(originally published in New Fraktur Arts Journal no. 4)
I’m in the car with Ron and we’re heading upstate. I’ve been meaning to get out of the city for a few days, so when Ron said he was headed to his house in Woodstock for the week, I asked if he could take me along. Woodstock’s not far from where I went to college, and I knew I could stay with friends who stuck around after we graduated. My ex-girlfriend Catherine is still a student there. We haven’t spoken in months, and it’d be a lie to say she isn’t part of the reason I’m in this car with Ron.
Ron owns Cleo’s Vintage, the store where I work, and lives upstate when he’s not in his apartment in Manhattan. He’s a short, fat, gruff man in his late fifties with long gray hair tied in a ponytail – not the kind of guy you expect to own a vintage store, but then again, what do I know?
I know that on this ride I’m going to get an earful, because Ron has a lot to say. I’m a little nervous because I’m not even sure if he likes me. He has it out for a lot of people, and I don’t want to be one of them. He’ll surprise you occasionally – the other people at the store think I’m his least favorite, but he still agreed to drive me upstate knowing it would involve spending a few hours in the car with me.
It was pleasant outside when we got in the car, but Ron’s got the windows closed and the air conditioner on full blast and I’m getting cold. Ron can’t stand the heat; that’s something you learn about him early on. It’s one of many idiosyncrasies that he publicizes. A fan blows on him when he sits behind the counter at the store, and if a customer remarks about cold weather, he’ll say, “I love this. I can’t stand the heat. I keep my house at 62 degrees. I don’t like anything that’s hot – coffee, tea, hot chocolate – I can’t stand it.” There’s a forceful enthusiasm and matter-of-factness in his voice when he says this that seems uncalled for, but that’s Ron.
He’s telling me how much he hates New York City. He keeps an apartment on the same block as the store, but spends as much time as possible upstate. “I don’t go farther than three blocks from my place or the store, and only if I absolutely have to,” he says, repeating what I’ve heard countless times. It’s funny how older people do that, as if they’re playing the same role every day, using the same script.
“I’ve gotten so negative living in the city,” he says as he takes the exit for Route 91. This remark surprises me; it betrays a self-knowledge that doesn’t seem to fit with Ron, who’s so fixed in his ways. Perhaps I’m naïve, and that has nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s getting older. You see yourself changing, but there’s less and less you can do about it, and eventually you stop caring. Then why don’t you live somewhere else? I think of saying. But I don’t bother.
The route looks familiar now. It’s the same one my parents used to take to get to campus from New Jersey. This is the first time I’ve been on this road since I left my college town almost six months ago, and the landscape, exit signs, and towns we pass bring back that last trip in the opposite direction, when my parents took me home. It’s as if I’m in the car with them again, not Ron. The difference is that now instead of the shock of going back to Summit to live at home, it’s strange to think I was ever up there at school to begin with.
Passing a sign for Palisades Park, I remember Catherine and me out on a lake close to the park, smoking cigarettes in a small boat when we visited her great aunt at the family’s big summer house. It was dark outside, but the lake was lit up by stars and the lights of other houses on the shore. When we came back no one was awake so the two of us went skinny-dipping. I remember the way her wet body felt against mine afterwards. Later that night, in bed, she said that things seemed perfect, the way they were really supposed to be.
Somehow or other, Ron has started talking about his mother, whom he hates passionately and who shut him out thirty years ago when she found out he was gay. “My mother’s a bitch. She used to poison me against my father, who I didn’t like at the time, but now I realize she was the bad one.” Ron’s feelings about his mother are well known to anyone who’s met him and it inevitably comes up in conversation. “The fucking cunt. My grandfather used to invite us over to his house for dinner after school because he knew she couldn’t be bothered to cook for us.”
“Do you know where she is now, or what she’s doing?”
“I don’t know if anyone’s still alive in my family. Two years ago I ran into one of my sister’s friends, and she asked if I had seen my sister lately. ‘You must’ve seen her at the funeral?’ she said. ‘What funeral?’ ‘Your father’s funeral.’ My father had died a few months before and I didn’t even know it!” He chuckles a little bit, something he often does when concluding a thought.
