No Church in the Wild

by Paine, Bacchus

  “But you said there was a she?”

  “Yes, forgive me. I love this stuff too much.” She smiled a warm, wide smile, and her eyes softened. It took me a second to recover. “Right so, there was a client-queen in what is now the general vicinity of Syria, the Palmyrene Empire. She was married to the local king, who died when she was in her late twenties. After he died she assumed control of the country, expelled the local Roman authority. She conquered parts of Egypt. But the best part is how the biographer describes her sex life: when married, she permitted her husband to fuck her once per month, in order to conceive children, and then she made him wait until after her next menses to try again. Once he dies, she takes no other lovers, ever. And in all other respects she was a Marcus Aurelius – successful in battle, expanding her territory, heeded in counsel. The biographer is doing most of the work, of course. She’d lived about a century before he wrote. The idea that he had access to accurate information about her sex life with her husband in a country thousands of miles from where he lived is ludicrous. But I love that this was how he balanced portraying her as a successful ruler and a woman with a duty of fertility. Thesis: historical memory is an immensely powerful force, as you clearly recognize.” I’d love to think that I’d gone on like a seasoned professor, carefully intonating with my shoulders calm at my back. But I know I was fidgeting and almost breathless. I felt like I was on fire, drunk now mostly on the feeling of being interesting to her. “Okay, so now tell me about which proteins you use. And why.”

  Suddenly all of my academic inquiries, sexual or otherwise, cowered behind the glow of this brilliant mind. Suddenly, the only thing I wanted to understand better was her. I felt as though my brain was turned on for the first time in years talking to her, and the omnipresent urge to run away shifted vaguely into an urge to run towards something.

  What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our mind.

  Siddhartha Buddha

  Anamnesis[††]

  It was a cold night for March, it seemed, when February had seen 74 degrees and sunny. But it was dry. The walk circulated the blood such that friction warmed me from the inside out. I was overheated with it. I didn’t know whether Isis and Ben could still see me on Market Street, so I felt obliged to turn the corner before I slowed to a stop, put my hands on my hips, and let my jaw fall to my chest. I exhaled.

  “Been joggin’?”

  I lifted my head and my eyes fell on Grot. He was covered with a four-leaf-clover green blanket. It spread around him like liquid poured over his shoulders, reaching outward onto the steps. “Hello, there… how’s your evening?” I asked.

  “I’m sitting on the street and it’s cold outside.”

  “Fair.”

  “What’s with you?”

  “Whaddaya mean what’s with me?”

  “Your eyes are googly. You high?”

  “Oh, much worse than that.”

  “Got any more?”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get any.”

  “You got some tonight!”

  “No… this is… not for sale. I’m allowing myself to want something I can’t have, before I stop.” I plopped down beside him. Have you ever been enchanted, Grot? Is that really your name?”

  “Yes. And yes. But with me I was enchanted with drugs.”

  “I have to say I think I just met – well, just properly met – the most perfect imaginable woman. And I’m sorry about the drugs.”

  “Why?! I love drugs.”

  “Some drugs are quite lovely… I can’t speak for them all.”

  “So she’s straight? That’s why you can’t have it?”

  I drooped my head and smiled to myself. “So it seems.”

  “Can ya not be friends? Ya know, perfect people can kick it without gettin’ in the sheets.”

  “Perhaps.” I took the loose dollars in my jacket pocket and handed them to him. “It’ll be more of an uphill climb than that,” and I gestured toward the 16th street hill. I looked on for a bit, then said, “The problem is, I guess, that I’m not sure how long I can sit near her without ripping her clothes off.”

  “If you can walk over that hill in those shoes,” he pointed,” I’ll bet you can manage that bit o’ self control.”

  I looked down at my shoes. “They’re more comfortable than they look.”

  “Psshaw,” he snarled.

  “She lives in the Castro with three lesbians. I think any gay she had in her would’ve bubbled up by now.”

