by Gary Indiana
I couldn’t work up to any embarrassment about Victor’s awkwardness, though he clung to me like a puppy, since I didn’t much care about the people he felt awkward around. Sarah, I considered, had really fucked up by letting Doris invite this glittery flotsam. Not one person there would buy a single painting or encourage anyone else to. Even so, watching Victor haplessly shifting his weight from leg to leg as he stared into space, I wanted to grab his hair and scream at him: For Christ’s sake, can’t you hold your own, just once?
The whole affair passed in a merciful blur. I would wake late the next day, hung over, dreading the second opening ahead, my mouth tasting foul from the spiced wine cooler Cyril had served, two packs of Marlboro, and the five beers I’d drunk with Victor at the corner saloon, where we’d sat until closing, dissecting Cyril’s guests. This midnight-to-four postmortem with Victor was becoming a regular feature of any complicated evening. Victor had some temporary stage design job uptown at night. He usually looked for me in the bar on his way home. Victor had such a protective attitude that more than once, in the throes of liquor, I thought about taking him home. He was sexy if you didn’t know him, or if you just thought about him physically. I didn’t fully imagine what having sex with him would be like, and it never happened, in any case. It was a bit awkward that Richard had begun sending off sexual vibes at the gym, where we viewed each other naked three mornings a week, did aerobics and free weights together, and joked all the time about getting it on with each other. When I was with Victor, Richard often entered the back of my mind. I thought if Victor split up with Richard, Richard would immediately come on to me in a serious way. But he would have to feel it was final, his breaking up with Victor. And it would also signify the end of Victor’s friendship with me, because he would always be in love with Richard no matter what. Some people are like that. Even after there’s nothing left between themselves and someone else, they persist in being in love with that person to the point of mania.
Whatever Victor and I raked over during that first happy flush of alcohol was simply a prologue to the somber topic of Gregory. I still tried puzzling out whether or not Gregory was on smack. I described our arguments and his mood swings and flaky habits, reconstructing conversations in precise detail, thinking Victor could see something I couldn’t, since he wasn’t involved. I had a definite picture of how a junkie talked and what a junkie looked like: a sort of boneless, vague, implacable person, incapable of prolonged lucidity, furtive about everything. Gregory didn’t exactly coincide with this picture. He just seemed impossibly unhappy. Sometimes I felt certain he had started shooting drugs again or maybe hadn’t ever stopped, but then he’d say something, or do something, that made him enigmatic in a different way. I couldn’t draw a conclusion. I began to think that was all I really wanted, to know how things actually stood. Victor said he had the impression that the key to the whole thing was: whatever I wanted was exactly what wasn’t going to happen. If I wanted to know just one simple fact, I would find out everything except that single piece of information. That’s why, he said, you should cultivate a Zen attitude.
Gregory turned up an hour and a half late for Sarah’s second opening, so close to the end I’d given up hope, and I’d told Jacques, He’s always like this, I never know, no matter what he promises, and he knows it’s important to me—and Jacques laughed and barked, Have another drink. The over-lit gallery and the pictures and the people sagged like weathered flesh. I was watching the damaged frames of a lousy movie. People in thick, smoky, boozy clusters. Lots of toothy smiles, lipstick, fur, the erratic progress of people moving through a room in order to avoid certain people and be seen by other people. I circled about feeling mortified and fragile, meeting up with Jacques every few minutes. Well, he said, if he doesn’t come, it isn’t the end of the world. But it was, because he’d promised, this once, to do just this one little thing for me. By the time he showed up I’d gone into my own fugue.
Libby always told me stories. Jane recounted her day and horrible things she’d seen on the television news. M. had things to say about food, foul behavior witnessed at dinner parties, and the location of various attractive men in the city. Richard described the state of his friendships, itemized his clothing purchases, and needled me about things I’d written or said, for no good reason I could think of. Richard cultivated frivolous and embittered people who wanted to be famous. Most of his friends had missed the boat for reasons that were obvious to me but completely opaque to him. One had been a child prodigy as a violinist, and had become a failed writer with a profitable sideline in ceramics. Another one did subtle copies of other people’s paintings. They all clung to Richard like barnacles. Whenever I went to his loft they were hanging out, bopping around to salsa music. They were often stoned and tended to break things. Richard was incapable of sustained anger. He wanted desperately to be liked by everybody. Richard told me his version of his day at the gym, and then Victor gave me the annotated version in the evening. Victor was a better storyteller.
