Anything But Sympathy

SPOT

When I first moved from New York to Plantation, Florida at the start of the Reagan administration in January 1981, I needed to get a new checking account.

In New York I'd used Citibank, basically because I believed in the Big Bank Theory and Citibank was everywhere. Suzanne, my ex-girlfriend, who was by then living with her girlfriend Jennifer in a co-op in Park Slope and working as a $50,000-a-year executive at the New York City Transit Authority, called Citibank Shittybank because she said it discriminated against gay people. Citibank wouldn't give Suzanne and Jennifer a mortgage.

These were the days before interstate banking. I decided to get an account at the Florida National Bank because the name sounded official and it seemed like it was a big bank. Also, after thirty years of living in New York, I wanted an account with a bank that had Florida in its name; this would confirm to me and to anyone who received my checks that I was indeed living in the Sunshine State.

The Florida National Bank was then the creature of Ed Ball, "the uncrowned king of Florida," who for decades had controlled the Florida legislature. Ed Ball lived on the top floor of the poshest hotel in Jacksonville and every evening at 5 p.m., he would raise his cocktail glass into the air with the toast, "Confusion to the enemy!" -- even when he was alone.

Ed Ball had gotten hold of the bank holding company, along with the St. Joe Paper Company that owned much of Florida's Panhandle, by dint of his being the brother-in-law of Alfred DuPont. DuPont had come to Florida with his young wife Jessie Ball and her even younger brother Ed. DuPont was either an invalid or stupid, and so Ed Ball controlled his money.

Alfred DuPont died young. Jessie, childless, died soon after. Then Ed Ball inherited everything and controlled Florida and its malapportioned legislature dominated by rural Panhandle politicians called porkchoppers.

In August 1986, after I'd moved back to New York for the summers, I was given a lift from Brooklyn to Manhattan by some DuPonts who were friends of Suzanne and Jennifer, who'd thrown a party in her Brooklyn apartment to celebrate the appearance on TV (channel 5, WNEW, now WNYW, owned by Fox) of a one-hour film drama for which Jennifer had written the screenplay. The director was Jennifer's brother-in-law, now ex-brother-in-law, a hotshot young director of commercials and music videos. The show starred the old vaudevillean Sally DeMay and, as her grandson, a handsome, hook-nosed boy who later died of AIDS.

Years before, in November 1979, I had met Sally DeMay at the office of the producers of the David Susskind TV talk show in New York. She and I were part of a group being interviewed for a panel of short people. I was there because of my publisher's publicist, Eileen Something. Eileen was famous that year because she gave away the nicest tote bags at the American Booksellers Association convention in Los Angeles, which had been overshadowed by the death in a plane crash of many publishing notables, including the fiction editor of Playboy, an Asian-American woman who had rejected my editor's attempts to sell her the first serial rights to two of the stories in my book.

Eileen knew I was short, but it turned out I wasn't short enough for David Susskind's show because at the interview -- unlike Sally DeMay -- I had a hard time coming up with anecdotes about the problems of being short. I'm 5'5".

Sally DeMay was 4'11", a feisty, obnoxious old trouper. She had worked with Mickey Rooney and gave me her unsolicited opinion that while Mickey may have been a shrimp, he was "a giant in the Business" -- the Business being the one that there's no business like, the Business which we are all in whether we know it or not.

I knew Suzanne and Jennifer's friends only as Phil and Buffy, and I was grateful for their offer of a ride home to Manhattan after we saw the TV show, which received a third prize award at a film festival in Houston. Later Jennifer, who had gone to Dartmouth with Buffy, told me that Phil and Buffy never introduced themselves using their last name because they were DuPonts.

"So what's the big deal?" I asked Jennifer. "That they're DuPonts?"

Jennifer -- who in 1994 would hire me to write a humor column for Connecticut Online, where she was editor -- told me, "Being introduced as DuPonts always puts them on the spot."

It must be hard having such a name, which is perhaps why Alfred DuPont let Ed Ball run his paper mills, his railroad, and the Florida National Bank. Ed Ball, who ended up living to 98 without ever marrying, rarely let himself get put on the spot.

OPTS

So I walked into the Florida National Bank branch at the corner of University Drive and Peters Road in Plantation and wrote my name down on their signup sheet. A young blond guy wearing a blue shirt or some color shirt and tie but no jacket took me to his desk away from where the tellers stood behind their counter. I filled out the necessary forms to get a plain vanilla checking account, no options, and then the guy went away to get something and I started reading what was on the yellow legal pad in front of him.

