So what are you going to do?

Wilbur dialed into the conference number that Giles had given him. Some Minneapolis area code he didn’t recognize. Giles had insisted, don’t use the toll number if calling from your cellphone because the long distance is free anyway. Wilbur had to look up the eight-digit password, and wished he had some way to memorize it. Like Giles-is-a-big-fat-jerk converted to some numeric code. But yes, after three tries that had Wilbur grinding his teeth even before Giles opened his pompous mouth, he got in.

Egbert was already on the line from Dallas. Yes, guys, I’m sorry I’m late, Wilbur heard himself saying. Traffic was super bad driving in from Lowell on the Mass Pike. Oh, that’s all right, Wilbur, he heard Giles sermonize. Our time isn’t as valuable as yours.

Go screw yourself, you sanctimonious prig, Wilbur thought – oh, if only people could say what we really think, and get away with it! Giles launched into his 25-minute soliloquy about Mother and Dad and their nursing homes in Cleveland. How well they were doing. So well, Wilbur thought – they must be ready to go out and buy a house and live independently again. Even if Mother was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s and Dad’s only physical capability was lifting his right arm off the wheelchair.

“If only Mother wasn’t such a control freak,” Wilbur actually heard Giles say, actually saying that – “we could have them live in a single nursing home. But she makes Dad’s life miserable, and we can’t have that. They have only a limited amount of time left to them, and we just can't have them living together.”

“Giles,” Egbert said at long last, “I really think we need to revisit that decision. Not a good idea. They’ve been married sixty years, and Dad’s been begging me to get them back together.”

“No, there’s no way, Egbert,” Giles said, launching into another 15-minute diatribe on the absolute necessity of keeping the parents apart, finally ending, “and in summary, I’d just like to add –“ which gave Wilbur and Egbert another ten minutes of listening to His Grandiose Pomposity pontificate about absolutely nothing new at all.

“If I may add,” Wilbur said, after fifty-five minutes of saying no more than seven or eight words altogether, “I agree with Egbert –“

“Excuse me, Wilbur,” Giles said, “you interrupted me. Why must you be such a control freak, just like Mother?”

Alphabetical order

A is for the anexoria I’ve endured so that I could be as thin as you expected me to be. B is for the bulimia I suffered so that I was good enough. And I suffered through the big C – skin, that is – so that we could go to the beach every time you wanted to go. But D came between us when you decided that you wanted a divorce so that you could pursue E – the nubile Eileen – followed by your F, the blonde Francie with the G-spot and those breasts. That’s H for hooters.

J is for the johns I had to hire during the rough patches when I couldn’t make ends meet, slinking in and out of rooms in that state – K for Kentucky, feeling like a loser with a big fat L. But finally I met my savoir – M for Montgomery, who took me to N for New York, O for Ohio, and P for Pennsylvania. But Q is for the inner quest that I had to seek to realize that I wanted another life …

R is for my rebellion against the two men, one who left and the other I left, so that I could life – S to save myself, T for the tenacity when I finally lived on my own. U is how these men, and my family and friends, underestimated me, and V is for the victory I finally achieved – X for extinguishing my foes, Y for yearning to have a better life, and Z – for reaching the end of my story.

Until the end of my story, there was no I. But now there is, and I stand on my own.

A woman at the urinal

“I had a dream, Mama,” Jerry found himself saying to the comatose woman with the feeding tube and the oxygen mask. “I dreamt that Sylvia swooped down on her broom from Toronto and took you back there to a nursing home she dumped you in. And never visited you again.”

Jerry put his hand on his mother’s wrist, and for a second, thought he felt an impulse from her. But no, just his imagination. He’d also dreamed that Sylvia had walked into the men’s room and peed in the urinal – just like a man, instead of sitting down on the toilet like a lady. Sylvia. He hated his lawyer sister. She always had an argument up her sleeve to get whatever it was that she wanted. What a jerk.

“Well, she won’t get what she wants, Mother,” Jerry said. “I’m sorry about the fall, I’m sorry about going out on Saturday nights without telling you. If you recover, I promise I’ll be a good boy. I promise I’ll be nice.”

