Ode to Lata (16 page)

I closed my eyes and rested my head upon my arm, waiting for the rest of him, catching my breath every time his fingers began to feel like a hook piercing into me.  But then I caught the scent of lotion and I turned around, horrified to find that we’d run out of lubricant, and him retracting his fingers and preparing to enter me without a condom.  I stopped him immediately and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing.

“It’s no big deal,” he said sheepishly.  “I’m negative.”

I felt unnerved.  His nonchalance made me wonder if he’d pulled the condom off before when he fucked me on my stomach, and would I have been able to detect it?  I decided not to wallow and expunged the thought from my mind.  Upon my insistence, he agreed to use a condom and I conceded to the lotion as a compromise.  Even adherence to safety, I convinced myself, had to have practical limitations.  While he fucked me, having managed to pry my grasp off the headboard and molding me into prostration, as if I had rolled out my mat and were about to give thanks to Allah, I thought fleetingly of Adrian’s dead uncle and of the suffering his family had had to endure; all those disco records that Adrian had reluctantly boxed away because nobody used vinyl anymore.  And I thought,
Nothing’s changed.  Nothing’s come out of all the loss, all those deaths, and all the tragedy that AIDS has caused.  Even now, millions of people this very moment, men and women, gay and straight, are fucking away in motels and toilets and homes and cars and offices.  Even now, after witnessing the degradation of this epidemic, I still go to the sex clubs and bars to look for new and uncharted bodies to explore, oblivious to the virulence pulsing beneath the chiseled armor.  I still afford myself the luxury of allowing Nelson to use pink, perfumed body lotion to inhabit me.  I still hunger for love, but instead of holding out for it, instead of taking the time to have a conversation of any lasting significance with anyone viable for such an undertaking, I cave in to the need to get fucked instead.

When I felt pain and cried out from it, Nelson jammed his fingers into my mouth and I started to gnaw on them.  Along with the colliding of his body, his passionate utterance filled my ears and validated my long-suffering ego.  There was no rent check due and no mother sitting at home counting the rosary.  All – at least for the few hours in that motel room rented on my nearly maxed-out Visa card – was well.

KISSES

He liked to take me on my stomach.  Flattening my front against the bed, Nelson focused on that one part of my writhing body into which he soldered his own.  I gave in to this whenever we had sex.  Sometimes I thought that by averting my face from his, Nelson managed not only to avoid some of the emotion, but also to annihilate the disapproval of society.  He had reduced me to a butt hole, that entrance that transported him into an underworld where emotions and introspection did not thrive.  We rarely kissed when we made love.  When we did, his fleshly lips clamped against mine, as if he was trying to hold back words that might otherwise hurtle forth or bar the entry of some vile germ I might spew from my mouth and into his.  I felt at those times like the whore who he let suck his dick but not kiss his mouth.   

But outside of bed, Nelson was strangely different. He caressed and persisted, chiseling through the walls that Richard and I had erected so arduously. He wanted to know what I thought of dating older men.  Available men as opposed to the Richards of this world.  Black men.  Men who wanted to spend money on me for a change.  I think I preferred it when he was distant, when he was demeaning, when, instead of looking me in the eye and expressing his desire to take care of me, he was facing the back of my head in the grasp of his hand and grunting like a beast.

It kept me from panicking, from cringing at the thought of being laid bare again.  What if my heart, starved by my very own hands for all these years, should retreat, resentful from my acerbic offerings?  How to open up again?  And what if I should start to need him too much? I asked myself.  Every time I opened up, it was to the wrong damn man.  Why should Nelson be any different?  The more elusive I was, the more determined he became. He wanted to hold my hand in public, to call me at work and play Nancy Wilson over the phone, to buy me gifts on holidays and get acquainted with my friends.  He wanted to meet my mother, whose potential reaction to his color worried me more than that to his gender.

