“Yes,” the lady said, “you were underage. But I was the innocent one. I didn’t understand boys like you with semi-invisible friends, boys who saw themselves as tragic prostitutes in their own personal Bette Davis movies.”
The lady in question and I go way back, more than fifty years, to a time of legends and wonders. We first met in the waiting room of a psychiatrist in Boston in 1960. I was sixteen and she was twenty-one. She introduced me to amphetamine and straight sex. I gave her a glimpse into prostitution and my doppelgänger—pretty much an even exchange I’d say.
We met again late this spring in Physical Therapy, an appropriate rendezvous for those in our age range. Some years ago when my arthritic left knee first acted up, the place was called the Greenwich Village Pain Clinic, giving it an enticing hint of medical S&M games.
Now it’s called Physical Dynamics but it’s still right on a corner of Twelfth Street near Union Square and I still think of it as the Pain Clinic. The machinery is like something out of a well-run gym. Lots of the therapists, especially the guys, are young and cute. Eleven years ago arthritis was my first hint of aging. Late this spring the knee began aching again, stairs started to be a barrier and I came back to be taught new exercises and ways of walking.
Lots of the patients are older and in far worse condition than I. On my third or fourth therapy session I was riding a stationary bike, focused on the pain, knowing I had to eradicate the limp that would destroy my mobility.
If I didn’t have this to concentrate on I’d have been obsessing about my problems with a publisher who wouldn’t let go of an out-of-print novel of mine, Minions of the Moon, which a gay press wanted to reprint. Just that morning I’d had an email encounter with a non-cooperative underling at the publishing house.
Minions came out in the late nineties and won a couple of awards. Its themes are addiction and recovery, booze, drugs and gay teenage hustling. Back then it was a bit controversial. These days it would probably be marketed as YA.
Suddenly a lady’s voice distracted me. She had just been given a massage in a small side room and spoke in the clear voice of the old Wasp establishment. “You know,” she told her therapist, “I’ve never lived in a building that had a street number. They always just had names, ‘The Riverside,’ ‘The Dakota.’ In England it was ‘Payson Manor at Abbot’s Gate, Helford.’ ”
The voice, the conversation, suddenly brought the novel back to the front of my brain. I turned and was amazed. The woman’s hair was white like mine but somehow had a hint of gold, like the sun rising on snow. She had that luminous skin only the very rich know how to achieve. “Stacey Hale!” I said. Stacey Hale was her character’s name when I’d used her thinly disguised in Minions.
She glanced around. “That was many years ago and I should have sued…” she started to say, and then looked more closely, focused on me. “Kevin Grierson,” she said which is the name I’d given the narrator in the book. She looked mildly annoyed, though I also saw a flash of calculation in her eyes. “You have a gift for the inappropriate moment.”
“I can recall a time when you were happy, anxious even, to see me,” I said. Her expression indicated that she had trouble remembering any such an occasion.
So I shrugged and turned my attention back to the Exercycle. When I looked up Stacey Hale was out of sight and I was kind of disappointed. I’d thought she’d have stuck around and we’d have more to say to each other after fifty-plus years.
It’s my belief that if one has reached his late sixties and an arthritic knee is the biggest medical problem, one is lucky. Especially since in my case I have reason to suspect my condition may be my own fault.
The veins on the back of my knee were very nice and easy to hit. In my early twenties, a not very auspicious time in my life, I’d shot methedrine into them on the advice of someone who was more than a close friend: my Shadow. Knowing that made me even more determined to triumph now. The idea of a future in a walker and then a wheelchair because of youthful stupidity does not appeal to me.
But as I worked my leg muscles, tried to keep my balance on unstable surfaces, practiced new ways of striding, I kept thinking of Stacey back when we were much younger and she needed me. What I remembered most about that time was a tension between me and the world.
My family had sent me to see the shrink because they worried about me. In fact I lived by a couple of simple rules. One was that if I always took money for sex with guys and never took the passive role, then I was straight. Another rule was never to tell anyone, especially not the shrink, what I did after school and Saturdays. My Shadow had taught me all this, whispered it in my ear without anyone seeing him.
To a weird and weirdly innocent sixteen year old, Stacey was tall and elegant and right out of a movie. Obviously she saw something in me, maybe caught a glimpse of my Shadow. Stacey was acute in some ways.
She introduced me to Doctor X, a speed cult leader who’d taken up residence in her mother’s house. The mother and stepfather were in Europe and Stacey as I discovered later was his mistress.
