seeing your window

Dear Eddie, 

I thought about you a few nights ago, while walking back home, really drunk, from the Wallflower Bar on 12th Street. I had had 4 glasses of wine by then without even realizing it because I was so into the conversation with Peter Sanger, my old classmate from Harvard. We didn't talk about anything you and I used to talk about. Instead, we talked about business -numbers, figures, data and social rhetoric. It was good in a way, liberating even, to touch his skin -even if it was brief and sincere and self-admittedly professional. We laughed a lot, made noise to a point a waiter had to come and ask us to "keep it down a little bit", embraced each other like a father and daughter, firmly and rigorously and intentionally full-bodied, and joked around about Chris Wilkins fucking the tutor on Sunday nights by Wigglesworth. He's come a long way with his insecurities about height, bought a studio apartment on the 11th floor of Jane Cottage, working out of Berkeley now, in data mining and population design and plays dodgeball in a gay league every weekend since February. A full life, he calls it. Plays golf with his father at a country club in Long Island, fasts on Yom Kippur, and spends seventy five dollars on liquor by the end of every week. He's charming, and amiable and piercingly smart, but I sense loneliness in his smile. I can tell that he wants to be touched more, held more, and loved, more, by people. We get so caught up with New York sometimes, that we forget people. We forget what personhood means when all we do is increase our tallies of people as objects, of men as objects and women as toys. Everyone deserves love in a way, you know. Everyone does. Peter and I spoke about this for a very long time, for the last hour at least, and about effortless dates, about wanting to settle down and about finding boyfriends, about adversity and disappointment and about sustainable friendships. One of the biggest problems with New York is that we can't form a sustainable network of friends or lovers or fuck buddies because man-the-object is treated as something disposable, easily sacrificial and conveniently replaceable. To invest in a friendship, to drill into an ultimatum -oh why should you ever want to do that? Perchance the swinger on Christopher Street or the drag queen on Waverly can be your liaison to someone hotter, better and sexier. You are uprooted in your position of even friends because you're not the face of glamor anymore, because you cannot provide the wow-making, you cannot be suitable for continuous camaraderie. Why? Because you're knocked down, like a chess piece, plucked aside in a wooden box, and stowed away till a new player starts the game.

We got Japanese food later. A sizzler of fried, curried octopus limbs, some sauteed sea urchin called Uni, two bottles of Orion lager and a braised duck hot pot. I managed to wink at the bartender twice. Woof! He was hot as hell, with nice fleshy arms, ocean blue eyes, and a bright silver hairline. He seemed really really nice and even gave us a lot of really tempting offers about the evening's dining specialties, cocktails and desserts. But, they are all really nice aren't they? Is it genuine? or just part of their job? To attract, to allure, to draw you in so much that you feel heard, paid attention to and temporarily cared about? We, in America, demand "being nice" a little too much of customer service, I think -it feels unreal to think about. But such is our culture of service with a smile. You've got your problems, deal with your problems, I don't need to know. Or want to know. Or care to know about what's going on in that brain of yours. Don't burden me with your issues, whether you have a dead pet or a heroin addiction, because all I care about is me. Me. Me. Me. And only Me. And, the way you're serving me -because I'm paying you. I'm buying the way you're going to behave with me. And if you don't, I will not tip you. I will complain to your manager and give you a terrible review on Yelp so that you are fired from your current enterprise. For every customer, you will remold, you will play the game again, and change the way you do business to cater to them, and please them just the way they want. You, Mr Bartender, will be my puppet, and your heart will be a bismuth spade, that will freeze to cement when you are on the stage, working with a smile, serving with a smile and providing to a crowd an agency of pleasure. You shall be flawless, you shall be ideal, you shall abide by my rule book or else -leave. You will be sent away, and replaced, again, with a perfect host. With a straw doll of glamor in Oxfords and plaid, in heels and shoeshine, and lipstick and rouge who will smile at me, pretend to care and refill my water just as I please.

