How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  MY NEXT CLEAR MEMORY of Peter is seeing him at five in the morning on Market Street, under the giant Safeway sign there in the middle of the city, where our ACT UP activist affinity group had gathered in the parking lot for a “non–ACT UP–related action,” which is to say, we were some of the same people, just acting under a different name for this occasion—if you couldn’t reach consensus on an action, an affinity group could do what the group itself would not. I was a participant in a handful of these sorts of actions. This morning, we were going to wrap false newspaper fronts over a thousand copies of the San Francisco Chronicle. 9,000 DEAD IN THE CITY, read the headline on the false front page we’d created. Clever group members had imitated the font and layout, and the false front wore the name San Francisco Chronic Liar. Anyone reading closely would see that 9,000 was the number of people who had died thus far in the AIDS epidemic, but the cover photograph, a shot of the city from the sky, was meant to evoke a natural disaster or terrorist news story, which, to us, the AIDS death toll story was. The action’s purpose was to increase the accurate coverage of AIDS in the media.

  About thirty or forty of us were gathered there, and we split up into groups, dividing the bales of false fronts. Each team was assigned a neighborhood. The plan was to wrap the false fronts over the papers after sneaking them into our cars. Each car had a squad of three. One of us had coins to get the newspaper boxes open, one of us drove, one of us was on lookout. As we took the bales of papers from each box, we felt we were doing something dangerous. But when we wrapped the fronts it only seemed tedious, or silly, or funny. My team, after we wrapped the last one up, sat and waited for twenty minutes to see the effect of our work. Finally a pedestrian came up to the paper box, opened it, and read the headline. This person puzzled over the paper and walked off to catch the train.

  Was it all just for that quizzical look? In the morning dark, the action seemed both ridiculous and necessary. There’s nothing else you can do other than everything that might work, I told myself that morning, and I often told myself that in those days. These kinds of actions were about resetting long-standing frameworks, ways of seeing the world that didn’t include us or our deaths. We had to be sure people couldn’t ignore us. We knew ordinary ways of protesting—blocking traffic, marching, getting arrested—were often misrepresented in the media, cost taxpayers money in police overtime, and could result in criminal records and police brutality. We weren’t vandalizing the boxes that morning, for example, and even paid for one paper to open them. A quiet, quasi-legal way to do something loud. We didn’t know what would work, so we tried anything we could think of. That someone wouldn’t do any or all of this is what seemed extraordinary to me then.

  I DID NOT MEET Peter that morning. Instead, I ached as he walked in the parking lot, oblivious to me, his leathers shiny in the dark, his blue hair flashing occasionally above the perfect white of his scalp. I asked my friend Choire about him. Who was this man?

  Peter Kelloran, he said. Dreamboat. Jason’s boyfriend.

  Jason was another member of our activist family, and a friend. He also took part in the newspaper action. He reminded me of a soldier in a poster from World War I, the same ethereal good looks, but gone punk. Jason had always had what seemed an enviable sexual success, but never more than that day. He felt to me like the blond boy I was always losing out to, and it was hard not to resent him for it. In any case, I drew a line through the possibility of ever getting Peter’s attention then.

  PETER FELT BEYOND ME for other reasons besides Jason: too handsome, too adult, too cool to want me, and, certainly, unapproachable. But for all I tried to believe I had no chance with Peter, my desire for him was like a private horizon line, hidden inside every view I had of that morning. And after that, it seemed there was nowhere I might not see him. His electric-blue Mohawk, the blue eyes carrying the light like a filament, the way they flashed through me every time they met mine. The sight of him on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, or at the wheel of his VW Thing, his head settled low as he drove by.

  The next time I saw him, we were protesting the filming of Basic Instinct. It is not widely remembered that a leaked version of the script sparked protests about the misogynistic antilesbian story line. We had no way of knowing, of course, that in the future, the film would become a cult lesbian classic, and Sharon Stone’s vehicle to fame. Peter joined me and Faustino, my boyfriend at the time, under the overpass where the crew was filming, and together we let out a discordant three-way yowl. Peter and I had both been in boys’ choirs; Faustino couldn’t carry a tune, but he was quite loud. The resulting sound was haunting, but it also filled us with joy, and I remember Peter’s smile in the San Francisco night as the tone climbed the bridge’s belly and flew everywhere around us.

