Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  He waited a forever minute, awash in cold adrenaline. The word “cock” floated between their bright faces. He could feel his heart beat in his dick, swelling his pants leg. He would either get his face punched or his ticket punched, he thought, turning the phrase over and over. Paul stared right into the guy’s eyes. He had thought he was going to say, let me suck your cock, and then look what had come out of his mouth. He laughed. They were underwater. Paul was a merman, a very bold fishy. He remembered how he was magic, and the guy stood up.

  “Okay,” the hippie guy said, showing those expensive teeth again, and loped up the hill. Paul walked slowly after him, like a panther knowing he’s about to sink his teeth into a nice fat antelope, then broke into a run. His legs felt amazing. He was a powerful beast. He followed the guy into the bushes. They were close to the street but totally hidden. Paul released his cock into morning air, then warm mouth.

  The hippie guy bent over at first, then sort of knelt on one knee. Paul felt a little embarrassed for him, and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the bobbing rasta hat. He knew he shouldn’t be rewarding this guy’s fashion with sex.

  “Am I not doing it right?” the guy asked.

  He looked like he might cry. Paul didn’t know what to say. With the chase over, Paul’s excitement flagged. He tried to think of things to make the experience hotter. He could ask for more stuff; that might work. Or he could distract the guy. He pulled the guy up and reached into his army pants, down the loose waist. No underwear, kind of gross but also hot. Paul was not high enough to put his mouth on that, so he pulled the guy’s cock out into the air and stood on his toes so they both fit in his hand. He jerked them together, and the guy spewed almost immediately, which Paul found hotly jejune and which was worth a few drops of his own juice. Paul had a little bit of a premature ejaculation fetish; a person must be really attracted to him if they came that quick.

  The hippie guy tried to kiss him but Paul was done with that. It didn’t matter if Paul was gross or rude or non-reciprocal; he would never see this dirty hippie again and plus most guys liked gross, rude, and non-reciprocal. He pushed the guy down to his knees and slowly fucked his mouth, just a few thrusts with his eyes closed; Paul didn’t even try to pull out. When he was done, Paul stuffed his dick back in his pants.

  “Thanks, man,” he said.

  He brushed pine needles off his shirt.

  “Wait,” said the hippie. “Would you want to get some breakfast?”

  Paul calculated. He had the morning off, but there wasn’t much food at his house. He could get breakfast and then just go home and crash until his shift. Maybe the guy would even pay.

  “Okay,” he said.

  They walked silently toward the street, then up to the Castro. The hippie guy’s name was Jim and he was a political science major at SF State and he was from Walnut Creek, which was accessible by BART. Paul nodded and said uh-huh at appropriate intervals, like a cyborg learning how to be human. He wanted to get away, but was hungry. They ended up at Sparky’s; Paul hadn’t been back to the diner since his first day in town, even though the bookstore was only a few blocks away. He felt relieved when he saw Oscar wasn’t working, and he slid into a booth. The hippie guy reached over the menus, awkwardly moving his hand toward Paul’s. Paul pulled away. He didn’t want to hold hands right now but especially didn’t want to hold a grimy-nailed hand. Maybe he was a bad gay; he just couldn’t work up a hotness for dirty fingernails.

  After they ordered, Paul listened to the hippie chatter, now about the great genius of the band Phish and now about the terrible situation in the redwoods, which were being clear-cut. Paul understood that he should care about the redwoods and the predatory practices of the timber industry and if Diane were here he would care with less effort. But he was so tired! He ate his eggs sleepily, trudging forkfuls up to his mouth and trying to keep his eyes open.

  When he chanced to look up and across the diner, he saw Franky ordering coffee at the counter, his soft faded Flipper tee shirt hanging loosely over Ben Davis pants in that way Paul could never achieve, that casual perfection which came from actually skateboarding for transportation.

  Oh, now Paul was awake, awake and alive with a biting shame as if a miniature dragon was burying its pointy teeth into the tender flesh of his side. Franky spun around on a counter stool, and saw Paul seeing him. He nodded.

