I Loved You More (29 page)

Then, too, maybe after all, the magic
is
the gold. One of gold's properties is its high electrical conductivity. Maybe Greylock, the mountain peak looming high above Atlanta, is still so full of gold that it's conducted us to the only place in the world where I could be with four friends, together at the same time, at
a time when most of my friends were either dead or dying. In a ghost town for chrissakes, not much to distract us.

Or maybe what made Atlanta magic wasn't Atlanta at all. Maybe the magic was just the time. Destiny, fate, fucking fortune, whatever it is. The way the earth was spinning it spun the five of us together, our good health and our youth, still immortal, in a way we'll never be spun together again.

Or maybe what made Atlanta magic was the mushrooms.

LATE MORNING IN
Boise, Idaho. Reuben and Sal and Gary, Hank and me, all of us climb in Sal's Jeep Wagoneer. We're all big guys and we're traveling with food and provisions for five men for three days and three nights. There's no electricity in Atlanta, at least in Gary's house. No refrigeration. So the Wagoneer is jammed.

The first hour out of Boise, we're still on the plains. When we get to Lucky Peak Dam the road starts to climb. In Idaho City, we stop for hamburgers, coffee, French fries, and pie. Not long after Idaho City, we turn off the tarmac.

Then it's three and a half hours of dirt road, the Wagoneer going straight up, going straight down mountains. Around every hairpin corner, we slow down, honk the horn. Around every hairpin corner, visions of a huge logging truck barreling down on us. Always on the one side of us, a rock wall. On the other, dropoffs like to clench your sphincter closed forever.

Three and a half hours of hanging on for dear life to a one-lane road. During the times when we aren't just about to drive off a cliff, though, we're talking, dishing, and talking talking. My old friends Reuben and Sal and Gary – it's been ten years since we've all been together in Idaho. I've told them Hank is just a friend, but when they meet Hank they fall in love, too. Who wouldn't. They've all read his book and they want to know everything about him.

At one point, I look over, take a good long look at Hank. The last time I'd really looked at him seems like ages ago, just two
days before, at Ephraim's in Fort Hall in that piece of bright sun after the sweat lodge. He'd just taken my hand and put it over his heart.
That's someplace I've never been to
. Ever since Hank said that, there hasn't been much else I've been thinking about. What that place for Hank was.

But this day Hank's in a car full of chattering homosexuals. First Indians, now queers. Far as I can tell, Hank's doing fine. In fact, more than fine. Who wouldn't be, traveling with these characters?

We cross the bridge over the North Fork of the Boise River and start up the last mile of straight low grade to the town of Atlanta. The sun is just going behind the mountain. On the right, from out of the pines, the first building, a two-story gray ghost, old wood from a century ago. Its wavy windows, sun in its cataract eyes look right into my soul. That glint of light I'm not sure happens inside me or out.

THE ATLANTA TOWN
Hall is the old Atlanta Club, a flat-roofed rectangular concrete building that's modern for Atlanta. Built in the Twenties. We all pile out of the Wagoneer and stretch. Hank lets out a high-pitched fart.

“Mountain lions,” Hank says.

Reuben hears the fart, looks at me, and says:

“He gambled and he lost.”

Then Gary says: “She was a poor dog. But a good one.”

Always proud of his farts, Hank. Me, I'm as far away as I can get from him. Then in a moment, something else has my attention. The way the mountain air lays on my skin. I have to stop. Cold on my ears and in my nostrils. My breath in deep, when I breathe out I can see my breath. Magic.

The Atlanta Club has a shed roof overhang above the front door. A half dozen or so people, bundled up on two old church pews, are sitting in the fading light. One pew on each side of the front door pushed up against the building. Above the pews, two windows you can't see through.

In the back of the Wagoneer, Hank finds his faux leather suitcase, I find my powder blue one. By the looks of things we don't expect to sell any books, so Hank grabs one book and I grab a book and we walk inside. It's one big high-ceilinged concrete room. The warm hits us first. And the smell of wood fire. To the left is an old wooden bar back, looks like oak, that goes on forever, stained dark and rubbed to raw wood where, over the last century, men and women have bellied up to it. Dark dark all around in the corners and on the floor and above you on the ceiling dark. The brightest light is a kerosene lamp set on a low table, oak too, setting in a circle of high-backed wooden chairs ordered together like old Mormons in front of the potbellied stove.

