Not too long ago I found out how Hollywood helps the homeless. I was almost home from the Y one evening to shower and change before I went to Kalpesh and Dmitri’s for dinner when I suddenly remembered that I was out of cash, so I made a quick detour to the ATM. The season’s first snow fell softly. It conspired with the early darkness, cocooning the crowds and cars, muffling the chaos of rush hour. It was cold but exuberant and vital, not the deadly, savage slap-in-the-face of mid-winter. Crisp, butch, flirtatious snowflakes tingled my cheeks. The bar, restaurant, and store windows along Church Street were awash in a yule tidal wave of festive lights and decorations. The street was incandescent with panic. Flushed, shop-till-you-drop faces slipped by me soundlessly on the cushioned sidewalk. Panhandlers stood in doorways, shuffling from side to side. The traffic seemed to float.
A United Way Santa Claus clanked his bell outside the Body Shop.
“Hey girl!” said Santa. “It’s me.”
I stopped and stared. He pulled the beard away from his face. It was a demi-beard, actually; the top half was real. I’d’ve recognized that handlebar moustache anywhere.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. We air-kissed.
He snapped his beard back in place and shrugged. “A girl’s gotta have a hobby.”
Hart ran accounts payable in the very first ad agency I worked at. He was the only person I knew who still called his male friends “girl” or said things like “smell her” without irony. His vernacular was furnished with doilies and throw pillows. Joey used to joke that Hart was like Jurassic Park, that somebody found a chunk of petrified amyl nitrate containing a mosquito from which they extracted the DNA of a ’60s cliché and cloned him. Somewhere, Joey proposed, on a faraway tropical island, enormous homosexuals lumbered through the rainforest tossing out quips like, “Oh Mary it takes a fairy to make something pretty,” scaring small mammals half to death with elaborate table settings.
An attractive man walked by. “And what would you like for Christmas?” said Hart. “Why don’t you sit on Santa’s lap and tell him your secret?” The fellow turned around and gave Hart a filthy look.
“Well. Smell her.”
“You’re too much,” I remarked, in a hurry to get going.
“Merry Mary,” he said.
I went on my way, walking through the city’s gay village, past the 501, Woody’s, Sailor, Crews, the Black Eagle, and the signs: Hairy Butt Contest, Bad Boys Nite Out, The Drag Kings at Tallulah’s. A cute guy from the gym was walking his pit bull. I’d seen him in the showers. He was full of attitude when he worked out, indifferent to the world, but now he gave me the eye and smiled. His Eddie Bauer parka was open to reveal a clinging, synthetic zip-up top popular in the clubs. His hair was short and frosted, combed forward Caesar-style. The dog had a studded S/M collar and a rhinestone tag.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
The dog sniffed my pant leg.
“Morrissey likes you.”
I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t pet the dog. Tempting as it was, I didn’t want to encourage Morrissey’s owner. I felt funny because I knew he’d been with Joey several times and even though it was a long time ago, and even though Joey was dead, it bothered me. I kept walking and he evaporated into the crowd, pooch in tow, accompanied by the Christmassy jingle-jangle of a chain-link dog leash.
“Hockey tickets! Who’s got hockey tickets? Tickets for tonight! Who’s got hockey tickets?” a scalper shouted at fans swarming Maple Leaf Gardens. “Hey chief.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Not tonight.”
I crossed the street to my bank. The lock on the bank machine door had been broken for months. I swung it open and walked in. The enclosure smelled of ammonia.
“Hi Roscoe.”
He stirred and sat up on his cardboard mat, blinking at me with bloodshot eyes. I handed him a couple of my emergency cigarettes. I’d given up chain-smoking but kept them around for special occasions. If I gave up too much, what would be left? Beatitude, sure, and its half-wit twin, Boredom, drooling upstairs in its chair in the attic, playing with a hat pin.
“Thanks,” said Roscoe. “You’re a saint. Not like most of these buggers.”
Taking a deep breath, I lit one for him, then stepped away to the furthest machine so I wouldn’t suffocate. I didn’t know how old Roscoe was. He looked about seventy but was probably around fifty, from the sound of his voice. I knew his name because my mother had drummed good etiquette into me. “When you meet someone new, always introduce yourself, ask their name, and remember it the second time around. First impressions rarely count. Second ones stick. Remember their name the second time and they’ll always remember you.”
