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Good Times

Patrick Fealey

    I made love to his girlfriend in his dried blood. I know he would have been happy for us. His cock was in a ceramic urn in her living room, so he was helpless and he knew we were the best comfort each could have had.
    Katz and I spoke on the telephone every night. I would be on a pay-phone somewhere, maybe sweating in the sun in the Mission district in San Francisco, maybe Narragansett Pier or the Seaman’s Church Institute in Newport, standing in 20 degrees while he sat in his warm house drinking rum and Tab and stroking his cat Willy. Our conversations were mostly at night and lasted hours.

    “What’s it like there?” Katz said.
    “A lot of hot chicks. It’s always hot in the Mission. At least eighty. The rest of San Francisco can be under a cold fog bank and it seems the Mission is always sunny.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “I think it’s the hills to the west. The fog doesn’t make it over them.”
    “It’s typical November here, raining and forty-five.”
    “That’s the worst. Of course doing laundry is the worst too. If it were not for the women coming in and out of the café next door, I’d be in a coma.”
    “Good-looking women, huh? Not like around here. The most beautiful girls I’ve been around were in college in Michigan. Blondes. One was so beautiful I married her.”
    “You were married?”
    “For five minutes.”
    “Why do you wait seven years to tell me you were married?”
    “It wasn’t a big deal. We got into a fight on the way back from the honeymoon.”
    “Over what?”
    “How low the windows should be rolled down. I knew then it was over.”
    “You’re so tolerant, patient and good at compromise,” I laughed.
    “There were many other options. My friends and I chose that school for a reason. We looked up the school with the highest women to men ratio. A lot of men had been drafted. I think it was fourteen to one. I once dated two roommates and neither of them knew about the other.”
    “Maybe they didn’t want to know.”
    “May be.”
    “’My boyfriend has a big dick.’ ‘I bet you mine’s is bigger.’”
    Katz laughs.

    Katz and I had been friends for ten years and I considered him my best friend. His death at 58 threw me off the wagon. I had been sober for seven years and needed to be for my health, but the night I went to his house I found blood on the bed and Champagne in the fridge and rum on the table and drank the whole bottle in celebration of his sad victory. I know he bought the booze for those of us who would be there. I did not consider his suicide an out; I considered it treatment.
    That was 13 years ago, and six months after my lover Mimi had fatally overdosed and my housemate Mudslide, a fisherman, had drowned when he fell off the dock drunk in February. My closest friends were wiped out in 18 months. I am solitary and it was not easy for me to find friends like them.

    “What’d you do today?”
    “I walked Sandra’s dogs,” Katz said. “Took them out to the beach.”
    “Walking the dogs?” I laughed. “What’s the latest with the banker at Mensa?”
    “I showed her how to administer the test to others on Saturday. Afterward, I asked everyone if anyone wanted to go out for lunch. She was the only one to say yes. I said, ‘Okay, nobody wants to go out for lunch, I’ll see you next time.’”
    “You fucking blew it.”
    “I know. Did I?”
    “What do you think? She wanted to go to lunch with you.”
    “ . . .”
    “Now she thinks you’re an asshole.”
    “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
    “You’ve been talking about her for two months. Now you wreck it?”
    I had been hearing about this woman. She was in her forties and quite attractive. To hear Katz turn down the woman he was obsessed with? It was a symptom of a decline in confidence. He was getting older. He had lost his hair and muscle and was an alcoholic. But she knew these things and after so much time around him wanted to go to lunch with him. How could he lose his nerve? With someone he already knew? Because it would become a date? Because he was losing his mind and knew it? I did not know, but to me lunch would have been an ideal move.

    Katz and Sandra had been through for several years and they remained close friends. She had spoken to him two nights before he did it. She had just had pelvic surgery and told him not to call her while she was recovering. The same night Katz and I were in our first fight. I launched against him for transgressions he had committed and I had overlooked with effort earlier in our friendship. I called him a fucking asshole and prick. I should have explained to him why I was angry. I did not know he was so fragile. He was a brawler who watched the fights to relax. His last words to me were “peace out” and then he blew his brains into the Atlantic.
    His favorite character in all of literature was Pursewarden, a cynical journalist in Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the first book of the Alexandria Quartet. It may have been his favorite book. Katz was a cynical journalist who had put the governor in prison and Pursewarden had committed suicide.

