Horse Crazy

by Gary Indiana

  At last I returned to the pharmacy window. I would give him a few more minutes, then go home and take the messages myself. No accounting for this person, I thought. Maybe he feels threatened and wants me to give up on him right at the outset. And I should, I considered, staring at a gleaming enamel bedpan, give up now, he’s too handsome, a monster of vanity, too sexy, and in this freezing weather, letting me stand all this time waiting is practically a declaration of contempt. Rupture belts. Imagine getting old, going flabby, and having to wear a rupture belt. I’ve always been thin, my body’s in relatively good shape for someone who drinks and smokes and never exercises, but I should do something, keep myself fit somehow, go to a gym, work out, lift weights, if I stopped smoking my skin would clear up, it’s always breaking out in strange eruptions, thank God I’ve got a nice face, if I were plain these skin things would make me look really ugly.

  Gregory put his hands on my shoulders. He wore a black fleece hat with flaps covering his ears. His face had roses in the smooth cheeks.

  I’m really sorry, he said. He said that as he was leaving his apartment the phone rang, and it was Gloria, the girl he’d been living with. Their relationship, he said, was now a thing of the past. My spirits lifted at this news. I pretended not to be irritated. In fact, the discomfort of waiting had already dissolved. He smiled, I turned to gelatin.

  He suggested an Indian restaurant nearby, and in a few minutes we arrived at Shagura, a place whose festive canopy and red-and-yellow window decorations had repulsed me for years.

  I love this place, Gregory declared as we pushed into its steaming interior. A pink and green paisley dining room full of squat, square tables covered with stained oilcloths. He went decisively to a table against the wall. I followed. We sat. We gazed into each other’s eyes. A waiter, who seemed about three feet high, set down enormous menus and two water glasses. The menus, bound in brownish vinyl, felt clammy. The amber water glasses had a malarial cast. I couldn’t keep my eyes away from Gregory’s face. I pretended to study the menu. I kept up a brisk flow of bright chatter about the weather, the holidays just past. Gregory answered with matching banalities. We ordered kurma. The room had a thick smell of curry.

  He pulled off his hat. His hair was fastidiously clipped, his fingernails tidily manicured. The black shirt and embroidered vest on his slender frame attested to careful maintenance. He’s dressed up for me, I thought. He’s made himself look nice for me. I noticed we were both chain-smoking.

  Why does he like this hideous restaurant, I wondered. Two people live in the same area, they sometimes have the same opinions or ideas about any number of different topics, but the way they feel about various places that each one sees all the time will be drastically unalike. One will have strange emotional associations with a bar, a restaurant, a block of houses, yet for the other it’s just a place. There are places I can’t go because of the past, houses I can’t walk past without some painful feeling. Some people conquer their sentimental impulses, their draining nostalgia, their regrets. They can live in the streets and rooms of their memories as if every day were a new day. Why is that, I wondered.

  I asked him what had happened between him and Gloria. He said something quick and somehow shocking, a phrase full of words so abruptly violent it took my breath away. A moment later he described, in a perfectly sanguine voice, a pop singer he admired. It was as if a tape recording had been spliced at some jarring, brittle point and turned into sedative mood music. I didn’t know where we were going but sensed that a door had been opened that wouldn’t easily close again.

  2

  . . . and then Gregory said that Gloria, who was really just a kid, inexperienced, not at all sophisticated in affairs of the heart, had left the apartment on Clinton Street just before Christmas, a few days after you met me in the bookstore, Gregory said, she started driving me up the wall, he said that her incessant demands, her sexual demands on him, would start at four in the morning when he got off his shift at the restaurant, I’d be half dead, Gregory told me, my feet would be throbbing, all I’d want to do would be to get my clothes off and do aerobics for twenty minutes and then pass out, he said, and Gloria, as soon as Gregory came through the door, would grab at his belt trying to get his pants off she just wasn’t capable of understanding that the last thing in the world I would want at four in the morning after being on my feet for twelve hours was sex, Gregory explained, in a tone of infinite reasonableness, compassionately, though an aggrieved note kept slipping into his voice, and she’d moved out, finally, actually he’d sort of kicked her out, made her leave, the thing is the apartment’s in my name, he said, and now Gloria was persecuting him. He said he’d supported her for several months and even though she’d put up some of the initial money for the apartment she’d lived off him since then, he’d certainly more than paid back whatever funds she’d invested in the Clinton Street apartment, but now she’s demanding that I give her back her seven hundred dollars, Gregory said, which is crazy, I just don’t have it. I’m making a lot at the restaurant but I also have a lot of debts, he said, and I’m trying to get my work made, his work involved expensive photographic processes, first I make slides and then those have to be blown up into prints, Gregory explained, it’s costly, my work means everything to me, right now it’s the most important thing in my life, and now, he said, Gloria had launched a campaign of persecution. She had started ringing his buzzer at all hours, or phoning him in the middle of the night on his nights off walking him up, throwing pebbles at his windows, screaming up from the street at him, ambushing him when he left his apartment house, he’d taken the keys away, or changed the locks, anyway, she couldn’t get in anymore, she was demanding money and also claimed he had some of her belongings in there, in fact some of her things are there, he said, she’s welcome to have them back but I won’t have her coming into the place, she has to set it up so I can have her stuff carried down to the street. I won’t have any more dealings with her, she’s insane. Gregory said that Gloria’s insane behavior was beginning to make him completely paranoid and he had taken to unplugging the telephone and cutting himself off from any contact with the outside world on his days off, I bring all this food home and hole up there watching television, Gregory said, or cutting things out of magazines, I use stuff from magazines in this work that I make, I really want you to see it, he said, but I’m honestly afraid that Gloria’s becoming violent, she’s made threats over the phone, she says she’s hiring goons to beat me up, or she’s going to have this old boyfriend of hers beat the shit out of me, she says all this stuff to me and then she goes real sweet and says she’d like us to get together and just talk things over, I told her, there’s no way we’re getting back together again, if that’s what you’ve got in mind, Gregory said, I can’t take it, he went on, I’ve been through a lot of awful crap and my threshold for insanity is extremely low, if she keeps this up I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m having the phone number changed, he said, because the phone’s in her name. You threw her out? I asked, meaning, how do you throw someone out in the middle of winter, a few days before Christmas, in New York City, someone with whom you’ve been sleeping, it sounded somehow off, a bit ruthless actually, not withstanding Gloria’s sexual manias, I thought, there has to be more to it than that.

