by David Leite
I hoped the explosion of noise, chaser lights, and billboards—massive sensory overload—would bulldoze this back where it had come from, so I could return to Ronnie saying, “False alarm!” Instead, I could feel the bastard elbow aside my insides, digging through its filthy, reeking bags as it unpacked.
The nameless, homeless fear was back.
Unlike with my other breaks, there was no grace period this time, no wobbly days that could be chalked up as semi-successes. A headfirst plunge into an airless, dry well, that’s what this was. Everything went from light to dark in the span of a minute, a few thousand frames of film. All that had come before—the elation, the camaraderie, the rocket-fueled late nights, and the hopped-up mornings—vanished.
I analyzed it obsessively. “Fear of my own anger.” Isn’t that what the doctor at Bradley Hospital, the one who met with my parents and me, had said about movies? All my rage played out big on the screen? Desperate, I tried that on, like a new sweater, but it didn’t fit. It could have been watching Muttonchops go mad, but that, too, didn’t make sense. This had nothing to do with movies. I’d become a film buff, and I’d seen countless flicks since I was sixteen, and nothing like this had ever happened. This was about something else, something more. Being gay, maybe? No, that felt wrong. I was beginning to suspect films were just a trigger, a portal to the other side, the crazy side, the upside-down. It wasn’t movies, but The After, that made me want to evacuate my soul.
The days that followed at work, when I wasn’t avoiding Ronnie out of shame, were bleaker than any I’d experienced. I’d heard alcoholics talk about hitting bottom, a hard, mean place. Maybe this was mine. I slipped into the back of AA meetings, hoping to hear someone describe what I felt, so that afterward I could sit with them over coffee in some fluorescent-lit diner that stank of old french fries and ask questions. I couldn’t be the only one who experienced this. There had to be others—but I found no one. In time, I gave up on AA. Liquor wasn’t my demon, and I had no idea what was. I just knew I no longer had the energy to fight. Worse, for the first time, I didn’t care.
At home, when I wasn’t sleeping, which could at least liquidate the pain for a few hours, I ate. I’d shuffle into the kitchen, which was no more than a pass-through from the living room to my roommate’s bedroom in back, and pull out a pot from under the sink. I had read somewhere that when you’re at a loss for what to eat, start with boiling water. I’d open and close the same four cabinets and the refrigerator. Carbs. I wanted carbs. Listless, I’d flip through my international cookbook and check out the dog-eared pages. Gougères speckled with Gruyère cheese? No. Mr. Lewis’s éclairs? Didn’t want sweets. Coq au vin, which the Hollises had liked so much, or chicken paprikash? No and no. Too long. Eventually, I’d end up on the same page: spaetzle. The kind of food that demands nothing of you in terms of skill and offers everything in return, namely comfort.
Mix flour, salt, pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg in a bowl. The steam from the boiling water collected on the edge of the hood, a tiny string of transparent garland. Beat the eggs and milk in another bowl with a whisk. Vovo Costa never used a whisk. Always a fork. I did as she’d taught me. Stir the egg mixture into the flour until smooth. Again a fork would do. I fitted a colander on top of the pot. Steam rose up in a million tiny smokestacks. Scoop the batter into the colander and, using the back of the spoon, pass the batter through the holes. Little worms of batter dripped into the pot, roiling over themselves. Cook for five to eight minutes. Dammit, I’d forgotten to look at the clock. I tasted one. Too soft. I waited. Again. Almost ready. Finally: chewy, dense, perfect. Drain and toss with butter. Sometimes, if I was mindful enough, I’d take half a stick of butter and swirl it in my mother’s Revere Ware skillet that she’d given me. I’d watch it spread into a puddle, spitting as it turned dark yellow, tan, brown. Brown butter has a nuttiness to it that I liked. Hazelnuts, some say. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. (That was my addition, which I’d written in the margin of the cookbook.)
I leaned against the counter, by the light of the hood, the only light on in the apartment, chasing doughy worms across my plate with my fork.
One morning, after I’d deep-sixed my Christmas party and thrown out the unopened box of holiday cards, I considered calling in sick. But the idea of lying in bed and watching game shows and soap operas was even less appealing than catering to the whims of privileged, overweening megalomaniacs who thought having a membership to the world’s tallest lunch club was something.
