Michael Tolliver Lives

  But, hey, it was just a pound cake. My folks still loved me all right, but they saw that love as cause for forgiveness, not acceptance. And while Mama and Papa eventually met Thack—and made a damn good show of liking him—they saw no reason whatsoever to modify their stance. My life had been conveniently reduced to a “lifestyle” by then, something easily separable from me, that they could abhor to their heart’s content without fear of being perceived as unchristian. By the time the Berlin Wall fell and queers replaced commies on the big TV screens at my brother’s church, I knew not to expect a miracle anymore; my family was as far beyond saving as I was.

  “And your brother’s an actual deacon in the church?”

  This was Ben, calling from the bathroom across the hall, where I could hear him rummaging in a drawer. It was just after eight that evening and I was already on the bed, flat on my stomach with my new Lucky jeans shoved down around my ankles.

  I twisted my head in his direction. “More like a Sunday school teacher, I think. I don’t understand the hierarchy. They’ve all got something to do.”

  “No shit?”

  “Last year Lenore—that’s Irwin’s wife—was in charge of the fetus key rings.”

  “C’mon!”

  “No…they were selling these little plastic fetuses that were supposed to be the exact size of an early fetus. You know…so you can carry it around with you and…get to know it better. Sort of…‘Fetuses are people, too.’”

  Ben came into the room and sat down on the bed next to me, tearing open a foil packet. “You’re creeping me out,” he murmured.

  “You should see the really big one they put up on Halloween.”

  “What do you mean?” Ben removed the alcohol swab from the packet. “Put up where?” He drew a line with his finger from the top of my ass crack to the mound due east of it and began swabbing the target area briskly.

  “In a haunted house,” I explained. “You know…like they have for kids. Only it’s not spaghetti guts and eyeballs in a bowl, it’s the Big Giant Aborted Fetus.”

  Ben groaned.

  “And right next to the Big Giant Aborted Fetus is the Gay Man With AIDS.”

  “Don’t tell me they actually took you to this thing?” There was barely a tingle as the syringe hit its target. And target is the word, too, since Ben is a kind soul and thinks he’s less likely to hurt me if he just gives the syringe a jaunty toss, like a dart.

  “Well, I didn’t actually see it,” I said, “but I met this queen at a local bar who did. He said they used iridescent-purple lipstick for the lesions.”

  Ben swabbed my butt again. “Stay there a second, sweetheart. You’re bleeding a little.”

  “Never mind that. Are my balls shrinking?”

  Ben laughed and reached between my legs. “All present and accounted for, Captain.”

  “I know that. But are they shrinking?”

  “Well, not in my expert opinion.”

  My doctor had warned me about the shrinking thing when I started testosterone therapy two years ago. The stuff can give you energy, restore your libido, lift your spirits, and make you grow hair like a Chia Pet, but it can also shrink your balls. Apparently, if your testicles wise up to the fact that someone else is on the job, they can lose interest in the job altogether. The meat may be sizzling, but the potatoes have taken a hike.

  “How do they seem to you?” asked Ben. “You handle ’em more than I do.”

  I chuckled. “We’ll have to work on that.”

  Ben patted my ass. “You’re good to go, honey.”

  As I pulled my jeans up Ben dropped the syringe into an empty Ragu jar we had saved for that purpose. “You know,” he said, screwing the lid on, “we should start a Liberal Haunted House. We could have oilmen bombing kids…and fags being tied to fences…and black men being dragged behind trucks…and maybe those Abu Ghraib guys, you know, with the hoods and the wires and all.”

  I said that was a nice twist but too unsubtle for liberals. “That’s the problem,” he said. “We’re always too subtle.” He gave me a long, tender look. “I’m sorry, babe…about your mom.”

  “Thanks,” I said, looking back.

  “I’m glad I’ll get a chance to meet her.”

  Poor guy. Little did he know.

