Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  He’d made a night out of it, a group date of sorts. David A. and David T. would meet us, we’d have dinner after—a comfortable, predictable scenario.

  I couldn’t keep a wild friend like Dallas and stay sober this time. It was possible I was simply jealous of the youth she still possessed, that limitless horizon and casual disregard of all things middle-class society held dear, though I knew she’d likely change once she got older. I didn’t want to know her then.

  * * *

  Eventually, Jake left for work despite my pleas for him to play hooky. I’d begun the process of clearing off my desk when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Ben! You always surprise me. Didn’t think you’d be home—it’s Soren.”

  “Well, I am here.” My hands trembled as I hesitantly sorted through piles of opened but not yet discarded mail.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “We saw your movie at Frameline, you know. Don’t know if I mentioned it.”

  “I don’t think you did—?”

  “It was cool to almost be a starfucker at least once in my life, if you know what I mean.”

  I spilled some of my coffee on an envelope from ASMA, no doubt already shilling for their next convention. Maybe it would be in New York again.

  “Metaphorically speaking,” he added.

  “I get it. Too bad there weren’t more groupies.” I was certain Christian Banner still had a line of supplicants on his Saskatoon doorstep.

  “It will happen; I know it, I just know it,” he said, and then went silent for a worrisome second.

  “Of course, I’m calling at such an early hour because Dr. Kim wants to talk to you. Hold on for me, handsome?”

  There was a click; then someone cleared his throat.

  “Dr. Kim?”

  “Yes, yes. Ben, how are you?”

  “Uh, OK, I guess. Considering everything. What’s on—?”

  He knew I was sweating and didn’t make me wait. “The PSA tests—I hate telling you this—came back elevated again. It’s up past twelve.”

  The Deadboys and Connie appeared in a flash, like lightning, just as my head started to throb. I could hear the blood rush past my ears.

  “That means it’s still there, it’s somewhere else in my body?” It started out as an elevated whisper, lengthening into an anxious screech.

  I thought I detected a sigh.

  “Somebody who’s had a radical prostatectomy and two months of radiation should have a nonexistent PSA, so, unfortunately, yes, we’re looking at metastases—”

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Sounds like this is a bad time.”

  “There’s a good time to tell someone he’s got term…terminal…?”

  Dr. Kim got the nuance. “Soren’ll get back on the line to make the appointment. Hormone therapy will give you lots of time, probably years.”

  * * *

  It was true. Hormone therapy for advanced prostate cancer, or what was sometimes called chemical castration, blocks the natural production of testosterone, which feeds the cancer, thus slowing its growth. Medical science in the person of Irving Kim made the assumption that a certain man with this disease would apparently like to live out his last days as a eunuch because he could have just so many more hours, days and years that way.

  Well. I wouldn’t do it.

  The Deadboys weren’t much help. They watched, waiting for me to make a move. Connie took a nap.

  So I left.

  The Slog was open. Rickie, Edmund, maybe even Dallas might be there, and there were full bottles of Wild Turkey behind the bar. Rickie would automatically set one in front of me and say, “Your drink, sir,” and bow.

  It’d be a good start. All this for fucking nothing, like a broken record, playing over and over again in my mind, making time with the traffic lights downtown. All the treatment: operation, radiation, incontinence, dead dick, all the rest, what was the goddamn point, because none of it worked and I was going to die anyway.

  In a year or so I’d wake up with a sore back, innocuous for most, a signal of the end times to come. It would end in horrible pain and debilitation, living rooms changed into sickrooms, rented mechanical beds and fat day aides who couldn’t see ghosts, watching the clock like rented vultures.

  I was well down the Slog block when I got the brainstorm. It wasn’t the alcohol I’d craved at all—it was a clear slap of cold water that could straighten a person like me out. I hailed a cab and it stopped.

  It was an easy four words to the driver: “Take me to Sausalito.”

  We passed the Slog’s front slats and I waved at those who might and might not be inside. The cab turned, don’t remember which street, the tears started and my vision blurred. The streetlights switched on. It was midmorning; it was spring; why the fuck was it always so dark here?

  The driver took me up Van Ness, veering left onto Lombard as the cab made its way along the Marina shore and into the Presidio. Wet leaves stuck to the window next to me. The bridge loomed up ahead, the wind blew in and I rolled up the window.

