Groove

by Geneva Holliday

  He could have brought more, he should have brought more. Shit, he wasn’t on vacation and I wasn’t the concierge level of the Peninsula Hotel. This was a lifestyle change—this was my home!

  “You could have brought more than just clothes, Kendrick,” I said brightly, planting a sunny smile on my face for added effect. “You could have brought the entertainment center.” I pointed toward an empty wall in the living room. “That space there would have been perfect.”

  Kendrick turned around and considered it for a moment, then grunted and said, “Let me get back downstairs and get the other suitcases.”

  “I’ll help,” I said as I followed behind him like an obedient puppy.

  Forty-Two

  I was sitting on my bed with a dozen or more pamphlets spread out around me.

  WHEN GOOD GAY MEN GO STRAIGHT

  CURBING YOUR CRAVINGS FOR VAGINA

  HOW TO STAY STRICTLY DICKLY: THE PUSSY-FREE DIET

  I’d been up all night perusing the dos and don’ts of homosexual living. One expert advised, “Try to keep your male-female friend ratio balanced. Never have too many female friends around you for more than six hours at a time. A woman’s energy is very powerful, especially when she has her period. Men (hetero as well as homo) are greatly affected during this time, and the hetero instinct that is built inside us is heightened so much that a homosexual male will begin to fantasize about having sex with females, and a weaker one will actually act on it.”

  I guess I’m a weaker one.

  Another expert explained: “While still in our mother’s womb we are female until the second trimester, when our sexual organs begin to fully develop and our bodies reveal if we are to be born male or female. Because we are female first, and most females are closet lesbians, we retain that primal desire first instilled in us while we are still in our mother’s womb, and so at times the homosexual male will find himself attracted to or desiring to be with women. It is a natural repercussion of being human; but we as homosexual men must fight to suppress it!”

  The meeting took place in the garden-level apartment owned by “Bob,” who was exactly how I’d imagined him. Tall, thin, neat, and pale. So pale that he was almost translucent.

  “Welcome,” he said when he opened the door. A Barbra Streisand tune sailed out from behind him. “Are you here for the meeting?” he asked through his thin pink lips.

  “Yes.”

  “And your name?”

  “Noa—I mean Wayne.”

  “Welcome, Wayne.”

  The space was tight, but Bob had managed to make it homey. There was a small overstuffed floral loveseat and an old steamer trunk being used as a sofa table. Two ivory-colored wing chairs sat on either side of the trunk.

  A bamboo ceiling fan whirled lazily above our heads, and in three corners of the room there were towering potted broad-leaf banana plants, giving the space a Havana-like feel.

  Beyond the living room was a small hallway that led to a minuscule kitchen, and what I assumed to be the bedroom and bathroom lay beyond that.

  “Please sit down,” Bob said.

  “Thank you.” I took one of the wing chairs.

  “Can I get you some iced tea, lemonade, or water?”

  “Iced tea, please,” I said as I crossed my legs and folded my hands in my lap.

  Bob came back with a blue glass filled with iced tea and a coaster with daffodils across its face.

  I sipped some, smiled, and then thought I should say something. “Nice place,” I croaked.

  “Thank you,” Bob said as he scurried down the hallway and disappeared. On his return he carried three folding chairs.

  “Can I help you with that?”

  “No, no, I have it,” he said as he expertly flipped the chairs open and set them out.

  Afterward he looked at his watch, sighed, and then placed his hands on his hips and looked directly at me. “I’ll take your payment now.”

  Was it fair to have to pay for a service before you were even serviced?

  Suppose no one showed? Suppose everyone showed and all we did was sit around playing backgammon and singing Broadway show tunes?

  “Okay,” I said, standing up and pulling my wallet from my back pocket.

  By seven-fifteen, there were twelve of us, including Bob. After the introductions, the meeting got under way and I was astonished by the stories I heard.

  “I’ve been having sex with women for three years now,” a large, burly-looking white man named “Jerry,” with a thick mustache and mouselike voice, confessed. “It all started when my lover and I went to South Beach on vacation. He can’t really take the sun, you know,” he said, and then his voice dropped down to a whisper. “Skin cancer runs in his family.” The group moaned and nodded their heads. “Anyway, he left me on the beach because he had a massage appointment, and that’s when it happened. I mean, I have always been able to admire a woman without wanting to sleep with her—you know what I mean?”

  The men nodded.

  “But those women down there, I mean, what the hell do they put in the water? They’re just too beautiful for words, and their shapes, my Lord, it’s like a cartoonist drew them!”

  “It’s all of those Cubans!” one man cried out.

  “And don’t forget the Haitians!” another one said, using his hands to make the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle.

  “Well, by the time my lover’s massage was over and he was tapping me on the shoulder to come to lunch, I had a full-fledged boner and there was no hiding that from him.” Jerry breathed and then turned to the man closest to him, placed a finger on his knee, and said, “I’m very well endowed.”

  The man next to him, “George,” I think his name was, pressed his index and middle fingers against his lips to conceal his smile.

