Novel Excerpt by Brian Harrison - 1. Chapter 1

I understand that some object to the name of this work. I can only say that there is a thematic reason for it. Surely the title may have been at the root of a few rejections I've received from publishers, but I like the bluntness of it. The story tells of a night in the life of a young gay man when, while assisting someone whom he has been admiring from afar, he finds himself in thrust into a realm of violence and intrigue that almost claim his life. This is also in part a memorial, a tribute to old friends, and set in the streets of West Hollywood where we played. Names and places have been changed to protect the guilty.

I am posting the opening chapter and will post more depending on the reception.

Fags
A novel by Bryan Harrison

Chapter 1
The Day That God Never Finished

This is the end of a long story. It has been in the telling for decades at this point and I have actually forgotten many of the main characters. Excuse me if the names, places and dates get fucked up in the telling, but I am glad it's finally over.

It ends here with me waiting in my van, at the mouth of an alley just off the night-lit boulevard of Santa Monica, the matron saint of lost angels and derelicts. There's a dismal Los Angeles sky overhead, starless and moody. Grim overcast bounces back any light that tries to escape. The grind of traffic has died in the pre-dawn hours save for a few frustrated johns and the cops that watch their ceaseless cruising. Faint wisps of laughter erupt and die in places outside my vision and somewhere there's a momentary siren. But all I can really hear is that undead hum I call ‘the sound of thickness'. It's as if the concrete and metal world that's been wound around us has grown a voice. It's a grim sound that never really goes away; a constant backdrop to everything, like the white noise on an un-tuned radio; the low groan of a reluctant progress.

Please understand that I was completely unaware that the story was still unfolding until it finally, mercifully ended. Its cadence has been in suspension for so long that I grew accustomed to the tones and have taken them for granted, ignorantly walking through the challenges of everyday life while the weight of this final moment built and shaped itself.

At the end of this story I see a face highlighted for an instant in the flash of impatient headlights before the car passes on. It is his face. But I don't know that yet. See, I am sitting here for another reason and my mind is elsewhere, lost in some trivial business of my day, or perhaps a song on the radio evoked some nostalgic reminiscing. But I cannot be sure what I saw in that first wash of white light across familiar features. Broken from my introspections I watch, waiting for another car to light him in passing.

Then I see him again. Now I am sure who it is and who it can't be, sitting here at the black edge of dawn. He is a gaunt and hollow face now, portraying nothing of the beauty he once possessed.

And this is where the story begins.

It wasn't a million years ago but it wasn't yesterday that I was hurriedly stuffing my ass into a pre-washed, strategically pre-torn pair of jeans while Steven ranted in the living room, cursing my "shit records" and causing general mayhem in his immediate vicinity. He was not unlike the demon in the Eddie Murphy vehicle "The Golden Child" that created havoc everywhere it went. Steve is a similar whirlwind of psychic turbulence disrupting things by his mere presence. You cannot have a neutral sentiment about him and he is never boring. I heard something fall and something thrown and Steven finally shutting up as Darby Crash began screaming some unintelligible mayhem about blitzing on the media or something.

Outside of our third story window, overlooking the decline of the hill above a calmer Hollywood than the one we know today, Los Angeles glittered a whisper, a lurid promise of dancing and amphetamines and sex and sex and more sex. Inside our chaotic den, the shower ran wasted water, steaming up the hallways. Ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts that seemed to reproduce like roaches on their lips. Something was burning in the kitchen, sizzling impatiently like our reckless lives. And everywhere the devout were preparing for Saturday night; the eighth day; the day that God never finished; the fag's holy day.

When my jeans were finally secured I slipped into my faded Leif Garrett t-shirt, just because I liked the way the breeders looked at me when I walked down the boulevard. "Whose this fuckin' black guy in the faggoty t-shirt?", and the occasional "Faggot!" or "Cocksucker!" and I always laugh hearing those observations because I already knew those things. They are factors of which I have no shame and the idiots never quite understood that.

Steven ran in from the living room. He was all mohawk that night. Jet black leather. Plaid underneath. A fierce manner of stiletto shoes jutted menacingly from below surreal plaid legging, and zippers were everywhere. Too small to be threatening even in that violent motif, he was a comic flash of crass elegance against the backdrop of our worn-out apartment, where forgotten projects and abused clothing were strewn about in mock organization.

"Put this on!" he ordered impatiently, thrusting a black lining pencil at me. He was practicing his snarl and although I was not at all threatened by this, and he knew it, I obeyed in mock acquiescence. Patiently obedient, I darkened the hairline above his collar and filled out his formerly blonde eyebrows. His obsessions were as specific as they were varied. When I was finished, his appearance was adequately menacing, effectively offsetting his pale, thin frame. Scary.

"Why'd you change the fuckin music?" I cursed him. "You're leaving for work anyway!" He always left me in the chaotic din of some ambitious white urban social commentary. I was aghast at the clutter of noise behind the singer's grunting.

