The Romanian (2 page)

Our room is a tiny cell, offering little space between the mahogany wardrobe and the narrow bed. Tossing the black turtleneck onto a chair, he begins a mournful striptease. Slight, satin-skinned and covered with fresh bruises and old scars, he's nearly half the weight of my stocky, infinitely less wily body, cultivated by the ingenuous values of middle-class America.

He pounces for a seldom-had shower, while I stare at the worn-out pants and black turtleneck thrown across the chair . . . wondering whether I should go through his pockets, look for weapons or clues that he's been lying about his story. Instead, I lock the door of the room from the inside and slide the key far under the mattress. Only by overturning the mattress with me on it will he be able to rob me and leave. He'd have to murder me first.

The shower goes on endlessly, and then he's leaping into bed, his body snaky and slippery, his strong thighs quickly locking with mine.

“There's something Russian about you.”

“Jewish,” I add, as if he'd ended the word with a hyphen.

“Not a problem,” he counters with blanking eyes, as my mind scans memories of old history books for the Romanian role in the Holocaust. Gently caressing my chest, he puts moist lips against my ear. “Put on the porno channel?”

Bare white concrete walls, lawn chairs, bodies, a fountain pool and potted palms, lit mercilessly by halogen lamps, explode from the screen in a utopia of flesh, aluminum and water.

German porno.

Upon a Mediterranean-blue chaise longue, a blonde lies masturbating. Ample breasts with large brown nipples pointing away from each other. Now a hairless, broad-shouldered demi-god has stooped to eat her cunt in close-up. His tanned biceps bulge around her svelte thighs, against a fountain playing in the background. There's an unreal crispness to the digitized images flooding hallucinated libido into our room, now colored by the harsh, shifting, bright reflections.

I remember his name: Romulus.

He doesn't shed his social identity with his clothes as some people do. Nudity only sharpens his persona. Sex before the hard-edged German porn images becomes a feline experience—agile and evasive, always indicating beyond. His skin feels glossy, poreless. His rough hands spin out my excitement without sacrificing the gentlemanly cover of his cherished masculinity. They play across my nipples as he masturbates me, while I ponder the fact that such elegant sexual complexity as he's able to offer is in some way a handmaiden of the grotesque political prohibitions against homosexuals in his country. With proud narcissism he offers his body to be fondled, and when I ask him to put my cock in his mouth, he obliges. Sex as he sees it is a game of finesse and street honor, better understood by the disinherited. Through a drape of foreskin, droplets spray across my chest.

The German is bent back in an impossibly gymnastic posture, her legs straddling the gushing fountain, while the man's enormous cock slides in and out of her like a piston, his buttocks tensed like two planets.

It's almost dawn, but the privilege of lying next to such a petite, perfectly sculpted body keeps me entangled. I switch the channel to an American film, whose disturbing plot absorbs us as gray light seeps through the window. It's the story of wilderness scouts of the Old West, lost without food in a blizzard. Limbs freeze and gangrene, and food sticks to chilblained lips. Primal hunger transforms one of them into a deranged cannibal who must be kept chained, but not until he's eaten several people. The intricate, grisly tale of murder surging from hunger and Western pragmatism seems to suit Romulus well, who nods and clucks his tongue at each twist of plot, as if such occurrences were an ordinary part of life.

Several shifts of maids have knocked and gone before we disentangle. Doubtless, staying with me is a better option than going back to the shopping mall for the rest of the day. Then we hurry. He has to meet four other Romanians at Nyugati Station. They're all going to Slovakia for the day to renew their visas. They have to leave Hungary once a month in order to live here.

Filled with nervous excitement at the chance of sampling his daytime life, I take him for a quick lunch at a bad Italian restaurant. Foolishly I offer to rent a car and drive all of them to the border and back, or take them to Romania for the day. My imagination zooms through the Hungarian countryside toward the forbiddingly exotic Romanian border, pressed between young vagrants who trust my generosity and courage. But my offer wins only a look of astonished suspicion, though after skipping a beat, he shrugs. “Okay.”

