by Paul Russell
I guess Carlos didn’t mind me not saying anything—he’d decided to talk about it whether I said anything or not. Sometimes in your life you feel completely close to somebody else, maybe three or four times in your life you really feel that way. It doesn’t have to be when you’re having sex with them. It’s probably better when it’s not, because then you know it’s not the sex but something else that’s a lot harder to put your finger on. But it was there right then, with Carlos’s head in my lap and the sky going dark around us and lights coming on in all the buildings—this feeling of complete closeness, like whatever games we were usually playing with each other were just games—another kind of soccer you played with your life instead of a ball, but that’s the only difference. And none of that mattered like this mattered. Which was just sitting there on that grungy roof together and talking in peaceful voices about whatever’d happened to us that we couldn’t change even if we wanted to.
“He was the first person I ever had sex with,” Carlos said. He opened his eyes and looked up at me, I guess to see what my reaction was.
“See?” he said. “I do have some surprises left.”
I never doubted that for a minute. But still I didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem like I had to. I liked the way Carlos’s head was resting there in my lap.
He sort of laughed. “I used to go crawl in bed with him,” he said. “I guess it started when I was about eight or so, and our father took a real turn for the worse. About the time he started stationing himself on the front porch with the shotgun. And here’s something interesting. Everybody knew about it, the local cop and the neighbors, but nobody did anything. It was out of some kind of respect for him, I think. Nobody blamed him for what happened to him.”
“Talk about Adrian,” I told him, because that was what I wanted to hear about.
“Well,” Carlos said, “sometimes I’d wake up at night and hear my father walking around the house. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up, and so what you’d hear would be his shoulders rubbing against the wall when he walked down the hall, and then a thump when he’d lurch against the wall on the other side. He’d just walk around downstairs like he was looking for something he couldn’t find. He never came upstairs where we were, but I was always afraid he would.”
Carlos drank some more whisky, though most if it dribbled down his chin and onto my pants, which were these thin billowy cotton things Carlos’d bought me a couple weeks before—he called them harem pants, and I wore them all the time around the apartment because they were cool. Carlos was so drunk he didn’t know he was spilling whisky on my favorite pants, so I took the bottle from him and put it on the roof beside us.
I think what he really wanted to do was pass out—but I wanted to hear about him and his brother having sex.
“So how’d you have sex with your brother?” I asked, prodding him awake.
He looked groggy, like a little kid who’s just waked up from a nap.
“Oh, sex,” he said. “You know, Adrian was a very talented painter. When he was sixteen he started painting, and he went after it with a vengeance. Beautiful stuff, incomprehensible mystical stuff. I used to sit and watch him paint, and smell the turpentine, which was enough to give me a hard-on sometimes. He was the talented one. I’m just some tenth-rate jerk-off amateur who’s trying to make up for him not being here anymore.”
He reached for the scotch bottle but it was out of reach.
“I’m so fucking drunk,” he said. “Are you fucking drunk?”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t very drunk at all. I ran my fingers through his hair. I touched the tip of his nose with a fingertip.
“Did you ever have a brother?” he asked me. He was slurring his words a lot, but I thought his face was really great-looking in the dim light like that.
I told him about Ted.
“Ted,” he said. “I’d like to meet him.”
“I’ll kill you if you touch my brother.”
“I know where he lives,” Carlos said. “I could go find him.”
“I’ll kill you,” I teased, and bent down and kissed him—which is an odd angle to try to kiss somebody from, so after a minute I stopped and just put a couple of my fingers in his mouth. He sort of sucked on those a little, which was sexy, and I felt around his teeth and gums but after about a minute I realized he was totally passed out. He was even snoring.
To get on the roof you had to climb up this little ladder, which meant there was no way I was going to get him down tonight. So I got some blankets and stuff and we slept up there, which was cooler than the apartment anyway since it was the middle of August.
