I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.

  THE DAY I leave Manhattan, Hank is up from Florida getting the last of his shit out of storage. We meet at #77 St. Mark’s Place, at Auden’s door. It’s the afternoon of Cinco de Mayo. Already hot. After this day, I won’t see Hank for eleven and a half years. Hank’s in his gray hooded sweatshirt and Levi’s. Still wearing the straw cowboy hat Gary gave him from Atlanta. His new white tennis shoes. His hair’s cut short and his beard shows gray. The Eighties are about over. I’m wearing the green coat Gary gave me with Idaho Dairy Association on it. Levi’s, my Red Wing boots. Sal’s red baseball cap. I’ve brought an old bike along somebody’d left in one of my basements. Hank said he could use the transportation in Florida. It’s one of those stripped down bikes with ten gears and knobby tires that’s good for dodging through traffic. Hank’s standing on one side of the bike, me on the other.

  THOSE BLACK EYES that should be blue but they’re not. Hank looks tired. But I do too.

  I don’t tell him about Tony. I try to but I can’t. But I do tell him about the house I’ve rented in Portland. I make up some shit about going back to the Pacific Northwest. Hank’s still going on about Barry Hannah.

  When we embrace the bike is between us. We’re front to front and Hank holds onto the bike, keeps the bike right there between us.

  I wonder why that bike is there.

  But then I got to figure. It’s been eight months since Atlanta and the wedding ring bed. And Hank Christian, The Enigma of Hank, The Warrior Ghost, is back to holding his cards close to his chest.

  Hank Christian, man. Fucking Hank Christian.

  I’m trying not to cry, but I cry.

  Fucking Auden’s poem gets me every time.

  THAT FIRST YEAR in Portland I spend more time in the cemetery than anywhere else. There’s a huge old cedar tree I like to lean against. Smells great under that tree. Pioneer Cemetery. Mostly poor people buried there. Couldn’t find a spot for myself right next to him, but I got one close by.

  Tony Escobar, man. Fucking Tony Escobar.

  AND THAT’S HOW I got here, Portland, Oregon, on the second step. The sun is warm on my face, my shoulders, my hands. Five years and three months since Tony died. Five years and two months I’ve lived in Portland.

  It’s my birthday and people are coming to my house for a birthday party and I have enough money to buy the food and the booze. I have two books published and I have a contract for a third and the third book is busting my balls but I love it. I’m writing about what only there is I can write about. AIDS and New York.

  Something else that’s important to know. Not a day has gone by in these last seven years that Little Ben hasn’t woken up afraid. AIDS. That bright flickering filament in the middle of my chest. Every day at Bikram’s College of India, with every drop of sweat I think of AIDS. I quit smoking, quit drinking. Every day when I want a smoke I think of AIDS. Every day I want a smart cocktail I think of AIDS. My organic breakfast, the organic vegetables for lunch and dinner, the naturally grown meat I can’t afford at the fancy grocery. Every night I put myself to sleep reading Louise Hey and other self-help books. Flip the I Ching. Do the tarot cards. Trying to keep the Fear Giant at bay. One spiritual book tells me my urine is my own secret personal medicine cabinet, so every morning I drink a cup of my urine. Every morning with my cup of piss I remember AIDS. It’s not so bad, just tastes like piss. The secret is to believe. Not one moment since that day I lay on the floor in Penn Station, not for one fucking moment have I let myself forget what the doctor on East 83rd had said.

  Positive = Sick = Death.

  Then there was Montana. Just the week before, as a birthday present for me, Ephraim arranged it so that I could dance with a sacred medicine pipe. Me, the only white man that’s danced with that pipe. When the old native man asked me why I wanted to dance with his pipe, I looked into his dark eyes. They were the eyes of a child, nothing in between. I’ve never felt so looked at. I told him about my friends who died and the virus called AIDS and the test that I had that showed I was infected. I told him I was dancing with his pipe so I wouldn’t get AIDS.

  We can do that, the old man had said.

  ON THE SECOND step the sun is almost gone. I take another breath, a deep inhale.

