THE
SEA OF POSSIBILITIES
As John strode through the high school
corridor, head up to find air in the closeness, Patti Smith chanted in his headphones
that there was a rhythm generating down the hallway.
There was one, pounded out in
textbooks, showers and boy/girl sexuality, with variations tattooed in
response, but he ignored it – it did not suit his style of dancing. Unfortunately, the affair did not take to
wallflowers.
Horst, Will and Craig were lounging by
their lockers, abstractly beautiful bodies, concretely ugly minds. As John passed, and winter light hit his
multi-coloured hair, a plan was formulated between the lads.
Collectivity was needed, as they
lacked the imagination and will to act alone.
Herd mentality protected groups and justified common goals, no matter
where it was found.
John had nearly reached the school’s
front entrance when they struck.
It was like ballet. The tape player, ripped from John’s grasp,
went into a corner of the foyer, playing tinnily.
With precision, Will held John’s arms,
exposing the heart to choreographed blows from Horst.
Craig called out steps and provided
encouragement and direction.
John was stage and audience.
Patti was asking the listener whether
s/he liked it like that.
The offenders did. John held a different, unsolicited opinion.
Finally, the performance was over, and
the players left the stage, talking and patting each other on the back. Having shown they were men, affection was
sanctioned and sanctified.
Time passed at a variable rate. As it was four o’clock, and the school was
deserted, no-one came to his aid. His
diminishing resources were marshaled to pull himself up.
Once on his feet, he staggered to the
washroom to tidy up and survey damage.
Enraptured as he had been by the experience, he had not noticed
individual elements – careless, but understandable.
The mirror was warped and stained, but
served. There were marks on his neck
where Horst’s fingers had found purchase – or perhaps it had been Will’s – they
could not keep their hands off him.
Given other circumstances, that might have been flattering.
While his chest was tender, nothing
appeared broken to sight or touch. They
had not targeted his eyes, except for a few scrapes – kind, since old bruises
had not yet faded.
Bashers often targeted eyes, he had
learned somewhere. They could not stand
another man’s look, and had to avert gays/gaze permanently.
In the back of his mind, John almost
wished he HAD been blinded by them.
However, that was a short-lived, dark fantasy, as it was important to
look at such people defiantly until they cringed away in shame/fear/desire –
polite engagement was for the polished, among victims and perpetrators – and as
there was beauty to see in the world.
But now was no time for
philosophy. He had to return ‘home’,
because it was his night to prepare dinner, and the others who lived there (not
his family – he had none since the death of his mother and the departure of his
sister – his father and brother were mere ties in poisoned blood) would be
upset if he failed to fulfill his designated duties.
He looked out the door, scanning for
the trinity. Not seeing them, he went to
his locker, put on his leather jacket (stopping to ensure Patti’s voice rang
true – it did), combed his thatch again and left, Patti moaning in his ears
about how her friends were not here today.
He had to walk slower than usual, so
his father’s car was already home when he arrived there.
Furthermore, his older brother’s
bicycle was sprawled across the sidewalk again, for which, although it was not
John’s bike, he would somehow be blamed, because all fault accrued to him with
interest, or disinterest – he should have been home earlier to put away the
bicycle his brother had failed to (it was vital to give a semblance of order to
chaos that was ‘order’) – which meant he too had returned from school earlier
than usual (Ed attended a school across town, to avoid being seen around
John). They both would be hungry, or
expecting to be fed, whether they actually had any desire for supper or not –
it was routine, and ritual existed outside need or justification…
John paused, took a deep breath and
stepped through the doorway, abandoning hope as he did. Certain things were left behind upon entering
prison – overt emotion was one.
Ed was the first vision to
appear. “Got beat up, huh, freak?” he
jeered, mouth full of something undefined.
Ed was not a freak. He looked like what he thought everyone else
did, and monitored his actions and words accordingly.
He was, in short, normally
abnormal. This phenomenon was well-known
to John, but invisible to many others.
Normally, John would have let that
slide. Today, however…
“How do you know?” John muttered. “How do you hear these things?”
