Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  I have a photograph of him on the wall, above the desk. Richard is at the beach, covered with baby oil, reading The Magic Mountain. The photo was taken from a skew angle; the camera near ground level, directed at Richard’s torso and the clouds above. Consequently, his visible arm is massive, his chest gigantic (a pun on The Magic Mountain}, and his head unnaturally small in comparison.

  Richard went to the gym five times a week, which left two nights for me. He tended to be a creature of habit, settling into patterns quite easily. Before I met him he would have a cheeseburger and a protein shake for dinner every night. I taught him how to make chicken in a skillet. So he switched to chicken every night. There were periods where he would go to AA meetings for support, sometimes as many as three in a day. The year I met him we went through more therapists than I did boyfriends, which is to say quite a lot.

  Why We Broke Up

  We ended up breaking up because one day at Sheridan Square he pointed at my thickening waist and then at a display for starch blockers at the General Nutrition Center. “That’s it,” I said. “It’s over.”

  We actually broke up because I was compulsive and he was addictive and our relationship had never been properly consummated because he refused to sleep over in my apartment because it was too noisy and threatening in Hell’s Kitchen and too messy in the apartment and he lived in a single-room occupancy residence with a single bed so when I slept over it was on a foam mattress on the floor while he would sleep in the bed which was too tiny to fit both a Sheridan Square Health Club (Exercising and Reducing) Gym Queen who had used steroids a few years ago to gain friends and influence people and me, so the relationship could have been annulled properly had I been Catholic and had papal permission.

  We actually broke up because after spending months anticipating the movie version of Sophie’s Choice Richard made a date to see it with someone from one of his therapy groups who had been telling Richard how wonderful he was whereas I was long past the stage of praise unmitigated with sarcasm and cynicism and I was furious because I had tacitly assumed that we would see it together and my pettiness knows no bounds.

  We actually broke up because I wanted more than two nights a week, maybe, and he expected me to be faithful on two nights a week, maybe, and he was interested in sadomasochism as a purely theatrical act of the imagination (he had joined Amnesty International a few years earlier just so he could read the documented accounts of torture in third world countries, complete with photographs and illustrative diagrams) and I was interested in achieving the type of popularity I had always dreamed of in high school but never imagined would be possibly by (a) going to the gym three or four times a week, (b) buying a pair of contact lenses, and (c) eliminating the word “NO” from my vocabulary.

  We actually broke up because he would lose his erection fucking me if I moved too much and I was tired of playing Nicaraguan corpse to his freedom fighter.

  We actually broke up because I wasn’t supportive enough of him and he wasn’t responsive enough to my needs and he claimed that I was making him feel guilty with my passive aggression and although I denied this on some level I knew that I was eating him alive.

  We actually broke up in December of 1982 because Richard had persistently swollen lymph glands under his arms and in his groin and his doctor had diagnosed him as having lymphadenopathy and he told me that any diminution of his immune system was not contagious, that whatever virus he had been exposed to had long since left his system, after decimating his T cells, so he would pose no risk to me in regards with sex but that I must be absolutely faithful to him for fear of spreading something dire and this was just something that I could not do, TOTALLY, at that stage, with an unconsummated relationship.

  So we broke up three years ago yet remained close friends. Two weeks after we broke up I was mugged on the PATH train coming back from a New Year’s Eve dinner in Jersey City. Then Richard called me, telling me that his mother had died a few days ago, and could I come over? We were drawn together in a hostile world.

  After he told me he was going to move, it felt as though I had just lost a limb. I thought that I was slowly disappearing, and that the next time I tried to look at myself in the mirror, there might not be anything there. I took two deep breaths and swallowed. I paused, and tried to calm myself. I thought slowly, deliberately: I … must… not… get… upset… It … is … im … per … a … tive … that … I … not … get … up … set .. . How can you do this to me, Richard, after all I have done for you? How can you abandon me like this, so easily? And NOT WHEN I HAVE HERPES.

  The Little Disturbances of Man

  For the past several years, it seems that I have turned into a mass of symptoms and inchoate disease. As soon as one minor inconvenience leaves me, it seems another fills its place without a moment’s loss. I tend to think of it as some cosmic law, like the conservation of matter and energy in the universe: the conservation of bacteria, microbes, viruses and disease. In moments of endearment, Richard would call me his walking petri dish.

