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In 2002, a year after 9/11, a forgotten performance artist named Gideon supports himself with sex work while he writes a final AIDS-themed piece he knows no one else wants to see. And Leon, a fading closeted Hollywood filmmaker, tries to revive his career with a glorified car commercial, which project fills him with self-hatred.
At Leon’s office, bright young creatives pored through magazines, ripping images to paste up on what they all called a “mood board”: images to inspire, images to make something grander than a car commercial. One of them pulled an ad for Eminem, on the perfectly gritty streets of Detroit, and rapped a bit of “Lose Yourself.” He turned to Leon, like a dog checking his owner’s face for approval.
At the end of the conference table, Leon secretly flipped through the sex ads of a gay newspaper and ignored them, which inspired them to find something better, something that would amaze him. But Leon didn’t want to be amazed. He wanted a body in bad black-and-white, in a standard porn pose, just a step up from a street hustler, to leer up at him from the cheap newsprint. He wanted it the way a child wants to smash a toy.
A young art director pasted up a photo of New York in the early ‘80s, of the rotting piers on the West Side Highway. Summer, and shirtless men draped along the warped wood, leaning against homoerotic graffiti, leaning into the windows of idling cars. It was only 20 years old but already it looked like ancient history.
Leon felt a flush of hot exposure, as if this was meant to taunt him. As if he might be in the photo. But Leon never went to those piers in daytime. And he looked so different back then.
Leon flipped the page. A muscular mountain climber smiled up at him from a pharmaceutical ad. “HIV Won’t Stop Me,” he said, his face ruddy with health. Leon flipped the page.
The art director tapped the pier photo with pale excited fingers. “What if we give it a rough feeling like this, like you can feel the soot on the skin, a real authenticity, like Panic in Needle Park from the ‘60s, but with a kind of outlaw energy, sort of Kerouac-y with a more erotic edge. But more subliminal, more of the environment than the figures depicted here … what if the car takes you into an outlaw world like this? What other worlds might a car let you access?”
Again, the sound of water lapping. Leon thought it followed him from the executive’s office. No: bright colored iBooks like clamshells dotted the table, it must be from one of them. Leon took another pill, flipped another page. The men in the pier photo mixed up with the whores in the ads. Most of them didn’t fit, their bodies were too puffy with steroids, and too clean. Then one seemed to have stepped from the pier into an ad: he exposed his body but hadn’t yet decided he was interested. He was rough trade, a Cro-Magnon brow, a gorilla torso. If you started to blow him, he might look away as if it wasn’t happening. Or he might grab your ears and force your throat open. Leon picked him.
Leon felt the second pill hit as he drove through Hollywood, and turned onto side streets where cops might not see him swerve. Chicano families sat on steps and lawnchairs, at the front of bungalows and dingbat apartments. A few young men smoked and moved to the beat of music.
They didn’t feel sexual to him, the way the Puerto Rican men did by those New York piers. He realized the art director’s photo was stuck in his high. The summer after he married, he went jogging there every twilight. 1979: the Puerto Rican men called him papi, which he guessed meant daddy, which made what they were doing feel more homosexual, which made him so hard. He would pull up his shorts and jog back home to shower, and moved to Los Angeles before summer was gone. He wouldn’t hear about AIDS for three years, a year after the first reports.
He swerved close to a corner with three teens, wearing colored handkerchiefs. They could be gang colors but he didn’t know. The men on the piers flagged colors too, signaling desires in a code he also never learned. He never actually went out on the piers, just stayed on the edge. The teens eyed Leon as he swerved away, but turned away when they saw he was white.
He was in no gang. No danger, no desire, no where.
There was red light at the top of the whore’s stairs. It was a two-story at the back of old stucco bungalows, one flight up on dirty carpeted stairs. Crushed mulberries from an untrimmed tree littered the walk and stained the carpet, like disease. Behind some door, a girl with a Santa Cruz accent cried monotonously into a phone, plaintive sounds with brief pauses for the replies that didn’t help. Leon listed into each wall with each step.
