I’ve never been into gambling; life has always seemed dangerous enough. Once, with Andee in the Las Vegas airport, I let go of a roll of quarters. Every few years, I buy a lottery ticket. When Jeremy and I decided not to use condoms, after we got tested, we agreed to use condoms with everyone else. That’s what made me safer—my promise, Jeremy’s desire.
Where does responsibility start, and where does responsibility end? Jeremy never liked fucking me, because I could never fucking relax. I wanted him to hold me in his arms and tell me everything was okay. He held me in his arms, and I believed everything was okay. You notice the difference, right?
The best part of the legacy of my relationship with Jeremy is that now I’m so safe—I’m not going to let this guy fuck me and then there’s a smelly crowd and the guy’s zipping up, I say wait a minute and watch me come. The crowd leaves and he holds me, I shoot almost immediately. Then I’m holding him from behind, squeezing him tight and that’s the best part—see, girls like us just want hugs, really, just hugs.
Walking downhill, I’m finally in a good mood—sex was worth it, after all! At home, I open a cabinet and a roach comes flying onto my face—it’s a big one, so it hurts my cheek. Ralowe and I go to Aquarius, and I listen to the new Peaches album on the listening station. The beats are good, but the lyrics are embarrassing. I listen to the beginning of each song, just to make sure that every song is awful—so I don’t end up buying the album used at Amoeba. The worst song is when she’s telling the guys to shake their dicks, girls to shake their tits. I mean, who does she think she is? I thought it was going to be guys shake your dicks, girls shake your dicks—so she’d at least be acknowledging the butches and the trannyboys, but no such luck.
Ralowe shows me his new room—subsidized housing, hello. They’ve got a lot of rules, but in the lobby there’s this queen telling us how she’s got the biggest room in the building—six windows. She looks at Ralowe: how many windows do you have? Ralowe has two windows. The queen says: I’ve been here for twelve years, and I can guarantee you that I have the biggest room and the best view, will I see you at the End Up on Sunday for tea dance? After we leave, Ralowe says why was she trying so hard to make me feel bad—we’re both living in subsidized housing, why does she want to compete about windows? I guess I’ve been around more shady queens than Ralowe—I just thought she was trying to be friendly.
Another hotel lobby after turning a trick—I could stay in that place between leaving the elevator and walking out the lobby door, for the rest of my life. Soon it’s 1:37 a.m. and it’s time for The Mattilda Show, fifteen minutes of thinking I’m going to take over the world until the inevitable: I crash hard. There’s a mouse crawling across my kitchen counter, and I can’t do anything but gasp.
It’s the time of year when the sun only shines onto my fire escape for about twenty minutes a day; I have to rush out to catch it. I don’t even understand why this happens—I guess it’s the angle of the earth in relation to the huge ’80s monstrosity on O’Farrell and the 1000 Van Ness theater addition—the ugliest building in San Francisco, except maybe the senior housing on Ellis near Larkin, fourteen stories of poured concrete with a rocky finish. When I wake up, I’m so tired I literally start crying. I want to go back to bed, but I’m not sure if I’ll fall asleep, so I just keep walking back and forth from the kitchen to the bathroom. I turn the radio up way too loud—it’s about Found Magazine, and it hurts my ears. Handwriting is a huge part of it; at least you think you know something about someone by his or her handwriting. I cut my nails—they look good. I’m sick of walking around acting like I’m okay.
I decide that today’s the day I’m going to find a chi gung class—if I don’t get some exercise soon, I’m going to have to start jumping off buildings. I call all the acupuncture schools, then ten or fifteen acupuncturists from the yellow pages, plus all the practitioners I’ve seen. Every class isn’t starting until next year. Can’t they see I’m desperate, the sides of my stomach turning to blubber for the first time in my life, and the only energy I have is in my head, waking me up at all the wrong times.
My mother calls, why do I pick up the phone? I have caller i.d. Actually it’s okay, though I was about to get out of the house before dusk, for the first time in a week. She wants to know why I’m so tired. Then she tells me about seeing Taboo on Broadway, the show about ’80s London club culture where Boy George plays Leigh Bowery. She and my father got an upgrade at their hotel so they were in the penthouse for the first time ever, the view was great but the alarm kept going off at three or four in the morning. The hotel said it was a technical difficulty, but my mother thought it would be hard to get downstairs if there were a problem, like terrorists on the roof.
