Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing

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Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing Page 24

by Lazaro Lima


  “It’s a conspiracy,” I continued my thought, “between the airlines, the FAA, and the National Weather Service. They want to keep travelers traveling this holiday season.”

  “There’ll be a layer of ice beneath that snow soon,” Gerry said, joining us at the window. “And it’ll stay there until March, the way it does every year.”

  Bruno made his lumbering appearance, panting his way to the window and making it so our little group consisted of three men in sleep-crumpled pajamas framed by two dogs, each dog weighing nearly two hundred pounds. All around us, throughout the house, fish swam in their respective tanks, ornate clocks ticked, and the small, brightly colored birds Sil likes to breed twittered in their cages. Down in the basement, in a hall that connects the guest room to the laundry room, Sil’s pet snakes hibernated. But there were no tenants upstairs, not this visit. Sil and Gerry said they’d reached a point where they could forego the extra income, said they liked the house all to themselves—all to themselves and, for the duration of my visit, me.

  My previous visits to St. Paul had been made during the spring, that small window of opportunity in which a visitor can enjoy a city that freezes through much of the long winter and is humid and mosquito-ridden through much of the short summer. But not to worry. Sipping at their cups of coffee that first morning, Sil and Gerry reassured me that the inhabitants of St. Paul have to venture out in extreme weather. They underlined that, to avoid cabin fever, we’d go to the Walker again, this time to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition. They insisted we’d still see the new wing of the Minneapolis Museum of Art, that we’d still visit the Russian. The Russian Museum of Art, you see, is housed in a structure designed to replicate a Southwest mission, so Sil and I, who went to high school together in San Antonio, feel at home there. We don’t care that, for the citizens of St. Paul, the museum is an architectural anomaly.

  What wasn’t exactly the same was my relationship with Sil and Gerry. As I said, Sil and I went to high school together in Texas. We were both members of our school’s speech and drama team—a small group of friends who’ve remained in touch through our twenties, thirties, and now our forties. Sil grew into a tall, thin adult but was even thinner as a teenager. He speaks Spanish better than I do, and is considerably darker skinned than I am. And since he looks somewhat Asian around the eyes, he was particularly vulnerable to high school bullies. That vulnerability was no doubt one of the reasons it was easy to want to nurture Sil—that and the fact that Sil’s family, never very nuclear to begin with, completely fell apart long before any of us graduated. One day, Sil’s long-suffering mother told Sil’s father to stick it and she packed up and went off—back to Mexico—essentially abandoning Sil and his sisters. After that, our speech and drama team, our families, took Sil in, now and then passing him off from one family to another.

  One of Sil’s adopted families saw him through his overdose of pills. Then, after we all graduated, Claudette, one of our best debaters, went east for her poli-sci degree. And it was there, at Harvard, that she saw Sil through his hospitalization for alcohol poisoning. Sil was living with Claudette in her dorm room the night he almost drank himself to death. Actually, he’d been making his rounds of the dorms. He’d stay with Claudette in her room for a while, then with one of Claudette’s friends in their rooms, usually for long stints. He had nowhere else to live, nowhere else to be, really. But despite his desperate circumstances, despite his fragile appearance, he would make it to adulthood pretty much the way he’d made it through puberty—by being pushy, by being willful and unabashedly clear in his likes and dislikes of people and places and things to do. His ability to master the practical—to cook, to furnish and decorate a comfortable home, to plan and guide trips to just about any place on the globe—made him a good addition to any crowd, even if his own abilities made him perpetually impatient with those whose talents lay elsewhere. His tough skin was a necessity, I suppose. How could he let anyone in—anyone really in—when letting people in meant they might abandon him?

  On my previous visits to St. Paul nothing untoward had taken place, never a scene, never an early departure, but Sil’s pushiness had rubbed me wrong, chaffed me, forced me to keep my mouth shut. Those trips were made during my own partially disclosed, half-hearted attempts to get clean of my own addictions, which had kicked in full force later than Sil’s, after I’d moved away from San Antonio to live in New York City. Giving myself over to those habits had meant losing touch with my family and hometown friends. Kicking those habits had meant kicking the docility that had been my response to a family life as chaotic, in its own way, as Sil’s. Antidepressants helped, talk therapy helped, and one result of it all seems to be that the New York assertiveness my many years in the City had already begun to develop have only been fortified.

