by Gary Indiana
You’ve also got bad breath, Gregory concluded.
Obviously not bad enough, I said, since you’ve given me hepatitis.
Hepatitis antibodies, Gregory told me. Pugg has full-blown hepatitis.
Lucky Pugg, I said. If I was Typhoid Mary I wouldn’t brag about it.
Thank God I never fucked you, Gregory said. I knew if I ever did you’d destroy what’s left of my sanity.
What makes you think there’s anything left? You’ve been insane as long as I’ve known you.
Since meeting you, he assured me. I was fine until then.
I’m sure there’s a mountain of used syringes to back that up, I said.
Thanks to people like you, he said. People I took pity on because I thought something decent might be buried under all that bullshit.
You should’ve been an archaeologist instead of a waiter, I said. Maybe it would’ve paid better.
Go ahead, rub it in, he said. It makes you feel so superior.
I’m actually not enjoying this, I said.
I find that hard to believe, he said, like everything else you tell me. I wonder why that is.
Because, I said. You’re that rare thing, a skeptical drug addict.
You’re the one on drugs, he said, classical Freudian projection.
I’m not on drugs, I said.
You’re drunk, he said. Same thing.
Yes, I said, I am drunk. I’m often drunk lately. When the person you love treats you like shit you have to make your own fun.
Your idea of fun is self-destruction, he said.
So’s yours, I said. And you go a lot further with it than I do.
We’ll see, he said.
A few days later, Philippe lost control of himself in a definitive manner, fortunately not with the gun, first smashing a row of bottles with a fireplace poker he happened to have in the basement, then bashing a waitress in the kidneys with some detachable part of the espresso machine. Then he broke a chair over the bartender’s head, raged through the kitchen overturning stacks of dishes and cookware, threw a colander full of bubbling french fries into the cook’s face, grabbed a meat cleaver, started with it for the dining room, then, evidently, restrained by considering the legal consequences of assault with a lethal weapon, dropped the cleaver on his foot, unfortunately catching it on the blunt end, and finally he slung an unopened can of Amstel Light at Gregory’s back, causing no serious damage but inspiring Gregory to walk off the job.
For the next six hours, Philippe called Gregory’s apartment, begging him to return, and Gregory kept calling me, reporting each outrageous string of insults, threats, bribes, and, incredibly, emotional appeals that Philippe resorted to, citing their “years of intimate friendship.” Gregory sounded greatly amused by Philippe’s desperation, which escalated as the dining room of the restaurant filled, though after several hours of more or less complete inanity, Gregory gave me a code to use to get through to him, Ring twice, he said, hang up and ring again. I suddenly wondered if during the many periods when Gregory wouldn’t talk to me, someone else had been getting through, using the same code. He had more or less admitted to screwing Pugg, and I suspected too that he’d been screwing one of the waitresses. I knew the waitress was in love with him. She had come into the gallery one day when Gregory was working there, and had looked at him with such dewy eyes I wanted to vomit. She was also dewy from heroin, Bruno later told me. In any case, it pleased me to learn that the waitress had hepatitis as well as Pugg, even though they’d gotten it from Gregory, since whatever he’d done with them he wouldn’t be doing again for a while.
Once he’d actually quit at the restaurant, Gregory fell into a panic and made me promise to take care of him. If I did, he said, he’d make everything up to me. What’s more, he’d never treat me badly, ever again. I would see right away what a different person he could be.
You should only get addicted to things you can afford. Cigarettes kill slowly, softening up the tissues for the inevitable neoplasm. Alcohol turns your liver the green of rare cheeses. One morning you discover a lump, a swelling, a mysterious discoloration.
When Gregory came, not to move in, but to “rest” in my apartment every day, returning to his own in the late evenings, we fell under a spell. The barricades between us toppled, and a strange quiet settled in. He came every day without fail. It no longer mattered if he came an hour or two later than promised, because that gave me free time. And I knew he’d eventually appear. I cooked his breakfast. After eating he spent hours doing the Times crossword, while I sat at my desk, chipping away at my weekly article. Often he laid the paper aside and went into the bedroom and slept.
