The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Read online

  I was glad for the darkness but still I looked down, flooded in the incredible novelty of bashfulness. “I thought I was more discreet than that.”

  “You probably are. I was paying attention.”

  “You were, huh?”

  “Maybe I was.”

  “Maybe you were?”

  I felt my collar bones flush. I wanted to ask outright, get confirmation, put an end to the ambiguity. But on the other hand I was enjoying it too much to end it. With anybody else we would’ve screwed by now and I’d be home already, staring up at the ceiling, laboring over blank sheets of paper or watching my fish swim around.

  “They didn’t really know what that word meant, did they?” he said. “In middle school, I mean.”

  “Felcher? I doubt it. They just thought it was a funny word.”

  He nodded. “In Portuguese, arrow is flecha. It’s more obvious from the Portuguese why a person who makes arrows is called a fletcher.”

  “That’s true. You’ve stumbled onto one of my secret interests. I’m kind of an etymology nerd.”

  “I like words too.”

  I pulled my legs out of Indian-style, sat up on my knees and wiped dry leaves off my jeans. “We should probably get going, right?”

  “Really should’ve been gone before the paint dried,” he replied. “This was a bad example of how this is done. But I guess your first time is always clumsy.” He reached for his backpack and from within it he pulled a paint-smeared Polaroid camera. He stood up, steadied his elbows on the rail of the fence, and pointed the camera into the train canyon. He took two photos of our work, held one out to me. “Here,” he said, “put that in your black book.”

  I took the photo from him. It was developing slowly, but so far I liked what I saw.

  I thought/hoped, when Mateo

  offered to drive me home, that it was a bit of clever maneuvering on his part to get me to his place. Once there, there’d be some reason why he had to go inside—for his car keys, for a drink of water. It wouldn’t be polite to leave me standing on the sidewalk, so he’d ask me to come in, and I would. Then there’d be some reason to go to his bedroom—his keys were there, he needed to change his shoes, check his email, whatever. The bed would be there and I’d sit down and then he’d sit down and before long we’d be in it together. That’s how it worked. That’s how I was used to it working.

  There were other ways it could work, though, too. He could drive me home with the goal of wrangling his way into my bedroom, into my bed. This was the scenario that seemed more and more likely as the others, one by one, didn’t pan out.

  So, standing on the sidewalk outside my place, one foot still in his Civic, I helped it along: I invited him in to watch TV.

  “Nah, thanks though,” he said. It was a remarkably casual decline, the decline of someone who believes he’s only turning down television. Giant mark in the straightboy column. “I’m gonna get home. See you at work tomorrow?”

  “Cool.” I was disappointed but not dismayed. I’d done this enough to know when someone wanted out of there, and I didn’t get that sense from him. I just didn’t get any sense from him. “It was fun.”

  “Yeah. Oh—hey, you’ve got the photo, right?”

  “Right here.” I patted my front pocket. Then I closed the door and watched the car take off down the street.

  “Weird,” I said out loud.

  I went inside. I thought about waking Cara. I thought about beating off. But I ended up just going to sleep. I must’ve had the Polaroid in my hand when I lay down, because when I woke up the next morning I found it under my pillow.

  Street art became synonymous

  with Mateo Amaral, even all the stuff that obviously wasn’t his. All demanded a moment of my attention—could that be his?—and reminded me of the wall by the tracks outside Jamaica Plain. I realized how ubiquitous graffiti was, and considered for the first time that every line was put there by someone with a story, and that every block of gray paint covered a story up.

  On the columns of bridges, on the backs of trailer trucks, on newspaper dispensers and billboards and telephone poles and on the sides of stores. I saw it from my car, driving to work. I saw it from the T. I saw it running errands. Every time I saw it I thought of his colored fingers.

  “You’re really crushing on that guy from work, aren’t you?” Cara said one night when I must’ve been staring too googly into the distance beyond the TV. “I think you’re in love. You have the glow.”

  “I’m definitely not in love,” I said. “Puh-lease.”

  “You’re at least smitten.”

  “I may be smitten.”

  “You going out painting again?”

  “I hope so.”

  “What’s he like in bed?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t done anything.”

  “Nothing?! How does he kiss?”

  “We haven’t kissed.”

  “Are you still not sure he’s even gay?”

  “Haha. Nope. Not even sure.”

  “Why don’t you ask? You can end the speculation any time you want.”

  “I don’t want to end it.”

  She sighed. “Does he have roommates? Sometimes you can infer by the roommate.”

  “I don’t know if he does. I don’t think so. He rents a place in JP.”

  “Does he live with his parents? You said he’s from Brazil.”

  “I don’t think he’s from Brazil. His parents are. Or were.”

  “Wow, you know almost nothing about this boy, do you?”

  “Not much, no.”

  “No wonder you’re in love.”

  A week after the first

  night, he asked me, in a whisper in my cubicle, to go out a second time (though it was clear from his hand that he was going out every other night by himself, or at any rate without me). This time he suggested Brighton, which was closer to my home turf than his. I wondered if there was significance to that as we climbed into a fenced-in area surrounding construction on a small bridge. A clean new concrete wall stood in front of us. He seemed to know it would be here. I wondered if there was some kind of graffiti newsletter that advertised these ideal places.

