by Achy Obejas
“Con permiso,” I say in my loudest voice, although I can tell from the way they’re looking at my mouth that they are lipreading. “Listen, I’m a writer—a poet—from New York and I wonder if you’d mind if I took your picture?” What I mean is, I want their image to inspire me. I want to print these up and fill my New York space with so much Havana that I can project myself back here anytime. I lift my camera for them to see.
They are both gorgeous, olive-hued, with dark, wounded eyes and creamy skin. The smaller one turns away and folds into her lover, who looks at me with a sober and unforgiving expression. “We would mind very much,” she says. I hear her slightly accented English through the crunching sounds of some German industrial dance song, dismissing the fact that I spoke to her in Spanish.
“Aaaayyyyyyyy, take my picture, take my picture!” shouts an excited young queen dripping with faux pearls who drags his drunken lover into my face.
I laugh and nod, bring the camera up, and push the button. The flash explodes, freezing everyone for a split second. Faces turn toward us, some excited, others placid, some enraged. The beautiful women are gone.
“Mi amor, photograph us!” says a boy in a sailor’s suit, pushing his companion, a soldier in full military regalia, at me.
Isabel puts her hands squarely on my hips and drives me away, through the labyrinth of flesh out to a patio, where the air is suddenly cool and refreshing. We pass a small table, where greasy paper plates pile up, and a cart full of rapidly melting ice from which a couple of lithe young men are selling beer and soda. We settle under a low-hanging tree with ripe, aromatic leaves. The moon is somewhere high above us.
“Jesus,” I say, laughing, “what is it about gay men, huh? It doesn’t matter where in the world I go, they’re always listening to disco, they always want their picture taken.”
Isabel pulls a handkerchief from her pocket; she wipes her face and sighs. “Good party?” she asks.
I nod. “Yeah, and an amazing place,” I say, surveying the mansion. The owners have cleared the front room of all furniture and blocked access to the other rooms. There are meaty men standing guard in front of the doors leading to the bedrooms and kitchen. Some of the windows that look out to the patio are boarded up, nailed shut, but we can see the glow of a light inside one of them and a solitary shadow in a rocking chair, reading a newspaper.
“That must be the mother. Listen,” Isabel says, coming closer to me. Her breath is hot on my face. “No more pictures here, okay?”
“Yeah?”
She shrugs. “Yeah, you know . . . the flash.” I know it’s more than that, but it’s okay.
Then a short brown-skinned woman comes over to us. She’s wearing a red suit, with a lacy red shirt and a red ribbon holding her hair in a curly wet ponytail. Her apparel is sort of corporate femmy, but her demeanor is entirely butch. As she crosses the patio, she’s practically marching.
“Tú—mujer linda,” she says, pointing to me. Her smile is sly, cocky. “Quieres bailar?”
There’s an unintelligible rap song booming through the speakers now, which seem nearly as powerful out here as inside the house. I see Isabel in my peripheral vision, smirking at my little admirer. I tower over this girl.
“Maybe later,” I say, “something slower.”
Isabel smiles, nods approvingly at my discretion.
But suddenly the music shifts. The beat is tropical and lazy. “J’imanije . . .” sings an indolent, Caribbean voice.
“Ay, mamita, si es una canción francesa,” says the little butch, imploring.
Isabel laughs. “That’s not French,” she tells her, “it’s some kind of Creole.”
“You’re not together, are you?” the girl asks, as if it just occurred to her.
Instinctively, we both shake our heads. The red-dressed butch grabs my hand with her moist, slippery fingers and pulls. “Vamos,” she says, and I obey, laughing over my shoulder at Isabel, who seems entertained by the turn of events.
On the dance floor, we are overwhelmed by the long, gangly bodies that sway dreamily around us. A few women wrap themselves around each other, their bodies cloaked in shiny perspiration. My dancing partner pulls me toward her with one swift, hard tug, but I resist. I feel my T-shirt molding to my back, as soaked as if I’d been standing out in the rain. We struggle wordlessly back and forth until we come to a compromise: I nail my elbows to the inside of hers and her hand goes to the small of my back and works from there. All the while, she sings, “J’imanije . . .” In my head, I make it French: “J’imagine.” As we turn, I catch Isabel’s eye. She’s leaning up against a wall, watching us and smiling. She’s drinking a beer I don’t remember her buying.
