I Shall Not Be Moved
I will not be separated from the city I love. Here I have found, if not complete acceptance of who I am, an environment in which I am able to exploit the odd dimensions of my body to achieve something resembling a normal life.
My lover and I have worked out our routine: from Monday to Saturday of every week, he walks me, just as he does now, to the Golden Lantern before continuing on to work. While he works, I sit on the bar and drink with my friends. At five in the evening he drops by to pick me up, ordering a soda and catching up on what he has missed. Then we walk back home, and I lightly fuck my lover until I climax or become too tired to continue.
Sundays, on the other hand, are relaxing days. My lover goes to church, and I sleep all day long. I do not touch a drop out of consideration for his religious beliefs, though that is perhaps the only concession I will make for him.
I am, admittedly, a bit stubborn. But beyond that, the stress from evacuating this city would put an unnecessary strain on my heart, which is already and, I should say, naturally, a bit overworked. My lover does not know this, and I don’t want to worry him with something he cannot alter. For all his supposed interest in little people, though, he has no idea of the very real medical problems we daily face.
It is a lovely, slightly overcast Saturday morning, and the heat is as it always is in August: wet and persistent. I am in my usual leather, my lover’s favorite. My lover and I live in a shotgun in the Marigny, so our walk is an easy stroll west on Royal Street into the French Quarter. Were it any other day, the street would be full of sweet, silly men, meticulously cleaning up behind their tiny dogs. Today, however, there are only a few, but they’re busy packing their belongings into their cars, with grim, distracted looks on their faces. I would say that the mood is slightly anxious, were I not several gin and tonics into my morning, and therefore immune to such sensitivities.
When we reach the Golden Lantern, my lover kisses my cheek and hands me a hundred dollar bill. It is an unusually high sum.
“I want you to get whatever you want,” he says. “I want you to get as drunk as you possibly can.”
“So that you can kidnap me and drag me to Houston?” I ask.
“Oh, Derrin,” he says, “you’ve figured out my plan.”
“Yes, I have,” I say, “and that is why I will only drink soda until you return.”
“If you stay sober today,” he says, “I won’t ask you to evacuate ever again. But only if you stay sober. If not, I’ll ask you when I return, I’ll ask you as we walk home, I’ll ask you long into the night and all of next day, when landfall is predicted.”
“Promise me something,” I say, buttoning my leather vest with an important air, “that if we do stay, and we find ourselves in the situation where we are both hungry, and surrounded by water, with no help in sight, I want you to promise that you will eat me to survive.”
“Don’t joke about that,” he says.
“Promise me. ”
“I won’t.”
“Then at least promise me that after I am dead, and you have thoughtfully buried me, that you will enlist the services of a woman to have your child, and once the child is born you will name him Derrin, or Derrina, after me, after the little man you once knew.” I nibble at my lover’s palm.
“I won’t eat you. I don’t want children either.”
“But dear,” I say, “don’t you know that if the city is destroyed, and our house is underwater, and the Golden Lantern is closed indefinitely, and you are going hungry right before my very eyes, don’t you know that I would want you to eat me?”
“I’ll see you after a while,” he says. I give him my empty cup to throw away.
The Golden Lantern is a long, rectangular room, smoky and intimate and not for the faint of heart. Occasionally a curious tourist will poke a head into the bar and, finding the assortment of tawdry queens and hustlers not exactly what he or she had in mind, quickly run in the direction of Bourbon Street, where the straight and vacant dwell. Today it is very quiet; there are only two people in the place: Jimmy, who tends bar, and a handsome young boy I do not know.
“Hey, little daddy,” says Jimmy. He comes to my side and lifts me up on the counter, where there is always a space cleared for me to sit. Jimmy is in his seventies and speaks through a voice box in his throat, and he is by far the most courteous person I know. I believe he beat his cancer simply because he never thought death might be required of him.
He pours me a gin and tonic in a plastic cup and sets it in the crook of my arm. “I have a reward waiting for me if I stay sober,” I say.
“What might that be?”
I take a long swallow of the gin. “He says that if I keep to the soda today, he won’t ask me to evacuate.”
Jimmy points to my drink. “Do you want me to get rid of that for you, sweetie?”
“Absolutely not. I can pull myself together in time. You’re staying, are you not?”
Jimmy does not hesitate before depressing the button on his voice box. “Yes, indeed,” he says.
