In the City of Shy Hunters Read online

  This book is dedicated in loving memory to Eric Ashworth.

  And to his family: Richard Ashworth, his father; Amy Ashworth, his mother; and to his brothers, Tucker and Everard.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  And in loving memory of those who have passed through the Door of the Dead: Bruce Bradley, Ira Chelnik (Chef Ivan), Anthony Badalucco, Silvio Zignazo, Christopher Coe, Sam McNabb, Carl Tallberg, Arne Zane, Carlos Curos, Michael Fackenthall, Will Docherty, Emma Dan, Tom Maxwell, Susan Bitney, Debbie Lawson Tate, Russell, all the boys in Key West, all the boys in New York. In loving memory of Candida Donadio.

  And, of course, the lovely and talented Ethel Eichelberger.

  My heartfelt thanks to Neil Olson of Donadio and Olson Literary Agents.

  My thanks to Morgan Entrekin and my editor, Andrew Miller.

  Thank you Carolyn Altman. Your touch gave me, gave the book, a shape to be in the world.

  Thank you Grey Wolfe, a true friend and a great therapist.

  My love to Julietta Lionetti for the pitadas, the copetines, the tartulias.

  Thank you Bengt Oldenbourg elephants all the way down.

  My love to the one-eyed fat man, Peter Christopher.

  How old Mendy Graves.

  My love to Ellie Covan.

  Thanks to the parjener, Steve Taylor.

  Thank you Alex Cadell.

  Bless you Thomasina.

  You too Mr. Poopy Head.

  Thank you Joanna Rose.

  Thank you Carol Ferris for the star stories.

  Thank you Maria Kosmetatos for the loving health care.

  * * *

  Thank you Chuck Palahniuk, Stevan Allred, Gregg Kleiner, Laura Zigman, Ken Foster, Jennifer Lauck, Rodger Larsen, JT LeRoy, Brian Pera.

  I’d also like to thank Running With Scissors, Tim Hendrickson, Ann Boyd, and the cast and crew of the play: The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon. Zefiro’s, The Brazen Bean, the Arvon Foundation, Steve Deardon, Kathy Hanson, Luigi Flammia, Federico Oldenbourg, Charles Lawrence, Clyde Hall un son baisch. David Frieierman, Ivan Johnson, David Zakon, David Dubin, Tom Fought, Richard Llense, David Oates, Horatio Law, Lynn Kellor, Erin Leonard, Alan Minskoff, Jim Edmondson of The Oregon Shakespearean Theater, the Penn Foundation, the Oregon Health Plan, and my special thanks to the Visiting Authors Program of the Institut de les Lletres Catalanes in Barcelona. My thanks to the Dangerous Writers.

  Darin Eugene Beasely, bless your goddamn heart. And you Zuna Johnson, Ragine, Sophie, Mick Newham, Susan Anderson Newham, and Evelyn Newham. Blessings to you Mel Green, my hero.

  My thanks to Common Ground, Outside-In, Bikram’s Yoga College of India, Poekoelan Tai Chi, and Dr. Shirley Robbe.

  Cole Coshow you forgot my head.

  I miss you Chris, Jennifer, Rose, Pete, and Julie.

  And you Mikey, sitakusahao mzee.

  PROLOGUE

  Things start where you don’t know and end up where you know. When you know is when you ask, How did this start?

  Wolf Swamp. That’s how this story started. When I crossed over the East River into the mystery, this city, the fuck-you city.

  Wolf Swamp. Or, as you probably know it, Manhattan.

  Quite a story, this story, how the fog settles and Manhattan shape-shifts into Wolf Swamp.

  Like all stories it’s a mystery. At the beginning you don’t know and then at the end you know. But this mystery isn’t the Agatha Christie kind where there’s covering up all along and a big revelation at the end.

  In this mystery, everything is out there from the first but you don’t realize it.

  The revelation is when you’re going this way and then shit happens and then you’re going that way, and for some reason this time you stop, you notice what was there all along, and because you notice, everything gets perfectly clear.

