by Gary Indiana
In any case, if you had sex now it was a matter of deciding, even if you took elaborate precautions, whether the degree of risk involved (and who could calculate that?) was “worth it,” whether your need for that kind of experience with another person outweighed, in a sense, your desire for survival.
When I think about Perkins in that fifth-floor walk-up watching the color TV his friends gave him, I imagine him measuring out his life in half-hour segments, telling time by the flow of images and the chatter of voices, his thoughts melting into the TV. As he wasted away the set continued entertaining him, keeping his mind off things. It showed him funny pictures that weren’t really funny and brought him news of catastrophes that were somehow beside the point. The TV made his death feel vicarious and filled his bedroom with another world he could enter when this one ran its course. A quilt covered the bed, the same bed he’d slept in with Mike, the room was big and chilly with a thin musty carpet covering the wood floor, brown velour drapes hiding the arched windows. His bedside lamp had a pink shade, the square table near his pillows had pill bottles and a water glass on it, he didn’t feel as though he were dying, Victor said, he just knew, intellectually, that his death was coming sooner rather than later. Sooner than expected. But does anybody expect to die? Even when one is quite old, it must seem a fantastic event, if you’re ninety you can still imagine living, say, till ninety-five.
M. is lying in the darkness of his own bedroom, a plywood cubicle within his vast loft, near the southern tip of the island. He’s talking into his cordless telephone, which gives local calls the scratchy echo of long distance.
We live in large and small boxes in buildings on regularly shaped streets. We see each other seldom because we are busy. Nothing happens to us except dinner parties and visits to the dentist and work, our lives have the generic flavor of deferred pleasure and sublimation until we fall in love or die.
M. is thirty-six, rich, successful. He’s a closer friend to me than Victor but I haven’t been in his apartment in years. When you’re busy you use the telephone.
Contamination, he says, through the telephone crackle.
Like water, I tell him.
Water, blood, sputum, spit, urine, semen, any kind of fluid. It’s all in the food chain, M. declares. You have to imagine particles, like from Chernobyl, settling into the water table like—like little dissolving snowflakes. They sink into the ground when it rains, go into the water, everybody drinks it. Some people get a little bit, some people get a lot. Or maybe it gets eaten by a cow or a pig, it grows into grass and some swines store it up in their tissues, and then you pop into the local deli for a ham sandwich with a little mustard, on some nice rye bread, presto you’ve got AIDS.
And what if I die, right away instead of later on, if for instance I take the blood test, it’s positive, I’ll never finish anything important, I won’t leave anything behind. Or just a few things, of no historical interest. On the immortality front I will fail, ashes to ashes, and no health insurance either, I’ll become a ward of the city and be put in one of those wards where the doctors and nurses shun you for fear of catching it, and none of your friends comes to the hospital. Libby would come, M. would come, Victor would come, my friend Jane would definitely come, but how would I die, what would I be like, and how lugubrious for them, if it’s a big ward there’s bound to be others dying in the same room, dying with the television on, perhaps they make them wear headphones but when the ward got deathly quiet at night I’d hear the little bug noises in their earpieces. Is that the point, to leave something behind, it’s really a silly ambition, if you’re dead what difference does it make. Of course they say it’s why people have children, they can remember you for a time, though mainly they remember pain, pain from their terrible childhoods, even if their parents loved them, it’s usually so twisted it’s as bad as hate, and even when it isn’t, the other children torture you and make fun of all your little quirks and debilities, you try to escape into fantasies but those are poisoned from the very outset, while you’re still in first grade they’ve already turned you into a monster, you spend your whole adult life trying to wipe out all the things they’ve taught you to do, trying not to hate yourself.
