Almost everyone was dead, and Joe was lost. Two lovers dead—one of AIDS, the other of pancreatic cancer. Both parents dead; brother, sister, all dead. When Joe was young, he did what most Midwestern gay boys did: he moved to New York to get away from his family. When they were all gone, he didn’t know what to tell people who asked about them. His siblings, both older than Joe, hadn’t died from any horrible accident, but from the slow, steady accumulation of ill health wrought by sedentary Midwestern life lived among the most mundane of murderers: television, cars, food. They’d surrounded themselves with as much flesh as their bodies could bear, and then suddenly collapsed within months of one another. Joe told all of his friends that his family died of heterosexuality. It was a cheap shot, but sometimes it got a laugh.
So, lost and alone, Joe was free to do anything he wanted. He tried not to feel stupid for not realizing until he was almost fifty years old that he had always been free to do what he wanted. Part of the problem was that he had had an idea of himself. He was a funny guy, a guy’s guy. A gay guy’s guy, but still. He still had his dancer’s body, complete with aching joints, a ruined knee and shoulder pain, but he stayed vigilant and the gym kept him slim. He stopped dancing after age and injuries caught up with him in his thirties, then worked his way up from a variety of café jobs to a position as Maitre D’ in the Standard Hotel’s restaurant, not far from his rent controlled apartment in the West Village where he had lived for thirty years.
Joe had taken no more than a few days off work during the deaths of his family, and only a week off for each of his two lovers. His friends thought this showed “strength,” but Joe knew his ability to power through the tasks of daily living was directly wired to the peculiar engine of his anxiety. His constant activity during times of great stress was the only way to expel his agitation, thus allowing him to appear outwardly “cool” to most of the world.
Both of his lovers had been named Tom. When the shock of the second Tom’s death had faded—his cancer was diagnosed two months after moving in with Joe, and he died three months later—Joe felt nothing more than empty. He was bursting with emptiness. Or rather, it was nothing like that, but if it had to be like something, that would be the closest to it. If he’d had to feel something, he thought he might just die.
He wasn’t glum; he just wasn’t interested in anything. He went to work, he came home. He learned to knit, which was an immense comfort. The repetitive movement calmed him; there were only two options—knit and purl—and at the end of it one had a scarf, or a blanket, bath mats, wash cloths, big floppy knit bags with which to hold more yarn. When he knit, he didn’t have to listen to people talk. At work people talked all night. The bartender talked to everyone, waiters talked to waiters, waiters talked to customers, customers talked to each other, and they all talked to Joe. On the subway, in the street, in lines at the grocery: talk, talk, talk. People had conversations about sandwiches, curtains, the inner workings of a computer, painfully detailed descriptions of their petty little personal dramas. Should I de-friend her on Facebook? It’s the best bran muffin in New York! How many gigabytes does it hold? Yes, the film was intellectually stimulating, but I found it indulgently self-referential.
There was way too much talk in the world.
Joe enjoyed listening to music, but the songs he liked best were those in languages he didn’t understand. Then one day on NPR he heard a panel show with comedians, and for the first time in a long time, he was interested. He realized the only time he could stand people talking was when they were funny. And every once in awhile he thought: I could do that.
He went to comedy clubs, and again thought: I could do that. He went to drag shows, where the humor was filthy, raw, and sometimes dangerous, if a bit broad. I would never do that, he thought, but I could. Perhaps he could write for a drag queen. Drag queens needed writers, didn’t they? He bought an unlined notebook, a purple felt-tipped pen. He met the emptiness head on, and it was easy because now the emptiness was limited to eight and a half by eleven inches.
*
The first time I shit my pants in public I was in an elevator. With twenty other people. On the way to the top of the Empire State Building. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and two hours earlier I’d thought the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Chinese restaurant was a good idea. One too many helpings of mu gu poo pants. Then there was the Indian restaurant two days later. I got the panty saag. What a week!
*
Well. It was a start. But one needed a whole routine, didn’t one? A beginning, a middle, an end.
“Poop humor.” Joe’s friend, Oswaldo, wrinkled his face. “Even when it’s not funny, it can get a laugh. But that’s the problem. It’s the pity-fuck of jokes. And if it goes wrong, it goes really wrong.
