by Gary Indiana
That spring eleven years ago, we drank on the Prado and the colonnades around the Capitolio with shady characters Ferd collected wherever we went. I couldn’t follow the conversations, but I suspected the altitude at his end was absurdly high, since his sudden compadres were creeps intent on getting drunk at his expense and hoping to rob him if the chance presented itself. Ferd believed they were thirsting for an earnest discussion of socialism. For a brilliant person, he could be amazingly clueless about other human beings.
We ended each night at the cafetería on 23, surrounded by boys offering pinga grosso for “a little present,” normally twenty US dollars and a T-shirt, or a pair of sunglasses. A comical, rage-filled transvestite calling herself Madonna, who looked like Lupe Vélez in Mexican Spitfire, pined for Miami, a BMW, and marriage to an elderly billionaire. She appeared on the stroke of midnight, artfully disheveled, as if she had been ravaged in a taxi minutes earlier. For the price of a cerveza, Madonna would introduce an emphatically willing, heroically endowed “nice, good boy,” certifying, along with his pinga magnificence, that he came from a decent family and wouldn’t steal anything if we let him stay the night. She was always truthful; she’d had them all before.
The straight-up pingueros were few then, among boys who are now Abdul’s age (and, except for Abdul, have disappeared, or, like Madonna, died). Yesteryear’s pingas came attached to quite honest young men, in fact, who were more interested in sex with a foreigner than the “little present” they received afterward. They were students, or held real jobs, and did, by and large, come from decent families. They more or less believed in the Revolution, despite the siren call of South Beach. Sex was fugitive, fraught with the thrill of the forbidden, though nothing was more commonplace. Now, when even Fidel denounces “homophobia,” and the whole country senses the inevitable demise of socialism, sex has become a cold, private enterprise for the sons and younger brothers of vanished sweethearts. They prefer Nike trainers to affection. Their cell phones have become more involving than sex of any kind. Still, unless they are firmly attached to a rich man from elsewhere, they are totally available at the same depressingly low prices.
The ease of things astonished Ferd. Inevitably, he began to moralize about it from the world-improving altitude he habitually assumed. He befriended an acting troupe that held itself aloof from the cafetería’s erotic commerce at a perpetual gin rummy game on a fast-food patio around the corner, where orange plastic tables were set up under the stars. It’s now a swankier joint with an inside dining room and swishy waiters, a striving, hopelessly inferior Havana restaurant that makes you feel sorry for it.
The actors quickly exploited Ferd’s guilty responsibility for the world’s inequities. Sighing tragically over existential problems they attributed to excessive integrity and thwarted artistic genius, they required groveling persuasion before allowing Ferd to pick up the check for the entire table, every night. He welcomed that. He had an innate need to feel responsible for everything.
They were a pricklish, un-Cubanly snobbish group: six bland, despondent white males and one Trotsky-bearded mulatto, dominated by two lipstick lesbians avant la lettre who were not a couple and infused their theaterless theater company with an air of what I can only describe as chaste, imperious self-pity. I now have to wonder if my discomfort around them was justified, or simply a contrary attitude I struck in the face of Ferd’s overdone camaraderie. The rummy table stood flush with the lobby of the Riviera Cinema. We soon knew the people working at the Riviera, their friends, their friends’ friends: that’s how things roll in Havana.
The woman who managed the Riviera had a jinetero son who attached himself to Ferd like a limpet. Ferd was love-struck in a matter of minutes. The boy didn’t have a pinguero face or build, only the same hollow look of corruption and a doggish persistence that screamed stupidity. He was furtive and scrawny. His teeth were bad. His feet stank. He scraped a livelihood from just anywhere. I couldn’t stand him. Ferd towed him all over the island with us in a rented Lexus.
In Santiago, their love story became unbearable. I couldn’t look at that boy without hatred. Santiago featured an epidemic of conjunctivitis. Yellow snot seemed to drool from every eyeball. As soon as we arrived I rented a separate habitación. It was the screened-off parlor of a ground-floor apartment in the center of town. The owner was a drowsy old Buddhist who said it didn’t matter at all who I brought to the room, as long as they weren’t police officers. I pursued my own idea of fun for a week, escorted all over the province by a gang of punk rock jineteros in a 1950 Dodge convertible. We went to beaches and forts and ate a lot of seafood and fried bananas. One morning the Lexus pulled up to the curb with Ferd’s paramour behind the wheel.
