by Doug Weaver
I’m flawed. I know I fucked up over at Point Mugu a couple of decades back. I couldn’t help it – I was just driving up the PCH – I know I should think things through more of the time – I know I shouldn’t have taken my clothes off in front of the giant sand dune where we used to get drunk. But I thought I had to, I really did, like my salvation depended on it. But – my imperfections are almost certainly more deep-seated than stripping out on the PCH at one in the morning, even though it was pretty fucking cold that night, so maybe that’s it, but maybe not. Oh – okay, I got it now. It’s my nails. I knew that was gonna come up sooner or later. I should have stopped picking at them decades ago. As a matter of fact, I’m absolutely the only person I know – at least of dope fiends whom I care to hang out with – who still does that. I rarely chew them – never got into that because chewing suggests more of a commitment than peeling does because when you pick and peel them, you can hide with your hands in your lap or wherever, but chewing them – that’s really not giving a damn. Your shit’s right out there for everybody to see. Maybe it’s that little seemingly insignificant detail, the one that’s allowed me to hide my imperfections in my lap where I’ve spent – I haven’t added up the time, but it’s probably, all together, maybe about between six months and ten years that I’ve picked and peeled my way to freakdom. And it’s not like I don’t notice other peoples’ nails when they’re all fucked up either. I do. And I judge, but it’s the kind of judging done by the guilty, because my nails are almost always more screwed up than theirs. And I suspect this habit is going to turn out to be something listed on my death certificate: “Decedent’s nails chewed” but there won’t be any way I can explain, after I’m dead, that chewing with my teeth wasn’t my vehicle of choice in the process of willful disfigurement of this part of my body. The dead can explain exactly zero, except on TV, and that’s a whole other story that’s made some asshole hundreds of millions of dollars and sold millions of Fords and tons of hand sanitizer and created shiny new CSI curricula at expensive storefront schools that promise rewarding careers of employment after only a short eight months of earnest study. And people will judge me. If I’m murdered, probably the first thing the coroner will notice – beyond my prodigious number of track marks – is my raggedy nails: “He’s a nail picker, detective…one of the more egregious cases I’ve seen actually.” Or what’s more likely, death due to an overdose, where chewed up nails is just one in the pantheon of expected bad habits that the hopelessly immature citizen is expected to suffer. It might even be mentioned at my memorial service: “If only Jimmy’d stopped picking his nails to death. Maybe he’d still be here with us.” Picking a tiny chink loose on one of my nails, then peeling it off just gives me so much pleasure. How to explain the urge to continue doing this past the fourth grade…hmmm. It’s really kind of an invitation to attend to something – what’s it called? An exigency. What a fucking great word. Really, an invitation to attend to an exigency. And if you’re anything like me, real invitations, like to attend parties or weddings or whatever, more robust invitations that involve good-natured interaction with other, you know, human beings, started drying up a long time ago. It’s kind of like when you have a loose tooth in front – either upper or lower – and the tooth is still pretty firmly there, but still it’s a little bit loose. It’s that fucking tongue, that muscle of deft curiosity that leaps to action as soon as it’s discerned even a slight imperfection inside the mouth – and a loose tooth, to this instrument of Babel, amounts to an insatiable curiosity where testing the tooth’s viability about one billion times per day isn’t unreasonable. Not only isn’t it unreasonable, it actually seems like it’s a duty. If it weren’t for speech, it would probably be reasonable to say that the tongue is the body’s tool for detecting and verifying imperfections inside the mouth – and testing and verifying over and over and over until a loose tooth can’t take it anymore and just falls out. I’m not an idiot. I know that nail picking can never rise to the level of vocation, avocation – or even hobby. How fucking dumb would that be – “Oh, my hobby? Yeah, I have a ‘hobby.’ It’s picking my nails down to the quick.” Like if I was ever on a TV game show for gay guys where some single guy chooses a date from just the aural/oral evidence that three contestants would offer, meaning that the choice couldn’t be based on anything visual anyway. “Oh, I’ll take bachelor number three because he picks his nails.” So that’s what my little habit of picking at my nails is like. So I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry I never got around to putting Band-Aids around the imperfection on my left thumb’s nail just to allow it to grow to its potential. Either that or maybe opting instead for a more punishment-heavy medieval routine where forbidden bad habits are stopped by turning their pleasure quotient into awfulness, like maybe soaking the tips of my fingers in vinegar overnight – or here’s a good one: maybe jamming my thumb up my ass several times a day. But that still leaves the other less opposable digits to bask in their – maybe not fragrant, but unspoiled states. I suppose I could learn to fist-fuck myself in an attempt to sully all five of my digits, but