Flannelwood Read online

  Flannelwood

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  FICTION

  The Last Deaf Club in America The Kinda Fella I Am Men with Their Hands

  POETRY

  A Babble of Objects The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips How to Kill Poetry Road Work Ahead Mute This Way to the Acorns St. Michael’s Fall

  NONFICTION

  From Heart into Art: Interviews with Deaf and Hard of Hearing Artists and Their Allies Notes of a Deaf Gay Writer: 20 Years Later Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life

  DRAMA

  Whispers of a Savage Sort and Other Plays about the Deaf American Experience Snooty: A Comedy

  As EDITOR

  Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology Among the Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience Eyes of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader When I am Dead: The Writings of George M. Teegarden Eyes of Desire: A Deaf Gay & Lesbian Reader

  FLANNELWOOD

  a novel

  Raymond Luczak

  Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

  Flannelwood

  Copyright © 2019 by Raymond Luczak

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book layout by Mark E. Cull

  Cover photograph of Adam Kauwenberg-Marsnik by Raymond Luczak

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Luczak, Raymond, 1965– author.

  Title: Flannelwood : a novel / Raymond Luczak.

  Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018042729 | ISBN 9781597098977

  Classification: LCC PS3562.U2554 F58 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042729

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, and the Riordan Foundation all partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank Steve Pierson of the Golden Leaf, and Earl Melvin, for their clarifications on the subject matter of cigar smoking. He is grateful to Tom Steele for introducing him to Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood half a lifetime ago. Phillip Herring’s definitive biography Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes makes for worthwhile reading, and Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, edited and with an introduction by Cheryl J. Plumb, has provided helpful insights into the creation of Ms. Barnes’s masterwork. He is deeply grateful for the time spent with Peggy Merchak at the VA Hospital going into great detail about the challenges a newly amputated person is likely to confront in rehabilitation. The author appreciates the help and hospitality of Melainie Wilding Garcia, Scott Holl, and John Link. He also appreciates the assistance of Mark Cull, Adam Kauwenberg-Marsnik, and Rebeccah Sanhueza with this book, and the enthusiasm of Kate Gale and Tobi Harper for Flannelwood.

  for

  Anthony Santos

  CONTENTS

  Of Winter’s Light I Bring

  Moonlight, Caked of Ash

  Footprints Turned Ember in Snow

  A Shadow Fluttery Among the Birches

  As Winds Bitter and Calm Flee

  A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.s

  —Djuna Barnes

  OF WINTER’S LIGHT I BRING

  “I used to think,” Nora said, “that people just went to sleep, or if they did not go to sleep that they were themselves, but now”—she lit a cigarette and her hands trembled—“now I see that the night does something to a person’s identity, even when asleep.”

  —Djuna Barnes

  Your missing right foot was only a part of you, just like the fur that blanketed your body. I remember the look of fear on your face when I’d accidentally opened the bathroom door the morning after we met. You’d just finished showering. I simply needed to piss, but there you were, wet, the many shades of black, gray, and white in your body fur glistening like your beard, and the cone end of your shin. It didn’t look real. It wasn’t a special effect in a Hollywood movie. What was real was dripping. I saw the crooked scar of brown near the bottom of your shin. It wasn’t what I’d thought a limb amputated halfway below the knee would look like in daylight. You’d kept it cloaked, a shroud carrying the unborn child not yours, tucked inside a prosthetic shin and foot. Now it was pink, red, startled with a cry.

  I looked up at your face: a volley of fire, spear, armor.

  I said, “I’m sorry. I just needed to—”

  “Get out.” Your whisper rumbled forth at 2,000 decibels. The ice in your voice, jagged and rich, knifed into my eardrums. Surely this would be the end of us. Already before we had our first breakfast, lunch, dinner.

  I would’ve left, but I walked quickly to the stall, where behind you was a shower chair, and knelt before you as you remained standing. I leaned forward to kiss the cone of your shin. I took hold of your beautiful leg and kissed you down there, the space far more private than anywhere else on your body. We had traveled all over the world of each other the night before, but this was uncharted territory. I had to map the rest of your body as you stood petrified, not daring to kick me like the unwelcome conquistador I was. I closed my eyes and kissed the unreal topography of your most private world. I lingered my tongue all over your shin, a brand-new foreign language. I was absolutely frightened of what you would do to me. I didn’t know yet how to translate. I’d never been with a disabled man before.

  You held onto the wall railing. Your knuckles turned into tiny snowcaps. Your skin dribbled paint drops of clarity. Your body trembled. You weren’t erect. I looked up. A glimmer of tears, a gush of aurora borealis. Heaven was marbled in your eyes.

  I stood up. “You okay?”

  You nodded; looked away. The white tiles in your shower were mirrors in a prison, opaque reflections about to turn full-color bleed.

  Even though my body couldn’t decide which need was more pressing—ejaculation or urination—I left the bathroom. I could hold it in a few more minutes.