  Our shriek apparently caused so much distress on the set that Michael Douglas hit a bank of lights with his car. He was not harmed but filming was halted. A few days later, another affinity group I was a part of used fake passes and got on the set during filming. Riot police hidden inside emerged, handcuffed us, and took us all down to the precinct house, where we were held. Peter and Faustino both avoided arrest, I recall. They were technically legal observers and waited for us as we left the police garage. I remember sashaying out of the garage to the howls and whistles of my waiting friends, and that may have been the first time Peter saw me. He was standing at street level, talking to Jason. But I saw his eyes find me, smile, and go back.

  Some weeks later, on a morning after we had eluded arrest for a Gulf War street action, I was having brunch at the Baghdad Café when Peter came to my table and asked for my phone number. He waited as I wrote it, grinning a little. He walked off after I handed it to him, looking over his shoulder and waving at me, more or less ignoring my table mates.

  He never asks for anyone’s number, my friend Miguel said. He’s still hung up on his ex.

  People change, I said.

  I said this with the bravado I often felt back then. And Peter had asked in a manner so calm, so at odds with my reaction, it didn’t seem like desire. It was courtly and calm.

  I don’t know how Peter saw me. I’ll never know. How I saw him: Peter at Café Flore, sitting in a sunlit window, surrounded by friends; Peter walking a dark sidewalk, wheat paste in a bucket in his hand, putting up flyers; Peter at meetings, standing in the back of the room, scowling slightly; Peter shining, naked, in the reflection of the mirror in his apartment as he approached his bed.

  ON OUR FIRST DATE, Peter took me to see a concert. He picked me up at my apartment on Market Street, we went to the concert downtown, and we drove back to my place afterward. I don’t remember the music. That whole night I was aware only of Peter. I asked him in, and he said sure. In my room he sat down on my bed, a lumber-and-cinderblock affair that I’d made with a friend. I did not turn on the light.

  San Francisco nights are always more vivid than the days. The sunlight, for all its color and clarity, added to my sense that the city was an illusion, and the nights are when everything seems its true self and color. Peter felt much older than me that night. He wore his leather jacket, a coat I loved, and it was one of the few times when I knew him that his hair was blond, his head nearly bare. All night he’d been taking drops of astragalus, and he did again as we sat on my bed.

  So, he said, as he tucked the dropper into his jacket, I normally take boys home and tie them up and whip them. He smiled as he said this.

  Do you want to take me home and tie me up and whip me? I asked.

  Do you want to be tied up and whipped? he asked.

  No, I said, not really. Part of me thought he was joking. Part of me knew his reputation.

  He lay down next to me. The two of us were in our coats and boots, and I felt alone with him for the first time. That’s fine, he said, we don’t have to do that. And he reached his arm around me.

  Can you do me a favor? I asked him after we had lain there awhile, silent and still.

  Yes, he said.

  Can
you lie on top of me? Just, you know, lie there?

  He rolled on top of me, in a light embrace, and the weight of him pushed the breath out of me.

  Am I crushing you? he asked.

  No, I said. This was exactly what I had meant. The weight of him pressed me out. I felt covered, safe; something dark in me retreated and, for what felt like the first time in the arms of a man, I felt safe. I was still me—the switch was not flicked, but the terrible feeling haunting me then didn’t reach me. Which is one of the things that love can feel like. Peter stayed there for some time. He may have fallen asleep at some point. And so it is that when I hear stories of how thin he became, I can’t reconcile them with the weight of the boy who pinned me to myself, made me feel the place in me where I attached to the world.

