I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  It’s cold but the sun is extra bright. I never wear sunglasses, but that day I buy a pair of Ralph Lauren knock-offs from a guy on the street. The number six isn’t crowded and I can sit. It’s good I can sit. The subway car is one of the old cars where the seats are lined up on both sides against the walls. Across from me, my reflection in the glass. My short hair. I’m my father wearing sunglasses.

  What I’m about to tell you next may sound contrived or overdramatic. But you’d better believe me. Because what happens next I swear is true.

  From my left I hear it, the door between the subway cars opens. The roar of the train on the track gets louder and then the door closes. Coins shaken inside a tin can. That left turn from looking at my father in the reflection is such a simple movement of the head. No longer than a second. What I see, when I take my sunglasses off to make sure of what and who I’m seeing, I take as an omen. It’s a woman with a white cane. Around her neck is a sign: Blind and have AIDS.

  The woman on the TV special. It’s her. In the middle of an epidemic an upbeat moment on the local WCBS Channel Two News. Six months ago, I’d watched the special tucked away safe in my loft bed on my black and white TV with the coat hanger that’s an aerial. The woman was pretty and young, short bouncy hair. She worked as a secretary and had just been tested positive. The woman kept going on and on about her faith in God and her high hopes and what an important thing it was to maintain a good attitude. Something so young and fresh about her, so Debbie Reynolds the way she talked, her sense of purpose. Her expression of great faith gave me faith. Stopped that hard piece of terror that had been growing in me since the day I first heard the devil speak its name: GRIDS. Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

  And there she is, the bouncy young hopeful woman, scabs on the skin of her eyes, her light brown dishwater hair greasy, on the six train uptown with a tin can and a white cane and sign around her neck.

  THE DOCTOR IS a woman and I’m sitting in her high-ceilinged, oak-paneled office. She’s my age, maybe younger, with long dark brown braided hair. The braids folded up around her head. Lots of eyebrows about her. The way she moves her eyebrows. Silver half-glasses that set on the end of her nose. Dark red lipstick. Her dress is something tailored and comfortable and blue and she sits in an ergonomic leather chair behind her large oak desk. The window to the street behind her is a bright rectangle. Tiny strands of her long hair stick up in the light. I can’t actually see her face. She’s a silhouette with eyebrows. What I can see, what I can’t stop looking at, are her hands. Smooth and tanned, fingernails short and neatly manicured, they are folded on top of her blotter under the light from one of those desk lamps with a green glass shade and a brass pullstring. Her wedding ring is gold with green stone. The way the green stone sparkles, I can’t stop looking because I’ve never seen a real emerald before.

  “This is what they tell me to tell you,” she says.

  The only movement I can see that she makes are her thumbs. She rolls her thumbs.

  “You are HIV positive,” she says. “Two hundred forty T-cells. And because you are HIV positive, you are going to get sick. And because you’re going to get sick, you are going to die.”

  IT STARTS AT that moment. Big Ben gets on his Big Fucking Bull Horn:

  Get out of this office and fast. This doctor woman is too powerful, she’s behind too big a desk, her emerald is real, and this house impresses you way too much. You could start believing this shit.

  Running Boy running down Lexington. Running and running. Each time a wing tip hits the sidewalk, the heat burns my foot, shoots up my leg. A blur of black wingtips, a Road Runner cartoon, underneath me. That’s all I can hear too. No traffic, no city noise, just my wing tips pounding cement. I’m running so fast my sunglasses fall off, but I don’t stop. At intersections sometimes I float over the whole street, a long distance high jumper. I swear at times I’m really flying. Big Ben is yelling look how strong you are. You’ve been running for blocks and still you have breath, still you are strong. These fucking doctors don’t even know for sure if it’s HIV that causes AIDS. It’s all in your attitude. A good attitude can beat any diagnosis. All you have to do is believe. The secret is to believe.