When Jacques saw us he shot me a big, gap-toothed grin. He turned away from Doris and clapped Gregory across the shoulders. Here he is, the little bastard, he cackled. Jacques was drunk. A look spread over Gregory’s face, like the look he’d worn in the restaurant. Unspeakable pain, rage, embarrassment, humiliation: all that jazz.
Todd, Martha’s friend, cursed me before he died, not so close to the end as to seem an obsessed malediction, but when he was failing, during the third attack of pneumocystis, at a time when his survival prospects were nil, and his last conversations were sure to be remembered. He said, I’m told, I hope he gets it. I had known him for fifteen years. Some people choose to die like pricks, taking their bitterness right into the grave with them. People are funny, Jane said. And then she said, Give me a dog any day.
At the tail end of the opening Doris asked Gregory to bring his slides to the gallery. It might have removed Gregory’s suspicion that he was considered a “trick” by my friends, if Doris hadn’t also cast a baldly appraising glance all over him and added, I’m interested in anybody who wears an embroidered vest.
Let’s get out of here and go someplace, he murmured. We drifted out into a cool evening full of mist, through TriBeCa along West Broadway. As we approached Spring Street he said, as if suddenly remembering it, Jack owes me a hundred bucks. Jack was a tall guy with bad skin who tended bar at the restaurant.
We walked up Spring and went in there. It was jammed with coked-up Europeans simulating the atmosphere of an early Virna Lisi movie. The last place on earth I’d thought Gregory would go on a night off. We wedged ourselves into the alcove at the near end of the bar, Gregory ordered two Remys. The glasses appeared, Gregory said, Wait here a second, and darted off into the kitchen. Then Jack disappeared through the swinging doors on his side of the zinc. I stared into the Remy, feeling I’d suddenly lost control of the evening. Time dragged past while a Latin song drummed away on the high-distortion speakers. It was a song that had blared out of every bar and bodega in Cartagena when Rainer and I were filming there. The words translated into something like, Mama, my sister’s run off with a Negro.
I remembered the choking humidity of the Arsenal Disco on the canal bank, with the fishnet ceiling studded with Christmas lights. A mestizo bartender I spent a day and night in bed with, a pile of finely crushed powder on the glass bureautop shrinking down into dandruff; and I thought of Willie, who had not been sick in Cartagena, playing “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” on the Bechstein with missing keys in the house near the Plaza de Bolivar, Willie like a small, trimmer version of Adolphe Menjou. I had hunted through Carl Fischer for the score, the day before getting on the plane for Bogota, so that Willie could play the song in the movie. The man who sold me the sheet music wanted to go to Peru. Mama, my sister’s run off with a Negro. Gregory reappears. Jack only has fifty dollars in the till. We’ll have to wait until he makes up the rest of it. But why, Gregory. We don’t need a hundred dollars just to go out. Oh, he says, he�
��ll have it in no time. Just be patient. Have another Remy. Mama, my sister’s run off with a Negro.
The amplifier over the bar telegraphs red dashes, oscillating in length to the volume. Gregory puts his fingertips on my face. Don’t get excited, he says. But something else is going on. I’m thinking about Willie and Rainer and I hear Willie’s voice singing, I wonder who’s looking into her eyes, breathing sighs, telling lies . . . Jack motions at Gregory, some cases of wine are wheeled in on a dolly, Gregory snaps into the rigid motions of work, the crates and the dolly and Jack and Gregory disappear through the basement door, a long time passes, the speakers drizzle noise through the damp air. I drain my Remy and stare at a Laurie Anderson poster above the pay phone. I watch people I know walk by on Spring Street, one’s an architect and one’s a composer and the third one, I seem to recall, is under indictment for tax fraud and owns a huge discotheque in the West Forties. Then I see a group straggling home from Sarah’s opening. There’s the critic from Newsweek and a woman who writes children’s books, finally I see a boy I once paid $54 to suck his dick, I’ve forgotten his name, but he went on to invent a duck-shaped lighting fixture that earned him half a million dollars. History waddles along as I wait, Jack returns to his post behind the bar, still no Gregory, Jack pours me another Remy as if he’s been told to, I stare at the glass, I’m ready to burst into tears.
