The Night Listener : A Novel

would still greet such a discovery with worldly amusement, not alarm or disgust.
    “Well,” I said mischievously, “it’s not the sort of thing moms have to be told, is it?”
    “Right. I’ll remember that the next time a magazine salesman comes by my oxygen tent.”
    I bowed to his grim humor. “Don’t get out much, huh?” Pete growled.
    “Tell me about your room, then.”
    “My room ?”
    “What does it look like? I wanna picture it.”
    “Well, there’s a cocktail lounge…and a mud-wrestling pit…and a trapeze over the Jacuzzi, which is where the strippers usually—”
    “A straight answer, please.”
    “Then gimme a straight question.”
    “I’m serious. You’re a writer. Describe it.”
    “Well…” He paused, seemingly to survey the room. “There’s a bookshelf on the wall next to the window…”
    “What sort of bookshelf?”
    “I dunno. Chrome or some shit.”
    “What’s on it?”
    “My X-Files tapes, the Encyclopedia Americana , some old National Geographics , your books, Tom Clancy…”

“He’s a big right-winger, you know.”
    “That’s what Mom said, but I like him. So tough shit.”
    “Your mother is an exceedingly wise woman. Tell me what you see from the window.”
    “Not much. Just a bunch of trees. The house across the street. And an old water tank above the trees. It’s completely rusted and dangerous as all fuck, but they leave it up so they can hang a star on it at Christmas. It’s like a tradition or something.”
    “Sounds nice, actually.”
    “Except the star faces the wrong way. All we get is some of the light on the side of the tank…you know, like spillover. It just makes the graffiti easier to read.”
    I chuckled. “Festive.”
    “Yeah. The rest of the town gets Bethlehem. We get ‘Roberta Blows.’”
    “C’mon.”
    “I swear. They painted it out last year, but it came right back.”
    “She must really blow,” I said.
    Pete exploded with laughter, which delighted me until it led to a bout of coughing that I thought would never stop. “Fuck, man,” he said, gasping for breath. “You gotta give me warning.”
    “Sorry.” I waited for him to compose himself. “You okay?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I think you should go with it, you know. Start your own tradition.”
    “What?”
    “‘Roberta Blows.’ Just say that instead of ‘Merry Christmas.’”
    “Right.”
    “Really. Think about it. It’s got a great sound to it. Euphonious.
    It’s like something out of Poe. And it would put some meaning back in the season: ‘Roberta Blows and a Happy New Year!’”
    “Man, you are weird.”
    “What else?”
    “What else what?”
    “Is in your room?”
    “Oh…lotsa nasty medical shit.”
    “Okay. Go on.”
    “That’s it, except some lamps and stuff. And some comic books in plastic milk crates.”
    “You like comics?”
    “Not anymore.”
    “Grew out of it, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I had a friend who loved comics, and he was forty.” For two weeks, Wayne, remember? You were forty for two crummy little weeks, and that was all the middle age you could take.
    I met Wayne Stevens at Harvey Milk’s memorial service. Wayne had slept with Harvey three times in the last month of Harvey’s life.
    The day the supervisor was assassinated at City Hall Wayne heard the news at work and stumbled home in disbelief to find a flirty message from Harvey that Wayne’s roommate had taken that morning. At the memorial service, Wayne knew no one (including the three official “widows” in attendance), so he took the seat next to me. “You’re Gabriel Noone,” he said, and I held his hand for the next hour. A week later, when I ran into him in North Beach, I felt as if I’d always known him.
    Wayne was blond and twenty-five then, with the face of a happy rabbit and a sleek superhero chest that startled you when his shirt came off. He was very bright in an obsessive adolescent sort of way.
    He filled composition books with annotated lists of his favorite things, which invariably included what he called the Four B’s: Batman, Bette Davis, Busby Berkeley, and Bette Midler. I know how that sounds, but Wayne was no dreary queen doing bad Baby Jane impersonations. He had a serious gift for criticism, and he could analyze in depth the very essence of the artists he admired. Including, I should add, me.
    We were lovers in the beginning, but it never took. Wayne wanted The Great Dark Man, and I, typically, wasn’t up to it. We lived together for a while