Paul remembered the cheery rattle of day-of-the-week pillbox compartments.
Paul remembered the smell of orange medicine soap, sulfur and sweet, the gash on his palm from a fruit-salad can lid—how was it possible to get a fruit-salad injury?—wanting the sliced cherry, glimmer of fear in the eyes of the receptionist at the Center who sent him to the free clinic, fear of his blood, now contaminating the can.
Paul remembered colored condoms.
Paul remembered a condom stretching over him like a balloon animal, unlubricated, Tony squeezing out two free packets of Probe.
Paul remembered Tony’s pockets, his backpack, always full of giveaways and liberated rolls of toilet paper from restaurant bathrooms, Tony stopping in the foyer of every bar to fill up, the top of the cigarette machine, wherever they kept the bowl, Tony collecting condoms in all flavors and brands and colors like baseball cards, his shock and horror at the condom stapled into the Bimbox page “Straight-Acting Straight-Looking WM Seeks Same” not because he didn’t agree that self-hating homosexuals should fuck off and die but because that exact condom was wasted, and some proud and out queer might need it.
Paul remembered flannel shirts with the sleeves cut off.
Paul remembered Tony’s black leather motorcycle jacket with its rectangular stickers bragging FREQUENTLY FEMME and BASICALLY BUTCH and SAFE SEX STUD in neon green, his black hair shagging over the collar like a Portuguese Lief Garrett, how was anything ever so smooth as Tony’s just slightly too-long hair?
Paul remembered Tony’s serious boyfriend of two months, then three, four, five—David, unsuitable David, the WASPy Jewish guy who’d played lacrosse at Andover and loved John Cheever, older but recognizable to Paul, his easy law-school ways, his embarrassing obsession with any dark-skinned man, how he’d settled for Tony Pinto who was not dark enough, how he’d cheated on Tony Pinto over and over again, how he’d once at a demo outside St. Patrick’s run his index finger down Paul’s chest, down to his navel, dipping then turning away from Paul, who was enraged, flattered, humiliated, and never mentioned it to Tony.
Paul remembered asking his friend Jimmy—how proud he felt to say his friend Jimmy about Jimmy Battelli, the kindest and most handsome man in ACT UP, an older man who preferred older men and that he’d allowed himself to be befriended by Paul was a miracle—Paul remembered asking Jimmy Battelli where he’d been, why he’d missed some meeting and Jimmy shrugging, oh another memorial service darling you know, Jimmy turning away from Paul kindly even in his despair, Paul’s relief to be so young, his nineteenth year a talisman, the word containing the word teen itself protection from what the older guys, those memorial-weary men in their twenties, thirties, forties, what they were losing—
* * *
×
—and then the phone rang, as it will. Paul moved upstairs in drunk-time, watched himself miss the last ring, watched the miniature-tape mechanism click into action and rewind when the caller hung up just after the beep. Leprechaun tapes, Tony Pinto called them. Paul didn’t have any real friends here. He stretched his body out onto the couch and lay without sleeping or moving until Ruffles came home and fixed him a box of macaroni and cheese, which he set on the floor next to Paul’s couch. But then Ruffles left for his mysterious office job suspiciously early, clearly avoiding, clearly back to master-tenant distance. Paul’s troubles were not his troubles; Ruffles had a full trunk of loss, room for nothing new.
Who did Paul even know? He couldn’t call Franky or Christopher or Silver, all for their own specific reasons unable to help or listen, or he was so in debt to them he couldn’t ask. He couldn’t call his mother or Kostas; he hadn’t talked to either of them in months. He thought momentarily to call Justin Rosenblum, but he could hardly call the boy he rejected in high school to cry about another boy he’d rejected. He would have liked to call Diane, but that was the worst possible idea. The only person he could tell was Tony Pinto himself, who was not only dead but probably mad at him for not calling back. Paul was oarless in a boat on a river of factory runoff. He poured himself another tumbler of ouzo. He’d have to replace the bottle; he might as well finish it.
Paul stood up on his liquid legs, spun over to the record player and carefully unsleeved the Doors’ Greatest Hits, another Tony Pinto band. He hovered the needle over “Break on Thru” then released, and when the song was over, he played it again. Tony Pinto loved what he called “babysitter music”: Led Zep, the Who, Pink Floyd—all the music those long-legged long-haired coltish girls played while eating plastic-wrapped cheese slices from the fridge and talking to their boyfriends for hours on the phone. Tony Pinto loved babysitters, pointed out dykes they knew or women on the subway who could have been babysitters once. Babysitters were of a particular age in relation to oneself—seven years older, usually—and a particular temperament—maternal, crafty, teasing, a little jocky, mean to men but nice to boys.