Gideon looked better than his picture. To Leon, at least. Like a fantasy of an army sergeant, more sculpted than the real thing, more sexual, but also maybe too friendly. Leon didn’t want friendly but he couldn’t help smiling back. It was already off track. Gideon nodded him in. No, he was not too friendly. But he was looking at Leon too much.
Leon pulled out a bottle of poppers and inhaled.
“Come here.”
Who said that? But Gideon’s face was suddenly up against his. His beard just touched Leon’s, moved by his lips, and it felt suddenly like some drunk straight man accidentally getting too close, not meaning anything erotic and so all the more erotic, and then his lips grazed Leon’s, an accident the straight guy started to like and he realized his shirt got pulled up somehow and Gideon’s nipples were just touching his, flicking it, chest hair commingling lightly, and his breath was warm and close on his cheek and his hand was on his cheek, it was like a buddy being friendly and then more than that and his tongue was in Leon’s mouth and Leon made a little cry, a little helpless cry, and what were they going to do, there were no signals about where this should go, and he wanted him to take control and he was scared what he might do and he snorted the poppers again and it didn’t bother Sergeant, didn’t break his concentration, and then Sergeant broke away but kept an arm around his neck to lead him into the bed. He snorted more poppers, he left them at his nose so the room reverberated and he had no body except where he was being touched.
How does he look at me that much?
There was a long finger up his ass, doing something to his prostate he didn’t understand, it was uncomfortable and in between was a thin sharp kind of orgasm where he did not know orgasm could be so he hit the poppers and why is he looking at me so much, what’s my face doing? And time was confused and then Leon felt himself fucked and fucked and his legs were spread and bent and it was humiliating and he cried with pleasure and also barked out fuck me dick me breed me cum are you cumming cumming in me, and then You want it, You want it? That’s what he heard back. Is that what you want, boy, want my sperm want my semen it’s gonna blow you want it and then everything was black And then he was staring at the popcorn ceiling and didn’t know how long it had been. And when he turned his head, there was a used condom laid out on the bedside table, displayed proof the whore did not really infect him. And when he looked beyond the condom, he saw Gideon naked at a table, writing in a notebook, and whispering to himself. And he was the same and he was different and it was hard to say why.
It was dark and it was cool and he wasn’t in a rush. Usually there was a need to rush. When Leon sat up, finally, the dappled light sidelit the hair on his chest. It was the kind of image that used to hypnotize him when he was young, an archetype of maleness. His own maleness was just a default setting; he never believed it was the animal thing he saw in other men. But there it was. When did he get this hairy? It extended from his torso to his pelvis in one unbroken carpet, it spread across his ribs to his back. There was a musk rising from his chest hair. He believed it must be Gideon’s sweat.
As he stood, dried semen pulled at the hair on his stomach. He should have been scratching it off, rushing into his clothes, and out. He was dizzy. He felt his naked body, standing there, its heaviness. The thickness of his arms, the breadth of his barrel chest. He was not muscular, but he was thickly built in a way that gets mistaken for it. He fingered his beard for dried semen. When he didn’t find any, a strange disappointment.
He listed into the living room, bumped an ancient wall heater. He wore his nakedness like a costume. He was not sober, he could not do this if he was sober.
Gideon scribbled naked at an old formica table, positioned where a desk should be. A tensor light was low and aimed directly at his paper, which put his muscles into a kind of rim lighting. His eyes had either a blankness or a focus. He didn’t look up.
There were books pushed back on low bookcases, hiding. Small press paperbacks he did not recognize, then a Genet, a Kenneth Anger catalog, a girl named Kathy Acker, some graffiti images of homoerotic apocalypse. It felt like the hurried selection from a library threatened by fire. Things that could not be lived without.
Leon had lived without them.
“Who would I be if I’d stayed in New York?”
Gideon looked up, and Leon realized he’d said it out loud.
“Want some water?“
“Yeah.”
