Ode to Lata (27 page)

“I’m sick and tired of those clubs, Ali,” he had admitted at least once, when he had been brave enough to speak without hiding behind his usual camp one-liners.  “Especially WeHo – dear God, how many times can you run around Heaven, sucking in your breath and holding your gut in?  Ahh, I don’t want to compete with those stupid queens.  I just want to…be
me
and not feel so much like
nobody
, you know what I mean?”  Sadly, he was probably right.  As it is, few people appeared happily paired up in the community, and the paucity of those interested in an overweight Indian, as he frequently called himself, made matters more grave.

As for the sex clubs, which he enjoyed, even they had become a bit of a liability lately. “You in the mood for some seafood?  No, I don’t mean Farida’s twat,” he said over the phone, the day after he had discovered he had been struck.  “I’m farming enough crabs to open a crab house.  Bring your bib and go crazy!”

I couldn’t help but admit that there were times when I had looked upon this lifestyle as kind of a curse.  But crossing over to the other side had never even occurred to me.  There had never been a choice.  Its inducements were as impractical for me as a bewildered Vegan hoisted over a prime rib.  The soul of a gay man, even if anatomy permits it, will not allow for the love of any other.  But then, a sizeable inheritance had never been dangled in front of me.

I thanked God for my mother.  For her attempt to understand that after all her sacrificing, all her love, a demand from her for me to be something I could not would have been tantamount to a much-delayed abortion.  Salman hadn’t been so lucky.

THE PRICE OF PASSION

My grandmother didn’t live too many years after my grandfather’s demise.  In death, it was as if they’d signed an unwitnessed contract to pursue one other within a reasonable time for the next leg of their journey together.  These were my mother’s thoughts months after my grandmother passed away, when she had broken down in tears over the phone.  On the subject of my grandparents, most of us had always been dumbfounded.  None of us wanted to use them as an example to legitimize notions of love, but none could deny that they had stayed together longer than most married couples.

Upon returning home from Salman’s that night, when I had exhausted of ruminating over his life-altering decision, I found a message from Mummy.  This time I called her right away.  I reassured her about my health, my job, and then she inquired after the people in my life, about Nelson.  “No,” I said firmly. “We’re not in touch anymore and I like it that way…Yes, everything’s fine with Adrian.  We’re even closer than before,” and I decided not to drag her into yet another fiasco that would keep her up nights worrying about my emotional well-being.  The last thing she needed was to add another round of
tasbih
to her already interminably long prayer session. “Yes, I see them all once in a while, you know, mostly over a barbecue or something.  But I’ve been kind of busy lately.”

“Good, good,” she said.  “I’m so happy to know that you’re doing well.”

“And you?” I asked.

She tsked.  “I miss
mama kuba
,” she said, referring to my grandmother, and started to cry. “And I miss you.”

I allayed her by committing to sending her a ticket next year.  “Come on, now.  Think of all the shopping and television you’ll be able to watch.” 

“Things here are so rotten,” she said, as if in contrast – a complaint typical of parents like her, residing far from their kids in America.  Between the clucks and groans they always began to paint this bleak picture with the crumbling economy and varnished it with the escalating crime. “We’ve all had such miserable lives,” she said.  “That’s why I want your life to be happy, you know?  If you’re going to be the last one in line, then I demand that God give you the rewards of all the good we’ve done.  Who else have we lived for? 
Mama kuba
and me?”

Suddenly I could see the chain of martyrs preceding me, and I felt bolstered for being the recipient of their deeds.  My grandmother had taught kindergarten for more than twenty years.  She had nurtured those children in the formative years of their lives, children that went on to be the men and women with successful adult lives and families.  Pity she’d been unable to impart such wisdom to any of her own.

Until the later years of her life, when my grandmother couldn’t do much more than waddle to the bathroom on the walker, she went like clockwork to mosque at seven every evening, climbed the three flights of stairs reverently and carried out her duties as head volunteer.  When, debilitated with the bulbous swellings of arthritis in her legs, her only lament from that dowager sofa in the dining room was that God had taken away from her the strength to come to His home and visit Him.

My mother had followed in her devotion, taking religion’s panacea against the damage of love to even greater heights. And now, defying the apparent curse running through our lineage, she was hoped that my life would turn out differently.

“You,” she said.  “You have to be the inheritor of all the fruits of our labor.”

I shook me head at the irony. How could I tell her that I could see no such light on the horizon without breaking her heart? That although I didn’t doubt how much she and my father had loved me, their parenting had been a sanctioned debacle of neglect at best.  And now, years later, with him six-feet under and her enraptured in religion, it had left me with huge holes in my heart.  Holes that allowed so much to seep through me.  Holes that, I had been convinced for so long, could only be filled by someone exactly like my father.  How to tell her all this without breaking her heart?

“Ali,” she said very softly.  “I know we haven’t exactly been the best role models for you, but no child is free of the, you know, the baggage from his family.  You must learn from our example to do differently instead of feeling fated for the same ending, you know?  You can’t be like those other people,” she said, extracting from all those hours in front of Springer, “who start blaming everything in their lives on their parents! 
Hunh!
  Nothing is ever their own fault! What is important is that you realize that no matter what it looked like, we loved each other very much.  Your grandparents loved each other immensely and your Dad and I loved each other too.”

I flinched.  I could see, hear, the screaming, the rapid swinging of limbs in assault and defense, their delirium even now.  My grandmother’s face floated in my mind.  I missed her too.  She had been, after all, more of a mother than any grandparent should ever be.  “You were all so cruel to each other,” I said.  “There was never any peace.  You all never stopped to think what it was doing to anybody else.”

“But darling, we never stopped to think of what we were doing even to each other,” she laughed nervously.

