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Don't bang the gate

Mi Amor, I found these leaves you find enclosed thrust into a musty biography of Boccaccio while I was doing some preliminary work at the M. D. Anderson Library yesterday. Strange that I should have even removed the book from the shelf at all since it was not one of the call numbers on the poet that I had listed from the computer search. The book I wanted turned up mis-shelved (no uncommon occurrence there) two rows down. So I had picked up this Vita di Boccaccio by error. The volume had a deceptively pretty marbled cover similar to those black and white composition books schoolchildren use, but it was deteriorated and, frankly, the book smelled its age. From the flyleaf I noted that it had been printed in Italy before the Great War. Because of the cheap paper, the pages were brittle and disgustingly yellow. It would not be pleasing to read such a book for one would be always commenting inwardly on the musty odor and the bad condition of the leaves. Surely, the book would disintegrate in your hands if you actually attempted to read it. I never understand why, when occasionally I find them, such volumes are not stored on the eighth floor, where old books are guarded from circulation and the temperature is controlled below sixty-five degrees.

Vida, I opened it only to extract the folded papers that extended from its middle. A few unlined pages apparently torn from a pad, filled with spidery writing laid down with a fountain pen on thick paper like a sketchbook's. Momentarily I wished I were a graphologist or at least could remember the particulars of a book I read on the subject years ago. Such chirography with its strange curlicues looked more like pin curls or one of those picture puzzles that require you to stare at the image intently for two minutes before you see it change before your eyes into a Wordsworthian pastoral scene..

In contrast to the Vita di Boccaccio, this epistle was not worn with age. ¿Qué es esto? I thought. The trenchant notes of a fellow scholar? The hastily scribbled recipe for the return of a lost lover written by una bruja. . Or, better, una carta de amor? But no, it was something else. I enclose it for you. Perhaps you will find it interesting as you lie reading yourself to sleep one of these December nights, enduring that New York frigid winter without me. Or, maybe you’ll read it to kill time in the subway to the library (where you’ll run into Erica Jong), or in a cab on your semi-annual pilgrimage to the Museum of Modern Art. Since you are casi un espiritista, un Boricua, but even more important, a native New Yorker, with a great understanding for the human comedia, perhaps you'll have an interpretation. What do you think? Is it a joke, a hoax, una metáfora . . . or real? Do you think I should send it, anonymously, to the Chief of Police (didn’t you meet him at a gallery opening recently? No, no, pardon me. That was the former mayor, Lee Brown, who used to be Chief of Police). . . or burn it?

Houston, Texas, 8 August, 20---

During my year of isolation and solitude, I became very sensitive to the petty annoyances of the household. Since I rarely ventured out-of-doors and never allowed messengers, telephone calls, or visitors, I sometimes became inordinately fascinated by my closest condominium neighbors. I learned the ritual of their leaving and going in. For two weeks once I watched at five o'clock the play of a young girl who was visiting Estella Meyers, the only neighbor whose walls conjoin mine. Sometimes there would be snatches of conversation I might hear from a bedroom window. Or, early in the morning, I might watch the walking of dogs and their urinating and defecating. Once I opened a window and shrieked an obscenity when Estella allowed her poodle to relieve himself on the few square inches of grass near the garage below the bedroom.

I remember that one suffocating humid summer night I stood behind a curtain in the dining room and peered for an hour through a tiny hole in the fabric to witness the behavior of guests. It was a soiree Estella was giving. Por dios! The woman had a revolving door of entertainment over there, and I began to recognize some of the regulars—there was always an old man, thin, not well looking who came outside to smoke and sit in the wooden bench she had placed by the double brass and glass doors. I noticed how he smoked holding the cylinder of tobacco between thumb and forefinger only—as if he were always ready to throw it away, but he smoked it to the very beginning of the filtered end.

In fact, now that I think about it, it was the 4th of July. That night marked an anniversary and I didn’t even know it. My ex, Damian, had met that flake Maritza at a party his even flakier lawyer, Shelley Moran, had given at her house in The Montrose on the 4th of July exactly one year before. I didn’t know that while I was watching through the little pin hole in the curtain. Damian told me about their meeting much later, when we said goodbye for what I believed was the ultima vez before he left, finally, for his new life in Woodland Hills, California.

I watched that gray faced old man smoke a cigarette, his solitude and despair screaming through my peephole. I remember feeling sorry for him. I had the strange desire to go out and take hold his hand and say something like "it is the same for me."

I watched Estella, her soprano's helmet of hair-sprayed and chemically created red hair bob up and down as she listened in solicitous attention to a pair of faggots who each held a delicate champagne glass with the confident ennui only participants in such holy unions seem to affect. Eventually, the guests came in and out no longer and I heard nothing until the leave-taking. I thought how disgusting how ridiculous that Estella the soprano adopts a baby speaking voice and tells each guest in turn "nightee-nite." That is what mami always told me when I was a little girl as she tucked me into bed, in those elision days before puberty, before she became my loathéd adversary.

