by Gary Indiana
He seemed to have disappeared from the city. I considered calling his mother, in case he’d gone home to Connecticut. While I was still thinking about it, his mother called me, asking for him. He’d given her my number as the place he was living. He doesn’t really live here, I told her. Do you know where he is, she wanted to know. I’ve been trying to locate him for several days, I said. Is he in some kind of trouble, she finally asked. Yes, I said, I think he probably is. I knew it, his mother said.
13
I find it difficult to tell the rest of this story. Incidentally, I am not sure that it is one. Such a continual accumulation and disintegration of things can hardly be called a story.
After Gregory’s disappearance his mother called me every day, and sometimes his sister called, a few times I heard from his brother as well, furthermore there were several calls from a social worker connected in some strange way with the mother, this person lived in the city and felt he could help Gregory if only Gregory would agree to meet with him. Gregory’s mother sounded quite odd, a mixture of resignation and hysteria. At times she would say, I just know he’s dead somewhere. I’m his mother, I can feel it. At other times she opined, I wrote him off a long time ago. I can’t afford to feel anything about him.
When the sister called, she cautioned me that the mother was emotionally unstable, hyperbolic, hypocritical, a born liar, and had always favored Gregory over the other siblings, that Gregory had been the mother’s golden child who could do no wrong. And, the sister said, the fact is, Gregory’s a loser, he’s never been able to get anything together. Now, I suppose, he’s all strung out on drugs somewhere. It’s happened plenty before, the sister said, but he’s so sly and manipulative and my mother worships him, the last time he lived at home he had her convinced I was the one on drugs. Actually, the sister went on, my mother has been on drugs for twenty years, Libriums, ever since my father left, if the truth be known my mother threw him out, he made our lives totally miserable. The brother told me that the sister was emotionally unstable, a pathological liar, and a drug addict. He also said that Gregory had been “unnaturally close” to the mother, had in fact slept in the mother’s bed “long after the normal age for that,” but further claimed that Gregory had always been industrious and cheerful about working, a truthful person with tragic problems caused by the mother and the sister, and that it was “quite unlike Gregory” to complain about his lot.
I began hearing strange reports, that Gregory had been sighted in the West Village, or uptown, Victor spotted him one afternoon on Second Avenue, “racing to get somewhere,” Victor had greeted him but Gregory had shot him a frightened look and kept going. The telephone at his apartment had been disconnected. Bruno attempted to learn whether Gregory still lived there, and once saw him near the building, “moving quickly down the street” with “a very large black person.”
I felt the way I imagine an air crash survivor feels. Horrified, but weirdly liberated. Richard took me out of town for several days, back to Sag Harbor, abruptly severing the increasingly importunate communications from Gregory’s mother and Gregory’s sister and Gregory’s brother, all of whom had decided to blame me for Gregory’s situation. When I returned I discovered that my apartment had been looted, three huge bookcases emptied, the typewriter and answering machine gone, and within a few days, I heard from certain people who had sighted Gregory on Second Avenue, with his own blanket, peddling books and magazines. He had told Roger, the painter, This is actually a lot of fun.
I later heard, through Bruno, that Gregory’s sister and brother had tracked Gregory down in the streets, restrained him with help from a third party, shoved him into a car and forcibly removed him to Connecticut, where his mother committed him to a hospital. Several months passed, and then I heard that Gregory and Pugg had been observed in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum, “looking very symbiotic.” Shortly after this communication my phone began ringing every night, just after midnight. I would listen to the blankness on the other end; sometimes I heard music playing. These calls continued for several weeks, then stopped.
This story, if it is one, deserves the closure of a suicide, perhaps even the magisterial finality of what is usually called a novel, but the remnants of that faraway time offer nothing more than a taste of damp ashes, a feeling of indeterminacy, and the obdurate inconclusiveness of passing time. People come, people go. If I were to offer a picture of how things are now, I would need to tell the story of Libby and the stain. If now were then it would seem unduly cynical, but time has ruined all the feelings that would make it so. And I myself have changed decisively enough to recover pity without taking a bath in it.
Two years after the events I have described, I happened to be with Libby in a bar near the theater district. We had gone to some wretched performance given by a mutual friend, and afterwards drifted into the nearest saloon, a welcoming place full of amiably plastered regulars. This reminds me, Libby said, of the places I used to go in the sixties to pick people up. Oh, I said, the sixties, they were actually sort of wonderful when you look back. Yes, Libby said, at least one had adventures then.
But, I said, when I went to bars I’d never wear my glasses, because they ruined my looks.
Me neither, Libby said, and it used to get me into trouble.
I know, I said, I’d get this whole heated thing going with some guy across the room, and by the time I saw what he really looked like it was too late to change my mind without a scene.
I had a lot of peculiar near-sighted experiences, Libby said. One night I was sitting at the far end of a bar, I think it was the Grassroots Tavern on St. Marks Place, drinking a gin martini, and I noticed this very sexy guy down at the other end of the bar who seemed to be cruising me. So, you know, I started smiling suggestively, and doing things with my face that you do to attract people, but he kept staring in this uncommitted fashion, so this went on, and I had another drink, and finally I thought, Obviously I have to make the first move with this one. So I screwed up my courage and stood up, and started walking down to his end of the bar. And, as I got closer . . .
Don’t tell me, I said. When you got there you realized he was hideously ugly.
Actually, it was worse than that, Libby said. Because when I got up close to him, he turned out to be a stain on the wall.
I never saw Gregory again. Although I believed, for quite a long time, that I would hear if something bad happened to him, I’m not so sure any more. We live in a time when bad things happen so frequently, to so many people, that it’s an entire vocation to keep up with the bad news. To tell the truth, I don’t think I would want to know.
Last week I quit smoking, and this afternoon I had my hair cut.
