She laughs to herself, shakes her head, looks at the roof a moment. This would have been a nice time to say my name, Emma.
“No one,” she says. “No, someone, just no one … no one I’ve met yet. A future love, I think.”
Yeah, I thought, and maybe because I’d been such a jerk to Betsy the moment before I was capable of being better than my usual rotten selfish self, and I thought: Yeah, Emma, I hope one day you do find your future love and I hope it lasts and I hope I like him and I hope it’s been worth the wait and, mostly, I hope you’re happy.
“I think you’re still hung up on Emma,” said Kevin, giving an unsolicited opinion, over at my place on Avenue A for the third time this week. “But I sort of liked Betsy too…”
You go out with her then.
“Too many women, Gil. Too much Drama in your life.”
If I missed Drama, all I had to do was follow the Kevin and Nicholas and Soho Center saga. Kevin told me the whole story. Nicholas had this wife (now ex-wife) and they married when he was in law school and they were twenty-five or so. Nicholas dropped out and opened up the theater with this gay fellow named Michael. Nicholas fell in love with Michael, divorced wife. Wife sued for half the profits of the theater, half Nicholas’s income and many other spiteful things, her spite perhaps justified. Michael’s ex-boyfriend Randall kept pursuing Nicholas behind Michael’s back … This paragraph could finish out the book—hundreds of twists and turns. What it amounted to was Nicholas, this slightly exhausted, suffering presence in his mid-thirties, with a beard and beret, was now living with Kevin, this perpetual teenager who seemed to precipitate a weekly fight. By mid-September it was, according to Kevin, a daily fight. As he began to drift away from Nicholas, he started coming to see me. He was terribly camp and I used to cringe walking down Avenue A with him as he flamed out like a Texas oilfire, being as outrageous as possible. Mostly, he was harmless.
“Gil honey look what I found,” he said, traipsing into my room one time, having worked his way through Ruiz’s store. He had picked up a Spanish teenybopper magazine that Manuela must have left lying around.
You are going to give that back, aren’t you?
“Nonsense, finders keepers.” He flopped down on my bed. “I love these Puerto Rican boys … look at these Menudo kids.”
They’re like thirteen and fourteen, Kevin.
He arched an eyebrow, peering over the magazine: “Well, you gotta break ’em in young these days. Gil, listen, listen—this one is for me…” He read from the magazine: “‘Pablo is fifteen. His favorite color is purple.’ Gil, my favorite color is purple. We’re meant for each other.”
Would you put that down?
“Purple huh? See, he must be a budding little faggot already.” Kevin read on: “‘Pablo loves to play futbol.’ Probably loves it when all the other hot little Puerto Rican boys pile up on him in a tackle.”
You’re thinking American football, that’s soccer, I reminded.
Kevin, still reading: “‘Pablo likes cars. Pablo’s favorite group is the Beatles. His favorite food is chicken.’ I can DO chicken, Gil—I can give the Colonel a run for his money.”
Finger-lickin’ good?
“You are so bitchy, Gil—you’d make such a good queen, you know. I’m making you my project. And there’s absolutely nothing—NOTHING, do you hear me?—between me and Colonel Sanders at this time. Don’t know how these rumors get started. Of course, if the old boy dropped enough money in my direction…”
Give me a break.
“Hmmm,” Kevin grimaced as he read on, putting down the issue of MenudoMania. “Problems in paradise. It asks Pablo who his best friend is and Pablo says: ‘Jesus Christ.’ This one is going to take some doing. A LOT of ground work. God knows, though, I have the time.”
Is it really that bad with Nicholas?
“We still do a lot of things together. Like fight, say awful things about each other, complain, bitch, run out of money. Between his ex-wife and Michael poor Nickie isn’t the least bit fun anymore. I’m going to become celibate like Emma, that friend of yours.”
Yeah? Well I’m not supposed to be going around telling everyone about her celibacy, so be subtle if you see her.
“I do want to talk to her about it. I think it’s the only way I can keep sane. I don’t want any more involvements in my life, unless it’s with Pablo. I have always loved Pablo and you know that’s true—I’ve been saying it for years.”
Since he was nine, right?
“You know … oh I am not going to tell you this.”
