by Gary Indiana
We go on scribbling misspellings on the yellow paper before and after sex, a labored, thin communication that turns ridiculous when I hazard any lengthy message involving a passage of time: past, present, and future are the same to him. I tried to describe my ferry trip. He interpreted my crude drawing of a boat and the harbor, replete with arrows and a lighthouse, to mean I’m soon going far away by ship.
Two or three hours groping for words of one syllable are all I can handle. Drinks, if he wants drinks. He can make Neyda’s off-putting lunch disappear if he likes. He scowls when he sniffs the plate, but gobbles everything down in twenty seconds.
Mastiu cares about eating, fucking, and catching a peso cab back to Cotorro instead of the bus, with some leftover change in his pocket. Fine with me, if he’s nice about it. Not every old whore gets swived to smithereens by a twenty-three-year old on a daily basis. But he’s also tiresome. His fishing job finishes up soon and it won’t be heartbreaking when he leaves, I don’t think.
He knows I’m at Bim Bom at night picking up other men. Some of them have known me forever and think it a treat to get trashed on my balcony and bang me once a year for old time’s sake. The other deaf-mutes tell Mastiu whom I talk to, hoping he’ll strangle me in a jealous rage: six or seven of them gang around, whipping up dramas on the waterfront with sign language, more importunate and in-my-face every time they spot me. I really don’t see myself as Desdemona. Mastiu doesn’t care who I sleep with, as long as it’s not one of them. But really I’m tired of them all, including him.
Last week, offering what he takes for granted as my swooning dream, he indicated that he was spending the night. He rested his cheek on an imaginary pillow to demonstrate this. The whole thing was farcical. For one thing he didn’t ask, and I had other plans. I didn’t want to sleep when he did. I felt like drinking on the terrace and going down to feed the cats. He grew insistent, finally pushy. As soon as we got under the sheets, his cell phone vibrated and lit up with text messages, on what looked suspiciously like cue. Fresh messages beamed and gurgled in the dark every few minutes. He tapped out replies instantly—curious, no hearing or spelling problems there—and sank under the sheets. Between calls he thrashed around until all the bedding coiled around him, making restive noises that were building up to the revelation that he had to leave, supposedly to deal with whatever the texts were about, hoping I’d believe he didn’t want to go.
Such a drag. I hate being taken for a fool, especially by somebody who probably is one. My eyes adjusted to the dark. I picked out the dresser, the chair where his light pants were folded, the giant mirror on the wall, the murky shapes reflected in it. A little after midnight. It was pathetically obvious that the phone business had been planned with a friend, maybe the skinny girl from the French café.
However I will myself to feel about him, this is never going to be more than a client relationship. Personable, sweet, easy, as most such relationships are in Havana, but even if the verbal part of it were nuanced enough to tell him I don’t want it any more complicated than it is already, and don’t yearn to hear him snoring beside me, and don’t care to wake up next to him or anyone else, he’d still assume what any self-respecting coquette or man-child would: “He’s lying, he wants me fucking his brains out all night, it’s all he thinks about. He’s crazy about me.”
We forget, since we’d rather not know, that everybody has his own agenda. Everybody.
The next day, he appeared at the usual dot of two. He performed an arduous pantomine assuring me that soon he’d keep his undesired promise to sleep here. After the lame charades of the night before, I completely lost patience and hustled him out to the street right after we finished the business end of the afternoon. Maybe I’ll dump him altogether this week. Life’s too short.
The Rusty Nail, West Hollywood, 1976. I drink a vodka tonic and peer out at a plate-glass window at Santa Monica Boulevard, provisionally waiting for Dane, who said he might come here, and provisionally cruising the bar for a backup, in case he doesn’t show. The crimson stars of passing taillights trail across the window. The reflection of something familiar in the glass makes me shudder. Ferd has materialized suddenly, sitting at the shiny bar counter.
