by Jos
Planning
Koreans are the busiest people in the world, working an average 2300 hours a year. They take few holidays. Ideally, I would plan all the shit to go down the night before a long holiday. The streets would be packed with drunks, which make the best crowds to blend into. You could pretend to be drunk and the police would never suspect that you had just returned from carrying out a calculated hit. The heist was carried out on the Wednesday night before Chuseok. The bank was closed for four days following the heist. The newspapers reported that the security system was tampered with on a Wednesday afternoon. The cameras went into a feedback loop at around the same time and the money taken at night. A camera across the street shows black bags being rappelled out windows with the aid of what was believed to be black, lighter-than-air-balloons. It wasn’t until a routine inspection of the bank vaults Tuesday afternoon that the money was discovered to be missing.
The Korean media was filled with idle speculation. In the end, no suspects were apprehended. The authorities have no leads whatsoever. I last saw the Chill Out Crew out for wings at Stony Hill Tavern on Tuesday, the day before they disappeared. I sensed nothing different. They were supposed to join us for Quiz Night at Rooftop Palace on Wednesday, but never showed up. If I had only known that that Tuesday night would be the last time I ever saw Joaquín and the Chill Out Crew, I would have told them how much I felt for them. To them I was one of the bros, we had an unparalleled level of freedom with one another.
Hell, I would really love to once again be in the same city as them. At least I have mementos to remember Joaquín by. He left everything behind – only took from my room his external hard drive and a copy of a Junot Díaz parody he had lent me a week earlier. His laptop refused to work. I paid a thousand dollars to have the information on the laptop’s internal hard drive recovered, but apparently it had been surgically wiped. I did discover his sex diary buried in his extensive book collection. I gave his clothes away to the Salvation Army Korea. Right before I deposited his gray trench coat into the bin, I noticed an expensive-looking, golden pomegranate lapel pin with deep, luminous rubies. I always wear the pin whenever I dress well. “Regarding the pomegranate I am not to say anything,” I tell curious people who inquire about it.
___________________
Pathological fiction orator.
The most reliable source of information in the Dominican diaspora.
Bringing to justice.
It was either that or crack.
The Korean version of “yo, dawg.”
Mental boot camp. 900 hours of work in one summer is all it took Joaquín to truly understand the power of hyperconcentration. The concept of “intelligence” lost all meaning to him.
Best looking and horniest.
Club FM party.
The closest liquid to ambrosia on earth.
A form of country music, but replace “pick-up truck” with “jeepeta.”
The closest herb to ambrosia on earth.
To be subjected to intensive penetration by a member of the same sex in a Korean detention center.
The movie on DVD, not the flag.
A little toy necessity taught him to make in the alley next to Pancho’s bodega.
“Liberation in a bottle for the common salary man or GI.” – Bubba.
A daily exercise regimen recommended by experts to help with weight-loss and depression.
A language spoken by 78 million people.
Degenerates.
A type of rope.
A person who can tie a lot of amazing knots.
To properly tie.
An invisible brujo.
A leather belt, or a broomstick as was the case that one time he found out Joaquín burned a cross into his arm with a hot knife and convinced all the older kids in his building to join him in his cause. Don’t feel sorry for Joaquín, though; he actually laughed in his room later at how light the beating was in comparison to what he doled out to his fellow classmates. But I’m sure he’s sorry for biting his Tocayo’s ear in 7th grade. Tocayo: it was necessary at the time; your crew had more people than his crew so he needed to use you as an example to establish his authority. Your pain was not in vain, however, for he learned from that incident that instant hyperviolence (or the threat of it) at the slightest offense was the best way to daydream in peace. And it worked! No one in the Bronx ever dared cross him again after 7th grade.
After he bit your ear and screamed wildly into the air as the blood dripped down the side of his mouth, he learned that he no longer needed a gang to feel safe. So, he thanks you. He left his life as a crack dealer and gangbanger thanks to you.
ADHD
ADHD-inattentive
Self-medicate in a frenetic bar with soju instead of a planned vegan diet and meditation.
With real diamonds, of course.
Don’t expect those twenty bucks back.
The least desired profession in a Dominican barrio.
A cowgirl (replace leather boots with rubber boots, and a lasso with a machete)
A directed blow utilizing a sharp, metal object.
A device built by a spider out of proteinaceous spider silk extruded from its spinnerets.
He never got to find out who won.
It means he’ll take you out without blinking.
A woman who fails to achieve reproductive success.
A paranoid, mix-breed dog found in all barrios.
A poor man’s airplane.
A poor man’s bogeyman.
A directed mass blow utilizing the prehensile, multi-fingered extremity located at the end of his right arm.
It hurts! That’s all you need to know.
Drinking this on a street corner is the mark of class. In a megalopolis of 25 million, no one will care if you’re drunk and lost.
Third-world goldfish.
Chapter V: Helena Deciphers the Sex Diary
Realization
It was Monday morning. I sipped spiked mango juice under a canopy of trees that looked nothing like a mango grove. I smiled at the whole artificiality of the plastic trees that littered the entire mall. The randomness of the situation reminded me of my drunken days in Corea. Specifically, I thought back to when Joaquín would make me a spiked morir soñando and whip up some fried plantains. We almost always had them green because we never had the patience to wait until they ripened. The taste of morir soñando can only be described as orgasmic. We made it using soy milk instead of cow’s, but the soy milk and orange juice came together in a perfect blend.