When the song ends, my partner doesn’t give me a chance. As soon as the notes of the new tune begin—something even slower, even more drippily romantic—she takes advantage of the instant I relax to yank me into her. My breasts squish up against her chest, hers slide around under mine. My nose is in her hair, which smells of roses. She sings, her voice raspy but strong, directed at my ear. I feel her flushed breath on my lobe and neck. I think I recognize the song—something by Marta Valdés?—but I can’t make out the words.
And now she seems more convincing, leading me, turning us in small, tight circles. The room spins, like a ride at an amusement park. I look for Isabel, but all the faces have smudged together. I try to pull away but I can’t. It’s as if all the air has been siphoned out of the space between our bodies and we’re being held together by suction. The little butch continues to sing, her tone rising with the song’s crescendo, her throat full of emotion.
It’s then I look up and see Mayra, the girl from the intersection. She’s framed by a pair of couples whose deliberate moves make them look as if they’re peaking in slow motion. She is across the room, standing in a thin funnel of light, her shirt loose around her candied shoulders, barely damp, but her full lips glisten, even at a distance. Her eyes are bright and she’s smiling, free and open. She doesn’t recognize me as the foreigner from the stoplight. She waves at me as if we’re old friends, perhaps neighbors. I feel something loosen and drop inside me.
I jerk away from my dancing partner, who falls back, disoriented by my sudden determination. The disco ball spins aquamarine.
Mayra’s eyes open wide; she’s laughing now, her head tossed back languidly against the wall. She mouths something to me. I have no idea what language she’s speaking. But, wet and feverish, I slowly begin to make my way toward her.
Supermán
They say that, for the longest time, Enrique didn’t know he was a superman. What he understood was that men liked his dick. He’d known it since he was a boy, when an older neighbor had kiddingly pushed him into the water off the Malecón and stared at the wet outline of his member after they dragged themselves laughing up to the rocks. What the hell is that? he’d asked, not waiting for an answer and grabbing it with his big hand through the fabric of the boy’s shorts. The neighbor was too quick, and the tug too electrifying, so that the boy couldn’t hide the swelling of his penis in the man’s fist. Behind them, up past the Malecón’s long wall, car horns blew like Haydn’s trumpets. The neighbor pushed him roughly to the edge of the rocks then silently instructed him to sit with his legs in the water and his back to the traffic. The neighbor submerged himself and brought his head between the boy’s thighs. He popped his fly and pushed as much as he could into his mouth before spitting it back out. It’s an eel, he said, it’s too much for me. Seeing the boy’s panicked look, the neighbor said, Don’t worry, don’t worry, and curled his fingers, pushing and pulling until, many minutes later, the boy finally shot over his head and into the waters.
As they were making their way back across the reef to the Malecón, the neighbor shook his hand out and joked about how it had almost fallen asleep. Embarrassed, the boy apologized but the neighbor clapped him on the back. That’s gonna make you a lot of money, my friend, just you wait. The neighbor, whose name was Osmany, grinned the wh
ole way home.
They say that was the beginning—that then Osmany told Mercedes, his wife, about the sleepy-eyed neighbor boy, how his penis went on for so long it seemed to defy human possibility. She had him come by their apartment and, after fussing over him so much that he began to tremble, he was finally convinced to unbutton his pants and show her—except this time, his treasure lay flat and soft on his thigh, still impressive but inert. She shook her head in dismay.
Hmm, said Osmany, who was baffled: he couldn’t swallow that thing, much less let it up his ass; the boy was too young to fuck and yet there was something in his somnambulant gaze that let Osmany know trying to get the boy to take a dick in his mouth—a mouth like syrup, glistening and sweet—would be futile. That strange boy seemed so different from mortal men.