I was in public high school and Boston was a small city. Stories about me had begun floating among my classmates. Members of my family had some idea of what was going on.
I was planning to run away from home. One morning I went to school intending to pick up stuff from my locker and split at the end of the day. Suddenly I was called out of class and told a family member needed to see me.
It was Stacey and she’d appeared at the principal’s office saying she was my cousin and that there was a family emergency. She got me sprung and I remember us going through the dark and rainy November Boston streets, taking a streetcar out to the nice suburb where she lived.
Stacey was in desperate crisis. Doctor X had stolen her car, a red MG, and her mother and stepfather were suddenly due back from Europe.
My book bag was stuffed with clothes for my great escape. In the inside pocket of my overcoat was a service revolver stolen from a closet in my grandmother’s house.
Stacey knew none of this but she definitely thought I was capable of great things. In her moment of desperation she turned to a kid so baby-faced that no one would sell him cigarettes and whose looks appealed only to pederasts.
In retrospect I knew Stacey saw this kid as a contact with the Shadow, the doppelgänger she could glimpse in and around me. Even fifty-plus years later it wasn’t wise for me to think about him.
I remembered all this as I walked with elastic ropes around my ankles, practiced stepping off and onto wooden blocks. In the background, sugary cover versions of eighties songs played softly. Over that and the whirl of machines, I heard a familiar voice say, “No, dear, I do not feel like bending down today.”
With my session over and on my way out the door I was a bit surprised to find Stacey waiting for me, asking, “Shall we indulge in a coffee?”
And we did. As we made our way across University Place to a café called the Grey Dog or something, she said, “Understand that I no longer have patience with men whose main interest in me is finding out how to get their hair to look like mine.”
“Now that you mention it…”
“It’s a subtle tint. But you couldn’t get it to work, yours is too thin.” We sat, not outdoors but just inside. I ordered iced tea. I’ve been off booze and hard drugs for decades. Stacey ordered a mimosa.
As we waited for our drinks, I said, “So you’ve had it with guys like me. Been married much?”
“Three times.”
“Any of them gay?”
She was a tiny bit amused. “No one who was adorable in childhood or youth ever fully recovers from the experience. You imagine my life has been a long, lonely attempt to find someone like you. I couldn’t imagine there being anyone quite like you and had no desire to find him if there was.”
The drinks arrived. I sipped my tea. She drank through a straw and put a very nice dent in the mimosa.
“Actually,” I told her, “I recall our brief time between the sheets as your payment to me for dirty deeds you wanted me to do.”
“Well, you and your special friend,” she said with a wise and knowing smile. “I don’t see him with you, today.”
“We don’t hang around together anymore. I’ve got no idea where he is.” Not quite true, but then again I don’t trust her.
Years ago on the Shadow’s advice I had taken our payment—a tumble in bed with Stacey—in advance. He and I were curious as to what straight sex was like.
From Stacey I’d found out Doctor X was a college psych instructor with ideas above his station. When he showed up, my Shadow was both beside me and part of me.
I produced the .38 and fired it close enough to his head to part his hair. When he left in defeat, Stacey had no more use for us and sent me and my Shadow on our way.
Decades later she gave no indication of remembering any of this. “Have there been other women?” she asked. “I know there were in that ridiculous book.”
“Sure,” I said, “1960 was the heyday of ‘The Tea and Sympathy Syndrome.’ Every woman wanted to straighten out some sensitive boy before he got taken down the Hershey Highway.”
“It never works,” Stacey said looking me over. Something about my clothes made her smile. She sucked in another draught of mimosa. “You’re still in shorts,” she said.
“At my age and in my physical shape,” I told her, “I consider wearing clothes to be an act of philanthropy, a way of hiding unpleasant truths and making the world a little lovelier. But I don’t overdo the charity. It’s summer and I had to do exercises.”
“The last time we met, you did nothing but whine and beg me to buy you longs.”
Right then I had no idea what she was talking about. Stacey saw this and was even more amused, like she knew I’d remember when I thought about it. We parted a little later, saying we’d run into each other in PT.
But what she’d said stayed in the back of my mind. Falling asleep that night an image of me seen in a mirror more than fifty years ago came back. I’m crewcut and dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt, striped tie, black oxfords, white socks and khaki shorts.
Somehow I always manage to forget that I spent the summer of my seventeenth year depantsed. For a teenage boy in 1961, wearing shorts in public was one step away from running home in your jockeys after your chinos had been flung over a telephone wire by a gang of bullies.
