I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  ’67 in Idaho, the year the Sixties really hit. On the front porch, I’m surprised when she accepts the cigarette. A Gamma Phi smoking a cigarette. So easy sitting next to her on the steps. Hazel green eyes under all that makeup. Short, dark pleated skirt and white polka dot pantyhose. Mary Janes. Her long legs press together and poke up from the second step. May in Idaho, one of those first hot days when everybody’s been outside in the sun trying to get a tan. On the steps, my tanned feet next to hers in penny loafers, no socks. Duct tape holding the sole onto the left shoe. We’d mown the lawn that day and the smell of the evening was cut grass, the Marlboros, and her. Something clean and French. It isn’t long and we are shoulder to shoulder.

  “What are you doing this summer?” she asks.

  “Going to San Francisco,” I say. “Want to see what the hippies are all about.”

  I think that was it. Why she fell for me. An older guy, almost twenty years old, going to where it was really cool. Haight-Ashbury. Most guys back then, in Idaho, for my brothers at the fraternity, hippies were the last fucking place they wanted to go.

  That’s the first time I feel it with Evie. After I say San Francisco: the silence. Her faraway silence. Like suddenly the person who’d been sitting next to me just up and disappeared. I remember turning my head to see if she was still there.

  “You’ll never come back,” she says.

  I knew I’d be back. San Francisco. I was scared stupid.

  “You never know,” I say.

  I come back. With hair over my ears and a mustache. A peace symbol around my neck. There’s a big hullabaloo fraternity meeting. My acid trips and marijuana parties are a bad influence. Hippy fag is stuck onto my door every morning. Commie queer. Phi Sigma Delta Love It Or Leave It. I move out, find my own house to rent.

  I’ve never taken acid. Smoked dope twice.

  Idaho.

  The fraternity formal we go to, Winter Carnival, our last attempt at status quo, Evie so bold as to wear a shiny silver blue bellbottom pants suit, her hair dyed pink, cut in an extreme angle across her face, huge silver earrings. Painted eyes you can see across the room. Me and my mustache, hair going down and down, in a vintage double breasted suit and a porkpie hat. Everybody else at the ball, some version of 1958.

  Fucking scandalous, Evie and I. There are no limits.

  A year later, Evie, in overall jeans without a bra, putting a torn bit of blotter acid onto her tongue. “All I want,” Evie says, “is to take acid and sit in a blue room and listen to the Moody Blues.”

  Why she loves me. I don’t know. She says it’s Jimmy Webb. I’m a sensitive man like the songwriter Jimmy Webb. That whole first year, the way she holds my hand, as if every moment is a perfect moment, and the moment is passing too fast.

  Awkward Catholic-boy sex. Working on mysteries without any clue. Despite the fact that Lorca has long been murdered, I have my youth. And my youth has a cock. It’s a faraway squirm of petulant flesh. Poetry bound inside a medieval contraption.

  One day I stand in the shower, my cock in my hand, and hold it, look at my cock. Really look. I can’t run away any longer. Something is definitely wrong down there. It’s the first time I can admit there is a wound. I go to a psychiatrist and tell him I think I’m homosexual. He is Mormon and tells me I can’t be. Homosexuals have their sex organs in their mouths.

  Idaho. Not only is it the Middle Ages. It’s Idaho.

  There is a day in the kitchen in my rented house – a railroad they call this kind of house – a string of one rooms connected to one another, four rooms long. Each room an exterior door. That kind of siding that looks like fake brick. Gray. Evie and I have painted the kitchen yellow. On the kitchen exterior door, Evie’s bought white curtains. The kitchen table is pushed up against the door. It’s a glass topped table and there’s a huge bouquet of bursting orange gladiolas in a mason jar from across the street in the cemetery. The sun that morning through the curtains. It’s a Sunday and Evie and I have made pancakes and eggs. Our friends John and Maggie are over. The sunlight, the steaming food on our plates, four friends around a table, Peter, Paul and Mary on the stereo, Late Again. Percolator coffee and Marlboros. We’re laughing because the day before our landlord had come over and was so shocked and obviously in awe of this new kind of young people, men and women living together so open and so casually, that he forgot to turn off the water supply before he changed the faucet. Water blew out a geyser. Pandemonium.