I could always read upside-down amazingly well. In grade school I astounded my friends with how fast I could read The Daily News upside-down. It was a skill similar to one of my father's claims to fame, which was that you could give him any word and he could almost immediately say it backwards. For example, if you said "DuPont," my father would say "Tnop Ud."

Back in his time, my father used to tell me, there was an entertainer with this ability who styled himself Mr. Backwards, who made a living performing feats of backward-speak. When I was in the MFA program at Brooklyn College, this inspired me to write a story about Mr. Backwards and his strained relationships with his lesbian daughter Anna and his drug addict son Otto, a story that was rejected about a zillion times by literary magazines before I threw it away, saving for a future story only the sentence, "In America you can get anything but sympathy."

The blond bank guy had a neat, feminine handwriting

-- right off I knew he was gay -- and he was writing what appeared to be a letter to a friend or relative (cousin?) named Barbara who was in the military. It was a chatty note, telling Barbara about this costume party he'd gone to with her brother Matt where they dressed up as Dr. Frank N. Furter and his assistant from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

I'd never seen "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" except in the brief excerpt shown in the movie "Fame" where the Puerto Rican guy takes the blond girl (played by Maureen Teefy, an actress I never saw in any other movie -- I once read an interview with her in which she said her parents were fundamentalist Christians who wouldn't go see "Fame" because it was immoral) to a midnight showing and the cult film's audience did their usual routine, throwing rice at the wedding scene, saying "Nice basket, Brad," etc.

When the blond bank guy -- who actually was sort of cute, like the young Mickey Rooney -- came back with my paperwork, he asked me if I wanted to have the option of getting an ATM card which would be good at their Tillie the Alltime Teller machines. I liked the drawing of Tillie, a blonde smiling young woman in a frilly dress, so I opted for the ATM card. In the fall, when I got my first credit card, from First Atlanta Bank, there was also a Tillie the Alltime Teller logo on the back of it, enabling me to make cash advances with my Visa. Also in the fall of 1981, after Ed Ball finally croaked, the Wall Street Journal reported that Chemical Bank in New York had bought 5% of the Florida National Bank holding company in an agreement that the two companies would merge when interstate banking became legal.

Interstate banking did become legal, but Chemical Bank and Florida National Bank never merged. Instead, the Florida National Bank branch in Plantation where I once had an account is now a branch of First Union, and Chemical merged first with Manufacturers Hanover -- which my father, whose letters of credit to a Kowloon clothing factory I used to type up, called "Manny Hanny" -- and ultimately with Chase Manhattan, which held one of my student loans.

Even though Chemical was the acquiring bank, the new bank took the Chase Manhattan name. Today there are no banks named Florida National or Chemical. When lots of money is involved, the expected rarely happens.

A year after I opened my account at Florida National Bank, I met Matt, the brother of Barbara in the bank guy's letter, and fell in love with him. It wasn't till years after that, long after I'd lost touch with Matt -- Matt's option, not mine -- that I connected him with the letter in the Florida National Bank.

TOPS

I taught at a community college in South Florida, in an English Department where the department head and the division director, both former Chicago high school teachers, wrote the textbook that we used in the first composition course. It was called You Can Write, with the emphasis on the Can, as if they were trying to convince the students they weren't illiterates. The book was filled with long admonitions telling students what not to do and lots of examples of errors they should avoid. I suspect the text reflected the authors' conviction that writing well was largely a matter of avoiding mistakes, mistakes such as letting parenthetical remarks interrupt the flow of a sentence or using an awkward phrase like "by dint of his being the brother-in-law of Alfred DuPont."

You Can Write also made a fetish of the distinction between facts and inferences, facts being statements that can be proven true or false, inferences being statements that cannot. Inferences were to be used (oops, I used the passive voice, a You Can Write no-no) as the topic sentences of paragraphs or as the thesis statements of the neat, five-paragraph essays that were endlessly modeled (oops again) in the text.

"Homosexuals are very prominent in Fort Lauderdale," was the topic sentence of the paragraph of Matt's first assignment. It was flawless writing, with all the supporting sentences being facts that provided proof details of his major inference. The only criticism I could think of to write was next to prominent: "Word Choice?"

