November 1997

I work. I walk. I breathe. I frown in trying to fathom other people's actions.
Sausalito
Harlem
San Francisco
Azerbaijan
Winds disregard master status
Inspire and move all.
Over time the bough of a tree is worn soft by the grasp of passing hikers trying to keep steady on a winding path. It is a softness so consummate one would think it was always that way, and that there was no human intervention. I too want to grow softer, more civilized by the blows of life- not harder, not wilder. I want to remain always receptive to change, to experience, to knowledge, to freedom, not impervious. I do not want to be caged by my inability to understand, accept, and shift.
Ginger on my tongue. Contented. Not presently desperate to move constantly, to change, to fix anything, or to console myself through the difficult hours with silent, private reassurances.
After romance there comes reason. And usually I've no reason to stay.
I continue to possess the insecurities of a homeless, rootless wanderer. This insecurity keeps me from a consummate love of the present, and everything in it. Everyone. But why so much fear? I'm smart, talented. I'm young and articulate. What stops me?
Luis is Mexican. My age. He does not speak a word of English. He is thin and has a brilliant smile. Pock marks. He cuts the lettuce, dices onions, dresses the thin wooden skewers with chicken and beef, washes the dishes. Smiles. Smiles. Smiles. He tells me in Spanish that others like me very much. He tells me slowly and with many gestures so that I may understand.
I dream that I am in a wheelchair. Everyone tells me this is best for me; after all, I am a cripple. They encourage me to embrace the wheelchair, wheel about in it and become accustomed to it. But in my heart I know this is not right for me, that there's more to life. I know, am certain I can walk despite others' insistence that I am paralyzed. Daringly, defiantly, though I cannot feel any sensation in my legs, I attempt to stand. The others are horrified and gasp. I shake and falter, but ultimately stand up and walk! My grandmother is there. She cries, "Ya Imshiekha!" And weeps with joy…
The days and I are like mismatched mouths kissing.
Why do I feel like I'm going crazy? One night I cry, cry with fervor. I cry because it seems that I am losing more and more of my faith. Though, with each teardrop I feel lighter and lighter.
I still love the hills. I step out of the house each morning and they are there to greet me faithfully, and sooth me. Today they are barely visible behind the mist that sprays about in the air, alleviating my heart of its everyday human transgressions. But I'm faithless and wait for the hills to disappear, wake up one morning and find vapid flatness. I expect the aliveness I feel in relation to them to suddenly retreat. For good.
Mother seems to be in better spirits, I am happy to report.
Modesto. Adi is a consummate actress. She portrayed George beautifully, intensely. Like the character she was overweight and possessed a great deal of sex appeal that was second nature, not forced. Afterwards I pulled Adi aside and told her how pleased I was with her performance. But when she began to weave off-stage dramas regarding the direction of the play I quickly stopped her.
'I'd rather not know… please…'
She smiled and said she understood that I wanted to preserve the ideal.
We continued to talk. I asked her if she was thinking about pursuing acting in life, 'Because you have a true talent, Adi.'
"I'm afraid," she answered frankly, still smiling sweetly.
'You have to surrender, Adi,' I urged her. 'You were the best out of everyone, and they were damn talented!'
"That's because that part was written for me," Adi said tenderly, her hand pressed to her chest, bright eyes shining in the shadows where we talked.
I have to confess- I have no idea whether my one-act was good or not. I seem to have no objectivity whatsoever.
At a small get-together some of us student-writers and actors talked in a circle of our great need to communicate our ideas and emotions, our selves. It was revealed that each of us struggled with surrendering to and accepting our artistic desires. We agreed that it takes inhuman measures of strength not to feel too crazy in our thinking or become ascetic in our non-conformity.
Seeing friends and acquaintances was a pleasure. I spent too much money, smoked, and drank. But I realized that I value my quiet life in Marin far more than any drug, one person, or great gathering. I feel I am no longer as attached to my vices and addictions.
"You are thinner," they said. I am happier, I thought to myself.
