“I keep the exits in mind as we raise our glasses.” Throughout “Treatment-Resistant” by William Hawkins, this kind of competing mood lingers. There’s tension. There’s celebration. There’s isolation and company, shared history and new relationships. As our narrator waits for his chance to leave this birthday celebration in The Court of Two Sisters, conversation ebbs and flows until it finally circles to a story from his childhood, one that’s been told too many times before.
I keep the exits in mind as we raise our glasses. Cheers, Happy Birthday, Salut. Peter and Austin kiss; we awww dutifully. Someone signals the waiter for more mimosa; the pitchers are empty. Otherwise, it’s a slow New Orleans afternoon in The Court of Two Sisters, or at least in this sun-slanted courtyard. Besides our table, only two others are occupied, resolutely ignoring the ten-top of queers toasting. Set into the nearby brick wall is a door marked Employee’s Only. It would take me less than a minute to reach. Unless it’s locked. Unless it leads to nothing but a storeroom. Unless, instead of escaped, I’m trapped.
“Should you be drinking?” This from Vaughn. He’s been in a mood since he arrived late and found himself stuck here at the end of the table with me. I am here because I know Peter better than his ten-month boyfriend Austin, whose birthday we are celebrating. Vaughn knows Austin better. They fucked a few years back. So naturally, he wants to be at the front of the table, where the action is, the well-wishing and squeezing of Austin’s newly-formed triceps. Exercise, Austin keeps repeating, was how he stayed sane in quarantine. We are six months out of the mask mandate, though our waiter, bearing a new pitcher of mimosa, still wears hers. And Vaughn, instead of the flirtatious play of Austin’s body, is at the end of the table with me and Benjamin, who Peter thinks would be a great match for me. But Benjamin’s eyes are already following Vaughn’s lips.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I’m only having the one.”
“Why shouldn’t you be drinking?” Benjamin asks politely. His sweater is tight; the swell of his chest is apparent. He’s handsome and has a tan from Puerto Vallarta. It’s a bad match, Peter.
“I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow,” I say.
“He’s going down a k-hole,” Vaughn adds.
“A k-hole?”
“Ketamine,” Vaughn confirms happily. “He’s snorting it up.”
The man next to Benjamin—Hector, I think, a friend of Austin’s—turns toward our conversation. At the top of the table they’re asking Austin to open his presents.
“I’m being given ketamine,” I say to Benjamin, who’s waiting on an answer, “as a nasal spray. In a doctor’s office.”
“They’re giving out ketamine now?” Hector asks.
“It’s a treatment for depression,” I say. And then, just because I love to dig a hole, “For treatment-resistant depression.”
Hector says, “Oh.” Vaughn drinks his mimosa with a sudden intense thirst. Benjamin looks at me with a vague pity. So much for a set-up. I could be mad, but what’s the point? I recognize Vaughn’s mood. He likes to stub out his cigarette in champagne just for the ruin of it. I imagine that someone, or several someones, did not give him the attention his expectations demanded, either at this late luncheon or earlier today. If I had any sense, I would make a polite excuse and leave. But you can’t say you have treatment-resistant depression and leave the party early. It’s not a good look.
Elsewhere, someone got Austin a Trixie Mattel doll. He laughs. Poses for a picture. Why are we five years old again?
“What did you give him?” Vaughn asks me.
“A painting,” I said.
“That’s bold of you.”
“Yeah. But I know Peter’s aesthetic pretty well.”
“What does that matter?”
“They moved in together.”
“God.” He says it dangerously loud, but no one hears. Or, if Benjamin hears, he ignores us. He and Hector have turned to watch Austin unwrap an apron from Etsy with something cute embroidered across the chest. I can’t make out what. “I give it a month,” Vaughn says in a voice that is actually meant for me.
“You’re horrible,” I say, but in a low voice meant only for him, a voice which says, You’re horrible, yes, but keep talking.
“You know he’s still on Grindr. I recognize his chest.”
“Austin?” But now we’re attracting attention. Hector, Benjamin, and even Peter, at the head of the table. Perhaps because he’s been keeping an eye on Vaughn since Vaughn first arrived—it’s always wise to keep an eye on Vaughn, if your boyfriend is around. But now Austin is unwrapping my gift. There are appreciative noises, Austin making most of them. But Peter claps his hands.
“Stephen!” And to Austin, “We saw this at the gallery, remember, babe?”
“Of course.”
“It’s beautiful,” Hector says and sounds sincere.
