by Gary Indiana
It’s true, I’ve lived here too long. The person who lived here before was a ribbon queen with a degree in Arabic languages, for years I sublet from him, surrounded by his thrift shop furniture, his winter clothes, his camp treasures, and then, somehow, a legal problem arose between us, the landlord offered a choice between a joint lease and eviction for both of us. He refused to sign, so the landlord evicted him in absentia and made me the legal occupant. And then I got threats, tirades, accusations, on blue airmail paper from Paris, weirdly mixed in with poetic descriptions of his Arab lovers, of paintings he’d seen in the Louvre, of unforgettable meals. Look here, I had written him, you’ve dumped me in an impossible situation. We’ll both get thrown out unless you come to an agreement. And months later I received a fuzzy assurance, again on blue airmail paper, that he’d consulted a lawyer and nothing at all could happen. By then the thing had already gone to court. But his stuff stayed in the flat for a year, two years, finally I said, Enough. Libby helped me cart everything down to the sidewalk, on three sizzling afternoons in August, and six months later the former occupant, missing for three years, showed up on the roof of the building next door, like the ghost of Christmas past, demanding his spaghetti heels and Chianti bottle lamps and the rest of his junk. He wore a powder blue suit and looked like a sort of embryonic Daddy Warbucks, balding, with giant freckles, bulldog mouth, eyes glowing with the fixity of rampant self-deception. He’d already come to look the way he would at sixty. I called the police. They made no special effort to flush him from the adjoining building, but instead searched my place for drugs. A year later our paths crossed, in a local bar. He claimed he had a razor in his pocket, that he’d been “waiting to kill me” for three years. Well, then, I said, tonight’s your lucky night. He backed off. And then I had the embarrassment of telling him all his belongings had bitten the dust.
The apartment still carries the faint musty smell of that faraway time, and other times. An era of pickups and bizarre micro-affairs with boys whose points of reference belonged to another planet altogether, the underbelly of Young America. Disturbed youths and borderline schizos harvested off Second Avenue in the doldrums beyond midnight, lean bodies and adorable faces that evaporated in daylight or loitered for days in a carnal stupor, living out of the refrigerator, sometimes helping themselves upon departure to small, electronic objects or pathetic amounts of cash. The Valium salesman who shaved every hair off my body and kept an erection for three days, afterwards calling from Bellevue: I dropped acid at the Ritz, he said, and I don’t remember anything after that. And Dickie Dwyer, who liked fucking standing up and later went out on a speedball. Paco with the enormous balls: Suck it again, baby, drink all a my come. Lots of damaged children have fluttered through this place, surly moths on their way to distant bonfires. That whole scene tapered off wound down, whittled itself into disgusted chastity, long before the disease made sexual loneliness healthy. I lost the energy and zeal for seduction. The script became too familiar. The real sex of our time is fame and money, and all sex is negotiated through the porthole of those ambitions. Even with Gregory. We never get through a day without rooting around for equilibrium between his potential and my reality, what he feels entitled to and what he imagines I already have.
Hours and hours of epic cleaning: for him. I leave Victor mopping and scrubbing and rush to the Associated on Second Avenue. What does Gregory like to eat? A chicken, possibly. A stuffed chicken: mushrooms, onions, crumbs. But maybe he’d like a fish. All their fish here is frozen and greenish. I could run to the place on First Avenue before they close, pick up a pound of scallops. Vegetables. I’m sure he’s fiber-conscious, probably likes broccoli, too, the one vegetable I really hate. Jane also likes broccoli. Jane really enjoys food, whereas I have trouble with it. I can’t always get it down, especially first thing in the morning. It’s the cigarettes. When I travel I have a better appetite. In Japan we got pickles for breakfast. It’s funny how food has its own special hours. You eat this for breakfast, that for lunch, something else for dinner. They say you metabolize fruit much better in the morning. M. goes to a nutritionist. Jane was skinny for years and now she’s expanded. I’m forty, she says, I’m going to eat what I want for a few years.
