The Gutter Prophet

Waverly SM

First published in Emerge: 2019 Lambda Fellows Anthology. With heartfelt thanks to Nicole and Cat.

“Did you learn your lesson from Harvey Weinstein?” asked the gutter prophet on Santa Monica Boulevard, hard-eyed and unyielding in the way he held my gaze. His dirt-caked skin pulled itself taut over knucklebone, jawbone; all the technicolour lights of the bars along the block couldn’t cut through the devouring black of his jacket. I was barely a person, cigarette smouldering quietly in my hand. I didn’t know enough to look away.

“Yeah,” I said, and I scuffed my boot against the sidewalk’s edge, like it needed more scuffing — the sidewalk or the boot. 

“And did you learn your lesson from Kevin Spacey?”

I shrugged my dumb sloping shoulder, satchel slipping and dragging my jacket down after. “Sure.”

“And did you learn your lesson from Woody Allen?”

Retro Kesha thrummed in my wrists, spilling onto the street from the bar on the corner of the block. The mess of WeHo gays in the outdoor smoking pen lit up at the sound of her voice, united in a single shriek of joy. A city after dark is an Impressionist painting, brushstrokes and smudges in washed-out blacks and searing colours. A city after dark is a body, bruised in neon and light pollution, black like the sky and blue like sirens wailing, harmonic, past. “I guess.”

“Then you see my fucking point,” said the gutter prophet of gay West Hollywood, and jabbed his pointer finger in my face two times, before he rounded on the world beyond the corner and stalked into the night.

There was no point to be seen, though it took me a moment to remember. He spoke with such authority, the low rasp of his voice as insistent as stubble on skin, and I was all alone under a blank Los Angeles sky. I would have believed in anything, which was why I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my contacts for Will. The harsh blue backlight turned his face into a poem: the faint suggestion of a fuckboy pout, a world-weary middle-distance stare.

Kesha switched places with Adam Lambert, a vintage I must have been too fake-woke in 2010 to recall. I took a step, and then another, toward the frozen yogurt place two doors down. Cool phone glass pressed unsteady to my ear; my cigarette hand bore witness to its burning-paper warmth. I listened for the trill through the heartbeat pound of duelling speakers, bleeding from smoking sections into the night.

“Yeah?” he asked, hangover-hoarse and immaculate — I mean immaculate in the Catholic way, like free from the sin of warm breath on my cheek. I folded myself into a pocket of space between storefronts, invisible as I knew how to become. “What’s up?”

“Hi,” I said, no breath in my throat for more. He’d always been a perfect thief. I’d had the breath, moments ago; I’d watched my own lips part to release it, laced with tar and smoke. I’d had the words, too, I was certain. I knelt inside my body and I scrabbled on the asphalt to retrieve them. “Will. Are you coming?”

“Hmm?” A moment’s airless quiet. On my knees inside my skin, I caught myself in the instinct-act of prayer.

“I’m out,” I said, trapped the t between my teeth, bit down hard on an unspoken motherfucker. “Like I said. Are you coming or not?”

“Oh,” he said, long and slow, sinking down a sliding scale like the floor of my hollowed stomach. “Oh, dude. I fucked up?” It was no kind of question at all, and he must have known it, because he echoed himself like a bell in the quiet dark: “I fucked up. I’m so sorry.”

I slumped inside my person suit and told myself I’d known all along.

“I’m leaving in like two days.” I measured out my words in coffee spoons. “I’m meant to spend tomorrow with my sister.”

“Yeah,” he said, as though he’d remembered. A perfect thief, a perfect grifter, cheating me out of breath and speech and time. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know if I’m gonna… like, I don’t think it’s gonna happen this time.”

The implication of a next time skipped clean over my jumprope heart, cast an unattainable smile over its shoulder, and vanished into a bar down the block.

“I guess,” I agreed, dropped my cigarette butt to the sidewalk and ground it to nothing with the ball of my foot. “I guess you’re right.” 

It was no consolation to hear him strain for a way to end the call.

