by Gary Indiana
We leave each other in the street. Walking home I realize he’s made me feel like some elderly lecher. I remind myself that I’m only thirty-five and look pretty good for my age. I hate his guts, I tell myself; he’s a manipulative little creep. Three weeks ago he was fucking Gloria every night and suddenly he’s frigid, it’s some twisted sort of power trip. What does he want from me. Ego gratification, no doubt. He wants me to desire him. He enjoys feeling worshipped. I ought to drop him right now, put him out of my mind before it’s too late. I can see where this will lead, more misery. He knows I’ve fallen in love with him and I could be useful to him somehow, he keeps harping on what a big celebrity I am, which I’m not, maybe he wants to meet famous people and attach himself to someone with money. I think he mentioned he once let some rich guy take him to Egypt, some old queen I believe he said, back in his hustler days. Obviously I’m not in any position to help him financially so maybe he thinks I’m a stepping-stone to bigger opportunities. If he strings me along . . .
He said Gloria went from being great gash to a pain in the ass in no time flat, that “great gash” business really bothered me. He thought she was a convenient hole for when he wanted it. And when she wanted it he thought she was predatory. Now he says he can’t stand being touched but he touches me whenever he pleases. Maybe he’s sick, though, anemic or something, and when he works these long shifts he really does get abnormally drained of energy, it could even be mononucleosis or leukemia, today he looked quite pale, even a little cheesy, gorgeous as ever but his forehead was sweaty. He didn’t actually say he wasn’t attracted to me but he obviously isn’t, he simply doesn’t want to say it, he thinks it’ll hurt me, but really it wouldn’t hurt to know it now, while I can still get him out of my life without going nuts, because I’m getting a little crazy, I can feel Gregory talking over larger and larger areas of my mind, I think about him incessantly, lately I need to know or at least feel like I know exactly where he is and what he’s doing every minute of the day, if he’s not with somebody now I’m scared he’ll meet somebody he wants to sleep with, but how do I know he’s not already fucking five different people, ten for that matter, if he doesn’t want me to know there’s no way I’d find out without actually spying on him, which would be truly crazy.
He might even be right, I’m making all kinds of unfair assumptions, for instance, because he attracts me sexually I assume everyone else is after him, and further assume that because he’s beautiful he also has a raging sex drive, that if he found me attractive he’d automatically want to sleep with me right away, and because he hasn’t, he’s not attracted to me. So I’m reducing him to a sex object when he may very well be this highly sensitive, caring person with leukemia or mono or a severe vitamin deficiency. After all, he says he wants me to love him, so he wants me to be attracted to him. But then again, knowing I want him physically, he should give me what I want or leave me alone, if he does care about me, because I don’t want just a friendship. It’s too frustrating that way. This feels like a movie I’ve seen before.
4
A big furry black and white malamute races across the arctic snow, breaking the gelid crust with his fat paws, heaving sprays of soft flakes as his chest barrels up and down, like a dolphin stitching through breakers. A helicopter slices the air overhead, firing blasts from a rocket gun. The pooch tears along with his mouth hanging open in a doggy smile, tongue lolling out comically, as scientists on the ground call to him. The helicopter crashes and explodes. Charred bodies tumble from the wreckage, making long steaming holes in the snow. The scientists lead the dog to a kennel, where the other dogs instantly start howling, petrified. When the humans leave, a strange look colors the dog’s whitish-blue eyes. His jaws open impossibly wide, tearing apart his head, revealing a stumpy magma of bloody tissue and dripping bluish viscera that wiggles arterial tendrils in the direction of the other canines. A monster inside a puppy.
Gregory says he’s had a tiring afternoon with his models. First they went to Los Angeles, then flew to Montego Bay for a shoot. They’re so featherbrained, he says in his “bright teenager” voice. So vain. Forever arguing over makeup and which is their best angle. I know he means the magazine models he clips out and pastes on cardboard backing, but he maintains this fantasy for so long, with such adorable earnestness, that it sounds like the story of a life he should have had. Gregory enters his fictions with awesome concentration. I’d like to segue back to reality, though the suspension of time and the zero gravity of these playful longueurs seduce me. I have nothing clever to contribute. When he offers the names he’s given the models, I try to play, referring to them familiarly. But Gregory contradicts whatever I say, changing the game. “Dave isn’t like that at all,” he declares. Or, when I hint that Bobby is difficult, Gregory protests that he adores working with Bobby.
He can linger in flight for hours, spinning out a movie script world where no rough edges obtrude. He calls nearly every morning now, after his shower and coffee. I picture his apartment in my mind, picture him in his apartment, drying off with a Cannon bath towel, brushing his vigilantly serviced teeth, dressing himself with a pedantic sense of street language. One morning when I miss his call, he leaves an obnoxiously long message on my machine, plaintively wonders where I could be at ten in the morning, describes the wonders of personal hygiene he’s performed while trying to reach me: an inventory that conjures a vivid underground film of his naked body, complete with toenail clippings, Q-tipped earwax, snips of pinkened dental floss.
