When the magistrate pronounced them man and wife, Étie initiated the kiss with a gentleman’s modesty, but Frankie, actress that she was, went the whole nine yards, filling my baby’s mouth with more tongue than I thought was necessary. But in spite of my tinge of jealousy, I rapid-snapped the gesture from every angle imaginable and then joined the others gathered in cheering, applauding, hugging and kissing the new couple with an enthusiasm as festive as the Charles and Di nuptials.
That night I made love to my baby sister’s husband as if it were my honeymoon night. And in a sense it was. It was our honeymoon night. Ours.
The next day, Sunday, I flew back to Los Angeles to begin prepping for my photo shoot with Snoop, which would take place that Wednesday in a faux Compton setting at a studio in Burbank.
Everything was going well. I talked to Étie and Sis every day and they emailed me wonderfully convincing pictures taken by resort staffers of the “loving couple” enjoying their honeymoon vacation—scuba diving, parasailing, dancing the night away in the resort disco, romantic candlelight dinners. It was a full Hollywood production so convincing that it seemed like a reality show that was actually reality.
And that’s when I got the panicked call from Étie.
Chapter Eight
I couldn’t believe it! My sister actually tried to fuck my man! Goddamn you, Frankie! You and your fucking burning bush!
“She come to my room, baby,” Étie tried to explain as calmly as possible, but he was obviously very upset. “And she drunk. I invite her in. We talk. I go to pee. Come back and she naked! I say to her, ‘What you doing, Francesca?’ ‘Nothing yet,’ she say, ‘but I’m here to do my husband.’”
“What?!”
“That’s right, baby. That what she say! I tell her, ‘Francesca, you must put on your clothes and leave!’ But she no listen. She come to me. I back away, but she get to me, have me against wall. Then she grab my pinga.”
“She grabbed your dick?!” I gasped in startled anger.
“Sí. So I grab her hand, snatch it away from me. I rush out the door. I in resort lobby now. What I should do?”
“You go back to your room,” I said, trying my best to contain myself. “And you put her drunk ass out!”
“But she naked.”
“Then put her naked drunk ass out! And throw her clothes out the door after her. I’ll be down there on the next flight out.”
I was absolutely furious. I know Frankie can have a problem holding her liquor. I know liquor makes Frankie do strange things. And I know she’s as addicted to sex as she is to her liquor, but this was totally ridiculous. She was going to try to fuck her brother’s man? My man? Sister or not, the bitch had crossed the line and I was not having it!
I tried to call her but got her voice mail. I didn’t leave a message. I was afraid of what I might have said. In fact, I’m glad she didn’t pick up. I think I would have said some things to her that no brother should ever say to his sister. That’s just how pissed I was.
I also knew that Étie was not going to put her naked ass out, nor had he retreated from the scene out of any fear or trepidation. He had gone through enough in his young life to be prepared for almost anything, including a ditzy Hollywood nympho who just happened to be his boyfriend’s sister. I had no doubt he would be able to handle the situation firmly, with as much decorum as could possibly be expected and without breaking out into a visible sweat. He would handle it and her.
But what pissed me off was that he had to be confronted with this, and from my trusted baby sister no less. I was pissed and I was hurt.
It was seven o’clock in the evening my time, eleven o’clock in Santo Domingo. I went online and booked the red-eye flight on American Airlines, threw some things into a carry-on and headed to the airport, aware that my seething anger could impair my journey. I calmed down as much as I possibly could.
I was so mad I felt like calling Mom and telling her what her baby girl had tried to do. But as angry as I was, I couldn’t subject my mother to such sordid bullshit.
I was so angry that I almost copped an attitude with the TSA officer at security check-in when she said she had to confiscate my Burberry Brit cologne because its bottle was more than three ounces. But I caught myself before I was really about to make a mess of things. I mean, it’s not as if I didn’t know better, but in my hasty funk, I grabbed the standard-size bottle instead of the travel size and threw it in my bag with my other toiletries without even bothering with the requisite plastic bag. The agent really let me off pretty easy, considering.
I squirmed in that cramped middle coach seat in that dark cabin, pretending to bury my head in my Walter Mosely novel to avoid conversation with my chatty aisle-seat neighbor while my sleeping window-seat neighbor snored as loudly as the jet engines roared. I kept the grumpy flight attendant busy on her feet with order after order of double gin and tonics. By the time we landed in Miami at six thirty-eight a.m., I was one pissed-off, drunken mess. Not falling-down drunk but sauced enough to feel the retch in my stomach and the boulders colliding in my head. I went to the gift shop in the terminal, bought a bottle of overpriced Excedrin and downed a couple. I then calmed myself, straightened myself up and called Étie.
“Baby?” I said when he answered the phone anxiously, as if he had been up all night waiting for this call. “You all right?”
“I fine, baby. I get her dressed and get her back to her room. I lay her on her bed. She fall asleep right away.”
“But how are you doing?”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“I am okay…I guess. She like my sister. It felt so strange that she touch me like that.”