  Not exactly, Gregory said, I mean she agreed to leave, we’d done nothing except fight for days and days and it couldn’t possibly go on like that any longer because one of us would’ve killed the other one, she’s not that crazy, besides which it’s my name on the lease, if one of us was going to move out it was going to be her, I don’t know where she’s staying now but she found another place right away, it’s not like she was suddenly having to sleep in the gutter or anything, but now that she’s settled into her own apartment she’s decided to make my life a living hell, twenty-four hours a day, all hours of day and night, it’s incredible that anyone can throw so much energy into making another person miserable.

  But this is awful, I said, what’s
the matter with her, if she agreed to leave and she knows you can’t possibly pay her this money right away why does she keep it up? She hates me, Gregory said, she thinks I betrayed her, she’s still in love with me, she won’t give up no matter what. I actually feel sorry for her, the sooner she forgets all about me the better off she’ll be, she ought to just find herself a new boyfriend, she’s quite attractive, but she was always in love with me with that kind of clinging horrible fixity, we couldn’t just have an ordinary relationship, on her side it was this major passion whereas I loved her but I never felt in love with her, being in love like that is dangerous and stupid, Gregory declared, it blinds you to everything, it’s unfair all the way around, I feel a lot of compassion for Gloria but I can’t make myself love her if I don’t love her, can I?

  No, I said, of course you can’t, it sounds like she’s behaving very unreasonably and this harassment is absolutely destructive for both of you, it’s too bad she can’t step away from her feelings and realize you don’t feel about her the way she feels about you, situations like that are always horrific, you must feel really frazzled, I said, between your job and her showing up all the time, God.

  I’m trying with every ounce of will to hold things together, Gregory said, I went through a really bad time a few years ago, I had to leave the city for a long time, almost four years, I got involved in some pretty sordid scenes, I got involved with a lot of people who were really, really evil, things got very rough and I had a kind of crack-up and I had to get out of here, for a while I went in and out of a mental hospital, it got that extreme, it’s taken me almost four years to put myself back together again, I spent two years living like a complete hermit at the seaside, I never saw anybody, I worked as a short order cook in a little diner and kept to myself all the time, I lived in basically a shack, out in the dunes near P-town, I had a dog and that was all the company I had, Lucie, my dog’s name was Lucie, it took me four years to pull my nerves together, and before that, when I lived here before, at the tail end of this truly rotten period I got into heroin, heavily involved with it, I made a lot of money back then doing interior design, which I just sort of fell into really, I had this guy who was kind of my lover who did that for a living and he showed me how to design basic stuff and do rooms, and I started doing it on my own and got all these fabulously rich clients and then I got written up in some magazines and then every rich old bag in Manhattan wanted me to redesign her apartment, he said that someone in the same business was in love with him at the time and turned him on to smack “and later when I was all fucked up and strung out this guy told me he’d got me hooked so I’d get into a condition where nobody else wanted me,” Gregory let this statement sit there for a few moments, his eyes wide and horrified, as if he’d unveiled the nature of true evil, then went on, within six months his business went bankrupt because he’d gone through about a hundred thousand dollars in drugs and dissipation, buying drugs for himself and buying them for everybody he knew, and then he’d gotten severely strung out and sick, also, I finally went home, he told me, first they put me in a dry-out hospital but on the wrong ward, they put me in a ward for the criminally insane, I almost got killed in that ward and raped and everything else you can think of.

