I Loved You More by Tom Spanbauer

apart. It’s as if the words that are being said go to the deepest place, the place in you that’s become the way you’ve become so you can keep on going. The helmet you put on when you were a kid that grew into your head and now someone is saying you have a helmet on your head.
    â€œThat first time I heard you read at Ursula Crohn’s,” Hank said, “it was as if the skies opened, or my soul opened, whatever, shit just opened. Your broken voice saying it is I who am broken, and it is human to be broken, and we are all broken, and it changed my life. I’ve never heard anything so beautiful.”
    â€œIt was you who taught me, Gruney,” Hank said, “to be authentic.”
    â€œIt’s you who taught me to be a real man.”

       5.
    The women
    THEN THERE WAS THE NIGHT HANK AND OLGA AND I GOT thrown out of Seville.
    That’s where we were going to meet that night, at Seville – a Spanish restaurant on Perry in the West Village. Hank said Olga said it was the best Mariscada de Salsa Verde in town. I didn’t even know what Mariscada de Salsa Verde was, other than it was green. But I didn’t care. It could’ve been fried green goat brains and I’d have gone. In the year I’d known Hank, besides Mythrixis, of all the girlfriends Hank had only mentioned now and then, Olga Rivas was different. She was from Nicaragua. Into Santeria. Her long thick curly black hair. Her eyes, her eyes, Hank couldn’t stop talking about her eyes. Her English. The way she adorned herself with jewelry. And that night, I was finally going to meet her.
    It was summer again and hot like only Manhattan can get. Humid hot with nothing green around to suck it up. Heat waves bouncing off concrete. I started out from East Fifth Street an hour early. Those days, my vacations were walking. My favorite route was to cut across Cooper Union Square to Broadway, then window shop Eighth Street with its cheap chic, shoes, and salons de belleza eres . To Fifth Avenue. My favorite corner. There was always a guy drawing with chalk on the wide sidewalks, wonderful drawings that looked like da Vinci or van Gogh. I always watched where I stepped so I’d never step on his drawing. Andsomething else I loved to look at. One Fifth Avenue. That building was what my eyes always went to.
    More often than not, that corner was my destination. There was a Hebrew National on Eighth, my favorite dinner out. Two hot dogs with sauerkraut and a Coke. I’d take my dinner to across from One Fifth, sit on the curb, eat my hot dogs, drink the Coke, stare up at the building. The Spanish terra cotta tiles, the mullion windows. The little round windows at ground level that looked like windows on big ships.
    There I was, Ben Grunewald, so close I could reach out and touch it.
    It. What George Plimpton had, what it takes to be Truman Capote. The penthouse apartment with the arched tall corner windows. The crystal chandelier you could see in there at night. Sometimes the curtains, like clouds those curtains. Vacations on Lake Como. The Paris Review. The New York Review of Books . Miles Davis. Sailboats. Those blue plates people hang on their kitchen walls. Pressed starched linen. Chablis Grand Cru. Truffles. Café de Flor. Museo de Chocote. Havana, Cuba. People to love you like Hemingway.
    The myth of van Gogh coursing through my veins. One painting. He’d only sold one painting. So happy with my Kosher wieners and my Coke. Sitting there my ass on the curb, my feet in the gutter, next to me the guy chalking out Starry Night .
    I’m looking up, always looking up.
    I knew it was far away. That world. But no fucking idea how far.
    If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t. I’d find someplace sunny. Always have tanned feet. Drink clear clean water from a thick green glass bottle. Find a big Catalpa tree to love. Eat dirt.
    AT SEVILLE, THERE’S a line, and even though Olga has made