I'm Still Your Fag Read online

  ***

  When I didn’t call Claxton, he called me. It was the night my mother had her book club over. Each week they’d trot out the classics, sit around in the living room talking about the underrated beauty of George Eliot. Physically, I mean—no joke. Few of these women were still with their husbands. Some, like my mother, lived alone. They brought homemade snacks and by the time they’d unpacked their stuff the room looked like a bake sale. My mother uncorked a bottle of Don Pepe and I was preened over like a little boy at an adult party. There had been suicide attempts in that group, she revealed to me once. One day a woman from up the street came and sat on the chaise lounge and drank melon balls until she passed out from the pills she’d taken. These days she was painstakingly restoring her Victorian mansion. She read to us out loud in a faux British accent from Middlemarch on that same chaise lounge.

  After the phone rang my mom summoned me with the same concerned voice she assumed when Claxton called in high school. It was all I could do to not make an indignant, snotty face at her. Instead I just said “thanks,” and pretended that she wasn’t lingering in the kitchen eavesdropping.

  “Driving by your house in a few, wanna go for a ride?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Come on. We’ll chuck some stones at Tamar’s window.”

  “You know her?”

  “I’ve always known her, Shatz.”

  “Well, okay.” My mother muttered something and paced out of the room. Tamar Zimmer had been a serious crush of mine. She used to wear leg warmers and leotards to class. That really impressed me, as though she might burst into dance at any moment. I’d never spoken to her at school, not once. I didn’t remember Claxton being friends with her, but he probably was. You never knew whom Claxton would be hanging out with next back then. He didn’t ossify into a particular social strata like the rest of us; instead he moved up and down the popularity latter at will. There was a rough period when a couple of jocks tried to knock him from his perch; for about a week Claxton got challenged to a fight every day after school. I know that if it were me, Claxton would have been there, watching my back, but I stopped attending the fights after the first one—I didn’t have the stomach for them. He left half the football team bloodied in the lakeside park and from that point on he was untouchable. I didn’t complain; because I was friends with Claxton I got left alone, too.

  Instead of a few minutes, it took Claxton over an hour to get to my house. I cursed myself, looking out the window, waiting for him. The anxiety that he wouldn’t show rose in me, bringing back the specter of my insecure teenage years. There had been times when that had happened, when he would blow me off, and I had been hurt and furious with him. But we’d always came back to each other, one way or another. This time, when he finally did arrive he didn’t offer an explanation and I didn’t ask. I slipped into his Jetta and we took off. I could see the silhouette of my mother in the window, watching us leave. I’d kissed her good-bye, something I’d never done before.

  Claxton drove to Sheridan Road along the Winnetka lakefront, then cut over to Tower. All along the way he pointed out the sites where old homes had been demolished, where developers were putting up prefab mansions.

  “It’s like there is a town of zombie homes springing up.”

  “They’re just houses,” I said.

  “They’ll never be houses,” he said. “They’ll always be teardowns.”

  It was true, I didn’t like to see historic homes pulled down, but I couldn’t concern myself with it and I found his outrage a bit absurd. He was the one whom I would have expected to flee the North Shore as fast and as far as he could. But here he was, dug in.

  We drove west until we hit the Indian Hills Forest Preserves, where he parked. “Aren’t we going to go find Tamar?” I asked.

  “Did you think I was serious?” he said.

  “Weren’t you?”

  He shrugged, got out of the car. I shivered and rubbed my hands together. I’d forgotten how cold Chicago could get in the winter. “Take these,” Claxton said, handing me his pair of brown kid gloves. I put them on, and Claxton made fists of his hands and shoved them in the pockets of his slacks.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You know.”

  “The tree house? I thought they ripped that down.”

