Later

by Paul Lisicky

  Plus, I’m a little giddy after having just given my reading. I think it went well.

  “He already has a husband,” Polly says.

  “Of course he has a husband,” I say, and the voice that comes out of my mouth is new to me. It isn’t embittered or jaded. I’m happy for him. He glows. There is no question that someone like him, a human who looks at everything so he can transform it into description, has a husband.

  Break Me

  On the steps of the shoe store sits a man in a leather jacket, stubble on his face, pointy sideburns. He is in a mustard-colored T-shirt, scuffed black Doc Marten boots, with a red paisley bandanna on his head. He looks at me as if he’s seen me before—at the gym? He has a style about him, the look of someone who’s spent more time out in the world than on Commercial Street. Maybe Europe—his face looks very European, maybe Eastern. Or Berlin. Someplace where there’s been an actual war on its soil. There’s some shadow in his eyes, shadow beneath them. He is probably sadder than he knows. He looks seasoned, though I doubt he’s five years older than I am. He has the demeanor of a person who gets some of his power from not looking at other people, so the directness of the gaze disarms. It has a weight in it, as if it expects a reply, and not just a hi. It says, You’ve been chosen. And I look off to the side—or down.

  Small talk. I let him lead as I’m hardly ever the one to initiate. It turns out he knows my friends Jim and Jane, but I don’t think he wants to talk about them, which might be why my reply is not terribly animated or inspired. I sound bored to myself, but I am not bored. By any means.

  Immediately it’s clear that Hollis is one of those people who make fun of you if they like you. If he doesn’t like you he’d probably dismiss you, look right past you. It feels like a prize to be made fun of by him: he doesn’t just give it away. He laughs, I laugh. He is obviously glad I laugh back, though there is a sadness and shock in his left eye that comes short in its attempt to conceal hurt. It’s a stark hurt, and it’s complicated by the sense that he has layers that probably can’t be known. But he also seems to know just how he feels, and when he feels he transmutes it into a joke, with hardness in it. Any intense feeling is transmuted into a joke, the tactic a way to keep me destabilized, as if sincerity is in itself cruel, and has a gun pointing out of it.

  It’s a technique from old gay times, with a modern spin. I have never learned this trick, maybe because my way of dealing with the prospect of being bullied was to turn my light down so low I wouldn’t stand out.

  But he sees me. He must think I’m wide-open, an innocent who hasn’t been around the block yet, like so many others in Town, and that might be true, but it’s also not. I don’t carry myself with a lot of certainty. Perhaps in my J.Crew chore coat, I have the air of someone who’s fairly clueless in terms of how to dress as a Creditable Gay. I must look like a person who wants something, wants it terribly. I’m still capable of being enthused; I’m prone to blushing, the feeling that flushes my face and turns my feet the iciest cold, even when I’m wearing wool hiking socks. But I’m without a direction, having spent the better part of my twenties in grad school. I’ve been made a baby by deadlines and grades, being told what to do by school or by my father, but a baby can’t fend for himself out in a tough world like this, where people need to make up the rules on their own, day by day, or else they die.

  And is that why he wants to hurt me a little? Break me?

  He says something about my ditching the straight-boy clothes. He’s going to take me shopping, tell me what to buy, but not today. He has a better idea in mind.

  After a walk back to the Work Center, we head up the stairs to my apartment. He steps behind me as if he’s been up there once before, but I doubt it. Maybe he sees that sex isn’t an easy, casual thing for me every time, and that makes the prospect of what we’re about to do more exciting. We pull the shirts over our heads and step out of our pants, kicking them away. He isn’t afraid of being expressive, of saying the lusty things from a place deep in his throat, not his usual speaking voice. I’ve never been with anyone like that. He becomes a bit of a rough animal, and it’s a relief to be here, not in the world outside but in the place of dreams, where we transform death.

  And now, every other guy I’ve had sex with? In retrospect they all seem timid, held back, probably reluctant to look slutty.

