When my cell phone rang, it said: Tom Office. TOM1 was his private cell phone. I actually expected to hear his voice. I hadn’t heard from him in over a month. That’s the way it was with us. I wouldn’t hear from him for a week or a month or two months and then I’d get a phone call from him. “Al,” he’d say, “let’s have a drink.” My name is Michael—but he renamed me Al. “Mike-Al,” he said one morning as we lay in bed. And then it just became Al. Half the time he called in the middle of the night. “Let’s have a drink,” he’d say.
And I’d say, “Now? It’s one thirty in the morning.”
“You were asleep?”
“What else would I be doing at one thirty in the morning?”
“I could think of a few things.”
“I’m tired, Tom, it’s late.”
There would be silence on the phone—and I could tell he was a little hurt because when he called that late, I always refused to let him come over. I’d never been anybody’s booty call, nobody’s bitch.
“Okay,” he’d say. “Tomorrow. At the Kentucky Club. Six o’clock?”
“Sure,” I’d say. It was our private joke. He said he’d had a dream about me—and in that dream he walked into the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez and there I was at the bar, smiling, waiting for him. “That’s where it began for us, babe. At the Kentucky Club.”
“It was a dream,” I said.
“You looked like an angel in that dream,” he said. “A fucking angel.”
I laughed. “So,” I said, “the only way for me to arrive at angel status is to appear in your screwed-up dreams.”
“Take it any way you can get it, babe.”
I guess I got a kick out of the Kentucky Club thing. All it meant was that he’d pick me up at my place. Kentucky Club was code for home. Every time he arrived at my doorstep, he was all smiles and charm. He’d kiss me and say, “I missed you, babe.” It annoyed me, all that affection pouring out of him. He made it all look so easy.
We’d laugh, we’d talk, we’d have dinner. He drank a lot. I drank with him. One time I wasn’t in the mood to drink and I ordered a club soda. At the end of the evening, he said, “I feel lonely.”
“Because I didn’t drink with you?”
He nodded. He looked sad. I ordered a drink before we left. He kissed me in the car.
Mostly we’d wind up at my place. Sometimes we’d wind up in a nice hotel because he liked them and could afford them. But we never went to his place, not ever, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t even know where he lived. That put me at a disadvantage. You could tell a lot about a person when you knew where they lived, the neighborhood they chose, the yard they tended or didn’t tend, the paintings they hung on their walls. Tom could study me through all the things I had in my house—and things I didn’t have. He liked looking around my place. He said I had too many books.
“Look,” I said, “I haven’t read half of them.”
It didn’t make him feel any better. “That means you’ve read the other half.”
“Guess so,” I said.
“We got to get you a life,” he said.
“Sometimes reading makes me feel alive.”
“Like I said, we got to get you a life.”
Tom and I, we had certain rules. I never asked about the details of his life. That was his rule. And we weren’t ever, not ever, to bring up the word love. That was my rule. I wasn’t going to get near that word. When he disappeared for a month or two, I never asked where he’d been. Sometimes he told me—sometimes he didn’t. He had secrets. I let him keep them. I had my secrets too. So that’s the way we played it.
I never figured out what we had, what I meant to him, what he meant to me. Not that I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I was busy counseling kids, some of them screwed-up as hell, wounded, some of them just wanting advice on where to go to college, some of them just wanting someone to talk to because they were already old and tired from being made invisible by the adults around them. And then there was night school at the university, trying to finish a degree in art. I loved art. It had everything to do with psychology. I was too fucking busy thinking about my last failed painting or my last conversation with a student or my last encounter with a lousy teacher who’d stopped caring or an out-to-lunch parent who had a hundred excuses as to why they didn’t notice that their boy or their girl was doing drugs or having sex or engaging in behavior that was probably going to fuck them up even more. Yeah, I was too busy to analyze what Tom and I had. What we had, why did it have to have a name?
I met him five years ago. I was thirty. He was forty-five. He was handsome, just the other side of perfect. Once, he had been perfect. I sat across from him at a dinner party at a nice restaurant. One of my colleagues was married to an attorney, and they were celebrating ten years together. I didn’t really understand marriage and ten years of it was either a miracle or hell pretending to be heaven. And there he was, one of the guests, Tom Espinosa, who didn’t appear to have a hint of ethnicity left in his social make-up. A non-Mexican Mexican. He might as well have been a gringo. Hell, I was more Mexican than he was. It helped that my mother had been a Garcia. My father was a Steadman. Steadman genes and Garcia genes, all mixed-up to hell in my psyche. I got my mother’s black eyes, my father’s fair skin. My sense of irony I got from reading books and from some fucked-up relative a few generations back—probably on my father’s side.