“You worked up a sweat.”
Their nakedness was casual like a locker room, but erotic like a locker room is only surreptitiously. It was post-coital but sexier for that. It was confused.
“Drink.”
Gideon rubbed Leon’s chest with his knuckles, the way you rub a dog’s throat to take pills. As he drank, he felt the whore’s other hand graze his balls.
He couldn’t think about the art books. He couldn’t remember. He was being played, his attention redirected. He was so high, but in a calm warm way.
He should have been in a rush.
“I’m in the movies. I got nominated for an Academy Award once.”
And that was how he noticed he resented the whore. The arty whore.
Who only nodded his head.
“I was in New York … I started in New York. I wasn’t in movies then. I was … I saw the senior thesis films from the film program, and I thought I could do better than that. I didn’t think about being good, I just meant to do better than them without really trying because they were so full of shit. So I spent the summer getting high in my parents basement and making a film. You know what I did? I plundered Stan Brakhage techniques and married them to a Bob Dylan song. Nobody thought of that before that. There was no fucking MTV then. They hadn’t even thought it could be fucking marketing. Then I found out what film festivals they dreamed of winning and entered them and won them. All of them.”
He was so angry but wrapped in a caul of haze. Purple haze, his mind sang.
“And then Hollywood called for meetings. I was stoned and could barely speak and they thought that meant I was a genius. I reimagined their unimaginative dream sequences and special effects and crap like that, and when the movies made money they thought I was their secret weapon. And in a few years I left New York and art and telling the truth and made money instead. I whored myself out. My art out. I’m a rich whore. Rich enough.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Gideon, mildly. “Even terrible movies can have brilliant images. Artists always had rich patrons who made them glorify their ugly children. Everyone works with what they have.”
Leon didn’t like that.
“It doesn’t look like you did.” It was a wave of condescension.
“Nobody asked me.”
“Well, you’re new to town.”
“Nobody asked me in New York either. That used to bother me. But no one was making money anyway, so the only currency was group acceptance. And my group died off.”
Leon barely heard that and didn’t get it. He was busy, wanting to feel superior to the whore, like all the whores writing bad poetry in between clients and the gym. And he wanted to feel as bad as him, worse than him.
“I’m the real whore,” Leon insisted, getting loud. “You didn’t sell out your art, just your cock.” He had no idea if that was true. Was he even an artist? Maybe he’s just writing a letter. Maybe he just has books.
Gideon looked at him curiously. Then he reached between Leon’s legs, separated his cheeks and slapped his hole. Hard.
Leon’s anus was puffy, and his prostate was sore and the feeling shot up his body like a sexual organ a man isn’t supposed to have.
Humiliation and something like wrongly-placed orgasm rippled upward and his knees weakened.
Gideon leaned in. “Feel like a whore now?”
Leon grunted, involuntarily. The whore kept tapping his hole without penetrating. His hairy pit swallowed Leon’s face, acrid and close and forcing him to breathe nothing but the whore’s smell.
And then he was descending the red-lighted stairs of the whore’s front steps. He was dressed, his shirt was tucked. It was something like the denouement of a symphony or a French film. Something happened beyond a story, something that collapsed time but took him past the climax. He had been played like an instrument, an instrument that did not know there was a music for it. A music that only the instrument can hear, and only an artist can play.
Leon woke and realized he had survived.
A long black sleep wiped everything away, the suicidal impulse, the humiliation, the whore, the years, everything. He was not exposed to HIV, as he’d wanted. He was restored. He was his old self.
The dark leather couch he slept on was clean and his feet felt no grit when they touched the polished concrete floor. He had a new creative team and a project that was only nominally advertising. He could do anything he wanted with it, tell any story. He was back, he was better than back.
The new workspace was raw with long steel tables stocked with young art-school graduates. Desert plants lined the unpatched brick walls. There was no money to build out the space, so his wife has made that look like a design choice, a nod to the burgeoning tech industry and a new era of fresh creative thinking. He liked it. He believed it.
