And love, Grand did.
In his mind, he was making sure he was becoming someone who could be loved back. A notepad for a notepad. A pen for a pen. A journalist for a journalist. The boy flitting around town, interviewing about this and that. Notes that would become articles later on the typewriter in his room. He even did an article on Dresden.
And so she is gone, and we cannot put that out of mind, but we can thrill at the joy of knowing we have loved her and that the warmth we go to, shall be her.
Grand’s other articles were of fewer stars. He covered everything from activities of the local chamber of commerce to the farmer studying drought-resistant vegetation. He wrote about craft exhibitions, quilt bazaars, and the marijuana growing in a cornfield.
About the movie theater renovations, bigger screens, plusher seats. About the local fan drive and the mayor’s continued effort to keep the town cool. Boring things he was unable to make interesting, so he’d crumple them into a ball. Gripping this ball like the old ones he used to. Winding up, a slow pitch to the wastebasket. That was his baseball those days.
I went to the wastebasket, unrolled the balls, and found so many ways Sal was being blamed. Grand quoted a man as saying if Sal touches your mailbox, you’ll get nothing but bad news.
“I’ve taken to freshly paintin’ my own mailbox every couple of hours,” the man said, “that way if he does touch my mailbox, I’ll know it ’cause wet paint always saves things.”
A woman claimed she’d seen Sal in the middle of the train tracks.
“He was shinin’ a small penlight on a ball of foil. A couple hours later, I turned the radio on and heard about that terrible train crash in the next town. So many folks died, and all ’cause the conductor said he was blinded by a bright, white light.”
No need in saying there wasn’t even a train crash. I crumpled the articles back up as I’d found then. When I turned, Grand was there, standing in the doorway.
He didn’t say anything as he walked past me to lay his notepad and pen by the typewriter. I knew something was wrong by the way he rubbed his head, as if there were a drum there, pounding until it’d won.
He looked out the window and I would be reminded of him doing just that years later when I read a line in a book that spoke of water slipping out a crack in the bottom of a jug.
“Grand?”
He looked out at the columns of the Parthenon painted on his walls. His bedroom was Greece, and Mom had made it as classic as Aristotle.
“They’re gonna throw stones at the house, Fielding. Later tonight, they’re going to throw stones. Yellch told me. I saw ’im just now.”
“I thought—”
“That he don’t speak to me no more?” He finished my sentence with a look down. “Yeah. I thought him warnin’ me ’bout the stones, I thought it might mean we could be friends again. But he said he was just tellin’ me ’cause of that time I saved ’im from the stones.”
“Why they gonna throw stones? ’Cause of you?”
I thought for a moment he’d ask me to call him a faggot just one more time. The way he looked at me, it was as if family was the point of collapse and all happiness was going, gone, and impossible.
“No, Fielding, not because of me. Not this time, at least. They’re doin’ it ’cause of Sal.”
“What should we do?”
“Stay away from the windas, I reckon.”
“We will do more than that.”
We turned to Dad’s voice and him standing in the doorway. He told us to follow him outside to the cannas. Along the way, Sal tagged on and I told him about the coming stones. His voice cracked when he apologized.
“It’s because of me.”
Dad said everything would be all right. Then he instructed us to pull up all the cannas. Mom hovered on the porch, yelling at us to stop. Dad said, to my surprise, “Come out and make us.”
She placed her foot on the top porch step. It was the farthest I’d ever seen my mother from the house. “Another,” I whispered. “Come on, Mom, just one more.”
She looked up at the sky, yanked her foot back, and shrugged her shoulders, probably said the word rain. We jerked up the cannas harder, and she looked away. When we returned to the porch with the flowers, she asked for one. Sal handed her an Alaska.
And then we waited. On the front porch we sat. The flowers were so tall, I felt like I was holding another me. We waited in silence for the danger ahead. No longer ahead, coming around the corner. Marching down the lane. Bare feet slapping dirt and led by a short man in white.
