Plays Well With Others Page 2

  III.

  12:12 p.m. How, in twenty-four minutes, to get this rictus of disembodied yearning uptown? I couldn’t afford the round-trip cab fare. Taking yet another day off work meant the usual: tending my dying buddies was not just exhausting; during these condensed, hypnotic years, it’d gotten extremely expensive. The Sickness followed a Health of almost its equal: our early frisky New York days.

  Under Robert’s kitchen sink, I found a huge blue Tiffany’s shopping bag (the show off!), plus a Lord & Taylor one featuring an Old English plum-pudding Christmas. These bags would make fine protective coloration for my smuggler’s chore. When uneasy in Manhattan, assume the city’s protective camouflage: feign shopping.

  Opening my backpack, I piled in Robert’s porn. Then at the kitchen’s corner, I knelt, commencing the loading of dildoes into toney, neutralizing shopping bags. You couldn’t just throw these things in helter-skelter. Too many to fit. So I worked, tongue pressed between teeth, as if building some Scout-worthy, log-cabin doghouse. I crosshatched nearly three dozen dildoes, dovetailing, relying on my early expertise at boyhood Lincoln Logs. (No offense intended, Mr. Lincoln.)

  First I wondered, “Robert, what did you do with all these things?” Then of course I knew, and switched to alternate imagery. (“If only you’d stuck with these,” I said aloud. I’d lately found I was saying things aloud a lot in public, aloud to friends alive and dead and dying. Teasing them, mostly. It was rough on strangers but seemed to help me, so I kept doing it. Why not? Apart from hospitals, I’d had little social life since about ’84 on. I mostly picked up people at memorial services; I’d briefly dated a male nurse. And now, this tired, when it came to muttering aloud on streets, at least I didn’t need a prescription; at least the jokes to departed loved ones made them seem less shadowy. Made me feel half-opaque. And, hey, the price was right.)

  My backpack weighed with thin Swedish boys outdoors, I hoisted two shopping bags containing maybe fourteen pounds apiece of premium-cut dildoes. “This here pecker pack mule’s about to trot uptown. Head ’em up, move ’em out, Rawhiiide!” Such quips helped give me strength. Don’t ask why.

  I locked everything, then rushed to the Christopher Street station. The rain caught me. Soaked, I jumped the local just as its rubber-edged door sucked shut behind me. How efficient I’d become. It was only 12:39.

  One forearm looped around the steel pole, I tried planning what to tell Robert’s naïve, judgmental parents. His father mounted a weekly pulpit, preaching the need for Christian love. The pastor hadn’t seen his son in five years. I knew it was my duty to lead these people, smiling their simulated smiles, bearing church homecoming keepsakes, into Robert’s narrow room.

  “Prepare yourselves,” I’d warn these folks. They had somehow conceived, then spoiled, then offered organ lessons, then tooth-braced the former prettiest boy in New York. I loved them at least for that. I’d say, “It’s still him.” (Or is it “he,” it’s still “he?” I felt very tired. Syntax, an early casualty.) I was so tired, I could only compare today’s tiredness with last month’s, “At least I’m not that far gone.” Pearl gray I contrasted to the brindled dove gray darkening most of last fall.

  I gave my days away in handfuls, partly out of superstitious gratitude that I’d somehow been spared. I helped because I could, and just hoped this equation might continue. It made me feel less guilty if I kept myself nearly as exhausted as my beloved patients. Surely I had been undercharged. Therefore, I could brutally tax myself, passing along the savings to others. My own apartment, one block from Robert’s, had recently flooded; just my luck the sublet was ninety blocks north. A beggar now hollered his spiel above the train’s din. People groaned, sick to death of being cornered by such need. “Just got out of prison, folks, an’ I don’t want to have to hurt nobody for my six babies’ food, but …”

  Our hospital receptionist, Lourdes Amy Llamos, spoke mostly Spanish, but with such cheer you felt you understood it. Behind her desk—stocked with candy and Reader’s Digests—a stained-glass window burned. It showed Mary the Mother, receiving hurt children of all nations, kids wearing casts and head bandages. Three had wedged themselves under her either arm and, within robes too blue, even the Virgin stared up into yellow light as if for strength, further funding. Lourdes always greeted me like staff, never exhausting her own goodwill. Her melon-colored silk blouses became a fact I leaned toward. As I swept in daily, she’d wink and ask about the latest of my twenty-odd patient-friends: “He betterer or worserer?”

