Today we shine the spotlight on Michael Ampersant and
Green Eyes
Blurb:
Alpha males, delicate souls, and a killer-psychopath hit it off in an impossible scramble for the last happy ending.
Yes, the GREEN EYES take you on a roller-coaster ride of gay romance (“When bipolar John meets mesmerizing Alex in the cruising area of Georgia Beach, little does he know about Alex’s haunted past…”). And, yes, the book is about lithe, tapered bodies, perfect abs, and outsized male organs. It’s about love. And hurt. And murder. And redemption. Glands fire. People talk during intercourse. There’s a hilarious supporting cast. Expectations are met.
Yet we do more. We have Nobel laureates. We have an even-handed discussion of the orthographic skills of the Tea Party (“No pubic option”). We have educational content about the mysteries of vasocongestion. We have neologisms (“Ikea moment,” “Armani minimum”). You learn about the 302 neurons that constitute the brain of a microscopic worm---and how this all relates to the IQ of John’s hated, child-abusing father. You participate in an in-flagrante masterclass. You get a hitchhiker’s guide to gay sex. You learn about the unheard-of provisions still on the Georgia books prohibiting all but intra-marriage intercourse (Title 16, Ch. 6). You hear about Torre’s observation (“The other line is moving faster”). You’ll be amazed by our avant-garde art and music, or by the voracious appetites of two desperate housewives (“Consenting adults, unite”). We have secret drugs, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Albert Camus, Mark Twain, and countable near-death experiences. Pizzas are undercooked. Our bears (hairy middle-aged homosexuals) are ticklish. And there’s a table of contents.
Excerpt:
From Chapter 18
Agatha Christie
ne two three, infinity (I’ll explain later). My ass.
Alex has already left his perch as a grand horizontal when I wake up. Better even, or worse, the sheer fact that I could fall asleep testified to his untimely departure, since nobody, not even straight people, would be able to do so with the Green Eyes on top of them. And I did sleep, because I have my usual morning glory, and I am alone, as outlined already, no external stimuli present, only my sleep, and sweet dreams perhaps that I don’t remember. I’m too old for spontaneous erections, it’s either sexual or it’s sleep (not quite true, I remember now, I had one just yesterday, but still).
Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep, and sometimes I don’t know whether I did actually fall asleep before waking up in the middle of the night, but then I feel my boner, and know I slept, realizing that my sleeping is better than feared, and thus comforted fall asleep again (only to wake up at a later time with another boner (I think I should stop now)).
Alex is gone, at least he is not the cause of my erection, and my bed is otherwise empty. Where is Alex? Perhaps he’s brewing coffee in the kitchen. I get up, and my pendulous organ—I had learned the term “pendulous organ” from Alex only hours earlier—my organ was still not very pendulous on the way to the kitchen, the place where Alex was not brewing coffee.
My world falls apart, and only the second or third time in 24 hours. Through the haze of my upcoming tears I look around. There’s a sheet of paper on the kitchen table, a location where experienced tricks in my days—in the days I still brought tricks home—used to leave their goodbye messages when they had been brought up well-enough to signal goodbye before leaving—after getting up as quietly as possible, hoping to undisturb my sleep, getting dressed quietly, not using the bathroom in order to avoid noises, finding some reusable sheet of paper, and a pen, and then writing in very readable hands, usually, like, like drawing a Valentine heart, signed “M,” or perhaps even signed “Michael,” or, in extreme cases, writing a grammatically well-formed sentence along the lines of “Sorry that I have to leave early, Michael.” Sometimes even the word love was used, carelessly, perhaps, but carefully written, since most tricks live near the literacy threshold, rarely write anything, whence their writing hand is unblemished by later excesses.
Where was I? Yes, In the place where experienced, well-brought-up tricks would leave their messages (Mother: “Michael, there is another thing that you should never forget, your exit should always be graceful, and should it happen that genetic destiny strikes and you end up as a loose homosexual, so loose that his nights are spent as one night stands in the company of other loose men, even then your exit should always be proper and good-byed”), in said place I find a re-used sheet of paper with the not-so-readable words “Dear John, I had to go, I love you, Alex,” and a little Valentine heart drawn under the text (he could have encircled the text with the Valentine heart, it would have been prettier, but he didn’t).
No home number, address, email, homepage link, twitter, tweet, something. Alex is gone.
Now, the situation isn’t completely hopeless, at least in the technical sense that I know where he works, so I could try to retrieve him by calling the hospital and ask for Alex, the alpha-god paramedic, (“Alexander, you know, I don’t know his last name, the paramedic with the green eyes”) and it’s anyone’s guess what the result would be. Perhaps he is a medical secret, (“We cannot divulge the names or other coordinates of our staff, by law”), or not a medical secret (“You’re not the first person asking for Alex in this way, you know”). Or I could, in anticipation of such answers avoid any contact by telephone and position myself around dawn near the staff entrance of the hospital, waiting for Alex like fans wait at the bühnenausgang of Wagner’s opera burgh in Bayreuth for a famous singer, and ask for an autograph when the alpha-god finally appears.
There are other possibilities as well, think hospital email etc. Let’s do some hand-waving here (an expression I have yet to learn from Alex), you get the gist. Email, stop. Internet, Google. You know, I can’t think in panic, so I type “Alex” in Google’s main search window of my computer, today enhanced for unclear reasons by a Sherlock Holmes motif. Only more than one billion answers. Without thinking I click on the first link, which connects me to ALEX, the Alabama Learning Exchange. Good, I think, that’s in the South. But not in Georgia, I realize, then my thinking stops again since the terrible truth strikes again, that I have lost the Green Eyes to a hopeless, lonesome future in confirmed bachelor county, GA, USA.
I would normally make coffee once detumescence (what a useful word) has commenced, but don’t feel like it. Instead, I get my thoughts together and start a systematic search for “Alex,” the “paramedic” of the “Memorial Baptist Hospital” in "Georgia Beach, GA",” in “Glynn county,” “GA,” “US,” which yields nothing. A hospital is not a university, they won’t list all their staff in unreadable, smallish fonts, even people who died 20 years ago of disappearance, like Alex had died of disappearance, this morning, between eight and ten o’clock.
I read the message again. “Dear John, I had to go, I love you, Alex.” Nothing, nothing in this message would speak of the future. There are no undertones, no overtones, the message is as neutral as his green eyes were (used to be) when his own studied ambivalence was undecided about a course of action. In the meager space of a few hours I had seen this neutrality more than a few times already, if his eyes talked, something was at hand, and there was nothing of the surreptitious eye language that tends to accompany the meaning-challenged behavior of people who have nothing to say, eyes too open, eyes too small, eyes winking, squinting, and so on.
