Ode to Lata (13 page)

“I was about to take a bath,” he said, and then stepped aside to let me in.

When he closed the door behind me and I heard the clicking of the lock, I knew that my visit would take a while.  Seated on a gaudy sofa covered in a print of frangipanis, I watched him saunter over to the entertainment center against the wall and turn the television set on.

That seemed to be the extent of our greeting.  A man I had been fucking for some six or seven years and hadn’t seen in at least four.  Still, it didn’t feel even the slightest bit awkward.  Niceties had never been a component of our relationship.  And words had almost always been used only to convey lust…
Come here so I can fuck your ass… You know who this is?  This is the one that fucks your
gand
calling…

I suppose it would have been nice if he had given me a hug.  Put his arm around me and given me that friendly squeeze on my shoulder like he did with his soccer buddies.  Or even smiled to indicate his pleasure at seeing me.  Asked me how I was doing in America.  If I had become the famous artist I had set out to be.  But no, there was no such civility.  Nawaz acted as if he had seen me just a few days ago, and I had come back hungrily for more.

The news came on in black and white, color programming still a technology crawling into Kenya.  An African broadcaster, his eyes brazenly transfixed on a handheld script, attempted to make the President’s latest groundbreaking at some school sound like a philanthropic achievement in his heavily accented English.  I had heard that the Voice of Kenya now had two channels of programming.

Nawaz turned around to face me.  From where I sat, I could see that he was no longer the model of a youthful man’s beauty.  His muscles sagged, and the underside of his chin had gotten heavier.  He was well on his way to being the married man who had “really put it on.”  None of this made any difference to me though.  He still aroused in me the kind of hunger that can easily be stimulated by the memories of shared sexual encounters.

I felt weak with desire.  I want to be raped, I kept thinking.  Ravished.  Completely gutted.  Have my lusts exhumed and unfurled around us.  How must I beg him so that he won’t keep me waiting any longer? How to initiate what we both knew was going to happen?  Perhaps if I reached out and stroked him through the towel.  Started to slide my finger inside myself, there in that place where I knew he would want to go.  Said something lewd and bold.  Or knelt down in front of him without saying anything and reminded him of the lessons he had taught me.

Right then, Nawaz walked over and paused right in front of me, his groin inches away from my face.  I sat there frozen in the moment as he looked down at me and I felt as if the blood had drained out of my body, and I was going to pass out.  He could sense my weakness and it excited him.

With one swift move of his hand, he yanked his towel away and let his hardness spring forth, slapping me on my eye.  Turgid and commanding.

“Is
this
what you came for? 
Hunh?”
he asked.

Some things never change. 

After we were done, he wiped himself with the white towel he had been wearing and said, “You suck cock like an expert now.  So, how many boys have you been screwing?”

“Hardly any.”

“Ah, don’t be a liar.  You never sucked my cock like
this
before!  Aren’t you worried about AIDS?”

I looked at him incredulously.  How ridiculous a question was that coming from him under the circumstances?  “Of course I am.  But we should
all
be worried about AIDS!”

I looked at him incredulously.  How ridiculous a question was that coming from him under the circumstances?  “Of course I am. But we should
all
be worried about AIDS!”

“Hunh,
all those
shogas
….” He shook his head and trailed off as if it wasn’t worth commenting on.

 
What about them, you closeted bigot?
I thought. 
What homophobic crap are you going to say now that you’ve already sprayed yourself over me?

“So, you even
sound
like a
dhorio
now!”

“No, I don’t!” I objected at being branded a sellout, what most people in my position in this town would have been only too delighted to be perceived as.  Because that would have meant they had gone abroad and adopted a superior culture.

“
Hanh, hanh
, you think you are better than us already!  Anyway,” he said.  “You better go now,
hunh
.  My mum is going to be home soon.  I don’t want her to see you here.”

I buttoned myself up, his treatment of me suddenly much harder to swallow.  I fought the urge to tell him that I had half a mind to educate his bride-to-be about her husband’s very special sexual needs and that he should be careful about where he stuck his own dick now that he was so suddenly concerned about AIDS.  That all those dirty homosexuals he had rammed himself into, all those
shogas
– as he had so derogatorily called them – had been branded so by doing nothing different from what he had just done there with me.

But then again, why bother? 

Nawaz would marry and in time his indiscretions with the men in his life – if there even were others beside myself – would cease.  Instead, his betrayals would manifest themselves in binges with the hundreds of
malayas
, or prostitutes, of Mombasa after a few cold Tusker beers.  If questioned, he would stretch the statute of limitations and claim that even a few weeks before his marriage, at the age of twenty-nine, he was doing what many boys had done growing up.  Experimenting.  And that now, with a wife and numerous whores at his libido’s disposal, he was, as had only rarely been suspected, one hundred per cent heterosexual.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Nawaz said, stretching his arms and then to my astonishment letting out a rampant fart.  “We’re going to Abdallah’s tonight.”

Disgusted, I shook my head and grimaced.  This confirmed my feeling about him and others like him.  Engaged to some naive woman, still doing an old boyfriend and planning on visiting the local whorehouse afterward.  I stood up, wondering why should this behavior should surprise me.  Was he really any different from the other men I had known growing up?

Is
this
was what our parents preferred we do, instead of just coming out and being honest and gay? 

Was this man, who had just come thunderously in my mouth, gay?  Or just oversexed?

I said “bye” curtly and walked out of the flat.  There were no handshakes.  No hugs.  Not even a smile or well wishes.

