TO BE READ IN MY VOICE: MEMOS OF A GAY CALIFORNIA BY BENJAMIN GALLOWAY

She’s got electric boobs, a motor suit You know I read it in a magazine, oh B-B-B-Bennie and the Jets

“Bennie and the Jets,” Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John

For most, I just have one name, but for mom and dad, I exist in plurality. It’s like when I call mom and she talks about Flippy and Goose and I have no idea who she is talking about because she’s tired of loving her dogs and has decided to rename them to keep them young. But, we all still keep the same names. They’re almost not even a memory. It’s like they’ve been ingrained in my walk, how I feel when I listen to music, how I see the Blue Angels in the sky, and how my hair waves from my scalp. So Bennie was the first name I came to know through song. And maybe she came to know me as we began to drift together. She sticks with me now, as for a long time, when my own name was spoken it was her’s that I heard. For, to be lulled by the Rocket Man in taught blue sheets on a red corduroy chair is what it was for me to come into consciousness. It wasn’t until I had learned to live without the comfort of names I’d never worn did I learn that he sings boots and not boobs and mohair, not motor.

I think about high school and I think about Spanish class. I think about where I met Tallula and we gossiped and she told me why she’d been out of school for so long and I never knew what was happening so I got the brother and sister confused for lovers and everyone laughed at me when I said it aloud to the class. The kindred of heart brought together by the lasting trauma of the American high school Spanish dream. One of the teachers is a perv who likes talking to her in his office alone when he doesn’t do that with anyone else and the other is an angry little gay man. And I’m stuck with the angry little gay man. Now I’ve found my way and I’m grasping with my tongue at everything I know is right. But I’m still asked to stay after class. It’s me and Eli who talks like he owns the language. So if I were to say why the two of us would be doubled out, asked for more of our time to let our tongues weave, I would not say it’s about the control of our muscles but the way that they flow out of our mouths. And we’re here for a meeting when nobody else was asked to be here. The Spanish is Castilian and empirical and our loose tongues just can’t get a grip. I’m told my mouth drawls and Spanish is quick and enunciated. But my throat stays lazy and I sound like Liberace dances from my mouth when it should be James Dean.

I’m David Sedaris and I’m yelling Go Carolina!

My hair is braided and my mind swaddled. There are two twin beds pushed together. One for me and one for you but it’s really just one for us even though we keep falling in the crack. My mouth is running and I don’t think I can make it stop. I’m standing at the start line and you’re firing the gun over and over and I’m running around the track of my life and your life which feels like our life now. If I stop I’ll be a heap which is keeping my tongue sprinting. You say sweeper and I say vacuum. Get a shower, take a shower. I can hear the first time you called me when you were drinking and you’re friends said I was hot and I couldn’t believe they had my name in their mouths. Now it wasn’t just something I heard with the familiarity of voices slowed by the ocean that are tucked into bed by the fog and bump Mac Dre. Now I could hear a twang in it and for the first time, I started turning my head whenever someone says ‘then’ because that’s what it sounds like when it comes out of your mouth. But you really just call me buddy and that feels like the most honest I’ve ever heard you be. You’ve given me a second name and it’s like I exist again as two, but I’m fighting to make that one.