I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  “What?”

  “He opened an avenue of fear,” I say. “He’s a bullshit doctor and I won’t go back to him.”

  “Ben,” Madalena says, “that was over a year ago. You promised you’d go back. Are you seeing another doctor?”

  “No.”

  “Are you taking your antidepressants?”

  “They’re like taking speed. Do you know any other doctors?”

  “Your health insurance won’t cover anyone else,” she says. “Have you been sleeping?”

  “But what if I pay?”

  There’s a moment of silence on the line. I mean not silence, all the wires the way my ears always sound.

  “Give me just a minute,” Madalena says.

  Then: “Do you have a pen and paper?”

  I uncap my black grease pen.

  “Her name is Dr. Shelley Roth,” Madalena says. “She’s a psychopharmacologist and has her own practice.”

  Across the Mediterranean sunset, across Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, in black grease pen I write: Dr. Shelley Roth. And her phone number.

  “Ben?” Madalena says, “I know Shelley. I’ll call her myself.”

  ON THE PHONE, Dr. Shelley Roth can hear it in my voice. She gives me her address and tells me to come the next day at one o’clock. I ask her how much she’ll charge and Dr. Roth tells me we’ll talk about payment after she sees me.

  The next day is another gray day, cold, but that’s June for you. I’m in my kitchen, showered, shaved, in my pressed white shirt. My good white shirt, as Hank Christian would say. At my waist, my pants bunch up khaki drape folds under my black belt. My black loafers spit-shined and dark socks. My shiny blue suit jacket that fits a 42 long. I’m swimming in it. Hair product in the gray fuzz that used to be my hair. In my wallet, I’ve got one hundred-dollar bill left. Two twenties, a ten, three fives, and a bunch of ones. I’m waiting for the Radio Cab to honk outside.

  There’s a knock on my door. I cuss that I didn’t hear the cabbie honk, open the door. There on my porch stands Ruth. We both put our hands up to our throats.

  Beautiful, according to Hitchcock, skinnier than ever. Her hair is pulled off her face into a bun. Strands of blonde in the red. Those ultra blue contact blue eyes I never got used to looking into. No drag that day, no feather boa, no leopardskin, no vintage. Just her sweater. Pearls on the breast of her creamy white sweater. A flowered cotton skirt, no underslip. Red ballet slippers.

  “My God, Ben,” Ruth says, “you look horrible.”

  “I’m waiting for a cab,” I say.

  “I’m your cab today,” Ruth says. “We’re going to the psychopharmacologist.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “You put me down as next of kin,” Ruth says. “Madalena Papas called me and asked me to drive you.”

  “No,” I say. “No, the cab will be here any minute. It’s best I go with a cab.”

  Ruth reaches out, puts her hand on the shoulder of my shiny blue jacket. Ruth’s biting her lip and her eyes are starting to tear. Her touch makes me jump.

  “Ruth,” I say, “we can’t keep doing this.”

  “I totally agree,” Ruth says. “Believe me. All I’m doing this afternoon is taking a sick friend to the doctor.”

  “Ruth,” I say, “you’ve helped enough.”

  “You’ll never be able to repay me,” Ruth says. “Now hurry up. We’ve only got ten minutes.”

  “Don’t tell me to hurry up, Ruth,” I say.

  The standoff on the porch. Ruth’s got a red Chinese clutch bag she’s holding in front of her. My hands are folded over my crotch.

  Ruth could be Doris Day, Tippi Hedren, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly.

  “Come on, Ben,” Ruth says. “You need some help. Please.”

  DR. SHELLEY ROTH’S office is in a yellow Victorian house in Southwest, just off First Avenue. Ruth and I sit in a small area under the stairway that maybe used to be the pantry. Some designer has tried to make it look like a waiting room. Matching small overstuffed burgundy chairs. Matching burgundy pillows. Burgundy panels on the window. A round spindly wood table with magazines. Old People magazines. Monica Lewinsky. Madonna on tour. Weird Michael Jackson.

  It isn’t long, though, and a door opens. Footsteps down the hallway.

  Dr. Shelley Roth is a small woman, looks like Frida Kahlo, only Jewish. Her brown hair is long and going gray, pulled back in a barrette. I’m thinking about the last Jewish doctor I went to on 83rd Street. But there’s something about the way Dr. Roth moves. The way her clothes fit her. Like she’s really comfortable in them.