  Eventually he got up to go home. We made a plan to see each other again. I was with him in a way that I had been with no one else, and from what I understand, this was also true for him. It isn’t just that you fall in love with someone—you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you’ll be next. Strange to ourselves and to each other; only the feeling of the room, the silence of it, was familiar. All over the city, people were strung into slings, dancing on tables, walking down alleys following strangers, but on my doorstep it felt like we were a young couple out of Happy Days, out of the fifties, mild as milk. I watched him go and then turned and went back upstairs to bed.

  I wouldn’t know until years later that he had just told his mother of his illness. He had shaved his head after returning from his sister’s wedding, for which he had grown out his hair. In pictures from that day, “he looked gorgeous,” his mother says. But his grandmother Paula Morgan thought otherwise. “He’s sick,” she said after seeing him. She knew before he had told them what was wrong. “He was a very special young man,” she says of him now. “It seems to me this happens to special young men.”

  I WAS BREAKING UP with Faustino at the time I met Peter, or, really, what we had was falling apart.

  I was as in love with Faustino as I had ever been with anyone. Once, when I told him I had trouble sleeping, he made me a ring with zzzzzz circling the band—he was a metalsmith. No one had ever made anything just for me. We both drove motorcycles and used to cruise the long avenues at night, then lock them up together at home. But once we were inside, undressed and in bed, it seemed like a switch had been flicked, turning off the lights. I would freeze, and feel as if I were replaced in the room by someone else. I didn’t know how to stop what was happening to me; I didn’t know what the problem was. I was at the age, I would one day learn, when memories and feelings related to childhood sexual abuse usually return. I thought it was peculiar to me, but it was all too ordinary; I just didn’t have anyone to explain it to me.

  In any case, I’d asked Faustino for a break while I figured it out. During that break, he found Jason.

  This felt like another failure to me. It was not lost on me that in our circle of activists, we were the only couple composed of two men of color. All of the other gay men of color in our activist group were with white men. All of them had a tendency to date white men and had even commented on it with each other. I still remember one young white man at an activist party who came up to me and asked what it was like to date his future husband.

  Want to see the ring he made me? I said, and flashed it at him.

  Faustino had driven his motorcycle out of West Texas for San Francisco. Shortly after, by his account, he had walked into the bookstore where I worked. I remember it distinctly: the sunlight on the backs of his legs, the shy smile on his face as we locked eyes and fell in love. Our first kiss was at a Queer Nation kiss-in, at a straight bar downtown. Our whole story together was, before this, about dreams come true and the pursuit of justice. It was love at first sight also, but with someone who had fallen for me, too. I didn’t want to lose it. But I didn’t have any way to stop what was happening to me either, and I didn’t know how to explain.

  It may be that Peter approached me that day because he knew Jason had started seeing Faustino. This kind of drama wasn’t really like him. But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. I could have been a point he was making.

  Jason and I were otherwise opposites of a kind, me the dark to his light, or, as I experienced it, me the invisible to his visible. That we would end up having not one but two men in common was strange. That I would feel I had lost both of them to Jason—this was what I had always feared would be the story of my life. That I would always lose in love to any blond white man.

  Faustino eventually asked me for the ring back, and I did return it after I moved away to New York, by then in love with someone else. And Jason and Peter got back together and had a commitment ceremony, before breaking up again.

  After their next breakup, Peter, in the grip of his dementia, would sometimes believe, right up until his passing, that Jason, who visited him regularly, was still his boyfriend. No matter what I’d said to my friend Miguel, Peter had not changed: he still loved Jason, and would until he died.

  Peter would die first; Jason, shortly after I interviewed him to write this. Faustino remains alive, but we don’t speak. I hope someday we can.

  I left this tangle. Peter’s story continued without me, to its end.

  HERE IS EVERYTHING I never knew about Peter:

  He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had grown up in Washington, first on Mercer Island and then in Bellevue, where he went to Newport High School. He was a skier and a swimmer in high school, but “not competitive in that way people wanted from athletes,” his mother, Jill, adds. Intelligent, quick-minded, he never had to study hard and school came easily to him. “He used to love to bug me,” his sister Lisa says of him. She remembers that when she would come downstairs in the morning in what he considered inappropriate clothes, he would take her back upstairs to re-dress her. He could get away with a great deal of mischief. “He used to leave the house undetected all the time,” Jill recalls. “I didn’t know for years that he would get out of the house through his window and go out all night. He started doing it as a child.”

