Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  She would call and say it was over. She would send me a note detailing all the time we’d been together and how she had felt alone. Sitting on a bar stool later that night, I felt the floor shift beneath me. I felt profoundly fucked-up and sad that I hadn’t spent the night with her. I wanted to tell my friends about it. I would build up to the punch line: And then she fucked three guys just to make sure she didn’t go back on it. And then, get this, she tried to go back on it anyway!

  Would I tell them that? Would I mention that she had actually told the men why she was fucking them, and they had fucked her anyway?

  4

  I think everybody has an Andy Warhol story. I grew up in Chicago. When I think about Andy Warhol, I think about the Kelly house on Sacramento Street. The father was dead, and the oldest of three children had moved out. The younger son was trying to destroy himself, and the daughter was wrecked by the loss of her father. The place was filled with junkies and house thieves, people I had known all my life. It was like a contained plague. There was shit coming up over the rim of the toilet. There was also this vicious dog that had to be kept locked in the daughter’s room upstairs. People were sleeping everywhere, and some of the people were very beautiful. Particularly Justin, who slept with everybody, boys, girls.

  There was also Maria, Justin’s girlfriend and my first love, who was beautiful and tragic. Her grandmother had kept her locked in the closet and sent her door to door, begging for heroin money, when she was only ten or eleven years old. She used to call me crying, saying she had been masturbating with the vacuum cleaner and she couldn’t stop and her thighs were all bruised. Or she would tell me she had walked down to the gas station at night in her underwear and heels. I loved her, but I didn’t know what to do about it. We had met in the group homes when we were just fourteen. We had tried for years to find some meeting point where we could comfort each other, but we both wanted basically the same things, and what we needed was someone who wanted something different.

  When everything was really going down at the Kelly house, I had already left for college, 150 miles south of the city. But I couldn’t stay away. I went up every weekend. I wasn’t even getting high then. I spent six years clean and sober; I just didn’t want to be alone. And that’s what the Kelly house was really about. It was about not being alone. The filth and the drugs were secondary.

  It was just like Warhol’s Factory in New York, except it was on the North Side of Chicago, the drugs were cheaper, and nobody was ever going to be famous.

  I met Ted from the old neighborhood. He was just walking down the street. Turns out we live in the same neighborhood, on the edge of San Francisco. I’m pushing thirty-five now, and he’s pushing forty. He asked what I was up to, and I almost started crying. I didn’t have a good answer. Of course I was up to things—I was writing this essay, for example. I was also working on a screenplay and an oral history of myself. So that’s what I told him. But I got kind of choked because it also wasn’t true. I wasn’t doing anything. The true answer would have been something like, I’m drowning. Or, if I were feeling optimistic, I might have said, I’m recovering. Same thing, really. He asked if I would be getting on the campaign. There were all these races coming up, elections to be held. I said no, not this year. What else could I say about it? I didn’t want to leave the city. I didn’t want to see another town, another strip mall, another campaign office. I didn’t want to be anywhere I was unfamiliar with the public transportation. In fact, I didn’t want to go anywhere that wasn’t directly on the route between where I lived and where I worked.

  I first met Ted at least fourteen years ago, when he was bartending in the Heartland Café and I was just out of college, starting to shoot heroin and strip in the gay bars. Back then he was directing plays at this small storefront theater. He was older than me, not part of my social group, and seemed to have his shit together. He was basically slumming. He came from a good family. His father was an airline executive and owned a penthouse in New York with an atrium. He had been to New York University for dramatic writing. A friend of the family had made a phone call to get him in. One time he slept with my friend Angel’s girlfriend, and when Angel asked him why he did it, Ted responded that he did it because he was a writer, and Angel punched him in the face.

  Now he’s the literary director at a large theater in San Francisco, but we never see each other. I’ve been in San Francisco eight years already, and we’ve seen each other maybe five times. His wife, he said, was at home working on a children’s book. They owned their own house and had a dog.