On the way to meet his friends, he offers me a rapid tour of the station and points out a gangly man sidling through the crowd. “A Romanian,” he says, with a grim smile, “a great pickpocket.” We meet up with his friends, and the pickpocket is standing among them. Like Romulus, they're all spookily suave with their low-cost belled jeans, well-groomed hair and grimy hands. They size me up behind a restrained politeness. The gangly pickpocket looks relaxed, confident, but keeps refusing eye contact. A conspiratorial conversation in Romanian pitter-patters among them under their breaths, and Romulus informs me, “They say you are driving me to Romania too dangerous. Discrepancy between us will say to authorities that maybe we carry drug.” He offers a hand stiff with pretentious camaraderie that the others scrutinize ironically. He'll meet me the next morning at eleven, at the Gellért, he promises. Off they go.

 

 

WHEN—PREDICTABLY, I SUPPOSE—he doesn't show up, the hysterical ecstasy of that first encounter takes a nosedive. It's as if I'd been plunked back into the West with all its deceptive marketing formulas. I go back to my room, sullenly change into a robe and head for the gloomy, cathedral-like bowels of the Gellért. They contain an enormous complex of baths filled with reproductions of classical statues and faux Byzantine columns, wanly lit by high, small windows in a vaulted, turquoise-tiled ceiling. There are a few curative pools featuring gnarled old men attached to monstrous pulley machines, intended with water therapy to correct skeletal misalignments.

In my mood of rejection, the lumbering locker attendant's frown seems accusatory. A burly masseur offers me an inexpensive half-hour mauling, but his hands are like an interrogation.

Feeling unpleasantly anesthetized, I go about my assignment for the online magazine. The only male brothel in Budapest is a tiny establishment with barely enough room for a horseshoeshaped bar and seven stools. Three of them are taken up by the evening's trade. A platinum-haired adolescent, pasty and tubercularly elegant, and a darker, duller-looking hulk fix me in their sights. The underfed blond has a brutal effeminacy, a deprived Dietrich face, bony features set off by plush lips.

The bartender is a fat Ukrainian woman with a malicious smile and fast, greedy fingers, who increases the price with every drink I buy. Her hospitality is predatory, full of the threat of violence to enforce rules. The Dietrich boy, who speaks passable English, is fumbling in my lap with moist, wormy fingers. Nothing illuminates the underground chamber to which he leads me but the red coils of a heater and American porn glaring idiotically from a TV monitor. As I come, I'm instructed to shoot on the floor.

The next day I spend the afternoon wandering through the chilly catacombs of the castle district on the Buda hillside, where female Soviet-style museum guards with steel-clamped expressions stand vigilant in their black costumes and white gloves. Outside, along the river, I pass svelte and busty women who exude Cold War chic like stewardess extras in
From Russia with Love.
A rosy-cheeked teenaged girl with longish, watery hair and dark circles under her eyes stares at me suspiciously. Everybody seems fiercely introverted.

Depressed, I walk over the bridge toward the stretch of waterfront where the black figure separated from black the night before. If I see him, I won't stop to speak.

Almost on cue, he's there, chatting idly with a group of underaged hustlers. He swaggers toward me with fake bullish-ness, as if ready to pick a fight. He'd waited, he exclaims cockily, in front of the Gellért for almost an hour. “But we were supposed to meet in the lobby,” I protest.

Did I really expect him to make it past that doorman in his monkey suit of gold braid? Our dissonance of expectations produces an erotic, masochistic charge. What am I but a foolish tourist, blithely unaware of the class problems of a sex worker who, though without a future, is far savvier when it comes to social boundaries? He knows they won't let him into that hotel alone. Why didn't the ugly American think of it? This is when it occurs to me that it really is some unconscious feeling of discrepancy that arouses all of us. More than anything, I want to keep experiencing that epiphany.

Soon I'm swept into his sphere of control, while he stays grave and endlessly poised. Night comes, then grows blacker and more remote as we careen from bar to bar. With glum, masochistic eyes, he gives a vague, amoral report of the possibility of his Hungarian girlfriend's pregnancy, the opportunistic options for him in terms of bringing him closer to the European Union should they marry, and the confused, deadened affect produced in him by the idea of creating another life. His monologue is set off by numbed half-gestures of a cigarette-holding hand, as smoke curls across his luminously sallow skin.