  When I saw you again in the kitchen, you were already in your jeans, frying eggs in the cast-iron skillet. You looked up at me with an unexpected softness in your eyes. You had such a stoic face, but here, suddenly you were like an angel about to be given wings, your cocoon molted clear of shoulders, already furred and strapped with muscle. Surely all you had to do was to open up your arms to your full wingspan and take flight.

  The way the sunlight rested on your bearded face while we ate . . . wow. Oceans once mad with fury came to a still; suddenly a pond filled with cattails and dragonflies in the grays of your eyes. Diamonds of snow married in your eyebrows. The rocks of crag all over the mountainside of your face avalanched into a smile filled with sky. I wanted so much to have my camera right there with me. But you’d made it clear how you disliked having your picture taken. You must’ve been afraid of disappointing men when they discovered your disability after drinking in one single gulp the hotness of your fur, pecs, cock. If my camera could flit about like a hummingbird, I’d have shot you from below and have you look incredibly imposing, especially if your face and chest were partially covered in shadow.

  There’
s something powerful about shadows. Voices stilled by the dark, voices afraid of the knife of sunlight ready to slash the dark in half, voices afraid to sing.

  You weren’t just a ghost. You were pure shadow.

  That’s why you still follow me no matter where I go.

  Start anywhere, and there you are.

  In my heart, it’s always winter.

  My heart’s trapped inside a snow globe, not just inside the shell of glass, filled almost to the brim just enough to allow a flat bubble of oxygen to push the blanket of faux snow around and about to give the illusion of white falling, but my heart, made of plastic, is glued to a thumb-sized house, an evergreen or two, a frozen pond, two skaters never moving, everything locked to the floor. Shake, shake hard as one usually must, and watch the flakes cascade, settle with a puffy sigh all over the tacky contours, while my heart feels ready to explode from hypothermia. There’s not enough furnace. No fire, just room temperature water that will never melt the shellac hardening my heart. I am a child of factory, not of sun nor field, but a spit of souvenir coming down the assembly line.

  Sticking a thermometer into the mouth of my heart, under its shivery tongue of flicker and fear, brushing up against the roots of molars, won’t help. Made of mercury, the thermometer doesn’t register the subzero fickleness of affection; the glass nub, silvery liquid dangerously toxic if broken, swallowed, bleeds dry until I am all glass. Shake me again. Maybe, maybe this time I will crack, a hairline fracture that will splinter the globe into shards, tiny swords that will pierce the cool polish of your heart. I would not rain down but float upward to the heavens where I will regard you, observe all you do, ponder. Go on. Go on, shake me again, and watch me snow tears down my cheeks in the darkness of shellac. Paint my house of heart white. Freeze me until I pale into nothing.

  Every night when I lie here on this bed, I dream up conversations that you and I will never have.

  Like right now: the window over there by the bed would be wide open, and even in the dead of winter, you’d want to keep it open just a smidge. You hated having a thick blanket on top of you when you slept. You were the kind of guy who felt hot no matter the season. You needed ventilation, wind, flight. Summers were too hot for you even up north. You used to work out for years and gained a lot of muscle until you lost part of your right leg in a car accident one winter evening. The driver was too busy arguing with his wife on his cell phone and hadn’t noticed a patch of ice right up ahead by the corner so he couldn’t brake his truck hard enough in time to prevent crumpling your side of the car so badly that—well, you couldn’t walk so easily like before.

  I didn’t know all this yet when I saw you the first time at the Eagle on a Friday night. Everyone there seemed to know everyone else, but I didn’t know you. Your face, though: not even a discernible expression, a feeling of one way or other; partially hidden by the brim of your baseball cap, so I couldn’t see your eyes. I moved to the side for a better look. Your lush beard sang of birch, tall and squat with scarred bark eyeing saplings unweaving from the grass, sparrows twittering about on the telephone lines, balls of dandelion whiskers breaking up from the belly laughs of wind. You sat on a barstool, nursing a drink while Trevor Covins, standing next to you, carried on about something or other with his buddies. A former president of the Browell County Bears, Trevor was a hot daddy with his thick and wiry goatee streaking a bit of gray down the middle of his jaw. He reminded me of certain bears who were damn hot and knew it enough to pose naked long enough to enable nameless strangers like myself with longing upon their natural ruggedness of fur and muscle. I was always paralyzed when he glanced my way. I tried to smile, but he made it clear he wasn’t interested in me. I was simply not there, a twig snapped in half and rolled off the sidewalk.

  That’s why I didn’t look at you again, even though you were woofy as hell. Your T-shirt, pulled on so tight, showed nipples pushing against the fabric. Your forearms were densely coated with fur that shimmered like rubies from the neon behind you. Your black beard was thick with gray and white unbraiding its strands everywhere, ropes of ship fraying at last from too many nights of storms at sea. Then you smiled slightly at someone in my direction. I glanced around, unsure if you’d smiled at me. No one was standing right next to me. No one was looking back at you, or me, or had someone been there, in that moment of my head turning to look, or had I imagined you looking my way at all? When I returned to you, it was as if I wasn’t there, no longer a blip on your radar.

