Chapter Ten
The cabby said nothing, which Andy had privately feared would not be the case. They carried Jeff out of the hospital like a carpet, rapped up in blankets, even his face barely showing as they moved at a beetle like pace through Manhattan and arrived near Christopher Street. Prynne stopped himself from saying with a Chicago rivalry that New was a dump, and beside him Andy just kept looking and saying, “There used to be so much life here. There used to be a club right here that was open till sunrise. And this used to be…”
It seemed as if not only Jeff was sick, but the neighborhood and the city, and the world was weighed down by trouble and by this new president Prynne tried to ignore. They carried Jeff up three flights, and Prynne immediately set to cleaning up his place.
“It’s not that friends wouldn’t come,” Jeff said in a voice like a cracked cylinder while Herulian and Andy washed his feet and his limbs and he sighed, “It’s just that most of them are gone.”
“That’s certainly no excuse for the family, though,” Prynne noted when Jeff was asleep.
“They refuse to speak to him,” Andy said.
“They let their child die alone and far away?”
Prynne said it more as a statement than as a question.
He had no problem with disrobing Jeff and washing his body, turning him over and cleaning up the many bedsores. Andy remained their watching and changing the water and maybe that was enough. He had run his hands over this body many times and slept beside this flesh. Now Jeff was withered to something like a living mummy, ribs exposed, stomach sunken, genitals shriveled and still, seemingly unaffected, Prynne washed and dried and anointed him with his grim mercy. Prynne had done this same thing for his mother years before.
As he tucked Jeff into blankets, and Herulian set down a water cup with a straw, Prynne yawned and said, “I am unaffected because it does not help to be affected. If I give into this anger and this… everything else, I won’t be able to be here. Tears are your job, Andrew. Competence is mine.”
“We had some good times, didn’t we?” Jeff said while Andy sat beside him.
“Those track days. Those weekends! Good God. We had some fun. And in college! And when you came out to New York those few times. Of course, now I guess it’s a good thing you became a monk because… Here you are, and here I am,” Jeff flapped up a useless hand and cackled.
“I have to wonder if they’re right.”
“Huh?”
“You hear it so many times. You knew you were sick and wrong and not doing what you were supposed to do. And then you say, fuck you, I’m going to live my life. I’m going to meet my brothers. I’m going to meet all these guys like me, and we’re going to have our own world and do our own thing, and I’m going to fuck and get fucked and do what I want and screw God! Screw this God you’ve been telling me about who is white and straight and loves the American dollar from sea to fucking shining sea, and all that bullshit. We’re going to have our own gods, our own loves, our own worlds. So much… music… So much art. So much….” Jeff broke off into a long coughing fit
“So much… wonder. So much FUCKING!... And then it ends… Just like this.”
Andy didn’t know what to say, so he just kept rubbing his friend’s hand.
“But…. I don’t really regret it. I don’t…. I’d rather… I’d rather fucking go out like this then die in Marion County with a wife and three kids wondering what it could have been like. Life… is for the living…. It’s for the living.”
“It won’t end like this,” said Prynne, who had been standing there with a cup of water and a straw. He tipped the cup to Jeff’s lips and Jeff sipped.
“The life you created, the other world that people can go into because the one that they were handed is too small… it’s not ended. This is just a very awful interruption.”
Andy looked up at Prynne wondering how much he knew about him or about his past with Jeff, but it was not Prynne’s way to talk about such things. Andy went on, holding Jeff’s hand through the night, and when he woke in the morning it was cold and stiff in his fingers.
“Don’t you worry,” Herulian said to his friend as he closed Jeff’s mouth and his eyes. “We’ll take care of this.”
The order in which things happened fades after this. He remembers Herulian called the hospital and Prynne called the funeral home and they both called family. Things could not have really gone that smoothly, though. It must have been a hassle, but they let it not be his hassle. They could have left, but they remained for the ashes. They could have had them sent back to a family that didn’t care, but they waited to take them back on the plane, in Andy’s suitcase.
Andy remembers going through Jeff’s closet, putting on his black jeans and a black tee shirt. Putting on his leather jacket and walking through the busy streets, hands in his pockets, tongue rolling in his mouth, not caring about the cold of the night, in fact, pleased by it. He went inspecting what was open, and what had been shut down. He received the hookers and rent boys like scenery, and stood on the other sides of bars with their blue and red neon lights before finally he entered the safest of places, a place where he felt at home and paid his money in the mirrored lobby, then got his key and his towel and stripped naked in the locker room. He wandered the darkened halls of the bath house that felt like a welcome matrix. Andy put up his towel and stood under the showerhead and watched other men and let himself be watched, felt the hot water on his body, rejoiced in men fucking in a corner. Towel over his shoulder, he made his way to the Jacuzzi and the pools and the steam rooms where male shapes moved through the mist. He closed his eyes while some nameless angel went to his knees and put his head between his legs licking and sucking something which had been too sad to feel or desire, and turning it into manhood.
Desire returned again, feeling returned. Life was for the living again. He rose to his feet and so did the man on his knees. Why were they here if the world was saying this could kill you? If this was sordid and sinful then why was it so much bliss? If he was in such agony, and such mourning, why was his cock so stiff? Why did this man cry out when he buried it deep inside of him. Why…? This was not the place for questions. All questions, all doubts disappeared in the fucking, in the sweat down the body, the thump of sex through walls, the music pounding through him, him pounding through this man.
When he ejaculated it was like the violent end to an evil spell. Almost before he was finished coming he was overwhelmed by feeling and he was weeping. He was bawling and hands were on him, hands were touching him, embracing him. No matter what anyone said of this place, of these people, these people he had walked away from or thought he wasn’t part of anymore, hands were here and more. There was no shame. If in this transaction he had the sickness now too, it was almost worth it.
The rest of that night, in the water he felt like something real again. He was raw and full of pain and passion, and he even wondered if this wasn’t the person he was supposed to be, the person who understood these men and the people on the streets because they were who he was. He knew the hours were passing and friends were waiting, and slowly he rose from the water feeling like a beautiful man, feeling the beauty of his own body, the eyes on him, remembering those first days with Jeff and how lovely Jeff had been, and the memory was like saltwater. It was like being hurt in a good way.
Later, he would return to his friends, his brothers, and find them sitting in the apartment, Benji in plain clothes and Prynne still in his habit, and he would insist they go out. They would even laugh and have a good time, spend money at a fancy restaurant, and when the ashes came to them, Andy would comment on the heaviness of them. They would not be mailed off to some family in the middle of Indiana who had turned their backs on him. Too much had happened to his friend who so young, their age, but who had looked so old and was so very rejected.
“We should scatter him.” Benji suggested.
“I was going to say we should bury him in the monk’s cemetery,” Prynne would suggest.
