by Gary Indiana
Pugg turns out to be a tall, broad-beamed, quiet boy with a shaved head and nervous features. His brown eyes flash away when you look directly at him. His mouth has a gliding, reptilian thinness. His voice, soft and uninflected, provides no clue to his personality. He’s abstemious, guarded, like Gregory an ardent, flagrant narcissist. Every time I catch his gaze, he tilts his head as if peering into a favorite mirror. We’re introduced at so-called brunch, in a dreary Art Deco joint where the glare of dead Sunday afternoon light filters through inch-thin hyacinth blinds. Gregory talks and talks, telegraphing their private jokes and observations. He knocks himself out to sound clever, and at one moment when he actually does, I touch his arm affectionately, then catch Pugg’s eyes indignantly widening as they fasten on the point of contact. From this look, I understand that he and Gregory have just woken up in the same bed. Gregory immediately shifts the force of his charm from Pugg to me, talks in our private lingo, pushes Pugg into the wings of the conversation. He doesn’t miss a ripple of tension. By the time we finish eating, I’m no longer sure what Pugg’s look signified.
Pugg desires him. But does Pugg possess him? What kind of name is Pugg, anyway? They’ve slept together, I can tell, but maybe not so recently. Later, the three of us walk around the maze of Gregory’s neighborhood. We poke into shops, examine clothes hanging off awnings on Orchard Street. The two of them seem very bonded, at least on the level of shopping. The lens of the afternoon keeps shifting. At certain moments I feel I’m the object of their interest, an adult whose behavior they’re curious about. At other times Gregory’s my lover. Then again, he’s Pugg’s. Gregory is threading his way to work. When we leave the Lower East Side, the walk becomes a silent tug of war between me and Pugg. I wait for him to detach himself; he waits for me to leave them alone. I’m tenacious. Pugg pretends obliviousness. When we reach West Broadway, Pugg finally relinquishes his hold. Before he gives up, though, Gregory goes into a rap about sex. A familiar theme lately. He feels clever articulating it. Now, he says, because of AIDS, he’s not having sex with anybody until they find a cure. The only safe sex, he says, is if one person jerks off at one end of a room and someone else jerks off at the other, both trying to hit the same spot in the middle of the floor. I hate the smug, funny delivery of his little speech. It’s as if the disease gratified his sense of justice. As he rattles on, Pugg’s face parades an odd morphology of appraisal. Hard to tell if Gregory’s letting him know he isn’t sleeping with me, or letting me know he isn’t sleeping with Pugg, or letting Pugg know he’s kept me in the dark about the fact that he sleeps with Pugg.
Then Pugg skulks off in the direction of Washington Square. Gregory asks me what I think of his wonderful friend. He’s charming, I lie, I guess the two of you are pretty close. You see how beautiful he is, Gregory says, catching my drift. Now he lets out a petulant sigh, his “I’m tired of explaining things but since I care for you I will” sigh: The first time we saw each other, Gregory confides, we wanted to rip each other’s clothes off and fuck, but we didn’t, he claims, we decided it was better to be friends. And isn’t it, he insists, when you consider how fast the physical thing gets used up? Couldn’t we be friends like that?
Personally, I don’t find Pugg even remotely attractive. His face is so evasive and creepy. Everything about him is alien and slightly repulsive. If that’s what Gregory’s drawn to, he’s more perverse than I imagined.
If you think I’m always fantasizing about having sex with you, you’re wrong, I tell him, lying. But I’m sick of hearing how awful and disgusting sex is, Gregory, you made your point a long time ago.
It’s the same as death, he says, the way things are now.
No, I say, it isn’t, there’s this disease, and it happens to get passed around through sex, that doesn’t mean people who’ve had sex with each other deserve to get sick, and besides, Gregory, you slept around as much as anybody else a long while after this thing got started, don’t pretend otherwise, maybe you’re afraid of getting it from me, but I’m a lot more worried about getting it from you.
And it’s true, though I suspect I’d forget about my own health if Gregory wanted to sleep with me. Some of Gregory’s past lives have recently surfaced from other sources, including a suite of provocative photographs taken years ago at the Everhard Baths: these pictures, in the collection of a local jewelry designer, have fueled my jealousy of everyone who ever had him. And it’s exasperating to consider how many people that includes.
