by Paul Lisicky
When she leaves, I walk into the office. Friendly, tight handshakes—Michael? Robert? I tell myself I cannot forget their names and then I instantly forget their names. The person in charge passes a key into a tiny manila envelope and offers me a handout of instructions.
I want them to think they’ve made the right choice by inviting me here. Maybe if I’m sweet enough, funny enough, they won’t know that I’m a fraud, that it takes me hours to put the simplest paragraph together, that I distract myself from my work as soon as the writing goes well, and I’m too flustered to sit down at my desk for more than twenty minutes at a time.
I pop open the hatchback. Suitcase, duffel bag, boxes of manuscripts, floppy disks, envelopes of positive rejections, which I think of as my hall of shame. I trudge up the stairs, their thin carpeted treads. Running up and down, up and down. Somehow I manage to empty the hatchback in five minutes flat. I sit cross-legged on the floor of my long, narrow space, the second floor of a Cape Cod. One window to the north, the other to the south. Dormer in the living room. Strip of kitchen fixtures to one side. Narrow bedroom, single twin bed up against the wall. Enough room to fully stand up only within three feet of either side of the ceiling peak. A boxcar, a monk’s space. A little disappointing, to be frank, with just a hint of Florida on the air. By Florida I mean mildew. Flat soaps and squat motel glasses trapped inside a waxed sleeve. Not the Florida of the present: my parents’ house.
I lie on the bare mattress, fully dressed, look up at the ceiling. Something singes my eyebrows. Or is it just death grabbing at me, the voice of my mother pulling me down, down? Why has my father run away? I want something that isn’t directly in front of me, which translates itself to desire. Desire is a condition I can manage.
Though the night is quiet (crickets, sitcom laughter from a wide-open window), I can’t sit still. There is a town out there, a circus, and I have been dead too long.
Movie
It’s October, and life is about to change for all forms: animals, humans, plants. Town seems less like the beach towns of my childhood, and behaves more like a metropolis. The harbor is secret, tough to find, the openings narrow and few. Smelly, weedy, industrial. No settler could have predicted tourism: who’d ever want to visit the windiest place on the East Coast, where loose sand once buried the houses to their eaves? It must have made sense to wall off the water, to shut down the view. For mariners and fishermen, the sea was work, the life they wanted to get away from. That sea could murder you too.
So the street means more than it does in other places by the sea. Commercial Street is as wide as a rural drive, constrained on either side by stores. It pretends it’s a boardwalk but has no open horizon to calm frenetic minds. People don’t disappear; people are larger here. Voices, faces, gestures, the cuts of jeans, shirt patterns. Clothes appear to be chosen experimentally, expect to be remembered, recorded. Commercial Street purring with the expectations of a catwalk, even when there’s no one awake to spy, interpret, pass on what they’ve seen.
Haven
How far has my life been from my body, my breathing, my posture, my silliness, my joy? I stand up straighter, my shoulders fall backward as if they’ve been held up for too long by pulleys and strings. My walk changes, too, or so I imagine; my heels strike the pavement as if I’m possibly damaging my feet. This is what power feels like, but only when power is spread evenly, or when queerness isn’t othered but is central. I look at people’s faces; people look back at me, not exactly with need but curiosity: Who are you? And never the stench of judgment. No expressions that say ugly, weak, failure, get out, go back to your country, I’m going to rape you.
To be freed from the day-to-day expectation that someone’s out to kill you. The air alive with released human energy.
But how will I ever be able to leave this haven, so far from the repression and punishments of adulthood? Am I trapped in sweetness now?
I’ve been given the cake of the afterlife and I can’t help but taste the chemical on my tongue.
Mystery
From now on I’ll call it Town. In that way I’ll keep it a mystery, take it back from all my old associations, commercial, poetic, a visual artist’s capital of light. Anything too sociological. Anything known. Town as much a myth of community as a place attached to the earth. Town embedding a notion of how to live with one another, even if it’s falling short of its ideals, yes, failing on a daily basis, and still going on.