In the locker room, I slipped off my shirt and grabbed a clean jacket. Lyle, another waiter, snuck a glance at my belly and looked away. I wasn’t wearing a T-shirt, and all the eating I’d done over the past several weeks showed. A few days before, Mayur had looked at me as I was bending over in the kitchen, my Japanese robe falling open, and remarked, “Look at you, man, you’re disgusting. You have tits. Do something with yourself.”
“You better hurry up,” Lyle said, slamming his locker shut. “You know Moira.” I nodded in thanks.
After he left, I sat there, elbows on knees, head hanging. I wanted to cry, but I just couldn’t summon the strength.
“David, come on!” Ronnie said, running into the locker room. “Moira’s screaming for you.”
I trotted after him up the stairs and out into the sleek dining room. My jacket was still open. If Moira wanted me in lineup so bad, she’d get me in lineup. I stood there, defiant, staring her down. My belly protruded between the open folds of my jacket, hairy and round. I saw others lean over and gawk. Let them. I don’t give a rusty fuck what they think.
“Get in the kitchen,” Moira shouted. I didn’t move. “Now.”
Instantly, all of that inertia rolled over on itself, uncovering a welter of rage. I ached for a confrontation, a bruising head-on collision. The last time I’d felt like this was back in Pittsburgh, when Bridget and I had been on the fritz and she’d invited a guy to her house for dinner. The next day she and I had a screaming match. After she stormed out to class, I opened the window of her bedroom, which faced a steep drop into briars that tumbled down to the highway, and chucked out all of her stuff. I screamed as I heaved clothes, stuffed animals, books, photos, anything that would squeeze through the square of the window frame. Later, in a fit of regret, I climbed down the hill, ripping long bloody gouges up my arms, to collect everything before she got home.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Moira said, busting into the kitchen after me.
Veneta pinballed in my head. Scream, punch, kick, bite, stomp, rip. Somehow, I eked out a lie that could half-explain my behavior. My grandmother died, her head blew up because of an aneurism, been in a car accident, something. I don’t recall, but it must have been big enough to melt her, because the next thing I remember, I was buttoning my jacket, head down and contrite, and walking out to my station.
Waiting for service to begin, I felt compelled to go over everything, one more time. A thought came. Not really a thought; more like a small bubble breaking the surface that, if followed deep, deep to its source, would lead to something ugly and big and frightening. I can see it so clearly: I was gripping the brass rail that surrounded my section, tapping my turquoise ring against the metal—plink, plink, plink. Lost in that murky depth, I heard it like it was someone else’s voice, like in the underwater game we would play in the O’Shannons’ pool, holding one another’s faces close and speaking, bubbles gushing out, trying to figure out what the other had said. Inexplicably I heard: Maybe I’m manic-depressive. And just as quickly, the thought floated away, to be forgotten for a decade. I turned to the guests being seated, a smile taped to my face.
That night, I rolled over and squinted at the alarm clock. The red numbers fishtailed into view from across the room. I was wiped; still, it wasn’t enough to knock me out. When I was alone in the dark, with the light from the streetlamp splashing across the ceiling, was when the press of hopelessness was heaviest. I didn’t want to do it, but it was all I had. Just one more time, I told my
self. Since Christmastime, the seduction of planning my own death, the relief of suicide, had become the only thing that could calm me so I could vault over insomnia into sleep.
I went through my usual list in the usual order. Guns were too violent, and messy. What was it James Dean had said about leaving a beautiful corpse? Carbon-monoxide poisoning was a possibility, but I needed a car for that, and I didn’t have a clue how to hook it up. Hanging myself was out of the question: I was too fat, and I’d just end up ripping out the chandelier, which meant I’d have to pay for the repairs on top of explaining the hole in the ceiling to my landlord. Pills. Pills always did the trick.
