I floated through most of the fall of 1997 on a piss-warm wave of booze, trailing nicotine clouds in my wake and buoyed by the kind of coruscating self-loathing that nourishes even as it rots you inside out, shepherding you through the night for the sole cold, curious purpose of finding out just how much more damage you can do yourself the next day.
I had moved to a small, filthy two-room apartment on the old main drag of the North Side, in a rapidly-gentrifying area which seemed to be split evenly between insufferable yuppies delighted to spend $250,000 on a 1000-square-foot row house (and another $250,000 restoring the plank floors and installing climate-controlled wine cellars and state-of-the-art alarm systems) and struggling families, mostly black, who'd lived through the neighborhood's toughest days only to find themselves being slowly, inexorably squeezed out of their homes by ballooning property taxes and onerous new appearance "standards" that dictated everything from repair and building materials to acceptable paint colors, and by the creeping tendrils of prejudice that laced themselves through the neighborhood as surely and calamitously as green ivy through the classy European brick and stone facades. Across the street was a park, once and still largely known for its copious drug deals. A few blocks east, the Light of Life Mission sat among shuttered and burned-out buildings that once housed bars and newstands and the city's last big-screen "adult" theater, the not-quite-pastoral Garden, flashing its perpetually wonky neon welcome (sometimes it was the "Gard," sometimes just a "den") to its flock of twitchy pensioners and furtive husbands.
There was something comfortingly apocalyptic about the collision, or collusion, of money and flesh, poverty and Williams-Sonoma cookware.
Each day that autumn felt like a clammy, empty dayroom in an abandoned hospital. I rattled through them numbly, drinking, smoking, scratching the peeling paint from the walls and waiting for an emergency. And at Halloween, at last, one arrived.
His name was Ray, and he was something of a legend among the crowd I'd fallen in with. In his slightly-younger days (he was not yet thirty when we met), he'd been known as an unpredictable party boy, never far from a club (and a drink, and some unsuspecting, infatuated twink). Every city, even Pittsburgh, has its stars and its starfuckers, and Ray had started young, charting a sort of Showgirls-cum-All About Eve course to secure his place on the scene. After an altercation at the most popular local club involving Ray, a notoriously venomous drag queen with a bad synthetic wig and a cigarette lighter, he'd decided that Pittsburgh was too small to hold him, and so, emboldened by an inheritance from a recently-departed grandmother, he'd lit out for South Beach, where he'd remained more or less without incident (at least, any incident which might have involved the police or plastic surgeons) for several years.
Earlier in 1997, Ray had returned to Pittsburgh, with a blond boyfriend named Henry in tow. Henry was a curly-haired Southerner, from a Carolina, or possibly Georgia, and spoke with a Scarlett O'Hara accent that added at least two extra syllables to the word "fierce," which was, unfortunately, Henry's favorite word. He worked, variously and sometimes simultaneously, as a hairdresser, a waiter and a florist. Even by South Beach standards, Henry was outstandingly gay.
Ray and Henry moved into an apartment on the North Side, just a few blocks from where I lived and right around the corner from a mutual friend, who was famous among our Siouxsie and the Banshees/Joy Division diehard set for his Halloween parties. And appropriately, it was at TJ's Halloween party that year that Ray and I finally met.
I was already fairly drunk when Ray and Henry arrived. The party had been going for a couple of hours, and TJ's little house hummed with '80s Goth and the sweet/sour funk of sweaty velvet and pot and and beer. If I hadn't been buzzed when I was introduced, at last, to Ray, about whom I'd heard endless, doubtlessly embellished tales of epic debauchery and seedy glamour, I probably would have made smiled and excused myself immediately to the safety of the back courtyard, where a tarot reader friend of TJ's was giving unduly optimistic readings to a group of recent college graduates costumed, with distressing lack of imagination, as a bunch of Anne Rice devotees with perfectly mundane futures in pharmaceuticals and business.
As it was, I kissed Henry's cheek and then made a rude comment about Ray's legendary genitalia.
It was, I would discover, almost impossible to not think about sex when you were in Ray's vicinity. John Berendt, in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, memorably characterizes his young hustler as a "walking streak of sex," and there is no more apt description for Ray. He combined the just-awakened, bedroom-sleepy voice of Vince Vaughan with the heavy-lidded, laddish, thick-bodied physicality of Robbie Williams, to whom he bore more than a passing resemblance. He had a childlike and oddly endearing affection for the coarse and the vulgar, a kamikaze Jackass sensibility which implied that he could be up for anything. He was not shaved, tanned and toned to perfection: he was more Dionysus than Apollo, and far more appealing for it.
Ray and Henry had a terrific argument that night, an event which was, I would discover over the next several weeks, hardly unique. They sometimes argued about men (both attractive, both somewhat vain, these arguments were rarely based on traditional romantic jealousy, but more on ego), occasionally about money (Henry, despite his love of dropping enormous sums on Body Shop moisturizers and Banana Republic tee shirts, worked long hours at dreadful jobs in order to afford them, while Ray was disinclined to work as long as his inheritance showed no sign of running out: they held fundamentally different ideas about money and only found common ground in the belief that it should be spent as quickly as possible), often about nothing at all. They could ratchet up a disagreement about an unmade bed into what Henry described, with justifiable pride, as a "trailer trash Virginia Woolf performance piece." In the wake of their more serious battles, Henry often disappeared from their apartment for days at a time, staying with friends or coworkers until the domestic melodrama had cooled.