I never talk about my childhood because I only remember pain. And then I keep meeting people like Gregory who think they’re as they are because of the father or because of the mother, he seems so clear about it, my father did this to me and my mother did that, therefore I am. I don’t know what either of my parents did. My mother says she regrets slapping me too often and I can’t remember ever being slapped. Maybe she remembers wrong. When you go into psychotherapy they teach you to invent false memories of childhood beatings and sexual abuse, people become addicted to these simple explanations of why they’re monsters.
And now everyone is going to die before they figure anything out, I’m going to die before I can be truly loved, I’ll die with every sort of bitter memory of my last lover’s coldness and Paul’s faithlessness, though really that didn’t matter with him, I’m not bitter against him, but why couldn’t I have what I had with him with someone who loved me, and I’ll die before I can make Gregory love me, I can see I’m fated to cash it in without a single memory of real happiness. What is real happiness. Is it this business of living with another person, I never really lived with anybody, I thought no one could stand it. You think you’ll have a long life, so you do everything at a snail’s pace, before I tried to write Burma I started a book about a family, one sister was a socialite, another was crippled in a wheelchair, the brother was a fag actor in Off-Broadway, the parents had been murdered in their townhouse, I only wrote two scenes of that book, the sister in bed with her boyfriend and the brother getting drunk on the set of a soap opera, not bad, oh yes and one scene with the sister racing through the townhouse in her wheelchair, she’d had special ramps built so she could get around. Before that I tried something like a love story based on me and that California surfer type I fucked a few times when I lived in Boston, a shoplifter. Nobody shoplifts any more, I remember when everyone did it, it showed your contempt for the capitalist system. Everyone worships capitalism today. Look at this obscene medical system. If Paul doesn’t have insurance he’s probably in a room full of other people’s contagion, they say the patients with AIDS go into Sloan-Kettering perfectly healthy and pick up diseases in the waiting room, it’s how Michael got pneumonia, I almost forgot about Michael, his apartment windows used to be right there, the windows still are there but he’s dead.
Maybe I’m dying anyway, faster than others because I smoke so many cigarettes. I try and try quitting and nothing works. I can lay awake at night telling myself, You will not smoke a cigarette tomorrow, your body doesn’t want you to smoke, when you go to the hypnotist he makes you close your eyes and tells you your brain is going down a steep flight of steps, that you’re on an elevator going down, deep down into the hypnotic state, it sounds like a car salesman, and when you emerge from hypnosis, he says, You will have no desire for a cigarette, all cravings for a cigarette will have left your body, and whenever you feel a temporary urge for a cigarette you will tell yourself “I need my body to live. ” The impulse only lasts for ninety seconds, he says, after ninety seconds you will no longer crave a cigarette. I ought to go back because I did stop for six hours, thinking the whole time, I’m a nonsmoker now, since telling myself I’m a nonsmoker now was one of the hypnotic suggestions, and even while I smoked the first ten cigarettes the same night, I still thought: I’m a nonsmoker now.
They say if you’re infected and have the antibodies you might not come down with the fatal syndrome, therefore you should build up your immune system, which I’m tearing down with cigarettes and alcohol, sometimes I drink nothing for weeks and then for reasons I’ve never figured out I’ll get drunk at a party and then drunk again the following night, sometimes for as many as six or seven nights running, then stop again, though I never stop smoking, I wake up wanting a cigarette, it’s crazy, but then again, Per
kins went into AA two full years before getting ill, he stopped smoking at the same time, he began looking wonderful, his skin all clear, the bags around his eyes vanished, he’d always been youthful anyway but then he became spectacular again, young again, and immediately got sick. And Michael the same story exactly: he gave up drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, toned himself up at the gym, etherealized himself like some ideal sexual object, but without screwing around because even then he was frightened of catching it, and perhaps a year passed before Michael’s glands mysteriously swelled up, he woke one day in a high fever, they treated him at St. Vincent’s for pneumonia, he recovered, then I saw him out and around, he said he felt normal and the only difference was you suddenly know that anything can kill you. I despised Michael but near the end he wrote a hilarious story about assholes, assholes taking over the world, assholes that turn into mouths that breathe and talk and kiss, it wasn’t original with him but so what, he laughed right to the grave about the whole thing, which I can’t help respecting, really, he died his own particular death without any pietistic nonsense or feelings of solidarity with anything, least of all the social contract, he’d had a good time while he was here, lots of laughs, plenty of weird scenes, his one full-length film which somebody somewhere has, Michael didn’t want much in life besides kicks, I don’t think death found him with a lot of plans pending for the future. Whereas Paul, this can’t possibly feel natural to him, something further, quite a few things further were supposed to happen, he’s always gotten acting work, always a play, a movie, something, never a starring part but it would’ve happened eventually, Michael had had plans once upon a time, but then his wife went through the windshield on the Ventura Freeway, after that Michael wanted a good time and eons of forgetfulness, but at the very least, he must have wanted to live. Life doesn’t care about what anybody wants.
