Bosco wants to go to a concert with Amber and her friends, but I say no, not unless I chaperone. Bosco says please, so I tell him we’ll have to ask his parents. We call, and they say no. He calls my stepmother back and begs her. “Why?” he says. “That’s stupid. But, Mom. But, Mom.” He hangs up the phone.
“Did you just hang up on your mother?”
“Yes.”
We meet the girls at the station, and I find myself wanting to impress them, but I can’t. Young girls talk a lot, act dramatic, dance around and sing inside trains. I feel so old.
The club is near the warehouses and the waterfront. Teenagers are sprawled across the sidewalk. I go inside, sway to the punk music. I want to dance, but I don’t want to be the old dancing guy.
The first band poured motor oil on the floor so people could slide while they listened to the music. I help the clean-up crew mop the mess, and Bosco disappears with some of the girls. When he comes back, he’s smiling, and I think he’s stoned.
“Don’t worry,” Amber says. “We’ll take care of him. You can leave him with us.”
I say no, I’ll stick around. I go to the bar across the street for a drink.
On the way to the train, Bosco walks with his new friend Mickey. It makes me happy to see him bonding. These are good kids, except that they are stoners and two years older than him. They are very kind children, environmentalists. They don’t think guns are cool. And that’s what I want for Bosco, to introduce him to kids who don’t think violence is a good thing. Because his uncle has closets full of guns and swastika tattoos, and his cousin was given a shotgun for his fourteenth birthday. It’s after midnight now, and parents are calling these children, who are out so late, on their cell phones. The children say they are doing fine.
I think of my own mother, who died painfully for five years on the living room couch. She used to pee in a bucket, and I would have to walk her pee to the bathroom and flush it in the toilet. “Give me money,” I would tell her. And she would refuse, so I would yell and scream. And then she would give in, because she was too ill and weak to fight. Then my father stopped giving her money. Sometimes I would yell at her, and other times I would curl up with her, laying my head on the quilted blanket covering her legs. I remember loving her and hating her. I remember how often she cried. Despite what people might say, I don’t think she liked me very much in the end. Children are horrible. Children are monsters.
And yet most people my age have them. I do too, I think. I was a sperm donor for about a year when I was living in my car. I checked the box that said they can look me up when they turn eighteen. Fifteen years from now, I expect to meet the genetic experiment I made at forty-five dollars a toss in the Berkeley clinic.
It’s one in the morning. Bosco says he wants to stay out with Mickey and Amber, and I say OK. I give him forty dollars and tell him to take a cab home.
Back in the apartment I watch the dangerous city from my window. I can see a chocolate factory and Twin Peaks and the lights of the cars driving up the hills. Bosco calls. He’s having a good time. His friends are having dinner in a twenty-four-hour diner. I used to wait tables in a place like that. I know the kind of kids that come in at two in the morning. They have too much freedom. “We’re going to Liz’s place in West Portal,” Bosco tells me.
“No,” I tell him.
“C’mon.”
“Use the money I gave you to get in a cab. It’s time to come home.”
On Bosco’s last night we go to Andrew’s to play cards. First we watch Orgazmo at Ben’s house. Then we walk Valencia to Dolores Park and I point across my adopted city to the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. “You see,” I say, “it’s so much more colorful here than in Chicago.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“There are more parks. Did you know there’s more park per square foot than in any other major city?”
“I’m hungry. When are we going to eat?”
“Did you have fun while you were here?”
“It beats being in school.”
At Andrew’s, there are so many people that we have to split into two games of cards. I tell Bosco I’m going to set a good example for him by not drinking tonight, but I have a few beers anyway. Bosco wants to know if he can drink too, and I tell him he can have a beer if more than half the people in attendance say it’s OK. “This is democracy,” I say. He’s too shy to ask.
Bosco partners with Adam, and I partner with Geoff. He wins every game, and I win every game, and in the end it’s Geoff and I against Adam, my brother, and Tom. The score’s nine to six. Geoff and I are in the barn. “Should I call it?” Bosco asks Adam, and Adam spreads his large hands and says, “Last time you called that you got euchred.”
“I think we should,” Bosco says. He’s got that look in his eye, the look of a gambler. We’re not playing for money, but somewhere inside his head the little synapses are firing. He has a keen understanding of the game for his age, a rational mind, an ability to learn from his mistakes, but he does not have the ability to read other people, and he doesn’t take instruction well. I slow-play a king of trump, and when Geoff takes it with the left bower, I lay down the rest of my cards. Game over.
“That’s a great game,” Bosco says on the way home. “I only lost to you tonight.”
“You’ll never beat me in cards,” I tell him. “It’s your burden to bear.”
…
I wanted to steer my brother in the right direction. Instead we drank and played cards. Sunday morning the streets are still wet.
“Is there anything I can do to convince you to stay?” I ask.
“You’d have to give me more money.”
“You’ve already spent all my money.”
“Oh,” he says. “Thanks.”
