by Paul Lisicky
We resume the night, in the hopes that the fun won’t be spoiled by too much genuine feeling.
The bloopers film gets put aside almost immediately. Farts and premature ejaculations and running out to take a dump: it thinks sex is disgusting, thinks human bodies are ugly. It hates people, and was likely conceived and directed by someone who was never the object of someone else’s desire, who never had satisfying sex in his life. We go instantly to the straight video. What is there to say about it? The actors here have done these moves so many times they can’t help but rely on animal memory to get the work done; they’re not at home, not in their heads, or in their bodies. They’re not exactly bored but they’re not so present either. Maybe some of them are simply drugged, but not on ecstasy or acid but in a K hole, which is another way to say: mild cat tranquilizer. Even I don’t get unsettled by a close-up of a vagina. On the screen the vagina looks as friendly as a handbag, a pink one from T.J. Maxx. Maybe this is because the women are performing a kind of theatricality that doesn’t align with their own pleasure, their inner lives. Rather, it is to convince the men, who are not especially dashing or endowed, that they are horse-hung studs, holding reservoirs of uncontaminated semen inside them.
The point hasn’t been to vote on the best of the films, but as a group of artists and writers, we are obsessed with standards and we cannot help articulating our standards. A vote is cast. The winner? Dress Up for Daddy. Some venture to say it was the only hot one, and I silently keep my mouth shut about the Falcon film being plenty hot for me.
“I just want to be a lesbian,” one after another of us declares, as if a dumb joke is one way to restore order and distance. As if there’s nothing inherently patronizing about such a statement.
I will talk to Elizabeth about this night many years later. I want to know if I’ve remembered it correctly. How could any of that translate to an online realm in which we’re always just one click away from porn? “Yeah, that was a bad idea,” Elizabeth says. And we leave it at that.
18
Kenneled
Wally and I now know he isn’t going to get up one day and walk down the street. He lies on the couch, I sit across from him, and conversation seems useless after ten minutes. I don’t want to be a burden to him. And I don’t want him to think he has to take care of me. What is time? I’m learning not to be nervous about having nothing to say, even though I occasionally fill silence with chatter. It would be better for Wally if I weren’t nervous. So I sit cross-legged on the floor with Arden, who has grown accustomed to my visits. I let my hand get lost in the dense smoky black of his curls, which is as much about soothing me as about soothing him. Occasionally he gives tender licks to my fingers as if I’m broiled chicken.
Arden must wonder why Wally has stopped taking him for walks. And his confusion around all that might account for the fact that he’s been eating so much. Whenever Wally cannot finish breakfast, he gives it to Arden, and as a result Arden has swelled to the size of a small household bruin. The weight puts extra pressure on his hips, his joints. It takes effort for him to stand, and he wobbles a bit when he carries himself from one side of the room to the other.
I probably don’t know how much I am terrified of death, but I’m starting to sit with it. It would be unseemly to even mention any of this to Wally: he has enough on his mind. The only real gift I can give Wally is to pull us both into the here and now, when the future is looking at us, so loud and scary we can already hear it roar.
Wally doesn’t want to say too much—or maybe he can’t. He might simply want to keep silent so I won’t know what he’s losing. If he sees me see something lost in him, maybe there is reason to be scared.
Three creatures in stillness in the room: the furnace high, peace in the middle of catastrophe.
After an hour, Wally says, “Your check is on the kitchen counter.” And I always know that’s a synonym for: I’m tired. I think it might be time for you to head home.
Paying a visit to my friend. Wally.
One Wednesday afternoon I get a phone call from Mark just as I’ve come in from the gym. There has been some emergency; the absence of any details—he is too rushed to fill me in for now—frightens me. Is Wally OK? I say. Yes, Wally is OK. But there is some medical appointment that possibly involves a hospital stay in Boston. And could I take Arden to the kennel?
