NINE
MORE THAN ELEPHANTS
THE SIDEWALK OUTSIDE Pasqua was bustling with Bears: big guys in beards and suspenders who would have been called portly in an earlier age. Though they often gathered here in—what? packs?—their furry-shouldered presence was especially evident this morning. Was there a convention in town, I wondered, some mass migration from the hinterlands? There was a distinct tribal hum in the coffeehouse, the kind you hear on an airplane when every passenger but you is travelling to the same ball game.
I waited in line with a trio of grizzlies, then took my turkey pesto sandwich to a table in the corner, where I pondered my identity. At just under two hundred pounds I was certainly eligible for Beardom.
What would it be like to abandon the gym, to sa yes to jelly doughnuts, to buy a pair of roomy overalls and learn to eroticize fat? Bears were supposed to be free of attitude, weren’t they? I liked the idea of that, and of reviving the carnal democracy of yore, before steroids and circuit parties had bullied so many men into seeking identical pneumatic bodies.
Then again, I already knew how it felt to be thirty pounds heavier.
At the height of my domesticity with Jess I had lost my body-consciousness to such an extent that I stopped consulting the scales and started wearing sweatpants. Jess found me sexy in any size, he claimed, so I relaxed and ignored the obvious. I didn’t realize how much had changed until I went on a book tour in Europe and read my own press profiles. Photographs can be denied as easily as mirrors, but even translated from the Finnish the word “fat” is sufficiently clear. So I joined a gym when I got home—not a gay one, which would have been too intimidating, but the gym down at the UC Medical Center, three blocks from the house. And I hired a trainer this time, adding financial commitment to my growing list of incentives.
My body changed in subtle ways—and slowly—but it changed.
It was thrilling to discover the muscles in my back, to see my chest begin to expand, to feel that deep exquisite soreness the day after.
And my thrice-weekly endorphin rush was an antidepressant like none I’d ever known. As Jess grew ever more distant and restless, my workouts became a routine bordering on a habit. (It was as if some part of me already knew I was about to require a much deeper reserve of self-esteem.) I was so pleased with my progress that I bought a pair of 501s—the first I’d braved in over a decade—though I snipped off that faux-leather label on the waist. Thirty-six was respectable, I told myself, but hardly worth advertising.
I was wearing my delabelled Levi’s today, in fact. And wondering for the first time in ages if my basket was presented to its best advantage. Or did guys in their thirties even give a damn about fifty-four-year-old baskets? I certainly hadn’t, as I recalled. Once, for instance, when I was doing PR for a local hotel, the owner, a burly, white-haired guy in his fifties, asked me jovially if I had ever seen his cock. Before I could answer, he had reached into his desk and produced a plaster cast of the member in question, fully engorged. It was the proverbial baby’s arm, ropy-veined and magnificent, and I was instantly drawn to it—but not, alas, to its proud owner. Looking back, I wonder why I didn’t just drop to my knees and narrow my focus a little. But all I could manage then was a clumsy compliment, as if the nice gentle-man, a much braver soul than I, had just shown me a snapshot of his grandchild.
I had been in the coffeehouse for at least ten minutes before I realized Jess was there. He was at a table near the window with a group of leathermen, most of them shiny-skulled and stacked like chorus girls. There was no clean escape without awkwardness, so I waited until I was sure he wasn’t gripping the knee of anyone in particular, then made my way over. He was seated with his back to me, but he seemed to sense my approach and turned around. Or maybe someone had nudged him under the table.
“Hi,” he said quietly, as if we were alone.
“I’m not stalking you,” I joked, realizing he’d wonder a little, since Pasqua had never been a haunt of mine. I’d come here for the reasons he’d probably first come: the camaraderie and mild sexual energy, the chance to be alone in a crowd without alcohol.
He introduced me to his friends—as his partner, amazingly—then invited me to join them.
“Thanks,” I said. “I gotta get back. I’m hopelessly behind on this episode.”
