The Jesus Man

by Christos Tsiolkas

  He turned out to be an Aborigine. As much as I’d like it to be, that is no innocent fact.

  An Age opinion piece about racist violence and anti-racist legislation laws referred to recent race hate crimes, mentioned the Tommy story.

  The media created that story. That doesn’t mean they might not have been right. No-one knows what happened in that house, on that night. Not the police, the investigating detectives, the victim’s family, Tommy’s family. No-one. That doesn’t stop the media.

  Was it a racist murder? I hate them, I hate them for leaving that question in my head.

  It is the idea of Tommy suiciding that rocks me most. Me and Mum and Soo-Ling. Maybe not for Dad and Dom. I know Dom detests the idea of Tommy’s murder. The one person I thought of most during that time was Mum, her spinning out of control. That’s something that wasn’t in the fucking media.

  Mum came out of it, we all did, but we all got changed.

  The media interest in my family had the effect of drawing us together. But now we’re a family that doesn’t trust easily, and that includes Soo-Ling. Fuck them, fuck them all.

  My thesis may vindicate the family as well. Maybe. I won’t know till it’s done and I’m not one for stating firm conclusions. I’m here, at the university, and it’s far away from my family. My thesis is also an argument about place. This is an argument that began last year, in another tutorial, between me and another man. He was arguing integrity. And I hated him for it.

  —The Sum Of Us is bullshit. It’s boring and it’s conservative. All that crap about mateship.

  He is a tall boy, an angry boy, pierced mouth.

  The rest of the class agrees. I’m thinking of my mother. Her tears at the end of the movie, how she cried when the old lesbian couple were split apart.

  In Greek, she turns to me, A fantastic movie.

  Here’s the plot. Jeff (Russell Crowe) is a working class homosexual son, a plumber and amateur footballer, who lives with his accepting father (Jack Thompson). Jeff finds it hard to find a guy who will commit to a relationship and the father tries to assist him in his search. Father has stroke, Jeff looks after father and the film ends on the upbeat note that maybe the guy Jeff is interested in will reciprocate his love.

  Also, an important subplot. Jeff’s grandmother was a lesbian, lived for years with her girlfriend until the family decide to split them up and put them in separate nursing homes.

  It’s a film about family.

  —I don’t mind The Sum Of Us.

  Everyone turns, eyes on me. The tall boy challenges me.

  —Why?

  —I like the characters.

  He explodes.

  —It’s a fucking fantasy, no-one, no-one lives like that. Certainly no working-class poofter. I come from that world.

  —So do I.

  —Then how can you like it?

  There’s the rub, there’s the argument. There’s the contradiction. We come from the same place, we end up different.

  —I like the fag son, I like the father. I like the relationship.

  —So being a poof is all right unless you happen to be a bit nancy, a bit effeminate. Don’t you see, he is imploring me. The movie celebrates monogamy, traditional gender roles, can’t you see how conservative it is?

  My mother laughed a lot as well as cried watching The Sum Of Us. At the end of the movie, my mother switches off the television set, takes my hand. She begins in Greek. My child, if you decide to be with men, I’d like you to find a man like that boy in the movie. She finishes in English. Whoever you are, whoever you are with, I love you.

  This is the first time that a non-heterosexual future has been discussed by my mother. I am shaking, scared, but also excited. We’re both crying.

  —I’ll find a footballer, I joke with her, like the guy in the movie.

  —Make it a soccer player, she says, deadpan. I don’t want you to be with any Australian.

  —I wouldn’t mind finding someone like the Russell Crowe character, I argue back.

  There are giggles in the classroom.

  Let me put this straight. Taxi Driver is a great movie, an absolute masterpiece. The Sum Of Us is shoddy, a play unimaginatively transferred to screen. But I’m not interested, not in this thesis, in formal questions of aesthetics. I’m interested in what is being communicated. I want to understand two things. My mother’s tears and pleasure in the movie, and the source of the giggles.

