by Paul Lisicky
14
Bubble
Summer is as wonderful as it is awful. Week by week, through June, the crowd builds. Then it’s busy, always athrum, a buzzy, elongated hive stretching cells from Pearl Street to Franklin. The street is quiet only after 4 a.m., when I’ll see a lone guy walking home from the Boatyard. By the time August rolls around, every single human, plant, and animal is shredded, abraded, overwhelmed, overstimulated. Nerve endings rubbed with steel wool. We’re too exposed, and each perceived aggression makes us snap and lash out, bewildered that we’re harboring that much rage—what the hell is wrong? Aren’t we in the most beautiful place in the world? Could it be all that salt air, which corrodes the bathroom faucets, skins paint from the wood? In the West End a moving car almost pushed me into a parked car, and I’m a storm: a whirling comma spitting acid and wind, like the ongoing storm that shapes Long Point, out where an abandoned town, Hell Town, used to be. The driver turns out to be my friend Mary, sweet Mary, who sticks her head out the window, with a concerned look, to see whether I’m all right. The voice coming out of me? It is not a voice I’d want any other human to hear, much less someone so kind, funny, and down-to-earth. I tell her I’m sorry, so sorry. I don’t want her to think of me as the bonehead who talked to her like that. Luckily Mary seems to forget instantly, and when I bring it up a few weeks later she casually calls herself the shittiest driver on the Outer Cape.
And in spite of all this, time floats. Time just floats as if we’re all above the earth. Town a lyric bubble outside past and future. Town a dream that rips up all your intuitions about narrative and goes its own way every time I think the arc of a story is here. The sun goes up and down. High tide and low, restaurants, bars, head shops, sex shops opening and closing—how could I not be aware of the tide when the Town beach is all but swallowed up twice a day, water all the way up to the tops of Town landings? I’m not living my life the way other people are living their lives. Town summer is an experience of being fully present, no dead minutes, no burned patches of grass. Looking out at people, being taken in and evaluated by people. Not much actually boring. Do people go crazy when their lives aren’t boring, when they’re part of an endless, ongoing movie? I’m in a state where I’m close to feeling high all the time. While I know a few people who might like that idea more than is best for them, my brain wants something else after weeks and weeks of it. Maybe it wants rest, dullness, darker colors, sepia. No light or bodies. No voices. Inky night. Cool water. A lobster buoy? Raft floating on stillest harbor, five hundred feet out from the breakwater, 3 a.m.
A Lion
A floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, on the boat, “Of Other spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”
On holidays Commercial Street is a bit like an old pinball game. It shoots me out into obstacles and then bounces me back through the flippers, knocking me against silver knobs that light up and ring with multiple bells. On one hand it’s safe. I don’t have to compose myself the way I would in other places. No possible queer basher is going to follow me down the street. No one is going to scowl and call me by a slur. My shoulders fall backward; I lift my chest upward and out. I bare my arms. I can be a lion here. And just when my body agrees to that feeling, a car comes up right beside me, too close; the driver wants me to know he has places to be. Hear the revving engine? A truck lurches by, its sideview mirror just grazing the top of my shoulder, not enough to hurt me, but just enough to make me cry, “What the fuck?” The trucker has no clue. He has crates of beer to drop off, and if he stopped to worry about everyone on the street, he’d never get this cargo unloaded. His daily stress is ten times more than my daily stress, and at the end of the day he has to drive all the way home to West Yarmouth, forty-seven miles away. But you can’t keep to the sidewalk when it’s just wide enough for one person, and people are walking in both directions, and people stop to say hello, to encircle a Great Dane who rolls seductively on his side for public inspection.
Would I really want a peaceful street? While that sounds like a reasonable thing to ask for, maybe all that safety would lead me to sleepwalk through Town. If I’m worried that a handlebar is going to hit me, or a truck’s mirror is going to box my ear, I’m going to stay awake.
Administrative
There is an opening for an administrative job at the Work Center, and once my fellowship runs out, I pounce on it. The job involves not only janitorial duties, say, cleaning apartments and helping the grounds manager move an occasional mattress, but also administrative office work. In the office there are just two of us: Liz, who runs the operation in summer, and me. There’s enough work for a dozen people, but this is a period when no one expects to get anything accomplished. There are larger matters around us to get stressed-out about. The office itself looks half-finished, wood overhead and on the walls, some of it raw or painted white, wires and extension cords hanging. My office chair barely held together with corroded screws. Nabi, the Work Center cat, makes a satisfied nest out of our workplace. Sometimes she’s up on a desk, sometimes down on the floor in an afghan throw from the ’70s. I’m not even aware of all the flea bites I have until I go out to solicit businesses for the center’s upcoming summer auction. My ankles sting. They’re so red they look like they’ve been stippled, and I can’t help but pull up my pant leg and scratch myself, as I ask a B&B owner to donate a free weekend to us. He looks down at my scratching, frowns, then relaxes his face. He scratches his ankle, too, and signs the form with near-perfect grade school penmanship.
