HE SHOWS UP TO MY HOUSE unannounced again—he’s fresh off a however-many-day speed binge. His shoes are missing. He’s panting hard and he smells like he’s been walking barefoot in the hot streets for miles.
My heart sinks deep. He’s different from the European cologne–wearing, fragrant dandy I once knew him to be; he had bewitched me from the first day I laid eyes on him. It was with little effort on his part, I knew this much—his wish was my command, even when he had nothing to say. He was never the boy who everyone could love. He was kind of an asshole, but more importantly he was something that God had tailor-made just for me.
He was funny, morbidly beautiful, always horny, and if it wasn’t so sad there might have been something about his self-destruction that seemed sexy. Perhaps it was sexy when we were younger—it had morphed from sexy to demonic long ago. Yet he still had that power over me, this thing that I could never explain, like saying no to him was always out of the question.
Even in the half a second it took for all these thoughts to flash and materialize in my mind, I sense that he’s already annoyed at the slow recognition in my eyes. Like he’s daring me not to let him in.
He says nothing, and I’m taken aback, because the first time this happened it was an explosion—this is the second time he’s come over strung out and I tell myself it will be the last but I also said that last time and now I’m not so sure.
THE FIRST TIME, he was crazed and out of his mind. It was a very active disassociation. He was convulsing and dry heaving. He started breaking things and yelling at me, telling me to get the fuck out of his apartment, that he would kill me. The situation was moving so fast that I stood there silent and still. He took off his shirt and pants and the track marks on his arms and legs looked like a constellation of stars. He lay on the couch but as soon as he lay down he popped back up; he ran out of my apartment in his underwear and I ran after him, chased him down the street, shouted for him to come back, but he just ran faster and faster. This was some years ago. I just assumed that he would be dead soon, and tucked the memory away.
This time he is quieter. There isn’t any energy left in him and he’s so thin I want to cry. I shave his head and make him a bath and throw away his smelly, mangled clothes. I go look for clean things I have for him so that he can lie in bed with me later. I turn the air conditioner on because I know he is burning up and he likes his pillow and sheets cold when his body settles into bed. I remember that much from when we lived together.
It had been his apartment first, some fifteen years before. These days people talk about how expensive the city is but dear god, even when a one-bedroom apartment was $650 a month we basically couldn’t afford it. I got kicked out of my spot and he let me move in because he wanted me close. He wanted to play house. It just worked. Or rather it worked for longer than I thought it would.
This boy, as far as he and I are concerned, could show up to my house with a severed head and I would still let him in—that’s how unnecessarily devoted to him I am. I remember saying to him in our youth, “No, I’ll never leave”—he held me to my words like a steel trap stabs into a bear.
I run a bath for him and put him in. The boy who I actually missed is long, long gone. But I cannot sever myself from what remains. What was once a big beautiful star has collapsed in on its own weight and turned into a black hole.
•••
I REMEMBER WHEN we were younger—he was the one who picked me. I remember it. I worked as a waiter at the diner near this spot he bartended at. We couldn’t have been more than twenty-two at the time. He would come after his shift at the bar and I remember he came in for a week in a row at 3:00 a.m. He would sit in the same place and stare at me—I’d ask him, “Is there something I can get you, sir?” And he would always say with kind eyes, “No, you’re fine,” and nurse his cup of coffee another thirty or so minutes. I would see him eyeing my every move and I always found it rude. He explained to me after I moved in with him that he wasn’t trying to be, and said, “I don’t think I had ever seen anything like you before,” and to the present day he had never really clarified that statement. Anything like me how? Did he mean a punk boy who worked at a diner? Dear god, at the time the whole city was CRAWLING with the likes of me. Or did he mean a Black boy like me? Or did he mean something outside the Venn diagram of sociopolitical identity politics?
I can only imagine he meant Black because though he loved me I know that he did not see us as the same thing. I knew that I read as “other” to him, and I learned why one day.
To the eye he looked like some Mission cholo dude—or at least that’s where one’s sexual desire would go when meeting him. He was Mexican, 6'3", bigger built, face of a fallen-ass angel (there were tattoos all over it), and he just had the style. Graffitied skateboard and a black hoodie and a Giants cap. He had a gold crucifix necklace that I liked to mentally fixate on whenever he wore it, which basically was every day. I had fucked enough boys with Catholic damage to know that if he’s wearing a crucifix, he’s definitely a ho. That boy was a ho. Yet still, that shit was all a crafted look ’cause his ass was as Orange County as a strip mall next to Disneyland.
I remember the first holiday that he dragged me to Southern California to meet his folks. I expected some charged, colonially Spanish feast of tamales or mole, but his family home had a framed American flag in the living room and I think I offended his mother when I looked visibly taken aback when they served a TV dinner for Thanksgiving. They had the TV on the entire time playing the news. It felt like I was in some form of hell and it made me feel a certain way for him. How on Earth did he grow up in this?
