by Gary Indiana
The horizon behind the Malecón is fractured by faraway oceanfront high-rises. The ship’s enormity, as it crossed the water and parts of it appeared in spaces between buildings, suddenly foreshortened the distance between this house and the sea. The ship’s deck ran level with the tenth floor of the Girón housing project. This confusing revision of scale shrank the gray-blue expanse of water to the width of a narrow canal. The optical effect revealed my misperception of the earth’s curvature, which I’d imagined more pronounced than it actually is, as well as a flawed estimation of my optical depth of field. I had wrongly imagined the view encompassed at least a third of the distance between Cuba and the Florida Keys. In reality, something less than a nautical mile is visible from where I stood. Abrupt and uncanny, the foreshortening caused a jarring feeling of exposure. I sensed the city visible from my flat looking at me at the same moment I looked at it.
The ginger cat from the institute hasn’t appeared in three days. Last night, two police, one male, one female, asked to see my documents. Actually it wasn’t a request. They found the leftover chicken I was tearing apart suspicious. They studied my passport as if they had seized a deceptive explosive in the nick of time, for the glory of socialism and the mother country. When I explained I was searching for my cat, though, they gave the passport back and began looking for her too. It was after midnight. Only teenagers on the paseo were about, strolling up and down in little cliques, passing rum bottles. One held his guitar the way you’d hold a toilet plunger, swinging it an inch above the pavement.
The sun is strong today. Chains of shredded clouds drift west on the trade wind. In a while, I will visit old acquaintances in the Colón Necropolis. Gaston Alvaro, Juan J. Musset, and four other firefighters killed in a blaze. Blanco Herrera-Ortiz, in a much-photographed marble catafalque. Familia Tamayo. Familia Borges. Ramón Cruselle Faura (1820). Francisco Gonzales y Osma (1882). The Revolutionary hero Cienfuegos, whose plane went down suspiciously a mile offshore. Calixto de Loira, the necropolis architect, who died in the great cholera epidemic right after he finished the place, becoming the first person buried in it. There used to be a densely freckled, red-haired caretaker, but no one there remembers him.
I promised to return before two o’clock. I think so, anyway.
Yesterday, sitting in the sidewalk café of the Hotel Telegrafico across from Central Park, I glimpsed a beautiful young man walking in the direction of the Capitolio. He glanced at me and slowed his pace, continued a few steps, looked back, looked away, walked a little further, then slipped into the French café, the name of which I forget, between the café of the Telegrafico and the terrace of the Hotel Inglaterra. His second glance was a familiar, unambiguous message of availability.
After he disappeared behind the plants bordering the French café, I wondered if he’d gone in there as a way of staying close to me without setting foot on the Telegrafico terrace, where he would not be welcome. I hadn’t signaled any interest and decided he had probably been going to the French café anyway. A circumspect uneasiness that I had felt throughout the day returned in the form of uncertainty about whether this person was lying in wait for me, or simply buying a pastry. Often someone who solicits you turns out to be a can of worms. I decided to forget about him.
One type of person here, easily spotted in a crowd, is a young man or woman from the provinces who just got off the bus from Las Tunas or Ciego de Ávila and plans to find employment in construction or the service industries after a season or two as a sex worker. He or she might have family or friends in Havana but usually doesn’t know a soul, and when the bus drops him or her off beside Parque Central, a new job is waiting a few yards away.
I thought the young man who went into the French café might be such a person. Such persons have an unspoiled aura that activates a futile and usually superfluous protective instinct. Havana is the least dangerous of cities. The only danger such a person faces is a cop demanding to see his ID card. A young man from the provinces, unless he wears a bespoke suit or other sartorial evidence of respectability, is often asked for his identity card. If it doesn’t identify him as a native of Havana province, and he can’t produce documents that explain his presence in the capital, they arrest him or drive him to the train station and forcibly send him back where he came from.
This medieval procedure was not in my thoughts as the young man in the French café began making faces at me. I mention it as a feature of Cuban society that promotes an atmosphere of dread and intimidation. This oppressive atmosphere varies in intensity at different hours of the day and in different parts of the city. Police comb through tourist districts with special care to expunge precisely the dazed, lonely, indolent-looking new arrivals from the provinces, to prevent them from “molesting” visitors.