  I’ve had herpes for about five years, on the lower lip. It tends to recur when my defenses are down, when I am overtired, when my resources are low, when I am overdrawn at the bank, when another prospective boyfriend turns out to be living with his lover of ten years and I call by chance at the incorrect time, when I sit and wait for two hours at the dermatologist’s reading about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rock Hudson in People magazine and after being tortured with WRFM’s mellow music I’m admitted and he scrapes off some tiny warts from my chin (“We won’t need any anesthetic for this,” he says, beaming beneath his headlight, a strap-on light I expect coal miners use) and I rush home afterwards to get stood up for dinner by a friend named Paul who lives down the block whom I haven’t seen for about a year who had called me last week saying that he had been diagnosed with AIDS so how can I possibly be mad at him, or when I sit and wait in expectation of Mister Right to open the door and come into the steam room at the health club and sit across from me and start stroking his dick all the while not letting his eyes leave mine and an hour later, having lost ten pounds in water I manage to pry myself off the bench with the last ounce of strength I have and go back to the office from the gym and eat a tuna salad sandwich in a pita pocket that leaks through the bag because it has too much tahini dressing and sweat through another shirt because my glands have not decided to stop, or when the local from 14th Street turns express one stop before mine and I have to take a local back downtown and it’s midnight and it’s August and the subway is at least twenty degrees warmer than surface and I decide that even though I am dead tired because I only got four hours’ sleep the night before it will be quicker just to walk home from 72nd Street, or when my phone is out of service for an extended period of time (e.g., more than fifteen minutes) or invariably after I have sex with the person who had initially given me herpes.

  Unnatural Acts, Nonstandard Positions

  Herpes is just a minor indisposition, a major irritation; certainly not worthy of a cover in Time magazine, compared to Madonna, I mean. Hardly cause for alarm. The anal warts are, however, a major source of grief and humiliation. Every two or three weeks I am in a nonstandard position on the doctor’s padded table; not lying, not sitting. I can only describe it as follows: imagine that I am wearing suspenders, and a crane has caught them with its hook at the seat or my pants and has lifted me by the ass a foot off the table. My elbows dig in tight to the padding; my hands are clasped behind my head as if I were a hostage in a bank robbery. My shirt is sweated through; my pants are now down to my ankles, my underwear not far behind. Doctor Rotorooter tells amusing jokes (about, for example, why warts are not burned off electrically when they occur in this area; should the patient fart, he might spark an explosion) and he applies the acid with the utmost of care and delicacy. How I appreciate the bedside manner. I close my eyes and think of more pleasant things: favorite dentists and root canal work. Doctor R doesn’t have a particularly busy practice. He waits for f
lu season the way that some people wait for Barney’s annual warehouse sale. After I button up and sit on the most extreme edge of the chair in order to minimize contact, I write him a check and listen to him talking about the anxieties that accompany closing the deal for his co-op in the Village. On the memo section of the check I write “real estate: extortion.”

  Aside from herpes and warts, there’s a host of minor dermatological disasters, including psoriasis, impetigo, dermatitis, seborrhea and dandruff, virtually anything you would care to name that requires sixty dollars for a five-minute visit with a skeletal dermatologist who seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time in Peru and always seems to have a case of the sniffles. All this is minor.

  Except now I am worried that my lymph glands are slightly swollen at the neck. Is this because of the herpes, or did they cause this outbreak? Questions of teleology concern me deeply. Was it the chicken or the egg? How did the first sheep catch the clap, if not from an errant farm boy? Everything, of course, has a reasonable explanation in the end. The recent unexplained weight loss of four or five pounds became an equally mysterious weight gain the next day. This, due to a faulty scale. The purplish bruise on the arm is terrifying until it is realized that that particular arm had been burned on the frying pan during an unsuccessful attempt at chicken Marengo. Again, the temperature reading of 105.5, which caused severe hysteria (shallow breathing, profuse perspiration, and a host of other allied symptoms) last Sunday, turned out to be the thermometer’s only reading. Unlike the stopped clock which is at least accurate twice a day, the broken thermometer has no value whatsoever. And on it goes. The sweating at night: is this pathological or just because of the August humidity?