  I tried to be bolder this time. I turned down the gloves he offered and started painting while he was still picking through his colors.

  After we’d been painting for a minute he stepped back and surveyed his work, shaking the clacking can. In tall letters with long, flowing serifs, stood DEDINHOS in black, brown and yellow.

  “Those colors remind me of sunflowers,” I said.

  “Nice!”

  “Is that your tag?” I tried to be nonchalant about asking, and continued painting. I was still trying to get the arrows right on my first R and was using way too much paint to do it—I kept lengthening and widening the arrows to subsume drips.

  “Yeah. That’s me.”

  I was surprised and delighted to finally know his tag. It was his identifier, could link him to everything he’d done around the city, however much that was, and until now I figured he didn’t want me to know about everything he did. The way he carefully guarded his secrets, I wasn’t going to risk taking another one from him. Here was proof that I only needed to be patient.

  “I’m trying to think where I’ve seen it around,” I said. “You paint all the time so I must’ve seen it around, right?”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “It’s Portuguese?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Fingers,” he said with a smirk. “Little Fingers.”

  “Little fingers like your pinkies?” Why did that seem to warrant a mark in the homo column? “That’s gangsta.”

  “Not little like small, really. Little like—endearing?”

  “You mean little like widdle?”

  He laughed. “My cousin Vinicius—” he said it Vih-NEE-cee-us “—gave it to me when we first started painting. I’ve always been messy.” He held up his hand and grinned. �
�Vini called me Dedos and that became Dedinhos.” And this he said like DEH-jin-YOS. “The rest is history.”

  “That’s pretty cute. How old were you when you started?”

  “Hmm. Around thirteen.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’ll tell you about it sometime. Come on, let’s find someplace else.”

  “But I’m still working on my R’s.”

  “You and your R’s.”

  “How do you know about

  all these places?” I asked, figuring there couldn’t really be a newsletter. “Do you have some kind of sixth sense for good places?”

  “I keep my eyes open.” He smirked. “Also you can read up online. Other writers make note of choice spots.”

  Ah, so there was a sort of newsletter.

  On the brick wall of a narrow alley near Kenmore Square he’d produced a big green rectangle; this he outlined in white, making it look like a highway sign. When he began adding words to the sign, I wondered whether this was going to be another tag of his or something. But when the words Porcupine and City gained enough definition to be legible, my cheeks started getting hot.

  “Oh man,” I said, distracted enough to drag a stray blast of paint across a door. “You know my book?”

  He stopped and wiped his forearm across his face, smearing a coil of hair straight across his cheek until it popped off and re-coiled like a spring. “Sorry? Your book?”

  “You found my book. Porcupine City.”

  “Oh, that’s your book?”

  “Haha. Yes. How’d you find it?”

  “The interwebs.” He turned back to the green sign. Beneath the first words he added 0 Miles.

  “You were stalking me?”

  “Hardly. You’ve seen my writing so I wanted to see yours. Fair’s fair, right?”

  “Oh man. You didn’t read it too, did you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Maybe yes.”

  “You’re ambiguous.”

  “It was good. I liked it.”

  “You read the whole thing?”

  “It’s only 200 pages.”

  “208.”

  “See?”

  “Now I’m embarrassed.”

  “Why embarrassed? I said it was good.”

  “It’s just so—ugh.”

  OK, so Porcupine City began

  as my senior writing project at Shuster College, largely the thing that separated my BFA from a plain old BA. It almost kept me from graduating, though. Not because I didn’t do the project, but because I did nothing but the project. A few halting, resentful paragraphs about the romantic tribulations of a guy named Bradley exploded in length and depth that scared me and exhilarated me and for months filled my days and nights with an unrelenting tap tap of laptop keys. Other classes and papers and projects faded into the background. Friends faded too. Jamar, when he claimed to notice dark circles growing under my eyes, tried to stage a one-man intervention.

  “This story is killing you, Bradford,” he told me, half serious.

  Practically snarling, I hunched closer to my laptop.

  Like Sauron forging the One Ring, into the book I poured my rage, my agony, my frustration with all mankind—all boykind. Porcupine City represented a decade’s worth of malice. Bradley was a thinly veiled version of me, of course, and the small army of antagonists were all the guys I’d been with up to that point—all guys from college. Being out at age twelve had made for a lonely adolescence. In high school even the kids I knew were gay wouldn’t admit it to me or probably even to themselves yet. They didn’t want anything to do with me. And when I got to college and finally, finally found guys to go out with, one by one they’d blown me off, said there was someone else, said they weren’t feeling it. These guys I’d been desperate to meet since age twelve were walking away just because they weren’t feeling it.

  That anger poured onto page after page and the book boiled and bubbled like a cauldron of angst, one I kept stirring for months while Jamar grew increasingly fearful for my health. When it came time to turn it in it was no longer a school assignment but my reason for living.

  It was also, by the due date, very unfinished. I cobbled together a patchwork version of the best parts, turned it in, and got back to work. I passed and I graduated, but my diploma interested me far less than the sheets of paper sliding off my printer day by day—my sheets of revenge.

