The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (23 page)

In the vicious circles of this world, Saul is at once the dope and the methadone, damnation and salvation.

Saul’s Book
is, among other things, a
Bildungsroman
. Picking Sinbad out of the gutter, Saul instructs the hapless, addled kid in the ways of survival amid the wiles of the world. “Assume the mask appropriate,” he advises. “If you’re hustling, then act like a hustler should. Don’t let the trick know how much you hate him. Don’t let him know that he, not you, is the piece of shit. And don’t, under any circumstances, flaunt your beautiful body.”

There are three fundamental laws, Saul goes on to say. Understand them, and you can begin to navigate this absurd world. The first is: “Things are always as they seem.” The second: “Things are never what they seem to be.” Which is right? Sinbad demands to know.

The novel is filled with Saul’s cryptic apothegms. “If you’re absolute certain about something,” he tells Sinbad, “then most certainly you are wrong.” “That’s the adventure, to plunge into the pool without knowing whether or not it is filled.” “The only way to be satisfied is to suspend judgment. Without laughter one soon becomes morally fastidious, unfit for human company.” And perhaps most memorably, “Every act of love ordains an act of betrayal.” And so it does, again and again in these tumultuous pages, equal parts pornography, philosophy, pederasty and pedagogy. Dostoevsky looms large here, as well as Nietzsche and Genet, and by the end perhaps Beckett also, for these two battered figures that somehow manage to remain standing on the author’s bleak stage-set even to the bitter end, “him, a pot-bellied old faker and me, a washed-out hustler,” resemble no one so much as Vladimir and Estragon, or perhaps I should say, were we to know everything about that play, offstage as well as on, Godot and his boy (and you thought we were just reading about hustlers and johns, didn’t you?).

At a climactic moment (Sinbad is threatening to leap from a window), Saul taunts him:

All this might seem like so much text-book adolescent existentialism were Sinbad and Saul not such marvelously realized characters embedded in a vibrant plot. Young, unloved Sinbad’s descent into the underworld of drugs and prostitution is gripping. Part Two of the novel (it is in five parts) is a black-farcical tour-de-force account, at once comical and heartbreaking, of a day in the life of a hustler so drug-impaired that he can barely keep himself together. Part Four is a suspenseful, noirish episode in the baths as Sinbad, newly out of prison, comes looking for Saul while the Mafia are at the same time looking for
him
(or in this novel teeming with sleights-of-hand, perhaps they are looking for Saul, or perhaps no one is looking for anyone at all). The epilogue involves not only a spooky séance with a
bruja
but also a final stunning revelation about the scope of Saul’s seductions that makes grimly perfect sense.

The novel’s narrative voice is compelling as well, shifting as it does among several different modes, sometimes first person, sometimes third, in an attempt to convey the various stages of Sinbad’s evolution, ranging from the semiliterate voice of the 12-year-old: “I was just, you know, hanging out. I bought a coke at the hot dog stand and was just standing there, sucking up the last little bit from the bottom where all the ice gets stuck. I didn’t even know the guy was standing there until I felt him staring at me;” to the world-weary adult: “In the beginning I suppose there was a God, but he must be too bored by now to care about anyone or anything and certainly too preoccupied to take any note of the chipped plaster saints, the multicolored candles, the fragrance of incense, the dishes of mangoes and bananas and pennies, the gilt prayer cards: in short, all the elaborate equipment of Santeria which my mother assembled.” If to some extent we are the words available to us, then Sinbad’s moral growth is charted through his gradual acquisition of articulate speech. It is only in prison, he tells us, that he finally discovered the books and words that eventually set him free.

Perhaps what I found most attractive in
Saul’s Book
circa 1984 was its searing, let’s-see-through-all-of-it brand of truthfulness. Sinbad at one point rages,

I suppose such lucid nihilism is always bracing, but it seemed particularly so amid the smarmy pieties of the Reagan/Bush years.

Saul himself is a formidable presence, loathsome and repellent, yet capable of strange charm and an almost supernatural ability to confound Sinbad at every turn. He is at once cruel and gentle, monstrous and benevolent, arbitrary and accommodating, a storm of conflicting aspects — and Sinbad’s vexed relationship with Saul, at first merely that of a desperate user with his fix, in the end comes to figure for something much grander and more disquieting: namely, man’s perplexed, enraged, disappointed but necessarily ongoing relationship with God Himself, who is evoked throughout these pages as an exhausted deity, bored with humanity “but still petulant enough to play his pranks upon a world long wearied of his improvisations.”

Two years after the publication of
Saul’s Book,
Paul T. Rogers was beaten to death with a plank and his body burned in an incinerator by his 20-year-old adopted son Chris, to whom the book had been dedicated “with my love and devotion, now and forever,” and a 27-year-old drifter who had been living with the two men in Queens.

One always takes a risk in rereading after many years a novel that has had a powerful effect on one’s younger imagination. Certainly my early (and long out-of-print) novel
Boys of Life
could not have been written without its predecessor’s cadences haunting my brain. That novel
owes a great debt to Rogers’ laser-like focus on all the currency of lies and hypocrisies that prop up respectability, as well as to his spicy stew of the prurient and the literary. But I realize I have moved on since then — in large part, I suppose, simply by growing older. When I am sometimes asked by readers (and editors) if I might ever again write so fierce a novel as
Boys of Life
, my answer is invariably no. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, and I no longer want to. I no longer possess the righteous anger of the young and disenfranchised (if a college professor can ever be disenfranchised, no matter how unconventional his sexual tastes). For eventually one gets over reality’s affront to one’s innocence. One grows accustomed to the melancholy fact that we all sell ourselves at one time or another, that whoring is the dirty little secret of our success as human beings. Exposing that obvious truth no longer seems very interesting. One instead becomes rather more curious about the intricate and elaborate lies themselves: for how varied, ingenious, poignant, demented and inspired those charades can be!

