for AXM Magazine for October 2005
I was always funny, which is why my brother beat me up so often. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, the jokes just kept rolling, and this only made him angrier. For every laugh I got at his expense, I also got a punch. But I couldn’t stop. He had a speech impediment, a tiny cleft palate. All his vowels were pronounced to sound like “u’s”. “Don’t” was “dun’t”. “Can’t” was…well, you get the picture. He wasn’t dumb, not by any means. In fact, he was quite good with numbers, which sounds patronizing and is meant to. He was big and strong and scary and he had a large nose and he talked funny, so he was a gold mine of material to a skinny, frail, slightly cruel nerd like me.
Steven is 4 years older than me. We slept in the same room as children, until I constructed a rather complicated system of posters and plastic beads to separate us. When I was a sallow 13, and still very much a virgin, Steven stumbled into bed drunk and bragged to me, through my makeshift wall, about having just fucked a woman. And apparently she was black, which was shocking, and I gasped, silently. I just didn’t think he knew any black people. I certainly didn’t, we lived in a very white suburb near San Francisco, and I didn’t like the idea of him knowing people that I knew nothing about. And anyway, Steven wore striped rugby shirts and blow-dried his hair. He drove my mom’s green station wagon to tennis practice. I couldn’t wrap my tiny mind around his white hands on her black ass. For a moment I thought maybe he was lying, but Steven wasn’t that clever, he wasn’t like me, he couldn’t help but tell the truth.
“I dun’t want you to tell mom this, she wun’t like it at all. You got that?”
I bit my lip, stifling a parody. After all, he was confiding in me. This was one of those male-bonding moments I’d written about in my own journal. Fictional accounts of the way brothers can be, supportive and loving, not anything I was even vaguely familiar with.
“I won’t tell anyone Steven, really.”
“Promise me you wun’t.”
Lip. Biting. “I promise.” Then I giggled. Even after 13 years of hearing it, his speech pattern made me laugh. He sounded like he had an allergy. Which was endearing really. If only he could’ve seen it that way.
“Stop laughing, Scott. I’m serious, she cun’t find out.”
“She cunt?” I could barely breath, I was choking on my own laughter. “Is that her nickname?”
He hit me hard, in the stomach, which was probably less painful than his bruised ego at my dismissive lark. I’ve never known what to say in sensitive situations, and in fact, I almost seem to hunt for the most demeaning remark, I suppose to masque my insecurities. At least that’s what Oprah would say. When will someone shoot that ugly bitch in the back of her pumpkin head at sunrise?
See what I mean? It’s like a tic! When sincerity pops it’s ginger head, I look for the nearest open door, which is always a gag. I’ll never find happiness, not due to my emotionally absent father, as my psychiatrists have always claimed, but more because of my desperate gay attempt to end every earnest moment with a punchline.
When stressed by performance, I’m doubly cursed. As I near a show, my comic self bleeds into everything I do. So recently, in Edinburgh, on a drizzly August evening, when receiving some devastating news, it’s possible I wasn’t as caring as I might have been toward my boyfriend, or really some married guy I’d had a rather intense affair with in London. He’d gone home to Prague to tell his wife he was leaving her, not for me, but because he’s fucking gay! She’d taken it badly. So did their son.
Men’s sexuality is so fragile. I thought he’d called for (more) sympathy in the form of a slightly clever quip, but instead he had fresh news. The medical facility where he works demands all employees test for HIV. He did, and he’d converted to positive. He was, obviously, very upset.
I removed my Fringe Festival clown cap, and put on my serious hat. “Just calm down, you’ll be fine.”
“But Scott,” he repeated, “I’m HIV plus!”
“I heard you. You’ll be ok. And Milan, it’s ‘positive’. You’re HIV positive.”
“I’m so fucked.”
“No, you’re fine.” I looked at my watch. I was on stage in 8 minutes. My ‘fans’ were waddling into the venue. “Just look after yourself.”
“But what should I tell my wife?”
I thought, don’t ask me this. Even at the best of times, my response would be inappropriate. And right now, I’m in a comic mode. I’m telling dick jokes in 7 minutes, to a drunken, paying audience.
“I don’t know.” I paused. I could hear him breathing heavily. He was about to cry. I thought, nervously, maybe he should tell her with a song. Whip out a guitar. It works for lesbian poets and middle class comics. But make sure there’s a rhyme: ‘HIV, easy as 1-2-3…’
I’m sinking. My boyfriend, or whatever he is, this guy I really like, has HIV, and the Guardian might be here tonight, and I’m not sure which is more important.
Cornered, I took an unlikely swing.
“I’m here for you. Don’t worry.”
Not a funny line, but genuine and just in time.