  Then she smiles. Wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. It’s a face that has smiled a lot. My heart stops beating so hard. I take a long deep breath.

  “Good afternoon,” Dr. Roth says. “I’m Dr. Shelley Roth, and I presume you are Benjamin Grunewald.”

  I smile, start to say something, but Dr. Roth has already turned.

  “Please follow me to my office,” she says.

  I know Ruth too well. No way she’s not going in. I give her the go-ahead nod and Ruth and I follow Dr. Roth down the hallway, past the stairway, and into the front office. The office was once the front parlor of the house. Behind Dr. Roth’s desk, a shiny new wall where once there was probably a sliding pocket door. A painting on the shiny wall. Just a big black rectangle framed behind a glass. Maybe a Richard Serra. Shelves and shelves of books, and books piled up on her desk, piles of papers. Ruth and I sit down on the loveseat in the bay window. There’s room enough on the seat that we don’t have to touch. Sunlight coming through the clouds right then. My God, sunlight.

  “This is my friend,” I say, “Ruth Dearden.”

  “Hello, Ruth,” Dr. Roth says. “Thanks for driving Ben here today.”

  Ruth and I give each other a look.

  “Ms. Papas told me she called you, Ruth,” Dr. Roth says. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Dr. Roth opens a manila envelope, puts on a pair of tortoise shell glasses, reads for a while, then sits down.

  “So, Benjamin Grunewald, tell me something about yourself.”

  I MEAN, WHERE do you start? I don’t know, so I look at that big black painting and I start talking. I start with my mother and my father and my sister and Catholicism, Idaho. Go straight to being homosexual, New York City, AIDS, sleeplessness. Dr. Mark Hardy, SSRIs and his Avenue of Fear. I talk for a long time. A couple things I say I can tell Ruth’s never heard. She doesn’t know about my mother, or my sister. Not really. She’s totally surprised when I tell Dr. Roth that I haven’t slept in eleven days. I keep talking for a while longer but then I stop. Feels like I’m babbling and I’m afraid Dr. Roth will think I’m crazy. Have me committed.

  There’s a long time in Dr. Roth’s office that nobody speaks. It’s as if the three of us forgot how to breathe. Ruth uncrosses, then recrosses her legs. Her red ballet slippers. The sun goes behind the clouds, comes back out again. We’re just reflections on the glass of the big black rectangle.

  Dr. Roth gets up from behind her desk. From where I’m sitting, she looks much taller. Small bones, tiny wrists and ankles. She walks around her desk and sits in the chair closest to me. Her knee pops when she sits. She takes off her glasses and looks straight at me. When Dr. Roth finally speaks, her voice is low. And there’s a hitch in it. A warbly sound the way when some women sing.

  “Benjamin,” she says, “according to your records, from talking to Madalena, and from what you’ve told me here, I can tell you with all candor that I have never met anyone who has been so deeply anxious for so long who has lived through it. Most people’s bodies would have simply failed them. Then there is suicide. I must tell you, the suicide rate for anxiety like yours is phenomenal. I don’t know how you have managed to stay alive.”

  My body, in that moment. I’m so proud of my body – Big Ben, Little Ben, The Running Boy. And something else. When Dr. Roth stops speaking, I know for sure. That’s the closest I’ll ever feel what it’s like to have a mother.

/>   DR. ROTH STARTS writing prescriptions.

  “Take as many Xanax as you need to stop the anxiety,” Dr. Roth says. “Whatever you do, stop the anxiety. You’re used to the Xanax, so you might try the Valium. It’s the strongest of the benzodiazepines, just be aware of that. For sleeping you should try the Klonopin. It doesn’t peak so quickly. The trazodone will keep you asleep. Before you go to sleep, start off with one milligram of Klonopin and fifty miligrams of trazodone. If you aren’t sleeping eight hours a night within a week, increase the dosage by a half. I’m putting you on an antidepressant that’s just come out. It’s had a lot of success. It’s not an SSRI and its side effect is sleep.”

  When Ruth and I get up to go, there’s a long back and forth between Dr. Roth and me. Finally she accepts my hundred-dollar bill.

  AT THE DRUGSTORE, it takes about an hour, but I get all the prescriptions. It’s in Ruth’s car in crosstown traffic that I open the container of Xanax. As soon as I see the pills, I know in an instant. Fuck. That all along I’ve been taking fucking steroids. As fast as I can, I pour four white pills out into my hand and put them in my mouth.

