“Alienation, however, does not lead our hero out of society, but deeper into it, for he is impelled by a curiosity to know, down to the smallest detail, the corrupt world that he wishes to escape.” —LARRY KRAMER, FAGGOTS
I’m a dumbass. And I’ll do my part on this island filling it up with other dumbasses like me. With rich people side-eyeing me at every red light. With locas who just came out of the closet and haven’t learned how to protect themselves yet. With Angélica. I’m a dumbass because I work at a clinic administering rapid HIV tests in a country where people refuse to get tested. Whether the results take fifteen minutes or three days, it doesn’t matter. No. I could care less about finding a cure. Why? Because diseases like HIV, like cancer, like the flu, serve to control overpopulation—all the excess people who are going to turn the world into a burned-out hunk of charcoal. A cure doesn’t interest me because I tested positive at twenty and I already know I won’t find love—the only cure I need, the only reason to want to go on living. I’m going to die at twenty-seven with a used-up smile. I also work nights at the bathhouse on Parada 22, Wednesday through Friday, right near my day job on Eduardo Conde. I pop in my headphones and listen to Madonna (the Like a Prayer era, never the MDNA era) while I walk down the hill, ring the doorbell, step through the blue light, climb the dark stairs, undress, and then work eight straight hours in a thong I own in shocking pink, in chartreuse green, in cherry jubilée … Whatever: the point is I show off my fat ass, which I’ve been self-conscious about since the ninth grade but the guys with the biggest dicks seem to like it. Who knows. The meds make me drop weight like a candle melting on an altar in front of a saint … In the middle of the night, I fearlessly walk the mazelike streets of Santurce because violence is like seroconversion: you can avoid it all you want but it’s gonna happen. You can try to gain a little control over how and when. The most beautiful and brutal things in this life happen like that: suddenly, terribly, cathartically.
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN strange. I care about things no one else cares about. The inverse is also true. I care about having a fresh gallon of milk in the fridge. I don’t care about remembering (or even knowing, for that matter) the names of the men I sleep with. I care about getting a front-row seat in my Puerto Rican art lecture (because the professor is eighty years old and the sound of his voice transports me and because the weed makes me imagine every painting he describes as surrealist). I don’t care about air-conditioning. I care about white rice. I don’t care about the meaning of life. I care about masturbation. I don’t care about small children. I care about the liberation of Puerto Rico. I don’t care about love. But then, I do. Then again, I couldn’t give a shit. Love just lands. You don’t look for it. It tethers itself to your body and drags you away like a comet hurtling through the night. You don’t look for love, because it can’t be found. If I looked for love the way I look for dick, pieces of my heart would end up in every library urinal. In every mangrove of the Capital and around Boquerón. To be honest, sometimes I feel broken into a million pieces anyway. Memories of me spread against walls with perverts asking to be jerked off and stepped on, memories written in cum that I clean off the bathroom floor and then watch spiral down the toilet, memories of the patio of my grandmother’s house, La Concha stairs, Mar Chiquita reefs, Condado beach. Yes, I’m a bathroom regular. So what? I love to feel my balls contract when some stranger peeks through the crack in the stall door and sees my erection in my left hand, then goes to the neighboring stall and starts jerking off (I will be forever grateful to the Adam who had the idea of drilling a hole in the wall, eye level with someone squatting like a crow on the toilet seat, at just the right height for them to see you playing with your foreskin). My mouth waters just at the thought of it. It also disgusts me.
I DON’T CARE about prevention because I got infected right from the beginning. Right from the very first breeding at seventeen. That’s what I suspect anyway … To be honest I don’t really know who infected me, but whoever it was I’m sure was cured in the act. He took the purest part of my being, the virginity that transcended any sexual act. That’s why I’m a dumbass. Because I let it happen and delighted in my metamorphosis. I suppose it was probably the soldier from Aguadilla who came all the way to San Juan when I told him I had the house to myself. I told him to hurry because the rain was chilling my bones, and warm like the summer sun he pulled me onto his big dick and tore up my ass for two hours until he screamed and then the sound of him snoring resounded through the empty house. He filled me with his sweat and cum. He lit my insides on fire. I can still feel the original big bang and the residual hot ash that burns red despite having been passed from one generation to the next—the radioactive material he used to make me sick, me and all the people around me. Then I fucked him and came inside him, like an idiot. The next day, when I went out to fuck for the second time (because when I get the craving there is no way to shake it), I fucked an athlete on a scholarship from Río Piedras with caramel skin and a fat ass. I don’t like the feeling of a condom, so I ripped it off and kept fucking him. I came inside him too. They never complain. They almost never complain. It makes me feel free, sometimes. It also makes me a dumbass.
