WHEN I GET HOME,
Roman is like a puppy. I can’t even get in the door before he starts running his mouth.
“I was talking about you today.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Why you have that attitude? It was quite good. Alphonse, his boyfriend is going to Columbia and is writing a paper on Jean-Michel Pasquiat.”
“
B
asquiat.”
“OK, whatever. He asks me I ever heard of him. I go to the bookshelf, you has almost all his stuff. He say you is probably very smart young man. I say not probably, honey!”
“I’m really tired.”
“Too tired to listen? That don’t take no energy.” He pouts.
Roman has the Whitney Exhibition book on Basquiat open on the coffee table. One time, talking to Snake, I found out he had read the whole book too, not just Greg Tate’s essay but
all
the essays. My Lai and I read
Story of O
together. Roman had it sitting on his shelf, that and
The Thief’s Journal
—wild French stuff Roman never even read, one of the “boys” left it.
I wonder how much money he really has. I know he has a safety-deposit box where he keeps his stock certificates and bonds and jewelry. He told me. “I got to, some of the boys used to come here is bad. Come to rob you. You different from the other boys.” Not really. How did he get any fucking stocks and bonds anyway? Not teaching dance. Cash? Does he keep cash in the safety-deposit box? What’s a bond anyway?
But you know what, fuck it! Fuck his money, put it out your head, it’s the last thing tying you to this old douchebag. You’re gonna make money! Hell, what did My Lai say? “Shit, you
are
money!”
“He asks me—”
“What are you talking about?” I snap.
“Alphonse, my friend. What, you wasn’t listening? He asks me why you is not in school like his boyfriend if you so smart. I say I don’t know, but it’s a good idea. He says how old is he? I say twenty—”
“Why? I’m seventeen.”
“Well, you is been seventeen so long.”
He laughs. I laugh too, even though I half want to slap the shit out of him. But I don’t, number one, because I know he likes it and two, because I’m tired of being mad.
“You want to go to college. It’s all around here, Columbia, City College, right here.”
“I know.”
I look at the coffee table. How fucking weird; he has the book open to pages 88–89,
Acque Pericolose.
The reproduction takes up both pages.
“Let’s go get some Chinese, OK,” he says.
“OK.”
We’re standing on Broadway near Ninety-eighth Street in front of Hunan Balcony when I feel someone’s eyes on me. I look up; it’s Amy, the new girl. I look away, try to act like I didn’t see her, like she didn’t see me. You saw someone that looked like me, you stupid ho. My stomach contracts. Shit, me pretending I didn’t see her don’t change she saw me standing with this antique fag! I feel like killing myself. That’s good and stupid, really stupid. Just because I’m walking down the street or standing on a corner with someone doesn’t mean I’m
with
them. Come on, gimme a break! I’m a dancer. He’s one of the best ballet teachers in the city. I’m a dancer, but hey, do I look like—Where is she? Let me explain. She’s gone, of course she is, why wouldn’t she be? The smell of sautéing garlic coming from the restaurant nauseates me.
“What’s wrong with you?” Roman asks.
“Nothing. I’m tired. I’m going home.”
“Going home? But you didn’t eat nothing yet.”
“I said I don’t feel good.”
“You don’t feel good?” he echoes.
I turn from him. Now, I think,
now.
They can’t put me in no group home or juvenile lockup. I’m a man, an artist, hanging out with people in their twenties! I head for the subway, the swish of his tight jeans and clip of his leather-heeled cowboy boots right behind me.
“What’s going on here!”
What’s going on here? Late in the day to be asking that shit. I run down the subway steps and lose the sound of his boots behind me on the subway stairs. All these
selves
are floating in my head as the train jolts out of the station, morphing into people with names like Arthur or J.J. I see myself doing weird shit, but I know I’m basically normal. That shit at St Ailanthus was some kind of Halloween psycho. But back then I thought I had been kicked out of some kind of paradise.
