“What?” He’s looking all alarmed.
“You keep saying ‘you boys’ this, ‘you boys’ that.” I dash to a door I guess is a closet, fling the door open. “They in here?” I feel like a fool for letting him give me that test. What made him think I would just sit still for that? He had me figured out?
“You gonna pay for that test,” I try to growl, but my voice just comes out loud and high. Like a girl?
“Ah, sweetheart, do not be angry. Roman is trying to stop this dreadful disease that kills so many young boys and so many of your people. And us too. So many is dead.”
Half the time he sound like some old movie actress with that “you is so beautiful” shit. Other times he’s talking I hear something else, but I can’t put my finger on it. What would Jaime think of this guy? I take off my jeans.
“Give me the cookies and a condom.”
“Huh?”
“The dough, bread,
money
.”
“But we have tested for each other.”
We.
I can’t believe this dude. I’m a kid so I’m dumb? He better have some money, or I’ll crack his motherfucking head open, take everything I can carry out of here,
and
show for ballet class in the morning. “You boys.” Please!
I take the condom from him, it’s weird to put it on, I never wore one before. Your dick is supposed to be hard? I see the white girl’s hand in the video as she opens the square package and gives it to the boy, but I don’t remember how they put it on, just that she points at the little peak left at the tip, room to come. Video is different from real life. Row row row the boat, roll it down the dick. Hah! I’m a poet. I can’t let this old dude think I don’t know what I’m doing.
“Let me lubricate you, dahling.”
I’m rolling this shit, trying to get it on my dick. I know this hurts this dude more than if I stomped his head. He had his program laid out. Wonder what he do with the “you boys” that test out shitty. He’s pouting. I finish rolling it down. Revenge. Roman is different from the brothers. He ain’t no man, dude. But then Brother Samuel wasn’t no man with the pit bulls down at the police station. And Brother John disappeared. I look at the turquoise film of latex over my penis. Ha! I look at a picture on the wall in front of me. He turns to see what I’m looking at.
“Oh, Picasso! You know Picasso?”
“I heard his name before.”
“You should know him. He’s the most famous artist. You know he claim he have African blood.”
“They said that about him?”
“No, the fool say it about himself! I don’t mean he’s a fool to say that, just he’s a fool in general, how he treat all those girls, and his son, don’t like gay people and all, but talking about his ‘Moorish ancestors.’”
Moorish ancestors?
The white people called her Lucy, but the Ethiopians called her Dinquenesh.
What does Dinquenesh mean, Mommy?
Baby, I don’t know.
“Where you is, boy?” He waves his hand in front of my face.
“Look we got to work this ‘boy’ shit out.”
“You is a boy. How old are you? Tell Roman the truth.”
“Thirteen.”
“Stop lying! Making a fool of me!” He touches the turquoise.
“I told you I was seventeen, so why keep asking?”
“I is not ‘keep asking.’ I ask you once and ask one more time because I is concerned about you. OK, now when one is seventeen, he is a boy. He should go to school, not drink whiskey or go to
prostituée
. A boy need help, protection. A boy is not a man, even though he be a man one day. Don’t no mens come here to Roman.”
He has on a pair of faded jeans, one knee out and a fluffy pink sweater, like what ballerinas wear to warm up in, and leg warmers. When he takes off the sweater and the torn T-shirt he had on under it, his body is a shock. It’s like Michelangelo drew his muscles for him!
“First position!” he barks, turning his legs out from his hip sockets, his bulging thigh muscles pointing to the side of the room along with his feet.
“I made this body! I was not you—look what you got! God is give you everything! You boys always crying racism, my mother, my father, the police! Nobody give you anything in this goddamn world! Suffer? I could tell you about what happen to my family in Europe, but you don’t care. My family experience it all. You want to dance? You dance. You better built than Alvin or Arthur. I tell you I know them? I was very close to Alvin before her died. Arthur too. I could tell you stories.”
About what, and who is Alvin, and I
don’t
care about his parents and Europe. Maybe I’ll get an order of chicken nuggets too. He’s still standing in first position, looking more like a soldier than a dancer. So where was he born?
