Escapes
art by Jameson Currier
pencil, watercolor and ink on paper
20180225002

Escapes

by Jameson Currier

The job starts it, of course, not the job but the lack of a job, or, rather, the lack of a career, not that I have a lack of a career—I know what I want to do, it’s just that I can’t make a living doing it because I have to work at a job and not a career but the problem is not everyone believes that my career is a career, after all, not even a job, really, because when you deconstruct the problem, I mean, who reads gay fiction, you know, everyone says now it’s a limited market and now it’s shrinking not growing, but that’s not what makes me fill the glass—not the state of the art or, rather, the lack of the art, the lack of the state of gay literature, it’s the fact that I don’t have the time to work at it anyway and try to make it better, or, at least, my output of it better, and even when I can find the time, squeezing a half-hour here, ten minutes there, I can’t find the energy to do it anymore because all I want to do is escape from it because it’s become so hard to do now because I am always studying it or searching for a different story to tell and then when I work it all out in my head there’s the time and the energy obstacles again and then I come home from the job-that-is-not-my career and all I want to do is relax and get away from the idea of that job-that-is-not-my-career and that’s when I pour the first glass even when I know I should be at least reading something even if I am not writing anything so as soon as I take the sip from the glass and feel a tiny little explosion of relaxation in my brain that’s when I try to go through the mail, to at least feel like I am accomplishing something, but the bills pull me down and I end up looking through one of the new catalogs or brochures for vacations and items I can’t afford which, of course, is the basis of one of the other problems, the problem that leads me to refill the glass again and sip some more even as the dizziness lets me dream that I can escape and take a vacation which will get me out of this lousy four-wall box of an apartment that has no view even though the view is not what is the lousiest thing about this apartment, what’s the lousiest is that the hot water doesn’t work when I need it to, the windows don’t lock, the electricity goes out even though this apartment costs more money than the apartment I lived in before this one but at least in that apartment I didn’t have to blame anyone for the crap except myself because it was a cheap, lousy apartment instead of an expensive, lousy box imitating an apartment that I always have to work and work and work to pay the rent for every month because nothing in this life is easy anymore, you know, not even finding a trick is easy but that’s not because I’m not trying, it’s because I’ve burned out on that too, not really tricking, but on trying to make conversation to initiate the trick, because it all seems so futile, you know, not the tricking because if I wanted to I could get someone and I could do it, sex is never difficult to find in this city, it’s just that I’ve done all that before for years and years and years and now I want something else, something different, a relationship, but even the quest for that has left me bone dry because I am trying so hard to make it work with that married-man-who can’t-make-a-commitment who started me on this heavy sipping in the first place because we do it together, or, rather, I do it with him because he likes to do it on the nights when we’re together, to help him fall asleep, or so he says, and I do it to be with him and not alone in my lousy, expensive box of an apartment, but what happens, of course, is he begins to show his honesty while he is sipping, because the saying is true, after all, a drunken man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts, and he begins to unravel the problems which he has with our relationship while I sip from my glass, and, you know, in all honesty, after all these years of dating him, it isn’t the idea that he wants to date other guys that really pisses me off so much it is his dishonesty of trying to cover it up for such a long time, you know, because I knew he was doing it long before he admitted it, of course, but the wounding part is not so much his desire to see other guys—okay, I’ve accepted that we have an open relationship even though I wasn’t asked to be in an open relationship—what really pisses me off are the put-downs about my weight, my hairline, and lack of money and the fact that he doesn’t think I have a real job and a real career because I can’t even pay a month’s rent, but I have to tell you, after all these years of hearing him say this over and over like a broken record I could care shit about the other guys, let them deal with him and his narcissistic behavior, but the problem is now that I can’t pull myself away from him because at least we are having sex and at least I am not alone in that tiny-box-imitating-an-apartment, and at least he supplies enough booze for me to drink and escape him, too, you know, even though I was using him to escape my cheap, lousy apartment and my job-that-is-not-a-career and the fact that I want to drink more than I want to write because what has happened is that I am so tired of pretending I want to be somewhere else when what I really want is to just get a decent night’s sleep and not to have to admit to anyone that I now have this problem on top of all the other problems, at least asleep I don’t have to pretend I want to escape that, too, you know.

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“Escapes” was written in 2001 and first published as “Glasses” in the author’s memoir, Until My Heart Stops (Chelsea Station Editions, 2015). The art was completed in 2018.