Lily Lucas Hodges | The Common

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

To kick off the autumn column, our contributors bring you three novels that invite unexpected encounters with time. A recommendation from former TC submissions reader SAMUEL JENSEN trains our sights on the future of the American dream; with LILY LUCAS HODGES, we unearth an artifact of historical erasure; and with HILDEGARD HANSEN, we finally transcend history through prose that gropes at the primordial core of life.

Alexander Sammartino’s Last Acts; recommended by Reader-Emeritus Samuel Jensen.

I picked up Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel, Last Acts, because of the cover. Seeing it at the book store, it was as if someone had walked up the road from my childhood home, aimed their camera across the arroyo, and snapped a picture. I’m from El Paso, Texas and Sammartino’s novel is set in Phoenix, Arizona—two very different places—but still: a sunbleached strip mall with a gun shop in it, burning under a merciless blue sky? It was like running into someone you’re not sure you wanted to see again.

Last Acts is a bowl-you-over kind of book. In the first few pages, gun store owner David Rizzo drives to pick up his son who has nearly died from an overdose. On the way, he is waylaid. Rizzo is always, somehow, waylaid. His truck breaks down. He gets back from his mile-long walk for coolant just in time to watch it be towed away. At the hospital, he’s stonewalled by busy nurses, told by a patient to tell Charlie Miniscus (whoever that is) to rot in hell, and conversationally stunlocked by an overeager medical supplies salesman before a janitor tells him his son is no longer in the building.

While reading, I found myself thinking about Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2019 film Uncut Gems, a film without a single truly quiet scene. People constantly scream over each other, tinny music blaring without cease, as we watch the characters make the worst possible decisions again and again. Last Acts is a similar cacophonic rush with a similarly tragic hero, all this driven by Rizzo’s voice, the novel’s most wonderful accomplishment. His endless, internal self-narrative has a striking poetry, one of a man trying desperately to convince himself that everything is going to be okay, that his son and failing business will be. And Last Acts too is a book of schemes. Rizzo and his son Nick quite literally have hope in their sights. In Sammartino’s world the American dream is played out in gun shops and the religious overtones of Nick’s near-death the father and son attempt to exploit for profit. Last Act’s commentary on American gun violence lifts the floorboards: we see how the tentacles are tangled down there, from national want, to symbol, to myth, to blood.

Still, what got into my heart most was the setting. The beauty of the desert is here, but I kept thinking about how often characters are simply smote by the heat. For hours they lounge on their couches, AC blasting. It is as though the Rizzos’ one-track ambitions are borne of heat, their brains cooked into one tragic idea, one lasting, stifling silence. I almost couldn’t help but read Last Acts as a climate change novel—when the whole country is as hot as a Phoenix summer, how will America think?

Justin Torres’ Blackouts; recommended by TC Online Contributor Lily Lucas Hodges

Blackouts starts from nothingness. The narrator, known only and affectionately as nene, journeys to reunite with Juan Gay, who he finds dying of old age. Nene wants to learn from Juan. Learn what? He doesn’t quite know, though Juan seems to. It’s an inheritance of sorts that Juan’s ready to pass down, if nene doesn’t mind telling Juan about his mother first. “Make it terrible,” Juan says, a playful demand that defines their desire to learn from each other. The back and forth that ensues is tender, at times campy, always seeped in flirtatious generosity, yet evasive and incomplete. This opening sets the tone well for the rest of the book: Justin Torres strings readers through Blackouts in a state of unresolved pleasure.

At the same time, Blackouts is about the effects of oppression. Both nene and Juan are queer and Puerto Rican. Their dialogue deconstructs these identities, exposing the ways medicine and empire made them into pathologies. And though Blackouts is a work of fiction, the subject of nene and Juan’s time together is a real-life document—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, an infamous 1941 study by Dr. George W. Henry. This study started with the work of the real-life Jan Gay, who interviewed people in her queer community, before Dr. Henry erased the positive nature of Gay’s work and published it as a study of sexual “maladjustment.” In Blackouts, the reader only sees a redacted version, with black lines crossing out much of Dr. Henry’s version to create short erasure poems. This double silencing queers the old saying two wrongs don’t make a right: can two erasures make a truth? Can they reclaim authenticity, and can pathology be undone?

