Wendell Ricketts | Portfolio

Qualcuno era Comunista / One Guy Was a Communist: Giorgio Gaber

2010-05-23T04:37:00.000-07:00

One guy was a Communist because he’d been born in Emilia.

One guy was a Communist because his grandpa, his uncle, his dad ... not his mom, though.

One guy was a Communist because Russia seemed like a promise, China seemed like a poem, and Communism seemed like a heaven on earth.

One guy was a Communist because he felt alone.

One guy was a Communist because he’d grown up much too Catholic.

One guy was a Communist because the movies demanded it, theater demanded it, painting demanded it, and so did literature: everything demanded it.

One guy was a Communist because they told him to.

One guy was a Communist because they didn’t tell him everything.

One guy was a Communist because before (long, long before) he’d been a Fascist.

One guy was a Communist because he understood Russia was moving slow and steady, but it was winning the race (!)

One guy was a Communist because Berlinguer was a great man.

One guy was a Communist because Andreotti wasn’t....

One guy was a Communist because he was rich, but he loved the people....

One guy was a Communist because he drank a lot of wine and got teary-eyed when he went to working-class rallies.

One guy was a Communist because he was so firmly atheist that he needed a different God.

One guy was a Communist because he was so fascinated by the working man that he wanted to be one, too.

One guy was a Communist because he couldn’t take another minute of being a working man.

One guy was a Communist because he needed a raise.

One guy was a Communist because ... the revolution? Not today, no. Could be tomorrow. But the day after that, guaranteed!

One guy was a Communist because ... “the bourgeoisie the proletariat the class struggle, shit!”

One guy was a Communist to piss off his father.

One guy was a Communist because the only TV channel he watched was RAI3.

One guy was a Communist because it was trendy, another guy as a question of principle, another one out of frustration.

One guy was a Communist because he wanted the state to take control of EVERYTHING!

One guy was a Communist because he didn’t know any government workers, civil servants, or their ilk....

One guy was a Communist because he had confused dialectical materialism with the Gospel According to Lenin.

One guy was a Communist because he was convinced the working class was behind him.

One guy was a Communist because he was a better Communist than anybody else.

One guy was a Communist because of the Great Communist Party.

One guy was a Communist in spite of the Great Communist Party.

One guy was a Communist because there wasn’t anything better.

One guy was a Communist because Italy had the worst Socialist Party in all of Europe!

One guy was a Communist because, when it comes to government, the only country in worse shape was Uganda....

One guy was a Communist because he’d had it with forty years of Christian Democrat governments made up of idiots and mobsters.

One guy was a Communist because Piazza Fontana, Brescia, the Bologna train station, the Italicus Massacre, the DC-9 crash over Ustica, and so on, and so on, and so on!

One guy was a Communist because if you were opposed, you were a Communist!

One guy was a Communist because he couldn’t tolerate that filthy thing they insisted on calling democracy!

One guy, one guy thought he was a Communist, and maybe he was something else entirely.

One guy was a Communist because he dreamed of a freedom that wasn’t like what they had in America.

One guy was a Communist because he believed he could be happy in life only if other people were, too.

One guy was a Communist because he needed a push toward something new, because he felt the need for a different sort of morality.

Because maybe it was just an aspiration, a flight of fancy, a dream. Maybe it was nothing more than an impulse, the wish you could change things, to live a different kind of life.

One guy was a Communist because, when that impulse took you over, each one of us became more than just himself: it was like being two people in one. On the one hand, every single day, there was your personal toil. On the other, the feeling that you belonged to a tribe that longed to take wing and fly off toward a different kind of life.

No, no regrets. At the time, maybe, a lot of people spread their wings without really being able to fly, like a flock of theoretical seagulls.

And what about now?

Now we still feel torn in two. On the one hand, we’re men and women well-integrated into society, obsequiously moving through the squalor of our daily survival. On the other hand, we’re that seagull, who doesn’t have any intention to fly anymore. Because, by now, the dream has withered.

A double torment in a single body.

- Giorgio Gaber & Sandro Luporini
(from “E pensare che c’era il pensiero” [Just Think What We Used To Think], 1995)

Politician, Heal Thyself. With the AIDS Cure Act in Trouble, Who Will Cure the Curers?

2010-04-13T04:58:00.000-07:00

“Politician, Heal Thyself: With the AIDS Cure Act in Trouble, Who Will Cure the Curers?” Unpublished, 1994; reposted on the AIDS Info BBS, April 1998.

_______________________

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come. — Victor Hugo

Suppose they gave a cure for AIDS and nobody came.

After nearly ten years of largely dead-end research, a handful of toxic drugs of dubious merit, and a steady string of gloomy international AIDS conferences, the dawning of the 1990s seemed to have brought a new buzz to the air. Even old rivals in the AIDS-politics game suddenly found themselves in agreement: What AIDS needed was a completely fresh approach — new ideas, new ways of looking at the disease, a revitalization of research efforts, and a reassessment of whether AIDS money was actually going where it could do the most good.

In New York and in other AIDS centers across the country, a coalition of AIDS activists set out to provide exactly the fresh, innovative ideas that everybody was talking about. During President Clinton’s campaign, they pointed out, he had promised a “Manhattan Project for AIDS,” but the plan had gone no further than election-year rhetoric. They would provide the missing blueprint.

After two years of intensive national meetings, the AIDS Cure Project (originally called the Barbara McClintock Project to Cure AIDS) was born. The Project was a radical, even idealistic approach to the development of a cure for AIDS. It skewered pharmaceutical companies for their role in delaying AIDS research and attacked the NIH for its continued failure — despite eleven years of effort and billions of dollars in spending — to come up with so much as a workable model of AIDS pathogenesis.

The Project’s advocates demanded a coordinated, highly focused effort to find a cure for AIDS — what they dubbed “a new initiative” — that would be modeled on the Manhattan Project (which developed the atom bomb) and the Apollo Project (which put the first men on the moon). In May 1994, the AIDS Cure Act was introduced into Congress by Representative Jerrold Nadler (D- Manhattan). And there it has languished.

Far from rallying behind the AIDS Cure Act’s visionary reforms, in fact, the AIDS establishment — what not a few activists have cynically dubbed “AIDS, Inc.” — is doing everything it can to make sure the AIDS Cure Act doesn’t get far off the ground.

* * * * * * * * * *

To understand the impetus behind the AIDS Cure Project, it’s useful to know something about Barbara McClintock, the Project’s original namesake. A Nobel Laureate in genetics who died in 1992, McClintock spent her entire career studying corn. During her life, McClintock was perhaps most notable for two attributes: First, beginning in the 1930s — decades before the discovery of DNA — McClintock developed a series of novel theories of gene behavior that remain the cornerstone of modern genetics. And second, McClintock’s work was so far outside the scientific mainstream that it met almost universally with hostility and derision at the time it appeared. In fact, although McClintock’s most dramatic discoveries came in the early 1940s, she wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize for that pioneering work until 1983 — a long-delayed vindication for a scientist whose colleagues had openly called her a “kook.”

McClintock’s approach, say AIDS Cure Project organizers — intense commitment coupled with a focus on divergence rather than on statistical norms — is the only appropriate model for AIDS research in the 1990s.

With a philosophy like that, it’s no surprise that the AIDS Cure Project’s reforms, like McClintock’s work, fall outside the mainstream. In specific, the Project calls for the establishment of a research agenda that emphasizes a focused, basic-science effort to answer essential questions about AIDS pathogenesis; gives the Project broad legal powers to commandeer any other research project, after compensating the parties involved, if all other efforts to accelerate development of a promising drug have failed; and requires researchers to give up honoraria, stock dividends, lucrative consulting contracts with pharmaceutical companies, and income from any source that poses a conflict of interest with the Project’s work (researchers typically take out patents on cell lines, drugs, and tests that they develop, for example; the HIV-antibody test alone brings some $11 million a year in royalties to its patent holders).

Given reforms that would literally mean a revolution in medical research, it’s also no surprise that the first line of resistance to the Project is often philosophical. A certain battle-weary Realpolitik, that is, surfaces quickly in the face of the AIDS Cure Project’s optimistic, even utopian goals — and of its inherent critique of the status quo. To put it another way, the Project inspires conflict over two basic principles: the nature of reality and the likelihood of change.

In a 1990 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Larry Kramer, co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and of ACT UP, described the need for a “Manhattan Project” for AIDS in characteristically blunt terms. “Ten years into this plague,” Kramer wrote, “the Federal agencies dealing with AIDS are mired in such bureaucracy that it is next to impossible for them to respond to the crisis.... Paths of least resistance are the chosen norm. Imagination is not encouraged and exchange of vital information is often nonexistent.... The bureaucracy is so byzantine, nobody can or has to make a decision. Research is delayed not only by a lack of any coherent plan and mature guidance, but also by a lack of first-rate personnel.... Vital studies that many assume are being done are not. Conflict of interest is rampant....”

Tony Davis, a member of the New York AIDS Cure Project Working Group, brought Kramer’s analysis up to date in a recent interview. “I have little faith in the NIH’s ability to respond in any kind of emergency fashion (to AIDS),” he said. “What they have to offer are new improved deck chairs on the Titanic. Ergonomic deck chairs.”

But wait. Massachusetts Congressional Representative Barney Frank bristles when asked about the criticisms Project activists have leveled at AIDS researchers. “These are well-motivated, decent people,” he insists. “Frankly, I’m a little skeptical of those whose interest in this disease came only because they got the disease, and are then critical of people who’ve spent their whole lives and careers trying to find ways to cure disease.”

Professor Ed Tramont, Director of the Medical Biotechnology Department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and formerly the head of Infectious Diseases (including AIDS) for the U.S. Army, is also leery of proposals that tamper with the existing federal structure. “The perception that there is an uncoordinated or disjointed research agenda (at the NIH) is not true,” he says. “If you look at what the NIH has put together, it’s a network, with research going on in many different areas. Therefore, it has seeded the landscape and made it more probable that something good will happen eventually. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, but I don’t think that the criticisms I hear from (various) groups are well founded. I think progress (on a cure) has been extraordinary, to be honest.”

Discussions of the Project’s specific provisions, meanwhile, tend to turn subjunctive: If scientists had to give up conflicts of interest, might they stop doing AIDS research altogether? Wouldn’t pharmaceutical companies abandon AIDS if they knew the Project could step in and demand that they speed up their work?

And Mike Shriver, director of Mobilization Against AIDS, one of San Francisco’s most powerful AIDS-service organizations and one of the Project’s most vocal critics, argues that the Project could never realistically be funded. Says Shriver, “The Congressional will on HIV and AIDS right now is at an all-time low. In terms of the larger, philosophical approaches of the Project, we absolutely agree. But it’s a practical question. There simply isn’t going to be any new money for AIDS. “

In other words, to sum up the Frank’s, Tramont’s, and Shriver’s positions: We don’t need the AIDS Cure Project and, even if we did, it could never happen.

New York-based AIDS Cure Project organizer Mark Milano has been fielding criticisms like these for nearly two years. “In terms of comments that (the Project) won’t work,” he says, “I agree that it’s a big question mark. But the risk that this won’t work is a risk we have to take. Given (the operation of) the NIH and AIDS research the way it is now, we won’t have a cure for 50 years. We have to try something new. I can’t guarantee that the AIDS Cure Act will work. But I can guarantee you that the current system won’t.”

Ironically, even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, might agree with Milano’s assessment. In a June 1993 interview for the Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci summarized the search for an AIDS cure this way: “On a scale of 10,” he said, “we’re only at a ‘4’.”

* * * * * * * * * *

According to AIDS Cure Project supporters, community awareness — and a sense that those affected by AIDS are entitled to demand sweeping changes from government — is what is missing in the push for the Cure Act. Huge AIDS-service organizations like Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, AIDS Project Los Angeles, AIDS Action Baltimore, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, among others, have duly met with spokespeople for various regional Cure Project working groups — and have just as duly issued polite statements supporting the AIDS Cure Project’s “spirit” but refusing to endorse it. In most cities hard hit by AIDS, moreover, grassroots debate on the Cure Act has yet to take place. Even gay-community newspapers, traditionally on top of anything new in AIDS, have largely ignored the Cure Project.

San Francisco AIDS Cure Working Group member Michael Belafontaine thinks that’s no accident. He charges that powerful mainstream AIDS organizations across the country are actually stifling debate on the Cure Act.

“I came from Portland, Maine to be an AIDS activist,” he says, “thinking that to push AIDS legislation in SF would be the easiest thing I have to do. But we can’t even get (the AIDS Cure Act) out to the community to create a dialogue or grassroots movement because the people with access won’t allow it. If this community said, ‘Enough is enough. We are doing this,’ we’d have the AIDS Cure Project. Instead, mainstream AIDS organizations have become a new strata that activists have to push through.”

Mark Milano is perhaps no less frustrated, but he couches his criticisms in more moderate terms. “We understood from the beginning that mainstream AIDS organizations would have a tough time endorsing this,” he says. “It’s a radical proposal that calls into question the entire current structure — which they are deeply ensconced in.”

Many national AIDS organizations, it is true, simply have their irons in other fires. The New York-based Treatment Action Group (TAG), for example, has labored for years on various NIH reforms and its members now occupy key positions at many levels of federal AIDS bureaucracy (including on the National Task Force on AIDS Drug Development, established in early 1994 by HHS Secretary Donna Shalala).

San Francisco’s Project Inform, at the same time, has been advocating its own “mini-Manhattan” project through former AIDS “czar” Kristine Gebbie’s office, as well as a series of Office of AIDS Research reforms that have yet to take effect.

To its credit, Project Inform is virtually the only national AIDS-service organization to produce an analysis of the Project for public consumption (a two-page, point-by-point article in the June 1994 issue of its newsletter, PI Perspective), but PI still found more to dislike than to like in the Project and branded it “unworkable.” The article ended with a plug for the Accelerated AIDS Research Initiative, a 1993 model that PI was instrumental in developing.

In the Washington office of California Representative Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, whose district includes San Francisco and whose support is considered crucial by local Cure Project organizers, legislative aide Steve Morin explains that Pelosi’s refusal to co-sponsor HB 4370 or to endorse the AIDS Cure Project is due to the fact that “We have significant opposition in our district from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Mobilization Against AIDS, and Project Inform.”

Officially, however, PI, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and Mobilization Against AIDS say they don’t “oppose” the AIDS Cure Project at all — they just don’t endorse it. Still, in August 1994 the executive directors of all three organizations signed a widely circulated “Open Letter to the Community” that criticized the Project and attacked local working group members for being disruptive and threatening at a public meeting.

In San Francisco, that’s AIDS politics as usual. But while opposition to the Cure Project clearly exists in that city, there is also considerable support. In fact, San Francisco endorsers of the AIDS Cure Project include the Early Advocacy and Care for HIV Program, the Executive Directors of the Black Coalition on AIDS and of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, both chapters of ACTUP, the Green Party, the Metropolitan Community Church, Social Justice for Street Youth, the Gray Panthers, Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics, the entire San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, and Mayor Frank Jordan.

For Morin, however — and, evidently, for Pelosi — that’s not enough to tip the balance. And so, Morin repeats patiently, “There just isn’t consensus in favor of (the AIDS Cure Act) in San Francisco.”

* * * * * * * * * *

On the other side of San Francisco Bay, however, the “big three” evidently hold less sway. There, in the Cities of Oakland and Berkeley, both of which are located in Alameda County, some thirty organizations and individuals have endorsed the Project. They include the Mayors of Oakland and Berkeley, the Oakland City Council, and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Their elected representative to Congress, meanwhile — Ron Dellums — has not only endorsed the Project, he’s become an official co- sponsor.

These northern California supporters join AIDS-service organizations, National Organization for Women chapters, People With AIDS Coalitions, politicians, clergymembers, ACT UP groups, medical professionals, labor organizers, and others from Nevada, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Ohio, New Jersey, Arizona, Connecticut and a dozen other states in endorsing the Project. Washington State Congressional Representative Jim McDermott, author of the single-payer health plan, is an official co- sponsor of HR 4370, as are Major Owens, Charles Rangels, and 18 others from a total of nine states.

With that kind of support, why aren’t the big boys among mainstream AIDS organizations climbing on board — or, at least, working with the AIDS Cure Project to revise the provisions of the Cure Act that they find unpalatable?

“I understand why,” says Mark Milano. “When someone has been lobbying in Washington for years to try to get increased AIDS funding, they know it’s like pulling teeth. And as far as they’re concerned, it’s clear: There is no more money for AIDS. So when we come along and ask for $2 billion, their reaction is, ‘You’re idiots. You can’t do it.’ But what they essentially admit is that their efforts are not going to generate any more money. Precisely the reason they dislike us — that we’re visionary and radical — is the only reason we feel this thing has a chance of working.”

Barely concealing his frustration, Michael Belafontaine adds, “We have to demand what we know is right, not what someone decides is ‘reasonable.’ For months I’ve been hearing how politicians like Jesse Helms are going to savage this bill when they get their hands on it. Well, Jesse Helms is never even going to see it because his friends in this community are going to make sure that it never reaches the Senate floor.”

But Mark Milano is allowing himself a bit more optimism. HR 4370 became dormant when the 103rd Congress adjourned, and there’s still time to regroup before the bill is reintroduced. Tentative plans are underway for a meeting with national mainstream AIDS organizations to “hear their suggestions and problems ...and see how and if the Project should be modified.”

The AIDS Cure Project has, from the start, been a “working document,” Milano point out. “We’ve always been open to constructive suggestions. If someone has a better solution to the conflict-of-interest problem, we want to hear it. But the Project has to deal with that in some way. Similarly, we have to address the absolute power that drug companies have now, and what we’ve come up with is eminent domain. There has to be a way through the careerism and fiefdoms at the NIH. Our solution is to make (the Project) completely separate from NIH. If somebody has a better solution to those problems, please, we want to hear it.”

In the meantime, a graphic from one of the New York Working Group’s broadsides may most succinctly sum up the Project’s goals. Above a blank endorsement form runs a legend in bold, half-inch-high capitals. “There will never be a cure for AIDS,” it reads, “if we don’t cure the research.”

Self-Hatred or Proud History? The Boys in the Band: A Review Essay.

2010-03-07T04:27:00.000-08:00

Self-hatred or proud history? The Boys in the Band come back. Out/Look, Summer 1990, pp. 62-67.

_______________________

In the summer of 1967, when playwright Mart Crowley sat down to write The Boys in the Band, revolution was the last thing on his mind. Instead, after a series of setbacks in his career, and with the voices of childhood demons loud in his ears, Crowley says, he was “frustrated and angry and confused and just sick of it all! And I just struck out and wrote this play.”

For reasons that may have everything to do with destiny, however, by the time Boys in the Band premiered—in Spring 1968—revolution was just around the corner. After a brief workshop at Vandam Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, Boys in the Band officially opened on April 14, 1968 at Theatre Four, an Off-Broadway house on Manhattan > ’s , where it ran for 1001 performances. On June 27, 1969, just ten weeks after Boys’ second anniversary, Judy Garland died. And that night marked the beginning of the era called Stonewall.

At least partly because of the historical coincidence of Boys in the Band with the Stonewall riots, Crowley’s play was destined ever after to be evaluated in light of the new sensibilities of the liberated homosexual. For that reason, perhaps, Boys in the Band has achieved a unique and divided kind of significance. In the twenty-two years since it appeared on the stage, it has been marked in equal parts by fame and infamy.

Credited with helping to usher in the age of Stonewall, Boys has as often been denounced for setting gay lib back thirty years. While some have counted Crowley’s portrayals of gay men among the most homophobic representations in theatre history, others have applauded Boys as the first play to give genuine dimension to the lives of gay characters. And, in 1989, as if to put a fine point on the debate, the Alyson Almanac gave Boys in the Band top spot on its list of the “Worst Gay Plays of All Time.” Of that distinction, playwright Crowley wryly remarked, “Now they call it a gay play. Once upon a time, it was just a play.”

The Boys in the Band controversies were re-ignited last Winter when San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros mounted a wildly successful revival of Boys on its mainstage. Rhinoceros’s was the first-ever production of Boys by a gay theatre company. But no sooner had Rhinoceros announced the inclusion of Boys in the Band in its 1989-1990 season than angry letters came firing back. In one, printed as part of Rhinoceros’s program note for Boys, the anonymous writer promised never to patronize the theatre again and exhorted, “Return to the gay and lesbian affirmative path blazed by (Theatre Rhinoceros founder) Alan Estes. Shame!”

Shame, indeed. Boys in the Band appeared during an era of tremendous political and social upheaval in America, and at a time when minority consciousness was undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Shame and, in particular, homosexual shame was rapidly going out of style—being aggressively replaced, in fact, by gay pride. By the end of the 1960s, gay life—and gay theatre—had reached a watershed.

By now, thanks in large part to lesbian and gay historians and archivists, we know more than ever about the sociological, demographic, and cultural forces that shaped our pre-Stonewall history. Less well documented is the pre-Stonewall history of gay and lesbian theatre (or, perhaps more accurately, of more-or-less identifiable homosexual characters on the stage)—the kind of hidden-in-plain-sight representation that Vito Russo so admirably analyzed for the cinema in The Celluloid Closet.

One thinks first, of course, of the “homosexuality as dirty secret” school of drama, including such plays as The Children’s Hour (1934), Tea and Sympathy (1953), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958), among many others. These encoded, scandalous depictions of homosexuality often represented little more than what William Hoffman characterized as “winks across the footlights.”

By the mid- to late-1960s, however, the pathetic invert was daring to speak her or his name in person—The Killing of Sister George (1965) and Staircase (1966) come immediately to mind, as do Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1965), Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967), and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Latent Heterosexual (published in 1967 and not, as far as I know, ever produced). Although all of these plays were intended for mainstream audiences, and none of the portrayals of homosexual characters was flattering, they were, at least, a counter to invisibility.

But even that much presence was threatening and, as early as 1961, New York critics were decrying the homosexual encroachment in theatre. Even Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was taken as an emblem of that subversion--the attempt to camouflage a homosexual relationship within a heterosexual one (an interpretation that seems to have occurred to everyone but the playwright).

At the same time, unambiguously affirmative voices were raising themselves in alternative theater, leaving behind for good such portrayals and quasi-portrayals of homosexuals. Between 1958 and 1961, f0r example, playwrights at the Caffe Cino were producing club-style gay theatre for the Greenwich Village art crowd, and Cino became both a catalyst for the post-Stonewall gay theatre movement and a key player in the development of the Off- and Off-Off-Broadway scene—then, much more than today, an exuberant, vital force in American theatre. Some of Cino’s notable descendants include Al Carmines’ Judson Poets’ Theatre, LaMama Experimental Theatre Club, and The Glines.

Cino productions ran heavily toward versions of extant works by Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Genet, and other “gay” writers both ancient and modern. As such, Cino was perhaps better known for its gay sensibility (e.g., its popular drag version of Medea) than for its gay playwrights. Still, the talents of writers such as Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick, and Doric Wilson—to name perhaps the best known Cino graduates—were nurtured there. It was at Cino, in fact, that Lanford Wilson scored his earliest success (and a certain notoriety) with The Madness of Lady Bright (1964).

The second vital force in the growth of theatre produced by and for queer people was Ronald Tavel and John Vacarro’s PlayHouse of the Ridiculous, founded in 1966. The PlayHouse produced Charles Ludlam’s first play, Big Hotel and Tavel’s Gorilla Queen, as well as a series of campy, “low” theatre spectacles before a falling out sent Ludlam off to establish his own famous Ridiculous Theatre.

What is interesting about the plays produced by nascent gay theatres during the 1960s—and particularly the new work that came out of Cino—is that the plays’ themes were not necessarily what would be called “positive” today. Homosexual characters were sometimes suicidal, neurotic, or tormented; promiscuity and exploitative relationships were depicted as a dangerous potential of gay life; the homosexual milieu was often constituted as cross-genderism, sexual innuendo, and a more-or-less romantic fatalism. There were, of course, many exceptions, but the tacit understanding seemed to be that such views of the homosexual subculture might be explored—at least within the “closed circuit” of the gay Greenwich Village theatre-and-cafe crowd. Then, as now, setting made all the difference.

This was the theatre environment in which Boys in the Band made its debut. Significantly, Crowley shepherded his play onto the stage via none of the “gay” avenues available at the time. That chain of events, however, had less to do with any design of Crowley’s than with the professional connections he had formed by that time in his life.

Shortly after graduating from Washington, D.C.’s Catholic University of America, Crowley came to New York to take a position in Elia Kazan’s production company. When Kazan wasn’t filming, Crowley worked as an assistant for other movie crews that were shooting in Manhattan. His credits included pictures such as Butterfield 8, The Fugitive Kind, and Splendor in the Grass, during the course of which Crowley became friends with Natalie Wood. When Kazan’s company went on an extended hiatus during his research for the ill conceived America, America, it was Wood who suggested to Crowley that he move out to Los Angeles to look for work.

Crowley did just that, and picked up regular writing stints in Hollywood through the fateful summer of ‘67. That was the point, he recalls, when life came “crashing down around my ears.” Although Crowley had been delighted by the sale of his first screenplay to 20th Century Fox, the studio abruptly dropped the film in mid-production. A pilot he had written for Bette Davis was shot, but then abandoned by the producers. As a final blow, Crowley was fired from a screenwriting job at Paramount.

By that summer, Crowley recalls, “I was really broke, and very anxious, and emotionally pretty broken, too. I was over 30—and for some reason that seemed to be more depressing than ever. And I thought, oh God, I’ve blown all my chances and nothing is ever going to happen for me again.” As therapy and as a kind of retribution, he began to write Boys.

But writing Boys in the Band proved to be less than half the battle. When friends assured Crowley that the play couldn’t possibly be produced, he hand-carried his script to a agent. He recalls, “She said she would [read the play] only because she owed a favor to the man who sent me there. So I left her office, and about mid-way in the block (I came to) this rundown movie house, playing some Andy Warhol picture. And I went and sat through that while she read the play.”

When Crowley got back to the agent’s office, she “was like a changed woman. She sat at her desk, straightening pencils, and scooping up ashes into little piles and patting them down, and never once looking me in the eye. And she said, ‘I can’t stake my reputation on this. This is like some weekend at Fire Island!’

“By this time,” Crowley says, “I was almost in tears. This really was the end. So, just off the top of my head, I asked, ‘Do you know Richard Barr?’”

Barr and Clinton Wilder, of course, had produced Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s breakthrough drama and the winner of five Tony awards in 1963. Crowley didn’t know Barr, but he thought that “anybody who produced Virginia Woolf certainly wouldn’t be shocked by my play. And so I asked her, would you send it to him and at least get his opinion?” Somewhat less than graciously, the agent agreed.

The next day, it was a toss-up whether Crowley or the agent was more stunned when she phoned him to say, “Richard Barr and Edward Albee would like to have a drink with you. Can you go to Mr. Barr’s apartment tonight at 5:00?”

Crowley went and, although the meeting was cordial, “They didn’t say, ‘Yes, we want to do it.’ They thought they might consider doing it in the workshop—but everything went little by little by little. And Boys would have ended in the workshop. I mean, it was for free, just come in, first come first served. No seat reservations, no tickets, no nothing. The first night, nobody was there. But the second night, there was a line around the block! And it started pissing with rain, and the whole rest of the week it rained. And I said to Bob Moore, the director, ‘My God, the front of the theatre looks like the third act of Our Town!’ All those umbrellas. The New York intelligentsia began to descend on the play, and suddenly it was famous.”

Although the rain eventually did stop, the long lines continued for most of the next four seasons. Near the end of the first year, the original cast took the play to London, rturning to New York just in time to begin work on William Friedkin’s film version, the 1970 movie that exposed literally millions of people to Boys in the Band. Arguably, it was also through Friedkin’s direction that the most sensational, piteous aspects of Boys became its leitmotif.

Boys in the Band is set in the Manhattan apartment of Michael, the play’s protagonist and, because Boys is essentially a tragedy, its villain. The occasion is a birthday party that Michael is hosting for friend Harold. During the first act, the guests arrive—including, quite unexpectedly, Alan, a former college roommate of Michael’s. Alan is heterosexual and “square city,” and Michael has never come out to him, which makes Alan’s sudden arrival in the midst of the “freak show I’ve got booked for dinner” enough to push Michael to the brink.

Michael’s agitation is not helped when Alan punches Emory in the jaw or when the guest of honor arrives over an hour late. By the second act, the contained farce of the ruined party has darkened, and what follows is emotional grand guignol. Drunken and hostile, Michael savages his friends, forcing them to play a brutal telephone version of truth or dare in which they are brow-beaten into calling the one person they have ever truly loved and confessing their love to him. For Michael, the the exercise is meant largely as humiliation.

It was this ritualistic ego slaughter that Boys exposed to public scrutiny, along with a host of other “secrets” of homosexual life—Emory’s relentless effeminacy, for example, Michael’s obsession with Hollywood grandes dames, and Donald’s conviction that his fucked-up family turned him into a “queer.”

But there was more. During the course of the play, several characters fondly describe their trips to the baths; there are jokes about rimming. Larry and Hank, the play’s only intact couple, wage open war over the unlikelihood of male fidelity, even as other characters dredge up their pathetic and unrequited attachments to heterosexual men. Through it all, the melody of Michael’s malice and self-loathing is reaching crescendo, and he finally utters the play’s most malevolent line: “Show me a happy homosexual,” he bites out, “and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”

For gays, the shock of Boys in the Band wasn’t that Crowley dared to touch on these issues—they had been raised before and, in the explosion of gay-made theatre the followed B, they would be dealt with time and again. Rather, the discomfort of gay and lesbian audiences came because the play—particularly the movie—aired the dirty laundry of homosexual life in the most public forum imaginable. Once loose, the images could no longer be controlled, nor could reaction to them. Even today, that process terrifies many lesbians and gay men.

Over the course of the last 20 years, of course, Mart Crowley has heard every conceivable objection to the kind of homosexuality he allowed the public to see in Boys in the Band.

For whatever reasons,” Crowley says by way of response, “I just called ‘em as I saw ‘em! I wrote that play from my gut. I was writing for me—the truth as I saw it of the gay scene at that time. I did [Boys in the Band] at a point in my life when I felt I connected with my own times in a dynamic way. And I felt very sure of my material. Of course, I was living with a lot of gay people when I put this play on, and nobody said, “Oh, this rings so false. We can’t do this, this is a lie!” I never heard the word “stereotype” until years later.

If people think it’s a negative aspect of gay life, well that’s just the way I felt about it. I was a person who was forming. I’ve changed over the years like anybody else would. I’m not that person anymore. But all my own upbringing, the prejudices that I was exposed to, and certainly the Catholic guilt that was drummed into me all of my life all of it reached its apex at this exploding moment in the summer of 1967. And in a way, I was never the same after it, either. For one thing, I didn’t think about God anymore! And absolutely everybody knew about me, from that point on!

Once, Boys in the Band was a shock, and people were aghast at the very subject matter. Then, when that died down, and the sociologists got going, there was a kind of rejection. Now it’s come full circle: This is our past and it’s not to be denied. I think that’s some sort of maturity because I do think we can find pieces of ourselves there, maybe even pieces of ourselves that we don’t like. And through that maybe we can do something to change, saying I don’t want to be that way, I don’t want to do that to myself anymore.

But it’s just ridiculous to sweep under the carpet anything that we don’t want to believe is there in ourselves. If we’re going to have any kind of health, every aspect of our whole self ought to be admissible."

The San Francisco production, under the guidance of Theatre Rhinoceros’s Artistic Director, Ken Dixon, found answers to the “negativism” of Boys in the Band both in the text itself and in a renewed emphasis on the ensemble. What became apparent, as a result, was the chorus of reaction and rebuttal that Michael’s friends provide to his acts of malice.

As Dixon pointed out when Boys opened in San Francisco, “When Bernard is broken up about having called the boy he was in love with, Emory is there to see that he gets home, to make him coffee, and tell him everything is going to be all right. Harold, even after he tells Michael off, makes a point of coming back to tell Michael, ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’ And after everything, Michael asks Donald, ‘Will I see you on Saturday,’ and Donald says, ‘Yes, if you don’t have any other plans.’ So they haven’t destroyed each other [and it isn’t] like they’re never going to see each other again.”

The other essential point to be made is that Larry, when he calls Hank on Michael’s private extension and tells him that he loves him, wins the telephone game. Hank and Larry are the specific counterpoint to Michael’s belief that to love is to be humiliated, and to his assumption that no one at his party could love anyone who loved him back. Significantly, the only other winner of the game, Alan, totes up the same number of points as Larry. At the play’s end, he firmly closes the door on Michael and returns to his wife, even as the reconciling Larry and Hank go upstairs and close the bedroom door. In most discussions of Boys in the Band, that parallelism is ignored.

But questions of “image,” of stereotype and representation have continued to haunt Boys in the Band, as they have done gay and lesbian theatre generally throughout the two decades since Stonewall. All “minority” groups seem to reach a stage in the creation of their public identities—of which theatre is a vital tool—during which the forces of assimilation do battle with advocates of cultural separatism. For both sides of the argument, mainstream media depictions (which are sometimes the only public images of the group) always come to be evaluated in light of how well or poorly they convey whatever meaning the group in question considers politically expedient.

Such a burden is a nearly impossible one for art to bear, and “minority” theatres have, to a certain extent, all been plagued by internal censorship that is sometimes far more severe than anything from outside. Such criticisms became quite heated, for example, when George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum premiered in 1986—both because the content of the play was critical of white-created and black-created images of blacks and because the discourse was placed in front of white audiences in mainstream theatres.

It would be difficult to argue in any objective way that Boys’ Michael is a more appalling “representative” of his breed than Martha (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Hedda Gabler, or Eddie Carbone (A View From the Bridge) are of theirs. One can scarcely imagine the stage without the cataclysmic heterosexual jealousy of Othello, or the cannibalistic lust and amorality that cripple Chance Wayne and Miss Del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth. Yet, in all of these instances, the “negative” qualities of the characters are seen as organic and broad. Michael’s flaws can similarly be seen as simply theatrical—familiar (if painful) without being representational.

At the same time, whether it is loved or hated, Boys in the Band has provided a standard by which gay theatre has often measured itself—whether through imitation or renunciation. For better or worse, gay theatre and gay politics were irrevocably linked by Stonewall, and Boys in the Band served as a lightening rod for energies that soon after exploded into a lavender stage revolution. Boys in the Band, that is, assumed a social context for gay life that was large enough to encompass a dialogue about gay life, that could take gayness, so to speak, as the occasion for a larger examination of social function and dysfunction, of love’s wounds and friendship’s balm, and of the implications of personal choice.

That may be what makes Crowley proud of the New York Times review he received from Clive Barnes in 1968: “The point is that this is not a play about a homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual way of life totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis for human experience.”

Modern gay and lesbian theatre, meanwhile (by which I mean audiences and playwrights, as well the institution itself), finds itself striving to build a house large enough to contain the need for visibility; the requirements of the political discourse against homophobia; the concomitant protest against the constraints of gay-created images; the demands of art; and the dialectic of trendy excursions into and away from isolation, assimilation, self-criticism, and celebration of gay and lesbian lives. In all that, there is no chance of pleasing all of the people even some of the time.

Theatre Rhinoceros’s revival of Boys in the Band, and reactions to it, points toward the tasks that lie ahead of lesbian and gay playwrights. Indeed, just as Crowley suggests, lesbian and gay theatre cannot be held hostage by the demand for “positive” images, as if lesbian and gay identity could withstand anything but a challenge.

The best theatre, it has been said, holds a mirror up and invites audiences to take a close look; but if the main function of gay theatre is to reproduce the ways in which lesbians and gay men want to see themselves, then the face is the mirror is a stranger, and the stranger wears a mask.

^{^[1]} A notable recent example is Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s After the Ball, in which the authors prescribe an elaborate, if totalitarian, course of conduct for the control and sanitizing of public images of homosexuality.

Boys in the Band's Mart Crowley on his 'Gorgeous Little Monster'

2010-03-07T03:30:00.000-08:00

"Talking Truth: Boys in the Band author Mart Crowley on his 'Gorgeous Little Monster.'" Bay Area Reporter, February 8, 1990, p. 35.

_______________________

For more than twenty years, playwright Mart Crowley has lived in the light and the shadow of Boys in the Band. When it premiered on Easter Sunday 1968, Crowley’s play fired a shot heard around the world—a shot that echoed with particular force in the gay world. During Boys’ opening weeks, gay New Yorkers stood on blocks-long ticket lines, waiting in the streets to get their first glimpses of real, three-dimensional homosexual characters on stage. Just over a year later, they were rioting in those same streets. Gay life—and gay theatre—had reached a watershed.

Today, the phenomenal success of Theatre Rhinoceros’s revival of Boys in the Band, now extended through February 24th, is rekindling the questions raised by the original production. In creating Boys in the Band was Mart Crowley “taking the homosexual way of life totally for granted and using it as a valid basis for human experience,” as Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times? Or was Crowley merely airing the dirty laundry of gay life in public? In short, as many have often wondered, Is Boys in the Band friendly?