“Are you insane?” I screamed at Ferd, who looked crumpled and scared in the passenger seat. “We rented this on my credit card.”
“I have to let him drive,” he said plaintively. “I can’t see.”
I’m embarrassed by the tangled feelings, most of them childish, exposed during that brilliant, hideous holiday. I believed, for example, that Ferd took up with this charmless barnacle to reproach my beauty-freak whorishness. To show how more mature and meaningful his relationships were in contrast to my slutty one-offs.
There were other tensions at work, unresolved issues between us. I think I’m working too hard to feel penitent about all this. I’m in danger of losing the thread. Santiago. The rental car. That finished it. Ferd wanted to borrow money. We were leaving the Lexus with the Rex car rental branch in Santiago. He’d spent himself broke during the trip, and couldn’t afford his plane ticket back to Havana. He said he needed to buy one for the jinetero as well. He confessed that he’d already called Ricardo and Barbara, who owned my apartment, and asked them to wire two hundred dollars to cover that. He had more money in Havana, he’d simply miscalculated. I said the jinetero could catch a ride on a potato truck for all I cared.
“He should feel right at home,” I said. “He has the brain of a potato.”
It was infuriatingly cavalier, I told him, to ask Ricardo and Barbara for money. They were my friends, not his. They didn’t have any money to lend anybody. He at least could have shown some trust and told them where he’d hidden his own money in the apartment, and had them wire that. Furthermore, wiring money on the island, even within the country, was a complicated, ridiculously time-consuming process. It would ruin their weekend.
To be bald about it, I thought it appalling for Ferd to presume upon people I’d known for years, in a way I would never have myself, behind my back. I knew they would send him the cash because they felt they had to, since he’d come to Havana with me. I didn’t think he deserved their help. Or mine, at that point. I flew back to Havana alone and left him to figure out how to get the potato across the island.
My lack of empathy scandalized me at times. I couldn’t control it. Ferd and I had stored up too much mutual resentment over thirty years to ever feel completely safe with each other. Now that it’s too late, I realize I should have swallowed my loathing of that boy, if he made Ferd happy. Because he was abject and out of his depth, the boy tried to be invisible around me. He deferred to me like a servant, lit my cigarettes, pulled the chair out for me to get seated at dinner. At a certain moment my hostility felt forced and tiresome, but I refused to show him any kindness. Even when he held my head while I puked in a sink, one night where we’d dossed down in Trinidad de Cuba, I still couldn’t look at him. He never asked for anything. He may even have loved Ferd, whatever that means.
Abdul remembers that boy telling him that he crashed the rental car into a telephone kiosk in Santiago after I left. Ferd never mentioned it. The insurance must have covered it. A few weeks later we left the island. We had stanched the wound, as we habitually did, imagining that it would never bleed again. Ferd flew to Mexico ahead of me. We met up at the airport in Cancun and continued together to LA. I slept at his place in Mount Washington for a few days, then moved into Highland Gardens on Franklin Avenu
e, where I had been living a few months out of the year.
Ferd returned to Cuba later in 2001, further proof that 9/11 didn’t stop anybody coming here. He and the jinetero picked up where they left off, or it went bad, he never told me anything about it. The boy’s mother no longer manages the Riviera Cinema, Abdul says. The family moved back to Holguín years ago.
All right. I was jealous. I had to know I was more important to Ferd than the jinetero. It came down to that pathetic insecurity, something from prehistoric traumas that wreak more havoc in the present than they did when they were fresh.
Ferd knew his time would run out a lot earlier than the national mortality rate. I know he counted on more than what he finished up with, who doesn’t? He carried the terrible weight of approaching death for so long, though, that a dark outline displaced the air around him. He wanted to have one last love affair, and I made him feel like a fool about it.