  He just looked at me and wheezed in and out, slowly.

  “Well, I should get on with the hill. Sorry I don’t have another blanket or something for you.”

  “Eh, I’m steeled. See you around.”

  I stood up, brushed the stoop off my ass, and waved goodbye as I took off uphill.

  I texted Wesley as I walked, wondering if I could find any Sauce in her. “I’ll be needing your input on matters involving the seduction of one with the most amazing insight about memory.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just, a researcher chick. Straight. I know you’re good with the straight boys.”

  “I can’t wait to hear all about it,” he replied.

  Once over the hill, it took forever to let myself fall asleep, but when I did I again saw the women writhing in fresco before me.

  The mind is it’s own place,

  and in itself

  Can make a Heaven of Hell,

  a hell of Heaven

  John Milton

  I, Demiurge[‡‡]

  Just before Easter I headed to SFO on a curiously rainy April Friday to collect my friend Scott, whom I found crisp and ready for golf, in a baby blue polo shirt and well-cut jeans marked by the brand of some eminently fashionable maker of jeans. He’d just cut his hair, it seemed, as the stubble rising from his neck faded into oblivion in just the right spot. Pomade shaped his blonde locks into careful, unobtrusive spikes, and his hazel eyes smiled warmly.

  “Thanks for picking me up… and for letting me stay.”

  “Of course, friend!” He hadn’t been expecting to stay with me. He was in town for a couple of Cubs games, planning to stay with his high school friend who hailed from Chicago, where they’d gone to school together. A month before Scott had reached out to say he’d be coming in just to hang out for the weekend, that we should get together at some point, that he was staying with his friend Mark. I liked Mark despite his sometimes-douchey personality. I had to admit that the two of them became especially douchey together, but I knew there was more to each of them than that, so I didn’t hate.

  Scott had gone to business school with Ben, Wesley, and I, and we’d met early on. I’ve since forgotten our first meeting, but I assume it was in the context of our having several of the same introductory classes. I recall vaguely that at one point Scott had suggested we hook up, though I didn’t think he meant to say we should date. The offer hung in the air for a short while before it evaporated.

  In hindsight, it was easy to tell why: we had no chemistry. I’d never quite managed to understand why it was that he had always felt so proximally distant despite my finding him physically attractive. Once I’d recognized the lack of chemistry, I started to notice our classmates’ joking suppositions that he was gay. Then I’d met Mark, and I’d formed a hypothesis.

  Mark had come into town on business for a few weeks in early February during our first year, and as a consequence was around for a grandiose birthday party I was throwing for Ben. I knew who Mark was by the time of his visit, not because I’d asked but because Scott talked about him constantly – the funny things he said, the intelligent things he did, the hilarious exploits he engaged in, how he stayed ridiculously fit without dieting or working out. I gathered from Scott’s descriptions that they spoke on the phone frequently, at least once a week.

  Scott and Mark stood beside one another throughout the party, and they continued to appear obsessed with one ano
ther during the afterparty, when all of our guests began to slur their speech and the pool cover came off. I couldn’t help but watch the two of them, distracted from the other guests almost entirely and hoping I wasn’t noticed. It was during my return from a quick trip to the bathroom that I saw what I was looking for. Mark, his current girlfriend, Scott, and Scott’s then-girlfriend posed for a picture, the boys standing beside one another in the middle. When I walked past I looked to the flip side of that frame to find Mark’s hand squeezing Scott’s ass. Everyone was smiling at the camera, and they’d stood quite close to the wall, and it required that I happen to walk by just at the moment everyone was distracted by a flash to catch the unmistakable gesture of intimacy.

  There was plenty that I didn’t understand, of course. I didn’t understand what they really did – it could be anything from abundant overenthusiastic hugging and ass-slapping during man-bonding to ass-fucking. I didn’t understand how it had started or how long it had gone on, and I was hardly going to ask such questions outright. The flanking by girlfriends meant that they didn’t want to acknowledge whatever it was, and I wasn’t in the business of bursting carefully-erected bubbles – at least, not then. Yet the gesture I had seen was decidedly intimate.