Her white glove philosophy used to drive me crazy, but she was right. The first time I encountered Roscoe, back in my drinking days, he was happily playing his harmonica, an old tune I recognized from down east. I was with some guy I’d picked up and was getting out money to take him to an after-hours club. To impress my new companion, I gave Roscoe a fistful of bar quarters weighing down my jacket pocket from all the change the bartenders gave me, hoping for tips. He shook my hand.
“Luc,” I said. “Luc Robichaud.”
“Roscoe,” he replied. “Just Roscoe,” he added, suspiciously. “Fag?”
“Sure. Here.”
I gave him a Players Light. Next time I made certain to remember his name and sure enough Mom was right. I was a comrade from then on. I read my dismal bank balance, weathered by the relentless recession. My savings had dwindled. I was jobless. Thank God the condo was bought and paid for. Roscoe unscrewed and drained the last of his Chinese cooking wine.
“Jesus loves you.”
“Jesus loves everyone,” I said. “He’s too promiscuous for me. I need something stable.”
“It’s not a choice.”
“Roscoe, don’t yell.”
“He helps those who help themselves.”
“Hey, easy now.”
“He died for your sins.”
“Roscoe, relax.”
“You’ll love Him despite yourself.”
“It wouldn’t work. We’re both tops,” I said as I escaped out the door. I looked back through the glass. Roscoe seemed to think that his right hand had become a pair of scissors and was snipping at the air with complete concentration.
I stood at the crosswalk waiting for the light to turn. Across the street the crowd around the Gardens had thinned. As I waited, I thought about why some Christians and romantics anthropomorphized eternity. How could someone put all their bets on one guy? Having worked in advertising for years, I was suspicious of the power of rhetoric. It was a very small step from repetition to reputation. From the Pentateuch to Playboy, Love had a great team of copywriters. They made it look simple, said it was inevitable, then kept it just out of reach. For me, the best way to forget the future used to be to drink myself stupid and quite possibly get laid in the process, until Joey.
When Joey was still (but barely) alive and pretty much a permanent satellite orbiting Planet Morphine, I fell off the wagon. I’d have liberating, daylong, tectonic hangovers that clashed like continental shelves, freeing ideas so clear and deep, I could float in them for hours without touching bottom. On one such day it struck me that sacred is an anagram for scared. I managed to traverse the mists of time to tell Joey and he briefly defogged to give me his who’s-going-to-take-care-of-you-when-I’m-gone look.
“Maybe you should stop anesthetizing yourself and face your fear,” he Twelve-Stepped.
I opened my mouth to say something snide, but he read my mind.
“Pain and fear are not the same thing,” he said.
Joey had a point. Who was I to talk? What I really needed to do was grapple my terror to the ground and screw it senseless. Sober. But I couldn’t. Not then.
The lights changed and I made my way across the street, turning up my collar in the wake of an icy gust of wind.
“Hey chief.”
“Sorry guy,” I said. “I already told you. I don’t want any tickets.”
“Fuck you too.”
Several safe yards up the block, I turned around and gave him the finger, then popped into a convenience store and bought some ginger ale.
My place reeked. You could have spread the air on a cracker and served it with a pinot noir. I thought about doing the dishes but when I turned on the kitchen light, they looked too beautiful to disturb. The counter, the table, the sink, and the stovetop were alive with colour: seashore blues, sunset purples, and lichen greens. From the remains of my appetite and aversion to order had evolved a flourishing polypary of stunted brains, furfuraceous tumours, and blanketing webs, a bonsai coral reef settling over the shipwrecks of pots and pans.
I dimmed the light on my ecosystem, tripped over books and lecture notes on my way through the living room, and flung open the balcony door. A fresh metallic chill fumigated the room. I navigated through my bad housekeeping into the bedroom and opened the window there as well. After Joey died, before I made the decision to quit my well-paying job and go back to school, Muscles Maid Service came in once a week. Now I couldn’t afford them. Without Muscles, my lifestyle had atrophied.
