by Paul Lisicky
Hollis must feel a version of this, too, but if he does he keeps it sealed off, away from my sight. It’s tough not to resent the hiddenness of him, what he values and doesn’t, the complex and negotiating math of it. But in hiding his emotions from me, he’s teaching me to keep feelings in perspective when they could so easily take on a life of their own. A big beast is prowling through my life. I imagine he doesn’t want the beast to prowl through his, too—not at the same time. He’s lost enough for now, not just Jaco, but so many other friends I can’t even tally. We’ve all lost a lot, even if we haven’t loved or known the dead ones around us, and it would be no surprise to be told we are acting out. But acting out is for people who have a safety net, and queer people have no safety net, unless we’re protesting for our lives, in the big city, en masse. We’re acting on our feelings. We’re at the edge of the world, and you say this isn’t a time for indulgence?
Transmission
Would AIDS be a different beast if you could catch it from the air-conditioning, or by a sneeze or subway pole, a public swimming pool? Back in the ’80s Reagan didn’t even mention the word, not even when his wife’s best friend, the famous Hollywood actor, went off to Paris, skinny, ugly, exhausted, scared, for experimental treatment. We know exactly how you get it now—we know it requires multiple exposures. But transmission is associated with what? Parts of the body—acts—some people don’t want to talk about. Not frottage, nothing polite or gentlemanly. But more often than not: sodomy. The ass: site of shame, even for the most sex-positive kind of person, though they’d never admit to that. All those internalized phobias that the ass should not be used for sex when the ass has been used for sex since the beginning of time. The ass isn’t always clean. It’s unpredictable, unwieldy. It has a mind of its own even when you believe it’s emptied and clean.
As if disease itself is smell. Or vice versa.
The hovering stink of judgment, the slippery mud of its dream. Not just from others, but from inside yourself. You’ve brought it on yourself. You let in what your body was never supposed to have. This is what you get for giving yourself too much freedom.
This is what they’ve done to us.
10
Scrub
Am I angry? It doesn’t occur to me that I might be one of those people who turn their anger inward, against themselves, to make it look like another emotion—inertia or loneliness so I don’t have to think of myself as an angry person. But why am I opposed to the anger in myself? Why can’t I make a home in it? Is it just that anger lives in absolutes, slams the door on nuance? Is it only that anger doesn’t always feel so good, like running six miles without any of the endorphins? Maybe it’s just that anger wears me down, and when I’m in a fury I don’t have the distance to think through a problem and then I’m back again in the house of my childhood, listening to my raging father, and I see how weak it makes him, hear how it turns him into an idiot, no captain of himself, and then he’s using it against my brothers and me. There we all are, in the middle of the night, installing a new kitchen at the shore house at three thirty in the morning, and everyone except for him is pretending to find it funny, Aren’t we the craziest family, because it’s easier to laugh at madness than to say, No, this is wrong to us, we should be in bed now, sleeping. We should be taking care of ourselves, replenishing, brushing our teeth now, drinking water. We could resume first thing in the morning. But anger filled every glass in our house. We drank so deep of it we were convinced it was sacrament.
He called my brothers and me into the bathroom. It was always one at a time. You never knew when it would be your turn. He’d be in the tub after a long Saturday of work, the water around him dense and gray, as if it had been expelled by the laundry room hose. The project was to scrub his back, not with a brush, nothing with a handle—that would be too safe, not personal enough—but with a washcloth. It was always the cream-colored washcloth that was already discolored, rough, cheap, with torn edges. The air would be too warm in the bathroom: a swamp with a dome over it. A smell of soil and dead skin and mist. Did he want us to adore him, adore his body? He must have known that there was nothing to adore of his back, red and freckled from repeated sunburns, with a small white crater near his meaty right shoulder, as if someone had once punctured him with a screwdriver. It was not about getting us to love him. Rather, he wanted his skin to rub off into us so we would not forget the cost of everything he did to give us the life we had. The martyring. And if that isn’t anger in its purest, most frozen form, then I can’t read the world.
