Still Blue: More Writing By (For or About) Working-Class Queers

Villanelle for Dónal Óg - Colm Tóibín and Maura Dooley

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:50:00 +0000

"Hurling Ball, 1914" © GAA Collection, Clare Museum.

Villanelle for Dónal Óg

The hurler said: I get more out of men
I love their buttocks and their hairy chests.
They get me going nine times out of ten.

I knew that I was not a straight guy when
Blokes became stayers and girls stayed guests.
The hurler said: I get more out of men.

As sure as priests intone the word ‘amen’
As sure as young birds fly out from their nests
Guys get me going nine times out of ten.

I could be lonely with a pint of plain
Instead, I seized on what for me is best.
The hurler said: I get more out of men.

When skies are fierce and Sunday’s lost to rain,
When I might feel like letting things go west,
They get me going, nine times out of ten.

It is not pasta, prayer, not coke, not zen,
I’ll own what gives my game mouth-watering zest.
The hurler said: I get more out of men.
They get me going nine times out of ten.

_______________________

Dónal Óg Cusack (Dónall Óg Ó Cíosóg) was born in Cloyne, County Cork in 1977. He was educated at the local national school in Cloyne village and later attended nearby Midleton CBS. Following his secondary schooling, Cusack began a career as an electrician. On 18 October 2009, he revealed to the Irish Mail on Sunday that he is gay.

Colm Tóibín is a multi-award-winning Irish novelist and critic. He is the author, among many other books, of The Blackwater Lightship (1999), Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives From Wilde to Almodovar (2002), and The Master (2004).

Poet Maura Dooley was born in Truro, England, and grew up in Bristol. Her poetry collections include Explaining Magnetism (1991), Kissing A Bone (1996), and Life Under Water (2008), which is shortlisted for the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Reprinted from "I Get More Out of Men" by Colm Tóibín.

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"No Easy Business" - Duane Williams

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:20:00 +0000

Mornings on Lake Erie, with nothing but water all around us, I’d feel small in the world. During storms, when the lake was vicious, I prayed not to be swallowed by the giant waves, but I never let on to Dad. I wondered if Christopher Columbus was ever afraid, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, looking for India. Trap netting was like that, like finding a new world. It was no easy business.

Half-way out to where we’d drop the nets, Dad would finish his bottle and fall asleep, the sun burning up the horizon. That left Ernie and me, and Ernie wasn’t much use to no one, thanks to a forgotten war. That’s what Dad called it. Ernie liked to roll up his pants and show off his wooden legs. His real legs were missing from the knees down. Dad said Ernie would have been better off if he died in that war.

Ernie was an old man. Old and crippled. But he made do all right, he never complained a word. When the nets were in and there was nothing to do but wait for the catch, Ernie would take his break and light a cigar. He’d stand at the bow, staring into the lake and humming softly to himself. Every morning the same song. Ernie was missing Uncle George, Dad’s brother, who never came back from that war. Ernie and Uncle George were blood brothers, or so Ernie said. Dad, he laughed when I told him that, and begged the Lord’s almighty mercy.

Dad never had no buddies. Mom used to say he had a sliver in his heart, maybe that’s why. He could be mean, that’s for sure, and seemed to me Ernie got the worst of it. Out on the lake, Dad sometimes woke up and hollered at Ernie to get his sissy arse in gear, he wasn’t paying him for dreaming. But mostly Dad slept in his chair, one eye half-open on the world, giving him a powerful sort of look, like the spirit was lifting out of him. Ernie and me, we knew better than to wake Dad, even if a storm was coming or the catch was heavy. We’d let Dad sleep ‘til the nets were in and dusk made the water black.

All those years of fishing, the day came when Dad couldn’t go, the day he fell down the stairs at the Lakeshore Hotel. He never liked hospitals, especially not since Mom was taken by the cancer, but the doctor said Dad wasn’t going nowhere, no sir, he was staying in the hospital.

That morning, Ernie and me set out fishing without Dad. There’d been a storm the night before, but now the lake was like a giant mirror and fresh white clouds floated over its surface. Dad’s rocker sat empty and quiet on deck, not creaking the way it did when Dad was in it, rocking even in his sleep. Without that sound, I couldn’t hardly stand Ernie’s silence. I started singing Johnny Cash, Dad’s music, but that didn’t help. I finally had to ask. I just came out and asked Ernie why he was so damned serious all the time and didn’t hardly ever laugh or tell a dirty joke. Ernie just looked at me and smiled, his eyes deep and dark as empty wells.

“You ever been in love?” Ernie asked me.

I didn’t have no answer. I just stood there for the longest time, staring out at the glassy lake. Ernie, he limped over on his wooden legs and sat down in Dad’s chair. He lifted up his sweater to show me the ugly scar across his belly, pink and thick like a cornrow.

“I was, once,” Ernie said. “Here’s the scar to prove it.”

“From the war?”

“Before the war.” Ernie looked at me, pushing out his hairy belly to show off the scar, his eyes shiny. “When your uncle was still living.”

“Uncle George?”

“We was closer than brothers, me and Georgie. Shared our blood even. First when I got stabbed. Then when he got shot in Korea. Bet you didn’t know your Dad knifed me, did you, kid?”

I didn’t, but it wasn’t no shock either.

“Yep, your dear, ole Dad couldn’t stand that George and me were thicker than blood.” Ernie let out a laugh that was like a crash of thunder rippling across the lake.

“It looks sore,” I said.

“No, it ain’t sore no more. Touch it,” Ernie said. “Feels like leather after all these years.”

I looked again at the scar, then back at the distant shore. “Better get the nets in,” I said.

“Forget the nets,” Ernie said. He stayed put. Pretty soon, he was rocking in Dad’s chair, rocking crazy fast, his eyes pinched shut as the tug sputtered along. The chair creaked like it was in pain, the only sound out there on the lake, farther out than the gulls would fly.

_______________________

Duane Williams lives in Hamilton, Canada. His short fiction has appeared widely in literary anthologies, including Quickies, Queer View Mirror I & II, Blithe House, Boyfriends from Hell, Velvet Mafia, Love Under Foot, Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly, Friction 6, Between the Palms: A Collection of Gay Travel Erotica, Best Gay Erotica 2006 and Ultimate Gay Erotica 2007. He can be reached at duanewilliams@cogeco.ca.

Photo credit: "Fishing Boat" © David Ross, 2009. Used by kind permission of the photographer.

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"Rodeo: Real Gay Cowboys and Brokeback Mountain" - Patricia Nell Warren

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:59:00 +0000

Just as Brokeback Mountain hit movie theaters in early 2006, The Learning Channel cable network launched Beyond the Bull, a reality-based series dedicated to profiling world champion bull riders as regular guys who were belt-buckle deep in wives, kids, girlfriends, and groupies. Was Beyond the Bull a propaganda move timed to counter Brokeback’s gay cowboys? Especially twenty-year-old Jack Twist, the gay rodeo rider played by Jake Gyllenhaal?

Rodeo is one of our most American sports, with roots as deep as baseball’s. As an action-packed extreme sport, rodeo lends itself easily to TV and is now routinely covered on ESPN. The sport reached exhibition status at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and even had its own TV reality show—Cowboy U--which aired for four years on Country Music Television.

The film Brokeback Mountain, based on the short story by Annie Proulx, became an overnight cultural icon—and the film also kicked up a political dust storm. After all, right-wingers view the cowpoke as a core symbol who embodies the purest in heterosexual family values. One Christian blogger screamed, “Now they’re out to destroy the American legend of the cowboy. God help us, and John Wayne forgive us!” In Congress, Senators from sagebrush states pushed a resolution to declare the fourth Saturday of each July the “National Day of the American Cowboy.”

Meanwhile, some contestants on the rodeo scene assured the media that, in all their years around the arenas, they’d never met a real-life Jack Twist.

I had to smile at all this denial. I grew up on a historic Montana cattle ranch that was steeped in cowboy tradition. Few occupations in America’s history have been more conducive to secret man-to-man love than cowboying. Indeed, frontier men may have gravitated to this job so they could enjoy the company of other males.

If gay cowboys have never been visible in professional rodeo, it’s because the sport has become so conservative that it makes the NFL look like the ACLU. Judging by what we know of other sports, there must be a few closet cases among the world champions of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) and Professional Bull Riders (PBR). But so far no one has dared to come out.

Dirty Dangerous Work ~ Rodeo is said to be “the only sport that grew out of an industry”—meaning the vast nineteenth-century livestock business that flourished west of the Mississippi, from Mexico north to Canada. To find the roots of gay rodeo riders—and gay rodeo itself—we have to dig in this soil of the Old West.

Already in colonial times, cattle and herders dotted the English-speaking east coast and the Spanish-speaking southwest. But after the Civil War (1861-1865), with native tribes being slaughtered or swept onto reservations, millions of square miles of grassland in the Western interior were suddenly open to grazing. The livestock industry exploded. By the 1880s, there were millions of cattle on the prairies and plains. Beef was suddenly abundant and cheap, and Americans rushed to eat it.

To handle these millions of cattle, the professional cowboy proliferated, too. He might have been called a cattleboy, cowpuncher, cowpoke, drover, wrangler, vaquero, buckaroo, ranahan, rannie, or waddie, but he was a skilled working stiff—the horseback equivalent of an autoworker or coal-miner. Ethnically he might have been white, American Indian, Mexican mestizo, Hispanic, Creole, African, or Canadian Metis—or mixtures of the above. “Boy” referred to his menial status, whereas the word “cowman” designated a rancher.

Cowboys did all the dirty, dangerous work that made millionaires of cattle kings like my great-grandfather, Conrad Kohrs. And they did it at a time when there were no unions, worker’s comp, industrial safety regulations, pension plans, or health insurance. Since there was no mandatory retirement age, a cowboy might still be working at seventy. An outfit’s youngest rannie—usually called “the Kid”—might be fifteen or sixteen, since there also were no child-labor laws.

Often a cowboy had a “past”—army deserter, former slave, criminal on the run from the law in another state. Nobody asked questions. All that mattered was whether he could be trusted with a horse and a lariat. A cowpuncher was usually poor—he owned his clothes, horse gear, rope and bedroll, maybe a harmonica or a Colt .45. He did have pride in his person—his clothes, boots, and gear were good quality. His hat varied in shape—a wide Spanish brim in sun-fried Texas, a narrow brim on the windy northern plains. But the horses he rode usually belonged to the boss. Well into the twentieth century, his wage was $40 a month and board—less if he was black or Mexican.

Some cowboys banked their wages for decades, aiming to homestead somewhere and live out their sunset years in comfort. But many a cattleboy blew his pay in the nearest honky-tonk—alcohol and gambling addictions were common. He might have had chronic health problems—bronchitis and rheumatism from sleeping on the ground in cold rainy weather—not to mention old aches and pains from wrecks with horses. When he got too old or broken-down to work, he sometimes wound up homeless. Suicide was not unknown among ailing elderly cowboys who didn’t want to wind up in a bed at the county poorhouse. Because there was no welfare or Medicare, many ranches (including ours) took care of indigent ex-employees until they died.

Still, cowboys knew how to make their stark lives bearable—even fun and entertaining at times. After supper, in the bunkhouse, the boys might swap yarns, play cards or dice, and howl with laughter as they played practical jokes on one another. Even on roundup, with all hands tired and busy, there might be a little storytelling at the campfire. During the daylight hours, the boys could find a few minutes for spontaneous sport—like roping a wolf for the hell of it. As Annie Proulx wrote, “When you live a long way out, you make your own fun.”

Nonetheless, one has to ask how this hard and thankless life ever got so romanticized. In the 1800s, novelists like James Fenimore Cooper were already gilding the frontier lily. But the big romantic job started after 1900, when the art of Western artists Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington was popularized on calendars sold across America. The figure of the lone cowboy silhouetted against a Western sky exerted a deep appeal, and provided nostalgia value as the Old West disappeared. Cowboys were also mythologized in bestselling pulp novels cranked out by Zane Grey, Max Brand, and others.

But it was Hollywood who recast the hard-drinking, rough-living nineteenth-century hired hand as a twentieth-century hero. Played by John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan, Roy Rogers, and others, the cowboy became a symbol of “manly clean living” and “family values.”

Hang and Rattle ~ An ungentled horse was called a bronc (from the Mexican Spanish word bronco, meaning “rough” or “unpolished”). On most ranches, horses weren’t ridden until they were full-grown at five or six years old. The first few rides were an athletic contest—a man matching his wits and reflexes against those of a half-ton of horse.

You ran one of those wild things into a corral. You roped him, hobbled his feet so he couldn’t kick you in the nuts, and slapped a saddle on his quivering back. Then you took a deep breath, climbed on, and yanked the hobble-rope loose. Naturally, the horse thought you were a mountain lion on his back. So he frantically tried to unload you in any way he could think of. Cowboys had colorful names for these moves—hogging, sunfishing, highrolling, frogwalking, corkscrewing. The horse might slam you against the corral fence, even throw himself backwards to try and mash you. If you “hung and rattled” (stayed on), the horse tired of the fight—and finally figured out that you were harmless. From then on, he was a dependable mount.

Sometimes, though, the horse won, and stayed an incorrigible bucker. Every big outfit kept one or two of these hellions around for entertainment and sporting value. Not every cowboy could ride them. It took a real buckaroo (from Spanish vaquero) to be a “bronc stomper.” After the Civil War, these little ranch competitions began to be organized into public sporting events called “stampedes” or “roundups.” Eventually the new sport adopted the Spanish word for roundup—rodeo.

In 1885, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show put bucking and roping contests on the program, along with choreographed Indian fights and stagecoach holdups. When Wild West shows disappeared in the early 1900s, rodeo stayed. By World War I, many a Western community was building its facility for an annual rodeo—equivalent to the baseball stadiums and football fields that dotted the Midwest and East. Around the arena was a high fence strong enough to withstand direct hits by broncs. Behind the arena, corrals held the bucking and roping stock. Facing the grandstand was the dramatic row of side-release chutes for the bucking events.

Rodeo Gets Creative ~ Through the early 1900s, rodeo mostly stuck to the traditional work-based events—roping and bronc-riding. You paid an entry fee for each event. Everybody’s fees went into a prize-money pot, sometimes with added money from the rodeo committee. You could win the “day money” for the best performance on that day’s go-round in your event. Or you could win “best all around champion” if you swept the go-rounds in several events. In addition to the prize money—twenty-five or thirty bucks in those days—you got a trophy belt buckle with an inscription on it.

Rules were written. Timekeeping was introduced for the roping events—the fastest roper won. For bronc events, you had to stay on the horse for eight seconds. The judges scored how well you rode, and how well the horse bucked.

But around 1920, one new event made rodeo history. This was Jack Twist’s specialty—Brahma bull-riding. Across the southern U.S., those hump-necked, droopy-eared Brahma cattle had been imported from India for crossbreeding. Inevitably, some creative promoter put a cowboy on a droop-ear’s back and discovered that Brahmas and Brahma crossbreds were astoundingly athletic. A bull might weigh a ton, but he could jump the arena fence like a deer if it suited him. Limber as a gymnast, he could unleash high kicks, vertical leaps, belly rolls, dizzying spins, neck-snapping feints and turns.

The cowboy had to ride him bareback, with one gloved hand wrapped tightly into a rawhide rope cinched around the bull’s midsection. The rope was rosined to help his grip. The eight-second rule applied.

Bulls could be more dangerous than broncs. Once a bull threw you, he might go after you on the ground with those horns of his. Cowboys called this type a “headhunter.” Worse—if your hand got hung up in that rope when you bucked off, the bull kept spinning and sunfishing with you attached. So you were flung around by one arm like a rag doll, possibly even trampled horribly, before you could be freed.

As bucking bulls quickly became the climax event of every rodeo—and the apex of machismo in the sport—rodeo producers had to contract for a whole string of “rough stock” that would buck reliably. Contestants drew their rides out of a hat, so each could have a fair shot at a money ride. This created a new business—the rodeo stock contractor—and a steady market for misfit horses and bulls with an attitude about humans on their backs.

The most unrideable animals became celebrities. They were worth a lot of money, and lived long lives with good veterinary care. Some bulls knew their jobs so well that they were actually quite gentle, except for that eight seconds in the arena, when they turned into hoofed hurricanes. The minute the whistle blew or the rider was off their back, they trotted calmly to the gate. Cowboys called them “union bulls.”

Serious injuries and deaths did happen to rodeo stock. Humane societies complained about rodeo, so the sport finally became more concerned about animal welfare.

Rodeo was hard on humans, too—not just injuries, but crooked judges who took payola and crooked promoters who embezzled prize money. Blacks and American Indians were often denied the chance to compete. In the 1930s, outraged contestants formed a grassroots union, the Cowboys’ Turtle Association, which later became the Rodeo Cowboys Association and, in 1975, the professional PRCA. The Association took control of world-championship competition and enforced fairness (except toward women, who were barred from professional competition in the 1930s).

Gay Cowboys—Yes or No? ~ Closet love between cowboys grew out of the loneliness and hardship in that job.

In the 1800s, a fall roundup or an eight-hundred-mile trail drive meant being away from civilization for weeks or months. For heterosexual cowboys, female companionship was scarce. Ranches didn’t want the boys fighting over women, so most had no women employees. You had to wait ‘til Saturday night, or the end of the season, to visit the whorehouse in town. But town sex could also give you syphilis and gonorrhea—not curable in those dark days before penicillin. Like men in the army or on ships at sea, even the hetero hands may have turned to each other for sexual relief when the boss wasn’t looking.

Across the northern U.S., the winters were long and harsh, so employment lasted only from May to October. Fall roundup was the finale of the work season. In the early 1900s, when my family’s ranch still had a big operation in eastern Montana, with 75,000 cattle ranging on free grass, we might need fifty men and five hundred horses for the roundup. After we got some 15,000 steers loaded on trains and shipped to the Chicago stockyards, we paid off most of the boys, keeping a skeleton crew through winter. The rest had to find a warm burrow somewhere ‘til spring.