He made no preamble: “OK, what have you got for me?”
He said it to the mood board. At its center was a large, elegantly lit photo of the car. It was black and sleek but carefully underdesigned. It was the ride of choice for a post-apocalyptic anti-hero, who could never actually afford it.
Around the picture were scribbled words, all synonyms for “outlaw,” and photos of rugged settings and men and one lone woman, with a glow of sweat matting her hair to her throat and upper chest.
It was all obvious. But that’s OK: the obvious is where to begin.
They were so still. He felt their trepidation and he liked it: it held his patience the way a cup holds still water. In a kind of aggression or sadism, he refused to care what they felt. This was their big chance but it was too soon to talk. His mind worked around the edges of the ideas before him.
A few synonyms came to him. The same ideas, restated.
He imagined the worlds around these ideas, the background for an outlaw, then what might be before him. Darkness and desolation flipped through his mind in posters and movie frames. The feeling was coolness, a satisfying disconnection from troubling feeling. An absence of need. An unmovable object, an unmovable man.
Who? Gang leaders. Army veterans, past and future. Revolutionary icons. Drug lords. Madman artists. The list came to an end. What else? He breathed in and out. His mind stayed blank.
He breathed again. Blank.
He smelled the whore’s sweat on his skin. He thought he’d washed.
For a moment, it was 1973 and he was telling the executive on the phone what he didn’t, that he was taking an apartment on Avenue B instead, with no idea what he would do next and he was not afraid at all, the way he actually was at the time. He did not need to be wanted and praised in Los Angeles, as he did in the real 1973.
“What is this obvious shit?”
He was in the workspace again, and he felt his persona, like a shell. It was suddenly a performance. He was yelling it at them. “What else?!”
He’s done this for years: his emptiness is made their lack. The boldest threw out a few more synonyms, the same ones that just rattled through his own head, and——
“NO! NO! We need ideas! You can’t just repeat the same fucking poses, like some motherfucking sci-fi Hollywood B-fucking-movie shit!”
He started to panic. He looked back to the brand of the car: the elegant outlaw. OK, let’s work from there. But that was what he would do on a commercial or an action movie. He was too scared to jump off the cliff of not knowing, of unformed feeling, he was afraid to follow it into the dark. His mind kept churning up the same archetypes everyone could understand and will never be afraid of.
“Fuck this! You all want to do an elegant outlaw? Then you need to show me what we don’t already know about him. Find me a darker side of the dark side or go find me another fucking story. You fucking children.”
And they looked ashamed, confused, like the other half of him, purged from his own body, had come to rest on their faces. The weakness, the hope, the want and the confusion that knew it would not find clarity, ever.
Over their heads, he saw his wife in her glass office, oblivious to this drama, or beyond caring. The budgets and contracts on her desk excuses for sitting there while their son’s tapes played on her headphones. The last point of contact, the last clue to a missing alien child.
He scanned the room with cold eyes, and realized he was performing Clint Eastwood. He saw their fear; they couldn’t see his. The puffiness of his anus reasserted itself, pushing out. He sucked it back in. He was a man who got fucked and liked it. There was vertigo in him, but he finished the performance and walked steadily to the door, making an exit he knew was theatrical.
He was not the man on Avenue B. He would never know what the man on Avenue B would have known. He was a collection of old movie frames and idiot rage.
The car was hot, like nausea. He dug a pill out of the glove compartment.
The whore didn’t leave time to talk. He stood shirtless in jeans, and barefoot. His shoulders were bent forward like a wrestler, and he grabbed the back of Leon’s head and pulled it into his sweaty, hairy chest, mashing his nose and lips, pushing another hand down the back of his pants. He grabbed one cheek of Leon’s butt, and dug his fingers into the flesh close to his anus. He thrust into the muscle there, wriggling, mimicking what he would do when his fingers shifted over that final inch and invaded him. It was too fast and like cold water, yet another part of him was more excited because the domination was so real. Panic rippled through him. He couldn’t tell what to do so he just kept letting it happen. He felt wet in the front and knew his dick was trickling precum. It happened without his deciding. He was being forced to feel pleasure against his will, with things happening he hadn’t even thought of.