Town moves on two tracks at once. The time of narrative—in which people want things and lose things—and lyric time, which has nothing to do with the clock. It floats, and it isn’t quite attached to Town but is part of its structure—what draws people here whether they realize it or not. Clock time moves forward but lyric time moves off to the side and stalls: lateral instead of linear. It’s time as enacted in a painting or a poem or a song. It was around before humans and it will exist long after humans are gone.
The Grid
I’ve grown up thinking of the ocean as being in the east, so why is the water in the west? Town scrambling my coordinates once again. On a map, the Cape appears as an arm bent at the elbow, hand gone absolutely relaxed. Town situated on the final joint of the longest finger—the fuck-you finger—facing southeast. The center point of a spiral, a fury of wave and windstorm and sand. Who knows where I am now, and now, and now? Though I love music that shifts rhythms, tears up the harmonic structure, and changes key just as things get safe, I’m probably drawn to these qualities because I’m more attached to the grid than I know: a north–south directional attunement that lets me guess the time and temperature within a shade or two of the exact reading. But there’s no grid here, at least not one aligned with the compass. West means as much as south. It’s like living inside Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” in which the guitar is retuned to preposterous notes and I’m left to find the chordal shapes on my own.
More San Francisco than San Francisco
I keep walking until the lights go off in the houses, and there’s no more street left to walk, just the bay bisected by a thin breakwater that reaches like an arm of a clock into the dark.
It isn’t my first walk in Town but an early walk. I don’t yet know that sex is never really just sex here. In a small town where everyone values privacy, I probably still have the hungry look of a tourist who’s never going to be heard from again. Thus I am “talent,” a designation that lasts all of a few days, until somebody figures out I’m not driving back over the Bourne Bridge anytime soon.
The tall blond guy stands in front of the head shop, one of the beating hearts of Town. It is bright with pink and green Day-Glo, obscene bumper stickers in the front window, and possibly monster dildos hanging from hooks in the ceiling. I usually don’t take to blonds, but he has a rangy, goofy energy in the manner of a cartoon dog like Scooby-Doo. He doesn’t present as queer, or even comport himself for others who might be queer: no military haircut or goatee or red bandanna on his head. His hair sticks up then falls down, as if he might comb it every three days, or whenever it occurs to him. His eyes are blue, unexpectedly kind. He’s still a boy, though he might be twenty-eight. He has the look of someone who doesn’t have a family, doesn’t have a best friend, or any close friends, really, just a lot of noisy people swirling around him feeding him any powders and pills he wants.
“Hey, do you want to get high and have sex?” he asks.
And because I haven’t touched anyone since God knows when, and because I’m possibly flattered to be chosen, I say yes to the cracked glee of this, the easiest yes I’ll ever say about sex in my life.
But what do I want? Instantly it stops feeling so easy. As we’re walking up the stairs, I think, Why am I here? Can I back out now, run down the street? I want to lose myself a little while, I want to connect. I want to inhabit another plane that doesn’t put the spoken front and center. I want to summon up the other times I’ve had sex, at least the good times I’ve had sex. I want to feel embarrassed, because to feel embarrassed is to f
eel broken open, alive. I want to read someone’s sounds and reactions, second by second. Skin against warm skin, even if the bottoms of my feet are rough, cold. He must be nothing more than his dick, his arms, his ass, his scrawny white chest, his kiss.
Why should all of that be impossible?
But of course it will be impossible. A puzzle piece will fall onto the floor, get kicked under the rug. He’ll tell me too much about himself; he’ll tell me he likes hamburgers; he’ll tell me he went to Catholic school, he wants a motorcycle, a cobalt-blue helmet—he won’t stop talking. I won’t be able to project onto him. Instead, I’ll be running laps around my head, and not in my animal body.
My animal body—I want to bring that back too. The animal I came from before ancient people started thinking: relationships.
