Page 52 of Exquisite Things

I should never have promised Oliver that this year would be better than the last. A promise is a dare. To fate. To the gods.

To whatever force controls the brutal dance of life. A promise is a fragile thing waiting to be broken. Mine has been broken

day by day. Week by week. Month by terrible month. Oliver has finally agreed to Lily’s suggestion that he talk to a professional.

Finding the right therapist has been hard. His melancholy days seem to be more frequent. He goes through days where he doesn’t

play any music. That’s how I know he’s in a dark spell. When he closes the door on the one thing that always gives him hope.

“ I know not whether laws be right .” My thirteen-year-old student recites the poem he’s studying Friday afternoon in the park. “ Or whether laws be wrong. All that we know who lie in... ”

“Gaol.” I know the poem by heart. Of course. I know much of Wilde’s work by heart.

“What is gaol?”

“It means jail. Wilde wrote this poem when he was released from prison.”

“I asked Mother why Oscar Wilde was put in jail, and she said I would find out when I was old enough to understand.”

“You’re fourteen.” I look into his adolescent eyes. So full of curiosity. Yearning. “You were old enough to ask me to teach you some of Wilde’s work.”

He looks at me slyly. “Truth be told, I asked about Wilde because my literature professor said I should avoid him at all costs.

Said I should stick to Shakespeare and Dickens. I figured it was because his writing was obscene. Didn’t expect an endless

poem about prison.”

I nod. “Let’s dig into the poem some more.”

“Why wouldn’t he just say jail or prison? Why use a word like gaol ?”

The thing I love most about tutoring is the questions. The way they remind me that I too am full of questions. Curiosity keeps

me going. Persistence too. My persistence is something I cherish. A badge of honor. It’s what got me here. Curiosity and persistence.

And the ability to laugh at everything . These are the qualities that keep me alive. I’d be merely existing without them.

“Was it common back then in... when did he write this?”

“1898.”

“Fuck me, that’s a long time ago.” I love when the students swear in front of me. It means I’ve gained their trust. That they’re

willing to be themselves in my presence.

“Not so long, in the grand scheme of things. Not even a century.”

Wilde had been released from prison by then.

A bon vivant no more. The era of green carnations had passed.

The witticisms that once delighted this city gave way to cheerless verses.

His words dried up as he drank himself into a stupor.

Loneliness. Meningitis. An acute ear infection.

He who had a talent for hearing what others were hiding could hear no more.

He died too young. Too broken. Perhaps—among the many things he taught us—this is the most important one: that all beauty must fade.

“ Gaol is a word of Irish origin. As Wilde is of Irish origin. Perhaps he chose the word to tell us something.”

I wait patiently. Watch the wheels in this intelligent boy’s head turn. “My father says the Irish are greedy and ungrateful.”

“Mmm.” I don’t dare say more. I need jobs like these. I cock my head toward the book in his hand. “Keep reading. Better yet,

close the book and try to recite from memory.”

He closes the book. “ All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong. And that each day is like a year. A year whose days are long. ” He glances nervously at me. “I haven’t memorized the rest.”

“You still have time.” I glance at my watch. “Let’s wrap up now. The sun is shining, and it’s Poet’s Day. Go have some fun.

Next time, we’ll focus on your Latin studies again.”

“Why must we learn Latin when nobody speaks it any longer?”

I shrug. “That’s a question for your classics professor, but I suppose it’s so you might comprehend the etymology of your

language. If we don’t study the source of our way of thinking and communicating, then we can never understand why we are the

way we are.”

“Latin is boring.” He laughs. I do too. “What’s Poet’s Day?”

I smile. “Piss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“What?”

“Think about it.”

He thinks. Laughs. Delight in his young eyes. The world all future for him. Nothing but revelation and possibility. “Let’s

piss off, then.”

We walk across the park toward his parents’ East London flat. Another spring. Flowers in bloom. Sunlight warms the wet grass. Cherry blossoms. Wilde’s poem accompanies me as we walk.

This too I know—and wise it were if each could know the same—that every prison men build is built with bricks of shame.