Crowley, now 54, lives and works as a screen- and television-writer in Los Angeles, his home for over twenty-five years. But in the summer of 1967, Crowley recalls, when he sat down to write Boys in the Band, life was “crashing down around my ears.” Although he had been elated by the sale of his first screenplay to 20th Century Fox, the studio abruptly dropped the film in mid-production. A pilot Crowley had written for Bette Davis was shot, but then abandoned by the producers. As a final blow, Crowley was fired from a screenwriting job at Paramount.

By that summer, he says, “All steam had run out. I was really broke, and very anxious, and emotionally pretty broken, too. I was over 30—and for some reason that seemed to be more depressing than ever. And I thought, oh God, I’ve blown all my chances and nothing is ever going to happen for me again.

“At the time I wrote (Boys in the Band)—and I think I’ve said this in a thousand interviews—I was frustrated and angry and confused, and I just struck out and wrote this play. I was sick of it all! And people really thought that I was having a nervous breakdown that summer, I think.”

But writing Boys in the Band proved to be less than half the battle. After reading the play, friends assured Crowley that it couldn’t possibly be produced. Determined nonetheless, Crowley hand-carried his script to a New York agent, armed only with a mutual friend’s recommendation. There, he found the reception equally chilly.

The agent agreed to read the script, Crowley recalls, “strictly as a favor to the man who sent me there. I was only in town for a day or so, and I had no money and nowhere to go. I remember I left her office, and about mid-way in the block was this rundown movie house, playing some Andy Warhol picture. And I went and sat through that while she read the play.

“When I came back, she was a changed woman. She sat at her desk, straightening pencils, and scooping up ashes into little piles and patting everything down, and never once looking me in the eye. And she said, ‘I don’t know anyone I can send this to. This is like some weekend at Fire Island!’

“By this time,” Crowley says, “I was almost in tears. This really was the end. So, just out of the top of my head, I asked, ‘Do you know Richard Barr?’”

Barr and Clinton Wilder, of course, had produced Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s breakthrough drama and the winner of five Tony awards in 1963. Although Crowley didn’t know Barr, he was betting that such a man wouldn’t balk at Boys in the Band.

The next day, it was a toss-up whether Crowley or the agent was more stunned when she phoned him to say, “Richard Barr and Edward Albee would like to have a drink with you. Can you go to Mr. Barr’s apartment tonight at 5:00?”

Crowley went—and, “little by little,” plans began to materialize for a workshop production of Boys in the Band in Barr and Wilder’s Playwrights Unit. Boys might have ended in that five-day workshop, except for one small miracle—audiences were wild about the play. “The first night,” Crowley says, “I don’t think anybody was there. But the second night, there was a line around the block. The New York intelligentsia (began to) descend on the play. And suddenly it was famous.”

Boys in the Band moved to Theatre Four a few months later, where it ran for 1001 nights. The original cast took the play to London, and returned to New York just in time to begin work on William Friedkin’s film version. Meanwhile, stage productions of Boys have continued all over America and internationally; within the last five years, for example, Boys in the Band has appeared in theatres in Italy, Spain, and Japan.

Boys in the Band has, in short, influenced a generation of lesbians and gay men—and a generation of lesbian and gay playwrights and writers. For nearly everyone, however, Crowley’s relentless portrait of Michael, Boys’ guilty, self-destructive protagonist, is wrenching. But Crowley sees no cause for revision or apology. “Listen,” he says, “for whatever reasons, I just called ‘em as I saw ‘em. That play, I wrote from my gut. I felt I was writing for me—the truth as I saw it of the gay scene at that time.

“I was a person who was forming. I had the same sort of negative feelings about myself as anybody else, and I wanted to come out of that. But all my upbringing—the prejudices that I was exposed to, and certainly the religious Catholic guilt that was drummed into me all of my life—all of it reached its apex for me at this exploding moment in the summer of 1967.

“Certainly there were elements of (Michael) in me. But I don’t think that Michael is everybody else in the play. That’s one way (the play) has been falsely accused over the years. I always felt that I had other aspects as well, and they were reflected in the attitudes of the other characters.”

As Boys in the Band approaches its twenty-third birthday, Crowley admits he doesn’t know “what keeps making this play a success. I don’t ask people to put it on. I don’t ask people to come to see it. Or to say nice things or bad things about it. It just happens. It seems to have a life of its own now, and I don’t even have to worry about defending it. And that’s terrific for me. It’s very, very rewarding to know that you’ve created this gorgeous little monster that won’t die!”

Crowley concludes, “I do think we can still find pieces of ourselves (in Boys in the Band)—maybe even pieces that we don’t like. And through that maybe we can do something to change, saying ‘I don’t want to do that to myself anymore.’ But a sane, healthy look at one’s whole self has to include all the aspects. It’s ridiculous to sweep under the carpet parts of ourselves that we don’t want to believe are there.”

Slings and Arrows: They Always Come from the Left

2010-02-05T01:19:00.000-08:00

by Massimo Gramellini
English translation by Wendell Ricketts
From La Stampa.it [or download .pdf here]

After yesterday’s proclamation by the Boss, we’ve finally got a clear picture of where things stand. Italian judges are Leftists, which is nothing new. Public television, with the exception of Topo Gigio, is Leftist. Seventy-two percent of newspapers are Leftist (not 71 and not 73: 72%; He said it himself). The Constitutional Court is Leftist; the Quirinale, where the President of the Italian Republic lives, is Leftist; referees and umpires are almost always Leftists. Cops who hand out traffic tickets are Leftists. The teachers who give my son “Ds” are Leftists; the neighbor who stinks up our entire building with whatever he’s frying is a Leftist; the woman who stole my parking place is a Leftist, just like the Queen in Snow White, Veronica Lario (Berlusconi’s second wife), and the Constitution: Leftists, every single one.

The alarm clock that wakes you up at 7am is Leftist; having to shave is Leftist; coffee without sugar is Leftist; traffic jams and holes in my socks are Leftist; my hateful boss is a Leftist; my wife nagging me about the errands she wants me to run is an extreme Leftist. The lottery is Leftist, otherwise I’d win. Foreigners, professional comedians, and black cats are Leftists. Paid escorts are Leftists, but only the ones who can’t keep their mouths shut afterward. Cavour (Italy’s first prime minister in 1861) was a Leftist, but so were Indro Montanelli and Frederick I, if that’s the issue. Gianfranco Fini is a Leftist and the weather forecast is, too, at least if it predicts rain. Even I become a Leftist when I have trouble digesting my stewed bell-peppers. In Italy, there’s only one disaster that isn’t Leftist, and that’s the Left.

P.S. Long live Italy, long live Berlusconi! (yes, He said that, too!)

Affront to Rosy Bindi Exposes the “Philosophy of the Exploiter”

2010-02-03T01:34:00.001-08:00

Silvio Berlusconi (linked via telephone on live television): Ah, is that the voice of Signora Rosy Bindi I hear?

Bruno Vespa: Yes, and she's saying that your comments present a really serious problem....

Berlusconi: As usual, she's prettier than she is intelligent.

Bindy: Mr. President, evidently I'm not one of those women who's at your disposal.

October 7, 2009 exchange between Premier Berlusconi and Rosy Bindi, MP and Vice-President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, on the Italian political talk-show, Porta a Porta.

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You'd need a little background to fully appreciate the rage in Chiara Saraceno's article from today's La Repubblica, "Affront to Rosy Bindi Exposes the 'Philosophy of the Exploiter.'” But then again, maybe not all that much.

But you have to take a minute to get the full impact here. This is the leader of the entire country, the Italian Premiere, insulting the Vice President of the lower house of Parliament for (a) not being pretty and (b) not being smart. On national television. In front of literally millions of people. Roberto Castelli, Vice Minister for Infrastructure and Transportation, also present on the program, followed Berlusconi's shrewish and dismissive comment with a jibe of his own--Bindi was a nagging old maid, he opined.

Berlusconi's zingers and idiotic one-liners would fill a book (and I don't know why they haven't)--such as his comments about how he and Obama were so much alike because they were both "handsome and had a tan" or, in 2003, before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, when he "joked" to the socialist parliamentarian Martin Schulz, who had just finished (as they say) tearing Berlusconi a new one for Italy's racist immigration policies and failure to pursue cross-border extraditions: "Mr. Schulz, I know a production company in Italy that's in the process of filming a movie about the concentration camps. I'd like to recommend you for the role of kapo."

You get the picture.

So here's Saraceno's OpEd in translation. I hope her article--which is reproducing on the internet faster than mold on cheese--marks the start of something.

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Affront to Rosy Bindi Exposes the “Philosophy of the Exploiter.”

Silvio Berlusconi has always claimed to “adore women.” But he loses all sense of decency the minute one of them dares to contradict him.

by Chiara Saraceno
English translation by Wendell Ricketts

The Premier who “adores women,” as he so graciously told a Spanish journalist who asked him about his social life, loses not only his mind but all evidence of civility and decency the moment a woman, one of his colleagues in Parliament and the Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies, dares to criticize him. In the eternal locker room in which he seems to feel so at ease when it comes to talking about women or to women, it’s not enough to insult them in a general way—as baby-eating Communists, for example, the way he generally does with opponents of the same sex.

Instead [when he and Bindi locked horns on Porta a Porta], he couldn’t stop himself from basing his expression of scorn in an aesthetic judgment. In so doing, Berlusconi—who, by the way, is himself unattractive, dyed, and heavily lifted, in addition to being rather on the elderly side—confirmed that, as far as he’s concerned, women fall into two categories: the ones he finds pleasant to look at, who are potentially exploitable (if they haven’t already been exploited), and in whom intelligence is an optional accessory. (Or, if it' isn't optional, at least it doesn't stand in the way of their duty to hold him in fawning high regard).

And then there are all the rest. Women who are older or not conventionally beautiful are acceptable only if they are adoring. If they are not, the axe of judgment falls and they’re cast into the land of nonexistence.

Senator Roberto Castelli, floor leader of the Lega Nord [the Northern League], contributed his variant on this same locker room mentality, choosing to characterize Bindi via the classic topos of the old maid. As if a woman without a man were automatically unloved and unwanted rather than simply being an individual who had chosen not to have a partner (wisely so, one might be tempted to say, if men like Castelli are examples of what is available on the market).

For members of the Lega Nord, evidently, women must be prohibited from covering their faces or their heads for religious reasons, but the old saw from the depths of the Veneto Region remains true: “Che la tosa la tasa, che la piasa, che la staga a casa” [roughly, “woman: keep your mouth shut, your man happy, and your self at home”].

That attitude isn’t very distant from the one held by the traditionalist Muslim men from whom the proud members of the Northern League consider themselves so different.

Rosy Bindi was quick-witted enough to respond to the insult by observing that she was obviously not one of the women who belonged to Berlusconi’s “available and exploitable” category. But she is the only one who has reacted to Berlusconi’s and Castelli’s boorishness. Though there were a few embarrassed faces, not one of the men who were present, including the host of the show, Bruno Vespa, felt it was his duty to distance himself from the sort of gravely sexist language and behavior that makes it difficult for the few women who are, rarely, given the opportunity to participate in public discourse (Bindi was the only woman present on Porta a Porta that evening, on a stage full of men).

Not one of the many more-or-less elderly, flabby, unattractive, nipped-and-tucked men who populate Italian politics need ever fear being insulted or robbed of his dignity on the basis of those physical factors by anyone he deals with, no matter how heated the interaction becomes.

The silence (the embarrassed, cowardly silence of collaborators) of the men who are Berlusconi’s allies (just as of those who are his political opponents), of men in political life (just as of those in the media) is a crucial political issue that must be faced because it indicates how deeply the roots of sexism have been planted in our country’s culture. We can hardly forget that, in Spain, President Zapatero was attacked in the press simply because he stood silently by during one of Berlusconi’s road shows (on that occasion, Berlusconi explained just how he would extend the concept of hospitality if he found himself in the company of a beautiful and potentially available woman).

But there is another disturbing silence: the silence of the women in Berlusconi’s own governing party, starting with his cabinet ministers. Their voices are raised solely when their boss calls them to order so they can defend him against one or another of the scandals in the ongoing parade: his promises to put showgirls in political office, eighteen-year-old Noemi’s birthday party, all those carefree goings-on at his Villa Certosa mansion in Sardinia. But not one of them has distanced herself from the image of women—and of themselves as politicians and as ministers—that emerges from their passionate defense of their boss.

The Minister of Equal Opportunities, Mara Carfagna, is the most notably silent, although it would presumably be her institutional duty to put in a word. Whatever the reasons that led her to be offered a position as Minister, she ought to make an effort to remember that equal opportunity is not a beauty pageant. And that we can’t permit a bunch of old letches, no matter how rich and powerful they may be, to pronounce judgment on what women are and what they’re capable of, age and beauty standards aside.

Allowing a colleague to be insulted, even if she’s a member of the opposition, for reasons that having nothing whatever to do with politics and everything to do with sexism is a serious mistake, and women are all paying the price for it.

Alvin and the “Immigrant Student Quota”

2010-02-03T01:13:00.000-08:00

This is the first of two articles by Leonardo Tondelli on the subject of the "immigrant quotas" established recently in Italian public schools by the Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini. Part Two, "I'm Dreaming of An (All-)White Classroom" is available here.

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Alvin and the “Immigrant Student Quota”
by Leonardo Tondelli
English translation by Wendell Ricketts
[Read the original in Italian here.]

I have a theory. If we want to understand the true impact of Minister of Education Mariastella Gelmini’s new quota system (yeah, that quota—the 30% limit on immigrant students in public-school classrooms), we need to try to get inside the head of one of the guys who most favored the idea of quotas: an Average Lega-Nord-Voting Working Stiff ^FN1 (from here on out, just to keep things simple, we’ll call him Alvin).

Alvin is not a racist—just ask him. In fact, one of the trainees down at his shop is from Moldavia. He’s a good guy and he minds his own business. But ever since Alvin, Jr. started his first year of middle school, Alvin is having a hard time digesting this business of immigrant kids in Italian school classrooms.

At the beginning, everything seemed normal. Sure, Alvin, Jr. occasionally dropped some odd name or other when he came home with one of his “what I did at school today” tales, but Alvin has a lot of Italian friends who’ve chosen to name their kids Brandon or Sharon or whatever. And then, during the very first parent-teacher meeting of the year, the teachers told Alvin and his wife, “The group that Alvin, Jr. is in ... well, it's quite a handful.” But they wouldn’t be teachers if they didn’t find something to complain about, right?

The real shock didn’t come until Alvin saw his son’s photos from the first class excursion of the year. What he immediately realized was that his son’s class was a zoo. Three Africans, each one blacker than the next. Some sort of Martian with a cowl over his head (“No, Dad, he’s from India, but he’s a Sikh”). An indeterminate number of Romanians, Poles, and who knows what else. Six or seven out of twenty-seven.

“It’s a multicultural group. A marvelous opportunity for your son,” the teacher told Alvin. The same teacher who’d said it was a difficult class. As far as Alvin was concerned, something stunk. If multicultural classes were really such a marvelous opportunity, how come his neighbor, the engineer, didn’t have his daughter in one, too? She’s the same age as Alvin, Jr., but she seems a lot more advanced. His wife told Alvin it was nothing to worry about: girls always do better in school than boys.

One morning, as Alvin was drinking coffee at his local café, though, he couldn’t hold back any longer, and he started in on the school situation with the engineer. Eventually, of course, they wound around to the fateful topic, immigrant students in their kids’ classes....

His liberal-minded neighbor had his answer ready. “They’re better students than the Italians,” he said. “In my daughter’s class, for example, there’s this Hungarian kid who’s a real whiz with computers, you know?”

“There is? Sure, but there’s also the ones ... I mean, some of them are having a hard time even learning Italian, which slows down the rest of the class. Your daughter must have some classmates like that, too.”

“No, not that I know of.”

And that’s how it came to light that Alvin, Jr. had eight immigrant classmates but the engineer’s daughter only had one (the computer genius).

“Of course,” Alvin’s wife said. “The engineer enrolled his kid in the bilingual German class.”

“Why? They don’t allow foreign kids in that class?”

“Theoretically, I don’t suppose there’s any reason why they wouldn’t.”

“So why aren’t there more of them?”

“Because German is a tough language. Besides, there’s a waiting list.”

“A waiting list?”

“Not much gets by you, does it?”

“No, I mean ... they have a waiting list to study German in a middle school? What’s so special about the German class?”

“Maybe it’s that all the pupils are white.”

And voilà, the mystery was revealed. There hadn’t been any invasion of immigrant students. The problem was that they’d all been concentrated in a small number of classes, one of which was Alvin, Jr.’s. In the other classes (Alvin had checked the role sheets posted outside the classrooms when school started in September), kids with foreign names were extremely rare. That was when something in Alvin finally snapped. Or maybe it was when he heard his son’s teacher say for the fifth time that Alvin, Jr.’s group was falling behind in its program. Whatever it was, the first chance he got, Alvin voted for the Lega Nord.

When his guys in parliament proposed instituting so-called “transition classes” (a separate, remedial-Italian track where foreign students would remain until they demonstrated sufficient language skills to join the normal educational program), he got into a heated argument at his usual table at the café. “It’s the return of Racial Laws!” the engineer thundered. “The truth of the matter is that you’re all terrified of foreigners, even though a lot of the time they’re sharper than our own kids.”

A few months later, the Lega Nord started talking about quotas, and the engineer predicted that forced deportations couldn’t be far behind. But guys like the engineer always have something to say about everything. Because they’re Communists. Alvin, though, the more he thinks about it, the more it seems reasonable. Finally (he thinks), immigrant kids won’t be piled up in one or two “classroom concentration camps” but distributed fairly throughout the school. And Alvina, Alvin, Jr.’s sister, who’s starting middle school in September, won’t end up in another ghetto of illiterates. Way to go, Gelmini!

Next Fall, though, when Alvin reads the role sheets outside the newly formed classrooms, he’s going to have a heart attack. Out of twenty-nine students in Alvina’s class, sixteen have foreign surnames. And at that point, he’s going to go ask the Principal: “What’s going on here? Are we being invaded? What happened to the quotas? It must be true what people are saying, that this school is nothing but a den of Reds where you ignore Ministry of Education regulations whenever you feel like it!”

And what’s the Principal going to tell him? “First of all,” (he’ll say) “please let me reassure you. A multicultural classroom like your daughter’s is a marvelous opportunity.”

“Blah blah blah. I’ve already heard this song. What I want to know is how come you’re refusing to abide by the immigrant-student quotas.”

“But we do abide by the quotas. There are nine immigrant students in your daughter’s class.”

“That’s still more than there were three years ago! What about the quota?”

“The quota is 30%. The problem is that, as a result of budget cuts, classroom size has grown larger. There are thirty students in your daughter’s class, and 30% of thirty is nine. We’re within the quota.”

“Hold on a sec ... right here, I’m reading at least sixteen last names that aren’t Italian. Not nine. Sixteen.”

“Naturally, because the class also includes students who come from immigrant families but who were born in Italy. Minister of Education Gelmini has made it clear that those students aren’t to be counted in the quota.”

“Ah, you don’t count them.”

“No.”

“Okay, but why do they all have to end up in the same class as my kids? I mean, it’s not like I’m some racist, but I don’t understand what’s going on here. How come you don’t put a few here, a few there.... For example, why don’t you put some here in Classroom A?”

“Classroom A is studying German....”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. There’s a waiting list. What about Classroom B?”

“B is working on musical experimentation.”

“So? Are all the immigrant kids tone deaf?”

“No, but there’s a waiting list for that group as well.”

“What about Classroom C?”

“That’s a high-demand group. They don’t come back after lunch for the afternoon session. It’s for children who are involved in a lot of extracurricular activities. You know, swimming, horseback riding....”

“There’s a wait for that one, too?”

“Let’s just say that immigrant students aren’t involved in as many extracurricular activities. I hope our little chat has cleared things up.”

It sure has. Things in Alvin’s mind are clearer now than ever. It’s not Minister Gelmini’s fault. She did what she could. The real problem is that these Communists are devils. Pass a law, find the flaw. They make sure their kids study German or learn the flute, take horseback lessons ... anything to keep them away from the colored kids. And Alvin’s children are the ones who are paying for it. Damn those Communists. Their day is going to come though. The minute our guys manage to get into power....

January 18, 2010

_____________________________________________________________

^FN1Once a slightly marginalized, radical far-right party dedicated mainly to the secession of a large swatch of Northern Italy from the rest of the country, the Lega Nord (the Northern League) has come to play an extremely powerful and influential role in Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling Popolo della Libertà (the People of Freedom) coalition, including the control of four cabinet-level ministries (Interior, Legislative Simplification, Agriculture, and Reforms and Federalism) and five under-secretariats (Infrastructure and Transportation, Interior, Economy and Finances, Health, and Legislative Simplification). The Lega Nord is directly responsible for Italy’s increasingly draconian approach to immigration, the closing of mosques and, at various local levels, the creation of public bus services for Italian citizens only, proposals to legalize armed neighborhood posses designed to “increase public security,” and door-to-door roundups of illegal immigrants. For more on the Lega Nord, see Dreaming of a White Christmas, What If It’s True We Get the Politicians We Deserve?, None Dare Call It Racism, and One Ronde Doesn’t Mean It’s Spring, or visit Wiki’s Lega Nord page (in English)—most of it is obviously a translation of an Italian page sympathetic to the Lega, but go to the bottom to see information about “Violent Rhetoric” and “Accusations of Xenophobia.” For more on Minister Gelmini and her educational reforms, see The Monster Reduction and Simplification Act.

I’m Dreaming of An (All-)White Classroom

2010-02-03T01:10:00.001-08:00

This is the second of two articles by Leonardo Tondelli on the subject of the "immigrant quotas" established recently in Italian public schools by the Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini. Part One, "Alvin and the Immigrant Student Quota" is available here.

************

I’m Dreaming of An (All-)White Classroom
by Leonardo Tondelli
English translation by Wendell Ricketts
[Read the original in Italian here.]

A kindergarten in Luzzara (Province of Reggio Emilia) ended up in the media spotlight last October when its principal decided he had no choice but to set aside a classroom exclusively for immigrant children. Responding to critics who accused him of racial segregation, the principal pointed out that, faced with a student body in which immigrant children accounted for 75% of the enrollment, he didn’t have many alternatives. At that point, the media’s indignation over this flagrant episode of apartheid began to be tinged with panic: were there really that many immigrants in Luzzara?

Most people missed a significant detail. In this very small town (of less than 10,000 inhabitants), there is another school no more than a few meters distant from the one in question. That school is attended almost exclusively by Italian children. Specifically, it’s the parochial school of the local Catholic parish. Separate but equal, it goes without saying, and likewise financed by the town. Unlike its public counterpart, the parochial school has no obligation to enroll immigrant children, though it has been kind enough to admit a few ... eight, to be precise.

I mention the Luzzara episode because it so perfectly illustrates my theory: for every “classroom ghetto” with a high percentage of immigrant students, there’s another class somewhere (possibly no more than a few meters away) in which all the students are white. Nobody ever says a thing about it; they’re those classes you never see on the TV news (where, instead, pupils are invariably multiethnic) and which never merit a mention in the newspapers.

On the other hand, they’re also the classes that everyone wants their children to be admitted to. There’s almost always a waiting list. And they’re not necessarily Catholic or private schools, either—quite a few public schools have their all-white classrooms, too. Of course, they don’t refer to them that way. In the “Guide to Our Programs and Educational Philosophy” (the brochure given out to clients—excuse me, to parents), schools talk about their “special” or “experimental” classrooms, about a more rigorous approach to foreign-language education, or about their unique advanced-placement courses. The important thing is for there to be a list: it’s the easiest way to insert a selection mechanism into the enrollment process.

The parents who understand how this works and get their children admitted to classes of this kind aren’t necessarily the most affluent. They’re just people who want the best for their children. Most of the time, they don’t even entertain the possibility that there may be something racist in what they’re doing: they don’t have anything against immigrants, they just don’t want their kids to end up in one of those classes where there are eight or nine of them ... one of those infamous “classroom ghettos.”

And here’s where the snake starts swallowing its own tail. A classroom ghetto can exist only because across the street—or across the hall, or maybe in the very next room—there is an all-white class. Without the one, the other has no reason to exist. Italian public schools are not under invasion. Nationally, for every hundred Italian students, there are barely seven immigrants (though it is true that the concentration is higher in the North of the country and in larger cities). Instead, it appears that there are 514 primary schools nationwide (out of 18,539) in which the number of immigrant students exceeds 30%. What’s going to happen in those schools now that Minister of Education Mariastella Gelmini has drawn her 30% line in the sand?

It’s difficult to imagine that excess immigrant children will be loaded onto school buses and carried off to another school (perhaps in a nice, quiet residential area). That’s because such an approach necessarily means that a different school bus will be called upon to make the same trip in the opposite direction, dropping off some sweet white child at a school in a “problematic” neighborhood. Busing of that sort would be a lightning rod for criticism from the Left or the Right, but most important of all: it would cost money.

The sleight-of-hand behind all this has already been revealed by Minister Gelmini, who quickly made it clear that the 30% quota was not intended to include children born in Italy to immigrant families. We’re to understand, one gathers, that second-generation immigrants (a third of the total) are already perfectly integrated. And that’s a stroke of luck because, in other countries such as France or Great Britain, the prerequisites for racial unrest are found precisely in the identity crises of the second generation. For Gelmini, however, the second generation doesn’t need to be counted, so the problem ceases to exist.

There are, in addition, another thousand schools or so in which immigrant students make up between 20% and 30% of the total. Here the Gelmini Quota, rather than avoiding classroom ghettos, would serve to institutionalize them. From now on, principals and schools boards are on notice that they can pile immigrant students into designated classrooms as long as they don’t exceed more than 30% of the total (nine out of a class of thirty). That way, there’s no risk of creating a “ghetto.” Besides, the brochure says it in black and white: it’s not a ghetto as long as a classroom contains no more than one immigrant child in every three. Pay attention, though: We’re talking about immigrant children born abroad. Which leaves the door open to adding additional children from immigrant families as long as those children were born in Italy. As we’ve already seen, second-generation children aren’t counted for purposes of the quota.

Here’s an example. Let’s imagine a small school with five classrooms designed to hold thirty students each; and let’s assume, in a student body of 150, that twenty-seven immigrant children enroll. If the goal were truly integration, the best solution would be to assign them evenly to existing classes—about five students each.

In fact, Minister Gelmini could have asked schools to divide immigrant students evenly among the number of classrooms they had available; that would have been a reasonable criterion. But she didn’t. She decided it was preferable to invent a “quota” which, in the case of our example, makes it possible to concentrate all the immigrant students into three groups (that is, nine in each classroom), allowing the other two groups to be taught in All-White, Immigrant-Free Classrooms.

Sure, sooner or later some parent is going to complain about this. But which ones? Those parents who don’t understand the way certain things work, who didn’t know about the waiting lists, who had reservations about enrolling their child in a group that was too demanding. And, of course, immigrants themselves will have something to say about it (immigrant parents in Luzzara protested against the new classroom formations as well).

Principals can safely inform these parents (who include our friend, Alvin) that everything’s just fine, that the 30% groups may be a little rambunctious but the system is working, that their children may have fallen slightly behind but will certainly catch up, and that it’s obviously not a ghetto as long as we’re talking about no more than nine kids out of thirty. Minister Gelmini said so. And she’s one of those politicians who, when she sees a problem, she finds a way to fix it.

January 25, 2010

Two by Vauro

2010-01-27T05:46:00.000-08:00

"Extended Families" by Vauro, September 2009, English trans. by Wendell Ricketts.

"Contagious Viruses" by Vauro, November 2009, English trans. by Wendell Ricketts.

'Extended' Families Destroy Children

2010-01-27T05:05:00.000-08:00

"Extended Families" by Vauro, September 2009, English trans. by Wendell Ricketts.

Virtual Strike

2009-07-21T02:13:00.001-07:00

"Virtual Strike" by Sergio Staino, English trans. by Wendell Ricketts.

The Year of the Paper Tiger - Leonardo Blogspot

2009-07-10T04:04:00.000-07:00

The Year of the Paper Tiger
Or, Who’s Reporting Hu?

by Leonardo, the author of the leonardo blogspot
Italian version here.
English trans. by Wendell Ricketts

* * * * * * *

“Good morning. May I help you?”

“Good morning. Yes, I’m here to report a crime.”

“Fine, just give me a minute to get my terminal turned on. It’s a theft, I imagine?”

“No, not really.”

“Vandalism?”

“Actually, I’m here to report ... what’s it called ... you’ll have to forgive me, I don’t have a lot of experience in these matters, you know? An imm ... an ....”

“Immorality? An immoral act?”

“No, no, an immigration.”

“Ah.”

“Illegal.”

“Right, right, I see.”

“What I mean is, there’s this person and he’s an illegal immigrant.”

“Of course.”

“And I’m here to turn him in. Because now it’s a crime, right?”

“Do you know this person’s name?”

“I certainly do.”

“Do you know where he lives or his place of work?”

“I have all the information.”

“And you have a reasonable basis for stating that he is an illegal immigrant?”

“I have proof.”

“Fine. You tell me the whole story, and I’ll make out the report....”

“And then you’ll go arrest him!”

“If we deem it necessary.”

“What do you mean ‘necessary’? You have to do it, end of story! In Italy, you have that ... what’s it called ... the compulsory minister.”

“The compulsory administration of criminal penalties. You know a lot about this.”

“Thank you. I studied law, back in my country.”

“I wanted to study law, but you know ... I come from a big family.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, let’s get down to business. Your name, sir?”

“Hu Wen. H, U, space, Wen. Just like it sounds.”

“Excellent. And the last name?”

“Hu.”

“Hu Wen Hu?”

“No, just Hu space Wen.”

“Ah, OK. Sorry, but all these foreign names nowadays are enough to drive you crazy.”

“You have my complete sympathy.”

“All right, then. So: Hu Wen. Born on?”

“Thirteenth of September, 1974.”

“The Year of the Tiger!”

“My compliments, sir. Does that mean that you....”

“Yes, I was a 1974 baby, too, I admit it. Now then, Hu Wen, born on the thirteenth of September, 1974, and a resident of....?”

“Umm ... put this: resident of Canton, China.”

“You’re not a legal resident of Italy, then?”

“No. But I can still make a police report, yes? I mean … if I were a tourist and somebody stole my wallet.…”

“Quite right. Very well, then. Hu Wen, born on the 13th day of September, 1974, and a resident of Canton, China, on the 3rd day of July of the current year did appear at the Parmeggiano Alto Division of the Italian state police, in the Province of Mussolonica, and, having so appeared, did subsequently report to the competent authorities, in the person of Gabriele Panunzio, a duly designated functionary of said division, the presence on sovereign Italian soil of an illegal immigrant, hereinafter denominated as....”

“Yes?”

“I’m asking you. Hereinafter denominated as ....?”

“Sorry?”

“This illegal immigrant ... I’m saying, what’s his name?”

“Oh, him. His name is Hu Wen.”

“Last name?”

“Hu.”

“Wen Hu Hu?”

“No, Hu space Wen.”

“Ahh. You know, I’ve heard that name before. You just wait and see. I’ll bet this isn’t his first run-in with the law.”

“Well, actually....”

“Hold on. Your name is also Hu Wen.”

“I cannot deny it.”

“One of those coincidences. I understand.”

“No, perhaps you do not. I am him. I am here to report myself. I am an illegal immigrant. Arrest me.”

“All right, all right ... let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now.”

“There is that whatsit, the compulsory administration of criminal penalties.”

“Excuse me, but why are you trying so hard to get arrested?”

“Put yourself in my shoes. I work in the outdoor markets, and I travel the entire province. I get up every single morning at five o’clock. Whether it’s raining or whether it’s snowing. Five years like that. I’m not used to that kind of work. In China, I was a law student. I’m tired.”

“You might have thought about turning yourself in before.”

“Before you would have sent me back to my country as an illegal immigrant. But now you cannot do that anymore.”

“What do you mean we can’t?”

“You cannot because illegal immigration is now a crime, which means you have to try me in court.”

“Who knows if there’d ever be a trial....”

“But I want to take advantage of my automatic appeal.”

“Don’t make me laugh! I mean, if all the illegal immigrants in Italy waited for their automatic appeal to be heard....”

“Yes? Please go on.”

“It would bring the courts to a standstill!”

“This is not my problem. I am a criminal suspect, and as such I have the right to a fair trial. Ah, and since I also work, I have compounded my crime, because I am stealing a job from an Italian citizen. I think you better put me away in prison or some place like that. I know your prisons. Compared to the basement where I’ve been sleeping, they’re not so bad.”

“They’re overflowing.”

“True. You probably have no choice but to release me and find me a job while I wait to go to court. Now, it happens that I have studied the Italian justice system for quite some time. I would say I could count on a good five or six years of food and lodging plus a job, guaranteed.”

“But then they’ll send you back to China.”

“Who can say? In the meantime, the government will change and they will announce an amnesty. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if the amnesty came along sooner rather than later, the way things are going. It’s a shame, really, because then I’ll have to go back to the outdoor markets. I really hate those markets.”

“You should have become a lawyer.”

“True. Shall we proceed, if you don’t mind?”

“All right, then. Hu Wen ... did report to the competent authorities, in the person of Gabriele Panunzio, a duly designated functionary of said division, the presence on sovereign Italian soil of an illegal immigrant, hereinafter denominated as .... ”

“Hu Wen. Just do a cut-and-paste.”

“… born on the 13th day of September, and so forth and so on, and domiciled at?”

“Number 3, Via Garibaldi. It’s the doorbell with the ideograms next to the buzzer. If you want, I’ll give you my cell phone number.”

“You’re making things too easy.”

“This is what we have come to! Now that you know where to find me, you have no choice but to arrest me.”

“But you might not even be a real illegal immigrant.”

“Of course I am a real illegal immigrant.”

“Aha. Easy to say. But can you prove it?”

“I certainly can. I don’t have a single document to show you.”

“That’s no proof. At most, it’s an absence of proof.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Who’s to say, for example, that you didn’t just tear up your work visa? I mean, look at it from our point of view. Do you really expect us to arrest the first person who comes along just because he says he doesn’t have any documents on him?”

“That’s what you used to do.”

“It used to be a lot easier. Dash off a deportation order, charter a plane if absolutely necessary, and off you’d go back to wherever you came from. But if we have to arrest all of you and put you on trial.... I mean, you tell me....”

“So you’re not going to come and arrest me?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Italy never changes. ‘Pass a law, find the flaw.’”

“Take it easy, okay? Or else...”

“Or else?”

“I’ll arrest you for defamation.”

“Excellent! What is defamation?”

“It’s when you offend someone.”

“I see, very good. Italy is a hundred thousand square miles of dried-up swamp weed waving in the lurid wind of stupidity.”

“Sorry?”

“It is an offense against your country. Arrest me.”

“You were just exercising poetic license. At most, it was the free expression of a personal opinion. I’m not going to arrest you for that.”

“Italy is shit. Arrest me.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? No, I’m not going to arrest you.”

“You have to arrest me! There’s the compulsory minister! It’s defamation!”

“No, it’s not. It’s just satire, and I’m not arresting you.”

“The President of the Republic is a Nazi invert.”

“It’s satire, political satire.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Come on nothing. Look, I’m laughing, too. Ha ha ha!”

“Italian women all whores.”

“Hee, hee, what a kidder.”

Singloids - No. 250

2009-07-07T02:19:00.000-07:00

"Singloids No. 250" by The Persichetti Brothers, English trans. by Wendell Ricketts.

Not One Euro for the Earthquake in Abruzzo

2009-04-17T04:27:00.000-07:00

by Giacomo Di Girolamo
English trans. by Wendell Ricketts

You'll have to forgive me, but I won’t be donating so much as a single cent toward the fund -raising efforts now underway for the victims of the earthquake in the Abruzzo. What I'm saying sounds like an obscenity, I know, and I also know that people normally flaunt the opposite position, with none of the modesty that charity requires.

But I’ve made up my mind. I won’t be making any telephone calls to toll-free numbers that extract a Euro from my account; I won’t be sending any "donate-a-Euro" text messages. From my end, there won’t be any bank transfers to special accounts set up for earthquake-relief. I don’t have a spare bedroom to offer, no summer house on the coast to open up to a needy family, no old clothes to donate, not even ones that have gone out of style.

I resisted the celebrity appeals, the minutes of silence at the soccer games, the statements by politicians, our Prime Minister being moved to tears on live TV. The television schedules turned topsy-turvy, the non-stop live broadcasts, the appeals superimposed on the screen during prime time—none of it made an impression on me. I’m not going to donate one single Euro. And I believe that’s the greatest gesture of civility that I, as an Italian, can make at a time like this.

I’m not going to donate so much as a Euro because the thing that is destroying this country is charity: the stereotype of the generous Italian, of that bungling populace guilty of every kind of foul-up and impropriety but which, in the midst of tragedy, is capable of spasms of generosity and is consequently forgiven everything. That’s the point: I’m sick and tired of that Italy. I want nothing more to be forgiven. Generosity, unfortunately, and with it charity, is a pretense. We’re still standing there, on the edge of that well in Vermicino in 1981, waiting to see whether little Alfred will make it out alive,[1] holding on to one another with all our might. The compassion we suffer from (and which we offer one another) is genuine. But we haven’t moved one single centimeter.