  James, look at me. In bear parlance, I’m considered a cub even though I don’t see myself that way at all. I’m forty-five years old, five feet nine, and 197 pounds with a scruffy beard. I don’t work out much. I’m gaining a bit of permanent weight every year, but I’m okay with that. I’ve always liked guys with a bit of padding on their bones, but not too much. I’ve never liked those anorexic twinks with haircuts so gelled that they looked like pewter under a mirror ball. During the nineties I saw those images of men dying of AIDS, skinny and laced with pockmarks of pallor. Their teeth sometimes reminded me of Max Schreck’s in Nosferatu. They were so young, so ravaged, and yet used for inspiration the same way disabled kids were used on Jerry Lewis’s Labor Day telethons back in the seventies. Seeing those men’s faces, weakened hands taped and wired with IV tubes designed to sell bravery— and newspapers and magazines, too, as they’d understood how Americans liked to gawk in the perpetual museum of freedom and horror—made each kiss I got from a man feel like charcoal skin—my own!—ready to crumble from the merest kiss of air. I wasn’t heavy back then. I knew I liked stocky guys, but I didn’t know about the bear community. It seems so obvious now, but I didn’t know where I could find gay stocky guys. I went out to the bars and clubs near the university, which were filled with young college guys like myself. They wanted to dance and party all night long, and they wanted to stagger, drunk and horny, with someone they barely knew, back to their dorm rooms. They didn’t want to think of dense textbooks, exams, grades; they’d become sloppily researched textbooks on love’s woes, having waxed and waned, and still didn’t learn a damn thing. They never took the time to study themselves in action, become case studies in the mirror of alcohol and haze of smoke, conduct experiments with tighter controls. Their hearts turned into footnotes of woe gone weary, now wary from age. Today they just fudge their stats when they cruise online for another hookup.

  I never drank. Just never liked the taste of alcohol. Beer makes me feel queasy, like after ten loop-de-loops on the rollercoaster right after another without stopping, so I’m always someone’s designated driver. I never minded. I like seeing things clearly.

  Funny how I hadn’t seen you so clearly until recently. I am a rearview mirror, sailing through space as your car careened out of control across the slickness of ice.

  Hello guys!

  I’m on this site because I think bearish men who aren’t afraid of oil and grease are mighty fine. I don’t use moisturizers or get pedicures either. I like my men to be of the rough and tumble variety. Shirts that show off your round pecs and bellies can be just as hot as fur that shoots out of collars.

  If you spend your free time on video games, we are not a match.

  If you are comfortable with long sentences, stick around. You won’t be disappointed. I promise not to bore you with the same old, same old.

  If you think my profile is too long, please click elsewhere for your next victim.

  Please don’t ask for my X-rated pictures. I don’t have any. Sorry about that, fellas.

  I’m a former farm boy who’s an overworked and underpaid barista at the corner of Broadway and Hancock. You know that place, and I’m sure I’ve seen at least half of you ask for a cuppa cawfee. If you see me again, be sure to say hello and give me a special wink (woofs are always welcomed) so I know you’re a member of our bear family. ;-)

  For those who are wondering about my stats, I just turned 45 (how the hell did that happen?!?), 5’9” (taller if I wear platform shoes, but I lost them o
ne wicked Halloween), and 194 lbs (I keep trying to lose weight all the time, but if you can accept the fact that I may never be svelte again, that’s a big plus).

  If I’m not busy watching movies that require a little brainpower to digest (like subtitles), I’m always reading. A good book is always like a good friend you wish you had. It’s like having a great conversation you wish more people would have. At any given time, I’m usually jump-reading two or three books. Right now I’m reading Cheryl Strayed’s WILD (was she really that ill-prepared for a long hike?), Jeanette Winterson’s WRITTEN ON THE BODY (definitely one of her best), and Nicholson Baker’s THE ANTHOLOGIST (a funny story about a man who tries so hard to write a foreword to an anthology but just can’t). Of course I have many favorite books, so let’s chat.

  A singer that I wish more people knew about is Drake Jensen. I don’t much care for country music, but have you ever seen him? He’s friggin’ HOT. And no, he’s not a closet case. You should check him out in the music video “Fast Enough for Me.” His voice is sexy fine. I wish he’d croon to me naked. His hubba-bubba is sure a lucky fella.

  If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations. It means your attention span is long enough to hold a conversation in person. If you like to talk about the arts, that’s a plus too.

  But if you still feel overwhelmed, relax. I’m actually an easygoing sweetheart. Let’s give ourselves a whirl of chitchat over a scoop or two at Cold & N’ice. Who knows, you might be lucky to find out what a great romp I am in the bedroom. Date is not a four-letter word.

  Looking forward to hearing from ya.