However, this youth was safer in the café, spending money, than he would have been in the park, where I have often watched the police shake down young men who should have been entered in a beauty pageant instead of arrested. I didn’t acknowledge him at first, but it seemed cruel to ignore him. He was making unusual efforts to get me interested. There was something puppyish and sweet about his face. From a distance he looked unusually guileless, a simple soul, even … well, quite possibly a bit retarded.
I stirred the coffee in front of me for no reason, lit a cigarette, opened the book I was carrying—Fontane’s Effi Briest—and read a paragraph, found it impossible to follow, closed the book, smushed the cigarette out, looked at the yellow-domed pedicabs parked at the curb, flattened my hand on the table, rubbed my eyes, all the while processing a blizzard of aleatory thoughts, or half-thoughts, some having to do with aging, incapacitation, death, the possibility that cancer was slowly spreading through my organs. Another trail of micro-thoughts led to my parents, both dead, guilt, awkward episodes of childhood, my failure to ever convey my whereabouts to what remained of my family. Mixed in with this, a vexing suspicion about the state of my lungs, followed by a reel of mental images, featuring sodomy in all its miseries and splendors, a partial replay of my recent week-long search for a pencil sharpener in every conceivable and inconceivable place in Havana, snippets from a scene in Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear in which Margit Carstensen washes down a handful of valium with a tumbler of whiskey …
I stared at the murky, greenish Adolph von Menzel painting on the cover of Effi Briest. I looked up. The young man’s head and shoulders loomed over what appeared to be a bouquet of drastically pruned sago palms in the middle distance. He grinned goofily, the grin turning his face into a parody of a face. Then he vanished behind the plants. I opened Effi Briest. I read. When I glanced again at the midget palms or whatever they were, the young man—a boy really, I now realized—sprang up at the same moment, still grinning his face off, then dropped out of sight again. He had evidently settled at a table in the French café. Soon he began springing up to stare at me at one- or two-minute intervals, like a six-year-old playing peekaboo.
I noticed that his flesh was a few shades darker than a walnut, his hair black and short, like a skullcap. His features were … smooth? Finely proportioned? It’s easier to say what he didn’t look like. He didn’t look at all like a hustler. He wasn’t delicate. He wasn’t tough-looking. He didn’t look corrupt, or skanky, or furtive. The volumes of his face were unemphatic, but pleasantly inflected, his head more oval than square. His brown eyes were arrestingly deep. His ears were smaller than they should have been. Unconsciously, I had begun returning his looks with a series of increasingly unnatural expressions reflecting my ambivalence about looking at him. What if he was insane? All right. After a half hour or so I gave in. I walked around the apron of the Telegrafico terrace into the French café.
He sat at a little round marble table. He was not alone. A strikingly skinny girl, whose stringy, brownish hair was cinched at her neck with a red rubber band, sat across from him gesturing with her hands, laughing, or more exactly, bobbing her chin and opening her mouth as if she were laughing uproariously, without making any
sound. She wore a tight, red faux-leather jacket, a patterned mid-length skirt, zippered brown boots that reached to her crossed, bony knees. A desultory face, an urchin prettiness, avid, exophthalmic eyes. As I sat down, her lips pursed and puckered in a series of knowing little smiles, her eyes moving back and forth between me and her companion, who looked sheepish, shy, but shrewdly involved in the moment.
The girl was drinking soda from a can. The youth—I don’t know what else to call him, he wasn’t exactly a boy, not quite a man as a man is usually thought of here, i.e., married to a woman raising their kids while he shacks up with a girlfriend—held an empty coffee cup in a loose fist. They looked at me intently. For an unnaturally long time we sat there, the girl smoking cigarettes, the boy, looking feline, slouched in his chair, no one talking, as people went in and out of the café and other people trod along the sidewalk. Eventually the girl pointed at the youth, moved the same finger horizontally before her lips, motioned at her ear, moved the finger back and forth in front of her. I understood: the boy couldn’t talk or hear.
I pointed at her with a questioning look. With a series of gestures that were not formal sign language, she indicated some slight hearing in one ear, and her ability to speak, which she demonstrated by uttering sounds that were not exactly speech, but phonemic filaments whose longer vocables stuck in her throat as she tried to expel them.
