by Victor Yates
In two minutes, I have my portable backdrop assembled in front of the wall where Marian is singing. I unravel the white paper background to hide the wall. The black-framed pictures and posters would shift attention away from Brett, with their own narratives. I hold the jagged end of the paper down with seven oversize books. The bathroom doorknob clicks as I move the tripod in front of the background.
“What’s that red stuff in the sink?” Brett asks.
“Clay from a mask. I washed my face earlier.”
“What’s all this?”
“I want to do something like Avedon. Plain white background. Black and white film.”
“Make me look important,” Brett says.
The contrast of his pink underwear against my blue walls would make a provocative photo on masculinity and desire. I have never seen a man wear masculinity and femininity the way he does as if it is a lace scarf, its unthought, part of his uniform. This blending of gender is a flirtatious performance that I love watching. His masculinity is not enclosed in aggression, and his femininity is not centered on his love of pink, but his sensitivity, gentleness, and strength. Since yesterday, his beard has grown in thicker, and his curly hair is spiraled with tighter curls.
I laugh watching him standing still, not sure what to do, maybe nervous. It is the equivalent of entering a room with an almost domesticated jackal captured in the wild, not dangerous anymore yet dangerous still. Watching him through the viewfinder, he walks to the tripod, grabs the camera, and flips it around.
“Smile.”
The high-powered flash turns the room white. The room is white, then red, and then a million colors.
“You can add your picture now,” he says.
Grinning like a schoolboy, he scoops his hand around the curve of my back. His lips, an opening redness, brush my bottom lip. His kiss is the equivalent to peeling mangoes with a knife: a knife for meat, danger for pleasure, and a burst of juice on the tongue, then down the throat. When this sweetness collected in the bowl of my imagination, it would turn rancid prematurely. I would leave it on the kitchen countertop of my mind untouched until I was curious again. Now knowing it, this pleasure, that bitterness seems wasteful. Eventually, Brett and I are out of our underwear on my bed with our tongues in each other’s mouth. We are black and tan cutouts against white sheets. Our bodies become tangled and twisted up like a salted pretzel, unrecognizable from its previous body.
The one room in our house without photography equipment is my bathroom, the reason I spend no more than ten minutes in here. Even when using skin care products, I slather them on and continue working, in my bedroom, to feel anchored. But for half an hour I have been crying over the sink, with the water running. After Brett and I laid down from exhaustion and dozed off, I woke up with his arm draped over my chest. The heaviness of it terrified me. Men, who love the person they are sleeping next to, hold them in that way. Love, lover, boyfriend, Brett, the words rolled around in my mouth and solidified on my tongue, becoming real. They were as real as the photographs hanging on the walls. Under the shadow and weight of Brett, the tears started. What I experienced was a miracle of mirrors and transformation and looking at myself through an unexpected lens – the other side of the camera.
“What are you doing in there?” he asks, with his mouth close to the door.
“Washing my face.”
“Please open the door.”
The hinges crackle. Through the small crack, first I see Brett’s pubic hair, then his lean body when the door is fully open. Naked and boyish, Brett erases his erection with cupped hands in between his legs. Remove all forms of femininity from Brett, clothing and mannerisms, and he is still himself, but bare and perfect. In my head, I am photographing him. One day, I will shoot him the way he is now, a silhouette, and move him in exaggerated poses to feminize the shape of his body.
“I heard something downstairs,” he says.
His head turns toward the door inviting me to listen. In his profile, I see a teenager becoming a man; a magnetism that could go unnoticed if there were more explicit details. That transformation is an aspect of men that is quieter and more narrative, I think, in part because men rarely see it themselves.
After staring at the bedroom door for four minutes, Brett asks, “Are you cool?”
“What did you hear?”
“I don’t hear it anymore.”
“Do you hear things no one else does?”
“You know what.”
“What?”
“I like you,” Brett says and kisses me before I can respond.
