I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

  Proposition 13, also known as the Jarvis-Gann Initiative—also known, hilariously, as “People’s Initiative to Limit Property Tax”—was thought certain to pass when it came up for a vote the following spring. This ballot referendum, contrived to enrich the already rich but relentlessly advertised as a benefit to all, would freeze California property taxes at their current figure. As a sop to the non-rich, rents were supposed to be rolled back to their next-previous amount.

  In anticipation, landlords made flimsy cosmetic tweaks that could then be claimed as substantial renovations that justified a rent increase: when rents were rolled back, they would only be lowered to what they’d been before the plumbing got fixed or the boiler replaced. The Okies had been brought in partly to oversee the nonexistent improvements, but also to drive out as many tenants as possible.

  They set about it with malicious glee, selectively withholding tenants’ mail and, though it could never be proved, throwing it away. They targeted pensioners and welfare dependents who’d lived in the Bryson forever. I got a Legal Aid lawyer to file a complaint with the post office, but the result—the installation of actual mailboxes with locks in the lobby—supposedly qualified as a rent-hiking property improvement. Next, the elevator stopped working, on a semi-permanent basis, supposedly shut down for repair. Finally, the malignant new managers began letting themselves into apartments with a passkey when the tenants were out, allegedly inspecting for leaks and damaged furnishings.

  I kept a bowl of loose change in my kitchen. One day the Okie woman stopped me in the lobby.

  “You know, you shouldn’t keep all that money lying around your apartment where someone could steal it.”

  It was infuriating to picture this malicious hag inspecting my personal things, but the Okies were impervious to insults or threats. I had already arranged with a friend of Ferd’s to steal all the furniture in the lobby the following evening and sell it at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, so I kept my mouth shut.

  I loved living at the Bryson. For a few years, at least, it was one of those rare places exempt from the passage of time, like certain islands and barren landscapes in the north and bankrupt cities where industry has come and gone and won’t return. Now it was all going to change, swiftly and horribly. I lit an imaginary candle before bed and prayed for Fred MacMurray to die.

  La Rochefoucauld: Il arrive quelquefois des accidents dans la vie d’où il faut être un peu fou pour se bien tirer.

  fifteen

  Ricardo, my new boyfriend, drags me to visit Ino, who teaches dance. Ino lives in a gigantic five-story building between the Capitolio and the Plaza de Armas. The entrance is like the mouth of a whale, a pitch-black tunnel between the sidewalk and a courtyard where laundry hangs from sagging balconies overhead and everything visible looks theatrically battered and decrepit, the set of an imaginary Samuel Beckett opera directed by Visconti.

  Cement steps on the left go to a mezzanine terrace of apartment doors, balustrades, a restaurant with little tables planted in the walkway, dwarfed by the vaulted underside of the floor above. Across the mezzanine, a staircase of wooden slats grooved with rot bypasses the upper floors to the roof. Ino’s room resembles the shack Monica Vitti’s friends demolish for firewood in Red Desert. It has a water closet, no bath. He washes in the sink. The floor feels stable, but really the whole Piranesian structure could collapse in a second into a pile of debris, as old buildings in Havana often do.

  The roof is a sky-shantytown of hovels, like animal burrows, lining an alley of packed earth. Instead of doors they have gauze, with Santeria candles flickering on altars to the Black Virgin of Regla behind them. I’m not convinced that the science fiction effect of Ino’s roof—the Capitolia dome, copied from the US Capitol Building, looms gigantically and looks about to collide, like the rogue planet in Melancholia—justifies the risk of plunging to a certain skull fracture by setting foot on Ino’s staircase. Ino is a florid, sweaty, histrionic queen, who throws his meaty arms around me and kisses my face unpleasantly whenever he remembers I’m in the room. This is the third or fourth time I’ve visited Ino with Ricardo. I’ve tried hard to like him, but don’t really.

  Ino always has boys from the country in his cluttered lair, who sit or stand around looking spellbound until Ino sends them bolting down to fetch something from outside. Sometimes it’s another boy or a melon or a bottle of Havana Club. He finds these boys nearby, in front of Kid Chocolate Boxing Hall, where they gravitate upon arrival. Ino ensorcells them with eccentricity and bits of food. They expect a little cash from anyone they sleep with—rightly so, if it’s a tourist. Even rich Cubans are poor compared with tourists, and any foreigner in Cuba is richer than a poor Cuban. I don’t know if Ino pays them, or just lets them use his bed for business transactions. I can’t imagine where he goes in that event or if he stays and watches or joins in.

