I Loved You More Read Online Free PDF

piece of me with you . Hank is sitting on the step just above me. We’re stripped down to loose fitting T-shirts and shorts, sandals. My whole body feels like crotch rot. Every once in a while, Hank’s bare knee touches my bare arm and it sticks. I’m on my third or fourth beer and Hank’s still nursing his second. Hank usually didn’t drink more than a couple beers. He didn’t get marihoochied either. That’s what Hank called it, marihoochy .
    On the stoop, when Hank said that about Mythryxis, I had to turn and look up at him, and the porch light was right there, so I had to put my hand up to shield my eyes. Hank’s black eyes again. It never ceased to startle me the way he and I could look at each other. They were kind of misty, his eyes, as if the whole Mythryxis thing was a whole lot tougher than he’d ever let on.
    â€œAre you sad about that?” I said.
    Hank rolled the bottle in the brown bag around in his big hands. Looked at that bottle the same way he’s looking in his author’s photo on the back of his book.
    â€œIt’s all sad, Gruney,” Hank said. “If we let ourselves know how sad it really is, there wouldn’t be anything left of us.”
    Just after he spoke, I swear a big gust of wind blew by. Like a semi truck on the freeway. It was hot wind – but still it was moving air, and it blew back our sweaty Eighties hair and then made a mess of the garbage all the way down East Fifth Street.
    Sometimes I think Hank Christian, the Maroni , was magic. Or we were. Really, I loved that guy so much.
    SOMETHING I’D LIKE you to notice, though. The Enigma of Hank Christian. When I asked Hank about Mythryxis, he did something he always did. He answered with something pithy and true and in such a way that it makes the saying beautiful, but after you think about it, he actually hadn’t told me one specific thing about himself or Mythryxis or the situation he was in with her.
    There are two ways I feel about this. Now that I am old and sick and Hank is dead, sometimes I wonder if I knew Hank Christian at all. Before his death, all those years we didn’t speak. No deathbed reconciliation. Nada . Believe me, the shit that went down with Ruth could tear anything asunder.
    Years passing can do other things as well. Shit that before I didn’t know even existed, let alone try and understand, I’m beginning to make sense of now. Which I’m thankful for. Still, change like that ain’t easy, especially when you’re sixty.
    Hemingway called it the black ass . Virginia Woolf put herself in the hospital after every one of her books. Except the last one. And the book about New York and AIDS I was writing was, on purely a physical level, only prolonging the horror of the Eighties one decade further. Once is enough with depression like that.
    THE SECOND WAY I feel about the Enigma of Hank Christian is fuck it . So I didn’t understand it all. The glorious mystery of the man who touched me in a place that wasn’t there before he touched it. I want to dance my ass off in some naked-pagan-by-the-bonfire drum chant, screaming thanks at the universe for the blessing of that hole his black eyes burnt into me. So what if he didn’t spill all his beans. So what if he was a persistent, obdurate, goddamn goat. I’ll never be the same after Hank Christian, and thank God for it.
    THAT FIRST FRIDAY night Hank came over felt like a blind date. Hank and I both were freaked. Neither one of us knew what the fuck we were going to say or do with the other. I was freaked because of what I did know. Hank because of what he didn’t.
    My radar for Hank – something, I figured, that overwhelming could only be sexual. Don’t get me wrong, that was good, way good, in fact dream come true good. But dream come true good, the very perfectness of Hank Christian and his buff Italian body and black eyes, his Maroni status with Jeske, his