I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  Hank and Ruth and me.

  The three of us.

  Crying too hard, big sobs and snot.

  In the front yard in the mud in the rain.

  WISH I COULD say Hank and Ruth and me cried so hard we started to laugh.

  That our tears miraculously turned into rain.

  Fucking wishes, man, regret.

  October 12, 2000. Got to go pal. All day I sit with that letter. Silver morning light, late afternoon sun, the Portland sky evening blue, the street light on the sugar maple making the leaves glow fiery red and yellow. Wondering if I should make it sound so final and forever, or fuck it, just take the risk and say something more, something ridiculous at such a ridiculous time to say it: if I should tell Hank to stop using that Just for Men hair color, because the light through his hair made his thin hair look purple.

  When you say goodbye to someone you love, maybe if you say something crazy, something true, maybe he won’t stop loving you.

  I end up not giving Hank the hair tip. How many times have I regretted it, thought I should’ve gone for it, said the hair thing right after Got to go pal. Maybe it would’ve changed the way things turned out.

  If nothing else, it would have made him laugh.

  Then those last words on the page, man, that I wrote in at the last moment.

  That old litany in this strange new place. How it made my heart stop.

  Got to go pal.

  I can hurt you, and because I know I can, I will.

  22.

  The more loving one

  JUNE 19, 2008. THE STUMPTOWN COFFEE SHOP ON BELMONT. A sunny day in Portlandia and people are sitting outside on the chairs along the painted red brick wall in the sun. Coffee and dreadlocks and tattoos and piercings and bicycles and dogs. There are no chairs left outside, so I sit down on the curb with my peppermint tea. Just like in the olden days in Manhattan in front of One Fifth Avenue. The sun on the curb is warm on my ass. It’s taken me seven years to sit in the sun like this again.

  The tea is very hot. I try for a slurp but even the cup is too hot to hold. That’s what I’m doing, setting my cup on the curb. When somebody sits down next to me. Close, on my left. Death comes from the left. The sun’s in my eyes and I have to put my hand over my eyes. He’s a student of mine, Dab.

  “Sorry to hear about your friend,” Dab says.

  Dab’s a guy a little younger than me. Long silver gray hair. Lives in his SUV with his cat, Eggsy. AA’s what brought Dab to my writing class.

  “My friend?”

  Dab knows right off he’s stepped in shit. He pushes his John Lennon glasses up onto his nose, looks at the gutter, like there’s something important to look at in the gutter, then he raises his eyes up. Dark eyes but not black like Hank’s.

  Dab knows somebody who knows somebody who knows Ruth. He puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “Yesterday,” Dab says, “Hank Christian died of liver cancer.”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I get on the airplane, I visit Tony Escobar in the Pioneer Cemetery. It’s raining and I’m in my raincoat and waterproof pants, lying on my grave talking away. Tony’s always been a good listener. That night, he’s wearing a flight captain’s uniform and when he speaks it sounds like he’s talking through a microphone.

  Just have the huevos rancheros at Café Orlin, he says, and you’ll be fine.

  Where Hank is buried, I’ll probably never know.

  There’s only one choice. Big Ben and I agree.

  Manhattan.

  FOURTEEN YEARS SINCE I’ve been on an airplane. And I’m traveling alone. Since 9/11, just the words security check can start a cold sweat. Dizziness. The ringing in my right ear. Even after all these years, HIV is still a sure ticket you’re going to shit spray in public. The humiliation, man. Plus I still have to eat special food at regular intervals. And airplane food isn’t even airplane food anymore. It’s a tiny bag of pretzels and Coke.

  So I have to pack my breakfast, my lunch, my afternoon sardine snack, and just in case, a couple of pieces of chicken for dinner and some coleslaw. And all that food has to fit into a container that fits under the seat in front of me.

