was a cheap way to enliven my apartment’s brick walls. For years he’d been trying to break into comics, with marginal success and rarely better than token payments. Within days of the move I was surrounded by prototypes of brooding existential loners, sketched in shades of gray, who wandered vaguely recognizable wastelands.
He laughed when he showed me all his rejection slips from the better-paying costumed hero markets, saying that the art was only for killing time until he became headwaiter at his restaurant.
He laughed while he told me about being on his own since he was eighteen, when his father kicked him out after finding a porno magazine. “If it’d been hetero,” Jared said, “he probably would’ve taken me out to get drunk instead, maybe even buy me a whore if he could’ve found one cheap enough.”
He laughed when he told me about the former friends in high school who’d beaten him up for being too honest about himself when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
But by this time I was noticing how forced his laughter could sound, a worthy try but no longer good enough to fool me, like the unnerved and tuneless whistling of someone lost in a cemetery.
And that’s the way it sounded, more and more, until the day it stopped altogether.
“There’s this guy…”
No man wants to hear anything starting like this, tiny words that send heart and stomach skittering into sick panic. While you knew all along you were irreplaceable, everyone else knew better.
“There’s, um, this guy…”
Jared pulled it on me at one of the sidewalk tables in front of the beanery where we came for cheap, spicy meals served in crockery that would steam your face and warm both hands. A coterie of pigeons would always gather near occupied tables, to glean crumbs from the crusty bread served here.
“There’s, see, there’s this guy…”
It would be one of the last fine days of autumn before the killing frosts of winter took hold, the late afternoon sunlight golden even when the best it had to shine on looked otherwise run-down and corroded and ready for a renewal that would never come, because those with the power to decide these things knew that such places were easier destroyed than lived with.
“There’s this guy,” Jared tried again, then drew into himself as though he couldn’t bear to say the rest.
I wondered if this wasn’t some rebound thing, triggered by issues we’d gotten into last week, with Jared still smarting over Terry’s funeral and seeking…what? Reassurance in a world that offered him none?
He’d interrupted my daily 200 sit-ups and suggested, since we seemed to be getting along so well, with an eye to far tomorrows, making it as official as we could. A same-sex union ceremony? Lots of couples were doing them, even if they legally wouldn’t hold the breath expended on the vows.
“It’s not the legality of it,” he’d defended. “It’s the thing itself. It’s the ceremony that counts. The statement we’d make.”
I’d thought of when we first realized we had something going. Got ourselves tested for the virus, passed six months of fidelity, then got tested again, praying for a rerun of dual negatives, then putting the condoms away afterward in relief. This was all the ceremony we needed. All the statement. A phony marriage seemed like a hoax to play on ourselves. Why pretend to join some club that wouldn’t have us for members?
And it surprised me how much bitterness I heard in my voice, how much rage I thought I’d sunk to the bottom of my ocean, until it might break itself down into complete apathy over everything I was denied, that so many others took for granted. Say, walking down any street with someone I obviously loved, and not having to care who realized it. I listened to myself, hearing everything I’d never meant Jared to think was directed at him; said I was sorry.
But once you’ve laughed in someone’s face, he’ll remember the sound forever, and only a saint can overlook your best reasons.
“Serge isn’t coming back,” he’d told me. “I’m the one you’re stuck with now. I guess. I’m the one you have to settle for.”
There’s this guy.
My Brazilian black bean soup cooled in its bowl.
“Does he have a name?” I asked.
“Probably.”
“‘Probably.’ Well that’s good. Two years, and you can still surprise me over a bowl of beans. Jesus. I never took you for the toilet tramp sort.”
Jared blinked at me in genuine surprise. “That’s the kind of conversation you think we’re having?” He shook his head. “I haven’t sucked off anybody in a toilet. I haven’t gone cruising the park, I haven’t even gone cruising the Personals.”
“Then what kind of guy am I supposed to think you’re talking about? You’re not the Jehovah Witnesses sort, either.”
He didn’t answer, was somewhere else behind his eyes. Then he leaned back to watch the pigeons strutting on the sidewalk, sleek heads bobbing as they pecked at promising tidbits.
“I’ve never understood why so many people hate these birds,” he said. “Calling them rats with wings, and like that. What aren’t they seeing?”
He was shredding bits of his bread; sowed a generous handful across the concrete. Wary, the pigeons lifted off a moment with a great snapping of wings, then settled back again to feast.
“They’re not just gray,” he went on. “Look at those colors around their heads. All those different purples. Lavender. Greens, on some of them. Those are beautiful colors. So maybe they shit on statues, what’s to hate?”
“Jared,” I said, “I don’t want to talk about pigeons now.”
He nodded, sweeping more crumbs toward the birds. “There,” he told them. “Go shit on a statue for me.” Then it was my turn.
“You know one thing I’ve always envied about you?” he said. “It’s the way you can deal with pain. You lock it up and once it’s in the box, you never open that box again. You must have skin like an alligator inside.”
“Jared…” I said. “You’re giving me way too much credit for something I’m not even sure I’m flattered by.”
“Don’t be ashamed of it. I wish I could cope like you, with all the things that are wrong. I look in your eyes, then I look in the mirror, and I don’t see the same quality. I wish I could, but I don’t.”
“If you’ve got something to tell me,” I said, “quit dancing around the subject and tell it. Who have you met?”
“Aren’t you listening? I haven’t met anybody.”
A pair of sluggish flies buzzed into his bowl of red beans and rice. Impassive, he watched them crawl and feed; seemed capable of watching until their eggs hatched a new generation.
“Everybody has a breaking point,” he murmured.
And when I told him he wasn’t anywhere near his, that he was stronger than this, Jared didn’t even look at me as if to say How would you know? It made me question my credibility. If I conveyed nothing-no confidence, no faith, no belief-because nothing worth conveying was left. If, in experiencing most of the same intimate plagues that life had brought to Jared, the better qualities that were part of my essence hadn’t been burned away. Or worse, by my own hand been locked beyond retrieval.
“I’m tired of hurting,” he said. “Tired of letting everything hurt me, just taking it, because there’s nothing else to do, until I don’t have anything left inside for it to grind down. So…
“There’s this guy that I’ve heard about. Walks around looking like something out of Charles Dickens. I don’t know what he is, or where he comes from…but he’s supposed to make the pain stop.”
I went with Jared as he sought his deliverer, not because I necessarily believed in rumors he’d heard, or because if they were true I believed myself capable of dissuading him from rash acts, but simply because I’d convinced myself that he’d be safer this way. The streets could be dangerous; he shouldn’t walk them alone.
Like Serge had.
Up streets and down alleys, inside bars and outside liquor stores, beneath neon and through shadows…we followed a winding course of anguish the same as we’d follow a stream. Where it was created and where it deepened, where it bottomed out and where it became a roaring cascade that swept everything before it.
