Continued from last issue...



After five years in Mexico I had returned to New York to visit friends. I was walking on Bleeker Street on my way to meet a friend at his apartment at the Atrium, an upscale apartment complex that had once been a welfare hotel. A large truck pulled over and screeched to a stop next to me. Henry jumped out of the driver’s side of the truck. I was glad to see him as we had lost touch in the three years since he visited me in Mexico. He was working for a piano moving company and was partners in a limo business. While his partner was driving the limo he was moving pianos, sometimes crawling up stairs on his hands and knees with a baby grand strapped to his back. He was trying to put together a down payment on another limo. He sort of rushed through this news as if it was of no importance.

“I need to talk to you about something,” he said. “Do you have time?” I told him I was leaving the next day. We agreed to meet at Wo Hop’s in Chinatown at eight.

* * * * *

As expected the restaurant was nearly empty. Wo Hop’s was packed from 3am to dawn. We ordered a couple of beers and settled in. Henry stared out Wo Hop’s window at the busy Chinatown street. After a while he looked directly at me and started to talk.

“Do you remember what I told you about my father, how he was in the Special Forces?” I told him I remembered.

“My aunt and my mother sat me down in the kitchen and told me that my father had made it all up. He was in the army for a year; I don’t know where he was those other years. He was never in the Special Forces. And the martial arts master...” Henry reached into his back pocket and pulled out a paperback book.

“This is who my master is,” he said holding up the book. I recognized it as one of the Destroyer novels, a series about Chiun, an old Korean master who trades his martial skills as an assassin for money to support a village of orphans. His student Remo, whom he refers to as “poor white dough” is put through rigorous training to compensate for his inferior whiteness. Very funny, satirical writing, lampooning action novels.

“I can do everything Remo can do in that book, all of it.” He quickly went on to further prove that his father was not the master he claimed to be. “Do you know that Karim knocked him down five times fighting out in front of the Red Pool Bar before my father took him down?” Henry asked rhetorically.

“How old is your father?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” answered Henry.

He took a couple breaths, then continued.

“Remember the radio, the bathtub,” he asked, holding his hand as if dangling something, “the drainpipe...”

I nodded yes.

“To get even with him for all of that I slept with all his girlfriends. I never missed one.” He went on.

“The last one, Julie was her name; she told me that my father and my uncle got it on together. She says she watched my father give my uncle Ernie a blowjob. My father is a homo.”

* * * * *

A month after my return to Mexico Henry came to visit again. He still needed to talk about his father. I had been a good counselor during my eight years working with kids but on that day in Wo Hop’s I had been at a total loss as to what I could say to Henry about his father. I did say that I thought Henry was being overly critical about his father’s fight with Karim, a 25-year-old kick boxer/street fighter. I also knew that Henry was not homophobic so a lecture on the rights of people to put their genitals wherever they wanted was neither appropriate nor necessary. I had had a month to think about Henry’s problem and still did not know what I could say that would make him feel better. Maybe he had gotten over it by now, I thought, as we climbed to the upstairs terrace of Susan Porter Smith’s house where I had been living while she was in China taking pictures.

What would Susan say to Henry? Probably, “Get over it.” By now maybe he had gotten over it.

“I’m going to pound him senseless his next birthday,” Henry said as he sat down. “I’ve been going light on him for a while, because of his age and he’s my father. But that’s over.”

The doorbell rang, right at that moment. I trotted down the stairs, opened the door, and there stood the most insane and profane man I have ever known. Hal Bennett.

Hal was a published writer who wrote sometimes beautiful, sometimes bizarre, and sometimes funny stories about black people living in the south. He hadn’t had anything published in some time but still had an agent at William Morris Agency who kept hoping he would write something that made sense. Hal could only write nude while lying widthwise across his bed with his typewriter on the floor. He often complained of headaches. He liked riding high on the top of the garbage trucks drinking beer with the garbage men. He could be as eloquent in speech as he was in letters. He once sold three people a fifty percent interest in his next book. Hal pushed past me and asked, “Is Susan home?”

“No, she’s in China,” I answered.
“I hate Asians,” he said. “I was stationed in Japan after the war. The Japs used to fill the coffee pot from the toilet when they made coffee for us.”

“Can you blame them?” I asked.
“Fuck you, they started it.”

* * * * *

Hal used to like to read for Susan and a couple other people at her house. He was a wonderful reader. He mostly read from his published works. His newer work was strange, even for Hal. I remember from the last time he read only crows, a mental institution and a lot of masturbation.

I introduced Hal to Henry. I could see Hal was impressed by Henry’s courtesy and soft spoken manner and of course his size. Henry was equally impressed that he was meeting a published writer. Hal read one of his short stories, deciding against the newer work he had come to read.

“...and the congregation came to their feet and began to shout—do you know what it is to shout Henry?” And Hal began to dance with his arms raised, praising the Lord. Henry sat in rapt attention as Hal read in his mellow Virginia accent rolling his words in molasses and butter.

After Hal’s reading Henry stood up and shook Hal’s hand and thanked him”.

“So Henry,” I said, “would you like to tell Hal about your father?”

* * * * *

I went up on the roof to give Henry a chance to tell his story. When I came down Hal was talking about how a black man, feeling he had nothing to offer that a son would be proud of, might make things up. Hal then summed up what they had covered so far. According to Hal the greatest warriors of the past, the Romans, the Spartans, Samurais, had all been gay. Henry looked skeptical.

Hal continued, “Now Henry, I don’t know if one man performing oral sex on another man at the request of a woman for the purpose of her sexual excitement qualifies as a homosexual act. The fact that the two men were brothers would of course add to the excitement for her.”

A frown of skepticism still on his face, Henry thought about this for a moment and then burst into laughter.

“You are a fine man Henry, and a strong man. And I believe much of what is good and strong about you is due to your father, unsound as his methods were.”

* * * * *

Henry left Mexico determined to make peace with his father. Once again we both moved a lot and have once again lost touch. I am sure Henry has a string of limos or his own piano moving company by now. I wonder if he and his father are still slugging it out in the garage on his father’s birthdays. I hope not, by now we are all too old for that.