Ode to Lata (15 page)

It’s a perfect moment.  I keep thinking,
He’s back!  He’s back!  But he’ll be gone again… Better not to think about that now.  He’s back at least for a while…

And I’m happy.

MY FIRST TIME

Nelson McGhee was one of those men whose friends consisted only of ex-boyfriends. Surrounded by much shorter, effeminate boys, mostly Asian (and never black like himself, as he was to confess to me later), he towered over them like an obelisk in the center of a thriving harem.  His sometimes doting and at other times self-amused little queens formed a kind of fence around him, through which only his constantly roving eyes promised any possibility of penetration.

 I first saw him when groggily weaving through Oasis nightclub (popular for its Asian influence), not long before the music was to die and the lights – which made the patrons flee from the dance floor like vampires exposed to annihilating sunlight – were to come up.  That night money had been a little tight, and the free admission had lured Adrian, Kitty and myself into the club we had dubbed “Pearl Harbor.” 
What the hell, let’s go get a hot Asian!
Adrian and I would often joke, pulling up the corners of our eyes, and yakking away in mock-Cantonese as we entered the club.  Naturally this infuriated Kitty, but because his already poor English became even more incoherent when he got angry, he just turned beet-red, shook his head at both of us and managed, “It’s no funny, okay? Why this cracks you up so much? Is just stupid.”

From the moment I laid eyes on Nelson, I was completely arrested by lust.  He aroused in me the kind of sexual compulsion that hits you smack in the gut.  Made me want to press up against his body without the formality of sobering introductions and inane words.  Made me want to relinquish the cocktail that I had been concealing from club security and rake myself against his beautiful, muscled body.  Voltaire said, “To conquer one is not enough.  One must know how to seduce.”  And seeing Nelson leaning back placidly against the rail with a beer bottle clutched in hand, towering over his carnival of Asian queens chattering away in a conspiratorial dialect that even he wasn’t privy to, his wandering eyes subtly recruiting and betraying the feigned interest in their cackling, I felt this urge to seduce.  To seduce without forethought, without a blueprint, with the disarming confidence and directness that only one too many cocktails can purvey.

And seduced he was.

The most terrifying aspect of picking up someone in a bar was the possibility of being rejected in front of others who have already thought of making the same advance but pragmatically vetoed it.  Of being sized up by the companions of the pursued, of the catty discussion about you the moment you turned around and slinked away, your head heavy from the weight of your embarrassment.  The original purpose of a bar, camaraderie and sociability, was overshadowed by the rule that you should never pay attention to the man you really want.  But in a rum-and-Coke haze, such apprehensions vaporized and all I wanted to do was walk right up and tell him how attractive I found him and that I’d like nothing more than to suck his cock. I managed to disown my glass, saunter over and through his coterie of sexual conquests and, gently licking his ear lobe, breathe a “hi.” 

We spoke on the phone a few times before getting together.  Los Angeles, being the natural and human disaster capital of the world, had delayed our rendezvous until the fires of Laguna Hills could be vanquished.  Each time we hung up, I found myself masturbating to thoughts of him, feeling slightly awkward with my mother counting her rosary in the other room.  Obtaining Nelson became a libidinous obsession. Two weeks later, having tersely explained to my mother that I was spending the night out with someone and ignoring her eyes boring holes into me, I drove down to Orange County.

While waiting for him in the deserted parking lot of a mini-mall that night, I swigged rum from my flask, half-afraid that he wouldn’t show.  Every minute lasted an hour as I sat there, trying to regulate my breathing and cancel the lurid images of our bodies colliding against each other.
Why the fuck did I agree to do this?  I should’ve just insisted on picking him up from his place,
I kept telling myself. 
Now what if he flakes on me?  Fuck!  What then?  I’m going to throw myself onto this palm tree!

But Nelson had been adamant.  Having recently broken up with his lover, he was still in the process of moving out and considered it insensitive for it to be any other way.  For someone who never took notice of a ring on the finger of a prospect, I ignored this as any kind of sign or an indication of poor timing. 

