On my first demolition job with Niko, I asked about the damaged insulation I’d be dismantling, when it’d been installed, what was in it. He handed me the mask, the goggles, the gloves. “Didn’t know you’d be a smart one,” he said, to which I said that a concern for safety didn’t always signal intelligence, to which he whistled and said, “Wise, too.”
The summer after my first year of college I met up with Torrentelli at the Art Institute. As we walked through the at-the-time-brand-new Modern Wing he told me that he’d be transitioning to a woman—I’d had no idea—the therapy and the hormones and the surgeries, everything, he’d change his name from Antonio to Serenity. We sat on a bench by his favorite Dubuffet. I was the first person he’d told other than his nonna. I didn’t ask why, but he said, as if I had: “You’re not judgmental.”
One fall I helped Barton move from Rogers Park to Bridgeport during a surprise flood-watch thunderstorm. I was the only person he’d asked who showed. We ran through screens of rain, we loaded his car, we loaded my car, we chugged across swirling intersections and viaduct pop-up ponds. While we sat on the floor at his new place, which had lost electricity, drinking beers and waiting for the pizza to never arrive, he said, “You only did this so I’d owe you one.”
One winter my college friend D-Mac dumped his long-term girlfriend again. I gave him a bottle of Bulleit and helped him drink it, and because he didn’t want to talk, we played chess, backgammon, and Stratego, and I beat him at all three. He dug up a card game he used to play, Shadow Traveler, I’d never played, and after I beat him four or five times he slapped himself on the head and screamed, “Fuck me, you’re that fucker who’s good at every game he plays!”
At a year-end grad school party last December, Golnaz, my partner on a final project, gave me a hug. Then she gave me another one and said, “You’re a softie.”
“You’re good to have around,” said Dr. Madera.
“You know what you’re doing,” said my brother.
“You are representative of America,” said my uncle, as I put the check in my pocket.
Last May, I told my mom over the phone that it’d be better if we didn’t talk for a while. She laughed and said how long is a while. I said I would know it when I knew it. She said, “Manly Stanley being manly.”
51
Stanley Remembers an Uncomfortable but Accurate Assessment of His Character
On a sticky June morning, T and T’s actor friends and I moved all of T’s things out of what was suddenly just my apartment and into a rental truck. The rental was too big—when we finished, more than half the trailer echoed, empty. I pointed out that T’s stuff would slide around on the drive. The actor friends insisted that the last layer, a border of the heaviest boxes, would prevent that from happening, but I fetched bungee cords from my car and strapped all of T’s things tight. Everyone else watched from the street, sweating. T tried to look neutral. Afiya, T’s other oldest best friend, who’d come down from Milwaukee to help her move, cupped her mouth and said that what I was doing was not fucking necessary.
“Hello?” said Afiya.
On my way out I clanged the trailer door shut.
T and Afiya climbed in up front, T in the driver’s seat. She waved me to her window.
Afiya rolled her eyes.
The keys were in, dinging, but T hadn’t turned the engine on. She was wearing workout clothes, her big hair under a ball cap. She looked like a pop star trying not to look like a pop star.
“You don’t have to help us unload,” she said. “You’ve done so much already!”
I told her I didn’t mind.
Afiya said, “Don’t help us unload.”
“I’m okay with it,” I said to T.
T’s face had set into a forced centeredness, a state of trying-not-to-cry. It didn’t feel good to see it.
She said, “Most of the time, you don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”
“I’m waiting for you to cry,” I said.
I was crying.
Afiya rolled up the window.
Afiya started the truck.
Afiya yelled.
T drove away—the truck coughed down Sunnyside, past old green trees and big houses with porches, through a yellow light, and onto Lincoln.
The actor friends followed, all five of them clown-carred in a two-door. They sang along to a peppy show tune. Every one of them looked at me and saluted.
52
Stanley Recalls How T Planned His Surprise Birthday Party
“T is attending other events!” said Manny, exasperated.
