I’ve got paintings on practically every square foot of wall space; it’s a riot of color, my cozy downtown studio. I’ve got homemade coleslaw, organic potato chips, Dubliner cheese, homemade tuna salad (chunky white tuna—dolphin safe—lemon mayo, oregano, parsley, garlic, celery, carrots, onion, apple—all finely diced, of course—a little mustard, and fresh ground pepper), plus seeded spelt crackers and coconut macaroons, all of which is thoroughly delicious to a health-food nut like me. The books on the shelves range from Genet to Anne Lamott, with plenty of room for Beckett, McMurtry, Wolfe, Dostoyevsky, Hornby, Vonnegut, sci-fi favorites Rudy Rucker and Robert J. Sawyer, and miraculously talented writer-friends like Michelle Tea, Lynn Breedlove, Kirk Read, Justin Chin, Carol Queen, Ian Philips, Greg Wharton, and Daphne Gottlieb. I’ve got Kill Bill and Funny Girl, Amadeus and Batman Begins, Shaun of the Dead, A Star Is Born (the Judy Garland and James Mason version, thank you very much), Spun, Priscilla , and Trick.
Oh my god, I almost forgot to include Kung Fu Hustle and Angels in America. Shoot me.
But goddamn, it gets quiet when a man has made his presence felt here and then suddenly stops visiting.
I wanted to share my stuff with Dimitri. I did get to read him something by my poetry brother Trebor Healey. No matter what it does to my poor prose, I need to quote the first few lines of “Krsna” to render a taste, else no one will believe Dimitri’s reaction.
Cobalt-cocked blueboy
Gopi fucker
I wanna fuck you till you’re blue…
Dimitri started breathing weird when he heard this, and he spoke in these broken phrases, like a man in shock from seeing something too bright for his eyes.
“How did he do that?
“Each line is like its own hard-on…
“But it’s transcendent, at the same time…
“I feel high just from hearing it.”
When he added, “Let’s read it again,” I took the first step on the path to falling in love with Dimitri. In spite of all my caution and past hurts and scar tissue and uber-fear, my heart opened up and experienced a feeling which in words could only be described as At last.
It was not enough. Apparently. Unbelievably. Not enough.
He didn’t stick around. He went back into the woodwork.
I’m sure he has reasons, but that doesn’t do me much good.
I want a man with staying power.
I want a man who feels like home.
I want to fuck again and have it mean something.
I want all of me to be in bed with the guy, my guy, and I want all of him in there too. The good, the bad, the hard-core ugly, and the healing radiance of love. I want it all, with tons of laughter on top. Corny stuff. Beyond corny. The cliche that refreshes the whole world.
I want it.
I want Dimitri.
In our last conversation, Dimitri confesses, as casually as possible, that he has demons he must face before he and I… unfortunately, that sentence never gets finished.
“Yeah, well, I could probably name your demons right now.”
“Yes, you probably could.”
In the moment, I’m thinking of the usual suspects: ego, low self-esteem, fear of intimacy, guardedness. Later on, when I was alone, I got to reflecting that Dimitri might be one of the best human beings I’ve ever met, but he’s still only human, and that’s a demon or three right there.
He’s male. That’s at least one more.
He’s American.
Gay.
Black.
While we’re on this winning streak, let’s add in a violent childhood. Incest. Rape. Gangs. A shot in the chest before he even got to his teenage years (thank god it didn’t kill him, thank god it only left him with a totally butch scar that I would have been happy to kiss day after day). All of which Dimitri has mentioned previously, briefly, minimally, with the least amount of emotion possible.
It’s a miracle he didn’t turn into a criminal. Hell, he doesn’t even dress like a thug. He’s an upstanding, life-affirming, tax-paying, San Francisco leatherman.
I want to suck his dick till the day I die.
I’m not sure that’s how the story is going to end, though. I’m not sure I like my chances. Every day without a call or an email seems like a day in which this bright beautiful light of real happiness fades further and further into a dark forest.
I know these woods. This unhappy place.
The thicket and the brush of my stupid thoughts.
