Boy Trouble

"In fact, I found out afterwards that Mr. Dick had been for upwards of ten years endeavouring to keep King Charles the First out of the Memorial; but he had been constantly getting into it, and was there now."

Sometimes, reading Barrus, I'm reminded of Dickens's lovable character from David Copperfield, Mr. Dick (there are many reasons that name might swim into one's consciousness while reading Barrus, I know, but do try and keep your mind out of the gutter; I'm being literary here). Dick was a sweet old gentleman, happily engaged in his dotage in writing a magnum opus that is continually undercut by his inability to refrain from reverting to discussion of the unfortunate Stuart monarch.

King Charles lost his head, you will remember, and Barrus loses his in writing about "his boys." No matter what else he is doing, they are sure to crop up. Sometimes he’s the wise father, and sometimes something far more unsettling – a kind of savior/mentor, with just enough eros thrown in to be jarring. And it is jarring, because we’re not talking well-they’re-almost-18 boys; they’re far younger, and usually written of as having about the kind of world-weariness and sophistication, especially on all matters sexual, one might associate with… well, with a man in his 50s writing about dirty little boys.

If for no other reason (and there are many), this obsessive quality is why Barrus’s stories of his work – invariably his excruciatingly difficult, world-changing work – with HIV+ boys always felt so false. He wrote repeatedly, for example, about a place called Refuge House, a kind of transcendental asylum for terribly abused, terminally ill adolescents (and, it seemed, their younger brothers). Its location seemed to shift – it was at least once meant to be in Mexico – and its clientele were at times supposedly illegal aliens brought daringly over the border by Barrus so that he could save their lives. The apparent peregrinations of this remarkable institution set up an interesting internal contradiction in Barrus's writing: when Refuge House was in Mexico, it was there because the Evil American Medical System made lifesaving drugs unaffordable for the boys; when it housed boys Nasdijj had daringly brought over the border from Mexico, it was so he could heroically provide them with drugs unavailable there.

The numbers involved, too, seemed to fluctuate -- as high as 50, as few as just a handful. Certainly, he never seemed to write in detail about more than three or four at a time. Sometimes there didn't even appear to be a "Refuge House," but rather just some sort of "support group" in North Carolina.

The scarring lives and afflicted existence of these boys brought on some of Barrus’s choicest rants; here he is, for example, in a blog entry called “fade,” taking a rather unorthodox approach to detoxing his favorite 12-year-old:

“Bane was in Big Girl trouble. Here was a twelve-year-old who was shooting junk and was barely getting high. That's the thing with opiates. You need more and more. But there's the contradiction, too. Bane was flirting with overdose and death. I waited for everyone to leave.

They did.

Bane and I were alone.

It was now or never.

I beat him up. I just went for him. I pushed him. I shoved him down the stairs. I hit him in the gut. He doubled over and vomitted. I didn't care. I slapped him hard. I socked him in the jaw. His nose was bleeding. His eyes were flooded with tears. I kicked his ass.

I wanted his undivided attention.

No adult in his life had ever demanded this of Bane and he had pissed me off.”

Barrus's writing about these children, whom I devoutly hope are as fictional as his portrayal of them suggests, reveals how airless his work can be, how unconnected with reality, even as it is obsessed with concepts of “truth,” “history,” and “self.”

In Nasdijjland, it seems there are no little girls (he rails only at the horror that face boys in the Great Threatening Out There from which he is saving them), just as there is no good in publishing, just as there is no honest curiosity in journalism… One could go on at length about all the things he has erased from consideration, consigned to the world of Pumpkinhead (among his favorite insults) and the oblivion to which he shunts all that to which he feels superior. Without that comforting feeling of near-holiness, he might have to actually analyze some of the unshakeable assumptions from which he writes: that Timothy Barrus is a dangerous rule-breaker, an outsider, a regular little ol’ hellion, hounded by the legions of the hypocritical who aren’t worthy of his time, his art. I suppose that would mean he would have to start with the Timothy Patrick Barrus who was the fresh-faced youth, the student-council leader, the drama-club member, and (as one old schoolmate says) the “odd duck” we see in the photographs dredged up by his Lansing, Michigan, hometown paper.

And the Barrus who write honestly about that, might actually be a Barrus worth reading: stripped of his impostures, of his poses, of his supposed brushes with fame, of his endless rhetorical flights of scatology and invective. Were he to tell the truth about what brought that boy through the adventures, real and imagined, he has regaled us with, and a little bit of why, he might actually become the writer he so diligently proclaims he is. “I am going to do my work until my last dying breath,” he says on an online profile (and is there any last breath that isn’t dying?). I hope that in doing so, he spends as much time re-writing as he does writing, finds himself a good (and merciless) editor, and sets to something serious.

With or without Drakon Kerberos, the mysterious half-Tsakos.