Matt was seventeen, actually a student in the high school across the street from the community college campus who was so bright he was taking college courses for his senior year. He had a baby face, with slightly puffy cheeks, and red hair and freckles; he was lanky and when he came up to me for our first conference, I could tell he didn't yet shave.

All that spring semester of 1982 Matt would be hanging around the lobby of the building where my office was. This was not unusual, as there were comfortable chairs and a table out there for students. But I began to have a relationship with Matt in my mind. Whenever I caught his glance in class, he would lift his eyebrows and smile, causing me to wrinkle my brow as well. This was a gesture that was fairly new to me.

Matt usually wore worn jeans and a t-shirt and no socks, and seeing his sockless feet made me recall a sentence I read in the late 1960s in Time Magazine, in an article about sockless college students: some girl in the Ivy League said, "Hairs on the ankle look provocative."

I disagreed with this statement. Anyway, I assumed that Matt dressed like a schlump -- the only top with buttons he had was a Sears mechanic's shirt, with "Sears" written in script across the pocket -- because he came from a wealthy family and didn't care about clothes in the way that only rich people can afford not to care. This turned out not to be the case.

Matt came to campus by bicycle, for he lived nearby, and I sometimes would see him pedaling furiously or languidly -- I couldn't tell which -- on his way home while I was driving to my rented condominium.

On campus, Matt always seemed to be around when I wanted to talk to someone. When I got a postcard from my publisher telling me that Library Journal would review my new book of short stories as "highly recommended," Matt was the first person I saw that I could share the good news with. An exquisite writer, he was tops in my class, and I gave his essays A or A- every time.

Matt didn't seem to have many friends, for he sat next to a fat older woman whose assignments indicated she was a fundamentalist Christian.

The community college was my first experience with fundamentalist Christians. My first semester there, in remedial writing in the spring of 1981, a girl in my class told me it was her first time in "a secular school." She handed in a paragraph containing the topic sentence, "Ronald Reagan was elected to balance the budget, as God intended." I always wondered what she thought as that slum of a decade wore on. Perhaps she would have said that when lots of money is involved, the expected rarely happens. But she couldn't handle a secular school and opted for a transfer to what she told me was "the top Christian college in West Virginia."

I liked to get to the class Matt was in ten minutes early, and one day, when only he and the fat woman were there, I absent-mindedly turned the room's TV set to channel 45, a religious station. With obvious amusement, I watched Jan and Paul, a minor-league version of Jim and Tammy Faye, he reeking of oily polyester, she all teased hair and blue eye shadow. The fat woman scowled at me. Matt raised his eyebrows. I raised mine back.

The fat woman was doing her research paper on abortion, and I tried to make sure she would not make it a pro-life tract, but in the end she did. Matt was doing a research paper called "Gay Impact," on the gay rights movement, and his paper turned out to be more balanced. When we had a conference about his topic, I just pointed to it on the paper he had in front of him because I didn't want anyone else in the class to assume he was gay

-- or that I was.

Actually, I was thirty years old and had never had sex with a guy, only women, although I thought of myself as bisexual. One of my psychologists once asked me what percentage of myself I felt was gay, and I said, "Seventy per cent," but I continued to have only girlfriends until I was thirty. "When I get to be thirty, I'll be able to handle a relationship with a guy," I told my psychologist the day after I learned I was too tall to appear on David Susskind's TV show. "Forty, tops."

POTS

It was the Friday night at the end of the spring semester of 1982, and I was at home, a rented condo in the Sunrise Golf Village, where my neighbors tended to be in their eighties. Grades had been due at noon, but I'd gotten them in the day before, and I was looking forward to a week off before teaching the first summer semester.

I'd just finished making some spinach linguine and was pouring the contents of the pot through the colander into a bowl. I was simmering some Ragu spaghetti sauce in another pot. There was a knock at my door. I rarely had unexpected visitors.

It was Matt.He was wearing a Lacoste shirt and carrying the copy of the Village Voice I'd given him, a special issue on gay rights.

"Hi," he said. "I wanted to return this to you. Thanks. It helped a lot with the term paper."

"Oh, you didn't have to return it," I said. I realized then that the paper had my address label on it. I wondered if he thought I'd given it to him as a way to get him to come over. That kind of cleverness was beyond me, unless I'd managed to do it unconsciously. I hadn't thought about the address label at all. "Come on in," I said.

"I can't stay long," Matt said. "I've got someone waiting for me in Fort Lauderdale, we're going to have dinner."

"Yeah, I've just been making something for myself."

