Be Safe Page 2
Gallagher tells Rogarth that he’s disappointed with his English teacher at Los Angeles City College because he suspects he’s a philistine. And even though Rogarth has heard the word “philistine” before, he’s not sure what the word means, so he nods his head and listens with fake interest, hoping that Gallagher will spill the definitional beans. But as it turns out, neither of them knows the meaning of the word, so they’re stuck nodding their heads to each other, both privately accepting the truth that no truth will be forthcoming, at least about the meaning of this certain word, from this conversation. The men are basically killing time after class, lounging and smoking cigarettes on the mangy lawn that forms what is generously called “the quad” between the school’s library and Tinkerton Hall (abbreviated on computer-generated student schedules simply and adorably as Tink, suggesting that any class taught there would be governed by the same rules that administer life in Never Never Land), which might cause one to assume that the building was the home of the drama department, but instead houses most of the college’s algebra and English classes, before they have to show up a couple hours early to set up about four hundred folding chairs at what’s billed as Los Angeles’ biggest All Gay AA Meeting (it’s been claimed that it’s the biggest All Gay AA Meeting in the universe). One or both of these guys wants more than anything to use the word philistine to the assembled horde of sober homosexuals, if not at this particular venue, then some other sober gathering. But it’s Gallagher who’ll probably use it – just as he did while talking to Rogarth – to prove to everybody that there’s more to him than the overtly spelled out virtues of maintaining a life free from self-induced unconsciousness. Gallagher has heard the word uttered twice.
The second time it was Ryan, who is Gallagher’s retirement age AA sponsor, who’s had a considerable amount of plastic surgery performed on his face and who injects anabolic steroids into his body, two things that have left him perpetually smiling and muscle bound, and who, in decades past had earned advanced degrees in music – singing to be exact, with a specialization in the art songs of Franz Schubert. His graduation from a Master of Music mill in the Midwest was postponed because his rendition of “Erlkönig,” a dramatic song about a dead kid, was less than stellar given the fact that his vocal cords, during a couple of crucial performances, were muddled with phlegm, which he blamed on smoking cocaine. Ryan had said the word in close enough proximity for Gallagher to hear it when describing Die Kindertotenlieder, Mahler’s series of songs about a shitload of dead kids as sung by Ryan’s collegiate archenemy, Debbi Lott, a plump, indelicate, slutty contralto who played softball and believed in Jesus, and whose musical acumen found her sprinting toward and finally pouncing on this or that defenseless leading tone, usually understood to be the essential musical entities that serve as invitations to either end a current phrase or pivot to a new key, a novel approach that more than a couple of operatic dowagers believe led to the creation of the rare yet certainly extant musical direction in urtext editions of this or that score, the words piano pesante, to a couple of much younger men who admired inflated albeit mature muscles and whose accumulated sober time, unlike Ryan’s, who measures his unsullied breathing in decades worth of sober anniversaries, needed to be measured in single-digit months.
Ryan had referred to Miss Lott as a philistine, and he did it in a way that made you think the word smelled bad, like it was a nasty label someone spits out, like “pedophile” or “murderer” or something, but not with as much baggage – and Gallagher, who’s not an idiot or anything, figured out right away that “philistine” was a different kind of label; that unlike “pedophile,” which everybody knows is fucking little kids, “philistine” probably has more to do with quality or style rather than violating a moral code. But the very first time Gallagher heard “philistine” was when he was still drinking booze and using drugs, mostly meth. Every few months in a seedy part of town made up of dingy storefronts and dirty stucco apartment buildings, down past the 10 Freeway around Washington Boulevard, some industrious guys, who believed they might make a buck or two by exploiting the human penchant for sexual humiliation and degradation, rented a cavernous hall once a month or so in order to hold a surprisingly well-attended gathering that came to be known as The Urine Festival, where men would pay ten or fifteen bucks to come inside, either remove or change their clothes, and piss on each other for a few hours, all the while throwing back as many cans of beer as possible, snorting meth and sniffing poppers. The second or third time Gallagher found himself inside The Urine Festival, there was a group of ten or so guys standing around pissing on a hairless Rubenesque man of about forty who was splayed out inside a bathtub. Since urination held the status of chef d’oeuvre at this gathering, there was surprisingly little conversation among the celebrants, something that would have sullied the sullying, and which made it easy to hear the Master of Ceremonies, an obese man with a deep yet mostly effeminate voice, in black leather pants, motorcycle/military cap and Lycra body shirt, who stood on a raised platform and droned quietly into an amplified speaker system, over and over, the words “piss on that fucker…yeah, piss on that fucker.” With some amount of effort, Gallagher pushed his way through the small crowd to get a better glimpse of the pissee, and found himself standing next to two men, one dressed in a too-small, faux LAPD uniform, and the other dressed in Brokeback Mountain denim and boots, while both vaguely aiming their penises inside the tub, shot robust streams of piss onto the tub dweller while carrying on a clipped sounding, sotto voce yet easily discernible conversation about a comparison of the work of David Hockney, especially his early years, when he was disposed to painting swimming pools, both as canvas and subject; and Monet, who painted damp flowers in France. It was during this dialogue that Gallagher first heard the word “philistine.” And even though Gallagher wasn’t quite sure to which artist this epithet was aimed, he was so impressed by its pejorative potency that it prompted him to mentally bookmark the word for future use, even though he never bothered to look it up in a dictionary.
