Ode to Lata (31 page)

“I’d like to write a book,” I said.

“Aha!” he said.  “Now I get it with all these questions!”

I smiled at him.  “A book is too much work to base over someone you’ve known five minutes and will probably never see again.” I didn’t know why I said that.  Maybe I was already seeking some kind of reassurance.

“Good decision. They won’t buy it anyway,” he said, smirking.  Then he quickly added, “The story, I mean. America wants
Pretty Woman
. Not –
Here Comes the Happy Hooker.
  They’re not ready for the real shit, man.”

“The real shit?  What’s the difference?  You’re just like Julia Roberts being whisked off to Malibu instead of the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

“Hello? 
She
  was rescued by Richard Gere
and
she fell in love with him,” he said. “I’m
not
in love and he’s
not
Richard Gere by a lo-o-ng shot! Only thing I love is my dog.”

“Your dog.”

“Yup.  Rascal.”

“Rascal?  That’s his name?” I laughed.

“Yup!  He’s a rascal like me.  Mean old husky.  You got one?”

“Me?  A dog?  No,” I said, thinking, the closest I’d come to pets were the poor fish I’d systematically killed one by one.

“What, you don’t like dogs?”

“Not particularly,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road.  “But God knows, I’ve slept with plenty of them.”

NAKED

I made gimlets.  Having sobered up considerably, I felt the need to be alleviated by the relaxing cloud of intoxication again.  We had depleted the bottle of Bacardi before entering into our night, so I settled for that tangy concoction of English gin and lime cordial, which so reminded me of my partying days in Kenya with my friend Akil.  I lowered myself onto the floor with drinks in hand and handed Bill his.  He smiled appreciatively.  We leaned our backs against the sofa.  I thought instantly of my mother as the back of my head pressed into its cushion and my eyes toured the dimpled texture of the ceiling.  How I missed her.  Months had passed.  I often came home after nights of frolicking with the guys and, in bed, pretended that she was asleep on this sofa, a silent seraphim, watching over me.  I was glad that she wasn’t there on that night though, reminded of the reason she would relent and move here.  I knew that the task of slowly disassociating from her had involuntarily begun again, except this time, I wouldn’t distance myself completely.  Only enough to staunch my loneliness for her.

I closed my eyes for a moment and that’s when the room began to spin slightly.  I wasn’t as sober as I’d thought.  I reconsidered the need for the drink in my hand but then I took one look at him and decided, yes, I could definitely use it.

“Do you mind if we listened to something with words in it?” Bill asked.  We’d been listening to music scores, and he wasn’t in-synch with my mood. “I’m just feeling kind of sleepy, you know?  I need something that will wake me up.”

“What would you like, dance music?” I asked, just a touch irritated but eager to please.

“No, not necessarily dance music, it can be something mellow.”

I crawled over to the stereo languidly.  “How’s Sade?”

“Sade’s great,” he said, thumbing at me.  “Perfect.”

Sitting next to one other, neither one of us rushed into what I breathlessly awaited.  Sade began her requiem of unrequited love in her velvety vocals.  I again noticed the tattoo on his arm and, without asking, touched it gently with my finger.  It appeared to be a derivative of a swastika; a cross with some dots around it.  I could tell that it had been done amateurishly with a sharp piece of glass or a knife or something.  There was nothing artistic about it.  In fact, it was almost crude in appearance.  He looked over his shoulder as my finger traced its matrix.  Excited at the feel of his skin, I felt within me an urge to bite. To eat off the bulk of his shoulder.

“What is it?” I asked him.

He looked up into my eyes for a moment and then, falling back to it, said flatly, “It symbolizes my hatred for black people.”

Speechless.  I didn’t know how to respond.  My finger slowly slipped off his arm and fluttered on my lap awkwardly.  I continued to look at him inquisitively.  He explained that he’d belonged to a gang that shared this feeling.