  I’d made no mention of what I had seen to anyone, ever. I’d continued playing Scott’s wingman when we went out, and watched him date a few subsequent girls with curiosity. Regardless of what I knew, I’d not traumatize my friend by publicizing something he’d made such Herculean efforts to keep suppressed. But, after that party, I more carefully investigated the motivation for anyone’s telling me they thought Scott might be gay.

  Mark’s job had transferred him to San Francisco about three weeks before Scott’s job had unexpectedly transferred him out of San Francisco to New York. In the years that passed since, Scott had been to town about six times that I knew of. He always stayed with Mark, who had plenty of space and an air mattress, I was told, and who had, after all, been his best friend for over a decade. Where Mark’s girlfriend slept those nights – in Mark’s bed or with regret at her own apartment, I did not know.

  But now Mark had been drawn away unexpectedly, and I was the beneficiary of a three-game series worth of tickets to see the Cubs play the Giants.

  “Don’t worry, it’s supposed to stop raining by the afternoon,” I told Scott as he looked out of the window at the drizzle that could ruin any baseball game, given enough time. I dropped him directly at his local office and went to work myself, promising to meet him at the stadium that evening.

  In the stands, he’d told me the many developments in his life, including his growing respect for the size of the catcher’s forearms and that he’d met a new girl.

  “Oh my! Who is this?”

  “You remember Grace?”

  “Of course.”

  “We started properly dating. It’s been a while now.” I wondered at his lack of enthusiasm.

  “Well,” I said, beating back a wave a skepticism, “I’m just all about you being happy. If you’re happy, I’m happy for you. Congrats.”

  “Thanks. I am happy,” he said flatly. And that was the end of our discussion of that.

  On Easter Sunday I plied Scott with brunch mimosas in an effort to convince him to join me for an Easter celebration only a San Franciscan could love: Hunky Jesus.

  Hunky Jesus is your standard, everyday, mostly-naked beauty pageant, but of course, as the name suggests, the contestants seek to appear as Jesus did. Certainly their renditions refer to Jesus in the healthier years before any potential capture or locking in a tomb. Jesus in San Francisco’s mind is apparently not only au natural; Jesus is fucking stacked.

  It doesn’t seem as though a population the size of ours could muster so many decidedly hunky gents with long flowing brown hair and a matching long flowing beard – but we do.

  How, you may ask, did it come to pass that one of the City’s grandest parks fills with persons yearning to watch a facetious religious festival capped off by a high-speed downhill race on plastic tricycles? Oh, but it’s quite simple: an order of queer nuns organizes it. This year, they called it “Pumps and Circumstance.”

  Easter morning begins with a classic Easter egg hunt for kids in Dolores Park, where hills roll upon one another as they fall down upon the bay, beginning the gentle tumble descending into the Tenderloin and through the Transamerica Pyramid onto the expanse of Bay Bridge. The kids’ morning is followed by a parade of drag queens sporting bonnets that would put Little Bo Peep to shame, before the Hunky Jesuses spring forth to sate the clamoring masses. In between, minor moments of the Red Hots Burlesque and Adonisaurus and Thrillpeddlers sprinkle the park’s supple greens. Exposed pecs are everywhere to be seen.

  The nuns’ order, the dear Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, is a forty-year-old organization of, well, queer nuns, generally male, “dedicated to community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights and spiritual enlightenment,” using “humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.” Their day starts with a prayer, which appears by all accounts to be wholly sincere.

  Our drinking breakfast seemed more than sufficient to pick apart whatever inhibitions Scott might conceal from even me, and so it was barely two o’clock when we sauntered down Church Street to watch the park open before us, accompanied by his unadulterated enthusiasm to witness the Hunky Jesuses.