  Slutty: bad word in these years. Slutty gives you sickness, slutty makes other people sick. Slutty makes you die, even if we know you could practically be Saint John of the Cross and still manage to seroconvert.

  Slutty is low-class, which is possibly the worst thing to be in the United States of America.

  We’re just lying on my bed after a while, his head on my chest, looking out at the room. It occurs to me that I might be afraid of him, as I’ve been afraid of everyone I’ve ever been attracted to. They seem distant, unknown to me, which is probably the very trait that attracts me to them. I’m not so much afraid of them walking away, leaving me behind—I’m strong enough to survive that. The fear lies in my self-perceived inadequacy, and that fear seems to shimmer and thrive in the gap between us. My psyche, my libido seem to require this gap, and if I can’t perceive it, then, well? My interest isn’t there.

  We have a routine. The gray station wagon pulls into the Work Center parking lot, and instantly I step away from the window so he won’t see me looking—we pretend to be casual. I am sure others look out their windows and say, Yes, that is Hollis’s car, and all is right with Paul. At other times, I go over to his place, where we take off our clothes in the cold and slip down into the hot tub behind his house. The hot tub feels transgressive, because he has a boyfriend. Not that Lou lives there, but what if he should happen to stop by to do a load of laundry? What would he make of the towel I’m drying myself off with? Lou isn’t always so nice to me when I run into him around Town. There’s a bite to his friendliness. “Oh really?” is his signature expression, which he wields when you’re comfortable with him, and in your skin. The two words together suggest bemusement, dominance: Aren’t you a precocious semidelightful simpleton? He takes you out of your present, takes you out of your power. Still, we talk to each other as friends—and honestly I do like him and want him to like me. He wants to hurt me only so much. If he hurt me too much, he’d reveal how jealous he actually is and thus lose his dignity, his power. How can he be possessive if he and Hollis have an open relationship? It would violate some pact. He would lose a measure of control if he allowed those feelings to show up in his face, to color the tone of his voice, though I’d be surprised if there weren’t blowups about their arrangement (maybe even about me) in the late hours after they’ve watched a movie on TV or come in from the hot tub. If the blowups aren’t directly about that issue, then they might show up in terms of who had left the hot tub on.

  Their arrangement, which insists on trust and is meant to keep trouble on the periphery, probably ends up putting trouble front and center.

  Certainly Lou can tell how much Hollis and I are drawn to each other. He must see it in my face, he must see it in Hollis’s, though Hollis as always comports himself to show that deep feeling will not get the best of him. Not that Hollis is cold or numb. No, just the opposite. Hollis is always warm and lively, eager to laugh heartily and play, even if that playing involves making a joke when things get too serious. It’s like being in a kayak going downstream, and Hollis jerks the route of the stream abruptly, and goes out into the bigger harbor without telling you. Sometimes I want to say, Can’t you take anything seriously, dammit? Social life is absurd, yes. The manners we make up are nuts. You and I know that. Does that mean all of our reactions must be absurd? But in Hollis’s way of seeing, we are never to take ourselves too seriously, especially if our lives—our entire community—could be lost tomorrow.

  I suppose Hollis would know about loss. Hollis had had a long relationship with Jaco, another man, several years older. Jaco is involved with someone else now, a younger man. Jaco and Hollis are still friends.
Jaco has AIDS and is not doing so well. He’s in and out of Beth Israel, and Hollis must be in some pain about all this, even though he’d somehow manage to alchemize this pain. Maybe he wouldn’t turn this pain into a joke, but maybe he’d be all too willing to insist on the everydayness of it, as if he and Jaco didn’t deserve better and more. And thus he’d have no reason to feel rage.

  Welcome to homophobia, or what we do with it, how we turn it against ourselves.

  I honestly don’t want to hurt Lou, though I know I don’t care about Lou’s feelings as much as I should. I wish Lou would see us, in the largest sense. I wish Lou would step out and away, and find someone closer in spirit to him: someone equally feral, outlandish. I don’t doubt he loves Hollis. He’s possibly still in love with him, but really? It’s impossible to imagine him being devastated by the loss of Hollis. If that weren’t so clearly the case, then I’d certainly, well—back off?