AT THE CLINIC I collect souls. I have direct access to social-security numbers and credit cards … I wouldn’t ever do anything with them, but it’s tempting. Who knows. I always ask the same questions and get the same answers. Yes, they’ve been tested. Yes, they use drugs: weed, coke, dope, molly, speed, a little bit of everything, like salad. Yes, they are at risk, that’s why they sit two feet from my pen with that look of terror in their eyes. Yes, they are afraid—I can tell by that prehistoric stench. With my eyes I communicate that I understand them, that I knew their results as soon as they walked in, that I’m happy about it. That’s how you learn, dumbass. That’s how it is. That’s how our animal instincts develop. Just like that, with one fuck (only one, or hundreds, or thousands), you toss your life into the void. Because that’s life: constant death. Sex isn’t life, it’s a death: the most minuscule death, la petite mort. I die multiple times per day. They murder me, atrociously, with bullet wounds and stabbings, multiple times a day. Sometimes I murder myself with tenderness, with rage, with haste. Sometimes I want to murder in cold blood, to make someone else suffer, to set the deterioration of a body in motion so that in ten years it rots and disintegrates like a dried-up fetus in a belly, and break the cycle. It’s not that I’m horny: I’m suicidal. Sometimes I cry thinking about the past and about dangerous things, and I sit down in the shower with the water as hot as it goes and my skin glows red like the setting sun.
MY UNIVERSITY MAKES me sad. So many abandoned buildings (more than you might expect), so much free time to sit and smoke in the Humanities buildings while blowing off your French homework. There are a lot of people I’d like to say hi to but they avoid eye contact. I waited so long to enroll in classes for next semester that I missed the deadline. I’m a dumbass for leaving it till the last minute, and I don’t know anyone in administration to offer sexual favors to. In my mind I repeat to myself that I am a scholar, that I am going to be a professor of queer Puerto Rican literature. Then I remember I’m going to die at twenty-seven in an assault, murdered by a lowlife drug addict, and before long I’m back on my bullshit—horny in my favorite library bathroom stall waiting for the next customer to come in. It’s always the same ones—a DOE secretary, a bartender from the main strip, an unemployed social worker—and they think I can’t identify which cumshot corresponds to which dick. Eventually I get tired and jerk off a few times while listening to Cultura Profética (but from Diario, never from La Dulzura) to kill some time before my shift at the bathhouse starts. As I arrive my stress lowers. Here I know my role. Muscle memory. Greet the regular clients with a wink, collect their IDs, give them a key to a locker or to a room. I rub the dirty towels on my face, absorbing the musk of wet male, and then let them fall from my arms into the washing machine. I disregard the instructions to wear plastic gloves to pick up the used condoms off the floor. No one notices, because no one pays me any mind. Not because I am unattractive, but because they’re busy. There is no pool or gym or even a clean surface to sit down on. If they aren’t fucking, they are frustrated and pacing around in circles watching other people fuck. The best days are Saturdays, when the cars line up along Fernández Juncos Avenue and the bathhouse fills to capacity, when men bounce off the corrugated metal walls like comets, when you can hear doors opening and closing all night, when the sound of the neon-lit showers fails to drown out the moans and grunts and I dissolve into the crowd. For the record, my favorite days are Thursdays, when there’s no cover for customers under twenty-one and I blast Lady Gaga (from Born This Way, even though I don’t even really like that album) and turn off the lights.
Sometimes I think love will find me at the bathhouse, but at most I’ll probably just confuse it for a good fuck. Despite my supposed wisdom, I still haven’t felt the intimacy of a loving relationship—not even from my mother, who abandoned me at my grandparents’ house and ran away to Orlando, or from my father, who had a string of kids along the southern coast. So I’ve come to the conclusion that love doesn’t actually exist—or maybe it does? Maybe I’ve felt it, for real, outside a momentary hormonal flash? No, I know better. Love is just a perfect illusion that escapes all reason. I’d like to think we’re beyond these mind games, that we’re no longer capable of giving ourselves over to one another like the sun and moon surrendering themselves to the inevitability of an eclipse. I reject centuries of machismo and closetry. I recuse myself from finding love with creepy old men who think they’re hot shit cruising in the dark, or with potbellied bears who can’t get laid so they brush up against you, or anyone, for a rush, or with married guys who forget to take off their wedding rings. I think I could be happy somewhere else, on another island. If I ever fall in love completely, it won’t be with a Puerto Rican. Never. If my people are incapable of seeing beyond themselves, how can they feel true love? I’d prefer to die at twenty-seven at the hand of a crazy junky who throws me over the De Diego guardrail into the whirring traffic of the Baldorioty Expressway. That’s why I’m moving to New York. Soon. Somehow, some-way. In fact, it’s long overdue. I want to live the life of a go-go dancer in a gay club. In La Escuelita. In the Greenhouse. In Splash. In the Boiler Room.
