Love, the Magician

By Brian Bouldrey

In April of 1997, Tristan Broder makes a pilgrimage of sorts from San Francisco to the prickly desert and scalped mountains around Tucson, Arizona, the place where he helped bury his partner Joe five years before. Guided by a comet that crossed the spring sky that year, he wanders toward renewal and resurrection, memory and mystery, deadly secrets and dark intentions.

 

There are plenty of people in the desert who still love Tristan as much as they did Joe. There's Maria, Joe's wild sister, now a converted Pentecostal; her truck-driving husband Earl; Joe's mother with the dog Murphy she found one day abandoned in the desert; and Joe's best friend Mik, a tough-minded Punjabi Muslim whose one vanity is his long silken hair. With open and glad hearts, they join Tristan to help him make a memorial to the whole-souled man he loved. Yet, despite the fact that they are all bound, like Tristan, by the memory and love for the saint who once lived among them, every one of them is hiding something.

 

Originally published in 2000, this new edition includes a foreword by Miriam Wolf and a new introduction by the author.

 

"Brian Bouldrey's Love, the Magician is operatic in its passions, as well as in its themes of love, mortality, and the struggle to sustain faith. And yet the author never loses sight of his novel's human dimensions, giving us fresh and memorable characters. This book is, to quote the protagonist, Tristan Broder, an awesomely dark story about a prolonged mistake.' It is also a book that sheds a bright, uncompromising light on one man's reckoning with fate." – Bernard Cooper

 

"Tristan Broder, the protagonist and bereaved lover in Brian Bouldrey's fine novel Love, the Magician, takes the reader on a curiously unsettling pilgrimage into harsh terrain. Set in the Sonoran Desert during the Yacqui Deer Dance Easter celebration, Tristan's journey to the center of family, affection, grief, religion, and redemption reveals his own prickly relationship toward being a survivor of the 'Plague of the Morally Lazy.' This is a timely and moving story." – Antonya Nelson

 

"Brian Bouldrey's writing is so smart, and so risky, and consistently carries that precarious, curious balance between humor and heartbreak. I'm never certain whether to bust out laughing or burst into tears. Love, the Magician is filled with examples of what its narrator calls 'the little node of miracle that every human must have.' It's a really, really terrific novel." – Scott Heim

 

"Love, the Magician is a modern-day pilgrimage to the intersection of love and death, faith and its loss, the rituals of worship and the rituals of pleasure. By turns comic and unsettling, lyrical and brutal, it is a tour de force of storytelling – a passionate voice in search of miracles." – Jean Thompson

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReQueered Tales
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951092245

Brian Bouldrey

Brian Bouldrey is the author of three novels, ‎The Genius of Desire‎, ‎Love, the ‎Magician‎ and ‎ the nonfiction books ‎Honorable Bandit‎: ‎A Walk ‎Across Corsica‎, ‎Monster‎: ‎Adventures in‎ ‎American Machismo‎ and ‎The Autobiography ‎Box‎; and editor of several anthologies‎. ‎Brian teaches writing at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago. He is Series Editor, Gemma Open Door.

Book preview

LOVE, THE MAGICIAN

by Brian Bouldrey

Introduction by Miriam Wolf

RQT_Logo

ReQueered Tales

Los Angeles  •  Toronto

2020

Love, the Magician

by Brian Bouldrey

Copyright © 2000 by Brian Bouldrey.

Introduction: copyright © 2020 by Miriam Wolf.

Foreword: copyright © 2020 by Brian Bouldrey.

Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs.

First American edition: 2000

This edition: ReQueered Tales, November 2020

Print edition: ReQueered Tales, November 2022

ReQueered Tales version 1.46

Kindle edition ASIN: B08NTFP142

Epub edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-24-5

Print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-80-1

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Also By BRIAN BOULDREY

FICTION

The Genius of Desire (1993)

Love, the Magician (2000)

The Boom Economy: Or, Scenes from Clerical Life (2003)

NON-FICTION

The Autobiography Box (1999)

Monster: Gay Adventures in American Machismo (2001)

Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica (2007)

Praise for LOVE, THE MAGICIAN

"Brian Bouldrey’s Love, the Magician is operatic in its passions, as well as in its themes of love, mortality, and the struggle to sustain faith. And yet the author never loses sight of his novel’s human dimensions, giving us fresh and memorable characters. This book is, to quote the protagonist, Tristan Broder, an awesomely dark story about a prolonged mistake.’ It is also a book that sheds a bright, uncompromising light on one man’s reckoning with fate."

