by Gary Indiana
I leave the cab at Second Avenue, in front of Gem Spa: we don’t even kiss goodbye, it’s all perfunctory and sour, and as I walk home my mind fills with horrible scenarios, pictures of what may befall Gregory. And since what usually befalls him at work results in his becoming incommunicado for days, unplugging his phone and vanishing from my life, and since he increasingly reports sensations of extreme despondency, hints that he can’t hang on much longer with the kind of depression he has, feels himself sliding towards the edge, turning the mental corner, believes he could easily lose his sanity, contemplates suicide much of the time, “goes blank” for longer and longer periods, finds himself snarling at and insulting customers, refusing to wait on certain individuals, often thinks there is no hope in the world for him, I fill the time when he’s out of contact with fears, especially with mental pictures of Gregory dead, his beautiful face when he’s dead, like the face of a viciously slain animal lying in a field of pissy snow.
The next time I went to his apartment, Gregory showed me a card that Gloria had sent him shortly after New Year’s. Not a store-bought card but one she’d made, on a square of gray cardboard, with cut-out photos. It showed a pair of ample tits, and glued between them a meaty, erect la la. Just the tits and a bit of model torso, the prong and its wrinkled scrotum. Happy New Year, she’d written at the bottom, in infantile script. He rolled his eyes while exhibiting the card. So that was what she liked with him.
He still got stormy calls and letters demanding cash. On a whim, she’d appear in front of his building, as he left for work, planted on the stoop with too much cadmium lipstick on, a lovesick cow imagining herself a femme fatale. His finding her not just resistible but weirdly enervating bewildered her. Hadn’t they been lovers just a few weeks before? Hadn’t he put it inside her, come between her breasts?
He said she’d heard he was going out with me. He had refused to confirm or deny this rumor, since it was none of her business. I let this go by, although it obviously meant he hadn’t decided if he was going out with me or not. At any rate, “going out” would have been a strange description of what we were doing. We never went anywhere.
5
I’m living in hell, Richard told me in the steam room. Victor’s so heavy. I’ll be working on a painting, you see what I mean, really into it, he lets himself in with his key now, any time of day or night, hoping he’ll surprise me in the middle of a fuck. When we were actually together that way he’d never dream of coming over without calling up and asking.
So, Richard said, I got into this thing, I met this guy from Cleveland, a banker, loaded, married with three kids, and some guys, no matter what they look like, out of their clothes it’s like there’s nothing but you and him and the universe. He’s into, like, the best wine, the best food, gentle sophisticated vibes and he’s in love with my schlong, fifty sixty million bucks with a nice family and everything, and of course real guilty about the whole situation. If you saw this guy you’d laugh, but I’m in love with him, and now it’s over with, I just never got hurt like this, somehow.
It isn’t like he broke things off or anything, but I just couldn’t stand it. Like, we could never have anything normal, just pieces. Always if he was going to be in town, and what if he suddenly changed his mind, I was always at the mercy of his whims and his priorities. Victor’s been really supportive through this whole thing and tried being a loyal friend, like he put his jealousy over in storage in New Jersey. So, I’m always going to be, you know, grateful for what he’s been for me during this heavy period, but now it’s like he’s assuming all this intimacy again, protecting me from myself and, in other words, knowing every move I make.
You know Victor’s the nicest person, he’d cut his balls off for a friend. But after a while that can get pretty heavy, too. I’d like to be, like, responsible for my own shitty messes instead of thinking Victor will clean them up for me. I mean, I know I have this tendency to put myself into extreme situations sometimes, with guys I don’t know too well, there’s been some psychotic shit going on over there, that’s why I want to cut out drinking, because my judgment breaks down and I get looped and wild and I let go, like with Randy, that kid I had helping me for a while, I’m sure Victor told you about Randy, at first I thought, here’s a really built, hung kid who likes doing shows, that was when I had all that mirrored effect in the bedroom, well the mirror got smashed one night when I was porking him, Randy was ready for anything. I’d get him to sit on a broomstick or that Brancusi copy I have, or with cowboy boots, when I got those fancy boots in Marfa and came back I said, Randy, wouldn’t you like getting fucked with these boots? It felt funny, kind of sexy. I mean I slid one into him right up to the heel. And he turned out to be like a complete psychopath though he dug getting fucked with almost anything that looked like a cock he also liked getting zonked on angel dust and taking a razor blade, first he made these cuts along his thighs and all across his chest, and this turned into something I couldn’t handle at all and Victor was the one who threw him out finally, I mean, with my permission and everything but it was heavy. I only want to work any more. No more scenes. It’s not the period for that, right? Just work and fuck the rest of it.
I had let Richard talk me into joining the health club. It had something to do with Paul, and the strange things which now appeared nearly every day in the newspapers, the tumult and confusion of the times. When I saw Paul in the hospital, he showed me oblong, puffy red lesions on the heels of his palms, and one of the white socks he wore had a damp pink patch around the shin. It was a drab room with a view of Roosevelt Island. Paul’s hospital gown reminded me of a convict’s uniform. Someone had brought him lilacs.
