The day my mother calls to tell me about the divorce is the night I go home with a man who is allergic to me.
On the phone, I listen quietly as my mother repeats the counsel given to her by her attorney. He told her that contact with my father should be cut; the fact he now lived with another woman was not enough to show cause, and should be left out—a judge would assume the petition to be fueled by jealousy, he had explained.
While my mother goes on, I watch my cat nap on top of one of the many boxes in the living room. With my shoulder, I press the phone against my ear and begin to unpack, placing books on shelves, my grandmother’s broken tea cup on the mantel of the fireplace that doesn’t work, arranging the pieces carefully next to the framed picture of her. I keep the television on, the volume down. A commercial for my telephone company comes on, assuring me that I belong to the largest network in the nation. On the screen, a man answers a call; he turns to find all the people he will ever need, all connect to him by invisible radio waves. When my mother begins to cry, I look out my window, at the rows of cars parked so close to each other they almost touch, shaded underneath trees full and heavy with leaves, with light.
“Am I making the right choice?” she says to me.
At the bar, train stops away, I knew I would lose. In the dim, orange lighting I offer myself to a man with a square jaw, a man who tells me he isn’t picky. It’s July, and outside the warm rain comes down, trees and buildings drip into puddles on the asphalt. We take a cab to his apartment. In the rearview mirror, the cab driver’s eyes move on me briefly. We don’t bother with small talk in the back. Our hands rest between us on the worn leather seat. I let our fingers touch; I let mine play on his skin, until he withdraws. He begins to scratch at his hand, his arm.
It’s from my sister that I first learn about the affair. Weeks before I even think about leaving California, Heather calls on a Tuesday, and I’m late for work. Just as she says, “Anna,” the way she prepares me, I know what will follow. My sister is capable of delivering bad news—she’s collected and precise, but not without compassion; she’s able to answer any question.
“With whom?” I ask, as if knowing will keep me calm.
“With the woman whose name is below dad’s on the bank statement that came to the house today,” she replies.
“And mom?”
“She came back from the store with wine. She’s locked herself in her room with the record player. Anna, please come home.”
I think back to when my mother missed a red light at an intersection. She said she remembered the cars from the left charging at her like fists, the side windows of her vehicle in thousands of pieces all around her, and buried in her skin. The accident, and the procedures that followed, provided my mother with a supply of painkillers kept within pill bottles inside her medicine cabinet, from which I steal. I think of those pill bottles, how there are still so many left locked in with her, enough to guarantee the possibility of disaster, a mess left for my sister and myself.
The drive from Echo Park to Yorba Linda takes me about an hour and a half. The freeway, cutting through brown, sun-drenched hills, tests the limits of my car—a white hatchback resembling a small egg, given to me by my father. Heather meets me at the door when I reach home. From the garage I find a hammer, bringing it down on the doorknob to my mother’s room. She leans against the edge of the bed, her head hanging down as the record player spins LaVern Baker. On the floor is an empty bottle, and another, full, with the corkscrew still in. In the bathroom, Heather and I help my mother as she kneels beside the toilet. We hold her shoulders, her hair. Later, while my sister tips water from a glass to my mother’s lips, I quickly search through the medicine cabinet for the pill bottles.
I’ll say that the man’s name is John. And before we leave the bar together, he asks me a series of questions. One of them, Where are you from? I look down at my blouse and remove a strand of cat hair, letting it fall to the floor. Then I tell him. I tell John where I’m from, and I know he must think that I lived my mother’s life on the beach—in a bikini on a lawn chair in the sand at sunset, chips and salsa on a cooler, a bottle of cheap wine from the ninety-nine cent store —because, “What are you doing here?” is his next question; here, this is everyone’s next question. I think of an answer that allows me to lie without lying. Peeling the labels off bottles, I don’t tell him what I left behind.
My father stays up late at night, smoking at the kitchen table, filling the ashtray and watching the news while the rest of us sleep. Later, he will climb the stairs to the bedroom he shares with my mother. On the king-sized bed, he will lie on his side, his back facing my mother’s as their bent legs form a cove full with space between them; their almost still bodies under the layers of bedding.
From the passenger seat, my mother points to a small establishment off the beach, a café with outdoor seating. There, the wait-staff in white, button-down shirts and black ties carry light trays of green salads and cucumber water to tan women—their hair color from a bottle. “That,” my mother says to Heather and me, “is where I met your father.” I look to my father in the driver’s seat for confirmation; he nods his head once, slowly. Heather’s pink flip-flops fall from her feet as she taps them together, her knees not even reaching the edge of the seat. Although we are six years apart, my mother still has us in matching one-piece bathing suits—but I wear cut-off jean shorts, and headphones around my neck, to show that I’m older. Heather, constantly adjusting her sunglasses in the shape of stars, keeps her legs bare, like delicate stems in the spring.
My mother explains that before that place became a café, there was a bar called Casita Sierra. The inside resembled a sort of cabana, where red Christmas lights hung loosely from the ceiling and the happy hour crowd would track in sand from the beach, their loud chatter drowning out the live music from the mariachi band. The owners were an elderly couple from Galesburg, Illinois, who were more than ready to live the beach life, eagerly handing out wet drinks from behind the bar. My mother would come here with co-workers on nights she didn’t have to fly, ordering margaritas on the rocks and licking the salt from her fingers as she listened to men showing their worth. Looking down at her glass, at the floating ice cubes crashing against each other, she would think of emergency landings at sea, the chances of survival.
I ask my mother how she met my Dad. She replies that my father, at the time, had a friend with a thick mustache and curly blonde hair that was combed back with his fingers, a body that belonged on the beach. After introducing himself, he asked my mother who her taller friend was. My mother was left with my father, a quiet man with an accent who, throughout the night, would occasionally steal glances at my mother’s friend. Almost by obligation, my mother says, did my father ask for her number.
“And then you got married?” asks Heather, leaning forward and pulling on the seatbelt.
“Yes,” she replies. “And then we got married.”
That afternoon on the beach, Heather and I bury my mother in the sand, neck deep.
“Girls, I don’t want sand in my hair,” she tells us, and Heather can’t stop laughing. My father sits under the shade of our large umbrella, his shirt unbuttoned. He refuses to be a part of the beach, exhaling smoke and dropping cigarette butts into the mouth of an empty can of soda.
“My face,” my mother says, “I’m going to get burned.”
I have Heather retrieve the sunscreen, and we apply it on my mother’s forehead, her nose, and cheeks. Then, something comes over me, seeing my mother’s head above the sand, raising her eyebrows and moving her puckered lips left to right as our fingers rub the lotion onto her face, until it disappears into her skin. While Heather gets up and walks towards the water, I remember how in art class we were told that two pieces of clay must be thoroughly smashed together to become one, so that our crude animal sculptures and ashtrays do not fall to pieces in the kiln. I think of the cells that compose my mother’s skin, and also my own. I bring my face down to hers, pressing my lips tightly against her cheek, kissing her loudly.
“Oh, sweetie,” she says smiling. “Look at your sister. Just look.”
We watch her splash in the ocean up to her ankles as the small waves rush towards the sand. When she returns, Heather asks, “Where’s Dad?”
My mother turns her head as much as she can to find my father’s empty lawn chair under the umbrella. “Girls, get me out.”
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Puzzle Pieces
Since around late June/early July I've been trying to work on a story, the same way I've been trying to save money. Both haven't been working out so well. What I have so far is a page and a half of prose blocks that almost fit together. I think what I'll do is just post a new prose block whenever I have one done. If anyone's reading this, expect inconsistencies in time and space between the blocks.
Monday, November 9, 2009
another draft
Jo has her mouth wide open, her tongue out and to the side. I’m looking for white spots or growths. When I don’t find anything she pulls her lower lip down and I examine the inner lining.
“Are you having trouble swallowing?” I ask her.
“That’s not a question you ask a lady,” she says.
This week Jo is looking for cancer and she’s convinced it’s in her mouth. After class we walk across campus to the library and search through medical texts, trying to find symptoms that would lead to a diagnosis. Behind me, I listen to the study group ignore their studies and talk about the places they'll transfer to. We attend the city college. Jo and I know enough to not fool ourselves. What we do is this.
She takes my hands and brings them up to her neck, just below her jaw. “Feel,” she tells me, and I do. I think of silk, and I smell the cigarette smoke from her clothes.
“I think those are your tonsils,” I say.
“They need to go,” she replies, my hands still held where they are.
Jo’s mother, Jolie, invites me to stay for dinner. Tonight we’re meeting the new boyfriend and Jolie sets my place next to Jo’s at the table. Their home is full of lighthouses, statuettes and paintings. Lately, Jolie is trying to find God. She volunteers at the Lighthouse Baptist Church, organizing rummage sales and silent date auctions. This is how she met Mark.
Jolie introduces me to Mark and he gives an extra firm handshake. When we sit down for dinner Mark begins to ask me questions about myself and I turn to Jo for help, but she’s not interested in the show. Jolie explains that Jo and I have been friends for years, that I’m practically family. I’m waiting for Jo to talk, to begin to answer questions directed at her. She’s bored of the routine.
Mark compliments Jolie on the dinner, the meatloaf and mashed potatoes. She leaves them chunky and brown, full of skins. Jolie’s pink floral blouse is filled with her and she smiles and thanks him. I pretend that I’m like a probing adult and ask Mark what he does for a living. He tells us that he manages the new Bargain Warehouse off McKinley. Jo giggles, her head down. Mark smiles because he's polite, and I notice the lines in his face, how they don't make him look distinguished; that's not the right word. Worn.
“He was trying,” I say to Jo.
“She’s settling. She’s trying to settle.”
I watch Jo sit on the windowsill of her room, blowing smoke out into the night, the neighborhood dogs barking. She collects the things that killed her father years ago when we were freshman. On the wall above her bed she’s glued empty cigarette packs, positioning them at an angle, the entire wall covered.
