I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

  Seth’s sister Heidi dates the most thrillingly formed boy at Pinkerton Academy, Donny Samara. He’s considered impossibly gorgeous and sexy by the girls in school. His father owns Weeping Willow Trailer Park on Route 3. Heidi Willard is decent, so he’s never put it to her, he confides one day. But even making out with Donny Samara, I imagine, feeling his pink, wet tongue in your mouth, must set off multiple orgasms. I idolize him in a creepy pathetic way, and make bad drawings of his face from memory that I give him proudly as if they’re by Leonardo. I hang around where he parks his truck in town on his trailer park errands, for the slight chance of talking to him and looking at him for two minutes. It’s not exactly a friendship. I’m more his fan club. I’m too naïve to understand that he sees I’m in love with him, or that it’s public knowledge at school. Paul Carlisle still asks for a blowjob now and then, I never say no. Whenever I lap his balls, I close my eyes and pretend they’re Donny’s.

  Second blowjob: Donny Samara, his lanky frame arranging itself in a tense sprawl behind the wheel of a blue Corvair his father bought him for his seventeenth birthday. “Norwegian Wood,” a Beatles tune that’s supposedly a coded song about smoking marijuana, plays on the car radio. We drink Bacardi from a bluish-green quart bottle. An unbearably long pretense that we’re only out drinking together causes both of us to become sloppy drunk before Donny dares to unzip his fly and unbelt his denim slacks, pushing them and his white briefs down far enough to expose his stiffy and balls to my trembling lips. It’s too dark to see them, but that’s no obstacle to what we both knew was going to happen before we started drinking. Donny pushes my head down gingerly and slides his organ into my mouth, which he pumps in a clinically measured way, as if he’s anxious to do it correctly. I vomit all over his crotch.

  The Kelley brothers who take turns frenching me at the Pine Island fair, aping the male star of some romance film they saw on television. I win an ugly lamp throwing darts at a wall of balloons. A baby comes out of Bella Talbot’s vagina that she didn’t even know was inside her, in the girl’s bathroom at lunch hour. Bettie tells Ellen in her throaty, hectoring voice that a woman can get pregnant from using the same water a man took a bath in. Klev-Bro Shoe fire burns down Uncle Babe’s store, turning three blocks of Railroad Avenue into smoldering cinders along with it. It’s widely debated that a woman whose charred remains are found on a sled in the Manchester woods may not be the third victim of the local serial killer, but a case of spontaneous combustion. Mumma falls off a gelding and gets right back up in the saddle though she’s scared to death, because that’s how we do. Daddy burns the entire epidermis off his right arm cooking fried dough “blubbies” in a cauldron of boiling oil. They sew his fingers into his stomach temporarily to grow the skin back.

  Third blowjob: Richard Wacker, really his name, whose parents operate a bungalow-type motor inn in Salem that I drive past all the time while I’m training at Rockingham. The bungalows ring a kidney-shaped pond and suggest a magnified miniature-golf course. This is the year my bones grow too big for me to stay at the requisite jockey weight, and the thoroughbred owner who offered to sponsor me says if he tries to enter me in a race I’ll get disqualified. Richard Wacker’s glistening teeth, his dark feathery hair. His fleshy lips. His lascivious mouth. Richard Wacker is my image of perfection for at least a year. No one else is interested in him that way because he’s exotic, ethnic in some indefinable disturbing manner, and the expressions on his face point to an indecently wide and precocious range of sexual experience. After unbuttoning his corduroys he pushes my face into his kissing-fresh underpants, moaning joyously when the head of his cock presses into my mouth. He instantly spurts out a little splash of semen, which I swallow to show how much I really care for him. After a stunned moment Richard Wacker asks, in a drowsy, sweetly earnest voice, if his dick is bigger than Donny Samara’s.