I wanted to say something stupid like,
But you don’t look like that type,
or,
But, you can’t possibly be, you’re colored yourself!  And, you’re here with me!

Black people, I thought as my finger rose to touch his shoulder again, had it tough from every angle.  From Caucasians, Asians, to Latinos.  I couldn’t deny though that the racism I felt, some of which had been reduced through my assimilative efforts in America, and even oddly through my relationship with Nelson, paled in contrast to the conviction grazed in the golden flesh of his brawny arm.

“Who are these people?”  I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean who are they, the members of this group?  Are there whites in this group too?” 

“Mostly people like me,” he said.  “You know, biracial people, part Mexican, and part American-Indian.”

I grunted, shaking my head.  This sounded even more fantastic.  A hooded KKK member on an alabaster horse galloped through my mind.  I tried to picture a Latino like Bill under the disguise, an image both repulsive and confounding.

“I can’t believe that,” I said.  “I mean, I never knew there was anything between, you know, your kind and…blacks. I mean, anything
this
intense.” 

“There’s more anger when the den’s tiny and there are too many mice crawling around in there, you know what I mean?  These black monkeys, man, they’re always crying about all the damn injustice that’s been done to them and all that tiring shit.  What about
us?!
We’re
the ones that have been cheated and deprived.  I mean, this,” he said, jabbing vehemently on the floor, “this was
our
land long before any of
them
moved in.”

His comment jolted me.  The “go back to where you came from” remark always infuriated me.  And I felt ashamed because the same remark coming from Bill, from someone I was sexually attracted to, didn’t compromise my desire for him. “But
they’re
not the ones depriving you of anything!  They’re fighting for the same things you are!”

“Well, we’re sick of listening to their sorry-ass problems.  They have more than we’ll ever get from this country.  What are they crying about?  It’s time they stopped using that dragged-over-from-Africa excuse and just got on with their lives, you know? Or they can just go back to fucking Africa.  My people, shit, we went through just as much and we’re still waiting for some justice.”

I let it rest there, and again the image of the flag went through my mind.  Bill was one of those little specks as well.  A blazing, scalding, red one.  For him, and others like him, America would always be the stolen land, and the flag a reminder of their oppression. I was convinced that there was more lurking in Bill’s life that had reared this hatred in him, something I probably wouldn’t discover in a single night.  Unwilling to compromise my purpose in bringing him there that night, I refrained from making any sensible mediation on behalf of the recipients of his abhorrence.  There would be nothing gained.  I, of all people, knew that each of us carried within us, our own brand of daggers.  Ones that were sheathed in smiles, rarely revealed by admittance, and with which we’d find an opportuned stab every now and then.

Bill’s prejudice, I justified, even in all it’s repugnance, revealed an honesty that deserved both admiration and pity.  On a night when our meeting had been conceived by a flux of chance and timing, he became an open book, and I his determined, unflinching reader.  Instead of feeling put off by him, I told myself that by revealing this offensiveness in his personality, Bill had allowed a sincerity that most couldn’t reach until the masks had been pulled off.  He was unashamed for both his choice in being a prostitute and for being racist.  He had, in a complex way, permitted my understanding of him to be as naked and unapologetic as the love we would make; paved the way by revealing what he truly felt, for me to touch any tenderness that might have, that surely, lay within.

I just wanted to fuck him.  And thinking that way made everything so much easier.

When he asked me if it was alright for him to smoke his joint, I collected an old copy of the
L.A. Weekly
for him to shake the ashes onto.  I noticed that he’d barely sipped his drink and with a few brisk gulps, I had already drained mine.  I replenished mine, tossed the empty bottle of gin and settled beside him again.  I began to feel ashamed.

Bill had inadvertently reduced me.  For professing to be something I wasn’t.  For trying so hard to impress him when all he had been was himself.  For trying to sell myself as some hotshot investment banker that probably had a BMW or Jaguar in the garage instead of the firetrap in the carport.  In that aspect, I suppose, we were both whores, no?