Even though I’m going to die at twenty-seven in one of the gun fights that happen every Thursday night near Vidy’s, I’d prefer to prolong the inevitable for as long as I can. Long, but not so long that I disappear like an extinguished star succumbing to a black sky: I want to be a celestial flare, a red giant bursting in a macrocosmic blaze, dragging all who wish along in my fiery trail. I want to play my part in the extinction of the species. To contribute to the statistics, to the federally funded projects, to the isolation. Here we crash into one another. And I’m tired of this putrid little island, of my ocean view and the traffic jams on the freeway. I’m tormented by those flashing turquoise and scarlet lamplights the locas from Sacred Heart University ignore. I’m sick of working, sick of these empty hours. Sometimes I think the gringos live better than we do, except they don’t know how to appreciate the flavor Blackness leaves in your mouth. They can’t know how delicious tight curly hair is, almond eyes, heavy dicks. In New York there are plenty of Black people, plenty of Dominicans too. I’m craving plantains … Maybe today I’ll make tostones.
I apologize—it’s just that I’m on my fourth blunt and I’m in my own world. Lately the weed I buy comes from Colorado and I get greedy. I’m going to die at twenty-seven from pneumonia that I’ll ignore; that’s why I need my natural medicine starting now. Botanical. But I’m not one of those people who think they live in a beer commercial either, I swear I’m not like that. I don’t chill twenty-four-seven. Though I’m sure that, since I was raised to be a good Christian boy, if this very morning someone were to ask me how I’m doing, I would tell them great! Better than ever. Super. Trés bien. I wouldn’t tell them I couldn’t eat breakfast because nausea and diarrhea turned my intestines to liquid. I wouldn’t mention the new blotch on my dorsal spine. I wouldn’t tell them I need to go to the clinic today so I don’t run out of meds; that if I skip even just for one day, I’ll spoil months of consistency; that if I skip even just for an hour, my body will start to go to shit; that if I wait another minute, I will shit myself from anxiety and need to be taken to the hospital and die from shame. But today I’m cold and don’t feel like taking the train, and there is an asteroid field tearing my insides to shreds.
Fucking pills. They destroy me from the inside out. They give me night terrors. They give me bloodcurdling dreams. They make me piss the bed like I did when I was seven years old. If I just learn to stop the nightmares, I can break the cycle. Sometimes I dream that red ants are eating my dick with molten-hot steel clamps for mouths. Sometimes I dream that I’m being dismembered and chopped into tiny pieces at twenty-seven, a victim of a hate crime, dragged from Loíza to Río Grande without ever finding love. Sometimes whole days flash before my eyes—classes, traffic jams, hunger, sex, coffee, water, weed—and when I blink, I realize I’m still in bed, thinking I’m alive when I’m not, aging twenty-four hours in twenty-four seconds. Some nights I don’t sleep at all. Some mornings I can hardly lift my head up off the pillow.
After my shift at the bathhouse I walk the Santurce streets to feel alone. I walk from Del Parque Street to Miramar and stop at Olimpo to absorb the first morning light. I pop in my headphones and listen to Amy Winehouse (from Frank, not Back to Black) because I very much identify with her lyrics. The early morning sky turns cloudy and the shadows stretch long as the sun comes up. San Juan looks abandoned. I see myself in everything. I’m the junky gringo with a blond beard who sleeps in a bank doorway and dreams of his former banker life. I’m the old textile factory that’s been reduced to rubble. I’m the queen limping around Condado unable to find customers because her sores smear her purple lipstick. I am the avenue. I am everything that glimmers in the last shadows of night. The glass shards, used syringes, broken car windows. I’m surrounded by fallen stars and the hunger returns to me. I want to suck dick. But the runners are all the way on Ashford, and I don’t have the strength to walk there let alone convince someone to pull their pants down for me. Now I must be dreaming because the graffiti peels itself off the buildings, the rust-colored giraffes with twisted necks stampede, trampling drunk drivers, obsidian lizards with granite eyes drag their tongues and taste the dirty street, and I’m just a hooded figure with a vulture’s face, dressed in black, shrinking in the rain between asbestos-ridden buildings. Then I come to. I am in my room covered in white with a brush and a tube of paint and am not sure whether I’m the one who’s been painting white crosses on the streets or, on the contrary, that miserable faggot always escaping and insisting on defacing the walls.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I do not exist. I am. I am not. I don’t know what I am, I am something … I am a dumbass because I’m still in bed. I don’t have the courage to open my eyes and find myself still in kindergarten with my hand down Alexander’s pants, and learn that all these years were just a hallucination, the kind only children can see. I’m an infant, I know. I still don’t know how to speak. I still don’t know how to walk. I don’t know how I managed to get this second job … maybe because the owner says I suck dick better than anyone.