Lemme guess: that tired old story where you lost your virginity on the bus with some nineteen-year-old serviceman in South Carolina when you were thirteen. You have told that story at parties, Kevin—at family gatherings, to your mother, at the White House, they show reruns on TV of you telling that story …
“I only told Kathy at the theater and see where it gets me. It’s a good story and if I’d had a head on my shoulders I woulda taken the soldier’s name, because when he gets out of the army—”
Dishonorable discharge?
“Would you cut it out? I’m supposed to be the bitch here, not you. Anyway, a man in uniform—darling, like Dietrich in Morocco, I’d follow my soldier across the dunes, French Foreign Legion-like. Orlando can’t leave the Navy alone, by the way.”
I gave Kevin a beer. Once in every visit we talked about his friend Orlando. Orlando was this SCREAMING black transvestite trying to make it in the drag queen circuit (saving his money for Paris, etc.) and most of Kevin’s stories about Orlando were PURE fiction, I’m sure. Kevin kept telling me he was going to bring Orlando by, or we would have to visit him at the sex shop where Orlando worked days, but it never happened, enforcing my suspicion Orlando was a fake front for Kevin’s stories. Orlando, I always said, wasn’t his real name—
“It is too.”
No one is named that.
“Oh you should hear him on this subject. Orlando is a book by D. H. Lawrence or somebody where the character Orlando changes sexes. He says his mother named him after that. I said, girl, she did not, she named you after Disney World. Oh it gets him so mad!”
And what’s Orlando up to this week?
“Well they’ve got new things in on 42nd Street. We really should go down and see them. They have these new motorized vaginas. I mean, straight people are beyond me anyway, but good god, who would want to sit there and put themselves in a plastic slit that makes a noise like a blender, you know? They say we’re perverts, ha! They’ve got new dolls now, ones you don’t have to blow up with air. Skin approximation is getting better too, Orlando says—it’s not so plasticky anymore. And the new dolls—get this—come with REAL pubic hair—”
Get outa here.
“NO, it’s true, Orlando swears. There’s a company in Ohio that puts them out with real pubic hair. I mean these girls grow it, shave it off, hand it in and then they attach it. And they’ve gotten vaginal scent now. I mean, honey. I mean, that was the good thing about the doll in the first place, right? You didn’t have to mess with vaginal scent—that was the PLUS, right? How you can go down there, Gil, is beyond me.”
I’m not going down there very often these days. Why is it, Kevin, that when you visit the level of the conversation doesn’t even make it UP to the gutter?
“I’m only this bad around you. And guess what Orlando says they have in now.”
Okay tell me.
“Rejecta. She’s the new doll, Gil. She comes with a tape cassette with several ten-minute routines. She rejects the man who’s pumping away on top of her. She has this bitchy voice: ‘What? You call that a penis? It’s so small.’ And ‘You’re so disgusting, I bet you can’t get it up … you’ll never come … you miserable worm, why don’t you get off me, you fat piece of shit?’”
I don’t believe that for one second.
“Honey, it’s down there. You never believe me—this stuff exists on 42nd Street. Rejecta. I’m buying her for your birthday, Gilbert, so you wo
n’t be alone. I worry about you.”
Thanks a lot.
“Rejecta, she exists, I swear. What you straight people won’t do to get off, I mean it. Anyway, Orlando says hi.”
I almost let Kevin have his way with me one night.
Yeah, it’s true. We went and had cocktails and he got me camping and being bitchy just like him, and said, Hey, let’s make passersby think we’re lovers and so we walked arm in arm around Sheridan Square and got stares and winks and offers and reactions of all kinds. I was just waiting for Aunt Sarah to round the corner on her Garden Club Convention, up for the weekend. Or Betsy. Though that would serve her right.
“I bet money you’ve done it,” said Kevin, after we left the liquor store, picking up some gin. He could only drink gin and tonic.
Done what?
“Slept with a guy,” he said, taking my arm again. “C’mon, tell Uncle Kevin. Church camp, Scouts maybe? Freshman year. You HAD to in Scouts, that’s all anyone does on those camping trips is learn how to masturbate.”
