New Orleans hadn’t seemed as gloomy, not at first. There was a miasma hanging over the city, to be sure. But this miasma was one of dark decadence and sweaty sex, not of death. Luke landed there in 1990 by no particular design, got laid a lot, found a bookstore that stocked his work and was thrilled to have him come in to sign. Soon enough he could think of no real reason to move on. He had his apartment in the Marigny, the signing advance for his next two books, and a whole French Quarter full of cheap booze and lissome queer boys.
The city’s atmosphere was such an opiate to his soul that he decided to kick for a while, and did, enduring the sickness as he would a bout of flu or a really bad hangover. He loved heroin, but he abhorred the idea of needing a drug nearly as much as that of needing another person.
A year later he met Tran, and everything changed forever.
They turned up at the same party, a cruisy catered affair given by friends of another writer Luke didn’t particularly like. He almost hadn’t gone. Some Quarter kids crashed the party looking for free alcohol, which was tolerated because they were mostly young and cute. They brought along the silent, scared-looking, drop-dead-beautiful Vietnamese boy they’d met in Jackson Square earlier that night. Tran was an extremely young nineteen, a good shorthaired Oriental son making his first hesitant attempts at being bad. He was drunk on the sweet pink wine the kids had been passing around, and sat in a corner holding his head, his thin body jerking with an occasional hiccup, looking so sick that even the most avid prowlers stayed away.
Luke had just turned thirty, and was wondering if he could still trust himself. He didn’t want to watch this beautiful kid puke his guts up in front of everyone, or pass out and get groped by a stranger. But the kid looked like jailbait and Luke had no idea if he was gay.
He’d gotten Tran up and out of the party, walked him around the block, waited a discreet distance away while Tran vomited pink wine into some banana plants. After that, Tran staggered into Luke’s arms and tried to kiss him, which clarified one aspect of the situation. The kiss landed on the side of Luke’s neck, sloppy and wine-scented, making his cock and his nipples harden nonetheless. They stood on the street corner, just outside the circle of a gas lamp’s glow, their arms wrapped loosely around each other, Luke supporting the full weight of the frail, shaky body.
“How old are you?” he asked Tran.
“How old do I have to be?” Tran mumbled into his shoulder.
Luke liked that answer a lot. Even in extremis, this kid seemed fairly perverse. Luke helped him find his car and loaded him into it, drove him all the way out to East New Orleans, kissed his cheek and watched him stumble into the house. He left the car parked in the driveway and sat on the curb until dawn, then walked back to the highway and caught a bus downtown. People waiting for buses were routinely held up at gunpoint out here. Luke didn’t care. Tran’s phone number was scrawled on a piece of paper in his pocket, giving him a warm feeling when he reached into his jacket and touched it.
When he finally got home, he sat down at the typewriter and started writing Tran a letter, the first of a hundred or more. Through your haze of drunkenness I saw a fierce and obvious intelligence, and no drug could hide your beauty …
He never thought he would mail it. As it turned out, he didn’t have to. The next day, he dialed the number Tran had given him, half expecting it to be a fake. Tran answered, sounding slightly embarrassed, vastly grateful, and not at all hung over. They arranged to meet that night in a French Quarter coffeehouse. Luke bought Tran three iced lattes and gave him the letter, along with inscribed copies of his four books. Back at Luke’s apartment, they spent a delicious hour kissing, nuzzling, rolling around on the bed fully clothed, pressing their hard-ons together through maddening layers of fabric. Toward the end of the hour, Tran finally admitted that he was a virgin.
The next week was the longest of Luke’s life, and the most sweetly excruciating. He saw Tran every day, and he knew they were going to fuck soon, but he didn’t know when. It was like being in high school: first base, second base, and so forth. When he sat down to write, his train of thought wandered—he let me kiss his nipples last night, and his belly, I got all the way down to the top of his pants and I could feel what a raging boner he had, will he let me touch it tonight, strip him naked, suck his dick, at least put his hand on mine, OH GOD I WANNA BE INSIDE HIM SO BAD …
He had to masturbate before he could get any work done. The situation was untenable but exquisite. Luke wondered if he was in love. He had been in love a few times, but never with someone he hadn’t fucked first, and never so helplessly. He felt as if he would do anything for Tran, even wait.