  Eleven months I toiled on the first draft of that bitch and for another six I polished and, realizing how much aimless ranting I’d done, cut it down by 200 pages. Then I wrote another hundred pages and cut most of that down too. I knew being finished would feel like a death, something I’d mourn and feel empty about, so even after the book was done I kept polishing for another six months.

  “You really should try to get that thing published,” Cara told me. We were living together by then and she’d had plenty of time to witness firsthand the obsession Jamar had told her about. “If only so you can just stop tinkering with it.”

  Because finality (I thought of it in some way as burial) was a better reason for publishing than any other I could think of, I wrote to a handful of LGBT publishers whose names were featured on the spines of some of the novels I owned. Why not, I thought, when I sent out my queries. Why not, I thought, when a few of them asked for the manuscript. Why not, I thought, when one of them wanted to talk.

  I read the galleys not sure I liked this story of mine. And when they sent me a few complimentary copies I flipped through the first few pages of it sure that I didn’t. Publishing had been meant to be a burial, yet here was the corpse, neatly bound with a cover emblazoned with a stock photo of two shirtless twinks.

  “How could you not like your own book?” Mateo asked.

  The book was so angry. So me. It was like looking in the mirror and seeing someone I didn’t like. It gave me the shivers.

  I did some soul searching. With the book in print, all I could revise was myself. I tried celibacy. I got really horny. After eight months I gave in. I remember looking up at the random guy who ended that eight-month experiment for me, and thinking he was perfect. Perfect because all I wanted from him was this. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend anymore—it’d been eight months and all I wanted was to get laid. All I wanted was the thing this guy was happiest and most able to give me. It was a eureka, an epiphany—I actually started crying. The guy stopped quick when he saw the tears—he thought he was hurting me. After we finished I thanked him and moved on. And kept moving on. Practically every guy is the perfect guy the first night, so why ever bother with a second?

  My publisher was still waiting for the follow-up to Porcupine City. Had been for years. I was waiting too. The problem with one-night stands was that there wasn’t much of a story there.

  I told Mateo a version

  of that story, leaving out the details of my sexual epiphany for a variety of reasons. But he seemed to get the jist.

  “I think you should be proud of your book,” he told me. “Even if it represents a person you’d rather not believe you were. For one thing it captures a moment in time—what you wrote was true at the time, and that’s important. But mostly, it changed you. Made you into a person you probably like better. One who’s certainly happier. And that’s the best we can hope for from art, you know? That it changes you for the better. That it lights up the world a little bit.”

  I could tell I was staring at him, could feel moisture drying on my hanging lip.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing. Just, I think that’s the first time you’ve ever spoken a full paragraph.”

  He smirked. “Anyway, if anything I ever write on a building changes a person as much as your book changed you, and probably at least a few people who’ve read it, it’ll all be worthwhile.” He raised his can and made an arc. Fffssshhht. “I’m not sure I understand the title, though,” he went on.

  “Hah. Yeah. A major editing mistake. I accidentally cut out the part that explained it. Porcu
pine City. City of pricks. Get it? I seemed to meet them all.”

  “Oh. OK. City of pricks. That’s good. Heh.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ve gotta say, though, I think you were too hard on old Beantown.”

  “Hard?”

  “For example, the part right after the MIT guy with the blue hair breaks up with you. You’re walking through Copley. It’s the part where you overhear tourists saying how pretty the city is. And you realize they think it’s pretty because they’re always looking up. At the statues and buildings and things. And they don’t see the bullshit going on at ground level. One of them doesn’t even realize he just stepped on some passed-out homeless guy’s coat.”

  “Yeah, and I just about die.”

  “It just about kills you. But you blame the city for that. There’s like ten pages where you basically just bash everything about the city.”

  “Well I was pissed off. When you’re pissed off in the city it feels like the city is out to get you, or conspiring to keep you unhappy or whatever. The ground-level grunge was tainting my mood.”

  “I’ve never felt lonely in the city,” he said wistfully, as though realizing it.

  “I wouldn’t say I was lonely.”

  “I’ve always been happy just walking around.”

  “Well you’re lucky.”

  “I’ll admit it can be a little grungy in places,” he said. “But that’s why we’re here. It just needs a fresh coat of paint.”

  Alex came with me

  to Newbury Comics so I could grab something for Cara’s birthday. It was the first time I’d seen him since our sweaty weekend together, but there was no mention of our “activities” (funny how when it came to sex with Alex I felt the need for euphemisms). He had plenty to say about his and Jimmy’s activities, though. In a way it was torture but if I hadn’t wanted to hear it I wouldn’t have invited him along.

  Alex gave me the details: Apparently Perino saw him that night at the club (around the time I was not remembering the guy with the slip-on Vans) and Perino couldn’t stop thinking about him afterward. Seriously. So it was Perino who got back in touch with Alex, via friend request, a few days later. That just about killed me. Perino, now homeless after being dumped by the guy he cheated on to have wedding sex with Alex, had all but moved into Alex’s sublet. I was sure the relationship wouldn’t survive the remainder of Alex’s short sub-lease, but he was acting like it was a forever thing.