I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

  The two or three afternoon hours we spend together give mornings a definite form (breakfast, writing) and leave an aftermath of fucked-out, languid indirection. Once he’s been here, I find it impossible to return to any memory I’ve been trying to recover. Instead I replay the previous hour’s porn movie with a view to improving it when we re-shoot it the next day.

  I worry at times that he’ll disappear and meet a harsh fate I’ll never hear about. Even with Cubans who can speak and hear, it’s hard to maintain continuity, as my Spanish is tentative and imprecise, and no one I know here has more than perfunctory English. It’s usually true that if people want to find you in Havana, they will. But if you want to find them, it isn’t so simple. People do vanish. They get sent back to their provinces by police, or get swallowed by some desperate enterprise that takes them out of the city or lands them in prison. Is this some kind of love, I wonder, and if it is, does it really have anything to do with me?

  With its seedy desuetude of a James M. Cain novel, the Bryson Apartments exuded nostalgia for a previous Los Angeles. It was owned by Fred MacMurray, a well-guarded secret that enhanced its atmosphere of Double Indemnity. Famed long ago as a warren of love nests rented by studio executives for their starlet mistresses, the ten-story Beaux-Arts heap was one of several derelict follies in the triangular ghost town between Lafayette and MacArthur Parks: the Wilshire Royale, the Asbury, and the Park Plaza, also known as the Elks Building. The Royale had a street-side coffee shop with black glass windows. A block farther east on Wilshire, a revival cinema never drew a single customer, a few doors from a Mexican restaurant that featured an anemic mariachi band serenading an empty dining room.

  It was a perfect neighborhood for hiding away from the world and pretending time had stopped. The Wilshire District belonged to a forgotten era. The fourth-floor apartment came furnished, with king-size bed and chintz-covered sofa and a fold-out dining table with chairs. A glass-paneled breakfront. Thin gray carpeting wall to wall. A pleasantly flimsy set for Kraft Television Theatre, circa 1956. It had a Hollywood bathroom with black-and-white tiles, an efficiency kitchen stocked with plates and pans and a look of deluded 1930s optimism. A square balcony protruded over Wilshire Boulevard like a giant flowerbox. Side windows over Rampart Street faced the Royale, perennially stalled under renovation and vacant except for the street-level coffee shop, with a handful of elderly tenants in forty-watt rooms, shuffling behind half-drawn shades in sad gray underwear or staring down at the street waiting to die.

  The Bryson was haunted by myriad ghosts, among whom I numbered Stephanie, a spectral, transsexual night clerk, whose estrogen storms produced theatrical mood swings that made her conversation impossibly self-referential and confusing. Everyone living in the Bryson suffered from insomnia, I discovered. They wandered the halls after midnight looking lost, or knocked on random doors to “borrow” cigarettes or recount their latest dreams to strangers. In daylight, the Bryson ceased to exist. I never saw another tenant leave for work in the morning or come home at night.

  Many tenants, for legal or technical reasons, couldn’t operate a motor vehicle, and turned up at my door at weird hours to hustle rides, sometimes to an all-night diner on Miracle Mile. Another popular destination was the Ralphs market on Sixth Street. I made the mistake of ferrying a frowzy, unlovely couple named Joni and Hank to Ralphs several times, creating the false impression that I enjoyed their company. They described themselves as sex addicts. Soon they considered me their friend. They began suggesting nauseating three-ways while piling giant bags of Cheez Doodles and cases of Coca-Cola into their shopping cart. They had a trailer-park greasiness I associated with Charles Manson. Joni and Hank’s dream was to “break into show business,” a dream so remote from plausibility that it might have been touching, if they had been less needy and mentally dim.

  An obese girl named Martha lived on the seventh floor with her mother, Eleanor, in a flat empty of furniture except for the bed they shared. Their place was a four-handed handicraft factory where they crafted little elfin effigies and novelty pins for curio shops in what remained of old downtown LA. Martha and Eleanor had been swindled, they claimed, on a goose-shaped lamp they’d designed that I saw all over the city in those days. Each blamed the other for selling the patent, which occupied the place in their reveries that Belle Reve had in Blanche DuBois’s. They were at each other’s throats day and night. Martha was not young, but never having lived apart from her mother, had frozen at the emotional age of puberty.

