Love on Site (21 page)

The tenant was an Argentinean named Hans-Friedrich, a beefy man in his late thirties who wore his German descent in his blond hair and blue eyes, though he spoke fluent Spanish. Walter hobbled on his cane as he led the two of them around the building, with me trailing behind. “Looks very impressive,” Hans-Friedrich said when we were finished. “I’ll start bringing merchandise tomorrow. I should have my office transferred over here by the end of the week.”

“What did I tell you?” Heriberto said. “My son-in-law does good work.”

Hans-Friedrich looked at Walter. “You are still Heriberto’s son-in-law? I thought you were divorcing.”

Walter nodded. “The divorce is moving along. Let me show you the electrical panel,” he said to Hans-Friedrich. “The most energy-efficient one on the market.”

I left then to check on some site work problems at the pad for the third warehouse, and by the time I returned to the trailer, Hans-Friedrich was gone and Walter was meeting with Heriberto with the door closed. The site cleared out and Estefani left, but I waited in my office until I heard Walter’s door open, and him say good-bye to his father-in-law.

I stepped out to the lobby and saw Walter leaning against the wall, looking tired and drained. “Everything okay with Heriberto?” I asked.

“He wants me to sign warehouse one over to him. That will pay off his investment in the property.”

“Will you still manage it?”

Walter nodded. “But I was counting on that cash flow to finance the rest of the build-out. I’m not sure what I can do.” He sighed. “I’ll have to talk to Sal.”

“You’re not still—you know—with Sal, are you?”

Walter looked at me. It took a moment for him to make the connection. “Oh, you remember that story,” he said. “No, as far as I know, Sal is completely straight. We never even beat off together after that summer.”

That was just fine, I thought. I didn’t want any rivals floating around while I was moving myself into Walter’s life.

Muddling

I locked up the trailer and walked Walter out to the car. He’d been getting stronger, but that evening he seemed to have slid backward. I drove to his townhouse and fixed dinner. After we ate he said he was tired and wanted to get into bed.

I helped him upstairs. I was getting ready to go downstairs and watch TV when my cell phone rang.

“
Dios mío
,” I said, looking at the display. “What’s the matter now?” I pressed the button to answer. “
Hola, Mami. Qué tal
?”

“You’re coming to dinner on Sunday?” she asked.

“Yeah, I was planning to. Why?”

“Beatriz is bringing that boy again.”

“He seems perfectly nice, Mami. I don’t know why you don’t like him.”

“I don’t trust anybody who’s so religious. What if he makes Beatriz into a saint?”

I laughed. “I don’t think anybody can do that, Mami. But I’ll see you Sunday.”

“Can you stop on Calle Ocho for me on your way? Your father wants some cigars from that store he likes.”

“I’m not living on the Beach right now. My boss sprained his ankle, and he needs help getting around, so I’m staying at his house in Doral for a couple of days. I suppose I can make a detour to Calle Ocho, though.”

“Forget about the cigars. Your father will live without them. You’ll bring your boss to dinner,” Mami said, and it wasn’t a request.

“Mami. Mr. Loredo has better things to do on a Sunday than come to dinner at your house.”

I looked over at Walter, who was propped up in bed with the newspaper, a pair of reading glasses on his face. “I’d love to come to your parents for dinner,” he said. “If it won’t be awkward for you.”

I sighed. I could only imagine what would happen when I exposed Walter Loredo to my family. “Yes, Mami, he’ll come with me.”

“Muy bueno. See you Sunday.”

I hung up. “That was weird. My mother hardly ever calls me during the week. And it’s like she already knew I was staying here with you.”

“Speaking of which.” Walter patted the side of the bed next to him.

“I thought you were tired.” I put my phone down on the bureau and sat next to him.

“I am,” he said, and he yawned to make his point. “But I like having you beside me.”

“You’re a goof,” I said, leaning over to kiss his forehead. He looked so sexy there with his glasses on. “Got part of that paper for me?”

Walter handed me the business section, and when I finished reading it, he quizzed me about the articles. After that he yawned a couple more times, and I figured the only way I’d get him to go to sleep was to get in bed with him. I stripped down, turned the lights out, and slid under the covers.

By the time I turned to kiss him, he was already asleep.

