Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  “Life sucks,” Hemingway said.

  “Life sucks,” I repeated. There are times when it is simply wise not to argue with a literary ghost. Ernest Hemingway’s eyes flashed shit-hot fire with an inner anger as dry-iced as the Arctic Sea on a clear blue cold day at breathless noon. Angel Bananas jumped up onto the old man’s lap and purred. “He wants my rum, you know. Once a Southern drunk always a Southern drunk. Some things never change. He’s never asked for milk.”

  My kids and Angel Bananas keep telling me to stop bitching about change. Change, they tell me, is inevitable. Key West is no longer such a great place for my kids during our summers. The island is no longer a state of mind. It has become a public relations advertising illusion. Another gimmick. The telephone answering machines have won. Hemingway has gone fishing. Forever. And he vows that he will return only when hell itself freezes over. This past summer my children left this place as frenetic as they had arrived. I can see it in their hush baby eyes.

  You have to be their dad to see it. Or their cat. Now, even their kisses are furtive. It’s not that I resent change. What I resent is that as time keeps getting clicked off by all the little wheels that have invaded my home, I have less and less to give to my children. To my lover. To the people who Jesus count. To the people who will hold me when I need to be held. The clock doesn’t stop here anymore. It just keeps on ticking. Time is money. Or time is how much time you’ve got left. Time here is like time everywhere else. Time is a series of cost-efficient Jesus units being clicked off by little people with little wheels that make a lot of nervous racket. And unless you can grab ahold of time and make her do your bidding you fail at life as we know it. What was once so special about this Hemingwayesque place was that so many of us, here, had failed at something somewhere else. Something considerable. But here it didn’t matter. We stopped the clock and we survived for as long as we survived because surviving was enough. It was an art. I have failed and failed and failed at, oh, so many many things. Just ask Angel Bananas. We frequently drink margaritas for Jesus together with Ernest Hemingway at the kitchen table until the cows come home. Hemingway does not believe in Jesus.

  Hemingway is a Yankee.

  Angel Bananas would be a writer if he could. Unfortunately, he is a Key West feline. He will never win the Pulitzer Prize and I am rotten glad of it. I’m the failure in the family. A bum. Bill Faulkner used to call it white trash. The only really special thing I had was that I lived where I lived. My citified kids were, oh, so very impressed with the slowness that once existed here on the street—languidly—like those melted porch pups that first hot summer ages ago. Time became real. Island slowness was molasses Southern thick and magic. Island nights were bibleblack and jasmine sweetness filled the air. This summer my kids got on an Eastern Airlines Whisperjet at the Key West International airport for their ride back to their mother who lives in San Francisco where time is money and there’s never enough of it to spend with the kids these days. Time flew off like a Whisperjet and time does not travel tourist.

  Our island never used to have Whisperjets. They didn’t come here. And then our airport expanded—it was good for the economy. It became an “international” airport and now even the house of Ernest Hemingway shakes like it has the running Jesus shits whenever the jets scream by overhead. I stood there and watched the thing roar off. It could have been Chicago. It could have been LaGuardia. It smelled like Ton Son Nhut. Being in Key West didn’t mean anything more than Jesus loves you and Jesus loves only Jesus. We kissed and we all cried and my kids got onto a jet, the belly of the aluminum beast, whooosh they were gone. I’m not home right now. If you’d like to leave a message, leave your name and number at the sound of the goddamn beep. I shall miss Key West. I shall think about it often. But I, too, am gone. In many respects I’ve been gone for a long time.

  My lover now thinks I’m crazy. I have never denied it. There are a hundred thousand editors out there in the real world who will spit-and-swear on the Holy Bible to testify to it. Angel Bananas knows of my insanity. So does my ex-wife. It’s her fault. Miraculously enough, it is my children who believe in me. I could fail at everything. I could promise to go to Disney World (Angel Bananas LOVES Disney World) and then not go because I was too hungover to drive to Orlando. But my children would still believe in me. Here and now it is really all that I have. Their baby faith.