  Eleanor desperately wanted to get Martha married off. She was a kindly, self-interested shrew. She saw any male they met as husband material. Martha developed an insensible, elephantine crush on me, and a fantasy that we shared a stormy romantic bond. She poured unnerving histrionics into our glancing encounters, invented “dates” she accused me of breaking. She began letting herself into my apartment—I often forgot to lock up—as if we lived together. It took more tact and patience than I had to get rid of her. Her passion ended one evening when she barged in to find a recently paroled car thief sprawled on my living room sofa, stroking his enormous prick.

  Martha decided I had “jilted” her, and never spoke to me again.

  Enzensberger writes of a train passenger who feels lucky to have a whole compartment to himself. A second passenger enters. The first one resents him for ruining his luck. When a third passenger arrives, the first two bond in silent hostility against the intruder. The third passenger mentally aligns himself with the other two in resentment against a fourth passenger who shows up, and so on.

  The opposite happens at a roulette table. The gamblers welcome the arrival of new players. As the wheel spins they form an excited family. They buy each other extra drinks, tell stories, joke. They’re thrilled when anybody at the table wins. They share gambling systems and superstitions, talk about their jobs, even exchange business cards, though it’s understood that what starts in a casino ends in a casino. When they lose, they don’t care. When players leave the table, they’re sad.

  One night I had won six thousand dollars by two in the morning. Everybody thought it was hilarious that I kept winning. Until four, the table was crowded. Then one player left. Then another. By five, I sat alone with ten thousand dollars in chips stacked in front of me. I felt abandoned and horrible. I put the whole pile on double zero, which absolutely never comes up. The croupier understood my relief when I lost everything.

  nine

  I paid a peso and took the lancha across the port to Regla. The ferry landing and the boats are disintegrating from gravity and oxidation. The passengers looked relieved to get out of central Havana. Some carried bicycles. A few women held babies to their chests. One grizzled man sat on a bulkhead and smoked a thin cigar. The boat churned up orange peels and plastic soda bottles in the brackish water. We crossed several historical time zones in the space of a nautical mile.

  The notable things in Regla are the Belot refinery and the Galainela shipyard, and a massive electricity plant from the 1930s. Regla people are said to be fiercely loyal to the Revolution. In Regla itself, no house or other building, nothing worn or driven or purchased in one of the darkened shops, appears to date from later than 1959. Regla is a center of Santeria and other voodoo. Every shabby residence, however small, has a shrine room heaped with flowers, candles, saucers of chicken blood and gris-gris, where people sacrifice poultry to the Black Virgin and cast spells on enemies, cure malignant tumors, obtain winning lottery numbers.

  Old women smoked cigars in doorways. School kids in blue-and-white uniforms skipped along a potholed main street. Horse-drawn wagons clobbered down alleys of dried mud. The world slowed down, de-mechanized suddenly, like Algiers when you cross from New Orleans, or Montevideo from Buenos Aires. People moved differently. They were striking to look at, sensuous as figured textiles but spectral and impervious to outsiders, like the projections in The Invention of Morel.

  The stillness reminded me of New Hampshire summers, before the forests bordering De
rry were razed for tract developments. The landscape of secret places, fallow orchards, and forgotten graveyards, all vanished now under golf courses and malls. Time passed like slow-pouring syrup. I don’t think it will be long after I’m dead that nature won’t exist. The world will be a throbbing hive of computer chips.

  Lately, at two p.m. I drift into sleep, no matter what I’m doing. I fall asleep in taxis, sitting on park benches, anywhere at all. This happened before, in Mexico. It turned out that I was deathly ill. I can’t worry about that. If I die, fine. It would be lovely to die in my sleep, too relaxed and tired to resist the final exit. The siesta is not a Cuban habit, but there is a space in the media tarde when nothing occurs and the world might as well be in a trance. The best place at that hour is the Hotel Colina patio, or the cement park above the landing stage in Casablanca, where the other lancha crosses the harbor.