I see Gregory again, for five minutes, on his way into work. I’m walking along lower Broadway, deciding about shoes.
I’ve got to see you real soon, he tells me. I really want you to see my work.
When he speaks I fall into a terrified ecstasy. I’m losing my will to this man, who embraces me on the corner of Prince and Broadway and purrs: But mainly, I want us to become very close. I feel as if we are already. I’ve been walking along here thinking it might be the route he will take to the restaurant today. I’m not saying anything about Paul, though I want to tell Gregory everything I’m feeling and thinking. Not yet. If ever.
He has a beautiful smell, a faint nicotine funk mixed with some essential oil, opopanax or civet, in his fur-flapped hat he looks like an expensively bred animal, the thick nose a sexual warning, a carnal threat. And he looks as if he might dart away from me, slip out of my grip, jump to someone else like a fickle cat. He’s interested in everything that doesn’t interest me when I’m with him, little events in the street, what other people wear, how other people look, window displays, marquees, he dates everything, clocks everything, he’s obsessed with defining this minute, this period, this era, he savors details and tiny nuances, he knows about what’s on television and all the new movies and every song that’s played on the radio, his fixation with the inessential, the passing moment, also makes me feel he’ll slink off to someone else, almost unconsciously, to whatever offers him momentary pleasure without obligations. I pretend an interest in his interests, wanting to seem modern and up-to-date, and in fact all this junk he likes bores me silly. But I try seeing it through his eyes, I begin learning what something will look like to Gregory. Magazine pictures start falling apart when I study them, break down into sex messages, sales points, prescriptions of what people are supposed to be in this time, this place. He has more energy, more appetite than I do. As if the world were still offering him unlimited possibilities, endless options. As if he’d been born yesterday and still had a whole lifetime to make choices. His face lights up like a child’s when he sees, for example, a stunningly well-dressed Puerto Rican girl.
I need him and I need money. The editor who hired me at the magazine offers an advance of $400, which I take. We’ve been friends for a long while before this, long enough for him to say: Just imagine, this time you know you can pay me back.
I call Gregory at home, on a day he doesn’t work: Let me take you out to dinner. His voice is withdrawn, not exactly irritated but not expansively friendly, as it’s always been. I’m dead, he tells me. I need to be alone, I’m so fucking wired from working. I didn’t mean to bother you, I say, coolly, and he says: Please don’t be like that, don’t get an attitude just because I’m exhausted.
His voice sounds like it’s wrapped in flannel, but it suddenly turns genial and clear. I really can’t see you tonight, he says, then he tells me stories of the job, what happened last night, which customers insulted him, Philippe’s latest outrages, all with eager irony, as if to say: Look how well I put up with such insanity.
We talk for an hour, about everything and nothing. Something keeps getting shunted aside. He throws himself into amusing me as if this will compensate for not seeing me. I wonder if he’s seeing someone else. He reads my thoughts. If I could be with anybody right now, he says, I’d be with you. Try to understand, I always need a day or two completely alone, just to stop my nerves jumping all over my skin.