Blackouts is playful, it’s easy to read, and you enjoy the intergenerational compassion between Juan and nene. In the end, though, Blackouts is about our relationship to history: it insists that we cannot live without confronting the people who came before us or the institutions that defined us. It places you next to an elder on their death bed, confronting the choice between keeping this or that after they die, and evokes all of the moments where you’ve confronted yourself in similar ways. These moments are difficult and full of grief, but they’re also the moments where we’re dialectically the most alive.

Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H., trans. Idra Novey; recommended by TC Online Contributor Hildegard Hansen

After re-reading The Passion According to G. H., its atmosphere persists for weeks. G. H., a sculptor in Brazil, decides to deep clean the bedroom of her former maid. Inside the room, she crushes a cockroach in the door of a wardrobe and has a mystical experience. Now, reality forms in accordance. The person I formerly lived with moves out, and I inhabit this house alone for the first time, cleaning spaces I never considered mine. Insects visit me. One reason for this resonance, I think, is that this time I read the book aloud—first with the now-departed person, and thereafter, alone.

Reading aloud allows my mouth and my body to experience the intense physicality of this metaphysical book. It prevents me from unconsciously smoothing over the hard edges of the language, rendered from the Portuguese into English by Idra Novey: its recursivity, its cycling, its strained syntax. A mystical experience is exceedingly difficult to apprehend or communicate using language in its usual modes – impossible, even – and so Lispector and G. H. rely on unusual construction. As G. H. says (reflective also of my state writing this), “I only get eloquent when I err.”

These observations and unravelling understandings ground themselves in concrete and vast dilations of time and space. G. H.’s form has been drawn on the wall of a cave for three hundred thousand years. “Three thousand years ago,” she says, “I went astray, and what was left were phonetic fragments of me.” She sees, out the window, Rio’s cityscape, then the Strait of the Dardanelles, and beyond that the desert, the salt lakes, the first Assyrian merchants fighting for control of Asia Minor: the empire of the present, a dug-up future, remote ancient depths. “I was seeing, like someone who will never have to understand what she saw. As a lizard’s nature sees: without even having to remember afterward.” She sees that love is neutral, fierce neutrality. That the root of life has no human meaning: “a life so much greater that it does not even have beauty.”

For me, to read is often to go in search of something extremely specific but inarticulable, and to be dissatisfied if it is not there. In G. H., Lispector articulates it for me: “a kind of quaking happiness all over my body, a horrible happy unease in which my legs seemed to vanish, as always when the roots of my unknown identity were touched.” Or: “More than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible.”

By LILY LUCAS HODGES

A golden object, shaped like a window with open shutters, sits atop a reddish wood table. The object is busy with delicate engravings: a cross; simple human forms, some adorning heart icons on their chests; water droplets; and palpitating lines. To the right is a container of prayer candles.

Photo courtesy of author.

San Francisco, CA

Gold is all you notice at first. A triptych dressed in shiny monochrome. The center of it is just above eyesight, so you’re left looking up at of Keith Haring’s altar, Life of Christ, an imposing piece, big enough to hold most of your gaze and envelop your mind. Haring made the original cast in 1990 and it’s considered his final work. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco acquired this edition in 1995 for its Interfaith AIDS Memorial Chapel.

Grace Cathedral is an imposing, Gothic-styled church presiding over Nob Hill. Even though I call San Francisco home, I sauntered in after Sunday mass like a tourist, and made my way to the chapel, a corner carved out of the back of the church. I started visiting this chapel after my Uncle Barry died. Barry wasn’t my blood uncle, but I only knew him as Uncle Barry, our babysitter, the artist, a gay man. Growing up queer myself, Uncle Barry was more my uncle than my mom’s brother—straight, conservative, 2,000 miles away—queerness lending itself to question family ties.

My Uncle Barry told me once that a university hospital wanted him to join a study of gay men who were exposed to HIV but never contracted it. How had he survived the epidemic? I chalked it up to the vaguely mystical powers that surrounded him. He was a dog whisperer. He said watches stopped on his wrist. He was born on St. Patrick’s Day. These quirks were enough for my sister and me to believe he was a leprechaun.

Since I was a kid, I’d known about Uncle Barry’s time in New York City. I’d heard the name John Paul. But it wasn’t until I was older and had read Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On that I realized what it meant that John Paul had died from AIDS, just as Shilts had, and Haring had, and so many others.