Believe me, he’s saying, you’ve got nothing to worry about, because I’m not taking any chances.
That’s your prerogative, I say, but it’s one thing to be phobic about it, and another thing to judge everybody else.
People are killing each other, Gregory replies, climbing on his mental soapbox, because they can’t control themselves. I don’t think it’s wrong to pass judgment on that. Yes, I tell him, it is. I happen to think, he continues, that it’s immoral to risk another person’s life for the sake of your own uncontrollable libido. These queens, he says, I see them all over the streets, all they’ve got on their brains, apparently, is getting their mouths around some dick, it’s like they want to die and take other people with them.
Oh, please, I say, disgusted.
Gregory makes a face. Look, he says, now grave and reasonable, these are the times we’re living in, we’ve got to adjust, and that’s it.
He keeps it up until we reach the restaurant. No one is inside except the cleaning lady. Gregory taps on the plate glass with his bunch of house keys. She shuffles to the door, a bosomy old party with a mustache, her mouth creasing into Slavic delight. We step into the entryway near the bar. I have a strong urge to slap him around. I want to beat him into submission.
The cleaning woman gives him an adoring look. The restaurant smells of garlic, stale smoke, and cognac. Ammonia wafts off the shining wood floors. Round tables crowd the narrow aisle between the bar and the dining room, where the walls carry large tin advertising signs for French products. This place looks like a struck stage for a play that’s been running many years past vitality; I can remember when it was popular for two or three seasons. 1978, 1979. Crazy how long ago that is.
I watch Gregory as if through soundproof thicknesses of distorting glass. He wraps me in his arms and squeezes, an unexpected present. Darling, he whispers, in his Southern accent. He drawls something about dropping by later for a drink, as if he wants me to. Call first, he says. If things are slow here, you could come over. He talks as if it were usual for me to visit him at work.
I can’t resist the invitation, though I sense it’s a trap, another way of measuring my enslavement. He’ll know I waited all night for the fun of traveling twenty blocks just to talk to him for ten minutes. Anyway, when I call, he tells me the restaurant’s a madhouse, and not to come. If I could just seem for a few days not to care, one way or the other—this is my fantasy, that the ratio of need would reverse itself. But I know better. I don’t need you, he sometimes says, that need stuff is from a movie. I can love you exactly as much as I do now without ever seeing you again. And If you really have to get fucked, just go out and find somebody who’ll fuck you. The bathhouse photographs make his coldness seem doubly insulting: if he gave himself so freely and indiscriminately before, why can’t he give me what everyone else has had?
I can’t sleep. I decide to “leave him.” Even this dire part of the lover’s vocabulary sounds absurd in this situation. You can’t leave someone unless you’re living with him. If I break this off I’ll go crazy, but if I wait, it will kill me. I’m living two distinct lives with Gregory. In one of them, things really happen as they do, I thrash the whole time against the wall of my longings. But the other life proceeds on dreams that can never materialize, since Gregory’s strength consists of keeping them alive and slightly out of reach. This fantasy life has warped and buckled like a length of cardboard in a bathtub. I no longer picture happy endings, I know the twists and hairy turns aren’t really part of some baro
que courting ritual. All this madness is what I am going to have at the end, the same as at the beginning. We are traveling exactly nowhere. Away from the purring spell of his voice and the inexhaustible allure of his body, I feel madness brushing against my skin. My solitude has the fatal ugliness of wanting.
9
On Monday nights, fear puts me into a state of shock, although my editor assures me that whatever I feed into the magazine computer Tuesday morning will be, at worst, “enough to work with. ” Gregory stages our worst arguments on Monday evenings, a fact he seems truly unconscious about. He knows his only rival is my job, and if he could amputate my legs to prevent me from walking to the typewriter, he would. The job is my only remaining source of self-respect. Gregory has already taught me that my face is plain and my body doesn’t look wonderful and nobody else wants me. He also skewers any flaws in my thinking he can find. The only thing I can do that he can’t comes from working. And so, on Mondays, he calls up and says, This guy’s been after me at work, he buys a drink and then tells me how he wants to get it on with me, he says he wants to get my meat hard. He says it like a joke, but you can tell he means it.
