Still Life with June Read online

  He looked at me. I had already downed four straight double whiskeys — the only thing you should drink in a country and western bar, gay or straight — and I was heavily buzzed. He said, “You really want to know?”

  “Damn tootin’,” I said, and smiled.

  “My mother is shacked up with some artist down south and never calls,” he said. “My father’s a prick who won’t talk to me because I’m a fag, and I don’t like staying in my apartment because five years ago my lover died of AIDS. We didn’t celebrate Christmas that year. I was too busy wiping his shit off the sheets. So I prefer to work.”

  He turned back to the TV screen. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t expected such an honest answer from him but, now that I had one, I couldn’t let the moment go to waste. “Do you have it? AIDS, I mean?”

  He shook his head. “Lucky, I guess. Do you?”

  “No. Not the last time I checked anyway.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Last year.”

  “Been fucked without a condom in the last year?”

  “No. Haven’t fucked with one either.”

  “You a top?” The cowboy’s stance suddenly changed. It was a shift I’d seen many times, especially on Christmas Day, when there aren’t many customers around and a bartender or waiter can open up a little. That certain way of relaxing the shoulders and the slight but perceptible turn of his body towards me and away from the television — the heartwarming, Christmasy moment when I change from a faceless, nameless customer into a sex object.

  I knew from experience that if things had played out the way the bartender might have wanted them to, eventually — maybe after a few weeks or months of sleeping with him — there would be another change, another subtle shift in our relations. I’d change from sex object into a human being. That’s just about the time the bartender/cowboy would dump me. Or I’d dump him, depending on who glimpsed the other’s humanity first.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not a top.”

  “Too bad,” said the cowboy. “We could have had some fun.”

  His attention wandered back to the television. I bolted the last of my whiskey and left him alone, moving on to the next bar, looking for God knows what and nearly always finding it.

  XII

  That same evening I ran into Eric. I was surprised to see him. I pictured him as the type with family, friends, connections. Wrong. By the looks of it, Eric was as cut loose as the rest of us. Or maybe he just didn’t want to go home that year because of the way he looked. His head was bandaged. He had two black eyes. The skin around one of them was swollen and had turned more colours than a Tequila Sunrise.

  “I got beat up,” he said.

  I wanted to ask if he had handcuffed the wrong guy, but stopped myself. That was not the kind of thing you blurted out in a gay bar, even on Christmas Day when the place was nearly empty. Eric seemed to see right through me. He wasn’t a doctor of linguistics at twenty-seven for nothing. He was smart. Besides, even linguists, at some point in their lives, have to ignore the words and focus on the silences between the words, just like the rest of us.

  “I got bashed,” he said. “They were waiting outside in the parking lot last weekend.”

  “And you’re back here tonight?”

  Eric nodded. “Why wouldn’t I be? Where else am I going to meet someone?” He looked me in the face so nakedly, so shamelessly, that it was my turn to be embarrassed.

  This time I didn’t laugh. This time I turned away.

  For weeks afterwards I woke up in the middle of the night picturing Eric’s bruised and damaged face, made all the more noticeable by the too-white bandage wrapped around his forehead. I wished that I hadn’t laughed when he slapped on the cuffs. Being with someone and bound to the headboard is better than being alone — perfectly free in your bed with no one and nowhere to move to.

  XIII

  The thing about cruising gay bars on Christmas Day is that your odds of scoring are both substantially reduced and substantially increased. Substantially reduced because, all things being equal, there are fewer people in a gay bar on Christmas Day and therefore, from a probability standpoint, there are fewer people to pick up. Substantially increased because most of the people who are in gay bars on Christmas Day are so desperate for basic human contact they’d go home with a Doc Martin shoe if it made a move, and maybe even if it didn’t.

  Now I know what you’re thinking. Basic Aristotelian logic:

  A) You could fire a cannon in a gay bar on Christmas Day and not worry about hitting anyone

  B) If you did hit someone it wouldn’t matter much because he would probably be an all-time loser. Then,

  C) Yours truly is probably an all-time loser.

