Man of the Year

by Lou Cove

  “Poor Hunan Princess. She needs some loving.” She pauses, looks at me deeply. “And so do you. Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Penny?”

  I shake my head.

  “Gretchen!” She seems excited by that one. “No? Not Sarah?”

  “No,” I tell her. “New one. She’s blonde. Kind of new wave. She wears triangle earrings and blue leather boots.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Really really pretty. Almost…”

  “Too pretty?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it’s true. She’s so pretty I get nervous. When she walks down the hall at school all the kids yell “Punk! Punk!” But she’s not even really punk. She likes Blondie and The Cars, not the Dead Kennedys.”

  “Shiksa fever. I’ve seen it before. You want to play with the fire but you don’t want to get burned.” She musses my hair. “Know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Some people make you hot and that’s good. You want that. But your partner—the one you are really meant to be with—that one needs to be the one you can tell everything to.” Her gaze drifts to the front door, as if Howie has just appeared. “They still have to make you hot, of course. You can’t go without that. But there has to be trust and honesty. Otherwise you carry around secrets and secrets are like rocks in your backpack. The more you have, the heavier your load. You keep trying to drag it around with you, everywhere you go, until one day you just drop it all. And that’s the shit. But if you stick to the people you can bare your soul to, and you return the favor, then your pack never gets too heavy.”

  I mull it and it strikes me as true. The secrets in my family dropped all at once—they were heavy. My parents were unhappy. My father was unfaithful. So capable of succumbing to their own drama, they could barely parent anymore. They were only capable of leaving me behind.

  Carly intuits my destination: the dark rabbit hole. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s watch a little TV.” She runs a Betamax tape of her and Howie on Pittsburgh 2Day, his hometown talk show.

  The interview follows the same general pattern as Donahue did, but it’s even more awkward because the hosts are just local TV boobs. “What’s it like to pose naked? How do you feel about your husband being a sex symbol? What’s your diet like?” And then, there’s a surprise.

  “We have some very special people in the audience,” host number one, Patrice King, says from the crowd.

  “You betcha!” Howie calls.

  “These are Howie’s parents! Would you stand please? Mr. and Mrs. Gordon!”

  “Look at Howie’s dad,” Carly says. “Buttoning up his sports jacket and adjusting his belly?”

  Howie’s parents look really old. His mom, in pink sweater and red polka-dot blouse, follows his dad, standing beside him. She’s holding Mr. Gordon’s trench coat and hat against her chest. He takes them from her and hangs the coat over his left arm, hat in hand.

  “Mr. Gordon, I have to ask you. How did you feel when you heard your son was going to be a centerfold in Playgirl?”

  “To tell you the truth, honey, I was really uptight.” The audience laughs. A guy in the back wearing sunglasses nods and smiles. You can hear Howie hooting above them all.

  “Honey!” Carly giggles.

  “You want to know something? Much more than my wife was.”

  “Oh, really?” Patrice asks.

  “Yup, that’s an absolute fact. But I tell you, knowing my son, he always does the unexpected.”

  “The opposite,” says Mrs. Gordon.

  “The opposite of what you want him to do. You know? That’s Howie.” The camera bounces back to Howie and Carly on stage. They’re smiling, genuinely, but it’s less superstar, more tender. “The thing that surprised me … about this whole thing. Our friends, our relatives, our neighbors—at first I was afraid to show my face.” TV Howie’s face falls just a bit, unsure where his father is going. “But I was surprised how well they took it. They got a real charge out of it. It added a little spice to their life. So everything turned out real good.” He smiles genuinely, his own superstar smile, and Patrice holds his arm comfortingly.

  “They seem nice,” I say just as the real Howie bursts through the front door.

  “I need the bedroom,” he says curtly. “Can you guys go in the other room?”

  “OK,” Carly nudges me off her bed. “But can you give us a hint about your day?”

  “Intense.” He slams the french doors behind us. We shrug at one another and curl up on the couch.