    I slept at Sandra’s house. Her beach cottage with sun-bleached grey shingles had one small bedroom so we shared the bed. It was never suggested that I sleep on the couch. It did not seem romantic but what else could it have become? She was working on her computer one night and I came from behind and massaged her shoulders.
    “What are you doing?” she said.
    One night I reached over through the sheets and searched for her breasts.
    “What are you doing?” she said.
    “ . . .”
    The next night I found her breasts and we kissed and I moved on and took off her pajamas. I felt good about her. She had an incredible body. She was 49 and the oldest woman I had ever been with. I was 35 then and am 48 as I write this.
    Sandra climaxed orally. She climaxed quietly. I knew by her subtle movements and the release of her breath and relaxation that followed. My climax was elusive. She was reluctant to give me head and acted as if she did not know how. I did not know whether to believe her, but with a lack of proficiency and an unwillingness to go down on me, the sexual relationship deteriorated. I could make her come but she could not make me come unless I fucked her furiously for 20 minutes. I would always go down on her and then fuck her. I would get myself to come sometimes but it was a lot of work and she showed no interest in learning how to give head. She would try weakly for a couple of minutes and then give up like she did not want to do it, like she found it degrading. It was difficult for me to imagine Katz tolerating this.
    We helped one another through Katz’s death. We needed the comfort of skin to skin, the heat and the oblivion, the different place, the connection it created in our souls out of bed. I had not met her until after his death.

    She felt badly that she had told Katz not to call her.
    Sandra: “The detective said ‘It’s common to feel bad, especially in cases of suicide.’”
    My mother brought me his obituary and said “I thought you should see this. Is this your friend?” I read the obituary and did not believe it. I had just had my first disagreement with him. I looked up Sandra and I wrote to her about Katz’s fiction, which was somewhere in his house, long abandoned and needing to be saved. She came right over and I heard a woman shouting my name outside my window. I tore his house apart and within one hour found a collection of short stories and an incomplete novel stuffed in a cubby behind the refrigerator. He had abandoned his literary work years ago because it had been rejected by publishers, but had saved it, hidden it. I have had one of his short stories published posthumously. I was the only one in the world who knew he wrote fiction.

     Sandra was calling my name outside my window. It was fortunate that I lived on the first floor of the huge rooming house.
    “Hi?” I said.
    “I’m Sandra. I had to come right over. I got your letter.”
    She was compelled by the existence of his art.
    “Come around to the front door.”
    I went out onto the porch.
    “It’s good to meet you. Katz talked about your dogs all the time.”
    “I didn’t know he wrote fiction,” she said. “He never mentioned it.”
    “We have to find it and get it out of there while we can still get into the house.”
    On the first day, I checked her out. Her body was fine, but her face was strained. Her face had been strained for a long time before now. She was arranging a memorial for his friends. She was talking to Katz’s sister, who was the next of kin. His sister was a staid and moneyed publisher of Christian textbooks and unhelpful, more concerned about Katz’s finances and hiding the cause of his death. Katz had despised her for chaining him to the radiator when he was a child. She would not unlock him when he needed to urinate. He wet himself and she and the babysitter nicknamed him “tink.” It was a humiliation he did not share with me for eight years.
    Katz compartmentalized his life. I would not have known about Sandra if he did not walk her dogs. Sandra would not have known about his fiction had he not told me. As I said, he confessed he had been married seven years into our relationship and on the phone in San Francisco. This was also when he told me how he had dodged the Vietnam draft. It was the smart thing and the right thing, but my father went and it destroyed his nervous system and agent orange would claim his life by brain cancer. Growing up, I had a diseased madman for a father.
    I had read one of Katz’s short stories, “All Fours,” when we put out a magazine called MARROW. His short stories had been rejected and there were long passages missing from his novel. I read some of his novel and it was flat, but his short stories were brilliant. I would describe them as magical realism with sex and satire, Marquez meets de Sade. Of course, Marquez was a variation of Hamsun, who won the Noble Prize 60 years before Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a resetting of Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil. Both books move very slowly through generations of isolated peasant farmers. In a chest in his bedroom I found rejections he had saved and taken too seriously. One disgusted editor wrote him a ranting lecture on misogyny. I had never seen an editor put so much energy into a rejection. Katz was a beautiful man and had been with many women and had been through torturous relationships but at the end of the day he loved them – and kept his soul at a safe distance. His short stories about women and sex read true. He described semen on the lips of a vagina after orgasm and so he was banned. The editor with rabies was from Boston.

    At the University of Michigan, Katz met the Nordic goddess he would marry. The relationship came to an end on that drive back from the honeymoon. He moved east and worked for a newspaper and then went back to Michigan to see her. At the airport “Her beauty reminded me of why I had married her.” But it was not enough to compensate for the bitchery. There were many beautiful women.

    In Michigan, Katz and his friend Mike were drafted. They had thought they were safe in graduate school, that’s why they went to graduate school, but the Defense Department needed men and officers and it knew the scam. They were called up. Mike, a chemistry major, concocted a formula and rubbed it on his face. It created a temporary and sickening deformity that the draft board rejected. Katz claimed he was gay. He admitted to me that he had told the government he was gay while I was on the phone in San Francisco outside café Que Tal. Seven years and distance seemed to bring out of him confessions. He also may have known he did not have long to live.
    “I told them I was gay.”
    It is an easy statement for an intellectual who does not want to be caught up in the homicidal interests of the military industrial complex. I suppose it was a tough admission for an alpha male who loved women as much as Katz. But I felt despite all the women, he wanted more than friendship with me. I have been attracted to men, but to me it was not how I thought of Katz and how I wanted our relationship to be. I would only later consider my bisexuality. I was as close to him on intellectual and spiritual planes as I have been with the great lovers. I do not know what politics sex would have introduced to our equation but given our connection it might have been a foregone next step or a disaster.