“I wish you would speak to my lover. His mind is all but made up.”
I lay the large bill on the counter next to me. Jimmy looks imploringly at me. “It’s from him,” I say. “Let me buy you a drink. And the handsome young man over there, buy him one, too.”
The young man can be no older than seventeen. He possesses the longest eyelashes I have ever seen. To my delight, the blue T-shirt he is wearing has the quite original phrase dairy master printed across the chest. I notice that he is scribbling furiously with a pen on several napkins.
“Little dear,” I say. “Young man.” He glances up from his work.
“What?” he says. “What do you want?” I do believe he’s trying to sound tough.
“I want to know what you’d like to drink.”
“I don’t fuck for just a drink,” he says.
“And I don’t buy drinks for handsome young men in the hopes of fucking them,” I say. “It’ll be enough just watching you enjoy something.”
Jimmy reassures the young man with a gentle nod of his head.
“Red Bull and vodka,” the young man says. Ah, the youth and their cheap thrills!
“What are you writing?” I ask.
“Just a little poetry,” he says.
“Will you share some with us?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“We will not. Please, immerse us in beauty.”
“All right,” he says. “Can I have the drink first?”
Jimmy pours the young man his request. The young man takes it down, and is revived.
“This is called, ‘Young, Scared, Happy.’”
“It sounds wonderful,” I say. “Is it autobiographical?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m going to start now.”
“Wonderful,” I say.
“I dance in the dark,
Without a stage.
I twirl in sexual revolution,
Without protection.
My heart is exposed,
My heels dug in.
And the people protest,
They rage,
They stand erect.
Yet I shall not be moved.
I shall not be moved.”
Jimmy and I applaud. It is a shame that the city of New Orleans should lavish so much attention on its music, when there is clearly an equally vital poetry scene. I, for one, have always wanted to put my complex feelings into lines. I ask the young man if he’s staying for the storm.
“I moved here two weeks ago,” he says. “I don’t know what to do. The news is scaring me, though. What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to leave,” I say, “but my lover insists that we go. I am in a bit of a bind.”
“More drinks, then,” Jimmy says.
We all three pleasantly fill the time. There is small talk about business, about drama from the previous night, about the largest we have ever taken. I am quickly catapulting to a place beyond inebriated. I check the clock on the wall, and find that it’s a little past one in the afternoon. All three of us have graduated to taking shots, still on the hundred dollars my lover gave me.
“What could we do to commemorate this day?” Jimmy asks.
The young man has a secretive thought in response to Jimmy’s question, and he whispers it in his ear. Jimmy smiles naughtily.
“Well, little daddy,” Jimmy says, “Are these the last days?”
“We would be the last to know,” I say. “Can you please help me down?”
Jimmy lifts me from the counter to the floor. I walk toward the bathroom in the back of the bar. If there is one aspect of the Golden Lantern that stands to be criticized, it is the lack of a sanitary place to relieve oneself. A small quibble, but the urinal is practically mossy. I utilize it anyway.
I am thinking of my lover, I am drunk and thinking longingly of my lover. I didn’t love him at first, of course, but he paid for my meals and let me stay for free in his home, as long as I fulfilled a certain duty at the end of the night. I was happy to agree to this, though I found him rather cloying and unimaginative. Over time, however, and I think it truly mysterious how these things happen, I came to see him not as my benefactor, but rather the person I was destined to love, and to test his own attachment to me, I approached him one night, and asked him how he would feel about my leaving. He admitted, with tears filling his eyes, to falling in love with me. He had not meant to, he said, but he could do nothing about it, and therefore offered me anything I wanted as long as I stayed. Sensing my opportunity, I chose the Golden Lantern six days out of the week. I think of my lover as he must be this moment, meticulously nailing plywood to his office windows. I wish he was with me, that he loved to drink as much as I.
The bar is as dark as a mausoleum as I leave the restroom. I keep the bathroom light on just to understand what is what. Someone has closed the door of the bar and lowered the blinds. I can, however, make out what is happening. The young man sits nude, on the bar counter, as Jimmy sits on a barstool, fellating him. I want to look away, but I am too intoxicated not to be interested. The young man notices me.
“I’ve never had a dwarf before,” he says.
“Oh no?” I ask.
“I’ve also never had a man that couldn’t talk through his mouth before, either. It’s a day of firsts for me.”