  To make for more possible complications, during my visits I sometimes judged Sil to have grown into a pretentious and insufferably materialistic man. He had to have the best of everything, all the trappings of stability: the elephantine large-screen TV, the frequent vacations—to Amsterdam, to Japan, to Argentina—the most expensive meals at the nicest restaurants in whatever city he happened to be passing through. It’s true; he liked to pick up the bill whenever the three of us ate out. He liked to be generous and extravagant when giving orders to waiters. And all that was well and good. And certainly I, with my modest means and money-draining New York City life, benefited from his newfound prosperity. I smoked the expensive pot he and Gerry always had ready and waiting to smoke. I ate the expensive meals Sil had learned to make when he attended culinary school. I would take advantage of the gym he’d set up on the ground floor now that he’d switched careers and was making his living as a personal trainer.

  But his generosity, like his materialism, seemed to have dubious aims, one being the need to show that he’d more than gotten his life together, another being the need for control he had always felt entitled to. He’s fond of saying, “It’s my way or the highway.”

  I’ve asked myself if, perhaps, I’m envious of Sil, of his possessions: his large, surround sound TV speakers, his fine art collection, and his long series of pet dogs—loveable, all of them, but, like Bruno and Bruiser, large and expensive to keep. I’ve asked myself, too, if I’m just jealous of Sil’s long line of boyfriends, many of whom he’d attracted at his most dysfunctional.

  But once, between my visits to St. Paul, a third party confirmed my feelings about Sil. I was spending a week in San Antonio. Sil needed to make a trip to San Antonio himself—to check up on a house he still owns in Alamo Heights. So we met up often. Sil would spend days with my family and me and then we all said good night to him each evening as he departed to his expensive hotel room. One night Sil took me and one of our high school friends, Daniel, out for dinner. I kept quiet most of the meal, amused by the effeminate Hispanic waiter who waited on us. He was visibly happy to be serving two gay men who could speak Spanish, and Daniel, a handsome white boy with dark hair and green long-lashed eyes. When I wasn’t watching the waiter, I watched the tourists on the River Walk and was happy that I could only half-hear their drunken conversations through the restaurant windows. While Sil did most of the talking, I watched the waiter. I watched the tourists. I forked tuna steak into my half-smiling face. A few days later, back in New York, I received an e-mail from Daniel. It read: “Sil’s a little bourgeois, isn’t he? A little … full of himself, isn’t he?” Sitting at my desk, I smiled, and I felt confirmed, felt wickedly glad that Daniel heard how much Sil talks about himself, how any question Sil asks about anyone else’s life is only peremptorily listened to before he returns to the subject of himself and his own life.

  This trip, however, my first winter trip to St. Paul, I found Sil had mellowed some. I heard him, at least once, apologize for an outburst of condescension and irritability toward Gerry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m wrong.” His materialism seemed to have abated a bit, too—if only because he was running out of room to stor
e everything—and the usually immaculate house was even somewhat less kept. I stayed in a basement where Sil and Gerry had set up a guest bedroom with a small refrigerator and a small, adjoining toilet and shower stall. Getting in the shower one morning, I dropped a tube of foot scrub Sil had stuffed into my Christmas stocking. Lifting my hand out of a corner behind a water pipe where the tube had lodged itself, I found I was holding a handful of cobwebs. This would never have happened in the past.

