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When my grandma got senile she’d stare out the window from her rocking chair at the house across the street. Butter yellow with a white door and black shingles. She’d sigh then under her breath say
“That poor faggot.”
It wasn’t ‘til she had been dead for two years, digging through her old letters, that I learned who the poor faggot was. Already a while into being one myself. The last year of her life I thought she might be talking about me, caught some sixth sense from her dementia. Or the old sorry excuse for an oak tree that had dried in the drought.
In the late eighties, amongst the flock of the almost dead, was Tony Stachs, Tony Star to his regulars. A bay area dancer who packed his bags for a small suburban town a few fucks to late. HIV turned Aids by the mid nineties.
When he moved into the yellow house across the street with tales of auditioning for Michael Jackson and cage dancing, the neighbors were friendly. Smiling politely. Small talking at the mailbox. Came to his dinner parties but with silverware brought from home and bladders emptied on their own toilets.
Tony liked none of ‘em like he did grandma. She was the best gossip for ten blocks and smoked hand rolled cigarettes in a gold antique holder at the center of her dining table. When he saw the ceramic breaking tray shattered in the garbage after her second husband had broken it over her head, he replaced it. Left it on the porch with a note that read
“Found it in pink.”
When the pneuomia came grandma was the one who heard the death rattle. His parents got to his bedside in time to say tense goodbyes, two pairs of gloves on each. Grandma apparently came home when Tony died and lit four candles, one for each decade he lived.
I had no idea any faggot had lived in our one stoplight town except for Father Toffy who molested most of the altar boys. Never me though, so I hadn’t known he was a faggot first hand or anything. Then there was the one guy who lived over on Maple that was caught crossdressing by the high school baseball coach at a hole in the wall bar in the sticks. That makes three faggots if you count the baseball coach. But none had been a dancer, none were friends with my grandma, and none had fucked enough to die young. Not like Tony.
Katie Haley
Katie Haley writes in different vacant parking lots in Sacramento from the driver's seat of her black Honda. Her words can be read in/on Vlad Mag, Expat Press, and Hobart.
published May 22, 2025