  He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in graphic design and left for Europe, where he lived for a year in Spain and Portugal. He had been a kind of art prodigy, good at ceramics, drawing, design. In college he had made a ceramic relief so large there was no kiln big enough to fire it, so the relief stayed at his home in Washington until his father, Tom, sold the house. Jill still has a set of plates he made in the shapes of fishes, and one Christmas, she recalls, he sent her copper candlesticks that had once been table legs; he’d wrapped each one in brown paper and arranged the group into the shape of a star. “I didn’t want to open it,” she says. “It was like, that was the gift itself, it was so beautiful.”

  He worked as a bartender at the Paradise Lounge in San Francisco and made all its event posters, using a psychedelic style that soon became its trademark. They were the kind of posters people stole to take home. “So beautiful,” says his friend Laura, who bartended there with him. Peter created images for ACT UP’s Marlboro boycott, and was proud to see earnings reports that showed Marlboro had lost money in the quarter the boycott began. He also wanted to be a musician, and before he became too ill to do so, he had plans to record. “He had a beautiful voice,” Lisa says. “Yes, he had a beautiful voice,” his mother says.

  He is remembered as consistent by all who knew him, steady with everyone, but still a study in contradictions. He was immensely private, and yet he would say, without provocation, to anyone, “I’m a homo.” Serious and grave, he would give in occasionally to a jig, a little hopping dance. Extremely quiet, he could, when he wanted, be the center of attention. “I was called to school by the principal when he was in the fifth grade,” his mother recalls, “for a show. A talent show by the students. And out came this little boy, my boy, so self-possessed. And he emceed the entire show from start to finish, totally confident, a little Johnny Cars
on.” Peter attended his high school prom in a black tuxedo he splattered with shocking-pink paint to match his date’s pink dress and the pink shirt he wore with the tux.

  In San Francisco, after college, he became part of a punk-rock scene that centered on a place called the A-hole, where he befriended the painter Pasquale Semillion, whom he and Laura cared for until his death from AIDS. Peter had turned to photography but still painted abstract canvases. No one is sure who has what pieces of his art now. His sister has three of the Paradise Lounge posters framed in her home; his mother, the plates that he made and paintings and a sketch he had titled Three Dogs and a Pig, though it actually depicted four dogs. Jill likes to remember this as an example of his humor. Laura has paintings and pictures and tapes. Before he died, Jason had memories only, but only after he became ill. “I can’t really remember him from before he was sick, don’t really remember the art,” he says. “Isn’t that terrible?”

  His favorite musicians: Yello, Adam Ant, and Einstürzende Neubauten. His favorite article of clothing: a belt buckle shaped like a bullet. His favorite author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in particular the story “Welcome to the Monkey House,” in which Billy the Poet, a lighthearted sexual rhymer, stalks a futuristic America with plans to make Americans enjoy the sex they now all deny themselves.

  Jill has a picture of him, framed, that she looks at regularly: Peter on the beach in Portugal, waving from the sand in front of a tent he had made from debris—flags, old jeans, sails—where he lived for a good part of his time there. His father has framed a five-page letter that Peter sent from that Portuguese tent.

  When an artist dies young there is always talk of the paintings unpainted, the books unwritten, which points to some imaginary storehouse of undone things and not to the imagination itself, the far richer treasure, lost. All of those works are the trail left behind, a path across time, left like the sun leaves gold on the sea: you can see it but you can’t ever pick it up. What we lose with each death, though, is more like stars falling out of the sky and into the sea and gone. The something undone, the something that won’t ever be done, always remains unendurable to consider. A permanent loss of possibility, so that what is left is only ever better than nothing, but the loss is limitless.