We stuck around at the Fish Camp for about an hour or so and then started walking towards his place. He wanted to show me the roof deck of his building. But while walking back on 4th Street, I glanced at your building and noticed your window. The light was on, and looked like shy against the width of your frosted glass. I tried not to look, but I couldn't help it. I loved you once, and the curiosity never went away. I tried again not to look up, but I kept doing it anyway; smiling at Peter all this while. Don't Look Up, I kept telling myself. Don't Look Up. But I kept looking up, and finally just stared at your window for a few moments. And I saw what you didn't want me to see. Shadows. I wished it was a shadow of you. Just you. But you've taken to the plural again. It was you and someone else, holding each other. Kissing each other. Your tongues folding in on each other. Your fingers tracing up and down against the sigmoid of his back. You held his head, you brushed his hair, and you stood up straight and bent again. I wanted to disbelieve. I wanted to stab my eyes and blind myself -blow away my power fuse like a switch, like pressing hard on the nipples of aging candle wicks. I wanted to tell myself, that it was only a figment of my imagination, it was only a quadrant of my insecurity, but Eddie, silhouettes don't lie. Silhouettes cannot lie. They are the leeches of physics, the followers of actions, never a traitor, never a betrayer -only magnified sometimes and diminished during others. And at that very moment, my blood shot up. My heart started spinning like a bicycle wheel, and I couldn't breathe anymore. My legs started shaking, my brain started screaming, and I became epileptic with spasms. So dangerously severe, I turned blue in the middle of the street. And I convulsed, and buckled and bent like a snake, and slithered by the lamp post like an ovulating worm, and felt the binding materials of my skin shedding away, like an avalanche on Everest. My glands were burning, my ribs were ringing, and my bones were left to rattle on their own. My face swelled up, like an inflated grape, and my shoulders cramped. My nostrils flared, like hot air balloons, and my chest collapsed into a hollow bowl. And second by second, I felt increasingly choked. Like there was poison in my veins propelled by valves whipping up blood in delirious tango. I could feel your lips Eddie. I could feel your touch. I could feel your squeeze around the circumference of my neck. I could feel your erection against the fabric of my pants and I felt jealous, so miserably jealous, that I wanted to tear all my hair out, and just scream for twenty minutes. 

But Peter noticed my sweat, and heard my cry. And picked me by my arms and dragged me to his home, and seated me in his roof deck, where I fell in love with my city all over again. The lights twinkled like gems on a crown in the distance nearby. It was magical, and surreal, and made me miss you terribly. 

I have moved on from you, a long time ago. Or tried to at least. But I will never forget you, and even if it's a sliver of my age, I will remember you with fondness. Forever.

I hope you read this someday in your life.

Best,

T. 

seven minutes

The man seated across from me at the La Familia Day Care Center in Hollis Hills, Queens, is David; but he does not resemble a single David I know. When I say resemble I'm talking about facial features, expressions and ethnic backgrounds. He towers over me at six feet five inches but looks uncannily small as he hunches over the small maplewood desk and looks at me through drooping eyes like I am a piece of ginger, like I am catastrophe, like I will sentence him to isolation and squash his eyeballs; that expression of you may only touch me cautiously -that grave, defeated look.

I begin my routine.

"My name is Jonathan Wollman and I'm here from Castleton College. I'll be taking just a few drops of blood from you today for a diabetes test and a lipid profile test." 

I stare into his eyes. The white part looks a little yellow, and a few ruptured capillaries are netting around the edges. I am scared that there is some sort of a pressure build-up within his eye chambers, puffing it up, that may eventually make it explode. That will end up pretty badly; probably in a runnel of blood gushing out of his pink carunculae, leaving him blind, desperate and suicidal. What is left of a homeless man without the gift of vision? I ponder. 

He nods, loosely, and smiles a few times. Something must be really funny that I don't quite get or am completely oblivious to. I repeat my introduction. There is no agreement, disagreement or acknowledgement; just a calm indifference possibly common among the poor, homeless and decaying.

"Do you have a preference for which hand I should use?" I ask.

He shakes his head, gently at first then violently, for a few seconds. He pauses for a moment, yawns, and resumes shaking his head. His platinum-blond hair clomps against the arch of his forehead and thrums like a boat engine brrr-ing through the ocean. 

"Alright. I'll use your left hand, then. Do you have a finger preference?" No answer. I carefully reach for his ring finger. It is cold and crinkled and frighteningly white. 