His words permeate my room in the same way perfumes spread from wall to wall in an unventilated room, and suddenly I smell frankincense, earth, and dampness. His body is warm; mine is pliant, moving with him. He kicks something on the floor. Book pages rustle. Avedon’s Portraits opens to Dorothy Parker’s basset-hound eyes exposing Brett’s knife. We lie down in bed, surrounded by pictures of my father and brothers and working men I have known all my life. The space between our bodies smells like underarm must and mint mouthwash. I grab his hand, stare at the dedication and lines, and kiss it. I love the male body, but in particular I love hands. They carry answers as equally as the face and, like the face, can express every emotion. A hand slams a car door somewhere far away on Evergreen.
Brett’s finger pokes my chest with the emotional tone of an exclamation mark. “Have you told your dad you’re not going to marry your ex-girlfriend?”
“No.”
“What are you scared of?”
“That he’ll kill me.”
“What you think will happen, already has. You don’t know how he’ll react until you tell him.”
As Brett says the word he’ll, in my head, I see the word hell. Hell and he’ll sit on the front of my brain and poke and poke and poke. I get a slight headache staring up at the dotted globs of white paint on the ceiling. In Chicago, I would stare up at the ceiling in my room asking myself how could I be manlier. In Father’s eyes, I wasn’t man enough. His love teetered over my manliness, or lack of it and his love changed, becoming greater than, when I started dating my girlfriend. The day I ended the relationship with my girlfriend and was faced with telling him, I thought about jumping off our apartment building. I talked myself up to the roof, but when I looked out into the world, I saw the pictures I would never take. I pulled myself from the edge and decided not to tell Father about my girlfriend or the roof.
A thumping sound similar to bags dropping on the floor downstairs shocks me and my head bangs against Brett’s head.
“Carsten,” Father yells from downstairs.
“Shit,” Brett says and jumps out of bed.
Tap, tap, hard-bottomed church shoes step up the stairs.
“Where’s my underwear?” he whispers in a panic.
“There,” I say, pointing by the dresser and snatch my boxer briefs off the floor. Behind me, I hear a noise I should not hear, a quick click and creaking. I thought I locked the door. My father is coming into the room. Brett is naked bending over. I am naked and frightened, with my only form of protection being the underwear I’m holding. Often my thoughts are in Somali and I translate them before speaking. Dhimo, I see the word before I say to myself, “we are going to die.”
“Carsten,” Father yells from behind the door.
Both my hands drop to cover my genitals with the balled up boxer briefs. I hear a soft sliding sound behind me, and something bumps my bare foot. At my feet, I see the knife that Brett gave me. I grab it quickly.
Father’s head moves up, to the side, and back in surprise. “Where are your clothes?”
“I was about to shower.”
“Well, don’t. Get dressed and come downstairs. Cecilia’s waiting for you.”
“What? Why is she here?”
“You are getting married, and you haven’t –”
“We aren’t
getting married.”
“Yes, you are. Stop talking. Come downstairs now,” Father says and exits, making his decision final.
I fly to the door, fast, like an Ethiopian White-backed Vulture on a rotted bushpig, pushing the door closed. Father’s church shoes crunch on the wood flooring at the bottom of the stairs. The thin door lock, cold at the touch, makes the tiniest sound, similar to a hiccup from a mouse. Everything in my body gives.
“So you are getting married,” Brett says, unseen, from beside my bed, on the floor.
The way his body is, half hidden under the bed, and with his face tense he is aged ten years.
“I’m seventeen. I’m not getting married. My father’s insane.”
Reassured, Brett’s body collapses onto the floor like a failed soufflé. He drags his left leg out from under the bed. Had he moved more under the bed, he would have knocked over a pile of books. Then, Father would have found the boy he banned me from seeing, hiding in my room with an erection. The knife thuds, hitting the floor. I had stuffed it inside my underwear.
“What was that?”
“The knife.”
“Would you have used it on your father?”
“I don’t know.”
Brett’s fists press against his wrinkled forehead. A pink sticky note floats to the beige carpet, unstuck from the bottom of his arm. I wrote out a list of equipment to bring to a wedding on the note.
“Cecilia is downstairs. What am I going to do?”
“Go downstairs and tell your father you’re not going to marry her.”
For a second, I try to see it. What I see is a gray world flipped upside down, a reverse snow globe. The snow is ash. Imagining telling my father I like men, I feel as if I am falling forward fast off the bed, face-first to the floor, even though I’m not falling.