I was a child; now I’m a man. I’m not what they were—baby-buttbusting homos. Or maybe I am, maybe they came to me for that shit because I’m one too. Maybe I am a fag. I like getting my dick sucked. Would I like it with a girl? When I’m jacking off, I think of girls, J-Lo or a girl like the new girl, tall, blond, big titties. Scott told his parents he wanted to be a dancer, and they sent him to NYU, Merce Cunningham, the Graham School, Africa;
un
-homeboy been to Africa! Normal kids don’t have to pay! Where would he be now if he’d come through foster care and then had to deal with this faggot with his pink-implanted scalp, Pilates class, and tanning salons—slurping on his dick damn near every night. Does what I did with the kids at St Ailanthus make me a faggot? What I did with the kids wasn’t nothing they weren’t doing already. Shit, I did what they were doing to me. I don’t care what she was, I wish I could of stayed with my mother. My parents, dope addicts or whatever they were. My dad?
I don’t feel sick anymore; now I’m hungry.
Some days, standing at the barre after two days of nothing but coffee and double chocolate cake donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts, I come center and just jump straight up four feet in the air, my legs wide apart in second, or I come across the floor and jeté, my legs making a perfect split in the air, and I just hang there for a second. I see the envy on Ricky’s face and the challenge in My Lai’s. Shit, I am the one. I didn’t ask to be. I worked for this shit. But shit, everybody works. The fuck if I knew what it was gonna be in four years. But I can fucking do this. I can. Whether I do or not is another story, but at least I
can.
What does Roman’s ass have now? Nothing. He’s old. It’s way over.
“FOURTEENTH STREET, change here—”
Fourteenth Street? Where am I going? What’d I even get on the train for? To get away from him. Now back up there for the last time. I dash out the opening doors and leap up the stairs across to the uptown side.
Sitting down in an uptown Number 3 waiting for the conductor to shout out the stops. I look at the hole in my jeans, very chic hole, two-hundred-dollar jeans, that’s over for a while, at least until I get a job.
Someone’s—No, he’s looking down now. I had thought the guy across the aisle was staring at me, but he’s in his
Daily News
. I look back at my pants, but I feel, what is this, some kind of heebie-jeebies day? Someone’s looking at me, jeez! When I look up again, the guy has put his paper down. It’s . . . it’s Richie Jackson! Ol’ lying-ass Richie Jackson. I can see he ain’t at St Ailanthus no more. He looks like a old homeless. I can smell him across the aisle. He pushes the paper off his lap to the floor and walks to the other end of the car. I hate nasty dirty people like that. He got tall but he can’t be no more than thirteen or fourteen.
THIRTY-FOURTH STREET!
He shuffles off the train.
FORTY-SECOND STREET!
Maybe he’s on the pipe, a lot of those ghetto types are. He probably got AIDS or some shit already. Most of the white people who don’t get off at Seventy-second will get off at Ninety-sixth.
SEVENTY-SECOND STREET!
Now’s the time.
NINETY-SIXTH STREET!
I get off the train, run west, and swing up Riverside Drive home, to Roman.
He’s been waiting for me.
“Where you been?”
“I didn’t feel good, so I took off.”
“Just like that! You just run off. You rude, that’s what you is!” he shouts.
“Look, I’m leaving.”
“Just like that!”
I guess that’s the line for today.
“No, not ‘just like that.’ I been thinking about it for a long time.”
“Oh, just how long you is been thinking about this?”
An impulse to cry wells up in me, but I know I won’t. I don’t cry. I dance. Right now I got to get out, or I’ll never get out.
“I been thinking about leaving since I was thirteen.”
“There you go with that thirteen shit again! Why you always bring it up?”
“You asked me a question,” I snap.
“Where you going?”
“The Herd loft.”
“What, so I can call the police and tell them—”
He’s
gonna call the police? He’s really crazy!
“So I can come back and kick your ass!”
“Oh, we is very violent these days. Let me tell you one thing, you is deluding yourself with those little girls in the Village. You is down there fucking around in those little stinky pussies, eating it all up. Let me tell you, you is more pussy than the fish you eating. You running! You just as much fag as me, and you be like me one day—you love a boy, take in a boy, and he break your heart.”
He starts crying, big sobs.
“Thanks for the blessing.” I mean, gee, old dude, that really makes me want to stick around, I’m going to end up like you.
