Ode to Lata (35 page)

But I’d seen him here only the week after, scurrying from room to room, unaware that I’d been watching him without being the least bit surprised.  When he’d seen me as he approached the queue, shaking my head and smiling wryly at him, he’d covered his face dramatically, like a vampire shielding off sunlight.

“Whatever happened to you boyfriend?” I asked him, pretending this was the first I’d seen of him lately.

“Oh, honey,” he moaned.  “That bitch turned out to be an even bigger slut than I’ve ever been!”

He asked me where Adrian was, as he always did.  “She went home.  The bitch is getting old, you know what I mean?  She gets tired at midnight these days.  You, on the other hand, look like you’re shedding off the years,” I lied.  “What’s your secret?”

Alex framed his face with open hands, pouted his lips and flashed me a look of contrived sexuality. “Only be seen in the right lighting, honey.” 

Boosted by my compliment, he danced in his spot to the techno music playing inside, and I wondered if any of us could ever break away from this place.  Without having a boyfriend or a lover, that is.  Just how long can any of us go without finding that one special person, or at least a functional one, before caving in and falling upon the threshold of where anonymous arms were always ready to touch us and alien tongues eager to bathe us?

At his age, Alex was wearing a black tank top at war with an abnormally developed chest, giving the illusion of having breasts. I’d known him for years but was suddenly surprised that I could know someone so insignificantly for so long.  I didn’t consider him a friend because we never called or visited one other; but I’d slept with him and even seen him get fucked by a total stranger at a “Suds and Studs” party, where everyone stripped down to their underwear before gamboling neck-high in foam.  At one point that night, as I slithered amongst the naked dancing bodies, Alex had reached out and grabbed my wrist for support as he leaned over in a melting of pleasure and pain.  So now I considered him an acquaintance, a permanent fixture of the scene; like the bottles, the barstools and the boys, he was always there.  I too must have seemed that way to him. All of us passengers on this doomed ark that never seems to find land.

When I finally stood before of the cashier, having waited thirty minutes in line, he informed me that my membership had expired.  And I thought,
So, okay, what the hell are you expecting me to do anyway?  Don’t you realize that most people are practically out of money by the time they get here?
I knew they accepted credit cards and had even added an ATM feature; but I told him in all honesty that I had no idea it was renewal time – it’s not like they send you a reminder in the mail – and convinced him to charge me the dues on my next visit.

“Come on, you know I’m good for it.  You know I’ll be back,” I said wearily.

Even he agreed, and with a wink buzzed me into the labyrinth of lost souls. 

My jeans hang around my knees.  Sandwiched between two men, one of whom I can tell is black from touching his hair, and the other a Caucasian who followed me into this darkest of rooms, I allow myself to be consumed like mauled prey that still quivers with ebbing life.  Their hands feel harsh and rending.  One rubs his cock between the walls of my ass as another pulls away at my balls so forcibly that it hurts.  When I consider cutting out, I think,
but I want to forget.  I must forget.
  What it is that I’m trying to forget I cannot even remember anymore.  All I know is that I want oblivion.

I don’t want to walk around tonight and save myself for that special person that everybody else will try to coerce in a dark room.  The one who won’t put out until half have given up and others have been distracted by someone else.  I don’t want my hand brushed off by anyone here tonight.  And I won’t brush anybody’s hand off me.  I want to tilt my head back and rest it upon any available shoulder.  A sculpturesque shoulder, a flaccid shoulder, any shoulder, I don’t mind.  As they say in Gujarati,
Chattur kagro goo upar bese. 
A picky crow ends up perching on shit in the end.

Here in this sightless room with night advancing, my patience for holding out, my demand for perfection, has seeped away.  In fact, it is my particularity, my inflexibility, to settle for anybody who didn’t fit my rigid image of “the man” that has led me here, to a room marinating in the relentless heat of sweat, semen and shit.  It’s not until I enter a room like this that I actually realize just how foul human beings can smell.  Just how intense and repulsive the aroma of conglomerated sex can be.  How even while alive, the tissue of human flesh can emit such a rancid odor of death and rot. The kind of smell exacerbated by the cheap disinfectant, aimed at snuffing it out.

