Authors: Tom Spanbauer
I Loved You More (2 page)
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Contents
1.
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The Maroni
2.
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First date
3.
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The bullies
4.
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The West Side Y
6.
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Pennsylvania ghosts
8.
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The most miserable of all
9.
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Sweat lodge
11.
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No hay palabras
12.
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The real world
13.
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Portlandia, 1995
16.
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The promise
17.
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The way it is
19.
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The spiderweb
21.
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The end, my friend
22.
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The more loving one
I LOVED YOU MORE
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Book One
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1.
GOT TO GO PAL
WERE THE LAST WORDS ON THE PAGE OF
the last letter I wrote Hank Christian. Soon as I wrote them down I knew they were the words that hurt. The words that could turn his heart against me. All those years, twenty-three of them, how Hank and I joked back and forth,
got to go pal
now were the words lying on the page. That old litany in this strange new place, how it made my heart stop.
October 1, 2000. All day I sat with that letter. Wondering if I should make it sound so final and forever, or fuck it, just take the risk and say something more, something ridiculous at such a ridiculous time to say it: if I should tell Hank to stop using that Just For Men hair color because the light through his hair made his thin hair look purple. When you say goodbye to someone you love, maybe if you say something crazy, something true, maybe he won't stop loving you.
I ended up not giving Hank the hair tip. So many times I've regretted it, thought I should've said the hair thing right after
got to go pal
. Maybe it would've changed the way things turned out. If nothing else, it would have made him laugh. Hank's laugh. That big burst from down deep coming on fast shaking him around. But I didn't.
It wasn't long after the letter he married Ruth. In Florida, three thousand miles away he lived, and he goes and has his wedding three blocks from my house in Portland, Oregon. Still don't know who his best man was.
LIKE MOST LOVE
affairs, Hank and I didn't start off so good. In fact I hated his guts. Every time Jeske called on him, which was every week, Hank read his sentences out loud to the class and it never failed, Jeske always praised him as if Hank was the next Nadine Gordimer, or Louise Glück, or Harold Brodkey. Jeske even had a special name for Hank.
Maroni
. That's what he called Hank.
You've really knocked the ball out of the park this time, Maroni! You really nailed it on the head, pal! Just take a look at that, would you!
Columbia University, winter quarter, 1985. Twelve weeks of a three-hour-long night class in a hot big bright amphitheater room. Jeske down in front of us, trim, natty, silver hair, in some kind of military hat. Skin that was flushed from too many cigarettes. Something classy about him, one of those New England guys who just stepped off his sailboat. Our eyes on him. Our eyes never left him. You never knew what he was going to do next. Every class he bragged how he went three hours without pishing. Wednesdays six to nine. Thirty-six fucking hours and Jeske never called on me. Not one time. Forty people in that class and everybody got at least one chance, but not me. A couple others in class Jeske liked besides Hank, but to my ears it was all
Maroni! Maroni! Maroni!
Then came that class. The last class of the semester. The last part of the last hour. The last reader. Finally Thomas Jeske, Commodore Fiction himself, called on me. Fuck. My body did that separating thing where all of a sudden I'm way out there somewhere looking down at me sitting in a bright room in an amphitheater chair, the fake wood desk top flap out flat, my faraway hands trying to hold my pages still. I'm trying to find my breath, keep my asshole tight, trying to keep my chin from turning into rubber bands. All the rules I didn't know how to get right:
Never go beneath the surface. Speak with a burnt tongue. It's not writing, it's making. Take the approach that rebukes your own nature. Never explain. Never complain. Latinate Latinate Latinate
.
I took the knife, put it to my chest, punched hard in, cut down and around, pulled my throbbing heart out and laid it down
on the page. But I wasn't bleeding enough. The words sounded stupid. My voice in the fluorescent amphitheater did not project, was too high, cracking like an adolescent whose balls had just dropped. Fuck. There was no getting away from it. I sounded the way I always sounded: a Catholic boy with a big apology. Then the long pause. The long piece of silence after where all there was, was my breath. A drop of sweat rolled down the inside of my arm. Everything gets bright and hot and full.
The eleventh hour!
Jeske cries out,
Way to go, pal! Grunewald's pulled it out of his ass on the eleventh hour!
Looking back on that day now, I wonder. Maybe that was the first time for Hank. That he really looked at me.
THE FIRST TIME
I really looked at Hank, really stopped and looked, was during one of Jeske's classes. By then I knew who Hank was, of course. How could you not know
The Maroni
? But this one particular class I'm talking about, there was a moment that everything went away and my eyes filled up with nothing but Hank Christian.
In the middle of one of Jeske's lectures, there was a loud crash in the hall. You might think so what, a loud crash in the hall â on most college campuses that doesn't mean much. But when it's night and it's Columbia University, the hallway outside your classroom door is really a New York street. After the crash, Jeske quit talking and we in the class all looked around at each other. There was a way you could tell Jeske wanted to go to the open door and check out the situation, but he hesitated. I saw him do it. Hesitate. Something you don't figure Commodore Fiction to do. His thin body did a quick lean toward the door for a second, then stopped because he thought better. Hank saw it too. Oh! Commodore! My! Commodore! Hank saw the Commodore of the mighty ship stall. He was up and out of his seat just like that.
Hank's a big guy. Big arms, big chest. Twenty-seven to my thirty-seven years.