The dry twigs I smoke to forget. The smelly swamp of depression. The worm-riddled logs of negative self-esteem. The loneliness of the territory and the night. The rocks of anger picked up along the path. The isolation as the forest closes in.
Fuck yeah, I know it.
Pretty soon, it’s not so easy to see your way clear. You can’t recognize the most familiar landmarks.
You forget you were ever on a path.
A familiar fog settles in.
Quicksand everywhere.
Desperate days.
Last-ditch efforts.
I don’t know what to do…except the only thing I know how to do.
Write.
Get busy, get it down and send it out. All this.
Everything. (No, not everything, not really, not by a long shot; I left out some important bits and pieces. Like my failure in bed with Dimitri that one time. My health problems. The fact that I’m no longer clean and sober. I omitted as much of the buzz-kill stuff as possible. Neuroses. My neediness. The shit that doesn’t get anyone’s dick hard. I did my best soft-shoe razzle-dazzle around all the issues and baggage and fucked-up indelicacies that we log on to craigslist.com to forget about in the first place. And if I could have made my story cleaner and hotter and more suitable for pulling your putz, trust me, I would have.)
Dimitri did say, freely and unequivocally, I could write about him. He said I didn’t have to change any details, or hide his identity or anything. He said he would be honored to have me write about him.
Okay.
Tomorrow I will do a copy and paste of this little document, and send it to him. I don’t know what else to do. I already used my second-to-last gambit: the invitation for him to join me at the Warfield for the Iggy and the Stooges reunion tour. He was momentarily speechless, then stoicly excited, when I originally told him I had two tickets for us to go. I reminded him of it, in an email, a few days ago.
Nothing. Not a word from the guy I wanted to call my man.
So I don’t have a lot of hope.
I mean, Iggy. Chance of a lifetime to see the original Stooges. On Iggy’s birthday. It’s gonna be crazy and it’s gonna be sublime.
Didn’t get a rise out of my buddy, though.
Anyhow, this is my story, this is my truth; this is all I’ve got, what I’m down to, my very last dime.
Come on, Dimitri. The forest is closing in on the path, demons are on the move, and night is gathering.
And if some other dear reader sees me a few months from now sucking some stranger’s cock, have a heart, will ya? Say hi, say something funny, put a hand on my shoulder, throw me a lifeline.
I might be drowning in an ocean of Come, after all.
ORANGE
Lee Houck
Step one: Pick a moment in your life. Press your finger down onto it, holding it like you would the first loop in a square knot. Step two: Find a moment that represents where you are now, something separate, current and different, and touch another finger to that, too. Step three: Measure the distance from one to the other—in lovers lost, furniture stolen from street corners, estimated electric bills paid, early morning phone solicitations, car accidents you witnessed. Band-Aids on fingers. Step four: Figure out how the hell you got here now from where you were then.
Sometimes the first moment I choose is my cheesy orange fingertips in the propped-open back end of a station wagon parked on the tire-tracked sand of a crowded Florida beach. I must have been three years old. I don’t remember it, but I have seen the p
hotograph of me sitting there—blue and yellow tub of Cheese Balls between my diapered legs, hand stuck inside. Blond hair, just like now. When you look at pictures of yourself doing things that you don’t remember, the image freezes and becomes part of your history, even though it seems invented. A memory that forms who you are without you knowing it. Like genes, unconscious but familiar.
Sometimes the moment is foamy orange Circus Peanuts melting on the dashboard of a pickup truck. We were driving there without any place to be, or any place in mind to end up in. He bought a Mountain Dew because it was my favorite. I should tell you about the way his hands moved when he talked. The way words seemed to burst out of his fingers. The urgency, the way he made even garbage seem like quantum physics. But it all gets screwed around in my brain. Memory serves only to fuck things up. And photographs can lie to you, because if you have a picture of someone, and he goes away, dies or disappears, the photo becomes the only thing you remember about him.
How did this start?
Shredded carrots at a salad bar, on some school trip in a shopping mall?
