Maricón (Part 3)

Editor’s note: This is the third of three installments. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

And Jesus was asked by his students,

“When does ‘rest’ for
the dead begin,
and when will the
new cosmos arrive?”

Jesus replied,

“What you are looking for is already here.
You simply have not recognized it.”

— The Gospel of Thomas

∞

I got the call that Pedro had died from Father Andrew. Although I was fully prepared, those things always come as a shock. As I stood before the bathroom mirror, that summer morning, taking a good hard look at myself, I chastised myself for not being with him when he died; I blamed myself for being out so late, berated myself for being so hung-over. Putting on a pair of dark shades, to shield my eyes from the glare, I got ready for the last act of our little melodrama.

​On the street, as I walked to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where his body waited, I dreaded seeing his corpse. I had been with him on and off for the final days, giving him massages, clipping his toenails, cutting his hair, and we had continued to argue and get pissed off at each other but we were still a bit in love before he slipped into the final coma.

​As I passed a pair of boys, on the street, I noticed a fleeting quality of innocence on their faces, as the two youngsters bounced a basketball between them. As they frisked with their dog, I felt once again that innocent quality prior to the inevitable heartbreak, the cynical disdain. That quality of innocence I saw in those two boys, Pedro had seen in me that night at the opera in Central Park, a lonely boy by himself. If he hadn’t befriended me, I would have ended up in the gutter.

​But what had I accomplished since I arrived in New York? Almost nothing. I was still caught up in the magic of the amusement park; the ups and downs of one-night stands, the consumer driven lonely city. I had turned into a professional fag. Everyone has a price tag and mine was getting slashed down to bargain basement prices, each year I got older. The gay crowd was getting aggressively younger, more Republican, and hostile to camp and irony. Growing older in a world that worships beauty and youth was a dismal prospect. Our elders had fled the scene, and like Pedro, they were vanishing into thin air, leaving me to fend for myself in a world of Peter Pansies, waving our magic wands in this never, never, never land.

​When I got out of the elevator on Pedro’s floor at St. Vincent’s, I prepared myself for the worst, but what I saw when I entered his sun-drenched room, filled with flowers, was a relief. That quality of innocence I had seen in those young boys I saw in him when I entered his hospital room. I was unprepared for how beautiful he would look with his arms folded across his chest, the majestic calm of the countenance, as calm and ancient as the mask of an Egyptian pharaoh on a sarcophagus. 

​I took off my jacket, went to the side of his bed and kissed his forehead, which was smooth and cool. Father Andrew, Pedro’s oldest friend, who had known him at the seminary, stood on the other side of the bed, with a rosary in his hand. Father Andrew said to me, “You smell like vodka.” 

​“I was out late last night.” Shrugging my shoulders, still feeling the effects of the vodka, and the lack of sleep, I moved guiltily to the window and watched the street traffic below. Father Andrew stood at the head of the bed, and began to silently pray over Pedro’s dead body, while I, feeling ashamed of the alcohol on my breath, sat down, opened my brown paper bag, ate a doughnut, and sipped the coffee. The coffee tasted good. It was so ordinary, really. I was tired, very tired. I knew there would be no more fever, no more vomit, no more shit, no more blood, no more plans, no more poetry, no more Pedro. What a relief.

​All of those memories of my arrival in the New York that I had loved, of leaving the Texas that I hated, flooded through my awareness. I watched those confused scenes as if I was fast forwarding with a remote control; they became jumbled up, out of order, nor was all of it pretty, and I was unsure if any of it was real. Now that I was past thirty, past my prime, I should know the difference between dreams, imagination, and reality, but I didn’t.

​And though it was a summer day, this day at St Vincent’s, the day Pedro breathed his last, I kept thinking of winter and my mind was back there again revisiting my first winter in New York when I still lived in Hell’s Kitchen with Pedro. I tried to put it all in some kind of chronological order, but after all the booze and boys and cocaine from the night before there was a chaos in me that resisted my effort to figure it out.​

​As I glanced at Pedro’s body, I witnessed Father Andrew standing beside him whispering a prayer. Pedro, with his eyes closed, looked like he was deep in that other world, from which no traveler returns. I didn’t want to come back into present time, into the hospital room, and closed my eyes again, trying to escape, going back into my repertoire of memories again, looking for something to hold onto that wasn’t ugly and painful, but every memory, even the pleasant ones, hurt. 

​That hard, fast talking rhythm that I heard all around me, had crept into my own speech and behavior, and I had adapted to it. I had turned into a loud cartoon like everyone else. I was still nourished by the anxieties of the city, even as I was back then, when I first arrived off of the bus, in Times Square. I still thrived by being at the edge of chaos, but how long could this go on? My head ached.

