The Dreaming E-Book

Andre Bagoo

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 235

Beschreibung

These stories have the virtue of taking the everyday lives of gay Trinidadian men utterly for granted in their searches for adventure, pleasure, self-realisation, loving contact and sex. Written with a sharpness of perception and in a variety of engaging personal voices, these narratives find room for humour, tragic haircuts, and a connection between tattoos and terrible poetry. But they also acknowledge very real fears in a society where there is still prejudice, discrimination and homophobic violence. The narrator of several of these pieces is a writer who wants to focus on the pleasures and inner dramas of these lives as the truth about gay experience. But there are also the stories of brutal murders reported with coy innuendo in the press. If he is tempted to see his lovers as characters in a witty fiction of manners, is this the novel that can be written in Trinidad? And since this is Trinidad, could the conflicted, self-hating Dorian really be a serial killer? But then when one of Bagoo's writer narrators unwittingly alarms his writing buddies by the freedom of his gothic imagination, who knows what might be true. Not for nothing does the author include the singer Kate Bush with her Wuthering Heights in his acknowledgements. Bagoo's stories offer a witty and incisive portrait of contemporary Trinidad in all its intersections of race, class and gender politics. Not least, they have a strong sense of place – Bagoo's gay Woodbrook offers a fine sequel to V.S. Naipaul's Woodbrook in his classic Miguel Street.

Leseprobe

ANDRE BAGOO

THE DREAMING

CONTENTS

Haircuts

Conundrum

Simple Things

Hunger

1960

Selected Boys: 2013-2016

Bad-talking Boys

Belmont

The Forest Ranger

Preludes

MS.

Not Looking

Acknowledgments

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.

— Dylan Thomas, ‘I Fellowed Sleep’

HAIRCUTS

1.

I found another place to get my hair cut when I moved to Woodbrook. Wally, it was rumoured, had cut the hair of the former prime minister and at least three government ministers. He wore all black. He didn’t speak much. He held my head like an unusual specimen. He asked what I did, which newspaper I wrote for. He didn’t ask what I wanted done. He sized me up then started to comb and cut, all the while engaging in crosstalk with some of the other hairdressers in the salon, which was filled with gurgling fountains and Laughing Buddhas.

It was a bad haircut. My side part was crooked, lengths were mismatched, and the gentle down that had accumulated on my neck was left intact, so I had to borrow Stephan’s razor and shave it off myself in the shower the next day. I found this half-finished job odd. Wally was a household name. He had been in Woodbrook for decades, had branched out and now had several salons on both islands. His fees were not exorbitant, but they certainly weren’t low. I chalked it up to me being a new customer or Wally having an off day. Stephan was a regular. It was near to where we lived so I went back.

The second time, I told Wally I just wanted everything neatened and trimmed; he interpreted this as a desire for something bouffant and mushroom-like. The 80s was back in style. When I got home that afternoon, Stephan said Wally should have asked before giving me “a Patrick Swayze”. I chalked it up to me being unclear in my instructions. Maybe he had an off day. Stephan was a regular. It was near to where we lived. I went back.

The third time, I bumped into a high-profile lawyer who looked surprised to see me there. She had only a few weeks ago been involved in a scandal of sorts, quitting her post on a cabinet-appointed commission of inquiry. I had interviewed her. She smiled and said how good it was to see me again as she left, her hair perfectly blown out. Wally asked me how I knew her, as I showed him a photograph of what I wanted to have done with my hair. He remarked that people with my kind of hair would not be able to achieve that effect, but he would do something similar.

The result looked nothing like the image I’d saved on my phone. I couldn’t say what went wrong – that was the worst part. It had a passive-aggressive quality in how underwhelming it was, this haircut, as though the barest minimum had been done so as not to be a zog, but also not enough done to be a decent haircut. In those days, I was loathe to accept that sometimes people gave you bad service not because they can’t do better but because they’d rather you didn’t come back. I came to accept that most of the people in Wally’s salon didn’t want a journalist around. Neither did he.

I had the opposite problem in my previous place. Indira’s salon was right next to the newspaper. All of us in the paper’s three-man politics department went there regularly. In most barbershops and salons, people discuss the news. In this one, they broke out in soliloquies. I’d be forced to listen – held down in the chair by Indira’s heavy nylon bib – as customers and other people passing through loudly engaged in debate about the budget or the latest resignation or the latest on crime which, as always, was spiralling. On the one hand, I relished hearing all these perspectives. It was a good chance to get a feel for what people were saying “on the ground”. On the other hand, these outbursts had a staged air. I felt goaded. I just wanted somewhere I could relax for half hour as someone washed my hair with warm water and gently fingered my scalp with fragrant oils.

