Misery is what you get for not dying—misery but some good stuff too. If your harpy mother hadn’t cleaned me out, I would have ended up with different beautiful inheritances from all of you, Lou’s prized mahoganettes bookshelf, Greg’s china, the money from selling Pinto’s Honda, not a bad haul, and another good thing about not dying is you get to see everybody go before you and you know what to expect. Greg saw what happened with Chris’s family, how they purloined the body and forbade Jim or any of us to attend his funeral. Because Greg was the oldest of us, thirty-nine when he died, and he was an estate attorney anyway, he was the most prepared, but then was he, can anyone be prepared, I know you were not, Doc, I know, I’m sorry. A man who lives fully is prepared to die anytime, but has anyone ever lived fully?
Greg had a will already drawn up, no detail of his medical or post-death care left to arbitrariness, he was meticulous, and toward the end all he had left to decide was whether he wanted to be viewed before cremation in a suit or in his leathers, not an easy choice because if he went with the suit, he would betray his clan, and if he chose his chaps, he would shock his lawyer friends. You weren’t part of the decision, Greg and I talked about it for hours, even before he was diagnosed, he knew, he knew where the road he had taken was to end. Oh lord, the day he was diagnosed was overwhelming, commotion for me, not so for him, he had a floater in his eye, nothing scary, he told me, just an annoyance, like a hair in a camera lens, the big things were sure to come, he said, but this wasn’t it yet, but of course it was. Cytomegalovirus, his doctor pronounced the verdict, in those days CMV was rarely found without the presence of another opportunistic infection, tests were needed, what cruel and unusual death sentence would it be: lymphoma, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, toxoplasmosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, mycobacterium tuberculosis, cryptosporidiosis, Hodgkin’s disease, multifocal leukoencephalopathy, encephalitis, cryptococcal meningitis, and many many many more, including of course crucifixion by CMV itself, would you like a little dementia with that?
Upon hearing himself declared one of the many walking dead faggots, Greg did not return to work, but went home and began cleaning his glorious home, a spring cleaning to end all spring cleanings, and when I let myself in, he was polishing the brass pinecones at the bottom of the banister, he did not wish to speak, together we waxed wood, relined shelves with contact paper, we took blinds from the windows and soaked them in the bathtub, we removed every damn book from the bookshelves, wiped the dust off and reshelved alphabetically, sent all the New Age and self-help ones to Goodwill, bleached every corner of all the bathrooms in the house, for five days we worked until the apartment smelled like a hospital corridor. You know, Doc, for years after, every time I smelled powdered cleansers I would get a debilitating migraine, I’d have to hide under the covers in my darkened room avoiding light and Judy Garland, and I couldn’t remember why, I thought I was allergic to heavy antiseptics, I forgot, Doc, I forgot.
Greg wasn’t satisfied with tidying up surfaces, he emptied out closets, threw out clothes he no longer wore, designer shoes meant for galas he would not attend, impulse purchases, T-shirts, T-shirts, and more T-shirts, jockstraps, bikini underwear he should never have bought, floral silk shorts that had never touched his skin. He threw out record albums, who listened to those anymore, tossed his law degree from Hastings, his Leaving Certificate from Ireland, who was going to ask for those, jettisoned school yearbooks, debate ribbons, class papers, notebooks from lectures he couldn’t remember attending, and his porn stash, his dildos, his sex toys, who needed those anymore? He wanted to control the afterimage. Did the scouring and scrubbing help him, getting rid of so much stuff? Yes, I think it did, during the process he was most his body and least his mind.
I don’t have to tell you what that time with him meant to me, I loved him, always had, but he did not want me, well, didn’t want anyone, couldn’t commit, he told us, he was not a we man, he said, but I loved him, and only when he was diagnosed did he let me into his heart, my Irish Greg. What good is love when all you do together is weep? Weep and make decisions, we did that, in bed atop the cotton sheets among scattered pillows and handcuffs, he told me he wanted his ashes dispersed in his hometown of Limerick, there once was an emerald city in Ireland, I hadn’t known where he hailed from before, we had all assumed Dublin, but no, he wanted to be returned home. Could I possibly separate his ashes, would it be too much trouble to take some to the University Maternity Hospital where he was born, some to St. Mary’s Cathedral where he was baptized, dump some in the dark, mutinous Shannon waves, some in the estuary, and leave some next to his parents’ graves, could I do that? And he decided to be cremated wearing a suit with a black leather vest over a shirt and under a jacket, with a black handkerchief in his breast pocket instead of the pocket next to the left cheek of his ass, when Death came, he would be both Gregs, and it was to be not just any suit but his favorite one, which hadn’t fit him in at least a few months, like Pinto, he had been wasting away, and none of his clothes fit anymore, none, even those we didn’t throw out. Greg did not want to go through what Pinto had undergone.
