The Price Of Dick (20 page)

“
I haven’t talked to the others. They expect me to make decisions. You don’t expect me to do that. I want to know what someone who isn’t family would do. I can’t sit here and decide if I want to give him something that might kill him faster. That’s no different than if I brought in a gun...”

We were back to listening to the respirator.

I sat and stared at her. She was asking for advice. That meant her fear was greater than her hatred of me. That was frightening.

I thought about
it a few minutes, then finally said, “You’ve been given a third option. It has hope. The other two don’t. It might not work. But we know the other two certainly won’t.”

She closed her eyes. When she reopened them I could see the determination had returned. She wrote a note in her diary and then
bustled out without another word.

*
  *  *

They ushered me out of the room as a group of new,
fresh-faced doctors whisked in to start the chemo treatment. The idea that the weight of my words had brought this about scared me. The consequences could be other than what we hoped for, and the blame could be situated on my own shoulders. I wasn’t braced for the possibility that I could actually bring on his death. I left the hospital. How I made it through the maze of roads and stop signs back to the apartment is beyond me. My head held images of Dick dying on his bed surrounded by his family, pointing their fingers at me.

I needed my cocoon of familiarity: my work. I sat at my computer and began opening my files of his shoots. I started with our very first one at the pool, then through the apartment window.

He was so beautiful to look at. The power of his sexuality sizzled in the images my camera had captured. They still made my heart beat faster. The wonderful thing about digital photography was that it was so much greater and more durable than human memory. I could pull those pixels up tight and close and study in microscopic detail the fine texture of every golden hair. I could examine every facet of his flesh like appraising a precious diamond. The intensity of each expression could be savored at length. I’d preserved the very best of him for eternity. If ever there was any part of Dick that was completely real, it was captured in these moments. I had his essence, his passion. Something his family would never see, or appreciate.

I went through all of the shoots
; all of the photos of him. It took me the entire night. I finally fell asleep near dawn. I awakened sometime in the afternoon of the next day with the winter sun blazing through the blinds of the office window. I unkinked myself and was making coffee when my phone rang.

Terror
hit my heart like a timpani drum. I was afraid to answer the call, but finally did. His brother’s baritone came through the receiver so loud it was distorted and unintelligible. I had to ask him to repeat what he said.

“
He came out of it. He’s awake!” he shouted again.

There was no explanation
as to what triggered Dick's awakening from the coma. The doctors said there’s never been any proven method to determine why some people come out of comas and others don’t. My belief is that the chemotherapy was responsible. Maybe it gave his body the shock needed to come out of its grip. I’m not a doctor. I can only guess. Eleanor, naturally, thought it was divine intervention, the power of prayer that had delivered him. The first few days after he awakened, he was groggy, disoriented. He’d thought he’d only been asleep overnight. When he found out the length of time he’d been ‘gone,’ it confused him. The passage of time apparently isn’t felt inside the coma. He was permitted no visitors at first, not even family.

The medical staff
still had a lot of tests to perform, a lot of recovery to oversee. They didn’t remove his tubes for a couple of days. When they unstrapped his arms he tried to remove the tubes himself. They strapped his arms back down and gave him anti-anxiety medicine. When they did finally remove all the mechanized attachments, he still couldn’t speak. The disuse of his vocal chords had left them dry, and it would take several days to lubricate them with soft foods and liquids. After a week, they allowed his family in to see him. Speaking was still difficult so he wrote everything on a clipboard with a marker. All of this information had been relayed in phone calls to me by his brothers.

It was almost another week before I was allowed in to see him. I was anxious. I was overjoyed to see his eyes open, see those blues, the smile wrinkling his too-gaunt face. I came with my camera, I told him, to mark the occasion with photographs
. If his image appeared in them, I said, then he wasn’t among the undead. He was a thin reminder of his former self. His movements seemed odd, like his visual perception was off. He swung wide when reaching for things, often missing the connection. He, of course, was happy to see me. It shone on his face when he became animated. He wrote his greeting on the board. It read: “Did you bring beer?”

*  *  *

Things were different once Dick left the hospital. Recuperation over the next few months would take place in the care of his mother at his parents' home. He had his old room back. I agreed it was the best solution. I knew nothing about nursing anyone back to health. He’d need constant supervision and care. He needed a mom and home cooked meals to put meat back on his bones. He’d lost thirty-five pounds of muscle. He was emaciated head to toe. Without his shirt you could count his ribs and vertebrae. His clavicles looked like dining counters. That gorgeous ass resembled deflated balloons. This recovery was going to take time. I kept my promise to Walsh and updated him regularly on Dick's progress.

