Marks of Memory

The End of the Year

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?  A smile from a veil?

Do you think you can tell?

Roger Waters, Wish You Were Here

By the time we made it to Washington Square Park, 1993 was already half a day old.  In the sun’s glare, a mirage of brick brownstones bordered the eastern end like red smoke; a few feet away, manic pigeons pecked for food under tree branches sprayed like dull straw against the blue sky.  Lingering traces of the previous night’s New Year’s Eve were rare—maybe the wind swept up the celebratory remnants and whisked them away, leaving only the litter of cigarette butts and a few leaves. 

Wind-blushed faces hurried by in a blur, revved to heightened velocity by the static cold.  From a bench at the park’s southeast corner Dan and I watched boyfriends with girlfriends, couples pushing strollers filled with pastel bundles, dyed rainbow and black-haired grunge artists.  Like ants they crisscrossed and dodged each other on the now-circular, now-straight grid of walkways, shortcuts to somewhere else—a festive New Year’s Day open house, a movie at the Angelica or some family gathering.

The day’s surreal beauty unlocked a memory.   Dan used to go on about retiring to a communal house once he’d reached his doddering years.  The place would have a porch (mandatory), and a field where they’d grow marijuana to beat back all the aches and pains sure to accompany late-life infirmity.  He’d call it The Peak, so named for a Cincinnati house he’d shared with fellow Beta Alpha Gamma brothers George and Rodney after they graduated from DePauw.

All my life I’d been a middle child adrift in a sea of ten siblings, the sixth son of transplanted black Southerners; he was an only child of white privilege whose prevailing self-image was that of an orphan left to rot with alien parents.  The appeal of a home peopled with friends instead of blood relatives made sense and I fell willingly into his dream.  Once we became lovers he expanded the dream of The Peak to include me, in a satirically racist tone: “…of course you’d have to come.  Since you’re younger than us, chances are you’d still be in good shape, and…well, every estate needs a family retainer.”

I wanted to remind him of then, perhaps to distract us from the numbing chill that the Manhattan sun—glorious, fiery, blinding—couldn’t mollify.  Instead I kept those visions of our past to myself, letting them mediate the current view of the man beside me, his large rheumy eyes crowding the other features on his macerated face.  Only 38, he resembled some frightening male dowager, one of those cane-waving characters out of a screwball comedy.  Wheelchair-bound now: AIDS had rendered him ancient, more Citizen Kane, a thousand rosebuds dangling on his pale thin lips.

At 36, I was too young to be a retainer, though a year’s accumulation of sleepless nights and waking preoccupations made me feel three times that.  At least the park’s open burst of sky allowed me to imagine my friend and I were the last two people on earth.  We’d planned our escape the night before—I’d actually heard a rare spark in his voice when I offered to take him out for a stroll in his wheelchair, then we’d spin around the park where we’d have privacy in public. 

            Except for his last trip home from the hospital he hadn’t been out in weeks.  I’d hoped my gift—sunlight and fresh air—would be a distraction from the pills and his loft’s new claustrophobia, thanks to his parent’s arrival at the beginning of December.   Since they arrived, we’d had no alone time.  An outing would give us privacy in public.

He was my family that day, a kinship nearly sixteen years old.  That spring I’d heard his voice calling out my name as if he’d been chasing me for days.   He was a University of Cincinnati grad student who needed another actor for his directing thesis and I was an undergrad star of the theater department, an affirmative action baby with a talent for Shakespeare who’d already begun to work professionally.  Dan made his case—he wanted me to play a Cockney thug in Pinter’s two-hander, The Dumbwaiter—as we stood in front of the department’s bulletin board.  Tall, mustached, a boy-man with shoulder-length chestnut hair dressed in denim cutoffs; below them unfurled long tan legs atop bare feet.  The sight of the last made my brain fuzzy, to the extent that I barely heard a word he said.

At rehearsals he’d sit on the studio’s floor, a gangle of limbs.   I tried not to stare at his high-arches, their dusky insteps ringed pale like question marks.  Once, the other actor was late and Dan told me his life story.  His folks were from Michigan, but he was born in Davenport, Iowa; his father worked for Ralston-Purina and they’d moved around a lot…words, distractions from the provocation of sun-kissed toes and my mounting crush.

The afternoon of our Washington Park outing, Dan’s feet were encased in thick socks and dirty running shoes.  A pair of too-loose jeans and an old coat whose thick tweedy fabric was originally drab brown speckled with white buried the rest of him; I’d had it dyed navy blue a few years before Dan and I broke up.  The frayed wool cuffs reminded me that it was probably older than the two of us combined.  Such coats were popular when we moved to Manhattan, though we were never able to affect that staple of 80’s style, rolled up sleeves, because the one physical trait we shared—long arms—made us look like hicks from Dogpatch.  When he wore it he resembled a very tall crow, an image fostered by the coat’s cloak-like cut, the speed of his walk and his large beaked nose.  The big mystery was how the coat wound up in his possession—had I given it to him or did he appropriate it earlier, one more sartorial theft enacted by couples since the dawn of man?

His mother loathed the coat.  By then I’d grown used to Joyce’s anger, veiled in a politesse cultured in Cincinnati’s ultra-white suburbia.  Such snipes—at the coat and our artistic aspirations to name but a few—were manifestations of the scant power she retained, an impotency exacerbated by New York, its D-Day nostalgia beloved by her husband but scorned by her.  Or feared—in Manhattan she was out of her element, one minute dowdy compared to Dan’s tony female friends, the next, disoriented by the cramped Red Apple on Mercer Street.  She’d been brought low by Dan’s calamity, but also the city’s chaos.  Her superiority to Manhattan—“…a lady turned to me and said she knew I wasn’t from here because I looked so clean”—failed to shield her from a place so unlike her suburban Ohio cul-de-sac.  In Manhattan, there was no controlling anything; the idea of a town that defied order shattered her sanity.  That this unmooring (not Dan's condition) was the true source of her grief, she communicated relentlessly.  I hated, and pitied her for that.

◊

 The year before, Dan had gone to Amsterdam.  He’d rung in 1992 with his best friend Billy, a geology professor who was overseas for a conference.  At night they hit the bars, but Billy’s days were taken up with seminars, leaving Dan to haunt the baths and the various coffee bars where he could buy and smoke grass and hashish without being hassled.   The pictures Billy took showed a tall pale man wearing a rolled blue pakol, and a short green leather jacket more suited for the spring or fall.  No doubt such a garment—tight, cut just so in back to frame the wearer’s buttocks provocatively—made Dan a man magnet in old Amsterdam, much as it had in the States.

          Back in New York, his seductive powers waned as his cracks began to show.  Chemo treatments for the Karposi’s sarcoma on his arms and legs thinned out his hair.  His sensuous gay drawl grew quieter on the dwindling occasions we attended the theater, and when he showed up for dinner at a friend’s, it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to lie down.  Sprawled on our various sofas, he’d sit and smile at jokes as we got him water or another pillow.

          By then I’d grown used to men breaking down at dinnertime.   Too many evenings I’d watched as the sly shock of AIDS plagued intimates and strangers through their appetites.  At one friend’s West Village apartment, a beautiful black man my age had a long violent coughing fit during dessert; by the time he was done his voice had disappeared.  On another night, the evening’s host took a few bites of the delicious stir-fry he’d prepared before returning his fork to the table, tense lips on a pale face beating back nausea.  High drama—and sly comedy, especially in the ways men sought to keep their status private: the discretion award went to a pal who surreptitiously downed his antivirals between bites at an Indian restaurant on East 6^th Street.  I wonder if I was the only one who noticed.

Eating was but one of Dan’s issues.  To combat gastrointestinal parasites, his flagyl treatments continued.  His doctors took him off AZT and put him on DDI, a new antiviral.  Maybe Dan was too overwhelmed by his other symptoms to note the early tingling sensation in his toes and feet; by the time he complained of numbness in his ankles, it was too late.   The experts called it DSP, or distal sensory polyneuropathy: the nerve damage was a notable side effect of both flagyl and DDI.  Those beautiful feet were suddenly useless, and as his long loping stride gave way to a tentative limp, like a colt hobbling on broken glass.  Still, he refused to carry a cane

          That July I’d thrown an afternoon party at our old place.  An hour or so after everyone had arrived, the buzzer rang and over the intercom I heard a breathless, “It’s me.”  I went out to wait in the hall and listened, as the sound of panting preceded his slow crawl up five flights.  His arrivals were always fraught in those days, but that afternoon he appeared on the verge of hysteria, as if he’d escaped a mugging.  Dressed in denim cutoffs, and a sleeveless shirt that revealed a bandage covering a patch of recently lazered KS, he collapsed on the steps as soon as he reached my floor. 

Somehow he’d taken the wrong train from the Village, and had wound up in the Bronx.  He’d managed to double back but getting lost had terrified him.  Perspiration from the day’s humidity darkened the light blue of his shirt.

“You’re fine, now,” I murmured as I stroked his downy head.  He wore his chemo-thinned hair in a buzz cut; the remaining tufts of chestnut shot through with white and gray accentuated a premature impression of old age.

“My feet really hurt so much.  I can’t train it back.”

I took his hand.  “Look, there are a bunch of folks here who’ll be going back downtown.  We’ll get you home, okay?”