  Last month I went to the zoo in Edinburgh to visit the penguins. The day was so blowy the treetops thrashed in the wind with a shirring sound like crashing surf. Finally rain thin as needles fell and the zoo closed the park. I only had time to see the giant sloths and pink flamingos and a leathery aquatic mammal I don’t know the name of moving swiftly back and forth under the inky water of his pond. The penguins were diving and feeding, feeding and diving. The zookeepers, in yellow smocks and blue galoshes, hand-fed them whole, dead fish. They snapped the fish up as if pulling them from a vending machine. We love penguins, but that is one-sided. No penguins will talk to you. No penguins will even look at you unless you are close enough to be a threat. Why should they? Unless you are holding a dead fish, no penguin has any reason to go near you. That is the way of penguins, and it always will be.

  two

  In the morning before Neyda arrives from where she lives with her husband in a housing block behind the Melia Cohiba Hotel, I sharpen pencils and write in notebooks for an hour or two. One day, when I’m dead, dozens if not hundreds of notebooks of every conceivable quality and kind will be found, some covered front to back with drafts of novels, drafts of stories, drafts of essays, occasional poems and what have you, but most will contain a formless jumble of stray thoughts, phone numbers, addresses, names, quotations, lists, coded messages, and Internet passwords, among other things, in a schizoid variety of scrawls, letter sizes, and penmanship styles, often occupying only a few pages of an otherwise blank volume:

  Item No. 46012

  Norcom, Inc.

  Griffin, GA 30224

  www.norcominc.com

  Made in Brazil

  Napoleon only liked to spend 15–20 minutes on dinner pour le bonne table, Mme Recamier et al ‘Almanach des Gourmands’ (1803–12) (beat gigot until tender) British blocade 1812 shortage of ingredients: no rum, coffee, chocolate or sugar coming from French W Indies

  ATTN: Debby Wilbur

  Send form

  $1000.00

  March 1

  Miami rentals

  Camera battery

  Call car service

  (Cuban oceanic research biodiversity sphere)

  Fouché – ‘bad style of company—muddy boots, doubtful linen’

  Bank crash of 1805

  No dining room @ Tuileries, would lay table in different room every day

  Flight record locator XTTQOF

  *Anaconda – 11”, 5’11”, $260 – 816-877-1589

  Miguel 559-519-7988 ‘always safe’ 5’10” big getinurazz1 (raw freak) 6’2”, 9” 678-457-5037

  *Jeffi 6’2”, 10”, 150/hr 305-514-0565

  transfer pictures to flash drive

  N ate fast, ate everything, but liked good wines—Chambertin, Clos-Vougeot, Château Lafite

  Juliette Récamier – Chateaubriand

  “led on” Lucien Bonaparte & rejected him (covered walls with

  mirrors)

  her party on Dec 16 1804 — snarled up 6,000 coaches in traffic

  Psalms 115:6 — aures habent et non audient

  Royalist rebellions in the Vendée during French Revolution

  to give you the general effect. I brought a pile of “used” notebooks with me, along with ones yet unmarked, and I’ll probably find some use for what I’ve already written in them, because if you note things as chaotically as I do, eventually you find that you’ve already written down, months or years earlier, any “new” idea that comes into your mind: on the whole, a deflating discovery. One wants to flush everything out, become a geyser of originality, but no hay posibilidad de esto en absoluto. I am often ridiculous enough to imagine I can pursue several projects simultaneously—something experience has repeatedly disproven—and therefore need a separate notebook for each one.

  At least I am here, again, finally, away from the electronic mental gunk of Very Late Capitalism, US style, which I’m convinced will soon drive everyone who isn’t already a zombie over the edge.

  When New York ruins my day, I think about this terrace. I imagine myself sitting here, at this round glass table that easily seats twelve (I’m not sure we have that
many chairs in the flat, but I could borrow some from a neighbor). I picture the zebra plants and majesty palms in terra cotta tubs that line the terrace. I visualize Neyda rolling the grimy red-and-white awning with the hand crank dangling from the awning brace. Or unrolling it when the sun’s blazing. I hear the elevator thubbing to a stop at this floor, the cheap plastic telephone’s faint, infrequent ring. This is my favorite place in the house, whether I’m writing or not.

  Señora Carlotta Dominguez is at last in residence next door. I have been missing her, because that empty apartment spooks me a little when I get off the elevator at night. Sometimes the hall light is off because I forget nobody’s next door to switch it on after dark. Alberto was over there for three days relinquishing his own flat after I arrived, but then he went back to Bogotá.