  I’ve moved to Eva and Dom’s because no matter how much she restrains herself, my mother can’t stop interrupting, coming in, asking if I’m hungry, asking me questions. At Dom’s I’m left alone, except for the children, and I don’t mind the children. They watch ‘The Simpsons’ on video, I am entertained by their laughter.

  Eva and Dom aren’t going well. I can sense it in the silences between them. The house is large, four bedrooms, and mercifully full of the gabbling of the kids. I’m reading them stories, rolling on the floor with them.

  Lisa asks me, What are you doing? I’m at the kitchen table, punching the keys on the laptop Jay lent me.

  —What’s that?

  —A computer.

  She is disdainful.

  —I know that. What are you doing on it?

  —Writing my thesis.

  —What’s that?

  —A story.

  —Like a book?

  —Kind of. Shorter.

  —What’s it about?

  —Me.

  —What about you?

  —It’s about what I think. But it’s also about a movie called Taxi Driver. Have you seen it?

  She shakes her head.

  —What’s it rated?

  —R.

  She points a finger at me.

  —Then I can’t watch it. I’m not allowed to see any movies but G and PG.

  I suppress a laugh. She’s not yet ten, but she’s so self-assured, a baby copper, ordering me around.

  —It’s all right, if there’s any movies that you want to see, you can watch them with me. I’ll explain anything you don’t understand.

  Lisa comes and sits next to me. She looks at the screen, squints to catch the notations.

  —Am I in it?

  I shake my head.

  —You have to write your own story one day. I can’t write it for you.

  She bangs her feet against the kitchen chair.

  —Can we watch Aliens?

  —Sure.

  She sniffs, and says, without looking at me, It’s rated M.

  —That’s all right.

  A big grin. She runs off to the garden.

  Homosexuality is a sickness. This is what I’m writing. I need to write the truth or otherwise I only contribute to the din of evasions and lies. So, probably, is being hetero. Being black is a sickness, so too is being white: we’re all living our templates. The first chapter of the thesis is set in the porno cinema where Travis Bickle takes Betsy, Cybill Shepherd, for a date. In the movie Betsy runs out, confused and appalled that Bickle would take her to a porno. The chapter begins just as she leaves. Unlike the actual film, my story stays in the cinema, following the shadows in the movie. I make up their stories. A young hustler, a stoned black straight couple, the lonely masturbation of an older Hispanic man. This is the most autobiographical part of the thesis, where I try to get to the reality of my own thoughts and emotions.

  You see, every time I have had sex I have walked away perplexed and resentful. I’ve followed the rituals, got off, but got nowhere. Here’s how it goes between fags.

  —What do you like?

  There is the menu.

  Giving head.

  Getting blown.

  Top.

  Bottom.

  Leather.

  —Can I come on you?

  —Will you come on me?

  There is no exchange of names.

  Homosexuality is a sickness.

  Travis Bickle always maintains a distance from the filth around him: we don’t see him wank in the theatre, we do
n’t see him fuck the hooker, we don’t see his sleaze. We are only aware that it is all around him. This is why I have chosen to stay inside the theatre, to be honest about the attraction and the repulsion I feel about sex.

  For five weeks, every Friday night, I had sex with a man in the back row of a porn theatre. He caught my eye; I was standing against the wall and I went and sat down next to him. The first time we hardly touched. I tried to masturbate him but he recoiled from my touch. At first I thought I had made a mistake, but he smiled at me and I placed my hand on his crotch. He crossed his legs and I moved away.

  The second time we masturbated each other.

  The third time we kissed, and the kiss was long and passionate, and I tasted his saliva, I tasted the cigarettes, I tasted the cheap coffee. He came on my jeans and wiped them clean with a handkerchief.

  The fourth week, after a mutual wank, I asked him if he wanted to go for a coffee. He shook his head, stood up and walked out. As I left I saw him flicking through the magazines outside. He refused to look at me.

  The final time we kissed again immediately. The same thing, the desire, the passion. I pleaded with him, I wanted to go outside, to talk, to discover his name. His agitation was violent. He pulled away. I went down on an old guy, flimsy wisps of white hair on his crotch. His come, when it came, was thin and runny. I spat it out.