Afraid not. Although …
“C’MON, Gil, tell me. I know you’re essentially straight (not that I couldn’t ruin you, ruin you in five minutes for other women). Tell Kevin all.”
I was eleven, Sammy Henderson was twelve, we were tent-mates in the Platypus Patrol. Sammy had torn out this picture of a woman on her knees, showing us her ample buttocks, from one of his father’s porn magazines. He started doing something and I asked what he was doing in his sleeping bag and he said, boy Freeman you don’t know anything, I’m doing what you do with a girl except with no girl. You know what you do with a girl like this? I was too intimidated to answer. You dummy Freeman, you get hard and …
“What? Stop laughing, tell me!”
… you get hard, Freeman, and you stick it up her BUTT.
We both, drunkenly, got into hysterics over this.
“Well Sammy had the right idea,” said Kevin, doubled over trying to breathe.
Sammy Henderson, I went on, was also the guy who had a birthday party for his thirteenth birthday and we stayed up late after Mr. and Mrs. Henderson had gone to bed, and there was this late sleazy ’60s movie with Dean Martin or someone, and Connie Stevens, and Sammy thought Connie Stevens was the hottest woman in the world and had written Connie Stevens letters, and he pulled out his prick and ran up to the set with all of us watching saying: I’m gonna fuck Connie Stevens on the TV …
More hysterics, drunken rolling about.
“I gotta meet this Sammy Henderson. Where is he now, Gil?”
Married, has a kid, works for the Army recruiting office or something.
Kevin and I laughed all the way home. He told me stories that were alternately heartbreaking and uproarious about trying to get straight boys at Christian Church Camp to sleep with him, finally ending up with the born-again counselor.
Kevin asked if he could stay over, as it was raining, and I said yes. And he asked if he could sleep beside me on the one and only mattress and I said yes.
“Just like a slumber party, huh?” he said after being quiet for a while.
Yep, no Connie Stevens movie though.
“Can’t have everything.” Kevin put his hand on my shoulder and I didn’t pull away. He began: “Now you see how harmless it is to be in bed with me. This is as far as I’ll go. I will not go any farther unless you tell me to. I want to point out to you how very little technical difference there is between my hand on your shoulder and, say, my hand on your arm. You would concede this, wouldn’t you?”
Yes Kevin.
Kevin put his hand on my arm. “Now I’m going to sort of … here, slip in right here, beside you, close like this. Now no one would say this is queer. This is not technically anything like homosexuality. I am a homosexual and I know homosexuality when I see it and this is not it. This is friendly affection.”
I was laughing. Right, Kevin.
“Now if you’re wondering about the difference between say this and, say, real homosexuality…”
I think I know the difference Kevin. Let’s go to sleep.
“Gilbert you are a drag. Let’s just conduct a little experiment here. This is in the interest of science, darling—I want to know what a straight boy thinks of as too far. I will behave as I’m inclined to behave and you tell me when I have crossed the point at which you are not inclined I should go further.” He put his arm under me and hugged me.
Okay … that’s, that’s all right.
“Right,” he said. Then he stroked my hair.
Dubious.
He put his arm across my chest and nuzzled closer.
Borderline.
He slipped a hand down to my inner thigh.
WHOA THERE.
“Afraid you were going to say that,” he sighed. “Oh well. You give it some thought, Gilbert Freeman.” And then he kissed me good night and we drunkenly drifted off to sleep.
I miss Kevin. He, like so many gay men, moved west to do some modeling or TV work or see a lover or all of the above—he just knew he had to get west. Hope he’s all right, what with AIDS and all that.
Of course, why move west when you can have the rootin’ tootin’ Wild Frontier right in your very own neighborhood. I refer to when Ruiz’s store was robbed at gunpoint. I’m in my room and I hear KRRTAO KRRTAO! which sounded like gunshots on TV except realer … Then yelling and screaming outside ensues, commotion upstairs as Sẽnora Ruiz must have heard them too. Should I go out? What if the robbers are still there? I’m not armed … yes, go out and see if he needs help—WAIT, of course, calm down and call the police. Sẽnora Ruiz couldn’t communicate. I called 911, fingers trembling, voice shaky, throat dry, my hands emptied of blood, cold as ice … yeah, Avenue A, Ruiz’s Caribbean Foodstore, hurry, I said. There was someone running toward the house, bounding up the steps of the family house. A criminal? No it was Rickie, and he and Sẽnora Ruiz were screaming, crying, barreling back down the next second. I had to go out too.