Mom lifted the bundle of flowers from Sal and added them to Dad’s.
“Best if they not see ’im.”
With Sal and Mom under the darkness of the porch, me, Dad, and Grand walked to the edge of the yard. First they came fast, determined to use the stones in their hands. Stones that filled their palms and stretched their fingers into scary bends at the knuckles.
They slowed when they saw us, looking around at each other, uncertain of what to do. They had not discussed this situation. They had planned to see only the brick of our house, the windows, the door. It’s easy to throw stones at these things. It is not so easy to throw stones at people they know. People not like the boy and the devil they’d created from that very image.
They met us at the edge of our yard. They were quiet. We were quiet. Somewhere a cricket wasn’t.
Finally, Dad spoke. “Who wants one of my wife’s blue ribbon cannas? Hmm? All they cost is a stone. One stone for a flower. Sounds like a bargain to me.”
He took a step toward them.
“What about you?” He offered a flower to a woman biting her lip and sweating above it. The woman looked down at the stone in her hand, turned it over. She tried to look at the house, but couldn’t get past Dad or the flower.
“All right.” She let go of the stone and took the flower before hastily moving to the back of the group.
“And you?” Dad was making another sale.
Grand was offering his own flowers. Those in the crowd in front of me stared, waiting to see if I too would be something to stop their throwing.
“A flower for your stone?” I stepped forward.
And there we three were, slowly dismantling the mob that had so wanted to tear us apart. We tossed the stones into a big pile in the front yard. Every click of stone against stone made me flinch, made us all flinch behind petals and stems.
As I was handing a flower over, I saw Grand slowly extend a Russian Red to Yellch. Without a word, Yellch gave his stone to Grand. Because their hands lingered for so long in the exchange, you could from afar have thought they were merely friends, or gardeners at the very least, holding hands and talking flowers.
In the back of the crowd, I saw Elohim. No one had given him a flower yet, so I asked him in my best voice, “A flower for your stone, Mr. Elohim?”
He held up his empty hands. And yet wasn’t that whole crowd just one big stone for him?
“Do you remember when you threw stones at me, Fielding? Don’t lower your head like that. Look at me. Do you remember?”
I nodded.
He nodded too. “I hope one day you know what that feels like.”
He took the flower and turned away, the crowd going with him.
Years later, when I was standing on my last roof, the stones finally came for me. They came sudden and from the sky. They hit cars and dinged. They hit the slate roof and broke the tiles I was standing on. Still, while others ran inside, I stayed.
“Hey, buddy, you’re gonna get killed up there in this hail.”
But I stayed and spread my arms out, tilting my face up, the wound before the scar and I, dear Elohim, finally knowing what it feels like.
23
These troublesome disguises which we wear
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And that must end us; that must be our cure—
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose …
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:740 2:142�
�151
WHEN I WAS thirty-three, I met a man. My house was burning down and he was the one with the hose, come to save me. I liked that about him. That he put fires out, didn’t start them.
Come here, memory of him. I’ll make guitar songs out of his eyes. Come here, memory of him. Give me the Sunday in the warm bathtub when I leaned back against his wet chest and he washed my hair. Come here, memory of him, remind me of the morning sun, like good yellow, on his face. Come here, you memory of him, and give him well.
His dark skin was like that of the color of a bird’s feather I found beneath my window long ago. I almost told him about that feather. I almost told him about Sal. I almost told him all my baseball-shaped secrets, but I was too distracted by the possibility of happiness with him. Far too distracted by him pulling me in by the loop of my jeans and reading me Langston Hughes.
Heaven was no bigger than a queen-sized bed during those days. Blankets kicked off, pillows even. Just a white sheeted square and us. Chests were pillows. Arms and legs were blankets. Waist deep in each other. A heaven of mounting gasps and sides rising and falling in the same deep breaths, breaths grassy enough to walk on from here to Elysian Fields, where paradise is set in motion by the almost too beautiful connection of one man and another.