Jess gave me a private smile, recognizing a glamorous lie told for the benefit of the others. “I’ll walk you out,” he said.
When we were on the sidewalk, he added: “I wanted to tell you that I called Pete.”
I hadn’t expected this. “Oh, yeah?”
“How bad off is he, anyway?”
“What do you mean?” I was fretting already, though Donna had promised she would call me if he got any worse. It had been at least three days since our last conversation.
“He sounds awful,” said Jess. “Congested.” I told him that was business as usual.
“He’s a spunky little fucker, isn’t he?”
“What did you talk about?”
“Oh…Matthew Shepard, mostly.”
“Who?”
“That kid in Wyoming.”
“What kid in Wyoming?”
“You haven’t seen a newspaper, have you? Look over there.” He pointed to the corner of Eighteenth and Castro, where a makeshift shrine was already materializing on the sidewalk: burned-out rain-bow candles and limp bouquets, a grainy blowup of a sweet-faced young man. “A couple of cowboys picked him up in a bar. Tied him to a fence and pistol-whipped him to a pulp. In front of their fucking girlfriends.” I winced. “He was gay, you mean?”
“What do you think? It was Wyoming.” Jess’s face was flushed with outrage, but there were tears in his eyes. This was what I loved him for: the pent-up passion of that big, gentle, wounded heart.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
“Might as well be, apparently.”
“Jesus.”
“I didn’t bring it up, by the way. He did.”
“Who?”
“Pete. He was crying about it. About how mean the world can be.”
“He knows enough about that,” I said.
Jess wiped his eyes. “He said to tell you he’s enjoying the magazine. Whatever that means.”
I smiled. “Good. He got it.”
“Got what?”
I explained about the Playboy, knowing Jess would understand.
Another reason I loved him: he saw sex as everybody’s blessing.
“Do you think he’s hiding it?” he asked.
“I would imagine. It’s required by the laws of puberty, isn’t it?” Jess couldn’t let that one slip by. “Don’t tell me you ever hid Playboys.”
“No. But I saw them sometimes. And I was turned on.”
“‘Sex in the Cinema,’ right?”
I laughed. “Some of those guys were hot. Not to mention naked.
You didn’t get a lot of that back then.”
“So you’ve told me.” The teasing look he gave me spoke to our age difference, and how long we’d been together, and how well he knew the particulars of my shopworn stories.
“Are you gonna talk to him again?” I asked.
“Pete?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure he’s getting the best advice about treatment.
And the doctors at that hospital act like he’s dead already.”
“I know. He told me.”
“It’s really unbelievable.”
“Yeah…it is…as a matter of fact.” There was a deepening crease in his forehead that disturbed me.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…some of it really is unbelievable.”
“In what way?”
“No doctors are that insensitive, you know. Not to a kid with AIDS. Not nowadays.”
“Well…maybe not here…but he’s in Milwaukee. It’s probably a lot different back there. What are you getting at?”
“Just that he might be…revving it up a little. Telling you what you want to hear.”
/> “What are you talking about? Why would I want to hear that he’s being treated like a piece of meat?”
Jess remained calm. “It just makes for a better story. And it makes it that much easier to care about him.”
“A better story? ”
“He’s a writer, isn’t he? A pretty good one, you said.”
“So he’s making all of this up, just to give me a—”
“I didn’t say he was making anything up. Don’t put words in my mouth, Gabriel. You do that way too much.” We had stumbled upon a larger issue—and a much more threatening one—so I softened my tone. “Then what are you saying?”
“Think about it. Doesn’t it strike you as a little too gothic? This poor little kid who’s always being mistreated. By his evil parents and the evil pederasts and the evil doctors. People have shitty lives, but they’re not shitty all the time. This is like The Perils of Pauline.
Don’t you think it’s possible he’s exaggerating a little?”
“Jewelling the elephant,” I said, nailing him with my gaze.
