by Paul Lisicky
Then I make a mistake. I admit to my parents I’m finding it hard to pay my car insurance, other bills. Instantly my candor is transmuted in their minds as a tale of woe in which I am selling my butt on the street. Maybe they picture me moving in with a man who will use me, take everything he wants from me, then cast me off, like the hustler Alex in Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, an ABC Movie of the Week from my youth, another warning film, which managed only to make squalor seem satisfying and electric.
One day a letter arrives from my father. I keep it beneath a pile of junk mail, think I might not ever open it—or at least today. But curiosity gets the better of me. Am I surprised? He wants me to come home to Florida. The request, the audacity, the demand behind the request is a shock—I’m asked to choose between loyalty to my family and independence. He makes several appeals to my self-esteem, as if to say the life I’ve chosen is antithetical to my ideals. I can tell how much effort he’s put into these paragraphs. He’s given this some work. My father is brilliant in the department of math, but as far as putting words to the page? He’s refused to nurture that side of his brain. He should have given me the letter to edit before mailing it to me, just the way he used to give me rough drafts when he was president of the Anchorage Point Civic Association or chairman of the Cherry Hill Planning Board. I could have said, The logic in this sentence is faulty. I could have said, The comparison in paragraph two is sentimental. I feel his frustration with every sentence, as if composing it got in the way of all the other tasks he’d bulleted on his to-do list: spreading fertilizer on the backyard, installing sprinkler system pipes in the front to keep the date palm green. The raw need is so palpable that I stare at the final paragraph frozen, unable to move for an hour. I hear a few stray notes from John Dowd’s piano, then silence, deep winter silence. Trees creak outside. The mere act of reading the letter feels like it’s bringing hurt to my father, to my mother, to me. All our loneliness, our need to be simultaneously together and apart.
Maybe this plea involves a generalized fear of sex, my sex, camouflaged by the fear of AIDS. But what if this request isn’t even about me? If I go down to Florida, maybe he is then off the hook for spending time with my mother. He can remain in his own separate world, back in New Jersey. What does he do in his own private Idaho? Does he miss us; our dog, Pebbles; going out to dinner and running into random neighbors? Or is it a relief to be away from all that pressure, that expectation, social or self-imposed? Always somebody tapping you on the shoulder, always someone suggesting you didn’t do that job right—see the mistake in that equation? That sloppiness? Maybe it feels like he’s back at work, and he hasn’t yet shaken off those feelings, even though he’s been retired for a few years.
But do I respond to the letter? I wonder if it would hurt less to write back to him, but I don’t. Why? Maybe because I know he still has the power to convince me out of here.
Sleep Tight
Polly calls one night, in the middle of the night, hours after I’ve gone to sleep. She asks if she can stay at my place: she and Richard are fighting, terribly, but she doesn’t want to talk about it, can’t talk about it yet. Her voice sounds stoic; she isn’t crying. I tell her I don’t know where she’s going to sleep, but she says she’ll sleep on the floor, on the carpet; she’ll bring some blankets and sheets, and she’ll borrow a pillow of mine, is that OK?
What will happen if I lose my favorite couple, the couple who affectionately call me their gay boyfriend? I shouldn’t make this about myself, but they are my sturdiest connection to the straight world, the world of my upbringing, though they’re both more queer than any other straight person I know. I don’t ask any questions when Polly knocks at the storm door that never quite shuts or fits. The night is too charged, bleak; it’s written in her eyes and in the corners of her mouth: she looks hunted. I will not ask of her, or impose on her, or even expect her to hug me: I see those notes in her face. She makes up a nest by the east-facing window, perpendicular to the bed. The apartment is a treehouse. There are ghosts outside on the tips of the dune grass. Sleep is the means by which we take ourselves out of adult terrors and back to childhood, where we’d never expect to lose anyone.