“Still… ”

“Ali, all mothers struggle to protect their babies from the harsh realities of life for as long as they can.  Until one day it just can’t be done anymore.  We always want our children’s lives to be better, happier, than our own, you know?  If I could have kept you from growing up, from feeling all this pain, if I had known how, my darling, I would have.”

“I know,” I said, thinking that maybe it wasn’t the search for adventure but the need to escape the chaos of their lives that had driven me away from Kenya.

“You must remember, Ali, that we’ve all led exceptional lives.  The things we’ve been through in this family… ” she tsked.  And then she said, “When you feel so much, when you love so desperately, then you also fight with the same intensity.  It’s just the price you pay, Ali.  The price of passion.”

I thought momentarily about what she had said: that their atrocities in love could only be matched by their capacity to love those that had hurt them; I felt an appreciation for all she had endured. Yes, hers has been an exceptional life.  What one always thinks happens only to others had happened to her.  At that moment, I wanted to reach through the phone lines and touch her.  To kiss her and protect her and take away all those years of pain that she had to endure.  The love of a son for his mother was perhaps the most potent, prohibitive lust.  It was the first bond in the life of a human being and could be, in its consuming, impetuous nature, also the most damaging.  After the disassociation that every son had to undergo, the years of severing from her persona, I felt as if I had finally come back to her as a grown man to give her the strength and reassurance she had been unable to give me.  “I love you, Mummy,” I said.  “And I’m not afraid of what life brings me.  You’ve taught me, somehow, that in the end we’re always alone.”

“Not alone, darling.  By ourselves.”

“Yeah,” I said, impressed.

“For that I’m thankful.  That you have the courage.  I know that if anything were to happen to me, you would go on and be fine, it wouldn’t destroy you.”

“Yeah.”

“I do want you to be happy with someone though.  Whoever it may be.  Boy, girl, whatever. It will happen one day, I know it,
tu naarje
.  You must have your faith in God.”

“It’s not that I don’t have any faith in God, Mum,” I said wryly.  “I just don’t trust his judgment.” 

RESCUED

When night falls upon Santa Monica Boulevard, a modest stretch of its cadaver takes on a shadowy kind of life.  Away from the heart of West Hollywood – that couple of miles on either side of the street littered with the mercantilism of bars and clubs, the glaring chrome and glass veneers of gyms, and late-night purveyors of pulp and video erotica – awakes another world.  A world that, to the keen eye or a trained observer, simmers with life as early as dusk.  But it’s only when darkness finally cloaks its pavement and bus benches and buildings that it actually starts to surge and ripple, that the boulevard becomes a visible procession of sexual trade.  Young boys and men stake their corners night after night as I do my banker’s desk each morning.  They pose in a variety of dissimulations.  The lurid, unbroken stare of calculated lust delivers promises of unforgettable pleasures to the drivers that pass by.  Or the oblivious and bored stance of those who are aware that even sullen disinterest has its following.  The cars loop around the dimly lit blocks, around rows of structures without coruscation, unintended for any nighttime purpose – sleeping schools and office buildings and not-so-trendy pizzerias.  The setting that’s required for the thriving of this enterprise is just a little bit of darkness and the obscurity it promises.  The drivers stealthily, and when more experienced arrantly, search out those they will not acknowledge by day.  Here they will find a menagerie of sexual creatures to expiate the churning in their bellies.  The seeming virgin in all his tenderness, the jaded man who looks like he’s had a fight with his wife and hasn’t returned home to even shave his stubble, and the homme fatale who, by virtue of his handsome looks, is fated to leave for other loves and lands.  Sometimes mingling, and at other times in packs of their own, one will also find the transgendered.  They all come to this stretch of the boulevard, exiled from the contrived respectability of a few blocks to the west to skulk and prey under the cover of night.

Sometimes, in a car, huddled with my group of friends on that ill-timed search for an ATM machine or a nutritional catastrophe at Del Taco at two in the morning, we traverse this area of the boulevard. And there has never, since that one night, been a single time that I haven’t looked out of the car and onto that stretch with at least a decibel of anticipation.

Of course he’s never there.

But my eyes, as if by some involuntary action, always survey that block on which the bank sits, outside of which on that night so long ago, he had stood with his hands dug deep into his jean pockets, his eyes drawn by our passing car.

Here – I tell myself, as if recanting nirvana, to whoever else has to listen to my drunken drawl in the car – is where I met Bill. 

Bill was a hustler from Santa Monica Boulevard.  He’s been missing from that block since that first and last time I found him there.  His phone is disconnected.  Many times I think he’s dead – such a fate, after all, is part of the territory when all that’s negotiated before jumping into the darkness of a car is the rate for passion.  Sometimes I prefer to think that he is.  It makes his absence easier to accept.  At other times I think that maybe he’s living in Malibu with a pewter-colored dog called Rascal or Rocky, and that maybe one day, in the sprawling city of L.A., we’ll miraculously run into each other again as unexpectedly as we had that night.

It was a night very much like those that culminated in a sex club.  Had it not been for Bill, the evening would have ended up that way too.  After carousing with other men at a club, we headed east.  We’d just drained more cash from the ATM and bickered over the sounds of pulsating dance music about the bank surcharge.  Only Adrian, always the prudent one, had come equipped with enough cash.  Kitty, who had just paid his third surcharge for the evening, endorsed the bank robberies that were happening all over the city in his disgruntlement.  “Is serve ‘em right,” he said in his own brand of English.  “Why they needin’ a money when they so much and steals from us?”

I slapped him on his head.  “I work for one of those banks, and let me tell you, it’s no fun being part of a takeover!”

Kitty became more amused.  “Good!  You pays for us!”