Ode to Lata (36 page)

“How did you explain that to your boyfriend?”

“Oh, hemorrhoid,” he says casually and darts off behind a group of new arrivals.

There are still four people ahead of me in line.  None of them interest me.  At least not here in the light.  The Asian boy has defected from the line to pursue the same group of men that Alex went after.  Disappearing around the corner and in the direction of a couple of little less popular rooms on the second floor, I spot someone who arouses my interest.  I get more impatient.  Then a little desperate.  Finding it increasingly difficult to keep still, I decide to follow this guy up the staircase.  Perhaps I’ll just bend over and get fucked like Alex.  I’ll let him fuck all the wearisome insights out from me. Find this guy and see if he’s willing to do what was being offered to me only minutes ago.  Forget romance.  Forget tenderness.  Some brutal physical aggression might just be the trick to snapping out of it.

I pick the room on my right.  Upon entering it I face a TV monitor that bombards a porno at the three people in the room.  There is the guy I followed up here, a twenty-something brunette, standing in a corner with his muscled arms folded across his chest and his eyes transfixed on what, at such close range, looks like the core of a rotund peach being pummeled.  And there is a black guy slumped on a couch on my left, his jeans around his ankles, his body slender compared to the astonishing size of his cock, curving upward to him like an obedient pet responding needily to his fondling.

There is too much space in this room.  It’s paralyzing.  A single step toward either one of them will feel like a pirouette across the room.  For a little while all three of us remain locked in our positions.  And then, with a supreme effort I surrender the comfort of leaning against the wooden wall, looking at the brunette, thinking, what the hell, what’s the worst that can happen?  For a second my eyes meet his and my intention registers in them.  As if to respond to my question, he throws me a mean expression that withers me completely, as if to say, don’t even think about it.  Then, without as much as a second glance, he walks out of the room, establishing his disinterest in both my ardor and the size of the other boy’s cock.  He can live without either one of us.

Dejected, my head falls to the ground and I sigh gently.  When I look up, the black boy has sunk deeper into the sofa so that his torso is extended further out and his cock rises from him magnificently.  He stares at me as if to say, “Isn’t this what you came here for?  Look at it!  I know it’s probably the biggest cock you’ll ever see.  I’ve been told that all my life and now I’m letting you touch it.  He languorously runs his hand up and down its glistening shaft, his eyes fixed upon my gaping face.  I hesitate only for a moment and then walk over to him and reach out to hold it with a kind of reverence etched upon my face.  His hands fall away, allowing me complete autonomy.  And then, just as I am about to kneel down between his parted thighs to offer worship, to take it with both my hands and rub it against my face and suckle him in my mouth, he says, “Hey, you wanna’ piss on me?”

Jolted, I straighten up and let go. He looks up at me and sighs disappointedly.  With his head crooked to the side and hunched shoulders, he says, “C’mon, man!  C’mon!”

A fleeting silence. Even the synthetic sexual sounds of the porno are unheard.  I remain rooted to my spot, feeling the pressure in my abdomen, my eyes locked into his, my body paused over him.  A welling tide wars within the walls of my stomach.  “Come on, man, just do it!” he says, and closing his eyes, rests his head back and starts to rub himself eagerly.  Slowly, I unbelt myself.  I position myself over him, between his parted thighs, his knees locking against mine.  At the moment I’m poised over him, I’m removed from myself.  I pretend that this is not happening to me.  It’s not me here, hanging over this man’s naked body, preparing to urinate over him.  Not me, who came here for tenderness and paternal embraces and chance occurrences of love.  When that doesn’t help, I close my eyes and try to block out his face with the parted lips and the tensed body squirming in anticipation under me. 
Concentrate.  Concentrate.  You can do this, just like the urinal.  Piss on the motherfucker.  Piss on him!  Piss on him and you’ll be pissing on all the others.  Piss on him!