These circumstances tended to discourage most cowboys from marrying and settling down. Most were itinerant bachelors, “saddle bums,” who drifted from ranch to ranch. Most ranches had a bunkhouse where the boys slept and ate and hung out together. On our ranch, the 1880s bunkhouse still stands—a long log building, with woodshed, washroom, kitchen, dining room, and dormitory room with narrow iron beds. When I was a kid in the 1940s, it was still operating in the old-time way. The place was snug but Spartan, heated by wood stoves, with a table and chairs for card games. A vintage AM radio provided news and music. Chaps and other gear hung from hooks along the log wall. Each man kept the rest of his few possessions in a box under his bed. The latrine was outside, fifty feet away—a long walk on a cold night.

To combat the loneliness of this life, male-male friendships sprang up like spring grass. Even heterosexual bonding tended to be strong. In frontier times, Western men used the word “partner” for these bonds. Two single males would pair up, living in close association, sharing everything, maybe starting a business together.

There was also an economic reason for partnership: the low pay. In those days, society expected a man to own a house and to demonstrate his ability to support a family before he got married. But a dirt-poor cowboy could hardly afford to feed a wife and kids on $40 a month. Typically, a pair of men operated on the old adage that “two can live as cheap as one.” They’d work the ranches for years, getting themselves hired as a team. They’d save to file on a homestead or buy a little ranch, own it as joint tenants, and maintain visibly separate sleeping quarters. Often a “kid” paired up with an older guy so he could learn the ropes with an expert.

Traditional cowboy songs often revealed deep grief over the death of a partner in a shooting or roundup accident. In one old song, “Utah Carroll”:

In the land of Mexico in the place from whence I came,
In silence sleeps my partner in a grave without a name.
We rode the trail together and worked cows side by side,
Oh, I loved him like a brother, and I wept when Utah died.

You don’t have to be a Ph.D. in sociology to realize that some of these rawhide partnerships extended into discreet sexual intimacy. As long as two partners were circumspect and did their jobs, many livestock owners very likely viewed gay cowboy love as an unavoidable result of the circumstances. Such partnerships made the loneliness and hardships more bearable.

But as the West modernized, as it filled up with towns and churches, this old-time tolerance slowly vanished. After 1900, the fencing of public lands made it impossible to swing the big herds. Ranches downsized and switched to more intensive methods of producing beef. Agriculture was mechanizing by then—fewer horses and men were needed.

During World War II, the trend accelerated. Many a young puncher came home from driving a tank or jeep across Europe only to find that the newest farm machine had put him out of a job. By 1950, the bunkhouses were closing everywhere. At the CK, we closed ours in 1958. For fall roundup, we only needed three or four hands.

Rodeo Heterosexism ~ It’s no coincidence that rodeo went big-time and commercial during the same postwar period. As ranch jobs vanished, many cowboys drifted to rodeo—it was one of the few niches left in America where cowboys could still earn with their skills.

You could get into rodeo for just a few bucks. To rope or wrestle steers, you didn’t have to own a horse. You could buy rides on somebody else’s horse. To ride bareback broncs or bulls, all you needed was your riggin’ and a gunny sack to tote it in. You didn’t even need a new wardrobe. The plain workday chaps and the conservative white or Pendleton cowboy shirt were fine for the arena. Not to mention the re-soled Justin boots and last year’s XXXX “beaver” Stetson. A rodeo cowboy might be broke, but he still wore good clothes to work.

The changing attitude towards cowboy relationships must have hit hard in rodeo. Indeed, I think that the raw heterosexism of today’s rodeo, with its groupies, flag-waving, and pumped-up parading of family men, is the sport’s effort to leave behind that time when a cowboy might be more interested in his “pard” than the cute little gal in town.

The Brokeback story of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar fit this historical trend like a horseshoe fits a hoof. By 1963, the year that the story starts, real cowboy jobs on cattle ranches were so scarce that Jack and Ennis wound up herding sheep. Ennis not only felt compelled to deny his love for Jack—he also felt he had to prove his masculinity by getting married. The story describes Ennis’s grim struggle to support a family on the few rural jobs available in Wyoming.

Jack had an option that Ennis didn’t. He had rodeo. As Proulx wrote in the original story: “He was infatuated with the rodeo life and fastened his belt with a minor bull-riding buckle, but his boots were worn to the quick, holes beyond repair.” Jack often finished out of the money. One year he earned $3000, along with a collection of sprains and broken bones that would have crippled a city dude.

Still, and more importantly, Jack had social opportunities on the rodeo scene. Though he was no Hollywood cutie like Jake Gyllenhaal (“Jack seemed fair enough with his curly hair and quick laugh, but for a small man he carried some weight in the haunch and his smile disclosed buck teeth, Proulx wrote), he had enough going for him to snag a rodeo queen from a well-to-do Texas family. So Jack moved up the social ladder a little. He had money to travel—not only to rodeos, but to Mexico for gay sex. But he was ready to give up all this comfort if only Ennis would come live with him on their own little place.

But Ennis knew this old-time strategy for closet “partners” was now risky. So he said no.

Rodeo Today ~ Today, pro rodeo is radically different from those cow-country contests of 1869. Fewer contestants are country kids now—the “urban cowboy” rules. City kids can overcome their fear of animals and learn bull riding in special schools, even in college courses. Contestants train hard like Olympic athletes. The familiar cowboy hat, which offers no protection against being kicked in the face, is giving way to a protective helmet with face mask.

Bull riding has gone so big that it’s international, often a stand-alone event. Its association, Professional Bull Riders (PBR), is owned and operated by the ever-prickly contestants. Today’s Jack Twist gets on the plane to ride bulls in Brazil and Australia. In his designer duffle bag, the bull rope and rosin are packed with a suit and tie. He has business cards and a website, and his bulletproof bull riding vest is plastered with sponsor logos. Top contestants can win $250,000 a year, with a few individuals topping $1 million.

Despite efforts at safety, there are still catastrophic injuries, even deaths—captured on footage that gets aired on Real TV and Sports Disasters. In 1994, for example, five bull riders were killed—a bad year. Because of this, women are still barred from competing in the roughest pro rodeo events.

Some Americans complain bitterly that today’s professional rodeo is too commercial, too divorced from its roots. But the grassroots rodeo is still out there in many towns, for anybody who wants to find it. The old-time “ranch rodeo” is being revived. And gay rodeo is as grassroots as it gets.

Rainbow Rodeos ~ Jack’s story ends in 1983 with his death at the hands of gay-bashers. By that time, a real-life Jack Twist could have been out of the closet and competing at gay rodeos.

The first gay rodeo in history was held in Nevada in 1976. Reno events producer, Phil Ragsdale, who was also Emperor of the Imperial Court, had come up with the idea of an amateur gay rodeo as a fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Local homophobia meant that Ragsdale had no easy time hiring a stock contractor or finding a venue. But finally the event came off at the Washoe County Fairgrounds on October 2. The Court raised thousands of dollars for charity.

Inspired by Ragsdale’s event, visionary LGBT rodeo producers began to emerge in other states, sparking the formation of local rodeo associations across the country and hooking the LGBT rodeo movement together with country/Western gay bars, clogging and square-dance groups, equestrian centers, etc. In short, they created the package that is familiar to gay rodeo fans today.

Gay rodeo continued to grow. At this writing, the International Gay Rodeo Association boasts twenty-eight regional associations and some nineteen rodeos on its schedule in U.S. and Canadian cities. The old Imperial Court connection is still strong. No gay rodeo is complete without high camp—meaning drag rodeo queens and truck-loads of sequins! IGRA also pulls major sponsors like Anheuser-Busch and American Airlines.

Unlike pro rodeo, the rainbow circuit has stayed amateur by choice, so it is open to community participation. The old formula is pretty much the same: the core events, the announcer with his drawly patter, the colorful grand entry, the flags carried by galloping riders—Old Glory and Old Rainbow fluttering side by side. But the gender barriers have tumbled. Women ride broncs and bulls, while men compete in barrel racing, traditionally a female event. Last but not least, LGBT creative minds have created new events for tenderfoots—like “goat dressing,” where you wrassle a pair of men’s boxer shorts onto a goat.

Today, contrary to what some right-wingers say, gay cowboys who competed in mainstream rodeo aren’t hard to find. I’ve been running into them for years as I travel the U.S. on book tours.

Texas produces a good crop of gay cowboys. Example: my good friend Don, who is now a financial consultant in Los Angeles. Born in 1967 on a ranch near Dallas, Don rodeoed seriously during his sophomore and junior years in high school, when he was fifteen and sixteen, and collected his share of trophies and belt buckles.

“Rodeo is part of the culture in Texas,” he told me. “It’s a letter sport in high school. You go out for rodeo like you go out for football. It’s one of those things you do to prove your manhood the Texas way. I was an all-around guy—calf roping, bareback bronc, saddle bronc, and bull riding. Saddle bronc was the scariest, in my opinion. A horse is bigger than a bull and it’s a lot farther to the ground. But the bulls could be bad. I always prayed to draw a bull with no horns.

“My older brother was a professional bull rider, so I would sneak away with him on weekends and go to all the big rodeos across Texas. I loved everything about rodeo—including the partying, everybody drunk and getting into fistfights. I’d come home with black eyes and a split lip. My dad knew what I was up to, but he’d say, ‘Just tell your mother you fell off your horse.’ I wasn’t out yet, of course, but I had a kinda boyfriend through high school.”

Don aimed to follow in his brother’s footsteps—he had to be eighteen to turn professional. But during his junior year, he injured his back playing football. That finished rodeo as his first career choice. Business was second. When he graduated from business school at age twenty-two and got ready to move to L.A., Don finally came out to his parents. They took it in stride. Don relates: “All my dad said was, ‘Yeah, we used to have guys like you around. They were called confirmed bachelors.’”

* * * * * * * * *

A longer version of this article appeared in Warren’s anthology, The Lavender Locker Room: 3000 Years of Great Athletes Whose Sexual Orientation Was Different (Wildcat Press, 2006) and was featured on the site, Outsports.com. Copyright © 2006, 2009 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.

_______________________

Patricia Nell Warren grew up on the historic Grant-Kohrs Ranch at Deer Lodge, MT. She started publishing short fiction at age 17. Her series of bestselling gay novels, notably The Front Runner, started in 1974. In her 2006 title, The Lavender Locker Room, she turns to nonfiction. In recent years she also writes provocative op-eds and blogs on many issues. Wildcat Press is her independent publishing imprint, with website at www.wildcatpress.com.

Photo credit: "Shadows, Phoenix Rodeo" © Greenbroke/Will, 2009. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License.

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because they are not eight - Christopher Soden

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:03:00 +0000

Tattoos, 1944 © Bob Bobster. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License.

Ronnie gave up on his folks before
he was ten and signed on two days after
he graduated from high school. His mother
would pour the ashy, treacly scotch
until her head was swarming with rattles
and growls and recrimination. If she wasn’t

strapping Ronnie’s ass in a blind lather
she was trying to get some off him. His father,
Jerome, was gone most every night, cruising
parks, men’s rooms and adult movie houses.
Mornings Ronnie would hear him in the shower,
bathroom steamier than heaven, singing and gasping

sobs by turns. He just started talking to me when
they were shearing us in bunches, clumps
of sandy brown, black, and rusty hair
splotching dingy yellow linoleum. Heaping
in small drifts. Some trippy inane shit he said
made me laugh though I couldn’t tell you why.
My precious mane! My masculine fortitude!
Like some kind of eulogy for Caesar.

I never thought of it as mine anymore
after it was cut. And you always get more.
We bunked together. Closed the taverns in port.
They gave us watch duty on deck beginning
an hour before the next day. Creaming
night waves were ragged claps of wet
voltage teasing your mind into a graceful

stupor. It was steady and soothing and Ronnie
and me would unwind. Nothing mattered
to him I think. The way a lost balloon
meanders and bobs. Tangles and glides. Ronnie
asked me why sometimes sailors are called gobs.
I said he should ask the captain. He cradled
my neck, hooking his lips into mine.

I caught him with a rabbit punch and he yelped
and bayed. Shaking back to his feet with raucous
guffaws he kissed me again with blood in his
mouth. I spat into the hollow of his chest and cried
some, punching his shoulders and arms. I said,
“It’s okay for you first,” and he got in after three

fingers and rubbed my belly whispering, singing
Sinatra (Summer Wind) and I was frail and genuine
suddenly under hushy symphony of leaking light
thinking of my grandma’s riddle: Why are the seven
stars no more than seven? I don’t care if he wakes me

for a slip trip ‘cause I get my chance at bat as often
as I like. Ronnie can turn cook’s duty for three
hundred guys into a fucking privilege. Swabbing
toilets a jokey tango for the deranged. Sometimes
he just climbs into my bunk and tells me gags
‘til we fall asleep. I do not ask God why

He brought me Ronnie. Prince of tickles
in a kingdom of the damaged and ravenous.
Doctor for the annihilated bounce. I heard
once in church deserving has nothing
to do with grace. And I figure it’s better
not to raise the question.

_______________________

Christopher Soden holds Vermont College’s MFA in Poetry. He has written film critique for AfterElton.com, Blogcritics.org, The Fort Worth Ally, and Tribune, as well as performance pieces and dramaturgy. Honors, positions and awards: Poetry Editor—Espejo. President Emeritus—The Dallas Poets Community, The Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion Series, Fourth Unity’s Annual Unity Fest, and The Dallas Public Library’s Distinguished Poets of Dallas. Publication Credits—Gertrude, Windy City Times, The Chiron Review, Sentence, Borderlands, New Texas 2002, Off the Rocks, Poetry Super Highway, Touch of Eros, Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians, WordWrights!, The James White Review and Best of Texas Writing 2.

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"Melhos Place" - Amber Dawn

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:16:00 +0000

Melhos is a pink stucco building next to a highway on-ramp. All day, diesel trucks and work vans roll past to the neighbouring auto shops and factories. In summer, the air around Melhos smells of fish rotting in cannery dumpsters. The winter rains sound like a ceaseless drum roll against the corrugated steel warehouses. And year round, girls dot the corners, their pleathers and satins looking misplaced against the industrial backdrop.

Melhos was originally named Oceanview Manor because the Pacific lay beyond the ship yards and rusted barges moored along Commissioner Street. By the time I moved in, the original name had been weathered completely off the pink awning and the tenants had renamed the building after the Aaron Spelling favorite. There’s no swimming pool, no blue-jean-wearing repairmen to have gusty affairs with. What Melhos has is hos. On the front stoop, girls in lingerie smoke cigarettes. Red lanterns hang in apartment windows. Some girls are shacked up with their men. Some—like me—are straight-for-pay and live with their wifeys. My best friend, Maria, has suite two-oh-four all to herself.

Maria’s got monster stereo speakers that can stand up to the traffic outside. Her bedding is from the IKEA catalogue, and her toilet flushes properly every single time. Her regulars bring her perfume and Chinese take out. She has a sophisticated hustle, a blend of ho innuendo and corresponding business rates: “When a trick picks you up, read them the menu like this: $50 for a soda pop, $80 for a burger, and $120 for the full meal deal. See, technically you’re not soliciting. No laws broken.” I’m a bit envious of Maria.

Before Maria, I only had my mistakes to learn from. The first time my face was spray-painted black, I learned not to lean inside an open car window. I only had my head wedged under a steering wheel once to learn not to give blowjobs to a man in the driver’s seat. I used to live in the skids—the poorest eight-block radius in all of Canada. There was no official stroll there, but if you were a woman in the neighbourhood you were for sale. I’d simply step out my door (and over the people sleeping in my doorway) and there’d be a trick shouldered up to me, whispering, “twenty bucks, twenty bucks.” These tricks made the trip to the skids for the cheapest dates possible. They preferred to be turned in their cars, as if the assumed filth of my place would give them some disease that the bareback blowjobs they requested would not.

Moving to Melhos was Maria’s idea. There’s a vacant bachelor apartment on the third floor, already painted pink from the last girl. I barely fill it with what little furniture I have. But Maria helps me set myself up like a pro. I buy the things pros should have: boxes of tissue that match my wall colour, scented candles, lots of anti-bacterial spray. I put Madonna’s Erotic in my ghetto blaster, lay a leopard print drop-sheet over my bed. “You’ll make money,” Maria assures me. “You can set yourself up real nice in no time.”

I warm up with nooners—lunch-hour tricks who gingerly curb their cars and say “please” when ordering blowjobs. These men are quick dates. They have forklifts and assembly lines to get back to.

Nighttime brings traffic from other neighbourhoods: the West End, the suburbs. And the stroll turns into a stereo-pumping, drinkin’-n-drivin’, cat-calling trick parade. Cars circle and circle, as if maybe the hos might get a little prettier after one more loop around the block. I won’t go night-shifting without Maria. “I got my eye on you,” she tells the men who pick me up, pointing a commanding press-on-nail at them. Unlike me, Maria is tall and meaty and loud. Really more of a daddy dressed in pretty-girl clothing. Tricks somehow sense her queer femme macho. They only insult her as they are driving away or else Maria buries them in comebacks—mostly about eating for some reason: “Eat a shit sandwich” or “Go eat your own scrotum cheese.”

I am with Maria when Paul’s Dodge Ram, with tinted windows and custom headlights, stops at our corner. She has to give me a boost up the chrome running board into his passenger seat. Canuck bobble-heads line Paul’s dashboard. Photo-booth pictures of him kissing a pretty teenage girl are stuck to his rear-view mirror.

He’s three years younger than me, but he lives with his parents. A hundred for the hour is “no problem” says Paul as he paces my bachelor apartment like a trapped fly looking for a window. He eyes my rabbit fur coat and my CDs, he opens my fridge. I wonder if he’s casing my place. “No beer in here?” he asks. “No boyfriend?” Then his inspection makes sense. No men’s jackets on the coat rack. A collection of “chick” music. A beer-less fridge. To his hetero gaze these are all signs that I live alone.

