by Milton Stern
“Are you serious? She’s an Academy Award-winning director, why would she want to direct a TV show?” Michael asked with bewilderment.
“Because you’re writing it, dumb ass!” he said as if the answer were obvious.
“Seriously?” Michael continued to doubt what he was hearing.
“Jeez, Michael, get your ass back here. You have no idea how big you are now. Birthright has surpassed all predictions at the box office. You’re fucking hot. What the hell have you been doing out there? Don’t you talk to anyone out here?” Mark asked.
Michael realized he had talked to no one except Sid, and they had not talked in almost six months. He had sent the two treatments to HTO a few weeks earlier and heard nothing. Michael also realized that he had been obsessing so much about the situation with Steve that he had blocked out almost everything else.
“I really am out of the loop,” Michael said.
“I’m telling you, dick wad! They’re saying your show will be the next hottest thing. What the fuck have you been doing with yourself?” he asked again.
Michael then told Mark about the entire situation with Steve.
“Michael, he’s Mr. DC Falcon? I can’t believe you are in involved with a leather queen in a sash! Why do you want anything to do with this guy?”
“Because I’m in love with him,” Michael said.
“Michael, this is called co-dependency. He used you to fill a void, and when your use was no longer needed, he cut you off. He only contacts you if he is down or needs support. You don’t need this. You need to cut him off completely. I know, I’ve been there,” Mark said.
“I know. I know. But it hurts so much. How do I fall out of love with him?” he asked as he stood outside smoking.
“Michael, every time you have an urge to contact him, call me! Call me immediately,” he said. “And, I can hear you puffing away there. Put out those goddamn cigarettes!”
“But, he would tell me he missed me and trusted me like no one else,” Michael said.
“Michael, do you want me to fly out there and kick your ass? He told you those things to keep you close. If he contacts you, don’t respond. Call me!”
“I think he’s on steroids, too,” Michael blurted out.
“Oh Lord, Michael, run as fast as you can. You cannot get involved with someone on roids. Believe me, I know. Ask Gary. When I was first diagnosed with AIDS, they put me on steroids to help me put on weight. I became a maniac. My personality changed, I felt invincible, and I didn’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings but my own. Gary wanted to leave me. Everything you have described about Steve is classic.”
“He does seem to take out his hostilities on me,” Michael said, knowing Mark was right, but he also knew that not contacting Steve would be next to impossible as he was so much in love with him.
Michael then called Dr. Mikowsky at 1:30 pm and asked if he had enough legal pads. He chuckled, and then Michael told him the entire story of Steve, repeating it for the second time that day – how he was angry at himself for his behavior and how he screwed things up.
“Dr. Mikowsky, I should have given him his space. I bombarded him with e-mails and calls.”
“Michael, you sent six e-mails in one day. I have a friend I e-mail twenty times a day. If he didn’t want to read them, that was his choice.”
“But he was busy with work and other stuff, I should have left him alone,” he said.
“You know, Michael, you keep making excuses for him and blaming yourself. Think for a minute; would you want to be in a relationship with him?”
Michael was sitting on the stoop out front at this point, smoking cigarette after cigarette and noticing how his fingers were turning yellow from the tar. He thought for a minute before responding. “No. I know that being in a relationship with him would be exhausting, painful, and lonely,” he answered.
“Then, Michael, would you want to be friends with him?”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“Think about it. What I need to understand about you is why you gravitate towards these men who do not care about you, use you and mentally abuse you. Did he physically abuse you?”
“No, Dr. Mikowsky, he didn’t physically abuse me. I would never be with someone who did. If someone hit me, I would leave in a minute. I saw enough of that growing up.”
* * * * *
In August 1968, Michael was playing with his Matchbox cars in the den, when he heard his mother yelling from the kitchen after hanging up the phone.
“Michael, get in the car. We have to go somewhere, NOW!”