We’re on the bed of a second-floor bedroom of a violet Victorian with dragons and gryphons in the side yard—more San Francisco than San Francisco. It is very dim, and I don’t see any objects inside. No mementos or pictures of old boyfriends or siblings on the tall dresser. No shades or even a torn sheet over the windows. It’s the room of someone who hasn’t ever moved into his life, and probably never will. Why bother at this late hour?
He doesn’t ask who I am or where I’m from, which is a relief. I take a long drag from the pipe he offers and choke back my cough. It seems very important that I follow his lead, if only because I want him to see that I don’t want too much out of this. It certainly helps that I’m not attracted to him, and know exactly how I feel about him. I’ll definitely not be pining for him anytime soon, and though that should help, it doesn’t. Every few minutes a passing look in his eyes suggests he’s scared of me, but maybe he’s just mirroring the look I’m giving back to him. It’s hard to know if I’m scared when I’m right on top of those feelings.
Is my dick still hard in spite of all my busy thoughts? Amazing.
What I’d give to be back home right now, wiping down the sink or putting the objects of my mess back into drawers.
I’m still watching him, watching myself from some safe distance when he pulls out a condom. Even though he’s three times higher than a kite he pulls out a condom. He rolls it onto me, even if, in his case, he appears to be just taking me into his mouth. We’re close to AIDS, so close it’s almost inside before it’s even inside. By that I mean the idea of it: the air we breathe is drenched in its possibility. And that’s why it doesn’t even occur to us to be bothered by latex, the smell and gummy barrier of it.
Wetsuit for deadly times.
Afterward, he dashes over to the bathroom sink and spits, as if he’s been given a taste of raw blood. I tell myself it’s good he’s careful about health, even if his mouth never got near my skin.
But I’m a little annoyed too. That’s me he spit into the sink, dammit.
Nights of Cabiria
On some nights the moon in Town is the moon from The Tempest, but with sex and menace in it; it sweeps down on the rooftops and harbor. There’s no other place I’d rather be. It tells me I was foolish to expect anything less of the world than this—why am I always putting up with less? The harbor is a cup that was made for this moon. It holds and shimmers it, backlighting the shapes of the boats and the breakwater. The light doesn’t move in a straight line. Instead it concentrates, shifting to the left and right like a river moving downstream. There’s even an oily pool in the center of that light—water upon water. It’s so strong it falls outside its corridor, throwing sparks that shock and dazzle the surface. Rather than a Shakespeare moon, it is a Fellini moon, transferred from film stock to everyday life.
It doesn’t hold itself to the harbor, but saturates the houses too. I’m not here on earth anymore. Every street in Town leads to this light. It knocks whatever trail of thought I’d been following right out of my head. Maybe I can’t even hold a conversation when this moon is nearby. Brenda Shaughnessy’s moon: “You change shape and turn away, / letting night solve all night’s problems alone.”
Is this light a devil? If so, the devil has never been so pretty.
It works into my room, works into the cracks between the cabinets, underneath the rugs, until nothing is left unlit, untouched, uninfected. Nobody, nothing can hide from that moon.
Golden Gate
Maybe it’s easier to leave the world when it’s unstable, pitched on the end of a peninsula, indeterminate as the fog that rolls in over rooftops, dormers, houses on hills, forking through the oaks and hickories as if they’re redwoods.
The Lamp
Commercial Street is dense with apartments and rooms impossible to ever fully know. Other towns live beneath the visible Town. I don’t understand the conventional explanations of ghosts, but I do understand boxes of ashes stashed beneath drafting tables, the ugly shirts of the young dead still hanging in closets, the young dead crying, Now, get rid of them now—I don’t want to be remembered by that tacky thing, too vivid and out-of-date. And meanwhile a man—I’ll call him Tom—turns on a cheap little lamp, not suspecting the dead live in that lamp. The dead light up the room for an hour, while Tom drinks a beer gone flat, scratching his nose and watching the 6:30 news.
3
Star Boys
Fear of the Communion cup, fear of surgery: fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ’s blood or your neighbor’s. Life—blood, sexual fluids—is itself the bearer of contamination. These fluids are potentially lethal.