My mother wants to know why I haven’t called Barbara, her therapist. I’m just so tired. She says Barbara’s really upset, she felt like she was connecting with you and she’s confused about not being able to reach you. Will you call her?
My mother claims she’s trying not to obsess over things as much, but then she asks me over and over again if I’m going to call Barbara. Barbara would really like that. I say it sounds like you would really like that. But no, she’s just worried about Barbara.
LOVE POTION #9
Voicemail on my cellphone: we met on bareback city or bareback—whatever. You had it. I wanted it. I’m calling to let you know that it finally took.
I play the message again, somehow in disbelief at this horrible world—the whole world first, and then the more specific world of guys searching out HIV infection and the scarier world of the guys who want to give it to them. And give them my number—ha ha—I’ll breed him with my poz load, and then give him some hooker’s cell!
It’s hard to stay present in so much hopelessness, I mean way more than the usual despair, burning out my lungs and replacing them with air. Why lungs? Because heart would be too painful.
Blake calls; he says an eight-year-old boy set our house on fire—twice—so we’re having a benefit. Rue says: I’m at the bottom of my everything right now. But I want to emphasize his illusions and finesse them into delusions. What about a ten-day land-and-sea vacation? Meanwhile, Ralowe wants to know if The Hulk made back all the money, or if there are warehouses full of green oreos.
How many amps are in your breaker, how many breakers to get to your maker? I’m dressed up, Zero and I are frantically trying to hail a cab in the rain and this guy says what do they call New Yorkers who used to dress like you in clubs? Club kids? That’s right, he says—club kids. I spend the next day recovering from sleep, Ralowe says we need to start a group for people who don’t do drugs, but feel strung out anyway. Benjamin and I talk about the tension between us, because she doesn’t see herself as a queen; she constantly needs to tell me this.
Benjamin says: I don’t identify with that culture, everyone wants me to perform that role and it’s disgusting. I think she’s just in denial; she’s the queeniest person I know. She says: I’m not invested in that identity in the way you are. I think about it. I realize she’s right, I want her to be a queen too because she’s been around East Coast girls doing 4 a.m. runway, she knows that culture. I miss it.
I call my voicemail and it says I’m sorry—all three access lines are busy. Oh shit—that’s not my voicemail, it’s the phone sex line. Before, she was an institution—now she’s in an institution. At 4:30 p.m., I rush outside to get some sun. There isn’t any. My trick says: ever since I moved into this new apartment, the cat has been throwing itself at the window. What do you mean? All the sudden, the cat leaps off the bed and throws itself at the window.
Benjamin says: I haven’t been able to sleep, whatever you have is contagious—I’m not used to this, I’m emotionally melting down. Benjamin was on the bus and this guy met her gaze, so she followed him to the Marina. When she got off the bus, she followed him further, and when he came out of a store he seemed surprised. Oh hey, you’re from the bus—see you later, I’m going to Sacramento.
Benjami
n walked all the way to the beach—that’s a long walk, were you wearing your platforms? She says it was okay because I came twice, but then on my way home I went to Mission News to cruise more—my whole life is tragic—drugs are ruining my life, even though I don’t do them; everyone in my life is strung out on drugs.
I get in bed at 1 a.m. because I just can’t function, everything hurts. As soon as I lie down, I’m wired—alarm clock! I get up to take pills. At 9 a.m., there’s a pigeon dying in my wall. I make toast, and take another pill. I talk to the pigeon: I wish your friends could help you, I hope you won’t be devoured by the rats.
It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre, and one of the cult survivors says it’s hard to tell what’s insanity and what’s keeping people together. Ralowe wants to know if she could live on nori seaweed, just nori seaweed. She’s vegan now, and trying to figure it all out. This is an actual Marines chant: blood makes the grass grow—who makes the blood flow? A trick calls, he wants to cross-dress at my place—well, that shouldn’t be a problem, not like I usually do that kind of thing around here, but . . .
