(Story for D.H., who could care less.)

I remember the last time I saw Gerry as though it were one of those famous paintings you keep coming across in magazines but forget every time you turn the page, only to find it again and again when it's most likely to disturb you. He was in the corner of his converted warehouse screaming into an empty jar of Vaseline with a juvenile rage, pounding one fist against the door to his "secret room," the room he said he could never share with me no matter how intimate we became. He was a kind of genius, I guess. And just then I thought of how we met, his personal ad and the shy fake-photo letters: "Single white male, tall, one blue eye. Mindfuck artist looking for weakling to push around."

I was new in town and thought it would be a good opportunity to meet someone. So we started up a relationship, going out to truck pulls and industrial destruction shows. He showed me things I'd never seen before, and sex with Gerry, well, there's nothing like that where I came from, back in Provo. (I still have sores!) But after a few months it began to go stale. It didn't just hurt the first time, like he promised, and the mean, self-absorbed way he treated me became less and less charming. He said I was reading too much Cosmopolitan, but I think now that Cosmo saved my life.

And now there he was in that corner, making a wax pressing of his erection to fit a lock he was constructing for the door to his secret room. That way, he said, he could assure that it was only accessible to him in his passion, letting his lust regulate his relationship with whatever lay on the other side, and insuring that his obsession would be slowly shut away as he ages, "like memories of childhood with tidy half-lives," he said.

One of his friends, a kind of idiot-psychic, once told him that his kind of genius only came around once every seven generations, so with some connections I had back in Utah I helped him look into his family tree. And sure enough, six grandfathers ago he had a relative who came to the colonies to escape "the inanities of European illuminism," whatever that is, and spent a brief time with the Oneida Group before deciding they were pansies, and cut a broad swath of perversion across the frontierlands leaving only a trail of heartbroken bison and missionary suicides until, suffering from injuries he received while experimenting with a technique to flay and consume live coyotes, he wrote down his memoirs for posterity and died, quill in hand, even then impregnating the homely Indian woman whose line would eventually come down, without much further excitement, to Gerry.

He wasn't sure that all of that amounted to genius, as his friend had suggested, but he was inspired enough to erect a little shrine outside of 'the room' in honor of every eighth ancestor back, throughout all time, until he could no longer open the door with his prowess. And it was that shrine I was walking toward, with a flower in my hand, when he stood up shrieking at me and spilled a saucepan of molten wax down his groin. I ran in horror as he screamed and I never saw him again.

I haven't found the strength to start up another relationship but I still find a little Gerry in my hands now and then, sticking to the pages as I leaf through magazines, looking for that disturbing painting.