On his retreat with the empty tray, Lee spied a half-f bottle of champagne sitting on a cart. He glanced both ways, poured some in a glass, and gulped it before moving on. It was tepid, but it still tasted sweet.
Rick cornered him in the kitchen hallway near their changing room. “If I have to say, ‘Of course, it’s kosher,’ one more time, I’m gonna scream.”
Lee smiled, tickled by Rick’s attention and crude humor. “Why not just do a little runway.” Lee affected a model’s sashay. “Try it. It’s kosher. Try it. It’s kosher.”
Rick furled his brow. “What do I look like, a supermarket taste tester?”
“No,” Lee smirked. “But from what I saw before, you look like your testes taste super.”
They burst into guffaws. Lee started to head off, but Rick pulled him back by his shoulder. “C’mere.” He quickly led Lee back into the classroom, dark except for the dusk light spilling through the window. The door closed behind them.
“I’ll show you what tastes super.” He clutched Lee’s crotch. They nudged close together. Rick’s thick lips pressed against Lee’s mouth. They kissed deeply, their tongues dancing. Lee’s hand reached down to Rick’s pants.
“Jeez, you’re hard as a rock,” he whispered as Rick’s penis pressed against his pants.
“Ya wanna suck it?”
“Not here!”
“Lemme suck you.” Rick dropped to his knees and swiftly unzipped Lee’s pants. After his fingers dug through his boxers and released it, Rick’s lips surrounded his cock.
“Isn’t this sacrilegious or something?” Lee whispered, his knees buckling from the pleasure. The empty tray, dangling from his hand, clanked softly against the door.
Rick released Lee’s cock from his mouth with a slurping sound and looked up. “Why? You’re circumcised.”
Maybe it was the Elvis impersonator that did it. It could have been the conga dancer in spandex pants and pink ruffled sleeves or his busty, frizzy-haired dancing partner swirling to “Got To Be Real” that sent Marcos reeling from the dining room. Or was it the glassy-eyed joy in the eyes of the adults, for whose amusement the acts had obviously been hired, since the children had long ago given up watching the show, and instead raced around the rickety dessert carts of waxy kosher chocolate and non-dairy eclairs? Perhaps noticing the thick pile of gift envelopes swiftly trade hands from the young boy of honor to his father’s coat pocket had forced Marcos to escape. Maybe it was just the food.
Whatever the reason, he stood on the dark loading dock behind a dumpster, pissed, lit a cigarette and took a much-needed break. His own introduction to manhood had hardly been such a celebrated affair.
At fourteen Marcos was forced to become the ‘man of the family.’ His parents had raised a good Catholic crop of kids in the Latino barrio of Philadelphia. He’d had his share of schoolyard fights, but gained a reputation for being smooth with the girls. None of the other boys knew his secret; he just liked to do their hair and share old Supremes records.
His mamma had scolded him to be more of a man. He knew what a man was. He wanted to be one. He also wanted one, and didn’t see anything wrong with that. It was everybody else’s problem.
Especially his papi, a tall lean Puerto Rican man who was free with a good smack when the kids or his wife got out of line. He was also free with his liquor. As the years drew on, his father spent less time at home, until one day, his mamma took him aside and told him papi may not ever come back, “and if he does, he is not the man of the house no more. You are.”
Marcos Antonio Tierra did not relish his new position, but knew that if he stayed home and worked, his mamma would help him get to college, with the help of a few scholarships. They both knew what that meant. Escape. An education meant getting a job and getting out. Marcos knew little about the world out there, but what he’d seen looked good.
“Found ya.” Lee, silhouetted by the floodlight, appeared as Marcos tossed his cigarette.
“Hey.”
“Had enough?”
“They never stop.”
“How long does this go on?” Lee asked.
“Longer than those WASPy affairs in town. Makes you appreciate Fabulous’ efficiency. Had enough of refolding used napkins?”
“Really. What do they want next, for us to wipe their little mouths and butts, too?”
“It’s so much easier with the upper crust. It’s like a dance and they know their parts. Here, they’re so ... clumsy with their wealth.” Marcos turned away, staring out into the night. Lee had a hard time falling into Marcos’ morose mood. He was still a bit weak in the knees from Rick’s aggressive and quick seduction. The two had been careful not to ejaculate on themselves or each other’s tuxes. But he didn’t feel at all guilty. They had, after all, washed their hands.
“Tired?” Lee asked.
“In more ways than imaginable,” Marcos sighed. “That kid, the one they’re throwing the party for. He’s got it good.”
“Yeah, wish I had a party like this when I was thirteen. I felt lucky just to get a cake shaped like Snoopy.”
“Yeah, he’s got a truckload of money and some terrific job waiting for him.” Marcos shoved his hands in his pockets. “The envelope, please. Good fucking luck. Take the house. Take the job with Daddy’s firm. Take the girl. Take the car. Take doors number one, two and three.”
Lee looked out into the dark night with Marcos a few minutes, then patted his shoulder. “C’mon. Let’s go steal some forks.”
“This tacky silver pattern? Surely you jest.” They headed back in. “Did you make a bet on the ‘La Bamba’ pool?”
“The what?”
“The pool. We all put in a dollar and bet on a time when the band’s gonna play ‘La Bamba.’”