Regardless, Gallagher has always envied AA speakers who peppered esoteric words throughout their inspirational speeches. AA is, after all, a program of attraction, so he aspires to use such words, especially into the microphone that’s set up at the AA lectern on a stage before hundreds of his peers, most of whom have certain expectations, especially to be dazzled and entertained by whoever’s speaking into the P.A. system: Hello everybody…my name’s Gallagher and I’m an addict and an alcoholic. And before I get too far into my spiel here, I want to say that I before I got to these rooms, I was beset with roving hordes of philistines on a daily basis. They’re everywhere it seems. The sad truth is, however, if Gallagher is able to remain in AA for any length of time, he’ll realize that it doesn’t matter if one uses esoteric words or even English words. No one’s going to listen anyway.
All this is predicated, though, on a hard and fast rule in AA: addressing the group as leader, which requires merely introducing yourself and then reading the meeting’s format (which is almost always composed by a philistine whose grasp of the rules of syntax and grammar remain realms as unknowable as advanced quantum physics and Aramaic) to the attendees, and especially speaking to the group, which consists of revealing the miraculous route taken from addiction to recovery, credit for which must be given – one more time – to God the Merciful and Most Powerful, and who, it seems, favors this or that speaker over just about everybody else on earth, are great privileges bestowed weekly from The Secretary, whose choices are born not from any sort of flawed motivations shaped by mere appetite and prejudice, but from the lofty realm of principle. Just as the Pope chooses bishops and cardinals, AA secretaries, protected with the shroud of infallibility, choose the leaders and speakers for their meetings from some imagined store of evolved consciousness. So it must be simply a happy coincidence that ninety-eight percent of the leaders and speakers who stand at the lectern before the hundreds of homos at The
Wednesday Night Beginners meeting where Rogarth and Gallagher set up the chairs are youthful specimens who could easily have wandered in off the pages of an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue.
It’s said that alcoholism is a disease of perception, which may be a concept yet to be internalized by Gallagher, who isn’t exactly A&F material, not because he’s a homely or unhandsome man. It’s simply because he’s a little long in the tooth to be photographed wearing scanty underwear. There have been about forty-nine days in Gallagher’s entire life that, when seen through certain gauzy filters, his image could have been chosen to grace the pages of a Sears Catalogue, but they’ve since been drying up and blowing away at a rate that has placed them, like the California Condor, on an endangered species list, a state of affairs not lost on The Secretary, Sally Boo, sixty something, a perpetually aspiring white-haired cross dresser who somehow maintains an emaciated mien (and is referred to by many of her critics as “that old boiler hen”) despite her almost exclusive diet of beef tacos, lemon cake, Oreo cookies and Haagen-Dasz, who’d come to the conclusion within five minutes of meeting Gallagher that his public exposure would be limited to a monthly round of applause for his unselfish service of setting up chairs.
This class of AA service to which Gallagher and Rogarth belong, when viewed objectively through a sociological lens, is of the troglodyte variety: hard-working gay men and some lesbians who, by virtue of their meager physical gifts, remain consigned to an existence of the candle-lighting, coffee making, cookie-replenishing, trash-emptying, water-carrying, stain-mopping level of meeting responsibilities.
