Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  The couple and their baby were directly in front of me on the sidewalk.

  I stepped onto the park’s crabgrass. “Well, are you going or what?” I asked.

  The man, who was tall and very thin, with jet-black dyed hair and expensive eyeglasses, didn’t say a word. He frowned as if he’d stepped on a large bug with a pair of shiny new shoes, then passed me first.

  The woman was about half his size, wearing what appeared to be a hand-made tunic loosely draped to make me think she still had a bump left over from the now-crying baby.

  “Excuse us,” she said. “We were just waiting for you.”

  “Sorry—got a lot on my mind today,” I said, bending toward the kid an inch or two to coo. “Nice, nice baby…”

  It wailed even louder. The woman pushed the stroller forward and they tore off down the block, wheels squeaking.

  Lexus Guy still subtly waved that fifty, if there’s any way you can subtly wave money out the window of a car on a Sunday afternoon in the most notorious cruising block in San Francisco.

  “You with some friends?” Dad sounded confused.

  I blurted out, “I have it now. The prostate cancer. So maybe it does run in families.” The back of my neck was wet.

  Lexus Guy lowered his window all the way, and I saw he was someone who wore nice threads from a store like Sloane & Bradford, which apparently fit him quite nicely. I couldn’t help but smile.

  Dad mumbled something. In the background, I could hear Jackie say, “What? What’s he got?”

  Always the empiricist, Dad’s next comment was “I guess if you have it, then it doesn’t really matter if there’s a family history or not.” Then, an afterthought: “I’m so sorry, Ben.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lexus Guy pulled over to the curb and turned off his engine. He waited, watching me in his rearview mirror. My free hand briefly massaged a nipple, then took a detour south to brush against the front of my jeans and linger slightly longer—OK, a lot longer—than publicly acceptable. A gentle squeeze.

  “What do you have to do about it?” Dad asked.

  “There’s an operation or radiation, basically—if I want to live another ten years, that is.”

  * * *

  Lexus Guy and I drove up the Seventeenth Street hill to Clayton. He was taking me to Golden Gate Park, where I’d give him a blow job. He was trim, slightly nervous, and younger than he first appeared with his success car and preppy weekend wardrobe. He didn’t appear to live in the City but must have in a prior life since he hadn’t required directions.

  “I’m Ray,” he said.

  I was certain that was a lie, but it seemed as good a name as any.

  “Eric,” I replied.

  In the park, he pulled off onto a dried-mud maintenance road that made a sharp turn right into the trees. He reclined the driver’s seat and I put my head into his lap. I unzipped his expensive serge slacks and took out his cut, nicely shaped, medium-sized penis, which was already hard and wet, and I sucked it.

  “Yeah, Eric, please,” he said, so softly I could hardly hear him.

  The utter strangeness of this did occur to me, as I wasn’t particularly horny and Lexus Sugar Ray would not be my default type if I was independently searching out this kind of activity.

  He whispered, “I’ve been so horny.”

  It was something stupid like that, right out of a porn movie, but there wasn’t much in the way of moaning or any other kind of verbal encouragement.

  I heard the birds that lived outside the car, felt Ray’s fingers in my hair softly petting, like you might with a dog you hope is friendly. That tender action by itself excited me, and I rubbed my stiffening cock through my jeans.

  He stroked my back and my ass with his other hand, and I felt his fingers go into an empty pocket back there. I hadn’t taken a wallet to Badlands, so there was nothing to mug—though if he wanted to touch my ass my pants weren’t all that tight.

  He didn’t warn me he was about to come. There was a shudder, and then one or two seconds later my mouth filled with his salty juice.

  Fuck! I’d always lived by the rule that it was unbelievably rude not to warn your partner you were about to launch—even if you were being paid.

  I didn’t want to swallow Ray. I let him fill my mouth until he stopped breathing hard, so I figured he was done. I sat up and opened the car door, its warning bells adding to the happy park birdsong, which startled the warblers out of the trees.