“Well it sure as hell sounded strange. Just wait until I get there, I’m going to give her a piece of my—”
“Baby, no need. She drunk. She not know what she was doing.”
“She knew exactly what she was doing.”
“She do this before?”
“Well…no.”
“It be strange for her, I am sure.”
“I’m glad you were able to handle it.”
“I am not so sure, baby, that I handle it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I panicked. If she be a man, I hit her. But no. I felt helpless and dirty, like she feel a right to touch me, to violate me, like I be nothing. I never felt like nothing before. But it…it make me feel like nothing. She make me feel like nothing.”
“Étie…”
“Is what people think of what we have so no importa, so no special, that they can violate it any way they want? Is two men loving each other so no importa that it need no respect? I up all night thinking about this, thinking people think you and me like poor people, like slave people, like invisible people, people no importa.”
“We are muy importa, Étie. Our love es muy importa.”
* * * * *
I boarded my connecting flight to Santa Domingo sobered by black coffee, Excedrin and Étie’s haunting words ringing in my head. People think you and me like poor people, like slave people, like invisible people, people no importa.
I knew and he knew, Étie and I, that we were indeed bonded by our self-respect, and no disrespect of our self-respect, our self-love, our united love would go unchallenged, un-dealt-with, unanswered.
Still, the paper-cut battles that lay ahead, the fight against the subtle tyranny of the heterosexual majority, and the trudging through the maze of that pejorative ignorance and polite dispassion, wearied me.
Rare black butterflies are we, our exoticness admired under glass, on the carnival stage, for the love we share. Our love is a love that speaks its name in tongues too foreign to be understood by those well-meaning, condescending heterosexist admirers, yet with a lilt that intrigues them enough to indulge in things they wouldn’t dare try within the civilized civility of their pristine opposite-sex existences. The very thought of a man lusting after his brother’s wife is a universal abhorrence. Fucking your gay brother’s partner
? No problem.
My mother, a lifelong housewife, was asked by a new acquaintance, “What kind of work do you do?” She answered proudly and without hesitation, “Honey, that’s what I have a husband for.”
Imagine that scenario between two men. The immediate assessment is that one is a user and the other a fool.
That smooth flight over blue Caribbean water was what I needed as I pondered these things with a bitterness that needed to be tempered.
Upfront bigots are easily manageable. But well-meaning friends and family—set and self-sanctioned society—prick lethally, slowly, memorably, with an unconscious disdain innocently disguised as genuine love; the height of condescension that begged for an understanding of its own.
All of this made me realize how much I missed my daddy and the emotional protection of his unconditional love. I was simply one of his beloved children, all loved and cherished equally for our united spirit and our individual differences. We were all equally special in his heart.
But my relationship with my father also made me think about Étie’s relationship with his. For one so full of love to be brutalized and rejected by a father so full of hate is my baby’s unimaginable reality. And now a part of him is armored with hate. Oh how I so want to love away that hate.
But how can I, in the face of gingered disrespect for who I am and what I am? Isn’t subtle hate the worst kind of hate?
To be gay is to be tolerated. And I am sick to fucking death of being fucking tolerated by friends, family, foes and social foreigners!
I thought about a lot of things on that ninety-minute flight from Florida to Santo Domingo. And when I landed, I felt somewhat grounded by my contemplations.
But as grounded as I was, I was still pissed, and baby sister Frankie was about to get a piece of my gay-ass-not-to-be-tolerated mind.
Chapter Nine
Étie and I greeted each other in the terminal with our usual hugs and subtle kisses, now colored by the unusual circumstances of the previous night. We saw something in each other’s eyes that fueled a fire flash of conflicting emotions. As forgiving as he was, the pain and hurt of what went down had birthed a plaintive sadness in his stare that pissed me off, and I am sure that what he saw in my eyes was a boiling anger at what my sister had done to him, further fueled by that damn sad calm of his.
“Why aren’t you angry?” I asked as we drove out of the airport lot and hit the highway headed toward the resort.
“What good anger do?” he questioned.
“She fucking violated you, Étie.”
“I stop her. What more I’m supposed to do?” he suddenly snapped back.
“Stop being such a fucking pussy.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“So now you think I fucking pussy.”
“You could have been more assertive.”
“What you mean ‘assertive’?”
“More forceful. Strong. Macho. Machismo.”
“Oh so now you think I no machismo because I no beat su hermana?”
“I’m not talking about you beating up my sister, but you could have gone off on her, let her know that you weren’t to be fucked with like that.”
“How you know what I say to her, Jesse?”
“Not much you could’ve said if you ran out the room and hid in the lobby like a little punk,” I snapped a little too viciously.
“Now I see why some people call you Americanos pigs,” he growled in a voice I had never heard before.
“You don’t seem to have a problem with this Americano pig,” I snapped again.
“And you seem to like much your punkito, no?” he snapped back.
I suppose it wasn’t really much of an argument, as we both sat in silence for a few seconds before bursting out in snickering laughter at the absurdity of it all. We were both frustrated and needed to vent in our own separate ways.