4/4 Time
It’s hard to keep my mind on the body on top of me, on my own pleasure, the hand on my throat, my chest, my dick, his dick. Should my mind be on my pleasure or on pleasuring the person I’m with? Is there a morality to sex, or are all ethics off the table once I’m lying flat on the bed, just as long as no one is getting hurt? Should I be close to my everyday personality, should I laugh and talk? Should there be breaks? Or should talking be kept to a minimum—how else would I shake off the straitjacket (no pun intended) of self if I weren’t leaving language behind? How could language in such a situation be anything but porn language, secondhand, trite, shopworn, embarrassing if I saw a video of myself, and someone were sitting there in the room to watch it with me?
And if all that weren’t enough, when I’m in it, even if I might be enjoying it, I might be thinking, When will this be over? I’m not sure if I like how this feels. Am I hurt? How long do I put up with that motion before I decide it feels like—like—surgery? Should I say stop? If I say stop, am I changing the course of our time together? Will my stop make you—me—self-conscious, too concerned about how we’re feeling rather than our pleasure, as if the two were radically separate categories? Do you have to involve your teeth like that? Is it OK to let a tear roll down my face? And yet—sex that is too comfortable, sex that doesn’t change—well, what could be more boring? Sex that is concerned only with getting you off, sex in 4/4 time, all plunging and stabbing with no variations of time signature. No wonder women (and some men) pretend they’ve come just so they can get the whole procedure over with. Why would anyone ever stay in sex—risk the disappointment of it—if not for the dream of falling into a new net, being cradled by it, taken to a place to which neither of us expected to go? Carried in space, caught just above the current of the abyss.
Foglifter
Other times the devil is a ghost and he’s taken something from me, or turned me into a ghost with him. His kisses fill me with a cold gas and then take the cold gas out. And then I’m only an empty membrane, without shape, a broken balloon. Something has been taken from me that’s not exactly flesh and bone, but what? All that’s left is the fog of me. He’s stolen something. And that was always his plan: to use me a little, to leave me with less, because he’s not concerned about self-esteem. He feels better if he leaves me with less. And I’ve let th
at happen. I’ve given him that power. He’s preparing me for the hardest things, and I still think I can escape aging and endings. Maybe I should be grateful to him.
And at other times I could just use a big, fat cock.
Phone Date
My mother picks up the phone just when I think she isn’t going to answer and I’ll have a reprieve. It always makes me ache to hear her hello, the particular cloudy color of it, as if she’s just downed a glass of milk, an old habit from growing up on a dairy farm. Sometimes when I’m first talking to her, just before I catch myself, I go right to that place when I was in camp in sixth grade. Her voice is as familiar to me as blood, even if I’m working harder than I should to sound cheerful. Lately I’ve been putting off those phone calls to her, only because our conversations make us feel further and further apart when we’re trying to draw closer. It’s as if she’s still speaking English, and I’ve left that old language behind. I don’t even understand its verb forms or articles or syntax anymore—is that why there are so many pauses and breaks in my sentences? I tell her I’m having a wonderful summer (which sounds like I’m rubbing salt into a burn), but there’s so much I can’t share with her. She hears it. And into that empty space she spills so many generalities. It’s as if she’s trying to close me down rather than draw me out. She doesn’t want to hear about my nights out. She doesn’t want to hear about Hollis or being knocked off my bicycle or dancing on the stage at the A-House. So instead she talks about Pebbles, our family Boston terrier, who got bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake last month when the two of them were out for a walk one night. But I’ve heard this story before, detail by detail—and how has she forgotten I already know? It worries me to hear her talking like that. It makes me feel awful to remind her, Yes, I know all about Pebbles’s snakebite. Do you think I’m that far removed from the family? Tones slide into tones we didn’t intend. A tone sounds like aggression, and once we name it as such, we can’t refigure the conversation, which must disconcert her as much as it does me. For so many years we finished each other’s sentences, and now we speak with the politeness of exes, of a couple who’s had a terrible falling-out.
Finally, to break things up yet again, I tell her I have news. I tell her that I’ve gotten a Second-Year Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center. I will be here through next May 1.
I tell her that I have just found out, when I actually got the news weeks back but was too apprehensive to tell her. Once, my mother got excited by my good news. She reacted as if the award or publication or reading was as much for her as it was for me. Now, though, she hears the announcement with wariness, as if the purpose of such awards is to take me away from her. I tell her it is extremely rare to be given two fellowships back-to-back. They are open only to present and former Fellows, the competition is fierce, they are very much coveted, and though I know it sounds like I’m bragging, waving the flag of my good fortune, I am simply trying let her know that home is here, I’ve come to know myself here, I can’t go back.
She tells me she’s happy for me. I can hear that she’s trying not to sound hurt, agitated. It’s taking a heroic effort. That does not stop her from saying, “Does that mean you’re not coming home next year?” But I can bear it. She’s trying to envision days ahead without company, nights before the TV, just her and the dog, cooking for herself, lost in her worries about the past, about what is to become of her if she falls down or if she’s had a stroke.