  Nonetheless my neck aches and it is 95 degrees outside with 200 percent humidity and the office is littered with shrink-wrap covers of the well-bred kitchen gourmet fruit squares, a testament to my willful exertions (they are nigh impossible to remove) and Dr Pepper empties (even my empty calories are directed toward quasi-medicinal sources) and once again I seem to be without prospective boyfriends and the thought of reading through ten pages of fine print personals in search of more prospective boyfriends in the New York Native is not at all appealing and going to a bar would be too depressing and going to the baths is of course out of the question and now my head starts to hurt which could be dehydration from the endless series of carbonated beverages I flood my system with or else could be from the minor case of the runs I’ve had off and on for weeks or months or years and might even be from the herpes which also seems to affect my sinuses and I don’t even know why I should be THINKING about prospective boyfriends considering the state I’m in, I should probably be eating more saltpeter in my diet but the equations are just too complicated or maybe too direct and simple for me to comprehend. Sex equals death. Libido equals Thanatos. They used to be flip sides of the coin, didn’t they?

  I’ve been convinced that I was dying about three times in the past three years. My head was pounding, I was at the gym and I noticed a swelling at the side of my neck. I did my fifty pushups mechanically, thinking, “This is it. The final curtain. The big sleep. The deep six.” How gladly I paid Doctor Rosen (fee due in advance; no checks or credit cards, please) to tell me that the swelling I was feeling was a subcutaneous pimple, a gathering of pus not even a cyst. Sad for me, I never believed in an afterlife. If I ever come back chances are it will be as a strand of worry beads.

  I used to think that VD could be eradicated if everyone on the planet abstained from sex for fourteen days and anyone with symptoms was treated. This includes sheep. You would only have to wait for the period of transmission or detection. As precautionary measure, all sexual contacts of those infected would also be treated. And, just to be safe, all contacts of those contacts. With AIDS, we merely have to extend this fourteen-day period to eight or ten years. This might even do something for the population explosion as a side-effect.

  Love for Lydia

  Well, I’m in my office, in shock, after Richard’s phone call. Ten minutes later Lydia Magnussen, deranged Southern Belle, called me on her WATS line at work.

  “BEEJAY! It’s Lydia!”

  “Oh, uh, hi.”

  “What’s wrong BEEJAY? You don’t seem OVERWHELMINGLY OVERJOYED to hear from me.”

  “Uh, I’m a little low. Richard just called and said he was moving to San Francisco in two days.”

  “Worrying about RICHARD again. I told you that Bernard or Edward would have been much more suitable for you YEARS ago, but DID you LISTEN? Well, I’m REALLY sorry, but I can’t say that I didn’t WARN you. It must be my SEVENTH sense.” Lydia had met Richard on the street in passing a few years ago, and after we broke up, she told me I should have been lovers with Bernard or Edward, two hopelessly charming and irresponsible English boys. One worked at Lloyd’s of London as window dressing; he was devastatingly attractive and utterly bored by the business. The other sold used cars and defrauded credit cards for a living. They would pop in at odd intervals and just as randomly pop out. Lydia is a hopeless Anglophile: anything said with a proper English accent, bracketed by “rathers” and “quites” was smashing in her estimation. I must admit my spine does get goose bumps when I hear an English man being abusive to his boots or companions. Lydia had visited Bernard and his family for two weeks a few years ago. Bernard was a bit resentful that she always seemed to disappear into the ladies’ room when the bill for lunch arrived, but his parents were quite impressed with her, to the point of wanting to adopt her as a daughter-in-law (Bernard was most distressed at the position in which that would place him). I stopped speaking to Edward when the mail that I had said he could have sent to my address turned out to be bills from American Express and I subsequently received several extremely rude telephone calls from credit officials.

  “Gee, I’m sorry,” said Lydia. “Do you want me to send you my recipe for breakfast biscuits, like the ones I made the last time you visited me in Raleigh? God, it seems like it was AGES ago. I remember exactly what you said that morning. You said that those were the best biscuits you had ever eaten in your entire life, you said that you PREFERRED those biscuits to Arlene’s buttermilk donuts in Santa Monica and I know you weren’t just FLATTERING me, I could tell that was the TRUTH, and those donuts used to be your FAVORITE breakfast in the ENTIRE WORLD, although I’ve heard a great deal of positive things about the blueberry muffins they serve at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. I remember what I was wearing. I was wearing that extremely tacky T-shirt that you gave me when I visited LA that said ‘I’m with stupid,’ remember, I made you buy us matching TACKY T’s? Well, would that make you feel any better if I sent you the recipe for those shortening biscuits?”