Jimmy presses his finger to his throat. “Derrin, he says, “give me a hand with this horse.”
I have forced the fluid from a thousand members in this bar in all my years here, so this is not a shocking invitation. I am aroused within my leather pants, and I think again of my lover. I have a lover who accepts my many whims and even encourages them, who knows for a fact that I have engaged in lewd conduct in this bar and has hidden his jealousy and contented himself with the fact that, at the end of the day, I am his. I see him again, boarding up his office, preparing his mind to leave the place that he too loves. At this moment I want only him, long to be deep inside only him.
“Three’s company,” says Jimmy.
I am only a man, though, at the end of the day, but I do believe that certain boundaries should be set. I believe it is the Lord of scripture who says that one should be either hot or cold, to exist nowhere in the middle, but I am afraid that the man who wrote that did not spend one moment in the world that he created. It is, in fact, very advantageous to find a compromise between extremes.
I decide to stand beside Jimmy as he pleasures the young man, and am happy to simply watch. I furrow my brow and form my mouth into an o. I make low sounds in my throat. Both Jimmy and the young man are in ecstasy. The young man has reached a point of drunkenness in which he has forgotten the aged face applying suction to him, and Jimmy is thrilled to be making a boy fifty years his junior lose control. Let the storm come now, I think, let this be their eternal pose. I encourage the young man to ejaculate onto my chest, which he does with all the vigor and strength of his age. He slips from the bar and dresses. Jimmy hands me a fresh bar towel for cleanup, then raises the blinds and opens the door of the Golden Lantern. The clock tells me it is now just after two.
I take my remaining money and walk down the street to Verti-Mart, where I purchase a gallon of water, a chicken salad sandwich, and a tin of breath mints. While in line, I notice a ribbon of jissom on my leather vest, just above the breast pocket. Sweet remembrances. I wipe off the souvenir with a complimentary napkin from the deli. The clerk carries my purchases back with me to the Golden Lantern.
When I return to the bar, there are at least five more men seated at the stools, and Jimmy is listening intently as they converse. The young man sits at the far end of the bar, alone, scribbling his beautiful poems on napkins. A man I recognize but cannot name lifts me to my place on the counter. He feeds me my sandwich and lifts the container of water to my lips, stroking my hair. An angel.
It seems that since I’ve been gone, a mandatory evacuation has been ordered, and even if the storm were to drop to a category three, catastrophic flooding is likely. I imagine my lover and me on the rooftop of our little shotgun, the water rising all around, the music from an invisible orchestra swelling dramatically. Our neighbors paddle by in boats, waving to us, wishing us well. Some offer us a seat, but we say no, we will not leave our home, not until we are forced to swim. Just as the water rises to our necks, when my lover and I are standing, but for our heads, fully underwater on our rooftop, we kiss, and as we do, the waters recede, defeated by the power of love.
The patrons are chatty, frightened and chatty. Promises are made, vows are forged. Meet me here at x time, my friend has a generator, and he has a place for you to sleep, we live on the highest ground in the city, yes we have a few weapons, he’s comfortable with me bringing people home, we’ll paddle through the city, we will be the royalty of the new Atlantis, no, the cats will be safe, we’ll store them in the attic, I won’t leave and neither should you.
Why should it be that this should ever end? I wonder. These people have found this place, they have traveled across the entire world to find this place, the place that they have searched for their entire lives. What kind of prude, I wonder, would bring his fist down and smash it?
My lover arrives at four in the Mercedes; I watch him, now completely sober, from my perch on the counter. The urgency of his mission requires that he park on the curb. I realize with horror that the sedan is packed full of our belongings.
He is, of course, in quite a state. His shirt is unbuttoned at the top, his tie has fallen. He is sweating terribly, entering the bar. “Derrin,” he says, “We need to go.”
I point to the nearly empty jug of water. “Don’t you have something to not ask me?”
“There isn’t time,” he says. He lifts me to the floor.
“So we are staying. Wonderful!” I shout.
“We can’t stay, baby.”
“You promised me that if I was in my right mind, you wouldn’t ask me to leave. Here I am, in my right mind.”
“I’m sorry. We need to go.”
“What has happened?” I ask.
My lover thinks for a moment. He is troubled by everything. He is sensitive to every living thing at every moment. It is why I love him. This realization does not dampen my fury at being taken advantage of, however. “I couldn’t live if something happened to you,” he says.
