Ode to Lata (33 page)

“Sounds so… I don’t know, clinical.”

“That’s sex in the nineties for you, man.”

“When did you last get tested?  How long ago?”

“Oh, a couple of months ago.  They arrested me.  Whenever they do that, they have to get you tested.”

“Arrested you?”

“Yeah, motherfucking cops, man,” he said, scowling while clipping his beeper to his jeans.  “They just love busting our balls, you know?  Like they have nothing better to do in a city like this but give us shit.”

“Well, I suppose they could give out more speeding tickets.” 

For the past couple of hours, when we’d talked in between lovemaking sessions, Bill’s language had been refined.  Now, the “man” and curse words crept back in as he assumed his other role.  I didn’t tell him how his comments basically revealed he worked the streets more frequently than he’d indicated. “God, what’s that like?  Getting arrested?”

“Oh, no big deal.  Sometimes it’s just an overnight stay.  Other times it’s… ” his voice trailed off.  “But when they do that, they get you tested because of
why
they arrested you.  They know what shit you’ve been up to.  Hey, can I use your phone?”

Bill walked out into the living room and I remained, absorbing his experience.  I began to doubt his entire story about the modeling agency and Andy Jacobs.  There was no doubt in my mind that the lunatic had been somewhat of a pimp for him and that they had even slept together.  But I began to think of the whole modeling agency element as a fabricated attempt to legitimize his prostitution.  If he’d slipped in his story, he didn’t seem bothered or aware of it.

Oh, well, I thought.  He did say he was negative, and I’m still here in my apartment with all of my things intact.  And, I did have a fucking great time.  So, why not lighten up and stop dredging myself through unnecessary paranoia?  Mustn’t give myself so much drama, drama, all the time! 

My eyes spotted another condom, possibly the last one we’d used, by the foot of the bed.  I walked over to it, wondering who he was calling.  Was it the psycho from last night?  Returning a page from a customer?  I knew he wasn’t calling to tell mother he’d be home soon.  I tried to eavesdrop as I fell to my knees, wanting to pick up the condom with some degree of respect and curiosity, like an artifact, but his voice seemed deliberately low and I could only hear mumbling.  Carefully, I pinched the condom up between my fingers and realized that it still contained some of his sperm.  As I held it up to take a good look at that quintessential part of him that had been denied a merger into me, it collected in the reservoir at its tip.  And then, as my fingers pressed upon its pregnant belly, droplets of it, heavy and glutinous, trickled into the palm of my hand.

I looked at them, confused.

I began to inspect the condom closely, pressing the tip of glassy sheath’s tip that spurted little beads of his sperm onto my fingers, and felt a wrenching in the pit of my stomach.  Horror shrouded my face and I gasped, focusing on the source of the tributaries now pooling into my palm.

There was, at the tip of its emaciated latex barrel, an invisible and traitorous tear.  And the drops were trickling away mutinously, right in front of my eyes. 

After picking up a disgruntled pack of friends from the Spa, more than an hour late, Bill asked to be dropped off at a rather shady motel between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards.  I wondered who he might be meeting there but didn’t ask.  Kitty quickly took control of his car, throwing nettled glances at me.  “We thin’ you have car acciden!  We all worry!”

Crammed in the backseat of the car, I held Bill, arms around his waist, head resting on his back; I thought about how I might not see him again and about the condom.  I felt so pathetic.  How could I need him, or anybody else for that matter, so much after only one night of something only suspectfully mutual?  I wondered what such rapid overindulgence for someone I’d only just met made me.  Why hadn’t past hurts made me more resilient?  More independent?  How could it still be so easy for me to latch onto someone after everything I’d been through?  Still so vacuously needy, had I learnt nothing of the purely fictional, romanticized nature of my obsession? 

I couldn’t deny though, that just holding on to the girth of his torso, laying my head on the musculature of his back, like a strong tree trunk, made me feel so damned good.  But it could have been anyone.  That it came down to the human body’s need to be touched, to touch, to be reminded; because it was a living organism, every pore of it breathing and alive.

