Ode to Lata (34 page)

I unlocked the door to my apartment, relieved to be alone, and reminded myself that I was over-reacting again as was characteristic of me.  I was just being a dramatic Indian.  Every unsafe encounter didn’t necessarily translate into HIV-positive status.  Surely it was more difficult to contract AIDS.  All the information I’d crammed during
Saath
relayed through my mind.

Undressing, my eyes on the rumpled bed marked with patches of dampness, I consoled myself that no one I knew had been 100 percent safe, regardless of their fervent allegiance to proper procedure.  Not even Salman, who made it a point to vocalize his allegiance to safe sex and repeatedly swore by mint-flavored condoms.  There had been times when, like a reprimanded slave, Salman had subjugated himself to the soiled floor, unaware of my presence as I awaited my own deliverance in the same dark and musty room at the Vortex.  Not once had I seen him pause to plant the mint condom before plunging into the task of obediently lapping the man up.  And at the end of the night, on our way out through the lobby of the Vortex, packed with vending machines and the ritualistic cooler of mouthwash, I even saw him absentmindedly leave the condoms behind on a rack of magazines, like tokens to be gleaned by fellow agents in espionage.

It would be alright.  I’d pray.  I would shut it all out of my mind and concentrate only on the romance I’d helped create in the night.  I wouldn’t recognize this as a sign to either alter lifestyles or coerce me into getting tested.  One of these days, I smirked, climbing into bed, they will just come up with that damn vaccine.  And everyone who’d been too terrified would bandwagon to the clinic and turn over their arms for a quick jab.  An antidote to the sickness suspected to be incubating within them, which no one dared confirm.  Then all this shit would be just like the flu or malaria or something.  An inconvenient trip to the clinic.

I pulled the sheet around my legs and reached out for myself with a hand slathered in lubricant.  My eyes closed, my mouth parted, I thought about Bill and inhaled the smell in the bed.  I began to rub myself more vigorously.  His arms came around me, his cock up inside me, his lips gashing against mine.  I heard his voice in my ears. 
I’m going to fuck you silly,
he said. 
I’m going to fuck you silly…
 

Among the three groups of people after the advent of AIDS – those who abstained, those who had never stopped fucking (and maybe only mildly altered their behavior), and those who floated between encounters – we belonged to the latter.  Assuaging such sexual indulgences with untimely, obligatory discussions felt as incumbent as confessions to a priest.  Some time the next day, having returned to the mundane, perhaps when driving from work on the freeway, shrapnel of guilt would poke me, as it did everyone.  Some of us would make quixotic promises of avoiding sex clubs, reverting to stashes of pornography for satisfaction.  Not me.  I’d be the one to allay them over the phone, to reassure them that provided they had practiced safe sex, they had nothing to worry about.  Feeling guilty about enjoying sex was unnatural, a result of being conditioned that way in the nineties.  I’d tell them that under these circumstances, what we were feeling was normal.  A denouement for not consistently indulging in sex.

What I wouldn’t tell them was that a condom could tear.  About my condom.  I’d keep this to myself.  For the first time, after years of having sex with strangers in stench-ridden cubicles and the romantically prepared atmosphere of my room, the nudging fear of my HIV status kicked like an ill-conceived pregnancy.  It wouldn’t help to share this with them.  They’d all insist I get tested.

JUST LEAVE

Richard stops by unexpectedly.  He’d been rollerblading in Venice Beach, and was laden, as usual, with tales of lustful glances exchanged on the boardwalk.  How, as always seemed to be the case, believably and irritatingly so, they all wanted him.  He told me excitedly of unbelievable chemistry between him and other vagrant bladers from half a mile away, chemistry that was foiled due to bad timing.

Gay men cruise everywhere.  It’s like breathing.  With every breath of polluted oxygen is that lustful espying of a potential fuck.  On the freeways, in the supermarkets, in a drive-thru, in the gyms and on the beach.  Even sport is an opportunity to cruise.  Jogging is not just jogging.  Rollerblading is not just that.  It’s the chance to hunt. 

