Who
needs hard drugs
when you’ve got Austin in July, a central nervous system depressant as powerful
as any ever sucked into a hypodermic needle? The normally laid-back population
of the Texas capital slips in summer into a citywide swoon. Laziness,
procrastination, and most varieties of decadent behavior are broadly indulged;
swimming and napping in particular are elevated to acts of civic solidarity. To
lure the sagging natives to work and jump-start their discharged brains, the
office buildings have their air conditioners set to subarctic levels. In
restaurants, at weddings, even at church socials, margarita machines churn.
Insects show who’s boss, and like a population under siege, the humans stick
together, especially if they make the mistake of touching each other. Despite
the absence of key elements like a communal mess hall and an archery range,
Austin does a decent job of impersonating a large-scale, all-ages summer
camp.
From my first bite of migas — scrambled eggs with fried tortillas, peppers,
onions, cheese, and ranchero sauce — my first glass of iced tea, my first
plunge into the vast, gorgeous city pool at Barton Springs, I could hardly
believe I had ever moved away. The simplest pleasures, like driving my car to
the grocery store and not having it towed away or leaving my house unlocked and
not having it robbed, were a thrill to me after New York and New Orleans.
Yet Austin was not quite as small a town as it had been when I’d first
encountered it in the seventies. By the time I left in 1981, a real estate boom
was transforming the center of the city and stretching its borders. Though the
boom was decried by many for ecological, aesthetic, and spiritual reasons, upon
my return I did not find the city changed in essence. It had always had a
colossal ego, like the rest of Texas: for me, raised in a state with a
self-esteem problem, this was part of its charm. Neither the boom nor the
subsequent bust did much to change the inhabitants’ view that they were among
angels, living in heaven.
The change in the local economy had one unfortunate effect: my old
neighborhood just west of downtown, Clarksville, was now far too expensive for
our reduced fortunes. So me and my baby got us a little shack on Jeff Davis,
the most famously named of the namesake streets that ambled through the
unaspiring north Austin neighborhood that fell into our price range. The other
streets nearby paid homage to citizens of more mysterious renown, Jim Hogg, Joe
Sayers, Messrs. Koenig and Ullrich, each now loaning his arcane glory to a
bedraggled Boulevard or Lane. Everything about this run-down neighborhood with
its shaggy, stunted greenery spelled R-E-N-T. Few home-improvement projects
pitched further than a couple of weeks into the future were undertaken by its
residents, a quintessentially Austin mix of footloose students, upward-striving
young couples, and old folks who had been there since the dawn of time. Though
I never made any friends in that neighborhood or even learned many peoples’
names, Tony knew exactly who lived where and would comment on any divergences
from their usual patterns of comings and goings.
Our house was a white clapboard box divided into four rooms, featuring
once-beige carpeting, pitted linoleum, a single space heater, no AC, and
ceilings so low that the outlandishly tall landlord could not stand up straight
when he came to visit. Its star attraction was its extremely low rent, a key
requirement at this point. When we arrived in Austin in August, essentially
penniless, the teaching job Tony had been offered evaporated like spit on a
sidewalk. His friend never even returned his phone calls.
I was frantic about this. How was I going to become a great writer if he
didn’t have a job? I kept urging him to go over to the ice rink and find the
guy, but that required a kind of assertiveness Tony was incapable of.
It wasn’t that Tony had a problem expressing his opinions. When adequately
provoked, he could be fearsome in his vehemence. Once while entering an
intersection in Manhattan, he was cut off by another driver, a pointless move
since it was rush hour and no one was going anywhere but gridlock hell. Tony
slammed the car into park, jumped out and spat on the guy’s windshield. I
expected to see him mowed down by machine-gun fire right then and there.
Another time, I found a half-written notecard stuck in a book he was reading,
addressed to a friend who owned a Mexican folk-art shop near our house. Dear
Marcia, it began, I just had the worst shopping experience of my life thanks to
that dopey cow who works at your store.
But when it came to agitating to get something he wanted, like the teaching
job, Tony was Mr. Wait-and-See. I had no patience with this approach. Like an
obsessive high school guidance counselor, I was determined to inspire him, egg
him, or force him into more achievement-oriented behavior.