​Father Andrew asked me if I wanted another cup of coffee. I said no thanks. He said he would be back in a moment. I placed the chair next to Pedro’s bed, sat down and studied in silence his pale face, trying to feel something. And I guess that’s all there is.

​Father Andrew had returned with a cup of coffee which he sipped as he gazed out the window. Father Andrew said nothing. He was a handsome man in his late forties with silver hair and a sensitive face. I liked him, though I knew him only slightly. Then he broke the silence. “Would you like an aspirin?” I thanked him and took the white pill he offered and swallowed it, washed it down with some of the coffee he offered. “I made the arrangements to have Pedro cremated.” I nodded my head in silence. “They are ready to take his body to the morgue.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I want to thank you for your to devotion to Pedro. You were a good friend.” 

​Father Andrew put a hand on my shoulder, which steadied me. He placed a pile of notebooks on my lap. “Pedro’s journals. He asked me to give them to you. He asked you to read them if you want and then destroy them. He asked that you not show them to anyone.” I nodded my head. He shook my hand and left the room.

​Alone with Pedro for the last time, I opened his journal, to an odd passage, that he wrote when he first met me, so long ago. The attendants came and put a sheet over the corpse and wheeled it away; the nurse came in and told me they had to prepare for the next patient.

​I put the journals under my arm and went to the nurse’s station and thanked the staff for taking care of Pedro. They said they were sorry for my loss. As I walked through the familiar streets of the West Village I felt the need to sit in a café. I read from his journals in the dim café, sipping espresso. His style was like his voice. He was often immensely amusing.

​For Pedro, I suppose, I was the waif, the kid in the park without a place to stay, a stray cat he took pity upon, and for me he will always be the man who got away. Then I felt the pleasant effects of the aspirin and my mind felt at peace for a while.

At the memorial service, a few weeks later, Father Andrew gave me a plain wooden box, wrapped in black silk, which held Pedro’s ashes. He told me that Pedro wanted me to have them. He told me I could do with them whatever I wanted to do. 

​One of Pedro’s mourners—a drag artist, as she preferred to be called—dressed in a long black gown and a mantilla, told me she felt she was the Mother of all sorrow. Pedro had done her hair for decades; how could she go on without him? She asked me what I was going to do with Pedro’s ashes. I shrugged my shoulders.

​“You could always snort them,” she said, and she started to chuckle at her bad joke. “Snort Pedro? She would just die!” Then she started laughing hysterically, tears streaming down her gaudy face.

​I had to get out of there. Holding the precious box of ashes, I headed for the exit. Father Andrew stopped me at the door but I kept walking and did not look back.

​Under my bed, I put the plain wooden box, wrapped in black silk, which held his ashes, just as I once held his living, warm body, long ago, that night in Central Park when I first arrived in New York.

Later that night, as I walked down one of those tangled tiny streets in the West Village, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man inside a bar wave at me. Not recognizing him at first, I stepped into the dimly lit bar. It felt as if I was meeting a dream figure, someone who had an important message to deliver to me. I noticed his denims and sneakers and a baseball cap, and for a brief moment imagined that he was like my father. Then when he took off his cap I recognized him. I felt disappointed, because I wanted to maintain my picture of Father Andrew as a good-looking priest, an older man, who was faithful to Christ, chaste, above the sins of flesh, someone that I hoped I might one day wish to confide in. 

Disturbed by this secular Father Andrew, with the tipsy grin and a sexy slouch, whom I suspected was eager to get laid, I extended my hand but he ignored that, leaned into me and kissed my cheek. I sat down next to him and allowed my eyes to adjust to the dark bar. The sacred is the profane.

​It was Happy Hour and the bar was filled with aging men from the neighborhood who had peaked too soon. Having let go of their beauty long ago, they felt no sense of urgency, no sense of shame, no sense of pride. They were openly lecherous, dirty old men. Hiding out in this dive was their idea of a safe bet, a way of hiding from the harsh scrutiny of the outside world, a way of sharing a bawdy tale with fellow inmates. This was not my idea of a happy future, a future that I felt was drawing me towards it slowly but surely. I felt constrained by this dingy bar scene, as I noticed the denizens were observing me cynically. The dirty old men checked us out.

​Father Andrew offered me a drink. The bartender conjured up the frosty mug of beer with a shot of tequila. I reached nervously for some peanuts and chewed them quickly, causing me to cough. I took a big gulp of the beer to clear my throat, followed by the shot and a twist of lime. This was not a good beginning. 

“So, Father Andrew, what brings you here of all places?”