He didn’t have to wait long. A week after the night of the party, Tran showed up at the apartment with a wicked little gleam in his eye. He’d told his parents he would be sleeping elsewhere that night, and not to worry, though of course they would.I want you to show me everything, Tran whispered as they got naked and slipped into bed. Just be careful.
Looking back on it, Luke thought that had been the theme of their entire relationship. Show me the heights of experience, and their seedy depths. Drive me mad with pleasure, then tease me with pain. Take me to the edge, share your joy and fury, know my body like you know your own. But don’t forget to wrap it all in latex. Back then, though, he probably would have sprayed his dick with Lysol and worn two condoms if that was what it took to breach the virgin sanctity of Tran’s perfect ass.
At first Luke couldn’t figure out what was different about Tran, why he’d fallen so hard for this particular cute Asian boy when there were so many in the world. Part of it was the fact that Tran hadn’t been instantly attainable. He had presented a challenge. But the thrill of the chase couldn’t account for their intimate, intense conversations, or the part-protective, part-voracious gnawing deep in Luke’s gut when their bodies interlocked, or the sense of completion they felt in each other’s company.
Spending so much time with Tran reminded Luke what it was like to be nineteen: poised on the brink of your own life, wanting to know everything, to experience all sensations. Tran was like a raw nerve cell in a world of constant sensory input. He felt things deeply, laughed easily, got his feelings hurt often. He was at once elated and terrified by his emergent sexuality, and Luke found the combination exhilarating.
Tran was also very smart, and curious about everything. He was talented at intricate pastimes that left Luke mystified: computer programming, cooking, reading the I Ching. He said he wanted to be a writer, which made Luke slightly nervous, but so far he seemed to be stuck in the notebook-hoarding stage. Eventually he let Luke read some of these notebooks, the same kind Luke had kept at nineteen with their tattered, soft-cornered covers, their spiral bindings full of the shredded leavings of ripped-out pages. It was mostly diary stuff—Tran was still his own main character—but the voice was clear and engaging, with traces of stylistic extravagance.
All in all, Tran’s company made Luke feel as if he’d been getting intellectually and emotionally lazy prior to their meeting. The relationship inspired him to cram his brain with information, to stretch the possibilities of his intelligence, to read and write whenever he wasn’t having blissful sex with his new lover.
Six months in, they weathered the Christmas party affair with minimal damage. Luke suspected that incident had been Tran’s way of testing him, a venture into dangerous territory to see how much shit he would brook. He brooked none, but how strange it felt to be on the other side of infidelity! He wished he could apologize to all the boys who’d ever had to listen to his antimonogamy riff: I refuse to limit my range of experiences; you can deal with it or walk, your choice, but I’m not changing. He cringed to think of that now, because if any of those boys had cared for him a tenth as much as he cared for Tran, Luke knew how deeply his smug words must have cut.
It was the longest monogamous relationship Luke had ever had, the only one Tran had ever had, and they were determined to explore all its avenues. Tran was in t
he process of breaking away from the loving but vastly overprotective confines of a Vietnamese home, and Luke found it fascinating to watch him seek out new thrills. Tran tended to get in trouble when he drank, so they smoked pot, inhaled nitrous oxide, tripped on acid a number of times. Luke had never been crazy about acid—he was already pretty well unfiltered, and all the sensory input made his brain ache—but Tran loved it, and mushrooms too.
Things got a little weird when Tran decided he wanted to try heroin. Luke decided to go along with it. He’d always been able to maintain occasional use without letting it get heavy. Shooting up again now would be like visiting an old friend he hadn’t seen in a while; a volatile and temperamental friend, to be sure, but a faithful one.