  “Were you reading this?” Carly asks, holding up the bright orange paperback that begins with a guy’s first-person account of being raped in a prison cell. “Oy. Your mom’s going to kill me.”

  Through the curtains I can make out Howie hunched over the desk that is nestled against the window of his room. Is he hitting the desk with his fists? Shaking it? Just typing furiously. It lasts a long time. And then, as suddenly as it began, it ends. Howie flings open the door, wild eyed, surrounded by stanky smoke. “Carly?”

  “Yes…?” Carly says slowly.

  “Yes. Hi. I need you.” He beckons her with a hand as he turns back to the desk. “And niño,” he calls over his shoulder, “take a walk around the block.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Howie!” Carly lays a calming hand on his shoulder.

  “Sorry. I mean, can you go grab me a pack of smokes? There’s money on the table in there. And you can get yourself something, too.”

  “Howie,” Carly soothes. “How about talking to us a little bit.”

  “I will. I will.” He comes and stands at the door, looking to me imploringly. “Just help me out, hermano?”

  “No prob.” I grab the bills from the table, slip out the front door into a cooling night, find my way out to Martin Luther King Jr. Way, browse the comic books at the convenience store, and pick up Spectacular Spider-Man #40. Headline: “THIS, THEN, IS THE TRAGEDY.” And below, five Spideys flailing in a tumultuous timeline—from regular Spidey to Spidey with a lizard face, ready to strike, eyes bloodred, fangs bared, scaled arms, pointed claws, thick tail wrapping treacherously around his legs. In a blue box above his head it says: “TO BEGIN AS MAN…” And in a red box by his lizard feet: “… AND END AS MONSTER!”

  I read by streetlight on the slow walk back to the cottage, the unfamiliar exile from my friends’ private lives making me lonelier than ever. I tiptoe up the stairs and enter through my darkened room. Howie’s desk lamp softly filters through the sheer French door curtains and they are there, glowing, on the bed. My breath catches. Behind the sheer folds, Carly’s legs are spread, ass in the air, Howie on top of her, thrusting. Her feet are bare. Her toes grip and release. Blood pulses in my skull.

  This is it: the one thing they have yet to share with me. But the vision of Carly’s heels rattles me, as if I am seeing something not meant to be seen, neither titillating nor seductive. I try to will her feet down to the bed. Wish silently for them to switch positions. It doesn’t happen. They just keep fucking like this, Carly pushing herself up and against Howie. Howie slamming down with the same ferocity he brought to the typewriter.

  My head feels like Carly’s feet: flopping, bobbling at the joints, wagging loosely with the forces that pound against it. I feel guilty at the sight of her soles, dark from our barefoot walk in the park.

  I go back outside. This is the porch where they got married, I realize. Those pictures. The smiles. The group watching them in their nakedness, steaming water fusing them together. It is a fond memory still: shocking then, romantic now, after everything I’ve seen since.

  I return to Spidey under the yellow bulb of the porch light, ears turned toward the night sounds of insects in the yard and away from the night sounds coming from the bedroom. I flip to the final page, which concludes with a cliffhanger promising that, very soon, Spider-Man must face “The Macabre Menace of Meteor Man.”

  Lights flick out in the houses arou
nd me. Howie and Carly’s bedroom lamp still glows.

  I pee in the bushes, return to the porch, and flip back to the cover of issue #40. Five Spideys, all in pain, fighting the transformation to lizard. I read it again, from the start.

  This, then, is the tragedy.

  One Day I Will

  Nothing moves this morning. I can’t remember my dreams but when I wake I expect to be surrounded by rubble, the ceiling ripped off or caved in, cars tossed around the yard like Tonka Toys. Instead, a soft breeze eases through the window. I can smell the world and I wonder how cold it is back home, wherever that is. California, alien with its scents and prolific sun, is too bright for witches and ghosts. Howie and Carly are still asleep in a tight knot on the other side of the curtain. Together.

  The phone rings until the machine picks up.