As the guys pattered on about the various men they’d sighted at the spa, those whom they had been unable to attain, Bill and I remained silent.  He smoked a cigarette, comfortable in my embrace, neither of us contributing to the bathhouse confessions.  We pulled over by the motel, and before he jumped out of the car he kissed me, and, pulling a little card out of his pocket, handed me his phone number.  “Give me a call,” he said.  “This is the number at the agency.”

When did he write this down?  Did he always keep one ready, just in case?  I kissed him again, appreciative, and then freed him to the swamps of the city.  We drove away, feverish with sleep deprivation, and I fought the urge to run back to him or turn to see him diminishing with distance.  That’s when
they
vented at me again for keeping them waiting so long.  They fussed about it for a few minutes, especially Kitty, who had been terrified that his new car had been in the hands of one who he considered a reckless, uninsured driver.  “I can’t believe you do this!  Din’ you not hear the phones ringing?  Is not right. I call you how many time?  Three time!  Is completely not right! Thisa’ so
very, very
inconsiderate!”  Adrian, who would normally have defended me, sat silent, and I knew he was annoyed.

But I didn’t care.  As a child I’d learnt to win my battles by throwing myself on the ground and wailing until granted my demands.  As an adult I’d become an expert at belittling any crisis that had worked out to my advantage.  I scoffed at them for overreacting, knowing all along that I’d have been inconsolably furious in their situation.

As we drove down Fairfax, I sank into the back seat next to Frankie, who obsessed over some nine-inched stud who had inveigled him in the steam room.  This man had apparently confided to having been straight – whatever that constituted in light of him being there – and to have a wife and two kids at home.  Naturally this excited Frankie.  Tremendously.  It automatically increased his worth as some kind of a prized trophy.  For being the man who, after fucking Frankie with the zeal of a prisoner during conjugal visits, returned to his cell to put the same cock back into his wife. Frankie had scribbled his phone number on the establishment’s little business card, the other side of which allowed one person to rate the person on a star system, and this man had apologized for being unable to give his number out but promised that he would call Frankie for more of the unforgettable sex they’d had.   

“Oooh!” Frankie cried.  “He looked completely like Clooney!  What a fucking stud!”

We all knew Frankie was prone to exaggeration, that he indulged himself lavishly in aggrandizing his encounters.  The rude shock of discovering what a person truly looked like in the light of the lobby had never happened to Frankie.  Apparently everyone had been on Frankie’s hot little trail, including Clooney.  So we all listened with mock excitement.  (Later someone would attest to how drunk little Frankie, when walking in front of others, had taken to purposely dropping his towel to reveal himself and pretended that it had slipped off him; that he’d also groped everyone in sight, incapable of exercising such discriminating taste). Candid encounters filled the car.  A dialogue about penile size, stamina and the assortment of men.  Everyone, it seemed, bragged about conquests.  And I thought, fags that we were, we still thought with testosterone-choked brains of straight men.  Perhaps that’s why sex for us, as it was for so many heterosexual men, was promiscuous and competitive. Restricted from freely expressing ourselves in public, having to seek out zones where we could get away with acting queer, inevitably resulted in a kind of blind desperation to do as much as possible when permitted.

The whole time, my fingers rubbed the coarse piece of someone’s business card, on which Bill had scribbled his number.  I looked out the window along Santa Monica Boulevard, at recumbent forms of sleeping bums, elderly Polish couples on the way to a market, depleted and washed-out nocturnes slavered from a rave, and either the remnants or early morning workers of the hustler trade.  I thought about when it would be okay to call Bill.  I could barely wait  to get home so I could masturbate to his memory.  I thought again of the leaking condom in the wake of our lovemaking.  Fuck!  Something always had to fuck up, didn’t it?

Frankie nudged me, pulling me out of my reverie. He suggested I make it up to them for keeping them waiting by buying breakfast.  I rolled my eyes.  “Yeah, keep dreaming.  I’m surprised you have any appetite left after all the dick you ate in there.”

