The thing about Rack is that the moment I met her I knew immediately that she would lick her own bottom if she could. 'If only' hung in the air between us. This, of course, made me fall in love with her instantly.
I hadn’t known anybody to be able to do that since I kidnapped Kim by pulling him/her through the hole in that hedge. The mater nearly killed me, banjaxed me with a belt, for making the hole bigger, but Kim was worth it. She/he was my first stolen love. I told the story of beastly dead Kim before, but I will link to it below. We are now in that miraculous epoch where such things can happen, links and the like, I mean, and even liking those links with pulsating red hearts and thumbs-uppery. It’s a brand spanking, and dazzling, new age, indeed.
Kim was a dog, in Clondalkin (then a satellite village on the outskirts of Dublin), a beautiful Alsatian, in the very early sixties, another time completely, and Rack was a ‘words fail me’ in Lower Manhattan in 1987.
They are the same person, in my palpitating, née breaking, rancid heart. I don’t know why my heart was born broken, but I guess that’s why I am writing this.
I would bet, ready money even, that Kim died that very same week on which Rack came asqualling© out of her mother's labyrinth. All praise be to that divine ushering. I should say that if you see that copyright thingy after a word, then you should know that I am not at all sure if the word exists, but I am making it mine anyway. Anybody can go ahead and use it anyway; I don’t believe in copyright.
In truth, I don't care if it's true, that ‘samsara’, I mean. In my story I midwifed them both through that scratchy hedge-hole and love just happened to follow on from that sluicing, naturally self-lubricating.
Kim died young, at the tender age of 8 dog-years. Rack seemed/seems to live forever. She is one of them there 'Immortals', apparently. She hates me calling her that, like it’s challenging the very non-bleeders themselves. I can’t help it; it’s how she seems to be to me, or perhaps it’s how I need her to be. I wonder can you expire from wanting, like they say you can die from a broken heart. I suspect you can, especially if you really let yourself down. But that was inevitable from the get-go.
Rack told me she was dying, practically in that first moment we were alone together. She did, respectfully, wait until we were both sitting down though. It was just as well. The waiter, there will be more about him later, had just asked us if we wanted coffee, before handing us the menu. Rack went straight for the jugular, with little or no hesitation. She told me she was dying years before I discovered she was immortal, even. She told me at that precise moment, even before I took my first gulp of that too hot coffee. This caused a certain tension between us, an imbalance. At the same time, I had somehow surmised, simultaneously, that she was the reincarnation of that wonderful own-bottom-licking bitch, Kim. Of course, I don’t really believe in reincarnation, my name isn’t Shirley (of the Beatty, née Beaty, clan). Demonic possession would seem to be somewhat closer to the truthiness of the whole situation.
I had loved both of them from their first yelps, Rack and Kim, though I didn’t really appreciate Rack releasing that snake in my ‘Garden of Eden’. For some clarity here, I will mention that, on the same day that we met, she lost a, luckily, recently fed boa constrictor, a wee squeezer, in my loft on West Broadway and Broome. It remained ‘lost’ there for one month, basically until it became ravenous again.
Rack, my very own demon vampire of Broome Street, that Moondancing Dog Goddess, she would hopefully see me out. But that was way before I got all my own balls in the air, before I became an immortal myself.
And whoever said that Anne Rice is dead?
Ratchet-away rackety Rack, reel me in Hecate, drain me, I am yours. You are your very own everlasting miracle.
Words don't really fail me, I was just pretending, but I am going to continue to pretend for a while longer yet.
So, let’s dress up together and dissimulate, and see wherever this takes us, ‘Wild-Goosing’ perhaps, through Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Palm Beach, Helsinki, Amsterdam, and other conurbations. Yes Kim, we ain’t in Clondalkin anymore.
Woof! Lick, laugh, cry, scream, bumbelch. Let’s let those boundaries dissolve, shall we? If they prove insoluble, we can always make a scratchy hedge-hole, to pull each other a-yelping through.
I have to say that there were times too when I absolutely hated her with a passion, terrible times, drugged and addled interludes even, but that’s love, I guess.
No holds, or holes, will be left unturned, un-stoned, or barred, un-soothingly licked, or torn asunder. After all, this is only...
The Beginning.
WhatsApp: [6:41 pm, 20/10/2022]
Rack: Great stuff Ruin. Love that Rack is a reincarnation of a dog. Not to be a pedant, and you may have good reason, but it was 1988, that breakfast break in the ‘Moondance Diner’. Lucky 88 in Chinese culture.
Ruin: Blimey, was it really?
I just changed it (I didn’t). What year were you born? I know it is the 9th of June, but which year? I wonder was 88 the year of the dog... (after some quick googling) It was the buggering Dragon, auspicious, all the same, resplendent with pearl-clutching and all that Chinese imperial yellow.
Rack: I was born in 1962, in Baile Átha Cliath, the year of the Tiger. A year that all Chinese families dread bearing a female child. Female Tigers are considered ghastly. This year is also a year of the Tiger, 2022.