I let him ramble on as I ironed my clothes for a party in Long Beach.  Trying not to appear scornful, I threw him a contrived smile or a suspiciously shallow reinforcement at the required pauses in his conversation.  He bored me.  Where his fantasies of other men once filled me with rage, they now inspired something akin to pity.  My mind was far away from his tortured ecstasy.  As long as I maintained a safe distance from him, I no longer craved his lust.  I was also unable to live vicariously through the attention that he commanded anymore.  In some twisted way, being attached to that which others wanted to possess helped me to fill my own void once.  Now that was not enough.  I was reminded, as he absentmindedly riffled through his black day planner (the one that I had despised with the passion a wife reserved for the other woman), that despite the multitudes that have been inked into it, little nuggets of sexual details to help him remember bracketed beside each name, Richard remained, essentially, alone.  Unavailable men, ultimately, were always available.

I wondered when he intended to leave.  I wished he would just leave. Or take a shower, which is what I suspected he’d come for before embarking on the second leg of his journey into West Hollywood.  I tried, while his description of some boy’s muscled torso wafted over my head, to be more tolerant.  To remember that he was not the only one caught in a cycle of addiction.  I may have managed to outgrow him but that only meant that I’d emerged from Richard’s spin.  My own patterns were far from completely broken.  I was still lying there like an
almost
completely laundered article of clothing, awaiting another cycle in the washer.  So I couldn’t be so arrogant.  I had to be humble.

But, by God, looking at him over my shoulder as he vied for my attention over the jeans I’m steaming – at that same man who once drove me up and down the spires of emotion and now had me fighting impatience – it felt so darn fucking good to be over him.

POST NO BILLS

Certain special moments give you mileage.  Having experienced them, one could go forever without another one, gassed up on sheer memory.  My night with Bill was such an event.  Once I had found a way to suspend all the fears about the leaking condom, I was able to feel bliss, even without knowing when I would see him again.  For a couple of days, I didn’t even think about calling him, although I thought about him all the time.  Whenever the urge to speak with him possessed me, I educed sustenance from the memory.  

A few days later, Bill called.  “Hey Ali, I hope you remember me,” he started to say on the machine before I grabbed the phone.  “It’s Bill…I love Sade.”  As if I need that tidbit to remind me.  He went on to say that he’d missed me – missed me! – and he couldn’t wait to see me again.  “You’ve mesmerized me,” he repeated.

“Okay, enough with that.  You’ve gotta find a new word for the day.”

“Alright,” he said. “Hypnotized…captivated…fascinated…” 

 “Wow!  What a vocabulary,” I said.  “Maybe
you
should write the book.”

We made plans.  He said he was going to clear his schedule so he could come over starting Friday and we could spend the entire weekend together.

“Oh, good!” I giggled. “Then you can fuck me silly again!”

And so the plan was made and in my mind we were a couple; Adrian and Salman and the rest of them could eat shit and die because I’d found my man and it didn’t matter one bit that he was a hooker.  The unlikelihood of such a pairing, the very inadvisability of it, made it all the more wondrous in my mind.  This, I told myself, is how love happens — with the most unlikely soul, when it is unplanned, suddenly and quite irrevocably.

I didn’t hear from him for the next few days, but I didn’t feel even the slightest need for it.  I anticipated Friday when my argosies would come, loaded with the joys I had already started celebrating.  Lata’s songs of doom and devastation in love were forsaken for those of jubilation:
Na Jaane Kya Hua Jo Tune Chu Liya;  Jaise Radha Ne Mala Japi Shyam Ki; Aap Ki Nazro Ne Samja Pyaar Ke Kabil Mujhe…
Those few days became Bollywood fantasies in which Bill, his hands stretched out magnificently and his body arching back under piercing blue skies, sang his declarations of love to me in fluent Hindi; somewhere on that same ice-capped mountain or blooming field, I stole my eyes from him coyly, waiting to reciprocate my love but in Lata’s voice, of course.