Of all his friends, Oswaldo understood him best. He’d had his own battles and desolate moods, and had a sixth sense for when to call Joe and when to leave him be. Oswaldo and Joe had met the week after Joe moved from Detroit to New York, and Oswaldo from Cleveland. Joe was 19, Oswaldo 20. They’d checked one another out from folding chairs stationed directly across from each other at a dance audition for the same company. Joe got in, Oswaldo didn’t, but he got into another, better, company. Years later, Oswaldo became a choreographer and formed his own company. Joe and Oswaldo had never slept together, and because there was never any of that confusing sexual tension, they became the best of friends.
After hearing a few more of Joe’s jokes, Oswaldo said, “Sometimes things that work on paper don’t always translate to the stage. And you have to think about the persona. Jokes should be specific to character. You should be your own drag queen,” he said, and left Joe with his empty pad of paper to figure out the rest.
It all clicked at a MOMA exhibit devoted to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The Berlin street scene paintings of people in severe poses wearing lush colors reminded Joe alternately of Toulouse Lautrec and of drag queens. And that’s when his character’s name came to him: Tootight Lautrec.
It was all a joke. Even if he never intended to do anything about it, just considering it cheered Joe up. He made an off-hand comment to one of the waiters at work about maybe wanting to do drag; the waiter said he had friend who did makeup on Broadway, and was always up for something kicky. A nudge here, a nudge there. Joe reminded himself he was free. Oswaldo said why not, and soon Joe was in a panic of preparation, on track for an open mic night at the Stonewall as Tootight Lautrec.
*
It couldn’t have gone worse. It wasn’t like a dance crowd, where people sit quietly in their seats and pay attention. Is that what he wanted? Attention? All the discomfort that he’d been avoiding by knitting alone in his apartment had been collected in this bar room, and there stood Joe, all covered up in a short, dark bobbed wig, garish green-yellow makeup, and a tight orange evening gown, with every nerve exposed.
He told his jokes, but what he thought was funny apparently was not funny. Or his delivery was off. Or his charisma lacked the necessary flash.
“In fact,” said Oswaldo, “it’s the best thing that could have happened. Could you imagine if you had been a huge success? Every time after would have been disappointing in comparison.”
“There will be no time after.”
Oswaldo laughed and said, “Nonsense.”
*
Two weeks later, Joe tried a new set out on Oswaldo.
“Genital humor.” Oswaldo crinkled his nose. “Yes, it’s funny enough, and I understand the impulse, but I’m hoping you’ll grow beyond it into the subtler, more intelligent humor that you use in your daily life. Or rather, Tootight’s daily life. But anyway, go with what you have. Work toward building a real persona. It takes more than tossing a wig on your noggin and flouncing around in a dress to make a character. But this is fine. For now.”
During the second performance a band of rowdy, drunk boys grew noisier and noisier as the set wore on, until Joe could no longer hear himself speak, and he unleashed Tootight on them.
“Ladies, ladies, ladies,” Tootight said pointing at them with a hand gloved to the elbow with chartreuse satin. She clapped twice, as if calling a classroom to order, and then, in a quiet, elegant voice said, “Ladies, please. We must learn to comport ourselves with a modicum of éclat and élan.” She paused as the room quieted, then looked out at the other patrons. “Do we know what these words mean?” She cocked her head. “Of course not. But we must act as if we do.”
The crowd responded well, and Joe tucked the technique into a pocket of his mind knowing that along with his standard jokes he’d need a grab bag of witty repostes for hecklers and ne’erdowells.
*
“How about this,” Joe proposed to Oswaldo. “She never purposely talks dirty. The filth slips out in malapropisms. She’s uptight—Tootight—well-meaning in a school marmish way. She quotes people like Balzac, but mispronounces it as Ball Sack. She throws the audience off by alternating between extreme intellectual rants interspersed among her malapropisms and jokes. She wants to be sophisticated, makes up convoluted stories about her life that are too far-fetched to be true.”
“Like what?”
“Like,” Joe paused to think. “I don’t know.” He thought some more, and brightened. “Like, she talks about her days as Mother Superior in a convent on the French border. Alsace-Lorraine. The Asslips-Lorraine region. But she left because she just couldn’t stand the smell of all those unwashed virgins.” Joe slipped into character, and said, “So I went back to Paris to resume my career in a much, much, much older profession. Of course I mean teaching.”
Oswaldo chuckled, “Okay.”