  “They did. What can I say? I’ve had some spare time on my hands.” Claxton had first built the tree house for us in junior high. We’d both grown up in fatherless households and I depended on him for such paternal gestures. We were supposed to initiate it by spending a night there, telling our mothers we were sleeping at each other’s houses. The occasion was well planned-out; we’d brought snacks, flashlights, and Claxton had swiped a National Lampoon from the drugstore. I’d barely made it past midnight: there were noises outside, probably just deer, but I couldn’t get the image of child molesters out of my mind, or older kids, who seemed to possess godlike powers compared to my scrawny self. What if they lit the place on fire, and we were sacrificed in some heavy metal ritual? I pestered Claxton until he led me down, causing no small amount of confusion when we showed up at his mother’s house. Overnights aside, it became a haven for Claxton, myself, and other assorted burnouts or couples who had nowhere else to go. That was, until the police caught wind and destroyed it.

  I remembered the way through the trees, though I needn’t have: the snow was well beaten down into a path. Kids, I thought. A gust that came off the lake cut through the trees, creeping into the collar of my coat, which wasn’t heavy enough for the weather.

  “Bet you’re missing LA right about now,” said Claxton.

  “No,” I lied.

  When we arrived at the tree house, I could see a light coming from one of the windows. He had hammered in a sturdy ladder, and I could hear muffled voices coming from above as I climbed. It sounded like there was a party going on up there. Claxton banged on the trap door in warning, then pushed it open. I watched him ascend into the halo of light, then climbed up after him. My glasses clouded over as soon as I got inside. I took them off, and tried to focus on the blurry faces in front of me.

  “You remember everybody.”

  “Hey, it’s Shatz. Jesus man, I’ve missed you,” came a voice I didn’t recognize.

  “Ben,” Claxton clued me in. “And Cindy, Cammie.” I heard mumbled greetings as I furiously buffed my lenses with my shirttail. I put my glasses back on. Indeed, there sat a group of kids from my graduating class—some I knew, some I had only seen in the hallways. Everybody was smiling, holding bottled beer. “And of course you remember Tamar Zimmer.” A face appeared before me; she had cut her hair short since school, in the candlelight her hazel eyes appeared to churn with bright, private energy, then my glasses fogged over again.

  The tree house was bigger than its previous incarnation. There were two futons on which people sat, covered by blankets. The space was warmed by bodies and a small battery-operated heater. I don’t know if it was Claxton’s intention to deliver me to this group, but I looked up after a beer and an intense, brief catching up with Cindy (arch and trustworthy sounding as she had been as class treasurer), and Claxton was gone, having slipped silently down the trap door when I wasn’t paying attention. I looked over at Tamar and felt overcome by the same shyness that had inhibited me with girls throughout school.

  “I missed you man,” repeated Ben Ogilvy, throwing his arm around my shoulder. I had barely known Ben in school; he was one of the wealthy country club kids who had stayed aloof to me. I once spent an unbearable few hours caddying for him and his younger sister one Sunday, burning with humiliation at having to eat behind the ninth-hole diner while they lunched inside.

  “Can you work this, man?” said Ben, handing me a bottle of Sam Adams and an opener.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Yeah,” replied Ben, laughing uncomfortably, then turned to Cammie, who dutifully opened his beer for him. “Cheers,” he said, toasting me, smiling again. I�
�d taken it as an affront, until Claxton clued me in later. Ben had experienced some unspecified breakdown at Rollins and returned to rehabilitate. Claxton said he had become depressed and drank a shot of undiluted liquid LSD. It fried him. He was catatonic for days, and when he came round he was no better than a toddler. He’d had to learn everything from scratch, including dressing himself and going to the bathroom. Now he was doing better, but still got tripped up over mechanical things. That was four years ago. Now he had grown his hair long and was talking about some extreme golf league he wanted his parents to invest in.

  “Um, why do you guys hang out here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, nobody really wants to be at home, and nobody has a place to themselves, so here we are. It’s kind of fun, no?”

  “Sometimes we cruise around and crash high school parties.”

  “Or play doorbell ditch.”

  “You’re giving away all our secrets.”

  “Shatz is trustworthy. He’s one of us now.”

  After a few more beers the evening became hazy, and soon I found myself sitting next to Tamar. I noticed for the first time that she had a cane laying over her legs.

  “What happened to you?” I asked, thinking she might have twisted her ankle.