I took my soggy shorts and tank top out of my gym bag, tossed them in the direction of the laundry hamper, and unclothed in the pearly paper glow of my fake Noguchi floor lamp. I always get horny after a good workout. The combination of the soft warm light and a cool cross draft tickling the hair on my legs aroused me even more. I still had some time to kill so I popped a porno into the VCR, jerked off with toe-curling abandon, then showered, splashed myself with cologne, put on a clean T-shirt, sweater, and pair of jeans. Feeling refreshed, I left.
Time …
Time to kill. Dividing your time. Finding time. Buying time.
One night Joey and I were watching a prime-time soap opera because Joey thought a blond guy on it was cute when he turned to me and said, “We’re all nuts, thinking we can commodify time or separate it into bits. Time doesn’t have a beginning or end, or even a here and now. It has a top, a bottom, and curving sides. Time is a round aquarium we circle like goldfish with gaping jaws and astonished eyes as we try to figure out that murky unbreathable light show happening beyond our vision and ability to survive. Outside its walls is where the real stuff starts, and we can’t even get beyond the fucking goldfish bowl. We float to the top of time when we die, decompose, then drop back down to the bottom. Maybe the Internet is the answer, taking us past our limitations. Maybe one day we’ll evolve into thingies with Pentium chips instead of livers. Memory-intensive crap processors. Maybe time is just a snake biting its tail.”
“Do you think Valerie’s going to snag Brandon away from Kelly?” I asked.
He gave me one of his looks, took some of his pills, redistributed his duvet, and lit another cigarette.
Now I see what he was getting at. I mean, the moment of his death is inside me every second, whether I’m conscious of it or not. These days time is the only thing I can count on to replenish itself. I’ve got all the time in the world inside me. This very moment is repeating itself. And I am always inside Joey like the very first time, holding him, licking his neck, and I’m pushing and I’m pushing and I’m pushing and …
Everyone automatically assumes I’m positive but I’m not. I’m guilty. Why did I blame myself? Why did I blame everyone else for letting me? Blame. All you’ve got to do is take away the b and it’s lame.
Celebrity place was a six-block walk. That was the name of Kalpesh and Dmitri’s condo complex, two twenty-storey cylinders of red brick that towered above the sex workers on the corner of Maitland and Jarvis, across the street from a neoclassical building that housed a high school. The lobby was decked out in old movie posters and potted palms. Six different suite styles were named after legendary movie stars. Their one-bedroom pie slice of luxury living was called the Jean Harlow Suite. I’d tricked once with a waiter/model leather fetishist who lived in a Greta Garbo Suite.
“Dante was a bad boy. He pissed on the Thinker,” Kalpesh said as he ushered me in.
“That’s not something you hear every day,” I replied.
The teensy Chihuahua usually yapped and clawed when someone came to the door. He was nowhere in sight.
“He’s in the doghouse,” said Kalpesh. “We’re teaching him a lesson. We’re not letting him watch television and he doesn’t get to see his Uncle Luc.” He smiled at me. “Let me take your wrap and put it in the closet.”
“Thanks,” I said, and gave him my biker jacket.
“Let me get you a ginger ale,” he said. He headed into the kitchen, where I heard someone chopping food.
“Hey babe, long time no see,” Dmitri yelled from beyond the kitchen door.
I smelled marijuana. There was also a piquant waft of curry. A fridge door opened and there was a clank of bottles. I went into the living room and sat down on their couch. As always, the heat was up too high, and the TV was on with the sound off. The pissed-upon Thinker posed in the corner. It was a replica of Rodin’s sculpture that looked quite real but was fabricated from Styrofoam and fibreglass. The Thinker was as light as a feather. Kalpesh had swiped it from a movie set where he worked as a set decorator. That was how Kalpesh and I became friends, through work. I used to hire him as a stylist for shoots back in my agency days.
Their place was filled with ersatz antiquities and faux masterpieces: prints of famous Renaissance paintings and Medieval-looking triptychs, Greco-Roman statuary, and gilded frames, all balanced by the spare lines of Modernist fixtures and contemporary Italian furniture. It was too kitsch for me. I needed to put on a pair of mental sunglasses to sit in it for more than a few minutes. I adjusted my shades.
“You take it in. I’ll finish off here,” I heard Kalpesh say.