Sometimes it’d be him over me like a swinging branch and my mouth feeling that slight curved fruit of his neck until I felt like I was falling away from him and that paradise. I’d almost scream, a fearful grasp on him, “I’m falling away from you.”
“I’ll never let you fall,” he’d promise.
And so the heaven continued like a scurry to eat the last apple before the tree gets cut down.
Yes, heaven is a breathless mouth. It is the core underneath, where two souls meet and give and take little pieces of each other, all the while the light orbits, rippling soft on the edges.
He was mine and I was his. He told me so as he pulled me and my jeans into him on the street, the Empire State Building in the distance.
After the kiss, he asked why I looked about to break. I said I didn’t know, but wasn’t it because I did know? Because I knew all the great splendor of a man. I knew the heaven of making love to him later. All the splendid, heavenly things Grand would never know.
We caught the eye of an old man passing by.
“Do you think his frown is because we’re gay or interracial?” he asked, his dark skin the best part of me.
“I’m not gay.”
“What do you call us, Fielding?”
I shrugged. “Just a moment.”
That moment lasted eight years, longer than any woman. A moment that saw me saying I love you and for the first time meaning it. After I said it, I said I was going out for some shaving cream and never went back. I wonder if he thinks of me every time he shaves? I know I think about him. I feel my beard and know I think about him.
I deserve the vinegar, not the violets. It was why I left that queen-sized heaven and that man who made love like a Langston Hughes poem.
I couldn’t bear such a beautiful life, when Grand never got his. Him and Ryker had fucked, but they hadn’t loved—and that was what Grand missed out on. That is what Grand paid for.
It was the beginning of September and a few mornings after the unsuccessful stoning attempt, which was a moment that showed us what they were capable of but it was also a moment that showed us we could win. I suppose that’s why we didn’t pack up and leave. We thought we could win it all with a flower.
We were sitting at the table, having breakfast. Dad was pouring syrup on his pancakes and Mom was sizzling sausage.
“God bless the woman who cooks in such heat,” Dad said. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was something we just thought.
Sal was sprinkling cinnamon on his buttered toast and Grand was reading the newest edition of The New York Times. As Dad talked about the rising prices of gasoline, Grand tightened his grip on the paper until it pleated and the ink smeared in little wisps from his sweating palm.
“Food prices will be rising with all the drought,” Dad was saying as the paper began to tremble with Grand’s hands.
When he lowered the paper enough for me to see his eyes, they looked like a lot of something gathered in one place. A whole pile that towered too tall and wobbled, about to fall.
“What’s wrong, Grand?” I spoke under Dad’s voice, but still he heard me and stopped talking about rising prices.
He too saw the wobbling pile in Grand’s eyes and reached for the paper. “Bad news in the Times, is it, son? Another Dred Scott v. Sandford?”
Grand jerked the paper to his chest. I thought he was going to crumple it up the way his hands wanted. Instead he forced himself to fold it and lay it on his lap as he became determined to spread strawberry jam on his toast without shaking.
Dad was about to ask again for the newspaper, but Mom’s short exclamation stopped him. Grease had popped from the pan to her arm. She rubbed out the sting, saying she wished she had some yellow mustard. Sal looked down at his toast while Dad shook his head with a smile, the way husbands are quick to do at wives they love beyond measure.
Dad had forgotten about Grand and the newspaper, but I hadn’t. I watched Grand as he took a bite of his toast. The strawberry he piled upon it oozed out around the sides of his mouth.
“It looks like blood.”
I don’t know why I said it. I suppose I thought it would make him smile. But he didn’t smile. Instead his eyes fell strange.
“What?” He sounded hoarse as if in the span of those few moments, he had going on inside him an internal dialogue that had drained him of his voice.
“The jam. It looks like blood.” I gestured at the sides of my own mouth to mean his.
Mom was at the table by then, dropping off the carton of orange juice. She stopped by Grand and pulled up the dishcloth tucked into the waist of her apron to wipe the jam from his face.
He jerked back and grabbed her wrist.
