Sketchtasy

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

  We both get up late, and then we paint each other’s nails and plot out our hair. We go to Bertucci’s and ponder the rolls made out of pizza dough—how can they always be this fresh? We talk about drugs, and whether they’re really in the past. Whether they ever will be. Joanna says she can never go back to San Francisco so I’m starting to wonder if I ever can either. We chop vegetables and make carrot juice with ginger and put lemon juice on our faces—oh, how it burns.

  Joanna says Boston is what she always thought San Francisco would be like.

  But what do you mean?

  She says I’m living in a house with you, it’s us against the world.

  And then I kind of don’t hate Boston anymore.

  Joanna says she’s been in love with Boston ever since I met her at the airport, even though I didn’t recognize her because she was so skinny. And then, when we got back to the apartment, and she saw the new living room, purple walls with magenta trim and that big gold sofa set I bought at a yard sale down the street, and then all my lists taped together on the wall behind a gold frame, it was like a dream if dreams weren’t just nightmares. And I didn’t even tell her I created this room just for her.

  One night Joey wants to get ready at our house—it’s her first time out in full drag so she wants to borrow one of Polly’s wigs. Joanna and I make a stir-fry with peanut sauce, cashews, dill and liquid amino acids. That’s Joanna’s special. We already know that Joey isn’t going to eat, but we make food for her anyway.

  Joey arrives with Avery, who won’t even look at me so I keep saying oh, Joanna, this is Avery—he thinks I’m going to give him AIDS. And Joanna thinks that’s the funniest thing on earth. Do you want some AIDS in your cocktail? Vodka, cranberry juice and AIDS. Don’t worry—no extra calories.

  We’ve moved all Polly’s stuff into the extra room, and when Joey comes out her face is candied up and she’s wearing some blonde wig I’ve never seen before, all curled like it’s fresh from the store. She holds out her hand and says Anita, Anita Bump.

  Speak the truth, honey. Speak the truth.

  Once Anita and Avery leave, Joanna and I go on a walk to clear our heads. I always forget about this cute square and all the grand old houses up here at the top of the hill but next time we should walk in the other direction because it’s not looking that cute once we get to the airport.

  Joanna loves my list project, especially now that the lists are expanding beyond the frame in the living room, spreading across the whole wall—she keep saying Alexa, you’re so inspiring. At first I think she’s joking, but then one day she takes the cardboard from one of my underwear packages and paints it gold, sticks her fingers on the sides, fingerprints forming a frame. After it’s dry, she glues a smaller piece of cardboard to the center of the first one, then draws two figures with oil pastels and markers, one with purple hair and the other pink, facing in opposite directions in the corners like on a playing card. I’m the one in pink, and she cuts out the word TREASURE from the newspaper to go over my lips, TRUTH to go over hers. And then, at the bottom corner, in small letters, also cut out from the newspaper: SMOKESCREEN?

  And then we’re on a roll. I find one of those gaudy jewelry boxes with a soft red velvet interior and a ballerina on top with a big mirror. I’m spelling out the word HELP on the mirror with contact lenses, I’ve been saving them for a while but I still don’t have enough so I’m trying to decide whether I should ask other people for theirs. I guess I can take my time—what’s the rush, we have time.

  Then I do the same thing with used razor cartridges on a plain wall mirror. I have plenty of used razors. Now I’m working on a bigger project about rape, using playing cards and an old table and chairs, and Joanna’s started a series of faces that she tapes to the wall. So, yes, our apartment is now officially an art gallery: old school meets new school meets no school.

  Over the river and through the woods—or under the harbor and through the tunnel—there’s Nate in his own art gallery, Nate who pays me monthly, now that we have an arrangement—he deposits the money directly into an account for me, it’s in his name but that’s better for me anyway. Nate didn’t come out until he was fifty, married with kids and everything. He says he’s fifty-two now, so even though he’s at least thirty years older than me, I have way more experience as a fag. I think that’s one of the things that makes him listen so carefully. At first I just talked about bullshit anyway, like the college I don’t really go to, the former sugar daddy who never really existed, my day that didn’t really happen, but Nate kept asking questions so eventually I got bored of telling stories and started telling him some things that are actually true.