Dmitri entered the room carrying my ginger ale and a beer for himself, a large spliff dangling from his mouth. He wore a pair of faded cut-offs and nothing else. He put our drinks down on the glass and chrome coffee table, sat beside me, inhaled deeply, took the joint out of his mouth, and pulled me close so that our lips met. He shotgunned me, staring into my eyes until my lungs were about to burst. I started to cough.
“It’s been a while,” I said.
He gently thumped my back. Dmitri was about as good-looking as it gets. We’d slept together once but Kalpesh didn’t know. It was the summer before last, the night before Pride Day, a few weeks after Joey died when I was drinking the life of the party at a party I couldn’t remember. Somehow, I connected with Dmitri in a bar. We ended up in his room at the Executive Motor Hotel on King Street. He was up from Buffalo for the parade. Over breakfast I could tell he was trouble, a nineteen-year-old cling-on looking for a daddy. Not my scene. I played it cool for the rest of the day and at a post-Parade warehouse party I pretended we’d just met and pawned him off on Kalpesh.
“I think he likes me,” Kalpesh whispered as they were washed away by a wave of euphoria whitecapped with Ecstasy. They’d been attached at the hip since.
Dmitri was an illegal alien, an American. “Land of the free, homo of the brave,” he liked to say. He worked under-the-table on top of the table at a strip bar on Yonge Street. Kalpesh dragged me there to watch him once, never having caught on to the fact that I’d already enjoyed a personal appearance. Dmitri was introduced by the disembodied voice of a used-car salesman who informed us that there was a special on tequila shooters at the bar until the end of the performance. Gyrating to a funk song, he took off his clothes on a stainless steel stage, backed by a floor-to-ceiling mirror that gave the all-male audience a complete view of his chassis.
I scoped the denizens. Dancers worked the room in G-strings and jockstraps. Occasionally, one of them would usher a patron beyond the backroom’s darkened doorway for a private table dance. Dmitri hopped down after his set and briefly joined us. He showed me how the dancers used an elastic band to keep themselves hard.
“S’interesting,” I said. My tenth gin and tonic had kicked in.
Later, I patched together the rest of the evening based on what Kalpesh told me. A tall, broad-shouldered muscle puppy in a shredded leather loincloth, with shoulder-length curls and bangs that made him look like a Greek god, approached me. He put a hand on my crotch.
“M’I sposed’a cough now?” I asked him.
He didn’t laugh. “I could do a guy like you for a discount,” he said, twitching his head at the backroom. He discreetly guided my hand into his bulging jock where there was a small, strategically placed bottle of poppers. I paused to consider. Kalpesh pinched my elbow and gave me a dirty look.
“Ooooooo!” I said to my assailant in the sissiest voice I could muster, “Momma told me good things come in small packages. Zat true?”
In a flash he was out of my face and halfway back to Mount Olympus.
“You’re shameless,” Kalpesh admonished me.
“I juswanned t’elp him with his PhD,” I said. “Or his pH balance. D’you see ‘at fuckin’ hair. Fuckin’ dancer. Get a haircut!”
Apparently, I had my shirt and socks off and my pants wrapped around my knees by the time they managed to get me off the stage and into a cab that night. Nobody had mentioned it since.
There are a lot of things people don’t mention because they can’t. I know because I used to try to talk about what it was like when Joey died but I couldn’t find the words. Really, there were none. When love became synonymous with death, I got Tourette’s syndrome of the heart and found myself barking, in silence, at strangers.
Dmitri’s arm was resting on the back of the couch, brushing against my neck. He passed me the joint and I finished it off. Kalpesh, looking half-crazed, rolled in with plates, cutlery, and napkins, got fussy, then rewound himself back into the kitchen. We tried to stifle our giggles.
“We’re not eating in the dining room?” I asked.
“Kalpesh got a video. Didn’t he tell you?”
“No. What?”
Kalpesh made a triumphant return, carrying in a huge tray loaded with lamb korma, papadums, potato rotis, and a cucumber salad with yogurt and dill.
“What?” he said. “What’s so funny?”
He placed it on the coffee table in front of us and wedged himself between me and Dmitri. He’d poured himself a glass of red wine.
“It’s the restored version of Citizen Kane,” said Dmitri. He read from the video box. “Director’s cut.”
“Oh, come on. Director’s cut? Isn’t Orson Welles dead?” I laughed.