George & Martha
Fighting between my parents is always out in the open. Fighting never hides. Fighting is behind and ahead of us, roiling beneath the bed or out in the kitchen drawers. There’s nowhere to go to be safe from it: the barks, the shrieks, the slammed doors, the snapped-off syllables. From a distance, the fighting might sound so absurd as to be from a comedy. Years later, my brothers and I will crack each other up when we mimic certain lines, but when you’re in the thick of it, there’s nowhere you can go to shut it out. Your hands aren’t big enough to cover your ears. It always feels personal, this fighting. It always feels as if it’s about you, as if it started with your own birth.
It gets in through all the openings in your body: your pores, your nostrils, your ears, your pee hole, your asshole, your mouth. And when they’re yelling, how can any other sound come in and find you? You can’t tell where you begin or end when that sound is in the air. No one is blameless, no one can walk away sparkling and clean, even after the doors have been closed and the rooms, though silent, are still ringing. You smell gamy to yourself, as if you haven’t worn deodorant. And is that why your mother says, “You have B.O.,” when the two of you are alone in the car, on the way to your music lesson in Cinnaminson? She says it as if she likes you less for having a smell, for leaving childhood behind, for the possibility of leaving her behind.
The tantrums are so full-bodied they feel like sex, or a substitute for rough sex, actually—an instinct it takes me years to put words to, but why make your children your prime-time audience? Why not put your children in another room, tell them to play outside and cut the back lawn with the noisy mower—something? It makes sense that my brothers and I watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with awe when it comes on the TV one night. George and Martha, Hump the Hostess, we didn’t need to understand what the fighting was all about. We knew it as music, which might have explained why my mother walked out of the room fifteen minutes in; she couldn’t stand seeing how it comforted us, made us laugh so hard, made us feel less alone. She didn’t need to hear the sound of her own voice echoed back to herself.
11
Three Ways
I’m slowly learning that there are three ways to be a queer man, socially. I could be part of a pack. I could socialize as part of a group. I could disappear into the group, be a listener in the group, and it wouldn’t matter from the outside—I’d still be one of the chosen. I could be the person I never was in high school, or even college. From a distance this might look like a lot of fun, but my fun might only be group-bound. I might not be able to slip away. Might not be able to leave with the dark-eyed guy looking at me from the other side of the bar. All my group members concerned with every flicker sent my way. Or every one I send out? The possibilities of evaluation, dismissal, mean jokes, jealousy. Group as cockblock. So I lose the possibility of sex, and drinking (or drugs) becomes my sex. Groups are evolutionary. Groups have their roots in starlings, in murmurations, snapping above the landscape like a scarf, dense as ink at the corners, then thinning out in a flash, but that doesn’t mean every creature has the gene to be a part of one. I know I don’t have that gene. Perhaps I still have a kind of PTSD from gym class.
Or I could be in a couple, which has obvious benefits: comfort, reliability, routine. Others gravitate to me now. It’s safer to approach a pair, less threatening than to talk to a single man. I might not fully know it, but others are trying to read the roles in our relati
onship. Who’s the quiet one, the talkative one? The bottom or the top, or are we versatile? Do we have sex, or has that long stopped between us, and are all our alliances outside? Who makes the money? Who makes more? How does that shape how we stand next to each other, whether we look at each other’s faces to lend support when the other is talking?
But there’s nothing like walking into a busy room as part of a couple, nothing like that statement of love, of identity. In a way I look more gay than I would if I were on my own—much more so than those who are part of a large group, who could even be mistaken for frat boys, gregarious to the point of aggressive, their public expression no longer simply about sex, even if they are walking around shirtless, with tight jeans.
Or I could be on my own, what I’ll call the Lone Man. His first preoccupation isn’t with finding a boyfriend. He isn’t romantic in the traditional sense, but is romantic with the world. Though lonely, he knows there is value in his freedom, in his ability to pack up at any moment, whether for a trip or to start a new life. He can have sex, lots of sex, if he wants to. And the sex can always be an adventure, as it isn’t friendly, married sex. He looks forward to the challenge of walking into any social situation. He has to be awake, has to be looking. He cannot afford to sleep in any social situation, for he can’t depend on a sidekick to do all the work for him. He must play both parts, all parts, and so he is often extra-vivid. Some try to match him with their best friends, or else shake their heads at what they see as an inability to grow up, but he knows better than all that. He has learned how to say no to outside pressure. He knows how to take care of himself, as he doesn’t take his confidence for granted. Maybe he was once in a relationship and he knows the cost of being involved with someone, giving up a part of his identity to someone, the danger of losing his boundary, losing too much.