“It looks like blood,” Vaughn says.
Hector frowns, but I nod, “It does a little, but no blood spatter is that bright.”
“I wouldn’t know,” says Vaughn.
“What’s it painted on?” someone from the middle of the table asks.
“The canvas is layered with old Times- Picayune clippings,” Peter says, more to the table than to Vaughn. “We all went to this artist’s gallery together.”
“That was a fun day.” Austin is over the painting, but he’s more than polite about it. It will be displayed on their wall—a wall—I have no doubt, though when they break up Peter will take it. Because I agree with Vaughn. I don’t think they’re going to make it. I think Austin is too young and horny and Peter too hooked to the idea of monogamy. That’s the bottom of it. I think a twelve-year age difference is surmountable, but not for these two.
“Stephen, have you heard much from E?”
I shake my head. “The occasional text.”
“I didn’t bring a present,” Vaughn says to me, after they moved on to the next, and, as it turns out, second-to-last. Austin is ripping through them now. “I didn’t know we were supposed to bring a present.”
“It said so on the invite.”
“What invite?”
I do my best raised eyebrow. “How did you get invited then?”
“He said to come.”
“Austin?”
“Yeah.”
“In person?”
Vaughn doesn’t answer.
“Lord.”
“I don’t need him or your judgment.” Then he smiles across the table to Benjamin and says, loudly, “Benjamin, yeah? How do you know Austin?” And Benjamin answers, already under the radiance that is Vaughn’s attention, Vaughn with his tight shirt and cold eyes, his unblemished skin, a pencil mustache at his lip which, on anyone else, would be ridiculous yet on him emphasizes the edges of his cheekbones. All of this, I’m used to. The face, the body, the attention it gets. I check my emails surreptitiously under the table. The last present is from Benjamin. It’s a Tarot Deck. Not the traditional Rider-Waite; I can tell that but not much else. Austin is much more enthusiastic about it than the painting. The deck is sealed in plastic; Austin holds it with both hands. He and Peter both smile down on it as they would a baby. Vaughn asks Benjamin where he got the idea. Vaughn has Benjamin in his scope now. I’ll finish my drink and leave. I do this all the time, leave early; no one will think anything of it.
“For seventeen years,” Vaughn says. “Isn’t that incredible?” He squeezes my shoulder. I look up from my phone and smile blankly at Hector, Benjamin, at all the faces at the table, up to the birthday boy Austin and his boyfriend Peter, who looks a little put out that everyone is paying attention to Vaughn now. “We were friends before we both knew we were gay! Can you imagine?”
“You not knowing you’re gay?” says the man to Peter’s left whose name I missed. “No, I can’t.”
Vaughn performs a little face that, on the surface, laughs along with the joke while also conveying a hearty fuck-you to whoever this person is. It amounts to a smile with a little shake of the head and touch of raised eyebrows. Just a touch.
“I was the poor Northshore relation.” Vaughn’s elbow jabs my arm. “Stephen is New Orleans royalty.”
“Hardly.”
“Stephen. Tell them about when we went gator hunting.”
“No.”
“Our dads thought it would be a good idea,” Vaughn tells Benjamin. And he is telling Benjamin, exclusively, though the whole table is listening. Everyone is watching him now. It’s only missing a spotlight. “They thought it would be educational.”
“They thought it would be a story we would tell all our lives,” I say, with no small irony. It gets a few laughs. Vaughn slaps me playfully on the shoulder. We could be on stage. Punch and Judy Garland.
“Well, they take us out on a fishing boat. Smaller than this table.”
“At least as big as the table. If not bigger.”
“Some Cajun is at the motor, me and Stephen are sharing a seat, then it’s some big guy, then after him a bigger guy, and the bigger guy is holding, like, an elephant rifle.”