“Did you get it on ya, Mom?” The angst in his voice is with me still.
“What?”
“This blood.” He wiped the red from his mouth.
“Honey, it’s just strawberry jam.”
“Strawberry jam?” He closed his eyes as he pushed his chair back and stood, the newspaper on his lap sliding down onto the floor and under the table. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”
What had happened to the well-rested boy we’d sat down to breakfast with? How could that hollowing, a dig away from reaching bone, come so fast beneath his eyes? His tan of that summer seemed to lift up and float on pale water that went nightmare deep. It was as if he would go on emptying, coming to nothing before our eyes. Just collapse or fade or vanish away.
“I didn’t sleep last night.”
“Oh, I know. I heard the typewriter.” Dad feigned typing. “One day, when you are a married man, your wife will say the typewriter is your mistress, so be prepared, young journalist.”
“Yes, my wife.” Grand said wife as if he was almost sorry she would not exist.
“Go lie down, son. Get ya some rest.” Mom started clearing his dishes.
He slowly walked out of the kitchen while Mom and Dad started discussing rising prices again. Meanwhile I slid under the table to scoop up the newspaper. I hurried into the hall with it. Sal followed, but not to read the paper. He was passing me to go up the steps. I heard his knocking and then him asking if he could come in. Grand’s door opened and closed quietly.
I frantically tossed through the paper until I found Ryker’s name written beneath the title, MY COMIC BOOK DREAM, A PERSONAL ESSAY.
In Victorian England, it was hypothesized that having sex with a virgin would cure venereal diseases such as syphilis. This came to be known as the Virgin Cleansing Myth. Myth, because that is in fact all it is. There is no truth to the story that a virgin’s blood will somehow cleanse the blood of the diseased. Yet, to this day, there are some with HIV/AIDS who are having sex with virgins in the hope of a cure. In most insta
nces, this sex is not consensual, and the virgin is put at risk of being infected themselves without their knowledge or their permission.
I myself have not had sex since being diagnosed with HIV in November of last year. This is a very personal decision and one I made because I do not want to put my fellow men at risk. That being said, I do understand the desire to find a cure. I understand it, yes, but I’d never knowingly infect another person with HIV/AIDS. I just want to make that clear. I do imagine it, though, in a sort of comic book style, if you will.
When it’s you and HIV/AIDS, you become a superhero, if you want to survive. Your body becomes the city you must protect and the HIV/AIDS becomes every villain ever created. It’s the Joker. Magneto. Doctor Doom. And in the fight, some may call themselves Superman or Batman, but I call myself Dr. Michael Morbius.
Fans of the Spider-Man series will recognize this name as that of the villain first introduced during those AIDS-free days of 1971.
Morbius was dying from, funny enough, a rare blood disease. He set out to be his own hero, looking for a cure that ultimately turned him into the villain. A vampire.
I suppose it’s because of these similarities between myself and Morbius that I imagine I am him. He suffered, as I am suffering now, from a rare blood disease. And like he was a vampire, I imagine myself to be one as well. I imagine I have sex with a virgin and, by doing so, I am cured.
Of course, this is just me imagining a comic book hero and a comic book villain, a comic book story and a comic book hope. But in this real world, I have to rely on the heroes in the white coats to see me through. We all do. It is the only ethical way.
I read that last line a few more times before I closed my eyes and saw Ryker. I searched for something in his appearance or his mannerism that would’ve said he was sick, but he was the human saxophone with the golden glow, and he played no laments. Damn that spick-and-span man.
I hated him.
The only solace I had was of imagining him alone in that one life rotting away, smelling of shit and fear on some hospital bed somewhere. Just another lump under the blanket, waiting to be rolled off into the ground. I’d spit on his grave, dance on it, if I knew where it was. Because I don’t, I do on occasion suddenly start dancing and spitting on any ground. People passing by may think I’m just a happy, jiggy, slobbering old man, when really I’ve got a grave in mind.
The Summer That Melted Everything Page 25