Driving home, I thought about his visit to Abdallah’s.  I had heard the black prostitutes lay on their backs, chewing Bazookas and reading comic books while the guys fucked them, clumsy in their enthusiasm.  I had been in that vicinity myself.  Waiting outside in the car while my best friend, who I had been convinced was the one and only boy I would ever love and obsess over, was escorted into the shanty by two other boys to be initiated on his sixteenth birthday.  I remember feeling sick to my stomach.  Wanting to retch. Not because I was revolted by prostitution but because I felt ill at the thought of him spending himself on someone else, and more painfully, on someone like
that
.  Someone who would actually charge him money for it while I, devoted to him, would have chopped my arm off to lie under him.  I felt incapable of preventing him from touching her, that whore smacking her pink bubble gum as he penetrated her with his clean, virginal cock.  Unable to stop him from mounting her and deriving pleasure from her.  Images of him writhing on her, into her, while I waited muted and wracking my mind.  Longing for his sperm like a boon from whichever deity could hear me pleas.  So afraid that I would tear through our friends’ excited imaginings of what was going on inside that shack with an anguished cry if I had even tried to participate in their endorsements.

There was this other time I waited in my car for some guy I had experimented with – he had begged me to wait on him for about a half hour at three in the morning while he satiated himself with Khadijah, his favorite one.  He had been with a girlfriend hours before, at the Blues nightclub along the North Coast of Mombasa, and now it was time to expend all the excitement she had aroused in him and refused, out of virtue, to satisfy.  He claimed to care for her deeply, employing the reasoning that men do about their biological need for sex, just as he had claimed his satisfaction from his favorite whore and me, the willing friend.

Many of these guys had gone on to get married.  Had children.  Put on some weight, gotten settled, matured.  Whatever they wanted to call it.  None of it, however, changed the fact that they had all been involved with me.

I started to think that, yes, perhaps labels are truly for cans of food.  Not people.  We are all simply sexual beings.  Sometimes it took so little to tip the scales, to redirect one’s sexual preference from the norm.  The right timing perhaps.  Or loneliness.  A little too much drinking to overcome the inhibition.  Or just downright horniness – sometimes that was all it took to shut one’s eyes and yield to pleasure from whoever, whatever.

I had seen the scales tip more than once in my life.  Many times, I must admit, I had applied the pressure.

But now, years after being removed from such an ambivalent stance, having such clarity in where my pleasure lay, having marched down Santa Monica Boulevard in full view of the cameras and onlookers (some bewildered, others still making that unsteady transition into full light), I wondered what such behavior said about those I had left behind.  Those men from my homeland who would never enter a Heaven or the Vortex.  Men who would never find themselves in anything even remotely comparable to a bar in West Hollywood.   

I thought about men like Nawaz who would frequent Bora Bora or Florida nightclub, perhaps accompanied by their naive girlfriends – a perfect veneer of masculinity, hoping to lock gazes with some German tourist or American sailor based on the naval camp on Mombasa island.

Men whose fantasies of other men would be eventually muffled under the pressures of the norm and distending the family tree.

Would their lives have coursed differently had they been here?  In a country that may still be far away from handing out equal rights but at least attempted to legitimize preferences by providing the forum and places for expression?

Would they still have gotten married, had children and disregarded past experiences as adolescent phases in a more permissive environment?

And then I thought of myself.  Perched expectantly at the edge of a bar in West Hollywood.  Glossed up by rigidly scheduled facials at Ole Henriksen’s, admirable regimens of concealing cosmetics and alpha-hydroxy acids and some gym time to ward off the encroaching signs of aging.  Searching during endless nights at the Vortex, long hardened against the guilt and sophomoric resolutions of never going back there again.  Staggering in at two or three in the morning like it was second nature now to flash attitude to the very men that had been indifferent to me only hours ago at some club, but would now rise to the occasion in dark rooms and glory booths.

And I wonder, who made the right choice?

What did it make them, these friends of mine, who hadn’t made
my
choice?  Had they been cowards or just realistic? Practical-minded bisexuals who had modified their tastes or just suppressed individuals? 

Hell, what did it make me?

FAT LOSS

My mother is addicted to American television. 
The Bold and the Beautiful
is her favorite.  I came home from work to an apartment churning out the aroma of spices all the way to the end of the block and asked her what she had been up to, besides pestering God with her praying and cooking curries, so she filled me in on this passion.

“In Kenya,” she said, her hand held up firmly for emphasis, “we have to rent it on the video,
khabar ayi neh?”
 

How she managed to do that with a daily series, I was afraid to ask.

“Ali, you know, today I saw this advertisement on the TV for this miracle drug that burns off
all
your fat!  Can you imagine? 
All
your fat!  I
must
have it!”

I shook my head at her, walked into the kitchen and lifted the lid to smell the simmering chicken curry.  The kitchen was spotless. In an apartment that boasted modern Z-Gallery acquisitions, the grime-ridden stove had been the only embarrassment – now it actually looked unobjectionable.  My landlady had renounced her responsibilities a long time ago, claiming rather sarcastically that a Santa Monica rent-controlled apartment didn’t always come with a stove.  Or linoleum that matched the tiles in the bathroom.  Or a screen door to alleviate the heat of summer.

“Oh, this looks delicious.”  I carefully blew on the curry floating on the wooden spoon.  “God, Mummy, don’t fall for those infomercials!  They’re just trying to make you
chodu!”

“What info—info—are you saying,
hunh?”
She watched me sample her offering for the day from the kitchen doorway.  “I saw it with my own two eyes!” she insisted, her fingers forking at her eyes, her brows raised in wonder.  “Were
you
here?  No, you weren’t here to see it, okay?  This woman,” she said, parting her arms, “she was so obese –
Yah, Khuddah!
They even showed her photo.  And after she had taken this thing for just one month, my God, she had
completely
changed!  You should’ve seen her!”