Margaret Reynolds

Asshole Dude (AD) Dies

 

 

I cut out AD’s obit and laid it below the ones I have framed in the living room. Yours is two-lines long — a gift of your parent’s Upper East Side wealth — and Aeron got three after his brother won the city council race. The rest are just a list of names that I had to cut out, one by one, and frame together in a kind of sad, cut-up poetry display.

 

AD got the front page of the paper. Even then, the obit bled onto A7. I’ve tried reading it a few times now, but I kept getting caught on “public servant” in the second paragraph. I thought about scratching out “servant,” and writing “enemy,” but you’d roll your eyes at the drama of it all.

 

I might ball up AD’s obit, turn it into a wrinkled mass, then paper mache it into a spherical pinata. I could push the sides in to mimic your sunken cheeks just before you died. Maybe get a straw to act as a breathing tube. You’d find that clever, I think. Give me one of your rare smirks and a hiccup of a laugh.

 

Your sister suggested I cut his obit into 94 strips, for each year he got to live, then lay each strip next to the names — James (42), Alonso (28), Dmitrius (33). It wouldn’t be hard. I saved cut-outs of nearly 1,000 dead. I could spare 94 to make a point.

 

I even got the exacto knife out for this, but I nicked my hand pulling it out of the drawer. It felt like a dull fingernail pressing into the ball of my hand, and just a little bubble of blood popped to the surface.

 

I started sobbing anyway. The cats ran to the bedroom after the first gasp, and I could already see you, your eyes peeping over the paper, green, bright, scrunched with a smile.

 

“I’ve never seen a grown man cry over a cut,” you’d said, pressing a towel onto the cut. “You’ve become a sentimental old fool.”

 

When we first moved in together, back in ‘82, I cut my hand making chicken parmesan. My chest, all coiled from too many espressos and seven back-to-back night shifts at the restaurant, snapped like a rubber band. I was gasping and crying before I even looked down at the small slit across my palm. You started laughing so hard you were crying too. You laughed from deep in your chest, and it drummed across the room. It took you a whole minute to compose yourself enough to help me bandage the cut.

 

I think I can still remember the press of your fingers into my knuckles. The sweat of your palm cupped under the back of my hand. You were always the prim prep school boy. We’d hold hands during a movie occasionally, and you always kissed me on the cheek goodbye. Otherwise I waited for the unexpected brush of your arm as we passed in the hallway or the bump of our knees under the dinner table. Even then, before all the obituaries and the names, I pressed into those little touches and let them count as unsaid I love yous.

 

For a while, right after your funeral, I would cup my own left hand with my right and pretend it was yours. Now I wonder if I only remember my own finger pads. If I remember your hand as being scratchy because my own is always dried and cracked. You used to carry hand lotion in your bag, so I think your hand would have been smooth, but then again, your whole body was all birch tree by the end. So maybe I’m remembering that.

 

We didn’t hold hands during the last movie you saw, some conspiracy thriller you loved. When I first heard your enunciated accent, I’d have never thought you went for movies like that. I thought we’d only ever go see operas and award-winning Broadway plays together. Then I started staying over at your apartment and finding little paperback mysteries shoved into drawers.

 

That last film had nearly 12 plot twists, only three of which I followed. By that time, you knew to lean over and whisper-explain each one to me. Your voice was raspy, and more than once, your recaps were broken by thick coughs. Other movie-goers turned to glare at us, but if you noticed, your stick-straight posture didn’t give away any remorse.

 

The good guys, political rebels, uncovered a government conspiracy by doing some complicated math. They added and subtracted the dates of terrorist attacks and government elections, multiplied it all by the ages of a group of CIA assassins.

 

I watched you checking the math when we got home, scribbling furiously in your notebook. We were crowded onto one side of the couch, our cats splayed on the other, and you kept interrupting my reading to explain how the equations worked.

 

You were talking so fast you barely had time to take a breath. By the time you finished, sweat was dripping methodically from your mustache onto your upturned lips below, and you kept having to wipe your face dry with the back of your hand.

 

I re-watched that movie last week and thought you might like it if I did a whole algorithm painting. Took AD’s age, 94, subtracted out your age, 44. What the fuck would 50 mean, though? 50 felt round and solid in a way he didn’t deserve, but maybe it’s resinant of some half-century, karmic justice. You calling on the eve of your death for the soul that wasted yours.

 

But AD died in December and you in July, and besides, you’d never bother leaving your pearly throne to collect the life of some dead president. You didn’t even like when some of our friends went and dumped the dead’s ashes on the White House lawn.

 

“What’s that going to do?” you’d sighed. I tried to repeat what Aeron had told. Something about protesting AD cutting funding for research and another point I’d forgotten. You just rolled your eyes and told me like hell you’d want to be cremated and dumped in the middle of the Capital. You specified — mahogany coffin and a tailored suit you’d already had made. I nodded mutely. Surprised more by your cursing than anything else.

 

I think you’d be happy to know I left your obit on the wall. I threw AD’s in the trash under some old coffee grounds and eggshells. I let it soak in the trash for an hour, and then I dug it out. It was brown and goopy with raw egg. I couldn’t place its sour smell.

 

I used a butter knife to cut it into pieces, laid it on a dinner plate, and ate it. Thought there might be something poetic about getting salmonella from it all. Then I went to work and cursed at a co-worker who told me they were wearing red in honor of AD’s death. I got written up by my boss for it, and I cried in the bathroom during lunch. No one made eye-contact with me. They didn’t want to see the red splotches covering my nose.

 

I went to your grave after I got off, and I dug my hands into the dirt and I wondered if I could go deep enough to feel your bones again. I would climb into the coffin beside you and curl into your arms. I would press my cheek into your skull and kiss your jaw bone. I could stay there until I withered like you, turned into flaky skin hanging off bone, became brittle and smelly and dead. Then we would look like the ying-yang sign of dead fags, curled together into eternity.

 

But really, you’d never cuddle with me for longer than 20 minutes. By the time your arm fell asleep, you’d slip it out from under me and roll away.

 

“Don’t be so flamboyant, Allen,” you’d yawn towards the wall. The cats would climb between us, pawing at my cheek, and you’d be snoring a minute later.

 

 

Margaret Reynolds is a genderqueer educator and writer based in Denver. They came to Colorado by way of a soggy CRV that has since died. They had a fish named Garp that has also since died. Their fiction work has previously been published in “The Thought Erotic” and “The Round.”  Bienvenue au Danse, Margaret.