Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (21 page)

Monday turned into Tuesday turned into Wednesday. Each
night we would kiss Howard goodnight—amazed that someone could look greener than the night before and still be alive. Sarah was on the day shift and usually arrived at noon. That Wednesday noon, when she walked in, she was greeted by Elaine telling her that she had just missed the homecare people. “They were so wonderful!” she said, as if nothing special were going down. Sarah hurried into Howard’s bedroom to find that he had an intravenous tube stuck in his arm connected to a big bag of fluid hanging over him. Elaine shot her the guilty look of a teenager who had totaled the family car. “It’s just hydration, no food, just water, only water,” she insisted. Then, more quietly, she confessed, “I had to.” By the time I arrived that night, Howard’s color had improved, making us only more conscious of the torturous blinks, the pointed reminders. “Howard, if you’re in pain, blink your eyes,” I repeated. “Howard, if you need more morphine, blink your eyes.” He blinked definitively. He was clearly aware, and trapped, and no longer able to voice his needs.

I woke up screaming the next morning. I rarely screamed. I certainly never woke up screaming. I was fused in my half dreams in that bed with Howard, and I was in pain, and I had to get us out. I went barefoot and robed straight into my hovel of an office and called Dr. Josh. “His mother’s not making any decisions,” I said. Dr. Josh concurred. He ordered a bottle of morphine to be sent to the apartment and we agreed to meet there later that evening. Sarah had to read
The Waste Land
for her class the next day. She had gone back to school for a degree at Columbia. Since my dissertation was on T. S. Eliot, I volunteered to read the poem and interpret. Competing with Howard’s
favorite Sleep Sound Machine tape, “Cape Cod Sunset,” with waves crashing, I read aloud to Sarah and Sean from the poem, which was full of obvious ironies, including the time of year, “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire . . .” The doorbell rang.

We froze and listened as Elaine answered. “Why, Josh, what a nice surprise!” she said, even though it was past midnight. Josh did not exactly smooth over the situation. “I’m only going to talk to Brad this evening because Brad put in the call to me,” he said, as he walked into the bedroom. When she realized that I had asked him to come, she turned and glared at me, “Who died and left Brad in charge?” There were jokes about sending the bill for the evening to Brad because he had called. “I’m going to call Brad ‘Mother,” added Josh, gratuitously. I felt all kinds of discomfort, but also relief. And then even Elaine turned thankful that Josh was there because Howard started to suffocate on his own build-up of lung congestion. His temperature was nearly 104 degrees. He was making ominous hiccough sounds. Josh and I turned him onto his other side, revealing huge bedsores, like lakes of reddish lava floating in the thin, pale Pietà marble of his skin. I held him steady while Josh stuck a long tube down his nose and pumped out the mucus, mixed with blood. The procedure was gruesome.

JOSH
: I wasn’t cut out for this. Neurosurgery. Brain operations. Migraine headaches. Not this.

Josh changed Howard to a higher-dosed bag of morphine. And he gave him two small shots of fifteen milligrams of morphine to soften the coughing, help him to sleep.

JOSH
: Are you high now, Howard?

Howard blinked.

JOSH
: You’re aware of what’s going on, but you’re not feeling pain, right?

Howard blinked.

I kissed Howard on the forehead quietly. I did not even speak to him or say “Goodnight.” I was drained by the effort of pushing to get him to this comfortable state, at last. I felt that something had clicked. Tired hugs were exchanged all around. Elaine was quieter than usual, but fine. Sean and Sarah and I took the elevator down with Josh. It was two a.m., and a full moon lit the street as I thanked him for coming, and then peeled off.

The next morning I wasn’t thinking much about Howard. I was content for the first time that week that he was blissed on morphine. I was making phone calls. Around a quarter of twelve, I felt weary of the world. Felt funny. I switched on my answering machine to screen calls. At noon Elaine’s crying voice came over the machine. “Brad, it’s all over, it’s all over. . . .” I rushed from the couch where I had been sitting, reading.

