Fake House (6 page)

But don’t get the wrong impression. I’m no leftish tree-hugging faggot. If the Vietcong were to attack Portland tomorrow, I’d be the first to drive my Chevy down Route 12. But why would I go ten thousand miles to fight them in Saigon? For whom? For what?

In short, I was in a major crisis. What in hell was I going to do? I couldn’t say anything to my own family. My father and two of his brothers were World War II vets. One came back with a plastic bladder. The only person who knew about my anxiety was Trish.

Each life is determined by two or three crucial moments. One night, after drinking a fifth of Jack, I went into the back of the store and flipped on the band saw. Its loud hum unnerved me for a moment, although it’s a sound I’ve heard all my life. You can go for years on cruise control, but then, all of a sudden, you have to make a decision. And if you cannot do what is in your best interest, then you are a coward. No, worse, you are a pervert. Only a pervert shrinks from what is in his best interest. With my left hand I guided my right hand, its index finger sticking out, toward the blade.
Fluffffff!
That was it.

I felt no pain, only exhilaration. I was bleeding like hell, sure, but I was ecstatic. For the first time in my life I had made a decision that could not be reversed. I had taken charge of my destiny. I was a man.

You know how they always say, “It takes balls to do that!” It was literally true in this case: The second before my index finger hit the band saw, I felt a pinch in my testicles. They were blinking, so to speak. Gritting their teeth before their moment of truth.

But there was a logistical problem: I had made no provision for what to do after my amputation. With my bleeding stump pressed against the front of my flannel shirt, I walked back into the store and found a piece of cheesecloth, which I wrapped around my entire right hand. There was blood all over the floor and I thought,
Great, now I’ll have to clean all of that shit up
. But the pain was starting to kick in, throbbing, increasing by the second and making me dizzy, and the cheesecloth had turned completely red. For a moment I thought I was going to bleed to death and die, right here, in Walla Walla.

Confronted with a novel crisis, the mind comes up with a novel solution. It was snowing outside. I went out, made sure I
was not seen, knelt down on the ground, unwrapped my improvised bandage, and thrust my right hand into a mound of fresh snow. My blood coagulated.

My father never forgave me. He went to his grave thinking I had humiliated him.

I’ve never talked to Val about my index finger, and he has never asked me about it. I do not know if Trish ever said anything. Considering what he has done to his own body, it would not be appropriate to bring it up now.

Now that you’ve heard my little confession, tell me: What is the connection between a man cutting his trigger finger off because he did not want to get his balls blown off in a war he did not care about and a man hacking his penis off for no apparent reason during peacetime?

I saw Patricia last month while waiting for the train in Trenton. It has been three years since we were lovers, two since my self-surgery.

I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She was leaning against a wall, standing about five feet away from me. Of course it was Patricia: still in her shades, black leather vest over white T-shirt, black leather pants, and black boots. I know this woman, I know her breasts and her vagina. I know her stump. Of course it was Patricia, with those thin lips. But I made no move to acknowledge her. I was in disguise. I was wearing a wig and a dress.

I stood still, looking up the track, while seeing Patricia out of the corner of my eye.

But I was not acting naturally. I neither turned my head left
or right, nor shifted my weight from one foot to another. Nor blinked. Nor breathed. I stood perfectly still, like a classical statue, like the
Venus de Milo
, hoping that she would move so that I could move. But neither one of us moved. This went on for about two minutes. I knew then that she had recognized me. As the train came up the track, Patricia finally moved from her position and walked slowly but deliberately back into the station.

As I saw her from behind gliding up the escalator, I thought,
I know that woman, I know her vagina and her breasts
.

It was very unfortunate that Patricia saw me in my disguise. She had known me as a man, as her lover. There was no need for her to be devastated by my transformation.

More importantly, she was my archivist. She had known me during my happiest, most successful moments. If my life could be distilled to what was stored in her memories, then it would be considered a happy life.

It was a happy life, that is, until this episode in Trenton, this codicil, fucked it up. She had known me as a man with a beard, as her lover, as someone who gave her orgasms, not as a clean-shaven, dress-wearing faggot.

But if Patricia thinks I’m a faggot, then she’s mistaken. I’m not a faggot. I’m not even a cross-dresser. It was a brief, misguided experiment. I wore dresses only for a few days.

What Patricia saw in Trenton was an hallucination, my hallucination. It was theater, a clumsy skit performed among friends, an amateur production, and not emblematic of anything. If you could walk into my job right now, you’d see a rather generic, tall,
well-built, bearded gentleman in a conservative tie and suit, sitting at his cubicle.

Aside from inspiring me to grow a beard, Patricia also inspired me to drink. It took the edge off our time together. It was also, as it is for everybody else, an aphrodisiac. It made me an enthusiastic lover. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I ever penetrated her sober. Like the saying goes, a man without alcohol is like a flag without wind.

Unfortunately my drinking habit did not go away after Patricia and I split up. I drank and drank and drank and drank and drank. I drank and masturbated to revive our best moments together. The habit of shaving my entire body also came back. I shaved my face and my chest and my inguinal region. I plucked out my eyelashes and my eyebrows.

But I no longer had a spiritual foundation for these private rituals. I was a drunk who was compulsively depilating himself.

One night, as I was squatting over a small mirror to prune the hair from my ass, it happened.

I cut my dick off.

A C
ULTURED
B
OY

I
had to make him understand that there is a correspondence between touch and feeling, between gesture and emotion. I had to teach him that the body has a limited vocabulary, is a limited vocabulary, that there are only so many things we can do to each other.

Each touch must be warranted: an index finger on the lips, a head nestled between the breasts.