But this was the summer uniform of St. Sebastian Soldier and Martyr in New Hampshire. During the regular semesters Sebastian’s was a military school with uniforms, drill and saluting. In summer it was a place for academic hard cases—problem kids like me. I’d lost a few months of school when I ran away to New York.
During the academic year the Brothers of the Holy Cross threatened us with summer school. No need for them to worry about runaways. There were maybe forty boys age fourteen to eighteen and none of us wanted to be seen in the outside world. Rumor had it that any kid in shorts caught hitching rides anywhere in New Hampshire was automatically brought in handcuffs to St Sebastian’s by the state cops.
When we were taken into town little kids sang “Who wears short shorts?” Guys and even girls our age taunted us. The brothers regarded us as an ad for their teen-taming talents.
My life had been coming apart well before the night at Stacey’s house. Running away, which my Shadow and I did after leaving her, made things much worse. Sex without any choices or options is brutal. Coming off booze and speed cold turkey is a horrible thing. My Shadow and I split up and I returned home in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.
St Sebastian’s S&M was where they sent me. Life as a Catholic cadet was hell but I was too numb to notice. My Shadow invaded my dreams. In cool hair and clothes he lived in the demimonde of some city that wasn’t New York or Boston.
I’d wake up and stay awake to avoid him.
Summer at Sebastian’s, though, seemed okay. It felt at first like I’d been freed from the world and from being seventeen. An early childhood that had been taken away was restored.
There were all these boys plus some novice brothers not a lot older than we were. Within a few weeks that summer I had a crush on one of my roommates, Greg, a kid a year younger than me. Brother Allan, a young guy who taught French and Latin and swam in the lake with us, gave me looks that said he knew a bit about the life I’d led. I thought about each of them a lot.
Over the weeks I did a little dance of desire and distance. Into this world one Sunday morning came news. “Grierson, one of your cousins is driving up to take you out for the afternoon. Stay in your church clothes.”
My family didn’t want to see me. I knew it was Stacey; was torn between curiosity and a desire to avoid her. Greg changed out of his clothes and into swimming trunks right in front of me, caught my eye and grinned while doing it. Then I was being called.
The main building was an old mansion. Visitors waited in a kind of reception room. I entered and saw my reflection in a mirror at the same moment Stacey saw me. She did not look happy.
The brother at the door reminded her to have me back by eight p.m. I was surprised by what I saw in the look he gave her. “The creepiest guys in earth!” she said as we went down the stairs and towards her little red MG. “And what the hell did they do to you, Kevin? You look like you’re twelve years old. And just…ordinary.” No trace of my Shadow remained.
In the car she had a flask full of brandy, some ups and some downs. I hadn’t had access to booze in many months. I hadn’t had speed for even longer. Stacey’s voice floated to me as we drove down a New Hampshire back road. “Pictures they took without my knowing…have to get back whatever they have…no telling what they’ll reveal,” she said. “… need you to go in there and…”
This sounded like a variation on the Dr X crisis. “I don’t have the gun,” I said. The brandy and the pills made a little rhythm in my head. “And I can’t do it dressed like this. You need to buy me long pants.”
“There’s no place in New Hampshire open on Sundays to sell pants and even with them they’d still laugh at you. Where’s your secret friend?” Stacey had parked under some trees. “Your aura is gone. It used to be you and then sometimes I could see the outline of your Shadow around you. Do you know where he is, your doppelgänger?”
“I sent him away when he fucked everything up in New York. He’s living in a city somewhere. I see him sometimes in dreams. I believe he dreams about me too.”
“Summon him!”
“I don’t know how.” Of course, I did know that dreaming about him, thinking about him intently did the trick. It was just that I didn’t want him back. But high and with her hounding me I couldn’t think about anything else.
As evening began, we were riding in the two-seater when suddenly it felt as if I was sitting on a lap. ‘Hey, Kev, you look like something out of a priest’s wet dream,’ my Shadow said in a voice that was half inside my head and half out.
Then it was twilight and we were back at St. Sebastian’s. “You go right inside and go to bed and nobody will notice how screwed up you are,” Stacey said.
She’d just given me another pill, a down this time. I got out of the car and looked at my Shadow with his nice hair, his ankle boots, a turtleneck and tight, black chinos—a hip hustler.
He said, ‘See you when you grow up and get out of this hellhole.’ He was smiling. In fact he laughed at me and rubbed his hand on my crewcut. Then, like he suddenly remembered something, he pulled back, jumped into the seat and said, ‘Let’s split before I turn into him.’
Eventually I must have done what Stacey told me because I woke up in bed. But a big chunk of the prior evening was a blank hole in my memory.