“Okay. Whatever.” He smiled back at me carefully. “It’s been known to happen.”
“You know, I’ve enjoyed that joke as much as you have. But there’s a lot more than elephants involved here. This kid is probably dying.
If you toned down his life by half it would still be horrendous. And he’s also somebody I happen to love.” This just tumbled out heed-lessly, like a deathbed revelation. My face grew blotchy with embarrassment.
Jess was gentle about it. “C’mon, sweetie. Love? After four phone calls?”
“It’s more like ten. But yes.”
“Well, that’s what makes you who you are.” I knew he was trying to be nice, but I felt trivialized, dismissed as a sentimental fool.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
“Just a little disappointed,” I said. “You know how this works.”
“How what works?”
“What they always say about child abuse: the hardest part is getting adults to believe that it actually happened. People don’t want to believe something that barbarous, so they find ways to deny it.
That’s exactly what you’re doing, Jess. This kid has somehow screwed up the courage to lay it all on the line, to blow the whistle on his own parents…and all you can do is accuse him of exaggera-tion.”
“I haven’t accused him of anything. I just explained a feeling I had. If I can’t do that with you…”
“I thought you guys would hit it off.”
“We did. I like him a lot. He’s a bright kid.”
“You’re one of his heroes, you know. He sees you as a much bigger hell-raiser than I am.”
“Well…he’s perceptive, too.”
That made me smile.
“And politically he’s right there with us. I was impressed by that.”
“That’s Donna’s influence,” I said, beginning to calm down. “And all that time in the AIDS wards. He knows what it’s like to be an outsider. He’s practically an honorary queer.” Jess locked eyes with me. “I see why you like him. I just brought it up because—”
“It’s okay. I know what you meant. Maybe he is a little…vivid sometimes. Maybe we both are. It’s just a mechanism, sweetie. It’s how writers explain things to themselves.”
“I know,” he said, with only a trace of irony.
Jess, of course, had mechanisms of his own. A rough childhood and a decade of near-death experience had turned him into a hardcore skeptic. He distrusted most things until they were proven certainties, until they seemed incapable of disappointing or betraying him.
“Will you talk to him again?” I asked.
“If he wants to. I gave him my number. Don’t these calls get expensive for them?”
“Donna doesn’t seem to mind. It gives him something to do, I guess. And I call him sometimes.” Jess’s eyes darted into the coffeehouse where his buddies were deep in conversation. “I should get back.”
“I know.”
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Are you really writing?”
I rolled my eyes.
Jess smiled benevolently. “It’ll come. Don’t sweat it.” His face slipped into a scowl when he was jostled by a chubby guy in flannel headed for the terrace with a tray of cinnamon rolls.
“These fucking Bears,” Jess muttered, and went back inside.
When I was about Pete’s age I took a cross-country bus trip to New Mexico with the other boys in my Explorer post. We were heading for Philmont Scout Ranch, where most of us would experience the West for the first time. I remember our excitement when we learned there really was a Dodge City, and the rumble that ran through the bus when we heard we would stop there to buy cowboy hats. The other guys went for the ten-dollar model, a cheesy fake with wire in the rim, obviously intended for children. I spotted the word “Stetson” on an upper shelf and decided to go for the best: a mole-colored dome of genuine felt that screamed authenticity. It would take most of my spending money, but my souvenir would be one for the ages.
Alas, the hat was less suggestive of Steve McQueen (the person my mother said I most resembled) than of Tom Mix in one of those silly silent westerns. I learned this the hard way when I wore the bulbous monstrosity back to the bus, only to be greeted by a burst of rude laughter and a new nickname—Penishead—that would dog me for the rest of the trip. I told myself I’d be vindicated once the hat had been properly blocked in a mountain stream, but the taunts continued. I shed secret tears that night when we bunked at a nearby army base. And I considered thumbing into Dodge early the next morning, so I could throw myself on the mercy of the haberdasher and beg for my forty dollars back. But I knew there was no undoing the damage I’d already done.
