My Two-Faced Luck: "straight has never been right for me"

20 Nov 2021.

by Drew Rowsome -

My Two-Faced Luck is an absorbing sprawling novel that does debate the vagaries of luck but is more concerned with happenstance. Our narrator sorts through his life marvelling at how chance encounters led him to where he is at the time of narrating: dying of liver cancer in a Canadian prison. He has been convicted of murdering a geriatric widow, his employer, while on a cruise ship. He is convinced he has been convicted for being homosexual and for climbing above his social status. As he eloquently describes it,

Me, the child of a penniless woman who'd been both abandoned and twice-divorced . . . me, a drifter, a dabbler, a known homosexual involved with numerous married men, a pill-popping alcoholic, a beauty school drop-out, a juvenile delinquent, well, with all that what else could I be but a money-hungry schemer who'd stooped to murder when every other ploy had flopped?

Though My Two-Faced Luck reads like a memoir, make that an "as told to" celebrity memoir, it is the new novel from Brett Josef Grubisic (From Up River and For One Night Only). The central conceit is that the text was dictated onto cassette tapes as part of a "life writing" rehabilitation project. After the narrator's death, the tapes were left to a lesbian nurse who worked at the prison and had treated the narrator. As Grubisic has her say, "I was the recipient of the tapes, for reasons known only to a man who expired in a hospital bed on the same morning my ex-wife and I picked up our rental scooters in Tulum." Years later, nurse Seerat Gill goes to all the work of transcribing the cassettes and attempting to put them in some sort of order.

That would have been a monumental task for a seasoned ghost writer or editor as our narrator, whose name is never revealed, is a mesmerizing but erratic and unreliable raconteur. He seems to be aware that he continually runs the risk of losing his audience as he says, "Oh, I'm telling this out of sequence. You see, straight has never been right for me. Even in storytelling." And, "Am I repeating myself? I get lost in the bygones. They're blind alleys." He does repeat himself. A lot. But is the process, like peeling an onion or picking at a scab, of trying to find the truth of his past and what he wants to say. Each time a memory resurfaces, My Two-Faced Luck is chronological with reams of fleshing out flashbacks, the narrator digs a little deeper. Or reveals something he has previously hidden, possibly even from himself. He says,

Memory isn't a snapshot . . . I swear it's closer to an oil painting that never quite dries. Each time you awaken, it's changed. In intensity, in tone, in character. What the canvas actually shows, that changes too.

And,

A decade flows by and disappears. Later, it's only a jumble of pictures and sensations . . . No, I take that back. So much remains, once you close your eyes and look around.

But of course he is an unreliable narrator. The tapes have also been recorded as a redemption project. A justification for how he, innocent of course, came to be where he is. Though he doesn't beg for pity or forgiveness, he is determined that we understand that it wasn't his fault. And here is the most damaging choice made by the narrator, and by the book itself. Threaded throughout is foreshadowing about the murder, My Two-Faced Luck often reads like a true crime mystery, but when we get there, the narrator brushes it off, saying he can't remember. He might have done it or he might not have, but he thinks he is innocent as there is no reason why he would have other than the excessive drinking and pill popping. It is a frustrating moment rendering the bulk of My Two-Faced Luck an elaborate cocktease.

Fortunately Grusibic is an alluring writer and the sensual literariness of the prose offers a tease all its own. Many, many paragraphs, sentences and metaphors are a sheer delight to read. Perhaps transcending the ramblings of a dying queen, or perhaps subtly shaped by Ms Gill? Or simply written to be as lush and pleasing as possible without distracting completely from the rambling narrative. The death of a son born with medical problems is succinctly and heartbreakingly dealt with in one sumptuous, horrible sentence, "Eight days later the boy died after a lifetime of struggling." Or describing the aftermath of the death of the widow's not so faithful husband, "The saintification, if that's a word, begins, or at least, for posterity, those rosy cheeks and the warm tones get painted on the faces of corpses. Not life-like, but reassuring to onlookers." There is much to savour in Grusibic's words and thoughts.

My Two-Faced Luck also offers an overview of segments of gay life from the 1930s right through the '90s. Though initially cloaked in euphemism, the narrator climbs on his back, more frequently doggy style, from the extreme poverty of the depression to the gilded cage closet of high society. He posits himself as passive, inherited from his mother who he paints as a masochist, and just let it all happen. But then again, he has is telling a story of rationalization. There are glimmers of gay liberation in the narrative but they are distant, the narrator is always aware of being not only something shameful but also for most the novel, illegal. He says, "I suppose we were no better or worse than anyone else. Saving our skins by keeping quiet," upon witnessing a protest for gay rights.

Our narrator's story is a fascinating one. From trading sexual favours for popcorn at the movies, to hustling, blackmail and falling in love with his pimp. A marriage of inconvenience when a stint in the army turns into a typing job. Continually, right to the bitter end, wishing he had had the will to start a chain of hair salons. Or even finish his training in the art. Becoming a gigolo with one foot in the gutter and the other behind a bar mixing cocktails. When the miracle of Miltown grew to become a dependency on "Judys." My Two-Faced Luck is almost the inverse of the typical gay novel, there is no redemption in sexual terms. Or even much sexual pleasure beyond the transactional. That he admits to. He waxes lyrically about his time with his pimp and muses that, like his mother, there was some love and ecstasy involved. He was always "happy to oblige."

As in From Up River and For One Night Only, Grusibic reveals a keen ear for popular music. But instead of new wave '80s, My Two-Face Luck is suffused with the popular music of romance. Specifically of gay icons and tragic divas. Julie London, Frances Day, Liberace, Dionne Warwick and Peggy Lee are some of the touchstones. And Grusibic shows how those aspirational romantics can influence a life lived for love but settling for whatever life offers. A descriptive passage equating the stages of grief with Chopin's oeuvre, is a master class in music appreciation and character building. While the narrator struggles to explain himself, to himself and to the reader, in words, Grusibic cuts to the heart with musical choices and memories. If only we were to learn what music was the soundtrack to the murder, surely that would have been remembered by our narrator. Our narrator may have lived in a bubble, there is no mention of popular entertainment beyond a television kept hidden in a closet (literally, as well as being a metaphor), but the music sings off the pages.

Our elders, those few who survived the plague and the closet, are voices that are tragically missing. The memoirs we get and greedily devour are from those who achieved celebrity status or notoriety or had the stamina and the balls to write their life and truth. Grusibic ventures out to the fringes of gay life, of respectability, of history. He was inspired to write My Two-Faced Luck by a sentence, a reference, "fifty-nine-year-old homosexual found guilty of murdering an elderly widow at sea on a cruise ship." From there he researched and extrapolated and we'll never know how much is real any more than I assume he, or the narrator, does. My Two-Faced Luck is like sitting with one of our elders, most likely in a bar, and just listening. To the rhythm and glory and deception of their words and history. And yes it may ramble and repeat and repeat but there is a beauty and a strength at the heart of it. Do we surrender to chance, few are as passive as they present, or do we take advantage of it? A metaphor for the two-faced luck of being gay.