I pictured myself carefully pouring out a bottle of pink pills onto the floor beside my futon. I would arrange them into a smiley face, like on my mother’s big button, so they wouldn’t seem so lethal. I watched myself taking them one by one, slowly, as if they were tiny handmade Jordan almonds, hoping I’d slip away before I finished off the smile. I wanted the person who found my stinking corpse to see that smile. To know that despite it all, I’d had the hope of a happy life. Eventually, a blackness would strum through my body, but I wouldn’t fear it, because I was calling this blackness, this sleep, to me, and it would mercifully obliterate thinking, obsessing, worrying, feeling.
Over time, imagining my death lost its somnolence. I needed more. I needed a plan. Walking home from the R train at night, I found myself thinking specifics: Where can I get my hands on enough pills to whack me? What is enough? What kind? Should I leave a note? Or a tape recording? Or is that too Valley of the Dolls? I looked over my shoulder and down side streets. Surely in this neighborhood I could score something that would make short work of me.
The only thing that stopped me from knocking back a handful of lethal pink pills by the glare of the streetlamp was the fact that my mother was now the executive director of the Samaritans, a suicide hotline back home. And I couldn’t bear the headlines that would be splashed across the front page of the Herald News, the local paper: SUICIDE DIRECTOR’S SON KILLS SELF. Or the jokes: “What’s worse than getting a busy signal when calling the suicide hotline? Picking up the phone and hearing your mother on the other end.”
I woke up early one April morning and looked around the room. The gray walls, which had for so long depressed me, and every morning unlatched a spiral of dread, looked almost cheerful. I didn’t move my head but shifted my eyes, across my desk, to the club chair, and over to the dog-shit brown couch, and tried to understand the lightness inside. I waited for this bubble to pop. That sometimes happened in the morning: I’d awake and for a moment I’d feel happy, until I remembered I wasn’t. Something was propelling me out of bed, but I was scared that if I got up, the illusion would fade, and I would be back to slumping through my day, dragging my blanket to the couch, ticking off the minutes until I had to go to work at four-thirty.
Slowly I propped up on my elbows. All good so far. I pushed myself off the futon and stood up. Still good. I squinted my eyes almost closed, which threw everything into focus so I could find my glasses. Sitting on the blue club chair, I looked out at the sky, the color of slate. It couldn’t have been later than seven-thirty. I wanted to laugh myself silly, like Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who couldn’t contain his joy after his long night of ghost-busting. Sitting there, I couldn’t remember why I’d been so despondent. That’s not true. I could remember, but it felt more like shards of a dream from the night before, rather than something that had dragged on for four months. The longer I was awake, the more it receded.
Every other time these breaks had happened, it had been a slow slog back to normal. It would take years, sometimes, for me to feel my head was tethered to my body, my heart cupped in my rib cage the way it was meant to be. So to wake up suddenly, magnificently fine was indescribable. I thought of alien abduction—I kid you not; it was popular at the time, and I thought maybe a lizard-headed doctor with cold, scaly skin had performed some kind of surgery on me. The change was that dramatic.
I kept waiting to be sucker-punched back to reality, but it didn’t happen. I found that I could go a few hours without thinking of my break, the sadness, the fear. And even when I did remember and my stomach clenched—always a tense moment, like being stuck in an elevator as it jolts to a stop, not knowing whether it’ll plummet or judder upward—nothing happened.
Walking to the subway a few days later, I began weeping with exultation while listening to Dvorˇák’s New World Symphony on my banana-yellow Walkman. As the music played, it flushed every part of my body with euphoria: It felt like hoses were attached to the soles of my feet, pumping liquid joy into my toes, legs, knees, groin, torso, then spilling over into my fingers, hands, arms, neck. And when it reached my head, another type of explosion happened, far different and far more pleasurable than those of the past. I saw an entire production unfold in front of me, a production so fully formed, so ripe with meaning and symbolism and pure genius, that the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just down the street from my apartment, was sure to mount it.
