That we weren’t coming home for Thanksgiving was a big deal. Logically, I knew it shouldn’t be, but with her this was a breach of contract. We were going to Mr. Parker’s brother’s wedding in Mexico. I knew the conversation wouldn’t be pretty. Usually dreaded conversations don’t go as badly as one expects. This one went worse.
Before the conversation, on a Sunday morning, I fortified myself with my usual weekend day drinks—Bloody Marys and Greyhounds (grapefruit and vodka)—to gather the courage to tell her. That’s not quite true. As usual when I told her something she didn’t want to hear—such as coming out to her on the phone—it was because she asked. I was on my third drink when she called to ask when Michahaze and I were going to book our tickets for Thanksgiving. LBD hit. I felt as if I were ten years old on top of the high dive at the Beaumont Country Club swimming pool, terrified to take the plunge. I took a supersize gulp of my Greyhound and jumped into the deep end.
“Did I tell you that Mr. Parker’s brother Doug is getting married?”
“No.”
“Well, you know, Michael and I got to know Doug well when he was living in DC, and of course their mother, Suzanne, has become a good friend since she’s been living in DC and visits New York all the time.”
“Uh-huh.” It felt like the lead-up to the “two kinds of sex” talk.
“Well, they’ve invited us to the wedding. And Doug has asked me to be a reader at the wedding.” I lied about the reader bit to add gravitas to my being there.
“Mmm…”
“Anyway, they’re going all out for the wedding. It’s going to be on the beach about forty miles from Cancún.”
“He’s going all that way to get married? Who’s he marrying?”
“A girl named Esther. She’s actually Mexican, but grew up in California. The thing is, the wedding is Thanksgiving weekend. And Suzanne really wants Michael and me there. She considers us family.”
“Just what exactly are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you that we’re going to Doug’s wedding in Mexico this Thanksgiving.”
“And you’re not coming home?”
“No.”
“But you come home every Thanksgiving. I count on that. You know how important the holidays are to me.”
“Well, I’ll be there at Christmas, like I am every year.”
“We’re not talking about Christmas. We’re talking about Thanksgiving.”
“I know, and we’ve been there every Thanksgiving for the last thirteen years. We really want to go to the wedding, and I’ve been asked to be in it. And it’s important to Suzanne. She considers us family.” Wrong thing to say.
“Suzanne?! What about me? She’s like family to you? She’s not family! I’m your family!”
“That’s not what I said. I said that she considers us family.” Another gulp of the Greyhound.
“That’s what you meant. I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, and after all I’ve done for you.”
“I didn’t say that I’m never coming home again, and I’ll be there at Christmas.”
“And who’s going to decorate the tree?”
“That’s what it’s about!” I exploded. “That damn tree! Fine. I’ll hire someone to come decorate the tree. It’ll be my present to you.”
“Oh, stop it. It’s not about the tree. It’s about having you here where you belong.”
Neither of us spoke for what seemed like a month of Thanksgivings.
“So you’re not going to be here?” she asked, giving me a last chance to cave and redeem myself.
“No.”
More silence.
“Well, you have really shit in the nest this time. I have nothing more to say to you.”
And she didn’t for about three weeks, which left me tortured and guilt ridden. I called Dad to at least get his blessing and absolve myself of some guilt. “She’ll get over it,” he said with resignation. “Go on and live your life.”
Once again I was in the red, and the grand total of “prove you love me as much as I love you” of that imaginary bill was in the negative digits, but I had finally broken the pattern. I had finally stood up for myself. It just took a few drinks to say what I needed to say, that’s all.