Howard died at 11:45 a.m. Elaine was out grocery shopping. Tony and the day nurse Louise had finished his morning grooming, hair brushed back. His temperature was nearing 107. (Josh had smelled the bacterial pneumonia on his breath the night before.) He stopped breathing while everyone was out of the room. But when
Tony came in, his heart was still pumping. Tony went to call 911. Elaine luckily walked in while his hand was still on the phone, to stop him, or two police would have shown up at the apartment.

I took a cab in a yellow haze. Walking out of the elevator, I started sobbing. Tony put his arm around me, took my coat, led me into the bedroom. Elaine was still on the phone in the next room. There was Howard. Dead. His face was stiff, noble. His black hair slicked back, skin slightly sallow. Eyes closed. He looked peaceful, but also defiant: the defiance of closed lips, stern jaw, and high forehead. The upper part of his head was the most like Howard. The lower had distortions: puffed lips that would slowly turn a waxy gray throughout the day, a second chin that formed a geological ledge beneath his real chin, never moving. I couldn’t believe this was Howard, but without his soft breathing. What did it mean? I felt terribly sick to my stomach, and terribly alone without my best friend.

The rest of the day was a vigil. Waiting for Lester to arrive from Miami. Heaving crying with Elaine by the bed. Then Andy’s wife, Jean, talking comforts into my ear. Elaine’s friend Rhoda arrived and flew across the room to her, feet not even touching the floor. The poet John Giorno appeared by chance with a check, a contribution to the hospital fund. He was a Tibetan Buddhist and chanted over the body, in regal splendor, so that even his body odor, as I stood next to him, smelled sweet. Josh was silent, for once, except for a few cracks while filling out the death certificate. Sean and I took a break to walk down to the river, past so many yellow tulips, on as beautiful a day as I can remember: warm, breezy, and sun-dappled. It was a walk in paradise, the heaven that Howard may or may not have been finding for himself that day. We returned, and I cried with Andy, in his workaday blue suit, and we talked over the
body about retroviruses, and life: like a conversation with Howard, so abstractly intelligent, so full of thinking as joy.

Howard’s father did arrive, and soon after, the men from the funeral home. When I heard their voices, I was by Howard’s bed, and my heart jumped. I yelped, “No!” I felt as if they were the police coming to take Howard, as if we should hide him. They were wearing black overcoats in April. I heard Lester say to me, “Say goodbye to your friend.” I bent over and kissed him on his forehead, now truly cold marble. Then others followed. We went out into the living room. Elaine’s friend Rhoda and her husband, Mort, stood blocking the door so that we wouldn’t see them rolling Howard out. His mother, sitting on the couch, was crying into Les’s shoulder, “They’re taking my baby away. They’re taking my baby away.” Kevin Goldfarb, Howard’s high school friend, hooked on junk after Howard introduced the drug into his life, and now a mess, had shown up, without knowing. He was howling a primal howl in the corner. It was a crisis. Life was cracking apart. And then it was over. Howard was no longer in the apartment.

The morning of the funeral I was getting dressed in my gray suit, playing Fauré’s
Requiem
on the record player, feeling comforted by white tulips someone left the night before in a vase on the counter. Suddenly I turned and without thinking said, “Oh, you came!” I was talking to Howard. I had this incontrovertible sensation that he was standing there—not his memory, not a ghost, but him, and that he was communicating with me again. I did not exactly see him, but I would say that he was three-dimensional.

And then he was gone. And then the chiming doorbell rang.
Sean and Sarah were downstairs. Sean was driving his beat-up white Mercedes to take us to the funeral.

We drove uptown, to a Jewish funeral home on the Upper West Side. I was pretty much out of it the entire time, as evidenced by the fact that my only clear memory is the memory of Howard in his resurrected body. But there was a family room, and there was lots of bawling, and as the mourners came, I huddled with them and we trembled together. “You finally let it get to you,” said Dr. Josh. Bob Wilson walked in, tall, with his big warm hands. He flew in from Europe. I was extremely distressed without my other half.

