GLR November-December 2024

I N HIS GENTLY COMIC NOVEL An Evening with Birdy O’Day , Greg Kearney manages, among other things, to spin a poignant tale sustained over the course of sixty years, em ploying antiheros as the two main characters. Roland, our nar rator, is never entirely in charge of his life, while his childhood friend Birdy fiercely controls his own life, Roland’s life, and that of anyone who lets him get away with it. As the novel be gins, Roland is feeling every one of his 69 years, but is thrilled to learn that after 45 years his best friend—the once Grammy winning now has-been Birdy O’Day—is scheduled to perform in their hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, for the first time. As guests of Mr. O’Day, Roland and his husband Tony will sit in the front row to witness Birdy’s talents before a paid audience. To hear him tell it, life has simply happened to Roland since he met Birdy at the age of ten. Roland floated with the tide, oc casionally bumping into the shore, mostly drifting. And yet, he’s not feckless; he is insightful and compassionate to an uncom mon degree. According to Roland, until he met Birdy his child hood was that of a boy who was “thrilled to exist.” Afterward, he is only thrilled by Birdy’s attention. In contrast to Roland’s forbearance, Birdy is a bossy, lonely ten-year-old fabulist. When Birdy weeps during a knock-down, AN EVENING WITH BIRDY O’DAY by Greg Kearney Arsenal Pulp Press. 336 pages, $21.95 When he shifts to his divorce, a topic fraught with potential self-pity, he steps back to make seemingly agonizing moments both funny and sad. When speaking about returning to his once shared queen-sized bed, he ponders where to place his pillow, and what to do with his former partner’s pillow, then shifts to say: “If you would like this/ to be a metaphor,/ I won’t mind./ Here I am, figuring out how/ to take up all the space/ I used to share.” In his last poem, dedicated to his mentor and friend Stanley Plumly, he says: “I’ve never made sense of my life.” Yet his mod esty reflects what is most endearing about him. He can shift from painting a room to pornography, to stories about Plumly, to Boy Scouts, to a doctor doing a rectal exam, and to himself, mourn ing his friend, and he never stops wanting to find how all of this makes up his life. He never tires of asking questions about what he or any gay man must do to make sense of his life. No wonder he ends his book with these lines, which speak to what it means to be alive: “I feared I’d never fully make sense,/ even to myself, but how it reassured me, that as long as someone/ knew how to live, it would be ok if I never quite figured it out.” _______________________________________________________ Bruce Spang is a poet and writer living in Chandler, NC. T HOMAS K EITH Divergence of the Twain rage: “I think Someone should blow out all / their big, stupid candles ./ If all you want is dirt,/ it’s everywhere you go.” He makes the political personal, speaks the truth with irony, and admits his own vulnerability all at once.

drag-out fight between his parents, Roland observes: “I sud denly understood the ferocity of Birdy’s imagination: it was his only armour.” When Birdy’s mother dies from a stroke, Roland’s mother becomes his legal guardian. The boys then share a bed and consider themselves brothers, albeit brothers who kiss and snuggle and, at the tender age of ten, are improb ably self-aware enough to know they’re gay. The first fifteen years of Roland and Birdy’s friendship make up the bulk of the narrative, from adolescence through adulthood. What it is about Birdy that keeps Roland in his thrall is not always clear—be yond the fact that Birdy was his first friend and first love. It al most seems as if Roland has imprinted on Birdy the way a duckling imprints on its mother. One of Kearney’s strengths is his ability to create prickly yet appealing characters. The only anchor in Roland’s life is Margaret, his no-nonsense mother. A pugnacious atheist, she was once a devoutly religious sixteen-year-old who was raped. When we meet her, she’s ending a relationship with a messy al coholic. Next she has a long-term relationship with a brusque and insecure woman who shows signs of being on the autism spectrum. Margaret is later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, against which she wages a battle well into her late sixties. There is a tough-as-nails lesbian bar owner named Shit whose care and protection for Roland is unwavering. The boys’ new choir director is the dapper and patrician Caesar Stock, who takes a special interest in Birdy and Roland. They vie for his attention until they discover that he’s a bitter, cynical closet case. At the center of everything is Birdy’s certainty that he will one day be famous for ... something . What Roland and Margaret take as fanciful daydreaming, Birdy sees as fact. Birdy decides he will reach superstardom as a singer-songwriter (and he briefly succeeds). From now on, every move he makes, every person he allows into (or excludes from) his orbit, is justified as strategically advantageous to his career. As the single-minded Birdy calculates his future success, it becomes inevitable that Roland will be left behind. Merely to pathologize Birdy O’Day as a malignant narcissist would fail to do justice to the full depth of a character as spectacularly self ish, driven, mercurial, disloyal, manipulative, neurotic, hilari ous, and fragile as Birdy. One does feel for him, up to a point, and his selfishness can be entertaining, especially his dramatic precociousness as a child. His long slide into anonymity, how ever, does not arouse pity. Primarily it prompts sympathy for Roland, or frustration with Roland’s fatalistic acceptance of his perpetual status as a doormat. Roland leads one to believe that his life is neither well-spent nor fulfilled, just a ripple in “the wake of Birdy’s ambition.” Yet Roland’s view of himself is belied by an important fact: he re mains steadfast to his mother and his husband, always. One hopes there may be a moment of reckoning when he and Birdy reunite. Instead, it turns out age and distance have worked their magic and shrunk Birdy down to size. Robbed of his former power, he no longer controls much of anything. Roland’s re sponse is mild bewilderment and indifference. In contrast to Birdy’s hard-fought life of misery, a life of loyalty and love doesn’t seem so bad. ______________________________________________________________ Thomas Keith is professor of theater at Pace University in New York, as well as a writer and dramaturg.

November–December 2024

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