  “I have to go,” Paul said to the guy, this Jim. Jim looked crushed; he’d already paid the check, conveniently, although now Paul wished he could toss some bills on the table to buy back his freedom and dignity.

  “Wait up,” said Jim. “I can drop you someplace, if you want. I have a car.”

  Paul could see Franky watching.

  “I’m good walking,” he said.

  “Or I could walk you wherever you’re going.”

  “Really,” Paul said, a little harshly. “I’m good. Thanks for breakfast.”

  He walked out, Jim catching the door behind him, and headed toward Market. He hoped Franky wasn’t still watching, but he didn’t dare look back. Jim walked a few paces behind like some kind of servant. Paul realized he was going to have to say something mean. Sometimes that was the only way to get free.

  * * *

  ×

  The answering machine’s red light blinked its red 1, 1, 1—a heartbeat. Fuck it. Paul walked over and pressed play.

  “Hello,” said an awkward voice with a flat New England accent. “This is a message for Paul Polydoris. This is Maria Pinto; my son Anthony wanted to talk to you—”

  Paul went cold. He pressed the pause button so he could get warm first. Why was Tony Pinto’s mother calling? He knew and he didn’t know. He sat back down on the couch with the afghan but it wasn’t enough. There were more blankets on the other couches and he gathered them all and lay down on the couch and piled them on top of himself. He was shivering. He better call Tony. He was still cold but he reached out for the phone, exposing his bare arm to the freezing air. No fucking insulation in San Francisco, why hadn’t they learned? What would it take for that technology—storm windows even—to make its way west?

  He pulled the phone by its curly cord to the couch, dragging the answering machine on the floor. He covered his head with the blankets. What was the number again, the number Tony Pinto had left yesterday or whenever he’d called? Paul rewound and listened to the first message twice to remember it because he was too cold to get a pen and where would he get a pen from anyway? He dialed and the number rang.

  “St. Vincent’s, please hold.”

  Paul hung up and redialed, moving his cold fingers more carefully, as if they were remote-controlled sausages.

  “St. Vincent’s, please hold.” Same voice, more irritation.

  Paul hung up again. He couldn’t listen to that message again. He dialed directory assistance for Waterbury, Connecticut, and the street name—what was it, Hawthorne? They now connected you automatically from Information, so he didn’t need a pen. Progress was good. He thought about Thomas Edison and how his own grandfather had worked for Ma Bell, and Alexander Graham Bell, who was that, what had Alexander Graham Bell done? Buzz buzz buzz.

  “Hello,” said a man’s stern voice.

  Wrong number. He hung up, cursing in his head, and went through the whole process again because he didn’t have the number written down.

  The same stern man answered the phone. Of course. It must be Tony’s mean dad.

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Paul Polydoris,” Paul said, lowering his voice to heterosexual man levels in case Tony’s dad still didn’t know. “Is Tony there?”

  “No,” said the man. “There’s no Tony here.”

  Paul held the phone, listening to the dial tone. The man had hung up on him. Tony Pinto was in trouble; his father had found out he was gay and he was in de
ep shit and he needed Paul—he’d called Paul, out of all the friends he could call. Paul would call back again until the bastard put Tony on the phone or he’d go there, go to that crappy city where Tony had grown up and rescue him.

  He redialed in a righteous fury.

  “I know he’s there,” Paul said. He didn’t wait for the man to talk. “I know he’s there. Put him on.” He couldn’t believe he was talking to an adult like this.

  “Is this Paul?” It was a woman’s voice now. “Are you Paul?”

  “Yes,” Paul said. He was freezing cold again. His name sounded strange to him. She must mean someone else.

  “He’s gone, Paul. He died last night.”

  Paul listened to his heart beating, studied the reddish black insides of his eyelids.

