by Chris Abani
It was the thing he couldn’t name. But it was there, in rain, in silence, and in night. In the random minutiae of his daily life, it was there: like the warning sound of a raven’s call, like the gathering of a storm. Like a child’s nursery rhyme: one, two, pick up my shoe, three, four, knock on the door. The compulsive collection of omens that could transform the ordinary into the tarot; the neon cross on the Zion Call Church, the golden arches of the McDonald’s, the plastic flowers in the window of Lolita’s Bridal, the cake that was a pair of humongous pink breasts in the window of the panaderia, Pedro’s taco stand with the plastic dinosaur on the top of it, and on and on. He stopped in front of Charlie’s. After Brandy’s, still turgid and desperate, there was nowhere else he could go. He had to see Sweet Girl and tonight he would get a lap dance, he thought, as he walked in.
He sat down. Sweet Girl sat beside him.
“I thought you were never coming back,” she said, her voice a purr.
He shifted uncomfortably.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. But I guess I was wrong.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Sure, honey. You maybe wanna buy something else?”
He nodded, licked his lips and pointed to the lap dance section. She laughed and pulled him along behind her, stopping briefly at the bar for drinks, then continuing on to the lap dance corner. Before straddling him, she shed all but her G-string. He stared hard, looking for—but not finding—any evidence of her penis. As she sat in his lap, she leaned forward and breathed:
“It’s twenty dollars per song, baby.”
And surprisingly the intrusion of money did nothing to erase the illusion that she was in love with him, that she desired him. He pushed up and dug into his pocket, fishing out a twenty. She smiled and folded the money carelessly into her clothes on the floor, almost as if it were an afterthought. Arms around his neck, she rubbed down, her ass working with the informed touch of a masseuse, searching for the hard of him. Soft, then down hard, then soft, twin cheeks clenching and releasing.
Black leaned back and relaxed into the curious touch of Sweet Girl’s buttocks. They were almost like he imagined a man’s buttocks would be. But that thought threatened a wave of something: lust or nausea, he couldn’t tell which. Emptying his mind, he thrust his hips forward, trying to help, trying to feel something. But his dick was bent back, under him, still turgid, but trapped. His heartbeat was faster. Desire or fear? he wondered.
Sweet Girl paused, and Black felt both her ass cheeks locked in confused concentration. He guessed she was wondering why she couldn’t feel his erection. She turned and faced him and he looked away, embarrassed. How could he explain that at thirty-six his penis was acting eighteen? Spontaneous erections lasting for so long he had to bind them to go about his day. He caught her looking at him from the corner of her eye, a tight smile on her face, and he wondered what she was thinking. She leaned forward, both knees on his thighs, breasts brushing his face, her breath teasing his ear:
“Is this good, baby?”
Black nodded. Smiled. Cupped her face lightly with both hands. He tried to kiss her, but she moved her head slightly, his lips landing on her neck where his tongue left a damp spot. She smiled, pulling all the way back.
“Feisty boy!”
He smiled and touched the side of her face, and she rubbed her cheek against his palm. He was looking deep into her eyes. Then his hands dropped to her lower back, resting like tired blackbirds on the ledge of her hips. Half crouching on his lap, knees spread, facing him, she rubbed her breasts against his face. The plastic pasties were hard against his freshly shaved chin. He breathed her in deeply, but all he could smell was the flowery scent of her body lotion. He was experienced enough to know the smell was common to all strippers, and thought it was probably something from Victoria’s Secret. She pulled back to watch him as her pudenda, like the gentle pressure of an open palm, pushed into his crotch. Still, he eluded her. Then surprising them both, his tongue danced over her breasts, around the pasties. This was more touch than was allowed, but he hoped she liked it. Liked him. He hoped that she could sense his sincerity, sense that he was looking for more than what just her body could give.
Sweet Girl glanced around as though to make sure they were deep enough in shadow. Reaching down, between them, between their heat, she ran a hand down his pants.
