by Darren Greer
or
How I Won the Battle but Lost My Boner
by Cameron Dodds
Dear Julie: I can tell by the countless, frustrated e-mails I just downloaded from my Hotmail account that you are thinking simultaneously about what a loser I am and how you have lost one hundred dollars. Never fear. You’ll be happy to know that I have seen your illustrious brother. In fact, I have spent the last two days with him, which is why you haven’t heard from me in all this time. I did consider calling you, but thought it better that you hear what I have to say over the electronic transom, where your screams won’t damage my eardrums. Let me start at the beginning.
I did not go to Dean the night after I picked up your $100. (Which you were right in guessing I desperately needed. Juxta was out of food and litter and I was out of whiskey.) That night I got good and drunk and cried myself to sleep face down in the pillow. But the next night my conscience got the better of me and I went to see Dean. He wasn’t home, so I left a note. Apparently I forgot to mention it wasn’t urgent, for someone proceeded to bang on my door at three o’clock in the morning. It was Dean, of course, blind drunk in the hallway, soaking wet from the rain, with my note in his hands.
“What’s this?” he shouted. “What in the fuck is this? You want me out of here!”
At that hour, and in that condition, Dean couldn’t tell the difference between me and Rose. He thought my little paper billet doux was an eviction notice. I finally got him inside and settled him down, before Amy called the police, or, worse, Rose came up herself and did the hokey pokey all over Dean’s drunken ass. He collapsed on my sofa with his leather jacket and boots still on, promptly fell asleep, and I went to bed. When I got up, Dean was sitting in my little kitchen, a pot of Maxwell House brewing, petting Juxta on his lap. He looked kind of sick, and contrite enough.
“Hi, Cameron,” he said. “How did I get down here again?”
I told him about the note and the banging on my door in the middle of the night. Dean laughed sheepishly, and asked if I had any Alka-Seltzer. I found him some, burnt some toast, poured the coffee. I asked him what was up.
“Nothing,” Dean said. “I was out with some friends. Had a few too many, I guess. What’s up with you?”
He was referring to the two-inch carpet of photocopied files and manila folders obscuring the floor of my living room, the piles of dirty laundry in the corners, and the pungent odour of cat piss wafting ungraciously out from the litter box, which I hadn’t changed in a week. “Nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “Research.”
“Still writing?” said Dean.
“Yes. Still playing?”
Dean didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. I hadn’t heard the sound of a piano from his apartment for weeks. Dean only shrugged. “The thing about writers,” he said flatly, “is that, unlike musicians, you can’t hear the silence that results from a loss of inspiration.”
“Ah, come on,” I said. “It can’t be that bad.”
It was that bad. Worse. But it would take me a bit longer to figure that out. What I could figure out pretty quickly was that Dean was in no hurry to get back to his own place. This is quite a statement, given the condition of my apartment. He stayed for a couple cups of coffee, bummed half a dozen cigarettes, moved over to the sofa, read for a bit. I cleaned up the living room the best I could around him, made my bed. (Not what you’re thinking. I long ago gave up on getting into Dean’s pants, I’ll have you know. I can tell when a guy is or is not interested. It’s an instinct you develop early when you grow up gay in a small town.)
I was going to suggest that he leave so that I could go back to work when Dean asked me if I wanted to go out for a drink. It was only 11:00 A.M., but it would be a nice way to get rid of him without having to ask. One drink and I could come back to my apartment without him and finish off the rest of the afternoon with the files. I can see you cringing when I say “Get rid of Dean.” Really, Dags, your brother is a nice guy and everything, but my apartment is pretty small. Besides, he looked okay to me. A little rough around the edges from a night of drinking, but he didn’t look at death’s door. So I was gonna go, have one drink with the guy, and then send you a hundred-dollar e-mail letting you know that everything was okay with your brother. It should have been that way, except that Dean was loaded. I mean loaded. He had a wad of money in his pocket and another in his wallet, and the next thing I knew, instead of one drink at the little dive around the corner we were having two and then three and then four. Dean paid for them all. All I paid for was the cigarettes.
