When Elaine and I moved in—to help the live-in nurse look after Larry—it was not the same as living “together”; we were done with that experiment. Larry’s house had five bedrooms; Elaine and I had our own bedrooms and our own bathrooms. We took turns doing the night shift with Larry, so the sleep-in nurse could actually sleep; the nurse, whose name was Eddie, was a calm young man who tended to Larry all day—in theory, so that Elaine and I could write. But Elaine and I didn’t write very much, or very well, in those many months when Larry was wasting away.
Larry was a good patient, perhaps because he’d been an excellent nurse to so many patients before he got sick. Thus my mentor, and my old friend and former lover, became (when he was dying) the same man I’d admired when I first met him—in Vienna, more than twenty years before. Larry would be spared the worst progression of the esophageal candidiasis; he had no Hickman catheter. He wouldn’t hear of a ventilator. He did suffer from the spinal-cord disease vacuolar myelopathy; Larry grew progressively weak, he couldn’t walk or even stand, and he was incontinent—about which he was, but only at first, vain and embarrassed. (Truly not for long.) “It’s my penis, again, Bill,” Larry would soon say with a smile, whenever there was an incontinence issue.
“Ask Billy to say the plural, Larry,” Elaine would chime in.
“Oh, I know—have you ever heard anything quite like it?” Larry would exclaim. “Please say it, Bill—give us the plural!”
For Larry, I would do it—well, for Elaine, too. They just loved to hear that frigging plural. “Penith-zizzes,” I said—always quietly, at first.
“What? I can’t hear you,” Larry would say.
“Louder, Billy,” Elaine said.
“Penith-zizzes!” I would shout, and then Larry and Elaine would join in—all of us crying out, as loudly as we could. “Penith-zizzes!”
One night, our exclamations woke poor Eddie, who was trying to sleep. “What’s wrong?” the young nurse asked. (There he was, in his pajamas.)
“We’re saying ‘penises’ in another language,” Larry explained. “Bill is teaching us.” But it was Larry who taught me.
As I said once to Elaine: “I’ll tell you who my teachers were—the ones who meant the most to me. Larry, of course, but also Richard Abbott, and—maybe the most important of all, or at the most important time—your mother.”
Lawrence Upton died in December of ’86; he was sixty-eight. (It’s hard to believe, but Larry was almost the same age I am now!) He lived for a year in hospice care, in that house on West Tenth Street. He died on Elaine’s shift, but she came and woke me up; that was the deal Elaine and I had made with each other, because we’d both wanted to be there when Larry died. As Larry had said about Russell, the night Russell died in Larry’s arms: “He weighed nothing.”
The night Larry died, both Elaine and I lay beside him and cradled him in our arms. The morphine was playing tricks on Larry; who knows how consciously (or not) Larry said what he said to Elaine and me? “It’s my penis again,” Larry told us. “And again, and again, and again—it’s always my penis, isn’t it?”
Elaine sang him a song, and he died when she was still singing.
“That’s a beautiful song,” I told her. “Who wrote it? What’s it called?”
“Felix Mendelssohn wrote it,” Elaine said. “Never mind what it’s called. If you ever die on me, Billy, you’ll hear it again. I’ll tell you then what it’s called.”
THERE WERE A COUPLE of years when Elaine and I rattled around in that too-grand town house Larry had left us. Elaine had a vapid, nondescript boyfriend, whom I disliked for the sole reason that he wasn’t substantial enough for her. His name was Raymond, and he burned his toast almost every morning, setting off the frigging smoke detector.
I was on Elaine’s shit list for much of that time, because I was seeing a transsexual who kept urging Elaine to wear sexier-looking clothes; Elaine wasn’t inclined to “sexier-looking.”
“Elwood has bigger boobs than I have—everybody has,” Elaine said to me. Elaine purposely called my transsexual friend Elwood, or Woody. My transsexual friend called herself El. Soon everyone would be using the transgender word; my friends told me I should use it, too—not to mention those terribly correct young people giving me the hairy eyeball because I continued to say “transsexual” when I was supposed to say “transgender.”
I just love it when certain people feel free to tell writers what the correct words are. When I hear the same people use impact as a verb, I want to throw up!
It suffices to say that the late eighties were a time of transition for Elaine and me, though some people apparently had nothing better to do than update the frigging gender language. It was a trying two years, and the financial effort to own and maintain that house on West Tenth Street—including the killer taxes—put a strain on our relationship.
One evening, Elaine told me the story that she was sure she’d spotted Charles, poor Tom’s nurse, in a room at St. Vincent’s. (I’d stopped hearing from Charles.) Elaine had peered into a doorway—she was looking for someone else—and there was this shriveled former bodybuilder, his wrinkled and ruined tattoos hanging illegibly from the stretched and sagging skin of his once-powerful arms.
“Charles?” Elaine had said from the doorway, but the man had roared like an animal at her; Elaine had been too frightened to go inside the room.
I was pretty sure I knew who it was—not Charles—but I went to St. Vincent’s to see for myself. It was the winter of ’88; I’d not been inside that last-stop hospital since Delacorte had died and Mrs. Delacorte had injected herself with his blood. I went one more time—just to be certain that the roaring animal Elaine had seen wasn’t Charles.
It was that terrifying bouncer from the Mineshaft, of course—the one they called Mephistopheles. He roared at me, too. I never set foot in St. Vincent’s again. (Hello, Charles—if you’re out there. If you’re not, I’m sorry.)
That same winter, one night when I was out with El, I was told another story. “I just heard about this girl—you know, she was like me but a little older,” El said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“I think you knew her—she went to Toronto,” El said.
“Oh, you must mean Donna,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s her,” El said.
“What about her?” I asked.
“She’s not doing too well—that’s what I heard,” El told me.
“Oh.”
“I didn’t say she was sick,” El said. “I just heard she’s not doing too well, whatever that means. I guess she was someone special to you, huh? I heard that, too.”
I didn’t do anything with this information, if you could call it that. But that night was when I got the call from Uncle Bob about Herm Hoyt dying at age ninety-five. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders,” Bob said.
No doubt, that must have distracted me from following up on El’s story about Donna. The next morning, Elaine and I had to open all the windows in the kitchen to get rid of the smoke from Raymond burning his frigging toast, and I said to Elaine: “I’m going to Vermont. I have a house there, and I’m going to try living in it.”