  When I say homosexuality is a sickness, I mean that I experience it truly alone. I am as alone as Travis is amid all the cum. I am ashamed to say that what I want is to love.

  The second chapter of the thesis begins with a rewrite of another scene in Taxi Driver. The taxi driver picks up a customer, played by the director himself, who is going to murder his wife who’s made a cuckold of him. I write that I identify with such jealousy, I can understand it. Then I write about The Sum Of Us. In one scene, early on, the homosexual protagonist is in bed with the man he wants, Greg, and they’re beginning to fuck. Jeff’s father, Harry, pokes his head in and asks how Greg wants his tea in the morning. Greg decides not to go through with the sex, he can’t handle the domesticity between father and son. It’s not sexy. I write an extra scene. After Greg walks out he goes to one of the twenty-four hour sex clubs in Sydney, stands next to a stranger, gets aroused, blows him, is fucked by him.

  What’s domesticity? Breakfast in bed? The cuckold going to shoot his wife? Does one inevitably lead to the other? I’m asking because there are no rules any more and I don’t want to end up fucked up. I don’t want to destroy anyone through my love. But I don’t want to end up chasing intimacy from strangers either.

  It strikes me that the love between Dominic and Eva has faded. They are both happy for my presence, they both fill their evenings together with the children and the television. Affection, however, seems to have gone. I don’t see them kiss, they don’t touch each other. We don’t discuss any of this, and probably Dom would consider me too young and too different to understand. Eva and I still have a closeness, a shared liking for each other, but she is also too aware of my kinship. The three of us are Australian but our emotions come from somewhere else.

  —That’s why you’re not an Aussie. Aussie guys don’t see further than a root.

  I laugh when Eva says this to me, but I also withdraw and contemplate. What she says is what I’m learning.

  They won’t divorce. Not yet. Little Arthur is a new glue to hold them together. He has moved from the fragile whimpering of infanthood and is now a personality. He speaks in my ear, words made up, words learnt, words from the angels. He sits on my lap and tries to steal the laptop. He smells of shit and baby soap.

  Friends, around me, on the carousel of sex, condemn the inertia of marriage. But though I don’t know whether Eva and Dom love each other any more, I understand they can’t easily forget the commitments made. I’m not at all sure I would be prepared to compromise the way they do, I don’t know if I could face what Eva faces, after the kids are in bed, after Dom has fallen asleep on the couch. She roams the house then, quiet, smoking a joint, looking out of every window, checking on every door.

  —What are you afraid of? I asked her.

  —I’m not afraid of the outside, if that’s what you mean, she replied. She goes stoned to bed.

  Little Arthur, the only boy, is loved by them all. I adore his being a boy. He already plays at kick to kick with me, wanting me to send the football high above the trees. He wears the Collingwood colours, he makes guns from sticks. He stumbles forward differently to the girls, making noise and calling out his joy. Betty is so much more quiet, reserved. She sits quietly next to me, watching me write or watching me draw. Asks her questions. I adore the boy, the nephew, because I can see myself in him. With Betty I’m finding out, for the first time, how the world looks to the girl.

  Last year, at uni, graffiti began to appear. Barry Bond is a rapist. It was painted on walls, scrawled on toilet doors. It was not because I knew him, though we had crossed paths at parties, that I was disturbed. Suddenly he was, for everyone to know, suddenly he was evil. The words were written by phantoms, I don’t know who scribbled them across the walls. The blame was not one-sided. The feminist bitches, whoever they were, they too were condemned. Did he do it? To me that seemed to be the question that got lost in the heat of arguments. Who did he rape? No-one knew to tell me.

  This has been the hardest part of my thesis, the one requiring the most work. I wanted to set my work within the university itself, to explore the age, the moment, the culture I am enmeshed in, rather than pretend that I can add anything else to the din of knowledge about the big wide world. I began by interviewing Barry Bond.

