Читать книгу Dear Prudence - David Trinidad - Страница 40

ODE TO DICK FISK

Dick Fisk,

one of the first

gay porn stars,

handsome,

short,

muscular,

hung like a horse,

did you ever dream

that someday

you’d be the subject

of a poem,

let alone an ode?

Did I ever dream,

jacking off to

pictures of you

in the 1970s,

snorting Rush

as close

as possible

to orgasm,

the bed in my room

in my parents’ house

creaking late

at night,

that I’d be the one

to write it?

Yet here we are,

thirty years later,

sharing the most

intimate of moments

as I enclose

your name

in quotations

and click

“I’m Feeling Lucky”

on google.com. And what do I get? Ten color photos on Al’s Gay Porn Stars: you, nude, with your straight brown hair and mustache, your washboard stomach, and your astounding endowment, posing in bed and in a white armchair with a defiant, come-hither look, and lost in action with a mustached blond in a red-and-black plaid shirt, your mouth stretched wide to accommodate his cock. And a brief but informative bio: “Dick Fisk was a little guy from Georgia with a big dick, and he knew how to use it too.” Your real name was Frank Rick Fitts and you were born on May 13, 1955. I again search the Internet and sure enough: the thirteenth fell on a Friday that month. Friday the 13th! Dick! On howstuffworks.com, Jill M. Phillips tells us Taurus men possess a great deal of what used to be called “animal magnetism.” Those born May 13th are rare individuals with unique and special talents. There is a dark side to these people, yet they are rarely moved to reveal this aspect of themselves. You were a math major in college, Dick, before dropping out and breaking into the adult male film industry. Your acting credits include such Falcon and Bijou Studio classics as Axe Master, Champs 2, Cruisin’ the Castro, Help Wanted, Spokes, The Other Side of Aspen, and Try to Take It. At the time of your death, you were between films working at a bar in Midtown Atlanta. You and your lover were killed in an automobile accident between Atlanta and Marietta on the evening of Halloween 1983. I’ve only been to Atlanta once, for a writers conference in 2007. My dog Byron had just died and I spent a lot of time in my hotel room, crying. It’s not much of a coincidence, Dick, but during that trip I visited my sister and her family in Marietta, where you presumably lived. We ate a pleasant meal and played a game of Hearts. You perished at twenty-eight. That October 31st, I was in a single apartment in Holly wood, thirty, and sober exactly one week. I didn’t know it, but my real life had just begun. Gone, all the drugs and alcohol and torment of my twenties, exacerbated by a 1979 car accident in which my best friend Rachel was killed, and which I barely survived. A psychic recently told me that when I was in ICU, I was connected by a very thin cord, but I chose to come back (I didn’t have to), and the dream I had just before I woke, of a scarecrow falling down a mountain, bouncing from rock to rock, was my soul returning to my body. Gone also, the blasé anthem of those years, Blondie’s reggae-infused “Die Young Stay Pretty.” Oh Dick, it’s true, for Rachel, for you. Forever you’ll get to keep your good looks, ample evidence of which is easily obtained online. I drag your image— cute as Jackson Browne, only mustached— onto my desktop. Unabashedly, I walk into the back room at Specialty Video and select my favorite of all your films, Steam Heat