I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

  Yet the strongest feelings I associate with her are anger, contempt, and resentment. It was as if she reserved her positive emotions for works of art, and to a lesser extent their creators, and for people in distress at least six thousand miles away from her usual surroundings. She played the role of neighbor much less charitably than that of world citizen. The contents of daily reality exasperated her beyond endurance. She was unflaggingly rude to waiters, cab drivers, hotel clerks. After she was recognized by a diner cashier we’d bought sandwiches from, her displeasure was frightening. “He only knew who I was because he saw me on television,” she said disgustedly, as if unmasking a former concentration camp guard.

  Reality is, for the most part, a great disappointment. Susan took it as a personal insult.

  It feels improbable, but eight years have already passed since she died. A few months ago, as J. and I boarded a flight for Oslo, I remembered something from 1985 or 1986: I was often in touch with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who told me he had run into Susan at a Houston literary conference.

  “She must be cross with me about something,” he said. “We took the same flight to New York, and when I waved to her she ignored me.”

  A short time later, Susan was bagging unwanted books to sell at the Strand. Kathy Acker had asked me to give Susan her then self-published novels. Thinking it was probably not a good idea, I had. I now noticed them at the top of the pile.

  “Can you believe this person,” Susan said, plucking up a small book with a green cover and waving it with distaste. “She actually writes, ‘Dear Susan Sontag, Please write about my books and make me famous.’ This woman is a friend of yours?”

  There was absolutely no way to defend someone like Kathy to someone like Susan. For one thing, they lived ten blocks from each other. If Kathy had been Croatian or from Micronesia, then perhaps … The moment passed, as moments do. I mentioned talking to Magnus. Susan’s back went up. She inhaled noisily, a bull about to charge, as she did when unspeakable things wafted into her ken.

  “Last week,” she said, “I waved at him when I was getting on the same plane. He turned his back on me and acted like I wasn’t there.”

  “That’s so funny! He told me he did wave to you, and you didn’t wave back. Maybe you didn’t see him waving,” I suggested, “and then when you waved, he was looking the other way.”

  It sounded reasonable, but that was the problem. Susan wasn’t having it.

  “He’s a liar,” she said, with startling violence.

  It occurs to me now that Magnus probably upgraded his cheap conference ticket to first class, while Susan had to sit in coach. She had no money at the time except whatever Roger Straus gave her. A German national treasure (and quite an entrepreneurial one), Magnus has been rich since the 1960s. Susan considered herself a national monument, but had the misfortune to live in a country that cares less about intellectuals than it does about the ash content of dog food. I can’t swear that this had anything to do with her animus against Enzensberger. It might have. She may have had other reasons for calling him a liar, for all I know. She never mentioned any.

  After my breakfast amphetamine and tepid instant Nescafé on Monday mornings, I maneuvered into light Santa Monica Boulevard traffic and headed for the 101, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on the eight-track player. Mild cases of road rage and games of chicken in the lanes around me brought the earth plane into reach as speed dissolved my hangover into soothing oneness with the ozone-heavy smog. Goddamn it, I sometimes thought, I am doing something noble with my nonexistence, even if it’s something small and stupid that anyone could do.

  Breezing into reception at Legal Aid instantly sucked me into the Problem of Race in America. Greeted by incredulous, angry stares, my blood pressure surged with selfless virtue. The loathing “our clients” directed at homosexuals was thought to derive from indoctrination by the black churches. Relieving their distress while meeting their hostility with a smile, I habitually mistook my reciprocal loathing of them for righteous anger over the racially motivated injustices that they sat in the waiting room glowering about.

  These unfortunate souls had usually been served with papers from landlords, warrants from the sheriff’s office, notices of repossession and imminent seizure of goods, intimidating documents that demanded an immediate, legally framed reply. By the time people showed up at Legal Aid, the last possible deadline for this response had usually long passed, and the remaining available recourse was practically nil. It was always the eleventh hour, or considerably later. All the business of our office was a rushed, urgent, desperate last-ditch effort. Overtime was the only time we knew.

  The clients came in all shapes and sizes, though they tended to be either gaunt and indignant or fat and tearful. They were victims of domestic violence. Also perpetrators of domestic violence. Their husbands or wives or children were serving time for assault, drug dealing, car theft, arson, kidnapping their own children, or petty larceny. They ran amok in supermarkets with machetes. They walked off psychiatric wards against medical advice. They used public transit as a toilet.

  Their hopelessness scared me. Yet I was fascinated by them, and hoped I was gleaning material for the novel I would write one day, if I ever worked up the nerve. Tireless raconteurs, as hopeless people tend to be, they spilled their entire lives while I shamelessly babbled encouragement while doing “intake”:

  “Let’s see. It says here your name is Queen Elizabeth Jones? And you were in Sybil Brand for three years? Queen Elizabeth, can you tell me what you were in Sybil Brand for exactly?”

  “I hit my old man.”

  “Uh-huh. You hit your husband.”

  “Nigger ain’t my husband. Boyfriend smacked me, I hit him with a piece of metal.”

  “Wait, you got three years for hitting your boyfriend with a piece of metal?”

  “Yeah, out of the mouf of a .44!”

