by Gary Indiana
The problem is, Gregory said, lighting a cigarette, which suddenly drew my attention to the mess of butts that had accumulated over lunch, I’d never make as much money, Gregory explained that part of his odious bond with Philippe was the tacit understanding that he, Gregory, along with Philippe’s other underpaid employees, would rob various amounts every night from the house till, pocket checks from certain tables, neglect to ring up various bar receipts. Philippe knew all about this furtive rake-off, according to Gregory, and didn’t care about it at all, except sometimes, while throwing one of his absolutely inevitable yet invariably surprising fits, Philippe would accuse one or another waiter or waitress of robbing him, the accusations typically accompanied by blows, and not infrequently by threats with the gun, Philippe had in fact on one occasion pistol-whipped a bartender, who had quit on the spot but had later, somehow, been lured by Philippe’s honey-tongued, lying promises of higher wages. Philippe’s fits and accusations and assaults took place in full view of the clientele, usually when the restaurant was jam-packed, during the stylishly late dinner hour. Philippe’s fits were a grotesque entertainment for the customers, Philippe’s tirades had seasonally driven off any normal habitués, the place was mainly crawling with Philippe’s drug-crazed friends and acquaintances. But precisely because Philippe was this kind of monstrous, criminal exhibitionist, Gregory felt no particular ethical qualms about peeling off anywhere from eighty to five hundred dollars from a night’s receipts. This money enabled Gregory to get his real, that is, his photographic, work fabricated, at decent laboratories. The success of Gregory’s art work absolutely depended on using the best laboratories available.
But he was, he said, caught in a Catch-22 situation, since the job deprived him of the time and energy required to go at his real work full steam, so to say. Gregory’s artistic aims, he elucidated, were impossible to achieve through half measures. It was, he emphasized, integral to his work that it resemble the most technologically crisp sort of advertising images. He was, he said, deconstructing the media in his work. The satirical qualities of Gregory’s art could only be perceived, he said, in mental contrast to contemporary advertising, and therefore the technical level needed to be as high. For the moment, he said, he had purchased a Nikon, and on his days off he made transparencies of his little cut-out tableaux, which he would later have blown up to giant size. I’ve spent a fortune just doing the slides, Gregory said. Until I get a show, sell some works, I’m going to be stuck at the restaurant. I don’t see any alternative. I would never steal from a place where I was treated decently, and if I worked in such a place, I’d never make enough to get my career going.
Gregory said that the expense involved in becoming a contemporary artist had almost discouraged him from pursuing any such endeavor. He had started making these little images, deconstructing the media and so forth, on Cape Cod, purely for his own amusement. At first he’d lived with his friend Pugg, and the dog Lucie, Gregory said, You must meet Pugg, he’s so brilliant, he’s in art school now, Pugg had been wonderful to live with, but immature, confused, a bit too demanding, I worry about him now, Gregory said, he sleeps around a lot, and with this AIDS stuff, I mean, he gets fucked up the ass quite often, picks people up in bars, French types, boy model types, Comme des Garçons types that give it to him up the poop chute, and he’s such a great guy I worry all the time what could happen to him. When Pugg left Cape Cod for New York, Gregory remained with Lucie in the shack, until the dog died from chewing lead-based paint off the molding, of which Gregory’s despicable lesbian feminist landladies had been entirely culpable, when Lucie first began gnawing on the molding Gregory went to the dykes insisting they strip the toxic old paint and repaint the place with harmless latex, the dykes then told him to get rid of the dog, they weren’t going to all that effort for a cocker spaniel, and, besides, he owed them several months’ arrearage. If Gregory paid the arrearage they would consider repainting the place, but not before then, so consequently, by the time Gregory had slaved double shifts at Helen’s Truro Hash Palace to settle the arrearage the dog had already ingested lethal quantities of lead, gone into convulsions, and died. It was one of Gregory’s ugliest memories. Then after that he met Gloria, which at first seemed the kind of placid, mutually nourishing relationship Gregory needed as a check on his excessive tendencies. Gloria didn’t smoke or drink, didn’t take drugs, her only major problem was wanting her pussy full of Gregory’s juicy whang every time he turned around, but this hadn’t been as much of a problem at first, up there, as it became later, down here, since Gregory was learning from Gloria about screwing women for the first time and was entranced by the novelty of it, and of course it had proved interesting, even from a clinical perspective. I’d always been the fucker with guys, he laughed, but a cunt feels different from a rectum, it’s real squishy inside and it really clings to your meat, I’d probably be straight if guys had cunts instead of assholes.