The aisles of food and cans and boxes had been overturned, everything knocked to the floor. Sẽnor Ruiz was standing there—thank god, thank god, I thought, he isn’t lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He saw us, sort of registered our presence, cursed, shook his fists, bellowed, “The stoopid kids—they were kids, they were stoopid kids, I see them every day—you!” He seized Rickie by the collar: “I see YOU hangin’ out wid thees kids all the time, my own SON.” He threw poor Rickie forward into the pile of boxes in the aisle—Rickie tried a faint protest. “If I ever see you with those riffraff again,” Sẽnor Ruiz threatened in a muddle of Spanish and English, “I keel you my own SON. You go to the police, you tell ’em everytheeng you know about those boys—my own son!”
“Papa,” Rickie managed, “I don’t know ’em—”
“So help me I gonna…”
Sẽnora Ruiz screamed, tears flowed, she cupped Sẽnor Ruiz’s face in her hands, she implored the Virgin, she shook her head in disbelief, she was in a despair I had never seen a human being display … and then I saw: as Sẽnor Ruiz was ranting and waving his hands above his head, his jacket revealed a patch of red on his shirt. It was growing. He had been shot.
Police sirens. The police came in—
Radio for an ambulance, I said.
“No ambulancia…” muttered Sẽnor Ruiz, not quite registering what had happened to him. “No, I no shot, no ees no necessary…”
The policeman took Sẽnor Ruiz’s arm and led him outside, all the while Sẽnor Ruiz mildly protesting going anywhere, he had to clean up the store, look at the mess, look what they did—ah, he had to pick it all up, no time for police reports, for the ambulance. Manuela had run home bawling as the news spread through the neighborhood; Johnnie was out somewhere. Manuela and her mother fell upon each other, crying, screaming, denouncing the world in Spanish.
The ambulance arrived.
“Tell the Sẽnora that he is all right, he is just hit in the shoulder, he is all right,” said the policeman, raising his voice to add,
“Sẽnora, he is bueno, muy bueno…”
Sẽnora Ruiz yelled something frantically about going with him; they forbade it. A taxi had been called and she and the family were to follow. No, no, no, she protested, she had to be with her husband—it was insane! In Puerto Rico they would not have rules like this!
“Thees is a terrible country,” she told me, her tear-filled eyes cutting deep into me; she clutched my arm, hurting me: “Thees a terrible place, America. Qúe horrible, qúe terrible…” And she released me, almost in shock—her children and the officer helping her into a cab …
Between questions and locking doors and writing a note for Johnnie and talking to two policemen, I numbly made my way through the crowd, the spectators, the gawkers, went out into the city in the direction of Emma’s—not home, not back to my flat, I could not go there, my heart was beating too fast to lie down. I had to walk, walk briskly, stopping for nothing, not for stoplights—I almost got myself run over, I heard a car horn, a curse—stopping for nothing. My walk became a run. This is panic, isn’t it? This is weird—a minute ago in the presence of gunfire and emergency I was calm and efficient and now I’m falling apart. I should stop and calm down. But I can’t stop.
“Hey man, what’sa mattuh, brothuh?” said one member of a gang of youths I walked into. I’m hyperventilating. I’ll kill them if they touch me—
“You on some kinda trip, my man?”
“Those pockets look full to me, T. G.—”
“He’s freakin’ out, man—”
I don’t know what I yelled at them, but it scared them enough to back off and I am running again, hurtling past strangers, pushing people, damn them, out of my way. Where am I running to? I have nowhere to run. I belong to no one. My mommy and daddy live one thousand miles away and my older brother is in Des Moines and my theater friends aren’t really my friends, and I’m panicking not only because there are gunshots and gangs and danger and death in this city, but I’m just so goddam tiny and floating free unattached to anything and I have no one no one no one … except Emma.
“Gil, what’s wrong? You’re white as a sheet!” Emma said, bringing me inside, taking my arm, leading me to a chair.
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 36