  I’m not going to argue but let me answer this way:

  A) I already know I’m a loser

  B) A loser who knows he’s a loser is slightly less of a loser than someone who doesn’t know it, and,

  C) There’s nothing worse than a loser who doesn’t know he’s a loser.

  XIV

  I haven’t told you yet why I go to gay bars to get loaded on Christmas Day. I go to hear the stories. You haven’t heard anything until you’ve gone to a gay bar on Christmas Day and heard the stories. Eric and the cowboy were nothing; interesting asides, not shocking at all. I have discovered that among those of us hanging out in bars on Christmas Day a lot of us get gay-bashed, a lot of fathers are pricks and many, many mothers are shacked up with artists down south. A lot of lovers have died of AIDS. Hell, a lot of us have AIDS, or live in shelters, or live nowhere at all, or used to do coke but ran out of money and now just drink. Some of us have cerebral palsy, or are just drunk (between the very drunk and the very afflicted it’s hard to tell the difference). Others have cancer or Hepatitis C, or are bipolar and take lithium, or suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome and take dopamine injections. I have never met anyone with diabetes in the bars on Christmas Day.

  This is a big city. Even our little ten percent of it is endlessly varied. A lot of people take a lot of things and have had a lot of things happen to them. That’s why I go.

  These stories keep me alive for the rest of the year. The other three hundred and sixty-four days I sit in my apartment on Lime Street and write the stories down, then sell them to magazines. I can even sell some of these stories to the more liberal straight magazines. After all, with all apologies to Jerry Falwell, cerebral palsy is cerebral palsy, no matter who gets it.

  It’s not that I am a singularly depressing writer, who writes only about death. I hear funny stories too, and moving, inspirational stories. I hear stories about gay men whose dads came out of the closet at sixty-five and start doing drag. I hear stories about lesbian musicians who turn out to be men à la Victor Victoria. Once I heard a story about a man who bought a house in the city and invited young hustlers to live there for free. He didn’t even insist they sleep with him, though some of them did, of course. It was a disaster. They stole from him, used him, beat him up. But it was a happy story, because of the way he told it. He laughed and said he would do it again if he had the money and his house hadn’t been repossessed. He even asked me if I wanted to live rent-free in his apartment with him. When I passed, he shrugged and said he was thinking of starting another commune, on a much more limited scale. This one for people who didn’t have anywhere to go on Christmas Day.

  XV

  One year I met a drag queen from a village in Oaxaca who was a Muxe for his tribe. A Muxe. I had him spell it.

  “M-U-X-E,” he said.

  Because boys in his culture couldn’t touch women without marrying them, his tribe had long ago created this ceremonial position. A man dressed like a woman and satisfied the sexual needs of the tribe’s young men so that the women would not be defiled before marriage. Eventually this guy got to sleep with every man and boy in his village. After I published that story in a gay magazine here in the city, you wouldn’t believe how many letters were forwarded to me from men who wanted
to know how to become a Muxe. Although I didn’t write back and tell them, I knew they could not just move to Mexico and become one. I knew because I had asked the Muxe, whose name was Amaranta, the same question. Amaranta told me, in his poor, heavily accented English, that you have to be chosen by your tribe, which has already asked the gods to make a recommendation.

  “And how do they do that?” I asked.

  “All the males from the village gather together. The young boys play under the yucca trees for one day, and the old men sit and watch. They know. The gods tell them. The old men pull the Muxe aside, and she lives the rest of her life as a woman.”

  “That’s quite a hiring process,” I said.

  “Si,” Amaranta said, and took a sip of his frothy drink. I wondered if he knew that all those quaint umbrella and swizzle-stick decorations standing up in his glass were almost certainly made by people in his own country at close to slave wages. When I asked him what he was doing in North America that time of year, he smiled sweetly.