“I remember the curtains in the living room, the smell and feel of smoke,” she tells me, “The curtains that were taken down.” I reach for her hair and my fingers run through the strands, effortlessly. My hand falls behind her neck and she rests her head on my wrist. I never want to move. But she does. She pulls on her lower lip again and feels the inside with her finger using the same hand.
“How would you like to go?” she asks.
I think about it for a while and then I answer. “My grandma went the best way. She did the two things she loved best before passing: she watched soccer and flirted with the young doctor. Then she told everyone she was tired.”
Jo smiles and flicks the cigarette butt out the window. When she looks at me I’m looking down. I thought that telling the story this way would make it easier.
When I return home I find my dad drunk on the couch, the TV on and muted. He looks like he fell asleep laughing. After work my dad drinks so much he can’t speak, he can only laugh, if he does. We’re all okay with this. It makes him happy. When he’s passed out, I like to hold his face—it feels like putty; his cheeks fall in folds in my hands. I kiss his forehead and his eyes open, dopey; he smiles.
“Go to sleep, dad.” I say.
My mom does sit-ups to infinity in the bedroom, her hands behind her head as she thrusts her torso forward and back down, her abs tightening. She sees me and she stops once she reaches her goal.
“Hi sweetie, how was Jo’s?”
“Fine.”
“Are you hungry? I can make you a shake.”
“No thanks. Keep going. I’m going to bed.”
Before she tells me she loves me, she asks if I've sent out any applications. She reminds me of the general deadline, of my second year. I give her the next best thing to the answer she wants, a smile. My mom is happy to avoid the truth, and she accepts this, flattening her body back on the yoga mat.
My mom has become something of a health-nut. Each day I witness her build her body into a machine through exercises and protein shakes. Her determination shames me. I find it hard to get out of bed, and in class I fall asleep. My mom encourages me to go on jogs. It’s become her solution to every problem.
Lately I have dreams that are more nightmares than dreams. My grandma visits and I forget what’s real and what isn’t. Who is alive and who is not.
I think back to after the funeral, when my mom was my mom. She brought back a plastic bin full of my grandma’s scarves, the lid sealing the box air-tight. She sat the bin down on the bed and called me close. Pulling the lid open, she stood back. “Go ahead,” she said. I slipped my hands in, clutching the silk scarves that felt like the dearest of skin. I brought them up to my face, smelling the familiar lavender lotion. “It’s her,” she said.
“Are you having trouble swallowing?” I ask her.
“That’s not a question you ask a lady,” she says.
This week Jo is looking for cancer and she’s convinced it’s in her mouth. After class we walk across campus to the library and search through medical texts, trying to find symptoms that would lead to a diagnosis. Behind me, I listen to the study group ignore their studies and talk about the places they'll transfer to. We attend the city college. Jo and I know enough to not fool ourselves. What we do is this.
She takes my hands and brings them up to her neck, just below her jaw. “Feel,” she tells me, and I do. I think of silk, and I smell the cigarette smoke from her clothes.
“I think those are your tonsils,” I say.
“They need to go,” she replies, my hands still held where they are.
Jo’s mother, Jolie, invites me to stay for dinner. Tonight we’re meeting the new boyfriend and Jolie sets my place next to Jo’s at the table. Their home is full of lighthouses, statuettes and paintings. Lately, Jolie is trying to find God. She volunteers at the Lighthouse Baptist Church, organizing rummage sales and silent date auctions. This is how she met Mark.
Jolie introduces me to Mark and he gives an extra firm handshake. When we sit down for dinner Mark begins to ask me questions about myself and I turn to Jo for help, but she’s not interested in the show. Jolie explains that Jo and I have been friends for years, that I’m practically family. I’m waiting for Jo to talk, to begin to answer questions directed at her. She’s bored of the routine.
Mark compliments Jolie on the dinner, the meatloaf and mashed potatoes. She leaves them chunky and brown, full of skins. Jolie’s pink floral blouse is filled with her and she smiles and thanks him. I pretend that I’m like a probing adult and ask Mark what he does for a living. He tells us that he manages the new Bargain Warehouse off McKinley. Jo giggles, her head down. Mark smiles because he's polite, and I notice the lines in his face, how they don't make him look distinguished; that's not the right word. Worn.
“He was trying,” I say to Jo.
“She’s settling. She’s trying to settle.”
I watch Jo sit on the windowsill of her room, blowing smoke out into the night, the neighborhood dogs barking. She collects the things that killed her father years ago when we were freshman. On the wall above her bed she’s glued empty cigarette packs, positioning them at an angle, the entire wall covered.
“I remember the curtains in the living room, the smell and feel of smoke,” she tells me, “The curtains that were taken down.” I reach for her hair and my fingers run through the strands, effortlessly. My hand falls behind her neck and she rests her head on my wrist. I never want to move. But she does. She pulls on her lower lip again and feels the inside with her finger using the same hand.
“How would you like to go?” she asks.
I think about it for a while and then I answer. “My grandma went the best way. She did the two things she loved best before passing: she watched soccer and flirted with the young doctor. Then she told everyone she was tired.”
Jo smiles and flicks the cigarette butt out the window. When she looks at me I’m looking down. I thought that telling the story this way would make it easier.
When I return home I find my dad drunk on the couch, the TV on and muted. He looks like he fell asleep laughing. After work my dad drinks so much he can’t speak, he can only laugh, if he does. We’re all okay with this. It makes him happy. When he’s passed out, I like to hold his face—it feels like putty; his cheeks fall in folds in my hands. I kiss his forehead and his eyes open, dopey; he smiles.
“Go to sleep, dad.” I say.
My mom does sit-ups to infinity in the bedroom, her hands behind her head as she thrusts her torso forward and back down, her abs tightening. She sees me and she stops once she reaches her goal.
“Hi sweetie, how was Jo’s?”
“Fine.”
“Are you hungry? I can make you a shake.”
“No thanks. Keep going. I’m going to bed.”
Before she tells me she loves me, she asks if I've sent out any applications. She reminds me of the general deadline, of my second year. I give her the next best thing to the answer she wants, a smile. My mom is happy to avoid the truth, and she accepts this, flattening her body back on the yoga mat.
My mom has become something of a health-nut. Each day I witness her build her body into a machine through exercises and protein shakes. Her determination shames me. I find it hard to get out of bed, and in class I fall asleep. My mom encourages me to go on jogs. It’s become her solution to every problem.
Lately I have dreams that are more nightmares than dreams. My grandma visits and I forget what’s real and what isn’t. Who is alive and who is not.
I think back to after the funeral, when my mom was my mom. She brought back a plastic bin full of my grandma’s scarves, the lid sealing the box air-tight. She sat the bin down on the bed and called me close. Pulling the lid open, she stood back. “Go ahead,” she said. I slipped my hands in, clutching the silk scarves that felt like the dearest of skin. I brought them up to my face, smelling the familiar lavender lotion. “It’s her,” she said.
Draft, untitled
Mike stands at the head of the blue-matted studio, facing a small army of children, lined up and dressed in martial arts robes. He guides them through the routine, a kick, a punch—their tiny fists propelling forward, into their invisible enemy—yelling Hai-ya with each move.
On the radio, the morning weather forecast predicted afternoon thunderstorms, a possibility of rain, temperatures dropping below fifty. I took my chances, leaving behind my umbrella at home. Now I’m outside the dojo, under the awning—heavy with tonight’s rain—watching Mike through the window.
As the class comes to a close, parents begin to arrive and gather at the door. In low voices, they establish who has the busiest schedule—their heat fogging the window. In unison, Mike and his students bow. The class dismissed, the children disperse, retuning to their parents. And before Mike is crowded with mothers delivering payments, he catches sight of me and I meet him in the alley.
Tonight, Mike’s wife is away, in a bigger city across state. At his house, climbing the stairs to the bedroom he shares with his wife, we pass the other bedroom that remains closed, where his son doesn’t live anymore.
On top of Mike, I try to rub out the tension in his muscles under his skin. I begin at the small of his back, pushing my palms upward, spreading to the shoulders. But I know I can never get deep enough.
A year and a half ago I came to this town to student teach. There were twenty-four children in my first grade classroom. After the real teacher would give a lesson, I would go around the room, kneeling down beside the ones that raised their hand for help. I was still new and never good with names. I wasn’t perfect with names. I relied on touch.
The boy was in that class.
Once, after I finished helping the girl next to him, he asked me if my name was Miss Neer because I was always near people. I gave him a smile and touched his head.
It was the real teacher who told me what had happened. She pulled me aside, in the teacher’s lounge and explained that there was an accident, that the mother was fine but the boy didn’t survive. She said that we would have to explain the empty desk to the others.
When Mike’s wife recovered she took a job as a pharmaceutical representative that would keep her out of the house. In the new car she zig-zags across the state, her foot pushing down on the gas pedal to the floor. In the glove compartment she keeps the speeding tickets she’s accumulated as she drives to oblivion.
The day we had to explain to the class was the day I resigned. I had only made it through the winter break. The real teacher and the principal told me they knew it was hard, but that this is life. I told them that I wasn’t strong enough. That I kept getting the names wrong.
In the dead of night, when the trains cross town to the train yard, the house rattles. Mike is asleep, and I hold on to him until the house stops shaking.
I remember my sister’s funeral, her open casket, the white satin that held her face. Her skin had already become pale, powder. After the funeral my mother became hysterical. On her bed she held on to me, calling my sister’s name into my chest.
On the radio, the morning weather forecast predicted afternoon thunderstorms, a possibility of rain, temperatures dropping below fifty. I took my chances, leaving behind my umbrella at home. Now I’m outside the dojo, under the awning—heavy with tonight’s rain—watching Mike through the window.
