Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  “Aren’t rose hips, vitamin C?” asked Earl.

  “Yes, a great curative. Like me. Sometimes.” Rose Hips looked into Earl’s mouth, took his pulse. “Have you been to the doctor, Earl?”

  “No.”

  “I understand. I hate doctors, too. That’s why I became one, to get my own back, and teach the Surgeon General how to fuck!” Earl laughed a little. “But Earl, I think we have to get you to a hospital …”

  “No!” Earl cried out, “then my folks’ll find out …”

  Leatherette and I exchanged a look, guessing that Earl’s folks had thrown him out.

  “Earl, listen to me …” began Rose Hips, but Earl was starting to get up. This was difficult for him but he worked at it fiercely. Rose Hips held on to him. Another crowd had gathered. A cab screamed to the curb, and La Pincushionova leaped out. She was dressed in a long unflattering gown, with her makeup misapplied and smudged. Earl gasped when he saw her. She probably looked like Death to him. He weakened and lay back down. Rose Hips caught and held him.

  “Did you bribe that cop, Leatherette?” demanded La Pincushionova. “I saw it a block away, and tried to get your attention but the traffic just wouldn’t move!”

  “She make me honk,” complained the cab driver, an Iranian, leaning out of the passenger side of his cab, and screaming, “I could have got the citation!”

  “Oh, shut up, you crybaby!” she screamed back, then turned to Rose Hips and pointed to Earl, “Is he sick?” When Rose Hips nodded, she asked, “Where can we take him?”

  “They’ll do me a favor at Saint Vincent’s.”

  “No!” cried Earl.

  “He’s afraid,” Rose Hips said to La Pincushionova. “His parents …”

  “Should we try for an ambulance, or can we use the cab?”

  “Ambulance crews have been refusing to take cases like this … ,” said Rose Hips. La Pincushionova’s eyes widened. Rose Hips continued, “In any case, we should try to get him there as fast as we can.”

  “That’s the cab!”

  “He sick, he sick, you no use my cab. He sick.”

  La Pincushionova drew herself up and said menacingly: “If you give us any trouble, my husband here,” she grabbed Rose Hips, “will grind his golden spurs into your face!” La Pincushionova grabbed the door handle, making it clear she wouldn’t let go if the cabbie tried to drive off. The cabbie looked Rose Hips over. He was at least six three, and very muscular. “But,” said La Pincushionova seductively, “if you take the kid, I’ll double the fare.”

  “Hurry, make hurry,” snapped the cab driver, looking nervously in his rearview mirror.

  It was evening now. The lights of oncoming cars cast an eerie glow over us. Earl tried to get up again. “Please, I’m sorry, I can’t go to a hospital.” He sobbed, and then, losing his strength, vomited again. There was a terrible smell about him. Leatherette and I started away from him, instinctively. La Pincushionova took Earl’s head in her hands firmly and held it as he threw up. The cabbie moaned something in Parsi. La Pincushionova glanced at him to shut up. Rose Hips got up and opened the back door of the cab.

  La Pincushionova spoke firmly to Earl: “Look, my parents hate me too. They disowned me, you know, when I was about your age.” Calmly, she took Kleenex from her purse and started wiping his face. “We’re outcasts, you and me, and they like it best when we suffer like you’re suffering now. They want you to think there’s nobody for you.” He had stopped heaving. She rested his head on her breast and stroked him. Rose Hips gestured at her to hurry. She turned all her attention on Earl. She was a small woman but seemed hard and firm as a rock. “But you aren’t alone. You have friends here. We’ll help you. I’m sure we can, between us. And you’ll feel a lot better than you’re feeling now, cleaner and safer. Even if that’s the best we can do, that’s a lot. Nobody’s going to scare you or make fun of you while we’re here. Now, come on, let us lift you into the cab. You hold on to me and squeeze when you need to, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  We got him into the cab’s backseat. There was only room for Earl and La Pincushionova. Rose Hips got into the front. The cabbie started to honk his horn again and soon they sped off. The people who had been watching the show walked away, many shaking their heads disapprovingly. Leatherette turned to me: “A trick?”

  “No. I’ve only spoken to him a few times. I guess I’ll go over to Saint Vincent’s and see what I can do.”