Everything he tells me on Monday night is about his meat, his prick, his dong, his dick: Guys used to tell me, You’re crazy but you’ve got a fantastic cock. This queen used to pay me $100 to beat off while she dressed up like Marlene Dietrich, it actually got me turned on. I’d squirt and she’d rub the come all over her dress. And sometimes Gloria drifted into the narrative, like an errant coal barge: I’d wake up and she’d be licking my balls, or sucking on my toes, or have her tongue halfway up my asshole, and I’d tell her, Gloria, why don’t you just fix yourself a sandwich or something . . .
I thought: Oh, please, go cram it. The verbal invocation of his penis was foreplay to darker themes. He’d gone into the neighborhood gay bar after work and this guy I used to shoot up with, he said you used to be in love with him years ago and told me you’d write him these desperate letters. Gregory conjured a smoke-filled, gibbering underworld of low types eager for gossip and full of stories about me. It’s funny, I told him, how in a world where there are no brains there can be so many long memories. Why are you going in there unless you’re trying to score? Are you so insanely jealous that everything I do has to be about sex? Can’t you imagine I might want to relax a little bit after fourteen straight hours of hell?
Meanwhile, after a month on the job, I feel a constant pressure in my head, paranoia in the street, a kind of constant embarrassment. People recognize me wherever I go. I’ve begun to feel like I’m walking out on stage whenever I leave the house. When I read over what I’ve written in the magazine, I pretend I’m specific other people reading it and imagine their reactions. And every week, the moment rolls around when I must perform, make my brain do something fast, develop an idea into 1500 tortuous words that will have some sort of effect on the public.
The deadline terror feels like something worse, so I make an appointment with M.’s new doctor. I notice blood, sometimes, on the toilet paper. Bright red, which usually comes from hemorrhoids, if you have real internal bleeding it comes out brownish. But my mind jumps to stomach cancer, perforated ulcers, vast systemic maladies. Maria Lorca, a short brown-haired woman in her late twenties, projects thoughtful competence and a faintly terrorizing, ruminative manner. Her practice has clean lines and muted colors. Her voice lets the air out of the doctor-patient helplessness I’ve brought in with me. I complain of unbearable tension, debilitating sleeplessness, and morning shakes, hoping at least to wangle a Valium prescription.
Maria Lorca peers into my rectum with a proctoscope and declares it free of pathology. She palpates the flesh of my stomach, my back, my chest. She says: I can’t feel any tumors in there. She says: Is it just your job bothering you? What’s the rest of your life like?
I think: What is the rest of my life like? I have this boyfriend. At least he’s sort of my boyfriend, but that isn’t too clear. He used to be an addict. He kicked it, but the way he acts seems like he learned all this junkie behavior he can’t get rid of. For instance he’s always late. Not a few minutes late, but at least a half hour, sometimes so incredibly late I can’t believe it’s happening. He never understands why this upsets me. Sometimes he doesn’t show up at all. Or he calls, insists on seeing me, tells me it’s urgent, so I get all prepared, interrupt whatever I’m doing, if I’m working I stop dead, an hour goes by, he calls and says he’s been delayed, but now he’s coming right over, another hour passes, then another call, at this point I say, If you don’t plan on coming, I’d like to go out. He gets pathetic then and says, Of course, if you’ve got something more important to do. And I say, There’s nothing more important than you, but you can’t eat up all my time like this. I’ll be there in ten minutes, he says. So I get on the phone and call up a friend, to make the ten minutes go by without going nuts, I’m talking to this person, I even say, I called because he’s on his way over and I don’t want to feel like an idiot, frozen in anticipation. So we talk. But I can’t concentrate because I’m expecting to hear his key in the door. I even take the phone to the window and stick my head out, if I think I see him coming my blood pressure drops about twenty points, but no, it’s never him, then I walk away from the window, thinking if I don’t look out, that will make him get there faster, and when I think, Well, he’ll be here any second, I get off the phone, more time passes, I start freaking out, I call someone else, this time I say, That little bastard has done it again. I say I’m at the end of my rope, he’s been doing this to me since I met him, I know I’m debasing myself putting up with it. A few times when he phoned, I waited the usual time, more like an hour, then I went out. The whole time I was away I thought about him, wondering what his reaction was when he found out I’d left. So I go home, expecting to find calls from him on the machine, or a note, but surprise, he didn’t call, not even to say he’d be late. Then I can’t reach him the next day, or the day after. When I finally hear from him he tells me he went off with some friends that night, not because I wasn’t home, but because between the time he called and the time he said he’d come, someone else called him and asked him out so he just went without thinking anything about it.