    One of my greatest regrets is that Katz and I were in a disagreement when he died. I had attacked a man who for the most part had been a good friend. It was only his one-time greed and the time he sabotaged my relationship with a woman which cut me to the heart. Dante wrote that the worst sin is betrayal and we have all committed it. I believe what the great prophets have said. Usury is the worst sin because you are profiting off the blood of your brother and many have committed it with varyin degrees of success. Betrayal is a form of usury. And Katz used me and my writing for money when he low-balled me on the payment, while insulting a girl I was trying to bring in one day when the two of us walked past her. I had been talking to her on the wharf before she went to work to waitress and she knew I was there and heard Katz say: “She’s just a lunch waitress.” Her back was to us and she had seen me and may have thought I said it. She flinched. I was cock-blocked by my best friend.

    Sandra was an elementary school librarian for many years. I was a starving writer living on Social Security, which did not pay me enough to eat and drink. I received $579 per month from the government, no foodstamps, and my rent was $500. I walked a dog for food money while writing novels. This is the place where the nymph Ashley would move in with me. Sandra’s cottage was waterfront and had been appraised at $1,000,000. It was the land that went down to the beach. It was not the cottage, which was beautiful, but small. She could have dramatically improved my circumstances if I had stayed with her, but she became too old and I wanted better sex, though it would take me a year to find the 16-year-old wayward ingénue Ashley, one of the best girlfriends I ever had before she went off her psyche medication and birth control without telling me and demanded a baby.
    Ashley was living in a state-run house for girls who did not have homes and soon was climbing in my window and crawling into bed with me in the morning. Eventually, she moved in to my two rooms in the rooming house.
    Ashley had quit high school and was essentially illiterate, which I had to weigh against her entertaining and dynamic personality and the outrageous sex. She was also unemployed. As a writer, I had a hang-up dating a girl who could not read. She was incapable of appreciating a lot of me. I tried to teach her how to read starting with cartoons. She was slow. Bright personality. Beautiful. Socially adept. Everyone loved her. Intellectually compromised. When she demanded a baby, I saw the end coming. Her tearful implorations made me pity her. Then she had a miscarriage. She had lied against me and gone off her birth control. We were living together and I broke us up. I went to live in the subsidized hotel and found her a house subsidized by the local mental health organization. I moved into the hotel and she moved into the house two days later. She stayed with me the first night at the hotel and the second night she determinedly said she was going to stay in the women’s shelter downstairs instead of with me. She could have stayed with me a second night.
    “You don’t have to do this,” I said.
    “I may as well get used to it,” she said.
    It was unnecessary and afterward she spread the news among our friends that I had abandoned her to the women’s shelter, to the streets.
    I had coerced the mental health clinic into giving her a place in a house. They did not have many houses and a place for her was unavailable. But I pushed it. I had power over my counselor because she was in love and disliked Ashley. She was jealous and happy to see us splitting. I told her I was not moving into the hotel unless she found a place for Ashley. It worked out, but Ashley needed to spread that rumor about me. I ran into a man we had lived with, the man whose dog I walked for fifty dollars a week, and he was curt and wouldn’t look at me. Ashley had endeared herself to him because that’s the way she was while she was being good. When I split us up she stated “I have tried being good and it didn’t work. Now I am just going to be bad again.”
    Ashley and I continued to see one another for a couple of months and it was good but I did not come over often and this was our break-up period. Men started coming over to see her. She did not pursue them, but was too naïve to discourage them. She was sure to tell me about them. Her housemate was a whore who fucked three men a night. I had seen her at work. I suspect they were paying. She was white and morbidly obese and devious and the train of men were black. The girls were not allowed to have guests stay overnight and one night after Ashley had ridden me to god I stayed and the obese whore ratted us out to the mental health clinic. My counselor threatened us.
    One day a drug dealer named Todd arrived with blunts and continued to arrive and one night he raped Ashley. He was also black.
    “I told him never to do that again!” she said.
    Ashley had a tolerance for rape which most would consider absurd. She had been gang-raped in high school and was promiscuous. Every time she left the house for girls, a counselor gave her condoms. She dressed as unattractively as she could until she was going out with me and I demanded some fashion sense, like blue jeans. Then she fucked Rob some more and she dumped me for good and had his child. Ashley wanted children more than she wanted a good relationship with a man. She respected crime and violence.
    Today she has three kids, the one by the black drug-dealing rapist, one by a Puerto Rican gang member, and a third by another. She got a dragon tattoo on her shoulder blade when she was with me and now has more, a big elaborate one on her face.
    A gang of African Americans stabbed me and gave me a concussion in the street a few years before. They almost killed me because I was just walking by and I was white. They almost killed two more white kids after they stabbed me and attacked another before me. The first attack drew the police, but they let the assailants go. After they attacked me, the police and I caught up with them down the road and I identified one of them as the one who set me up. He had approached me from the side and walked beside me saying, “It’s cool, it’s cool, it’s cool” before I felt the pain and saw one white star. I was struck in the back of the head with a running punch from his accomplice, an all-state football player. The one I identified was the son of a doctor and a prominent family. Their ancestor was the first to be freed from slavery and everyone knew the name. I did not identify the one who had hit me from behind and stabbed me in the face, though I had seen him well enough under the sodium vapor, because when the police caught up to him he had tucked in his shirt and hid his dreadlocks under a baseball cap, which I had seen one of the others wearing during the attack. He was the biggest of them and I had seen his inflated shirt and hair flying when he attacked me. The police put the one I had identified in the back seat with me. I got out of the car. The police let them go and the wilding gang put the next two kids into the hospital with broken ribs and fewer teeth. A black man raped my aunt Mary while she was jogging in Central Park. She was a virgin. She was studying nursing in the city. A black gang attacked my father also in New York. He punched the leader in the face and they all ran away. The blacks attacked women, men when they outnumbered them, and from behind. They did not stand up and fight, but were wilding, an African American pastime throughout the country and captured on film. The victims are inevitable white and age is not considered. Wilding is an attack from all directions by running assailants who strike you as they run past. They do not stop and face their victim. I stood with my fists at the ready and was stabbed by the passing football player. He came from a family of criminals and would later be arrested for attacking someone else. He was never arrested for attacking me and the others. His brother had been a drug dealer in Providence and he had been murdered. A cop told me the younger brother “will end up in the river.” Instead, The University of Rhode Island gave him a football scholarship. His criminal record was public knowledge and someone at the university had reservations. A retired Providence Police Chief came to the university to satiate the mass need to accept him into the program. He told of a good kid who had grown up disadvantaged. Then a black raped Ashley. It is difficult not to take it personally and form opinions when you are saturated in your own warm blood and African Americans have raped your family and girlfriend. Rarely in my life has an African American shown affection for me, including co-workers, one of whom later apologized for his racist attitude. My father’s mother’s family are among the founding fathers and they had owned slaves. The blacks’ response to me appears to be one toward a slave-owner. I had blue English blood in my veins. I share the family resemblance. As a journalist, editors had sent me into black communities because of my liberalism and accepting nature. I was open to everyone and the all as well as a warrior for individual freedom. I got along splendidly with the black officials I interviewed. I also wrote about a racist public housing authory director who used racial slurs on the job. He was fired and died weeks later when he choked to death in a bar.