  In summer Lou dances most nights at Ryan Landry’s House of Superstar, where he is a go-go boy, and one of his signature moves involves bending over, grabbing his ankles, and showing his asshole to the crowd, who feign the indifference of the sophisticated. The asshole, a ridged, deep pink, does not look exactly friendly. The asshole asks you to deal with it, accept it. The asshole speaks its aggressive thoughts out of a north–south oval. It’s almost too much to look at, but I do so for a second, then look away again. I might cry. Lou spends Tuesday nights away from Hollis, at his own place, where he presumably spends nights with his own friend with benefits—or does he? That butt is about to blow up in our faces.

  Twinship

  To go on living a full life which includes sex, in this time of AIDS, is an act of resistance. I believe we resist because we simply will not give in.

  VIC D’LUGIN, “Power & Passion”

  In Hollis’s lexicon there is no higher term of endearment than dick pig. Not everyone gets to be called a dick pig, and I consider it a supremely high honor to be described as such. There’s something pleasing about the way he tosses it off. You’re part of a club. You like sex, it’s one of your gifts, and you are not inhibited with decorum or fear or good taste. Those words rinse clean the stigma, the shame of total immersion and commitment. They also take away the complexity I’ve always associated with sex. I don’t even mind that they siphon death out of it, as if death were never sex’s twin.

  9

  Recycled

  It’s not just that the sun sets so early; nights are longer in other places: Reykjavík or Fairbanks. It’s just that eight o’clock can feel like two in the morning; Town isn’t exactly timed to a forty-hour workweek, which means it operates more intuitively, in tune with the animals. But some of us still carry the energy of our former urban lives, and cannot stomach the idea of crawling under the covers at 9:30 p.m., even if we’ve written hard or gessoed canvases all day. On one particular long night, I look around my apartment for something to do, but it’s not there: every sheet picked up and folded, every surface dusted, cleaned, scoured. There is a single can beside my sink waiting to be recycled. I pick it up, walk down the stairs, and intend to carry it to the other side of the parking lot and drop it in the recycling bin. At the same time, my downstairs neighbor’s door swings open. In Tim’s hand is a single can. He’s about to do the same thing. Our laughter can be heard all the way to the dunes. We’ll still bring up that story twenty-five years later, as if it manifested the excitement of winter nights.

  Butch, Butch, Butch

  In a matter of weeks, I am no longer wearing my gold J.Crew chore coat. In fact, I’m no longer wearing anything that could be found in that catalog: the ubiquitous costuming of my twenties, the look of inclusion and aspiration, but also the look that once allowed me to disappear. Ludicrous! Shirts with collars, button-downs, khakis, boat shoes—out! Or else pushed to the side of the closet, in resentment. Whom was I trying to please? It’s no small deal to take on the look of a subculture that’s still derided as dangerous. Not here in Town, but a few towns south, or off Cape.

  It’s surprising how quickly I take to this new appearance, as if my body had always been waiting for it.

  Today I have on an olive T-shirt, skinny white jeans, a blue bandanna on my head. My sideburns come down into points, dark facial stubble clipped in the blunt approximation of a goatee. Hair buzzed on the sides, and a long, wavy, romantic clump on top. I wear Doc Martens even though they hurt, not just a little but a lot. They are likely a size too small for me, and occasionally a terrible clear bubble on my heel leaks and burns, keeping my sock disconcertingly wet. I could either buy them from the shoe store in Town or drive all the way to Boston, and I don’t have time to drive all the way to Boston. I must be like my mother, who claimed her feet were ruined in childhood because she didn’t know shoes weren’t supposed to hurt. I decide I will never wear an outfit that doesn’t in some way insist: Butch, butch, I am too butch to live. I become a different person inside these clothes, and for the first time in my life, I understand costuming not as a falsehood but as a way to bring the inner life out in the open. Turning myself inside out is another way to put it. Why keep dreams to myself when others are all too ready to be actors in them?