A completely mediocre, but still your favorite, orange-tinted album cover?
The smooth spine of an unread paperback book?
Other times, like this time right now, right here in this guy’s bedroom, it’s greasy orange cleanup wipes, the kind that he rubbed up and down his arms before climbing up behind me. “Do you like to get fucked?” he says.
A giant of a man, six foot plus something. Huge, but not alien-looking, still handsome, still attractive. A tiny line of mustache. He’s bulky like a sack of flour, his body dense, smooth like rising dough. Forearms thick as a coffee can, covered in what I guess is car grease or engine grime, a shiny ultraviolet glimmer. Smells like steel. Skin brown underneath.
His lips are drawn on so beautifully that I can’t help but look right into his mouth when he’s talking, and not into his eyes. He kisses my hand.
He’s holding a white plastic tub. Tearing off the lid, he pulls out a strip of creamy orange-colored cheesecloth. A powerful knock-your-ass-on-the-floor kind of scent. The most fake, plastic, outer space, movie-smelling orange. Good though. The orange-powered grease cutter is pasted into the spaces of the cheesecloth. He rubs his hands, detailing the knuckles, the cuticles. And the smell of it hangs around through the entire act. Through the rough fingers, unclipped nails tugging at my warm knot of skin, before he’s climbing up behind me.
Once again, I end up on my stomach. And I realize that when he reaches his arm around my face, around my neck, and grabs on to my shoulder with his hand—starting to really fuck me hard—that I’d better get fucking control of myself. I start to flatten out. In my head, I mean. I start finding that preaware, rocklike place where I can concentrate. I go to the place where everything is flat. I’m inhaling, looking for that sugary ashy smell, and suddenly, uncontrollably, my brain begins its hyper-journey back to twelve years old. Memories hijack my neurons. Memories of taste, of touch, of fake orange, and when I place my mouth on this guy’s arm, it all becomes clear. I’m no longer in this place, in this bedroom. My head, my brain, myself, it’s all somewhere entirely different.
We’re pushing our bikes up this giant hill, and the bugs are swarming around our heads. Hot Southern summer, with salty beads of sweat around our brows and upper lips. Slapping our necks with our dusty hands, smashing black gnats. Sometimes one will fly into your mouth. But we don’t care when they do. And when we get to the top of the hill we find a beat-up old cassette tape, cracked open and spilling its threads of sound onto the pavement. And we unwind the tape, a huge, hundred-foot string. And we snap it in half at the middle, tying the pieces onto the seats of our bikes, and ride back down the hill, watching the glittering of who knows what on cassette flowing behind us like a tail, like a stretched-out wish, like a thin brown destiny.
We’re driving a beat-up white car through a rainstorm at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of Mississippi—or maybe we’d made it to Alabama without seeing the sign, or maybe we were still in Louisiana. And the rain is coming down so hard that we can’t see the street in front of us. And we’re both thinking tornado warning for upper and lower Alabama, but we don’t say it out loud. So for three hours we travel what adds up to be forty-two miles on the low-shoulder freeway. We pass a few cars parked on the side, determined to wait it out. And in those three hours; the loud, wind-shaken hours; we don’t speak. I squint, my eyes low along the top of the dash, and he drives, tapping the gas pedal, not braking, easing on, rolling back toward home. Then, crossing the state line, we see the brightness of the morning. I look over at him, he stares ahead.
And when he loosens his grip around my neck, around my head, when my mouth breaks free from the inside of his elbow, the awfulness of the present returns. This guy, this orange-smelling grease monkey, barks in my ear about how he wants to tie me up. Haven’t I heard all this before? You would think it was tattooed across my forehead: TIE ME UP, TIE ME UP!
He knots my hands to the bed frame, rope made of something natural, cotton I think. Blocks my legs apart with a short two-by-four. So I’m spread-eagle on this bed, on my stomach, of course, and the knots rub raw places into my wrists. And I know that if I didn’t tug so much on the rope, then it wouldn’t rub so much. But he asks me to struggle a little, and I don’t know how much is a little. So I do it until he starts going, “Yeah, yeah.”