    Ashley lives on Social Security for manic-depression, a process I put into action, and welfare for the babies she has had. She had a good white-trash plan of baby-empowered womanhood and never took her psyche meds again. One night several years later she called me when I was living in California to tell me how great her life was. She had gotten a driver’s license. She had a Mitsubishi Eclipse she had wrecked. She had a new boyfriend and three children and all three fathers were under her thumb. She explained why she broke up with me.
    “Todd got daps,” she said, referring to her rapist. I did not command the type of respect she sought. I was a loner and artist while Todd attracted many with his drugs.
    Once she took a baseball bat to the head to protect Todd. In the town park he had jumped into the path of the swing meant for him. She came over and showed me the cut, which needed stitching, and assaulted me verbally for eight hours before I called the police to take her away because she refused to leave. I pushed her toward the door, but she fought back and I realized I was assaulting her. She was out of her mind. The cops asked me what took me so long to call. I suppose it was love and hope.
    So we talked on the phone, Fall River to Humboldt County. She bragged about being a guest on the Jerry Springer Show as an abused woman. Apparently, Todd the drug-dealing rapist with “daps” deserved to be beaten with a bat. There in Los Angeles they discovered she was smoking crack including while she was pregnant with the babies she had to have and Springer put her into a very expensive southern Californian rehabilitation center. He probably cared because she was the most charming girl he had ever met. The night she called me she was clean, but mentioned that one of her sons was slow and did not talk. She said she did not know why. She talked the way she always could and her flood of words rolled over me. I was quiet for a long time and she said she would say goodbye. The next day she left a message asking me to call her boyfriend, who apparently was jealous of our conversation. She said he suspected she had met me when she was in Los Angeles. Of course I never called him. Ashley was still trying to play me off other men and them off me. She started this game before I kicked her out and it was a betrayal. Playing men off one another is destruction. She learned it from her mother who once had strung along nine members of the East Coast Motherfuckers. And this woman called the police on me when she found out her daughter was dating an older man. We went down to the police station and met with a detective and answered some questions and he concluded that all was well with us and told her mother to essentially fuck off. The day I met the woman who looked much older than she was, she acted like she wanted to borrow my cock from her daughter.
    Ashley was comic and socially adept and everyone she met loved her, but we never could have lasted. She was inexperienced and unwell in the head and I was at fault for pursuing a relationship with a teenager. The mental health clinic moved her to a better house with better roomates, but she could not tolerate them. She wanted to live with me. One night she slit her wrists when I was over there and said I was not going to spend the night. She bawled and begged and I rode away on my bike and she wound up in the hospital. The next morning, she and her friend showed up and she apologized. I was not going to be manipulated. But in the end I gave in to her unhappiness with her living situation and allowed her to move in with me. We shared two large room and a common bathroom and kitchen. One guy, a pizza maker with whom she shared a mutual admiration and attraction, started coming to our house and playing cards with the dead-beat, wife-abusing, crack-head, former Navy boxer and now school bus driver. He crashed his bus twice. The pizza maker did not talk to me. After Ashley moved out, she became an erotic dancer and he would go to the club and pay her for lap dances. One of the last times I saw her was in the morning in Newport, long after our relationship had ended. She was arriving at the pizza place before it was open. She was wearing all black, an overcoat that went to her ankles, back to the high school goth look.