“Every whore has a future,” he quoted Oscar Wilde, with a slight trace of a working class Irish accent, “every saint has a past.” He lifted his bottle slowly to his lips. I must have looked surprised, for he added, “I’ve never pretended to be a paragon of virtue. I live in the world, my dear, just like you. I heard you were quite a party boy—”

“Oh really?” I asked, feeling coiled up and wanting to run. “I’m not feeling nostalgic for my lost youth.” I evaded his direct gaze as I surveyed the old beer hall, sadly amused by the stout middle-aged men playing pool.” I used to visit this place with Pedro back in the old days, when he gave readings over at St. Mark’s. Still looks the same, dreary, old hell hole.” 

In the dim corner, I saw a young guy hustle an older guy, the well-known old predator and prey dynamic. I hated seeing the old dudes fall down drunk and go home with some young guy who would steal their wallet while they slept. No fool like an old fool. Time stood still in this old, dank dungeon, smelling like the torture chamber of an ancient castle. On the large TV above their heads they watched with mild interest a pretty blonde boy bend over and get his butt spanked by a hairy old bear. I noticed an old drunk sitting by himself. A sad expression passed across the old drunk’s red face, as he turned away from the porn action on the TV screen and looked directly at me. He had the look of a lost soul. I felt a shudder.

“The old should neither be seen nor heard.” I quoted Oscar Wilde, as if I was in a dream. I feared that I had quoted too glibly. “I’m sorry,” I apologized to Andrew quickly. “I wasn’t referring to you. I don’t think of you as old.“

“Oh but I am,” he said, “I am quite ancient.” Andrew gave me a roguish smile, with unconcealed lust in his blue eyes, and placed a hopeful hand on my knee.

“I have to go in a minute,” I added tactfully, looking at the clock that read a quarter to six.

“So soon?”

“I really don’t like this place.” I realized I was exaggerating a bit. I just wanted to play hard to get. I hadn’t made any commitment that evening but I wanted Andrew to think I had. I felt my vanity operating, a need to make my life more glamorous than it was. I had nothing to look forward to, a can of tuna in the fridge, a bottle of beer, the evening news. I shook my head trying to sort out my priorities, catching a glimpse of myself looking puzzled in the wide mirror behind the bar. 

“I was talking to Pedro’s sister,” he said, in his most diplomatic tone of voice from Puerto Rico. “She asked about you, says you don’t answer her calls.”

“That’s because I don’t want to talk about Pedro anymore.” I put my hand across my face.

“She said he left you some money in his will. Two thousand dollars. She said she would send it to you.“

“What was Pedro like,” I asked carefully, “when he was at the seminary?”

“He was a beautiful boy, shy, withdrawn-quite innocent.”

“What happened to him?”

“What happens to most of us?” Andrew evaded my question. We were going in a circle. I felt compelled for some reason to ask Andrew more than he was willing to answer.

“I always wondered,” I thought out loud, “what he wanted with me?” As I swiveled around on the bar stool, our knees touched. “I’ve been reading his journals slowly. He never talks about me. I was a peripheral figure. He was obsessed by sex and God.”

“I have observed,” he said, with one finger poking the air as if he were bursting a bubble,“that issues surrounding sex and God are rarely resolved and easily disturbed. That was Pedro’s big obsession.”

“Sex and God or sex and death.” I repeated his phrase, feeling a slight slur in my speech brought on by the beer on an empty stomach. “Is that all there is?” Feeling self-conscious, I sat up straight, aware of my sloppy posture reflected in the mirror.

“I think I can see what he liked about you.” He touched the center of my forehead, gently, with his finger. “It’s right there. The life of the mind. You have an inquiring mind. He liked that about you. You are actually a lot alike. You are both seekers. Seek and ye shall find. Pedro was looking for something beyond himself that he could surrender to.”

“Sex or God?”​

“Oh, something like that.” He sipped his beer and leaned back on his stool. “You are a lot alike.”

“We are not.” I shook my head, frowned, almost feeling angry, exposed. My annoyance I knew was a coverup, for I was trying to attract Father Andrew, and he knew it. “I’m not a big intellectual, I’m not a poet. If I were I wouldn’t be sitting here in this depressing dump. Pedro was into Twinkies, just the way I was into hot Latinos. I know that sounds cynical but it’s true. I was looking for an older man to fuck my brains out and pay my rent. I was lucky to find Pedro. If I hadn’t I would have ended up on the streets.” 

Annoyed with my own cynicism, I made a sweeping gesture that nearly knocked over my glass. Andrew studied our shadowy reflection in the mirror, behind the bar, with an otherworldly wisdom. Suddenly, Andrew looked like a sage, with his silver hair shining, instead of an aging fag looking for a date. I felt warmer towards him, less guarded.