When the big red van pulls up, we put his bag in the back. I go to hug and he goes to slap hands, and we end up in this awkward embrace, with our biceps against each other’s necks. “You choked me,” he says, climbing into his seat. I point my index finger at him with my thumb up, as if that were some kind of cool sign. The driver gives me a small nod and closes the door. My little brother looks into his lap, fiddling with his CD Walkman. I step back toward the metal grating of my entryway. The driver smiles at me like everything is going to be OK. Like he knows this is my little brother and he understands my concern and will take good care of him and get him to the airport safely, and once at the airport, the boy will board a plane that will not crash, and he will get home fine. And then Bosco will tell the whole world how cool his big brother is, and his father will leave me messages saying how much better I am at this child-raising thing than he was. And I won’t return his messages, because my father and I still have so many unresolved issues, but I’ll know and he’ll know I’m right and I’ve been right all along. I see all of this in the driver’s calming, placid eyes. But he doesn’t know anything, he’s just a van driver.
—San Francisco, 2003
Hate to Be Alone
On the fourth day we broke up. We had planned this for a while. Not the breakup but the four days. Her husband wanted to spend a week with her over Christmas in Chicago, and so she wanted to spend four days with me when they returned to the Bay Area. That was the deal they worked out.
We had been dating for more than five months, and her marriage was falling apart. Lissette was in an open marriage, where you can see other people, the kind everybody says doesn’t work. Except her husband didn’t see other people. Which was fine, because they had different desires, but then I came along and we fell in love, and in the nine years she’d been with her husband, she had never fallen in love with someone else. Her husband told her he felt ripped off. She told me he hated me, but I didn’t think it was my responsibility. It was the situation that was killing him. I was incidental. Anyway, I had my own problems.
We spent almost the entire four days in bed, and when we broke up there were condoms on the floor, latex gloves covered in lube, a rattan cane flecked with blo
od. There was rope spread under the desk and near the closet and attached to the bed frame. There was a roller box full of clamps and clothespins and collars and wrist cuffs, and a gas mask and leather hood pulled from under the bed, so we had to step over it when we got up to go to the bathroom. There was a strap-on dildo and holster sitting on top of a box of photographs next to the door, a purple silicone butt plug near the radiator.
…
Love is a hard thing to explain. I had successfully not fallen in love so many times that when Lissette told me she was married, I didn’t even flinch. We were in a café, and she was wearing all black. It was the first time we met. She mentioned her husband, said he was away for a couple of days. “I tell him everything,” she said. “I told him we were meeting for coffee.” She wanted to be sure I understood that he was her primary, that I could never be first in her life.
Two and a half weeks later, I was sitting on her kitchen floor while she prepared dinner—slicing eggplants, soaking them in salt, and transferring them to the stove. The flames licked the bottom of the pot, and I was careful not to move. I didn’t want to get in the way. She leaned down and took my face in her hands.
“Look at me,” she said. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” I replied.
The breakup didn’t come out of nowhere. I had lost my mind in the week she was in Chicago. I called friends I hadn’t seen in years just so I could tell them my story: that I was in love with a married woman and I slept with her once a week and the other six nights I slept alone. My thoughts were consumed with her, and I couldn’t do my work. My savings were nearly depleted. I lost my adjunct position at the university when I failed to show up for two classes. I saw her two other days each week in the morning, while her husband was at work, and on days we spent apart, we spoke for an hour on the phone. Sometimes I saw her on the weekend as well and we went dancing and she came back to my house to sleep over, a bonus night. I told my friends I saw her more than her husband did, as if that counted for something.
They said, “Get rid of her.”
I said, “What if it’s me? What if I’m not capable of love?” And what I meant was that I was thirty-four years old, and I had never been in a serious relationship in my entire life. I had never been in love. There was no one in the world who depended on me in any way.
Before we broke up she told me the story of meeting her husband. They had been neighbors. She had a boyfriend and lived with him downstairs, and her would-be husband lived upstairs with his wife. They rarely spoke. She usually spoke with the wife, and he spoke with the boyfriend. But years later he was divorced from his wife, and Lissette was no longer with her boyfriend, and he called and asked, Would she like to go see a band? He’d fathered a child since the last time they had met.
He didn’t try anything that first date, because he’s a gentleman, with his short, dark hair and innocent face. He’s tall and thin, straight-shouldered, and from a good family with a good name. He works in a brokerage, wears a suit to work and a black leather jacket. He asked her on a second date and then asked what her deal was. She explained that she was seeing someone, this guy. But the guy had moved to Seattle. So now they were still together, but she was seeing other people as well. She said she liked seeing other people. She didn’t believe in seeing only one person, in constraining love. She was never going to be monogamous again; she had tried, and it made her unhappy. This was Northern California—a woman’s body was her own, and people didn’t have to abide by the old rules if they didn’t want to. He asked if he could be one of those other people she was seeing, and she said yes, and six months later they were living together and then they were married, and she became a mother to his son.