As the class comes to a close, parents begin to arrive and gather at the door. In low voices, they establish who has the busiest schedule—their heat fogging the window. In unison, Mike and his students bow. The class dismissed, the children disperse, retuning to their parents. And before Mike is crowded with mothers delivering payments, he catches sight of me and I meet him in the alley.
Tonight, Mike’s wife is away, in a bigger city across state. At his house, climbing the stairs to the bedroom he shares with his wife, we pass the other bedroom that remains closed, where his son doesn’t live anymore.
On top of Mike, I try to rub out the tension in his muscles under his skin. I begin at the small of his back, pushing my palms upward, spreading to the shoulders. But I know I can never get deep enough.
A year and a half ago I came to this town to student teach. There were twenty-four children in my first grade classroom. After the real teacher would give a lesson, I would go around the room, kneeling down beside the ones that raised their hand for help. I was still new and never good with names. I wasn’t perfect with names. I relied on touch.
The boy was in that class.
Once, after I finished helping the girl next to him, he asked me if my name was Miss Neer because I was always near people. I gave him a smile and touched his head.
It was the real teacher who told me what had happened. She pulled me aside, in the teacher’s lounge and explained that there was an accident, that the mother was fine but the boy didn’t survive. She said that we would have to explain the empty desk to the others.
When Mike’s wife recovered she took a job as a pharmaceutical representative that would keep her out of the house. In the new car she zig-zags across the state, her foot pushing down on the gas pedal to the floor. In the glove compartment she keeps the speeding tickets she’s accumulated as she drives to oblivion.
The day we had to explain to the class was the day I resigned. I had only made it through the winter break. The real teacher and the principal told me they knew it was hard, but that this is life. I told them that I wasn’t strong enough. That I kept getting the names wrong.
In the dead of night, when the trains cross town to the train yard, the house rattles. Mike is asleep, and I hold on to him until the house stops shaking.
I remember my sister’s funeral, her open casket, the white satin that held her face. Her skin had already become pale, powder. After the funeral my mother became hysterical. On her bed she held on to me, calling my sister’s name into my chest.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Old, old things
Pictures of my grandmother, grandfather, and great grandmother in Mexico City and surrounding areas.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Cemetery
This story was accepted into Catch, the Knox College literary magazine. Let's ignore the fact that I recently graduated.
"Cemetery"
In the backyard, the guys stand around the grill, smoking and ashing their cigarettes onto the grass. Mario claims he’s done this before, that he knows how, but the grill still isn’t lit. The sun goes down, falling behind the trees in the graveyard at the end of the block. On the foldout chair by the back porch, the thawed hotdogs and hamburger patties are set, covered from the insects that have returned for the season. Mario holds his hand over the grill; he feels nothing.
Larry goes to the cooler to bring back more beer, digging through ice for new cans, and handing them out, dripping. They begin to debate whether to use lighter fluid—after some time, they agree not to, and to start over; they dump the used charcoal in a corner of the yard where the grass doesn’t grow. This time Mario reads the directions.
Daisy stands under the front porch light, by two people she knows but isn’t close to. She listens in and out of their conversation, holding a beer like it’s not what it is. Tonight she wears a new dress she bought in the city, and a new hair color. Earlier today, she dyed her hair over the kitchen sink of her apartment—the one in the bathroom has long been broken, and the landlord forgets to come by. In the past, Mario came by. With a towel over her shoulders, she watched the dye stain the dirty plates, the silverware, and circle around the drain.
Mario comes around the front to tell everyone that the food is cooking. He sees Daisy under the light, but he talks to other people first. When everyone goes into the house, making their way to the back door, Mario and Daisy begin to talk, but about nothing. He looks away, down at the porch floor, and sees her legs crossed. She’s leaning against the post with her hands behind her back, her new blonde hair falling in her face. When he asks her if she’d like to go for a walk, she pretends that this isn’t a sweetheart deal.
Walking slow, they reach the graveyard, and Daisy says she’s never been. Mario pushes the gate open and goes in first. Going through, they read the names and dates in stone, the epitaphs they think they’ll remember, but none will stay. By a grave with a statue of a civil war soldier they sit and don’t speak. When Daisy tucks her hair behind her ear, Mario holds her face and brings it towards his. On the ground, he feels for her skirt and pulls it up. Daisy will think about the grass stains later.
Back at the house, in the backyard, Larry is buzzed. In the corner of the yard he sees the space where they dumped the first batch of charcoal, lit red and heat waves rising. In the upstairs bathroom they fill a bucket of water in the bathtub, spilling its contents on the hardwood floor as they make their way downstairs and out the back door to the burning spot. When the small fire is out, no one notices that Daisy and Mario have been gone until they return, back from trying to raise the dead.
"Cemetery"
In the backyard, the guys stand around the grill, smoking and ashing their cigarettes onto the grass. Mario claims he’s done this before, that he knows how, but the grill still isn’t lit. The sun goes down, falling behind the trees in the graveyard at the end of the block. On the foldout chair by the back porch, the thawed hotdogs and hamburger patties are set, covered from the insects that have returned for the season. Mario holds his hand over the grill; he feels nothing.
Larry goes to the cooler to bring back more beer, digging through ice for new cans, and handing them out, dripping. They begin to debate whether to use lighter fluid—after some time, they agree not to, and to start over; they dump the used charcoal in a corner of the yard where the grass doesn’t grow. This time Mario reads the directions.
Daisy stands under the front porch light, by two people she knows but isn’t close to. She listens in and out of their conversation, holding a beer like it’s not what it is. Tonight she wears a new dress she bought in the city, and a new hair color. Earlier today, she dyed her hair over the kitchen sink of her apartment—the one in the bathroom has long been broken, and the landlord forgets to come by. In the past, Mario came by. With a towel over her shoulders, she watched the dye stain the dirty plates, the silverware, and circle around the drain.
Mario comes around the front to tell everyone that the food is cooking. He sees Daisy under the light, but he talks to other people first. When everyone goes into the house, making their way to the back door, Mario and Daisy begin to talk, but about nothing. He looks away, down at the porch floor, and sees her legs crossed. She’s leaning against the post with her hands behind her back, her new blonde hair falling in her face. When he asks her if she’d like to go for a walk, she pretends that this isn’t a sweetheart deal.
Walking slow, they reach the graveyard, and Daisy says she’s never been. Mario pushes the gate open and goes in first. Going through, they read the names and dates in stone, the epitaphs they think they’ll remember, but none will stay. By a grave with a statue of a civil war soldier they sit and don’t speak. When Daisy tucks her hair behind her ear, Mario holds her face and brings it towards his. On the ground, he feels for her skirt and pulls it up. Daisy will think about the grass stains later.
Back at the house, in the backyard, Larry is buzzed. In the corner of the yard he sees the space where they dumped the first batch of charcoal, lit red and heat waves rising. In the upstairs bathroom they fill a bucket of water in the bathtub, spilling its contents on the hardwood floor as they make their way downstairs and out the back door to the burning spot. When the small fire is out, no one notices that Daisy and Mario have been gone until they return, back from trying to raise the dead.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Some Things
It has been months since my arrival and I think I finally feel settled, here in Chicago. I remember the move from Galesburg, in the passenger seat of the cargo van, everything packed in boxes behind me. My cat, Taffy, wouldn't stop whining. I held her, hoping it would calm her. Her face was horrifying. Her eyes were actually bulging, she was panting. As if she couldn't believe the road was moving below us. In a way, I almost felt the same way; my biggest fear, since moving to Galesburg, was being stuck in Galesburg. Last year, a professor asked me, after reviewing a story, if I was happy. I didn't know how to answer, and this professor seems to have trouble separating fact from fiction. It was spring. He said that Galesburg was a great place to nurture melancholy; he said he was worried. I was stoned when I left Galesburg, and the sun was beginning to set. On the road, insects crashed against the windshield, their remains spread across by the windshield whippers.
Now I have a routine, one which I appreciate after a month of unemployment. My office is on the fifth floor of a building you wouldn't think twice to look at, across the street from St. Peter's church. I watch the pigeons gather on top of the crucified Christ, and the window-washers suspended above many stories, working diligently, without fear.
I'm in love with my neighborhood, Andersonville. It's a place where children can play on the street. In the summer, they set up lemonade stands, and draw on the sidewalk with chalk--the summer rains smearing the colors. I stay mostly indoors. When I hear the gates crash outside, I run to the picture window, hoping to catch a look at one of my neighbors. This has become the most physically demanding activity I do at home. Mostly, I nap on the couch with the television on. The cold has arrived and this only encourages my napping. It has been very easy not to write. However, I have been reading. I recently finished Bad Behavior* by Mary Gaitskill, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel**, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth* by Kevin Wilson, The Feast of the Goat** by Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Safety of Objects, by A.M. Homes.
(*=recommended; **=strongly recommended)
I recently started a story this week. It's very exciting, for me, at least. So far, I have four sentences. Let's hope I make it to ten by the end of the week.
Now I have a routine, one which I appreciate after a month of unemployment. My office is on the fifth floor of a building you wouldn't think twice to look at, across the street from St. Peter's church. I watch the pigeons gather on top of the crucified Christ, and the window-washers suspended above many stories, working diligently, without fear.
I'm in love with my neighborhood, Andersonville. It's a place where children can play on the street. In the summer, they set up lemonade stands, and draw on the sidewalk with chalk--the summer rains smearing the colors. I stay mostly indoors. When I hear the gates crash outside, I run to the picture window, hoping to catch a look at one of my neighbors. This has become the most physically demanding activity I do at home. Mostly, I nap on the couch with the television on. The cold has arrived and this only encourages my napping. It has been very easy not to write. However, I have been reading. I recently finished Bad Behavior* by Mary Gaitskill, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel**, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth* by Kevin Wilson, The Feast of the Goat** by Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Safety of Objects, by A.M. Homes.