In fact, I believe that tragedies, all of them, can be anticipated. The wells covered over. The guilty parties identified. The damage repaired in a timely manner. I refuse to donate a dime, because I already pay my taxes. And what I pay is a lot. Those taxes already include money for rebuilding, for aid, for police, fire fighters, and other public safety measures. All of which winds up being spent for other things. And that, in turn, means that the police, fire fighters, and public-safety authorities turn to Italians for donations when they need money. I’m saying no. Go get the money out of all the illustrious tax cheats that permeate this country’s economy.

My taxes also pay for the courts whose job is supposed to be to figure out who is speculating on building safety, and which are supposed to be doing that job before catastrophes take place. With my taxes I also support an entire political establishment—all of them, at every level of government, incapable of accomplishing anything, not one single thing, unless you count putting themselves front-and-center whenever there’s a camera in sight.

Even the President of the Sicily Region, Raffaele Lombardo, went to visit the areas hit by the earthquake—a trip paid for, like all the others, by us, the taxpayers. But what was the point? Was there really any need for him to go?

I might have been able to come up with a Euro, or maybe even two. Then Berlusconi started talking about building a “New Town” in L'Aquila, and I thought about “Milano 2,”[2] about the lake with its swans, and about the neologism “new town.” Where did he get that from? Where did he read it? How long had he been mulling that one over?

A time of anguish like this can’t be allowed to be marked by silence. Everything has to be toyed with, reproduced for the spectator to consume. That’s where “New Town” comes from. It’s a brand name. Like Brooklyn Chewing Gum.[3]

I could have shelled out a few cents. Then I saw that even Renato Schifani had decided to pay a visit to the earthquake zone. The President of the Senate declared that “what we need at a time like this is a united political effort.” Amen to that. But don't ask me to be on your side, because I’m not like you. I work. I don’t make my living from politics, on the backs of the community. While you, all of you, are responsible for what happened, because in one form or another you’ve governed the Italians and the ground they stand on for generation after generation, I am guilty of nothing. In fact, I'm in favor of justice. What you’re in favor of is the kind of solidarity that helps us forget about the fact that there isn’t any justice.

I’m not going to part with it, my Euro. Because I remembered my mother, who worked for the Italian government for forty years: In an entire year, her pension is worth what Schifani earns in a single month. So explain why I should fork over my Euro. To pay for what? Oh and by the way: When the Belice earthquake hit Western Sicily in 1968, my parents were deeply touched by what had happened, and donated some of their savings to the victims.

Then there was the earthquake in Irpinia in 1980, and once again my parents made a noble and symbolic donation through their post-office account. For the rebuilding. And we all know how that turned out.[4]

After Irpinia, there was the quake in Umbria in 1997. Then, in 2002, in San Giuliano di Puglia in Molise, where no one could have failed to be moved by the story of the classroom that collapsed on twenty-seven children, killing them and their teacher.

But now I’ve had enough. What’s the point of sending aid if everything goes on just the way it always has?

They’ve discovered, just the way decent journalists should do (now there’s a good way to spend a Euro—buy a newspaper written by decent journalists) that one of the schools that collapsed in L’Aquila was once actually a hotel. With the stroke of a pen, however, some obliging city bureaucrat decided to transform it into a school, regardless of the fact that it satisfied not even the minimum safety requirements for such a building.

In fact, in my own city, Marsala, there’s a school just like it, the largest one in the area: the Istituto Tecnico Commerciale. For thirty years it has been housed in a building that’s really a hotel transformed into a school. Not one safety requirement has ever been respected in this papier-mâché building with 600 students. To date, the Province of Trapani has spent nearly €7 million in rent on that school, where—just to give one example—the asbestos subceiling in the gym collapsed last October during a sirocco. (A sirocco!! Not an earthquake! A sirocco! Is there a Richter Scale for south-easters? Should we invent one?)

So that’s where my Euro went—drowned along with all those other millions of Euros—my one Euro of shame for the members of a political establishment who are incapable of making decisions, unless it’s the decision to line their own pockets without the slightest restraint and to pay their pals back by making sure they get rich, too.

I was just about to send off my one-Euro solidarity SMS, and then I heard them bragging on the Tg1 newscast about the exceptional audience shares they’d been receiving during their live broadcasts from the earthquake zone. Since I also pay for the public television service with my annual license fee, my feeling is that I’m already doing them a favor if I don’t ask for my money back after hearing an atrocity like that.

I won’t donate a dime for the towns ravaged by the earthquake. And I don’t want anyone else’s money if something should happen to me. What I want is an efficient national government, one in which it isn’t only the craftiest and the slipperiest who run things. And since I already know that nothing like that is going to come to pass, I also believe that the earthquake will turn into a great big lottery landslide for politicians. Now they all have the perfect excuse not to talk about anything else. Now no one can criticize the government or the majority political party (which is all of them, even the ones in the opposition), because there’s the earthquake to think about. Just as with 9/11, the earthquake and the situation in the Abruzzo are going to be the front that is used to justify anything and everything.

Thousands of resources are wasted in this country every day. If only it truly wanted to, the national government knows where it could get the money to help the earthquake refugees: by freezing politicians’ salaries for a year, or the salaries of the “super managers”; by combining the next European parliamentary elections with the upcoming referendum, rather than funding two national elections. Those are the first ideas that come to mind. Every time I think of something else, I’m that much more enraged.

I’m not going to donate a dime. Instead, I’m giving the best help I can: my outrage, my indignation. In these difficult days, I want to assert my right as an Italian to live in a house that is safe. And the rage welling up inside me turns to tears when I hear people say “something like this would never have happened in Japan,” as if the Japanese had discovered something new, as if know-how was the exclusive province of the Land of the Rising Sun. Every engineering student with a freshly printed university degree understands how a building ought to be constructed. What happens is that they’re made to forget as they exercise their profession.

I cry in my rage because it is always the poorest people who die, and in the televised pandemonium there’s not even one single poet with the greatness of a Pasolini to tell us how things really are, to gather together the pain and anguish of the least among us. This country has killed all of them, all the poets, or else it's allowed them to die of boredom.

But today, here, I feel Italian, a poor man among poor men and women, and I demand the right to have my say.

In the end, just the way that nature does when it causes the earth to move.

[1] Life in Italy came to a halt on June 10, 1981, when, for some 60 hours, live television broadcasts from Vermicino (near Rome), tracked superman efforts to free a six-year-old boy, Alfredo Rampi, who had fallen 180 feet into an uncovered artesian well. The events were followed by some 21 million Italians and, when the rescue efforts proved futile, the entire nation was plunged into mourning.

[2] Milano 2 is a planned “new town” or “supercondo” community in Segrate, in the suburbs of Milan , built and financed in the 1970s by firms owned by Silvio Berlusconi. The built-in TV network installed throughout Milano 2 helped Berlusconi launch his television empire as well, and he used his own television channels to market Milano 2 to upper-middle-class families. One of Milano 2’s features is an artificial lake, frequently used as a location for shooting TV programs and commercials.

[3] Brooklyn “the chewing gum with the bridge on the package,” was introduced in Italy in 1969. The massive advertising campaign that followed earned its producer, the Perfetti Van Melle group, a market share of 90%.

[4] The allusion here is to the fact that, following the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia, reconstruction and repair efforts quickly became a lucrative business opportunity for organized crime, which controlled contractors and contracts, supplies and suppliers, etc. An article in the 15 April 2009 The Independent contains more background on what took place.

Jeremy

2009-04-09T10:02:00.001-07:00

Will it surprise you to know that I found the cabin empty and silent when I arrived there for the last time, the lights extinguished (of course there was no one to tend the generator after the gas ran out), and the savage smell of decay seeping from under the rubber seal on the lid of the chest freezer? I didn’t open it. If I’d rather go to my grave ignorant of certain details, no one could fault me. Not for that at least. Besides, someone will look inside eventually, and then the newspapers will compete to print the gruesome details for everyone to read. Except not me. When I get where I’m going I hope not to see a newspaper for a very long time.

Even without recent events as background, being in the cabin was an odd and unpleasant experience. Is there anything more unfamiliar than the familiar place you’ve chosen to abandon? Of course there was nothing there to tell me what has become of Jeremy. I don’t know what I expected to find—nothing as simple as a note, certainly. He couldn’t have known for certain that I’d be the one to find it, and he wouldn’t have wanted to compromise me. Besides, what could he possibly have written that would be adequate under the circumstances? Still, I wanted … something. A sign of some sort, a clue only I would recognize. Not some secret signal that told me how to reach him—I didn’t want that—but some acknowledgement, something to tell me at least that he knew I knew, and that he understood what my knowing meant. Instead, he’s just vanished. I haven’t seen him in more than two months.

Of course I realize, in the end, that silence is the more rational choice, even if it is, in ways, the more unsettling one. Stupid people wouldn’t understand that someone like Jeremy could be supremely rational, that his logic turns out to be more shocking than his violence.

The police contacted me as soon as the story broke, wanting to know what I could tell them about Jeremy and his “appetites.” One of them actually used that word. They were back again three nights later, and for a few weeks they continued to show up with a certain random frequency. They were convinced that Jeremy must have been in contact with me since he disappeared, though they couldn’t imagine how he was slipping messages past them. The answer is that there simply aren’t any messages.

The first time they came they brought their search warrant and took our computer, along with other things that made less sense (every last article of Jeremy’s clothing, for one thing, though I suppose I should thank them for sparing me that). I’m sure they tapped the phone and they must have followed me whenever I went out, at least at the start. That’s certainly what I would have done. Even if I felt inclined to help them, I’m quite sure I know even less than they do at this point about the only question that really matters—where Jeremy is—so my vague and unhelpful answers were, in their own way, painfully sincere.

Their interest in Jeremy is as great as it is only because he humiliates them. Yes, also because he targets them, but mostly because he makes them look like fools. With all their equipment and their computers and their weapons, which they wave at you like phalli, they were never able to foresee what he would do or whom he would hunt or when or, more to the point, stop him.

No question: a few of them knew almost instantly what it was that connected the men Jeremy targeted, but he counted on their silence and their guilt. He knew he could use it against them, and he was right. Still, it wouldn’t have taken a brilliant police mind to understand that Jeremy’s project was revenge—pure and vicious—even if no one could admit in public the reason for the revenge, the jus ad bellum so to speak.

For Jeremy, this town meant torture and had done since before he was out of his teens, so I’m sure there’s been no shortage of worried consciences. I hope some of those bastards go on suffering in terror. I don’t wish Jeremy’s literal vengeance on them (no one could wish that) but the fear that he might still be out there somewhere—their Moloch, their Monster of Montmarte—might redeem their diseased souls.

Anyway, it should be they who explain Jeremy to the rest of us. They created Jeremy in their hellhole of a small-town jail, in their airless, soundproof interrogation rooms stinking of cigarettes and piss. I wanted to say something like that, but I suddenly felt so deeply, deeply weary, and I sat like a good child responded quietly to their questions—responded to them, but never really answered them.

The police knew that Jeremy and I were together, of course—not that we’d have been able to keep that a secret for all this time in a place like this, not that we ever tried—and they had a hundred pointless questions about that. They naturally think the sexual aspect is explanatory, that it was just a short step from one perversion to another. I didn’t bother to suggest to them that it was Jeremy’s love for me that kept him in check as long as it did. I let them fumble through their questions, my enjoyment of their discomfort only partially diluting the chill that comes over you when you’re being scrutinized by someone in the capacity to make his disapproval count. Someone able to disapprove on behalf of an entire government, I mean. Like that line from “Prufrock”: “The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.”

They wanted to formulate me and they hope to formulate Jeremy; they’d like us sprawling on a pin, but they didn’t get that satisfaction from me. I was impassive, straightforward. I admit to some pleasure in shoving it in their faces. They asked me if Jeremy had ever written me any letters, and I showed them the love letters, which are rather graphic. You’ll recall that Jeremy was quite inexperienced when we met, and he got some delight out of cataloguing our private moments together. I find the letters charming for his enthusiasm and his naiveté. So precocious, he even quoted to me those ambiguous lines of Whitman’s:

Give me now libidinous joys only,
Give me the drench of my passions, give me life coarse and rank.

I had forgotten about that.

If they expected me to be embarrassed by the letters, they were disappointed. The one who led the interrogation snorted as he read Jeremy’s descriptions of our sex life, but in the end, he didn’t take the letters as I’d expected. In fact, I’d prepared for that contingency and had already hidden a set of photocopies, but I didn’t need them after all. I knew there was nothing in the letters that would help, and they were, after all, written nearly ten years ago, long before any of this, but I didn’t dare hope they’d see it that way. It’s the obsession of police agencies to collect information after all, even if they have no idea what it means or how it connects with anything else they think they know.

I tried to comprehend that they were men with families and loved ones, with children who sat in their laps and laid small blonde heads against their chests, with wives they turned toward for solace in the night. It was enough to soften them for me, but not enough. I felt the hate nudging me, seductive and so persistent, like a horse after the lumps of sugar it can smell in your pocket. It would have been no effort at all to give up trying to stanch the hate and let myself submerge in the red baptism of it. I could taste the intoxication of it at the back of my throat, a milder version, I suppose, of what Jeremy experiences when he is in full rut. I will need to be forgiven for that.

In any case, I got up to the cabin and finished what I needed to do, evidently without their knowing. If I hadn’t been so nerve-wracking, I might almost have enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger of it. You know how I love my detective novels. I drove south for a couple of hours and spent the night in a town I hadn’t even known existed. I left the truck parked on a quiet back street and took a bus west to another town on the banks of the river, spent the night there as well, and finally caught a second bus back to pick up the truck. Two nights in godforsaken motels that take cash and don’t ask for credit cards; two nights of free HBO and revolting, watered-down coffee in the morning, jumping out of my skin every time I heard footsteps outside my room. And after that the long drive to the cabin.

I don’t know whether all of that was really necessary. It’s not as though I’ve done this sort of thing before. But I couldn’t risk leading them straight to the cabin before I’d had a chance to see it first, and I didn’t know another way to find out how closely they were following me. If the truck was still there when I got back to it, I figured, I could go ahead with as much of a plan as I’d been able to work out. Before I left town I bought five gas cans at the Wal*Mart and filled them at the self-service pump so I wouldn’t have to stop again until I was done. Turns out all that extra gas came in handy for other reasons.

When they connect the dots and realize I own the cabin, or did until yesterday morning, when I completed my business at the real estate office and caused everyone consternation by insisting on taking my proceeds in cash, I shall certainly be labeled an accomplice and be in some serious trouble on account of it, though they’ll have to find Jeremy first or I don’t suppose there will be anything for me to be an accomplice to.

Well, that isn’t exactly true anymore. Up until I got to the cabin, the only thing giving me a bad conscience was knowing that I’d harbored some vague suspicions that something wasn’t right with Jeremy. There’s no denying that I stopped suggesting quite some time ago that we come up to spend weekends at the cabin. Naturally I had registered Jeremy’s sudden lack of interest—odd because he did so love the forest near there—and in some part of my being I must have understood that it was because he was using it. Perhaps all I thought was that he was bringing tricks there—after ten years, I could hardly have minded that. But the train of thought doesn’t really bear much inspection. If it was just for a little fun, why take someone all the way up there? Four hours’ drive. Almost as much, given the price of gas, as renting a motel room. I can’t defend myself. I sensed I mustn’t press the issue with him, and I didn’t. Who knows what might have happened if I had insisted, but I’ve never for a moment worried that Jeremy would harm me, even to save himself. Perhaps he would just have disappeared sooner.

The police made the same connection, of course, and the interrogator asked why I didn’t seem to be afraid that Jeremy would come after me.

“The thought never entered my mind,” I said.

The interrogator pounced. “And why is that?”

I answered bluntly: “Because Jeremy’s interest is in people who hurt and abused him. I’ve done neither.”

But now I truly am an accomplice. I’ve destroyed evidence, though I’d like to think that it’s not evidence that could ever make any real difference.

That’s part of the reason for my leaving, too, of course.

By separate mail, I’ll be sending the authorities a list of additional names and disposal sites they may not know about. Jeremy kept meticulous and detailed logs in one of those spiral notebooks you can buy anywhere, right down to the scientific names of bones, so many of which (phalanges, fibula, manubrium) sound like the kinds of exotic plants only a professional landscaper would recognize. I found the notebook as I was cleaning out the cabin, just slipped in among the books on one of the shelves in the main room. The fact that I didn’t miss it is pure randomness. I worried that it was disloyal to turn the notebook over—a foolish concern, but that was my first reaction. Ultimately, logic prevailed: They already know more than enough to hang Jeremy ten times over, literally as well as figuratively, and the families of the men named in the list will appreciate, in time, the opportunity to know for certain what they now only dread. “Appreciate” is the wrong word. They would choose to know, if the choice were between knowing and not knowing, though of course what they would wish most of all is to have an entirely different set of choices. We have that in common.

I took Jeremy’s notebook to the Kinko’s three towns over and copied it on a Xerox machine the size of a Volkswagen. I also used one of their rent-by-the-hour computers to type out a separate list of names and locations culled from the notebook, and I printed out a copy without saving the file. I asked them at Kinko’s to FedEx the copy of the diary to The Star for me, and I’ll put the list for the police in the regular mail along with this letter to you. Even without a return address on the envelope, it’ll take them two minutes to figure out where it came from, but I’m not trying to be mysterious. I suppose I took such pains with the notebook out of some surviving loyalty to Jeremy. I wanted them to have the names and other details but nothing that Jeremy had actually held in his own hands. Yes, I still love him and feel protective of him, after everything, though I hope never to see him again. Does that shock you? It shocks me.

The negotiation with The Star was surprisingly quick. I faxed a page from the original notebook, and they offered me $100,000 for the complete diary. By now the cashier’s check will be in the hands of Father DeSiard, along with instructions for distributing it to the families of the men Jeremy killed. You know I don’t normally have much to do with the papists, but DeSiard is decent enough. Besides, he’s a politician, like all of them, and his ego is so huge that the publicity he can get from this will keep him honest. I realize that the money doesn’t break down to much for any one of the families, but it’s neither absolution nor mitigation and it isn’t meant to be. I don’t relish the idea that somebody’s children may end up reading exactly what happened to their father while they’re standing in the checkout line at Kroger’s, but there are no unmixed blessings in this story. It’s what I could do to get Jeremy’s story out, and I feel I owed him that.

Which is as much as to say that there aren’t any unmixed motives, either, and I’m not convinced there are even any innocent victims. That’s not to defend Jeremy, but to say that no one would ever have believed what happened to him otherwise. In fact, for all of his adult life, I’m the only one who ever did, and even I didn’t know many of the details. In the diaries, he tells everything: what happened to him when he was seventeen and spent four nights in the town jail before they decided he hadn’t stolen somebody’s car. He didn’t have anybody to come get him out, and I suppose they were counting on that, the bastards. They knew what he was, that’s for sure, and they used him for every one of those four days, the sheriff, his deputies, the buddies they phoned to come join the party. Some of those are among the dead now, but I’m not sure it isn’t fair for their families to know what they did to a boy. What Jeremy did isn’t for weak stomachs, either, but his sense of justice is Biblical.

In any case, once I found the notebook, I had to do something to discharge the obligation that had suddenly been handed to me, and now I have. I burned Jeremy’s notebook at the cabin along with his love letters and threw the ashes in the lake. It all felt very East Indian and funerary, as if I were ritually releasing these unknown souls. No less, of course, than my own.

I feel a twinge for what the couple who bought the cabin will face once they get there, but I made it clear that the place was a wreck and I gave them a ridiculously low price to take it sight unseen. I got about half what the land alone was worth, never mind the buildings on it or the machinery. Anyway, that ought to salve their outrage somewhat. Nothing too ghastly, now that the freezer’s gone, but there are stains on the rug, and the mattress on the guest bed was a ruin. I put that in the back yard, soaked it with gasoline, and set it on fire along with the other things. Trash fires are common enough out here, so I doubted anyone would investigate. Later, the new owners might recall seeing signs of a recent fire when they first arrived, and they might tell the police, and the police might find all of that very suspicious. But they won’t be able to prove that I did it and, anyway, I can’t worry about that now. In any case, I’m depending upon my intuition that my eager yuppie buyers are fussy enough to tear out and burn everything that isn’t nailed down and repaint everything that is. I told them the mantlepiece and some of the moldings were original oak, if they wanted to spend the time stripping them down, and they seemed to light up. By the time the police get around to searching the cabin, nothing of use to them will be left. More protection of Jeremy, I suppose, but also of myself. My life was in that cabin, too, in the years I lived in it alone before I moved to the city and in the three summers Jeremy and I had there together after we met. We couldn’t get enough of each other.

It’s terrifying how much you cannot foresee about your life. As Jeremy and I lay there in the night, naked on top of the sheets because the heat was fierce that first summer, even at midnight, I thought I was world-wise and pragmatic because, battle-scarred veteran of other love affairs, I dared to allow my mind to experiment with the idea that I might not always love Jeremy or him me, or that someday we might have to give up the cabin. That was my acknowledgment of the vicissitudes of fate, my idea of acknowledging the worst that might happen. Such arrogance, to imagine I could guess all the alternative outcomes, could name and contend with them. I had no idea.

In any case, I felt I didn’t dare make more than one trip back and forth to the cabin, and I couldn’t manage both the freezer and the mattresses at one go; so I chose to dispose of the former as the more egregious item. I left it at the dump, but someone will notice that the door is still attached, which I believe is against the law, and that will be that. As I’ve told you, I don’t know what’s inside, but perhaps it’s something someone might want to bury. After plane crashes and so forth you read that relatives are desperate for some physical object and are relieved to sit through a funeral service with a shoe or a swizzle stick or a kneecap resting on the satin cushion inside the coffin at the front of the church. I would find it bizarre and macabre, but grief is always obscene and I can’t judge anyone for how he makes it through.

I’ve lost Jeremy, of course, and I grieve for him, though I also grieve for myself. He’s dead to me, but so is what I had of a life, which I must now cleanly amputate if I care to go on with any vestige of autonomy left intact. I can’t judge if I’m doing the right or the wrong thing. I know I have adopted a single-mindedness about myself that I wear like someone else’s clothes. It’s an odd sensation to operate in the world as though one’s actions existed in true isolation. Of course, it’s never exactly like that: On the freeway you slow down so as not to run into the idiot who has suddenly changed lanes in front of you; you can’t pretend you don’t see the other cars. If I want this letter to reach you, I shall have to drop it into a box and depend upon strangers to carry it to its destination. In that way, we are helplessly tied to one another.

But those are small matters, comparatively. By making my disappearance, I’ve divorced myself from the questions of what others will think of me, what they would expect from me, whether they will have feelings or needs that I might, under other circumstances, bend my actions around. I’ve become my own moral compass; I’m the only judge, and perhaps more to the point, both defense attorney and prosecutor. In the process, I’ve come close to what must have guided Jeremy, which is to say sociopathy. It’s exhilarating and yet terrifying to cut the rope and push out across the water on your own. There is always the danger that you’ll entirely forget the need for the shore.

I don’t pretend not to be curious, but for the most part I don’t find myself sorry not to know more. I admit I’d prefer not to live out my days wondering if I’ll open the door one day and find him standing there. But as I say, I don’t think he’ll turn up where I’m going, and I can’t even be sure he’s alive. If he went into the deep woods to end himself, no one may ever know of it. If I’m angry about anything, I suppose it’s that—and my reasons are completely selfish. Things would go easier for me if there were some way to be certain that Jeremy was gone for good. They’d lose interest in me then, or they might. I’ve read that it’s difficult these days for any living person to truly disappear, but then I suppose everything depends upon how tenaciously someone else cares to look.

Which brings me to my reason for writing: Please do your best to forgive me for winking out like this, my old friend. In a few years, if it seems I can, I may let you and a few others—if there’s anyone who still cares—know my whereabouts, but you’ll have to leave that up to me. You can’t try to find me, and I won’t make contact unless I decide it’s safe for both of us. I apologize for the harshness of my insistence on this point and for what perhaps seems like melodrama. I have my reasons.

I know you have also grasped by now that you cannot keep this letter. I’ve already over-exposed you, perhaps, but on balance I decided that the greater kindness would be to make things clear rather than allow you to imagine some more distressing scenario. The police are welcome to believe that Jeremy came for me at last, despite my assurances that he wouldn’t. Surely it’s what some of them are hoping. Yet I couldn’t bear it if you wondered the same thing. I don’t know whether you will find it helpful or merely pathetic to know this, but I have realized something. Even if I had lost Jeremy under entirely mundane circumstances, I am convinced, I would have felt this same urge to drift away, the very one I am obeying now. True, the actual facts of the matter have served to weigh the anchor good and for all, but in the end, what I can most honestly say is that I finally came for myself.

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting

2009-03-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

“ ... here comes the big boss, let’s get it on ...” (Carl Douglas)

Somehow we were talking about Chinese New Year, about whether, if you were Chinese, you just called it “New Year” instead of Chinese New Year.

“Once we were in this Chinese restaurant?” Dorflex was saying. “And they were having, like, a celebration? And I asked what was the occasion? And this Chinese guy told me it was New Year’s? Just New Year’s?”

Ross was nodding like a hula-dancer doll in the back window of a Camaro, the signal that he wanted to be next in line to hold the Talking Stick.

“It’s like if you ask an American what’s the 4th of July, he’s not going to tell you it’s American Independence Day,” Ross said. “He’s just going to say it’s Independence Day.”

I couldn’t stand it. “What if the guy was Chinese and American?” I asked.

“What?” said Dorflex.

“You said ‘this Chinese guy’ like he wasn’t American. They’re not mutually exclusive, you know. Anyway, American is a nationality and Chinese is a race or ethnicity or whatever. So the guy in the restaurant was probably Chinese-American and it doesn’t prove anything, what he said.”

“Everything is Hyphenated,” said Adam, quoting the title of that stupid film with that little bulge-eyed fag from Lord of the Rings that’s supposed to be all deep about memory and shit but just ends up being a Euro-trash bore. Adam is one of my housemates. He’s got the biggest room and pays the least amount of rent, which he considers fair because the lease is in his name. He also says he’s a socialist, which don’t get me started.

Dorflex was giving me her super-intense, my-eyes-are-lasers stare to let me know I was pissing her off. “I’m just saying, the guy was Chinese? And they were celebrating Chinese New Year? Only he just called it ‘New Year?’” Ever since Dorflex and Ross got together, she’s been talking like that: Everything she says is a question. If I had to sleep with Ross, I’d be waffly, too.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, “I didn’t realize you asked him to show you his passport before you started interrogating him about holidays.”

“I don’t see why you have to get all politically correct?” Dorflex said. “I’m just making a point? About what they call New Year?” Next to her, her roommate, Ziva, was helping Dorflex glare, working like a radio-repeater station to step up the all-around contempt emissions. Ziva used to be bi, but six months ago she announced she was a lesbian separatist and would no longer respond to male-oriented language. Now, if you want to ask her anything, you have to say it to Dorflex first, and then Dorflex translates. I don’t know why Ziva keeps showing up to drink with us, but I suppose it’s because none of us has the nerve to tell her in male to cough up her share of the bar tab.

Dodging Ziva’s hostility vectors, I stare right back at Dorflex. “It isn’t even Chinese. They celebrate it in a bunch of places in Asia, anywhere they use the lunar calendar.” I didn’t actually know if that was true, but I figured Dorflex didn’t know either. “So, yeah, if your point is that people in China don’t go around saying, ‘Happy Chinese New Year,’ we’re five-by-five. But the guy in the restaurant was most probably American and so it doesn’t have anything to do with whether Chinese people say Chinese New Year or whether Americans say American Independence Day. It’s a stupid analogy.”

“God, you’re such a queer,” said Adam.

“I’m going to get a beer,” I said, and I very pointedly got up without asking if any of them wanted anything. “Get a pitcher,” said Ross to my back, but I pretended not to hear him.

The bartender was kind of cute, but then they’re always kind of cute. In a queer bar, it’s part of the job description. Possibly it’s the entire job description. Anyway, we live two flights up from this place—in the asshole of SOMA, just blocks from where they turn the streets into open-air pissoirs during the annual Dore Alley freak show—and I’ve got zero interest in being a guy who tricks out of the bar that’s downstairs from his apartment. I don’t cruise here at all, as a matter of fact. First off, everyone is so jaded, and second, all this leather-and-hankie drag is seriously over. I’m not saying I’d mind if some big, hunky Daddy carried me off and had his way with me, but then to find out he’s a union-busting lawyer at Littler, Mendelson or something and that his leather pants go to the cleaners in the same bag with his suits from Nieman’s—I mean, just imagining who he really is, is like, anti-Viagra.

Anyway, I ordered a gin and tonic instead of a beer. I decided not to go back to the table because right then I pretty much hated all the people who were supposed to be my friends. I carried my drink down to the end of the bar, where there was plenty of open space. On Wednesdays, this place isn’t all that crowded. Even so, there were a few hot guys playing pool, but right at the moment I pretty much hated hot guys, too. Plus, what I said about not tricking out of the bar that’s downstairs from where I live.

Four evenings a week I work as a waiter at Chevy’s, which is a Mexican restaurant for people who don’t know what a Mexican restaurant is. It’s very popular with off-duty Wells Fargo tellers and with tourists who want to eat enchiladas in California without having to deal with any real Mexicans. Actually, we have real Mexicans, but they’re all dishwashers and no one in the dining room every sees them. When I come home, I smell like tortilla chips and canned jalapeños.

For a queer kid from the dwarf-fescue-lawn-and-ornamental-citrus-tree burbs of Sac, this is supposed to be the shit, right? A Victorian flat with the bathtub in one room and the sink in another, two floors up from a famous leather bar that’s listed in all the faggot travel guides. A job that officially pays crap but which gives me sixty bucks a night in tips, easy. Big-city life in Oz and safe-sex sluts every where you look. Not long after I got here, though, I had a revelation: I’m just not that into it. The provinces are still the provinces, and the fact that you can see some independent Afghan film that only opened on about twelve screens in the entire United States or have a queer mayor or Maoist roommates or eat Vietnamese food one night and kosher vegetarian the next doesn’t make the place seem less small, even if there’s 750,000 other people sharing the culture warp with you. Anyway, it’s not San Francisco’s fault. It’s me.

I don’t want Dorflex and the others to get the idea that I’m just pouting because then one of them will come looking for me and I’ll end up back at their table, wasting another night of my life talking about random shit that doesn’t matter to anybody, like how, if you read War and Peace at the rate of one word per hour, every day for the rest of your life, you still wouldn’t be able to finish it—which, in recent memory, is something Adam actually wanted to talk about. So I gulp down my drink (not difficult: once you get past all the ice, it’s about a half-dozen dainty swallows) and then, when three drag queens come gabbling through the entrance, I take advantage of all the dust they’re raising to slip through the black leather curtain and out the door. Normally, I love hanging out with drag queens. If you feel the need to fade into the background for an evening but you don’t want to just sit around alone at home, they’re your best bet. You’re a portable audience, and the only thing they ever ask of you is laughter and applause.

I decide to walk. Basically, walking is boring, but boredom is sometimes all you can stand. There’s a catch, though. I can never just come to the end of the walk, turn around, and go back the same way. It’s too depressing. If I end up in a blind alley, it’s dramatic. There’s that moment when you’ve got no choice but to retrace your steps, but you know you look like an idiot, because if you had any business being there you’d have known there was a dead end, and people start to give you those “get your punk ass outa my neighborhood” looks. Anyway, once you get south of Market, the streets are arranged pretty much in a grid, and the blocked-off alleys tend to be short so you can see before you turn that they don’t go anywhere. Basically, you can keep walking until you hit water, and even then you can always skirt around it.

I pass my favorite Thai restaurant; a bunch of bars with doorways that look like slits gouged out of the sides of buildings with a chisel; a piercing parlor; a discount outlet for leather jackets that smell like cat pee; a by-the-hour motel painted cantaloupe orange; the studio of this famous S&M photographer who looks like some species of flightless bird but who we’re supposed to be all grateful to because he’s this, like, sexual liberation icon; and a store that sells bustiers and edible panties for women who weigh more than 200 pounds. This is where I live now, and all of this is here all the time, whether I want it to be or not.

I start walking toward the freeway, to get beyond that thin slice of the “south of the slot” area that’s crammed with loft “spaces” and unsold yuppie condos and designer bars dying like cycads in the wake of the asteroid that killed off the dot-com millionaire. A few blocks away, you start to see the industrial skeletons of a previous extinction: warehouses, loading docks, and rust blooming like lichens on unrecognizable metal surfaces. It’s a place made for first-year photography students at the Design Institute, the ones who like to take slightly overexposed black-and-whites of train tracks and the busted-out, crossword-puzzle windows of abandoned factories. It’s also one of the cheaper areas—relatively speaking—left in San Francisco, partly because it’s ugly and partly because there’s no parking or grocery stores and not much in the way of bus lines, either. It’s all very, like, gritty urban realism. When I first moved to this part of the city, someone broke into my truck and ripped off a box of paperbacks I was planning to drop off for the library sale. In San Francisco, even the petty-ass thieves are literate.

The closer I get to the freeway, the more the traffic starts to sound like waves breaking in the distance. Down here, below the elevated highway, the drivers in the few cars on the street turtle their necks to keep an eye on me as they pass, as if I could reach in and scoop them out of their metal shells with one claw. The look on their faces is both knowing and disapproving: Doesn’t take a genius to guess what you’re doing here at this time of night where practically nobody lives and the industrial printers and the “direct to the trade” designer-lighting store have been locked up for hours.

A cop car approaches from the opposite side of the street, slows down, then rolls into a lazy U-turn. I keep walking, but before I’ve covered half the block, I can hear him coming up behind me. Three more steps and blue flashes pulse like summer lightning. I stop and he pulls up beside me, his passenger-side window already rolled down.

“Where you headed?” he asks. My first reaction is to think he’s offering me a ride.

“Uh, no thanks,” I say, “I’m just walking.”

“You live around here?”

“Eleventh Street.”

“That’s in the other direction,” he says, extending his thumb from his right fist like a hitchhiker and pumping it back and forth a few times alongside his ear. It doesn’t seem to be a question, so I just look at him. He makes me feel I should be doing something more to demonstrate my innocence, but the fact is, I am innocent.

“Not much to see at night in this part of town,” he says. Another nonquestion-question. Whatever speech pathology he’s got, it’s exactly the opposite of Dorflex’s.

“So can I go?” I ask.

A smile ignites on his face. He’s got recruiting-poster features: dirty-blonde hair with lashes several shades darker and so thick they seem to outline his eyes in kohl; a jaw line that shows the whole, clean length of the blunted V of his mandible; an assertive chin; and museum-grade lips—not the usual white-boy mouth like the edges of a pair of dinner plates. “Hop in,” he says.

“Hop in?” I parrot back at him, stupid with disorientation. “Are you arresting me?”

“Of course not,” he says. “Hop in.”

“But I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “I’m just walking.”

“So just ride instead.” He pats the passenger seat.

When I still don’t move, he adds, “Hey, didn’t your mom teach you to listen to police officers?”

“She told me not to get into cars with strangers, if you really want to know what my mother taught me.”

“That’s right. Except if the stranger is a policeman. Because policemen are your friends.”

“Are you serious?” I say.

He pats the car seat again. “Hop in. Friend.”

The theories to consider are basically two. Hypothesis One, he’s a maniac on the Night Stalker/William Bonin/Leonard Lake tip. Point against him: driving around late at night offering rides to people who haven’t asked might reasonably be defined as abnormal. Point in his favor: the patrol car and uniform lend him an extreme amount of cred. Point against him: He doesn’t seem crazy or dangerous but then again, someone who really was crazy and dangerous would probably be doing his best not to show it, including going to the trouble of stealing a cop car. Point in his favor: This is San Francisco, which leads directly to Hypothesis Two. In most places in the world, a guy inviting another guy he doesn’t know to get into his car at something like ten at night might arouse suspicion, but here it’s what sociologists would call normative. Plus, although SF certainly has more than its share of whack jobs, there’s still bound to be more guys trying to get laid than there are serial killers, statistically speaking. In any case, I do what he says.

“Ever been in a police car before?” he asks once we’re moving. “In the front seat, I mean.” He gives me a wink that’s the equivalent of an elbow in the ribs.

“Isn’t it, like, against the regulations to have civilians in your car?” I counter.

He laughs. “I’m off duty.”

Since I don’t know cop rules, I have no way to know whether that makes any difference, but I doubt it. He drives for a while down the nearly deserted streets, guiding the wheel with the heel of his left palm, cruising like someone with no particular destination, his fingers gently tapping the ridged plastic. A couple of times I glance over to remind myself what he looks like. His body seems solid, accessible, with none of those hard angles that remind me of pigeon-spike strips: don’t touch, don’t land. Under his uniform shirt he’s wearing a white T, and a curl of chest hair foams past the edge of the collar and into the protected bay of his throat. He’s probably ten years older than me. When I look, he smiles back, casual. We don’t talk, but it isn’t weird. We’re like a couple of old friends, just rolling.