  But you’re all right now, I said, touching his hand on the tablecloth, thinking he looked as normal as anyone else, that in fact he seemed bursting with health and sounded entirely lucid about it all. Yes, he said, but this is after cleaning out up there and fucking up all over again when I was living at my mother’s, I got completely out of control twice and finally my mother even threw me out, drove me out to the Interstate and pushed me out of the car, after that I checked into another hospital and they assigned this counselor who actually finally put me straight, I went into her office and started mouthing off about all this bullshit about how great I was and how I had been at the head of my class in college, which actually I was, and she just looked me straight in the eyes and said, You’re nothing but a scummy little junkie, Gregory, and until you get clean that’s all you’re ever going to be, Gregory asseverated that this initial encounter woke him up, and from that moment on he began really working on himself, I started seeing all the ways I’d found to deceive myself I never had acknowledged my basic patterns, Gregory stated.

  One thing that had profoundly affected him without his ever really understanding it, he said, was this trouble between him and his father, not simply between Gregory and his father but between the mother and the father, and Gregory’s sister and Gregory’s brother and the father, and between Gregory and his sister, and Gregory and his brother, and in a completely different way between Gregory and his mother, and perhaps also between Gregory and his Yugoslavian grandmother, relations on the Yugoslavian, that is to say on his father’s, side of the family. On that side of the family, Gregory claimed, lay mania and depression. Everyone on the Yugoslavian side of Gregory’s family was a chronic depressive given to periodic bouts of mania.

  Not only had the children, that is, Gregory and his siblings, inherited the congenital manic-depression of these despondent Yugoslavs, but living with the father for almost twenty years had reduced the mother to a nervous wreck. The father was, had been, a compulsive gambler, whose fortunes—and therefore the family’s fortunes—had oscillated wildly from one week or month or year to the next, sometimes they were, according to Gregory, “incredibly well off” whereas, at other times, they “suddenly had no money,” life “was either a feast or a famine” in the Burgess household, during Gregory’s entire childhood. At some juncture in the middle past, Gregory didn’t stipulate precisely when, the mother had divorced the father, after years of torment, Gregory assured me, my mother crawled through hell for that man, all they ever really had in common was their physical attractiveness, she tried every minute to make a good home, and all he ever cared about was gambling, and now he’s living in a car, selling pencils on the street in Meriden, Connecticut, right near where my mother works, sometimes if she walks to the office she has to walk right past my father selling pencils, Gregory said, or sleeping in his car. He’s a complete derelict, Gregory said, whenever I see my sister she says, I wonder if we’ll all end up like Dad.

  Now, he said, the main problem in my life is this job, it sucks away all my time and energy, it’s unbelievably draining. Philippe, the guy who owns the restaurant, is a certifiable lunatic, a total coke freak, he’s completely out of his mind, he throws fits, sometimes he takes out the gun he keeps under the bar and goes into the basement and shoots at targets, while these hordes of trashy Europeans are upstairs gobbling up his lousy nouvelle cuisine and swilling alcohol at the bar, everybody who hangs out there is a coke freak, they get it from Philippe, in fact his main profession is selling coke, he only has that restaurant so he can socialize with other coke freaks. He’s even beaten up a couple of waitresses, one of them took out a lawsuit against him and she’s been getting death threats from him over the telephone. When Philippe gets high he’s either effusively and suspiciously friendly or homicidally paranoid, he swings from one mood to another without a moment’s warning. He likes me, he’s never actually attacked me. Gregory said that before he’d made all that money in the design business he’d waited tables for Philippe in the same restaurant, Philippe had been just as crazy then, or possibly a bit less crazy, since Philippe’s insanity was obviously a degenerative disease.

  I almost despise myself for going back there, Gregory went on, he’s always had this sort of sick affection for me. There’s this odious bond between us. I think he wants to fuck me. He’s not openly gay or anything but he’s always grabbing me and saying, Dah-ling, you are ze only one who is worse anysing, and planting these big slobbering kisses, right on the lips, he’s such a pile of shit, really, a total psychopath. Everything Philippe does is completely criminal, he’s never even paid taxes on that dump, and the people who eat there, these braying bosomy pigs and their oily gigolo boyfriends, oinking swine from Ibiza or Goa or wherever they come from. You can�
�t imagine what torture it is serving them food, and when I’m bartending they’re all the time coming on to me, telling me all about their repulsive sex cravings or who they’re fucking and what getting their dongs into so-and-so’s twat is like. Just human garbage basically. I hate the way they eye me behind that counter, I feel like a fucking monkey in the zoo fixing their cocktails for them. And waiting tables, unbelievable, the way they dawdle over the menu and make what they imagine are sexy remarks, sometimes it’s the same cruddy, pawing assholes from one night to the next, after a while they even think they’ve got some type of personal relationship with you, before you know it they’re inviting you up for threesomes after work.

  But why, I said, do you keep on working there? There are a million restaurants in Manhattan, they aren’t all run by maniacs. That place is notorious, I said, everybody knows what a trashy clientele hangs out there, I mean, I’ve even heard about Philippe and the drugs and all that. I used to go there years ago when I was more or less employed by this heiress, she had a lot of friends and family connections who were the type that goes there. I can’t imagine you working there, I continued, not for a minute. It’s the kind of environment calculated to drive any sensitive person into Bellevue. I said that I knew several perfectly civilized people in the restaurant business and would gladly try to find Gregory a more agreeable place to work.