  I walked the length of a heavily scarred, inclined street, the perfunctory sidewalk broken like the wake of an iceberg cutter. The road intersected a square where the iglesia of the Black Virgin stood dozing in the heat. Boys in the square had abandoned their soccer game to try on each other’s jerseys. Two police looked asleep on their feet. A woman in a green skirt paced back and forth, her lips moving as she read something on a clipboard.

  A movie theater. What might have been a dance hall forty years ago behind the scaling columns of an arcade. A pastry shop. Stores that looked closed but had people inside. A car. A water truck. The air smelled fresher than Havana, but there was no breeze. The palms looked set in bronze. Calm, slightly dead, with the eternal stillness of a parking lot in the Mojave.

  You would never find foreigners there, except on a bus tour. There is nothing to see in Regla besides the Black Virgin. The Belot refinery was blown up during Batista days and reconstructed after Castro came. I like places where nothing happens, the time between events. I am wary of events. I do not welcome them. Events make it difficult to breathe and remind you that death is coming. Last night on the Malecón, two cheerful guys from Guantánamo urged me to visit them there. “Everything is really, really clean in Guantánamo,” one said. “The houses, the forest, the water, all very, very clean,” said the other. Havana is filthy. No doubt about it. The best-kept neighborhood has piles of filth in it somewhere. “And you will love it there, because nothing ever happens.”

  I developed a building crush on Lester, who lived across the hall at the Bryson. Lester wore the ruffled shirts and satin trousers of a Carnaby Street dandy, his hair an unraveling Brillo pad. He looked like Marc Bolan. Anyone with hair that way does. Like many junkies, Lester subsisted on uncooked hot dogs and beer, and resembled an adorable sea mammal, a baby dolphin or a manatee, exciting a protective impulse he manipulated with childlike mastery.

  If Lester coveted a little object in my apartment, he cooed over it until I gave it to him. When I happened not to, he stole it. He had a skanky allure, demanding no effort on his part. A charming creep. I wanted to corner him, disable his slippery defenses, pin him to the floor, and rape him.

  I thought my fantasies about Lester might finally be going somewhere one night when he came over and asked suggestively if I would answer a personal question.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Okay, I was wondering. Have you ever had sex with a dead person?”

  I assumed a blasé expression. It crossed my mind that the dead person in question might be Lester’s idea of himself, but it seemed that a mate of his working for a mortician was having fun with bodies he embalmed and had offered to let Lester in on the action.

  “I think it’s against the law,” I said.

  “Yeah, right,” Lester said. “But I mean, what isn’t?”

  For a moment, I imagined the question of his sexual preference resolved: unless a decedent’s penis were frozen upright in rigor mortis, sex with a male corpse would hardly be worthwhile. Lester undoubtedly had a dead vagina in mind. But I then considered that you could, in a pinch, fuck a dead man in the ass. Anyway, most people I knew at this time weren’t picky about the gender of their sexual partners. Maybe Lester went either way. I prodded him to narrow things down. He was too stoned to focus on what I was saying.

  “It sounds extreme, but it really wouldn’t be hurting anybody. There’s nobody home. I’m repulsed by the idea, but I also gotta admit, I’m kind of fascinated in a sick way. Guy works for a funeral home in Palmdale. I’m not asking for advice. I just wondered if …”

  Lester’s voice went all drifty. “Nah, never mind. Forget I brought it up.”

  “No, Lester, go ahead, this is interesting.”

  He rubbed his oily nose and gnawed his lip.

  “Well, say some night I … need a ride out to Palmdale, would you give me a lift?”

  A ballroom on the tenth floor crowned the building. It hadn’t been used since the 1940s. Carved cherrywood chairs ranged along the walls. A carpet of dust on the parquet floor hadn’t registered a single footprint in thirty years. A tiered chandelier missing most of its crystals hung from an Arabic ceiling rotten with wood lice.