I’m having a relationship that’s a little bumpy, I tell Maria Lorca. Suddenly I tell her: I don’t know if this person is a junkie or not.
I don’t know why it comes to this definite point just now, when it’s never framed itself that way before. Maria Lorca looks alarmed, wary.
I think you had better nail that down, she says. We’re hearing now that 60 percent of the addicts in New York are seropositive.
I’ve been wondering about that.
Well, you should be, if you’re having sex with this person.
The fact that I’m not, after all this time, having sex with Gregory is a secret I dissemble without actually lying about it. Everyone assumes that I am. I let them think so: I don’t want to feel like a sexual failure. I cling to the belief that Gregory will want me someday. Only M., because he hints as much, has guessed the real state of things. M. has had the same frustrations, with guys who wanted to be “more than friends” but less than lovers, although M.’s a genius at getting what he wants. When M. asks me about it directly, I do lie: if I tell the truth, he’ll think I’m a complete masochist. What if my friends get the idea that I’m too cranky and difficult to have a real relationship? I want this thing with Gregory to look normal, so the emotional fragility people see will seem justified by compensatory pleasures. I want them to think we work things out in bed. In the meantime, I wait for Gregory to fall in love with me. What else can you do in this life, except attempt miracles?
At least let me cook you dinner, I asked, I pleaded, I begged. So he started coming frequently. Even if I had a full day. I raced through my appointments so I’d have hours free for shopping. I never just bought dinner. I stuffed the refrigerator with ten kinds of vegetables and five kinds of meat and dozens of bottles of mineral water, soda, qua
rts of vodka for the freezer, several kinds of cheese, fruit, exotic condiments, anything to suggest an ample, nurturing environment. Like the suburb he grew up in.
I bought tapes of the same music he had at his place. If he mentioned a book, I immediately read it. I wanted to know everything in his head, except what he watched on television. Gregory said he learned a lot from TV about what people were turning into. I told him I could see what people were turning into by walking out the front door. But I considered buying a TV, thinking it would lure him over more often. At his place, Gregory had it on all the time.
Since he had worked in so many restaurants and people used to drive twenty miles to Helen’s Truro Hash Palace for his celebrated omelettes, Gregory quickly usurped my nurturing role and insisted on cooking every night. It took, he said, too much time from my work. His palate favored bland heaps of tofu and overcooked fish, which I couldn’t get down without effort. I pushed food around on my plate while he sucked it in in bulk without ever gaining a pound.
We talked. We ate. He usually stayed until eleven or twelve, on festive occasions until one or two. Every time he left, he went with inflexible abruptness. He would be stretched out on the floor with his shoes off, and a second later was standing at the door, delivering my ration of farewell kisses.
We developed certain fantasies. We talked as if we were writing a play, improvising in regional dialects. For a long time we never spoke in our real voices: always an accent, a fictitious character, safely distanced from ourselves. We analyzed friends, identified adversaries. Gregory’s problems with Bruno were a running theme. Now that Gloria no longer materialized regularly, Bruno had become his chief impediment in life. Bruno asked him to do things that were inconvenient. Bruno found ways to damage his ego, bringing up Gregory’s past fecklessness, casting doubts on Gregory’s artistic abilities. Then there was Philippe, whose gargantuan importunities grew ever more unreasonable and edgy with cocaine paranoia, and of course the nightly horror of porcine customers, drunks, and drug addicts whooping it up at the restaurant.