I don’t dare say: I could help you. After all, Gloria thought she could calm him down by opening her body to him, and she was obviously wrong. I don’t want to blow it with him. But why has it always got to be me who’s worried about blowing it. Days and days go by without seeing him, I know he’s thinking about me but he doesn’t want to come closer. Maybe there’s something about me he’s afraid of.
I wake up with tears running down my face but I can’t tell if I’m crying. Nerves. Plastic coating on the parts that feel.
They say the outer surface of the virus mutates rapidly from one host organism to another. It’s difficult to fix a clinical picture of the virus. You can kill it, said a health worker, with ordinary ammonia.
Who was the disinherited nephew, Libby asked, who swallowed the bleach?
What have I learned? He smokes a lot of grass. He watches Friday night videos without fail, alone, and he’s stood me up three times in two weeks. We make a lunch date and he does show up, forty-five minutes late, somehow smoothly talking me out of my irritation by saying he’s intimidated by me, that I’m a celebrity and he feels like nothing in comparison, a fucking lousy waiter in a sleaze bag restaurant, he’s afraid I’ll find his afraid I’ll find him boring, or stupid, if he stands me up, he says, it’s because he’s terrified, the job makes him so depressed he’s sure he’ll alienate me by complaining about it, he wants so much to give me the best of himself he only wants to see me when he’s feeling good about his life.
This is already more than I know how to deal with. I tell him it doesn’t bother me if he’s depressed and wants to complain and that listening to problems is a normal part of a friendship. I say that my so-called celebrity means nothing to me and isn’t as enormous as he imagines, and even if it was it wouldn’t have anything to do with how I feel about him. I explain that I know he’s “more than a waiter,” that I don’t think of him as “a waiter,” but even if all he wanted to be in life was a waiter, even if that was all he did, I’d love him the same way. He says this is unfair because he wants me to love him for who he really is and he doesn’t think of himself as a waiter, he’s repulsed by having to be a waiter, and if I think I could love him if that’s all he was, then I obviously only love him for his looks because that’s all being a waiter requires, his looks. I say that I don’t define people according to what they do for a living. He says that really clever people don’t waste their lives doing menial work. I tell him there are lots of kinds of cleverness and I don’t particularly respect the kind that devotes itself to making money, that it seems to me it takes as much brains to be a good waiter as it does to do anything else. He says I’ve obviously never been a waiter. I tell him that’s true, but I’ve been a gas station att
endant and a busboy in a cafeteria and an office clerk and I’ve also sold popcorn in a movie theater, I know what menial work is like, I know it’s exhausting but I think his reaction to it is a little bit extreme. Everybody who doesn’t come into the world with a trust fund, I tell him, finds they’ve got to do stuff like that for a few years. It’s nothing shameful or unendurable. You just get through it however you can.
You don’t understand, he says. He then describes a sensation of vertigo, of falling into a bottomless black pit, of knocking off his four-day shift every week and immediately becoming hypersensitive to noise, to touch, to voices. In this vulnerable state he goes into, the touch of someone’s hand feels like a razor ripping through his skin, or an electrical shock. I know, he says, that part of this has something to do with Gloria as well as the job. I can’t stand being grabbed ahold of. I don’t think I can have anything to do with anybody physically for a while.
I decide to be brave and tell him that if he isn’t physically attracted to me, he should tell me. He says if he told me that I wouldn’t want to have anything further to do with him. I say I’d probably feel bad about it but I’d still want to know him, but even if I decided not to, he’d have to take the risk. He says he can’t risk losing me because he wants to be part of my life. I say I want him to be part of my life but I also want him physically and if he doesn’t want me physically I want us both to be clear about it. He says it isn’t that he isn’t attracted to me, but his present mental state makes it impossible to feel anything sexual about anybody and I have to understand this and if I refuse to understand it I’m just being horribly unfair and cruel to him.
