2026 Memory Contest Fiction Runner-Up
It’s 1992, I’m in the East Village, and my favorite dead ex-boyfriend Mike picks me up in a gay bar that burned down and came back years later as a sushi bar: activist queers to omakase, a downtown progression. Not yet, though. In 1992 it’s still a working-class gay bar with windows you can see in from the street. And Mike’s at the pool table, a stranger. Anyway, to me. Small and tightly wired and blue-brown, with long sideburns and short black hair gelled to trendy downtown stiffness. Italian American guy from Boston. I’m feeling competitive, not turned-on, assuming there’s a difference between competition and desire. He looks like Michael Madsen getting ready to torture a cop in Reservoir Dogs, in a pressed white shirt and straight-legged black wool trousers. Deck shoes without socks, though it’s winter in New York. It’s snowing, the snow beginning to stick fast and pile high. And Mike has come riding in from the storm, a morally compromised hero in a 1950s western by Anthony Mann, his equivocal past hidden behind easy charm and a mask of good will. He’s got a leather knapsack like a bursting mail pouch, and the silver lining of his cashmere coat is ripped.
So when he looks up from his winning shot and cruises me, it’s a movie, and I follow him out to his car, and we’re together almost a year.
Jean-Luc Godard says movies are better than novels because in a novel, when you want to describe a train pulling into town on a beautiful fall day, you have to show the train, and the tracks, and the passengers, and the station, and the motion of the wheels, and the expectation of the travelers, and then you have to describe the day — soft light, blue sky — all of which can last for pages, even if you’re Ernest Hemingway and you only know twelve words, most of them verbs and the rest of them “good,” “tight,” “brown,” “rotten,” and “lousy.” Whereas with a movie, you hold up a camera, and there’s just a shot of the train platform in Long Island, Monday morning, and you, waiting for the 7:15 to Penn Station to grow visible in the distance. And as it does, everything appears at once: train, people, weather, even God by implication, and with God, anticipation and loss.
Films are simultaneous, novels are not. In a novel, you need to keep in mind that the guy at the top of the page is sitting in his car all through the description of his surroundings as he heads from the Bowery to Brooklyn and the bottom of the page. You have to remember things in a novel. You have to keep your place. Put your thumb on Mike, on “Mike,” try to hold onto him, see if you can make him happen at the same time as I’m here at his side, while he drives to his Williamsburg loft. Jump cut, we’re walking out of the bar. We haven’t got a girl and a gun, but we have cigarettes and a fast car — a Honda with a rattling stick shift. Jump cut, the city flashes by as we take Delancey Street to the Williamsburg Bridge. The East River is chopped into grey slices by bridge cable and the profile of my face. We cross the river in two seconds, or sixty-eight frames. The camera is behind us, watching the backs of our heads, and then suddenly the sound goes dead, and you hear nothing but your own breathing as you watch the car spin off the bridge into Brooklyn, past warehouses and abandoned banks. The M train curves past on elevated tracks. Mike’s car circles around and crosses under the bridge. City noise breaks the silence, cars honk, there’s the sound of an airplane angling to land at LaGuardia Airport; and a woman’s voice sings a few bars of a Goth song: “It’s nature’s way of saying something’s wrong.” Jump cut, Mike parks in front of a factory building.
Now we’re opening the door to his loft. Suddenly we’re in color and popping the lid off a Jack-in-the-Box. Spring! The place jumps out at you, packed with stuff. We’ve left behind the shadowed streets and walked into Mike’s three-strip Technicolor world of found objects and salvaged debris. “I have a knack for finding period pieces in the trash,” he tells me, and my favorite dead best friend Dave says, “Including boyfriends!” Dave’s been dead since 1993, and he doesn’t know Mike yet, not that night, though I’ve spliced him into this film clip because my mind is a movie theater where I watch the past in present tense. Mike’s dead, Dave’s dead, I’m not. We’re all alive in 1992, though. I’m thirty-three, “Lifetime of Christ,” Mike says later, “your crucifixion year,” and I say, “Resurrection too,” and he says, “Do them in reverse, get resurrected first and then nailed up.”