“No boyfriend,” I confirm. These two words are all he needs to stop pacing and drop his drawers. He comes at me with his arms and his erection, reaching for a hug. I twist sideways to prevent his penis from ramming my stomach. Pre-cum smears against my left side. I am prepared to butt heads about condom use. I’m prepared to tell him I won’t lick his balls or let him ejaculate on my face—these are the things I am used to arguing over. I am not prepared when Paul kisses me.

No trick has ever kissed me. Many don’t even look at my face. After my initial reluctance subsides, kissing becomes surprisingly easy. Paul doesn’t hack back phlegm like the factory men do. He has chewing-gum breath and glossy lips. He latches on to me with non-calloused fingers. We make out as if I am that pretty teenage girl in the photo-booth pictures.

Afterwards, he asks for my phone number. I scribble it on scrap paper. He calls me from his cell before leaving. The two of us stand awkwardly at my door listening to the tinny ring of my home phone. “Just making sure you aren’t shakin’ me off,” he says, giving my arm a punch as if we are buddies.

When Paul calls again it’s from a bar. “Whatcha up to?” he asks. I barely hear him through the muffled music and shouting in the background. I tell him I’m already in bed. “Ah, all alone?” His puppy-dog voice is syrupy and beer-buzzed.

He arrives so drunk his young face has gone limp and liquidy. The corners of his mouth seem to be treading water just to smile at me. When he hands me two hundred dollars I figure it’s a blunder on his part. “There’s extra,” he tells me, “so you could shop for some new clothes or something.” Suddenly the thrift-store slip I’m wearing feels even more threadbare. It lays on the floor in a sad huddle of frayed lace as we climb onto my bed.

“He says he wants to be my regular,” I tell Maria while we’re at the mall; my cash spent hastily on a single pair of good-butt jeans. “A sugar daddy.”

“No, sweetie. Sugar daddies are old dejected men with marriage or erection problems, or both,” says Maria. “Young tricks just wanna dip their dicks in the underworld. Then they return to the ‘burbs.”

Maria’s statement makes me all too grateful when Paul calls again, same late hour, same loud background. I imagine him at some pseudo-Irish pub, surrounded by ball-cap-wearing boys like himself. “I got something for you,” he says.

He stumbles through my door with a TV too big for him to carry. He grunts me away as I try to help, pushes the row of paperback novels off my dresser to make space for it. “It was sitting in our garage,” Paul huffs. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s only like two years old.” He grabs the remote control from his coat pocket and turns the TV on. Blue light washes over my entire apartment. This is how Paul becomes my regular. He simply plants himself in front of the TV.

My apartment becomes a receptacle for his family’s unwanteds. Wine glasses or terrycloth bath towels. Nice things—rejected only because they clash with their decorating schemes. Paul brings so much that I start re-gifting: a chenille throw goes to Maria, unopened bath salts and body lotions are disseminated throughout Melhos. Every girl in the building smells of perfumy lavender and vanilla. The more gifts he brings, the longer his visits stretch out. We watch late-night talk shows, fix ourselves drinks in my new stemmed glasses.

Paul starts putting my pay in Hallmark cards with doves flying across pastel brush strokes, the kind couples give each other. “Don’t open it until I’m gone,” he says, suddenly faux-shy, as if he has written me a love poem. But the cards aren’t even signed. Paul writes “Your friend,” his name absent altogether. Sometimes there’s three hundred in the card and I race over to Maria’s to brag. “Get it while you can, girl,” she says, jealously screwing up her frosted-pink lips.

Other times, Paul slips a meager eighty bucks in the card and I find myself grudgingly on the stroll to earn the money I was expecting. I drift around the factory parking lots as the workers eat their bagged-lunches, my eyes vigilant and desperate to catch theirs. When one does pick me up, I hate him for his labor-nicked hands. I find myself holding my breath and staring at the wall until he’s finished. I take his hard-earned money without a thank-you and usher him out my door.

I use up all my “thank yous” on Paul. My “yeah babies,” my “fuck mes,” my “you like thats” all exhausted on Paul. When he asks to stay the night I am too exhausted to say no. We’ve downed most of a fifth of rye whisky that didn’t make the cut in his father’s liquor cabinet. Paul can’t hold himself steady enough to put his pants back on. He collapses into my bed, reaching an absentminded arm out for me. “Don’t go there, girl,” Maria would say. “No kissing, no real names, no sleep overs, no playing house.” I hear her warning voice buzz in my ear until everything blurs and darkens.

When I wake, Paul’s body is splayed out, snoring. I am at the very edge of my bed. My mouth is parched from too much drinking and kissing. My stomach flips in a way that tells me “no sudden movements.” All the sheets are twisted around me like a cocoon. The only part of me I can really move is my eyes. There is no place I can look without seeing something Paul has given me. His gifts overwhelm my bachelor Melhos apartment, turning it into a middle-class façade, a comfortable getaway. Is it easier for him, I wonder, to fuck a whore with a big-screen TV and 400-thread-count sheets than to fuck a whore in an apartment sparsely furnished with alley-found chairs? I imagine the TV set tipping off my old wobbly dresser. I hear my expensive new clothes twitch on their hangers.

Beside me, Paul has kicked off the blankets. His too-perfect body clashes with my stripped, yellow-stained mattress. I wriggle an arm free of the tangled sheets to nudge him. “Wake up,” I say. “You have to go home now.”

_______________________

Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker ,and performance artist based in Vancouver. She is the co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005). Her award-winning, genderfuck docu-porn, Girl on Girl, was screened in eight countries and has been added to the gender studies curriculum at Concordia University. She has toured three times with the infamous U.S. tour, "The Sex Workers' Art Show." She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.

Photo credit: "The No. 5 Orange" © Steph Lim, 2009. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License.

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"Walls" - L. A. Fields

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:49:00 +0000

Tulsa looks out the window of the trailer, and in a quiet moment of reflection, considers the irony that they must dig deep holes to build tall buildings. Right now his construction site looks like a spacious grave with brightly colored rebar caps pointing accusations at the sky. Tulsa didn’t go to college; for him deconstruction is the opposite of what he does all day, so this type of philosophical musing only goes to show how disturbed his mood is right now, just waiting to do what he has to do.

This sort of preoccupation has come upon him before: years ago, for example, when he had built a flight of cement stairs in the middle of a building’s foundation, and for a while that was all there was. Just a set of steps leading to nowhere. Tulsa found himself lingering outside and moving around the thing like some photography faggot, watching it cast a toothy shadow that he knew was symbolic of something. That was an uncomfortable period in his life, right around the time he told his mother what he was. This won’t be as bad as that, nothing ever will be, but Tulsa still isn’t looking forward to this meeting. What can he do, though? This is the kind of stuff the foreman gets to deal with; it comes with this torn-up territory.

The problem is, is the new kid, with his big mouth. Most of the guys on Tulsa’s construction crew don’t care a rat’s flung anus that their boss and his boss go home in the same truck and presumably sleep in the same bed. God bless them, some of the most stubborn and old-fashioned guys have just gone ahead and convinced themselves that Tulsa and Terrence carpool to save gas. Nowhere else in his life has Tulsa seen ignorance work to such good advantage.

But this new kid, Kent Jaspers, he doesn’t seem to embrace their don’t ask, don’t tell policy. He keeps bitching about his light-footed bosses. On somebody else’s site it might be standard fare to question the foreman’s sexuality, but here it’s too true to joke about. Besides, Tulsa has a terrible sense of humor on the topic of his sexuality. If Jaspers doesn’t shut up, he might rip the blinders off this whole operation, and Tulsa isn’t looking to get chained to one of his own company trucks and dragged around behind it. So he has called Jaspers in for a little gum flap. Excuse the phrase, but they need to get a few things straight.

The kid knocks and comes in, sits down across the particle board desk from Tulsa without speaking. Tulsa can barely stand being in the trailer, and he’s only in here when he has paperwork to do or something he needs to set down. The floor is covered with the same carpet as the portable classrooms at his old high school, a joint he never did graduate from and doesn’t like to be reminded of. The synthetic smell, the fake paneling on the walls, and the way the fucking door sticks whenever it wants to: This room feels hostile to Tulsa, like the trailer knows he doesn’t belong here, doesn’t belong in charge, doesn’t really have the sack for it. And yet Tulsa has been cooped up in here all day, letting the office erode his self-confidence, all because of Jaspers.

Tulsa takes a second to look at the kid. The office doesn’t seem to like Jaspers either, which is at least something. He’s slumped like he knows he’s in trouble. He probably shares Tulsa’s distaste for offices, and that’s why he chose to work in a shitty, unstable industry that lets him labor outside. Tulsa can almost relate. He must have twenty years on the kid, but he hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be young. Tulsa used to be one of the angriest kids in a tri-county area, with a bad attitude and a real mouth on his face too. Matter of fact, if he were twenty years younger, he might have killed Jaspers over what he’s been saying. He’s certainly put people in the hospital for implying less than what Jaspers has been explicitly saying.

“You know what I wanna talk to you about?”

Jaspers shrugs, but doesn’t answer. Tulsa can’t tell whether that means Jaspers knows better than to say it out loud or whether he’s as dumb as his handsome face says he ought to be. Tulsa sighs.

“You see these walls?” he says, pointing around at the room. “They’re pretty thin, and I don’t know if you’ve heard yourself lately, but your voice tends to carry, just clear as a bell.” Really, Tulsa heard about the kid’s trash talk from another guy on the site, someone he met during his stint in juvenile detention when he was about Jaspers’ age. The guy was a reliable snitch back then too, God love him but never trust him, Amen. Jaspers gets the point Tulsa is picking at. He looks pissed off, wondering what he’s in for.

“Let me ask you something,” Tulsa says. “Terrence, Mr. Jackson to you, he owns this company. If he were on site all the time like I am, would you go around calling him a nigger?”

“Hey, I’m not a racist,” Jaspers says, jumping to his own defense. Tulsa holds up a hand to stop him.

“I don’t care if you are,” he says. “You’re allowed to be a racist. You’re allowed to hate fags. You’re just not allowed to talk shit on my build site, you hear me?”

Jaspers shuts up with a quiet snap of his mouth, like a guppy. How much Tulsa really likes the kid is sad, all things considered. He no more wants to hate Jaspers than he wants to hate his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.

“Am I fired?” Jaspers asks.

Tulsa bites down hard on a smirk. “No. But you are free to go. Next time,” he says just when Jaspers has his hand on the door. “I will fire you.”

Jaspers leaves in a huff, but Tulsa feels sure he’ll get over it. Friday is nearly over, and Jaspers has all weekend ahead of him to blow off steam and come back to work just fine. Tulsa can hope along with the best of the fools, in other words. Never say he is not an optimist.

He still has a few minutes until Terrence comes by to pick him up, and Tulsa spends the time holed up in the office, not wanting to poke a stick into the rattlesnake nest that the parking lot full of his employees looks to be at the moment. When Terrence’s truck pulls up, Tulsa is already standing. He locks up fast, hoping to keep Terrence from honking or even slowing down for long. He jumps in the passenger seat and asks Terrence to get moving before they even exchange pleasantries. Terrence can guess why.

“D’you talk to him, then?” Terrence wears the suit in this operation ever since he inherited the building business from his uncle. The both of them used to be bottom-rung workers at Jackson Constructs, and that is why Tulsa still feels like a phony sometimes in his hateful little office, knowing he only has that job because he’s fucking the boss, and that’s the truth.

“Yeah, I talked to him,” Tulsa says, putting a hand between his face and the window as they pass a couple of guys who are yammering near their open doors of their trucks. He never really got over the shame of what he is, but sometimes when he is with Terrence he can forget about that shame for a while, and so here is the choice he has made: Terrence in the driver’s seat, taking him home. “I think it’ll be okay,” Tulsa says.

“Then why we leaving so fast?”

“I think it’ll be okay by Monday.”

Terrence nods and they drive home in comfortable silence, Tulsa trying to cheer himself up with how good Terrence looks buttoned up and neatly cinched, even though he’s kind of getting to be an old bastard, too. Tulsa has always liked that Terrence has much bigger lips than he does, and not to be racist himself, they make kissing Terrence awfully nice and spacious. He’d like to kiss him now, but by mutual agreement they keep all that sort of thing inside, which means Tulsa has to wait until they get home.

The wait isn’t long by relative means, but it aches in him all the same. To take the edge off, Tulsa slides a hand over the vinyl of the seat, touching Terrence’s two-toned fingers and feeling them close on his hand like trap. The contact is little enough, but it keeps him going. Every day Tulsa doesn’t crawl beneath a cement pourer or fall from some scaffolding is a day he gets to ride home with Terrence, and that’s a good day, if you can’t already tell.

_______________________

L.A. Fields is a writer of gay fiction whose work will soon appear in the anthologies Cool Thing: The Best New Gay Fiction From Young American Writers and Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of The Closet. She is an undergraduate student in her home state of Florida, and someday intends to make a decidedly working-class living with her writing. She can be reached at all4laf@gmail.com.

Photo credit: “Construction Site” © Tanakawho, 2009. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License.

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"Whybeblue" - Sarah Nolan

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:27:00 +0000

28.3. 39.2. 54.7. 68.9.

76.4 flicker. 76.2 flicker. 76.8 flicker. 76.9 flicker. 76.9.

76.9. Fuck.

I am naked. Head to toe. Standing perfectly still. And Erect. (No, the other erect. For your ease of reference, I have, amongst other things, boobs. And rather big ones at that.)

Where was I? Oh yes, erect. I am standing erect. My feet are spread exactly the recommended 15 cm apart.

I always hold my breath. Like the audience watching the action movie at the part where the bad guy is standing behind the good guy, and we all know (except the good guy, of course) that at any minute, any minute now, the bad guy will lunge and the good guy—being the good guy, and therefore always plagued by that particular blind spot—will get stabbed or shot (though not fatally, because again, being the good guy, he can’t die just yet) and as much as we scream at the TV screen, as much as we will him to turn around, he is deaf to our calling.

Oh sorry, I digress. I have a tendency to do that. Especially when I am nervous. Back to it. Naked. Erect. Belly held in (so I can see the numbers). My elbows are horizontal to the ground. My chubby hands (white, like the rest of my body) are placed one on top of the other, the fist underneath is clenched, the other hand rests firmly on top. This is my morning ritual. My 43 seconds of pain that sustain me for the rest of the day (no pain no gain, right?). I once read in Cosmo that if you think about your weight more than eight times a day, you are more susceptible to having a dangerous eating disorder (as opposed to an un-dangerous eating disorder). So far, I have made four references to my weight; if my story stops in the next two paragraphs, I’ll be safe.

Mirror mirror on the wall, you are, alas, right after all. I am the fattest of them all. Another 3100 grams and life will not be worth living. It bewilders me, how, in the span of 8 hours—8 hours in which I sleep, following two rice-crackers and half a glass of water—I can gain a whole 200 grams. Did I not read, in last month’s edition of the factually-reliable-self-esteem-inflating-and-information-rich edition of Cosmo (e.g., how to blow a guy without smearing your lipstick) that we burn calories in our sleep? (Incidentally, we also burn calories when we fuck. Fuck a boy, that is. Because, god forbid, it’s not like girls can fuck each other, and in any event, if we actually could, I bet science would say you gain calories when you fuck a girl, because lesbos are all overweight anyhow.)

I step off the glass, pull on my underpants, struggle momentarily to clip on my bra, slip (no, that word is deceiving) wriggle, first, into my grey stockings and second (after watching the ladder run eagerly to what it has been misled to believe is heaven), into the standard grey skirt, and button up the white pleated shirt (trying this time not to watch the shirt as it pulls at my chest. I am ready. Ready to apply, with my podgy fingers, the concealer that She gave me (it’s not to cover up your blemishes, She says, but to enhance your features), draw black lines on each eyelid with child-like accuracy (to enhance the almond-like shape of your eyes), and paint on the cherry-berry lip gloss (to enhance the all-so-natural cherry-berriness of my lips, needless to say) (at which point, She kisses me slowly on my now-enhanced lips, before drawing shyly away).

I look in the mirror. A clown, who has run away from the circus because he let little children apply his make-up, looks back at me.

Now don’t get me wrong. My seemingly suicidal mentality and depressed tone is not caused by She. I was already a goner before She was ever in the picture. So please, do not fear. I am under control. (In fact, you will be proud to know that I took the first step and during comp class last week logged on to whybeblue.com.au (truth be told, it was the rhyme that got me; the advert guys really did the job on that one).). I am under control. I am under control not because I know about alternatives. Not because I know about the wheel of life, how it will turn again, how things will not stay like this forever. Not because the advert guys told me things would change for the better. Whybeblue.your.life.is.not.true (perhaps there’s a future for me in advertising), whybeblue.just.sniff.some.glue (I may be a natural).

No. If you can keep a secret, I’ll tell you why I am under control. Promise? Don’t send in the troops or try calling the Department of Community Services. (At this point it would be helpful if I could cite some convincing statistics about the incidence of suicide amongst queer teenagers who live in the burbs with no one to talk to, save random strangers who read short stories hundreds of kilometres away whilst eating takeaway Thai in their inner-city apartments; alas, I don’t have any.) But here’s my little secret. I am under control

because
I
have
the
girl.

And not just any girl. The most popular girl at school. Not just the most popular girl at school, but captain of the debate team. Not just the captain of the debate team, but the most successful breast-stroke swimmer in our school’s history (and not just the best breast-stroke swimmer, She’s also very good at the breast-stroke (if you know what I mean)).

She comes from a good home. Red brick, 2 stories, 5 bedrooms, 3 car spaces, 2 living rooms (one for the formal living, the other (just to have all bases of living covered) for the informal living). Her parents have a good marriage (there’s a man (tick), a woman (tick), a union of the above (tick) to the exclusion of all others (well, half a tick, but that’s a minor formality).

Of course, no one can know about us. It took her parents a long time to build that white picket fence, and I would not want you, some stranger, going out and destroying the familial bliss that is the glue that holds our great society together. No one can know, She said. Please, if you love me.

