I know this will
strike some people — not that anyone else is ever going to see it — as
inappropriate or non-PC or whatever, but when I spend 55 minutes (on a good
day!) driving down here when there are lots of much more enjoyable things I
could be doing, I wonder if you could make just some vague semblance of an
effort to look presentable. I mean, all right, you’re dying, and in pain, and
on so much morphine that you hardly know your own name. I get that. I genuinely
get that. But would you mind thinking of someone other than yourself — in this
case, me — just a little bit? You’re grey — no, ashen. Your eyes are sunken. You look around 112. I won’t deny that it upsets me. You’re three and a half years — not even that: 20
months — older than I. Do you not, in those rare moments of lucidity the
morphine allows you, realise that I look at you and think, “There but for
fortune go I,” on the good days, but, “Behold what awaits me!” on the bad ones,
which are far more frequent?
You seem to be off in
Morphineland again, so I’ll tell you some things I’ve wanted to tell you for
decades. I knew, in the early days, that you were in love with me, and I’m
haunted by my having pretended I didn’t know. But I was 22, for crying out
loud, and it wasn’t yet a time when a young man wanted even to consider the
possibility that he might have it in him to fuck another guy. (No. Strike that.
My word choice is so revealing, isn’t it? So fake-macho, so devoid of anything
resembling tenderness. Not fuck. Make love to.) I think I’d been a little bit
in love with The Beatles, as I suspect a great many young men were at the time,
and with James Franciscus, the actor who played the eponymous character in my
favourite TV programme, Mr. Novak. But I certainly wasn’t about to let on, was
I! I had some self-respect. And yes, I am of course saying that with tongue in cheek,
having come to appreciate, over the intervening decades, that there was no good
reason that a bisexual or even gay person shouldn’t respect himself. What a
fucked-up world I came to manhood in.
The fact is that I was
reciprocally in love with you, though I think I might have been less attracted physically than you were to me. I loved your seeming to know everything
worth knowing, and God knows, your admiring my work. At that time in my life,
except for the two consecutive creative writing awards in junior high school, I
hadn’t experienced much admiration. Yours made me feel as though I’d stepped
out of a frigid grey room into buttery warm sunshine. It made me feel as Neil
Young’s exquisite “Expecting to Fly” did, transported and incredulous. Not,
mind you, that I ever entirely trusted your admiration (or anyone else's). I thought that at any
moment you were going to burst into laughter and say, “You can’t honestly
imagine I think you’re any good, can you?” And maybe that dread made me love
you all the more.
I kept my love well
hidden, though, and looked for all the world like one of those
not-a-queer-bone-in-my-body types. I liked sports. No, I adored sports, though
I suppose adore isn’t a verb a guy
without a queer bone in his body would use. And God knows I genuinely lusted
after pretty women, and seduced and abandoned more than my fair share,
if you factored in my immobilising shyness! But at the core of myself, I always
knew I was living a lie. I married one of those I didn’t abandon, and what
could be more vivid proof of my not having a queer bone in my body than our three
kids, and, more recently, the four grandkids? But I never stopped longing for
you.
So maybe tomorrow, or,
if Jean needs to use the car, Thursday, when I come down again, you’ll maybe
bribe a sympathetic nurse’s aide to rub some blood on your cheeks (a trick
women in concentration camps used to make themselves look healthier, and thus
less likely candidates for Zyklon B showers), and comb what’s left of your
hair. I sure hope so.
