Conditions of Precarity

By Joseph Allen Boone

An immigrant grandmother who sells roses to gay customers at a West Hollywood bar; a deaf-mute masseur and sex worker plying his trade; a transient nesting in the lilac bushes of a New England college campus—these are a few of the characters in Conditions of Precarity who find their existences at grave risk in a world in which every choice impacts an uncertain future.

Exquisitely wrought stories. Boone's range of character, setting and development is remarkable, as is his ability to inhabit so convincingly his large cast of characters.

T.C. Boyle, author World’s End and Drop City
*
I was struck while reading these stately understated stories by the camouflaged velocity of the epiphanies, the turns in the turns. These are aggressively graceful fictions that sneak up on you. There, that sting of the bullet that comes moments before you register the muzzle flash or even hear the report of the shot fired. This work packs that kind of punch—kinetically energetic in a potential energy drag. Yes, I found myself on edge, on that kind of edgy edge.

Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne
*
Conditions of Precarity is abundant with beauty. Joseph Boone has written a collection that reminds us of our small moments of grace, moments that affirm our connections and moments that illuminate our humanity in these precarious times. Each story is a wondrous meditation of longing, desire, joy—or the will to reach for more. Read this brilliant collection. It will never let you go.
Dana Johnson, author of In the Not Quite Dark and Elsewhere, California
*
Conditions of Precarity is an atlas of longing and desire populated by characters whose sensitivity, wonder, and abiding optimism afford them the capacity to be surprised, to explore, to change. With these ten stories, ranging in style from the gothic to the farcical to the tragic, set in wildly different terrains—the rural South, the Yorkshire moors, college towns, the Hollywood Hills–Boone puts on full display his abundant talent for charting all of the libidinal currents of the world, all of its varieties of love.
Peter Gadol, author of Silverlake Life and The Stranger Game
*
All of these stories put us at the terrifying center of precarity—the searing vulnerabilities of childhood, of sexuality within hostile environments, even within the storied precarity of certain literary masterpieces—but always the reader's sturdy perch is Joseph Allen Boone's gorgeous prose.
Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow and She
*

• Language: English
• Publisher: Post Hill Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798888456774

Book preview

cover.jpg

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 979-8-88845-676-7

ISBN (eBook): 979-8-88845-677-4

Conditions of Precarity

© 2024 by Joseph Allen Boone

All Rights Reserved

Graphic design by Cristen Fitzpatrick

Cover photograph permission of Adobe Stock Images

Permissions to reprint the following stories are gratefully acknowledged:

The Sound of Water, first published in The Bridport Prize: Poetry, Short Stories, and Flash Fiction (2019).

Take Back the Night, first published as Me, Too? in Write Launch, April 2019.

Bubba’s Shoes, first published in American Writers’ Review, 2019.

Chrysalis, first published in Tikkun, April 2019..

He, first published in Birmingham Arts Journal, October 2018.

Bad Day at Furnace Creek, first published as Furnace Creek, in Green Hills Literary Lantern, June 2018.

Our Lady of Rosas, first published in Razor Literary Magazine, May 2018.

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

PRAISE FOR JOSEPH BOONE’S

FURNACE CREEK

__________________________________________________

Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award for LGBT+ Fiction

Winner of the Next Generation Indie Awards for First Novel

Honorable Mention, Foreward Indie Book of the Year Award

Honorable Mention, Eric Hoffer Book Awards

__________________________________________________

"A funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment."

—Michael Cunningham

"An ingenious re-telling and re-imagining of Dickens’ Great Expectations. Its narrator is endearing and knowing and also, like the novelist, a born noticer."

—Colm Toíbín

A sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.

—Viet Nguyen

Boone invests in his central characters’ obsessions, preoccupations, failings, and aspirations, lighting them from within with the glow of humanity. Deeply satisfying.

—Los Angeles Review of Books

"With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines Dickens’s Great Expectations in the American South, in the tumultuous 1960s, with a queer perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Exquisite prose and a storyteller’s elan keep the story going."

—Publishers Weekly

A page-turning novel. The American South is our own Dickensian England, and Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!

—Marianne Wiggins

Lyrical and inventive, merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic.

—Kirkus Reviews

A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: a novel that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down. It seizes you in the opening chapters and refuses to let you go.

—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

A wonderful novel with psychological depth to match a period in American history that was both stormy and exhilarating.

—Bookscovertocover

"The richness of the characters makes Furnace Creek work brilliantly. Boone’s writing . . . is at times lyrical, memorable, and always in service to the story."

—Southern Review of Books

First-time novelist Joseph Allen Boone has made a debut unlike the majority of literary writers. He defies all expectations of a first-time novelist with this reader, demanding a standing ovation for his efforts.

—Next Generation Indie Book Awards

"No single review could possibly encompass the abundance of lives and life underway in Furnace Creek—nor should anyone wish it to. That’s why we read books like this one: to get happily lost in their capacious, prodigious pages."

—Greg Bills

"Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have: characters we love, a story that touches the reader deeply, and a haunting quality that reaches beyond the pages, informing our current lives. It is also wickedly funny."