I used to want to write only about out gay men, those noble beings who had left behind the camouflage and subterfuge of the closet in order to live their lives openly and proudly. I looked forward to celebrating a world liberated from shadows, where everything was lit by the kindly glare of honesty. Now as I head into the more wistful landscape of middle middle-age, it’s the closet and its shadows — the deeper, darker, more well-defended the better — that fascinate me, for I’m increasingly convinced it’s only here, amid the cobwebs and mummified mice and the boxes of rejected photographs, the old letters one can no longer bear to read ( I’m thinking of lost friendships, of violated loves, of those irrecoverable visits to Provincetown so many years ago), it is only here, as I say, that the wondrous awful secret of what we have made of ourselves is most likely to be found.

That I’ve voyaged beyond
Saul’s Book
in the last quarter century doesn’t in the least discount its vital importance as an early port of call on that very long and continuing journey. Everything about
Saul’s Book
is still true. And none of it ever was.

Penguin, 1990

Andy Quan

Infatuation involves who you are at the time, who your object of affection is, and who you believe him to be. The reasons can be perfectly evident, or opaque.

In the summer of 1992, I fell into infatuation (I think the word ‘love’ should be used sparingly and truthfully) with a writer named Patrick Roscoe and his book,
Birthmarks.
Just as one often remembers the small details of affairs, so I recalled the concrete object: the cover, a face of a boy appearing in hot red as if from a tray of photographic chemicals, the print removed before the image was fully developed; the pages were slightly degraded, as I had found the book in a used bookstore after its 1990 publication by Penguin.

Also important to this story is who I was when I read the book: 23-years-old, awkward in knowing how to put my desire for men into practice, taking a break from my university in a small town in Ontario, Canada to work as a host at the Canadian Pavilion at Expo ’92 during a hot summer in Seville, Spain. I had written many poems and only one short story and was many years from being a published writer. The main concern in my life was finding out who I was; the main question: would I ever find a place where I belonged, where I was accepted? I had already traveled a lot and wondered whether I’d ever settle down or whether I’d always be travelling.

So it was predictable that I was hooked into
Birthmarks
by the very first story — introduced to a family of nomads by the grandmother who visits them while they’re still in Africa. Meeting her grandson years later, she comments on that generation while shaking her head, “All she knew was they switched jobs and countries the way people used to change socks.” I predicted, correctly, that this would describe how I would be as well as the people I’d meet.

Roscoe’s book veers off into unpredictable directions from there: short fiction divided into four sections, inhabited often by a young man named Richard, Rickie, Reeves; by parents who abandon and children who were abandoned; and by glittery mother figures who may or not have been forgotten movie stars.

One way to piece together various narratives: Patrick Roscoe was one of four children, born in Tanzania to parents who had given up stable work to live in Africa. At the end of their time outside of Canada, for nearly a year, they rolled through Europe in a cramped minivan with little money. His parents were distant, unable to connect with or nourish their children. He leaves home at a young age, takes up prostitution and drugs, is taken under the wing by a woman of faded glamor, and turns tricks and survives in Oregon, California and Toronto with an occasional visit to his mother’s home.

Of course, this is only a simplistic sketch. What also drives the book are other stories which may or may not be part of Roscoe’s own history. In an early story, a child is kidnapped, beaten and kept in the dark for years. A boy (a runaway?) is taken in by an older hooker. A boy (the same?) lives with a woman – his foster mother? – who dreams of California, where the boy ends up as a sex worker. A pedophile arsonist’s plans go wrong. Rickie tells the story of his years in an orphans' home with his best friend Frances (imagined?). The clash of the real and imagined reaches a climax in ‘A Child of Man.’ At last the narrator makes an emotional connection with another man. His past history and hurts are on full display. He trusts himself little to stay around. He feels a child growing within him. Family members from other stories come into the narrative. The speaker’s voice becomes charged with poetry as the child is born. But if any expectations are raised for the narrator to explore an intimate relationship, the very next story confounds with a claustrophobic tale of a hemophiliac harassed by silent phone calls.

The blueprint of the book becomes clearer in the final stories. In ‘Rorschachs V,’ the author takes on the voice of a psychologist, in charge of a grand experiment, watching himself and describing what he sees. To get at his outcome, it’s necessary to “erase the outlines of my personality, blur the contours of my character.” He explores who he is both by telling his life history, and by inhabiting other characters. The astonishing ‘Dying to Get Home’ recounts a writer and a man in an AIDS hospice watching each other through their windows; each takes turns speaking.

It’s risky writing. In one story, an omniscient narrator not only describes himself as a separate character, he occasionally addresses the reader. Passages often take off like kites into bouts of poetry and life philosophy, but without details to anchor them to a lived experience. There are long, focused explorations of a single emotional state, with few external descriptions to distract: you are going to live these characters, inside their heads, like it or not.