I turn around. It’s really him, but I have that unsettling moment of wondering who “him” is. A ruffle of short hair pokes from the brow of a beige leather cap, too sportif by half. He wears a striped, white sports jersey with an alligator on the tit. The un-Ferdish shirt and hat compress the last seven years into a flash card. But times have changed. From his look, I think he expected me to notice him several minutes ago. The only Ferd news I’ve had all this time was Carol calling me in Boston to say they got divorced. I don’t know how she knew where to find me or how she got my number. Not long ago she tracked me down here in Los Angeles by telephone, too.
I tried living in Boston after being released from the place where my parents put me to finish my nervous breakdown. Boston fell within their sphere of attraction, a fateful misstep I saw in advance but also felt protected by. They were close enough to send an ambulance. I missed them, too, though the warmth I felt from a distance frosted over the minute I saw them in person. New York would have been far enough away to have a nice relationship with them over the phone, but the thought of it scared me. New York was too big, too high, too indifferent, too full of millions whose miseries New York sponged up and squeezed out over the Atlantic without even tossing in a sympathy wreath.
Boston. A mean, provincial town with a heart of shit. If you looked gay to some drunken mick from Southie or walked down the wrong street at the wrong hour, you could count on an ugly reception, and maybe get beaten to a pulp or your head bashed in with a crowbar. The supposedly better element of Boston consisted of would-be bohemians floundering cluelessly in the fantasy that they lived in a cradle of civilization. As cities go, a ripe outhouse.
I got out of there as fast as possible, when someone offered me a Legal Aid job in LA. Not the one in Watts, but an earlier paralegal slot at the central office on Eighth Street. The Eighth Street office sat in a dead zone where Bunker Hill had been demolished that looked as desolate and nearly as scary as Watts. I didn’t miss Eighth Street later on, though we had been able to buy good sandwiches at Langer’s instead of skipping lunch or risking our lives foraging for food.
LA in the 1970s was a sleepy backwater, which no one born around that time or afterward ever believes, but it’s true. Asked to point out evidence of LA’s defensively touted cultural bounty at the time, one of the lawyers I worked for cited Hamburger Hamlet. All the same, Boston was the anus of the USA by comparison. After settling at the Bryson, I felt less at war with myself than I had in my entire life. I felt like a grown-up. I felt almost home. And now here was Ferd.
Passing time had bleached them into unreality, but the last days in San Francisco persisted in a faint phosphorescent residue of anger about being used like a Kleenex. This emitted its dying glow as I went over to the bar. I made a snide, lame crack about people who eat people being the lousiest people in the world, which made him wince and pull himself back slightly, as if expecting a full barrage. But a real display of hostility didn’t seem justified, since I no longer actually felt any.
I’ve had spotty images of Broderick Street available for viewing in my head since 1969. I’ve never kept them in sight long enough to discover what I think about them. Forcing them to mean something has never appealed to me, though I’ve written about them here, so I suppose now I have. It seemed prudent not to bring any of it up, but inevitably we did talk about it that night, and never spoke of it again. Ferd had given Broderick Street a lot of reflection. He confessed to feeling guilty about that whole period. He told me he felt responsible for the rape, which I felt was really taking it too far.
I had never figured out what to feel about getting raped. Men were not supposed to be raped, and when it happened, nobody called it that. If you were male you were supposed to be immune to it, or strong and scrappy enough that
nobody could really penetrate you without your cooperation. In my mind, the incident in San Francisco resembled the cemetery acid trip in Easy Rider, and it made me sad. But weird as it sounds, the fact is that I was raped a second time, by a male nurse, in the place where they put me after I flew home from San Francisco.
Two rapes seemed more ridiculous than tragic. Perhaps this sounds glib. But prevailing opinion that what happened to me was not even possible forced me to suck it up and keep my mouth shut about it. As it happens, I reported the second rape, with the consequence that the psychiatrist assigned to me filed an affidavit swearing I had admitted fantasizing the whole thing, while the hospital administration quietly transferred the rapist to a job at a different facility.