  “Hi everyone, it’s Phyllis. It’s Mom.” My stomach backs up to my spine. “I just wanted to say hi. Hi and I miss you all. And Lou, I miss you so much. Your brother and sister miss you and we can’t wait for you to come home.” Wherever that is. “So just call back. We’ll see you soon.”

  I lie looking at the ceiling for a time, wondering what will happen when I do go back. Mama’s apartment in Brookline, so small and unfamiliar, loud with the old C-line trolley cars clanging along Beacon Street.

  Papa’s new place—a basement apartment on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay—is worse: two tiny bedrooms side by side at the end of a narrow hall that opens onto a living room/dining room/galley kitchen framed at the end by a door of wrought iron. On the other side of the bars there’s a small brick sitting area walled off from the Dumpsters and the fancy cars parked at senseless angles alongside one another. The apartment has two windows, one in each bedroom, also protected by black bars. In Salem the wrought iron was decorative. But we’re not in Salem anymore.

  “Huevos?” Howie opens the french doors, smiling in Carly’s nightgown.

  We eat together while Carly showers and scoots out of the house to a meeting.

  “So?” I ask, watching him dump salsa on his eggs.

  “Yup?”

  “That’s gross.”

  “I beg to differ. But we’ve already agreed to disagree when it comes to palate, haven’t we? And I’m a hungry motherfucker.” He spoons even more salsa on the plate.

  “Are you going to tell me about it?”

  Howie nods, chewing and swallowing, slurping coffee. “It’s complicated,” he begins slowly. “It’s a new kind of experience. Didn’t go exactly as I imagined.” I shrug a casual acknowledgment, as if I understand what he’s talking about. As if I have some kind of experience that can relate to this. “It’s one thing to pose for a camera, by yourself, when you’re the center of attention and you’re the focus. It’s arousing in a nice way. But when you’re fucking a woman, your attention is turned toward her and toward yourself. Then there are these cameras and people and they’re telling you how to move and what position to get into and when to come…”

  “Sounds tough.” I snort.

  “Tougher than you think. They pay you for two things: to stay hard and to come when they tell you. And to look pretty. I did a decent job of looking pretty. But the other stuff was harder. I have this beautiful woman and she’s dressed like a nurse in a hot little white uniform with the pink pinstripes and she’s sucking me off … and I can’t make it happen. Look: I can do sit-ups for my body, memorize all my lines, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll have a bone in my boner come game time.”

  “So you…?”

  “Lost it.”

  “No.”

  “And I got hives.”

  “No. Really? No!”

  “Sí.”

  “So you … you didn’t do it?”

  “No, I did it. It just took forever. And the funny thing is, the only way I could make it work was to not be Marc Howard the porn star. I actually had to be Howie Gordon, the fat Jewish kid from Pittsburgh again.” His eyes meet mine and find utter confusion. “I had to go back to when I was that guy—that guy who was nervous and hot for the hottest girl in my class. And I had to work for that gift because I was fat and when I finally got with Mary Beth Scanlon…”

  “The shiksa goddess?”

  He laughs, my favorite laugh of his, as if the world just got unexpectedly brighter. “Did I tell you that?” he asks, grinning at me.

  I raise my eyebrows, smile back. “On the roof. Magical mystery tour of fantabulousness and first vagina you ever touched.”

  “Well, yeah. Alright, compadre. That’s it. Me and the shiksa goddess. You know, I thought I wanted to have this experience of getting blown by a porn star, but in the end the thing that got me hard and kept me up and made me come was the one thing I could always count on, my fantasy of fantasies, Mary Beth Scanlon and her hot little mouth. We never did it. I could never get her to go all the way. So every time I have sex, I’m thinking about her a little, about what if? What if this were her? That was so much sexier than the professional on her knees trying to fluff me back to life and get a wrap. And in the end, it was me that got me off. Me and Mary Beth. And that’s how it ended. And they gave me a check for two hundred dollars and I went home.”

  “It does sound like fun. I mean, not all the people watching, but…”

  “Well, they asked me to do another one. So we’ll see if it gets better. But enough with the one-way confessional. What about you? You writing in that book I gave you? Laying down some truth?”