But when we climbed into bed at the end of a night, having conversed about everything from Richard’s dejected gaze to Adrian’s peculiar behavior at the club that night, from his daughter – whose photo he carried around in his wallet – to my estrangement from Mummy, who had stayed six weeks already, Nelson still refused to fuck me any other way but on my stomach, with my head smashed against the pillow and his lips so far away from mine.

FRIENDS

As a freshman in college, Darnel Washington was the first black person I befriended on the integrating campus grounds.  Removed from the preconditioned, postcolonial environment of Kenya, I forged a friendship with Dar that would facilitate my entry into gay Los Angeles.

A fashion major who had moved from Newark, Dar was the kind of flamboyant, animated artist that typified most people’s impression of the gay fashion designer who went swishing through life equipped with a lacerating tongue and a brimful of attitude.  He peppered all his sentences generously with drawls of “Ooh, da-r-r-ling” or “Hey, gir-r-l!” regardless of who he was talking to.  He could be spotted sashaying his way through the art-cluttered corridors of Woodbury University, a measuring tape perpetually around his neck, a turtleneck on, a freshly sharpened pencil lodged behind his ear and rolls of vivid fabrics carried under his conspicuously shoulder-padded arms.  His hair was coifed in the front to resemble a visor over his head; rare was the day I’d see him without the dark cat-eye glasses, which defined his attitude first and blocked out the UV rays second.

Dar’s prescription for his lack of an L.A. gym body, which he despised as a condition of gay-male culture but pursued in his men, was: “Layer, honey!  Layer!  Layer!  Layer!”  And he was always swaddled in layers of meticulously coordinated clothing that he had either made himself or plucked out from various thrift stores on Melrose and then remodeled to reflect his personal style.   

One night, months into our friendship, Dar and I ventured out to West Hollywood on the bus.  At Studio One, where it was eighteen-and-over night, I remember perching nervously on the balcony that overlooked the dance floor and watching Dar unleash the dance steps that Janet Jackson performed on the video monitor behind him.  He duplicated her choreography flawlessly, had her every mercurial move down to a science. He didn’t consult her for any cues, paid no attention to the screen that mesmerized others and continued to dance on his own, focused on his inner director.  As I clutched my drink (sans alcohol) and gazed only upon Dar’s celebration of self-awareness, I thought,
My God!  I’m here at last!  I’m here at last! 
And kept thinking quite stupidly, quite naively,
Now I can find love.  Now I can find someone to fall in love with
, because everyone here had come to find the same thing: another man to fall in love with; not one who could substitute for a woman, not an indiscretion to be erased from their minds because they’d been horny and preferred to think themselves as straight.  There are times now when standing on the balcony of yet another club, looking down at the nearly indistinguishable view of the dance floor that I think the same thing: to find someone who can take us away from this frenzied, deafening, drug-and-alcohol catalyzed milieu of nightclubs and bars.  And I think,
My God, only love can make it all right.
But then the music changes, the video screen rolls away into the ceiling and a friend grabs my hand, leading me to dance with him and to stop acting so dramatic.

On the way back home, drenched in sweat from dancing all night, he and I had huddled at the back of the practically vacant bus and excitedly shared our feelings.  Dar uncoiled the muffler from around his neck then slathered some balm over his chapped lips, handling the little tube as if it was a lipstick, pronouncedly puckering and smacking his lips.  As I watched him, marveling at how comfortable he was with himself, I wondered if it was because he was a couple of years older or because he’d been around more.  I found myself appreciative of his outlook on life in a way that I had never been with another black person.  Here we were, students away from home, closeted to our parents, finding ourselves and planning our futures.  There was no master or servant.  No native or migrant.  We had been equalized.  Or so I thought.

Dar divulged the tale of his family in Newark: a mother who had juggled jobs as a seamstress and as a department store saleslady to support two children after his father deserted them; a younger sister who was pregnant at seventeen; his hesitation to reveal his sexual persuasion to his family; how he thought being black must be a little like being Latin, in that there is overwhelming pressure for a man to be macho when all Dar wanted to do was create fashion like his mother and suck dick on weekends.