  It’s that day, in the patch of sun, in Portlandia. All that Montana sacred pipe spirit flowing through me. That moment there on my forty-seventh birthday, I decide.

  My thumb is on the no fear spot and I move my thumb away. It’s time to let the fear go. My birthday gift to myself. Big Ben steps up and declares: I am healthy and I’m going to stay healthy and I’m not going to get AIDS.

  As if it were up to me.

  The patch of sunlight is gone. That breath is a difficult breath to let go of, but when I do, it’s the first time in years. No fear. Clear and clean and smooth and as soon as I finish my proclamation of health, the phone rings. It’s Hank Christian.

  “Dear sweet man,” Hank says. “Happy Birthday.”

  “How’s Barry Hannah?” I say.

  “We’re armwrestling,” Hank says. “Three to two my favor.”

  “Dr. Christian,” I say, “if you ever graduate you should come teach with me. What a team we’d make. Just like the old days at the Y.”

  “Hey, I’m serious,” Hank says. “I’d love teaching with you. Nobody else is doing what you’re doing.”

  “There wouldn’t be any tenure,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean there ain’t no benefits.”

  Hank’s big laugh coming up and out of him.

  “You could say motherfucker all you wanted,” I say.

  “And no freshman comp,” Hank says.

  “I ain’t much at armwrestling,” I say.

  We laugh some more after that. Then we talk as long as we can but neither one of us are good on the phone. So we make our usual promise that we’ll visit one another. But I have my new book to work on. And Hank has to find a job. It will be five years before we talk to each other again.

  IT’S THAT NIGHT I have a gin and tonic, two. I smoke some reefer too. Weird. I’d completely forgotten what a funny fellow I can be. Of course, you can’t smoke reefer and not have a cigarette. Before I know it, I’m completely stoned and I’m Big Ben and there are so many people in the house it’s hard to move. Most of the people are from my class. It’s when my favorite song comes on, “Got to Give It Up,” that I look around for someone to dance with.

  Ruth Dearden’s been dancing all night, nonstop, as if the back patio was a place of magic. Sometimes alone, mostly with other women. Ruth is completely unselfconscious, and often the way she moves is quite dramatic. For a moment I think she’s high, then I remember her husband.

  Ruth always leaves right after class. Most students hang out, have some wine. Usually someone lights a joint. Later on, Ruth will tell me it was because of that joint that she left early. She was afraid her husband would find out and he’d make her stop class because there were drugs.

  At first, I dance alone next to her. The last time I’d danced to this song was with Hank that night before we went to the Spike. All around Ruth on the patio are puffs of chiffon that all night she’s been tearing off her dress.

  The moment when Ruth sees that I’m close, she smiles way too big. I take her hands and we begin to dance. Jitterbugging I guess is what you’d call it. My sister taught me the steps when I was in the fourth grade and I’ve been doing them ever since. Modified the steps with Bette Podegushka for the disco years.

  “Oh my God!” Ruth says. “My teacher is dancing with me and he’s in his long johns!”

  Some women just know how to follow. Don’t ask me how they do it. I can’t do it. Ginger Rogers as good as Fred Astaire only Ginger did it backwards and in high heels.

  Some women Ruth ain’t. As soon as I touch her hands and begin dancing with her, the unselfconscious, dramatic dancer that was Ruth Dearden, all of a sudden loses her rhythm. It’s like she isn’t listening to the music at all.
She actually begins to clown, throwing her arms and legs around. I’m surprised she makes fun of herself like this. Then in a moment I get it. Ruth Dearden has a propinquity problem. I quick let go of Ruth’s hands and we dance together without touching.

  On her chest, just above the chiffon bodice of her white dress, her skin flushes scarlet. Ruth knows her skin is doing that, so she puts her hand at her throat. She’s looking for something to say, anything, so she says:

  “Happy Birthday!”

  “You look like you’re having a good time,” I say.

  “My husband isn’t here,” she says.

  “Your dress is falling apart.”

  “I’m ripping it apart. It’s my wedding dress,” Ruth says. “I’ve always hated it.”

  “A little girl’s dress,” she says. “Or a doll’s. So puffy and so First Communion. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  What I say next. You got to be high to say shit like I say next.