(*=recommended; **=strongly recommended)
I recently started a story this week. It's very exciting, for me, at least. So far, I have four sentences. Let's hope I make it to ten by the end of the week.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
On Film
“On Film” (latest draft)
This director rents out a small mansion tucked among the last orange groves in the city, not far from the house where I grew up. In the downstairs bathroom, Michael prepares himself, his jeans unbuttoned and down to mid-thigh while I wait with the crew as they set up the camera and lighting equipment in front of a black leather sofa and a glass coffee table in the otherwise bare living room. When the bathroom door opens, Michael appears in costume. He’s wearing a baseball cap and a plain white shirt, a semi under the fabric of his baggy jeans, ready to begin.
I’m told to stand behind the crew and stay quiet. Two men crouched on the floor do final checks on their equipment. Sara, the only woman in the room, turns to look at me, making sure I’m at a good distance away. Even though this isn’t my first time watching, I’m still treated like it is. Lifting her headphones over her ears, Sara turns back to the director and says, we’re all good. With his arm over the sofa, Michael sits with another guy, Cody, in similar attire, minus the hat. As they begin filming, the director casually asks Michael questions—his age, his height, and then more specific ones: “Do you have a girlfriend?” Yes. “So, you’re straight?” Yeah. “And you’ve never fucked a guy before?” I haven’t. “You ever been fucked?” No. “Do you wanna make some money?” Yeah. “How do you feel about Cody?” I don’t know. Okay?
This is acting.
The director laughs, and Cody and Michael smile, looking down and away from each other like they are strangers. When the director says, “Okay guys, take off your clothes,” Michael looks at me before he lifts his shirt.
Later, on the drive home, he has the passenger seat back, his feet on the dashboard; he’s tired. Night has fallen. The road that leads out of the orange groves winds down to the stillness of the sprawling neighborhoods, the quiet streets. No one can be found, no one walking their dog, or coming home from work. Neighborhood kids have disappeared, abandoning their bikes on front lawns. Farther down, the quietness breaks. Streets widen to busy intersections: impatient cars and flashing traffic lights, the closer we get to the freeway onramp. As the headlights illuminate the broken stripe that divides the lanes on this side of the freeway, I remember my first time coming back with Michael after a shoot. I had asked him what it felt like. He said that he liked it—to be watched, losing himself fucking, releasing something more from inside himself than come.
Now, I think of myself there with him in front of the camera: my legs over his shoulders, I’m crushed breathless and filled. I imagine that as I turn to see the bright light, the cameraman and the director beside him, from the middle of my chest I’m torn open, rib cages pulled apart, everything inside of me seen, obliterated.
With his head against the headrest, Michael looks out his window, at the houses along the freeway, lit up from the inside. Before he falls asleep, I say, “Let’s play a game.” He agrees. I ask him, “What do you want?”
“To get the hell out of here, away from this place,” he says. Before he yawns, he asks, “What do you want?” rarely saying my name. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t know it isn’t Raymond, but Raymundo.
I tell him that turning back, taking this freeway all the way down, down to Artesia Boulevard and following until we reach the 405, going north, will take us up to Santa Monica. I tell him that years ago, my mom and my stepfather took me there at night, to a lookout point just off Ocean Avenue to watch the Malibu fire. The coast curved out into the ocean, red against the dark, hills breathing heavy smoke. My mom holding my hand, pointing to the scene of the disaster, “Mira, Raymundo. Mira cómo todo se quema.” Through the eyepiece of a beach telescope—my stepfather handing me a quarter—I watched palm trees in flames; houses we could never live in, burning, collapsing into embers, into ash.
When he doesn’t say anything, I try to explain. “I want to feel like that,” I say, but he has already fallen asleep.
Michael and I have been involved for a few months. He’s finishing up a contract with the eighth largest Internet gay porn production site in the nation. It was our second time together, at his place, that he told me he made a living fucking in front of a camera. I told him that I was stuck working the third shift in the back room of a department store. I left his apartment that night thinking I wouldn’t see him again, imagining that the clothes in the bottom drawer of his dresser, left open, belonged to someone else. It was a week later that he called me again, to come over and fool around. In bed, he asked me if I would like to see him work. I said, yes.
Now, I go with him because he doesn’t own a car and can’t get to the places they’re shooting—from a rented beach house north of San Diego, to a loft with a city view in Studio City. It’s not because he can’t afford it. He says that it helps him to have me there on set—in an anonymous kitchen, an office, a backyard—to watch, and I try to believe him. Because Michael has become friends with the director, he says it’s okay for me to be there, and that this sort of thing isn’t unusual. The first time I showed up to one of the shoots, the director, Sean, could see that I was uncomfortable, that it was obvious I didn’t belong there, standing behind the crew and waiting for it all to be over. While Michael was in the bathroom freshening up, Sean called me over and, as to ease me in, began telling me of other actors he had worked with who’d bring their boyfriends or girlfriends with them. Having them there, he said, would turn them on, made them better performers. I nodded. But what I wanted to tell him was that I wasn’t sure what Michael and I were, that in fact, I was waiting quietly for him to leave me. I still am.
When we get back to Michael’s place he checks his messages on the answering machine. In his bathroom, with the door closed, I do the same on my own phone. I count the many times my mom has called while it was off, the messages she has left, all beginning with “Mundo, Mundito, answer.” She calls often, at night, telling me that the air she breathes is like water, that she’s drowning. She can’t be alone. I have to go to her, calm her down and set her to bed. I lay next to her, over the blankets, and she holds me close, like when I was a small child, when it was only me and her before she remarried and years later was abandoned—all her sadness and fear becoming my own as she holds on. Once she asked if I thought that life would be easier if we were dead. Mom, don’t think like that, I said. The more times I go the more I fear we will die on that bed. I have to wait until she has fallen asleep before I can make an escape route.
Beneath the door I see Michael’s shoes. His voice coming through, “Ray.” When I open the door, I ask, “Have you heard back yet?” I follow him back into the living room where he sits at his desk, his computer on.
“Not yet,” he says.
For the last couple of weeks, Michael has been searching for bigger and better things. He complains about the cost of rent here in town, the people in the apartment complex. Barefoot kids are always playing on the stairs, hanging off the railings. Many times, when I go home with him, we see the older woman who lives next-door. She doesn’t speak English. She sits outside every day, peeling vegetables for the dinner we will later smell through the walls. She stares at us when we pass by. It’s never friendly. We hear the couple that lives upstairs, a thin waitress from Manchester named Emily and her fat boyfriend, Shane, with his red goatee. Visitors climb the stairs up to their apartment at all hours of the night. We hear thrown things crash. Some mornings we see Shane coming out of his apartment with fresh cuts on his neck and cheek. Michael says it’s not worth being here in this shithole, paying what he does and so far from anything exciting: Los Angeles hours away in night and traffic. I want to believe him, that there is more. But I’m scared that this is life, that it’s no different here from there.
Now, Michael’s trying out for a better-known production company based out of Las Vegas that features young men with a collegiate look. He has already sent in his information along with pictures of himself that I took, one of his face, another of his upper body, and two full nude shots. He had asked me to take the pictures after I had brought him back to my apartment where he found a collection of photographs I had taken, mostly Polaroids, left on my coffee table. He sorted through them, held up two he really liked. One was of a young couple at a table in an outdoor café, the boy turned to the girl with one had hand on her arm, needing to tell her something while she looked away, at something out of frame. The other was a side profile shot of a woman at night, her hair covering most of her face and falling on her bare shoulder. In the picture she’s looking down, her prominent nose at an upward angle, a cigarette in her mouth. I told him that she was about to cross the street, at the crowded intersection of Lincoln and 6th. Lights from traffic and neon store signs lit up the square, but in the picture it is only the flash from my camera that hits her, and everything around her is black, like it had never existed.
When I arrived at Michael’s apartment with my Polaroid camera for the favor, he looked surprised. “With that?” he asked. It’ll be fine, I told him. In his living room, he stood naked in front of me, the afternoon light from the window touching his skin. Locating him in the viewfinder, he had his head titled down, looking straight at me. “No attitude,” I said, and his eyebrows relaxed, his eyes softened. As I waited for the film to develop, I saw him appear through blurry gray hues, young and fresh-faced. “Those look like shit,” he said when I showed him, and had me do it over with his own camera. When he asked me if I thought he’d be able to make it, I said yes, thinking of how his body would fit with those on the website. I’m sure that sooner or later they’ll contact him. Now we’re both waiting.
After he’s done with the computer, he gets up and sees me standing by the door, with a look that makes me think he’s forgotten I’m here.
“Are you going?” he asks.
“You seem tired.”
“I’m not tired,” he says. When I don’t move, he adds, “It’s up to you.”
When Michael and I fuck, for just a moment, I forget about everything. I go to him sedated, waiting to feel something. His shirt off, I smell his skin. I bite on his lower lip, his shoulder. “Beg for my cock,” he says, towering over me, slapping my lips with it. When he’s fucking me, I wrap my legs around him, pushing him. I want nothing left of me. Once, I let it slip, “I want you to hurt me.” I was shocked and embarrassed, lying naked under him. He stopped and looked at me in the near dark, the orange glow of the streetlamps coming in through the blinds, falling on us. Then, he turned me over, onto my stomach. Grabbing hold of my wrists, my arms out, he pinned me down. Through grunts, he said, “Am I filling you up?” “Completely,” I told him, half alive, my body blossoming as he continued crushing.
But now, I’m beginning to think that I’m disappointing him. The first time we fucked he came first. “Okay, now you,” he said, moving down on me. As he sucked me off, I could feel his jaw and neck beginning to tense, his eyes motioning up to me, wondering when I would. With my hands on the sides of his face, I brought him up. “Sorry,” I whispered, “I just can’t.” I told him that I hadn’t been able to with anyone. There’s a point during sex when I know that what I want won’t happen, that I will never feel what I hope to, that I can only come so close to it and then I have to give up. I’m worried it bothers him now. He’s relentless, always trying, and then I always have to stop it.