that seems a bit unwieldy, and also absolves fifty percent of my available hands from their fate, which might finally give my teeth ideas about destruction of my available nails. But I simply cannot – please don’t say that what I really mean is “will not” – because it really doesn’t make that much fucking difference in the scheme of things, now, does it. I can’t give up that pleasure – yes, it is a pleasure to me – a pleasure that actually, like the tongue/tooth example, fills an empty place in my soul. Stop shaking your heads! I know it’s pathetic. I also know what you’re thinking: I will never ever ever actually ever grow up into maturity where I might become “stable” and into a state that sloughs off its temporariness until I stop this one habit. You think I’ve never thought about this before? But I probably won’t – or maybe I will. Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe my fatal imperfections are just so basic that I will never be able to see them. I know where this is heading, you know: A deficit of L-O-V-E. That’s it, isn’t it. There’s no way I can trace the route down that particular rabbit hole, but if you insist. Okay, okay. I turned my back on love. Satisfied? I can’t remember their names, obviously, but there was that one guy who fucked me so silly that people at the baths thought I was actually dying in that deluxe full-sized room up there on the third floor. This guy must have had money because he sprang for that big room with the majorly huge bed instead of one of the dingy little single rooms that always smell a little like a mixture of bleach and shit. But getting back to the sex, Jesus fucking Jesus motherfucking Christ. I will never forget that. Afterward he wrote me a little note on an oversized business card, but with no hint of what his vocation or business was written on it. All it was was a small card of off-white cardstock – with little dark speckles here and there on it – a style I’ve since learned certainly costs more than plain white and which has earned for itself a perch on one of the many shelves of “elevated taste” – and he’d written his first name – which I’ve forgotten – and the words “I want more – MUCH more!” (his emphasis and exclamation mark – not mine) – and his phone number and address, which was somewhere down in the California desert – which, at that time in my life seemed a bit too exotic, like I didn’t know at that tender time in my life that the California desert was a haven for homosexuals to accrete, as well as the notion that anybody’d travel longer than eight blocks to get laid seemed just so stupid. But here’s the thing: When he got dressed in his street clothes, he put on these Lawrence of Arabia really loose-fitting harem clothes, like gossamer white bed sheets that had been made into casual clothes, and I guess my mind took the decision-making duty right away from me when I saw those clothes, because I just couldn’t fit that “look” into my life in any way at all at that time because in this respect I’m like every other human being on earth: Every person I’ve been intimate with is automatically cast into predictive roles of future acceptance or non-acceptance, and I remember after watching him
pull on these silly looking pants thinking how uncomfortable I would be on subsequent Christmases with my family – WTF – or how weird I would be treated by his family who probably lived in a deluxe yurt near some desert oasis, and all the gifts I’d receive from them would be harem clothes.
Or it might have been this guy named David – I’m saying “David” but it – yeah, I think that’s it. He was an artist, but so incredibly handsome – like an actor in a beer commercial or maybe one for fast cars. And he loved me. I mean he was hopelessly in love with me. But screw it. Sex with David or whatever was a chore because he had this really long but seriously skinny dick – and he fancied himself a total top and he’d get my clothes off and he’d start thrusting and shit, but Jesus, it hurt, but not in a good way. Not. At. All! David had a little white house way out in the Calabasas Hills, and it was like immaculate, like not one bit of dust in it at all. And the “art” he made was what he called reverse glass painting, which he explained was exactly how the images on pinball machines were created, where the artist had to paint the last brushstroke first, which, according to David, was a process that was right up there along with painting the Mona Lisa, and turned out to be a subject that I’d never once until that time in my life had ever thought about – I’m not a pinball kind of guy. And right away the process seemed a little – boring – but I was polite because he was so handsome and I felt obliged to imagine a life lived with David and his skinny dick. And he treated me chivalrously, which was another detail that bugged me. Always made me feel like I should be dressed in a ballroom gown or something where I’d start to feel “conspicuous.” Probably starting to get warm, so if I were a betting man, I’d say this all stemmed from motherfucking David with the skinny dick. Because that whole conspicuous thing kind of makes so much more sense right about now. So my problems just might be totally connected to this David guy, but who really knows? There’s no way to literally go back and examine anything without maybe being hypnotized, but that’s cause-and-effect for you, I guess. But don’t get me wrong. I really did used to be happy. I must have been, right? No one on earth has been fucked up from day one, right?