  Instant relief. The world is a little bit more my world, twenty minutes tops.

  In front of my house, so many dramatic scenes in front of my house, Ruth and me. Ruth stops the car and pulls up on the hand brake. I gather up my bags full of drugs. It takes a while for my big body to get out of Ruth’s little car. Just before I close the door, we grab each other’s hands quick, then let go.

  10:30 that night. I lay the three yellow antidepressant pills in a pile on the kitchen counter alongside the one green Klonopin and the white trazodone. All my searching for an answer, for meaning to it all, has come down to this. Life and death in a pile of pills.

  I stare at those three little yellow pills for a long long time. I won’t let myself think about it. What will happen if this antidepressant doesn’t work.

  The glass with the yellow balloons, I fill it up with tap water. I hold the pills in my hand. That moment.

  AN HOUR LATER maybe, I’m sitting on the couch in front of the fire, a blanket over me, my head resting on a pillow. I don’t need the TV or music. In those moments, just the fire and being alive is all that matters. The phone rings and it’s Ruth.

  “I just wanted you to know,” Ruth says, “that it was only today in Dr. Roth’s office that I realized something.”

  Ruth clears her throat. She’s crying but so I can’t hear.

  “That whole time we were together,” Ruth says, “there was a part of me that thought – the depression, the anxiety – that you were just making it all up.”

  It’s at that moment, or soon after, I drop the phone and fall asleep. A deep sleep I don’t wake up from ’til ten hours later.

  Book Three

  Hank & Ruth

  19.

  The spiderweb

  LOOK AT HIM. BEN GRUNEWALD SPRAWLED OUT ON HIS couch, in front of the fireplace, sleeping like a baby. When he wakes, it will be a new world.

  The AIDS cocktail. It doesn’t feel like it, but the AIDS cocktail, with some adjustments, is working. Men are starting to live and not just die.

  Plus now Ben has an antidepressant that works.

  Well, works isn’t quite the right word, and we’ll talk about that later, but now, I mean just look at him. At least he’s sleeping. And a couple years down the line, Viagra will come along. There’s so much hope in a hard-on.

  All he’ll need to do is take his meds, eat right, exercise, and keep a good attitude. A good attitude. Like the famous guy who, when he was told he had cancer, locked himself up in a room, watched a shitload of funny movies and laughed so hard he cured himself.

  Or Shirley MacLaine when she won the Academy Award. How she made such a rousing speech: if you really and truly want something with all your heart and soul you can make it come true.

  And Shirley was absolutely right. You want proof, it’s right there on your TV. She’s the bitch on the stage holding the golden statue.

  A good attitude. That’s the secret. With a good attitude there’s nothing that can stop you. Fucking people can be so stupid. Still I’d give my left nut that it were true.

  That this story would have a happy ending.

  DECEMBER 24, 1999. Hank Christian is flying into Portland, Oregon. It’s Hank’s forty-first birthday. Hank and Jesus Christ. Maybe that’s how Jesus got his middle initial.

  Jesus Hank Christ.

  SO MUCH HAS happened in the last four months I don’t know where to start. I’m teaching my class again. Alone. And so far the class is full. I run out of energy all the time but arbeit macht frei. I’m taking a yoga class twice a week. Hot Yoga. Sometimes I think I’m going to melt in there. My viral load is way down and I have 148 T-cells. Sleeping eight hours. I’m back up to 176 pounds. The way the weight’s coming back on my body, though, is totally fucked. I still have no ass, and my legs and arms are skinny, which leaves my belly. The AIDS belly.

  Oh, and I’m developing a pendulous left tit. Somehow the AIDS meds fuck with your DNA and so you start developing breasts. Or rather one breast. The doctors don’t call my left tit pendulous, though. They don’t even mention the area or that the area is under my left nipple. They just call it the fatty tissue deposit.

  The day I went in to have my fatty tissue deposit checked out, it was at the same hospital where I was treated for AIDS. A sprawling piece of architecture that looks like an old yellow brick university campus that huge space-age sculptures of steel and glass have suddenly erupted out of.

  When I finally found the clinic, the word above the desk was Mammography.

  I’ve been to a lot of clinics at this hospital. The otologist who checked out my tinnitus. The optometrist who checked out my CMV. The specialist who checked out my positive test for tuberculosis. The neuropathic doctor. The gastroenterologist for the colonoscopy. The dietician. And a shitload more ologists I can’t even tell you. All the clinics had spacious waiting areas, with big windows, plenty of natural light. I never had to wait longer than twenty minutes.