A second message follows the first: I’ve had my coffee now, I’m cutting up some magazines, pretty soon I have to leave, where are you? The days begin with candied daydreams. Gregory invites me to China, all expenses paid, ticking off possible itineraries. Or wails about the technical gaffes committed by his brace of assistants.
I haven’t visited his place, and he’s never been here. I would prefer meeting him in the flesh, since our phone calls mainly transpire in his imaginary interzone. The dialogue barely touches ground, floating instead through Gregory’s dream castles. He talks about how life will be “after my first show,” admits that he expects his work to be “popular,” perhaps unavoidably so, for the wrong reasons, since it “deals with the body,” though his work, he says, is really a critique of “sexual images,” it also displays these images, it might easily appeal to people “on an uncritical level,” he worries about that. In any event, he says, suddenly hypothesizing public indifference, I’m not interested in becoming rich and famous, all I want is enough money to go on making work, I’d be completely satisfied with that. Once he’s free, once he never has to see Philippe’s stupid face and its protruding lower lip, never has to serve another malodorous plat du jour, never has to interrupt his projects or enslave himself to keep food in his stomach, Gregory will feel contented. After I’ve established myself he tells me, we can really be good for each other. Not that we aren’t now. But I know my moods exasperate you, the trouble is I can’t control them as long as I’m this indentured servant working my butt off
Hours crumble away. We could have taken a walk together. It’s a bright day, with false traces of spring softening the air. The buildings in the window are mottled from the snow that’s melted off the rooftops. If I came out to see you, it would eat a big chunk of the day, he says. I’d have to dress and then come back here and get ready for work. You could just dress for work, I suggest, but he says No, I couldn’t, I’d have to carry a bag full of work clothes and they’d get all wrinkled. And I like being in my place just before I leave.
When I think we’re finished talking he opens a new conversation, something about Georges Bataille: have I read Blue of Noon? Oh, of course, I tell him, I read it when I was sixteen, before it was translated. This slips out needlessly, casting me as the pedantic older role model, the “admired” one. There is the danger, when Gregory strays from the movies and pop singers he consumes, mentioning a book, that my years of incessant reading and dormant intellectual snobbery will poke f
orward with spines attached, that I’ll become overbearingly cerebral, detached, argumentative in a way that stings his ego, underscores our age difference, and reminds him unpleasantly of his long history of wasted time and his aimless druggy past. He’s told me he feels unequal, that he needs to catch up lost time. I’ve wasted twenty-seven years, he says, while you’ve made a name for yourself you’ve gotten things done, you’re in the public eye. I’ve let my talents stagnate. Now, he says, he can’t afford wasting any time at all, that’s why this work of his is so crucial, it will make up for his nervous breakdowns and his horrific family background, the heroin, the hustling, the ugly behavior which he still feels paralyzed by guilt about, and of course, even now, after five years, there are times when Gregory must cross the street, avoiding people he treated wretchedly or ripped off when he was a junkie, quite a few people actually, though he also experiences a rush of inner pride when he encounters some of the scum buckets he used to hang around with, when he sees them playing the same old sordid games they ran on him years ago, because now he’s having none of it, he’s clean, he can look them straight in the eye without any embarrassment. It’s just that certain things he did will never be forgiven by the people he did them to, it’s sad, he says, it’s actually tragic, but there it is, when he catches sight of those people the only thing Gregory can do is make himself scarce.
Gregory says: I should’ve known you’ve read Blue of Noon, you’ve read everything. Then he says: That’s what I want to be, a person who’s read all the books. One of the smart boys. Like you and Bruno.
On certain days these phone calls last half the afternoon. I never find the will to say I’ve got work to do. It’s always Gregory who suddenly decides he’s got to press a shirt, mail a letter, run out for groceries or art supplies. The conversation tapers down to a flutter of gentle noises. We’re like two fragile little birds preening each other’s wings. He longs to see me as soon as he can. He’ll call me tonight if the restaurant’s slow. He buffers his goodbyes, as if assuaging my unreasonable need to keep him on the telephone. It’s true, his voice has become a hypnotic drug, a bed of caressing hands. I’d stay on the phone with him around the clock. When he hangs up I feel vacant and useless.