The simple quirkiness of riding in a cop car with a stranger I would probably kiss gives me little breathless roller-coaster moments. Hitchcock or someone like that said it was an undeniable aspect of human nature that we love to scare ourselves to death. Right at this precise instant, no one knows where I am, I think, and the idea sends a sharp, raw shot to my brain like snorting coke: panic and euphoria, alarm and weightlessness. I could disappear! and then: Oh god, I could disappear!

Objectively, there’s probably not much to worry about. I’ve already checked to make sure the passenger door’s not locked, and I know this neighborhood. I know, too, that we’ll eventually hit the piers and he’ll be forced to turn either north or south. North would take us up toward Market Street, where there are busses and street lights. In the other direction—well, I’ve never been in the other direction. On the map, what’s there is a lot of gray-green, shapeless space, empty.

Maybe getting into the car with him was stupid, but what’s impressive is realizing what a strong gravitational pull the fantasy of demolition exerts, the urge to become one of those “without a trace” mysteries: The Roanokes, Ambrose Bierce, Butch and Sundance, John Anglin and his brother, D.B. Cooper, Joe Pichler, Natalee Holloway, the Ecuadorian guy who worked in a pizzeria near the WTC and, after September 11th, nobody ever heard from him again but no one’s sure he’s dead either. Most of them probably are dead—murdered, suicides—but at least a few must have recognized an opportunity to float away, to land like Professor Marvel in an unheard-of world and step off into a new life as if whatever came before was just a navigational error. In unexpected moments, we suddenly sense the weight of what we are, and for scary, euphoric moments all we want is to get out from under it.

As we’re nearing the ballpark he takes a left, spinning the wheel with one hand. He heads toward Market for a few blocks, then turns again on Howard, driving west. “You’re at 11th and Natoma, right?” he says.

“What?” I bark.

“I’m going to take you home,” he says.

“How do you know where I live?”

“Face recognition software. You went to the gay pride parade last June, right?”

“So?”

“Don’t get hostile, I’m just saying. You went. At big public events, we take routine crowd pictures, we scan them in, and then the software goes to work on matching them with photos from the California DMV database. For events like the parade, where there’s a lot of out-of-towners, the hits are only around forty percent. Usually, though, it’s a lot higher. We got enough anti-terrorism funding from the Feds to outfit about half the cruisers with these video cams”—he taps a small device mounted on a swivel to the right of the steering wheel; a small lens points at the passenger seat—“which are linked to the mainframe.”

I think this over for a few minutes. “Bullshit,” I say at last.

He smiles again, that klieg-light smile. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s bullshit.”

I stare at him. Men acting squirrelly isn’t exactly news to me, but there’s already enough clutter between us to make me wonder whether I should pull the plug. To his credit, he takes the hint and dials himself down a few notches before he starts to talk again.

“Just a lucky guess is basically all. You already said 11th Street, right? After that I picked a likely corner. Most of the housing on 11th Street is between Mission and Howard anyway.”

“Well, since you figured it out, that’s as good a place as any to drop me off.”

“You’re not going to invite me up?”

“Why?”

“Because you want to.”

“Because you want to, is what you mean. This whole thing, coming up behind me on the street and offering me a ride and everything ... that’s pretty weird, you know.”

“I know, Brad. But isn’t it nice?” The line comes out in this poncy Brit accent and he bites off the last word just like in Rocky Horror, and what’s great is that he obviously wants me to know not only that he’s capable of quoting the movie but that he can imitate Tim Curry, too. The shift in his voice is such a shock that I can’t help but laugh. Nelly fags can be entertaining, but they’re usually so relentlessly desperate about making you think they’re witty that you end up feeling lonely. At the other end of the spectrum, there are the guys who act like they’re auditioning as stand ins for Mt. Rushmore and who wouldn’t camp even if you offered them free gym memberships for life. So when a normal-acting guy lets the queen pop out for a second or two because she’s just right for the part, and then he puts her away again so she can go on observing, preparing for her next appearance, there’s no way not to be charmed.

“Okay,” I say. I give him directions, and he finds parking on the alley side of my building without any trouble. As I start to walk toward the apartment, I notice he’s got the trunk of his cruiser open. He pulls out a long, cylindrical nylon bag and slings it over his shoulder by the straps. He sees the curiosity on my face. “Skis,” he explains. “I just had them waxed and sharpened. D’you mind if I bring them inside? Even cop cars get broken into, you know. In neighborhoods like this, especially cop cars.”

“Sure,” I say.

Once we get upstairs, it’s the usual ritual: I offer him a drink, and he paces the living room, trying to find something he can comment on. While I’m still busy with the ice and the glasses, he starts in with the questions. “This is a big flat. You got roommates?”

“Yeah, a couple. They’re basically assholes, so don’t feel that you missed anything.” I’m glad no one’s home because I don’t want to have to be in attendance during their pathetic efforts to make small talk with my friend, or guest, or trick, or whatever he is. Or hear Adam start in about the police state.

I carry the two drinks into the living room, where he’s settled in on the U-shaped upholstered seat below the turret window. The window leans out over the street like an observation tower, and it’s the apartment’s best feature. “You got a name,” I say, “or am I just supposed to call you ‘officer’?” He isolates one shoulder like a Martha Graham dancer and twists it toward me so I can see the brass-colored nametag over his right pocket: “L. Valachi.”

“I’m guessing Lance, Lawrence, or Louis,” I say, “but what I’m hoping is not Leroy or Lamar. Or Leslie. Or Linus ... or Lloyd. My god, why are all the ‘L’ names so dorky?”

“The first man I was ever with was named Lamar,” he says. “He was from Arkansas and he was very sexy. We did it while his wife was asleep in the next room.”

“I’ve never slept with a guy named Lamar while his wife was in the next room,” I say.

“Oh, I bet there are lots of things you’ve never done,” he says. It comes out perfectly flat, like he’s saying ‘My eyes are gray.’ No smirking, like in the car. His expression arranges itself on his face like built-in furniture.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m Luther.”

I tell him my name.

“So how come your roommates are assholes?” he wants to know. I give him the brief version of Adam and Ross and Dorflex and Chinese New Year and War and Peace and all the rest. “Last I saw them, they were in the bar downstairs getting hammered,” I finish. “Wednesday is ‘Leather Ladies’ night, so Dorflex and Ziva get to drink for half-price, even though neither of them wears leather. Thank god.”

Luther-the-cop just nods and stares out the window. There’s a light fog tonight, and the streetlamps are surrounded by bruise-colored halos. He takes two slow sips of his drink. “You have no idea how many assholes you come across in my line of work,” he says. “Some days you just want to....” Like a kid, he forms the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand into the shape of a pistol, then he snaps his wrist upward in an imitation of recoil. “POW!” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Pow.”

“I mean, wouldn’t you do it if you could get away with it? Just to not have to deal with that shit anymore?”

“I ... what are we talking about?”

“Listen,” Luther says, jumping up, it’s kind of warm in here. Do these windows open?”

I lean over to struggle with the window nearest Luther. It slides up in a series of fits and starts, and the cool night air reaches in for us. “That’s nice,” he says. “D’you mind if I use your john?”

I point him down the hall. On the street below I can see that people are starting to leave the bar. Too-hearty laughter and nice-to-meet-yous and see-you-laters float up. It’s getting to be that time of night, at least for people who have regular jobs. The bar’ll be dead soon, and Adam and Ross will come banging up the stairs, and probably Dorflex, too. She and Ross never sleep at her place anymore, now that Ziva doesn’t feel the space is safe when there are men in the house.

I hear Luther making his way back, but my thoughts are focused on the way other people’s freedom starts to close in on you like a trap, about how you don’t even notice, until it’s too late, that you hardly have any room left to move in. He sets the nylon bag on the window seat, sits down beside it, and slides the zipper open. I figure he wants to show me his skis, not that I’ve been skiing in my life or that I’d know enough to be impressed.

What’s inside the bag is long and black and tube-shaped, and I’m about to say ‘That sure doesn’t look like skis’ when Luther takes out a rifle. He props it across his knees while he lifts other, odd-shaped pieces of metal out of the bag. One of them, I realize, is a scope, but I don’t know about the rest. He’s looking more at me than at the rifle as he screws or snaps things into place. The sounds his hands make as they move are clean, precise.

“What is that for?” I say finally, stupidly.

He laughs. “Well, it sure isn’t for hunting Bambis.” He shifts to sit next to me, his thigh touching mine. “You take it,” he says.

“Why?” I say.

“Just take it,” he says again, and I do. I’m surprised to notice that the metal feels slightly warm in my hands, and that the odor it gives off reminds me of my father’s workshop in the garage back in our old house.

“Now listen,” Luther is saying. “This is an easy weapon to fire, especially at this distance, and the sight is first-class. But I’m guessing you’ve never done this before, and there’s going to be a lot of panic and running around afterwards, so what I’m saying is that you can only get one. So you have to choose. Think about it now while we have time, because you won’t be able to re-aim and go again. You have to decide which one you really want.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Look,” Luther goes on. “See that guy down there in the green shirt? Just hold the barrel up, out the window, and look through here. Can you see? He looks like he’s six inches away, doesn’t he? It’s a great scope. Get him right in the middle of the circle, where the ‘T’ is. It’s just like taking a picture, really, the same principle.”

Luther is standing now. He puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me gently so I’m facing the window full on. I get up on my knees, the barrel of the rifle out the window. I’m looking at the man in the green shirt. Luther walks over and switches off the living room light.

“You’ve probably heard this before in movies,” he says, “but it’s true. You don’t really pull the trigger, you squeeze it. Want to try? Don’t worry, the safety is on, nothing can happen. Doesn’t need much pressure at all. You just take a deep breath and, as you let it out, you’ll feel that sensation of your chest sort of collapsing in. That’ll help you. You’re going to do the same thing with the trigger, let it collapse inward toward your body as you exhale. Nice and slow.”

Down below, I see that Ross and Dorflex have come out of the bar. Adam is right behind them and then Ziva, who’s hanging onto some paper-white girl with hair that’s green on one side of her part and auburn on the other. I stiffen and lower the rifle, but Luther puts a hand under my left forearm and calmly raises the barrel again.

“That’s them, huh?”

I don’t say anything.

“Okay now. Afterwards, we’ll wait until we hear the first sirens, and then I’ll take the bag out the alley door and put it in the car. Then I’ll come out front and say I was in the neighborhood for an after-work drink when I heard the commotion. I’ll volunteer to canvass the building, so I’ll be back up later to talk to you. But just in case someone else gets here first, you’re going to say you were in bed, reading. Decide on a book now, whatever’s next to your bed. No one’s going to twig. Don’t worry.”

The four of them are clustered at the edge of the curb, where Ross has hooked one arm around a parking meter and is swaying rhythmically as he watches Dorflex talk. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but it’s as if I can feel her words reach all the way up to the surface of my skin, snapping at me like damp rags.

“I’m going to flip the safety off now,” Luther says. He does something to the rifle and I hear a click. And then he’s pressing against me, his chest against my back, his arms extended along the length of mine, helping me support the rifle. His body is warm and solid and I give in to the pressure and curve forward slightly, taking his weight. His lips brush my ear and I can feel the slight stubble of his cheek against mine.

“Ready to breathe?” he whispers, and I begin my inhalation.

That Old Dog That Maysie Had

2009-02-12T10:25:00.000-08:00

Long about a year ago, I shot Maysie’s dog one day when I went up on her front porch and it humped my leg. I’d already told her if the damn thing did that again I’d put a bullet between its weepy little eyes and so, when it started in before I’d even got to knock, I fetched the pistol out from under the seat of my truck, went back up the stairs, and fired point blank. Maysie’s brother, Raymond, came busting out the front door then, took a look around, and asked me was I the one who’d shot the dog. Not too bright, Raymond isn’t, because, except for the gun and the dog, still twitching but well on its way to dead, I was the only thing on the entire falling-down porch. Since their daddy died, ain’t neither one of ‘em lifted a finger to work on the house. “Sure am,” I said.

“Well,” Raymond said, “I never much cared for the animal myself, but Maysie was attached. I expect you ain’t heard the last of this.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but just in case Maysie takes a mind to go out and get her another one, you can tell her that I’ll shoot that one, too, if she doesn’t show it how to behave right.” Raymond just raised his eyebrows up into his hairline and went back into the house. But I noticed he closed both the screen door and the inside door, and I heard him click the bolt shut before I walked on back down to my truck.

The next day, I was working at my Uncle Jake’s shop, winching the engine up outta some rusted-out ole pickup, when this fancy-looking man come in and asked me was I the one had a reputation for shooting people’s dogs on their front porch without so much as a “Don’t mind if I do.” I gave him a look and didn’t say nothing.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” he said. “Reason I ask is I’m wondering how much it would cost me to get you come out and put down my sad ole pig.”

Now I’m not saying that this town’s so small anymore that you know every single body on sight, but the rich folks who live in the new developments out on the west edge don’t come around here much. And don’t nobody come to Jake’s shop wearing a tie, not in recent memory, and anyone that does is probly a bill collector or some kind of police. Anyway, that’s how I figured it, and I wasn’t trying to be friendly before I knew what he wanted.

“I don’t shoot pigs,” I said. “Besides, I didn’t do Maysie’s dog for fun nor money. I did it because Maysie’s dog was having an unnatural relationship with my shin bone.”

“But speaking hypothetically,” the man went on, “if I could come up with a figure you found attractive, would you shoot my pig?”

“Why don’t you shoot it yourself,” I asked. “Or slit its throat?”

The man got a tight look on his face like he was trying hard to swallow down a dry biscuit. “Pearl’s been our pet for years,” he said finally. “I couldn’t bear it.”

“You got a pig for a pet?” I said. That wasn’t the strangest thing I ever heard, but it was damn close. The man just nodded and looked sad.

“Well,” I said. “Well.” I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to know, so I went to finish cranking up the motor, still dangling the way it was up in the air like a side of beef on a meat hook. Ain’t hardly anything sadder-looking than a vehicle when you got the hood off and the engine mounts, and you’ve pulled out the motor and everything so there’s nothing left but the empty carcass and a hole up front to where you can look straight down and see dirt.

The man started twisting the toe of his shoe around and around in a little hill of sawdust that was left over from the last time we tried to get the oil stains up off the garage floor. “So will you do it?” he asked after a while.

“She sick?” I said, wiping my hands on my coveralls.

“I think she’s got cancer,” the man said.

A pig with cancer. Now that’s an unusual fact. “Whyn’t you take her to the vet and have him do away with her?” I said.

“She’s too big to fit in the car and, besides, they want a hundred and eighty-two dollars to put a pig down.”

I took a glance at his shiny tie and his sport coat that had some kind of design sewed in above the pocket looked like a coat of arms. “Seem like you might could afford that,” I snorted.

“I’ll pay you seventy-five,” he said, “plus gas out to my place and back.”

I didn’t like to show it, but I had started in to be pretty curious to see this pet pig with cancer that was too big to fit inside the car, never mind what kind of a house the man that owned it might live in. And seventy-five dollars was about twice as much as I made in a whole day at the shop. “All right,” I said.

“You have to come over during the day while the kids are at school,” the man said. “I don’t want them to be there when you do it.”

“How’s tomorrow lunchtime?” I asked. Next day was a Wednesday and I figured that ought to of been all right.

The man took a skinny spiral book outta his coat pocket and turned the pages. “Make it Friday?” he asked. “We need some time to say good-bye.”

“Friday, then.”

He scribbled on the back of a small white card and held it out to me. “My home address and phone number,” he said, “in case you have to reschedule or anything.” I flipped the card over, leaving a black thumbprint right where he’d wrote his address. Hailey Monroe, it said in fancy script on the printed side, Counselor at Law. Well, that figured.

“Laird Sutton,” I said, and stuck out my hand. I hoped he got grease on him.

When Friday morning rolled around, I woke up early to clean my gun. I went into the chest at the foot of my bed, where I keep the guns, and the cleaning oil, and a real World War II Jap bayonet that my Uncle Jake gave me, and pulled out a new box of shells so as to have plenty of extra rounds to carry along. If the pig was as big as the man said, one shot might not be enough. At about a quarter to noon I hollered to the guys in the back that I was taking lunch away from the shop, and I drove out to the address on the card.

“Mr. Monroe,” I said when he came to the door.

“Oh, you’re right on time,” he said. We stood there for a while, him not asking me in, and me trying to look pleasant but not like my spirits was too high, on account of I knew the man thought of this as a solemn occasion.

“Pearl’s out back,” he said finally, smiling at me kind of nervous and showing a lot of big, square teeth like two rows of hominy. He stepped back from the door and held his arm out, the way the junior crossing guards do when they direct traffic down at the public school, and I took that to mean I was supposed to go ahead on in the house. He walked about eight steps and just stood there, so I came up behind him and waited for him to show me the pig. I figured this was more emotional for him than it was for me.

“Nice place you’ve got,” I said, but really it wasn’t as fancy as I thought a lawyer’s place would be. They had a lot of space though, or anyway just the living room by itself seemed half as big as the whole trailer where I lived with Alice, or did until she left out of here for a place in the city. That was a while ago now, some time even before I met Maysie.

He had one of those TV sets with a screen the size of a front window and a lounge chair across from that with the plastic wrap still on the footrest. There was a fireplace, of course, and pictures all stood up across the mantle like soldiers. I didn’t want to pry by actually walking over to stare at them, but I could see well enough from where I was that there was the same woman in a lot of the pictures, sort of pale and neat-looking, like a librarian or maybe a dental hygienist. I guessed that was the wife because she and him appeared to be in most of the pictures together. Them and a couple of regular old kids, the kind you see anywhere, a boy and a girl, I guess, but really I just made that up on account of it wasn’t that easy to tell. Coulda been two girls or a couple of long-haired boys, the way rich folks leave their children because don’t lice ever break out in their schools.

“Nice family,” I said. “What’re your kids’ names?”

“Uh ... Jaren and Chris,” he said. “They’re twins.” Which that didn’t help me any figuring out who was what, so I just gave up.

“Well, come on outside,” the man said, and we walked through the rest of the living room and down a little hall to some glass doors off the kitchen. He slid the doors open and made that “after you” signal with his arm again, so I went out first. He had a cement slab out there, just off the house, about eight by ten with one of those barbecue grills on it that don’t take charcoal, and the rest of the yard was grass. Nice regular grass, too; not a yellow patch or a dandelion in sight. He’d fenced off the yard pretty solid with about three rows of bricks for a foundation and then wood planks looked like redwood set into that so the whole thing was about almost ten feet tall. Good and private.

Only thing was, I didn’t see no pig.

“Mr. Monroe,” I started to say, “where is it you keep...,” when out from the side yard came this big, ugly woman the size of a linebacker. She just ambled on out in no particular hurry, all the time fixing me in the eye with a look that was damn unfriendly. She had a man with her wasn’t no prettier nor no smaller, and behind the two of them, looking a little grim about the face, came Maysie.

“Hi, Maysie,” I said.

“Don’t you ‘Hi, Maysie’ me,” she said, “not after you just walked up on my porch and killed my dog.”

Now, I was still trying to get the lay of the land and see what this was all going to come to. I had about figured out there wasn’t no pig, of course, but I was getting my first good look at that woman Maysie had with her, and frankly, she was more worrisome to me than the fella. She had on a man’s shirt with the sleeves torn off up high on the shoulders, and from the ragged edge of the seam all the way down to her wrists wadn’t hardly a space didn’t have some kind of tattoo on it. In another situation, I might have wanted to look more closely at her designs or ask who worked on her, but I was surely not going to try any of that now. Anyway, she must of outsized me by a good eighty pounds and more’n a few inches. She had biceps on her, too, the woman did. On her bottom half she was wearing some tight, raggedy old pair of greasy blue jeans with her ass hanging off the back like an air conditioner, and black stompin’ boots on her feet must have been as big as mine. I ain’t never been in the service, but I thought if I did go, she’da probly been who I got for a drill sergeant.

I was still feeling a little bit of indignant because I didn’t like being tricked that way, and I was gonna say to Maysie that I’d done told her what I’d do if she didn’t fix that dog, and that I was within my rights to keep my word after she’d had fair warning, but right at that time, I didn’t exactly see the advantage to bringing all that up. So I just said, “I guess Raymond told you, then.”

Maysie made a noise that sounded like “Schaaw!” and stood there with her hands on her hips and her breasts all kinda mashed down inside her overalls. I always thought Maysie woulda done better for herself if she didn’t dress like a man half the time.

“This is Earl,” Maysie said finally, pointing to the man standing next to her that looked like Paul Bunyan. “And this here’s Skee. And you already know Hailey.” I just stared around at everybody—didn’t seem quite the right time to be shaking folks’ hands. Besides, I was busy having a revelation. I knew Maysie had taken up after me with some fella named Skee who I’d never laid eyes on, but now it turned out Skee wadn’t no kind of fella.

“Did you bring your gun,” Hailey said.

“Yeah,” I said, though the way he asked didn’t make me feel none too good to be telling them about it.

“Then give it here,” he said.

“I won’t, either,” I said.

Maysie threw me a look of pure disgust and said, “Skee,” and Skee reached around into her back pocket and drew out a switchblade. She flipped it open and started for me.

“Now just hold on here a minute,” I said, backing up until I was pressed against the glass doors to the kitchen. “If ya’ll got some kind of sick John Wayne Bobbitt shit in mind, you just remember that this is all over a damn dog. And you don’t want to be putting a dog’s life over a human’s. Anyway, Maysie, you always got some old mangy, broke-down, worthless animal or other around your place, usually more than one, so I don’t know why you’ve taken on so about this one. But it don’t matter. If you want another dog, I’ll get you one. And I’ll even buy you the feed for the next six months,” I added, on account of Maysie didn’t give me the impression she was finding my offer all that sweet. In fact, she was shaking her head at me like I was pitiful. But the good thing was, Skee wasn’t coming any closer.

“First off,” she said, “he wadn’t technically my dog, he was Skee’s. Well, Skee give ‘em to me, but he was hers first. Skee’s been staying over to my place quite a little bit during the last few months, which you’d know if you ever bothered to come around ‘cept when you want something.”

Now, I knew what she was talking about, even if maybe everybody else didn’t. Maysie and I used to go out together for about a minute, but we broke up on accounta she said she got fed up with me showing up past dark, after I’d already been out drinking, and wanting to crawl right into bed with her. Far as I could tell, it didn’t matter much to Maysie how or when I crawled into bed with her, she just didn’t like it. So I didn’t figure what difference it made if she got her a movie and a Dr. Pepper beforehand or if she didn’t. My way, the whole thing was over quicker anyhow. But Maysie wouldn’t hear nothin’ but that we had to break up, and so that’s what we did. Things didn’t change much between us after that, to tell the truth. I’d still stop over when I was out of beer money or dope, but to be fair, you’d have to say that I also did sometimes ride her up into the next town when she wanted to go to the CostCo and buy a bunch of stuff, ‘cuz I had a pickup and could hold more than a sack of groceries like that piss-ant GM she decided to start tooling around in like she was a damn movie star.

“Second,” Maysie was saying, “you want to watch whose animals you’re insulting, because I am the only reason you’re here instead of saying howdy to Skee and Earl when they showed up at your door all unexpected with a baseball bat. When Skee found out what you done, I had the devil’s own time convincing her to do this my way. So you’d better thank me for making things a whole lot easier on your sorry ass than you even deserve.”

“Uh, thanks, Maysie,” I said. “But what’re you gonna....”

“And then you can apologize to Skee for shooting her and my dog in the first place,” Maysie interrupted, “‘cuz you still got that to account for.”

“I know it,” I said, “and Skee, truly I am sorry for what I did. I surely didn’t ever want to bring a third person into this.”

Skee glared at me and spat, hard and loud. The place where the gob landed left a wet crater in the dust the size of a half-dollar. But she put the switchblade back in her pocket.

“Well, that’ll do for now,” Maysie said. “All right, let’s get this done. Laird, give Hailey your gun. And don’t make me ask again.”

Whatever they had in mind, I didn’t much like my chances of gettin’ out of it. I thought about running, but I knew I’d never make it over the wall in the yard before they caught me. And wadn’t any way to get back out through the house without going through the sliding-glass doors Hailey had locked behind him. I hardly had a minute to think about all that, though, before Hailey come up beside me and held out his hand. I put my gun into it.

“Now,” he said, “you take this.” He hitched up his pants leg to where he had an ankle holster and he pulled out this little ole Nancy Reagan-sized pistol with mother-of-pearl grips.

“Meet Pearl,” he said. “Now you take it.”

I took it, but then I just stood there, holding onto the gun by the barrel and goggling down at it in my hand like he’da just passed me a cold, wet chicken neck. When I raised my head again, Maysie, Skee, Earl, and Hailey were staring straight at me, the four of them looking about as warm and helpful as those faces on Mount Rushmore.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked.

Well, that was the first time Skee stopped frowning and started in to look almost a little bit cheerful. “Shoot yourself in the foot,” she said.

I paused a minute to let that sink in, then I said, “I don’t think so.” I tried to hand the gun back to Hailey, but he wouldn’t take it.

“Laird, don’t be a stone fool,” Maysie sighed. “This is fair and you know it. Besides, if you won’t, I can’t be responsible for keeping Skee and Earl from coming for you. And you know that’s gonna be worse. You wanna be foot shot or beat to hell with a bat? You know I ain’t trying to shit you, neither. Skee never liked you from the get-go and she’s mad enough now to put a hurt on you you’ll not soon forget. Do you believe me?”

“Maysie, I surely do believe you,” I said, “but this is some crazy shit. You can’t just tell a man to shoot himself in the foot and expect him to go ahead and do it.”

Maysie ignored that. “Here’s how it’s gonna go,” she said. “After you shoot yourself, I’ma drive you to the emergency room in your truck ‘cuz you sure ain’t gonna feel much like doin’ it yourself. That way, you’ll be able to go along home when you want after they look at you. You might as well give me your car keys now, too. Meanwhile, Skee’ll come behind in her truck and pick me up. Now you tell ‘em whatever you want at the ER, but I advise you to say you shot yourself by accident. You’ll sound like a damn fool, but you’ll get over it. If you ever try to say anything different, I’m gonna tell ‘em you stalked me here to Hailey’s house and picked a fight when I wouldn’t leave with you. You pulled your gun and Hailey wound up having to shoot you in the foot with his own gun to keep you from hurtin’ anybody. It’s gonna be four people’s word against yours—and one of ‘em a lawyer. Don’t forget, neither, that you’re the guy just blew a pet dog’s brains out when it was tied up on the porch, which ain’t exactly the actions of a sane and healthy man.

“Holy Mary in a Cadillac, Maysie Diane,” I said, “who’d ever a thought you had such a devious mind.”

“Well,” she said, “one of these days I aim to get the hell out of this town and become a writer, and it’s good to have an active imagination.”

“Maysie,” I said, “you keep on doing shit like this, ain’t gonna be a man in this town’ll go with you.”

When I said that, I saw Skee start to come forward again, but Maysie put her hand out and giggled. “Oh, Laird,” she said, “you ‘bout as bright as an old penny in a mud puddle. Now get on with it. Skee and I both got jobs we got to get back to some time this afternoon.”

“Right or left,” I asked.

“Both!” Skee snarled, opening up her big ole mouth and making a nasty, snaggly smirk. I swear to God, seemed like that woman had more tattoos than she had teeth.

“Left,” Maysie said, smiling a little herself. “You ain’t gonna like it when you have to clutch, but at least you’ll be able to step on the gas without breaking down and crying like a girl.”

I bent down and put the muzzle of the pistol against the top surface of my left work boot. I had the barrel angled over toward the edge, thinking I might get away with just blowing the tip off one toe, but Hailey brought his face down right next to mine and said, “Tsk, tsk, tsk.” Then he covered my gun hand with his and slid the barrel back up toward my ankle until the muzzle was nestled right in there where the bottom of the laces starts. “Better,” he said.

Now, I ain’t one to say I never did a crazy thing on a dare, but in all my time one thing I never once had the urge to do was to jump off one of those cherry-picker-type things like they have at the county fair with a rope tied to my leg. Still, if ever I did get drunk enough to want to do such a foolish thing, I guess the moment right before I pulled the trigger must have been just like how it is when you step off the edge. You know it’s probly not going to kill you, but you ain’t too sure how much it’s going to hurt before you’re through. All I knew was, Skee wasn’t never gonna know me to scream in pain, I didn’t care how bad it got.

So I fired, and I screamed, and the last thing I heard before I passed out was Skee making a sound like a dull saw blade going through wet wood. I guessed that musta been what she called laughing.

I woke up later at the hospital, with my foot propped up in some kind of a clamp, and a hole in the middle of it like Jesus H. Christ and a little bit of daylight coming through on the other side if I held my head just so to look. They give me something for the pain, but my foot was still throbbing, and each toe felt like it had its own little separate heart inside, and all five of them pounding as if I’d run all the way to the hospital from Hailey Monroe’s house. Not that I’d of been able to do such a thing in my condition.

Some doctor came by in one of those baggy suits look like wrinkly green pajamas and said, “Lucky for you it was just a .25 caliber. Your basic Saturday Night Special. Could have been a lot worse. We’ll have you out of here in a bit. You had a tetanus shot lately, by the way?”

Well, so that’s how it happened. I wasn’t sure how I was gonna get home that day on account of I was feeling pretty woozy by the time they wheeled me into the lobby, but damn if Raymond wasn’t there waiting for me with the keys to my truck. I was suspicious at first, him being Maysie’s brother and all, but he took me home and got me into bed, and that night he slept on the couch, saying he felt responsible and did I mind if he stuck around to make sure I didn’t want for anything.

Turns out he was a lot of fun to talk to and not nearly so slow as I took him for at the start, and he started sleeping over even after I was well on account of he said things got awful noisy at his place whenever Skee stayed the night. The way he rolled his eyes when he said “noisy,” I knew just what he meant.

Since then, me and Raymond have gotten to be real good friends, and a couple of months ago we just went ahead and moved him in here to my trailer. Skee had quit her place and was living up with Maysie anyway, and I had plenty of room for the two of us. Ever once in a blue moon we go out drinking with Skee and Maysie, but not all that often ‘cuz Skee still makes me some nervous. Still, when I decided to get rid of all my guns, Skee bought ‘em for a fair price and didn’t hand me no attitude about it either. She and Maysie got themselves a new dog not long after that afternoon at Hailey’s—some evil-looking mutt with Rottweiler and German Shepherd mixed in it, I think—and that’s the main thing keeps me from going over to their house. I’m happy to wait in the truck while Raymond goes inside, but I won’t walk up on the porch. Skee went and called that new dog Butcher, and I can’t help but think she named it with me in mind.

_______________

© Wendell Ricketts, all rights reserved. Published in Blithe House Quarterly, Fall 1998.

If This Is A Rom - Lorenzo Renzi

2008-05-27T04:35:00.000-07:00

by Lorenzo Renzi, Professor of Romance Philology, University of Padua
English trans. by Wendell Ricketts

Rom and Romanians await expulsion from Italy.

We don’t yet know what form the Italian government’s plan to expel gypsies, Rom, and Romanians from Italy will take. Because the newly arrived Rom, whose crimes have been so widely discussed in Italy in recent months, come from Romania, the plan also includes provisions to limit the presence of Romanians in Italy, to filter them out at the border. It’s true, of course, that even Romanians who are not Rom have committed numerous crimes.

Such a move, however, would contravene EC law. Romania entered the European Union on January 1, 2007, and the admittance of Romania turned Romanians into European citizens; thus the Rom, who were Romanian citizens in Romania, became European citizens as well. Meanwhile, as an aside, let me say that here in Italy, a civilized country, gypsies are largely stateless—they are denied Italian citizenship and their rights are ignored.

I say gypsies. That is, the Rom. For some time, newspapers and politicians have labored under a self-imposed linguistic taboo: Gypsies are not to be called by that name. Journalists never write gypsies; they write “nomads,” Rom, or even Slavs. The same is true on television. More recently, “Romanian” has become the preferred term, meant to include the Rom as well. It may be useful to make clear that Rom and Romanian are not synonymous. The Rom are to Romanians as our gypsies (who are Rom, or Sinti) are to Italians.

Gypsies, the Rom, and other groups with still other names, arrived in Europe from India during the Middle Ages. They were already present in Italy in the fifteenth century. They were itinerant tinkers; later, they became horse traders. In eastern Europe, they are musicians who play at weddings and other festivities. Some have become skilled interpreters. But the vast majority has never assimilated, never mind been integrated: not in Italy, not in other European countries, and not on the other continents where their nomadism has carried them (North Africa, the United States). A certain number of gypsies have created permanent settlements, but the vast majority remains nomadic. In the spring, their campers take to the road again, following well traveled routes. In the past, horses led these caravans, but the itineraries haven’t changed. The freedom of the gypsy people was declaimed in Spain by Cervantes (in his splendid La Gitanilla) and García Lorca, by Victor Hugo in France, and by Ion Budai-Deleanu in Romania, in much the way Tolstoy celebrated the Chechens.

Are gypsies thieves? Are they dangerous? Sometimes, yes. But as Guido Ceronetti wrote regarding the gypsies in Sole 24Ore (May 11, 2008): the manner in which the law’s “iron fist” falls cannot be separated “from an understanding of the spiritual mystery that has always accompanied the races maudites of our strange planet.” Just to underscore the obvious, I would add that it cannot be separated from fundamental human rights either.

Though Ion Mailat, a Romanian gypsy, killed a woman on October 31, 2007 in Tor di Quinto, a neighborhood in the north of Rome, we cannot permit ourselves to say that all gypsies are murderers. We know that Mailat acted alone, without accomplices, and we know that his crime was reported to police by another gypsy from Mailat’s own encampment. But in the public imagination (a sensibility either feared or shared by many politicians), Mailat’s actions have become the crime, emblematic of the presence of the Rom and of Romanians in Italy. It is a sin that requires the punishment not of an individual, but of an entire nation.

In its report describing the status of the Romanian Rom in Italy, the Community of Sant’Egidio, the influential, Rome-based lay-Christian community, reminds us that, in the 1950s, juvenile court judges in Switzerland debated the elevated number of crimes committed by young Italians. “As a result,” reads one of the sources quoted in the report, “one may well ask whether there is not a cultural propensity toward thievery among the Italian people. Such an idea is corroborated in much European literature.”

The debate died out as soon as Italians began to open stores and restaurants and acquired improved social standing. Italian crime diminished, but the identical suspicions were quickly aimed at subsequent newcomers: the Portuguese, then Yugoslavians, and finally the Turkish.

We don’t know whether Romanians, both Rom and non-Rom, will ever improve their social standing (today often marginal) in Italy, or whether, as is being contemplated, they’ll be expelled first. If that should come to pass, the only thing left to wonder is who their successors will be.

We might also wonder, however, what action Italy took in the face of the arrival—well anticipated—of thousands of Romanian gypsies after January 1, 2007. As was revealed in discussions between Italy and Romania following the Mailat murder, Italy had never even applied for the European funding that is available to member nations to assist gypsies. Six months later, it appears, the City of Genoa is still considering ways to provide housing for the Romanian Rom in its area—using European funds assigned to ... Romania. It fell to Dana Varga, the Romanian Undersecretary for the “Rom question” (who is herself Rom), to remind the authorities in Liguria that European funding exists and is available to Italy for just this purpose.

In the interest of fairness, we might also recall that, even before the arrival of the recent anti-Rom decrees, the basic rights of Romanian gypsies had been violated repeatedly in Italy. Between 2007 and 2008, in Rome, in Milan, and, I fear, in many other civilized Italian cities, bulldozers were deployed to eliminate Rom encampments. In Milan, after the Bovisasca encampment was destroyed, gypsies were pursued and scattered, just as has happened in other places. Were it not for the protests of the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Tettamanzi, the news would never have made it off the local pages of the newspapers.

So are we the first—we European Italians in the twenty-first century—to persecute a people that has lived among us for at least six centuries? The first in the new century, certainly, but not the first in absolute terms. In 1933, Nazi Germany deprived the gypsies of all rights and then consigned them to the crematory ovens where, it appears, some five hundred thousand perished.

“Rom,” in the Indoeuropean language of the gypsies, means “man.” Do you recall Primo Levi’s words? “If this is a man.…”

Cher Upon A Midnight Clear - Matteo B. Bianchi

2007-12-17T07:03:00.000-08:00

Contact me for a sample of Cher, Upon A Midnight Clear!

For Italian readers: Tu Cher dalle Stelle di Matteo B. Bianchi è disponibile dall’editore, Playground nella collana "mio nonno renzo".

A Holiday Tale for Naughty Children

2005-12-31T04:12:00.000-08:00

by Giuseppe Iacobaci
English trans. by Wendell Ricketts
Italian original, "Fiaba natalizia per bimbi cattivi," from the LiberIdea blog

Once upon a time there was a pig, a big, fat, stinky hog named Castonzio. The foul-smelling porker lived on a squalid and dilapidated farm in Kansas, the McKenna Farm, and he reeked of eau de sewer—which is exactly what you’d expect of someone who spends his days wallowing in muck and his own excrement.

Every year at New Year’s, the McKenna family prepared a succulent feast in strict observance of the best Italian holiday traditions: French-fried veal, potatoes-au-tuna, trotter (a lovely big pig’s leg all stuffed with mincemeat and spices), lentil quiche, and a nice twice-boiled cake.