At that moment, Nurse Gertler came into the room. “All right, Mr. Lindstrom, visiting hours are over. My goodness, you look a fright, almost as white as your mother. Now go home, Mr. Lindstrom, and please get some rest. You can’t be getting sick yourself.”

“How can I rest, knowing that she’s in here like this?”

“She won’t be waking up tonight, Mr. Lindstrom. You might as well go home.”

He pressed his hand onto hers. “All right. Mama, I’m going –“ he said, and then he felt the hand push back against his. “Nurse Gertler, she pressed my hand –“

And then he saw the bells and whistles go off the E.C.G., her heart began to race, she began to breathe harder, Nurse Gertler called for more nurses, doctors came into the room, Jerry didn’t know what was happening – and then he became dizzy and saw blackness encroach into his vision, and all was a swirling, breathless mass of confusion until finally he succumbed to the blackness.

What I never expected

He made sure that the door to the basement stairs was firmly shut before he picked up the telephone and dialed out. Two minutes later, Jerry had dispensed with the small talk and got down to business.

“Mr. Gagner, I’ve decided to accept your offer,” Jerry said, “and I’d like to start as soon as I can.”

“I’m delighted, young man, and I know you’ll enjoy working for Balm Technologies. We have exactly the right environment for someone of your skill set. I will alert Ms. Robinson and she will contact you.”

Jerry’s heart raced at a hundred per minute and he could hear his pulse pounding in his ear drums. He looked up the staircase. The door was still shut. Mr. Gagner continued.

“I’ll have Ms. Robinson contact you about the necessary paperwork, and Ms. Meyer will contact you about your relocation options. Where do you think you will live? There are many choices in this area.”

Jerry had thought about it long and hard, and on the trip out there, had settled on one specific neighborhood. But he didn’t want to risk getting fired before starting the job, so he lied – but only by a hill.

“I’m going to live in the city,” he said, and then he hedged a little, “somewhere in the vicinity of Noe Valley.”

Jerry heard a click on the other end of the line.

“Mr. Gagner, are you still there?”

“Yes, Jerry, of course I’m still here. Noe Valley is a wonderful neighborhood in San Francisco. I’m sure you’ll be very happy.”

The basement door opened and down the stairs stomped Mother. She threw a file of papers onto his bed, tears streaming down her face, her motions all jagged and sharp. Jerry covered the mouthpiece of his extension and just as he was about to speak –

“You can take your medical records with you, you ungrateful spoiled child,” his mother said, “and don’t expect to ever come back here again. And you owe me rent for the past six months, and you can feed yourself from now on until you leave.”

Mother turned around and stomped back up the stairs, but when she reached the top, she tripped and fell backward. Her hips first hit a stair half way, and then her head smashed into the railing, and then her legs wrapped around a post, and she came to a stop at the bottom of the staircase, hitting her face against the bare floor. Blood oozed out of her teeth and she stared up at him with a wild, blank expression.

Jerry’s blood curdled and he felt his stomach go empty. But he took his hand off the phone's mouthpiece.

“Mr. Gagner, I’m afraid I need to get off the phone,” he heard some remote part of his brain saying, without knowing where it was coming from. “Thank you for your call. I’ll be in touch with both Ms. Robinson and Ms. Meyer. Goodbye.”

Believe it or not ...

Jerry looked out of the corner of his eye. Mother sat in her high-backed chair, snoring away like a saw on a rotten old tree. The television blared her favorite re-run, some insipid 1972 episode of The Lawrence Welk Show. Jerry felt the window of opportunity screaming at him. Hurry up and take the plunge, old boy, she’ll wake up with a regurgitated snort at the next commercial break when Madge is hocking her Palmolive nonsense. Jerry could taste the sweet smell of a raucous Saturday night on the town with the boys.

Thank the Lord and Mother’s compulsive neatness that Jerry was in his socks and could tiptoe quietly out of the room and down the stairs to the basement. He put on his best disco wear. He’d take the train into Manhattan and meet the boys at the Stonewall. Of course she’d wake up some time before he made it home, but who cared? It was easier asking for forgiveness than for permission.