  I get my journal and let him read at random, anxious but ultimately feeling safe in his hands. He finds the dream entry.

  “I think the part about suffocating in the spongy wetness is scary as hell,” he says, rubbing his face. “Did you really have that dream?”

  I nod. “I dream about food a lot,” I say, realizing it for the first time. “That one, about landing in the cabbage. Then this one.” I read him a different piece, about being in a restaurant, starving, but only finding carrot cake on the menu.

  “Hmmm … Suffocating in food. Nourishment and sustenance turning against you … You really have something there, Sigmund.”

  “I just don’t know why everything—including my dessert—has to be made with vegetables.”

  “I hear that. But you’re in the wrong town, compadre. Ever hear of Chez Panisse?” I shake my head again. “Big on veggies.”

  “Well they can suck my panisse.”

  “Good! Now you’re freeing the muse. What else you got?”

  I jump ahead a few pages. I know where I’m going, I just don’t know if I can read it aloud.

  “This one’s a little…”

  “This one’s the one I want to hear,” Howie says gently, as if he already knows what’s burning on the page.

  I start to read.

  “‘One of the hardest things for me to admit…’” My voice cracks a bit and I start again.

  “‘One of the hardest things for me to admit to myself I will now try to admit to you. Pause-think-be kind. At the moment my father finds sexual release with a woman named Danielle Heffernan. To my knowledge my father had been doing this only weeks after my mother had moved. He told me that this was true. He told me that there was no connection to their separation with this. My father has outright lied to me. I will never again believe him under any circumstances. I will never forgive him.’”

  I look up at Howie. His eyes drive into mine, hard. He doesn’t say anything but he is willing me on and I want to be strong for him.

  “‘His is a sad case. He uses his affair to purposely hurt my mother and I will not see her deliberately hurt by any man. My father is in deep trouble when it comes to associating with me. He neglects me, he pushes me past any fair expectations, and in no way repays me. His is the illusion that my hurting him is the most terrible thing I could do. He may be right but hurting me is worse. He has to understand. I am old enough to understand a situation but too young to do anything about it. Why my life has come down to so few words is a question unanswered because there are s
o many words but my hands have failed to yet write them. But one day. One day I will.’”

  I close the book and we sit in silence. Howie doesn’t take his eyes from mine but he doesn’t say anything, either. He nods almost imperceptibly, shifts in his seat, pushes away the huevos detritus, and sighs. My face contracts with the wave of salt water I am trying to hold back. I need him to say something.

  His face is sad, arms crossed. All his fiery intensity has fallen in on itself, crushed under its own great weight like a star going black.

  “Come here,” he says suddenly, his voice so soft, but still it fills the room. He opens his arms and I am sucked into them, his gravity pulling me away from my own desperate singularity. And as I tear from my decaying space in the universe I feel the months of withheld tears rain down against his chest and I am choking to stay above it all, gasping not to talk but just to breathe.

  Surrender Dorothy

  My last day comes too quickly. I wake up extra early, anticipating the flight. “Premature evacuation,” says Howie, shaking his head.

  I open the door of my room to the outside. One more whiff of warm air and lemon. The Chronicle is on the stoop. I sit down, unfold it. They found the Titanic. Carter’s new strategy to take down Reagan. A $1.8 million Brinks robbery right here in San Francisco. But none of it matters. Dorothy Stratten’s photo is on the front page.

  For a moment this seems like good news. Coming to town? Meeting the Man of the Year? But, no. The headline says something different:

  “PLAYMATE OF THE YEAR” MURDERED

  The police found her and her estranged husband, Paul Snider, dead in his apartment. Both nude, lying there for at least a day, Snider with a twelve-gauge shotgun underneath him. Lieutenant Dan Cook said the motive was “that he was despondent over the breakup of the marriage.”

  I didn’t even know she was married.

  There’s something about newsprint that doesn’t do her photo justice. Dorothy should be glossy and in color, not a victim of rough black-and-white offset.