Somewhere in the middle of the day there would be another meal, and then later another, and then at ten or eleven or midnight I walked him home, or halfway home, or else he decided to walk home by himself We had a rule, that when I walked him I had to phone when I got back, and if he went by himself he called me when he got there. We seemed extraordinarily fragile to ourselves. The dozen blocks between our houses held all the world’s strangeness. The air was a dense medium full of monsters, flesh, drugs, and danger.
The hours between midnight and four were my own, and the hours of sleep. Gregory didn’t want me to drink, so I did it secretly, dumping the evidence outside when I went for the morning paper. I dreamed about lost dreams. I suddenly had what I had wanted all along. A daily presence, someone who took my constancy for granted. I dealt with his laundry, paid his bills, massaged him when he ached, protected him. We never talked about the earlier time. He had had some kind of falling-out with Pugg. I stopped seeing Victor late at night. I dropped my gym classes. We were completely alone. The days were running longer and the weather was glorious, but we never left the house. The apartment had the dead atmosphere of a sick ward. I changed the phone number again.
Gregory couldn’t work, so he looked at pictures. We passed through the blanket bazaar on Second Avenue on the way to his place, shopping for porn. He knew the magazine models by name, the agencies they worked for, knew which look was featured where. We spent our spare money on jumbo packages of Jock and Powerhouse and Stud. Some showed oral and anal penetration, others had alternating color and black-and-white spreads of individual boys and men undressing and playing with their genitals. There were specialty publications featuring nipple and cock torture, whip action, stuff with chains, boards, and pulleys. Anything anyone had thought to do, there was a magazine about it. Soon there were little skyscrapers of porn in the apartment, awaiting Gregory’s scissors.
He began to refer, sarcastically, to sodomy; from the absurdly uncomplicated dramaturgy of the magazines, the idea of sodomy as a bad joke entered the schizobabble we exchanged in private. Gregory would indicate a large object and ask if I thought he could get it up his ass, or up my ass. Eventually, he only needed to point at something with a certain look on his face. This stayed funny for a while, but he kept joking about it long after it lost its charm. Let me just stick this refrigerator up your ass. Would you mind easing this bathtub into my asshole? Do you think your ass can handle the file cabinet? We hardly touched each other. In such straits, even the surreal verbal intimacy of someone who offers to shove a bookcase up your can may seem indicative of an interest in your body.
He enjoyed being contagious. He didn’t need his usual defenses, since nothing could lead very far. So he became kind, reliable, and loving. The total stasis of our days corresponded to what I thought a “real” relationship might consist of except for the quirk that we left each other to sleep. He claimed he could never sleep in anyone else’s bed.
He’d lost weight. How much, I couldn’t tell. A lot. He was pale, careful about his movements, almost simperingly gentle. He didn’t want to have the X-rays and the biopsy Maria Lorca insisted he should have. He said they cost too much money. When I said I would pay for them, he still refused. I knew what he was thinking.
He was there for me now, all the time. And yet he remained absent. I sat at my desk making f
alse stabs at going on, he sat in his chair penciling letters into the crossword boxes. We spoke in lowered voices, always about practical things. Are you hungry. Can I get you anything. Did you want some music.
I lost the habit of talking to Libby and Jane every night; there was nothing to report, nothing to arrange into anecdotes. And the act of speech had come to seem dangerous. I didn’t know my own thoughts. Life assumed a regular, lifeless pattern. At night, when I walked him home, the streets carried too much noise, too many colors. I wanted things to stay dim and gray and soundless, spectral, unthreatening. He intoxicated me and made me full, and at the same time he had lost all reality. I often forgot to call him to tell him I was safely back in my apartment, even when I had nothing except him on my mind.
I can hear him breathing in the next room. I wrote: How on earth did I get involved with him? I had just returned from Colombia, where I had been acting in a low-budget movie—I’d gone down there and stepped off the plane with $8 in my pocket and no precise address for the hotel, the airport was pitch black and the daily thunderstorm had just finished flooding all the potholes on the road into town. I found Rainer at the Hotel Plaza de Bolivar, at a table in the courtyard where the palms and the ivy were still dripping; Rainer looked up from his storyboard and laughed. Wouldn’t you agree with Edith Sitwell, he said, that the laughter is always in the next room?