Once, fed up with the old lady who would come into the salon to berate Jack Warner and Keith Rowley every time I happened to be there, I tried another place in the mall down the street. The mall was called Excellent City Centre. There was nothing excellent about it. There was a big department store with a perpetually shifting layout; a small bakery that sold greasy pastries, dry sandwiches, mahi mahi wraps, and frosted cakes; on the upper level there were kiosks selling electronics, clothes and stationery. There was a food court where I’d go sometimes to buy steamed cassava, broccoli and stir-fried chicken. On this floor, one of the clothing stores was, in fact, also a salon. There were two barbers inside and the owner, Paula, did nails.

The first time at Paula’s, Francisco cut my hair. Handsome and chatty, he talked to me about his weekend, an epic party on the beach at Salybia. He recommended I try puncheon because I’d said I’d never tried it when he asked. His haircut was quick and sharp, like his conversation: the fade on the sides perfect, and he didn’t charge much – about the price of lunch. He smiled and told me to come back soon.

The next time I went back, Franciso had vanished. Paula, whose plastic crucifix at her nail station made plain that she was deeply religious, declared he no longer worked there but Marco, the other barber, would be happy to cut my hair. Marco looked at me as though I was a chore, then, after a few tentative starts, took about two hours to cut my short tresses. The end result looked bizarre. He’d shaved off my widow’s peak but the hairline was crooked. My forehead looked large and I seemed perpetually to be turning to the left.

I went back to Indira armed with earbuds. I felt bad at first, because this could be interpreted as rude. But I never actually played anything, I kept the music off so I could talk to Indira if she felt like chatting with me. One day, as she cut my hair (no complaints), I noticed she was breathing heavily and asked if she was okay. She said she was having health problems. The salon closed a few months later, leaving the old lady with no place to vent her frustration about the Ministry of Works and Transport.

2.

Saturdays was when Mother would give me a trim. She’d set up a stool or a chair in the kitchen of our home in Belmont, bring out a flat comb and her sharpest scissors. I wasn’t sure where she had learned to cut hair, or if she had learned anywhere at all. But she never showed any hesitation. Her grasp was firm and deliberate as she cupped my head, held my hair up as though lifting the bonnet of a car. Sometimes, because she had to angle the comb and the clippers a certain way, her fingers brushed against my scalp and this hurt because of her rings. I always hated those rings. They seemed warnings about the hard transactions of the world. But I loved these Saturdays.

One year, in secondary school, around the time I fell in love with the new boy from Fatima College, I asked Mother to shave my head bald. She used Father’s shaver (this was before Father left us). He asked why I wanted to go bald, and I said I just wanted to go back to my roots. In truth, I wanted to disappear, to be somebody else. When I went to class that week, I removed my glasses. The guy I had a crush on said hello, shook my hand and introduced himself to me as though I were a new student. I told him who I really was, and he laughed and said how I looked completely different. For a moment, he kept his hand in my hand. It felt like a soft bird. Then he pulled away.

Eventually, I got my hair cut by the barber on Jerningham Avenue. Johnnie had recently moved from the Circular Road. He said he moved for the bigger space, but there had been a shooting near the space on the Circular Road. I thought he’d moved because that part of Belmont was too rough. In those days, there was a local designer on Jerningham Avenue, some jewellers and some shops selling crafts. The Trinidad Theatre Workshop had bought the pretty gingerbread house on the corner, though it was way too small to be a real theatre space. Johnnie was not far from all of this and he seemed to have more clients than ever when I started going there.

Johnnie’s haircuts were good. Once, I told him I felt for a change. Maybe something like Darren Ganga’s hair? He looked at me as though he realised something about me for the first time.

The next time I got a haircut, Johnnie was halfway through when he started to ask me about my skin. That week, I’d started to break out again but it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It’s just your run-of-the-mill spot, I said. No, he said, it wasn’t, it’s a boil. I laughed at what seemed a huge exaggeration: you could barely see the thing. But he wasn’t laughing when he told me not to come back to his barbershop.

3.

Cummings Kalipersad comes here you know, she said, and Verne Ramesar.