Castonzio the Pig was fed up to here with all this holiday business and with everyone’s having to be at his absolute best: to tell the truth, he’d have much preferred it if he had tasted absolutely dreadful, indigestible even. Indeed, he had already decided he would stop by Old Man Jones’ emporium to pick up some turpentine which he would then inject under his skin on New Year’s Eve, poisoning the lot of them: the two older McKennas and those little bastards, Zeb and Bratt, their children.

Ever since the two of them were little, Zeb and Bratt had had themselves a grand old time pulling Castonzio around by the tail or using him for target practice—pelting him with potatoes and flower bulbs and splitting their sides with laughter as the poor, chubby, smelly, terrorized piglet ran from one end of the sty to the other, trying to get away.

Or else maybe he would reverse the current on the saw they used each year for pig-limb removal and electrocute them all.

Every holiday season, Castonzio the Pig had the same baleful thoughts, but with that wheelchair contraption he was in—nothing more than a fruit crate with some second-hand wheels stuck on—there was little he could do. The whole world was marked “not handicapped accessible,” starting with the pigpen that had kept him confined for as long as he could remember.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but he just wasn’t crazy about the holidays.

So it happened that on a night full of silent stars as tiny as the heads of pins, the scrofulous and fetid pig never noticed as a light slowly began to take solid shape nor even when that light transformed itself suddenly into a figure of distinctly porcine features.

“Wake up,” the resplendent, hoggish apparition said to him.

It was The Great Porker, the guardian witch of pigs everywhere. Legend had it that she appeared only once a year during the holidays to grant the wishes of the pig who had been the unluckiest SOB in the whole wide world.

“Wake up,” she said again. “I’ve come to grant your every wish.”

Still not believing what was happening, and certain he must be asleep, the noisome swine rubbed his eyes.

“Can you hurry it up?” the witch remonstrated. “I’ve got my broom double-parked.”

The Great Porker was constantly pissed off about something. Her position as Granter of Wishes, even though it kept her busy only one day a year, was a job that she nonetheless found significantly constricting. In the first place, she didn’t feel she was cut out to be a fairy, and then there was the matter of her title, on account of which she was often asked to perform services that fell quite outside the requirements of her contract and which she, of course, categorically refused to provide. She was furious that a female pig should be called a “sow,” a name that made everyone think immediately of “slut,” or that “Great Porker” conveyed unduly prurient connotations, and she spent her three hundred and sixty-four days off each year gathering signatures on a petition to delete such terms from the dictionary.

The malodorous hog couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Listen, kiddo,” said The Great Porker irritably. “According to my contract, I’m required to wait up to five minutes and thirty seconds to hear your wishes, at which point I’m authorized to leave. Let’s get this over with, shall we? Tell me what you want.”

“I want a Red Bull,” said the big, fat, stupid piggy, who spent much too much time watching MTV.

And so it was that the McKenna family, once again that year, enjoyed a splendid supper of trotter for their holiday table.

Bayonet

2005-02-25T03:52:00.000-08:00

In my bedroom, my mother was sitting beside me at the olive-green desk. Bring me one of those chairs from the dining room, she’d told me, and now we were pulled up next to each other, close enough for me to smell the cigarette smoke in her clothes and the AquaNet in her hair. The bulb in the gooseneck lamp was the only light in the house, and outside my window geckos were stalking insects across the other surface of the screen. The desk lamp attracted the bugs, which beat against the screen until a gecko, so motionless it might have been fossilized, suddenly seemed to flinch. The motion itself was all but invisible, but not the result: legs and wings hung crosswise in the gecko’s mouth, going in the wrong directions but still twitching. I could see straight into the geckos’ eyes, the color of copper pipe.

“You aren’t even trying,” my mother was saying. I could tell she was mad. More than mad, she was disgusted. I didn’t like how it felt to have my mom look at me that way, with the light of the lamp on one side of her face and shadow on the other, like the moon. Like she’d finally realized her terrible mistake. So I focused on the geckos.

I thought my mother was beautiful. Some days, when she picked me up after school, she stayed to talk with my teachers, and she had a habit of sticking the stem of her white sunglasses into the corner of her mouth, where she chewed it gently. She stood that way, listening, her head tilted to the right. I wanted to be as elegant as that.

She was trying to help me with my math homework–long division—but we weren’t getting very far. Miss Johansen, my sixth-grade teacher, had been sending home notes. I was doing good in all my other subjects, but I was about to get a “D” in math, Miss Johansen said. In my school, there were only seventy-eight students in eight grades, and a “D” was the same as flunking. We lived in the country. In the boondocks, my mother said. The only kids who got “Ds” were the hopeless ones, like Hinano Kalama. He was retarded, but we weren’t supposed to say that word in front of him. Hinano lived with his grandmother, who taught Sunday School and baked every single week, cookies or sometimes brownies, which she sent to school with Hinano. He could remember to do that, at least. She played the ukulele and sang at the May Day pageant, which was the second biggest deal at my school after the Christmas play. Everybody loved her. They felt sorry for her because she was stuck with Hinano, who was taller than anyone else in his grade and took about a week to say anything if you asked him a question, but the teachers still gave him “Ds.” The other person who got “Ds” was Tammy Saito, who stuttered and sweated and had an old-lady face even though she was the same age as me. She also had a cleft palate, and the scar in the middle of her upper lip looked like the thick, raised seams on a stuffed animal after you pulled off all the fur.

If I got a “D” in math, I’d end up like them.

“You’re not applying yourself,” my mother said. Miss Johansen wrote that on my first-quarter report card, and it had become my mom’s new favorite saying, right along with “You just don’t have any stick-to-itiveness.” I figured I’d be hearing that any minute. She’d signed my report card with the “C-” in math and sent it back without writing anything in the box for “Parent Comments.” That blank space was terrible, like the silence when my mom got really mad. The silence before something bad took off. As long as she kept talking, things were okay. Later, she and Miss Johansen started sending each other notes all the time, and I had to carry them back and forth, in sealed envelopes, like a spy against myself.

I tried to concentrate on the page of problems on the desk in front of me. They wanted you to figure out things like: 721 divided by 47. What Miss Johansen called the dividends were housed in neat, three-sided tents, with the divisor outside on the left. At the bottom of the page was printed a warning in purple capitals: SHOW YOUR WORK.

That was the whole trouble. I could have gotten the answers if they let us do it the way I knew how. Like I knew that 47 times 10 was 470. You put the 10 over on the right side and subtracted 470 from 721. So then you had 251 left over. You could try 47 times 5. You put the five over in the column underneath the 10, and subtracted 235 from 251. When the number got below 47, you did the same thing, but added a zeroYou just kept going like that. After a while, you narrowed in on the answer. I could multiply and subtract okay.

But we weren’t allowed to do that anymore. We had to learn the new math. They’d mailed out a notice about it. We had to put the answer on the top of the little tent now, not on the right side in a column. Now you had to think how many times 47 would go into 72 first, and you had to get it exactly right or the problem wouldn’t work out. Then after you subtracted, you could bring down the 1. To me, it was a stupid way to do the problem, but you had to show your work, so I couldn’t just do it the old way on scratch paper and transfer the answers. Besides, we always went over the homework in class, and I knew Miss Johansen would call on me to work a problem on the board, and then there would be no way to hide.

My mom knew how to do it the new way, but she didn’t know how to explain it. She wasn’t a good teacher. And I wasn’t a good student because I wasn’t going to do the homework. Not if we sat there all night. It wasn’t my mom’s fault, but I wasn’t going to do what Miss Johansen wanted. I was sorry my mom had gotten in the middle of me and Miss Johansen, but she didn’t know what Miss Johansen was really like, and I wasn’t going to explain. Anyway, even if I did, I already knew what she’d have told me. She’d have said that you don’t always like everyone you meet in life, but you still had to get along with them, especially if they could hurt you. “When you have your head in the lion’s mouth,” she used to say, “you can’t snatch it out. You got to ease it out.”

Finally, my mom gave up for the night. “Fine,” she said. “Flunk math. It’s your funeral.” She picked up the dining room chair and bumped it along in front of her. When she got it into the hall, she turned and slammed my door. I felt bad, but also relieved. She wouldn’t try that again until the next note. I turned off my desk lamp. My mother was in the kitchen, making coffee. She was opening a new can of MJB, and I could hear the hum of the electric can-opener. She drank coffee all day long. My stepfather was going to be home from work soon, and after she drank a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette and calmed down from helping me with my homework, she’d fix him a plate. Then she’d start getting ready for work. She worked as a bartender from nine every night until three the next morning.

When I heard my stepfather’s Pioneer coming up the gravel driveway, I got up from the desk and put a record on my record player. One of the teachers who liked me had given me a stack of old LPs without the jackets. My mom looked at them and said, “No wonder she gave you these. No one’s ever heard of these people.” My favorite was the one called Rite of Spring. I turned the white plastic knob all the way down to nothing and then slowly edged the sound up again. I kept it to where I could barely hear, but it didn’t matter because I knew the music by heart. I tied a pillowcase around my neck like a cape and I held a pencil between my thumb and forefinger and I conducted, twirling slowly around my room in the dark until I was ready to sleep.

* * * * *

The next day was Saturday, and as usual I planned to spend the day at the beach. I almost always went to the beach after school anyway, but on Saturdays I could stay from dawn until the sun went down if I wanted. On weekends, I had chores I was supposed to do, but mostly I didn’t do them, or I waited until after dark. My mom and my stepfather called me lazy, but if I had to pick up all the mangos that had fallen off the trees in our yard and started to rot, what difference did it make if I did it at night instead of wasting the daylight? My stepfather was paranoid about burglars, so he’d rigged floodlights on the four corners of the house . When they were on, it looked like noon out in the yard anyway. What did we have to steal, was what I wanted to know.

At the beach you could dig under rocks for crabs and sand turtles—not turtles at all but small creatures like white, shiny cockroaches that blew foamy bubbles when you held them between your fingers. You could snorkel and body surf. There were tide pools where, in the deeper ones, ocean fish and even baby sharks were sometimes trapped between the tides. You could hike the old lava flows almost a mile down the coast. I’d done that enough to give me calluses on my feet, and could walk on the lava barefoot. Some days I spent so much time in the water that at night, if I lay still in my bed with my arms spread, I could feel the ocean moving under me, as if I were still drifting gently up and down on the surface of the sea. It felt like someone was touching me softly all along the surface of my body.

As far as I remembered, my mother and stepfather had never wanted to spend much time at the beach, though sometimes my mom cooked a pot of rice and made potato salad, and marinated teriyaki meat in the Tupperware container, and we’d go for a barbecue at one of those parks where there were built-in grills next to the water. Anyway, I was just as glad to be by myself.

The surfing beach, just across the highway at the end of the gravel path that led to our house, was hardly ever crowded. There was no bus out there, and the red mud slicked the road over when it rained, which was most of December. You had to be coming our way for a reason, because the road didn’t go anywhere else. But the waves were good, and there were usually at least a few surfers in the water. Lately, I’d been spending a lot of time watching them: When they were standing on the shore counting waves before they went in, or after they were done surfing, as they leaned back up the slope of the beach, their boards under their arms and their feet burying themselves over and over in the sand like pillars.

Sometimes a group of haole soldiers came in a jeep from the army base in Wahiawa, about fifteen miles away in the center of the island. That was where we went when my mom wanted to do a big grocery shop. When the soldiers went into the cinder-block changing room, I would park my bike outside and follow behind, pretending I had to pee. I wished I could touch them; I wished I could sit on their laps. I kept hoping they would notice me and invite me to go somewhere with them, but they never did. Sometimes one of them smiled or said hello, but that was all. When they left, I felt out of breath.

Later, alone in my room, I could remind myself about the shapes and textures of their bodies, about whether their faces were kind or hard. I pictured the beach, and they would begin to appear, walking toward the water. I’d see them in the long light that came at the end of the day, when the sun was falling behind Pupukea. They were beautiful and the beach was beautiful, and no one ever asked me what I did there all day long.

* * * * *

This Saturday, the water was too churned up for snorkeling, and I was tired of tide pools. Anyway, I was thirsty, and I decided to stop at the Kamakura I.G.A. to buy an Icee. They cost fifty cents, but you could cut out the red-and-blue diamonds on the side of the paper cup and save them, and when you had ten you got a free drink. I had money because every Sunday night my mom left three stacks of five quarters on the corner of my desk: three dollars and seventy-five cents. The quarters came from her tips at the bar. Some of them were colored with red fingernail polish on one side, which were the ones that came out of the jukebox. My mom kept a beer glass full of red quarters by the cash register so she could sing along to music if the bar got too quiet, or else she gave them to her good customers so they could play the jukebox for free. They got three songs for a quarter, so they usually asked her what she wanted to hear. If she wanted to keep them drinking, my mom said, she’d tell them to put on Patsy Cline or Merle Haggard. On weekend evenings, she tried to make things seem more lively, and so she’d ask for that song that started out, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine.” When the man came to empty the jukebox, he gave my mom back all the red quarters. Some of them would mix in with her tips.

Lunch at school cost thirty-five cents. The rest was spending money. I could afford to buy an Icee almost every day if I wanted, but I usually saved that for Saturdays. With the money that was left over, I bought comic books. Speed Racer was my favorite, and he was the last thing I thought about most nights before I went to sleep. I made up adventures for him and me all over the world. We were always in danger, but each one had the same ending: Speed and I would fall asleep together, safe at last and holding each other like buddies .

Mr. Kamakura smiled and waved when he saw me. He was pretty old, and everything in his store seemed old, too: the slats in the wooden floor that had been worn down to a soft furriness by years of bare feet shuffling sand across them, the glass countertops, cracked at the corners and repaired with masking tape. “You like one cone sushi?” he asked. “Mrs. K just made fresh.”

Cone sushi cost thirty cents. “Okay,” I said. “And a cola Icee, please.”

Mr. Kamakura pressed a lever, and the Icee slushed out of the machine, which was the size of our refrigerator at home. I gave him four quarters and he opened a Roi-Tan box to make change. “You be careful now,” he said. “Police officah, he come by today, say some bolo-head buggah makin’ problems down da beach, nasty man do nasty t’ings. Any kine trouble, you run o’heah fast, no worry, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I took my change and walked back down the road toward the beach. I bit into the cone sushi and tasted the tartness of the rice vinegar as it mixed in my mouth with the sweet juice of the wrapping.

I knew Mr. Kamakura was talking about sex. On the bookshelf in our living room, my mom had left a blue pamphlet with the title A Doctor Talks to Nine- to Twelve-Year-Olds. One day it was just there. I knew she’d left it there for me because I was the only one who touched that bookshelf other than to dust it. But I still made sure to read the pamphlet only when I was alone in the house, and I put it back in exactly the same place—between a paperback copy of The Sand Pebbles and a hardback of Wake Island Command. When you slid it in, you had to be careful not to rip the cover of Wake Island Command, which already had a lot of tears in it.

I’d read that book at least five times. It had a drawing on the front of fighter planes coming through the clouds and told about a commander who tried to defend Wake Island from a Japanese attack on the day after Pearl Harbor. He was forced to surrender, and he and his men were starved and tortured in Japanese POW camps. When I was in fourth grade, I took Wake Island Command to school for one of the book reports we had to give out loud in front of the class. I told about the men having to stand naked in the prison yard all day long without moving. If they moved, they’d get beaten or even shot. To me, that was the most important part of the book. My teacher sent a note to my mother that said she thought I was reading too much “in the adult area.” My mother laughed and balled the note into a tight sphere. Every once in a while she did something that amazed me.

The pamphlet had phrases in it like, “The man and woman lie together in an embrace that gives pleasure to both of them.” It wasn’t very specific, but I knew what they’re talking about, There were diagrams, which didn’t help all that much because they didn’t look anything like bodies. But I memorized all the words for things. I doubted anyone else in my whole school had read a pamphlet like that.

In the last section, the doctor explained that there were people who liked to touch children in ways that only grownups were supposed to touch one another, and that if someone tried to hurt me like that, I had to tell my mom or dad or a teacher right away. I thought: If one of the men in the changing room tried to touch me, I wouldn’t tell anyone.

* * * * *

The next day, we went to church, the way we did every Sunday morning. The church owned my school, so it was the same place with all the same people. It was like going to school six days a week instead of five. My homework still wasn’t done.

Before services, we kids all attended Sunday School. My teacher was Mrs. Kalama, though I knew the next year I would have to go to Miss Johansen’s group, and when we prayed, I asked to be able to stay with Mrs. Kalama. The oldest kids, meanwhile, got the minister’s wife, Mrs. Powell. There was only one other married teacher at my school, and that was Mrs. Cooper. Her husband got killed in Vietnam. She had a son named Tommy, who was sixteen. Tommy went to school all the way in Kahuku, which was the closest high school to where we lived. He hung around after Sunday School during the time when we were supposed to be having snacks and waiting for our parents to show up so we could all go to big church together.

Tommy was tall and had a lot of frizzy blonde hair, including on his forearms and his legs. Tommy said the bad words that we were not allowed to say, including the really bad word, and he was mean to us kids, especially to me. I complained about him all the time, but nothing ever changed. Mrs. Cooper didn’t know what to do with him since his father died. That’s what she told my mother.

When Sunday School was over, Tommy followed us to the outside lunch tables next to the playground where the little kids were already on the swing set. He sat at my table. I ignored him and went on reading the book I’d brought until he stuck the tip of his finger into my last, uneaten graham cracker, twisting the dirty blade of his fingernail back and forth like a drill.

“Cut it out, Tommy!” I said.

“Make me,” he said.

“Cut it out or I’ll tell.”

“Girls tell,” he said, “so you probably would. ‘Cuz you’re such a girl.”

“I will, if you don’t leave us kids alone. Your mom said you had to stop bugging us.”

“Leave us kids alone,” he mocked in a cartoon voice.

“Go pick on somebody your own size,” I said, which was what my mom told me to say if he bothered me again. Tommy leaned over and brought his face directly in line with mine, as if he was going to kiss me.

“Gee, now you are my size,” he said. “I guess I should be picking on you.”

I shoved against his chest to get him away from me, and he stepped back, yanking my arm with him. The next thing, we were wrestling on the ground. Someone might have called it wrestling, but it wasn’t really. I’d never learned how to fight and, anyway, he was ten times stronger than me. Basically, he was just pounding me and I was getting pounded. He wasn’t hitting as hard as I knew he could. If I didn’t fight back too much, he usually let me go after a while.

He flipped me onto my back with his knees pinning my elbows down and leaned into my face. He hawked up a wad of spit and let the silver line of it drool across his lips, spilling toward mine. I could see the place on his chin where a patch of blonde hairs poked out like tiny silver pins. He was wearing corduroy shorts, and the fuzz on his thighs rubbed against my cheeks on both sides. I rolled out of that pretty easily because he wasn’t really going to spit in my face. That would have been serious. But then he put me in a headlock and started raking his knuckles hard across the top of my skull, which really hurt. The muscle of his forearm was thick against my throat. My left arm was across his back as I tried to push away. I could feel the tautness of his body, the way the flesh under the surface of his skin moved and hardened when I struggled and he flexed to keep hold of me. I could smell the sweat of his armpit and the fresh-laundry smell of his T-shirt.

“Say ‘I’m a sissy,’” he said. “Say it!”

I wasn’t going say it. Sissy was what Miss Johansen called me. She made me come to the board one day to do a math problem and I didn’t know how and I started to cry. She told me to see her after school, and that was when she said it: “You’re quite a little sissy, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said.

“Then what were you crying about?”

I kept my mouth shut and concentrated on the linoleum tiles laid out on the classroom floor like a green-and-black checkerboard. I wasn’t going to cry in front of her again—not ever. But I wouldn’t talk to her either. Finally, she sent me home.

“Fucking baby,” Tommy said, “fucking baby sissy.”

Suddenly, I did something I hadn’t planned. I reached my right arm across our bodies and I jammed my hand between Tommy’s legs, squeezing as hard as I could. My hand was only on him for a second before Tommy threw me off, but I was astonished by how warm he was there, how warm and how soft. By then a teacher had come around the corner of the main classroom building and was yelling at us to knock it off you two, and Tommy stumbled back a few steps. I hadn’t hurt him much, but it took him a moment to realize that and to get over the shock of what I’d done. He stared at me, and I liked the look on his face, which was almost fear. “Bet that got you all excited,” he snarled before he turned and ran toward the koa bushes that grew in a dense line along the edge of the playground. There was an empty field on the other side, and beyond that the gravel road to Tommy’s house.

When we got home from church, my mom and step dad changed clothes and climbed back into the car. They were going to my Uncle Charlie and Aunty Ida’s house to help them pull a tree stump out of their yard. My stepfather had a hitch on the Pioneer that you could attach a chain to. My mom asked me whether I wanted to come along, but she knew I didn’t. “Don’t turn on the stove,” she said as they drove away.

My Uncle Charlie was a sergeant in the Army, and a lot of the stuff around our house came from the base where he worked. Mortar casings on the patio that they used for ashtrays. The barrel at the corner of the yard where we burned trash. Even my desk and my lamp, for that matter. It was Army surplus, he said. When we were broke, Aunty Ida took my mom shopping at the PX, because you could buy things cheaper there. Those were the times when we had pancakes for supper a few nights in a row. At the PX, you could get the really big box of Bisquick.

Something else we had from my Uncle Charlie was a bayonet from an SKS rifle. It came from Vietnam, where he’d been four times, but he said the Chinese made it or maybe even the Russians. The blade was slim and about eight inches long. My mom kept it in the middle drawer of her desk and used it as a letter opener. Ever since Uncle Charlie gave my mom the bayonet, I couldn’t stop looking at it. I took it out of the drawer when nobody was home and played with it. I liked to run the edge across the ridges of my thumbprint and feel them catch. When he gave it to her, Uncle Charlie said it was sharp enough to shred paper, and sometimes I’d hold a piece of paper out in front of me with one hand and swipe at it with the bayonet, shaving off strips like orange peels. I took the bayonet out of the desk and carried it carefully it into the yard.

My mom had planted spider lilies all along the makai side of our house. She put them in right after we moved, ten or fifteen plants in all. With the way the weather was, and how much rain we got, they grew quickly. The leaves were deep green, long and waxy and sharp at the tips like a sword point. They were almost as wide as my hand, with a ridge down their length like a banana leaf. The flowers grew at the ends of fat, fibrous stalks that shot from the center of each plant, three feet long, rigid and fleshy when you closed your fingers around them. The lilies were in bloom, and a circle of narrow white petals arced, then drooped from the end of each stalk like a Fourth-of-July rocket.

I lifted the bayonet over my head and brought it down first against one of those thick green stalks. There was a satisfying crunch as the blade passed through. I tried again, making a game of slicing so quickly and so viciously that the tops of the stalks hesitated, unaware of being cut, before toppling into the dirt. I began ripping wildly at the lilies—the stems, the leaves, the pathetically fragile and beautiful flowers. I slit the leaves lengthwise, again and again, then tore at the frayed ends. I moved from one end of the garden to the other, rendering it all, stabbing and slashing and ruining whatever I could reach, making particularly certain that not one single white bloom remained; and I hacked a second and third time at the ends of the already-cut stalks, weeping their watery milk, until nothing of them was left to protrude above the plants.

While it was going on, I thought of nothing, or only of the pleasure of destruction and of the satisfaction of watching the pile of litter spread across the floor of the garden. At some point, I stopped and looked around me. I knew what I’d done, and I understood that I’d have to pay for it. I brought the bayonet back inside and rinsed it carefully at the kitchen sink, then dried it on a dish towel and put it back into my mother’s desk. If my parents took their time at Uncle Charlie and Aunty Ida’s, or if they stayed into the evening to drink, I thought, I’d have until the morning, but nightfall was hours away. And there were always the floodlights. I lay down on my bed and waited.

* * * * *

It was still daylight when the front door slammed and I heard my mother surge through the house like a breaking wave. She flung open the door to my room and came toward me, her arms flailing wildly, just as mine had done, to strike me wherever she could reach. “Why? Why? Why?” she demanded with each blow. “Why would you do something like that?” I raised my hands to cover my head and curled my body away from her, letting the slaps and punches fall. She was angry enough to close her fists, and she was hurting me, but I deserved it and I took my punishment in silence. Finally, she stopped, her breathing heavy. “Why did you do it!” she sobbed at last, collapsing to her knees at the foot of my bed. I'd never experienced such compassion for her. My mother had truly cared about those lilies.

I left her there and went to the storage shed in our back yard. I took out the big yellow plastic trash can that I used for picking up mangoes, dropped the rake and the rusty pruning shears inside, and dragged it all to the side of the house. Though I always hosed the can out after I used it, the stink of rotten fruit remained. I began to clean the garden as best I could, piling up the chaos of shredded leaves and chunks of stem, fleshy and angled like the celery my mother put in stew. With the shears I straightened the ragged edges of leaves and amputated those too mangled to survive. I got on my knees and used my fingers to pull the limp white petals from where they had lodged like confetti in the plants’ interiors. As I was working, my mother came into the yard.

“You tell me why,” she said quietly.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She watched me work for a few moments. “That’s only the beginning of what you’ll do to make up for this,” she said. “You’re grounded for two weeks, and tonight your father and I will talk about what has to be done about you.”

“My father is dead,” I said.

“No beach for two weeks. And you come straight home from school and do your homework. When you’re done, you stay in your room until supper is ready. And you’re going to start doing your chores every weekend like you’re supposed to. Things are going to change around this house!”

I kept working.

“There is something wrong with you,” she said, “and we’re going to find out what it is.” She turned and went back inside

I took my time finishing up, in no hurry to begin the days of exile in my room. If it was a question of what was wrong with me, my mother was about as prepared to figure that out as I was to learn new division. And in the end, nothing would change around our house or anywhere, least of all my mother. Nothing ever did after these storms, after the threats and ultimatums and dire predictions, after the explosions of anger or even after the few sentences of truth we always allowed ourselves to speak, carefully nestled in all that anger like a fresh egg in newsprint.

But I had changed. If I felt anything about what I’d done, it was a strange sense of leave-taking. I had discovered that a place existed beyond their ability to hurt me. It wasn’t that I had become immune, but rather that I was full. They—my mother, Miss Johansen, Tommy—had filled me with all the hurt I could carry, and there was no room for more. In the years after, each new sadness would come to me with nostalgia in it.

I finished cleaning up my mess, put away the tools, and went into the house. The lilies would heal, and the two weeks would come to an end. Until then, I would fall asleep with the visions I had memorized—with the lonely surfers who never saw me and the loud and handsome soldiers who were indifferent to me; with Tommy who, for all his cruelty, was the only one who touched me; and with Speed who, for as lovingly as I know he would have touched me, was never real. I conducted them in the darkness like music, drifting in the comfort of my remembered sea until I was far from shore.

Speedos and a Sweatshirt

2004-10-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

(for Mike Lyons)

Yes? Okay? I should go ahead? Sure, I’m ready. What’s not to be ready? We sit and we talk, and for once I have the perfect excuse for no one else being able to get in a word. But to tell you the truth, I am a little nervous. It isn’t every day I get interviewed for the sake of history! Besides, I know you want me to tell you all about Jim, and there’s so much to remember. Sure, sure—about me, too.

Your little machine is running? You know, when I was your age, these things were the size of a suitcase—not like now, a pack of cigarettes. All right, let me just take a minute to organize.

You have all of Jim’s papers, hm? I gave everything that wasn’t personal to your friend, the one who came from your gay museum with a dolly and with that other boy who looked like an advertisement for nutritional supplements. They took away Jim’s office, practically intact. Sure, they took the cabinets—six of them. What was I gonna do with six empty filing cabinets? Planters, maybe?

Anyway, probably you can use them for something, hm? In your office? Do they give you an office for going around and talking to old queers?

Of course I know what’s an archive. It’s like a library, right? So.

Jim’s letters to me, souvenirs, most of the photos—those I kept. You can have all that, too, if you want, only wait a little until I’m too dead to miss it—please! That was a joke.

Jim kept a lot of news clippings over the years. You might find that useful. Also the papers or whatever they give you from when he went to legal conferences. The manuscripts from his books I’m sure are also in the files. You know he wrote two textbooks for law students about queer people, right? The constitution and civil rights and all that. And about sodomy. He was big on sodomy.

Ha! I made you smile. Good. “Just another day advancing the radical homosexual agenda.” That was Jim’s joke when I asked him how his day had been. Also speeches—like when they asked him to talk before the Democratic Convention when it came to San Francisco in 1984. I don’t know all what else is in there. I had a friend go through and put aside whatever he thought I might want to look at again. All the rest, away it went in the van to your history project.

You know what else I have—somewhere, anyway. The suit Jim wore when they swore him in as judge. Who would keep such a thing, hm? Believe me, I didn’t do it because I thought either us was going to wind up famous. Although that was Jim’s big warning when I would try to throw away so much as an old letter—Remember the biographer! What I was thinking, though, was that there might come a day when Jim was feeling maybe not so ai-yi-yi, and I’d get out the box with the suit and say, “Remember the last time you had this on? Aren’t you glad now you ignored me when I said wear the taffeta?” And it should cheer him up, hm?

But you probably wouldn’t want old clothes anyway—I’ll put it for the reliquary! Or better—they could bury me in it, it should get one more wearing. Someone can make money with the alteration so it’ll fit.

Sure it was a big deal, Jim’s swearing-in. The first gay judge in the state—in the country! Well, the first one who wasn’t a secret, anyway. The closet cases you could tell because they came to the party afterwards just long enough to gulp one glass of champagne, shake Jim’s hand, and suddenly have to scram for a pressing engagement. Real momzers, some of them, who for years Jim had to look out for them so they didn’t stab him in the back.

But I have pictures with the mayor and all sorts of other San Francisco bigwigs. The governor—Jerry Brown—even sent a telegram with congratulations for Jim. That I know I gave because we had it in a frame, and I was just noticing this morning that I need to put something else on the wall where it used to be because you can see the outline. Anyway, I thank god for Jerry Brown, because he’s the one who made Jim the appointment, and since him it’s been a steady stream of asshole Republicans. God forbid they should appoint a known fegelah to be in charge even of scooping dog shit. Not that they are not already surrounded by us up in Sacramento—fags, but at least Republicans. For their sake, when the camps come, I hope this means they get a nicer room.

When Brown made Jim a judge, yes, I think it was brave. And of course it was news. But it also wasn’t as though Jim didn’t earn his appointment, is what I’m explaining. He was qualified, sure, but he also raised a bundle of money for that man’s campaign for governor, and a judgeship is the least Brown should have given him. Besides, when you’re the first one, it’s not enough to be as good as everybody else—you have to be better. Otherwise, these people—the ones that make such decisions—they wouldn’t give you the steam off their piss. So don’t think they had made for him some special gay slot out of the goodness of their hearts. Jim deserved. He earned.

After he retired, you know, we just moved everything here and piled it into Jim’s office in the house—whatever didn’t need to stay in his chambers in City Hall for the next guy, I mean. He was always saying he’d go through it one day because he was sure there was a lot of rubbish. I guess I should have cleaned out myself, before your friends came, but I was no good for that. The worst was not the papers, though, it was the clothes—can you imagine? And I don’t mean just the swearing-in suit. The ordinary clothes. With all the people in this town living in rags, could I make a simple trip to Goodwill so Jim’s things should go to someone who needs them? No. The socks and undershorts I could wear myself—I won’t have to buy for years. Probably never again, to tell you the truth. But the rest—shirts and coats and slacks—they don’t fit me. Maybe a shirt or two I could wear for pajamas.

Still, do you know what a selfish thing I did? Ha! I moved all of Jim’s clothes out of our room and into the walk-in closet in the guest room, and that’s where they sit even as we’re talking. Every once in a while, I go in and shut the door behind me, and I just stand there in the dark and smell Jim. Nothing by itself smells much like him anymore, but when they’ve all been shut away together like that for a while—that wonderful smell, the one that used to get into the sheets and pillow cases—it comes back strong as ever. A few times after he died, I even tried wearing what was left of his favorite cologne, you know, as a way to remember. But it didn’t smell good on me. So I put the open bottle way up on the closet shelf. I never thought how fast it would evaporate! But that cologne-smell, too, is mixed in there a little with the other. Faintly. If you know what you’re smelling for.

Ha! You’d think, after almost a year, I wouldn’t get so emotional, hm? You’ll have to forgive. I wanted to have things more pulled into a good shape by the time I lit candles for Jim’s Yahrtzeit, but I’m thinking now maybe it won’t work out like how I imagined. I don’t know why a year seemed such a big deal—an arbitrary date, after all. But I wanted to make everything tidy for Jim, who always wished tidy would rub off on me. And a year, that’s tidy, hm? Like bookends.

I don’t know how I got started on that anyway. You musta guessed an old guy would ramble on like this, hm? I bet you brought extra tapes!

So. I guess when people make these kinds of reminiscences, they usually start by saying something like, “I remember like it was yesterday,” hm? That’s how it is in the movies. So organized. My memories are a little more jumbled. Poor you, who has to sort it all out! Me, all I have to do is live with them, and I was never one to mind a messy house.

Yes! Good thinking. How I met Jim is the best place to start. And that day, in my mind, is very clear. Crystal clear—ha! Clear like water, I could say, if I wanted to be poetic. Wait a minute and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a motif!

But I must also tell you that this is not a memory that seems like yesterday. No, this picture I have of the day I first spoke to Jim—though, I should add, this was not the first time I saw him—is nearly fifty years old, and I have to admit, that’s exactly what it feels like: an almost-fifty-year-old memory. Some days it feels even older than that, which means, I suppose, that I do. Old man, old memories, nu?

Me? I’ll be sixty-eight any day now. In a New York minute, as we used to say. It’s true what they tell you: As you get older, time does go by faster. Whole weeks seem to disappear while I’m not paying much attention. There I am, in my usual muddle, wandering around the bedroom trying to remember where I put my glasses. And then I look up and it’s time for my doctor’s appointment again or Teddy is on the phone, asking what time I want to meet him for the ballet. “My God,” I say, “I thought that wasn’t for weeks yet.”

Such a look you have on your face! Losing time isn’t as frightening as it sounds. Actually, it has a way of softening the edges. And sometimes we need a break from having everything too present. Too much with us, eh? A little literary allusion.

I better explain first about Teddy, who is by now so old he could be in one of those capsules they used to bury under Times Square so the future should know how we lived back in the day. Ha! Teddy’s joke, not mine.

Teddy has been my regular theater partner for fifty years, give or take—but to be honest, he’s been my partner in practically everything. Even after Jim and I got together, I still insisted on my nights out with Teddy. Jim didn’t go for it much at first. But Teddy and I were never anything more to each other than best sisters. And with such a lifelong friend everyone should be blessed. So take my advice—start cultivating already. Out of all the friends you have now, you never know which ones are gonna stick.

Teddy was the kind of guy, we used to say, who really knew how to pour the tea. You know that phrase? I didn’t think so. Someone who could pour the tea was a guy who collected all the best gossip—who knew where the bodies were buried, hm? And he should. Teddy was in San Francisco since before dirt!

Ha! Also Teddy’s joke, for what it’s worth. Me, I don’t tend to kid about my age.

Teddy and I met at college. He was a teaching assistant in one of my classes and we took one look at each other and that was that. Teddy was what you might call “high strung” in those days. The nervous type. You couldn’t make him be still, no matter what. Sometimes you just wanted to say, “Teddy, sit on your hands for God’s sake!” In other words, what I’m saying: If you wanted to stay in the closet, with Teddy you couldn’t be seen. He didn’t exactly pass, is what I mean, hm? But what did I care about that? I just needed a friend. You have to remember, at that point I knew exactly one other gay man for sure.

Well, of course you suspected others. Some of them, it was more than a suspicion. But I’m talking someone who you knew what he was and he knew what you were and, when you were together, you didn’t have to talk about the girlfriend you didn’t have or how you went “all the way” with some coed you’d met or pretend to be interested in football or, God forbid, hockey. With Teddy and me, it was T.O.T. right from the start. You know that one? “Tits on the table.” In other words, no bullshit. Teddy knew things about me that even Jim didn’t know.

No, I don’t mean that how it sounds. I didn’t keep things from Jim, but you have private reactions, hm, that you don’t just blab in your lover’s face. You have a worry about what’s going on in the bedroom, say, or the holidays are coming up, and, okay already, you’re going to his sister’s, but you’ve got to tell somebody that you’re dying to drown her two little darlings in the bathtub. That’s what I’d tell Teddy. And he, of course, had his own tales of loves pursued and loves lost. Mostly lost. Teddy didn’t have luck that way.

Anyway, after Jim and I got together, he and Teddy fought a lot. Not fought, really, more like they’d snipe at each other across the table. “All I’m saying is, why do you have to be such a goddamn flit just because you’re a homosexual?” This is Jim talking. Mr. Establishment. See, later on he’s defending drag queens in his legal practice, but then, no, it was different.

