I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

  “He had a huge cock. It was the only thing about him that anyone cared about. It made him completely miserable.”

  Many men, I think, would consider a huge cock an enviable cross to bear, but obviously that kid hadn’t.

  three

  I purchased the notebook I’m writing in last November at a stationer’s behind the Goldoni statue on Ponte alla Carraia in Florence. The cover reproduces an engraving of the Santa Maria del Fiore basilica. It’s tinted a warm, creamy beige. In real life the flat colors and rigid geometry of the façade of Santa Maria del Fiore resemble the visibly bogus building coverings sometimes draped over real ones under renovation. Walking past it at night feels like the dream so many people report, of waking up standing before a large theater audience without knowing their lines or what play they’re in. Buñuel had that dream all the time. A lot of my friends have had it. I’ve experienced it most of my life, not only in front of a theater audience, and never as a dream, either.

  Brunelleschi designed the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. Brunelleschi also reposes in the crypt in Santa Maria del Fiore, among its many treasures: a Uccello fresco, a stained glass window Donatello designed, and one of the biggest gold crucifixes I’ve ever seen, by I forget who. This is not what I planned to write in this notebook.

  After breakfast I leave the house, walk to Coppelia or down to the sea wall behind the Hotel Nacional and jot lists of “things to remember better at another time.” I watch container ships glide across the harbor, follow pelicans streaking high above the fibrillating waves. They dive kamikaze fashion into the water, plopping back up to the surface like rubber ducks, beaks full of fish. The Malecón stirs up longing for things already lost to time, along with a thought that there aren’t many things left to lose.

  So far I’ve filled one notebook with my surprisingly legible, right-slanted cursive. It was often said to be identical to my mother’s, though she was left-handed. Some of these new pages bear a sprinkling of names, followed by rows of associations. (“B., when S.C. came into the Mudd Club: ‘She has that just-fucked look.’ ” “Story of the turd in the trattoria toilet bowl.” “Karen F.’s pianist telling story about Nico.”) Other pages reflect little broken-off efforts at narrative. The past is chaotic and slippery. I haven’t had the Proust tea-and-cookie epiphany, or the flood of buried memories supposedly resurrected by odors. Havana is an encyclopedia of foul smells, it ought to trigger an avalanche of amazing flashbacks. But nothing doing. Or nothing much.

  The house on Broderick Street was mined with unwelcome encounters: with Charles, who never budged from his wing chair and cast a disapproving eye on any scene that passed before him, though it was impossible to tell how much he grasped or paid attention to; with Steve, who began arranging candlelit feasts each week or so in an otherwise unused dining room, at which nebulous others living in the house appeared.

  These included a stout black lesbian residing in a basement bedroom next to Steve’s, an apparition in thick round glasses who resembled an enormous frog, and was somehow the local parent of an eerily silent, wraith-like white female child of eight or nine. An actressy, broad-faced blonde whose saturnine expressions hinted at lethal secrets concerning the future of each person in the house lived on the second floor, evidently sharing custody of the little girl, who was unrelated to either woman by blood. Carol and Ferd believed the child had been kidnapped in the middle past, possibly brainwashed into believing her parents were dead or had abandoned her to their care. After living on Broderick Street for a while I came to believe something of the sort too. The girl never left her guardians’ rooms unaccompanied. We suspected she was drugged and kept in a stupor.

  These women, bonded in witchy sisterhood, alluded in passing to New Age consciousness, hobbits, grokking, and black magic. They ascribed anyone’s characteristics to an astrology sign, any event to some planetary alignment. Such occult blather was usually weak-minded drug talk, but something genuinely malefic lurked behind their mystic twaddle, sinister Cheshire grins, and breaching over-friendliness. We stayed aloof from them, gingerly deflecting proposals that we all “take a trip” together.

  At Steve’s impromptu dinners everyone claimed to have plans. Whether we actually spoke of them or not, we strove to convey, in some manner, that whatever we were doing at the moment was a well-considered step toward something more legibly responsible that we intended to do later. This focused ambition could have been an intention to cast a spell on Sleeping Beauty, or to corner the market in gold doubloons and pieces of eight. It didn’t matter how unreal or implausible our plans were. Striking a goal-oriented note seemed imperative to everyone sipping Steve’s Merlot and eating Steve’s casseroles.