1988 is probably the only date I remember other than the year of my birth. The year of my so-called death.
Ruin: Okay, we are going to have to make you one year younger. Kim died on the 3rd of June, 1963, the very same day as Pope John XXIII's dying. We could always kill off the Pope a year earlier. Or you could be a '63 Rabbit, your call.
Rack: I’m rather sentimental about my 1962, dread year of female Tigers. But your call (back at you).
Ruin: Okay, we'll dump the Pope. Or we could always make it a demonic possession, as opposed to a reincarnation, and keep the Pope.
Rack: Yes! Reverse lycanthropy!
Ruin: Groovy, considered yourself possessed.
Rack: Will do. And have always done so. ♥️
Ruin: Woof! As all the big hairy gay bears say, in a doggy sort of way.
XXX
Rack: Woof woof!
Rack, why did you trust me? I mean, it must have been obvious to you that I was delinquent, that day in 'The Moondance Diner'. The strange thing is that it began with me playing Adam, making Jan’s film, and you were, supposedly, in control of the snake in the ‘Big Apple’, our adopted city. That was, of course, the same snake you lost in my short-term sublet, that 2,000 sq.ft. loft in Soho, and with which I cohabited for a month, eventually recapturing it, with the help of a terrified rodent, on a treadmill, in a cage. For the vegans amongst us, to stymie a panic-attack or whatever, let me just say that the frightened rodent survived, being protected by the bars of the cage. The neighbours, downstairs, had a 2-month-old baby, which I imagined could have easily ended up as a delicately wrapped ready-meal for my hungry nemesis, that boa. The baby survived too. The people from whom I had sublet the space eventually found a complete, discarded, snakeskin in one of their filing cabinets, some months later.
Then you handed me that incredible gift, in a break from shooting, the one I have grappled with for the past 34 years. Why did you decide to tell me?
I have to say that I loved that you constricted me, and, perhaps over time, I even became addicted to those constrictions.
That actress, the one who had a small part in 'Silence of the Lambs’, playing Eve in our film ('The Coil'), she wasn't Eve at all. You were. You see, this is how I am compelled to write, overblown and attaining towards the epic (dare I say biblical?), unfortunately Catholic, even. Why did a 'nice' Irish Protestant girl choose a purple, potty-mouthed, regurgitating, fellow ‘Wild Goose’ post-Catholic to expose her in all her beautifully controlled glory? You were far too smart not to realise that the eejit sitting opposite you had boundary issues, to put it mildly.
This inquiring mind wants to know, needs to know even. You do know that if he doesn't get an answer, he, Adam/Billy, forthwith to be known as Ruin, will invent one. 34 years sitting on, or rather coiled around, a snake egg, now there's a beginning. Ten of those years were spent walking, and screaming, caterwauling and laughing, up and down the cavernous Avenues of Manhattan together, followed by 24 years of compulsive entanglement in that ether called the World Wide Web.
For better or worse, in illness or in health, we bit into that fabled and loaded, apple together. I know, purple, but what can I say other than we might just have to live with it? I can do absolutely nothing about that, I am sure you realise that now, these 34 years further along.
Rack remains ruined, it seems, and Ruin remains wracked. We haven't changed at all, thankfully. My inability to write, and your refusing to, might just 'save' us after all, for whatever salvation there might be in graphomaniacally keeping a record.
But then this was a few days after you had just received that diagnosis, and we were then living through those times when such a diagnosis was still considered to be a death sentence. There was a topsy-turviness about the situation too, me being a promiscuous homosexual, a shirt-lifter extraordinaire, and you being just you, the wonderfully wayward Rack, 25 and already ‘in extremis’. We were opposing turncoats, somewhat stunned into a strange rawness, swapped that morning in that breech birth in the ‘Moondance Diner’.
You completely took my breath away. This, also, has never changed.
But that's just the beginning of this saga. Fast Forward 35 years, embracing ‘WhatsApp’, even.
Rack: I do hope we get to see each other pre-death. Though it seems strangely unimportant as if we really live together in the ether. Like floating souls.
Ruin: yes, it might end up being that, but who knows....we do ether well, and in the ether we get to catfish the bejaysus out of each other.
Rack: I’m thinking about the answer as to why I trusted you. I’d never asked myself. More tomorrow.
Email: early November 1998
Dear Ruin,
What are you up to? My server has been acting up; did you get my last missive?
My pancreas has gone berserk, and I have had to stop all HIV drugs, alarming as this is I am secretly thrilled not to be ramming 28 horse pills down my throat every day. I'm not sure what they will do with me now. I have to go for CAT scan, etc. to make sure I'm not in croaking mode. Anyone who thinks those new-fangled meds are a long-term answer needs their head examined. All this emergency and alarm has me galvanised in an odd way. I am even tempted to write and am polishing up my scamming skills and off to the services that be for multifarious helping hands.