And yet, I remind myself and yet. I “have a life,” a role to play. The way I’ve arranged my life strikes me as extremely dangerous. Instead of having a job and someone who tells me what to do, I’ve got to make everything up on my own and tell myself what to do. Even though I’ve never got any money, the money I need always comes to me. I sell an idea, Or a piece of writing, or else I borrow money from M., mainly M., though I owe huge sums of money to twenty other people, somehow everything gets paid, I manage to eat and also to buy books. Any extra money goes for books, despite the fact that there is almost never even the slightest amount of extra money, I somehow always save enough for a book or two. I don’t even really need money, since I never buy anything except books. I haven’t, for example, bought clothes in ten years. All my clothes were given to me by friends who tired of wearing them. People undoubtedly imagine that I spend lots on clothes because I have expensive things, when the fact is, I have never, in ten years, purchased a single article of clothing besides socks and underwear. Nor have I frittered away money on furniture. The furniture in this apartment, which scarcely can be called furniture, all came from various acquaintances who moved away or grew tired of the furniture they had, now I have it, I’ve never given a single thought to furniture, or to clothes, or for that matter to anything else associated with the home, with the home environment. The objects and appliances associated with the home environment, which occupy and even obsess other people, have never exercised the slightest fascination for me, and in fact, I have always found other people’s mania for cluttering the home environment with objects and appliances grotesque. This mania, which I have observed in many of my closest friends, amounts to a psychosis, as far as I am concerned. When people begin talking about their latest acquisitions, their tables and lamps and stoves and sinks and whatever else they’ve managed to fill their homes with, I immediately think, Now the psychosis comes out, the buying mania, the replacement mania, the remodeling mania. A person may seem intelligent and reasonable, full of interesting observations about life, show an unusual understanding of human psychology, human foibles. A person may seem refreshingly sympathetic, strong-minded, subtle, well-informed, and then, without any warning, he’s chattering on like a maniac, describing his home and everything in it. My couch, he tells you, I’ve had my couch done in vermilion leather. And next it’s my chair, my table, my lamp, my desk, my stereo, my television, my carpet, my refrigerator, my microwave oven, I’m replacing my this with my that, and of course this passion for inanimate objects extends to the world of art and culture as well, people yearn to own all the products of the inner life, as if the inner life were comparable in value to their chairs and sofas and dining room tables.
We can only expect this degenerate mania for possessions in a culture where everything and everyone is for sale, a malignant disease of a culture like ours can only acknowledge the existence of the inner life if it too is for sale. By the same token, in such a malignant disease of a culture, only an inner life which is for sale has the slightest chance of survival, since those who keep their inner lives locked away and bolted up against the depredations of the public marketplace soon find their inner lives overwhelmed and colonized by the inanity of this culture. This culture cannot rest, until every inner fife that is not for sale has been consumed by the inanity and violence around it, while the inner lives which are offered to the cultural marketplace become part and parcel of this inanity and violence. Everything we do, every effort we make to express our disgust at this situation becomes an integral part of this situation, all our pacific intentions and reasonable acts are transformed by our vicious culture into more inanity and more violence.
Therefore, I considered, the so-called freedom I enjoy, in contrast to Gregory’s servitude in his menial job, his status as a wage slave, only makes me more aware of the impossibility of any freedom, since everything I do contributes to everything that oppresses me and everything that oppresses him. Furthermore, it’s dangerous because, being somewhat more free than he is, I’m more liable to waste time, especially since I dread my own work, knowing perfectly well that anything I do simply adds to the general ruin, despite my intention to do otherwise. If I write and publish my writing, I end up selling out my inner life in order to remain alive, everything that lives within me becomes something for sale, therefore the more I write the less existence I have, consequently my freedom diminishes the more I produce and expands if I write less, the less I write the freer I become, but in order to remain free it’s necessary to sell my writing, and so, the less free I am, the freer I appear to be.
Naturally I could not sustain these thoughts for very long. Such thoughts lead only to despair, the type of despair I’ve heard so often in Gregory’s voice. He’s drowning in self-pity, I thought, letting every minuscule irritation destroy him. He spends half his time in despair, the other half in a fantasy world. What am I to him, I wondered. What is he to me, and what am I to him? He resents it when I tell him he’s attractive, and I resent it when he praises my intelligence. He hates the beauty of his own face, he says his father’s looks brought him everything without any effort, until he started losing them, and then he took up gambling, dropped all the family money at the races, later on in poker games, blackjack, ultimately craps. Gregory’s father never stuck at anything because his face could charm the skin off a snake. The other day Gregory told me his friends used to call him the cutest boy in the East Village, evidently he’s worried about losing his charms the same way his father did. I want him to like how I look, he never says anything about it. He can’t see me over the telephone, in any case.
I rolled these conversations around while trying to think my way to some activity. I found it impossible to recall much of what Gregory said. His voice carried the cloudy atm
osphere of a steam bath. It had a playful tone and a somber tone, a tone of distance and a tone of intimacy, it ranged freely back and forth, giving out or drawing back, marking boundaries or rubbing them away. But what is happening here, I wondered. If Gregory is depressed, I enter his depression. When he’s in a good mood, I’m elated. I shouldn’t feel what he feels. His life isn’t my life. I have as many problems as he does, furthermore I’m seven years older, I haven’t the time to waste that he does. He’s selfish about time, whereas I’m wastefully generous. I have more to do, yet he’s the one stingy about meeting, or giving himself. Perhaps I’m crazy and doomed, after all my efforts in the opposite direction. I’ll ruin myself over him, and he’ll get anything he wants handed over by a bunch of fools like me.
Crowded blocks of retail markets and one-room shops, then a passage of high, cross-shaped public housing flats. Snow shrinking in grimy pyramids between the parking meters, stubbled ice pools glistening with livid opacity in the roadbed. Sunlight catches every harsh angle of the street, streaks across car chrome, explodes against store windows. Time has stopped, or paused, to frame a sore picture of things, on one of those frozen afternoons that sits dead in a person’s vision like a jade lizard squatting on a plastic leaf. The occasional tree has been flogged bare by blasts of wind and stands rotting in its square of incongruous earth.
