Emma Who Saved My Life (48 page)

Yeah? Well I'm not supposed to be going around telling everyone about her celibacy, so be subtle if you see her.

“I do want to talk to her about it. I think it's the only way I can keep sane. I don't want any more involvements in my life, unless it's with Pablo. I have
always
loved Pablo and you know that's true—I've been saying it for years.”

Since he was nine, right?

“You know … oh I am
not
going to tell you this.”

Lemme guess: that tired old story where you lost your virginity on the bus with some nineteen-year-old serviceman in South Carolina when you were thirteen. You have told that story at parties, Kevin—at family gatherings, to your mother, at the White House, they show reruns on TV of you telling that story …

“I only told Kathy at the theater and see where it gets me. It's a good story and if I'd had a head on my shoulders I woulda taken the soldier's name, because when he gets out of the army—”

Dishonorable discharge?

“Would you cut it out? I'm supposed to be the bitch here, not you. Anyway, a man in uniform—darling, like Dietrich in
Morocco,
I'd follow my soldier across the dunes, French Foreign Legion-like. Orlando can't leave the Navy alone, by the way.”

I gave Kevin a beer. Once in every visit we talked about his friend Orlando. Orlando was this SCREAMING black transvestite trying to make it in the drag queen circuit (saving his money for Paris, etc.) and most of Kevin's stories about Orlando were PURE fiction, I'm sure. Kevin kept telling me he was going to bring Orlando by, or we would have to visit him at the sex shop where Orlando worked days, but it never happened, enforcing my suspicion Orlando was a fake front for Kevin's stories. Orlando, I always said, wasn't his real name—

“It is
too.
”

No one is named that.

“Oh you should hear him on this subject.
Orlando
is a book by D. H. Lawrence or somebody where the character Orlando changes sexes. He says his mother named him after that. I said, girl, she did not, she named you after Disney World. Oh it gets him so mad!”

And what's Orlando up to this week?

“Well they've got new things in on 42nd Street. We really should go down and see them. They have these new motorized vaginas. I mean, straight people are beyond me anyway, but good god, who would want to sit there and put themselves in a plastic slit that makes a noise like a blender, you know? They say
we're
perverts, ha! They've got new dolls now, ones you don't have to blow up with air. Skin approximation is getting better too, Orlando says—it's not so plasticky anymore. And the new dolls—get this—come with REAL pubic hair—”

Get outa here.

“NO, it's
true,
Orlando swears. There's a company in Ohio that puts them out with real pubic hair. I mean these girls grow it, shave it off, hand it in and then they attach it. And they've gotten vaginal scent now. I mean, honey. I mean, that was the good thing about the doll in the first place, right? You didn't have to mess with vaginal scent—that was the PLUS, right? How you can go
down there,
Gil, is beyond
me.
”

I'm not going down there very often these days. Why is it, Kevin, that when you visit the level of the conversation doesn't even make it UP to the gutter?

“I'm only this bad around
you.
And guess what Orlando says they have in now.”

Okay tell me.

“Rejecta. She's the new doll, Gil. She comes with a tape cassette with several ten-minute routines. She rejects the man who's pumping away on top of her. She has this bitchy voice: ‘What? You call that a penis? It's so small.' And ‘You're so disgusting, I bet you can't get it up … you'll never come … you miserable worm, why don't you get off me, you fat piece of shit?'”

I don't believe that for
one
second.

“Honey, it's down there. You never believe me—this stuff exists on 42nd Street. Rejecta. I'm buying her for your birthday, Gilbert, so you won't be alone. I worry about you.”

Thanks a lot.

“Rejecta, she exists, I swear. What you straight people
won't
do to get off, I mean it. Anyway, Orlando says hi.”

I almost let Kevin have his way with me one night.

Yeah, it's true. We went and had cocktails and he got me camping and being bitchy just like him, and said, Hey, let's make passersby think we're lovers and so we walked arm in arm around Sheridan Square and got stares and winks and offers and reactions of all kinds. I was just waiting for Aunt Sarah to round the corner on her Garden Club Convention, up for the weekend. Or Betsy. Though that would serve her right.