It was after three when we finally stumbled out of the tavern and into the street. Then Dean wanted to go to dinner somewhere, all on him, and I agreed. We didn’t eat anything that I remember, just drank more, at this swanky cocktail lounge midtown. You know the place, with a stencilled napkin under every drink and black glass tables? Mimeographed matchbooks and a fresh ashtray every time you light a cigarette? Dean hooked up with these two “babes,” Lisa and Yvonne. I have to admit, your estimation of Dean’s taste in women is pretty dead-on. Lisa and Yvonne were in cocktail dresses and high heels and it wasn’t even 10 P.M. They weren’t twins — they didn’t even look alike — yet I couldn’t tell the two of them apart. Dean paid for most of their drinks. Long story short. We all ended up at Lisa’s apartment downtown. Then Lisa pulls out a little glass vial of cocaine and we fall into some eighties existential nightmare. Dean ends up buying more coke. I kept wanting to ask him where he got the money but didn’t. Guys who live above Rose and Amy’s Shit Palace aren’t generally rolling in dough. I thought maybe he got it from you, but changed my mind about that. Even Dagnia Daley, the Dagnia Daley, would have a hard time supporting that evening’s coke consumption with all the royalties of Fly by Night and Destined to Deliver combined. Every two hours a coke dealer stood at the door and Dean paid for it all. I got pretty wrecked. I stay away from cocaine as a rule. After having worked in a treatment centre for guys who mostly ruined their lives with it, I just don’t see the point. Anyway. My high-flown principles flew the coop, and I was just as stoned-ass-drunk as the rest of them.
Then Lisa and Yvonne go off to the bedroom. Dean cuts up more lines on the glass coffee table.
“Come on, man,” I tell him. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” Dean says. “You’ve been a good sport until now, Cameron.”
Lisa and Yvonne come back out of the bedroom, both naked. Dean smiles, winks and lays back on the sofa, his hands clasped behind his head. Yvonne kneels down before him and starts to undo his belt. Lisa kneels down and does the same thing to me. Or maybe that was Yvonne. Whatever.
“Guys,” I say. “I’m not into this. Dean, you know I’m not into this!”
“No categories here tonight, Cameron,” Dean says. “Just relax and enjoy it, sport.” Dean kept calling me sport, like we were characters in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
How much of this do you want to hear? Do you need all the gory details? Or should I just cut to the chase?
Cameron
CLIII
Subject: Last Instalment
Date: Sunday, 21 September, 2000 16:42:17 _0300
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC:
All of it. Every damn word. Then cut to the chase.
Julie
CLIV
Subject: Last Instalment
Date: Sunday, 21 September, 2000 17:23:08 _0300
From: [email protected]
To:[email protected]
Okay.
Last Instalment (Continued)
by Cameron Dodds
It gets kind of jumbled here. I passed out at one point, woke up and found myself in the middle of a knot of bodies. Then I woke up again in a bed with all of us going at it. Lisa kissing me, Yvonne kissing Dean, Dean kissing me. It’s kind of hard to write about this to a guy’s sister, okay? Let’s just say that we went through every conceivable combination of boy-girl-boy relatio
ns — like trying to see which key will fit into which lock to open the magic portal. There was no magic portal, by the way, at least not for me. Dean was completely in charge. Whatever he told us to do, we did. Finally, it ended up with just Dean and me in bed together. I can’t remember how. Maybe he told Lisa and Yvonne to get lost.
We fell asleep for a bit.
Before it got light, maybe six o’clock, Dean woke me up, made me get out of bed and get dressed. “Come on, sport,” he said. “Time to go.”
I didn’t question him. After last night, I wouldn’t have questioned anything he did. A night of hollow sex with a good-looking guy always does that to me. I turn into a bit of a slave. Dean and I left the apartment and caught a cab back to Rose and Amy’s. I thought he would want to be alone, he wasn’t so very talkative in the cab. But when I made to go back to my own apartment he asked where I was going.