Obliterate me, he didn’t say.
The whore wasn’t this rough before.
Suckle my pec, he said. More than the nipple. Take the whole muscle in your mouth. Swallow it. Leon’s mouth was scared and tight – he might choke – and then it softened as he swallowed and he didn’t choke. Hair swam against his tongue. Gideon grunted. It felt like his pec was getting hard. Leon swallowed harder.
And then the whore pulled his pec from his mouth, and it was slick and red like a sex organ before his eyes but the look was brief, the whore was pushing him to his knees and mashing his face against the crotch of his jeans, open my pants with your teeth, suckle my dick through my jeans, and Leon chewed on the bulge, on the shaft, and he wanted the glans and it frustrated him through the fabric so he suckled harder, whining like a horny woman in a porno, a humiliating sound, the whore’s hands moved his lips to the buttons, open my pants.
The whore made one abrupt thrust into Leon’s throat, and let his choke push him right out, and he rubbed his shaft against Leon’s beard, smearing saliva and sweat and the whore lifted up Leon’s pelvis with the finger in his ass, using his ass like a handle upending him and pushing him to the dark sofa, his head angled down to the floor, his ass up in the air, carried he’s being physically carried like a—— like——like——like——
His face got pushed into the cushion but he could breathe and the finger was rough in his ass but nothing sharp or tearing was going on, just the fear of a pain that didn’t yet exist making him tighten on the finger and the whore wriggled his finger in response, telling him to loosen up and it was intense but it didn’t hurt and suddenly he could open for the whore, good boy good boy, and he was so slick in his ass that when the whore’s dick joined the finger in there he had never felt so full and never felt such pressure on his prostate and the whore’s hand was off his neck and on the head of Leon’s cock and the orgasm started so deep in his ass that the cum came out late, almost at the end of the long slow orgasm, which was so long it was hard to tell if it was pleasure or excruciating but it fired every nerve he cared about until each one was finally quiet.
There was a ringing in his ears, or crickets, he couldn’t tell which. His body deflated but didn’t move, moving would put him back in the world of thinking and deciding and being himself and that was not someone who could have done what he just did, or allowed it to happen. Or wanted it.
His position was awkward; he began to shake.
He heard steps and then a warm washcloth wiped his ass, thoroughly, dipping into his anus. “It’s just lube,” Gideon said. A gentle voice. “You were clean.” He hadn’t eaten all day. He was lucky that way.
“Lie down. On your side.”
He could, he did. His arms kept shaking. His body felt it was a different shape. The whore had changed him.
Gideon sat down by him; he was naked now, but it was casual again, like sex between men was allowed and always possible but never required. Not like being naked around a woman. It was a nakedness Leon had never experienced before.
His body felt so large. If a woman was here, it would feel monstrous to him. It would feel bulbous and ridiculous and stupidly thick. He never knew he had these thoughts before, they were lost in a mass of vague shame.
He didn’t hear the ocean. He didn’t hear the folk music.
“I’m in Homo-land,” he murmured. He sounded drunk to himself.
“Sounds free.”
He thought the whore would ask what he meant and was grateful he didn’t do that. No one could find him here. He had the feeling of playing hooky and not caring. He was not responsible for what happened, though he was.
He looked at the bookcase; all the art books had been moved out of view now. The whore had removed clues to any creative life. It made Leon certain he was some kind of artist.
“Does anyone know who you are?”
“Not really.”
“They’re forgetting me.” Gideon didn’t say anything. “I should have stayed in New York in the ‘70s.”
“What would you have done there?”
Leon didn’t say anything; he didn’t know. He drew a big blank.
“Art,” he said, finally. It sounded vague.
