Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing

by Lazaro Lima

  Sex, for example. I did have sex after I became Juanita. It was very confusing, when not actually embarrassing, to relearn but, to my surprise, even more exhilarating than before. Part of the problem was that even though I was now a girl, I still felt attracted to girls. To complicate things further, now I also felt a clean, neat, distinctive attraction to boys. Indeed, it was the first time I thought of Walker in, shall we say, a different light. Intangible images appeared in my mind, in which I saw at times myself still a girl with my new body, but with a penis, a penis and vagina, a pussy, both at once, fucking and being fucked and enjoying both and doing it all in one big swoop with both Walker and Pandora, slipping into both roles in a vertigo of amber-colored desire, grappling with both, feeling the exquisite pleasure, never imagined before, of being penetrated, my muscles opening themselves at first to receive the foreign object and then fusing with it in full, tight force, the singular swift sensation of bursting in orgasmic bliss as I felt split in two by the foreign wedge spreading me in opposite directions. I no longer felt bound by the limitations of a specific gender, as in fantasy I was both, and penetrating was no less exciting than before but profoundly more transgressive since I was also a girl, and my feelings were now more involved with my desire, so that a caress of the belly, a kiss on the nape of the neck alone were virtually capable of giving me an orgasm. These opaque feelings were completely unknown by the boy in me before, whose lonely transcendence was the spurting forth of sperm, prelude to a snoring, chorkling siesta. I came to appreciate the incredibly rich inner experience of eroticism that women possessed and that men, at least the men I knew, were simply incapable of comprehending, this incredible web of buried events, layers of feelings, transfiguration of the imagination in concave shapes and dizzying colors.

  This story is even harder to write than I thought. It’s my duty to describe to you what it felt like to be a girl, when in reality I want to fast-forward to the moment when finally Walker, Pandora, and I … But no. I’ll stay true to my genre, and the art of writing stories requires me to depict daily life at its plainest, while credibly juggling suspense so that you, dear reader, don’t find out what is going to happen until the very end. Endings are elusive? Middles are nowhere to be found? Patience. Let me carry on first with the daily doings of being a girl.

  The first noticeable disadvantage, beyond the constant ogling of disgusting men with IQ’s the size of peas, was when I began to feel something I had never felt before. It was a swelling of my entire body, as if I were absorbing all the atmospheric moisture and my body were becoming some grotesque water balloon, stretched to the limit and ready to burst. My joints ached, my breasts hurt now when they bounced, and my nipples were so sensitive that the fabric of my clothes felt like sandpaper. The worst part was the effect on my emotions, which also felt like they were ready to burst wide open at the slightest prick of a pin. The only benefit seemed to be the sensitivity in my clitoris. I thought I could come forever. In fact, I felt like I needed to desperately.

  In the absence of constant sexual relief, the intense physical anxiety came out as anger, which might have seemed unprovoked to uninformed observers. Assholes, what did they know? I was in agony! And I was a walking landmine, wearing my short, tight red dress and high-heeled shoes, feeling the wind blowing up my legs and forming a whirlpool by my crotch, ready to slap the first man that crossed my path. As it turned out, he happened to be a very solemn and saintly looking homeless person who always sat meditating in the lotus position on the corner of Taraval and Sloat, with a hand-painted sign explaining in eloquent prose why he was out of work and detailing in precious scripture his list of daily needs. I scowled at him and muttered:

  “Lazy jerk!”

  Startled, he turned to me, half scowling, half staring with hurt eyes and wounded pride. Then, twisting his lips derisively in a cruel grin, he retorted:

  “Bitch! If you were a man I’d punch you right in the face!”

  I was flustered, and then furious. What was this nonsense that if I was a man he’d punch me in the face? I was a man, for goodness’ sake! How dare he?

  “Fuck you, macho asshole!”

  The man puckered his face into an asterisk, denoting both genuine anger and amused irony. He walked slowly over until he stood right next to me.

  “You were saying?”

  “Fuck you, macho asshole.”

