The End of the World Book: A Novel

by Alistair McCartney

  This period of furniture ended somewhat abruptly in 1793 with a new period of furniture that would come to be known as the Furniture of Terror. One of the most popular pieces of furniture during this period was designed by a doctor by the name of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. Marie requested that the posts and beam of her guillotine be constructed from one of her favorite timbers, either satinwood or rosewood.

  G

  GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS

  It is said that British portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough hated painting portraits and only did them to make money. He preferred painting landscapes. So, whenever he did a portrait, he spent most of his time on the grass and trees and clouds and rolling hills, etc., and then placed the sitter in last. The sitter was incidental, secondary, getting in the way of all the spaciousness.

  Apparently, when he painted whoever that boy was who would come to be known as Blue Boy, from time to time he'd stroll up to the boy and whisper things in the boy's ear, like, If I had my way, I'd take a pair of scissors to all my canvases and cut carefully around the human figures, and throw 'em away, so there'd just be landscape and negative space. Then he'd spit into the boy's ear.

  Yet when you gaze upon this painting, which hangs in Los Angeles's Huntington Library, there's something supremely confident in the boy's pose. From his calm demeanor we sense that he can see further than the eighteenth century, and that he is aware that long after his body and the blue silk and the big bows on his shoes have decomposed, long after even the small buttons on his jacket that threaten to burst with all his repressed feeling disintegrate, he and his image will live on; he and his image will be endlessly reproduced, endlessly multiplied into millions of kitsch and inexpensive reproductions placed in gold gilt frames, like the one in my parents' bedroom, above my mother's bedside dresser.

  GAMES

  When I was a kid there was a game I used to play: I would gaze hard at the face of one of my friends and try to imagine what it would be like to have his face and to be looking at the world from behind that face. I found this game remarkably easy to play, and I became very good at it.

  I still enjoy playing this game today: it is still very easy for me to slip behind the faces of my friends and while away some time there, fall asleep there; but, perhaps due to my increased age, it's much harder to find my way back. Sometimes it can take me weeks to get back to my own face.

  GANG INJUNCTIONS

  Naturally, whenever I find myself reading about the gangs of cholos in the L.A. area currently placed under injunction—court orders that prohibit all members of a gang from doing certain things, such as gathering together in public places, riding bicycles, owning cell phones and pagers, or wearing a particular football team's jersey—my thoughts inevitably turn toward the Brontë sisters, who were sort of like a gang. After all, there were three of them: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, not to forget Elizabeth, who died when she was only ten, and Maria, who died when she was twelve. In 1820 the Brontës were similarly placed under injunction when their clergyman father took them to live in Haworth, in the parsonage, which overlooked a graveyard and was surrounded by desolate, graffiti-covered moors.

  Life at the parsonage was so isolated and dull that the girls had nothing to resort to but the splendid exuberance of their imaginations. Although they would have probably preferred to fuck up the parsonage and then fuck up the moors, they had to make do with writing down their violent stories in longhand in spiral-bound notebooks.

  The Brontës were, in a sense, the Victorian equivalent of the cholo, Victorian gangsters, and although grammatically speaking it would be more correct to use the feminine form here and call them cholas, given the Brontës' iconoclastic relationship to grammar let us stick to the masculine form.

  One of the most common and cruelest features of a gang injunction is manifested in the form of a curfew, forbidding the members of said gang to be out between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. A boy I used to know placed in exactly this position once told me, Damn foo, I feel like I'm a cholo trapped in the nineteenth century.

  I lost touch with that boy, just as I lose touch with almost everyone, but I see the Brontës, under the curfew of their century: one's century can be an injunction in itself. I see them playing parlor games and smoking chronic, drinking Coronas and doing needlepoint—the latter bearing heartwarming messages like THE HEART'S VIOLENCE IS THE BEST FORM OF VIOLENCE AND MY HEART IS THE MOST VIOLENT rendered in exquisite Gothic lettering, the text surrounded by a border of hummingbirds with tiny clown faces and thorny, blood-dripping roses. All this activity while waiting impatiently for the sun to shine.

  One of the thirty gangs currently placed under injunction in the L.A. area is the Colonia Chiques gang of Oxnard. I'm not sure what the Brontës would have been able to do about this, but I just bet if Lord Byron were around today—though, realistically, the set of conditions we exist in could never create a Lord Byron—upon hearing of the injunction placed on this gang, he would have set sail immediately, just like he did when he heard about Greece and their revolt against Turkey. Upon arriving at Oxnard harbor, which would have been foggy—here and there a cholo's bald head peeping out of the fog—he would have immediately joined in the rebellion of the gang against their injunction. Yet his poor health would surely not have been able to withstand the rigors of cholo life, and he would have died in Oxnard, just like he died at Missolonghi, on April 19, 1824.

  GARDENING

  Although I do not like gardening in the least, I like it when my boyfriend, Tim, is out there gardening.

  Maybe I don't like gardening because my dad was a gardener. Actually, he worked as a fitter and turner at the BP oil refinery, but on the weekends, to make some extra money, he gardened for wealthy widows who lived in big glass mansions on the other side of the Swan River.