There was so much warmth between all of us. People seemed to cling to me, follow me. I am neither bragging nor complaining- I'm just baffled by the attention. When I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette in solitude friends found me. When I leaned against the kitchen counter for a meaningful one-on-one others came and remained.
Now, it's great being home. I am half alive, half destroyed. Destroyed by reunions, socializing, pretending, and consciously breaking away from yet one more portion of the self and past. And this reliving of events in my diary also exhausts me. Isn't writing supposed to be natural for me by now?
Haunted. Jolted.
A voice tells me to forget about the fear and move on. Live, live, live! I respond. I agree.
Precious life.
Ran errands on my bike and felt the coolness of autumn in Marin against my skin- a crispness that permeated my defenses, touching even my mood. Nature is psychic that way. The hills know. The leaves that fall. The colors that blend. All the while I feel no need to escape from scenes, words, gestures, and nuances.
And writing here in bed while the sun warms my back, a distant chainsaw cutting through the silence of the neighborhood, I let myself become overtaken by a precious feeling of complete security, functioning on steadfast love alone, a love that enables me to smile, giggle, laugh, guffaw.
I did it! I made it through the day on love. And fears slowly dissipated. There's nothing I can't do. I am young, smart, creative, and willing. There is no reason tonight to fear, or to live with fear.
This is my life on ocean waves. What I dream inevitably happens. I am constantly preparing. Training. Occasionally I stop, look about, look within, note the smallest improvements. It becomes daily highlighted that a certain level of dissatisfaction is good for me. It forces me to continue living, growing, and changing. This is my life! This urgency, this commitment, this inner battle to become something more than a broken person. I adore my life, accept it, write this as proof, and quickly move on with it, living toward, toward, toward…
Shammi called tonight. Luay is in the hospital. She thinks we ought to waste no time in rallying around him. She is not specific, but I sense that it's worse than I know. His mother is at his side at all times. The man he loves declares that he will take care of him. I am saddened and shocked to discover he has been living with AIDS since 1986. It's just not fair! We cannot lose him. He offers so much generous, authentic love to this world. We cannot lose him! This is one new friendship I am not willing to relinquish.
In the morning mother and I drive out of the Bay Area, out of the rain, across the bridge, through the oscillating wind turbines of Altamont Pass, and arrive at the magnificent open skies of Central Valley. Throughout the drive, reading, looking intermittently out the passenger side window, I become distressingly conscious of the surreptitious manner in which my resentment toward mother manifests itself, making itself known through certain words, tones, subtleties. And for that instant, while the scene changes beyond the windshield, and as mother drives, I am able to exit the dramas of Emil, stand before him, and say to him with the frankness of a true friend, 'You are so busy punishing her for being who she is that you cannot be pleasant to her for five minutes without erupting. You reject her constantly as she rejected you when you were fourteen and moved to Chicago with your father instead of remaining with her. You reject her as she did you when you were eighteen and confided in her that you are gay.' I stand apart from my disgruntled counterpart and gasp at having just viewed my shortness of temper, my volatility, and the raging immaturity that undulates beneath the very surface of me!
I have begun my most profound transmutation: forgiving my mother…
AIDS is a sanguinary, pernicious despot, sparing no one. We must annihilate its truest disciple: homophobia! When I think of Luay's struggle I am gripped by a certain hopelessness that is so real and scientific, so terrific, that it snatches from me grace, composure, delight.
And yet I'm divided, feeling that I have no right to grieve Luay with the intensity that I do for I have not known him all that long, and my natural sense of love and drama come to seem not only superfluous but inauthentic. But I do grieve. I am broken. Hasn't Luay in just a short period of time displayed great affection for me, without reserve, without conditions?
I love you, Luay! I speak wholeheartedly and selfishly when I insist that you must pull through…
Look what AIDS has made of me! I am sexually ascetic, emotionally vagrant. I am not brave but deeply, irrationally fearful of sex. My fear precludes eroticism, even emotional commitment, when all I want is passion, warmth, animalistic surrender. It feels as though I have been raped, but do not recall the traumatic experience. I only possess the destructive symptoms.
