Scott Capurro

Scott Capurro
GT
October 2007

Hotel rooms are a cock magnet. Even this traveling tanned carcass can lure away from their offices married men seeking a quick fix in innocuous surroundings.

My room is a model U.N., proving the cultural diversity of Toronto is no myth: Every country, it seems, has been through my door. Most often, however, I’ve entertained black men, many Jamaican, and all ‘discreet’, because they’re cheating on their wives. They lay back in casual business attire while I drain their ballpoints. I watch their faces, eyes closed tight, big smiles, and I wonder how often they reflect on their choices. Maybe, I muse, silently, being gay isn’t just whom one sleeps with. This guy I’m sucking might even make fun of queers with his mates. Am I ingesting self-hatred, masked as pre-cum?
Oprah would weep, and my dick feels hard as a tombstone.

Then his is up my ass and there’s no time for thinking.

One sunny day, I give in to the droning pull of the notorious middle classes and indulge in public transportation. The black youth seated opposite on the subway seems intently submerged into his headphones, head bowed. Thankfully, he’s keeping his rap backbeat to a bare minimum. But he can’t stop himself from mouthing words. He has the music in him, but more importantly, he has a rhythmic story to tell. His feet tap, his head swings, as fellow Canadians look on, or don’t, smiling, or not, in the friendly yet cool demeanor this hinged nation presents.

I understand rap as much as I understand any contemporary music. That is to say, very little. To me, anything recorded after 1985 sounds like screaming children crashing canned hams together. Yet the furor I find impossible to avoid is that so much rap is violent misogyny cradling homophobia. But then so is everyone’s favorite musical, Oklahoma. What makes rap different is that this time, the black man has the gun.

I watch this teenager on the train banging his fists against his knees, settling his scores and expressing his angst with his furrowed brow and I think, but why here? It’s Canada, where ‘fair’ isn’t just a four-letter word. In Toronto, there are more soup kitchens than there are slurping poor people. Canadians actually chat with the homeless. I’ve witnessed a businesswoman discussing the ebb and flow of magazine sales with a vagrant. The conversation lasted longer than my cappuccino.

There are fewer than one thousand gangs in all of Canada. One can actually COUNT the number of gangs thriving in Canada. Nationally, there were 151 murders here last year. And most of those were domestic disputes. The point being: So you’re black, gay, bi-racial, Indian, from Indiana, indigenous, or orange with one leg, a vagina and a penchant for eating pussy – who cares? How’s the weather? Oh god, did ya’ really move all the way from Calgary cuz’ of your allergies? Need a hand with your shoelaces? What the heck, let’s all rap together, seein’ as the winters last nine months and there’s nothing else to do, darnit!

Later, five male police in black shorts ride by on their bikes while I smoke pot. I’m between shows, and I’m working up an appetite. One cop with a mustache sniffs the air, mocks a clownish frown, then waves his index finger at me as if I’m naughty. I wink back. They ride on. I get higher, and the comedy club manager asks if I want a three-way with he and his girlfriend. I swoon, because he’s Jewish; and because I can’t imagine a more progressive society.

That night, my audience is so supportive. I feel cheerful, like Julie Andrews. I want to run through the streets, singing about my favorite things, one of which is a comedy room with visitors from as far away as Chile, China and Chad. It’s a gold mine for a comic who rants about race. They’re laughter feels like flying.

Until I casually mention my penchant for black cock. But I’m white and gay and that gives table seven in the back the license to mutter, “Someone’s gonna get shot tonight.” Then she repeats herself, this very angry black woman. “Someone’s definitely gonna get shot tonight.”

Naturally the room grows silent. I’m quick to the draw.

“What makes you think it won’t be you?”

She and her three friends walk out. Stressed and grasping for irony, I might have dropped the n-bomb, but I’m on anti-depressants, I can’t recall. And I’m not famous enough to be videoed on a mobile. But I am tall enough to be hit by a ‘random’ bullet, so I’m escorted through the service entrance, back to my hotel.

Once online, I sail to the West Indies. Hair of the dog…

This appeared in the Glasgow Herald last weekend…

Among the big-name comics playing Scotland this weekend, Scott Capurro is cruder than Frank Skinner, bitchier than the Grumpy Old Women, less discreet than Alan Carr, skinnier even than Mark Watson and has corresponded with more convicted killers than Ardal O’Hanlon. Seemingly driven by spite, bitterness and Viagra, the provocative San Franciscan is currently upsetting liberal sensibilities with his acidic opinions on the Maddie media coverage. A perennial Glasgay! turn, Capurro has appeared in Star Wars, graphically champions dwarf copulation and has just been handed a Royal sex blackmail scandal. What more could you want? He plays the Edinburgh Stand on Tuesday.