He raced upstairs to put on his shoes and was out the door and waiting by his mother’s red 1965 Chevrolet Corvair 500 in less than a minute. He knew better than to keep his mother waiting when she was in one of her moods. She walked out the front door carrying her purse and her new Polaroid camera. Why does she need a camera? Michael thought. Once in the car, she lit a cigarette and started the engine.
“Where are we going?” Michael asked.
“Shut up with the questions, I am not in the mood for your goddamn questions,” she answered.
Michael slumped down and looked at his feet not saying a word. When he did look up, as his mother shifted from second to third, he still wondered where they were going, but dared not say anything. Within a few minutes, he realized they were pulling into Farmington, a new development in Hampton, where Aunt Flossie and Uncle Al had just bought a new house. Hannah pulled up next to Florence’s white Camaro with the black vinyl top, but Michael didn’t see Al’s station wagon. They had sold the Chrysler-Plymouth dealership a couple of years back and now exclusively drove Chevys. Michael was always fascinated with cars and could remember what year and car every one of his mother’s friends drove.
Hannah jumped out of the car, purse and camera in hand and ran for the front door, forgetting Michael was behind her. She knocked on the door, and Florence’s maid, Katie, answered. They nodded knowingly at each other, and Hannah raced up the stairs to Florence’s bedroom. Michael followed her, and when they reached the second floor, he saw Doreen, Rona and Arlene standing at the door to Florence’s bedroom crying. When Hannah walked over to the girls, she looked in the bedroom and started crying also.
“Oh God, Florence. Oh my God,” Hannah said between sobs.
Michael inched up closer, but his mother spotted him and yelled, “What the hell are you doing? Go downstairs. This does not concern you.” The other girls looked in his direction, but quickly looked back into the bedroom.
Michael walked downstairs to the den and saw all of Florence’s children watching TV, oblivious to what was unfolding upstairs in their own home. He sat down on one of the orange vinyl couches and said hello, but no one acknowledged him. Michael wanted to ask what was going on, but something told him not to ask. Is Florence sick? Is she dead? What happened? Michael was worried as Florence was his favorite of his mother’s friends, and he was closer to her than his own mother. Her son, Scott, was his best friend, but Scott did not want to talk either. Scott just sat there staring at the television.
Within fifteen minutes, Hannah came downstairs and called for Michael to get into the car again. They drove home in silence as Hannah chain-smoked. After arriving home, she went into her bedroom and shut the door. An hour passed, and Michael was hungry, so he knocked on the door and asked about dinner.
“Fend for yourself, I cannot deal with you right now,” Hannah answered.
Since he had learned to make his own meals by then, Michael went into the kitchen and made a peanut butter sandwich and poured himself a glass of milk. He sat there eating his dinner alone still wondering what was going on. After he finished eating, Michael cleaned up his dishes and went into the den to watch television just when his mother emerged from the bedroom. She sat down on the couch next to him and did not say a word until it was time for him to go to bed.
Later that evening, Michael found it hard to sleep, so he got out of bed and walked downstairs. His mother had fal
len asleep in front of the television, still sitting where he had left her hours earlier. He decided not to wake her and walked upstairs to her bedroom, where the light was still on. He looked at the bed and saw some Polaroids sitting on the side of the bed near the telephone. Michael slowly walked over to the pictures, and what he saw frightened him. They were pictures of Florence, lying in her bed. Both her eyes were black and blue, her nose was bruised, and her lip was swollen. Somebody had beaten her up. Michael stared at the pictures for quite some time, then realized he better get back to bed. He put the pictures back exactly as he had found them, walked back to his bedroom, and tried to fall asleep.
But, Michael could not sleep. He could not get the image of Florence with a beaten-up face out of his mind. Who would hit her? Why would anyone want to hit Aunt Flossie? Michael thought if anyone needed to be beaten up, it was his mother, not Florence. He also vowed never to tell anyone he had seen the pictures and kept his promise.
