I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (18 page)

“I’m still not certain,” I told her. “I did not wake up this morning thinking about adopting another dog. It’s a lot of responsibility. I tell you what, I can’t take Teddy just yet. I have things I have to do the next couple of days. Will you be here on Sunday?”

“No. I do this same thing at a different pet store on Broadway just above Houston Street,” she said, giving me the store’s name and exact address.

“Okay. I’ll make a deal with you,” I offered. “If you still have Teddy on Sunday, I’ll foster him for a week and we’ll see how it goes. This is Archie’s decision more than mine.”

“Okay. Fine. I see you Sunday.”

Holding Teddy, I gave him one more little nuzzle before putting him down. He instantly peed on the store’s floor. “He’s been doing that. Poor thing’s nervous, that’s all,” said the woman. “It’s okay.”

As we walked out, Archie looked back over his shoulder at the puddle Teddy had just left there and then up at me. Are you sure you want to put up with this? he seemed to be thinking.

*   *   *

The little old lady still had Teddy when I went down to the pet store on Broadway, so I brought him home to foster him for the week as I had promised. Archie didn’t seem upset by the visitor, nor did he treat Teddy like an intruder. He neither barked nor growled. He never even gave Teddy a sniff. Archie just turned his perfect pink nose up in the air and ignored him—that is, until we went to bed that night and Teddy jumped up on the bed to sleep with us. Archie would not allow that. He was ready to attack Teddy for the first time, for Archie had been sleeping curled up next to me for five years and no interloper was going to take his place. Remembering the bed that Chico and Coco had first had, which was fashioned from a pair of my father’s old sweatpants, I dug around in my closet and found an old pair of my own and put them on the floor next to the bed. Teddy curled up on them and slept through the night.

For the next couple of days Archie was fine with the company but continued to ignore him. I, however, was growing quite fond of the little dog who could not have been more different from Archie. Archie, who had been raised by me talking to him incessantly, had, I was convinced, developed an understanding of what I was telling him a lot of the time. I’d simply tell him what to do or mention something and he seemed instinctively to understand. At times, he even made sounds of frustration—not growls or barks—that seemed to be efforts to talk back to me. Teddy was an animal that had obviously been forced to survive by his instincts. He was stubborn but thankful to be in our household. Archie still wasn’t allowing Teddy on the bed.

By Wednesday I had decided that I wanted him to be a part of our family, but I knew it was not my decision alone. “Okay, Arch,” I said. “This is our decision to make. Not just mine. It’s your world that I’m rocking with the addition of Teddy in it. His life hasn’t been as nice as yours. We’re going to have to have some patience with him at first. I would really like to adopt him, though. What do you say? I’m going to leave you alone with him for ninety minutes and then I’m going to come back home and you have to give me some kind of sign that it’s okay with you that he be a part of our family. Okay?”

Archie cocked his head at me in the manner he cocked it when I knew he was listening and understood. I left them alone.

After ninety minutes I walked back into my apartment and, for the first time, found Teddy lying right in the middle of the bed and Archie lying on the floor at the foot of it. Archie looked up at me and almost seemed to shrug. If you want the little guy then it’s all right with me, he seemed to be letting me know with his allowing Teddy up on the bed.

That night for the first time we all three slept together. Archie and Teddy curled up next to me and I spooned with them, an arm draped around each and holding a paw from each in my hand. Teddy even began to snore a bit. Archie snuck a look back at me. I thought of the first time I ever saw snow.

*   *   *

That winter Chico and Coco joined our family I fretted about their shivering out in their three-sided doghouse. As the winter settled in further, I also had nightmares about their freezing to death in the garage where my mother suggested they take up refuge as the temperature dropped.

As February rolled around, the forecast for the first time in my childhood predicted we’d have a snowstorm in Mississippi. My brother and sister became little lookouts at the living room window watching the sky for any sign of a snowflake. My mother stocked the pantry with cans of soup and extra loaves of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly. My father brought home some long pairs of newly laundered athletic socks from the gym for us to use as scarves about our little necks, our mother shaking her head at his ingenuity but thankful too she’d not have to go into her grocery budget to buy us any extra clothing for the frigid weather that had already descended so oddly upon us.