I never did find out any more about his brother, Adrian, how he died or whether they really had sex, or even if any of what he said was true in the first place. It’d be just like Carlos to make all that up, though for some reason I don’t think he did. Whenever I’d mention it later he’d just say that whole evening never happened, it was all just a bad dream he barely recovered from—which if you’d seen the way he looked the next day, you’d agree.
He was so hung over he could hardly move, and I spent the whole day playing nurse, helping him find the black headband he put on when he had bad hangovers because he thought pressure on the brain would cure it, and when that didn’t work getting him a cold washrag and laying it across his eyes the way my mom used to do when she was hung over, which didn’t work either, and then going out to buy orange juice and soda and a bottle of aspirin he took about half of that afternoon. For some reason I was totally fine, like the way a tornado hits one house full on and the next one it skips right over for no reason you can figure out.
I‘VE BEEN WONDERING. IT’S ABOUT THREE WEEKS now since I started writing on all this: what’s going to happen when I get through? The other day I thought, Tony, maybe this isn’t what you should be doing. You let Earl put this thought in your head, but maybe it’s not right. Because what I thought was—when I get through writing all this, I’m going to be used up. There’s not going to be anything left of me.
Maybe I should leave things out. Then when I’m through, I’ll still have some things left, parts of my life I never told about.
Like about the time I was married.
I’ve got my surprises too.
I’m very depressed tonight. Now that I’ve mentioned Monica, I guess I’m starting to use up even that part of my life. Maybe I want to use it all up. Have it all over and done with. Maybe that’s why I’m writing everything down—so it really will be all used up.
That’s what happens, isn’t it? You start off full and then life just uses you up, it empties you out and there’s nothing left. You’ve seen people like that—walking around, sitting on benches, sleeping on heating grates in the winter to try to keep warm through the night because they’re all empty inside. I used to see them on the front porches back in Owen, or sitting in courthouse square on hot afternoons in summertime. It’s what happens. It’s like those wasps that came into my room here. Those leftover wasps from the summer, the way they swung around in here on those long lazy leftover flights of theirs. One morning they were all dead. Just like that. I must’ve picked about twelve of them up off the floor and flushed them down the toilet. I guess a cold snap or something hit the room in the middle of the night and that was that. Or maybe it was just their time. But I could tell from the first I saw them—they were leftovers, they were all used up.
There must be a way to keep from going empty like that. I’m sure that’s what Carlos was looking for all the time—some way of filling himself back up. I know he woke up in the middle of the night sometimes to feel himself emptying out, one day at a time, and that’s when the panic would set in—he’d have to find some kid somewhere to fuck who still had life in him, or he’d have to make a movie, or do anything to get it back, whatever it was that was emptying out of him. I didn’t exactly know at that time—you could say it took me years to figure that out—but I know it now. And he infected me with it, I think. These da
ys everybody talks about everybody infecting each other. But I think the real thing Carlos infected me with was that need to fill myself up again. To keep from going dry. When I think back about it now, in some way everything he did with me, and I don’t just mean fucking me up the ass with that crazy scared energy of his, but everything, making those movies or even just knowing me, just sitting up on the roof watching the sunset or playing soccer in Central Park or even leaving me alone in that apartment with Sammy Finkelsztajn for weeks on end—all that was his way of using me up so he could try to get back something that was his. Somewhere in his past somebody must’ve done that same thing to him, which is how he got started on all this in the first place.
Like I say—maybe it’s not that bad a thing if writing all this down uses me up for good. At least I’m not going to be out there doing it to other people. At least when I’m emptied out that’ll just be it.
I remember something Sammy told me once about Carlos. Sammy was being very fatherly, which in his weird way I think he was always trying to be since he never had any children of his own, and with everything he’d seen he felt completely sorry for any children that ever got born into this world, including Carlos—but he used to say about Carlos, Carlos is burning his candle at three ends. Which I used to think about a lot—trying to picture it. And I finally figured it out. Those two flames burning at both ends and then the other one, the one that was Carlos’s real life, that flame burning deep down inside the candle, eating it out from the heart and completely invisible to see.