—Dana Johnson

The love of literature hinges not just on beautiful writing but an awareness that the stories of the past have a lot to teach us about the present. By transporting Dickens into our era, Boone demonstrates just that.

—The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide

Contents

The Sound Of Water

Chrysalis

He

Bubba’s Shoes

Our Lady of Rosas

Bad Day at Furnace Creek

Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me

Take Back the Night

Head Over Heels

Mo’s Gift

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Conditions of Precarity

Stories

__________________________________________________

THE SOUND OF WATER

You stand watching from the edge of the jacuzzi as he lowers himself into the steaming water, as he yields to the hissing cauldron. Face turned skywards to the October harvest moon, arms flung askew, he sinks beneath the churning surface holding his breath. Eyes closed; lips curved in ecstasy; smile visible despite the ripples breaking his image into a hundred refractions, pink against turquoise.

That sound as he went under, was it a gurgle of delight or the hum of the jets tumbling the waters? You wonder, knowing what you now know about the boy, studying his slender body, pale as moonlight in the underwater light, as he lazily sinks to the bottom, opens his mouth to expel a trail of bubbles, arms swaying like sea plants whispering a private language. Suddenly he springs upwards, bursting into the night air as forcefully as the spray of a Bernini fountain, eyes flashing and mouth grinning in the cloud of steam that hovers above the tub.

Little fishies, my little fishies: those were the words, you recall, that Tiberius used to describe the wantons who frolicked in the baths of his pleasure palace on Capri. Once the emperor tired of his minions, he tossed them off the island’s cliffs, their lissome bodies shattering against the rocks jutting from the surf below.

My little fishie, you want to say to him. I’ll never hurt you.

But you know he won’t hear.

* * *

You remember the first moment you saw him, that July evening when the heat wave nearly paralyzed the city. You opened the front door and there he stood in the cold rush of the air-conditioning, dark liquid eyes at once expectant and hesitant. Before you could invite him into your glass-and-steel house, perched high on the hills overlooking the City of Angels, his hand darted to his mouth, then he tapped his ear—all this as he shrugged his shoulders with a crooked smile. A split second of surprise, even panic, flashed across your face as you grasped the situation. When it came to masseurs, you thought you’d seen it all. But this was new: he was deaf, and he was mute. Your momentary panic made you blush; you felt pity for his affliction; you felt, oddly, an arousal of interest.

* * *

That was the beginning.

The third time you hired him, in August, he revealed via the BuzzCard app on his phone that his name was David. No surprise there—you’d assumed that Lance—the name in his online advertisement—was an alias. They usually were. He was Mexican-American, an achingly beautiful young man who, once stripped to his black jockey Calvins, looked a full decade younger than his already young twenty-six years. His calves and legs were as impressive, and as furry, as those of a marathon runner, but his chest and arms as spindly and as hairless as an adolescent’s, begging (so you tell yourself) to be hugged, protected. Despite such bony arms he was amazingly strong; all to the good since you’d hired him (so you tell yourself) to work the knots out of your back. He seemed genuinely to like you, though you were more than twice his age, your hairline receding, body slackening, and too many white chest hairs to bother plucking the offenders anymore.

How did he cope, you wondered during those first meetings: cope with being deaf and mute and gay? With being deaf and mute and gay and doing this for a livelihood? Did any clients, flustered at his inability to speak, turn him away on sight? You, ever the clinical psychologist on alert for symptoms of trauma, wanted to ask all these questions and more, but they felt too complex to condense into the BuzzCard texts he and you used to communicate. ASL? David shrugged. He’d learned the rudiments, he told you, but with his family he had developed his own language of signs plus he read lips fairly well. Nowadays he used his mobile phone to communicate, he could peck out messages as swiftly in English as in Spanish: ah, nimble fingers of youth. The same fingers that seemed to feel nothing odd, nothing shameful, in touching your naked body, telegraphing your desire back to you in the orgasmic dribs and drabs that at the conclusion of the massage were the best you could muster—but for which pleasures you were, at the end of the day, grateful.

Most of all you wanted to ask how he had come to be so well-adjusted, so normal in spite of the difficulties of growing up deaf and gay and Latino in America—for that was what David radiated, more than any other quality; an almost irritatingly wholesome normality; as if he were just any youth barely out of his teens, vague about his future but filled with brash self-confidence and dozens of friends, a youth who claimed to live on a shoestring budget but was somehow able to afford regular trips back home to Texas and vacations to Europe, a youth on terrific terms with parents and siblings—they’re fine that I’m gay, he pecks out on his phone, they’ve known forever. But do they know what you do for a living, you wonder; what did you tell them when you took off for Budapest last spring? Some of his background you know because David’s told you; some you’ve learned by tracking his online posts. But you crave to know more. You rue your incapacity to plumb his inner world. Whence this craving? Why do you care?