    Sandra was intelligent, literate, and Irish. Sandra and I had good times walking the dogs in the waterfront neighborhood, shopping, going to the beach and cooking together. I appreciated her quick jokes, but in the bedroom things were not working out. And she was very thrifty. She would actually drive to Fall River, Massachusetts to get gasoline for five cents less. And she drove a Honda which got great mileage and she worked at the elementary school in town. So she drives to Massachusetts to save one dollar on a tank of gas for a car that gets 32 miles to the gallon? There was no value in it; she was fooling herself. After we broke up and were friends and I was detoxing involuntarily she would loan me twenties. I paid her back, but she soon resisted my requests. She was never obliged to give me a cent and I had broken up with her so she could have said no easily, but I asked and she loaned me the money for a few weeks.

    Before Sandra and Ashley, there was Katie, who was my lover soon after I was stricken with manic-depression and my family had marginalized me and left me on my own, sick and unemployed and destitute. I was diagnosed as manic-depressive, rapid-cycling, mixed state, schizo-affective, with seizure absentia, otherwise known as Plato’s Seizure. I had the worst form of manic-depression, according to the literature, my Harvard psychiatrist and the Mayo Clinic. But the disease reaps artistic benefits every day you manage not to kill yourself. While I suffered, my family thought of themselves. They had plenty of money and lived 10 miles away but let me go without food. They never invited me over for dinner. They were paranoid about their own minds and I had become a pariah. Bipolar disorder is inherited and both of them would go mad resisting treatment. My father would actually receive Social Security Disability for his mental problems. But mine belonged to me. Our family had three suicides on both sides. My parents were not well and would not admit it until it was too late. My mother is still alive and has been tricked by her doctors who recognized her denial of mental illness. They prescribed her what they told her was a sleep medication but is truly an anti-schizophrenic. She is doing much better. So my sick folks let me rot, walking a greyhound-pit-bull mix for $50 a week so I could eat while I was writing two novels. When I had been a newspaper reporter for The Narragansett Times and The Boston Globe, I was a star; they were so proud. When I was sick and recovering and was working on greater things they could not see printed every day, they did not want to know me. On Thanksgivings they spent two days with my sister and brought leftovers to me and visited for one hour. My sister did not invite me to Thanksgiving dinner at her house because she said I drank too much. After a year without food I got scurvy and eight teeth fell out. I still have the belt I wore from that time. I had to cut four new holes in it as I shrunk. It is a reminder of hard times and my family.
    “Great men succeed despite their families, not because of them.” Charles Baudelaire.
    The mind is the last organ to admit there is something wrong with itself. I experienced this as I descended into a suicidal state without ever knowing I was going down. I could not admit I was sick and it was not voluntary. My mind blinded me from its condition. Once I became paralytic I did not call a psychiatrist, even after my boss suggested I do so simply by looking at me. Eventually I looked up psychiatrists in the phone book and never called them. I lived as a sick and crippled man for months knowing something was wrong but resisting treatment. I did not improve and finally called my mother and she sent me to her psychiatrist, who was treating her for clinical depression. She considered my bipolar disorder my own dreadful affliction that had nothing to do with her genes or the fact that she was a manic and spent $1,000,000 on clothes and shoes and was a germaphobe and paranoiac.
    Her shrink misdiagnosed me as just another serotonin-depleted drunk. He gave me the same medicine he gave my mother. Prozac.
    Prozac helped but I experienced wildly shifting moods on a daily basis. I started to mark on the calendar how I felt each day. Good Monday. Okay Tuesday. Bad Wednesday. Okay Thursday. Good Friday. The cycle from high to low was three days. From high to high six days. I noted the days on my calendar and charted a graph before my second appointment and showed it to the doctor. It looked like an EKG. He said, “That’s rapid cycling.” I was also experiencing mixed states, where you are depressed and manic at the same time. It is excruciating. Your head is twisted and you are suicidal. Intellectually and spiritually I was breaking through to the other side and what I saw there was death. It would take medication and time, as well as the fact that I had tied a philistine rope to my ankle to get back. This first doctor prescribed an anti-seizure medication, Depakote, used for epileptics. And it helped and changed everything like a gentle rain on my taught brain but he did not prescribe enough. The cycling was diminished, but remained. I called him.
