(Another antique postcard post--Beware. I'm going way, way back on this one)
And how I long for a place like this, in which to write, in which to think, in which to be utterly alone. I can remember a fistful of nickels, a click of the door, and helping myself to the cornucopia inside. Was this self-help?
I might be the only person I know who's eaten at a Horn and Hardart. They went out of business in the early 1990s. I sat in one with Sam, my very first lover, in our fur coats in 1979, and we planned out a relationship that would let him see other people (his idea--he was interested in men) and me never have to work for the entirety of my life (my idea--I had been working since I was 12). I was 20 years old. I had ironed shirts, changed sheets, folded towels, mopped floors, wheeled an old man onto the sunshine of his patio to feel the warmth of the sun on his face.
I never wanted that again--to care for someone whose life was ending.
Six years later, when Sam was dying, I did the same thing for him--swabbed his floors, changed his pajamas, made sure his sheets had the highest thread count I could afford, wheeled him into the sunlight on the terrace of his hospice room, helped him stand when he, the strongest man I ever met, couldn't stand alone.
With him the first time when I was 13 years old, when he was 17, and we perfected sex for 4 years. Technique, physique--we were each other's perfect fit. Except for the fact that he liked boys and he didn't tell me. And I liked him and didn't know about
gay. And his family liked me enough to give us everything two kids could possibly want--his grandmother's diamond, a house, a car--if we would marry. They thought that
gay would be licensed, put away.
With him when I was nearly 18, two weeks before we were to stand under the chuppa his family insisted we have, before we were to sleep under the canopy of the honeymoon suite of the Palmer in Chicago, before we were to lie under the stripes of a beach umbrella in Montego Bay during our honeymoon, with him when he said, "I think we should see other guys." With him when he explained to me exactly what that entailed. With him when I told him I never wanted to see him again and threw his grandmother's ring at him and left.
Without him when I realized those were the bravest words that could be said in 1975. (They're still the bravest words I know). Without him when I figured out that
I can't was better than
I do.
Without him for a year and a half. Meeting RFH, kissing a truly straight boy for the first time and seeing something different in the kiss, something toe curling, but finding something missing in the sex--true love, first love, laughter, that moving from awkward to awestruck.
With him again at age 20, when he said, "Let's try again. When we're together, we're together." The other part of me. Terrific sex and crazy conversation, spontaneous trips to New York and the Russian Tea Room and CBGBs, treks to Montreal and Mount St. Helens, the cross-coast move to San Francisco. A year and a half of peripatetic.
With him when I told him I could never have sex with him again, that sharing was too hard. With him when he told me,
It would be you, if it could be you. With him in my head and heart, if not in my bed.
With him when he met his boyfriend. With him when his boyfriend left him. With him when his last lover came into his life, and when his last lover slipped out of his hospital room, never returning.
With him when the first purple spot of Kaposi's showed up, the center of Queen Anne's Lace on his lovely skin (a word I later learned from a poet as
maculate). With him when the first curls fell out, like so many pencil shavings. Shaving his head when his vanity couldn't stand thinning.
With him through the vomit and the blood, through mouth blisters and meningitis.
With him as I had never promised, for better, for worse. We weren't married, we hadn't had sex since 1980, but we were wedded, we were welded by friendship.
With him. He wasn't alone. He didn't die alone.
Without him. I was. Alone.
He left me. He left me with a garnet necklace, diamond earrings, an idea of what was and wasn't love. It was passion, though. It was terrific sex, till I couldn't take the sharing any more, which saved my life. Back then, who knew about HIV, who knew when he fucked his neighbor from Africa? Who knew about HIV, when he went out as the prettiest boy and came home the loveliest, the loneliest?
I was so lucky.
Negative. The year before the virus hit the States, our sex had become safe.
Without him, when he was with his first true love, when I met my first legal husband. I left technique behind and went for trouble: the most macho, motorcycle-riding badass painter I could find.
That was lust. And we paid for it. The only good things I had in that marriage were my son and a trip to California when Sam was dying. For that I'll always love my first husband a tiny bit; he gave me that time.
That wasn't love. That was generosity.
But Sam? Sam was love. He was Horn and Hard Art. This living, this dying.
I swore to myself after Sam that I would die first, that no one else would ever die on me.
And I met Harvey, my great great love, who was seven years younger than me. Statistically we should have died within 11 days of each other.
Harvey died; I died a little more. And Sam died for me a little bit more, too. That's not the way the story was supposed to end.
I'm not, you see, a stranger to loss.
I lost my beloved grandmother, my garnet ring, my St. Christopher's medal.
I lost my true love, Harvey. I lost my best friend since my first love, Sam.
For a while, when I had Harvey, each of us lost ourselves: I in him, he in me, each in the other, in the quotidian of day-to-day. He lost himself in his work. I lost myself in reading, in the raising of children--no one else's fault, a choice I made. We kept the love, though, and when he went back to sculpting, I went back to writing, It made us happier, it made us better, and it made us even more inseparable in a new way, to share our art as well as our days, our nights, our children.
And these days, when I have found myself able somehow not only to be a widow--but to be a writer, a mother, a teacher, a student, and even a partner, a lover--I want to go back, to the future I am supposed to have. I want to see Sam one more time, to introduce him to Harvey (who'll still be alive), to show Sam my poems and my peonies and my children and my Jacob's coat roses, my Bakelite bracelets and my blingiest rhinestone brooches.
I want to show him my newly renovated body, the one I've walked so hard to retrieve. I want to walk for miles with him, talking nonstop. I want to brush his hair, to have him brush mine. I want to hear him say
Pamela, you're still my best friend.
Harv was the greatest person; Sam was the greatest prototype.
I still think of Harvey every day, but no longer every hour. I don't think of Sam every week, every month, every season. But today, I think of him, my first love, my first grownup friend, the guy who taught me how to kiss in a devastating, take-no-prisoners style that sent my latest lover reeling, who taught me about Art Deco and Art Carney, about Blondie and Baudelaire.
So many things I'd like to do again with Harvey; I remember them every day.
There's really only one thing I'd like to do with Sam, and I'm thinking of it today. That postcard, that
ephemera, brought it back, that ephemeral first love.
I want to have a cup of coffee with him at the Horn and Hardart. I want to scatter Sweet-N-Lo packets like wedding confetti on the table, and have him throw them at me. I want to fit a nickel into the sweet shell of his ear. I want to laugh and look at him and lean back in one of those those curved-wood coffee-shop chairs, the ones with the evocative backs, the ones with the name I called Sam.
Sweetheart.
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