“When don’t ya, freak!” Ed replied
with what he doubtless thought good humour.
“’Sides, Will phoned me!”
Until now, John was not aware Ed knew
anyone from John’s school. Of course, it
should have been no surprise. Evil is a
party animal.
Ed was expecting a response – John
could tell – as he was standing there, poised and quivering like a regulation
mouse-trap. As John did not want what
cheese could be gained by risking the device, he shrugged and walked towards
his room.
Ed grabbed John’s shoulder. John realized that sore spot had been missed
in his self-examination. No matter – he
did not give Ed a clear reaction.
“Leave ‘em alone! Quit looking at ‘em
and they’ll stop hitting you.” Ed probably meant this as kind.
There was no way not to look at Horst,
Will and Craig, however, because they were everywhere and wanted to be
regarded. On their terms. Fear.
“When you gonna act normal?” Ed called
out after his as John shut his door.
“When normal acts like me,” John
muttered as he gingerly removed his jacket and shirt. A poster of Darby Crash looked down upon him
with confusion, anger and some form of desire.
The parallel to his feelings from a closet-case suicide was cold
comfort.
He sat on the bed’s edge and took deep
gulps of air, but he was no more able to catch his breath here than anywhere.
John got up and went into the kitchen,
contemplating the sustenance he would have to take.
And there was the father, hunched over
the brown beer bottle altar.
“About time,” the old man
slurred. “You hanging out with your
faggy friends again?”
“I don’t have ‘faggy friends’,” John
muttered foolishly. Then he froze, near
the refrigerator, and the shadow fell across him.
John’s head bounced against the
freezer compartment and he slid down the spotless white appliance, hands
dragging magnets in the shape of fruit and chocolate boxes and idyllic homes
down with him.
“Don’t you sass me, boy!” the father
roared.
For the second time that afternoon,
John staggered up on his feet.
It was darkly amusing to John that
no-one but bashers and his male jailers/fellow inmates ‘read’ him as gay.
It was probably true, in the latter
case, that they had some insight into him, though, like all character analyses,
ideological glaucoma clouded the vision.
As to bashers, a number of theories
had been presented.
There was the idea that bashers were
themselves gay, an argument which had never held weight for him, if only
because anyone that concerned with conformity, who was a non-conformist only in
the sexual sense, should have bought the problematic pacifist mentality
plaguing the gay scene and never laid a finger on another human being, even in
self-defense.
Internalized homophobia also struck
him as a dubious concept. Patterned as
it was on assumed commonalities, shared goals, beliefs and cultural images, it
was used to attack gay rebels as much as straight bigots. John was aware that he would be accused of
it, were he to run across the wrong people.
John favoured the divide and rule theory
– that bashers and some gays targeted those viewed and constructed as weak.
It was grimly true that few bashers
were as single-issue as the identity politicians who claimed to combat them.
Such thoughts occurred to John as he
stirred soup and rubbed his pained head.
Naturally, no-one credited him with
ideas. He was, after all, only
seventeen, and thus not as wise as those subsumed in either queer or straight
culture. Furthermore, his outsider
status made him unworthy to comment, just as no-one in North America had any
right to speak about Hong Kong and no single person had the right to speak
about the abusive nature of a married relationship.
John was not entirely ungrateful about
living in Toronto, however.
The city was, after all, the gay
Mecca/Shangri-la/Brigadoon – thus holy, idyllic and prone to not appearing to
the unclean or those not in the right place at the right time.
He had extensive access to gay
materials, books, magazines and groups.
He had even read a few, and had one or two hidden away in obscure
locations.
There is nothing more alienating than
knowing one is gay and being told by the holy texts of one’s alleged (queer)
culture that one is not – not to mention by the prophets of one’s tribe.
With the possible exception of Who’s Emma,
the anarchist bookstore/record store, there was no queer space John felt
comfortable in, and neither was any queer space comfortable with him.
‘Divide and rule’ cut far too many
ways, a deadly razor.
Punks were a threat to gays, he had
been told more times than he cared to think about.
