Ripcord by Nate Lippens

Author:Nate Lippens [Lippens, Nate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2024-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

8

Charlie and I talk about acquaintances flying off to destination weddings and circuit parties. How men scoff at using condoms because they're on PrEP and antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia rates are soaring. We both hate it all, but what else can we do? Even a hermit needs to get dicked down sometimes.

After Leo dumped me, I told Greer I was back on the market, and she said you are not a commodity. But we all are. This world treats us all as whores and then we spend our social lives convincing ourselves someone else is a dirtier, nastier whore than us. Respectability politics is not rimming dirty assholes for fun, I guess.

I don't understand the world now. I feel like a faggotus rex. But the truth is I didn't understand the world back then either.

* * *

I crave an old encounter. The feeling when you run into someone you haven't seen in a long time, and you realize it's an affront to them you no longer carry yourself like you are ashamed to be alive. I want to be him again.

* * *

Charlie shows me old copies of the AIDS zine Diseased Pariah News. We flip through them. Pitch-black humor by people with AIDS for people with AIDS. It upset pieties, including my own. There was a New Age push during the height of the AIDS epidemic to heal by loving yourself. The implication being you'd gotten sick by not loving yourself. Loving and healing and letting go. All that rot. Derek Jarman talked about being encouraged to use Buddhist detachment from pain: “Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness, but he wasn't attached to a drip … we all contemplated suicide.”

The period was suffused with sickness, and not just illness but the immorality of politicians, preachers, and healers. That took a dark toll and damaged those of us who witnessed it. How do you heal after that? Many had to forget, to bury their friends and their feelings. The rage was too much. Others rode it out, but it wore them down. Some withdrew. Some became scolds, mouth-pieces, experts. Some turned to drugs. Ron Athey said, “Is healing being restored to what you were when you were twenty-three? Or is healing becoming a kind of monster on the other side who survived?” You can't go backward and be restored. You must be a monster. There's something of the harridan's laugh having come out the other side. You're scarred but alive. I think of Marianne Faithfull describing her voice as “loaded with time.” What can you do but sing?

* * *

I remember the list of afflictions, the suffering. All the queens dying. Regicide. And then I would work as many shifts as I could until I had money. I saved to spend it all on a ticket somewhere else, to start over. As if death wouldn't follow.

* * *

In an interview, the writer is asked about a story in which the narrator “wonders whether there is a way of being selfish without hurting anyone.

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