Library
Elizabeth comes over one day, sits on my bed, and dozens of copies of Honcho, the magazine, spill out onto the floor beneath the mattress. It is an archive, a multitude, a veritable Niagara Falls all over again. I had no idea I’d been buying so many; they must date back to October 1991, when I first arrived in Town, not a single month missed. Elizabeth’s laugh is so loud, I’m sure it passes through the floors and walls of 411. But it isn’t the laughter of shaming. I’m sure it’s about the look on my face, which might be pulled into so many directions my eyes must pop. When my mother found my stash at home, she couldn’t resist making me feel filthy, as if she’d pored over every image, every page herself, and hated it all the more because she found it sexy, hated what it made her.
Boatyard
It’s always daunting to slip down the street to the Boatyard, even in the middle of the night. Someone could be walking by, usually it’s a group, laughter brought on by too much booze. But what if it’s someone I have a routine casual banter with, say, the lady in the health food store, the guy who signs me in at the gym? All sorts of people call themselves sex positive, but they might think differently of me if they saw me rushing down that notorious lane, hands in my pockets, steeling my shoulders, as if I’d just shoplifted a pork chop and held it under my arm. Guess who I saw going to the Dick Dock? that person might say. And the unspoken shared belief involves stereotypes of unmanageability, trashiness, self-disgust, disease sharing, and a pitiful sense of: Couldn’t he do better? They’d never see me the same way again.
Even in a sex-positive church, sluts are not always viewed as high priests.
Of course once I’m walking among the boat hulls, I feel uncannily safe, even if I could possibly trip on an iron spike, conk my head against a low beam. Though it’s all in the dark, it’s all pretty easygoing and respectful, with bursts of group intensity. The sex I see is what’s called safe sex: blow jobs and hand jobs. If horniness weren’t narrowing my perception, I’d be able to step back and see how cinematic it is. All these bodies moving—it is like a scene out of Fellini if Fellini had been queer. No wonder the moon likes it here, shining a trail on the harbor from the Truro bluffs right to this very spot. There’s a swarthy, muscular bull, with the face and demeanor of a bouncer. He’s reportedly a famous nightclub promoter. People from every corner of life show up here. I’ve tried to catch his eye all summer, but it’s been hopeless. I’ve even given up on looking at him when I pass him on the sidewalk, if only out of self-respect—I don’t want to think of myself as a creep, the kind of person who leers. I’m not his type, clearly. I don’t have big enough muscles, don’t have big enough attitude. My swagger would never match his, which was probably cultivated by his relatives on the streets of Napoli, then Bensonhurst. Possibly he wants someone with classic features, more all-American, the polar opposite of him. But in the dark he’s a different human. His eyes practically tear up when I touch his neck. I crouch down to suck his dick but he really wants to suck mine, and I back into a post and concentrate on his mouth. I close my eyes. I’m as happy as if I’ve published a book.
Nameless
Stranger whose name I’ll never know, under the pier, in the darkness. What luck to be here with you. To hold parts of you in my mouth. To be held by you, to kneel down in the sand with you. To stand up again. To press my mouth to yours with a little pressure, then more until it almost hurts: teeth to teeth. To press my thumbs against the expanse of your forehead. To let you know your head—and the skull beneath it—is beautiful to me.
To know we don’t have a history. No names to exchange and no obligation.
And the almost joy in letting you go.
20
The Hours
It’s been months since Hollis and I have spent any time together. The unrave
ling—any other word seems too extreme—doesn’t seem to have been marked by any incident. If anything, it feels like we’ve gotten too close. Playing around that way can be dangerous, especially when the chemistry (our ability to crack up at each other’s jokes) is undeniable. Does it make him sad? My sadness and confusion have been so pervasive I’m not even sure I can feel them as such. To say we lost something would be to say there was actually something valuable between us, something to lose. But hope was never attached to our afternoons. Maybe it’s too much to call them afternoons—hours. Let’s just call it as it is.