But Friday came and went.  And there was no Bill.  I called his number, and it was disconnected.

As the city rushed out to parties or to be with their loved ones, I huddled in bed thinking that something must have happened; he was supposed to be here with me.  Our brand of moonlight still poured in from the window, but this time its pearly light only felt like it was excoriating my flesh.

The celebratory music in my soul started to die, and slowly, the poignant, loyal soundtrack returned.

Where are you, Bill?

Where have you gone?
 

The next night, by which time I could barely breathe, I went in search of him.  Adrian, Kitty and even Frankie called and left frolicsome messages, but I didn’t call any of them back, letting them assume I was with Bill.

I returned to the same spot where I had first met him, as if by some small miracle, he would be there, under the lamppost, looking cool and collected, and we could begin our courtship all over again.  This time, I couldn’t even pray.  Something in me just couldn’t.  I no longer had the heart.  Or maybe, because prayer was often used as a corrective and employed when something had already come to pass, I was unwilling to admit that I had somehow lost him and had to work at regaining him. As if my yearning for him, the desperate roving of my eyes, my spasmodic breathing wasn’t prayer enough.

Bill was nowhere to be found.

His spot stood vacant.  Even the lamppost mourned for him, a spotlight missing its star performer. Every once in a while a worker would walk across it, and mercifully, scurry to more obscure spots.  As I waited, parked by the curb, some even made eye contact and hovered around the car, but I looked away quickly and faced the boarded building to my right instead, upon which, painted crudely across to discourage anyone from sticking posters and fliers, were the flagrant words Post No Bills.

After about a couple of hours, it was time to leave but I couldn’t go just yet.  I had to say goodbye or know I would be returning to this spot every night, searching for Bill.  Something in my heart told me he would never be coming back.  Then my head fell in my face and I just started to cry.  No prayers, no words, no thoughts, nothing to accompany the deluge.  Just tears.

I don’t know how it was possible, but I couldn’t remember or imagine missing anyone more than him. Bill had done something different.  There had been no deception.  He had given me two things: passion, which even Nelson and Richard before him, had provided; and, in the few hours we had spent together, the truth.

For this, Bill deserved, not the anger that came from a broken heart but the appreciation that came from a sad but grateful one.

LABYRINTH OF LOST SOULS

I couldn’t go back home, to that empty apartment; it would only remind me of the love that should have unfurled through each room that weekend. I made the fatal error of thinking that if I tried hard enough, I would be recompensed in someone else’s arms or crouched at someone else’s feet.  I would do my best, knowing all along that it was futile, to recreate some of the magic, to manufacture some rapture with another stranger.  I needed, like an ailing patient that craves human touch, to be felt, to be reminded that along with my heart, Bill had not erased my corporeality as well.

I have been back several times since.   

I’d been waiting in line for twenty minutes already.  It was three-fifteen in the morning. No one had been let in since I arrived, and behind me, the line to get into the Vortex was getting longer.  Some people even arrived, surveyed the queue of people – restless yet patiently waiting – and decided to go to another sex club instead.  The city was now littered with them.  There were membership wars going on.  Trade in your old membership for one at ours.  Sex clubs had begun to imitate that other gay institution, gyms; many would argue that business, in the age of AIDS-enforced sexual repression, ironically, had never been better.

I was beginning to feel increasingly tired myself, but convinced that once inside, I’d have no problem staying up.  Besides, Alex, a forty-year-old Italian whose face was like that of a thirty-year-old, was keeping me company.  Another man Adrian and I had shared at the Hollywood Spa. When I’d last bumped into him at Axis in West Hollywood, wearing his signature black tank top, which he insisted upon sliding off his shoulder like a bra strap, Alex claimed to have given up the Vortex.  He had made it sound like a drug.  “I’m done with that shit, honey,” he said with a look of invincibility.  “I have a new boyfriend now, and if he ever catches me going there, honey, he’s going to pull a Lorena Bobbit on me!”