  Squiring other parents into other rooms of other dying boys, I had done all this before. I could hardly remember ever doing anything else. I’d always coddled my New York men friends—like Wendy mothering the Lost Boys. (We’d all come to New York in search, natch, of Peter.)

  Followed by my lost ones’ spritely, terrified parents, I felt like one more West Village Virgil. I was starting to sound bored as that old gal who’s done the Circle Line boat tour of New York for fifty years. “On your left, that green roof? The building where they filmed The Apartment …” My references had grown dated as hers. I’d nearly forgot an upstate paradise called “Before.”

  At times, truth is, I felt some fugitive urge to shock these remote-control parents who’d let their boys suffer alone. By telephone, they told us, “We would come to New York, but given our schedules till Christmas, we just can’t. Besides, hospital rooms are small, we’d only be in your way.” My way?

  They were probably decent folks, perfectly willing to dare their son’s city friends to abandon him. Within the safety of their walled suburbs, they absolved themselves: “Wouldn’t other lepers know leprosy just a li’l better?”

  They arrived for final tearful scenes. Then, in the hall, after the first sight of the blinky, grateful skeleton who’d replaced their plump Princeton son, they would ask us caretakers—in lowered tones, “I think his accounts are with Citibank, right, Ed? Perhaps the time has come to inquire as to the disposition of Hiram’s things … ?” So the genteel ones phrased it.

  And we, the nurses, waited, knowing that Hiram’s will, leaving us his complete Fiesta ware, a signed (Gustav) Stickley chair and one half-mature retirement IRA, would soon be revoked by the finer law firms of our American Middlewest.

  Before, I was considered very funny. Do I now sound tired? There are so many reasons. Today I muted a few. Robert’s parents had acted kinder than most; their church held bake sales to offset Robert’s bills. Like many of us struggling artists, he’d had no health insurance. His mom once mailed me a small costly mall-bought German teddy bear holding a note: “I am a Care Bear for You, the one who’s bearing care for our boy, Robbie. We sure look forward to meeting you! Rebecca Gustafson, and Reverend Bob.” Robert’s parents knew just the things to say by phone, if only thanks to pastoral practice and the peace afforded by fifteen hundred miles. These folks would definitely need me by 1:25 this afternoon. Pineapples are the symbol of something … hospitality.

  I patted one pocket of my rain-drenched jacket, touched the six keys required to open Robert’s doors. My key ring, thanks to a wasting sickness, now weighed three butch pounds. Pills rattled. I kept, upon my person, medications for Robert and my others, all in separate little timered pillboxes that—day and night—went off like pocket aneurisms. Around me, other passengers, sogged by a downpour unpredicted, smelled of wool, rubber raincoat, contradictory beauty products, overwork.

  Why did this medevac duty keep being mine? Why didn’t others take off from their jobs? Why did I always feel so pulingly obliged? I had sacrificed the writing of six books, or seven—all that energy fed into the fire of this disaster.

  Why me? Why not me?

  IV.

  or betterer or worser, I’d adapted. Holding the subway’s upright pole, I promised myself I’d someday get back to writing fiction. Once my dears were free of needing me, I’d leave New York. And I would not depart in a box; I’d find some way to make Comedy of this shuffle toward the crypt. By now, I’d ordered so man
y helium balloons and bouquets, I had memorized shops’ phone numbers, “Wanda, Hartley. The usual. Room 198. Plain white card, no ‘Get Well’ on it. —Today’s name: ‘Robert.’ Bye.”

  I knew St. Vincent’s Hospital as intimately as my childhood home. I filched clean linen for my patients, sparing the nurses so long-suffering and short-fused. Lourdes Amy Llamos, mother of six, daily Mass-goer, kept slipping me laminated bookmarks, prayers.

  She’d pierce their edges (between phone calls and bloody ER arrivals). She would then whipstitch these holes with red satin ribbon. Do not ask me why. Bookmarks showed rouged low-expectations martyrs. They grinned as they held a dish supporting their own breasts, pudding servings suitable for one, and smiling! The markers had good edges, perfect—during endless bedside hours—for cleaning your nails, freeing a pesky piece of corn from back teeth. Occasionally, in the long sleep of sick ones’ tidal drift and return and drift toward perfect stillness—I would, thanks only to boredom, scan today’s Prayer for Sufferers:

  “Lord, give me the patience to endure what I must, and the wisdom to trust God’s hard yet beautiful blueprint for me. Give me large strength equal to my little time. May I feel that, as says Dame Julian of Norwich, ‘All will be well, all will be well, all will be wonderfully well.’ Make me humble enough to….”

  blah blah blah.