At my gesture, Matt sat down at the table. I hadn't realized he was so tall. In the classroom, sitting next to the fat fundamentalist woman, he looked as if he were only a bit taller than I was. "I was here a little while ago," he said. "This dog started barking like crazy. You weren't around, and I wondered if I had the right place."

"That's my neighbor's dog," I said. "They keep him inside."

We both looked at each other in a weird way.

"Well, I just wanted to stop by and give you the newspaper."

"You didn't have to," I said. "I'd read it already. But I'm really glad you stopped by. Really glad. Here, let me give you my phone number." I wrote the unlisted number down on a piece I'd ripped off from the cover of the Voice. "Sure you can't stay?"

"Yeah, someone's waiting."

I nodded. "Okay, well, you know where I live now...."

"Yup," Matt said.

We both smiled. I walked him to the door. "Come back whenever you want," I told him. "When you've got more time."

Afterwards I didn't touch my linguine. I called Suzanne and told her what had happened; she already knew about my crush on Matt.

"Don't let him break your heart," Suzanne advised.

I absent-mindedly turned on the TV and one channel was showing the old movie Boys in the Band. Weird. I'd seen the off-Broadway show in 1969, and I'd gone to the movie twice.

Monday morning I was in my king-sized bed (the only one I've ever had in all the apartments I've rented or sublet) listening to the radio when Matt knocked at my door.

"Hi," I said. I was still in my T-shirt and boxers.

"Hi," he said.

"Come on in and let me get dressed. You wanna do something today?"

"That'd be cool," Matt said.

After I showered and dressed -- Matt stayed in the living room the whole time -- I suggested we take a drive to Miami.

We drove around in my station wagon -- why I had one is a long story -- and basically we talked about ourselves and school and stuff. I felt quite adolescent. It reminded me of the first dates I'd had with Suzanne and other girls in college. Every once in a while I would touch him on the shoulder as I drove, enough to give him the idea but not enough to have him think I was a pervert.

I was real hungry after a couple of hours, so we got a pizza and went back to my apartment. We ate about two slices each and drank Coke. I kept feeling nervouser and nervouser. Finally the Coke made me have to go to the bathroom, and while I was peeing I told myself that when I went out there I was going to do something, not just talk around everything like I usually do.

He was sitting at the table. I came behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. I started massaging his shoulders, as if he'd asked me to relieve a neck-ache or the way I'd seen trainers do when boxers were sitting in their corners. Matt didn't flinch, but I couldn't tell what his reaction was until he reached down and put his hand on my right calf. I was wearing jeans.

One thing led to another and eventually we were facing each other. Lots of things kept going through my mind, like how holding Matt and kissing him seemed just like what I'd done with girls. I'd expected it would be a lot different with a guy.

We were on the floor of my dining room. There was a knock at the door.

"Someone saw us," I said crazily.

"You're totally paranoid," Matt whispered, and kissed me on the lips.

There was another knock at the door, Matt and I froze -- or rather, I froze and he did what I did -- until the knocker went away.I realized it was probably some kid selling magazines or candy.

"Want to go into the bedroom?" I asked.

"Let's get naked," Matt breathed into my ear.

He came over to my house practically every afternoon for the next seven weeks. I was crazy in love. After a few days, I said "I love you" to him. I didn't care that he never said it to me. I knew he was going to bars and messing around with other guys, and probably there was one guy -- the guy who'd been waiting for him for dinner that Friday night -- who was special.

Matt made me feel special, too, and he did say "I love you!" the last time I saw him, when he shouted it out from his car to my car the day before I flew to New York for the summer. By the time I got back for the fall semester at the community college in mid-August, he'd already left town for a university in the Midwest and had made it clear that he didn't want me to contact him there.

I was thirty and he was seventeen. I hadn't taken Suzanne's advice.

STOP

One afternoon this spring, after stopping to buy some chemicals for the swimming pool at her new house on Long Island -- with a mortgage from Chase Manhattan -- Suzanne and I drive over to Manhasset to the North Shore Hospital nursing home where her 98-year-old grandmother lives. I've known Grandma Agnes for twenty-five years and remember as the most intelligent of my friends' grandmothers: she seemed more educated than my grandmothers, Russian-Jewish refugees, and you could discuss art and literature with her.