“Why be alone?” he said. “We’ll be alone enough the rest of the day, won’t we?”
And so, using the very carrot that got me spying on the guy in the first place, Dean took me up to his apartment. I’d been there before, of course. Same layout as mine: kitchenette, small living room and bathroom, even smaller bedroom overlooking the street. Except that Dean’s always seemed even smaller because of the upright piano taking up one whole wall of the living room. A couple of times I sat there, next to the open window, and listened to Dean play. For what it’s worth, the man really does have a gift. The best part of your brother will always be sitting intently in front of a piano, waiting to play.
Except that now, there was no piano. The wall where it sat was bare — not even a picture hung to make it less stark and noticeable. Dean must have wanted me to see it. Why else bring me up there?
“I sold it,” he said. “Don’t make a big deal of it. I got a good price.”
“Why?” I asked him.
Dean plopped himself on the couch, pulled the last of the coke from his pocket and started laying out lines on his coffee table. He didn’t even take off his jacket. “What good does it do? All that music and no one to hear it? Playing for you and the rats and eating Alpo from a can by the time I’m sixty? No thanks. If I could go back through my life and change just one thing, I would change music. I would erase that whore from my life so completely you’d never know she existed.”
What can you say? I’m sure if you were there, Dagnia/Julie, you would have said something. Some pep talk, maybe. Something inspirational. At least it explained where he got the money. All night we had been drinking and snorting Dean’s piano. It was almost funny. The visual image of it, I mean. But I couldn’t say anything. We did the last of the coke, and I thought about the cancer. The brain cancer. I wanted suddenly to ask him about it, ask him if he was taking his pills, going to chemo, doing all the things he was supposed to do to keep himself alive. I wanted to ask him what kind of cancer it was, and why he looked so good, and what I could do to help. But I couldn’t, because he didn’t know I knew. We went to bed together one last time. And it was only after we’d finished, after Dean had kissed me and rolled away from me, that I thought of it. I reached out and touched his hair, the soft brown ringlets that cost you, Dagnia, so much. I pulled on one of the curls a little.
“Fuck, ouch!” Dean cried. “What are you doing, sport?”
“It’s real,” I said.
“Of course, it’s real. Why in the hell wouldn’t it be?”
Then, of course, Dean realized. I realized that I had completely blown my cover. Just like 007, I’m at my most vulnerable when lying naked in someone else’s bed. Dean rolled over to face me.
“That bitch,” he said. “You know her?”
“She told me about you, yes. I met her at —”
“Get out,” Dean said. “Get dressed and get the fuck out.” I got up, found my clothes, stumbled around half-naked while I tried to put them on. Dean just watched me from the bed. “She told you about the cancer?” he said finally.
“Yes,” I said. “She told me about the wig, too. The wig she bought, but ...”
“Yeah, well,” said Dean. “Whatever.”
And then, with one leg in my jeans and one leg out, it came to me. That flash of intuition that writers — and sometimes people who aren’t writers, like doctors and counsellors and mothers — get from time to time for no good reason at all.
“You’re not even sick,” I said. “You don’t have cancer at all.”
“Go home, sport,” said Dean, “and jerk off from now on.”
“You just tell her that so she’ll keep feeling guilty and giving you money.”
“Bite me, sport,” said Dean.
“You keep missing chemo because there is no chemo. Or doctors. Or wig. What’d you do? Shave your head to get the wig money out of her?”
“Jesus,” said Dean. “I wish there was more coke. Got any money, sport?”
“Yeah, Dean,” I said. “I do. A hundred bucks your sister gave me just to let her know if you were lying dead on the floor of your apartment.”