  As my father imposed some order on the gardens, the widows watched him intently through the dense screens of their black lace veils. Afterwards, they'd pour him a whiskey, and then another. He would keep them company. Their veils stretched across the river, all the way back to our house.

  After he was made redundant, gardening became his fulltime occupation. Dad kept his gardening tools in the back of our white station wagon. Sometimes I'd dream that I was lying there in the back with him, my head resting on the big bag of fertilizer, and that he was blowing the smoke from his pipe into my mouth, while my thigh was getting cut on the sharp edge of his shovel.

  As I was saying, although I have no interest in gardening, my boyfriend, Tim, loves it. Every now and then when he is gardening I go out and join him. While he is busy, I like to wander around, absentmindedly, just as I did when I was a boy in my parents' backyard; I like to look at things, like the spiders and their webs and the insects trapped in the webs. It's somehow consoling to know that there is a miniature world of betrayal out there that is even more intricate and delicate than our own.

  Occasionally, my boyfriend even sparks my interest in gardening by saying something exciting like, The lemon tree is being engulfed by the bougainvillea and the pink jasmine!

  This interest of mine is always short-lived. The only thing Tim can ever get me to do in the garden is watering, which is extremely boring, but if coerced I will do it. The one part about watering that I like is when our dog Frida comes and drinks directly from the hose. Her small pink tongue laps away. I've even had dreams where I am watering, and, just as in real life, Frida comes up to drink. But whereas in real life she'll drink for a minute at the most, in the dream she drinks interminably; it seems her thirst, like mine, cannot be quenched so easily. And sometimes I dream that Tim is gardening, that he's tangled in one of the fruit trees, and I have to stop what I am doing and come out and extricate him.

  Dreams aside, in waking hours, Tim is always out there in the garden. I have to say, for the most part, I'm never exactly sure what it is he gets up to out there. I've grown suspicious; he claims that he is out there gardening, but I know what he is really doing: burying things he thinks he needs to
keep from me. So, whenever he goes away, I dig up these holes, learn his secrets, and then put them back, exactly where I found them.

  GARGOYLES

  I've always had a thing for gargoyles, ever since I was a kid and first saw a picture of one, all ugly and hunched, crouched on the edge of the roof of some cathedral in Paris. I like their name, which comes from the French word gargouille, which means throat and indicates their function: to drain.

  Wouldn't it be weird to get a blowjob from a gargoyle? Although in light of their monstrous appearance it would probably be quite off-putting, I bet they'd be really good at it, and therefore the experience would be both frightening and intensely pleasurable.

  The thing that initially attracted me to gargoyles, and continues to appeal to me, is how silent and lonely they are.

  I'm not such a loner anymore, but I spent a lot of childhood by myself, dreams rushing through me like rainwater. You could say I felt like a gargoyle, and I believed that my purpose in the world was similar to that of a gargoyle, to be a kind of ornate drain for those dreams.

  Even today, when you're behind me and inside me, something about the sound and quality of your moans running through me reminds me of dreams and rain. I feel half-human, half-something weirder and scarier than human. And if I stop talking dirty for a minute, once again I begin to feel like a gargoyle, very quiet and solitary.

  GAY LIBERATION

  After living seventeen years of my life in the so-called closet—though I prefer to call it the coffin—and after finally coming out—though likewise, I prefer to think of this as a process of unburying oneself, of clawing one's way out of one's coffin—to finally go out to gay clubs and be amongst my own kind, and to encounter all manner of boys, boys I was not in the least bit attracted to and had to reject immediately, boys I was semi-attracted to, whom I chatted to for a while before inevitably rejecting them, and at times, to even encounter boys whom I was genuinely attracted to, slavishly attracted to, who, noticing my desperation, were swift to reject me, was, all in all, still profoundly liberating.

  GAY MUSIC

  Surely there is nothing more hideous and depressing than the bland, monotonous, supposedly uplifting house music that is played at gay clubs throughout the world.

  Gay men, I beg you: stop listening to this music! There are other rhythms out there that are far more uplifting and far more monotonous. Dance to the sexy beat of my microwave. Dance to the seductively robotic sound of the homeless man at the end of my street sharpening his knife blade.

  GAY PORNOGRAPHY

  Gay pornography began with my father's discovery that exposure to sunlight turns some things dark.

  GAY PORNOGRAPHY, FILMS OF

  In his journal, my father wrote, A good gay porn movie must have basic unity, simplicity, and make several clear points.

  The earliest gay porn films were made by the alchemists in the fourteenth century. The images of the men fucking are technically crude, sometimes upside down; the focus is soft and unsharp, but the images are still obscene and recognizable.

  GAY PORNOGRAPHY, MY FATHER AND

  While my father sleeps in the living room in his favorite chair, I watch porn on the VCR. When the family dogs were still alive, they also used to sleep on this chair, which is covered in a kind of tweedish fabric. The chair was reserved exclusively for the dogs and for my father. The only VCR in my parents' house is in the living room, hence the necessity of my watching porn tapes in the living room. Although my father is a heavy sleeper, I watch the porn with the volume turned down very low, so as not to disturb him or his sleep, which are two separate things.