Arden has been to the kennel many times before—it is said that he feels at home there—so of course. There is no problem getting him into the front seat of the car. He seems perfectly content, a gentleman in the passenger’s seat, looking out at the pine trees and the Christian motel and the occasional gas station. But his head looks left as soon as I turn onto Nauset Road: maybe he already smells the poop, the obedience, the fear. Still, he keeps his chivalrous posture. He has too much dignity to whimper or whine. I park, open my door, open his door in order to hook the leash onto his leather collar. He will not move; even when I try to pick him up by the haunches he will not move. He has willed himself to weigh ten cinder blocks. He wants me to get the message. He has put up with enough, enough change, enough with being a good boy, dammit. He is middle-aged. And now he is losing his human, whom he’s been watching out for ever since he was taken into the house, and his devotion isn’t even enough to keep him well, to keep him in the world. It will take two people from the kennel to get him out of the car, and when he does move finally, he trots with ease, as if to shame me in front of these strangers, as if to say, Oh, Paul, what was all the fuss about?
Heroes
No die-ins except a brief one at the Outer Cape to force the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to agree to a treatment preventing pneumonia. It’s a different AIDS world here versus the city world, where, as part of ACT UP and TAG, men and women demonstrate, call out, and confront, and get what they need from those in power, make sure drug approvals speed up through a bureaucracy that has brutality and murder in its DNA. It’s not that anyone is any less energetic about saving lives at the end of the world. In fact, many have spent their time on the front lines before their arrival here. It’s just that in a town that comports itself as a haven, where there’s no resistance from within, the desire to save lives takes a different shape. It happens in houses, behind blinds pulled down, and you don’t always know who the heroes are. The situation’s far too grave for anything but the immediate. And who’s certain if they’re really helping when the terms of the illness shift from person to person? Heroes: They might not even want other people to know whom they lifted from the shower stall or off the floor. And they probably hate the neatness of the word.
Mother
What has happened to my mother? It isn’t enough to say she’s gotten older. All people, if they’re lucky, get older. Skin sags, hands mottle, eyes and brows lighten as if bleached from within, but some people are still themselves. Some keep their energy, their sense of humor, their charisma. I hold the photo she sends me in my hand. My brothers and I blame our father for exhausting her, but I wonder how much of this exhausting she’s done to herself. I slide out a photo album from underneath my bed. Here she is, in the earliest picture I have of her, by the ocean in Beach Haven, smiling with so much electricity, it is hard to take my eyes off her. The wide mouth, the hazel-brown eyes, her brows, thicker than you’d expect on a young woman: her beauty is more than the sum of her features. There’s a quality in her that’s elusive and complex, and that quality overpowers everyone else in her group, including her mother and friend Rita. But now she carries herself with a caution that suggests she never knew what it was like to attract others, both women and men. Maybe this is how a culture kills you, not through isolation or boredom or soul-impoverishing distraction, but by telling you that beauty is trouble. By telling you that maintaining your appearance is vain. By telling you that too much self is sex—and that sex is a threat to the status quo.
What must it be like for my mother to see me reaching toward another life? Every time she took a step toward another life? Well, ma
ybe that step took her to a bad place. Maybe if you’re not fully alive it isn’t so hard to die. It is like going into an all-consuming corporate job and not considering the costs to yourself. You can convince yourself you are doing good by it. You say it’s for the sake of your family when in fact you’re just giving yourself up to the Big Greedy Force that has always been waiting to eat you up. Not quite death with a capital D, but another version of it. Capital D in disguise, making your acquaintance from an early age so you can get dressed for him, wait for him to point you to the room where you will sleep for the night, and the next night.
Once, in an unguarded moment, she tells me, “Your father wasn’t my first. He doesn’t know that.” I don’t really know what to do with the news. I feel honored, and somewhat startled to carry it, hold it close. Who wants to be the bearer of another secret, which has its costs? It is both a confession and an admission of pride. I had another life—other lives—before your father broke me. I can feel her testing my reaction. But I don’t know why she’s telling it to me. Why must my mother break some boundary whenever she wants to feel intimacy?