One tempestuous fight occurred, as such fights often do, around Christmas that year. I no longer remember, if indeed I ever knew, what that particular fight was about. The result was that Ray was spending Christmas Eve alone in his apartment up the street, and a friend of ours decided, quite spontaneously it seemed, that she and I should go wish him a happy holiday. (Ever the proper unexpected, univited guest, I insisted on taking a bottle of bourbon. Few things, at that time of my life, screamed Christmas quite like bourbon, except possibly for gin. Or scotch.) There was snow on the ground, twinkle lights on the yuppies' townhouses and even the drug dealers in the park seemed a little more cheerful. The sirens, at least, were more sporadic.
During that five minute walk from my front door to Ray's, I rehearsed a half dozen possible lines of conversation. From Halloween to Christmas, I'd seen Henry half a dozen times, mostly at the local diner where he was waiting tables and where his accent and blond curly-haired charm were coaxing extraordinary tips out of women of a certain age who weren't sure if they wanted to mother him or seduce him (see also: the mysterious appeal of Josh Groban). But I hadn't seen Ray at all. Almost everything I knew about him had been pieced together from Henry or from one of our group of friends, all of whom had gospel and gossip they were happy to share. One thing that I knew firsthand was that he loved a drink as much as I, so the effect of the unexpected arrival of two people on, admittedly, the outer orbit of his circle was likely to be softened by the bottle in my mittened hand.
Ray welcomed us graciously, and if he swayed a little, it could have been that he was simply moving to the music: he'd been watching a DVD compilation of videos by The Cure when we rang the bell, and swaying was (and remains) the most accepted form of dancing to Robert Smith's glorious agony. As at Halloween (where, immediately following my initial burst of Dutch courage, I'd retreated to a more Swiss frame of mind, studying Ray from the safety of a cobweb-shrouded corner), all the witty banter and cosmopolitan sophistication I'd conjured in my head and which I relied upon for safety in just such situations congealed into a lump of half-wit useless, savage lust and sunk to my stomach where it churned in queasy anticipation. The Cure made it worse, acting as they do as a sort of auditory aphrodisiac, as did the mingled spicy scents of cigarettes and whiskey and Fahrenheit, at that time my favorite cologne and one which Ray had apparently slapped on just a few minutes before we arrived.
You may be wondering at what point I realized that I'd been pimped out by my girlfriend.
It hardly mattered. In fact, it made the process a lot easier. Usually, I agonized over whether or not someone might find me acceptable even as a potential one-night stand. Thanks to Lena, the wheels were already greased, in a manner of speaking. She knew that I found Ray unspeakably attractive, knew too that he thought that I was clever and vaguely interesting, and was fully aware that the combination of holiday melancholy, booze, testosterone and loneliness could bring people closer together than A Miracle on 34th Street. Ray and I continued drinking long into the night after Lena had excused herself, begging out sick despite the fact that we both knew she could drink like Courtney Love and face like Dame Judi Dench.
We finished off the bourbon around three o'clock. The snow had fallen all night, and the streets were eerily still and silent, strands of fairy light twinkling among the drifts of white like a Nora Ephron cliche. We were in the middle of a conversation about The Smiths, trying to remember what album "Shoplifters of the World Unite" was on (which shows how drunk we were, as both of us sober knew that this was totally a trick question), when Ray began to pass out. Or rather, I assumed that Ray was passing out, as his face had gone a bit slack and he was moving toward me rapidly from the other side of the couch where we both sat.
In an instant, I felt his lips and tongue on my chin, and both of us, balance impaired by excellent drink, skewed sideways, winding up at a messy angle, legs entwined and still on the couch and our heads on the floor beneath the glass coffee table. I looked up as Ray gnawed at my neck, and I saw the underside of the landscape of our evening: the empty bottle and rheumy glasses, an ashtray full of mashed-up cigarette butts, the sprawl of CD cases we'd generated by free-associating favorite songs all night (Skinny Puppy, Ministry, the Eurythmics, the Stooges, the Pogues) and a few leaves from the withering poinsettia.
We rose and staggered together to bed, breathing bourbon and lust onto each other like two repressed Kentucky moonshiners. I discovered that a certain level of drunkenness effectively restores your virginity: Ray and I knocked and pawed at each other as if we'd never undone a button before. For my part, as well, a certain level of fear made me unusually clumsy: Ray was something of a legend, after all, if only in the world I had sequestered myself in, and therefore entirely (as I thought) out of my league. An hour of laborious effort ended with us both still mostly clothed, passed out in one another's lap, stinking of alcohol sweat and dissipated cologne.
It was the most romantic night I'd spent in years.
The next year I would be living in Brighton, but I would return to Pittsburgh for a brief Christmas sojourn, and Ray and I would once again meet up on Christmas Eve. In an alternate timeline, we could have made a good run at our own "Fairytale of New York" (tellingly, perhaps, both Ray's and my favorite Christmas song), trading epithets and recriminations, goading one another to our graves in boozy bonhomie, out-MacGowan-ing MacGowan. Mercifully, Ray and Henry left Pittsburgh again (separately) soon after New Year's 1999, and I grew up a little, though the notion of mutually-assured romantic destruction will, I suspect, glow untended in a dark coal-stoked corner of my heart until it is either realized or until I finally become the sort of person who doesn't have the urge to shout "It was rigged!" at every happy Hollywood ending.
Anyway, enjoy Shane and the late, divine Kirsty MacColl. See you in the drunk tank.
