Chapter 2 Jesus of Suburbia
JESUS OF SUBURBIA
CHARLIE
I make it fifteen minutes into my shift at the Tool Shed before I realise I’m gonna cry.
I’m on my knees, loading cans into the fridges behind the bar, when I get to an iconic red-and-white block of Emu Export – the proud, bogan, West Aussie beer Matt used to drink – and that’s what sends me over the edge.
Not like I haven’t seen a million cans of Bush Chook since Matt died. It always makes me think of him, but it’s usually a muted pain, my grief a Nurofen-dulled toothache.
No, the beer cans send me into a spiralling menty b today for the same reason I left Steam Works: because Zeke said Matt’s name, and it made my old scar a fresh wound again.
I haven’t heard anyone talk about Matt in seven years. Nobody – not my bitch mother, not my deadshit stepdad, not my old bandmates, Hannah and Rocky – knew I was with Matt. Nobody but Zeke and Hammer.
I know Matt is dead. I live with it every day.
In some ways, it’s affected me more than my dad’s death.
I was too young to save my father, but I feel so goddamn personally responsible for Matt’s death.
There were warning signs I should’ve understood, but I was so desperate for a boyfriend, I ignored them.
A loud, deep voice behind me says, ‘Holy hell, son, if you worked any slower, you’d be goin’ backwards.’
I tell my tears to stay in my head, take a deep breath and stand up to face Curtis.
Curtis Levesque is simultaneously the coolest and toughest dude I’ve ever met.
He’s a big Black motherfucker in his sixties but still has the muscular build and steroid addiction of a nightclub bouncer half his age.
Everything about him, from his permanently grizzled grimace to his tattooed shoulders, says survivor.
He grew up in an abusive home in New Orleans and fled to San Francisco in the late 1970s, where he came of age, came out and, according to the lurid stories he tells over dinner every night, just straight-up came in every guy he could get his hands on.
His stories of his adventures in the Castro – pre-AIDS crisis, when being homosexual was both subterranean and a seemingly endless sex party – are legendary, and the closest thing I have to mythology.
Every time he regales us with tales of that era, I wish I’d been born then.
Which I know is stupid and short-sighted and yada yada, because we have rights and aren’t automatically sex criminals and can get married now.
But there is something about the freedom of those days, and the fondness with which Curtis speaks of them, that makes me hanker for them.
It’s like I was born too late to enjoy who I am.
Curtis worked gay bars in San Francisco and ran sex-on-premises venues and sex shops in New York and London for decades before he met Ahmed, a male model nearly twenty years his junior.
Together, they used the legendary Damron Men’s Travel Guide as a kind of personal GPS for years, travelling the world to every Pride festival, Mardi Gras and cruise ship you can think of.
Their adventures are seedy and sordid and make me insanely jealous. They’ve done everything and everyone.
Now Ahmed’s in his forties and his modelling career has slowed, they’ve settled in the sleepier burbs of Perth, to slow down and be closer to his family.
I met Curtis on Grindr two years ago and never anticipated he’d be anything more than a one-off hookup.
The day we first hooked, I was all depressed.
I’d gotten my song – ‘Roof’, a radio-friendly acoustic track – played on RTRFM, a local indie station, but when I shared the news on Insta thinking people would be psyched for me, it was crickets.
Twenty-five people liked the post. Half a dozen comments.
That was it. Nobody gave a shit. Dunno what I expected from one spin by one DJ who was doing me a solid.
You wait your whole life for fame and you get what you think will be a big moment and it fizzles like a cigarette in a Heineken bottle.
That day, I felt at my lowest. I felt like my rock star dream was dead.
Radio is nothing anymore. Physical music sales have flatlined.
Spotify pays a fraction of a cent per stream and it’s never close to real money, even when you’re famous.
And hell, I’m in the wrong genre to make any impact in the 2020s.
I coped the way I cope with anything: I jumped on Grindr and hunted for a man to rearrange my guts.
Curtis was an incredibly hot root. I usually go for guys my age, so a leather daddy in his sixties felt borderline illegal. But the dude was jacked and had a cock like a tree trunk, and I was in the mood to get thrown around. Curtis fucked the pain away.