Tony loved one such girl in particular, a dyke they knew, his neighbor Griselda. She lived around the corner on Clinton and waited tables at an Italian restaurant in Soho. She brought Tony leftovers, which he refused to share with Paul, who was so charmed by Tony’s adoration of Griselda he forgot to feel jealous. Griselda only ever called him “Tony’s friend,” as in “Hey, Tony’s friend, will you get me a beer if you’re up?” Paul accepted this as mild flirtation, though in his heart he knew Griselda was of the rare breed of person completely immune to his charms. Sometimes he walked by her work, hoping she had an outside section so he could study her.
Griselda had a roommate, Rainier, as gorgeous as his name, gorgeous as a buck, all tawny shining fur and rippling muscles, deep sad eyes always looking for his dead boyfriend. Rainier didn’t have a job; he sat around being beautiful and sad, and older men paid his rent, or he had a trust fund. No one envied or begrudged Rainier. He had earned a life without work by being handsome and tragic. He rode his bicycle all over, from the East Village to the West, and men would stop and stare as they went out to get flowers for a party. Men would drop their bouquets in the streets when Rainier pedaled by, shirtless, one overall strap hanging loosely off a perfectly shaped and tanned and muscled shoulder. And Griselda, the most beautiful lesbian on any rooftop on the Lower East Side, near Rainier like a cat, the only person to whom Rainier looked for approval, Patti to his Robert—the real star, the true man of the two. Tony Pinto was their son, their rescue puppy, their friendship project, someone for whom they could break out the blinis on New Year’s Eve, someone who would exclaim in pleasure and present himself to be taught. Paul had no place in their little family but was seduced into its periphery. He lounged on the dusty hardwood floor of their sixth-floor railroad, listening to Dionne Warwick records and watching Griselda and Rainier marvel over Tony Pinto, as Paul too marveled—Tony Pinto’s boyish delight in gossip, his dance-floor transformations, his earnest guided tours through Forbidden Planet’s metal figurine collection, his unironic reverence for the dawn.
Now Paul was Rainier. No, that wasn’t true either because valiant Rainier had lost his boyfriend after a year of fighting with pharmacists and applying cold washcloths and lotioning bedsores. And Paul? Paul had abandoned his first love to the stinking deck of the beautiful plague ship, had fled in cowardice, had insult upon injury fallen in love with Diane, had not listened to his fucking messages.
Paul force-finished the second tumbler of the once-delicious ouzo and wobbled up. He’d go out into the night, find someone to beat him tender. He’d swish up and down Divisadero, taunt cops or college boys, move their fists on him like marionettes. He left the house without a jacket, succeeded in crossing the street to the park, face snorkeling the air currents. He located a bench and allowed his body to collapse. He was limp but everything was spinning, so he closed his eyes. A wall of vomit, one wave in a great sea of vomit, pushed up through his mouth and over the park bench; he was hanging half over, more throw-up in his mout
h and on his shoes. Everything started. He threw up his heart and his liver and some palm trees and a cowboy hat, widening his mouth to disgorge the brim. He threw up Rainier and Griselda, Dionne Warwick, the gray plastic answering machine. He threw up Franky, a box of stale Lucky Charms he’d apparently eaten; he threw up years of beer and the afternoon’s ouzo. He didn’t want anything. He wanted to be with Diane; he wanted the bed of their morning-breath love, the comfort and safety of her babysitter arms. Or he wanted to be with Tony, for it to be before, back before any of this, before Tony had written him that ultimating letter after the Iowa visit, before Tony had given up on him, before Tony had been right to give up on him.
Paul went back in the house thinner, brushed his teeth, took a shower, and walked over to the Mineshaft before happy hour ended. Whatever there was for him tonight was outside, was another mystery, this mysterious universe with its mysterious purpose. He leaned his corduroy hips against the long wooden bar and ordered a Negroni, Tony’s drink, adopted after watching the young Warren Beatty down them in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Tony had thought Negronis classy and European. Paul savored the Campari as if it were Tony’s blood, as if he were a vampire and could drink Tony to death. He understood that he had failed the test. What do you do after you fail the test and you’re still alive?