When he met her a year ago, the possibly pregnant Hungarian girlfriend was, according to him, a good high school girl who lived with her parents. My vampiric empathy produces an image of her with the heart-shaped face, rosy cheeks and watered-honey hair of the teenaged Hungarian I passed that afternoon by the catacombs. Her moist, fragile hands poke from the sleeves of her oversized parka anxiously clasping his in hopeless excitement. When she's naked, I somehow believe, her body is pale pink and bruises easily. Her cunt hairs must be soft brown, with an overly sensitive slit that he has to coax open. And her gasping mouth saturates a strand of the hair falling across her face as he enters her, while she clutches his hard, slippery back, denting his skin with the cheap ring on her finger.

My stunned, mute gaze confuses him at first. It's too complicated for a john's. All he can say is, “I know you trying to read my thoughts. But truth is, me myself don't know what I am thinking.”

He tells me that when the month in a rented room with the girl ended, there wasn't any more money. She was afraid to go back to her parents and became homeless with him. She would wait in the cold on the Corso while he combed shopping malls and bars for ways to make money or went off to one of the hotels to turn a trick. Then she, too, began working the Corso. After a few scary episodes, she found her way into a cathouse run by and for Asians.

“Every time I see a Chinese person I want to killing him,” he spits.

 

 

WE DON'T GET BACK to the hotel until four a.m., and the sour desk clerk has had it. “Are you a guest?” he shoots out, before we can even make it to the elevator. I explain that my friend is only going up to watch television with me for a while, but the man insists on seeing his passport. When Romulus holds it out, he snatches it and locks it in a drawer.

We head for the elevator. I'm shaking with outrage, or is it fascination? Romulus has that stiff, sardonic expression of someone whose opinion of the human species has once again been proven. Inside the room, I barricade the door with a tilted chair and start pacing manically. What, if any, are the sanctions against prostitution in this country? I'd never thought to check. What's lurking on his record? Am I harboring a passport forger, or a murderer? How reasonable are the Hungarian police, so recently working for a Communist regime? What's their attitude toward homosexuality?

Holding a cigarette, he watches with sad bemusement, the way some people watch animals pacing in their cage at the zoo. Rapid footsteps in the hall are getting closer, but they just continue past.

My fingers shakily dial the desk clerk. “My friend is staying the night. Give us a double room and bring his passport back right away.”

“Someone will be there to remove you,” snaps the clerk, in what I hope is a case of bad English.

A formal, frowning bellboy arrives to swiftly gather our belongings, sweeping them, and us, to another, much larger room. I paste a dignified expression on my face and march Romulus down to the lobby to reclaim his passport. By this point we've fallen into a kind of corny intimacy based on my “heroic” behavior—in which formulas of gratitude, even little vows and cute recriminations, become the script. “I go with men, I think,” says he, undressing on the velvet-upholstered stool, “because of something to do with the father. You would be the father I would wish to have.”

To his vast credit, he plays this awkward part gracefully, even allowing new sexual liberties by putting them in the context of manly friendship. Of course, a blow job given in friendship isn't the most arousing, but it stays in the memory longer.

Then comes the quick exit: hurried packing, the exchange of money plus extra money, his rush to meet his girlfriend making her early-morning egress from the whorehouse.

The desk clerk has a surprise in store for me. Our new room has been billed as costing four times as much as the other—more than $350.

 

 

AN HOUR INTO THE TRANSFER AT PARIS, a not altogether unfamiliar feeling begins its leaden crush. I could describe it, I suppose, by the term “sinking heart.” It's part of a formula of erotic intensity, which, like most, never takes into account its own aftermath. Just before releasing subjects from the trance that causes their foolish behavior, stage hypnotists tell them, You will remember nothing. But maybe misgivings nag at the subject afterward.

My black despair has little to do with anything so banal as our physical separation but is, instead, that sense of shame and helplessness that comes from opening up to a certain type of hopeless person. Just days later, he'll call me in New York (collect) to tell me that his girlfriend has been stabbed at the cathouse by an irate client. He'll ask me to wire money, and I will.