Drinking it and doing kegels always helped me climax. I used to do them every morning on my commute to work in Seoul and no one ever noticed. The subtle dirtiness and secrecy surrounding the act made it even more deeply arousing.
While thinking of sex and Korea, I recalled the sex diary that Joaquín had left behind. He must have left it on purpose. A man as meticulous wouldn’t leave such a personal possession out of his hands were it not for a reason.
I attempted reading it when I first found it, but it was in Portuguese (I could figure that much from the cover). I was too busy and too lazy to learn a new language for what could be a worthless pursuit. I decided instead to go to a Brazilian bar in the city with the hope that I could befriend someone who would help me decipher the diary. I was reluctant to let just anyone read it because of the possibly very private nature of the diary, so I had to find someone I trusted.
O Espelho
A co-worker told me about O Espelho: “Oh, it’s a wonderful bar, darling. I met a really nice Brazilian boy there who could just work miracles. Miracles I tell you.” It was close to my house and so I began going on a weekly basis. By my second visit, everyone was already greeting me as “Americana.”
I kept myself entertained with reruns of matches between Maranhão and São Paulo FC. I was usually the only girl in the bar on her own, and, naturally, a throng of men approached me. I was friendly, but firmly and politely declined their advances. In reality I was looking for the compani
onship of a brasileira. Reading a diary with a man would prove too difficult I imagine. Chemicals and emotions would get in the way.
One day a Carioca from Leblon walked into the bar. She was alone and sat across from me. She wore a nose piercing and dressed in all black. She ordered a caipirinha like it was her regular drink and glanced over at me. She gave a warm smile and an inviting look. I returned the smile and she moved to the seat next to me. “What’s your name?” I asked her. “Joana,” she replied and lightly bit the side of her lip.
We only had to drink together twice to develop a strong bond. Her deep nasal accent and inability to pronounce consonants made her often incomprehensible yet endearing. I had to make her repeat the word “picnic” (she pronounced it pikiniki) five times before I could figure out what she was saying. She lived near the bar, too, and after a month of knowing each other, I invited Joana to my house for a smoke session.
It was her first time. Her fear of messing up while she toked made her nervous and that fear become a reality. It took fifteen minutes to teach her how to use the bong. Even then, another fifteen before she was able to inhale properly. She managed to fill the chamber, but seemed quite unable to get the smoke to go past her mouth. When she finally managed to get the smoke into her lungs, her green eyes turned red and she started touching herself. “It makes me so wet and horny,” she said. Lloyd Brown’s “Slow Wine” came on the iPod boom box in the room and, before I’d even realized it, she began to slip my hand down her sand-blasted dark jeans. I immediately pulled her cowgirl boots off and almost ripped her jeans apart while I lifted my mini-skirt.
She held me back by my shoulders and said, “I’m not looking for anything serious.” I looked her in the eyes and replied, “Neither am I.” We began rubbing up against one another, the weed and music intensifying every motion. “I’ve never felt this good,” she moaned. We rubbed our clitorises against one another faster and faster. She hyperventilated and arched her back. I did the same. We both climaxed repeatedly until she started moaning weakly and pushed me away. She continued moaning with her eyes closed for what felt like five minutes. I rubbed up on her hip until I felt good and tired.
We lay on the couch next to one another, knowing full well that this would most likely be a one-afternoon stand. I took the opportunity to start talking about my time in Korea and eventually brought up the topic I wanted to discuss: Joaquín del Monte’s sex diary.
Código
To say that Joaquín’s handwriting was chicken scratch would be an insult to chickens everywhere. The dude’s writing was messier than the army doctor on 179th Street who lost his writing hand to an IED. Not only that, the motherfucker decided he wanted to fuck with our heads. It wasn’t until I stood up and looked at the diary from a different vantage point that I realized his treacherous Da Vinci ploy.
He wrote everything backwards, like a reflection. We had to hold the diary up to a mirror so she could read it to me. It took us a solid two hours just to figure out the handwriting.
Content
I knew the dude liked to fuck, but he was prodigious at it. He made Porfirio Rubirosa look like a parigüayo. I wish I could fuck with that freedom, but you know what they say: “If a key can open every lock, it’s a damn good key; if a lock can be opened by every key, it’s a shitty lock.”
The first pages were written at Yale as he reminisced about some of his pre-college escapades. He got caught dry humping his cousin when he was eight. The dude got scalded bad ‘cause it wasn’t with a blue member of the family, but he didn’t really know what the hell he was doing.
He did, however, know what he was doing in middle school. The dude fingered and licked the pussy of one of the girls in his building. He had his dick out and was ready to start giving estilla but he walked away. Why did he chicken out? The girl was his third cousin or some shit like that. They had the same great-grandfather. But hey, shit happens on a horny-given Sunday, as the Wolfdog can attest.