Of course, I said. Of course I love you. But I am not keeping it a secret just for her. I go to Fred-Nile-High where the word “condom” has been redacted from the official version of the Macquarie Dictionary, where Father Roberts declared at Mass last week that Sex in the City is a threat to the sanctity of marriage, and where (rumour has it) even Dick Cheney’s granddaughter has been refused entrance (you know, if you are a (n) or if you are related to or know any (adj.) people, you are most definitely contagious) (and, of course, if you dare use That Word (other than in its correct meaning of “blissfully happy”) you must, by virtue of some Freudian concoction, be (adj.)).

And so this is the fruit of our parents’ sacrifice. This is why they work their butts off. To send their kids to the school with the glossiest brochure and the most unfashionable uniform. But at least they know we’re safe. Because no-siree. Just like in Iran, there are definitely no (n, plural) here. Just some blissfully happy, hormone-high teenagers, a handful of sexually frustrated middle-aged, middle-class, white teachers, and the random balding pervert.

You know, people who say that life is so much easier when you’re younger are either (a) wearing glasses of a rosy hue; (b) medically blind; or (c) all of the above.

You may think it’s hard being a grown-up. Poor you. Forced to think about the impact of rising interest rates on your mortgage for your half a million dollar apartment. Stressed out how you are going to afford your next, de-stressing holiday. Fretting about whether or not your brother-in-law will like that coffee mug you bought him for his fortieth.

If you think the young folk of today have it easier because we have broadband connections and think that Stonewall is just another club on Oxford street, then you’re still a PC. Welcome to the world of Macs, my friend.

But just because we don’t remember what it feels like to be arrested for homosexual activity, just because we aren’t as socially stigmatised as you may once have been, just because in some young circles today, being gay is the new black, or just because some of us may mistake Bobby Goldsmith for the latest fragrance by Armani doesn’t mean that we do not struggle in our own way, nor that we don’t want to understand the struggle.

Because you know what? Despite appearances, The Closet is still The Closet. Even though it may have undergone some significant physical transformations and may perhaps no longer look like The Closet of old, The Closet of new is still suffocating. It may be smaller, it may be refurbished with glossier paint, or it may have fancier fittings. But The Closet is The Closet is The Closet.

If you will allow me to speak from experience, I can tell you that I am suffocating, at least. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Stop. Rewind. Play.

We are naked. She is standing behind me on the scale. Her legs are spread apart, cocooning mine, her arms around my belly, gently caressing. She is playful. Her fingers gently squeeze my nipples, and for the first time, I feel weightless. She kisses up the nape of my neck, along my jaw line, until her face is beside mine. You look like your mother, She says, just like I look like mine. I don’t respond. I know She would not understand. We are nothing alike. I live in a rented, government-owned family home (less the family), my mother serves Domino's two-for-one pizzas on Tuesday nights after returning from the night shift, the only VIP card we have is for the 24-hour Krispy Kreme, and our plastic-fantastic has all but expired (it’s official, even Aussie Home Loans can’t save us now).

I move my face away. Hey, She says, why don’t you believe me? I think you are wonderful—you’re smart, the smartest girl I know, you get me, and most importantly (She pauses) you make me come. I smile. That’s better, She says. I don’t say a word, only look at her and wonder whether She will look like her mother when She is older.

Her mother is a stunner. She has straight blonde hair, quick brown eyes, a slender figure, and a sharp dress sense. Her long neck is always embraced by a string of black pearls (a cliché, but not). She is a woman of the world. Perfect posture, perfect elocution, perfect everything. She looks like the woman in the Mercedes Benz ad. You know the type. A woman who had the foresight to christen her children with trendy names—the Ashleys, the Jessicas, the Melissas of the world. Why is it that our mothers never read the Book-of-baby-names-so-your-kids-will-be-popular-at-school?

How old is she? I ask.

Oh, she is 46, turning 47 in September, She says. Wow, she doesn’t look it. People always say she doesn’t look it, She says. Well, she wouldn’t, I think to myself. People with two living rooms never look their age.

But she doesn’t just wake up looking like that, She continues. My mother works hard to maintain it. Watches what she eats, mostly fresh fruit, steamed veggies, fish, whole grains. Pilates twice a week, yoga every other day and she jogs (as the male American voiceover says, nothing’s impossible if you’re wearing a-dee-das).

She doesn’t understand. She’s not like me. She’s not like Susannah. Susannah, the girl next door. Susannah who understood. That is, until she suddenly discovered a desire for cock. And upon this epiphany (which, funnily enough, coincided with the Government’s announcement of its pre-election promises) she fucked Adam. Now there’s a baby, Eve (not to mention an extra 8 kilos). That’s what you call a bonus. Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister.

She is not like Susannah at all. She would not leave me for some overrated, government-subsidised cock. That would be cheap, and girls like She are not cheap.

I know you must, at this point (if you haven’t already done so), be thinking of me as just another overweight, obsessive, hormone-driven, cliché-hugging, pimply teenage girl more concerned about her clit-driven desires than accurate story-telling. The first five allegations are true. I make no attempt to deny them. But I fervently deny the last one. I am not more concerned about my clit-driven desires than accurate storytelling. (For the sake of clarity (and in furtherance of this point) that last sentence was not a denial of my clit-driven desires. Those remain.)

But as for accurate story telling, all the above descriptions of She are facts. Just as it is a fact that my hair is brown, my arms are flabby, and that I live in a weatherboard house with my dysfunctional mother. I am that overweight, obsessive, hormone-driven, cliché-hugging, pimply teenager (complete with clit) but I am not that overweight, obsessive, hormone high, cliché-hugging, pimply teenager-with-clit who puts She up on a pedestal and thereby destroys all claims to journalistic integrity founded before the Magna Carta.

You see, if I were indeed that dishonest-putter-upper-on-pedestals, I would say something outrageous like, every time She looks at me with her hazel eyes, we have entire conversations without uttering a word. Or I would say something like, every time She flicks her hair back in geography class, She sends flecks of love my way. Or her love for me has given meaning to all those sappy boy-band love songs and amazing grace, I once was blind but now I see.

Stop. Rewind. Play.

Naked. Standing together on the glass scales. She behind, I in front. She has no idea how much I want her at this moment. She speaks into my shoulder, but all I can hear are the mounds of her breasts pressing into my back and the loudness of her slender fingers playfully weaving their way downwards. I am aching.

I hurriedly unbutton my grey skirt, pull my stockings down to my knees, lift my hands towards the ache.

Oh, quit it, or you’ll be late. And you’ll miss it when the 8:37 bus arrives and She disembarks with The Jessica and The Ashley. You’ll miss the tidying of wavy brown ringlets just before She slips into roll call and you’ll miss your ribcage giving way and you’ll forget where your heart resides.

Rewind. Stop. Play.

I pull up my stockings, fix my skirt, grab my blue backpack, and run out of the house to catch my bus.

_______________________

Sarah Nolan is a lawyer whose desire to avoid having all creative energies sapped slowly from her by the day-to-day monotony that is corporate life, has produced this piece, her first published work of fiction. Born and raised in a working-class suburb of Sydney, she was encouraged to dig her way out of the working-class hole, only to find that sitting for double-digit hours in an office with a Harbour view is just another working class of itself. She can be reached at peni_arcade@yahoo.com.au.

Photo credit: “Weighting Game” © Natalie Johnson. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License Site”

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"National Blank Book" - Sally Bellerose

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:21:00 +0000

A factory built of brick, surrounded by canals, National Blank Book produced paper. Blank, lined, bound by the gross and by the ton. Spiraled, graphed, embossed, paper. Raw pulp was pressed into diaries, pads, date books, birth, and death books, in shades of white and every color.

Every girl wanted to work a line with color.

On Thursday when the rain came the girls working the line were glad. Nice weather on a work day meant trouble, bent our minds toward sabotage; tripped fire alarms, cardboard jammed in punch presses.

The foreman, carrying his clipboard, wanted workers for the week-end, checked names of girls who would, x’d names of girls who wouldn’t. My cousin Jeannie, afraid of being x’d, said yes. Outside was mid-day, but already early evening dark. Inside eight foot lengths of fluorescent lights hung from cable above the assembly line. Rain slapped the roof. Wind spat water on twelve foot windows long since sealed shut. We heard the downpour through holes of metal punching paper.

Cutting, packing, all that product moving: conversation was not possible. Every girl was left to her own thoughts. I thought about my cousin, Jeannie. She seemed so old to me. Jeannie, twenty-eight, with ten years seniority, had gotten me this job. She stood now at the end of the line sorting guest books, throwing the faulty into a bin, to be sold at the company store for cut-rates.

Jeannie, timid and kind, looking forty, scared to use the bathroom without an escort. Afraid of being alone with the rats that sometimes scurried when the stall doors opened, or worse, stood in a corner, beady eyed, watching.

The foreman took me off assembly to stack my cousin’s misaligned and mangled cast-offs. A plum job, off alone by the big dirty windows, working at my own pace, which was fast or I would not have been chosen. One factory girl among one-hundred allowed to labor alone until a rat appeared and sat on the deep sill, gnawing a slice of bread dragged from the lunch room. Somewhere far off, a crack followed a boom. Not the excitement of thunder and lightening, just factory noises from the second floor.

The rat and I stared each other down, glanced away just long enough to get our separate jobs done. The lunch whistle blew. Paper stopped moving. The rat gnawed on. The rat’s teeth were yellow. Its fur was slick and wet. Desperate to check my fear, I clapped my hands. When the rat did not move, I decided it was factory-deaf.

Eighteen: my hearing still intact, I never felt sorrier for any living creature.

Except perhaps myself. It was an accident of birth that either one of us was here.

The rat showed its teeth and I showed mine.

Ten years seniority and too afraid to say no to working Sundays or to pee unaccompanied scared me more than yellow teeth and slick wet fur. All I wanted was outside that factory. I was hungry. It was lunch-time. I was trained to be quick, but my left hand inched toward the crowbar slowly.

There were many rats, and I feel sorry still, but once I held the metal, cold and solid, I was damned if I’d leave my cousin, alone in that paper mill, while that one rat lived.

_______________________

Sally Bellerose’s writing most often involves themes of queer identity, illness, and class. She has received various grants and fellowships including an NEA, The Barbara Deming Fiction Prize, and The Rick DeMartinis Award. Her recent work can be read in Rock and Sling, The Binnacle, The Journal of Humanistic Anthropology, The Boston Literary Magazine, Passager, Cutthroat, Saint Ann’s Review, Memoir (and), and Per Contra. She can be reached at sbellerose@comcast.net.

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"Counting Tips" - John Gilgun

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:03:00 +0000

My mother came home from work,
sat down at the kitchen table
and counted her tips, nickel by nickel,
quarter by quarter, dime by dime.
I sat across from her reading Yeats.
No moonlight graced our window
and it wasn't Pre-Raphaelite pallor
that bleached my mother's cheeks.
I've never been able to forget
the moment she said--
interrupting The Lake Isle of Innisfree—
"I told him to go to hell."
A Back Bay businessman
had held back the tip, asking,
"How much do you think you're worth?"
And she'd said, "You can go to hell!"
All evening at the Winthrop Room she fed
stockbrokers, politicians, mafioso capos.
I was eighteen, a commuter student at BU,
riding the MTA to classes every day
and she was forty-one in her frilly cap,
pink uniform, and white waitress shoes.
"He just laughed but his wife was there
and she complained and the boss fired me."
Later, after a highball, she cried
and asked me not to tell my father
(at least not yet) and Ben Franklin
stared up from his quarter,
looking as if he thought she deserved it,
and Roosevelt, from his dime, reminded her
that she was twenty years shy of Social Security.
But the buffalo on the nickel, he--
he seemed to understand.

_______________________

John Gilgun is the author of Everything That Has Been Shall Be Again: The Reincarnation Fables of John Gilgun (Bieler Press, 1981), Music I Never Dreamed Of (Amethyst, 1989), The Dooley Poems (Robin Price, 1991), From the Inside Out (Three Phase, 1991), Your Buddy Misses You (Three Phase, 1995), and, with Warren Norgaard, There Is A Tomorrow: A Collection of Dialogues in Prose and Poetry (FIERCE Concepts Publications, 2007).

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"What Work Is" - John Gilgun

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:27:00 +0000

Work is letting someone
pound your thumb
with a hammer
because it feels so good when they stop.

Only they don't
stop.

_______________________

John Gilgun is the author of Everything That Has Been Shall Be Again: The Reincarnation Fables of John Gilgun (Bieler Press, 1981), Music I Never Dreamed Of (Amethyst, 1989), The Dooley Poems (Robin Price, 1991), From the Inside Out (Three Phase, 1991), Your Buddy Misses You (Three Phase, 1995), and, with Warren Norgaard, There Is A Tomorrow: A Collection of Dialogues in Prose and Poetry (FIERCE Concepts Publications, 2007).

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"Ben's Eyes" -- Louie Crew

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:02:00 +0000

Mooned © Kat Jewel Hawk. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License.

I loved Grandmama’s. I loved the tin roof, the smell of the wood stove, the taste of the metal dipper, the tiny roof above the well, the tomatoes we picked and ate off the vine, the rope swing that hung on the tall hickory, but most of all I loved Ben’s eyes.

Long before six others and I integrated the high school in Stewartville, Georgia, or before I became a drum-major and broke the heart of the white football captain, back before I was a teenager, back then we lived on an Air Force Base in Texas, but I used to spend two months of every summer at Grandmama’s house in Clinton County in south Georgia.

My thirteen-year-old sister, Hattie, teased me, calling me her “country kid-brother” in front of everyone. She went to Georgia with me the first time, but didn’t like the single-room house, the bed she had to share with Grandmama, the goats in the yard, the weeding and the hoeing, collard greens every day of the week, no radio, and the six-mile walk, each way, to the movies. She stood it for about three weeks and then cried until Grandmama let her return early to “Texas civilization and the twentieth century,” as Hattie boasted to her girl friends on the air base.

Ben was my older cousin, sixteen or seventeen, and he had gorgeous, round eyes with long lashes, like the kind women pay to have made up false. Ben’s face was a richer black than mine, with not even a hint of tan. He had generous cheeks and a lean chin. His strong red lips couldn’t conceal his slight smile as I stared at him for minutes at a time, not just when we rested in the shade to guzzle water from the mason jar, but even while I rode with him on the rented single-seater, plowing Grandmama’s field. I probably wasn’t much help, but he made me feel as though I was.

We watched for any rocks down the row. “Go get it, Cleveland,” he’d say, and I’d jump down, run ahead, and put the rock into the big drum we’d hung on the back of the tractor. At the end of the row, we’d add them to the border that surrounded the field, built on for more than fifty years. Yet the field continued to yield new chunks of rock with each plowing.

“God makes them during the winter,” Ben told me.

Ben had dropped out of school at fourteen, but anything he said convinced me. Most of the time he just sat silent, concentrating on the noisy tractor. Still short enough not to block his view, I braced myself on the narrow metal strip meant for his feet, and leaned against Ben’s legs, just looking and looking and looking.

Ben was Grandmama’s only help. Ben’s mother and father both had been killed in separate automobile wrecks, a week apart, when Ben was thirteen. “Fancy. Mighty fancy,” my mother used to tell me about them, “but a bit dangerous, too.”

Grandmama kept a picture of Ben’s mama and daddy on the chifforobe near where she slept. Ben’s mama, my daddy’s sister, a pleasantly fat woman with a broad, pretty face, had sung the blues for black farmers at backwoods clubs all over South Georgia. His daddy, lean and less noticeable, was more-or-less a tag-along, or so I thought at the time.

Later, when I was at Stewartville High and no longer went to the farm for summers, I learned that Ben’s daddy’s accident had happened ‘cause the Clinton County police drove him off the road at high speed. They used the six cases of bonded whiskey in his trunk to prove he was into “big crime.”

Ben’s sister and brother had already grown up and moved away when the two accidents happened. The sister worked as a hair-burner up in Macon, and the older brother worked for a packing house in Tallahassee.

Ben didn’t talk about his people much, nor did he seem interested when Grandmama would answer my questions. While Grandmama and I cleaned up after supper, he usually sat over by the kerosene lamp looking at a Jet magazine, or studied his mustache with a pair of trimmers and a small hand mirror.

“You gonna break some gal’s heart iffen you don’t stop trying to be so pretty,” Grandmama would tease him. “God done already give you sexy eyes. Why don’t you leave well enough alone?”

Ben would laugh and go back to his grooming.

After we’d put everything away, we sometimes lolled around on the porch or swung on the hickory tree. At the top of the hickory, Ben had built a tree house back when he was my age, but I never got to see the inside of it. Long before I ever came to visit, Bessy Craddock, the girl who lived at the next house down the road, fell off a weak limb and broke her arm. After that, Grandmama laid down the law: the hickory tree was only for swinging.

Sometimes I seem to convolute all our evenings on that swing into one, but one in particular is distinct for its sunset alone—dark reds and oranges, and then a streak of royal purple that appeared just about as fast as Ben blinked his eyes. He sat on the seat and I sat in his lap, nose almost touching nose, my legs tight around his hips, his large hands clasping my ribs, my arms thrown loosely over his shoulders, as we swung higher and higher and higher. I did not grasp. I knew he held me.

Grandmama went to bed early, got up early. Sunrise. Sunset. That’s what her “early” meant. “You young ‘uns can do as you please, but if you want to live as long as I have, you’d better be payin attention. Leastaways, don’t disturb my rest with no kerosene lamp. Those folks’ pictures in Jet seem a bit highfallutin anyways....” She would natter on until she gave us the cue: “Now I’ll get into my night clothes.”

Ben and I would dutifully step outside. When we came back in, we’d make our way in the dark to our own side of the room. Even without a moon, starlight sufficed. Each of us had a chair to hang our clothes on. I slipped into some short pajamas Mama had made for me, but hot as Georgia summer nights are, Ben slept in his birthday suit.

Some nights, after we’d been on the swing, Ben wouldn’t come to bed at once, but would go down the road to see Bessy and her brothers. One night a storm came up unexpectedly after he’d left. There was thunder and lightning something terrible. Grandmama snored through it all, but I lay awake until well after midnight, listening to the rain batter our tin roof, looking at the green hands on Grandmama’s wind-up alarm clock, wondering whether Ben was dry.