  Humble, I didn’t need. But shoot me an overdose of “wonderfully well.” If my health was betterer than friends’, my looks were often even worserer. I had narrowed my routes to a sleepwalker’s Forward and Reverse. That was all that kept me vertical, still strong enough to be left holding the bag(s) of Robert’s pleasure, jostling uptown before needing to rush back down.

  —Even so, I would arrive only just in time to let in the poor Gustafsons.

  v.

  12:58 p.m. Just when this car became most crowded at Seventy-second Street, just when I’d begun to nod a bit—hoping to snag some rest before my next words of kindness aimed toward the newest oblivious Iowans—just when I felt one moment’s civilian privacy for the first time all day, I readjusted the weight of both rain-sogged sacks and there came such a sundering rip.

  I stared forward as, all around my feet, thirty-odd sickening thuds. Thwunk, plonk, fwawp! The bags’ string handles heaved upward, sudden weightlessness. Then strangers’ screams, the gagging started.

  Penises struck rubber floor matting with hideous rubberized zest. Many bounced so. Thirty dildoes are a lot of dildoes to try and catch on the move. Yippee oh cayyah! Git along little dildoes …

  Rods hopped knee high, others achieved unsuspecting strangers’ thighs. All leapt toward/at people. Who jumped real fast elsewhere, several shrieking.

  I turn: One older lady in black—lower body pelted by several humongous disembodied peckers—stands atop four to six. Hands pressed against her cheeks, staring down at sudden unleashed dickdom, she resembles someone riding a disorganized log raft right over Niagara. The aged virgin hollers those around her into early deafness.

  Pink domes, large as the cups atop thermoses, plop across people’s fashionable skinny shoes. One Spanish boy drop-kicks a black prick halfway down the car. It strikes an ad for dental surgery, then thuds against a businessman’s shoulder, ricocheting. What this gent screams down here at me, me—already fallen on all fours, intently hunting/gathering—is extremely unpleasant. If probably accurate. All I can say is, “Yikes, little spill here, definite spillsies. Oopsie daisy, so sorry. ’S not like me, folks. Butterfingers.”

  I am kneeling among these many ankles. Collecting, I am so alone with loads of logs of Lincolnly homeliness and lank. I find I suddenly have much space here at the train’s south end. Forty people herd off from me, quickly gather at the car’s north quadrant. Strangers are united in their rage, completest sputtering disgust; they act abruptly joined, as only jaded New Yorkers can during some annoying natural disaster. “Don’t we have rights? And on a workday. Do we deserve this?” one chubby businesswoman shouts.

  I now assemble stray cocks by hand, spurned, an unloved zucchini worker, considering giggling, too tired to care (no, never that tired: see, there’s the rub), I am mainly mortified at having zero resistance in a world so tetanus harsh.

  I count the seconds till the train’s stop at Ninety-sixth Street. Bent here, I seem to be farming these; I feel unzipped and peeled and sickly, for once in need of someone else’s harvesting. Mother Mary, lift me, tuck me underarm, quick, gir’friend. I keep pickin’ up poppas and stickin’ ’em in my pockets. Pockets prove too virginal to accommodate this many.

  I feel as detached, as puppet ridiculous, as the woody dorks I’m forced to hoard here. Why am I keeping them? Do I need these? Why not run to another car, abandon these heaped here like the Homeless? Who’ll miss ’em, Robert’s parents? What good are used ones? More intimate than borrowed toothbrushes. God knows, Robert will never want these guys again.

  But he told me to save them. And I’m doing it. And what I keep hearing as I scoop them up anyway is a shrill half-human mantra. Repeated, repeat it. Someone not unlike myself must be shouting, even as he tries to gather peckers, stuff’em in his britches, jam some under his belt, cover tips with spare wet scraps of Tiffany blue. As I tuck several beneath my soggy wind-breaker, with the rest stacked over my arms like firewood, the point of my chin, dainty, steadying the load, I find myself calling in exhaustion something I’m not proud of: “They aren’t really mine. Just carrying them for … a friend. Not for me! They’re … friends’.”