“Okay, I admit it.  I wanted to be in love, I wanted to be normal like everyone else. None of that faggot shit. Look at me now.” Annoyed with myself for feeling the performance take over, I felt vulnerable, a need for Andrew’s approval. I tried to find the right word, hoping to receive a blessing and some guidance, as we were both traveling on the same treacherous path. I hoped he had some wisdom to share but my hopes were sinking fast.

“Pedro, on the other hand, didn’t care about the love stuff—well, maybe he did, a little bit, but like he was always hiding something. I guess we are all hiding something, aren’t we Father?” I polished off my beer, having drunk it too quickly.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, seriously. “I think you are deceiving yourself.”

“About what?”

“He was a loyal person. And so are you. You have a deeply loyal nature, too. I saw your devotion to Pedro.” Andrew put his hand gently on my forearm. “I know how close you were to Pedro.” Andrew’s eyes lit up. He seemed to radiate a light from the inside, as he did at the Memorial service.​

Tears came, foolishly, to my eyes. I softened but not too much, keeping a distance, but I felt touched by his remarks. The puddle of beer I’d spilled on the bar began to have a gleaming light in the center of it looking much like the puddle of light inside the center of my head when I go sleep at night. As I gazed into the puddle of beer, I could see an image of my own face in the puddle swimming around like a goldfish. I took my napkin and wiped it up.

“Andrew,” I asked, “did you ever have sex with Pedro?” Andrew had a pained expression. “Sorry. Don’t answer that. I really don’t want to know.” I felt we had gone too deep without a life guard.

“No. That is a fair question. I met Pedro when he was sixteen down on the boardwalk at Brighton Beach. I was much older, already ordained. He followed me back to the seminary where he visited me often. We became good friends. Then he joined the seminary. I was surprised what an apt pupil he was. I tutored him in Latin. He was a wild child—indiscreet. He left shortly after the first year. We kept in touch. Is there anything else you want to know?”

“What is your definition of a mystic?” 

“A mystic,” Andrew answered dryly, “is an agnostic who is in love with the unknowable, someone who is compelled to explore the dark side of the moon.”

“Are you a mystic?”

“No,” he said, emphatically, removing his hand from my arm. He asked for another beer. I had struck a chord in him. It was his turn to feel uncomfortable. “I’m just an ordinary priest. I have been trained in obedience. I have never relied upon my own guidance.”

“Never? Then what are you doing in a gay bar?”

“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

“Father Andrew,” I began nervously,” for some reason I feel I can trust you. I’m in trouble. I need your professional advice. I need to talk to someone about my—I don’t know what they are—I guess they are visions. As I read Pedro’s journal late at night I get these visions. I get these weird experiences. I actually saw Pedro. He told me that he had seen God!”

“Visions?” he seemed worried. “With angels and demons?” 

I nodded my head. 

“Oh dear. Do you take drugs?”

“No, not any more—”

“Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

“No, I’ve kept it to myself but I can’t do this alone. How do I know if these experiences are God or not? At night, I read Pedro’s journals and relax and breathe slowly and get this buzzing sensation in my head and then—oh never mind.” I was afraid of Andrew’s scowling expression. I was afraid of his scrutiny into my messed up inner world.

“Perhaps you should see a therapist?” Andrew speculated, for he thought I was crazy, overly imaginative, psychotic. I looked up at the clock, suddenly very eager to get away. I offered Father Andrew my hand, abruptly, indicating that I had to leave.

“Please feel free to call me,” he said, hurriedly. He pressed his card urgently into my hand. I felt a warm current between us as I held his hand, as if we had struck a Faustian bargain. “Gnostic voices.”

“Gnostic voices?”

“Pedro was a goodhearted heretic.” Andrew smiled sadly. “Just like you.”

I didn’t want to leave him there, alone, at Happy Hour, with a sour bunch of lecherous old queens. “I’m sorry to leave you here, but I really must go. Left something on the stove.”

“If you should ever need me,” he said, sincerely, “I am here for you. I miss Pedro, too.” We kissed lightly on the lips, a Judas kiss. 

I caught a cab to my apartment, resisting a panic attack as I recalled what Pedro said about the Gnostics in his journal. In ancient Egypt, when the baby is born the ka (the life force) is breathed into them. At death the ka departs and becomes part of a statue or portrait of the person in the tomb. The person also has a ba, which is a capacity to move and after death, the ka and the ba are reunited to form the akh, a being of light, that roamed around like a ghost.

​I felt that it was harder to for me to breathe and I wanted someone to put his arms around me and hold me, to bring me down. When I entered the foyer of my building I opened the mailbox, grabbed the bundle, and ran up the stairs as if someone was chasing me. When I opened the door, I imagined that Father Andrew in his priest garb pulled me towards the bedroom, his hands all over me. I resisted that image of him with all my might. The last thing I needed was to fall in love with a priest, a seedy priest from a Graham Greene novel. How cliché. Right out of central casting. 