TWENTY-ONE
Lost in Paterson
Just as there’s a photo of me somewhere in Kansas, there’s a photo of me somewhere in Paterson. I’ve never seen it, but the details of that snapshot are as cloudy to me as every other detail of the day it was taken. I’m standing on an icicle-covered bridge and oozing an anemic smile; my eyes are as dull and dingy as the frozen snow surrounding me. Besides that wan smile, I’m wearing a charcoal-gray topcoat over yesterday’s outfit. My face is puffy, and if the photograph weren’t in black and white, you could see that my skin is splotchy red, almost the color of my fading copper hair. Instead of an Acapulco beach, raging waterfalls are behind me and I’m facing the photographer, but I’m not looking at him. I’m standing with my gloved hands in my pockets, shoulders hunched, and looking in the direction of Manhattan, wondering how I ended up in Paterson. New Jersey.
When I woke up—came to, really—on the morning that photo was taken, I wondered why Michahaze had put the alarm-clock radio on a Spanish talk station. An animated, but one-sided, conversation in Spanish was emanating from a corner of the bedroom. I pried open my sleep-encrusted eyes, but I wasn’t staring at the deep-red ceiling of our bedroom. Instead, I faced a drop ceiling, the kind with rectangular panels of alternating Styrofoam-esque material and fluorescent lights, like in an office building. I wasn’t next to Michahaze in the Victorian bed that Mama Jean had given us. I was alone in a twin bed. Where am I? “Uhhh,” I groaned. It is going to be an orange-alert hangover.
Across the bedroom in the opposite corner was the source of the talk radio: last night’s amigo sitting next to a brown, dorm-room fridge and talking on the phone in Spanish. I wasn’t in a bedroom, but a studio apartment. Well, not even that. It was just a narrow room, about the size of a middle manager’s office. On top of the fridge was a collection of black-and-white photographs in drugstore frames.
Fragments of last night started to descend like snowflakes: each one was different, just hard to make out. The last venue of what must have been a multi-venue night was a scant half block from our Chelsea apartment. Oh, I was so close to ending up in my own bed, and now I’m … Where am I? The evening’s preamble before that penultimate stop was a wash. Where is Michahaze in the tally of the evening’s events? Had we started out together and I kept going? Or had I been flying solo the whole evening?
Just one more must have been what I was thinking. Just one more.
Here’s what I could piece together:
Stumbling up Seventh Avenue to my street, but turning west away from the safety of my apartment because it occurred to me that in the basement of the Chelsea Hotel was a new gay hot spot.
Descending into a murky sea of faceless heads floating in a dark nightclub.
Three Latino guys—a tall drink of rum and two pocket-size ones—giggling like geishas.
The raising of glasses. “Salud!” The locking of lips—mine and those of Mr. Glass of Rum.
“You come home with us? Ees not far. I would bery much like you to be my guest tonight. Sí?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Sailing in a van with my new amigos while in deep lip-lock with Mr. Glass of Rum. Did I get his name?
Visions through the winter-crudded window of a cluster of Manhattanites bundled up under a red DON’T WALK sign, then the beady, white eyes of vehicular fish swimming toward us in the black abyss of a highway.
Me asking, “Hey? Where are we going?” The geishas answering with giggles, “We already told you!”
The van dropping me and Mr. Glass of Rum—Juan? Julio? Carlos?—in a deserted back alley of what looked like a cheap office building.
Then black.
As I lay there staring at the drop ceiling—about the only thing I remembered from the previ
ous night’s sex—I remembered why the building looked like a cheap office building. Because it was a cheap office building. Mr. Rum told me it had been converted into “studio” apartments.
While cradling the crescent-moon phone receiver between his ear and shoulder, my host turned and smiled beatifically at me from across the narrow room. He was older than I remembered him to be from seven hours ago, like ten to twelve years older. Thank God he isn’t coyote ugly. Actually, he was a hot daddy with salt-and-pepper, close-cropped hair—always a sexy look to me.
“Sí, Mamacita.”
Oh my God, he was talking to his mother.
“Él tiene pelo rojo, Mamacita. Sí, es natural!”
I didn’t speak Spanish, but I’d traveled over enough South American sheets to pick up that he was telling her I had genuine red hair. Did he tell her that he could prove it?
“Su nombre es Jaime.”
Correct. My name is “Hi-may.” But what, pray tell, is yours?
