Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

  By the time she was ready to leave the hospital, she could no longer trace the line of her life from the accident to the present moment, was no longer even sure why they’d been in the car that day of the accident, and she began thinking of her life not in the straight line of biographies, but passing in quantum leaps, so that the various stories of her existence were not linked by logic at all, but sat alone like cutlery in a drawer, ready to nourish or cut her, linked only by her own imagination. So one minute she was leaving the hospital in a wheelchair (institutional policy), and the next she was in a bar in Panama City (on her honeymoon?), watching a mediocre jazz band and waiting for her plate of carpaccio to arrive. She was eleven. She was seventy-two. Sometimes it didn’t even feel like it was her. Sometimes it felt like she was underwater, perhaps drowning, and she blinked and was immediately jerked to another instant.

  She theorized this aimlessness as the result of losing her family, her anchor. Without them, she was drifting through nothing. She was a child, begging her own mother to get her saxophone lessons, drum lessons, dancing lessons, dance camp. She had to go to dance camp. And as soon as she arrived she called home crying because she wanted her own bed, and something recognizable to eat, and for the instructors to stop being mean to her. For the other girls to stop being mean to her. She’d been told she had malformed feet, not a dancer’s feet, and so she refused to remove her sweat socks before addressing the bar. Her mother refused to bring her home but did get another room down the hall in the same university residence for herself and Chris’s sister.

  Then she was up all night cramming for finals.

  And buying groceries when she dropped the bottle of milk on the floor.

  And being touched longingly for the first time.

  A flash of being chased through the house by her mother with a wooden spoon. Laughing. A hint of the pride in her first dishwasher. In the grocery store again. And the first time she saw her future husband. After the crash, Chris Eaton spent many years without leaving her home. She paid a neighbourhood boy to mow her lawn. Her groceries were delivered. She had subscriptions to nine publications for the crossword puzzles. On several occasions, she wrote letters to them about words not appearing in her Collins, which seemed unfair to her. She was fairly certain, for example, that banjax could not be a word, and inserted banger instead; but that would have made the across words into tag, ame and mir, all of which were certainly words, and some of which might have been poetic metaphors for “a symbol, to some” and “goes to great depths,” but certainly not a word that meant “crossbreed.”

  It was Ian who then reminded her of the international space station, with its multinational crew, and she felt much happier.

  Living with jules changed his life entirely. To the point where he was sure the Chris Eaton he had been in New York – or the Chris Eaton in London, or Barcelona, or even across the bay in St. Petersburg as a child – would not have recognized him. Through Jules, Chris Eaton became more involved with the Bay Area homosexual community, an advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) culture, joined Equality Florida, was elected as secretary to the Gay and Lesbian Center of Tampa Bay, and worked for a short time for the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which had grown out of the city’s annual Pride events to be one of the largest in North America. He also went back to school, just barely making the cut-off point to transfer his credits from his first attempt, enrolling in a Psychology BA at The University of Tampa, and under the tutelage of an amazing professor progressed directly into the Gender Studies Masters with a focus on heterosexual psychoanalysis. He graduated in a swift ten months, but just barely, and he suspected that they might have approved his thesis simply to be rid of him. He’d been quite vocal about not continuing to his doctorate, so displeased and frustrated was he with the political nature of the academic world. Instead, he withdrew from that world entirely, and he began writing a column for The Weekly Planet called “Each Is Torn,” attempting to address the tensions and confusions between members of the LGBT and heterosexual communities, which was syndicated in several other regions of the U.S. When that other Chris Eaton ran for the Florida House of Representatives in 2002, there was naturally some confusion, and to some degree, because it allowed him to talk about gay politicians and the way many of them try to hide their sexuality, he sometimes played it up.

  ***

  Then, in a letter to his column, after he’d allowed it to become more and more sensationalist over the years, a reader inquired about watching gay porn, wondering if getting turned on by it necessarily made him gay, too. The writer had been watching a lot of straight porn with the same actor in it, had gotten to really relate to that guy, to feel more like, when that guy was doing some chick, so was he. It just felt more real somehow. But then he rented a video starring the actor that must have been placed in the wrong section, because the story didn’t work the way it should have, with the two construction workers talking about being tense and then maybe one of them gets called into the portable by the foreman who happens to be a chick with big boobs, and instead just stayed on the two construction workers. Who knew, the letter ended, that Ian Dowd used to be queer?

  What do I do?

  Chris Eaton spent the next week in a daze, unable to even mention it to Jules. Angelo was alive and had made the switch to straight porn? It made no sense. Surely the letter was a joke. But who would know him well enough to know that he knew Dowd/Angelo? And who would want to play something so cruel on him? Jules? It made no sense.