I poured myself a vodka and thumbed through the mail. I found it. The check from Pedro’s sister. Two thousand bucks. No amount of money, her note said, could repay what you did for my brother. I listened to Coltrane, cool, elegant, in a duet with Johnny Hartman’s velvety voice, and let the music help me wind down. The knot in my forehead started to uncoil and I stared out the window at the Manhattan skyline and asked out loud, “Why hast thou made me flesh?” 

I listened to the quality of the voice and it didn’t feel like my own voice. Who was this voice that was emanating so deeply from my chest, from my bones?

What to do with Pedro’s gift? I wonder what he would say about my getting involved with Andrew. Pedro’s voice was starting to fade. He was slowly but surely becoming one of the mighty dead, austere, beyond praise, beyond blame. I was a double, in between. He was a being of Light in the Upper World, and I was trapped in the Lower World, run by the Archons, a hungry ghost.

And I knew, that after a few more beers and some more Coltrane, after midnight, I would be waiting under the shadow of the bridge, wanting to surrender, surrender to the stranger, willing to consent, as Pedro did, to be one of the damned.

Maricón (Part 2)

Editor’s note: This is the second of three installments. Read Part 1.

Then Jesus took Thomas aside and spoke three sayings to him in private. When Thomas returned to the company they asked him, “What did Jesus say to you?” 

“If I were to tell you even one of the things He spoke to me,” Thomas replied,“you would pick up these rocks and stone me, and then fire would blaze out of them and burn you.” 

— The Gospel of Thomas

∞

Pedro lived a few blocks west of Times Square—in Hell’s Kitchen—near the theater district, a gaudy place, where rich tourists and stage-struck kids flocked to the shows, and jazz artists played in the streets for loose change. I got to know the district well, developing a fondness for the interiors of all those run down, ornate theaters with grand chandeliers dangling from high deco ceilings, where another golden age of decadence had once been. On the busy streets I saw beautiful people going to plays, I saw the prostitutes who were selling themselves in the dark shadows.

​His apartment was like a halfway house. Drag queens, drug dealers, actors and models and other misfits visited our apartment daily. I said little when they started camping it up, for the cruel tone of their banter frightened me. Acting like loud cartoon characters, they talked fast, just like the cast of characters in Boys in the Band. They made fun of my Texan accent, which I tried to tone down. Pedro cut their hair, advised them on their head shots and love affairs, and was forever buying and selling marijuana. 

​It was Hell’s Kitchen, late summer of 1978, and I remember Hell’s Kitchen as mean and dangerous. Pedro’s apartment was squeezed between a church and a basketball court, and there was a row of porn shops and strip clubs that catered to both gay and straight, loud and proud, without shame. I absorbed everything.​

​This is where I learned how to sneak in after the intermission without paying, learned how to find bargains in thrift shops, learned how to furnish an apartment with what you find on the street. This is where I found used records and books for dirt cheap, where I could grab a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast, eat pizza by the slice for lunch, take out Chinese for dinner. We were always on the run. Running was a common feature of everyone’s life. Everyone was late for something, for work, for a doctor’s appointment, for a show, for a wedding, for a funeral. I learned that you could bump into people without saying you were sorry, you could say good morning without smiling. If you were polite, you would invite seedy types who would ask you for money. ​​The city was crazy and I learned to take risks, to think fast and pretend that you didn’t see anything. Once in the subway I saw a bag lady pull down her pants and take a shit in a shopping bag. The passengers vacated the subway car without saying a word, without holding their nose, without even lifting their eyes from their newspapers. You pretended nothing happened. You never knew who was carrying a gun or a knife.

My first autumn in Pedro’s apartment was full of music. He loved the classic divas—Billie Holiday, Celia Cruz, and of course, the legendary Maria Callas. He took me to the Metropolitan Museum, where I was fascinated by the Egyptian art and the Greek sculpture, and walking through the autumnal Central Park with him felt magical. At the library, he suggested books that I should read. He taught me the pleasures of talking about ideas, an experience I never had back in Texas, where talk was considered cheap. As the weather got chilly, he gave me one of his woolen sweaters, got me a pair of boots for the winter.

​Walking down the street, after work, seeing men and women, in couples or standing alone, waiting for a bus, eager to get home, I wondered if they knew that each of us is as boundless as the sea.

​As the Indian summer turned into fall and then into winter, I spent more time indoors reading books that Pedro checked out at the library, and which he stacked in piles around the apartment but forgot to return. One late afternoon, when he was out, I found the plain manila folder where he kept his neatly typed out poetry. Feeling guilty, reading it without his permission, I was shocked by what I read.