  I went just a few feet into the woods to spit out his sperm, then rinsed my mouth with my own saliva. Leaning against a tree, I was nauseous, my legs were weak and I felt like any second I’d puke.

  I heard the car’s engine. Ray was backing out of the service road.

  * * *

  I briefly considered getting change for the fifty-dollar bill and taking the Muni bus back to the Castro—my thought being, I should use as much of that whore money as possible to buy myself something nice. After all, there was always the possibility of deluding myself into thinking Ray tricked me into having sex with him for cash.

  The cab dropped me at home and there were thirty-five bucks left. Dinner later, maybe.

  I wanted to talk to Jake, or just be around not talking, hear his voice, footsteps, his life going on simultaneously with mine—Jake, in an old white-turned-gray T-shirt, that chest hair sprouting lightly over the crewneck.

  It had been a full afternoon and it wasn’t even four. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought it was a really good thing that the people we knew didn’t possess some kind of telepathic memory-rewind device, where they could look in our eyes, back up, see where we’d been and what we’d been doing.

  For all I knew, Jake would have laughed at “Ray” and his furtive but ultimately successful attempt to procure a midrange blow job. He would say my services were undervalued and I should have asked for more. But that was most likely a dream Jake rather than the flesh-and-blood man upstairs, who was, alas, not a saint, and then again jealous.

  Several measured, loud thumps came from my bedroom. My first thought was the rats had become larger and bolder—or perhaps the pregnant wall bulge had given birth to something. I stuck my head in the doorway and nothing moved, but there was an odd shadow against the window. A ladder was propped up against the house.

  Jake was putting up Christmas decorations.

  * * *

  “That time of year,” I called up to him, shielding my eyes from the afternoon sun outside on the sidewalk.

  I startled him. Jake grabbed onto a windowsill, a strand of lights falling to the sidewalk. I caught it.

  “I heard you come back last night, pulling that noisy suitcase over the sidewalk, up the hill. Thought you’d come upstairs right away, or—you meet some cute guy in New York and now you’re dumping me?”

  * * *

  The day I’d moved in, he’d knocked on my door in a rainstorm. I let him inside the flat, which still had that lonely empty-apartment-echo-fresh-paint-and-disinfectant thing going on. Jake would’ve been a hippie in another time, I’d thought. He wore a woven-hemp shoulder bag over an earthcolored dashiki that had to have been from some obscure, unpronounceable Central African outpost.

  He’d come to warn me about Bunny Mathews, as much about her landlady eccentricities as about her unpopular—for San Francisco, anyway—politics. He told me about Keith and Ralph on the floor that separated us, who may or may not be addicted to methamphetamine; regardless, they stayed up all night every night and never opened their blinds. He told me about the previous tenant of my unit, whom he missed terribly. And he told me about the garden he’d planted out back that he’d show me sometime when it wasn’t dark and raining.

  I told him where I’d come from—Los Angeles this time—and what I did for a living, the Safe Harbor software story. All he said, as he looked me deep in the eyes just a few inches from my face in that dark hallway, was, “Sweet.”

  * * *

  I wrapped the fallen light strand around his n
eck and we kissed. “Want some coffee?” I whispered in his ear.

  “I want you,” he said.

  Had “Ray’s” penis had left a foreign taste in my mouth? I was ashamed. There was a Catholic church on the next block that doubled as a place for AA meetings and speed-date seminars. I could donate all thirty-five dollars still burning in my pocket for the starving kids in Sudan, if I could convince myself the Romans wouldn’t push their homophobic bullshit on those hungry young minds.

  “Ah, later, OK? I want to talk.”

  We sat on the hopelessly out-of-style futon in my living room. Trying to ignore my self-consciousness about the lesser beauty of my surroundings compared to his showplace upstairs, I prayed no mice would surprise us.

  “I’m going to have the operation,” I said. “I don’t want it, but they convinced me that’s what I have to do to stay alive for a while.”