If he loves me, will he pretend he likes what I cook even if he doesn’t like it? When you’re seeing somebody you eat to humor him. Friends too. M. made a horrible omelette once, with all the gristly parts of a take-out chicken, I gag just thinking about it. Some people can eat every edible part of anything. Even marrow out of chicken bones. Turnips, forget it. No one eats turnips, or parsnips for that matter. What I hate are funny things in meat, those little beef veins that look like suckers. We shouldn’t eat our fellow creatures. When you walk through Chinatown you see fish gasping for water in those wooden bins full of bloody ice, the Chinese are cruel, no more cruel than we are, but we hide everything. Even pork has some gross passages, even lobster, it’s all cultural. Maybe my body’s not perfect enough for him. I’m too thin, my chest’s too narrow. And it could be too that my looks are really gone, I can’t tell from the mirror. The gym doesn’t help, all we do there is gossip and look at pricks.
I return with the food. Melon and prosciutto, so civilized. Three cheeses. Grapes, salads, red wine, chicken, an illusion of abundance. If this were only for me it would all rot in the refrigerator. Victor’s finished the floors, he’s drinking a beer and reading a porn magazine, an old one I bought last year. It shows teenage threesomes, all nineteen or twenty. A tall, cute one with a Prince Valiant haircut fucks a not-so-good-looking one who’s spread out on a kitchen table, while another cute one with curly hair, kneeling on the table, prods his dick into the throat of the one getting fucked. These boys are continually recycled in other magazines under different names: Chuck, Dave, Tony, Peter. Chuck fucks Tony’s ass on the pile carpet, two pages later Tony kneels over Chuck and rams his prick into Chuck’s mouth on the bed. In another magazine Chuck’s name is Billy and he takes it up the can from Peter. Peter, it says, has ten inches of thick throbbing man meat. He sits on Billy’s face and Billy’s tongue goes into Peter’s anus. Next Peter has two fingers jammed into Dave’s joy chute. Tony’s name is Jason. Jason’s enormous wet prick slides into Bobby’s greased hungry hole. Fuck me, fuck me, Bobby squeals, pushing his eager rosebud down as far as it will go on Jason’s pulsating pleasure prong. Tim shoves his succulent pole down Billy’s deep throat. Peter takes all twelve inches of Joe’s delicious beef stick. Dennis spurts his salty cream into the crack of Pedro’s hairy butt. Jim’s man juice spurts into Chuck’s suck tube. Victor closes the magazine. He’s sprawled out expansively on the floor in the front room, his paint-splattered work boots crossed at the ankles, as if he plans on sticking around. The apartment still looks cluttered, but clean, as if the person living in it has a relaxed but secure grip on things.
I lay out the beginnings of dinner on the blue metal desk that functions as a kitchen sideboard. This desk is the bane of my kitchen, as the built-in shelving is the bane of my study, the flimsy fiberboard closet and yellow foam chair the banes of the living room/bedroom area. Each room has its special bane, mainly residue from the Arabic languages expert. Disposal of the blue desk is a perennial topic of speculation. Victor says the desk could be folded up or taken apart by its internal hinges, if the hinges haven’t rusted, but the hinges have rusted, and therefore to remove the desk I would have to hire large, strong people with equipment for getting it down the stairwell, this always seems an absurd extravagance even when I have money, and when I don’t have money it becomes an urgent impossibility. I must have considered a million times, at the strangest imaginable moments, getting rid of the blue desk, it has often seemed, in fact, that getting rid of the blue desk would dislodge a staggering freight of recurring problems, liberate my mind, and allow me to really live. And yet, here it is, as always, the blue desk, symbol of everything oppressive and stultifying attached to this apartment. I tell myself I cannot afford to dwell, just now, on the
implications of the blue desk, removing the puckered, yellowish chicken from its plastic wrapper. I know I could easily, easily become paralyzed, if I think too long not only about the blue desk in the kitchen, but about all the related, unsatisfactory things which make me less than perfect, the things Gregory will instantly notice. The childish objects I save and leave out in the open, for lack of more precious objects. This general look of disorientation, the visible evidence of mental asymmetry.