In the background, Barry White crooned, “You turn my whole world around . . .”
Black shifted under her palm. He was trying to move his penis out from its cave, the shaft lying between balls stretching for comfort. Sweet Girl’s hand slipped under the band of his pants and under the band of his boxer’s and traced the full length of him.
And Barry: “Never have I met a girl like you . . .”
Black winced as Sweet Girl pushed against his balls. Excruciating, but he loved it too. Felt the rush of new blood, felt the rush of old memories.
Pain.
Kneeling on the shards of broken glass from the tumbler he knocked over in that long ago. Kneeling for the penance of his mother’s devotion.
Pleasure.
Yes, my Jesus of the Heart of Flame, yes, I love you and renounce the world and my pleasure for sin, Black intoned in that long ago, all the while flogging the Bishop, so to speak.
Pain.
A finger held too long over the flame of a votive candle, while the other hand counted out the slope of the spell in the hard of wood, stroking, Hail Mary full of grace.
Pleasure.
His hands working himself in the dark when his mother had gone to bed. Stroking himself and seeing the Virgin in his mind’s eye. Pearl-white plaster face. Stroking himself as he imagined her red lips whispering his name, her blue robe pulled up around her waist. Stroking himself as his other hand dug a bit of glass into his thigh. Stroking himself as he heard her whisper, yes, m’ijo, for pleasure, for pain, yes.
“Yes, baby, yes,” Sweet Girl breathed into his ear, bringing him back. Her forefinger and middle finger, wet from her mouth, were rubbing faster and faster on the shaft of his penis, the shaft bent under him, the shaft bent away, into itself, like a vagina. Black was thrusting, thrusting, but he couldn’t come. Frustrated, he pulled Sweet Girl’s still wet fingers out. She looked him straight in the eye and sucked on them.
“Was that good?” she asked.
He swallowed. He didn’t know how many songs had elapsed in the time she had spent with him. Reaching for his drink, he downed the whiskey in a gulp. Sweet Girl laughed and curled up in his lap, her face nuzzling his neck. He felt revulsion. He felt elation. He thought he might be in love.
“I don’t usually do that,” she said. “I’m a lesbian.”
He nodded and reached for her drink. He sipped.
“Then why me?”
She sighed and stretched.
“I don’t know. Maybe because you always look into my eyes.”
He nodded. She ran a finger down the side of his face.
“Very few men see me,” she said.
He nodded again. He wanted to get away. He turned his head and looked at the stage. A middle-aged dancer with glasses was building up a sweat but nobody was paying any attention. Sweet Girl pulled his face back.
“How come you aren’t touching me?”
“I didn’t know I could,” he said. He didn’t want to touch her. He wanted to get away.
“Touch me,” she said, taking his hand and placing it on her stomach. He stared at it for a long time. She was lighter than him, and his hand, fingers splayed, looked like a dark crab on a beach. He moved it over her belly and felt his hair stand up. Sweet Girl purred under the stroke.
“Are you allowed to get so close to the clientele?” Black asked.
Sweet Girl sat up. She was smiling.
“I frighten you, don’t I?”
“Why would you say that?”
She laughed, and taking a tube of lipstick from her bag, she wrote her number on the back of his hand. He pulled it away, look
ed at it.
“What’s your number, baby?” she asked.
He was unable to lie. He told her, watching with fascination as she wrote it on the inside of her thigh. She was still laughing and it was mocking.
“I’ve got your number now,” she said.
He pushed her off his lap, but not roughly. He got up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.
“Sure, baby,” she said, and laughed again.
There was a urinal against one wall, and a cubicle with a toilet in the corner. He didn’t lock the main door as two people could easily use the bathroom. He slipped into the booth and bolted that door. He was about to flush when he heard a soft moan. Stepping on the rim of the bowl, he peered over the top of the cubicle.