“What made you suddenly disregard our agreement?”
“For some reason,” he says, “I can’t stop imagining the neighborhood under water, and your body floating in it.”
“But don’t you understand that if I were floating in the flood, the sight of our neighborhood, preserved for all time, would make me happy? I don’t want to leave. What will all these boys do?”
“They will be all right. I hope the Lord will keep them safe.”
“I don’t understand why you think the Lord would discriminate in who He saves and who He does not. I would think that, you being a believer, and me being at least a partial acknowledger, that we would stand a fairly good chance.”
“We live a life of sin,” my lover says. “You know it, Derrin. We need to look out for ourselves.”
My lover and his Catholic guilt! I feel an erection stirring. He becomes a fearful altar boy before my eyes. Still, I feel the need to hold my ground, though I don’t know yet how to go about this.
“I’m going to the restroom,” I say. I hand him the remaining three dollars of the hundred he gave me. “Why don’t you order a soda and say hello to Jimmy?”
I once again make my way toward the back of the bar. Instead of entering the restroom, I slip into the shadowy part of the hallway and lean my back against the wall. From here I can see everything, all patrons, though they would have to look hard to see me. I watch my lover as he makes his way to the bar. There are several open seats, but he chooses the one next to the young poet, who sizes my lover up, wearing a face at once pensive and passionate, if such things are possible, and it is only after Jimmy has poured my lover a drink that my lover finally notices the young man’s efforts. He engages the young man in polite conversation, and it is obvious, by my lover’s body language, that he is quite attracted to the young man. My lover puts two fingers to his own lips when he is taken with something, as he does now.
I am not jealous. My lover is a born caregiver, above anything, and if there was ever someone who exuded fragility, albeit knowingly, it’s this young man. Watching my lover now as he momentarily puts all of his fears and worries aside so as to share a pleasant moment with the young man, I find it impossible to stay angry with my lover. His manners are absolutely impeccable. I walk to him, and, pulling on his sleeve, I ask that he accompany me outside. He thanks the young man for the conversation and follows me out.
“I will go with you on one condition,” I say, leaning against the beautiful sedan.
“Tell it to me,” my lover says.
“That we will take one of these people with us.”
“There isn’t room in the car, Derrin.”
“Throw out my possessions, then.” I am not sure I completely mean this.
“Why do you care, baby?”
I lift one of my arms in the air magnanimously. “I care if for no other reason than you attempted to take advantage of me,” I say, “and since you decided to go back on your word, I feel that I have the right to request just about anything I want. Therefore, if this storm is going to be as deadly as you say, I would like to save the life of someone else.”
He smiles. “Who would you like to bring?” he graciously asks.
I walk into the bar, to the young man, and tug on the sleeve of his shirt.
“I am offering you a free ride to Houston,” I say.
“I can’t afford a hotel,” he says.
“My lover is a lawyer,” I say. “He has promised to take care of everything. I suggest you go home and pack a bag.”
“I don’t have a bag,” he says.
“The car is waiting outside, then,” I say.
I tell my lover of our new passenger, and he clears space in the back seat for the young man. Just as he finishes, I inform my lover that I will be riding in the back with the young man. “You are an evil one, Derrin,” my lover says, holding back a smile. He picks me up and carries me into the bar, and we say our goodbyes. I kiss Jimmy on his precious lips.
We drive, up to our ears in all that we own, down Royal, up Conti to North Rampart, and North Rampart to Canal. I look at my lover’s face in the rearview mirror. He listens to the radio, as if it held a kind of secret, cursing sweetly, taking the three of us to the freeway. The young man has brought with him his pen and a stack of napkins. He is already composing a new poem. When he finishes, he hands it to me, and I read it aloud. It is called “Three Strangers”:
“A man met another man, and formed the bond of love.
Then they met another man, and formed the bond of
friendship.
A hurricane makes them both lovers and friends.
In Houston wait the loving arms of Mother.
All lovers and friends await the loving arms of Mother.”
My lover and I applaud. We are gridlocked in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Interstate 10. Seeing the faces of the others, I begin to feel a little better, knowing we are not the only ones fleeing. The young man passes me a napkin, and presses the pen into my palm.
“I cannot,” I say. “My condition prevents me.”
He takes them back, compassionately.
“I will tell you one instead,” I say.
