by Greg Kearney
The room is silent. Joel is reminded of when Sinéad O’Connor tore up the picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live and nobody clapped. By way of apology for his gender he bows his head and leans away from Shoshana as she walks past him back to her table, where a woman with long, black Cher hair awaits her, weeping.
The boozy host takes the stage again. “Wow, Shoshana,” he says, “That piece was every bit as powerful and dangerous as when you read it last week. I think we maybe need to impose a new rule where returning performers only perform new work. Just to give us all a chance to gather ourselves in the wake of such a powerful piece as … What is the name of that piece again, Shoshana?”
“‘Forgiveness,’” Shoshana shouts.
“Right. Yes. Good stuff. Next up is another performance poet, Joel!”
Joel has suddenly lost all desire to perform. His work is idiotically slight compared to Shoshana’s, and any attempt at a performative tour-de-force would only come off as a pale copy. She is actually applauding wildly for Joel, nodding and smiling. He briefly considers running out of the bar, but Shoshana is so encouraging, with her clapping and hooting, he’s afraid she’ll beat him up if he bolts.
He says “hello” into the mic. He holds his notebook with both hands. He studies his piece. It is very stupid. What a directionless mess his adulthood has turned out to be.
“He said ‘she has cancer,’” he begins. “But I’m ensnared by a …” Prickly heat migrates across his chest. “I’m sorry. This is too horrible. My piece, I mean. Not the evening as a whole. Sorry. I’m going to — try some — free-association. Starting, like, now. Okay … hair … curly … red … hair … hair …”
“Hair-hair?” he hears someone in the front ask the person beside them.
“I’m sorry. My free-association isn’t yielding anything interesting tonight. I’m not at my best. I’m kind of in crisis. Thank you.”
He walks off. As he passes sex-abuse Shoshana she snatches at his sleeve — “Wait, I’m in crisis, too! Do you want to maybe hang out sometime?”
He smiles and pulls away.
Once outside he realizes he has forgotten the brown poncho he arrived in. Oh well. It’s not like he’s cold; he’s dripping with sweat and his ears pulse. And he looked horrible in it, anyway.
11
EDMUND GOES TO COLBY’S. THERE are two other people there. He stands at the edge of the empty dance floor and watches the lights streak and retreat, in starburst and laser beam, white, green and magenta. He still feels quite up, quite whippy, quite swingy, quite backflippy even, and it takes all his reserve to not bound onto the dance floor and do some antiquated sock hop step sequence.
Two songs later a tiny woman with jagged front teeth and a tinsel wig comes up to Edmund and asks him if he knows where she can score rock. Edmund looks around himself, swiping this way and that with his head, certain that there is someone standing behind him, someone rough and obvious, someone who knows where one can score rock. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I can’t hear a thing you’re saying, with the music.”
“Sure you can hear me, honey,” the woman says.
“I’m sorry, I really can’t hear you.”
“Don’t be a bitch, honey. I’m so nice. Talk to me, honey. You can talk to me — I love that song.”
Edmund squints. Sudden exchanges with the addicted or mentally ill happen to him all the time, for some reason. He remembers the time a huddled homeless man grabbed him by the pant leg as he passed by. Edmund fell face first into a pushup position, and the homeless man asked him how it felt, falling down. It felt bad, Edmund said to the man, turning his head from pushup position. Well, there you go, the man said. And then there was the nude lady on Gerrard Street who offered him a bite of her imaginary slice of pizza …
Edmund puts a hand to his bladder to indicate that he has to pee and walks off. The woman says something, but this time Edmund really can’t hear her. As he walks to the next bar — the newish, ugly one at the bottom of the street, all clapboard and yellow paneling — he can’t help but feel slightly smug at the elegant way he enacts his own loneliness, unlike some people — like this crack woman and Joel the orphaned monkey — unlike most other people, for that matter. Other people tend to dump their need at your feet like dead game. He likes to think that he brings a little levity, some disarming music to his need. He isn’t repulsive. He is still approachable. This could all be vain bunk, though. He is not above vain bunk, God knows. All of this, he now realizes, he is saying aloud.