  This clinic, Mammography, the clinic that deals almost exclusively with women was the worst. Well, not the worst. Mental Health was the worst.

  In the Mammography waiting room it wasn’t pretty. Fifty women were jammed into a small room. No windows. Crying children. All the women looked stressed-out, hollow-eyed, and going through it.

  Maybe it was just the day, but sitting in the Mammography waiting room, it was so clear to me that women really are treated different.

  The woman I sat next to, middle aged with dyed-black hair, designer labels, and Gucci glasses, brought her own magazines to read. Vogue, Wallpaper. Her Chanel No. 5 could not conceal her fear.

  My appointment was at one o’clock and at three-thirty they still hadn’t called my name. I hadn’t brought my sardines. I asked the nurse for something to eat and she gave me a saltine cracker.

  Finally, in a small square bright room with two doctors, men, I took my shirt off. One was an older guy, five or six comb-over strands, thick glasses. Full of language I couldn’t understand. The younger doctor had thick black hair. I remember the hair because of the bright room and the white.

  Without warning, no local anesthesia, no Valium, nothing. The black-haired doctor stuck a long needle two or three inches just under my nipple. The pain was so sharp and instant I couldn’t speak. When the doctor pulled on the syringe, it felt like my heart was coming out through the needle. That’s when I started cussing.

  Then I sat in that white room alone for over an hour with the door closed, holding my tit, fucking staring at a fucking bright white fucking wall wondering if I was the one fucking man in the world with fucking breast cancer, when finally a nurse came in with the test results on her clip board.

  “Benign tumor,” she said, “Mr. Greenblatt. Good news.”

  That’s the only time a doctor or a nurse ever called what was under my pendulous left breast anything but a fatty tissue deposit. A benig
n tumor. Of a kind and beneficial disposition.

  I wish to God that had been Hank’s kind of tumor.

  AT FOUR IN the afternoon, Christmas Eve, there’s a knock on my kitchen door. Four o’clock December in Portland is already dark. Of course it’s raining. It’s been a downpour all day and it’s not going to let up. Thank God it’s not freezing. When I hear the knock, I flutter. Everything about me flutters – my hands, my fingers, the breath in my chest. I take a deep breath, run into the bathroom and look in the mirror, check what’s left of my hair, look myself in my eyes and mark the moment. Hank Christian is knocking on my kitchen door. I suck in my belly.

  The light on the porch is out. When I turned that light on at 3:30 it was working. I flip the fucking switch on and off but nothing. The doorknob smells of Windex. I’ve been cleaning house all week. I swing the door open and the rain is loud, big drips falling from the gutter. A gust of wind blows the rain in. The smell of rain and wet cedar boards and earth, the compost heap. Just then the porch light flashes on and I blink and blink and raise my hand to block out the bright, then the light goes out again. Hank in his black rain gear is a mass of shiny wet inside the black rainy night. I go to speak, but suddenly Hank’s hand pokes out of the darkness and into the overhead fluorescence of the kitchen right at me. It is the hand of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and appears as if out of another dimension. I look and look and look at the hand, then grab it, Hank’s hand, and I pull him in as if Hank out there was drowning in dark water. The Maroni. Both Hank and I laugh a little the way I’ve hauled him in. When I catch a look from Hank’s eyes, I quick pull my hand out of Hank’s, and my hand falls down against my leg, fluttering.

  There’s a way my body is in shock to see my beloved friend right in front of me. All that the eleven-and-a-half years have done to him.

  Hank’s in shock, too. Both of us just stand and stare. The door still open, the wind banging the door against the wall, rain blowing in. We get the whole big gestalt of each other, no details really. My eyes go right to Hank’s black eyes. We say some shit like hey buddy or how’s it going man. In no time at all we’re front to front in a big embrace, no bicycle in between us like the last time. At first it’s proper bear hug, man to man, back slapping, no crotch. But the embrace doesn’t stop. Our bodies get closer and pretty soon we’re a full on frontal. New red potatoes in a shovelful of earth. After a while we both have to admit it. We are the one holding the other one up. Those kind of tears that just roll out your eyes one endless stream without any sobbing sounds. For me that’s how it is. Hank is sobbing big sobs, his belly bouncing against mine.