  It happened so fast I barely saw it coming. He lifted his right hand and with his open palm almost slapped me across the face, laughing ironically at the same time. But he held back before actually coming in contact with my face. At that instant he stuck out his tongue and rolled his eyes. Then he clapped to himself for a job well done before walking slowly away in a cloud of laughter.

  “I could kill you, bitch, if I wanted, but I’m damned if I’ll go to jail for you.”

  That night I got cramps so bad I had to take a hot bath in the middle of the night. In the morning I was greeted by a thick bloody stream oozing from my pussy. I felt muggy and slow, with a certain dose of laziness and melancholia I’ll never forget. I bought my first box of tampons, embarrassed by my ignorance of the size I needed.

  Peeing sitting down was another adventure. I had a hard time adjusting to sitting on the toilet instead of simply standing, parting my thighs, and feeling a feverish flush of hot water dazzlingly flow out while holding nothing in my hands. And then, of course, feeling the damp drip on my thighs and discovering the yellow droplets on the toilet rim until I remembered to dry myself regularly with toilet paper. I could not just shake the last drop anymore, and believe me, it was frustrating.

  I painted my toenails red and the effect turned me on, but no matter how pretty it looked, the arches of my feet always ached when wearing my girl shoes. I began cheating by wearing tennis shoes on a daily basis and only switching to girl shoes when concrete actions required a girl disguise. For example, when employing the oldest trick in the commonest book I put on my kinky sleeveless red dress and went upstairs to Walker’s to borrow a cup of sugar. I was nearly hyperventilating by the time my agitated finger found his doorbell, gingerly touching it as if I were fondling an undersized asshole. The sound felt loud as a fire alarm. Eventually I heard his deliberate, beefy footsteps approaching the door with impatient speed, and a voice yelling still from the other side in a sort of groggy manner:

  “Yeah?”

  I answered in a voice so dainty it surprised even me.

  “I’m your downstairs neighbor, hi. Sorry to bother you, but, uh, could I, uh, borrow a cup of sugar? I know, I know, it’s more than silly, it’s boring, but I’m baking a cake …”

  “No problem.”

  The footsteps went away like the aftermath of a hurricane for what seemed an eternity. I was standing there, in the hall, all alone, a little cold, and my shoes were beginning to ache. Had he sneaked out through the window and gone to the 24-hour supermarket to buy me a pound of sugar? Finally, when, discouraged, I was ready to head back empty-handed downstairs, I heard the mastodon footsteps once again. The door opened this time.

  I could tell you that at that instant the air felt steamy, greasy, stained, chaotic, mad, but I won’t because it would be embarrassing to employ language typically used to describe latinas locas. However, there he was, standing deliriously in front of me, making my head spin with his Aramis lotion. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt with a few wine stains on it, opened down to the middle of his hairy chest, black pants, and, yes, he was barefoot. His provocative dark hair seemed rumpled, as if someone had just passed her fingers through it. His eyes, vacant, as if I weren’t there at all, told me everything I preferred not to know.

  “Here.”

  “Thanks a lot, I really appreciate …”

  The door closed in my nose, nearly knocking the cup of sugar from my hands.

  “Asshole!” I muttered, biting my tongue at the same time, and then giggling a little. Men were unbelievably selfish. I should remember. It was as if you weren’t there, as if you we
re invisible; they saw right past you. However, of all his gestures, it was his refusal even to ogle me from head to toe, when I had put on my red dress and black shoes just to get this particular cup of sugar, that left me absolutely furious, depressed, insecure. From that point on I decided, in a stubborn fit of anger that thinly disguised my dejection, that I would be woman enough to make any man do whatever I wanted to. I went back downstairs and switched to my tennis shoes. I had finally understood why being denied a desire intensely longed for was infinitely worse than not knowing one’s desires. I resolved to myself that no matter what, he’d be mine. Looking out my forlorn window at the crescent moon with its dark shadows shaped like fish swimming on its surface, I decided to swallow my newly found fears, and, not without guilt, to become a new woman. With God as my witness, I swore, I’ll never be hungry again, obviously not thinking of food. If I were writing a stereotype of myself, I’d say that after that moment I became a predatory feline that paced and hunted, that preferred to experience the night raw, hungry, and lawless. But my singular beingness matters to me, and I’m too proud to reduce myself to a cliché, even if I did dress like one—a carnivalesque cross of a beauty queen and a robot dressed in a leopard-print bra top and mini-skirt.