  We were bent on reassuring Charles of our solvency, lest he conclude he had a houseful of deadbeat hippies on his hands. I don’t recall the precise atmosphere on Broderick Street the week the October rent fell due, but paying it had become a pressing concern for Carol and Ferd. We three had dropped mescaline and smoked weed nonstop for a week without sleeping. People came and went through the house at all hours, as the crisp autumn days became shorter. Nights became interminable voids, the nightmare parties of North Beach and other dark attractions having diminished to precious few and far between. Desolating fog swept the chilly evening streets. In the starry night skies the cosmos seemed to wake from a long summer stasis and lumber into catastrophic motion.

  Late one night the suggestion arose, almost certainly from Carol, that the rent issue might be quickly resolved if Steve, who had gone to the opera hours earlier with his ancient mother (then in seasonal residence at the Fairmont Hotel), were to discover my young, comely, prone, clearly willing naked person in his bed when he returned. Carol had a gift for suggesting things without feeling responsible for them after they happened. She could have given Mesmer a run for his money.

  There began a not-terribly-contentious debate about it. Ferd weakly objected on grounds that I might well do it to please them, but couldn’t possibly wish to throw myself under an elderly pederast, since I was nineteen, obviously naive, and clueless, however jaded I tried to act, and that I had never even been fucked before. He was, to my astonishment, moved to protect me, if not very forcefully—less from Steve, I sensed, than from Carol. He felt vaguely responsible for me. This made me uncomfortable, and somehow guilty. It was no revelation that Carol didn’t care what happened to anyone besides Carol, an attitude I perversely chose to align myself with.

  I cut into the argument and said it was no big deal, nothing to worry about, I liked Steve fine, I was open to whatever happened. It would be an amusing way to surprise him—I wouldn’t testify in court about the hours leading up to my deflowering, but this was the gist. Perhaps I went through with it to defy Ferd’s feeble concern, or to win points with Carol by proving I could be as cold and libertine as she was. I wanted to matter more to them than I did. If letting them pimp me out to pay the rent accomplished that, I was for it.

  It was settled. The scenario felt lifted from a French bedroom farce. I crept down the basement steps to Steve’s room, undressed, got in his bed, pulled the sheets up, and waited. Excited anticipation became drowsiness as hours went by; I nodded off.

  I was wakened by a rapturous, throaty groan, and the simultaneous thrust of a sixty-two-year-old, unlubricated member deep into my rectum. I was pinned to the mattress by a gigantic, dessicated brisket. It didn’t exactly hurt. It wasn’t any pleasure, either. I didn’t even understand what he was doing to me until he finished doing it. I’d read about it, and heard people talk about it, but it felt so unlike what I’d expected that I thought he’d substituted some innocuous household object for his penis. But no, apparently it was him.

  The epilogue was strangely confused. I only viewed it from an oblique, distant quadrant of the first floor. The next morning Steve pressed a thick wad of cash into Carol’s elegant grasp. Later, he came into the hall through the basement doorway, panting and dragging a large suitcase. He pulled it along the runner
carpet and threw open the front door. A taxi idled in the street below. He announced that he was leaving for the Fairmont Hotel. “It’s high time I went and killed Mother,” he said as he left, his voice shaky. It was the last we saw of him.

  Unstately, plump Arthur Ginsberg, gnomish magus of a media venture called Video Free America, materialized one evening, wishing to meet frowzy, bespectacled Lowell Pickett, grubby producer of The Straight Banana and other instant classics of modern porn. Instead he encountered us, vainly staking out Lowell’s front door from his living room. We planned to shake down the elusive impresario for money he owed us. If that failed, we all agreed, we’d ask the dykes on Broderick Street to turn him into a toad, the way Kenneth Anger had done to Bobby Beausoleil for stealing footage from Lucifer Rising.

