by Dale Peck
Sight
by Gil Cuadros
At first I think it must be the fires and the winds, miniscule ash floating through the air and into my eyes. Or the dry Santa Anas pushing down the hillsides, raising the temperature till moisture vanishes, making the edges of my eyes blood red. On the freeway, driving to my doctor, I see clouds of black smoke billowing off the mountains, strange aerial formations of crows and seagulls, twisting and turning like a swath of fabric falling in air. These are the signs, clues written in some ancient script, and I want to know what it all means. The doctor looks at me, her hair pulled back away from her face, as if she were asking, “Can’t you read this language?” She is obviously frustrated, her fingers snap against each other, disbelief in their sounds. I must look ridiculous, sitting there, a smile across my mouth. She pulls out a model of a large eye the size of a bowling ball. She begins to disassemble the eye, the cornea, the retina, the optical nerve. I push the parts away from me; I can see that everything, everyone in her office has a glow around their bodies, some with colors more distinct, others thin and wavering. Even more unsettling, some people leave trails of light, a residue that takes a long time to dissipate. Occasionally a trail will curl upward, a large snake the color of ochre, poised as if ready to attack any nearby person. The doctor wants me to understand, says without this medication there is no hope; without this medication you are sure to lose all the sight that you have; the small discomfort you’ll experience will be worth it compared to the alternative; what is one more drug to you? She is telling the truth, I can see it being said in the gold light that temporarily covers her body, can taste it under my tongue like a hazelnut liqueur. I tell her, “No, thank you.” That is all I have to say and she starts shaking her head. The bones in her neck pop; she tells me I am foolish. By the time I near home, the drive has become more dangerous. My peripheral vision diminishes, the crest of my forehead, the crown of my head seems to ignite. My other senses revel in new-found power, guiding me through a maze of streets, using the scent of jacarandas and freshly cut, large-leaf philodendrons, the feel of bumps on the road, the dampness along my arm that means I’ve come into my underground parking space. People seem entranced with me as I step into the lobby of my apartment building; there is vague recognition but no recall of my name. I hear a few whisper, “Who?” They look at me as one would a religious painting, a lamentation. I am temporarily blinded by the various colors spewing out from their bodies, can see one man is covered with nothing more than white static, while another woman has tendrils of bluish light connected to everyone she’s near. For a moment the inside of my chest seems hollow. I smile briefly; by now I am used to people not recognizing me because of weight loss, the waste of my muscles, but this is different. An elderly woman holds the elevator for me, her arm braced against the closing door. A warm tingle runs down my throat, informs me that she is not well, some perceived similarity with myself. I face her and smell lavender, old wool, sweat like eucalyptus oil. Her hair is white, I know, but I see tumors instead, the stench of black rotted fruit, dappling her brain. Her heart is erratic and I feel as if it is my own and that I am the one who will fall soon. I want to touch her. I sense the elevator aching to lift us up. She is saying something to herself, I hear her say the word “God” with the warm buzz of bees and wooden flutes in her mouth. I feel my palm near her shoulder and her body begins to change, slippery as mercury. Now I can see an amber light emanating from her stomach, her head. She is unsure of why she feels better, but she takes it like a gift of inestimable worth. In my room I lie back, close and open my eyes and all is darkness. My ears hum, and the woolen blanket beneath my fingers seems unbearably rough. For a second I think I have fallen asleep, and now it is late, the street lights are turned off. Somewhere in the house, my roommate watches TV. Miles away I can sense my folks readying themselves for sleep, the rustle of their bedsheets, the sounds they make using the bathroom. My brother far away in another state begins to open a can of beer; I hear him spray the fluid across his hand. It used to make me sick, the thought of my family, but now I see it as a legacy I will not understand till much later. Through the window, a man watches me: he is white, bright as if a hundred candles were burning inside him. He sees that I am ready, calls more of his people to the window. At first I pretend not to know what he offers, can taste meat in my mouth, blood on my lips. There is no judgement on whatever I do; he is just there for me. Before I go, I want to tell my roommate what he needs to take to stay alive, the astragalus I have in my closet, this new experimental treatment out of Korea. I want to call my ex-lover and explain that I really understand why he had to leave me, his heart battered like bronze from all the other deaths in his life. I want my mother to know I know where all her anger comes from, and if I could just touch a certain spot on her body, near her breastbone, it would all be released, she would always be warm after that. But I have come to the end, thoughts of the world seem woven of thread, thinly disguised, a veil. I let the angels consume me, each one biting into my body, until nothing is left, nothing but a small glow and even that begins to perish.