“Good point,” said Dmitri, trying to compose himself. “It says ‘Director’s Cut’ right here.”
I took a deep breath. “Then it must be true.”
“They can do anything they want in Hollywood now with computers,” said Kalpesh. “Isn’t it fabulous how everything old is new again?”
“You’re right, Kalpesh,” I sputtered. “It’s pretty fabulous.”
“What’s with you two?” said Kalpesh. “I.G.Y.H.T.B.T. I guess you had to be there.”
We subdued ourselves and ate dutifully. It was a good copy of the film. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I’m always completely sucked into the story of the megalomaniac newspaper magnate Kane.
“Man, I’d kill to live in a place like Xanadu,” said Dmitri, passing me another joint.
“Isn’t that the film’s theme?” I offered, taking it. “Killing to be in Xanadu?”
Kalpesh sighed dramatically. “We keep forgetting you’re Pauline Kael.”
“Who’s Pauline Kael?” Dmitri asked.
“I can’t believe you don’t know who Pauline Kael is!” said Kalpesh.
“She was an important film critic,” I told Dmitri. “She used to write for The New Yorker.”
“And Pauline Kael’s been to Xanadu,” Kalpesh interjected, looking at me with a twinkle in his eye.
It was true, I had been. Back in my waitering days I saved up a bunch of money and went on a pilgrimage to San Francisco. I was going through an activist phase and wanted to soak up a sense of gay history, or something like that. But the Castro was a faded Mecca. It was the mid-1980s. The Village People were dropping like flies. Try as I might, I couldn’t get laid even if my life depended on it. I found the city so depressing that I rented a car and went down the coast. At San Simeon I found what I’d been looking for in San Francisco, a fantasy made real. I took the tour of William Randolph Hearst’s fairy-tale castle. It was proof that you could make anything out of life you wanted to, no matter how bizarre, and no matter what the cost. San Simeon was a potpourri of unrelated objets d’art and historical styles. It was like Kalpesh and Dmitri’s apartment, except bigger and not fake.
When Citizen Kane was over, we sat around talking about our favourite old films, reliving our favourite scenes, reciting our favourite lines. Chinatown, Rebel Without a Cause, The Women, Born Yesterday, Taxi Driver, and others were brilliantly exhumed and reanimated.
Then Kalpesh and Dmitri got into a contretemps. They couldn’t agree about who it was.
“It was Kim Novak,” said Dmitri.
“No, it wasn’t,” said Kalpesh. “It was Jayne Mansfield.”
“No. It was Kim Novak.”
“Jayne Mansfield.”
I kept my lips sealed because I knew who it really was.
“How could it be Jayne Mansfield when it was Kim Novak?”
“Because you’re wrong, that’s why.”
“How can I be wrong if you’re wrong?”
“Everyone in the world knows it’s Jayne Mansfield. What planet have you been on?”
“The planet where everyone knows it’s Kim Novak. The planet where everyone’s right.”
“Read my lips, Dmitri. Jayne Mansfield.”
“Read mine. Kim Novak.”
“God, I hate it when you think you know something you don’t,” said Kalpesh. “I’ll bet you twenty bucks it was Jayne Mansfield.”
“I’ll bet you twenty it was Kim Novak.”
“I’ll go get Halliwell’s Film Guide,” Kalpesh announced.
I sat there, mum. Kalpesh went into the bedroom to retrieve their film guide. There was a spasm of yelps.
“Shut up Dante, I’m not in the mood.”
Kalpesh came back into the living room and sat down with the tome in his lap. He flipped through it, looking for the movie in question.
“You’re both wrong,” I said. “Twenty bucks says it was Lana Turner.”
“You’re on,” said Dmitri.
Kalpesh found the page. He checked, then looked at me.
“I hate you. You’re right.”
“He’s your friend,” Dmitri mentioned as they fetched their wallets.
“You keep forgetting I’m Pauline Kael,” I said.
They each handed me a bill.
“Did you know that Jayne Mansfield was the original choice to play Ginger on Gilligan’s Island?” I said smugly, sitting there with a couple of twenties in my paw.
They say that hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but it isn’t always so. I’d stared too closely too long at the past and almost blinded myself.
“Prop me up,” Joey said. “And close the door. That woman’s moans are driving me crazy.”