I awoke again when I heard the tractor revving in the dark. He had stayed in the Craddock’s barn until the lightning stopped, but had come back to put the tractor under the shed.

A few minutes later, the room deadly dark without so much as starlight, I felt cool air rush over me. He even sounded wet. I heard him sniffle as he closed the door. I heard him drip as he unlaced his shoes. I heard him peel off his socks. I heard a chair scrape the floor as he tiptoed past it. I heard the zipper. I heard his buckle jiggle on the wooden floor. I heard him breathe and knew he must be arcing his T-shirt over his shoulders. I heard his underwear ping at his knees.

Then an interminable silence. Even under the covers I shivered, knowing he stood there wet, exposed, although all I could see was the shadow of his blackness against the slightly lighter darkness of the room.

I feared my eyes might glow in the dark like the hands on the clock, that he might know that I stared, so I slitted them. I held my breath to hear him breathing, slowly, evenly. A board squeaked. I expected our bed to tilt under his weight, but still he stood there.

When he did get in, he moved to me at once, not after he was asleep, as he usually did. His wet chest sent goose bumps down my back. His thick thighs seemed a bit drier at my hips. He sighed pleasantly through his nose as I warmed him. “Sleep well, my little heater, sleep well,” he whispered softly.

I didn’t love the outhouse. That’s about the only place where I ever thought of Hattie and her “Texas civilization” during the entire summer. Hattie had made it worse by telling me, “Snakes lay down there in the holes just waiting to bite any ass black enough and delicious enough to sit there, particularly if they decides to sit there too long. And the spiders. You just look up at the ceiling. They be waitin for you, country bumpkin!”

Mama had told me I should try not to use nasty public restrooms except for liquids, and to plan my days so I’d be near home when I had to go. So the first time I went to Georgia, with Hattie’s warning in mind, I got it in my mind that the outhouse was a public restroom. When I peeked in and saw the two-seater, that cinched it. Besides, the shack stood separate from Grandmama’s house. How much more public could you get? I decided I’d wait until I got back to Texas before I’d go again, except for liquids.

By the third day, I must have looked mighty ashen. After supper Grandmama asked, “Boy, you feelin all right?”

“Yessum,” I lied.

“You don’t look it. Have you vomited or something?”

“Nome.”

“Ben, you be out there with him all day on the tractor. Has this child seemed sick to you?”

“The boy probably just taking time to get used to eatin real food,” Ben said, lost in Jet .

“You regular?” Grandmama asked.

Hattie snickered. “Ain’t you been goin down with the creepy, crawly snakes every day?” she asked. She had yet to throw her screaming fit to escape south Georgia.

“Hush your mouth, girl, or I’ll creepy crawly you,” Grandmama said. Ben laughed like he was on my side. I bowed my head.

“Answer me, boy,” Grandmama said gently.

She finally got out of me that I had been too scared to go, and she wouldn’t hear a word of my explanation that Mama had told me never to use a public restroom.

“Ben, you go down there with him and don’t either of you come back until he’s done a job, you hear? Land’s sake, all this Texas civilization will be the death of him for sure.”

I didn’t think I could do it with someone else there. At least the restroom at school had partitions for those that dared to use them. Here Ben’s thigh touched mine and I nearly choked on the cigar he lit “to scare everything away.”

It began to get dark fast. “Take your time, Cleveland,” he said. We left the door open for the clean air, and looked far down the field where we’d plowed all day long.

“I didn’t know that you is circumcised,” Ben said.

“What?”

“I didn’t know that you is circumcised,” he repeated.

“What’s that?”

He reached over and touched the head. “That,” he said.

“What’s ‘circumcised’? Ain’t you?”

“Nope. See.”

He held his up into the twilight. “Pull back the skin like this,” he said. Yours been cut that way by the doctor soon as you born.

I looked at his, then at mine. “Why the doctors do that to me?” I asked.

“Beats me,” he said. “Must have something to do with Texas Civilization.”

I did my job easily now.

“Don’t be fraid, Cleveland. Just tell me when you want me here witchya. Besides, see this stick?” He reached just outside the door for an old broom handle he kept there. “You just take this pole and beat on the side before you ever come in here. That’ll scare away anything that might harm you. Don’t you listen to Hattie or everwho talks that way. Nobody can’t make no sissie outta you.”

I didn’t fear the outhouse anymore, though I still waited most times until I knew he was going so I could go at the same time.

I liked being with Ben even better outdoors on the tractor, leaning against his lap, or in the swing, or taking a break in the shade at the far end of the field, or having him snuggle up after he thought I’d gone to sleep.

One day right there on the tractor I took mine out and studied it again. “You think they done something bad to it?”

“They didn’t hurt it none. It’s as good as mine,” Ben said.

I felt him grow stiff. I turned and tried to straddle him the way I did in the swing.

“Just a minute, child, lessen we kill ourselves on this here machine.” He idled it at the end of the row. Far at the other end, clean white bedclothes whipped in the sun. In the shade I looked long into Ben’s eyes before and after I inspected uncircumcision.

Before Daddy left the Air Force, we were stationed back in Georgia. When Grandmama fell sick, one of my aunts moved in to take care of her, ‘cause Ben was away in the army. They didn’t have time or space for children then, and I was too busy with my paper route to laze away a summer in the country.

By the time I took Home Ec at Stewartville High, my sisters and brothers had gotten used to me, and were plenty proud when I brought home a national prize for one of my recipes. Besides, I led the parade and had the captain of the football team sneaking over to see me four nights a week.

After I graduated, I took up modeling in the North. I heard Ben had married—not Bessy Craddock, but a jazz singer named Eula Hines, from Macon. My Mama said Eula was as much a looker as Ben’s mama had been, and that she and Ben lived just as dangerously as Ben’s mama and daddy.

I hadn’t seen Ben for some eighteen years when Grandmama died. Neighbors and family all came for the service. They brought at least twenty kinds of deviled eggs, ten styles of fried chicken, and as many more of cornbread and collard greens, plus platter after platter of other good eatins. They laid it out on long picnic tables in the pecan grove between the church and the cemetery. Eula’s band played gospel music all day inside, before the sermon and the burial in the late afternoon. Since the church was too small to hold all of us at once, we went to and fro, from feast to funeral, in shifts.

About one o’clock, Ben himself arrived. He had filled out, but he was still muscle, not fat. I recognized him first by his eyes.

“She was a good woman, Cleveland, a good woman. A real loss to the world,” he said.

Everybody came over to greet him. Later, when he went to get himself something to eat, I eased over to the same side of the food table so I could strike up a conversation. I wanted to get off somewhere to ourselves, maybe alone in Grandmama’s room, so I could tell him how much it meant to have learned about myself from someone who loved me, who was gentle, who taught me how to scare away the snakes. Before I met my lover, I discovered many people, women and men, who didn’t seem to know that you can also love the person you hold through the night.

After I hit puberty, I started using a particular word to describe myself, but I never thought Ben was like me. I did know that he loved me when we did those things together.

“You remember the outhouse?” I asked him.

“Cleveland, you were one scared little boy, yes, indeed!” he said, and moved on down the table to get some ribs.

“You remember the swing and the tractor?”

“What about ‘em?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Cleveland, you’ve grown up a fine young man. I always said you’d go further than most of us. You may have started out scrawny, but like the turtle and the rabbit, you passed us all!”

“You really don’t remember?”

“Hey, little brother, what happened a long time ago is not important. Don’t go troubling yourself.” He forked a deviled egg, nibbled it, and lifted his chin to catch some yolk.

“Man, it sure is good to see you!” He said it like he meant it.

With his eyes, he indicated that perhaps we ought to mingle with the others. I could find no way to thank him.

_______________________

Louie Crew, 71, is the author of 1,888 published poems and prose works. He is emeritus professor of English at Rutgers University. He lives in East Orange, NJ, with Ernest Clay, his husband since 1974. “Ben’s Eyes” first appeared in The James White Review 5.3 (1988): 11-12; then was collected in Gay Nineties: Contemporary Gay Fiction (Phil Willkie & Greg Baysans, Eds., Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1991, pp. 101-107).

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"End of Shift" - Kevin Shaw

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:48:00 +0000

At the end of our last training shift, we ride
the elevator from production
to packing. The flashing orange light lapping
our four new faces, the skin
free of the factory’s traces—the grimace
the older guys carry in a glance.
Only our words seem capable of aging us,
we curse until we recognize our fathers.
The loudest one asks me,

“If you could fuck any chick here
who would it be?”

and I see the question for what it really is: training.
Crafting the response will take the same
muscular precision I’ve practiced all day,
my ability to stop and clean the machinery
without losing a finger. I think of saying

that no one here is worth a look, that I’m here
for the money not the women. I consider
the easier answers, a list of blondes,
so that the guys can tell whether I’m a tits or legs
kind of man.

I think, briefly, of trapping them with the truth
in the elevator’s cage. Telling them in our own
blunt tongue what kind of tail I’d rather be chasing—
my desire for something broader than the most
storied blonde in the building. Like daring their own
wayward glances in the locker-room
with a harder stare in this orange blink of light—

but today we learned about Quality Assurance.
That daily art of remaking expectation, each of us
contributing our work and devotion—
the guy from corporate said we put ourselves into

the product. So I shrug, and offer
the most unlikely name
for a joke at an ugly woman’s expense. I am not myself,
but I pass the test.

_______________________

Kevin Shaw is a poet based in London, Ontario, Canada and is currently a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario. His poetry is forthcoming in The Malahat Review (Summer 2008). He blogs at www.kevshaw.com.

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"Going from ZERO to SEXY on High Caloric Queer Overdrive" - CAConrad

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:52:00 +0000

Bacchus - Giardini Boboli, Florence. © W. Ricketts, 2008.

“Beware the terrible simplifiers."
—Jacob Burckhardt

An old friend asks me, “Doesn’t it disturb you that men only want to be with you because you’re fat?”

“NO! I LOVE IT! How about your boyfriend? Would he like it if you got fat?”

“NO! He would LEAVE ME!”

“Ah, I SEE! Doesn’t it disturb you that he only wants to be with you because you’re skinny?”

My friend laughs, “OK, YOU GOT ME!” His mouth waters as I drink my delicious chocolate milk shake. He LOVES chocolate milk shakes, but can only drink them vicariously through me. While others live in fear at the gym, I’m eating a cream-filled cannoli with a smiling man’s hard cock hidden inside. Our Love truly is free BECAUSE it’s unsanctioned! The Joy of Gay Sex has no chapter for us, and I’m GLAD! FUCK THE EXPERTS and their claustrophobic parameters!

You don’t know TRUE FREEDOM until you don’t want what they want you to want! Coming from white trash has advantages people with money don’t seem to understand. For years, I’ve watched friends whose parents are doctors and bankers live in FEAR (even while rebelling) that they don’t achieve enough, aren’t good enough, clean enough, and especially NOT thin enough. In my family, we never discussed the quest for a socially acceptable body-fat ratio; we were too consumed with bill collectors and police reports and how the judge would react.

When I escaped my rural poverty for life in Philadelphia, I was still a kid, skinny and cute, and I made friends with guys my age who were turning tricks for easy cash. My first boyfriend in the city was a coke dealer who kept me out of the skin trade, kept me in parties, kept me high and frantic. When he went to prison, I was lucky to fall in with a group of vegans and macrobiotic spiritualists. For ten years my life revolved around eating well, animal rights, and paganism. They were a beautiful ten years.

When I worked at Giovanni’s Room Bookstore, my diet was more vegetarian than vegan, and I started to gain weight. Customers had plenty to say about that, and so did my faggot friends: “You BETTER BE CAREFUL. You’re getting FAT!” One regular customer who had a crush on me came into the store drunk one evening to stroke my cheek and tell me, “You know, sweetheart, if you lost forty pounds you’d be my ideal!” And I said, “Oh really? How much do you weigh?” He beat his chest, “I’M A HUNDRED SIXTY POUNDS OF PURE MUSCLE!” I nodded and said, “Well, sweetheart, if you lost a hundred sixty pounds you’d be MY ideal!” He didn’t get it.

They didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t care—and never have cared—about my looks. What they ALSO didn’t seem to register was that there are A LOT of faggots who LOVE fat men! And there are precious few of us fat faggots to go around. While my friends were warning me to BE CAREFUL, lest I lose Love, they were missing the simple fact that Love is for EVERYONE! At the bookstore, the guys buying the fat porn like Bulk Male and all the other blubber-zines were starting to give me the Glad Eye. Hmm, that was something new. I felt adventurous and titillated.

Suddenly, my dance card was very full! Being an openly fat gay man made me an overnight ROCK STAR! We’re a secret, SPECIALIZED clan of faggots and it’s quite possible we really do HAVE MORE FUN! My men bake me chocolate cupcakes and prepare my favorite buckwheat noodles with mushrooms and ginger sauce. They indulge me, and I indulge them, full, fully loved. Food and sex in long, blissful nights has plucked my fat flower and released me in ways I never knew when I was thinner and dated men who were OBSESSED with thinness.

I know faggots who are only attracted to the fat Elvis, and you feel the soft purr as they talk about His chubby neck and breasts. Some people get angry when debating how long Elvis was fat, furiously whittling it down to six months as though the dead are anything but thin. Let me assure you that a photograph of the fat Elvis will not evaporate from your wall in six months. Yes, you can jerk off to it for the rest of your life. I give you my word!

Being simultaneously outside queer and straight norms is liberating, and constantly exciting in ways I never anticipated! In the tedious, predictable world all around us, we have it OUR WAY—sexually as well as politically! Outside the domain of the respectable, the unjust world is always clearest.

When I was invited by a queer student group to give a reading from my book, Deviant Propulsion at their college recently, it was young faggots who opposed my arrival. One young man, no more than twenty, angrily confronted me, “The things you write don’t make room for discussion or acceptance! My parents love and accept me, but they would NEVER accept the things you write in your book!” Hmm. “How weird to be in this position,” I thought—was he really telling me I need to WRITE different books so people’s parents would love them? I decided to say what I felt was best to say. “First of all, your parents SHOULD love and accept you, so STOP giving them BROWNIE POINTS for something they SHOULD do! Second, THIS IS YOUR WORLD TOO, stop walking on egg shells, man. Take up some space!”

Too many young faggots today compromise way too much for the golden carrot of acceptance. When I was twenty everybody hated us, and in many ways I realize how great that time was for me. NEVER ONCE have I written a poem or anything else with the Love and Acceptance of others in mind! Being hated kept me true to my creative PUNCH! How to get younger faggots to realize: living in a time of assimilation doesn’t mean we must abandon anger and rebellion! We need to be even angrier and more rebellious and creative so we can change the grim, apathetic direction we’re headed in!

Being unapologetically unacceptable has given me the eyes to see how respectable faggots are clearing our way for the quiet death of total assimilation. The horrors of former President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy continue to reverberate with what the respectable faggots are aiming us toward: the horrifying sense that we NEED TO serve, we NEED TO sacrifice, in order to be LOVED and accepted. FUCK ALL THAT, I SAY! Being queer in this brutally homophobic world has been MORE THAN ENOUGH SACRIFICE!

The PBS queer TV news show, In the Life, broadcast an episode about a queer ex-soldier. He said that he was angry after 9/11 and went back into the closet to join the army so he could heap vengeance on the bad guys. But where did he wind up? Baghdad! AT NO POINT in this man’s story does he stop to scratch his head and ask, “What the FUCK am I doing in Iraq!? Were there Iraqis involved in the 9/11 attacks that I didn’t know about!?”

Then, of course, comes the predictable conclusion: he is discovered as a faggot and sent home, and we’re supposed to feel outraged and sympathetic that he can’t proudly cover his machine gun with rainbow stickers. In the Life would rather focus on the UNFAIR OPPORTUNITIES heterosexuals have to carpet-bomb foreigners and pillage their national resources—another example of our inability to make it clear, through the mainstream GLBT media, that ANY positive conversation about “gays in the military” is in fact a positive conversation about the military, leaving us unable to negotiate a way to speak out against the war in Iraq and against the million-and-counting death toll.

With the pro-gay military naturally comes the streamlined, pro-military gay body, obsessively perfected, a machine for the good of the state. It’s never been more unacceptable to be fat, and no one knows this more than fat faggots like me. But being fat these days isn’t just unacceptable; it’s seen as dangerous to the very movement for acceptance. Fat bodies do not fit into military-issue battle fatigues! “Gays in the military” is a conflation of all other aspects of the queer search for acceptance because it’s THE ONE thing THE ONE president ever offered us. And we took to it like it was THE LOVE we’d all been waiting for.

In the end, what Clinton was saying with “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was that faggots must kill proudly in the closet for love of country to be granted love from country. Our problem comes from asking for acceptance from people who don’t deserve us instead of DEMANDING our space on Earth in the first fucking place! Well, FUCK BILL CLINTON and FUCK THE MILITARY! I don’t accept THEM!

Now, if you don’t mind I have a date with a delicious smartass with a trick jaw who’s on his way over to my place with freshly made chocolate pudding and a can of whipped cream! I’M HUNGRY FROM HATING PRESIDENTS!

_______________________

The son of white trash asphyxiation, CAConrad is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull, Press, 2006), The Book of Frank (Chax, 2008), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX, 2008), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School, 2008). He blogs at at www.CAConrad.blogspot.com. His other projects include Dear Mr. President, Philly Sound: New Poetry, and (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises, among others. He is also one of the original authors in the anthology, Everything I Have Is Blue (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005).

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"Lowest Of The Low" - Keith Banner

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:23:00 +0000

Slurpee ©Tom Magliery. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License.

Hell I don’t know. Barney’s gone. I just heard his car door slam. I stick a frozen pizza in, I go out on the patio, smoke while it nukes. There’s that March sky with cottage-cheese for clouds and bony trees around the half-frozen field and beyond that the backs of a McDonald’s and a Walgreen’s and the United Dairy Farmers where I work.