“In case you have forgotten,” he said, “she has come to Prague to participate in a festival. Workshops, presentations, panels, spontaneous conversations. Followed by her own performance this evening. She does not have the time to appreciate a cup of kava with myself, you, or anyone else!”
I let him know by how I looked at him that I knew this was a lie.
He grumbled. “And even if she did profess to have the time to meet—I would not, under the current circumstances, permit it.”
T would be at the café.
I stood up.
Manny’s mood changed: he turned somber. He tucked away his phone.
“It is extremely important that you listen to what I say next,” he said.
I saw straight through him. T had carved out the time to meet that afternoon; she hadn’t emailed me about it because she wanted it to be a surprise; to better set up the surprise, she’d conscripted Manny, who was unwilling but obedient.
“I am going to ask you a question,” said Manny.
T delighted in masterminding surprise schemes.
I thought of the many times she’d enlisted my help in pulling fast ones on her friends for their birthdays and bachelorette parties, how I’d provided diversions and delivered props, how I’d told strategic lies on her behalf.
Then I thought of the last time she’d tricked me: one week before my most recent birthday, she’d made me clear my schedule for it. “It’s your day, but you are mine mine mine,” she sang, hanging from my neck, naked, as I tromped from the bedroom to the kitchen, naked, to grind coffee. This was in March. We’d been living together in Lincoln Square for a month, and we were discovering that we weren’t so bad at it. Nothing new and ugly emerged from chore division or cleanliness standardization or kitchen usage or bathroom sharing or sex frequency. My uncertainty about moving in together—an uncertainty that lost shape when I tried to explain it to her, but that firmed up, square and solid, when I was alone—seemed to be gone for good. We congratulated each other to sleep. It seemed like the celebration of my birthday would in some way be the celebration of living together successfully. The night before my birthday, a Friday, T returned from a late rehearsal angry at herself. She said she’d realized that she’d double-booked the day—months ago she’d committed to a trip to Milwaukee to visit Afiya, to help out with a staged reading of her new play. I insisted that it was fine. It was. T, as disappointed as she was determined, sat on the kitchen counter and punched at her phone. She proposed make-up dates, she searched for replacement activities, and in the time it took me to drink a pop, she’d bought tickets to a concert the next week. Although she didn’t say who the act was outright, she hinted that we’d be front-row for Marilyn Manson, whom I’d followed in high school with intense devotion but could no longer listen to without wading into a reservoir of residual self-hating shittiness from that shit-rich stretch of my life. I couldn’t tell if T was joking. She opened her arms—I hugged her off the counter. She smelled like rehearsal, sweaty and musty, and I loved it and she knew it, and she shook her hair in my face. She radiated such devious pleasure that I didn’t push her with questions. The next morning, my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke to T having sex with me. We didn’t check our voices and we didn’t stop the headboard from applauding with the wall, and when I said that I was about to come, which I’d never said to her before, she shouted that she loved me, which she’d shouted before but never
during sex, and she was crying, and so was I, and she reached for my face and covered my eyes, and I closed them under her hand, and in the darkness everything deepened. We dropped beyond our selves. We weren’t even what we were doing; we were one wide dream. Then a bright fear flashed: what this happy weepy unembodied moment signaled was nothing more than the acknowledgment of the unlikeliness that our relationship would last. A moment of missing us before us became memory. I denied this fear. I said: Fear, you are only the feeling that I have when I cry. You are only the feeling that reveals the fact of my status as a product of a culture that teaches its men to undo any feeling that is not a feeling of strength or of comfort. I am a site of sociohistorical influences, I said, a backyard of