Words are mere winds traveling on the surface of something more esoteric and ineffable. Our truest exchanges are executed by spirit, gestures, emotions. The winds that graze us acquire a certain shade of tenderness when we have been present and honest.
Mother and I take a relative to the Riverbank train station. It's hard to tell where Modesto ends and where Riverbank begins as the car travels on single-lane country roads that are flanked by rural farms. At the station I sit on an old bench overlooking the silent rails. The station itself looks deserted to the naked eye but I know it is not; it is only old. I look about with a kind of quiet fascination, feeling strangely aware of past departures that must have taken place here, beneath my very own feet. I see a mustard-colored stationhouse with brown trim, a scant plant in a broken barrel, sullied payphones, green freight cars married to rust-colored ones- their union romantic in a visual and mythological sense, conjuring faded impressions of stowaways- enormous cumulus clouds mounting in a melodramatic display, a frenzied flock of pigeons that seems stuck in a flight circle too close to the ground- their performance at once graceful and violent, like a carnival ride! I breathe all of this inside having learned and never forgotten the wonder of the child.
The West Campus Cabaret is now a temple I am glad I no longer have to revisit. A temple we visited only by night, a secret cult that met in the shadows of an overpass, each member worshipping his or her own creative possibilities. I entered the theater always with a keen sense of dread. My hands shook, my stomach cramped, my mouth locked down in muted outcries: You are doing it all wrong, Sam! Cringing in the audience.
But Adi was a true professional again. I pulled her aside after her second run and she looked up at me with bright hungry eyes. I fed her insecurity with genuine praises. 'You were even better this time!' Indeed she was. Adi had choked on the apple her character bites into but had recovered naturally, flawlessly, without losing character. She had taken her time to clear her throat, coughed briefly, and said- as her character might have, "These darn apples…" I had adored her for it, sitting at the edge of my seat, breath held, waiting. She admitted she hated working with Sam. "There is no chemistry between us, Emil. He skipped two entire pages of dialogue!" She suffered with him.
I had overheard two people sitting behind me complement "Third Rail".
Each night I came home exhausted, drunk perhaps more from conversation than drinks, and restless, unable to shut off the faces, the voices, the events, and my heart!
I never was able to establish a secure human bond with Michael, our instructor, the high priest of our dilapidating temple of the arts. Michael- white-haired, thin, unreachable. I came home feeling always that I had failed to fulfill a holy duty, some universal task. Sure, I got to bond more closely with certain friends for whom I felt such an intense devotion that it even caught me off guard. But even this love kept me turning, tossing, doubting.
Emotions exhaust me… Being loved, invitations, attention, conversation, confidences, everything exhausts me. In trying to run from others I am constantly running into them. Relationships are unavoidable. I modify my love many millions of times.
Jackie just called from Casa De Maria and was immediately concerned by my perfunctory, 'Hello.'
"Are you OK?" she asked.
'Yeah…' I answered dazedly, still half-immersed in reflections from today's taxing entry.
Now I must exit these pages, this diary, this mood. Gather myself, cut off loose ends, sever dangling thoughts, and live.
I am taking a night off from a more serious Emil who inundates me with barters, settlements, options, and warnings.
I settle into hills, back in Marin, into gentle musings.
Novato. I retreat to Sleep Café to shut off ten senses. Not five. Reliving tires me.
Michael said a friend of his found "Third Rail" "sophisticated". She was a woman.
Hours pass and I tango with no one but my fears, doubts, my hate for others, my resolutions, my inability to master my imagination. I miss everyone, but here I am at least clean. Just frustrated that I don't write… fiction.
I dance alone like a ghost. No cumbersome body. Only motion. In silence. No man, no human partner could lead me as finely as solitude. There is no such thing as loneliness in the company of words.
Without words, read or written, life reverts to an uninteresting state.
Jackie occupies her time, distracts her restlessness and dissatisfaction with projects that stretch late into the night. Her anguish is so palpable that it fuels my own imagination. She has made her curtains. I condone her productivity, but worry about her emotional health. It's as if she and mother are not sisters at all. There is a rift and I fall into it.