  Jake looked at his hands, which were smudged. He rubbed them together, as if he wanted to make that dirt a part of himself. “It must be a relief, to decide,” he said, and then we were quiet.

  I put my head on his chest, smelled the earth there, and started to cry softly into the cotton.

  8

  It wasn’t going to be much of a Christmas. Once I’d actually told Jake about the decision to have the prostatectomy, busyness erupted in cancer world.

  Dr. Kim would do the operation at Presidio’s Hospital in the Richmond District. I had to pick a date in early January. A clingy group of support staff then leapt out of the woodwork; calls and e-mails started coming. Insurance assessments, blood tests, X-rays, measurements of my insides, a bone scan—all were necessary, and all must be done in sequence.

  At Safe Harbor, I had to tell Tony Mallard, who was very supportive. This didn’t surprise me, but he had an interesting reaction to someone else’s cancer, in that he seemed to believe he could get it from being too close. This had some advantage, because if he stayed his new distance, or increased it, there was less of a chance for me to have to deal with his feet.

  The bone scan itself, a test for metastases, was conducted at a beige stucco nonmedical-looking facility I hadn’t been to before, a block in from the Great Highway and Ocean Beach.

  Karen agreed to come with me. We’d do some Hell for the Holidays business while we waited for the scan results. Always the multitasker, Karen picked me up in her Mini Cooper. She’d packed her folders and tossed her clipboard in the back.

  I’d finally told her about the cancer in what I’d hoped would be a tightly controlled situation—at least for me. I called one day right at the end of her lunch break, when I knew she’d be rushing back to her reference pod before her boss could calculate the number of minutes she was late and dock it from her sick time.

  The conversation started out innocently enough: Sydney trip minutiae. She seemed distracted or maybe a bit irritated. The idea was to slip it in at the end:

  “One other thing; I know you have to get going,” I said. “There’s a little health problem, nothing serious really, but I have to have an operation before I go to Oz.”

  “What?” she said.

  “They want to take out my prostate gland, that’s all; it’s just a weekend operation, go in Friday, you’re out Monday, simple as one-two-three.”

  “You have prostate cancer?” she yelled into the phone.

  “Like, tell the world, Karen.”

  “Oh, my God, Ben, I’m so sorry—Jesus,” she said.

  “You having a conversion experience?”

  “Stop it! This is serious,” she said.

  There was a short period of tears and then denial or disbelief, which quickly shifted to command-and-control mode, which I knew it would. Here she was, taking me to the bone scan.

  For some reason, she’d dyed her hair bright raspberry red. I was sure it hadn’t been this color before, but I did a double take anyway. It was so obviously a fake color that didn’t occur anywhere in nature—not like a real raspberry—and I guess that was the point.

  “That’s an interesting color,” I offered. She smiled without turning her head.

  * * *

  Once inside, we were informed the scan would be done in two parts—there was an injection of radioactive tracer material first, then a break, then the actual scanning procedure. The IV drained into me quickly. Forms were signed and smiling instructions given to return in two hours.

  Since we were already near the ocean, Karen and I took advantage. In the insular Castro, it might never be apparent that there was an ocean just a couple of miles away unless the wisps of fog breaking over Twin Peaks or a foghorn clued one in to the adjacent large body of cold water.

  We settled on a diner-type establishment with big picture windows overlooking the ruins of the Sutro Baths.

  I couldn’t focus on anything and wasn’t the least bit hungry. The water in the old pools far below us rippled in the morning winds coming off the Pacific.

  In a little over an hour I’d find out if I had bone metastasis.

  “Tell me about the movie and what you’ve heard,” I said, desperate to stop thinking about my health if only for a few seconds. I tapped a spoon against the sides of my coffee cup as she drenched her lettuce with diet ranch.

  She smiled. “I was going to save this for later, but since you asked—we’re in L.A. and in New York, the New Festival there, which is what they call their queer fest now. Los Angeles’ Outfest in July; New York is in June just before the pride thing there.”