  Besides: he’d heard from some common friends that Angelo had never come out of his coma.

  But that had been years ago…

  He went to a video store that wasn’t his own, and lurked around the gay section for some time before casually slipping over to the breeder shelves, as if he’d happened on them by accident, picking up random titles without even looking at them. He found a handful of titles with Dowd in the credits, but no photo of him on the front, as is normally the case with these things. So he was forced to rent them. Only, when he brought them to the desk, the chubby Chinese girl asked him for a credit card to secure a membership and he was too afraid she might recognize his name so he left empty-handed.

  He turned to the Internet. A photo search, much like looking at the video dust jackets, produced mostly just shots of splayed women, but some of the pages also provided short scenes on video, and many of those featured pairings with the aforementioned Dowd.

  Definitely not the same person. But then what was the letter writer talking about? It made no sense. He told Jules. Wasn’t that strange, he said. The same name, he said.

  It’s a play on words, Jules said. And not a particularly clever one. Why would you be so surprised?

  And he wasn’t sure. He replied to the letter in the next issue and tried to forget about it. From work, he decided to call Angelo’s uncle Ernest, but couldn’t find a listing for him, so he looked up the hospital and they told him that there was no longer anyone there by that name.

  Can you look again, Chris Eaton said.

  We have no one by the name of Angelo Monterossi.

  And he began to show doubt. Was this not the age of plastic surgery and witness protection programs? Was it not possible to completely change one’s identity, if that were the goal?

  Over a five hundred dollar debt to you? Jules asked.

  But the obsession was already planted. Even if this man weren’t Angelo, he now had a firm place in Chris Eaton’s being. There was so little he could find about Dowd’s life on the Internet, however, where he had come from, or even complete lists of his work. Most entries on male porn stars were for the gay ones, with fairly useless and probably inaccurate information about penis length. What he did find was contradictory and overblown, based entirely on rumour and conjecture. Dowd had been born in Missouri, or Indiana, or Ohio, or Alberta. There were even stories of him being Russian, snuck across the border as a baby in the tights of one of those monstrous female Cold
War weightlifters that were defecting to the US in the eighties in herds, looking like no more than a third glute, and reaching his own epic proportions by suckling straight from her steroid-shrivelled breast. Or he had been born to a new initiate at a nunnery in Italy, raised in the eyes of God by the Sisters themselves, until the sight of young Iago became too much of a temptation. His nickname of Woodpecker was perhaps the greatest clue that he was actually American, because it seemed to point towards him coming from Ohio, where he supposedly played high school football for the Woodville Woodpeckers. But there was also one story of him taking on the name before dropping out of college in St. Louis, because he was originally from Raicheston, Missouri, whose most famous progeny was the creator and voice of the early Woody Woodpecker cartoons, Ben Hardaway (although if that were the case, you’d imagine he might have taken on the animator’s name as his porn handle, too). Then there were the rumours that he’d received the name simply because so many of his co-stars were forced to take short sabbaticals after appearing with him and said in interviews that he could drill holes in trees with that thing.

  In any case, this other Dowd seemed to have lead the life that Angelo had always sought before his accident, only with different sex positions. He had somehow managed to walk off with all of Angelo’s lucky breaks while Angelo had been napping, or drinking, or apologizing for not being able to get it up.

  Desperate, he decided to search for Dowd in academic writing. Porn studies was such a growing field and he was already familiar with a lot of the current academic heavyweights. All he could find on Dowd through the university library, however, was a passing mention in the thesis of a colleague at the University of California Santa Barbara, about gay men of colour in porn and how these stereotypes have affected the romantic lives of other gay men. In addition to some very poignant and precise insights of her own, the author had interviewed dozens of actors and industry insiders, including a woman named Tina Cerosh who told how Dowd was naturally not his real name, and that he had chosen it as a post-modern homage to the gay industry, much in the same way that, as the celebrity obsession of the nineties took over, there came a trend of gay porn actors naming themselves after the real names abandoned by the tinsel town elite. Names like Thomas Mapother, Joe Levitch and Carlos Ray, but also Francis Gumm (largely in tranny flics) and Robert Zimmerman. This coincided with similar names with women in straight porn, which saw the rise of stars like Tara Patrick (the real name of actress and popular softcore model Carmen Electra), the predictable flood of actresses with the name Paris, and the exotic DP-specialist Israel Baline, star of such a broad range of pornographic genres like the rare British-style musical comedy Oh, How I Hate to Get it Up in the Morning, the ass-to-ass lesbian classic Cheek to Cheek, and Anyone You Can Do (I Can Do Better), a sort of Olympic-style reality film with the aforementioned Patrick and a cast of amateurs. She wasn’t entirely sure where he’d first come across the name Ian Dowd, but she believed that he’d heard it at a party in New York City where he’d seen a wall poster for a brilliant parody film with the name on it.