  “I want to go to the rally. Call me later if you need to.” “Thanks.”

  He started down the street and I crossed to walk to the hospital. Suddenly, I heard: “Girl! Hey, girl?!” It was Leatherette, screaming at me, and literally stopping traffic. “Just remember, girl, you owe me a twenty!”

  EARL DIED EVENTUALLY, OF COURSE. My pianist friend also died, though he held on much longer than I would have thought possible. We never spoke again.

  La Pincushionova also died. Sometime after the march, those violet marks spread over her legs. This was just before the HIV test, so we hoped against hope it was some eccentric manifestation of inner oddity. But it was AIDS.

  La Golgotha, Leatherette, the failing Pincushionova and I went to Leonie Rysanek’s Gala at the Met. We sneaked in for old time’s sake, and we shared a joint right before it started. “Does anyone die tonight?” she asked, inhaling very cautiously, and repressing a cough.

  “No,” I answered, “it’s just act two of Parsifal, and act one of Walküre.”

  “What a pity! Leonie’s so good at death scenes.” She exhaled, which triggered a noisy spasm—the wages of dope.

  She asked me to stand with her in the Dress Circle where her coughing would disturb people less.

  Leatherette was with one of his security guards, who was trying to get culture; they stole seats in the Orchestra. La Golgotha, who loved La Rysanek so much he sometimes confused himself with her, was sitting as close as possible, in ecstasy.

  La Pincushionova got through the second act of Parsifal despite her cough. During the first act of Walküre the cough was replaced by a horrible wheezing.

  I was concerned for her: “La Pincushionova, I think we should leave.”

  “No not until the end.”

  The last third of the act came. Sieglinde emerged from the bedroom, having given her life-denying husband a sleeping potion. She told Siegmund about the sword hidden high in the ash tree by a one-eyed stranger (their father, the orchestra let us know). The doors of the hut flew open and spring flooded the room. Sieglinde—La Rysanek in full cry—had screamed in alarm. And my, how Leonie could scream! But Siegmund told her it was only the spring summoned by their burgeoning love. La Pincushionova was leaning her face into the wall behind the Dress Circle. I suppose the wood was cool. Sieglinde burst into her aria: “You are the Spring,” the song one sings to the young god who against all the odds has brought love into one’s dead life. La Pincushionova slid down the wall as the music mounted in ecstasy. I bent over her, then ran for the house manager, who called an ambulance. Perhaps it was fortunate she never awoke from her coma and died peacefully enough a week later.

  I have to laugh remembering La Pincushionova. I look out through the bars into my garden. Her son plays there. He answers to two names: Ingo, when he’s been good, and “Spawn of Pincushionova,” which Leatherette is apt to thunder, when he’s been bad.

  Leatherette is his guardian, it looks as though an adoption will go through. No one came forth to claim him when his mother died. In fact no living relative of La Pincushionova wanted to acknowledge ever having known her. “Ingo might as well join the holy unwanted,” Leatherette had said, and surprisingly, the foster care people have helped him with every step of the process. When my gargantuan super won the lottery and moved to Westchester with his family, Leatherette moved into his apartment. With Ingo, he needed more space, and more lockable doors. Luckily, my landlady decided we could share the super from next door if we paid more rent.

  As for me, I no longer perform. I teach. I
’m quite a success at it. One of my first pupils, an epicene ephebe of Oriental extraction, has gone on to win numerous competitions. That has resulted in my having a full schedule of naive hopefuls. I do my best to teach them reality but they scoff. They think it was really a lack of talent that sank me, and after all, maybe it was. I had nothing to do with my star pupil’s success, certainly. I couldn’t bear to hear him massacre Schubert and Mozart, his specialties on the contest circuit, so we read through Norma and Carmen, two of many favorite operas, playing my favorite parts over and over, transposed up, transposed down, in thirds, in octaves, a la Liszt, a la Schoenberg, a la Chopin, in variation form, with divine simplicity’. He tells everyone it helped, but maybe this is evidence of the sense of humor I kept expecting to emerge but never saw manifested in our long lessons.

  Leatherette leaves Ingo with me when he is out sneaking into things, or when he is practicing his version of safe sex—videotaping security guards as they strip in his apartment.