  And all I really now have to offer them in return for their faith is my fanaticism, my courage about making if from one day into the next, my scars, my horrible ability to love them, to bleed with them, and all too often I’m bleeding all over them. It was my children who insisted that the time had come—for me—to leave Key West. Before they left at the end of our last island summer we sat around and discussed the things we would remember about this place.

  This is the place where many of my friends are dying. Not gracefully. None of them are going gently into that good night. There is, oh, so very much justified rage. Many are already dead. It is so hard. Watching them go. I will cry and hug them when I leave them but leave them I must. We will all promise to write. These will be lies. Convenient lies. Nevertheless, these will be lies. They will die and I will not be there for them when they die. Someone else will have to hold them. I am too dry and too cried out to hold any more of them when they die in this island place.

  This is the place where my lover, Lucas, has no idea (until he reads this) that I used to go into straight bars in order to talk to straight men when men in gay bars would not talk to me. Sometimes I just needed someone to talk to me. This is the place where I got to stir up dirt and trouble in the gay community (writers are scum) because the gay community here is so very comfortable. And well off. And complacent. And confused. And hurting. And haughty. And apathetic to an extreme. And scared. And sadly oftentimes horribly addicted to the cheap cocaine that is now this island’s smuggled lifeblood. “I can’t stop shaking. I’ve got the shakes,” my friend Brian would say. Light a cigarette. Brian, Angel Bananas, Ernest Hemingway, and I used to gather around the kitchen table regularly to discuss the fact that Brian had been shaking for as long as any of us could remember, and Angel Bananas said that Hemingway could remember back to Jesus. Brian was my friend— another NamVet. Although I find it difficult to be around other NamVets, Brian was still my friend.

  “He’s had the cocaine shakes for as long as I can remember,” Hemingway said. “In the old days we drank smuggled gin and gin could give you the gin shakes and the gin blossoms. Damn Jesus shit. The Rock has gone to the dogs if you ask me.” We all felt a certain amount of honest sympathy for Brian, his shakes, and his anal warts. Angel Bananas said that Jesus had anal warts, too, although Ernest Hemingway mainly denied it.

  When AIDS first became the nightmare that it has become, it was assumed in Key West that the island and its moral universe would be spared such awesome tragedy. After all, this was rightly paradise and such a thing could never happen here. Sweet Jesus, don’t tell the tourists. Not only did it happen here, but it happened with a stunning vengeance. Something considerable. Jesus loves you. Where festive renovation was once the hope of Key West, many of those original Southern boy-renovators are no longer with us.

  “I was going to paint the house this year,” Brian would tell us. Brian had been talking about possibly painting his raggedy house for as many summers as any of us could remember. “But what with these shakes and anal warts and all …” Brian never did paint that raggedy house. He died and it sucked a big fat one losing Brian and his shakes. Visions have been buried. Visions have been replaced with Holiday Inns. Where so many gays in places like San Francisco and New York take for granted the fact that their communities have support systems, and a shared sense of identity, we in Key West have none of these things. These idealistic traits have eluded us in this place.

  This is still very much the South. The traditions are deeply rooted. The Ku Klux Klan is alive, and well, and living—it thrives—here. “Weirdo alert,” Lucas would whisper to me late at
night when we were living in the back of the truck on Stock Island. Sometimes the Klan boys would put on their Jesus robes and engage in what could only be described as a drunken brawl on the beach complete with hate, torches in the night, and enough white Woolworth sheets to fill an entire linen department. Lucas and I did not venture (except to pee and you tended to pee fast) from the truck, our refuge, when these Southern extravaganzas took place. “More weirdos than weirdos in a weirdo tree,” Lucas would say, although he tended to say it awesome quietly.