  “I know you were his friend. And he wanted to talk to you especially, he had the phone in the bed with him—”

  Paul couldn’t hear the rest. He could tell she was still talking and he let her talk and then he hung up and walked covered in blankets to his room and drank the second bottle of whiskey he had stashed in his drawer, his emergency bottle, swallow by swallow, under the blankets, in the bed, freezing cold.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul lay in bed, trying to figure out who to tell. He should call someone; it seemed like basic human courtesy to announce what had happened. Paul considered his mother, who thought he was still in Iowa City. She was too sad. He couldn’t call her. He called Jane instead, planning his apology, but as soon as he heard her voice, he began to sob.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said when he could talk.

  “Oh honey,” Jane said. “What’s going on?”

  He told her about Tony, but not about the messages, not about what Tony’s mom had said about the phone.

  “He was my boyfriend in New York,” said Paul. “I mean, kind of.”

  “I remember,” said Jane. “You told me about him.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah,” Jane said. “You knew him from ACT UP, right?”

  “Well, mostly from the Pink Panthers,” Paul said, annoyed at Jane for acting like she knew anything about Tony Pinto. “He actually came to Iowa City to see me, the semester before I met you. I think he was in love with me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jane said.

  “Whatever,” Paul said, roughly. “It’s fine. We weren’t in touch.”

  “Honey,” said Jane, clucking.

  “Just tell me about what’s going on there,” he said. He couldn’t take the clucking. “Please.”

  Jane complied. Apparently her dissertation director, a famous medievalist who did queer theory as a sort of sideline, had told Jane to read the French feminists, which had led Jane to Derrida, which seemed to be leading to a nervous breakdown the kernel of which was the evidence that nothing meant, and what was more, why was Jane doing a film studies dissertation with a medievalist anyway? Martha, the dissertation director, considered film a passing fad, and focused her theoretical lens on queer readings of French convent literature, and wasn’t that practically criminal, that refusal to pay critical attention to the world around them, that privileged retreat into the apolitical, a practically Modernist solipsism and (probably racist) reverence for some impossible golden age, unusual only in its locus of medieval France? And Jane’s new date, a sporty older butch about whom she was ambivalent anyway, was not being supportive.

  Paul listened docilely, agreeing when he should, murmuring all the right outrage. He needed to get off the phone but he needed to stay on the phone; the phone line physically connected them: from his hand, through the curly cord, to the plastic box, to the wall, to the ground outside, up those tall wooden posts, over the miles to Iowa, to South Johnson, up the side of the white shingled house and through Jane’s apartment wall, down into Jane’s hand and head. They were touching. He pressed the yellow receiver into his ear until it hurt.

  “But Paul, I feel bad talking about this!” said Jane, with the wrung-out disbelieving gratitude of someone who’s been unexpectedly allowed to monologue for an hour. “Tony died. How do you feel?”

  “Oh, shit, other line,” Paul said. “Can I call you back?”

  “Of course,” said Jane. “Of course!”

  She sounded guilty. Paul tucked that away, without intention. He sank into the living room couch and waited for something to change. He waited on the couch for fifteen minutes and then reached out to the special bottle of ouzo Ruffles kept on the mantlepiece. He felt the thrill of stealing a drink, the thrill of drinking a special occasion drink on an ordinary occasion, the thrill of the afternoon drink, the thrill of the solitary drink—all the thrills of a bad act broken down into component parts—and he poured himself a tumbler, the final thrill of disproportion. He liked ouzo, experienced what he thought of as racial memory in its sweetness; ouzo was from Cyprus, like him. The ouzo went down fast into Paul’s empty stomach, cough syrup for his soul. His soul had a cough. That made him laugh a little as he flipped through Ruffles’s vinyl collection, drawn mostly to what Ruffles called the Quiet Storm: Dionne, Al Green, Barry White. Or maybe older jazz vocals? He held Billie, Ella, Lena, Sarah like an altar boy. Then he saw the Sandra Bernhard Without You I’m Nothing concert album—

  * * *

  ×

  —Paul remembered staking out the Cubbyhole with Tony Pinto because Madonna and Sandra Bernhard had once had a date there in 1987, or kissed, or something.

