Henry Miller, My Roommate

Spit stains drape the old, lumpy pillows I'd fall asleep on, wine stains graced the rug, where he would occasionally sign off after many hours in the cement mixer, known as his mind, and pass out.  Spitless.  His insides were all wet, and my neck was wet, so we went together like that.  Perfect roommates.  Henry Miller and I.  Just for a short time, in the waterfront brooklyn neighborhood..."not like that shithole on Driggs Avenue" he'd grumble to me, in his gravel laden minimalist language, when I'd go into the kitchen to search out some of that French aspirin headache powder he'd always bring back...I sucked down the water, also minimalist and tasteless (God bless the French for their ingenuity, unabashed and humble) as he complained to me.  I didn't have the heart to tell him that his crude, middled street was now full of anorexic rich kids with straight legs and trust funds...no heart at all.  Sometimes the truth is better left unsaid.

The point is, with Henry Miller as my current yet temporary sublet roommate (we were both heading onto "other things" don't you know), I was always the one passing out, earrings on, bad story in my pants and lost machinery, drooling all over the place before or after or during the sickness, and him...HIM...never sick, never headache, a lightweight if you think about it (I didn't say that).  All I am saying is that he was always up, his faculties all about him, in the dim light (one of four we would have to replace over the great meeting ground of the dining room table....how does that happen? Three lights, of equal wattage, all linked to one similar switch, out while the fourth stays lit...just enough to frame his grand buddhist head like a shroud of merlot, and calm), wanting to talk about it.  Always talk.  But never sick himself, or messy, or embarrassed.  The wine stains, yes, because he would often just gently fall asleep there for a moment, knocking his wine into the carpet, the tablecloth, the wall, anything that would have it.  I'd imagine a great way for a wino from the streets to get some free red was to crouch nearby, when he'd overstepped his bounds and just wait for the remainder of his glass's contents to wash the insides of their gum diseased, wanting mouths like a dream.  A good source of "income" if that income was vino.  So, I was the one with the industrious mother who taught me how to remove all the stains, no matter where their distress spot, while he watched, in awe - in interest and delicacy.  Listening, cause he was good at that too. 

That time, on New Years Day, after I walked home in the black, abrupt night, drunk on tears and heaving with the weight of him in my skin.  Henry told me.  He Told me about what I was about to learn, and wasn't it all about learning...he knew I couldn't see that yet, but he knew to tell me to take note, remember the way the moon looked, the things he (the one that caused my tears, or so I had thought at the time) and I had talked about, painfully and like a body being torn about at the seams, on the way to said Brooklyn bar, to compare it with the salty, teary night, the first in a year which I had mapped out so perfectly and utterly fucked up, from behind my own eyes and with my old, golden touch.  I told Henry, I said, the boy's ugliness as he saw it, was not worthy of my love, due to beauty which he could not possess.  Henry laughed (as if he hadn't just drunk 2 Whole bottles of wine! With a few crusts of bread, even though he knew I always made a sunday stew with meat and noodles and left it in the ice box, for him to enjoy), and looked off to the window, to whatever vista he would find, and twirled his near empty wine glass, forcing a dark purple ring on my grandmother's birch wood table, and said to me, eyes all slinky, mouth twisting a smile at one end, "but my girl, he has to love himself enough to know the beauty of the gods by which you possess easily, without care...." à bouche ouverte", said with the grandeur and sharpness of his Brooklyn tongue.  I told him I had learned Spanish, though I didn't remember any of it, because I really didn't enjoy them as a people....short, stocky, overwrought with corn oil and bass judgements.  

But I understood all the same, through my well full of tears on that New Years, and on all the drunken nights since, when I came home and found him there, in that incandescent, inescapable light which never died along with the others.  I knew I was beautiful every time, even when my makeup had worn off, and my stockings had ripped.  Henry never ceased in telling me all the truth that he could find, before he gratefully sipped or spilled the last of those various red wines I had always in store for him.  He tried to seduce me one, but I told him I simply couldn't make love to a grandfatherly type....I just loved my own father, who was 44 when I was born, too much to subvert the idea of a man like that.  He was well past 44, he said, but he liked me all the same, he said, as he angled his long, and graceful finger in the air around me, as he spoke.  We wrote on the same page, and I always knew my tears, whether new years or old hat, were safe with him.  Being drunk on wine made him simply more himself.  And the reflection was a kind one, in those murky, perfect moments before I would pass out, or drool my way to a somber, hungover morning of aspirin powder and looking for my purse.

M. Lucia