He comes back looking agitated. Let’s go, he says. We walk outside, go up Spring, across Mercer. Where are we going, I ask him. He says: I’ve got to go home now. I tell him: But we’re going out. He says: I can’t do that, I’ve got to go home now. I’ve got to be alone. Now I really don’t understand anything. But I’m fed up, I’ve swallowed enough nonsense. Suit yourself I tell him. He seems to be trembling. Don’t say that to me, he says, don’t ever say that to me. You don’t understand anything, he says. We walk together up Houston. Near the corner of Elizabeth Street I stop walking and scream, What is wrong. I’ve got to be alone, he whines, without looking at me, his pace quickens, he moves faster. I stop. He keeps walking. As far as he’s concerned I’ve disappeared. He doesn’t look back. Finally I turn down Elizabeth, thinking he’ll turn around and follow me. I sit down on a stoop and gaze into a fenced-off filling station at a pile of tires.
What did I do to deserve this? What’s wrong with me? I cannot quite believe he’s kept on walking and left me here, but in fact this is exactly what has happened. I know the trees on this street better than I know him. I walk home along Bowery. Just near the corner of Third Street the sidewalk swarms with derelicts, some of them collapsed in piles of garbage. They’ve taken over one corner of the big gas station across the street, the empire of smelly drunks and crack addicts fans out from the men’s shelter on Third all across the Bowery and down the lower end of Second Avenue. The procession of bums tapers off at Phebe’s on Bowery and Fourth. Then there’s a brand new Japanese restaurant, with a bunch of yuppies chawing sashimi in the window. The mission church. A pizza joint. Cooper Union. The Optimo Cigar place the Koreans have taken over, that sells the good porn. And then the stretch between St. Marks and Tenth, where the old parking lots are being excavated and blasted to make way for hideous NYU dormitories. In another year there won’t be any trace of the neighborhood left. The hookers have already moved from Third Avenue to Second and Eleventh Street.
Up the miserable stairs. I unlock my door and bolt for the refrigerator, find a beer, and sink down into the study reclining chair, next to the phone, and wonder if I’m strong enough not to call him. A stupid thing to wonder about. When I do it there’s no answer. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s overdosed. Maybe it’s just his way of saying I’m the biggest fool he ever met.
10
In the dream time Maria Lorca told me: If you don’t quit smoking, you’re going to have some problems in about three years. It was a feature of the dream time that this kind of information got stored in the same place as unwanted invitations and requests for nonpaying lecture gigs and the kinds of embarrassing things I sometimes did when I got drunk, a place where irritations pooled in the short-term memory and trickled their way down to the dumping core. In the dream time Gregory told me: I’ve got these swollen glands in my armpits. I am not calling it the dream time for any poetic reason, the dream time is simply what it was.
I knew a man who’d made a film that happened to be playing at the Public Theater. The director led a prolific career in Europe but had had no success in America, and when I saw the ad I told Gregory, Can’t we go see this together? Although he hardly ever agreed to do anything, when I pleaded Gregory put on an astonished, bruised air. Of course, why not? he said. Why not go to the Met on Thursday? Why not go dancing at the Pyramid? Why not have dinner out? And invariably, a day or an hour or minutes before the promised thing, the date, the “shared experience,” some terrible, unprecedented psychological disaster made the whole thing impossible. Gregory cross-hatched my disappointment by telling me there was always another day. We had our whole lives to go to the movies. And in the dream time it did mysteriously seem that we had eons stretching out ahead of us, miles of time for all the things we never did.