I was the only one who didn’t seem to be excited by the prospect of such unusual weather in our midst or the expectation of making our first family snowman or falling down on the newly whitened lawn to make something my mother called snow angels, pointing to a picture in her
Redbook
magazine that month of a mother and a child making them in the snow in some faraway enchanted place called Cape Cod when she was trying to take my mind off Chico and Coco outside. But I would not let up about them. I kept begging her to allow me to bring them inside so they wouldn’t freeze to death outside. Finally, I began to cry uncontrollably when none of my arguments was working with her.

My father came to my rescue and picked me up. “What have you done to him?” he wanted to know. “Leave him alone,” he told her.

“Oh, don’t start with me,” she said. “You two. You’re ganging up on me. I know what you’re doing.”

“It’s starting!” came my little brother’s voice in the other room. “The snow! We see snow! Look! Mommy! Daddy! Look!”

My father put me down and I, drying my eyes, followed my mother and father to the window where my brother and sister were standing. We all stood there amazed as we watched the stormy swirl of flakes fall onto the frozen ground. I left them standing there in their amazement and, wrapping a long athletic sock around my neck, walked out in the storm to check on Chico and Coco in the garage. My father followed me. “They’re going to be fine, Kevinator,” he said, bending down to tighten the sock around my neck. “You can’t stay out here without a coat on, though.”

“They don’t have coats,” I told him.

“They have built-in coats. Their fur will keep them warm.”

“But they’re shaking, Daddy,” I said, shaking now myself.

My mother joined us in the garage. Outside Kim and Karole were running around with their faces turned toward the falling snow and trying to catch it in their mouths. “Mama, please,” I pleaded. “Can’t we put them in the kitchen for just tonight until the snowstorm is over?”

“Nan…,” said my father.

“Oh, okay. You two win. But just this one night. And then we’ll talk about it again tomorrow. Only in the kitchen, though. There’s a box under the sink. Get that and put those nasty sweatpants in it and put them in that.”

I picked up Chico, and my father, winking at me, took Coco. He put his other arm around my mother and gave her a kiss. She shrugged it off and scurried out into the yard to play in the snow with Kim and Karole. Once my father and I placed the dogs down into the box in the kitchen I ran back out into the garage to get the sweatpants and brought them back inside to cushion the bottom of the box. My father put a bowl of food and a bowl of water down inside it.

“Kevin!” my mother called. “Come play!”

I ignored her call and stayed inside the kitchen. I looked up past the silent radio on the windowsill and saw the snow swirling about outside.

“Howard!” called my mother. “It’s fun. Come outside!”

My father gave my head a pat and did as he was told.

I sat silently with Chico and Coco. Free of my family, I listened to them frolic in the snow outside, merry, muffled, and free of me.

*   *   *

That night I realized how silent snow can make the world in which it falls. No cars passed by on the street outside my bedroom window. No one walked along the sidewalk. Sound itself seemed to have come to a standstill. It was so quiet I could not sleep worrying that either Chico or Coco, if they barked to complain about their strange new surroundings in the kitchen, would break the night’s eerie silence and be exiled by my mother once more out to the frigid garage. I got out of bed and tiptoed into the kitchen to check on them. Coco was asleep, but Chico, the more fragile of the two (he would come to suffer, like the young Teddy Roosevelt, from asthma), was shivering in the box. The long athletic socks my brother and sister and I had used that day as scarves were on the kitchen counter. I retrieved them and stuffed them down around Chico in the box, which awakened Coco, who began to bark. I could not quiet her, and my groggy father came into the kitchen. He looked like he was prepared to bark himself at all three of us there on the floor, but then he softened. “Come on, Kevinator, let’s get back to bed.”

“Can I bring Coco and Chico with me?” I asked.

“Now, Kevin…”

“Please, Daddy. They’re so cold. I can keep them warm.”

