Testosterone: A Novel

Dean Seagrave was having an extraordinary day. All his belongings just went up in smoke, and he's tooling around Los Angeles in a rental car with a handheld tape recorder. The police are on his trail for assaulting an old woman outside a grocery store, or so he was just told by the man in a wheelchair he attacked at Venice Beach. "He's an emotional serial killer," he says, explaining his frenzied quest for Pablo Ortega, his lover, who disappeared one night going out for cigarettes. But what bothers Dean more is Pablo's connection to a cult, all the disappearing animals, and the story about torture in Chile. Problem is, Dean might be crazy. Or everyone might be lying. But now Dean has a machete (because the chainsaw made too much noise), and he just found Pablo.James Robert Baker is the author of four other novels: Tim & Pete, Boy Wonder, Fuel Injected Dreams, and Right Wing (published on the Internet). His sixth novel, Testosterone, will be published by Alyson in October 2000. On November 5, 1997, he committed suicide.

Amazon.com Review

Dean Seagrave is a crazed L.A. artist with a vendetta. His heart has been broken and his house burned down--all his books and art, even the only manuscript of his new graphic novel, Testosterone, destroyed, along with his good nature and his sense of restraint. Now he's careening through Los Angeles on the trail of his loser ex-boyfriend, Pablo Ortega, who had promised fidelity but turned out to be a "sleazy little scumbag beaner tearoom queen," an "emotional serial killer" who simply chose Dean as his latest victim. In one hand, Dean holds the tape recorder into which he recounts events as they occur, a sort of "living novel" of his search for vengeance. The final book from the author of Tim and Pete (Baker, who suffered from depression, killed himself in 1997), Testosterone is a wild ride--dark, funny, and satiric--and a testament to the savage side of love. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Controversial gay cult author/filmmaker Baker (Tim & Pete) committed suicide in 1997, but left behind this previously unpublished novel, an amalgam of inner torment, sexual addiction, lost love and angry retribution. Revised, edited and updated for prime time, the novel consists of the transcripts of tapes dictated by harried protagonist Dean Seagrave describing a tumultuous, frenetic Los Angeles odyssey. In the middle of the night, Seagrave's house is set on fire, sending him on a quest to find the guilty party. But he already suspects the culprit is his missing lover, Pablo, who went out for cigarettes one day and never returned. Hopped up on drugs and rage, and carrying a Glock, Seagrave embarks on a hunt to find (and murder) his errant boyfriend, starting with random visits to mutual friends. His search turns violent when he happens first upon Pablo's best friend, Calvin, a wheelchair-bound AIDS victim, and then upon Pablo's terrified mother, and attempts to physically shake answers out of each of them. As his search progresses, Seagrave finds a series of sinister clues to Pablo's mysterious past: a home video of a missing, mutilated pet; a secret apartment stocked with bondage equipment; and evidence that Pablo has ties to a demonic cult. Still, it's never clear quite what is true and what isn't, and by the time the tale builds up to its ultra-violent, surrealistic conclusion, Seagrave has proved himself a wholly untrustworthy narrator. Baker is adept at generating suspense, and he exhibits a sharp wit when ruminating on gay culture. But the tape-transcript device is tired, and reading Baker's high-strung prose style is often like eavesdropping on an overcaffeinated cell-phone conversation. Still, this is a fitting if flawed valedictory effort. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Dean Seagrave is driving around L.A., looking for Pablo Ortega. When he finds him, he is going to kill him. Why? For starters, because Dean's house has burned down, and he believes Pablo is to blame. Then there are the ugly things Dean has learned from Pablo's other lovers. Pablo practices black magic rituals in which animals are tortured and dismembered--so that was what happened to Dean's missing dog--and that even include human sacrifice during S & M sex. Pablo puts curses on his exes, too, that require white magic exorcism to be removed. Certainly, Dean could be cursed, so obsessive is his quest for the man who loved (?) and left him. Cast as a series of transcriptions of tapes Dean records during his manhunt, Testosterone is a tour de force, part nourish suspense novel and part grim satire of compulsive gay male sexuality, as despondent as a Jim Thompson yarn in which the narrator is killed on the last page. It is as compelling as good Thompson, too. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter: Tape One Hey, Jim. By the time you hear this, I'll be dead. Just kidding. But you're probably wondering what this is. One thing it's not is what you were expecting: a tape of the Bad Religion show at the Palace. I missed that, as it turned out. A lot's been going on. I'll tell what this is, on one level anyway. An experiment. A novel, a living novel, spoken directly onto tape. Without all the tedious typing and editing, and agents, publishers, printers, before the book-on-tape version. I'm skipping all that. And it's a living novel because it's taking place right now as I speak it. I mean, I don't know exactly what's going to happen. I don't know how each scene is going to unfold. But I do have a very rough sense of the narrative. I know the premise, you could say. I know the fundamental thrust of this thing. But I'm not going to spill it. I need to build my case first, so you don't think I've flipped out. In the meantime, I don't want to shoot too soon. I'll tell you this much: I'm out looking for action, some very serious action, today. I'm seeking catharsis, a visceral catharsis-that's what I'm up to right now. I'm a no-bullshit guy, and one angry queer, so don't fuck with me because I'm on a mission. Attention all breeders: You'd better part for me like the Red fucking Sea, because I'm plenty pissed-off, and if you get in my way, I'll ram your rear-end and squash your little baby. In fact, I'm in the car now, as you can no doubt tell. But if you're listening closely, you may already know that it's not my car. It's not my throaty '66 GTO. It's a Hertz rental car. A purposefully nondescript mouse-gray Nissan Maxima. At first they were going to give me a Sentra. Till I mentioned Nicole [Brown Simpson] and got a free upgrade. I miss the power of my GTO. But I wrapped that around a sycamore almost two months ago. I wasn't drunk, in case you're wondering. I hadn't had a thing to drink, and I wasn't on drugs. I was spaced out and angry, I guess, and a few other things, maybe not paying attention. This happened on Old Canyon Road, on a stretch I know well. I mean, I know automatically where to slow down, but for some reason I didn't. Except it's not for some reason, like I don't know what the reason is. I know, I remember, exactly what I was thinking about when I drove off the road. I was thinking about Pablo Ortega. Remembering how much I liked to wrap my lips around his fat brown uncut cock. Then my lips became my car and his cock became the sycamore tree. I broke the windshield with my head and got a pretty bad whiplash. Had to wear a brace for six weeks. That's why I still hadn't cleared the brush around my house, which I usually do in April. Not that it would have made any difference. Except it would have made it more obvious the fire was set intentionally. It happened in the middle of the night, two weeks ago Thursday. I haven't been sleeping well, that's all that saved me. I tend to wake up a lot in the night. And sometimes I get up, smoke a cigarette to calm down again. Which is strange, in that it's something that Pablo also does. So sometimes when I'd be doing that, smoking a cigarette in the dead of the night, I'd think about Pablo, doing the same thing at the same time somewhere else, thinking about me. So it gave me this strange sense of connection. Except that night he wasn't that far away. He wasn't across town somewhere, I'm convinced of that. I was smoking a cigarette in the bedroom, looking out at the moon through the eucalyptus trees, when I smelled the smoke downstairs. Saw the flames. I grabbed my pants, that was all. I saved nothing from the work room. It was too late for that. It was three in the morning, so nobody saw the flames or called. By the time I got to the first yuppie house on Saddle Peak Road and woke them up, my house was completely engulfed in flames. Five units arrived within twenty minutes. But there was nothing left to save. The fire inspector said a cigarette started it. Someone flicked a cigarette from a car. He tried to blame me for not clearing the brush. Like it was an accident. Carelessness, that is, instead of deliberate arson. I argued with him about this, but he kept insisting it wasn't arson. He got defensive, like I was questioning his expertise. I asked what the cigarette brand was-if he'd said Kools that would've cinched it-but he wouldn't tell me. I let it go at that point. I didn't need evidence. I already knew what I was going to do. I was going to kill Pablo. I'd known that for several weeks before the fire. The fire just convinced me that if I didn't kill him, he'd kill me. He'd just tried. I tried to minimize the impact of the fire in my mind. Most of what was lost, the original art work, was in a sense sentimental. Most of it's been published. It's out there, it still exists in the world. So it was like losing the original cels of Fantasia or something, when dozens of prints are still in distribution. I kept using that analogy so I wouldn't feel raped and buttfucked and lobotomized. But I think that finally I was beyond a certain kind of anger. Which is good. It's given me clarity, resolve. To just do what needs to be done. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. I can never remember who said that. Clint Eastwood? Liberace? Margaret Thatcher? Maybe all three.

About the Author

James Robert Baker is the author of five other novels: Tim & Pete, Boy Wonder, Fuel Injected Dreams, Adrenaline and Right Wing (published on the Internet). Baker was a filmmaker, whose underground film Mouse Klub Konfidential, about a Mouseketeer turned gay-bondage filmmaker, is credited with driving Michael Medved away from filmmaking. On November 5, 1997, he committed suicide.

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