Dean shrugged. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” he said, pulling up the covers and rolling away towards the wall. And because there was nothing left to say or do, I left him there, craving cocaine in his own bed with dirty sheets. I left him there like the rest of us losers who don’t know we are losers in this goddamned crummy century that we live in, perfectly free in our beds with nothing — no one and nowhere — to move to.
CLV
For five days after sending off my final instalment I heard nothing from Julie, though I checked my Hotmail account every day for some kind of response. Finally, one Monday afternoon in early October I got a message from her. It was dated that morning and sent from her own Hotmail account — Julie Lowell and not Dagnia Daley. The message contained only one word:
C-O-K-S-U-K-E-R
Although I didn’t remember doing it, I must have once told Julie/Dagnia the story of the low-rated tennis pro and Tattoo Sam of the blue, blue ink.
CLVI
Excerpted from
The Scar: The Three Rivers Stories
by Cameron Dodds
My father drove a forklift at the Three Rivers Lumber Mill. It was a massive piece of machinery — as high as a house and nearly as wide. He spent his days in the heated cab, listening to country music on the local radio station and loading the hauling trucks one after the other with stacks of lumber earmarked for shipment all across the country. He still managed to come from work every day reeking of axle grease and with wood chips in his hair, even though special mechanics fixed the forklift when it broke down and he never actually touched the wood with his hands. Still, despite the absence of physical labour, he was enormously strong. Sometimes in the summer he would rollback the sleeves of his T-shirt and flex a bicep for me. “Feel that, Darrel,” he would say. Tentatively I would reach out and trace my finger over his bulging muscle — it was as hard as steel and his skin was tanned brown from hanging his arm out the window of the forklift under the hot summer sun. Even then, at that young age, I had an appreciation for the male physique that went far beyond what I suspected other boys had. I could hardly breathe when I touched my father’s arm and he would always laugh, push my hand away, and roll his sleeve back down. “You like that, do you?” he’d say. “You work hard and you can have muscles like that too, one day.”
There were times when he could be nice, especially before our mother died. Once he came home from town with new bicycles for my sister and me. It was no occasion — not Christmas nor anyone’s birthday. Just a Saturday afternoon in September when he had seen matching pink and blue gt Racers in a store window in town and had a few extra dollars in his pocket from overtime pay. He decided to buy them for us on a whim. At other times he took me deer hunting with him, or helped June wash her hair in the sink. These days stand out like fresh-minted money in the bank of my memory; they were rare and glorious occasions, and I always feel a little uncomfortable when I think back on them, as if my father cou
ld reach out and snatch back even the few good memories I have of him.
The bastard.
CLVII
The thing is:
1. Darrel and June Greene were both raised at the wrong end of a small town up north with an asshole father and a mother who hanged herself in the bathroom when they were just kids.
2. I grew up in a small town with an asshole father and a mother who took off when I was just a kid.
3. It doesn’t take Sigmund-fucking-Freud to see where this is going, does it?
CLVIII
Julie finally picked up the phone and called me at my apartment, more than three weeks after I had informed her of her brother’s betrayal. The last time I visited the store Rose informed me that Dean had left. Apparently mistaking my friendly little note for an eviction notice was not entirely drunken paranoia on his part.
“He didn’t pay rent,” Rose told me. “I kicked the bastard out. I kept his furniture too, except the piano. The bastard sold the piano.”
I know, I told her, and asked if she knew where he had gone.
“Don’t know,” said Rose. “Don’t give a shit. Wanna buy a sofa?”
I didn’t.
Rose rented the apartment furnished to a young guy with a nose-piercing and green-dyed hair who played nothing more than a stereo in the early evening. When Julie called she said Dean had contacted her that day. He was out of money and needed a place to stay.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“I told him,” Julie said, “to go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.”
Classic.
Obscure but classic.
Truth and lies about brothers and sisters.
CLIX
Which gave me a crazy idea. Two of them actually. But I only ran the first one by Dagnia/Julie. The thing about crazy ideas is that you have to feed them to people one at a time, with plenty of space in between. Otherwise they’ll think you’re nuts.