Love to you Ruination, and your Man of La Mancha
Rack x
Dearest Rack,
Now I'm worried about you and glad I'm coming over soon. Don't croak, but I'm sure that's not immediately imminent. Fuck this lurgy! I'm going to phone you this evening because e-mail is not enough, and I want to hear your voice reassuring me or telling me you're scared, or whatever. You know you upset me but that's only because I love you too much and I know you might need a sounding board to share your fears with. Thank God (who?) for ‘Him Indoors’, your Foggy. I hope he's managing OK. I wish you were here, but I recognise that this is just a selfish wish, but I will see you again very soon. Galvanised to write, eh? Write then. Write to me. Let's write an e-mail novel together. A sort of ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ with contemporary STD undertones...sounds a bit like ‘Rent’. It’s strange that the sadly deceased writer of ‘Rent’ was our waiter in the ‘Moondance Diner’ on our ‘first’ day, all those years ago.
Talk to you later
Your Bilious Ruin xxx
The unravelling in cyberspace began almost casually, or in retrospect it seemed casual, even though it began with the spectre of mortality looming. They had already been through this too often together in their history, their shared story. That story embraced tragedy and humour early on, in fact from the first day, or at least from the first day that she impressed herself on his consciousness indelibly. He guessed she had been a presence before that but only one that merged attractively with all that was exciting about negotiating a new and bohemian life in New York City in 1988 (You see, I did fix that date after all). Central to that excitement was a sexually generated plague.
He wasn’t sure why she was telling him. They were taking a break from filming one of those Lower-East-Side Art films that had no aspirations towards being ‘a Movie’. It was definitely ‘a film’ with all the necessary credentials, a slightly depressed and self-knowing, youthful and handsome, Polish director, and lots of nudity, and, of course, no script. Rack was the snake handler, in charge of the reptile, their slithering adversary. Ruin was Adam, or at least one of his alter egos, this was never really explained. Eve was a beauty who later went on to have a small part alongside Jodie Foster and who, invariably, never mentioned ‘The Coil’ in her resume.
Rack never blurted; she always controlled her output. The effect was precise and Protestant,
“I found out I am HIV positive three days ago”.
“Oh Christ”, Ruin blurted, Catholic to the hilt.
The pattern of their relationship was set at that moment. When Rack presented something to him it was like a jewel of great price, his responses were always scattered and overdone, purple in hue and intonation, like a simple sword in an over-wrought scabbard. He had only ever known melodrama and transubstantiation, well that at least was his excuse.
WhatsApp Tiltings. (2022, coming on towards a 34 staggering years since that Moondance ‘Protestant Confession’).
Rack: I am far from dead these days. I’m not sure that I’ve ever felt this alive. Though I do wonder what that pain in my left arm is, heart or artery about to blow. I will, however, admit to being angry. I feel as if it has been there with me for a long time. I remember kicking a bicycle at a tender age, the rebellion against inanimate objects that torment our days.
Happy you are enjoying ‘Clarissa’. And pursuing the ‘Wild Geese’ motif.
Today is one of those perfect NY days. Zero humidity. Crystalline blue skies. A reminder of death in the autumnal light. I do still harbour the illusion that I’ll get my writing out there. And I only write illusion to keep the evil eye at bay.
Ruin: Enjoying ‘Clarissa’ doesn’t quite describe it. It is wonderfully stilted in that 18th century way, all revolving around propriety, the opposite quality that might be useful to the ‘Wild Geese’ that we were. We did our best ‘goose-on-the-hoof’ sort of impression, I guess. I always felt that I wasn’t getting it quite right but managed to fool some people anyway. There wasn’t really any way that Clondalkin or Howth could prepare us for London or New York. But our antecedents took on even more pressing challenges. I am looking at ‘Barry Lyndon’ now, again, but it immediately becomes clear that he was very much the Howth, as opposed to the Clondalkin, type. He, perhaps, came from your side of the tracks, like you, there was also a certain ‘Ascendancy’ there. He had propriety down pat well before he left Ireland, he left fully assured of his privilege, though that was nicely challenged along the way.
Yes, I am enjoying this idea, this ‘Wild Geese’ idea that plonks us down in a pre-determined pattern, creates a sort of mould, or mold, to squirm in. It seems to me that it fits within a possibility of something that might be termed a ‘destiny’. This is strange because I don’t believe in pre-destination, but I do like the idea of patterns we generate and which we have no control over. I am also enjoying the idea of updating the epistolary canon, hence ‘Clarissa’, that looking at those roots.
For the same reason I have been ‘enjoying’ ‘The Sluts’, by Dennis Cooper too.
“'The Sluts' by Dennis Cooper, published in 2005, is 262 pages long. It was written completely in the form of emails and personal reviews of a male whore on an internet site.”
I see them as the same story told centuries apart, at least using the same story-telling device, correspondence.
Rack: I love “a mould to squirm in.” I’d be all for emails versus this phone app. Let’s do it. And yes, I don’t envy the visual artist and their storage problems. I am still confounded as what to do with my father’s oeuvre, the stuff I did not drown in the bath. And my mother’s portfolio of sketches, all unsigned and stained with linseed oil, resonant of her weird messiness, which coexisted with a fastidiousness and exacting perfectionism. A worthless hoard that is not mine to destroy.