“It slips out that really she’s just a school teacher from Normal, Illinois who was fired after a particularly scandalous photocopier incident. She’s a French chanteuse who can neither speak French, nor sing.”
Oswaldo approved. “But that floppy thing you call a wig won’t do. I picture her with black hair pulled super tight into an abnormally long bun that goes out and up at a forty-five degree angle. Maybe bangs in front.”
“Yes!” said Joe. “She’ll begin every act by saying, ‘Bon soir, class.’”
“Pronounce it Bone sore.”
*
“Bone sore, class. I thought it might be fun if tonight we talked about Virtue. By the looks of it, some of you here need a good talking to. In fact, there are seven virtues, but it depends on who you get to do your research for you. Did you know the word ‘virtue’ in Latin means ‘manly?’ Manly with a capital MAN. And who knows more about manly men than those Greeks, with their Ganymedes, and geisha boys, and Roman orgies, and…. Well, uh, there’s a slight probability I have my geometry a little mixed up, but you know what I’m getting at. Now, my girlfriend, Febreze McQueaf, and I were chatting about this the other day—just a little girl talk, you know—and Febreze asked if I remembered how Aristotle departed from Plato by saying that virtue is a habit of being. Oh, I laughed. Yes, Febreze, I said, everybody knows that. But don’t forget that Kant revised Aristotle by saying that virtue is a moral solution to ignorance and weakness. Such a silly girl, that Febreze. Well, for us, tonight, we’ll simply consider Virtue as moral character, rather than dealing with the messier deontological or consequentialist approaches. That okay with you?
A man in the front row whistled. Tootight stopped, and said to him, Quite a mouthful, huh? Don’t look so shocked. As if you’ve never had a mouthful of manliness.
*
The rest of the show was light and silly. A manager of a club in the East Village saw the act and invited Joe to bring Tootight Lautrec to perform there for a small chunk of cash, plus tips. Joe decided to develop an entire series of acts surrounding the seven heavenly virtues, one virtue a month to keep him busy through the winter.
Then, on the night of the first installment of his new act, in the bathroom of the club, while affixing an oversized eyelash more securely, Joe’s mother walked in. Well, not really his mother. But another queen who was also performing that night drifted past wearing a perfume that thrust Joe back to Detroit, the family bathroom, him as a seven year-old boy watching his mother powder, rouge, and lipstick herself for a night out with his father while Joe talked about the four o’clock movie he’d seen on TV. There was a French psychiatrist in the movie, hypnosis, past lives, flowers that bloomed at the touch of a lady with long fingernails who sang like nobody Joe had ever heard.
Joe’s mother—the seven-year old Joe’s mother—steps back from the mirror to appraise herself fully. She and her husband are young, healthy parents, none of her children are fat yet. She approves of what she sees in the mirror, and smiles at the young Joe. She removes a velvet, black and orange striped cap from a bottle, waves the bottle over head, shoulders, heart as if she’s blessing herself in church, squirts, lets the mist settle. She pulls the blousey front of her dress out with one finger, sprays deep into the cleavage, dabs the spray nozzle under each ear, replaces the striped cap, and when she sets the bottle back down on the vanity Joe can see that the perfume is called Tigress. Joe’s parents are in love. His mother is happy. They are all happy.
The club music from the floor above the bathroom where Joe secured his lash was so loud that it shook the bathroom mirror. Joe inhaled deeply and peered at the drag queen in the other part of the mirror, who was fully made up except that he hadn’t yet pulled a wig onto his bald head.
“What are you wearing?” Joe asked. He had seen this queen before, a fat, crass stage hog who mistook vulgarity at high volume for humor, and called himself Muffy McGillicuddy. Joe watched him pull a big red curly wig out of his bag and shake it violently with one hand.
“What?” said Muffy. “This old thing?” He pulled the edges of his tight skirt toward his knees with his free hand. Joe had never liked this queen, and the fact that he answered with the oldest cliché in the book normally would have bothered Joe, but the smell of the perfume eased his annoyance.
“No,” said Joe. “Your perfume. What perfume are you wearing? Is it Tigress?”
“It’s a mixture of four different perfumes.” He leaned forward, pulled on the wig, and jerked back up to adjust. “I don’t really know which ones, I just spritz and go. I saw Cher talk about doing it on a talk show once. It’s different every time.”