I sipped my drink, learning with some ambivalence that in the dark porches of my soul, instead of being repulsed by someone like him, I was beginning to find a curious and illegitimate salvation.

Having smoked his joint, Bill returned to his drink.  Although his face twisted at its taste, he said nothing and emptied his glass.  We’d been sitting there for close to an hour now, our backs leaning against the sofa and our minds embraced by an unexpected comfort.  I was to discover that Bill had only just begun to reveal himself.

Without much probing on my part, he began to tell me about his childhood.  By now, he had convinced himself that he was to be the subject of my great American novel.  Bill told me of an abusive father who just couldn’t get it through his head that it was his wife he should have been fucking, not his five-year-old son; the sanguinary depths of domestic violence that composed the fabric, it seemed, of all those who have nose-dived into emotional dysfunction.  There were the years he spent in juvenile prison, which educated him further in hate and survival. Bill revealed to me in sparse, difficult and incisive strokes of the unequivocal horrors that made him who he was today.  Bill the molested son.  Bill the gangbanger.  Bill the hustler.

By the time he’d finished telling me what I’d only gently encouraged, I wanted to roll another joint myself and lodge it between his lips.  Such confiding from Bill appeared both rare and painful: to aerate passages that seemed barricaded forever; to shed, albeit momentarily, the tough-guy image that street-smart dwellers required almost by genetic inherency.

On that night, I watched Bill struggle through his demons, knowing even as it transpired, that this was indeed an exceptional and cathartic happening.  It had taken him considerable effort to articulate his feelings.  Between the pained expression on his face and the hint of tremor in his voice, there had been the occasional winces and the hesitation before the words could leave him.

Why he had chosen me to lay himself bare to, I would never truly know.  Of all the men Bill must have spent only one night with, I found it difficult to imagine that any of them might have served as his confidante.  Perhaps it was because he wasn’t on the clock.  Since he wasn’t performing, he could be himself.  I wanted to think that perhaps he was feeling the kind of indescribable attachment that I was feeling.

Then, as a caution to what I considered our ground-breaking connection, he said, “I don’t want you to get all attached to me, okay?”

I paused and then turned to him.  “Excuse me?”

“I don’t want you to start getting all emotional about me, you know what I mean?”

“Where did that come from?” I said.

He raised his hands.  “Just…letting you know, man.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask to hear your confessions, okay?”

“All I’m saying is that, you know, I don’t want you feeling all involved… ”

“Well, you should’ve thought about that before you started telling me all this!  And what the hell makes you think I need such a warning, anyway?” I asked, trying my best to sound calm, but not managing.

He shrugged. “It’s happened before.”

“Oh, so you’ve done this before!  This is part of some routine, then!”

He closed his eyes and shook his head regretfully.  “Okay, let’s just forget about it, okay?”

“How can you be
so damn
condescending!”

“Hey, Ali, I said forget about it, alright?  I just feel, you know, like we’ve crossed a certain line here, okay, and I don’t want you to… you know, fall in love with me or something like that because I’m not going to be around.”

I grunted.  “Fall in love with you?  Well,
hunh,
thanks for the warning.  It’ll keep me from asking you to move in tomorrow.”

With that I turned away from him.  Why couldn’t I just laugh at him?  Why couldn’t I just make him feel stupid for saying something like that?  Reacting this way only confirmed his suspicions.
  Well, fuck you, Bill!
I felt him looking at me.  But instead of frustration, I could sense the hint of a smile lingering on his face. 
He’s amused
, I thought to myself, my irritation vexing. 
He’s fucking amused that I’m so pissed at him!

I started to finish my drink, my eyes transfixed on the dead television set.  The music had stopped playing, and the silence was heavy with anticipation. 
The incredible nerve!
  I screamed in my mind.  Yes, it was true I was already feeling involved.  That the thought of this being the only night we will share together, long before we’d even touched each other, was already unbearable.  Still, how dare he!