A man was leaning into the urinal, one hand on the wall, fingers splayed, the other clearly working his penis. Black studied him: black sleeveless leather vest and pants, tattooed arms and a heavy silver Tibetan Vajra hanging around his neck from a black cord. His leather pants were bunched around his knees and he wore heavy motorcycle boots with significant heels. His long black hair was gathered in a ponytail, his beard was well groomed and he was heavily tanned.
As he masturbated, the man reached up and pulled his ponytail loose, shaking his hair around his head like a halo with a few practiced flicks, spreading it across his back like the sudden splaying of an exotic bird’s tail. Moaning a little louder, he began running his other hand through his hair, his body swaying from side to side, hand sliding faster than a trombonist playing a hot blues. Black wondered if the man knew he had an audience and whether he was thinking about a man or a woman and why he couldn’t wait to get home and what kind of passion and desire caused a person to masturbate in a strip bar toilet and why he didn’t feel like this about Sweet Girl and why he was breathing heavily and why he had an erection and why he was unzipping and touching himself and why he was excited and whether this meant he was gay and then he came, hard and thick, the pressure causing him to slip and nearly lose his footing. He held the sticky mass in his hand, never taking his eyes off the man at the urinal. The man came with a sound that was a near shout, legs knocking against the tile wall. With a deep satisfied sigh, he rubbed the semen through his hair, then he zipped up his pants and turned away from the urinal. He stopped at the door, looked up at Black and smiled.
Waiting until the man was gone, Black left the stall and walked bowlegged, to keep his pants from falling off, over to the sink to wash the semen and Sweet Girl’s number from his hands. He had no idea how long he had been in the toilet, and as he studied his face in the mirror he half expected to see it unraveling at the seams. He took a deep breath and when he pushed out of the toilet, he headed for the exit. Gabriel was a pigeon perched on the eave. He shat on Black as he left, then flew into the dark.
It was a good night to be an angel.
nine
uncertain.
The flame flickered on the altar in the corner of the spaceship. Black knelt before the candle against which an icon of the Lady leaned drunkenly next to the little dog. A rosary dangled from his hand and his lips moved silently as he rolled each bead intently, squeezing the last drop of faith from it before moving on to the next. The shadow of his hand and the rosary on the wall was a fist-headed snake swallowing an endless string of prey. It was always the same. Whenever he went to see Sweet Girl, he came home and did penance. Penance to wash the pleasure from his soul, because in his mind, pleasure was a sin, but a sin he loved.
It was raining this Los Angeles night, washing across the Plexiglas skylight like hot tears, melting the light. His face, reflected in the skylight, was a water-smeared ink stain, the only feature standing out: his nose. Even in the smudged dark surface it looked big, reminding him of a nickname he used to have in elementary school—Electrolux. He paused halfway through a Hail Mary and stared hard at himself in the Plexiglas, but as the rain got heavier and the night darker, his reflection grew more unclear, just a shadow really. Not that it mattered, he thought. What he looked like. A man was more a sum of his character. The unspoken things that fill the blankness of a form reflected. Yet the things of character he was searching for in the window were too dark to show up here, long buried and forgotten. Dead things.
Like the fights between his parents that in his memories became one fight, remembered as clear as instant replay. Black was playing in the living room, on the rug, pushing a toy fire truck across the tight weave, pausing to stuff handfuls of Cheerios into his mouth. His mother was watching I Love Lucy, talking in her customary way to the television.
“If Desi Arnez is Cuban then I am not Catholic,” she said, laughing out loud. “Lucy, now there’s a real spitfire, a real Salvadoran, down to the red hair.”
Black paused in his play and looked up at her. He was five in this memory and wearing a dress. He looked from his mother to the clock. It was eight p.m. and his father would be home soon, and Black was worried that his mother hadn’t started dinner. It wasn’t good.
“Can I have some ice cream, Mom?” he asked.
“Sure, m’ijo.”
Black had just dug into the plate of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup when he heard the sound of keys at the door. Both he and his mother glanced up as Frank banged in, slamming the door. He walked past Black as though he wasn’t there, nodded at María and went straight into the kitchen. Black and María could hear pots clattering, the refrigerator door opening and closing and then Frank came back in drinking from a bottle of beer.