  I used to fear children, but I don’t mind Ingo. He’s much like his mother: He’s turning into an ugly little boy; he loves the ballet. He’d much rather watch Leatherette’s pirated ballet videos than “Miami Vice.” He was born HIV positive, but seven years have passed and he is still asymptomatic. Since Ingo’s health has been good, Rose Hips, who recently went skiing with Caballé (he said seeing her toboggan slowly down the beginner’s hill, her hippopotomic bulk swathed in tons of multicolored furs, singing Castillian folk songs, was as close to the beatific vision as he expects to get), is optimistic.

  Neither Leatherette nor I have taken the HIV test. We don’t speak of what it would mean should one of us get the disease. I shouldn’t exaggerate my closeness to Leatherette. He’s an elusive spirit for all his camping. I’m alone, I suppose. There isn’t much of a circle anymore at the opera. There hasn’t been much worth going to recently.

  Though I don’t know how much longer I’ll survive, I have some survivor guilt. I’d like to reach out to La Pincushionova, my pianist friend, Earl, and the many others and tell them … what? Could I have been a better friend to them knowing I’d live a little longer? And would that have made a difference to them, given they were to die? But after all, I tell myself, people die, consciousness ceases, and that’s it. La Pincushionova, and the others, have done nothing different from millions of other humans who died young from inexplicable and cruel diseases. I suppose I’ve learned the only true solidarity humans have is with death.

  Ingo flings himself around the yard, yelling Swan Lake at the top of his lungs. At least he’s imitating the male lead; it would be sad to have another failed ballerina in that family. He sees me looking at him through the bars and suddenly bows elaborately, as he has seen the Bolshoi dancers do in one of Leatherette’s tapes. I clap for him. He leaps to one side, gathers up some roses (the landlady, who tends the garden, will go crazy; luckily she likes and forgives Ingo), and presents himself with them. He accepts them, miming shocked modesty, then, tears flowing, enfolds them with the tenderest vulnerability, and slowly collapses to the ground, as though to a crowd of raving ballet queens screaming themselves hoarse.

  “Bravo, Pincushionov,” I cry, applauding, “bravo!”

  He slams into my apartment, grabs a Diet Pepsi and a Sara Lee mini snack, and runs to the VCR to check some of his moves against the dancers on tape.

  Somehow I don’t want to accept that our only solidarity is with death. Scratch an ex-Catholic … But what can a spinster piano teacher make of it all? Is it that everything is nothing— America, and TV, and opera, and nuclear weapons, and technology, and advanced degrees, and Star Wars (movie and defense initiative), and the musical establishment, and gayness, and beauty, and Madonna (the icon and the Icon), and obesity, and ugliness, and secret longings—is all pointless, because death, smiling and insolent and mysterious death smothers everything? Maybe it’s true, as the dying Pincushionova suggested to me, that some million years ago, alien beings, for a lark, infected a she-ape with a communicable disease called consciousness, and altered her DNA so she could pass it on to her progeny, and laughed and laughed as she went around fornicating. Because they knew the only cure for that terrible disease would be death; and in time, that would be seen as the most dreaded cure in human history.

  Luckily, I am rescued from this unprofitable line of thought by a phone call from La Golgotha. He’s looking for Leatherette. We get off the phone quickly. Fate was kind to La Golgotha. One rainy night while riding his bicycle he got run over by a garbage truck. His face was all mashed up and had to be redone. The trauma killed his appetite. Within a year, he was transformed into an ordinary-looking man with muscles. Corinne was so happy about this, she hired him to run her burgeoning real estate business which has made her a multimillionaire. One can see her on cable around the country, a mannish frau in radiant health, promising you too can get rich, just by sending her a large sum of money.

  In the hospital, La Golgotha tested negative for HIV virus. Leatherette told me he had known all along. For, despite all his queenly grandeur, La Golgotha has had exactly one sexual experience, after which he was so upset he needed shock therapy. His breakdown was due to the terrible guilt nurtured in a sensitive soul by a Catholic education. That’s why Leatherette gave him the name: Golgotha.

