Ritual Calls Routine Responses

Georges & Oliver 

“Are you gonna, do you wanna stay over?”
“Um… yeah, can I?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve got work tomorrow, so I have to get up early. Is that okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine. Just um, you can let yourself out… or if you want I can, I can just throw something together… coffee, whatever.”
“I’ll probably just, just, just get up and… I’ll try not to wake you.”
“O… okay.”
“Do you have something that I could… borrow? Like a t-shirt or something simple. I wore this, I wore this today. I just don’t want them to say anything.”
“Uh… yeah, yeah I do. Let me get up and… see what I, see what I’ve got.”
“Thanks.”
“What about this? I think it’ll fit… you don’t have my tummy, so it should fit.”
“I like your tummy.”
“You’re the only one then.”
“Can I, can I try it on?”
“Yeah. Here.”
“It’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
“Where did you get it from?”
“Like Asos or something. Somewhere online.”
“Let’s see… it’s perfect. I’ll give it back. I won’t forget.”
“Sure. Just, the next time I see you.”
“But it’s okay if I… that I’m staying here?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. I mean, I don’t wanna ask, but is it gonna be okay for you? Not going home tonight…”
“Uh...phew… yeah. Yeah it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be… yeah.”
“Well I’m gonna leave this here for you.”
“Thanks. Like I said, I’ll get it back to you.”
“Yeah… I’m, I’m not worried about it.”
“Cool.”
“What time are you gettin up tomorrow?”
“I guess…. I guess seven thirty, to be safe. What time do you usually, do you, do you get up?”
“Since the lockdown, I… I usually get up maybe ten, maybe fifteen minutes before I have to be in front of my computer.”
“That must be nice.”
“It is actually. I just… get up and brush my teeth, wash my face, button up my shirt, fix my tie, and then I’m there in front of my computer. Sometimes I’m just in my underwear. You know uh, shirt, tie, underwear. Obviously.”
“Ha ha, obviously! But really that’s it no, no trousers?”
“Yeah sometimes. Most of the time if I’m honest.”
“Then you can’t move.”
“Yeah. If I do have to uh, I make sure that they can’t see anything if I have to stand up… but I don’t ever have to do that. I don’t usually have to get up.”
“They keep saying that this is gonna, that’s it’s gonna be like this for a long time. What do you think?”
“I keep thinking that we’re not gonna know what, what’s happening right now, we’re not gonna know how the world changed… or we don’t have, we won’t have any idea of what we can’t go back to, and what we’re heading towards, until maybe ten years from now. I think it’s gonna be, I think things are gonna be a lot different.”
“Sigh… at least I’ve got a job and, now we’re ‘essential’ Before we were shit, not always with the customers but with the management.”
“It must be hard bein on your feet all day for hours.”
“The customers are usually nice, but I get angry sometimes because people don’t use the fucking sanitise, or their masks are falling off their faces. It’s like dude if I can see your nose you’re doing it wrong. I don’t wanna die because you’re not following the rules. One, one guy I know, he works in advertising and all he does is complain about how he can’t go on holiday, he misses dancing, he misses coming home late from bars or going to restaurants. He lives in a three bedroom, two bathroom apartment, all on his own… I do not feel sorry for you mate! So entitled. So fucking entitled.”
“Yeah… yeah… it’s like that with my colleagues as well. It’s all about what they can’t do… I haven’t seen my mum in two years, and they’re complaining about not being able to have dinner parties or visiting family that they otherwise never mention, and would not want to see outside of Christmas.”
“Your family, they don’t live here?”
“No. My dad does, but… we’re not on very good terms and my mum moved back home after they divorced like six or seven years ago. We talk a lot, at least three times a week.”
“That’s gotta be rough. My family is my life. Sometimes I feel… like it’s too much, they’re too present but, not seeing them for two years… and hearing your colleagues whine about the dinner parties they’re not having… what? I guess that’s your world?”
“My world? Hm. One good thing about having to stay at home is, it’s having the screen between me and them. It’s… a lot less talk that doesn’t revolve around just work. I don’t really, these people are not my friends. We just work together and… they ev… they complain about that!”
“What do you mean?”
“Yeah, because I’m not… I keep things really professional. I don’t socialise with them because I’m busy working and when I’m finished, which I’m never finished because there’s always something to do, it’s more like, when I leave I’ve done all that I can do that day without falling asleep at my desk. So there’s no time to go out for drinks or strip clubs or pubs. None of it. I eat lunch in my office everyday.”
“What’s wrong with that? Like, what do they say to you?”
“They have told me to my face that I’m standoffish, they even said I’m intimidating. One of my colleagues told me that he thought I was a stuffy, arrogant prick when he first met me. In my yearly review they always praise my work but tell me that I need to make more of an effort to fit into ‘the culture’.”
“Hm.”
“Yeah, I know… now I’m complaining. I’m complaining about nothing because I get to do what I do from my own home.”
“I can’t relate.”
“I know. I, I guess I get it.”
“The woman in the picture on your mirror… is that your mum?”
“Yeah that’s her. We were visiting my dad’s family.”
“And they both know?”
