by Gary Indiana
He says he admires me, he’s always praising my work and all that.
Well, Libby said, people are never all one way or another. One part of him does admire you and another part resents your independence and the freedom you have. When people recognize you in public he feels very small and minor next to you, probably. He’s still young and confused.
He’s not that young, I said.
Libby sighed. Is it possible, she wondered, that you could somehow put him out of your mind for a while?
She ordered another martini. Alcohol was making her giddy for a change.
I’d love to be able to forget about him, I said. If this is the way things are going to be.
If you could leave town for a few days, Libby suggested.
Oh Libby, I said, you know I just can’t. I’d like to, but I can’t.
Well, she said, there you are.
Right. There I am.
Did he think I had taken him to the movies to torture him, rub his nose in stories of mania and failure, shatter his fragile equilibrium? I doubted it. Nobody could possibly be that delicate, that vigilant about another person’s motives. Gregory had simply found an opportunity to strike out at me. We broke off, with the usual suddenness. He didn’t call. I thought it unfair that we hadn’t broken off before, the night he kept walking on Houston Street. I had hounded him by telephone right after that, to forgive him.
The magazine writing became effortless. Since it couldn’t bring him back to me, I attacked it with indifferent competence. I was too depressed to write with any grace. One bleak evening when fog had again crept into the city, I discovered six boxes of Captagon in a rusted drawer of the blue desk. This will get me through, I thought.
There are myriad ways not to think of someone. You can think about another person. You can read books which are not about love. Books about thermodynamics, or ecology. You can plunge into a whirl of party going and flirt with every available and unavailable person. You could also go to the movies, take walks through Central Park, carefully avoid any place or object or person that reminds you of him. You can overwork, lecture out of town, wear a Walkman and blast really coldhearted music into your ears. And while you do all these things, if you happen to have six boxes of it laying around, you can take speed.
I ate fast, on the run, to get it over with. Never anything like a meal. I doused my stomach with coffee while sucking in the first ten morning smokes. I swallowed the day’s first Captagon with a double tablespoon of Pepto-Bismol and settled in behind the typewriter. I had decided to write a novel. I would make it up out of my imagination. I gave it an island setting, somewhere near Lipari. The hero would be a fifty-year-old man living on a trust fund. Bog, his name was.
The story of Bog and his adventures. Bog walks down to the port every day from his hilltop retreat. He lives here because it’s cheap and within his income. In summertime the port was overrun with tourists, but much of the time only a few people live on the island, demoralized and out of contact with the world. Bog eats breakfast at the same cafe every day. Every afternoon he plays cards with two other fifty-year-old men. Bog eats lunch at the same taverna, dinner at the same outdoor restaurant, under a carpet of stars. He doesn’t talk very much, but he’s a good listener. No one knows much about him. He knows everything that goes on, all the marriages and deaths and feuds and infidelities, Bog listens, but he offers no advice. He has no conversation, no repartee, no aphorisms. He doesn’t really exist, in a way, and yet he does, because there he is. I thought I would write the story of Bog’s life, describing all the objects in his house, the awnings of the port cafes, the colors of the ships, the exact look of all the people: only sharp, objective physical details, no psychological explanations, just facts.
Bog carried me away from my problems, into a world of graphomania. I wrote all day without eating anything. Food became something I forced down to settle my stomach, something easy to chew and “nourishing”: a few plums or a nectarine, a soft roll, a take-out cup of cole slaw. Yogurt, which I spooned down so fast it passed right through me. At night, I boiled a few handfuls of curlicue pasta and doused it with butter and a flaming chili and garlic sauce, the house brand of the Korean emporium. I believed the garlic would squeeze all the toxins out of my body through the skin, toxins having become my principal diet. Eating annoyed me. I wanted to get through it so I could smoke another cigarette.