  “I was blown up,” she said, smiling.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “So am I,” she replied, looking at me askew. She told me she’d been waiting behind a rope for a disco in Tel Aviv when somebody at the front of the line detonated their explosives. “I don’t remember anything, but I’ve got a video of me being carried to an ambulance. After the bomb went off, and people asked what it was like, I’d say, it was just like a bomb went off. I didn’t know how else to describe it, but somehow that worked. They couldn’t understand the experience, but the simile sank in for some reason. That got me interested in poetry. Now I’m taking some classes downtown. Any more questions?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t talk much.”

  “It’s kind of a riveting story,” I said. Tamar might have taken that opportunity to ask me about my own reasons for coming home, but she didn’t. She liked to talk about herself, which was fine.

  “Are you going to stay?” she asked me, rising to leave.

  “I don’t know. Actually Claxton was my ride.”

  “He’s probably not coming back.”

  “No, probably not.”

  “I’ll drive you home. Come on. Bye everyone.”

  “Hey Shatz,” said Ben. “Give me a call. We get together at my place quite a bit.”

  “Okay,” I said. We slowly descended the ladder, then made our way across the path through the woods. As we went I noticed she walked with a slight limp. Tamar had always looked so poised walking through the hallways of school, almost as if she was being escorted by an invisible guardian, or there was a strong wind at her back, charting her course. But now her limp had robbed her of that poise. She took my arm as we stepped over an ice patch in the parking lot.

  “I have to admit something,” she said in the car as we drove. “I don’t really remember you. From school. I mean, I remember Claxton.”

  “He’s kind of like that. A blazing sun. You don’t really notice what’s around him.”

  “Or a black hole everything just gets sucked into.”

  “You could say that too, I suppose.”

  “Maybe that’s why you were friends with him, so you wouldn’t have to get noticed or not noticed. Sort of takes the responsibility off. There’s a consonance there. Some people just like being the shadow.” I remained silent. “I just hurt you,” she said.

  “Yeah. That’s okay.”

  “Sorry. Everyone tells me I’m too blunt.” We drove in silence for a bit. “I’m hungry,” she said, pulling up in front of a 7-11. “Want anything?”

  “No,” I said. There were, even on this cold night, high-school kids hanging out in front of the store. Tamar came back with a microwaved hot dog in a paper bag. “I’m breaking kosher,” she said. “I just decided.”

  “Am I a bad influence?”

  “At home I am Orthodox, but in the car I assimilate,” she said, and pulled a bottle of beer from her coat pocket.

  “Did you just steal that?”

  “Yeah. Trying to loosen your tongue. Here, it’s twist off.”

  Tamar ate her hot dog, then we drove down by the lake, which I could see from the window—the way the ice was whipped up in peaks and cracked over the water in great sheets like a collapsed building, we might have been on the moon. The night glowed blue; she sped around the curves, hugging the edge of the ravine drive close as a scoop through ice cream. After the final curve she lost traction and we spun out, Tamar shrieking in laughter as the car careened around, coming to a halt in a snow bank.

  “Fire didn’t kill this Jew girl, and ice won’t either,” she said. I leaned over and, high on adrenalin, kissed her. We stayed that way, kissing, until a police car rolled slowly by. Tamar waved them over, and we pushed from behind as she maneuvered the car back onto the road.

  “That was fun,” I said as we pulled up to my house.

  “Yeah,” said Tamar, “it was. But there’s also something to be said for staying at home.”

  Now that I was back on the North Shore I should have been looking for another job. That was part of the plan. Instead, I got up around noon, ate whatever my mother had left for me, showered, watched some TV, and went over to Ben’s for martinis as the sun descended.