On their two-block walk to the corner where they’ll stop and purchase a couple of burritos before trekking for another few blocks to the Protestant church where the meeting is held, Rogarth and Gallagher check out a couple of handsome and quite scandalous looking men, an admittedly indefinite descriptor, but one that becomes accurate given the fact that R&G pegged them right away either as guys fresh out of jail or on the verge of getting busted. Out in the daylight walking down the sidewalk, amid the bustle and the commerce and the population, these guys just looked out of place somehow, not unlike American businessmen visiting Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on business trips, who stick out because they’ve been trained to walk from point A to point B with a practiced resolve, a trait honed from the Darwinian necessity of living life in a big city born and sustained through the parentage of capitalism. Saudis seem to eschew any sort of purpose-driven movement, opting instead for a leisurely meandering style, as if doing anything else would amount to a vulgar display of intention and would be considered poor taste. Friendly advice offered from a Saudi to any visiting Westerner often consists of this: If you want to blend in, friend, you must appear as if you have nowhere to go.
R&G’s assessment of these two guys is confirmed when, as their paths are about to meet, part of their conversation is overheard: “Oh, yeah – no, dude, he’ll walk. He’s got himself a lawyer and everything, so…” And this snippet of conversation, along with the speakers’ sketchy bearing, are enough to set the imaginations of both Gallagher and Rogarth alight, as neither of them have been, especially in their pre-AA lives, strangers to the United States legal system, especially as defendants for various drug-related offenses to society. The legal infraction that landed Rogarth inside the Cri-Life front doors four months ago grew from an extended visit to his parents’ home in a privileged, albeit somewhat dusty and mountainous area about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, in a part of the state well outside the progressive sphere of influence of the great megalopolis, and therefore not open to the idea of providing needle exchanges for its dope-injecting-and-therefore-prone-to-catching-blood-borne-bugs-kind of citizen, which Rogarth doesn’t really give two shits about, mainly because he’s been aware of his HIV status for years already. The needle exchanges in LA were simply a means to obtain brand new (read sharp and unclogged) rigs that, given the amount of product Rogarth and his friends injected into their veins, preserved their epidermises with as little damage as possible. Before new needles were readily available to the impaired masses, their arms resembled pepperoni sausages.
Which begs the question: Why did Rogarth want to visit his parents in the first place?
A: Good intentions.
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Like most folks on earth, dope fiends (even meth freaks) are prone, now and again, to fits of guilt, shame and regret, three states of mind that will, more often than not, evaporate well before the transformation from thought to deed. Once that threshold is crossed, however, the act gathers strength and momentum until, when perceived in the mind of the dope fiend, it turns into a full-blown act of what might be mistaken for caring and selflessness – or, objectively speaking, a truly domesticated understanding of the concept of “love,” or more plainly, the currency on which about 1000 percent of Disney cartoons are built: I know he’s monstrous…but I love him for what’s inside his soul. Or in Rogarthian terms: I know I’ve been a horrible son. I’ve stolen your money and possessions, I’ve taken advantage of your feelings for me and I’ve ruined the reputation of our family. But I love you more than you can know, and I’m here to make amends.
Further objectivity, however, will reveal that before this deed has a chance to mature or even see puberty, the reality sets in that Rogarth or James or Sally or whoever, once they realize they’ve left the safety of their natural habitats that includes quick access to their drugs, will begin to have second thoughts. Just prior to being tested by the stress created by the tortured trial-and-error baby steps of wide-eyed pedestrians – much less the rolling big rigs necessary to deliver the building blocks of renewal onto the loading dock of one’s character – the road to hell falls into disrepair.