The doorman at the ugly, clapboard bar laughingly asks Edmund for ID, then pats him on the back and lets him through.
This place is also almost empty. No light show here. A few guys slumped at a bar that runs the length of one wall, and a bartender flipping through an old Chatelaine. This looks like a real drinker’s bar, the sort of bar he’d use as an example of the rock bottom he was absolutely nowhere near, when he was still drinking. Edmund briefly considers sitting at the bar; alcoholics tend to make for great conversation, in his experience. It’s as if their addiction, while most definitely ruining their lives, has also freed them up to make inspired inductive leaps while chatting. But a brightly lit room in the back of the bar gets his attention.
A scrawny boy is sitting sidesaddle on the lip of a pool table. He holds a pool cue against his chest like it’s the neck of a cello. He does not have a drink. He is waiting for a pool partner. When he sees Edmund he looks at him with a weary scrutiny, as though Edmund is a second-hand sofa that he is sizing up after a long, fruitless day of secondhand sofa shopping.
Edmund thrills to the kid’s face. It’s a fist of a face, wind-burned and blunt, with small, spiteful grey eyes and a tight, angled mouth, like a hasty hem. Edmund is reminded of a book of photographs he has somewhere on the second or third floor, page after page of Russian immigrant children, tired and terrified at Ellis Island. This kid could be one of those kids, but for the bleached white hair and battered, black, oddly dandyish high-heeled boots.
A song comes on that the kid likes and he starts rolling his shoulders, tossing his head this way and that, wagging his finger at the cruel womanizer that the female singer confronts in the choruses. He is possessed, oblivious to his surroundings. By the end of the song he is stalking up and down the length of the pool table in a terrifying war dance, arms arcing like startled wings, his reprimand now aimed not at one bad man but all of bad mankind. The song ends, and he instantly resumes his bored pose with the pool cue.
Edmund sidles up softly. “That was really intense.”
“What was?”
“Your performance just now. It was wonderful. You completely inhabited the song.”
“‘It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay.’ Diva Whitney, pop princess goes ghetto, she’s going to make it anyway realness. Oh yes I am riding in the car with Diva Whitney, rumours of crack cocaine addiction realness.”
Edmund doesn’t understand any of this, nods anyway. “Wow. Are you a professional performer?”
“Yes, I am! Thank you very much!” he snaps imperiously, then folds slightly. “Well, no, I’m not at this present moment in time a professional performer, I should say. But that is a goal, definitely. My talents are … many. I do it all. Have you seen Paris is Burning?”
“Is that the one about the drag balls? Yes, I think we did see that when it came out.”
“Directed by Jennie Livingston, 1990 realness. I watch that movie over and over, when I have a VCR. I want to live in that movie so bad. I’ve been beaten and raped and stabbed and left for dead but I am a soul survivor, like Diva Tina, Wildest Dreams Tour presented by Hanes Pantyhose realness. So it is all good.”
It is apparent that this person is either manic or high, or both, but Edmund, himself amped up, decides that he likes this person’s mania, and asks him his name.
“My real name is long and Russian — Ow! the way I like my meat
! Ow! Catch me I’m falling! — but I go by Binny. And this one time, in the heat of the night, when it was feeling all right, someone called me Waterfall. So, the choice is yours.”
“I’m Edmund. Can I buy you a drink, Waterfall? I’m sorry, I don’t think I can call you Waterfall, Binny.”
“Like I said, the choice is yours, kind sir. I’m only drinking Pepsi. I don’t want to fuck with my buzz. I did a big bulbie before I came here.”
“Oh. What is that? Is that crack?”
“‘Is that crack,’ she says! I’m not that ghetto. I’m only riding in the car with Diva Whitney, ‘I Will Always Love You’ video filmed sitting down because of pregnancy realness. I’m a T girl.”