“That’s crazy,” I say, knowing I’m responding with a platitude. But what’s an appropriate response to something like that? Anyway, listening to Ron gets my mind off the night on the lake with Catherine, which I’ve thought about enough already.
Then I remember what Catherine told me about her mother, whom she wouldn’t speak to and whom she probably hated as much as Ron hates his mom. Catherine’s mother disappeared abruptly when she was nine. She didn’t like to talk about her but eventually told me the story. She was showing me photos of herself as a kid and in one of them she was looking up at the camera, eyes filled with tears. “My mom took the photo and said when I got older I would laugh at it.” Catherine laughed, then, but immediately started crying. There was probably more on her mind than her mother.
“Yeah, it’s been decades since I spoke to any of them. I didn’t do what they wanted me to do. They wanted me to go abroad after high school, but I didn’t. They wanted me to go to college, and I said fuck that, and started working instead,” Ron stops, again chuckling a little. There’s something of the exhibitionist in him, and I can’t help laughing. “You think it’s funny, don’t you? I know you guys get a kick out of it. Sometimes I exaggerate because I know that.” Again the chuckle.
That remark surprises me. Maybe that’s another thing about getting older: After a while, you parody yourself. I glance at Ron and see that he really does look old, older than his age. He shifts his large body in the seat and I’m pretty sure he just farted, because suddenly something stinks.
There’s a moment of quiet now, except for Frank Sinatra. Ron listens to Sinatra almost exclusively, and it’s the only music he plays in the store. “I have it playing at the house non-stop, too. I love the songs. You can actually hear what he’s saying, not like music nowadays, where I can’t understand a thing, or it’s just ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that’,” he tells me in his no-nonsense way, as if anyone who doesn’t care for Sinatra must not understand the nature of things. I can see the way his face looked when one of the others at the store changed the radio station. He was in the back and came out roaring, his face beet red: “Who changed the music?”
It’s dusk now and there’s not much traffic on the road. I don’t like Sinatra, and it’s putting me in a somber mood. “You’ll see – when you get older, like me, you’ll grow to appreciate this music,” Ron explains.
“Well, we’ll see, I guess... So, how did you first end up in New York?” I ask, changing the subject.
“I was in San Francisco working two jobs in wholesale, dealing a little bit of coke on the side. Boy, did I end up using a lot of that coke. When I quit my jobs, I thought I’d be fine. I was owed a lot of money that never came through.”
I picture Ron doing a line of coke with Sinatra playing in the background.
“Yeah, we used to do all kinds of drugs. I was a pretty boy back then and got invited to all the parties. I remember snorting heroin once, found it taped up behind my friend’s refrigerator and we knew what it was... boy, did that make us loopy. The way I lived, I always thought I wouldn’t make it to fifty. Now I don’t think I’ll make it much past sixty.”
Again I think of Catherine and a night we took a lot of painkillers and went to a friend’s apartment. She had some coke then, too, and periodically gave me a look saying, let’s go to the bathroom to do some lines. The whole time I sat next to her that night I held her hand. I’m starting to wonder if I’ll see her when I get into town, and what I’ll say. But Ron’s still telling his story.
“So I had hardly any money anymore, and I didn’t know what to do. That’s when a friend of mine put me in touch with Drew, who ran the store with me before he died. His partner at the time had backed out, and since I could handle the business matters, we got in touch and I moved to New York. We were both broke at the time, so it made sense for us to live together. That was a rough time. Drew thought he was going to die of AIDS so he’d blown all his money, but he pulled through.”
“I didn’t realize all of that,” I mumble. What else could I say? It’s difficult to talk about these things, but Ron could have been talking about his favorite place to get lunch in the East Village by the sound of it.
We’re off the main highway and onto a real country road, heavily wooded on either side with occasional signs warning us to watch for deer. “Once I had to stay in the apartment almost non-stop for a whole week because Drew was threatening to kill himself – locked himself in his room for two days. There’s no reason ever to do that. It’s stupid.”
Looking out the window, I try to imagine Ron talking Drew out of suicide, but I can’t picture it. I think about asking him what he said, but I stop myself. I want to tell him I’ve been there – that I’ve been where Ron was, and I’ve been where Drew was. But I can’t say that, because have I, really?
“How did Drew die?”