This was Claire, of Hair by Claire, who insisted on name-dropping. A friend had recommended her. She had a small salon in Maraval, not far from Burger King and SuperPharm but you’d swear it was in Beverly Hills. When she found out I was a reporter she started regaling me with the big name broadcasters on the island who were regulars (though I never saw any of them when I went). One time, after a particularly stressful month in which I’d been banned from covering parliament by the government, she had a class of trainee hairdressers. As she combed and cut my hair, she called them over to observe.

The first time I’d walked into Hair by Claire, Claire said she could tell just from my face I was fed up. I needed something new. Thereafter followed a series of bold, rather ill-advised, experiments. First came the highlights and perm, which made me look slightly like Tina Turner. Then, the low sides with the cut eyebrows, which gave me the air of a cartel leader. I’d started to go grey (Claire insisted it was premature, but I knew it ran in the family) so dyeing was a must. Blond, blue then a beautiful shade of rose. The novelty felt oppressive: I wanted to go back to where things had been. I asked her to just dye my hair black. Claire called over her students and told them to observe my scalp, as though there was some defect in it they should take note of. I felt like a freak and started to sweat under the attention.

4.

One day, Stephan came home from Wally’s. He had continued to go there even though I no longer did. Wally, apparently, had never noticed that I was gone; at least he didn’t ask Stephan about my absence. It was as though in his eyes we weren’t a couple.

Stephan was upset, which was unusual for him. I often compared him to the potted cacti he collected: prickly but cool. He had asked Wally to cut his hair a certain way and Wally didn’t. It was the third time in a row, apparently, something like this had happened. So Stephan resolved never to go back.

My friend Finn recommended a place in West Mall called Farina’s. There was no appointment system, you just walked in, took a chit, waited a little and then walked into a chair. There were five hairdressers, but the first time I went I got Farina herself. I had not long quit my job, and she was decidedly unimpressed when I said I was a “freelance writer”. So, halfway through the conversation I added I was also a “published author” and her eyes lit up. She had recently returned from America and had many, many ideas about how the country could be improved.

Farina was on to her ideas for how the highway interchange could be redesigned when she asked me why my hair was so dusty. It wasn’t dusty as far as I could tell, just a little grey but that was nothing she hadn’t seen before. She didn’t pick up on my joke. Then she asked when last I’d washed my hair and I thought this was to get me to have it washed, but I’d washed my hair that very day. When I told her this, she said I was lying. My hair smelled, she said, and I should wash my hair and wash it properly because dusty hair was a hazard to her as she was sensitive to dust.

I told Stephan about this and he expressed surprise because he said she had been so nice to him when she cut his hair right after cutting mine. I wondered if I was being Wallied again. What was it about me that was so different from Stephan? He was fairer, yes, came from a prominent and well-known family – but those things didn’t matter anymore. Child marriage had been abolished, we’d had a woman prime minister, for crying out loud.

The next time we went to Farina’s, the girl at the front asked if I preferred any specific barber to cut my hair. I said anyone but Farina. Someone suppressed a laugh and it was then that I decided I would return to Farina’s as often as possible, just to annoy her.

5.

Things were tight after I broke up with Stephan, so I found a new place on Queen Street. Like most streets downtown, it was home to street-dwellers who slept on cardboard boxes and kept their things in supermarket carts. There were a few jewellery and furniture stores, and an empty mall in which Jeremiah cut hair on the third floor.

Jeremiah had a child and always talked about her. What subjects she was studying (geography was her favourite). How many books she read. The wise and clever remarks she made. The glowing report cards she brought home. He also talked about her good-for-nothing mother who, I was to understand, was unreliable, toxic, irresponsible, but nonetheless had custody of his child.

It was only after some time that I realised Jeremiah wasn’t just talkative, he was always drunk. I realised this when, one day, with half my hair cut and the other half wild and unbridled, he asked me if I’d like a drink. He was going to take a break and grab a beer from the bar around the corner on Frederick Street. A few minutes later, he returned with the beer, placed it on his counter, and carried on as normal, talking about Sheba and all the wickedness she was up to with little Geraldine.

The next time it happened, Jeremiah didn’t come back until half hour later. But I’d developed a rapport with him. I liked his haircuts and they were cheap. I just told him I was in a rush and it would be better not to have too many breaks next time.

The last time I saw him, he nicked my ears with his razor, the cut burned when he sprayed me with alcohol. I was still bleeding when I got home.

6.

I went back to living with Stephan, even though we had broken up, because I couldn’t afford a place on my own now that I didn’t have a regular salary. I paid half the rent and we were still friends so it was fine.