In the back corner there's another kerosene lamp. For going out to the outhouse. And something else. Music. There's a guy back there by the lantern and he's cranking an old Victrola. Billie Holiday singing “April in Paris.” I do a quick look at Hank, but Hank doesn't remember his “April in Paris” dance that night in Pennsylvania. He's busy shaking hands with a woman with bright red hair in a blue parka who's introducing herself as Misty Rivers.

Magic. The big casement windows that line the west wall shine out of the dark as if church windows, four frames of bright red-orange fire.

We all sit in the Mormon chairs around the low table. I sit next to Hank. We both know to sit our asses near the stove. On the table, cheeses spread out on thick white plates, baguettes, bottles of red wine, a huge plate of cookies, stemware, a coffee press, old coffee mugs, hot water, tea bags. Cream and sugar in those kind of blue dishes.

By the time everyone has their coffee or their wine, the bright shine of the windows is gone. Everything is black. Pitch. Just us human beings there crowded around the kerosene lamp and the stove. There's maybe twelve of us. One chair is empty. The kerosene flame from the table below us comes up light into our faces. The guy who was playing the Victrola sits down in the
empty chair. His hair is gray but he looks young, something wild, rugged about him. Gray chest hair coming out his shirt collar. He's not wearing shoes. He looks over to Hank and me. Like everybody else is looking, he looks too.

I've never heard a place be so silent. The way time is not a measurement but something you are perfectly still in.

Hank puts a chocolate chip cookie in his mouth, then two more. He presses his knee into mine. That knee press means I should go ahead and do something. Since usually I go first, I open my book. I have to push the pages down into the light. My voice in the big dark room, echoes of it, all the spirits listening. Maybe even one Most Miserable in particular. At first my words tremble, finally I hit my stride.

Those twenty minutes I read that night in the Atlanta Club, while I am reading, more than ever before or since, in all the world the feeling I love the most. When I'm finished reading, nobody claps, nobody steps up, takes charge, pours more wine all around. The way the faces all look at me it's as if I'm still reading. Or maybe some other guy is reading now only I can't hear him.

The black dark, the silence, the light of the kerosene flame. The flicker on the faces of the people in the circle. Twelve, I count them, twelve of us sitting, including Reuben and Sal and Gary, Hank and me, Misty Rivers and the Victrola Guy.

I've never felt so listened to.

Those of us around the table, it's as if we are dark houses in the dark, windows shuttered to the night, a light on inside. Each of us with our front door wide open.

Or this is a séance and Hank and I are the channelers.

The dead speak as Hank begins to read. My favorite story of his. The same story he read at the Blind Lemon in Pocatello. About the little girl who calls in the cows. I cover my mouth with my hand because I don't trust my mouth not to lip-synch. Why I love Hank's story so much is why I love it even more that night, because more than anything the story is about light, fading light, and the little girl narrator, her lists of cows' names and
family members, how her voice becomes a litany of blessings on them all.

With my mouth covered like that, I look my eyes around the circle. I make a blessing, too. On this strange gathering of people, or spirits, who sit in high-backed Mormon chairs around a low oak table and a kerosene lamp 6,000 feet high in the middle of the Sawtooths. Seven people I don't know. Five, including me, I do.

Reuben, not like the sandwich, but roo-
BEN,
is directly across the low table from us. He looks French in his black beret. A big mug of Earl Grey tea in his hands. He's just had his teeth capped and the kerosene lamplight shines off his white teeth. Sal is sitting next to Reuben, as close to the cookie dish as he can get. He's particularly fond of the double chocolate fudge. Sal's wearing his trademark big white long-sleeved shirt. Not his red baseball cap though. He just wears his hats in the sun.

I met Reuben Flores and Sal Nash on a September afternoon in 1973. The very next day was my first day as a high school English teacher and my hair was down to my shoulders.