"Do you mind rubbing your hands for me, please? This'll help with your blood flow." I tell him, while rubbing my own to show how it needs to be done. "If we get your hands nicely warmed up then we don't have to prick you multiple times," I say. 

Suddenly, he makes a low-pitched, mechanical gurgling sound. Perhaps he wants to say something?

"I don't have blood," he says, finally. The voice is gruff, a little raspy, a little smokey but not extremely deep. It sounds like a packet of audio waves leaking through a plug of mucus, covering, intermittently, a nozzle looping into his vocal tubes. 

I laugh spontaneously. "You're funny," I say, but he's not amused. "It'd be hard that way. But here...can you please rub your hands while I get my kit ready?"

He rubs his palms in smooth continuous circles, but so gently that I doubt it will do any good. The motion seems mechanical, artificial and ticklish; as if his fingers have ears and wake on command. There is no mind involved, just simple steps and two bare hands rubbing away in sporadic rotations, familiar to one another like coeval half-sisters or neighborhood cousins skipping rope, rowing or lobbing pebbles in a lake. 

From the blood kit in my delegated station 6 I take out a piece of white netted gauze, a Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid, a green plastic-encased lancet, a lipid profile cassette and a capillary tube. I arrange them all on a piece of paper towel, in an anti-clockwise fashion, and go through my checklist to make sure I have everything I need.

I've missed the alcohol swab. So I turn to my left, pull one out from the kit and keep it at the end of the trail. It looks like a Japanese fan, only not as sophisticated. Then I pick it up and tear it through the center of the wrapper. One uneven piece spirals down the eight inch distance and lands on the paper towel. The other is still stuck to the swab. Next, I pull the swab out with my right thumb and index finger and throw the other piece of the wrapper into the trash can. It lands without a sound -as if, nonexistent. 

I bring the alcohol swab closer and closer to his ring finger. Eventually, it touches the pulp, I wipe it for a few seconds and fan the area to dry it off. There are little ripples on his skin, as if hit with an avalanche or corrugations made from wind, the kind of creasing that happens when you dip your fingers in hot or cold water for too long. Age and homelessness have taken its toll, forming shapes like contour maps all over the pulp. This is a sad reality and there is nothing I can really do to remedy it. 

Within a few seconds, I pick up the lancet, twist the cap off, hold it perpendicular to the finger, count in my head, one, two, three and push the plunger, deep, through the five strata of epidermis, into the inner layer of skin, till the tip of the micro-spear nicks a part of the digital artery. I remove the lancet, and notice a drop of blood peeping through the wound. 

"That felt great, Doc. Do it a few more times," he says. The lancets are not reusable and I have no reason to prick him multiple times, unnecessarily, so I take it and throw it into the red "Sharps" container. As soon as it enters the container, it is invisible because the bucket is not see-through. I hear a crrunch, and know it has landed safely. Glass upon glass, steel over steel, they can resume sharing stories of piercing, pain and viciousness, the many people that have come and gone in happiness and in despair. 

I collect the first drop of blood in the capillary tube and start the A1C test right away. Then I wipe the site of his wound with fresh gauze, and start squeezing his finger to get a few more drops. I will need it to run the lipid profile cassette. He seems restless and annoyed, all of a sudden. 

"Just one more minute, just one more minute," I say as Theresa, my assistant, and I squeeze out blood from his finger. Finally, we have the necessary amount and start the test. I give him a Band-Aid and ask him to wait. The tests take about seven minutes to run. During the remaining time, he is allowed to drink water, fill up a questionnaire or just sit there. 

After about a minute or so, he suddenly starts talking. "You can't deny that the Germans still won, aye? They revolutionized the world. They proved themselves despite having a bad reputation. They did the right thing -you know?" 

"Oh-okay. But where is this coming from all of a sudden?" I ask, casually.

"You're using a god-damn Siemens machine. You outta know this shit." I'd never given it much thought, but he was right. 

"Those Jews, I tell you...I hated them. Growing up. I knew the Germans did the right thing. But now I hate them even more."

"Why? Why do you hate them even more now?" I ask. 

"Because one of those docs, Silberman from the Bronx, killed my best friend. My best friend of 37 years. It's tough, ya know?" He says.