  4

  Our Little Grrrl

  Several times a month I pick up fruit trees at a nursery on Clement Street called Plant Parenthood. That always makes me nostalgic, since I ran the place for twelve years before selling it to my business partner, Brian Hawkins. My T cells had begun to climb by then, and I was sick of pushing Tuscan flowerpots to bored housewives. I wanted to plant something serious for once, to leave my mark on the earth before somebody planted me. I’ve never regretted that decision. I’m now tending at least a dozen mature gardens that I myself created years ago: lush green kingdoms seeded from my own imagination.

  Not that it’s getting easier. My arthritis seems to be here for good, and the sheer grunt work of the job can put me out of commission for days on end. I’m my own boss, of course, so I can adjust my schedule accordingly, and I do have an assistant now—the aptly named Jake Greenleaf—who helps me with the trimming and hauling. But the big question remains: How long can I keep this up? The topic is almost unavoidable at Plant Parenthood, since Brian turned sixty-one this year, and retirement is his chief preoccupation.

  On a recent visit I found my old friend hunched over his laptop with a crazed gleam in his eye, like a zealot planning a people’s revolution. Brian Hawkins, hippie-turned-radical-lawyer-turned-waiter-turned-nurseryman, was poring over a website for motor homes. “What do you think of this one, Michael? It’s still a class C, but it’s got most of the amenities of a class A, without the bulk. It’s a little more eco-friendly.”

  “I hate the name,” I said.

  “What’s the name got to do with it?”

  “You’re not seriously gonna hit the road in something called a Minnie Winnie?”

  “Hey,” he said, “I’m secure in my wussyhood.”

  I laughed. “Have you thought about where you’ll have to park the damn thing? Your neighbors will all have bumper stickers that say ‘Baby Jesus On Board.’”

  Brian spun around in his chair. “That’s a gross generalization.”

  “Is it?”

  “Damn straight. All kinds of people have RVs.”

  “Like who?”

  “Well…this sculptress I met at Burning Man, for one.”

  “Ah…this sculptress.”

  Brian grinned. “Don’t start with me, man—”

  “You got some New Age pussy in a Winnebago, and now it’s the only way to travel.”

  “You missed something, that’s all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Burning Man, buttwipe! The desert! There were sandstorms whipping up all around us, and the stars were so bright you could see by them. The Winnebago made me feel…I dunno…so self-contained out there in the middle of nowhere. I haven’t felt that way since…Wounded Knee, maybe.”

  I smirked as benignly as possible.

  “I’m ancient, aren’t I?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Next thing you know I’ll be wearing Sansabelt slacks.” He wrinkled his brow in thought for a moment. “Do old farts even wear those anymore?”

  “I think they wear jeans,” I said.

  “I think they do, too.”

  We exchanged rueful looks, sharing our pain. We’ve done this for almost thirty years now, since the day we met, in fact, in the courtyard at Anna Madrigal’s apartment house on Russian Hill. We were both in swim trunks at the time, both bronzing our bodies for a night at the bars, though the bars were as different as the objects of our lust. We were just a couple of guys talking about guy things, cheerfully enslaved to our dicks yet secretly, deeply, romantic. And those ever-warring instincts drew us ever closer.

  Like me, Brian is at least twenty (or so) pounds heavier these days, but that architectural clef
t in his chin is just as fetching as it ever was, especially under a sandpaper beard, though the sand is now white as Daytona Beach. It’s been ages since I’ve felt anything like lust for Brian—that would be way too incestuous—but Benjamin, my beloved, finds him eminently fuckable. And Brian loves knowing that.

  I walked to the window and looked out at the latest shipment of fruit trees. “I need something tall for a courtyard on Townsend. That lemon tree is pretty, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Brian deadpanned, “and the lemon flower is sweet.”

  “But,” I said, playing along in a dry professorial tone, “I’ve always found that the actual fruit of the poor lemon is…very nearly…impossible to eat.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  We laughed with idiotic abandon, terribly amused by ourselves, until a voice in the doorway told us we were no longer alone. “You guys are way weird.”