“A couple years later, the AIDS brought his immune system down again. He was really sickly, looked awful. Didn’t give a shit anymore. One day he didn’t come into the store. I had to call his super to let me into his apartment. He’d taken an overdose of his sleeping pills. I was always skeptical of those fucking pills.”
I never knew Drew, but I’ve seen a photo of him. I imagine the scenario, no drama, just Drew calmly taking the pills. I look over and Ron’s attention is focused on the road. “Sometimes those pills are the only way to get to sleep,” I say, not sure why because I don’t want to explain myself. He doesn’t ask what I mean.
There’s a rare silence. I’m beginning to wonder if it was a good idea to leave New York.
Now Ron’s telling me about the good deals he gets at a grocery store in Tivoli on potato salad and pork barbecue. It’s pleasant just to sit and listen to him ramble from one thing to the next. “Did you ever get the pork barbecue there when you were in school? It’s the best I ever had, and you really get a lot for the money.” His tone hasn’t changed, as if picnic food were just as important as suicide.
I have to tell Ron that no, I haven’t had it. Ron takes no small pleasure in eating and talking about food. He talks about food with a fervor that I don’t bring to most subjects. Despite his love for it, I was warned about the quality of what he brings for lunch. One time, he came into the store looking especially gruff and disgruntled, pulling an enormous cooler behind him. “My freezer upstate broke, so I’ve got meat for all of you,” he said. I laugh under my breath thinking about that. I wonder if Ron notices, but apparently he doesn’t because he continues talking about his favorite grocery store. It makes me wonder: After all Ron’s been through, shouldn’t the bargains he discovers deserve just as much enthusiasm as anything else?
Whatever the case, it’s a lighter subject of conversation, and I feel less somber. I have a little fun with him: “Ron, I’m surprised you like barbecue – I thought you hated salt; isn’t there a lot of salt in it?” It’s true. When Ron talks about food, he claims to hate salt; it’s another preference he makes sure everyone knows, as if it’s a tenet of his life philosophy.
“No. This stuff’s okay – not like that shit you get over on St. Mark’s. I ordered a sandwich there the other day and spit out the first bite. I called the waitress and said miss, you ‘gotta take this back, and I got up and left without paying.”
I laugh to myself again. It’s about what I expected. “Well, you’re a man of opinions,” I remark. I’m not going to point out that maybe he should have paid for the sandwich. The only thing I’ll openly disagree with Ron about is Frank Sinatra, whose music Ron knows I can’t stand. He probably holds that against me, but Ron’s implacable.
“Let’s take a pit stop. I have to piss,” he says. I smoke a cigarette outside while he’s in there. The warm air feels nice and we’re far away enough from the road that it’s relatively quiet. Looking around, I realize Catherine and I stopped here on our way back to school after she came home with me to meet my parents. I remember she was wearing my old high school t-shirt that I had given her when I found it in the bottom of my dresser. We shared a cigarette and admired the scenery. It’s the kind of memory I don’t want to let go but that stops me short every time I think about it. “Ah, so you smoke,” Ron says when he sees me. “I used to smoke about two packs a day.”
“Does it bother you? Should I put it out?”
“No, take your time. But don’t smoke while you’re at the store. No cigarette breaks.”
“Okay.” Now I’m worried he’ll hold this against me. “When did you quit?”
“When Drew was in the hospital. We were both heavy smokers, two or more packs a day. But he was forced to quit, and to help him along, I quit too.” Silence again. Something about being outside makes him less talkative.
“It’s nice out,” I remark.
“Too hot for me. I’m getting sweaty. I’ve ‘gotta be back in air-conditioning.”
I stomp my cigarette out and we’re on our way again.
“Why did you move to New York?” he asks me. It seems to come out of the blue, but he hasn’t really gotten my story yet.
I pause. “Well, I had other plans. For a while I intended to go abroad. That would be almost over now. At really the last moment, I bailed on it. You could say I wasn’t in very good shape. Then I planned on staying around here, in Red Hook or Tivoli or one of these places, to be with someone... you know how that is... but that didn’t work out either. So I ended up living with my parents, and when I saved up enough money, I moved to New York to join some friends.”
I feel like I’ve said too much and don’t continue.