After goodbye, I put my phone into my satchel and I grabbed the fake ID I’d bought in advance of my flight out of England. You can drink at eighteen where I come from; it’s not like breaking the law if the law is patently ignorant. Los Angeles laid claim to around half of my family when I was ten years old and kept them away from me until my plane flew in last week. Los Angeles gathered Will into its arms after his life fell apart in the last flameout months of a fireball summer, new media slamming down strangers shot after shot after shot. I couldn’t have told you which was the greater enticement for me — not because I didn’t know, but because I knew too well.

The doorman looked from me to the photo on the card, looking through the second skin painted onto my face by the light. When he waved me in, I breathed out with my whole body — breathed out Will and the prophet and the last suggestions of tar on my tongue and teeth.

The bar was cowboy kitsch, aged wood panelling sodden through with beer, upsettingly sinewy horses racing through gaudy, flourishing frames. A muscle gay in a rhinestoned hat mixed drinks in the shadow of a wall-mounted TV set. I walked like I belonged, although I didn’t. Adam Lambert had long since ceded the floor to Destiny’s Child, who swung their hips together in the heaven on the screen; in the incandescent purgatory of the dancefloor, a universe of strangers fell back through time as one. I fumbled in my satchel for my wallet, folded out dollar bills and fanned them like cards in my hand. I leaned against the bar, overspill soaking into the front of my shirt, but of course the bartender took his time to see me; left there holding the money, bereft of conversation or company, I tried to fan myself off with the bills, though I couldn’t muster the charm to make it work.

Los Angeles assumes that you will never be alone; it accounts for you plus one, invites you to its parties and then leaves you to drink by yourself. When Will crash-landed here, he threw himself right onto the dancefloor, shoved his hands in strangers’ pockets like he hadn’t learned a thing. He had to, he said, his Insta story dripping with picture-perfect faces, highway lights streaking by through tinted Uber windows. You roll up to the city with a suitcase and a history and know inside your bones that you will die if left alone. You rewrite yourself in real-time onto the minds and bodies of people who don’t know better. I didn’t know better. All that ever separated me from his palimpsest onlookers was distance; I was never in LA, until now.

“All right, all right, all right,” cooed a sugar-voiced stranger through the speakers hanging high on the walls. The beat shifted, skipped; all sound in the world fell away except a finger-picked guitar, dragged through a synth and punctuated by a wave of screamed-out joy. “Show a little love for Carl—” stretched out long and rhotic the way Americans do, Carrrrrrrl with the L curling up like burning paper at its edge. The scream redoubled itself, and through the wall of sound the bartender yelled in my ear: yo, what can I get you tonight?

I stammered, then squared my shoulders, satchel too heavy on my left-hand side. “Vodka tonic,” I said, and crumpled up my fan on to the bar. “Thank you.”

Carl’s voice soared above the soundtrack, unimpeachably on key in a way that knifed through my gut. “We clawed, we chained our hearts in vain,” sliding effortlessly up and down the octave in a way that belied his body. The words stuck in my throat like a howl I didn’t dare to unleash on the world. The bartender slid a plastic cup across the bar to me, my sodden dollar bills overspilling from his fist.

“Don’t you ever say I just walked away,” sang Carl, screamed the bar en masse, and my phone in my bag was so still and so silent as the music hollowed out my chest. “I will always want you.” In suspended animation between chorus and bridge, in the wait-for-it space between bars, the West Hollywood congregation caught its collective breath. 

I, Will, always want you. I tipped my vodka tonic down my throat, and I howled along in chorus with the crowd.

I left before I meant to, with the alcohol talking to my meds in the chambers of my heart; their conversation landed in my ears all wrong, throwing my body out of joint. The air had eased up in the hours I’d spent dancing, cooled down enough that it almost felt like home. I dragged my feet down Santa Monica to the bus stop, folded myself up onto a bench that was only incidentally designed for sitting. There was no sign of the prophet, though the hard-edged ripples of the bench under my butt made me wonder where he would end up sleeping that night. There’s no place for human frailty in LA, nowhere to go when you’re down and out. Even the dog park down the street was astroturf, rather than grass.

