Hammer Down
For Samantha Callahan
(ENOUGH ROPE)

You’re an eight-ball. Every hand you see
is crooked, that of old men who shake whiskey sours
in harbor bars. Forget that sludge of a sigh
resting heavy in your gut. Autumn is always here,
always bringing you back to Seventeenth Street: church
every day with the south-end Irish,
a paisley shawl wrapped tightly ‘round your waist.

This city is no bigger than when the men were scarce and broken,
when all the boys were merely boys. When the tide takes it,
its nervous waltz will keep us sleepless. Don’t rest. Hurry home.
Name your truth and touch me.

___

This Is What Happens When You’re Single Too Long and a Pretty Girl Named Joan Smiles At You
(JOAN OF ARC)

I thought for too long about the arc of our bodies.
Not when we are older, but when we were younger,
before we knew each other: your drink stays full all night
and you hold it like a burden. You lean forward.
I’m a janitor three states over. I tug at my posture
like a half-truth. We’re seventeen. We’re always seventeen.

___

Let’s Spend the Night Together
(David Bowie)

Popular rumor states that Angela Bowie found her then-husband naked in bed with (also naked) Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger sometime in the early 70s. Upon Angela revealing this on an episode of The Joan Rivers Show in 1990, the aftermath of denial showed both men handling damage control in the spirit of their rock and roll personas: the cocksure Jagger came right out and said that Angela was full of shit and Bowie came right out and said nothing, as his lawyer released a statement saying that there was never a gay relationship between the two. It makes sense that Mick, who has based an entire career around singing like a man and dancing like a woman, would do one thing and say another. And of course David, who has based an entire career around androgyny and displacement, would just let people think whatever the hell they wanted.

It’s called being a rockstar. The whole point being that you do whatever it is that you want with no consideration for the outcome, which is why you can take a class on the British Invasion and think critically about lyrical allusions to personal and political turmoil, but at the end of the day you’re either the sort of person who’s going to throw a hotel television into a pool or you’re not. To this end, it would make perfect sense for Mick and David to come right out and say, “Yep, we totally had sex with each other. What of it?” Because there was no such public acknowledgement of the tryst, are we right to assume that the tryst is a fabrication and that both men led totally hetero lives?

Perhaps. In moving beyond base-level fascination, salacious celebrity sex stories are no more interesting than their blue collar counterparts. Hip Hop Man fucks Business Mogul’s Inexplicably Famous Daughter is, essentially, the same thing as Bowling Alley Manager Man fucks Avon Saleswoman. The true banalities of sex are obvious when the act is both the means and the end. It’s like watching pornography or engaging in last call hook ups or almost all of sex that Mick and David had throughout their careers. For them to have been outed in the 70s, at the height of their respective popularity, would have only helped to propel the mythos they were building. It would have just one more hole for Mick’s “fuck anything” attitude and as for David, it would have added another layer to his queerness-by-way-of-fucking-supermodels. So it’s entirely possible that the issue wasn’t one of sex.

Or sexuality, for that matter. When (then former) Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford came out of the closet in 1998, he made note of how having to hide his homosexuality caused him to go through severe bouts of loneliness and depression. Though I don’t doubt that Mick and David dealt with similar demons, nothing they’ve ever done has given the impression that it’s because they were hiding their sexual preference from the world at large. If anything, they fell into depressive states due to their substance abuse, as opposed to Halford falling into substance abuse to help deal with his depression.

It seems to make the most sense, then, that Mick and David are two men who loved not other men, but one another, in ways that stretched beyond gender. A true “forbidden love” usually tends to be more of the former and less of the latter, but Bowie and Jagger seemed much more like Romeo and Juliet than, say, a teenage version of yourself in dire need of dating someone ten years older who likes to punch you in the meat of your arms while you fuck, and only survives because the street value of cocaine doesn’t fluctuate as wildly as the job market. (Call your parents and apologize. They were probably right about some stuff.)

I like to believe that Bowie and Jagger had sex at least once. I like to think that they shared a unique, honest love that, both in spite and because of their importance to rock and roll, they felt they could never publicly express. It humanizes the larger than life aspects of their characters in ways that only the effects of simple, compounded ache can do.

Putting aside musical integrity and topical aesthetics, the video for Mick and David’s version of “Dancing In the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas is amongst the most ambiguously gay entities of the 1980s, the same era that spawned the volleyball scene in Top Gun and the ’87 Oakland A’s. Above all, it is the Rosetta Stone to their dynamic, and while the undertones range from playful to overt, there is no slack at all in the tension between Mick and David, as if their hearts and cocks are tethered by the tightest of guitar strings. In it, we find two men who allegedly shared at least one evening of passion a decade prior. After the fires of both their careers and feelings have settled a bit, they get together and experience somewhat of a rekindling, somewhat of an exposure to the differences between what they were to one another and what they currently are.

