The Good Homosexual

The good homosexual is kept in check by shame.  He does not cross lines, or at least speak of the lines, the depravity on the other side.  Instead, he lets a blustering, dust-covered morality control him and keep him in check.  

The good homosexual is heckled still by teenage boys.  

He pretends:  he is not gay.  

He moves about the sets--his own illusory Hollywood, steeped in glamorous tragedy and tangled in the vestments of a tragic glamour--self-consciously, his long arms swinging.  They are masculine, phallic, unraveling and exitable appendages that bespeak a confidence (that is not there).

On sidewalks, and crosswalks, walking with his chin up and butt tucked he is happy to ignore human nature, happy to live in a model community, a gated gay ghetto where perfect roses grow like razor wire, a heinous ivy overtaking the high marble walls...

The good homosexual retains just enough self-hatred to be earnest when he goes shopping, dedicated to his gym regimen, and oblivious to his epicurean obsessions which entrap him in the pleasure principle.  You complement him.  He defers.  He is not sure if the radish soup needed the cactus slaw.  He feels fat in his new skinny jeans.  On the toilet:  the coral on the ceiling clashes with some of the tiles in the bath.  Besides the blue he has chosen now is more congruent with the mid-century revival that Marcus was telling him about...

He thinks the perfect meal in the ideal garden with a collection of stylishly casual, buff (young) men will help him, help them all, forget that he likes to lick the salty foreskin of men who's ethnicity would preclude them from the guest list.  Or maybe with his coiffed fauxhawk, his faultless skin, his light bright grin and the pressed baby blue T-shirt that clings to the stubble of his shaved chest and incentivises his nipples, perhaps like this--practically perfect in every way--the good homosexual will only get gooder, will improve in his repression, and succumb to his obsessions:  his current house in Dwell, a cool place in hell, Arab men and their smells. 

"Wow.  So he makes no mention of sex, the reckless nights of white knuckling lust in a sling?" 

"Has he any idea of the amount of VHS tape is dedicated to that talented ass?"

"I know, right?  So you're thinking blackmail?"

"Not exactly."

"Who would you show it to?  His girlfriend, his mother, his frat brothers?"

"No, no.  The person who needs to be forced to hook up the VCR and spend an evening with those two tapes..."4

"Long play?"

"Extra long play.  That's twelve hours documenting the transformation of that farm boy into a ferocious and feral power bottom."

"Who?"

"Who, what?"

"Who would you make watch the tapes?"

"Well, himself, of course.  So that whenever he is wandering around with a superior stick up his ass I can remind him of the first colonists to the free world."

"And they were legion"

Guest of Honor

At the birthday party for the dead, there was a wonderful chocolate cake filled with raspberry jelly that oozed like blood onto the muddy surface of our paper plates.  "Delicious," someone said.  There was a muttering of agreement, "Delicious, delicious."  They were nodding to one another, approving, the corners of their mouths collected bio-waste as if they too were cannibals.   

At this point the, camera steps away a little.  The invasive/earnest quality of the lens that we will come to associate with the  young detective (and with the dead girl as well) relaxes into a languid playfulness that will mirror the flirtation and tension betwixt Pabla and Nero.  For the audience, the personal and emotional quality of these scenes is best elicited in an ambience that is romantic without being saccharine, nostalgic without being delusional.

Climactically, after dancing a long time with Nero,  Pabla, glistening with sweat, the cotton of her dress well-soaked under her arms and on her back, stumbles off the floor and tosses herself--"like a Raggedy Anne Doll"--onto the folding chair beside her aunt Eileen.  She is lost in the music, in the drunken sensation of "love."  She doesn't see the discarded plate smeared with the sweet filling....

It was as if the savage's arrow had found its mark, as if the collaboration between make-up and special effects had cemented the lie.  Splat!  The raspberry blood was suddenly not the sacrament of the (virgin) victim's blood.  It was, instead, the suggestion of shame.  Shame for....   being a woman?  bleeding in public?  having an accident?  The red tide had arrived without warning and smeared the yellow gingham of a girl's wholesome secrets.

You enjoy the erotic tension of your own vulnerability.  Absolved of all of your actions by your subservient posture, by your obedience, you are free.  Or you imagine so.  You are liberated from culpability by your degradation.  If the police should come, these bruises, these serpentine cords, the stains on the carpet will all record your trauma.  You have chosen shame over blame.  It is difficult to say if this was a good choice.