As the phone call continued not to come, we speculated that this old friend of
Tony’s couldn’t handle the idea that he and I were a couple. He had betrayed
his gay brethren; he was out of the club. Not every gay male friend reacted
this negatively, but practically all of them were at least somewhat bemused by
the situation, made more confusing by the fact that Tony never claimed to be a
bisexual. He was a gay man who happened to be in love with a woman — who had
forsaken all others to make his life with her. It was an odd choice and, for
some gay friends, a threatening one — a kind of mixed marriage.
And what was it for us? Here we were, two people who would later joke that if
we invited all of our respective ex-lovers to our wedding we would have to rent
a convention center, and we had each chosen a partner with whom we were less
than compatible sexually. Had we just had enough sex, or at least enough of sex
being the most important thing? A convention center full of disappointments
later, had we just developed other priorities? That must have been true for
Tony, who became a virtually asexual being once he fell in love with me. I,
however, actually believed that our physical relationship would eventually work
out the way I wanted it to, and failed to consider what life would be like if
it didn’t.
Part of why I had fallen in love with Tony was specifically because he was
gay: off-limits, impossible, forbidden. To be with me, he had to change his
whole life, and the idea of someone doing this on my account appealed to me
deeply. I needed it. It was as if I were partially deaf, and someone was
finally screaming loud enough for me to hear. I was a drama queen — the part
was made for me. At least since Judy Garland wasn’t available.
For Tony, who, despite his natty appearance and carefree demeanor, was really
falling apart at the time we met, a changed life probably didn’t sound like a
bad idea. And maybe I did remind him of Judy Garland, at least a little. I
certainly had the excess, the vulnerability, the spotlight-snagging, onstage
approach to life. He used to joke that he fell in love with me because I
carried a whole carton of cigarettes in my purse.
More than lovers, we were like infatuated grade school best friends who spend
every waking
minute together and never tire of one another’s company,
experimenting with sex occasionally at wild sleep-over parties. My need for
attention and closeness was one Tony was fully capable of filling. He never got
sick of me, never wanted me to go away, never needed to be alone. He could be
alone with me around just fine, with his head in a magazine or taking a nap.
When I required more than just his physical presence, he came right back,
sometimes a little grumpily, but back. Finally, I was not too intense.
Nor too wild. No stupid things I said or did when I was drunk or otherwise
fucked up were ever a problem. I acted like a jerk last night, I would say,
remembering some inebriated poetry reading or raunchy break dancing.
No you didn’t, honey, he’d say. You were funny. Everyone loved you.
What we both wanted, deep down, was the security of unconditional love, the no
matter what you do, no matter what you say, I will always be right here. Even
if you’re gay and I’m straight. Even if you’re beautiful and I’m just okay.
Even if I have money and you don’t. In fact, we melted into each other. I gave
him money, he taught me how to dance. I made him smart, he made me beautiful.
And beauty had so much to do with it. I loved being with Tony and being seen
with Tony because he was so beautiful. His beauty and his love of beauty were
not superficial; they were him, they poured out of him. Within a month
after we moved in, he had completely glamorized our pitiful shack with fifties
furniture from thrift stores and tchotchkes from Mexico, make a dumpy cracker
box with formerly beige carpeting into house beautiful. Even the bathroom had
voodoo candles, postcards of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a basket of colored
soaps. There were Bunny Matthews New Orleans cartoons pinned up on the wall
surrounding the toilet and a hanging plant flourishing over the tub. To me,
fixing up the bathroom meant putting in a new roll of toilet paper; I was truly
amazed.
While Tony was redoing the house — he even went so far as to build and stain
a worktable for my typewriter and papers — I put the great writer thing on
hold and got a job writing technical manuals for a computer software company, a
position I ended up keeping for more than a decade. In my spare time, I
reactivated my connections in the local literary scene; soon there were plans
for what would be my second small-press book, illustrated by Sandye, Steve,
Shelley, Pete, and a few other artist friends. I received a call from a woman
named Liz Lambert asking me to read in the series she emceed weekly at a
caf� downtown. Liz, a smart, funny blond lesbian with a heavy West Texas
accent, was one of the first new friends Tony and I made as a couple and became
a central figure in the close circle we eventually assembled. In those early
days, we would visit her in the red brick duplex she shared with her gay twin
brothers, staying up half the night drinking and talking.