  Señora Carlotta Dominguez is a tiny, avid vamp of sixty-eight who looks like an Andalusian grandmother, which she is, and Alberto’s maternal aunt. She has an ardent lover a third her age who comes in from Matanzas to see her, and two others repining for her in other countries. When I saw the Cuban lover on her terrace back in January, I couldn’t look at him and breathe at the same time. This proves there should always be hope.

  Carlotta arrived last night on the Madrid flight, gleeful, cackling at her own fun while the taxi driver unloaded her luggage on the sidewalk. I was on my terrace, smoking and drinking rum colas in the dark with Brayon Lazaro Silva from Artemisa province. Brayon Lazaro Silva had sent me a note via cocktail waitress in Las Vegas Club a week ago. The message was so funny and blunt I had to spend the night with him. We got very drunk first. We got very drunk again last night. Señora Carlotta Dominguez was in such an effervescent mood that she came over and got drunk with us.

  Carlotta is peering over the edge of her terrace as I write this, smiling at passing birds, the trees, the clouds. She casts a pointed glance down at voices rising from the entrada, shaking her dyed onyx curls. She waves at me and cocks an ear at a burst of laughter below. Often we communicate by making faces. Her expression says that the workers swarming in and out are predictably taking their sweet time with the repairs, it’s obvious at a glance, but it’s not unpleasant having them around, it makes a change, so why be bothered? We both remember the elevator going out for a month after the rains last spring; the dilatory cosmetic work underway is comparatively painless. Neither of us enjoyed climbing the back stairs, the lights in the stairwell short out all the time, and for her it was a real physical ordeal.

  If I am not mistaken, two house painters are currently planted on the stoop and plan on dawdling there until the rest of their crew arrives. Which could be anytime between now and next Tuesday. It’s a state job. They’re paid whether they show up for it or not. The painters claim to be making their methodical way up here, a floor at a time, though in reality they work on any floor they can loiter on, where the tenants are gone for the day. It’s wise to keep an eye on them when they’re in your apartment. Nobody cares if they slack off, but they might pilfer something if given the opportunity.

  They’re repainting terrace ceilings and other surfaces damaged in last month’s four-week deluge. They’re also giving the stairwell, terra incognita since the elevator got repaired, a fresh coat, and have turned that into festive picnic grounds. One of the painters has his eye on me. A few days ago he tapped at the back door and asked Neyda for a cup of coffee. I focused his fuzzy form across the salon once he stepped inside, furtively checking him out while he stood in the kitchen drinking it. Down here, fascination with male beauty impedes my progress. I continually remind myself it’s irrelevant to what I’m trying to do.

  When attractive men show up at the door on their own initiative, though, I become the prone cataleptic in I Walked with a Zombie. There’s no disputing it’s a role I was born to play. While the painter sipped his coffee, slouched against the utility closet, shirtless, paint speckled, looking remote, I sensed he was taking his sweet time with his coffee break, too. Unexpectedly, he shot me a swift, scorchingly direct look. It was like noticing a sniper on a distant rooftop a second late. Then he averted his face and handed Neyda the empty mug, wiped his hands on his spattered jeans, and left.

  Now he nods and half-smirks for a second when I pass him in the building, as if we share a secret. It’s hardly a secret, since his coworkers all catch these utterly casual signals and totally get what they signify, and couldn’t care less about it. Cuban men will screw a grapefruit if there’s nothing else around. Their need to fuck as much as possible is a given. Who they do it with isn’t even considered a worthwhile topic of gossip unless it’s a case of incest. He’s handsome, no question. Full crown of black ringlets, moistly ponderous, anthracitic eyes, lips from the African heart of Baracoa, is my best guess. He never wears a shirt so I see how well he’s put together on a daily basis.

  It was no surprise to me that this man knew he was going to fuck me the instant we made eye contact. I knew it, he knew it, go know. Despite the languid pace of everything else here, nobody wastes any time or breath establishing this silent understanding. It’s effortless. He’s not in any hurry about it. I’m not either. At the rate they’re going, he’ll be around at least another month.

