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We Regret to Inform You | Lamb ♣ 01
He Said, He Said
♣ ♣ ♣ 16 ♣ ♣ ♣
Back in the 90s, there was this local gay zine called Rock Bottom with the tagline “Because you gotta start somewhere…” There was always a picture of different guys’ bare butts on the cover, and you could buy it at a handful of shops and bookstores around town. It came out quarterly, pretty regular for six or seven years, until one day it just stopped and it took awhile for people to say, “Hey, whatever happened to that zine…what was it called? Acres of Ass? Butts O’Plenty? Swamp Bottom?”
It wasn’t porn, although one issue a year was devoted to erotica. It was a total homemade jobbie—photocopied pages, folded in half and stapled—but it sold for $10 and you really would see people reading it at Café Flore (Café Hairdo, we called it) or BrainWash, that laundromat/café South of Market.
Anyway, as far as I know, the only piece of writing Lamb ever had published was the attached short story titled “Rubber and Glue” in Rock Bottom (Volume 4/Issue 2) in spring of 1996. The theme of that issue was “First Times”—basically, all stories about when guys lost their virginity. I found a copy of it in Lamb’s papers, as well as the original draft in his notebook.
I didn’t get the whole story at the time, it must have been late in our sophomore year in college, so we were 19 and weren’t actually out yet. He did tell me about a guy named “Elmer”—I remember making fun of it, like “as in ‘a millionaire and a yacht’ Elmer?”—but I see now that wasn’t really his name, and I’m wondering why Lamb never shared this story with me.
Ashamed, I guess—he carried shame around with him like a pair of Coke bottle-thick glasses as long as I knew him. Even when we went out to bars, or walking down the street, he couldn’t see guys checking him out—it was almost embarrassing—guys we knew would confess to me that they had a huge crush on Lamb, but they thought he was stuck up or standoffish because he was too afraid to look people in the eye.
Well it was the opposite, of course, it was a deep, cringing fear—it almost always is insecurity, isn’t it?
Anyway, I think they only dated about a month, and when I asked him later how’s Elmer, at first he forgot he’d given me a fake name and didn’t know who I was talking about, and then said he had invited him to come hang out in Berkeley—rather than Lamb always taking BART over to the city to see him—and the dude ghosted him.
Awhile back, at least fifteen years or so, I went to Lost Weekend, the video store that used to be on Valencia, and picked up a VHS tape with a collection of gay short films from the 90s. Standard fare—meet cutes, and missed connections sort of stuff. The last film caught me off guard—it was titled “Punk!” and it was Lamb!
It started out with him fully dressed in the bomber jacket and lace up boots and pegged acid wash jeans, slowly undressing. It was completely silent, lots of zoom shots back out to long shots, shots going up and then back down. He was taking direction from someone, the guy behind the camera, who was obviously savoring this long, slow striptease of this crazy-tall kid in a mohawk down to buck naked.
How could he not know how beautiful he was? How could I have missed it?
Rubber and Glue
By
Willam Broeder
He told me a lot of things.
“We’re all whores. We’re all johns.” His theory was that because gay men would have sex with just about anyone, we were in a unique position because the people we want to have sex with are not worried about their reputations, or babies. He said it was like a frat party, only all the guests are guys—no girls allowed—so no one was worried about people thinking they were a slut.
More than that, he said the beautiful thing was that we paid for sex with sex, rather than money—that sex is our currency, and the more we spend, the more we get in return.
He said he thought it was unnatural that men should be with women, rather than with other men—that it was weird how straight men wanted to be enfolded in all these soft things, the perfume and the makeup and the lace and hair; it was more natural that we should be attracted to people that like the same things we do: cigars, boots, leather, Levi’s, beards and crewcuts.
If anything, being attracted to women made a man soft (he’d say, “You are what you eat—so don’t eat pussy!”) and that it made more sense to him that women should like other women.