We all huddled at the door of the family salon. Some kind of lull had been orchestrated and we were waiting in an offstage area. Elaine murmured into my ear, “Go on and have a good life. He wanted you to have a good life.” They had black ribbons pinned to their clothes, cut by the rabbi as part of the ceremony. We walked out. I hadn’t thought that the coffin would be there. It was. Plain dark wood, a Star of David on top. I stared as I walked by, mesmerized by the closed casket. As I shuffled into a bench, I heard Elaine saying, “I want to sit by Brad. I feel closer to Howard that way.” Andy got up to speak. He was wild with crying, and trying to talk, and talking through his crying. I liked his outburst. Steve wept through memories of his big brother playing baseball.

I don’t remember my talk. I only remember the microphone staring at me from the podium. The room was packed, but the only face I recall is Keith Haring’s, as he stood way in the back, like Howard at Bob Applegarth’s funeral, looking a bit freaked, probably. He must have felt that he was next. I typed up cues for myself on an index card, and when I look at the words now, I can imagine what I said. I summoned up our Bleecker Street apartment, with Howard’s
grandmother’s curved wooden chair, and plastic sheets over the windows to keep the chilly draft out, and talking with Howard about Shakespeare in front of the fireplace. About how we joked that he was a “phone queen” and had “black ear” and was a “doer,” and how we joked about his “stirring up mise-en-scène.” I said that nothing that I had known of him prepared me for the magnificent, indomitable man, without a trace of the victim, who was revealed, like a noble statue chipped out of a hunk of marble, over the past year: the man who was lying now in the casket in his gray Brooks Brothers suit. I had typed out the words “Walking Scene: happy,” so I guess I moved on to some happy memories to relieve the sorrow and too much pretense. Then I read the lines from
Romeo and Juliet
that Bobby Kennedy had recited for his late brother at the 1964 Democratic Convention:

Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

I remained as robotic and low-key as possible to keep my composure and stay on track, which only sort of worked. I had with me the poem I had written for Howard in the Bleecker Street apartment that started with his chair. I guess I had been setting it up:

This is for you

Now that your curved wood chair

Like a chair carved in Black Woods, Germany,

Is gathering the silvery daylight in places . . .

And I read the poem all the way down to the last lines, which now had extra resonance:

This is love, when it comes down to it, a bowl of porridge here,

A few words of advice on income tax loopholes there, and later,

When the swans and geese have sunk under the pink lakes of the south,

When this chair is up in final smoke, and I have not yet said it,

You and I, we will still be trying to say it in other ways,

Which is, finally, the best way, like saying Amaryllis,

When you don’t mean that gorgeous hunk of fragile flower,

But mean an old girl sitting in the fertile rain, humming to death.

And then I was done.

We were in Sean’s white Mercedes driving through New Jersey. We arrived at the cemetery. Cars were backed up in a kind of holding pattern because so many funerals were scheduled that day. Finally they let us move on to our spot. I don’t remember the weather. It was Howard’s thirty-fifth birthday, April 30th. I stood there, waiting. I stood next to the hearse, looked in, trying to be close to Howard. His two nephews, older Aaron and younger Austin, just three, were on the floor of the funeral limo playing with toy cars. Aaron, adored by Howard, predicted by him to be very handsome someday, his surrogate son, observed me closely, briefly. I saw and felt the same laser eyes as his uncle Howard.

All the moments at the gravesite felt like an antigravity simulation. My perceptions were entirely off. I felt closer to trees than to people. Some details loomed large, while I didn’t have much sense of others. Primitive feelings flowed in and out.

We carried the coffin: Lester, Andy, Steve, David Rephun, Sean, and I. It was heavy. I kept imagining the body from the deathbed inside, but without our Macy’s sheets with red geometric designs over them. I was standing on the skirt of the grave somewhere, collected. Then I noticed that one of the workers over the grave, helping lower the box, had a USMC tattoo. I knew that Howard would have loved that touch. I thought of the burial scene in the porn movie
The Idol
and wished that I had been alone on my rusty bike looking down from a hill, like the mourning lover in that film.