Victor came into the kitchen. Do I look all right, I asked. Oh, he said, you look fine. Chicken. Yes, I said, chicken, I thought this chicken, plus rice, with some vegetables. Good idea, Victor said. Yes, I said, but I seem to have forgotten how to fix chicken. Chicken’s simple, Victor said. I know, I said, I’ve cooked chicken a million times. Nervous? he asked. Yes, I said, although God knows why. Well, Victor said. Chicken. Chicken’s easy. You take the chicken, he said, and run it under the cold water. Victor snatched the chicken from the blue desk and bathed it under the tap. There, he said, popping off paper towels from the roll, laying out the chicken. Now, we’ll salt the cavity. Salt the cavity, I repeated, fumbling on the shelf for salt. Got the stuffing? Victor inquired. I indicated a bunch of celery and a net bag of onions. Victor washed the vegetables and commenced chopping them into bright mounds. I felt helplessness washing over me, helplessness and relief, Victor was taking control of the chicken problem. I opened a beer and sat on the rim of the tub, watching as Victor kneaded the choppings into a mash of damp bread, chattering the whole time about the placid spirituality of his karate training and the locker room at the Twenty-third Street Y. Rousing escapades flourished at Victor’s Y, in contrast to the furtive cruising that went on at my health club. Victor was always vocal and explicit about the day’s libidinal perks. Richard did things without talking about them, Victor talked about things without doing them, and I didn’t do anything and didn’t talk about it.
Victor gnawed his lips contentedly and made a display of practiced motions around the cored, sanitized corpse of the chicken. He derived a certain pleasure from making himself useful, a pleasure that instilled indolence in everyone around him. As usual, I thought, Victor hasn’t the slightest disabling dread of real life and the little physical chores that go with it. Victor can clean and dust and soap things down and mop and then stuff a chicken without falling apart. I thought: This must have something to do with karate discipline. And lately he’s been blabbing about “creative visualization,” perhaps if I could creatively visualize I would take control, snip off these loose ends, these threads of distraction. I thought: I don’t really know anything or how to do anything, my memory’s lousy, all these books I read don’t make me erudite or learned, knowledge simply passes through me like this beer, nothing sticks, I don’t make anything out of it. And now I’ve even forgotten how to cook, I’m afraid of everything and I’m particularly afraid of Gregory. He idolizes me, but he also looks down on me because I’m not twenty-four.
I felt a rush of tenderness for Victor, tenderness and schizophrenia. Victor did not occupy the world of my other friends. He saw himself, in some convoluted sense, economically or politically estranged from the groups of people Richard and I knew. A few years earlier I had had more friends like Victor, people who lived in the neighborhood and thought of themselves as a permanent core of dedicated bohemians, people who resented the success of others and believed that their own artistic purity kept them out of the larger picture. They were, I often thought, permanently damaged by the sense of their own inferiority, unable to compete with “real” artists, “real” writers. Among Victor’s friends, I was considered part of the big oppressive culture that kept them ruminating in their rent-controlled ratholes. I was held to be a traitor to the pure values that ensured failure. Victor’s friends felt embattled. They pretended to be philosophical and indifferent to the rewards other people extracted from the city. In reality, they drank too much all the time and smoked too much dope and never attempted anything except little sycophantic exercises in drama or poetry or music which they staged for each other in local “spaces.”
Victor asseverated his loyalty so often that I knew he betrayed me all the time, not maliciously, but from habit. I sometimes caught a look at Victor’s darker side, just a peep through the keyhole. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that Victor’s excessive devotion concealed a constantly tabulated score of grievances. He reveled in discovering my little character flaws and moral lapses. He did not really wish to jam bread and vegetable mush up the anus of a chicken, but doing this for me added to my staggering debt. And one day Victor would present the bill for all his kindness.
That, I thought, is how people really are. Unless they see themselves as equal to each other, there is always some deranged form of accounting going on in one or the other’s head, and we live in a system where no one is equal to anyone, all are exploited by everyone, no one gives anybody anything and everyone owes everyone everything, the only equality available is equality in misery, and even the miserable ones argue about who is more miserable than whom. But that is another story. This one continued with Gregory’s arrival, just as Victor left. I embraced Gregory, hurried through the introductions, and sent Victor on his way, wondering why Gregory had turned up early.
