Shuck (11 page)

I have a particular problem with garden-variety adjectives.

Trapping them in, I feel the combustion building up, and then when my tongue blasts flapping out of my mouth, there's no telling
what
I'll say. Even worse, in polite social situations when I have to swallow these dangerous subject-verb-object combinations (which often seem quite harmless to me), my stomach's at full blowout risk.

I called his painting “infantile,” but I meant to say “innocent.” Is that the worst crime in the world?

Screw vocabulary.

Gem Spa on First Avenue is the coolest bodega I know, and not only because they have the biggest magazine selection in the East Village, or because they have those quirky red-and-white striped paper cups that you can't find anywhere else.

It's because of the clientele, but not who you think.

Liza Minnelli on one of her midnight benders? Who cares.

Alec Baldwin getting a
New York Post
and flipping to the Page Six gossip column so he can remember what he did the night before? Old news.

Susan Lucci mapping news clippings of herself into some kind of astrological chart to predict when her second Daytime Emmy Award win will be? As if.

These and other washed-up stars lurk around in semi-transparent shades, checking to see if they can still make the magazine covers. The glasses are semi-transparent because they want to be recognized, of course, while they still can.

No, Gem Spa's main attraction is somebody entirely different.

Celebrity photog, image-maker, master of the beautifugly: David LaChurch.

May's covers are stacked in a grid of risers—a magazine altar. I want to lick the fruit-loop ink right off them because they celebrate everything I hold dear about hard luck. David LaChurch is the only
photographer who can make a candy-coated masterpiece out of the sheep manure that life slings at you.

The Face
: Drew Barrymore in a banana yellow waitress's uniform, sprawled on the floor of a typical New Jersey diner, miles away from the set of
E.T.
, one perky breast hanging out amid spilled grapefruit and maraschino cherries. She's wearing a cutout paper tiara made for the disposable age.

Details
: Leonardo DiCaprio, post-
Titanic
but looking pre-pubescent, bleeding sexily under a crown of thorns. His lips are so red, it's either lip-gloss or blood. There's something quintessentially New York about glorifying little-boy masculinity. There's something hopelessly LA about a corrupted Beverly Hills brat striking a Jesus pose.

It disgusts me that these actors know nothing about the hardship they're portraying, but at least they're trying to make it look real.

Rolling Stone
: Trent Reznor with his lips sewn shut, lying on a bed of white fur. Cheap, silver-painted Realistic microphone for the Lo-Fi age. Everybody knows there's no way to shut Reznor up, so we'll chalk it up to LaChurch's meticulous airbrushing team.

Interview
: The hotel room is washed Pepto-Bismol pink. An overweight Courtney Love look-alike in a pink Chantilly lace prom dress and messy lipstick. She's serving a rat on a silver platter to a faux “Girlie Show”-era Madonna (in a wheelchair, no less) who's smoking a set of wrinkles into herself. Nipple tassels for the age of the young-at-heart, when you can be anyone in the world. Not that you'd want to.

Paper
: Lily Tomlin in a fern-choked forest, sitting on a giant spotted mushroom, using a lichen for a footstool. The spots make her mottled complexion look amazing by comparison. She sips, shell-shocked and staring into the camera, from a straw stuck in a red-and-white striped
Gem Spa cup.

Spin
: Tom Jones in a hot pink catsuit, hanging off the mirror bracket of an eighteen-wheeler that's stopped in front of an inflatable Uniroyal tire the size of a house. The gayest straight man in pop music (aside from Ricky Martin) is singing to the vanishing point on the road in front of him. An anthem for the lost and misguided.

The Advocate
: It makes sense that a celebrity photographer is his own best model. David himself in a boxing ring, looking bruised but defiant, swatting at invisible ghosts who shadow-punch him. Good metaphor for how the pundits get on his case about taking vacuous pictures of nothing, and him hustling past those who can't appreciate the nothingness of life.

May is a Technicolor sweep. I hear that David's making a film, something to pull us all deeper into LaChurch Land. I can hardly wait for these covers to come to life.

Then I see it.

It looks right at home, nestled between Leonardo and Trent.

