April 1, 2011
Gerard Wozek’s Postcards from Heartthrob Town: A Gay Man’s Travel Tales (Haworth Press, 2006) makes me want to grab my passport and head for the nearest boarding gate.
I confess, however, that my relationship with Wozek’s book is a somewhat secret affair. You won’t see me sipping coffee at my favorite café with that cover (not Wozek’s doing). What makes me cringe is not the blatant sexuality of naked sweaty pecs, an effortless six-pack and an unseen hand no place our imagination can’t go. It’s that whoever this guy is (headless yet), the color photograph of him on a book of erotica reeks of cliché and condescension. OK, so it gets your attention. But Wozek’s stories deserve better.
Even before I hit the book’s table of contents, the Joni Mitchell epigraph tells me I’m in for a literary journey that’s honest and heart-felt, personal and poignant. Wozek convinces me this trip is worth my treasured tub-reading time, just from his titles alone: “Tenderness Among Wolves.” “Paris Angels.” “Kissing the Buddha.” “Pulse Points.” Already I can’t help but see the poet in him, and by the first paragraph, he’s got me.
From one story to the next, Postcards sends me on an itinerary of mostly foreign places traveled in wanderlust and wonder, musings and melancholy. His protagonists seem always longing for somewhere they almost are able to reach, as they drive past Midwest highway billboards and cross Paris bridges, linger in Moroccan cafés and stroll through Japanese gardens. Among all the Frenching and thrusting, Wozek detours into dreams and diary entries, fantasies and flashbacks, The Carpenters lyrics and Charlie Chan movies, ancient-cathedral histories and tourist routes (without sounding like a travel agent brochure), seamlessly weaving between the sensual and the erotic, the intimate conversation and the illicit tryst.
He first takes us back to childhood (his?), in “Tenderness Among Wolves.” There’s the protagonist with his G.I. Joes, not combating in camouflage fatigues but kissing each other in their wheat-stalk and grass skirts. He covers up the secret of his backyard hideaway with a “boyish swagger,” barely concealing his infatuation and lust for his older cousin Leigh, who ends up spending the night with him in the playhouse: “I’m thinking all the while of Leigh’s hands, of the way my breathing changes when he stands next to me, of the gentle way he charms and makes me forget myself.” Even Wozek’s night gives in to desire: “I look up at the sky swollen with dead stars. The stars succumb to the mercy of thin air and vanish.” And the story’s ending? The first time I read it, it made me gasp.
Some of Wozek’s first lines have a similar effect. Take “Paris Angel” that begins: “Angel of the veil. Angel of whirlwind and smoke. Angel of the unknowable rune.” His artful eye for detail delivers opening sentences like the ones in “Reuben Ran:” “Reuben liked to run with the wolf boys. He liked to walk in thick packs that inspired fear from his classmates and feel his square shoulders rub up against his two best partners Mario and Deek. He liked to slick his black hair back with wet-look gel and wear orange leather cock rings around his wrists. He liked to sneak out of his bedroom window at night to smoke Camels in the park after curfew.”
Like walking onto a plane in New York and waking up eight hours later in Rome, Wozek’s stories, just pages or even paragraphs apart, transport us less from the familiar to the foreign than they do from one end of the sensual/erotic spectrum to the other. We bask in “Brujo,” set in Oaxaca, Mexico: “I nestled into a corner of the botanicals where I was surrounded by all kinds of roses: black roses, tea roses on thornless stems, seashell roses. The most exquisite orange roses were nodding in the late morning sun and something compelled me to reach over and inhale the aroma of an open bud.” From this story’s tender embraces, we’re jolted by the one that immediately follows, bluntly titled “Francois at the Toilette,” and I’m amused by Wozek’s brazen transition while admiring his flexibility.
So much libido in Wozek’s stories—even when he writes about death. In “Arcana,” he eulogizes a lost love in Tarot card images, beginning with the Prince of Cups: “I remember your eyelashes. The way snowflakes would crust over them when we were standing outside in a Chicago winter waiting for the bus. The way they would brush against my cheek when you would kiss me hello on the cheek. How they framed your hazel-brown eyes, making your limpid gaze even more hypnotic, even more compelling when you fixed your stare onto some handsome stranger at a cruise bar.”
And later, in the Temperance card, “All my stagnant, buried emotion won’t raise you from the dead, all my forced macho bravado, stifled tears, the turning away from your bird-frail frame.” In the final card, The Magician, the protagonist recounts, “Last night I dreamt of you again. You were waving hoops of burning fire over my naked body as I levitated in the air. Then you placed me in a narrow box and drove steel spikes through it. Of course, in that dream I felt nothing. And when you opened the paneled coffin, I stepped out, still alive, still intact, and I walked over to you and there were fluttering doves pouring out of your Dr. Seuss hat. You wrapped a long rope of knotted rainbow scarves around us and we kissed to thunderous applause.”
Whether they throb with true love or the truly lurid, the travel tales in Postcards from Heartthrob Town ultimately arrive at the place where they all started—the heart.
Text © 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
All photos, except book cover, are of Gerard Wozek, © Gerard Wozek. All rights reserved.
Gerard Wozek is the author of Dervish (Gival Press) which won the Gival Press Poetry Award. His book, Postcards From Heartthrob Town was selected for the Haworth Press “Out in the World” Travel Literature Series. Wozek’s award-winning poetry videos have been featured at festivals and conferences around the world. He teaches writing and literature at Robert Morris University Illinois.