But we did go to this particular movie, debating the whole way, right up to the ticket window, whether this was the right night to go out, whether Gregory would actually like the movie. If I don’t like it, he cautioned, don’t be offended if I walk out in the middle. The threat of disaster was always palpable. A boring movie would never simply bore. It would ruin an evening, and by implication help to ruin everything.
After ten minutes I knew I’d made a hideous mistake. In the film, a young auto mechanic fell deliriously in love with a much older woman, a pharmacist. She rejected him. He became deranged. He parked his car across from her drugstore and started living in the car, putting a carpet down on the street, decorating the car with vases full of flowers. I felt Gregory turning restive immediately, and when the car business started I remembered the story of his father. Gregory’s mind blackened in the seat beside me. He endured every frame like a crown of thorns. When we got outside the theater I said, That was heavy. He stared at the facade of the Colonnades as if willing the neighborhood to explode. Looking away from me he said, in a soft voice, You knew, didn’t you. You knew what this was about when you forced me to go, didn’t you.
Gregory, I said, I had no idea what this film was about. Oh sure, he said. If you expect me to believe that, he said, I don’t think we have anything left to say to each other. And he marched away from me down Lafayette Street. I watched his determined back getting smaller and smaller. There was no point in catching up with him or trying to put things right: he would already have a specific place he’d decided to go, and once he’d decided something, nothing on earth could change his mind.
Libby, I said, whatever you’re doing, I have to see you this instant or I’m getting in a cab and checking into Bellevue.
I’m feeding the cats, she said. Where are you?
I’m at Indochine, I said. I’m in the pay phone at Indo-chine.
Give me ten minutes, she said. And keep in mind, you know, that Indochine is a particularly unfortunate place to go crazy in.
I waited behind an immense tropical floral arrangement and drank three vodka martinis. I realized that every relationship I’d been in before had somehow prepared me for Gregory in a special, awful way. I had always wanted someone to take control of me body and soul, rule my life, fill my consciousness to the exclusion of everything else. And at last someone had, a full-blown psychopath. I knew we had reached the point at which Gregory could take it all away from me: my money, my sanity, my status, my sense of humor.
Libby appeared in a Gaultier T-shirt and a pair of tight bleach-splattered jeans, her Brillo hair tucked up inside a straw hat. I stood up and waved at her and gave her a kiss.
I feel terrible, I said, because since I called you I’ve drunk myself into a philosophical mood.
That’s all right, she said, I actually need a drink.
I got
her a drink. Libby is not a drinker. It makes her silly, and later acrid. She doesn’t smoke or drink coffee. She likes two cans of Bud at the end of an evening. She said she had already had them. She now had a gin martini.
What made you come here, she asked.
Well, I said, we were across the street.
I told her the plot of the movie. Libby said it sounded pretty good. “Let It Bleed” was playing at insect volume. Libby hummed fitfully and mimicked the loose body language we all had back in the sixties. Then she scanned my face for depression.
He went into this fugue about the movie, Libby paraphrased, piecing events together.
That’s the trouble, I said. He goes into a fugue over a chipped nail.
I know you love this guy, she said, but I don’t think he’s wrapped too tight.
No, I said. I sensed the alarming transmutation of my misery into the material of a therapeutic narrative. A story that would circle and circle around itself until it all came out fine.
A lot of American men can’t handle relationships, Libby averred. Especially at his age.
I think it’s all finished anyway, I said. I mean I don’t think I can stand much more of this, breaking down and blubbering about him every night of my life. How can he continually do these things and why do I let him? It’s mind-boggling.
Libby reached for one of my cigarettes. She started to light it, caught herself, then laid it aside near her glass. She pressed her lips together.
He does adore you, she said. You look so happy when you’re with him.
I’m so obsessed with him it’s making me sick, I said. And it must be incredibly boring for you to hear every little twist and turn. It’s so embarrassing to feel publicly vulnerable and kicked around . . .
Actually, you somehow manage to make it sound interesting. But I do worry about you lately. This should be a good time in your life, with all this recent success and attention, and instead Gregory’s spoiling it all. He’s probably getting back at you for the things that are working out for you.