harbor.

  After he left, I’d confided my cancer story to Oliver. Maybe the jet lag had me craving sympathy. He seemed to be surprised that I’d made the trip and was in such good shape so soon after the operation. I also sensed he felt less secure about a totally positive outcome.

  Whatever; it did get me help with my luggage. The Mansfield Hotel stood atop a hill overlooking the Darlinghurst area to the south. The weather had turned hot and somewhat humid, a reminder that February was the middle of summer in Australia. The premiere of Hell for the Holidays was later that night, so there were a few hours to rest, acclimate myself somewhat, and of course, call “Anna, publicity coordinator,” who’d left four messages at the hotel desk.

  * * *

  Anna had booked a radio interview with a station in suburban Bal-main. It was scheduled for early the next day at whatever constituted Aussie drive time; she said she’d “fetch” me at six a.m. There’d be a couple of other American filmmakers there, too. And, not surprisingly, that “super guy, that Christian Banner.”

  I left to look for the Trevor Theater, over on Oxford Road. Overdressed and sweating like a frustrated tourist on a scavenger hunt, I found my way down the hill in blazing sunshine to what
was the main drag of Sydney’s gay area.

  Super. My long-awaited opportunity to meet sexy Australian men and I’d be standing up in front of a room, hopefully full of them, wearing what was essentially a diaper under my trousers.

  I walked up and down Oxford with my map, first one side then the other, looking for building numbers, and not finding the Trevor or any other theater. Perhaps I’d turned the wrong way at the bottom of the hill. I was about to retrace my steps and head downtown when my phone rang.

  Jason. Had to give him credit; he hadn’t been calling me excessively during this operation and rehabilitation period. In fact, he hadn’t called me at all. I didn’t tell anyone from Safe Harbor about the Oz trip, so…this would be a surprise.

  “Jason.” Direct and articulate, as if I’d just been responding to what were undoubtedly hundreds of e-mails in my in-box. In reality, I watched a pair of big white cockatoos dart from tree to luxuriant tree on a residential block off Oxford.

  “Ben, hey Ben, how are you?” he said.

  “I’m good—it’s great to hear a friendly voice.” I did the math—it was about five p.m. yesterday in San Francisco.

  “Is it warm there in Palm Springs?” He typed furiously as we spoke, always the multitasker.

  “Actually, it is rather warm. I’m in just a short-sleeved shirt.”

  “Hate to bother you. I know we weren’t supposed to call you unless it was an emergency.” He paused. I sat on a bus bench that conveniently appeared, glancing up to make sure those birds were not about to shit on me.

  “Yes, well, it’s OK—”

  “Paul’s been in Tony’s office quite a bit, I mean, a lot, ever since we got back from CES,” he said.

  Shit. My heart began to pound.

  “Kelly was talking to Kristin, they’ve been hanging out, kind of weird, but I guess they buried the hatchet or something—”

  “Do you know what Tony and Paul have been talking about?”

  Jason sounded irritated. “Yeah, well, that’s what I was getting to, dude.”

  A Sydney city bus stopped for me. The door opened and the driver looked down at me holding the phone to my ear. “No, thank you,” I said, and waved him on.