Contemporary Gay Romances Read online

  Synopsis

  Contemporary Gay Romances is the third collection of short fiction by legendary novelist and memoirist, Felice Picano (The Lure, Like People in History, Ambidextrous). It is also his most diverse in terms of the times, places, themes, characters and situations he writes about. Filled with the unexpected, the true, and the amazing, Contemporary Gay Romances moves with ease from gas-lit, upper class London, to a future, climate-altered Bay Area; from semi-rural Florida to Southern California beaches, to an extrasolar planet where people have surprising existences. His characters range from ordinary American suburban housewives to extraordinary children, from grieving young geologists and memory-haunted middle aged men, to British Midlands soccer stars and 22nd Century war heroes. Picano subtitled this collection of stylish, unique, and moving works “Tragic, Comic, Mystic & Horrific,” and they are all that and more. The ten tales include prize winners as well as stories published here for the first time, and are as different from any standard “romances” as you can get, but they will linger in the mind and memory.

  Contemporary Gay Romances

  Tragic, Mystic, Comic & Horrific

  Brought to you by

  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.

  Also available from Bold Strokes

  The Lure

  Late in the Season

  Looking Glass Lives

  Contemporary Gay Romances:

  Tragic, Mystic, Comic & Horrific

  © 2011 By Felice Picano. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-640-3

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: October 2011

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Stacia Seaman

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Donna Lieberman, Susan Moldow, and Rob Arnold for their support when I was writing certain stories in this collection.

  Dedication

  For Tom Libby

  Preface

  For people who keep track of things, Contemporary Gay Romances is my third collection of short stories, following Slashed To Ribbons in Defense of Love in 1983 (reprinted as The New York Years in 2003) and Tales From a Distant Planet in 2005. The latter was published by French Connection Press, in Paris, France and had a very limited distribution, although the book is still available for sale in the U.S.

  The truth is, although I am primarily known as a novelist (and lately also as a memoirist), stories are my favorite way of writing fiction: whether it is a 1,750-word “amusement in prose” or a 30,000-word novella, or anything in between.

  When I can know, sense, or even merely get a hint about an ending while I’m writing, I think I’m simply a better writer. Doing that with a novel usually means a five- to ten-year period of gestation before I even begin. With stories, I can start and end in a few sessions, or in the case of longer works, a month.

  My first story was written when I was twelve, and my first published story (collected in Slashed to Ribbons) was written as far back as 1972. I’ve now written close to fifty shorter stories, of which over thirty have been published in one form, format, place or another, from magazines and newspapers to anthologies to online magazines. So far, no story I wrote ever became a novel. And only a few stories ever reached the popularity of my novels, although a few of my longer ones—novellas—did.

  Among the shorter stories, only one included here was as popular: “Hunter” has been published many times in other people’s collections, and it’s amazing that readers find it as fresh and relevant now as when I first wrote it thirty-five years ago.

  The stories in this volume are—with the exception of “Hunter”—twenty-first century creations. Which makes them unique in my catalogue: they were all written recently, from 2003 to 2010.

  They are also “new” in another way, and thus different from my other stories: while two of them are undeniably autobiographical, the others are all stories that “came” to me as “gifts,” and one of them even is titled “Gift.”

  Let me explain, if I can.

  Being a lazy person (if efficient), I daydream as much as possible, and it is during these daydreams that ideas for books, plays, and stories first come to me and are developed.

  That daydreaming, we now know, is a kind of Alpha-wave thinking. This has been measured by scientists. In the past, writers and musicians often sought it out, calling it their “muse”—i.e., Miss Alpha-Wave—and as often they used artificial means to woo Her, including alcohol, hashish, cocaine, hypnosis, post-hypnotic suggestion, and a bevy of other illegal substances. Unlike these forebears, I was already happily using illegal substances when I began writing. The only question was, could I write without them? Short answer: yes.

  However, it was only in the past few years that my daydreams reached a level where “voices” other than my own began to intrude—distinctive voices that came along with fully formed stories, settings, other characters, etc.

  Now, were I not the distinguished, award-winning author that I am, one could easily think, he hears voices. Hmmmm, that sounds a lot like schizo…

  Let’s not go there. I’ve already accepted that something like that must already be part of my mental makeup. I mean, in 2008–2011 I was writing three separate books all at the same time: 1) a memoir set in the 1970s in Manhattan, 2) an epistolary novel set in Victorian England, and 3) a novel set in pre-Homeric Greece. And I would stop writing one, and move to the other with utter ease. So schizo…? Yeah, thanks, but I believe I’ve got a handle on it.

  Back to the short story “voices”:

  For these I believe I should thank or blame my uncle Vincenzo Picano, a person I never met. In fact, a person who died at the age of nine and a half in 1923, brutally murdered by unknown assailant(s), his body thrown into a rural pond in Rhode Island.

