Advance Praise for Lee Houck and Yield
“In this deft debut, Lee Houck gives us Simon, a young man seeking direction and connection in a minefield of violence and exploitation. Witty and wrenching, Yield is required reading for anyone who wants to know what it means to be young, gay and without a roadmap in today’s world.”
—Vestal McIntyre, author of Lake Overturn
“Yield is a subtle novel which creeps into your soul. The characters are realistic and Lee Houck’s writing is refreshing and provocative. It is a story of unexpectedly finding your place in the world by appreciating what it has to offer.”
—Emanuel Xavier, poet and author of Christ Like
“Lee Houck’s Yield is a rich mixture: a hustler’s conflicted psyche, the emotional after-effects of a gay-bashing, a hot love interest, a romantic sojourn in the Vermont woods, and the nourishing powers of gay friendship. This is a complex, evocative, and unforgettable book.”
—Jeff Mann, author of A History of Barbed Wire and Loving Mountains, Loving Men
“With perfect emotional pitch, Lee Houck has crafted an exuberant, often witty, always smart story about 20-something queers scrambling to make their way in contemporary Manhattan as they negotiate friendship, yearn for love, and—gotta pay the rent—sell sex. Brisk and buoyant, this engaging debut captures big-city hustle with small-town heart.”
—Richard Labonte, Book Marks, Q Syndicate and series editor, Best Gay Erotica
“Lee Houck’s writing is a portal, a crystal ball projecting the scapes of his mind and soul—where everything from ironic beauty to rebellious desire dances with abandon. His words construct vivid “stage sets” in your imagination, where his characters encounter disappointment, ecstasy, deception. Yield is a bold and shocking story concerned with humanism—it’s a dazzling and sometimes dangerous foray into post-queer realism.”
—Charlie Vázquez, author, blogger and queer East Village PANIC! reading series host
YIELD
LEE HOUCK
KENSINGTON BOOKS
For Meg
Acknowledgments
This story was sometimes a lonely one to write. But during the years that it took shape, I was lucky to be surrounded by family and friends who brought me out of the apartment for rooftop phone calls to all corners of the earth, waxy paper cups of Italian ice, sour cream biscuits, swing sets in evening playgrounds, and endless (maybe they felt that way to you) hours of creative discourse:
To Clark and Tisa Houck for a whole lifetime of encouragement and support. To Stella Duffy, Becky Beahm, Laura Helton, Chris Lueck, and Andrea Maddox. To the initial readers: Amanda Baltazar, Manuel Muñoz, Alessandra Nichols, and especially John Summerour for his early and invaluable criticism.
To: Peter Senftleben, Jim McCarthy, Alexander Chee, Richard Labonte, Emanuel Xavier, James Lear, and Charlie Vázquez.
And to Kip Rathke, Mario Roman, Foster Corbin, Chris Cochrane, Witold Fitz-Simon, Sean Frankino, Cory Davis, and Sean Quinn.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.
—Tony Hoagland
Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part Two
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
Dear Reader
Chapter One
My high school chemistry teacher was also a forensics investigator. He specialized in arson, burned bodies, and flammable chemicals, and he entertained us with sometimes-gruesome stories from more than twenty-five years of duty. There was the skeleton of a woman, average height—which is to say five-foot-four—somewhere around thirty years old, reduced to blackened bones and cinders in a house fire. He gave us two clues: “For example, the middle finger on her right hand has a large calcification on the top section, like you might have if you wrote heavily with a pencil, for example.” He said “for example” at the beginning and end of everything. “For example, she also has a tiny indentation, a notch, in her front tooth, also the right one, for example.” It was our job as eager students, wound up by the grisly details, to figure out her occupation.
Work changes you. It shows itself on your body. In the same way that a carpenter’s hands are tuned to the nuances of hammer and nail, the way wood can talk to you through your arms, my hands listen to numbers on files, to injection records and saturation levels, to painful and courageous histories. I filter through the hundreds of thousands (could be millions) of dead medical records at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and line them up in ascending order by year of admittance.
The files begin with a complaint. Something like “My back hurts and I don’t know why,” or “My leg is broken,” or worse things—usually only one sentence, typed up by someone in Admitting. Then a social and family history, which is dictated to the nurse by the patient, and handwritten. This is where the nurses fill in what’s really happening, the stuff that doesn’t show up in the complaint: “Woman claims to have walked into door,” or “Child has bruises on back and legs, father says they are from falling off the bed.” Then a medical history, a list of procedures performed, if any, and finally billing information. Sometimes there are X-rays, sometimes there are sonograms. Sometimes there’s hardly anything—a blurry carbon copy and illegible signature. The files are stored vertically on shelves in thirty-two rows. They’re accented by six different color-coded stickers (green for first-time emergency visit, orange for same-day dismissal, red for DOA, yellow, brown, and light blue for what I haven’t been able to figure out yet).
My fingertips are tough, callused by the constant shuffling and reshuffling of paperwork and paper clips, removing the tiny staples, and my cuticles are often rubbed red and raw from jamming my hands in between two folders, cut open on the sharp edges of the files.
I work alone. I don’t talk to anyone, don’t