The flippancy with which Muffy said this reminded Joe why he hated this queen, and yet he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to fall into that smell. Joe didn’t say anything. They stood side by side in the mirror adjusting their drag equipment.
“Hey,” Muffy said. “Are you okay?”
“It,” Joe said. “It’s lovely. The perfume.” He leaned in to sniff, and Muffy flinched.
“Ooookayyyy,” Muffy said stepping gingerly back a pace. She turned from Joe to inspect herself in the mirror. “Damn,” she said. She made a great show of rooting through her bag. When she found what she was looking for, she pressed her face very close to the mirror, tweezed out a long nose hair, sneezed aggressively, and said to Joe in a high, loud, imitation of camaraderie, “Break a leg,” and sauntered out.
Tootight’s first lesson of the seven virtues was Charity. Joe couldn’t think about his mother directly during the act, so he tried to let the memory of her dance around him like a cloud. His mother had been the most charitable person he’d ever known; she never judged other people, always considered the peculiar predicaments of the human condition, always tried to imagine the difficulties other people endure. She would have been ashamed of Joe’s meanness of heart with Muffy McGillicuddy.
Muffy had left the crowd frenzied with some sort of raunchy, raucous nonsense, and Joe wanted to bring them back to a more relaxed mood. Tootight walked slowly onto the stage, waving like the Queen of England. She stared out at the audience gesturing for quiet until they fell into a more dignified silence. At first, fear threatened to stop him in his tracks but Joe had prepared well, and the smell of his mother lent some odd strength he didn’t feel on his own.
Bon Sore, Class. I beckoned you all here this evening to discuss something of vital import. Charity. Mostly, Charity to me. Buckets in which you can deposit your appreciations are positioned at either end of the stage for your convenience. Tens and twenties are acceptable, but fifties and hundreds are a more exemplary show of charity, aren’t they? My philosophy is similar to that gorgeous silver screen icon, Loretta Young, who once said, “Like Charity, I believe Glamour should begin at home.”
Joe’s mother wafted close and receded, and Joe knew he was loved. His mother had been dead for years, and yet he felt her love. This love was alive, like a young animal. It occurred to him that this ghost of a feeling that was so strong and so real must be why some people still believe in a god. His act went off with a verve and panache it had never before had.
As he neared the end of his material the lights glared and Joe saw Oswaldo gesture to his watch and hold up five outstretched fingers. He was finishing way too early. “Twenty minutes is an eternity when you’re alone on stage,” Oswaldo had warned, but Joe had dismissed this as poppycock. Joe had wanted Tootight to end on a big joke, but the joke had been told, and still there was more time. He thought that as long as his mother was wafting around, he’d let her help him push toward something more. Joe moved Tootight forward toward the edge of the ragged stage floor. He felt as though he were stepping off into thin air. He had nothing planned.
*
Now, you’re wondering, what’s the use of all this talk about Charity? What is the point? What is the point of anything? Only this: Charity is a practice. It’s a tool to help you live a more satisfying life. Decency and human kindness requires work. I know you have encountered people who hate you for who you are, or what you are, or what they think you are. You will never change their minds. But I want you to try something the next time you’re faced with an enemy. This is the most difficult kind of Charity: Imagine your enemies in their purest state, whether it be as a scared child, or the first time they fell in love. Be kind to them, even if you think they don’t deserve it. It’s those people who need kindness and forgiveness most who are the last to get it. Now, being charitable at heart with your enemies won’t stop them from hating you, but it might stop you from hating them, and that’s worth a lot. Hate is poison. It kills every good thing. You’re going to die someday, but while you’re alive for this very short time, don’t live with the poison of hatred in your hearts.
Tootight paused, stared down the audience, brought the microphone close, and said quietly, insistently: I can see you don’t believe me. You’re young, healthy, invincible, right? Don’t be so stupid. Make no mistake. You will all die. You: in the tight red shirt, so young and virile. Fifty or so years hence, perhaps much sooner, you will be as nothing. You, over there. Yes, you with the pretty, unlined face smooth as a creamsickle. If you’re lucky, and you become very old, all your powers to attract will leave you before you return—Poof—to dust.
Joe barely knew what he was saying, or where it might lead. Nobody spoke. People stared, some with jaws ajar.
My mother told me when I was just a wee little drag princess, Tootight, she said, remember what that famous philosopher Epididymis said: “Have a little imagination.”