I repurposed the office into a bedroom, used pallets to make a bed (I’d seen this on YouTube). I started to paint a lot because my therapist said it might help and some people actually bought a few paintings. A guy down south even started to print T-shirts with my paintings on them, which I wore to parties as a way of promoting myself.

One day, our landlord said she was raising the rent. She also said a new guy was moving into the apartment next to ours.

Angelo, it turned out, was a hairdresser. His family was originally from Venezuela but had been living in the country for generations. He had a heavy Spanish accent, and people often took him for one of the migrants you’d see in the news fleeing Maduro. He worked at a salon around the corner.

Angelo was clearly popular with men. There were all the burly guys who helped him move his stuff in. Then, the men who came to several house-warmings (his place was small so he had multiple events). During the week, our courtyard was quiet as I wrote late into the night. But early in the mornings I would hear Angelo’s door open and then someone would slink through the gate.

A month after Angelo moved in, he started to blast gospel music in the mornings. I thought this odd. But when I started to get to know him, I realised Angelo was genuinely religious. And he had a side-hustle. He was praying, not having sex, with all of the men who came to see him. Apparently, they were all seeking a way not to be gay anymore. I found this out the hard way when, after he had agreed to give me a trim in his small living room, he started asking me about my problems and then proceeded to tell me about His Saviour Jesus Christ. He prayed for me, carefully holding his blade, as he gave me a mark.

7.

The Christmas Stephan moved out, he left me a parting gift. I expected it to be another cactus or maybe another set of journals or stationery. When I opened it, it was a really nice shaver, an expensive one. He said I could use it to cut my own hair. For a moment, a pang of regret came over me. Things hadn’t worked out with Stephan (he was moving in with his new boyfriend) and I was going to miss him. I was going to miss, too, how the apartment was filled with all kinds of cacti – bunny ears, pear, chollas, the showy schlumbergera with its fuchsia flowers.

I tried to get a new roommate. It was a tough sell. The landlord had raised the rent again, and the economy was in the toilet so there were few takers. I asked a few ex’s if they were interested and they politely declined. Two friends of friends came to look at the space, but they didn’t seem impressed. I’d forgotten how, sometimes, when lovers move into a space, that space is perfect no matter what. When the love fades, suddenly you see all the flaws.

After a few months of paying the rent on my own, I could go on no longer.

On my last day in the apartment, I sat in the empty kitchen and searched haircut videos on the internet. It was pretty easy, I realised, once you had the guard rails for the shaver. The problem was, of course, the back. And the fancier things like marks. But with guards you could wing it. And who needed marks, really? I took out the really nice shaver and plugged it into a socket. Small lights at the side glimmered; it glowed alive like a spaceship. I put the length setting of the guard on seven, turned it on, and combed it through my hair. Nothing happened. I set it to three, for a shorter length, and tried again. Sure enough, hair began to drop to the sink, to my feet, to the floor, silver and dark flakes softly falling like the years had passed me by. If the result was a little uneven, a little jagged near the temples, I didn’t care. With practice I would get better.

At least Mom wouldn’t have to cut my hair.

CONUNDRUM

If he were honest, the leg was okay but not wow. There it was, a stubby, artless thing, impressively muscular yet impassive, drowned in the hazy sea of the sepia filter. Newton clicked ‘like’, not because of any particular enthusiasm but because he felt this was the kind of thing he had to do. He had to put himself out there, ensure he was seen, let it be known that he liked legs and well-toned legs too.

The leg belonged to Duane, a trainer Newton followed on Instagram. Duane had a boyfriend but was into books and, on learning Newton was a poet, followed Newton back and expressed an interest in Newton’s writing. This was the previous July; then the interest petered out, as it inevitably did when people read Newton’s work, but both men continued to like each other’s posts every now and then in the awkward netherworld between indifference and not wanting to offend by unfollowing.

Newton had recently deleted Grindr again. Men there were weird, flaky or not interesting. Whenever he thought he’d found someone who might want to do more than exchange dick pics, he would send a face pic and they would fall silent. He didn’t understand this. He wasn’t that old and, in the right lighting, he was rather attractive with his cute dimples, his manly Roman nose (his father’s), intense eyes and long eyelashes (his mother’s). His fashion sense was nothing to write home about, consisting of smart glasses, plaid shirts, and multiple pairs of converse sneakers – but didn’t that qualify as “geek chic” these days? He was marketable, a catch, in fact. And weren’t people attracted to poets? Hadn’t that worked for Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rimbaud? Talent, creativity, passion, a profound engagement with the world – what man on Grindr could resist?