  Because that’s how I dressed the next time I saw him, even if I did need a penny under my tongue like when I was a shy child, out of sheer nervousness. But I acted out the slut beast role only to discover that he wasn’t interested. “It’s not you, really,” he said in the end, when I struggled uselessly to get his face as close to me as possible. “I know,” I said, suddenly wise. “You like somebody else.” His silence and uneven tiptoeing away from me was a form of confirmation of what I had said. My skin was suddenly too tight to breathe as I slowly died. I didn’t know, I failed to grasp or unconsciously refused to know, who it was he actually desired.

  I ran into the goddess, Pandora herself, at the “Curl Up” Beauty Supply Store on West Portal Avenue. I no longer feared speaking to her, so I actually did approach her and discovered that she responded to me in normal tone, just as though she were speaking to another woman. I didn’t tell her I was Juan but introduced myself as, well, Juanita, which indeed had become my name, while requesting her advice on which cold cream to buy. She rambled about this and that as if this were the only world she knew, baroquely slouching toward a concrete answer. I realized, however, that it was the longest conversation I had ever had with her. Or, for that matter, the only time I had actually cared to talk with this woman, as opposed to just fantasizing about her. Well, as I admitted before, I thought she was beyond my reach. But that was as a boy, hard as it is for a Don Juan to admit such a thing without singing an aria to underscore his angst at his failure to conquer. But now I was a girl, and therefore, the stress of putting up or shutting up was no longer mine. I could just do girl talk, cold creams or eye liners, and she would never be forced into her own self-defined role as the perfect body of dreams for the masculine gaze.

  “Men treat me as if I have no life of my own,” she said at one point of the long conversation, “but I do.”

  “A life of your own? What is it?”

  “I’m a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Did you see the recent photo exhibit of AIDS widowers? My doing.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t you act like a boy on me; what do you think? I have a degree in museology, and I minored in comp. lit.”

  It had never actually occurred to me that she had a mind. She had always been just a body to me, and only now did it dawn on me that she fought the experience of being essentialized as a woman while paradoxically essentializing herself with her looks. She was the ultimate contradiction, the woman who chose the role of reified object of desire and then resented being perceived as such, all the while holding open her humid lips to welcome kisses like a noiseless, flowing river, her half-closed eyes drowned in pleasure, even more lost than her mouth appeared to be at times, while refusing blatantly to cast herself out from her chosen role. I understood the damage men like Juan had silently done to her, while burning with my own female anger at her sacrificial passivity. And as a Latina to boot, it offended me that she was more “half out of her mind and half out of her dress” than María Conchita Alonso. I laughed after this last reflection, of course, because I remembered she had chosen her iconic role precisely for the type of male that I myself had been.

  Later, I ran into Walker at the supermarket. He was deftly choosing various liquors and placing them in his cart next to frozen food, Dannon yogurt, and a small pile of cans. I followed him silently, as I would have done with Pandora in my recent past. The surprises life gives us like spoonfuls of honey! I began to daydream. And daydreaming as I was, in an aura of pink and golden tones, I did not notice that, turning from one aisle to another, he had stopped in front of the vitamin section, unsure which of them to pick. My cart bumped into his.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  He said nothing.

  “You’re my upstairs neighbor. Remember me? The cupful of sugar, the leopard-print bra and miniskirt? I’m so sorry …”

  He half-smiled and I interpreted the ceremonial gesture as permission to perform. Before he could retreat in any civilized direction, I talked and talked, about his wonderful Gloria Estefan music seeping through my ceiling, about how we should get to know each other as neighbors, and how I promised to return his raw Hawaiian sugar that very evening with a present to thank him for his kindness.