Eventually, my sweet Beau Tali ran out of walls to paint and had to find
something else to do. Skating was out. How about something with flowers?
Clothes? Music? Hair? We decided his future one night when Nancy and Steve were
visiting and we were all high sitting by the edge of Town Lake shouting out
possibilities like we were playing $25,000 Pyramid.
Beauty schools and liquor stores were the two main types of business on the
decaying retail strip that bordered our neighborhood, so it was a simple matter
for Tony to sign up the very next day at the Modern College of Hair Design. For
nine months, he set off for school every morning on his bicycle wearing a
beautifully pressed white shirt and a pair of jeans, carrying his lunch in a
paper sack under his arm.
The Modern College of Hair Design was run by a prissy, self-righteous
born-again Christian couple named Gordy and Viv. They were all preachy and
smarmy and love-thy-neighbor on the surface, slave drivers and Scrooges
underneath, gleefully collecting money from everyone who walked in the door.
The clients paid to get their hair cut and the students paid to cut it. What a
deal. Gordy and Viv’s downfall was the fact that their outlook on life made
them seriously at odds with their trendy young student body.
Tony hated them on principle from the outset and over time developed a genuine
loathing for Viv, who had a sugar-coated voice, a Doris Day flip, and
absolutely no mind of her own. Now here was a dopey cow if there ever was one.
Within a few weeks of his enrollment, Viv and Tony were at war over what music
should be played on the school’s sound system. She set the radio to a Christian
Muzak station; every time she walked out of the room, he’d run over and change
it to the black station or college rock. Then he started bringing in cassette
tapes from home, compilations he made of bands like the Smiths and Dead Can
Dance and Tears for Fears.
One day, Viv returned from lunch to find Boy George rocking her world and she
had enough. She minced over to the tape deck, ejected the tape, and dropped it
in her purse. Tony looked up from the squirming six-year-old whose hair he was
attempting to cut, dropped his scissors on the back bar, and strode over.
That’s my tape, said Tony.
You can pick it up after five at the front desk, she informed him, clutching
her purse as if he might grab it away from her.
Inspired by her gesture, he snatched at the purse. That tape is my property
and I won’t be here after five, you fucking bitch.
You certainly won’t, said Gordy, a meaty hand on Tony’s forearm.
By the time he confessed to me that he’d been expelled from one beauty school,
he’d already been across the street to enroll at another, Gordy and Viv’s prime
competitor, the actual name of which I can’t remember since Tony always
referred to it as the Postmodern College of Hair Design. The Postmodern College
was run by a jolly, laid-back guy named Ranger Ronnie who was perfectly happy
to have the kids blast their music and dye their hair purple. Word filtered
back to Tony’s friends in Christian boot camp, and by the end of the month
three-quarters of Gordy and Viv’s students had transferred.
People had a way of clustering around Tony, of following him. It was not just
that he was a trendsetter; he was fundamentally a good person to be around. He
enjoyed hanging out so much, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, that his
pleasure in it was contagious. You couldn’t help hanging out with him.
That fall, the newlyweds, Nancy and Steve, moved back down to Austin from New
York for a while, trying to clean up in the drug department. Some dealer friend
they’d been sharing a loft with in Soho had just gotten busted, and his
girlfriend had ended up on the Bowery hooking, and the whole ordeal threw a
major scare into them. Of course, once they arrived, they started ordering
FedEx shipments and on the days one was expected, we’d all be on the phone to
each other all day to see if it had come. We’d meet at their little house
downtown after work and shoot up and talk and laugh and play cards and dance to
Steve’s rap tapes. Eventually, we’d have to go home and we’d lie in bed, too
high to sleep, drifting over the whispering plains of the subconscious in a
waking dream.
Do you want to get married? Tony asked me one night as we lay in this state.
What a great idea, I said. Let’s get married and have some babies.
I couldn’t wait to tell my mother. n
This article appears in February 16 • 1996 and February 16 • 1996 (Cover).