The Throat

retrospective, beginning with Strait-Jacket. Along with all the usual Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise posters in the window was one for a line of film noir released on video for the first time. Now we're talking, I thought, and moved up to inspect the poster. Alongside a reproduction of the box for Pickup on South Street was that for From Dangerous Depths, the movie that Tom said had been playing in our neighborhood at the time of the Blue Rose murders. I peered at the picture on the box, looking for details. From Dangerous Depths starred Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino and had been directed by Robert Siodmak. I told myself that I would rent it someday and moved on.

At the Spring Street Bookstore, I bought John Ashbery's Flow Chart and took a quick, unforeseen spin into desperation while I signed the credit slip. I saw myself pouring the vodka into the drain the previous night. I wanted it back, I wanted a big cold glass of liquid narcotic in my hand. As soon as I got out of the bookstore, I went into a cafe and took a table at the opposite end of the room from the bar to order whatever kind of mineral water they had. The waiter brought me an eight-ounce bottle of Pellegrino, and I made myself drink it slowly while I opened the Ashbery book and read the first few pages. The desperation began to recede. I finished the water and devoured another hundred lines of Flow Chart. Then I left some bills on the table and walked back out into the sunlight.

What happened next might have been the culmination of all these events. It might have been the result of getting only two hours of sleep every day or of the wretched dreams that jumped out at me during those hours. But I don't think it was any of those things. I think it happened because it had been waiting to happen. A long gray Mercedes pulled into a parking space across the street, and a huge bearded blond man got out and locked bis door. He looked like Thor dressed in artist uniform, black shirt and black trousers. His hair fell in one long wave to just above his collar, and his beard foamed and bristled. Although I'd never met him, I recognized him as a painter named Allen Stone who had become famous in the period between Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel. He'd just had a retrospective, negatively reviewed almost everywhere, at the Whitney. Allen Stone turned away from his car and glanced at me with cold, pale blue eyes.

I saw. That was all that happened, but it was enough. I saw. On a mental screen that obliterated the street before me, Heinz Stenmitz's great blond head loomed over me. He was grinning like a wolf, pressing one hand against the back of my neck as I knelt in semidarkness, crowded between his vast legs, my arm across his lap, my fingers held tight around the great veiny red thing straining up at me out of his trousers. This, the center and foreground of the scene, pulsed in my hand. 'Put it in your mouth, Timmy,' he said, almost pleading, and urged my head toward the other head, my mouth toward the other little mouth. I shuddered, recoiled, and the vision blew apart. Allen Stone had turned away from whatever he saw in my face and was moving past the front of his car toward a set of double black doors set into an ornate building at the level of the sidewalk.

Heat blazed in my face. My scalp tried to peel itself away from my skull. My stomach flipped inside-out, and I stepped forward and deposited a pink mixture of Italian water and partially digested Vietnamese food into the gutter. Too shocked to be embarrassed, I stood looking down at the mess. When my insides contracted again, I drooled out another heap of the pink lava. I wobbled back on the sidewalk and saw two of the well-dressed suburban women, their faces stiff with disgust, standing stock-still about six feet away from me. They jerked their eyes away and hurried across the street.

I wiped my mouth and moved toward the corner, separating myself from the spatter in the gutter. My legs seemed disconnected and much too long. Fee Bandolier, I said to myself.

When I got back to Grand Street, I fell into a chair and began to cry, as if I had needed the safety of my own surroundings to experience the enormity of whatever I felt—shock and grief. Anger, too. A glance on the street had just unlocked a moment, a series of moments, I had stuffed into a chest forty years ago. I had wrapped chain after chain around the chest. Then I had dropped the chest down into a psychic well. It had been bubbling and simmering ever since. Among all the feelings that rushed up from within was astonishment—this had happened to me, to me, and I had deliberately, destructively forgotten all about it.

Memory after memory came flooding back. Partial, fragmentary, patchy as clouds, they brought my own life back to me— they were the missing sections of the puzzle that allowed everything else to find its proper place. I had met Stenmitz in the theater. Slowly, patiently, saying certain things and not saying others, playing on my fear and his adult authority, he had forced me to do what he wanted. I did not know how many days I had met him to kneel down before him and take him in my mouth, but it had gone on for a time that the child-me had experienced as a wretched eternity—four times? Five times? Each occasion had been a separate death.

Around ten, I reeled out to a restaurant where I wouldn't see anyone I knew, reeled through some kind of dinner, then reeled back to my loft. I realized that I had done exactly what I wished: instead of therapy, I had gone straight to electric shocks. At midnight, I took the usual second shower—not, this time, to get ready for work, but to make myself feel clean. About an hour later, I went to bed and almost immediately dropped into the first good eight-hour sleep in two weeks. When I came awake the next morning, I understood what Paul Fontaine had been trying to tell me on Bob Bandolier's front lawn.

4

I spent most of the next day at my desk, feeling as though I were shifting a pile of gravel with a pair of tweezers—real sentences, not instruction-manual sentences, came out, but no more of them than filled two pages. Around four, I turned off the machine and walked away, figuring that it would take me at least a few weeks to adjust to what I had just learned about myself. Too restless to read a book or sit through a movie, I met the old urge to get on my feet and walk somewhere, but two weeks of wandering in an aimless daze were enough. I needed somewhere to go.

Eventually I picked up the telephone book and started looking for veterans' organizations. My sixth call turned up information about a veterans' group that met at six o'clock every night in the basement of a church in the East Thirties—Murray Hill. They took drop-ins. Without being what I wanted, it was what I was looking for, a long walk to an actual destination. I left Grand Street at five-fifteen and turned up at the low, fenced-in brick church ten minutes early. A sign with inset white letters told me to use the vestry door.

5

When I came down into the basement, two skinny guys with thinning hair and untrimmed beards and dressed in parts of different uniforms were arranging a dozen folding chairs in a circle. An overweight, heavily mustached priest in a cassock striped with cigarette ash stood in front of a battered table drinking coffee from a paper cup. All three of them glanced at my splint. An old upright piano stood in one corner, and Bible illustrations hung on the cinder-block walls alongside colored maps of the Holy Land. Irregular brown stains discolored the concrete floor. I felt as though I had walked back into the basement of Holy Sepulchre.

The two skinny vets nodded at me and continued setting up the chairs. The priest came up and grabbed my hand. 'Welcome. I'm Father Joe Morgan, but everybody usually calls me Father Joe. It's your first time here, isn't it? Your name is?'

I told him my name.

'And you were in Nam, of course, like Fred and Harry over there—like me, too. Before I went to the seminary, that was. Ran a riverboat in the Delta.' I agreed that I had been in Nam, and he poured me a coffee from the metal urn. 'That's how we started out, of course, guys like us getting together to see if we could help each other out. These days, you never know who could turn up—we get fellows who were in Grenada, Panama, boys from Desert Storm.'

Fred or Harry sent me a sharp, dismissive look, but it didn't refer to me.

'Anyhow, make yourself at home. This is all about sharing, about support and understanding, so if you feel like letting it all hang out, feel free. No holds barred. Right, Harry?'

'Not many,' Harry said.

By six, another seven men had come down into the basement, three of them wearing old uniform parts like Harry and Fred, the others in suits or sport jackets. Most of them seemed to know each other. We all seemed to be