Barney’s Tercel is stopped at the stoplight by the bank.

It doesn’t matter. He told me upfront he wasn’t into me, and I kind of liked that. It took the pressure off, and when I needed him, he was there, bored and glassy-eyed, embarrassed by how much I felt.

The other day he said his wife wanted him back.

“So you’re not queer anymore?” I said.

“I guess not.” He laughed. “She said she’s pregnant.”

I laughed too.

This is one of those deluxe frozen pizzas. Not bad. I eat half the thing and I smoke some more on the patio, with the TV on in my living room. I can hear the wheel of fortune and the overemotional audience. This apartment has some pretty nice amenities for being so crappy—a fireplace I don’t use, brand new wall-to-wall carpet, this patio with sliding glass doors and vertical blinds. A washer-dryer combo in the bathroom. Too bad it doesn’t work.

There’s a knock on my door while I’m peeing. I yell that I’ll be there in a sec. And of course as I finish, I whip up a whole new fantasy of Barney’s Tercel doing a U-turn. Barney out there in the foyer next to the row of rusty robot-looking mailboxes.

I open it, and there’s Tiffany, the teenage girl from upstairs.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She wears a midriff, Britney-looking thing and thick mascara, purple streaks in her hair. You can kind of tell that she’s looking for something more out of life.

“Sorry for what?” I ask.

We don’t talk that much. One time I helped her carry groceries in, and her and her mom’s place was decorated with all kinds of funky shit, like a big cream-colored vinyl sectional sofa and ostrich feathers and an abstract painting with sparkling lights embedded in it they told me they got on vacation.

“I have a favor to ask.”

“Come on in.”

I am not in the mood, but there you go. My boyfriend of three months just left me. I am a forty-two-year-old homosexual who day-manages a convenience-store. I have a major bald spot. I bite the crap out of my fingernails.

Tiffany and I sit down in the living room with Entertainment Tonight on.

“I need a lift over to my boyfriend’s place. Mom’s gone, and I don’t have money for a cab, and it’s just I really need to see him. He’s been weird all day, calling me and begging me to come over, and I really think he’s completely depressed, you know? I’m afraid of what he might do.” She smiles, like it’s a joke but it’s not.

I do know “depressed.” Hell I know it intimately. I look right at her and I can feel tears starting in my own eyes, just because she asked me, and I notice how she has a gut on her, poking out from the bright orange T-shirt she’s chopped in two to make herself look like a star. That white little belly breaks my heart.

“Let me get my keys.”

She smiles great big. I’ve seen that boy before. Skinny as a rail with a wiry goatee and always in the same black T-shirt and pants hanging down so you can see the Old Navy label on his underwear.

“You really are nice,” she says.

I don’t answer. I saran my pizza, I get my keys, and we are off. It’s dark, and the little town is dead all around us, except for the drive-thrus. I look in at the convenience store I manage, and there’s Monique, that one woman I can’t stand, running register, frowning like a mental patient, which she happens to be sometimes I bet.

One time, Monique comes up to me at the change of shift and she says, “I saw that sticker on your car.” Her expression was so serious as to be comical.

“What sticker?”

“That gay sticker.” Monique frowned like a spy. She wasn’t a Bible-thumper either. Just pissed and on the prowl for a target.

“Yeah,” I said. It was a rainbow bumper-sticker Barney and me got when we went to Key West the month before.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get your brains bashed in? My cousin’s gay, and he lives in Indianapolis and he got beat up last year. Him and his little boyfriend. I told him you can’t be holding hands no matter what’s on TV, Will and Grace or not, people can’t take it.”

The pitch in her voice was going higher. There’s a certain kind of pleasure certain kind of people take in letting other people know how dangerous it is for them to be alive. Monique had that going on big-time.

“I’d peel that thing off if I was you. I mean. Come on.”

I let it pass. I laughed nervously, like I really was scared, and secretly I hoped she had a prescription in her purse for Zoloft. Which is what I used to be on, and I’ll probably go back on now.

Barney and me in fact met at the UDF. He was taking a second job to pay off credit-card bills, and that day he first came on I trained him. I didn’t hire him, the night manager did, but I always ended up having to train people. He came in dressed in a pair of khakis and a short-sleeved shirt and a wrinkled clip-on necktie and scuffed-up Nikes.

“Am I late?” he said.

“No,” I said, and right off I knew he was what I wanted. I saw his short dark hair, and the wrinkles in his tie, and the wetness of his sleepy eyes and I knew.

I tried not to show it at first. I showed him how to change register tape and how to do inventories in back, where the mop sinks were. He followed along, real tired, you could tell, and after about two hours of training he said, “Can you smoke in here?”

I was pulling night-shifts back then. I just got the day-management position two months back. So I had slept all day. I was okay.

“No. But you can go outside there and smoke if you need to. I’ll watch the register. I’m a smoker too.”

I grinned at him, and he nodded his head, went outside, lit up. I watched him from beside the Slurpee machine. He smoked like a little lost nobody, looking out at the parking lot as though he were staring out at his own future and just seeing litter and oil-stains.

He came back in, and he said, “So where’s the caffeine pills?”

“How about some extra strong black coffee?”

“Sure.”

So we drank French Roast and I showed him how to cut deli meats and how to arrange the donuts that came in and how to make sure you check inventory and the bank deposit, all that, and then it was time to go home. His wife had fallen asleep, though, and they only had one car and he called her five times to no avail.

“She sleeps like a corpse,” he said, ringing out the mop. He looked down at the floor as he mopped. There was a tiny piece of a candy wrapper floating in the mop water.

“I’ll take you home.”

Suddenly his face was full of hope—like an insomniac just discovering there are sleeping pills in a desk drawer.

At the stoplight just outside his apartment complex, Barney said he didn’t want to go home.

“You wanna go get something to eat?” he asked. It was 5 a.m.

“I guess.”

“I really just don’t want to see her,” he said over scrambled eggs at that one pancake house that used to be a Ponderosa, pig plagues and daisies on the wall.

I was drinking more coffee. I wouldn’t sleep a wink I knew and yet I felt him pulling me into his orbit just by being what he was: some sad-sack loser in a bad marriage having to work a second job to keep out of bankruptcy court. All his misery was giving him over to me.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” he said and he coughed, got his cigarettes out.

“So what’s so bad about home?”

“Everything.” He laughed and then his eyes were right on me.

“I have a couch,” I said.

But of course that night he slept in my bed with me, and I remember feeling like I had died and gone to some alternate universe, not heaven, but close—a place where I got what I wanted without a lot of struggle, and it wasn’t a perfect world but it was somehow fair. Love got reciprocated right away in this universe. Love got love. He was what I wanted and he didn’t pay a lot of attention to me while we did it, and when he got off it was like one single sad little pop and then he was unconscious beside me. I watched him breath for a long time. My eyes got hot while I watched.

Hell I think I actually cried from happiness.

Barney moved in with me a few days later, and every day my life got easier because he was there, blank and willing to be the object of my desire. I didn’t have to pretend that I could make it anymore. I realized what my main problem was, what had kept me in turmoil: just plain old run-of-the-mill loneliness. Of course, that realization would end up fucking me over in the end.

We’re inside this condo over by I-275, on a cul-de-sac of beat-up-looking townhouses and condos with toys in the grass and bags of garbage waiting to be picked up. This condo we’re in is completely gutted, no furniture or nothing, boxes on boxes, and part of the living room wall has been karate-kicked in.

Beside the biggest hole, on the floor, is Tiffany’s boyfriend, whose name is Kyle. Kyle has not had a good day either. He’s in sweatpants with no shirt and has the whitest skin like he was born and raised in a basement in the light of Nintendo games. He has a tattoo of a demonic sun on his back, big black combat boots on his feet with no socks, strings untied. He just sits there, Indian-style, with his eyes focused on the paperclip he has untangled, trying to clean out his one-hitter so he can smoke more pot.

“His brother moved out last week,” Tiffany whispers.

“Hey you okay?” I say. We just came in, the door being half open and a cat meowing beside the porch. The cat was in now, roaming the empty condo, smelling for its litter-box.

Kyle throws the used paperclip into the kicked-in hole in the wall. The hole is about the size of an open mouth on a billboard. That took a lot of karate kicks to do that. His goatee beard has grown into a long strand spilling out of his chin. When he looks up, his eyes are a glittery fake gold.

“I’m fine. I mean I’m getting fucking evicted tomorrow, but I am so goddamn fine.” He laughs a messed-up-boy-on-a-soap-opera laugh then lights the one-hitter and inhales like he is inhaling the Smoke of God.

Tiffany says, “Did you do that to the walls?”

“No,” he says, and he laughs again that way, and he looks her right in the eye, “Keanu Reeves did.” His fake gold eyes are contacts. They have to be.

Tiffany laughs too and goes over to him and sits down and he packs her a hit in the one-hitter and she does it and looks up to me.

“He’s gonna be homeless, Dwayne.” She smiles with tears starting.

“I’m sorry.”

Kyle stands and hands the one-hitter back to Tiffany. The only unboxed thing in the room is a boom-box on the floor, and he goes and turns it on. Hard rock with a whiny singing boy comes out. Kyle stands up and feels his left nipple, looks up at me.

“I get pissed off all the time. I can’t keep a job.” He stares down at the floor.

Tiffany says, “When he goes low, you know, like from bipolar, you know? I mean when he goes low he is the lowest of the low.” She stands up and sways a little. It looks like she’s proud of Kyle’s low status in a way.

I keep on smiling. I’m thinking of Barney. What he’s doing. Are they ordering a welcome-home pizza from Papa John’s? Are they talking about redecorating a room in their little house to turn into a nursery? Kyle steps closer and I can smell his bipolar body heat like an oven that’s been on too long without anything in it. He blows a wind past me and then turns into the Karate Kid, connecting with a part of the wall that’s not been demolished yet, his combat-booted foot going all the way through until half his body is in the adjacent kitchen and the rest of him is still with us. He lays there in the rubble.

Tiffany goes over to him, high as a kite now, but not laughing.

“Are you dead?” she says.

“No,” he says. “Help me up.”

He gets up, breathing real hard. The bottom part of him is covered in drywall dust. His chest is bleeding little red stars.

“I hate my landlord,” he says to me, like that might make me understand the whole thing, and I do for a second. And it happens right then of course that feeling of love busting out of its container, like 2% milk turning into a thundercloud. For a second I look at Tiff and feel sorry for her and sorry for me and just plain sorry for the whole damn world.

“You need a place to stay?” I ask.

He dusts off his sweatpants’ legs, stands up, smiles.

“Thank you Dwayne,” Tiffany says. She comes over and I smell that burnt-poinsettia smell of pot.

“Yeah,” Kyle says. “Thank you Dwayne.”

Kyle and me and Tiffany share three weeks together.

When she gets time, Tiffany’s mom comes down to get Tiff. She’s a skinny lady with hardly any hair in a pair of jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, glasses on a chain. She makes a lot of noise thumping down the stairs. She knocks on the door and yells Tiff’s name, me and Tiff and Kyle usually in the dark living room watching DVDs we rent. It’s almost like we’re a family in a way, we’re so quiet and disenchanted, and Kyle laughing too hard at Jim Carrey. We eat whatever we want to. Neapolitan ice cream and circus peanuts and beef jerky and Chinese food from a can, etc. At work I whip up decadent ideas in my head about what we’ll be eating and watching every night. It’s sick and yet it’s also like hope.

And so tonight, three weeks in, there’s the thunder of Tiff’s mom stomping down the stairs, and Tiff’s mom pounds on the door. We’re in the middle of The Sixth Sense, some very scary stuff.

“Tiffany,” her mom yells. “You are coming home.”

Tiffany yells back, “Mom! We’re watching a movie!”

She pounds more. This time it’s like she’s had it. I am about to get up to face the music, when Kyle pushes me back down, stands up, stops by the DVD player and puts it on pause, then half-stumbles to the door. He is in his underwear and nothing else. He opens the door.

“Why don’t you fucking stop this shit?” He’s yelling like he’s on a reality TV show, like there’s cameras everywhere and he has to put on some kind of act or get booted off.

I see him yell and I can see parts of Tiff’s mom out in the corridor—this time it’s cutoffs and her uniform top from Target. I’m thinking I should disappear off the face of the earth. Her face is pale and tired and irate. She’s not ready for a fight. She does not even know if it’s worth it saving her daughter you can tell, but then again that’s all she’s been doing lately so it’s become sort of second-nature.

“Get some clothes on right now,” she says.

She tries to come into the apartment. Kyle won’t let her though. I look over at Tiff and she looks halfway between wanting to protect her mother and wanting to go back to the movie.

Tiffany looks at me and slumps her shoulders. “This is weird,” she whispers. “I love them both. It’s like a tug of war for my heart.”

Kyle keeps blocking the door like a goalie.

“Let me in. She’s my daughter goddammit,” Tiff’s mom grunts and growls almost. She goes from one side of the doorway to the other, but he’s fast and he keeps her out. Finally she gets down on all fours and crawls through, knocking him back with her head. She’s in and runs toward us. It’s dark except for the TV, so I turn on the lamp. Tiff’s mom is breathing real hard, standing beside the La-Z-Boy.

“I can’t believe this,” she says.

Kyle comes over to her and grabs her and slams into the chair.

“I am so sick of you,” he says.

“You’re crazy!” she screams.

He hovers over her like he has trapped her with his secret powers and she will never be free. I slowly get up.

“Hey you guys come on,” I say.

Kyle does not have his colored contacts in. His eyes are very brown, so brown as to be black and in his white Old Navy underwear he resembles a refugee from a nighttime tornado. He won’t take his eyes off Tiff’s mom. He has her targeted.

Tiff is standing up now.

“We just wanted to finish the movie Mom!” she screams.

Tiff is not in her underwear, but she might as well be—a halter-top-thing, skin-tight jeans. I’m in my sweats. I must look sixty years old by now, all the bad food and no-sleep for the past three weeks, that feeling of being held captive by Kyle because he never leaves the house even though he keeps telling me his brother is coming back to get him and they are going to pick up Tiffany at school and escape to Arizona.

Tiff’s mom is looking at me.

“You ought to be ashamed,” she says.

Kyle comes to my defense, “He’s a kind and gentle person.” He says that like it’s so true it’s downright embarrassing. Hell I love him but I can’t love him too.

I’ve fallen in love with the both of them in a way. It’s like they have come into my head and nested there, replacing normal life with their junk food comfort and pot-head slumber and always asking me to buy them beer and I do and we drink it and get drunk and they go into my bedroom and have their sex and I half-sleep out here and wake up and quietly get ready for work the next day, Tiff having slipped off upstairs after they did it and Kyle snoring like a cowboy with sleep apnea.

“Kind and gentle my ass,” Tiff’s mom says.

Kyle’s nostrils flare. “I will hit you, okay? I will fucking hit you you pick on Dwayne!”

Tiff’s mom looks away. “I just want my daughter.”

Tiff runs over to her mom, bawling now.

“I’m sorry Mom! He’s bipolar.”

Kyle starts crying too then. He goes over to the wall, and he makes a fist and he punches a hole right next to the TV. This is the first time he’s done that in here. The wall gives in like a piece of nothing.

“Time out,” I say. I go over to Tiff and her mom, and I say, “Tiff you go home with your mom. It’s time to take a break.”

Tiffany nods and gets up. Her mom stands up, looking all hateful at me. “I ought to call Children’s Services and the goddamn cops.”

She knows what I am, but I’m not that. I don’t love them like that. The love I do have for them is lazy and good-for-nothing, even possibly illegal. But it is not that.

“I’m not a pervert,” I tell her.

She and Tiffany just walk out. Kyle is on the floor, not crying, just staring into space.

“Why don’t you go to bed?” I ask him.

“I took my meds, swear to God,” he says, still staring into space.

“I know you did. I’m the one that went and got them for you.”

I walk over to the couch and lay down. Eventually he gets up and comes over to me.

“That stuff about my brother?” he says in the dark.

“Yes.” I close my eyes.

“He never calls me. I made that thing up about Arizona. I’d like to go though. Maybe me and you and Tiff?”

Even with my eyes closed I can feel his smile. It’s got the sticky warmth of not being able to live right. He wants me to take that smile in like a pervert would, use it to make myself happier than I ever should be.

When he bends down and kisses me, I just let my lips fold into my mouth, and then I open my eyes.

“Go on to bed,” I say.

He stands there for a second or two, swaying.

“Whatever you say,” he whispers.

Monique comes in at the end of my shift that next day. She gives me the evil eye.

“You don’t look so good,” she says. She’s got the biggest ass in the tri-state area, wearing baggy sweatpants and a big smock to cover.

It’s close to 3:30 PM. While I am at work I try to do my job very well thank you. But my clothes are not clean. I haven’t gone to the laundromat in these three past weeks. Basically I rinse out stuff in the kitchen sink and then hang it out on the balcony to dry.

My shift is almost over, and there’s the smell of dirty bleach coming up from the floor I just sloppily mopped, the fake-butter in the popcorn machine, the waxy vapor of candy bars washed in sunlight.

“I feel okay,” I lie.

“Are you sick?” she says, smiling.

“No.”

“Well you look sick.” She stops smiling and she goes over to the mop bucket where I left it in front of the milk coolers.

“Is this the water you used to mop with?” she asks, pissy and judgmental.

“Yeah.”

“It looks like sewage water.” She laughs really loud.

Fuck you, I want to say. Fuck this whole fucking world.

He wasn’t who he is now, Barney, back when we went to Key West. We went there together a month into the relationship. I paid for everything. I paid for the plane tickets and I paid for the Super 8 Motel and I paid for the convertible we rode around in that one night, top down, humid as all get out. Barney and me drove next to the Gulf of Mexico, a beautiful storm riding in the orange sky like a jellyfish coming in for a smooch. It was so damn hot. We were drunk from going to some fancy place (all of this on my Visa remember). Shrimp and baked potatoes and white wine.

The wind whipped back Barney’s straight dark hair. He had a tan from earlier that day at the beach. He looked like what I wanted him to look like.