Chain of Fools
by Kevin Killian
Again I approach the Church, St. Joseph’s at Howard and Tenth, south of Market in San Francisco. It’s a disconcerting structure, in late Mission style, but capped with two gold domed towers out of some Russian Orthodox dream. I’m following two uniformed cops, in the late afternoon this October, we’re followed by the sun as we mount the steps to the big brass doors and enter into the darkness of the nave. I see the pastor, Filipino, short and shambling, approach us from the altar, where two nuns remain, arranging fall flowers around the vestibule. I fall back while the cops detain the priest. They’re passing him a sheaf of legal papers regarding the closing of the church, which has been damaged beyond repair by the earthquake of ’89. Anger crosses the priest’s handsome face, then he shakes the hands of the two policemen; all shrug as if to say, shit happens. I glance up at the enormous crucifix where the image of Christ is sprawled from the ugly nails. His slender body, a rag floating over his dick. His face, white in the darkened upper reaches of the Church. His eyes closed, yet bulging with pain. Again I bend my knee and bow, the body’s habitual response. Across my face and upper torso I trace the sign of the cross, the marks of this disputed passage. I’m dreaming again—again the dreaming self asserts its mastery of all of time, all of space.
Late in the ’60s Mom and Dad enrolled me in a high school for boys, staffed by Franciscans. I was a scrawny, petulant kid with an exhibitionist streak that must have screamed trouble in every decibel known to God or man. My parents had tried to bring me up Catholic, but as I see myself today, I was really a pagan, with no God but experience, and no altar but my own confusing body. In a shadowy antebellum building high on a hill above us, the monks rang bells, said office, ate meals in the refectory, drank cases of beer. In the halls of St. A—, bustling with boys, I felt like the narrator in Ed White’s Forgetting Elena, marooned in a society I could hardly understand except by dumb imitation. In every room a crucifix transfixed me with shame: I felt deeply compromised by my own falsity. My self was a lie, a sham, next to the essentialism of Christ, He who managed to maintain not only a human life but a divine one too. He was God, the Second Person of the Trinity.
But I talked a good game, as any bright student can, and did my best to get out of my schoolwork, so I’d have more time to develop my homosexuality. I spent a year in French class doing independent study, reading Gone with the Wind in French, while the other students around me mumbled “Je ne parle pas” to an implacable friar. Presently I was able to convince the history teacher that reading Gone with the Wind in French should satisfy his requirements too. Then I could go home and confront my appalled parents by saying, “This is something I have to read for school.”
Later on, when I was a senior and drunk all the time, a friend and I invented an opera, a collaboration between Flaubert and Debussy, set in outer sp
ace and ancient Rome, that we called Fenestella. George Grey and I flogged this opera through French class, music class, World Literature, etc. We recounted its storyline, acted out its parts, noted the influence of Fenestella on Stravinsky, Gide, etc, you name it. Our teachers slowly tired of Fenestella, but we never did. The heroine was an immortal bird—a kind of pigeon—sent by St. Valentine out into Jupiter to conquer space in the name of love—on the way to Jupiter she sings the immortal “Clair de Lune.” I must have thought I too was some kind of immortal bird, like Fenestella, like Shelley’s skylark. None of our teachers pointed out the unlikelihood of Flaubert (d. 1880) and Debussy (b. 1862) collaborating on anything elaborate. We had them quarrelling, reuniting, duelling, taking bows at La Scala, arguing about everything from le mot juste to the Cathedrale Engloutée. Nobody said a word, just gave us A’s, praised us to the skies.