The last time I'd seen Grandma Agnes was at Suzanne's sister's house on Mother's Day 1994. On that occasion she thought I was her nephew Joseph, a retired New York City teacher who lives in Plantation, Florida, not far from my old Florida National Bank branch, with his partner Seymour, another retired teacher, who converted from Judaism to Catholicism for Joseph.

Grandma Agnes is tiny, about the size of Sally DeMay and close to her age, except Sally DeMay was dead by now -- along with her co-star in Jennifer's movie; Ed Ball; David Susskind; Buffy DuPont (ski lift accident); Matt's blond friend from the bank (complications of AIDS); Matt's fat fundamentalist classmate (breast cancer);

my former department chair and the co-author of You Can Write (Alzheimer's); and Tillie the Alltime Teller (interstate bank merger).

Grandma Agnes now has only wisps of her grey curly

hair -- a Cippilone family trait -- and she picks at her food: pureed lumps of starch, protein, and vegetables. Suzanne keeps spooning some of the lumps into Agnes' soup so she will at least get some nourishment because Agnes still likes soup. She also still has an appreciation for a cup of coffee and for the ice cream Suzanne wangles from the Haitian woman on the other side of the room.

Grandma Agnes is in a rare talkative mood this afternoon, and she tells us this story:

"When we came from Italy, at first I was unhappy. I was a little girl, and I would cry. I didn't want to be told everything: no, you can't do this, stop doing that. "'Never!' I told my mother. 'When I get married and have a little boy, I will never call him Pasquale. He'll be Patsy Americano or he'll never come to my house. I will let my daughter do anything. If her dress is a little too long, I'll cut her hem off. That's because we happen to be in a free country. In America, we do as we please and we can get everything we want.'

"But my mother said, 'No, daughter, that is not true. In America you can get anything but sympathy from me. So do not cry to me that you are unhappy in this house.'"

Then Grandma Agnes continued her mother's statement in musical Sicilian dialect, which Suzanne translated for me:

"Stop! Stop! Don't make up you mind you're going to be like that, or you will always be like that. God made all of us, the same type of children, and if you don't want to do what is right, just sit down and read your books. They will tell you what to do."

I think about this after we get Grandma Agnes back into her room, in the next bed from a demented woman with a colostomy bag. I think about this while Suzanne drives the minivan through a short-cut that avoids both the Long Island Expressway and the Northern State, back to the new house that she and Jennifer share, where I am a house guest, staying in what Jennifer calls the Lincoln Bedroom.

The books I've read haven't told me what to do. I can't imagine my short stories tell any reader what to do. I can write, but everything I write comes out sounding nonsensical, as if it were composed by Mr. Backwards. What I expect to happen at the end doesn't happen. I find myself on the spot when my stories stop abruptly and senselessly, like my relationship with Matt or the poem that Grandma Agnes recited for me in the nursing home dining room after Suzanne had prompted her:

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two

Columbus didn't know what to do

So he sat in the grass

And scratched his ass

Because they were in the boat and they didn't care whose ass they were scratching.

Currently I have a checking account with NationsBank.

POST

Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 20:33:28 -0400

From: tootall@aol.com

To: thehouseonelm@sfgate.net

Subject: Hi

Matt,

Hope you're doing well. I'm fine. Sorry if this is an intrusion, but if you want, I'd love to hear from you.

Rick

Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 07:33:28 -0400

From: mwanglund@glgsystems.com

To: tootall@aol.com

Subject: Long time

Rick -

Funny how life goes. About 6 months ago I looked up your email address. I didn't ever email you because I didn't want to bother you. Then last week I thought about you again but simply never got around to actually writing a letter. I checked my

mail last night...and there is a note from you.

Isn't life strange. Thanks for the note. If you could, though, please mail me here at work (mwanglund@glgsystems.com). The other address is my home address. I've been in the same relationship since I knew you back in Ft. Lauderdale. We've been together 15 years. However, I still have some secrets that I don't want to have to explain...(i.e., you) :-)

Are you healthy? Are you happy. Are you married with 2.5 kids? What's up with you?

I'm both healthy (HIV-) and happy. I've lived in the same home with the same person for 12 years now. I've had the same job for 11 years. Pretty boring, huh? I'm just a stick in the mud. When I get into something, I stick with it...

I don't know what to say. I'm really glad you wrote. I want to find out more about you and your life now.

Matt

P.S.- I hope you don't look back on the past with regret. I don't. I get a little 'warm and fuzzy' thinking about it.

P.P.S. - What are you writing these days?