  Things to remember better: Ferd Eggan entered my life in San Francisco in 1969. I had dropped out of Berkeley. I had what today are called sexual identity issues that made it impossible to focus in any degree-winning manner on philosophy and English literature, my purported areas of study. I had drifted away from classes and moved out of student housing, crashing at various communes around the Berkeley campus. One was a Trotskyite commune. Another housed a study group of Frankfurt School scholars with guest lectures by Herbert Marcuse and also raised money for the Tupamaros. Another went in for encounter sessions and scream therapy. My final Berkeley commune was devoted to growing peyote cacti and magic mushrooms. I met Ferd on a film set. He was helming a new wrinkle in the developing canon of narrative porn cinema from his own co-authored script, The Straight Banana (“exhibitionist flashes nymphomaniac, fucking ensues!”—a meet-cute picture). I was “sexually involved” by that time—not on camera—with one of the stars of The Straight Banana, a tall, bisexual Nebraskan refugee often billed as Mr. Johnny Raw, or plain Johnny Raw, whose penis was a minor celebrity in the Bay Area.

  Johnny Raw, aka Leonard Jones of Omaha, lived in the Marina district. I never socialized with him. I hardly knew him. I didn’t care about him. His self-involvement was hermetic and vaguely reptilian. Johnny Raw referred to the creeps who bought tickets to jerk off watching his films as “the fans,” and believed he was an actual movie star. He was boastful, stupid, pathetically narcissistic, and sad, but such a deluded asshole it was impossible to feel sorry for him. I liked how he looked, he liked how I looked looking at him, that was literally all we shared. Whenever we stumbled over each other that summer, both in half-drunk stupors, in the same bar, at the same midnight hour, we rushed robotically to the Marina in a cab, and got it on—without passing Go, without collecting two hundred dollars, without spending a minute longer in each other’s company afterward than I needed to put my clothes on.

  I never took my clothes off, actually. Johnny Raw usually pulled his dick and balls out of his fly or lowered his pants to his ankles. Gay youth today may find it incomprehensible, but “having sex” with Johnny Raw ten or fifteen times that summer didn’t involve Johnny Raw fucking me, or me fucking Johnny Raw. I was unusually innocent for my age—and, it’s the truth, unusually pretty and sought after at nineteen. I admit that by my present lights, I’d have to agree with former President Clinton that he “did not have sex with that woman.” By today’s standards, I had been around too long to hook up with men and then do nothing besides service them with a Monica Lewinsky. But that was as far as I’d ever gone. Despite skipping grades in secondary school and attending a top-five university in a major urban area at sixteen, despite having read Jean Genet, John Rechy, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, and many others who had certainly “gone all
the way” in the rear more often than they’d brushed their teeth—even regardless of a precocious history of fellatio with other boys since the seventh grade, I had no concept of anal sex. I wasn’t aware of it as something many people did. A true son of 1950s backwoods New Hampshire, I thought sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality. Believed, in fact, that a rectum capable of accommodating even an average penis was such an aberration of nature that only rare, anally deformed individuals even attempted it. “Fucking,” in my mind, meant male-on-female vaginal penetration.

  For a while post-Berkeley, I lived in the attic of a hippie commune with no special theme going on, in a leased house on Seventeenth Street. By coincidence, a tenant below was Johnny Raw’s costar in The Straight Banana. Grinda Pupic, a licensed practical nurse whose legal name was Bonnie Solomon, secured the attic for me when I moved across the bay, as a favor to a Berkeley friend of a friend.

  A relentlessly sultry, ebulliently secular Jew, Bonnie’s sang-froid enabled her to resume her side of an argument about local zoning laws between takes, while the bone-hard penis of a costar remained planted in her lady parts. Among friends and coworkers she exuded a generally misleading maternal solicitude. At the Nocturnal Dream Shows in North Beach, Bonnie sang with the Nickelettes, a hallucinatory, feminist auxiliary of the Cockettes. We occasionally had sex. I wasn’t a frontal virgin. Bonnie was awfully nice and surprisingly tough.