I make love,
The way an older man does.
I touch what is ancient 
In the boy beneath me. 
Lord, may I get it right,
As the long night 
Holds the desire
Of deserted stars.
May I be merciful to him
When none were merciful to me.
I have no needs left, 
Except to give
What I did not get.
The man-boy beneath me 
Who is Beauty
(I am the Beast) 
Pleads for love 
As all lovers must 
And struggles to be free.

I debate the pain I give
With the pleasure I feel.
Am I Daddy? 
Rapist? 
Redeemer? 
I am no man’s daddy—
Should I give up 
Before I get started?
The boy whispers.
I surrender. 
Grief equals love,
Again and 
Like a plastic cup 
Filled with the ocean
I sink all the way down
Unto Him.

​I sat down and started to read it all over again. I wondered what was behind those words? Did he think of himself as an old man? Did he think what we were doing was wrong? Was I one of his boys that he used and cast aside? There was something in the words which caused me to want to rebel. I wondered who the lover was that Pedro described?

​From outdoors, I heard the shouts of the boys playing basketball at the playground next door to our building. I envied them. Those straight kids were normal, not like me. I was doomed to be maricón.

​That is what they shouted at us, taunting Pedro and I, as we walked by them. Maricón!  I asked Pedro what that word meant. He said, “It means faggot.” I winced with pain, as if I had been spat upon. “Just ignore them. Don’t look at them. You will get us killed.” I wondered how he had gotten such a reputation, for what I most liked was that Pedro looked like a masculine man, not a faggot. But maybe I was wrong. What was it about us that people called us faggot? Had Pedro taken one of these hostile boys home? My imagination was filled with intruders, and I began to view him differently, from a distance. Maybe he was a bit effeminate. Maybe I was, too.

​I was jealous of Pedro’s imaginary lovers and of his vaster sexual experience. Short poems, long poems, quirky poems, I read them in secret when he was out. I didn’t understand them. Poem after poem, sounding much alike, revealed the charms of some new image of his desire, even as he prayed for some kind of deliverance from his too, too solid flesh, which he had contempt for, that he wanted to leap out of. I put the poems back in order and left them the way I found them and never revealed that I had looked at them.

​I became more curious. When Pedro left the apartment, I went through his desk and found his journals, which were loose and undated. That’s how I discovered the identity of that always young lover in Pedro’s poems. I was amused and saddened, for Pedro seemed to be always writing about himself. He was the betrayer and the betrayed, the rapist and the redeemer, the lost and the saved, a sex addict and a mystic.

​I was jealous of his poems about God, too, for I had no art of my own to turn to, no instrument to play, no medium to express myself in, no method to relieve my suffering—except through sex. I was like a brute animal. I hadn’t learned how to feel my way through the invisible worlds that Pedro inhabited, but when I closed my eyes while fucking him I could travel to other worlds. Poets could do that without having sex, poets could do that with words alone.

​Winter brought on Pedro’s nightmares. As the weather got colder, we were more often inside the tight apartment and started to feel claustrophobic. As I lay closer to Pedro, after he woke up, on those winter nights, the room too hot with the radiator clanking, he would be terrified by some phantom chasing him into a dark alley. Being deeply superstitious, Pedro lived in Purgatory, a world of shadows, of profound uncertainty, of mysterious signs from another world, which inspired his poems. After describing his troubled dreams to me, he would jot them down in a notebook next to our bed, and fashion them into one of his poems.

​He would finally go back to sleep but I would be wide awake, musing upon the mystery of things, as I watched the all-suffering Madonna with the beautiful body of Jesus in her arms, the Pieta, by the votive candles flickering light on Pedro’s altar. I felt that Jesus was foreign to me, a stranger, too theatrical, slightly ridiculous, but then I would feel sad and forlorn without Him.​​​​​​​

Then there was the day I discovered, in the back of a drawer, a video. I put it in the VCR and let it roll. It was a copy of one of those porn movies he had made, after he left the seminary. It was an early porn video, amateur, made in lurid color, by a swimming pool, a voice over with heavy breathing and silly dialogue. Pedro, barely eighteen, serviced two black guys, who treated him rough, gave it to him from both ends; the good old slave position, the double whammy. As I watched I felt jealous for him, for he was beautiful and did not know it, and I felt envious, for I felt also a desire to be used that way. I hated that I was aroused by submission/dominance action. I never told him about this.

​Then came our first big fight. It happened shortly after that first brutal winter, after the holidays, after we had taken the Christmas tree down and put it on the street. It was when spring had just showed up early for a few days in the middle of March and started to invite the brilliant white blossoms to come out, and, after a few days of glory, they fluttered down to the dirty street.