And so Teddy, who could leave nothing alone, shoots off his mouth about how if Jim thinks the people at his work are fooled by the butch act, he’s got another think coming. Both of them drinking too much, of course, because in those days there was no such thing as too much, and it was hard liquor, too, highballs. Even piss-elegant queens weren’t yet serving three kinds of Napa Valley Merlot with their supper. Meanwhile, I’m the one in the middle balancing the platter of crudités and trying not to have my lovely dinner party turn into a fucking William Inge play!

Oh, terrible, they were. Maybe they were jealous of each other, a little. Maybe Teddy was worried I’d start spending all my time with Jim and leave him out in the cold, because it wasn’t so easy for a guy like Teddy to make friends. But there was no danger of my dropping Teddy. After a few years they calmed down and we enjoyed many long truces between skirmishes.

But anyway, the reason I’m telling you this is that, about fifteen years ago, Teddy finally decides to go to the shrink and the guy says he has anxiety-something-or-other, and for this they now have pills. So Teddy turns into Penelope Placid and, for more than the last decade of Jim’s life, he and Teddy were best pals. In fact, the last time Jim ran for reelection before he retired, Teddy cashed in some policy and donated to Jim’s campaign a thousand dollars. How’s that for irony? Of course, Teddy showed up in drag to the swearing-in, but Jim had long since stopped minding Teddy’s outrageousness. He just gave him a huge hug and a kiss and said, “Teddy, you look like a float in the goddamn Rose Parade.” And Teddy says, “Let’s face it, Jim, honey. I’d paint my eyeballs if I could!”

And no one was crying harder at the funeral than Teddy. Always the drama queen—dressed head to foot in black with a veil, no less. Later on he said he was crying because he realized he was stuck taking care of me from now on, but I know he was missing Jim.

So what I was saying—Teddy and I have always kept our supper dates, our dish dates, our theater dates. I bet we’ve seen literally thousands of operas and plays in our time. Jim, he never cared much for that sort of thing—dance performances, plays, what have you. He liked sports, if you can make sense of that. I never could! I teased him about it constantly—it was a joke we had between us, you understand: the jock and the bookworm. It’s ironic how life turns out. When you’re young, you think things are always going to stay the way they are. And if you’re a skinny, uncoordinated Jewish kid, how many options do you have? You study. You get smart. You hope for the best.

Still, between you and me, I secretly admired Jim’s enthusiasm for sports. He always had something to talk about with the straight men at cocktail parties—and that’s not nothing. Straight people don’t mind you so much if they can convince themselves that, deep down, you want the same six boring things out of life that they do.

But it was nice having a lover who sat around on weekends watching football or basketball on TV. I would putter around in the garden—replanting my goddamn azaleas or something—and when I came back inside he’d still be there, usually with friends over. Lesbians, mostly, if you want to know—you try to find four queens who want to watch the Super Bowl!

Well, sure, guys your age, maybe, because even fags today expect each other to act like frat boys. But what I’m talking is Jim’s and my peer group—a different story.

So anyway, I’d make them popcorn and put the beer glasses in the freezer so they would frost up nice when you poured—just like my mother did for my father. It felt—I don’t know. Normal, somehow. Wholesome.

Every once in a while during the summers, when he really twisted my arm, I’d drive with Jim across the Bay to watch the baseball games or, more often, we’d go here in the city to Candlestick Park. It was usually freezing there—the fog you know, and the wind lashing off the Bay like little ice darts—and I’d pack blankets and thermoses full of Irish coffee.

That was before they started searching everyone like you might be a member of the goddamn IRA or something—and they take away your booze. Mind you, they meanwhile sell booze at the park, you just can’t bring your own. Anyway, we’d get all bundled up and snuggle together—well, later we did, when it seemed safe enough to be seen like that in public, not during the early years—and Jim would watch the game and I’d read the New York Times. With white knuckles, too, I can tell you, from trying to keep the wind from blowing the pages all over the stands!

Personally, I always found baseball to be the most boring game on earth, but I liked being there with Jim, and every so often he’d call my attention to something that was going on in the game, and I would be interested just because of how it felt to have his breath warm on my ear as he patiently explained why everyone in the stands had decided to stand up and yell like crazy persons. But I still don’t think I could tell you the difference between an “RBI” and an “ERA.”

And Jim. Jim didn’t know a plié from a pile driver. And of course then it was his turn to tease me about my “culture vulture” friends and about how he hadn’t counted on his husband turning out to be an opera queen. Well, that I was, but I think Jim also got a secret kick out of my conversations with Teddy and the others who we’d have over for an early supper sometimes before we headed out in our little flock to the War Memorial. That’s where they held the opera for all those decades—before the earthquake closed it down, I mean.

We’d sit around kibbitzing and eating some cheese that cost eight thousand dollars a pound and no one had ever heard of, least of all me, and I would try to make Jim laugh with little jokes—you know, involve him in the conversation.

Oh, mostly we made very bad puns. Like, for example: “Vesty the Jew Boy.” For Vesti la giubba? Pagliacci, hm, the one with the crying clown? Or like calling Elizabeth Schwartzkopf “Betty Blackhead” or saying “Monster Rat” when we meant Montserrat Caballé. Birgit Nilsson—she was The Swedish Meatball. They all had their nicknames.

No, these were not operas. These were opera singers. Famous sopranos. Those were the old stars, of course. Later it was people like Kiri Te Kanawa or Kathleen Battle, who you were more or less forced to hear on CD as often as she could get a booking in this farkakte town. Now everybody’s mad for Cecilia Bartoli—don’t ask me why. A lovely girl, but with a voice still green and hard like a piece of fruit you shouldn’t have picked yet. Too soon she’ll be sorry what they made her do before she was ready.

I don’t know why we liked the sopranos. Maybe because they almost always die in the end—but gorgeously! Or could be because it was easier for us to imagine being the one in love with a man than being the man pursuing a woman. Anyway, was it our fault that composers wrote the best parts for sopranos?

I suppose it was a kind of a private language, yes. There were all kinds of abbreviations and code phrases that would have been mysterious to the uninitiated. Mind you, no less incomprehensible to the outsider than the language of baseball—but it was terribly important to us. Terrence McNally even wrote a play about it: The Lisbon Traviata. All about an opera queen who murders his lover because of an insane obsession with Maria Callas. Frankly, I don’t know how straight people ever understood that play, but I suppose there are plenty of straight opera queens. You don’t think we ancient queers keep opera afloat all by ourselves, do you? Though you might get that impression on opening nights in this town.

The opera scene wasn’t always so outrageous, but in San Francisco it became quite festive. A real clash of cultures. Oh, you know: On one side of the aisle you’d have the Herb Caen crowd—“old” San Francisco, so to say, though of course there isn’t really any such thing. But having a pile of money can buy you an awful lot of heritage, believe me. So there would be these filthy-rich women with scrawny wattle necks down to here, but decked out in these godawful dresses that cost ten thousand dollars, you know, with bows the size of box kites or some dreadful plissé fabric that looks like they slept in it. And—on the other side of the aisle—these A-List Pacific Heights queens in head-to-toe leather that cost almost as much. And everyone mingles at intermission, wielding their little glasses of five-dollar champagne like scepters.

Because the leather queens are on the fucking Housing Commission and the scary-hair matrons are married to the guys who give the opera half a million dollars every year!

You never went? You should see it sometime. It’s genuine San Francisco. They have standing room still for less than a movie ticket.

It was a different world then, hm? I got interested in opera because it was what you did. You found other people like you and you were introduced to the arts. You know, we thought being gay was the royal road to culture. We scoured Ackerly and Forster and Maugham and Cavafy for all the hidden meanings. We read Proust—at least, we said we did. We made it our business to study classical music and to know about painting, and, if you could speak well about those things, you got an invitation to the party, so to speak. It was all about a sensibility.

And it didn’t hurt to be pretty. Many’s the time I endured the deadly conversation of some handsome boy who hadn’t read anything since The Hardy Boys but had gotten in on the arm of one of our friends.

Oh God, yes, it was pretentious! Insufferable is what it was. But we were, many of us, still in the thrall of Oscar Wilde—the salon, the idea that style and wit were more important than almost anything. Or maybe it was just overcompensation—we were queer, but at least we were cultural, hm? And the rest of the world was full of Neanderthals.

Still, I was sorry to see it all go, as it eventually did. Because, my God—is anyone witty anymore? Is anyone urbane? We certainly had more entertaining dinner parties than I remember attending in the last ten years. I mean, there you would be at table with someone who was an expert on Japanese netsuke, a man who had just come back from safari in the Australian bush, a poet who was translating Villon, a woman visiting from the Seychelles, and someone whose photographs were on exhibit at the art museum that very moment. And now—who do I eat with? A window dresser at Macy’s, a therapist, and somebody who writes grant proposals for an AIDS organization. And what’s the conversation? Whether Madonna is any good in Evita!

I’m sorry. I know how I must sound. But you wouldn’t have come to see me if you didn’t expect me to tell you that the world was sledding into hell with a blindfold. Isn’t that what old people do? Reminisce about the good old days, kvetch about the present? So, I’m true to type. And I’ll tell you flat out—all the interesting people are dead.

Ech so.... Maybe a little break, hm? I have some sesame crackers and a nice schmear I picked up at Holey Bagel. Chives and who knows what. No? You’re fine?

Maybe some tea, then? It sat all day yesterday in the sun—very delicious with ice. That you will have? Good. I’ll be two minutes. Can your machine hear me if I talk from behind the counter?

Okay. So now, what was I saying? Oh yes, about Teddy and me and the opera.

Jim would go with us now and again, sort of a trade for my going to the baseball with him. He said he thought of himself as Margaret Mead, taking field notes among the savages. I wanted him to go more often—not because I cared if he ever learned to like opera, but because the sight of him in his tuxedo used to take my breath away. Even when he was well into his seventies, he cut an imposing figure. And when he wore a hat! My dear, the crowd would part.

What? No! No, of course he didn’t wear a hat with his tuxedo, but he often did when he went to work—just with his three-piece. I thought he must be one of the last twelve men alive who could make a hat look sexy. Well, he was so tall—6’2”. And he always had that mane of hair. He never lost a single strand—God how I hated him for that! Even when it started to go gray at the sides his hair was as thick and full as when I first touched it. So a hat never made him look like someone trying to cover up a bald spot.

Here you go. Let me put down a napkin. Sugar? No sugar.

After we met I tried wearing hats, too, for a while; they hadn’t yet gone completely out of style. And there was something I liked about two men walking down the street together with hats on and overcoats blowing open in the wind, just looking like two ordinary businessmen and no one having any idea who they really are to each other. It seemed more fun to have that secret back in the days before everybody stopped having secrets about anything at all. Pre-Charles and Diana.

But I never really carried hats off very well anyway. My hair was already thinning by the time I was thirty, and I just stopped trying. Jim was so sweet about it. When I first started going bald, he began making a special point of touching my head and ruffling my hair—what was left of—not just when we were making love, but even when we were alone at home together, sitting around doing nothing. He’d come up behind me in the kitchen and put his arms around me and kiss me right on the top of my bald spot.

At first I was so self-conscious that I’d push him away or tell him to stop, but he kept on, in that ineffable way of his. He never tried to argue with me or tell me I was silly to be worried about it, which would only have made it worse. Instead, he’d wait a few days, then he’d be at it again, holding me against his chest as we lay in bed and leaning down to kiss my head, very casually, so that eventually it seemed natural for him to touch me there, just as he always had. As if it were any other part of my body. And I stopped caring about it—at least as far as Jim was concerned. For that I don’t think I ever thanked him, not specifically, I mean, for giving me that one place—which was anywhere he was—in which how I looked didn’t matter.

Yes, I suppose people are more obsessed with their looks now than they used to be. But when I met Jim, what we cared about most was appearing straight—not being “obvious,” you know? And it was harder for some of us than others. But it was a matter of life and death in some cases. I mean, it depended where you were or what you did for a living, but people we know lost their jobs. A young attorney at Jim’s firm even killed himself. It wasn’t so many years after McCarthy when Jim and I started living together, and the mentality was still very much alive, even in San Francisco. And of course we all knew about the Boise witch hunts.

What Bosie? You mean like Oscar Wilde’s Bosie? Boychik, I’m old, but I’m not that old. No, it’s a town—Boise, Idaho? Around 1955, this was. Someone started the accusation that a group of queens was preying on young boys—“a ring of prominent older homosexuals” was how the papers said it every g.d. time. Of course it was ridiculous. There was no sex ring, as everyone later found out, just a bunch of desperate closet cases and some teenage hustlers who didn’t object to getting a blow job in exchange for pocket money. Some of them from surprisingly good homes, which just goes to show—sex is the great leveler, hm?

It leveled a lot of those men in Boise, anyway. Several went to jail and many others had their lives ruined by the accusations and the rumors—they printed people’s names in the papers before anything had even been investigated! The Idaho police actually came all the way to San Francisco to extradite people for questioning. Jim had a friend who worked in a restaurant and the police came and pulled him out right in the middle of a shift one day and shipped him back home to Idaho.

Of course, Jim and I hadn’t been so long together by then, and the Boise story was all over the local grapevine. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We were worried about the age issue anyway because he was twelve years older than I was. I mean, I was twenty-one when we got together, certainly an adult by anyone’s standards, but Jim was in his early thirties and already successful in his firm, and you never knew what conclusions people might draw.

But I do remember thinking, even when it was happening, that I wished I had known about a place like Boise when I was seventeen or eighteen, because I would probably have found some way to go there.

Why? Because I was desperate to find someone who would prey on me! During the time when I was figuring out what I was, gay life was almost completely underground, and of course I was too young to get into bars anyway. Legally, that is. If some nice older man had approached me in the right way, I would have gone with him in a hot minute. What I would have done afterward, or how I would have kept it a secret, that I don’t think I could tell you.

You’ve got that look again. You don’t approve of men getting together with boys of that age? A lot of people think like you—and maybe things have changed today, hm? I mean, anything you want, you can find it, so maybe if you haven’t found it, that means you really don’t want it, right? Me, I’m not so sure. You ACT-UP types, you seem to think that gay exists in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, maybe three or four other cities, where everyone is free and happy and able to find his people with no trouble. You forget that out there in the middle—in the “land you fly over,” as Jim used to call it—the closet is still spacious.

Go live in rural Missouri or some damn place and be amazed! Suddenly there’s a lot of “bisexuals” running around, hm? And “discrete married man seeking same.” Ha! Quite a surprise. It’s not so nice like here where you can spit out the window and hit a gay person. And you want to know something else? Not just out there in the savage middle, but right here, too, even on this block probably, are homosexual-type people who would have nothing to do with your so-called community if it came with free checking and annual dental. Bars, boutiques, and bodybuilders—believe me, shana punim, for everyone they are not!

So. Hear what I’m saying. A lot of people are looking for someone to help them out of nobody-can-love-me land, and they’re maybe not so picky that it should be a pre-approved, card-carrying, liberated urban homosexual. Sometimes the man down the street—the boy down the street—will do. I’m telling you this not so you should now search my house for NAMBLA literature, but so you should understand that meeting Jim saved me from such loneliness—the kind that so much liberation has not destroyed, thank you very much—and if he had met me when I was seventeen instead of twenty-one, I would only have been four years luckier.

Okay. A breather, hm? I have to rest a minute I shouldn’t get a heart failure.

You think I’m not being fair, hm? You could be right. I don’t know you, you don’t know me—so we look to each other maybe like people who stand for something more than just ourselves. It could happen. But a lot of what I see today, I must tell you, I don’t understand. You have the world and look how you act. I don’t mean you, you. Generic you. Like me: generic old fart.

But I’m saying: the people who made the first movements in this country, they had politics, they believed that we were here to do something good—for each other, yes, but also for the whole world. Okay, so maybe it was schmaltzy, idealistic even. But if you’re idealistic, at least you have ideals, hm? Today, they call it progress when the Stolichnaya company puts a full-page ad in The Advocate. Now we are accepted! No, now we are a marketing niche, and gay money is just as good as anybody else’s—only, please, don’t ask to get married. For this only the straights may apply.

Jim and I talked about this many times—what was becoming of the gays. You have to take the wide view, he said. Everything else is just a passing style. He might have been right. Life was not exactly so perfect for us back when, hm?

Of course I discovered the bar scene, which was a meat rack, just like now. Or so I’m told by my young friends, because God forbid anybody should get a breakdown because a guy on social security walked through the door.

Anyway. First, you were lucky if you could even find them—it wasn’t like listed in the phone book! No name on the door, usually not even an address number. And the entrance was down some side street. That was the back entrance, what you used, because the front, the official entrance, was reserved for when the cops showed up and tried to herd everyone off to jail. Or, more often, just beat the shit out of you, which was one of the favorite off-duty exercise activities of San Francisco cops. They’d leave their hats, guns, and badges in the trunk and just hang out in their cars, drinking out of open bottles—they wouldn’t always come inside—and biding their time to lay into anyone who wandered down the alley alone. Saps, brass knuckles, whatever. And what were you gonna say afterwards? I was at a queer bar and a cop I can’t identify broke my jaw? Not likely. So we’d get the signal that the cops were outside and we’d try to file out the front, all orderly-like and quiet. Sometimes it worked and you made it, sometimes not.

But the bars weren’t much for me, anyway. I never felt good-looking enough to go for the gorgeous guys, and they certainly weren’t falling all over themselves to pick me out of the crowd, either, such as it was. And I was so painfully shy in those days that I found it hard to meet anybody. And of course that was on top of wondering whether somebody you met might be a vice cop or a prostitute—or maybe just a bouncer ready to eighty-six you for not being old enough to be there in the first place, like I wasn’t—and, if you were certain he was none of those things, figuring out whether you were compatible.

In bed, I mean. Which one of you was going to be the boy.

Well, I never really had a preference, but everyone assumed I was the nelly because I was small and because there was no question of my pretending to be a stevedore or something, which is what people seemed to want in those days. Rough trade. You’ve heard the phrase? Though I wasn’t exactly flitting around in a ball gown and a tiara either. I guess I was what people nowadays call a nerd. Bookish, we said then. And I didn’t care what we did in bed. If you managed to get through my shyness, and you got me home and got my glasses off, I was just enthusiastic about sex, any which way.

That was one of the wonderful things about Jim. Even though everyone assumed he was the “man” and that I was the one who always got—that I was always the one on the bottom of the bed—it wasn’t true. Jim liked to be taken care of as much as the next guy—as much as me, anyway, but he also liked doing the care-taking. I could be rough and I could take it when he felt like being rough. But we never had any problems in that area. Even toward the end, we still made love a couple times a month—not that I was keeping track. Which I think is not so bad when you consider that Jim was pushing eighty.

You find it hard to imagine a couple of wrinkly old guys having sex? I certainly did at your age. I never would have imagined that it would be possible for Jim and me to do what we did, long after our bodies had lost all charm for anybody but each other.

Jim was expert that way, at making whatever we did together seem right. And I don’t just mean sex. Sometimes—and I’m talking about all those years we spent together before anyone thought of being liberated—the feeling would just come over you that what you were doing was wrong somehow, even sick. Two men keeping house together—me at the stove scrambling eggs and Jim sitting at the breakfast nook in his bathrobe and asking me if I thought I wanted new carpet in the den. That wasn’t what men were supposed to be doing! Even if all the other straight couples on the block were sitting at breakfast having the same conversation, you just felt that yours was different, that you’d have to get up and hide in the other room if the paperboy came to the door collecting.

I don’t know if Jim experienced moments like that. If he did he never told me about them, and I think he would have. But I had them. A lot at first, then less as the years went by. I suppose I almost started to feel militant, to use a word that became very popular. Our home, our friends, the things we lived through together—that carried weight. I started to feel that I could defend Jim, that I could defend what Jim and I had made together, even if I couldn’t always defend myself. I mean, you nurse a man through enough years of hangovers, bouts with the flu, and shitty moods when his work is driving him crazy, and you feel you have a right to be there.

And Jim was a man who was always going forward. He never bedeviled himself with “what ifs.” Our life was our life, and there was no other. Ergo, it was the right thing to be doing. And that was the end of it. I found it maddening at times, if you want the truth—that certitude. In fact, that was probably our most frequent fight. It’s so cliché I can hardly bear to tell you, but I’ll just give you the opening line and you’ll get the gist. I would say, “Damn you, why do you always have to be right about everything?” And away we’d go.

Oh, sure we fought.

I guess you could say often. He was the most stubborn man I’ve ever known and he could be an absolute tyrant. Ironic, yes, for the man everyone now thinks of as the great mediator? Well, home is home and public life is public life. And I, meanwhile, I had a hot head of my own, especially when we first got together and I was embarrassed about Jim’s money and the fact that he was older and so well-educated. And had a better job. Such a pill I was! Always trying to assert my independence, always trying to be a man. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that gay men don’t worry about their masculinity. Especially when you have a lover, it’s worse. You’re the husband and the wife. And you wonder: If you’re the one who is doing most of the cooking or you’re taking care of the home, or—God forbid—you’re the “artistic” one, maybe the other guy sees you as less of a man. This is what you think. Certainly people outside the house see you that way. So you’re always trying to measure up. Who can make more money? Who has the more settled career? If you don’t get hold of it, the competition will gnaw your insides into matzoh meal.

Of course I settled down as I got older. I suppose I learned to pick my fights. Age ought to give you something in exchange for taking away your muscle tone, hm? But no one ever made me angrier than Jim. He was forever canceling dates at the last minute because he was staying to work late, or he wanted to put in an “appearance” at some event or political fundraiser—always his damn career! What I realized finally is that Jim adored his work. Even as a child, he wanted to be a lawyer. When he was in fifth grade he wrote an essay about the law that won a prize. He made for an introduction a poem he had written—like an epigraph. And a lousier poem never existed. Stilted. Self-conscious. I’m sure he was trying to copy that tight-assed British-boarding-school style that everyone was affecting for a while. Kind of like John Betjeman later on.

John Bet—B-E-T-J-E-M-A-N. A crummy writer who became the British Poet Laureate in, um, 1972, I think. But you don’t have to put that in. Who cares what I thought about him? He’s dead anyway. You were alive in 1972?

You turned one.

Well, at least the Brits have had Poets Laureate for three hundred years. We didn’t get an official one in this country until 1985. And thank God for Bill Clinton—he helped get Rita Dove appointed two years ago. You know, sometimes you could think he was queer just because of this thing he seems to have for colored women! Remember Maya Angelou at the first inauguration? Another terrible poem if you want my opinion.

All right. You’re getting a little tight around the jaws, so I’ll change the subject. But something I don’t understand—you kids today are forever utzing each other over who’s a racist, who’s not, but the minute anyone passes an innocent comment you get nervous. You’re so enlightened you didn’t notice maybe that Maya Angelou was a colored?

Okay, I’m sorry. I was talking about Jim’s awful poem, anyway. I used to have it somewhere. His mother, God rest her soul, saved it and gave it to himin a gold frame no lesswhen he got sworn in as a judge. But that was what impressed them at his grade school, I think, the poem. Jim’s father, too, had been an attorney—and so Jim was following his heart’s desire. How else can I describe it? And later, when he was appointed to the judgeship? Forget about it. He was in heaven. Jim’s career, it seemed to come so naturally for him. He worked hard, sure, but he was never busting his balls to be somebody, you know?

Me, I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I’ve held so many different jobs, it’s a regular shonda. But, you know, another way to look at it, my career was Jim, and I’d still be doing it if he hadn’t died. Anyway, when he was at the office or wherever all those nights, it took practice not to let my imagination run away with me. Not to see every missed dinner as a sign that he loved me less. Oh it got better, of course it did. You don’t stay with a man for nearly fifty years and still wonder every day if he loves you. Of course Jim loved me. And even when I would have one of my fits I would get over it quickly. As soon as I saw him again, as a matter of fact. I’d hear his key in the door, and I’d be sitting in the living room in a huff, with the lights out and tapping my shoe. Already I had rehearsed everything I was going to say and, boy, was he going to get it right between the eyes. So I’d start out, “You’d better have some good excuse for yourself, mister!”

And he would just say, “My baby, you’re right, I’m a terrible husband. Will you let me make it up to you? Please?”

I should stay mad after such an apology? Am I made of stone? Nu. I always forgave him, pushover that I was. But you learn to make accommodations for the things about the other person that make you want to scream like fingernails on the blackboard.

Accommodations. Did you ever hear that story about John Cage and Merce Cunningham? All the years they were together, John thought Merce was a terrible, reckless driver. And so, instead of having fights about it every single time they had to go someplace in the car, they put some nice, comfy pillows in the rear seat, and John would lie back there and take a nap while Merce drove.

Yes, it is a sweet story. But you live for stories like that, hm? Because, straight or queer, no one tells you how to do the simplest things. You’re always looking for some advice or some guidance, and then you get to be a couple of A.K.s like we were and suddenly everybody is turning to you and asking you the same questions you always wondered what the hell the answers were. Go know. Life bites you in the ass that way.

So. To tell you the truth, I’m getting a little pooped. I think maybe I should tell you the story of how Jim and I met like we said at the start, and then we can make it a day, hm? You want to come back another time, if you think you can stand it, I’ll tell you more.

Okay: Here’s how it happened. Though I should first explain that there’s the “company” storythe one we tell ... told, I mean, to people who didn’t know us that well or Jim’s colleagues from work. That sort of thing. And then there’s the gay version, which is the true one. Or, at least, it’s the complete one. Even among our good friends, not that many people know it. Teddy does, of course, because he was there.

When I got out of Europe with my sisters—a brucha on their soulsI was a boy of thirteen. We stayed for quite a few years by relatives in Brooklyn, and that’s where I learned English. But it took a while because I wasn’t what you would call quick. Meantime, frankly, my family was more interested I should attend Shul, and also I worked, because everyone worked even at that age, so I didn’t get through public high school quite so fast as the American kids. And in the middle of all that, my father himself got out and took us right away to California because the whole world was moving to California. He got a job at the university in Berkeley. Groundskeeping and maintenance at first. He was lucky, because by then the war was over and everyone was looking for work, but he was a kind of genius at fixing things, and they gave him a position in the machine shop. So he stayed, and that’s where he retired twenty-five years later.

When it came time for me to think about college, of course he would hear nothing but that I should go to Cal. He could keep an eye on me he said, and it was cheap. In those days, remember, they had this revolutionary idea that a person should get an education if he wanted, so they took in anyone. Not like today where we have policies to weed out the nogoodniks who we already know they’re stupid because they didn’t have the sense to be born with money.

Anyhow, I went, and it wasn’t bad. In fact, I realized I wasn’t such a dummy after all. I discovered a new kind of status, I guess you could call it, which was being the person in class who often knew the answers. Still, as my father used to tell me, “If you are such a smart person, why are you not also rich?” But he was proud of me—God forbid he should actually have said it.

Now at Cal, in those days, they had a beautiful gym, and in the gym was a huge swimming pool, also beautiful. The old-fashioned kind that looked like from a Roman bath, with hand-painted tiles on the edge and on all the areas around the pool where you walked, and marble benches against the walls. And the roof they had made with panes of glass the size of picture windows, each one beveled so the whole thing curved, like a giant hothouse, and the sun came right down on top of you.

My father was the one who sent me to the gym—poor man, never knowing where it would lead. “You’re such a nebbish,” he said. “You better put some meat on those bones or no girl is every going to marry you.” Well, I already knew a girl wasn’t what I wanted, but I also realized it wasn’t out of the question that I would have to get married—I was the only son, hm? Anyway, it was easier to go to the gym than fight with my father. Besides, to obey your father is a mitzvah, I told myself. But what my father had in mind was I should lift weights or go out for a sport, and this I was never going to do. I mean, a mitzvah is a mitzvah—I didn’t also have to be a saint. So swimming became our compromise.

Anyway, I went, and I loved it, much to my surprise. I started going almost every day, early in the morning before classes when it was less crowded. Also the “serious” swimmers went then, and I, who was never good at anything athletic, I liked considering myself serious. And, as you must by now have guessed, Jim was also swimming at that hour. He was already working as an attorney, but he had taken his law degree from Boalt Hall and so, afterwards, he kept his alumni privileges at Cal. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until later.

At the time, what I did notice about Jim—let’s just say it wasn’t his intellect, hm? No, it was his bathing suit—a very skimpy thing for those days. All the essentials were covered up but also not much was left to the imagination. The only time you saw suits like that was pictures of foreign swim teams—and even then not so much. Judging from the suit, I thought he must be European. But he wasn’t—not Jim and not the suit. His Speedo, I found out after, came from Australia—that’s who made them first—but also they were starting to catch on pretty big in the states around then. Very clever, those Speedo guys—they outfitted the Australian swim team for nothing in the ‘48 Olympics and all the free advertising did for them wonders. And Jim, he was just a big, healthy California boy who took a vacation to Australia and came back with a suitcase full of fancy-schmancy bathing suits that he sold to his friends. This, also, I don’t know until later.

Meanwhile, back at the pool, after a few weeks of seeing each other we had gotten to the point where we waved or nodded hello and goodbye. All very butch, the way men do at the gym. But nothing more than that. I thought he was straight. Of course I thought he was straight. By me, the whole world was straight.

Anyway, one morning, I’m standing at the edge of pool and waiting for the lifeguard to blow his whistle to open the free swim—I’m shivering wet from the shower they made you take before you got in, dripping and hugging myself. And out of the corner of my eye, I see that Jim—who, all I know is, he’s some guy who I have now carefully arranged my schedule to be sure to be there whenever he is—has come to stand beside me. And my first reaction is: I have now got a giant neon sign lighting up my ass. Suddenly, I’m convinced that every single person there can tell I’m queer and that I have a crush on this guy I don’t even know. That’s the worst thing when you’re hanging halfway out the closet door—the anxiety that you can’t control who knows about you. Years went by before I realized that nobody gives two shits because they’re too busy worrying about whatever makes them feel self-conscious. But who knew that at the time?

And then Jim spoke to me. Just a few words about nothing, but the point is what he didn’t say. He didn’t try to involve me in some slap-you-on-the-back jock bullshit or ask who did I like in the World Series or had I noticed the tsitskehs on the co-ed at the check-in desk. Which is the kind of talk, even today, you get into an elevator with a straight man and unless you’re wearing a wig and a dress, he will mention these things to you. But the important thing is, Jim had broken the ice, and so after that I had permission—that’s how it felt—to talk to him when we ran into each other, though what I said couldn’t have been too engaging because, when I wasn’t speaking in words of one syllable, I was stuttering like a moron.

What I’m remembering is the water. Or, I should say, Jim in the water. I liked to watch him especially when he swam laps underneath—you know, for breath control. He’d push off from one end and wriggle through the water like a sea snake. He knew when I was watching, too, because sometimes he would get to the other side and not come up for the longest, knowing that I’d get nervous. So I would peer over the edge and there he would be, hanging just beneath the surface and smiling up at me, the little waves in the water making his face split into pieces and then come back together again.

When the hour was over, he’d haul himself out of the pool, pushing up on the edge so his triceps made upside-down Vs on the outsides of his arms, and the water would run down his body, leaving furrows in the hair on his legs and his forearms, like when wind blows through a wheat field. I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful. It wasn’t even erotic—well, of course it was erotic. But I mean, seeing him like that didn’t make me suddenly mad for a schtup. I guess what I felt more than anything was that I wanted to touch him, just to see what it felt like.

Naturally, Jim acted as if he didn’t even notice the attention or the way I looked puppy-dog eyes at him. And he was afraid I was jail bait—or this is what he said after. I’d go sit on the bench with my towel wrapped around my legs so the marble wasn’t so cold, and he’d pull a gray sweatshirt out of his bag—one of those oversized, long-sleeved, crew-necked ones made out of brushed cotton—and throw it on, just like that, still wearing his Speedo, and saunter over to where I was sitting, and he’d stand there, waiting to talk. Sometimes he’d put one foot up on the bench right beside me and lean down, with his elbows on his thigh. For me, who had never in my life been so close to a man—how can I explain. He might as well have been showing me pornography.

And this is how it went for months. We’d chat—about my school, about his job, about California, about swimming. But never anything revealing. He never dropped any bobby pins, as we used to say—never let on he was queer, is what I mean. So why was he spending time with me? I made myself—and Teddy—crazy.

“He’s obviously flirting with you,” Teddy would tell me, and I would insist it couldn’t be so. Because why would anyone? This is what I was thinking of myself.

The frustration, meanwhile, was killing me. So near and yet so far, hm? I decided, if I couldn’t have Jim, that I was at least going to have sex with someone, because the mornings I spent staring at Jim’s chest were making me very edgy, if you follow me. I had heard about this bathroom—a tearoom, hm? —in one of those department stores on Union Square, and so that’s where I went. Also I was hoping that if I went there I might learn some great homosexual mystery—I don’t know, from osmosis, maybe—that would tell me what was what about Jim. A secret signal or something, because you know, in those days you heard things. Like, homosexuals wear green socks on Thursdays. Or you could ask someone, “Do you like seafood?” and, if he said yes, you would know he was also that way. I wish I could tell you I was making this up, but this is how naive I was.

In any case, I got myself immediately arrested for groping some red-headed guy with a crewcut who turned out to be a security guard. He’s standing at the urinal jacking off, mind you, but still, he carefully zips up and then he pulls out his handcuffs and arrests me. You can hardly imagine how convinced I was that the world had come to the end. My father, my school—everything ruined. So I call the only person I can call—Teddy—and Teddy calls a friend, and the friend says he knows an attorney who is taking queer vice cases, and Teddy makes the appointment. Meanwhile, he comes and bails me out and I don’t leave the house for the three days until we have to go to the lawyer’s office. My father, to whom I cannot even show my face, is convinced I’m in my room preparing to die. Which, in a way, I was.

So the day comes and Teddy takes me to downtown San Francisco to a fancy office on Montgomery Street. I’ve never been in such a place, with the wine-colored leather sofa and the mahogany coffee tables, but who can pay much attention to the surroundings since all I’m thinking is, I’m about to go in and tell some stranger that I was caught trying to get laid in a men’s bathroom and could he please keep me from going to jail for the rest of my life. Because what do I know about what they can do to you?

So the secretary comes and says Mr. So-and-So will see you now, and Teddy and I walk into this kind of swishy office with an enormous desk with a black marble top—and who should be sitting on the other side but the man from the pool. And I don’t know which one of us—Jim or me—looks more like he’s ready to plotz. Teddy has by now figured out that something isn’t right, and he’s hopping around, getting more nervous with every second that Jim and I stare at each other and don’t talk. “What? WHAT?” he’s saying.

And Jim, he suddenly undergoes a transformation and turns into Mr. Cool As A Cucumber. “Won’t you gentlemen please sit down?” he says to us—gentlemen, yet. And he tells Teddy, “You must be Mr. Harris. We spoke on the phone.” Teddy, who is speechless, sits. I sit. And Jim, he starts doing his lawyer schtick, explaining what I have to do and what’s going to happen next, just like we were any two clients off the street. I don’t say anything about seeing him at the pool, and he doesn’t say anything. For the next month, until my hearing, I don’t go near the gym, of course, and whenever I talk to Jim on the phone or see him in his office, the whole thing is completely professional.

Well, to make a long story shorter, the hearing is over in about ten minutes, the judge throws out the case for entrapment or some damn thing, and I’m out the door without so much as paying a fine. No record, no nothing, on account of Jim convinces them that I’m so young and upstanding that it wouldn’t be right. What I don’t know until Jim later tells me is that there’s dozens and dozens of these cases because the whole Bay Area is going crazy with vice crackdowns, and almost all of the cases are getting thrown out. The police don’t even really expect convictions, they’re just out to harass queers and embarrass as many people as possible. Which, they’re doing a good job.

So we’re outside on the steps of the courthouse, and Jim offers me a ride back home. At this point, why the fuck not, I think, so off we go. And he says to me, “I don’t think you should be going to places like that.”

“I know,” I tell him.

And he asks me, “What were you doing there?”

Hello Mr. Lawyer! I’m thinking to myself. Was it perhaps not you who, less than twenty minutes ago, heard the security guard tell the world that I tried to grab his dick while he was standing at a urinal? So I say, “What do you think I was doing there?”

“No,” Jim insists, “I mean, what were you really doing there?”

And what am I going to tell but him the truth? “Looking for someone like you,” I say.

So he sighs to himself. And then he reaches over and squeezes my knee and he tells me, “Well, you don’t need to look any more.”

And that, my young friend, what I just told you—that is not the company story, hm? Jim never repeated it because it was a story on me, and I never did ... well, who knows why? We usually said we just met at the pool. But now you have the whole megillah on tape, all out in public, and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.

You know, in a way, I guess you could say that my mess had something to do with the direction Jim’s career took, because after that he accepted more and more gay cases until he eventually opened his own firm with some other gay lawyers he knew—very hush-hush at first—just to deal with civil rights stuff. He started to get involved in the bar raids and liquor license suspensions that were going on—like that one famous case in the late fifties where the state closed two gay bars, one a very popular bohemian hangout in North Beach called The Black Cat where all the poets and the wannabes went, and then another one in Oakland— Mary’s First and Last Chance. An awful name, hm? The police said the bars were a resort for prostitutes and sexual perverts. And Jim said everyone had the same right to gather together in public places as long as they weren’t breaking the law. He won that case on a technicality, but a win was a win, especially then.