“Relationships aren’t photographs,” Brett says. “You can’t edit out parts you don’t like. That’s called lying.”
I stare at the knife and the underwear in my hand, unsure what to do. Three minutes pass.
“You should go down now. Take my watch and your knife. Put them in your pocket to help you.”
As I walk downstairs, the quiet that follows makes me think of the ‘L’ train in Chicago and the metal on metal roar of old trains hurtling past an old city. The quiet concerns me more than my safety. At all the train stations in downtown Chicago, it is always quiet before the roaring.
Chapter 24
Pushed from behind by distraction, my foot kicks a tin box on the floor. The lid pops open. The mirrored top and metals glint. Buried under grandfather’s cufflinks, mother’s wedding band, a wedding cord, a red seed bracelet, a Bobby pin, a Cuban coin, and a tooth, there is a gold thorn necklace. Most of the gold flaked off inside the tin. I bought it for Cecilia from Ford City Mall to wear to prom. Tenth-grade year, when I asked her to be my girlfriend, I was not asking her out, I was asking my father to not see me as weak. Womanhood would have pumped oxygen into the lungs of our new relationship. Every time I kissed her was a chance to be the son he wanted. However, every time I kissed her confirmed I was not another Junior.
I can taste her lip gloss now – cherry vanilla.
In January of tenth-grade, I received permission from the school to work off campus at The Tribune. The time that Cecilia and I hung out shriveled up from every day to once a week. Sometimes less. Her absence was nourishment. And, I could taste its sugary sweet juice. It was as if God had kissed my head and given me an excuse to breathe and dream behind cameras. The editor of the school newspaper cornered me downtown months later, shaking me awake. Cecilia confessed to his girlfriend that she wanted to have sex after prom. We had performed every sexual act that I wanted to have with a girl except vaginal, oral, or anal. I would force myself to finger her, and then scald my hand, washing it with soap, shampoo, alcohol, and dishwasher detergent. Her vagina smelled like cold beer and warm puppy breath. When she wanted to go further, I hung religion over her head like a crown of ash crosses. Eventually, I stopped clipping my fingernails.
On accident, a fingernail flicks a frame on the wall as I listen for her voice. Father’s dominates the conversation in the dining room.
The day of prom, Father left a condom on my desk, with a note that said, “Proud of you, son.” I kissed the word and said it out loud, repeating it as if it were a prayer. He stacked peppermints around the condom in a circle. I waved my hand back and forth under the light cast from the gold wrapper. Neither of us mentioned it when he adjusted my cummerbund that night. The foil crinkled each time Cecilia’s thighs rubbed from my thighs to my crotch on the dance floor. One of the edges folded back and scratched my leg through the pocket lining.
Dwelling on that detail, I rub the spot where there used to be a jagged scar. Fingers snap in the dining room.
At midnight, our school principal kicked everyone out of the Crystal Garden at the Navy Pier. Cecilia’s girlfriend invited us to a party at the Four Seasons above the Nine Hundred Shops on Michigan Avenue. I hoped the party would weaken her to yawns so I could drop her off by her curfew at two in the morning. The room lights were off, and the drapes pulled back. Body odor, cologne, girlhood, alcohol, and anticipation weighed down the hot air. I saw the outlines of more bodies than I expected. My girlfriend squeezed my hand, leading us around high heels, church shoes, plastic cups, crushed flowers, and over things that crunched under my feet. I bumped into a table. Thick liquor bottles clinked. I grabbed the edge, and a rose prickle pricked my finger. A voice moaned, mimicking my pain but sexualizing it. Smacking, gulps, sucking, zippers unzipping, and candy wrappers unwrapping were like a compass guiding us either in the direction of kissing, drinking, undressing or freshening our breath. Cecilia poured our drinks, heavy, thankfully. In the dark, I bent over and rammed my fingers down my throat, vomiting up the chicken, sweet potatoes, broccoli, and salad that I ate. While the people beside us rushed to the other side of the room, my girlfriend grabbed my hand and hurried into the bathroom. She wiped splatter off of my tuxedo and then cleaned up the vomit in the room. We left to a thunderous applause.