When it comes to physical contacts, to the dialogue between bodies, there is a hierarchy, absolute and vertical, corresponding to degrees of emotional intimacy. It is a gradation that must be sorted out and calibrated.

It was no small event when he placed his palm on my hip, when he rubbed his knuckles against my cheek. The first time his tongue entered my mouth, I thought his soul was trying to escape its solitary confinement to enter my body.

But he was impervious to the implications of these nuances. Later, when he fucked those girls, it was simply a kinetic spectacle, a punch up the middle, a twitch of the nerve.

He was my first. I chose him. We dated for seven weeks
before it happened. Our first date was at the Ritz. We saw
Remains of the Day. We
sat in The Last Drop and drank cappuccino. We took the 32 bus to the zoo on a Saturday afternoon. We went to the art museum on a Sunday. We gave each other books to read.

At the zoo we saw two massive turtles coupling: one tank teetering on top of another. He joked, “They look bored.”

“You can’t tell the male from the female,” I said.

Later, back in my apartment, we sat on the couch, drank Rolling Rock, and read Walt Whitman out loud to each other. He thundered,
“What is this that frees me so in storms? What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging mean?”

At midnight I said, “I think I’m ready for bed.” He gave me an imploring look. We were drunk. He followed me to the door. We hugged. I gave him a kiss on the cheek. We had never touched lips. Impulsively I said, “Now for the other cheek.” But before I could do this, kiss his other cheek, he intercepted my lips with his own. I had kissed boys before, but only perfunctorily, chastely, without passion. Never had one stuck his tongue into my mouth. He stuck his tongue into my mouth. I was shocked by its texture, by its violence. It was a thumb gyrating, a blind animal thrashing inside my face. I thought his soul was trying to escape its solitary confinement to enter my body. He kneaded my ass with his hands. He made these
um, um
sounds. He said, “You feel so good.”

I pushed his chest away and said, “You’d better go.”

How is it possible that, at nineteen, I had never really kissed a boy, never had sex? There is a correspondence between touch and feeling, between gesture and emotion. The body has a limited vocabulary, is a limited vocabulary. There are only so many things we can do to each other. Each touch must be warranted: an index finger on the lips, a head nestled between the breasts. When it
comes to physical contacts, to the dialogue between bodies, there is a hierarchy, absolute and vertical, corresponding to degrees of emotional intimacy. It is a gradation that must be sorted out and calibrated. I had never fallen in love with anyone before Tom.

He was different. He was a cultured boy. At the museum he led me to Duchamp’s
Étant donnés
. He could talk about any painter with authority. He said, “Fuck Raphael!” He recommended Duccio, Giotto, Masaccio, Morandi. He explained to me, with great lucidity, the parallels between Chinese painting, late Monet, and early Guston. He said, “Thomas Eakins had a chiffon fetish.” He would rail against Jackson Pollock: “Yes, yes, yes, the artist pissing on the canvas.… What that guy represents, with his billboard canvases, repetition, and no content—unless you count acting out your adolescent sexual angst over and over, in the most jejune fashion, piss, piss, piss, as content—is America at its worst: smugness and megalomania fig-leafing a homicidal castration complex! And all that posturing: the painter as a sensitive athlete … a bald James Dean in jeans and T-shirt.…”

His looks?

I never itemized his body. Never scrutinized it. I only had the most cursory awareness of his nose, his eyes, his shoulders, his forearms.… Physical attraction is a hindrance to love, I reasoned. One must get over it. Even in high school I’d become indignant whenever I heard a girl say, “That’s guy’s cute,” or, “He’s buff,” or, “Nice buns.”

Girls who talked that way were all about looks, were all visual strategists, were schemers. They preened themselves endlessly, farded their faces, and came up with subtle and not so subtle ways to highlight their tits and ass in order to create the necessary effects to lure as many boys as possible. They would
say, “At the party I was standing by the onion dip surrounded by a herd of swains.” They spent hours regarding themselves in reflective surfaces, the hood of a car, the pupils of your eyes as they’re talking to you. Sexual display, always sexual display.

But love is not about looks because, within intimacy, the loved one’s visual capital is quickly depleted, you can barely see him. If you’re still staring at each other, then you are not intimates, because to stare is to acknowledge strangeness, novelty, even freakishness. It is a cruel and distancing act, what men indulge in at go-go bars. When you are in a new city, you stare, but at home you do not stare. That’s why artists are the most alienated people, because they make a career out of staring. To become familiar, to become intimate, is to not see each other at all but to listen. The loved one is distilled to an instantly recognizable voice babbling endlessly.

Love is a communion of the minds, I thought, because the mind is the creator and repository of meanings. Unlike the body, the mind retains its elasticity through aging. It becomes increasingly more attractive, more profound, as the body collapses from within. You must anticipate, even look forward to, your lover’s physical debasement, when there’s no seduction left. When there’s no bounce to his step, when he’s groveling on the floor. Every physical attribute is random, unstable, a mere decoy, and has nothing to do with who someone really is. To say, for example, “He’s five-ten, with chestnut hair, a hook nose,” is to say nothing.
Hideous, handsome, radiant, striking
are all meaningless adjectives. The skin is cosmetic, a coat of paint: peel it off, burn it, and what’s left is still the same person, and not just the same person but that person’s essence. That’s how you get to a person’s essence, you burn his skin off. Any idiot can be seduced by a healthy body in the flush of youth, but to love someone is to envision cradling an
invalid, or even a corpse, in your arms. It’s the very emblem of love, cradling a corpse in your arms. The physical degradation of your lover is the first and last allegory. The body is merely a semaphoric armature to telegraph the soul’s intentions.