  “And just like that,” Jerry said with a snap of his fingers, “I was lusting after women. I spent the better part of that vacation avoiding my lover’s advances while I tried to get some booty from our chambermaid.”

  The men gasped.

  Another story of female addiction was told by “Norman,” a slight Hispanic man with sleek black hair and a long thin nose. He was tall and very good-looking. He reminded me of one of the Abercrombie & Fitch models I’d seen splattered across the fashion magazines.

  “I have been gay since I was eight,” he started. His accent was heavenly and very, very Central American. “I had been with a woman once, when I was just twelve—she was my nanny.”

  The men leaned back and grabbed their chests in horror.

  “Although I remember the experience to have been a pleasurable one, I had already had relations with the twenty-year-old son of the gardener, so I knew what it was I wanted, and that was a man!”

  A cheer went up.

  “But last year, while I traveling to Rome,” Norman started, and his eyes swept the group, “first class, of course . . .”

  “But of course,” someone interjected.

  “How else would you go?” another person said.

  Norman continued, “I found myself sitting next to a stunning woman. Dark-haired, with green eyes. Sicilian.”

  “Ah, yes,” someone moaned.

  “Her name was—”

  “Uh-uh,” Bob abruptly chimed in, waving a chastising finger at Norman. “No names. Everyone deserves anonymity, even the heifers that got us into this situation.”

  Norman bowed his head. “Forgive me,” he said. “While her name is not important, the power she exerted over me is.”

  Norman picked up his glass of iced tea and took a sip before continuing.

  “She was a goddess and smelled like Elysian Fields after a light rain. Her hair was as soft as spun silk. She was perfection.”

  He took another sip.

  “Three hours in, she shared her heartbreaking story of love and loss. Some scoundrel had broken her heart and slept with her sister.”

  The men shook their heads in dismay.

  “She cried on my shoulder and then fell asleep in my a
rms. Breasts like fresh-baked bread rose and fell beneath her v-neck blouse, and I found myself aroused by the nearness of her.”

  The men knew the feeling and moaned at the thought of it.

  “Later, when the movie was playing and the cabin was dark, her hand found my knee and then climbed my thigh and grabbed ahold of my, my—”

  Norman got choked up for a minute.

  “You can do it,” someone murmured.

  “Don’t be ashamed, tell it. Release yourself!” another shouted.

  “We’re here to listen, not to judge!” someone else yelled.

  Norman recovered, wiped at his eyes, and then took another sip of his iced tea.

  “Her hand found my manhood, massaging it as it had never been massaged before.”

  I looked at the group, and they were all on the edge of their seats.

  “Before I knew it, her head was in my lap and she was giving me the best blow job I’d ever received. I had to bite the pillow to keep from screaming.

  “And then she climbed over me and went to the bathroom. I wasn’t going to follow—I swear I wasn’t—but I couldn’t help myself.”

  Norman dropped his head and began to weep. Bob came over and gave him a hug. “Go on, finish it—purge yourself,” he urged.

  “I—I slipped into the bathroom with her, and in one fell swoop I became a member of the mile-high club!” Norman blubbered and then crumbled into a weeping mess of a man.

  “Women are evil!” someone screamed.

  After Norman had composed himself, Bob turned to me. “Wayne, would you like to share your story?” he asked.

  I looked down at my hands and then up at the faces that waited expectantly before I quietly confessed, “Beyoncé was the beginning of my homosexual end.”

  Our assignment was to revisit, if we could, the places that we had had our first homosexual experiences. To relive the joy and then record it in our rainbow-colored journals. “Gay porn is fine,” Bob said, “but try to get out to the gay strip clubs. You need to smell the flesh, not just watch it on cable or DVD.”

  I left that meeting feeling charged and renewed. It was uplifting to know that I wasn’t going to have to go through this alone. I would work this program and prayed to God that it would work for me.

  Forty-Three

  He’s a slob,” Crystal whispered to me.

  “What?”

  “A fucking slob.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Geneva, I have to pick up after him like he’s three years old.”

  “Really?”

  “Socks, shoes, his shitty drawers!”

  “Shitty?”

  “He’s been lying around here for a week, claims he’s on vacation.”

  “Well, maybe he is.”

  “I don’t think so. His father has called here twice, but Kendrick won’t speak to him.”

  “What the hell is that about?”

  “I don’t know, but what I do know is, Kendrick ain’t washed his ass in about four days.”

  “Stop your lying, Crystal!”

  “I don’t know who this man is sleeping up in my bed.”

  “You still sleeping in the bed with him?”

  “Hell, no! I’m sleeping on my couch.”

  “Oh.”

  “Something is wrong here. I mean, I go to work and he’s asleep, I come back home and he’s asleep. I know he’s eating because there’s dishes in the sink and crumbs on the counter.”

  “Damn.”

  “And he’s drunk up all my liquor.”

  “Say what?”

  “Not that I had much, but what little I did have, he drank.”

  “Shit!”

  “And—and I’m telling you this and no one else—the night he proposed to move in to my place . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah?”