  Summer. Half a year away and it seemed incomprehensible, as my life was only being planned to January and the Operation. Slide viewer: Irving Kim was an angry Asian chef, staring out the diner’s kitchen door holding sharpened knives crossed over his chest.

  “Ben?”

  I’d turned my head to look out at the water, searching for the dorsal fins of great whites.

  Karen’s good news finally registered. “That’s fucking great.” I forced a smile. “I’m gonna have to figure out how to get to both festivals.”

  “Of course.” She took my hand. “It’s going to come up clean. The scan.”

  As usual, Karen displayed certitude as if she had a checklist in her brain of life’s events and how to most effectively deal with them, which always made me insanely jealous.

  * * *

  The bone scan gamma camera was fixed above a table where you lay while the scanning mechanism traveled the length of your body. It took about half an hour, and I wasn’t supposed to move. I nodded off briefly during this procedure and dreamed of the Shroud of Turin.

  I wondered whether my own scan would look anything like that famous X-ray-like view of the dead Jesus, but instead of ancient linen or whatever the shroud was made of, this would be on high-tech American paper. The image coalesced and came to life in living color, and there Jesus was, smiling at me. I woke up and my leg moved partway off the table.

  “Don’t move, Mr. Schmidt!” the technician said. My hiccup apparently wasn’t bad enough to make them start over, but the camera apparatus progressed so unfathomably slowly, I became both bored and anxious.

  Finally, the technician turned it off and the machine powered down to silence. She walked over, smiled and gave me her hand. “You can get up now,” she whispered.

  * * *

  The doctor who interpreted the scan appeared to be a few months away from retirement, and I got the sense this was a part-time gig for him. He had the expected white hair and glasses, an ill-fitting lab coat and a strange smirk, as if this whole procedure amused him.

  Anyway, he said so matter-of-factly, “You’re good. There’s no metastasis to bone here. Looks like you’ve got some arthritis in your knees, but that’s pretty common for someone your age. Congratulations.”

  Karen applauded and I let out the breath I wasn’t even aware I’d been holding in.

  “Merry Christmas, Ben,” she said.

  * * *

  Jake and I both had a few days off from work for the holidays. His world had been crazy since be
fore September 11, really since last July, when the big stores he designed windows for started to plan their holiday strategy. It reached fever pitch in the weeks before Halloween; then there was fine-tuning all through Thanksgiving and into December, as sales data confirmed for his bosses what worked and what didn’t.

  As much as he would have liked to believe himself that bohemian artist—which is definitely the way I fantasized about him, especially when I saw all the software engineers at Safe Harbor in their preppy-nerdy uniforms and happily convinced myself I had the real stud, the real deal, right there at home—Jake was like everyone else in that he had to put up with the same corporate bullshit one can avoid only by being the capitalist who owns the company.

  Winter had locked itself down over San Francisco. Every day was rainier and windier, the perfect meteorological companion to my gloomy prostatectomy countdown. At Safe Harbor, we dutifully scrambled to prepare the company’s booth for the Consumer Electronics Show, that mother of all Las Vegas confabs. My heart wasn’t in it, but I had to prepare Jason and Kelly to take over, as I’d be leaving in the middle of the exhibition to go to the hospital and wouldn’t return for more than a month.

  The word about my cancer had traveled around the company—Tony had promised confidentiality, but I knew how that went and how impossible it was to keep juicy gossip to oneself, so I couldn’t really blame him for telling.

  I would’ve done the same, with a great deal of relish, had the situation been reversed.

  There was a subtle shift in coworkers’ attitudes toward me. Occasional sidelong looks of—what? Pity, I guess. Whispering. A marked decrease in phone calls to me for advice or for anything. They had largely written me off. It would be tragic, I thought—if it wasn’t so funny.

  I wasn’t going anywhere, and they’d realize that soon enough.

  Jake must have sensed my increasing apprehension, as he suggested something quite out of character—a weekend away. It would have to be close, so we chose the Russian River, accepting the gamble that it would likely be colder and rainier there than in the City, where at least there were other diversions.