So he looked up some of his old connections, scored a bag and tested it by himself. The first stuff he got was low-grade; it numbed his fingertips, sent pins and needles up his spine, left a nasty medicinal taste in his mouth. He threw it away and told Tran he hadn’t been able to score, but would keep trying. Eventually the sweet payload came through, the gingery stuff that took you down smooth and slow. Injecting Tran, finding the vein in that healthy firm-textured skin and puncturing it with his needle, Luke was as nervous as he had been their first night in bed.
To Luke’s relief, Tran enjoyed himself on heroin but seemed unaffected by its more insidious charms. You couldn’t get hooked with your first shot, like the straights said, but some people took to a heroin high so strongly that the old saw might as well have been true. Tran said he’d be happy to do it again next week or never. So they toyed with junk occasionally, but Luke didn’t get his habit back, and Tran never had anything resembling a habit. They found each other more intoxicating than any drug.
Tran still lived at home, but he spent most nights with Luke, and his parents tolerated his absence as long as they didn’t have to think too much about what he might be doing. According to Tran, they thought he was sowing wild oats and would soon settle down, marry a nice Vietnamese girl, and become a partner in the family restaurant. They even had a particular Vietnamese girl in mind, a former high school classmate Tran eloquently characterized as “a brown-nosed dweeb.”
Luke wondered how long Tran expected to keep up this slacker’s charade, living rent-free, doing what he pleased but committing to nothing, shuttling between two worlds. It seemed a fool’s paradise, but of course Luke had abandoned his own family at seventeen. His parents hadn’t been so bad: hardscrabble Georgia crackers, barren until late in life, they had always seemed old to him. It was the town that had driven Luke away, the bland contempt in his neighbors’ eyes, the rapacious cruelty of his classmates, the smug ignorance, the eternal exhortation to pair off and breed.
But Tran had been lucky enough to grow up in New Orleans instead of rural Georgia, and Luke surely didn’t begrudge him the hope of maintaining a relationship with his family. All in all, things were good.
Then they got tested together, and everything fell apart.
Luke had never taken an AIDS test in San Francisco. He knew he would want to kill himself immediately if he turned up positive, and he couldn’t afford suicide; there was still too much writing he had to do. If he did have it, he would know the cause of infection, though not its exact source. He had always been obsessively careful with needles. He had never been careful with sex.
He would wear a condom if his partners asked him to, would refrain from coming in their mouths if they insisted. But there was little he wouldn’t do with an acquiescent partner. Safe sex struck him as a form of living death. How could you lust after someone without wanting to taste his fluids? How could you love someone without wanting to seek out his innermost membranes and spend your pleasure there?
When Luke tested positive, Tran had tried to deal with it and keep on loving him. Luke realized that now. But at the time, a little over a year ago, it had seemed as if Tran just wanted to get away. Hardly surprising; what twenty-year-old kid could confront the specter of his own death, let alone the reality of a dying lover? It had gone bad, very bad. Luke began to see himself as if from a distance, a writerly part of his brain observing his own madness, storing even this for later. He might have no more tranquility in which to remember this emotion. It didn’t matter; the mill never quit grinding away.
They tried to separate, kept peeling apart and slipping back together like the edges of a wound that would not heal. Somewhere along the way, Luke found himself wanting to hurt Tran, to hurt himself and bleed into Tran, to let a condom slip or tear. He caught himself getting physically abusive in small ways, shoving Tran into the pillows, holding him down on the bed, grinding those delicate bones a little too hard.
Tran took every bit of it. He didn’t have much choice, since Luke still outweighed him by forty pounds, but his tongue stilled and his eyes flared with resentment. He began finding reasons to stay away. Luke remembered the wretched exultation he’d felt when he first realized Tran was afraid of him: a spasm of self-loathing so great it was almost pride. Soon after that, Tran bailed. A rash of interminable phone calls at odd hours, a plethora of endlessly revised scheming letters, and then nothing. Nothing at all for a very long time.