FOR SOME REASON I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT various things, little odds and ends that don’t fit in anywhere in particular—but I want to talk about them. It’s my story, right? I can tell whatever I want to.
I’ve been thinking about the Paradise Grotto Lounge. It’s something I haven’t thought about in years, but back in Owen it was one of my favorite things. Though for some reason it always sort of spooked me just a little. I don’t think I’ve talked much about Owen—the town itself—but it sat up on this little rise which kept it from flooding whenever the Pocohatchie River came out of its banks in the spring. Underneath this rise, like in most of Kentucky around there, were all these caves, most of them just small fingers you could go back about twenty-five feet in and then they closed off. But every once in a while, the cave would open up into something bigger.
The cave under Owen had an opening about the size of a door—in fact, there was a metal door somebody had fixed up so they could close the place off when they wanted. Once you went through that door you followed this corridor back about fifty feet—there were lights strung along the way to guide you—and then it opened up into this very large cavern that went maybe three hundred feet farther back, with a ceiling about twenty or twenty-five feet above your head. People said the cave went on back even after that, but nobody’d ever really explored it. Wallace used to love caves, and he kept trying to get me to explore some of the ones around Owen, but I was never that crazy about closed-up spaces.
I don’t know who the first person was that found Paradise Grotto, which is what the cave was called, or when, but around the 1920s during Prohibition it used to be a speakeasy, and people would drive from about four counties around to drink there. That’s when they put the metal door in, and the lights along the walls, and a long bar and tables and chairs. At the rear of the cavern, where the ground sloped down, there was a lake that some people said was bottomless, though I’m sure that’s not true. Back in the twenties they had a platform built out on the water with a piano set up on it, and so when you went to the speakeasy there was this man sitting out in the middle of the water playing the piano for you. My mom told me about that. She used to go out there when she was a teenager in the fifties and they still had the piano on the raft then, though nobody played it. I don’t know what happened to it—by the time I went there, there wasn’t even any platform. But then by the time I went there, it was pretty rundown. You could tell it was once fixed up with colored tiles on the walls and stuff like that, but they’d let it go over the years. It wasn’t a bar anymore, they only served soft drinks—but in the summer it was a great place to go and stay cool. There was always this breeze coming up from deep inside the ground, like water from a well. And this hollow wind sound.
Outside the cave, about fifty feet from the entrance, there was a concrete swimming pool where for a quarter you could go swimming. In the summers Ted and I were there practically all the time, from when it opened at ten in the morning till it closed at eight.
I remember this one thing we used to do—and I’d completely forgotten about it till just now. There were these openings along the side of the pool, right below the water level, where new water was always jetting into the pool to keep it full. I used to stand right up against one of those holes and pull my bathing trunks out so the water was jetting right down into my trunks. It was a weird squirmy feeling, and that was the first time in my life I ever came.
It was some kid my age who first showed me. He wasn’t anybody I knew, I think he was visiting from somewhere and that’s the only time I ever saw him. But I remember he swam up to me and just said right out, Want to see something fun? He nuzzled up to the concrete edge of the pool where the water was coming out and pulled his trunks down—that was the first time I ever saw anybody with a hard-on, except of course myself. I remember he and I spent all afternoon doing that, going from one spray nozzle to another, all the way around the pool, till my dick hurt with standing up so much. We didn’t touch each other or anything, we just took turns at the nozzles and watched each other while we were doing it, and after that one day I never saw him again.
