You Can Say You Knew Me When (14 page)

I hadn’t spent any time with Ian since the funeral. For all the grandeur of the Manifesto we had the kind of relationship in which a month could go by without even a phone call. Then we’d get in touch and be inseparable for days on end. Ian had a lot of time on his hands these days. Eight months earlier, his motorcycle, parked downtown, was knocked over by a Porsche backing out of the adjacent spot. Ian witnessed the hit and ran to the corner, where the Porsche was stopped at a light; he leaned into the driver’s open window to confront him. When the light turned green, the driver hit the gas and took off, and Ian, his elbow crooked inside the car, was dragged a block and a half. He wound up with a concussion and a broken leg—and, a few months later, a big, fat settlement from the driver, who turned out to be a newly wealthy software engineer. Ian immediately quit his bartending job and began teaching himself, from scratch, all there was to know about web design.

Since then he’d been obsessed with creating a webzine, which was just him and the people he knew uploading whatever they were interested in—highly opinionated essays about idiosyncratic topics and surreal cartoons that made you laugh even if you didn’t get the humor. The site, called
Better Example
, was guided by the foundation myth Ian put forth: One day, he was Windexing dead bugs from his motorcycle headlight when the face of Kurt Cobain appeared in the glass and commanded, “Set a better example than I did.” Ian, after some reflection, decided this meant A) don’t get addicted to heroin, B) don’t commit suicide, C) don’t get mental if people like your art. (Everything in life was indicated by
A, B, and C
for Ian.) For years, he’d been the epitome of a frustrated artist; he made stuff all the time but never showed it to anyone and often destroyed it. His new productivity had inspired the rest of us. Colleen had created a paper-doll project that let visitors to the site dress naked celebrities in costumes she’d designed. I’d recorded a batch of sound effects, and Brady had digitized them for downloading. Ian himself had written a long, nonsensical play populated by Tolkien-esque fantasy creatures and the ghosts of dead gay porn stars. I think it was nonsensical; it might have been a brilliant satire. That was Ian.

He plowed into my apartment like a bull, heavy footsteps, downward gaze, dark head of hair leading him forward. Ian was Black Irish, his family from the north. He had what he called a peasant’s body: short and thick, with wide, rounded shoulders and a strong chest. He wore a black motorcycle jacket and black boots and jeans, and carried his helmet in one hand. “They’re tearing down the building across the street,” he said.

“I cheated on Woody,” I replied, handing him an already-packed bowl.

A corollary of the Spontaneity Principle: small talk was not required. Pot usually was.

He stopped in his tracks. “Wow. Okay, you first.”

“That’s so hot,” he kept saying as I related the story. I wasn’t surprised that he found Rick enticing. For all of Ian’s adamant individuality his lust was often triggered by the blandest signifiers: baseball caps, hiking shoes, neutral-toned cotton clothing. For weeks I’d borne my infidelity like a personal cross, so it was a relief, and surprisingly uplifting, to relive it through Ian’s giddy reaction. Out of context, without morality attached, it was, simply, a quick orgasm with a stranger in a men’s room. It was
hot
.

We’d moved into the living room and sat ourselves down on the floor, passing the pipe back and forth. “You didn’t tell Woody, did you?” Ian asked.

“I’ve been torturing myself about it. What if this guy was positive?”

“If cock-sucking was a risk factor we’d all have died a long time ago.”

“That’s sort of where I wound up.”

“You’re queer. Screwing around is your birthright.”

“
Honesty is the best policy,”
I countered.

“There’s far too much honesty these days. This damn culture of confession we live in. It’s just a lot of behavior control.”

I threw on a shanty Irish accent. “You don’t understand the healing power of confession, Mr. Gillespie. You’re a bloody atheist.
”

“Just deal with your fucking Catholic guilt and leave Woody out of it. Why would you tell him something that hurt his feelings? It’s a no-brainer.”

The matter was settled as far as he was concerned—
no-brainer
being Ian’s sign that he’s about to dismiss the topic at hand—but I wasn’t quite done. “Woody told me he helped you with a computer crash while I was gone. Now you’re encouraging me to cheat on him.”