After the second sexual assault that I was supposed to feel less manly about having been the recipient of, turning both events into an ugly comedy was the only way I could deal with them. Anyway, it sounded as if Ferd, for all his sophistication, had cast himself as the agonized father who didn’t protect me from the Hells Angels in a script written for afternoon television.
“You know something,” I said when he finished flagellating himself, “I wasn’t as traumatized as you seem to think I was.”
I hear his voice again, which I can’t really describe. He had a very individual voice. A slightly droning one, crackly, with high-pitched, piping inflections. Its ever-mysterious, hypnotic effect on the evening in question revived that fierce, familial, occult recognition of who we really were in the core of our souls.
“Really?” The slightly sunken, drooping eyelids that gave him his Baudelairean aura flipped up in surprise.
“Oh, go ahead, asshole, you were about to say what a relief it is to hear it when you realized what that would sound like.”
I’m not sure whether we saw Dane that night. I can’t exactly locate a free-floating memory of us three driving to East Hollywood in Dane’s exterminator truck and doing the bars. It definitely happened, but maybe on a different night. Of the night at the Rusty Nail, I only clearly remember the beginning of a long conversation that continued somewhere or other until closing time, stiffly at first but then sloppy with alcohol and an excess of drunken feeling. We weren’t the same people anymore. Ferd hadn’t injected heroin in years. I took speed, but only to get through insanely many hours of work and cruising bars after work and a lot of fucking after the bars. Chronic sleep deprivation was causing me to go numb all the time and forget things, but being numb agreed with me and I had nothing important to remember at the time. I was up all the time, but never really high.
After seven years, Ferd and I had no sexual or romantic interest in each other at all. Yet there was an unexpectedly strong connection. In our different ways, we had been thinking about the same things, reading more or less the same books, paying attention to the same awful things happening in the world.
He had finished a teaching degree in Chicago, abandoning “the arts” after splitting up with Carol. He joined a splinter faction of the Weather Underground. After that, he migrated from one militant leftist group to another. From what I gathered, this progression reflected his growing conviction that nonviolence had stopped being a workable strategy around 1973. I had drawn a similar conclusion, though unlike Ferd, I had no intention of doing anything about it. I’ve never felt any burning desire to change the world—it’s completely beyond my capacity. It was beyond his, too, though Ferd eventually did change part of the world for the better. (This is much more his real legacy than my personal dealings with him, I hasten to add.)
After he left San Francisco, politics really became Ferd’s life. As it happens, it had also been his life before San Francisco, though I never knew this, weirdly enough, until after he died. Before I met him he had worked in the South during the darkest days of the civil rights movement, and he’d done many other really praiseworthy, selfless political things, full time. I can’t account for having known precious little about his life before 1969, except by saying that no one who met him where and when I did would have imagined this history, and he never told me about it later.
This is odd, for sure, because I lived with him for months at a time, intermittently, over a twenty-year period. We spoke once or twice a week from 1987 until a few months before he died. It’s just the way it was, he seldom said anything about his early life. It occurs to me that some people bring their whole histories into friendships and love affairs, out of habit, and others don’t, without necessarily being secretive. It’s jarring all the same, to discover that you know little about someone you consider an intimate friend.
I had taken him for a besotted aesthete and would-be French decadent in San Francisco. Perhaps it was the heroin, but he played this role to perfection. When we met again in Los Angeles, he had shed that pose entirely. He had moved back to California, apparently, out of rigid fealty to a commune of militant, gay leftists living in a house in—Echo Park? Los Feliz?
I never visited the commune. I don’t think I ever knew where it was. Ferd’s description of it in the Rusty Nail made it sound like a weird cult of doctrinaire, puritanical faggots. Men joining the commune, for example, had to take oaths that they would only have sexual relations with other commune members. This was the acid test of their ideological purity, because none of them found any of the others remotely attractive in that way.