  Even myself, at the end of this story, my bare feet on horseflesh galloping up Avenue A, I am the mystery: the Mystery of the Will of Heaven.

  There’s a couple suicides, a couple sacrifices, a betrayal. An ethical act. A famous movie star. An ancient Indian legend. A journey into the underworld to find a lost lover. There’s a greedy king and his evil queen. Vicious Totalitarian Assholes. A virus—an epidemic—thousands of dead.

  A hero on a white stallion.

  It’s a tale lip-synced by a drag queen.

  So the ending is happy, sort of.

  Torch songs forever.

  It’s all drag.

  * * *

  AUGUST 8, 1988. This was the headline in The New York Times: TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK RIOT. THOUSANDS OF HOMELESS. BARRICADE.

  But it’s not the truth. The headline wasn’t that big. And Tompkins Square Park was no riot. It was war, the Dog Shit Park War.

  My tasks were simple: Kill the monster, save the maiden.

  Fatum.

  The fates lead those who will, who won’t they drag.

  For me, it was all drag.

  My first task was plain as day. I knew this was the monster, and I had to kill him, and I did.

  The moment that after, you’re different. Didn’t know my first task, not really, until the moment I pulled the trigger.

  Same way with my second task: didn’t know.

  All at once, there I was, the hero on the white stallion, rescuing the maiden.

  But it’s not the truth.

  My tasks were not to kill the monster and save the maiden. The truth is, my task was to wake up, to notice.

  It’s like Rose told me: The life I am trying to grasp is the me who is trying to grasp it. My task was to not abandon myself, to not confuse the confusion with myself, to not turn into salt, into dust, charcoal, into purple bumps of Karposi’s sarcoma like the rest.

  No one can tell this story the way I know it but me. The characters—Rose, Fiona, True Shot, Ruby Prestigiacomo, Charlie 2Moons, Bobbie, Harry O’Connor, Fred, Mother, Father—are memories of myself.

  Except for True Shot and Ruby, the closest any one of them got to each other was me.

  In the twilight of what I remember of the day, I am lying, cheating, stealing, but not to mislead you.

  I am lip-syncing here, so sometimes the words don’t go with my mouth.

  Language is my second language.

  I’m just making it up where I don’t know.

  Ergo: The story does not follow a consecutive horizontal plot line.

  Ergo: Time gets lost.

  Plus also, some of this story, not much, is en Français, so there’s some places you might get confused.

  It all comes around at the end, though. I promise.

  What else?


  I just got to say it: I can tell I’m already in love with you. Which means I’m going to hurt you.

  * * *

  ON AVENUE C with Ruby Prestigiacomo one evening, one twilight, Ruby stopped, hiked his pants up over his skinny ass, and pointed his finger. My eyes followed Ruby’s pointing arm, down from his red polyester shirt rolled up to the elbow, down his forearm, the yellow hair, over the tracks and purple bumps, to his finger pointing the way man points to the Sistine Chapel God.

  In the space in between Ruby’s finger and God was the hierarchy of humiliations, plus the telephone booth. On the corner, the telephone booth, inside and outside painted all over with words. The cyclone fence behind it, the empty lot, bits of broken glass shiny from the streetlamp light, tiny illuminations in the dust, sandy dirt, rocks, and dead grass. Beat to hell, the telephone booth, receiver hanging down.

  Like your limp dick, Ruby said.

  Ruby smiled his famous smile.

  When all else fails, Ruby said, When there’s no place left to go, when you’re up Shit Creek. You can come here to talk. A special kind of phone booth: Saint Jude phone booth. Direct line to God, Ruby said. Hopeless cases.

  Last call.

  THAT TELEPHONE BOOTH got stuck in my head. The telephone booth was more like a Catholic statue, a shrine you could kneel down in front of and pray, a broken shrine to all things broken, a shrine you could lift the receiver off, put your ear against, your lips against, and speak into, and you wouldn’t be alone.

  It’s like what Rose said once: We don’t live on things, we live on the meaning of things.

  That telephone booth, the thing. The meaning of it.