I leaned back, but my shoulders met nothing but air, and I scrambled into a forward motion like a cat righting itself after a fall. There’s a reason they land on their feet, I think; it’s not luck but preparedness, not a gift of genetics but a studied hypervigilance that’s terrified of other people’s laughter. The sky was rinsed clean of stars overhead. The absence of an arm around my waist was an open wound.

Some stranger sat down next to me, older and brown with eyes that spoke to endless smiles gone by. He offered a smile to me as he sat, one off the top of his infinite supply; I answered it half-heartedly with my own threadbare simulacrum. “Hey,” I said, though competing songs from packed-together bars did their best to drown me out. It was apathy more than it was courtesy. It couldn’t get weirder than the prophet in his void-black coat, who had seized the thread of my bad decisions and pulled; I’d become untouchable, braced against fear by the cruel coincidence of his insight.

My phone was in my satchel, and I hadn’t checked it since Will hung up. If I didn’t look, then maybe he had texted. I would have believed anything, still, clinging to arbitrary omens with the afterglow of music cooling sticky and stale on my skin. If I didn’t look, then maybe he was coming after all.

I didn’t look. I looked at the stranger instead.

His grey-brown hair was tousled and damp with sweat; maybe we’d come from the same bar, and I’d missed him somewhere in the music and the crowd. He wasn’t dressed for dancing, but neither was I, and the ache in my calves and my feet still screamed like proof of life. Besides, I liked the thought of him dancing. I liked the thought of myself dancing, years down the line, older and wiser but no less prepared to hand over my common sense for the sake of a decent party. I’d be at home in my body at last, when I was sixty-five, and I’d dance through the bone-pain and grief until time could no longer keep up with me on the floor.

The stranger looked back at me through thick, dust-flecked spectacles, like I was a puzzle piece he was considering how to place. “Don’t you ever say I just walked away,” he sang at last, with a knowing spark in his eye and no suggestion of a key — he didn’t need one, said my heart, as it cramped up tight in my chest. “I will always want you.” I guess I must have been pretty distinctive, an underdressed kid scream-singing Miley with an accent that meant someplace else. I guess I hadn’t been paying much attention, swept up in Carl-with-an-R and his my bitter-tasting drink and the space at my side that should and shouldn’t have been Will’s.

I laughed down into my hands, wrenched my gaze away from his. “Yeah,” I said, breathing out the word like I couldn’t live with the air. If gravity had only allowed it, I would have fallen from the bench into the sky. “Yeah, that was me. It’s, uh… you know.”

“I know,” he said. Mexican accent: maybe he was from someplace else, too. I believed him, regardless, though I think my belief has never meant all that much. 

“Are you okay?” he asked me, when I didn’t say anything more. He laid his hand carefully on the rounded curve of my shoulder — the opposite of pointing, of insisting. I could have cried at the sweetness of it, that out-of-nowhere kindness from someone who had no reason to be kind. I wanted to ask his name. I wanted to ask where he’d come from, where he was going. I wanted to offer him all the faith I’d placed in Will, every scrap of clumsy misguided love, and let him absolve me of my every mistake. Are you okay, he asked me, and I knew I would never tell him anything. I’d cry myself sick if I ever tried; if I gave the grief an inch, it would take all the thousands of miles I’d crossed to meet it face to face.

“Yeah,” I said, again, and smiled through a thin film of salt slow tears. “I’ll be okay.”

It was the best I could do; it would have to be enough. 

I closed my eyes on the bright-light pain of not quite crying, and I don’t know if I’d say I saw the point, in the dark and lonely place where my eyelids joined shut. I don’t know if I believe that there ever was a point. But the stranger pressed my shoulder with his hand — the best he could do, in return — and he stayed with me until the bus pulled in, headlights knifing through the night like scissor blades. He steadied me when I got to my feet, my every nerve electric with the remnants of the buzz; I watched him from the window as the bus began to move, until I was carried unceremoniously off around the corner, and the stranger passed to memory from view.