“Oh!” Frankie shrieked, clutching his breast.  “Listen to Miss Virgin Mary, here!  I’m not the one who took off with some hustler, you know!”

“Honey, only one of us didn’t pay to get any tonight, and it certainly wasn’t you.”

“So, did you tell him it was your first time?”  Adrian teased.

“Yeah,” I said, sensing a tinge of bitterness.  Sorry to rob you off your one meaningful contribution to the world of good fucking.  “But then I gave him instructions on every position in the Kama Sutra and my story fell apart.”

“Well, I hope you were careful, at least,” Frankie said, his trademark paranoia kicking in.  “I still can’t believe you’d take such an incredible risk and take someone like him home with you!  I mean, you don’t even know this person!  What if he’d, you know, done something, Ali?  You did use a condom, right?  Please tell me you didn’t let him do it without a condom!”

“Several, as a matter of fact.  Until we ran out and he wrapped his dick in Saran Wrap instead.”

“Was he big?”

“Do you see me walking?”

“Was he cut?”

“Just as nature created it.”

Frankie let out an ecstatic hoot, something he’d picked up from a black woman who worked with him.  “I’m glad you were careful, Ali, because as studly as he was, we did pick him up from the boulevard.”

Everyone started to exchange reassurances on having had safe sex.  Consolations of safety after a night of sexual decadence;  sex, nineties-style.  I tried not to say anything more about my night.

“You’re acting strange,” Adrian remarked from the front seat. “Is everything alright?  Did you have a good time or what?”

“You din’ pay him, do you?” Kitty asked, glancing at me from the rear view mirror.  “I hope you don’ paid the boy!”

“Of course not! He didn’t want any money.”

“He din’ aks you?”

“No.”

“Well, that was one generous worker,” Frankie said.  “Will you be seeing him again?  I wish you’d stop acting like your life is over, though.  Jesus, you just got laid, what are you mourning for?  Would you snap out of it?”

“I’m fine, okay?  I’m just a little tired.”

“No, you’re acting romantically delusional again.  That’s what you are,” Frankie pronounced.  “A romance junkie!  Everything turns into a soap opera with you.  Why can’t you just accept it for what it was?”

“You had a good time and you’ll probably see him again, although personally, I don’t think that’s such a great idea, but you know, if you want to, you can,” said Adrian.

Kitty began laughing and excitedly bobbed up and down in his seat.  “Yeah, yeah, thas’ it!  Drama queen!  Drama queen!”

They were right, I was a romance junkie.  A drama queen.  I’d always been that way.  Every event colored and spiced with tragedy and romanticism.  Vetoing orgasm, creating impalpable connections with men, pursuing that which appeared unobtainable.  I orchestrated, even welcomed, only situations and people that contributed to this opera.

Perking up in an effort to avoid telling them about the condom, I inquired about the CPA Kitty had encountered in the video room.  But in my mind, as everyone honed in to gorge on more details about the specifications and application of an accountant’s cock, I could think only about the sperm that had dribbled onto my hand.  In my mind’s eye, I could see that condom within me, flawed, with a fishlike mouth, emitting, as it might have, Bill’s sperm into me.  I envisioned droplets of blood hitting a pool of water and dispersing in whorls, unsure of its significance.  Maybe contamination. Or maybe just the familiar swelling of a hemorrhoid.  Sinister images performed a freakish gavotte in my head.  The time Nelson had fucked me with perfumed body lotion.  Men who I’d yanked out from inside me when realizing they’d forgone protection.  Times when I’d been forced to use every ounce of strength to push them off  me.  Kicking my legs around.  Close to screaming out. None of them had been even the least bit unattractive.  Or appeared to have had any self-esteem issues that could have propelled them into such irresponsibility.  Men who had not only epitomized physical beauty with their arduously worked-out bodies, but who also gave the impression that no destruction could come upon their galvanizing looks even through their own intention.  Now, having slept with Bill, who I felt confident had lied about his sexual history and probably disseminated into me, I thought about all the times that I had put myself at risk.  I felt sick to my stomach.