  PENNSYLVANIA STATION IS the first place I recognize. At first I don’t believe my eyes but I’m in Pennsylvania Station. Wet. As if it were raining, I am wet. My vintage blue linen suit sticks to my arms, my back, the backs of my legs. Through my white shirt, my belly hairs. I’ve run from 83rd Street to 34th Street and in Penn Station I’m still running. It’s Esther I want to get to. Get my ass to Esther in Pennsylvania and in Esther’s big old house. Solid wood, I’ll be safe. In the cozy, sloped-ceilinged garret with the matching beds and a bay window that looks south over the cherry orchard. Safe. I’m running and my hand is searching for change in my pocket so I can call Esther and tell her I’m on the next train. Somewhere in there I pass out. Mid-stride, mid-air, the lights go out. The hard gray floor.

  SILVIO SHIT HIMSELF to death. Silvio, that smile, his one tooth gone, his smooth olive skin, sweet sweet Silvio died shitting on the toilet. All the nurse could do was hold his hand. One last shit-spray and his para-sympathetic nervous system went tilt. Gary slit his wrists in the tub. Long cuts up the arm with a sheet rock knife. Deep cuts, over an inch deep. The red how it pumped out in pulses into the bathwater. Is that when he screamed? His neighbor said she heard him scream. Randy died in a straitjacket. They had to tie his hands down. Dementia so fierce he tried to tear his face off. Lester overdosed because the AZT was making him so sick. Tom’s heart just gave out. Dick finally just gave in. In one exhale he was his skeleton.

  And these are only six. Six men I know in a city of thousands and thousands of men sick and half-dead, infested with scabs and pustules and tuberculosis and thrush and skin fungus and flesh-eating viruses. The way it eats at your brain, when you sit quiet you can actually hear the virus in your head.

  Thousands. Thousands of men full of fear and dread and alone with their fear. Each man’s fear as contagious as the virus itself. Fear and fear and fear feeds the collective fear and the city is the horror the horror the fucking horror so thick it’s the air you breathe the same way years later the air you breathe from the World Trade towers is thick.

  IT’S STILL PENN Station. I’m still on the floor. No one has come to help me, but New York instinct, I’ve already checked for my wallet. No one has ripped me off. My elbow is sore, though. A puddle of sweat on the floor under my face. At first I think it’s blood, but the eye that isn’t pressed into the floor looks and it’s only sweat not blood and I’m happy it ain’t blood. AIDS blood. If it were blood, I’d get up again and run like I ran when I was a kid and Uncle Bob chased me all over the farm.

  In a heap, my body. I don’t even know where my legs are. Only what I see I can know. My hand is way out there in front of me two tiles away just lying there. For a moment I’m sure my hand is dead, but I know it ain’t ’cause it just checked my ass pocket.

  The lightbulb in the middle of my chest.

  Over the years nothing has changed. Fear has ruled my life and now it will rule my death. No matter how long I run or where I run to.

  Then my hand is in Atlanta under Gary’s apple tree and I’m looking at my thumb. Remember? The amazing understanding I had about fear and my thumb. How was it exactly that my thumb moved? At what position was there fear? What position was there no fear?

  Look at you sprawled out sweating like a pig in some other dandy’s clothes, looking one eye across two gray tiles at your thumb. Your thumb, your thumb, your goddamn thumb. Too afraid to move your thumb because you can’t remember where the no fear position is, and maybe your thumb is already in the fucking no-fear position. And it can get worse. You know damn well it can get worse.

  Maybe what you found on mushrooms under an apple tree in a ghost town in Idaho won’t come back to you now that you’re down and out in New York City in a puddle of sweat.

  Lie there, Little Man. Try and
move your thumb. It is your only hope – not the consequence of what comes after you move it, but that you can summon up the will to move it at all.

  The worst thing about hope isn’t when you can’t find it.

  It’s that you stop.

  13.

  Portlandia, 1995

  Seven years later

  MY THUMB IS AGAINST THE KNUCKLE OF MY INDEX FINGER, on the no-fear spot.

  I’ve just got back from a week in Montana and it’s a summer night in Portland. Hot for Portland, and the miracle above all, it’s not raining. It always rains until July Fourth and July Fourth is four days away. The house is clean and decorated with white candles and white crepe paper streamers. I’ve cooked up a huge barbecue of ribs and chicken. It’s a full moon and a blue moon. A Summer White Party.

  My birthday. Forty-seven years old.