Then last summer this old friend of his, Bruno, visited him for a couple of weeks. You know Bruno, Gregory told me, Bruno runs that gallery. He named the gallery. I did know Bruno. Right, Gregory said, well, I’ve known him for years, he came up to Truro and saw the pictures I was making, Gregory said that after that he’d started getting letters from Bruno full of encouraging remarks, urging Gregory to move back into the city, even inviting Gregory to stay with him until Gregory found a job and an apartment. In the letters Bruno said that the art scene was opening up for the type of work Gregory was doing. Bruno implied that he could help Gregory “launch himself ” in the coming year.
Gloria sensed danger. Bruno’s letters also conveyed a restrained but unmistakable romantic attraction to Gregory. Gregory said that Bruno’s interest in him had been simmering unobtrusively for some years, but had suddenly churned to a low boil during those two weeks in Truro. How can he do this to me, to us, Gloria wanted to know, poring over Bruno’s twice-weekly semi-love letters to Gregory. Bruno’s invitation did not extend to Gloria. He said in his letters that his apartment was much too tiny for two long-term guests, besides which, as Gregory well knew though Bruno’s letters didn’t say so, Bruno loathed Gloria and everything about her. Gregory knew that Bruno had told Pugg that Gloria was a vicious destroying cunt. He had told Pugg, according to Gregory, that Gloria was ruining Gregory. Bruno had contacted Pugg, evidently, to check up on Gregory, was constantly calling up Pugg for news of Gregory, grilling Pugg about Gregory’s relationship with Gloria, looking all the time, Gregory said, for some little crack to drive a wedge into, Pugg reported all of Bruno’s calls directly to Gregory with bemused exasperation.
As things turned out, the heinous lesbians who owned the shack served him a thirty-day notice to vacate for the arrearage, which he hadn’t paid, finally, because of the dog’s death, which had been entirely their monstrous fault, and they also hated him because he was fucking Gloria, whom they were both vainly trying to get their squalid mitts on, and the tourist season was winding up, which meant that business at Helen’s Hash Palace would soon begin dropping off and he’d either have to move to Boston, a dead place, where everyone he knew was a heroin addict or an alcoholic, or go back to his mother’s house in Meriden, where, despite his slightly improved relations with his family, he remained an object of intense suspicion and constant anxiety, since his greatest behavioral excesses had actually transpired there after his initial removal from New York and his first unsuccessful rehabilitation at Silver Hill. Ultimately, given this array of dreary options, Gregory and Gloria devised a scheme, wherein Gregory would move into Bruno’s apartment while Gloria stayed with Pugg in Pugg’s sublet on Macdougal Street, keeping Gloria’s presence in the city a secret from Bruno, until she and Gregory found an apartment. In that case, Gregory wouldn’t be subject to Bruno’s whim, at least with respect to Bruno’s sexual jealousy of Gloria; and later, when Gregory and Gloria turned out to be living together once again, Bruno would be compelled, by his own principles, to continue supporting Gregory’s work, on the basis of h
is expressed admiration and friendship, since he, Bruno, was too honorable in his dealings to stop promoting an artist simply because he hadn’t been able to exploit the artist sexually.
Which was, Gregory said, putting it too crudely, really, and if my part of it sounds calculating, he said, you’ve got to understand that Bruno’s infatuation with me was and is a thing quite separate from our friendship, and it would’ve been very wrong of Bruno to invite me here just to get me in bed. And don’t forget, he went on, if he did invite me here only for that reason, he himself was deviously planning to smash up my relationship with Gloria.
