Stone Arabia (16 page)

*erratam note

I have forgotten to include something, and this feels like a relevant place to correct the record. I am taking her meds. I TAKE MY MOTHER’S PILLS. No, I’m not taking them from her; I am also taking them. She has a giant six-month supply of glutamine, her quasi-effective anti-Alzheimer’s pills, endlessly refillable. So what is the harm? Why not take a prophylactic dose myself? I filled her plastic container that had a little compartment for each day of the week. She had a morning set and an evening set. One day, not so long ago, when I was filling it, it occurred to me: Why not take it myself? It can’t hurt. I doled out, every week, handfuls of supplements
and filled the compartments to the brim. In addition to her doctor’s prescribed glutamine, I added piracetam, choline, alpha-lipoic acid, vinpocetine. I scoured the World Wide Web for possibilities. I bought them in bulk and they were still significant hits on my credit card. I hated the names that appeared on my statements: memextend, nusmart, braintonics, mindroids, movita. As if smooshing words together and eliminating any tongue-tripping syllables somehow hit just the right promissory key.

She often forgot to take them. Noncompliant. Well, of course she was noncompliant. How could she remember to take her memory pills? But I was totally compliant. I took the same memory-enhancing regimen I had cobbled together for her. I felt foolish doing it; what exactly was I so desperate to retain? Didn’t I see she could be released, stoic, alive only to the moment? I no longer had peaceful moments in my days, I just had these desperate backward grasps.

Writing it all down, and for what, exactly?

lowercase a:

daily musings of an unemployed but brilliant filmmaker

Okay, I am heading out to LA to start filming my documentary,
Garageland. Garageland
is about a life spent making music and art outside of the mainstream. Way outside. It is a celebration of a devoted unrepentant eccentric. It is about living out a secret fantasy life of your own making. Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist? And ultimately,
Garageland
will question what makes a person produce in the face of resounding obscurity. We have enough money for our initial budget. We will shoot enough to put together twenty minutes and then use that to get more investors and, hopefully, a distributor. If you would like to be an investor (yes, you can produce films), join our DIY efforts. You can invest/ contribute through your Paypal account here.

a

He would be interviewed and he would open his archives to her. He was willing, it seemed, or at least indifferent enough, to go along with it. Nik hardly ever said no, he just slid out of things. Anyway, the chances were slim that she would raise
enough money to make a full-length movie, so what could be the harm in letting her film him? I didn’t realize the uncertain alchemical potential of filmic attention. Or of any attention. But maybe part of me did.

Ada had gone to her father, Chris. He would at least give her some starting funds. I knew he would help her—that’s just who Chris is. Chris worked as an information systems manager and lived in a split-level ranch in Huntington Beach with his wife and two small children. Chris lived as normal a life as one could imagine. Who knows, of course, but he appeared content, and how could I want anything less for him? We were so long past as to almost never have been, save for Ada and her brilliant reordering of the best of our genetic attributes. And a person was not a small thing, as far as things between people go. So here we were, Chris and I, never seeing each other but deeply in each other’s life.

When I first met him, Chris played bass in this eyeliner band called Ether. (Later they moved from New Romantic/ new wave to a more death/Goth style and changed their name to the Select and then, after Chris left, to Crown of Thorns. After that they moved beyond death/Goth to life/bright wave and then to Romanesque edge metal and changed the name to Leviathan until they finally broke up or faded out or quietly kept going in someone’s garage.)

They were not good.

He played bass and he sang in an uncomfortable nasal tenor. His singing didn’t match him—he should have been short and slight with missing teeth and a dirty mohair sweater. He was too pretty for his voice, for the band, and way too pretty for
the scene. 1980 was a tiny window of a moment when pretty boys were suspect. Chris was more suited to be an actor than a singer. For one thing, he smiled all the time, his huge brown eyes clearly discernible despite the hunk of brown hair that he used to comb over half his face. He wore tons of kohl on his eyes, and he wore earrings and even feathers in an unlucky pirate/Indian amalgam.