  Hollis and I shop for a motorcycle jacket. I pick up the first one I see, slug my arms through the sleeves, shake my shoulders into it. It feels good. I’m as much at home in the jacket as someone who’s never even stood within fifteen feet of a Ducati could be.

  Hollis shakes his head from side to side, eyes half-closed, chin lifted. A slight smile establishes his position, his knowledgeable position. “Too roomy, too big.”

  He might actually say it looks like a housedress on me. A muumuu.

  I stand before the store mirror, which elongates me, confusing my sense of my body more than ever. The houselights are bright. It occurs to me I still might like my clothes roomy and big. I’m not exactly a muscleman eager to show off his arms, his tight butt, his chest as deep as a chest of drawers.

  It’s curious that I give in so readily to Hollis’s instruction. I don’t say no to his advice, and don’t experience it as an act of control. When others in my life have attempted to control me I have not responded so well, and have either pushed back or walked away. As much as I’m wary of power, I appreciate instruction—it’s pretty clear Hollis has my welfare in mind. And I have a pretty strong sense that Hollis doesn’t perform this role for everyone. Again, I feel chosen by him. He wants to mentor, as someone must have mentored him once, as no parent, no school teaches you how to be a queer person. And you can learn only so much on your own, especially in these last days before the internet.

  When I get back to the Work Center I beat my brand-new jacket against the stones in the driveway. I beat my shoes too—no hiding. Again, Hollis’s advice. “What are you doing?” Marty asks. “I am making it wearable,” I say, and the look on his face suggests that he completely gets why I am doing it: he is a visual artist, after all, and understands spectacle. I beat them to suggest that the new is wrong, a sham. I beat them to suggest that anger belongs in the spirit of my clothes. I beat them because—am I angry at Hollis? Because he means so much to me and isn’t as available as I’d like him to be? It’s not the year for perfection and the ideal fit. At this point in time we are only damaged, scraped, burned, and used.

  Boots & Battered Jacket

  My mother meets me at the gate of the Tampa/St. Pete airport. I’m happy to see her, she is happier to see me: I only wish the laugh that comes out of her mouth did not sound like it’s protecting itself from shock. Whatever I’m wearing—I must be embodying some fears she’s been brewing. She looks at me as if I am wearing a costume but she won’t tell me to take off the boots and battered jacket. That laugh is a way to put me in my place. The scolding inside it—the dressing down, so to speak—familiar: it’s fed by the culture in which she grew up, in which you don’t stand out, you don’t look like you’re having too much fun, you don’t make too many claims about yourself (as much as she would probably li
ke to wear a battered motorcycle jacket too). There’s practically a voice in the expression on her face: I have lost my son for good. Which contains shades of hurt, betrayal, horror, and confusion. She’s beginning to let go of me, as if she can already imagine some brawny Bluto buggering me from behind, about to fuck HIV into me. If she lets go of me now, it won’t hurt so much when she has to do it later.

  The Big Beast

  There’s a spectacular feeling that comes from being seen as desirable, especially when I’d never thought of myself as being desirable before. It has a rightness that I experience deep in my body. It shapes the way I stand, the way I speak, the way I assess a situation without equivocation. It’s energizing, this feeling. Boats go golden in late light, clouds rush forward, as if in the wake of a tropical storm. A relief: now I’m just like other people. I don’t need to eat, don’t need to sleep. And yet I feel distracted and achy, too, as if I’ve just come down with a mild ongoing flu. My mind cannot even be still long enough to fix a confused sentence, and I’m in part relieved when I have an excuse (dishes to wash! I have to pee!) to leap up from my desk. If this is love, I’m not sure I want it. Love is too many lines of coke, your mouth dry, the center of your head aching and ice-cold, and every nerve in you alive, so alive.