  Gay folks in Key West are well-aware of who hates them. To their credit, Key West gays are capable of raising hundreds of thousands of local dollars for national AIDS organizations. It is possible to remain Jesus anonymous with this kind of thing. As well it should be. But dime one for locals stricken with the disease has yet to be seen. There is no support. There is no such thing as welfare. There are no resource centers in this part of the planet. Local indigents are literally buried at night, under cover of darkness so no one can see how it’s done, at county expense in plastic garbage bags in unmarked graves.

  Brian was put in a garbage bag, buried as if he were a untouchable criminal, and none of us ever knew if he ever really did get over the cocaine shakes.

  The Key West graveyard has run out of room for the indigents. The moon in the graveyard shines soft like the incandescent light from my first lover’s eyes. There is literally nowhere else to bury the dead, here. If Key West has become less of a good place to do our living in, it has also become less of a good place to do our dying in.

  “We have rules, you know, what with burying the indigents,” the manager of the graveyard tried explaining to me. “I can’t tell you …” He paused. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone where we bury them or when we do it. Those are the rules, boy. I’m sorry. But if you happened to be here maybe tonight around midnight you might see us burying your friend, although I have to tell you upfront that it won’t be a pretty sight.” That night I silently watched them bury Brian in his garbage bag in the rain soaked Southern ground. I told myself that I wouldn’t cry. I was from the South and people from the South do not cry at the sight of either death or alienation. We are death; we are alienation. I did not want to cry. I choked it back. And then the dam just damn Jesus broke.

  Perhaps it is not at all ironic that in an island place where gays are an important part of the social fabric those very gays are absolutely terrified into the center of their Southern souls to publicly display something as insignificant as a picnic on Gay Pride day, a date that is totally and utterly ignored in Key West. It doesn’t happen. Where dollars and drugs and property have been so very easy for so many of my friends to grasp, here, their humanity, their courage, and the bonds which bind them have been an altogether different proposition.

  Now that many of them are dying, they are beginning to find the strength to assert their courage. Yet most struggles in this place remain inner struggles because outer struggles—at least in the South—imply nothing less than civil war.

  “The problem with most Yankees,” Angel Bananas said recently, “is that they think too damn much.” You have to be from the South to understand that the South has never really given up fighting the Civil War. Somewhere in the bones of every Southerner who is really a Southerner lives the hope and the knowledge that the South will rise again. And if it doesn’t rise again the least it can do is hang onto its intransigent traditions. Gracefully. The social influences that affect those gays with AIDS in this place are far removed from the social influences that affect gays in Manhattan and San Francisco. Key West’s outer skin makes her look like any other whore. But she is a Southern whore. There is a difference. Those gay Southerners with this particular disease are alone in ways that a gay man from the North could never in a million years understand.

  For a long time Brian lived in his car (after he lost his raggedy unpainted house) which he parked permanently (the tires went flat) alongside a deserted canal on a sparsely populated key just to the east of Stock Island simply because there was nowhere else for him to go until he moved in with me, Lucas, Angel Bananas, my two kids, and then he died. It left my kids stunned and breathless. After the ambulance took his body away I found a copy of The Sun Also Rises under Brian’s pillow. The sun does it every Jesus day. Before he moved in to die, Brian and I ate mushrooms one late afternoon and watched the canal his car was parked beside float and ease its deep cool current into the sea, which mesmerized us with whispered sorcery.

  “See how the water flows so smoothly,” Brian observed. “I want to merge with the universe smoothly. Like indigo dust.” Brian did not want to go in a garbage bag.

  In a way it is good that Tennessee died before Key West really started going down the tubes. This is the place where Thomas Lanier Williams and I used to walk along the beach at sunrise and laugh about nothing of significance whatsoever. The milk train doesn’t stop here anymore. Maybe it never did. Key West is no longer timeless. This is the place where a Miami paper I wrote for fired my ass. They canned me because I screamed bloody murder about the lack of pay. The pay got a lot worse. This is the place where the rent went up. And up. And up again. I used to live next door to black folks from the Bahamas. The smell of deep fried conch used to linger in the air till midnight. The black folks are gone. A movie star bought the house, fixed it up, sold it. And left. I don’t know who lives there, now. This is the place where cute little trains of tourists taking pretty pictures pass by my house and wave. Only occasionally do I give them the Jesus finger. This is the place where I played basketball with black kids with laughter, with sweat, with muscle. This is the place where so many times I came face-to-face with my own typically Southern sense of Southern hypocrisy something considerable.