Which, I pointed out, had gone kaput anyway, just as soon as they moved in together.
Yes, Gregory said, but for completely different reasons. That doesn’t have anything to do with Bruno.
3
Who knows what hearts and souls have in them? On the answering machine a message from Victor, who tells me when I call him that Paul, long ago my lover for two years, is sick. People use a special tone of voice, now, for illness, that marks the difference between sick and dying.
I’ve heard he’s sick.
And so this body whose secret parts were my main pleasure in life for longer than anyone else’s transforms itself into a fount of contagion. Paul passes over into the territory of no-longer-quite-alive, and I calculate that if he got it five years ago, the general incubation period, he must have been infectious on each of the fifty or sixty occasions when we slept together, giving me a much better than average chance of being infected.
He wants to see you. He’s asked for you.
I haven’t seen Paul in over a year. One day I saw him on the street with the man he’s been living with, a tall, gangly man, whereas Paul has a rugged, packed look about him and that face, the map of Macedonia. We said hello goodbye very pleasantly and I considered that if he hadn’t had a continual need to fuck all over town we might’ve moved in together and had a normal relationship, if there is such a thing. He liked having someone at home, waiting for him. I never could wait for people. Victor says, he came back from abroad and his roommate found him the next morning bleeding from the mouth.
Maybe it’s because we didn’t love each other that we broke off without any rancor, without even really breaking off. We met every three or four nights in the corner bar, the one near my house where I still sometimes drink with Victor. Paul and I never made dates or anything, and some nights we saw each other there but went home with other people, if Paul didn’t feel like doing it with me he would say: Let’s get together real soon.
How long has he been sick.
We stopped sleeping together when people still referred to “gay cancer” and thought it came from using poppers. For a long time I moved back and forth from Europe, each time I returned the thing had become more of a subject, I heard of this one that one getting pneumonia and fading out. Paul said once: It’s getting scary, it’s getting close. He’d met Jason years ago and they had made it once in a while, Paul told me, when it wasn’t you it usually was him, and then he and Jason moved into a place on Cornelia Street, signing a joint lease, which was practically marriage.
They’ve had him in the hospital for two weeks.
At first the people who died were people I barely knew, or people from earlier lives who’d been in a lot of the same rooms, their deaths were disconcerting but seemed to happen on a distant planet. At first people would say: Well, he must have been leading a secret life, taking all kinds of drugs and going to the Mineshaft. Because at first, most people who got ill did seem the same ones who never finished an evening at four A. M., piled into taxis together when the regular bars closed. And then of course there was this other thing with needles, if it spread by blood and sperm, people who used needles would naturally get it.
The worst thing is, I can’t feel anything for Paul. I’m too scared for myself.
But you’ll go see him, I hope.
Of course I will.
Except that I am, in this particular business, a bigger coward than I’d like to be. Victor and I used to drink with Perkins when Perkins turned up in the bar, and when Perkins got ill, I didn’t go to the hospital, he had one bout of pneumonia and the now-familiar remission, and Chas, who lives in a building behind my building, called raising money to get Perkins a color TV, since he had to stay in all the time, and I never gave any, I promised to, in the early autumn, and one mild afternoon I saw Perkins at Astor Place, looking all of his fifty-four years which he never had previously, he said, Call me sometime, and the next I heard it went into his brain and they brought him into St. Vincent’s raving, Victor went four or five times, I said, My God, Victor, what do you say?
The thing is, Victor said, when he feels all right he doesn’t feel as if he’s dying, the worst thing is acting morbid and stricken about it. You just go have a normal conversation with him. But it’s too late now because he isn’t lucid for more than a few minutes during any given visit. At first he’s his old self and then he babbles.
I never thought I’d be so chickenshit about anything.
But this new situation, with Paul, what does it mean? And with Gregory? Another thing about Perkins: he had, for a time, a comely Irish lover named Mike, a slender boy with soft brown eyes and a small wisp of a mustache, they were together for a while and then they weren’t. Mike fucked everything that walked, one night we found ourselves using the toilet in Nightbirds when it was still an after-hours joint and I let him piss in my mouth, then we screwed at my place the whole next day in every conceivable position. He called a few days later and warned me his doctor thought he had hepatitis B, as it happened I’d just had a typhoid shot for my visa to Thailand and got a bad reaction, my pee turned red, then it passed on and Mike phoned just before I left to say his results turned out negative.