  Laughing there, a part of me opens up and is aware. I am in a yellow kitchen with Evie and my friends and there’s good food and we’re laughing. And especially: I am wearing a yellow T-shirt and blue-lensed John Lennon glasses that Evie’s bought me. For no reason, she’s just bought me these gifts. Things I love that she knew I’d love and she bought them for me. Under the table, Evie’s knee is pressed against mine. She’s doing her impersonation of her French teacher, Monsieur Faggot. In that moment, Evelyn Firth looks like everything I’d ever been waiting for.

  1969, I’m 4-F. Flat-footed.

  Evie’s parents, my parents step in. Evie and I can’t find a reason not to marry so we agree. After all, it’s just a piece of paper. Halloween, at the university’s Catholic Church, Evie wears a red wedding dress. Outside the church, just before, my mother attacks my mass of curly hair. The wedding starts late because I won’t sit still. Our honeymoon is going to the movies. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  The beige round plastic dial Evie daily turns: the pill. Youth, marijuana, a couple of beers can make the dead rise. Lorca, I find, is Persephone, and twice maybe three times a week, I can will it to be spring. Ah spring! Evie! This lovely woman, her cunt, our moments of delight. A year maybe of decent sex. Then Evie, a full-on feminist, gives me the real deal. The details. I learn to give good head like Edith. You know, Edith Head?

  In our second year, lying on the bed, my hand in Evie’s hand as she pulls our hands across her naked belly. “Do you feel that?” Evie says. “That electricity, the spark between us?”

  Another year. The old stucco house we bought. The inheritance: her grandmother’s furniture. Her grandmother’s fur coat. The paring knife that grandmother used to cut her oranges in the morning. “Look!” Evie says, “how the acid has eaten away at the blade.”

  The night I drive out of the service station in our old purple ’53 Desoto. I’m talking on and on about Don Juan, about Carlos Castaneda. About A Separate Reality, Summerhill, The Primal Scream, R.D. Laing. The years with my mother, my sister, my scary father, the dictatorship, my chamber of horrors, the wound, I’m only beginning to comprehend. As yet, no idea that Lorca even existed, let alone his murder.

  “They’re all just books,” Evie says. “I can’t really see what you get so excited about.”

  I create my own reality. I attract what I radiate. Believe that it hath been given and it shall be given unto you. Christ, all the New Age crap. I eat it up, make it mine so I can believe I have a say in this: who I am. It’s only a glimmer. How fucked up I am. The task ahead is clear: to heal. But heal what. And how.

  Seven years married. The separate bedroom where I keep my clothes. Her clothes are on the bed piled up so high you can’t see the bed. The blinds always closed. Evie with the night-light on during the day reading a book, any book really, the TV pulled in there, in the bedroom, in where I sleep with her in that bed covered with her clothes, the smell of the room a burnt-out TV tube. It’s my fault. Her unhappiness. If I were a real man. So I make her into a queen. Try and serve her better. My cock is not enough. Even with Edith, it’s not enough. I am not enough. Nothing works. The day I get mad and throw the iron skillet and the iron skillet breaks. Tell her to wake the fuck up. She gets a job. Waiting lunch tables at an exclusive men’s business club. She hates me for it.

  I make an appointment with a therapist for Evie and me. Evie refuses to go. I make her go. I take her by the arm, walk with her out of the house. Force her into the car. I almost drag her into the therapist’s office. During the se
ssion, Evie doesn’t say a word. I try and talk but can’t. All I can do is cry.

  That last day, when the divorce is final and the house is sold and we’ve signed the papers and we’ve split the money, in the parking lot, when I get in the pickup I’ll drive across America in, just before I close the door, I panic, stick my head out the window. I scream: “Evelyn! Evelyn! Evelyn!”

  Her voice. The hope in her voice. I can hear the hope.

  “What?” she says. “What?”

  “Take care!” I yell. “Take care of yourself!”

  The way I cry that day is the way I cry across the United States. Even still, now after thirty years, I cry.

  A couple old songs: Judy Collins’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat.” The line in that song: And thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes / I thought was there for good / So I didn’t try.

  Evie. Evelyn Marie Firth.

  A woman I have loved.

  And Olga sees it.

