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.
II
I’M LYING IN MY BED in Manhattan’s East Village, surrounded by books on Central Europe and Romania, thinking about last week’s trip to Budapest, so repulsive and enthralling. In this year 1999, the context of m
y life is changing. The trip has marked a new start. Strangely, I’m full of all kinds of new imaginings and philosophies. The silly idea has even crossed my mind that sex in the dark must have been invented by northerners like these chilly Hungarians, whose weak-lashed eyes would have found the sunlight too clinical.
I put down the book on the Magyar tribes, and my head falls back as if hypnotized. Lust for flesh under the smell of pelts must not have been very different from hunger for meat, I imagine, and I myself am in a swoon, famished for Romulus.
I roll the melodramatic name across my tongue. He’s called twice already, each time in need of money. Charity needs images. When he asked for a hundred dollars to bribe the doctor of his stabbed, probably watery-haired girlfriend to get better treatment, I had to picture the white walls of the hospital, him perched yawningly, casually, by the bed.
His second call was to announce that he was leaving Budapest and the penniless mess into which he’d sunk. When he got to the train station, I wired a little more money, after which he disappeared. He never showed up for Christmas at his mother’s home in Sibiu, Romania, as he’d promised. I called there four times that day, to the perplexed reactions of mother and brothers and cousins.
A week later, he did show up in Sibiu and immediately called collect. With weary, casual poise he detailed his attempt to get to Italy by way of Vienna—and my money. It was, he claimed, a spur-of-the-moment decision. He bought the ticket and hid in the train toilet when they got to the Austrian border but was caught anyway, and spent a depressing Christmas in jail that he didn’t want to talk about. Still, I tried to picture him lean and inebriated from depression, squatting in a corner of the cell, waiting for the long unraveling of red tape that would ship him home on some hard train seat.
Home—Romania—is a shadow-desire for me; a few blurry TV images of a monster dictator and his wife assassinated—two crumpled bodies in black-and-white. It was the only violent anti-Communist revolution in Eastern Europe. And then there was that time, in 1991, I think, when I went to Hamburg to work on a film script. At the train station and in the St. Pauli district there were clusters of teenaged refugees working as hustlers who I found out were Romanian. I remember their brooding young faces, with similarly wolfish haircuts and that identical expression—what would you call it? Seductively depressed. A stylized, toreador-Elvis look, full of bruised machismo and oversensitivity, bewildered surrender.
Other images of his country, perhaps no less obscure, emerge from a book I choose from those scattered on the bed. They’re morbid and fantastic like German fairy tales, full of romanticism and guilt. In a palace in Bucharest, across the room from a throne, a balcony veiled by gauze curtains; food on gold platters and champagne in a crystal flute are being carried to it by a servant in black livery. From time to time, a king in a white silk cloak imprinted with a crimson cross looks up at the curtains to raise his glass in a toast. He is Carol II (1893-1953), prince of the German house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the last king of non-Fascist Romania. The woman hidden in the balcony to whom the king raises his toast is his mistress—Elena, née Lupescu, from the Romanian word lup for “wolf.” She’s at least half Jewish, and her life is in danger. The country is turning Fascist and is against her. They’ve accused her of being a “voluptuous parasite,” the king’s Semitic manipulator, whose wiliness is degenerating the nation. . . .
What kind of country can produce such risky melodrama? I actually know very little about it. According to these books on my bed, Romania has always been a land of necessary suspicion, hemmed in by larger powers greedily eyeing its riches. A manipulative Austro-Hungarian Empire lurking in the west, swallowing and regurgitating its western territories; to the northeast, the heavy fist of Russia clamoring for influence; to the south, an implacable, exploitative Ottoman Empire and an envious Bulgaria.
Its people date back to the year 101, when tribes known as Dacians are conquered by the Roman Empire, whose soldiers intermarry with their women. By the end of the thirteenth century, it has become two fertile principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia, which hug the Danube River. Centuries of occupation from nearby Turkey follow, aided by Greek governors called Phanariots, who bleed the country dry. The Romanian landed gentry, the Boyars, are in thrall to these foreign leaders; and to compensate for it, they in turn suck the wealth of the land to its marrow, leaving the peasants impoverished and bitter. To make matters worse, Russian and Austro-Hungarian neighbors are hungering for mineral-rich Romanian territory, playing for it against the Turks in a brutal game of Monopoly. But during all this—for some unexplainable reason—the people keep their ancient identity: they believe they are the only true surviving Latins, adrift in a hostile Slavic wilderness.