In the meantime everything is so changed I might have come back twenty years ago. Yesterday I knocked off my piece for the magazine and came home, Gregory had washed the floors and tidied up the kitchen, we smiled at each other and he said, Welcome home, darlin’, kissed me on the nose, and then resumed reading a back issue of October, lying on the bed with his head propped up on the pillows and his fat bare feet crossed at the ankles, I started fiddling around with papers in the study to give him some solitude, naturally I couldn’t get anything accomplished, I could hear him lighting his cigarettes and crossing and uncrossing his legs and inhaling exhaling and after an hour he got up and walked into the kitchen, started making dinner, asked me about my day, what I’ve written, made some jokes about Conceptual Art, then some of his asshole humor: he showed me the bluefish we’re having and mimicked cramming it up his keister. I kept thinking, If he didn’t have that goddamned face I would’ve gotten rid of him months ago. But he does have that face. He’s being stoical about his hepatitis. He doesn’t complain but why should he since both our lives revolve around his illness. We talked for a while about how to renovate the apartment; Gregory made some sketches. He said he needed to borrow back the pictures he gave me, for Bruno’s group show. And asked if it would be all right to sell them, since he’s not making any money. We ate dinner. Illness hasn’t affected his appetite, he still eats like a horse. Then we sat around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee until he decided to go. We went together as far as Second and Seventh and then he said, You don’t need to walk me tonight, I want to think for a while, I’ll phone you when I get home.
I stopped in the Reno Bar and drank a beer, feeling guilty because he might be trying to reach me. When I came in he hadn’t left a message so I phoned his place. No answer. I suddenly wondered how long I’d been in the Reno Bar, thinking he’d had plenty of time to get home. I waited a half hour and called again, when he didn’t answer this time I freaked—I don’t know what I was thinking, but I found myself running downstairs and racing across Ninth Street Over to First and all the way down into Loisaida, the air had gotten muggy and my face was sweaty. When I got to his place the super was standing out on the sidewalk, reeling drunk, I pushed Gregory’s buzzer and waited and waited while the super stared at me like a staggering moron, this went on for ten minutes and finally he said, You wanna go in? and unlocked the door for me. I went upstairs and knocked on his door.
I could hear music inside, I expected to hear him coming out of the bathroom or getting out of bed, but nothing happened. I stood there pounding on the wood until my fingers hurt, then I noticed a keyhole under the doorknob, They hadn’t removed the old lock panel after putting in a deadbolt. So I got on my knees and squinted into the opening. The fights were on inside, my eyes kept watering so I only got a blurry picture. I could see most of the futon and part of his desk and the space between, the place was all lit up and the stereo or the radio was on at a low volume. From my side of the door, it didn’t look the way you’d leave a place if you were going out. But I also had the feeling he wasn’t inside. I kept blinking, trying to clear the picture, the edges of things kept getting wet. I rapped on the door again and strained to hear if there was any movement inside. I imagined him crouched in the alcove or hiding in the bathroom. I couldn’t identify the music at all, I knocked again, I suppose I thought he’d been murdered, and then I realized I could only find out by breaking down the door and I wasn’t ready to do that. I stood up and left the building, suddenly paranoid about running into him outside. What would he think I was doing there?
Why wasn’t he there? He calls me even if he stops somewhere on his way, so I won’t wait up for his call. I ducked into the cocktail lounge on the corner, a real shithole, and took a stool at the bar, with a clear view of the side window, but far enough back so he’d have difficulty recognizing me if he glanced in while walking by. I ordered a beer. The bartender was a perky old dyke with a henna crewcut who would gladly have bored me to death with a little encouragement. There were a couple of obvious hookers further down the bar, a fat man in a rumpled suit nursing a beer at a table, and some Spanish punks playing video games in the back. Patsy Cline on the jukebox, falling to pieces.