I had no intention of going back – repeat hookups are never as good – but the aftercare made this one different.
Curtis didn’t turf me out of his house like most tops would.
He gave me a slow, full-body massage. He told me I was a beautiful boy, that I deserved to be happy.
I felt suspicious at first – what was this dude doing, mixing real human emotions with a transactional fuck-and-run hookup?
But there was nothing sinister behind it.
This big badass just cared about boys losing their way in the city.
He told me he was like me, once. He said I was going to survive.
I’d never had anyone be so kind to me. The neglected child in me liked it. A lot.
Over the next two years, Curtis became a go-to when I was in the mood for getting rammed.
We hooked up every few months, enough to be in each other’s orbits.
He’d tell me about Ahmed’s dimming modelling career, his struggle to keep his sex shop financially solvent, all his sexual conquest tales from the Castro glory days.
I’d tell him about my music dreams and he’d tell me I could make it.
When my last share house fell through, Curtis offered me a room. And when he told me about his new business idea, I put my hand up to work here.
After Curtis says I’m a slow worker, I swallow my tears about Matt and face my boss with a stiff upper lip. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘You know I’m usually fast, right? I set up those chairs real quick.’
Curtis’ stern face breaks into a playful grin. ‘You’re not great at tellin’ when I’m jokin’, are you son?’
I give him a sheepish grin. ‘Just wanna make a good impression. New job and all. Don’t wanna let you down.’
‘You don’t wanna let me down, how about you finally come to the gym and lift some weights with me and Rex?’ Curtis jokes.
Curtis is a gym junkie and never stops trying to recruit me.
‘Hard pass,’ I say, for the millionth time. ‘Never gonna happen.’
‘One day, I’ll get you lifting,’ Curtis says, tapping his nose. He holds up his iPhone in the daggy case that holds his bank cards and ID, like any regular dad who doesn’t wear arseless leather chaps on Friday nights. ‘We just got a DM from Xander Sullivan. You know who he is?’
‘Holy shit, really?’ I say, forgetting I’m meant to be a punk who doesn’t care about Insta-famous influencers from shit reality-TV shows. ‘The Xander Sullivan messaged us?’
Xander Sullivan is the most famous local gay Perth has.
He’s not much older than me but after breaking through as the first homosexual candidate on one of those godawful Insta-marriage shows, he did the circuit of Celebrity Survivor and shows like that and now he’s got the level of fame I always wanted.
He’s a squeaky-clean celebrity – his teeth are artificially lighter than they ought to be and his skin tone is artificially darker – and he’s never said anything vaguely cancellable, or even halfway meaningful.
He is pink fairy floss in human form. He ends up on lists of ‘Most Influential LGBTQIA+ People Under 40’ in the Sunday Times Magazine but nobody can actually name anything he’s ever done other than appear on TV and smile like a maniac.
He always wears shit covered with glitter and rhinestones, uses the word ‘fabulous’ liberally, and has two pet chihuahuas named Dua and Lipa, with whom he has been photographed for magazine covers a whopping three times.
He’s often called a Perthonality, which is our local backhanded mode of recognising a West Aussie has become famous, but only in Perth.
Anyway, I fucking hate him.
Curtis holds his phone screen out about five metres from his face, like a grandpa.
Dude is so stubborn about ageing he refuses to get glasses.
The font size on his phone is so gigantic I frequently can’t help reading his dirty texts to Ahmed over his shoulder, but he would rather that than acknowledge his vision is starting to fail him.
‘Xander just followed the Tool Shed Insta account,’ Curtis says, ‘then messaged asking for an invitation to our grand opening, offering to work his influencer magic.’ He raises his eyebrows.
‘I’ve been in this business a long time, and nothin’ raises my hackles more than the dumbass word “influencer”.
But this is a new world, and I’m not a young buck anymore … What’s your take on him?’
I admit I’m no fan of the term influencer either, nor the overly smiley pyramid-scheme cult leader vibes it suggests.
But Xander Sullivan is the biggest fish in Perth’s tiny gay pond, and having him attend our opening and promote us to his hundred thousand followers would be a massive coup.
People would rock up just for a chance to bask in his trail of glitter.