  Arthur Ginsberg owned a prototype of the first portable video camera (the Portapak, which actually weighed a ton), which Sony was test-marketing and giving free to certain artists like Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol—and, evidently, to Arthur Ginsberg, whose resume consisted more or less entirely of an “audiovisual poem” based on Allen (no kin) Ginsberg’s “Kaddish.” He was now searching for a real-life drama to document in real time on video.

  In that prehistoric age of three-quarter- and half-inch magnetic videotape and analogue technology, it had not yet occurred to everyone on earth that his or her existence deserved recording more extensively than with silent home movies, snapshot albums, letters, boxes of memorabilia. A cumbersome first step toward “home video,” the Portapak was too costly for most consumers. Its image quality was atrocious, not so much black and white as a spectrum of milky greenish gray that broke up into streaks and splotches of camera burn when the lens passed across a light source. Yet somehow the novelty of making something that looked like bad television inflamed the imaginations of a few people at the time, including us.

  It’s probably clear that we considered ourselves artists, although aside for Carol’s one-hit fluke as a lyricist and Ferd’s first, arty porn movie, none of us had produced a thing to support this delusion. Here, suddenly, a chance to pretend that exposing the raw sewage of our lives, in a visually crapulous medium, was the same thing as making art! Obviously ahead of the times, by at least several minutes. We screened Billy Rainey’s Brother on Lowell’s projector, regaled Arthur Ginsberg with our unorthodox domestic arrangements and drug habits, and urged him to document us—sensing, I’m sure, that someone whose only previous idea had been to make a film of “Kaddish” was highly suggestible and clueless. This proved to be accurate.

  However, Arthur Ginsberg was nowhere as suggestible and clueless as we were. A few days later, Video Free America commenced taping our days and nights on Broderick, our revels on the town (which had become dimmer and, frankly, listless since the summer). At once, the torpid formlessness of our lives took on a strangely bloated shape imposed by the incessant round-the-clock presence of bulky technical equipment and three large, overfed videographers pretending to be invisible. This was at least a year before the hit PBS series An American Family emerged from the haute bourgeois altitude of Santa Barbara.

  Within a few days, I suspected, correctly, that Arthur & Co. planned on serving me up as a weird speck of lint on the central drama of Carol and Ferd. After a few days of taping, I made myself scarce. I wasn’t in a happy place. This daily taping ratcheted festering tensions between Carol and Ferd and everyone associated with them into the desperate-looking exhibitionism of bad theater. People acted out to make the video more dramatic, more confrontative, more excitingly sordid. They exaggerated their squabbles into screaming matches, aired their ugliest thoughts about each other, told the camera things they should’ve confided to a psychiatrist, or a priest, or a diary with a deadbolt lock.

  The Adventures of Carol and Ferd, as the finished masterpiece was titled, culled from thousands of videotaped hours, climaxed, like oatmeal heated to a boil, with the wedding of Carol and Ferd, which took place, without much notice, in the moldy Victorian parlor of the house on Broderick Street.

  It was a travesty wedding, a macabre masquerade party, like the more perfunctory nuptials, a few years later, of Ingrid Thulin and Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s movie The Damned, officiated in this instance by a minister from The Process, a satanic cult noted for its vivid fashion sense. I don’t know if it was a legally binding ceremony, or only looked that way. It struck me at the time as an obtuse publicity stunt, but then most marriages and weddings had struck me that way, and frequently still do. It was happening on a camera, for a camera, to give all the frivolous dissipation recorded earlier some earthly weight and a retroactive illusion of narrative momentum. I had withdrawn into a severe depression, and was practically catatonic.

