The Gay Gatsby by B. A. Baker

Author:B. A. Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, new york city, parody, metafiction, mashup, remix, lgbtq, flapper, lgbtq humor, lgbtq scifi
Publisher: B. A. Baker

Chapter 6: Prevention

Now I will tell the story of Dan Cody, who once met a young Gaylord Gatsby and changed his life forever.

It isn't easy to say what a young Bruce Gaytz of North Dakota would have taken in satisfaction knowing about where in his status he may have been at this moment in time, in this place in Long Island's West Egg where he currently resided.

Bruce Gaytz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of eighteen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was Bruce Gaytz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Gaylord Gatsby who borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the "U.S.S. Masculine Delight" and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.

(Everything I say to you now, of course, is part of a grand illusion of which I had been subjected to for reasons I could not comprehend. "Gaylord Gatsby" was the alternate, false name for Jay Gatsby, and his legal name was of course James Gatz. But we will not dwell on this just yet.)

I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his imagination had never really accepted them as part of his future even though he loved them a lot and they loved him back like in any healthy family relationship. The truth was that Gaylord Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself, or rather a Pragmatic one if we are to judge by the theories about love I mentioned to Jordan somewhat earlier. Gaylord was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meticulous beauty. So he invented just the sort of Gaylord Gatsby that an eighteen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam digger and a woodsman logger or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, bronzed, hardening body lived naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days. He knew men early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night, especially when he began sharing those beds with whoever would embrace him first. A universe of

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