The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  We take the truck and stop by the grocery store to get a bunch of cartons. I’ve got the keys to Jim’s place. When we walk up the steps I think of Jim standing there when I came by to drive him to the hospital. We climb the gray-mustard colored carpet of the stairs. The hallways smell like food. Living people still live here.

  When I open the door to the apartment everything looks different. We set the empty boxes on the living room floor and begin to look in closets and drawers, intruding in a way we never would if Jim was around. There’s nothing in Jim’s drawers but socks and T-shirts and underwear, nothing beneath the bed but dust, stray pennies, a couple of crusty paintbrushes.

  The Carlsons get there before we can go through all the rooms.

  The Carlsons don’t think there’ll be anything they’ll want from the living room, so I start packing the books and records, wrapping the TV in towels before I put it in a box.

  Jeannie and Mrs. Carlson start in the kitchen. I hear Mrs. Carlson telling Jeannie about the first time Jim made scrambled eggs, about her trying to teach “my Jims,” as she calls her husband and son, to cook. She laughs as she remembers the story of the eggs. It’s good to hear her laugh. In Jim’s room Mr. Carlson and Ange are packing shirts into cardboard cartons. I glance in. Mr. Carlson looks so small, like a schoolboy being sent away from home. He’s very slow and careful as he fastens buttons and smooths collars and folds sleeves. He creases the shirts into neat, tidy rectangles. Ange says a couple of things but Mr. Carlson doesn’t answer much. So after a while she leaves him to sort through his son’s ties and loafers, his jackets and suits, his baseball things, alone.

  “This must have been Scotty’s room,” says Mrs. Carlson.

  I’d been in there when Scotty was around. But after Scotty, the door was never open.

  The handle of the door is colored silver. Mrs. Carlson puts her hand on it. It clicks. She pushes it open. The curtain is drawn, the room is dark. But we can see around Mrs. Carlson, in front of us, that the bed and dresser and the night-table are gone. The only piece of furniture is the long desk by the window. The desk is crowded with clutter. There are pale gray-white rectangles on the walls. Ange flips on the light.

  And all around is Scotty. Scotty in his red-checked lumber jacket. Scotty smiling with a three-days’ growth of beard. Scotty sitting cross-legged on a mat. Scotty with long hair, a tie-dyed shirt, and sandals. Scotty in his ridiculous bright orange bermuda shorts. His firm brown stomach, his compact upper arms, him holding up a Stonewall fist and grinning. His fine hands holding something blue. His profile when he was a boy. Him resting his chin in his palms and looking sleepy. His baseball hat on backwards. His pretty shoulders, his tender sex, his hands.

  In every one, his skin is tan, his body is whole, his eyes are blue and bright. We recognize some poses from old photographs, and some from Scotty as we remember him. But some are of a Scotty that we never saw; Jim’s Scotty. Painted alive again by Jim.

  “Dear Scotty,” Mrs. Carlson says, “my Jim’s beloved.”

  We take some stuff to a center that is starting up. We leave most of it in both their names. The TV in Scotty’s. The hundred dollar bill in Jim’s.

  A few days later everything is over. The Carlsons are flying back to Texas. They don’t want a ride to the airport but they invite us all down for coffee at their hotel. They tell us if we ever get to Texas to come see them. We all thank each other for everything and say if there’s ever anything we can do. The Carlsons take some paintings to share with Scotty’s family. When the airporter arrives we put their suitcases in the storage place beneath the bus. Mr. Carlson carries the paintings rolled up into tubes. When the bus pulls out Mrs. Carlson waves to us for both of them. Mr. Carlson won’t let go of the tubes.

  We go back to Bob and Dale’s and drink more coffee. We all get pretty buzzy. Then Jean says they shouldn’t put it off anymore, they need to get back to Olympia. I mumble something about starting up temping again.

  Jean says, uncharacteristically, “Oh, fuck temping.”