We rented a motel room, for which I paid.  As soon as I unpacked the change of clothes, condoms and a travel-size bottle of lubricant from my overnight bag, Nelson remarked that I knew exactly what I had come for.  When I responded that I did, that I wanted him to fuck me, he was stunned. Of all the things he expected to come out of me – despite the audacious way in which I had introduced myself to him – the boldness of my demand shocked him.  Mostly, I think, because it was so blatantly sexual.

Slowly, I walked over to where he stood, and his eyes fixated on me like he was searching my body for concealed, complex muscles, some explanation of how vulnerability and confidence could seethe together within me.  I started to feel him up. “You know what I want, Nelson?” I said.  “I want you to get inside me.  And then when you’re inside me, I’d like for you to just stay there for a little while without moving.  Can you do that?”

I thought his face looked a little nervous if not flustered.  “That would be very difficult,” he managed, and then, assuming the dominant role that my aggression had momentarily deflected him from, drew me to him and started to knead my buttocks with his large hands. “But I’ll try.”

  I went into the bathroom where I sunk my car keys in the toilet tank.  You just never know.  I pissed, hitting the side of the bowl so as to not make that crass sound I suspected might further confuse his perception of my submissiveness.  The distinct sound of urine jetting into the reservoir of toilet bowl water, a sound I knew he would never even think to suppress.  It was just such a man thing.

I reflected upon his discomfort as the blue of the water turned green.  The struggle that he was undergoing, because, like women, submissive sexual partners were expected to yield control of the sexual arena to the man.  The top.  The assumed aggressor.  But I had learned a long time ago that the real power in sex was in the hands of the submissive, whether they chose to reveal it or not.  It was the woman, the bottom, the receiver who had the real power, the most potent kind of power, because it was completely mental. With all his grinding and heaving, Nelson would get no further, feel not much more than I would ultimately allow him to.  In the grand design Nelson was but a component, like the bed that we would fuck on and the pillow I would sink my face into.

I slipped off my jeans and threw them to aside.  I put the lid down, flushed the toilet and thought of my keys soaking in there. 
I don’t trust him with my car but I’m going to let him fuck me. 
I walked to the mirror over the sink and blotted the oil from my face with toilet paper.  Then I drained my flask of what was left and felt the rum burning down my body. A deep breath later, I went back out to find him standing over the bed that he would ravage me on, eagerly tearing the seal off the bottle of Wet, and accordion of condoms hanging from around his wrist.  It was a sight I would never forget.

For some inexplicable reason I thought of my mother right then, sitting at home on the living room sofa that temporarily served as her bed, rapt in prayer, worried sick about me.  Grappling with the knowledge that her son had grown up and was having casual sex. Mothers never needed to be told, only forced to confront what they already knew.

She must have been terrified of her suspicions, of the things she thought me capable of because she knew me through herself.  How different could my appetites be from her own?  How dissimilar could we be, mother and son?  

For a man of his build, I found it strange that Nelson should feel so cold.  He turned up the heater to high and started to turn out every light.  I asked him to keep the bathroom lit so we wouldn’t be engulfed in darkness.  “I want to be able to see you,” I said and climbed onto the bed.  I sat in my unbuttoned shirt with my legs folded under me and watched him remove his pants, fold them neatly and hang them over a chair.  Then he walked over to me.  All I could see was his bulbous cock bobbing between his legs and I thought,
My God.  Do I really want that thing inside me? 

Pushing me down with one hand, he climbed on top of me and taking his cock with the other hand, aligned it between my thighs.  I could feel it, slathered with the lubricant, warm and pinguid as it pushed up against my balls.

“You ready for this?” he asked.

“No,” I quipped.  “Why don’t we do it next week?”

“What?”

“I’m just kidding,” I said quickly.  “Yes.”

He promised that he would be gentle and although I wanted to laugh in his face at the banality of his line, I acted nervous and told him that it was my first time getting fucked – partly because I knew they always wanted to believe this and partly because I truly feared the pain.  This excited him tremendously.  I imagine he felt like some great explorer charting into the undiscovered territory within my rectal walls.  This precursory advice had always been Adrian’s job as he lay by my side, watching.  We would laugh about this in the coming week, I knew this.

