I’m Still Your Fag
by
M. Henderson Ellis
First North American serial rights
I’m Still Your Fag
The device was Claxton’s invention, of course. It used a cigarette as a fuse that, once burned down, would set off a combustible mixture of crushed-up match heads and sawdust. Not much of an explosion was needed, just enough to ignite the pine needles, now dried out and highly flammable so many weeks after Christmas. Once lit, the flames from the discarded tree would blaze high into the air in a slender spiraling stream, looking like the tail of an upturned rocket, lighting up the facades of houses along the street. It was a captivating sight, a spectacle Claxton and I watched from the front seat of my mother’s Cadillac, idling curbside. We’d stay until the flames burned themselves out, unless we heard sirens, in which case I would drive unhurriedly away. Sometimes I think that for Claxton, the real thrill was seeing the emergence of the fire engines on the scene. He liked to linger there a bit too long, making me edgy. “Come on,” I’d say, I could have driven away at any time, but no matter how nervous I got I always waited for Claxton to give his consent.
By the time I’d quit my job at one of the movie trade papers in Los Angeles, Claxton had already been home over a year, living in his mother’s basement. When I ran into him at the Pancake House I hadn’t seen him since he’d visited me at college. There he was, late afternoon, eating a Dutch Baby, drinking decaf alone in a window seat, looking too debonair for that place in a heavy camel hair overcoat, a maroon turtleneck sweater, and polka dot ascot. He had grown a little John Waters moustache and appeared both comic and handsome, as though rehearsing to be some retirement home Casanova.
“Shatz, what the hell? I thought you were in LA?”
“I was.”
“Were you in the quake? It looked bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was pretty rough. My neighborhood got hit hard.”
“Back for the holidays?”
“No, I was actually there for Christmas. But I’ve moved back. I’m staying at home for a bit.”
“You too. It’s really going around.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a lot of us here,” he said, squeezing the last drops of lemon on the Dutch Baby.
“A lot of who?”
“Class of ‘89,” he said.
“Buying houses already?”
“No, back with their parents. Ben Ogilvy. Cammie Martin. Cindy Lewy. Tamar.”
“Zimmer? Tamar Zimmer? I thought she moved to Israel?
“Back. There’s more, you’ll see.”
“Jesus. I’m not sure I want to.”
“Do you think you have a choice?” Claxton spread his arms, using himself as an example of my past inevitably catching up with me. Though I should have delivered the apple pancake home for my mother before it got cold, I sat with Claxton while he finished his dinner.
“You probably know what happened to me,” said Claxton.
“Uh-huh. The word got around.”
While I was studying journalism in Ohio, he’d been selling crystal meth out of a Streeterville high rise. By the time he was busted, he’d been living off protean shakes and speed-balls and had lost thirty pounds. Now, four years later, he’d been through rehab and was working as a part-time salesman at the Northbrook Court Brooks Brothers, staying clean, trying to make good on his parole. I knew all this through my mother, who liked to use stories of Claxton as on object lesson to keep me on the straight and narrow. Now he wouldn’t touch so much as caffeine.
“Gimmie a call,” he said, handing me a card. Claxton Long, consultant, it read. I searched Claxton’s staid expression, unsure whether or not I was supposed to laugh.
***
I remember the first time Claxton had me over to his house, way back in fifth grade. We’d crawled out his bedroom window and onto the roof over his deck. As I gazed out over his back yard, Claxton had climbed back in and shut the storm window, locking me out. He grinned at me from behind the glass, which had a scrim of frost creeping down the pane. “Break it,” he yelled. “Go ahead, you little pussy.” I began to cry out there on his roof, and Claxton traced the letters F-A-G in the frost on his window, his finger melting the word slowly, taking his time as I shivered. Only he wrote the message backward, so I got the mirror image. At that moment I apprehended something about Claxton, some inchoate knowledge of both his charm and limitations. My tears dried up and I jumped down from the deck, landing in a soft snowdrift, then running home. The next day he showed up at my door. He didn’t apologize; instead he handed me a bag containing his Atari console, games and all. He called me “his fag” after that. It was something between us; he never said it when other people were around. I complained, but I secretly liked it. I felt presided over when he called me that, as if the word was an arm thrown roughly over my shoulder, guiding me.