I know times change and everything, but back then – back when I was young and didn’t have so many problems – shit never used to be so serious before all this “awareness” shit that’s around today. We didn’t do drugs really, except smoke pot and take acid now and again. And we weren’t such fucking victims either. God! I’d blow my brains out in the next couple of seconds if I turned into one of those bitter old queens who complains about everything all the time – actually I wonder if any of those guys is actually able to see the progression of their reasons for being as they cross the boundary from minor annoyance to constant victimhood. Either that or maybe turning into one of those leather clad relics who hangs around leather bars every afternoon and you’ll maybe be slumming one day and will have ducked inside into the darkness for a while, and one of these old dudes will inevitably walk over and start to take liberties, verbally speaking, and just out of the blue say something like, “Everything you think’s happening isn’t,” which might literally ruin your afternoon because you’re not ready for it, and you’ve got your own fucking problems out the ass but you’re just here for a little respite from the world – but that’s what it’s designed to do is totally knock you off balance so that maybe, in a moment of weakness or indecision that might be brought up by just about anything in your life, like maybe your dog’s sick or your thoughts have been consumed by increasing mention of “the gay cancer” on the news every night, and you might be feeling a little sick, or any fucking thing actually – or you’re maybe questioning everything you’ve ever done or thought, and this old relic’s indecision meter is pretty finely tuned and he offers a weird form of intimacy available to “special” people like you that will end up being some kind of succor or something, that he’s tried to get you to believe would be stupid to turn down – or maybe they’ll be some kindly old grandpa who kind of places a huge amount of stock on “happiness” and he just says, “Why don’t you smile,” which, when it’s happened to me, I just feel like stabbing whoever’s said it. And I’m not saying that victimhood hasn’t been a “good” thing in the long run. I mean, if we just kept our mouths shut, AIDS would probably have killed us all off. It was just different back a long time ago. For a really good time, gay guys used to dress like nuns and drink wine and smoke not very strong pot. Period. I’ve heard the stories. It was so – good natured – so innocent. I used to love to hear their stories from when these old queens were young. They’d get dressed up in drag, but not like the kind of drag that’s popular now, like all those TV shows and all that LGBTQ stuff, where the women they’re trying to imitate are like Godzilla with big tits and metallic hair, but it was something so different, and I would love to have seen it. It was all about cunning and being clever – kind of like reading a book instead of thinking that you can entertain somebody with something “novel” from the realm of mass media. I remember once a few years back on this Sunday afternoon I asked one of my neighbors – this old guy who lived downstairs from me – I asked him if he wanted to go see a Spielberg movie – I think it was one of those fake dinosaur ones with the major special effects. And he seemed ambivalent at the suggestion and so I right away said, “Oh, come on! Go with me! It would be good entertainment!” And I remember his eyebrows raised for a second and he said in this way I’ll never forget: “Do you think that I want to be entertained?” like the whole concept of “entertainment” was just so vulgar to him, but he smiled anyway and I couldn’t really tell if he was being serious or not, but I thought his answer was really fucking cool. Anyway, drag used to not be such a big deal. The whole idea was to dress up like a plain Jane kind of woman, one who held down an office job who typed really really well and answered phones and wore “sensible” shoes and not much makeup where making a spectacle of yourself just wasn’t done. This one old queen told me that he used to get dressed up to resemble one of these plain Janes, and he was so good at it, no one – even at a gay get-together, would be able to tell if he was a guy or just some run-of-the-mill lesbian. The getup he described was a powder blue turtleneck fluffy kind of sweater with a modest crucifix hanging on the outside, unstylish glasses, of course, and a gray medium-length wool skirt – or maybe a pantsuit – and sensible