The first tailor we visited almost had a psychotic meltdown as soon as Greg walked through the door, he refused to have anything to do with us, when I asked him why, he asked if I was crazy, he worked with pins, didn’t I know that, he was visibly trembling as he screamed at us to leave his shop, as if we were going to pinprick his smarmy soul all the way to Hell. We ended up going where we should have gone in the first place, to Benjie, the fairy Filipino tailor, who not only welcomed us but guaranteed his work, he didn’t want us to worry, You lose more weight, he said, I will adjust again, lose more and I adjust again, and again, and again, no problem. You remember him, Doc, don’t you? He used to tailor his own jeans so tight he could take only small steps, heaven forbid if he ever needed to run, that angel, he died too, about a year after you did. Twice I had to take Greg to Benjie for suit adjustments, Jim drove us the second time because Greg had begun to dance with Saint Vitus, even with a walker he shook so much it was difficult for him to move, and when we helped him out of the car, passersby walked a wide circle around us untouchables as if even the air about us was a vesicant. The more Greg trembled, the steadier Benjie’s hands, the pins penetrating exactly where they were supposed to, on his knees, Benjie would tell Greg, Save me a place when you get up there, tell the angels I’m coming, tell them to be ready for me, I want big big wings, swan feathers, fitted, of course, tight at the waist, don’t you forget now, golden threads for everybody. Greg got his suit, he got what he wanted.
Thank you for helping me with the dishes the day he died, ill as you were, Doc, it was a lovely gift, standing with you, shoulder to shoulder at the sink, weeping together and washing the dishes, there were so many of them.
Do you remember Hibernia Beach, Doc, men parading shirtless in front of the bank on Castro Street under a blanket of flaxen sunlight, promising acts that should be performed only under cover of darkness? It’s gone, disappeared, erased from our collective memory. Feeling benighted one sunny day when not a single breath of fresh air came through the open windows, I decided it was time to lie under the sun, its light turning me darker. I would seek in one of the parks a patch of grass the length of a coffin to lie in, not read, not think, become part of the landscape, not fauna but sessile flora. Backpacked nothing but towel and sunglasses, descended the stairs only to find Behemoth sprawled along the door’s threshold, which he never did on weekends, never, he did that only early before the sun came out, only at five in the morning when I wanted to leave for work, he would rush down the stairs, I almost stumbled trying to avoid stepping on him or because I’d forget about the slight swell on the fifth step, he would spread himself, weather-stripping the bottom of the door, two black feet pointing toward either side, and pretend to ignore me. I would pet his tummy and scratch it, and he wouldn’t budge, it took me a few tries while he was still a kitten to figure out how to move him back to the stairs, block him from blocking the door again. I found myself talking to him every morning, I must go work, I’d say, I can’t just quit, how am I going to feed you, why can’t you be like those cute cats on the Internet? I must be crazy for talking to a cat, Doc, mustn’t I?
Remember the day we were all together in Dolores Park, I was trying to get Lou to venture out six weeks after the dreaded lesion appeared, but he refused to take his shirt off as we all did, Pinto was down to his bikini swimsuit in less time than you can say Phoebus, Lou remained covered in long pants and long sleeves, dispensing weak smiles. Do you remember Chris’s wild paisley board shorts? I can’t remember whether that was the last time all seven of us were together, do you? Whisper in my heart, tell me you are there. I lay with my head in your lap, my knees straddling Greg’s thighs. Little did we know that we should have been happy because everything was going to get worse, even worse than we expected. Your thumb caressed my cheek while a long shelf of clouds hung above us, the sun ignited their pipings, pink flame, orange flame, red and vermilion, and I said to all of you that these clouds had so many colors but not silver and I asked where the phrase Every cloud has a silver lining came from. You understood me, your hair transparent before the insistent sun rays, and you said, To see the silver, you must cut a cloud. How the clouds moved on, how they thickened.
I did not go to the park, I allowed Behemoth to remain a doorstop and went back up the stairs. Baudelaire once wrote that the poet was like the monarch of the clouds, familiar of storms and stars, and God said that Iblis wished to place his throne in the clouds above the earth, becoming equal to Him. Cut a cloud open and you find Satan, you find the poet, cut me.
You balanced my thighs on your chest
my back arched to meet your thrust
our sacral rhythm.
I remember, I remember now.
You looked into me,
looked into my eye—
the left eye, Auntie Badeea used to say,
through the left eye one could see the soul.
You hung my calves on your shoulders
like laundry I draped.
Framed by my knees your face was marble white.
Where is he that is black like me?
I kissed you and felt on my tongue
the fleeting taste of mint and the moon.
I felt the ribbed arch of your chest,
you bit my ear, you licked my lips,
left a trail of saliva to mix with mine.
My body has its memories too.
You found my armpit with your tongue,
tickled me irreverently.
I laughed so hard with you inside me.
You loved me while in me
but you couldn’t keep it up, could you?
Loving me was hard, Doc, I know.
I was young enough to not understand
that falling in love is just a metaphor.
I was innocent then, knew so little.
I know less now, but I’m no longer so innocent,
no, not so.
Do your fingers still remember me?