And this is where I usually say, “It was just a rifle.” That’s the line. Vaughn even pauses, nothing noticeable to anyone else, just a small breath after the word rifle. When I leave it unfilled, he presses on, and the story continues. We were ten-year-old boys surrounded by men in an aluminum fishing boat. The man with the rifle was the friend of our fathers. His name was Mr. Eustace. The unnamed Cajun at the motor puttered us to a rope that hung limply from a tree branch, arched over the bayou water. At the end of the rope, as we were told, was a hook; on the hook was a cut of raw chicken. But it drooped when it should have been pulled taut against the water. Mr. Eustace said, “You’re in luck, boys, looks like we came up empty today.” Or so we say he said. He reached out to the rope, took it in his hands to pull it up in order to see, I would imagine, how much of the bait was left. The rope was loose and then, suddenly, tight in his hand. The boat bucked. The gator was under us. A gator with a hook in its mouth. A little water came splashing over the side. Mr. Eustace said, “Hold my beer.” Yes, he had a beer in hand. A glass bottle. Budweiser. Vaughn reached out and took it. I took the beer from the other large man. Vaughn and I, side-by-side, gripping beer bottles as Mr. Eustace lifted the rifle and aimed at the water. Did he even see the gator? Or was he hunting by guesswork? A shot fired. The boat tipped one way. Another shot fired. The boat tipped the other way. The men weren’t really standing anymore but crouching, trying to keep their balance. The Cajun at the motor kept shouting advice in his thick accent. How many blasts of the rifle did it take before the water finally calmed? The big man, the one between us and the gun-toting Mr. Eustace, it was his job to retrieve the gator. He had a hook at the end of a broomstick that he used which he used to grab the corpse and pull it to the side of the boat. This was gator hunting. The alligator was then dragged through the water as the Cajun navigated us back to shore where a small crowd of men, including our fathers, waited, drinking their beers. The cooler a white, Styrofoam rectangle at their feet. There they heaved the gator ashore. Mr. Eustace and his assistant took their beers back from Vaughn and me. Hefted it in their hands, laughed to the men, said, “Damn, boys, you didn’t spill a drop!”
So goes the punchline. The long table of gays at their mimosas laughs. Vaughn tells it well. You know because everyone expresses incredulity, a collective, “No way,” that only emphasizes how completely they see this bizarre picture, two ten-year-old gaybies in a boat of alligator hunters. Austin, especially, laughing with Vaughn as Vaughn says, “Really!” A few ask me for confirmation; I nod. I do not continue the story, as it’s usually my role to do, though admittedly not by much. I do not tell them about the picture; Vaughn and me, both straddling the alligator’s corpse, posing for the camera my dad brought. Vaughn is holding up a peace sign, his pale blonde head shining in an approaching noon sun; my hair is dirty brown and hangs over my face, though I am grinning like a maniac, a missing premolar in my smile. The dead reptile lies below us. I also do not, as an addendum to our story’s ending, tell the table about my cousin Andy, who has a similar photo, though he was only four-years-old, four-years-old and sitting on the neck of a dead alligator in the bed of a pickup truck. Except that alligator, when they went the next morning to look at it, was gone. Because that alligator had, in fact, not been dead. Because as it turns out, the difference between a dead alligator and a live one lying very still is so negligible as to not exist. By looking, anyway. The gator Vaughn and I sat on, knelt by, posed with, was an eleven-footer. When they weighed it, eventually, it came to six hundred and eighty-nine pounds. A bull gator. I could say all this. I usually do. Vaughn is waiting on me, as the laughter fades from the punchline. I’m supposed to say all this. I’m the addendum.
“That sounds terrifying to me.” This is Benjamin, shaking his head at the punchline, a sudden fly in the ointment of the telling. Benjamin deserves a second look. A weak chin but a strong gaze. “I can’t believe your dads put you through that.” Though he is talking to Vaughn. No. His eyes slide to me. Stay.
I look around the courtyard. This is when it would happen. When we’ve forgotten it could happen.
“We didn’t spill a drop!” Vaughn repeats, for fewer laughs. His smile doesn’t play as he would like. He looks to me for help, but I have no smile. And he’s already told the joke. The table, on Vaughn’s cue, looks to me. I shrug.
“It was an experience,” I offer.
“It just seems a little traumatizing to me,” Benjamin says. Then he smiles sheepishly, holds up his hands in surrender. God, but gay men love to pose. “I mean, just to me.”
“Well,” Vaughn says, “I wasn’t traumatized, anyway.”
“I was traumatized,” I say, “but only much later.”
Only Vaughn laughs. Austin says something about alligators being dinosaurs. Everyone pretends this is interesting. It’s his birthday, after all. Vaughn exclaims that it’s perfect. It’s perfect, in fact, that an alligator is a dinosaur. Exclaims is the operative word. He’s trying too hard. He doesn’t even know what it is he wants. He just has the want. Poor Vaughn is sick with want. It’s a hole made of fire inside him. It’ll burn through Austin, next. Austin and maybe Peter, who’s smiling down the table now, his eyes on Vaughn’s dimples, or the shape of his mouth, or the way his muscles cut into the sleeve of his shirt. It’s time for me to leave. And I’m looking at Peter. And I’m smiling, and tilting my head, and rising from my seat, and Peter is already asking, “You leaving?” as a permission, when Vaughn’s hand grips the nearest arm.
