by Kris Ripper
I told silly stories about meals we’d screwed up making, books we’d viciously fought about. I knew I was talking too much, but once the dam broke, it was hard to know where to stop.
When I finally ran down, like a vibrator with a dying battery, Miguel was just sort of gazing at me, a little star-eyed himself. “I’m so fucking jealous. You’re insanely in love with them.”
“Shut up.”
“So you can pretend you don’t have a fucking golden ticket in your hand and you’re wiping your ass with it?”
“That’s a really beautiful visual, Miguel, thanks. Anyway, I gotta go. Beauty sleep, you know. This has been fun, chum, let’s be sure to do it again soon.”
“I oughta kick your ass!” he called after me.
“I wish you would!” I called back, and escaped into the night.
* * *
When I got home from work on Tuesday, my Hazeltines had arrived, so I made a pot of tea and settled in for a full, blissful evening of reading.
As a teenager, I hadn’t had the money to buy all of his books, so I’d carefully paged through them at a bookstore—at least, the three they stocked—and selected the one I still owned: Diaries: 1978-1991. As an adult with access to the internet and discretionary income, I could order the other four published works and have them delivered.
I arranged them in chronological order by publication date, then studied them again and rearranged them roughly in order of when they’d been written. His oldest writings had been published after he’d died.
Diaries spanned from age 15 (mostly recounting the sex he’d had or tried to have or occasionally tried not to have and had anyway) until his death (mostly fury and helplessness at the unholy intersection of medicine and politics). The first book he’d ever finished, The Valley of the Shadow, had also been published posthumously. A glance through gave me large blocks of stream of consciousness interspersed with line drawings of people. I set it aside.
The Blind Pig was a ripping, savage deconstruction of the systems of power that had, as a pull quote on the back cover proclaimed, “Sent us to our deaths less efficiently, but no less effectively, than the line to the crematorium.” I set that aside as well.
Which left me with the other two books: On Liberation (and Other Myths) and Attic Salt. Since Attic Salt had been his first published book, that’s what I started with.
And almost immediately forgot about my tea.
Enrico Hazeltine had moved to the Castro in 1980, when he was sixteen or seventeen. And while my experiences with the catty, quick-talking subculture of gay men twenty years later had been alienating as hell, he’d loved it, basked in it, immersed himself with pleasure and gratitude.
It was part of the romance of Diaries for me, and I’d been viciously disappointed when I finally found other gay cisgender men and they were intolerable. Though at least some of that was because of Alex, who wasn’t gay enough. And later Jamie, who not only wasn’t gay enough (though she was, let’s be clear, queer as a three-dollar bill), but wasn’t the right gender to count anyway.
My brief stint in gayland had been a study in mutual intolerance; when it was over I’d retreated back to my friends, who had the good grace to not tease me about it too much. After a while.
Attic Salt had more form than Diaries, and a throughline of Hazeltine’s personal development through the first year he was on his own. He was a magnificent writer, able to carve out scenes from language, using terse description for an incident in a man’s small, dirty apartment that ended with Hazeltine bleeding and stumbling down the street, and then, in the next essay, rich, lyrical prose to describe falling in love over the course of an afternoon with two beautiful old men at a bathhouse. I can’t wait to be sixty and going to the baths with my lover, picking up cute young guys for a few hours of glittering adoration, a gift of shared joy.
He managed what most people failed to pull off when writing so close to the events they were depicting: perspective. And even though he was enamored of the times, the freedoms, the glorious high of finally being able to walk down the street, as he said, without the hounds of hell at my heels, or a lecture on morality waiting for me at home, his words didn’t drip with syrup.
I couldn’t stand nostalgia, but Hazeltine had considered himself a record keeper, a scribe of the times. He was deeply emotionally involved in the scenes he depicted, but somehow simultaneously left space for the reader to watch unencumbered.
When I finally set the book down it was past midnight and I only had a single essay left. I was wrung out, my eyes a little crusty with tears I hadn’t shed, which nonetheless had gathered and dried out in the corners. I stumbled into the shower and then to bed, still thinking about the old men in the bathhouse, that vision of a future Hazeltine would never see.
He’d forced his friends to take pictures of him after death. What a horrific thing to ask of one’s nearest and dearest. I wondered if they had protested, or if they’d taken the camera and agreed without fighting. He would have been terribly sick by then. And of course, they had been his closest friends and confidants; they’d no doubt seen him with far more nuance than I did. Perhaps to them he hadn’t shone like a beacon, a lighthouse of understanding and fellowship on the fringes.
Then again, I knew Alex better than anyone on earth, and he’d never been anything but the safe harbor of my truest self. If he asked me to photograph his dead body, I would not have argued. I would have taken the camera, kissed him, and done it, even if it haunted me the rest of my life.
On those pleasant, uplifting thoughts, I fell asleep.
Chapter Six
TO DO LIST
1) Wrangle Chad.
2) Do not kill Chad.
3) Use stick as necessary.
The best stick I had for my boss was his agent. Who also happened to be his son. But Paulson* (*his real name; Chad actually chose to send his kid into the world named “Paulson”) was my last resort.
