by Michael Cart
Some of us applaud. Others look away, because it hurts too much.
We always underestimated our own participation in magic. That is, we thought of magic as something inherent, something that existed with or without us. But that’s simply not true. Things are not magical because they’ve been conjured or created for us by some outside force. They are magical because we create them and then deem them so. Ryan and Avery will say the first moment they spoke, the first moment they danced, was magical. But they were the ones—no one else, nothing else—who gave it the magic. We know. We were there. Ryan opened himself to it. Avery opened himself to it. And the act of opening was all they needed. That is the magic.
Focus in. The blue-haired boy leads. He smiles as he takes the pink-haired boy’s hand. He feels what we know: The supernatural is natural; wonderment can come from the most mundane satisfaction, like a heartbeat or a glance. And the pink-haired boy is scared, so incredibly scared—only the thing you’ve most wished for can scare you in that way. Hear their heartbeats. Listen close.
Now draw back. See the other kids on the dance floor. The comfortable misfits, the torn rebels, the fearful and the brave. Dancing or not dancing. Talking or not talking. But all in the same room, all in the same place, gathering together in a way they weren’t allowed to do before.
Draw back farther. We are standing in the eaves.
Say hi if you see us.
Silence equals death, we’d say. And underneath that would be the assumption—the fear—that death equaled silence.
Sometimes you glimpse that horror. Someone gets sick. Someone gets sent to war. Someone takes his own life.
Every day a new funeral. It was such a large part of our existence.
You have no idea how fast things can change. You have no idea how suddenly years can pass and lives can end.
Ignorance is not bliss. Bliss is knowing the full meaning of what you have been given.
We watch you, but we don’t intervene. We have already done our part. Just as you are doing your part, whether you know it or not, whether you mean to or not, whether you want to or not.
Choose your actions wisely.
There will come a time—perhaps even by the time you read this—when people will no longer be on Face-book. There will come a time when the stars of High School Musical will be sixty. There will come a time when you will have the same inalienable rights as your straightest friend. (Probably before any of the stars of High School Musical turns sixty.) There will come a time when the gay prom won’t have to be separate. There will come a time when you will be able to listen to any song ever recorded or watch any movie ever made, no matter where you are. There will come a time when you will worry about being forgotten. There will come a time when the gospel will be rewritten.
If you play your cards right, the next generation will be so much different from your own.
On the day that Ryan and Avery get married at a church in South Carolina, they will read for their vows a poem written by Ricky Schiller. When Avery gets to the last line, his best man, Erik Johnson, will have a tear in his eye. Not from loneliness—he will be happily single his whole life—but from the perfection of the moment. In the seventh row, Neil Hayden will find himself wondering about his high-school boyfriend, Peter…and three months later, he will be walking through a park and Peter’s dog will run over to him, and bring her owner along, too.
Amazing, no?
Welcome to the attainable world.
We saw our friends die. But we also see our friends live. So many of them live, and we often toast their long and full lives. They carry us on.
There is the sudden. There is the eventual.
And in between, there is the living.
We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.
That’s all we ask of you: Make more than dust.
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
BY ERIC SHANOWER
MY LIFE AS A DOG
BY RON KOERTGE
When Noah’s a dog, the best part is remembering things from his other life. So he’s like a human in a dog’s body. The smartest dog in the galaxy. It’s the best of both worlds in a way. He’s fearless about taking a canine crap, for instance, but inhibited and pretty much chronically constipated as a human. But he’s aware of his fearlessness, so he gets to relish it.
Once he was staying with these two guys, both named Chip. They found him running loose, checked for a collar and tags, and then took him home. Chip #1 works as a clothes salesman and worries about his looks. Chip #2 is rough-and-tumble, and the tattoo across his shoulders says, life is a dust-strewn plain. Guess who stays out all night and guess who stays home tapping his gold-and-amethyst ring on the coffee cup and staring at the clock? Number 2 comes in looking pleased with himself after an evening with a few anti-friends. He’s glad to see Noah. Glad to get down on one knee. He sports one of those beards of depravity, like Peter O’Toole in Becket. To Noah, he smells like he’s been eating chicken in a jeep and smoking opium. “How are you, boy? Are you a good boy?” He slaps him on the muzzle and Noah pretends to bite at his hand, which circles like one of LAPD’s sky pigs over West Hollywood.
Number 1 says, “Leave that dog alone, and tell me what you value in our relationship.”
Number 2 replies, “The way you can microwave Tater Tots?”
“Get out!”
But that’s code, and Noah knows what for. He pads over to his bowl, eats, then lies down. Number 1 uses the hurt look Noah has seen him practice in the mirror. After which he kneels beside him and croons, “You love me, don’t you, boy?” Sure. Unconditional love for thirty or forty bucks a month. Or whatever dog food costs these days. Noah wouldn’t know. His parents, Martin and Aimee, never let him have a dog. Not when he was little, certainly not now when he’s twenty (or almost three in dog years). A couple of weeks ago, Noah trotted into a Safeway Market, took a can of Mighty Dog off the shelf, and carried it to a checkout line in his mouth. He was cute as hell. People fell all over themselves trying to pay for it.