shoes. He said he knew he’d nailed it if he got hit on by a lesbian instead of some seriously fucked up straight guy with tons of issues. And he said he’d never ever ever give away anything to anybody – he’d keep it all “inside” – like the joke was just that precious – until he got back home or back someplace with his buddies, and then they’d fucking let loose and howl and cackle like crazy about how much fun it was blending in to the female wallpaper. Anyway, I can just imagine seeing all these bearded guys wearing habits crossing some busy street in Silver Lake – right out in the daylight. They smoked cigars and they didn’t give a shit, but they weren’t all fucked up with some kind of a “mission” like everybody is today. They were just having a good time. And I knew some of these old queens and they treated me like I was something. And we’d head over to Mr. Brott’s apartment over on Lucile – he and his roommate had a terrace, but nobody really liked his roommate much – his name was Lee something or other – and I can only remember that his astrological sign was Pisces, which seemed really really appropriate for such a wishy-washy type of person. He worried all the time! “Oh, I think we’ve smoked enough pot” or “Oh, I think we’ve had enough coffee” or “Oh, that wine isn’t free, you know. I think we’ve had enough.” What a fucking loser Lee was. Brott pronounced his name like it was spelled “Brote,” but it actually should have sounded like “brought.” And we smoked pot together and Bill Brott – we called him Mr. Brott on Sundays for some reason – well, Bill would wait until we got seriously drunk and totally stupid on this shitty weed, and he had this dorky jeweled box about the size of the Kleenex box. And he’d dig it out of some closet and car
ry it out on the terrace along with his Mason jar-full of cheap red wine – there was this big black button right in the middle of the box. And he’d explain that we were gonna drink “lemon-aid” but he pronounced it “lemon-ahhhd,” kind of like that white girl in Auntie Mame – the one with the ping-pong balls and that unlikely pubescent relationship with a man who should have known better because he was portrayed as somebody with solid character who should have had more discernment in his girlfriend picker than he obviously had – and blow up rich peoples’ houses while we lounged on the terrace there getting unconscious and sloppy. And Mr. Brott – Bill – would give me this box and tell me to look off in the distance toward the Hollywood sign where all these mansions are in the hills. And he’d tell me to pick out one of these houses that I’d like to blow up with explosives, which would happen if I pushed the button. And then I’d settle on some big old house that had all these white turrets and outside walls that were tall and topped with orange roof tiles and was supposed to look like a Moorish castle or some shit, and push the button down and Boom! The house would be blown to smithereens. Not really, you know. The explosions weren’t real, but it sure was fun imagining you have all that power – it had a real kind of Roman emperor feeling to it. And everybody would choose a house to blow up and push the button and everybody would yell “Boom!” and we’d lounge around for a while and laugh and cackle like hell and drink “lemon-ahd” and it was just so much fun because it was on this great terrace with all these guys who used to dress like nuns and go out in the sunshine. I met Bill – Mr. Brott – when I just got to LA from Arkansas. I had this cool part-time job in an antique store and Bill used to come in and buy stuff there. I guess saying “antique store” isn’t exactly accurate – it was more of a thrift store with old shit. And Bill picked out a chair made of bamboo that he wanted to look at, and he always used to tell me this story – he’d say I was really enthusiastic about this style of chair and he did an impression of what I said way back then: “Ah luv rattan” – but the “rattan” I said sounded more like “ra-tay-yan.” I loved Mr. Brott. He’s gone now though. Don’t you understand? Please tell me you understand. Wait a minute though. If you’re sitting there judging me because I’m gay, if that’s the basis for your attitude, then hold the horses for quick second. If it turns out that that’s the case, then all I have for you is one more giant Fuck You, because come on. You really can’t be serious, right? This is motherfucking Hollywood and you’re judging me because you “suspect” I might suck cock? You just wish I’d suck your cock, right? Keep on wishing, asshole!