The next morning after our meeting, I helped Walter hobble into his office. “I’ll be locked up in here most of the day,” he said. “I’m going to crunch the numbers and see if I can keep the project going if I turn over warehouse one to Heriberto.”

“Can I do anything to help?”

“Keep an eye out for any trouble and don’t worry about bothering me.”

Things were quiet out on-site, and after a quick lunch meeting Walter went back into his office. His banker friend Sal showed up late in the day, but there wasn’t any of the backslapping bonhomie that had accompanied his previous visits.

Sal left a few minutes before five, and Walter called. “I’m ready to get out of here.”

“How do things look?”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” he said. “What I really want to do, in the immortal words of Jimmy Buffett, is get drunk and screw.”

“I can get behind that program. I make a killer mojito.”

“I’ve got plenty of rum in the house. We’ll stop at the Publix on the way home and get some lime and fresh mint.”

“You’ve got a muddler too, right?”

“Would I be Cuban if I didn’t?” A muddler is a wooden gadget you use to mash up the lime and the mint and release all their essential oils. Walter was right—no Cuban household was a home without one.

I left Walter in the car with the air-conditioning on while I ran into the grocery. I got the fresh mint leaves I needed, a couple of limes, a big bottle of club soda, and a bag of blue corn tortilla chips and some organic salsa. A big frozen box of miniature hot dogs too. If we were going to drink, even if we were doing it at Walter’s house, we needed some food to soak up the alcohol.

When I got back to the car, Walter was furiously texting to someone. I didn’t ask who, though I guessed it was either Dolores or Heriberto. “I’m needing those mojitos more and more with every minute,” he said when he finished his message.

“We’re almost to your house,” I said. “Hold on.”

I helped him into the living room and left him on the sofa while I mixed up the simple syrup for the mojitos. When I was a kid, my papi used to drink mojitos by the gallon, and I learned how to make them by watching him. He’d heat a cup of water and a cup of sugar in a saucepan until the water was boiling and the sugar had dissolved, then take the pot off the heat, and the crushed mint, and let it steep for an hour or more, and then strain out the leaves and start to make the drinks.

I set up my water and sugar, and while they were boiling I switched to a quick and dirty recipe for our first round, dropping a couple of mint leaves and a lime wedge into each of two tall glasses. I dug the muddler out of Walter’s kitchen drawer and crushed the mint and lime together.

By then my simple syrup was boiling, and I took it off the burner and crushed in a big handful of mint leaves. I covered the pot and pushed it off to the side, and went back to the first-round drinks I was fixing.

I added more lime and sugar to the glasses and muddled again. I filled the glasses with crushed ice from Walter’s refrigerator, then opened Walter’s liquor cabinet to consider my rum choices. “You have Havana Club? I haven’t seen a bottle of this since I was a kid.”

Havana Club was the original Bacardi rum. The brand was one of the sacrifices the family had made when they fled Castro for the United States. It had an almost iconic status in the Cuban American community; it was illegal to bring in, and yet it showed up occasionally in Miami homes. “Don’t use that for the mojitos,” Walter called. “Bring me a shot of it while I’m waiting, though.”

I poured quick shots for both of us.

“Where’s my mojito, boy?” Walter demanded after he swigged his shot. “Get your cute little butt back in the kitchen.”

“Blow me,” I said.

“I will. Later.” Walter smiled devilishly, and my dick swelled as I poured the shot into my mouth. The taste was smooth with a residual kick. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself in Habana Vieja—which was tough, since I was born in the USA and had never been to my father’s natal island.

I hurried back to the kitchen and finished off our drinks with rum and club soda. I stirred, tasted, and added a bit more sugar. When I was satisfied, I put another lime wedge on each glass and carried them out to the living room.

“
Salud, amor, y dinero
!” Walter said, bringing his glass up to clink against mine. Health, love, and money.

“I’ll drink to that.”

Walter tasted the mojito. “Nectar,” he said and sighed with pleasure.

I went back in the kitchen, put the hot dogs in the oven, and prepared a platter of chips and dip, which I carried back to Walter. Then I sat next to him on the sofa, cuddled up against his side, and we ate and drank.

When Walter drained the last of his glass he asked, “Any more where this came from?”