Caesar asks if I like guys. We are standing over the grill. I think I was too coquettish that time, and chastise myself. 'I like animals,' I shirk the question, and exposure. I don't want George to know I am gay. I should not have said, 'Tengo hambre para tu verga.' Although, Latinos seem to accept homosexuality in a quiet, mystical fashion.
I have been feeling sensual again. My arms might be an animal that gazes at dawn with awe; my legs carry a fairytale; my soul an ocean. I swell and careen and find moods connecting within myself I did not think possible.
Extremes are exhausting.
It has become my purpose to embody the ephemeral. But while here I am two hundred percent here.
I feel as though I am about to have a sexual encounter, an erotic assignation.
It rains. After work I opt to walk in the rain, declining an invitation for a ride to the bus stop. The rain welcomes me. It takes me. It touches me everywhere at once. It kisses me in the dark. I run through puddles, not around them as I was brought up to do. My hair falls around my face, sopped and heavy. I feel alive. I seek the rain while others seek shelter. I will live without erotic love if I have to, renounce fortunes, go without because I am filled with the will to love nuances, to feel for adjectives, to write with my breath, to press without fingers- not always easily or comfortably, but wholeheartedly.
I am cleansed of ugliness of emotion by ugliness of emotion. My hatreds and resentments cannot be avoided. I must pass through them like the puddles at night. Not around them.
I will push aside the emotional wheelchair that loves to contain me and run, skip, jump, and kick, writing!
I am so fortunate to be living. I feel it so powerfully that it makes me either cry, shout, or laugh inside. Outside, I breathe in the night, the autumnal scent of burning wood, the cold, the distant stars, every endless possibility and image by which I feel encompassed and welcomed. Not imprisoned, not limited as by my upbringing and so many, so many, so many rules. I continue to remain the child who tries to fathom the universe overhead, question boundaries, imaginatively traverse every illimitable vastness, God, and the infinite beginning.
Every day I prepare for my ultimate embarkment into adulthood.
Rain.
Sister-conversations with women keep me sane on the bus, close.
Mother calls me into the family room where she, her brother Sam, and Jackie are watching the weekend Iranian program that is broadcast from Los Angeles. I suppose I will join them because after all we are alive, together, and this is obviously a blessing and my opportunity to become a part of things.
But before I go I have to say one last thing. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and for the first time I look forward to it. I feel connected to my family. Safe. And I give this feeling, this savorous intensity, to the sixteen-year-old Emil who opted to wander the downtown streets of Chicago alone one Thanksgiving than to be around a drunk father, and a homophobic family. Alone, cold, young, and desperate with terror. And there, in the night wind, amidst the lights, the traffic, and the crowds he found that architecture was actually larger than his grief, and was somehow comforted by this discovery.
Now, this life I live I live for him. All of it. And I suppose in this manner time travel is possible. I do it as we speak, reaching well into the well of past, reaching, reaching, reaching deep into the ripples of youth for a semblance of us. When I join my family at the dinner table they would never suspect that I've just returned from a night walk on Michigan Avenue. They'll assume my hair is mussy because I have been napping.
I continue to live in a state of anticipation, in the thrill of beginnings, in the encompassing aura of the moment before the moments. For me the climax remains in the predawn of any event, not in the event itself by which time I am ready to move forward because everything ages, loses luster, and flaws become dishearteningly revealed. I am always sprinting because life in the imaginary realm remains the apex of my existence.
Fragments, phrases, images, characters spill from an unknown spout inside my veins and as I sprint through life I can hear them moving inside my soul, swishing about, mixing, overflowing. Tickling me.
The aftermath of every gathering is depressing to me. Clear the table and all that remains is war, genocide, disasters of nature, rapes and molestations, hunger, loss, and mother. I hate her! I hate her with an emptiness inside myself I cannot fill or fathom, a bitter taste in my mouth, my fountains halted, my youth arrested, my gardens parched. She single-handedly destroys all hope, twists all truth, rearranges history, and sabotages family. She dwells until she lashes out in helpless retaliation.