It was the funniest feeling. Joe heard himself talk, but he was more observer than performer. It was him, Joe, speaking, but he’d have never uttered these thoughts if he’d had to say them as himself. His voice grew louder, stronger, and took on an edge of anger as he spoke, but he kept going just to see what would happen.
Imagine yourself better than your enemies. Every day, every moment, imagine yourself decent, loving, beautiful. No matter what happens when you leave here tonight, no matter who calls you a filthy fucking faggot, or a dirty dyke, or hetero scum, remember: You are beautiful. You are loved. And not just because I say so. I’m not some fucking Hallmark card up here spouting easy nostrums for your benefit. You’re all ugly too. We’re all ugly. But we each have a tiny part of us where beauty and love live. Find it. Cultivate your beauty, inside and out. It takes a lot of work, certainly, but everything worthwhile takes a lot of work. If you’ve ever known love for even three seconds of your miserable life, then you know love. Mother, father, sister, brother, lover, friend. It doesn’t matter who loved you, who showed you your beauty, or how long ago. Once you’ve found that kernel of love with your name on it, bring it out. Show it to the world. Give it away every chance you have to every one you meet. It’s contagious. Kind of like crabs, but not as itchy. Let everyone in on your secret. You are beautiful. You are strong. You are loved.
He stripped off a glove, threw it into the audience, and walked off stage.
*
Oswaldo brought the glove back to Joe, hugged him close, and said laughing, “What the hell was that?” Everyone was very kind. Boys and men sent so many drinks over to him that he had to give them away. Even Muffy waltzed over to congratulate him on a fabulous show.
*
For the next two days Joe couldn’t leave his apartment. He told work he had the flu. He didn’t answer the phone, didn’t return messages, didn’t turn on his computer to answer emails. When Oswaldo knocked on his door, Joe said, without getting up from his knitting, “I’m okay Oswaldo. I just need to be alone for a little while.”
“I’m worried,” Oswaldo said.
“Don’t worry.”
Joe heard the soft slump of Oswaldo’s body against his door. Oswaldo sighed heavily, probably so that Joe could hear. “I’m not going to have to call the police to break down the door or anything later on, am I?’
“No.”
“Or clean up any… big mess, right?”
Joe laughed.
“A laugh. Good. Call me if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” Joe yelled to Oswaldo’s retreating steps.
A host of abstract emotions swarmed Joe. He decided he would sit and knit a big blanket and let the swarm wash over him and try not to think too much. He took cover, the way one might sit out a passing tornado in a cellar. But after two more days of doing not much more than knitting and drinking tea, he ran out of milk, and as he walked to the corner to get more, Joe’s father walked slowly, haltingly down Jane Street in his old walker with the tennis balls on the two back legs to keep it from rattling. Of course, when the man smiled at Joe it wasn’t his father at all. And then the woman eating ice cream who was so fat she could barely walk wasn’t really his dead sister, nor was the sweaty guy with the black plastic framed glasses and ridiculous mustache his dead brother. Suddenly, Joe’s ghosts were everywhere. The Tiffany lamp next to Joe’s bed was Tom One’s lamp, and every time he touched it, Tom was there. Joe danced around the apartment to Nico’s manly voice because she was Tom One’s favorite singer. Tom Two’s favorite Snoopy tee shirts were still in the drawer, and Joe found himself making enough of Tom Two’s famous garlic borscht for four people, only to end up eating it alone when he was done. His senses magnetized, gathering his ghosts into his eyes, ears, nose, even brushing against his skin from their former comfortable distances hither and yon. But why? Why now? And why didn’t he want it to stop?
*
Meanwhile, he had to work on the second heavenly virtue for his act, Prudence. How does one make Prudence funny? Tom One used to call Joe “Prudence” because of his relative lack of sexual experience, but they both realized near Tom’s end that Joe’s delayed awakening had probably prevented him from getting infected. Joe spent the next few years after Tom One’s funeral catching up sexually, and while he was always safe, he made sure he could never be called a prude again.