Ruin: I want to be awful, and say “feck you, sentimentalise this shit”, with my ass in the air, doing a ‘Wife of Bath’, begging. Driven to it, with no idea where the impetus comes from. Overcome and innocent, but completely unapologetic, not Dickens at all.
Rack: I need to embrace unrestrained. Slough off all that wasted academic shite.
Ruin: I am so tired of moralisers. We are, in our own awful way, magnificent. Or at least were until we unexpectedly became old crones. If the truth be told, I actually love our cronedom. Therein lies the fun, that dried-out and screaming rebellion of the neutered unashamed crones, at that point where we might have been expected to achieve wizened, attaining towards invisibility, dignity. I prefer our withered magnificence, so overlooked that if it was to fully manifest it might be more ferocious than it ever could have been in our callow youth. Goya described them beautifully on the walls of his house, the ‘Quinta Del Sordo’, the house of the deaf man, those gnarled, frightened, outrageous characters, appalled, and celebrating their own impotence. I spent 10 days with them once, those Goyas, some 45 years ago, and they have stayed with me ever since, giving me somewhat of an appreciation for our timely and unexpected withering. Who would have expected, then, that we would have gotten this far.
Welcome to now.
Ruin: Bring it on Rack, bring it on. We are old lushes thoroughly lushed-out with that added benefit of having feck all to lose, a double pandemic, Covid and HIV, dare we even take time to catch our breath?
Rack: When I mentioned you to Jan, he was keen to remind me that he introduced us. I guess it is true. He maintains he met you in ‘The Ludlow Café’ when he was a server. And then we worked on his film.
Ruin: Yes, it’s probably true, thank him profusely. I had forgotten that part, though I have written about that first day on the shoot and your dropping of that ‘bombshell’ in the ‘Moondance Café’. I was so jealous of him for years, he was so bloody cool and tormented, and handsome. You can tell him I said that. We must immortalise us; we have a story to tell, a pandemic story, whilst negotiating a second one, even.
Rack: Yes. We must.
Ruin: I don’t care that we were on the edges of everything, more able to have an overview, perhaps. You know I will use all of this, rape and pillage everything.
Rack: Go right ahead.
Ruin: Nothing you send me is sacred, everything you send me is sacred.
Rack: I know. You fucking plagiarist whore.
Ruin: Lol, Duh!
Rack: ♥️
Ruin: Yes, it is equally strange to be here. We have a duty to tell our story to this fecking sore world. I will do my best to do that.
Rack: Or your worst
Ruin: You need to write, and I will do whatever I can to support or inspire you, make a total fool of myself, even. We have a story, it’s personal, beyond ‘Act-Up’ history, even, and It’s partially hanging in the museum in Dublin. I put us in the ‘Irish Museum of Modern Art’, even. I am proud of that.
Rack: Yes. Agreed.
Ruin: We can go, perhaps, somewhat further. I will never use your photo, or anything that will push you further than you want to go, though, at the same time, I am thinking of a strange hybrid photo book, like a sex-filled ‘Ladybird’ primer on how to survive twin pandemics in a seemingly unravelling world. But is this not how the world has always seemed, especially to us folks who have inadvertently attained a type of seniority? 2022, who would have guessed?
Rack: Peter and I used to argue interminably about the personal and the political. He maintained everything was political. I vehemently argued that all is personal. On his death bed he said, “I changed my mind, you are right.” It made the whole debacle feel worthwhile.
Ruin: I love it! Lovely Peter’s death-bed redemption. I was jealous of him too, what a bloody twat I was (and still am)!
Rack: Sort of, his death was a real kick in the arse for me.
Ruin: I was aware of it when it was happening, your struggle, your day-by-day bedside ministrations.
Rack: He gave up on life long before he died. I do not want to do that.
Ruin was always an outlet for Rack, almost like a delinquent spokesperson, the stuttering utterer of the unutterable. He had the ability to take the private into the realm of the universally available with consummate ease.
Rack didn’t. It was something she greatly feared and something she instinctively grasped that early summer morning in 1988, in the ‘Moondance Café’, on 7th Avenue and Broome. She knew she was making the personal public. She was undoing herself. He possessed that strange gift, the one imposed and imprinted, like the mark of Cain, on the incestuously sexually molested child, of having no facility to recognise boundaries, no ability to be able to tell the personal and private apart from what could be made generally available. She knew that he was her surrogate broadcaster and momentarily shuddered at the stranger she had spontaneously trusted sitting opposite her. This understanding hung between them as they ordered breakfast.
22. November 1998 11:00.
Dear Ruin,
I am feeling so much better after stopping HIV poison. I am eating and putting on some flesh and feeling feisty again and giving ‘Him Indoors’ a hard time. It is so good to feel the life and energy seep back in after weeks of feeling like poisoned lobster in a nuclear sea. After such foul dreariness, every cell feels like it is coming back to life. Am so reluctant to go back on them. New trend here is to give the fucker meds up until you are at death's door. Interesting revolt.