I expressed my deepest sympathy and then asked, "What did he do?"

"Never paid attention to my friend. At all. They say they wanna take care of the homeless, and volunteer for this and that to show that they care, but that's bull-fucking-shit! They don't give a bleep about us poor people. They lie to us, tell us, we do this, this and this, and everyone believes. When Cody was in pain, he didn't even write him a damn pain-killer because he was busy. My ass. He was probably too busy fucking his slut or mooching up to the rich ones. It'll all about the money, isn't it? You people are all about money." 

He made a gesture with his right thumb and index finger, gliding the 2 briskly, thumb over index, like flipping bills, or tossing a coin. "Because of that Jew, my friend died of an airborne infection of the Central line. What could be worse?"

There were 2 minutes left on the blood panel machines. "Keep talking," I said.

"37 years is a long time you know. When you know someone for 37 years, it takes another 37 years to forget." 

"I'm sorry for your loss, David."

"Thanks Jonny. Cody was such a simple-minded guy, you know. It's really hard to find. We lived together, found food together and hung out all the time. When I became homeless, in the September of 2006, he even left his parents' home to come with me."

"That was very sweet and considerate of him," I said. 

"Sometime around mid-summer, last year, we went to Santa Monica. Hitchhiked all the way. We did drugs, smoked pot, talked about life till the end of the night. We just always discovered new things about one another, and that brought us much closer throughout the years. Such a good guy...oh God's so vicious!" 

30 seconds left on the clock.

"A lot of you think that homeless people like us are always unhappy. But let me tell you, it's not true. Not necessarily. We are and we aren't. It's like a dynamo going back and forth. All we expect is for society to not treat us like a piece of shit. Like dirt. Many of us had homes once, had families once. But circumstances change things ya know? When you lose all of that, you start looking for new companions. People who understand your situation and not judge you for everything that happened. You look for people in the same boat as you -or even a new cruise-liner. You start bonding over it, slowly; you have things to talk about -where the free food is today, when the heater's not working in the Citigroup Atrium, when it is...stuff like that. There's competition too you know. People struggling...who gets that dang food first! But it's an adventure really. Not the typical...just a different kind of life. Some have it betters than other, just like you folks."

The green Fisher Scientific beeper goes off. I mute it and write down the numbers.

"Have you ever had a companion? Like someone who you just think about and it brings a smile on your face? Gives you energy on a bad day? Someone you know who's thinking about you constantly even if you haven't talked to them in 2 weeks? Someone you can count on no matter what -come hail come snow, even through the most bizarre family circumstances -like the death of your son? I smell him in this room, even thinking about him. I hear him talking on his cell phone with his god-damn sister in Nashville, Tennessee. Oh Cody..."

I smiled at him then waved my hand at Jemima, who was standing at the reception area, to let her know that the tests were complete and that she should send me the next patient.

But David continued. "...And you know when we were in Riverdale, earlier this year, visiting my cousin Diana Finley. One Saturday evening we sat down in the living room floor and made plaster molds of our hands. They looked great, boy, they looked grreat. You could see the outlines of the veins, hairs, everything. I took Cody's and he took mine. But that bastard broke it within a week. Haha. But I kept it carefully. And thank God I did. Now that he's gone, I hold on to it every night before I go to sleep, outside the church or on the street. It's like holding on to a little part of him, a part that doesn't slip away. A part of him that stays with me, real and alive. I bring it close to my face sometimes, to wipe my tears. Maybe he can feel it too, up there somewhere..."

"It'll get better," I say and offer him a hug. It's awkward and maybe unprofessional, but he appreciates it nonetheless.

"Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Time will tell. But I tell you boy, those Germans were right." 

I didn't want to prolong the conversation, on this topic of Nazism and anti-Semitism, any further. Finally, I said, "Your numbers are ready, David. Zenda will escort you to Dr Karen's office and she'll tell you what your numbers mean. It was nice meeting you. Hope you feel better and have a wonderful day."

He stands up while pushing his chair backward with a resounding squawk. He has advanced hydrocele, a condition where his testicles are enlarged to a point it almost touches the floor. Lymphatic drainage issues -chewing his organs away, second by second. Homeless and uninsured -why, of course, should he receive treatment? God forbid healthcare should ever be a human right -the line of thought that exasperates me beyond control. In the middle of all this, I notice his suspenders, beautifully woven, holding up his denim pants with mini-eruptions of thread. 

