After the Blue Hour

Memory is too unreliable to be ‘truthful’.

All true? I think autobiographers are big liars.

I suppose you could say that Paul is a … hustler? His rich wife Corina paid him grandly when they divorced, wouldn’t you say?” “That’s called alimony,” I laughed.

How erotic Texas must be!” she said. I was sure she had meant “exotic,” but I followed through: “Maybe, if you find cactus and deserts erotic, sensual.

It was never about the money; at times no money was involved, just sex.” “Then what?” “It was always about—” I had never asked that question of myself. “It was always about—” No word came, no answer. “Power.

I think the camouflage of fiction allows more authenticity – you know, acknowledging that it is a ‘fiction’, a terrific lie, and that you want it to be believed.

Love can fuck up desire, I’ll agree to that,” I said, and I believed that. If, on the occasions when someone I had sex with remained after orgasm, and an edge of friendship was being suggested to me—as, say, we might lie, though rarely, talking—if, then, at those times, all desire faded.

No, I did not tell him about the raids on gay bars; cops invading private homes to arrest men having sex, the sexual act being illegal; entrapment, lying, aroused cops, years-long prison terms, suicides, violence.

During the Mardi Gras carnival in New Orleans, drunk and drugged and sleepless for sex-driven nights and days, I saw leering clowns on gaudy floats tossing cheap necklaces to grasping hands that clutched and grabbed and tore them, spilling beads; and revelers crawled on littered streets, wrestling for them, bleeding for them on sidewalks; and beads fell on spattered blood like dirty tears—and I saw costumed revelers turn into angels, angels into demons, demons into clowning angels; and in a flashing moment the night split open into a deeper, darker chasm out of which soared demonic clowning angels laughing.

Because it’s getting to be the blue hour, and that’s the time when everything is revealed.