INT. A HOSPITAL ROOM: DAY
AIMEE
He was hit by a car. The driver never stopped. The doctor says he’s lucky to be alive.
MARTIN
Did anybody see anything? Aimee?
Were there witnesses?
AIMEE
Noah was conscious when the ambulance got there. He said something about a blue van.
MARTIN
I’ll make some calls. Why doesn’t he say anything?
AIMEE
He goes in and out of consciousness.
The doctor says that can happen.
MARTIN
He’s barking. Does the doctor say that can happen?
AIMEE
Martin, please sit down.
MARTIN
And do what—wait? You know I’m not good at waiting. Where are his car keys? Where was he, anyway, at one of those movies of his?
AIMEE
The police said something about West Hollywood.
MARTIN
West Hollywood? What was he doing in West Hollywood?
Sometimes Noah goes home with girls. Single gals. Pretty little things. Slender kiosks hung with trinkets. He waits outside a supermarket. The night like velour. “Whose little dog are you?” asks the fairy-tale voice.
A caress. A hand on his forehead like the night nurse checking for fever. He trots toward the parking lot. She says, “Go back, doggie. You can’t come home with me.”
But he can and does. Some return to the market and ask every insomniac and night-shift worker if they own the dog sitting outside. No? No? No? Are you sure?
Others just let him right into their durable little economy cars. “Can I trust you?” they all ask because he is riding beside a week’s worth of groceries: cottage cheese, canned pineapple, glacier water, a thousand yogurts.
He shows his bright, blameless eyes. And his tongue, innocent as the red carpet in the Garden of Eden. They all pet him and say, �
��You’re a good boy, aren’t you? Aren’t you a good boy?”
They’re happy for a while. There’s always a rug in the suburbs of the bed. There’s always walking and flirting. They go places they used to avoid because he makes them less fearful. At home, they talk on the phone in their underwear while he noses around the hamper. The smells are intoxicating! (A certain Denise did not have days-of-the-week underwear but a kind of Adjective Panty: Solitude, Lassitude, Interlude, Gratitude, Semi-Nude, Quaalude, Platitude.)
They all give him a name and their friends ask about him. On weekends they cry sometimes, undo the latch of their secrets, and out they come. And they’re everybody’s.
Sometimes, an inamorata objects to Noah’s presence and plays the Either-That-Dog-Goes-or-I-Go game. At that point, he runs away.
Usually, though, his leaving starts with candy. Fine. He doesn’t want to drift through their lives anymore. Where’s somebody who will wrestle with him and throw a big, heavy stick? More candy, a little ice cream. And, right on cue, he pukes.
A few hit him, but mostly they say, “Oh doggie. No.” Demoted from Boomer or Duke or Spenser to the generic. Then it’s right into the car. Right back to that market.
Once in a while, he’s taken a long way. For Noah, the air everywhere is alive and humming. Even in the desert below Twentynine Palms. None of them ever wants to see him again. He was a nice dog, but he couldn’t be trusted. “Get out!”
Easy as pie. He trots along the side of the road. Cars swing wide to avoid him. Wolves are running in his blood. He laughs out loud. Pretty soon somebody slows, stops, puts on their hazard lights. He trots right up, sits, and offers to shake hands. Which just about stops their hearts.
INT. A HOSPITAL ROOM: DAY
MARTIN
Why does he twitch like that?
DOCTOR
He’s dreaming. Or it’s like dreaming.
MARTIN
Well, he looks like a damn cocker spaniel.
DOCTOR
When he was admitted, he had fleas.
MARTIN
I beg your pardon?
DOCTOR
Fleas. So we were wondering—
MARTIN
My house is spotless. My wife sees to that.
DOCTOR
We were wondering if your son worked with animals.
MARTIN
He goes to UCLA. He’s in film school. I’ve met a few of his friends and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were infected.
Breakfast with Noah’s owners. Or rather his parents. He can’t imagine Aimee and Martin having sex. It’s not unimaginable; he just can’t imagine it. Or kissing even. As Martin leaves to sit behind his big desk at the bank, Noah’s seen them pretend to kiss, but it’s brusque and perfunctory. What the shoe does to the doormat on a sunny day.
Sometimes Robbie and Noah suck on a cough drop and pass it back and forth until it’s gone, and it’s a thousand times more passionate.
His father orders the newspaper around. He opens it like a sail. Closes it like a door. Folds it like a map. He hoards it, his big hand on the pieces not in front of his face.
He asks, “Noah, what’s on your agenda today?”
“I’ve got an exam.”
“In what?”
“History of film.”
“Well, when that gets you nowhere, just let me know. I make one call and you’ve got a desk and a client list.” He lifts his cup of coffee, scowls at it. “Noah, get me the Sweet’n Low.”
Noah’s mother immediately stands up.
“No,” his father says. “I want Noah to do it.”
As he fetches, Noah wonders what he could say that might make his father happy.
Medical school this morning, Dad, and law school this afternoon, dinner with you and Mom tonight. Jo Ann’s coming. Remember when you had her DNA checked and she turned out to be related to God?