Father’s voice stomps the thunder out into an uncomfortable silence. The word love falls from his mouth, and I stumble on the stairs. Attraction is not a flashlight switch that can be clicked off. In the past, I wished I could blind myself from seeing the beauty in men, to be an ordinary black flashlight on a white perforated shelf in a discount store and be like my Father. But, at this moment, I don’t.
With my head stretched away from hers, I assumed the stench on my breath would squash Cecilia’s desire to have sex. My hand cupped the hardness in my pants. She wanted it in the car, parked where we were, on a side street two blocks from the hotel. We looked like a newlywed couple – Cecilia in a white dress and me in a white tuxedo jacket with balloons smothering us in the back seat. I pretended I was too nauseous to push my tongue into her mouth. She drove Junior’s car, heelless and in silence, back to my house. Then, she waited for the city bus outside in the cold. I watched her from my bedroom window smoothing the wrinkles out of her wedding dress. The bus arrived, and she waved without moving her hand from the front seat. I felt sorry for the both of us.
The condom had fallen from my pocket onto the bed. I walked into the bathroom, dropped the wrapper in the sink, and lit it on fire with a matchstick. I unpinned the rose boutonniere and dropped it into the fire, then urinated on them.
As I pass by her photograph, on the last step of the stairs, I try to pick out soft plump lies to tell Cecilia. Once found, they escape my mouth in a boyish rush and feel too formal. New words that follow me to the corner seem brutal. When people speak with brutal honesty, the brutality, not the honesty is remembered the most. The bottom of a chair scrapes the carpet as someone stands up in the dining room, and I dig the bottom of my feet into the floor. I want to turn away, to run out the front door, but if run, I won’t be moving the way my blood beats. Thorns
from a bush planted by a shaken man prick deeper than other thorns. The scratches and the ugliness ahead give me the chance to be the son I need to be – prepared to fight.
Chapter 25
Legs wobbly, but determined to speak, I lean back, listening to their voices.
“Carsten,” Father yells from the opposite side of the wall.
An electric shock jolts my hand. The sensation stings, spreading up to my shoulder, then onto my skin. A patch of bumps burst out on my wrist. The bumps itch; I scratch and loose balance. My hand crunches as it lands flat on the console table. The smell of citrus and mint rises up from the bundle of khat. The leaves snap as I pluck them off the stalk. I roll a wad of leaves into a little ball and pack it down inside my right cheek – the way Father showed me. The taste is green, sour, and unpleasant. Six bundles are wrapped in banana leaves, tied with string, and twisted at the bottom. Evergreen glistens under lime. I chew more leaves and stuff the lump beside the little ball, squashing my tongue against the mass. Slime dribbles down the edge of my mouth. Meat, men’s cologne, mint, and fresh cut grass bounce on the surface of the summer air. I should smell kiwi and melon from Cecilia’s signature perfume. I hear two clicks, possibly from a cigarette lighter. The scents thin out and frankincense carpets the hallway. In the dining room, Ricky’s voice squeaks and Junior whispers. Our Father, who doesn’t art in heaven, is giddy, attaboy-patting Ricky for kissing a girl. I shiver and slump against the wall. The bronze rooster vibrates on the table. My hand swings, rubbing the knife in my pocket. To hide the bulge, I hold my hand over my thigh. In my other hand, I squeeze Brett’s watch and then shove it in my pocket. I rub the rooster’s pearl bone, before rushing through the doorway to madness.
Father and Ricky sit, laughing at the table, taking up more space than necessary. Clean-shaven, but curse-filled, Father looks fifteen pounds heavier. He stabs the air with a child-like excitement that would’ve forced me to smile on a different day. Slouching against the same wall I had been eavesdropping behind, Junior calls me over, but I ignore the gesture. I search for clues a woman would leave – a lip smudge, a folded napkin, a purse, or perfume. Pizza boxes, chicken wings, garlic bread, string beans, two cakes, khat leaves, tea mugs, plates, and a soapstone pot hide the tabletop. The fourth plate is the only plate missing food. Glancing back, I notice medical tape binds Junior’s index and middle finger together on his right hand. His left fist is under his right triceps. The telephone sits propped in the crook of his neck. The puffiness under his eyes, his receding hairline on the sides, the roundness of his belly, and his hairiness betray his youth.