  It was Shawna, Brian’s daughter—an assault of dark-red lipstick beneath crow-black bangs and Harlequin glasses—addressing us tartly with hand on hip. She had stopped by to bring her father a brown-bag lunch from Cowgirl Creamery at the Ferry Building. “If this is early Alzheimer’s or something, I need a little warning.”

  Brian laughed. “We were riffing on a song.”

  Shawna made the open-mouthed “Huh?” expression that’s so popular with the young people today.

  “You know,” I said, and began to sing for her: “‘Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet…’”

  Brian joined in, giving it a saucy Caribbean beat: “‘…but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible—’”

  “All right…fine,” said Shawna. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  I turned to Brian, slack-jawed. “She’s never heard of it.”

  “God,” he said, “I’m a fucking Neanderthal.”

  “It’s from Peter, Paul, and Mary,” I told Shawna. “Tell your father you’ve heard of them before he self-immolates.”

  “Oh…well, I have,” she said.

  “Thank God,” I said.

  “Those old guys on PBS, right? With the fat blond chick?”

  Brian groaned.

  “Oh, you poor, poor Boomers,” said Shawna, rolling her eyes. “Life is always so hard for you.”

  “I’m not a Boomer,” I said. “I was born well into the fifties. And Brian’s too old to be one.”

  “Bite me,” said Brian.

  “Listen, guys,” said Shawna. “I’d love to stick around and get truly pathetic with you, but I’ve gotta get back to work.”

  Brian faced off his daughter like a soulful spaniel. “Dare I ask?”

  “It’s the same thing, Dad—the Lusty Lady—I’ve only been there two days.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Brian remained lackluster. “Seemed like more somehow.”

  I laughed, ushering her out of the room. “C’mon. I’ll walk you to the car.”

  “Ah,” said Brian. “Now you’re gonna talk about me.”

  We did talk about him. Or, more accurately, his discomfort over his daughter’s budding literary career. Shawna, who’s twenty-two and a Stanford graduate, writes a widely read blog called “Grrrl on the Loose” in which she chronicles her escapades in the pansexual wonderland of San Francisco. She’d just signed on for a week of work at the Lusty Lady, a peep show in North Beach that recently became the nation’s first worker-owned strip club. This is journalism for Shawna—a big thrill, sure, but mostly fodder for her site. She has no inhibitions about sex. She’s breezy and unapologetic about her own desires and her willingness to explore them in others. Previous columns have dealt with latex fetishists, foot worshipers, and people who like to fuck in clown costumes. Shawna isn’t always a participant, much to Brian’s relief, but her curiosity remains vigorous and laced with scrappy irreverence. Our little grrrl is nothing if not modern.

  I say our because I’ve felt like her uncle since 1988, when her mother, a local television anchor, left Brian and Shawna for a career in New York. Brian was a fretful single father but ended up, ironically, establishing his first successful relationship with a female. He lived with Shawna far longer than he has with anyone else, and even though she now rents a studio in the Mission, the two of them are still something of a couple.

  There are other ironies, too. First among them being that Brian, the longtime horn dog of the West, has bred a daughter so unashamedly free-spirited that she makes him feel like—and sometimes behave like—my fundamentalist brother in Florida. And it’s somehow poetic that Shawna’s vocation incorporates both her mother’s love of media exposure and her father’s love of…well, pussy. Not that Shawna’s a dyke. She likes dick as well. And lots of other stuff, believe me. They’re all just gadgets in her toy box.

  As far as I can tell, Brian rarely, if ever, visits his daughter’s website. He wants her to succeed and be happy, but he’d rather not know the particulars. Clearly this less-than-blissful ignorance will become more and more difficult to maintain, since Shawna has already signed a book deal, and the talk-show circuit can’t be far behind.

  “I need to talk to you about something?” she said outside the nursery.

  “Talk away,” I told her.

  She glanced at her watch. “Shit. I’m gonna be late. Raven’s gonna be pissed. Look, Mouse…why don’t you come meet me later?”

  That nickname always feels like a shout from the past. Shawna learned it as a child from her mother—the one who split for New York—and no one else calls me that now.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “What’s wrong with the club?” she said.