Too sleepy to argue, he picked the dogs up and told me to come along. “Sshshshsh,” he warned us, and led us back to my bed and began to tuck us in. He looked down at Chico and Coco so comfortably curled up next to me. He sighed. “Oh, hell, move over,” he said, surprising me by climbing into my bed himself for the very first time. He lay behind me and pulled me up close to him beneath the covers, his head next to mine on the pillow, the rough stubble of his face no longer splinter-like but something more splendid that I had yet to have a name for. He wrapped an arm over me and then over Coco and Chico. I watched my father’s big hand—could it really be the same hand that I had watched so often palm a basketball back in the gym where he coached his team or grab the black belt before it spanked me or even once slap my mother in my presence?—now gently hold one of Coco’s paws and one of Chico’s in its palm and then carefully, oh so carefully, enclose them there.

I looked up and saw, in the doorway, my mother taking in the tableau of her husband and her child in the bed with two curled-up Chihuahuas. She wore a woolen white robe. Her blond hair was mussed but magnificently lit by the snowy light that snaked across my bedroom floor and up one of her legs, snaring her whole lovely body before further whitening her face and finally forming a kind of halo that hugged those mussy curls. She moved a hand toward her hair and I knew in that moment she was real and not the apparition she seemed to be and, indeed, would become in two years once her cancer had killed her and carved this very image into my memory for the rest of my life, my mother’s ghost-like presence suddenly spun from the first light I’d ever seen reflected from a snowfall, my first sight of any angel in any doorway.

My father let go of Chico’s and Coco’s paws and motioned for my mother to join us, but she did not take his cue. She turned instead to go back to their bedroom. Then, lifting her hand this time to her cheek, she kept it there. She hesitated. She pivoted back our way and I saw something flutter across her face—resignation? reality? love?—along with the light that seemed again to float silently about the room until it chose that cheek of hers on which to perch. She walked into the light toward us, wafting it about once more with the sway of her hips, and found a way to come between my father and me, slipping her body like a sliver of the snowy light itself into the bed. My father then laid his arm over both of us, my mother and me, his hand lying flat against the bed. I took a paw from Chico and one from Coco and placed them again into my father’s open palm. He enclosed them, this time including my own hand in his gentle clench. My back was against my mother, whose back was against my father’s. I moved closer to her, then she to him. I heard my father growl and kiss her on her neck. She sighed. She touched my arm. I finally fell asleep in a world that was no longer silent.

EIGHT

The Pilgrim

“There are two kinds of people who work at the Factory,” Brigid Berlin told me. “There are lifers like me and then there are those who walk through it to get to somewhere else,” said Brigid. “Don’t be a lifer like me. You keep walking. Promise me, Kevin. Keep walking.”

I took her advice and kept walking straight through my Factory days to my days at
Vanity Fair,
to my freelance days as a writer, to now my days as a memoirist. But there was a time back in 2008 and 2009 when, finding myself in a corner, I could not find a way to walk out of it. I take that back. It was not a corner in which I found myself. It was, instead, more of a dead end, an emotional one.

That was when I got a phone call from my old friend Perry Moore. I had met Perry very soon after he had moved to New York from Virginia around 1995. We were at a Toys for Tots Christmas party full of gay preppies at the Ethical Cultural Center on the Upper West Side. Introduced by a mutual friend, we hit it off instantly. He told me he wanted to be a writer or get into some form of show business. At first I had a crush on him—so many people did when they first met him—but I soon fell into a kind of an older brother/younger brother mentorship relationship with him. I’d offer him advice, agree to read some of his writing, give him a shoulder to cry on when some much-anticipated date didn’t pan out. I was working on a novel at that point and one of its main characters was named Hunter. Perry was so excited when he met a man who turned out to be the love of his life who had that same exact name. He couldn’t wait to introduce Hunter to me. Perry and I believed in kismet of that kind; it’s one of the things we shared: the love of narrative in one’s own life.

Perry worked at
The Rosie O’Donnell Show
for a few years as a researcher. When my brother and his wife and children came to New York on a family trip, it was Perry who got us tickets to a taping of her show and escorted us backstage. After leaving Rosie’s show he got a great job as the executive in charge of production at Walden Media, which was founded by the archly conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz. I expressed my dismay, at first, that Perry would be working for such a man—I was afraid of his being co-opted by the man’s politics and the corporate culture that had sprouted around it—but Perry convinced me that he could do good working there, that his presence, as an out, proud gay man, would be an important one in the company.