*
Bone Sore, class! My, my, my, my, my , my. Just look at you all. You’re all so young, and ripe, and tight! Mmmm. For tonight’s class, I thought we’d have a friendly little discussion about Prudence. Of course, when I say “discussion” I mean I talk and you listen. Now, class, I know you’re all at an age when, how shall we say it? Your… JUICES are flowing. (Pointing to a man in front) Yes, Dear. I mean you. You have juices, don’t you? They should call you Minute Maid. Made in a minute (snap). (Aside to his friend) I’m right, aren’t I? Don’t worry, Dear, it’s okay. Just sit back and enjoy your martini while I talk, but don’t forget to tip your adorable waiters. I’m a very liberal teacher. Trés hip. Trés cool. You can even eat in my class. Order a little nosh and I’ll continue the lesson while you, you know, masticate. Oh, please! It’s all right. We all do it. Some of us maybe more than others.
All of us here are Homosssssapians, oui? Non? Oui! We all know about… juices. (Tootight fixes her eye on an especially attractive man.) Oh, hellloooo! (Giggling, touching her bun, smoothing her dress). Sorry.What was I saying? Oh, yes. Prudence. Let’s get to it tout de suite. (Smiling at man) And the tooter (hip bump), the sweeter.
*
And Tom One was there the whole time as a man who looked nothing like him, but laughed the same laugh like air squeezed rhythmically from an inner tube. Joe made sure to leave time at the end to walk to the edge with his ghost. It was terrifying to depend on bald improvisation, but it was also thrilling.
Joe summoned his father to walk him to the edge with Fortitude, his brother with Justice, his sister with Hope, and Tom Two with Temperance, and by the end of the winter Joe had worked through all his ghosts. They didn’t leave him completely, but now when they arrived, the pang was sweet. He’d no longer mist up into tears at their appearance, when they had brought to mind the total helplessness of his love against their deaths. Tom One transformed from the person he had become at the end—the sunken-eyed emaciated 35 year-old who was so weak that he walked like a newborn fawn. Now he appeared happy, joking, sexy as when they’d first met. Tom Two was still the funniest person Joe had ever met. Joe’s sister was again young, vibrant, slim; his brother was patient and funny with Joe’s total ignorance about anything mechanical; his father could split wood just like in the old days when they went to the farm in Bad Axe where Joe’s grandparents lived. His mother wasn’t shaking and crying for more Xanax in the nursing home. Now when they appeared they enveloped him in the memory of their love, then faded away slowly before he remembered how much he missed them.
*
The last stop on the Virtue Tour was Faith for Atheists. All his ghosts were there, in the blinking lights, in the coughs from the back of the room, in the hoppy beer smell that rose from the wooden floor, in the glitter and puffs of powder swirling around the other queens, but his ghosts were just there for the show, they didn’t help him at all.
He left time at the end of his act as usual, moved to the stage edge to step onto air, but this time there was nothing there except silence, the impatience of a waiting audience, bald-faced fear. He scrambled to cobble together old bits from his previous lessons. He couldn’t even come up with a funny new name for a philosopher. The sweat rolled out from under his wig. He couldn’t see the pealing wallpaper, the chinks in the concrete walls that he’d seen before the lights dimmed to work their magic and drown out all the flaws, but he knew they were there. Joe was finally exposed in the bright light at the edge of the stage, his lipstick bleeding into the craquelure of his make-up, a lost, lonely man pretending to be witty and strong as he fumbled to finish.
Because it was the last performance of the Virtue Tour, and Tootight had acquired a loyal following over the winter, the final act was received warmly by the crowd, who were overly kind. The hoots and applause at the end sickened Joe. He thought about all the times people gave standing ovations in New York theaters for less than mediocre performances. Their sturdy clapping had nothing to do with the quality of the performances. People were basically stupid sheep who needed to convince themselves that they had had a “good time,” that they hadn’t wasted their money on mediocrity yet again. Every accolade was suspect. Everyone was a fake. Joe knew he had failed. He could be original and scintillating only with help from his ghosts. Alone he was nothing.
*
The club cleared out after 4AM, and Joe headed home. It was early April, that in-between time when an ice storm was as likely as a day for shorts and tee shirt. Blackened peaks dotted the tops of small clots of snow left from the last storm, which had covered the city with three inches. It had warmed twenty degrees or more over the past few days and, rather than bleeding away in small rivulets, the snow seemed to be rising into steam.
The city looked just as it had the first time Joe visited and fell in love with it. Then as now the buildings charmed him, their shapes, their varying heights, the facades designed with bricks and stones placed at various geometric angles, and the variety continued on down the line. Water towers crowned buildings here and there. Fire escapes zig-zagged up toward roofs. It was all merely bricks, stone, plaster, wrought iron, a door painted Spanish red, or Mediterranean blue. He walked alone, and tried to forget about the impermanence of all things. He loved this feeling of dissolving into the night, drifting for a little while, almost disembodied as he walked home.