  Six o’clock, an hour before everybody gets there, I’m just out of the shower, heading upstairs to put on my party duds. I’ll be wearing a pair of white long johns. The double doors to the deck are open and in the distance, Mount Hood on the horizon is a piece of sharp white. Just down the stairs of the deck, under the clematis, sunlight there on the second step. There’s only a minute or two before the sun goes behind the hill.

  The patch of sunlight is just big enough for my face and shoulders. And my hand. The sun on the thumb and the index finger of my hand. On the knuckle, the no-fear spot. I take a deep breath. Move my thumb to the tip of my index, to the fear spot.

  That evening, my forty-seventh birthday, in the patch of sun on the second step, there’s no lightbulb in my chest, no flickering filament, no Fear Giant. Only the sun on my hand and water from my wet hair rolling down my back. I move my thumb back to the knuckle, then back again to the tip. Back and forth, back and forth.

  SEVEN YEARS AGO, back in the puddle of sweat on the floor of Penn Station, I finally got my thumb to move. If you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Nothing changed. I mean the fear didn’t just go poof. But I figured that since I moved my thumb I could move something else. Besides, how long really can you lie on the floor in a public train station.

  Lots of people were staring. Most of them New Jersey or Long Island people. New Yorkers wouldn’t stare that way. I sat for a while on the gray tiles, then Big Ben made my knees do it and I stood up. Had to stand for a while, too. Kept forgetting what I was doing or why I was doing it.

  At the curb I got a taxi. Nothing like a quick taxi to fix things up. Give you a sense of power. I even had enough money to pay him. Tipped him good. A dark brown guy with huge black eyes and pock-marked skin from one of those unpronounceable -stan countries. Incense burning on the dashboard. I think he knew he was my guardian angel.

  After I showered I sat down at my new computer. I started writing because I didn’t know what else to do. It was a longshot, this novel, but I trusted my heart, I followed my bliss. I stayed centered with a positive attitude. I shot my arrow of intention into the air. The secret is to believe. It all sounds like bullshit, but what else you got?

  Imagine it and it will come. One day the phone rings and through a bunch of mysterious events, on the line it’s an old friend of Randy Goldblatt’s. Randy, from Jeske’s class. The guy on the phone, his name is Tony, and he wants to have coffee. Tony Escobar. Another long story and not an easy one to tell.

  We meet for lunch at Café Orlin. Tony’s odd and funny and looks like a heavyweight Billy Zane. Neither one of us knows what to say at first. Randy’s dead and he died of dementia strapped into a straitjacket. What can you say.

  Tony orders the huevos rancheros. Tony raves so much about the huevos rancheros, I order the huevos rancheros too. The table is small and the restaurant is crowded. Our knees touch under the table. Tony was right about the Mexican eggs. Delicious. We hit it off pretty quick and soon enough we get to talking about Randy. Tony tells me he and Randy were roommates as undergrads at UCLA. They got real close. Then Tony says something that surprises me.

  “You’re all Goldie talked about,” Tony says, “that whole semester he was in Jeske’s class.”

  “Goldie?” I say.

  “Randy, Randy Goldblatt,” Tony says.

  “Poor Randy,” I say. “That first day, Jeske made Randy say it. That he was fat. Made him fucking cry.”

  Three years older than me, Tony, a Sagittarius. His father’s family from Spain and his mother’s Black Irish. He’s a recovering Catholic, too, and a professor of English at Reed College and he’s just finishing up his sabbatical in Manhattan. Single, out, and gay, and he lives in Portland, Oregon. Smooth olive skin and a clipped beard but not too tidy. Blue eyes that jump out of all that black hair. Lips like Marco’s lips, cherry red.

  It ain’t long and we’re talking about our HIV positives. We’re talking about sex. What we can do and what we can’t. What is safe if you’re both positive? Just talking about sex, we both get a little crazy.

  I know. This guy Tony is too good to be true. God bless Randy Goldblatt. God bless Goldie. But the best thing about Tony is his dick. He doesn’t get hard right off. His dick isn’t as big as the rest of him is and he’s shy about it.

  Shy. That’s it right there. I’m totally smitten.

