We choose our own methods for treating grief and fear. Superstitions and pharmaceuticals have their cost, and confession is too cheap. Brutality is circular and flight inevitably leaks. But there is a folk remedy as simple as the hedgehog, something more valuable in the institutional dayroom, the widower’s autumnal parlor, than any drug or counselor’s bromide. It is television.
I had a friend in New York named Chris Bruno. His father, a hotel man, kept trying to give him large sums and he kept refusing. Not that Chris had an overdrawn sense of his own integrity; only that the entailments of wealth didn’t interest him. He did airbrush paintings of office equipment and kitchen appliances. He wanted to be a lounge lizard, bitter and languid, but he was too excitable and no lounge would hold him. How close were we? Chris is the only man I’ve ever wanted to sleep with.
It was a long time ago. He called me on Christmas Eve from his parents’ apartment across town. He was just back from camping in Trinidad and very excited about music he’d heard there, fruit bats and clownfish he’d seen. We talked a long time, promised to meet the next day and eat oysters.
Just about one hour later Chris went sailing off his snowy balcony thirteen stories onto Fifth Avenue.
Wham.
A tragic suicide, his family announced. The guilty lamentation seemed so important to them that I withheld the more terrible truth: Woozy with goose and cognac, Chris had gone out to plot the stars over Central Park and, simply, slipped.
When his sister called me in the morning, I thought at first it was a joke. But the quaver in her voice turned harsh and she cursed my stupidity. I threw the phone into the wall. And then I sat for a long time on my bed waiting for something to come out or come up, for some physical sensation, but it was as though I were inside a test tunnel with everything unnaturally still. I went in the next room, turned on the television, lay naked in front of it. There was an electronic living-room show, a man in pinstripes being interviewed about group therapy. I thought how thin Chris looked in pinstripes, then stopped thinking at all.
For days, stuporous and inured, I lived there on that floor. The flickering blue screen was the only light in the room when night came down, and it was like lying at the bottom of a lake with people calling down to me, faces blurred and words indistinct. Now and then I closed my eyes to rest them, but never really slept. I absorbed loose time while stimuli bypassed my brain. Ashtrays overflowed, fur grew in the empty food cans, and the drone of noise and light went into me like an intravenous drip.
At the same time that I began to distinguish intervals in programming, I began to recognize, if not to comprehend, my pain. I wept at a hockey game, at a Petula Clark variety special. I slept dreamlessly, holding to me like some stuffed fuzzy toy a great armful of hissing air. On waking, my skin seemed unfamiliar, a stolen envelope. Not quite dawn and the sky was a test pattern. I groped in muffled ignorance and found, horribly, the nub. Chris died.
I showered, put clothes on, watched warships crisscross a billowing flag for the sign-on anthem, then a tornado of identical cartoon mice engulfing Farmer Gray. Regaining volition now, I could pick and choose my channels. I knew right where I was and I didn’t care. Chris died, but here was Bill Cullen to numb me.
It was January by the time I went outside. The streets were iced and I sprawled forward inside two blocks. No hurry to get up, now it was safe, safe to picture everything — Chris still smiling as he toppled, gracefully taut in his fast dive, landing, no bounce, with a sound like planks clapping, the bright blood, the taxis pulsing yellow at the corner.
I limped to a steamy restaurant and ate two portions of shredded beef with oyster sauce. “A poor workman always finds fault with his tools,” my fortune cookie said irrelevantly. I phoned Chris’s sister from a booth. She said come on over, there’s plenty to drink. The TV was on when I got there. It was on loud.
Richard Conte said: “Ease off, buster. I’ve had about all I can take.”
We drank rum highballs and glanced at each other.
Lisa said: “He had nothing to be angry about. Not one fucking thing.”
I said: “He wasn’t angry.”
We stopped talking once the bottle was empty. We slept in one bed, touching, but fully dressed. I woke energized, without a hangover, and thinking widely: This could be easy. I could leave my whole sorry life behind like a pile of bloody clothes. Lisa was still asleep when I went out, and the TV was still on.
It was on loud.
10
I CAME TO SAN FRANCISCO with a clear calling, with an insatiable appetite for squalor. I’d torn up my privileges like losing exacta tickets. I despised my soft youth, and wanted to get rid of it as fast as I could. What could be easier? Snug as a bug.
I took a job in a porno shop and soaked up the desolations of my customers. I gorged myself on simplicity. Black latex capes and ball gags, all-wet full-color spreads, gobbling nymphos, teens in bondage, lesbian nurses. When Mr. Bob came by to pick up the receipts, I’d go for a fast meal at a Chinese cafe where the waitress had a harelip and the fried rice gleamed with fat. Then it was back until closing time, aligning vibrators in the display case and listening for murders on the all-news radio. Oh, I was a man for all seasons in there, like something growing on the wall. I wore the same brown corduroys for weeks at a time; they got so shiny that when I stood under the colored bulbs at the back of the shop, it was like a rainbow up and down my thighs.
I slept in my clothes and had breakfast in bed, canned bonito and chocolate milk. I’d smoke slowly, picking dead skin from my scalp and watching my ashes soak into the fish oil at the bottom of the empty can. Then, assuming I hadn’t gone back to sleep, I’d be out prowling the neighborhood like some spawn of the freight yards — raking shoppers with my menacing eyes, spinning out heinous imaginings of the grimy little playground girls — until it was time for work. My off-days were spent in a bar where I was sure not to encounter any chess players or political theorists. The Forest Club was where beaten, cirrhotic honkies brought their pension checks and helpless repetitions. It smelled like old washcloth and the cigar box was always out, inviting contributions for one of the boys who’d landed in the VA — or worse. There was a notice in the john: DON’T THROW BUTTS IN THE URINALS — IT MAKES THEM SOGGY & HARD TO LITE.
Turpitude without hardly trying. I felt proud. But, unavoidably, I would recognize myself in the next instant, burrowed deeply into the muck at the bottom of Lake Success and still trapped. Would I ever get free of this Halloween posing? Would I stay sixteen the rest of my life?
I’d conditioned myself, following the squalor trail like a set of dancing-school footprints. But if I didn’t find some new moves, it would be too late for everything — or so I thought. Everything seemed portentous that season, even the new “kneeling” buses that the city introduced.
On my birthday I walked twenty-two miles and made copious notes on everything I saw. Rewind, begin again. I bought two new pairs of pants, sprinted through books of crossword puzzles, switched to a new brand of cigarette, planted geraniums in a windowbox, rode the ferry to Angel Island and hunted starfish on the beach. I vacated the Forest Club for chummy cafes where I was sure to come up against members of my own subspecies, beings in flight from manifest destiny and Danish flatware. But I stayed on at the porno shop because, honestly, I liked the work.
In time, I was deeply submerged in a comfortably uncomfortable love affair. I still felt soft, but not as youthful, so things were looking up. Andrea gave me the energy she wasn’t using. I went to parties without having to be coaxed. Like the one over in the East Bay where I met a truly wise man.