“Well, I got some news for you, you is got so much for me,” he says triumphantly. “You don’t know this, but I been to the doctor, I tested positive for the HIV!”
Everything freezes in a flash like a locked-up computer screen, it’s going dark. And then I realize he
wants
me to jump up and almost beat him to death so he can call the police, have me locked up, and then visit me in jail with the wham-whams and zoo-zoos. I’ll still be his, a “you boys.” I was playing myself, thinking I was more. I feel ice growing around my heart.
“Where you going?”
“To get my stuff.”
“You hear what I said, this is serious for
us
.”
Who cares? Number one, I don’t believe him. Number two, I’m going somewhere and dance till I drop, whether it’s tomorrow or fifty years from now. I ain’t even kissed this faggot in four years, much less let him butt-fuck me. So if I got it from this midget sucking my dick, then I just fucking got it. He can see I ain’t scared, that was his hold card, that and his retarded ass was going to call the police on someone.
“Well, hurry up if you going.”
If
—please, motherfucker! I flip open this big cheap suitcase I got on Fourteenth Street. He starts in with the sobbing again. It’s really disgusting.
“Please listen one more thing.”
“What, you been shitting in the coffee?”
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I didn’t want to ruin your life—”
“My life ain’t ruined.”
“Just you is so . . . so
ravaged,
I don’t know if that’s the word, when you got here, when I take you in. One thing, I teach you to dance, admit that.”
He’s crazy. T-shirt, jeans, roll ’em up.
“You never listen to me! This is the last thing I have to say, maybe ever. I been so depress—”
“Kill yourself.”
“Listen!”
I flip the suitcase shut and shift an army duffel bag up onto my shoulder.
“Listen, it’s not what you think.”
All his little puffed-up triumph is gone. I don’t care what he says, he can’t bring me down. Or back. He sighs like it’s killing him, his next little bomb. If he brings up anything in the notebooks, I’ll crack his skull.
“OK, I’m listening.”
“You is a very good dancer. If you want to keep fucking with Herd, fine, but start auditioning for companies—ballet, modern, all that. I never tell you before, you are a fine dancer, one of the best young dancers I see in my life—anybody woulda did what I did to have you. From the first day I saw you—”
“Look, I’ll call before I come get the rest of my stuff.”
“Take it now!”
Fuck him, if I come back here for my shit, he better, number one, have it, and number two, let me in.
“Bye,” I say, and head toward the door.
TWO
“We should call you Ice-T Number Two or something, you’re so cool.” She had laughed, flipping her hair with her hand the way white chicks do. All I had said was, “Sexual history? I think what we’re really talking about is HIV,
oui
?” Then I raised my eyebrow in the way I had been practicing in the mirror and said, “Fuck sexual history. I mean, so what if I been celibate since the day I was motherfucking born and I
got
it, right? And so what if I been fucking sheep and sucking off at an AIDS hospice or some shit and I
ain’t
got it. I think you got, or have, as you would say, pretty good sense and you want to protect yourself. And I don’t know no way to do that except get the test, oohhh scary scary, that, and
thee condumb
. And hey, beautiful, I’m willing to go there for you, you know.” She turned all red, but boy, did she look relieved. I was relieved too, very. I can go somewhere and get some fucking test and sit up in fake, or maybe real, dread. Yeah, I can do that, but sexual history? Ah, I don’t think so.
Yeah, red but relieved, very relieved. Afterward she tells me she’s on the pill, but for like a week I avoid her, like she’s nuts or something, like what’s up with you, nothing was ever going to happen, like she’s just another person came into Herd and we never had a little sting thing getting ready to jump off.
I PAINTED THE
walls of the sleeping space blue. The whole loft was supposed to be painted in two colors, flat black and this dead white. Black was for the performance space and white for the bathrooms (which Scott wanted to paint black too). He had already done the walled-off sleeping space in black. What, trendy, hip? I don’t care; I didn’t want it. My Lai picked the color, and she, Snake, and me did it in a weekend: scrape, prime, paint, and paint—sky blue. Snake painted fluffy white clouds! Then we got some high-gloss black, not like the flat we used for the performance space and did the floor. Perfect.