“You got more than three or four people put together! No one thought I would dance—bad body, short. But I did. Roman been around a long time. I run into some of them people every now and then, not many left, most of them dead, you know, the plague. Them not dead is fat, same thing, right?”
I think of the big girls in Imena’s class dancing their asses off; I try to imagine Roman in that funky gym with no mirrors getting down in front of the drums. I can’t. He turns his little legs back in, walks toward me. What I see now is me getting up, picking up the lamp on the table by the bed, and walking slow, like I’m walking through water, toward him—Then I see myself onstage, the corps lined up behind me. Holding my head up, I walk downstage, I port de bras, bow, the stage is bathed in light. People are screaming my name. I see the newspaper headlines:
NOT SINCE THE GREAT SO-&-SO!
Ladies are crying. I hear one lady over the roar of the crowd: “You dance like an angel!”
“You will let Roman suck you without thee con
dumb,
” he begs.
Now that he’s safe, he want to play hardball, “without thee con
dumb
.” Fuck him. But I do get confused about head; you can’t get AIDS from that shit. Chocolate, yes, vanilla, no. It ain’t gonna be a thang even if he was thinking about riding, which girlfriend ain’t. He’s going to work on my nuts.
Testicles, Abdul.
His tongue playing me, feels good. My dick gets hard.
It’s your body
—Shut up. It’s
your
fault. I feel like crying. His finger touches my asshole, I flinch, forget it, Roman, I think of Brother John, Brother Samuel, at least they was
men
. He’s kissing the inside of my thighs, ooh. He’s also trying to roll the condom down. Ping! On the side of his head with my thumb and middle finger. He looks up all puppy-dog innocence. I wag my finger, playing but not really, even though I don’t care about the condom, I don’t want to give in.
“How much?” I taunt.
“Roman does not have a lot of money.”
“Then what you gonna do?” I wanted my voice to come out way deep, but it squeaked.
“Roman wishes you was his boy. His big black boy. You could live here.”
He reaches up, touches a cut on my chest from where a piece of the mirror fell on me.
“Who, your father beat you like that? Whatever.” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “You could be Roman’s man.”
He unrolls the condom, his tongue following it down, the air hitting me makes me shiver. The condom is a blue spot on his white carpet. He swallows me.
“You are a good clean boy. You like for Roman to take care of you?”
He swallows me again. I thrust slow in his mouth. Hail Mary full of grace. Eeee! Feels so fucking good what he’s doing with his tongue, the Lord is with thee, on the tip, whoa! I keep thrusting. He’s holding my booty. Blessed art thou among women, I’m breaking like firecrackers going off, fucking Fourth of July. Fucking Jesus Christ Holy Mary Mother of God! My skin is lighting up all over, I’m kneading my nipples, blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus! Thinking of Christ and the D train going across the bridge, me and my mother, January night the whole city cold and lit up, fireworks going off across the water like the end of loneliness. For a minute I’m who I was and who I will be, a little boy and a man, in the last inning and I’m winning, coming, it’s my birthday, Mommy is bringing me ice cream and cake. Mostly ice cream down his throat. Oomph ump! Blow out the candles now make a wish on a falling star. I don’t see a falling star, Mommy. Well, pretend you do! I wish I may I wish I might be the dancingest star in the sky tonight! Ha!
THAT WAS MY
first night with Roman, how it began. Now I’m leaving.
“So what’s with all the questions?” I ask.
“You is the one told me to move the stuff around to make room for your sneakers. I didn’t go looking for nothing. They fall in my lap! Now, yes, Roman is curious.”
“They just
fell
out of the suitcase into your lap? Yeah, right!”
“The suitcase wasn’t locked. Stop being an idiot!” he snaps.
“Oh, I’m being an idiot now?” I snap back.
“You wanna fight rather than answer me. You mean you never read them? I don’t believe you!”
“I don’t have to lie to you.” Fuck him!
“I can’t believe I never know any of this before, all I hear about is this book, that exhibit, Herd, Basquiat! You never tell me any of this before!”