  I tell Nate how Joanna moved in with me to get off heroin, or to stay off heroin, and how it’s so exciting having her here—it’s like I finally have a home. But I don’t tell him I’m supporting her—I don’t want him to think he’s giving me too much money. Nate asks me if I’ve ever done drugs, and I say yes, but not heroin. Nate says he’s never been around drugs—but he sure does like his liquor.

  When I first started coming to Nate’s I only glanced at the art because it looked like pompous old European garbage—but then I realized that’s not exactly the case, like the one that looks like Adam and Eve from a distance, but then you get closer and they both have two heads, Picasso style, one male and one female, and then coming out of their mouths are snakes instead of tongues.

  And it turns out that Adam-Eve and Eve-Adam are standing in supermarket bins of apples and oranges and grapefruits and pomegranates and pears, with labels from all different countries. The piece is called Bruised. Nate says it was the first one he bought, because of the global outlook—he travels a lot. And then after that he started going to this artist’s shows in New York and buying a new piece each time. Somehow I can’t picture this pasty old guy with a ratty gray wig at some fancy New York opening, but he sounds so excited that I tell him sure, I’ll go to the next one.

  And then upstairs, the first time I just assumed all those photos of naked men on the walls were tacky gay garbage, and yes, some of them are definitely cheesy, but one day I find myself looking at the one of two naked dancers or gymnasts and the way their combined shadow plays out behind them on the wall, and I realize I’m wondering how the photographer managed to get those in-between facial expressions, like the moments you’re not supposed to see.

  Then there’s the photo of some guy bending down to grab onto his ankles, his ass and legs forming a giant upside-down V against the sky. Even though these photos are black and white, there’s so much variety in tone and texture. Like the way the clouds are not exactly the same color as the guy’s inner thighs, which somehow shine in the light, and the part that’s shining isn’t exactly the same color as the bright white sky underneath the guy’s head, and even that white isn’t the same in the center as it is on the edges.

  How is it that he bends that far over, but we don’t see any of the details of his face? And what is that bone that sticks out at the base of his back—I guess I’ve never stared at a guy in this position for so long, but the composition is so formal that it almost becomes abstract. This is the photo that’s in my field of vision while I’m fucking Nate, this one or the one on the wall to my right of some guy bent over on his hands and knees, pulling his stomach in, and that one’s hotter, more details, like the hair on his legs, and maybe the sneakers he’s wearing add a kind of excitement too. I can’t tell if these photos are old or new. I keep meaning to ask Nate about them but every time we head to the bedroom I’m busy thinking how on earth am I going to get hard? Because all he wants to do now is lie on his stomach while I fuck him. Usually once I’m actually fucking him it’s okay, I can just keep pumping away and grunting and moaning while I study the little rainbows making their way across the wallpaper because of the chandeliers.

  When Joanna was staying with her mother in Issaquah, her mother made her go to AA meetings several times a week. Joanna said half the guys in the room were just like her fat
her. Some of them actually knew her father, they’d been drinking buddies, and Joanna said it was so embarrassing, she couldn’t believe she’d put herself in a position to be stuck in a room with all these assholes talking about God and how they were going to turn their lives around.

  Joanna isn’t even an atheist, I mean she doesn’t think that religion is the stupidest thing in the world like I do. So these guys at the meeting would say God or Higher Power or whatever, and Joanna would think Goddess and her own power. She says I know that’s not enough, I know there’s so much more filtering and figuring out that I need to do, but I got used to the meetings. At least they got me out of the house, they became familiar, something to do, a ritual.

  So one of the first things Joanna did after she moved in with me was go to an AA meeting in East Boston. She said it was kind of like the meetings in Issaquah except everyone was poorer, but then as soon as the meeting ended all these guys wanted to walk her home and that creeped her out so she decided to find the lesbian meeting. Even though before she got to Boston she said she didn’t want to see any lesbians for a long time, lesbians just made her want to shoot up.

