Brawn

There were aspects to his body that seemed patched together, like Frankenstein’s monster. This was a man who had had to be put back together, who had to learn to walk again. This was all before I met him, but that body – the body he had before the disaster – haunted me. I would trace my fingers on the giant scars on his thighs and calves, scars hard and whitened. The before-body hovered around him like a ghost, in my eyes, a what-might-have-been.

M. had been an athlete. And he was still a big physical guy with a certain amount of grace. I watched him play basketball once with his friends. He was beautiful. In action, he was always beautiful. He hated it when I got sad what had happened to him. He was quite forbidding about it, and got impatient with me, so we rarely talked about it; I could never get my tone right.

My impression of M. was one of physical swagger, brawn, and fearless macho gestures. There was an awkwardness, too, alongside the strange grace. The awkwardness telegraphed to me, from the first moment I met him, a certain level of honesty. M. was unconcerned with being “cool”, and so that often led to bumbling foolishness, or fits and starts of movement: he’d try to help me into a chair, get awkward about it, and end up tripping over the carpet, or odd moments when he would start to say something, stop himself, and shake his head at his own silliness. Honesty. He exuded it. No manipulation. Never concerned with how he came across.

He was all about honesty. Dishonesty made him visibly uncomfortable. He couldn’t lie or fake it. He had a type of listening that approached ESP levels, and an appreciation of and commitment to the moment. He was an improv comedian (still is, and is a very well-known teacher with his own studio in LA), and he believed in the tenets of improv like they were a religion. The only thing that exists is NOW. Thinking about the next moment or the moment that just passed is a waste of time. The #1 rule in improv is “Yes And”. You reject nothing that has been given to you by your scene partner. Instead of responding with “But” – which means “no”, you respond with “And”, which means “yes” and also ADDS to what has been given to you. In order to accomplish this, you must listen on a super-sonic level to what other people are saying. You can’t pretend to listen like that. Your focus is never on yourself. Your focus is on the person in front of you. That’s the only way it works. He believed all of this to a fanatical degree. It wasn’t just the way to do good improv. It was the way everyone should LIVE. (I agree with him.) This type of attitude, by the way, results in what I would coyly call world-class sex skillz. Just sayin’. If you want to up your game…

Many people disliked him. He could be obnoxious. He was perpetually cranky. He had no social graces, and could be very blunt. He wasn’t always polite. He drank way too much. He was a Woman Magnet. Some women – not all – just loved this guy. Other women found him boorish, untameable. These women found his woman-magnet-status suspicious, and disliked him for it, thinking of him as a dog, or a user. (Some of these women were my friends, who expressed concern – at first – when I ran screaming with glee into his arms. Not really. But close.) I am not saying my impression of him was the correct one. Everyone is going to have different responses to things, and who am I to say that mine is the right one?

But all I know is what I know. There was something in M. that fit perfectly with me. It was pheromonal. I mean pheromonal in a body chemistry kind of way – a personality mesh kind of way. Even before we had had a conversation, I could sense it.

I saw him performing at an improv club, and I remembered having met him before, but that night it was as though I was seeing him for the first time. He staggered onstage, and I felt a small inner explosion. I’m trying to talk on a chemical level here. It was all quite practical, when you get right down to it. Something in me needed him. My response to him was not just about lust. It wasn’t recognition either, or love at first sight, or being smitten, or any of that. It was something else. It was like seeing what you’ve been longing for, physically, not emotionally, like a drink of water, a breath of air, warm sun), and knowing that you had to have it, knowing your body needed it. It was necessary. Some inner/outer voice whispering: “See that stranger up there? The one with the black hair, pale skin, and white-blue eyes? Trust me. He’s what you need.”

I am making this sound like a love story. I never really thought of it that way, as it was happening, although I did eventually love him and still do love him, in the way you love old friends, in the way you love people who took care of you, who never hurt you, who gave more than they took..

My instincts were so scarily right on in terms of M. and who he ended up being to me over the years, that I sometimes shiver at the thought of how close the whole thing came to not happening. My vague sense that I “needed” him … for what I had no idea … was so prescient and correct (in retrospect) that I still don’t think about it head-on all that much, it’s too weird. What was it I sensed? How on earth was I so right? It can make me feel like God. Because I did nothing with the surge I felt that night. I did not make the first move, or initiate a conversation, or slip him my phone number after the show. I just sat back, and waited. I was clearing the deck for him, I see that now. He felt it and by the end of the night he had my phone number, after a false start where he told me I looked “erotic” – the first thing he said to me – and I turned and walked away.