If there was ever any magic at St. Sebastian’s S&M it must have been in my mind. Because the remainder of the summer was Catholicism at its meanest: dozens of frustrated teenage boys and a bunch of “celibate” older males all together and afraid of the thoughts even the straightest had to have.
Getting awakened at the usual seven in the morning after my adventure with Stacey and the Shadow wasn’t so bad at first. Stacey hadn’t given me much and I was very young.
Greg was the first problem. He opened his eyes and stared at me with this look of guilt and fear, held his pillow in front of him so I couldn’t see his undershorts, for Christ’s sake. Something had happened between us last night but I didn’t remember what.
For the rest of the day, in fact for the rest of the summer, he avoided me. After dinner Brother Allan fell in step next to me. It was getting to the time in August that you notice evening coming early.
“Certain behaviors are so repugnant to God and man that they don’t get discussed, let alone acted on, Grierson,” he said. “You understand? We’ll keep an eye on you for the rest of the semester. Stay away from young Gregory. And first thing tomorrow morning go to Brother Otto and get your hair cut.”
Looking in a mirror I realized it had grown an inch overnight. Being touched by my Shadow had done that. I got a new roommate, a big, dumb guy who never spoke to me. He pushed me out of his way every chance he got and punched me a few times. No one in the school spoke to me. Many stared.
I understood the ritual and kept quiet. Only a couple of weeks of summer semester remained. The school wasn’t going to tell my family about my behavior or ask them about the “cousin” who’d visited me. It would reflect badly on them.
That fall I was in college and me and my Shadow got together again. Once, I asked him what Stacey had wanted and he said, ‘Old photos of her screwing two or three guys and stuff, nothing interesting to me. And stupid things she wrote about doing drugs. She didn’t want her family to find out and have her locked up.
‘These Weirdos who live in a place in the woods were going to blackmail her. I appeared in front of them like some kind of specter, said I’d haunt them forever. They gave the stuff up with no problem. Stacey wanted us to get it on as her payment but I wanted money and pills.’
Five decades later at the PT clinic, I didn’t run into Stacey for a little while. I wondered if her appointments were now at a different time but couldn’t find out. The clinic had some younger patients. But mostly it was people my age and older. We reminded me of the fallen angels in Michael Swanwick’s story “North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy.” Like them we were mostly a displeasure to view but we each still possessed one, maybe two aspects—a lovely arm, a dancer’s grace—left over from the paradise of youth.
I didn’t quite forget about Stacey or my Shadow. But I was making progress, toughening muscles, learning stretch exercises and a different stride. The arthritis pain had receded and that had most of my attention.
Then one day as I got taught a way of rising from a chair and sitting back down that didn’t involve pressure on my knee, I heard the voice. Stacey emerged from a side room with a young woman therapist saying, “Darling, there’s no such thing as a cute old man. Old men are either rich and thus fascinating or poor and tiresome.”
Stacey nodded in my direction to illustrate the second kind. She walked past a gaunt senior citizen with a walker and healthcare worker close at hand. “Calvin!” she said, “I never expected to see you here!” He looked up from the simple exercise he was doing and slowly focused. He said her name and tried to straighten his bent back.
“Easy, you could kill him,” I said when she came close to me. “But, rich and thus fascinating?”
“C.L. Dickerson? Yes and yes. But it’s you I wanted to see. Coffee? Later?” I said yes and knew something was up.
There is enormous satisfaction to be had in looking back over a long and misspent life! So often when I was very young I was tempted to do the right thing. And each time I refused! In my thirties, of course, I reformed, came off drugs and booze, became semi-respectable, found a partner and took care of him when he died of AIDS. But how boring it would be if I’d always been good.
This I thought about as Stacey and I sat in a café. It wasn’t the one we’d been in before but the differences were minimal. Again we sat just inside.
I’d caught the hint of tension about her and pretty much guessed what she wanted from me but watching her tale unfold was part of the fascination.
“There was that friend of yours,” she said, sipping alcohol through a straw. Stacey was one of the few people on earth who knew about my Shadow. She looked a bit thinner this time, and was prepared to be a lot more direct. “You and he were so close.”
“I don’t see him anymore,” I said. “Don’t much even think of him. He and I are kind of like you and me. If we hadn’t met at the clinic, would we be on each other’s minds?”
“But you can summon him. I’ve seen you do it.” Stacey had a bright intensity. “Not as good as nine lives” she said. “But you do have two.”