And Jim’s career more or less just went from there. It’s a small pond, San Francisco—not to take away from what Jim did, but what I mean is that a person who is determined can make his mark here. Or could, when Jim was coming up, because so many people were still terrified to be known, and Jim, he just stopped caring. I think maybe being in a couple made things look different to him, hm?

Being single and hiding is one thing; the only person you’re lying to is yourself. But when you have a partner, being in the closet also means acting like your lover is just some school chum you happen to room with— who of course doesn’t mind giving up his room to sleep on the couch when the other guys’ parents come to town. And I’ll tell you this: In all the time we were together, Jim never once asked me to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

* * * *

After Liam sent the transcript of the interview up to the house—and, please God, I never heard such a goyishe name as Liam—I must have read over it a dozen times. At first, I wasn’t going to. For quite a while, the transcript sat in the envelope, torn open at one end, and I told myself I wouldn’t look. But eventually I did. And from the very first time I was amazed at how much I left out. No surprise to anyone who knows me—I talked too much about myself and not enough about Jim. But everything about his work is in his papers, and a lot of people know more about his professional life than me. If Liam wants to know, he’ll go ask them.

In his cover note, Liam said they plan to put my interview into their gay archive with the rest of Jim’s materials. So, it’s official: I’m a museum piece. How’s that for information guaranteed to make a person feel not so young? But, if that’s the case, then I think maybe it doesn’t matter so much that I rambled on the way I did. The words of the widow. Helpful for establishing context.

Liam also asked me if I want to correct anything.

And I did have a correction to make—a big one, too. I wanted to correct the part about Jim’s death. I wanted to take my pen and a ruler and make a perfectly straight, black line through every place where I mentioned it. I thought, if I take my scissors and carefully cut out each of the references to it, and then burn the scraps of paper, will he come back?

He wouldn’t come back. And what I would have left is what I have now: A story with holes in it, each one of them the outline of a place where someone used to be.

So how’s that for no way to run an interview, hm? I am interesting to them only because of the holes. Did they come when Jim was still alive and could talk for himself? They didn’t come. The young think there’s so much time. But I don’t blame them. I don’t blame anybody. Maybe I blame Jim’s parents for bequeathing him such a lousy heart it should give him trouble all his life and finally stop altogether only two years after retirement. Two years I had Jim all to myself with nobody else wanting anything from him! Not even two; a little less. Is this fair? For this I should get an interview?

But such a polite boy in his leather jacket and his Nazi shoes. Nobody thinks what they wear on their bodies anymore. And tattoos! Everyone has tattoos nowadays. In my time a tattoo meant something a little different, I can tell you that. But he meant nothing by it. And this is perhaps what bothered me most of all.

Jim had a tattoo, from being in the Navy, right on his shoulder, his deltoid I think you call it. I sometimes wanted to cover it with my hand when we made love. When Jim and I went back east to see my relatives in the summers I dreaded those times when someone would suggest we go swimming and they should see his tattoo. Some of them had tattoos of their own—on their wrists. I was old enough I might have one, too, but by God’s grace I got sent to America as a teenager instead. My parents stayed behind—why, I never asked. And, by the time I saw my father again, he wasn’t in the mood to talk.

What I know is what my Bubelah was willing to explain: One day my father is late coming home from work, and when he arrives through the door he sees the furniture is broken, the windows are full of bullet holes, my mother is gone. Even if the signs weren’t so clear he would know what an empty house means. They were Communists, after all, when it was bad enough just to be a Jew. So, he runs. Well, you call it running, but it was much quieter than that—sewer pipes, neighbors’ cellars, buried and half smothered under rags and old clothes in the bed of a drapers truck. Somehow he gets out. What was he supposed to do, stay and look for her?

I didn’t want to be angry at him. Just like I didn’t want to be angry at Jim, either, for going ahead without me. But what are you going to do: These are the kinds of thoughts you have. Maybe my mother asked herself, too, why my father didn’t save her, but maybe nobody saves anybody, hm? Still, it’s shameful to make comparisons of this kind. I have no right. My personal grief against what my parents must have gone through? Am I living in hell? No, hell this is not. Though sometimes I think it may be the waiting room.

No one should hate life. If there is any sin, that must be one of the big ones.

And every once in a while, small miracles occur.

A little more than a week after my interview, Liam calls to ask would I mind some follow-up questions. What’s to mind, I say, because my appointment book is not exactly overflowing from ink.

So he comes over, we have a little nosh; it’s more like a visit than an interview, but I’m still waiting for him to start asking questions. Only he isn’t getting around to it and he’s so nervous he’s making me nervous. Finally he spits it out: “I want to do something for you.” Sweet, hm?

But I don’t need anything for me, I say. I was glad to do the interview, and it was very pleasant to have permission to talk so much about me and Jim—almost like I had him back here for a few hours. By now, you can imagine, most of my friends are up to here with my reminiscences.

“Wait,” Liam says, and he jumps from the table and runs into the bathroom, looking like he’s about to toss up the nice sandwich I just made. But I don’t hear unpleasant sounds coming from the bathroom, and a few minutes later the door opens and he comes out. And this is the part, may God strike me dead if I’m lying: The boy is standing there naked like a jaybird.

I am, of course, by now with my jaw on the floor—to say the least. What is a twenty-five-year-old boy doing in the doorway to my bathroom with no clothes on? I think, is he going to rob me? Stupid thought because, if there’s one thing I can tell for sure, it’s that he’s not carrying a weapon.

But I’m looking—of course I’m looking. He’s a beautiful boy. One of those black Irish types, sturdy with good muscles, but thin and wiry, like the old Dorothea Lange photos you see of field workers in the West. Furry legs and arms, but straight hair, not curly. And mostly smooth on his chest, with one thick line pointing down from the middle of his stomach to the woolly patch around his privates. And white, white skin, so the dark hair shows up even more. You can see the veins in his arms and hands—worker’s hands, I always thought of them—and one vein in particular rides up over the curve of his biceps, like the Great Wall of China.

“Liam,” I say, “is something the matter?” Another person might have been more clever.

He’s not moving from the doorway—in fact, he’s gripping the door jamb on both sides so hard I can see that the top of his fingers are turning red and white, mottled from the pressure, and he says, again, “I just wanted to give you something.” And so, being that old age has apparently rotted out most of my synapses, I finally begin to understand what would have been obvious to a blind person.

Now Harvey Moss, my dear old friend, he assures me that there are young men—younger men, I should say, which at this point is everyone—who go for older guys. Even guys Harvey’s and my age. Gerontophiles he calls them. Antique dealers, I say. Anyway, maybe someone who wanted you for your wrinkles might be more comforting in the end than someone who wanted you for your muscles. Muscles you can lose, but God continues to be generous with the wrinkles. And no use raising your arms up to heaven and crying out, “Thank you, God, for all the character you’ve given my face, but please, I have more than I deserve. Dayenu!” Because God doesn’t always know from dayenu. Still, I don’t think this is Liam’s story.

So I go to him and I reach gently around behind to the hook on the bathroom wall where I hang my robe, and I take it down and wrap it around his shoulders. “Here, sweetie,” I say, “put this on and then come sit over here with me on the sofa, where we’ll have a little talk, hm?” I hold his hand, which is ice cold, and we go sit.

Immediately he throws his arms around me and burrows his head down against my chest, practically trying to crawl onto my lap, and so I fold him up against me as close as I can and we sit that way for a long while. Being there like that with him, which incidentally I’m not minding at all, makes me think that I haven’t touched another human being in almost a year. Oh sure, quick hugs at the funeral and some afterwards, but not like this.

Finally he says, “I feel so bad about Jim.”

“Yes?” I say.

“How could you stand losing someone you loved so much?”

“Well,” I say, suddenly wise, “I only lost him for a year. I had him for almost fifty before that. That’s what I have to keep remembering.”

“Are you sad?” he wants to know.

And I tell him the truth: “Not all the time.”

Then we stay quiet again for another while, still cuddling. I put my face down into his head of thick, black hair, rubbing gently against the masses of it tumbling all across his shoulders, just soaking up his smell, until Liam gives out such a sigh, and he says, for the third time, “I wanted to do something nice for you. “

“I know,” I say. “And you have. Plus, I have an idea, if you don’t mind.”

“You can do anything you want with me,” he says.

“Shh,” I say. “Wait.”

In the guest bedroom I go to the closet with all Jim’s clothes, and I take down from the shelf one of his old gray pullover sweatshirts. This is one of my favorites—frayed around the collar and torn on one sleeve. I’ve washed it so many times the cloth is soft as flannel. Thank God Jim never lost the habit of wearing them. We must have bought and worn out dozens and dozens of them over the years, although I can say it became a challenge to find the ones made only of cotton.

In the dresser, meanwhile, I still have one or two of Jim’s old Speedos. He wore them, still, but not so much in public as he got older. He said he didn’t want to look like one of those ancient German tourists on vacation in Rio, with a belly like a brown leather basketball hanging over the waistband and, behind, an ass like a flat tire. But sometimes, when we would go up to the hot springs, just the two of us, or when we were among old friends, he would still wear them to swim because they were comfortable.

Me, I never thought he looked so bad, but like all of us maybe, he sometimes found it hard to love such an old body, hm? Jim was hardly one to be vain, but he was definitely not pleased when the gray pubic hairs started coming in. Gray hairs on your head, he said, you’re distinguished; gray hairs on your chest, you’re experienced. Gray hairs on your balls—baby, you’re old!

Anyway, these two things, the sweatshirt and a pair of Speedos, I take out to Liam, who is still curled up on the couch. I wonder would you put these on, I say. For a minute he gets a look on his face like I’m about to suggest some necrophiliac fantasy, but I put up my hand. “Don’t worry. Nothing kinky. Besides, a boy so pretty like you, I’d be dead in minutes.”

That makes him laugh, and I’m glad because I know he’s been thinking to himself that maybe the problem is I don’t find him attractive. He puts on the clothes I’m holding out to him, and everything fits, more or less. He has a nice schlong, this Liam. Of course I noticed. I’m old, not dead. Symmetrical and perky, with I would say a lot of character. Not that I’ve seen so many, but you could tell a lot from a man’s pischer.

Pretty soon, though, he’s got everything covered up again, and he’s just standing there, waiting for me to talk. “You look very handsome,” I tell him, which is true. I never knew Jim at Liam’s age, but, if I did, it’s not so crazy to think he should have looked a little like Liam.

Now that I think of it again, though, there might be some photos. Jim would have been—what?—getting out of law school when he was Liam’s age. More or less. I’ll have to go dig through the albums and see, though the family pictures might all have gone to Jim’s sister. The ones from before I was in the family, anyhow. We had a stack of those old albums, with the stiff black pages like cardboard and that sheet of almost transparent tissue in between. And those little white corners you had to glue into place, by some miracle of God, in the right position to fit the picture so the photo would be straight on the page. Too much for me: My photographs, I kept in boxes.

So Liam asks me, “What do you want me to do?”

This embarrasses me, even more than sex would have embarrassed me, but it’s what I want and, anyway, the whole idea of his being in my house like this has been strange from the beginning, so why not?

I say, “I wonder could you go over by the window and stand in front. Also, maybe you would push the sleeves on the sweatshirt up to your elbows, hm? Yes, like so.”

And I sit on the sofa where I can look at him nice and clear. Not so close I’m right on top, but enough to see what I want to see. The sunshine coming through behind him lights up the edges of his body, catching the fine hairs on the nape of his neck and on his arms and giving them highlights: gold, red, and some color that isn’t really a color, it’s just light. Liam is touched all around by this glow, from the sun, so bright that his face seems to move in and out of shadows, as if there were ripples in the light. I think: This must be how it is when you see an angel—so bright, so overwhelming that you have to remind yourself to pay attention to the details.

When Jim stood over me beside the pool, on those days when I waited on the cold bench to talk with him about nothing, the sun came also through the window panes in the ceiling, filling in the space behind him and outlining his face in gold—like an aura, like later when I saw for the first time Kirlian photography, and Jim explained to me that your skin has light on the inside that not everyone can see.

And suddenly I am laughing, because what is happening to me is what I can only call joy, though I also feel the tears damming up in the corners of my eyes and rolling down. Joy so big my body seems to be stretching to hold it in, and I’m taking breaths huge enough to fill up my new lungs and to make new spaces in my unladen heart.

Liam, too, is laughing, his head thrown back, and his face—as it wavers in and out of my focus, disintegrating for a moment into the warm sunlight behind him and then surfacing again so that I can see again the clean, clear features I already find so familiar—that face that reminds me of my Jim, waiting beneath the water for me to peer over the edge and catch him, unharmed, happy, opening his entire self into a smile that he has hidden there for no one else but me to find it.

That Bitch Rita

2004-05-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

If I even see that bitch, Rita, I’m going to kick her ass up and down this street. And she better not even think I’m fucking around, ‘cuz I will fuck her up. Nobody gets away with puttin’ that shit on me, not especially some skanky bitch like Rita. Marisa! Get back over here! Marisa! Marisa! Get your ass back over here I said. Rapido! Goddamn you, you wait ‘til your moms gets back. I’m gonna tell her you never minded a goddamn thing I said this whole morning. Get over here! Man, I can’t believe Marisa’s fucking mom dumped her on me while she’s off looking for work. Supposedly. Like I don’t know she’s banging that skinny ass cholo wannabe Sammy Leong over at his crib. His moms is Mexican, pops is Chinese. Came out lookin’ all Indonesian or some shit. Man, he go around acting like he’s all that, but ain’t nobody want that tired shit. Before he came sniffin’ around Marisa’s mom, he was fucking my girl Erica. You know? Until he got her ass pregnant and tried to play it off like he was sterile or some shit. Told her ‘cuz he was a half-breed he couldn’t have no children, you know – like a mule? Shit. She so stupid she almost believed him. I was all, so how many guys you been with, ho, if it ain’t his? Then the baby came out all slant-eyed. No shit, huh. Then he’s still all, no, that ain’t mine, ‘cuz her pops works at the shipyard with all that chemical shit, so that’s why the baby came out that way. Erica’s bro was about to cut his punk ass, but her moms moved them up to Española and made Erica put the baby up for adoption. I was all, damn girl, you can’t give up your kid! Make his ass pay for it. But she told ‘em at the hospital she didn’t know who the father was so they didn’t go asking Sammy to sign nothin’. His sorry ass was in jail when they moved anyway, and it ain’t like he got a job. Marisa! Get back in the yard. I told you, stay in the yard. Get off that fence and get back over here. Right now, I said! Marisa! Goddamn you, Marisa. Man, if I didn’t have to watch this little brat I’d go find that ho Rita and fuck her up. She’s such a pussy ass bitch I’d hardly have to break a sweat on her. She’s all pulling hair and shit. Fucking puta bitch, all made up like some ho on Central. Like she don’t know I found out she was all rubbin’ up on my boyfriend Junior when they was kickin’ it over at Sammy’s house last weekend. Sammy has good weed, that’s the only thing he’s good for. So Rita’s all, like, oh, Junior, why don’t you take me for a ride? Junior just fixed up this black Grand Am and he’s all proud of it and shit. He’s got these phat speakers you can hear, like, six blocks away! He pulls up to the stop light and the people in the next car be givin’ him all kinds of dirty looks and shit ‘cuz his stereo is like shaking their fuckin’ windows! Junior ain’t no gang banger really, but he looks like it and no one says shit to him ‘cuz they think he’s strapped and might blow their bitch asses away. Anyway, it’s always some fag in a Geo or some fucking white lady wanna give him looks, and he don’t give a fuck. But Rita knows that him and me got a thing. Ain’t like she was gonna give him none anyway, the cock teasing bitch. She gave Sammy Leong a blow job once for some weed, but no way she was gonna get on her back, the little ho. Wouldn’t mess up her makeup. Plus then she was all tellin’ the world that Sammy don’t got that much anyway. She said the Mexican side sure didn’t show up down there! That cracked me up. Marisa’s mom the one saw Rita and Junior. Man, I’m working my ass off at the fucking Applebee’s and she’s tryin’ to get with Junior? Just to piss me off? Aw hell no. The first time I got to work a night shift and she takes her fucking chance. I hate that bitch, man. I ought to go over there right now and kick her fucking ass. Shit. I’m almost out of fucking cigarettes. Marisa’s mom made me give her gas money, so I can’t even buy none. Fuck! She had better show her ass back up here with some money in her motherfucking hand. That or some cigarettes, one. Like I’m so stupid I don’t know she ain’t going to hold down no minimum-wage job. She’s making more on welfare and selling dope on the side. Plus her baby daddy give her some cash sometimes that she don’t report. Why she’s gonna get a job? If she does get a job, I hope she don’t think I’m going to be her permanent free babysitter, man. Before she started fucking Sammy Leong she never got her ass out of bed before eleven o’clock anyway. Marisa be like playing on the balcony and shit ‘cuz the door’s locked to go outside. I know she don’t think Sammy Leong gonna marry her sorry ass. He’ll fuck her, but he sure as fuck ain’t going to marry her. Plus she looks old, man. She don’t even hardly get carded at clubs no more. Shit. They think she’s like, twenty-five or something. Marisa! Get down off that fence! Do not go out of this yard. No, not over there either. Get your ass back here like I already told you. No! Get off that fence. There’s dogs over there that are going to bite you. Marisa! Are you deaf, girl? I said don’t go out of this yard. Do you want your firecrackers later? Do you? ‘Cuz I’ll throw them right down the fucking toilet. I will. All right, you stay on that side of the fence, but that’s far enough, you hear? You better mind me, girl, ‘cuz your mom ain’t here and I will slap you, even if she don’t. Shit, there goes the fucking phone. I’m sure that’s my work, wanting to know how come my ass ain’t there yet. Fuck them, man. I ain’t working there no more anyway. Let that little freckly ass white boy manager pick up some plates with mayonnaise all over the edge and some nasty ass napkin somebody blowed their nose in. That place is fucked up. Like, they don’t pay you shit, and then you don’t even get to eat for free. You get a fifty percent discount. What kind of shit is that? Plus you got to mop the bathroom with piss all over the floor and soggy toilet paper all wadded up. That shit is nasty, man. I was just going to call in sick today so I could go over and kick that bitch Rita’s ass in for her, but then Marisa’s mom showed up and I just said, fuck it. She’s lucky I was home. Fucking piss me off. She just expects me to be here and watch her fucking brat whenever her crica gets an itch. Plus she takes all my cash so I can’t even smoke a fucking cigarette. Motherfucker! That’s what happens when you’re too nice, man. People take advantage of you. Like these bitches over here all the time with their punk ass boyfriends, eating out of my refrigerator, smoking my shit, listening to my CDs, which they “borrow” and I ain’t never see that again. Fucking Marisa’s mom gets her weed for free now anyhow, but don’t even ask me the last time she brought me any. Man, people take advantage of you if you’re not careful. Marisa mom’s motherfucking brother was over here a couple weekends ago and I caught the motherfucker out in the front of my house with a forty in one hand and his dick in the other, pissing in my driveway. Drunk ass pendejo motherfucker. I told Marisa’s mom, don’t bring his no class ass back over here again, ‘cuz he ain’t welcome. Marisa’s mom is all, oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know he was going to do that. No shit, huh. Plus he picked a fight with these other dudes from up the street and they was throwing punches in the fucking street. Out in front of my house, man! Shit. My fucking fag neighbor called the cops and they show up and I’ve got weed in the house and half these motherfuckers too young to be drinking anyway. I just ran inside and locked the door and turned off the lights. Fucking cop pounded on the door for fifteen minutes, man, before he finally gave up. I was inside in the dark thinking, okay, these motherfuckers don’t got a warrant, right, they can’t do shit. But what the fuck do I know. So Marisa mom’s bro all the sudden jumps up from behind the car where he’s hiding and takes off running like an asshole, so the cops go after him and forget about me. Whatever. I told Marisa’s mom I was fucking lucky and so was she, ‘cuz don’t think I wouldn’t have told them all that weed came from Sammy Leong. Hell yes, I would. I’d give them his fucking beeper number if they wanted it. I don’t give a fuck about him, and I sure as shit ain’t going to jail for that piece of trash. So for a while she wasn’t talking to me until one day she shows up with her kid and she’s all, oh please, would you mind, ‘cuz I have a job interview. What she had was Sammy Leong wanting to get his dick wet and she needed some free motherfuckin’ day care. Marisa! Don’t cross that street! No! I know I can still see you, but I said no. You stay on this side of the street. Marisa! Stay on this side of the street. Damn you, girl, don’t make me come over there and slap you, ‘cuz I will. You hear me? I swear to God, when Marisa’s mom gets back, this is the last fucking time she’s getting me to watch that brat. I don’t even need this shit. Plus as soon as I get rid of Marisa, I’m going over and kill that bitch, Rita. I can’t even believe that fucking slut! Oooh, man, I just want to smash her perra face in. She had Junior’s brother, Virgil, all strung out for a while, too. Then Virgil shows up one night at four in the morning drunk on his ass and he’s all, can I crash here, ‘cuz Rita kicked his ass out. Junior don’t even want to get out of bed, so I’m like, what the fuck? And he’s all, man, the bitch just went crazy and started hitting me. She was like trippin’. So then he passes out and I don’t figure out ‘til later after we get up and he’s already snuck his punk ass out the door that he’s puked all over the couch and didn’t even try to clean it up. I’m, like pissed, and I tell Junior it’s his bro and he better take care of that shit, and Junior’s all, I ain’t cleaning that. You’re the one told him to stay here. And I’m all, he’s your fucking brother, buey, did you expect me to kick his ass out? So Junior takes the pillows out in the yard and shoots the hose on them, all cursing under his breath like a punk. Junior such a fucking baby sometimes. Oooh, but he’s got a verga on him, man! Can’t get enough of that shit! I mean, it’s not like I would stay with a guy just for that, but you know, it’s other stuff, too. Like, he takes me out to dinner sometimes, and I don’t never have to mess with him about condoms. It ain’t like he brings his own, but if I buy ‘em, he use them. Which, you know, I ain’t tryin’ to end up like Marisa’s mom, so that’s all good. But you gotta work to keep your man, ‘cuz you can’t even trust these other bitches nowdays You turn your back, and some ho like Rita is all, hey, lemme just get with you. I guess she figured she fucked his brother so might as well fuck Junior too. But I ain’t tryin’ to let her, and she’s gonna know that. Oh, she’ll know. Right after I kick her bitch ass. Marisa! Marisa! Where the fuck are you, Marisa? Goddamn that girl. Where the fuck did she go? Didn’t I tell her not to go off this street? See, that’s her mom’s fault. I told her Marisa needs her little ass whomped, man, but she don’t care. Oh, but let something happen to her, and see who’s screaming like a motherfucker. Marisa! Shit. Now I gotta chase her down the goddamn street, and she ain’t even my kid. Motherfuck, I need a cigarette. Marisa! Fuck Rita and fuck Marisa’s mom both, man. Both those bitches. I should just say fuck it and kick both their asses. Their motherfuckin’ day is comin’, though. I ain’t worried. I ain’t worried about a motherfuckin’ thing.”

Roma Termini

2004-03-09T01:56:00.000-08:00

Darren Wien was in Rome the day he realized he was out of the running. A moment of self-reflection that was, even at the time, full of clichés: An American homosexual just beyond forty; sex, of a sort, in a vividly squalid theater south of the train station where subtitled straight porn showed on a pocked and fraying screen; a boy whore named Massimo; the fact that Massimo was originally from Sicily and had decided to stay in Rome at the end of his compulsory military service. Massimo had been a bersagliero—literally, a target shooter. And what is to be done when life hands you metaphors no better than that?

Take, for example, the Indian Summer evening a few months earlier, when Darren had attended a friend’s pool party. In the blossoming quiet after the boisterous children had finally, mercifully been ordered to bed, Darren noticed that a large, blow-up beach ball, patterned like a globe, had been left to glide across the surface of the empty pool, ferried by invisible breezes and by the currents of the pumps working away below the surface. The planet adrift in space, Darren tried. The floating world.

But really what he experienced was a rather garish plastic ball with a phallic white plug jutting from one end, a scummy pool turned a milky and urinary shade of green, an evening in which the mosquitoes promised to be fierce. He’d have liked to have done something with all that—something redemptive—but he couldn’t manage. The trouble with life is that it is sometimes too specific for art.

Darren had paid for sex exactly twice in his life. The first time was in 1979, during a trip to Tijuana. He’d driven south across the border from Laguna Beach, where he was staying with a friend who had insisted that a week’s holiday in Southern California was just what Darren needed. Darren was barely installed in the guest room, however, before his friend began to suggest a side trip to Mexico.

“We’ll call Bob,” the friend had said, speaking of his ex-lover, a middle-aged college professor who dressed as though he might be asked at any moment to step into a golf game. “Bob will go the Mexico at the drop of a hat.”

Perhaps it was just a way to get Darren out from underfoot for the weekend. Darren’s host was in high demand in Laguna Beach, in the way handsome boys once were, before beauty turned brutal. He had other fish to fry and a bungalow with very thin walls.

So, in the end, the trip was rather suddenly arranged. Bob drove into the driveway one afternoon and honked his horn, and he and Darren went to Tijuana. The boys they picked up on the street that night didn’t mention money until after they’d put their clothes back on, at which point the older one began to threaten them without conviction (police involvement, eviction from the hotel). Bob rolled his eyes at Darren. “This is so ‘50s!” he laughed. He handed over fifteen dollars and told the boys to beat it. Darren and Bob could hardly wait to get back to Laguna Beach to tell their story.

Massimo was the second time, although what Darren paid for was not the sex, officially speaking: He gave Massimo money so he could fill the oil tank in his Vespa, with which he took Darren from and returned him to the rear edge of the train station, where the creosote-soaked yards began, because the smoking, hiccoughing Vespa so clearly needed it. Darren might have had stand-up sex with Massimo in one of the stalls in the bathrooms alongside the tracks, but that wasn’t Massimo’s style. He liked to get to know a person, he said, to be a little friendly.

Salvatore, another Sicilian, had approached first as Darren leaned against the wall outside the reeking bathroom, its floor slick with a viscid paste of spit, piss, and greasy soot from the platforms. But, like Cassius, Salvatore had a hungry look that put Darren off. Darren wanted to be enthusiastic about the sleaziness of Salvatore: his obvious desperation, the fact that his half-hard cock was outlined, pornographically, in his tight, filthy jeans; the fact that he, as he put it, “did everything,” which meant that you could have fucked him if you wanted to. Later Darren thought he should perhaps have taken Salvatore up on his offer—more straightforward and, ultimately, cheaper than Massimo (Salvatore’s final demand, before he walked away in disgust, was that Darren accompany him into the gabbineto for just under three bucks American).

But Darren had already seen Massimo and that was whom he wanted. Massimo was butch. He looked as though he’d showered recently. Darren didn’t imagine he’d find his foreskin rancid and stinking of ammonia. These are the sort of details a person thinks of when he thinks of paying for sex, however distasteful they seem in other contexts.

When Salvatore smiled, he looked like a vulture. When Massimo smiled, he looked liked a wolf. Wolves are good luck in Rome—Romolo e Remo and all that—and if a Roman wants to wish you good luck, he’ll tell you “in bocca al lupo.” Who knows why being in a wolf’s mouth is good luck. Perhaps because the wolf cares so tenderly for its young, carrying the pups gently between jaws that have the power to shear and tear. Maybe it’s just a perverse phrase that means its opposite, like “break a leg” in English. Anyway, Darren liked Massimo il lupo better than Salvatore l’avvoltoio, though he was confused at first whether Massimo was working the station or just hanging around, the way boys of his age hang around all over Rome, draped picturesquely against statues and fountains, stationed in haphazard groupings along the pied, peeling walls that line the piazzas. What are all these boys, many of them so beautiful, waiting for, a person might wonder, but that’s a mystery as eternal as the city itself.

Disoccupazione breeds trouble, certainly—not always big trouble, but idleness, a listlessness of spirit. People who are not Italian like to say that Italians don’t work hard, but the fact is that they fall largely into two groups: people who hold jobs they know they cannot lose and who are bored as a result, and people who live in ceaseless fear of unemployment and who are, therefore, obsessed with their jobs. Then there are boys like Massimo who slip between the categories. They have little chance of finding legitimate work; their only income is “black money.”

Having sampled a few of Rome’s gay clubs, with their perversely invisible entranceways, their dogged air of furtive anonymity, Darren was tempted to say that homosexuality was the one thing Italians didn’t do well. When he tried the quip out on his traveling companion, however, the retort came back instantly: “But they’ve had so many centuries of practice!” And that observation, more clever and more spontaneous than Darren’s, made him decide to abandon his witticism for use at post-vacation dinner parties back home.

Still, you needed some way to talk about how it was between men in Italy, some way to make sense of what anyone could plainly see—not the easiest task without sounding like a guest on a daytime talk show. Because you tended to start using terms like “behavior” and “roles” and “identities,” which is the way we talk about sex in America.

In Rome, it’s like this: “If I’m going to sell my body, it has to be with someone I can talk to. Who understands that I’m not desperate, a drug addict or something. Who won’t see me on the street two days later and refuse to look me in the eye or, worse, laugh behind his hand. Because I do nothing to be ashamed of. And it has to be someplace better than a bathroom at the train station—a private house, for example, or at least the cinema.”

Which explains how Darren got to the cinema, since he didn’t have a private room. Normally he would have had, but he had broken his own rule on this trip and agreed to travel in due, accompanying an old friend who, having no Italian, was convinced that scoundrel gypsies and thieving cab drivers would ruin his long-anticipated vacation. Thus was Darren pressed into service, shouldering his duties as translator cum guide in exchange for airfare, which he could scarcely have afforded on his own, and becoming in the process what the Victorians quaintly called “a paid companion.” Under the circumstances, the term was particularly ironic. But even if Darren had been alone, the difficulty would have remained of getting Massimo past the Signora at the front desk, though all of that is another story.

The earlier declaration was Massimo’s, of course. His speech sounded very sincere in Italian, with gestures, intonation, and that magnetic rhythm. One of the problems with Italian is that it’s a language that makes anything seem reasonable. In other words, if you heard the same lines from an English-speaking whore on Polk Street, you’d be inclined to disbelieve them, as Darren was not with regard to Massimo. Or you might suspect it was just part of the fantasy, the setup. A cynical form of foreplay: the hooker with a heart of gold.

A cliché, see? But maybe you’re willing to pay a bit more for this—for someone, if you believe him, who doesn’t “go” with just anybody, who exercises discretion in his partners, because, even if it’s only by a whore, we still love to think we’ve been chosen. At least Darren did. Does.

Two days before they were to leave for Rome, Darren flew to JFK, then cabbed to the uptown apartment his traveling companion shared with one of those New York roommates that no one ever sees. They’d decided—the friend had decided—to put themselves on an Italian schedule and were forcing themselves to stay awake through the nights. If they succeeded, the friend argued, they’d arrive in Rome in the third morning fresh and ready to begin the day. While his friend went out to an all-night bookstore to buy last-minute travel guides, Darren drank take-out espresso in the tiny living room, leafing through magazines and trying to make the hours pass before he could safely go to bed without deranging his circadian rhythms.

In one magazine was an interview—a minor character actor who was suddenly, perilously famous for being queer or for coming out or for having AIDS, or maybe for some combination of the three. “I was the whore of Babylon,” the actor told the interviewer.

Great line. Unless you know who the Whore of Babylon actually is. But isn’t it interesting: He meant that he’d been promiscuous. Though that’s not the word. Promiscuous means utterly indiscriminate—that you go with everything, like the color taupe. But the actor wasn’t promiscuous; he had types, he had to experience desire in order to have sex, which implies discrimination, no matter how wide the swath you cut. No one is attracted to an entire gender.

Massimo, of course, or those of his profession, are officially supposed to be promiscuous, meaning indiscriminate, indifferent. But they are neither. Darren had known a few whores in his time. His most recent ex had even become one briefly on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday, his mechanism for proving to himself that he was still attractive. And not just attractive enough for people to want to have sex with him, but attractive enough for them to want to pay for it. Because money, after all, makes attraction more sincere. Though what Darren’s ex didn’t account for is that a man will pay a male whore for all kinds of reasons, physical beauty (or dick size or Abs of Steel) being only part of the package. Convenience is another part, availability. So is the likelihood of never having to see him again. So is the belief, general all over the world, that you can ask a whore for anything and that he either won’t make you feel ashamed for wanting it or that he’s seen much worse.

Massimo did that: made Darren feel that what he wanted wasn’t shameful. Afterwards, as the two rode back on Massimo’s scooter to the train station, Massimo asked Darren several times, “Did you like that?” (He had.) “That’s a fat cock, isn’t it?” (It was.) He even shared his philosophy that only a healthy man could produce semen as fine-tasting as his. Bitter cum is what you get from guys who are sick, Massimo explained. “Sborro amaro.” The pronunciation is difficult for the non-native speaker—the alveolar trill, the lax vowels.

Cum is always bitter, Darren wanted to tell him, though it is an acquired taste, perhaps like grappa. Would anyone believe that Darren remembered a time when people used to joke about the flavors of cum as if they were vintages of wine? That fellow obviously smoked, that one was a vegetarian, the other one was taking medication of some kind (but not that kind, not then).

The man in the interview, the Whore of Babylon, said that he wanted the accomplishment of his later years to be to put an end to secret lives. Private lives, if you like a Noel Coward pun. So he was using the interview to tell everyone about his former sex life, about his legions of tricks, about all the “husbands” he’d gone through, as if he were some great, cannibalistic female spider. The shadow woman: the Whore of Babylon. Given the caliber of the man and the caliber of the magazine, Darren didn’t think he really had any idea what he was talking about. Other than obeying the urge toward memoir. Toward the need, ultimately, for confession.

When Massimo was ready to come, he asked Darren whether he wanted it “dentro” or “fuori.” No question, really: Darren wanted it dentro. He thought Massimo was polite to ask; it showed a kind of sophistication on his part. In fact, that was one of the things he appreciated about Massimo: Though Massimo was unlikely a connoisseur of cocksucking himself, he was philosophical about Darren’s interest in it. He wanted to give Darren a good cock, because he knew he’d like it. He’d offered Darren his cum because he thought Darren might like that, too.

Dentro or fuori. All the same to Massimo probably, though perhaps he, too, got an extra fraction of thrill out of being “accepted” in that way. Men do: It’s a fact of life. But nobody wants to talk about what cum actually means in the sex lives of human beings. The unaccounted-for factor in the teenage-pregnancy statistics. The “reason” behind barebacking, behind so-called risky sex. Men like you to take their cum. And a lot of people are eager to oblige.

But maybe you tell people they can’t do that anymore and maybe you’re even right and maybe they go along with it, grudgingly or pragmatically or perhaps with the missionary zeal that characterized the late ‘80s and limped on until the end of the ‘90s, when more likely than being asked for spare change as you walked on certain streets was to be accosted by a blankly handsome boy with a clipboard and a concerned expression on his face who wanted you to attend a meeting where you could confess your safe-sex failures and promise never to do them again, as if having unsafe sex was vaguely like abandoning your AA schedule and renewing your commitment to it was all that was necessary to climb back on the wagon. It was “healthy” to make this commitment, one learned, and not just in the obvious physical sense. Rather, “healthy” became a code word that implied, darkly, the idea that other kinds of sex were shameful, morally wrong, addictive—addictive, in particular, being a favorite word of the end of the millennium. Along with appropriate: Talking about why Darren wanted Massimo’s cum wasn’t appropriate. Isn’t. Not while everyone is soldiering together against the epidemic, the scourge, the plague, the chaos, the troubles, the unpleasantness, the genocide, the blight, the end of the world, the horror, the Pandemonium, the catastrophe, the Holocaust, the outbreak, the pestilence, the pandemic, the curse, the contagion, the disaster, the cataclysm, the devastation, the calamity, the extermination, the apocalypse, the fall of Wormwood, Armageddon. The Whore of Babylon.

But whatever you do, you can’t pretend you don’t know that people feel they’re missing something important. And that’s why Darren wasn’t going to let Massimo’s cum go wasted. Although, had he been able to get words out of the end of Massimo’s plantain-shaped dick, instead of semen, he might have been just as happy.

If the project is to put an end to secret lives, of course, the part that’s hard to tell isn’t picking someone up outside the bathroom of a train station or sucking him off in a straight porn theater, or even giving him money afterwards. The part that’s hard to admit comes later.

When Darren and Massimo parted company, they made a date for that evening, agreeing to meet again on the Spanish Steps at six p.m. Darren wasn’t sure what he was going to do with him—one thought was to bring Massimo back to the pensione to be shared with Darren’s traveling companion, and there, perhaps, to discover whether Massimo might possibly, if persuaded sufficiently by affection or by lire, prenderlo in culo, since Darren suspected he had an ass—like ninety percent of the boys in Italy, high and tight and shaped like a pair of meloni—that would have brought tears to his eyes.

By the time they left each other at the back of the train station, Darren and Massimo had already discussed the question of maschio versus femminile. Italians appreciate the distinction, but don’t go to the extreme of the Mexicans, who practically turn it into a religion. Tijuana whores who know no other English know the phrase, “Doan’ tosh my ass.” Massimo asked Darren which position he preferred, and Darren explained that, in the United States, it didn’t matter so much, that you pretty much did whatever you wanted, assuming an agreeable partner. Everything in America is wonderful, Massimo said; Darren thought he was too guileless for irony, but you could never tell.