Despite all his miscalculations, he was beautiful.

I was one of those girls who loved boys who looked like girls. As far as I was concerned, the gayer a guy looked, the better. A guy couldn’t be too gay-looking for me at that point. Gay, gay, gay. It was my version of anti-sex, I suppose, to be in love with gay boys. But I really did love them and want them. I had spent from sixteen to nineteen having a lot of sex. Most of it wasn’t great. I don’t even remember all the men I had sex with in those days. It used to make me cringe, but now I sort of admire my shameless promiscuous period. I would go out and get wasted and then wait until someone made a move on me. I usually had a few to choose from, but I was pretty ecumenical in my selections. I would go to their house or, I’m afraid, their car. And if I liked the sex, I would stick around and see the guy again. Sometimes, like with this one seemingly sweet guy, Brad, the feelings between us would disappear after sex. He asked me home after we shouted into each other’s ears for an hour over bourbon and room-shaking bass. We both agreed the band was great, or awful, or boring. We made out in the parking lot behind the club—I think it was the Starlight, or Van’s, or the Velvet Pony. He drove us to his studio apartment in Silver Lake. He looked younger in the light of his kitchen. We smoked a
joint. We had tender stranger sex, his broad hand guiding my lower back. A sigh in my ear. And I remember feeling that we worked well together, we lacked the common awkwardness and the itchy discomforts of new bodies. Afterward—right afterward—he unpeeled himself, sat up, and lit a cigarette. He wouldn’t speak or look at me until I left. I had to call Nik for a ride.

Other times, like with this other guy whose name I won’t recall, we started out almost nasty in bed—he whispered all the porn things he could think of into my ear as he held me down. Of course I discovered this was the kind of guy who ends up falling hard: calling all the time, then following me, writing notes and then letters, until I actually had to hide from him.

My sex life often felt complicated and unpleasant. Then, after one too many postcoital waves of despair, I had a change of inclination. I became what some people call a fag hag.

I used to think I liked gay men because I could remain safely undesired with them. I wanted to avoid sex. That was an aspect of it. But now I realize it was also because I loved men too much. I loved being around them before they played with their band and after, I loved joking with them, and I loved getting high with them. I loved how they loved music and pool and how they harbored secret ambitions. I loved the size of their hands and, truly, I loved how they all wanted sex all the time. Somehow (perhaps mistakenly) I never perceived this as predatory; I thought their constant desire made them needful and secretly vulnerable. I felt almost sorry for them. What I learned after a couple of years as a hard-core free girl is that if I really liked a guy, I shouldn’t have sex with him. One of us
(unclear who beforehand) would want more than the other one did. It is weird, and lovely, how sex changes everything, how there is no predicting what will happen until you’re there on the other side with your swollen lips and unrolling your underwear from the bunched top sheet. Except you could predict that you wouldn’t be friends afterward. It was extremely unlikely that it would feel the same to both of you. Therefore, if I really liked a guy, sleeping with him would ensure he would not be in my life very long.

So why didn’t I just stay friends with straight guys and not sleep with them? Because even if you didn’t sleep with them, sex came up and interfered. For example, I didn’t want to sleep with my friend James: he was my good buddy; he made me laugh; our sensibilities matched perfectly; and we could and would stay up all night talking. We even watched movies together over the phone, adding constant commentary as we watched. Eventually, the moment came, as it always did. He’d had a few drinks. He clutched my hand. I knew what was coming. I could feel how he wouldn’t forgive me. He thought I didn’t sleep with him because I was shallow and wanted only aloof, unattainable men. I could feel, and see in his face, as his desire quickly slid into resentment. Now I was using him, getting all the companionship without giving up any of the goods. Then I was a tease, and finally, of course, a bitch.