  Packs of hipsters speckled the green and the smell of weed snuck carefully into our nostrils, never to depart. Congregants laid a quilt of beach blankets clipped together by kegs, slipping jumbled over the roll of hills and the carpet of grass. We strolled past hula hoopers and skaters, purchasing beers two-at-a-time from makeshift cooler-bars, as I listened to Scott remark on the risqué hairstyles, speckled in pink and seafoam and cyan and consisting of incomprehensible fleecing choices. I supposed that New York did not contain nearly as many Mohawks or heads only half shaved.

  Having been persistently distracted by the musings of the crowd surrounding us, we were actually quite surprised to find ourselves standing below the stage hosting the Hunky saviors themselves when they began to prance with their crosses and loincloths and beards contrasted with shorn genitals. Scott stood hypnotized with the man-bunny-hosted procession, his eyes never leaving the swelling muscles of messiahs. The man-bunny host was hardly the only attendee dressed in a relevant costume. One elderly gentleman appeared to have dressed as father spring, flowers in his hair, and a girl in a dress made of teddy bears was blessing each Jesus as he passed her. Blessing them with what, I could not tell. Perhaps the spirit of childhood.

  One Jesus sported a mop of curly, short hair, a speedo, and a cross twice his size on his back. One wearing only white booty shorts had scraped red paint across wannabe stigmata and as lash marks along his back, joyously. A shorter Latin Jesus was mostly dressed in blood, though he’d draped a swath of lace around his genitals. Perhaps the most amusing savior was not naked at all, but rather was wrapped in a giant loaf of bread, with smaller baguettes taped to the outside, resigned to be but a metaphor. A pope with a white painted face flapped flailing wrists toward the finest contestants passing by. A benediction, I suppose. He ignored the Loaf.

  After the big-wheel downhill race and after seeing four drunkards splayed on the pavement laughing through the blood, I suggested we go out and meet Jackson in the Castro. I half suspected Scott would decline and ask to go to straight bars, but he said, “Sure, I guess I’m not picking up any women anyways.”

  We found Jackson at Toad Hall, an iteration of the Castro’s standard middlingly-fancy watering hole, unique only in that it had a penchant for becoming inexplicably steamy inside. I surprised Jackson from the rear, interrupting his conversation with an older gentleman swooning in his general direction. I had, of course, briefed him on Scott’s, er, circumstance, though I’d not known or revealed that there was now a girlfriend in the mix. He turned from his suitor an
d gave me a hug.

  “Jackson, this is Scott. Scott, Jackson.” Jackson transferred his drink to his left hand and reached out to take Scott’s.

  “Great to finally meet you,” Scott explained. “She’s made you quite famous.” He looked at Jackson’s drink, and excused himself to grab us a round.

  He’d taken two steps toward the bar when Jackson turned back to me and said simply, “He’s definitely gay.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “That was quick.”

  “Well, it’s painfully obvious.”

  “How so?”

  “I can’t believe you of all people are tasking me with explaining gaydar… I mean… his walk, his voice, the way he moves his arms. That watch he’s wearing became a GQ darling last fall, and he wreaks of pomade. Plus, The Look.”

  “The Look” I understood. It was the same look I used to test interest at Trigger, or pick the lesbians out of a bar that was chock full of fag hags. It is no particular expression, merely the purposeful failure to conceal interest in someone, the unabashed holding of one’s gaze, with the singular purpose of recognizing that The Look is or is not returned. It functions precisely the same way as heterosexual courting, in my experience. With same-sex courting, I suppose danger in the risk of social awkwardness adds a dimension.

  “Well, look, I certainly don’t disagree that he’s interested in men. He has a sizable quantity of Sauce.” I paused for a moment as I weighed whether or not to reveal to Jackson that he’d just announced a new relationship. I decided I’d not pile any moral baggage onto Jackson’s evening. “But he does date women.”

  “Oh, like that means anything.”

  “Well… agreed,” I said, watching the bartender pour out two drinks in front of Scott, projecting the timing of his return.