  “I can’t decide if we should do away with the golf course, or keep the course and do away with the clubs,” Ben said over Lobster Thermador. “Ah, it’s stupid. I should probably just stick with cooking. Extreme cooking.” In his time at home he’d discovered he had a savantlike ability to construct dishes, though operating the appliances was still almost impossible for him. His mother had a sheet of written instructions taped to each one. Unfortunately, reading was also still a challenge. As a result he could sooner throw together a Cesar salad than open a can of Chef Boyardee. Ben stayed home a lot playing bongos or watching cooking shows. Most days we’d be joined by the others: Cindy, who had been let go from her brokerage in New York over an insider trading scandal, and Cammie, who had returned from a volunteer job in Africa after contracting a blood disease. Cammie brought an acoustic guitar along; we sang camp songs as Ben cooked furiously, trying to keep up with the guy on the TV. “Zoop, put in the butter, zoop, sauté until light brown the color of caramel.”

  Outside of Tamar, I’d never liked any of these people. They were the sort of kids I’d held in contempt—their normalcy and social adjustment, their predictable pursuits of sports and social advancement—these were the sheep that made the school feel so homogenous and oppressive. But now I felt those judgments trickling away, or perhaps I was just lonely for my past.

  “You know what’s so funny,” Cammie said, swirling the liquid of her drink around in her glass, one of her nervous tics. “When we found out I was sick, they brought me to a witch doctor. Can you believe it? A goat was sacrificed on my behalf. I had to sleep with its carcass at the foot of my bed, and drink some concoction made with its four humors. That couldn’t have been smart.”

  “Zoop,” Ben said, refilling her drink.

  “There’s a reason we’re all back. I don’t mean an individual reason. I mean there’s a mutual reason. A purpose. I believe in a shared purpose, don’t you?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We were supposed to be special, we were brought up to believe that we were all waiting to fulfill some special destiny. It’s just that some of us are still waiting. That’s why we’re here. To help each other.”

  “You already are special,” said Cindy, kissing her cheek.

  Claxton didn’t come on these afternoons. I don’t know what he did with his days—I suppose just worked. I’m not sure what he was going through, though I know my cigarettes and martinis weren’t a part of it. But it was around t
his time when we started on the Christmas trees. Nobody else came on those excursions; it was just us, driving around the North Shore so late at night.

  “People loved these things, and now they discard them like trash,” he said, as if that justified our destruction. “Who cares what we do to them.” Soon all the trees would be gone, collected by garbage trucks, or burned by us. What we would do with each other then, I didn’t know.

  Cammie wasn’t joking about the doorbell ditch. One afternoon we went out: she, I, and Cindy. Cindy would push the bell: it was a special privilege she had reserved for herself and would not relinquish, her long manicured finger extending toward the bell, pointing at it like making an accusation.

  “Why are we doing this?” I asked. Cammie only giggled at my question. I remembered her from high school: she had been on the pep squad. Now we were crouched behind a Forerunner as a man stood ticked-off in the doorway of his teardown, scanning the street for whomever had rung his bell and bolted. Claxton said that she’d already had multiple blood transfusions, that she was planning on going back to Africa when she got better, which might just be never. Cammie held her middle finger up when the man closed his door. I was liking her more and more.

  “What are you doing home anyway?” she asked me.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “It’s a bad question, though. You shouldn’t have to explain coming home. If it’s really home, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “My mother takes care of me,” she said as if reassuring herself.

  I nodded. “Mine too.”

  “We believe you need to hit a sort of second puberty,” said Cindy. “Not a sexual maturity. Not maturity at all. But you realize something. That the world is basically indifferent.” I looked at Cammie. You could see that the sun had weathered her skin; she was no longer beautiful, only she didn’t know it yet.

  “Thanks for bringing me out today,” I said.

  “I’m tired, Shatz,” said Cammie, resting her head on my shoulder, breathing spearmint from her gum toward me. “I’m real tired.”

  Maybe they were right. When the earthquake had hit LA a few weeks before I left, it was like it opened something up inside of me. I suddenly became aware of my organs: my liver, my kidneys, my heart. These were all separate entities. Until that point it sort of felt like they were all functioning as one, like my body was one unstoppable unit. Now everything in me felt compartmentalized, acting on its own, barely getting along and cooperating only out of necessity. It’s like what my boss at the paper said about Los Angeles: six suburbs looking for a city. That’s how my organs felt, disjointed. I had a premonition that some communication inside me was going to fail, and once it did, there would be only death.