“I
bet
money you've done it,” said Kevin, after we left the liquor store, picking up some gin. He could only drink gin and tonic.

Done what?

“Slept with a guy,” he said, taking my arm again. “C'mon, tell Uncle Kevin. Church camp, Scouts maybe? Freshman year. You HAD to in Scouts, that's all anyone does on those camping trips is learn how to masturbate.”

Afraid not. Although …

“C'MON, Gil,
tell
me. I know you're essentially straight (not that I couldn't ruin you, ruin you in
five
minutes for other women). Tell Kevin
all.
”

I was eleven, Sammy Henderson was twelve, we were tent-mates in the Platypus Patrol. Sammy had torn out this picture of a woman on her knees, showing us her ample buttocks, from one of his father's porn magazines. He started doing something and I asked what he was doing in his sleeping bag and he said, boy Freeman you don't know anything, I'm doing what you do with a girl except with no girl. You know what you do with a girl like this? I was too intimidated to answer. You dummy Freeman, you get hard and …

“What? Stop laughing, tell me!”

… you get hard, Freeman, and you stick it up her BUTT.

We both, drunkenly, got into hysterics over this.

“Well Sammy had the right idea,” said Kevin, doubled over trying to breathe.

Sammy Henderson, I went on, was also the guy who had a birthday party for his thirteenth birthday and we stayed up late after Mr. and Mrs. Henderson had gone to bed, and there was this late sleazy '60s movie with Dean Martin or someone, and Connie Stevens, and Sammy thought Connie Stevens was the hottest woman in the world and had written Connie Stevens letters, and he pulled out his prick and ran up to the set with all of us watching saying: I'm gonna fuck Connie Stevens on the TV …

More hysterics, drunken rolling about.

“I gotta meet this Sammy Henderson. Where is he now, Gil?”

Married, has a kid, works for the Army recruiting office or something.

Kevin and I laughed all the way home. He told me stories that were alternately heartbreaking and uproarious about trying to get straight boys at Christian Church Camp to sleep with him, finally ending up with the born-again counselor.

Kevin asked if he could stay over, as it was raining, and I said yes. And he asked if he could sleep beside me on the one and only mattress and I said yes.

“Just like a slumber party, huh?” he said after being quiet for a while.

Yep, no Connie Stevens movie though.

“Can't have everything.” Kevin put his hand on my shoulder and I didn't pull away. He began: “Now you see how harmless it is to be in bed with me. This is as far as I'll go. I will not go any farther unless you tell me to. I want to point out to you how very little technical difference there is between my hand on your shoulder and, say, my hand on your arm. You would concede this, wouldn't you?”

Yes Kevin.

Kevin put his hand on my arm. “Now I'm going to sort of … here, slip in right here, beside you, close like this. Now
no one
would say this is queer. This is not technically anything like homosexuality. I am a homosexual and I know homosexuality when I see it and this is not it. This is friendly affection.”

I was laughing. Right, Kevin.

“Now if you're wondering about the difference between say this and, say, real homosexuality…”

I think I know the difference Kevin. Let's go to sleep.

“Gilbert you are a drag. Let's just conduct a little experiment here. This is in the interest of science, darling—I want to know what a straight boy thinks of as
too far.
I will behave as I'm inclined to behave and you tell me when I have crossed the point at which you are not inclined I should go further.” He put his arm under me and hugged me.

Okay … that's, that's all right.

“Right,” he said. Then he stroked my hair.

Dubious.

He put his arm across my chest and nuzzled closer.

Borderline.

He slipped a hand down to my inner thigh.

WHOA THERE.

“Afraid you were going to say that,” he sighed. “Oh well. You give it some thought, Gilbert Freeman.” And then he kissed me good night and we drunkenly drifted off to sleep.

I miss Kevin. He, like so many gay men, moved west to do some modeling or TV work or see a lover or all of the above—he just knew he had to get west. Hope he's all right, what with AIDS and all that.