The thing about Chad—and it might have been a thing about artists, or creatives, or possibly assholes—was that the second he got a new idea, he lost all interest in his old idea. And by “old idea,” I refer to “the series under contract to the City of La Vista for the new waterfront walking/cycling/jogging path.” All metal sculptures of local sea birds.
Not so surprisingly, he hadn’t exactly aspired to be an avian artiste. But the money was spectacular due to blah blah grants blah urban renewal blah hipsters. Or something.
None of that was really my job. I took some calls, forwarded others on to Paulson. The contracts and terms were only relevant to me for one reason: I was paid to ride herd and make sure the right work was done at the right time.
The deadline specified on the contract for the sea birds was December 18. A little more than three weeks away. And when I showed up Wednesday, the day before Thanks-freaking-giving, the last day I had to strongly emphasize the importance of time management in the coming weeks…
…I found a wall full of sketches clearly inspired by Hazeltine’s The Longest Day.
After swearing a lot more than I’d readily admit I’d done in an empty room, I texted Jamie to whine.
She suggested a cattle prod, but that sounded like too much work.
Then she sent me a video, and while a cattle prod seemed sort of mean to use on cows, I could see definite applications on the human motivation side.
Yelling at Chad that he didn’t have time to screw around and he needed to focus on sea birds would accomplish exactly nothing. Calling in Paulson would definitely get the job done, but it was basically tattling, and would also mean I’d failed to do my job.
If war was the failure of diplomacy, then calling Paulson was the failure of my customized brand of assistance, which on a day like this felt a hell of a lot more like babysitting.
I was not, however, entirely without tricks up one or both sleeves.
By the time Chad limped in around one (late for a normal day, about the usual for a day when I walked in to discover he’d wor
ked into the early hours of the morning), I had assembled an impressive looking binder about Hazeltine’s visual art, including every quote I could find in which he talked about The Longest Day and its unfinished companion piece The Shortest Night.
I’d even printed one of the quotes and stuck it to the front, beneath his name: “I wanted The Longest Day to be about an entire lifetime as lived in one day. With The Shortest Night, people will walk away feeling like one moment of love in its truest, purest sense—whatever that takes for each person—can last for an eternity.”
Chad could be a meathead when it served him, and his outlook was definitely murky where social justice was concerned, but the thing he believed in far more than he did small government and tax breaks for business owners was Art. His art was his own little fiefdom, and he only really enjoyed it when he could achieve a moment of cut-off words as someone caught sight of a sculpture he’d made and had to stop whatever they were saying to fully take it in.
He wanted to do an homage to a man who was addicted to the same thing. Hazeltine had talked about it in Diaries, the intense peaks and valleys of presenting work to others, the freefall of waiting for their judgement. He’d written about someday being old enough to not care what people thought, but if Chad was anything to go by, that day never arrived. Not that he cared what critics said, or blogs, or whoever. But that he wanted random people to be moved by his pieces, to feel them.
I set the binder up on the desk and waited for him to find it.
Two cups of coffee and a sandwich later, he said, “You raid the company supply closet again? What’s all this?”
He’d used the same joke every single time I offered a professional looking…anything. I sighed and picked the binder up before he could. “Oh, nothing. And by that I mean, you can have it when you’re done with the sea birds job.”
Chad narrowed his eyes at me as if either of us thought I was intimidated by him. “The hell does that mean?”
“It means, you have three weeks, you know damn well you aren’t going to get anything done the next few days, so more like two weeks, and I’m looking around without seeing a whole lot of finished sea birds.” He opened his mouth, but I overrode him. “And don’t say you put them in storage, I checked there, too. You have three done. Which means you have four more to do. Please tell me you at least have sketches.”
“I got some sketches,” he muttered petulantly.
For the first two months I had the job, he’d mocked me all day long for my “big boy suits” and “fancy shoes.” But as I straightened my back, lowered my shoulders, and stared him straight in the eye, I was glad for my armor. He was a blowhard. But he needed me and he knew it, or I wouldn’t still be standing there. My role was to deliver the medicine, and his role was to kick and scream at first, then eventually take it.
Being Chad’s assistant was the closest I’d ever come to parenting. I wasn’t a fan.
“I will give you the binder when there are seven sea birds in storage, and not a second sooner. And it’s good, too. Did you realize there was a companion piece to that painting you like, which the artist died before completing?”
“The guy’s dead? Jesus, Justin. You couldn’t have…fuckin’ said that a little nicer?” He frowned. “Hell. I wanted to talk to him. I had all these questions I wanted to ask.”
Oh god. I had the same taste in men as my straight boss.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. “I assumed you knew. He died in 1991.”
Chad rubbed the scruff on his cheek, a nervous tick he usually saved for the last five days before a looming deadline, during which he’d neglect to shave. I thought maybe the sound soothed him. Or the sensation. “’S all right,” he mumbled.