He told me years later how much he loved how I walked away from him: “I was in the middle of saying something – and you had on those gloves – and that hat – I had no idea who you were – but I was talking and you were right there – and then BOOM you vanished. What the hell? Where did she go?” He was not put off by me fleeing, or by what would have seemed to an unobservant person as my blatant rejection of him. He knew me walking away from him didn’t mean what it looked like it meant. It meant, actually, the exact opposite. He was kind of a genius that way. So he took some time to re-group, get his act together, and come in for a second try. It was all very tactical.

We were already way beyond flirty banter. Something else jump-started.

He winced when he looked at me. Holding back? Cautious? Trying to see through me?

I would get to know that wince really well. It was his involuntary acknowledgement of: “I feel awkward right now.” He was not a smooth operator, even though he was this big handsome crazy sexy dude. An odd combination. So he winced at me, knowing he was busted, and he waited to see what I would do next.

We always had between us the strangest mix of total relaxation and bizarre restlessness. This was still going on the last time I saw him a couple of years ago. We never “settled in” with each other. There was comfort and trust there, but because we never knew what the other person would do next, our interactions sparked, at all times.

Once, he was in New York, teaching, and gave me a call. We met up at an improv bar in Manhattan, and there were lots of his old friends and colleagues there. All of them are now famous (you’d know their names) and some of them remembered me from those long-ago days in Chicago. They sort of blinked twice when they saw me, like, “Oh! Yeah!” There were long stretches where I sat there next to him, as he and his friends talked, laughed. I had no part in the conversation, because I’m not in their world. I sat next to him, and – just like the old days – I had this crinkly oddly pleasant mixture of contentment and nervous energy. I watched basketball on the TV, drank, and enjoyed being in his presence again. He included me. He introduced me to everybody – “You remember Sheila maybe?” But I wondered, sometimes nervously, Am I a fifth wheel here? Am I the dreaded “hovering chick”?

I would get overwhelmed when I was with him. It made me feel awkward and exposed, how fascinating I found him. What if he thought I was weird, or obsessive? This wasn’t about being madly in love. It was about information. There were alwaysbe things to discover about him. There was the catastrophe that happened to him. Did he regret that other life that didn’t happen? As I mentioned, I was never really allowed to ask him about it, and I respected that. But I would protect myself from how much I wanted to know more about him by behaving like a lunatic. When I read Nancy Lemann’s novel The Fiery Pantheon I came across the following paragraph and had to laugh because I so recognize the two of us in this:

It is always remarkable when someone sees your soul to a better degree than you see it yourself. You could count the people who see your soul on one hand. Others might know you but they would forget; their knowledge of you was like a weak and undisciplined thing. But that wasn’t so with him. He didn’t forget. It stuck in his mind. He had seen a kindred soul. He had seen it long ago. She only saw it now. But she was stricken with it. Suddenly she had identified him. There was the man she loved. As a result, she proceeded dementedly to behave as if the opposite were true.

Instead of sinking into our bond and accepting it, I would “dementedly … behave as if the opposite were true.”

For example, every Monday night I would go see Pat McCurdy play at Lounge Ax. When I say “every Monday night” I mean even when I was deathly ill with the flu, even if I was jetlagged. My main social life revolved around Pat shows on Monday nights. I lived in Chicago for 4 years. Drop in on Lounge Ax on any given Monday night during that 4 year period – you would have seen me there. So if M. wanted to find me, he knew where to go. There were long periods when I didn’t see him at all. Sometimes we took breaks. Because we did, on occasion, drive each other crazy. We were best in small doses. Occasionally haiku fits would be thrown. But we always started it up again. And sometimes M. would just show up at Lounge Ax on Monday nights, knowing I would be there.