– Bernard Cooper

"Tristan Broder, the protagonist and bereaved lover in Brian Bouldrey’s fine novel Love, the Magician, takes the reader on a curiously unsettling pilgrimage into harsh terrain. Set in the Sonoran Desert during the Yacqui Deer Dance Easter celebration, Tristan’s journey to the center of family, affection, grief, religion, and redemption reveals his own prickly relationship toward being a survivor of the ‘Plague of the Morally Lazy.’ This is a timely and moving story."

– Antonya Nelson

"Brian Bouldrey’s writing is so smart, and so risky, and consistently carries that precarious, curious balance between humor and heartbreak. I’m never certain whether to bust out laughing or burst into tears. Love, the Magician is filled with examples of what its narrator calls ‘the little node of miracle that every human must have.’ It’s a really, really terrific novel."

– Scott Heim

"Love, the Magician is a modern-day pilgrimage to the intersection of love and death, faith and its loss, the rituals of worship and the rituals of pleasure. By turns comic and unsettling, lyrical and brutal, it is a tour de force of storytelling – a passionate voice in search of miracles."

– Jean Thompson

brian-bouldrey

BRIAN BOULDREY

Brian Bouldrey is the author, most recently, of Inspired Journeys: Travel Writers in Search of the Muse (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). He has written three nonfiction books; Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica (University of Wisconsin Press, September 2007), Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books), and The Autobiography Box (Chronicle Books); three novels, The Genius of Desire, Love, the Magician, and The Boom Economy (all three with ReQueered Tales), and he is the editor of several anthologies. He is recipient of Fellowships from Yaddo and Eastern Frontier Society, and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Western Regional Magazine Award. He is the North American Editor of the Open Door literacy series for GemmaMedia. He teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and literature at Northwestern University.

LOVE, THE MAGICIAN

by Brian Bouldrey

DESERT HEART

Back in the 1990s, I was an editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, an alternative newspaper that was equal parts scrappy muckraking journalism and scruffy hipster lifestyle guide. Among other duties, I edited the book review section.

The very best part of my day always came early in the workday: After arriving at around 9:30 a.m. (alternative journalism hours, baby!), I would inevitably pick up the handset of my hard-wired office phone and place a call to Brian Bouldrey. At the time, Brian wrote a literary gossip column for the book review section, along with reviews and features. But he was so much more than just a writer for the section.

During these daily phone calls, we planned the tenor, tone, and content of the section (all with the sound of his coffee grinder whirring in the background. To this day, a Pavlovian reaction to the sound of beans being ground brings a smile to my face). I relied on Brian’s literary knowledge and great taste; it’s not too much to say that each issue was as much his vision as it was mine.

But the reason I looked forward to these daily calls wasn’t about the work we got done. It was about just getting to listen to Brian talk for 15 or 20 minutes. You see, Brian has a singular way of communicating. His style is joyful and transgressive – you can see how much pleasure it gives him to explore forbidden topics – but also intelligent and intimate. Brian is not afraid to show you who he really is and what he really thinks, the bad as well as the good. And through it all, his quicksilver wit delivers just the right cultural reference whether it’s from 19th century literature or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

All of these qualities are on display in Brian’s second novel, Love, the Magician.

First published at the end of the 1990s, this book follows Tristan Broder as he travels from his home in San Francisco to Arizona on a pilgrimage of sorts. His plan is to take in a Yaqui Easter Ceremony, a melding of the Jesuit-inspired Passion of the Christ with Yaqui traditions pre-dating the Jesuit arrival to the new world. The real purpose of his visit, however, is much deeper and more personal.

The love of his life, Joe, is four years gone, taken like so many young men in San Francisco of the 1980s and 90s by AIDS. Joe’s mother, sister, and best friend Mik all live in Arizona, and Tristan has unfinished business with all of them. What they don’t know is that Tristan himself is HIV+, but a new class of drugs, protease inhibitors, have turned a death sentence into a … life sentence.

Tristan careens through the desert Southwest, breaking things. He’s not careful with glassware and he’s not careful with feelings, his or those of others. Beneath his happy-go-lucky, pleasure-seeking exterior, he’s seething. Angry at Joe for dying, at Joe’s family and friends, angry at God, mostly just angry at himself.

This canvas allows Brian to explore themes that have become hallmarks of his writing: ritual, faith, and its opposite – the fall from grace that moves humans from innocence to guilt. How the AIDS crisis created a community of survivors tormented by ambivalence about escaping the fate to which they’d long since resigned themselves.