And then, this appeared in The List…

Scott brings his ‘Premature Gift’ show over to The Burgh after treating Glasgay! to his sense of humour. Not for the easily offended. Or quite hard to offend. Everyone else will adore the little bitch.

I know they’re both short paragraphs, but I liked them and thought they were worth putting on the site. This isn’t part of the mentions. This is me, writing about the brevity of them. I’m kind of bored and very tired, I was up rolling around on the floor of a gay sauna. Pot and viagra make me needy. And funnier, apparently. Or bitter. Or something.
Back to London tomorrow. Thank God. Although in this cold, coffee is better. Especially if the beans are seriously burned. xx

Scott Capurro
GT
September 2007

I’ve never been single. As my mother’s only gay son, I’ve been her constant chaperone, confidant and admirer.

We’ve weathered job loss, divorces and drug use. In the early 80s, she was my preferred cocaine dealer. And in 1982, during my first summer home from university, Mom outed me, to myself.

“Honey,” she purred one afternoon, while refilling her white wine mug, then readjusting the bra strap of her black bikini, “we can play this game, but I know you’re gay. Let’s talk about it when you’re ready.”

After I confessed, she removed the burden of revelation with five strategic phone calls. Suddenly, in less than an hour, my entire family knew I was queer. Homing pigeons gasped with admiration.

I notice my skin wrinkling, like hers. From too many years of sun abuse, my pressed belly becomes a series of vertically woven strips, and I think of my mother grabbing one of her three deep, parallel c-section scars and telling me, probably on my birthday, “This is you. This is what you did to me.” She wasn’t accusatory. She was actually bragging. Like the time she told me, drunk, “Your father has a huge cock and he cums buckets. Merry Christmas.” I was eight.

I think we’ve watched Funny Girl together a thousand times. Streisand live, once. In ‘94.

“I prefer the film,” my mother later said, over pie.

She reads veraciously, and without a high school degree she raised three kids, mostly on her own. She’s been punched, hard, by men for mouthing off, and she falls asleep in the cinema, and then pretends to have seen the movie. We just have so much in common.

Mom has a very impressive vibrato, and modeled when she was a teenager. She wanted to perform, or fall insanely in love. She did the latter. He was a popular math teacher, and I was still young enough to wish he were my Dad. But he was ill, and he ended his own life; Mom still speaks softly when Bill’s name comes up.

I like her dog, not because it’s a corgi, which actually is a bit of a fucking pain in the ass with its dwarfish legs and neediness, but because she sees qualities in that fat ball of hair I’d never see.

“Look how Gracie loves you.” Gracie stars out the car window. “She adores her Uncle Scott.”
As if she doesn’t express her love enough, Mom offers more, through her pets. She a Pez dispenser of affection, it flies out of her and sometimes it buries me a little.

Donna, my mother, has asthma. It’s become emphysemic. Her lungs are basically gone. Last month, her doctors gave her a sell-by date.

“Ten years?” She asked. They shook their heads.

“Five years?” They shrugged.

Nature is mean, but medicine is much, much meaner.

I’m not prepared to lose her. Even now, I can’t write ‘die’. It seems insane. She’s only just driven me to the airport, she seems to warm, so full of gossip and innuendo. We hate the same people, and while discussing my brother’s first wife over lunch, she’s full of oxygen.

In fact, I can’t get off the phone in less than thirty minutes. She does go on, paying an obsessive attention to schedules. I hear about her entire day, probably because she feels isolated, living on a golf course, with, some days, only that shitting sausage on a leash to keep her company. A while ago, she told me she was lonely, and asked me to call more. So I do.

“I spoke to Karen (her best friend) and Fred (Karen’s husband) has a nephew who…”
And I think, what the fuck? Why am I learning about someone’s nephew? Unless she’s fixing us up. I listen. Nope, she’s just telling me about his eye surgery. Health, poor or otherwise, is always at the top of Mom’s chatty agenda.

I sigh. It’s sunny outside. I’ve got writing to finish. She asks how I’m doing, then cuts me off with a story about my slightly arrogant, but lovable, niece.

And I wonder, Jesus Donna, why haven’t you married a man you like to talk to? Then I think, why haven’t I? If I weren’t talking to my mom right now about my humdrum life, who would be listening?

I’m just not ready. She can’t die. If she goes, then my lifeline to my family disintegrates, maybe slowly, but inevitably. I’ll lose my feeling of permanence. I’ll disappear. Hers is the only Valentine card I’ve received for the last ten years.

Even Hallmark will mourn the loss.