Thirty-seven years old. Columbia University. I've always been a late bloomer.
That day, as Hank made his way through the seats and down to the doorway, Hank was holding his body that way he does. He pushes out and raises up his chest, pulls his chin down, his shoulders down, and flexes his biceps. I've seen Hank do that a lot. Usually he does that when he's trying to express something inside him that's big â as if his body is literally trying to push the thought or the feeling that's inside him out, but that day in class Hank was puffing up for another reason. He was on a mission.
I've never seen Hank do anything so perfect, so true to who he was. Hank stood himself in the doorway, at the portal, at attention, elbows out touching each side of the door. Our linebacker, our protector, our bodyguard, our hero.
Immediately I was embarrassed for him. Such an obvious show of macho. I mean, what was Maroni trying to prove? That he could save our sinking ship from the big, bad pirates in the hallway? Yet maybe there
were
pirates in the hallway! Maybe the loud crash was a street gang, or some crazy motherfucker. Maybe with a gun. Then what was Maroni going to do? Stop the bullet?
Saint Hank Christian, Guardian of the Doorway. At that moment, I had no idea what a friend, a lover, what a hero, Hank would be to me. All I could know was what I saw. His dark-brown hair down to his shoulders. Lots of hair back then, the Eighties, plus a mustache too. Almost as big as mine. Beneath his deep-set eyes â eyes with his complexion you'd figure would be blue, but weren't, were dark, almost black, under the efficient line of Roman nose, above the square jaw a bit of cleft, straight teeth, Hank's sweet smiling lips that one day no matter what I was going to kiss.
Sure made Jeske proud. Pretty soon, a bunch of other guys, but not me, were up at the door standing with Hank.
SOME MONTHS LATER
, when I didn't hate Hank anymore, when I was getting to know Hank, I asked Hank what
Maroni
meant.
He said something about how
Maroni
was Italian for how guys talk to one another. Like
dude
maybe, or
buddy
, or
pal
. I never did get it exactly what
Maroni
meant. But that was just Hank. He always played his cards close to his chest, especially at the beginning. It wasn't that he had something to conceal. Hank liked to say he was a ghost. A warrior ghost. He touched the world and when he was done he left no trace. What was left of him was his sentences on the page.
No wonder I fell in love with him. Seduce the laconic straight guy. Not necessarily to fuck him, but to bring him out. And not
out
like
coming out
, but
out
in the sense
of inner workings revealed
. If I could understand my father, if my father could actually be someone I could know, by knowing him, I could gauge myself against him, and discover how I was and how I was not like him.
Those first four or five weeks, though, Hank was fucking Maroni, Jeske's private ass kisser. Then it was Saint Hank Christian Guardian of the Doorway, but when it really happened big time was the night at Ursula Crohn's apartment. The first time Hank actually put his body next to me. As soon as he spoke, out of Hank's sweet lips the blow, some kind of frenzy in my heart.
Somebody who does that. Reveals you to yourself. You can't help but love.
SOMETHING I'D LIKE
to say. All this I'm recalling here is not actually what happened but me remembering it. It's only now, after all the years, after all the death, after years and years of running it through running it through, there's a way that a sixty-year-old me can look at the same situation the forty-year-old looked at and see another story altogether.
It's like a photograph of two friends. Let's say me and Hank. 1988 and it's my fortieth birthday. We've just walked across the Brooklyn Bridge because we always walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on my birthday. Hank's left arm is over my shoulder. You can't see his whole left hand, just the long fingers against my blue
T-shirt, fingertips at my clavicle. My right arm is over Hank's arm because I am maybe a half-foot taller. Hank's wearing a wifebeater, a black one. His hair is shorter, mine too, because the Eighties are almost over. And a beard, gray in his beard. He's pulling his shoulders down, straightening his neck, pulling his chest up and out. I look skinny next to him. There's a Budweiser in my hand. Behind us is Manhattan and a big mustard brown cable of Brooklyn Bridge. We are smiling in a way that says that we are not like our fathers. One of us is straight and one of us is gay. We are men and we are friends and we are celebrating. We have each other's backs. We'll go to the mat. Mates the way Australians say
mate
. We're laughing hard at our joke. Instead of
cheese
, Hank has just said the thing Jeske always said,
Got to go pal
.
That photograph that back then, weeks later when we saw it, we scrutinized ourselves for what was important, what was wrong. Hank says,
Jeez I'm getting fat! Look at all the gray in my beard!
I say,
My hair never looks right. When am I going to get used to having this fucking nose?
Now that same photograph some twenty years later, it's still just Hank Christian and Ben Grunewald, our arms around each other, on the Brooklyn Bridge. But what I can see now. The cancer that had started on Hank's cock. My viral load doubling every week. Then there's Ruth. Ruth Dearden. It won't be until 1999 and on the other side of the country in Portland, Oregon, before I introduce them, but still she's there between Hank and me. Almost as tall as me. Red hair, thick and long. Her hair looks great because I did give
her
her hair tip.
It's all in the forehead. Women like you and with a jaw like that, you should never hide your forehead
. Plus the color highlights. Blue eyes and tinted blue contacts. Dangerous beauty because her beauty wasn't given. Dangerous beauty because it's been hard won. So much like me. Larger than life, all that reckless power that somebody who has just discovered her power has.