  A phantom ball swirled through this cavernous, forgotten space, where I never saw another living soul. Ghosts, yes, all the ghosts of the hotel had migrated up there over the decades. The parquet tiles, the moth-eaten velvet walls, the decomposing ceiling beams were all imprinted with spirits of the great long ago. The window glass along all four walls had fallen out. I’d discovered an inviolable, secret place with the wind blowing through it, high above the world.

  Across from my hotel balcony in Istanbul, on the top floor of a three-story yellow house, a man whose head I’ve never seen is lying on a duvet, naked except for black socks and white underpants, channel-flipping a TV with the remote held in a milky hand in gray darkness. I can’t see how old he is or anything else about him. His sprawled flesh suggests someone who has given up and decided to live in his underpants for the rest of his life, a hibernating animal living off stored body fat. I can’t really tell if he is fat, or if the faint light catching his body from the streetlamp makes him appear bloated and blubbery.

  ten

  Mastiu is an encyclopedia of carnal knowledge, but this is the only knowledge I glean from him. The better I learn his body’s tastes and textures, the greater a puzzle the person inside it becomes. Sometimes he’s a baby in a grown-up’s body, or a schoolboy who barely knows the alphabet. Sitting close together on the terrace, we decorate yellow legal pads with pencil threads of broken Spanish. A sad suspicion that his brain is damaged seems belied by flashes of rakish cunning that appear at the corners of his mouth, or when he flares his nostrils at some remark I expect to fly over his head, casting the question into doubt again. Glimmers of intelligence in his personality hint at some undiscovered secret person he becomes when he isn’t with me. But basically, I think, he isn’t that bright.

  He enslaves me with his cock and loves me into submission with the bullish thrustings of a steam shovel. He isn’t brutal, exactly, just implacable. I could even say he’s a sensitive lover, but only because he never really hurts me. I’m aware the whole time how much stronger and more substantial his body is, and that his need has total priority: he doesn’t even notice if I come or not. To be fair about it, that isn’t my priority either.

  It’s so much a complete pornographic fantasy, though, so consummate and flawless it can’t possibly go on for many days before reality steps in to spoil it. Since when does life give you what you want without fucking it up as soon as possible? Okay: For now, today, in some drastically limited but gratifying sense, I have exactly what I want. He can’t hear anything I say, I don’t have to listen to him talking, we don’t even have the means most people have at their disposal to ruin each other. It’s how I want it, so I tell myself: he’s the man, he fucks me good, I can have his cock in me as much as I want, and that’s all he wants, more or less. When he’s back in his pants he turns into a puppy. Perfect.

  Puppies are adorable, but they don’t have fascinating inner lives.
Before his awkwardly held pencil completes a word on the yellow paper he scratches out the erratic lettering and starts over. His difficulty printing revives my downward estimate of his IQ. I lose interest in his clumsy list of bodies of water where he fishes, a dreary penmanship exercise that doesn’t interest him, either. I can do fine without conversation. It’s these dutiful attempts at having one that begin to bore me.

  In a gloomy hour of the morning, days ago, I understood that if I knew for certain that Mastiu is “challenged,” I would ignore my qualms about sleeping with him. This realization makes me queasy every day when he leaves. Of course I feel something’s wrong, and knowing I’m capable of deliberately doing what I think is wrong—capable of planning to do the same wrong thing again and again—is really damning. All right. “I’ll own it,” as idiotic people say these days. I won’t add lying to myself to the disgrace of exploiting the mentally challenged.

  But I’m honestly not sure if he is. He could be slightly retarded and mimicking a normal adult when he acts like one, but as plausibly fully cognizant, his vocal noises making him sound “slow.” He won’t teach me sign language. I read and write Spanish poorly. It’s probable Mastiu wasn’t taught anything beyond a third-grade level. That’s not unusual among deaf-mutes here, who all seem a bit stupid to someone with full sensory equipment, though they’re street-smart—within a small cluster of streets, but all the same.

  Anyway, he picked me up, not the other way around. I’m not corrupting an innocent. He’s twenty-three. He’s been married, or says he has. He’s fathered a child. That I believe without question. He’s been boning both sexes in record numbers since the age of twelve, so I’m hardly the first, though that doesn’t really make anything else I can think of all right.