  Sil even seemed to be developing an ability to talk about more things than himself. All three of us habitually went to bed before ten o’clock. But my first night there, Sil and I stayed up late talking and smoking pot long after Gerry had gone upstairs, allegedly to go to bed. Sil inquired about my health, my medications, and my time off hard drugs. We had a long talk about my brother, a ne’er-do-well Sil is fond of, then turned to my mother and her health problems. Sil updated me on his sisters, their children, and even turned, for some reason, to the topic of transgender people. I was surprised by the sympathy Sil could show for people whose lives are very different from his own. When I cocked my head at the sounds of Gerry moving around upstairs, Sil said, “Guess he hasn’t gone to bed yet. Gerry spends lots of time burning porn DVDs and talking to his online buddies.” I was sitting on a stool at one end of their large wooden table. Beneath the surface of the table there are two layers of storage shelves stuffed with kitchen supplies. With my elbows on the surface of that table, more than a bit stoned, I was allowing myself to be hypnotized by the paths the fish made as they swam one way then the other and back again in the tank against the window. “It’s his only vice,” Sil added. “So I let him get away with it.”

  I liked to comfort myself, during my trips to St. Paul, that Sil and Gerry at least have not given in to that ever-growing desire among middle-class gay men and women—the desire for children—a desire that I, at my snidest—perhaps at my most selfish—think of as little more than a penchant for status symbols. Look at what I can afford, I imagine those children’s parents secretly gloating, see what I have the power to obtain. Visiting Sil, I at least don’t have to compete with a child to find a bit of time with an old friend. I do, however, have to compete with Gerry.

  In fact, it was Gerry who would grate on my nerves during my six snow-filled days in St. Paul. His attention span, never very grown-up to begin with, had grown even shorter. We could only watch or go out to the most action-packed, special-effect-filled movies. Even The Fearless Vampire Killers was too slow, too yesterday, and far too uninteresting for Gerry. I had to monitor the length and subject of any anecdote I related—nothing too long, please, nothing too serious—assuming of course that I could get a word in over Gerry’s loud, booming voice, his erratic drumming of the table with the thumbs of his thick hands. “Let’s go bowling,” he’d say one minute. “No,” he’d say the next, “let’s stay in—play a game.”

  Hadn’t I found Gerry’s childishness endearing in the past? Maybe. Yes, definitely. I can be childish myself, playful, downright immature, and Gerry was always good for joining in on a little tomfoolery. It’s also likely that Gerry had gained my sympathy more than my ire on previous trips. The extent to which he had to live under Sil’s thumb easily induced sympathy. One spring trip, for instance, we drove to a lighthouse on the shore of Lake Superior. Sil drove for the last leg of the trip while I pulled the lever under my chair and reclined. Gerry stretched out in the back. I think I napped. The drive was long and we were all relaxed. Sil nevertheless got impatient once we’d all arrived.

  “What’s taking you two so long?”

  “Jesus, Sil, give us a minute, would you? We’re putting on our sneakers,” I snapped back. “And is it really necessary to speak to us that way?”

  I must have shot a look at Gerry for not backing me up as I hopped out of the four-wheel drive, because as we stood outside the doors on the passenger side, he looked at me in his childlike way and said, “I know, I’m so pussy whipped. I know, I’m sorry.”

  So, the behaviors Gerry had to put up with from Sil in their life together might have always made Gerry the object of my sympathy, but Gerry was in his fifties now. And Sil, as I’ve said, had, in his way, matured. And my coming more and more into myself made me perhaps less and less patient with Gerry. In that impatience, I was like Sil, I suppose, wanting everyone else to be competent at whatever it is I’m competent at. Maybe that’s one reason Sil and I are and probably always will be friends, or something like friends anyway. What made the situation more intolerable for me was the fact that Gerry wasn’t stupid, not really. I think that he’d just grown accustomed to playing the part of the dumb husband. Occasionally, I’d seen Gerry show resistance to that role, like the time he was leafing through one of my book-review magazines in the backyard. He put the magazine down on the backdoor steps where I was sitting and said, “I wish I read.” I offered to make a few suggestions, to take him shopping at B&N or, better yet, a secondhand bookstore, but Sil chimed in from the barbecue cooker, saying, “He won’t read.”

  I shot him a perturbed look.

  “He won’t read,” he repeated, flipping over the ground turkey.