He shakes my hand one last time and before he leaves he leans forward and says, "Pleasure. Pleasure meeting you boy. When you grow up, just remember one thing, the helpless will always need your help. Don't fool them no more." 

for pleasure

I am surprised, a lot of the time, when I think about happiness. And what it means to be happy. I find myself thinking about what brings me happiness, the context, the circumstances, for example, under which I get to be happy; under which you get to be happy. Think about an occurrence in your life that brought you a tremendous amount of joy. And try and reminisce as much as possible about what the experience meant to you at the time. Does it mean the same to you today? Do you feel any different? Do you feel once-removed, or far-removed in any way? Perhaps your present dictates the interpretation of your past experiences; or maybe it doesn't. But what brought pleasure to me during my childhood years, my boyhood and labor-intensive teenage rarely give me pleasure anymore. It is a contradiction that really surprises me.

A lot has changed, for sure. Things that were once exciting and important seem trivial and silly today. Its immediacy removed, its urgency vacuumed away and its influence questioned. It embarrasses me, even though it shouldn't and it makes me wonder if my queerness has anything to do with it, with a concerted welding of whim and reason or an outcome of my solitude. When people live in solitude, they have the option of pleasing themselves, with the use of their hands, their tongues, their shadows, their thoughts, ideas and imaginations. Self-serving they call it; and it boggles minds. It only lasts for a period of time, though -long or short depends on the person -after which the excitement of self slips away. The body becomes a wasteland of provocation, the hull of repetition, and a metaphysical trough of mindless routine. One of the ways in which some overcome this condition of stagnancy is through the investigation of sexuality -a facet of human life, popularly filigreed with holiness. There is the aspect of primacy, the animal life, the mammalian living that they polish and present, to add gravity, meaning and culture. The transition, the body's exploratory desires, the gradualness of sexual curiosity is really quite baffling, if you put some time and think about it. From Lego-lions to jump ropes to genital play, the advent of maturity, age and body triggers is like a timely ritual, a sort of coming of age, like a ripening fruit cracking its skin. Or think about it like a Sunday circus, with its acrobats and medleys choreographed to a point of mechanical precision, and compare it to a child's timeline of development; as if readying for a circumstantial transition to which there is no undoing. Nothing left but the footsteps of time gnarling at existence.

The simplicity with which pleasure installs itself in one's day-to-day life in a gridded city of phenomenal squalor, is worth pondering. That was home, for me. A city of millions losing the battle of inequity and lawlessness. We clapped through the storm of helium balloons, in the event of a political victory, and returned to the fair grounds secure in our faith. We found joy in the squalor, even when the infrastructure of our intermittent luxuries fell apart; trampled down by capitalists and crushed to powder by the insidious government. We swam in the lakes, night and day, played carom at dusk and read to the homeless on Middleton Row. And we discussed literature and philosophy in coffee shops on Allenby and inched around the cobble stones, on alternate Tuesdays, taking photographs of the moon, jaws of clouds and the spouting cones of mustard sunshine. For years and years, we rolled in the mud, flew kites on the terrace and stole coconuts from neighbors, held hands of the homeless and rescued orphans and survivors of infanticide.

Can you believe that, desirous of boys, of heirs to estate, they would take their girls, the one-day olds, and drop them from window sills of the tenth floor bathroom? They did so, often; the ungrateful parents or sometimes the in-laws, and you could stand at a distance and see it happen. You could see a white bundled object, an epileptic spool, a miniature spindle, kicking through cloth, purring and wailing, till it came crashing down on the ground in a resounding thud. Blood would smudge the entrance to the wards, diffuse like ink through pores of terrycloth, and people would gather around, cry, be surprised and leave. That would be it. We would read about the police reports in tabloids or watch them on the news. But nothing ever happened, and no one ever got arrested because the law protectors were just the same -hungry for boys, the "cheaper of the two," the ones who would eventually "protect and take care" in old age. I would ask A sometimes, feeling exasperated and defeated, "Why do people do this? Does it give them some sort of pleasure?" And we would both sit in silence, at the south corner of a mahogany bakery, sipping coffee, positioning our frames while the voices of traffic horns bugled in the street, like an applause at a theater, raucous and boisterous, and fade away into the dizzying darkness of the evening. 

