Five Shots of Gay Sam, 2009-10

Daniel David Froid

April 25, 2009, 11:13-11:25 a.m.

Gay Sam is mowing the lawn. He is wearing blue jeans and a worn flannel shirt. It is rather cold, not unseasonably so for this midwestern spring, and he is dressed for the weather. The shot captures his movement back and forth as he pushes the mower, the sound of the machine interspersed with neighborhood ambience—cars, a dribbling basketball a few houses down, voices here and there raised, whether playful or imperative—along with the occasional shifting in the seat of the one who is holding the camera. The shot appears to have a very dark filter overlaid on it, which it does: the darkness of a tinted car window. Gay Sam is therefore hard to see; probably only one who was there could truly ascertain the man’s identity.

He mows the lawn with dedication. But most men do who own a house. He mows in tidy rows, one by one along the length of the lawn. He has an eye; he takes great care. He knows how to move in a precise and economical manner that will make short work of the task. There he is now, expertly executing a sharp turn to the left, where the green grass halts at a well-maintained flowerbed. In this way, too, he could be just about anyone. Nothing he does here gives it away, confirms he is indeed Gay Sam.

The man’s identity, of course, is the whole point. But this video does not yield much. From sartorial details alone, it seems difficult to extract any further information about his life, his secret doings, or his proclivities—to derive any signs. Now, through the filter and the passage of years, I watch and inspect as best I can the cut of the jeans, the rugged quality of the shirt; they appear, in my assessment, indistinguishable from clothes my father or my brother might have worn. What do I expect now, what did I then? They do not hug his body tightly, do not reveal or suggest anything at all about the body they enclose or the longings it harbors. To expect them to do so seems dubious, foolish; to do so, in fact—to get any closer to him, his core being—I must imagine it.

I thought, then, that his skill surpasses mine by far: I tried to operate the mower once but—thanks to a problem of depth perception, or was it some more mundane species of carelessness—veered off-course, creating inadvertent zigzags in my parents’ front yard until my father, who had been watching from inside, stormed outside and cursed the mess I made. Gay Sam, however, knows how to mow a fine lawn.

Now, several minutes into the shot, he is facing in the direction of the camcorder, and the shakiness of the video testifies to how I tried to keep the camcorder in place as I squished myself further into the well of the passenger seat of my grandmother’s darkly windowed car. And then, there—as I regained my composure and trained my gaze Sam-ward once more, as the video straightened itself out, ceased its shaking—a sign. Now as then, I stop my squirming and pay attention: one button, undone on the shirt, scarcely visible truth be told, revealing tanned and supple skin lightly marked by faint dark hair. Or, at least, that is what I remember as I glimpse Sam through the terrible filter, and my stomach twists, and sorrow and eagerness vie in my soul, just the same as then. The unbuttoned shirt offers nothing tangible. It is, rather, the fleeting glimpse of a body and how the glimpse makes me feel and how the glimpse and the feeling align me with him. It is that I am coming face to face with the purpose of my mission, my expedition to his house, camcorder in tow.

There the video stops. There I ceased my recording with a subtle button press, tucked the camera away, drove on.

The footage that resulted was, is, obscured, useless, like everything I shot on this cheap hand-me-down. Certainly any signs are now indetectable, save for what my memory and my longing can impose. Sam, as seen through the filter of the darkened window, is barely more than a specter, a ghoul in the shape of a man. Then again, that’s what I first understood him to be.

June 9, 2009, 1:19-1:38 p.m.

Gay Sam is tending the yard out back. He is trimming two elms that lend the yard some character. The sun is high, the day is bright, and, as in the last shot, only occasional sounds disrupt the suburban quiet: a child’s voice, not near, pleading or hectoring; the blat of a car horn. Sam is wearing short sleeves and cut-off shorts this time. He moves back and forth within the boundaries of what the camcorder can capture, occasionally moving beyond it to work on the elm at the edge of his property. His t-shirt bears a legend—Bermuda—surrounded by palm trees and a stylized wave that crests toward a beaming sun. The shirt’s design seems but a set of brightly colored blobs, now and then more distinct as he approaches the camcorder’s lens. Still, the shirt seems more useful than his previous masculine uniform. I think, now, watching, that we’re cooking with gas. These are clues, certain evidence, signs: of frivolity, disposable income, a predilection for sand and sun that is, in that town, unusual. At the time of the recording, I had never heard of anyone going to Bermuda, the very idea a dim and exotic abstraction.