Twice a week I visit my mom after my shift at work. I try to catch her before she heads out, leaving her apartment with a large pot of warm tamales. When I meet her at the door, she sets the pot down and holds me close, bringing my forehead down to her lips. At the kitchen table with the tablecloth that belonged to my grandmom a long time ago, she sits me down and heats up the leftovers from her dinner the night before. “It’s mole verde con pollo,” she says.
She still wears the wedding ring my stepfather gave her. About a year and a half ago he ran off, left her in the home they had made together, the home where I grew up. She stayed, going about her usual chores, pulling out the wet laundry from the washer and moving it into the dryer, dusting the living room and scrubbing the stove. He stopped paying the mortgage but continued to pay the gas and electric bills until his failing business finally went under. Friends found him on the bedroom floor of his new apartment, with a plastic bag over his head and taped around his neck. My mom stayed as long as she could, until the bank forced her out. All of our belonging were packed into boxes. Some things we had to lose.
Now she lives in this apartment she shares with no one—with the furniture she was able to salvage—trying to recreate the home she once had. Since she lost him she’s tried to find other sources of income. When the applications she filled out, along with the resume I helped her build, didn’t lead to call backs, she began making tamales and selling them from the trunk of her car in super-market parking lots. The people she sells to love her food. Some even beg for her recipe, but she only smiles and thanks them. She doesn’t tell them that this is how she barely stays alive, that late at night she pushes her hands into an earthenware pot of cornmeal, pieces of it clinging onto her fingers as she wipes the side of her face with her forearm—her rings resting on the kitchen counter.
She comes back from the kitchen with the warm plate, setting it down in front of me. After I take a few bites, pushing rice onto my fork with a butter knife, I ask her how things are. “Here, everything is worse,” she says, turning the wedding ring on her finger. “I haven’t been making enough.”
“Mom, how much do you need?”
She points to the stack of bills in between the prayer candles on the table. She’s behind again; some of them are second notices. I go through each envelope, tearing them open and adding the amounts due on a napkin by my plate.
“Why didn’t you ask me before?” I say.
“I called you,” she responds.
I ask her if she has been taking her medication. She shakes her head. “Sometimes,” she replies. She gets up to retrieve her pill case from the bathroom. When she returns to the table she sets the case down in front of her. A small thing painted gold. Opening the case, she turns it to face me. “Look at my failure,” she says. “My life in pieces.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, and she nods, taking out a pill, brining it to her mouth. As she sips from my glass of water I take my plate to the sink, rinse it off. Above the sink, she has an old picture of the three of us, herself, my stepfather and me in between, at the Griffith Observatory at night. We’re standing in front of the view of Silver Lake and downtown, a blur of red and white lights. In the picture, my stepfather is looking up at the night sky, where no stars swirled above us, as if he already knew his way out.
Turning in her chair, she faces me, looking up when I come back into the room.
“It would be easier if you came back,” she begins. “If you shared this with me.”
“I can’t do that,” I say, standing by her chair.
“Who do you have, if not me?” she asks, holding onto my hand. “Who else?”
When I can’t look at her, she grabs at my arms, and buries her face just below my chest, in the folds of my shirt, her tears soaking through.
My apartment complex sits on the outskirts of town, in between an abandoned golf course and a wide-open field of dried yellow grass. All this will soon be a construction site for a new shopping center; this includes my building. When my stepfather moved us to this city, it was still mostly orange groves and quiet neighborhoods. Soon after, construction began. The orange groves were uprooted, the landscape became bare and new homes, schools and shopping center sprang up from the ground so quickly we almost forgot what existed before. Most of the tenants in my building have already picked up and left. My landlord stops by often, leaving his new sports car in the driveway, checking to see who has left and who remains. When he sees me arrive he stops me as I get out of my car, asking me what’s my plan, when are you getting out. I tell him I’m working on it. He tells me that if I don’t move quickly, construction will begin over me.
After my shower, I get a call from Michael. With a towel wrapped around my waist I leave wet footprints in the carpet leading to the phone. “I got it,” he says, his voice coming through the receiver, “They want me.” I meet him at his apartment. When I come in he smiles. He begins to tell me the details, that they need his test results as soon as possible to begin filming. “We’ll have to drive there,” he says, “it’s just outside Vegas.”
That night in bed, before we begin anything, he tells me more about the job. “They want me to look more natural,” he says. I feel the small patch of trimmed chest hair over his sternum with my fingers. “I’ll have to grow that out. They like body hair.”
“Vegas is far,” I tell him.
“ I know.”
“They’ll want you back.”
“I think I might move there.”
Across the ceiling we hear Emily’s footsteps in the room above. I bring the sheets up and around my shoulders, wrapping myself in a cocoon. “You’ll come too, it won't be hard to find a job,” he says. It’s difficult to pretend that I’m not an afterthought. I imagine myself in Vegas, in the extreme heat, wearing a button-down shirt and red vest, catching keys to other people’s vehicles at a hotel-casino parking lot—a landscape too new and constantly under construction. I imagine coming home to a bare apartment with black steel furniture against white walls, and no one else home.
He moves over me and then we begin. As we kiss, he brings each of my arms up over my head and pins them there until we’re both hard and swollen. “I have something for you,” he says into my ear.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he replies. We’re gaining momentum.
When it’s almost time for him, he’s behind me and has me face down, pressed into the mattress. My eyes closed, I say, “I want you to come on me.” Then, his hands stop pushing down on my back. There’s a sudden flash that shocks the room, then a mechanical moan.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he says, keeping my head down with one hand, “Keep going.”
My eyes still closed, I turn around. He keeps pushing in and my head goes back. I’m grabbing the edge of the mattress. Then he lifts away from me, and again I sense a flash. When I open my eyes, Michael’s up is on his knees, holding a Polaroid camera in one hand and a picture in the other. “It’s okay,” he says, dropping the picture over the bed, “keep going.”
In the morning Michael is still sleeping. Before getting up and gathering my clothes to return home, I look over the bed. On the floor lay the two pictures that he took the night before. The first one my back is pushed forward. My face is to the side, eyes clenched and mouth slightly opened. In the other, my front is washed out by the flash. The top of the frame cuts off my face, and there’s black all around me. Michael rolls over in bed, still asleep, his chest expanding with each breath and the sheets tangled between his legs. I’m embarrassed to look at the pictures, at the estranged, pathetic positions of myself.
The videos of Michael on the Internet, and the ones I’ve seen filmed, don’t bother me. For the most part I know they aren’t real. Sometimes I can separate fact from fiction. There’s always some distance between bodies in the videos so that the cameramen can get a good shot of the penetration. In the frame, while one is flat on his back, the other, usually Michael, is perpendicular, on his knees and holding the other guy’s legs up by the ankles. Between them, the viewer needs to see cock shoving in and sliding out.
When I return home, I watch videos of him on my computer. The thing is, I never have trouble by myself. I sit at my desk, my pants unbuttoned. There is a video clip of him that I return to repeatedly. It’s one of his earlier gigs, when he was still new, made on a digital camcorder. He lies on his back, alone, his head turned to the camera that stays on his face, close up. He blinks a few times but doesn’t look away, letting out quiet moans, and then smiles. The clip lasts only twelve seconds that I keep on a loop.
Once, in bed with Michael, he wouldn’t give up. After he came, he laid beside me and gripped me tightly with his right hand, going slow first then fast—my hips motioning up in soft thrusts. When I couldn’t, he went faster. “Just fucking come,” he muttered. Still going, he sat up and went harder. I felt his other hand on my throat, his thumb beginning to push down. “Stop!” I shouted, pushing him off and getting out of bed.
“What’s wrong with you?” he yelled as I left the room.
One time I did come with someone. I’ve never told Michael. It was with a man from the gay bar in Riverside—a man who stared me down, deathly, who bought me drinks and placed his hand on my thigh under the counter, his fingers running on the denim of my pants—a man that looked like my stepfather. The lights off at his place, on his bed, I straddled him. I put one hand against the wall as I jerked my dick with the other. He touched me all over and I looked up, away. Above, the ceiling fan spun slow, blowing air that made my sweat cold. “On my face,” he said, his voice resonate. I didn’t want him to speak.
As our trip to Vegas gets closer I see that Michael is already changing and I document it with the Polaroids he’s reluctant to pose for. After a trip to the drug store his hair has become a chestnut brown, a more natural match to his skin. His eyebrows are growing in fuller, defining his face. I’m discovering a new feel for him when my fingers trail down his torso over the new patch of chest hair, or the light fuzz on his ass. But we’ve been calming down at night. In bed, he begins to show a polite tenderness I don’t believe, rubbing my arm as I lay close. He’s saving himself. I’m thinking of the load of come he’ll shoot on film when he’s done, getting up and walking out of the frame for a towel to wipe himself off, not coming back to where I am. “Just a few more days,” he reminds me.
Days before we leave for Vegas I try to find my mom at her apartment, but she’s not there. I find her at the supermarket parking lot blocks away from where she lives. She stands by the trunk of her car, facing the entrance to the store, waiting. It’s getting late, the sky in red and orange. Soon, the streetlamps will come on. I go over to her and she greets me with a kiss. I give her the check I promised her and she thanks me, folding it in half and slipping it into her pocket.
“No one is buying,” she says.
“Mom, I’m going to Vegas,” I tell her. “I might not come back.”
“With who?” She often asks questions she doesn’t want answers to. The sky changes. The evening blue light weights everything down, my mom and I and all the parked cars in the lot. A woman with her small child leaves the supermarket, pushing a cart full of groceries. They walk past without noticing us, the cart rattling as they go forward.
“And me?” she asks.
“Mom, I can’t help you anymore.” I say.
Walking back to my car, the streetlamps on, she calls to me.
“All I wanted was a family.”
But I keep going..