“I like being the first one inside you, ” he said and with that his torso gave a little thrust against me.  “I’m going to make this real special, your first time.”

“Thank you.”  I pulled his face down into the nape of my neck and with one leg over the other, squeezed my thighs tighter around his cock.  I looked up at the ceiling for a moment before closing my eyes to the world.   

When I woke up, I found Nelson seated across from me on the chair that he had hung his pants on.  He was just sitting there, watching me intently, a white towel knotted around his waist.  Even in the dim light that peered from the bathroom, I could see the faint smile on his face.  I asked him what time it was and without looking at a watch, he told me it was a little past one in the morning.  He asked me to go back to sleep and continued to watch me for a little while longer, the way an admirer might gaze at art in a gallery.  Except I didn’t feel like a painting and his gaze made me feel addled – more like an insect on formalin.  I felt the searing pain in my rectum, dreadfully aware that in the coming days it would get much worse.  Despite his gallant promises, Nelson had not been gentle.  In the throes of passion, he had pushed me back down into the mattress and spurred himself to an orgasm as I bit into the fleshy palm that had brutally covered my face and held me down.

I wanted to pull the bed sheet up, but his gaze upon me like an invisible pair of hands frisking through my body, I forced myself to lie naked for him to look at.  Nelson had liked my body for exactly what it had been.  Unlike his own.  There was no need to conceal myself from him.  While he was fucking me, he repeated, “God, I love your body…I love how you feel…”  

When first treading into gay Los Angeles, one of the rudest shocks had been that opposites didn’t always attract. The clones were looking for clones.  Buffed men were looking for other buff men.  And the most popular of them all, the tops, were looking for bottoms who, alas, looked like tops. Only the queens weren’t looking for their own kind.  Ultimately though, everyone, irrespective of his tribe, was looking for the same thing: the man.

In this culture of complex narcissism, where everyone was relentlessly searching for their spitting image, Nelson desired someone dissimilar to his own physical type.  I told myself I had no reason to feel self-conscious, that in his eyes my digressive physique was not a flaw but an asset.

And with that thought I continued to lie on my stomach, the sheet entwined around the lower half of my body like a classic sculpture, and I felt beautiful.  I smiled faintly within.  Everyone deserves to be looked at just this way once in his lifetime.  To be adulated unawares at first and then with secret knowledge and calculation.  This was my moment.  What would probably be one of the few tender moments I would elicit from him.  Yes, let him appraise this body that so few like him in this city would demand.
I will give him this body,
again and again, for him to crave and drink from.
  And I’ll guard him from the conniving little queens that will want to lure him away from me.

And with that, I started to shift languidly in my pretended sleep, stretching my body out like an elongated landscape for his relishing eyes. 

My face against the wall, I grasped the top edge of the wooden headboard and looked into the kind of insipid painting I’d found myself staring at in the dentist’s office or some other lobby of eternal waiting.  We were both on our knees, and I could see the reflection of his body shuffling behind me among the sunshine, sailboats and seagulls in front of me.  His arm slid around my belly and pulled me higher up toward him, but I gripped the headboard tighter instead of falling on my hands.  I felt his pelvis warm and moist against my behind as he prepared to plunder.  When his fingers, sheathed with lubricant, started to probe inside me, I flinched from the pain but said nothing. 
I’ll give him all the sex he wants,
I kept thinking.  And then he would need to look nowhere else.  Nelson would be my farewell to the sex clubs and the nights of marauding through the string of bars on Santa Monica Boulevard with Adrian, Salman and Kitty.  An end to the huddled last minute attempts at picking up someone off the curb at the end of the night – “Side walk sale!  Side walk sale!” someone was always alerting.  A culmination to the despondent sleepovers with friends who returned home equally disheartened and too tired or too drunk (mostly both) to drive back home at three in the morning for expiration in a lonely bed.