Of course, why move west when you can have the rootin' tootin' Wild Frontier right in your very own neighborhood. I refer to when Ruiz's store was robbed at gunpoint. I'm in my room and I hear
KRRTAO KRRTAO!
which sounded like gunshots on TV except realer … Then yelling and screaming outside ensues, commotion upstairs as S
ẽ
nora Ruiz must have heard them too. Should I go out? What if the robbers are still there? I'm not armed … yes, go out and see if he needs help—WAIT, of course, calm down and call the police. S
ẽ
nora Ruiz couldn't communicate. I called 911, fingers trembling, voice shaky, throat dry, my hands emptied of blood, cold as ice … yeah, Avenue A, Ruiz's Caribbean Foodstore, hurry, I said. There was someone running toward the house, bounding up the steps of the family house. A criminal? No it was Rickie, and he and S
ẽ
nora Ruiz were screaming, crying, barreling back down the next second. I had to go out too.

The aisles of food and cans and boxes had been overturned, everything knocked to the floor. S
ẽ
nor Ruiz was standing there—thank god, thank god, I thought, he isn't lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He saw us, sort of registered our presence, cursed, shook his fists, bellowed, “The stoopid kids—they were kids, they were stoopid kids, I see them every day—
you!
” He seized Rickie by the collar: “I see YOU hangin' out wid thees kids all the time, my own SON.” He threw poor Rickie forward into the pile of boxes in the aisle—Rickie tried a faint protest. “If I ever see you with those riffraff again,” S
ẽ
nor Ruiz threatened in a muddle of Spanish and English, “I keel you my own SON. You go to the police, you tell 'em everytheeng you know about those boys—my own son!”

“Papa,” Rickie managed, “I don't know 'em—”

“So help me I gonna…”

S
ẽ
nora Ruiz screamed, tears flowed, she cupped S
ẽ
nor Ruiz's face in her hands, she implored the Virgin, she shook her head in disbelief, she was in a despair I had never seen a human being display … and then
I
saw: as S
ẽ
nor Ruiz was ranting and waving his hands above his head, his jacket revealed a patch of red on his shirt. It was growing. He had been shot.

Police sirens. The police came in—

Radio for an ambulance, I said.

“
No ambulancia
…” muttered S
ẽ
nor Ruiz, not quite registering what had happened to him. “No, I no shot, no ees no necessary…”

The policeman took S
ẽ
nor Ruiz's arm and led him outside, all the while S
ẽ
nor Ruiz mildly protesting going anywhere, he had to clean up the store, look at the mess, look what they did—ah, he had to pick it all up, no time for police reports, for the ambulance. Manuela had run home bawling as the news spread through the neighborhood; Johnnie was out somewhere. Manuela and her mother fell upon each other, crying, screaming, denouncing the world in Spanish.

The ambulance arrived.

“Tell the S
ẽ
nora that he is all right, he is just hit in the shoulder, he is all right,” said the policeman, raising his voice to add, “S
ẽ
nora, he is bueno, muy bueno…”

S
ẽ
nora Ruiz yelled something frantically about going with him; they forbade it. A taxi had been called and she and the family were to follow. No, no, no, she protested, she had to be with her husband—it was insane! In Puerto Rico they would not have rules like this!

“Thees is a terrible country,” she told me, her tear-filled eyes cutting deep into me; she clutched my arm, hurting me: “Thees a terrible place, America.
Qúe horrible, qúe terrible
…” And she released me, almost in shock—her children and the officer helping her into a cab …

Between questions and locking doors and writing a note for Johnnie and talking to two policemen, I numbly made my way through the crowd, the spectators, the gawkers, went out into the city in the direction of Emma's—not home, not back to my flat, I could not go there, my heart was beating too fast to lie down. I had to walk, walk briskly, stopping for nothing, not for stoplights—I almost got myself run over, I heard a car horn, a curse—stopping for nothing. My walk became a run. This is panic, isn't it? This is weird—a minute ago in the presence of gunfire and emergency I was calm and efficient and now I'm falling apart. I should stop and calm down. But I can't stop.

“Hey man, what'sa mattuh, brothuh?” said one member of a gang of youths I walked into. I'm hyperventilating. I'll kill them if they touch me—