first dead boyfriend

he could make a glory hole of my grave and I wouldn’t know a thing about it

It was Thanksgiving and neither of us had plans. His surrogate dads were in San Francisco visiting friends or rather, sitting on a hospice ward watching one of their friends be spoon-fed rice pudding only to spit it back up. I’d have to remember to ask if the nurses were nice, or hot, or both.

He was making us some kind of bizarre pasta that didn’t involve any meat or any cheese just so that there wasn’t much risk of me shitting myself like I almost had last Thanksgiving. He was dicing up tomatoes and a bruised eggplant, head bobbing along to the songs drifting out of the living room. I was paging through a tattoo magazine that had him on the cover.

He plucked a piece of raw pasta out of the boiling water with his numb fingers and said he wondered what he would be doing when Jeff Buckley died. Jeff’s mournful wail careened out of the stereo and started to climb the walls.

That’s morbid.

He shrugged. He often considered deaths that had nothing to do with him; what he would be doing, how it would happen, how he would feel, as though every death was an anecdote. When my mom died I was in the passenger seat next to her. When River Phoenix died I was at a Halloween party in Long Beach. When my dad died I’d just stolen his car and I was sitting exactly where you’re sitting now and I think it was my fault.

I pushed out a small breath and folded my arms.

Maybe you’ll be married by then, I said absent-mindedly, glancing at the pile of eggplant while my stomach slithered with revulsion. When he dies, I mean. I had meant to say that maybe he would be all grown-up or that he’d own his own studio or something as equally far-fetched but no, I had to go and say that. He scoffed at me and grinned, tongue clacking against the hunk of pasta in between his teeth.

Nah. He turned back around and glanced down at the stove, at the bubbling, oily water. He’s gonna live forever. A strange deflection.

Like you, I thought. You’ll live forever. You’re good that way. Lucky. He scooped the mound of eggplant and tomato up in his hands and dropped it into the pan that was slowly filling the room with the sticky smell of garlic.

I asked him where he reckoned he would be when I died. I only said it as a joke but my stomach was starting to cramp thinking about it and I really wanted to know the answer before I did shit myself, after all. He leaned back against the counter and lit a cigarette and the sound of his lighter snapping closed was so decisive it made me flinch.

With any luck I’ll be dead, he teased back, but I could tell that he meant it. I wanted to feed his words back to him, to grin in that terrible arrogant way he did and tell him flippantly that no, he would live forever, but I just smiled, shrinking away from whatever it was that he was possibly trying to tell me. I told him he smoked too much. I didn’t say that I wanted him to live forever so desperately that the smoking was offending me. I coughed and he apologised.

While we were eating he asked with his mouthful what I had been doing when Kurt Cobain died and I rolled my eyes. Again with the morbid shit. He said he’d been fooling around with a girl in his car and the news had come over the radio and the girl had pulled her mouth off him to start crying and it really freaked him out. I asked him to pass the salt.

She still let me fuck her, though, he said, and I said I didn’t ask. There was the arrogant grin again. Relax, that was before I met you.

Yeah, by like a week, I snorted out, and he shrugged. I knew the girl he was talking about; I’d stolen him from her.

Seriously, what were you doing?

He had had so many people die that he would latch onto grief and let it tug him around, as if some part of him liked it. I didn’t want him to do that with me. I wanted to destroy that suffocating obsession he had with death and make it so that he would run from it instead of flirting with it all the damn time. There was a leash that kept him tethered to the grave, probably because of his mother. I couldn’t blame him, but I hated it all the same. I just wish he’d gnaw his leg out of the trap once in a while.

When Kurt Cobain died I was auditioning for Grease. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of actually having an anecdote. It would be coming with me into the ground. If I had my way, I’d take him with me just so he’d shut up about it.

I asked if he missed fucking girls, because for the first time in a while I actually felt guilty for having commandeered his junk off the meat market, and he just smiled down at his food. The eggplant was a little soggy and he knew it and I wondered if he was waiting for me to say something about it because I could tell he didn’t want to eat it. We were locked in a silent game of chicken where both of us were begging for pizza. I would have to peel the cheese off.

He pushed his plate away from him and leaned back in his chair. The air still smelled like garlic and I knew it would have clung to his hair, to his clothes, and to mine.

Have you even fucked a girl? Ever?

Of course I’ve fucked a girl, came my high-pitched retort, and he grinned. It wasn’t that I was lying, more that I could never shake the memory of how terrible I’d been at it, sixteen with no glasses on and trying not to throw up. I’d be better at it now but there’s no way I’d try.

But, if I die, are you gonna go back to fucking girls? It was the stomach cramp that pushed the words out and he started to laugh, quickly going quiet. I wasn’t the only boy he’d fucked but I’d built myself up to be important to him for some reason; I guess that comes with the territory of being the first dead boyfriend.

I did wonder what he’d be doing, when I died; whether he would finally be fucking somebody else by then, or whether he would have finally had surgery on his wrist, whether he would be feeding me pudding from a plastic spoon and trying not to look at me. I hoped it was anything but the last one. I did wonder if he would still love me by the time I dropped dead, if it would mess him up. I wanted it to mess him up. I don’t think I could handle him fucking another guy after me. I’d want him to cry if he did.

When my boyfriend died I was downstairs watching straight porn on mute.

I don’t know why it mattered to me, really; I was going to die anyway, what difference did it make what hole he ended up putting it in? He could make a glory hole of my grave and I wouldn’t know a thing about it, about anything. Boy parts, girl parts, dead parts, it’s all the fucking same.

He cleared his throat and swallowed another laugh. Precious, immortal Jeff caterwauls and moans. Tattoo magazine boyfriend smirks at me again.

Like I said, if you’re dead, I’ll be dead, he said, a little too softly, getting up to take our plates to the sink. God, imagine fucking in a grave. You wanna order pizza?

[Cover pic: My Own Private Idaho (1991) dir. Gus Van Sant)