  “No, not tonight. I have a date.”

  Those words were devastating to this girl, but, pretending it was nothing, I chattered diplomatically about how the day after or the one after that would do. I introduced myself; he timidly agreed to inform me of his name; I gave him my phone number; he did not give me his. I promised I would knock on his door if he didn’t call. He only smiled, said nothing, and we parted ways. That evening I was determined to spy on his door to find out who was the malicious witch who dared to steal my handsome knight, and that’s how I found out his date was, you’ve probably guessed it by now, Pandora. I kept at a melancholic distance as they descended the enchanted staircase in a sort of perpetual communion; then, neither fulfilled nor requited, I dissolved into tears on my bed.

  They came back later that same night, much earlier than I would have imagined. I heard them walking upstairs. Well, the truth is, I spied through the peephole as well, then heard the inevitable, recognizable noises coming from the apartment directly above mine. Heard them, or imagined them, as I tried to sleep, foolishly thinking that such an act could erase all traces of reality, until I heard the knocks on my door. It was a dream, I told myself, part of my fantasies about Walker, because I wanted Walker so badly I felt his image burned my skin, Walker walking all over me, but it wasn’t a dream or a fantasy; the knocks were very real and very much on my wooden brown door. I realized I had dozed off, probably not for very long, and the knocks on the door were bringing me back to a certain reality, my female reality of being neglected by the only man I yearned for. I couldn’t imagine anyone knocking on my door at that time. Before I even dared look at the clock, I instinctively rushed to the door to open it, possibly a foolish act, yet driven by my longing, by desire, by loneliness, nostalgia, never-ending hope. I did look through the peephole first, obviously. And, to my amazement, Pandora stood on the other side of the door. She looked embarrassed, impatient, about to walk away. I opened immediately and smiled.

  “Hi. Funny time for you to drop by for a visit.”

  “I’m sorry, Juanita. That’s your name, right? You do remember me, don’t you? I’m really sorry, I know it’s late …”

  “No, not at all, I’m addicted to late-night TV, insomniac that I am, when not rereading Proust …”

  “Proust?”

  “A French writer.”

  “I know, dear, I read him in the original. Comp. lit. major, remember? Anyway, I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself …”

  “You’re not. Don’t be silly. I’m always
longing for a stranger to knock on my door late at night.”

  “Well, Walker kind of sent me, ’cause he was too embarrassed to come down himself.”

  “I see …”

  “His corkscrew broke, just when he was about to open a bottle of wine, and he was wondering if …”

  “He could borrow mine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure. I’ll bring it up in a jiffy.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I’ll bring it up in a jiffy.”

  “You’re coming upstairs?”

  “Tell Walker I’ll be there in just a minute.”

  I closed the door in her face. I dashed to the bathroom, washed my face, dried it, and clumsily, still feeling sweet and humid like a tropical night in the Caribbean, began drawing a long snake of a shadow with the eyeliner, fearing more the trembling of my own hand than the opportunity I was profiting from. I still confused the glittery powder with the other one, the one chosen this night, drier, like pancake mix, and of course lipstick, my favorite part, painting my lips as if I were sucking the man of my dreams in that image reflected on the high altar of my nights, my bathroom mirror. I jumped into a very short dress with no underwear underneath, slipped on my high-heeled shoes, dashed upstairs, backtracked because I had forgotten the damn corkscrew, pulled it out of the kitchen drawer, and dashed back up in those damn shoes, fearing I’d break my neck on every step, arriving breathless at Walker’s door, where I rang rang rang the bell while pretending that not even an earthquake could disturb my stiff composure.

  The door opened. I smelled incense, heard Gilberto Gil in the background. As I had guessed, it was Pandora who opened it. Walker was nowhere to be seen.

  “Thank you.”

  Before she knew what was happening, or even had time to register that I had changed and made myself up, I darted inside toward the living room.