This footage turned out far better: the natural light of the warm summer day, the angle that happened to be ideal for my purpose. A feeling or two distracted me then, as I tried to keep steady, crouched behind a lilac bush in the alley behind his house, fixing the camcorder directly on him. My eyes shifted back and forth from the real thing to its rendering on the camcorder’s tiny screen—the only thing that, now, I have left, the only thing that lets me access the feeling, the memory of my voyeurism on a lovely summer day. What shocks me most now is that nobody caught me, Gay Sam above all; nobody saw me, or could it be—surely not—that nobody cared? Regardless, my secret filming brought no consequences in its wake.

Gay Sam veers close to the alley, to the lilac bush. The shot veers off-course, moving down, as the camcorder juts into the bush that is discernible for only a moment, and then all is dark, and there is the loud sound of rustling, of hands in the bushes as they fumble with the device. The shot is dark, though alight with tension.

The dark again gives way to Sam, tending to the flowers in his shirt and cut-off shorts. That he is being filmed doesn’t register at all. He is concerned with his immaculate yard, with its trim green grass and its tall healthy trees and its beautiful flowers, its pair of chaises-longues picturesquely angled around a fire pit he always keeps tidy. Unlike our yard, his is not littered with plastic detritus: balls and broken action figures, Barbie’s left leg, or the shards of a shattered plastic paddle ball sticking out of the dirt. Such things would make him balk. They would be seen as encroachments, if not assaults, on the beauty of the yard, which he spends his time maintaining, and he finds the time well-spent, and it keeps him well-satisfied. Or so I imagined then and might as well, now, continue to do.

He looks once, toward the alley, and his face projects the disapproval that the poorly maintained strip has duly earned. Whose duty is it, Sam, to care for the alley? Do not approach further, do not add this burden to your day or to your life. I prayed: Grant me the safety of the lilac bush, my hiding place. I waited, still, breath slowed, mouth grown dry. This time the camcorder does not move. Even now, the awkward pause is harrowing.

But as the shot shows, he looks away, he takes a pause from trimming trees, he raises his arm, and he wipes sweat off his brow. And then he returns to the work that is a blip in his day, or perhaps a reward in his day, a thing he enjoys and to which he looks forward, or at least he enjoys the work’s fruits, the fruits of his labor of course, which is to say the greenery that bedecks his home and offers just a little bit of beauty within the long span of the life he is living. Here. In this town. As he is watched and recorded.

Soon enough, he walks his trimmers over to the shed, tucks them inside, and bids them adieu for now. He swipes his hands in an exaggerated motion, fingers to the opposite wrists, as though he is doing it for me, and then he goes inside.

This is the only shot that manages to capture his face. Now, I think he is not so old, perhaps a few years older than I am. His weak chin and large eyes give him the look of some sort of frightened animal. But his face is kind, I think. Or I want it to be kind. Difficult not to feel once again the swell in the heart, the lump in the throat, which of course went unrecorded. These various distended bits confused me at the time. Perplexity and tenderness and sorrow. Yearning. Envy, envy, envy.

July 17, 2009, 9:04-9:10 p.m.

Gay Sam is inside the house. He is sitting on the couch in a room toward the back, whose name I cannot fathom. It could not be a family room, because he appears to live alone, without family. Perhaps it is a den or rumpus room. The camera, held near but not against the window, yields, on one side of the frame, a grainy view of the man on the couch, and the TV on the other. From this angle, the room looks nice, tasteful, its walls painted a dark green, with nature scenes hung on the opposite wall above the furniture, a desk and low shelf, likely antique.

