The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  The third week, he begins to walk with me from rehearsal to the subway. We discuss the play, our Catholic, middle American families. When we get to the stop on Houston Street, he pulls a rose from his knapsack. “Here,” he says. The following afternoon, it’s a box of chocolates. Not much said, a furtive smile. Out of rehearsal, he’s a quiet guy. A few days later, February 23, 1985, he stays by my side all the way to the loft, where he meets the three Broommates, where he wakes the following morning, still at my side.

  8

  MEN.

  It is there above the door, carved in white marble, in bold classical script. Like a commandment. So I enter.

  I’m the young one. At twenty-seven my body is finished finding its height. He’s probably forty-five, the lone guy at the urinal, fifty, perhaps, with his tall, heavy frame and beret. He seems to belong to no one. He stands still, staring straight ahead at the sloppily painted brick. A slice of sunlight falls across his shoulder. I take a position two away and open my fly. I study the walls, dull beige with countless coats of paint. Sounds of revelers from the nearby park echo through the room. I should be working, singing, writing. Should be doing something, anything, else.

  I play serious at the business of peeing as I feel him look up at me. Over to me. He’s giving off something I know. An admission, an admixture of desire and fear that clings to him even as it radiates toward me. I know then that, in a certain way, we are the same. I feel sure his heart is pounding like mine, his knees shaking. He’s got the madness; that unrest that sends you out searching off-limits where your mother or teachers or, dear God, your lover, would not in their wildest imaginings think you’d be—pulsing with want in front of a public toilet.

  I thought sure this would end. That the grip of it would cease. Why is it happening again? Why am I allowing it? It’s like a trance, familiar the way it creeps in, creeps out from behind the angst. A hankering. A hunger that says only this food will do. Only this will soothe the sharp edge of anxiety. All my nerves screaming like spoiled brats hooked on it long ago. Get some, the synapses shriek, get it now.

  It’s crazy, standing there full-bellied and famished, fly open, holding myself out because that’s the ritual, the prayer before a meal with a stranger. I stand there exhausted from the wish to be two places at once: Here and not here. The chaos feels ancient and I’m scraping up reasons as I stroke myself:

  I was born oversexed, marked with a family gene; it’s in the blood, an overactive libido. I should look into this, get help. But, for now, I just have to see, please, this one thing swollen with proof that I’m here. Allow me this one quick glimpse of another man.

  It’s OK. Chill out. Just taking care of an animal need here. That’s all. That’s it. It is my earthly right as a guy to feel the pulse, the pleasure, the aliveness of body. This is what men have done since God knows when, since we were cavemen, for chrissakes. Don’t let the enemy, the old Catholic guilt, crush what the body desires, deserves. It’s cool, you’re not hurting anyone. Stay put.

  But why are you looking for aliveness inside a toilet? It’s deadness, isn’t it?

  No, it’s just a few minutes of fun with the damned. A few moments to enjoy, then on my way.

  Go home and enjoy. Get out of this shit hole.

  This is what I’m choosing.

  If you think you’re choosing you’re crazy. This is desperate behavior. This surely is one thing you should be able to control, to sacrifice, to give up for love, for Lent. Stop hunting up excuses for being a rogue.

  And I watch the man. I glance up at his skeleton smile (are my eyes that vacant?) I watch him play with himself. At least I’m being “safe,” I think. I’m not doing anything dangerous in the midst of this horrible epidemic. At least I have that much control, and then it comes. A quick, silent release, eyes clenched, an obliterated chunk of time. Over in a second. Did that really happen? Wipe hands on the Kleenex stuck in your pocket, get out, out of the dank and into the sun, get on with the day, on with your life. For God’s sake.

  And out into the light I march, stomach scooped hollow. And what rushes right in to fill the pit is punishment. A thrashing in the chest, the mad, criminal heart. Like day follows night, shame rises up and it’s old hat, it’s an old, surly friend come pounding, stubborn and loud, to announce he’s here and plans to move in. To crash in your living room for the foreseeable future.