“So it’s a little bit like what happened to me when I canceled my trip abroad and decided not to go to college,” Ron remarks. I hadn’t thought about that – a small part of me is flattered.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
We’re getting closer to our destination now and the scenery looks familiar. In a half-hour or so Ron will drop me off.
After talking about some drama between two of the gay guys at the store, he’s started telling me about his former lover. It’s a well-known fact that Ron hasn’t gotten laid in a decade or two – something he claims with his usual bravado doesn’t bother him. “Back in the day, I was a pretty boy, hard as it is to believe. I was slim and blond and used to get lots of offers. I got sick of making friends with other gay guys, because it would always come to that,” he’s telling me. “But I met Ken, and we ended up living together for thirteen years.”
“That’s a long time,” I say. Thirteen years is a long time to me, more than half my life. “How did it end?”
“Well, I think the simple fact was I wasn’t in love with him anymore. We kept trying. I lived with him for a whole year after I started feeling different, but it wasn’t the same. I used to go out all the time and leave him home alone. I wasn’t cheating on him, but I just couldn’t be around, couldn’t face it. We both knew the end was coming. It was real hard on him, and on me too.”
I’m looking out the window while Ron says this, but I’m paying close attention. I can see how far he’s come since then by the easy way he discusses it, even if he is a little more solemn than usual. I remember the night I woke up and Catherine wasn’t in bed next to me. I found her smoking on the front porch. That was when she knew it was coming to an end.
“Eventually I left him. It was really difficult for him at first, for a few years even. It was difficult for me too, but it was the right thing.”
“Are you still in touch? Do you still speak?”
“After years went by we did, and I still really like the guy, just not that way. We see each other when we’re in the same area, we exchange gifts – we even talked about leaving each other things in our wills, and since I figured I’m going to die first, well, he’s getting the house and a few odds and ends when I go. Jesus, he’s the only man who ever made me come when he did me in the ass. There were a couple guys after that, but it never worked, and eventually I gave up on the whole thing.”
I don’t want to think about sex with Catherine, but now I can’t help it. I shudder. “Don’t you... get lonely?” I ask. His candor surprises me. I wonder again if it has to do with the exhibitionist in him, but this time I see less of that. It’s a little more like it just came out unintentionally. But what does he get out of revealing these intimate details to me?
“No. I don’t even really like sex – I’ve realized that. I just don’t have the drive. I’m perfectly fine without it. Aside from that, I have enough to keep me busy,” he says emphatically. I don’t know if I believe him, but of course I’m not going to get into it. Maybe he’s telling the truth – maybe he is better off that way. What do I know?
As we cross the Kingston Bridge, close now, I’m reminded that I love the way the Hudson looks from that bridge. It’s like a landscape painting or a scene from a well-photographed movie. I took a walk with Catherine once next to the river. When I look closely I can even see the path from the car. I feel like I’m on that walk again. I can picture the short green dress she was wearing and the way the trail looked. Ron’s talking about something different now, the guy who works on his house, but I’m not following anymore. His voice, though, and the once-familiar scenery rolling by, almost hypnotizes me. I can feel how peaceful it was on that walk. I was able to live in the present then. Now I’m all over the place.
I start to feel like I could cry, so I try again to listen to Ron. He’s still talking about his maintenance man, and I can’t focus. It’s probably a story he’s told me already, anyway. But his presence captivates me; looking at him, it’s difficult to believe I’m in his car, heading back to the place I wanted to escape months ago. I’m still thinking about that walk next to the river, and I can’t help but ask myself: how did I get here from there?
Ron pulls up in front of my friend’s apartment and I get out to grab my bag from the back seat. “Thanks for the ride. I guess I’ll see you next week?”
“Yep, see you then. Have fun.”
I’m a little underwhelmed; somehow, I expected saying goodbye to him would seem more meaningful after three hours together in the car. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I even wonder if someone else in the car would have heard more or less the same things.
I call my friend and he lets me inside. After I put my things down, I say I’m going to take a walk and have a smoke. It’s a calm evening. Lighting a cigarette makes me feel lonely.
Catherine’s apartment isn’t too far away. I think about going to talk to her. Now’s as good a time as any. For some reason the image of Ron dragging the cooler of meat into the store comes to mind, and I smile a little, still wondering what to do.