We celebrate Thanksgiving at Case De Maria where everything seems normal. But once we are in the car, mother and I, driving back to the house, mother begins her bitter charges against the family. She carries on until she realizes that she's forgotten her cigarettes at the rest home. To my horror we turn back, this otherwise five-minute drive is prolonged to a bitter decade of torment. Ridiculous charges, petty accusations, universal complaints made unique and prodigiously harrowing. My mouth hangs agape as she carries on, my heart trembling, my personalities thrown against each other- my feminine warring with my masculine, logic wincing, composure cringing. When we arrive at the rest home I hop out of the car, fetch mother's cigarettes, hand them to her through the car window, and say, 'I'm not going with you. I can't listen to any more. Not until you've learned to forgive and move forward.' She takes the pack of Virginia Slims from me and says nothing. Nothing with words any way. Just an expression of surprise, then abandonment, shocked that I would send her into the night alone, thinking to myself, 'Continue your black journey through black streets by yourself. I cannot follow. I love you.'
I struggle to love a hopeless mother as I struggled to love an alcoholic father.
I will not imagine it. I will not picture mother driving home alone, unlocking the front door alone, entering an empty silent house alone. I will not allow my powers of sensitivity and special vision torment me as do mother's own special powers of making everyone else criminal and herself terminally victim!
I hate her with all my love!!!
I want to be unaffected always, living on surfaces only, moving like a boy, a boy in an adventure story; a fictitious boy who overcomes everything and does not become so easily entangled. I want silence in my soul. Dumb silence. Not words, imaginings, dramas, changing realities, fickle people, wishes, wishes, wishes.
I will be cured by the kiss on your lip, immortalized by the whispers from your tongue.
I am just like anyone else. Human. Sexual. Animal. I am made restless by an event that has begun a new phase.
My abstinence has not been a spiritual condition; it has been an unnatural attempt at denying this hunger in myself, and feeling sexually superior to others. It has merely been an impossible test that I have created for myself out of fear, guilt, dysfunction. Lust is stronger than I. Sooner or later I give in, and how erotic it was this time. How absolutely sexy. Spontaneous. Shocking.
I resolve to meditate on the beauty and eroticism of my experience, though I fight severe inadequacy. But why this awkwardness, this discontentment after every sexual encounter? Why do I punish myself?
I am not better than passion, above sex!
I am no saint.
I am emotional. Impetuous. Built of hormones and driven by desires as others are… as nature intended…
I too answer to urges.
Gliding through the hours dressed in flesh, young, beautiful, mad with feelings and passion. Insatiable. Impractical. I have seen my true face, felt myself move flirtatiously. Heard myself seduce, feign, fox.
And instead of thinking of death and disease after every homoerotic exchange I'd prefer to think of everlasting life. Though this requires great effort…
Luis and I have worked together for two months now, forming a bond despite our lack of a common language. The first time I saw him at the grill I was delighted because he was the boy with whom I'd exchanged smiling glances on a bus earlier that same day. Luis, too, lives in Novato and after work we take the same bus home. At night, at the bus stop, looking up at the sky I ask him how to say stars in Spanish. Estrellas. Angry. Enojado. We laugh, Luis unable to speak a stitch of English, the bus arriving finally. On the dark bus home I desire Luis, but my confusion grows so intense I resent our tongues for not being able to clarify my curiosity: Are you gay, Luis? Was that gesture a hint? Was that a desirous gleam in your eye or just a reflection off the bustling highway?
After a few days of this I am exhausted.
Some nights Luis receives rides from his friend, also named Luis. Luis, too does not speak English, is handsome, has dark eyes so drawn that they seem to be smiling at all times. I secretly desire his arms, stomach, hands, neck, and kisses.
One night, recently, it happened. My curiosity was soothed after dancing around each other for some time, moving for a revelation, extricating without words statements from one another, falling onto a bed where the Luises set upon me like mist, vampires, shadowy doctors who undressed me, kissed me, fondled me.
Suddenly, here was the answer I had sought- a grand Yes!