:00-40 (Warehouse)
Mick is dancing by himself. He calls out, asking if everyone in the world is “ready for a brand new beat.” He sings “Summer’s here, the time is right,” and then David shows up in frame on an elevated surface to the right of Mick.

:41-:47 (Warehouse)
The camera does a momentary close-up of David smiling in a somewhat maniacal toward Mick. Overwhelmed to a point of bursting, David jumps down in the direction of Mick. When the camera cuts back to Mick, David walks into the shot coolly and stands next to him without acknowledging or being acknowledged.

:48-:50 (Warehouse)
David dips down and bounces back up quickly, brushing his head against the side of Mick’s head. Mick takes a second to react and then darts his eyes over to David as if worried about the obviousness of intentions better left secret. David doesn’t notice.

1:06-1:13 (Street)
The men face each other and sing “It doesn’t matter what you wear.” David’s head remains forward, but his eyes go to Mick’s mouth. Mick looks straight forward at David’s face. Mick fiddles with the lapel on David’s jacket. The men put their foreheads together and sing, loudly, convincingly, “As long as you are there.”

1:14-1:22 (Street)
Immediately after finishing the previous line, the men turn away from each other to sing “Every guy, grab a girl.” They then face each other at close range once again to sing, “Everywhere, around the world, we’ll be dancin’.” The scene freezes briefly before cutting away. Mick’s lips are puckered. David is moving toward them, eyes closed.

1:36-1:42 (Street)
The camera revolves around Bowie in the foreground and Mick in the background as David takes the lead vocal. Mick fixes his hair with one hand while looking at David. Mick’s gaze is one of inventory and concentration. He quickly licks his lips as he hops back in front of David so the two of them can sing the refrain together.

2:18-2:19 (Warehouse)
This time, it’s Mick who rubs his head lightly against the side of David’s. David looks annoyed. Mick doesn’t notice.

2:45-2:58 (Street)
The camera slows down and does a tight shot of the men’s asses. They’re side-by-side and they shake their hips in total synchronicity to the left, the right, and back to the left quickly before the camera freezes and fades to white. In the last second of the video, the screen fades to the traditional black.

Five years after that, after they had learned to live at peace with what they shared, it’s brought up as a cheap matter of publicity. I’d deny it, too. And then I’d grab a girl and dance in the goddamn street.

___

Line
(David Bowie)

A pity-seeking friend of mine who was prone to announcing his heart pains at dinner and then dramatically taking nitroglycerin pills started up with the old act, to which I said, “If you have chest pains alone in the woods, is it still a heart attack?” It was the last time I was funny, about twenty-five years ago.

I ask Vince about comedy the way kids ask their parents how clouds work and he responds back like cough syrup dripping down the side of the bottle. I’ve been his tour manager for the past few decades. He keeps me around because I’m not funny, because I don’t romanticize comedy the way other people do. When I said my heart attack line at dinner that one time, he laughed like everyone else and then said, “One more like that and you’re fired.”

The newest tour is probably his last big one, so I’ve made it the biggest one: half a year straight, 140 shows. Vince is in his late-50s and he’ll do more shows this year than an MLB pitcher will play games. I’ve set it up so he’ll be taking a young comedian out with him, and when I pick them both up at the airport, Vince and I wait for twenty minutes while Lee signs autographs. Vince watches him through the window and I go, “He’s on that new show, Mumford’s Place. The reviews aren’t great, but the ratings are pretty outstanding for the timeslot.”

Vince moves his mouth off to the side of his face and thinks for a moment before saying, with no malice, “He’s at the part of his teens where girls think he gets ten seconds of TV time for every inch of his dick.”

“He’s twenty-three,” I say.

“Yeah,” Vince says. “No shit.”

Lee bombs that first night, which is the opposite of killing, which is what a comedian wants to do. “It’s like the wilderness,” Vince tells me the next morning over breakfast at the hotel, talking about Lee’s set from the night prior. “You kill the audience or they kill you. And if you don’t do either, you probably aren’t worth a goddamn.”

I look over and see Lee through the window, lying down on a bench outside. The sun is already out and Lee is on his back, arms hanging off to his sides so the tips of his fingers touch the ground. We go to see if he’s all right. “I don’t think I did so hot last night, guys,” he says.

“It’ll get easier when everyone cares except you and not the other way around,” Vince says, tossing a bagel on his chest. “Now eat your Jew pills and go take a shower.”

Later on, right as Lee walks onto stage, Vince turns to me as we watch from the wings. “He has the sort of eyes that always look like someone just got done politely attacking them with a squeegee.” The crowd laughs, and for a second, I think it’s for Vince.