We had almost broken up on the first day, three days before our breakup. I was badly damaged and trying to hide it when I arrived to pick her up at her house. Why was I so sad? I thought it was the holidays. Christmas is my least favorite day of the year. And my girlfriend had been away with her husband. And we’d had a fight before she left. And my friends were also out of town.
Christmas was over; it was cold, and the streets were wet. It was eight in the morning and I was on time but not early, because her husband left for work at seven thirty and he and I had already run into each other too many times. They owned a small ranch house built in the backyard of a larger house. Their bedroom was dominated by a king-size bed with a short space between two large dressers. Her husband’s laundry sat in a small pile in the corner, and I waited there while Lissette showered.
She had been miserable in Chicago, where the streets were so cold and her feet hurt from walking the city. She said they’d been to the library and the museum, the Art Institute, and Clark and Division. They’d taken a train to Addison and seen Wrigley Field. I’m from Chicago, and I held my tongue because I thought they had missed everything.
Later that day, in my room—which is just a yellow space I rent in someone else’s apartment and is filled with everything I own in the whole world, because I own so little—before the box full of sex toys was all the way out from under the bed and maybe there were just one or two gloves on the floor, she told me she didn’t think it could work. And we broke up. But then she changed her mind. In the morning she broke up with me again, and again changed her mind. We never left the bed.
I told a joke about Arabs sending threatening email in order to get the federal government to come out and dig up their yard for them.
On the third day we didn’t break up. She caned me, then tied me spread-eagle to the bed and got on top of me. “Don’t come,” she said. And then we lay in bed talking about how much we loved each other and the various things we had done together. It was a list that included Nashville and honky-tonk bars and packed lunch on cliffs overlooking San Francisco Bay. We’d been to readings and parades and movies and shopped for organic produce at an Asian grocery in Berkeley. We always held hands. We’d been dancing, and we danced together well. We spent hours on the phone agreeing on the political issues of the day. Beneath it was this: We were sexually compatible. She liked to hurt people, and I liked to be hurt. She liked it when I cried, and I wanted to cry all the time.
She turned me over and tied my arms forward and spread my legs and bound a rope around my ankles and thighs to keep my knees bent and greased her strap-on and slid it inside me. “I’m not going to go easy,” she said. “I want to hear you.”
When we were done, she said, “I did all the things you like today.”
“You did,” I told her. She asked me why I thought she did these things, and I said because she loved me, and I told her I loved her too.
We went out that night. The only time in four days we left the bed. But not for long. We went to a noodle house with small round tables, and I looked at other couples on dates or just eating dinner. Everyone was in pairs; no one was eating alone. There were couples who had just met, trying to impress each other, still hiding themselves, afraid of what the other might think if the other saw them whole. Older couples were there, people who had been together many years and had stopped talking altogether. Each person in each couple had their own unique needs. I wondered what those needs were and if they were being met. A famous analyst was once asked, “What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defenses against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don’t see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts?”
“I’d call that life,” he replied.
From the noodle house we went to a bar. There were people I knew at the bar, and they were playing darts. One of them was moving to France to finish a novel he’d been working on for years. I didn’t want to know about it. I thought the bar was cold and empty and there was too much space.
On the fourth day we broke up for real.
It was 1:40 in the afternoon, and the curtains were open. We could see my neighbor sitting a
t a computer in a square of light on the fourth floor of the apartment building across the street. Lissette asked if I remembered when we first got together, and she told me how she was territorial and jealous, and I had said I could be monogamous with her. She told me she was consumed with jealousy. It wasn’t a matter of me seeing other women; she was burning with the idea that I might desire them, which I didn’t deny. She had never felt this kind of jealousy before.
I told her I didn’t know what I wanted, because I had never been in a relationship like this. I didn’t know what it would do to me. I didn’t say what I thought, which was that this was about other things. That we both wanted our lives back. I wanted to write and she wanted to save her marriage and I wanted to find someone who would love me all the time, even though I doubted I would. Even though I knew that sharing her part-time was more than I would ever get full-time with someone else. We had stopped growing. Everything had stopped.
Our four days were two hours and twenty minutes from ending. She was meeting her husband in Union Square. They were going to go shopping and then maybe see a movie. It was New Year’s Eve tomorrow, and she wanted to get groceries so she could have a traditional New Year’s Day breakfast, with fish and rice, to start the new year correctly with friends. Earlier in our relationship she mentioned that she hoped we could get to where I could come over for New Year’s and be comfortable with her husband and he with me. But we never got to that point. I never fully joined her harem with her husband, who had stayed true to his wife these nine years while she went through a parade of men, looking to see if it was possible to love two men at the same time and finally deciding on me. Maybe it was the sex. She rarely had sex with her husband. He wasn’t into the kinky things we were into. He hadn’t grown up eroticizing his childhood trauma the way I had. And he had married a sadist.
She said she couldn’t do it, and I agreed. Then I waited a heartbeat, and I said, “So we’re breaking up?” And this time I knew it was true because I started to cry and she grabbed me and I buried my face inside her hair.
Sometimes I Think About It Page 3