I ushered him into the apartment, my hand at his back for subtle support.  He recovered quickly—during the party he sat on the couch, holding court as friends spoiled him with attention, nudging his surrender to the day’s high spirits.

It was the last time I’d see any semblance of the old Dan.   In September, I came down after work to drop off cans of Nutrament.  The high-calorie protein drink was the only food he consistently took by mouth, but he hadn’t the energy to carry groceries.  When I walked through the door I was blindsided by a nauseating stench; as I unpacked his groceries I heard rustling overhead in the loft bed built above his kitchen.  He’d been in bed the whole day.  When I mentioned the smell, he confessed that the drugs were re-arranging his insides so unpredictably that he couldn’t always make it to the bathroom.

The culprits were all lined up on the kitchen counter, brown plastic vials of miracles meant to forestall the virus’ complications: Epogen for his AZT-related anemia; Ganciclovir to head off CMV, an eye infection that could blind him; fluconazole to keep fungal infections in check, and pentamidine to guard against the deadliest threat, PCP—pneumonia. Their side effects only exacerbated the wasting by killing his appetite: even the sight of food made him nauseous.  And on those occasions when he actually desired a meal, the medications made it impossible for normal digestion.  It was no longer a question of whether diarrhea would occur—only when.   He didn’t have any choice but to endure; his “dolls” as he quipped at rare stabs at humor, were keeping him alive.

Pot gave him his only comfort.  He always had a large bag of it around in those days, a supply that rarely ran low since few of our friends smoked anymore.  Sometimes I’d have a toke, but he could keep the bowl lit all night, when he wasn’t chain-smoking menthol Benson and Hedges.  The cigarettes appeared around the time of his diagnosis; though I’d lectured him on the dangers of further weakening his immune system, he refused to stop.

At the beginning of November they installed the Hickman—a port with external catheters that dangled from the center of his chest like stunted tentacles.  In addition to the nurse who came daily to check the IV lines, I scheduled friends to run errands and look in on him—but after he was hospitalized for the second time that month his parents could no longer be left out of the picture.  Helen elected to make the call.  She and Dan had attended DePauw together; after we moved to New York, she became one of our closest friends.   Dan didn’t want them to come, but by then someone had to be with him all the time.

Days before his folks arrived we cleared out his marijuana and cigarettes, his bongs, his porn and other incriminations: he’d warned us that Joyce was a notorious snoop.  I couldn’t imagine the withdrawal from the nicotine and the pot, or that he’d have nothing to take the edge off while the pharmaceuticals turned him inside out.   Some friends we were: to me, taking away his only means of escape was the ultimate cruelty.

1992 was one of the busiest years of my performing life.  Soon after Dan’s Amsterdam trip I was hired for my first Broadway workshop: ‘39 was a show built on the songs of Harold Arlen.  Rocco Landesman was producing; The Secret Garden’s Susan H. Schulman helmed a cast that included the great Philip Bosco, among others.  The achievement belonged dually to Dan and me—this was the reward for the indignity of our salad days and a life consumed by the treadmill of auditions.  Every night I’d call him to share news of the day’s rehearsals and my state of mind, as I reeled between elation and insecurity.

Even in sickness, Dan remained my Svengali.  The idea of my doing a one-person show sprang from his assertion that I’d feel better about the ups and downs of show business if I had some control over some aspect of my performing life.  That May we mounted a show of songs and monologues at Soho Rep where our playwriting workshop was in residence.  Luck intersected with ambition: my musical director got wind of a cancelled booking uptown—on his recommendation I found myself booked at Danny’s Skylight Room on 46^th St, a spot that would become my cabaret home

I was grateful our cabaret work had taken off because it meant evenings at his place.  We talked on the phone all the time, but those conversations were no substitute for a visit where I could see how he was.  I needed reassurance that he was alright; rehearsals were a way for me to check in without being intrusive, or horrors, a mother hen.    We rarely spoke of his illness, probably because Dan had little use for self-pity, or the confessional.  Keeping it hid was his way, but I hoped our nights spent working on patter and songs were at least a distraction from his own preoccupations.

In the two years since Dan and I broke up, every relationship I attempted failed to take hold.  All came stamped with a six-month expiration date, like the one with Tim, a lawyer I’d been seeing until shortly after Dan came back from Amsterdam.  It was only my second dating experience as a gay man.  I was needy, a trait that ill-suited me for the rituals of courtship.  Dating was a consistent disaster: it didn’t work out with the East Village housepainter, the student in Soho or the French shoe designer either.   I had no patience for, nor much knowledge of, the coy games dating required.  Those guys lingered at the starting line; I was already at the altar.

          So I had sex instead.  Before Dan moved to the Village in the winter of 1990, I’d already discovered a Times Square full of peepshows, and while I waited for the real thing I let myself be distracted by a trail of anonymous men.  At the end of a six-month dalliance I’d return to those dark backrooms concealed by absurd beaded curtains, where you’d have to go either upstairs or down: rarely were these sections of the porn shops—with names like the Meat Hook or The Male Box—on the main floor.   On a lunch hour or after work, I’d wander over to 42^nd Street for the hope of a caress through a clear Plexiglas partition raised waist high to create a glory hole large enough for a penis, or if I was lucky, an arm or a face.  There I could kiss a stranger, or have him hold my hand while his mouth engulfed my cock.  No games here: eye contact and a nod of consent made such fleeting intimacies happen.  Sometimes I meet guys who wanted to see me again, but neither of us ever had an expectation we’d progress beyond fuck buddies.

Maybe that was all I’d been capable of.   There I was in my mid-30s, sowing wild oats that’d been bottled up since I first laid eyes on Dan.  That I hadn’t descended to total depravity became evident when I found myself fantasizing a life of domesticity with myriad tricks.  If the guy wore a suit, or showed some depth of character, I immediately imagined what it’d be like to spend evenings with him curled in front of the TV, or mornings when I’d make him breakfast.

It was ridiculous and revelatory: in the guise of lust I’d sought to assuage loneliness.  All the quickie sex juxtaposed with all my pickups, who interspersed with men I “dated” in desperate attempts to fill the gaping void left by Dan.  Such encounters only accelerated as Dan’s condition worsened—grief fucking was what one trick called it, and while he rightly perceived I was mourning the end of my relationship, that stranger couldn’t have known what seemed clear to a doctor friend: after I told him Dan had KS lesions on his biceps, he said it was a sure sign the AIDS had progressed beyond repair. 

Those episodes of sex in back room and strange apartments fed the year’s other addiction: habitual HIV testing.  My first had been in early 1991, weeks after Dan told me his status.  His assurance that he’d been faithful seemed unrealistic given the speed with which he’d gone from positive status to full-blown AIDS.  But he was what the experts called a rapid progressor, one of many who defied the 10-year incubation theory; for reasons unknown their immune systems cowered in the virus’ presence.  Rapid progressors weren’t the norm, but their numbers were growing as the virus mutated faster than science’s ability to track or contain it.

I tested negative.  The results were the same six months after that, but I kept going back.   Sometimes it was the hysterical fear that I’d slipped during an encounter, but the underlining reason was the belief that Dan and I were destined to walk the same path.  I met a lot of guys who felt certain that inevitably they’d go the way of their friends and ex-lovers.  Luck spared us, we reasoned; dumb luck seized our cronies.  Guilt on top of grief—it gnawed and churned, keeping me up most nights—and the only remedy was the sound of those health department counselors cooing, “you’re negative.”  Their reassurances lasted about as long as my relationships.   Within months my dread would re-surface and I’d call for another test.

◊

Like a mother—I imagined I knew what it was to be Joyce, wondering if your actions were the wrong ones, if your mistakes made him worse, not better.  Remembering his blue wool coat was unlined added one more notch to my tally of lapses though last fall’s was the worst; after an early evening appointment at Columbia-Presbyterian, he asked if he could crash overnight at my apartment—our old place.     Over dinner he regaled me with his medical mishaps.  At the hospital drinking the flagyl made him gag, an embarrassment because the doctor was cute.  Getting a cab was easy, but as he slowly climbed the stairs to the apartment a neighborhood stared at him, perhaps mistaking his fractured walk for drunkiness.

Pushing around his pasta and zucchini, he’d asked a question that caught me off guard: “So, are you dating anyone?”  The leer in his voice was unmistakable: it never occurred to me to ask about his love life, and I tried to remember how often I’d seen this teasing Dan, someone who could talk openly about sex or drop bits of provocation for shock value.  Despite the virus coursing through his body, he was still a sexual being, something I hadn’t allowed as a possibility.  I realized his curiosity was an attempt to re-cast our relationship as something more casual, more comrades than ex-lovers.  I couldn’t make the leap: call it shyness or shame, but my myriad pickups or the wasted hours I’d spent trolling for sex was the last thing I wanted to share.   I didn’t want to discuss the times I’d been stood up, the guys who failed to return my calls after a single date or lonesome Sunday afternoons spent roaming the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Such confessions would surely invite his pity; I was too proud to reveal this particular failure.  So I lied, ending the conversation with a quip: “Yeah, there’s someone but it’s too early to bring him home to Mother.”