Tonight I want to forget this perfect man that never comes.  Or the man who just cannot stay.  Tonight I want to be washed in desperation that does not emanate from me but from someone else instead.  Let them touch me, let them ravage me, this body that I have only opened up to those I mistakenly assessed as worthy on merit of their appearance alone.  And those who may have had more to give but wanted so much more.

The guy behind me asks if I have a condom.  I tell him I don’t actually want to get fucked.  I just want to hear myself say those words. 
Fuck me.  Fuck me.  Please fuck me. Or maybe it’s my mind, my heart I want you to fuck so that I can stop thinking for a little while.
  But I don’t want him to penetrate me, at least not just yet. After futile pleading, and calling me a cockteaser, he continues to slap up against my buttocks and I squeeze my legs together to provide him with as much constriction as I can.  Meanwhile, the wetness of a warm tongue flickers over my cock, and soon I’m enveloped in the moist oven of a mouth.  Engulfed in the long luxurious lapping of an eager tongue, I implore myself to let go and enjoy the experience of being sucked off.  This isn’t something I’ve been able to allow myself.  The moment that a man has fallen upon his knees to gorge me has always been my most disappointing moment of sex. I believe in roles and this just wasn’t mine. 

As the guy behind me starts to grunt away, we draw attention from others.  Shapes of bodies close in around us like scavengers hankering for a kill.  Everybody wants to join in on a thriving scene.  For food.  The vultures don’t wait.  Instead, claws materialize from the dark to partake of the cadaver, and in time, there is barely a part of my body that isn’t being tended to by tongues or fingers.

The next time I say “fuck me, fuck me,” my words resounding among hisses, groans and garbled murmurs of shock and excitement, the fellow pushes my head to make me fold over and prods forcefully into me.  I wiggle myself to elude him, inadvertently pulling myself out from the black boy’s mouth also.  Irritated, he pulls away from me and says, “Do you want me to fuck you or not? Make up your mind, will you!”

I’m only talking dirty, for Chrissake!  Don’t you get it?
By then, the others have managed to squirm between us by taking advantage of the rift, and I’m separated from him. In what feels like a slow wave of bodies swaying back and forth in the crowded room, I find my mouth pulled toward another mouth and feel fingers digging deep into my bowels.  Recoiling from the pain, I yank that hand away from me and begin to decamp.  Someone says in my ear, “Hey, piss on me, man.”  When I don’t answer him, he repeats himself more urgently.

“No, I’m not into that.”

“Shit,” he grunts. “What the hell are you into then?”

I’m into music
I want to say ludicrously. 
Not the pounding, insufferably meaningless stuff playing right now, but the melodious, swoops and tumbles of a lush score.  I’m into kissing forever and forging his face with my fingers and exploring the demons that move him…I want to lay on a bed somewhere and feel his weight upon me, his body fixed into mine, his eyes looking into mine, his hands webbed into mine…

“Not this,” I say.  “Not this.” 

And pulling my pants up, I jostle my way out of the blind room. 

The music has gone from my mind.  I try hard to listen to the strains of a melody but my brain feels beaten and bare. What I hear now are not the internal, private dulcets of Lata or Doyle but the grating, oppressive cacophony of dance music. With leaded legs I drag myself from room to room, tarrying from immersing myself into any one of the marshes of flesh.  I am tired.  I want to leave.  I want to go home. But a voice within me says,
You’ve paid ten fucking bucks to get in here, and what do you want to do?  Leave all these men here only to go home and masturbate!  What the fuck is wrong with you?  Any sensible person would latch on to someone here, anyone at all, and at least come first before leaving.  Stop your theatrics at once!  Stop trying to burden sex with meaning!  Find someone, anyone, and come or you’ll be sorry! Look around you – able, providing men everywhere! Please stop looking for
him,
for someone like
him,
for someone to be
him.