  I’m behind the wheel of a blue Mazda sedan on the Harbor Freeway in the early autumn of 1978. The extreme right lane of the Harbor Freeway, near the junction where the left lanes curve to negotiate an underpass. Every lane is marked off by speed bumps, raised metal cleats that rattle the car if you drive over them. Commuting from Watts to Westwood, I’ve developed the habit, or game really, of steering out of the far right lane at the last possible moment, as the freeway widens and divides, into the farthest left lane, crossing six lanes of traffic, the object being to avoid all speed bumps. A real test of dexterity. The Mazda glides into the underpass, hugging the extreme left curve of the freeway as the road skirts the huge cement pylons that support the Hollywood Freeway overhead. A game of skill and daring, and fabulous stupidity.

  Something is wrong with the car. It hawks and splutters when I turn the ignition. The engine slacks for a couple beats during a gear shift, as if a nonexistent fan belt has slipped off—the car doesn’t have a fan belt. When I bought it, I was mildly interested to learn the Mazda rotary engine was “all one piece,” more dramatically so than a normal car engine. If one component broke, the whole engine became worthless. I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong with such a car. I assumed it would one day die a natural death and possibly shoot up into the upper air, in a sort of Auto Rapture.

  Events, or a lack of them, have instilled in me an unshakeable sense of utter insignificance. I am too peculiar to figure importantly in anyone’s life, including my own. Even years later, when the idea that I exist can be asserted with external evidence—books I’ve published, films I’ve acted in, plays I’ve directed, friends who can confirm my physical reality, passport records of countries I’ve visited, bank statements, dental records, blood test results, psychiatric files, hotel registers, airline ticket stubs, old photos, bales of early writing archived at a major university, and other documentary proof—I will continue to register as a blurry human smudge in my mind’s eye.

  But now, in 1978, I’m trading the Mazda for a used, dusty VW Bug at a dealership in Glendale. I drive off the lot with unnerving clumsiness, having lost the hang of operating a stick shift. The car lurches up an on-ramp into seething west-bound traffic. I’m keenly conscious that my cousin Jimmy died only three years ago in a crash of exactly this model Volkswagen. The engine punched through his back. I recall a well-intended but vulgar, tactless remark my father made at the funeral. I briefly despise him for it, then cringe guiltily for my punitive thoughts about this parent, whose life hasn’t been any picnic, whose own parents knee-capped his self-estimation like two Mafia thugs from day one. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. The car stinks of sour dust and motor oil. Fetid after languishing unloved for months, between more attractive, sexier, younger vehicles, under wire lines of flapping plastic pennants. I have an eerie fantasy that I’m driving the death car my cousin was crushed in.

  Over the ensuing days, minor accidents in the VW cause me to regret the trade-in. I crash the front bumper into the wall of the Bryson garage. In Chatterton’s back lot, the rear bumper collides, with great force, into a parking meter. The car�
�s steering is tight as a spool of thread, the tires instantly pivot when I touch the steering wheel. The gas, clutch, and brake pedals feel too close together, or too far apart. I swerve out of lane on the 101 and miss scraping a tanker truck by a hair. The car seems scarily vulnerable, like a brittle shell between me and highway fatality.

  On the weekend, Dane, who recently ditched me in the Spike to pick up a comelier trick, insists I come to the house in the Valley, where cardboard boxes he didn’t unpack for three years have been joined by many others containing everything he did unpack. He pours shots from a Sambuca bottle. He’s moving ahead with leaving town, depressingly cheerful, promising he’ll stay in touch, which he won’t. He interrupts his clearing out to waltz-walk me into the bedroom. “Maybe,” he says, exposing Mr. Stiffy in friendly tumescence, “you’ll come to Austin some time.” “Not real likely,” I say. “If you come,” he says in what he thinks is a Texas accent, “I’ll fuck you real good.”