  This is the place where I caught midnight fish in midnight canals, and if I fell in, at least it’d sober me up and then some. This is the place where my neighbors would give me big fat juicy grouper and red snapper and stone crab from their weekend catch. Brian and I would boil the stone crab over an open fire down by the canal where I never got used to the fact that Brian was living. Such as living was, and living could still be rich. Warts or no warts. “Angel Bananas likes lobster,” Brian would say and then he’d feed the feline big fat sweet globs of luxurious Florida lobster.

  This is the place where my kids and I sold all of the furniture in the house in a yard sale in order to buy one week’s worth of groceries. There was nothing genteel about our poverty. This is the place where I danced in the pouring rain down the middle of the street because I had been published. This is the place where I learned the difference between being published and being paid for being published. This is the place where my daughter learned how to swim and how to apply eye shadow. This is the place that I leave. I leave it with sadness, gladness, a certain amount of relief, and the clock still … ticking.

  I have such a love-hate relationship with this island. Pinkness and goodness give my cat severe migraines. I’m gone. I want to go to New Mexico and visit my father who still swears by mountain fishing. I hear that the fishing is also good in Alaska. They have yet to define sunset in Alaska. I want to spend some time in Mexico. I want to run along the beach in Mazatlan. I want to go to Paris and see a friend of mine who is a hooker. A woman who is not too unlike this place: made-up, rouged over, full of contradictions, ironies, making it one minute, and dying the next. I want to fuck this town and leave it. Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am. It is now only a so-so fuck.

  This is the place where when it got really tight with money I used to sell my ass to tourists who were on the island for only a short while—maybe just for a quick tennis weekend—and they wanted some island buck to fuck with and I could fit the bill. Sometimes the wife would watch. Sometimes the man would watch. I never did play any tennis. Lucas never knew and it occasionally could put groceries on our table which was no mean accomplishment. Usually it’d be with a straight man, invariably they all had families—somewhere—and the Marriott got used to seeing me com
e and go. And sometimes if the man was nice I might let him play, although I had to often close my eyes and pretend that it was Lucas. And now I am leaving even gentle Lucas who says that he’s not moving around with me another time anymore not ever again nada. Lucas sees me as being more difficult than I really am. I blame him for everything.

  It was a pretty stupid thing to do, whoring, but we needed the money. People who only managed to survive are no longer tolerated, here. The bars get crowded with strangers who stare. Kindness here has been over-glamorized, overindulged, and obsessively overrated. The hotels are too damn pink. And everyone swears by their telephone answering machines. Jesus loves you. My lover, Lucas, says he’ll meet me there: wherever. Wherever I end up. Perhaps when he can get a day off. Someday.

  Mainly, Lucas sees me as being Jesus shiftless, Jesus unrooted, and Jesus Southern. Jesus was better in the old days. Lucas says he’s staying right smack where he is and he’s not inclined to discuss it further because he’s not moving no matter what I say and he gets mad just thinking about me trying to talk him out of what he’s already settled on in his Yankee mind. “I’m not moving off to Jesus anywhere just because you’ve got a scratch in your ass to move us all over again because either they’re kicking us out or you’re over it and can’t stay put any more than a Tom can keep his dick out of a pussy cat’s pussy.” Lucas ain’t coming. For company I’m taking my truck and Angel Bananas. It’s about time that cat had an adventure or two. We will go around Orlando. We’ll find someplace where time has stopped. Where time lives. Where Ernest Hemingway never slept. Where the time you have left is the time you have left. Where it’s what you do with what you have that counts versus how much you have left of it. Where there are no little people with little clickers clicking—time is money. Where the sun sets whenever the sun damn well feels like it.