I showed Ted about it, but he was shy about me watching him. He’d always turn away so I couldn’t see his hard-on—which I remember I was always really curious to see. Sometimes I’d catch him over at the far end of the pool up against the side, and I’d know what he was up to. I’d swim over hoping to catch a glimpse of his hard-on, though most of the time he’d see me coming and stuff himself back in. I always teased him when I caught him. I’d reach down and grope his hard little dick, which would get him all embarrassed and he’d swim away to another part of the pool. I’d chase him and we’d usually end up thrashing around in the deep end with me trying to grab him and him trying to twist away. We could spend hours doing that.
I hadn’t thought of any of that for a long time, and now I wonder if other people saw us doing that with the water vents. Did they know what we were up to? I’d say probably yes, I know you’re supposed to feel all shy about stuff like that, but I guess I’ve just never really cared if people saw me or not.
It’s funny how Ted comes and goes in my head. There’ll be times when I think back and I can’t really remember anything about him at all, and then other times I’ll remember something, like those swimming-pool games I’d completely forgotten about. It was like that the whole time I was in New York. I’d go for a while without thinking about him, but then I’d be walking down the street or taking a piss or anything—and suddenly I’d be thinking about him.
There was always this twinge I got when I thought about him, like I’d run out on him in some way I didn’t feel good about. Like I just left him there. I never felt that way about my little sisters, but then they were too little to really be people yet. And I also never felt that way about my mom, because taking care of herself was the one thing she knew how to do really well. But Ted was different. When I thought about Ted I always got this empty feeling—the way when sometimes you look at the clear blue sky, and the light’s just right, you get this feeling of emptiness but also something else, some feeling of being full up to overflowing with emptiness. If that makes any sense.
I thought about writing him a postcard or something, but then I never did—those first weeks and then months in the city just overwhelmed me, and even buying somebody a postcard and writing it and getting a stamp for it and then finding a mailbox to put it in—all those simple little things were way too much for me even
to think about doing. It was all I could do to go out of the apartment to the little Cuban grocery store down the block and buy a six-pack.
But when Next Year in Gomorrah finally came out, I was feeling so great about being this big movie star and everything—I actually went out and bought a postcard of the Statue of Liberty, and I wrote on it that I was starring in this movie and I told Ted the title of it and he should watch for it. Which to look back on was a dumb thing to do, but how was I to know Next Year in Gomorrah wasn’t exactly going to show up at the Arrowhead Drive-In on Route 24 any time soon?
I can’t remember what else I said, but then how much can you say on a postcard anyway? I think I mentioned to him how I was sorry I just skipped out, and I hoped he didn’t worry too much. I think I told him I was going to come visit him one day soon.
EVERY DEATH SERVES SOME PURPOSE,” CARLOS ONCE told me. It was another night when we were sitting on the roof of the building. “There’s no such thing,” he said, “as a senseless death.” And he looked at me and grinned that tight grin of his, which the instant he grinned it fell into something else that was sad.
I can’t remember what we were talking about. I only remember that one thing, because it made this tremendous impression on me.
THE FIRST TIME I SAW NEXT YEAR IN GOMORRAH was in Montreal, Canada, in September 1980. Incredible to think that in just a year I went from being that kid on his bike who showed up on the last day of filming Ur to being the star of a movie. Though my name wasn’t in the movie, nobody’s name was in it because there weren’t any credits—it just started up out of nowhere and ended that way too, like somebody’d found this piece of film and decided to show it to see what was on it.
It was a film festival where they were showing a bunch of movies. Carlos took me along to keep him company in the hotel and go to the receptions with him, and then to the screening of Gomorrah. Also to check out the other movies they were showing. If you thought Carlos’s movies were strange, you should have seen some of the others, especially the one where they let a monkey operate the camera (at least that’s what they said, and I’ll have to admit that’s what it looked like). Carlos’s movie at least had a kind of story you could follow—even if nothing much happened, and you never exactly knew where it was coming from or where it was going, because it was like the beginning and the end got lost somehow. I personally probably wouldn’t have paid money to see me and Sammy hang out on the alphabet avenues, but if other people wanted to that’s fine with me.