The Provincetown of 1992 is a friend to the Lone Man, who is always more queer than gay. His status comes with no stigma, unlike in other gay communities in which group affiliation is insisted upon in public places. The New Boy is a Lone Man, and in that he sets a standard for everyone. All kinds of cultures, queer or straight, human or animal, tell us our value is determined by the packs we run with. The Lone Man has himself.
Wrenching
I am walking down Pearl Street with someone I don’t know very well. Maybe because I don’t know her very well I am at more distance from Town, the structures I’ve started to take for granted—only a stage set for the people up inside their rooms. The yards aren’t thick with dark, jungly plants, no ceiba, no mahogany, no flame of Jamaica, no silver buttonwood, none of the plants that crawl and twist through the novel I’m working on, the tangled flora and fauna meant to conjure up an atmosphere that’s personal. No, I’m right here. The stars overhead, the rooflines, the pitch of the eaves above the window peaks. The blue hour, holding on as long as it can before night. “If I had a boyfriend …,” I start, then close myself down before I can complete the sentence. I go back to where I was. There is no reason that wrenching beauty should be enough. In that moment beauty is all about death, and my friend knows that too.
Intuition
Hollis’s legs stretch out across my lap. Winter chills the moisture on the windowpane. The sun hasn’t shone in days. There is a possibility of change both outside the window and inside the room, which is hot from steam, visible in shadows, rising off the radiator fins. I can’t actually give words to it just yet, but it’s an intuition I feel deep into my feet. Sex won’t always be like this. By that I mean people won’t have to rein themselves in, cordon off certain acts. They won’t look at a drop of semen on a chest as if it contains spilled nuclear fuel. Sex won’t always be intrinsically wound up with dread, with the possibility of accident and error: blood going into the wrong place, a bitten lip, or through some membrane so thin it’s barely a barrier.
And when the right drug comes along they’ll be obsessed with semen for a while. Every aspect of sex will be about fetishizing it. All sex will be toward making contact with it, as if sex’s sole purpose was in service of that contact. They’ll want to taste it, they’ll want to rub it all over their chests and faces, as if it might ward off bad luck. Then one day they’ll get bored with this obsession, realize how peculiar it was to turn what has always been human essence into danger, taboo. Maybe they will even get tired of sex, as sex will be everywhere, at any time. Sex will be like running, or stopping at the supermarket’s salad bar and filling up a cardboard container with leaves.
Does danger make sex more erotic? Would I find it so compelling if I didn’t experience it as a bit of an obstacle course? If it didn’t have within it the possibility to kill me, if not now, then five years from now? Would I feel this ache? Would I be missing something?
Fucked
At some point in February, when it’s still cold but the days are getting longer, Hollis says, “You’re staying for the summer, right? Where else would you go?” As if I’ve already been ruined for the world. Like no one else I know, he makes pronouncements like that with such certainty they leave no room for doubt. He says such things with an amazed laugh, which suggests years and years of crazy experience. The Town of summer, or at least the way he describes it, doesn’t sound exactly like fun. Overwhelming to the point of sickening, but necessary. The Town I’m getting to know through the off-season is only a dress rehearsal for the true experience of it. Or maybe it’s just getting its sleep and taking its vitamins. In recovery mode from what came before.
Does my decision to stay happen over time, or is it triggered by Hollis? I really don’t want to live anywhere else. Else suggests duty, denial, safety, patience, routine. Else involves desensitization, suppressing disrespect, brutality, inequality. An emphasis on numbers, statistics, positions. Commerce. Trash along the roadsides and overpasses. Stalled traffic at red lights. People harried in supermarkets. Else does not involve a conversation with water. Else does not have a sense of extremity, life-and-deathness in the air. Hollis is right. Town has already written itself into me. It’s fucked me in the manner of a lover, and I might as well just get used to sharing his bed, though I’m not sure I want to be in his bed all the time. Is that the ideal life, and I’m just too controlling, too invested in the values of my former life to give in?
