Sometimes Grief Comes With Nude Polaroids

Sometimes Grief Comes With Nude Polaroids

An excerpt from Bastards

Rudy left me his old leather motorcycle jacket, which I took to have the zippers repaired and the lining replaced. On retrieval, the man at the counter slid an envelope to me. “We found these in the lining. Must’ve fallen through the torn pocket or something.” He couldn’t meet my eyes. Outside, a mist. Under an awning, I checked the envelope. Old Polaroids of cocks, assholes, feet. I laughed, delighted, one last pervy gift.

In Rudy’s 1980s diary, which he sent me three months before his death with a note to “read and burn,” he writes about a long, messy night out, armored in his leather jacket and cap, cruising bars and piers for quick sucks, and ending up marooned at a party where the cocaine has worn off. Leaving, he runs into a painter who made acid-bright cartoonish work, and says, “You look like one of your monsters.” The painter replies, “I’m all of my monsters.”

He wrote the entries on scraps and threw them in a shoebox, only later finding and creating the book—the pieces pasted to pages with marginalia and commentary sometimes scribbled beneath them. They had sat for years while he took photographs and drugs and lived through a plague. This is the way to tell a story.

You win. I say it all the time to people. You win. You won. You’re the winner. Congratulations. I said it when a boyfriend told me he didn’t love me. I said it on the ward. I said it when I got evicted. You win. Good for you.

No reason to stay, nowhere to go, no claim ticket, nothing.

Rent has gone up again on Charlie’s house, an old Polish two-flat on Milwaukee’s lower east side bought by an Arizona-based management company. The letter announcing the hike had a land acknowledgment. “Does that mean I can pay the rent increase to the Ho-Chunk tribe?” Charlie said.

Charlie sold old books by Phil Andros, the Simenon of semen: Stud, The Boys in Blue, Shuttlecock, and Different Strokes—because he’s flat broke. Next up: Adults Only-marked 70s paperback one-handers originally priced at $2.25 with names like Cherry Cop, Mountain Stud, The Big Pipe, Saddle Buddy, Shore Leave, Truck Stop, and Tall Timber. He’s even considering his beloved show poster signed by Ethyl Eichelberger, Peter Hujar, and Agosto Machado. Collectors pay big for queer 70s and 80s memorabilia. Vintage.

When he listed the books for sale, they were classified as Historical Erotica. “I want a business card that says Historical Eroticist. When the person reads the card and looks back up, I’m suddenly wearing a steamed-up monocle,” he says.

“I know it’s hard but . . . .” I forget the rest because we are seated outside and a man I used to occasionally fuck is nearby. He concertedly watches his dog root around in some grass.

“It’s absurd. I guess I could have unloaded all this stuff ages ago. I thought maybe I’d pass it on to someone someday.”

“Well, you did in a way.” 

“Desperation.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling.”

The man and the dog are gone. The man: Johnny? Lenny? Danny? The dog: Pickles? Chuckles? Knuckles?

Charlie turns 60 next month. He’s $70,000 in debt. No house, no car, no vacations, no savings.

Student loans and credit cards, with some medical debt heaped on for variety.

“Pay my serf fees and get a doughnut,” he says.

Charlie says, “Once the antiviral drugs came out, it was like a gag order. People stopped talking about AIDS. Here’s your pills, shut up, faggots. And we obliged. We were exhausted. Or I was.”

HIV-positive since 1988, he was near death when the cocktail came along. My Lazarus. I try to remember the names of the treatments and medications he has been prescribed or is currently taking but it’s a jumble—NRTIs, NNRTIs, INSTs, PIs. I forget if he’s on Mercy Medicaid or Badgercare Plus Standard or if they are the same thing. Many times, it has been a full-time job staying alive.

He’s on an AIDS hit parade: Sylvester, Klaus Nomi, and reissues of Diamanda Galás records. I listened to her trilogy Masque of the Red Death back in the late 80s. In an interview then, she said, “My voice was given to me as an instrument of inspiration for my friends and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies.”

I hadn’t revisited those early albums in a decade. I listened to the live recording Plague Mass Galás performed after the trilogy. Its final lines are: “There are no more tickets to the funeral. The funeral is crowded!” The audience’s applause and shouts at the end brought me to tears.

Galás is 66 now and lives in San Diego where she grew up. She moved back to care for her ailing parents until they both died. She rarely sees people. I relate to much of this. Withdrawal. The world not as too much—as the agoraphobic spectrum is imagined—but as too little. Thin. Inconsequential.

When her mother died, Galás fantasized about painting the house’s interior entirely black, covering the windows with duct tape, and soundproofing the structure so that she wouldn’t hear anything from the outside. Extreme grief or an appropriate reaction to the world’s noisy chatter? Stylized because style is important even if no one sees it. Especially so.

I saw Galás on the street in New York, 20-more years ago. She looked like Salvador Dalí’s wife dressed as the Empress in the tarot deck he was commissioned to make in the 1970s for the James Bond film Live and Let Die. The deal fell through, but he made the deck anyway (he cast himself as the Magician, naturally). No matter. The Empress glided ahead of me, and I watched. The late afternoon’s low sun hit my eyes and when I looked again, she had disappeared.