I took little breaks to refresh my mind, to flip through an improving book, looking for a phrase or a paragraph to spur my thoughts. I ventured down to the sidewalk, getting dry heaves, gagging if I walked too fast. Ideas for this book, Bog’s book, flooded through me like laser beams. Every building suggested a fresh detail. Every torn cloud in the sky opened vistas of descriptive possibilities. My mind seemed to expand at every corner. The whole thing typed itself out in my head. Intricate plot revisions worked themselves out with dreamlike ease. And at a certain moment during this pause from work, I’d find that I had walked fifty blocks, to Battery Park or Lincoln Center.
I wrote through the evenings and at midnight or one I called Libby, then Jane, or Jane, then Libby, and told them I was making fantastic progress. Any word from you know who, Jane asked, and I said, proudly, Who. Jane said, I guess you are making progress after all. Libby asked, Do you miss him a lot? Breathless from amphetamines, I declared that I wanted to put masochism out of my life, that I was getting a little old for that sort of thing, and I now had to get Serious about my Writing. Let’s face it, I said. If we want to get anywhere we have to get tough with ourselves. All Gregory wants to do is generate endless dramas that have no conclusion and will ultimately drive me out of my mind. Of course, I said, its painful that things turned out this way, but if I let it get to me I’ll just become paralyzed. No, I said, that isn’t my way. I’m stronger than he is. Which, I promised, he will find out to his own surprise.
Right after hanging up, I tapped my way down six flights and across Second to the Lebanese deli (which I preferred to the Korean one, because the horny Lebs flirted obscenely) for a six-pack. Quite often I drank the first six-pack and crawled out to buy a second one, this time at the Koreans’ so the Lebs wouldn’t know what a drunk I was. Eventually the beer brought a maudlin edge to the amphetamines, and at four in the morning I would read through my Bog manuscript, becoming tearfully moved by the beauty of my own prose, meanwhile playing the Callas Tosca at volumes that crept ever higher the drunker I got, creating an acoustical nightmare for my neighbors along the airshaft.
Despite the alcohol, my literary circus resumed at nine or ten the following morning, since Captagon has its own quirky bioclock. I woke in a world-annihilating despair, staggered to the coffeepot, considered suicide, waited for the speed to kick in. I watched myself turning cadaverous in the toothpaste-speckled mirror over the kitchen sink. Am I letting this happen to extract pity, I wondered. Do I expect someone to rescue me? Not him, I thought. Not really.
I applied the brakes after 110 unreadable pages. In the meantime, I had filed two consecutive magazine stories of such stupefying obscurity that my editor suggested, demurely, that I needed a vacation. Maria Lorca eased me off Captagon with injections of Valium. My appearance scared her. So did my muttered responses to her questions. If you don’t mind, she said, I’d like to get a little blood work done. She caught the fear in my eyes and said, I’m sure it’s nothing too dramatic.
Food: health: life. I was gnawing a Sabrett’s hot dog when I saw him walking towards me, crossing Astor Place near the cube sculpture. We slowed down as we neared each other and stopped at the wrought iron railing of the Community College, performing a kind of waltz glide, him with his back to the fence, me angling around to face him, and though we stopped it seemed as if we were still moving, around and away from each other. I threw the hot dog away.
You wanna talk things over, he asked. I could see he wanted to.
I shrugged.
What’s to talk about, I said. I smiled, but not much.
He swallowed,
lowered his eyes. He took a few steps away. I looked back and he looked back.
Obviously, he said, I’m not capable of giving you what you need.
I don’t think you’re capable of giving anybody what they need, I said.
He spun around and stalked off. Bad theater, I shouted after him.
I guess I’m happy enough, I told M., tilting a glass of champagne. Happy, and empty.
You can’t have everything, M. countered. Never happens.
And I do have wonderful friends, I said.
And a job, M. reminded me.
Yes, I said. And prestige.
And, he coaxed, what else?
Well, I said, in the same bright voice, Maria Lorca seems to think I’ve got hepatitis.