Only two days into Rogarth’s arrival to his parents’ Ojai home – and given Ventura County’s lack of largesse, at least as it might relate to clean needles – Rogarth, who set out on this trip dopeless and rigless, found himself, mid-jones, loitering through the halls of the local hospital, surreptitiously opening various drawers looking for syringes, a strategy which illustrates the cunning of the addicted mind, given the fact that, in his formative years, he’d had numerous dope connections, including his supervisor at one of the rare jobs he’d been able to secure in his lifetime. Valery, the head waitress of the Ojai Valley Inn, an overly popular patrician getaway, had spilled the beans to him one night after the dinner shift by uttering the word Desoxyn into the phone loudly enough to be overheard by Rogarth, who, emboldened by his knowledge that Desoxyn, better known as pharmaceutical methamphetamine (the kind, it was rumored, used by Adolph Hitler himself and was still prescribed now and then to regular non-fascist folks in order to ward off the effects of narcolepsy and sometimes epilepsy) was a rare term used only by certain physicians, pharmacists and, of course, dope fiends, who coveted this particular form of meth because its preparation for injection didn’t involve any flames or spoons, and is so pure that it can be skin-popped, which is great if your arms have undergone the inevitable vein drain that most dope fiends experience after decades of stabbing their epidermises where they’ve predicted a vein lays because prediction, since plain old eyesight, due to misshapen eyeballs and lenses that are the result of too many awesome rushes, is all you have left in your quest for viable conduits. Rogarth had asked Valery about it, to which she at first blanched, then grinned, telling him that she wanted them to get high together, at which time Valery would slip on a pair of steel high heels, squeeze into a leather bustier, and then beat the shit out him. So Rogarth, after opting not to give Miss Valery a call, immediately pocketed a couple of hospital syringes large enough to be labeled harpoons, as well as an unopened vial of epinephrine, something he’d never tried and never even considered, but what the hell, was being handcuffed by one of the local sheriff’s deputies for multiple legal transgressions. How such a seemingly minor offense, especially in California, warranted, in terms of seriousness, any mo
re than a ceremonial appearance inside a courtroom resulting in a sentence greater than a bit of community service, was simply because this was a road not unknown to Rogarth, who’d nearly burned through the maximum number of minor offenses for which anything but state prison was appropriate punishment in the minds of defense attorneys and prosecutors alike.
During a quick and illuminating (at least for Rogarth) conversation with his assigned public defender, Judi Goldberg, Esq., a thirty-something barrister with the physical attributes of an overstuffed Barcalounger Pegasus II with a short, stylish haircut, Rogarth, wanting to show off both his legal acumen and his will to fight the system, raised his palm facing Mme. Goldberg’s cherubic face and interjected his desire for her to “cut to the chase” and run a 1538.5 motion at his preliminary hearing, a strategy that, if successful, would have forced We The People’s representative on earth to discard the evidence they’d garnered in order to secure a conviction. Better known as a motion to suppress, a 1538.5 motion is like a throw-away camera: it’s something that can be used only once during the entire life of a legal case and, because of details like the burden of proof (a hot potato that imbues the prosecution with complete tactical advantage), has about as much chance of succeeding as the proverbial snowball in hell. Ms. Goldberg, having seen maybe not “all of it before,” but a lot of it, responded with a musical quality to her voice that was as close to singing as speaking could be: “That…would open up a whole can of worm,” a style of speech she picked up from one Bernie Fierro, her flaming yet distinguished legal mentor whose conversational dissents regarding outmoded and thus feeble arguments often included the phrase, “That, my dear, is positively antediluvian,” where the “u” would elongate, soar and linger in the air as if part of a Puccini aria, along with her seemingly intentional use of the singular “worm,” not only struck Rogarth silent mid-thought, but opened wide what was left of the corroded floodgates of his meth-addled brain. With mercurial speed, his imagination conjured a tiny movie trailer that featured his lawyer, dressed in a plush yet matted terrycloth robe, at home with several feline companions at her feet, opening a can labeled “Pâté of Worm,” scooping out several spoonfuls and frying them in Canola oil, and then, selfishly avoiding the cats completely, depositing them carefully onto a burgundy-colored Melmac plate, then sitting at her kitchen table, sprinkling them with salt and pepper and chowing down, a meal that amounted to, unlike Pope Leo X’s 1520 denunciation of Martin Luther’s radical anti-Catholic principles, literally a diet of worms. That, along with the fact that it was apparent to Rogarth that her analogy was faulty; that rather than opening up a whole can of “worm” or “worms” (or taking the first misguided step down the slippery slope of ruin), Ms. Goldberg should have equated the running of a 1538.5 motion with the choice of whether to open up one’s Christmas presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, the former having the ability to spoil the surprise, the net effect of which was what Christmas presents were all about anyway; that what she really should be emphasizing to Rogarth was the virtues of patience rather than the shock and awe of spilling her strategic beans prematurely. After his thought ended with the quick assessment of Ms. Goldberg’s girth, Rogarth found himself mildly surprised and amused by the fact that worms, apparently, were as fattening as cupcakes. So, finding himself confused and distressed by both his lawyer’s seeming inability to grasp the distinction between things plural and a processed collective whole, along with her perceived penchant for eating insects, something that he, almost as a side thought, correlated with the fact that she had a Jewish last name: I knew it, they eat worms! – a suspicion that bolstered, one more time, the walls separating Gentiles and Jews, Rogarth, right there on the spot, surrendered and said he wanted to plead guilty and request a program.