  BETTE. LOVELY LOVELY Bette. Evie’s best friend, the woman I have an affair with. Bette Ann Podegushka. She’d hung around with Evie and me for years, Bette, what a pal. All those nights sitting stoned with her and Evie watching Saturday Night Live. All the men Bette went through, the women. Really, Bette Podegushka was a walking soap opera series. It was her Marilyn Monroe ass and blue eyes. Hair that was sometimes red, or dark brown, jet black. Cut so short she looked like she’d had brain surgery. Ironed, shingled, permed, or naturally curly. Another day, another Bette. Always her own creation. She was too skinny or overweight, a gum-snapping Levi Lesbian, a femme fatale, June Allyson, Donna Reed, the girl next door you could always talk to. How I envied her fashion, her incarnations, her bravery, her life. When I grew up I wanted to be a free woman like Bette Podegushka. So many late late Saturday nights, Evie usually always long ago asleep, sitting across from Bette at the kitchen table, drinking and drinking and smoking and smoking.

  One night, an empty bottle of tequila on the table along with a big bunch of crazy-assed fresh flowers and herbs from my garden I’ve jammed into a gallon bucket, cigarettes and marijuana, all the ashtrays overflowing cigarette butts, Bette tells me just about everything. I tell her, too, everything. And by telling everything, I learn something new. Lorca. I tell her how they’d murdered Lorca.

  Who knows how it happens. The moment when friendship is something more. The first thing, of course: I tell Bette I am leaving Evie.

  Then there is that afternoon. I haven’t moved out yet. I’m still living in my married home. Evie is out being a waitress, and Bette has just dropped in for coffee. Nothing unusual. We’re sitting at the kitchen table. Like so many times before. Percolator coffee. Bette is just entering her Marilyn Monroe period. It’s as if Bette’s famous voluptuous ass has overwhelmed her and she’s bleached her hair blonde and somehow the rest of her is just miraculously turning into Marilyn.

  Bette Podegushka as Marilyn Monroe, the woman I fall in love with.

  There’s only one cigarette left, a Marlboro from a hard box, and we’re sharing it. One of those first clear sunny Idaho days of spring. Warm outside, still cold in the house.

  Bette wants to look behind the washer and dryer. I think it’s strange but I go ahead and pull the washer and the dryer away from the wall. Bette sits down in the corner, I sit down next to her, together in the corner of the laundry room looking in behind the washer and dryer. The cobwebs and the dust balls, the hoses and the tubes and the pennies and nickels and dimes, the electric wires. Bette misses New York City and behind the washer and dryer to her it looks like New York City. And she starts yelling, Neelie O’Hara! Neelie O’Hara! like Patty Duke in Valley of the Dolls. I’m laughing is why I kiss her.

  But we don’t fuck. Not until weeks later when Evie announces that if I move out I can’t expect her to act like a married woman.

  I move out. Have a whole day to myself. Take a ride on a city bus. Eat a chocolate ice cream cone. Sit on a park bench under a budding Catalpa tree. God the way my heart feels free. Ever since that day, I’ve been trying to get that feeling back. That park bench feeling. Bette comes over the next day. Just that she knows about Dead Lorca, the careful way she touches me, my cock gets full and hard. And she loves how well I know Edith.

  We fuck so hard we fall off the bed. We laugh so hard that we’ve fallen off the bed. I’ve never felt so safe.

  Still though, I wish I’d had more time. Alone. It would have been better for me and Bette if I’d have had more time alone.

  ALL THIS ENDS, or begins, with Bette and me in New Hampshire – long story – in winter, real cold, real drafty in a second story apartment decorated only with Bette’s brass-bound steamer trunks and a futon with a faux leopardskin bedspread and shiny red sheets. My first novel that no one will ever read finished and a frozen chicken in the freezer.

  The night there’s a disco contest in a town, Rutland maybe, twenty-five miles away. First prize fifty dollars. Between Bette and me, we only have the money for enough gas to get there. But not to get back. We decide fuck it. We go to Rutland and win the contest.

  The job I get waiting tables at The Mercedes Inn in Middlebury, Vermont, because the owners have seen Bette and me win first prize in the disco contest, because I am a writer, because at thirty-two, my beautiful off-the-rack-42-long body is expertly fitted into a classic gray tweed two-button suit, starched, pressed collar, and vintage Thirties tie. Bette Podegushka is not the only one who can have new incarnations.