“Sure.” I stood up and went into the kitchen. I checked my simple syrup. It wasn’t as steeped as my papi would have liked, but it would have to do. I mixed up another round of drinks, and the oven beeped and I pulled out the franks in blankets.

“This is a feast!” Walter said when I returned to the living room.

“You’re seeing the limits of my cooking expertise,” I said. “My mami taught Del and Beatriz, but she always said I’d marry a woman who would cook for me.”

I cuddled up next to him again, then leaned forward and scooped up some dip with a big blue tortilla chip.

“I’ve spilled my guts enough, Manny,” Walter said. “Now it’s your turn.” He ran his hand up my thigh. “When was your first?”

“I was like seventeen, I think. One day I was walking down Bird Road on my way home from somewhere, and I passed this X-rated bookstore that had just opened up. I had never been in a place like that, so I went in.”

I sipped my mojito. I was already starting to feel looser, freer. I had never told anyone this story before, but I figured it was time.

“Walking through the parking lot toward the store made my dick hard as a rock,” I said. “I went inside and it was so—I don’t know, mundane. Ordinary. Fluorescent lights overhead, and rack after metal rack of movies and books and magazines.”

Walter sipped his drink as I speared a hot dog and dipped it in mustard.

“I wasn’t really sure what I was then,” I said. “I mean, was I gay? Bi? Straight and going through some kind of phase? I never talked about sex with other boys, so I didn’t know if what I felt was normal or not. I walked around the store, past the movies with couples on them, and the ones with the girls with big tits and their legs spread wide, and I was like, so? My dick had gone down by then.”

I smiled. “Then I got to the gay section, and my dick popped right back up. It was like, oh, okay, I guess I really am gay.”

Walter kissed the top of my head.

“There was this older guy hanging around the gay section,” I said. “Maybe forty or so, Cuban for sure, skinny, with these dorky glasses. He looked over at me, and he saw what I was looking at. He said, ‘That’ll make your dick jump.’ Then he kind of looked toward the back of the place, where the video booths were, and back at me.”

I leaned forward and got another little hot dog. I was starting to feel the effects of the mojitos, and I didn’t want to lose too much control.

“He started walking toward the booths, and he looked back at me again. I followed him, and when I caught up with him, he said, ‘We got to be careful.’ He looked up at the clerk, who was busy ringing somebody up, and he pulled open the curtain to one of the booths, and nudged me inside.”

“I’ll bet you were a sexy little thing then,” he said. “My God. Seventeen years old and adorable.”

“I guess so. You’ll see pictures of my childhood on Sunday.” I sipped my mojito again. “As soon as I got inside he followed me in and closed the curtain. He slipped some money into the slot, and a movie started to play.”

“A gay one?” Walter asked.

I nodded. “It was the first time I ever saw a movie like that. Two guys going at it. I was so hard it hurt. The guy reached over and undid my pants, and reached inside and grabbed my dick. It was wild. It was the first time anybody had ever touched me there.”

“I remember that feeling.” He leaned over and kissed the top of my head again.

“Then he sucked me,” I said. “I came like right away, but he swallowed it, and kept on sucking, looking at the movie on the screen and reaching down to his own dick. I got hard again, and this time it took me a while to come. He jacked himself off, too. Then the movie ran out, and he said, ‘Stay here for a minute so nobody sees us come out together.’ I did what he said, and when I got out of the booth he was gone.”

I looked over at Walter. “I felt so, I don’t know, dirty. I thought I was going to cry.”

Walter wrapped his arm around me and pulled me close to him. “It’s all right, baby boy. It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not.” I reached up and wiped a tear from my eye. “I had something precious, and I gave it away to some jerk who never even told me his name.”

“When was the first time you did it with someone you loved?” Walter said.

I looked up at him through a mist of tears. “Seriously?”

“Of course.”

“In the hotel in Naples,” I said. “With you.”

“Oh, my sweet Manny,” he said. “You make me want to be a better person, you know that? I want to be the guy you see.”

“You already are, Walter,” I said.

Mojitos

Walter stood up, swaying a bit. “I think it’s time we moved this party to the bedroom. Help me up the stairs, and then you can come back down and make us another round. We’ll have those in bed.”