I tear into the harness, which is already several sizes too small. The harness that has been in use through many generations, on both sides of the family, its hide cut from early Catholicism, not enough money, class aspiration, learned passivity, practicality, family catastrophe. By tearing into it, I challenge and threaten everyone else who says no, no, no, no, no to themselves. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel shame and regret. Throwing off that harness is like coming out. It doesn’t happen just once, the way they say it does in the literature of identity politics. No, I do it every day of my life. The practice keeps me alert, awake. And it still manages to chafe my skin red.
Musicale 2
Billy is too sure of himself, of his jokes. Or it could be that the reception of his performance is beyond concern at this point. It’s the second Café Musicale, one year after the first, and in the interim it’s become a legend. Billy presides over the Common Room as if it’s his living room, certain, but maybe too certain, that he is loved by us. He doesn’t seem to apprehend whether we get his inside jokes or not. He doesn’t see that some wince when he starts in on his imitations, embarrassing imitations, of the people closest to him, some of whom are sitting in the front row. There’s nervousness in the air, stale. People tap their feet, shift, cough, yawn, scratch their ears, rub their nostrils, adjust their posture in their chairs. Faces are frozen with smiles of support, eyes emptied of inner feeling. Some look out the window in the hope a storm could shut the whole night down. There’s still definite love for Billy, but it’s a challenge to love someone who is fucking up to the point where he is not noticing the reactions of his audience. The night is in service of a cause, but Billy has inadvertently turned the evening into a celebration of him, or at least his circle of accomplished friends. For a minute he seems to have forgotten that people are suffering and dying, including some people in this room. If only we were able to admit to ourselves that Billy, too, is on the way to dying, we might have real compassion.
Painters show slides. Poets read poems written especially for the night. Fiction writers read excerpts from novels in progress. The performances are just as animated as last year’s musicale, if determinedly more so, but they’re overshadowed by Billy’s elaborate commentaries, which sometimes go on for minutes. We are waiting for logs to catch fire and flare. Billy is speaking in fondness and admiration, but his interpretations are twisted, broken by non sequiturs. He makes us all extensions of him, we’re his minions. Here I’d thought he was our biggest fan and now it turns out he contains multitudes.
But perhaps a more morbid story is at work here, and it’s taken me this long to see: Is Billy losing it? Is his breakdown happening right in front of our eyes? Maybe his verbal wandering is simply the first sign of dementia and we’re all gathered inside the edge of the world. And we can’t walk out, the way one might want to walk out of a John Cassavetes film when Mabel’s disintegration at the dinner table might be too much to take. We’re hostages of a film, of one another, this illness, this chaos.
At intermission, I walk up to Polly. “They shoot horses, don’t they?” she says, referring to another director’s film. And neither of us smiles. The joke isn’t easy to make as she loves Billy, loves him as she would her brother.
When it’s my turn to read, a mysterious, unexpected anger surges through me. I can’t seem to find the voice that would transform the material, transform this night. What could one read to lift this evening? There can be something enthralling about any performance that comes so near to unraveling, when the performer misreads the audience, alienates them with his self-involvement, then somehow brings them back, and the audience is so grateful to be taken back, taken home, riveted all the more for being ferried from danger to safety. But I am not that kind of clown, or hero. The voice in me just wants to get through the performance, through this night before things get any darker, meaner. I read a little too fast. Human aspiration is being crushed—or is it love? Care feels like a vain project tonight, impossible in the face of outsize forces. Last year’s inspiration haunts this year’s disaster, and how could we not be furious at God for making a disaster of the night? Why does God let this happen to Billy in front of all the people who love him best?