It wasn’t just the men online. It was the cool, pretty boys at Boycode parties, the Muscle Marys at Carnival fetes, the slightly pretentious gays at Drink! Wine Bar, the drunk, sketchy gays at Club Studio, the nerds at his NALIS book club and the artsy, sexually fluid crowd at galleries and backyard art spaces – all of whom rebuffed his wines and attempts at small talk.

While gay Trinidad was reluctant to embrace him, straight Trinidad couldn’t get enough of him. Newton was caught up in dalliances with ostensibly heterosexual men, all of whom he felt were slightly crazy or at least confused. He knew enough about closet cases to impose clear limits. He lowered his expectations again and again and told himself it was just sex, not love. Yet still, some of these men lingered in his mind, hard rocks in his sea of longings. If only one – just one – could find the courage to be truthful, to love him and to love him openly. If only.

It was in a half-depressed, half-bored mood that he scrolled through the list of people who had liked Duane’s leg-day post, an action he didn’t find the least stalkerish. It was research. Most of the men who approved of the leg were probably gay or, at the very least, interested in the male body. He followed anyone on the list whose profile was pleasant. Put yourself out there, he thought.

Klaus followed back immediately. Newton had never seen his profile, recognized none of his friends, and could not be sure what country he was in, though he thought Klaus had that charming, sharp look that indicated he was definitely a Trini. Klaus had a handsome face with a big, hipster beard and a Bollywood vibe. He was evidently obsessed with working out. Every post was from the gym. One with his biceps flexed. A video of him doing pull-ups (a cocky bulge visible in his joggers). An image of him throwing a tyre around. It was the kind of thing Newton was attracted to but normally passed over because he thought such men were compensating for some emotional or physical deficiency or were in the throes of some kind of body dysmorphia against which he’d never be able to compete. Today, though, he didn’t have much to lose.

In the first few minutes of their interaction, Klaus liked thirty of Newton’s Instagram posts, a gesture that Newton found more ambiguous than it was. Was it a clear red flag: too eager too soon? Or just a safe way of expressing interest without explicitly doing so? It could have been a routine series of likes, the way some young people swipe and swipe and swipe, all the while clicking ‘like’ without much real deliberation. There was only one way to find out.

Over the course of the day, they spoke about their shared love of rainy nights, the pros and cons of vegan diets, body sculpting (Klaus commented on images of Newton at the beach; Newton asked about Klaus’ pull-up technique), life-changing moments in their childhoods, favourite places to go. These exchanges felt amiable but not quite flirtatious. Still, Newton was pleased with any attention he could get. Then, around the middle of the afternoon (it was a slow day for Klaus, who worked in a big pharmacy on Wrightson Road) Klaus asked him about his poetry.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that obscure, mid-career poets like nothing more than a chance to talk about their work. The question was like a shot of heroin. Newton spoke of the origins of all five of his books, the painstaking process of finalising each manuscript, his experiences with various publishers and the literary elite of the island, his models and influences, the pitfalls of trying to market poetry in an environment inclined to prose, and his plans for future books. Maybe, he said, a selected is due, because he was advancing in age though in truth 34 wasn’t really that old, as 29-year-old Klaus pointed out.

Then Klaus told Newton he had a secret he wanted to share. He, too, was a poet. Could he email Newton the manuscript for a book he was going to publish?

A sinkhole opened in Newton’s stomach. Of course, he said, even as he weighed the likelihood that the whole interaction with Klaus had been meant to serve this one purpose alone. Such things had happened to Newton before. The thrill of somebody new would give way to a manuscript being sprung on him at the earliest opportunity. It was flattering. His judgment was valued. But even this he could not be sure of. He got little sense any of these closet writers had ever read his work.

Klaus’s book was 150 pages, a fact that Newton noted with apprehension, since poetry books these days were half that length. He opened the book. Each poem was short; they consisted of lyrics like:

if you are the cliffi am the mountainwe are one and yet not one

savour this momentbefore we both fallto the sky

— K.

and

patience issandfalling throughan hourglassis knowing whento turn overa new leafconfidentthe bottlewill never run out

— K.

and

we are brokenmy heartyearns for youbut I know my heartand I know it enoughto know what I cannotknowyour bodyour storythe stars, their faults!all our crimesopeninglike a hibiscusthe river flowsto the seaof forgiveness

— K.