“Well,” Gideon said, “most of that world is dead now, anyway. Death is the biggest forgetting of all. So it’s just as well you came here.”
This was not what Leon wanted to hear. “I don’t want to do the bullshit I’ve been doing all these fucking years.”
“Hm,” said Gideon. This was not a reply. Leon waited for one. Finally:
“This is the best job I’ve ever had. I regret the years wasted doing other jobs that took time from my work. You made money doing a job here too. I’m not sure why it’s so different. Unless you already had money.”
“No, I didn’t have money. We were middle class. My grandfather had been a factory worker but then my dad started his own business and we grew up in a neighborhood my grandfather couldn’t believe. He was Polish. He had an accent. And a deep voice. He was big.”
Leon saw him then, sitting on his mother’s tapered mid-century sofa, his thickness wrong on its fine lines. He looked around the room and just smoked. Leon felt like he was supposed to say something but didn’t know what so he started to read a book. His grandfather began to pound the armrest of the couch, harder and harder, until Leon thought it was going to break. Leon just read the book because he didn’t know what else to do. He also thought that reading a book might be part of what his grandfather thought was wrong. Wrong with him. Then Leon got mad because there was nothing wrong with him, and he began to read his book in anger, and he felt his body grow still and rigid, and he realized that was what his grandfather’s body did, and realized he was like him as well as different, and Leon did not know what to do with that knowledge so he just kept reading. His grandfather kept looking around the room, as if Leon wasn’t there, then he jumped up and went outside to smoke until Leon’s dad got home. Then he went back to his own house and died and Leon didn’t think about him anymore.
“You’re big,” said Gideon. “Stocky. Do you look like him?”
“I don’t know.” He wanted to look in a mirror to see.
The whore stroked the hair on Leon’s chest, like a cat. His grandfather had a hairy chest too, Leon remembered. His chest was maybe this broad.
“I always think I’m smaller than him but I’m pretty sure I’m bigger. I don’t think I ever hugged him. Men didn’t hug back then. This sounds like the Stone Age. My son would think I was a hundred if I told him this.”
He flushed because he’s mentioned his son to the whore. But he couldn’t think of a real reason not to.
None of this was what he wanted to talk about. What did he want to talk about? He was free to talk about anything to the whore. There was anxiety and a sense of getting off track, except he had no track to get back on, which made him panic more. He started to pound the sofa cushion, which was so much like his grandfather he felt crazy.
“It wasn’t just leaving New York. I married a woman and had a kid, and I did it because it made it easier to succeed. Everyone approved of that. Everyone did it then. She knew. In New York, I went running every night and got blowjobs on the piers or at the front of the Mineshaft, then went home and took a shower. It was perfect. It all worked and then it stopped working out here. I should have …”
He drifted. He was whining. He had described the confines of his cage and felt trapped by the description. It led him nowhere. He noticed the whore’s hand had stopped petting his chest hair.
Leon blurted, “How do you create if no one sees what you’re doing?”
Gideon let out a breath, which sounded impatient. But when he spoke his voice just had a shrug in it.
“You see if you can stand not to do it. And if you can’t, then it doesn’t matter if anyone sees.”
Leon noticed the whore had not been looking at him.
“But don’t you owe it to your art? To make it seen?”
Leon craned his head, to make the whore see him. The whore took Leon’s jaw in his hand and looked at him too directly. It was the act of a father who had had it. But his voice was confusingly gentle. “Maybe people need what you do, even if you don’t like it. That’s your story. Mine is different.”
“What’s your story?”
“My story doesn’t tell my story.”
“Where are you from?”
Gideon shut up. Then sounded annoyed. “I grew up in Kentucky, then came to New York.”
“For school?”
Gideon looked at Leon like he was crazy.
“I didn’t think I was supposed to go to school the way business people go to business school. I just came to New York and went to where the artists were and started doing it.”
Gideon suddenly stopped talking. He wasn’t annoyed any more, his eyes aimed somewhere to Leon’s left. No one was there. He stared fixedly at no one.