  “If you keep at it,” I say, “you’ll be like Shingli-shoozi.”

  Ruth Dearden isn’t as tall as me. She’s barefoot and I got two inches on her. She’s not fat or plump. She’s just big. By the time she meets Hank she’ll have lost twenty-five pounds. Her skin is that strawberry blonde that freckles. The flush still on her chest. Maybe a heat rash. Her hair is thick and red that hangs to her shoulders. Curly hair that won’t frizz. I want to touch it. Because of the color and how it looks silky and because I’m high.

  “What did you say?” she says.

  I have to stop because I’m laughing. That happened a lot with Ruth. There was a way so many times when we were together I’d start laughing and not know how to stop and the moment would expand and expand. I’d just suddenly find myself in a place I couldn’t explain that was never ending. And I’d be laughing.

  “Shingli-shoozi,” I say. “It’s a Betty Grable movie. Betty’s singing and dancing on a stage in front of a red curtain and there’s a pocket in the curtain and she steps inside the pocket and changes into a skimpier outfit.”

  “It’s a game my sister and I played,” I say.

  The way Ruth is looking at me. Her big plastic glasses a little crooked. Her bangs hanging down into her eyes. That asymmetrical jaw of hers and her mouth open. The flush is on her cheeks as well.

  “I made up the word,” I say. “Or my sister did. When I was five. I was so fascinated by Betty Grable’s pocket in the curtain and her quick wardrobe change I called it Shingli-shoozi.”

  “Shingli-shoozi!” Ruth says.

  “My father hated it,” I say.

  “Betty Grable?”

  “No,” I say. “That I made up the word.”

  “Was it you who made it up,” Ruth asks, “or your sister?”

  “Men can’t do that, you know,” I say. “Women are lucky that way. You can step behind a curtain, change your outfit and your makeup, and voilà, you step out a whole new woman.”

  “Jeez,” Ruth says. “Wish I knew how to do that.”

  That was the first time Ruth hit me. Knocked me the fuck down. I mean she didn’t mean to. It’s just at that moment, Ruth decided to do one of her dramatic dance moves and she twirled with her arms out and when her arm came around, her fist hit me square in the face and knocked me down.

  I put my hand to my nose, blood on my hand.

  “Ben!” Ruth says. “I’m so sorry!”

  She leans down, and with a tuft of chiffon she’s ripped from her dress, she goes to put the chiffon to my bloody nose.

  “HIV!” I almost yell it.

  LATER ON THAT night, when the full moon is hanging above the chatter and the music of the party, I pass out the words to a song. It’s an old song from the Thirties and what’s a better thing to do on a Cancer’s birthday than sing to the moon.

  I turn the lights out and each person lights a candle and we gather close together in the backyard and we’re all in white and we all look up. The full moon up there in the dark night sky, a bright silver ball. The night is clear and warm, and the moon feels close, how we can see that it’s a ball hanging up there, the craters on its surface. The way it shines is the way we all shine when we know we’re beheld.

  Blue moon

  You saw me standing alone.

  VOICES RISING TOGETHER in song. It can get me every time. All of a sudden, my body feels the bodies close around me. My birthday, my friends, my students, this new world in Portland, Oregon, the shine up there shining just for me. The breath I take is another new breath, a breath without the constant fear.

  I heard somebody whisper please adore me

  And when I looked the moon had turned to gold.

  It’s on the refrain that I look around at the group of us. Mortals singing at the moon. We’re all children, really. No wonder people sing to feel united. Each one of us, alone in our body, gives voice to a sound that goes up and out into the world. Our voice is joined by other voices, and by some miracle, what joins our voices out there dives down into our throats back into our hearts.

  Then I hear it. One voice I can hear above the rest. It’s not a strong singing voice. There’s something fragile about it, yet clear, determined.

  Ruth Dearden, a candle under her chin, her big plastic glasses. All the chiffon tufts of her dress torn off. Her head is tilted up. The way she’s looking at the moon, somehow you just know.

  All her dreams are going to come true.

  14.