The road to Vegas goes by in naps for Michael while I drive on long stretches of road. At convenience stores we pick up bottled water, soda, snacks and dated magazines. As we move ahead, I watch the black ribbon of road escaping behind us in the rearview mirror. Through the burning windows an endless desert in gold and brown burgeons into the horizon. I pull over to the side of the road when we reach Death Valley. Michael wakes up and asks what I’m doing. “I want to look,” I tell him. Before I get out of the car I reach to the backseat for the camera, hoping it hasn’t melted. Outside I can barely breathe comfortably. The sun cuts the mountains into sections, creased by light and shadows. Down in the valley, the dunes are so bright it hurts to look; I have to squint my eyes tightly to catch some of the glow. Everything shifts in heat, as if it were to disappear if I were to touch it. Bringing the camera up to my eye, I take a picture. Beside me Michael asks if I’m done.
“Let me take yours now,” I say.
“God, Ray. It’s really hot. Can we just go?”
“Please,” I say, and he stands with his hands at his waist, a golden valley behind him.
We don’t stop, driving through The Strip, muted in the harsh daylight. I ask him if we can go through old Las Vegas to see the neon cowboy, but we don’t have time. We take the freeway, crossing through the sprawling suburb in the desert until we reach a gated community of small mansions in North Las Vegas. At the gate, near the speaker box, Michael leans across me to my rolled-down window to speak. “We’re here,” he says.
Most of our things are left in the trunk of my car, parked on the curb. We both carry backpacks with a change of clothes as we walk up to the door of the mansion. A man named Greg meets us there and introduces himself as the director and producer. He’s dressed in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and cargo pants. Leading us in, he gives a short tour of the place, crossing through the living room, down a hallway to the large master bedroom where the walls are painted dark blue. There, four men set up the equipment around the king-size bed, checking the photographic and video cameras, positioning the softbox and the main spotlight. By the equipment an assortment of condoms and lubrication lay on a small table. “This is where it will take place,” Greg tells us, but really speaking to Michael. “We’re just waiting on Brandon.”
Greg gives us the okay to swim in the pool out back until Brandon shows up. Outside we breathe in the dry heat, standing in the shade under the awning. The backyard is closed off from the desert landscape by a six-foot brick wall. We’re left with an oblong shaped pool, a green lawn with the sprinklers going. But rising above the wall, in the distance, we see a pillar of smoke.
“Something’s on fire,” I say.
“It’s far from here,” he responds.
Michael makes a run for the pool as I follow behind, my feet burning. He jumps in, swallowed by a big splash. While he’s under, the light distorts him, bending his body as it moves through the water until he resurfaces. I join in, swimming slow from one end of the pool to the other. We both go under and when I come back up he’s already there, neck deep, looking at me like he wants to say something. But Greg comes out and calls him in. He gets out of the pool, dripping, picking up a towel from the poolside chair and wrapping himself in it as he heads in.
When I go back inside, into the master bedroom, Greg is speaking to Michael and Brandon, giving directions before shooting, the crew standing around. Right away I notice how handsome Brandon is, shaggy hair, a scruffy face and a muscular build. While Greg speaks I notice Michael examining Brandon, his eyes moving down his body. When Greg is done, the two men move onto the bed and the crew gets into place.
“Hey, stand over here,” Greg says, motioning to me. Once I’m next to him he says, “Okay, go.”
Already, I know this will be different. The two of them are slow to begin, their lips dragging, Brandon’s face lingering in the curve of Michael’s neck. As clothes are removed carefully with a sort of anticipation, I see they’re both locked onto each other. Michael isn’t looking back at me. As Brandon begins to move down on Michael, neither of them is making exaggerated faces or moans. It’s all pure hunger. We’re left in a silence until Michael begins fucking and Brandon clings to him tight, no room between them.
During a break while Michael and Brandon freshen up in the bathroom, Greg begins to tell me about his site. He says that in featuring these collegiate looking guys he hopes to recreate his own experience while he was in school, and the intensity he had with each of his partners. He wants to create something different, something that will stand out from all the other sites on the web. Not only do people want to see two good-looking guys fuck, he says, but they want to see something real between them, something that they, the viewer, may not have. When the two men finally come back, Greg wants to shoot again.
The motel room we stay at later has two twin beds with a pair of night stands between them. We’re removed from The Strip, even from Old Las Vegas. On the wall behind the beds is a mural of a locomotive headed straight for us. That’s the theme of this place, railroads. Michael and I haven’t said anything to each other since the shoot. “I don’t want to leave this room,” I tell him, turning on the television. He looks at me, again in the same way he did in the pool. He doesn’t need to tell me anything, because I already know. On the news, the anchorwoman reports that fifty miles away from the city fire fighters are unable to contain the blaze that started his afternoon. Before Michael says my name, I feel it all rush in, all the wrong emotions. Watching the screen, deep in the clouds of smoke, I see home. I lick my lips and taste salt.
This director rents out a small mansion tucked among the last orange groves in the city, not far from the house where I grew up. In the downstairs bathroom, Michael prepares himself, his jeans unbuttoned and down to mid-thigh while I wait with the crew as they set up the camera and lighting equipment in front of a black leather sofa and a glass coffee table in the otherwise bare living room. When the bathroom door opens, Michael appears in costume. He’s wearing a baseball cap and a plain white shirt, a semi under the fabric of his baggy jeans, ready to begin.
I’m told to stand behind the crew and stay quiet. Two men crouched on the floor do final checks on their equipment. Sara, the only woman in the room, turns to look at me, making sure I’m at a good distance away. Even though this isn’t my first time watching, I’m still treated like it is. Lifting her headphones over her ears, Sara turns back to the director and says, we’re all good. With his arm over the sofa, Michael sits with another guy, Cody, in similar attire, minus the hat. As they begin filming, the director casually asks Michael questions—his age, his height, and then more specific ones: “Do you have a girlfriend?” Yes. “So, you’re straight?” Yeah. “And you’ve never fucked a guy before?” I haven’t. “You ever been fucked?” No. “Do you wanna make some money?” Yeah. “How do you feel about Cody?” I don’t know. Okay?
This is acting.
The director laughs, and Cody and Michael smile, looking down and away from each other like they are strangers. When the director says, “Okay guys, take off your clothes,” Michael looks at me before he lifts his shirt.
Later, on the drive home, he has the passenger seat back, his feet on the dashboard; he’s tired. Night has fallen. The road that leads out of the orange groves winds down to the stillness of the sprawling neighborhoods, the quiet streets. No one can be found, no one walking their dog, or coming home from work. Neighborhood kids have disappeared, abandoning their bikes on front lawns. Farther down, the quietness breaks. Streets widen to busy intersections: impatient cars and flashing traffic lights, the closer we get to the freeway onramp. As the headlights illuminate the broken stripe that divides the lanes on this side of the freeway, I remember my first time coming back with Michael after a shoot. I had asked him what it felt like. He said that he liked it—to be watched, losing himself fucking, releasing something more from inside himself than come.
Now, I think of myself there with him in front of the camera: my legs over his shoulders, I’m crushed breathless and filled. I imagine that as I turn to see the bright light, the cameraman and the director beside him, from the middle of my chest I’m torn open, rib cages pulled apart, everything inside of me seen, obliterated.
With his head against the headrest, Michael looks out his window, at the houses along the freeway, lit up from the inside. Before he falls asleep, I say, “Let’s play a game.” He agrees. I ask him, “What do you want?”
“To get the hell out of here, away from this place,” he says. Before he yawns, he asks, “What do you want?” rarely saying my name. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t know it isn’t Raymond, but Raymundo.
I tell him that turning back, taking this freeway all the way down, down to Artesia Boulevard and following until we reach the 405, going north, will take us up to Santa Monica. I tell him that years ago, my mom and my stepfather took me there at night, to a lookout point just off Ocean Avenue to watch the Malibu fire. The coast curved out into the ocean, red against the dark, hills breathing heavy smoke. My mom holding my hand, pointing to the scene of the disaster, “Mira, Raymundo. Mira cómo todo se quema.” Through the eyepiece of a beach telescope—my stepfather handing me a quarter—I watched palm trees in flames; houses we could never live in, burning, collapsing into embers, into ash.
When he doesn’t say anything, I try to explain. “I want to feel like that,” I say, but he has already fallen asleep.
Michael and I have been involved for a few months. He’s finishing up a contract with the eighth largest Internet gay porn production site in the nation. It was our second time together, at his place, that he told me he made a living fucking in front of a camera. I told him that I was stuck working the third shift in the back room of a department store. I left his apartment that night thinking I wouldn’t see him again, imagining that the clothes in the bottom drawer of his dresser, left open, belonged to someone else. It was a week later that he called me again, to come over and fool around. In bed, he asked me if I would like to see him work. I said, yes.
Now, I go with him because he doesn’t own a car and can’t get to the places they’re shooting—from a rented beach house north of San Diego, to a loft with a city view in Studio City. It’s not because he can’t afford it. He says that it helps him to have me there on set—in an anonymous kitchen, an office, a backyard—to watch, and I try to believe him. Because Michael has become friends with the director, he says it’s okay for me to be there, and that this sort of thing isn’t unusual. The first time I showed up to one of the shoots, the director, Sean, could see that I was uncomfortable, that it was obvious I didn’t belong there, standing behind the crew and waiting for it all to be over. While Michael was in the bathroom freshening up, Sean called me over and, as to ease me in, began telling me of other actors he had worked with who’d bring their boyfriends or girlfriends with them. Having them there, he said, would turn them on, made them better performers. I nodded. But what I wanted to tell him was that I wasn’t sure what Michael and I were, that in fact, I was waiting quietly for him to leave me. I still am.