  He told me they were really happy, and I didn’t doubt it. We didn’t talk for long. I was on the way to get some nails; I wanted to hang a painting. My ex-girlfriend’s slave had made it for me as a housewarming present. I had just moved into a cheaper apartment in a neighborhood where there were a lot of dogs and children, and I was trying to make it livable. I kept thinking, It’s OK, I’m not that far away from things.

  5

  After the Kelly house had come and gone, when I was just out of college, the world revolved around Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. There were no politics. Bill Clinton was president, and all I knew about him was that he was against welfare and he was putting a lot of people in jail. I would meet my friend Angel at the Beachwood, and we would watch the games on the small TV there with Lisa the social worker and Pat the mailman. The bar owner lived in two rooms attached to the bar.

  It was the 1990s. It was Wicker Park. The junkies still shot on Milwaukee Avenue, but the neighborhood was changing. Occasionally Angel and I did heroin or stayed up all night snorting coke at Lisa’s apartment down the street, where she lived with her twelve cats and her broken mirrors. But what was really important was the Chicago Bulls.

  They could do anything, and if things were really bad, MJ would launch six three-pointers and score thirty-five points in the half. One season we won seventy-two games. They played incredible defense. They would swarm you, knock you off balance, smack the ball away. Scottie Pippen, with those long arms and that crossover dribble. BJ Armstrong, with his boyish good looks. He actually got voted onto the All-Star team just because he had the fortune of passing the ball to Michael Jordan. There was Coach Phil Jackson and Tex Winter, with his fabled triangle offense. Then Dennis Rodman came along, pulling down fifteen rebounds a game and covered in tattoos. They had to take Dennis’s image off the facade of a building because it was causing traffic jams on I-94. I would see Dennis on Sunday nights, when Liquid Soul played at the Double Door. He would lean against the wall near the stage. He was crazy. His birthday party was invitation-only at the Crobar. He fucked Madonna and married Carmen Electra during a Las Vegas bender. He was once caught sitting in a truck in the stadium parking lot with a loaded shotgun under the seat.

  In the mid-nineties, everything clicked. We beat Detroit and Portland and Phoenix and Utah and Orlando and New York and Houston. There were all these great players who were never going to wear the rings: Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, and Clyde the Glide. There were all these teams that were good enough to win the championship, but we wouldn’t let them. We won every year except when MJ left basketball to play minor-league baseball, and even that year we did good. We built a new stadium on the South Side, with a statue of Michael in front. It was called the United Center, but there was a petition to name it after Jordan’s father, who had been killed in a carjacking in South Carolina.

  Then I left Chicago for Los Angeles, and basketball didn’t matter in the same way. Even though the Lakers now had Shaquille O’Neal, in the bars they left the music on. You could watch the game, but you couldn’t hear it. People sat at tables, talking over the music, explaining the screenplay they were writing or the film they were producing or the pilot they were acting in. There’s a lot of room in Los Angeles. The bars weren’t crowded enough. And then I stopped caring.

  Later I would decide that politics was the only game for adults, only to realize it wasn’t any different from a sch
oolyard, just a bunch of hurtful insults, character destruction, power grabbing, and coalition building. Meaningless but with consequences. The worst of human nature on display under glass. But early in the new millennium I would follow it just like I had followed basketball. Reading charts, comparing scores, discerning who was on the rise and decline, remembering the stats and rooting crazily, passionately, for my team.

  It’s only recently, when I’m reevaluating everything, that I realize somewhere in there I made a bad trade. Now I sometimes watch sports with friends, but I get bored. They all have fantasy teams, and they’re mostly interested only in how their own players do. I used to read the statistics in the newspapers, but now it’s just guys in uniforms on a TV set. Most of the uniforms have a Nike Swoosh.