I imagine my student’s literature professor would become one of Thatcher’s targets if he assigned Wilde. Teachers corrupting

the young with the work of queers. With poems that possess the power to haunt. This one has haunted me since the revelation

that Lily’s Uncle Alton is in a jail cell. Possibly forever. For doing nothing but existing. Just as Wilde was imprisoned

for existing. But no, they were both living . This was their true crime. Daring to live when the world needed them merely to exist.

Society grants the few life and the many mere existence.

“You’re home early.” The boy’s mother wears an apron around her wide waist. Stained with some sort of red sauce. She has kind

eyes. Overworked hands. Teeth that need fixing.

“It’s Poet’s Day!” My student says it gleefully.

His mother wraps her arms around her boy. “Is that a holiday I don’t know about?”

I answer fast. “It just means we focused on poetry today. He’s doing fantastic. He has a rich understanding of language. Next

time we’ll focus on Latin, which he’s still struggling with.”

“We’re very grateful to you, Bram. You have a way with him.” She pulls a fiver from her apron pocket. Hands it to me.

I hear a police dispatch from within the flat. Her husband is home. He works for the Metropolitan Police. The Black Rats.

He’s some sort of commander or deputy commander. I can’t hear every word. Perhaps every third word. Emergency ... Brixton ... now ... riot . Like a redacted poem.

“It’s my day off.” His father’s voice. Husky and authoritative. The voice of a man wearing the mask of what he thinks a man

must be. A voice like my own father’s.

Reinforcement ... Railton ... Operation Swamp 81 .

An association. The prime minister’s words: People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture . The way she deployed the word rather to soften the revulsion in her statement. To make the fear she speaks of feel soft and rational.

A memory. Long buried. James’s uppity mother, after she found me atop her precious son: Go back to your vile country. Stop swamping ours with your savage ways.

“I’ll be going, then. Till next week.” I feel dread as I walk to the Tube station to head back to Brixton. The rumbling train

seems to speak the words from the dispatch to me: Emergency. Brixton. Riot. Reinforcement. Railton. Operation Swamp 81.

I get off at the Brixton station. Ascend the staircase into the open air. Something feels different. The smell. Not the heat

of spices being cooked but the heat of fire burning. The sound. Not joyful reggae but frightened desperation. Police everywhere.

Their bodies upright. Primed for battle.

I grow increasingly frightened as I near Railton Road.

I clutch the bottle of poppers in my pocket.

Lily recently had Archie give us each a bottle of poppers to carry with us at all times.

To throw in someone’s eyes if they ever try to mess with us.

She got the idea when some guy accidentally spilled poppers in Archie’s eyes while Archie was on his knees.

Azalea was called in to care for Archie.

To convince him he wouldn’t go blind. Archie worried that the amyl nitrate entering his mucous membranes meant he had broken his sobriety.

We all laughed about it at the time. Teased Archie until he laughed too.

But the incident led to Lily’s revelation: “Cheaper than pepper spray, and more inventive. Anybody fucks with you, you throw this at their eyes and run.”

I walk past a burning police car. A tornado of fire. Across the street: young Black boys stand next to a group of white queers.

They cheer and clap. One of the queers wears red heels and long silk gloves. He holds what looks like a box of chocolates.

I recognize him. He was in one of the Brixton Faeries shows we saw. He offers me a chocolate. I realize they’re not sweets.

My God, he’s handing out petrol bombs!

“I-I’m headed home.”

At first I feel disgusted by this violence. Petrol bombs? Is this what it’s come to?

But then I wonder why we didn’t do this in London in 1895 when Wilde was on trial?

And why we didn’t do this in Boston in 1920 when Harvard destroyed our community?

Why do we always shrug off the establishment’s violence toward us?

I rush away. Gripped by fear. On the street is an old copy of Gay Noise .

I step on its front page. The word RAID in big block letters.

Raids. Arrests. Just like London in 1895.

Just like Boston in 1920. Same as it ever was.

People taken to prison for no reason but their difference.

Increasing day by day. Week by week. The state is fighting back.

Just as Oliver warned they would. A little over a month ago: fifteen thousand marched in the Black People’s Day of Action.

We were among them. All but Oliver. He was still too afraid.

He was also right. Maybe he knew this would happen because he stayed in Boston longer than I did.

Watched them crack down on us. Police presence in London has multiplied since the Black People’s Day of Action.

Arrests have increased. The whole neighborhood has felt like it could ignite. And now it has.