“You never
asked
before. You didn’t
want
to know. You’re asking now because . . .”
“Well, finish. You asking now
because
? Well, go on!
Because
. . . ?”
“Forget it!” I shout.
“You always do that, talking out the side of your mouth. You can’t answer me in a decent conversation.” He pouts.
Here we go again.
“I can’t even finish a sentence, you ask me so many fucking questions.”
“So finish the story,” he insists.
“You keep inter—”
“Well, because I never hear anything like it,” he interrupts again.
“And you ain’t gonna hear nothing ‘like it’ if you don’t shut up. I have a rehearsal in a little while.”
“Don’t get grand, dear. I know what you got. You forget who introduce you to those people in the first place.”
“Introduce me to
who
?” I say.
“You meet Scott and Noël in my class; you don’t think I remember,” he says.
“I’m glad you remember something,” I say.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“See how you is,” he says in his most injured voice. “Go on with the story, please.”
“So anyway, I’d only been there a few—”
“Where’s ‘there’? I’m sorry, go on.”
“So anyway, I’d only been there a couple of weeks or so and there was all this . . . this
confusion
. Some of the priests had been messing with the kids, and evidently one of them had moved on me—”
“Evidently?”
“Yeah, one of them
tried
to mess with me—”
“Ooohh, I wish it had been me!”
I glare at his stupid ass.
“It’s a joke, silly. You has no sense of humor.”
“It’s all over the news now, but back then no one believed that shit. So here I am a kid in the hands of these . . . these
perpetrators.
They got custody of me by saying I was an orphan with no living relatives. But they tell that shit to me too—everybody’s dead, you ain’t got nobody, right? No, wrong! I had a grandmother, great-grandmother, some of my dad’s people in the Bronx, a sister—”
“You has a sister?”
“Lemme finish! So I mean my mom and dad are dead but the brothers had x-ed the knowledge about the rest of my family. So they were, like, trying to make me the captive orphan sex slave. I mean really!”
“So the sister?”
“She died.”
“How sad. So this was when I meet you, you never tell me any of this. Sometimes you say ‘brothers,’ sometimes you say ‘priests,’ which one was it?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“So go ahead, this was when I meet you—”
“Yeah, just, so they got busted, I guess, and had to get rid of the kids who’d tell on them, so I got sent to live with my great-grandmother—”
“How they find her?”
“I don’t know. I mean, they probably always knew where she was. She was thinking, I think, that I had gotten adopted by some rich Arabs. At least that’s what she said. ‘I thought de Cath’lics had give you to de Ayrabs’cause of yo’ name—’”
“I never hear of Arabs adopting no colored kids.”
“Well, whatever, old people say weird shit. So anyway, I ended up with her in her house. Everything’s all old, nasty, and raggedy. She’s . . . I don’t know, maybe all old people is like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, just go off. So I had asked her to give me the 411, you know, the whole deal—her, me, the creepy crib, what’s going on here? I’m thinking, despite appearances that state otherwise, she’s normal, understand what I’m saying? I figure she’s gonna respond, you know, normal. I mean, I’m a kid who shows up on her doorstep, innocent—”
“I remember how innocent you was.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. You getting distracted. So what happened?”
“Well, she just started talking, like she was crazy or having a nervous breakdown or . . . or high, or I don’t know, like, like remembering herself being high. But, whatever, she was gone. She was sitting in the kitchen staring at the wall, or at something couldn’t nobody see but her. And she’s talking, just a-talking, loud too. Every now and then, she’ll check me out, look at me or ask me a question. But why I say nervous breakdown or something is because this goes on for hours. I don’t know, it felt like days, even. I mean, I would get up, go to the bathroom, and come back, and she’s
still
talking.”
“About what, Arthur?”
“Her life—Mississippi. According to her, she damn near walked to New York, and then she gets involved with some ‘nigger boy’ in the fast lane who gets killed. She never got over it. Then her daughter—”
“Ta mère?”
“No, my grandmother, this is my great-grandmother talking. You know, the whole bad-man story for generations—”