  “The Lusty Lady?”

  “Sure. We can talk in my booth.”

  I’m sure I must have winced. “I dunno,” I said. “I’d be there under false pretenses.”

  She chuckled. “Everyone’s there under false pretenses. We aren’t even allowed to use our real names.”

  I made a note to remember that. It would come as a comfort to Brian.

  I found the Lusty Lady on Kearny Street between Columbus and Broadway. I’ve passed the place for years, big queer that I am, without wasting a moment’s thought on what actually happens inside. A brightly backlit plastic sign now spelled it out for me in quaint Victorian block letters—PRIVATE BOOTHS—OPEN 24 HOURS—as if to invoke the halcyon days of the Barbary Coast. Women, after all, have been shaking their moneymakers at the foot of Telegraph Hill since the streets were sloppy with mud and the girls were paid in gold nuggets. The only new twist is unionization. The Lusty Ladies were recently seen picketing the club in pink T-shirts reading BAD GIRLS LIKE GOOD CONTRACTS while they chanted “Two, four, six, eight, pay us more to stimulate!”

  Shawna, I knew, was intrigued by this collision of the city’s two magnificent obsessions, sex and social justice. She liked the idea of women who embrace their libidos yet refuse to accept exploitation. The dancers had unionized when management installed two-way mirrors through which the girls could be videotaped for porn movies without their knowledge or consent—and certainly without compensation. They wanted the mirrors removed and new carpet installed and a guaranteed pay rate of twenty-seven dollars an hour. The money was crucial, the strikers insisted, since unlike lap dancers and other strippers, the girls who work the main stage are physically unable to receive tips; the Lusty Ladies (some of whom are domestic lesbians in real life) are shrewdly separated from their feverish customers (like Jodie Foster from Hannibal Lecter) by walls of protective Plexiglas.

  Shawna had already told me her nom de porn, so once inside the club I asked the door person where I might find Mary Margaret. I’d dismissed the preposterously dowdy name as Shawna’s way of being subversive in a strip club until I was directed to a Private Pleasures booth and Shawna appeared, moments later, grinning at her anxious gay uncle behind a sheet of streaky Plexiglas. She was done up like one of the schoolgirls over at Saints Peter and Paul, in a pleated skirt, knee socks, and pigtails. And neatly arrayed behind her, like treasured dolls awaiting pl
aytime, was an unnerving selection of dildos.

  I tried to mask my discomfort with a joke: “I didn’t know you were Catholic, Mary Margaret.”

  She cocked an eyebrow wickedly. “I’m anything you want, mister.”

  “Okay, don’t do that. You’re creeping me out.”

  She laughed. “Sorry, Mouse.”

  “Can we go out for coffee or something?”

  She shook her head. “This is my shift. I don’t want them to think I’m frivolous.”

  “Oh, right…can’t have that.”

  She smiled indulgently. “It’s cool just to talk here. A lotta customers do, believe it or not.”

  I asked her what the other ones do.

  “Masturbate,” she said brightly, “or watch me play with myself. Or both. It’s not a terrible gig, when you get right down to it.”

  “Right.” This was all I could manage. I had just noticed the handrails flanking the window, apparently enabling the ladies to grind against the Plexiglas. There was also a slot through which cash could be crammed when things really got going.

  “It’s been a revelation, Mouse. You guys are such funny whimpering creatures.”

  “Can we make that straight guys, please?”

  “No, we cannot. You’re all all about visuals. Every single one of you. Give you something juicy to look at, and you’re set for the evening.” The sweet, inquisitive kid I’d taught to roller-skate and taken to nearly every Cirque du Soleil bounced onto a large crushed-velvet cushion and crossed her legs with childish zest, as if I were about to tell her a bedtime story. “It’s not sticky over there, is it?”

  “I don’t wanna look,” I told her.

  I had already entertained a graphic fantasy about attacking that Plexiglas with a family-sized spray bottle of Simple Green.