“I’m not encouraging—oh, enough already.” He shook his head, and leaned in closer. “Listen—last night I picked up this kid on my motorcycle, brought him back to my garage, bent him over the seat and ate his ass for an hour.”

Taking advice from Ian about relationships was dangerous—ludicrous, even—because he’d never been in one that lasted. Temperamentally, he was a member of an older generation, the Stonewall radical. Liberation
was
his birthright, and nothing was a more concrete example of this than multiple sex partners. He’d found most of his friends through sex. Including me.

We met the first year I was in San Francisco. I sometimes forgot that it had started as a fumbly sexual pickup at the Detour, a dark bar with a chain-link fence running down the middle, once a reliable place to find sex with interesting guys. We had gabbed about music, both of us way into
grunge
back then, and I’d found him sexy. When he asked me to go home with him I said, “Oh, yeah, absolutely.” Ian remembers that, the “absolutely.” I don’t remember the sex too well—it was mostly jacking off and wrestling—but I remember listening to
Nevermind
afterwards and trying to figure out if the lyrics to “Lounge Act” were actually the coded story of Kurt Cobain’s crush on a straight boy:
I’ve got this friend you see who makes me feel and I wanted more than I could steal.
We commiserated about how hard it was to find friends among
the gays
in San Francisco if you didn’t have a gym membership or weren’t into house music at certain big Saturday night clubs. In the days that followed I felt a little stab of something mushy and romantic when I thought of him. The next time we saw each other was for a movie,
Poison,
playing in rep at the Red Vic, and we talked about it for hours afterwards. Parts of the film are deliriously erotic—prisoners comparing their scars, reform school boys getting “married” to each other—but our conversation was without sexual tension. Flirtation had given way to intellect.

Sex with Ian still crossed my mind, usually during spontaneous hangout days—both of us stoned, our improvised brotherhood like a private, secret clubhouse—though it wasn’t kissing and cocksucking that I wanted. What I wanted didn’t exist: a way for two intensely adoring friends to snap into one another, like Lego blocks, and stay there, conjoined. For us, that’s what language did. Fastened us together.

We walked out into the glaring afternoon, instantly aware of the rising mercury—one of those unexpected mid-winter heat waves San Francisco did so well. Loading up Ian’s motorcycle, I watched glumly as a bulldozer flattened the single-family house that had stood across the street just this morning. The red-shingled bungalow, with its sign under the cornice reading B
UILT IN
1897, had survived the big earthquake and fire of 1906 and the quake in ’89, just before I moved here, but could not outlast the current economy. That sweet red home would go down in half a day, leveled unceremoniously, a hundred years of history reduced to splinters and dust.

Anton the Straight Blade stood watching, too. Along with the Jordanian guy who ran the corner market and Eleanor, the elderly woman in the apartment across the hall from me (her yappy dog was my alarm clock most mornings), we were the only witnesses to mark the passing. The couple who’d rented the red house for twenty years—a guy who built boats right in the garage and his wife, a tough-talking acupuncturist, an ex-New Yorker, whose clients came and went through the side alley—had departed a few days earlier, relocating farther north, to somewhere rural. I’d given them my condolences before they drove away, but she shushed my sentimentality: “We don’t like it here anymore. Too many cars double-parked in our driveway.” I didn’t know them well—first names only—but I liked them. The
concept
of them. Once a year he opened up his garage to anyone who wanted a look, proudly displaying the beautiful wooden sailing vessels he’d crafted with his own hands.

“What are they gonna build here now?” I asked Anton.

“What do you think?” He pointed to a recently erected four-story building—the tallest on the block, four-room flats starting at a half million dollars. For as long as I’d lived here, that lot had been undeveloped, a fragrant riot of wild fennel, spearmint and night-blooming jasmine.

“He had on a clean Gap sweatshirt,” Ian whispered to me. “But underneath he was a dirty little piggy.” Back to last night’s rimjob. I turned away from the bulldozer, slid Ian’s extra helmet over my ears and got on the bike. As we were pulling away it occurred to me through the haze of my high that I’d neglected to tell Anton I’d tracked down Ray Gladwell. Remember to tell him, I told myself, and then forgot again.