M. bristled. I think you better tell me about this, he said. We settled the check at the Spring Street Bar in the usual manner. I worriedly pulled a twenty from a mash of singles while M., always quicker on the draw, slipped a crisply folded hundred from the pocket of his pink and white Armani shirt and held it indifferently until the bartender plucked it from his fingers. We paced up to Broadway in nervous complicity. M. hobbled, his bad knee reacting to the fickle cool of an ocean breeze gusting up from the toxic harbor. I felt a rush of remorse for years of dumping my problems on M., in this case overstating them for dramatic effect.
She just said my antibody count is in a funny place, I said, clearing my throat as if to change the subject.
M. halted to light a Marlboro against the wind. The butane lighter sparked and flickered and finally sent a long rope of flame into the bluish mist. M. expelled an anxious stream of smoke and said: How funny is it?
We resumed walking, in silence, and reached the side of an unattended parking lot where very few cars, all highly polished, glistened under floodlights. I spotted the white Mercedes before he did.
Oh gee, I said. Look at that.
Please, he wailed. Don’t. Not here.
But I was already halfway across the lot, gliding up to the grille of the Mercedes. I leaned with my back against it, posing as if I’d stopped to light a cigarette. I reached expertly behind my back and snapped off the hood ornament, pocketed it, and walked through the lot to where M. stood on the Broadway side of the enclosure. I had been vandalizing Mercedes hoods for over a decade.
I don’t want it, said M., who owned at least a dozen of these nocturnal trophies.
Who said it was for you, I said.
It must have been the metal star in its circle, more than the letter I mailed him that week and the typed addendum I sent on a three by five file card immediately afterwards, that set the whole business going again. In the letter, I spelled out everything he’d done wrong, all the ways he’d invented to hurt me, and the most damning thing of all, that he knew all this would destroy my ability to function, I’d lose my job and end up penniless again, because unless I arrived at total ruin he couldn’t feel stronger than me. And, I wrote, you’ve almost managed it, but I won’t sacrifice myself for you, I need to build my own life, whereas you only know how to play games. If you had loved me, I might have considered changing things, I might have given up ambition to be with you, but you don’t want me, you want to witness the spectacle of my destruction. I’m on drugs now, I wrote—lying, since I’d just gone off them—and drinking myself sick every night—that part was true, though it wasn’t really his fault—and even though you’ve never made love to me my doctor thinks you’ve got hepatitis B, the worst kind, and I’ve gotten it from your feckless kisses, or maybe from eating off the same plate. So you’ve not only crapped up my working life, you’ve also ruined my health. I hope you’re satisfied, but I suppose you’re not, because you’ve never been satisfied with anything short of total catastrophe, and since I’m still alive, you’ve obviously failed.
I sealed the letter in a legal envelope left over from a long-ago temporary job at the Mystic Steamship Company in Boston, and even found a stamp, buried under a morass of canceled checks and Chemical Bank statements. This seemed a decisive augury because I had never previously managed to locate a stamp in my apartment, which was why I’d never written home in ten years. You write the letter and there’s no stamp, to get a stamp you have to walk to the post office, I’ve always hated going inside. Everyone in the post office stinks of expectation and petty concerns. They think their postal transactions will save their lives and solve impossibly complicated problems. Or they imagine they’ll receive something crucial, like a tax return or a package full of useful objects. Yet nothing anyone has ever received at the post office has prevented them from dropping dead or developing a brain tumor or having teeth fall out, my father used to get his hearing aids by mail and none of them ever worked, the only thing that ever happens in the post office is waiting, waiting for some disgruntled, overweight mental defective to weigh a package or inform you that whatever you’ve stood in line a half hour to retrieve isn’t there and never was there, the thing to do is to buy enough stamps to last until the rates go up, but of course the rates go up before you’ve used half your stamps, and then you need to buy supplementary postage, so the whole stupid comedy starts all over again. Which is why the phone has eliminated personal correspondence, except in cases like this one, where I really didn’t want to talk to him, and suspected his phone would be unplugged if I tried to.
