by Chris Eaton
So he joined Greenpeace, canvassing door to door to save the fucking whales or something, just to pass the time. He only became passionate about it because he couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of the minivan set, with their two-point-four kids and their file folders full of excuses. Their middle class guilt made them bring the environment up at dinner parties. They moved their investments into so-called ethical funds so they could avoid funding strip mines and sweat shops. Meanwhile these new funds invested mostly in banks, who, in their turn, invested in the strip mines and sweat shops for them. And when it came time to lay the money down – for something real like whales – they always managed to be on their way out the door, or on the phone, or had forgotten to go to the bank that week so they had nothing on them.
In the end, he decided to hoof it around Europe instead (way less hard on the feet), permanently borrowing his sister’s backpack and boarding the first plane he could afford for Amsterdam, where he met Marcus. Marcus was supposed to be the end of his fooling around. They met on the train to Barcelona from Paris. Marcus had been on vacation in Greece with some Norwegian schoolmates when they ran out of weed. And he set off on his own because he figured it would be easier to score more. He smelled like a rusting horse. And the musky smell hit the American errant before he felt the hand on his shoulder.
The day after they got off the train, he found an Internet café and wrote home to everyone about him. They booked a room together. If they could find a state that would legalize it (or take a trip up to Canada some weekend), maybe they’d even get married! But then there was this beautiful Finnish boy at a party and he was drunk and so was the boy and partly stoned and so was this boy and… what could he do, really, what could he do? Marcus was perfectly happy snorting coke in the other room, ignoring him already because someone had offered him some free hits. (Drugs would always be Marcus’s first love, and it drove Chris Eaton crazy.) They were also just kissing, at first. But Saku’s lips were like worn leather straps, smooth and soft with a forceful reluctance. The Finn seemed so new to it all, Chris nearly shed a tear, he wanted to hold his hand through the entire night, guiding and kneading and tugging and stroking. He might have stayed there all night if another bitch who also wanted Saku hadn’t ratted them out. And when Marcus eventually broke up the party, kicking Saku in the ribs with his socked feet and using his boot to slap him across the face like a blubbering like a fool (“Can you believe it? Who has the time to take their shoe off in a fight? The coward. In front of everyone, using a boot to smack an innocent fag around.”), Chris Eaton didn’t even bother to pull his clothes back on, his right cheek swollen up around his eye like a dying balloon, the party over, lurching half-naked through the living room, sobbing, and staggered pantless through the streets of the Barrio Gotico district until a cabbie with broken English and hair in his ears picked him up and cuddled with him in the back to calm him down.
“Do not worry about him – ”
“Thank you.”
“He is jealous only.”
“Oh, thank you…”
“Be careful, he hurt you simply because you are beautiful.”
“You’re too kind…”
Well, he’d gone to Spain to fall in love, hadn’t he? Something like his parents had? And here it was, the proof of that love, throbbing below his left eye, a reminder of his own weaknesses in matters of heart.
Who needed Marcus? There were plenty of other men. The cabbie started nibbling at his ear, trying to force his hand at his crotch. And he let him for a while because he didn’t have the money for his fare. “He stole my money,” he whimpered, trembling slightly for effect. “He stole my fucking money… and I’m all alone.”
“Is okay.”
“…”
“Is okay…”
So long as the old man kept driving, with one hand on the wheel, who gave a shit? He got out of the cab at the hotel zipping up his pants, and the old woman at the front desk gave him a dirty look as he strutted by.
When he tried to check out the next morning, the same bitch tried to charge him for an extra key. And, of course, he’d already handed his in. It was that racist, gay-basher Marcus who was still being delinquent. But he couldn’t make the stupid idiot understand what he was trying to tell her. Couldn’t she see the gigantic mound that was swelling up around his eye? Didn’t she know what he’d been through? And now she wanted him to bail out Marcus when all he wanted to do was escape?
“You no give no key!”
“Then what the fuck is that on the wall behind you?”
“He give key lass night,” she hissed at him, which was a bald-faced lie. He could see it in the way her moustache twitched below her right nostril, and the way her tiny, crack-baby eyes constantly looked to the left. But after the sudden appearance of what was either the clerk’s brother, husband or pimp, he finally admitted defeat, and said he would go back to the room for one last check, pissing on the bed before slipping out the window and spraining his ankle trying to jump to the street below. He half-crawled for two blocks before wedging himself between a crucifix cart and the wall, until the heat died off.
History is useless to understanding life, in general or in the specifics of one identity. Why? Because time and truth, the pillars of history, are such immaterial concepts. The latter, especially, attempts to give importance to events that “actually happened,” as if the world of our perception coincides at all with the empirical one. As if we can trust the first-hand account of anyone, including ourselves. The human mind is known to block out traumatic events. Like a car crash or a near-drowning. But even a simple first date can be drastically changed to procure a transcript better suited to liking ourselves. We must, in the end, like ourselves. And so, a “true life” is made up of memory and mythology. Something happens, we tell someone else, we obfuscate, the story changes, it becomes the new truth.
We create our own identities.
By telling stories.