“Daddy should come down to stay with you. When is he coming down next? Why’s it taking him so long to get the Cherry Hill house ready?”
“Your father—” she says. “You know you can’t push your father to do anything.”
“Really? I think you can just be more up front about it. Forthright. Just say it, dammit.”
“Well, you talk to him,” she cries, as if she’s just said a curse word.
We talk some more. Her trying is almost too hard to listen to. I hear the aspects of martyrdom, and I can’t stand the way she’s so ready to give herself over to the role. Why not say no to it, why not resist? If no one resisted, even the current president would never say: AIDS. And yet it would be a mistake to overlook the fact that behind her hurt she’s still excited for me, proud. That pride isn’t calculated or false, or even very much about her. There couldn’t be a parent prouder of my achievements—there she is after one of my first public readings at Rutgers, walking up to me, unable to contain her laughter, her face wet with joy—and yet no parent wants to lose a child, even if she doesn’t quite know what that loss involves.
15
Wally
Wally is warm, funny, brown-eyed, handsome. He has the demeanor of a much younger person, a great big boy inside a man’s body, with a deep urge to visit the absurd, which is part of a greater urge to laugh and connect. I have gotten to know him through Mark, his partner, on Pearl Street. Lately his health has taken a turn, his tiredness keeping him bound to the couch for days, though he still has that glow to his face. He can no longer work, which he used to do with Polly at Pennsylvania Company, the clothing store at the center of Town. All of this is complicated by the fact that Mark must leave two nights a week to teach at Sarah Lawrence, in Bronxville, just north of New York City, a drive of five hours, 280 miles away. Wally needs someone to look in on him, not anything as elaborate as cooking or cleaning, but just to sit with him for a couple of hours, and Mark asks if I would like to do that. There is a small stipend involved. The money would not come from Mark and Wally, but from some Visiting Nurse Association fund. There is already some in the account, and it makes sense to spend the money if it has been allocated.
But the money part makes me a tad uncomfortable. Shouldn’t I insist on sitting with Wally for free, as I would if Polly were sick, or Hollis were sick? All sorts of people in Town, queer and straight, have been stopping by to check on their neighbors for years. But money inscribes a boundary. Money ensures I will show up when I say I will—on time, present, ready to help if need be. Money, even if it is a little money, will remind us of how grave this illness is when we’d all probably rather run away, sick or not sick.
If Wally gets the best treatment possible, well—it’s quite possible he could live for a very long time.
But before any of this can happen, I must be vetted by someone in charge of the program. Her name is Nora, and she can’t interview me over coffee downtown. The usual reference checks will not do. No, she must see my house, must see how I live, even though Wally will never come here. It isn’t expected he’d ever come here.
The times are so extreme, it doesn’t even occur to me to question the ethics of her visit. Though some pay heed to established routines and procedures, others still make rules up on the fly, day after day. This is an emergency, more deaths than ever in Town. What health professional has time to mourn anyone? The names of the dead fill a big book, and not a few of the doctors and nurses hate its existence. They run on autopilot now, and the big book is an invitation to mourning, but an invitation to mourning has the weight of a threat now, as people need to keep themselves closed and strong as a way to keep going.
My studio apartment at the Work Center is admittedly not the finest. The back wing of the cottage I’d spent my fellowship in. Sky-blue wainscoting, wallpaper of tiny red roses, long bathroom off the big room, which is overtaken by the bed. A narrow kitchen complete with a coppertone wall oven, so many layers of grease on the floor tile, around the cabinet handles and the electric stove burner plates, I’m not able to get any of it fully cleaned. In truth I haven’t done enough to make the apartment my own, to make it look loved. I see it through Nora’s eyes as she stands beside me. Her job is to ferret out the possibility of fraud, any person who might get the idea to use state funds in improper ways (drugs and drink). Because of that she is conditioned to expect the worst of people. As we attempt to converse, I can feel her scanning my place. Her eyes pretend to be on me, but really she is using them to imply judgment. She’s thinking: Too small, depressing. She is wa
iting for signs of a bong or a load of porn to topple out. The person who lives here is flailing, not on the right track. I’m sensitive about her judgment because it others me, it’s what poor people must feel all the time when law enforcement demands to come inside. Nora does not think of me as an ally or peer. She does not even see me as a writer, or as someone who went to grad school. I am queer and thus a failure to my gender, to the dream of white masculine power I choose not to serve. She has worked around plenty of queer people, but she makes it clear, through strategic references to her husband and children, that she isn’t one of us. All kinds of people break rules, sneak in unapproved medicines through the back door of the clinic, and as if to counter all that rebellion, Nora clings harder to the rules and bureaucracy. I suppose I’d have more compassion if I could see we all need order, we all grab on to it in our own frustrated ways in times of deep chaos.
I know this kind of judgment is happening everywhere, in much harsher terms. And I’m getting only the gentlest taste.
And yet I’m approved, readily. I’ve gone through my hazing and I’m to stop by and see Wally on Tuesday afternoons.