    “Just stay on what I gave you.”
    I called my father and he called his brother, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, and he called me and gave me a thorough examination. He asked me more questions than the psychiatrist ever had and then called my shrink to tell him to give me more Depakote. My shrink got the message and without calling my uncle back, called me twenty minutes later and said:
    “We need to increase your Depakote.”
    Manic-depressives do not usually walk into the office, but this doctor was ignorant and burned out but he tried to take my bipolar rapid-cycling graphic away from me because he had misdiagnosed me and put me in more danger by prescribing a bipolar patient a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It was about liability. He was a better lawyer than physician. I was not just another depressed drunk as he had underestimated, I was afflicted with a disease poet Theodore Roethke called “nobility of soul.” The psychiatrist’s attitude toward me changed to respect and even awe. I was vicious and he took it. I moved and left that doctor and found another in southern Rhode Island who had been a Harvard Fellow and was a commander in the U.S. Navy and was moonlighting against regulations at my local mental health center.
    Dr. Fitzhugh read Thomas Mann and listened to the stories about my brilliant sex-pot girlfriend Katie, a newspaper editor and probable nymphomaniac who would blow me and blow me well on the spot anywhere in the world. Katie was Italian and we had dramatic fights and Fitzhugh and I laughed through most sessions. I had plenty of stories with Katie and wrote a novel about her. Fitzhugh would tell me about the cases he treated on the naval base, like a radioman who was convinced aliens had contacted him. The most important thing that Fitzhugh did was lay all the bipolar meds on the table for me. He prescribed them all and let me go home and experiment. He knew I was very sick. He knew I was very intelligent and wanted to get well. He trusted me. Each pill has its own effect. Each pill interacts with the other pills, for good or bad. I went through months of experimentation. The result was a rare cocktail of six medications that made me approach what felt like normal. Clear, calm, stable, not as depressed or manic. I remained somewhat depressed, but not suicidal, except for philosophically. I have had to defend this cocktail from several psychiatrists who believed one illness, one pill. I have used the analogy of the cocktail of medications they prescribe to HIV and AIDS patients in defense. No one pill saves a life, but liberal-minded chemistry saves lives. Fitzhugh saved my life and enhanced its quality. Most of the psychiatrists have agreed with him, but whenever I move, I do not know who I will meet. Here in Maine I do not go to the mental health clinic because they tried to take me off the medications I had been successfully on for ten years. The first thing my doctor there did was claim he went to Harvard and my previous Doctor Fitzhugh “does not have a good reputation.” This Maine doctor almost killed me. Interestingly enough, my internist said to me “If you have any problems” with the mental hospital, I will prescribe your psyche meds. He does.

    I made nachos for Sandra and me.
    “These are based on Yesterday’s,” I said.
    “These are fresher than Yesterday’s.”
    “It’s a good restaurant, but I caught them refrying the fish for lunch from the night before.”
    “They also don’t give you enough salad dressing.”
    “I’ve always thought that. They used to have live jazz.”
    “Now it’s a tourist trap.”
    “They kicked me out on New Years Eve for ordering a drink. Said I was drunk. But I looked like a wastrel in torn jeans and a t-shirt with wild hair.”
    I was booted from Yesterday’s because the owner said I was drunk. Babs, a prostitute I had fallen for, had ordered food to go and I went in and sat at the bar to wait. I ordered a whiskey. The bartender did not pour the drink. I inquired. “I was told not to serve you,” he said.
    “I want to talk to whoever told you that.”
    The owner confronted me. He said I was drunk. I was not drunk. I had had a few drinks earlier in the day, but then Babs and I had fallen asleep for a couple hours. I was refreshed and sober. He and a bouncer led me to the door while I told him I was not drunk and he called me a “fucking asshole.” One bouncer apologized for him as I left. The truth is the owner did not want people like me in his restaurant. I was poor, not well-dressed, and did not fit into the tourist destination vision he had for the place. He must have guessed that I had come from the Section 8 building a block away. A short time later a newspaper editor asked me to write a review of Yesterday’s. Such fortune! I wrote a fair review for 120,000 readers and shut the restaurant down. They closed doors after 30 years. I don’t know my role in its demise, but felt it could have been poetic justice.