North La Jolla Avenue. Winter. Rain falls every day. The ground-floor apartment resembles a monastery cell and rain turns it dank and bleary as a police holding tank. Los Angeles needs water, but the winds blow it south and it misses the reservoirs. The steady drought warning seems over-iterated and heavy-handed. You’re not supposed to run the tap while you wash dishes. The toilet rule is, “If it’s brown, flush it down; if it’s yellow, let it mellow.”
I scissor human heads and limbs from magazine ads and paste them into pages of “The Drunken Boat” in biologically impossible configurations. I’m making a collage book for a boy I met who was eating a burrito in the parking lot at Tommy’s. He kissed me the way people kiss when they’re in love. That was a week ago. He may not remember me now. His number is scribbled on a napkin stuffed in my wallet. Does he know who Rimbaud is? Does it matter? I can’t tell what men I sleep with have in their heads. I meet them late and see the last of them before the sun comes up. I’ve sliced up the Thomas Brothers map I use to navigate the city, and arranged the pieces in a maze no traveler could follow.
A bookshop in the beveled corner of my building sells fetish gear and porn magazines, stroke novels, poppers, dildos King Kong would feel threatened by. If I look out the kitchen window, day or night, I see somebody in a parked car jerking off with a centerfold spread against his steering wheel.
Once a week I carry pillowcases stuffed with socks, underpants, jeans, and T-shirts to a coin-op laundromat beside a Winchell’s Donuts in a strip mall. I skim the Hollywood Reporter and try to finish reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as my clothes wash and dry. I smoke weed in my rotary-engine Mazda as it’s towed through the car wash at Sunset and La Cienega. Afterwards my brain feels as scrubbed and clean as the windshield. I buy pre-ripped T-shirts at Tokyo Rose to wear to clubs. I drive to Watts, drive home, refresh my skin with an Aztec Secret Healing Clay facial mask. I reread The Day of the Locust in two hours, primp a little, then drive to the Detour in East Hollywood or walk to the Rusty Nail on Santa Monica Boulevard. I get drunk three or four nights a week.
I pick up a new person every night. This procedure is fraught with insecurity about my attractiveness. My willowy, fey look passed out of fashion a while ago, when the androgynous template slowly butched up during the disco era, becoming the present macho clone craze. I’m put off by the leatherman thing, handkerchief signals, big hairy chests and mustaches. If the Tom of Finland types aren’t stupid as boiled okra, they give that impression in conversation. But there are usually some available persons in my acceptable range of maleness. Then it’s down to whether or not they see me in a similar light.
When I can’t think of anything else, I drive up Malibu Canyon, to a spot where the land disappears and the Pacific Ocean fills the entire view. The way sunlight shatters across the limitless water calms me with a sensation of infinite possibilities. This epiphany curdles into dread as I drive back down to Pacific Coast Highway.
At this moment I am twenty-five, and waiting for my life to start. The will to make this happen feels beyond me. I’m told I think too much, and have too many emotions. For some reason this terrifies people. In my own estimation, I’m emotionally blocked, stupid in practical matters, and cursed with an isolating intelligence that’s worthless, “emotional” only insofar as I’m prone to panic attacks when my coping skills fail. I’ve gone into hospital twice for depression, which taught me where the safe line of sanity is. There is a threshold of self-neglect I can’t cross without getting locked up. I have to carefully gauge how much unhappiness I can manage, as I seem to be a glutton for it, and still function. I’ve been on various psychiatric drugs for years. Lately I’ve dispensed with them, in favor of “self-medication.”
I have no reliable idea who I am: I can be whatever somebody wants temporarily, if I glean a clear intuition of what it might be. I’m so solitary that roles I try playing for other people seem contrived and arbitrary. I’m uncertain enough of my existence to absorb nearby tastes and opinions, as if claiming them as my own will bring me into clearer focus.