I told him stories about my life, wrapping them up in bemused petulance, as if to say: Well, what can you do about things? He listened too closely, watched my face too fixedly, I could tell he evaluated every visitor’s performance, measured the precise degree of discomfort each one experienced in the theater of his distress. He lay on the bed with his head up, extracting private wisdom from the situation, and was clearly pleased when I seemed to forget what he was doing there. I made him laugh, once, when he asked what Gregory was like and I said, very much as an aside: Oh, Christ, that’s all fucked up, too.
If I hadn’t had Gregory distracting me, I probably would have noted the sudden omnipresence of death with greater clarity. Instead, the fatal sarcomas, pneumonias, and neuropathies reached me as isolated incidents, or manifestations of an abstract social problem. I convinced myself that since I’d been sexually unhappy for years after breaking off with Paul, this unhappiness conferred a special immunity against the virus that I suspected, nonetheless, must be floating around inside me. I reasoned: If Paul’s sick, wouldn’t I be sick by now, if I picked it up from him? This made no real sense, Paul could have gotten infected long before our relationship, infected me in the middle of his incubation period, by which token I might fall ill in roughly the same time after we broke up that Paul got ill after his initial infection, and then again, perhaps the thing developed at different rates in different people, with one person getting sick a few months after infection while another falls ill years afterwards.
I shunned as much information as I could. People talked a lot about “safe sex,” usually in a derisory way. Victor informed me that sodomy with a condom, which he’d tried out on his occasional Japanese boyfriend Hiroshi, never proceeded very smoothly. You could never quite lose yourself in lovemaking, since foreplay no longer led directly to insertion, but rather to the peeling of a foil packet and the usually clumsy rolling of the latex down the length of the penis, which quite often shrank if you didn’t slip in on right the first try. Blowjobs with a condom on the penis were really not worth bothering with. Licking the penis without inserting the head into the mouth was like eating the cone and throwing away the ice cream.
On the other hand, Victor expatiated, sodomy without a condom had always had a lot of little glitches too, if the person’s asshole was too tight, or too dr
y, and you didn’t happen to have the Vasoline open and ready. I remembered that with Paul, who always tried putting it in using spit, he often found the target constricted. He would ease himself off the bed, pad out to the bathroom for the K-Y. Of course, we were so high most of the time that these little interruptions heightened the excitement, in fact, Paul enjoyed pulling out, rummaging around for a bottle of poppers, and sticking his cock back in while holding the bottle under my nose. Once he spilled it directly into my nostrils and I spent ten minutes with my face in the sink. Now they say you should never drink or take drugs if you have sex because it breaks down your inhibitions and you find yourself “going all the way,” getting come down your throat or up your ass and then you’re paralyzed with fear the next morning.
So, Victor concluded, if you do it as you’re supposed to, both people are completely lucid and therefore completely self-conscious, and any break in the continuity makes the whole business seem ridiculous and arbitrary, and, on top of that, five out of six times the condom snaps or mushes up, at the end of the night you’ve got scads of wet latex sticking here and there all over the apartment.
Some other people: there was Rainer, who’d given me an acting job in a film he shot in South America, a film that wrapped only a few weeks before I met Gregory. I had known Rainer for five or six years, first in Munich, later in Paris and Berlin, during a period when I didn’t think New York would be my fate, a time when I was desperately broke but managed to hustle airline tickets everywhere and got little acting jobs with avant-garde directors. For six or seven weeks at a stretch I’d have a paid hotel room, free meals, and an honorary sort of salary. I never seriously considered myself an actor. It was just something I knew how to do. I saw more and more of Rainer in those years of restless motion, in New York and all over Europe, and by osmosis we became close friends. Rainer was one of the only people from the European otherworld I sometimes lived in who ever met Gregory. A privileged witness to my distress.
In March or April, I can’t remember exactly, Rainer phoned to say: Willie’s dead. Willie had been his lover of ten years. Rainer said: I take a strange inhuman comfort in the fact that the worst that could possibly happen has already happened, and what I’m now left with is the intelligent planning of my suicide.
There was Martha, a photographer who lived uptown, a friend I hardly ever saw. These intermittent friendships and their contents, like flashes of lightning, illuminate moments of that time and leave the rest in darkness. Even though people were beginning to drop like flies, we all acted as if we were going to live forever. The weeks were littered with unreturned phone messages, stupid feuds were sustained endlessly for no good reason, and very often the slight effort needed to maintain a sense of connectedness proved altogether beyond one’s strength or willingness. It was something quite strange. You would hear, for example, that X had died over the weekend, but no one could definitely confirm or deny the rumor. You would not ask anyone truly close to X because if it were true you would be intruding on their grief and if it weren’t they might go into a panic imagining that it was true and they somehow hadn’t heard about it. Then you might mention it to someone who believed that X had died months before. And just when you concluded that the whole thing was a rumor, X turned out really to be dead. Or, just when you’d received absolutely certain confirmation, you’d walk into a party and find X standing there.
