Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  The music was loud and on stage Suzee and Trevor spoke into each other’s ears.

  Suzee said, “Y’all, this is Trevor. Who wants dinner with Trevor at Praline’s? This is a raffle within a raffle. Just say something, give a holler. Hie thee to Trevor’s side pronto.”

  I was trying not to drink too much. Trevor held the envelope up as he stepped down off the narrow stage and got his applause. Soon I realized I was losing that battle with the alcohol, and then the show began and all I wanted to do was parcel out my last drink for the next hour. A cocktail waiter came and took my order before I was done with what I was holding but I was too gone to resist, and then I began to feel fine, surrendering. Too, I had the hunger for young flesh.

  I sat watching only the stage, not looking around, not thinking about anything.

  The show was about the death of Donna Summer. Trevor was no longer sitting with me, which was all right. He made me nervous. Let him make some others nervous. I was too busy remembering Donna Summer and the boy I was before I’d become the wreck of a man. It was a delicious evening. Trevor pranced about to the songs of Donna Summer, who herself was a great role model or something. She was a life force. All alone next to the wall, Trevor danced.

  Our townhouse was something of a dream given the town. Memphis always felt small, but I’d managed to make the place my personal heaven. The main room had a cathedral ceiling and I’d decorated the scenically crumbling brick walls. Carnival masks, silk banners, some of the usual corny stuff sure, but the key was the indirect lighting. The main room was my introduction and I introduced myself well, I thought. Trevor wanted to come home with me, why I cannot tell you, and before I’d gotten him his drink he looked around and nodded approvingly. He said his father would be disgusted, which he liked the notion of. His mother would be amused. She’d “get it,” he said. I spotted right away that he was too drunk really for social or sexual consumption, and he was eaten up by his neediness or something worse I’d rather not hear about, but he was too pretty and too here to ignore—and I was who I was at the time. So I watched him, didn’t touch him.

  He nodded and announced that he liked where he was now and then without my inquiring judged the guys back at the bar by saying, “Bunch of dumbasses trying to climb all over me.”

  I agreed too quickly, standing too close to him, and he said, “You’re a dumbass, too.”

  I went off and put on some Boz Scaggs and he said, “What’s that white-boy ofay mess?”

  I’d forgotten that even the redneck boys nowadays thought of themselves as hip and beat and liked to use black slang, or liked talking in a way they’d heard in songs or read about.

  “This some kind of cracker smooth jazz?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You’re too young. But if you’d like to go, I’d understand. I’m a lot older than you. I know, I looked younger in the bar lights.”

  “I know how old you are. You work with my mom.”

  A woman I worked with, Eileen, I knew had a son named Trevor. But there, who did not?

  Once I’d returned from the bathroom and Eileen had said, “You just missed my boy!”

  I had a state job, and not a bad one. I wouldn’t want to put that position down. I got a good salary but yeah, it was boring. I was boring. I was a pencil pusher, a drudge, a drone. A lot of these younger kids were unironic Republicans. My older lover was asleep in the back.

  “Is she Eileen?”

  “Eileen, that’s right. Has me call her that. She likes you, she’s even kind of hot for you.”

  I said, “She’s really sweet. She always covers for me. I’m not my best in the morning.”

  “She said. But she likes you, man. She hates the higher-ups. For her you’re a victim.”

  “That’s part of my silly act,” I said. “So she knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “Never mind,” I said, because he seemed nervous to me now, certainly not all there.

  Such small towns—you still couldn’t be too careful. What was, wasn’t. What could be, you’d never speak of. I’d learned to live there. I didn’t want to be there but it was my home. It was a while ago, of course, and things have started to change even there. I’ve since moved out.

  He flung up his arms and grinned wildly, saying, “Hey look, the stars, infinity!”

  I’d painted the cathedral navy blue and stenciled on gold stars like those homework stars back in elementary school. Did teachers still stick those on kids’ homework papers and quizzes?

  “Good job, good job,” he said, swaying then catching himself before falling. “I like it.”

  I nodded, smiling, and said, “What would you like?”

  “Everything.”

  “What would you like to drink?”

  “What’ve you got?”

  My older lover woke up and came in. The kitchen was separate from the main room by only a breakfast bar. George didn’t seem fully awake and didn’t even blink. He didn’t seem to register anything, just wanting a drink of cold water. He pushed across the linoleum in his sock feet to the fridge and I opened it for him, like the woman opening door number three on the game show. Trevor moved away from us, awkwardly gavotting, knowing the drill somehow.

  “Good night,” said George.

  “Good night, darling,” I said, deciding to hide nothing. I was in control, or not. Nothing mattered. I was in control and part of being in control was knowing I couldn’t control it all. And I knew it didn’t matter. I lived in a small town where nothing mattered, not even me. And I was alone here, with George, where nothing mattered except us and me. My mother had approved of George tacitly not long before she died. He was rich and that was all she cared about, truly, and I had watched him get old, having met him when we both seemed young and my parents not.

  The boy, Trevor, stirred. We were alone together and I said, “What can I get you now?”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Everything.”

