The drive to Point Dume, like Joe, is astounding. That’s one of my words. If Joe was telling this story, he’d say a lot of things in a different way, like: I can’t tell you how many times I drove out there that week! He’d slap his face like Jack Benny and you’d wonder how somebody could look so innocent and capable of violence all at once. Astounding, isn’t it? The way his voice eats up the can’t-tell part and growls away with a moan of a laugh. That’s Joe and that’s Point Dume.
I went out to the damned place three times in a week. Marco and I had been talking about this idea of a film in black-and-white super-8. I can’t tell you how many times I threw myself into the surf. That’s me talking now, already full of Joe’s ways of speech. There I was, stripped naked in October, floating like a corpse with an orange sheet strangling me from one end to the other in the cove at Point Dume.
Marco just filmed from his perch on the rocks with some pretty expensive equipment. He’s astounding, even though it was me that was freezing and him giving orders high and dry. That’s what happens when you live with a person.
You think three’s so magic? I was hoping Joe would show up again my third time out. I needed him like I needed Point Dume.
You take the Mexican stretch of Sunset out of Silver Lake, with the toothy Hollywood sign to your back, and slide into the freeway at the fake geyser on the edge of Echo Park. I’m squinting through the high-rise mirrors and corporate tombstones you’d see in other places mostly on television, and after a quick flirt or two in the fast Harbor lanes going south, we shoot due west on the Santa Monica with dreams of the coast.
I remember how afraid I was, of the fear I felt the first night I met Marco. It was
October, 1980 in a bar on the Upper West Side called Cahoots. I was still new enough to New York and just walked up and kissed him, trembling. He said: What do you think of the Hopper exhibition at the Whitney? I said: Great, especially what he said about not being able to get over Europe. But that was years ago.
And yes! But no! Joe and this city are different. I say to myself: Marco was New York; Joe is Los Angeles.
On a clear day you’d swear you can see where you’ve come from. When the smoke’s up, I’m glad I can’t and gladder still I don’t live in the Valley. I have this idea that somewhere there is a Rome in North America and that these gumdrop hills with pines and cypresses in Silver Lake are it. They remind me of the Pincio.
We live here now, and as I drive due west, cocksure of the stick shift I was terrified of a week ago, I wonder. All my love and hate and people who might make it better or worse are zooming all around me and I think: No place on earth has made me feel so steady. I’ve never seen so much ivy and so many palms slanting down to cars from so many foreign countries slicing through mountains and houses that look as if they were brought here on a wave, far away from last night’s bitch of a fight and too much to drink with my lover.
Then, just when I’m ready to say piss off, right where the continent seems to be ending, we twirl through a macaroni tunnel, blinded by the ocean, and I sigh: At least I’m still alive.
But Point Dume is still twenty minutes up the coast, and we’re looking for a place to stop for sandwiches and beer, and all I can think about is Joe and whether I am ruining my life and all Marco and I have ever worked for. I know Point Dume is a dangerous place, full of vagrants and teenagers on the prowl – jerking off and flashing knives – but all I can think of is having sex with him.
Him is a big part of what Marco and I have in common. It’s what we’re always talking about. And we both have a way of forcing him into some historical context. That’s what I’m afraid of this time: Joe’s going to get smashed by my anger and Marco’s too. Marco and I are always mad and looking for a nice guy to like. And when we find him, we’re ready to pounce, except that Marco just does it. I get in the way, my own or his, now that I’ve tried too many threesomes. I want it to be possible, but I don’t want it to have to happen. Not this time.
The two of us had been talking forever about making a movie about all this. We had all the scenes, but every time I’d sit down to do some dialogue, I’d get sappy and drunk, and some other useless story would come out. It was like getting a hangover, knowing full well you were already into the next one.
Marco kept coming up with three-minute black-and-white shots of subways and sad people going to work. He’d splice it with abandoned buildings and rusty ruins, only he pronounced it “runes” in the same way he said “museem” for museum. It was when I started getting grated by an accent I used to love that I said to myself: Something bad is going to happen.
But things like this are important. It’s what keeps us up at night. People who agree on the state of the world have to fight about something. So let’s take prepositions. He says: Put the water up. I say: How short are you compared to the stove? He asks for change: Of a dollar, please. I say: In the amount of a dollar or for a dollar?
I start to become a pain in the ass, but feel justified because I have this idea of always having waited in line, whereas Marco waits, when he does, on line. It’s what divides people: prepositions. Pronouns, too. And to think, all the background noise in my life has been Latin; his was Hebrew. The two of us made this decision, dialectically, to come out here to stay. Marco’s job, building buildings, was an out.
It’s something we both were looking for. And when we found a house on a hill, we wanted to move in. He did. Me too. But now I’m tired of saying we. I’m tired of being part of. I want to say: I do this. He does that. My pronouns and prepositions are all caught up. Joe has been untangling them, even if no one knew what he was up to, especially him.
All of this takes my mind up the coast, and after a few false highs that all will be better and I can work it into my doctoral thesis, I shift down into second and turn left where things go flat. It’s there I realize how subservient I’ve become, hating my freedom, and say to my lover: Marco, I love you, let’s draw a picture of this place. We both agree to do a sketch, even though I already expect he’ll do it one way and guess he thinks I’ll do it another way. I can’t think of the architectural equivalents of pronouns and prepositions. He’s always talking about the history of a site.