Martha had started looking after Todd, also a photographer, after his first pneumocystis episode. I heard news of Todd when Martha came downtown. A couple of years before, we had had a minor difference of opinion; he’d stopped speaking to me altogether a few months before getting ill, and after he got ill it became clear he planned on taking his anger with him to the grave. The thing that was special, she said, the way we could talk about pictures together, it doesn’t happen any more. And it never will again. I go shopping with him and if I watch him picking out a sweater, I know if this happened to me of course I’d go on, taking care of myself as long as I could, but it requires such hideous courage. Sometimes I’m over there cleaning up the dishes, and I’ll stop for a whole minute, thinking: Why on earth wash another dish.
It didn’t matter, in the wider scheme of things, if running into someone in the street caused a couple of moments of awkwardness and a stream of ugly thoughts, though a fifteen-minute conversation could have cleared up the entire business. But one of the unpleasant little ironies twinkling on the periphery of my day was this: in an abstract sense, I thought what was happening to Todd was horrible, but in a different sense, after he rejected a few conciliatory overtures, I began loathing him. I assured myself that I did not want him to die, but drew a weird satisfaction from the fact that I knew he was going to. He had never been a close friend, but over the course of his illness he acquired a heavy symbolic power. I wondered what he would feel about it if our positions were reversed, wondered if I would join him in the kingdom of illness before he died. I wondered why if death is such a conqueror it has no effect on pettiness.
We’re mutating, M. said. Becoming something new. A species at the end of its run.
I’m scared, I told Jane. I really want to live.
Hey, she said, it’s the only game in town.
Libby said her grandmother gave her three pieces of advice at her college graduation, about how to have a successful relationship with a man: listen to everything he says, constantly tell him how smart he is, and worship his penis.
If we seldom spoke of it directly, it must have been because Gregory’s art project presumed certain evils inherent in pornographic magazines, lustfulness, and even the body itself. He greeted the news of my health club membership with superior irony, as if it implied a vulgarly death-defying attitude toward my physical envelope. His collages had begun featuring porno models, spliced into settings that heightened the absurdity of their smiles, their foregrounded erections, and their brazenly offered buttocks to a pitch of supreme ugliness. I laughed when he showed them to me, one morning when he fixed breakfast at his place and seemed, for once, relaxed and happy. His anxiety for my approval put me on guard. It pleased me that Gregory could make technically sophisticated pictures, ones with a strong content that his peers wouldn’t despise. But what Gregory craved was my complicity in his message, his ridicule. Something of the zeal with which reformed sinners make themselves odious sparkled across Gregory’s photographs. His physical poise that morning, as he briskly arranged plates and coffee cups and orchestrated a continuous medley of irritating albums on the stereo, reminded me of some keenly deluded junior architect unveiling his plans for demolishing the red-light district.
There were times like this when, unplugged from the erotic current that usually ran between us, I saw Gregory not as someone unusually developed in matters of the heart, seasoned in “relationships,” but as someone painfully unversed in the art of survival. As we ate he fretted over “which pictures to put in the show,” how the public might receive them, whether or not there would be copyright problems with the porn magazines. I asked him if he thought the porn industry vigilantly monitored exhibitions in obscure East Village galleries. This stung, but only for a moment. Gregory explained that he was thinking ahead, because “just objectively,” he felt, his images were destined to shock people and hence to acquire a certain fame. Maybe so, I said, but look, you’ve only done four of them, I think you’ve got plenty of time to worry about lawsuits or what you’re going to include.
He seemed positive that Bruno would eventually offer him a show, though Bruno had expressed to me a certain skeptical distance from Gregory’s activities, saying that what he’d seen looked clever but not especially difficult. But how firmly did Bruno draw the line between his opinion and his desire? Bruno was currently dating a fashion designer, but he still had an unfinished lust that drove him to pop in on Gregory all the time without warning. Perhaps he would feature Gregory’s work in a group show, holding out the prospect of a one-person exhibition later on. Then Gregory would amplify his charm
in proportion to Bruno’s munificence.
When Gregory put something into his mind, if it didn’t conform to practical reality, he searched the corners of his daily life until something, or someone, offered confirmation of his fantasies. And so a few days later, he reported to Pugg, the mysterious Pugg, whose rather flaccid bons mots infiltrated Gregory’s jumbled accounts of people in his life I hadn’t met, this Pugg had agreed that “there could very well be problems” concerning the rights to these skin pictures. Artists who used images from existing sources, thus spake Pugg, had often run afoul of litigation. And Pugg had further said, according to Gregory, that people would “flip out” when they saw Gregory’s pictures, meaning, in Gregory’s interpretation, that the photographs were so “transgressive, ” so bound to strike a raw nerve, that Gregory was fated to erupt upon the art scene like Vesuvius. Hadn’t I been a trifle . . . abrupt in my judgment? A teeny bit thoughtless, possibly even . . . slightly envious in my temperate advice? No, I told him, not at all, I just don’t want you to get worked up and then disappointed. I said, Things don’t always arrive on a serving tray, just like that. You’ve got to prepare yourself for some difficult struggles, some hard times, some setbacks, it could take several years to establish a career, and even then, I pointed out, no matter how good something is, everything passes in and out of fashion, think how many things used to be shocking, this culture absorbs everything. Don’t be negative, he told me.