I was disbelieving as I looked into Luis' eyes in that dark room where we kissed. Smiling. At last…
Entangled between the two, I was mesmerized by the manner the Luises made love- like brothers. Their exchange in bed was familial, and in the dark they moved alike, looked alike. There was fraternity. Siamese ghosts copulating!
We were drunk. Luis, my Spanish instructor, was now buried facefirst in my ass, his tongue firm, wet, warm, moving, penetrating. Luis, the other, was on his knees, pulling his brown foreskin back, placing his erection into my mouth.
Luis, my co-worker, moved to penetrate me but I flexed and would not allow him inside. He was not wearing protection. He got out of bed to fetch lubrication in the dark, thinking this would permit him into my body more readily. I was drunk on so many elements. He slipped in, his penis also uncut, thick, intent. He began to thrust as if for his life! I rejected him with my muscles, forcing him out, though desiring him all the while inside me, pounding.
We slept in one another's arms, but how could I sleep against hot, coco bodies and not be beckoned for more lava? I licked them, my mouth searching their bodies for sweetness, a memory. We were smiling.
Then the most erotic thing happened. My friend Luis was taken from behind by the other Luis. I held them both against me. They kissed me. Luis moaned as Luis fucked him. I watched their faces in what little light that came in through the window.
There was pleasure. Luis looked so scant and soft, cringing and moaning, trapped between us without the need for escape. The other Luis looked serene, beautiful, methodic as he fucked, thrusting, pushing Luis into me until he came inside him- his friend, his lover, his son.
The Luises share a unique bond that has traveled with them from Mexico to the States and will undoubtedly return with them. I am envious of their partnership, though I know I am better off on my own.
We finally slept.
The next day Luis and I worked at the grill. I was continuously startled by the previous night's pornographic flashbacks. Luis, you had your face in my ass last night! I thought to myself as we worked alongside my great-uncle George. When no one was around I asked Luis if he'd enjoyed himself. He answered emphatically, "Si, mucho.' I smirked.
I want to go to their room again. I want to touch them again. Reach through the web of my own dysfunction and reservation, my distrust of the world, and grasp a penis, a hand, black hair. There will be four of us there; my distrust of men and of myself will be the reprehensive chaperon standing at the foot of the bed.
Last night, quite spontaneously, the Luises, Janet, and I went to a charming little bar in San Anselmo. We sat at a large circular table drinking beer, watching a terrible American belly dancer turn and shake across the barroom. When Janet went to the restroom I turned to the boys and said, 'Esta noche chinga?' My Luis nodded his head yes and asked the other Luis, who said we could not because their roommate would have family over in the morning.
Suddenly I was angry. Tense. I was disappointed. I felt childishly rejected. I became antisocial. I observed myself and noted just how abruptly my mood changed from mirthful to despondent.
After we'd dropped Janet off at George's and the three of us were alone on the highway heading north to Novato, my Luis asked in broken English, "Are you happy?" I hesitated to answer. The other Luis looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, "Habla." I was contrary, "Habla Ingles o Espanol?"
They were patient. I became remorseful and added, 'Estoy cansado. Solo cansado.'
I wished to confess to them just how disappointed I felt that we weren't going to be together, and more importantly how disappointed I was in myself for handling the whole thing so poorly.
When confronted with lust I am a universal fool.
Again I have seen my own sexual appetite. It is alive. It is real. I cannot manipulate my natural urges to make myself seem unique, or sexually superior to others, evolved. I suppose I am bound to have same-sex interchanges as long as I am alive. I cannot let my upbringing take this right from me. I have to choose to outgrow my guilt and shame in sex. My personal dramas. Somewhere deep within it feels right to be who I am meant to be.
Aqui y ahora.
Live fearlessly. Know you do not have to self-destruct in trying to attain your freedom.
Suddenly I have an urge to burn all my clothes!
That night in the car I noted that I took their "no" as a personal rejection, as if my own life lay in their answer. This is not who I want to be. And I'm glad I got to see myself in this unflattering light. Now I see that it is easy to be strong and individualistic when alone in a room, in a diary, but the true test lies out there in the world, with people.