His sharp eye for detail helps us see the desert, the Yaqui ceremonies, and the people with clarity. But it is the compassion with which he draws his characters that brings them to life – even the prickly, pained Tristan Broder, whose name sounds so eerily familiar.

Even 20 years on, Love, the Magician remains a powerful read, one that evokes a range of emotions. Revisiting it has been a great pleasure for me; I hope that readers new and old will get as much out of it as I have.

— Miriam Wolf

Portland, Oregon

July 2020

Miriam Wolf is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. She was the features editor for the San Francisco Bay Guardian from 1990 to 2000. In addition, she has been an editor with Bitch magazine and Twilight Zone magazine and shapes content for many corporate clients. Her book reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oregonian.

Foreword

I have always wondered where home was. Is it where your family is? Your college alma mater that invites you to homecoming every year as long as you throw it some money? Where you own real estate? Mary Lee Settle, in Celebration, her novel about dying, said Home is a place where you can die. In 1999, while working on this novel and all of San Francisco was turning into a place where people no longer worked to live but lived to work, I was at a new chic grocery store in my beloved Bernal Heights, the working class neighborhood turning horribly chic before my very eyes, when I overheard a boom economy startup bro dismiss the idea of a zip code meaning anything more than a place where your mail is delivered.

San Francisco was one of the cities where every small town gay kid moved, and made a construct of a home and a construct of family, new families with partners who made homes together. Once Jeff died in our Bernal Heights home, I felt unhomed, and I hated that the tech bro was right: my zip code now felt like nothing but a place for mail to go. That’s when I learned how to travel.

On one of my many journeys in the mid-nineties, on the Baja peninsula somewhere around a swampy desert called Todos Santos, I succumbed to a fever, Death-in-Venice style, in a weird hut on a beach where a thousand puffer fish had up and died and washed ashore. It was in this hut, shivering with fever, that I started writing Love, the Magician on a legal pad somebody had left behind, and I won’t lie: more than half of it was mapped out while sweating and shivering and maybe hallucinating a little. Can you smell the rotting puffer fish?

I based it on a ballet by Manuel de Falla, El Amor Brujo (I was torn between calling the book Love, the Magician and a more sinister Love, the Sorcerer, and because of my choice, which harbors connotations of a children’s birthday party entertainer more than a baleful necromancer, my excellent friend John always refers to the novel by saying Hate the Genii – LOVE the Magician in his best Paul Lynde imitation). In that ballet, Carmelo, a handsome man has fallen in love with the gypsy beauty Candelas. Their romance is disturbed by the appearance of the spirit of Candelas’s former lover, who died while they were betrothed.

De Falla composed his ballet in an atmosphere of ancient ceremony, evoking spirits that perform ritual fire dances and savage pagan rites. Candelas’s phantom lover resorts to all kinds of spells in order to torment the living lovers. It is only when Lucía, another gypsy girl, managed to seduce the ghost that Carmelo and Candelas can end the sorcery and commit completely to their love.

There are so many tales and myths about the desperate attempt of a lover trying to snatch the dead beloved from deceiving death. But there was something, in San Francisco in the mid-nineties, as the cocktail started reviving the sagging culture, that appealed to me about trying, somehow, to move on. Everything about moving on felt like betrayal both to those I’d lost and to myself and the feeling I had for them. It felt violent, sorcery, an inverted exorcism in which I was the demon and they were not. It required flight, unhoming. Nowadays, I feel more at home on the road than I am in whatever shelter I’ve been given. This is not self-pity; it is a fact. I’m inclined to agree with Mary Lee Settle.

So this novel, which is built as close to the Aristotelian unities as I can muster, takes place in one swift ruthless weekend, full of ritual, emotional betrayal, and, even though it’s all about death, a true need to find a way to live. This is my best novel, I think, or my best novella, a novella being shorter and tighter and darker in grain. So many novellas, like Death in Venice, are about somebody going out into the world, away from home, and being destroyed: Daisy Miller, Heart of Darkness, Billy Budd. That somebody might come back from such an excursion alive feels indecent, just as remarrying after the death of a spouse might feel like thrift to Hamlet. But without giving away the ending, neither Tristan Broder, nor I, ever really returned, for there was no home to return to.