  He pointed at me and ordered, “Make me a gimlet. Now, motherfucker.”

  “Done,” I said, feeling an old odd cheer. “Gimlet then.”

  This reminded me: we’d done our best work as father, mother, and son on the Gulf Coast. We’d covered the full reach and done it in style. Maxing out the cards, eating, drinking it all up.

  Then for an instant it was as though something drunkenly cosmic was going on, uncanny.

  Trevor said, “My dad used to whale on me, just blistering. Times I couldn’t walk. Got to school all right but then he’d do it again. I couldn’t keep up! He hated me then died, thank God. Fucker died. Still curse his shitty bastard memory but I’m here! My mom and I, we’re still here and I thank my stars. The stars. The stars are so forgiving where I can’t be. That was tasty.”

  “Would you like another?”

  “Please.”

  My father was gentle, never raised a hand. He was passive that way. He’d gotten his money yet did seem to believe, rightly, it would slip out of his grip if only he looked the other way—and he had. Not his fault. Dad was an all right man, just foolish. Naïve you’d say. My mother died and then—nothing. Not a sound. Her folks would not report their misgivings but then they had the lawyers on their side and everything went over, scooted to mom’s side of the family, the part of her life she’d despised although she’d liked the money okay, but she was gone. And then not long after, my father died, dissipated in unbelieving, unforgiving forgetfulness, and now I get it. I get the whole thing about liquidity, but still I romanticize our brief sovereign trio.

  I got Trevor his second drink and he said, “Let’s go out on the deck.”

  “Okay.”

  We went out onto the deck into darkness and he said, “Do you believe there’s anything?”

  “Anything at all?” I said, feeling I could follow him but no longer in a forbearing mood.

  “Yeah. Like, do you think anything out there exists?”

  “No.”

  “B
ut there has to be! There’s all this! And it’s beautiful,” the last phrase added lightly.

  As he said this his voice got progressively dimmer, dimmer as the tree frogs shrieked and seemed to pulse louder. He started down the stairs of the deck, swerved, and came back up.

  There was another room where I wanted to take him, but I didn’t think we’d get there.

  He said, “I don’t think despite all that stuff my father was evil. Do you believe in evil?”

  “No.”

  “Then what? You’ve been saying all this crap, this mess, but what do you believe?”

  “I believe we’re here not for any purpose but to enjoy.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “Do you want to enjoy me?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m nothing.”

  “You’re not nothing.”

  “I was never anything. Can’t make my way. My mother says I just need time. Moron!”

  “Don’t listen to her or bother trying to interpret anything. Go. Get out as far as you can.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  “You’re a fake.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re saying go.”

  “I’m saying go, just get out. You’re young.”

  “And what?”

  “Take what you have, use it, and get out.”

  He started crying. He said, “You’re a fake.”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned and kissed me painfully hard, that second drink a mistake but an exciting one.

  And then we went upstairs to the room. The room was nothing. Something I’d done in a day with a paintbrush and some mail-ordering online.

  He said, “And what about George?”

  I said, “He doesn’t care.”

  “You’re going to die.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’m going to die. Does that bother you?”

  “It bothers me more about you than about me, to tell you the truth. You’re young.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “Don’t you want someone to mourn for you?”

  He waited then said, “But you’ll be dead.”

  “Rub it in, but that’s not what I meant.”

  Already this sounded inane to me, but I felt as though I had the moral upper hand anyway.

  We were in near-complete darkness but I could see the shine of his eyes looking at me.

  “Oh come on,” he said. “You’ll have lots besides me mourning for you.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You’re full of self-pity.”

  “That I am.”

  “You should be.”

  And then we did it. It wasn’t much. I’m not slighting him. I’m just saying it wasn’t much for him—and he didn’t even stay till morning. I felt worse for him than for me though later I did feel sorry for myself. It seemed typical. Life was like that, typical.

  Later I saw him in a mall in Pascagoula, where I had moved, when he was with someone better suited for him. They looked marvelous together, and I mourned for myself and for George, too. But then I thought things weren’t all that bad.

  He winked at me while the other guy wasn’t looking. We had both moved on. Life.

  werewolf

  to

  THOMAS ERIC JACKSON (1965–2013)

  After a while, I got so tired of going back to Florida not because I didn’t miss it but because each time I returned I got more and more disappointed by my life, and by myself. Plus I couldn’t afford it. I’m not talking about the disappointment of the suburban nature of it. I missed driving around the old places but even renting a car for a week was way out of my budget. In New York I was getting poorer just staying alive, while my friends who’d had the good sense to stay behind owned houses; they had pension funds and investments, as grown-ups were supposed to. They’d thought that my living in New York, where the rents are obviously insane, meant I was rich. And I was single and gay and you know what that meant. Champagne cocktails before the opera. I’d lost touch with most of them. I just assumed they were all flourishing down in the palmy ’burbs.