After dressing he looked at himself in the mirror. A rust red leisure suit, a pale blue silk shirt with a fabulous wide collar, and black shoes with 2-inch heels. He put on his gold chains. Why, he’d never looked better. Three months in his mother’s prison and, finally, his back had healed enough that the doctor said he could go out. Maybe the boys would have some weed or Quaaludes for him ... now that’d be one hell of a trip.

He took the shoes off. Going up the stairs, he’d make too much noise in these shoes. He’d put them back on when he got to the door. So he tiptoed up the stairs and, turning the corner after he reached the top, he stared her in the face.

She had on her pointy glasses and made a sugar bowl out of her body – both hands on hips, her mouth two thin lines pulled down on both sides, spider veins on the sides of her nose. She really needed to stop drinking so much scotch. And the pink bathrobe from the ‘50s and those bunny rabbit slippers. Jerry would rather face the Manson gang than this apparition.

“Where in the name of Jesus H. Chris do you think you’re going?” Mother said. “You march right back downstairs and take that hippie outfit off and put something normal on.”

“Mother, I’m 25 years old,” Jerry said. “I’m only going into the city to spend an evening with the boys.”

“You spend way too much time with ‘the boys.’ Didn’t anyone ever tell you, it’s not healthy to spend so much time with men?”

My car

They drove up to the Larchmont house. The rhododendrons had half a dozen mounds of clippings on the grass in front fo them. Dad must’ve come over to trim the bushes and forgotten to clean them up.

“Your damned father,” Jerry’s mother said as she put the gear into park. “He never cleans up after himself when he comes over here to do something for me. If I’ve told him once, I’ll tell him again, the reason I kicked him out is he’s a lazy good for nothing. Just like his own damned father.”

Jerry groaned and felt the stifling air in the car. Mother would never allow the air conditioning in her ten-year old Impala, and of course it had black leather seats and of course it was August in New York. And of course she wouldn’t allow Jerry to open the windows, might mess up her blue-rinse body wave.

“Now you just stay there,” she ordered. “No sense in you hurting yourself again. Can’t you listen? I said don’t move. Doctor said complete rest, four weeks. Do you hear me?”

Jerry sighed and looked out the window. The house was the same as always. Boring, boring, boring. Nothing to do here but lie in his bedroom in that tiny single bed they’d gotten for him when he was seven. And stare out the window. And avoid Mrs. Molinsky, who’d try to get him to call her daughter Joan out on a date. Jerry hated Joan. She had a nose that could open a coke bottle and smelled of mothballs whenever she wore a dress, one of those off-white chiffon things with a hoop skirt.

His mother opened the car door and Jerry turned around to get out. He felt a sharp jab of pain from his ass up to his neck, but not as bad as he thought it’d be.

“I can get out on my own steam, Mother,” he said, putting out his arm to her. “Just give me a pull, will you?”

“You stay there. I’m going to get your grandfather’s walker out of the closet.”

Not that closet – Magee’s closet was less disorganized.

What I eat

Jerry used his forearms as a lever to pull himself up in the bed. But basic physiology worked against him, however, and no matter how hard he prayed, the forearms were connected to the elbow were connected to the biceps were connected to the shoulders were connected to the shoulder blades were connected to the back. The stitched-up muscles in his back seized up and Jerry felt the two sides of stitched muscles rub up against each other and lightning-white nerves zap him in the middle all the way up his neck and the back of his head.

Jerry had to remember, breathe through the pain, just like Nurse Gertler had told him. He relaxed into the sheets and, as his nerves began to quiet down, felt the soft mattress under his backside. Like sinking into a pillow, the one thing this Bronx hospital did pretty well.

And then he tasted the bile peek its way up from his throat, a reminder of that lunch he’d eaten. Meatloaf, apple sauce, chicken noodle soup, and under-toasted Wonder bread. The taste of bland had his taste buds crying out for salt or cayenne. If he had to be in a hospital, why couldn’t it be a Mexican or Chinese one? And why was hospital food always beige, tan, or taupe? Just as bland to look at as to taste.