In the end I am cheating myself by avoiding life and sex, thinking myself beyond validation and neediness.
Having written this I feel somewhat liberated.
Tonight Luis and I sat side by side on the bus and I threw my leg over his, wrapped my foot about his thin calf. He smiled. Earlier, in the cramped kitchen at the grill I'd said to him, 'Quiero beso tu.' He'd looked about then, making sure we would not be discovered by George or Janet, and he'd kissed me. Fiercely. Our erections had rubbed against each other from beneath our clean white aprons.
He kisses savagely. I receive him savagely.
On the bus ride home Luis reveals the true nature of his relationship with Luis. He says slowly in Spanish that Luis loves him more than he loves Luis. That Luis II, as I will refer to him from here on, is jealous and does not allow Luis his frivolities. Luis desires his libertad, freedom. In fact, I am the first person Luis II has allowed into their bed in the five years they've known each other. This news thrills me.
When Luis tells me that he will be returning to Mexico in February I am deeply saddened. Yet devilishly entertain the fantasy that I may have Luis II all to myself.
As much as all this excites me the danger and uncertainty of it all unsettles me. I can't help but think of Rodney and Luay knowing that our Assyrian rootlessness does not protect us from AIDS, which is supposed to be, according to our elders, an "American" disease.
How absolutely disheartening it is that before, during, and after every homosexual encounter I should face the reality of my own mortality.
But nature prevails. Even as I write this in bed I imagine the Luises about me, here with me, laughing with me, rolling together.
A great desire to learn Spanish consumes me. I buy books on learning Spanish. I know solo un poco and want to burst with frustration when Luis and I try to communicate. There's so much I want to say to him, and ask.
There is total isolation in sexual abstinence and great jeopardy in living according to my most natural desires. I resent sex, homosexuality, men, and science. Why aren't I permitted to frolic carelessly? Why must I live and fuck in doubt and suspicion?
Tengo un gran deseo del amor!
Why was sex taken from us? Why are we given death instead? Why do friends die? It makes me wild.
Is sexual expression not an option for the modern homosexual?
Having submitted to my own desire I am suddenly thrown into a painful state of unrest. I am always much calmer, feel so much safer alone. Untouched. Now. Now I am paranoid, playing games in my own head, unable to leave it alone. Obsessive. I seem to enjoy the uncertainty, the doubt of life, and enhance it. I am destined to live alone.
There is a force more menacing than AIDS. The self!
Quiero vivir!
I am on campus. It is evening, raining. Desire comes and I want to seek the men's room, cruise. But why live as though I am a closeted suburbanite husband and father? Why oppress myself thus?
Ugly dreams of penises! Men! Desire! Desire! Desire!
George tells me I can go home early, but I opt to stay at the grill and work without pay. I stay… for Luis? For Caesar? For Juan? For flirting?
Juan, who'd almost wept while telling me about his wife and children back in Guatemala, now confides in me that he's been sleeping with his sister-in-law! He looks crestfallen, broken by his own desire and actions. I conclude that human beings are not to be trusted!
If death itself cannot deter us from sexuality, how can religion, a heart, art?
I will control myself when desirous. I will chain myself to a tree. I will set mines between that which tempts me and myself.
Luis and Luis were the last time. Ever!
I will be the unreachable. The unattainable. I will torture others; deny them sexual access. Emotionally, though, I will be a torrent. Giving.
I find myself saying romantic things to Luis.
'Estoy siempre en su cama,' I utter. 'Aqui,' pointing to my head.
He laughs, his eyes shining. His buttocks are like something synthetic, manufactured. They are perfect, soft. He is slender, dark, toned. His eyes are black and mischievous. His face possesses pockmarks, but I am not distracted by it.
I am a fool.