When we get back to Michael’s place he checks his messages on the answering machine. In his bathroom, with the door closed, I do the same on my own phone. I count the many times my mom has called while it was off, the messages she has left, all beginning with “Mundo, Mundito, answer.” She calls often, at night, telling me that the air she breathes is like water, that she’s drowning. She can’t be alone. I have to go to her, calm her down and set her to bed. I lay next to her, over the blankets, and she holds me close, like when I was a small child, when it was only me and her before she remarried and years later was abandoned—all her sadness and fear becoming my own as she holds on. Once she asked if I thought that life would be easier if we were dead. Mom, don’t think like that, I said. The more times I go the more I fear we will die on that bed. I have to wait until she has fallen asleep before I can make an escape route.
Beneath the door I see Michael’s shoes. His voice coming through, “Ray.” When I open the door, I ask, “Have you heard back yet?” I follow him back into the living room where he sits at his desk, his computer on.
“Not yet,” he says.
For the last couple of weeks, Michael has been searching for bigger and better things. He complains about the cost of rent here in town, the people in the apartment complex. Barefoot kids are always playing on the stairs, hanging off the railings. Many times, when I go home with him, we see the older woman who lives next-door. She doesn’t speak English. She sits outside every day, peeling vegetables for the dinner we will later smell through the walls. She stares at us when we pass by. It’s never friendly. We hear the couple that lives upstairs, a thin waitress from Manchester named Emily and her fat boyfriend, Shane, with his red goatee. Visitors climb the stairs up to their apartment at all hours of the night. We hear thrown things crash. Some mornings we see Shane coming out of his apartment with fresh cuts on his neck and cheek. Michael says it’s not worth being here in this shithole, paying what he does and so far from anything exciting: Los Angeles hours away in night and traffic. I want to believe him, that there is more. But I’m scared that this is life, that it’s no different here from there.
Now, Michael’s trying out for a better-known production company based out of Las Vegas that features young men with a collegiate look. He has already sent in his information along with pictures of himself that I took, one of his face, another of his upper body, and two full nude shots. He had asked me to take the pictures after I had brought him back to my apartment where he found a collection of photographs I had taken, mostly Polaroids, left on my coffee table. He sorted through them, held up two he really liked. One was of a young couple at a table in an outdoor café, the boy turned to the girl with one had hand on her arm, needing to tell her something while she looked away, at something out of frame. The other was a side profile shot of a woman at night, her hair covering most of her face and falling on her bare shoulder. In the picture she’s looking down, her prominent nose at an upward angle, a cigarette in her mouth. I told him that she was about to cross the street, at the crowded intersection of Lincoln and 6th. Lights from traffic and neon store signs lit up the square, but in the picture it is only the flash from my camera that hits her, and everything around her is black, like it had never existed.
When I arrived at Michael’s apartment with my Polaroid camera for the favor, he looked surprised. “With that?” he asked. It’ll be fine, I told him. In his living room, he stood naked in front of me, the afternoon light from the window touching his skin. Locating him in the viewfinder, he had his head titled down, looking straight at me. “No attitude,” I said, and his eyebrows relaxed, his eyes softened. As I waited for the film to develop, I saw him appear through blurry gray hues, young and fresh-faced. “Those look like shit,” he said when I showed him, and had me do it over with his own camera. When he asked me if I thought he’d be able to make it, I said yes, thinking of how his body would fit with those on the website. I’m sure that sooner or later they’ll contact him. Now we’re both waiting.
After he’s done with the computer, he gets up and sees me standing by the door, with a look that makes me think he’s forgotten I’m here.
“Are you going?” he asks.
“You seem tired.”
“I’m not tired,” he says. When I don’t move, he adds, “It’s up to you.”
When Michael and I fuck, for just a moment, I forget about everything. I go to him sedated, waiting to feel something. His shirt off, I smell his skin. I bite on his lower lip, his shoulder. “Beg for my cock,” he says, towering over me, slapping my lips with it. When he’s fucking me, I wrap my legs around him, pushing him. I want nothing left of me. Once, I let it slip, “I want you to hurt me.” I was shocked and embarrassed, lying naked under him. He stopped and looked at me in the near dark, the orange glow of the streetlamps coming in through the blinds, falling on us. Then, he turned me over, onto my stomach. Grabbing hold of my wrists, my arms out, he pinned me down. Through grunts, he said, “Am I filling you up?” “Completely,” I told him, half alive, my body blossoming as he continued crushing.
But now, I’m beginning to think that I’m disappointing him. The first time we fucked he came first. “Okay, now you,” he said, moving down on me. As he sucked me off, I could feel his jaw and neck beginning to tense, his eyes motioning up to me, wondering when I would. With my hands on the sides of his face, I brought him up. “Sorry,” I whispered, “I just can’t.” I told him that I hadn’t been able to with anyone. There’s a point during sex when I know that what I want won’t happen, that I will never feel what I hope to, that I can only come so close to it and then I have to give up. I’m worried it bothers him now. He’s relentless, always trying, and then I always have to stop it.
Twice a week I visit my mom after my shift at work. I try to catch her before she heads out, leaving her apartment with a large pot of warm tamales. When I meet her at the door, she sets the pot down and holds me close, bringing my forehead down to her lips. At the kitchen table with the tablecloth that belonged to my grandmom a long time ago, she sits me down and heats up the leftovers from her dinner the night before. “It’s mole verde con pollo,” she says.
She still wears the wedding ring my stepfather gave her. About a year and a half ago he ran off, left her in the home they had made together, the home where I grew up. She stayed, going about her usual chores, pulling out the wet laundry from the washer and moving it into the dryer, dusting the living room and scrubbing the stove. He stopped paying the mortgage but continued to pay the gas and electric bills until his failing business finally went under. Friends found him on the bedroom floor of his new apartment, with a plastic bag over his head and taped around his neck. My mom stayed as long as she could, until the bank forced her out. All of our belonging were packed into boxes. Some things we had to lose.
Now she lives in this apartment she shares with no one—with the furniture she was able to salvage—trying to recreate the home she once had. Since she lost him she’s tried to find other sources of income. When the applications she filled out, along with the resume I helped her build, didn’t lead to call backs, she began making tamales and selling them from the trunk of her car in super-market parking lots. The people she sells to love her food. Some even beg for her recipe, but she only smiles and thanks them. She doesn’t tell them that this is how she barely stays alive, that late at night she pushes her hands into an earthenware pot of cornmeal, pieces of it clinging onto her fingers as she wipes the side of her face with her forearm—her rings resting on the kitchen counter.
She comes back from the kitchen with the warm plate, setting it down in front of me. After I take a few bites, pushing rice onto my fork with a butter knife, I ask her how things are. “Here, everything is worse,” she says, turning the wedding ring on her finger. “I haven’t been making enough.”
“Mom, how much do you need?”
She points to the stack of bills in between the prayer candles on the table. She’s behind again; some of them are second notices. I go through each envelope, tearing them open and adding the amounts due on a napkin by my plate.
“Why didn’t you ask me before?” I say.
“I called you,” she responds.
I ask her if she has been taking her medication. She shakes her head. “Sometimes,” she replies. She gets up to retrieve her pill case from the bathroom. When she returns to the table she sets the case down in front of her. A small thing painted gold. Opening the case, she turns it to face me. “Look at my failure,” she says. “My life in pieces.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, and she nods, taking out a pill, brining it to her mouth. As she sips from my glass of water I take my plate to the sink, rinse it off. Above the sink, she has an old picture of the three of us, herself, my stepfather and me in between, at the Griffith Observatory at night. We’re standing in front of the view of Silver Lake and downtown, a blur of red and white lights. In the picture, my stepfather is looking up at the night sky, where no stars swirled above us, as if he already knew his way out.
Turning in her chair, she faces me, looking up when I come back into the room.
“It would be easier if you came back,” she begins. “If you shared this with me.”
“I can’t do that,” I say, standing by her chair.
“Who do you have, if not me?” she asks, holding onto my hand. “Who else?”
When I can’t look at her, she grabs at my arms, and buries her face just below my chest, in the folds of my shirt, her tears soaking through.
My apartment complex sits on the outskirts of town, in between an abandoned golf course and a wide-open field of dried yellow grass. All this will soon be a construction site for a new shopping center; this includes my building. When my stepfather moved us to this city, it was still mostly orange groves and quiet neighborhoods. Soon after, construction began. The orange groves were uprooted, the landscape became bare and new homes, schools and shopping center sprang up from the ground so quickly we almost forgot what existed before. Most of the tenants in my building have already picked up and left. My landlord stops by often, leaving his new sports car in the driveway, checking to see who has left and who remains. When he sees me arrive he stops me as I get out of my car, asking me what’s my plan, when are you getting out. I tell him I’m working on it. He tells me that if I don’t move quickly, construction will begin over me.
After my shower, I get a call from Michael. With a towel wrapped around my waist I leave wet footprints in the carpet leading to the phone. “I got it,” he says, his voice coming through the receiver, “They want me.” I meet him at his apartment. When I come in he smiles. He begins to tell me the details, that they need his test results as soon as possible to begin filming. “We’ll have to drive there,” he says, “it’s just outside Vegas.”
That night in bed, before we begin anything, he tells me more about the job. “They want me to look more natural,” he says. I feel the small patch of trimmed chest hair over his sternum with my fingers. “I’ll have to grow that out. They like body hair.”
“Vegas is far,” I tell him.
“ I know.”
“They’ll want you back.”
“I think I might move there.”
Across the ceiling we hear Emily’s footsteps in the room above. I bring the sheets up and around my shoulders, wrapping myself in a cocoon. “You’ll come too, it won't be hard to find a job,” he says. It’s difficult to pretend that I’m not an afterthought. I imagine myself in Vegas, in the extreme heat, wearing a button-down shirt and red vest, catching keys to other people’s vehicles at a hotel-casino parking lot—a landscape too new and constantly under construction. I imagine coming home to a bare apartment with black steel furniture against white walls, and no one else home.
