Читать книгу Dear Prudence - David Trinidad - Страница 30

AIDS SERIES

1

I met Larry Stanton at a party on the Lower East Side, Indian summer, 1982. My maiden trip to New York. Nervous and unsure of myself, pinned against the wall in a room full of poets, cocktail chatter, cigarette smoke. I’d just lit a Marlboro Light when Larry, part of the small group I was trying to converse with, leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. That’s all I remember. He might have invited me to visit his studio; Tim might have taken me there. He might have come to my reading at St. Mark’s. I only remember that mysterious kiss. And his looks: a boyish blond who had morphed into an unkempt mid-thirties handsomeness. I open the book of his paintings to a self-portrait he did in 1984, the year he died. He stares back, sad and cute. It aches to look into his face.

2

Lee Hickman and I became friends in the early eighties, after he published me in Bachy. Peter Cashorali (another young Los Angeles poet Lee had published) and I would hang out with him, ask him burning questions about poetry. Lee was dismayed that he couldn’t give away a perfectly good copy of Pound’s Cantos—nobody wanted it, Peter and myself included. I accompanied him to San Francisco (where he gave a reading); on the way back he got a speeding ticket outside of Santa Barbara. For his birthday I gave him a pair of elegant champagne flutes. He showed me a letter Anne Sexton had sent him, praising his poem “Lee Sr Falls to the Floor.” It was confusing when Lee rejected all the local poets he had supported and took up with the Language poets: he seemed angry for some unknown reason, acted like he wanted to punish us. One day when I was at Astro’s with Bob and Sheree, Lee came in and sat at the counter. My book Monday, Monday had just come out; I had one with me and debated whether I should give it to Lee. Bob and Sheree encouraged me. I walked over and offered it to him: “I hope you enjoy it.” Several weeks later, he showed up at a reading and asked me to sign the book I’d given him, on the last page of my poem “Meet The Supremes.” I wrote: “Lee, where did our love go?”

3

I went to Astro’s with Glen after one of my first A.A. meetings, fall of 1983. Chain-smoked and drank countless cups of coffee. Glen was loud and funny and overweight. I could do little but listen. I’ve never forgotten something he said that night: “Even a bowel movement can be spiritual.” I didn’t—and still don’t—know what he meant. He gave me my Big Book, wrote in it: “David T., May you have many sober years, Glen.” His gesture and message made a difference: I’ve been sober nearly three decades. Early on, Glen celebrated a “birthday” at the Hollywood Squares meeting on New Hampshire. All of the celebrants stood in line to blow out candles (one for each year of sobriety) on a cake and address the crowd. The man in front of Glen carried his toy poodle with him. When it was his turn, Glen walked up to the podium and said, “I always knew if I got sober, I’d follow a dog act.”

4

I was a year and a half sober when I saw Steve at an A.A. meeting. He had three or four months. I couldn’t understand why I found his profile so captivating; that had never happened before. A psychic confirmed that it signified a past life connection. A sense of stoic intensity, like T.E. Lawrence. Late twenties. Thinning blond hair. Wore a black-and-white kaffiyeh wrapped around his neck. Estranged (because he was gay) from his family in Albany, New York. In his living room in Pasadena, we slow danced to Carly Simon’s “The Right Thing To Do” then laid on his couch and kissed. When he ran his index finger up and down my wrist, I thought of the Ted Hughes line “Under the silk of the wrist a sea.” When we moved to Simple Minds at an A.A. dance, he smiled and mouthed, “Don’t You Forget About Me.” When things became emotionally fraught, my A.A. sponsor insisted I break it off: it was too soon for Steve to start dating. “Maybe when he has more time. . . .” When I told Steve we needed to wait, tears literally flew out of his eyes. After he left, I sat on the floor under my Isermann clock and cried. Before he moved home to Albany (where he would die), we talked on the telephone. He told me how angry he was at me. For once, I didn’t get defensive, just let him have his feelings. I’m happy that I was able to respond tenderly. What bothers me is that I can’t remember Steve’s last name.

5

Ron Cahill was a friend my last year in Los Angeles. We met through Sally, an overbearing woman we both knew from the program. In our early conversations, we tried to make sense of Sally’s personality. There was a sadness about Ron—pushing forty, positive, no relationship, fed up with the West Hollywood scene. I’ve sometimes thought that, under different circumstances, we might have been boyfriends. I still have the copy of Capote’s Answered Prayers he gave me for Christmas 1987, inscribed with red ink: “Love, Ron.” After I moved to New York, we kept in contact: there are twelve letters and eighteen postcards from him in my papers at NYU. I regret that I was standoffish when he suggested a visit; I was swamped with graduate work. He was hurt. His postcards mentioned that he was on a regimen of Chinese herbs, and was considering moving to Texas to be close to his family. Then an abrupt message from Sally on my answering machine: Ron was dead. No details, no number to reach her. Years later, when she found me through the Internet, I told her how her message left me stranded with the news of Ron’s death, how difficult that had been for me. Her reply was curt: “You poor thing.”

6

A few weeks after I arrived in New York, Raymond Foye took me to lunch with Cookie Mueller, Vittorio Scarpati, and John Wieners. An Indian restaurant in the East Village. I was seated across from Wieners, who was certain he’d encountered me in Canada years before. Every time I’d try to converse with him, he’d first say something coherent, then lapse into incomprehensible utterances. I don’t remember talking with Cookie at all. When the waiter brought out our food, he dropped the huge silver tray just as he reached our table. We waited while the meal was prepared a second time.

7

I liked Karl Tierney and I liked his poems, but all I can remember is that in the restaurant in San Francisco where we ate, our booth had a curtain.

8

Amy said that when she visited Tim Dlugos at Roosevelt Hospital in 1989, he was reading Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’ last novel, a book he’d been reading, off and on, since at least 1981. I think she said there were yellow flowers in the room. Eileen said that when she visited him a year later, during his final hospitalization, Tim was trying to eat pink yogurt, but his lips were too swollen. The radio was on a local station playing “Ruby” songs: “Ruby Baby,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town.” Jane said that at the end Tim was on so much morphine it seemed he was in a coma. She held his hand or sometimes, exhausted, laid forward with her head and arms in the bed. Even slept. “It was very peaceful to be with him.” For years I lamented the fact that I wasn’t able, as he was dying, to talk with him about what was happening. It would have felt intrusive for me to bring it up. Eileen said she just held Tim’s hand and told him she loved him. That was helpful to hear. The next time I visited him on G-9, I did the same. Tim said, “I love you, too.” It was late afternoon, and we sat, mostly in silence, as the light faded. I remember everything as gray.

9

Joe Brainard was so sweet and polite, so self-effacing, it’s hard to summon many specifics. I do remember that when he came to a dinner Ira and I gave, he drew the face of a troll doll in our guest book. And that he flipped over A Class Apart: Montague Glover’s photographs of soldier boys and rough trade, their large penises showing through trousers and bathing suits. And that he was once sitting in Aggie’s, a restaurant that used to be on the corner of West Houston and MacDougal, when I walked by. I didn’t see him, but he saw me. “I saw you!” he said, the next time we were together. He mentioned it two or three times after that: “I saw you!” It seemed so significant to him. “I saw you!”