No wonder he likes being a dog. The transformation is easy. None of that horror-movie stuff with the taut skin, the crackling ligaments, and the screaming in pain. He’s not Lon Chaney in The Wolfman, ruining a perfectly good suit every month. He just goes to sleep human and wakes up canine. He loves the feeling. He’s not as comfortable in his Noah body. The Homo sapiens one. A dog body is enthusiastic, not fretting and anxious, like the other one.
When he first opens his eyes, he doesn’t know which he is, and then seconds later he does. Mostly it’s the smells and the way they petition him. The funk and flavor of blood, a festival of rat shit in the walls, the whole secret society of the soiled and redolent.
When he’s a human, Noah thinks all the time. He looks at the books he bought. Those books—Boy Meets Boy, When I Knew, That’s Mr. Faggot to You. They’re a comfort in a way, but he knows who he is. That’s not the problem. It’s the ones who don’t know. And what they’d think and say and do if they found out.
What was he going to do with those books, anyway? Stack them on his father’s desk and hope he gets the hint? He might as well dig a hole and bury them in the backyard.
Except he’d never dig a hole where he wasn’t supposed to. He’s too well trained. Just like he wouldn’t pee on the rug. He’s housebroken, too. In every sense of the word.
Noah looks around Robbie’s apartment. He likes it here. He feels comfortable, more like himself—whoever that is. Not that he’s not anxious. He’s always anxious.
He says, “I told my mother I was going to the gym.”
Robbie puts down the plate he’s been drying. “Well, if my name was Jim, that would barely be a lie. What do homophones count on your list of punishable offenses? And speaking of homophones, those are available from AT&T if you’re out of the closet, so you aren’t eligible.”
Noah could live in an apartment like this. Nice things, a notch or two above IKEA. Not here, though. In a place of his own.
“I’m going to tell them,” he says.
“Your mother knows, anyway. Mothers always know.”
Noah points to the TV screen. It’s CSI Miami, with all of its glamour and dissection. “What’s wrong with David Caruso’s neck?”
Robbie angles his neck, too. “When he looks sort of sideways like that, he’s about to discover something everybody else on the forensics team has missed. Like that spleen pulsing in the gutter.”
“Why do you watch this crap?”
“Everybody’s got a guilty pleasure, Noah. This is mine. Unless you’d rather play Bambi Goes to the Salt Lick.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“Somebody has to.”
If Noah were a dog, he could do anything he wanted anytime he wanted. Dogs don’t have inhibitions.
Noah apologizes. “I’m sorry I’m so tentative.”
“That’s all right. You’re a kid.”
“I’m not either!”
“You go to school. You live with your parents. That adds up to kid for me.” Robbie crosses from the kitchen and sits beside Noah. “I found something on the net for you the other day. A fact-ette. In the Bible, in Ezekiel, it’s very clear that the sin of Sodom wasn’t homosexuality. It was inhospitality toward travelers from the desert.”
Noah turns so he can see Robbie, look right into his eyes. “You always knew you were gay.”
“Always.”
“And it didn’t bother you?”
“Why should it bother me? Even as I child I was hospitable toward travelers from the desert. I let them park their camels in my yard.”
“Is that true, that thing from Ezekiel?”
“That’s what it said right on my computer screen. Do you want some lunch?”
“Sure. We could go out. You’re always fixing things. I should pay or bring groceries or something.”
Robbie pats Noah’s shoulder briskly. “Not necessary. You just sit here and watch David Caruso find the smoking mortar shell casing in the delphiniums, and I’ll throw a few things together.”
On the screen, a policeman runs with his K-9 companion. Noah is a pretty good runner, but nothing l
ike when he changes. As a dog he’s drunk with running, that long aria of the body at its best. Thoughtless in the best sense of the word.
He watches Robbie cook—sees his strong arms, admires his shaved head and on his neck the tattoo that dives into his T-shirt and doesn’t stop until it reaches his left nipple.
“When you were little,” Robbie asks, “did you spell out dirty words in your alphabet soup?”
“Are you kidding? My parents would have caught me.”
“Parents?”
“All right, my mother. Didn’t your mother keep an eye on you?”
“When I was little, we lived in New York. There are no soup censors in New York. But there was this little pocket park with a sandbox and swings and a slide right across the street from our building, and she’d send me over there alone.”
Noah gets to his feet, almost propelled by the news. “Wow.”
There’s a kind of breakfast bar with two stools that separates the kitchen from the dining room. Noah looks at Robbie from his side. Robbie’s holding a stalk of celery like a baton. He could be somebody from a children’s book, the conductor of an orchestra of vegetables. Professor Von Garden.
“I thought it was cool, too,” Robbie says. “There were always other kids with their moms or their nannies. I was never there alone. For another thing, my mother was watching me through her binoculars. If anything looked even the least bit fishy she would’ve dialed nine-one-one.”
“What did she do all day? Why didn’t she come downstairs to the playground with you?”
“She didn’t like the sun.”
“Was she a vampire?”