  I felt less fucked up the more I listened to them. On a good day, I considered myself lucky to have a job and a paycheck, relieved that I was only gay and unstable instead of black and penniless. I would never get arrested for stealing pickles from a Safeway. Rats would never fall into my children’s breakfast cereal. I suspected nobody would ever love me enough to hit me with a piece of metal, either, but you can’t have everything.

  Elena, my boss, was prominent in poverty law, a ferocious advocate for the downtrodden. And more importantly for me, a narcoleptic with an endless, legal supply of pharmaceutical amphetamine. Her Eskatrol-induced mood swings were legendary in the legal field throughout California. She flipped from lunar exuberance to murderous rage in seconds, often using the latter to professional advantage.

  My desk was an ideal listening post to monitor Elena’s calls to adversaries in litigation: “You can tell that cunt if she files another postponement I’ll come up there and rip her uterus out through her nostrils.” The unlimited aggression Elena poured into the phone prepared anybody in hearing range for the possibility of an actual shooting rampage as soon as she hung up. It seemed entirely possible that she had an arsenal of automatic weapons stored under the vast piles of unsorted papers stacked in her office. But the minute she got off the phone, usually, she cackled at her own amazing nerve and stayed in a speed-bright mood for several hours.

  The office was a cesspit of seething racial animosities, more or less the inverted version of what prevailed outside its walls. Except for a trainee named Byron, Elena and I were the only white people within miles. Despite our habitual deference to the overwhelmingly African-American staff, which included several ex-Black Panthers, most of them hated us. “You white people” might as well have been our job titles, since practically all conversation started with it.

  “You white people go home to your mansions in Bel Air, while the black man has to pick food out of garbage.”

  “You white people just can’t see why the black man burns his own house down. As if the black man had any option.”

  At a staff m
eeting, when I mentioned my sadness over the recent accidental death of Bubbles, a hippopotamus who’d escaped the LA zoo, this was greeted with a chorus of malicious jeers:

  “You white people care more about a goddamn hippopotamus than you care about the black man.”

  “Poor Bubbles this, they did that to poor Bubbles …”

  “That Bubbles ain’t shit!”

  All we thought about at work was food. Speed had the paradoxical effect of making us constantly hungry. It was impossible to find any food in Watts. The only safe place we could venture for lunch was the cafeteria at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, itself a minefield of racial animus. We contemplated bringing our own chicken from Ralph’s to a place that advertised “You Buy, We Fry,” then realized we would be asking for trouble. The Black Muslims ran a stand selling fried things at the end of our driveway, but, despite their complimentary copies of Muhammad Speaks, I stopped ordering there after they served me a hoagie full of uncooked trout.

  A claque at the office threw off their slave names and rechristened themselves after African royalty: Asali, Lumumba, Masamba. Kwanzaa replaced Xmas, providing an occasion for the ex-slaves to parade around in dashikis and tribal headdresses. Many had failed the bar exam and relied on Elena to rewrite their legal briefs or handle their court cases. They had no use for me whatever, glaring in murderous silence if I asked to borrow a staple gun.

  A daunting bunch. Most of the cases involved evictions. Most of our clients’ landlords were Jewish. The former slaves viewed Jews as parasitic vermin, and all whites as obviously Jewish. Lumumba Jones, a dead ringer for Papa Doc of Haiti, sometimes hissed, “You forgot your yarmulke,” when I came through the door in the morning. “You forgot your spear and the bone in your nose,” I snapped back at him one bleary morning, which would have occasioned a star-chamber staff conference if a disgruntled client hadn’t phoned in a bomb threat a few minutes later.

  Whether fearless by nature or just constantly speeding, Elena labored for hours at the office after closing time. In exchange for Eskatrol, I did, too. Watts turned scary after dark. Actually it was scary all the time. The unlighted parking lot looked like an engraved invitation to Jack the Ripper.

  I was atrocious at filing and typing. I lost important documents and forgot phone messages. I spent whole days writing never-to-be-finished novels and fooling with my hair. No one minded. Absolutely nobody wanted to work in Watts. The fact that I was willing to made me invaluable.

  Nothing truly dire ever happened to me—except once, coming off the 101, when a stray bullet whizzed through my windshield and exited the rear window, leaving me with a mouthful of shattered glass—though people were constantly getting shot or stabbed or assaulted with lead pipes or brained with weed whackers in the neighborhoods around the office. The shootout that turned the Symbionese Liberation Army into French fries had happened only twenty blocks north of our office the year before. As soon as I exited the freeway, an atmosphere of gathering mayhem seeped into the car like Dickensian fog. The streets had a look of feral abandonment, of machine guns concealed in baby carriages, of knifing massacres at backyard barbecues.

  If I hadn’t been high all the time, I would’ve been petrified. Instead I felt fatalistic and pretended things would work out fine.

  I was irritated that Veruschka told a journalist friend the story about the rat. Although I had heard it from somebody else, I thought of it as my story and wanted to use it before everyone in the world heard it.