  I’m jealous of my friends who follow sports. They read about football, while I read about the war in Iraq. Of course they read about the war as well, but they don’t follow events the way I do. But I’m tired of the war in Iraq and the more shadowy war on terror. The propaganda and he-said, she-said of the daily news cycle. I want to watch the athletes, the very essence of human ambition, gladiators in the stadium, the bright-green turf or the smooth wooden slats. I want to see their long bronze arms extending, fingers reaching from somewhere inside that great huddle of men, all of them leaping in the air, grasping heroically for the ball. And I want to care about the score.

  6

  I have more to say about my time in Los Angeles. Hollywood is an awful place, and I wasn’t even in Hollywood; I was in the Granada Hills, just off the Ronald Reagan Freeway. One day we had a bachelor party. There were strippers there with an Indian bodyguard, and an actor from Seinfeld. One of the strippers was drunk, and she grabbed my hair and pulled my head back between her breasts and asked me to tell her she was beautiful. I told her she was and that possibly I was in love with her.

  Later the actor was doing shots off the woman’s chest. I remember wondering what he was so happy about. He was big and handsome and full of life, and we were in this crappy house in the San Fernando Valley, where everything was just awful dirt and smog. I was staying there, sleeping on a mattress on the floor and jerking off to a forced-feminization magazine someone had left in the bathroom. The magazine was filled with cartoons and stories of men being kidnapped by their girlfriends and fed hormone pills. There were dogs, and I was always stepping in puddles of urine. The actor rented a house in the Hollywood Hills, so things were nicer for him, but I still couldn’t get it. He had just landed a part in the next Batman movie. I wished I could be happy like that.

  At some point the bridegroom got upset, and then there was violence, the Indian rushing the strippers out the door, the rest of us hanging on to the groom by his limbs. What did anybody expect from us? Violence was all we knew. That guy from Seinfeld never came around again. Everybody else left Los Angeles or got into porn. The ones who stayed pushed barbells in strip malls and worked on their cars in front of pale ranch houses, and their lawns filled with so many tools and parts, soon you couldn’t see the grass. They folded into the smog and the landscape and disappeared.

  Watching the news the other night, I thought about Granada Hills. A reporter had done an exposé on a real estate developer, and he was back to do a follow-up. First the wife came and threw water at the camera. Then the developer arrived. He went right to the reporter and hit him in the face. He pulled back as far as he could and let go with this enormous swing. The reporter had his arms crossed and didn’t even try to block it. He was obviously a coward. They fell to the ground, and the cameraman just kept filming. When it was over, the reporter’s face was swollen and covered in blood, and the police were taking the real estate developer and his wife away in handcuffs. That’s what it’s like in Granada Hills, even though this happened in San Diego. Maybe it’s the same, all those low houses and so much sun.

  7

  In better times Lissette used to cut me. She would slice elaborate patterns into my shoulders and stick me with needles. My breathing would slow down when the pins went through me. It was like being on a raft. Everything would be OK. When we were first together, she dug her keys into my back and carved a series of Ls in my skin. The letters were deep and the cuts were ragged and for a while it didn’t seem like they would heal, but they did.

  I still have scars from my girlfriend before Lissette, who left three marks on my side with a scalpel. Before that I just had marks from a woman in Michigan who burned me with a cigarette on the backs of my hands. Lissette decided to make an E out of the scars on my side, the first of ten letters. She kept a knife by my bed, a present from a client. It had a grip handle. She would tie me up and hold the blade against my throat. One time I was blindfolded and my chest was bleeding and I tried to kiss her, pushing up against the knife, which she held to my jugular.

  “You have no sense of self-preservation,” she said.

  It wasn’t true. I had a fantastic sense of self-preservation, but it had left me for a while. I wasn’t sure if it would come back.

  Lissette used the knife to carve “possession” in my side, but she spelled it wrong. She used only three s’s. When I told her, I asked her not to be mad. “It’s ruined,” she said. Then we broke up. Then we got back together. She recut me, tried to fix it.

  It was such an obvious metaphor for our relationship, I didn’t even want to think about it. It was like Jim Morrison dying in the bathtub or Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. It meant exactly what you thought it meant.