  So I suggested she go to a meeting in JP, and I guess she started to like it because now she goes every week, and to a few other meetings too. She says the meetings make her feel more confident that she’s not going to do anything stupid. So whenever I spend the night at Nate’s, she stays at her sponsor’s house. Her sponsor is this older dyke who wears overalls and smokes cigars and lives in a big old house she renovated herself. Sounds kind of like Joanna’s daddy in San Francisco, but without the drugs, except when I say that, Joanna starts laughing hysterically.

  A week later, she comes home and says she slept with Tina. But isn’t that against the whole program? Alexa, Joanna says, I go to AA, and I drink almost every day. That’s definitely against the program. But it’s part of my healing process—even if no one in AA would agree with me on that. And I haven’t done heroin in four months. Four months, can you believe it?

  Four months is a long time. And I really don’t know anything about AA, except for the flyers Joanna brings home sometimes, and we can thank those flyers for inspiring the curatorial statement for our glamorous art show:

  DON’T GET BLOOD ON THE CARPET

  1. We admitted we needed a power vacuum.

  2. Came to believe that a power vacuum could restore us to sanity.

  3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Vacuum as we understood Vacuum.

  4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of every brand of power vacuum, including ourselves.

  5. Admitted to Vacuum, to our own vacuum, and to another vacuum the exact nature of our wrongs.

  6. Were entirely ready to have Vacuum remove all manufacturing defects, including character.

  7. Humbly asked Vacuum to remove our shortcomings.

  8. Made a list of all vacuums we had harmed, and became willing to vacuum amends.

  9. Made direct amends to such vacuums wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or other brands.

  10. Continued to take personal inventory of the vacuum industry, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

  11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Vacuum as we understood Vacuum, praying only for knowledge of Vacuum’s will for us and the power to vacuum that out.

  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to vacuum all our affairs, including anyone who doesn’t believe in vacuuming.

  Don’t worry, you don’t have to remember those twelve steps. Yet. Just enter our apartment and there’s seven feet of pure white runway now, featuring big black letters on the sides saying DON’T GET BLOOD ON THE CARPET.

  And that leads you right over to the table and chairs, covered in cards. This is the project I’ve been thinking about for years, ever since I remembered about my father. Now it’s finally out of my head and into the world.

  WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU’VE JUST BEEN RAPED: Fix your hair. Brush your teeth. Smile. Make dinner. Fix your lipstick. Shave. Make coffee. Get ready for work. Tie your shoes. Find new buttons. Wash your face. Get groceries. Trim your nails. Take a Xanax. Do the dishes. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Deodorant. Shopping. Watch a movie. Vacuum. Cocktails. Read the newspaper. Take out the garbage. Wash the sheets. Rearrange furniture. Buy flowers. Drink juice. Read a magazine. Get the mail. Turn on music. Make tea. Clean the toilet. Organize your room. Weed the garden. Air freshener. Take a Valium. Go to work. Go to school. Go to bed. Go dancing. Smile. Do laundry. Get a tan. Go to the gym. Pour wine. Drink a beer. Cocktails. Make a salad. Get a haircut. Take a shower. Remember to floss.

  All these things we do in order to keep going, right? And rape, it keeps going too—your heart, maybe it’s broken. And then you look up at the wall and oh, honey, Joanna’s snakes—slithering in every direction, layered in paint and oil pastel and marker and scratches and spit and blood and cigarette ash and glue. Snakes of every messy gooey oozy cracked and exploding color, but all the faces are blank, some with smears and smudges but otherwise pristine white with words in the middle made from newspaper cutouts: Medusa Oblongata, Medusa Fermata, Medusa Desiderata, Medusa Stigmata, Medusa Tomato Insalata, Medusa Carne Asada, Medusa Yada Yada, Medusa Piñata, Medusa Regatta, Medusa Dada, Medusa Messiah—and, of course, Medusa Matzo.

  But which Medusa represents which step? Darling, choose your own adventure.