After he hung up, he walked across the room and sat on the edge of the bed and smiled down at me. “That was my mother in Colombia. I talk to her e’ery Sunday. I was telling her about chu. I tell her e’erything.”
“I’m close to my mother too.” But not that close.
Mr. Glass of Rum caressed my earlobe. “Are you hungry, my dear Hi-may?”
“Oh, I really should be getting back to town.” I sat up in bed and ran my fingers through my hair to the back of my neck, which I grabbed to keep my throbbing head from exploding. I looked out the window through yellowing white plastic miniblinds to discern where I was. All I saw were telephone lines and rooftops of gray asphalt shingles set against a dirty-white sky. “Uh, where exactly are we?”
He chuckled. “Aw, baby. You don’t remember, do you?” I sheepishly shrugged my shoulders no. “We are in my town. Paterson.”
“New Jersey?”
“Sí.”
Oh, God. I did it again. I’d broken my no-outer-borough rule for hookups: Manhattan only. I’d ended up in various Brooklyn neighborhoods, Queens, even the Bronx—but Paterson? New Jersey? This deserves a special Wanderlust Travel Award (emphasis on lust).
“Oh. Well, fancy that. But, really, I’d better be getting back to the city.”
“Why you have to go so soon? You should eat first. Have you ever been to Paterson?”
“I don’t think I have.”
“Ah. Then I will show you my Paterson! Then I will drive you home.”
Before I could say, “Buenos días, Mamacita,” we were in his truck. A large, professional Nikon camera sat between us on the bench seat. The truck crept along the quiet Sunday Main Street, which was lonelier than a Hopper painting. A border of snow-caked cars of a decade ago was in front of crumbling beaux arts–style buildings mixed in with aluminum-sided storefronts promising weaves, wigs, and Checks Cashed.
My ambassador to Paterson told me his life story: besides his beloved mamacita back in Colombia, he had a teenage son from a onetime romp with a woman (All it takes is one time, I could hear Mamacita Jean saying) when he was a teenager himself; a move to the States for a better life, where he worked as a graphic artist and indulged his passion for photography on the side.
He took me to an empty Colombian restaurant where the staff outnumbered the patrons ten to two. They all knew him, but to my frustration never said his name. After a screwdriver and some Colombian empanadas, I started to feel human again.
I slipped away to the bathroom and called Michahaze on my cell phone, hoping that the answering machine would pick up.
He answered with a terse and suspicious “Hello?”
“Hi, Michael. It’s me.”
Then a formal “Hello, James. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m okay. Last night lasted longer than I anticipated”—weak chuckle—“but I’m headed home soon.” As always during those morning-after calls, I decided to keep the details to a minimum.
As always, he kept his responses curt. “Very well, James. I’m headed out to start my day and run some errands. Maybe I’ll see you later.” That meant he wouldn’t be there when I got home, so we could both have some time to recover.
“Well, señor,” I said when I returned to the table, as if señor were my sexy moniker for him, “this was delicioso. Shall we head back to the city?” I just wanted to get home, pour a tall Greyhound, and crawl into bed for a few hours.
“Sí. But first I must show you the most beautiful part of Paterson.”
No! Please just take me home, I wanted to whimper. “Oh, I really should get back to town. I have a lot to do today.”
“Okay, but you cannot leave Paterson without seeing the Great Falls.”
Can’t I just go home? “Oh, that’s very sweet but I really should get back.”
“Do you know the Niagara Falls?”
“Yes. I’ve been there.”
“Well, the Great Falls are like these Niagara Falls. Like a—how you say?—bebé version.”
I give up. “Sure. Why not?” I said, not remembering that those words had landed me in places—figurative and literal—like Paterson all the time.
His truck snaked up hilly streets until we reached the parking lot of the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park. He grabbed that giant camera and we got out of the truck. Just as we were the only customers at the restaurant, we were the lone spectators at the waterfall.