Bathed in the dim, salacious red light of a corridor lined with booths – some of which are occupied with men who have closed membership to those gaping over swinging doors – I head for the bathroom.  Some of these onlookers reach out over the doors, longing to meld into the excluders.  I’m bemused at my mind’s reprimanding locution as I walk by them. 
Come first before leaving.  Come first before leaving,
I keep saying over and over in my mind like a mantra.  But I know I don’t need someone to rub my cock or to pinch my nipples or to exchange blowjobs to come.  I can accomplish that all on my own.  What I have been coming here for is something that this place is almost guaranteed
not
to provide and almost always leaves me yearning for more.

Filing behind some six or seven men, I think, at first, that I used to come here after participating in the tedious games at the nightclubs.  A kind of delayed recompense.  To finally extract, after hours of affectations over cocktails and meaningless conversation, the touch of another human being.  To obliterate everything that waited out there. The absence of love.  The rejection from Richard.  The distance of family.  And even the virus.  In time, the freshness of sex’s copious availability gave way to deeper urges ebbing within.  I now come here for a sense of ecstasy.  For the fulfillment of all the yearnings I cannot express.  All the feelings I cannot act upon on my own.  For the ousting, at least temporarily, of all the sadness and failure of being alone.  I come here for the warmth of another human being.  The warmth that comes from the embrace of another man as our torsos melt in a sweaty bond.  The way two lovers, consumed by their desire to merge in one another, find themselves convoluted in a pleach of sticky limbs.  Or for the embrace of a father who enfolds his son.  For the chance that something miraculous might happen within these dark mazes and corridors.  And when I catch glimpses of this in a couple that is spent and exhausted, slumbered in a twined embrace on a couch, I’m encouraged again to think that such a thing can happen here.  Sometimes I sample moments of this elusive warmth with someone, only to never find him here again.  It is no wonder then that instead of leaning up against a wall that has been splattered with semen, I’m constantly trying to lead someone to the soiled sofa where we can settle into languid lovemaking instead.  Yes, I’ve come here week after week to educe romance and tenderness from men who might have come for the same but settled for a simple uncomplicated orgasm instead.

In front of me, a young Asian boy is approached by his friend and they chatter away, their eyes constantly appraising those who walk by us as we wait our turn.  There are nights when this place is chock-full of Asians.  On such nights Adrian has been quick to crassly announce, “Welcome to China.  On your way in, please pick up a condom and a pair of chopsticks for your eating pleasure.”  I miss Adrian and wish he was here with me, but he can no longer stomach this place.  Without him by my side there is no one to share acrid humor.  No way to ward off thoughts freighted with introspection.  Appreciating – with some bitterness – the lithe, bare upper bodies of these Asian boys and their rambunctious excitement, I’m learning that these excursions at the Vortex, these forays into brief ecstasy have another cumulative cost.  Even as I continue to reject those who are older, others around me are beginning to look much younger.  I have remained in this place like an aging nightclub patron who hasn’t settled down and suddenly finds a younger generation has moved in.  A fresh haircut and concealer under the eyes can work wonders but nothing can bring back the physical awkwardness, the elflike animation authenticated by youth.  The gradual settling of the face, the ease and relaxed gait of being accustomed to one’s features, to one’s own body, alas, becomes the betraying feature of age.

This place is no longer a refuge.  The absence of love won’t go away.  The distance of family won’t go away.  The virus won’t go away. They are all out there like hoodlums waiting to spring on me from the dark and I am tired of making temporary escapes only to return to their fear. And Bill, dear Bill, you never come back. Perhaps I should have phased out of here too.

I am tired.  I want to go home.  But first I will go to the bathroom.  With all the money they make in this place, why can’t they provide us with more bathrooms?  How could anyone justify one bathroom for all the men foraging in this place?  Perhaps I should just leave and piss by the car.  But then Alex comes by to tip me off about some obnoxious guy begging to be pissed on.  “Ay, what does she think this is?  Basic Plumbing?  I told her, honey, this girl’s got a vagina and she needs to squat on a toilet to tinkle!”  He tells me that he’s just about ready to leave but will do one last round to look for some Mexican guy who had fucked him here once before, leaving him unable to walk for a week.