  Just getting up early in the morning, after all the drugs I’ve taken the night before to get me to sleep, and having the presence of mind to gather all my shit together and walk out the door and then get into a cab that will take me to the airport, that will lead me to the security check, what you can have in your carry-on bag, what you can’t, then to the right gate. All those announcements over the intercom and I can’t hear anymore. I need my glasses too. Then my other glasses to read the monitors. Then I’m afraid I’m going to lose my glasses. Where is my wallet, where is my ticket. Where are my glasses. I’m cramped into a flying tin can packed in with hundreds people jammed in together thousands of miles above the earth in a middle seat, airplane air for six-and-a-half hours, then get off the plane. The airport’s too bright and at baggage claim I try and find my bag. I’ve put a red ribbon on my black bag, but so has everybody else. Not just my right ear, both ears totally fucked up. Where is my wallet, where is my baggage claim, where are my glasses. Then get a cab and drive the nighttime collision course into Manhattan, try and act like I can hear what the Afghan cabby is saying to me, then try and find my glasses so I can see my wallet and figure out a twenty percent tip. Then into the hotel, the reservations for the hotel. Where is my wallet, where are my glasses, where is the reservation for the hotel, where is the credit card. The host is Chinese and she may as well be speaking Chinese because my ears are still over Kansas someplace. And then I got to face the elevator.

  THE COOPER SQUARE Hotel. On the corner of Fifth and Bowery. Where the old wood Sinclair station used to stand. I slide the card into the lock of Room 19-3. Thank God the green light goes off and I’m opening the door and then the door is closing behind me and I lean up against the door. Drop my bags. Take deep breaths. Thank Big Ben for his big decision. Thank Little Ben for getting my ass here.

  The room is big, floor to ceiling windows, white curtains. Heavy gray shades for the morning sun. It’s sweltering outside, but inside it’s cool. Almost chilly. But it’s the nineteenth floor and none of the windows open. Jet lag, man, and I’m dizzy. The room is gray and taupe, spotlessly clean. The queen bed is firm, a white duvet and big white pillows you can fluff up. The room is small, but this is Manhattan and for four hundred and thirty dollars a night, what do you expect.

  The bathroom is black and white with designer amenities. Next to the sink, I lay out my meds – they take up almost the whole white marble counter.

  On the floor in front of the big window facing east, on a double napkin, I spread out my pieces of chicken, fried in Portlandia. I have no idea if it’s time I should eat. I’m not hungry but to be safe I’d better eat, so I eat. And better to start out in a new place with food that I know. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, crumbs of fried chicken fall onto the perfect silver-gray carpet. The coleslaw is limp and watery. I forgot the fork and my fingers get all greasy. The hand towel in the bathroom is so white and clean I decide not to use it.

  After a long, very hot shower, the white flannel bathrobe feels good on my body. I pull the chair in front of the big window facing east. Below me, the city lights, what an incredible sight. Really, I have to take a breath. A landscape like no other. Out of the black tar roofs of the red brick tenements, strange sleek towers, like the one I’m sitting in, rise up and out, shiny bright, nouveau riche. Looks like spaceships that have landed.

  East Fifth below me, the mercury vapor street lights. Right there, just two tenements to the east, the roof of my old home. And the tops of all the buildings I was the super for. Up on the roof. Only place to get away and get out and get some air.

  Midnight on a Friday night in Manhattan. It’s nine o’clock to me. I put on my baggy striped bermudas, my blue chambray shirt, roll the sleeves up to the elbow. Sal’s old red ballcap from Atlanta, Idaho. White cotton socks. New tennis shoes, the same brand Hank always wore, only b
lack. I have to slide in the foam rubber sole supports. Then it’s my knee brace.

  My hand’s around the doorknob. The door you got to walk through. The damn door. The portal. After the portal opens, after it closes, everything is different. My Xanax is in my left pocket. The plastic card that is the key to Room 19-3 in my right. My reading glasses, my wallet. And one more thing, a wad of toilet paper.

  The step I must take. Where I must go. Where that is. What it looks like. How to get there exactly. I’m not sure. All I know what to do is to walk, and keep on walking.

  IN THE HALLWAY, under my new tennis shoes, the carpet is a waterbed. Strange slantings and tilts of the hallway walls. The elevator doors slide open and deep in my ears, the place that makes balance, the fucking hula hoop. Propinquity. I’m in a small box with Muzak that hauls you down by a bunch of cables. Nineteen floors, man.