  It's almost like watching a silent movie accompanied by a soundtrack consisting not of cheesy piano, but my father's snores, which used to disturb me as a child, sounding like something coming from a creature that was not human. His snores no longer bother me, now that I have made peace with the fact that none of us is fully human.

  My parents' gay porn collection consists mainly of early eighties porn, made when AIDS was brand new and still confusing; there's not a condom in sight. As I watch these tapes, the men, most of whom are now dead, look strangely happy: it's as if they are smiling in retrospect; it's as if they know what is going to befall them, and they're happy that for the time being they are still alive. Or perhaps they are smiling a little spitefully, in the knowledge that their pleasure is being stored and recorded for future generations, unlike ours, which is already disappearing.

  Sometimes while I am watching, my dad coughs a bit, because even though the dogs, like the porn stars, have been dead now for close to twenty years, the chair has somehow still managed to retain some of their hair.

  GAY PORNOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAPHS OF

  In the history of gay pornography my favorite picture is of this one boy, kind of slumped in a trashcan in an alley, his legs open and splayed. His shaggy hair is very dark and his skin is milkbottle white. In the picture he's wearing nothing but long white socks with two thick, vertical black stripes at the top—the sweet obscenity of knees—and a pair of black-and-white sneakers. The look on his face is one of absolute abandon. There are other photos in this spread, in which he eventually gets ravaged in the alley, but I like this picture of him by himself, oblivious yet expectant. The photo is dated 1980, the outermost tip or extremity of the so-called Golden Era. After the boy died, his parents donated the socks to the Museum of Boys. Experts carefully catalogued the socks before placing them in a glass case.

  GAY PORNOGRAPHY, AND U.S. IMPERIALISM

  Although many people currently believe that the United States of America is in a period of profound imperial decline, and that proof of this state of decadence can be found in the fact that nothing of any cultural interest whatsoever is presently coming out of the United States, the one exception in this case is gay pornography. In this area, the United States still excels, and produces far more effective and delightful pornography than, say, for example, Europe and its so-called Euro porn. Gay pornography is the one area in which the United States continues to display imperial might; one can present this as evidence that the United States is not in a state of decline, but on the contrary, becoming more powerful by the day.

  GENOCIDE

  Superstitious, they bury the wings separately.

  But first, to begin proceedings, they leave official-looking letters in everyone's post boxes, instructing them to gather in a certain place at a certain time. Don't bother bringing any belongings, the letters state at the bottom. Then they cart away their victims in trucks, into the countryside, which is scenic. The people who aren't being taken away watch, curious, relieved, ecstatic.

  Before killing their victims, they hack off the wings with machetes or meat cleavers. Sometimes three particularly strong men take hold of each wing and rip it straight off the victim's back. On the corpses you can see the gouged-out places where the wings were once attached. On some corpses, there are the buds of new wings, nobbly, gnarled things, which have been known to continue to grow after death for a day or two.

  Some villages, in an attempt to rigorously eliminate every trace of wings, have taken up the practice of burning the wings. In the summer this causes a terrible stink, like burning rubber mixed with sugar. Eyewitnesses say you lose count of all the smoldering pyres lining the sides of the roads. And that nearby there are always bands of wild dogs with numbers painted on them, circling, waiting for the wings to cool down. Some of the dogs don't wait and burn their mouths and quietly howl. They eat only the flesh, leaving the wingframes.

  GERANIUMS

  My favorite odor in the world is that of the geranium—not its flowers, but its green, ragged leaves. If God told me that he was planning to eliminate every odor from the world, bar one, and wanted my opinion as to which aroma he should keep, I would be able to reply immediately.

  Tim has planted perhaps ten of these plants in our garden. Once a day I find myself rubbing one of the crinkly edged leaves between my thumb and forefinger and bringing my hand to my no
strils. The smell I inhale is dense and dank, yet sweet, somehow reminding me of the smell that at times wafts out of the insides of boys. Even more, the scent takes me directly back to childhood, to summer, playing at dusk as my mother watered her geraniums, the odor rising up to greet us.

  The musty odor is probably what a memory itself would smell like, what it would be like if you found yourself trapped in the cool, green chambers of memory.

  GHOSTS

  The act or action of haunting requires the involvement of at least one human being but does not require the presence of a ghost. Unlike humans, who are forever frightening one another and spooking each other out, peering into each other's transparency, and passing fleetingly through each other's lightness, ghosts are basically indifferent to one another's presence—or more accurately, absence. Similarly, ghosts are not attracted to one another; real love can only occur between a human and a ghost.

  Two other common misconceptions. First, ghosts are not white, but pale gray, the same shade as brain matter. Second, ghosts are not made from cotton sheets but from that very fine twill corduroy.

  We try not to think of the day when we will die and, losing our last little scrap of opacity, become actual ghosts. Everywhere we go, we try to leave souvenirs of ourselves, reminders; but there is nothing more difficult for a human being (or a ghost, for that matter) than to leave its trace.