  Between the cutting and the beating and the sex, I could barely move. We would lie in bed for days, until the sheets were covered in blood and lube. She would go home to her husband, but she would be back before I ever recovered. I would try to keep her entertained so she wouldn’t leave without giving me my next fix.

  I thought of my friend who broke his leg playing football when we were younger, and he was sitting on his bed in the hospital when they came in and wheeled him into the psych ward. His mother had him committed. I used to visit him. They had him in Northwestern, a nice hospital on the lake, much nicer than the place they put me when I was found with my wrist slashed, sleeping in a hallway—a public hospital with shit smeared on the walls. That’s what it was like with Lissette. Like being locked in a room. I almost never went out. I missed my friends. I felt like there was nothing I could do.

  This is all I know about love.

  After Lissette and I broke up, I had to come to terms with my depression. For two years, ever since George Bush was reelected, I had been waiting for the right time to kill myself. The first time in my life I was really suicidal was when I was thirteen. My mother had just died, and I was living on the streets and slashed my wrists. Then I did it again. I made about seven suicide attempts that year before I was locked up.

  Things got better after that. The state took custody. There was the mental hospital, then the group homes. I was completely divorced from culture in those days. In the group home we would watch Eddie Murphy movies and listen to house mixes, which didn’t interest me at all. I didn’t watch television. I read Catcher in the Rye and thought it was the worst thing. Who cared about Holden Caulfield? Who cared about rich people who stay in boarding schools and don’t know what to do with their lives? That wasn’t my environment.

  Of course, culture affected me more than I knew. Those house mixes would change music forever. There was a war on drugs going on, and marijuana was getting more expensive. While Joan Didion was in El Salvador, crack was moving into the inner city with the help of the CIA and the administration’s ties to the Nicaraguan Contras. It just appeared one day. Hard candy. Cocaine was out of our range, but crack was the drug of the people. We would smoke the rocks in pipes made from pressure gauges and burn our lips.

  This was the time of Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, and all sorts of construction was going on on the South Side, where I lived. There were ribbons in front of buildings and blue-and-white signs with the mayor’s name. Washington actually lived in the same
neighborhood as the group home, just closer to the lake. When he was reelected, a staff member who dealt drugs on the side took seven of us over there in the house van, and we watched the mayor come out of his building and make a speech.

  This wasn’t what concerned me. I didn’t care about the mayor. Farrakhan was making his move at this time, coming down on the Jews, and his mosque was nearby. So were Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. I was beat up in the Garfield train station by people wearing Adidas suits. They stole my gym shoes—Nikes—and I walked home in socks. It all came back to me in the waves of violence and social change that occur in the lowest strata of society, beneath the antenna of mainstream media coverage. We were as important as sand at the bottom of the ocean. We didn’t understand that it was the paths of the planets that control the tides. We were too far down to see anything but a thick, dark sky.

  8

  I sent a letter to my friend Heathen. I said, Gosh, you know. I said I wanted to be somewhere safe but public. I wanted to be on a leash or have a bit in my mouth. I didn’t want to be expected to speak. I had been in the papers recently for a book I’d written. My father had responded by sending letters to the editors insisting there was nothing wrong with me. I hadn’t been abused; I was just spoiled. He complained to one reporter, “He’s not damaged. My son is a success.” He told anyone who would listen that those group homes were actually very nice places.

  I told Heathen I was just finishing an essay that would combine everything I’d ever seen and end with a man standing in front of a chasm, preparing to jump. But I didn’t want to jump. I wanted to be naked and available and wanted. I didn’t want to know who was doing what. I didn’t want to engage with the politicians, the missing ballots in Prince George’s County. I thought about Daniel Pearl saying, “I am a Jew. My mother is a Jew.” I thought about Theo van Gogh, Mohammed Bouyeri stepping from the shadow. Theo begging for mercy. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.” First a bullet, then several more. Then Bouyeri slits his throat, pins his manifesto to Theo’s chest with a dagger, and Amsterdam is never the same again.