Hector was right. It’s a fucking cave inside. A wreck. Assorted dog stuff everywhere, dog food scattered here and there on the floor. Piles of newspapers. A torn-up, scratched-up black leather couch with an old blanket thrown over it. A large-screen TV with the local news on, volume off. Construction boots, bomber jackets, baseball caps lying around. A picture on the TV table of Hector, probably twenty years ago, with some gay blond guy — one of those really gay beach pics, both of them in their tiny Speedos and wraparound glasses, arms around each other.
Hector goes to the fridge, pops open a chocolate-flavored Ensure, holds it up to Mateo. “You want one? I live on these things. They’re easier than eating.”
“No, thanks,” says Mateo. The dog’s humping his leg now and he’s absently massaging her head. Hector goes to the back bedroom, turns up some gay house music, comes back. Thump, thump, thump, thump-thump, thump, thump, thump. Some diva screaming, You got me feeling high, some bullshit like that. Mateo’s heart is pounding, his hands are shaking, and his legs are weak. He feels like he’s gone into some kind of fugue state. The crit seems a million miles away.
“Why’d you come in here, negro?” Hector asks him. He’s standing behind the kitchen counter, drinking his Ensure. “You wanna get high?”
Finally, Mateo thinks, he asked. “You wanna snort H with me?”
Hector’s eyes brighten. “You got H?” Mateo nods. “I haven’t done that in a while,” Hector says. “You wanna smoke it?”
Mateo doesn’t say anything. Smoking it — he hasn’t done that yet. He’s always considered that the next step into the beyond, the one that leads to needles, which makes you a full-time junkie and not just a functioning, recreational user. “I never did that,” he finally says.
“Hold on,” Hector says. He goes back to the bedroom, turns up the music, comes back with a carton of tin foil and a toilet-paper roll, draws the dingy sheet on the front room’s one window, which reveals people’s feet walking by on the sidewalk above. He sits down on the cracked, ripped-up couch, lights another menthol.
“Come sit,” he says. Mateo does, so close he’s deeply inhaling the fagfunk. He pulls the baggie out of his wallet, hands it to Hector. The dog, who’d actually been chilling out in a corner, bounds up and comes and sticks her huge head between the two of them like she wants to get high too.
“Sit the fuck down,” Hector yells, pushing her down. She goes down with a whimper, looking up at the two of them from the floor miserably, as though she’s left out. Hector tears off a piece of tin foil, then folds it and tears it again until it’s about five inches square, then taps some of the off-white powder onto its center. Mateo watches him, transfixed, while he does it. Why are you doing this? he asks himself. You are going to fuck up your crit, that much is for certain. Yet deep within, he is still, still, still just watching Hector, feeling utterly and inexplicably at home. He reaches down, strokes the dog’s head, which she rubs desperately against his arm. His foot is tapping nervously to the pounding house music.
Finally, Hector hands him the foil square and the cardboard roll. “Wait to inhale till you see smoke,” he says, snapping the lighter to life beneath the foil. As soon as Mateo sees blue smoke curl up off the foil, like a genie appearing from the ether, he sucks it up into the roll. And then, even faster than when he snorts it, his world melts and crumples, beautifully and softly, inside his stomach, the velvety crumple blooming through every vein of his body. He sinks leagues down and the world comes into focus from below, almost like looking up at the sun from under the water, everything quavering, tremulous, so kind and lovely.
He smiles at Hector. “Fuckin’ crazy gay guy,” he says, and cracks up. Hector laughs with him, his eyes popping open. After Hector sucks up his own plume of smoke, he leans toward Mateo with his mouthful of smoke, then he stops short, turns away, blows it out. They each take a few more hits, then Hector sets down the makeshift paraphernalia. They each lie back on the couch. The dog lumbers up on the couch and settles in between Mateo’s legs, grateful not to be turned away this time. The fucking house music pounds on. Somewhere inside his head, Mateo’s thinking, Shut off the fucking gay house music, but he doesn’t really care.
“Feels so good,” Mateo manages to say.
At first, Hector says nothing. Finally, that crazy mess is quiet! The H has cut his speed high. “So peaceful,” Hector finally says.
Mateo’s arm twitches deliciously, along with the exquisite, vaguely nauseous twitching in his belly. Eventually, the music goes off and it’s just the three of them, lying there, the now-dark room flickering with the changing shots of the silent TV. Mateo can hear voices, cars, an ice-cream truck out on the street. This is the perfect place, his body tells him. The H baggie is the hole in the air we crawl into to get there, like when Bugs Bunny, being chased, saws a circle out of the air around him and jumps into it, then plugs it back up so that Elmer Fudd slams into it and lands on his ass. It’s just blue sky, it’s just the air, but there is a hole through it. Go through the hole in the sky.
Mateo turns, curls up on his side, wraps his arm around Hector’s leg, tucks his feet up to his butt. He’s engulfed in Hector’s fagfunk, so comforting. The dog feels good in the crook of his legs, her huge, steady breathing. He feels Hector gently stroke his pigtails.
“I remember this crazy fucking hair,” Hector says. “Fucking negrito in the building.”
Mateo cracks up in slow motion. “Negrito,” he echoes, laughing in a bath of delectable black ooze.
Eight. Parallel Tracking (1989)
There was weak A/C in Reminiscence on MacDougal in the Village, so it had been hot in there all afternoon, and it was hot and muggy on the street, especially for early June. Milly came out of the shop where she was working the summer after her first year of college, pulled her hand back through her moist curls, rubbed her eyes, sighed. She walked a few feet, felt the heat and her own fatigue and, most of all, the suspension of everything, this odd pocket of six o’clock when the little street was silent, when cars and horns sounded miles away — and she surprised herself by sitting down on a stoop and hiking up her black eyelet gypsy skirt and pulling a cigarette out of her fringed brown suede bag. She lit it, then pulled a bandanna out of her bag to blot her face with, then tied the bandanna around her head to hold her hair back. She was thinking about Jared Traum and should she go back in the store and call him or wait till she got uptown? Or maybe they’d stay downtown so better she just go back in the store, where Alicia was working till it closed, and call him now, and hang out down here in some café. .
She inhaled gratefully on the cigarette, an American Spirit, which was suddenly what everyone she knew smoked. Jared Traum, she thought. She’d known him since seventh grade, the school circuit uptown. Then they ended up at the same college, taking art classes together, that comfort of seeing someone on campus you knew from before, though, being from New York, that really wasn’t a rare thing; she was one of eight girls from her school who’d ended up at that particular college.
In May, Jared had told her he’d be in New York for a few weeks before going to some program at Cranbrook — she wished her parents would send her to some summer painting program! But no, it was work all summer, and then they’d all go to a family friend’s house on the North Fork of Long Island for a week in August — that was it for her vacation. Jared had said they should hang out. Yeah, she’d said. Then he’d called her last night, from his dad’s office in the East Village where he liked to stay because his dad let him use a whole room as a studio.