Books save me. Anais saves me. She is so small, yet so powerful, reaching her hand out of the published page, pulling me into the blanket of her poetry. She is superhuman that way. I fall to the floor when I am reading her, thrash about until I learn to swim in her sentences. And emerge dazed. I close the Nin pages and step off the bus, feel myself slowly following my body back to the material, the exterior, reality. I don't always like or agree with Anais Nin, but I certainly can't help but continue loving her. And through this love she becomes more real in my life, to me, than the people on the street.
I want the Luises again.
Ahora voy a su dormitorio donde sueño con Luis y Luis. Pero tengo miedo. Solo miedo. Siempre miedo.
Esto es el Jueves. Life, give me joy. Give me a certain carefree surefootedness. I give myself to the bed of roses- thorns in tact- that is life.
Mother continues to represent a total annihilation of pleasure and satisfaction.
Music restores, as always, my senses.
Glancing through Jackie's CD collection I happen upon the Greek musician- George Dalaras- who has become the first male vocalist with whose voice I have fallen in love. When he sings "Una Moneda Le Di" shall I weep… with joy? Dalaras is a journeyman who does not care to travel alone, but recruits the listener with wailing notes and sudden raspy turns of his voice. I surrender without modern issue, reservation, or logic. I relinquish my heart, my breath, and senses to the listening experience with pristine instinct. He cannot hurt me, nor jeopardize my health, my life. I am his. We are welded by images in music. That is music!
Everyone around me seems to willingly disassemble their most sacred relationships, psychically and blatantly. I can't help but adopt a certain air of fatigue, a tired resignation, indignation, and defeat about life, all people, and myself. I'm one of them but how do I know I'm any better, any stronger, more tolerant and willing to fight to maintain my faith in those I love? I've never lived with them, amongst them. I've opted for a life in pages, within myself. What will happen if I should return to their earth? Given half the chance I will fail myself. I always do.
The Luises slip into my thoughts, visit my musings and kidnap me to their bed, to the silent darkness of their encompassing arms, mouths, and legs where I drown again in them. I'm living life on my back, turning, slipping, kissing, receiving molten caresses.
My moods confound me. At work I am jovial, then downtrodden, oppressed by unattainable wishes. Wishes to be strong, free of sexual desire. I want, want, want Luis. I can't believe it is I who walks by and grabs him, embraces him, steals kisses behind everyone else's back. I want his company, his language, his friendship, his union with Luis II.
On the bus I show him this notebook pointing out his name. He smiles, but looks defeated.
He tells me he is stressed by his life here, that I have been right in picking up his restlessness and sorrow.
"Solo trabajo, el autobús, y sueño," he complains in the yellow hue of the small overhead light.
'Yo también,' I identify. This despair we seem to share.
He says he doesn't quite know why he has been sad.
I say I too have been discontented but that I know why. I am dying to confess it to him. I have to. I do.
With broken Spanish, some English, and my hands I tell him that I like him and think about him always; that I want him, but he belongs to Luis and I must stop. I want to stop. I like being on my own.
He punches my leg playfully, smiles brilliantly.
At work I buy lunch for everyone. I want to give to everyone, food and complements. Encouragement. I want to please and to be, be, be loved!
This is not a weakness. It is a powerful need!
I tell Luis I will miss him when he returns to Mexico in February. He asks why. Because! I exclaim.
'Porque somos amigos…' I'm not sure just exactly what I mean by "friends".
Moods volatile!
On a bench, after I have given him the tape I made for him, neither one of us attempts to kiss the other. Politeness keeps me from being forward, passionate, blatant. I made the tape late into the night. I dreamt as I dubbed it. The inscription reads:
Mi Luis querido,
La música es mi amor en la vida. Usted es mi profesor en español. Perdí mi corazón en su cama.
It is dark. I want kisses. He wears my shirt, which I offered to him because he was cold. I want to say to him, 'Keep it.' But I don't because it would give away my madness. Madness. My heart leaps. I have to satisfy these urges, emotional urges to give, give, give!
It used to make me crazy not knowing whether Luis was gay. Knowing makes me crazier. I haven't felt this desperately hungry for someone's company in ages. It means something. I'm not just being obsessive. I am certain of one thing only- this intense desire for Luis is my own, my own.