  Paul remembered staying up late to watch Madonna on David Letterman, never daring to believe anything gay would happen on television.

  Paul remembered Hudson Street in the rain.

  Paul remembered the porn store on the corner, looking at vintage physique magazines, those long-gone men in leopard skins and posing jocks.

  Paul remembered Tony Pinto making muscles to distract the shopkeeper while Paul stuffed an old Drummer down his pants.

  Paul remembered three-packs of old gay porn mags, the good ones on the outside and the crappy third stuffed inside like a grab bag, the newsprint stories and letters signed A Reader in San Diego or Horny Midshipman.

  Paul remembered Blueboy, Numbers, Honcho, Freshman.

  Paul remembered the case of the tape Tony Pinto made for him, the second time they met, Tony’s scratchy handwriting marking out the song titles, original artists in parentheses when the song was a cover. Who said gay men always had beautiful handwriting? Tony Pinto had spent his boyhood rolling six-sided dice and sketching elves, and it showed.

  Paul remembered “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “A Little Respect” and “TMT❤TBMG.”

  Paul remembered the first Saturday of the month dances at Columbia, crashing the Ivy League, being early, walking around the block ten times, the Greek diner in Morningside Heights, cheap bad coffee.

  Paul remembered coffee breath.

  Paul remembered C. Howard’s “violent mints.”

  Paul remembered the night he met Tony Pinto, smoking on the steps of Earl Hall, trying to tell who belonged, Tony Pinto stretching his Gumby arms in a terrible imitation of a voguer.

  Paul remembered lights up, finding his stashed coat.

  Paul remembered the Meatpacking District, clubs which changed sex according to the night (Clit Club Fridays, Meat Saturdays, or Jackie 60?), same cinderblock walls painted black.

  Paul remembered 4 AM bagels with bright pink lox-flavored cream cheese at the bakery on the corner.

  Paul remembered the Christopher Street pier at night, fourteen-year-old queers in tube tops and short-shorts, cigarette cherries reflected in the oily water.

  Paul remembered saying, “How fast they grow up,” and Tony Pinto shaking his head ruefully and saying, “Kids, what’re you going to do?”

  Paul remembered drinking at Max Fish with Tony’s straight goth friends
from Fordham, walking west for miles with Tony until they hit the water, sitting on a broken concrete pylon and kissing for hours, hands down each other’s pants even though Tony had a serious boyfriend of two months.

  Paul remembered the sunburn Tony got at Pride that year, how their older friends carried sunblock, Tony’s wounded red-brown chest and back, like a soldier wearing pukka beads, some older lesbian with a crew cut and a squeeze-tube of aloe vera, sitting in the shade on the steps of a church which was really a bar, far enough away from the fray, in the shade, laying Tony across his lap so he could think Tony lay across my lap like a pieta. And Tony’s serious boyfriend of two months rounding the corner laughing.

  Paul remembered giving Tony back.

  Paul remembered sharing grilled cheese sandwiches with Tony and that girl, what was her name? Glynis? Yes, Glynis with the gay mom. From the rap group for gay teens at the Center, the three of them college kids, older and not from the city, maybe a little too old to be in a rap group but officially still teens, still youth.

  Paul remembered the working group he joined because Tony Pinto was joining, meeting at an apartment of a much older gay man with a job and a leather couch and crudité in the living room while they made plans to die in the street.

  Paul remembered the aching hall of the Center, those Monday night meetings in the belly of the whale, the incomprehensible reports from the Treatment Action Group and the meeting’s incomprehensible response, what Tony Pinto called “the grown-ups fighting.”

  Paul remembered carrying store-bought frozen soup to a man he didn’t know, with Rina, somewhere in Gramercy, one of those high-rises that made him feel like he was in 1970s Poland, leaving the soup on the dusty kitchen island, feeding the man’s tropical fish while Rina changed the sheets on his hospital bed, all the while Days of Our Lives continued as if nothing were different.

  Paul remembered the men lined up in green plastic chairs at the Center, young men with canes and liver spots.