Playguy
: Jaeven Marshall in a concrete half-pipe, sprawled topless in skintight grass-stained jeans, holding a skateboard between his open legs. If you focus real hard, you can almost see the wheels spinning. Baseball cap cocked to the indigo sky, middle finger sprouting from a hand scraped red and raw. Shadows play with the contours of his crotch. A hero for the can't-give-a-shit.

These tiny shards of chemical glass that I swish into cans of Red Bull (sometimes it's a yellowish powder that smells like cat pee—every bathtub lab is different) is finally creeping into New York. They say
it has already eaten up all the young gay men on the West Coast, and now it needs new blood. They say it makes us unsafe, makes us fuck each other without condoms. It wastes us until we turn into gargoyles and paw at each other's deformed faces. Friends become impossible to recognize, so they say.

Whatever.

Some people are oblivious to the fact that there are always two ways to spin something, that every side effect has an equal and opposite benefit. Some people are stupid. Most of them, actually.

It's very simple. ADD takes my alertness away. Crystal meth gives it back. The universe takes care of itself.

A lot of kids smoke it, but that's too
junkie
for me, and snorting has never been my trip. Sure, meth can make you sick if you drink too much of it, and some people have to get their stomach pumped. I'm not like that, though. I would rather stick my fingers down my throat than visit a hospital. They take your drugs away in there, believing the media hype.

Anyways, it was all I could do to get through a Richard Rorschach photo shoot and have me be anything but a blur. He's too intense for me.

“Look at you, right.”

Richard dipped the tea bag in his cup like he was going fishing.

“You're still beautiful,” he went on. “New York has had its paws all over you and you still shine.”

I wondered if he could see my teeth chatter and my eyes go squiggly. He was expecting me to say something.

“Right,” I said.

Richard led me to a work table, gave me a magnifying loupe, and slid a row of negatives on the light tray, as neatly and meticulously as
he did everything.

It was from the last photo shoot. I had gone crazy with a roll of masking tape, fashioning myself a coat of beige adhesive armor, then a baseball uniform, then binding and gagging myself. A knight, an athlete, a prisoner: masking tape versions of people I've wanted to be, each of them heroic in their own special way.

“It's amazing how many different Jaevens can be convincingly you. You're the real deal.”

“I see.”

Richard pressed my hand on the light tray like a cop taking fingerprints.

“Yeah, right, look.”

When a light flushes your skin, your skin turns into glowing rice paper. Your veins pulse red and translucent. The mystery of you disappears, and so does the fear. Richard was the real light box, and he shone brightly through me every time I was with him.

“So what are you going to give me today?”

Thank God Richard didn't shoot porn.

I tore the cushions off his couch and threw them on the floor. This was going to go down as planned, as I mapped it out when I was giving ass to a boring trick and I needed to escape cerebrally to a sixth floor in Tribeca.

“I'm going to show you what I feel like these days.”

Cushioned thud. The weight of limbs. I fell on my face, all the while locking gaze with the camera lens, with Richard. I wanted him to capture the look in my eyes just before I hit the floor—what I imagined would be a creeping fearlessness. The look of young men when they realize they own the city they're enslaved to.

We shot a couple of rolls. There were no mirrors in Richard's place.
I tried to picture what he saw that day, what gave him that slapped look of awe, what made him emerge from behind the lens and stare straight at me as I fell time and time again. Maybe he was seeing invisible bruises. There were real ones for sure, when my shoulder missed the cushion and slammed into the hardwood floor, but those aren't the kind that stay with you.

We finished and he snuck the film away to what I guessed was his darkroom. He came out after a while, pensive and quiet. I whipped out my notebook, lay shirtless on the floor, and started to write about Derek.

“I mean the pillows, right?” he said. “There's someone you trust or
want
to trust, so it was like, let's go there.”

“I see them more as cushions.”

“Whatever, come on.”

“You're still way off.”

“I mean, your face was like, hello?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Okay, good. Because you should just let it happen. Do you mind if I shoot? Why don't I get you a tea?”

“Whatever. Sure.”

“Don't stop what you're doing,” he said. “It's cool.”

Our relationship changed. From that day on, I went to Richard's to write, he shot, and he brought me a piping cup of jasmine tea roughly every four pages.

One of the massages that made me famous:

Full Swedish treatment including muscle pulverization. Phil cried
like a little boy.