  “Being a Muxe is hard work,” he said. “I needed a vacation.”

  XVI

  Most of the people who give me their stories find in me a sympathetic listener and never once suspect that inside, where I live most of the time, I am sorting through the rubbish, discarding the boring bits, building up other bits, examining, taking notes, robbing them. Most people who are not writers don’t understand that writers are scum. Each writer is only one person, and one person can only live so much of a life. That life is rarely enough to write a whole lot of stories about. So writers pillage other people’s stories and call them their own. Whenever I hear (sometimes jealously, I admit) about a writer who has written a bestselling book or movie or play, I think: I know who you are. You’re a fraud. You’re scum. You steal people’s stories and give them back all jumbled up as if they were your own.

  Anyway.

  The guy in the bar on Christmas Day, the loser who knows he’s a loser or the loser who doesn’t, tells me everything like I’m Dear Abby or Dr. Ruth, and I sit there silently robbing him blind. Thieves steal your wallet. Murderers steal your life. Writers steal your stories. When people tell me about their virus or their drag queen father or their mother who used to dress them up in little girl’s clothes I thank them and move on to the next victim.

  Jesus. I need a vacation.

  XVII

  Another thing about writers: for some reason they are more respected than almost any other type of artist. I have no idea why one kind of thief can be reviled while another kind is applauded, except that we all know the value of money but only rarely do we recognize the value or the uniqueness of our own stories. In case you are starting to respect me in the way that only writers are respected, let me relieve you of that burden. I am not a successful writer. Most of the stories I publish appear in magazines that don’t pay well and that no one reads. Some of them pay in copies, which I guess means I am supposed to scream on the rooftops that someone published my story and pass them out to my friends.

  I don’t have any friends.

  Even if I did, I would never pass contributor’s copies out to anyone. If someone pays me for a story with ten copies of their magazine, that means I have ten copies to line Juxtaposition’s cat box with. I don’t even keep one for myself. I am embarrassed to read these stories I publish, these stolen properties. I am afraid that one day, one of the losers who knows he’s a loser will pick up one of these shitty little magazines and realize he’s been robbed.

  My phone number is unlisted and I always, always, publish under a pseudonym.

  These are some of my pseudonyms: Sam Mainster, Jay Dakota, Matt Harding, Darren Greer, Shawn Keating, Owen Wilkes. Not very inventive, but they don’t have to be. All that matters is that no one knows that it’s me writing these stories, and I will never be murdered in my bed by one of my fellow gay losers.

  XVIII

  As an unsuccessful writer, piss poor, I have to make money somewhere. I work at the Salvation Army downtown. Before you start thinking this is noble, I will also tell you that I am not philanthropic by nature. I work there for the same reason I started visiting bars on Christmas Day. To get more stories. At least, that’s why I started working there. Then I discovered that the stories of guys living in twenty-bed shelter dorms were all the same: alcohol, drugs, schizophrenia, or a combination thereof.

  The problem with these guys is that they have their heads so far up their addicted asses that you can’t get the truth, or even a decent story, from them. It’s always the same with them. I got robbed. My mother hated me. My father beat me. I tried AA but I didn’t like it. In Sally Ann’s world, we have a very polite term for losers who don’t know they’re losers. We say they are “in denial.”

  I’ve heard this term often since moving from the night desk in the shelter to the Drug and Alcohol Treatment Wing. I’m the guy who sits at the front desk every night and makes sure everyone gets in on time. I also pass out the medications — the methadone, the laxatives when you’re constipated from chronic heroin use, the Prozac. This was a big move for me. The guys here are — inch by inch, day by day, minute by fucking agonizing minute — acknowledging that they belong to the loser portion of the animal kingdom. It is quite something to watch the passage of a man from blind loser to aware loser. Treatment is the only place where you run into someone’s humanity and it’s not a turn-off. These guys sit in group therapy and mine for humanity in each other like it’s gold. They’re even surprised when they find it.