On some weekends A and I would bike to the eastern tip of the city, to the sunflower field on Pelham Way. We would park our bikes, drink some water, and lay on the grass, all afternoon, listening to songs of Leonard Cohen, humming along and gazing at the sky. The sun would shine brilliantly through a lattice of clouds, white and spongy like pillowy marshmallows, and we would trace the outlines of sunflower peduncles, while reciting Suzanne, Winter Lady and Stories of the Street. We would play with shadows, follow their trajectories with broken compasses, and whiff the limbs of wild sunflowers. And on days without breeze, we would doff our shirts, drop them on the floor and bolt into the lapel of the rolling grassland, huffing and puffing, breathing heavier and deeper, faster and faster, wheezing almost, with buckets of wind splashing against our bodies, spouting out thimbles of briny sweat, bells of tears clapping against our faces, right hand in the air, then the left, then right again, left again, like Sicilian marionettes, like tin robots, melting into the nebulous horizon, where sparrows chirped, ravens cawed and woodpeckers pirouetted on bamboo leaves.

One Thursday afternoon, when I was eleven, I went back home and masturbated in the shower stall, when no one was around. Globs of semen came gushing out through the nozzle of my foreskin, and I was absolutely terrified. I thought I'd done something wrong, that I would never be able to urinate again, and that God would punish me. The gooey white clumps gave off a musty odor, and I was sure that my parents would find out and that I would be grounded. But the release brought with itself an intoxicating experience, a kind of loosening up, a gimmicky pleasure that I had never felt before. It felt like, what I'd imagine to be, releasing steam from a steam engine, letting go of a pressure build-up. It felt like a rubber suction, siphoning out aches and pains from every square inch of my skin. It was intense, it was fierce and it felt exceptionally good, like someone or something had flossed the inside of my body, polished every valve, and scrubbed every bend of my elastic blood vessels. I was overcome with drowsiness afterwards, a satisfied mellow state, the kind where you are snug and comfortable and a peculiar motionlessness consumes your body. And you don't want to move, or tap your fingers or even lift your eyelids and just stay the way you are, listening to the ticking of the wall clock, running water or commercials on television. The pleasure that came that day from the simple act of genital contact was completely unprecedented, and despite the momentary panicking and ignorant anguishing, it became an addiction. An addiction that grew and grew over the years, driving me mad with desire, dictating my moods, surrounding my day-to-day with sexual affectation.

When Marjorie asked, a few years ago, what do you think about when you play with yourself, I said, "An older man or perhaps an older woman, taking control and giving me pleasure." I added the part about the older woman because, at the time, it was a fetish fantasy that other boys my age had and I didn't want to admit to my queer train of thought, not just yet. The idea of a sexual father figure engaging in fierce role play, exchanging kisses, touching lasciviously, licking and groping and caressing every fork of my body, me in submission, being charged and controlled, a face full of hair nuzzling my chest, calloused hands fondling my legs, wrinkles of age folding over eyes, eyes that dazzle like agate marbles, burning with desire, scorching with lust, bubbling with anticipation, soaring with climax, titillating and tonguing every pellet of sweat, every dribble of body oil, aroma of pheromones, brushing and nudging in the swirl of activity, in the flick of an overturned power dynamic, electrified me in a way. And then there was the other side; the side of being used. I wanted to be used as a sex object. Being made to moan, being made to writhe and squirm from edge to edge across the perimeter of the bed. Being tied to a wooden bed frame with woven ropes, metal girdles and a leather harness. Treated with disrespect, total powerlessness and abject humiliation. How this was acceptable under the gamut of hormones, I really do not know. For someone who protested violence, domestic abuse and sexual agency, how I could justify my own desires, I have no idea. How I could reason out the spectrum of my pleasures, I have no answer. What we did for pleasure, what I did for pleasure still confuses me sometimes. I am not ashamed by any means, however; I have no hesitations in admitting to my desires. Because I acted on it, many many times. And it felt so damn good.