  Then my best friend from high school got sick. He was living in a boxy apartment off the expressway not long after his second divorce. His kids, one from each of his two marriages, had been living with him, and it sounded happy until he’d gotten the diagnosis about his liver, and so they’d gone back to their mothers. He had insurance from his job, but it didn’t cover everything. He’d had to take a leave of absence and go on disability. When the insurance ran out and he was scheduled to go into hospice, he would be depending on Medicaid. And I think there were debts, although before I left New York to see Phil I asked a friend who’d been on disability for twenty-plus years with AIDS if anyone would be liable for paying the debts and he said he believed not.

  “But who knows,” this friend of mine in New York said with his patent kooky, wild-eyed foreboding (since New York bred just as many kooks as suburbia had), “between all the different dumb laws in all the different fucked-up states, and what the Republicans are planning to do …”

  Still, Drew, with AIDS, appeared to flourish. He swam five miles a day at the Fourteenth Street Y in Chelsea and traveled a lot. He was a good saver. He had a BlackBerry full of friends who took him out regularly and bought him dinner, gave him tickets to see the sold-out shows at BAM, and let him stay in their country houses in upstate New York or out in the Hamptons while they were in Europe or Southeast Asia or India (they were all Buddhists, it seemed)—and they’d leave him “expense” money so he could buy himself groceries and the food for their pets he was sitting. In May, just ahead of tourist season, he somehow scraped together enough cash to fly to Spain, where Drew had more friends. He’d had his Paris and Berlin periods and he spoke French and German and was working on his Spanish. He was from Houston and had the withering habit of making fun of Texas and the big-haired rich ladies he’d grown up around, wearing the prestige of knowing it top-to-bottom while beaming an assurance that he’d been smart to get out. He was a snob—and I took it as a moral failing, in his eyes at least, that I should want to return to Florida at all. He had a sense of entitlement all the more devastating and annoying to me because he had nearly died three times, which should have made him more empathetic but didn’t—since, I guess was his reasoning, as an eternal patient he had a spiritual outlook that didn’t punish him for being apathetic to the point of offensive preachiness. He’d had every opportunistic disease in the book: viral and bacterial meningitis, pancreatitis, kidney failure, a heart attack, gout, bloody-puke bouts with severe ulcerous reflux … and the list went on. Given his two decades of living with HIV, I suppose I thought of him as something of a testament to modern medicine, an inspiration capable of shaming me out of my own silly hypochondria. Around Drew I swung violently, but covertly, between admiration and a perhaps slightly misplaced pity. Drew was intelligent and had wowed them briefly as a student of classics at Columbia before dropping out. He knew everybody—from his stories that I didn’t necessarily trust—and he had slept with most of them. Cosmopolitan Drew.

  With Drew, the world was imperfect except for wherever he was at the moment or was headed next. Drew was always in a good mood. But with my old friend Phil, who did not have rent control in Florida, and who’d been told he had only a few more months to live, there wasn’t going to be any world by the end of the year. Phil and I were both agnostics and didn’t have the comfort of a poetic, onion-layered nothingness. Our neither believing nor disbelieving but being sure of a horrible nothingness had kept us loosely in touch for more than thirty years—and meant that I had no idea what to do when I finally saw him again after maybe two decades. Only that I had to leave New York right away to see him, wet-eyed, nostalgic, and with even greater self-pity.

  The day before I flew off, I was meeting Drew for lunch and told him about the situation, giving him the background
of my friendship with Phil then shading in some of the finer nuances.

  “Oh no question about it,” he said with a tenderness that was unlike him (and all the more frustrating because I’d always had a crush on Drew, those flashing blue eyes): “You have to go.”

  My anecdote took up most of the meal—at the end of which I hastily grabbed the check, despite my personal financial straits. Nor did my volunteering to pay the tab disarrange Drew’s usual Zen composure. He smiled handsomely and nodded semibrightly. How I hated him then!

  It went like this, and despite the fact that Drew was into Eastern medicine and loved to use disease horror stories to spank Western doctors and form object lessons out of them as quick, hard-to-follow advertisements for nontraditional practices (starting with acupuncture, which had helped relieve me of a nasty few months of GERD), he sat by and listened, drawing me out at the right moments, touching my hand when I almost blubbered, and telling me it would be okay. (A rather different Drew, I was seeing. And stupidly I wondered if we could still be lovers after all.)

  I knew it wasn’t going to be “okay,” but I took comfort from Drew saying my loyalty was sweet. “It really goes to show how important old friends are,” he said, but I also noticed a glazed look in his eyes that made me think he was really just trying to contain himself and not show that he was getting a tad revved up for his trip to a private island off St. Martin, paid for by a designer friend. Drew was getting on a plane the next day, too: “No, darling, it’s a sweet, sweet story.”

  At the door of the bistro he kissed and hugged me, saying, “Best of luck to Phil, okay?”

  Which wasn’t much like Drew, either. I felt jealous, envious, and, as always, unsatisfied.

  I went home to pack, and as usually happens I completely forgot about Drew within a few hours. I wondered if this was generally the case with foul-weather friends. Was I one of those to my old flame Phil? It occurred to me that time got behind the best and the least of friends—that only in times of crisis did we rise to the occasion and remember ourselves as loving familiars.