  Bob laughs. “Listen to that potty mouth.”

  Ange reminds me that I have to go back to Olympia to get my car, and I ought to help them finish the remodeling. Both of which are true, but it’s also true they know what I can’t say: how much I need to be with them.

  So we say “See you ’round” to Bob and Dale and get in the truck to drive back down to Oly. Ange makes me sit in the middle, between the two of them.

  “Wha-chew-wont, baby I got it!!” Ange howls as she shoves Aretha into the tape deck. Aretha takes a second to catch up with Ange, but then it’s the two of them singing. Ange cranks the tunes up as Jean pulls the truck out onto 15th. We turn at Pine. Jean slows the truck as we pass the Rose in case anyone cute is casually lounging around outside; no one ever is. There’s a moment of stillness at the red light on Broadway, a moment of stillness between the tracks, then “Chain of Fools.” Ange cranks it up even more as we turn left onto Broadway, then turn right again onto Madison and right into a traffic jam.

  Ange rolls down the window as if she needs the extra room to sing. She loves the chain-chain-chaaaaaain, chain­-chain-chaaaaaain parts and always does this ridiculously unsexy jerk of her shoulders and hips when she sings it. She gets especially crazy at the cha-ya-ya-ya-ya-in part near the end. She squints and tries to look very mean, meaner with each ya-ya-ya. Jeannie is good at the hoo-hoo’s, which she accompanies with some extremely precise nods of her chin, and some extremely cool finger points. I sit between them and laugh.

  But as the song is nearing the end and we haven’t moved more than ten yards, I growl, “What is this traffic shit?”

  Ange pops the cassette out of the tape deck.

  “What?”

  “I said, what is this traffic shit.”

  “Quarter of four,” says Jean, “I thought we’d miss it.”

  “The old ’burg ain’t what it used to be baby. New folks movin’ in all the time. And they all have six cars and they all love traffic jams. Reminds them of good ol’ LA.”

  “Where they can all go back to in a goddamn handtruck, thank you very much.”

  We inch along a few minutes then come to a complete stop in front of Rex’s. Pedestrians on the sidewalk look around for cops then start walking in between the cars. Someone squeezing by in front of the truck does a knock-­knock on the hood and grins in at us.

  “Smug asshole bastard,” I snarl.

  Cars start honking.

  “Jesus this traffic sucks,” I say louder.

  Ange looks at me.

  The car behind us is laying on the horn.

  “Fuck the traffic,” I shout.

  “Hey, babe, take it easy,” says Ange, “We’ll get outta here soon.”

  I ignore her. “Fuck the traffic,” I cry. I put my hands over my ears. “Fuck the traffic.”

  Then I hear Jim screaming, “Fuck the traffic! Don’t they realize they’re holding up a wheelchair full of dying faggot!” Then I hear him yelling, “So what am I supposed to do, fly?” Then he looks at me, “Tonto, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna die.”

  Then my head is against the back of the seat. I’m rigid.

  Ange’s hand is on my arm.

  “Baby?”

  Jean grinds the truck into reverse, backs up a couple inches, whacks it back into first and climbs over the sidewalk into the Seattle First National Bank parking lot. She cuts the engine.

  “Baby.” Ange says it hard.

  She yanks me away from the back of the seat and throws her arms, her whole huge body around me. Jeannie grabs me from behind. I’m stiff I’m like a statue. My body can’t bend and I can’t see. They sandwich me in between them. Spit and snot are on my face.

  “Let it go, baby, let it go.”

  I can’t say anything. My jaws are tight. “Let it go, babe.”

  Ange pulls away from me eno
ugh to kiss my forehead. I break. She squeezes herself around me tight. Then they’re both around me, holding me.

  And then, dear Jim, held close between the bodies of our friends, I see you.