  She also claimed to have been Dowd’s lover.

  But finding Tina Cerosh wasn’t nearly as simple as he had imagined it would be. Mostly because, as he discovered later, despite the fact she was living in nearby St. Petersburg, Cerosh was not, as it turned out, her real last name.

  ***

  Tina Cerosh, née Wax, after a horrifically fatal automobile accident in which certain vehicle parts should have been recalled but were not, was raised by her Albanian-Jewish grandfather in Celebration, Florida: Walt Disney’s fantasy town on the outskirts of his fabled Disneyland. Her grandfather, James Wax, had worked for The Walt Disney Company for years – several years before its inception, in fact – as one of the artists who fashioned the wax representations of Disney’s cartoon creations for use in his rides. An undeniable master, Wax was responsible for many of the original figures on rides like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and It’s a Small World, for which he was also on the crew when it was originally created by Pepsi for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. As soon as Walt Disney laid eyes on it, it’s said he hired the entire team on the spot, and James Wax, at the ripe old age of 54, went from fifteen years of relative obscurity in small-town museums to an extremely comfortable career in the most wonderful place on Earth. When plans for Celebration were first announced, Wax bought the first home, where he planned to enjoy his retirement. But moving day, which should have been one of the more exciting days of his life in 1996, was tragically marred by the death of his only son and daughter-in-law.

  ***

  James Wax loved his granddaughter in the way that grandfathers will: to excess. Anything she needed, he got her. And when he couldn’t afford it, he went to Roy Disney and asked for a favor, which he very nearly always got. He called her Cricket, presumably after Jiminy. And she called him Zdziz, which he told her was Albanian for Grandpa. Because he was retired, they played together most days like they were schoolmates. In fact, he took her out of class on multiple occasions to go fishing, to make art, or just to ride on the Disney attractions, to which he had lifetime free access. Sometimes he tried to scare her with stories about people being thrown from the Space Mountain roller coaster. But he’d also been on it so many times that he had the entire route memorized. And when they rode it together, they’d sit at the front and scream out the direction they were going before they hit it, ruining it for everyone.

  When she became a teenager, they grew naturally distant. She rebelled and began using drugs. She wanted to be a writer and felt that, in order to be genuine about it, she had to scratch every seedy underbelly she could. She and her friends would often take trips up to New York without even telling him, and he would not sleep for days until she returned. Once she walked almost the entire length of Seventh Avenue, alone, wondering what she might do if she were suddenly rushed by young thugs from an alleyway or subway entrance. A homeless man asked her for a dollar. She said all she had was a subway token and showed it to him, and the man offered to buy her a boat later, once he got back on his feet, if only she would only give him that token. I need it to get home, she told the man. It’s my last one. And he said: Girl, I will buy you a house. I will buy you a mansion. And they walked and talked some more. He followed her for the next fifteen blocks and never once asked her for money again, only licked his lips and stretched his hands and talked about the mayor, made a dated joke about an old basketball player with AIDS, and told her how he once worked in a processing plant for chickens and how you should always wash chicken when you buy it ‘cos it never mattered if they dropped that shit on the floor, they just picked it up and wrapped it in plastic and hoped some rich, white fuck would eat it.

  At one corner, the homeless man saw someone he knew, so he asked Tina to wait. He ran across the street and spoke quietly to the other man, occasionally glancing or pointing back across at her. She waited. Then they kept on walking, and when they reached her friend’s apartment, she shook the homeless man’s hand and gave him the token.

  Her Zdziz, it can be presumed, would have been proud of her, had the friend not been a gay man who worked in porn. Perhaps he would have been proud of her regardless. It is difficult to say because he never knew where she went and what she got up to. Nor did he ask. And for many years she took him for granted, this rock in her life that would always be there for her, her anchor, until one day he took sick, bedridden and powerless. And when she realized she might lose him – would lose him – she spent the next three months at his bedside, feeding and cleaning him and basically keeping him company as the Parkinson’s took hold. He fell into fits, began to hallucinate. Called her strange things like Danootah. Or Matoosh. Told her where she should send the clean sheets when she was finished. Spoke in a language she didn’t understand. And his final words to her were proud and defiant: Our name is Cerosz. We will not back down.