God’s Silence
The churches in Town turn their backs on the sick in Town, but that is not why I’ve turned my back on God. The churches’ failure is not news: even the ACT UP protesters throwing communion hosts on the floor at mass has ceased to shock after five years. Nothing I’ve known about the world feels permeable anymore, and the surfaces it gives back—trees, water, the sky—feel as hard and opaque as the bottom of a frying pan. In Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, the priest tells a congregant that he couldn’t reconcile his loving God with the atrocities being committed in the Spanish Civil War, so he ignored the atrocities. It makes more sense to deny God’s existence, he says, because the brutality of man needs no explanation. But what about God’s brutality? says the man. Later in the film, another congregant wonders about the church’s fixation on Jesus’s suffering. What about all the betrayals he bore? he asks. Wasn’t God’s silence worse? The priest answers yes, and wonders whether to hold a service when it’s clear that people haven’t bothered to fill the pews. He decides to do it anyway, and the bells ring and ring and ring.
19
The Smallest Apartment in the World
My new apartment is the smallest apartment in the world, about six by six, just enough for a narrow bed along the window, a desk with shelves above it on the opposite side. There is a tiny bathroom and a strip of kitchen, with a toy-sized refrigerator-freezer. Blue indoor-outdoor carpet that gives off a faint hint of mildew. An outside staircase blocks the front window, but beyond that I see the Town beach and full harbor, boats of all sizes, MacMillan Wharf, the bluffs of Truro, and Long Point Light. John Dowd, the painter, lives across the hall in a space a bit bigger than mine. Some nights I hear piano playing, people singing around the piano, and I go over sometimes to join them, but not often, as I am shy. Lately my old shy self, the earliest self I knew, has come back to meet me.
Maybe that’s why I like the fact that the apartment is high above Town, high above the funky beach out back. It’s part of a building owned by Madelyn Carney, another painter in Town. Generations of Provincetown artists and writers have put in their time in this house, and I like joining their company. It is removed from the clamor of the street. I can almost afford it through the summer, and through the next winter, when the rent goes by a different schedule. It’s more affordable, and I can pay by the month rather than for the entire season.
My friends call it 411, as that’s the address of the building.
After paying my summer rent, I have only a hundred dollars in the bank. Many people get by with only a hundred dollars in the bank, but for me it is psychologically treacherous. I suspect this comes from having grown up with a father who n
ever took toll roads in order to save twenty-five cents. Not that he didn’t have money—he had plenty of money, all of which he put into stocks and CDs and IRAs. Only that the possibility of losing it was always on his mind, from how much toothpaste he allowed himself to squeeze on his brush to making sure he ate everything on his plate when he went to a buffet restaurant. As a result I have lived a life not caring about money, which is another way to say I’ve remained a child. But such choices indicate I’m just as scared of losing money as my father. We just have opposite responses to the possibilities of crisis.
There was a tough month over the past winter when Lucy and I went to the Lighthouse, a restaurant in Wellfleet, one day. It was during one of those stretches when the rain was ongoing, like in Ireland or Iceland, the climate of one of those northern countries where the nights are too long. The trees across the street were heavy and wet, a dazzling spring green. Another winter that wouldn’t let go. Lucy still had plenty of money from her advance and offered to lend me some. My chest swung open, my pulse slowing down inside my wrists and neck. This touched me. Then weirder feelings rushed in: Would Lucy expect a deeper commitment from me? Would this change our friendship, the weather of it? Would I always be indebted to her, in some way, even when I paid her back? So I said no, but thanked her profusely, my scalp warm from the radiator at my back.
The strange moment continues. I am not poor the way genuine poor people are poor—I need to admit that to myself. There is always someone to invite me over to dinner, and I am definitely not yet stealing boxes of pasta from the A&P. Maybe I am just trying to hasten disaster imaginatively so that if it happens I’ll be prepared. But to be in this position is to disrespect my father: all the sacrifices he made to make sure he and his loved ones would never feel the sting of poverty ever again. It is to fail his vision for himself somehow. All those years of music lessons, musical instruments, the encouragement, the faith that my brothers and I could be extraordinary creatures if we simply worked hard enough.