The holidays were upon us. The ones we thought he
’d never live to see, so they became all-important. That meant I was now invited to spend them with his family in their household. Whether his mother invited me as an obligation or gesture of kindness, I don’t know. She was pleasant. I was pleasant. There were no hostile stares. It didn’t matter. I never felt comfortable. I think it had less to do with the new strain of civility we'd adopted, and more that these were people I really wouldn’t associate with by choice. Religious, conservative, Republicans. Three curse words in my vocabulary. I exchanged pleasantries, had dinner and drinks, then excused myself after a dutiful amount of time. Dick got tired easily and went to bed. No need for me to stick around.

He appeared to be falling back under the sway of his
mother. They attended Mass every morning and evening together, went to confession and he led grace at the table before dinner. He had that blank look in his eyes cartoonists use to indicate someone is hypnotized. The more I saw him like this, the more firmly I believed he’d never return to the apartment. After everything we’d been through in the past few months, I wasn’t upset by that idea. I needed to move on with my life. Muse or not, I couldn’t let his type of people into my life. I’d made far too many concessions for Dick already. After everything I’d learned about him during his hospitalization, I just wasn’t certain I wanted him around any longer. I wouldn’t condemn him, but I wouldn’t condone him either. My philosophy was Do Unto Others. His was the philosophically opposite.

So it was time for me to get back to real life. I began shooting again. It wasn
’t the same without him, for sure, but the photos were still beautiful. They just lacked that certain pizzazz he brought to them by keeping everyone physically aroused. I’d noticed that missing element, though no one else would. It was an intangible.

I was still pinching pennies to get bills paid. I was a one-income household again. I
’d taken on more of the regular shoots to keep afloat financially. By the time the New Year rolled around I’d budgeted myself so that I was comfortable. I drank cheaper beer, developed a taste for boxed wine, found ways to make generic spaghetti sauce taste like restaurant style with a few inexpensive spices. I only had to set the table for one again, so the food went a little farther. I could eat from that plate of spaghetti for three nights.

When I found myself craving companionship I
’d go to the gay baths. I know some folks have a mental image of what these are like, but most images are wrong. The one in town was modern, clean and posh. Open twenty-four hours, seven days a week. The baths were frequented by out-of-town businessmen more than locals, and for thirty bucks a night you got a key to a locker and a cracker box-sized room with a clean bed and sheets. You could roam the terrazzo-tiled facility that had a recreation room, steam bath, Jacuzzi, pool, and media room where all the other men were clad only in fresh white, bleach-scented towels. Every man was there for the same reason so, formalities aside, you found someone and took care of business. Simple. Efficient.

I
mention this only because for average Joes like myself, true fantasies are few and far between. That’s why, when you encounter a real-life fantasy, you’ll ignore most of the shit that comes along with it. I call it the baggage of Princes. I’d already had a couple of years dealing with the baggage of a Prince. A couple years were more than enough. The baths were a return to the normal world for me.

Over the
first months of the new year, with the help of his mother’s cooking, Dick regained his lost weight. I dropped by every so often when he called and was bored. He looked healthier and was even managing small workouts as his strength returned. It was a tough process for him. He was used to triathlon-style workouts. These were baby steps in comparison. But he was determined. He said that when he got pissed, he just worked harder.

He
’d entertain me with phone conversations when he got restless. He was eager to have some activity outside mommy’s walls. The whispered calls I’d get at night were the most interesting. I knew he was in his old bedroom in the basement. Door closed. Right beneath mommy and daddy’s room. The room where he had given me a blowjob. He asked me about the shoots, particularly about the guys. Hundreds of questions. He wanted me to describe them in detail. He missed being a part of them. I could tell he was sexually frustrated. Mommy was already setting him up on dates with girls from her church. They’d come to dinner at the house to meet him. It frosted his balls, but he humored her, then did things that made the girls not want to come back. I could just imagine. Mommy hadn’t won over any part of that boy, no matter how many Masses she dragged him to.

His voice was low, but it sounded strong again.
Like the old Dick. “I saw this guy stocking the shelves at the supermarket. He’s a ginger. Never thought I’d be into a redhead. Not normally my type. But Jesus! It looked like he was trying to steal two Easter hams in the back of his slacks with a salami shoved down the front. Freckles. Jeez, the guy had freckles. At least if he was boring in bed you could play connect the dots.” He laughed. It was his old laugh. It didn’t sound strained or winded anymore.

“A redhead?” I repeated. He had changed.