  I discovered very late in life all about poor Vincenzo, and I began investigating his death. I have written a little and I’ve spoken and lectured a lot more about this unfortunate lad and his story, and I think somewhere in the great ether, Vincenzo was (is) pleased that the secret of his life and death was finally being made known. I’ve yet to solve it, it was so long ago and information is so scarce, but I’m getting a grip on the basic situation, and I’m developing a theory and I may still some day publish my findings to date. Partly because it caused so many revelations about my parents, my father’s family in America and back centuries earlier in central Italy.

  After all that with my uncle, the “voices” began: as though I’d opened up some kind of gate to the “other side.”

  Each one of the voices was so perfectly and fully formed that when I decided not to ignore them any longer, and allowed myself to become the vessel through which they might tell their story, well, they did exactly that.

  Usually the story was written fast—I mean fast: two or three days, with very little backtracking, no need to check facts, and of course their narrative voices were, well, unique and indelible and individual and…perfectly
formed. Did I mention that these “voices” were a little annoying until I did decide to tell their stories? Not debilitating. At best a little irksome. And that once the stories were written, I never heard the voices again?

  Some of the stories were sad: one was almost heartbreaking, a few were comical, several odd, others rather sinister, and they came from different places—panhandle Florida, somewhere in the Midwest—where is Meriwether Lewis High School? Does it exist? If so, where is it? I’d appreciate knowing, as it is the only clue to the location of one story. Other places include London, England; Italy; New England; and New York City. One is set in a futuristic and pretty much sunken-by-climate-change East Bay Area, California, and another is set on a planet with no name given, circling a binary star.

  In time they range from the here and now—i.e., most of them—back to 1890 or so, and ahead to about 2250 a.d.—thus they are contemporary stories.

  As to “romances”—well, they aren’t your standard gay romances consisting of hot surfer guy Trey having the itch for even hotter garage mechanic Kyle, but they can’t get together for some stupid reason or another until they finally do in spastic gushes of sweat and sperm and questionable prose on page 240.

  No, these are romances that can and do happen in the real world. In some cases they are “fine romances” like the song, with no kissing; in others, with plenty of kissing and other stuff too. And in other cases, they are—since my “voices” told me the stories, actual stories that happened to actual people, although who these people are (or were in some cases), I don’t know. None of them told me their real names.

  So, yes, most of the stories in this book, including “The Acolyte,” “Gift,” “True Love…True Love,” “Gratitude,” “Imago Blue,” and “In the Fen Country,” are such “voice” stories, stories that came to me as gifts fully formed: for the most part I felt like a stenographer, merely copying them down and then cleaning them up a lot.

  Unfazed by all this, my intrepid publisher, Bold Strokes Books, has planned a second volume of stories in six months or so, and most of those are also “voice” stories. They’re even stranger than these, and not really romances, some not even gay in any way. They’re titled Twelve O’Clock Tales, because around midnight is when I sat down to write most of them, and it’s a good time for you to read them too.…Boo!

  Felice Picano

  Gratitude

  Both women had stepped away from the table. Lizabeth, his agent, to the restroom, Andrea Kelton, the editor who’d just said the words to make him float on air while seated still on the big moderne banquette, had received a phone call from her office and had wandered off somewhere at the far end of the restaurant trying to get better wireless reception. Leaving Niels Llewellyn alone to sit and gloat. Around him: the delicate tinkle of crystal and silver against porcelain in the overpriced eatery, and its otherwise artful sonic decor of swirling waters covering the multimillion-dollar deals being proposed and sealed by the industrial and media movers and shakers about the big, posh, water-hushed room.

  It was something to savor, as had been Kelton’s words, “this is unquestionably your breakthrough book. We’re so proud to be involved!” Followed rapidly by further indications of how proud they actually were, including the stunning figures of the enormous first printing the company had settled upon, the pre-publication acceptance as a “main selection” by the book club, with its own concomitant huge printing, and even—he was to expect it as soon as this week—an unprecedented further advance upon his advance of a year past, actual cash more than double what he’d received, as though confirming the success of a novel not yet in print, never mind one liable to ever succumb to the vagaries of the marketplace.

  Lizabeth returned first, and confirmed the second advance and pre-sale and huge printing all meant there were to be no vagaries of the marketplace at all now. They—she and he, together for twenty-six long years, through wheat and chaff—had been elevated, as though on an enormous dose of morphine, a good half foot so far above the buy-and-sell mentality that had so enclosed them all of their professional and personal relationship. Niels was now about to become a “personage,” and she too, at least in the “industry” a correlative mini-personage. They toasted each other’s good sense and tenacity and lifted a glass edge toward whatever literary gods there still might be in this ghastly age, to help them ever onward.