Hours after we’d gone to bed, he called out from the other room.  I walked in to find his teeth chattering, eyes wild.  I put on the kettle and grabbed another blanket from his old closet.  For a while we sat there silently drinking peppermint tea.  An eternity passed before he felt warm enough to fall asleep.  As the clanging steam pipes signaled morning, I kissed his balding buzz cut goodnight.

When I left for the day, he was still asleep.  Later he called me at work to say he’d had an accident; that evening I came home to an apartment reeking of the odor I recognized from his loft, a smell no amount of ammonia or bleach seemed to expunge.  Scrubbing the hallway floor, delayed clarity trumped the nauseous odor of diarrhea.  My body heat would have warmed him quicker than the tea.  I dredged soiled sheets in the bathtub, and kicked myself for freezing in the headlights of his illness. I should have gotten into bed with him last night.  Stupid fear had shut down my brain and rendered me useless.

I learned the mechanics of his mediport, a contraption best described as a computerized IV pole.  From it hung plastic kidney shaped bags filled with milky emulsions—the doctors called them infusions, essential nutrients that kept him alive once he lost his willingness to eat.   Someone else besides him had to know the mechanics of hooking the bag to the machine, but also how to maintain his Hickman.  His Asian nurse cautioned me on the dangers of infection, and how it was essential to flush the valves with clot-preventing heparin.

So much to remember: what if I forgot to clean the sharp before inserting it into the lumen?  What if the heparin didn’t work?  What if I couldn’t turn off the stupid admonishing alarm that signaled the machine’s malfunction?   During hospital visits it went off constantly, an annoyed high-pitched electronic pulse that only the nurses could silence.  That disembodied squeal invaded my dreams, reverberating like a conscience.

◊

After the park we navigated the cracked, empty sidewalks on Washington Place.  Turning left onto Broadway, a shock of chilly wind made my eyes tear, and Dan muttered an audible “Jesus fuck.”  Soup ‘n’ Burger neon sign beckoned and I remembered thinking how I’d passed it a thousand times but had never gone inside.  The place looked full, but his wheelchair got a waiter’s quick sympathy; having rescued us from the cold, I found myself flushed with an odd, fresh happiness.  I ordered tea for us both, followed by vegetable soup and a cheeseburger we opted to share.  I watched him peck at the soup, but he took no pleasure in the meal, which deflated my hunger. 

When we first met, he’d make a big stink when a hunger headache surfaced, and whatever engaged us at the moment lurched to a halt so he could shove something in his mouth.  He’d eat with his eyes closed, his face radiating comic mock rapture.  So much of his pleasure had been tied to food; our early New York years were marked by stacks of cheap toasted white bread slathered with butter and his favorite dinner of burger and noodles, wolfed down in our kitchen on a folding card table covered with a yellow vinyl cloth.  Cheap and filling was his motto: $1.99 for a six-pack of beer, or macaroni and cheese, 4 boxes for a dollar at the local supermarket.

Over such meals we’d mapped out our lives.  There was that late spring afternoon when, over a Coke and a cheeseburger, he asked if we could be together.  I’d not yet turned 21.  He presented the thing I’d determined was impossible—love—so simply as we sat in the Student Union Food Court surrounded by the din of peers swamped by upcoming finals, baby men and women contemplating summer jobs or hung over after a night spent drinking pitchers at Jefferson Bar.  That was us, zipping from one Cincinnati convenience store to the next in his Ford Pinto, his beloved Pink Floyd blared from the car’s cassette deck—riding the gravy train wailed the car’s speakers, a naïve mantra summoning destiny as we ate Doritos on our way to a movie, or his studio apartment to make love.

Our lives were lived to the tune of an FM Radio, when we weren’t gobbling up the latest original cast albums from a Broadway we hoped one day to take by storm.  We were both singers enthralled by the sound of a beat or the passionate heartbreak of a pop song.  His tastes were myriad and revelatory to someone who’d grown up on R&B and a steady diet of Motown, but in no time he’d turned me on to the virtues of art rock and the Doors.

          He was obsessed with the Floyd.  They took all of his guilty pleasures—heavily orchestrated rock, beautiful songs and vocals that hummed with naked emotion—and served them up in a synthesized wash of aural hallucinations, Valhallian soundscapes careening from dead calm to rampant chaotic opera.  Pot was the perfect drug for the toy sounds of whistles and bells weaving through their outrageous suites—but a melancholy disposition with a dusting of nihilism also helped the appreciation along: that’s where Dan came in, simultaneously mourning for his life and at a remove from it.  He’d found his soundtrack.

At Soup ‘n’ Burger, the music droned imperceptibly.  People murmured; stainless pinged against porcelain plates and coffee cup walls.  Through the diner’s dim glow words eluded the volumes hanging in the air.  The looks we give each other are hoisted by memory.  The waiter breaks the spell—anything else?  We ordered more tea as he broached the subject of his mother’s enduring harangue.  She saw his illness as a personal failing.  Frequently she moaned about the unforgivable way he let her down.  Such moments revealed his transparent hurt, and as I listened I thought how eternal, the way gay men are tyrannized in their yearning for an acceptance that rarely comes.   I get that he’s their big investment, but how exhausting to have all their hopes and dreams pinned on one child.

Did they love him?  I tried to look past his reports of motherly abuse, tried to imagine that she and I felt the same pain.  Maybe her complaining was about denial; how better to forestall the realization that soon she’d lose her only son.  But with so little time left, I failed to understand why she couldn’t leap out of contentiousness into love.  Dan’s tales only confirmed how hard she tried to make his illness about her—she was the one who’d been lied to, she was the one who’d been betrayed. 

Such revelations never lost their ability to stun.  Each time I listened, incredulous that an otherwise intelligent woman couldn’t grasp how quickly time was running out.   I couldn’t help but think of that November evening at his loft, weeks before Joyce and Bill arrived.  By then the place resembled a rather large hospital room: brown prescription vials littered the kitchen counter, while nearby stood a stack of brown boxes.  Some contained clear plastic bags of glucose for his IV; the others were filled with the thick infusions.  A wheelchair lay propped against a wall.

He didn’t want to take his medicine anymore.  It was more than the pain that came with his attempts to swallow—a week earlier he’d moaned, “I feel like one big pill.  I can’t believe this is my life now.  Flush them, Ennis.”  His request terrified me, and for a few minutes I tried everything I could think of to make him rethink his choice but the  look in his eyes—weary, panicked—convinced me he’d had enough.  That night I watched confetti dots of white and color swirl down the drain along with my already fragile hope.  Helping him die meant I was giving up too—or letting him go with grace.

I’d been well rehearsed in saying goodbye.  It began the week after he got his new job when he’d said, “I’m sorry to be leaving you behind.”  I thought he meant at the office where we were both employed at the time, but by then he knew he’d fallen out of love.  The day he left it rained.  When the movers arrived, we hugged, full of promises we’d talk soon, then I practically ran out the door.  When I returned, our empty home was much as it had looked when we moved there six years prior.  He’d left an envelope with my name poised under a lamp, a letter of thanks for our years together, expressing a desire to stay the best of friends, full of memories and long-forgotten details from our earlier life.  I re-arranged what remained and cleaned until midnight.

I snuck a look across the lacquered table.  He caught me with a smile poised as a question, so redolent of Dan from days long gone.  I smiled back, tapping my knees against his under the table.  Outside, the Broadway afternoon faded into early night.  We’d been gone for a while, and though neither of us wanted to leave I could tell he was tired—he had such a short shelf life then—so I asked for the check, unfolded his cumbersome wheelchair and sat back down.  Who are you now, went a lyric from Funny Girl, a show he loved.  His gray-blue orbs, from which I’d learned that a man’s eyes determined whether or not I found him attractive, were dull black holes of fatigue.  The large broken nose and those funny ears showed faint hints of the man I fell in love with at first sight, but his head looked naked without hair, parchment skin revealing contours of bones traced with veins.  I smiled at him again, a tight grimace this side of tears as I realized how much of that 22 year-old boy—the one who ambled barefoot into my life too many springs ago—had vanished.  Who are you now?

◊

Wheeling him down Waverly toward Greene, I’d instinctively glanced up at the row of fire escapes on his building’s façade.  Last summer came crashing back, sunny Saturdays when my long runs from our old place in Harlem Heights would end here; turning off Fifth Avenue, I’d look up to see him propped up against a pillow, his long legs—gams—in triangulated silhouette.  Head covered in a bandana.  Reading, always reading.  I’d let myself in with his key, grab a glass of water and join him, our small talk drifting in and out of conversations wafting up from the street below.

Our first apartment, at 860 Riverside Drive, had a fire escape nestled in the canyon between our building and a smaller one across the way.  It led to the roof and on the hottest days he and I’d climb up and down, carrying drinks, newspapers and games as we relished the breeze that buckled and snapped the canyon’s matrix of clotheslines weighed with diapers, shirts and kitchen towels.  Weekend afternoons sauntered along as I watched him bake his long limbs tawny.

The Peak East.  Within a week of moving in, a cat burglar came down the escape from the roof, slid his knife between the window frames and made off with our television, a few pairs of jeans and my high school class ring.  Fortunately he didn’t get our stash of weed, and after the cops left, we got stupidly high.  A friend gave us an old TV.  We used a wire hanger for an antenna.