After much awkward effort, we established that the boy wanted a date, which I already knew. His mutism excited me. It seemed to promise something besides the quotidian sexual exchanges so ubiquitous in this city. In minutes we were in a taxi, rolling down the Prado to the Malecón, across the Malecón to Avenida 23, up 23 to Paseo de Los Presidentes and down to the corner where my house is. We had sex after two Cuba Libres: rough, dirty, prolonged, intense.
His name is Mastiu, which I have trouble committing to memory, a fisherman working in Cotorro for the season. Next month his job will finish up and he’ll go home to Santiago. He fishes from shore, at night, in high rubber boots. His boss sells the fish to restaurants. Mastiu has an insane ex-wife in an asylum, and a small daughter living with his mother, whose whereabouts aren’t clear. It’s not clear exactly where he lives, either. I picture him in Guanabacoa, for some reason, in a decrepit house with a Santeria room. He has difficulty spelling words as he prints them on a yellow pad we use when miming fails. He can barely write. I’m not sure he can read.
He has a cell phone, but I can’t text him, since my US iPhone doesn’t work here. I can’t call him from the apartment phone, because he can’t hear. Since the building door is sometimes locked, I agreed to look for him from the balcony after two o’clock. Since the gestures we used to communicate lacked a single unambiguous detail, I’m not sure he’s actually coming at two, or coming at all. As he left yesterday he held up one finger and shook his head, then held up two and nodded emphatically. He soundlessly whispered “mañana” many times before stepping onto the elevator. But maybe he was saying “mama” or “Managua.” How could I be sure? I am going to the Necropolis. On the chance that I understood him correctly, I’m coming back at two o’clock. Or not coming back, because a lot of things here that seem uncomplicated only seem that way because I’ve overlooked some element that makes them fundamentally impossible.
1976. The Bicentennial year, tall ships, fireworks. Death toll from an earthquake in China, six hundred thousand. Ulrike Meinhof hangs herself in her cell in Stammheim Prison. Or someone helps her a little. Distant urgent events, thrilling history you’re embedded in like a questionable semicolon, powerless to affect the annihilating progress of the human species, only able to watch with a stricken feeling of being deliberately left behind. Not only by the other, cooler kids, but by history itself.
Richard Hell and the Voidoids. The Ramones. Son of Sam. Pol Pot, formerly Saloth Sar, becomes Genghis Khan of Kampuchea. Mao Tse-tung, Howard Hughes, Max Ernst, croak. These random subtractions from the swarm drag us along in their wake and work us into funny shapes, or set us on a dimly perceived trajectory. For instance: in Chatterton’s Bookshop, I instinctively snatch up the only copies of the single editions ever published of X Magazine and X Film Magazine. Both have materialized in Los Angeles along an occult route. I discover in these one-off New York underground papers, printed on cheap newsprint, writers and artists whose intimate circles will include me in another three years. My anxiety over the Red Army Faction trials in Germany, the storming of the hijacked plane in Mogadishu, the sense that capitalism needs to be torn down and incinerated is mirrored on every page—nobody here discusses these things, or allows them any significance.
Some nights I sleep with Dane Eberstadt, an exterminator who lives in the Valley. I met him at Oki Dog. He was eating a burger and watching kids burn each other with cigarettes. He looks like a depraved surfer. His sun-bleached, messy hair has an acid-purple streak running through it and flops across one eyebrow. A lanky five foot ten, with something skewed in his face. His nose veers to one side where it was broken, a small deformity that makes him beautiful instead of merely good-looking.
Dane drives a pickup with big silver bifenthrin canisters mounted in back. His house off Lankershim Boulevard sags like a deathbed smile, the weedy jungle in front a busy airport for thousands of white moths. Blinking Christmas lights entangled in ceiling fishnets cast tiny pats of color over a living room time forgot, dabbing two incapacitated hippies sprawled on dumpster sofas. “This is Chester, that’s Bob,” the exterminator says, giving an unresponsive big toe hanging over a sofa arm a friendly pinch. A lean black kitty with white markings and one green eye, one blue, pads excitedly across the warped keyboard of an upright piano for Dane to stroke under her chin. He plunks out “Chopsticks” to see if either housemate is conscious. They could easily be dead. He doesn’t encourage a lot of talk. He pulls me against himself with proprietary hands, kneading my ass with his fingers. His tongue feels like worn-down sandpaper in my mouth.