Mike’s bedroom is behind a blackout curtain in the back of his loft. The shot’s in black-and-white again, financing ran out and I’ve only got so much cash for color stock. We cross out of Mike’s Technicolor living room into his bedroom lit like a Hungarian art film, Sátántangó, shot by Béla Tarr’s DP Gábor Medvigy in black-and-white photography that is both crisp and gauzy, on grainy 35 mm photochemical film. “The actors will come from here and go there, and afterwards leave there,” is how Tarr explains “story.” It also describes my relationship with Mike. “We have some main characters, but the location must be the other main character, as must Time.”
His name was Michelangelo Sapienza, but he went by Mike Wise. A film editor and photographer. He liked excess and he liked absence, explosion and narcolepsy, and it took me a long time to realize that what excited him was shape, not connection. He trained me to watch objects project themselves through time and space. Dating him was like having a phenomenologist instead of a boyfriend. It was a relief for a while to feel like the past was a series of shots and the present was my movement from one to the next, not always in chronological order. Memory was the landscape the camera moved across, and personality was just that motion. I got flatter, being with Mike. I figured out how I was lit. “A person is entitled to the lighting he needs,” Andy Warhol says, and I might have stayed with Mike if being constantly lit were enough.
His bedroom is a wilderness of film and video equipment. He picks up a video camera and aims it at me. “Act natural,” he says. “The camera knows when you’re faking.”
“The camera’s running?”
“Are you?” he says. “Running out on me? Don’t lie, the camera will catch it.”
“No, I’m not running. All right? What am I supposed to do?”
“Whatever you want.”
I sit on the bed. It’s covered with a kid’s blanket decorated with cowboys — cowboys on horseback, cowboys lassoing sheep — and it’s the hardest bed in the history of beds, in the history of hard: a futon on plywood laid on a metal frame that Mike scavenged from an abandoned sanitarium in the Catskills. “I don’t like things that give too much,” he says, watching me sit, and I think, “What are you doing with me?” “He’s low maintenance,” I tell Dave, flash-forward (which is also a flash-back) to Dave and me sitting in the Kiev on 2nd Avenue eating kasha varnishkes with mushroom sauce, “he doesn’t need a lot,” and Dave says, “Yes, and one of the things he doesn’t need is you.”
Mike stops shooting me long enough to pop a mix tape into a cassette deck. It’s Goth music, hollow voices singing about mind games and death trips.
“Who are you,” I say, “Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse, Now?”
“If is the middle word of life,” he says, quoting Hopper. Then he picks up his camera again. “Let me ask you some questions,” he says. “All right? Just sit there, and I’ll ask questions, and you can answer however you want.”
“Is this how you seduce people?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes it’s how you try, or sometimes it’s how you succeed?”
“I’m asking the questions.”
“I guess I’m supposed to feel flattered. That you’re photographing me.”
He comes out from behind his camera and stares at me, like he’s deciding how best to light me. “Do you want to be flattered?” he says.
“I don’t photograph well. I always look fifteen. Is that what you like?”
“Can you relax? All right? I’m just having fun.”
“Is that one of your questions? If I can relax?”
“Yes,” he says. “Can you?”
“Probably not.”
“Great answer,” he says, and I watch him move around the room, changing angles. I’m feeling self-conscious, but I’m also aware of a vibrating thrum up the back of my head. The camera does its paradoxical work of creating the illusion of privacy around a moment of exposure, and I have the sense of being protected and alone. “That’s not protection, that’s pornography,” Dave says. “If he asks you to touch yourself, tell him you need to see a contract.”
“Don’t you have more questions?” I ask.
“Right now I’m coming in for the Guru Dutt close-up,” Mike says. “Don’t move. And don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Guru Dutt, the Orson Welles of India. You look too Ivy League not to know things.”
“Ivy League means the opposite of knowing things, and who are you calling a preppie? You’re the one wearing deck shoes.”
