I Loved You More - Softcover

Tom Spanbauer is beloved by readers and booksellers alike, and he will be a featured author at the ABA Winter Institute 2014 to coincide with the publication of I Loved You More, April 1, 2014. Tom was one of Gordon Lish's original student writers in New York and later in Portland became a teacher himself. His previous students include Monica Drake, Kassten Alonso, Jennifer Lauck, Joanna Rose, and Chuck Palahniuk. The latter is supporting I Loved You More, by sending gift baskets to 50 Indie stores.

Book One: Hank & Ben
Part one: Got to go pal

1.
The Maroni

Like most love affairs, Hank and I didn’t start off so good. In
fact I hated his guts. Every time Jeske called on him, which was
every week, Hank read his sentences out loud to the class and it
never failed, Jeske always praised him as if Hank was the next
Nadine Gordimer, or Louise Glück, or Harold Brodkey. Jeske even
had a special name for Hank. Maroni. That’s what he called Hank.
You’ve really knocked the ball out of the park this time, Maroni! You
really nailed it on the head, pal! Just take a look at that, would you!
Columbia University, winter quarter, 1985. Twelve weeks
of a three-hour-long night class in a hot big bright amphitheater
room. Jeske down in front of us, trim, natty, silver hair, in some
kind of military hat. Skin that was flushed from too many cigarettes.
Something classy about him, one of those New England
guys who just stepped off his sailboat. Our eyes on him. Our
eyes never left him. You never knew what he was going to do next.
Every class he bragged how he went three hours without pissing.
Wednesdays six to nine. Thirty-six fucking hours and Jeske
never called on me. Not one time. Forty people in that class and
everybody got at least one chance, but not me. A couple others in
class Jeske liked besides Hank, but to my ears it was all Maroni!
Maroni! Maroni!
Then came that class. The last class of the semester. The
last part of the last hour. The last reader. Finally Thomas Jeske,
Commodore Fiction himself, called on me. Fuck. My body did
that separating thing where all of a sudden I’m way out there somewhere
looking down at me sitting in a bright room in an amphitheater
chair, the fake wood desk top flap out flat, my faraway
hands trying to hold my pages still. I’m trying to find my breath,
keep my asshole tight, trying to keep my chin from turning into
rubber bands. All the rules I didn’t know how to get right: Never
go beneath the surface. Speak with a burnt tongue. It’s not writing,
it’s making. Take the approach that rebukes your own nature. Never
explain. Never complain. Latinate Latinate Latinate.
I took the knife, put it to my chest, punched hard in, cut
down and around, pulled my throbbing heart out and laid it down
on the page. But I wasn’t bleeding enough. The words sounded
stupid. My voice in the fluorescent amphitheater did not project,
was too high, cracking like an adolescent whose balls had just
dropped. Fuck. There was no getting away from it. I sounded the
way I always sounded: a Catholic boy with a big apology. Then
the long pause. The long piece of silence after where all there was,
was my breath. A drop of sweat rolled down the inside of my arm.
Everything gets bright and hot and full.
The eleventh hour! Jeske cries out, Way to go, pal! Grunewald’s
pulled it out of his ass on the eleventh hour!
Looking back on that day now, I wonder. Maybe that was
the first time for Hank. That he really looked at me.
The first time I really looked at Hank, really stopped and
looked, was during one of Jeske’s classes. By then I knew who
Hank was, of course. How could you not know The Maroni? But
this one particular class I’m talking about, there was a moment
that everything went away and my eyes filled up with nothing
but Hank Christian.
In the middle of one of Jeske’s lectures, there was a loud
crash in the hall. You might think so what, a loud crash in the
hall ? on most college campuses that doesn’t mean much. But
when it’s night and it’s Columbia University, the hallway outside
your classroom door is really a New York street. After the crash,
Jeske quit talking and we in the class all looked around at each
other. There was a way you could tell Jeske wanted to go to the
open door and check out the situation, but he hesitated. I saw him
do it. Hesitate. Something you don’t figure Commodore Fiction
to do. His thin body did a quick lean toward the door for a second,
then stopped because he thought better. Hank saw it too. Oh!
Commodore! My! Commodore! Hank saw the Commodore of the
mighty ship stall. He was up and out of his seat just like that.
Hank’s a big guy. Big arms, big chest. Twenty-seven to my
thirty-seven years.
Thirty-seven years old. Columbia University. I’ve always
been a late bloomer.
That day, as Hank made his way through the seats and down
to the doorway, Hank was holding his body that way he does.
He pushes out and raises up his chest, pulls his chin down, his
shoulders down, and flexes his biceps. I’ve seen Hank do that
a lot. Usually he does that when he’s trying to express something
inside him that’s big ? as if his body is literally trying to push the
thought or the feeling that’s inside him out, but that day in class
Hank was puffing up for another reason. He was on a mission.
I’ve never seen Hank do anything so perfect, so true to
who he was. Hank stood himself in the doorway, at the portal, at
attention, elbows out touching each side of the door. Our linebacker,
our protector, our bodyguard, our hero.
Immediately I was embarrassed for him. Such an obvious
show of macho. I mean, what was Maroni trying to prove? That he
could save our sinking ship from the big, bad pirates in the hallway?
Yet maybe there were pirates in the hallway! Maybe the
loud crash was a street gang, or some crazy motherfucker. Maybe
with a gun. Then what was Maroni going to do? Stop the bullet?
Saint Hank Christian, Guardian of the Doorway. At that
moment, I had no idea what a friend, a lover, what a hero, Hank
would be to me. All I could know was what I saw. His darkbrown
hair down to his shoulders. Lots of hair back then, the
eighties, plus a mustache too. Almost as big as mine. Beneath his
deep-set eyes ? eyes with his complexion you’d figure would
be blue, but weren’t, were dark, almost black, under the efficient
line of Roman nose, above the square jaw a bit of cleft, straight
teeth, Hank’s sweet smiling lips that one day no matter what I was
going to kiss.
Sure made Jeske proud. Pretty soon, a bunch of other guys,
but not me, were up at the door standing with Hank.
Some months later , when I didn’t hate Hank anymore, when
I was getting to know Hank, I asked Hank what Maroni meant.
He said something about how Maroni was Italian for how guys
talk to one another. Like dude maybe, or buddy, or pal. I never did
get it exactly what Maroni meant. But that was just Hank. He
always played his cards close to his chest, especially at the beginning.
It wasn’t that he had something to conceal. Hank liked
to say he was a ghost. A warrior ghost. He touched the world and
when he was done he left no trace. What was left of him was his
sentences on the page.
No wonder I fell in love with him. Seduce the laconic
straight guy. Not necessarily to fuck him, but to bring him out.
And not out like coming out, but out in the sense of inner workings
revealed. If I could understand my father, if my father could
actually be someone I could know, by knowing him, I could gauge
myself against him, and discover how I was and how I was not
like him.
Those first four or five weeks, though, Hank was fucking
Maroni, Jeske’s private ass kisser. Then it was Saint Hank Christian
Guardian of the Doorway, but when it really happened big
time was the night at Ursula Crohn’s apartment. The first time
Hank actually put his body next to me. As soon as he spoke, out
of Hank’s sweet lips the blow, some kind of frenzy in my...