“Damn,” he’d said in the motel room right before we went out to eat that night, right after I sucked him off. “That was good. That was really good.”

I knew he loved me. I was electric inside, all my fuses exploding in secret. I tried to make it seem like nothing. I did not want to scare him too much.

So I stop by Barney’s house after work. He is out getting his mail. I sit in my car watching, half-camouflaged by the other cars and the sun light splashing through tree-limbs. But I get out. He’s opening some letter and smiling. He looks up. Their little house is cute in a way, painted yellow, in a so-so neighborhood.

“Hey,” I say.

His eyes go cold, and I go in closer. I must be smiling. Yes I took a few “magnums.” That’s what Kyle calls his speed pills. I took a few around one o’clock because I was about to go into a coma, and this is what love can do to you, I think right now, walking up to Barney, walking very slowly and my mouth hurts from how much I love him and now that he is gone it doesn’t hurt as much as burn all the time and yet I know how he can just leave without one thought about me and pick up where he left off.

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Dwayne. Don’t go Glenn Close on my ass.” He laughs, but he’s nervous you can tell. “You look a little tired,” he says.

“I’m very tired,” I say, and I laugh too, but then I get choked up and I stop.

“Come on,” Barney says. “Leave us alone.”

I stand there on the sidewalk, and when he turns to go into the house I still don’t move. He stops and looks back at me. He gets a little pissed.

“Go home,” he says. “Go on.”

“I can’t,” I say.

This is embarrassing to report to you, I know, me standing there in the sunshine on the sidewalk outside his yellow cottage and him in some uniform-type outfit, maybe UPS, I don’t know. I can’t move. There’s a kind of hypnosis that you can do to yourself when you’re so miserable you can barely stand it. It pushes you into the center of the freeze-ray, stubbornness sets in. You can do anything if you come to the understanding that you’ll never get your way.

“It’s over. Okay?” he is whispering, and he pulls my arm toward my car but I won’t move. There is just no goddamn way.

I shake him off. I walk backwards.

“Go on,” he says. “Get the hell out of here before someone sees you freak.”

Barney kind of laughs then, not a real laugh, a cover-up. He looks both hurt and pissed, like he just can’t understand this behavior of mine and it’s that look that only blows my heart up into the size of that ocean storm, that look that he doesn’t care but has let me love him, that look.

“Have some fucking self respect,” he says. Then he looks down the street both ways. “I mean come on.”

When I get home the door is wide open. And inside furniture has been turned over, the walls are busted out all over the place, walls like Swiss cheese.

I get panicky and call out Kyle’s name. There’s no response. For a second, I think I might pass out. There’s the familiar stomping down the stairs. When I turn around Tiff’s mom is standing in the doorway. She looks like she wishes she had a gun.

“He did it,” she says.

Right then I can’t talk.

“He beat the living shit out of my daughter,” she says. “I just took her to the hospital, buddy. Thank God I came home for lunch. She was beat to a pulp over some stupid movie they watched. She is in intensive care. I come back to get her some things.”

I still can’t talk. She shakes the bag of her daughter’s things in my face.

“He’s gone. That little fucker took off. I called the police. They know about you too buddy. What you were doing in there. It made me sick. Well he beat her good. I don’t have anything against gays I don’t, but I can’t take a child molester. I cannot. I shouldn’t have let it go on.”

She keeps shaking that bag. It’s clear plastic and inside it are a peach nightgown and some shampoo and socks and panties.

“I love Tiffany,” I say.

“I am going to puke,” she says, and glares at me like she would be the one at the front of the mob, the one who would start taking me apart limb by limb.

When Kyle comes back, he’s all apologetic. He’s coked up too I think. It’s around 8:30, and the police haven’t come yet. He has on his combat boots and sweat-pants and a suede jacket with fringes he told me his brother had got him. He stands in front of me in the kitchen.

“Write me a check,” he says.

“I don’t think so.”

“Please,” he says.

“No.”

“Please God just write me a check!”

I shake my head no. I look him in the face.

“Let’s go do laundry,” I say.

His contacts are in. They glitter like gold fish. He looks like he doesn’t understand.

“I don’t have anything to wear to work tomorrow,” I say.

“Everything I got smells,” he says.

We go around the apartment, picking up dirty clothes. We get like seven big black garbage bags full of clothes. It’s raining. The furniture is still overturned, the walls still botched. I don’t want to notice anything then, and somehow Kyle is obedient, caught up in the need for clean clothes, like the boy he’s supposed to be, vain and self-conscious. He carries four bags out to my car, and I carry the rest. I lock my door, and then we go by the Kroger’s for some Tide and dryer sheets. We turn the radio on to his station. The rain is almost pretty on the windshield.

The Laundromat is just down the street. We run the clothes into the little place, in a strip-mall next to a bar and a Radio Shack. There’s only one other person here tonight, and she’s reading a Harry Potter book in front of the dryers. There’s a hum and the smell of mildew and clean drying clothes. The chairs are orange and green plastic.

I give Kyle a five dollar bill and he gets change, standing in front of the machine like it’s a slot machine. There’s happiness on his face, and his eyes shielded with gold-drops. Maybe it’s the lighting, but he doesn’t look so ghoulish now. Like he has snapped out of something.

This needed to be done.

I sort and separate and Kyle puts quarters in. Pours detergent. We sit down after everything is loaded—five machines playing in unison like a country band. The woman with her book gets up and goes outside to smoke. The rain has stopped. The concrete and cars are glittery with it.

I turn toward Kyle, exhausted and for a second almost happy with this one accomplishment, all the machines going, the smell of detergent and hot water.

“Why did you hit her honey?” I ask him.

He doesn’t say anything.

“Why?”

“I didn’t hit anybody, Dwayne.” His eyes are gold coins. He smiles. “Can I get a pop?”

I stand up and give him a dollar. He walks over to the pop machines and chooses Mountain Dew. The clock says 9:15 p.m. It’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Hell I don’t know.

_______________________

Keith Banner’s novel, The Life I Lead, came out from Knopf in 1999, and Carnegie-Mellon University Press published his short-fiction collection, The Smallest People Alive, in 2004. His stories have also appeared in Kenyon Review, Washington Square, Third Coast, and Witness, among others, and have been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories 2000 (Anchor, 2000), Full Frontal Fiction: The Best of Nerve (Three Rivers Press, 2000), and Best American Gay Fiction 3 (Back Bay Books, 1998). He started his work life at thirteen as a carhop, running burgers out on little trays to cars parked in a gravel lot. After that, he moved on to Kentucky Fried Chicken and Ponderosa Steakhouse, just to name a few. He has also been a part-time telemarketer, library-book-shelver, group-home worker, janitor, and convenience-store cashier. Currently, he lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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"Day By Day" - Allen Conkle

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:05:00 +0000

Day by day, in every way.
The alarm yells. Dad wakes up. Whenever I see him, morning or night, he is in a white T-shirt, white underwear, and black socks. The uniform that he wears to the garage is covered with oil so he changes in and out of it on the sun porch. Every single morning he calls out, “Up and at ‘em, Atom Andy.” I get out of bed and go down the stairs to the kitchen. On my way I rub against the textured paint on the stairwell that the drunk painter halfway finished. I get a scrape on my arm. Who would paint a stairway with sand paint? I pull out my Smurf bowl and fill it with half generic frosted flakes and half generic fruit-flavored circles. Dad drinks a pot of coffee and smokes seven cigarettes. On the seventh cigarette he proclaims, “That’s the last one.” He flips the Marlboro® pack into the trash. All our clothes are covered in this yellow film. He kisses me goodbye. His moustache tickles and it stinks.

Every day, in every way.
Dad wakes up. He calls out, “Up and at ‘em, Atom Andy.” I get up and run to the kitchen. I rub against the textured paint and get a brush burn above my knee. It barely bleeds. Dad plops the white boxes with black letters on the old, peeling Formica table. I have a bowl of half generic corn flakes and half generic rice puffs. I wonder why Dad buys the cereal in white boxes. I thought the one with the tiger tasted better. Or maybe it just looked better. After thirteen years, he quit smoking about a month ago, but all of his T-shirts and all of my hand-me-down Garanimals® are covered in this yellow film. Dad drinks a pot of coffee. It makes his breath stink. I hold my breath when he kisses me goodbye. I wipe my mouth.

Another day, another way.
Dad wakes up. He calls out, “Up and at ‘em, Atom Andy,” and I say I’m sick. Dad says, “OK, stay home.” I’m not really sick, just sick of getting smacked around in gym class. I hear the door shut and his car start. No kiss. I run down the stairs to the kitchen and rub against the textured paint that my Grandpop, another drunken painter, finally finished, and I get a brush burn on my shoulder. It bleeds a lot. The drops are tiny and kind of pretty, and I spray some Bactine® on the wound. Dad left the Mr. Coffee® on again and the pot is burned at the bottom. I spin the lazy Susan in the cupboard and all the generic cans make this swish of white like a canned-food ghost. I open a can of generic vegetable soup and grab a box of generic saltines from the pantry. I spread them carefully with some generic butter. I don’t bother to heat up the soup. I dip it right out of the can with my crackers. Mom used to make me saltines with butter. After, I go down stairs to the basement. It is starting to smell sour. I look through the chest filled with mom’s things. I find my baby book. It has a shiny satin baby-blue cover and the binding is falling off. The baby books says that I named my bowel movements, that I was obsessed with long hair. Then there are some scribbles that I probably made after Mom stopped being interested in documenting my progress. I like the smell of her scarves and slips and stuff. I put on her nightgown. It feels soft. It smells like Charlie® and mothballs. When she used to kiss me goodbye I could smell her all day.

One day or another.
Dad wakes up. He calls out, “Up and at ‘em, Atom Andy.” I go down the stairs to the kitchen. I rub against the textured paint that needs to be redone. It looks like two drunk guys painted it. I reopen a cut on my arm. I have a bowl of generic wheat flakes. Dad drinks a pot of coffee. It makes his breath smell bad. I go back upstairs and throw up. I am sick. Dad comes upstairs and kisses me on the cheek. The kiss is still gross.

One more day, in one more way.
I wake up. Whenever I see him, morning or night, he is in a white T-shirt, white underwear, and black socks. His uniform from the factory is covered with sweat so he changes in and out of it on the back porch. Every single morning I have to force him out of bed. I go down the stairs to the kitchen and put on the coffee. When he smells it, he comes down. I had my dad put slippery fake wood paneling in the stairway before he passed. I pull out two bowls and make some Quaker® Instant Oatmeal with apples and cinnamon for me and maple and brown sugar for him. We drink a pot and a half of coffee. It makes his breath smell bad so I tell him I won’t kiss him until he brushes his teeth. We have a no-smoking policy except for marijuana on the sun porch. After twenty years, we still get stoned and make out. Pot breath doesn’t bother me. We painted the exterior of the house recently in this strange pale-yellow color. I don’t know how I feel about it, but it was his idea so I compromised. All our clothes were covered in this yellow film. He leaves first. I work nights. He kisses me goodbye.

_______________________

Allen Conkle has been a practicing artist in Chicago’s performance/theatre world for the last twelve years. He is the co-founder of Nomenil and has enjoyed success with writing twelve original plays including: Faggot Bunny Daddy, Love Pollution, and Woman Alive! A different version of “Day by Day” was published in Swell magazine, along with another piece, Thank You Jesus. Lately, Allen is delving into video, performance sculpture, and public installation. He lives in the San Francisco area and is currently studying at The San Francisco Art Institute in preparation for an MFA. Allen can be reached via alkaline222 at yahoo dot com.

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"The Werewolf" - Donal Mosher

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:06:00 +0000

My face is warm behind a latex mask, behind ripples of painted fur and hooked teeth that protrude from black, slavering jaws. Tonight, i’m a wolf. Rubbery gloves turn my hands into gnarled claws with long plastic nails. My neck is cold, though. The letter jacket I’m wearing doesn’t keep out the chill. Shivers tickle down my torso. My eyes are ringed in black grease paint, covering any flesh that shows around the wide wolf-sockets. I can feel cold air slipping into the mask and growing warm as it flows down my cheeks.

I’ve been out back, howling behind our trailer, for almost an hour now. I’ve practiced running at a crouch, tearing at the air as I go. I’m sure no one’s going to recognize me. I’ll be able to walk around town for once without getting hassled, maybe slip into the dance, maybe even go up to the party at the cemetery. I give one last howl and head inside to put on the finishing touches.

I’ve been out back, howling behind our trailer, for almost an hour now. I’ve practiced running at a crouch, tearing at the air as I go. I’m sure no one’s going to recognize me. I’ll be able to walk around town for once without getting hassled, maybe slip into the dance, maybe even go up to the party at the cemetery. I give one last howl and head inside to put on the finishing touches.

Late afternoon light floods our tiny kitchen, bathing my mother’s owl canisters, owl dish towels, owl plaques, and owl figurines in soft gold. I sit at the table putting “WET LOOK” blood on my mask while she struggles to make popcorn balls. She curses but I refuse to look up from my task. The blood is jelly thick and unfolds slowly from the tube. I take special care with the teeth, thinking how the gore will look when it hardens, shiny as a candy-apple shell over each white fang. I’d like to smear the stuff over the beaks of my mother’s owl canisters, then fill them with the bones of mice and moles.

I wait in my room while the mask dries, up on my top bunk, digging myself into the pile of comics, horror novels, and ninth-grade textbooks. I pull on one of my claws. The word lupine repeats itself—lupine, lupine—in my head as I scratch the paneling on the wall, testing the strength of the nails until the soft, wood-grain paper comes away.

By the time my mother drives me into town, the sky is like glowing smoke. She drives fast, hoping to be home before her first trick-or-treaters arrive. “Your father’s on patrol tonight, “she laughs. “Wouldn’t it be shitty if he had to give me a ticket?” Dark has settled as we come down from the hill, out onto the road that runs between stripped cornfields at the edge of town. A full, pumpkin-colored moon sits low and sideways above the bristly acres.

She drops me off at my great aunt’s home where I’m to cover myself in front yard leaves and lie in wait for unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. Aunt D. is on the porch, taping a sign that reads “Help Yourself, But Don’t Be Greedy” to a salad bowl full of candy. She’s in a floral-print shirt and lime-green stretch pants pulled high over her belly. Any comment on her taste in clothing meets with the same reply—”It’s the only excitement these parts get anymore.”

I’m not supposed to know this, but during WWII Aunt D. was the only whore in town. With the kind of business sense that runs in our family, she took up hooking just as the youngest and lustiest of the population were going off to be mangled on foreign shores. The whole family knows—the women pass the story on in the kitchen, the men pass it on over beer and football—but of course none of us is supposed to mention it. As she kisses my cheek I can smell that she’s been drinking, and I hurry off to wait on the lawn.

Cool damp soaks into my clothes as I lie waiting. Leaves crunch whenever I move. I hear children’s voices, but wait, wait, then leap up snarling and grunting. I’ve chased them to the sidewalk when my aunt calls out in a drink-thickened voice, “Hey dumb-ass, let ’em get their candy first.” Feeling foolish, I want to turn on her and say, “I know you sucked cocks back then. We all know you were a whore.”

Instead, I growl. With an apologetic tone she calls me over to the porch. “It’s cold out here,” she says, holding out a pumpkin-shaped mug with drooping eyes and a wide, far-too-happy smile. A black cat with the same, insipid grin perches on the handle. Its head tilts over the lip of the cup, peering down into the pungent contents. I lift the mask to take a long sip. I grimace, then bitter warmth softens and spreads to my belly. She looks at the heavy make-up around my eyes and lips. “You look worse with that thing off!” she says, touching my head before heading indoors. She leaves the mug on the porch.

The kids come and go, always shrieking and yelping when I jump up—even the older ones, girls and boys both, some of them my classmates. I love that! Aunt D. comes out to check on me. I sit beside her while she pours more whiskey into the cup. “You like it?” she asks, taking a sip for herself. “Good, but you won’t tell right? Your dad would kill me. There’s mint gum in the bowl, chew a mess of it before you get home.”

My head is spinning by the time I lie back down. The moon is high. I can feel it riding over the valley and the hills; over the town full of monsters, super-heroes and princesses; over the Remington smoke stack, where steam billows and falls in pale masses down the walls of the factory. Light dapples my costume. My stomach turns. This is the moment of transformation. I will sprout wiry hairs like wicked pubic grass all over my body, a body which has only recently achieved enough hair that I can be naked in the gym showers without shame. My skin will merge with the latex mask, creating the heaving, bubbling stuff of so many horror films, fake, fascinating, elongating tissue with a texture somewhere between flesh and chewing gum.

Leaves cling like small, dry hands as I rise up and creep toward the house. Time to hunt. I pad the hallway, following the TV flicker into the living room. But my victim is asleep, curled and sickly looking on the sofa. I take her dishevelled head in a claw and slide a pillow beneath. On the screen, a used-car salesman flourishes a cape and moans, “Prices so cheap they frighten me!” I nab the fifth of Jack Daniel’s from the end table, tuck the bottle into my jacket, and slip out the back door.

Monster in my own film, I imagine a soundtrack, shrill and sinister, rising up as I prowl the streets, crouching behind lamp-posts, sipping at the bottle, watching as the last trick-or-treaters compare the weight of their bags. I peek into windows, growl at classmates on their way to the dance, and hide whenever a police car comes down the street, getting tense pleasure from looking to see if my father is driving.

No one shows any sign of recognizing me. I even swipe the air, Lon Chaney style, at the kids who fuck with me, kids my father has arrested and who never miss a chance to pound out their vendettas on me. I spend my school days trying to avoid their attention, but watching them constantly. I like looking at them, despite the danger. Everything they do is belligerent and sexy.

But now, I get a couple laughs, a couple of the blank-faced nods that upstate kids use to show approval. I trot beside them as they head for the high school, wary they might turn on me, but letting my eyes linger on their faces and shaggy hair, their army jackets and scuffed jeans. At the school, we pause by the tall hedges that surround the gym. Above us, windows pulse with orange light from the dance inside. Someone asks, “Smoke now or up at the cemetery?” “Now, fuck-head,” comes the reply. “You want to share with everybody at the party?” They tuck themselves out of sight behind the hedges.