I wonder how much we really tell each other as I follow the washed-out blacktop around the swamp – shading us with cattails on the one side and the bluff that forms it on the other – and I clam up. The beach pans out to our right and the sun pounds my head into a chocolate-chip cookie that is melting but still could be crunched. I feel sick, because for the second time in my life I’d rather be back in town in a dark, one-room apartment with no view. I’m thinking of Joe and how I’ll never change. It was this way with Marco.
It becomes a kind of mantra: Eric loves Joe, Joe loves Eric; I love Joe, Joe loves me. I keep repeating this to myself knowing saying it will make it come true. And I have all the history in my head: sites, pronouns, prepositions. All I’m screaming for is a verb.
Moving to this city was the most natural thing and the biggest disruption all at once. I had grown accustomed to my miserable self-indulgence and Marco’s infidelities. I was finally making some sense of the choices I never dreamed would become so hard to live with; of the connection between Marco’s success, my demise, and the durability of our love. And so what that I was reassembling the puzzle in graduate school instead of a published novel? I just wanted a job to tell people I did something and keep the rest my secret. But I couldn’t stand the dedication anymore, knowing it cut me off. For fun, I’d drive downtown in rush hour, creeping with the traffic from one light to the next, avoiding left turns – so always circling clockwise – feeling best when I could stop all the cars behind me to let someone trying to exit from a parking lot flow into my lane. This made me feel good, especially when my kind gesture elicited a wave or a smile. I could spend hours doing this and then clear my head on the freeway.
As I leave the car and sink my bare feet into the hot sand, I wonder how many of the old geezers throwing sticks to dogs were on the blacklist. The shifty wind is strong enough to knock you off the rocks and you have to climb to get to the little cove. These old Commies and their dogs don’t bother coming any farther. I stop, as Marco’s wide feet move him quickly from rock to rock, and think of how we could fit these men and animals into the movie we’ve come out here to shoot. They hike up the steep path to the top of the bluff, and I imagine the scripts in their heads that never got written. I’m not sure who turns me on most: They or the hunky hustlers that cruise this place.
But this is not the plot we’ve agreed on. We’re trying to keep politics out for a change. Marco’s been shooting lots of close-ups of mollusks and crabs and glowing green urchins caught in the pools left behind by the tide. He wants this film to be about patience and knowing how to wait in a scary place. I want it to be about something drastic happening because of the tiniest gesture. I want it to be about the euphoric fear I felt when I saw Joe.
I was freezing from too many jumps in the ocean. Marco wanted more shots and yelled down to me that he was going to the car for more film. I was shivering, trying to forget the cold, and it struck me, this thought that something could happen here and you’d never get out. The tide was already starting to come back in. The gulls and loons were clinging to their sunny grottoes high up the steep cliffs. Marco’s camera seemed like a lighthouse and I was afraid it might blow into the water or be stolen.
Then I thought that maybe Marco was finished shooting, that maybe he was really there, behind one of the boulders, beating off. It had been going on all day: a steady stream of sex amid the rocks and higher up in the caves, caked like Baroque tabernacles with powdery, bleached guano. There was a sweetness in the air, and if you used your hands to crawl over the rocks, they picked up an enervating, acrid stench.
I stretched out low in the sand with the cliff behind me, feeling my skin loosen and expand with the dry heat. A seal beached itself and came to rest an arm’s length from me. It was then I noticed the guy on the other side of the seal. He must have crawled down the cliff. I hadn’t noticed him, but couldn’t help myself now. I had the feeling that something violent was about to happen and that nothing made sense except to give in to this accident.
He was watching me, but not staring, allowing me to look back without flinching. The first thing I noticed then, after his eyes, was the blue crucifix tattooed just at the top of his highest left rib. I was astounded.
He got up, and without a word I followed him up the cliff, wrapped in my orange sheet. I didn’t even take my shoes with me.
This much Marco knows for sure. He has it all on film. If I weren’t so obsessed, he wouldn’t believe the rest.
I got into Joe’s car and we drove to Venice. All the way down the coast all I could hear in my head was the chant from being an altar boy: Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem. And I kept translating it into Italian: Agnello di Dio, che toglie i peccati del mondo, ci dia pace. And then it hit me: Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, give us peace.
It was a dark apartment full of dirty clothes thrown all over the place. He gave me some shorts and a shirt to wear, and an old pair of red espadrilles. He had a pet fiddler crab, with one huge claw and a tiny other one, in a glass cage.
We walked down to the beach, got some fried calamari and cold white wine, and told each other everything about ourselves. Then we just sat on the sand until dark, watching the planes take off out over the ocean. It was like taking communion.
We left each other at the bus stop by the post office, and I got home late.
Marco was furious and didn’t believe me when I swore we hadn’t had sex. Now he’s even madder that we didn’t. I tried to explain how I was so astounded that I didn’t even think of it until it was too late.
He will never understand it. Most people don’t. I don’t even know if Joe does.