  Father

  THE CAR I RENT IN BOISE IS A GRAY CHEVROLET ASTRO. I stop off at their houses, but Reuben and Sal and Gary are still in Atlanta. On I-84 it’s the Mountain Home desert. All the windows are open and my elbow’s out the window. August in Idaho. It’s mid-day and my shirt’s off. No shoes, my baggy cutoffs, my bare legs, bare feet. Wind blowing through the Astro and the radio cranked up high, I’m alone singing loud to the golden oldies the one hundred and fifty-four miles to Jerome.

  God, I miss Hank.

  Tony would’ve loved Idaho.

  MY FATHER’S HOUSE is set a ways off from the highway. The country mailbox Grunewald with the red metal flag, set on a railroad tie stuck in the ground in the gravel right where the driveway intersects with the highway. My mother used to back her Buick out of the garage, pull it up back to behind the house, just to where the Buick’s nose was even with the board fence, then hit the gas. She’d hit sixty before she got to the mailbox and still have time to stop. The distance less than one city block from starting line to finish.

  The house is a tile-roof red-brick house with a picture window. My father built the house for my mother when they sold the farm. This new house is almost identical to the house I was raised in. The same three-bedroom ranchburger. Same kitchen, same vaulted-ceiling living room with used-brick walls and exposed beams, the same front porch with a loveseat for two that is a swing. Identical to the old house, almost. It’s what is not identical that makes me crazy.

  My mother’s not in it. She’s dead.

  I pull the Astro to into the driveway and park next to my father’s red Chevy pickup. The sun is late afternoon hot and bouncing bright off the cement driveway and the white vinyl garage doors.

  The car engine shut off, the engine still ticking. This is always the point, Christmas or summer or whenever the visit, just as we’re about to get out of the car, just before we enter into the portal of the family house, is when my sister Margaret always said it: Cowboy up, Ben.

  Immediately, that day getting out of the Astro, I have a quick moment of shame and I want to cover my naked chest and arms, my naked legs, my bare feet. According to father, a man is always in his boots, in his Levi’s. Only long-sleeved shirts that you can roll to the elbow. And a hat. A man always wears his hat.

  Fuck him and his hat. I’m bare-headed, barefoot, half-naked, and he’s almost dead. I am too. Still got three and a half years. But I don’t know it. Don’t want to know it.

  My feet are hot on the cement. I do a back stretch and when I lean forward I fart. Think of Hank. Think of my f
ather. Both of them big on farting.

  On the sidewalk, just below the mudroom door, is the old chain-linked metal mat you scrape your boots off on that’s been in front of the mud room door since I’ve had a memory. The metal presses little squares into the bottoms of my feet. The mudroom door is unlocked. Up the four steps, the kitchen door is unlocked too.

  The silent way that door opens. Not like the creak of the door of the first house. I call out hello, but the house is silent the way only the second house can be silent. More than silent. The way nothing arrives at the ear. This second house, just empty, because it’s trying to be the other house, and it will never be the other house, plus she died in this house.

  Only the grandfather clock in the living room. That tic tic tic. At a quarter past, the chime, so German, and at the half-hour, and at quarter ’til, and then on the hour the big to-do with the chimes and the cuckoo. Like to drive you fucking nuts.

  But it’s not just that my mother isn’t here.

  The first house he built her had a promise. Something about that first house – how it expanded out past the green lawn she kept so perfect, past the log pole fence I built her, past the Four o’Clocks and the Austrian Copper rose, to the Tyhee Road, and from there through the fertile valley into town and from there on out it was the world.

  This second house was a ruse. A stage set of the first house built on a hill in the desert with a wind break of half-dead pines and scrub Russian olives. Something to keep her going, to stop her spine from bending completely forward at the waist. To stop the psoriasis and her hair from falling out. Something to get her to start baking apple pies again, au gratin potatoes again, chocolate cakes, carrot pudding, start playing her piano again – anything to bring her back. But the day she walked into that new house – at the very place my bare feet are standing that day – when the door closed behind her, she knew she’d never leave it. At that moment, one step in, so much like the old house but not the old house at all, this new house was a prison and she fell and broke her ankle.