“How do you know they’ll play it?”
“Oh, you are new, aren’t you?”
The wheezing fan of the underground Penn Station lobby pushed stale air across the young men’s faces as they returned to Manhattan after one in the morning. One good thing about Bar Mitzvahs; they usually ended early, since the guest of honor was a thirteen-year-old.
Lee missed winning the “La Bamba” pool by five minutes. He wasn’t upset, since he had spent the train ride home snuggling next to Rick in the rumbling comfort of the L.I.R.R. Yet upon arriving, he felt Rick’s need to separate, as if their escapade in the dark classroom were a mere fender bender.
“Which way ya headed?” Lee asked, hinting at a possible invitation to his place.
“Uptown,” Rick said. “You?”
“Down.”
“Oh, well, gimme yer number. Maybe we can get together.”
“Again,” Lee teased.
“Yeah, right,” Rick smirked. They traded numbers, Lee embarrassingly explaining the 201 area code. “Well, you’ll definitely come over to my place,” Rick said.
“Sure,” Lee responded with a resigned air.
“Call me tomorrow.”
“Sure,” Lee said, then muttered to himself. “If my desire for you doesn’t sour like the champagne in my gut.”
“What?” asked Marcos.
“Nothing.”
As he caught the Number One train with Marcos, got off at Christopher Street and walked toward Hudson, he wondered about the futility of dating such a guy.
Maybe he’s not always like that,
he thought.
Then again, maybe he is. Maybe that’s what I need.
“Well, I, for one, am exhausted,” Marcos sighed. They stopped at a corner. Someone had plastered a succession of flyers about AIDS over a wooden construction wall.
“Nice art work.”
“Thank God we got out of Long Island alive. Yeah, I like the font.”
“The miracle of Judy-ism.”
Marcos attempted a chuckle. “Under the river for you?”
“Yup.”
“Do they run trains to Jersey this late?”
“Yes, but the sidewalks are rolled up after midnight.”
“You sure you don’t want to stay over?”
“We tried that, remember?”
The pre-dawn song of sparrows chirped from Lee’s kitchen window as he toasted an English muffin and gulped down a glass of orange juice. He had been exhausted when he had arrived home, but neither masturbation nor reading helped him sleep. He merely stared out the window beyond his Dukakis election poster.
A hundred fifty dollars in cash from the bar mitzvah lay on his dresser, all for eleven hours of his life, including transportation. He imagined the bank accounts of people he’d served increasing as fast as the entire population of Mexico, while his finances accrued as slowly as a wooden scoreboard at an Old Timers softball game. At least he’d gotten a surprise blow job.
Outside the window the sky shifted from deep purple to dark azure. More birds chirped. A semi truck farted past, chugging a few tons of something somewhere for someone. Another morning he would sleep through.
Think tomorrow
, Lee told himself.
Dawn is not a good time for career reassessment.
Moving to the carpeted floor, he munched the buttered muffin and tried to scan the
Village Voice
job listings, but didn’t get past “Environmental Activist” before flipping through his TV to stop at CNN. An interview with a wiry, black-haired man in glasses had just begun. His byline read: Anthony Fauci. “ ... the capacity to replicate the virus ...” Lee went into the kitchen to toast another muffin when the anchor’s words drew him back.
“Over a thousand AIDS activists demonstrated outside the Food and Drug Administration today, claiming the approval of drugs to combat the disease ...” He raced back to the television in time to see a crowd of young men and women running around a glass-walled building. They screamed and shouted, waving black posters with pink triangles. A similar cloth banner rose up a flagpole. Police dragged people to the ground. A blond man in a leather jacket was shouting with them, his mouth open wide, his angular face red with rage.
Angel Gabriel wore leather. Kevin Rook.
Lee stood in his bathrobe, transfixed. “Fuckin’ A.”
The once docile exuberant hunk that had served tables with him days before had just become the latest instant media moment. The same young man who gracefully poured Chardonnay for corporate CEOs was being dragged off by rubber-gloved policemen in riot gear on national television. For reasons he didn’t understand, Lee felt a sudden surge build up in his stomach, pass through his throat and escape from his eyes in wet droplets.
The report quickly shifted to more men in suits talking, heads speaking and computer graphics showing charts and bars. He listened, but couldn’t shake the image of Kevin being dragged off.
I should have turned on the VCR
. He sat down on the floor, overcome with a feeling of the hugeness of events, the instant potential and inescapable menace of inaction.
Later, curled up between his sheets and his futon, he thought back to a spark of a memory, when he was ten, maybe eleven, and had watched the footage of the war, the green blurry film images passing by on TV after dinner. He had watched every night until Eric Sevareid’s looming commentary face and hard corn-like teeth told him the show was over.
He’d become very upset one night when a soldier walked by the screen and made a peace sign. He’d said out loud, “That’s Bobby,” the name of his older cousin who was in the Army at the time. His father, who wasn’t listening at first, looked at the screen from behind his newspaper too late. His father argued that no, it couldn’t have been him. “What do you know?” he had screamed at his father. He’d been sent to his room, yelling defiantly.
I know who it was
, he had said over and over, crying himself to sleep.
I know who it was.