Our sink fell off the bathroom wall, flooding our floor and the apartment below.  Another burglary followed: they kicked in the door while he was away and I was at work and took the stereo.  I cut Dan’s hair, and taught him how to iron and sew on buttons; he taught me how to balance a checkbook.  Together we learned to refinish cast-off furniture found in the street.  Both of us became better cooks, thanks to the Sunday Times and the legions of smothering women we met in our building and through temp jobs.  We helped each other with auditions and when acting work came, with lines.  The winter I had two impacted molars extracted, Dan brought me home from Mount Sinai, filled my prescriptions, brought me chocolate milkshakes and held my aching head like a mother.

For the first few years his parents flew him back to Ohio for Christmas, leaving me to an unwelcome Manhattan solitude.   But the year he resolved to forego Cincinnati Christmases forever, we celebrated: after dinner at Luchows on 14^th Street, fueled by champagne and joints, we blew up the entire contents of a few dime store bags of balloons, filling the living room space of our tiny 2½ rooms with orbs of red, blue, orange, yellow, pink and green.  We dropped them one by one out of the window into the canyon; the colored bubbles filled with warmth breath lolled in the cold air before drifting into the pitch-black alley below.

It’s similarly dark when we arrive at his loft.  Joyce waited at the door, her pinched face poised to administer more of her killing love, eyes permanently narrowed in reproach.  Long gone is the woman who, in 1978, packed us bologna and butter sandwiches on white bread for the long drive from Cincinnati to New York, the one who cried as she kissed us goodbye, entrusting her only child to a future she didn’t recognize or understand.  

After I settled Dan on the sofa that now served as his bed, Joyce and Bill retreated to his kitchen, preoccupied by their new obsession: store-bought frozen dinners.  The kitchen was less than 15 feet away so it surprised me when he curled himself into my lap and fell asleep, but it also made sense: he’d grown too tired to care what his folks, or anyone else thought.  A car commercial flickered on the TV as I stroked his soft bony head, its frail wisps of hair still strong with his damp aroma.  Dead to the world, I thought, pondering the truth such an innocent axiom held.  He was Sleeping Beauty, except there’d be no magic kiss to wake him up, sweep away the briars and turn back the clock to the way it was.  He was.

On my way home I walked past the park.  Right before McDougal Alley, amber light welled from the tall windows of a red brick brownstone.   Dreaming of lives beyond those walls made me long for balloons and cheap six-packs, for 2½ rooms and the days before words like positive and T-cells.  I ached for one of those evenings after Dan had finished working on a script, when a mellow tune would swell on the stereo and a tall man with a broken nose and tossed brown hair would pull me into his arms for a slow dance before dinnertime.

It dawned that I should call someone when I got home that night—his friends, spread out far beyond the Hudson surely wondered how he was getting on.   Maybe I could’ve chattered away the lump in my throat.  But as I waited for the A train, I discarded the notion—that night the only voice I craved belonged to a man I knew was already fast asleep on a sofa, his size 9 feet swaddled in thick blue socks. 

Summer 2005

I don’t like change.

Worse than the dawdling crowds of small-tourists jamming every midtown Manhattan corner, this particular eccentricity threatened to topple my sanity.  With the first warm days came palpable shifts in the landscape: tiny disappearances, incremental vanishings welled up like unexpected storms.  Early warnings came in April, when the Plaza announced it would close its doors for renovation.  The hotel told the press to tell us not to cry or mourn; though they planned to convert their magnificent palace to condos, management promised to set aside rooms—the hotel would endure.  Just don’t expect a suite facing the park. 

After that, the closings came fast and furious.  I read that that sleazy marvel of an East Village gay bar, The Cock, had its last call on July 10.  One evening as I raced up Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, I discovered The Big Cup was no more, its circus red storefront deserted like an abandoned parade.  That was the day after I walked past the Howard Johnson’s on 46^th and Broadway only to discover that it too had shuttered its doors, relegated now to the landmark graveyard where it would join the ghosts of the Morosco and the Ritz Theaters, the 43^rd Street Nathan’s and the 42^nd Street Automat. 

Not to mention The Gaiety Male Burlesk Theater.  The strip club butted against HoJo’s rear—HoJo’s back door, chuckled a friend one evening as we passed on the way to the theater.  A dichotomy despite the proximity: filled with rows of red vinyl booths, the restaurant exuded middle-American hominess, a place where you could get a grilled cheese sandwich or a bowl of its renowned tomato soup.  An invitation to sin beckoned just around the corner: the Gaiety’s simple black awning jutted over an always-open door through which a narrow white staircase ascended.  I never took that road, one I imagined led to seedy carnality: some guy in a g-string wriggling for drug money perhaps, or maybe a slumming porn star bending way over to give the audience a wink. 

I’d been inside the Howard Johnson’s maybe once or twice since I moved to New York 26 years ago.  I had a beer at The Cock in the mid-90s, but quickly discovered I wasn’t man enough for the bar culture that defined gay life back then.  The Big Cup was more my speed: under the guise of killing time or reading a book, I could passively, but longingly sneak glances at men who’d sometimes return the favor.  Work called me to the Plaza—a few times a year I’d attend dinners there at the request of my bosses, fundraisers, some of whose clients contracted the hotel’s ballroom for gala $600-a-plate dinners. 

But it was a mid-July stroll down Greenwich Avenue that made me feel how absence unearths vulnerability, how sharply change could wound.  Bouchon was a small, elegant bistro nestled between Charles and Perry Streets.  It wasn’t the only one in Manhattan—something tells me it wasn’t even the best, but none of that mattered.  When a new sign emblazoned with the name JONEZ caught my eye, a weary sadness descended.  The chickens had come home to roost.

Jonathan and I had our first New York date there five years ago.  We’d met at the beginning of a cross-country tour with a renowned downtown performance artist.  I was an understudy with guaranteed performances; he was the troupe’s company manager.  We started out in Pennsylvania, and by the time I left the troupe in Arizona, he and I had come to an…understanding.  Still, we’d decided to put on the brakes until he returned to New York to test whether our feelings for one another were true, or merely a backstage dalliance fueled by the convenience of proximity. 

On the advice of a friend I made a reservation at Bouchon.  Whether it was the atmosphere A sea change occurred that chilly March night as Gallic waiters glid past tables, coiled in a pas de deux for man and tray, and diners slightly older than us murmured in low conspiratorial tones.   Jonathan and I sat there for hours laughing, fawning, flirting, awash in happy discoveries of our likes and dislikes—“I can’t believe you love Joni Mitchell but hate her Mingus album”—while razzing each other for our romantic caution on the road. 

While we were on tour, we had the odd habit of ordering the same dish.  Jonathan and I interpreted this tendency as comic evidence of our compatibility.  Comic because, in the five years we’ve been together, enough of our differences have surfaced to reduce that little dinner trick to a mere fluke.  But that night our telepathy was in sync: we both ordered the monkfish wrapped in bacon served on a bed of endive in a sauce the menu said was red wine, but tasted more of balsamic vinegar.  He was beautiful that night, and so was I—but then, candlelight is a miraculous thing.  Around us, the staff whispered in French accents, witnesses to the moment when two shy men lowered their walls long enough to fall in love.

Bouchon was personal.  Bouchon was evidence.  Stupidly I believed it would always be there; I took for granted that one day we’d go back and relive our singular night.  That thought echoed each time I passed the purple brick building, its bright red awning splashed with jaunty white letters.  Whenever I was on that stretch of Greenwich Avenue I’d peak in the window for a look, hoping to see some other spellbound couple, their heads almost touching, hands clasped under a tiny table—our table—drunk on Pinot Noir and each other.  Sometimes I’d check the menu to see if they still had the monkfish.  I always stopped.  Stopping was essential, something you do when you spot an old friend. 

I let my pal down.  We should have gone back.

I am 49 years old.  My fifties loom large, and in my misguided attempts to take stock I’ve realized that 1) the years ahead will fly as fast as the years I’ve already lived, and 2) the lithe athletic man I once was becomes more of a memory as days go by.  When I make these observations my friends laughingly shrug them off, or ask if I’m depressed.  Out of love—or fear, for to acknowledge the aging of one’s peers is to see yourself in a sobering light, so out come the plaudits: You’re in excellent shape, they say, or the hoary but reliable You don’t look your age at all as if that might silence the reality of diminished energy, the incremental bodily sags or my sense that somehow life’s gotten away from me and there’s no getting it back. 

          Their compliments get contradicted daily.  Mostly by kids, who barrel past me with the obligatory “excuse me, sir.”  “Thank you, sir,” drones the cashier at Duane Reade, her words robotically respectful.  Sir.  Such a damming word, a cruel reminder that I’m almost the age my father was when he had me.  Four siblings followed—I guess that bodes well for my continued virility, though were I to become suddenly single, it’s doubtful the guys who’d turn my head would deign to throw me even a charitable glance.  Goodbye meat market; hello wrinkle room.

          I can’t run anymore, at least not the way I used to.  Regrettably my knees ran out of miles, necessitating meniscus surgery.  These days I’m good for twenty-five minutes on the treadmill at the gym—when I have the time to go.  On the other hand, I can still walk from midtown to the Village in less than 30 minutes, still squawk out a set of pull-ups every time I pass the chin-up bar outside my bathroom door.  I’m still limber enough to do those yoga poses I taught myself too many years ago.  I can still ride my bike to midtown, or even loop the island, as I’m wont to do when the weather and my inclinations collide.