SUSAN SONTAG, AIDS and Its Metaphors
In 1991, 10,000,000 people live with HIV, more than 1,000,000 in the United States. In that year alone 20,454 die in the US.
Officially, there are 92 people living with full-blown AIDS in Town, which doesn’t include HIV-positive people without symptoms. The number sounds low to me. There’s no way to know how many people are positive in a village with a year-round population of 3,617. Is it a third? Half? Are half the queer men positive?
By the mid-1990s, it will be said that 385 people died of AIDS in Town. Ten percent of the population. Sometimes I say it back to myself aloud, in hopes that it will sear me: ten percent. And yet I can’t feel statistics.
The dead by now include some household names: Keith Haring, Liberace, Perry Ellis, Rock Hudson, Steve Rubell, Brad Davis, Klaus Nomi, Ryan White, Amanda Blake—yes, Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke. But not everybody’s famous like that. Every time I reach for a copy of Manshots, a porn magazine, on the top shelf at the Little Store, I don’t even give the centerfold much more than a glance. Instead, I flip forward to the obituaries, which always fall on the final page. The obituaries are reliably thorough and affectionate in their meticulousness. They mean to do two things at once, to regularize the dead, with a particular emphasis on all-Americanness, and to elevate them to icons.
But what do the dead make of these accounts? Do they even care about purpose or meaning? Maybe purpose and meaning trouble only heady people like me—people not fully inside the present, too oriented toward the future. Maybe the star boys of porn want to be alive as much as it’s possible to be alive, and that’s their politics, their rebellion. Dreamtime, ecstasy, forgetfulness, proof that another life beyond repression is imaginable. They offer their bodies to be seen, taken, put to imaginative use. To serve as proxy. To be the rugged jawline you’re kissing, the dick you’re holding in your hand, whether it’s imaginary or real. They teach us how to be men, how to position our seeing at the center of our lives.
At least the general public is getting over the dread of visiting a place known as queer. No more fears of catching AIDS from the servers. Gone the concerns about the lobster and lettuce on your plate. That was the ’80s. Town then was a ghost town haunted not so much by the past as by the losses to come.
It’s not so easy to seroconvert; most of us realize that by now, but that doesn’t mean even reasonable people aren’t still afraid and feel some duty to process those fears. Whenever I kiss a positive man in friendly greeting, I make sure he doesn’t see me stiffen or hold back even a little, even though he’d probably rea
d that as just another stance toward him. The truth is, he’s probably quite used to it. He’s ten times tougher than any of us think.
Me Llamo Go-Go
At the Work Center—we always call it that, rather than the official name—we are proud to be Fellows, all chosen with an eye toward inclusion and intersectionality, decades before the larger culture makes use of those terms. Luckily, after initial awkwardness, we enjoy one another’s company. We’ve all been around enough to know that that is a rare trait in any group. What if we’d had to deal with pods, cliques, groups of people who didn’t speak to other groups? It’s a relief both to escape our categories and still retain membership in them: black, white, indigenous, queer, straight, Scottish, Israeli. Some nights, to stave off the off-season boredom, all those hours alone in our studios with our work, we hold impromptu dance parties in the common room that both parody and pay homage to the TV dance parties of the ’70s (think Soul Train). We catch ourselves behaving like members of an extended family, one by one jumping up on a makeshift go-go box, or cheering one another on in a line dance. We’re in the last moments of the era when wide numbers of people still dance, when they’re willing to be expressive (or possibly ridiculous) in a communal space.
Do I miss home on nights like this? I have admit to myself I don’t, which is new for me, secretly a relief and a thrill. My mother must hear it in my voice when she calls me on the phone. It must be a shock that I’m all right—or even better. I might as well be saying, I am having the best time of my life, without saying it directly, and if I am punishing her with joy, I am also suggesting she doesn’t have to live the way she’s living (fear, wariness of strangers, holding on, holding on), too blind to see the cruelty inherent in my lucky position.