I Can Give You Anything but Love by Indiana Gary

Author:Indiana, Gary [Indiana, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780847847228
Goodreads: 27272161
Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
Published: 2015-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

After my breakfast amphetamine and tepid instant Nescafé on Monday mornings, I maneuvered into light Santa Monica Boulevard traffic and headed for the 101, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on the eight-track player. Mild cases of road rage and games of chicken in the lanes around me brought the earth plane into reach as speed dissolved my hangover into soothing oneness with the ozone-heavy smog. Goddamn it, I sometimes thought, I am doing something noble with my nonexistence, even if it’s something small and stupid that anyone could do.

Breezing into reception at Legal Aid instantly sucked me into the Problem of Race in America. Greeted by incredulous, angry stares, my blood pressure surged with selfless virtue. The loathing “our clients” directed at homosexuals was thought to derive from indoctrination by the black churches. Relieving their distress while meeting their hostility with a smile, I habitually mistook my reciprocal loathing of them for righteous anger over the racially motivated injustices that they sat in the waiting room glowering about.

These unfortunate souls had usually been served with papers from landlords, warrants from the sheriff’s office, notices of repossession and imminent seizure of goods, intimidating documents that demanded an immediate, legally framed reply. By the time people showed up at Legal Aid, the last possible deadline for this response had usually long passed, and the remaining available recourse was practically nil. It was always the eleventh hour, or considerably later. All the business of our office was a rushed, urgent, desperate last-ditch effort. Overtime was the only time we knew.

The clients came in all shapes and sizes, though they tended to be either gaunt and indignant or fat and tearful. They were victims of domestic violence. Also perpetrators of domestic violence. Their husbands or wives or children were serving time for assault, drug dealing, car theft, arson, kidnapping their own children, or petty larceny. They ran amok in supermarkets with machetes. They walked off psychiatric wards against medical advice. They used public transit as a toilet.

Their hopelessness scared me. Yet I was fascinated by them, and hoped I was gleaning material for the novel I would write one day, if I ever worked up the nerve. Tireless raconteurs, as hopeless people tend to be, they spilled their entire lives while I shamelessly babbled encouragement while doing “intake”:

“Let’s see. It says here your name is Queen Elizabeth Jones? And you were in Sybil Brand for three years? Queen Elizabeth, can you tell me what you were in Sybil Brand for exactly?”

“I hit my old man.”

“Uh-huh. You hit your husband.”

“Nigger ain’t my husband. Boyfriend smacked me, I hit him with a piece of metal.”

“Wait, you got three years for hitting your boyfriend with a piece of metal?”

“Yeah, out of the mouf of a .44!”

I felt less fucked up the more I listened to them. On a good day, I considered myself lucky to have a job and a paycheck, relieved that I was only gay and unstable instead of black and penniless.

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