* * *
×
Paul woke in the mid-afternoon, disoriented and still a little drunk. He walked unsteadily to the bookstore, sweating out the drink and grateful to have someplace to go. At the end of his shift, he asked Franky if he wanted to get something to eat, but Franky said no. So Paul borrowed a store copy of a paperback that caught his eye, The Motion of Light in Water. On the cover a shirtless young man languidly cradled a guitar, obscured by white words and a rainbow scrim. He took himself to Orphan Andy’s for dinner, found a booth toward the back, and pulled out his book. The guy on the cover looked like New York to Paul, intense and toppy. He was maybe Black, maybe Puerto Rican, and Paul felt some obscure kinship in not knowing. As Paul read, he still didn’t know. Was it the science fiction? The passing? One hunter’s recognition of another?
Delany knew what he was, Paul realized—yes, married, but a man who loved men; light-skinned, yes, but a light-skinned Black man; writer; native New Yorker; intellectual. Delany was so certain, had always been certain. He’d busted through everything in his way, and on the other side he’d found morning orgies inside trucks by the docks. Delany at nineteen had seen hundreds of men fucking and had jumped in, had been pure body. Paul at nineteen had seen hundreds of people lying down in the streets, dying-in, and had run away.
The next day, Paul snuck out Borderlands/La Frontera, then Close to the Knives, then Sita, then Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, then Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, then The Devil Finds Work, then The Naked Civil Servant, then In the Life, then Violet to Vita, and on and on through every queer life on the shelf.
For the next five weeks all he did was go to work, come home and read, get up and go to work. He buried himself in books as he hadn’t since he was a child. He was careful not to turn down any pages or read in the bath. He brought Ruffles’s bike into a collective bike shop run by one of the Lickety Split dykes. He picked up a replacement bottle of ouzo.
“You’re a changed man,” said Ruffles one morning, desultorily pouring cornflakes into a bowl.
“I’m not a man,” said Paul.
* * *
×
One mid-morning in mid-June, Paul sat in Café Flore, gazing prettily at the rain while taking a break from Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, cover for his systematic cruising of the room. When he saw a particularly comely boy, Paul stared directly at him, and when the boy noticed and blushed, Paul feigned spaced-out thoughtfulness, made a show of focusing his eyes, and smiled. The boy was very comely, brown ringlets of hair in his eyes, like a little lamb. But the blush was enough and Paul returned to his book. Sometimes Paul preferred catch-and-release.
The café door opened, and a gush of rainy wind heralded a newcomer. Paul looked over and everyone else in the café seemed to look over as well. Who was that? The newcomer, an impish person with a black bowl cut, shook an umbrella. That was all. And yet Paul was caught.
He made certain fast surmises about the stranger, based entirely on palette, but he wanted to prove himself right and for that he needed to get closer. He took quick stock of his money and approved his own emergency request for another beverage. Very casually, and in the exact time it would take to arrive naturally behind the stranger in line, Paul approached the counter. Who was this familiar ineffable personage?
“Girlfriend!” said the counterperson, a faggy butch with—to Paul’s dismay—a septum piercing, like a bull. Paul believed everyone should do their part to beautify public space; this butch was letting the community down.
“Darling!” cried the stranger in delight.
Paul stood close but within acceptable gay proximity to the stranger and still wasn’t sure if the stranger was male or female, as if he, Paul, were some clueless straight person. This stranger was excellently talented. Paul surreptitiously cataloged the usual tells: pores, throat, hands, feet, hips, chest, package, eyebrows, knuckle hair—all inconclusive. He studied the wide shirt lapels, the French cuffs, the jacket slouched with a sloppy schoolgirl grace, the fall of the cuffed trousers, a delicate pinstripe visible only from this distance, the tropical-weight wool verging from navy into purple, the burgundy ascot. Paul noted every detail with simultaneous admiration for the wearer and for his own sensitive eye. The stranger was fancy, and not originally from California, Paul decided. Paul waited for his turn to order, twirling a forelock in a manner he hoped would register as “distracted by important French thoughts.”
An image tugged at Paul’s jumpy rabbit mind, a turned-over card looking for its match—wait…Chicago. The A-House. The youth! What were the odds? Paul felt heavy with meaning and intuition.
