“Yes, but when you drink it, it’s gradual. Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.”
As soon as the Traveling Medicine Show closed that first night of my prodigal return, Michael hurried me down the block to his apartment, as if there were urgent business to discuss. He lived right on Second Avenue, above a hardware store. His studio faced the back where an ailanthus tree had presumed to grow in the alley, forcing its way through the concrete and up past his window. Michael’s house was the most hallowed cell, the most beautiful, whimsical shrine in the whole of the material world, as far as I was concerned.
For months, while I was out on the street picketing, or stuck inside the freezing offices of the radical feminist paper Gutter, sitting on a metal folding chair and hammering out policy with the other women, I dreamed of this forbidden little bunker with its dark red corduroy bedspreads, like something a college boy’s mother might have sent, and the billowing white cotton curtains that hung down from the ceiling behind the two beds. The effect these closed curtains had was to make you feel, lying there, as if you were backstage. The beds were arranged in an L shape so that they might lend themselves to a variety of offbeat positions, but not to sleeping together all entwined and sweaty. Which was fine with me on a couple of counts. First of all, who slept? And then, even if you did crash there, who, crashing, wants to share a bed?
Crashing is a serious business. It is the other side. Speed whisks away revelation when at last it departs the body. The profoundest truth, the one you thought would change your life, evaporates as if it had all been just a shimmering, whimsical dream. You are a husk, and if you are wise, you do not stir for days. Your senses dulled to the point of uselessness, you might as well lie prostrate in your open grave-bed until life creeps back in, or, more likely, until you decide to do more speed. The apostates couldn’t take it; they tended to get suicidally depressed. Speed never affected me that way, or Michael either. What happens, if you allow yourself to surrender to it, which is what you have to do, is that you go into a mild coma. This was no big deal as far as I was concerned.
But of course, when the time arrived, I would want to come down by myself. At that point, you are feeling so fragile, you had better surround yourself with the familiar. When you come to, it’s as if you were sleeping in the womb and then had to bust out of the birth canal all over again. You look ugly as hell when you wake up, puffy, gray, dried spittle plastered over the entire side of your face.
The atmosphere in that small, hot room, with only one fan whirring in the window, bore down on us. It was charged with the unexpected, electric weight of intimacy. The drenched air, ringing with silence, wouldn’t let us speak or even, for a minute, move.
At last, as if someone had started the reel spinning again, Michael stripped, always the first thing he did. He made us both a rum and Coke, and then he took a bubble bath. I sat by the tub and blurted out a lot of inane things. The drug was starting to hit, and I was caught off guard. I had forgotten how liberating it was.
“The speed’s working,” Michael said.
“I’ll say it is,” I said. “I feel like a fool.”
“We’re all fools,” Michael said, lifting his leg out of the bubbles and soaping it the way starlets used to do in the movies. Finally, he got up and pulled a towel around his body, the front of which was covered with black hair. This made him seem human to me. I loved him even more for the humility his giant spirit had assumed stuck inside the lowly flesh of manhood.
Ah, speed, mother of hyperbole. The drug has left its mark, as if the machine of my mind lost a knob. Even now, I find it difficult to measure in degrees. When I am moved, the emotion wants to fly to its limit like an old horse making its way back to the barn. Back then, I was altogether blind to the subtleties of feeling and impatient with them.
I wanted to touch him. All those days and weeks and months I berated myself because I, a genuine feminist, I thought, could not stop wondering about the de facto harem I had left behind on the Upper East Side, of all places, and now here I was, overjoyed just to be watching Michael trail soap bubbles into the other room. He sat naked on his towel under the pin light, put his drink down on the table in front of him and then started to fiddle with the tuner on the radio. After a few minutes, he settled in and picked up Penthouse again, while I, recalling the order of our ritual, stayed behind and ran a bath for myself.
“Drink some of your rum, that’ll take the edge off,” Michael called out to me.
I lay back in the tub and drank the alcohol and felt myself float off, until I was hovering for an instant over the deserted street outside. Just a little out-of-body experience, nothing to get alarmed about, I told myself. Then I saw some writing form out of the cracks in the plaster on the bathroom wall. It said GET WELL over and over in big script, a very personal hand. This was not as odd a hallucination as it might sound. Remember, we were all preoccupied with healing ourselves. And we thought there was a better chance of achieving mental health if we became psychotic first than if we just stayed mired in our neuroses. Michael put it this way: “There is no cure for the common cold, but if you catch a cold and then go stand in the rain, you might get pneumonia, and that they know how to cure.”
“What are you doing in there?” Michael yelled.
“Oh, I—I don’t know,” I said, pulling myself back into space-time.
“That’s all right, you’ll mellow out. Drink some more rum,” Michael said.
He continued to look after me, taking responsibility for my state of mind, clocking it every so often to make sure I didn’t go out and not come back.
I flashed on a memory of my handsome father, Rayfield, and I, driving in silence up to his riding stable in the countryside where he boarded his horse. I am about nine or ten. We are absolutely silent the whole time. He is shifting gears in his little Karmann Ghia and simply delighting in the drive. It never occurs to him that maybe his daughter next to him is feeling one long howling pain of rejection. Is feeling that he has so little interest in her that she, like a parcel, like a Sunday burden, is being driven up to the stable and put on a horse because she is an obligation he is now too sober to avoid. Unless—and here is where the fruitful imagination takes over for good—unless this is it. This is, in fact, love. Silence is the ultimate communion, the evidence of complete understanding. Yes, silence, sharing the solitude, that’s what love is.
And now, freshly bathed and wide-awake, I sat silently with Michael on the other side of the pin light. If all women were looking for their father again, then I was set. They resembled each other: dark hair, strong black eyebrows and contrasting light eyes—a distinctly Byronic look. But the quality of Michael’s I was most grateful for on my first night back was that he was such a stick-in-the-mud. Michael was still there, a castled king in his corner. Unlike other men who would probably go somewhere else or take up with someone else in your absence, unlike this father of mine who married again so fast, Michael never moved off his spot, never left the block. He was strangely reliable. True, I might have to share him with another woman from time to time, but it was vastly preferable to being outright excluded. Handsome, winsome Michael was still there where I had left him. That was compelling; it was the crux of his appeal.
I was thinking this as we sat together, naked. The soft, long hair on Michael’s chest was glistening wet under the pin light. His body had matured beyond him, suggesting as it did a warm and nurturing kind of man. I felt like a little girl.
“Guess it was tough trying to make a living out there as a full-time activist. Orthodox feminists. Humph. Doesn’t pay very well, does it?” Michael asked.
“Michael, don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not, I’m really not. But I could’ve told you that wasn’t for you. You have to find some other way.”
“What do you mean ‘not for me’? Because I like sex too much, is that what you mean?”
“Something like that. Listen, they’re repressive. The way I see it, they want to turn things back, put more distance between the sexes.”
“You