Likewise, our identities never travel in straight lines, but instead jump willy-nilly from memory to memory, using similarities in the “facts,” taking something as innocent as a sitting position, to leap from one place to another. Time is replaced by memory. You go on vacation to Central America, and you’re sitting in a motorized dugout canoe over the clearest waters you’ve ever seen. The sun and sea spray have transformed you into a saltpan. Dolphins are breaking the water all around you. You might even see a manatee. And your lover is sitting on your left side with his or her hand resting excitedly on your thigh. Squeezing lightly.
And then you close your eyes, blink once and you’re back in bed, at home, or you’re back in the days with your ex, when things were still so good, or you’re at work ten years from now, staring at your computer screen and wishing you had made some different career choices, or you’re a three-year-old running around your parents’ pool. The next time you blink, you make the leap back to the Caribbean (and make no doubt about it, you are as much there then as you were the first time you felt it), you’re on public transit, with your lover in exactly the same position on your left side, and you blink, and it’s this little connection of proximity that links the events that define you.
This is why religions are so successful, because they allow people to form an understanding of the world through stories. The so-called truth of the stories makes no difference, because they offer an explanation that fits all the criteria we ask of it. A little bit about Jesus, or Job, a dash of David, a sprinkle of Solomon… This is what life is all about.
We are, each one of us, living, breathing Bibles. We are all mere anthologies of random, unrelated stories and coincidence.
He woke up with horrible pains in his lower abdomen. He was also feeling dizzy again. He wanted nothing more than to sleep in, but the pain was insistent. He could barely enjoy brunch at the bistro on the corner. But he went out that night, anyway. Some friends of Albert wanted to watch a Liverpool game at the pub, and he was glad for the excuse to visit the washroom to escape t
he boredom. He threw up on the ice in one of the urinals, kissed Albert in the alley without telling him about it, and headed back to their flat, hoping to God he wouldn’t shit his pants in the underground.
He’d been sick before. This was different. There was no fever, no exhausted weakness, no feeling of brittleness along his ribs and collarbone. Just nausea and a constant pain around his ass. It hurt to sit. Or to stand, for that matter. And he couldn’t sleep to save his life, not on the lumpy futon Albert called a bed. This was his punishment, he figured, for being gay. This was the ghost of his mother (alive and well back in Florida), cursing him for making her worry about him.
After Marcus, Chris Eaton hitchhiked his way to Berlin. Just in time for the World Cup semi-final between West Germany and England. The game itself held little interest for him, but the Wall had recently come down between East and West (not early enough to form a combined German team), so it was bound to be a party. It was also where the first car that picked him up was going. Albert was Irish to the core of his crystal blue eyes, and the shortest man he’d ever met who still turned him on. In the car, Chris would help him crack cans of Kilkenny so he wouldn’t have to take his eyes off the road. They talked about girls, football, how he’d become stuck in London (“The arsehole of England…”), and football. When Albert stopped for breaks along the side of the road, Chris Eaton watched him pee against the back tire in the rear-view mirror. They were both drunk by the time they hit the city. But they made it in alive, not even bored to death by Albert’s endless rants on why his homeland would never win at soccer’s elite event:
“The refs fucking hate us!” he bemoaned, spitting out the window. “The Irish are the Jews of Europe!”
“You mean the blacks.”
“…?”
“The expression is, “The Irish are the blacks of Europe.””
“…?”
“The Jews are the Jews of Europe.”
Albert didn’t think of himself as gay. But when he was drunk, it didn’t seem to matter much, masturbating each other while they drank at the hostel. They didn’t even make it to the game, passed out in lakes of each other’s sweat, and woke up later to the sound of German youth overturning Volkswagens in the streets below. Albert ran to the window and started spitting on people underneath them. And Chris Eaton was in love again. Thankfully, the apartment Albert rented in London had an extra couch, so when they returned to the UK, none of his friends had to be the wiser about their situation.
For Chris Eaton, London was a tale of two cities: Night London and Day London. Most evenings, they went to pubs and smoked. Or watched a game with the boys, cheering against England. Liverpool was basically an Irish town, anyway. And it was about the only way he could be certain of getting in a fight without trying too hard. When Albert met people he disliked, he played up the accent even more, gave his name as Rick O’Shea and then quickly found some way of turning the conversation around to child pornography or how Shakespeare and Byron used to like lying under a glass table while other British queers shat on them. Occasionally he and Chris Eaton would ignore each other at a disco. And when Albert took his shirt off and twirled it around his head, he was stunning. Then Chris Eaton would pretend to flirt with one of the hired dancers (who let him up on one of the pedestals) or start kissing some Turk who kept buying him drinks and Albert would have him by the hair, dragging him home, and Chris Eaton would be so drunk he could barely remember if he and Albert had fucked or not, or if they had, what exactly they’d done.
It was heaven.