He said he had sex with Jim Morrison back in the day, when they were both film students at UCLA before anyone heard of The Doors. That they dropped acid, and Jim wanted to try it all—fucking, sucking, top and bottom, he wanted his mind blown—but when they came down from their trip, Jim left without saying a word and the next time he saw him walking down the street in Venice, Jim ignored him.
He was at the Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, he said—he was just a kid, and his mom was friends with Jay DeFeo; they both had taught art classes for kids in San Francisco, and his mom thought it was bullshit when Jay got fired for shoplifting cans of spray paint. He was the only kid there, hidden in a corner on the floor because his mom couldn’t get a babysitter. Everyone was loaded. Jack Kerouac tripped over him at one point and yelled at him, but after Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” and everyone was hooting and hollering, Jack grabbed him and hugged him. Or so he said.
He kept telling these scientists at UCSF that he didn’t want to be part of their study—he said he was immune to HIV, and the wonks doing research wanted to know why, because he’d never used rubbers, giving or taking dick, but he was still healthy and that I didn’t need to worry about him, that he was probably the safest guy to fuck in all of San Francisco.
He taught me how to spike my hair up—he was one of the first punks, he said, and knew one of the guys in the Dead Kennedys. He thought I would look cool with a mohawk, so he sat me down in his kitchen and buzzed my hair on the sides, and then went to work with Aqua Net and Elmer’s glue. He said I looked super hot.
He took a bunch of pictures of me, and then he said he wanted to make a short film, so we got super drunk and high, and spent a whole night filming and fucking. In the middle of everything, he said he wanted to take me down to Jackhammer and show me off. I said, “I can’t get in, I don’t have a fake ID,” and he said not to worry, he knew all the bartenders. So we walked down, and I didn’t get carded. We did a bunch of shots, and then in the back corner, he got down on his knees and started sucking me off right in front of everyone. A bunch of guys were touching and kissing me, and at one point, someone got down on the floor and knocked him out of the way to get at me; that pissed him off and he dragged me out of there and back to his place for more drinking and filming.
He showed me a tape of a Cocteau Twins video he said he produced.
We smoked a bunch of weed that he said was “opiumated.” “What’s that?” He said it was weed infused with opium and made the high more intense and a little hallucinogenic. I didn’t really feel any different than smoking regular weed, and he said it’s because my drug palate was unsophisticated, but he would teach me all the good ones: opium, mescaline, peyote, DMT, MDA. “What’s that?” Like ecstasy, only better and stronger, he said—the good stuff—he knew a guy called The Medicine Man, a shaman who led clients on trips and stuff, and could get anything he wanted. He said the trick was to drink grapefruit juice, that it intensified the effects of almost any drug, that old people had to be careful what they had for breakfast because they were ODing on their heart meds and blood thinners after eating half a grapefruit, or after greyhounds at the country club.
He knew this guy up in Mendocino who he said had barrels of cash buried all over his property from growing marijuana in the national forests, that he had gone up many times to harvest weed with him. He called him a “white witch,” said that he wouldn’t go out at night without a hat on so moonbeams couldn’t control his mind, that he was deep into the teachings of Edgar Cayce, and had made a huge fortune in the 60s and 70s as a painter, then bought this ranch in the middle of the redwoods and never left. He showed me a Ming Dynasty vase this friend gave him, said that if there were ever a fire, that’s the only thing he would grab because it was worth a quarter million.
We walked out of a movie in Emeryville, and low in the sky there was this great big blob just hovering silently over the train tracks by the parking lot. He got really excited, and said, “UFO!” but it was only a blimp.
I said, “I love you,” but he didn’t say it back.
A zine called Rock Bottom, this is brilliant! That graphic bar scene lives in my mind, I'm picturing it at a place I used to frequent called The Bank, and it's all unfolding just as you wrote it. Your description of insecurity is so accurate, the portrayal of being stuck up when it's the opposite. Well done Troy.
Fantastic! Poor Lamb! I can imagine the devastation when Lamb said I love you but he didn't say it back...then again, he did just mistake a blimp for a UFO....
Also...Swamp Bottom? Classic!