“
Yeah. When you’re starved, even bread tastes like cake.”

I could relate.
I’d eaten a lot of bread in my life.

A groan; the sound of him falling onto his bed.
“You don’t know how bad it sucks being here. The only computer is Mom’s in the kitchen that she uses to email all her Pro-life cronies. I can’t even surf the internet for porn. If she checked the browser history on that after I’d used it, she cut my dick off and tell everyone she had a daughter. I’m losing my mind here.”

I couldn
’t imagine living under those conditions. Every man has to have his daily porn fix.

“
It's only for a little while longer,” he said. “Then I plan on looking for a condo for us where we can have a little more room. You can have a real studio. A nice home for us.”

I froze
. I wasn’t even certain I’d heard him properly.

“
I’ve been picking up those real estate brochures you find in the racks at the front of the supermarket every time I go in now. Looking through those to see what’s out there. Prices and stuff. Seeing what’s affordable.”

In my heart of hearts I wanted to be nice and let him go on with his daydream. But I couldn
’t be pulled into a world of false hope like that. I wasn’t his fake girlfriends, or Father James, Mr. Walsh, or his coach. I knew him for what he really was. And if it wasn’t a line of bullshit, if something had happened to his brain while he was in a coma and he actually believed what he was saying, he needed to be stopped before reality crushed him. He’d already had enough bad luck in one year.

“
I think your Mr. Walsh has dibs on that house with you, doesn’t he?” I said it nicely. Like it was a joke. There was no undercurrent of anger or anything mean. I was sure I’d hear some kind of protest or excuse. Most of us, when caught in a lie or confronted with the truth, would hem and haw and try to find some way to squirm free. I just wanted him to know that he didn’t need to play the game with me. That it didn’t matter anymore.

Laughter came bursting through the phone. Without missing a beat he said
, “Poor, poor delusional Mr. Walsh. He did break a lot of rules about personal privacy while I was out of commission, didn’t he? Made my crazy mom ask a lot questions I don’t like to answer. Wasn’t very nice of him to do that. That’s not the way to play the game.”

“
What do you mean?” I asked. “What game?”

“
I didn’t do good work for that old bastard just to have him put me in a bad position with my family, friends and work by stealing numbers from my phone and then calling everyone I know. I guess I learned my lesson about leaving my phone lying around...”

So that was how Walsh had all our numbers.
I wondered how he’d gotten them. I had a picture in my mind of Dick lying on that beach in Puerto Vallarta while old Mr. Walsh ran back to the room to get coconut-scented sunscreen, finding Dick’s cell and transferring all his data to his own like the pilfering stalker I always thought he was.

“
Well, it’s no matter, seeing how Mr. Walsh hasn’t filed any income taxes for the last ten years. He’s one of those crazed Libertarian conspiracy theory assholes who thinks the government is out to get us with Big Brother. So he cheated them out of their fair share. That’s just un-American. It’s a shame someone turned him in for that. Looks like he’ll be taking his meals with Wesley Snipes in a concrete home for a while.”

I remembered hearing on the news that the actor was serving time in prison for tax evasion.
“Walsh is in jail?” I asked.

“
As I always knew he would be, and probably until they pine box him out of there,” Dick’s voice turned confidential. “But not before I made enough connections and commissions from his wealthy friends so we can get that place with a studio we always talked about. I know how to take care of my friends...and business partner. But don’t feel bad. He got more from me than he really deserved. Everybody’s in it for something, and he got what he wanted. I play fair.”

“
Dick,” I really didn’t want to hear any more of his tale spinning and details of his underhanded dealings. I’d moved on with my life. I would remain his friend. I just didn’t want anything more to do with his hustle. Too many people got hurt in his wake. “Please. I really don’t want to hear...”

His tone changed. He was serious
, “I am not bullshitting you, J.J. I won’t lose the only person I’ve ever cared about, who’s cared about me. I got ambitious because of you. I did what I did to give us what we need to move forward. I might not have told you everything I was doing. But everything I did, I was doing it for us. For our company. For the new house. The new studio.” His words were emphatic. “Nobody gets ahead in this world without playing a few games. I played the games to make the money we needed to do everything I promised you.”

“
Dick, I never asked...”

Now he seemed
indignant. “Go look in the top drawer of my dresser in my room. The blue case I keep for my shirt collar stays. There’s a bankbook in there. Go get it.”

I tried to pull myself from conversation
, “Dick, I don’t care...”

“
Get it!” he insisted.

I went to the
dresser, dug through a stack of folded shirts, found the bankbook in the case where he said it was.