“So. That’s what I did.” But his voice was flat, as if he had lost interest in what he was saying. “But it’s not the story.”
“Then what is the story?”
Gideon seemed to disappear before Leon’s eyes. Somewhere was a thin high sound like a rusty hinge. A keening. Was that Gideon? Hair prickled on the back of Leon’s neck.
“Do you hear that?”
Gideon smiled blankly and got up and held Leon’s shirt for him. Staring past Leon as if at someone just over his shoulder.
Leon’s high kicked back in after the whore closed his door. He had to grip the railing to go down the stairs, but he made it only halfway before he sat down. The mulberry stains spun on the steps and the landing. He was not sure how he got out here.
Inside, Gideon was leaning against the door, staring into the dark that was over Leon’s shoulder. His stomach tingled and heaved. His mouth opened. A hissing went out. Then a whistle in his throat, a wind between tight branches. A creaking, and a cry. It was the keening. The dark was white to him, the dark was white fog, clearing as when an animal runs through.
Seeing Leon had worked.
Like magic, he thought.
In the stairwell, Leon heard a guitar play the chords of the Silkie song his son had loved, but as a country blues. And then a voice through the wall. And the voice said:
And as the last breath began to leave Babyboy’s body, a great knife did come down and split the world in two.
And on one side of that knife, Babyboy’s dying breath did go out and slip through an open window into the world. And lo, Jimmy did follow.
But on the other side, Jimmy did pick Babyboy up in his arms and began to run so he might make a wind that would force that dying breath back into his body.
And he ran so hard that he came to a river and a pier with a pickup truck beside.
And the pickup had a motor that was running and an open door and the smell of a shotgun’s blast.
And there was a line of blood that did lead to the river where the longest blond hair reached out through the water from a drag queen’s head, and floated like a thousand long fingers reaching and yearning out to sea.
But he saw they could not go to sea because the drag queen’s wrist was caught between two broken boards.
He put Babyboy in the pickup and leaned down to loose the drag queen’s wrist. And as the pickup did cross the bridge, he looked out and watched the longest blond hair leave the river for the open sea, like a highway into a watery America.
It got very quiet then. Leon couldn’t stand the quiet. He wanted to cry.
Inside, Gideon sat on the floor, up against the door, and let the guitar strings ring out until they became the whine of the pick-up truck’s wheels. He watched the panic and delusion and failure in Jimmy’s face, which he had seen on so many faces before. He could not see the feelings were on his own face too. He looked down the road. He felt the travelling. He felt the wind keeping Babyboy’s breath inside. It was not over. He was on his way.
In the stairway, in his mind, Leon saw the same face, but he had never seen it before. It was too much for him and it was also what he lacked. He gripped the railing and inched to the landing, pushed banana leaves and bird of paradise flowers from his face until he reached his car, where he just sat a while.
Once he was calm, he picked up his phone and called his office. He left a message.
He described Jimmy and Babyboy and a great knife and a pier and a pickup truck and a drowned blonde drag queen.
“Storyboard it and set up a shoot,” he said, and hung up. He took a pill and drove home and went immediately to sleep.
Dudley Saunders is a writer, composer and performance artist. Performance works include Death Blues, Birdbones and his collaborations with Heather Woodbury, Whatever (Faber & Faber) and the Obie-winning Tale of 2Cities: an American Joyride (Semiotexte). He has written for Rolling Stone, New York, The Village Voice, and Interview. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Edward Albee Foundation and the Speranza Foundation, and grants from the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation and Meet The Composers. Recordings include Restore (GLAMA Award Nomination for Best Debut), The Emergency Lane (OutMusic Award for Album of the Year) and Monsters (Mountain Stage NewSong Award). Currently he is at work on a new novel and two performance collaborations, Blue with Paul Outlaw, Sharon Udoh and Sara Lyons, and Snow Queen with Sarah Schulman. His favorite revenge story is The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon, which has one of the greatest last lines in all revenge literature.