  Through the lobby, over the hardwood and slate floors, swinging out the big glass doors, I’m out in it. Manhattan. The humidity and the heat. Instantly, my body remembers my old home. The Lower East Side. My new black tennis shoes are standing on the sidewalk and the street right in front of me is Third Avenue. The Bowery.

  Freakin’ wild the way the city feels on a summer Friday night. The deep breath I take is a sigh, really. East coast heat, man, the humidity, and Manhattan’s own version of it. My skin is immediately oily and slick. I take a couple steps and turn the corner.

  All those thousand days and nights I swept this stretch of concrete. In the winter, shoveled snow. Summer, I sprayed it all down with a rubber hose. The way a blind man knows braille, I knew every crack and every bump of that sidewalk.

  Before I know it, my body’s standing in that hallowed place. My old home. 211 East Fifth Street. In front of that old smooth cast iron stoop Hank and I used to sit on. But the damndest thing. The stoop isn’t cast iron anymore.

  Look at me. Sixty years old, dizzy, sweating my ass off, a length of toilet paper folded in my back pocket, just in case. Standing there as if maybe if I stand in front of them steps long enough, something will happen and time will go back and the stoop will change. But no matter how hard I try, there’s no curving balustrades, shiny rubbed smooth steps, no cast iron newel caps. Just painted shiny red steel with diamond tread covering.

  There’s a guy sitting on the shiny red steel stoop, smoking a cigarette. Gnarly brown hair. A V-neck T-shirt with a pen clipped in the V. I walk up the stairs, sit on the shiny red diamond tread one step down from him, start talking. Behind his greasy glasses, his eyes are blue. Fuck-you blue. He takes a drag, blows cigarette smoke into my face. I’m just another crazy to him, but that doesn’t stop me. I tell him about the night Hank on those steps told me about his old girlfriend Mythrixis. How it was over between them. How I had to turn and look up at Hank, the porch light right there so I had to put my hand up to shield my eyes. The song that was playing on the boombox. Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you. Hank’s black eyes. They were kind of misty, his eyes, as if the whole Mythryxis thing was a whole lot tougher than he’d ever let on.

  It’s all sad, Gruney. If we let ourselves know how sad it really is, there wouldn’t be anything left of us.

  THE GUY ON the stoop walks off New York Drop Dead Fuck You. I’m walking too. It isn’t long before I know it. A ghost in this place. That’s what I am. Or I’m real and Manhattan is a dream.

  Fish Bar. When I open Fish Bar’s stained wood door and go to step inside, my body just won’t let me go in. Too crowded. Barely room to walk in there. But maybe inside, that’s the place where I must go. To find what I need to find, so I can feel what I must feel. Grief and panic, man. My body has never known the difference.

  I press my face against the window, making my eyes see everything. On the jukebox, “Soul Makossa” is playing. At my spot at the bar, in the corner next to the wall, on the same stool my ass used to sit in drinking dirty Bombay martinis up, there’s a young man sitting there alone drinking from an up glass. Fourteen years ago, he could be me. Fourteen years ago, in the bathroom on the right, on the aqua blue wall, the piece of graffiti that used to be just above the toilet: AIDS Schmaids – just shoot that cum all over me.

  Walking. Second Avenue is still Second Avenue, I mean most of the buildings are the same. But it’s different. Love Saves the Day is gone. The Greek diner on the corner of Second and Fifth – turkey sandwiches on Thanksgiving Day, gone. Optimo Cigars, gone. Le Culot. Café 113, gone.

  Night Birds, you go first, no, you go — gone gone gone.

  Schacht’s Delicatessen, man.

  An hallucination of bright fluorescence. The smell of old wood, weird cheese, and chicken soup. Hum of refrigeration. At the back aisle cooler, Hank opens the cooler door and all that cold air comes rushing out. Hank swings the door back and forth making a breeze. It’s a miracle night, all right, and the miracle is taking in the whole world.

  Schacht’s is fucking gone.

  WALKING. TOMPKINS SQUARE Park. Now that place is a trip. All duded up. You wouldn’t even know it was the same place. Respectable manicured lawns, authentic lighting, wrought iron fences and shit – at one o’clock in the morning jogging yuppies talking on their cell phones. Man, we used to call this park Dog Shit Park.