  Not to be alone.

  ALL OF US together in Fish Bar.

  Fish Bar was the same as ever with the string of fish lights hanging across the back, the light a burnt red on the green and amber bottles, the jukebox with the black-girl songs, songs each one of us knew by heart.

  But everything was different. Different and bright. Everything about the world was brighter, clearer, like the kind of painting that, when you first look at the painting you think it’s a photograph the photographer took when the light made the edges of things hard and more real, or maybe the photographer took acid and took a photograph of how he was seeing, but then you step closer and you see the brush strokes, you see how the guy painted a painting to look like a photograph that looks just like the world, only brighter.

  That night in Fish Bar. At the same round table in the corner by the window with the red lantern-glass candle. When we looked around the table at each other, we didn’t know, none of us knew how we’d got so lost, how all at once the world had changed on us.

  We were sitting closer together than usual, and we were holding hands. Most always, sitting there, we touched each other, even Rose, but this last night we were hand in hand, a circle of hands holding each other around the round table. My right hand palm to palm with Rose’s Sahara Desert palm, my left hand palm to palm with Fiona’s bleached sand dollar, my knees touching True Shot’s knees.

  True Shot, Rose, Fiona, and myself, Ruby and Harry and Fred in spirit, holding hands.

  We were just talking talking, playing at talking, and then for some reason we were talking about the one moment.

  The moment that after you’re different.

  Jackson Holeewood, Wyoming, I said, May 13, 1983.

  Myself, even myself with my Heineken same as ever, my black zip-to-the neck turtle, my black knit stretch pants, my shiny Shinola black combat boots, my black baseball cap backwards—all that black avant-garde shit covering up my Coors flannel plaid white-trash roots.

  Of all the stories I could have told that night, of all the moments, I chose the one about Crummy Dog.

  I was waiting tables at Café Libre and living in a room above the Big O Tire Center.

  Café Libre was the only place in town with a decent wine list and real coffee.

  It was Sunday. I was off. I was sitting with my coffee on the deck of Café Libre, studying French from the Maison de Français book Première Année.

  Maison de Français: proof I wasn’t local.

  It wasn’t a car, it was a pickup, a blue Silverado, with a gun in the gun rack in the back window, a four-wheeler, and the guy didn’t stop.

  Sunday morning.

  Pauvre petit chien.

  Crummy was his name, Crummy Dog, terrier mix. Arrogant little mutt. Crummy ran out, wild fool that he was, kamikaze under the big wheel. There was the sound, the unmistakable sound, and my body did all those things people describe when they know shit has just happened, and I looked. Crummy went under the front wheel, then the back wheel. Sunday morning, in front of Café Libre, after my coffee, the sun shining, Première Année.

  The hardest part was Crummy running back to me, his back legs dragging, Crummy dragging his back legs back to me.

  Frozen moments in time. If we could unfreeze them.

  I knelt right there on the pavement, laid Première Année down, and that little golden dog, so uncomplicated and real and full of life, the one who loved me, looked up at me with all the understanding, sorrow, and bewilderment that goes with being aware of being alive.

  I always said Crummy wasn’t really a dog, he was a magic being who could do everything but talk, and right then, at that moment, Crummy talked. He said, This is death, Will, au revoir. Then Crummy’s eyes rolled back up into his head, and he laid his head on Première Années open page, and a big gush of blood came out of his mouth and nose, blood on French, and Crummy wasn’t looking at me anymore.

  WHEN I ASKED Rose about the one moment, I expected Rose’s moment to be one of his Elizabeth Taylor stories or one of his theah-tah stories—how he dined with Sir Lawrence Olivier and Danny Kaye, cocktails with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott by the pool, or Carmen Miranda without any underwear dancing with Cesar Romero. One of those. But it wasn’t.

  Rose in his Saint Francis Is A Sissy look, his Marrakesh earrings and his new pedal pushers and the silver lamé top Mrs. Alvarez, Rose’s personal tailor, made for him. His shiny oiled head smelling of rosemary and eucalyptus, and his black black skin and the gold loops in his queer ear, his jewels sparkly sparkly.