  There weren’t many pedestrians out there, the tourists no doubt disappointed at the rain and the lack of a postcard-worthy view. It was a quick ride for us. The traffic coming into the City was slow because of the rain.

  “Let me out at the parking lot up here on the right. I can walk the rest of the way; it’s just down the hill there.”

  The driver, no doubt from some unnamed Middle Eastern country we’d either been at war with in the past, were currently fighting or would attack soon in the future, glanced at me in his mirror and nodded. His black eyes might have lingered a second longer than expected and locked with mine. I suppose he saw the wetness.

  “There nothing to see today—fog, fog, just the fucking fog,” he said, with a broad flourish of his arm toward the bay.

  “Let me out up here, where the bridge ends. Add in the toll; you’re just turning around, right?”

  He pulled into the lot where the tourist buses parked. Today it was empty. Out in the water an amber buoy light bobbed, blinking steady.

  “Where you umbrella?” he said.

  I handed him enough cash to make a nice twenty-dollar tip. “I left it at home.”

  He rolled up his window and drove away through a puddle that soaked my pants and socks and dripped inside my shoes.

  I didn’t move till he’d disappeared back in the direction of San Francisco, then thought, Who do I know in Sausalito?

  No one. I just felt like a stroll on the bridge, and then a nice hike into the Presidio.

  It became my own movie, and I was the ultimate antihero star, viewed from a high-angle perspective, as if Karen came up with the budget for a crane or some fancy camera mount high on the bridge’s north tower.

  The crane swooped low and ended in a nice medium shot of my confused walk to the center of the bridge. Then a close-up of my profile leaning over the rail, followed by an ominous point-of-view shot of the roiling white-caps below.

  I was already wet, I thought—strange what popped into my mind at that precise moment. That and I should probably call Terry and cancel my AA speaking engagement. It was only polite. I hated it when I went to a meeting and no speaker showed up, making the poor alcoholics sit there and seethe.

  I’d make the call then—go—leave the phone on the rail, as there was no purpose in destroying a perfectly good cell phone. Maybe whoever found it could put it to some good use. Perhaps even Dan Lau would happen by; after all, this was his neighborhood.

  Or I could keep walking, past the toll booths at the end of the bridge, out to Land’s End, where the narrower pathways hugged the cliffs and where a careless step could send one plunging to the churning surf below… Then my phone vibrated in my pocket.

  I slowed but didn’t stop, as that would be a tip-off to the suicide patrols who watched the bridge. I could sense the eyes of a poorly hidden official camera on a nearby post.

  God. It was Glenda. Of all the peopl
e who could have called me at that moment, it was her.

  “Glenda,” I said.

  “Goddammit, it’s noisy there, sport,” she said.

  I raised my voice. “There’s some traffic noise today, yes.”

  “Then I hope you can hear me, ’cause I got some good news for you, Daddy.”

  I wasn’t sure I heard that right. Now she was beginning to irritate me, calling me names, which she knew I hated. Not to mention interrupting final, overly dramatic earthly activities.

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you the spermies took! I’m gonna have a baby and you get to pass on that questionable DNA after all,” she said.

  “Baby.” I repeated it so matter-of-factly and so quietly, I didn’t fully notice the flashing lights of the squad car that pulled up alongside me.

  * * *

  Counselor Guy, a fortysomething skinny, nervous man who looked to me like he needed a drink, wouldn’t leave until Jake arrived. They’d taken me home, fed me tomato soup from a carton with Wonder Bread on the side, and insisted that Jake leave the store in mid—Easter window design to come back and take over the “watch.”

  It wasn’t necessary. I would never have jumped, I mean, really, off the Golden Gate Bridge? How horribly common.

  So we sat there silently in my living room, me sipping the soup—which wasn’t bad—and it finally happened. The wall in my bedroom collapsed; the bulge that had grown over the months like a pregnancy gave way, and all it birthed was one hundred or so years of plaster, wood, dust, old nails and a million mirror shards. No rats, no treasure, no clues to the meaning of anything. One-hundred-year-old air inside the walls was trapped no more, as if there’d been a restless energy that was now freed.

  Just one more thing to worry about, it occurred to me.