I told him how most people in Los Angeles were surprised that I could speak English so well and that I could dress presentably when I told them I was from Kenya, ludicrous reactions familiar to all foreigners.  That I was astounded because they expected me to prattle away in jungle gibberish and prance around in a loincloth.  That I was at first insulted and then, in time, bemused by their ignorance when asked if wild animals stalked the city, posing a threat to everyday life.  And that one time, while taking the bus home from college, I had derisively indulged this middle-aged woman seated next to me by fictionalizing how my mother wished I would return home to protect her from this one predacious lioness that stalked our verandah every evening – that many a time I would have to charge out with a spear in hand to repel the beast.  When, instead of feeling absurd, this woman on the bus had clutched at her breast in horror and cried, “Oh no!  Your poor mother, who will protect her now?”  I had been so discomfited that I had clamped my mouth shut and buried myself in my art-history textbook.

“But dar-r-ling, that’s all they see on TV, what do you expect?” he reasoned.  “I mean, nobody thinks of going to Kenya for haute couture, do they?  Kenya is for a naturalist what Paris is to the fashionable, my love.”

“But that’s no excuse!” I said.  “People shouldn’t be so ignorant!”

“We live in America, dar-r-ling.  And even though it may not be the case, we like to pretend as if we live on another planet most of the time.  For so many people there is no reason to pay attention to the rest of the world.  Everything they need, want, is right here. Unless, of course, they plan on going on safari!” he laughed.

Once we reached my apartment in Santa Monica, trading more stories during the long walk from the bus stop, Dar and I felt as if we had known each other for years.  But when it came time to sleep, I laid out a mattress on the floor next to my queen-sized bed.  When he requested a sip of water from the glass I was holding, I handed him a separate glass.  And I caught a hint of a look that said he was insulted. He expressed none of his humiliation through words, but his eyes conveyed that he felt belittled and disappointed by my snobbery. 
What am supposed to do?
  I asked myself. 
I can’t be expected to share my bed with him!  It feels dirty….unclean… .Even in America, he’s still a
golo,
for Chrissake!  Having him in my bed, lying next to me, is unthinkable!  Unbearable.  No, no,
I thought. 
We can party together and share our secrets but some things are definitely beyond me.  I’m sorry, I can’t do it….

 
After all the years, I think about that night when Dar had hunkered on the side of my bed on a comforter, reluctant to remove his layers of clothing; I think about the two glasses of water that sat side by side on top of the stereo speaker across the bed; and I wonder if Dar had known the real reason why I had refused to lie in the same bed or share the same glass with him.  Because I felt that physical intimacy with him would have maligned me.  I think about it a lot those days, now that I shared my bed with a black man and let him come inside me.

LOVE LETTERS

In a drawer of her cupboard, buried at the feet of her many tailored dresses in pastel and wedged among unwrapped bottles of imported perfume that she’d hoarded, my mother kept the mementos of my father’s cataclysmic love for her.  These were the letters and cards that he’d sent her during what he professed to be his necessary visits to Nairobi city, bundled crudely with the stray cotton sash of a discarded dress.  Along with them, he had sent her several tapes of Indian film music, each song carefully selected to express the deluge of his love.  One card I remember clearly.  It was etched in my father’s own blood.  After having sat me on her lap, she’d opened it up for me to see.  Letters of the alphabet were inscribed with a needle dipped in blood and crawled across the page like little rusted filaments.  A triumphant look came onto Mummy’s face as she said, “See?  This is how much he loved me.  You know, he couldn’t live without me!”  And then the compulsory clucks of ruefulness.

As my tiny finger ran across his writing – a declaration of the convoluted love they both claimed they’d been unable to live without, yet which he proceeded so naturally to destroy – only admiration and awe registered in my mind.  There in his blood, aged to a burnt sienna by time, was all the proof I needed that theirs had been the love of legends: Heer and Rhanjha, Laila and Majnu, Romeo and Juliet.  Never mind that the obstacle that had cost my father his life and damned their love was not a family feud or conflicting religious ideologies but my father’s lust for other women.