Here's an old-ish excerpt from my Novel; it ended up being a chapter I scrapped, but I figured I'd put it out there anyways as I sort of liked parts of it re-reading it now...
Chapter 14 Excerpt:
‘Realness’
‘Girrrrrlllll….’ I could hear Sam’s voice from all the
way across the ballroom, probably all the way across the East Village if I
listened close enough. The way all those little intangible murmurs of the city
must drive some folks to schizophrenia; that was how Sam sounded to me today.
‘What now, Mr. Beckett?’, I answered wryly. We were always referring to each
other in glimpses of wonderful people we though we could become; Jimmy the
hustler became ‘Mr. Joyce’, Oscar the Puerto Rican bellboy ‘Mr. Wilde’, myself
‘Mr. Redford’ when I wasn’t Robbie the underpaid coffee slinger. We all had our
stories, our troubles, but the unspoken rule was when you entered the ballroom,
it wasn’t about you, or your broke-ness, or your mama who didn’t talk to you
after you told her, it was about making something.
You just watching today, mister?’, Sam countered.
That was mean.
He knew I was new to this; that I wanted just to be around other boys
like me, that my folks still didn’t know where I was.
‘I only dance when we go to the Disco, or when Danny calls me.’, I
replied evenly. Oooooo, I thought, I
shouldn’t have said that. The boys
in the back were already hollering and whistling. ‘Someone just got
reeeeead…..’
So Dramatic. But I guess that’s
sort of what it was all about.
Danny was his guy. Well, he wanted him to be his guy. Just like every fag
in the city. Sam just arched his eyebrows at me, his posse posturing
ineffectively behind him.
‘Don’t get yourself hurt now, babe. You know how he plays’, he mouthed my
direction. He always had to rub it in, that I was the Midwestern farmboy with
the sunflower hair and freckled arms who’d left high-holy-lonely Minnesota for
the big lights of New York.
I knew his deal, we all did- in our group, even if you weren’t friends you were friends; we stuck
together like the stray dogs down in the meatpacking district, because we had
to.
I remembered the night I’d spent in a dusty corner of Sam’s parent’s 5th
floor walkup in the Bronx when I first got to the city, the smell of fried
plantains in the kitchen so foreign and delicious, then overhearing his father
talking to him. ‘Son, you already got two
strikes against you; you’re a black man and you’re gay…this city don’t love you-
you have to be so much stronger than you think you can be.’
I remembered hard it was for me not to sob with him that night, how I had
to be the strong one when I wasn’t sure I could be.
Sam was performing, he informed me proudly, casually. He looked radiant,
really, as much as I didn’t want him to be, he was awash in his own light.
Funny how a bunch of homos could turn a dim warehouse in the bad part of the
Village into something Madonna wanted to rip off.
I saw Danny over in a corner; the boys from uptown everyone was afraid to
talk to surrounding him like one of those Chinese blinds the owners hid behind
in cheap dim sum places.
‘Shit…’ I thought. We’d met for lunch last week at a place I
couldn’t afford; a place where happy couples talked about 401K’s and soccer
practice in the park. I’d told him
I was a sculptor; that I’d show him a few of my pieces at hip galleries down in
SoHo sometime.
Well, I was a sculptor.
The library even took a few pieces for their ‘local student exhibit’ when
I lied and told them I was at NYU. Remembering this, I stuck my chin up a
little bit, subconsciously, the way I used to in high school when the Nielson
boys would wad spitballs at the little stone and ceramic pieces I’d bring into
shop class to work on.
I was, goddamnit. It just wasn’t easy to make it; to convince myself
I might be alright- might have something worth getting lost in.
I remembered the old man in the shabby beret and paisley shirt who
followed me out of the library.
‘You made those?’, he’d started to say.
‘Look, I’m not one of those’…
I’d begun; all sass and attitude. I wasn’t about to get propositioned by some
creep for the 50th time.
‘Never mind. Just wanted to say since you probably don’t know who I am, I
can say in confidence your work is better than half my graduate students.’
My jaw landed somewhere beyond the pigeon shit on the curb.
He glanced impatiently at his watch.
‘Got to go; late for lunch with my wife.’ The only other time I’d felt so
crumpled up and happy at the same time was when Maryanne, the prettiest girl in
our class, had asked me out to the senior prom in front of the Nielson boys.
Anyways, Danny didn’t need to know this. Hell, he didn’t need to know
anything except the address of my cheap studio on Avenue C. ‘Stop it.’ I heard my mother say to me.
Sometimes the guilt of having fled her upper Midwest tough love served me well
I guess. I smiled anyways. Who
could be sad about how screwed the details were when the periphery of life was
so great?
‘Heyyyy Robbie!’ pantomimed Oscar across the room, from the safety of
Danny’s aura. Oh, how I hated him right now. He wore a silver track jacket I
knew he’d jacked from the Sak’s over on West 31st Street, because
I’d seen it in the window displays a week earlier and had thought about doing
the same thing. I knew it was wrong, maybe I was wrong- lost and alone and the
blue-eyed preachers and my mother had been right all along. I avoided his eyes
and looked at Danny again. I just wanted to walk down those muddy roads where
the maples faded in the wisest shades of auburn these city folks couldn’t
imagine, holding him hand, lost in how strong his shoulders were so that
nobodies glances could burn me.
‘Hi, Oscar! How arrrre you? Love that jacket by the way’, I finally
replied in my cheesiest voice, that voice I said I’d never speak in again after
‘the latte incident’ at work a few weeks ago. He started saying something about
how it was on sale and he had to have it and it was perfect for blah blah blah
party in Brooklyn last weekend, but my eyes were behind him. Danny looked
bored. He wore this striped shirt with holes in all the best places, where the
sharp collarbone bends reluctantly into the neck, where the back joins the
enviable symmetry of the waist, where the pectoral muscles meet the mysterious
depths of the armpit. The kinda places that made me think I’d always known,
always been- maybe Danny was right, we were born this way. Crystal came up to
him from the backroom, whispered something in his ear, and he smiled, his eyes
wandering towards me.
‘Fuck.’
I felt a bead of sweat across my forehead, like the first day of work
when I thought ‘Americano’ meant expresso and chocolate syrup. He must be
thinking of this silly farmboy, the coverall lines under my t-shirt, the way I
kept looking down at that stupid plastic flower on the table at lunch last
week. I thought of his piece that has appeared in The New Yorker a few months
ago; how shy he’d been about it, how I pretended I didn’t know every damn line
in my head.
Crystal came back out, but this time it was legit. ‘Is is realnessss?’, she boomed on the microphone from across the
room. Somewhere in the catcalls and bright lights and heels on linoleum I felt
an arm across my back. I didn’t bother to look. Jimmy had been acting really
fresh with me lately, like I was one of his customers
or something. Stop it. Thanks mom.
A few fingers curled around mine, they were strong, angular- hesitant?
Now I knew it wasn’t Jimmy.
I felt myself turning, turning, turning like the leaves or the sun in
that magic in-between season in the Minnesota woods, turning out of the
ballroom and into the brisk air of 2nd Avenue.
‘Where we going?’, I ventured.
‘The Library’, the voice said confidently.
‘Isn’t it…’
‘They moved them to the window case; I knew they were yours as soon as I
saw them.’
‘Buuu.....’ I wasn’t sure I was even speaking anymore. My throat sure
could go for one of those chocolate syrup Americano’s right now.
‘I want you to tell me about them, then maybe if you want we can watch a
movie aa, aaa- at my place.’
His voice was wavering.
His voice never wavered.
Ohhhh, it was realness.
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