“Yeah. I’ve… I don’t like to say ‘I’ve been out’, or ‘I came out’... it’s strange. It’s like you don’t just ‘come out’. You have to keep on doing it… or you don’t. It’s also, it bothers me because it’s like I never went into the closet. You, not you but, you know what I’m saying, they created the closet. Saying that I’m ‘out’ or I have to ‘come out’, or ‘I came out’, like, it’s… the responsibility is on me when nobody ever asked me or, let me, or allowed me to figure it out. I was born. I was closeted.”
“When did that happen? When did you ‘figure things out’?”
“I guess I always knew. I had to know because, because everybody else was figuring it out and trying to, trying to… yeah, I… I knew because the uncles, the aunts, the church, my dad, my mum, everyone else was telling me.”
“The church?”
“Yeah, especially… especially the church.”
“Do you believe in god?”
“No. Do you? I guess you too, the scriptures on your chest and on your back.”
“Yeah I do, that’s why I have them.”
“What do you… if I can ask…”
“Yeah ask.”
“What do you think about what the bible says, or what the church says about us or… I don’t know how you identify yourself, but what we do, how do you reconcile that?”
“I… I believe that god will forgive me.”
“What if he doesn’t? I mean what does the bible say about, about being gay or homosexuality? I don’t know. I don’t actually know what it says about it. I’ve heard for example that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality so… where is it, where is it coming from, these preachers like, like that man talking about ‘They eat the poo poo’? All my life I’ve heard that it’s wrong. That god, god hate it but… he barely talks about it. Right? Do you know what the bible says about being gay?”
“To be honest… I don’t… I don’t know what it says. I know that people say that it’s wrong. That I’m supposed to be with a woman because I’m a man… and, and…”
“But if you don’t know…”
“Let me finish!”
”Alright sorry to interrupt.”
I’ve always just believed in god. I’ve always felt connected. When I started to understand the stories and the scripture, it was like, when that started to make sense what I felt inside of me… it clicked and I knew that god was real. I’m doing, I’m doing what I can to, to live right and I’m trusting god to understand me. I can’t do everything that he wants me to do, but he know that.”
“I’m sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I…”
“Nah, it’s just people wanna fight me about this all the time, and it’s not always just gay people. Why can’t it be you live your life like you want to, and I live my life the way I want to? I meet these guys on the app and they wanna tell me that I’m… that I’m not ‘free’. The way they tell it, my family, and the person that I’m with, they control me but they don’t. No one controls me. No one is controlling me. I’m making a choice to… I’m trying to live like how I think I should live. I’m trying to follow what I believe and I’m just trying to live my life. I don’t need people who just want me to come around fuck them to, to give me a lecture about my faith or to tell me what to do with my life. It’s like they don’t think I see what they’re trying to do. They don’t care about me. It’s about them. I know people that I meet have opinions about, about my situation, but that’s not their business. It’s between me and god.”
“Hey, I get that. It was just a question. I’m not passing judgement here. This is… this is the first like, real conversation that we’ve had and… I’m just trying to… I’m just trying to talk to you.”
“No, it’s cool. It’s like, I’m… I’m used to people trying to, to… I don’t know… if they think they can ‘fix me’, that I need fixing? I… it’s funny cos, I just came over to fuck you. Isn’t that what you want? Why do you want more? I’m one hundred percent clear from the beginning about what I’m looking for and my situation. I don’t know why these people are psyching themselves up to work on me. If you wanna work on me, then work on me, but don’t try to get in my head because you haven’t fixed things going on in your own head.”
“Okay… so it’s not a conversation. You’re not up for that?”
“No, I’m not ‘up for that’.”
“Okay, poor choice of words, ha ha, but what do you mean about fixing themselves?”
“If you’re good with what you believe in, you don’t need to tell me what I need to believe. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense?”
“Yeah uh, yeah. I, I get it. I just think… can someone just ask you about it? Can they be curious, cos they wanna know and, and maybe just try to understand. That’s why I asked you.”
“It… it usually doesn’t get that close. Kinda like what you said about your work. It’s not work for me obviously, not like that but I’m not trying to get to know these people. A lot of these conversations they’ve, you know they’ve seen my tattoos and they decided, they act like I have a youtube channel about being a gay christian or something. I don’t it’s not like that.”
“Do you usually see the same people more than once?”
“It depends. It depends on, yeah if it’s easy. It’s gotta be easy, and yeah, there’s gotta be, gotta be something that I like. Something that I want, that makes me come back. So…”
“I wanna just say, I was… maybe I was asking you and it was, it was me asking like there’s an answer and I know that answer and I was waiting to see what you were gonna say.”
“Yeah that’s what everyone’s doing but... “
“I don’t wanna be in that group.”
“There’s so many other things to talk about besides that, and I’m not the only person you’re having sex with.”
“Hmph. I’m not having sex with a lot of people. I’m not having a lot of sex.”
“I’m not either, especially now. That’s kinda why I called you.”
“Because you knew I was here all by myself, chatting with my mum and playing video games, after doing nothing but dirty work all day for a bunch of assholes?”
“Ha ha ha ha ha! I mean I didn’t say all that. I would say, it’s because I know you follow the rules and yeah, you are different and I like that.”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021