His camera lens nearly touches my nose. And he says, “What’s your grand ambition?”
“Are you serious?”
“You said ask more questions. There’s a question.”
“My grand ambition?”
“You think because I’m a Wop I don’t understand big words.”
“Okay, I don’t know where to start with that. You’re a ‘Wop?’”
“There, you said it.”
“You think I think you’re a Wop? Like I’d even use that word?”
“The camera doesn’t lie.”
I wave that away, and try another tack. “‘Ambition’ is a big word?”
“I have a grand ambition,” he says.
“I never know when you’re kidding.”
“No, you don’t. Do you want to hear my ambition?”
“I have a feeling I know what it is.”
“Maybe,” he says, and he puts down the camera and kisses me.
Then he opens the drawer in his bedside nightstand and gets out condoms and lube, and we’re naked and suited up and he’s on me and in me with my leg over his shoulder and his face buried in my neck. It’s like having sex with a Labrador retriever.
Everyone I’ve ever loved is beautiful and cold and withholding, including Jesus, so it’s a relief to be wanted and claimed. But I’ve been gay in the 1980s — I flew into New York after college in the fall of 1980, the same time as AIDS, we might have been on the same flight, me and HIV — and you’re not supposed to let a strange dude stick his member inside of you until the tenth date, even if it’s sheathed in latex and slathered with spermicidal gel. I feel infected. It’s not a new feeling, or a true one. This is not a story about anyone dying of AIDS, except Dave. When Mike’s done he curls up on his side with his head on my chest. He’s Streisand, I’m Redford, in The Way We Were. Role reversal. A moment of grace. I stroke his head. Then he shifts his weight, and I slip down the bed, my head dangling, and Mike’s mix tape plays the song we already heard on the soundtrack, a woman with a mournful voice singing, “It’s nature way of telling you something’s wrong.”
What’s wrong? Being gay? Getting fucked? Holding Mike? Worrying forever about AIDS? I’m still worried, telling you this. Did the condom break? I’m in a factory building with a strange man on a hard bed in Brooklyn. He wears cowry shells on a string around his neck like a San Diego surfer boy. His bedspread is covered with cowboys. Was I penetrated by John Wayne? I know he’s a man, because he passed out as soon as he came. He’s snoring and I’m sliding off the bed with my head nearly banging the floor, and a Goth voice is droning in my ear, “It’s nature’s way of telling you — ”
“What’s wrong?” Mike says, when I push myself back up onto the bed.
“Nothing, nothing,” I tell him, “go to sleep,” and he puts his arm around me and pulls my back to his belly, and we sleep, and that’s the first day.
Nature was telling me what? I don’t believe in nature, I don’t like trees, they’re weird. I loved Mike. It didn’t last. Before long, it’s time for him to go back to the woods alone to forage for free land and wild game. “He’s a gay man,” Dave says. “A gay man living in New York. His sexual preference is himself.” So what? I liked to watch him park his car. With one hand on the steering wheel and his arm stretched across the seatback, a cigarette held between the first two fingers of his right hand, as if it were surgically implanted there, he glances over his shoulder and squeezes into an impossible spot. He parks with the same authority and ease he assumes when he makes love, moving close but never colliding, leaving a heart-stoppingly small space between himself and everyone else. I like him because he’s detached. His favorite sexual position. Unlike me, he always knows which one of us is him.
After he fled, I searched for him in beer houses and waterfront bars, Hanna Schygulla walking the streets to find her vanished soldier in The Marriage of Maria Braun.
He died much later, though not yet fifty. He was a gay man who got out of the 20th century alive, and then died too young in another century of something else. Not AIDS. Not heroin? We were out of touch a long time when he died. “You never should be out of touch, but sometimes you are,” Ernest Hemingway said, making excuses.
John Weir is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut, and What I Did Wrong; and the story collection, Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, winner of the Grace Paley Award for the Short Story. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Queens College CUNY, where his is a member of the faculty in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.