I have a pinching wish for attachment. I don’t know if it’s real. It might be the product of movies and songs on the Top 40. Love is all you need, if loving you is wrong I don’t want to be right, can’t live if living is without you, this is dedicated to the one I love. In the bar ghetto I’m defensively cynical, or pretend to be. I don’t fit with anyone I meet, except in a lubricious, sweaty, transient junction of organs and holes, a fusion of raw desires that discharge themselves with two spurts of jism. The guys I pick up are impervious to emotional complications, intent on probing a fresh body, pushing beyond conventional sex, lab animals staging their own experiments. I do anything I’m asked that won’t kill me. I’m averse to grunting leather ladies, but I’ll go to a lot of the same places they do, taking the same risks. I prefer a Ray Davies– or Bowie-looking type to fist me, whip me, whatever, over getting mauled by a human tank. It’s not my usual thing. What I look for is an abridged version of what I want: a no-fault fuck in the parking lot of time between last call and the morning reality principle, and a modicum of cordiality.
I live in a goulash of stalled creative yearnings, surges of paranoia, fits of depression, frequent spells of drugged euphoria. “I” is a blur, something like photo paper in a developing tray. I swallow speed each morning in place of a vitamin pill. I hear voices. I talk into a tape recorder driving to work, preserving logorrheic routines in my head. I’m inhabited by a cast of characters sucked from outer space by amphetamines: a morbidly obese cab driver fond of guava jelly doughnuts who gets his own talk show after running over Al Pacino. Gary X, a gay-liberation terrorist recruiting for a Baader-Meinhof branch in California. A jilted studio hairdresser, May Fade, improvises verbal suicide notes, digressing often to recall her work on tragically hirsute or alopecia-stricken movie stars.
These cassettes circulate among some friends who send mail art to Ray Johnson. This group calls itself Science Holiday. Its members build exploding sculptures from old chemistry sets. They occupy hard-to-locate pockets of the city and depend on public transportation, the alternate universe of the non-wheeled. Their main activity is cult worship of Darby Crash and Devo. They have private understandings that exclude me. I’m over-talkative and uncool. They tolerate my company because I own a car. It’s depressing to be tolerated, but in this city even bad friends are hard to come by.
When the Baby June impulse strikes, I hit the piano bar circuit. Frequently I experience a compulsion to be seen and heard by total strangers. I would be in the right town for this actorish craving, if I weren’t such an obvious fag. LA hosts numerous smoky lounges where anyone can grab the microphone and request a tune from a Vladek Sheybal look-alike parked at a keyboard. (In years to come, this safety valve for wage slaves degenerates into karaoke.) After many drinks, I have a pretty decent singing voice.
In all-black bars in Crenshaw, the piano players know Edith Wilson’s “Mistreatin’ Blues,” and “I’d Rather Go Blind” by Etta James. At the Other Side, a wrinkle room in Silver Lake where the décor evokes
a perpetually hungover, geriatric White Christmas, it’s Lerner and Loewe, “The Night They Invented Champagne,” or Cole Porter, “You’re the Top”—an iffy choice given the clientele.
You’re the purple heat
Of a bridal suite in use.
You’re de Milo’s Venus,
You’re King Kong’s penis.
You’re self-abuse.
My finale is an Ethel Mermanesque “There’s No Business like Show Business,” belted out with demonic abandon.
Is this anything I want to remember better? Yes. No. You tell me and we’ll both know. Like everything irreversible and embarrassing, I’d like to remember it differently.
An unhappy-looking man in Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb, tall, thin, with a thin black beard like a heavy pencil line along his jaw, wearing an “I Paris” T-shirt.
five
A red and black cargo ship crossing the bay this morning revealed a trick of perspective produced by the view from the back terrace. The rear terrace is cramped and perfunctory compared to the large, high-ceilinged one overlooking Calle 21. Its white wrought-iron chairs and matching table are smaller and stubbier than the furniture in front, crowded near the door of a storage room away from a squidgy alcove where Neyda machine-washes laundry and pins it up to dry, where there’s another closet, full of sad children’s toys, that Theodore Dreiser could describe a lot better than I can.
The back terrace has a jaw-dropping view, though, that would cost many millions to equal in Dubai or Hong Kong. It’s a brilliantly swank spot to drink late-night cocktails and stargaze. At least one person campaigned to be my permanent consort after seeing that view. Many people who visit assume I own this place, even after I tell them otherwise.