buried trash and valuables that I am incapable of digging through objectively. I thought about the circumstances that allowed me to think these thoughts, the basic needs met, the lack of fear of oppression and suppression—I thought about my maleness, whiteness, lower-middle-classness—I thought about how I wouldn’t be having these thoughts if it weren’t for my aunt and Dr. Madera and T. We did not stop having sex. The bed jerked across the room beneath us. T took her hand off my face. She wasn’t T—she was someone I might see on the L and wonder at, a woman I’d imagine futures with—I wasn’t Stanley—I was someone she might see in the audience, between her lines and through the lights, a man that might as well be imaginary—then we kissed; we came; we were ourselves. I made eggs and kiszka for breakfast. T told an anecdote about a well-known acting teacher’s controversial pedagogy. I carried her bag to her car. She said that when we were married she wouldn’t forget my birthday. I said that studies suggested that marriage degraded memory. She said that her own study suggested that by the time the two of us tied the knot, she’d have dementia. I didn’t laugh. I wanted to, I couldn’t—I resented that she’d told me a true thing. I resented that I couldn’t make this true thing untrue. The moving in together was the thing that I could do and I’d done it, and despite everything going well with the living together I couldn’t propose to her and mean it. I didn’t know why: I didn’t want to know why. T saw these feelings on my face. She got in the car, picked up an envelope, glanced at it, and handed it to me. Theater stuff, she said. Would I mind walking it to the mailbox right now to make the earlier pickup time, she’d planned to take it but the mailbox wasn’t really on the way to Milwaukee. She honked out the first bar of “Happy Birthday” as she drove away. I went for a walk. Certain trees had budded, the smell of the soil had shifted. The tall couple with the snarly dog crossed the street to avoid me. Middle school kids played sixteen-inch softball at Welles Park while their parents watched, clapping and hooting. On Lincoln I passed restaurants and bars, banks and coffee shops. Couples spoke Spanish, German, Polish, Korean. Young musicians, carrying guitars and fiddles and banjos and basses, left classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I dropped the envelope in the mailbox and kept going, on to Western. Traffic had backed up already. I stopped at the liquor store for beer and cigarettes. Hassan, the owner, was surprised that I bought a pack, not papers and a pouch. I told him it was my birthday. He shook my hand and said, “I wish you every kind of health.” I smoked two on the way to Welles Park, where I sat under a sprawling red maple and smoked two more. I tried to see the spring. Hidden squirrels wheeze-barked, trading warnings. Fat robins fought fat pigeons for trash-can overflow. A blasted-looking homeless man slumped along, not quite picking up his feet, his face damaged. When I was sure that sitting there wouldn’t move me any closer to an understanding of myself, I headed home. On Sunnyside I passed an old church with a tall stained-glass window that my uncle had renovated last year. It depicted a Bible story I didn’t recognize: men taking abstract actions in fields of concrete symbols. I wasn’t familiar with common practice in the making of stained glass, but it looked like my uncle had used a lot of very small pieces where other artists might have used a smaller number of bigger pieces. The result was a steady, subtle warmth. Every section was in conversation with itself. I’d seen my uncle’s windows in one or two other places, his renovations and originals, but until then I hadn’t felt the effect of his enormously exacting patience. I crossed the street to our apartment. As I walked in the door, T and Torrentelli and Barton and six of T’s friends (the five who would later help her move out, and Afiya) shouted, “Surprise!” Singing, they presented a cake decorated to look like the grid of a dig site. The frosting was dirt-colored and crosshatched, populated with Lego adventurer-archaeologists. One square had already been “excavated,” cut away to show a filling packed with gummy skeletons.
My first dig, at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, was a few months away.
