Mickey’s house is a hovel. His apartment is small and the bathroom floor sags so badly the toilet rocks when I sit on it. The whole place smells of mildew because the roof leaks. His bed is in the back room that is a dark cave. The only light in the place is where he sits at his desk typing “making love to Nancy Remington”, he calls his old manual typewriter. Most times I have to clear a spot on his couch of the pages and pages of his writings when I visit. Still, he is the only intelligent American I have met who is like Gotson… and has some idea of what I am trying to do with my paintings. Most people, like my brother Robert, ask me, when they find out I am a painter, if I sell any of my paintings, then whether or not they are abstract or figurative. Silliest of all, once they do see one, they ask how much time it took to paint it… like it is a job I punch the clock on. I just give my age and let them figure it out. Mickey rarely speaks in mundane terms and admires what I do… making informed comments here and there but not to impress me... he sees it. I call Mickey my eccentric American friend.
Arriving at his place I see Homer on the screened in porch, I greet him and he goes before me… the door is unlocked. “No one is home, Homer?”
“Eeee-oow,”
“Not telling, eh?” Homer slid up to my ankle and took a full body rub on it. “Homer, is Mickey still not drinking?” There were only empty ice-tea bottles on his desk where the beer bottles always had been. I pulled a pile of typewritten papers off the desk and went back to the cave. I giggled as Homer followed me. “It is dark in here Homer, do you mind if I turn on a reading lamp?”
I crawled under the covers to read. The first page I riveted me.
Adriane
Ah, the chaos of desire…
The unrelenting agony… rejected by the body of love as though I am a foreign body, a bad organ, genetically unsuitable for a healthy existence.
I fear most that I’m damned forever in exile from love as though I’ve committed some sort of despicable crime against it in a dream a long time ago. I live where longing unfulfilled gathers by the wind in back alleys Hades like fast food wrappers trapped by swirling eddies in dark dusty corners. This is the life that God seems to be expecting me to accept and this is the fate that I refuse most adamantly… a life without love is no life at all.
These are not the frivolous railings of youth against the lovely chimeras of the day. These are the railings of a man in mid-life wounded beyond his comprehension of where it chooses this or that above him all his fucking life…Some crime I must have committed some time ago.
The world around my house keeps grinding on our fate towards the turning of dust to dust and ashes to ashes while I cry out… a bison in a drought for one green blade of moist grass to take me into the night nurtured and fed by its promise.
It must have been a crime that I committed in some dream some time ago.
I set the sheet down on the nightstand and for some reason wept: I cried myself to sleep. I woke up later to the sound of moaning and a woman giggling, coming from the front room. The curtain was pulled on the cave… I couldn’t see out but it was a familiar enough of a sound. Oh, god, he’d gotten lucky today and it wasn’t me. There is a back door to the cave but it is blocked by one of those small office refrigerators where Mickey used to keep his beer. I pondered what it would take to move it but thought better of it. Then I thought I’d see what kind of response I’d get if I walked out through the front room to the door.
Oh, shit, my clothes were on the couch… what was I going to do… walk out in my briefs to the door? I pulled the covers over my head to decide what my next move would be. When the moaning and grunting stopped I waited until I heard one, or both, snoring; then crept carefully across the front room. They were splayed out on the floor and my clothes were between the cushions on the couch. Not bothering with my jeans, I put on my top and stepped over Mickey, placing a foot between her head and his. Homer stretched out from where he was laying on the desk and jumped down onto the floor to escort me out the door.
I made it to my car. He had to know I was there because I was parked right next to his funky old van. My stomach ached… disturbed by raw emotion. It came from the gut. It was an anguish I never expected. Hadn’t I always wished that Mickey would find someone to…? Oh, shit, am I jealous? While they were going at it I longed to be the one in his arms. This is not something I am used to feeling: Sobriety sucks.
I drove by the liquor store… it was automatic, the car turned into the parking lot on its own, I swear. Lighting a cigarette, I sat there in my car for until I finished the smoke… Oh shit, sure… just to take off the edge. It isn’t like I want heroine… it is just vodka. I will only get a pint and then I will just have a shot and throw out the rest. I haven’t painted since I left. Yes, a shot will do just fine… loosen me up.
I took the pint upstairs to my studio and set it down on a shelf by the door. A fresh linen canvas that Mickey had stretched for me stood by the window overlooking the garden. I missed seeing my dogs, Sushi and Tofu, sprawled out on the pavement below. Nick, who, since our separation still kept an office at my place, couldn’t be trusted to take care of the dogs at all so I had them boarded when I left for Bayonne. They could wait one more day. I would like some time to think things over without distractions. Both Gotson and Mickey liked cats. Mickey says it is because dogs are too dependent. Gotson agrees, saying that a cat is a natural revolutionary and cannot be trained the way a dog can. I think that Sean and Gotson would get along fine.
There I go again… thinking about him, Sean… everyone calls him Mickey… Sean is his name…, No one calls him that. I once saw his driver’s license… Sean McKee. That’s why they call him Mickey. I heard myself say it out loud, “Sean… Sean McKee… Mickey… is he a cartoon mouse or an Irish gangster? The fucking Mick!” What the fuck… Ooops…. They always say… "Pardon my French." My French is good… it is my English where I get these words. Forget the English I was taught in school before coming to America. I learned to speak English from junkies and drunks over here. Mickey says I have the mouth of a sailor. I opened the pint and took just a taste. He, Mickey, lets me call him Sean. I am the only one I know off…. maybe his family… I let the vodka wash over my tongue and swallowed no more than a drop or two of it, then went back to the canvas. The brushes were laid out, cleaned before and as I had left them. The tubes of paint were in order too, spread out on the counter that ran the length of the studio.
The studio is my refuge. I have never let Nick enter it. Mickey, yes… he is the only one. Even though you have to pass through the bedroom to get to it, Nick has never gone in past the door. Sometimes back, when Sean was drinking too, he would bring that old portable typewriter up to the studio and tap away at it while I painted. I loved the sound of his two fingered clickety-click and … there I go again. I took a good pull off the pint. It was half gone already…. Where did it go? It won’t be long before I finish it at this rate… maybe make a few phone calls… Naw… just go get another pint… one more for back-up in case I need it. Go ahead and say it, “Sean… you love him, want him, don’t you?”
I heard Mickey’s voice as though he was in the studio. I could hear him plain as day quoting something from the Bible, “We are not wrestling with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers of darkness…” whatever. He isn’t religious but he knows the Bible. He says it is a book that would be better-off kept from the hands of religious people who are too apt to take it literally. It is read so much more clearly in lands where it is banned. Truthfully, I have never read it, nor do I care to, but this principality business makes sense to me. I’ve been wrestling with dope and booze since I was fourteen…
Shit…. I haven’t been home a day and I am drinking already.
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