As he reached in front of him for his book (“The Ten Best Anxiety Management Techniques”) which Mother had brought him to read – from one of the boxes he’d left in her Larchmont basement – he heard the familiar thomp-chump of his mother’s Oxford orthopedics. She stopped at the room’s entrance and pursed her lips, which only made her chin jut out even further than usual.

“Son,” she said, putting her hands on her hips in teapot formation, “your hospital gown is off your shoulders. You’ve lifted yourself up again. Haven’t I told you and told you, let the nurses do that? I can see your chest and that’s just not proper. Just not proper.”

“Knock it off, Mother,” Jerry said, fingering the soft matte finish of his book. “I have to do this some time, and the nurses don’t come by just for that. What’s up?”

“Your father has a message for you,” she said, rolling her eyes at the mention of Jerry Sr., “which I suppose I must give you. He’s moved you out of your old apartment in that terrible neighborhood.”

Mother reserved her heaviest emphasis for the word terrible, courtesy of five years of instruction with Lee Strasberg, or so she once said.

“Oh, yeah? And where am I supposed to live now?”

“You’re coming home with me when you leave the hospital. I’m setting you up in the basement.”

That sound

Jerry tried to open his eyes but couldn’t. He had the faint taste of silver shavings in the crevices between his teeth and cheek. And he smelled feces, the kind when you’ve sat on the toilet twenty minutes after a diarrhea attack. Had he voided? And had the fillings leaked out of his teeth? He heard a faint beep in the distance, the kind always done in B flat that sounded like a circle, a little soft around the edges at the start and again at the end, all in the space of a half second. It repeated about once every second or two.. And he heard a shuffling sound, like a soft shoe dancer perhaps? Each shuffling sound became a little louder, and then softer, and then not at all. Then after a few minutes, he’d hear it again – softer, then a little louder like the approaching steps of a Depression-era hobo, then softer again. And a third time, while all along he heard that blond little circle beep, every one to two seconds, racing faster at times but slowing down, only to race again.

After an infinity of trying to open his eyes, but failing, he gave up. He felt a rough talon of claws –he couldn’t count how many, probably three or four, grip his left wrist. Or was it the right? He couldn’t tell, but it gripped him hard and then went up to his neck and gripped that, then the talon touched his face. Puffy like a profiterole, and then the claws touched his forward, and then flattened on his forehead. Jerry felt something cold on his forehead after this, and a wet dripping feeling that fell down into the corners of his eyes. Blood? Had the talons pierced his scalp?

But he didn’t think it could be blood. Jerry had a sense of the smell, a sharp odor like clam juice – no, what the juice of a lobster smelled like. Yes, that was it – but that wasn’t this smell. He couldn’t smell anything, not even his feces any longer. And what about hearing? He still heard that sound, the blond little circle beep. And then he felt his eyes fluttering.

Something white blasted itself into Jerry’s eyes and he shut them again, fluttering them open, and then shutting them when the pain raced from the front of his brain all the way to the back and Jerry cried out. He heard a groan like a train’s brakes screeching on the tracks, a call for help and then something new, entirely new, words from a voice that sounded familiar –

He couldn’t make out the words, but the soft melody of the woman’s alto lilting into him softened the blasting white sensation when he opened his eyes, and he opened his eyes for a longer flutter, then an even longer flutter, and finally altogether open, he saw white everywhere, no color, no black, just white, except for the woman with sloping shoulders and long hair and a jutting chin. That blond little circle beep slowed down while Jerry sensed the pain being released from his head, his body, and a sense of calm radiate from his chest to his head, to his arms, hands, and fingers, and to his legs, shins, feet, and toes.