I should mention that regardless of how respectfully Ferd treated me, I felt intimidated by him. I thought he knew more than I did, particularly about political theory, Marxism, superstructure and base, all the canonical texts of communism I found impossibly written, et cetera, et cetera. This is why, when he spoke of the gay panthers, or whatever they were, I didn’t reveal how completely nuts they sounded to me. In 1976, part of me felt outraged at the lot of my Legal Aid clients—the better part of me, I think—and still believed in a violent change of the social order. Any group committed to disruption had my meaningless endorsement, although I thought it preferable that Ferd’s group make the revolution without my assistance. They seemed to have more time to concentrate on it, and no appealing ideas about how to carry it off.
Another commune rule: a member was only permitted to masturbate standing before a full-length mirror. “The point,” Ferd said, “is that when you actually stand there and make yourself come, you see what you’re actually doing.” I don’t recall what he said that actually was. I’m not sure if he said masturbation was the ultimate surrender to an evil, ideological paradigm—an analysis beyond my grasp—or if this jack-off-in-a-mirror concept had to do with Lacanian analysis, or what else it could possibly be thought to illuminate. I knew better than to ask for an encore of Ferd’s explanation. They had their reasons, whatever they were.
In a breathless hush, Ferd disclosed that he and his fellow communards, in concert with enclaves elsewhere in California, planned to travel later in the year to Houston, where they intended to set off an explosive device at the International Women’s Conference, for ideological reasons I think Ferd explained at some hour when I was too drunk to follow them.
Well. The second chapter of my Ferd story opened, if not with a bang, at least the rumor of one. As I mentioned, Dane may have shown up, and we all may have gone to the One Way or the Detour, unless this happened another night, I can’t be certain. I couldn’t say, either, whether Dane and I went home together if he did show up, though if he had we probably did, though we sometimes didn’t. By that time, I appreciated the lack of complication Dane insisted on from sexual partners. Ironically, once he perceived this, he often phoned asking if I’d meet him for a drink, or dinner and a movie.
A new, subtle register in his voice let me know if he only wanted to have a drink, without the full monty afterwards, or was leaving the decision up to me, or was set on bringing me home or at least getting a blowjob in his truck. For a long time, he’d resisted (sensibly, I think) spending time with me that didn’t lead directly to the bedroom if it started outside. This changed when I stopped acting like a desperate lover who couldn’
t get enough of him and resented his other boyfriends.
Having Ferd in my life again made LA less lonely. It still felt like a waiting room. I wanted it to be home, but never convinced myself that it could be.
It was also thrilling to feel connected to a terrorist. That was then, when terrorism made a kind of sense, though what kind I can no longer tell you.
After a suicide bombing, forensic investigators immediately “look for the face mask.” The shock waves from an explosion blow the bomber’s head to smithereens but for some reason leave the face intact as a peeled, rubbery pentimento of the missing person, like a condom that stares back at you. After the Benazir Bhutto assassination, they found two.
eleven
Yesterday a feeling of evil spreading everywhere like fog crept up on me. I was sitting on the patio of the Hotel Nacional near the cliff edge. The world has gotten very small, I thought. For some the world is limitless. Others find it small indeed, and finally crack from claustrophobia. I was gazing at the horizon where Florida was hidden behind the sea. The Caribbean looked stagnant, despite the tide crashing on the sea wall flinging up dramatic plumes that drenched people on the sidewalk.
A dream last night, with Kathy Acker in it: something that evaporated in layers as I woke up, full of noisy fragments, from the summer we went to the piers at night, Kathy in a sailor suit and cap, I in a silk Donna Karan blouse, white Courrèges boots, and a miniskirt, two heavily lacquered little figures in drag pretending to look for quick ’n’ easy sex among the leather queens and bum boys who did it in the trucks, talking loudly the whole time about Althusser and Roland Barthes, as if sitting in a crowded restaurant. The cobbled streets smelled of blood. Three-legged shadows coupled in the dark. We were an unwelcome hazard of West Street. Our voices broke the rhythm of a dozen blowjobs. We enjoyed scaring people.