I can feel him rocking as he beats off, his knees knocking against me, his quivering voice emboldening me to defile him. 
I can do this… I can do this…
In a paroxysm of images, the eternal wait for the bathroom goes through my mind.  Then Richard’s face is dredged up from some inner dungeon.  His unforgettable eyes, the bed of chest hair in which I had loved to bury my face, and which, he often insensitively bragged, his tricks liked to gnaw at while he fucked them.  And Adrian’s legs frame Nelson’s shoulders as he enters him and their mouths find each other, the kisses I was denied being lavished on him.  And Bill.  Beautiful bigoted Bill who had straddled over my twisting back, shaking in his climb towards an orgasm repeating
I’m going to fuck you silly… I’m going to fuck you silly… Don’t fall in love with me…
And Dad, who had held me in the parking lot, his “sunny boy,” in his arms, saying, “I’ll be coming back soon.  Look after your mother.  Look after you mother while I’m gone,” a fatalistic promise from someone who would be snuffed out only hours from then.  The feeling that stirs within my groin is tantamount to wanting to subject them to the  same.  To mounting them and fucking them up the ass, just as I’ve longed for them to fuck me.  To give each of them the alloyed, anguished fracas of unfulfilled love and promise, just as each of them have given me.  I’m filled with a strength derived from pure, unadulterated vengeance.  And then, within a minute of this invocation of emotional betrayals, the hot urine gushes forth from me and splashes over this boy’s dark skin as he beats himself frantically. I throw my head back, groaning in relief, my waist pushed forward and swaying from side to side until all of him is covered with me.

When I open my eyes, the boy is bathed in piss and sperm.  On his face is an ecstasy that is both repugnant and enviable.  His hands smear our discharge over his chest like sacramental balm.  Life source and waste.  I button myself up quickly.  He thanks me and slowly starts to reach out for me, but I back away and practically run out of the room and down the stairs.  I’ve got to get out of here.  Dear God, what am I doing?  What have I done?

 I storm past others swishing mouthwash in the lobby, past those purchasing snacks from the vending machine and those checking in their belongings.  I can feel the bile rising within me steadily and think I’m going to retch.  I throw the door open, pushing a bystander out of my way as he emits curses, and explode into the open air, into the parking lot and all the way onto the street.  Away from that place where everything that is different between animal and human has been diminished.

SUNDAYS

Sometimes I think that the reason I stay out so late on Saturday nights is to eradicate Sundays altogether.  Whenever I awake on a late Sunday afternoon, at the tail end of what the world over has always known as a traditional family day, I find myself slightly grateful that I’ve been spared from the dosages of solitude I’m being force-fed.  There were the Sundays in Mombasa at the drive-in, which had been the highlight of my youth.  And there are the Sundays of my adult life, when all I have to look forward to, if I decide not to turn back and re-enter a bar for more carousing at a beer bust, is the stark emptiness of a young man who has woken up alone and has therefore made no progress.

It’s about ten-thirty in the morning as I look out of my window and find myself confronting silence.  Outside, I see the pot-bellied neighbor who had once called me a “faggot” for refusing to keep my bass down, tending to our garden with the dedication and serenity of a monk.  This, I tell myself, cradling a warm cup of coffee in my hands, is what I’ve been avoiding for so long.  The chance to rest, to free myself from the two lives of work and play, to examine my soul.  To seek some kind of solution, some new resolve, to a youth that feels unnaturally stretched under a myriad of lights and limbs.  But nothing comes.  Instead I continue to see my obese neighbor, scratching his hairy belly as he pipes water out onto the garden, each flower, each leaf, in supplication to his nurturing.   

One of my neighbors had told me about how Mr. Klaus’ wife had left him with custody of one of their sons after eleven years of enduring his cantankerous personality.  The nurturing he was apparently unable to bestow on other human beings, I think, he has found a way to cascade into his flowers.  And as much as everyone in the apartment complex dislikes him for his inability to co-exist – he’s also been known to pull the plug out on laundry cycles because they’re too noisy after 9 P.M. – all of us appreciate him for the beauty his gardening adds to our world.

There is just this one isolated patch, right outside of my door, which has always remained barren.  Nothing seems to thrive there.  I’m convinced that this is deliberate on his part because out of all the people in this building, he seems to be the only one that resents me.  Once, on the rare occasion that I did greet him and we began to talk about the roses that were blooming, he seized the opportunity to point out the barren patch and grumbled, “That’s because of all your friends who keep us up till two in the morning.  They’ve been stampeding in there and throwing all kinds of trash until they’ve killed everything!”