“Someday I would like to live where you do, over there.” He pointed west to Manhattan. We could actually see the northern tip of Manhattan from where we stood. “But the Great Falls make me very proud to live here. It makes me happy to show them to you for the first time.” And to think that all these years I was just a van’s ride from the Great Falls.
We crunched our way across the snow-covered, icy ground toward the Great Falls. I heard them before I saw them. Their cacophonous roar sounded the way my head felt. We crested a hill and there they were, frantically flowing into the Passaic River hundreds of feet below. Their hyper three-dimensionality almost seemed fake, set as they were against that still photograph of frozen tundra. They looked like a giant reproduction of a reproduction of a waterfall, the kind you used to see on a lighted Coors-beer clock. My tour guide was behind me, repeatedly firing his Nikon camera. The only two things alive at that moment were the Tour Guide of Paterson and the Great Falls. I felt as dead as the landscape surrounding us.
“Beautiful. Sí?” he shouted above the crash of the falls.
“Yes. Beautiful.” And terrifying.
“Please. Stand on the bridge.” He pointed with the long lens of the camera to an icicle-covered pedestrian bridge. “I want to take your photo so I can remember this day.”
I really don’t want to remember this day. “Oh, no. I don’t want my picture taken. Not today.” It was so cold. I was shivering and the reprieve I felt from the screwdriver and food was dissipating.
“Para mi, Hi-may. Para mi.”
I sighed. “Okay.”
I walked onto the bridge and faced the Great Falls. They were falling, falling, falling into the swirling river, just a quick jump below. I thought of that van ride and how I was sucked up into the current of the night. I fantasized riding the falls down to the river and being swept away, never to see days like this again.
“Hi-may!” he shouted.
I turned around to see Latin Avedon pointing the camera at me. I was facing him but looking westerly, toward Manhattan. I tried to keep from shivering. I stuck my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders forward in a futile attempt to warm my body.
“Say chis!” he yelled.
I just want to go home. I cobbled together all the energy I could to birth a smile. “Cheese,” I murmured, certain that he couldn’t hear me.
The number one tourist attraction checked off on my tour of Paterson, we finally, finally, headed back to Manhattan. I explained to him that I had a longtime boyfriend, a husband, really, but we were open.
When Mr. Glass of Rum dropped me off in front of m
y apartment building, he held up the camera that contained the frozen image of me in front of the Great Falls of the Passaic River. With his other hand he gave me a slip of paper. I looked at it. (973) 321-4568—Manuel Antonio. Manuel Antonio!
“Gracias, Manuel Antonio.” I enunciated every syllable of his name.
“Call me sometime, mi amigo, and I will send you the photo.”
“I will do that,” I said, but I knew I wouldn’t because I never wanted to lay eyes on that photo.
I could see him back in Paterson boasting to his visiting mamacita about the copper-headed lush he’d picked up at a trendy club in Manhattan. When he tells that story, he points to the top of that dorm-room refrigerator, lousy with a collection of black-and-white photos in drugstore frames. In the center is a picture not of a bright-eyed, ripe teen, but of a puffy-faced man, wanly smiling in the gray of day as he stands in front of the Great Falls of the Passaic River—forever forlorn, forever hungover.
TWENTY-TWO
The Bare Truth
“What’s barebacking?” Mama Jean asked as I cringed. She and Dad were visiting Michahaze and me, and I’d taken the day off work to spend it with them. She and I were watching the tale end of an episode of Oprah devoted to crystal meth addicts. Oprah was interviewing a gay man whose fabulous, successful life was destroyed when he became addicted to crystal and lost everything. As he explained it, he started barebacking and became HIV-positive.
I explained the phrase to Mama Jean. “It’s when you have unprotected sex. Sex without a condom.”
She screwed up her face in disgust. “Oh, God.”
An hour later she, Dad, and I were having a drink in the living room when Michahaze came home from work. He said a brief hello and went directly through the open archway into the adjacent den to deal with a work issue.
Mama Jean leaned forward with a mischievous grin and whispered, “Bare-skinned? Bare-assed?”
Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir Page 16