I saw flashes of enormous tableaux filled with huge, gorgeous puppets of Jesus, Hitler, and the Buddha that would require five people each to operate, if they made them to my specifications. (To make sure, I made mental schematics in my head.) In there somewhere—I had yet to figure out all the stage directions—were multi-ethnic versions of the figures from Millet’s painting The Gleaners and the characters from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. A chorus of traditional Greek players sang contrapuntally (I didn’t know what that word meant; I heard it in my head and had to look it up later) with bands of Holocaust victims. Angels made a thunderous racket, stamping their feet on catwalks above. Demons sniggered from boxes on the side of the auditorium. Unaccountably, the Rockettes were there. And I knew if there were Rockettes, I wasn’t just back to normal. I was back to fucking fabulous normal.
25
A COTERIE OF PENISES
Becca and I were draped over each other, watching When Harry Met Sally, one of the movies we’d rented from the deli-video store on West Eighty-Sixth Street. It was Love Day, one of those Saturdays when we lounged all afternoon watching romantic comedies, the air conditioner beating back the swelter that is New York City in August. Becca was my closest friend. Mercurial and passionate, she was as fiercely devoted to me as I was to her. Although we were looking for love in opposite directions—her straight, me gay—we hung out almost constantly, even spending the night at each other’s places several times a week. After work, we’d walk arm in arm all over the city. People smiled at us like we were newlyweds, something neither of us discouraged. I got a kick out of playing Happy TV Couple; we considered it practice for when we found our future husbands. On weekends she’d drag me into Tiffany and Gucci so she could try on engagement rings. Salespeople would watch as she slipped on a ring and held out her arm, wrist cocked, so she could see it sparkle. Then she’d waggle it toward customers, asking their opinion. When they nodded and offered congratulations, she would thread her hands—ring showing—around my arm and squeeze. I would just shrug at the clerks and smile.
My parents adored Becca, and my mother practically exploded like a dirty bomb of delight whenever we visited, especially when someone called her asking to be put on the church’s prayer list. “Oh, poor you. Rheumatoid arthritis and irritable bowel,” she’d say into the phone, scribbling down the maladies in need of divine intervention, all the while giving us a wink and that megawatt smile. “Well, can’t talk long!” she’d say with an air of innuendo. “David and Becca are here. They’re spending the weekend.”
I allowed her this indulgence. When I was twenty-eight, I had told her in bald, no-uncertain terms I was gay. In the silence over the phone, I could hear the thunder of her veneta—this was one thing she wouldn’t be able to control. We didn’t speak for several months, and it wasn’t until years later that she told me she would call my answering machine when I was at work just to hear my voice. Still, all this time later, the woman bel
ieved that if she willed it otherwise, so it would be.
Becca had a veneta second only to my mother’s. When we were at a gay bar and some guy would call her a fag hag, I’d turn away and wince. It took everything for her not to smash him over the head with her lemon drop, our preferred cocktail. “Let me tell you something, sweetheart,” she’d say, leaning in close. “Every girl needs a gay, and he’s mine. Where’s your girl? Oh, wait,” she would add, leaning back, as if suddenly recognizing something about him. “You’re too much of a dickhead to have one.” By the end of the night, she’d have a bevy of boys surrounding her, laughing, buying her drinks.
She delighted and scared me in equal measure.
Pointing to Billy Crystal on the TV, I asked, “Do you think everyone has a Coterie of Penises?”
“A what?”
“You know, all the bad boyfriends you had in your life.”
“You mean a bunch of guys who were dicks?” she asked.
“That’s a vulgar way of putting it, but yes.”
“Absolutely.” She took a big swig of her two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and burped. “What about you?” I shot her a look that said, Are you serious? My coterie was as populous as it was unsettling.
It was 1993. I was thirty-three years old. By the time I met Becca, I had lost seventy pounds, and had a thirty-inch waist and hair so thick and full, it was practically muscular. Plus, I had a gorgeous parlor-floor apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, all to myself, where I spent my nights gold-leafing the ten-foot mirror in my living room and crying to the soundtrack of The Bodyguard.
Five years earlier, I had grown weary of the shape of my life. I’d been waiting tables for four years, with nothing to show for it but a dangerously wide ass and a bank account that required regular CPR, in the form of money orders from my parents. Under Scotch tape so rain wouldn’t splotch it, my mother had written on the envelope in red marker: Jesus Believes in You, And So Do We, Son! . After they’d witnessed all my failures, I marveled at how they were capable of generating such unending hope.