I had no respect for most of these dopes. In later life I was to pay the piper by dallying with several teens who had no respect for me. Nothing’s worse than that upturned, scornful face, that throws off youth’s arrogance like laser rays. When I was 16 I had the world by the tail. But in another light the world had already made me what I was, a blind struggling creature like a mole, nosing through dirt to find its light and food.
In religion class Brother Padraic had us bring in pop records which we would play, then analyze like poetry. It was a conceit of the era, that rock was a kind of poetry and a way to reach kids. Other boys, I remember, brought in “poetic” records like “All Along the Watchtower,” “At the Zoo,” “Chimes of Freedom.” The more daring played drug songs—“Sister Ray,” “Eight Miles High,” “Sunshine Superman,” or the vaguely scandalous—“Let’s Spend the Night Together.” When it was my turn I brandished my favorite original cast album—My Fair Lady—and played “Wouldn’t It be Loverly.” Now, that’s poetry, I would say expansively, mincing from one black tile to a red tile, then sideways to a white tile, arms stretched out appealingly. After the bell rang a tall man dressed in black stepped out of the shadows between lockers and said, “Have you considered psychological counselling?” I should have been mortified, but I shook my head like a friendly pup and, with purposeful tread, followed him to his office. Then the office got too small for his needs and he drove me to what I soon came to think of as our place, down by the river, down by the weeds and waterbirds.
Getting in and out of a VW bug in those long black robes must have been a bitch. Funny I didn’t think of that till later. It happened in front of my eyes but I didn’t really notice. I was too—oh, what’s the word—ensorcelled. He—Brother Jim—wasn’t exactly good-looking, but he had something that made up for any defect: he’d taken that precious vow of celibacy, though not, he confided, with his dick. First I felt for it through the robes, then found a deep slit pocket I was afraid to slip my hand into. Then he laughed and lifted the robe over his legs and over most of the steering wheel. And down by the gas pedal and the clutch he deposited these awful Bermuda shorts and evocative sandals. And his underwear. His black robe made a vast tent, then, dark in the day, a tent I wanted to wrap myself up in and hide in forever, with only his two bent legs and his shadowy sex for company. So I sucked him and sucked him, Brother Jim.
“Why don’t you turn around?” he asked. “Pull those pants all the way down, I like to see beautiful bodies.” He made my knees wobble as he licked behind them. Wobble, like I couldn’t stand up. On the wind, the scents of sand cherry and silverweed, the brackish river. The squawk of a gull. Scents that burned as they moved across my face, like incense. After a while he told me how lonely his life was, that only a few of the other monks were queers, there was no one to talk to. “You can talk to me,” I told him, moved. Every semester he and the few other queer monks judged the new students like Paris awarding the golden apple. Some of us had the staggering big-lipped beauty that April’s made from; some of us were rejected out-of-hand, and some of us, like me, seemed available. Then they waited till they felt like it, till they felt like trying one of us out.
He made me feel his . . . dilemma, would you call it? Boys, after all, are tricky because they change from week to week. You might fancy a fresh complexion: act right away, for in a month that spotless face will have grown spotted, or bearded, or dull. You might reject me because I have no basket, well, too bad, because by Christmas I’ll be sporting these new genitals Santa brought me, big, bad and boisterous. This was Jim’s dilemma—when you’re waiting for a perfect boy life’s tough. So they traded us, more or less. Always hoping to trade up, I guess. “Don’t trade me,” I pleaded with him. “Oh never,” he said, tracing the nape of my neck absently, while on the other side of the windshield darkness fell on a grove filled with oaks and wild hawthorn. “Never, never, never.”