  9

  IN THE SPRING of 1988 I moved into Henry’s place. A sweet and nervous leap of faith. A month later (the Gypsy life) I was hired to “Make ’em Laugh” as Cosmo in a Salt Lake City production of Singin’ in the Rain. I wanted to live up to the brilliant Donald O’Connor so I decided to incorporate the back flips off the wall during the big number. One night, midflip, I freaked and landed on my knee, then promptly in the hospital for surgery, and, knowing I couldn’t negotiate Manhattan on crutches, I ended up on my back in my old bed in Denver to recuperate.

  Sprawled in a postoperative stupor and looking for the bright side, I decided that this stretch of time at home was meant to be a blessing. Since I’d left for Stanford ten years before, I’d hardly been back, and here, I figured, was a rare opportunity to slow down and reconnect with family and friends. Carpe diem.

  Mom set up a convalescent bed in the dining room so I wouldn’t have to use the stairs. She organized meals and got me to physical therapy in the mornings, and Dad picked me up most days and took me to lunch. My little sister, Carolyn, and my brother, David, would stop in and shuttle me places. Here we were, all of a sudden, finding one another older and mellower.

  Dad’s marriage, it seemed, had deepened. He’d quit drinking. His wit was readier and wryer than ever and his kindness, his wish to help, was as clear as his sober eyes. The love I saw there was lucid, not the glazed kind I remembered from dinners past, the kind lit up by vodka and birthday candles. Mom was working hard at her job, excelling at bridge, and becoming a keen lover of films. We saw movies together, went for dinner. Discussed the plots and themes and cinematography.

  Henry came for a couple of weeks to visit. With great care, Mom prepared our room. She’d done a lot of work through the years to comprehend and accept her son’s homosexuality. And, besides, during the few trips she’d made East, she’d grown very fond of Henry.

  Crutches under my arms, I proudly showed him around my boyhood town and, one evening, even took him up to the Rockies, into Estes Park, where we spent a night in the Stanley Hotel, the prototype, supposedly, for Stephen King’s ghostly resort in The Shining. We couldn’t help but laugh after the gawky guy at the counter gave us a ghoulish stare when we asked for a queen instead of twin beds. Redrum, Redrum, Henry intoned all the way up the tiny, squeaking elevator.

  One afternoon I brought Henry, unannounced, to the Denver Catholic Register, where my father was then writing. Dad mumbled hello, staring at the keys of his typewriter. He never got up from his chair. Henry stood in the doorway, struggling, suddenly, through a fit of coughing. I died a thousand deaths as we stood there for two excruciating, wordless minutes before I croaked out an irritated and hasty goodbye. “Some things will never change,” I said to Henry as he helped me hobble back to the car.

  “That wasn’t a great idea,” he said.

  “I know. Sorry.”

  But, even with the barriers and tensions that remained, there was a truce, a quiet acceptance, which reigned over the family reunion.

  My old pals from high school, Mike and Kelly and Dave and Steph, came by and got to know Henry. And in the weeks after Henry left to play Trofimov in a production of The Cherry Orchard in D.C., friends continued to stop in and take me to dinner, once, to a Sting concert. Here was a beautiful Colorado summer, chums nearby, workmen’s compensation footing the bill, family taking good care. A gift.

  So why, I kept asking, did I feel so intensely troubled? The smell of the night air (so distinct in Colorado), the clouds moving over Mount Meeker, rendered me black with an inexplicable despair. Everything I laid eyes on—the green s
treet sign on Flamingo, the gold leaf dome of the state capitol, the ash tree in our front yard—caused sudden bursts of remorse. As if Denver was booby-trapped with forgotten devices, triggered by sight, that sent shrapnel flying. Flying straight for the heart. Suddenly, I was once again confronting serious thoughts (the kind that had begun to recede after I left Stanford and headed toward New York) of suicide. Christ, get a grip, I thought. Was it the Vicodin? Postsurgery blues? Or was it just that, without the rush of Manhattan, without the push of the next performance, I was suffering from none other than time. From too much of it on my hands.