    Hiking through the forest, Katie says “Do you want a blow-job?” We were standing on a rock outcrop in an opening in the forest with a view of the hills and trees and turning leaves, an autumn day that was warm enough to make you sweat. I leaned back into the stone and she was on her knees. She sucked me off in no time while I watched a jet fly overhead. I came sharply. She swallowed and I put my deal away. I thought about the people on the plane.

    Katie: “Do you want to put your cock in my ass?”
    “Not right now.”

    Watersports with Ashley I win. It is easier for a man to chase down a woman and piss on her than it is for her to piss on the man. She had to be clandestine and catch me when she was straddling me in moments I thought was romantic. I knew when I felt the warmth. We never laughed so much, except maybe when we were wrestling on the bed. The goal was to throw the other off the mattress. I always won, but she always fought like she was a winner. She was strong and it was not easy to get her off the bed. She brought me back to a youth I did not know was left in me. The childish laughter. She was a punk angel who brought joy until she secretly went off her psyche medication and demanded a child.
    From behind when I withdrew on the outstroke, Ashley’s pussy clung to my cock and came out of her body. Her flesh on my cock was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen. After bringing her to orgasm in the missionary position or her on top, I took her on all fours slowly, stroking slowly so that the ecstasy up to the orgasm was deranging. One time we were in front of the window with the shades up and I heard and saw people in the street looking up at me working and they shouted and applauded outside an Irish pub. Ashley was one of the best lays in my life, but she was illiterate and conspiring. She was just too young and did not know what we had. She destroyed it thoughtlessly by skipping her pills and demanding a child at the age of 17 when we could barely feed ourselves. She betrayed me and had a miscarriage. But the ten months we had were one of the best times in my life.

    Sandra found a new boyfriend in his 50s who was worth less than her. I thought of him having to go down on her every time to satisfy her and what he thought of the pussy Katz had left us all. He was not getting good head. He was not getting a good fuck. He rented his Newport house out for $30,000 a summer and lived with Sandra in her cottage. Pretty convenient. I have written to her, but she does not answer. I think I owe her sixty bucks.

    Katie had been in hypnosis therapy for more than a month. Before then she only remembered the shoes coming down the basement stairs. She had been told to go down there and wait and the shoes were coming down but she never saw the man’s face. In hypnosis, his face was revealed. Her rapist was not her uncle as she had thought, but her father. She cut off all contact with him and she was good, more psychologically healthy, but then he called and called and finally she talked to him. He wanted to give her $10,000 and a new Jetta, filthy money as far as I was concerned but she considered it. I said, “You are going to take a bribe from the man who raped you? Incest? Wrecked your childhood?” She threw things and screamed, worse than all our other fights and I walked out the door and never called her again. She never came to my house. That was the end of a love affair that I had wanted to keep. We lasted 10 months and were ruined by a man who had raped his daughter, who was a child model, for years. She took the money and the car. She went to graduate school. Began teaching creative writing and quit the newspaper. She could write a short story. She was also published in MARROW. I learned never to come between a woman and the father who raped her.
    Katie reconnected one day three years later and we went out on a day date in the car she had accepted from her rapist. I was a little ambivalent and while we were at Starbuck’s I went into the men’s room and shot up a good amount of heroin and was high and walking self-consciously when I returned to the table. She did not notice I was high and I did not tell her. We stopped at an arcade and I played some games while she got bored, but the heroin had destroyed the conversation and my sexual impulse. She seemed let down because I was not spontaneous or interactive or attracted to her. I was in the dead zone. Why I did it is because I did not care about her enough and I was an addict. We drove back to her place and sat on her couch. She told me about a male writing student and I imagined her fucking him. She made tea and we sat on the couch talking. We did not discuss our past, it was like a beginning, but I had a girlfriend, a diagnosed borderline 19-year-old red-head who lived two blocks from katie. It is important to point out that Katie was more beautiful, experienced, and much smarter than Mimi, who was very smart but young and sick and unstable and the worst girlfriend I ever had. When I told Mimi this, she smiled proudly.
    So I am on the couch drinking tea with Katie and I notice the bedroom light is on.
    “Would you like to come into my boudoir?” she asks.
    A good idea, but . . .
    I was too high to want sex and I had Mimi on my mind two blocks away and I had never cheated on her despite the fact she was psychotic and we had broken up at least nine times, times during which she had been with other men and I had not been with other women. Mostly it was the heroin that kept me out of Katie’s bed and she was okay with my reticence. Maybe it was too soon to jump back into the old days. And she knew I had a girlfriend. In retrospect, I should not have shot the heroin and should have fucked Katie the way I used to love to with her screaming while upstairs people were having their cavities filled at the dentist’s office. Heroin is as close to death as you can get while you are still breathing. Sex does not enter my consciousness. Katie drove me to the end of Mimi’s street more politely than I expected. She acted like we would see one another again. I got out and said goodbye and walked to Mimi’s sister’s house, where my reception was cold and indifferent. Mimi sat watching TV and hardly acknowledged me. Minutes before I had been in a bright model’s house with a woman who wanted to go to bed and here I was feeling prostrated and low. What I should have done then was walk back to Katie’s house, dumped Mimi for good, and renew love with Katie. We had a foundation and a sanity Mimi could never grasp, yet I was under the young girl’s spell. I gave up the perfect woman my own age to be with a teenaged bitch. What does that say about me? What does it say about love?