As I continue to watch, unbeknownst to him, I think about his son, the one who has remained with him, the one who often waters the gardens bare-chested, much to the delight of all my friends, and who appears mired with introversion and pain.  This is the tenet of all love stories, I tell myself.  That they begin, and have their foundation in people and events long before one appear on the scene.  I think of my mother and father, of my grandparents, all of them links in a chain of atrocities committed in the name of love.  That has been my legacy, I think.  And this is where it ends, with me, a man who no longer possesses the youthful heart which made the events of the last decade thrilling, and instead of having evolved, instead of having moved closer to a promising future, has only grown older.  The family, or at least those whom I can acknowledge as family, are gradually disappearing.  Now there is only my aunt and my uncle and Mummy.  And in time, even they, one by one, will begin to drop off, leaving only me in the end.  This is what Mummy warned me of, I thought.  Of Sundays.

Damien, my neighbor’s son appears in the picture.  No, he isn’t wearing a shirt this time either.  Father and son stand next to one another as he points out to his son the patch of flowers that have been infested and need insecticide.  I have never once seen them touch or even smile at one another.  But as they stand there, side by side, looking down at the single withering rose plant, there is an undeniable sense of communion between them.  The last thirty years of my life have brought me here to this moment.  To the sight of an emotionally alienated father and son connecting through an infested rose bush, the morning after I urinated all over some guy as vengeance against the men who alienated me.

Where are these men now?  What must they be doing?  Richard, who continues to call me occasionally, and whom I am quick to turn away from when I feel myself softening, is still hurtling between various men, unable to give of himself and quick to point out how they have all left him disillusioned.  Bill, who knows?  For his sake, I hope he’s surfing somewhere in Malibu, far from the intimidating prospect of having to ice-sculpt herons and fish, and looking out from the waters onto a sun deck where his provider is petting his dog.  Nelson, whom I run into every now and then, has gotten older, and it’s become easier to smile at him and touch his cheek and wish him well with whoever is perched on his arm, throwing nettled glances at me.  He asks me about Adrian every time I see him, and I tell him, without any discomfort, that he’s doing okay and that yes, we are still very much friends.  Salman, I know from running into his lesbian roommate Meenaz, has moved back in with his family, thus completing his phylogeny into the ideal heir and extender of the Surani lineage.

When I’m about to turn away from the window, Damien turns toward me as his father walks away.  For a moment it seems I’m caught in his gaze, but then I remember that light travels to the eye and that he isn’t able to see me.  It just feels like he can.  I remain, marveling at his strong, youthful body, the chiseled, determined face which, I suspect, belies his vulnerability, and pretend that defying the laws of physics, we are in fact looking steadfastly into each other’s eyes.  Then, just as casually, he turns away as if quietly sensing me; and when he has sauntered away, I’m left looking out at an erratic gardener’s vision again.

The stirring of desire within me brings an imperceptible smile to my face.  That my imagination has not been slaughtered by life fills me with gratitude.  I was footsteps away from being committed to bitterness.  Bitterness, which attaches itself like an unshakable tumor.  Bitterness, which kills desire and dries up all the fuel for living.  I am grateful for the space between these two states.  That’s not how I want to end up.  Alone, perhaps, but not bitter.  Never bitter.  I want to continue to feel desire because I want to continue to live.

I drink the rest of my coffee, walk over to my briefcase and reach into it for a mailer that was sent to me from the
Saath
center.  Despite my complete disassociation from them, I have remained, as people disinterested or dead often do on their mailing list, and continue to receive occasional invitations to meetings and workshops.  Shortly after my resignation, a new, vibrant young woman who had just emigrated from India took over the post of the South Asian coordinator.  I unfold the flier from the envelope, noticing again, that my last name, Khosla, is still spelled wrong.  Ali S. Khoshla.  They will be gathering at the junction of Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevards in Silver Lake in about an hour to perform free HIV testing.  I fold the flier back up, stuff it in the back pocket of my jeans and walk out of my apartment, cell phone in tow.