  On the corner of Seventh and A, it takes me a while to figure, but after careful consideration I’m sure it’s in the exact same spot. The skinhead dude with the red, white, and blue mohawk is standing up, his back to me and Hank, waving his arms. He’s yelling, trying to get the attention of his twenty skinhead cowboy dudes. That loud loud music.

  You need to watch out who you’re calling a Republican.

  That night, the night I’m a ghost, not a mohawk in sight. Pyramid Club’s open, though. Recently made into a Drag Landmark. Now there’s progress for you.

  The Lower East Side. Everywhere I look, everyone seems rich, young. I mean, not just because I’m not rich and not young. When I lived here, a stoned white teenage girl in low-slung tight pants and ass crack just would’ve made it across the street. It’s safer all right. But safe from what.

  HOUR AFTER HOUR, that night, early into the morning, I’m walking. Back and forth on every street from Tenth to Houston, between Third Avenue and Avenue C. Same way Hank and I walked that night, walking side by side, back and forth up and down, under a miracle umbrella, through the Lower East Side. When things have gone bad, when things have gone good, when things have dumped shit on your head, when you’re in the stars, when you’re fucked up, when it’s too hot, when your ass is freezing, when you’re old and sick and your lungs are sore, when you’re heart’s beating too fast, when your ears are some kind of fire alarm, when you’re sweating like a pig, when your knee hurts, just walk. Keep on walking.

  Maybe now that Hank is dead, I don’t have to go through Ruth to get to him.

  ON EAST FIRST Street, Dixon Place, the whole damn block is gone. I just stand and stand. Maybe a new muscle will develop in me, or my whole body will become a new muscle with super computer powers that if you just hit save I can soak in everything, how things smell, the muggy air against my skin, the sweat running down the inside of my arms. Store every detail in one forever accessible file that never changes.

  The dark heat of the night, the six-story walkups, every window open. I stop in a bright Korean market, buy a fucking bottle of water for three dollars. It’s the first time I’ve thought of my body. Me, Mr. Hypersensitive about my body. But I’m a ghost. A ghost haunted by a dream. As if I’m on acid, this night, even at three a.m., in a part of the world that fourteen years ago was only night and dark, the world is bright and loud and full.

  Walking. My lungs feel like when I used to smoke. My body, one big crotch rot. On the stoops, swarms of pierced and tattooed kids. Every now and then a big muscle guy in a stretched-out T-shirt, standing in front of a velvet rope. Some black dude loud inside rapping away mother fucker mother fucker.

  Walking. At 39 East Seventh Street, its shit flood basement, on the bottom step,
where I left my white Key West shrimper boots, the entire building is gone. The mimosa tree, gone.

  Walking. Every once in a while, a restaurant with gold stars and black limos parked out front. On top of the street smell – exhaust and garbage, sweaty bodies – the thick smell of marihoochi. And a new smell. Never a part of my New York. The designer smell of money.

  The narrow streets crowded with cars, honking taxis, loud hip-hop music I’ll never know. The later the night gets, the earlier the morning, the more it’s humid. I’m out of breath. My chambray shirt, my baggy striped bermudas, my underwear, my ballcap, even my new black tennis shoes are soaking wet.

  I’ll buy you a soda.

  A BLISTER ON my right heel. My knees. My hips. But where I must go I haven’t found it yet.

  On the cab ride across town, to the West Side Highway, the cab driver is from India. Hindu. On the dashboard, the incense, the plastic flowers around a statue of Ganesha. I ask him if he knows the Spike.

  “On Eleventh Avenue,” I say. “Somewhere in the Twenties. Next to the river.”

  Napalm. Behind us, the bar back with its bottles, glowing green, glowing blue, clear, amber, glowing Wild Turkey dark brown. From underneath the bar, Judy lights from down low so the bartenders can see. In front of us, three men deep. Beyond, the bar is dark. Smoky dark. A foggy night, an ocean of men, dark waves. The tall guy with his balls thumbtacked to the bar.

  In front of all of Homosexual Heaven I tell Hank about getting fucked in the ass. Hank, that fucking guy, man. I don’t see Hank for over three months. Whenever he wanted to, that motherfucker could totally disappear.