Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana

Author:Gary Indiana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: aids fiction, novels set in bookstores, writers in love, artists in love, novels about artists, novels about writers, east village new york, east village novel, lgbt love story, lgbt romance, gay love story, gay romance, art fiction, artist novel, counterculture fiction, subculture fiction, no wave fiction, no wave novel, 1980s novel, 1980s fiction, 1980s new york, new york novel, 1990s new york, 1990s fiction, aids-era fiction, lgbt canon, lgbt fiction, gay novel, gay classic, gay fiction, aids-era novel, lgbt novel
ISBN: 9781609808624
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2018-08-24T18:00:00+00:00

7

A memorable lie, as it turns out. On Friday Victor arrives two hours late, adding to the senseless panic I feel when I wake up: Gregory’s coming here, at last. If he sees what a slob I am he’ll have all the more reason to despise me, we’ve got to get everything spotless, and how is that even possible, there’s no place to hide all these years’ worth of idiotic accumulation, all these books, newspapers, it’s my mother’s fault, she’s never thrown anything out, at home there are thousands of shoe boxes full of receipts and notebooks and family snapshots, I’m just like her, with Gregory I’m actually turning into her, why has it always been so strange between me and my mother when I’m exactly like her, and Gregory, Gregory’s a bit like my father, clever with his hands, anyway, this is the trouble with getting involved with people, they don’t know what they’re supposed to be with each other so they turn into their parents. Dear Christ, this place is filthy. It’s a wonder I’m not insane. Victor can somehow manage all this brutal organizing, what stops me, exactly? I’m afraid of this piled-up crap everywhere. It’s my life, it’s stronger than me.

I don’t mind watching Victor clear everything out of here. It’s less of a decision if he does it. I’ve lived here too long. You can’t have your own life in New York except if you’re rich. For years and years I’ve been going through this door, down and up these stairs, in the door again, the mailbox has brought me millions of pieces of waste paper, most of them still lying around in disturbing clumps, stuffed into shoe boxes, Victor sweeps through the apartment swabbing down surfaces while I yearn for a garbage dumpster big enough to swallow the entire past. Books, books everywhere. I suppose this is my life, my books. Virginia Woolf and Leopardi and Henry James and Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann and Heinrich Mann, Chekhov Turgenev Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë and George Eliot, Defoe and Fielding and Swift and Pope, Byron Shelley Keats, Hazlitt, Herzen, most of all Nietzsche, Sartre, Darwin, Lévi-Strauss Plato Plutarch Pliny the Elder Pliny the Younger, Seneca’s Letters, Olga Freidenberg’s letters to Pasternak, Brecht, Euripides, Don Quixote (both versions), Dante, Ford Madox Ford, Swift, Kleist, Kafka, the Fugger Newsletters; these are the memories I’ve ended up keeping, Herodotus, no snapshots, Emerson, no souvenirs, History and Class Consciousness, some day I’ll regret not holding on to other things, mementos, when my parents die, though of course now there’s every chance I’ll die before they do, how strange that must be, thousands of children dying before their parents do. Libby says she wishes she had tape-recorded her father’s voice, because now she finds herself forgetting what he sounded like. Next time I go home I should tape them talking, though they never do say anything worth remembering, never open up, I’ve never had the faintest clue what

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