by Dale Peck
And the wonderful snapshots! I appreciate very much that you took care to go to the post office and to put into an envelope so nice pictures. I looked at them a lot of times and I have to tell you which were my thoughts:
The first one is that I want to see you again as soon as possible. I was hesitating to fly to this N.Y. this summer but I had no real purpose without seeing you. Nothing could enjoy me more than to take you in my arms. I would like only to be sure that it’s the same for you as it could be. I am a little bit afraid to be so excited to meet you again when I think of the short period during which we were together. I remember quite well that I cried a lot when you left me at the station on my last week-end in the Big City. Do you? And I had difficulty to forgive you to have left me alone but you explained to me the reasons.
The second one is that you look nearly the same. I say nearly, because you look taller and thinner. The surprising difference is your long hair! To any one you are still very good-looking and the most important thing is that I find the same nice boy when I have the great pleasure to see you again. I love your pictures and if you have other ones don’t hesitate to send me them. I’ll keep them very carefully. I am laughing a little bit about your long hair. Don’t consider that as a criticism but I prefer you with shorter hair. You have probably to do it for your magazine snapshots. Last week I said to one of my young accountants: “Do you want really to be one of the Beatles.” He blushed and promised to go to the hair-dresser, but he did not. May I confess that I have longer hair but still shorter than the young beautifuls in Paris?
The third thought provoked by your beautiful face is that I am pleased you are a little bit older. As you have written it you have thought of the problems of life, of love, of your way of living, of the purpose you have to follow. When I met you I was convinced after a few days that you could not arrest your attention on one person: Jean-gabriel, but that it was necessary for you, at your age, to know other boys, the gay life and all the aspects of the way of living in the world and it was painful for me. You did and I cannot criticize you. I regretted it but I had not the right to do it. You had to compare between them a lot of things, a lot of persons and only after you could stabilize yourself. This moment can happen when you are 20, 30, or 40, even more. It depends on persons. Have you now enough elements of comparison and do you know now partly what want? I hope so and I hope you have the desire to live a quieter life, a more interesting life, more attractive and that I could have a place in this life. You have to tell me frankly which one. What is the use to meet a lot of boys, to scatter his love, to kill his capacity of love finally? You have to choice your way: you have a lot of abilities: don’t spoil your life! Build something nice and great. And for that love is necessary, real love and not a lot of affairs. But with whom would you like to try? You’re more confident now because what you wrote about love and your “neurotic needs” is very well deliberated and true. Believe me, a French boy, at your age, could not analyze a problem in such an intelligent way. And I like intelligent persons. You say that you don’t live only for the “immediate satisfaction of your neurotic needs,” that it has taken for you two years to learn it. Wonderful, wonderful, but be prudent before swearing: “I’ll never drink of this water.”
The last but not least thought is about us. After such a nice and intelligent letter, I discovered great changes in you, in the good direction. I wonder if you are ready to come back 2 years sooner and to build something “marvelous” with a boy who did not forget you. I am afraid because it’s nearly impossible. At 3.000 miles, it’s, maybe, madness, but why could we not be mad? With you, it can be only lovely. I feel that there is a very good occasion of showing what we are able to do: our letters. Both of us we have to prove that we want to be more than ordinary friends and one of the conditions is to keep, until we meet each other, a very close contact. I make a proposal, a reasonable one, I feel. We have to swear to send a letter once every two weeks. At least. I think that 2 letters a month, it’s not too much. I am ready to swear it, if you do it and this vow should be valid until we meet. Don’t do again what we did two years before. There is no question of language.
A second condition is that we must tell always the truth. We must not hide anything. And to begin, I’ll tell you that I had a lover until September 10th. It was short because he wanted to see me seldom because of his family. He was 23 years old. And there was a question of money: He asked me for a lot and I did not know if he was interested about me or about my wallet. It lasted 3 months. But he had a lot of difficulties: no job, no flat. But could we accept that somebody has sex for interest?