He tried to conjure his ghosts as he drifted, to no avail. His memory had never done his brother, Paul, justice. Paul had taught Joe how to listen, really listen to music, by making him close his eyes, stand in front of the stereo with his fingers in his ears and feel the beat the music made against his body. Without Paul, Joe would never have sought out dance as his refuge. His sister, Chloe, had treated Joe like her own child. She read him the funny paper so many times when he was three and she eight that he memorized the frames and pretended to neighbors and relatives that he was a genius three year-old who could read. He’d always spoken cursorily of his family to keep from missing them. In his youth he’d thought that admitting he missed his family was uncool, too sentimental, weak. He couldn’t deny it; he loved them. Even now he felt it, if only in flashes, but his love was true; it was a palpable thing.
His happy memories of the Toms tangled with memories of all the dull, dull hours, all the disappointments. Joe had never confessed his irritation at wasting his days sitting at the hospital with Tom Two, even after Tom had slipped into the coma from which he’d never wake. He never told anyone about the joy of knowing he’d no longer have to wipe Tom One’s shitty ass, look into the longing, uncommunicative recesses of his lover’s eyes not knowing what he wanted, or how to help him. How could he tell anyone about the horrible relief he felt when Tom ’s long, slow, miserable slide from life was finally complete? But the love he had felt! He had as hard a time explaining that as anything.
He was only halfway home and already he was so tired. As far as Faith was concerned, he’d never been faithful to the memories of his loved ones. He called his lovers Tom One and Tom Two to keep their specificities from tormenting him.
Wet buds barely sprouted on trees. Joe walked home from the east village to the west, watching fog curl over the backs of rats in the alleyways. He had scoured off his make-up in the bathroom at the club and fit all of Tootight—dress, wig, shoes—into a bag he’d slung over his shoulder. As he’d left the club, people asked what Tootight’s next act would be. He simply shook his head in answer. She’s dead, Joe had wanted to tell them. It was just something to do. Couldn’t they see how he’d failed by reprising bits from his previous shows? But Oswaldo, who read the gloom in the lines on Joe’s forehead, told him he should consider this his Greatest Hits Show. “How many times do you think Barbra Streisand has sung Memories,” he said before he kissed Joe on the cheek, then went home with a comely, younger, prematurely silver-haired banker. Perhaps Oswaldo was right. Perhaps he’d given the crowd exactly what they’d wanted.
A truck rolled past, fluttering skirts of fog in its wake. Joe wondered what a skirt like that would look like in the material world. Crinoline, he supposed. Or strings of fringe like on a flapper’s dress, mid-Charleston. How would Tootight have looked in that?
Maybe he’d resurrect her, and counter his Virtue Tour with the obvious. He could see the poster: Tootight with the same outrageous bun, but wearing a 1930’s Bonnie Parker style beret, and a beaded deco dress, a machine gun slung over one shoulder. The poster would say: Tootight Lautrec and the Seven Deadly Sins, and stamped slantwise in red ink across the picture: PUBLIC ENEMA NUMBER ONE.
Joe laughed, and watched his breath paisley the fog.
It was too warm for the jacket he’d worn earlier. His sweat collected in a dew on his upper lip. He passed signposts ankleted with chains and locks from which bikes had been stolen. The beep beep of a produce truck sounded its backing-up warning in front of a Korean grocery. A man hosed down the sidewalk in front of a café.
The temperature had risen steadily during the night, raising a lush mist over the island that softened everything. Fog swaddled the moon, muted the streetlights, and Joe imagined it floating over the drunks in Tompkins Square Park, collecting in the ramparts near the Cloisters where Joe had first met Tom One, beading on the tin horses of the carousel in Central Park where Joe went on his first date with Tom Two. The fog curled around Joe in eddies, white wisps of it playing around the suck and poomph of the opening and closing door to his building. After his shower, the mist nuzzled against the windowpane with a faint glow of either moon or morning. The sheets on his bed were smooth, his skin smelled clean, and sounds of traffic whirred softly in the distance as Joe sank into the deep comfort of his senses, and slept.
This story originally appeared in Glimmer Train. It has been republished here with permission of the author.
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