  I roll you and your wheelchair out to the sidewalk. I’m worried because in the few minutes it’s taken us to get from your room to here, the sky has turned gray. I tell you we ought to get back inside, but you wave that idea away. I stand above you at the pedestrian crossing and look down at the top of your cap, the back of your neck, your shoulders.

  There’s a traffic jam. The cars are pressed so close not even pedestrians can squeeze through. A wind is picking up. People are opening umbrellas. Cars are honking, drivers are laying on their horns. I start to say again, that we really ought to go back in, but you find my hand on the wheelchair grip and cover it with your own. You sigh like a tolerant, tired parent. You shake your head. You pat my hand then squeeze it.

  “The traffic’ll break in a minute, Jim.”

  But you aren’t listening to me. You slip your hand from mine, and before I can stop you, you’ve unhooked the tooth of the drip­feed from your arm.

  “Jim, the IV.”

  “Ssssh.” You put your finger to your lips like you are finally going to tell the truth about a story you’ve been telling for so long.

  You slip the blanket off your knees. You stand up alone, not needing to lean on anyone. You’re tall as you used to be. You stretch your arms out to your sides and take a deep breath. I see your chest expand. You stretch your neck up and look at the sky. You throw your arm around my shoulder and pull me to you. I feel the firmness of your body and smell the good clean smell of your healthy skin the way it was the summer we climbed Mt. Si. You pull my face in front of you. You hold my face between your hands and look at me. You look inside where I can’t see, where I can’t look away from you. Beneath the fear the covered love, you see me, Jim. Then, like a blessing that forgives me, and a healing benediction that will seal a promise true, you kiss my forehead.

  You tell me, “Tonto, girl, I’m going for a ride.”

  You fling your Right-On Sister Stonewall fist up in the air then open your hand in a Hi-Yo Silver wave. I watch your hand as it stretches above you high, impossibly high. Your feet lift off the side-­ walk and you rise. Above the crowded street, the hospital, above us all, you fly.

  The rain begins. Cold drops hit my face when I look up at you. But you fly high above it, Jim. Your firm taut body catches glints of light from a sun that no one here below can see.

  I raise a Right-On fist to answer you, but then my fist is opened, just like yours, and I am waving, Jim.

  Good friend, true brother Jim, goodbye.

  About the Contributors

  Dorothy Allison is the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller, Trash, and Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature, among other books. A recipient of numerous Lambda Literary Awards and a National Book Award finalist, Allison is also one of the founders of the Lesbian Sex Mafia, and serves on the advisory board of the National Coalition Against Censorship.

  Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including In Memory of Angel Clare, Almost History, and Father of Frankenstein, which was adapted into the film Gods and Monsters. A Guggenheim Fellow, he received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle in 2003, and the Randy Shilts Award for Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America in 2013.

  Dodie Bellamy is the author of Feminine Hijinx, Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro, and Cunt Norton, among several other collections of fiction and nonfiction. Her 2015 collection of essays, When the Sick Rule the World, was named one of the fifty best independent books of the year by Flavorwire.

  Bruce Benderson is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including User, Pretending to Say No, and The Romanian: A Story of Obsession, which won the Prix de Flore in France. Toward the New Degeneracy is an homage and epitaph and eulogy to the old Times Square, while Sex and Solitude examines the loss of urban spaces and rise of the Internet.

  Rebecca Brown is the author of more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including The Haunted House, The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley’s Girl, and The Gifts of the Body, which won numerous literary awards. American Romances is an examination into nature of the American creativity, with essays on pop culture, sexuality, religion, and art.

  Raymond Carver (1938–1988) was one of the most well-known writers from the 1980s. His collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral, and Where I’m Calling From are iconic works of the period, and helped revitalize the short story form. Carver was also an accomplished poet, and author of numerous collections.

  Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle of novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period) as well as several other works of prose and poetry, including My Loose Thread, The Sluts, God Jr., The Weaklings, The Marbled Swarm, and Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.