“Oh. T. Testosterone?”
Binny rolls his eyes. “‘T’ is for ‘Tina.’ And I don’t mean Diva Tina, ‘Master Blaster runs Bartertown two men enter one man leaves Thunderdome’ realness.”
“Right. So what do you mean? Sorry.”
“Crystal! Speed! God. Where you been?”
“I haven’t been out for years. I actually did some coke before I came here. I think it was coke, anyway. It might have only been seasoning.”
Binny is manically scanning the bar. “Where’s my Pepsi at?”
Edmund apologizes and goes to the bar. He waves a twenty. The bartender will not look up from his Chatelaine. Finally Edmund yells “bar order!” and the alkies all look at him like he’s some over-caffeinated schoolmarm. “Bar order” does sound awkward and formal; Edmund hopes Binny hasn’t overheard him.
He hands Binny his drink. They clink glasses. “I’ve been bar hopping. At the other bar I came from there was … music. That’s not very descriptive, is it? Actually, the other bar was pretty dreary. It was quite disheartening. I should’ve expected as much. What about you? Is this your big night out, too?”
“Every night is my big night out. You wanna get with me?”
It takes him a minute, but Edmund recognizes this as a proposition. “That would be very nice. Yes, I’m sure I’d like that.”
“Yeah. I’m working though, okay?”
Again, Edmund needs to sit with that statement before he puts it together. “I see. I’ve never hired someone before. I’m certainly not averse to the concept.”
Binny’s face turns officious and he’s about to start in with his hooker spiel when two young men approach the pool table.
“Hey,” the shorter one says to Binny. “We’re going to play, okay?”
“No, it is not okay,” Binny says. “I’ve got the table right now.”
“But you’re just sitting there,” the taller one says. “We just want to sneak a quick game in, okay?”
“Not okay, bitches. I’ve got the table. You can either win the table offa me, or fuck off.”
The guys look at each other, stunned, as if Binny has just said he loves Hitler. They ripple back in the wake of his outburst, then gather themselves and advance again.
“We are living in something called a democracy, y’know,” the tall one says. “You don’t own this bar. Do we need to get management involved?”
“Go right ahead. Be prepared to get your ugly fuckin’ face smashed in when you step out onto the democratic sidewalk, though. I can go from zero to psycho in a heartbeat.”
Edmund waves his arm like a windshield wiper. “Actually,” he says, “my friend and I were just about to play. Weren’t we?”
“We were! So beat it! Step off.”
The boys huff off. Edmund is not put off by Binny’s anger. He likes it. It’s vigorous, snazzy. Dean was volatile. And in Dean’s rage there was real threat; while they never came to blows, Edmund knew to tiptoe around Dean when he was angry — one wrong move and Dean would set a loveseat aflame, or flush Edmund’s watch down the toilet. Binny’s rage is showy, a righteous pantomime, but not outwardly dangerous: it’s an ideal anger for this older, weaker, less durable Edmund. It’ll make for some fun shadowboxing, heavy on the shadow. Binny has promise. His presence makes Edmund’s dick get hard; when was the last time he had a hard-on that he didn’t have to frantically pump into existence and then pinch off with a cock ring to preserve?
He leans into the kid. “I bet you’re a real mean fucker sometimes,” he whispers.
Binny looks hurt. “I am not mean. I always try to be nice. I am a soul survivor. I’ve had it hard. My mother got rid of me when I was two so she could have sex with her new boyfriend in the kitchen and living room. She had me, she had a good look at me, and decided I wasn’t worth keeping. She kept my Down Syndrome sister though. How about that? Well, the winner takes it all, Diva Agnetha Fältskog, I dated my stalker realness.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. You’re obviously a very strong, sensitive person. I think you’re doing amazingly well, given what you’ve been through.”
“They say I have attention deficit whatever-it-is and one of them said I was autistic. What-evah! So. I do what I have to do. But I am not mean. I am a good person. I’m so good it’s sick.”