Sometimes my feet hurt, or a mysterious ache emanates from my hip.  I get headaches.  I appear to be drying up from the inside, as evidenced by skin that feels continually parched despite the copious slathering of expensive moisturizers and Vaseline.  My nearsightedness is in a holding pattern, but my ophthalmologist warns me that the era of bifocals is close at hand.  I shudder when Jonathan, in the matter of his folks’ yearly sojourn to Florida, asserts, “old people need to be warm.”  I bury the thought as I burrow under a comforter—never mind that it’s 70°.

This year my stomach decided to go south.  Everything I eat turns to gas, which prompts my doctor to ask, “Have you tried Metamucil?”  She and I turn it over, this new development.  It’s stress, she says, and attributes it to work on top of my graduate school course load.  She says it in such reasonable, conclusive tones that I want to believe her, but long before this talk I’ve had conversations of my own as I lay awake nights listening to a grumbling tummy, imagining everything from ulcers to pancreatic cancer.

          My gray hair bugs me.  I’d been keeping my head on the fuzzy side of shaved for most of the year.  I’m not crazy about the way the gray is coming in, the way it clings to my hairline like soap residue.  The “snow” lives resignedly in my brows, eyelashes and especially my nose hairs, a depressing development requiring frequent trimming.  Ugh, goes my brain on the mornings when the mirror finds me shoving a pair of tiny scissors up my nose to beat back the hedge.  The sages are right: growing old isn’t for sissies or vain, self-absorbed men. 

I’m a database manager for a business that relies on names: everyone from Mr. and Mrs. Fifth Avenue to successful movie stars, masters of the corporate universe, the Astors and the Rockefellers, hot shot technocrats and anyone else that reeks of old and new money.  Our Donor Management System contains over 300,000 entries, and it’s my job to record whatever changes occur, be it new addresses, phone numbers and executive titles—or bankruptcies, divorces and incarcerations. 

          Each day begins with a reading of the New York Times' obituaries.  Checking the paper’s rolls of those who’ve said farewell take the most time; I log anywhere from one or two (a slow week), to upwards of ten dead folks a week.  Every day I type a minimum of 30 names in the search function, not counting those deaths passed on from our crew of phone solicitors, or other websites like cnn.com.  I rarely spot someone I know personally, though any database keeper will confirm that after a while certain names become so familiar that you begin to feel as if you do. 

When noteworthy people die the Gray Lady gives them anywhere from a short column to an entire page, and I learn about people who heretofore were strangers: CEOs, congressmen, doctors, and deposed dictators vie for space alongside the mothers, wives and children of other long deceased luminaries.  The obits alert me to the work of an American painter “widely recognized for his often immense geometric abstractions.”  It’s here I’m told of “a nun who became a lesbian activist and organized the first White House meeting of gay leaders,” or that someone from my Cincinnati hometown was “an ethicist,” one who “took a leading role in formulating mainstream Christianity’s response to modern ethical challenges.”  I read mini-bios of inventors and notorious murderers, wacky socialites from the ‘50s and founders of just about any institution one could imagine.  In these pages, all become famous again, or at least have their fame confirmed—for the last time.

The paid death notices are something else.  These mini-eulogies suck me in like the evening news—where else can one see an In Memoriam dedicated to the lionhearted Richard Plantagenet and the lynched Leo Frank in the space of a week?  Call them paragraphs as tombstones: so-and-so passed on such-and-such a date, leaves behind who-sits, visitation at Frank Campbell, etc.  Here too, are those who’ve achieved a name in life (you can tell the bigwigs by the number of notices they rack up, which by the way, aren’t cheap), but most of the deceased in these snaking columns of fine print are famous to no one but their families and friends. 

Hence, the tributes to the partner in a brokerage firm, whose colleagues “will miss his intelligence, sense of humor and friendship.” Another notice will cite a departed love one “committed to social justice and activism.”  Often, the loved ones of the deceased acknowledge that it’s enough merely to have endured, like one doctor’s widow who lived to be 103: “Mrs. Yang witnessed the 20^th Century almost in its entirely and was personally touched by a number of its most visible events and people.” 

Typical of this section are elegies honoring those whose impressions were made subtly: “She was a devoted, wise, inspirational, loving, treasured wife and mother” who “filled the room with warmth, selfless generosity, good humor and empathic insight.”  Everyday angels: they’re our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers; the guy you met on jury duty; the kid who walked your dog; the women who taught us our multiplication tables in grade school, or the ones who lightly tapped your arm at the supermarket, so’s to draw your attention to the glove you just dropped. 

Always I’m reminded how the mode of departure can define an era—witness the 90’s, and the multitude of men who died of complications from AIDS, or that disease’s coded euphemism: pneumonia.  I don’t see “natural causes” as often as I used to: more commonplace are deaths from heart attack or lung cancer, though in the case of the original bass singer from the Four Tops, the heart attack occurred shortly after the lung cancer, which was discovered during surgery to amputate one of the crooner’s legs.    When Elvis Costello sings, “accidents will happen,” you feel he’s presaged another prevalent form of death: from a fall.  As someone who perpetually trips over invisible obstacles, that one always gets my attention. 

There but for the grace of God go we all, it seems, but while a reader might justifiably shrug off the passing of someone in his eighties or beyond, or the socialite who smoked like a chimney until her last days, who can accept the death of a child from drowning?  The premature victims of airplane and car crash fatalities, or a drive-by shooting?  Anthrax?  Fire?  Suicide? 

          My heart skips a beat when I see someone close to my own age.  My knee-jerk reaction is, he’s too young—a rationale that flies out the window on the days when the deaths in your age range predominate.  They’re my peer group: I know what books they might have read in high school, the TV programs they were addicted to, what they danced to at their prom and their succession of hair and clothing styles.  It’s a moment of reckoning: narrow lies the gap between me and the 103-year old grandmother, and I’m reminded that whatever one’s age, wealth or state of health, all of us are assured of one thing: life will surely end.  One day I'll be crossed off the list, blacked out of someone's phone book, excised from conscious memory.

          “Do you drink?”

          “Yeah, about 1 or 2 a night, mostly wine.”

It was my first appointment with Dr. Regina Lenska, and the interview round, those routine questions covering personal stats, family history and my trail of bodily breakdowns, was nearly over.  When I answered the alcohol query, her sly smile made me feel as if I’d broken the law. 

“Well, you might want to think about cutting back.”  She made a note on her chart.  Dr. Lenska was young, a brunette bob with blue eyes at once coquettish and permanently poised to roll.  She’d come recommended by Dr. Kane, my former GP.  He’d abandoned his practice after succumbing to a debilitating spinal condition. 

Her direct, unhesitating admonishment took me by surprise; silently I calculated she was old enough to be my daughter, if I’d married. 

          “Do you smoke?”

          “Well, yeah, lately.”  ‘Lately’ meant consistently since I’d begun my new career as a grad student.  “Max, two a day—if that.”  It was the truth; I only had two on class days, Monday and Wednesday.  The rest of the week I’d have maybe one at lunch, a breath of smoke before cramming whatever reading there was that week.  This summer I’d cut back to bumming occasionally from a co-worker.

Dr. Lenska shot me a look that said wrong answer.  “You know, the thing is, you’re a little old to be taking it up.  And the wisdom now is it isn’t only about the people who smoke a pack a day; even minimal smoking can do harm.  You have to be careful at your age—find another way to deal with your stress.” 

          My age. Ouch.        

          “Okay, let’s listen to your heart.”   The interview was over.   Taking off my shirt I inwardly pooh-poohed my habit.  I knew it wasn’t good for me, but I grew up in a house where my father smoked a pack a day until his death at 82—not of lung cancer but of old age, to hear my mother tell it.  My years as an amateur distance runner meant morning runs engulfed in clouds of car and bus exhaust on congested Manhattan streets.  It was the same whenever I commuted by bike—if breathing that gunk hadn’t done me in by now, what of a few cigarettes?  Fine, one more year, and I’ll stop.  She tagged my sweaty back and chest with her cold stethoscope; inhaling, expelling, I make that silent promise to quit, though I wondered, once my academic time was up, whether I’d be able.  

          She tested my reflexes, and as my foot jumped, she complemented my shoes, a pair of dress black square-toed lace-ups. 

          “Thanks.  Got ‘em at Daffy’s, the only place I can afford to shop.”

          The blue eyes flashed—retail lust?  “I’ve never been there, but the girls in front keep telling me to go…one of these days...” I relaxed, amused that of all things we’d bond on a point of fashion.

          After the EKG and the drawing of blood, it was time for the prostate exam.  Dr. Lenska requests that I lie down, turn on my side and draw my knees up to my chest.  Fetal, I think, as her gloved wet finger enters, presses the prostrate with a shock, takes a spin before its quick withdrawal.  I can still hear the brusqueness with which Dr. Kane muttered, “wipe yourself,” as if he found the business distasteful.  Dr. Kane always made me bend over the front of the exam table with my forearms resting on the crinkled paper cover, a stance that brought back grade school memories of punishment.  With Dr. Kane, I could never shake the thought that any moment, a wooden paddle might come hurtling through the air to smack my ass.

