my man
New York City
There is a loud, slow scream coming from within me. It starts out low and grows louder and louder until I can no longer ignore the desperation of the sound. Moans. Pitiful sobbing moans that build into hysteria. Its there when I pull the comforter up over my head knowing I will lay motionless on that lonely mattress for what will seem like hours until I finally fall into a less than dreamless sleep. Its there when I pull myself out of bed and move across the room with a hazy head. And as always, in these moments and all the moments in between, he comes into my mind and stirs up images of symbiotic memories.
Once the snow was crisp and crushed as my shoes laid tracks through the deserted sidewalk on my way to the R train. It seemed like the whole city had called in dead that morning and I was the only one to brave the elements. I crisscrossed from the street to the stripped down facades of the row of bleak tenements lining 49th Street weaving a frivolous pattern in the snow. I was drunk without touching as much as a strong cup of coffee with skim milk and two rounded spoonfuls of white sugar.
But still, I was drunk or at least felt that way. Not sloppy or dizzy drunk but intoxicated to the point of being giddy. Even a taxi, sloshing through a mass of icy water that soaked my pants legs had little more than a slight effect over my schoolboy lightheadedness. The station platform was surprisingly packed with long drawn out faces. Eyes without emotion stared into the New York Times and the Post. A boy in a tight black leather jacket, which was unzipped, leaned against the tile wall. Both his thumbs hooked through his belt loops. His pelvis pushed out. He eyed me with that look. I turned away and walked further down the platform and sat on a wooden bench and waited until the train came, sipping coffee. Perhaps on another day I would have flirted with him. Not the way one flirts in the after hours clubs or even in the park on Saturday afternoons, but in an early morning, this couldnt possibly go anywhere, way. Nonetheless, I was on my own isolated through thoroughly silver lined cloud.
As soon as the train shrieked to a stop on 8th Street I ran up the stairs taking two, even three at a time. I bounded through snow that was ankle deep and on down Broadway and over to Astor Place where standing alone under that huge black square that I suppose passes for some sort of modern art what-cha-ma-call-it was the reason for my unfamiliar mirth. His hands were tucked deeply into his pockets and I saw the outline of his knuckles through the wool fabric. He shivered a bit and his whole body shook but as our eyes suddenly met his demeanor suddenly changed and that sexy smile appeared on his face. We stood there for a second that seems like minutes and he grabbed me by my shoulder and led me toward the West Village. We stopped for a bite to eat and went back to his place where we made love the whole afternoon away.
Such a day was so perfect, so white with contentment that it became the foundation for the five years that followed. In those years we fought and loved and celebrated birthdays and anniversaries. We bought a living room set. He wanted red, so we bought red. I sat in the study for hours and wrote while he listened to operas and symphonies so loud that the neighbors knocked on the walls. Once when someone asked me how I could stand it I told him I at least knew where my man was. I told him: At least I knew where my man was.
How funny. Up until this point exactly 666 words have gone down onto this piece of paper. I did not plan for it to be that way. I always heard 666 was an unlucky number and it is here that luck has run out.
I would have never remembered that particular morning from any of the others before it. He came back into the bedroom and whacked my behind with his hand. He asked me if I was going to stay in bed all day and I grunted. He kissed me good-bye, as he always did., He never entered or left the apartment without kissing me hello and good-bye. I looked up and saw his tie was crooked. I straightened it out and crawled out of bed and walked him to the door. I watched him walk down the hallway and then went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. He always made coffee in the morning. I switched on the television and went back into the kitchen and started washing last nights super dishes. He had made the flank steak for dinner. Both of us at our mean medium-rare, on the rare side. He knew I loved whipped potatoes, not mashed, so he had whipped them and placed hunks of butter in the center. I ate most of the broccoli; he finished his off. Silly, the things one remembers.
I had just finished stacking the dishes on the rack and was about to go make the bed when a special bulletin flashed across the television screen.
I immediately thought that he might have been late for work that day. The subways often run late. They break down and stall all the time. I thought he might have still been in the elevator or had decided to come home and surprise me. And then a second news report came on and said the second tower had been hit and I thought as I watched all those images that he was in the crowd rushing out of there. I stared at the television set and every boy with medium length brown hair might have been, could have been, should have been him. And then the phone started ringing and people asked me if Id heard from him and I said no, I hadnt. The doorbell rang and it was a friend who had heard and rushed right over. We sat there and watched and watched that television screen go from the unfathomable to the incomprehensible and still I said, I said aloud, I said that hell be walking through the door any second now, youll see. And when the sun went down I saw the dark skyline looming outside my window. I felt hollow. The only lights came from dark green choppers against a black sky and the only sounds were from eardrum piercing sirens and I sat on that red sofa with the matching loveseat and I waited.
-Richard DAmbrosia
printed from XY Magazine #38, page 31
