'
The sermon for Feb. 09, 2003 is: remember me 1:20 a.m. It's the season for heartbreak, I swear. Just now, while engaged in the endless moving of my books from pile to pile (not unlike Sisyphus; but why does it seem like such an achievement?), I found a cache of all of Bo Huston's books. I had met Bo Huston years and years ago, during that short-shock burst of cocky youth that compels one to publish zines and do performance art; he was a friend of Earl Jackson Jr's (AKA UC Santa Cruz's landmark queer/ailurophile) and Dennis Cooper's (AKA Queer Spokesmodel For Disaffected Youth/scariest person alive now that Kathy Acker is dead); those two latter worthies asked me to read Bo Huston's books and promote him to my fellow ragingly-ambitious youthlings. Anyway. I read Remember Me; this novel, along with a now-forgotten collection of stories called The Body and Its Dangers and Derek Jarman's last two movies, Edward II and Blue, vividly limn that year long-ago when I was young, and learned the heartbreakingly brevity of love in this life; and yet, even as death and disease threatened dominion, the endurance sometimes of love, oh especially l ' a m o u r q u i d � f i s n e p a s p a r l e r s o n n o m . Oh... well, at any rate, I read Remember Me and arranged for Bo Huston to give a reading. The reading was postponed a few times because Bo, who was HIV-positive, was undergoing a variety of treatments; at one point, he'd gone repeatedly to Switzerland to have his entire blood supply removed and exposed to nitrogen; he went temporarily blind for a bit, but on the whole recommended the procedure for those seeking a different kind of vacation. Anyway. [get to the point] Well, the day Bo finally read, I bought all his books and brought them to the reading. There were only a few people there, but Bo didn't seem disappointed. The demeanour he projected, his voice, was unlike the meditative proto-Hamlet's-father's-ghost's-like voice with which I'd read Remember Me; it was, rather, a sardonic, bitter voice, veined with bemusement and resignation; Bo's still-handsome face, thinned with travail, skin heroin-ravaged and scarred again by treatment, as he read resembled that of a much-weathered cowboy's: eyes that had seen miles and miles of work. After the reading our small group adjourned to a bar, where Bo, hyping up his Pity-Me-I'm-Dying cred, got the management to allow us to chainsmoke. Anyway. So this was years ago, as I was saying; Bo, whose novels had been previously published by small queer-oriented houses, finally sold a novel, The Dream Life, to St Martins Press, a mainstream publisher; and, as if the effort of playing it straight had taxed the sense of zut dolour that had tethered him to life, Bo Huston died; and just now, after years of having lent these books out and painstakingly retrieving them, just now, moving books from one obscure pile to the empty shelves that Valerie had been using, just now I dropped the copy of Horse and Other Stories I had brought to the reading; and found that Bo had written a note on its endcover, years and years ago, but I had never read. Jonathan, For a moment I considered going out to the front room, where Valerie's sleeping, surrounded by piles of clothes, and showing her this. But somehow I doubt that she would understand what I was sharing, or that she would wilfully misunderstand, and turn it somehow into an accusation. She's on her way back to Los Angeles, something which devastates me except that this scene, with all its packing and fruitless portage, seems to play every three weeks or so; my heart, swollen and oozing thick clots of hurt within my heavily bandaged skin, can only sustain so much leavetaking and devastation. So instead of telling Valerie, I came here, dear Diary, and told you. Goodnight.  
|