He got a blow job here and there in high school, but was too busy with schoolwork and his side “enterprises” to go in search of pussy. I guess he didn’t see anything worthwhile in the Heights. He was always horny, masturbated multiple times a day, every day. I guess that’s why his subconsciousness led him to Yale, the sex ivy.
Losing the V-card
I wasn’t sure what I would find. Part of me just wanted to learn more about Joaquín. A man’s most personal and intimate thoughts probably reveal more about him than scarcely a few people in his life will know. There’s the public façade we put on, but in Joaquín’s diary I thought I would get to meet the true man behind the mask. Either that or I’m just a naughty girl and want to learn his most intimate details.
Most of my male friends in the Heights just wanted to get laid, bottom line. But Joaquín seemed to want to remember his first time, or for it to have some meaning. The dude waited ‘til his first Harvard-Yale game before finally eloping with a busty, long-haired, biracial hottie from Detroit he had been talking to for over a month. They did it in the bushes by the stadium. Something so planned for both of them ultimately came to fruit in perhaps one of the most wildly unexpected, animalistic ways. Publicly, he never confessed to it. Perhaps he wanted to give off the illusion that he was experienced by the time everyone his age was distracted with Pokémon. They saw each other every now and then, but he never felt any real attachment to anyone.
Lost
If anything, the diary painted the picture of a man who was lost. He would go through girlfriends and one-night stands like I go through plantains. He hooked up with five different women in his first week in Europe, never bothering to learn their names or numbers. Sex to him was a physical act much akin to eating.
That lack of emotional connection to other human beings was something he eventually found unable to handle and, in my opinion, led to him becoming a heavy drinker and smoker. But so detached was he that he didn’t even fall in love with that.
He went months without drinking, smoking, or fucking, yet he would feel no different. Around the same time, he started reading Nietzsche and lost his faith in God. His once bright attire went dark. He didn’t care for colors, he’d say. He began to travel. In search of something, anything. His search propelled him down to Brazil to learn Português and celebrate having graduated Yale. By this point he had already signed on to start working in Korea.
Part II: Joaquim em Paraty
Paraty
Paraty is a lovely beach town in the state of Rio de Janeiro. It ends where São Paulo begins. It straddles two different worlds and the people speak with an accent that is a mix of the carioca and paulista. Joaquín got a six-month student visa to go learn Portuguese there. He rented a small, brightly painted house overlooking an old colonial street no wider than a European Mini.
He lived 500 meters from the beach and often found himself lying in the sand overlooking an island inhabited by an aventureiro named Amyr Klink. The locals said he came by rowboat all the way from Africa, but that the solitude of the journey had turned him into a recluse who never ventured from his tiny island, which stood just a swim from a small church built by the Portuguese in the 1700s. Joaquín would sometimes kayak close to Klink’s island, wondering what it felt like to go ages without human interaction. Joaquín was used to spending ages reading in a dark, moldy library, but he had never gone more than a couple of days without having a conversation with anyone.
Joaquín eventually became good friends with Cassandra, the girl who rented him the kayak. Cassandra was a hippie college student who always wore a wetsuit. She was friendly and seemed to know a lot about the nightlife in Paraty. Cassandra took Joaquín to a baile funk where he learned to dance the Brazilian version of Puerto Rican perreo. All the women were decked out in their finest weekend wear, and the guys who could, would make sure to show off their suped up cars. Joaquín, a mechanic by apprenticeship, was able to tell that many of the cars were only modified on the exterior. They looked flashy and sporty, but were nothing more than
pretty shells. He nonetheless confessed to feeling rather bacana when he rode in a modified street racer – and thus, did it often.
It was in a street racer outside a field hosting a baile funk where Cassandra introduced Joaquín to a friend of hers. She was 5’10” and was dressed like a rapper with baggy jeans, baggy tee, and a fitted cap. Cassandra introduced her as a hipe hoper, an aficionado of hip hop culture. They talked very little, but something in her captivated him. Her appearance alone made her seem talented, daring, and original.
Jeito
A jeito is a concept that is strictly Brazilian. You give a jeito when you need to get something done in an unorthodox manner. Cassandra’s brother used a connection from the cousin of a nephew of an uncle to get a job in the police department. He gave a jeito. Cassandra herself would sometimes fix leaks on her kayaks using chewing gum and an inexpensive glue. That’s a jeito, too.
Joaquín requested a jeito. He needed Cassandra to arrange another “random” meeting between himself and the Hipe Hoper. Cassandra told her to meet by the southern estuary, the most romantic place she knew, at 2 o’clock, when the largest school of brightly colored tropical fish would be congregating. Joaquín was to meet there as well.
The Estuary
Joaquín met the Hipe Hoper there at 2 on the dot. Of course, Cassandra never showed. She would later claim to have been requested an urgent favor from an old friend. Not a big deal; every time they met was casual. They both ran on that small, old Latin town time that so naturally flows into magical realism. Time doesn’t matter to people like those; everything moves slowly and at one’s own pace in such a world. “You are the friend of the Cassandra?” she asked. “I am indeed. She told me to tell you she can’t make it,” he said slowly in Portuguese as they got in the kayak.