The pop of latex pulled me out of my head, and I heard Dr. Lenska’s assurance: “…seems pretty normal.”  She left the office so I could get dressed, and as I put on my clothes it dawned on me that no woman had seen me in such a vulnerable position since I was a child.  My mother took the temperature of my young brothers and sisters that way, little bawling creatures consumed by whatever it is that torments babies, passing their unease on to grownups and everyone else in earshot.  At their age, I must have been the victim of similar anal maneuvers. 

Mama believed in suppositories.  They were the cure-all for every child’s malady—though maybe constipation really was the problem.  The glycerin bullets made babies cry harder, an apt reaction to such an invasion.  Then there was that hospital stay when I was 8.  For two weeks I’d lost my ability to walk; the doctors were stymied as to the cause, but I could never forget the afternoon they wheeled me into an examination room and laid me on a table covered with crisp, white sheets.  Soon a male doctor—at the time, probably Dr. Lenska's age, bespectacled and wearing a white cap—put what felt like a refrigerated bedpan under my bottom, and with his gloved finger proceeded to unleash torrents of hard, painful stools. 

Maybe days of immobility had constipated me, or some bright mind deduced that the root of my paralysis lay buried in my rectum.  Throughout I couldn’t stop crying, either from frustration, humiliation or discomfort; all the while, that doctor talked to me—told me how well I was doing, assured me that they’d be finished soon—his words stroked the fear out of me, making me think that somehow he and I were in it together.  

But now I am 49.  My rectum has become the seat of constipation and other, deadlier maladies.  Dr. Lenska reminds me of this when she returns.  “So, in a few days I’ll call you with the results of your PSA, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“Great, thanks.” 

She turned to retrieve the allergy samples she’d promised me earlier.  Free drugs, the adult version of the lollipops we got when we were kids, pacifiers to mitigate the needle’s sting.   

I quipped, “I guess next year will be about the colonoscopy.”  Dr. Lenska rolls her eyes as she hands me a white paper bag.  “Yep, that’ll be quite a way to celebrate your birthday.”

          By late July too many days of heat devoid of rain withered everything in sight.  Small accumulations of amber leaves littered the sidewalks, and as the month limped along the sprinklings mounted and grew alongside street curbs and buildings in the Village, Harlem and along Riverside Drive.  The leaves were dry as parchment; whenever a rare breeze caught them up I heard that strange sad sound like rustling paper.   

          The quiet rasps on cement were out of season, the wrong accompaniment to the salsa and merengue sounds that spilled out of air-conditioned shops down on Broadway, the startling bleat of drive-by boom boxes on our sycamore-lined block, and the tinkly chatter of men—about men, clothes and money—overhead on crowded stretches of Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. 

          That fall was early hit particularly hard on weekend afternoons when I’d visit the Jumel Mansion, two blocks north of my apartment.  I pitied the weekend busloads of German and Italian tourists who invaded my adopted sanctuary for a glimpse of 18^th century antiquity.  The grass was dead, so singed by drought that it had taken on the appearance of burnt hay.  I’d long since said goodbye to the saucer magnolia’s pink moist blossoms that greeted visitors just inside the ground’s gates, but now even its once-fat green leaves hung limp. 

          Just inside the entrance gate to the right, the once-dazzling sunflowers had lost their petals.  What remained were chocolate brown stalks that held up the flower’s black center, an eye once surrounded by plump yellow lashes.  The front lawn’s leafless red oak revealed a bird’s nest.  In fact all the other trees—Siberian elms, Chinese elms, Washington hawthorns, American hollies the honey and black locusts, pin oaks—had suffered similar fates, their branches prematurely naked despite a month of summer still to go.          

          The fallen foliage had the effect of a dropped curtain.  Usually—and this is true of all New York’s great parks—once I crossed the mansion’s threshold, the new vista created the illusion that the city has disappeared.  With the lush foreground dissipated, the surrounding streets and apartment buildings rushed in: from the mansion’s promontory cars and buses were suddenly there, oddly close and invasive as they streaked or crawled along Edgecombe Avenue.  Its verdant trappings gone, the grounds were no longer a refuge, no longer my much-anticipated Oz.

          I wonder what Dan would’ve made of it.  Summer was his season—but since he was Gemini maybe this early turning wouldn’t have fazed him a bit.  In the old days he’d simply wrap a bandana around his head, pull a pair of denim cutoffs over legs that ended somewhere around his earlobes and light up a bowlful of grass.  Then he’d head for the beach, or the next best thing: the roof or the fire escape.  He was obsessed with the sun and abhorred the pale skin I loved, but I had to confess that yep, he looked stunning with a tan.  His was the look of a Seventies archetype—unruly light brown hair topped his six foot-one frame, and that Marlboro Man mustache had made him a weird sister to that era’s print models, and iconic porn stars like Al Parker or Harry Reems. 

          The last summer of his life he was 38 years old.  That August we’d joined the crowds in Tompkins Square Park for Wigstock, the annual drag show.  Men in dresses did nothing for me but I thought an outing would do him good, and it was close to his loft on Waverly Place.  He couldn’t have weathered the crowds alone.  By then his feet were useless; neuropathy had set in, a side effect from the AIDS drug DDI.  His gait mirrored other bodily dilapidations—severe hair and weight loss, and the large splotch of Kaposi’s sarcoma on his right arm.

          He was happy that day, game for an escape from an apartment riddled with IV poles, the ever-growing vials of pills and the stench from his frequent bouts of diarrhea.  The park was teeming with people; by the time we arrived, all the seats had vanished, so I propped him against one of the black wrought-iron gates that snaked throughout the park.  For him especially, I was grateful for the sunny day and the festive atmosphere—the balloons, the beautiful men and multiple Streisands, Judys and Lizas provided just the kind of irreverence we needed. 

          I’d held him up on the pretext of stroking his back.  We’d broken up in 1989; until the disease took over, such intimacy had eluded us.   Our habit had been to be careful with each other as we’d tried to go about our lives: dating other men, pursuing separate interests while often running into each other at the homes of our mutual friends.  But his illness shrunk that peculiar space between us.  Caring for him meant evenings filled with shopping trips for nutritional supplements and cleaning supplies; I took on the task of scrubbing his hardwood floors down with Lysol, and after he’d lost his desire to read the papers, caught him up on real news and shards of gossip.  His loft became the final destination of my weekend runs from our old Harlem apartment.  At last we’d become friends, shored up by our history as lovers.

          At Tompkins Square Park, Dan was good for about two hours.  Then he leaned over and whispered that he didn’t think he’d be able to walk back.  His panicked eyes—hollowed, grayer than their usual blue—made me think he’d had one of his accidents.  Fighting my own fear, I put his arm around my shoulder as we made our way to 7^th Street.  He’d done too much that day; once inside a cab he closed his eyes, and it was then I noticed the pink blush on his forehead.  I hoped he’d catch sight of it the next time he looked in the mirror, the closest he’d get to a tan for the rest of his life.

          I can still see it hovering like a special effect.  Out of nowhere, sometimes in the morning, often in the afternoon, a hummingbird would appear, presaged seconds before by its subtle drumming.  First it’d bob up and down the row of pale violet blue morning glories draped alongside the house before it’d stop to feed, as if suspended by a string.  Bee-like then: its wings barely perceptible, its body dangled like a mouse except for the sharp points of tail and beak at either end.  He (or she) never stayed long despite the abundance of flowers.  Away it’d dart, leaving only the memory of its sound—a faint drone to break the stillness, distract us from the spell cast by whatever we were reading, or the field across the road.

          It was our 4^th summer in Otsego County.  Barbara, Jonathan’s boss, owned this austere 2-story 19^th century farmhouse situated in about an hour south of Cooperstown.  Every since he and I became a couple, a week at Barbara’s became essential, a place we’d go to recover from other vacations, “big trips” to London, Paris, Barcelona, California. 

          At Barbara’s, the most compelling thing was the silence.  Not that it was absolute: the wind in the trees, the call of birds and the occasional car or pickup truck could break it, a reminder of the world beyond the property’s boundaries.  In Fergusonville, NY, there was no chance of being bludgeoned by squealing subway trains, or the strangled war cries of our one-floor-below neighbor Dahlia and her brood whose insistent racket wormed its merciless way into our marrow.

          And then there was the heat of the sun.  At Barbara’s the light was alternately beautiful, blinding and a balm.  When we’d come out mornings, such intensity took a moment’s adjustment—on her tiny strip of front porch we’d sip our first cups of coffee with faces set on squint, worth it for the irresistible rays that bathed our chests, arms and legs after a chilly night.  The sweat oozed like happiness from our foreheads and armpits, drizzled our cotton boxers and the heavy wooden antique chairs, dotted the books, newspapers and magazine clippings we’d lugged up from the city, reading material we could never quite conquer back in the far-away world of Manhattan where work, appointments and the mounting tourist trade threatened our sanity.

          She planned to sell the place.  That this day would come was part of her divorce agreement: once her sons were of college age, the house would be sold, and the money…well I didn’t know all the details.  But I suspect Max’s death played a part.  Her sons had grown up here; the oldest, Max had drowned along with 3 other teenagers a few winters ago in the frigid waters off City Island in the Bronx. 