I dumped the letter in a mailbox on Second Avenue. The feet of the mailbox had been unscrewed, either by vandals or perhaps by the post office itself, to undermine confidence. Maybe he won’t get this, I thought, until years from now, when it won’t mean anything. He won’t even remember who I am. I won’t remember who he was, and he won’t remember who I was, either. It will just be a strange piece of mail. And he won’t receive it anyway, because he won’t be living there, and Gregory isn’t the type to leave a forwarding address.
The addendum, on the file card, read: In spite of everything, you have a beautiful soul, and I would do anything for you if you were in trouble. For this, I bought a stamp from a machine at the discount center on Ninth Street. I mailed it from the same defective mailbox, wondering if he’d get the postscript before the letter, and what sort of confusion that would cause.
And then I bumped into him a few days later, and pulled the Mercedes star from my pocket. Here’s your birthday present, I said. I got the real present yesterday, he smiled, meaning the file card, the postscript, the apology.
11
At the carious onset of the dream time, Gregory went to Maria Lorca for a blood test. He did, it turned out, have hepatitis, which accounted, Maria Lorca thought, for his continual exhaustion, though she also wanted a biopsy on his lymph nodes, since many people with chronic hepatitis never experience fatigue but just have it rummaging around through their livers, whereas these swollen nodes, Maria Lorca told him, might be the residue of his long-ago IV drug use, or a side effect of hepatitis B, but there was, she said, a marginal possibility of lymphoma. He reported this accusingly, as if he would’ve been perfectly healthy if I hadn’t sent him to the doctor.
He immediately saw himself as a cornered creature. He needed bed rest and complete quiet, but he needed to keep going, keep working, or else he’d have no money. He’d lose his apartment and starve to death. Or else his job would kill him. Either way, he’d die.
You’ve got to quit, I begged him over the phone.
I know, he said, but how can I?
You’re supposed to be recovering, in bed. Resting. You’re not even supposed to move around.
I don’t have any insurance, he whined. I’ll have to move home. Or move in with you.
Would you rather be dead, Gregory? I mean, you don’t have too many choices here.
I’d rather be dead anyway, at this point. It’s just been one shitty thing after another.
I’ll take care of you, I said, instantly regretting it.
That’s just what I’ve been avoiding, he said, as I knew he would.
But Gregory, I said, this is an emergency. Maria Lorca says you have
extensive liver damage.
She told you that? Does she realize I could sue her for divulging information?
I paid your goddamned bill with her, I said, if you can’t afford to pay her how do you think you can afford to sue her? Anyway, I’m involved in this too, you know, I’m infected. I have to know how to take care of myself.
I’ll bet you even resent her for looking up my asshole, don’t you.
She’s a doctor, Gregory, she needed a stool sample, I don’t really consider her a love rival. I mean, grow up, will you?
I am bisexual, you know.
I know all about it, I said. You and the Emperor Tiberius. I’m sure Maria Lorca would prefer someone closer to the top of the food chain, in any case.
Oh, great, he said, now I’m nothing but scum to you, now that I can’t fuck you.
You’ve already fucked me, every way but in bed. Why are you dragging this down to some idiotic emotional level, anyway?
Go ahead, he said, get it all out. I won’t hang up on you. You’d just call right back anyway.
You’d have unplugged the phone, Gregory, I know your little ways.
You always think of me in the diminutive, because you’re so big and important. If you only knew what people really think of you.
What people. Your friends?
Everybody except the four or five people who can stand you. Everyone says you’re a raging drunkard and a liar and a mediocrity who thinks he’s a genius. That you have so little self-respect you’ve lived in a pigpen for ten years. That you pretend you’re this moral paragon when the fact is you’ve never had the opportunity to sell out. You’ve never paid back a loan, and you’ve never picked up a check. That’s what people say.
Anything else?