I remember him saying to me once, “I just like that you’re from somewhere—I don’t feel like I’m from somewhere.” I remembered the scene from Thanksgiving and understood what he meant. But this was one of the many holes he had in himself that he always made visible to me.
I never really needed to stare deep into some crystal ball to understand what his issue was. He had this way of always laying the problem out as plainly as possible.
Like how I was living with him in his house but he had boyfriends—a great many Daddies and some other boys our age. Sometimes I had to meet them and it was always the same. Some weird person who existed out of the realm of our life; he was always trying to “date up.” None of these men ever stayed for long and I found it rude as fuck that he even had the nerve to flaunt his whores in front of me.
Either way he chose me as his pet and for a long time we were happy. We were happy for longer than I thought we would be.
Our encounters blossomed into nights of us roaming the town high as fuck, well into the dawn. He would show up to my diner with bags of whatever drugs he copped at his bar and we would snort them and wait till 6:00 a.m. for my graveyard shift to end before heading to this one bar that was open all day, and we would party into the afternoon. We did this on a loop of what seems like years but in reality could maybe have been months. Time with him always seemed queered and distorted. A day with him seemed like both an hour and a lifetime. That’s the type of love we had.
I remember one night we got drunk and got into a fistfight about nothing at a bar and got kicked out. We found a storefront several blocks later and made up—we started kissing on the ground and then I remember we had sex on the sidewalk, three different people walked past us and didn’t even stop to notice. God bless San Francisco.
Another night he was so drunk he said that if I truly loved him I would do anything he said, and I responded, “Yes. I love you. I will do anything you say.” And so he grabbed me by the arm and we ran under an 18-wheeler stopped at a red light and made out underneath it for what seemed like forever until we heard the gears shift and sprinted from beneath it before it ran us over.
There were rules, of course—he never called me his boyfriend. We fucked, we lived together, we almost died together partying, all that shit. But he was the lover and I was the beloved. I was to obey what he said; it was like this incestuous brotherhood where I was the younger one who was to take every cue from him, which was a strange arrangement considering we were the same age.
My relationship to him was always a very specific kind of mindfuck—behaving as boyfriends when we weren’t but actually were. We did all the things two people who know each other too well do. We took turns being bored a lot. Whenever I was present, physically or mentally, he wasn’t—even when we were at the same table eating or in the same bed fucking.
IT HAPPENED THAT he just stopped coming home. He was always into the older Daddies, the ones who led him down darker paths than he had planned for me. He would brag about this one Daddy who had leather blackout curtains, and how he would sit and do drugs with him for days and not see the sunlight. I got tired of cleaning him up after his binges. I always felt like the Daddies he chased got to burn all the good parts of him up with the drugs they pumped into him, like they all wanted to turn him into some drugged-up porno pup. When they were done with him I would always have to glue the pieces back together. Somewhere in the back of my head—despite all factors making it seemingly unfathomable—I thought that he would ask me to marry him. I learned that the most I would ever be was his nurse and his surrogate boyfriend. If he hadn’t rescued me all those years ago from homelessness I probably could break the spell he has over me, but his early generosity has me locked in this position like a seat belt. I was on this ride, and on this ride, I would stay. We’re both thirty-two now.
I remember when his absence from the apartment became permanent. I didn’t hear from him and he stopped paying rent. I feared he was dead until that first time he came knocking on the door. He saw the apartment we once shared together and all he saw was me moving on with my life without him, and I guess it set him off. I didn’t understand why he chose to ignore the fact that he was the one who abandoned me.
I PUT HIM IN $130 white Champion sweatpants I just got at the store when I recently went on a shopping spree high on pills; I pair them with the matching $130 white hoodie because I want to wrap him in expensive things and get him to my comfortable bed.
I trace his body with my eyes and I know he cannot sleep. The drugs are hammering through him like a freight train. I know his body like it’s my own, and along his torso are a ridiculous bunch of pro-American, Sailor Jerry–style tattoos, spread all across his chest and belly, but from the start of his left clavicle and going up you can see where his tattoos had moved into weirder Aztec imagery. He started that phase when he moved to San Francisco and became more “woke.” He had an outline of some Aztec warrior god along his clavicle and neck, and I remember the line work of the god’s hand sits perfectly on top of the part of his neck where his jugular vein would pump bloody murder whenever he was high. I would sometimes just watch it move up and down and up and down and damn near hypnotize myself.
I get a bucket of ice water and sit it by the bed with a rag in it. I keep the lamp on the nightstand on and stay up with him. Every time I wipe his head with cold water I say, “You are going to behave yourself. You are going to come back to me.”