I want

The elevator gears grinded in a high-pitched metallic screech that had Jerry clenching his jaw and grinding his teeth so hard, he could taste milky, jagged particles of calcium landing on his tongue. When the elevator reached his floor – the top in this converted Bowery warehouse , but of course – a musty, pungent smell like cat urine surrounded Jerry’s nostrils with its tendrils. The doors opened and Jerry walked out, and as ever, the tapestry of gray floors and brown doors, torn newspaper and banana peels, plastic drug vials and cigarette butts, used condoms and open jars of KY made his eyes burn.

“Screw this fire trap,” Jerry said. “Soon as I get a job, I’m out of here.”

Jerry walked to his door on the far left side of the hallway. Somehow the walls always seemed to converge toward nothing when he approached the door, hearing the clickety-clack of his steel boots on the tile floors. Jerry always lifted his feet when he walked these floors. Otherwise he’d scuffle and hear the sandy grounds of dirt collecting weekly, monthly, yearly. He turned the key in the lock, too close to the door frame, he usually pinched his thumb. It always hurt.

He opened the door and walked inside. But instead of feeling the vise-tight pressure in his head descend into something like placid calm, Jerry felt his head squeeze ever tighter against his brain. He repelled against the thought of sitting on that $195 sofa he’d gotten on Henry Street. He’d sink into the weak cushions, see yellow foam through the tears, and smell that same cat urine that made its way into the halls.

“One more week,” Jerry said, “I get the security system sales job, I get out of here.”

Jerry swung the door shut, dropped his satchel, thought about the new life. Out at 8, in by 7, Chinese take-out and “Seinfeld” re-runs, a quick whack-off before bed, new furniture, spaghetti and meatballs, shampoo and conditioner. All those routines he couldn’t do now, no money no how.

And then he felt a blinding pain between his shoulders, every muscle being squeezed in his back, and the pain spread to his stomach, his chest, his lungs, and he fell to the floor, turning his head around just before the blackness overtook him. The man in the beige overcoat and five-day beard leaned his hairy-knuckled hands down, just grazing Jerry’s nostrils with that cat urine scent, and grabbed the satchel.

Allow me to introduce myself

Friday afternoon, the wind kicked up along Commercial Street, and the rainbow, bear, and breast cancer flags blew in a fierce easterly pattern. The men of Provincetown’s Bear Week sauntered up the street toward the Boatslip’s tea dance, the muscle-bound bodybuilders with their barbed wire bicep tattoos, army boots, and tit clamps and the chubbettes in their assless leather pants and pink sparkle vests.

I stood on the steps of the post office. I’d just mailed off thirty postcards to friends and family, as I’ve done for more than twenty years on vacations. I wonder if any of them know that I always write exactly the same thing on each postcard – except, of course, for the address and the salutation. And some people rate “Love, Jim” while others, not yet well known, rate only “Fondly.” I don’t think they know this. But now you do.

Last time I’d come to Provincetown, I was forty and just like any of the boys, engaged in a twenty-four hour quest for sex, sex, sex with stranger, stranger, stranger. But that was ten years ago and, safely ensconced in a same-sex marriage with another fifty year old, I found the whole routine rather tiresome. I sighed and looked up at the sky, wishing I’d stayed back at the house to read my book (“The 10 Best Anxiety Management Techniques”) under a tree with Peter and James, my Philadelphia friends. I don’t think my friends knew I’d reached the point in my life when I’d rather read a book than cruise for random sex. I don’t think they knew that I was getting close to preferring a good solid bowel movement to random sex. But now you do.

So I gave myself into the luxury of walking back toward the rental house, turning my back to the boys on their way to the Boatslip, telling myself that I had an as-happy-as-possible marriage, my great-grandparents’ crystal chandelier in the dining room, a financial adviser who smiled when he saw me, and both parents in nursing homes. But I couldn’t control that damned anxiety (still on Chapter One of that anxiety book), and that wind was powerful fierce.

Last day in Provincetown, I’d be flying across Cape Cod in one of those puddle jumpers in just fifteen hours. And with this wind, we’d be bouncing from cloud to cloud, probably crashing into the water like John F. Kennedy Jr. And I wouldn’t even get to do my Daily Write session. Major bummer, if the plane crashed. Most people don’t know I go crazy with turbulence. But now you do.