I was never very happy at camp, and Philmont was no exception.
I became the Designated Dork—an easy mark for the other boys—who, oddly, had never been that mean to me back in Charleston. This was the wilderness, though, and all rules were apparently off, so I kept to myself as much as possible and counted the days to my release. The only break in my misery came after a huge thunderstorm, a biblical downpour that loosened our tent pegs and drenched us to the bone. We were rescued by some Yankees at a neighboring campsite—New Jersey boys, as I recall—who shared their food and dry clothes with us. That night, as the rain pounded down, we joined them around their campfire. One of them put his arm across my shoulders so I could inhabit his poncho, and urged me to lean against him for warmth. The comfort I felt was a revelation. I can still conjure up the smell of that mildewy tarp, the toasty warmth of his chest against my back, those rough Yankee vowels forming so close to my Southern ear.
I had learned to jerk off earlier that year, but the experience had seemed more of a medical emergency than an act of lust. At Philmont I became an expert. I would jerk off in my sleeping bag after Taps, drawing on the images of the day: those olive-skinned Yankees in their wet underwear, the loinclothed braves of the Order of the Arrow, the time Bo Brandt dropped his shorts to prove to us how he could stick the tip of his little finger in his pee-hole. And when Taps was too far off, I would lock myself in the outhouse and pound away. It was there that Penishead (a limber lad in those days) made the useful discovery that he could suck his own dick—or at least, with some effort, lick the end of it. It wasn’t exactly Nirvana, but it was a lot closer than he’d ever been to his heart’s desire.
This came back to me last week when I rented a Cadinot porn movie called Hot on the Trail, in which a dozen French
“scouts”—most of them at least twenty—tramped across the coun-tryside and enjoyed each other’s company. The film spent a lot of time on preliminaries: wrestling and swimming, tempting bulges in loose khaki shorts. It understood the essence of that youthful longing, the exquisite ache of anticipation and denial. And this, I have to say, is what still excites me, after all these years of license and exploration; this is why I liked it best when Jess left his Jockey
shorts on.
It’s hell to lust for your tormentors, to know from the beginning that your deepest need can only betray you, only expel you from the tribe. So when you grow up, you find a tribe of your own, with guys just like you, to keep from feeling that way ever again. Only you do sometimes, as I had done that morning at Pasqua, seeing Jess among the leathermen, wondering what they could offer that I could not. That age-old pain came roaring out of nowhere to remind me that I’d never be strong enough, never be handsome enough, never be young enough, to really be a man among men.
TEN
THE MONKEY WRENCH
I CAN PINPOINT the day the bottom fell out. It was the day Matthew Shepard died, because that was the reason Donna Lomax called—”to hear a friendly voice,” as she put it, to sort out her feelings about the latter-day crucifixion that had hit so close to home everywhere in America.
“What is it?” she asked. “Are people getting meaner?” I told her this kind of cruelty had always existed, that only the circumstances around it had changed. Matthew Shepard had been openly gay, after all, and his parents had never been ashamed of him. For once there was no reason to hide the cause of his death, so the truth could be examined in full. And that was progress, I suggested, as grim as it might be.
“He was so little,” she said, ignoring my political analysis. “I think that’s what got to me. I know it’s what got to Pete. He hates bullies more than anything. He’s been a mess about this for days.” I told her I knew that.
“Did he call you?”
“No. But Jess talked to him right after it happened.”
“Really? You mean… your Jess?”
How I loved the sound of that possessive pronoun. “Yeah,” I said, feeling warmer toward her than ever. “I thought it might be good for Pete. Jess has done so well with his own treatment.”
“That was sweet of you.”
“Actually, I thought they’d both enjoy it. And I wasn’t wrong, as it turned out.”
(Never mind Jess’s talk about jewelling the elephant; he would just have to get over himself.)
The Night Listener Page 11