  “See how mean he is,” Gerry said as he winked at me. But that was it. That was the extent of Gerry’s resistance, and, in that particular instance, at least, his resistance had the advantage of not taking itself too seriously. But now it seemed exhausted, depleted, all gone and not nearly as resistant as the snow and ice that lay outside the house and, indeed, all around us.

  It was during another spring trip to St. Paul that Gerry said, “That is St. Paul.” And then, pointing in the other direction, past Sil in the driver’s seat, he said, “And that, that is Minneapolis.”

  “St. Paul—Minneapolis—St. Paul—Minneapolis,” I said from the back seat, swiveling my head, rapid fire, back and forth, left and right, until Gerry joined in. “St. Paul—Minneapolis—St. Paul—Minneapolis …” And that was the Gerry I loved—the childish, tom-foolish Gerry.

  And since it might not be fair to say that Sil or Gerry, one more than the other, got on my nerves—they are a couple, after all—the two cities, side by side, may serve as the best way to describe my feelings toward them. Visiting Sil and Gerry was like visiting two places at once. One place was the scene of a happy coupling, though I must say it was Sil who, for the most part, gave that impression, Sil being the one who would reach out a hand from whatever seat he was in, the driver’s seat or the passenger’s seat, and lay it on Gerry’s knee. Sil would say warm things to Gerry over dinner conversations, things like “Well, I’ve found the one, I found the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.” Gerry would either ignore what Sil had just said, or say, “Yeah, right.” “What Gerry means to say,” Sil would come back, “is that he’s just not sure he’ll be around much longer.” Those awkward moments were the other Sil and Gerry, the unhappy couple in a parallel city, a troubled locale in which the bridge between two places might collapse, just as the I-35W bridge collapsed in 2007, plunging a good number of the Twin Cities’ citizenry into the Mississippi. Sometimes, while we were waiting for our dessert to be brought out, perhaps during a lull in the conversation, Sil would suddenly snap at Gerry, “Who are you gawking at over there?” (Like me, Sil was given to eyeing other men he found attractive, but he never did so in front of Gerry. And he never gawked. Gerry did.)

  After dinner out one night, back at the house, Gerry was showing me their new dining room set. It was made up of six tall-backed wooden chairs and a long stately table with fold-out leaves. “You guys are going to have a lot to move if you ever do move back down to the Southwest,” I said. “Or Sil will,” Gerry responded. “Well, that was an unexpected remark,” I thought to myself. But it made me realize, Sil was the one who always talked about their plans to move back to the Southwest. Gerry never mentioned any such desire.

  What exactly Sil and Gerry’s problems were, I can only make an informed guess at. My guess, though, would be as informed as anyone else’s, b
ecause one of Sil and Gerry’s problems is that they don’t have many friends. Their relationship is their primary and practically their only relationship. Sil has professional friendships with some of the men and women he trains. They fly him to their residences across the country to set up their home gyms. Sometimes they have him cater their soirees. He has entree into their homes. They pay him extravagantly. But those relationships remain limited by status. For his part, Gerry supervises maintenance workers—working-class stiffs, ex-cons, and immigrants—at an expensive high-rise residence. And those employees sometime endear themselves upon Gerry, and vice versa, but, again, socioeconomics prevent any real relationships from ever forming. In bed by ten every night, Sil and Gerry don’t go to bars. Nor do they have much sense of community. On the contrary, they are weary of anyone who wears his or her sexuality like a badge, including me. Out at restaurants or wandering the aisles of stores, my loudness, my penchant for letting out a campy, risqué remark, or the way I can’t resist rubbernecking a handsome man—all these behaviors are sure to draw Sil and Gerry’s ire. “This isn’t New York,” they say in unison. One night, James Dean’s bisexuality somehow came up in conversation. Sil was incredulous. So, once I got back to New York, I e-mailed him an entry on Dean from GLBTQ.com. Sil e-mailed back, “Oh, yeah, like I’m going to believe that Dean was bisexual because some gay website says he is.”

 

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