Are you in New Jersey for a long time? It’s much better to be away from N.Y. temptations.
I understand that you could come to Europe. Tell me as soon as possible which are your plans. Is it necessary to write that you are invited at my place? I’ll get a new car next month, a convertable one, and we could do together some nice trip through Europe.
I have more to say about your music, about your job as a model. It will be for the next letter.
My dear Gino, I seldom wrote a long letter with such a pleasure. Be good. Write soon.
Love and love from your Jean-gabriel
*Ferro cut the “say no more” by the time Second Son was published in 1988, an excision I’ve wondered about off and on for the past twenty-eight years, sometimes regarding it as a kind of victory, sometimes a capitulation. I wanted to ask him why he removed it, but by the time Second Son came out Ferro was also dead.
16
I have to tell you
You have to tell me
Love is necessary
Is it necessary to write
I have more to say
There is no question of language
And yet, in the end, that’s all there is. Questions. Language. More to say. Because language is like a sense: it’s like seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, though perhaps it’s most like tasting. It’s a way of capturing something and bringing it inside yourself. But this capture is only a beginning. Words, like food, have to be digested, and definitions are like flavors. What you taste when you eat lasagna and what I taste when I eat lasagna and what you mean by love and what I mean by love have both similarities and differences—they may even have more similarities than they have differences, but it’s the differences that divide us, and it’s these divisions that stories like this one hope to narrow. And so, to close, one more story:
My first boyfriend, Jean-Claude Robert Breach, was a beautiful man with eyes the color of a clear brown-bottomed pool of water and, when I knew him, a fresh pink scar that brought out the line of his left cheekbone. The time of our love affair encompassed a lazy summer in which neither of us had jobs or classes or anything to do besides participate in ACT UP and Queer Nation demonstrations and be with each other. I remember one of those summer evenings after a long hot afternoon together: we ended up in the Bar on Second Avenue and 4th Street—the same bar where I met Derek Link and where I broke up with Patrick Smith (RIP), the same bar that today is a fake British pub—and because money was short we bought only one bottle of water to share between us. The bottle was in Jean-Claude’s hand and he took the first drink. I expected him to hand it to me but instead he pulled me close with his free hand and pressed his lips to mine and passed me the water that was in his mouth. I knew immediately that I shouldn’t swallow but pass it back to him, and I did, and he passed it back to me, and the water moved back and forth between us, its temperature warming, its taste changing as it mixed with his saliva and my saliva, its volume shrinking with each pass as some of it trickled down our throats and some dribbled down our chins, and when at last the first mouthful was gone he took another drink and the process began again. I remember this as the most shared experience of my entire life. I believed I was tasting the water exactly as Jean-Claude tasted it and that he was tasting it exactly as I did and, though I usually think that every cell in my body that might have been affected by that water has long since been
sloughed off, I remind myself that the brain is made of cells, and I let myself believe that those few sips of water did indeed change me forever. Not just mentally, I mean, but physically. In an era when the term “bodily fluids” carried a whiff of the cemetery and virtually every physical interaction between gay men was mediated by a discussion of its relative risk, the water that Jean-Claude offered me was analogue and antidote to the semen that, two years earlier, my first sexual partner had shot in my ass with no regard for my safety, or his own.
I’m not sure if this story is phrased as an answer or just another question. I do know I would like to eroticize our knowledge of the world and each other. And so, rather than conclude by writing “these words have left my mouth and entered your ear” (because they haven’t, after all, they’ve left my hand and entered your eye) I write instead: the water has left my mouth and entered yours. Now you have choices. You can spit it out, first of all, or you can swallow it. You can swallow some and pass the rest back to me. You can pass it all back to me. You can bring a third person into our chain. You can do nothing at all. There are other choices, some of which are not known to me, but, at any rate, what happens next is up to you.