"Got a joint?" he asked me, ignoring my inquiry while rolling up his sleeves and doing some last minute preening before he went out into the cruel world.

"Are you working the patio tonite" I responded, successfully ignoring him in turn.

"I hate the fucking patio!"

"Your life is hard"

"Gimme a joint," he said, rushing for the door.

"One left. I'll bring you a joint at work."

"Yeah... yeah do that," he said. Then he was gone. His whirlwind left with him, leaving me alone with the anguished voice of a doomed teenager, ranting against a backdrop of angry mechanical discord.

I was out of the apartment soon after Steven, brisking along the side streets and then onto the Blvd major where the Saturday night throng was already gathering. I always loved the feel of Hollywood then. Before anonymous wealthy exurbanites and their secret handshakes had sealed its fate; before the gang-bangers had been allowed to turn it into a weekend war-zone; before crack cocaine and its resultant desperation had left the streets riddled with hollow eyed men, lining the alleyways, sleeping in their own piss; and young girls, prematurely haggard, missing teeth and futures, could be seen sitting impatiently on hotel doorsteps anxiously awaiting a chance to relinquish whatever pleasures they have left to the man with the dope. Long before all this, I would walk the Blvd and get lost in the crowd, the swollen press of humanity that lined the Saturday afternoon street, impatiently awaiting the close of day when the streetlights would come alive and everyplace but Hollywood would seem a distant memory.

I fired up the joint while I walked. Nobody cared then. There was still such a thing as hard and soft drugs. There were still voices of sanity that occasionally crept into the public discourse, unfiltered by the crass, biased pomp of mainstream journalism. All the wars were still secret, as the military industrial conquest had yet to make the idea of dropping bombs on impoverished third world countries more appealing to the general public. They would eventually succeed in that endeavor.

But it was 1981. Ronald Regan had yet to become promoted to the ranks of legend by an aggressive right-wing media machine, revolution was still a nice word and I was young, gay and horney.

As I walked up Vine street, a warm satiny buzz filling my head, the sun was beginning its descent behind the western hills of Hollywood. The subtle violence of its waning rays filled the sky with a color like blood and gold. Saturday night was about to officially begin.

"What the fuck?" Danny always answered the door that way. Didn't matter who it was. He was perpetually in a bathrobe and his glasses always needed cleaning. I knew him to be a tediously hygienic person but his hair always looked to need a shampoo and he sported a perpetual facial shadow, whiskers left over from adolescence that never seemed to grow and he never shaved them. An apparent compromise had been reached.

Danny was one of those guys who would be fucking hot but for his eccentricities. ‘What the fuck?' he'd say and then zip into his cluttered apartment, expecting you to find your own way around the clusters of boxes, ancient fast food meals, poorly propped up card tables, speakers (for some reason he always had an excess of large speakers in his apartment. Only two of them were ever hooked up at a time. I never asked why. I didn't want to know) and the occasion sleeping form wrapped up on the couch or lain among the clutter of the room like another forgotten project. Danny's place was the jungle within a jungle. But it was never dirty. Just cluttered. I never quite figured that one out.

"What ya need?" he said when we finally achieved our destination and parked in the kitchen which was always lit by a bulb insufficient to the task.

"Gotta can?" I asked, retrieving the proper donation from my sock.

"A can man... gotta can for the man, man," he sputtered distractedly as he dug around in a drawer and quickly produced a healthy specimen of an ounce. I remembered having a touch of nostalgia for the times when nobody actually sold an ‘ounce'. Little did I know how premature my lamentations were and that only months later some fool would sell me a matchbox of pin thin joints for the same price. Blue book deal.

When the exchange was made, I tucked the can into my sock. I was toasted enough for the moment so there was no reason to roll anything.

"Soooo...you goin' to that club tonight?" he asked, tucking his profits into a bathrobe pocket.

"The Zone? Yeah... As usual." I winked at him "You wanna hang? Meet some of the girls?"

Danny pretended to be firmly implanted on the straight side of the fence. He rolled his eyes and flicked his wrist in that inaccurate and typical impersonation of a queen, the one that all the breeders and posers thereof have convinced each other is a "gay" gesture. "No thank you," he said in a poorly executed lisp, plopping down into the chair beside me.

"You know you want it," I teased and headed for the door before he felt the need to defend his heterosexual delusions. His objection was lost in the depths of the apartment behind me as I rushed out into the growing night, over the steps that lead down from the winding walkways of his old complex, and onto Vine Street.

The sun had already made its exit and the streetlights had attracted an audience of fluttering moths, bouncing their heads against its glass canopy until it killed them.

In the distance, the Blvd was attracting a different audience. The gathering throng cruised along the Hollywood streets, engaging in secret, illegal transactions, challenging one another, laughing at each other's postures, screaming against the looming night. Their voices bounced against the shining glass storefronts until they died in the growing rumble of traffic.

Saturday night had begun.