the impossibility of locomotion
by Douglas Messerli
John McCrite (screenwriter and director) Little
Boy Blues / 2005 [22 minutes]
Little Boy Blues is a two-man piece about an attractive Los Angeles artist, Michael
(Michael Gets, whose performance I found particularly effective) in his early
40s who one evening at a gay bar encounters a handsome younger sailor Zeno
(Adam Bloch) who, on leave from his San Diego ship, has journeyed up to Los
Angeles for a couple of days.
The
moment of their meeting is an important one for Michael given that his lover
Hugh has evidently died a short while ago of AIDS, and he has sold their house
in the Valley and moved to an apartment in Los Angeles where now for a year he
has been feeling lost, clearly with a sense of sexual emptiness given his
personal loss and his age. Still good-looking, he has, however, clearly shied
away from the one-night pickups at bars and is, from the signs of it, truly
lonely.
The very fact that in the nearly empty bar, obviously near closing, a
young man not only pays attention to him but approaches him and is willing to
go back to his apartment is a near miracle in Michael’s eyes, making him almost
a slave to the younger man who unfortunately seems to have chosen Michael with
the hope that he might have the drugs the older, fatter man had promised him:
“Crystal,” so great for sex, “I’m telling you it is the best fucking sex you’ve
ever had. You just want to lock yourself in the bedroom and fuck for days.”
But Michael apparently doesn’t do drugs, just pot, so he is at odds to
provide something that will keep the strung-out man with him, offering up a
superb bottle of Tequila and a box of poppers,* both of which the young man
eagerly consumes, along with a porn tape the younger man requests.
It’s interesting that all Zeno—who doesn’t even seem to know that he
shares the name of the famous Greek inventor of the dialectic and creator of
some the greatest paradoxes that have baffled thinkers of all time—can only
express his needs, drugs and sex (evidently doing without food and sleep),
while Michael tells two stories of men he loved, even if one of them was only
for a night.
It
is not that Zeno is unintelligent; he immediately links a small photograph
sitting on a table with the large painting that hangs in a nook, both of Hugh,
Michael’s former partner. Michael explains the source of the blue painting: a
dream in which both he and Hugh were at a party at which everyone was wearing
tuxedos, it seeming to be in the 1920s, a group of men seated at an oblong
table. Suddenly the men began to laugh at the two of them, both wondering what
was the source of amusement. When Michael looked over at Hugh he realized that
his lover was completely blue, the reason for their amusement. When Hugh asked
why they were laughing, he explained that it was because of his color, to which
Hugh responded mockingly: obviously, that’s because I’m dead.
The blue boy, however, might also have described Michael, left alone
with only the memories of having loved a dead man.
And the second story he tells is also of love and the perversity of the
living dead. At a grand party in London a beautiful East Indian boy takes him
up into the balcony of the grand ballroom in which the party was being held and
wants to engage in sex there, in front of the entire party below.
They begin to kiss and Michael momentarily licks the boy’s neck, the
lover crying out “harder.” Afraid that he might bruise him, he nonetheless does
lick more intently, and even more eagerly when the boy calls for yet more
energetic kissing, finally asking him to bite him there.
Stunned by the request, Michael nonetheless continues kissing and
licking the man’s neck until the boy again screams out, “bite me!” which he
does, the beautiful young man immediately ejaculating and Michael shooting his
semen soon after. As he suggests, for a moment he became a werewolf, a lover
once more of the living dead, obviously never having encountered the boy again
after that event.
Trying to encourage the young man now in his arms to stay, he offers him
a bed, about which Zeno seems disinterested, and begins to kiss, Zeno backing
away, jokingly inquiring whether he intends to bite him.
The sex is once again, fulfilling, certainly to Michael and perhaps even
to the young man, who now insists that he must be on his way, although he has
no destination evidently in mind. Perhaps, as Michael suggests, he plans just
to visit the baths across the way. Zeno’s true destination, as the ancient
philosopher argued, can never be reached because of the infinite number of
stages of any journey that one must travel to complete it. The problem of
locomotion to a destination is one of Zeno the philosopher’s most profound
paradoxes. For the voyage can never be finished, only half completed, a third,
and fifth, a sixteenth, each increment breaking down into an endless
multiplicity of others so that it becomes an infinity.
Although he has claimed to be HIV negative, we can only wonder given his
immediate destination and his stories about how drugs affect him, whether he
has practiced safe sex. Michael could also now be infected.
But that is not what this gently painful story is truly about. What we
know is this evening too will probably become one of Michael’s later tales of
the living dead. It also will be a memorable point among his moments of great
pleasure in the midst of long, meaningless, and empty hours, surviving as he
does, not upon his art—he has sold only one painting in his life, purchased by
the Chicago Art School he attended—but upon the money from the sale of his and
Hugh’s home and a modest insurance policy paid out after his lover’s death.
In that sense, both are already dead men, blue boys—which is the
expression in some societies to describe gays, the very opposite of the English
language meaning. Zeno will rush forward, he’s off on a military mission by the
end of the week, to his death either in the military or from drugs or sex. And
Michael is already almost dead, living out his days with so few pleasures that
each takes on the quality of a myth.
Little
Boy Blues, accordingly is a sad tale about two young men who have seemingly
everything to make them happy—good looks, money, a career, intelligence, and
talent—all rendered meaningless without someone to regularly share those
treasures. And that too, my friends, might be described as a baffling paradox.
*Poppers is the popular word for amyl nitrates
which creates sexual stimulation by increasing arterial circulation to the
penis or to the anus. It was in popular use by gay men in the 1960s through the
80s, but momentarily came under suspicion of spreading AIDS, to which it has no
relationship except, as this instance, that in the immediate effects of
stimulation through inhalation it sometimes leads to forgetting about using
condoms.
Los Angeles, June 19,2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2022).
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