(1989–2014)
2
THIRTEEN ECSTASIES OF THE SOUL
for Gordon Armstrong
1960–1996
Declaration:
ON LEAVING HOME
Tell your mother that you love her but make her no oath of loyalty. Let her clasp your hands between hers for only a moment and then pull free. Shake your father’s hand firmly then, then shake your brother’s, then bend down low to kiss your sister on the cheek. Hug your mother, and your sister, and your brother when he finally comes forward, and nod to your father, who stands with his hands behind his back. You know they expect words from you but don’t give them away. Tell them goodbye. Tell them you look forward to seeing them again but don’t say when. Tell them that today there are only starting points. The journey on which you embark has neither direction nor destination; the search that you will make has neither method nor object. If they persist in questioning you step away from them. Scratch your head, and smile, and tell them that you are a man now.
1. Sloth
In the morning, when you awaken, the light that fills your room is that of a sun pushing through a sky thick with clouds. You hear the light sound of drizzle outside, and on the exposed skin of your shoulders and neck and head you feel damp cold air, and you pull the light blanket a little higher. For a moment, you tell yourself, for just a moment you’ll stay in bed. In a moment you reset the alarm for an hour hence, and when that hour comes you push it back another hour. You half sleep during those two hours: your body is rested, what it’s doing now is languishing; you merely lie in bed. Your eyes are closed, your mind neither dreaming nor focusing on anything as definite as a thought. When the alarm rings again you shut it off. By now you’ve abandoned the day, and you turn the clock around, turn off the ringer on the bedside phone, turn your body over and feel, more than anything else, the pressure of your pierced right nipple on the mattress. But masturbation, you feel, would be wrong, a break in the pact you’re making with laziness, and, slowly, you convince your body to relax. You’re hungry, but when you realize you’re not going to do anything that requires energy that hunger becomes less important, ignorable, eventually unnoticeable; in the same way the pressure from your bladder recedes. The rainy day passes: sometimes you lie awake and sometimes you sleep; when you sleep you dream sometimes, and your dreams are deep and vivid but disappear each time you wake. When you’re awake you notice the gradations of light in the room, morning’s gray, afternoon’s silver, evening’s almost brown shadows, and then, inevitably, it’s black again. There’s no strength anywhere in your body; the urge to stay in bed all day, whatever else it was, wasn’t vampiric: you’re tired, and ready to sleep the night away. You set the alarm for tomorrow, and in the few minutes before you fall into a sound sleep you have the only clear thought you’ve had all day (because your mind, too, your mind was lazy today). You have done nothing today, absolutely nothing. But you haven’t wasted this day; you have, instead, erased it. When tomorrow comes you will be no closer to death than you were yesterday.
2. Hunger
That morning I put on last night’s clothes out of deference to you, who had no choice, and so, reeking of cigarette smoke and smelling also of sweat and beer and poppers, we entered a hot bright morning in search of food. You wore jeans, I remember, and an old tight T-shirt that had once been blue; your hair was more red than I’d realized, and the sunlight brought out the freckles in your skin. What was on your feet? At the restaurant we ordered coffee and water and orange juice. We ordered eggs and potatoes, and while we waited we ate the loaf of bread they’d left us, layering each slice with a thick film of butter. When our breakfast came we ordered more coffee and more juice; the waiter filled our water glasses, brought us more bread. We mashed the scrambled eggs and hash browns together and forked them in yellow lumps onto pieces of buttered bread. We laughed as we ate, I remember, but we didn’t talk, and bits of food sprayed across the table; when our forks scraped across our empty plates we looked at each other and then ordered more: more eggs, more potatoes—omelettes, this time, and French fries—more coffee, more juice, more bread, too, and a couple of those corn muffins we saw advertised on a blackboard. The waiter attempted a joke, but something about the way we wielded our forks and knives stopped him. Perhaps he was just driven away by the farts leaking from both of us: by then, peristalsis had produced in me a tremendous urge to shit, and I knew it must have been much worse for you. The waiter brought the coffee and juice first, then the bread. We discovered a jar of strawberry jam and ate a spoonful with each bite of bread. We dunked our muffins in our coffee and when they broke apart we fished out the yellow-brown dumplings with our spoons. We blackened our omelettes with pepper and drank drafts of water to cool our throats, we swirled fries into a spiral of mustard and ketchup, and as I finished my coffee I discovered an inch of slushy sugar at the bottom of the cup that I let dribble down my throat. The waiter approached warily. Will there be anything else, boys? We looked at each other and smiled. There were bread crumbs in your goatee, green herbs stuck in your teeth. I watched you press your finger into a piece of food that had spewed from one of our mouths, then bring your finger to your tongue. We hadn’t spoken all morning except to order, and you left it up to me now. We’d gone far past the point of satiety, but each bite, each swallow, each burning burp had carried a hint of revelation, and all I could say was “More.”