Darren stood on the Spanish Steps—La Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti—for half an hour. If he looked to his left, he could see the pastel, unprepossessing entrance to the house at 26 Piazza di Spagna (from which the steps take their common name), the rooms where Keats tried in vain to stave off consumption.

Darren had expected Massimo to be late. Massimo was the man and Darren was the woman, after all—that had been established at the porn theater—and women wait for men. But, as soon as the minute hand edged past 6:15, Darren started to know he wouldn’t show up at all. In situations like these, you feel that everyone who looks at you—and the Steps were mobbed that evening—knows that you’ve been stood up. Or, worse, that you’ve been stood up by a whore. They don’t have to suffer such indignities: they have homes, families, spouses, lovers, dates, girlfriends, partners, mates, counterparts, marriages, mistresses, boyfriends, assignations, people who expect them, places to be, places they belong, places.

They do not have secret lives.

Or this is what Darren thought as he stood there, watching the hands of his watch clasp together over the Antarctic of the dial: 6:30. Why had he bothered to put on a clean shirt, he wondered. Did he really need to bathe; brush his teeth; fish out the last pair of socks that were actually clean, not just rinsed in the bidet and hung across the radiator overnight; think about where they might go for a piece of pizza afterward; make plans? Much of what Darren had done was in the service of a private, unspoken agenda whose demolition left him stranded.

And of course what you feel at a moment like that is not so much that you’ve been fooled or cheated or even stood up. Because some genuine arrangement would have had to have been established before it could be disarranged. And it was never like that. In Massimo’s existence you were never more than a contingency plan—what he might do if nothing else materialized. He didn’t reject you; he held you in abeyance. A quantum worse. You see that now.

But it reminds you that the attributes, elements, charming qualities that you used to believe bound you to others are no longer working so well when it comes to … that certain arena of sex and love. Certainly you have friends. Some of them of significant long-standing.

But now that you’re waiting for a whore on the Spanish Steps in Rome, you have to admit to yourself that the whole adventure had a purpose you’d hidden even from yourself. You wanted to be different from the others. Sure, you gave him some cash (the equivalent of ten dollars and sixty cents, if it really matters), but you wanted him to come back not for cash, or not solely for the cash, but for you. Because he was interested in your attributes, your charming qualities, your elements. Perhaps the worst part is going back to the hotel room alone, because your friend never believed your whore would show up and silently watched you getting dressed and brushing your teeth and putting on deodorant, knowing it all the time, and when you come back in the door, your friend won’t say “I told you so,” because he won’t have to.

You’ll bring back bread and cheese instead, you decide, for which you’ll need to walk some distance from the Steps, though that’s all to the good: some time ought to pass before you reappear at the pensione (your friend might consider, at least for a moment, that perhaps he was wrong and that Massimo had shown up after all) and anyway you want to give the impression, as you return, laden with packages, of someone with less impeachable reasons for going abroad in the Roman night. You’ll get some expensive cheese and some of that chocolate fondant you’ve been looking for, and pasta to take home on the plane—bucatini, which you can never find in American markets—and, oh, on the way back, you’ll stop by the Scalinata to see if your whore has shown up yet.

What you can’t stop thinking about are the specifics of intimacy that are, paradoxically, impersonal: the softness of skin under your fingers when you run your hand beneath a lover’s shirt; the pleasantly painful turgescence of overkissed lips; the feathery dryness of hair; the way hair smells.

So much revolves around exactly that, you think—what you’re allowed to do with another person’s body, what you have access to: putting your feet in the other person’s lap, being able to lay your palm flat on the skin above his heart, the fact that it’s not strange when you reach beneath the covers and hold his cock. Little by little you’re granted the right to occupy, even if only temporarily, territories on another person’s body. Miraculous, really. The kinds of things a stranger would never allow, would call the cops if you tried. Little by little, of course, those same rights can be revoked—the easements previously granted are not renewed; rights of passage are denied; new boundaries are drawn. But you never think it’s going to be for the last time, even if, one day without your knowing it, it necessarily is.

Ironically, buying Massimo gave you access to his cock, to his balls, to his armpits, his tiny nipples, the optimistic line of hair down the middle of his chest. What you couldn’t buy was Massimo’s mouth, his tongue willingly in yours, his hands in your hair, the time it would have taken for the smell of his body to become familiar. No, your lease restricted you to the adjacent lots, and yet acquiring the rights to those was no more complicated than buying a loaf of bread. So the old maxim still had teeth in it: You can never get enough of what you don’t really want.

And that’s how you come to the realization: You’re out of the running because you quit; you settled out; you can’t handle the competition; you’re all wrong for it; there’s always someone younger and more handsome; playing the game is exhausting; the game told you to get out and you pretended not to understand; you are ridiculous; sex is ridiculous; love at your age is humiliating; you had more than your share of chances and you threw them away; you’ve stopped caring; you never meant it to be like this, but now you can’t figure out a way to turn things around; you couldn’t help but notice the moment when you started to become invisible.

What does it meant to have no more secrets or, at least, to entertain no more secrets about sex?

The forty-year-old gay man at the dawn of the third millennium is an ironic figure. You are pleased, you think, to have survived, but now that you’re out of the game—hors de combat, so to speak—what did it matter, really? Maybe you were never popular in the first place, which is why you’re still alive, because isn’t it often said of the dead what great beauties they were and how everyone desired them? But maybe that was better. If you were the Whore of Babylon, at least you'd have a past.

Now that you’re still alive, on the other hand, all that’s left for you to do is to pick up what you left behind while you waited for the plague to end: like bags stored for years in a bus-station locker. You find the long-lost key, you make your way downtown, you retrieve from the depths of the chrome-colored box shaped like a cremation chamber the barely remembered items that once were yours. But you’ve lived without them so long, you hardly recall their function. And, anyway, you've proved, by all the years, that you were capable of doing without: a certain insouciance and a sardonic wit; your game face; great, peppery handfuls of longing that you can’t do much about anymore. That’s what you chose instead of a past.

You don’t like to complain, but you feel you can’t fail to mention what almost seems a kind of a broken promise. You’ve always known what people thought about your kind, what fears your parents had for you: Queers are fixated on youth and beauty and disregard anyone who has neither; to grow old is to live past being desired. But you liked the new rhetoric you were hearing, and you spouted it along with everyone else. You said: It just isn’t true. It’s an ugly stereotype. People never see what our lives are actually like because we’re invisible, so they’re misled by propaganda.

But now you want to ask: Excuse me, but when we were saying those things, was there any reason to believe they were actually true, or were we just saying what we hoped was true—what we thought, at the least, might one day become true? You could handle being an unlucky exception, the one that proves the rule, if that’s all it was. If what the rhetoric told you held true for others, even if you hadn’t seemed to get your share of it. The people who were there at the time, the ones who marched with you, meanwhile, they’re either dead or as disappointed as you are, so no sense asking them.

And now, with Massimo, you’ve become a stereotype: the middle-aged faggot who pays for sex. The first time it was a game. This time it … wasn’t. But that’s another of those clichés you were told represented a reality that was as dead and gone as child labor. One of the things that couldn’t happen anymore. Because of social progress and all. Because you’d been liberated. From everything but desire.

And meanwhile there is such desire. The nearly boundless geography of what you long for is staggering. Wanting things you cannot have, of course—or, at least, that you do not have—is virtually an element of patriotism. If you’re not wanting enough, you’re barely holding up your end of being American. But now you see the cost of that. You have to be parsimonious with longing, you have to parcel it out—not because there is a limited supply of it (far from it), but because it’s like eating puffer fish. A little poison is what you want: enough to numb the lips, to make the tongue tingle. You’ve got to take it in controlled amounts. Too much and you’re comatose—or worse.

So let us put it this way: If you are a few days beyond your fortieth birthday; and if you are standing on the Spanish Steps in one of the most beautiful and terrifying cities in the world; and if it is an early evening on which the Steps are briefly deserted because of a sudden rain that came and went nearly without your notice; and if, out of vanity, you have elected not to wear your glasses, a decision you now regret because the reflection of the shop lights on the wetness of the rectangular, slate-gray paving stones has rendered the piazza a teeming blur of unparticular movement, a disturbed anthill awash in fractal light; and if you have nonetheless been searching or rather pretending to search the crowd as it returns from temporary cover for someone in particular, a pretense not because you are not really waiting for someone but because you are not sure you will see him and are more or less depending upon him to pick you out, which explains your unnatural pose against the clammy marble that is even now staining your pants with taxi soot and tourist grime liberated by rain; and if the man—the boy, really—on whom you are waiting is a prostitute to whom you have recently given a certain sum of money; and if you have reluctantly concluded, as his tardiness devolved into incontestable absence, that further waiting is pointless; and if you are contemplating what errand could possibly give dignity to your descent from the stairs, to your return, alone, to the hotel room and to the prim silence of your friend; and if you feel, almost superstitiously, that you cannot risk actual motion until you have hit upon a suitable plan; and if you experience yourself, at that moment, as a sort of shuttlecock in an existential game, juddering between utter anonymity and gut-wrenching conspicuousness—well, then, you can rightly lay claim to having had a kind of epiphany.

God knows you’ve had plenty of time to think.

Overcoming inertia is the hardest part, and Darren more-or-less hurls himself off the step on which he’s standing on, falling into the comfortable, purposeful movement of the crowd. Shame is the only enemy, Darren thinks. The embarrassment of being. We’re embarrassed to be! That moment when you start to fear that what you simply, finally are is no longer good enough. When your presence ever after needs justification.

Nearly hidden in an angle of the Piazza di Spagna is an entrance for the Metro, and Darren let himself percolate through its dark, mephitic mouth. He bought his fare and went down the scabrous passageway to the nearest track. He had no particular destination, so it hardly mattered whether he ended up on the inbound or the outbound platform. When the train came, he got on and sat down. He rode to the end of the line and then he rode back. As the train reentered the Spagna station, Darren meant to get up, but the muscles of his body acquiesced into the seat cushion, and he stayed put. Darren watched sadly as the train left the station for the second time. He’d have to go through the whole cycle again.

At every stop, men and boys entered the subway car or got off. Such astonishing men, Darren thought. From the adolescents to the grandpas, Italy hardly made an unattractive man. Although it is still considered impolite to stare, men in Italy mind less being looked at, and Darren let himself look, nodding respectfully if his gaze was returned. It was just like anywhere: You saw a man who drew you in, and in the flash of a moment you’d imagined an entire existence with him, but he was on his way to something else, and your lives didn’t intersect.

Or they did intersect, briefly—for an afternoon, for a year—but the moment eventually came when the door closed, when he walked off, rode off, faded gently out of sight, when, at last, all the potential of him died aborning.

He would have been the Whore of Babylon, Darren decided, if he could have figured out how to go about it. Because even if you set out to be promiscuous, it’s not exactly the sort of thing you can accomplish by yourself, is it? But in Darren’s life, the truth was that he had counted losses instead of conquests, preserving in his heart the stigmata of each and every parting as raw and fresh as if it had been struck into his flesh only moments ago, a devotion that now seemed to him equal parts heroism and pathos, honor and lunacy. They would never have imagined, the absent men (would it have mattered if they had?), the vast, lapidary, and incorruptible edifice of his fidelity.

But it made no difference now. He was done with all that.

He wouldn’t shop after all, Darren thought. As soon as he could, he’d get off the subway and go back to the pensione. He was tired, and anyway he’d stopped caring what his friend might think. Worry of that kind belonged to another life, the one he’d lived before his evening on the garish and filthy Spanish Steps. The train would finish out the route it had no choice but to take, and Darren would wait for it to carry him back to his proper stop. He settled uncomfortably into his seat, stung and scorched, over every surface of his body, by the contingencies of men.

The Way It Happens

2003-03-21T05:24:00.000-08:00

To start things off, she gets mugged. Afterwards, she’s lying on the sidewalk. Doesn’t know what hit her—that’s the cliché, but it’s also the truth. There’s a lot of violence around. You can’t always help the police make a sketch. Anyway, even if you do, it’s approximate. They can’t get inside your head with tiny cameras and see what your mind sees. Not yet, they can’t.

She was walking and then she was down, one shoe off, the sack of groceries burst open and the contents fanned out across the oily sidewalk: a bag of cat litter, two small containers of vanilla yogurt, a TV Guide, some peaches, a can of tomato soup and one of cream of celery. From this perspective the fissures in the broken cement take on geological proportions. She can see slender, sickly yellow leaves pushing up through the cracks like Carboniferous ferns. That and cigarette butts and the black crusts of chewing gum.

The lid of one of the yogurts has popped off and white globs are leaking onto the street. In the moment before people’s ankles and shoes start appearing around her head like thick, leafless stalks, she has time to think: How pathetic. It’s bad enough being a crime victim without everyone seeing your cat litter and your single-serving can of tomato soup.

Her backpack is gone. The man—she guesses it was a man—yanked it off her shoulder and ran. The most expensive thing in it was her new Norton Anthology of Poetry—nearly fifty bucks, including tax. Unfortunately, she needs the book for the class she’s just been assigned to teach. The rodent-mouthed department secretary made it clear she had no intention of trying to wrangle a desk copy out of the publisher at this late date, so Paula had no choice but to buy one. Now she has to buy two.

When she tells the cop about this later, he repeats his question in a polite, official voice as if she didn’t understand the first time: Did she lose any valuables? “That was valuable,” she insists. “If it was a fifty-dollar watch, you’d consider it a valuable.”

The cop looks at her, then writes a few lines in a palm-sized notebook with leather covers—or they look like leather. Just like on television. She wonders where you would get one of those, whether there were cop-supply stores somewhere like art-supply stores. You probably stick with the ones with paper covers for a while when you’re a rookie, then you get serious.

The cop asks her a few more questions—he’s efficient but bored. He wants to know her driver’s license number and she tells him. The mugger took her license, too, long since expired. She’d used her Radiograph to alter the date to make it valid for another two birthdays. She figures they’re going to figure this out eventually but she doesn’t volunteer. She only uses it for identification, anyway. She’s never actually owned a car and she hasn’t driven in years. In the city, you don’t really. Funny how you could tell a cop that you’d just been robbed and that your wallet was gone and he’d believe you were who you said you were and that you lived where you said you did. Any other time they demanded proof. Now they seemed to understand she couldn’t produce any.

But none of that happens for a while and she’s still belly down on the sidewalk, just starting to notice that her right knee is stinging where the skin has been scoured off. She sits up and examines her knee, turning back the torn flap of jeans to get the full picture. There’s not much blood after all, just some lymph tinged with red oozing out in neat rows where sharp pebbles dug into her flesh. There’ll be a bruise.

People help her up, and now all the ankles and pant legs have faces and voices. They’re asking her if she’s hurt, if she feels dizzy, does she want someone to call an ambulance. Mostly she feels conspicuous and embarrassed; so she answers no to all the questions. She’s read about this: It’s part of the psychology of being a victim. You feel guilty. You wish you could be invisible. People’s sudden pity and concern flood in like someone’s turned the hose on you. Poor you: But don’t you look ridiculous with your pants ripped and one shoe still AWOL and your sad groceries strewn across the pavement for everyone to see. Glad it isn’t me.

The worst of it is, she knows there’s no fast way out. Someone assures her that the police are on their way and another voice is saying that he saw the whole thing and won’t mind being a witness. She tries to smile at him. “Thank you,” she says, interrupting him in the middle of one of his sentences. “That’ll help. That’ll be a help.”

A runty, gray-haired woman in a brownish-green old-lady coat is already starting the post mortem. Her blocky coat is made of some thick cloth that looks sturdy enough to stand up by itself, like this old lady’s exoskeleton. “It’s getting so you can’t even go to the store,” the woman in the carapace-coat is saying. “You take your life in your hands.”

That’s when the guy in the gray NYU sweatshirt comes running up. He’s in his twenties, impressively tall, with close-cropped blonde hair and a single gold stud in his left earlobe. “Paula?” he asks. “Are you Paula Brandt?”

She’s confused for a moment. Is he with the police? His haircut makes him look like a cadet of some kind, that and his athletic shoulders.

“I think I found your wallet,” he says. “The guy threw it behind a dumpster.” He holds up her library card. “This is almost the only thing left in it—that and some photos. But it’s got your name on it.”

“Yeah,” she says. She needs a couple of beats to figure out that he’s expecting more of an answer, so she adds, “I mean, yes—it’s mine. I’m Paula.” She hates saying her name in front of people. It sounds dull; it’s a fat-girl name. “You ran after him?” she asks, because she can’t think of what else to say.

NYU-boy smiles and looks proud of himself. “Yeah, but I came along too late. He was long gone. But purse-snatchers almost always drop what they take within a few hundred yards of the crime scene. I just looked in the obvious places on my way back.” He’s still smiling, holding up her wallet. He isn’t even out of breath, Paula thinks.

She extends her hand and he puts the wallet into it gently. “How do you know?” she asks. “About the obvious places?”

“Criminal Science major,” the boy answers.

People are looking at her expectantly, waiting to see what she’ll say next. She’s aware that she has a role to play here. “Well,” she says, “I guess that makes you my hero,” and several people laugh. The boy puffs up like he’s going to bust out of his sweatshirt. He’s got a good face, wide across the cheekbones, almost Slavic, with big eyes and dark lashes. In spite of everything, Paula thinks, I still notice that. The woman in the heavy coat pats him on the arm. “See,” she says, “there’s still some good guys left in the world.”

Paula likes that he’s taking attention away from her. She wants him to have this moment. She wants him to be able to tell his buddies how he came to the rescue of some woman who’d been mugged and that he chased the bad guy down the street. It’s a good one, Paula thinks, a story you can dine out on. She can probably dine out on it, too. People love to hear their worst fears confirmed. Everyone gets an urban tale out of this.

For a while, Paula’s the center of a little storm, better diversion than television. Then a patrol car is pulling up in front of the corner store where Paula brought her groceries. And Paula is starting to see an end to all this.

* * * * * * *

By the time the police are done, most of the crowd has melted away, a layer at a time from the outside first, like a snowman. The police make it less interesting to be a voyeur; their presence takes the vicarious fun out of being a junior crimespotter. While Paula is talking to them a man walks up and hands her what’s left of her groceries. Everything has been repackaged: someone went home and got a new plastic bag and collected her things off the street. It’s an overwhelming gesture of kindness that makes Paula shy all over again. When she can finally leave, one of the cops asks if she wants a ride home. Must be a slow crime day, she thinks, and says no thanks.

As the cops drive off, the one who questioned her leans out the window to say they’ll call if they dig anything up—like earthworms, she imagines. He tips his leather-covered notebook at her in a parting wave, and Paula starts down the block. NYU-boy is waiting for her, propped against a No Parking sign. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” says Paula, and keeps walking. He falls in beside her.

“Do they think they’ll find the guy who did it?” he wants to know.

“I doubt it,” she says. “I mean, this must happen fifty times a day. And nobody saw anything very helpful. They said I was lucky not to be hurt. And to be sure to cancel my credit cards.” She laughs and the boy looks puzzled. “I don’t have any credit cards,” she explains.

They keep walking and Paula realizes that he means to escort her home. She wonders if a more cautious person might not want him to know where she lives. Maybe a more cautious person wouldn’t have gotten mugged. “You don’t have to walk me,” she says.

The boy smiles shyly. “I want to.”

“I’m not likely to get robbed again, you know,” she says, self-mocking. “Statistically speaking, I’m probably safe for at least the next eighteen months.” But she doesn’t actually mind his presence; she wasn’t scared while she was getting mugged but now it’s nice to have company. Someone who was there, someone she doesn’t have to explain it to. She thinks about telling her friends what happened and then decides she doesn’t actually have to. Nothing shows—it isn’t like she’s going to have bruises too visible to hide—and she can keep it a secret if she wants.

“Well, I’ve never been mugged,” he says, “so my number might come up at any time. Maybe you’d better walk me to make sure I’m safe.”

He’s charming, Paula has to hand him that. But still young enough to be naive about it. He isn’t smarmy; he doesn’t seem to know how cute he’s being. “How old are you?” Paula asks.

“Twenty-three. Just turned twenty-three. How ‘bout you?”

“Older than twenty-three.”

“You don’t look it.”

Paula laughs out loud. It feels good, a genuine laugh. She takes in a big breath of clean air and feels lighter. “Who taught you that you were supposed to tell women they didn’t look their age?” she asks, turning to look at the boy’s face for the first time. He blushes and stares at the sidewalk.

“Well, you don’t,” he mumbles.

“It’s okay,” she says, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “It’s sweet. Thank you. It’s just ... I don’t know. Chivalrous.”

“I like that,” he says, brightening. “Good crossword-puzzle word.”

“You like crossword puzzles?” she asks.

He smiles again, showing two rows of white, uneven teeth. “You don’t think I’m the type, huh?” he says, picking up Paula’s teasing tone. “I’d challenge you sometime, but I’m pretty good.”

This is okay, Paula thinks. This is not odd. All I’m doing is having a conversation with a guy I ran into on the street. In some places in the world, it’s still considered normal to talk to strangers. It’s like striking up a conversation with someone you sit next to on the plane. Some people actually expect it and are pissed off if you stick your head into your book and refuse to trade details with them about where you live and why you’re traveling. “So do you have a library card?” she asks the boy.

“What?”

“You know, a library card.”

“Yeah....”

“Let’s see it.”

He’s shaking his head as he pulls out his wallet. “It’s my student ID,” he says, “they use it as a library card.” He hands her a blue laminated rectangle with the predictable mug shot, his square, handsome face bearing a look of surprise as if he was expecting something other than the camera.

“Okay, Brian Michael Mitchell,” she says, handing the card back, “now we’re even. Although I have to tell you that my mother told me never to trust a man with three first names.”

Even before they get to Paula’s building, Brian has asked her to have supper with him. Does she feel like getting something to eat? is how he puts it. Paula isn’t hungry, but she says yes. She makes him wait downstairs on the stoop while she drops off the remains of her groceries. At first she thinks of dumping the whole thing down the garbage chute, just to avoid dealing with it again later, when she imagines she’ll be feeling less stoic than she does at the moment. But the canned stuff is still okay, and, by some miracle, the cat litter didn’t break open. That’s always the heaviest item walking back from the store. Why do that again if she doesn’t have to? Besides, tossing everything seems ungrateful to the man who went to the trouble of salvaging her groceries. Only one of the peaches made it, she observes as she empties the bag, and she puts it into the refrigerator where it shares a shelf with a crusted jar of chutney and nothing else.

She changes out of her ripped jeans and combs her hair. She debates whether to put on lipstick. It’s almost dark outside, and she is dressing for the evening after all, though that seems a strange way of putting it. She decides against it, but does put on a different sweater, a heavy one of thick maroon wool, one that makes her feel like a grownup. Then she goes back into the bathroom and washes her face. Before she goes down to Brian again she reaches for the lipstick anyway.

“Nice sweater,” he says as soon as she appears from behind the ornate street door.

Paula smiles. “I put on lipstick,” she says, “so I want to go somewhere where they don’t have napkin dispensers.”

Brian takes her arm and leads her in a direction. “You look good,” he says, so sincerely that Paula has to stifle another laugh. She doesn’t know where they’re going and it’s nice not to care. She thinks of another word: squired. She’s being squired to supper. As they’re stopped at a corner, waiting for the light to change, Paula maneuvers ahead of him a half-step so she can see more of his face. She wants a better look, now that they seem to have entered a new phase. First, he was just someone helping her home after a mugging. Now, they’re sort of on a date.

He catches her watching him and smiles backs. She’s amazed all over again by the whiteness of his teeth. The two in front are serrated on the bottom edge, she notices, like a teenager’s. Healthy teeth are a sign of money—but maybe not that much money because his are also slightly out of line. He’s never had braces. Good thing, too, or his face would be too perfect, almost blinding to look at. If his eyes were only brown, that would soften the effect, but of course they’re blue—sky blue—and lovely. As it is, he reminds her of a Marine recruiting poster.

“I’ve never met anyone this way before,” she says. “I mean, I’ve never needed to be rescued.”

The light changes and he starts them across the intersection. He’s focused diligently on getting them safely to the far corner, but she sees the angle of his mouth turn up.

“I didn’t rescue you, remember?” he says. “I came along too late, after it was all over, and helped pick up the pieces.”

“Oh,” Paula says, “so I guess that makes me just one of the pieces you picked up.” After it’s out, she cringes. She didn’t mean to say something with that much innuendo in it.

But of course he recognizes the double meaning. “No!” he says, a little too loudly. Then he says, “I just mean that I didn’t do anything heroic.” Shucks, ma’am. Twarn’t nothin’.

Paula decides she’d better steer them to neutral ground. “Well, let’s just tell people you rescued me,” she says playfully. “It’s a better story. Anyway, I feel rescued. And it could have been a lot worse. The only thing I lost was a book—a very expensive book that I will have to replace, unfortunately, but still just a book.”

“It wouldn’t have been worse,” he says. “I mean, it probably wouldn’t. A lot of people dwell on that—what might have happened—but you shouldn’t. These guys are pretty much strictly hit-and-run. Anything that takes more than a few seconds and they’re outta there. Too easy to draw a crowd if you make a big production out of it. Someone’s gonna be a hero and try and stop you or at least winds up with a better shot at recognizing you later. The percentages are bad.”

“Criminal Science major?” Paula teases.

For a moment Brian looks uncomfortable, even annoyed; a flicker of something that Paula’s gut identifies as anger plays over those reassuringly preppy features, then he’s back to normal. As if I know what normal looks like on him, she thinks.

“Actually,” he says, “the reason I’m in school is I want to become a profiler some day.”

“One of those guys who gets inside the minds of criminals and figures out what makes them tick?” she asks.

“Something like that,” Brian says. Then he pauses. “Italian?”

“No,” Paula says. “Jewish.” They’ve stopped in front of a restaurant and she doesn’t realize her mistake at first. “Oh, God,” she says, “that wasn’t about me, was it?”

Brian is holding the door open and grinning at her so kindly that she decides not to kick herself too much for not taking his meaning. “Thank you, Sir Brian,” she says, and steps down into a large square room noisy with diners and smelling aggressively of garlic and bread. The walls, a stark, cream-cheese white, are decorated with bright, pastel watercolors, reproductions of great works that strike Paula as more or less familiar. Brian sees the question on her face and points to the ceiling. She looks up and finally makes the connection: two beautifully muscled male arms stretch toward one another, the fingers nearly touching. God gives life to Adam. The entire ceiling is an enormous copy of the famous fresco, and now she can put the walls into context as well.

“It’s the Sistine Chapel!” she beams, surprised at how delighted, even giddy she feels to know that.

“Yeah,” says Brian, “that’s what this place is called—La Cappella.”

A waiter motions them to an empty table where wine glasses in two versions—what she always thinks of as the Laurel kind and the Hardy kind—stand alongside water goblets in a dignified grouping. Brian touches her elbow to guide her. She realizes that he never waited for her to say whether or not Italian was okay, then she decides she kind of likes Brian’s assumptions, his good-natured, masculine pushiness. He’s still playing at being gallant. Men her age don’t bother anymore, either assuming she’ll be offended or just because it isn’t done between professional people, which is who she dates, if she dates. Brian doesn’t see her as a peer, for better or worse. Turns out it’s a nice change.

The first few minutes after they’re seated are awkward. They’re face to face and completely still for the first time with nothing to do except talk to each other. The waiter brings a bottle of Asti, which Brian has apparently ordered when she wasn’t paying attention, and she gratefully takes a first sip, holding the tart flavors against the roof of her mouth before swallowing. A number of possible topics of conversation have occurred to her, and she weighs the options. She could remark that the actual Creation of Adam seems much smaller in real life, almost lost among the overwhelming colors and the hundreds of figures that surround it. She could mention a friend’s observation that the Creation of Eve, just one panel over and at the true center of the Sistine ceiling, is virtually unknown, while the Adam fresco winds up in car commercials and on the labels of bottled spaghetti sauce.

In the end she says neither thing because she doesn’t want to sound pretentious. Perhaps Brian hasn’t traveled, and, of course, she has only been to Italy once herself. Besides, she isn’t sure what Brian might say about the Eve situation, and she doesn’t want to be unpleasantly surprised. She settles on a safer subject. “So, Brian,” she says, “where do you come from? Originally, I mean?”

He ducks his chin and puts his hands over his face, a palm against each eye. Paula isn’t sure if he’s laughing because he finds the question banal or if she’s unintentionally upset him. If so, she wouldn’t be surprised. She generally finds people to be something of a minefield. Brian raises his heavy, blonde head to look at her, and she has the sensation that she’s watching the lid go up on a rolltop desk. “You don’t want to know where I come from, Paula,” he says finally. “You want to know if I find you attractive.”

Paula barely gets out her word of protest before he’s reached his two wide hands across the table and taken one of hers between them—all without jostling the flatware or spilling anything, she’s self-possessed enough to observe. “And I do,” he says, half-whispering. He’s holding her gaze, like a cobra. “Paula, I think you’re beautiful.”

* * * * * * *

After supper, he insists on walking her home. He holds her arm the entire way in the crook of his, and she lets him. They make small talk on her stoop until she invites him up for coffee, and, a half-hour after the coffee is gone, they end up in bed. Paula doesn’t pretend to be shocked, not even to herself, because these things happen, but she knows they don’t generally happen to her. In fact, that’s the remark that got him upstairs in the first place: Just as the chit chat was reaching the stage of semi-long pauses and self-conscious grins, he had simply said, “Invite me up for coffee?” It was a question, but there was a demand in it.

“I don’t usually ask people I’ve just met to visit my apartment,” she tried, not wanting to seem coy, but aware, too, that she wasn’t exactly saying no.

“You don’t usually get robbed,” Brian had answered, “and I don’t usually chase muggers. Maybe this is a day for doing things you don’t usually do.”

After he spoke, he ducked his head again and kicked her railing. He’s embarrassed himself, Paula thought, and that was his ticket in: All of a sudden she wondered what it would be like to kiss him. When he looked up she was holding her hand out, reaching for him just like in the painting at the restaurant, and that was that. Maybe the charm was a little self-conscious at this point, but what the hell. She was flattered that he was making the effort.

Charm wasn’t the only thing he was good at, as it turned out, and, after Brian went home, she surveyed the happy wreckage of the bed, the sheets tangled into damp, fragrant bunkers, the pillows long since lost over the edge of the mattress, the cat beneath the sofa who would refuse to emerge until morning. It’s true what they say about younger men, she thought, thrilled because she felt wicked—it’s all about stamina. Stamina and tight skin.

While she tidied up, Paula let herself try on the role of Older Woman, a possibility she hadn’t entertained before. It was a niche, certainly; it implied a fair exchange. There was even some grace and dignity involved. Better than simply being an aging woman. And he had pursued her; that was novel. She sat up in bed for a while after that, feeling worldly and wondering whom she could tell.

* * * * * * *

Paula is falling asleep about the time Brian reaches the downtown apartment he shares with his lover, Anthony. He unlocks the deadbolt and rolls back the security bar as quietly as possible, but, once inside, he can see from the entryway that a light is still on in the rear of the apartment. He hooks his coat over a doorknob and goes to stand in the doorway of the bedroom where Anthony is propped up in bed, a book spread open on his lap.

“I told you she wasn’t going to have anything worth taking,” Anthony says.

“Whatever,” Brian shrugs, and turns away. He heads for the shower, shedding clothes as he goes. He doesn’t bother to close the bathroom door because he knows Anthony likes watching him dry off. If he’s in the mood he gives Anthony a show, putting one foot up on the edge of the tub and bending over while he dries between his toes so Anthony gets a good look at his ass. “Big lush jock butt,” is how Anthony likes to describe it. Tonight, though, Brian doesn’t feel in the mood, and, anyway, Anthony comes in to sit on the toilet while he’s still in the shower.

“You were gone a long time,” Anthony says.

“We ate supper.”

Anthony makes a snorting sound that Brian detests. If he were to push aside the blue vinyl curtain and look out, Brian knows, he would find Anthony with his head cocked at a disagreeable angle, his lips set into a thin, prissy line. He’d be sitting with his legs crossed at the knees, one hand anchoring the edge of his robe so that it fell right over his ankles—a brittle figurine. When Anthony gets like this, all Brian wants to do is smash his face in with a brick. So he doesn’t look outside the shower.

Instead, he turns the water up as high as the flow-control nozzle will let him and says, over the noise, “You didn’t have to hit her so hard, you know. She practically went skidding. You always hit ‘em too hard.”

“It’s supposed to look like a real mugging,” Anthony replies coldly. “And I thought you liked them a little banged up. Makes for a more dramatic rescue. Anyway, I’m not taking any chances that one of these bitches has mace in her pocket. Or a gun.”

Brian doesn’t disguise the sneer in his voice when he says the next thing: “She strike you as someone who makes a habit of walking to the grocery store strapped?”

“Believe me,” Anthony sniffs, “she didn’t strike me as anything. But what people look like is deceiving—isn’t that right, darling? That’s how come you can pull off these little capers.”

“Fuck you,” Brian says.

“No,” Anthony spits back, “fuck you!” He stalks out of the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. Brian takes his time finishing his shower.

When Brian gets to bed, the lamp on the night stand is on and Anthony is still awake, his arms folded across his chest. He stares reproachfully at the ceiling, barely blinking. “So was she a tight little fuck?” he asks in his nasty voice. “Does she suck dick as good as me?”

Brian sits on the edge of the mattress and begins toweling his hair. “I don’t even know where that’s coming from,” he says. “This was your idea, remember?”

Anthony ignores that comment, but the silence between them gets as thick as wet plaster. After a while Brian says, “She wanted to see my ID card.”

“I hope you weren’t stupid enough to show it to her.”

“Why not? It’s four years old and I’m never going to see her again.”

“It’s a small city, sometimes.”

“She’s not the type to make a fuss in public if she runs into some guy she screwed who never called her again.”

“I guess you’d know about that,” Anthony says. He puffs air out through his nose. Not quite the snorting sound, but close.

Brian grits his teeth. “Maybe I’ll take her book back to her tomorrow,” he says.

“And how the fuck do you propose to do that?”

“I dunno. Maybe I’ll drop it off at her building, leave her a note saying I went back to look around one more time behind the store and I found it. Or I’ll say I just decided to buy her a new one.”

“She’ll know,” Anthony says.

“She won’t know.”

“Oh, she won’t know,” Anthony mocks. “No one’s ever smart enough to figure your shit out, are they? She probably even fell for that crap about being a Criminal Science major.”

“I was a Criminal Science major.”

“Yeah, baby, was. Right up until they caught you fucking one of your professors on his office divan. I keep telling you, they don’t like fags in law enforcement.”

“I’m not a fag,” Brian says quietly. “We’ve had this discussion.”

“Why don’t you just admit you want to see her again? As if I’m so stupid I can’t tell that’s what’s going on.”

Brian goes into a fit of hair-drying, whipping the towel around his head and shaking the bed like a wet dog. When he’s done he flips the damp towel across the room where it hits the closet door. He slides beneath the sheets.

“Come on, Brian,” Anthony whines. “You fucking promised.” He sits up, twisting the blanket between his fists. “You told me it would be just one time with these bitches and I didn’t have to worry about repeats.”

“Yeah, okay, so I promised,” Brian says.

“You prick. Okay. Fine. That’s what you want? How’s this: I’m not doing it anymore, you sick motherfucker! Chase down your own pussy from now on!”

“Jesus,” Brian says, “calm down. I said I promised, all right? Look, here—just wait a sec.” He throws back the covers and goes to bathroom, where his jeans lie in a heap on the floor. From one pocket he takes the card from La Cappella on which Paula has written her phone number. “See?” he says, holding it up so Anthony can take note of the unfamiliar handwriting, full of loops. He folds the card into a crisp V so that it stands by itself in the glass ashtray on the night table. In the drawer is the disposable Bic he keeps around for lighting blunts, and he uses that to set the card on fire. When all that’s left is a fragile fragment of ash, he climbs back into bed and flicks out the light. “Happy now?” he says.

Anthony waits in silence for few dignified minutes before he rolls toward Brian and throws one arm across his chest, nuzzling his neck. He lowers his head to kiss the hollow below Brian’s Adam’s apple, and then, when Brian doesn’t push him away, he moves down to encircle Brian’s left nipple with his lips. As Anthony slides his mouth farther down Brian’s stomach, darkening the line of blonde hair with saliva, Brian wonders whether he’ll still be able to smell smoke in the morning, however faintly.

Brian finds it appeasing, even comforting to watch the back of Anthony’s head as it makes its way down his torso, and he tangles his fingers gently among the glossy curls. Anthony’s good, most of the time, he decides. Still, Brian’s not sorry he took a moment, while he was riding home on the subway, to copy Paula’s number onto the second card from La Cappella, the one that’s still hidden in his jeans pocket. He’ll have to be sure to retrieve that before they go to sleep, in case Anthony plans to get up early and do laundry.

Always just a few jumps ahead, Brian thinks to himself, and then what Anthony’s doing, down between his legs, becomes so distracting that he decides to stop thinking about anything at all for a while.