I bolt for the park across the street, where there are no lights: kids shatter them constantly, not only on Halloween. Small groups are already gathered in the dark stretches beneath the oaks and the rambling shrubs. From the spiny wings of a juniper, I can see two bodies stretched out on a blanket: a couple I’d seen earlier as they walked arm-in-arm toward the dance. She’s dressed as “Carrie,” all blonde hair and blood-soaked satin. He has no costume. In fact his pants are down. He is on top of her, his ass rising and falling, her legs pale and spread beneath him. Her stained gown is hiked up to her waist, and leaves are matted in the bloody mess of her hair. His hand gropes its way up to her breasts. “Dirty pillows,” he says and they laugh.

Again, I set ominous music to the scene. I picture her pushing him off angrily. “Really, I heard something. I think someone’s out there.” And his face shifting from frustration to terror as he sees my eye, yellow and candle-bright, in the bushes. Boughs rustle as I back away. Their breathy giggling stops. Juniper limbs pull at me as I run toward the edge of the park.

The dance will be letting out soon and I want to be off the streets by then. Now that I reek of Jack Daniel’s, I can’t call home for a ride. I’ll have to walk.

Darkness closes over the road as I leave the last streetlight behind. A siren howls in the distance—my father on the hunt somewhere. My shoulders pull together and I listen for the warbling signal to come my way, but the sound fades as I pass beyond the edge of town. I’ve only gotten as far as the cornfields when I hear a car behind me. I hop the ditch and tuck myself down. “Keep going,” I whisper, but hope whoever it is catches a glimpse of my face snarling among the remnants of the cornstalks. The car slows. A bare ass pokes from the back, then disappears as the car speeds off, leaving a lit cigarette spinning like a drunk firefly in the air.

They’re on their way to Crossroad Pond, to the cemetery party. I walk along making up vengeance scenarios—naked bodies torn apart in the midst of lovemaking, blood splattering tombstones and Budweiser cans, Robert Plant shrieking from a boom box with bits of gore clinging to its mesh speakers…. I’m so caught up in the carnage that I don’t notice that another car is coming. There’s no time to hide, so I stand aside and let it pass. The car goes only a bit ahead of me, then comes to a stop.

How perfect is this? The vehicle on the dark country road, the windows fogging, the unsuspecting victim waiting inside, opening the passenger door….

But when I reach the car, a familiar voice asks if I need a lift. The thin, sharp-eyed face of Mr. Hanley, the Humanities English teacher, smiles up at me.

Mr. Hanley is the only teacher in the entire school that I consciously allow myself to lust after. He has glasses, thin arms, and a deep, soft voice. He sits cross-legged while reading in the cafeteria. His triple-pleated pants hang loosely on his waist and his shirts are always coming untucked, revealing the waistband of his Fruit of the Loom® underwear.

“Going to the pond?” he asks, sliding folders and envelopes from the passenger seat to the floor. “I can take you that far.” I feel the whiskey returning to my system as I climb inside. The car is small, smells like meat, and, very faintly, cologne. He crumples a Burger King® bag and drops it atop his papers.

“At the dance?” he asks, as the car starts forward. Not wanting to give myself away, I say nothing. Surrounded by fields, the homes grow farther from each other and farther from the road. Porch lights leave the facades of houses hanging in the oily darkness. Occasionally the bright grin of a jack-o’-lantern shines from a doorstep.

“Trick or treating?” he asks, with a bit of challenge. I know he’s baiting me, waiting for my response. The scent of his cologne seems to be growing. I sneak a glance at him, quickly taking in how long his body is, how he has fold himself up to fit into the driver’s seat. “Okay, Michael Landon, you’re a teenage werewolf, “he says. “No more questions.”

The hills rise up on either side of the road. We are definitely in the wake of party-bound vehicles. Every mailbox we pass has been smashed. We pause at a stop sign, freshly spray-painted to read “STOP FUCKN W/ME.” He looks at me closely. He’s trying to guess who I am, I think, feeling his eyes travel over the costume. “That’s a good mask, “he says. “I wouldn’t want to meet that fellow in a dark alley.”

But a warmth spreads between my legs at the idea of meeting him alone in such a place. He’s terrified by the revelation of my bestial self, but stands facing me, braving my hot yellow eyes and bloody jaws, with his back to the cold, dead-end bricks. “I love you,” he says calmly and honestly, placing mortal hope in the words. “You know that.” I pause. Somewhere deep in the hunger and howl of my mind, I hear him, somewhere recognition begins to spread. But the moon slides from the clouds above us and, standing sad and pale in its light, he is nothing but meat to me. I spring forward, all bristle, all jaws, all appetite. There is a bang and a flash. A howl echoes off the bricks. At the back of the alley, police have arrived. My father is there, holding the gun that fired the silver bullet.

I take a breath to dispel the images. His scent floods back into the mask and my cock begin to harden. The sound of him shifting in his seat sends me into full, uncomfortable erection. As we crest a hill and begin down, I can see my parents’ trailer in the distance, so small it looks like some weird candy bar. I don’t want him to notice it or my grandmother’s shabby house across the road. He drives past without comment. The crossroads are not far off now, one more farm, a stretch of woods, and my ride will be over.

“Let me guess,” he says as the pond comes into view. “You’re going to sneak up the hill and scare the shit out of them.” He doesn’t expect an answer but kills the lights and slows the car just in case. We come to a quiet stop and sit in the darkness with the moonlight flooding our laps. The inside of the mask has grown very warm and damp. My hands shake, but the rubbery claws show none of this, remaining steady, sharp, and deadly on the seat cushion.

The pond sits at the foot of a pine- and ash-covered hill. Hidden in the trees is a small cemetery from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. Nearby are the crossroads that give the place its name. The water is dark and still, not even a rippling trace of the fat, rusty carp and the snapping turtles that swim there. Even in daylight the pond is murky; if you dare dip your hand below the surface, it seems severed at the wrist. Supposedly there are cars at the bottom. And of course there’s the story—if you stand at the crossroads at midnight, you feel the ghosts tugging at you. They say a boy was found on the far side, pulled through the water and drowned by ghostly hands.

He rolls down the window, letting in cold air and the faint sound of music. “I used to come here,” he says with a distance in his voice. “I guess everybody does.” He looks at me intently and I wonder if he has recognized me, or is he filling the space behind my mask with the memory of himself, a memory I could carry up the hill with me. It’s the thought of him young and drunk up there that makes me lean forward, as if to look out his window, and place my leg against his thigh.

Above the water, I can see light from a Coleman lantern, transparent and yellow among the trees. Shadows pass over the illuminated trunks. There are screams and laughter in the wind.

“Getting out?” he asks, moving away. I wait for a moment, then shake my muzzle at him. Beneath the mask, I push my teeth into my lip. My face is so tense it feels as if it were changing shape. The wolf is coming over me, and I stretch my leg a little farther.

I can see confusion in his face. His hand pulls away from the wheel and floats, fingers quivering for a second in the moonlight. They won’t touch me. I know this deep in my shaking body, but still I’m prepared to receive them. Instead, his fingertips hiss over the polyester pant-fabric as he grips his own leg—close, but not touching mine. “I could drive you home,” he says. His breathing has quickened and his face has sharpened. Against my leg, his thigh tightens and quivers. He, too, is changing shape. The mask ripples, edges curl at my neck as I nod slowly. I’m gonna howl, I think. He starts the car without asking directions and we are off, turning at the crossroads, out toward the loneliest pastures.

_______________________

Donal Mosher is a writer, photographer, and musician living in SF. He was raised in rural NC and NY, and his work documenting working class life in these regions is currently being shown in Portland, LA, and SF. Portions of this work can be found in the on-line archives at marjoriewoodgallery.com. He is currently working on a documentary film that examines the transmission of traditional working, drinking, and redemption songs through American class and culture. Donal can be reached via ghosttype at hotmail dot com.

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"Finding Home, Going Home" - Anton Veenstra

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:37:00 +0000

I live in Sydney, Australia, a city of five million people, crowded around the best harbour in the world. For fifteen years I worked in the urban rail system as a sign on clerk. Train drivers and guards signed on at the start of their shift and were given their mail and any special instructions for that day’s traffic conditions. We were in a last-century sandstone building that was being excavated to make room for the international crowds expected for the 2000 Olympic Games. We talked about the convict cemetery rumoured to have been unearthed by the jackhammer. After midnight on the dogwatch, I wondered about the sleepers, rudely awakened.

My colleagues were a hard-talking, hard-drinking bunch. New regulations forbade alcohol on the job, and political correctness tried to discourage the thousand colourful ways they invented to bring to my attention the fact that I was gay. There was always a floating population that drifted through the office. The guards were a little insecure, often non-English speakers, feeling their way in an environment as flinty and unyielding as train wheels on their tracks. The Anglo guards quickly became drivers, the elite workers, kings of the road. Only a couple of women as yet had made that grade.

The train drivers were angels, philosopher cowboys, out on the range all day inside their train cabins with the blue of distance in their eyes. They were prone to putting the weight on; mostly they were quiet spoken, aware, considerate. By contrast the clerks were mean homophobes, stuck in the office, watching the clock, accountable to prickly bosses.

One summer the national cricket team was playing England at a nearby sports ground. My colleagues met at work to go to the match; they wore solemn expressions and their best clothes, as if on their way to church. For the first time I saw a sacred detail of their identity, I felt they’d suddenly changed completely, in front of my very eyes.

Office arguments, palpitations, time off work. I was diagnosed with “cardiac disease” and had heart surgery. As post-operative rehabilitation I went back to university to do a Master’s degree. Apart from research and studio work, I needed to attend one tutorial a fortnight. I was researching my family history: how my parents had come to the new world after World War Two ended. Dad had joined the Dutch army to fight the war of independence in Indonesia and was demobilised in Darwin, the northernmost large town in Australia.

Mum had been born in northern Yugoslavia, a pocket of land wedged between Austria and Hungary. She was caught up in the tide of people displaced across central Europe after the defeat of the Third Reich. She got into trouble, had to leave home; the International Refugee Organisation shipped her to Australia. The ship was stuck in Fremantle harbour, a southwestern port, for a fortnight because of a smallpox epidemic onboard ship. She was sent by train to a migrant camp called Cowra where I was born. Cowra is the first-nation word for hill of rocks. Alluvial boulders lie clumped in the botanical garden.

Dad’s background was more familiar. He spoke English and fitted into his new country from day one. Mum had more trouble with the strangeness of here. I figured my difference sprang at least partly from her. So I needed to know about this culture of hers, Slovenian. The country had broken away from the corrupt rule of Milošević in 1992. The year my mum died. A decade later I flew there to check out the place.

First Vienna, the hub of all central European air travel. The airport already had a milling crowd of displaced folk, as if from the Tower of Babel. The shops sold Sound of Music tourist kitsch: a goatherd, an alpine girl in costume. The airport cops, thin and snooty, looked like crime sitcom extras. I took the connecting flight to Ljubljana, the capitol of Slovenia. A half hour’s flight across hills and fields increasingly more wooded. I found out later that Slovenia has some of the largest remaining forests in Europe.

I was staying a little out of town in a dormitory room at a boarding school. Empty of students for the summer holiday, it accepted tourists like myself. I had the three-bunk room to myself. On top of a clothes cupboard I found a rolled up poster about AIDS. The poster person was lyrical, punk, androgynous. Out of one window I could see the lush growth of the garden and park. Flowers everywhere. It could have been a country meadow. I remember my mother singing folk songs to me as a child, about gifts of flowers and love. All around me was the raw material.

I met Daria in the local sauna, set in the Tivoli Park, a short walk from city centre. Saunas are a central European tradition. Here men and women sunbathe nude without a second thought. Daria was impatient of the gay men who filled the sauna that afternoon, strolling, looking at newcomers, exchanging greetings, covertly grouping, perving. We talked about life, her job as a primary school teacher, her previous boyfriend who, like me had his aortic valve replaced. Daria said she could hear mine ticking in the silence of the steam room.

One night I came back from a boozy evening meal at the local taverna, schnitzel [crumbed, battered, deep fried pork] and rosti [roasted grated potato]. In my room I could hear waves of noise at rock-concert-decibel levels. Three blocks away, at the bus stop was the Olympic Stadium, designed by Slovenia’s genius architect, Jože Plečnik. It always looked a bit shabby and run down when I caught the bus outside. The facade was a row of softly shaped wooden pillars, quite Egyptian, clumped in pairs to form the curved outer wall of the sports arena.

So I walked there, nothing better to do, impossible to concentrate on reading against the background wash of crowd noise. There were couples and small groups of blokes outside. One guy who spoke English explained the event for me. It was a soccer match, nearly over, between the local team, the Green Dragons, and the Red Stars from Belgrade. The green dragon was Ljubljana’s official city emblem.

Of course the match had taken on national importance. Everyone’s pride was at stake. There were a lot of police outside, and my guide explained that a no-alcohol rule was in effect. The footpath was littered with bottles of all shapes, discarded by the crowd who drank them dry before being allowed inside. From time to time the large gates swung open and a very drunk, disheveled male was thrown out, to cheers from both inside and without. Suddenly it was all over, and the crowd poured out, noisy, unruly, but good humoured. Some youths wore green face paint as well as bunches of green ribbons tied round their foreheads, ninja style, and hanging down their backs. It took an hour to empty the place. Three large buses shuttled the people away.

Looking at those men, the comparison to back home was inevitable. Here, men seemed to play with life. Interactions could be softer without threatening their identities, their masculinity. Perhaps that comes of living in a traditional culture where people have their allotted places. The new world is after all still the wild west, the train drivers like cool cowboys, others meaner, ornery, struggling to fit together.

I tried to connect with my mum’s family here, but they were farmers in a very poor province of Slovenia. I had nothing to offer. Their world view was tight, local, with unanswerable questions like why was I a middle-aged man still unmarried. Daria, the woman I’d met in the sauna came from the same area. She warned me about the provincial mentality. She herself had escaped to the big city. But I went to the churchyard where my grandparents slept under a marble stone my mum had commissioned on a previous visit. She had always loved her dad, Stefan, who seemed uncritical in his love for her. I sat beside the stone and felt peaceful, comforted.

At the time, I was studying at the local Ethnographic Museum, looking at catalogues and exhibits. The museum was a newly renovated building set in an area that still looked like a battlefield. The suburb was called Metelkova. It had been notorious during the bloodless 1992 revolt that had led to Slovenian independence. Police and army had resisted Milošević call for Yugoslavia to remain united. During that time a coalition of punks, grunge kids, and artists of all descriptions took over the Metelkova area, a sizeable city block. They called on the city’s mayor to give them possession so they could form an arts collective. Some understanding was reached, but after peace was restored both parties disagreed on the terms of the agreement. The artists barricaded themselves inside Metelkova and resisted efforts by police to evict them. Thus the rubble everywhere.

Some buildings were squats where people still lived. I walked along, taking photos. The outside walls, in European fashion, were papered with poster manifestos by the arts community. However their good intentions and high ideals were being slowly being removed. Only in one corner down the length of an old porch pillar someone had written: “burek, pica, kalamari, skampi, losos, pecenka, [illegible], pomfrit, union.” These were dishes characteristic of each of the former Yugoslav republics: meat pastries, gherkins, squid, shellfish, pork fillet, potato chips, Union beer. I imagined an idealistic artist hungry during the siege, his dream of a multi-cultural banquet, taking place in harmony. Instead there was ethnic cleansing.

_______________________

Anton Veenstra is a tapestry designer/weaver whose work has been displayed widely across Australia, where he lives and works. His parents were working-class migrants to Australia after World War Two and he was born in the immigrant camp where they met. When he was college age, thanks to a visionary program by then-Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, who wanted the working class to get a free university education, he won a scholarship and studied in Townsville and Sydney, receiving a Bachelor’s degree and a teaching diploma. He was a conscientious objector when drafted for the Vietnam war and has spent most of his work life in “hippie jobs”: telephone operator, postal delivery, public service clerk, sugar cane cutter, cleaner, council road gang worker, all the while writing poetry and weaving tapestries.

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"Class Analysis" - Wendell Ricketts

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell Ricketts, Editor | Still Blue) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:40:00 +0000

(for P.C., il miglior uomo)

If I were to write s.th. about Paul
I would write about
regret,
using abbreviations
to stand in for the failures of intention
or what went by too quickly for the human eye to follow.

I’d have to say s.th. about
suppers together
searing peppers over the gas flame
herbs I’d never tasted
and the sign painted along an entire kitchen wall
between the goldfish bowl and the Azalea:
EATS.

I wouldn’t fail to mention
the red wreck of a car
bench seats
and the first ride I took in it
Paul driving
looking small and efficient behind the wheel.

There’d be a part that talked about the long walk
to the cranked-up neighborhood candyman
willing to sell us his last two hits of acid
b/c he thought Paul might still one day give in;
and the 8 hrs on the floor afterward, a world,
holding on holding on and watching
the ceiling turn into cirrus shapes
160 mi. above our sprawled out, blissed out
shit-talking bodies that held on held on held on
like they expected to float down finally and find themselves
together.

How the word “love” was never spoken
or maybe once, at the end of a phone call,
stuttered
accidental
a Freudian slip,
but present ever after in the hidden language;
goodbye meant it
so did wanna do s.th. thursday
so did yes.

I’d write about the butt fur
the chest fur
the sweat-sticky buffalo fur
(the time we did it on a friend’s rug)
clinging to the backs of Paul’s
thin arms;
the blunt-fingered hands at the ends of them
work-rough and cut-up and always one nail hammered black;
the dark spot on the dick head
like a second, more reticent piss slit;
the lazy tongue the drawl the spit-
sweet kisses
the throat cored out special for me to park
my cock in
while Paul sang songs on it
about being

just

like

me.

_______________________

Wendell Ricketts is the editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-Less Gay Life and the author of numerous poems and short stories. He can be reached at editor@everythingihaveisblue.com.

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