Of course, gays were also a threat to
(queer) punks (and were also bashers and accomplices to self-murder, were the
implications carried to the fullest extent) if that attitude went unchallenged –
and for the most part, it did.
And naturally, punks were also a
threat to (queer) punks in many cases.
This also went largely unquestioned.
‘Queer community’ as a monolith was a
farce and, most disgusting of all, was often known to be one by participants,
who still felt as though it were out of their control – which it could never
be.
Freedom to dance to disco music. Freedom to wear a suit – to marry and replicate
the circumstances that led to his mother’s suicide and his sister’s fleeing the
soul-destroying environment of ownership disguised as love, before she did the
same – to fight for welfare reforms that would mean death for many people with
AIDS (bad queers?) – to have pride parades acknowledged by the enemy (police,
government and big business) – in fact, to have the enemy set up camp in the
midst of these commercial ventures – this ‘community’, John could live without.
“Quit thinking and get over here!”
John’s father suddenly bellowed from the dining room table.
John sighed very quietly and lifted
the soup from the stove, pouring it into shallow bowls set out nearby.
But at last the evening was over. The father had fallen asleep into a drunken
stupor over the kitchen table. Ed was holed
up in his room with the latest victim of love, who had come after supper.
John sat for a moment or two in the
darkness of the “TV lounge”, staring at his reflection in the silenced, dark
television, then rose and slipped into his bedroom.
The magazine had a high gloss to it,
although it was words on paper and captured images, like any ‘zine. John lay on his bed and flipped through it
absently.
He was told these men were
beautiful. So were Horst, Will and
Craig, however – all muscular with well-combed hair and big, vacant
smiles. It was surface – the surface of
an alien world that might contain wonders, but also menace.
Normalcy and respectability were the
keywords. To be like Conrad Black –
successful, well-attired, generally arrogant and self-absorbed – was the goal
to shoot for. One had to show
seriousness by taking part in what John viewed as a sick joke.
Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Jayne
Mansfield – why did a sub-group claiming interest in the masculine cling to
long-dead (physically and/or artistically) female icons? (He was not
necessarily disapproving of this phenomenon – just wondering – and questions
did seem welcome in this area.)
Why these ones? Had culture ceased to
develop around 1969, when those ‘unacceptable, stereotypical, sexist’ (that
label should burn in the mouths of the hypocrites who spoke it!) drag queens
had rioted and allowed ahistorical jerks years later to deride them in their
publication?
What of Patti Smith? What of Poly
Styrene? If anything, the alleged interest the queer community had in breaking
down stereotypes, which, unfortunately, tended to mean marginalizing non-conformists
with greater efficiency than the straight world practiced, should have driven
them to these women. Their entire body
of work fought for the importance of self and finding one’s place within
oneself as well as without.
In any war between the two, ‘within’
had to win, but it was not always possible to survive that battle.
John went over to the record player he
had inherited from his sister and put his battered copy of Horses on – to “Land”.
Patti chanted about the hallway, the
boy, the angel and the fight/fucking as John lay there in the dark and held his
arms around himself tightly – protection, a pinning in.
The needle leapt across the record and
stabbed down hard. John, briefly
entranced by the chanting and the throbbing music, returned to full
consciousness.
“Up there, there is a sea – a sea of
possibilities…”, Patti chanted, as various other tracks of her voice intoned
words John had never heard clearly.
Tonight, though he still did not hear
the actual sub-texts, he began to think it may have been contradictions and
doubts and influences that colour even the most assured work of art/life.
It is necessary to listen to these
voices, for they might be your own reflected back at you through the headphones
as you make the record you will leave behind.
It is not essential to do what they
say, but to ignore them is to miss fragments of wisdom, or those who are
speaking your language.
Frantic now, Patti was screaming about
the sea of possibilities.
John squeezed his eyes tight, both to
hide the tears (he had been well-trained) and to see the inside – for eyes open
wide may miss the internal vista for the ugliness and beauty that lie without.
He started to quietly whisper, “There
is a sea – a sea of possibilities…there is no land but the land.”
“Ah, pretty boy – can’t you show me
nothing but surrender?”
YES.