  DREAMING BIG

  The worst part about flying is always the landing, that’s what rips my ears apart and then it feels like my head is filled with steel wool and we’re driving through the Everglades, is this really the Everglades? I can’t believe how ugly everything looks. But then we get to the hotel and it’s a gorgeous renovated art deco building—Nate says it’s from the 1920s, I didn’t realize Florida was already a tourist destination then.

  Should we go to the beach? I guess that’s why we’re here, but first we stop at some weird health food store where I get fresh carrot juice and a bunch of premade wraps to put in the refrigerator. I can’t believe how hot it is, but I guess that’s why Nate wanted to come here—it’s barely even fall, but it’s already getting cold in Boston, which is fine with me but Nate realized he hadn’t been out in the sun all summer because he was working so much. He asked me to go on this trip so many times that I finally said yes—I hate the heat but I do like the beach, and I never made it to P-town.

  I need to get a bathing suit so we stop somewhere and Nate keeps pulling out the Speedos so I decide I’ll humor him and try on a pair, the square-cut kind that aren’t so ridiculous, and Nate’s got that skeezy old guy look in his eyes. The rest of the bathing suits are either tiny thongs or huge baggy surfer shorts so I go with the Speedos. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to run into anyone I know. I ask Nate to buy me some wacky Astroturf sandals because I need something other than combat boots in this heat—why didn’t I think of that before? At first he tells me these sandals are too expensive—I should just get regular flip-flops because will I ever wear them again, and I feel like I’m arguing with my father. But then Nate takes the sandals to the register and we go back to the hotel to change.

  The beach is so large it looks fake, but as soon as I pull off my sandals to walk in the sand I feel like a little kid—maybe Nate was right, and I do need a vacation. He reaches over for my hand and I make sure no one’s looking. We go to a restaurant on some pedestrian-only street that I guess is trying to look like Europe, angel hair pasta and a salad is all I can eat though the pasta with broccoli and pesto is delicious, and of course the cocktails help. Cocktails help with everything. Nate reaches over for my hand again, and I’m trying not to pull back.

  When we get back to the hotel, Nate lies down on the carpet because he says that helps with his back pain, but I guess not enough because then he takes some pills and gets in bed. Four nights left.

  I go on a walk, and I can’t figure out why anyone would actual
ly think this place is glamorous. Screaming drunk suburbanites driving down the main streets in convertibles, and then at every hotel bar near the beach there are Eurotrash in designer suits and stilettos. One woman is even wearing a fur coat, though it still feels like it’s ninety degrees out. People look at me like I’m trash because I’m wearing a T-shirt. There are supposed to be gay people here, but I have no idea where. The waiters at the restaurant were gay, but that’s true everywhere.

  The next day it’s even hotter, especially once we get to the beach. There’s almost no one around, and I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever seen this much sun—you have to squint even with sunglasses. Nate snaps pictures of me in my embarrassing bathing suit, and I hope the sun doesn’t bleach out my hair. Nate’s chest is already bright pink so we better get inside to rest—who knew that lying in the sun would be so tiring.

  We go to the same restaurant for dinner, and it turns out there’s a gay bar nearby so we walk over and it’s a suburban nightmare—people are yelling ooh ooh with their hands in the air like they’re on MTV Spring Break, and there’s so much CK One you could open an outlet store. But then the DJ puts on “Divas to the Dancefloor,” and yes that song has been tired for at least a year now but honey I still can’t resist, especially once Nate hands me another cocktail and I realize there are some cute boys around, I mean once you get past all the Lycra and frosted eyebrows.

  Nate joins me on the dance floor and at first that’s fine, right, whatever, just some old guy I happen to know and I can shake a few moves in his direction, but then he gets really close and pulls me to him from behind and I can smell that stale liquor breath and his baby oil sweat. I don’t like grinding with anyone, but especially not with Nate. I try it for a moment anyway but then I pull away and try to make it seem like I just want to twirl around, I mean I do just want to twirl around but also I’m watching people to see if they’re watching me with Nate.