3. Shit
Who was the culprit? The man you sucked off in the bar’s bathroom last Saturday, or the trick you met on the street in the middle of the week, the one who’d decorated his apartment in Catholic kitsch and kneeled in front of you like an altar boy? Perhaps it was the man who fucked you without a rubber beside the indoor swimming pool in his apartment building, the smell of chlorine in your nostrils, the cold tiles irritating your back, the guilt you felt almost but not quite overriding the pleasure of his unfettered cock moving inside you. It doesn’t really matter: you’re trapped now, on your toilet, your stomach swelling with gases like pseudocyesis and watery shit leaking from your ass, wishing you had followed your mother’s advice and become a priest and waiting for the erythromycin to take effect. When the diarrhea is on hold your body relaxes and your mind wanders; you imagine amoebae moving inside of you by means of pseudopodia, as your encyclopedia told you, false feet, a protrusion of cytoplasm that is both a means of locomotion and of consumption. It feels like they’re stampeding; what’s left for them to eat? When the diarrhea starts again your intestines cramp visibly; there’s Compazine for that but it’s not working yet. You close your eyes against the burning pain in your guts and your ass; it’s a cliché, but it feels like lava is moving through your body. After the umpteenth episode, when you have wiped yourself clean with wet toilet paper to soothe the rash on your buttocks and flushed t
he toilet, you open your eyes and realize as you look at the unfamiliar walls of your bathroom that when your eyes had been shut your mind had been shut as well. Not just shut, but shut off. You remember it as a blank moment of time; you remember now a succession of these blank moments, reaching back into the early hours of the morning when the diarrhea first struck. They are like bricks, these blank spots, and together they form a wall through which you can’t see, over which you can’t climb, around which you can’t walk or run. You feel trapped then, by that wall, by the undeniable feeling of wellness moving into your body, by the inadequacy of the grammar you possess to describe the wall and the wellness. You know that while you were building that wall you were able to see beyond it, but now you can’t remember what you saw, and as you wait in vain for the next bout of diarrhea you realize that the body doesn’t always succumb to illness: sometimes it yearns for it. It embraces it with a protrusion of false limbs and pulls it inside itself, and in so doing takes you, if only for a little while, beyond the confines of this world, and into another.
4. Love
Spring
The days pass one by one. On top of the mountain the sky is always clear and the wind always humid. Each evening at sunset, when the heat breaks, he becomes your sun. He pulls you into orbit around him; the heat is from his body, the light from his eyes. You try to take all of him but he’s too much for one man to handle. His surplus flows from you in fluids, in breath, in words, and it’s inevitable that in their rovings his hands, his eyes, his mouth shall retrieve the parts of him that you slough off. This is the cycle: day into night into day, him into you into him. But the light and the darkness remain discrete and distinct, while you and he blend together, become inseparable, indistinguishable, like lichen. It’s pointless to say that if you remove one the other will die: there is no one, there is no other. This is not the general product of love; this is the product of your love, of your ecstasy. Some people give birth to babies. You give birth to each other.