His bedroom is a vast Aladdin cave of candles, a waterbed that could cover a swimming pool. Reefer smoke and patchouli mask a cheesy smell of amyl nitrate. The bed’s undulations continue long after we’ve fucked for several hours, a tactile pentimento of sex. I drift into dreams in which his penis is still inside me. We’re in impossible public places that could be airports or museums or some mongrel shape-shifting architecture where, in plain sight of other people, I’m attached to him like a screen door flapping in a thunderstorm. I wake up, or dream I’ve woken up, feel breath on my hair and a foot pressing into my leg. Under the beaded fringe of a faux Tiffany lamp a night table with a litter of lidless Vasoline jars, candle-wax splotches, a glass bong streaked inside with oily grime, an open, filigreed jewelry box full of crushable amyl nitrate lozenges.
The only books in his house are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Dane’s history is Kentucky, Catholicism, two years of Army training. He used to be straight, or thought so. He’s never played a bottom, though claims he wouldn’t mind. He thinks he should take it up the ass sometime, at least once, “if I’m planning to be gay and all.”
The size of his cock is startling. He jokes as if it’s his evil twin, or the ventriloquist’s dummy in Dead of Night: “Tell Stiffy where you want him to slap you.” When he was in high school, “Kentucky girls impaled themselves on Mr. Stiffy.” Later, Army friends took him to Nashville brothels, where they watched him screw hookers with his giant dong.
“I get off on people watching. No business like show business, right? But. I was not taking Mr. Stiffy on a USO tour of Vietnam.” He arranged to get caught in flagrante homo at Fort Campbell, “with this butch bottom from Idaho. You can picture the disgrace. He wasn’t even the type I’m attracted to. I’m more into the delicate, fem … genre like yourself. I’m not all man or anything, but I could still fuck a chick, if I had to.”
“Why would you have to? Do you want to?”
“Sure. I mean, if she has a dick.”
Dane is a footloose char
acter. He calls me only when he wants sex. After a fuck he turns invisible for weeks, months. If I’m not home he rings another fuck buddy. He has them all over Los Angeles County. Guys he’s met in bars, at swap meets, in Licorice Pizza. His sunny disposition is implacable. Years later, Ron Vawter, though a more brooding and reflective guy than Dane, is cut from the same cloth: former Army, former Catholic, nightstand poppers, crazy dick, easy come, easy go.
Dane’s sleeping face is soft and untroubled, the face of someone well loved as a child, who still feels adored and protected by those around him. Unlike most people I hook up with, he’s not neurotic, secretly hostile, or messed up on drugs. Or, if he is, I don’t see him enough to know.
On weekends I sleep with him in the Valley, or else he sleeps at my place. He doesn’t care for my apartment, which makes two of us. We fuck insanely, for hours at a time, rutting like dogs on steroids, all over our respective domiciles. We fuck the instant we wake up, fuck before and after foraging snacks from the refrigerator, fuck in the tub, fuck standing up in the shower, fuck slammed against walls, fuck to defy our own exhaustion, fuck until we’re no longer sure if we’re fucking or have fallen asleep and continued fucking in our dreams: a real fuckorama every weekend, enough that I feel internally damaged for days afterward. But we both have the miraculous recuperative powers of bodies under thirty. Occasionally we clean ourselves off and go to a movie or order Chinese food. It’s nice.
I resent the wistfully possessive wishes that develop from this relationship. They’re irrelevant, they bring sadness into it. They’re sappy, romantic in a way that’s lethal, drawn from bad fictions. There isn’t any road map for homosexual relationships, and gay marriage hasn’t remotely been thought of. But an obtuse desire for this strictly erotic liaison to evolve into a less parochial equation, something more social and public than sequestered in a bedroom, intrudes on what’s otherwise an exhilarating mental enema and a country-simple good time. I have a million reasons to hate myself at this age. Yearning for clammy attachment tempts me to sabotage things, to suggest a different intimacy he doesn’t want and won’t put up with. One night I’m carelessly obvious about this wish, and he tells me exactly what to expect: “Ninety-nine percent of what I have to give you is going soft between my legs right now. If you need more from a boyfriend, you picked the wrong dude.”