​The fight was about sex. I had kept secret the reading I had done behind his back but I felt an inner rage begin to brew in me that erupted suddenly out of nowhere. Pedro always insisted that we make love standing up in the shower or doggy style on the living room floor. After months of this routine, that chill afternoon, I let my preferences be known. I had opened the windows, to air the place out. Lustfully, like one of the studs who raped him in the video, I pulled him onto our tiny single bed, and with Callas singing a stirring aria in the background, I tried to remove his clothes.​

​“What are you doing?” He asked, annoyed.

​“Let’s do it in bed,” I pleaded, “not in the kitchen or the toilet. Like normal people?”

​“Because we aren’t normal people. And the bed is too small. Muy quapo, porque muy estupido— “

​“This is America. Speak English.”

​“I am a cocksucker,” he exaggerated his accent, “It’s hard to suck dick lying in this tiny bed. It gives me a crick in the neck. I would much rather do it in the shower or the kitchen where I can use my imagination. It’s sexier. I don’t like to have sex in this narrow bed. It makes me feel married. It makes me feel like I’m in a coffin, in a funeral parlor.”

​I felt insulted.

​“I want us to feel like we are married.”

​He stood up, tossed my dirty clothes roughly into the laundry bag, with his nose up in the air. “I have work to do,” he said. “Didn’t your mother teach you how to clean up after yourself? You act like you were raised in a barn—”

​“Stop talking like a faggot!” I blurted out, hurt and angry. “Leave my mother out of this—”

​“Watch your mouth!” His face turned red. “I will speak the way I please. This is my house. Never tell me what to do.” He started to tidy up the bedroom, but with sharp gestures, tearing the protective fabric of our aura, letting the voices of the damned sweep in, the voices that declared that we were no good, that the world was a bad place. “This place is a mess!” he screamed. 

​“I’m not like you,” I shouted. I charged into the living room as if that was a place where I could escape from the fight but I knew what was going to happen was beyond my control. He followed right behind me, swung me around to face him. “I’m not a faggot. Those spicks—”

​“Don’t use that word—”​

​“Don’t call me gringo!” I yelled back. “Maricon!” I shouted, my saliva sprayed in his face. “Those spicks who call us maricon. You defend them? Whore! Drag queen! Cock sucker! You let them talk like that and walk on by. And those clowns that come here and you do their hair and scream like a lot of old ladies. It’s a lie. It’s just an act you put on when they are around. They are a bunch of losers. Why have them here?”

​“Don’t flatter yourself, Maricón,” he snapped at me; the Puerto Rican came out in him, like a naked steel blade. “I am just like they are and so are you.” He reached down and grabbed his cock. “You been fucked by a hair dresser, baby, and you begged for more. What makes you imagine you are better than they are? Because you are from some barbecue pit stop in Texas? You are just like them.”

​“I’m not a faggot.” I located the porn video I had found and put it into the slot and pressed play. The TV screen was filled with the images of Pedro being topped by two black guys.“You are the faggot, not me.”

​“Give it up.” He turned off the video tape, sat down next to me on the couch, as I started to moan. “I can never be normal, nor can you.” I sank into the sofa and cried softly, like one of those heroines in a Puccini opera. “What is wrong with you? Why are you acting like a little bitch?”​

​“I saw you in that porn movie,“ I sobbed, “with the two niggers fucking you. I thought that is what you like—that is what you want. I am not like that. You are not like that—”

​“Oh, baby, I’m sorry…” He put his arms around me. “Please forgive me. I don’t deserve you. I have such a bad temper. You are so good to me—” On his knees before me, he kissed my tear-stained cheeks, as if I were a school boy. It was too late for I had already entered another world, a world without Pedro. “You aren’t like them.” He tried to soothe me, for I was inconsolable. “You aren’t a faggot. If you were one of those faggots I wouldn’t love you the way I do. You are a handsome young man with a bright future ahead of you. You are perfectly normal. You will one day become an investment banker and make lots of money and take care of me in my old age.”

​I knew he was lying. He didn’t believe what he said, nor did he believe in me or himself. He knew I was a loser, just like all the other faggots, just like him. My fantasy was shattered. Pedro wasn’t a real man, just a self-hating drama queen, like all the others. I wanted a man, not a queen. I felt betrayed.

​Pedro got up off the floor and lit some sickly-sweet incense. I pushed Pedro towards the bedroom and, though he was stronger than I was, he let me dominate him. I unzipped his zipper, pulled down his pants, turned him around, slapped his ass. He knew I had to get even for being humiliated by him, for crying in front of him like a little bitch. He recognized the sign of my maturity. I was no longer his boy. If he wasn’t going to be the man then I would have to be. I fucked him hard from behind. The sheets got dirty.