          The place bulged with mementos—the tire swing dangling from its ancient rope; the dream of a tree house out back; the trampoline.  Mostly there were the photos.  Sprinkled throughout the house, pictures of the young Max peeked from bookshelves, from kitchen nooks and bedroom nightstands.  Ironic that such a bright urchin’s face could cast a pall where gloom seemed inconceivable. The property was built for boys: from the front lawn’s sprawling green to the trail that stretched from the red barn out back up into the hills and woods, how easy to envision the brothers exploring, roaming, rampaging over the generous acres. 

          We made it there twice this summer.  Coming back to New York after the first visit, we actually considered buying it ourselves.  We scheduled another trip up—generous Barbara never required a cent, only a phone call to schedule—discarding plans for a week in Hawaii.  We assessed the commute and our less-than-stellar finances, talked to other homeowners, listened as my pal Helen, warned that we were in a housing bubble and this was the worst time to buy a house, especially one we didn’t’ need. 

Tempting as it was, there were too many strikes against the purchase.  Our conversations took on the sheen of fantasy, as we discussed how we could replace the section of the kitchen’s roof with glass to create a light-filled breakfast nook, or ways to convert the storage barn into a guesthouse.  I told myself that the pictures I maniacally took—of the house and grounds—were for speculative purposes only, rather than attempts to capture every joyous angle, every sprouting wildflower, each bounce of refracted light, the dew, the repose, all the accumulations of joy and love awaiting us every time we pulled onto the tree-shaded path alongside the house.

          The days told all; leisurely mornings divorced from the rest of the world, full of coffee, fresh fruit and sharp green air, and the heat of the sun contrasted with the coolness of the house.  Movement indivisible from sound—crossing in and out of the house signaled by the twang of the screen door, like Dorothy Gale bouncing from black and white to color.    

          Rainy days, or those weighed too heavily with the previous night’s martinis and wine, happily shackled us to the porch.  Most days, we’d get out and tool around in our rental.  We’d hit the mall’s multiplex, where we’d watch movies in almost-empty theatres in the afternoon, finish in time to beat it back home for more lazy reading before cocktails at sunset. 

A trip to Barbara’s was incomplete unless we stopped at the head shop in Oneonta, a claustrophobically dark emporium nestled on a street that passed for the town’s center.  A walk through those doors meant stepping back into the 70s of my youth: incense, bongs, all the grass paraphernalia any pothead could desire, huge machetes and the kind of bizarre weaponry that made you think of Bruce Lee.  J and I’d rifled the racks for the odd jazz or pop classic; next to us stood skateboarders and baby Goths trolling for Megadeth, or cheap heavy-metal picks.

          So many pit stops—the Hannaford supermarket loomed as a distraction; so did the mega Home Depot 5 minutes down the way.  We spent hours at that rat’s nest of a used bookstore housed in a forlorn yellow trainer along Route 9, tumbling through obscure local journals, movie star biographies and comic books bathed in dust and phosphorescent overheads.  Eventually we’d stumble home, but not before swinging by the local barbecue pit for a takeout of baby back ribs or the chicken beef combo, depending on our mood.

          Always back by twilight.  Saranac, our preferred beer, was great at this hour; but a martini with a twist in a wine glass (yep, we were really roughing it) would do just fine.  Not that we needed alcohol: at Barbara’s, the beauty of the hour’s imperceptibly changing sky, the mountains and the pasture sprawled just across the road could make you tipsy.  A deer might venture out of the woods.  Fireflies might prick the air with light.  A lone pickup could suddenly flood the view with its high beams and just as quickly disappear, restoring the dull roar of silence.

The email query from Jonathan came in the afternoon:

E,

Do you know anyone in Seattle who might want to see MM for free?

J 

          “MM” stood for Meredith Monk.  Her performance ensemble, for which Jonathan serves as company manager, had an engagement there that weekend, and when I read his note I thought of Al Gress.  A Google search turned up an Alfred Gress of Lynwood, WA, who’d run a 5K race called the Elephant Stampede in Seattle in September of 1999.  On a website called MaleSurvivor, an Alfred Gress had written a poem in rhymed couplets called Still and Small, a plaintive cry from a child reeling from sexual abuse. 

          We’d met in an acting class in 1981—at HB Studios on Friday nights, we were two of a group of young (and not-so) would-be actors under the tutelage of Elizabeth Dillon, a ghostly pale woman with pinkish blonde hair, tinted glasses and the withering stare of a Nazi commandant.  Through a haze of cigarette smoke, her level gaze sized up our work; afterwards her low alto deconstructed it, lauding us with either compliments—“Do you know how gifted you are?”—or accusations of sloppy preparation that made you feel like a fool without a future.

          Al and I were paired to do a scene—something from Look We’ve Come Through by Hugh Wheeler—and out of that a friendship bloomed.  Soon Dan and I wove him into our circle of old and new friends, and when his girlfriend Juliet came to visit in the summer of 1982, we’d have dinner at each other’s cramped, vermin-plagued apartments.  On our nights out we did things that were either inexpensive or free: we heard the late Ruth Laredo play at Damrosch Park on a stunning, sweltering night surrounded by a crowd held rapt by the damndest bass chords to come from a piano.  At the cinema on 66^th Street where Tower Records now stands, the four of us caught Hitchcock’s newly restored Vertigo, a film neither Al nor Juliet had seen, let alone heard of. 

          On the screen Jimmy Stewart struggled with his Kim Novak obsession and his fear of heights, but I’ll never forget what happened in the audience.  At the film’s climax, Stewart’s character, struggles to climb the tallest staircase in the world, in pursuit of mystery woman Novak.  Whether it was the Bernard Herrmann score, or the mysterious on-screen figure who leapt out of the darkness at the top of the bell tower, we were never able to tell, but the whole thing proved too much for Juliet: she let out an ear-piercing scream that made the entire audience jump, then titter with relief.  Hitchcock would have relished that moment. 

          When they moved back to Washington State, we wrote for a short while.  I remember Juliet had a child but I never saw a picture.    Kathleen, a musician friend of Al’s, lived nearby on Riverside Drive; I’d run into her at our shared subway stop, but she never heard from them either.       

My only memento of that time was a photo of Al, his friend Kathleen and me.  In the spring of 1982 they’d come to see me play Tybalt in a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Lion on Theatre Row.  After the show, the three of us went to Barrymore’s to celebrate my first season in rotating repertory, a bill that also included Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Len Jenkin’s Kitty Hawk.  I grew up as an actor that season, but come spring the shows would close.   I’d weather summer through temp jobs and hot evenings on my fire escape with cheap beer and Dunhill Lights.  I’d visit my family in Ohio, courtesy of Peoples Express Airlines.  I was 25 years old.   

          Information confirmed an Alfred Gress in Lynwood.  No one answered that afternoon.  After work, I had a date for drinks with a friend.  Killing time before our appointment, surrounded by office grunts and panhandlers in Bryant Park, I tried again. 

A woman answered in a low voice devoid of energy, and my first thought was that I’d dialed a wrong number.

          “I’m trying to reach Al Gress.”

          Back came a guarded, suspicious response.  “What’s this to do with?” 

          “Well, I knew Al when he lived in New York.”  My nerves got the better of me, and I began to ramble.  “I’m trying to track him down, and I got this number from information.  Some friends of mine are singing in Seattle, they told me comps were available and I wanted to offer them to Al and his wife.”

          She hesitated before an answer came, again in that flat dull tone.  “Well, it’s been a long time since Al lived in the East.” 

          A bell rang, and I pounced. “Is this Juliet?”

          “Yes.”

          “Juliet?  This is Ennis Smith…remember me?  Al and I were in acting class together?”  She didn’t sound remotely like the girl I knew back then, so quick, so vocal, so excitable about…well, everything.  Twenty-two years, I reminded myself, but this woman gave no whiff of the dark-haired beauty that laughed—shrieked—at the least provocation.   

          “I remember coming to New York, but I’m sorry, it was a long time ago.”  She didn’t remember me: that crazy summer we shared was as lost to her as it remained palpably vivid to me.

          “It’s really good to hear you.  How are you—how is Al?”

          No pause or emotion.  “Al passed away last year.”

          The race results of the Elephant Stampede flashed.  Next to Al’s time was his age: 48.  That was in 1999; in 2004 he would have been 53 years old.

          “Jesus.  I’m so sorry.” 

          “Yes.  Actually, the anniversary’s soon, so we’re gearing up for that around here.”

          An awful silence followed; then my nerves made me ramble on and on about how I’d thought of them over the years, how much I’d cherished our brief time spent and my memory of Al as a terrific human being, awkward hollow sounds that made me feel like the biggest fool.  As I ground to a halt, out came a desperate “how are you holding up?”

          “I’m okay, we’re fine.”

Meaning her family?  The “we’re” registered, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask about her life, their lives: if they’d had children, if parents lived nearby.  Something about her tone—vocally she was neither aggressive nor tragic, just…weary—told me not to push.  But I didn’t know how to hang up, or move into a goodbye that wouldn’t be abrupt or awkward.  

          And I needed to know how he went.

          “Juliet,” I ventured, forming the difficult question, “had he been ill?” 

          Again no hesitation. “He took his own life.  He’d been depressed—he suffered from depression.”