  I suppose I should feel happy for La Golgotha, but I no longer feel comfortable with him. Though I’ll love Maria Callas until I die, I preferred him when he looked like Joan Sutherland.

  DANCING ON TISHE B’AV

  Lev Raphael

  BRENDA WAS ALREADY USED TO THE MEN across the chest-high wooden mehitzah separating the men and women, saying they needed one more “person” to make the minyan of ten, while she and sometimes as many as four other women might be there. Like now, suspended in summer boredom, their conversation as heavy with heat as the sluggish flies whispering past in the small gray-walled shul on the musty Jewish Center’s ground floor. Sometimes they all waited half an hour before continuing with services, for a man, any man, to be tenth. It amused her that even the dimmest specimens counted when she didn’t; shabby unshowered men who shouted rather than sang and read Hebrew as if each line were a heat-wavering horizon; yawning men whose great round gasps for air seemed their profoundest prayers; men who sneeringly hissed game scores (and had to be hushed) to show how immune they were to the ark, to anything sacred and Jewish.

  Sometimes, on the other side, her brother Nat corrected them and said, “Man. You mean another man.” And she smiled at his embarrassment for her.

  Though raised Conservative, she had come to like the Orthodox service. Here the purpose was prayer, not socializing, showing off Judaic knowledge, filling the shul, or even getting away from the kids for a morning. People sometimes joked, but the service itself was serious. At the faculty dominated shuls in their university town, the persistent chitchat and laughter were like the desperate assertion of rationality and control in the face of what was mysterious—as if to let go, to be silent and feel, would be an admission of nakedness and shame.

  “Too many Ph.D.’s,” was Nat’s comment, and she, a graduate student in history, had felt accused. A junior, Nat had been attending the Orthodox services for two years, and his commitment was as fierce and sullen as the clutch of a baby’s hand on a stolen toy.

  Nat went out now to practice his Torah portion in another room. Thin, with the twitching walk of a jerky marionette and that pale and narrow slack-mouthed face, he seemed a genetic rebuke to their handsome family, a warning that all gifts were uncertain. As a boy he’d been aloof, watchful, building castles out of blocks and books, pretending to be powerful, a knight. He never cried, never apologized. Spanking him was pointless, scolding absurd. The little mean eyes just shut inside, his face grew stupid and closed.

  “Red tsu a want!” their father would shout in Yiddish: “Talk to a wall!”—uneasily admiring the stubborn ugly boy. The stocky pharmacist would peer down at Nat, hands clenched, as if wishing they were equals and could
fight.

  Nat was sullen and silent until he went into theater in high school, stunning Brenda with his intensity as Tom in The Glass Menagerie, He had felt, to her, more maimed by life than the girl playing Laura. Onstage, his walk, his thin face were larger, more compelling; his authority was beautiful. It was the same here at State the few times he did a show.

  What did their parents think?

  Their mother said, “He takes makeup very well, it doesn’t look like him.”

  His father, when he didn’t fall asleep in the darkened auditorium, smirked, “Sure—here he can act—so what? Try Broadway!”

  They were just as supportive of Nat’s move to Orthodoxy, his father shaking his head: “What I gave him isn’t enough—he has to go to fremde menshen, strangers, to be a Jew.” And their mother wondered if Nat would be allowed to touch any woman he wasn’t married to, and was he going to Israel to throw stones at cars that drove on Saturday?

  How much this affected Nat, Brenda didn’t know. He had always refused to acknowledge successes as well as failures, lived, she thought, in stubborn exile, unreachable, untouched.

  Nat had learned to tie his shoes too early, was too neat and alphabetical in his approach to life. It was as if saying “First things first” and making points in conversation by clutching successive fingers could order and control the world. He read Torah in a dry triumphant chant as if the letters piled around him in tribute. He was a vegetarian and drank only mineral water and herb teas. He ran seven miles a day, even in the winter. He loved men.

  She had known this, known something, for too long. When she was sixteen and Nat eleven she found a folder in his pile of Life. Car & Driver and Reader’s Digest, crammed with pages sliced from magazines, all ads. They were men, whose exquisite eyes and hands and hair, whose tough hard bodies shot one hopeless accusation after another: “You are not beautiful—you never will be.” Nat had distilled this terrible poison from harmless magazines.