“Too busy to cook?”
María ignored him. Black ate quickly, wishing he could get out without being seen.
“I mean anyone of your class should be happy to get a man like me. An engineer, scientist, in fact, a near genius,” Frank said. “Why can’t you leave that stupid sewing job and cook?”
“Genius? Lucky? If I am so lucky, puto, how come I am working at a factory where the owner gropes me with his oily Greek hands? When are you going to be a man, Frank, and provide for us?”
“So, no food then?”
María just kissed her teeth at him. Frank shrugged, walked over to Black, bent and took the plate of ice cream from him. He changed the channels, sat back down and began shoveling ice cream into his mouth. Black wanted to cry but knew better. Instead he looked to his mother. She smiled at him.
“Come, m’ijo,” she said, putting out her arms. He ran into them and she carried him out of the room.
As they left, Frank muttered: “You are spoiling that child.”
María ignored him and tucked Black in. He wanted her to read to him, but she took the book out of his hand and said: “How about I tell you a story, like my grandmother used to tell me?”
But while she talked, Black’s mind wandered. He could tell from the tight set of her lip that she was mad at his father, but he was torn. He liked his father and lived for any attention he showed him. His father worked hard and Black rarely saw him because he was usually in bed when his father got home. Yet no matter how hard Frank worked, there never seemed to be enough money. Whenever Black asked for anything, his father said: “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” Like that. And sometimes more harshly: “Don’t be stupid.”
At first his tone had been gentle and he would sometimes rub Black’s head when he said the former. But over time, his tone became more and more clipped and angry until most of the time he shouted at Black.
“Don’t be stupid, money doesn’t grow on trees.”
And when Black didn’t ask for anything, his father shouted still. When he forgot to pick up his toys and they got wet with dew on the front porch. When he accidentally broke a glass. Or tore a magazine. Always the same: Money doesn’t grow on trees, don’t be stupid! And the sharpness of that retort and the look in his father’s eyes stung more than the smack that inevitably followed.
When his parents were sure he was sleeping, Black heard the fight that had been brewing for days, long before Frank walked in and ate his ice cream. He hated that his mother
started it, yelling at Frank, calling him names. Even in his bedroom, in his mind’s eye he could see her standing in front of him punctuating each insult with a finger or a palm slap to her chest. At first Frank was quiet, and Black imagined him flinching at the roll call of his impotence. Then as María grew louder, Black got really afraid, wanting to call out to his mother, say no, stop, estúpido, he will, he will, but just then he heard the slap and imagined his mother collapsing on the floor, sobbing.
Now, in retrospect, Black wondered why he had looked forward to the rare moments when his father showed him any attention, attention he responded to with puppy-like eagerness that was almost embarrassing, and why with his mother, he was cool. He sought her out when he wanted comfort, but for the most part, he kept his distance from her. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know why: he knew, maybe even then, as a little boy he had known why. He felt guilty, guilty that he couldn’t stop his father from beating her, guilty that he hated her screaming at Frank because he thought she would drive him away, guilty that he was sometimes happy when his father hit her and she shut up, guilty that he was lulled to sleep by the sound of her crying almost as if it were rain.
On her deathbed, his mother had accused him of always siding with his father. He wished now that he’d had the words to say: It’s not that I hated you, or that I loved him more, it’s just that you were always there. So it was easy to put it all on you. What else could I do? How could I hate a man who never really existed for me?
Back in the present, Black blew smoke circles into the night, struggling to admit that his memories were a lie: that he changed toward his mother after his father left. He felt all the voices pressed tight against his brain with the pressure of a headache. Eight years old and kneeling on hard rice before an altar not unlike this one. Eight and the rice biting into his knees and sweat running down his face and his mother standing over him with a cane. Stroke after stroke on his back and he struggling to hold back the tears and her voice:
“Try harder, m’ijo, try harder to call the Lady.”