  I needed a project. I borrowed Mom’s old IBM Selectric. We set it up at the dining room table and, acting on advice I’d received from my newfound friend, an old and wonderful actor, Morgan Farley (a cousin in Los Angeles who Aunt Marion had told me about), I began to type out, as neatly as I could, every line that Hamlet utters. “Memorize the great parts,” Morgan had counseled. “Get ready, don’t wait for the bastards to call you.”

  O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

  Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

  I punched out the script, studied the words, popping Vicodin along the way more for the buzz than the pain in the knee. A couple of afternoons into the Dane’s drama, I found I kept stopping to scribble bits of text in the margins, odd fragments floating by, asking to be pinned down. What happened when you were twelve? Tell the truth. It was irritating and strange and it was messing up my neat columns of iambic pentameter.

  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

  And thus the native hue of resolution

  Is sicklied . . .

  You had a lover. You had sex.

  The pen, as if on its own, would get to my hand and dash things off.

  What do you mean, lover? Molester, more like. And so what?

  Soon the words moved off the typing paper and onto a yellow legal pad and off it went, or I went, as if dictated to. My heart pounded, my groin swelled as I wrote because with the spilling of ink came an instant response. An instant erection, powerful, Pavlovian. I described a fence, a field, a truck, a man, a loft, a sleeping bag. Images of a ranch, horses eating hay, ghostly and beautiful. A lost fable unfolding. It went on most afternoons for several weeks. At the top of each page I began to place a capital C, with a circle around it. It stood for a name I could not yet spell out. I hid the scribbled pages in a peach-colored folder that I stuck under the typewriter. I’d take them out and add sentences each day.

  I’m in mourning here. For what happened, I think. Every smell, every site in Colorado reminds me of him. Of our bodies together. It was the force of flesh, I guess, muscle scooping up a naive altar boy, wasn’t it? What happened was dishonorable. Evil? But wasn’t there something honorable too? Holy? An awakening? Pleasure. It was unbelievably erotic. Or am I just remembering it that way? Wasn’t it awful? How much happened to me? How much did I make it happen? The questions are like a purgatory. A fire I’m stuck in. It was some kind of exchange. My little body for his big attention. He had a way of stroking my mind as well as my penis. Con artist. His penis was huge, frightening. I had never seen a man erect like that. The size, the will of the thing, shocking. A thrill, a terror.

  I was so little. It was like entering an adult race too soon and tearing muscles I’d need later to move well through the world. To find my own way. Or, maybe, it just strengthened me. What doesn’t destroy you . . . right?

  At school a nun guided my fingers over the frets of a guitar. On weekends he slid his lips down my chest. I am two different people, aren’t I? The altar boy and the slut. One’s in hiding.

  Henry knows one and not the other.

  How can I hate the part of me that partook? Then, I hate myself. I hate myself.

  Nothing I can do or become will ever be as vivid as this black crime in my soul.

  Where do you put the ache, the anger, so it makes movement? Not statis?

  At the end of that summer, I packed the secret pages away in my luggage. When I returned to New York I put them in a drawer and forgot about them.

  10

  MEN.

  The letters are yellow, painted on a sign above the second-floor hallway near the end of the aisle marked FICTION.

  But I’m not thinking about that. About MEN.

  It’s my day off from the play and I’m looking for a classic. A good solid read. The deep comfort of sinking into the era and into the lives of others. I’m thinking George Eliot. Or Tolstoy. Or Stegner. And maybe I’ll find a good new novel for Henry. A gift. I wander among the shelves, cracking open books, reading first sentences, catching the whiff of ink on new paper. I come across the Eliot I’ve always meant to tackle, Middlemarch, study the first words—Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time—and then, a force in a tight pair of jeans and a black turtleneck arrives to peruse the titles. A fat leather belt announces itself, the tip of it dangling toward the young man’s thigh. And, as best as I can describe it through the haze of the stubborn shame, it’s like this:

  A body has arrived to take mine away.