When he’s conscientious, it usually spells trouble. If he’s on time, it means he’s not staying long. The polite phone call presages a cancellation. But no, he’s actually planning to eat dinner with me. I nail this down as soon as Victor’s out of hearing range. Gregory looks exuberantly healthy: rosy cheeks, clear eyes, the customary all-black outfit that matches his hair, the embroidered vest. Chatty. He’s spent the day at labs, getting test prints. His work, he says, is developing in leaps and bounds. When I get these two new pictures, he says, I’m giving them to you.
A new theme surfaces. He owes me everything. My encouragement has given him the self-assurance he needs to forge ahead. His exhibition will be dedicated to me, by name. As I picture some egregiously corny press release bearing this dedication, Gregory pelts me with flattery about my magazine column, which stiffens my mouth, makes me hold my breath until it’s over, glazes me with embarrassment—I hate compliments, and even Gregory’s praise sounds grossly overdone, calculatingly therapeutic, phony. I know what I’m worth, I don’t need to hear about it.
He looks over the apartment, especially the books (“Gee, you’ve really got everything here”) impressed (I think) by the austerity of my private mess. No TV, the cheapest kind of tape player for music, a shortage of all the typical comforts. Actually, I don’t know what he’s noticing, though it all appears to fit some picture he’s gleaned from our conversations, since he acts as if he’s at home. He follows my routine in the kitchen. Just before dinner’s ready, I ask him to settle down in the living room and let me serve him. Then comes a moment of felicity: not quite anticipation, but an affectionate pretense of it.
Nothing holds, though. He refuses wine but encourages me to go ahead. His expression implies that too many drinks on my part will spoil the evening for him. I’ve never been drunk around Gregory, but I feel uncomfortably defiant as I pour a glass, and inhibited while drinking it. He consumes a very full plate of chicken and most of the salad, whisks out of the room for seconds which he eats with fastidious, piglike concentration, as if he were alone. I’ve laid the plates out on the floor, we sit on cushions facing each other. His feeding pleasure should gratify me, but as I watch big forkfuls of meat pass into his mouth and observe his lusty chewing, his sensuality seems gross, like the lewd exposure of a half-pumped erection. He eats the way other people masturbate, with a dreamy detachment from his surroundings. He sits cross legged, bowed forward slightly. I look at the crest of his hairline and down the lithe slope of his nose, ponder the grip of his thick, spatulate fingers on my dime store utensils, and notice a light speckling of dandruff on the shoulders of his vest. His slender frame looks vulnerable as an eggshell, but there is something fierce and stolid in his body’s self-protective
signals. The way Gregory polices the space around him repels the thought of touching him. I want to shatter this barrier but I realize that any movement will freeze before contact. He scares me. He knows how to hurt me. His eating is carnal, yet it belongs to a special order of narcissistic display, like the gigolo costumes he wears at work. These shows of physicality suck attraction from the atmosphere. The stirring of desire, anybody’s desire, confirms Gregory’s existence. Thwarting desire softens the awful powerlessness he complains about in so many different ways.
He gnaws a final chicken bone, slumps back against the base of the yellow foam chair, burps. His lips curl. He draws a cigarette from his shirt pocket and says, You know something, I went in the bar last night, Victor was there talking to some friends of yours. Oh, I say, you know Victor. By sight, he says, but of course he didn’t know who I was. I’ve seen you with him, Gregory says, and then he says, I heard Victor telling them he had to get up early and help you clean your house because you had these very important people coming for dinner and your place has been a dump for months. . . .
I laugh, but I feel my face turning red. Gregory enjoys this moment: he likes letting me know I can’t conceal anything from him, can’t pretend to be different than what I am. His amusement is gentle, but unnerving. It’s so easy for him to destroy my defenses, yet his are impenetrable. I realize now that he showed up early to catch me fretting over dinner, unprepared and nervous. This is how he likes to see me. Psychologically off-guard, distracted, embarrassed by the obviousness of my desire. Powerless. He enjoys deflecting my efforts to contrive “perfect moments,” he wants to show me he knows how my mind works, that he’s not taken in by my subterfuge. Sometimes I think he’s trying to discourage my wishes with elaborate tact, hoping I will accept him as a friend and nothing more. Maybe he’s afraid to let me down too bluntly. But when I act cool and treat him as less than my most intimate friend, Gregory burrows under my skin until his attention reaches my crotch. He knows my dick is hard every minute he’s around.