We rode out to the Golden Gate Bridge, me hanging on to Ian’s waist,
riding bitch
he called it, like he was some sinister Hell’s Angel on a Harley.

I pointed to a Chevron station on the corner. “Two twenty-five per gallon!”

“A culturally significant moment,” Ian yelled back, something almost gleeful in his voice. “The highest gas prices in U.S. history are in San Francisco. Today! And you’re here for it!”

“How are we supposed to revive bohemia when we’re living in the most expensive place in the country?” He didn’t answer. My Kerouacian fantasies were mocked by everything I saw. The city blurred in swaths at the periphery of my vision, flashes of storefronts, billboards, street signs. Everything appeared impermanent, here today and gone soon enough, like that little red house, like that flower-filled lot, like most of what had stood in 1960, when my father looked upon it.

Like my promise to Woody that I wouldn’t cheat on him.

We got to the edge of the city, just below the Golden Gate Bridge, and trudged down steep cliffs lined with untamed vegetation—ice plant, orange poppies, tiny wild irises—following a path worn into the rocks by countless homosexuals seeking this secluded cove. On the beach we sat on a bedsheet, surrounding ourselves with rocks and driftwood, sealing ourselves into a little fortress, a piece of beachfront real estate on a prime cruising day. We sat in our underwear while guys paraded back and forth showing off their classically sculpted gym bodies and, if they were naked, their stylishly trimmed pubic hair. Back and forth they went, shoulders high, abs taut, cocks bobbing, in search of an afternoon dose of happiness. I rubbed in sunscreen, complaining about my softening midsection, my love handles. Ian patted his furry belly and laughed, saying, “I’ve decided the only way for me to go is to become a bear.”

I told him about meeting Ray and about my frustration that I couldn’t seem to work a radio program out of it. He wanted to know if I thought Ray’s paintings were any good.

“Yeah. You could see the skill even from far away.” I told him about the two different styles. “I didn’t like the portraits as much, until she referred to the abstract landscapes as her bread-and-butter, which made me feel bourgeois for liking them better. They’re probably popular with rich people who buy art to match the furniture.”

“Painting is dead,” Ian said, exhaling. “It
should
match the furniture. I can’t relate to feminist art, that whole message thing.”

“She was part of this age of discovery, when people were looking to figure out something new and then share every bit of it with the world.”

“I want art to be new, and smart.”

“But smart for you means already-got-it-figured-out. The way she described it, they used to sit around talking about their canvases while the paint was still wet, drinking jug wine and passing around joints, staying up all night arguing the meaning of things.”

“I don’t like you in a beatnik phase,” he said forcefully, dragging on a cigarette, dark eyes following a lanky naked prince at the water’s edge. “You have to resist this kind of cliché. It’s no longer relevant.”

“Look, I know Levi’s sells khakis using Kerouac’s picture in their ads. But still, when you read his actual words—” I pulled
On the Road
out of my backpack.

He grabbed the paperback from me and flipped randomly to a page. “Ugh,” he groaned, and then speed-read aloud through the offending passage: Dean and Sal at “a little Frisco nightclub,” listening to a jazz musician named Slim playing piano while the crowd chants “Go!” and “Yes!” When Ian got to where Slim busts out the bongos and “goes mad,” Ian slapped down the book, saying, “This is completely without irony. You’re going to waste a lot of time romanticizing a bunch of drunk, sexually repressed straight guys who thought it was a big deal to write in run-on sentences.”

“Well, back then no one was deconstructing their pleasure. They were just—” I grasped for the right phrase. “The life they were living was directly related to what they believed in.”

“Listen, Jamie: A, you don’t believe in anything.”

I laughed; he was going to be such a prick about this that I had no choice.

He gestured with his cigarette like a professor repeating yesterday’s lesson to a dim student. “And B, you can’t take instruction from people who didn’t even have televisions and phones in their houses. It’s a new world. You have to keep up.” He paused; his eyes had locked in on a piece of jailbait—bare chested, his shirt hanging from the back pocket of his baggy jeans—ambling along the tide line. “Oh my God, look at this kid.”