Got ‘Til It’s Gone
by Larry Duplechan
Arsenal Pulp Press. 207 pages, $17.95
STARING STRAIGHT down the middle of middle age, Johnnie Ray Rousseau knows things could be worse. Although many of his friends have died of AIDS or other common diseases of living, Johnnie Ray is in shape, strong, and healthy. He has a job that he likes well enough and good friends to spend Saturday nights with. He has also—thus far—avoided becoming an auntie, which he fears is his destiny as a going-on-older gay man. And slowly, although it has been fifteen years since his husband Keith died, Johnnie Ray is beginning to believe in having something more than a friend-with-benefits relationship.
He wasn’t prepared to get caught up in the Worldwide Web. Joe Callahan’s profile on Dudes.com was yummy, but Joe in person was even better. Seventeen years younger than Johnnie Ray, Joe was caramel-colored and smooth-faced with a pin-up’s body, literally: he had been a centerfold model once, a somewhat famous porn star, and a call boy. He’d slept with dozens of men in his short lifetime, now always safely, having become HIV-positive. But Johnnie Ray knew that people could live for years with a diagnosis, and although Keith’s death haunted him, he wasn’t afraid this time. He let himself fall in love, hard. Within weeks, Johnnie Ray and Joe were exchanging “I love you’s.” Every thought Johnnie Ray had was of Joe, making it difficult to pay attention at work and in church. It was a love that made Johnnie Ray giddy. It made him forget about his friends and his impending middle-aged-ness.
And life would have been good, if not for what was happening back home. Clara, Johnnie Ray’s mother, was dying. She had a brain tumor and, although she wasn’t feeling too ill, she asked Johnnie Ray to lay his hands on her—a form of healing that she believed in but that Johnnie Ray wasn’t sure about. Whether it was the laying-on or the chemo, the tumor grew and shrank and grew again, putting the entire family on a Tilt-a-Whirl of emotion. So how does a man who’s about to find true love prepare for losing his beloved mother? Johnnie Ray isn’t sure, but he knows he’s going to have to learn the meaning of “goodbye” real soon.
Got til it’s Gone is the kind of novel that will make you wish Johnnie Ray Rousseau was a flesh-and-blood person so you could find him and spend an evening in his company—such is author Larry Duplechan’s deftness in telling a story. It’s hard to create a character that a reader would genuinely want for a friend, but Duplechan succeeds. What’s more, Duplechan is a master of style. Rare indeed are novels with such unstilted, conversationally real dialogue, and authentic patois as this one. It’s almost as if Duplechan spoke his story into a tape recorder before he put it to paper, so natural is the cadence of prose. In short, this is the kind of novel that will have you calling friends to read passages over the phone or pressing your copy into their hands when you see them.
Terri Schlichenmeyer is a freelance writer based in Wisconsin.