We are having such beautiful mild weather. You might have such an excellent time together here. Best say yes to everything, regret for committed crimes easier than those not undertaken.
Much love to you both,
Feisty Knickers
Their opening was torturous and drove them scurrying apart. It was more than either of them could handle, Rack racked with regret for exposing this opening wound and Ruin incapable of carrying the story alone. Their rehabilitation was slow and arduous. It was a time when to speak these words was a declaration of the almost immediate dissolution of self. It was a time before the hope generated by the “misnomered cocktails”, as Rack called them, and the political agitation, which was to burgeon out of despair and become ‘Act-Up’. It was a time before anything could be done except grasp at straws.
Yes, it was missing a jaunty miniature umbrella, that misnomered cocktail of yours.
So, both started grasping and would occasionally find themselves in the same room drawn to some or other possible panacea. Rack’s volition was desperation, Ruin’s was guilt. They acknowledged each other with some embarrassment and growing affection and, more often than not, turned away from each other and left separately. Ruin knew he loved Rack. Rack was not at all sure.
Not Flagrant, but beastly dead, Kim (On First Love). That promised ‘link’.
I don’t think it was actually a Post Office calendar. My sister said she received it free in some local Sunday newspaper or other, and she was amazed to find this image of ‘The Heffernans’ there, our neighbours and, much feared, landladies. It must have been some sort of nostalgic calendar about the glories of old Ireland, or the like. This, of course, makes it stranger still. I am sure that the ladies in question had no idea they would end up being ‘posteriteed’© in a Sunday Newspaper, eons after their deaths. Either way they did seem to make some effort in their best frocks, Gaelic ‘gúna(s)’ a lovey word, and smeared lippy.
The lady on the right had three dogs. I loved one of them, Kim, a German Shepard dog. As far as I was concerned, he was my dog. He used to come through the hedge to play with me, and I facilitated that migration by expanding the hole in the hedge. The hole was noticed and frowned upon, but I played dumb and mum. She, Biddy Heffernan, still had Mac and Judy, her Scottish terriers, to play with. I don’t think she ever noticed that I had stolen Kim, who may have been a bitch, but at that point I didn’t seem to differentiate. What did I know of gender at that point, or even now? Either way, he/she was my, gender fluid, bitch/dog. This relationship lasted about two or three years. I remember I was devastated when she was hit by a double-decker bus, the number 51B, to Dublin city centre.
This calamitous loss coincided with the death of Pope John XXIII, that exact same day. It was the 3rd of June in 1963, to be precise. I was 9 years old. It was somehow presumed that my profound keening was on behalf of the pontiff, and this sort of venerated me, momentarily, into the role of a professional ‘Pope Keener’. It might even have convinced my mother that I was well and truly on that thorny road to sainthood, or at least might have had 'a calling', that voice you heard in your head that convinced some young men that they wanted to join the priesthood. I knew that voice well.
I had never had a dog until then, we couldn’t afford one, but I knew that you actually only had to make, or enlarge, a hole in a hedge to get one.
Thankfully, Mac and Judy never took any interest in my hedge-hole. They were too posh for that sort of thing, and I didn't like them at all anyway. There was nothing I didn't love about Kim though. I really didn't care how he/she gender identified either. I vaguely remember that 'she' had female genitals, but I do also remember how she would always drag herself through the hole in the hedge when I called "Here, boy!" I guess they were a non-binary bitch-dog.
I think He/She/they was my first love. I doubt that even she/he/they knew he/she/they was an Alsatian. I loved that about him/her/them. They were a happy universal cis-gender dog/person.
All the same, I was more than blown away when I recognised Kim/Rack sitting in front of me in the ‘Moondance Diner’, and the only thing I knew is that I wanted somehow to be able to reverse the traditional role I had with Kim. It was my turn to lick her better.
That mutual licking, over 35 years, has now generated well over a million un-edited words. Now at the ripe old age of 69, having engendered the same lurgy, HIV, in my own life, I would like to spend the time that is left sorting those words out into something that could be mistaken for a story, a ‘Wild Geese’ escapade, even.
Almost 35,000 Britons in Limbo as Portugal fails to issue post-Brexit ID cards.