Dream Journal

I have returned to my parents’ house. It is summer. August. The days that start clear and boil into thunder storms. I am there for my parents 50^th Anniversary. But that is later. My grandmother is in the hospital. It is serious. I leave the family to go to visit her. I go alone. I don’t want anyone to go with me. On my way, I stop at the Salvation Army. I want to get something new to wear. I spend a long time in the racks of dated styles, antique clothing. Everything suggests other times, other moments in my life. Memories. I leave there. I buy something. I don’t remember what. I want to prove that I have been there. I know that I need to get to the hospital. 10^th Avenue South is long and stretches out while I drive. I keep stopping. I go to the Burgermaster and get a Green River and a Flying Saucer. The Green River is like liquid neon, as if it is radioactive and sickly sweet. Near the hospital there is a giant statue of a cowboy. He is made out of plastic. He is grinning and poised to lasso something. I don’t know why he is there. Across the street is the adult book store. I go in there. There is a labyrinth of hallways, little rooms. All the pornography is straight. I can hear it layering, one movie over another, a symphony of grunts and moans. In the labyrinth I see a “real” cowboy. He appears and disappears repeatedly. His eyes promise something, suggest something. I want him. But he keeps disappearing. I wait in the semi-darkness. I wait a long time. I feel like the cowboy must be gone but then he emerges from a booth. He motions for me to follow him. I do. We have sex. I feel like I am late now. There is urgency. I arrive at the hospital. I have been there. I remember where the room is. I go there. An old man, snoring is in my grandmother’s bed. I am confused. I try to find a nurse. When I do, I am told that my grandmother has been moved to another place. I leave the hospital and find the new address. The rest home is on the edge of the city, where the regular geometry breaks up and gives way to the plains. It looks like my elementary school. No one is outside. There is a large flag rattling in the persistent wind. Inside, the halls are dark. Maybe my eyes need to adjust so that I can see clearly. Slowly the old people appear, slow motion, dragging walkers as if they are in quicksand. Or propped up in the corners in wheel chairs. I find the room where my grandmother is. I see that my mother is there sitting beside the bed. She is visibly distraught. Quietly distraught. “We had a good visit,” she tells me. “She was talking a bit ago.” My grandmother is not moving, not sleeping. Her eyes are partly open. They see without seeing. My mother and I sit wordless. Then she asks me, “Where have you been?” I explain nothing. I excuse myself. I don’t say anything to to my grandmother, to her shell. I drive back to the farm. A thunderhead is rising into the blue sky. When I get to the house my sisters meet me at the door. They are dressed in fancy clothes, ready for the party for my parents’ anniversary. But they are crying. My grandmother in dead. This isn’t murder, but it feels that way. Because I was fucking a cowboy I didn’t get to say good-bye. I wake up. 15 years later.

Wet Dreams

Remember the first time you ejaculated in front of someone else?  The head of your cock angry, straining beyond the elastic of your underwear, above the cinch of your jeans, begging to be touched, begging, until it shook in reckless spasms, covering your smooth belly with your own sticky cream.  

Did you blush?  Did you smile?  Eyes turned down, did you fumble as you tried to find something--a tissue, a sock, a bandanna--to mop up the slop of pearls.  

Keep your eyes open, the lights on, get completely naked, surround the bed with cameras and mirrors.  Monitors are more honest than memories.  Eyes locked in eyes--the dark fire of adjoining cells--are stripped of words and one is left with uncertainty, swirling.  Who are you and who am I?  And what is this connection, the mixing of body parts, the merging of minds?  

Some people copulate in dim rooms, under the covers, without ever whispering--NO MOANS--not even the lover's name.  In the time before printing corrupted the race with pornography and ideas, this was the substance of the sexual dream.  Darkness, the chafing wool, the sound of rustling and breathing, barely in control.

As for me, the wet dreams preceded everything, accept imagination.  Their substance was a buzzing garden of fairy tails and bible verses, the etymology of hell.  I was a bridge over a torrent pouring out of a chasm into the mill of a quantifiably quaint little town; I lay naked,  and, hanging from my genitals, the bony red  hand of the devil with his neglected yellowed nails grasped something about me; and he was swinging, slipping from my member until he fell--releasing me--his black and red and blue body plunging into the cauldron at the end of the cascade.  

Or there was the dream of the bike wreck.  Out of control, I was careening down the steep steps of an elaborate building erected 100 years before I was born.  The steps gave way to a thorny garden, the garden to a mountain ravine.  And the bike shook and rattled over a precipitous edge  that landed in an orgasm, bloody knees and a sleeping bag lined with cum-drenched flannel. 

The apes came many nights, chattering absurdly in the jungle trees, angry behind bars in an imaginary zoo.  The gorillas, like the faceless demon, would use my penis as a vine or a jungle gym, slick and quickly tricked into whistling jism.  Their wet, black fingers--their nails still nasty with the fecal matter of their last bad tantrum--would stroke and stretch the member with that animal playfulness that exists without shame.  The apes came many nights, the apes and the skeins of red velvet and red silk.

Whether stretched on faceless women's thighs, a drum to rub against, naked again, outside on the steps of some classical monument.  Or turned into curtains  that  were blurring in the windows from which I watched the men work, unaware of me, frottage in the bleeding pleats.  Or the red silk that came slithering into the bed, replacing sheets and pillow cases with restless pleasure, until waking up to spoiled white cotton.... 

I keep failing. My failures
are smaller, my diminished ambitions;
I find no solace
in this fact...

Sea of Tranquility/Sea of Storms

His skin is the surface of the moon. It remembers adolescence in its altered geography. In this soft light of the only lamp in his bedroom, traces remain. Meteors whose devastation had done their best to shame him in his tender youth now rendered him shy in middle age. This damage made him a precarious lover, uncertain in sexual encounters. More than the pock marks themselves, he didn't like this effect. He had become one of those people who only undresses in semi-darkness, who fucks with their eyes closed, and who hurriedly departs the scene before his partner--now sated--can begin to perceive his many flaws through a lens of their regret.