  “I had to pay for the dinner! He claimed he left his wallet at home, but I swear I saw it in his back pocket when we walked out of the restaurant!”

  “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “Not only that, this morning he rolls over just as I was leaving for work and asks me if I could leave him a few dollars.”

  “No, he didn’t!”

  “Yes, girl.”

  “Something ain’t right, Crystal.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Look, when shit started going bad with Eric, I tried to hang in there for as long as I could, but it just kept getting worse. I mean, he was fucking around on me, had the women calling the house like I didn’t even live there, like he didn’t have a wife and son!”

  “I remember.”

  “We were fighting like cats and dogs. Every night was a battle, and then there were the nights when all I could do was cry because he didn’t even come home!”

  “Hmm.”

  “I just finally got sick and tired of the fussing and fighting, and besides, I had Little Eric to think about. He didn’t need to be growing up in a household filled with so much anger. I had to put myself second and think about the welfare of my child.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “Things ain’t going right. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better any time soon. You may not have a child, but you do have you, and that’s a hell of a lot.”

  “I know—”

  “Don’t be putting yourself second to a man who has stopped putting you first in his life. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me?”

  “Yeah, I guess, but—”

  “No buts. Take your own advice.”

  “I hear you.”

  Forty-Four

  I saw Noah for the first time in days. “Hey, Miss Thang!” he sang to me as he stood over the stove cooking an omelet.

  “Hey, Miss Thang, yourself,” I shot back at him. “Long time no see,” I added as I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and took a seat.

  “I been here all the time—where you been?” he said teasingly.

  “Around.”

  “Uh-huh—got a new man?”

  I smiled. “Something like that,” I said and then, needing to change the subject, “What about you? How you doing?”

  He looked thinner, but his eyes were sparkling.

  “Oh, I’m getting better by the moment,” he sang and slid the omelet out and onto a plate.

  “Really? I didn’t know watching massive amounts of porn could do that to you,” I said slyly.

  But Noah wasn’t biting. He totally ignored my sarcastic comment and said, “Can I make an omelet for you too?”

  “Sure, why not?” I said and then thought about what it was I had to do in a few hours. “No, no never mind. I’ll grab something later on.”

  After some mild chitchat, which was mostly bullshit that skirted around our real issues, I headed out and took the train up to Chelsea, to Abimbola and Cassius’s loft. We were going to do a test run today, to see how much my stomach could hold. We would use sugarfilled condoms as test subjects.

  Did you give yourself the enema?” Cassius asked after she swung the door open.

  “Hello to you too,” I said as I breezed past her.

  We’d come to understand that I didn’t like her and she didn’t like me. All the halfhearted attempts at civility had been thrown out the window after I received my down payment and agreed to be their mule.

  I assumed that she, like most overly beautiful women, was insecure. I saw how she watched me. I wasn’t no slouch: I knew how to carry myself, and I may not have had her exotic looks, but I was gorgeous and we both knew it!

  “Good morning, Chevy,” Abimbola greeted me. He was dressed in a green and gold dashiki. “My sister,” he said and embraced me.

  “My brother,” I said and held him a bit longer, just to get under Cassius’s skin.

  “Whatever,” she said as she brushed by us and disappeared into the bedroom.

  “So are you ready for your practice run?” he said as I followed him into the kitchen. On the table was a silver tray holding forty sugar-filled c
ondoms.

  “As ready as I’m ever going to be.”

  I sat down.

  “Okay, now, you did give yourself a good purge last night, yes?” I nodded my head. I was on that toilet for nearly three hours. I thought I was going to shit my guts out!

  “Empty,” I said.

  “Good.”

  Abimbola pushed the tray over to me. “Okay, take your time.”

  I look at the condoms and then at him. “Can I have a glass of water?”

  “No, no water. It will fill your stomach. The condoms are oiled, so they will slip down your throat easily. Just take your time.”

  “Oil?”

  “Canola oil.”

  “Oh.”

  I picked up the first condom and examined it before placing it on my tongue and rolling it to the back of my throat. I swallowed, and for a moment I thought that my throat was not going to cooperate, and then it relaxed and the condom slid effortlessly down my throat.

  “You see, it is simple. Next one, c’mon, next one.”

  “Slow your roll, Bola,” I snapped as I picked up the next condom and popped it into my mouth.

  Forty-Five

  I was standing staring out at a beautiful Saturday morning, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee in the other, feeling quite content and musing on what it was I would do with the day.

  Now that Little Eric was gone, my house remained tidy all week long and I had no pressing laundry woes. My day was free!

  Just as I was about to take another long drag of my cigarette, the phone began to ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Geneva Holliday?”

  Bill collector, I thought, and hurriedly changed my voice. “No, no, Geneva gone away. No be back till next year,” I said in my best Asian voice.

  “I know it’s you, Geneva,” the voice said.

  “No speak good English—you call back next year,” I said, and was about to hang up when the voice said, “This is Miriam Baxter, director of the Upper West Side division of Calorie Counters.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Who?”

  “Miriam Baxter,” the authoritative voice repeated.

  “Yes?” I said stupidly.