28 Oct 2002
Dear Ruin,
Have been thinking about your question as to what I was thinking as you drove towards virusdom.†
I haven't quite sorted it out yet, but I do know that I did find it very difficult to witness.†
It made me feel oddly prudish and disapproving and it was a deeply uncomfortable thing to have been feeling as I do understand the drive, believe me.†
In some respects it seems the only respectable thing to do:†
To go out and contract a life threatening illness through illicit sex.†
I think part of my discomfort was also related to the fact that I felt I had, for fifteen years, been trying very hard to keep myself alive and here you were doing yourself in.†
Coincidentally, at the time I think I was having a very hard time with the whole being infected thing myself (I can't quite remember, but I think I was coming off interferon and felt so cheated as the hep. c had come back).†
There was a lot of bitterness about my situation that leaked out when I watched you. I conveniently forgot that basically I had done the same thing as yourself.†
It's a subject matter that I still find difficult to look squarely at, it's so tied in with the most elemental forces of life and the urge for death.†
I mean at one end of the spectrum it makes perfect sense, why wouldn't one want to self-destruct, it's so much a part of the creative urge.†
On the other hand it is not an easy thing to live with.†
The daily ramifications are not as romantic as the wonderful cliche of the consumptive artist.†
I don't find pill swallowing romantic.†
Or blood tests.†
Or fear of disintegration prior to death.†
The condition we live with, coupled with the medical circumstances surrounding our condition, are equally bewildering.†
There isn't even the opportunity to live some romantic endgame, we are in a post-modern limbo of pills, side-effects, waiting, and guessing.†
Anyway, I'm not sure what I thought.†
It drove me a little mental to watch you, but now it's just faded into another reality of life, of friendship.†
I did try very hard not to be judgmental, but found the only way I could succeed was by removing myself a little.
Love, Rack
xoxo
Ruin: "Stuck in Limbo", or enduring "Travel Hell", take your pick in this diminishment of loaded signifiers heading towards that universal 'reductio ad absurdum', which we seem to be currently enjoying. Bring it on.
I like the crosses after each sentence, I have no idea where they came from. They seemingly generated themselves, a sort of glitch in the matrix, mysteriously created in transferring emails into word documents.
CIGAAUH? (Can I get an Amen up here?)
Rack: I like them too (the crosses). I think all of that was true, but I might also have been jealous that you were having fun getting HIV.
Rock: Okay, I am beginning to get it. Do you think you were a ‘bug chaser’, driven to get this disease 15 years behind Rack? Is that what you are saying?
Ruin: I don’t know yet; I am in the process of working that out. Perhaps that’s why I am writing this, that’s what I am looking to discover. I have said over and over that I am looking to uncover ‘drivers’, perhaps that was one of them.
So, begin again?
Rock: Yes Ruin, a new beginning.
Ruin: Rock, I really had better introduce you here, lest you become confused with Rack. You are not her at all. All the ‘key’ persons in this story, other than ‘family’ perhaps, will be getting a name beginning with the letter ‘R’, partially to set them/us apart, partially to alliterate along with Rack and Ruin. I guess the ‘R’ delineates a hierarchy in my mithered brain. I love the word mithered too, it is particular to that Emerald Isle (I think), and is used to signify confused to somewhat of a debilitating degree. Think generalised ejjitry (Irish speak for idiocy), and you might be there. As per recently usual, our friendship began in cyberspace, through corresponding, you were a Covid friend, a second plague confidant.
Ok Rock, introduce yourself, you know you want to. Where’s that bloody rude e-mail you wrote to me? Hold on a sec, here it is:
24 September 2022
Dear Bottom,
Ruin, Ruin, Ruin, what in god’s name were you up to? Neither of us believes in that geezer with the grey hair, on a cloud, but my exasperation needs letting out, so there he sits omnipotent. Just so you know, I was watching all those 68 years, and I can clearly see the stories you have been telling yourself. It’s almost as if I had nothing better to do than watch over you. But, I guess, someone had to, and that judgmental geezer with his tablet of ten regulations wasn’t really up to that job, now or then, was he? So, I hung around watching, and more or less saw it all, except for those times I might have been comatose in a Ketamine or alcohol haze, beside you. You may have gotten up to some shenanigans at those junctures, when I wasn’t exactly compos mentis. My apologies if I missed out on any of your multitudinous ‘calls for help’.
None of us are perfect, as you well know.
Before we start, get going that is, I should also say that I intend hanging around, watching over you, until your sticky, or otherwise, end. I wouldn’t miss that unravelling for all the gilt bronzes in Tibet. I am in it for the long run, as they say, whoever 'they' might be. I know you are having those memory holes, those vast, and growing, expandable black holes, but don’t worry there, Ruin. I think I can help out with this, even. You see, I kept a written record, I know, sneaky, but it’s the nature of the graphomaniacal beast, one of my own little foibles that might actually aid and abet your storytelling. I believe we might have shared that letter writing mania, that drive to communicate through correspondence, but we have never really written to each other, have we? I suspect that is about to change. I hope so anyway.
Rack, Sorcha and Thalia inspired you to write, I can see that, mostly by being able to tolerate you, it would appear. Perhaps you brought out a mothering aspect in their natures when they saw you in some considerable distress relative to that early abuse. Perhaps it was something else too, some mutual need. There were others too, mostly female others, Pat comes to mind, those correspondents, with the exception of Ray, who would be deserving of a separate story, perhaps. Rack spoke of them as the ‘Good Mothers’, those interventional women, those lifesavers.
