Eliot was wrong. The cruelest month is January.
January is the Monday of the year, the month I'd like to skip, sleep through it like a bear. Once in February, I would have a jump start on the year.
But it does not happen that way.
And besides with my slim, smooth body and finely contoured muscles, I looked nothing like a bear. Despite the delicacy of my appearance, however, I was neither frail nor fragile. Strong and wiry is more like it.
January was bitter cold. But I think of myself as invincible, and even on the coldest nights, I'd try the streets before giving in and hauling over to Benny's.
Guys would laugh at me for drinking hot rum and lemon with a nice heap of sugar. But it was an ice breaker and more than once I got a guy into my bed who used my drink as openers when he approached me. After he ordered one too and we got a little tipsy, it was smooth sailing.
Ira went home with me one night.
He seemed like a sweet and gentle guy.
We took off our gloves and held hands.
I was amazed and absorbed in his aura. It brought mine out, too.
Your name means anger in Latin, but you seem very calm.
He laughed and kissed me.
I'm a pacifist, he said.
What does that mean?
It means the only way I fight is without hurting anybody.
I have a loft in Chelsea, not far from Benny's.
In ten minutes, from Benny's to my loft, a heavy snow had begun to fall.
We were glad to get inside out of the piercing wind.
We hung up our now wet outer clothes and then went into the kitchen where I brewed some more hot rum, and he held me round the waist with one hand and played with my nipples with the other as I stirred spices into the buttery rum.
With our breaths still hot and stinging from the hot rum and lemon we touched our tongues to each other and brought our mouths together and took each other with a kiss.
We took a hot shower together, never ceasing to caress each other and naked went to bed under a plethora of feathers. We drew as if pulled by magnets together.
The winter bit strongly and stayed long. Before January was over I knew I had to do something. The number of men and a few women, who huddled in the streets throughout Chelsea, finding nooks in walls or alcoves by windows to crouch in wrapped in their blankets and sleeping bags was alarming.
It has become a time of destitution, I said to Robert as we walked down Twenty-First Street to Tenth Avenue, where he lived. People who used to live in houses are shivering on the streets.
You want to do something about it? he said.
Yes, I said.
Soup, he said. We ought to make huge pots of soup and bring it to them, hot.
Robert was not as tall as me and he was actually not very handsome. He was sloppy and paid no attention to how he dressed. He shaved sporadically and unevenly. But his spirit was so lovely that it shone right through his skin. Girls were crazy about him, not just as a friend, and he was irrepressibly heterosexual. I would tease him about it. He would blush.
It doesn't make me a bad person, he'd answer.
He also drove, which I did not do. His girlfriend Cindy was a carpenter and had a small truck, a truck with an open flatbed in the back.
On that we haled large pots of soup we'd make at my place in the afternoon, iron canisters of propane gas, and a small stove.
We set up in the street by a group of homeless people huddled in the cold, mainly on the avenues but there were some notorious side streets, set the canister and the stove on the sidewalk, heated the soup and in covered cardboard containers gave out the soup, which was a simple potato leek soup.
Peter slumped in a corner and said he did not want any soup.
But you must be hungry, I said, and it's hot.
What the fuck do you care?
If you have some soup I'll tell you.
You are relentless, he said, breaking into a grin, and took my soup.
But now you've got to tell me.
Because I have a lot to eat and you don't, I said, like it was obvious that that was my reason.
You have some place to sleep, too, he said.
Yes, I said, admitting it meant something.
When are you coming back? he said.
Tomorrow night, I promised.
The next night the word had spread, and the third night, Cindy brought two others with her and there were now five of us giving out soup. We had made twice as much as the night before and we went home with empty pots.
I worked for an auditing and accounting firm, Peter said.
This time we were sitting in a diner with aluminum siding and a blue neon sign. There was a table between us and we were having hamburgers and coffee.
It's my invitation, I said and he consented.
In the evenings I'd get dressed up, put on a garter belt and black fishnets, heels and mascara and go to the kind of clubs where that was not just acceptable but appreciated. Then I was laid off and everything became closed off. The guy I lived with said I wasn't paying my share, which was true, and that God did not put him into this world to take care of me, which was also true.
How old are you? I asked.
Twenty-three."
You gonna stay like this? I asked.
You got any suggestions?
That means yes I take it.
I don't need a lecture, he said. Is that why you're buying me a hamburger, so you can scold me?
He pushed the dish with the half-eaten hamburger away.
Come on, I said.
Come on, what? he said.
You know perfectly well that I want to see you off the street.
You gonna take me to live in your house?
Maybe, I said. You want to?
If I have to get a lecture for a cup of coffee, I can imagine what I'll have to put up with for a place to sleep, he said, shaking his head.
Is that a yes? I said.
You got a better offer?
It's the best I can do right now.
In that case, he said, yes.
Robert, Cindy, and I continued our soup project and often had help from her friends, and after a week, Peter started doing the rounds with us, too.
And then the weather broke and March turned into April, the incipient month, and the air was full of whispers of Spring, especially at six in the morning as my chest lengthened and my legs flew apart like the legs of herons as I ran through the city and around the park.
We have to do something else, Robert said.
They still need food, I said.
But I don't have the money to keep feeding people. And I don't think you do.
He was right. We had to think of something.
If this were a fiction, the kind posted on Nifty, for example, you can be pretty sure, the narrative would not have taken you back to the problem of people being left destitute.
I would have taken Peter home to my sumptuous loft and first noticed, as he got out of the abominations he called his clothes, thin, dirty, smelly, altogether foul, as he prepared to soak in the hot bath I had run for him, that he was beautiful, ripped, and wildly desirable. He would emerge from the bathroom radiant with only a clean white towel slung low around his waist. Through a kind of accidental bumbling, he would drop the towel, blush and say something like, Sorry, and I would respond by pointing out that it was not the first time I'd seen a guy in the buff, while I quietly hoped that maybe he was gay and despaired before I knew, that he wasn't.
I know what you are thinking, he'd say, seeing it from something about the way my eyes softened with desire as I looked at him, and I'd look at him and say, Oh yeah, what? afraid I was busted.
But he'd turn it around and say something like, You probably think I'm trying to come on to you.
Are you? I'd say, keeping my cool.
It looks that way, he'd say, taking a few steps near me, and I'd remember Alex, who left me in the kind of pain I still had not recovered from and wonder if this guy were putting me on and if I had not opened a whole can of worms by taking him in.
What happened? he'd say.
What do you mean?
What made you cut off?
How can you tell I cut off? I'd say, warding off his penetration.
Because you have nothing to be frightened about. I won't do that?
Do what?
What somebody did to you.
I'd want to deny it but instead start to cry. And he'd hold me till it was finished. And then our lips would touch and something new would have begun. And that would allow the story to end.