We are seated outside Café Express, in the cluster of cedar-shake buildings across from the post office. We have just worked out. Everyone in Town comes here, which means I’m always running into someone, there’s always a hug, an ebullient hello, but nothing goes unrecorded: faces, gestures, stray words. Hollis isn’t talking much today. Deep down, in a place I don’t care to inhabit, I am on fire; I am furious with him for disregarding the possibility of us as worthy of examination. I have ceded all the power to him, it’s my own fucking fault. It’s hard to find my feelings. Hard to see feelings as important when we are living in the middle of so much death. Not long ago, Jaco, his ex, took a turn for the worse, healthwise. And maybe that explains Hollis’s resistance to tearing up his life once more? He couldn’t build a new life without tearing up the last one. He’d have to say those experiences didn’t count.
In spite of all this, Hollis still wants to be my friend. He still wants to go food shopping together, still wants to drive up Cape, or up to Boston. He agrees to drive me to the oral surgeon in Hyannis to get a wisdom tooth extracted, to take me home when I’m still in the haze of general anesthesia, sticky, warm cotton jammed in the corner of my mouth—an hour drive there and back when he had a thousand things due: no small favor. Once we got back to Town, I didn’t even know I’d walked right past Norman Mailer, in the tiniest possible bikini no less, until it was pointed out to me.
One evening Hollis tells me he is setting me up with someone. The someone turns out to be a lovely guy, smart and sexy, with an inquisitive face and a dark, dashing, foppish curl atop his high forehead, but he’s someone I couldn’t possibly be drawn to because he isn’t—isn’t, well—Hollis! I try my very best to cooperate with this plan but I just can’t. On our second date, in the middle of sex, he leans into me, bites my ear to tell me that he loves me. I freeze into my back teeth, as if my mouth’s been stuffed with cold rice. I’m too upset to say, You do not. I bet you don’t even know my middle name, dammit. You could have at least waited until the fifth date.
Expedient
But I get why he wants to get together right now. There isn’t much time for any of us. What else do you do when the world is ending?
Adam & Steve
Every two months I see them, two devoted older men who look like tiny versions of Popeye. I imagine they’ve been here since the 1930s, when Portuguese women, open-minded and cosmopolitan, rented rooms to men. They wear cardigans and shorts in all kinds of weather and white knee socks that conjure up lederhosen. They live in a cedar-shake house surrounded by a chain-link fence almost as tall as they are. They’ve been a couple so long they don’t even know when they started to resemble each other. Possibly they’ve been together since the beginning of time, and their union precedes all other unions, heterosexual and homosexual, and they are the true parents of us all. Adam and Steve, in the words of a tired joke. One of them is said to host a show featuring the music of John Philip Sousa on WOMR, the local radio station. It is very possible they have the best sex in Town, taking each other’s loads night after night, and why shouldn’t they? It wouldn’t even occur to them to worry about AIDS. They were together before that.
Refusal
This refusal to get tested: is it murdering me? Maybe refusal is too strong a word—refusal suggests agency and resistance, and my own position? Well, it’s not even a position. It’s procrastination, plain and simple, like my father not getting to the second item on his to-do list for a dozen years. But even that isn’t cowardice, and I’m feeling cowardly, while at the same time I know I’m brave, very brave. Just for waking up. Just for meeting my friends day after day. There are all kinds of suicide, and maybe I’m just doing a long, slow suicide, another version of what my mother is doing to herself. What are the costs to the brain, the heart, the lungs, the skin? The hair is already receding from around my temples. And I’m not simply talking about disease as if it were lying in wait in me. I’m talking about holding the wave of dread back five times a day. Trying to silence the howl of illness.
21
Lonely People
Goofy bright eyes that want to laugh, muscular calves, Caesar haircut—he’s been around Town for some weeks, and it’s been impossible not to take him in. I’ve heard bits of his voice, one that’s hard to describe. It slides between a low register and high, without warning. He does not do th’s at the ends of words—youth becomes yoot. English is his language, but he speaks English as someone who is also proficient in another language. It sounds like he’s disciplined it out of his expression. Is he Lebanese? Greek? French Canadian? Israeli? I cannot pin him down. Sometimes he is in leather, sometimes he is in drag. He defies compartmentalization, and that’s what says magnetizing to me. Up against him, everyone else looks like they’re cramming themselves into framed boxes just so others will know how to interpret them: top, bottom, butch, queen, geek, party boy. He is all of the above at once: simultaneity incarnate.
