The Good Guys

At Nick Fabian’sfuneral I sat in the pew beside my best friend, Michael Cleveland, and listened to him telling me that he had been about to kill himself when I had called him with the news that Tony was dead. Michael had explained it. He explained it all the way back to my house.

“It was like he’d done it so I didn’t have to. Like it was just too much death. He had taken my spot, and because he couldn’t go on, I had to. Or…” Michael looked doubtful about what he was saying, “Because he had given his life, I didn’t have to. And I know that sounds stupid… But…. it’s how I feel. When you told me about Tony,” Michael looked at the empty spot on the floor where Tony’s shiny casket had been, “I felt lighter. Not happier. But lighter. Like the weight had been lifted. It’s so strange.”

And I know I’m not one of the good guys because I thought how right now there was a large and long funeral procession for a nineteen year old football player who had succumbed to depression and killed himself, and I didn’t give a fuck because I really kind of hated him, and I would see him die a thousand times to save Michael Cleveland, and Michael was standing there next to me in his old school sports jacket that was a little too big, with his rumpled curly hair, and he said, “We’re getting late. I mean. The burial’s probably about to start. They must be at the cemetery. Are you ready to go?”

And I said, and my voice felt louder than I’d meant it, “Neither one of us liked him, we paid our respects. He’s dead. Let’s go home. Anything else would be…” What would my father say? “Pretentious.”

Michael drove us home, to his house, where he stayed with his Dad. My home with the shaded back yard where light glowed shiny through the broad leaves, and the den was beautiful and dimly dark in the afternoon would never be my home because it was full of my parents and their drama. The bleak two story Michael lived in with his father was full of space and housed by two barely connected bachelors, and so that bland space made it free. We went there.

“You thirsty?” he said.

“I am. A little.”

“But he didn’t serve because I knew where everything was. I got the water. He said, “Could you get me one too? While I go get chips.”

He said, “You wanna get high?”

I said, “Not especially, not now.”

He said, “Me neither.”

With our drinks and chips, we went upstairs.

He had a west window, and it looked over the backyard that didn’t have enough trees. And I remember his room was so clean that day.

“I felt like,” Michael said, “and this is stupid, “that I could clean my room today, have the cleanest room in honor of someone who couldn’t clean it anymore. You know?”

Michael shut the door and took off his jacket. He is long and tall and awkward, his back is long in that long white shirt. He put the blazer on a hook and then loosened his tie. He kicked off his shoes.

“I promised to never wear a blazer and tie again,” I said, draping my jacket over the chair, and also taking my tie off. Placing one and then the other Florsheim under the desk.

Michael turned to me, half smiling.

“Let’s try to keep those promises from now on.”

It was early summer, and Michael took off his dress shirt. He began to unbutton it, and he had on a wifebeater underneath. I thought what a sexy name for it, and why was it sexy? Beating your wife wasn’t sexy. And while my mind was on that path, I took off my shirt. But I never wore an undershirt and didn’t even look very good without a shirt on. Michael looked at me. Now, he took off his wifebeater and we stood there looking unimpressive, pudgy and too think, ungainly, his hair tousled, mine a little nappy, both of us in front of each other.

And then I took off my pants, and I took off my underwear and slipped off my socks. Michael undressed quickly. He came to me, suddenly, and I pulled his face to me, I kissed him and thrust my fingers into his thick hair. Our faces were fused together and then I pulled him to the bed. We tangled together, holding to each other, touching each other as much as we could, rolling back and forth so now the sun was hot on his back, now on mine, now his hands were all over me, now mine on his. We had to be together. We always should have been. As I held him in my arms and his head traveled down my body, as my fingers threaded through his thick curly hair, and I thrilled to the touch of his mouth I nearly wept for the memory of when he was away from me, when he was in the asylum and when he had gone off to Whittier, and when he was lost himself, and in all the nineteen years when I had felt no romantic way for anyone, and in the last four years when I had not known that We needed to be together in every way, possible, that I would give anything to keep him, and that he would do the same for me. So that afternoon, while across town Tony Fabian was being buried and others were weeping, my hands opened and closed and my legs lifted, and my hands reach town to stroke his hair as my thighs closed around him, and I cried out and my mouth was closed with his wet kiss, as I have myself to Michael Cleveland and he gave himself to me.

As the afternoon turned to evening we lay naked, face to face on his bed and touched each other lazily

“Did you plan this?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, honest. “When you told me you almost died, when you told me that you could be right there where Tony was and gone from me, I knew I wanted you the opposite. As close as you could be to me. That’s all I knew.”

I looked on his red lips, the dark soft eyelashes, the last of the sun on his thick hair, before speaking again.

“That’s all I know.”

He looked on me, his mouth half open. Michael had been fat, and some of that was on him so he was long and tall, but with large thighs, with a boy’s body growing to a man’s, his thick thighs, his long long legs, took me in and he pulled me to him and kissed me deeply. He placed his head in my chest.

“This is what we are now,” he said. “This is us.”