* * *

We’re a couple weeks into the tour and a good chunk of the crowd is leaving after Lee finishes. They walk out in groups of two or three at a time and talk loudly about needing to use the bathroom or wanting some Ju-Ju Fruits, some sort of guilty alibi they feel they need to have for thinking that Lee’s schtick from Mumford’s Place that’s gone into his act is, somehow, unfollowable.

Vince isn’t sour, but it’s sort of nudged him toward long exposition about true, how there’s no such thing as the new truth, there’s only the new thing that is or isn’t true.

“The only thing left in comedy is honesty,” he says from the stage. “And it’s all being used up on some really convincing lies.”

We’re going to the car after a show and some guy casually walks up to Lee and hits him across the nose with a right hook. I talked to the cops while Vince sat with Lee in the ER. “I can see it in the papers, Lee,” he said. “HIT COMEDIAN IS HIT COMEDIAN.” That’s how Vince salts wounds, by being the worst possible variation of the thing he already is.

Sure enough, the news can’t leave it alone. Any tickets left for any of the shows sell. Then Lee’s act goes completely down the shitter. It becomes like watching one of those Time-Life commercials for Best Of compilations, little snippets of things remembered, the Reader’s Digest version of comedy with an odd shine-job from Lee’s newfound celebrity. Vince said it was like watching an open mic at a surgeon’s office. “They’ll laugh at anything, just leave their brain alone.”

Getting back to the hotel was an ordeal now, with everyone wanting autographs from Lee. “What do I do?” he asked me. “They wait for me in the hallway.”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know anything about hallways.”

Vince smirked and told me I was fired. We walked outside and Lee had his Sharpie out, running through the three letters of his name so fast that it looked like a series of number twos eating itself.

* * *

Lee is on the cover of US Weekly. Not the whole thing, just in a little box in the corner. But still.

Apparently, he’s one of the most eligible bachelors alive. The little blurb about him inside says that he’s a breath of fresh air into the stuffiness that comedy has become. He’s quoted as saying, “People think that comedy is just someone getting on stage and being funny. It takes a lot of unhappiness to get satisfaction through comedy.”

How do you feel bad for someone who hates the attention they tried really hard to get? It becomes especially difficult to do when he misses his next show to go trip on acid with some hippy looking woman, long Crystal Gayle hair down to the tops of her thighs, even the fog of her breath coming out in earth tones. The tour is half over and Lee looks like he has to be microwaved every morning. There’s been talk around the crew of Lee’s manager wanting to pull off the tour early and book some stadiums for Lee to do solo.

There’s an entourage all the time now. Publicists and other folks who, as far as I can tell, aren’t doing much. Vince calls to him one night when he’s walking out with his new friends and says, “When was the last time you were alone?” Before Lee can answer, Vince asks him, “Are you all right with that?” And again, Vince gets up and goes before Lee can say a thing.

* * *

There are five dates left on the tour. I’m starting to think that Vince could do it forever. It’s clear that he’s built his life around performing comedy on the road. I bring it up to him and he says, “I knew in twenty or thirty years I’d choose hotel shampoo over a family anyways, so I figured I’d just skip right to it.”

It’s been almost six months since we first left and Lee’s usefulness has pretty much been used up. There are no more magazine interviews, no more contracts being overnighted to the venue, and no more throngs of admirers. He didn’t know how to be famous, so he said the wrong things and got his picture taken with the wrong people. Not the people who have wrongness built into their image, but the people who have no image and promote Lee, albeit by association, as about as exciting as he really is, which is about as exciting as most of us, though we’re smart enough to fluff the truth.

He isn’t going to be broke or anything when the tour’s over. He’s still got offers he’s already been signed on to do, guaranteed money coming his way, but I think he knows that he has a year or two left in his career before he has to stop everything and find something else to do, go away for awhile in hopes that he is missed and then subsequently loved upon rearrival.

Vince and I get to the venue early and hear something coming from the stage. It’s Lee, not amplified at all, just standing in his normal spot doing his act, the first act he had when he started on tour. Bad gags about airports and his dick and comic books, but material that is all his. There’s a security guard in the way back watching him but not listening and there’s me and Vince standing off to the side. Lee doesn’t see us and he just barrels through his act, not fumbling the words, not throwing in any sitcom catchphrases. Then he stops and says, “I forget.”

It’s quiet. I visibly stiffen up my back and shoulders. Vince elbows me in the ribs lightly and says, “What, you don’t think this is funny?”

Author Biography

BIO: Ryan Werner is a janitor from Wisconsin. He runs the music/literature project Our Band Could Be Your Lit. He’s a six foot, hot look, all American male.