I could've gone to any barbershop in Boise. Three bucks and I'd have been acceptable. But I'd given up hope on so many things. The Sixties were over and the Seventies looked like married and a job. And now I was even going to give up on letting my freak flag fly. But I just couldn't let some redneck give me an American haircut. I figured if I was going to sell out, then at least I could take the risk.

Truth was I wanted more than it looked like I was going to get.

Beauty by Gustav, I opened the cut-glass, big, heavy door. Man, the smell in that big beautiful old house. Smelled dangerous. The problem was you needed an appointment.

But then Reuben Flores walked out. Really, this guy's a cross between John Leguizamo and Diana Ross. What a smile. If I could wait just ten minutes, he'd be right with me.

What I remember about that haircut was that Reuben
offered me a cocktail, and the offer surprised me, and I tried not to act surprised, and then I was sitting in his barber chair drinking a rye and ginger, and we were talking talking. Not guy talk. We were talking about life and breath, his guru named Bhabhiji, and I felt so at ease. I wasn't searching for words.

Reuben has a story about that day as well. The tall lanky man with long ash-blonde hair standing in the foyer of the beauty parlor and how surprised he was when I got in his barber chair that I asked him if he was homosexual.

I don't remember that. What I do remember is that Reuben pointed out the window. Outside in the garden was a young man wearing a red baseball cap. His lover, Sal Nash. The strong back muscles under his white shirt. His hands dug deep into a flowerbed. The way Reuben spoke of him, Sal Nash was no corporeal human being. Sal Nash was a heavenly angel. I didn't doubt it for a moment.

And something else. Something Reuben said just as he pulled the drape from my shoulders and I was about to get out of the chair.

“You know, Ben, what it all boils down to is love.”

That's when Sal walked in from outside. Actually, at first I couldn't tell it was Sal. All I could see was a huge bundle of red flowers.

“Ben, this is Sal,'” Reuben said.

The red flowers parted and under the bill of the red ballcap were two blue eyes. Maybe not blue. Maybe crystal or silver and just the red flowers made them blue. Like to look right through you, those blue eyes. His thick dark-red hair and full beard. Fucking Alan Bates right there in Boise, Idaho.

“Hi Ben,” Sal said. “Would you like a dahlia?”

Reuben, Sal, the beautiful big house, my new haircut, the smell of the salon, red dahlias, love.

Maybe the Seventies weren't going to be so bad after all.

And. Homosexual. Maybe one day, I just might start walking on the other side of the street.

HANK'S READING THE
part about Grandma Julia Mae. Nobody in our circle has made a move. As if we're in a trance. Gary Whitcomb, Atlanta's honorary mayor, keeps his knee a steady press against mine. He's done a lot of work setting this reading up. He owns the Atlanta Club and everything in it. Even the Mormon chairs are his. Gary's a big guy, solid. Sandy red hair, what he has of it. So he mostly shaves his head. Usually a beard, sandy red, too and trimmed short. Tall, rugged-looking. You'd think he was a real Idaho Spud, but when he opens his mouth, that voice. High-pitched and so gay. That's what attracted me to him in the first place, I mean besides his big shoulders, and a quiet way that made him seem sad. Then that laugh would come out of him. Mostly I liked him because he was a painter who always had paint on his Levi's and on his boots.

It was a mosquito. I couldn't sleep because there was a mosquito in the room. It was just after I'd left my wife, Evie, and I was staying in the extra bedroom with Bette Podegushka and her roommates, Will and Leo. Everybody was out dancing. I'd turned on the bright overhead light and I was standing naked on my bed jumping up and down trying to kill the fucker with my pillow.

That's when Gary Whitcombe walks into the room.

I quick sat down and pulled the sheets up around me. Gary let out that laugh. I had to laugh, too. Turns out I'd left the front door unlocked. Gary had a six-pack he was going to share with Will, so we started in on beers. After a while, Gary turned off the light and we sat there in the dark. I smoked cigarettes and we talked. About everything. Evie and Bette and sex and Idaho and art. That's the first time I heard about a place called Atlanta, Idaho. Gary talked about his house up there and the hot springs. The old gold mines. Greylock mountain. I remember how comfortable I started to feel. In the middle of all the changes, all that fear, that night I felt comfortable. It wasn't long and Gary and I were lying on the bed and I was curled up into Gary's armpit.