I came to Haring’s altar not for a memory, but to chase a ghost. When Uncle Barry died, I inherited his stuff, where I found John Paul, a Greek American from Nebraska with kind eyes, in a photo, staring back at me. Ancestors, one generation removed, flung through the storm. I came for a man I never knew but who meant the world to a person I loved.

A dark, mushroom-shaped sculpture sits in a church nave, elevated on a short pedestal. A vertical banner is partially visible behind it. The banner is royal blue and quilted with a shield-shaped patch, with two rectangular patches nested inside and brandished with names: "David" and "Ricky"

Photo courtesy of author.

The altar is cast in bronze but finished with gold leaf. It absorbs light and reflects it back with a glow. There’s no foreground or background to the piece. It’s not about depth, but energy, seeped in Haring’s characteristic style—outlined figures and expressive lines. At the top of the center panel is the Christ figure, a multiarmed body with a cross over its head. Drops fall from the body onto a crowd of outlined figures clamoring below, shouting, pleading. Angels circulate above, but they could be falling or rising or both, the duality of giving and taking, of life and death.

As Keith Haring’s friend Sam Havadtoy, who was present at the altar’s creation, remembers: “When Keith finished, as he stepped back and gazed at this work, he said, ‘Man, this is really heavy.’ When he stopped, he was exhausted, and it was the first time I realized how frail he had become. He was completely out of breath. He said, ‘When I’m working, I’m fine, but as soon as I stop, it hits me.’” Haring would pass away from complications from AIDS a few weeks later.

How do we deal with heaviness? It’s the gesticulating crowd that holds my attention. The sum of their frenetic energy, captured by a plethora of lines, almost frantic, all packed together from the left-most edge to the right. They demand your gaze. There are so many figures in the crowd, there were so many who lost their lives, and so many more who lost their friends, lovers, siblings, coworkers. I feel my own tears grow thinking about the sheer volume of loss.

There are donation stands in the room with rows of votives on them. I count eleven flames before stepping back to take a seat on the bench. Eleven souls remembered so far this morning. I realize I am no longer alone. A woman hovers over the stand. The chapel is small, and I feel self-conscious in the presence of her intimate moment. I look down at my cusped hands. Through the corner of my eye, I see she’s moved to the other side of the triptych. She spends a second there and then leaves. When I look up, I notice there’s a new light. Another soul remembered. Then, no, I see another, there’s two. How many light just one candle? If you lost one friend to AIDS, one loved one, would it be rare if there weren’t more?

A memorial quilt hanging vertically on a wall, made up of patches running two wide and four long. Some are minimally decorated, like a tombstone, while others are adorned with photo collages. One patch memorializes 21 lives alone, each represented by a candle labeled with initials and birth and death dates.

Photo courtesy of author.

Sitting in an interfaith chapel puts you into a spiritual sea of beliefs. I turn to death. A common one is that the soul doesn’t die. I was raised to believe in a finality to time on this world. The soul moves on elsewhere. But that’s just one view. Another is reincarnation. John Paul died about a month after I was born. Close timing. Had I missed the chance to inherit John Paul’s soul? Did another queer person born after me get it? What if many of my generation are living out a second chance for all those who passed away from AIDS—the artists, the churchgoers, the hustlers, the teachers, the partiers, the business owners, the actors, the designers, the activists and non-activists alike. A whole vibrant, textually complex force gone within a decade, inherited by another.

An organ bellows and fills the entire cathedral with a thick presence. It’s a familiar and uplifting tune, but I can’t quite put my finger on the name of it. I don’t attend mass. I only know the Christmas standards. But the sound is pleasant, and I don’t mind it. I look at my watch and realize the fifteen minutes I thought I’d spend had turned into an hour. As I walk out, I pass the baptismal font and peer in at the copper basin. I was baptized here in 1989, the year John Paul died, the year that AIDS cases in the United States surpassed 100,000. I don’t know if Uncle Barry was there at my baptism, if he had returned to San Francisco by then or if he was still trying to make sense of his life after John Paul’s death. At the height of an epidemic, how many others had to attend baptisms after a funeral?

I take one last look at the chapel, at Haring’s altar. Two women have just entered. It’s around 1:00 p.m. on a Sunday and if they look closely, they’ll see fourteen candles lit.

Lily Lucas Hodges (they/all) is a historian who’s written at the intersection of queerness and Catholicism for The Washington Post, TIME, and elsewhere. This is their first published piece of creative nonfiction. They are currently finishing a memoir on their gay uncles that questions LGBTQ+ generational archives.

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