​He zipped up, casually, afterwards. “Are you hungry?” he asked, sweetly. “Go see a movie? Just like a normal couple from the suburbs?” 

​After the rough sex, we went out for Chinese food, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I had a great appetite and ate like a pig. As we walked by the boys playing basketball, they started to taunt us. I shot my finger at them. I shouted at them, “I don’t want to suck your dick but I think your friend does.” That did it. They grabbed a garbage can and threw it at us. Pedro ran up ahead and opened the front door of our apartment building, while I dodged the garbage they pelted at me. Safely inside the apartment, I laughed hysterically, but Pedro got moody, withdrawn, angered by what he thought was my reckless behavior. He said we could have gotten killed.

Soon, after that first fight with Pedro, a cynicism crept into my attitude. I started going to the gym, noticed other guys looking at me with a lust that became like a drug. Arousing that lust became my mission in life. I didn’t yet leave. I became acquainted with Peggy Lee’s song Is that all there is? and played it over and over until Pedro pitched a fit. I started to get pretty jaded, just like everyone else.

​I began to go out, after work, visiting bars, meeting people my own age. Pedro accepted this with a kind of relief. I came home very late, took off my clothes and stumbled into bed, usually drunk, and was always forgiven for my trespasses. He became sweeter the more cynical I became. He knew, though I didn’t, that our love affair was not going to last forever. 

The biggest challenge, of course, was the big A. We started using condoms but the epidemic was in full bloom, like some deadly exotic flower in a dark jungle. Then the New Age arrived. Suddenly, every whore wanted to be a healer. Crystal shops began to open on every street corner. Pedro went into a detox program.

​He stopped drinking, stopped smoking dope. He took me to macrobiotic restaurants with ocean wave music playing softly in the background. He invited strange people over who were into the occult. They would sit in a circle in our living room, hold hands and chant, sounding much like the distress signal of a wounded whale.

​Pedro dragged me to fiery ACT UP meetings. Larry Kramer yelled at us for not doing enough, the ex-Catholics plotted to invade the Vatican, and ugly men with no social skills asserted their rights to have sex with young boys.

​When Pedro got arrested for staging a sit-in at St Patrick’s, I bailed him out of jail, but I was sick of the radical rhetoric, for in many ways I was a market driven, deeply conservative capitalist. I believed in honest work and self-reliance, hated the self-pity victim shit that they promoted, the boring identity politics. I didn’t believe that Silence = Death or that the government had any answers to our problems and I despised the pink triangle. I preferred silence to the petty squabbling that happened at ACT UP meetings and the blaming of the establishment for everything. Deeply disenchanted with the so called radical left, with its noble lost causes, I began to plan my getaway from Pedro’s fucked up world.

​The day I told Pedro I was moving out he was not surprised. I told him I had never really indulged in the evils of back rooms and wild sex so why should I feel guilty like he did? I wanted to act out as all young gay men must, their deepest fantasy, before they turn into dust. He seemed relieved, for the tension between us was terrible. He told me to be careful.

​I got my own place downtown, in the East Village, and decided to give it up to a lower power. From my roof, at dawn as the sun rose across the Manhattan skyline, having stayed up all night, I surveyed the entire sleepy neighborhood with a feeling of ownership. I had made it.

​I had gotten out of Texas and I had a spectacular view of downtown and midtown. I had established myself in the only bohemian enclave left in the city. Most evenings I could be found in one of the dozen or so gay bars that had sprung up like weeds, in the East Village. At night, I brought home boys and took them to the roof to enjoy the impressive skyline, the Chrysler building, the Empire State. The World Trade Center shimmered and sparkled, always a perfect backdrop for sex. I was barely twenty-one.

​I got a job in a restaurant at the World Trade Center, where I learned all about French service and how to set a table, fold a napkin, open a bottle of champagne, and make good money, while bullshitting with rich snobs. I quit that job and I went to massage school, got a license and, because I was cute, I got a lot of clients fairly easily. I created a life of my own. I liked touching men, hard muscle, melting in my hands. I liked the flow of energy between me and the relaxed, naked body on the table. 

​The years flew by, full of late nights, one-night stands.  I turned twenty five, spent most summers working in Fire Island, giving massages to rich sugar daddies out in Cherry Grove, receiving big tips, making more money there than I made the rest of the year combined; and then somehow I turned thirty and found my first bit of gray. Live fast die young had been my plan, but it looked like I was getting older than I expected to. Maybe I was going to become an old man. This made me feel that I had somehow cheated death, but others were not so lucky. Pedro was not so lucky.

∞

Continue to Part 3...