  “I’ll tell you a better story,” she said. “A famous soccer player became very depressed and one day he threw himself in front of a bus. The driver of the bus was a big fan of the soccer player. When he found out that he had accidentally killed his idol, he went into a depression and jumped off the roof of a building. Then the bus driver’s wife became depressed. She went to a psychiatrist, but her life was ruined so she swallowed an overdose of pills. The psychiatrist felt like a total failure when he heard about this and hanged himself in his office.”

  “How much of this is true?”

  “Maybe none of it is true, but it’s a better story, isn’t it?”

  eight

  Mastiu reminds me of a sailor in a Cocteau drawing, hair cropped to his skull, rippling muscles, exaggeratedly full lips, thick fingers, his heavy penis half-aroused in his cargo pants when he steps off the elevator every day at one o’clock, or two, a creature with animal grace and a holy stupidity eager to be kissed and fondled, petted and fussed over like a child. His lubricious joy is obvious and lovely, but a little strange. Why should he like me?

  A yellow legal pad records our messy attempts, when other things fail, to communicate more than the primitive understandings we already have, which only require blunt gestures for eating, drinking, or the other thing. These efforts all end in uncertainty, however literal, specific, and simpleminded we both try to be.

  If there is any space left on a page, Mastiu stops my pencil from starting a new one, even if the current sheet suggests an exit-less garden maze, or the chalkboard pentimento of multiple revised algebra equations, my semi-phonetic Spanish overlapping his labored scrawls and the crossed-out words his deafness confuses with similar-sounding ones, an alphabetic folie à deux of limitless futility. He definitely understands the world completely differently than I do.

  Several nights ago I ran into his friend from the French café. She stood on the mobbed sidewalk beside the Bim Bom, still wearing her faux-leather jacket, her chin bobbing, her mouth open in silent laughter. It took a minute or two to perceive that several young men surrounding her were deaf-mutes.

  She never offered her name, and didn’t name the sordomudos she introduced with perfunctory gestures. I watched them signing, telling one another unguessable things that appeared finely nuanced and at the same time simple, devoid of abstraction. On nights that followed, I became aware that an improbably large percentage of the crowd consisted of other deaf-mutes—male, female, young, middle-aged, old, scattered through the crush, chatting and signaling en passant with their hands while mingled with the general chaos.

  Mastiu showed up at Bim Bom last night. I had never seen him there before. I was sitting with five particular sordomudos, who by then had started to collect around me whenever I showed up, expecting me to treat them to drinks, give them cigarettes, and pay them exclusive attention. It was becoming obnoxious.

  Mastiu half-lifted me from the table and clamped me in an unmistakable embrace of total ownership. This led to a lot of deaf-mute conversation between Mastiu and the others, most of it visibly about me, and brainlessly vulgar on the part of my recently acquired friends. Cubans with all their faculties are frank and casual when discussing sex, but this torrent of deaf-mute innuendo was something different, with a nasty, sordid edge that made Mastiu look as uncomfortable as I felt—though the fact that he engaged with it at all disgusted me. I had no way of disrupting it. What I would have liked to communicate at that juncture was too complicated to get across. Within their own realm, the deaf-mutes are streetwise and clever. But from outside, in the world of sound and speech, they seemed obdurately stupid and boorish. This had to do, I realized, with how these particular deaf-mutes had been raised, by the poorest of the poor down here—feral children, basically. Whatever schools and social services exist for them are probably alienating, if they’re anything like the Young Pioneers or Junior Communist League or whatever indoctrinating clubs normal children get processed through. Still, even the outright thugs I know on this island have better manners and more respect for other people’s boundaries than these Bim Bom sordomudos. (If Ferd were here, having these thoughts, he would be in a paroxysm of guilt by now. But I want to understand this as it is, not how it should be.)

  In the hour we stayed there, I saw that Mastiu has little interest in using any language beyond the necessary minimum, even a language he evidently uses quite eloquently, keeping other deaf-mutes hanging, so to speak, on his every word. I also noted the difference between his open, provincia
l manner and the cringing, sneaky vibe of the city sordomudos, who give off the aura of a criminal gang, and act like conspirators whenever a non-handicapped person is around. I should feel sorry for them, and I don’t somehow, which should make me feel guilty, and it doesn’t.

  Mastiu and I finally walked away and bought some plastic cups from a girl who sells them in front of the gas station, where we bought a pint of rum and some cans of tuKola. (It costs a dollar less than real Coca-Cola, and I can’t tell the difference.) Then we crossed the highway to the Malecón, where some boys I knew were sitting on the sea wall. Mastiu kept beaming idiotically as if he’d won a prize. At the apartment later, he let me know that he absolutely hated the Bim Bom. He made the universal “blabbermouth” gesture to say the Bim Bom people talked too much.

  He lives off the island’s tenuous grid, earning chump change with a fishing rod, at night, on some obscure marsh or faraway beach. He isn’t scheming for a better life, or emigration. I doubt if Mastiu has ever heard of Karl Marx, or has the remotest idea what communism is. I’d be surprised if even José Martí stirs any patriotic fervor in his loins. His capacity for abstraction is nil. He’s an unassimilable person. They’re found in any society, eliciting honorary compassion, inspiring feeble remedial efforts, basically left alone to their own unimaginable devices.