Rue says in Northern Europe, a standard treatment for seasonal affective disorder is a homeopathic dose of gold, three times a year. I’ll take a suitcase full of gold, skip the homeopathy, thanks. Blake is moving to SF and we’re going to start a free door-to-door sleep deprivation clinic—Sleep Deprivation: You Want It, We Got It! Today, I feel like there’s a piece of particleboard between my eyes and my brain. My head is filled with distance. When I exit the bus at the same stop as this snooty British woman, she says from ahead of me: some days, it’s just not worth it—getting out of bed, or getting on the bus. I say especially the first one, and I go into the Relax the Back Store, just to see what they have. Everything’s so expensive. When I get in bed, I can’t sleep because everything itches again—is it the dust mites or am I allergic to sleep? I take a pill.
In the morning, I lie in bed staring at a piece of string rising off my sheet like a hook, it’s shaking slightly due to the air purifier. I look at it closely from all different angles, but I can’t figure out what it’s trying to tell me. What are the barriers between a chainsaw and a child? Benjamin sees the London anti-Bush protests on TV, she says there was this huge effigy of Bush—like fifty feet tall—with a bomb in his hand and they toppled it, it was beautiful. You don’t have a TV, she says, but maybe it’ll be in tomorrow’s newspaper.
I go over to Eric, Matt and Jason’s and we watch Circuit, about, well—you know. This guy’s a cop from Illinois and he moves to LA, within minutes he’s smoking crystal and trying to kill a cat in a tree. There’s someone in the movie making a documentary about circuit parties, there’s the cop’s childhood friend—a woman!—who’s a comedian, there’s the porn star, and there’s a high-priced escort. The cop can’t handle his drugs, the movie-maker hides his, the comedian cleans the house, the porn star injects Caverject into his dick to get hard, the escort can’t feel. The climax is when the escort gets paid to kill the porn star with poison disguised as drugs, or pure drugs which are poison, but instead the escort takes the poison drugs himself ’cause it’s his thirtieth birthday and his cheek implants are slipping. The former cop, who was in love with the escort, rushes in after the overdose and then the guy who set it all up is confused, the cop chokes him for a while to teach him a lesson.
Afterwards, Eric talks about panic attacks—he thought someone was going to kill him—and I talk about incest flashbacks: I thought someone was going to kill me. Eric eats more vegan pie, and I taste it—it’s delicious, but it makes me shit. I think about everything that I want to do if the new herbalist helps—I want to exercise and feel better about my body, I want to go dancing and feel amazing afterwards and even the next day, I want to sleep.
At home, I wonder about queers who’ve never experienced tacky gay culture, and I wonder what they’ve missed out on. Outside, someone’s honking their horn at me, and I figure it’s the usual homophobia drama so I ignore it. But it’s some woman screaming at me: do you know where the RR Bar is, Polk and Sutter? I say Polk and Sutter’s two blocks, she says you wanna come? I get in the car, she’s this super-posh tiny white woman, coked out of her mind on the best coke, I can tell it’s the best coke because she’s not biting her lips or anything, but her eyes are open wide to possiblity. You’re so cute, she says, can I buy you a drink? I’m okay. She says I don’t care if you’re okay; I want to buy you a drink. I walk her to the bar and we kiss goodbye, I really want a drink.
I think my apartment manager’s a tweaker, because he’s painting psychedelic clouds on the ceiling in the lobby, and he has the same hours as me. Lately, I can’t seem to get to sleep before 5 a.m., then I’m struggling to get out of the house before dusk. Like today, focusing on the blue of the darkening sky while waiting for the bus and everything hurts. I do mean everything.
I hook up with someone on craigslist—have I broken my promise? But it’s actually fun. He shakes when I lick his balls. Ralowe describes his first overnight: I still feel like I slept next to a trick, his breath smelled like a toilet and all night long, he kept belching—in the morning, I had to pretend I liked him, I kept jerking him off and jerking him off and he kept getting close to coming, but not going all the way there, and then I knew I had to suck him off. Andee says she wishes she could visit me, but I live in a fascist country. What about Germany? She says if there’s any country that’s done its share of soul-searching, it’s Germany.