That night at Huettenbar everyone laughed at me not only for having been to six Marilyn Manson concerts, but also for believing that T would take me to my seventh. Barton sauntered over to the internet jukebox and punched on the anthems from Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals. Torrentelli bragged to Afiya about the trench coats and combat boots and piercings we’d had in high school, the dog collars and red contact lenses. She told the story about the parking lot fight, when Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly had been picking on her, when I fractured O’Kelly’s jaw and knocked out one of Svachma’s front teeth and Svachma broke my collarbone and O’Kelly stomped a concussion into my head. “For the rest of the year we called him Frankenstanley,” said Torrentelli. Afiya regarded me with surprised respect, as if the fact that I’d been Goth improved me, or at the very least made me less boring. We all got drunk. The Marilyn Manson music raked across the edges of my happiness. From the other side of the room T threw devil signs and, between them, blew kisses. Barton tried to get Torrentelli to admit to having whacked off to whatever I’d written in her high school yearbook. Afiya handed me a pint and said, “I would have been friends with you.” I gave her a side-hug.
“The Beautiful People” came on. T danced up to and around me, lip-synching, contorting her face through a slideshow of comically angsty sneers. I hooked her at the waist and drew her in. She pretended to lick my eyeballs. I asked her why she’d added the bit about the concert. “You must’ve known you had me,” I said.
She picked up my hands and laid them on her face.
“I wanted you to think I didn’t know who you were,” she said.
53
Stanley Hears Artists in the Hallway
“Are you listening?” yelled Manny.
The air in the room felt newly stale.
I’d been sitting on the bed, saying nothing, and sweating.
I scratched at my beard. The smell of my body hit me: alcohol, airplane, pork-sweat. Being in an unfamiliar city, in an unfamiliar country, in a demented art project, in the company of a prick, in what I was hoping wouldn’t play out to be the painful last act of a wrecked relationship—these five conditions, pulled like fingers into a fist, were punching me into myself, into memory.
The space at the center of myself that wasn’t me still wasn’t me.
Manny had started to pack his roller bag.
He said, “Am I in possession of your attention?”
He said, “To what degree do you believe your uncle to be authentically dangerous?”
The sooner I returned with his migraine medicine, the sooner we’d leave for the café, the sooner I’d see T. T was why I was in the apartment.
I was in the apartment.
“My uncle is a fake,” I said.
“His resources are not ‘a fake,’” said Manny. “His persistence is not ‘a fake.’ The ambition of his aesthetically juvenile project—to evoke the atmosphere of a supposed ‘crime narrative’ for no other purpose than to sabotage your sense of security and disrupt the lives of uninvolved individuals—several of whom, it must be said, have far more at stake than you—is not ‘a fake’!”
I understood. “You think you’re here to protect T,” I said.
Manny rolled his shirts and slacks into tight bundles. As he shuffled around, he gave off the smell of booze-swea
t. What I was witnessing was not a migraine on a veteran, I realized, but a hangover on an amateur.
“If you mean that I would prefer for my dear friend to remain out of the range of avoidable danger, then yes,” he said. “I am T’s knight.”
The sound of slow footsteps came complaining up the stairwell.
I sat still.
Manny, sitting in the bedroom doorway, turned to the hallway door. The way the sound rolled through, it might as well have been open.
The stairwell muttered.
He or she reached our floor.
He or she, in heels, strolled the hall.
He or she stopped close to but not at the door to the apartment.
“This is your mother,” said a woman.
She wasn’t.
She waited.
I did nothing; Manny did nothing.
She sighed.
“I am not here,” she said.
She click-clacked back to the stairwell.
Then down the stairs, a squeaking exit.
Manny started to say something, but before he could finish the first word, another woman in the hallway said loudly, “I am not here.”
She seemed to be standing right where the first woman had stood.
This woman, like the first, waited.
Then sighed.
Then walked away on heels.
Instead of taking the stairs, she opened a door.
“It is difficult,” she said.
The door closed quietly.
I motioned to the hallway. “Fake.”
Manny massaged his temples. The second woman had frightened him.
“You were going to say something,” I said.
He rubbed his eyebrows, his forehead.
“It was going to be about your hangover,” I said.
He glared at me. “T informed me of an Easter performance…”
54
Stanley Recounts an Easter at Uncle Lech and Aunt Abbey’s
The Made-Up Man Page 11