          That poem from the Internet took on weight.  I sought to remember something, anything from the early 80’s that might have tipped this off, but kept coming back to a charming, reasonable man with a quick smile and a lazy tenor voice; in that easy drawl I’d never heard a note of anger or ego, or even mild frustration.  I’d called in the hopes of hearing it again, only to discover his wife’s numb, drained cadences. 

          “Juliet—may I write you?  This is a lot to take in, and if I say ‘I’m sorry’ one more time you might strangle me.”  She laughed, and I began to relax.  “I’d like to catch you up on my life, and I’d like to hear about yours.  Would that be alright?” 

          “Of course.”  I wrote what she dictated, all the while trying to imagine what I would say.  I kept seeing the picture of Al and me at Barrymore’s and wondered how long it’d take me to find it; if I did maybe I’d send it to her.  I wanted to blow off my drinking date and go home but it was too late to cancel. 

          “Juliet, it was good to hear you—and again, I’m really sorry about Al.”

          “Well, thanks.  We miss him around here.  And I’m sorry about when you called.  It’s just that the telemarketers won’t leave us alone.”

          Why didn’t she have a machine?  “Yep, they’re pretty bad here too.  Take care, Juliet.”

          “Goodbye.”

When Dan died someone said, “Watch out, he’s a haunter.”    Even through a haze of grief the statement struck me as comic, like something uttered by one of those stargazers sitting in an East Village storefront.   But soon after, my encounters with seeming pieces of him began.  Strangers with his shade of hair would jump out of the crowds.  Stubby nails that looked as if they’d been chewed would hand me change at a deli.  I’d see his slim build amble down a West Village Street—sometimes in the guise of a woman.  The sight of someone’s large once-broken nose would cause me to stare a little too long; so did a million pairs of blue-gray eyes, the sight of which instantly conjured that year’s exhausting sadness. 

          And so it was with Al.  Someone I hadn’t seen in twenty years appeared in the pale white faces of kids milling about Astor Plaza, the halls of the New School, or in a late-night subway car.  In a city overpopulated with Italian/Irish ancestry, a head full of dark raven curls passing on a bike, or nodding in a restaurant window seems unexceptional, yet this August that detail explodes in the summer light and stops the heart.

When Helen proposed we celebrate my birthday with a picnic, I thought how apropos.  This dining ritual—no doubt something we’d clung to from our own suburban backgrounds—had marked our relationship since our first meeting, in the summer of 1979.  On that night she traveled to the tiny apartment where Dan and I lived in Washington Heights, from a place she shared with two other women on West 105^th Street.  She brought the meal: salad and a homemade zucchini frittata, all bound in a flimsy wicker basket with a broken handle.  Dan and I provided our staple, cheap beer, and the three of us sat around a foldable card table covered with a mustard yellow plastic cloth.

          Since then, we’ve had other picnics all over the city.  Some were farther away: I remember a Saturday trip by car to Sag Harbor in the mid-80s, and years later, a weekend visit to her husband Ian’s old house in New Haven.  Even when Helen and I met for lunch it was rarely indoors, unless the weather was terrible.  Last month, she and I spent a few hours after work in Bryant Park; she brought the meal and I furnished the alcohol, a nice pinot gris we kept hid from the park’s roving security guard in a brown paper bag.

          Our belated birthday celebrations were typical.  Hers was in February, something we hardly ever acknowledged until March, or later.  I believed our late attentions had something to do with when they fell.  Mine always got lost in the merry-go-round of vacations, travel and the sweltering smog of summer; hers was swallowed by post-holiday numbness, the impending doom of tax time—she’s a broker—and that seasonal darkness that leaves most of us hanging halfway between depression and the hope of an early spring. 

          Our forgetting to remember has endured for 26 years.  She is Dan’s gift to me: they’d been undergrads together at DePauw University, but hadn’t known each other well.  It wasn’t until they reconnected at a Manhattan alumni mixer (she, after a stint in the Peace Corps, he after grad school in Cincinnati where we met) that a friendship took hold.  They had contract bridge, and DePauw in common, but our bond was more elemental.  Both of us came from large families.  We were athletic, with a shared interest in tennis.  But maybe the thing that truly joined us was our blatant lack of cynicism.  In her I saw myself, someone who retained the ability to be surprised, who continually sought out the new.  Hers was an informed innocence, a point of view that Dan good-naturedly heckled, though it didn’t blur his appreciation of her in the least.  Before his death he counted her as his dearest friend; after his passing, she remained mine.

          Helen and Ian made a picnic dinner, packed it in hampers and transported it by bike from their apartment in the East 90s.   They’d found a patch of grass south of the tennis courts; its slight slope meant that we gazed up towards a view of the reservoir track while below sprawled a sweep of trees and pathways.  They’d brought bottles of Rosé, though Helen, ever the Francophile, called it Provençal.  As we popped the bottles, she laid out bread, fat purple olives and rounds of mozzarella topped with sliced tomatoes and basil leaves.

          Helen reminded us why we were there by mourning my age.

“49,” she repeated over and over.  “I just can’t believe it.”  Neither could I.  It was only yesterday that we were in our 20s, trying to make our way in a New York City so diametrically opposed to our naïve upbringings.  All that time had passed; our milestones and disappointments, all our growing up occurred in the shadow of each other’s sympathetic commiserations. 

          The sun exposed the progression of age that shone on our heads, gifts of heredity and the dogged lives we’d chosen to pursue in Manhattan.  Helen was a classic brunette who’d always worn her hair short, but the length never denied the thick coffee-colored waves that framed her athletic, androgynous beauty.  Now subtle silver strands threaded the hills and dips like discreet pinstripes that required a special focus to discern.  I studied it, wondering how it might look when we were really old—would the gray finally outstrip the brown, obliterating all signs of the coltish woman, or would a hint of the deep color always remain?  

          The reservoir rose behind us, and here and there I caught sight of runners in dogged pursuit of yet another mile.  A few feet to our right a small group, probably a family, sat on a blanket and periodically a girl toddler would flee their ranks, giggling, stumbling with abandon, secure in the knowledge that one of the adults would happily give chase.  The heat made the various tableaus of lovers, bikers and strollers a little wavy as the sky began its subtle dimming.

          As always we played catch up.  Jonathan had been away on tour, so there was talk of what he’d seen in Italy and Prague.  Helen and Ian belonged to a book club that met regularly, and I got the scoop on what they’d been reading all year.  I contributed my adventures in graduate school, throwing out titles of books that had made an impression in various lit seminars.  We’d break off in groups of two, then change partners before blending back into four without pausing for breath.  Anyone looking on might think a reunion was in progress: never mind that Helen and Ian were only a phone call or email away.   

Right before our main course of marinated chicken, salad and tabouleh Helen touched my arm.  “I have something to tell you, and I don’t want to forget.”  As we finished the second bottle of Provençal, out came the news: Ronna Shaw was dead; she’d hung herself in Costa Rica.  The news of her having left the States was another surprise; she’d moved to the island after buying property with an inheritance from an aunt.   Helen found out from David, Ronna’s ex-husband.  It happened in the spring.  She and Ronna hadn’t been in touch for a while.

          Ronna and I weren’t close; I hadn’t seen her since the mid 90s, years after Dan died.  She was a talented artist who’d made her living as a freelance textile designer.  We’d known each other as members of a theater group that Helen had orchestrated.  A few times in an attempt at deeper friendship, we’d had lunch.  I’d gone to the studio co-op Ronna shared with a bunch of other designers who were politely curious about my life as a performer. 

The wine only slightly dulled the edge of Helen’s revelation.  Al was still fresh on my mind.  I thought of Dan, and of Ralph, a friend who’d died three years after Dan, from the same AIDS-related complications.  Helen reminded me of Ronna’s hospitalization for depression shortly before she and David married.  I recalled in Ronna’s gleaming aqua eyes, a fury hard as diamonds.  She was what people called brittle—a cynical term for fragile.  

Grave digging over a picket fence, I mused.  This was the kind of conversation my mother would initiate, with little warning, long-distance bulletins from my hometown: “By the way, so-and-so died,” Mama would say, or something like, “you remember what’s-his-name? Well, he got shot last week.”  Suddenly I saw us twenty years down the pike.  As our friends and acquaintances expire Helen and I will share the news—resignedly, indifferently—the way we’d come to share recipes, or word of a must-see gallery show in Soho.  Perhaps when we die our friends will do the same. 

We packed up our things as darkness fell and said our never-ending goodbyes.   Jonathan and I headed back across the park.  We weren’t far from Central Park West, but the twisty paths turned us around for a second.  The transmogrification occurred in an instant: from a benign city park to a forest, dense with trees and thick heat, like a dream.  I was seized by a fear reminiscent of moments not unlike when I’d gotten lost as a child

          The sinister feeling passed.  Was I woozy from the heat?  This was new: I was born in summer, had always felt in harmony when the warm months rolled around--while others buckled, I imagined myself a Viking, immune to whatever debilitations the humidity imposed.  My skin was slick with oil and wetness.  Old people need to be warm echoes as I spot the green globe at 96^th Street.  Descending into the tunnel below, Jonathan said something about air conditioning.  He’s contradicting himself, I thought, but I don’t argue.