  We have sadly self-conscious sex, stopping often to drink more Sambuca and smoke cigarettes. We’re both elsewhere. I’m impatient to finish and leave. Dane isn’t planning to depart for another two weeks, but I’m not emotionally equipped to return again, to an even more vacant house, which already has the hangover vibe of a struck theater set after closing night.

  On Sunday, Ferd calls and chats for an hour before carefully disclosing that he’s moving back to Chicago. I can hear that he knew this news would upset me and avoided telling me for a long time. I pretend I’m not bothered. My instinct is to berate myself for feeling anything, as if my ordinary emotions are irrelevant. Ferd argued with himself, he says, until yesterday, that he ought to tough it out, move to his own LA apartment, but he doesn’t see any bright future in California.

  “I didn’t realize you were expecting a bright future,” I said.

  “Of course I’m not,” he says. “You know what I’m saying. If I stay I’ll get a shitty job I hate, and muddle around for another decade. How’s that working for you?”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “You’d feel more secure, and also more free, if you lived closer to your family, wouldn’t you?”

  “In Boston? Ferd, fuck that. You know? Fuck that. You plan to spend a lot of time with your dad in Alpena?”

  “No. But I got offered a gig at that Latino high school, why not do it for a while? It’ll make a change. It isn’t a leap in the void.”

  “If I leave, the only logical place would be New York. I can’t live in Boston again. People rot away there. It’s totally inert.”

  “This commune isn’t working out,” Ferd says, not for the first time. They haven’t blown up a building or kidnapped an oil company CEO or carried out any other murderous pipe dreams worth going underground for, though they’ve all behaved as if they were on the Most Wanted List for over a year. He is, he says, rethinking Leninism, “and the whole base and superstructure paradigm.”

  “I thought that was Stalin’s idea,” I say. “I read Comrade Stalin’s thinking on base and superstructure not long ago. On your recommendation, come to think of it.”

  “Read Mansfield Park instead. It’s more true to life. This has been like Stalinism without Stalin.”

  “I used to think you’d make a good Stalin, Ferd. But I’ve judged you too harshly, probably.”

  Ferd suspects the commune will soon breed Golden Labs and hold bake sales in the front yard. He’s decided, finally, he’s going to bury himself for now, teaching high school to Hispanic inner-city youths. He will fan the flames of revolution on weekends, if he isn’t too exhausted.

  Carol phones days later, with similar tidings. She’s set on leaving UCSB for Pima College in Tucson, where they’ve offered her a job. Carol has history in Tucson, I recall, unless her tales from yesteryear of hanging around Andy Warhol while he shot Lonesome Cowboys was another Carol fabrication. The thought of living in the desert gives me creeps.

  No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies, who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice: she appeared intact, she said, but was threatened with disintegration, if her protective envelope should happen to melt.

  —Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

  sixteen

  There has been no butter for two weeks. A taxi driver thought there might be butter in the supermarket in Miramar. I think so too: I once saw a man in that market buy twenty cases of Coca-Cola in loose twelve-ounce plastic bottles. Otherwise there is no butter to be found anywhere in Havana. I am not going to Miramar to find butter. I am content to believe I could, whereas I’d be most unhappy if I went and discovered they didn’t have any.

  Last week there were no tomatoes. We looked for them everywhere, to make spaghetti sauce. Just when we resigned ourselves to no tomatoes ever again, the markets were suddenly full of them. Things like this happen all the time. Yesterday our building elevator, broken since the rains in May, was repaired. We rushed out for the joy of returning later and making out with our dates in the elevator. Or with each other, if we didn’t find dates.

  There is now a shortage of pharmaceuticals. That is the embargo. I have an infection. First the national pharmacies ran out of Dipirona for pain. Then Cipro disappeared. In the full-price international pharmacy in Miramar a tall, fortyish Jewish Cuban American princess held up the line for forty minutes with the kind of obnoxious, trivial complaint visiting Cuban Americans love to inflict on people working here in stores, smugly aware that they are inconveniencing many of their former countrymen by exploiting the bureaucratic fastidiousness and imperturbable slow pace of the people serving them. The proud little smile this witch offered the twelve people waiting behind her reminded me for all the world of an erstwhile editor of mine, a malignant twat who was full of absurdly unmerited self-confidence and had the brains of a luncheon menu. I gave the woman in the pharmacy the finger, which happened to be the infected one. I’ve just given the editor the same finger, so I suppose this infection is good for something.