It was too much to think on now, right after doing a show. He crawled out of the hole in the page, hauling himself on bony knees and bruised elbows. He dragged his fevered brain out last. It was nearly nightfall. He’d been writing all day, hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. Sometimes he thought heroin was the only thing that had ever let him sleep.
Outside, Airline Highway was cracking one bleary eye and shaking off last night’s hangover. Luke could hear souped-up engines going by, the subliminal hum of neon, the occasional dull pop of gunfire. He sensed a hive of activity in the rooms around him, comings and goings on the veranda. Cheap sex and business deals of all kinds. There was junk out there, pure and merciful.
He couldn’t stay in the room any longer. He slung his jacket over his shoulders, pulled his boots on, went out and sat in his car with the windows rolled up and the tape deck blasting Bauhaus’ last album, Burning from the Inside. Peter Murphy only sang half the songs on the album, officially because he’d been in hospital recovering from double pneumonia. Rumor had it that his pneumonia symptoms bore a remarkable resemblance to heroin withdrawal. The emaciated, androgynous singer had once bragged about a psychic’s prediction that he would die of AIDS in Paris; now he had a kid.
As far as Luke was concerned, Murphy should be here begging to trade places with him. Sure, breeder, he’d say, unzipping his pants, suck my dick, then go buy yourself a ticket to Paris.
He huddled in the bucket seat and wrapped his arms around himself. His leather jacket creaked softly, familiar as the sound of a lover’s breathing. The bulk of it reminded him what it felt like to be strong.
9
I stood staring at the filthy brown surface of the Mississippi River. The water had a slick look, iridescent with a thin film of crude oil. It humped and heaved and rolled as if in peristalsis, a long brown string of viscera endlessly churning. I was near its sphincter, which accounted for the smell.
A line of barges moved slowly upstream in the night, silhouetted against the opposite bank, heaped with some glittering black substance. I imagined them plowing into the gaudily lit bridge that carried traffic across the river, the long silver girders bending and shearing, the roadway crumbling into the water, spilling cars and tiny half-crushed bodies. Unfortunately, I held no sway over barges.
This river was nothing like the Thames, the cold gray vein that snaked through my cold gray city, upon whose banks I had spent most of my life, into which I had flushed through my toilet any number of carefully wrapped, slightly stained parcels. The Thames seemed sterile beside this roiling brown stream.
I wondered what it would do to a corpse. Perhaps I could float one out tied to an empty plastic bottle, then row out to retrieve it in a fortnight. From all the similar bottles sailing past, multicoloured indigestible tidbits, it appeared as if other curious parties mi
ght have done just that.
Once I had boarded the flight from London and found myself safely in the air, I raced through the papers I’d bought, suddenly ravenous for news of the world I was rejoining. Aside from myself, it seemed as dull and repetitive as ever: royal scandals, politicians’ sex lives, vicious opinions of the willfully ignorant presented as facts and swallowed whole by vacuous readers. One of the front-page articles about the abduction of my corpse had a sidebar entitled THE GAY PLAGUE—ARE YOUR CHILDREN SAFE?
I read every word of these insipid rags, then turned in desperation to the in-flight magazine. Ads targeted at corporate drones with brown noses and fat wallets exhorted me to monogram my briefcase, upgrade my powerbook, emboss my business card on the face of a watch. At last I found a travel article among all the sales pitches. It extolled the humid vices of New Orleans, the jazz, the food, the other delicacies. My interest was piqued by the caption beneath a picture of a blood-red drink in a long-stemmed glass, garnished with a cherry, a slice of orange, and a vivid green paper ruffle: New Orleans has over 4000 bars and nightclubs …
In London there were half again as many. But surely the city was only a fraction of London’s size …
I scanned the rest of the article. The population of New Orleans was just over seven hundred thousand. London was home to seven million shivering souls. As I worked out the math, I felt an incredulous grin spreading over my face. Londoners had a pub per thousand citizens, a ratio that had always set well with me. But residents of New Orleans had one for every 175.