  And away is what I crave.

  Suddenly, I am nearly shaking. Every pore of my skin alert to his presence, while George Eliot is obliterated. I hold myself motionless, as aloof as possible, trying to hide the waves of desire breaking off of me. My body screams as I feign silence, as I pray for discipline to close the door on this man and not the book in my hand. I glance over. His slip of a grin, the twitch of his brow, vocabulary from a language it seems I’ve studied now for years. A kind of Homo-Esperanto, spoken worldwide by a particular subsection of the tribe. I reshelve Middlemarch. My breath has gone shallow and quick like it does when you’re ill. Or breathless with anticipation. Whose body is this? I wonder, as I step back, try to take stock. What’s that my old therapist, the one I saw now and again for a year, what’s that he used to say about insanity? Repeating the same behavior again and again and expecting a different result.

  It always leaves you feeling horrid. Stop. You’re losing control.

  So? Is control such a great thing?

  He steps past me, deeper into the alphabet of FICTION. I move away and turn the corner toward SELF-HELP. Testing things. Is he really following, interested? He finds me again, gives me a quick look. He’s got bad skin, a sweet smile. He brushes his crotch. I do too and it’s off we go, in our electrified stupor, to the nearby park to see what’s up.

  Book, gift, never purchased. An hour, a chunk of eternity, gone.

  Next evening, I’m playing on Broadway again. “Doctor Stage,” an actor friend of mine calls it, “because, no matter what ails you, you always feel better after work than when you came in.” When we reach the finale, I look out at the audience as we take hands and make our company bow, happy you’re here, our bending bodies say, so glad to be of service. The chorus swells and I’m belting my F-sharp, it is tucked tightly inside the last, huge chord. Six months running and our harmony still gives me gooseflesh. The surge of music, a thousand people clapping, the lights at full tilt, it’s a golden moment eight times a week. A giant house full of joy. It happens every night except Monday, this musical story, this miraculous curtain call, and I know I’ll never get over how lucky I feel that this is my job, that I get to tell stories for a living. Up to the dressing room I go. Out of costume. The stage manager announces the call for next day’s understudy rehearsal, drops off the actors’ valuables that had been locked up for the evening. “Goodnight, folks. Good show!” come the last words over the loudspeaker. Down three flights of steps, I hand Josh the doorman the key to my dressing room. He slaps me five.

  And out into the night I am flying home on my bicycle when I see a young man standing on a corner of Ninth Avenue. I slow down, smacked by a longing that’s been crouching quietly under my ribs. He’s swarthy, cute. Instantly, I perceive that he is interested. It’s there in the air, coming at me. A libidinous vibe. I come to a
stop near the curb and offer him a quick smile.

  “What the fuck do you want!” he blurts out.

  “I . . . I . . . thought maybe you could sell me a joint,” I lie.

  “Get the fuck out of here, faggot!”

  He steps over suddenly and kicks the front wheel of my bike. Hard. The handlebars jerk out of my grip. I regain my hold and start pedaling. He decides to give chase. Runs and kicks my back tire. I nearly fall. “Get the fuck out of here,” he screams. “You’re lucky I don’t have a fucking gun.”

  My legs are pumping, my heart exploding with shame, fear. I take a right and head toward the river, then left for a block, and stop to collapse against a mailbox. The street is silent, seemingly safe.

  After a while, I pedal slowly home, wondering what I was thinking. He was a guy standing on the corner, minding his own business. How is it that I can long for something so badly that the longing makes me trust any possible path for attaining it? All this want inside, but just what the actual want is, I don’t know. It’s somehow not about sex, I think. But something to do with danger, destruction.