The days, conversely, were goddawful boring, with their museums and architecture, statues of warlords, men who were supposed to be guards but couldn’t move, and the double-deckers spitting up cameras on every corner. That’s why everyone rushes to and from work in London, it’s depressing, how they pander to the tourists, just to maintain the status of a world-class city. And always the same monotony. Every time he went out, it felt as though the movie of his life was a reshoot, and had been cast with the same extras. The middle-aged divorcees from the provinces were always out in full force, lining up for Random Musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, or Musical with an Indirect and/or Specious Historical Connection, or Musical In Which Inanimate Objects Come to Life, with their short-cut highlights and semi-stylish, black suit jackets over gigantic beaded necklaces and white turtlenecks. Or just the turtlenecks. What is it with middle-aged women and turtlenecks? And the hair that seems to be trying to escape from their heads? The ethnic gentlemen always seemed in such hurries, and yet with nowhere to go. The punks seemed like the only ones nice enough to trust with your kids. Every day at noon, he stopped at whatever pizza joint was closest, normally Pizza Hut, which he would never deign to eat at home but somehow craved with every waking moment when he was abroad. It also cost twice as much as any other place he might have eaten at, because the allure of American life was still so new and exciting. He might have blamed one of their grease bombs on the pain he was experiencing. With each meal, it grew worse. He was afraid the doctors might judge him. And eventually he broke down and bought himself a home enema. It was the most painful bowel movement he’d ever experienced. Yet, when he inspected the bowl, there it was: a plum-sized orange ball, the color and texture of the ones they used to play road hockey, with four or five tiny chain links dangling from it. The last one was broken.
“You lost something up my ass and didn’t tell me?” He and the Irishman watched it bob in the water. Apparently Albert had been trying new things for weeks, including this string of – obviously deficient – anal beads he’d picked up at a XXX shop, four balls linked by shorts bits of chain, and had thought Chris Eaton was enjoying it. No doubt he was, but how frightening was it that someone could shove something so large into him and he wouldn’t even remember? And how could he not tell him when he left it up there?
Albert was, at the best of times, reluctant to take responsibility. Perhaps, he accused, if the little pansy could hold his liquor, this wouldn’t be such a fucking problem.
“The little what?”
“You fucking heard me!”
And after shouting at each other for nearly three minutes, when he threatened to tell Albert’s friends and Albert slammed the door on his way out, Chris Eaton tried to flush the ball without thinking.
No amount of plunging could seem to dislodge it.
So he packed whatever he could into a garbage bag – he’d lost the backpack in Spain – and went back to America.
She was without direction. So she moved back to Cleveland, to attend the R. B. Turnbull Jr. School of Enterostomal Therapy Nursing, the only school of its kind at the time, partly to follow in her father’s medical footsteps and partly so she could help people like her mother to adapt to the fear and discomfort of their ailments.
It was in Ohio that he met Emily, at the library, while he was checking out a book about Sol LeWitt. He was thinking about painting his apartment in primary colors, with lots of geometric lines, and he was going to The Master for inspiration. She recognized him from the musical, where he’d been growing his beard out to escape the humiliation of his last dramatic role. And she’d recently taken a course on LeWitt, so the book under his arm provided her with an intro:
“Did you know Lewitt used to work at Seventeen magazine?”
He feigned shock, started flipping through the pages. “This isn’t Seventeen magazine?”
“…”
He was blowing it. “Last time I took out a book on fire.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“…”
“I had to stamp it out.”
She didn’t get it. But she was cute, with an extended neck that lolled like a dying vulture. Her eyes drooped adorably like turkey wattles. And because the Oberlin campus was so small, they couldn’t help running into each other at parties. Once, they even shared a bottle of Canadian rye whisky, and he knew immediately she was the one because she filled the awkward silences with whatever came into her hea
d first.
“In high school, I set up a system with the cafeteria where we could collect the tabs from soda cans and use them to build wheelchairs for the needy, I mean, it wasn’t really a system so much as they let me put a few mason jars and signs near the exits, but we collected nearly twenty thousand tabs before discovering the whole thing was a scam and the tabs were really being used to make guns.”
“‘For the needy?’”
“Can you imagine that? That’s, like, a multi-billion dollar industry there. Built on the backs of well-meaning kids like me. Lesson learned, right? You never know what you’re getting into sometimes. That’s why you really have to do your homework first.”
“…”
“…”
“They don’t make guns out of aluminum.”
And before he knew it, they were at his place, because she’d said something about the Sex Pistols and he invited her back for a lesson in real punk music. There was nothing in his bedroom except a mattress on the floor, where he lay with Emily, both of them naked, and she told him about this guy he’d gone to high school with, this guy she also knew, this really quiet, chubby guy who had rarely said a word to anyone and whom Chris Eaton had barely known except as the only male clarinet player in the school band. In fact, Chris Eaton was genuinely surprised to arrive for his first year at university and find they were living in the same dorm. One night at a party, this guy breached the doorway of his room with blood pouring down his face, having pierced his own nose by slowly drilling the stud pin through the wall of his progressively infected flesh. Within two days, he could barely touch it, let alone turn it to prevent his flesh from adhering to it as it healed. The infection eventually passed into his sinuses, and the only thing that could cover the stench of his breath while he was on antibiotics was popping cloves.