Later, after the party, I could hear the little explosions of fireworks being set off downtown. Since I live by Sam Houston Park, every year the sounds reverberate inside the house and scare the hell out of the cats. I was crazy and morose: I shook my fist angrily in the air at the noise while the fireworks' light flashes illuminated the landing where I stood. Celebrate freedom I did not. For a brief moment I became a version of Scarlet O'Hara and swore if I ever got outta this I would never be this lonesome or this angry with the world again. I would refuse to fall in love. I would write and drive a yellow Ferrari F50.

Now it is August, and what happened a few days after my little declaration of independence has a dream-like quality to it. This burden of guilt--what shall I do with it? Should I go to St. Anne's Church and make a confession? I may have, after all, committed the perfect murder. Everyone believes Damian is alive and well in California. Now I’m not so sure he’s there, and I’m afraid to call L.A. to see if he made it back. My former friends believe I'm “clinically” depressed, but ever since what happened happened, I’ve been growing in spirit, and I know I will return soon to normal life.

Damian called me on the eighth of July, four days later. Of course it would be the eighth--the most important number for me, my lucky number, the number that has always surrounded me since the day of my birth. And Damian, cursed Scorpio, the eighth sign of the zodiac, came into my life on the eighth day of October, 19--, now almost 15 years ago. And then, he left it, for the second time, on the 8th day of July, exactly a month ago.

Maybe I am not responsible. Perhaps none of this happened, and it was hallucination manifested by the new psycho-tropic La Doctora prescribed. If what I think I remember really happened, then it was committed by a force, some "power greater than myself," as they say in Alanon. I, the paintbrush of destiny commissioned to delete Damian from my reality in a few bold strokes?

He called from Hobby in the madrugada of the 7th. Drunk. Or just coming off one. Had a monumental quarrel with Maritza . He always pronounces it Ritza . Stormed out of his house in the Valley and ended up at LAX, then Houston on a redeye. Could I just talk to him? He was depressed. He wanted to die. He wanted me back. He wanted Conner (his son with Mary Rose) to call him but he never did. He was so f’g sorry. He hated his father; he missed his brother Mark. On and on and on and on, as only Damian can go on with his own misery and death wish when he’s drunk like that.

Of course, I was used to this kind of call. How many times had I bailed him out of jail? How many times had he stormed out of our house, only to call later, needing a ride? I said ok this time too; why not? He was a more than another human being who needed help; he had been my life partner, the person I had committed my life to. Once, I had called Joan my intuitive counselor before rushing to the bank, getting enough cash to bail him out of the Harris County Jail, and she had the cruelty to scream at me, “DON’T DO IT1 STOP1 CALL YOUR SPONSOR. YOU ARE HAVING A MAJOR ALANON SLIP!” This time, I didn’t bother to call her.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” I said reassuringly; “just sit tight on one of those benches outside the baggage claim at Hobby. “

When I glided into Hobby’s baggage claim area, in that pale orange light which floods the down below, I saw him sitting, so morose. I realized I loved him still, but not like before. This was the end of the romance for me. I was sad, too. After all those years with me ( I was, after all, such a good example of health and sobriety), he never grew up. He looked a spoiled child who had lost his mommy.

I knew the idealized bubble in which I had contained him since the divorce had burst, and I wouldn't have my fantasy anymore. I'm thinking about the one where Damian returns like a messiah, changed, ready to make a go of it, wanting a baby with me, etc, etc, etc. I said it out loud: "I will not do this again.” Those five words became a mantra, said over and over in my head as I sat parked there, looking at him; he, still unaware of my presence. But at last he did see me, and opened the door of my C280 as if he owned it. He appeared very sick, worse than the cocaine binge I saw him after two years ago. You can't drink with cirrhosis of the liver, but Damian does. He figures it will speed the process, and he looked like death, or what death should look like. We didn't speak; just eye contact for a long minute. I started the engine, and instead of heading north on 45, I went south. To me, “Galveston” on the green freeway signs had a festive connotation in that moment, but that was just the nostalgia.

I checked us into a wretched hotel near The Strand-- in the room, I could smell old piss and the black mould that crept up the walls of the john. I had to help him enter. Should I call a doctor? No, no, no. Do you want to go back to L.A. in the morning? Yes. No. No. I want to be with you. Aren't we going home? How are the cats?