“I can only do one thing at a time,” I replied.
“And open the blinds. I want to see the sunshine.”
“Window?”
“No. Okay.”
I quietly followed his instructions, then sat back down beside him. He removed his oxygen mask and took my hand.
“When it comes time, this is what I want you to do,” he said.
“What?”
“I want you to take the e out of my name and bury it with my ashes.”
“All right.”
“That way you can tell people I was Joy.” He looked at me angrily. “Put it down, you’ll forget. Joy!”
He lay back against the mounded pillows and stared at the opposite wall.
“You have, haven’t you?”
“What?” I asked.
“Slept with someone.”
I gazed around at the bedpan, the paper bag for sputum, a stack of magazines, the pale green walls.
“No.”
He looked at me sideways. “I thought so.”
It was the last conversation we had.
I left Kalpesh and Dmitri’s that night forty dollars richer and feeling quite full of myself. The route I took home went by a hotel that was part of a chain. As I approached it, I got an idea.
“Do you have any single rooms available?” I asked the front desk clerk, an older gentleman in a toupee.
“Lots,” he said. “It’s off season.”
“How much?”
“$39.95 with taxes.”
“I’d like to take a room then, please,” I said. “The name’s Roscoe.”
“Last name?”
“Just Roscoe,” I said.
The clerk started to hand me the room key.
“Hold on to it. It’s not for me,” I said. “It’s for a friend. I’ll be right back with him.”
The front desk clerk didn’t want to let Roscoe have the room, but I put up such a fuss that he finally caved. Roscoe was quite confused until he got into the room. He thanked me over and over, then suddenly shrank into a corner. “What do you want from me!” he cried. “I ain’t no faggot.” He crossed his hands in front of his crotch. I finally convinced him he had nothing to fear and settled him into a chair to watch television.
“It’s the Antichrist,” he said, scowling.
“Then change the channel,” I replied, and closed the door behind me.
The clouds had cleared. The snow had stopped falling. It lay three or four inches thick, covering Jarvis Street, blushing in the glow of the street lamps. I walked past some working gals shivering in a bus shelter. A salt truck went by. There was very little traffic.
I heard a soft scuffle behind me and turned around to see one of the women from the bus shelter, furrowing snow with her go-go boots as she hurried up to me.
“Hey hon, you wouldn’t happen to have a spare cigarette, would you?”
“Sure. Here.”
“Oh thanks.”
I lit it for her. After she’d exhaled, she picked something out of a tooth and looked at me. “I guess it’s too much to ask if you’ve got an extra condom.”
“Um. I guess I’m not using it tonight so you might as well have it.”
I gave her the spare in my wallet.
“Are you sure?”
“Go on. Take it.”
She put it into the pocket of her fake fur bomber jacket and scurried back to her friends in the shelter. She paused to turn around and shout, “Hon, you are one fucking lifesaver.”
That made me feel good.
At Church and Wellesley, I noticed something lying on the sidewalk outside the Body Shop and went to check it out. It was Hart’s Santa toque. I picked it up, shook it out, and put it on my head. As I was crossing the street a couple of young guys who were a bit drunk sashayed arm in arm up to me and walked by my side.
“Hey Santa, you got a nice butt,” one of them said.
“Thanks.”
“Hey Santa?” said the other one.
“Yeah?”
“Okay. Now, like, you go around asking everyone what they want for Christmas, right?”
“A girl’s gotta have a hobby,” I said.
“That’s just so he can get those little boys on his lap,” his friend cut in, laughing and slapping me on the back.
“Shut up,” the other one said, and hiccupped. He smiled at me.
“No really, I was wondering … like, what is it that Santa wants for Christmas? I mean, you’re Santa. You can have anything you want.”
“What do I want?” I asked.
“Yeah, what do you, Santa Claus, want more than anything in the world?”
I stopped walking and looked at them. It was very cold. Their cheeks were flushed bright red, and their eyes danced with booze.
One of them rubbed his hands together to keep them warm.
“I want to go home,” I said, and walked away.
My mind was as clear as the new night sky, obsidian now, and deep with stars. I could think. I watched a pinprick of light disappear beyond the high-rise horizon as a plane descended into the airport far away. For a moment I was convinced I could survive anything, even joy.