Zero and I listen to Carl Cox to find out what he does with the breakdown, Zero says there’s one in every track. It’s all about the pounding bass, heartbeat—oh that fucking bass, do we have that here in San Francisco? When Carl Cox fades out, there’s still some beautiful beat in the distance, waiting to take us home, sweet home to all that bang bang clang clang glory! It’s Thanksgiving, on NPR there’s a special about a turkey farmer who’s researching what kinds of music turkeys like best. He says they like the wind whistling on the moors, and the Tibetan monks, but they don’t like whale sounds. He doesn’t tell us what they like when their heads are snapped off.
The building manager is vacuuming again—he just vacuumed two days ago. I use the neti pot, but my sinuses feel more clogged than ever, like my nose just stops at my head and nothing goes through. Well, pain, of course—that gets through. On Polk Street, this tall stumbling boy with glitter on his face stops me with a hug, you’re so cute! He’s smashed, and his friend with blond hair and the same glitter is embarrassed.
They’re probably in high school, drinking cocktails out of Pepsi bottles with the spout cut off. I say you’re cute too—I’m already getting hard with all the rubbing. He wants to go home with me, but he’s supposed to go to a rave at the self-defense studio on Bush, which is a block away, even though they’re pretending to be lost. I walk them in that direction and the boy pushes me against the wall and we make out. He grabs my dick and says to his friend: look at this! She says you two can have anal sex all night long, but we have to go to the rave first—come on! I don’t want to be another tired fag who grabs the boy and ditches his best girlfriend—which is this boy’s plan, I can tell—so I make him go with her. In the morning, there’s glitter all over my face. I get the fancy full-spectrum seasonal affective disorder light in the mail, and at first I think what is this horrible heavy metal box? The light’s fluorescent and not even that bright, how can it possibly mimic the sunshine at Noon? I sit with it anyway, and within a few minutes I get that clear, fun feeling in my head—oh, I have a new friend, he’s awfully square, but he makes me feel special.
These days, I usually ask someone to carry my bag for me, so I don’t hurt my hands, but on the way to see the herbalist in Berkeley, I’m all on my own. It doesn’t feel too bad until later on, back home, after stopping at Socket’s house where they’re having a sing-along and I can’t deal. At my house, everything burns, until I go on the internet to look for sex—why?—and after that my wrists feel like they’re going to spli
t. I soak my hands in ice water, but then I’m hungry again so I have to cook. I run out to some boy’s house two blocks away, he sucks me off, I run back to make pasta. My hands feel better, but my sinuses are ruined because the guy who sucked me off was smoking and all the windows were closed. I use the neti pot, and then everything feels clogged, the pasta is overcooked, it’s 5:30 a.m. I go to bed.
Zero and I go to Millennium, since she’s moving back to Provincetown. Of course I think about Jeremy—I think about Jeremy every time I go into just about any restaurant, it hits me all the sudden like oh I guess I still miss him. But I’m feeling the Love Potion #9, which is pomegranate and lemon juices with mystery herbs in a martini glass. The chestnut ravioli is one of the best parts, though the crunchy vegetables in the stuffed squash and the maple smoked tempeh are pretty amazing, not to mention the pickled onions that taste like oranges, and the persimmon—I’ve never had a persimmon before. Zero gets the chocolate dessert and I’m already crashing from Love Potion # 9.
Late night gas drama: unfortunately it happens in bed with a trick, he says did you just pass wind? Yes, darling. It’s the guy who likes me to call him Daddy while he talks about raping my ass—what an exciting new idea! I have an ad out that says Ty instead of Tyler, and the photo’s different—the trick says what happened to that nice little boy, now he’s mean. Then he says: I think I’m falling in love with you. I say: open me a bank account.
Ralowe presents the new Sunday tea dance for men: Casual-Tea. Didn’t I see you there? Speaking of casualties, there’s Patrick, the trick who’s called me ten times and asked me if I’d shit in his mouth. Last time I said don’t call me anymore; you’re too much of a tweaker mess. He said I have a great job. This time he’s rented a hotel room at an SRO on Market, I get upstairs and he’s yelling at someone inside the room: can’t get the door open!
So Many Ways to Sleep Badly Page 19