M. would show up at Lounge Ax for one purpose and one purpose only: to see me. And someone would pass me the news: M’s here. So it’s safe, right? He’s there to see me. What’s the risk? But instead of running out to greet him, I would play it cool (play WHAT cool?), and basically ignore him for half an hour. We all still laugh about this because it was so rude and so immature. Ann Marie said to me once, when I was blatantly ignoring him, “What is happening right now? You are acting so weird.” Mitchell would roll his eyes and say, “Sheila. He’s here for you.” Imagine if HE did that to YOU, Sheila? Imagine how horrible you would feel! Finally, I would calm down enough inside to go over and say Hi to him. I do not defend myself. I know I am weird. Socially dysfunctional. Hyper-vigilant.

But here’s the deal. Here is the perfect thing. Here is why my instinct about him on that very first night, when I didn’t even know his last name, was so creepily on target:

One night, M. was sitting at the bar at Lounge Ax, and I was standing off in the distance, talking to Ann or somebody, ignoring M., and Mitchell went over to talk to M. Mitchell said, “Hey, M, how are you?”

M. said calmly, “Doin’ good. I’m just waiting for Sheila to stop ignoring me.”

When Mitchell told me this, I felt a flush of embarrassment (I was busted), but also the thrill that M. saw what was going on, and it was okay that he saw. His instinct about me was always right. How can I explain. How can I explain the feeling of never being misunderstood, even when your behavior is seemingly antagonistic? M. never punished me for my weirdness, he never even brought it up! And I never punished him for his weirdness (because I haven’t even gone into HIS weird personality). M. somehow intuited that I needed time to grasp the fact that he was there for me … and I couldn’t do it in his presence, I needed privacy, and as insane as that is, as annoying as it would be to a normal person, M. just waited it out. He didn’t take my weirdness personally. Maybe that was the key.

M. never melded with me. I never melded with him. We remained separate, distinct. I was not him. He was not me. I had my own crap to go through that had nothing to do with him, and he knew it had nothing to do with him, and he took none of it personally. “That’s just Sheila, going through whatever she has to go through. I’ll just be over here waiting until she’s ready.”

On our third date, he invited me to a terrifying pool hall and his car ended up being towed and I had to lend him a ton of cash to get the car out of hock. It was a marathon night, and we still really didn’t know each other. We didn’t warm up to each other right away. We circled each other warily. Magnetic forcefields pulling us in, but we didn’t succumb immediately. On that night, I sat on the sidelines again, watching him play pool. We had had our first kiss (besides the one on my cheek, I mean) the week before. On our date at the pool hall, we did not refer back to the making out of the week before, we did not mention it. But the memory it, the way he got suddenly aggressive, taking charge, but also how gentle he was … hovered around us like an afterimage that night at the pool hall, even though we were seemingly autonomous, and, naturally, barely speaking to one another.

That night was the first night I watched him play pool, an activity that soon became an addiction. Nobody wanted to play with him because nobody else ever got a turn at the table. The way he leaned across the table, cigarette dangling, his grace with the pool cue – like he and the object were one, his unselfconsciousness in draping himself over the table … I get glimpses of him still in my mind’s eye, and that’s how I see him. The bandana he’d wear around his head, the ubiquitous cigarette, the T-shirt, the jeans.

He moved kind of funny, a loping walk, arms dangling, almost like he was propelled forward by forces beyond his control, but that worked for him onstage. He said to me once, “I don’t know what it is, but when I walk across a stage people start laughing.” My impression of him was always one of strapping strength, strength used sensitively and well, not violently or carelessly. The way he walked. It was a bowlegged big-ranging John Wayne walk.

He was so loud and so crazy and such a good pool player that the shyness between us was startling. (Especially because we had already made out like teenagers the week before. Like: can you even reference back to it, kids? Can you admit that it happened? Apparently not.) There was a reticence in him, contradictory to his aggressive (yet strangely subtle) mating tactics. His weird little hesitations before speaking. The wince that I already recognized. He would wince before telling me a story, deciding whether or not to let me into his world. And at some point, during this night at the pool hall, he suddenly looked at me, took me in – not just my outer personality but my essence – I could tell that’s what he was looking at – and he rambled the following monologue at me. The monologue was incongrous with his tough-guy look (which cannot be overstated: Jeans, T-shirt, bandana tied tightly over his head, pack of cigarettes rolled up unironically in his T-shirt sleeve, big hands, big feet, swagger, cocky demeanor). But suddenly, with no lead-in that I can remember he started saying (wincing the whole time, that honest shy wince), “I really like what you’re about. Or I’m getting to see what you’re about and I like it.” He seemed awkward and I wasn’t sure why. He went on, sounding baffled, but in this shy and kind way: “A lot of women – well, a lot of people – have problems with me. For all kinds of valid reasons. But … you don’t seem to have a problem with me.” He was truly surprised. I said something like, “As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with you.” And he kept looking at me, in that weird wincing way, open and yet also standing back from me. I guess he was a skittish animal, to some degree, too, although it took me a long time to perceive that.