Everyone ended up in San Francisco. He heard vampire Catherine Deneuve: There is no escape, my darling, and felt fatalistic, immortal, jaded.
“We have to hang out,” minced the counter butch to the youth. The counter butch noticed Paul and nodded perfunctorily. Paul silently judged her mincing; he disapproved of fake gender-bending, those butches who tried to act more campy than they were and called you “sister-friend” and those fags who tried to front as if they cared about the changing fortunes of football teams when they really longed to don a cheerleader uniform.
Paul purchased a small cappuccino, holding his shoulders in such a way as to advertise his shyness and paradoxical approachability. The elven young person—it was the youth! it had to be!—made no sign of noticing Paul, but concentrated on inscribing what looked like a telephone number onto a napkin in artful block characters, folding it delicately and handing it to the counter butch. The youth then walked out of the café clutching a coffee, draining all excitement from the room. Everyone went back to their newspapers or conversations, limp but satisfied. The youth was a very powerful magician and Paul had not made an impression. He retreated to his window perch in defeat.
* * *
×
Now Paul began to be out and about, hoping to see the youth around town, which he did: walking a brace of pretty Italian greyhounds down Valencia, leaving the Endup just as Paul walked in, sitting in a reserved aisle at the gay film festival where Paul ushered for free admission. Paul was always alone when these sightings occurred, and he began to wonder if he’d invented the youth.
It was June, and like everyone else Paul made himself extremely busy going to queer art openings and queer punk shows and queer spoken word showcases and queer evenings of performance art. He was exhausted and broke from being so queer, and briefly reconsidered sex work to supplement his meager bookstore income. The rent boys who haunted the magazine racks waiting for their beepers to go off seemed like a
fine sort. Poets, mostly. What was stopping Paul but an obsolete bourgeois objection to working for a living? Why was sex so different from everything else? He’d given it away plenty. But he couldn’t make himself excited about sex without conquest. So he ate a lot of peanut butter and stole steaks from the Safeway.
Mid-month, Jane called to say she was coming to San Francisco for Pride.
“Well, officially I’m coming to use the Pacific Film Archives,” she said. “They’re totally paying for my plane ticket.”
“But really you’re coming to see me,” Paul crowed.
“But of course,” said Jane. “And I’m getting in Saturday afternoon, so if you pick me up we can go right to the Dyke March.”
“I have to work,” said Paul.
“Just take it off,” said Jane. She sounded annoyed.
“I’ll try,” Paul said, but he didn’t want to give up a shift. “Don’t you have some friends who live in Berkeley or something?”
Jane arranged for her college friends to pick her up from the airport in their car; they were a couple who’d been together since they were juniors, something like five years. Forever! And now they were lawyers or doctors. Maybe one of them was a publicist? They had jobs with titles.
Paul closed the store at eleven on the dot. He’d been receiving eyewitness reports of the Dyke March all night, mostly from older gay gentlemen who’d been unnerved by the sight of so many lesbians on the street. Paul grew more vexed with every passing minute. He had thought it would be cooler not to go, like Pride, but now he realized he should have tried to get the night off. He called his machine from the phone in the office and wrote down Jane’s destination, a Noe Valley address which proved to be a party thrown by rich lesbians, who had perhaps not expected such a turnout, if the ravaged plates of brie and grapes were any indication. Paul wandered pleasantly through the rooms of the small house, not seeing anyone he recognized. He had nourished a hopeful thought that the youth might be at this party, but knew from the Burmese shadow puppets on the wall that the youth would not be seen here. What could be less cool than a party of white cultural-appropriator lesbians? Occasionally Paul asked if anyone had seen his friend Jane, but only if someone was looking askance at him. Soon enough he found Jane in the backyard, downing tequila shots with the college friends; she promptly disappeared with her college roommate and left Paul stuck with the roommate’s lawyer girlfriend, whose caustic wit he enjoyed. Eventually the lawyer went to find her girlfriend, whom she discovered in flagrante with Jane in a stairwell. When Jane returned to Paul’s staked-out area of the garden, brandishing a half-full bottle of Jack, she informed him that the couple had relocated to a street corner to process. Oh, dyke drama, Paul thought. He’d almost missed it; he’d settled so easily into his rock-and-roll fairy life here. No one had made him talk about feelings in months.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl Page 25