I knew I expected to see him going by with someone, someone he’d arranged to meet well in advance. And what if they came in here? I drank the first beer and ordered a second, and then a third. I started feeling pleasantly stupid, remembering that Gregory couldn’t drink alcohol, and wouldn’t have any reason to enter this particular bar. He couldn’t have sex with anyone, either; and why else would he be bringing someone home at two in the morning? Maria Lorca had already vanquished the idea that Gregory was taking heroin, and I now saw myself spinning a pointless web of suspicion from overworked nerves and the sheer uneventfulness of his convalescence. Maybe he met Bruno in the street, maybe he took a walk. It’s not like he has a secret life, if I see him twelve hours out of twenty-four. I treat him like my child, and so he becomes a child.
I finally convinced myself to leave, and hailed a cab on Houston Street.
I had to see W.’s photographs at an opening on Fifty-seventh Street. Gregory hates W. because he thinks W. exploits sex, but says he wants to come along because he’s going stir crazy, Please don’t, I said, since you have such strong feelings against W., I want to enjoy myself. Besides, Gregory wants to bring the odious Pugg along, now that they’ve reconciled. I said I really didn’t feature listening to the two of them kvetching about the moral outrage of W.’s pictures since I happen to like them and W. is a friend of mine. Gregory said, I’m always willing to have my mind changed. I said I’d just as soon he took the opportunity to change his mind on another occasion, but then he promised to behave himself. And I finally thought, Well, it’s a big concession on his part to be seen in public with me, he’s so paranoid about it. We went up in a cab, and got jammed into the elevator with several people I knew. Then we spilled out into the gallery, which was so crowded I could barely breathe.
Pugg was already there, in the front gallery, where W. had installed some light boxes. Pugg and Gregory instantly formed a cabal. Martha happened along; I introduced Gregory, ignoring Pugg. Martha said: It’s a beautiful show. Gregory said: I hate this stuff.
And he went on, delighted with himself explaining to Martha how exploitative and retrograde W.’s photographs were. He wore his most seductive smile, and talked in that sculpted voice that’s so ingratiating, and Pugg stood around gazing at him rapturously, as if he’d never heard anything quite so brilliant. Martha tried arguing back, but she is no verbal match for Gregory. I left the three of them there and
ploughed through the place smiling at people and waiting to get lost in the crowd, as far away from Gregory as possible.
I found Jane somewhere in the mob, looking nervous, as though she were worried about the fire exits. Why haven’t you called me, she asked. I said, Because Gregory’s at my house every night until midnight. So call after midnight, she said. What’s going on with you two, anyway? I’m nursing him back to health, I said, and I guess it’s working, because he’s here, badmouthing W., I think I’ll throttle him.
We should talk, Jane said. Like, tomorrow.
I really do feel like killing him, I said.
That will change, Jane said.
I circled back to the front room, rubbing shoulders and sleeves with the rich and famous, and found him still holding forth. Martha had managed to separate herself, so Gregory and Pugg were contently snickering in a corner. I’m leaving, I told him, accentuating the singular, but of course he followed me to the elevator, with Pugg trailing. I couldn’t look at him. I got on the elevator hoping the crowd would separate us, but it didn’t. We rode down to street level in hostile silence. Outside I flagged a cab right away and jumped in, the two of them tumbled in beside me. We rode thirty blocks without a word. At last Pugg asked me some trivial thing about W. I managed a civil answer, knowing the whole episode had been about pissing me off I wasn’t going to play it the way Gregory wanted: he hoped I’d say something nasty to Pugg, giving him an excuse to leave me and spend the evening with his friend.
We got out at Tenth Street and Second. I had some doubt that Gregory still planned on having dinner with me, but just before the cab stopped he snapped into a sort of married tone: Do we have enough food in the house, he asked, and then he asked Pugg if he wanted to keep the taxi. So we left the creep with a few dollars and walked to the Korean place on Second and Fifth.
We did the shopping. I could barely speak to him, but kept telling myself, Let it go. But I lost it at the check-out. Behind the register an incredibly bovine, chubby Korean girl looked at each item in my basket as if she had never seen any such thing in her life. After ringing up one item, she would take the next thing out, look it over idiotically, then call to someone in the back of the store and ask for a price. She seemed completely stoned. Finally I said, under my breath, Oh for Christ’s sake, and the girl snapped out of her trance, blushed, apologized; I felt the kind of guilt you feel for hitting a child. On the street Gregory said, icily, How could you do that?