  Then Kelton was back, closing the phone and saying, “The advertisements are set now for a national vend. Six major newspapers and three magazines,” and Niels sank back into the banquette and listened almost as though he were not the major reason, but instead some hanger-on, or better yet and ironically, given his age, a child, as the glories of his immediate future were trotted out in all the brightest colors with metaphorical pennants excitedly set to fly in front of him.

  He was hardly a child. Closer to sixty than fifty. No friend to the reflections of windowpanes and looking glasses that had a startling way of creeping up and suddenly presenting him to his nowadays always unsuspecting and usually horrified self.

  “About time,” some would say. His previous agent, gone into real estate in Gulfstream St. Pete; his sister, an aged thing upon a stick who lived in Middleton, New Jersey, on a government pension and who he still held responsible for his mother’s death: responsible by means of her unbending maternal neglect; was it half a lifetime ago? “About time,” a few dusty professors would utter, those not yet retired, who’d gone to college with him, saying it with a bit more fire, a smidgen more respect. “About damned time!” his few pupils over the years would celebrate, wherever they celebrated these days; he expected in their overpriced apartments in the wilds of Queens or Staten Island, after all, who could afford to live in Manhattan except the wealthy and the few like him who actually were more or less rent-controlled unto death?

  The celebration soon over, the women once more drawn to the cell phones, someone—he didn’t know, he didn’t care, which—paid for the, of course, overpriced lunch, and they all stood, made kissing-like gestures in each other’s direction and slowly slid out of the water-tumbled dining chamber and into a corridor, into a bar, toward a coat check room, into another corridor, and out onto the front foyer where men with suits even he knew were ridiculously expensive—suits he soon could buy should he care to change his look (“Post-Graduate” one magazine had written of his habitual costume)—were entering.

  In the spring afternoon sunshine, Lizabeth spotted a taxi, and Andrea mentioned they were going the same way. Touchy kisses this time from the two of them, as the middle-aged women skipped chattering like preteen girls through the Mid-Fifties street traffic and into the cab door, “No-No”ing another matron foolish enough to try to beat them to it. Then the taxi slid forward, they were gone, and Niels was alone.

  “It’s April ninth!” Niels found himself saying to three other women, stepping around him without even a look back headed into the restaurant’s foyer, then he moved out of their way, forward into the 2:06 p.m. noise and grime of a midtown sidewalk.

  “About time!” he repeated to himself with secret joy, wondering with a start how life would be different now. “You’re lucky, N.,” Scott Fortismann had said to him only a few nights ago, “fate is saving you for last, for when you’re ready for it. Unlike poor schmuck me, you’ll be able to handle and thus enjoy your fame when it comes.” To which Niels had answered, “If it comes!” and been clapped on the shoulder and assured all across Riverside Drive and into Scott’s hundred-thousand-dollar Merce coupe that it would, it would, Scott Fortismann knew for sure.

  Scott of course had become famous early, twenty-eight, world-famous at thirty-four with Nets, and so had been famous seemingly forever and it had ruined him. Scott would reiterate that to Niels during their long (and on Scott’s part—increasingly booze-tinged) meals. And Niels could see for himself: the lengthy, expensive, disgraceful, emotional, first divorce. The seemingly abandoned children who’d come to hate Scott. Nicky nearly murdering his father that in
sane afternoon on the yacht in Antigua. Brenda in and out of jail or Payne Whitney or more lately caught up in the bust of the latest escort service to take her in. Scott himself going from wife to wife, girlfriend to girlfriend, even drifting into Niels’s territory awhile, with that much younger and somewhat questionable African American minimalist, what was his name, Nigeria Sands? More disrepute at their very public breakup at the Venice Biennale. Providing ignominious material for half a week of say-anything-just-so-long-as-you-show-everything (and they did!) European scandal sheets. Their few remaining friends, their colleagues certainly, and much of the reading public had come to expect Scott Fortismann’s very public romances and breakups so they could afterward savor them, endlessly rehashing them, appreciating them, a great deal more than his dwindling output of serious plays.

  Scott Fortismann would probably be the only one of what was left of Niels’s so-called “circle” (long perdu thanks to car accidents, air accidents, overdoses, suicide, cancer, and AIDS) who’d be truly happy for Niels now. The others, well, what had Samantha W. mouthed off last week? “For every artist who makes it in this damned country, fifty others have to fall down in front of a bus.” No, they wouldn’t so much like it, would they? No matter what they would actually say to his face—and who could blame them?

  He’d reached the corner of Fifth Avenue, where a complete tangle of traffic appeared to come from two directions. A crowd of pedestrians was gathered under the construction scaffolding, barring Niels from even seeing what was going on in the middle of the intersection—if not from hearing shouted drivers’ curses and the incessant honking of car horns.