  Room 523, the Hotel Olcott. The days of my propinquity are over and we get naked and we talk, have a little wine. The bathtub is huge and green and Tony’s got bubble bath. It ain’t long at all and there’s bathwater splashing. Then sex again on the bed. Tony’s bed is actually two beds pushed together and we’re lying in the middle of the beds and our fucking pushes the beds apart and I fall to the floor as I’m coming. Tony looks over the edge of the bed the way I was hollering to see if I’m still alive. Tony laughs like Hank, a whole-body laugh, lots of chest. A lot of things about Tony remind me of Hank. Dinner at Raoul’s that Tony springs for. Later on that night, we find a park bench in Central Park. We sit on the park bench in the shadows. Out in the street, the yellow lamplight, the wind blowing the gold leaves, Tony reaches over and holds my hand. Propinquity.

  After Tony reads my novel he’s convinced it’s love. I’m convinced too. He wants me to come live with him. I want to come live with him. We set the date for the end of June the following year.

  Tony leaves for Portland in early December.

  For Christmas, he sends me a Fairy Drag Queen ornament to put on the top of my tree. It’s a Ken Doll dressed up as Christmas Angel Barbie, only Christmas Angel Barbie’s got a black beard and hairy legs. Her lopsided halo you can plug in. Under his dress is a red jock strap. A wired connector on his asshole so he can sit, a proper star, on the very top tip of the tree. In his Christmas card, Tony tells me he bought the Fairy Drag Queen at a benefit for AIDS on Christopher Street.

  By April Tony is dead.

  Systemic non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  AT PORTLAND’S PIONEER Cemetery, I stay away from the crowd of mourners. Look hard to see which woman is his mother. Which man his father. Lots of young people gathered. Students, I guess. A young man plays his guitar and sings. “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” Fuck.

  When everyone leaves and the dozer has filled the grave, I just sit there on the wet grass among all the flowers. It’s a beautiful spring day. The tall trees. Everything so quiet. Green like I’ve never seen green.

  Big Ben finds a house for rent not more than a block away. Three hundred dollars a month for a whole house and backyard. On the FOR RENT sign it says: See Horace next door, and then an arrow. Next door in the front yard there is every kind of blooming flower there is. Horace is about sixty. He’s bald and wears a red T-shirt. His pants held up by red suspenders. Those wild kind of eyebrows old men got and spectacles. Spectacles, I think as soon as I see Horace’s gold-rimmed glasses. The way Horace’s bloodshot eyes look at me he can tell I’ve been crying. In Horace’s hand a copy of Moby-Dick.

  “Good book,” I say.

  “Have you read the feminist version?” he says.

  I don’t know what to say. I clear my throat or some shit like that.


  “Moby Pussy,” he says.

  Horace doesn’t laugh when he says this, so I don’t laugh either. Really, I’m afraid to start laughing. I take my wallet out, take two hundred cash out and give it to him and tell him I’ll send him the rest when I get to Manhattan.

  “Manhattan?” Horace says.

  I start to apologize for the missing hundred then stop.

  “Grew up on Orchard and Delancey,” he says.

  Then Horace goes in his house and closes the door. I can hear him in his front room rustling around. When he opens the door again he hands me two keys.

  “Same key opens the front door and the back,” he says. “You’ve got two there. Duplicates.”

  “Full rent is due by the fifth of every month,” he says.

  At Tony’s grave with all the flowers I tell Tony about my new house and ask him if he’s read the feminist version of Moby-Dick.

  A WEEK LATER, back in New York, Little Ben thinks I can’t possibly leave New York. Who am I if I’m not a New Yorker?

  One morning I get up, throw on my work clothes, grab my broom and dustpan, open and close and lock my apartment door, walk out the front door of my building. Down on the street, some asshole has ripped open the garbage bags and there’s shit all over creation. The night before I’d spent a couple hours bagging up that garbage. So I set myself to the task at hand. Get the mess cleaned up. All the while people are walking past. One guy in a black Armani overcoat hacks up a loogie and spits right at my feet. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that I’m invisible. But it’s the backed up sewerage in the basement of 39 East Seventh that’s the last straw. I leave my white Key West shrimper boots on the bottom basement stair.