A disturbing pattern has emerged. Both of my jobs essentially are the same: I give out condoms, promote prevention—but don’t ask me how many I’ve given out in the six months I’ve worked there. Some nights at least a hundred men come and go, but I can count on one hand the times I’ve refilled the condom bucket. Just before dawn, when there are no more keys to hand out and it stops raining wet towels, I walk home to my apartment. The truth is I’m not afraid. I know what to expect as I walk down Sagrado Corazón Avenue. To feel more alone than ever. For even my shadow to abandon me and escape down the dark streets. It doesn’t seem like anyone lives in these houses. They’ve already turned to ghosts lighting lamps in the night. There’s no breeze at all, toujours. I choke with loneliness. I would walk up Bouret Street, but a Black guy and his two lovers live there and they make fun of me when I walk by, and I yell “Ay, qué rico” so they don’t realize I’m a dumbass, but they laugh with fiery breath and say, “Awww come on, don’t be like that, don’t be like that.”
I gave out tests for two years before I took one when I was closing up the office one day. I turned out the lights and pricked myself three times to be sure. The lines appeared on all three tests. I didn’t have support from anyone and didn’t need it anyway. I let out a sigh of relief. I cried tears of joy. I don’t have to be anxious for the rest of my life, busying myself to delay the inevitable. Now I will take Atripla once daily and my problems will be resolved. That’s how I will break the cycle—by entering into another. Now I only fuck at night so no one will say a word to me, so they hear me open the condom but don’t see me “put it on.” I hear them moan when my dick slips inside them and their balls get hot with pleasure. Biological. If they put it on for me, well fine, I’ll play along even though I can’t keep it up as easily. But that hardly ever happens. You wouldn’t believe how rarely they ask about my status. Or how easily I lie. Très facile. Sure, I took the test on June 27, the so-called National HIV Testing Day, and I arrived just as they were closing and the fat Black guy who worked there gave it to me anyway. He gave me the results after fifteen minutes: negative. When I say it, I look them in the eyes with a naughty smile and they eat it up. Is it really that easy? Of course it is. I’ve already given that speech three times today. Next time I’ll change it up, keep it fresh.
That gets me thinking about something I’ve always said: I love my island, but I hate the people. No one here is worth a damn. Nothing is worth shit anymore … How things change. Some changes are irreversible and we can’t escape the rattling in our bones. Like death. Like a virus. Like sex. My world is a spinning top falling through space, and Puerto Rico sold its soul to tourism. I don’t deal well with the cold, I start to shiver, but I still wake up drenched in sweat. That’s why I keep going back to the bathhouse: to bring my temperature down to absolute zero and kneel down in a stall to wait for a faceless hand to offer its warmth, rub my dick like firewood, spark an explosion that stretches across a black-hole abyss, an orgasmic supernova that reheats my body like a belly-up lizard on a rock at noon. Come to think of it, just the other day I reconnected with a nurse from Centro Médico whom I’d crossed paths with at a motel near Aguadilla. One of my many excursions that month. Back in Río Piedras I get a Grindr message that he’s on campus, and I go to meet him, even though I was headed toward Jesús T. Piñero Avenue. We go to the fourth-floor bathroom of the Business Administration building and into one of the stalls. With his dick in my mouth, I stick a finger in his ass before he turns around and hands me a condom (thank god he has a Magnum). I don’t tell him anything because he doesn’t ask, nor does he turn around to look and make sure. He cums and I feel an unfamiliar urge to smile. For some reason, while we wash our hands, I hug him. There’s no hint of rejection in his eyes. The smell of his pink polo is intoxicating; his torso is soft, slightly deflated. I watch him observe my hands slide along his forearms and neither of us wants to let go. I’m afraid if I speak the moment might shatter. We’re still for almost fifteen minutes, floating.
“Does this feel weird for you?”