“However, they run concurrently,” I said, “and will probably end at about the same moment. Mostly I try not to dwell on my Shadow. Thinking about him brings him closer.”
There was and is more to it. The Shadow is part of me and I’m part of him. He’s the bad habits I manage to keep at bay and me taking care of myself keeps us both alive. None of that was any of Stacey’s business. To her the Shadow and I were a couple of magic servants she could hire and dismiss at will.
“Your doppelgänger will know I want to see him,” she said. I didn’t reply but she knew she was right. Remembering the incident at St. Sebastian’s had given me a couple of dreams about my Shadow. After that conversation with Stacey, I had them again.
He’s old and sick and shabby now. There was one dream, confused and half remembered, in which my Shadow and Stacey talked. I don’t remember what happened or what was said but she looked determined, even desperate, and he looked disturbed.
The next time I saw Stacey I was coming out of the PT clinic as she was arriving. “I’m having difficulties with your Shadow,” she said like she was complaining about bad service. But she looked pale and unhappy. I was curious but the hint of despair I detected made me wary of her.
A week or two later was my last day of PT. The therapists said I’d done great. Stacey was nowhere to be seen. But I’d had a disturbing dream, almost a nightmare, in which she looked scared, begged for help, and I caught a glimpse of a figure with red eyes.
After that last PT session I was walking home in the first blazing hot day of summer when I saw my Shadow. More than a bit translucent, he leaned against a fence in Washington Square Park looking needy, threadbare. When he moved he had the limp I’d just managed to lose.
“Stacey says you’ve been goofing off,” I told him.
‘That crazy lady wanted to get me dragged down to hell.’ His voice was kind of wispy. ‘She got in touch with me, wanted a job done. I figured it was the same trip as Doctor X or the Weirdos in the Woods.
‘But this time she wants me to go to this place out West, wants me go into a cave to tell someone who calls himself the King of Death to lay off her. Instead of having stolen her car or having a bunch of photos of her, this one has her soul.
‘I told her no, I wasn’t messing with anyone who calls himself the King of Death. She was pissed! Under all her talk Stacey was afraid she was dying.’
“Oh?” I’d seen no trace of that.
‘She had all kinds of stuff wrong inside.’
“Had?” I knew passersby saw a senior citizen seemingly holding one side of a conversation with an empty stretch of fence.
My Shadow said, ‘I know she treated us like hired help, put me at risk. But she was more like us than anybody else I’ve met.’
“Was? You think she’s gone?”
‘Unless she’s got someone she knows who’s stronger than me. Not that I’m so strong now.’ Then, after a pause, he said, ‘Let’s get back together.’
Encountering him is like running into an old boyfriend with whom you share lots of memories but whom you never want to have near you again.
“Here’s the paradox, honey,” I replied. “If we’re together I’ll get so fucked up I won’t take care of myself and I’ll die. And I’m pretty sure that then you’ll die too.”
‘Why, if I’m so evil, aren’t you really good?’ He wanted to know.
“We’re both doing our best,” I said. I send him money, a couple of hundred a month, mailed to a post-office box in Vancouver. But I took out my wallet and gave him all the money in there—twenty-five bucks, maybe thirty. Who carries actual money these days?
‘I know where you live,’ he told me.
“Good for you! So do I and at our age being able to remember things like that means we’re still ahead of the curve.” I walked away with almost no effort. The therapy and exercises have pretty much taken care of the knee for now. My Shadow, though, couldn’t keep up.
Glancing back as I passed the fountain, I saw him flicker in the sunlight. I looked again and he was gone. But we each know how to find the other in our dreams.
At my door, I looked back up MacDougal Street to see if I was followed. As far as I could tell I wasn’t. As usual these days there was nothing of interest in my mailbox.
The idea of us and Stacey as three of a kind, the feeling that we existed somewhere outside the human sphere, alien and alone, wouldn’t go away. The thought of her being dead, of losing an acquaintance after not having thought about her for so long, made me sadder than I would have believed possible.
But I climbed the stairs easily now. And I reminded myself that I needed to talk to someone at the publisher about getting back the rights to Minions. Which was a nice distraction.
Richard Bowes was raised in Boston, went to school on Long Island and has lived in Manhattan for most of the last forty-seven years. He wrote fashion copy and plays, sold antique toys in flea markets, worked on library information desks and got into an amazing amount of trouble along the way. For the last thirty years and more he has written speculative fiction and published six novels (including Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, forthcoming from Lethe Press) and two short story collections (with two more due out this year). He has published seventy stories and won two World Fantasy, a Lambda, an IHG and Million Writers Awards.