Back at the room at the resort, we took a long, soothing shower together and washed away the sentiments of our argument. It was Étie’s idea and it was a good one. The calm of the warm water against our skins, the soothing of our bodies touching, our eyes connecting, making promises and assurances that cooler heads would prevail, eased some of the bitterness I was feeling about my sister, but not all of it. Étie’s eyes gently cautioned mine. Suddenly I did not feel fourteen years his senior. Suddenly I felt like a little boy gently admonished by the wisdom of an older soul.
* * * * *
Frankie wasn’t in her room, or at least she wasn’t answering her door. I knocked again.
“Frankie?” I called out. Still nothing. I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. I knew she knew better than to avoid me. She may have been a lot of things, but a coward she was not. My baby sister knew how to face a firing squad—hell, she’s an actress—and if she were in that room, at least she would have answered the door when she heard it was me on the other side. That is, unless she was still falling-out drunk, a distinct possibility.
I refused to dial her cell phone. I needed to speak to her face-to-face, eye to eye, so that there would be no mistaking how serious the situation was, how serious I was.
I went downstairs and headed toward the pool bar. She was nowhere to be found.
The gentle swish of waves rolling up to the shore pulled my stare. I marched to the beach, already peopled with leisured tourists, laughing children and laid-back locals.
In the shade of a coconut palm tree, I saw her, sitting upright on the chaise, staring out at the ocean, a vision too angelic to fit the deeds of the previous night.
I approached her bravely.
“Francesca,” I said firmly, yanking her out of her reverie.
“Junie,” she said with a slight startle as she looked up at me. “What are you doing here?”
“You know damn well why I’m here.”
“Listen, Junie. I was drunk,” she cried, reading the subdued anger in my eyes. Oh if she only knew what a forgiving victim she had in Étie. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“You’re always drunk, Frankie,” I stated in a low, unsympathetic growl. No one around us needed to know about our showdown. “That’s part of your damn problem.”
“I know.” She surrendered without a fight.
“But that’s not all of it,” I continued relentlessly.
“Junie, listen—”
“No, you listen!” I interrupted. “I need to make something very clear to you. I believe in family. You’re my family. Étie is my life partner, which means he’s my family too. If I have to choose between you, my sister, and him, my husband, I will make the same choice that Mom made when it came to Daddy. Étie is not some boyfriend that I’m playing around with. He is part of my life.”
She sat there, her head bowed, nearly in tears, but I didn’t let up.
“You know what your problem is? Marriage don’t mean jack to you. I know that now. You get married because you can. But it means everything to me and Étie, and whether we have a piece of paper or not, we have a marriage, Frankie. A marriage you totally disrespected because you don’t give a shit about them. You don’t give a shit about relationships and you don’t give a shit about me.”
“That’s not true, Junie.”
“You wanna know what the real truth is? You don’t even give a shit about yourself.” Even as tears ran down her face, I couldn’t stop myself. I was driven by the sight of bleeding prey.
“You’re nothing but a common slut, a selfish tramp, spreading your legs at the first whiff of dick without the slightest thought of consequences to others and without the slightest bit of self-respect for yourself.
“I feel sorry for you, Frankie, because I don’t know how a woman of Mom’s great grace, dignity and class could have possibly produced such a thoughtless piece of trash like you. I love you, Frankie, mostly because you’re my sister, but right now I don’t like you very much and I sure as hell don’t respect you.”
“I am so sorry, Junie,” she boohooed softly.
<
br /> “You sure the hell are,” I said. Then I coldly walked away.
Was I angry? Certainly. Was I cruel beyond necessity? Perhaps. I had never spoken to my sister like that before. I had never seen her cry like that in my entire life. The sight of her tears bothered me beyond belief. Going off on her bothered me as much as going off on Étie had. What was happening to me? Is this what love does to a person? Are these some of the foolish things that love, according to the song, makes you do?
I went to the pool bar and ordered a Cuba Libre, probed the iced brown rum and coke blankly, sipped at it absently.
“You’re right, Junie.” I turned around to the sound of my sister’s voice, her eyes still red with sorrow and hurt. “I am a thoughtless piece of trash.” Her confession made me feel even worse than I already did. “And you have every right not to respect me.”
“Francesca,” I began, taking her hand, guiding her to the barstool next to me. “You really have to watch yourself. Take control of your circumstances.”
“I know, Junie,” she said softly, staring at my drink. “I really do drink too much.”
“And I really have to learn to think before I speak,” I confessed. “I said a lot of awful things to you, Sis.”
“Yes you did,” she said with that perky little baby-girl pout she always knew she could get me with, “but nothing I didn’t deserve.”
“Yes, well, you did deserve a good tongue-lashing.”
“And you sure the hell delivered it, didn’t you?” She managed to chuckle.
“Didn’t I, though?”
“Junie, I really am sorry for disrespecting you and disrespecting Étie.”
“I know you are, sweetie.”
“I really want to apologize to him.”
“I think that would be very nice.”
“And I’m going to leave you two to yourselves. I mean, this really is your honeymoon.”
Aching For It Page 4