And yet how do I know freedom isn’t weakening me? Could inclusion and acceptance make it harder to return to the world I’ve left once it’s time to move on? I might become one of those people who haven’t crossed the Sagamore Bridge in years, someone who forgets how to tie a tie, or gets too used to outfits that are more costume than anything. Outfits that might look juvenile and needy under harsher, more jaded eyes.
And money. Who doesn’t struggle with money here? Who doesn’t live in an apartment that’s too small, no closet, an under-the-counter refrigerator? Who doesn’t worry about the cost of electricity, the cost of heat, how much water you put down the septic tank? Not to mention the work season, which lasts all of four months, mid-May to mid-September. Two jobs, fourteen-hour days, at best one day off a week. If I rent a place for the summer alone, I’m required to pay the full amount of the term before I’ve even moved in. My two fellowships are close to running out. They’ve allowed me to be comfortable, more comfortable than many of my friends. I get to go out to dinner in February, I get to pay for my friends’ meals. But what will happen next year?
Days pass. I know what I’ve decided but it takes me some time to announce it to Polly and Hollis and everybody else. I will find some way to live. I will do all the necessary adult things. I will no longer carry the built-in prestige of being known as a Writing Fellow, but I’ve moved beyond caring about the rewards of all that months ago. I will be among, in a way I haven’t been before. It’s a new thing to be among: all my life I’d thought my only choice was to be extraordinary, as if to compensate for some lack. There is freedom in failure; I know that—how could I think otherwise after living with the body’s collective breakdown? Maybe it’s art enough to try to build a life agai
nst that breakdown. Maybe that’s enough.
12
Escapes
Although we know it’s our home, we also know our home is remote, surrounded on three sides by cold water, over an hour to anything of use. We have an overlarge new supermarket, a few convenience stories, a few doctors’ offices, a handful of restaurants still open, a gym, a few garages, two thrift stores, but other than that? We are as remote from the real world, as other humans call it, as Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are remote from the real world—they might even be closer, with their ferries. So when either Polly or I say, out of the blue, “Cape Cod Mall?” we might as well be proposing a trip to the Caribbean. We’re embarrassed to admit it to others, but sometimes we miss the brute and ruthless practicality, a deep need that cannot be satisfied in Provincetown, with its fidelity to the local. (Chains, with the exception of the necessary A&P and Cumberland Farms, are legally outlawed in the town of sexual outlaws.) Maybe this urge is about touching back to our pasts, Polly’s in Kent, Ohio, mine in New Jersey—the business strip of Hyannis, after all, does not look radically different from either. Or to put it more precisely, maybe the break between our past and present feels too strong, a false binary, an ersatz compartmentalization that could only make anyone crazy, the way my father’s departure from Allentown, city of his birth, made him crazy, racked with guilt. Or we are simply trying to shed adult responsibility, the hovering stink of illness, the sickness of our comrades from AIDS. It’s good to be part of Town, but it’s good to leave Town for a few hours, and as soon as we hit Wellfleet, ten miles south of the border, we are Hansel and Gretel in the woods, looking for compelling sights to catch our eyes, whether it’s a church thrift store, the herring run in Brewster, the tidied, idealized Cape Cod of Chatham or Dennis or Yarmouth Port, a fox trotting through the grave markers of a Harwich cemetery. Edward Gorey’s house on Strawberry Lane. We make up characters, hold extended conversations in their outlandish voices, and crack each other up. Some of what we make up might be truly funny and inspired. Much of it isn’t, and we find that funny too. We propose a scenario in which Polly goes up to the counter of a drugstore and says to the cashier, with a pained look on her face, “Excuse me, Miss? Miss? I have feminine needs. Emergency?” It’s not menstruation itself that makes us laugh, but advertising, our anticipation of the clerk’s prim, alarmed reaction. This is what happens when you’ve lived long in a place without taboos, where you’ve become too used to seeing someone with AIDS-related dementia walking down the middle of Carver Street, buck naked in winter but for the sheet around his shoulders, which is horrifying, but simultaneously funny.