Which more or less takes us to the ‘invisible man’, that centre of those black, expanding, holes, those memory lapses, the ‘Good Father’, or any father at all for that matter. He was purportedly there, constantly in the background, and often used as an alcohol sodden threat, but he was there. I seem to remember you even put some photographs of him up on your antiquated internet site, Flickr. I do see that there might be an absence there, a vacuum, and I have seen all the extremes you have gone to fill that infinite hole. So here I am, a Nelson Eddy to your Jeanette MacDonald (I know, camp and hopelessly dated, I am sorry about that), a top to your bottom, as Ray would have it.
Write to me, I will write back. Just don’t call me ‘Daddy’, that’s one step too far, and I know, and understand, your tendency to always overstep those boundaries. I am willing to play at being the ‘Good Father’, until you learn to do that for yourself. I really wouldn't do this for anyone else in this whole wide world, so hopefully this will help you begin to feel better about yourself.
Onwards and upwards as the aforementioned 'they' like to say, tomorrow being the first day of the rest of your life and all that cliched palaver. I will do my very best to rein all that corn in as we proceed, a struggle I know. I do believe we might have a job to do, and it's way beyond time to get on with it.
I've got your back, for what it's worth.
Best Regards,
Top
25 September 2022
Dearest Top,
Embracing the fear of possibly going full Ham, Shem and Japheth, I am going to have to name you. I can’t call you 'Top' for the duration of our correspondence, disregarding the reality that the Top/Bottom synergy thing doesn’t even hold anymore, now that one is post-gay, post-sex, and approaching post-everything, what with oblivion waving tantalisingly, as it is, from the border of that widening gyre (tips hat towards W.B.) of our beloved ‘event horizon’. I think I have even found a name for you. Its partially Catholic, even, from that miasma of childhood memories, that “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church, and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom”.
Okay Rock, I am giving you the keys. You, for a while anyway, can be the designated driver. Petrus, that's you, that dependable rock, rock of the walk, even, rock of ages, my Tio Pepe port in a storm, my fellow geriatric mariner. Lash me to your, larger than average, mast, we're off.
Welcome to Rack & Ruin, and Rock! It does have a certain alliterative ring, n'est-ce pas? (TYFTC)*. Fasten your seatbelts, we might be in for somewhat of a bumpy ride.
Deliriously yours,
Queerqueg von Lederhosen
PPS: Relative to the acronym used in this photoplay, please see photo in the following chapter, entitled: ‘L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.H.I.V+O.A.P, It ain’t heavy, it’s my acronym’.
Until that chapter is reached and memorised, I can tell you that *TYFTC means ‘Thank you for the correction’. Rock often corrects Ruin. It’s his job, even.
Dearest Ray,
Sorry to hear about your sore t(h)roat. Don’t they be at the doing of the blessing of that same gorge (St. Blaise) anymore, at all, at all? Probably not, I would guess. Perhaps the only church what did it is now boarded up, or turned into a leisure centre where they give Irish dancing lessons to all those young, eager, coiled-springy girls, with the revolving legs and primary-colour gúnas, in plastic ringlets. You know the ones; they make those Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleaders girls look like vestal virgins, pushed on by their mammies, hello Bernadette Peters, to excel in all that leaping and jiggery-pokery, moving downstage like one of those roman phalanxes, putting the fear of God in every ‘daecent catolick’. Anyway, I diverge.
But, having diverged, might I just add that I loved reading, in the ‘Daily Mail’, about the sex scandal rocking the ‘Irish Dancing Community’ there. You really couldn’t make it up, maters offering juicy favours in return for their ringleted offspring mulching the competitive ringleted ones. I am glad that I don’t have to, make it up that is.
Talking of Catholics, no, you ain’t Rock, meaning that Rock is not based on you, nor will he be built around your fine imposing Anglo-Saxon edifice. Rock’s his name, not Peter, or Petrus, or any of those Roman shenanigans you tell me you detest, just clear old plain, and sturdy, ‘Rock’, as in that island lodged between the East River, and the Hudson (where I met my beloved Rack), if you get my drift, and the rock of one’s birth, that emerald green one you are presently lodged up the backside of.
I will admit he is partial to the odd glass of Theo Pepys, Samuel’s tipple, and has been known to take an occasional dash along the boreens of the Adirondacks brandishing that emblematic, blue-striped axe. That Daniel Dye Sluice could play him in a moving picture extravaganza, ‘The Last of the Tops’, or somesuch©, Oscar fodder, no doubt, probably to be found, eventually, in the ‘Science Fiction’ section of our favourite ‘Blokebuster’, down that windy old boreen of a bog road. Occasionally I do be at the putting of that copyright thingy after misspelled words, just to let you know that I know about them, and they were how I used to speak. You know I don’t believe in copyright anyway, and everything I have ever done is open, for whoever who wants to, to be ripped off. If they can make moolah from it fine too, I certainly couldn’t, so more power to their thieving elbows.
And what does every poor Irish boy need, dare I say, what does every boy need? I answer here and now, without much hesitation, other than the time it takes to take a gulp of coffee, with a slice of me iced-duck, so that I can take me slew of morning pilules for me fatal disease. The answer is, of course, that every boy needs a Rock. You can see that I am substituting, intermittently (willy-nilly), the ‘me’ for ‘my’. I do believe I might be enjoying heading for a little regression, and sure why not, on this fine rainy Amsterdam morning? There’s nary a rock here, on this damp sponge of a low-lying place, so a lad would have to be going about inventing his own boulder to support him.