I wanted to know their names—who was queer, which of them—I had to know. He wouldn’t say. I named names. How about the flamboyant arts teacher who insisted on us wearing tights, even when playing Arthur Miller? No. None of the effeminate monks, he told me, were gay. “They just play at it,” he sneered. How about the gruff math teacher, who had been the protegé of Alan Turing and John van Neumann? If you answered wrong in class he’d summon you to his desk, bend you over his knee, and spank you. If you were especially dense you’d have to go to his disordered room in the evening and he’d penetrate you with an oily finger, sometimes two. “No,” said Brother Jim, my new boyfriend. “Don’t be absurd. None of those fellows are fags. You’d never guess unless I tell you.” I told him I didn’t really want to know, a lie, I told him I’d never done this with a man, a lie, I told him I would never tell another about the love that passed between us, a lie. And all these lies I paid for when June began and Jim got himself transferred to Virginia. But then another teacher stopped me in the hall. “Jim told me about your problem,” he said, his glasses frosty, opaque. This was Brother Anselm. “He says you feel itchy round the groin area.”
He’s the one who took me to see The Fantasticks in Greenwich Village and bought me the record, “Try to Remember.” If you’re reading this, Anselm, try to remember that time in September when life was long and days were fucking mellow. As for you, Brother Jim, whatever happened to “never?” You said you’d “never” trade me, but when I turned 17 I was yesterday’s papers. Thus I came to hate aging, to the point that even today I still pride myself on my “young attitude.” Pathetic. I remember that our most famous alumnus was Billy Hayes, whose story was later made into a sensational film called Midnight Express. At that time he was mired in a Turkish prison for drug smuggling. We students had to raise funds for his legal defense, or for extra-legal terrorist acts designed to break him out. Students from other schools went door-to-door in elegant neighborhoods, selling chocolate bars to send their track teams to big meets, but we had to go around with jingling cans, asking for money for “The Billy Hayes Fund,” and you know something, people gave! They didn’t even want to know what it was, good thing too. Later when the film came out its vampy homoerotics gave me a chill. Later still, its leading man, Brad Davis, played Querelle in Fassbinder’s film of the Genet novel. And even later still Davis died of AIDS and I conflated all these men into one unruly figure with a queer complaint against God.
Standing on the desert’s edge, a man at the horizon, shaking a fist against an implacable empty sky.
At first I resented Jim and Anselm and the rest, their careless handling of this precious package, me. But after awhile I grew fond of them, even as they passed me around like a plate of canapes at a cocktail party. Anybody would have, especially a young person like myself who thought he was “different.” I watch the E Channel and see all these parents of boys, parents who are suing Michael Jackson, and I want to tell them, your boys are saying two things, one out of each side of their mouth, or maybe three things, one of them being, “Let me go back to Neverland Ranch where at least I was appreciated.”
Unlike Michael Jackson, the religious staff of St. A— wore ropes around their
waists to remind themselves, and us, of the constant poverty of St. Francis of Assisi. One of them quoted St. Therese to me, to illustrate his humility: “I am the zero which, by itself, is of no value but put after a unit becomes useful.” I pulled the rope from around his waist, teasing him. I took one home as a souvenir. These fat long ropes, wheaten color, thick as my penis and almost as sinuous. I believed in those ropes. I said to myself, why don’t you become a monk, think of all the side benefits? I walked down to the grove of trees by the river’s edge one April afternoon, thinking these grand thoughts of joining the seminary. Beneath my feet small pink flowers, a carpet of wood sorrel or wild hepatica, leading down to a marshy space tall with field horsetail, up to my waist. “God,” I called out, “give me a sign I’m doing the right thing.” I felt guilty that I had sinned in a car, guilty and stained, like a slide in a crime lab. I waited for His sign, but zilch. Above me a pair of laughing gulls, orange beaks, black heads, disappeared into the sun. Is that my sign? thought I, crestfallen. How oblique. But right around that time I began to realize that there was something stronger than a Franciscan brother.