  Drop-dead freshly fucked gorgeous.

  Rose put out the cigarette I’d rolled for him and lit a Gauloise, crossed his legs, shook his head so his earrings picked up the green and amber light, lifted his arms up like a symphony conductor, bracelets clack-clack.

  The moment that after you’re different.

  Rose raised his shoulders, lowered his chin, and looked his black eyes straight into my eyes.

  Houston 1955, Rose said.

  It was hard to look at Rose when he made his eyes so open. Rose hardly ever showed the world his eyes so open that way—a Shy Hunter wasn’t supposed to do that—but that night he did. Rose opened his eyes and showed me vasty deep, his fire inside I would stand too close to. Roosevelt Washington King.

  I was eleven years old, Rose said. A Saturday night, Rose said. And like most other Saturday nights, my father was slow driving us through the neighborhood on our way to Wooten’s Ice Cream Parlor. My two brothers and I, Calvin and L’lrah, and my two sisters, Magnolia and Elnora. We were sitting all five of us, quietly, behaved, me the oldest by the window on my pa’s side. My brothers’ and my sisters’ legs eight sticks across the seat stuck out in front of us, sitting on the old red blanket Mama put over the seat for Saturday nights because kids and ice cream and Texas heat together in the same place always meant trouble.

  Ice cream the beginning of sacred, Rose said, Ice cream and riding around in the Buick Saturday night was always how Sunday began, Sunday and church and Sunday clothes and singing and preaching all day at the John the Baptist Church on Dowling, up from the corner of Dowling and Magown and the taxi stand and the Golden Arrow Bar where uncle Elasha King—my father Elijah King’s twin brother—drove a taxi and drank and hung out with fancy women. My mother, Montserrat, called them fancy women.

  The Bu
ick was washed and waxed shiny with Turtle Wax by my father’s big hands. Every Saturday morning, I sat on the curb and watched those hands scrub the whitewalls white with Old Dutch Cleanser. And every Saturday night, the whitewalls and the chrome Buick hubcaps rolling along residential streets, Elijah and Montserrat, waving at the neighbors, Elijah now and then giving the horn a honk at folks sitting on the gary of their skinny wood shotgun houses fanning themselves, heat lightning flashing across the purple sky, the streetlamps on the light poles a mess of mosquitoes, moths, and flying bugs. In the yards, barefoot children running after fireflies. The fireflies, now and then the flash of a TV, the lightning, the lights on the light poles, the headlights of the Buick—solitary illuminations in the night.

  Wooten’s Ice Cream Parlor, bright windows on Dowling.

  My father’s big hands, a nickel to each one of us, his children, placed in the our palms. I herded Calvin, L’lrah, Elnora, and Magnolia inside the bright and sat us down at the counter on the high red stools that turned. Each one of us each clutching our nickel, elbows on the counter, plastic-covered menus next to the napkin holders, one napkin each.

  In the car, driving down Dowling, licking chocolate, licking pineapple, strawberry—no one ever got vanilla; I always chose chocolate—my father, Elijah King, driving his Buick Special home toward Sunday.

  The red flashing light pulling us over, another illumination.

  My father steered us to the curb just in front of the Golden Arrow Bar, in front of the neon Lone Star Beer sign. My father looked over to Mama first. Mama looked back. Then my father opened the door, pulled up his weight, stepped out of the Buick saying, What’s the problem, officer, sir? Was I traveling over the speed?

  Two white cops, the one of them threw my father up against the Buick, frisked him, calling my father, calling Elijah King nigger, over and over again: nigger-nigger-nigger. I was looking out the open back window of the ’49 Buick Special at my father’s face, his eyes right into my eyes.

  Close the window, son, my father said.

  So I rolled up the window slow, eyes right into my father’s eyes.

  There was the split concrete of the sidewalk, the Lone Star Beer sign, Uncle Elasha in his black-and-white cab, the door to the cab open, Elasha smoking, spread-legged, fancy women standing around watching.