  “I didn’t know I was afraid,” they tell me. “I didn’t know I was so fucked-up inside.”

  I want to tell them that they’d better stay here, where they have a warm bed, a hot meal, and people to talk to, people who appreciate the best in each other. Here there are a battalion of counsellors ready to talk whenever someone needs it. The guys in here are lucky. They have someone to feed and clothe them. In here, humanity is a great thing — an indication that we’re all here and all the same, somewhat.

  Out there, life is messy. Better off just to stay in here for a while. Go out, use drugs some more, come back, and find protection. How often I wish I was hooked on what the guys call The Addict’s Alphabet — H or C or E — so I could spend a few months as a resident of the Sally Ann, safe and warm and having that which is most fucked-up about me listened to with such abiding interest. Unfortunately, I am not addicted to anything illegal or hugely brain damaging. As far as I know, there isn’t a treatment centre in the world for a compulsive writer of stories. And the Sally Ann Treatment Centre, like every other treatment centre, has a firm rule about cats. No Juxtaposition allowed.

  XIX

  On Thursdays I go to a writers’ group. I don’t go for support, or to read my stuff. I never read my stuff in these groups. I just sit and listen to everyone else read their stuff. The group meets in the backroom of one of those giant chain bookstores downtown which I will call BIG BAD BOOKS to avoid getting sued. This is the kind of bookstore that all pseudo-intellectual literate people claim to hate because it drives the smaller, more interesting stores out of business. The same kind of mammoth plop-yourass-down-on-a-comfy-sofa-and-read-till-you’re-catatonic kind of store in which those same people can often be found strolling the aisles or sitting in a corner next to a chemical fireplace.

  At least I am not a hypocrite. I have no qualms about these bookstores. I don’t care about the smaller bookstores, because there I have to pay. I never buy a book anymore. Whenever I want to read, I just go into BIG BAD BOOKS, take a book off the shelf, and sit down and read it. If I don’t finish the book I just set it back on the shelf, come in the next day, and pick it up again. I have not bought a book since the day this store opened nine blocks from my apartment. I used to go to the library and take books out for free, but I had a hard time returning them. The library sends you those nasty notices, then gets a collection agency on your ass. In BIG BAD BOOKS you have the incentive of returning what you borrow to its shelf or else you go to jail. It’s the pe
rfect set-up for me.

  The writers’ group held at two on Thursday afternoons is BIG BAD BOOKS’s way of mollifying authors whose chance of getting published is considerably reduced because of the store’s very existence. A lot of writers attend. Few of them are any good, and that’s why I go. I sit and listen to their overwritten, underwritten, self-indulgent material and make mental notes. The thing about most really bad writers is they just haven’t found a way to tell their stories. But the idea for the story, if you’re thoughtful enough to dig your hands in and drag it screaming to the surface, usually isn’t that bad. Most of these writers will never get published, so I just steal from them. Of course, I have to be careful. These people really do read the shitty magazines. They read everything. So I have to disguise the stolen properties well in order not to get a lawsuit slapped against the magazine I’m publishing in. These magazines are very careful not to get lawsuits slapped against them. One lawsuit slapped against The Back Water Review or The Living Daylights would permanently put them out of business.

  Let me get one thing straight. I am not plagiarizing. Often the stories I steal are just like the gay bar stories. They are more about the writers themselves than the stories they make up. The best part of any story involves what happened to the writer personally. If I do steal an idea, it is just the idea. Not a character or a plot. Just the idea. There is no copyright on ideas. Can you imagine if there was? Every time you talked about God you’d have to pay the folks who thought that one up a royalty. Jerry Falwell and Jack Van Impe would be out of business in a hurry.

  Anyway.

  We all sit in these comfortable overstuffed chairs arranged in a circle in the back room. The pot lights in the ceiling are dimmed but you can read by them. There are no windows to let in the daylight and remind us we should be out there getting real jobs. And we — they — read.