  He is shy, he is thin and wears a uniform cobbled from last decade’s hip-hop and the last generation’s punk. He is attractive and his eyes are blue. He has his prejudices, those feminist bitches again, and though he says this is a response to the campaign against him, I think he was not too fond of feminists before. He pleads with me to believe: I have not raped.

  —What happened?

  —I told you, nothing.

  —So why the graffiti?

  —Donna wanted to get back at me.

  The name of the woman.

  —Who’s Donna?

  —A bitch from fucking hell. He pauses. A girl, just a girl. I knew her, kind of, we had sex at a party. That’s all.

  —Did you rape her?

  Fury. I can see that he hates the question.

  —Fucking NO NO NO!

  —Why does she day you did?

  Silence. He looks at my tape recorder. He finally answers.

  —This is killing me. Me, my friends, my family.

  —Why does she say you raped her?

  He begins to cry.

  —I don’t know.

  The story he tells me is this. One Friday night at a party in Brunswick he flirts with a woman and they disappear into a bedroom with a half-bottle of vodka. He’s taken half an E, a bad one, a weak one, and he does not know what she’s on. They begin to kiss in the darkness. The sex is quick, he can’t remember how he came. Inside her? Maybe. She leaves, buttoning her shirt. He rests a while on the pillows, sipping from the bottle. When he emerges she’s dancing in the lounge room. She doesn’t look at him. He walks home alone.

  I try to interview the woman. She is scared of me, wants to know what for. I’m honest.

  —For my thesis.

  —What’s your thesis?

  —It’s on Taxi Driver, the movie.

  She giggles. Then is sad.

  —Sorry, she answers. My life isn’t yours to use.

  I think of the graffiti.

  —You’re using Barry’s life.

  She storms off.

  I approach the women’s room. I knock on the door. A young smiling woman with gelatin black hair opens.

  —Yeah?

  I hand her a letter and walk away.

  A woman called Nicole answers, leaves me a message at home.

  —This is a message for Lou Stefano. I’m replying to the letter you wrote
, regarding feminism and your thesis. Meet me at the union cafe, on the porch so we can smoke. Tomorrow, okay, three o’clock? My number is 9389 2424.

  Nicole is Greek, or her origins are. She dresses in faux fur. I buy her a coffee.

  —What are you doing this for?

  It’s a good question. She is asking something beyond my work.

  —I want to know about the damage done, I finally get it out. I want to know if there’s a way to argue for Barry without arguing against Donna. I hesitate. And maybe vice versa.

  —You’re presuming the guy didn’t do it.

  —No. I’m adamant on this and I won’t lie. No, even if he did it, whatever it was he may have done, I want to know if public shaming is the best way to go. I stir my coffee and say, quietly, I don’t think it is.

  —You Italian?

  —Half. Half Greek. Half Italian. Half Australian.

  This makes her laugh. She stops and looks intently at me.

  —Why this issue?

  —Because it could happen to me.

  —Good answer. She picks up another cigarette, lights it and drags hard on it.

  —Some of the other women were pretty upset about your letter.

  —Why?

  —’Cause.

  —What’s that mean?

  —’Cause you’re a bloke. ’Cause Donna told them you upset her. ’Cause.

  —Why did you answer?

  —’Cause. ’Cause it was a good letter. It wasn’t patronising, it was honest.

  —So what should I do?

  —Talk to me, ask away.

  The story she tells me is this. There is a party in Brunswick. Donna has been curious about this man Barry for a while. She thinks he’s cute, they share a philosophy tute. Donna is quite stoned when Barry comes up for a chat. They talk nonsense, Who Weekly gossip, and he shows her a bottle of something, maybe whisky. They retreat to a bedroom. Donna wants to talk but Barry starts kissing her. She wants to talk and doesn’t know if she wants sex. He has his hand up her cunt. She is beginning to cry because this woman Donna is far from as experienced as she would like to be. She is crying when he enters her, she’s trying to kiss him. When he’s finished, he falls asleep. She leaves the room, gets drunker and drunker, dances, walks home alone. She reaches home and finds, on entering the house, she can’t stop screaming.