  The orthopedist at the university hospital wanted me to take Cipro for five days before he lanced the blistered fingertip, which everyone on the Malecón is curious about now, as it began as a tiny white discoloration and quickly blossomed into a major problem. Also, since it was soaked in iodine, the bandage looks like a little orange microphone for Karaoke Barbie. But after two days I couldn’t stand it. We went to see Ricardo’s mother’s cousin who works in a hospital lab across the road from the Carlos III shopping center. She walked us through a maze of hospital corridors and waiting areas, some of them open to the sky, to a doctor who told her to poke it open with a sterile needle and squeeze the pus out, which Ricardo’s mother’s cousin proceeded to do, while a lab worker on maternity leave came by to show off her new baby. I wanted to scream from pain but didn’t. I looked at the baby and saw a future of scrapes and bruises. Life is short and full of pain and always beautiful, besides.

  My Santeria doctor thinks he can cure anything. He is useless for anything besides back problems, where he does possess a certain genius. Even then, he insists on explaining “the Eastern philosophy” he studies, at such tedious length that what are basically chiropractic sessions are ten percent treatment and ninety percent explanation of how the blood flows around the brain when the chakras or whatever are in tune with the moon. I get a brand-new pain from nodding like a moron for forty minutes out of sixty. All the same, I call him to give me acupressure with a lit taper, which distracts me from my finger.

  At the original hospital, a different orthopedist, young and handsome, studies the result of my treatment at the second hospital. He decides to scalpel away the blister, scrape out the infection, and douse the wound with iodine. First he injects a local that numbs my other fingers and leaves the afflicted one with full sensation. So that little operation was a trip. Now the finger is only a little swollen, but I can’t get it wet. The surgical glove they gave me to wear in the shower do
esn’t fit over the bandage. We wanted to go to Camagüey and swim in the coral reef. Now we can’t do it until August, if I come back in August. You must never plan, is the lesson here. Last year all the raving beauties on the Malecón were from Isla de la Juventud, but this month they are all from Camagüey. We thought it would be nice to meet some who hadn’t moved to Havana and become complete whores yet. It has to wait.

  Tuesday night, the Westland Twins: we’re screening a stupendously dull Claude Lelouch flick, If I Had to Do It All Over Again. Between show times, Kevin and I restock the candy shelves, tart up the refreshment area, tally sales, and gurgle a little song: “If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it all over you!” Kevin needs a ride home to Venice after work. He invites me to check out some gay bars on the way to his house. This is the first time we’ve gone drinking. Also the last, as it turns out.

  The beachside bars have nautical or underwater themes. Unlike gay bars in the city, which all imitate cowboy movie saloons, these shine with polished aquariums and glossy plants and smell like ozone. They have an unpleasant trick of using pinkish flood lamps to achieve the same degree of visual obscurity as bars that are semidark. Instead of torpor, though, these places encourage hyperanimation. Cruising guys dart at their intended prey in brusque strides, venture a few hurried words, speed to their next prospect when deflected. It’s as if the lugubrious, defensive ritual of snuffling for cock has been revamped as a wacky, tacky afternoon game show.

  Evidently, Venice bars all contain the same twenty or thirty muscular, blond, ex- or current gay surfers, each bent on coupling with his twin, or with an equally svelte, chiseled, darker version of himself with black hair and an Italian or Jewish nose. The seaside prime meat are disco queens with class pretentions, a whole species apart from the horny supermarket stock boys, civilian leather tops, and grungily alluring ex-convicts I readily attract in East Hollywood. This bunch looks aggressively brainless as they ardently appraise each other’s bracelets, shoes, haircuts, and other signs of expensive maintenance. They speak a metallic birdsong of sun and surf. In another time and place, their tribe would be easily enslaved through the judicious gifting of cowrie shells and glass trinkets. They boast of sultry lives, careers in jewelry design and hairdressing. They hint that they’re kept playthings of multimillionaires away on business. Chatter is all soigné weekends in Cabo and St. Barts, blunt-force fucking that’s better than sex because it has money mixed in with it. In ten years, all these people will be dead, since the exaggeratedly attractive are first to go in the epidemic.