Sam is watching TV. He is lounging on the sofa, which is large, beige, and spotless. His feet rest on an ottoman that matches, and his hands are splayed across his belly. On TV—though the camera barely shows it—people dance, and only if you were there at the time could you have recognized Sweet Charity, whose opening I caught once one dull afternoon at home. I didn’t get far because my parents came inside, saw it was a trashy musical, and turned it off. I think about my wish to watch it, then, as I watched him, and then I think about the fact that I was, after all, watching too, unseen beside him.

The shot captures a darkly lit, distorted room in whose depths only I could know who resides. The result proves to be almost nightmarish, as though in confirmation of what I then feared to be true. It all comes back as the video continues. All the sad inverts of my imagination who, haggard and hunched, wandered the earth as the Greeks held the shades to rattle around the underworld. Poor things, lost souls, whose lives served only the humble utility, the forlorn value, of the didactic. Lives fundamentally or even ontologically marred, so I was told, by impurity, faithlessness, fecklessness, and loss. Yet there I was, as gormless as Gay Sam was held to be, pressing my camcorder up against his window, wanting to know more about his life and capture something of it for myself, something more than what I knew—that he shared a workplace with my parents and his name was Sam and he was a homosexual.

This shot is the shortest of all, not even ten minutes. There is no sound. It offers a glimpse, just a glimpse, of Sam and his TV and his lovely little room, and no more.

The dryness in the throat, the pangs in the stomach, the embarrassing tears. Tears for one of those against whom I had been warned. It is true—less so now—that what I loved in Sam I hated in myself. Whether it is enough to say it, acknowledge it and let the thought breathe, out in the open, seems immaterial. The camera could never capture it.

September 5, 2009, 2:07-2:40 p.m.

Gay Sam has lain low for days. He stays inside, or he has left his home for parts unknown. The white house, red-trimmed, looks as immaculate as ever, but all the lights are out. What the camera cannot show this time is not just this context but my own boldness, parked outside, in the car with one window rolled down, the camcorder perched in that spacious gap as I wait for a sign—this time, of anything, just one little sign of life.

Perhaps it is the slowness and the silence of this long, still shot that captures the anxiety I felt then. It is uncomfortable, somehow ominous, to watch the shot and wait for something to happen, to wait as nothing happens.

Yet within that shot, all seems possible. It is only the world that moves within it, or just one piece of it, and in another piece far from here moves Gay Sam, unseen. Alone or not, at ease or not, I cannot say, and anyway, how could I know it. So I thought then, recording the house in one eternal thirty-minute take.

The shot briefly pans from side to side, showing the width of Sam’s lawn and the houses that flank his on either side, and there it ends.

So I thought then: I am part of a lineage with no forebears, each of us a lone node in a long, long line. They do not speak, and I do not know by what sorcerous art their lips might be wrenched open, the breath of life forced within their lungs so that they might whisper something to me, but I crave a whisper, a sound, a voice, a secret passed to me and me alone.

January 2, 2010, 7:41-7:52 p.m.

The final shot opens on Sam’s backyard. Once again, the camcorder peers from out of the lilac bush, though the bush, with its snow-covered branches, is merely a blur in the winter dark. The shot reveals a fire’s low flickering. Around it sit several people, voices meshed, mingled, in low conversation and laughter. Though one could not say from the footage alone, one of them is Sam. One man and one woman have joined him. This, too, is indiscernible. What is left: distant, blurry faces, lit only by the fire, who murmur to each other in the night.

Does this moment reveal any signs? Only a life whose contours and whose nature remain utterly mysterious to me. At the time, I remember that I understood my task to be finished, in a vanishing moment of clarity. I switched the camcorder off, held it close, tiptoed through the alley to the car, a block away, and never returned.

I don’t know who you are, Sam, not truly, or where you live now or how to find you even if I wished to do so. I don’t know your last name, let alone a single scrap of information about your character, passions, or proclivities. All that I have are a stupid nickname that I did not give you and a set of five shots made in secret, that, having watched them all, I have consigned now to a fire of their own. And, anyway, it was not just for your sake but for an idea’s, hazily formed—an idea I had about not being alone, about, yes, not being consigned to the flames, about something worth doing in a life worth living—that I committed these acts of furtive devotion, as their sacrifice is another.