They say Osmany was a valet at a downtown hotel and he’d see the boy each morning on the way to work, just lingering on the steps of the Saint Jude Thaddeus Church on the corner of San Nicolás and Tenerife. He’d wave and the boy would nod, his eyes so heavy-lidded you’d have thought he’d just woken up on those steps: shirtless, flawless. Sometimes he’d be eating an orange, delicately biting the golden half-moons, and other times he’d sprint across the street at the sound of a woman’s voice and disappear inside the building. In the afternoon, when he came home for lunch, Osmany would see him hanging over one of the second-floor balconies or back on the church steps reading the newspaper.
Oh, for the love of God, just invite him over again, Mercedes said.
They say that’s when it became routine for the boy to visit in the evening, always barefoot, to have a snack or dinner with the young couple. Sometimes he’d stick around to watch them have sex. Initially, Osmany had thought they’d try to bring him into their lovemaking (Mercedes would make him wash his feet first), but while the boy was willing to be kissed, he wasn’t much of a kisser, and while he was game to be stroked, he wasn’t enthusiastic about reciprocation. In fact, most of the time he wasn’t particularly aroused by their efforts and would just curl up and go to sleep.
It was Mercedes who noticed it was only once they’d given up engaging him and focused on enjoying themselves that the boy would come to life. Then he’d stare at Osmany’s member as it slid in and out of Mercedes and his own would grow and grow and grow. Osmany reached for it one time but Mercedes grabbed his wrist. Don’t touch it, she whispered, and let’s see what he does. But the boy did nothing, or at least nothing of the usual sort. Instead, he’d use his powerful thighs to bounce the shiny mast from one leg to the other, which sent Osmany and Mercedes into a frenzy.
Did the boy have a family? Some say he was an orphan, a street kid. Others were sure he lived with his mother and a handful of siblings; still others say he was an only and much treasured child. A few reported that both his parents lived in that upstairs apartment in Los Sitios across from the church. His mother (or an aunt, or an older sister—it was unclear) was a washerwoman, or a waitress, maybe a receptionist at a clinic in Vedado, but the father was sickly and so was never seen or heard from, which explained why the boy seemed to flutter about without aim. Some insisted the father was a junkie who only showed up during bouts of sobriety.
Whatever his true beginnings, all the origin stories began and ended in Los Sitios, with the boy sitting on the church steps. Did he go to school? Certainly for a while, but who knows when he dropped out. He could read, this was plain—not just from his extended focus on the newspaper he managed to get hold of every day, but also in his choice of reading material: dime novels, especially translated American pulp Westerns. There was always one in his back pocket.
Years later—yes, years, that’s how much Osmany and Mercedes invested in the boy—they put together a little show in their living room for a group of special friends. The windows were shuttered, lights dimmed, cold beer and aloe were passed out to the handful of guests who sat sweating in a half-circle facing the couch. And there was the kid, bare-chested and barefoot, in trousers with rolled cuffs. From above, a lamp provided a spotlight.
When the kid fished his member from inside his pants, it curled like the neck on the Loch Ness Monster. The room gasped, and then came the sounds of zippers, fabric rustling, and heavy breathing. Behind the half-circle of seats, standing with Mercedes’s back to him, Osmany lifted her dress to reveal the round of her buttocks. The kid’s penis wrenched itself to attention. It looked like a torpedo searching for targets. The guests panted and struggled as Osmany pressed his own erection into his wife’s rear. The kid thrust his hips up, then reached into his trousers again, this time to give his testicles some air. By the time he orgasmed—an act perpetrated by telepathy between him and the couple in the back of the room so that he never, ever so much as flicked his wrist—the men in the room were grunting and crying. One had dropped to his knees, but Osmany pulled him back by the shirt collar as if he were on a leash, and the man lowered his head and licked the floor.
They say one of the guests in that room was a friend of José Orozco García, the owner of the Shanghai Theater in Chinatown, a burlesque house with about seven hundred seats on the main floor and another three hundred and fifty in the balcony. The Shanghai hosted live shows and a handful of films each day. They say that Orozco’s friend rushed to tell him what he’d seen and the next thing they knew, the kid—now tall and athletic, though still sleepy-eyed and barefoot (it was his preference)—was strolling down Zanja Street with Osmany, serious cash in their pockets in anticipation of his stardom.