It was then I started to scream . . . The rage, the disappointment. I certainly wasn't myself. Something happened then—that is all I know; I cannot remember any of the rest of the night, what we did, what we said, if our clothes remained on or ended in a trail from the bed to the filthy shower. Suddenly I had a deep understanding of Adela Quested in Forster’s A Passage to India. My favorite novel, my favorite film, for many years now. Perhaps my identification with the protagonist, Miss Quested, was a prophecy of my soul. But in Quested’s case, she had a strange experience in a cave which ended in her undoing. She accused an Indian doctor of molesting her, and he was almost ruined--until at the very end of his trial, when she became confused and could no longer be sure that anything at all had occurred in the cave. The good doctor was absolved and Quested ignominiously returned to England. Think of me as Adela Quested. I'm confused, not really sure of what occurred. Damian may be in the Gulf of Mexico, devoured by sharks. Who knows? I vaguely remember wanting to leave the room to walk the seawall. I remember seeing the old madam, the Galvez hotel, in the distance. He wanted to go with me—we would talk it out, he said. But that part is so . . . vague, I may have dreamed it while he slept off the alcohol. All of it is fuzzy, but I do have a memory of washing my hands in a restroom with garish fluorescence at a Texaco on the way back. Bought a bottle of Mountain Valley water there and drank twenty cold ounces. Applied Wet n Wild lip gloss and tied my hair back. Looked in the mirror. Not bad, I thought. A little thin, a little pale.

Got back to Houston just before morning rush hour traffic. Nobody saw me except my neighbor two doors down, Steve Craft. He had parked his black sport utility vehicle in front (some domestic model that had Eddie Bauer Edition

in chrome letters on the right front fender). " Why?" I used to lament, when "Steve the attorney" could surely afford a decent marque, like the Mercedes-Benz M-Class for example . . .) Must have wanted his mail from yesterday. Probably hadn’t been home in a couple of days--off on one of his amours or legal business somewhere. He was always grabbing cabs, or arriving home in a stretch limo with two brunettes, or two blondes.

Just as my garage door made that final thud on its closure I head the front gate bang, hard and loud. Steve Craft all right. I had heard him bang the condominium entrance gate in just that way so many times during the year of isolation and solitude. At one point, I had begun to think of it as a prison gate and Steve Craft the warden. Even my break-out guy, Luke Gustamon, used to tell me, “This place is like a prison with the high walls and gate and all.” At the time, I wanted to quote Hamlet and say, “I could count myself a king of infinite space . . . if it were not that I have bad dreams,” but I didn’t have the heart for it.

I believed Steve Craft banged it to torment me. And Steve was banging the gate several times a day that year and often late at night. Each bang’s reverberation tortured me. “I bang the gate when I come home so you’ll know it’s me; Steve Craft is fg, drinking, whr’g, and I don’t give a damn how much noise the gate makes or whom it wakes from her dreams.”

Then, with Steve Craft’s ultimate gate-banging still on my nerves, I entered the house into the kitchen from the garage. Anger was escaping like hot wax from my ears. “How is it possible that a man with an education, someone entitled to write “Esquire” after his name, can be so inconsiderate? I thrust open the refrigerator door. Saw first the old bullet hole on the right side Damian had put there five years ago when he shot the refrigerator instead of himself. Thought for the thousandth time, “I am buying a Sub-Zero.” Nothing in the bullet-ridden fridge but plain non-fat organic yogurt and a bottle of flaxseed oil. Next, I opened the pantry. On the shelf most level with my eyes, I knocked over an orderly array of health food in cans: garbanzos without salt, tomato paste from Italy, FuFu flour (I have no idea what it is) from Africa, sun dried habaneros I bought while on the bike trip in the Yucatan, even spilled a plastic tub of tiny red lentils all over the floor in my carelessness. My quest-- to retrieve that hidden bottle of Budweiser that I knew Damian had left long ago. It was so old it had a promotion for the ‘96 Olympic Games on the label. The bottle opener was stuck to the fridge since it had a magnet glued to one side, and I opened it with gusto. I drank without pause. I didn't care that it was old and warm. I just wanted the alcohol. How many Kings of Beer had Damian consumed in his life? Is he cracking a bottle top of a Bud right now, or was he gulping salt water with the fat brown shrimps in Galveston Bay? Something in my gut answers, “It’s the latter.”

The last thing I remember about that morning is this:

I started to sing (and dance sinuously to the music I was creating in my head with the old bottle of Bud clenched in my right hand), softly, and playing up the made-up tune with a sort of Valley Girl cadence: Steve, don't bang the gate . . . please, please please oh , oh, don’t be bangin’ that gate . Bang! Oh, oh, oh, oh Steve. Please, please, oh.

***********

Corazón, there was no signatura ni nada de identificación. I leave it to you—send advice, and soon. Vale.

Siempre la tuya,

­-A