— Brian Bouldrey

Chicago, April 2020

Acknowledgments

Many people helped me write this book, in many ways. I would especially like to thank Paul Reidinger, Stephen Beachy, Gretchen Mazur, Michael Nava, Michael Lowenthal, and Miriam Wolf, and the entire staff of The Haworth Press, particularly Peg Marr, Bill Palmer, Bill Cohen, and Steve Zeeland.

Several books have also helped me discover the rich history of the Yaqui Nation, and all the native peoples of the Sonoran borderlands that give this tale its depth. In particular, I found the writing of William Griffith invaluable. His books Beliefs and Holy Places and A Shared Space: Folklife in the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands were extremely helpful. Griffith also plays a mean banjo. In addition, A Yaqui Easter by Muriel Thayer Panter, Yaqui Myths and Legends by Ruth Warner Giddings, and Yaqui Deer Songs / Maso Buikam: A Native American Poetry by Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina are excellent introductory books about the region. All of the above-mentioned books are not coincidentally published by the University of Arizona Press.

The Yaqui Nation, an extraordinary people and place straddling the United States and Mexican border in the lands called Sonora, are a source of great spiritual replenishment to me; they do not know me, but I’ve taken their example when I can in this life; I will always admire their dedication and resourcefulness, and strong sense of community. They are a great clan who have my highest respect.

You who do not have enchanted legs,

what are you looking for,

what are you looking for?

You who do not have enchanted legs,

what are you looking for,

what are you looking for?

You who do not have enchanted legs,

what are you looking for,

what are you looking for?

You who do not have enchanted legs,

what are you looking for,

what are you looking for?

You who do not have enchanted legs,

what are you looking for,

what are you looking for?

You who do not have enchanted legs,

what are you looking for,

what are you looking for?

Over there, in the middle

of the flower-covered wilderness,

You who do not have enchanted legs,

what are you looking for,

what are you looking for?

You who do not have enchanted legs,

what are you looking for,

what are you looking for?

Yaqui Deer Song

El Amor Brujo (Love, the Magician) is the name of Manuel de Falla’s ballet about Carmelo, a handsome man who has fallen in love with the gypsy beauty Candelas. Their romance is disturbed by the appearance of the spirit of Candelas’s former lover, who died while they were betrothed.

De Falla composed his ballet in an atmosphere of ancient ceremony, evoking spirits that perform ritual fire dances and savage pagan rites. Candelas’s phantom lover resorts to all kinds of spells in order to torment the living lovers. It is only when Lucía, another gypsy girl, manages to seduce the ghost that Carmelo and Candelas can end the sorcery and commit completely to their love.

1

THERE IS AN UNOFFICIAL SAINT in the Sonoran desert borderlands of Arizona and Mexico, named Jesús Malverde. He is the patron of the adolescents who live in the drainpipes of bordertown Nogales, the pushers and pimps and hustlers and addicts and other criminal elements. Pray for us, Jesús Malverde. There are even prayer cards for him, the hanged man who intercedes on behalf of bad boys.

Tristan Broder, originally from Ontonagon, Michigan, where the view was blocked by lakes and forests, by the shores of Gitche Gumee, had come down into this alien landscape on Holy Thursday for a half-dozen reasons. To collect prayer cards of Malverde and other heretical figures was one of them.

Joe’s sister, Maria, née, Jimenez, was an ex-Catholic Pentecostal convert and took a lot of pleasure helping in this and other searches. She’d practically planned this trip for Tristan. At the Phoenix airport, she stood next to him while the baggage carousel presented dozens of suitcases like possible game show prizes, and she chattered about what they needed to do in the next four days.

It’s perfect timing, you know, because the grass has grown completely over Joe’s grave, she explained. And you haven’t seen the stone. The stone is real nice. Maria was never not upbeat. Upbeat people usually bothered Tristan, but Maria was a relief. When Joe and Tristan had been together, and Maria, in the ninth month of her pregnancy, left her first husband for another guy – for a truck driver, of all people – only Joe and Tristan would talk to her. For her second marriage to the truck driver, only Joe and Tristan sent a wedding gift, a big blue mixing bowl.

That was several years ago. The last time he’d seen her was at Joe’s funeral, exactly four years past. Now it was late March but Arizona was hot. Some clown walked by Maria’s pickup in the airport parking lot wearing a T-shirt showing a cactus and a skeleton simmering under the slogan, Arizona: But It’s A Dry Heat!