  I gurgled some reply and listened to Lydia rattle on about the wedding plans (this was her third; for some odd reason or coincidence the husbands were always named Michael; now whenever she meets a man named Michael she gets this odd glint in her eyes, whether or not she is currently between spouses) the utter dearth of high culture in the Low South, the latest Victorian novel she had reread, and other minutiae of la vie quotidienne. I muttered a threat that when the reverend (she always prefers to have a religious ceremony) got up to the question that ends with “or forever hold your peace,” I would snout, “But the bride has syphilis and the groom is a homosexual and the wedding cake isn’t chocolate,” or confess my undying love for the best man and she said so long as I record it for posterity on videotape that’s fine with her.

  She wished me good luck and cheer up and she hung up.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon under the desk doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. Somehow I dragged myself through the rest of the working day. I made seventeen promises I knew I could not or would not fulfill to associates and strangers and bosses and underlings, my legions of serfs (five or six of them, I’m never quite sure: this is one of the keys to my success at the job past my level of incompetency), typed up a few meaningless memos and went home to check the mail and lie down.r />
  Be It Ever so Humble

  The apartment in a moment of whimsy and miscalculated aesthetics is painted two shades of blue: morose and inconsolable. There is no television in the apartment. This, less of a moral stance than a snobbish and elitist affectation, enacted when I realized that more households have television than indoor plumbing. Presently the management has chosen to upgrade the apartment with an intriguing avant-garde design concept: exposed plumbing. There was a leak in the wall. After ripping up a significant portion of the bathroom wall, the super, evidently pleased with the effect he had created, chose to leave the wall in this seemingly unfinished state.

  The ceiling hasn’t collapsed, so I am grateful. Each day I come home and the ceiling is still there I am thankful, remembering the day four years ago when this was not the case. The phone is working, another one of the modem conveniences I do not take for granted. I seem to lose phone service about once every three months. Most recently, after the hurricane, my phone has undergone a curious metamorphosis. On pulse I got nada, but when I switched to tone I heard a tiny voice exhorting me to give my soul to Jesus. It was “The Voice of Prophecy,” a syndicated radio show. In some bizarre fashion my telephone had transformed itself into a radio receiver. I call Richard and arrange to meet him for dinner.

  I look through the mail. Two bills (VISA and Mother Jones), six appeals (Cesar Chavez Farm Workers, Planned Parenthood —I’m already doing my part—Common Cause, League of Women Voters, Gray Panthers, National Gay Task Force, and a raffle for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis), and something from Publishers Clearinghouse.

  I look up. This is one of those apartments that is too cheap to ever leave. I don’t understand where all of the money goes. I mean, pornographic magazines, theater tickets, eating out, long-distance phone calls, Godiva chocolates, and hardcover novels can’t account for it all, can it? I debate on whether to play an album before going down to see Richard. I am pathologically polite at times—too polite to turn off a record before it’s finished for fear of offending the artists. I look at the floor: a sock or two, my dressy shoes, some dirty sneakers, the telephone book, the phone, a book, a magazine (Mother Jones), a shopping bag from D’Agostinos, a pornographic magazine, a bill from VISA, an invitation to a Halloween party, some souvenirs from a trip to the Far East. On the couch is underwear, a New York Native, a Playbill, a small black telephone book, a pair of shorts, a pen, a folder of things to do in New York for visitors, and a sweater. On the desk is a watch, a pair of scissors, a sushi handkerchief, a clock, a lamp that doesn’t work, a typewriter, a glass at the edge of the desk, waiting to be knocked over. I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and see: a dirty mirror losing some of its reflectivity covering a medicine case overflowing with pills and ointments, Band-Aids, adhesive tape, eye drops, a package of Good News blue plastic razors (unopened), dental floss, a rusted pair of scissors for trimming the mustache, shaving cream, nail clippers, mouthwash, a bottle of Eau Sauvage cologne, toothpaste, and my six or seven “guest” toothbrushes.