  I must be downtown to let his folk upstairs in under twelve minutes. I must let poor Robert’s poor parents through all those locks. I dread leaving them stranded on the street outside. They’ll have packed too much; they’ll be full of falsified optimism, trivial flight detail. The senior Gustafsons, decent people, overdressed, underprepared. As if anybody could ever prepare for this. —Is it possible to feel this tired and still stay conscious?

  Why am I trying to pick up sticks, and am now dropping them? Why keep gathering and failing and stooping and making arrangements of them, now like vegetables, like lilies? Why do this?

  Jeering people bunch tighter at the car’s far end. Looks like they’re actually passing around a petition. But, no sweat, I am by now some diva, a bit exempt, I’m really incognito—a beloved star and singer, plucking roses off the apron of her stage while spilling others, not caring, since there are plenty. Now I have slid from “These things are my friends’” to “These’re my friends’”—till finally, deranged, I achieve an odd immodesty, recalling so many absent ones, the thirty or so lost already. And as I now touch each of these colossal members, cut off from a bloodstream, now apart from being anything past Artifact and Matter, now just Art—a familiar family litany surges back.

  Under my either bony knee, train wheels clatter a more dignifying rhythm, I cradle and then get to name these dolls and dicks and dolldicks and dolls of dicks, these unlikeliest encapsulated friends. Sorry for being so slow to recognize you David, Hiram, Darrell, and James, sweet Tony Wu, Kit and Kirk, Paul, Ramon, Geoff, Bruce and Ansel and R.J., Stan and Roland, Bill, Gideon, John, the other Jody, Roger, Wayne, Jody, Paulo, Todd, Peter, Lance, Ernie, Marco, Jay, Jerry. And Robert, especially you, Robert, who—polite—aware how far your folks have come today, at what great cost and trouble, and with you being so kind and organized even if mostly dead, will see to it you die while they’re in town, to save them a second trip, and because that is so like you, so like our Robert … and James, and our Hugh, and Deke, and our Patrick, and our Nick, and our our …

  As my fellow passengers, understandably, fearing contaminants, scared that these are used ones, which they are—as strangers press against one another, dissing me and mine, it’s odd to find I hold these slightly higher. I clutch with some new strength, suspecting whom I’ve got here. Upright before my chest, now bunched under my chin … A stemlike rectitude, a certain, simple, rustic Gaudí beauty, my bouquet.

  Often symbols of hospitality.

  “Fr
iends.” I cough toward my trapped glowering audience. I need a new logic in this, my exhaustion. “See how many? And, boy, you lose ’em, you really know it. Thirty friends are a lot of friends!”

  Am I saying this out loud, or thinking it too hard? Am I overburdening them? I do have quite an armful. I consider trying a nifty Muppet voice for each. —Instead, I’m praying for this goddamn train to stop. Pleeeease let all this stop. I draw nearer the door. Others let me. Such courtesy.

  I’ll deposit these; I’ll take a cab. I’ll let his parents in. They will be waiting. They will be seated on six blue suitcases before his place’s flaking stoop, furious, checking their watches, faces pink, looking left, looking right. Irked, they are exactly that scared. Somebody’s Doberman in a spiked collar will be chained, snarling, to a fire hydrant nearby. Scruffy alien kids smoke herb upwind and these Iowans, miffed by their son’s illness and his friend’s insolence, scan every approaching face for my flushed apologetic grin. I’ll trot it toward them, puffing, “Sooo sorry. Had to rush uptown to drop some of Robert’s things. But, how good you’ve come. Flight okay? You’ll need an hour’s nap, I know.”

  The mother, nearly a foot taller than her agreeable husband, looks so much like Robert in high heels, she will spook me. I’ll shake both their offered hands. I’ll try to lug their largest powder-blue American Tourister. Their features grow less irritated, my Southern manners somewhat softening their rage.

  “We’re under lots of pressure,” she tries explaining. “You cannot imagine.”

  “Aha. I can only guess. —I’m afraid we still have quite a hike straight-up,” I smile so; they must never understand my full exhaustion. They are still innocent. And I? Am not.

  His mother lightens: “Our Robbie certainly chose a colorful neighborhood.” Just eleven minutes late for this, now fighting with the keys while dragging heavenward a Stonehenge of luggage, I call back down the steps, “Mmmm, yes, colorful. You have no idea.” Then I’ll lead them. Lead them up toward the huge bed waiting, made, hospitable.