He moves over me and then we begin. As we kiss, he brings each of my arms up over my head and pins them there until we’re both hard and swollen. “I have something for you,” he says into my ear.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he replies. We’re gaining momentum.
When it’s almost time for him, he’s behind me and has me face down, pressed into the mattress. My eyes closed, I say, “I want you to come on me.” Then, his hands stop pushing down on my back. There’s a sudden flash that shocks the room, then a mechanical moan.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he says, keeping my head down with one hand, “Keep going.”
My eyes still closed, I turn around. He keeps pushing in and my head goes back. I’m grabbing the edge of the mattress. Then he lifts away from me, and again I sense a flash. When I open my eyes, Michael’s up is on his knees, holding a Polaroid camera in one hand and a picture in the other. “It’s okay,” he says, dropping the picture over the bed, “keep going.”
In the morning Michael is still sleeping. Before getting up and gathering my clothes to return home, I look over the bed. On the floor lay the two pictures that he took the night before. The first one my back is pushed forward. My face is to the side, eyes clenched and mouth slightly opened. In the other, my front is washed out by the flash. The top of the frame cuts off my face, and there’s black all around me. Michael rolls over in bed, still asleep, his chest expanding with each breath and the sheets tangled between his legs. I’m embarrassed to look at the pictures, at the estranged, pathetic positions of myself.
The videos of Michael on the Internet, and the ones I’ve seen filmed, don’t bother me. For the most part I know they aren’t real. Sometimes I can separate fact from fiction. There’s always some distance between bodies in the videos so that the cameramen can get a good shot of the penetration. In the frame, while one is flat on his back, the other, usually Michael, is perpendicular, on his knees and holding the other guy’s legs up by the ankles. Between them, the viewer needs to see cock shoving in and sliding out.
When I return home, I watch videos of him on my computer. The thing is, I never have trouble by myself. I sit at my desk, my pants unbuttoned. There is a video clip of him that I return to repeatedly. It’s one of his earlier gigs, when he was still new, made on a digital camcorder. He lies on his back, alone, his head turned to the camera that stays on his face, close up. He blinks a few times but doesn’t look away, letting out quiet moans, and then smiles. The clip lasts only twelve seconds that I keep on a loop.
Once, in bed with Michael, he wouldn’t give up. After he came, he laid beside me and gripped me tightly with his right hand, going slow first then fast—my hips motioning up in soft thrusts. When I couldn’t, he went faster. “Just fucking come,” he muttered. Still going, he sat up and went harder. I felt his other hand on my throat, his thumb beginning to push down. “Stop!” I shouted, pushing him off and getting out of bed.
“What’s wrong with you?” he yelled as I left the room.
One time I did come with someone. I’ve never told Michael. It was with a man from the gay bar in Riverside—a man who stared me down, deathly, who bought me drinks and placed his hand on my thigh under the counter, his fingers running on the denim of my pants—a man that looked like my stepfather. The lights off at his place, on his bed, I straddled him. I put one hand against the wall as I jerked my dick with the other. He touched me all over and I looked up, away. Above, the ceiling fan spun slow, blowing air that made my sweat cold. “On my face,” he said, his voice resonate. I didn’t want him to speak.
As our trip to Vegas gets closer I see that Michael is already changing and I document it with the Polaroids he’s reluctant to pose for. After a trip to the drug store his hair has become a chestnut brown, a more natural match to his skin. His eyebrows are growing in fuller, defining his face. I’m discovering a new feel for him when my fingers trail down his torso over the new patch of chest hair, or the light fuzz on his ass. But we’ve been calming down at night. In bed, he begins to show a polite tenderness I don’t believe, rubbing my arm as I lay close. He’s saving himself. I’m thinking of the load of come he’ll shoot on film when he’s done, getting up and walking out of the frame for a towel to wipe himself off, not coming back to where I am. “Just a few more days,” he reminds me.
Days before we leave for Vegas I try to find my mom at her apartment, but she’s not there. I find her at the supermarket parking lot blocks away from where she lives. She stands by the trunk of her car, facing the entrance to the store, waiting. It’s getting late, the sky in red and orange. Soon, the streetlamps will come on. I go over to her and she greets me with a kiss. I give her the check I promised her and she thanks me, folding it in half and slipping it into her pocket.
“No one is buying,” she says.
“Mom, I’m going to Vegas,” I tell her. “I might not come back.”
“With who?” She often asks questions she doesn’t want answers to. The sky changes. The evening blue light weights everything down, my mom and I and all the parked cars in the lot. A woman with her small child leaves the supermarket, pushing a cart full of groceries. They walk past without noticing us, the cart rattling as they go forward.
“And me?” she asks.
“Mom, I can’t help you anymore.” I say.
Walking back to my car, the streetlamps on, she calls to me.
“All I wanted was a family.”
But I keep going..
The road to Vegas goes by in naps for Michael while I drive on long stretches of road. At convenience stores we pick up bottled water, soda, snacks and dated magazines. As we move ahead, I watch the black ribbon of road escaping behind us in the rearview mirror. Through the burning windows an endless desert in gold and brown burgeons into the horizon. I pull over to the side of the road when we reach Death Valley. Michael wakes up and asks what I’m doing. “I want to look,” I tell him. Before I get out of the car I reach to the backseat for the camera, hoping it hasn’t melted. Outside I can barely breathe comfortably. The sun cuts the mountains into sections, creased by light and shadows. Down in the valley, the dunes are so bright it hurts to look; I have to squint my eyes tightly to catch some of the glow. Everything shifts in heat, as if it were to disappear if I were to touch it. Bringing the camera up to my eye, I take a picture. Beside me Michael asks if I’m done.
“Let me take yours now,” I say.
“God, Ray. It’s really hot. Can we just go?”
“Please,” I say, and he stands with his hands at his waist, a golden valley behind him.
We don’t stop, driving through The Strip, muted in the harsh daylight. I ask him if we can go through old Las Vegas to see the neon cowboy, but we don’t have time. We take the freeway, crossing through the sprawling suburb in the desert until we reach a gated community of small mansions in North Las Vegas. At the gate, near the speaker box, Michael leans across me to my rolled-down window to speak. “We’re here,” he says.
Most of our things are left in the trunk of my car, parked on the curb. We both carry backpacks with a change of clothes as we walk up to the door of the mansion. A man named Greg meets us there and introduces himself as the director and producer. He’s dressed in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and cargo pants. Leading us in, he gives a short tour of the place, crossing through the living room, down a hallway to the large master bedroom where the walls are painted dark blue. There, four men set up the equipment around the king-size bed, checking the photographic and video cameras, positioning the softbox and the main spotlight. By the equipment an assortment of condoms and lubrication lay on a small table. “This is where it will take place,” Greg tells us, but really speaking to Michael. “We’re just waiting on Brandon.”
Greg gives us the okay to swim in the pool out back until Brandon shows up. Outside we breathe in the dry heat, standing in the shade under the awning. The backyard is closed off from the desert landscape by a six-foot brick wall. We’re left with an oblong shaped pool, a green lawn with the sprinklers going. But rising above the wall, in the distance, we see a pillar of smoke.
“Something’s on fire,” I say.
“It’s far from here,” he responds.
Michael makes a run for the pool as I follow behind, my feet burning. He jumps in, swallowed by a big splash. While he’s under, the light distorts him, bending his body as it moves through the water until he resurfaces. I join in, swimming slow from one end of the pool to the other. We both go under and when I come back up he’s already there, neck deep, looking at me like he wants to say something. But Greg comes out and calls him in. He gets out of the pool, dripping, picking up a towel from the poolside chair and wrapping himself in it as he heads in.
When I go back inside, into the master bedroom, Greg is speaking to Michael and Brandon, giving directions before shooting, the crew standing around. Right away I notice how handsome Brandon is, shaggy hair, a scruffy face and a muscular build. While Greg speaks I notice Michael examining Brandon, his eyes moving down his body. When Greg is done, the two men move onto the bed and the crew gets into place.
“Hey, stand over here,” Greg says, motioning to me. Once I’m next to him he says, “Okay, go.”
Already, I know this will be different. The two of them are slow to begin, their lips dragging, Brandon’s face lingering in the curve of Michael’s neck. As clothes are removed carefully with a sort of anticipation, I see they’re both locked onto each other. Michael isn’t looking back at me. As Brandon begins to move down on Michael, neither of them is making exaggerated faces or moans. It’s all pure hunger. We’re left in a silence until Michael begins fucking and Brandon clings to him tight, no room between them.
During a break while Michael and Brandon freshen up in the bathroom, Greg begins to tell me about his site. He says that in featuring these collegiate looking guys he hopes to recreate his own experience while he was in school, and the intensity he had with each of his partners. He wants to create something different, something that will stand out from all the other sites on the web. Not only do people want to see two good-looking guys fuck, he says, but they want to see something real between them, something that they, the viewer, may not have. When the two men finally come back, Greg wants to shoot again.
The motel room we stay at later has two twin beds with a pair of night stands between them. We’re removed from The Strip, even from Old Las Vegas. On the wall behind the beds is a mural of a locomotive headed straight for us. That’s the theme of this place, railroads. Michael and I haven’t said anything to each other since the shoot. “I don’t want to leave this room,” I tell him, turning on the television. He looks at me, again in the same way he did in the pool. He doesn’t need to tell me anything, because I already know. On the news, the anchorwoman reports that fifty miles away from the city fire fighters are unable to contain the blaze that started his afternoon. Before Michael says my name, I feel it all rush in, all the wrong emotions. Watching the screen, deep in the clouds of smoke, I see home. I lick my lips and taste salt.
My very own blog
This is very exciting.
I decided to start a blog so that I can post some stuff (writing) so that way, in the future, after school, I'll have a reason to continue, if that makes sense.
I decided to start a blog so that I can post some stuff (writing) so that way, in the future, after school, I'll have a reason to continue, if that makes sense.
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