Michael did not find out what happened to Florence or who beat her up until he was a teenager and Scott told him that it was an accident. He said Florence went into the bathroom for a tranquilizer, and his father tried to stop her with his arm, accidentally hitting her face in the process. Michael always knew it was a lie. That was a beating. He knew a beating when he saw one. That was no accident.
In 1970, Florence knew Al was having an affair. They both had car phones, and she knew if she called his phone, and he was not in the car, the horn would beep. The car phones looked like regular telephones mounted on the transmission hump in those days, and she kept driving until she heard a horn beeping and located Al’s car. Why he did not go out to his car, no one ever figured out. She pulled up to the house and knocked on the door, and he actually answered the door in his underwear and kicked her in the stomach. Soon after, she divorced Al. It was a scandal for any woman with four children to divorce her husband then, but she didn’t care. She needed to have her life back. She could never figure out why he answered the door in his underwear, and it became a running joke for years.
* * * * *
“I know Philip mentally abused me when I was with him, but he never hit me. I have never been in a fight. I won’t scream at anyone. I grew up in a house with screaming and violence, and I refuse to have a life filled with that,” Michael said with confidence.
“Michael, why did you apologize to Steve? You were honest in what you said, and you probably hit a nerve. Why did you say you were sorry?” he asked.
“Because I was mean to him. I didn’t want him to hate me,” he answered.
“Do you do these things because you want people to like you? Do you allow people to walk all over you, so they will like you?”
“I just try to follow the rules. I want to be known as a nice person. I care about people, and I care about Steve,” he said.
“Michael, what happens if you don’t follow the rules?”
“Someone will hit you, and you’ll get punished,” Michael said rather quickly and realized he sounded like a five-year-old. And, a light bulb went on in Michael’s head. “Oh my God! I’ve spent my entire adult life following the rules and never wavering because for some reason I thought I would get hit and punished,” he said. “I’ve somehow known it was the reason Los Angeles Live was cancelled. As head writer, I never wanted to push the envelope and always cowered to the network suits. The ratings started to plummet, and the show was done.”
“Michael, this is what we call a minor breakthrough,” Dr. Mikowsky said.
“What do I do if he responds to my apology?” he asked.
“Michael, what do you think you should do?”
“Not respond and call Mark if I have an urge to respond,” he answered.
“Michael, you just answered your own question.”
“Thanks, Dr. Mikowsky, I’ll put the check in the mail today. When can I call you again?”
“Call me on Wednesday at the same time, Michael.”
Later that evening, Steve did respond to Michael’s e-mail with, “No worries. We should stay away from each other for awhile. It is for the best.”
Steve was still calling the shots. When Michael asked for a break, Steve would not give it to him, but now that he wanted one, Michael was to grant his wish.
Michael did not respond.
For the next week, whenever he had an urge to respond, he called Mark, who talked him out of it. Michael then realized Mark was a real friend, and Steve was not.
Chapter Eleven
On Saturday May 20, Michael was determined not to spend the evening alone, so he went out to dinner with Sharon and Wes, who decided not to go their cabin in West Virginia for a change. He was still thinking about Steve every second but was starting to emerge from the depression over this strangest of strange relationships or situations or whatever the hell it was that he still had not figured out. However, he was still losing weight.
Sharon and Wes dropped Michael off at the apartment after dinner, and once inside, he turned on the computer. He had heard from Steve once when Steve told him he saw his ex with his new boyfriend, and it sent him into a tailspin of depression, which confirmed to Michael that he was still in love with his ex and always hoped they would get back together. Michael could only imagine what his ex went through with him. He did not reply to that e-mail, and he discovered that if he did not e-mail Steve, he didn’t fret over a reply or even wait for an e-mail from Steve. Michael was proud of himself for cutting off communication with him, but he still missed him, and he knew he was still in love with him.
The more Michael examined the situation with Steve, the more he reminded him of his mother. The obsession with his appearance, his refusal to answer questions, the way he would tell Michael things with no regard for his feelings, the secrecy, the non-responsiveness, etc. Michael had fallen in love with his mother, and as with his mother, Steve did not love Michael back.