We used to take drives out to nowhere on weeknights. He’d smoke and we’d put a mix tape on and take turns talking. About what we wanted to do when we grew up, even though we were sixteen and didn’t know what we wanted to do when we grew up. And didn’t really care. And what we wanted to do would change every few miles, every few minutes. And we were grown up already. We’d pass rusted farm machinery, crumbling frames jutting out of the browning grass, leaping out of the dirt. Out near the deserted factory that you’d ride past if you went far enough. He’d take pictures of me in front of it. He wouldn’t let me take pictures of him, he said he didn’t like having his picture taken. I wouldn’t smile because I knew what we were doing was serious. And he knew it was serious. And so he didn’t ask me to smile. We didn’t have to pretend. It was too hard to pretend. And mostly it still is.
We were fifteen and hiking up the part of the trail that was marked DO NOT ENTER. Because the best parts of the mountain were marked DO NOT ENTER. We’d stand at the tip of the rock, where the trail went shooting straight out into the air, over the waterfall, the canopy. The place where red-tailed hawks spiraled in circles, heavy wings lifted by the fast and beautiful air. The place where he put his arm on my shoulder. And we stood quiet. I could hear the thumping of my heartbeat in my ears, in my chest, in the tingling pulsing pressure of my fingertips. Some nights we slept outside in heavy nylon sacks, drowning in the half-light of the moon. Some nights we climbed trees, or burned pine-needle shapes in the road. Picked blueberries and ate them in the dark.
And I see him pull open the bedside table drawer, noticing the grease mark he missed on the back of his elbow. The orange air is thick and clammy around my head, stuck inside my nose, taking my olfactory canals hostage. He opens the drawer, rustles through the dog-eared TV Guide, the (what is that, a compact?) the Q-Tips and wadded up tissues. He pulls out a syringe. And the needle goes down into the side of my arm, a warm yellow energy flushing out my veins. If pain and happiness were mixed together and held in liquid suspension, that’d be almost what it felt like. And here’s where everything comes slamming back into me, tearing open the little fear pockets in my head. I jerk hard on my wrists and there’s nothing. No response. Like waking up too fast and you fall down. Only here the falling feels so fucking good. All of a sudden, falling without impact. So I slam my face back into the pillow, like a fool trying to reenter a dream. Saying softly to myself “Come on, come on, come on.”
And he pushes the needle (a different needle?) down into my arm again.
And like two trains colliding, all 142 passengers are presumed de
ad or buried alive in the wreckage, I’m on my stomach and the arm wrapped around my face tastes like a gritty lemon paste, smells like orange bubble gum, like Circus Peanuts. Light breaks open in my brain and shines on the back of my eyes, exposing broken vessels, tired retinas. Shock therapy in my arteries, buzzing like a blank radio and numb like a sleeping foot. I’m stuck here, roped and blocked with his fingers up my ass. No, wait, did I tell the fucking part already? How did I start this story?
Late at night, I drive out to the docks and stare out into the lake. And it feels like I’m drifting out, away from the shore, away from everything. I lie on my back, settle down in one of the concave places, rub my fingers against the wood. And the night gets so dark that I can’t see anything. Even my hands, inches from my face.
And then I start falling asleep, but it feels different than this in-and-out stuff. I feel my body letting go. Uncontrolled, unconscious, uncomfortable. And no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I tug and grunt at the stupid ropes, I know that I’m about to go under.
And this beautiful creature with the tiny mustache, orange-scented forearms and perfectly drawn lips breaks open another bottle of clear something and stuffs the needle down into it. “Want another one?” he says.
I roll my head back, willing it all away, trying to scream into the void, but nothing comes out. All the hairs on my neck bolt upright, there’s a continuous crackling of dendrites in my brain. I try to jerk away, and then—
Quiet.
I come out of it, shaken and unsure. The borders of the room materialize again, walls and windows and doors. And this grease monkey climbing up on top of me. And the hand is gone, the air sealed again, impermeable, like a see-through plastic surface.
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