  The owners of the Mercedes Inn, Robert and Paul and Bernadette, are gay, or mostly gay. Bernadette is still married, but Bette and I can tell. Inside her there’s a Lesbienne Vraiment clawing her way out. And then the owners, when they actually all meet Bette – her beautiful big ass, her blonde curls, her red lips, the unbelievable way that Bette Podegushka channels Marilyn Monroe channeling Judy Holliday is just too irresistible. Jesus, the way Bette could make people laugh!

  Bette and I love gay. Before we move to New England, Bette and I spend two weeks in New York with her best friends, Ronald and Martin, gay men, in a tiny Greenwich Village apartment. The discos we go to. The drugs we take. Flamingo and 12 West and The Loft and the Paradise Garage and Studio 54. MDA and PCP and Black Beauties and Tuilinols and Quaaludes and marijuana and cocaine, each our own bottles of Ethyl Chloride, all ingested in Ronald’s expertly orchestrated order to manumit us through the perfect disco night. Me and two thousand half-naked gay men and Bette at The White Party.

  The writing is on the wall. It’s so obvious now how things are going. How I am going. But as it’s happening I am oblivious. The drugs, yes, but mostly I’m hanging on for dear life. To Bette Podegushka. At Flamingo, at 54, men in the bleachers, only steps away, in front of God and everybody, their legs spread, opened their assholes wide for other men to jam their cocks in. While Bette and I, on the dance floor, keep on dancing.

  The Dead Lorca in me no match for that.

  New England isn’t as crazy. Robert and Paul, the owners of the Mercedes Inn, know of a furnished house right next to theirs on Oak Lake. Bette and I move in and start our summer by the lake. A summer house, inside the wood studs and wood walls. Wood everywhere. The floor, the ceilings, the walls. When you walk how your step makes the whole house sound. We even have a little boat. Our breakfasts are the best, real coffee, not percolator coffee, and yogurt and bananas and granola outside on the picnic table. Somehow we always end up fucking on the picnic table.

  The picnic table, in the morning where I sit and write my daily aspirations in my little notebook.

  I am loved. I am safe. Life is abundant and manifests itself everywhere.

  The tiny green leatherbound book with gold edging Bette buys at a rummage sale, The Book of Oracular Symbols, and sets face up on the bookcase next to the stairs. How we always check that book to see how it is how we’re doing.

  Bette and I work weekend evenings at the Inn. Me, a waiter. Bette cocktailing. At ten o’clock Friday and Saturda
y nights, Paul moves the tables off of Dining Room C and the Victorian painting comes down and behind it’s a disco booth and the ceiling rolls down into the wall and a disco ball descends and the disco lights flash and Donna Summer is singing “Bad Girls.” It’s me and Bette’s job to start the dancing. So many times, I’d just be finishing up serving dessert to my tables and Paul, the beautiful blonde one who used to be the model for Marlboro Man commercials, would be pulling at my shirt tails, unbuttoning my shirt buttons. I’d go from a waiter serving coffee to a bare-chested disco dancer, a hot man dancing with a beautiful blonde woman in nothing flat, just like in the movies. I can still smell Bette and me, our bodies, after a night of waiting tables just after that first dance.

  Really, the applause. There’s a whole town in Vermont that will only remember, me, Ben Grunewald, as this half-naked dancer, their very own Fred Astaire, dancing with their very own Ginger Rogers. My Bette, beautiful Bette. Betty Ann Podegushka. We carry the dreams of that town through every move me make.

  That’s the summer, too, that Bette takes on a new role that will change everything. Community Theater. Playing The Girl in The Seven Year Itch. I swear, Bette Podegushka could manifest anything. The trouble is the rehearsals. I mean Bette doesn’t have any problems taking on the character of The Girl or Marilyn even. The problem is that she takes the pickup and leaves me alone in the house by the lake. Our house next to Robert and Paul’s, next to Paul that is. The beautiful model. The first night Paul kissed me, nothing’s ever felt so right. But Lorca is dead. And I’m not about to go there.

  But Bette catches us going there, Paul and me and strawberry daiquiris and once again amazingly Dead Lorca transforms into Persephone. Me, Ben Grunewald, with a man’s cock in my mouth – the Marlboro Man’s. In me and Bette’s bed, one night, a Thursday, when she comes home too early.