But with gay men it was all different. They were not trying to get on you or even thinking about getting on you. You were not trying to get on them. You were not waiting to convert them. Not at all. Gay men you could love without hesitation, without jeopardizing your friendship, without art or guile. I still kind of
feel this way. True, I never got actual sex from them, but I got to dance, I got to lean against them, I got to hold hands, I even got to sit in a lap or two. We could ironically ape straight couples. I could still admire the large hands, or the curve of a shoulder, or the way a male back looked under a T-shirt. Contrary to the fag-hag cliché, we did not merely discuss male movie stars in salacious terms. We might have shared an appreciation for the male form, but that was only one small part of it. It really was about pure male companionship, something I couldn’t get from straight men or women of any tendency. Who knows what they got out of it (perhaps easy friendship and a little comfort), but gay men became my default favorites in those days. Aside from my brother, they were the only men whose desire I didn’t have to worry about.

I knew right away Chris was gay. The way he coquettishly leaned backward against the bar behind him, pushing up the unbuttoned cuffs of his white rayon shirt. It was actually more of a blouse than a shirt. He asked me for a cigarette. I watched him as he lit his cigarette and took a drag. I could see a triangle of taut flesh where his half-tucked-in blouse fell open at the hem; it created an inviting slide of rayon each time he moved. Although he was skinny, he was more muscular than the average rock guy—he probably did push-ups every day (GAY). He teetered on the heel of a boot and slouched sleepily to one side. He glanced at me as I stared at him, and he smiled broadly, a real grin. In contrast to him, I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans and boots with a vintage crepe dress pulled over the whole ensemble. Between my makeup and clothes, I didn’t show an inch of flesh or form. I liked it, me covered and desexed, him revealed flesh and smiles.
He was near enough to me that I could smell sandalwood incense and, faintly under that, soap. Just another gorgeous gay boy. He was even a little bit tan, which was completely recherché for straight rock boys in those days. But mostly I located his gayness in the artifice of his presentation, his shameless and flamboyant poseur-tude.

I kept thinking how gay he was while he yanked my jeans and panties off as I lay laughing on his bed. My hand was in his hair as his mouth pressed and licked, both gentle and insistent, and I thought,
This is the gay way to fuck a girl, right?
Even though that was clearly unlikely. I thought of him as gay as we met up night after night, invariably making out in a corner, or a car, or a parking lot, his hands searching for a way through my fortress of clothes. He gave me a coquettish smile as he took my hand and pulled me toward his car. Chris had (and has) no edge; he was happy and easy. And he wasn’t, I finally understood, gay.

Nik thought Chris was a brainless pretty boy, but that wasn’t right. He was very smart, he just wasn’t dark. He came from a middle-class family in the Valley, and he had gone to private school. Yet he thought of himself as poor. I would have found that obnoxious in most people, but it seemed merely innocent in Chris. He was so comfortably not poor that he was able to take his background for granted and imagine us all in the same boat. He just didn’t know what it meant to have no one to borrow from if you really needed money. He didn’t know what it meant to have nothing under you or ahead of you, and he didn’t understand what a difference that made. He was, assuredly, always broke, but it was a phase. He had a nice car (a 1980 Honda Accord) and his folks paid the insurance. “That’s all,” he
said. He had gone to college and had no debt. He had insurance and a small untouchable fund for a future down payment on a house. That’s all!

Chris didn’t want Ada at first. Our infatuation was already on the wane—we were not broken up but on the way there. I had already had an abortion in high school. I was twenty-two, I was sure I would get another one. But somehow I found I just didn’t want to. This pregnancy felt different. I knew (in the way women often claim to just know things and freak men out) that this was the baby I had to have. I knew. Somehow I believed that this would be my one chance to have a kid and I wouldn’t get another. I had this certainty; maybe it was from hormones or perhaps wishful thinking as a way out of my wheel-spinning life. We didn’t get married or even stay together, but Chris accepted my decision. He made arrangements. He gave me money every month until Ada was eighteen. He saw her regularly and he fell in love with her. He enjoyed, I think, being a dad but not having to do it full-time. Now-and-then dad. Naturally, Ada worshipped him. I didn’t mind. She may have adored him more than anyone in the world, but I was like the air and the sun and the sea. I was the world.