Years later, he and I sat in a bar in Hoboken. He was teaching in the area and had called me. We sat at the bar and talked for hours. There was never a regular friendship between us, we never said to each other: “Hey, how was your day?” We never listed the events of our respective days. But that night, sitting there with him, for the first time, believe it or not, I realized the level of this “thing”. Or I realized it in a deeper way. There were times when I wondered what I meant to him. And there were times when I would get embarrassed about my “thing” with him, and be self-deprecating about it to friends. But there, in that quiet dark bar in Hoboken, 10 years after first meeting him, I “got it”. My connection with him is unique, and somewhat cosmic. Impossible to replicate. He is my friend. My true true friend. Our rules were our own, our language was our own.

He told me what was going on with him. We talked about September 11. He asked about my writing.

And we reminisced. This was something we had never done. We talked about what we remembered, and our first impressions of each other.

I asked him, “What was your first impression of me?” And in that weird psychic way I always had with him, I knew what his answer would be.

He said, without a moment’s thought: “Gloves.” I burst into laughter.

Who knew that that detail would travel through the years. He also said, in a tone of fond tenderness, “I also remember coming to get you at Pat shows, and how you would ignore me.”

Like … this was a good memory for him.

We laughed hysterically. “Member all those haikus?” “Oh fuck, the haikus.” On and on. We reveled in how WEIRD we both were and how this whole thing made sense to nobody but us.

Hoboken was quiet and still when the bar closed. I walked him over to his car. He had parked illegally. Through all my years knowing him, I never knew him to care about whether or not he was “allowed” to park where he chose to park. Some things never change. (On a side note: just last year, on my birthday, he left a birthday message on my Facebook wall: “Happy Birthday, Sheila! Hope it comes with lacy gloves!”)

As we crossed the street to his car, he reached out and put his arm around me, in that way that he had which is hard to explain if you didn’t know him but I’ll give it a shot.

There was something vital about his body language, and it was always a source of energy for me: how he moved, he didn’t so much put his arm around me as yank me over to his side, crushing me a little bit, my arms pinned to my side, unable to hug him back, and he grabbed me to him like that on the dark Hoboken streets. No speech between us. Crossing the street, on the diagonal, no cars coming, his bow-legged stomping walk, hard to keep up with or predict …

… the salt of the earth awkwardness as familiar to me now as the air I breathe.

I wish he would live forever.

He said to me once, “Sheila, you could write a novel about what happened during the last 5 minutes.”

I forget nothing.

But neither does he. (Gloves.)

Others might know you but they would forget; their knowledge of you was like a weak and undisciplined thing. But that wasn’t so with him. He didn’t forget. It stuck in his mind.

I found out about him a couple weeks ago from a mutual friend.

It is hard for me to picture him as sick. It hurts to imagine, like a deep bruise in an apple. Long ago, I would try to picture him in the hospital, near-death, in the life-changing event that pre-dated me. I’d try to imagine it and I would come up against the same mental block. He seemed so vital, so of-this-earth. So alive.

And so the images come like flashcards. His strange unique gait. How he would jam the car into 4th gear. How he lit a cigarette, or sat on the bar stool. How he would stand by the pool table, cue in one hand, cigarette in the other, languidly looking down at the colored balls, assessing the spatial relationships, lazily, like a panther. How he would pull me to him as we walked along. How he would sit back and watch and wait, taking it all in with those blazing husky-dog eyes. How he held onto me in bed, how he touched me: Strong, firm, never hurtful. How gentle his rough hands on my face and throat. How good he felt on top of me. How good he felt under me. How he opened the car door and heaved himself into the seat. How he kissed.

His loping grace when shooting hoops.

The wince in his eyes.