  All of hip San Francisco turned out for this spectacle: the Cockettes, Les Nickelettes, the Hells Angels, the porn stars du jour, a contingent of zonked hippies and scag freaks, the more party-crazed zanies of the gay underground. I only saw it later, in the video. Freaks were still pouring into the house when one of the Hells Angels—fortunately, I suppose, one of the less porcine, who didn’t have the build of a small truck—threw me over his shoulder like a Visigoth looting a conquered village. He carried me like a potato sack down to the basement, where, uneuphemistically, with a diabolically acute sense of timing, he yanked my jeans down to my ankles, pushed me onto Steve’s former bed, opened his own pants, and raped me for several hours while the escalating noise above us made it pointless to scream. My rapist held the blade of a thick bowie knife under my chin until, howling like a rabid wolf, he came in my ass the first time. He tucked the knife into one of his boots when I stopped struggling against the fat, putrid-smelling cock hammering into my guts. Jacked on meth, he pulled out after spurting, immediately pushing his still-dripping cock into my mouth, indifferent to vomit that quickly spread everywhere, soaking the bedcovers. When it got fully hard he jabbed it into my ass again. Blood started pooling with the vomit; I lost count after four or five new penetrations, frequently passing out as he went on raping with gleefully relentless hostility. Snorting, groaning, farting, not for any effect on me, but as if he were fucking the corpse of something he’d freshly killed, making noises he undoubtedly made doing anything. The only words he spat out during those hours were: “Take the rest of the dick in that fucking faggot asshole,” and alternately, “If I feel your teeth on my fuckin’ cock I’ll cut your throat open and fuck the hole, so better suck good.” By the time charm boy finished, I had been unconscious for at least an hour and stayed that way for two days.

  Carol and Ferd disappeared a week later. Without telling anyone except Arthur Ginsberg, they’d planned for months to skip to Chicago, resume abandoned degree work, and find jobs in academia. I segued from depression to schizophrenia. In a fleeting lucid moment I called my parents, begging for airfare to fly home. During a layover in Chicago, hearing voices, I wandered through the airport, shoplifting scarves and talking to the voices. The police came; quickly realizing that I would constitute a problem requiring onerous paperwork and time-consuming placement in a mental health facility, they escorted me onto my Boston flight instead of arresting me. Soon after it landed, my parents collected me. Then I had a complete mental breakdown.

  A man in my neighborhood used to wish me dead whenever he saw me in the street, as he walked two enormous, snarling, unfixed male dogs. “I’ll be happy when you’re dead,” he would say, or “Anyone can see you’re shrinking with age,” or “You’ll be dead soon,” and he would say this with a big goofy grin on his deranged face, not only on the sidewalk but also in the corner deli, the local bookstore, if he saw me there, never loudly enough to be overheard but distinctly, implacably, with obvious sadistic pleasure, in the matter-of-fact way that someone might remark on the weather, and this man, who was tall and bald and unpleasant looking, with eyes twinkling with insanity behind his thick glasses, had written a novel once, a neighbor told me, and believed his brilliance had not been sufficiently recognized, and not only wished me dead but wi
shed many others in the neighborhood dead in the course of his dog walks, perhaps everyone he saw. These maledictions went on for two years, and eventually had their intimidating effect. After a time, whenever I left my building, I feared having to confront this person’s madness. Life is difficult enough without this kind of thing. In Regla, finally, I paid a Santeria priest twenty pesos to make this person stop bothering me. When I got back to New York, a woman who worked in the bookstore told me the man with the dogs had died, suddenly, a week before, from a cerebral hemorrhage. I don’t really believe the Santeria priest had anything to do with it, but for a moment it was nice to think so. “I wonder what happened to the dogs,” she said. “Maybe he took them to hell with him,” I said. “But look here,” I said. “I can’t help thinking there is a lesson in this. He wished me dead. He told other people he wanted them to die. And then his brain exploded.”

  four

  When Abdul left the other day, I sat on the terrace smoking and looking at the trees for a long time. On the grounds of the Institute of Something or Other across the street, the leafage of several ceiba trees meshes with the plumage of a laurel whose roots have pushed through the sidewalk on Los Presidentes. This foliage obscures a cluster of royal palms, clusias, and soursops that forms a massive shape-shifting topiary when it shirrs in the trade winds. A ginger tabby lives behind the institute’s perimeter wall, in a shady sunken garden.

  A condor slipped across the sky. I picked chicken bits from the pasta salad Neyda had cooked for lunch and walked over to Los Presidentes and fed them to the ginger cat, who had settled under a bench on the paseo for the afternoon. At night, when swarms of mohawked punks and skinny Rastafarians roam the paseo, I feed the cats along Calle 21 between here and the Hotel Nacional. While the ginger cat finished her meal, I thought about Ferd being dead.