“I’m going to rack ’em up,” Edmund announces, trapping the balls in the triangle. “This is going to be so much fun. I don’t know why I’ve been afraid of pool, all these years.”
Binny rolls his head around and around. “I think I’m gonna go.”
“Why? We’re just getting to know each other.”
“I don’t like that you think I’m mean.”
“I don’t think you’re mean. I think you’re beautiful and fascinating.”
“Don’t fuck with me, fuckface.”
Edmund feels slapped. The voice of God demands that Binny be Edmund’s lover. And the thought of standing alone with a pyramid of pool balls in the chill yellow light of this dingy room is too, too, too. It’s Wednesday. Garbage day on his street is Thursday; the bins will already be out, both sides of the side-walk. He’ll probably be awake all night. Again he comes in close to Binny.
“I will never fuck with you. I’ll give you three hundred dollars if you’ll come home with me. We don’t have to have sex. We can just watch TV or —”
“I don’t know. Yeah, okay. No scat, no necro. And I don’t want to hear about your ex-boyfriends. And I don’t do listening to your vacation memories or looking at and talking about your collectibles, or any of that. And if you have a dog, you have to lock it in another room. I don’t want no dog starting at me when I’m sucking cock.”
“That’s all fine, better than fine. Perfect. And I don’t have a dog. Not anymore. Simba died year before —”
“Hey, what did I just say? I don’t want to hear about your life things.”
Happily chastened, Edmund stops talking about his life things. They gather their coats and head out.
“So, who are your divas?” Binny asks in the taxi.
Edmund thinks of the women in his life — Lila, his mother, Mrs. Sanchez at the corner store — before deciding that Binny only wants to hear about his favourite female singers.
“I’ve always liked Linda Ronstadt.”
“Yes. Diva Linda, hypothyroidism, shot from the neck up in the ‘Heartbeats Accelerating’ video to hide weight gain realness. And?”
“Umm. When I was a teenager, I loved Olivia Newton-John.”
“Yes. Diva Olivia, breast cancer and Koala Blue bankruptcy survivor realness. Nice.”
Edmund laughs. “How on Earth do you know all this pop trivia?”
“I read all the magazines, every week. Billboard, People, Us, Rolling Stone, Hello, Spin, Q, as well as all the tabloids. Always have, since I could first read. I keep up with my divas. Diva Whitney, Diva Tina, Diva Diana, Diva Patti, Diva Mary J, Diva Chaka, Diva Donna, Diva Janet, Diva Millie, Diva Gladys, Diva Dionne. They’re my friends. I try to keep up with all the white divas, too. Even, like, the shitty divas, like Diva Gloria Loring or Diva Tiffany. It’s my thing. Can I borrow your cell phone?”
“I don’t have a cell phone.”
“You don’t have a cell phone! How come?”
“I’m home all the time. Also, most of my friends have passed away.”
“No excuse! You have to have a cell phone. What if you have like an emergency or you need drugs or a pizza or something? Promise me you are going to get a cell phone.”
“I promise,” Edmund vows, solemn as a praying priest.
“Yay! Work! Take me to the river!”
EDMUND WATCHES BINNY ogling the interiors of Edmund’s home. He reaches up to hold a glass dewdrop from the chandelier in his palm.
“You have the nicest house I’ve ever seen,” Binny says, fixated on the dewdrop. Edmund smiles. He feels house-proud, which he hasn’t felt since the dinner party days of the late eighties. Then he remembers the bedpan that he still sometimes uses out of habit, and the rooms filled with Dean’s mouldering things, and the pride vanishes. He pours Binny a glass of flat RC Cola. They head upstairs, Binny yammering about his own dream house, its various dream features, what he might do differently were Edmund’s home his own home. These stairs, for example: Binny thinks these stairs would be amazing if they were made of glass.
In the bedroom he is just about to show Binny the small Basquiat above the bed, but he catches himself before he accidentally talks about a collectible.
“I don’t think I want to take my shirt off,” Edmund says. “Is that okay?”