“Super weird.”
“Ah, okay … Should I stop?”
“No, no … I don’t mean it like that. I just wasn’t expecting it, but I like it.”
“Chemical.”
I could tell he was breathtaking when he was younger. His name is Omar. Omar. Now I can say I fell in love with an Omar in the bathroom of the University of Puerto Rico. C’est magnifique … but he woke something that had died in me. I want to see my reflection in his eyes while I breed him with the burning feeling in my belly. I want to feel myself on top of him, wrapping around him, without a condom to separate our love, to feel that with one fuck I could close the cycle and be born again. I want to stop hunting down dick like a vampire, but like everything in this life (like everything on this island), I find it impossible to do. So now I ignore his texts. Now he doesn’t exist. He’s just more graffiti marking my city’s walls. I dream of men like him from time to time. That’s why I’m a dumbass, because I just drift along, let the current take me and drag me under … C’est la vie.
It’s not sustainable to test negative or positive every morning and then go to the bathhouse the same night. It’s a push and pull that gives me whiplash; I see the same faces over and over in contrasting spaces. Maybe my brain is just fried from all the pills. I’ve been smoking a lot of crystal lately. I can concentrate but don’t sleep for three days straight, and I enter a new plane of consciousness. I see a lot of monsters. When I cum, I cum drops of dawn. They never ask me for condoms, but they always request clean towels. Lube, yes. They ask me for a lot of lube, and it costs them two dollars extra. Apparently friction is more important than self-preservation. People want to die, that’s the thing. I’m a dumbass for wanting to help people who don’t want to be helped. Protection isn’t enough. Motivation isn’t enough. There’s something in the water or in the air or in the heat that makes us dig our own graves, then climb into them and wait for hurricane season, for water to cleanse us, submerge us, drown us. Then stagnate. This is my personal glory hole. Welcome. Remember, clothing is prohibited. A towel around the waist or nothing. Lingerie optionnelle.
I have to tell myself the universe will eventually return itself to equilibrium. Ce sont les lois de la physique. Everything returns to ash, and when it’s your turn to die, the same sun you were born under keeps rising. Life is tedious, an aimless dream that never ends. It’s only when I close my eyes that I truly am, and so with death I wake. This world has stopped making sense. There’s no rhyme or reason: the purest of us wind up dead in a gutter bled dry and soulless, the filthiest remain with the marrow of the stars, and everyone in between surrenders to entropy. It’s absurd. I’d rather die open-mouthed while fucking at the age of twenty-seven. When I go all my deaths will flash by me in one macabre flow of consciousness: burnt at the stake and vomiting demons in a nameless, timeless forest and watching a tribe push a giant fireball out the mouth of an erupting volcano. That’s how I’ll break the cycle. I’ve been told I’m like a train gone off the rails. It’s just as well.
Meanwhile I get ready for another shift. I take my pills—hardly paying attention to which is which. It’s already getting late. I crawl into a crepuscular world. It’s the last Saturday of the month and the owner lets me be the star of the show. I shaved my head for the occasion. I don’t want to look human. I want to look like something else entirely. I’m another species and at the same time, I’m not. People around me notice: I can tell by the way they look at me. I’m their mirror: most would kill to be in my place. The other star arrives, an ex-lover, a Black photographer with a kilometric dick. We undress (except for my bright-red jockstrap) on the improvised stage near the lockers. I start kissing him with a lot of tongue and the clients gather round. They look like little nocturnal monsters with their big eyes, with the red glow on their eyelids, watching us. He opens a pack of condoms, but I whisper in his ear that we don’t need one, that I’m clean, and he smiles and pulls me against him. I begin to leave my body when his nails dig into my hips. I hear panting all around me. I become the vapor that fogs up the porn playing on the TV screens. More dicks come, more faceless bodies. I’m a virus traveling from mouth to mouth. I yell something I once read in a Humanities bathroom stall: “Don’t pull out, leave it inside! Fill my ass with cum!” I turn into hot, milky seed on the bathroom floor. I feel vibration and heat deep in my ass. I’m just another body in a dark room that stinks of sweat. I climb into the middle and get fucked by several different people, mercilessly, without ever needing to look behind me. They cover me with their junk. They cover the biohazard tattoo just above my ass; it melts under the scarlet light and grunts like a skull. I turn into something that exists, doesn’t exist, an entity that dies at twenty-seven because they’ve always been, at the very core, a dumbass. That’s how I transcend my own skin and get out. I’m a dumbass because it’s easier that way. I’m a dumbass because I’m an Aries and I like to play with fire.