“You always leave,” he says, and it comes out too strong, rougher than he intended, I can tell immediately by the look of surprise that follows his accusation. Poor Vaughn. Many wonder how Vaughn and I are friends, besides the simple proximity of our own fathers’ friendship, but it’s more than that. We both keep failing, Vaughn and I. He was in Los Angeles for seven years before he ran out of hope and money. And I, I couldn’t live in the world without being hospitalized for it. It also doesn’t hurt that he loves to perform and I love to be an audience. He entertains me, and he likes to know that he is entertaining. Though I wonder how much he knows of himself, if he is his own blind spot—I mean, if he is as much a fool as he acts. But then, what do I know? I’m a judgmental bitch.
“I have an appointment tomorrow, remember?” I say.
“Oh, right. Well, good luck with that, I guess.”
I smile. I tell Austin happy birthday, walk over to them. He and Patrick both hug me goodbye. Hector at the middle of the table makes noises about leaving, someone else says, “Just one more pitcher!” I leave The Court of Two Sisters without looking back.
The restaurant validates for a nearby parking garage. It’s hardly more than a two-minute walk down a tourist-laden Royal and up Toulouse, the brightness of this late spring afternoon bleaching out the more subtle colors of the Quarter. Plants wilting in their pots on the balconies above. Faint notes of mud and piss and cigarette smoke in the air. Cars trundling down the street; locals and tourists jaywalking. A two-minute walk. It could happen now. Like an unexpected gust of rain, the sort which comes in the bright sun—the Devil beating his wife, as my grandmother called such visitations. My therapist argues that this new obsession, this listening for the gunshot, is just a convenient fear for my anxiety to repurpose for itself, but even he sounds unsure when he explains it away like this. My rabbit fear.
There are many open doors on these streets. Darting inside would take a few seconds. Any bullet would be faster.
My therapist’s leans heavily on cognitive behavioral therapy. I am encouraged to recognize my distorted thinking, to acknowledge these thoughts, to challenge them. Though some Buddhist thought, I have argued back, would encourage me to let the thoughts simply go through my consciousness. Without challenge. Without attention. Let the armed monkey swing from the tree. My therapist, though he sees the value in Buddhist spirituality, even acknowledges what his own therapeutic practices have borrowed from it, doesn’t wonder if it’s not a way for me to intellectualize my fears. To which I say, “Obviously.” We both laugh. I like my therapist.
He will be there when they administer the ketamine. I’m scheduled for three sessions. After that, we’ll see how I feel. Many reports, from what I’ve read, detail positive results even after the initial session. A reorientation, is what my therapist likes to call it. “I don’t like the word k-hole,” he said. “Vulgar connotations aside, I don’t like the concept of a hole. A hole is something you’re stuck inside. I think it’s better to think of this treatment, this experience as a door. I don’t know what’s on the other side; neither do you. That’s part of it. But it’s not a hole. It’s a way through.” I nod, and I agree with what he’s saying. To a point. But a door—the whole point of a door—is that it opens two ways. Any entrance is an exit.
What I mean is, the gunman comes through the door.
In my car, before I’ve pressed the button of the ignition, I lean back into my seat, close my eyes, gather my breath. Inhale through the nose, hold below the navel, exhale from the mouth. The gator story. I’ve told it so many times I hardly remember it. But I can still feel the first buck of the boat. I can see the rope, suddenly pulling tight. I don’t remember them handing me their beer. I don’t, actually, remember the shot. Shots. Mr. Eustace, firing into the water, again and again, as the reptile rolled under us. They are strangely peaceful creatures, alligators. Fearsome, yes, but most of their life amounts to the experience of a log. They live in the peace of their bodies. There is no way they could be better for what they are, where they are.
My father was, is, fond of night fishing. I would go with him, out in his boat, sometimes, as a boy, teenager, young man. We would motor out into a great expanse of lapping black water. He would say, “Watch this,” take a spotlight and slowly sweep it across the water. The alligators surrounded us. Their eyes shone like coins. Dozens of them. Sometimes more. They waited in the water, just beyond the boat.
William Hawkins has been published in Granta, ZZYZYVA and TriQuarterly, among others. Originally from Louisiana, he currently lives in Los Angeles where he is at work on a novel.