  Gil Cuadros (1962–1996), among the first Chicano voices to document the AIDS pandemic in Los Angeles, was an early recipient of a PEN Center USA/West grant for writers with HIV. His 1994 book City of God, published by City Lights Books, is now taught in many Chicano and Queer Studies programs.

  Sam D’Allesandro (1956–1988) is the author of prose that has been collected in several posthumous collections, including The Zombie Pit, Real: the Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allessandro (with Dodie Bellamy), and The Wild Creatures.

  Bret Easton Ellis is the author of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms, as well as the screenplays This Is Not an Exit, The Informers, and The Canyons. Since 2013, he has been the host of a popular weekly podcast.

  Mary Gaitskill is the author of Bad Behavior; Two Girls, Fat and Thin; Because They Wanted To; Veronica; Don’t Cry; and The Mare. Veronica was a finalist for the National Book and National Book Critics Circle awards, and her stories have appeared frequently in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies.

  Suzanne Gardinier’s poetry has been published in Usahn, The New World, Today: 101 Ghazals, and Dialogue with the Archipelago, Iridium, as well as the essay collection A World that Will Hold All the People. She is the recipient of an Associated Writing Program Award, Kenyon Review Award for Excellence in the Essay, and the Pitt Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation.

  Robert Glück is the author of Elements of a Coffee Service, Jack the Modernist, Reader, Margery Kempe, Compound Fracture, and Denny Smith. One of the co-founders of the New Narrative movement, Glück has been director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and editor for Lapis Press and the literary journal Narrativity.

  Brad Gooch is the author of fiction and poetry including The Daily News, Jailbait, Scary Kisses, and The Golden Age of Promiscuity. He is also an acclaimed biographer, including Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, which was a National Book Critics Award finalist, and City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. His other books include Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, and Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the ’70s & ’80s.

  Jessica Hagedorn is the author of, among other books, Chiquita Banana, Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions, Dangerous Music, Mango Tango, Dogeaters (a recipient of an American Book Award and National Book Award finalist), Danger and Beauty, and Gangster of Love, as well as the editor of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Fiction.

  Amy Hempel’s fiction has been collected in Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and Collected Stories. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Hobson Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a USA Fellowship grant, the Am
bassador Book Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award.

  Essex Hemphill (1957–1995) was a poet and activist whose writing appeared in High Performance, Gay Community News, RFD Magazine, The Advocate, Pyramid Periodical, and Essence, among other publications, as well as the collections Conditions and Ceremonies.

  A.M. Homes is the author of the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack; the short-story collections Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects; and the memoirs The Mistress’s Daughter and Los Angeles: People, Places and The Castle on the Hill. She collaborates frequently with artists, has written for television and the movies, and has received numerous fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA, and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, among others.

  Gary Indiana is the author of well over a dozen books, including the story collections Scar Tissue and White Trash Boulevard; the novels Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Rent Boy, Resentment: A Comedy, Depraved Indifference, Do Everything in the Dark, and The Shanghai Gesture; the essay collections Let It Bleed and Utopia’s Debris; and the nonficton works The Schwarzenegger Syndrome and Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World. He is also the author of several plays, as well as an actor, filmmaker, and visual artist.

  Denis Johnson’s fiction includes Angels, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Jesus’ Son, Already Dead, The Name of the World, Tree of Smoke, Nobody Move, and The Laughing Monsters. His poetry collections include The Man Among the Seals, Inner Weather, The Incognito Lounge, The Veil, and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of several plays and screenplays, and the essay collection Seek: Report from the Edges of America.

  John Keene is the author of a novel, Annotations, a collection of short stories and novellas, Counternarratives, and a book of poems, Seismosis. He was longtime member of the Dark Room Collective and Cave Canem. He translated Hilda Hilst’s Letters from a Seducer from the Portuguese, and has translated several other works from French and Spanish as well, and is the recipient of an AGNI John Cheever Short Fiction Prize and a Whiting Award.