Mike moved to California and then Hawaii for several months and when he came back he lived with Perkins again but soon after that he started looking spectral and then stopped going out and then everyone heard that he had it and a few months later everyone heard that he died. That was four years before Perkins came down with it and when Perkins came down with it he told everyone he was sure he got it from Mike, though how Perkins could be sure, since Perkins took it up the can as often as possible from anyone available, was a mystery. Yet he insisted that Mike had been the source.
Until now Mike has been the only person I know I’ve slept with who later died from it and I used to think that because I recovered from the typhoid shot, which I got after I slept with him, that meant I hadn’t caught it from him, and I also rationalized that maybe Mike caught it in California or Hawaii and then gave it to Perkins when he moved back to New York, in which case Perkins’ incubation period may have only been a year or two, or rather four years, I keep getting dates mixed up, I went to Thailand in ’81 and I think I’d already stopped sleeping with Paul, so if I didn’t get it from Mike possibly I didn’t get it from Paul either. But with Mike I could only have been exposed once, and some people think repeated exposure is necessary for the virus to take hold, so if it had only been Mike I could now feel fairly confident though how can anyone who ever did anything with anybody feel at all confident, and with Paul, of course, the case is quite different, his dong has been in every hole in my body hundreds of times squirting away like the Trevi Fountain, I’ve rimmed him too, and once when he cut his finger chopping up some terrible cocaine he bought in the Spike I even sucked his blood.
Now, of course, everyone’s conscious about the problem, but as somebody said in the paper the horses are out of the barn, how can you possibly know if, back in the days of sexual pot luck, someone you met by chance and screwed and never saw again wasn’t a carrier? Not that I’ve had so many in the last few years, but they don’t really know if numbers are important, even if I don’t have it I probably have the antibodies and if I have the antibodies I’m probably a carrier. So if I do it with Gregory I risk infecting him. And then, I don’t know about Gregory, either. He says he hasn’t taken heroi
n in five years, but junkies who do manage to kick usually fuck up several times before they get off it, maybe five years isn’t so precise either, in addition to that Gregory looks like a magazine cover and I can’t imagine he hasn’t satisfied all his sexual appetites regularly, in fact he’s alluded to dark periods of the past, hinted that when he used heroin he did some hustling here and there, he’s so well-spoken and smart it’s hard to imagine him peddling his dick on the sidewalk but who knows what people will do. Anyway, I threw myself at him in less than a second after seeing that face and I’m shy, there must have been hundreds of opportunities. Thousands.
Victor says he’ll go with me to see Paul.
I realize that I really am in love with Gregory.
These have to be peculiar times.
It wouldn’t be strange to get it and then to decide as Perkins did that this one particular person gave it to you, one out of ten or fifty or a hundred, maybe because that person made you feel something special, had done wonderful things in bed or gotten you to trust him physically and mentally as no one else ever had. Mike for example had miraculous talents because his sexual demands were flagrant and overpowering, he was socially rather genteel but I remember in the bathroom at Nightbirds and later too he talked dirty and tough, Kneel down, bitch, suck that dick, he actually said things like, Yeah, you want that big dick, sure, you wanna get fucked with that big prick, and of course the pissing, which had introduced itself as a specially filthy surprise, but the way he insisted on it made it seem like an ordinary thing people really ought to do. Mike was an incredibly complete fuck, he exhausted your imagination and wiped out your memory of other fucks, when Perkins remembered making love perhaps he only thought of Mike and things Mike did to him. You would naturally connect your most vivid memory of pleasure to infection and death because the others weren’t remotely worth getting sick from, just pale skimpy traces of sex crossed with thin trickles of “bodily fluids,” if the two things had to be linked, better for a cherished memory of sex to connect with transmission of the microbe.