Michael would repeat this mantra daily: “He is not your boyfriend; he does not love you; you are not in a relationship; he is no good for you,” and it helped. It didn’t make him fall out of love with him, but it helped keep Michael from contacting him.
He stepped outside to have a cigarette, and while he stood under the stars, he had this overwhelming feeling that something was wrong. Michael had this same feeling a few years before, and he called Aunt Flossie immediately only to find out she was in the hospital. Michael could not shake the feeling, so he went inside and sat down at the desk. It was eleven o’clock, and for some unexplainable reason, he e-mailed Steve, “Are you OK?”
Michael was convinced something was wrong with Steve, so he e-mailed him again, “Steve, I am really worried about you. Please call me.”
Michael knew Mark and Dr. Mikowsky would be angry with him for breaking a rule, but he had to do it. There was no response, so he went to bed, but he didn’t sleep at all. Sunday morning, he got up and went running. Even at his now three packs a day, he was able to run five miles. Michael guessed obsessing over Steve helped him forget how labored his breathing had become. Since getting his stitches out on the Friday before, the doctor said he could resume working out, and Michael who was obsessed with exercising resumed his daily routine within minutes.
When he arrived back at the apartment, he stepped on the scale while he waited for the computer to boot up. He had lost over fifty pounds in the past nine weeks, weighing what he did in high school. Michael always wanted to lose the weight, but not like this. The blood tests and all revealed he was in perfect health, but in a state of ketosis from taking in too few calories. The doctor asked if he was dieting, but Michael told him he just wasn’t hungry. The doctor told him to eat more. In forty-three years, Michael never had a doctor tell him to eat more, and when he relayed the news to a couple of the guys he would chat with at Results the Gym, they each asked for the doctor’s name, wanting the same advice.
Michael logged on to his e-mail, and there was one from Steve which read, “I am in excruciating pain. I am taking myself to the ho
spital. No e-mail, call me.”
Michael called, but Steve did not answer. He then called every hospital in town to find out if a Steve Smith checked himself in. No one had a Steve Smith, so he started to think his initial instinct was right, and that was not his real name. His phone rang, and it was a number he did not recognize.
“Hello,” Michael answered.
“Michael, this is Nathan, Steve’s friend from Miami. Steve is in the hospital, and he told me to call you.” Michael remembered Steve mentioning Nathan as his Jewish friend in Miami, as if all Jews knew each other like the game of Jewish geography.
“Nathan, what hospital?” Michael asked.
“Washington Medical Center,” he said.
“There is no Washington Medical Center. I have to ask you a weird question, Nathan.”
“What?” Nathan asked.
“Is that his real name?”
“Steve Allan Dean Smith, yes that is his real name, why do you ask?”
“Because, there is no Steve Smith in any hospital here, and I thought it might be a leather drag name,” Michael said.
“Well, he said the hospital was on Irving and North Capitol Street.”
“That’s Washington Hospital Center,” Michael exclaimed, knowing the address from calling them just a few seconds before Nathan called.
“Oh,” Nathan responded.
“Thanks, Nathan, I’m going over there now,” Michael said and hung up.
He took a quick shower, threw on some jeans and a T-shirt and hailed a cab on 16th Street. When Michael arrived at the Emergency Room, they told him Steve was in Room 8 and he had a visitor, so he had to wait, but they would tell the visitor Michael was there. After a few minutes, a handsome man with a goatee, who was about the same height and weight as Steve walked up to him and said, “You must be Michael. I’m Tom.”
Michael finally met the boyfriend, and Tom said Michael could go back to Steve’s room in the emergency wing. He walked back, and he opened the curtain, seeing Steve for the first time in almost nine weeks. Steve was sitting up with a tube in his nose, an IV, and a foly catheter. He was also crying and reached for Michael’s hand.