What you do know, after several weeks, is that water is his element. On his Insta account you’ve seen the photos of him posing on countless beaches: Santa Monica and Venice of course, but also Oahu, Puerto Vallarta, Sitges. And at indoor pools; the great baths of Budapest and Istanbul. When he takes a shower in your bathroom after finishing the massage, he often doesn’t emerge for half an hour, the steam doesn’t dissipate for another thirty minutes. Then he discovered that you had a jacuzzi on the deck, and he started inviting himself over to relax in the heated water while the city below shimmered like a mirage in the mist rising from the foam.

You, of course, have been more than happy to oblige: your version of offering a happy ending. Sometimes, when he’s finally had enough of the heat, has lifted himself to the edge of the tub and lies back on his towel with only his knees dangling in the water, you’ve paddled up between those muscled limbs—such a contrast to his thin chest—and, as you’ve propped your elbows on his pelvis, he’s let you play with his penis, languid, soft, then slightly turgid, you’ve kissed his inner thighs, massaged his downy calves, and when he falls asleep your heart is ready to burst.

* * *

One evening David explains that under water he feels as if he is no longer deaf; water speaks to him; its rippling movements communicate; his floating limbs sound in the shallows and depths, his body hums with intimations of what it might be like, in the world above water, to hear.

You think: not to know the timbre of a bird’s warble, or the evening rustle of crickets, or the thrashing of branches in a gust of wind—what would such a world be like? You try but fail to imagine the universal silence. Can David conjure the crash of a door slamming? a chapel bell ringing? the whoosh of a fart, expelled?

* * *

You’ve known him two months, hired him for a half-dozen massages, when you happen upon his escort ad. Not on RentMasseur, your go-to site, but on Rentmen, which you only skim once in a blue moon. David’s photograph stares out at you on page four, the same beatific face you’ve come to know up close. It’s the identical headshot he uses on RentMasseur—but here it is followed by a parade of sexually explicit nude photographs, gleefully whorish poses, the naughty leer of dark eyes daring the viewer to beg for more.

You are surprised; taken aback, perturbed; perhaps even feel a bit betrayed. You thought you’d started to understand the way he balanced his world of normalcy, of family and friends, with a profession that pushed the limits of respectability—after all, you told yourself, how many gay masseurs, professional or otherwise, don’t include a bit of sensuality as part of their services these days? But the thought of David overtly escorting—the web site showed he had been actively posting his services for three years—adds an indeterminate note to the portrait you’ve composed in your mind: he’s selling his body brazenly, not a qualm in the world. Yet he’s not desperate; not jaded; neither calculating nor conniving; there is no whiff of the hustle that you’ve encountered in the handful of male escorts you’ve hired in your lifetime, nothing furtive. An open face, genuine smile, hopeful eyes: that is your image of David, the little fishie, little minnow, who likes to float in your hot tub, his limbs fanning out like sea plants as he absorbs the sound of water in silent glee. That is the image of the boy you’ve wished into being.

Not the escort whose list of services glare from the computer screen: Open to kink, dom/sub, mild to wild, roleplaying, pushing the limits. Plus: Great international travel companion.

David, you wondered. Who are you, David?

You don’t dare ask: who am I?

* * *

The next time he appears at your door, you scan his face for a clue, a talisman you might have missed. Yet David looks more boyishly innocent than ever: carefree, that’s the word, that’s the aura he always emanates, carefree and impish in a manner without guile. But you find yourself worrying about him, about this very guilelessness—does he always enter strangers’ homes so trustingly as he has yours, so lacking in caution? You fret—you know that all escorts, all masseurs, face potential risk when they make outcalls to unknown clients; but what special dangers might befall a youth like David, so slight in build and unable to utter a word—much less a safe word during the rough sex that seemed part of his escorting repertoire? Can he signal that enough is enough? Or is enough never enough? Does his inability to speak add to the thrill for his johns; does the uncertainty, the risk, add to the pleasure for David?

As you usher David, dressed in satiny blue gym pants trimmed in white, inside, you flash on Coach Roper’s Phys Ed class. You were a high school sophomore; the Dark Ages for kids of David’s generation. Roper’s reputation for cruelty preceded him. But particularly abusive was his means of teaching the class to box. Once your right hand was mitted with a glove, he tied your left hand to that of your opponent, then blindfolded you both. Your mandate was to pummel each other until one of you caved. The victor’s reward? To help his fallen companion limp to the locker-room showers, sluice the bloody traces of triumph off the loser’s body. You’d been lashed to Billy, the perfect scholar-athlete idolized by you and most of your classmates—a schoolboy crush before you understood the nature of your crushes—and he’d soundly walloped you, blows to the rib cage bringing you to the point of girlish tears. And when, alone together in the showers, he’d lathed the soapy water over you as blood from a split lip trickled down your chin and dripped into the white foam, you’d gotten hard and had to turn away. But for the next two weeks, you revered the purple bruise on your left rib cage—tracery of an erotic awakening as you begin to lust for all the Billys of the world.

David precedes you down the hallway, reaching behind to grab your hand and tug you in his wake as he leads the way to the bedroom. Beyond the glass walls the lights of the city float below. You’re in heaven. David’s step across the bedroom carpeting is light,