    What killed Mimi and me was drugs and distance. We had both been evicted from our places in Newport. We tried to stay in contact and I would visit her by bus. She would not drive her car to see me because it was now unregistered. It was another extended split; I had realized how futile it was to date her. I did not want to have anything to do with her and dropped her for good. Months passed and she finally wrote and said she had “gotten her head straight.” I did not believe her. Could she ever be stable for two consecutive days? It had been bad. Drugs, break-ups, reunions, break-ups, affairs, and finally . . . HIV. She was diagnosed. I did not have HIV and had never shared a needle with her. I urged her to get tested again because those tests err on the side of positive, they are conservative, but she was apathetic and believed in her HIV. Her drug use was an environment in which the disease was available. She accepted the news without surprise. She complained to me that she was not getting proper treatment by her doctor, but also said she had no symptoms of the disease, her viral count was virtually nonexistent. After she later overdosed on oxycontin and died in California, the coroner tested her and said she did not have HIV. I don’t know which test to believe. I guess I believe them both. I guess I believe none of it. Her belief in the disease lowered her life instinct to the point where she killed herself very simply and commonly by a very small margin.

    Katie is married to a Samoan and has two sons who she puts on Facebook. In photos she looks great. She quit teaching writing and became a yoga teacher. She looks like she is 25 at the age of 46. We have corresponded and we have admitted our past love for one another, though in our time neither of us stated it. I should not have rejected her decision to accept her father. I should not have argued against her taking the money and the car. After all, it was his abuse which had created the perfect whore I was in love with.

    Katz went out with so many women in the 1960’s and 1970’s, a big-time reporter in the era of free-love. He was as handsome as any movie star who ever showed his face on the screen. He went with more women than anyone I had known. He would explicitly discuss women and the widely varying sizes of the clitoris. He mentioned one black woman who had a large clitoris that was easy to find and please. He liked a woman with a large clitoris. Hunting down a tiny clit is as challenging as swallowing an enormous cock. Katz had a cock. I saw it at the beach one day running down his leg and almost out of his shorts. He was sitting on the seawall opposite me while I sat on a bench. It was surprising for a man of five feet, six inches, who weighed 150 pounds. If Katz had a Napoleonic complex it one specifically focused on the eradication of evil. As a reporter he investigated and wrote about corruption, had toppled administrations and put political crooks behind bars. I never saw him act egomaniacal. I knew a short megalomaniac with the smallest cock I had ever seen on a grown man. He was humorous, but a megalomaniac when it came to his writing abilities. Vinny.
    Katz was a genius and that is how we became best friends. We could understand and handle one another without feeling superior or inferior. He was Mensa. I had a tested IQ of 195. We were both former journalists who enjoyed many of the same writers. He was one who encouraged me not to give up on Celine after I had read his novel Journey to the End of the Night. So I read Celine’s next novel, Death on the Installment Plan. Celine, a physician, is one of the best novelists I have ever read. He is one of the best writers I have ever read.
    One curious thing about Katz is that he looked like the father of French romantic poetry, Charles Baudelaire, who died in poverty after writing the seminal The Flowers of Evil. Les Fleurs du Mal. I disagree with the translation of “Mal” to “Evil.” Mal also means sick in French. The Flowers of Sickness. English translators have imposed a darker title upon one of the most aspirant writers in history. In a way they are still trying to ban him 160 years after his death. The Flowers of Sickness. Baudelaire was sick with the way man chose to live his life. He envisioned something better than greed and war. It is natural to be sick with what man has done with the gift and Baudelaire wrote about what was and the beauty that existed and could be. A strange thing happened when you photographed Katz. The photo would come out blurry and he looked like a ghost. The first time he went to Paris he knew all the streets. He did not know how he could. It surprised him. He accepted it, but considered it extraordinary. It was extraordinary, but I had pinned him as a reincarnation of Baudelaire long before I told him. Baudelaire was a flaneur, an alienated intellectual who roamed the streets of Paris at night.
    “You know who you look like?”
    “Monty.”
    “Baudelaire.”
    Katz laughs
    “You might be him. You have led the life of a Baudelaire.”
    He laughs.
    “Keep laughing, Baudelaire. You’ve been banned and censored as much has he was.”
    “That’s true, but I think Rimbaud is a fraud and I don’t write poems.”
    “No, you took the fight to the street.”

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