But I regress. Where was I?
I remember. I was in Amsterdam about to take my ‘Daddy’s little helpers’, those much-loved lifesavers (said pilules). All praise science and all that palaver. I sit here pin-cushioned, enjoying the wonderful side-effects of the Monkeypox vaccine, and looking forward to when I can enjoy the same from the latest Covid update. Unfortunately, I have to wait a month for that second one, a recommended period of time between that first and second vaccine to ensure they don’t conjoin in some diabolical conspiracy to turn me into a 4G antenna, or something similar.
Pillar of salt, Lot’s wife’s lot, and how’s your mother?
I don’t think for a minute that that naughty Mr. Gates is out to chip me. As I said, pincushion here, and if he felt a yearning to chip yours truly, he could have had me eons ago. Have at it, Bill. Take me, I was, formerly, anybody’s anyway, writing bad cheques (checks, hello USA) akimbo.
And breathe.
‘Comhbhrú na cruinne in an carraig, agus rolladh i dtreo ceist ró-mhór í’, (trans: Compress the universe into a rock and roll it towards a bloody huge question) as the plagarised/plagarising ancient Irish bard might have warbled, and more than likely did.
No, it isn’t that Rack is non-responsive, it’s more that I am giving her a break from all my 'raiméis' (Gaelic for general doo-doo, shite for want of a better word). It's all been 'ri ra agus ruaile buaile', (gaelic for a gas craic) as far as I am concerned. We have chewed the cud now for 34 long, wonderful, and somewhat excruciating years. That’s not altogether true. We lived on that same rock of Manhattan for 11 years, then wrote to each other for 23 years after that. There are over a million and a half words lurking there. I think that you recognize that I love letter writing, or it’s modern equivalent anyway, the email. The problem is that the unwieldy words are there, and they are just a part of what lurks on my hard-drive, and I suspect it’s going to take my ‘Rock’ to sort them out. Rock has a pithy character, he takes no prisoners, that tough-love stuff, that ability to tell you when you are being an eejit. Anyway, Rack and Ruin could chew the cud relentlessly forever, they could easily become that universal methane generator, much feared of by the powers that do be sitting there, Canute-like, holding the tide back in Brussels.
Carraig is the Irish word for Rock, just so you know. Would that not be a great ‘secret’ name, one to make any mammy proud? “Come on over here, darling Carraig, and let me wipe your nose wit© me sleeve, you’re snottin all over de kip”. It doesn’t get much better than that in my book. Did you know that kip is the Dutch for chicken? - just saying.
I used to love, back on that old Manhattan Rock, when Rack used to croon "It's not your frock my dear", then look at me as if wisdom had been imparted. Rack knew how to make Ruin laugh. It was sort of a mutual thing. It was some 'Hibernafold', sweep me into your embrace my dear, understanding stranded between laughing and screaming, that wondrous type of hysteria, infectious, scary, and lovely. It’s far from the ‘Oxford comma’ that I was dragged up.
Pronouns be damned too, we know who we are. A pox on all your pronouns, here's to universal interchangeability!
Mise Lemas, (Yours Sincerely in Gaelic, though I won’t be repeating that every time I use it.)
Ruin O’ Carraig (Gaelic for Ruin, son of Rock)
Ruin: Hey Rock, I can sense you watching, even when I am not writing to you.
Rock: Go on then, do your damnedest, you know you want to, and it is your ‘book’, or story rather. So, who is going to stop you? That’s most certainly not my job. I know that I can nudge you, and even call 'raiméis' when it’s needed, but otherwise I am here to support you. Let it rip, Ruin, we can always fix it later anyway.
OK Ruin O’ Carraig, I am going to go for the jugular here, tell me what this is about. Put it as concisely as you can, no flourishes, no asides, none of your usual palaver, as you like to call it. Just state your ‘case’, and we can work on your blathering curlicues later.
Ruin: Right Rock, short and sweet then. It’s a story of this character called Ruin. He was sexually abused as a boy, incestuously, by an uncle. It went on for a number of years. His mammy put her brother in his bed. He spent most of his life blaming her for ‘setting it up’. This he wrote about in a piece called ‘My Mother, My Pimp’, to be included later. In 1988 he moved to New York, he was 34, after 15 years in London, and a childhood, until his late Catholic teens, in Clondalkin, part of the greater Dublin conurbation. There, in New York, he met Rack, a 25-year-old Protestant Dubliner, from Howth no less, who within moments of him meeting her told him she had just found out she was HIV positive, some three days before. At this point they were both post-religion, though their having been both steeped in that religious mire which was Ireland, at that time, was profoundly influential on their story as it unraveled.
That’s a ‘begin again’, isn’t it Rock?
Rock: Yes, Ruin, I would say it is. Don’t forget to breathe. I am listening.