It’s only in the aftermath of the Crimean War (1854 -1856) that Romania finally emerges as a nation. In 1866, a foreigner comes to claim the kingship, hoping to put an end to power squabbles. The outsider is the German Carol I, a prince of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty, who governs Romania with the Teutonic discipline and iron hand of his royal forebears. In 1893, Carol I’s weak nephew and future successor, Ferdinand, marries the stunning Marie, Princess of Edinburgh, the eldest daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
It is charismatic Marie, the queen beginning in 1914, who brings Romania to the attention of the West. During the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, she works seductively behind the scenes to acquire Transylvania for Romania and enlarge the country along the lines of its present dimensions. But soon she will be forcibly put on the shelf by her profligate son, Carol II; and under his rule, Romania slips irresistibly toward Fascism and Nazi control. When World War II ends, the country becomes a member of the Communist bloc.
A SHUDDER, swallowed by a pit of longing. Is it any wonder that my new obsession comes from an amputated country with a fractured identity, a country that is like an abused child from a broken home? How much of this traumatic history is hidden in his dark, suspicious eyes? All I know is: I have to find out.
Such thoughts rattle through my mind as I call my editor to report on the assignment. His voice skips only a beat when I announce that the piece I’m going to write for him will be called “The Romanian.”
“What happened to the brothel-in-Budapest assignment we paid for?”
“Trust me, this will slay you,” I shoot back with the conviction of an addict. Then I launch into a breathless, rambling monologue. Heterosexual though he may be, my editor is a connoisseur of any form of sexual energy, and I can hear him savor each nugget. But when I try to explain who Romulus is, I’m at a loss for words.
“He’s a . . .” I don’t say “vampire.” Romulus comes from the land of Dracula, and it would be too much of a cliché to resort to those kinds of metaphors.
“He’s . . .”
I falter. Because he’s no one, I suddenly realize, a person with no identity moving illegally and aimlessly from country to country. A vacuum sucking my lost life forward.
Then who am I?
I am, it occurs to me as I put down the phone and page obsessively through the books on Romania, a cultural leftover. An old-fashioned, pre-Stonewall homosexual. As recently as six years ago, I still spent white nights in the company of Midtown Manhattan hustlers, ex-cons and junkies, sponging up their speech and vampirizing their emotions to write about. This was, of course, before Manhattan became an entertainment complex for singles of a single class and gay life began turning into just another assimilation story. Now that gay life has grown blander and duller, it seems more and more identical to the world of family values I thought I was escaping. The field of my libido has shrunk; and since writing is desire, my texts have grown shorter. I long for new voices and accents, new worlds to mirror my loneliness and isolation.
To get back to the new world of Budapest and its offer of pure social disconnection, I’ve taken a job as a technical writer in a financial printing company going digital. It’s the dullest job of my life. Five d
ays a week I spend seven hours in a stifling, windowless room packed to bursting with Indians, Pakistanis and Russians, whose skills have bought them entrance to the United States on temporary visas. The room is white and silent, except for the tic-tac-tic of keyboards, endlessly producing 0’s and 1’s and 0’s and 1’s, for hours, days, weeks, months, without any programmer’s looking up or stopping or speaking, for fear of being sent away from the West and back to poverty.
I gaze at my own dazed reflection in the poisonous cathode-ray screen, adding a tac to their tic every once in a while, checking expedia.com every twenty minutes or so to type the words “new york . . . budapest” or dropping my head to read the book in my lap about King Carol II’s Jewish mistress, Lupescu: The Story of a Royal Love Affair.
In exchange for an impossible fantasy about a hustler, I’ve convinced myself that this temporary situation doesn’t matter. My mind is full of strategies for fleeing the city into the next touch of his hard-rubber body. In this stuffy white room, excitement courses through me like sap. I imagine great bursts of inspiration. Books about Eastern Europe and love and risk and class dissonance. Sexual desire, I’m convinced, is merely the interplay of social inequities—or should I say dreams about the libidinal possibilities of the Other. But now that gentrification has increasingly separated us from a clash with those who are different, libidinal energies are becoming blocked and denatured. If we want to, we can go our whole lives without seeing someone from another background. The Other has been banished from our reach. Am I foolish enough to think that I’ve found a way out?
Earlier I claimed that arousal is just an unconscious sense of discrepancy, a feeling of imbalance. Then desire, or love, must be the servant of that same impression of injustice—a perverse urge to settle the balance.
The Romanian Page 2