And it came, that stardom, and with it his new name: Supermán. An unseen harp would play a kind of roll, and then a brass section would introduce him with a short triad-based motif. He’d float onstage like Tathagata, his smoothly proportioned body covered in a flowing red cape. Then he’d pivot to profile and reveal his magnificence. Afterward, he’d sit on his throne and will his way to rapture.
Some say Supermán was a sensation right away. Others that it took some time: the kid didn’t know what to make of the light in his eyes or the black mouth of the theater that seemed to want to swallow him whole. He had to learn to surrender, to find a place inside himself where he was alone, where he could conjure what he needed to bring himself to peak. Still others claim to remember seeing Osmany in the wings—sometimes with Mercedes and sometimes with another woman or man—playing out what he knew fueled the Shanghai’s new star.
They say Supermán’s member was ten, twelve, even eighteen inches long, though there are some who insist it only seemed so hefty because of the play of lights in the theater. They say they were masters of forced perspective at the Shanghai, that they dusted his thighs and scrotum with a blue tint and covered his penis with an orange gel so it would give the impression of greater weight and length. A few say that when Supermán turned to show his treasure, what the audience saw was the forearm of a dwarf concealed at his side, his fist held to project a shadow that looked like a stout head. Some insisted it really was that long, and that, more importantly, he was able to pull it up without touching, so that it always seemed charged and ready. On certain nights, and only for special shows, Supermán would earn his name by attaching himself to a wire that was hooked to a contraption on the Shanghai ceiling that would hurl him above the heads of men and women who would jump from their seats, hands grasping in the air, laughing and sucking their knuckles.
Oh, those were easy days. They say Supermán bought himself white gabardine suits and comfortable custom-made leather sandals for when there was no choice but to cover his feet. He bought serious hardcover books he lined up next to his bed and dined out with friends from the neighborhood. He thought about buying a car but realized he’d have to learn to drive, and besides, he found the nightly walk to the Shanghai invigorating. Mercedes suggested he was making enough to move out of Los Sitios, that he could probably find bigger and better quarters for himself (and his family?) in Vedado or Old Havana, but even then it was clear Supermán understood his activities would not be seen with the same kindness in othe
r places. (And Osmany agreed with Supermán: That’s a machete in your pants, he said, and this—he tapped his forearm to indicate color—this is trouble. That—now pointing at his crotch—will only make it worse. Better to stay where everyone already knows you.)
No worries, I’m going to live here forever, Supermán told Mercedes, but she scoffed. She and Osmany were already making plans to relocate to Vedado with their percentage of his earnings, though into two different apartments: Mercedes had fallen in love with one of the strippers at the Shanghai and was moving in with her.
I’m going to live here forever and ever, Supermán insisted.
They laughed, but he meant it. He got a big garbage can to put right at the corner of the church, bought flowers for the women who’d seen him grow up and now enjoyed watching him strut off to work in the evening, and shooed the boys peeing against the sacellum walls in the early hours when he got home. Everyone says Supermán was as much a hero at home as in the spotlight.
In those days, tourists filled the streets and the seats at the Shanghai, and Supermán was applauded and adored every night. But not all was wonderful: now and then there were shots heard in the early hours, and once, walking home in the morning light, Supermán stumbled on a man whose chest had been ripped apart by a burst of bullets. He read the papers; he knew what was going on. But still he threw off his shoes and ran home, closing the doors of the balcony overlooking Saint Jude Thaddeus, dropping his mattress onto the floor so that if bullets came through his windows or doors, they’d whiz above his head.
Having no professional responsibilities other than to sit and meditate, Supermán didn’t have to attend the afternoon rehearsals at the Shanghai, though he often went by and hung out with the girls who supervised the day-care circle. There was one he liked a lot named Gise, the eldest daughter of one of the other performers (a beautiful smoky woman whose specialty was sucking off another performer while hanging upside down). Gise watched over the cast members’ kids and flirted with him. She was almond-eyed, with a mischievous glint that sparked the sleepy Supermán.