Her truck was big and white. Pretty girls and pickup trucks, Tristan thought, they’re so perfect together. But he realized that the truck was her husband’s when he saw the two mirrored girls in silhouette, the half-reclined, buxom player emblem in duplicate, facing each other, one on each mudflap.

Maria explained, It’s Earl’s. He said he’d watch the boys all weekend, so I could spend the whole time with you. What a guy. She watched Tristan study the silly silhouettes and pulled her own T-shirt tight to reveal her full, pretty, low-to-the-ground body. Don’t you think I look like the Mudflap Girl?

She did! It almost redeemed Earl in Tristan’s eyes, that he carried an image of his wife like his own religious icon wherever he went.

Once they got out on the open road, Tristan marveled at the desert. God, what’s that? A factory? He pointed west of them, where at least seven brown plumes rose into the bleached-blue sky.

Dust devils, she said. They looked diabolical, all right, like Japanese nuclear-waste-induced monsters burrowing into the earth to get at something or to escape. There were dozens of billboards along the way advertising developments of adult communities. Tristan told Maria that in San Francisco, adult meant Rated X. Here, it meant, we prefer, in our golden years, not to be bothered by noisy children.

She laughed, but didn’t pick up the thread. There should have been a ton to catch up on, yet they were both tired, and the heat that had leached the color from the sky also sapped their enthusiasm. The long Easter weekend ahead looked to Tristan like a huge overcatered banquet table spread, and he didn’t know where to begin.

First, he had come to see where Joe had been buried. And then there was local color: he had come for those unofficial saints, to see their shrines. And perhaps the answer to the questions Why here? and Why now? was the promise of the Yaqui Easter Ceremony, an epic Native American celebration of the Resurrection of Christ, complete with drums and dancing. And – oh yes – he wanted to see his in-laws. He’d always gotten along with them. And now they seemed all that was left of the physical existence of Joe. His mannerisms, his skin color, his very blood still embodied in their bodies – Maria’s body, sitting right here next to him in the truck.

Joe and I used to play a road game, he offered after a while. I give you questions I just make up, and you just answer. It’s easy.

Like truth or dare?

No, easier. Like this: What’s the best color for houses?

White.

He had a little notebook in his pocket. He decided to write down all her answers, like he was taking a survey. Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas?

Christmas!

Childhood nickname?

La Chupapinga.

That’s so funny – that was mine, too. Favorite food smell?

Baking bread.

Death or taxes?

Taxes.

Devil or the Deep Blue Sea?

Deep Blue Sea.

Scalloped, mashed, or baked?

French fries.

First name of the person you hate most in the world.

Debbie.

Name you would have if you were a boy.

Joe.

He looked over at her. The truck window was open and her chestnut hair was flying all over the place.

Are we going straight to the graveyard? Tristan wanted to know when they saw the Tucson City Limit signs.

She shook her head, concentrating on her exit. I hope that’s okay. Dinner with Mom. But even before that, I told Mik we’d meet him at El Tiradito.

El Tiradito?

The wishing shrine. Since you’re on a quest for folklore saints, he’s the best place to start. She told him about the bandit who’d been shot for true love a hundred years ago, and the shrine of candles that had persisted at the location ever since. If you lit a candle at the bandit’s shrine and it burned all night, you got your wish.

While she navigated the freeway, he stole little peeks at her, trying, as usual, to see if she looked like her dead brother. Of course she did. The obviousness was kind of disappointing. What he thrilled to was when she said something the way Joe had said it, held out the word wissshhhing, enjoying the sh blend. Or when her voice squeaked with enthusiasm.

Sometimes he did the mental equivalent of squinting his eyes, to pretend he didn’t know her. La Chupapinga? Who would ever guess that the Mudflap Girl behind the wheel of this truck was a fervent Pentecostal, with a brother dead to the Plague of the Morally Lazy in the late twentieth century?

2

MIK WAS WAITING BY THE SHRINE when they pulled in. He had been Joe’s best friend when he lived here near his family. Mik was a short, slightly tubby Punjabi guy whose only departure from humility was his mane of silky black hair. For years, Tristan had assumed that Joe and Mik had been lovers early on, one of those stalled-out things that rolled over into friendship. Tristan never brought it up with Joe, out of some respect for the past. But somewhere along the way – yes, on a road trip to the border on one of those early visits – Tristan discovered that Mik wasn’t even gay. All the idiosyncrasies of retaining his own culture: buttoned-down shirts, bowing toward Mecca, fasting during Ramadan, an avoidance of sexual direction – Tristan had mistaken Mik’s bentness for