One day, biking down Shank Painter Road, I catch him smiling at me beside the entrance to the A&P parking lot. He’s on a bike, too, and if I were bolder I’d stop to say hello, instead of driving forward on Shank Painter, past the damn A&P, when I actually came out here for just that purpose. I’m long past saying to myself, What is wrong with me? And instead I remember seeing him dancing the other night, up on the go-go box at the Crown and Anchor’s Back Room. He is a part of Ryan Landry’s House of Superstar, a dance party that happens once a week, the same party that Hollis’s Lou dances for. Queer people and straight people dance side by side at these parties—that doesn’t mean the parties feel neutered or well behaved. The dancing is enthusiastic, it never lags. People are always out on the floor. Out in the middle of the floor a demure white girl mock-buttfucks some huge Puerto Rican guy with huge forearms, his mouth wide open in comic agony and loving every minute of it. The whole night has quote marks around it, but the quotes are as much playful as they are nihilistic. One night an oversize replica of an AZT capsule hangs from the ceiling. It glitters in the smoky air, blue band around the center, while people dance around it, fully aware that the drug that’s supposed to be extending their lives is poison, is only making them sicker—and some corporation out there is accumulating a lot of wealth.
The DJ doesn’t let a night go by without spinning “Lonely People,” though its actual title is longer than that. At the beginning of the song there’s an exchange between a prospective clubgoer and a bouncer. To the clubgoer, who’s certain she’s on some guest list, the bouncer says, There is no guest list tonight. Though it’s all a joke, the bouncer’s voice burns, as the scenario takes place outside a club, in front of others. The clubgoer’s presumed entitlement: well, you’re indicted, too, because you know that desire to be a part of, to be included. At the same time you know the point of such an evening is to be inclusive, democratic, to take on people at all levels, no matter the race, gender, economic position, or sexual category.
And the paradox is there, always there, never corrected. For such a night to work it needs to be fueled by those opposing energies. To be cool, which is by its nature exclusive. And to be open enough to let everyone in.
One Wednesday, after he comes down from the go-go box, the man from Shank Painter Road walks right up to me, smiles, asks me what I like to drink, and offers to buy one for me. He puts his hand on my chest, then on my face. It is a public gesture, and it kills me, and I like it very much, possibly too
much. He is claiming me and wants other people to see it. He is conferring power in an arena in which power has nothing to do with money. Power is more alluring, and maybe scarier, when its currency has nothing to do with money. How do I measure it?
It takes him a while to come into focus, and maybe I’m drawn to that quality about him, as Hollis was nothing but focus from the get-go. There is someone new to learn about the man I’ll call Noah.
Lying together in bed the next morning, I find out he was a lawyer in Montreal before he came to Provincetown. He was in a long relationship with another man. He broke up with him, then went with a new boyfriend to India, where he traveled all over, from Goa to isolated mountain towns, before moving on to Bali. This might be why he carries the characters of so many parts of the world with him. He is single now, newly single, at least after some months. Too much sun floods my eyes, and I burrow my face into his back just to keep the dark in. I love the way lawyer turned go-go boy sounds when I say it to myself or when I imagine saying it to Polly.
We have a lot to talk about: so many people we have in common in Provincetown and downtown New York and Boston. And he loves books. He has deep opinions about books. He says he likes books with sentences that are long and difficult to write and read, Proustian sentences, those designed only to be read rather than spoken. Is this a French thing? He professes to a love of construction, artifice, which makes sense given his interests in leather and drag, but he doesn’t describe it as such. That would be pretentious, too knowing. I’m not exactly sure I share his appreciation of the long sentence. I appreciate long sentences, but I don’t want to be in a world in which everyone wears the same outfit around the table: What about Mary Robison? My hero, Joy Williams? Jane Bowles?