“I’ll see if I can make contact with anyone who might have been in touch with him when he was alive. Maybe he had an editor, or an agent.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll get moving. Fuck, man.” He turned slowly, surveying his wall of sketches. “I just had so much to say to him. Anyway, you know the minute you go home I’m gonna find that binder, right?”
“Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. I’ll take the risk.” I clapped. “Chop chop.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I stowed the binder where I kept everything I didn’t want him to find: in the bin beneath the shredder. It joined a bottle of whiskey and a magazine full of naked men. I had no reason to resort to printed media for my porn, but just on the off chance he found my hiding spot, I wanted him to suffer a little.
When I got out of work at last, I had another message from Jamie: Thanksgiving at the Saints house. You in?
It would be cleaner, more responsible, to say no.
I texted back: I’m in.
* * *
We called my mother from the car early the next morning. Between us, I had a decent maternal figure, Jamie had Denny, and Alex had an older brother, Guiseppe (sans Andrew, which he’d decided was “boring” and changed the second he turned eighteen). We joked that we were the collective product of a two-mother, three-household background.
Ma had basically adopted Alex by the time we were teenagers. I’d frequently thought she preferred him to me, which made sense: he was sweet and gracious and always cleaned the kitchen after making food. I was moody and at times mean, and I didn’t really pay attention to the kitchen.
Peppe treated me the same as he did Alex. He rolled through town every now and then when his band was on tour to crash with whoever had the nicest apartment. He’d been happy when we hooked up with Jamie in the first year of college; she’d already been living off campus with actual adults by then, so he’d endeared himself to her quickly so she’d take pity on him and let him crash on the couch at her place instead of the floor of our dorm room.
We didn’t owe Peppe a Happy Thanksgiving (he probably wouldn’t even know what day it was), but we always called Ma. Or Alex did, anyway.
“Hi, Ma! Happy Thanksgiving!” He was genuinely happy to talk to her. I knew they spoke more frequently than I spoke to her, though part of that was because Jamie had routines, one of which was calling Ma on Sundays. She’d started it up in the first place the three of us had shared after graduation, mostly for my sake. Or Ma’s. But Alex—whose own parents had never been nurturing, but they’d turned positively icy at the revelation that he liked to suck cock—had benefited the most.
They spoke for a few minutes on speaker phone before Jamie and I chimed in. I wished my mother a happy genocide and offered her a smallpox-infected blanket, she complained about me to Jamie, Alex said something soothing about the great bastards of history, and all was right with the world. Or at least with my corner of it.
It was a good day for DIY. The weather was dry and not too cold. We got the stringers up in the footings that had cured since the last time we were there. It was starting to actually look like it’d eventually be a staircase by the end, though it took all of Thursday trying to get them level. I was forever suggesting we just go with whatever, but only because I knew they wouldn’t. Plus, stairs should be level, right? Or they’d be a tripping hazard or some damn thing.
“You think we can get the risers in tomorrow?” Alex asked, stepping backward into the shadows of the yard.
Jamie groaned. “We were going to paint them first. Remember our brilliant plan? Paint the treads and risers, then while they were drying, install the stringers.”
All three of us contemplated the naked lumber we’d moved onto the porch in anticipation of getting to it. (Our proverbial DIY eyes were forever bigger than our DIY stomachs.)
“Is it supposed to rain tonight?” I asked. “You think we could paint tonight and install tomorrow?”
“You know what?” Jamie dusted off her hands and reached down to help me up. “We’re just gonna paint in the morning, and then do something else while it dries. We have a long weekend. If the sun holds, it shouldn’t take too long, and we’re going to give it another coat once everything’s built, so it’s not the end of the world if it’s a litt
le tacky.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Did you just jinx us?”
“Jinxes are for people who don’t have a good plan. I don’t see any point in painting until midnight just so it can all sit out here with sand blowing on it all night.”
“Yes, Cork, so much better to paint in the morning and actually watch the sand blow on it.”
Alex shifted back into the light. “We can paint inside. Open all the doors and windows, let the wind blow through. Take a walk for an hour, then bring it out to really dry when it’s not so tacky everything that lands on it will stick there forever like insects in amber.”
I pointed. “Excellent Jurassic Park reference.”
He grinned.
“All right, lads, we’re decided, then. Let’s go in. God, tell me we have something easy to make for food.”
“Cork!” I pretended to be shocked and insulted. “To imagine you think I’d forget our tradition! It may be Thursday, but it’s still the first night at the Saints house. Of course we have pizza.”
“You, sir, are a prince.” And she kissed me like it was a perfectly natural thing to do, on the lips, lingering only half a breath. “A prince.”
I sure as hell wasn’t a prince. But I was a little too astonished to reply.
“I’m pre-heating! You guys clean up!” She swung herself up on to the porch and went inside.
“Seriously,” Alex said softly from behind me. “I would pay to watch you two kiss.”
“That would be stupid, since we do it for free. Come on, let’s get this done.”
It took me a couple of minutes to decide that what I’d said probably hadn’t been a promise of any kind. Merely a reference. Right. Made perfect sense. And if some dumb, stubborn part of me wanted it to be a promise, well, that was absurd, and I was smarter than that.