I was having a conversation with Susan in Spanish. Tom looked at me from across the table and said: “You one of those gringos who wants to be a Mexican?”
I looked at him and said, “I come by my Spanish honestly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“My mother was born in Mexico City.”
He smiled. “My mother was born near the dump in Juárez.”
“You win,” I said.
He told me he was a criminal attorney. He was in the middle of a trial. It was a death penalty case and he believed in his client. I found that appealing. “Bad business, the death penalty. This is what passes for civilization.” He dipped his finger in his drink. “You? What do you do?”
“I’m a high-school counselor,” I said.
He smiled. “High-school counselor? Is that interesting?”
“My clients aren’t criminals so maybe not so interesting.”
He smiled again. All that smiling annoyed me. I was beginning to wonder if he didn’t treat everyone as a potential juror. “Criminals aren’t always that interesting.” He was sipping on a glass of bourbon on the rocks. “You like kids?”
“Yeah. Something about them. I don’t much care for their parents.”
“You have any kids?”
“Nope.”
“Planning on having any?”
I hated these questions. I got them all the time. “Nope, why would I want to become just like one of the parents I don’t much care for?”
I don’t remember what else we talked about. I noticed he drank a lot. But I also noticed he didn’t seem to be getting drunk. Another thing I noticed: he was studying me. I didn’t know what to think about that. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy that would be interested in a guy like me.
At the end of the evening, he gave me his card. “Give me a call,” he said. “We’ll have a drink.” He wrote down his cell number on his card. But just because he was easy on the eyes didn’t mean I liked him enough to call him. There was something about him I didn’t trust. He wore cologne. His hair was a little too combed. His clothes were a little too expensive. He wore a watch that he could pawn to buy a decent used car. He had too much money. I never cared much for people with money. They were a little too proud of themselves, too entitled. They never entertained the possibility that they might just be overpaid.
I never called him. He was the one who called me.
“How’d you get my cell?”
“You sound annoyed.”
“Maybe.”
“Susan gave it to me.”
“S
usan, yeah, well, she doesn’t know how to keep other people’s secrets.”
“Your cell number’s a secret?”
“Not anymore,” I said. What I really wanted to say was that if I’d wanted him to have it, I’d have given it to him when we met.
“Wanna grab a drink?”
“Sure,” I said. What the hell, there was nothing to lose. And then I regretted saying sure because I knew there was always something to lose.
We met at the bar at Café Central. It was six o’clock. He was talking on his cell, his coat hanging on his chair, his sleeves rolled up. His hair was more than a little uncombed and he looked tired but the whole look worked for him. He had a tattoo of a mermaid on his forearm. I sat down, almost smiled and let him finish his phone call.
He called the waiter over, raised his glass. I took the cue and ordered a glass of chard.
He clicked off his phone. “What are you, a girl? Drinking white wine?”
“If I was a girl,” I said, “you wouldn’t have asked me out for a drink.”
He gave me a crooked smile.
“What makes you think I’m interested in men?”
“I’m not so sure you are interested in men. I just know you’re interested in me.”
“You sure about that?”
“You gave me your cell phone number, and when I didn’t call, you came looking for me.”
“And found you,” he said.
“A real private eye.” I stared at his tattoo. “I think better of you for that.”
He stuck his arm out. “You want to touch it?”
“Okay, you just killed the moment.”
“Are you always this hard?”
“I’m not exactly a walking Hallmark card.”
“I thought gay men were supposed to be softer.”
“Where do you go to get your information? Ever been to an S&M bar? Nothing soft about that.”
“You frequent those places?”
“Nope. Ever hear of porn?”
“You don’t strike me as a porn kind of guy.”
“I’m not. I was curious when I was younger.”
“And are you still curious?”
“I think I’m more curious about art.”
He laughed. The drinks came. “Cheers,” he said. “Try this.” He pushed his drink toward me. I took a sip. “Nice,” I said. I looked straight at him. “So, you’re gay? Not gay? Curious? Bi? What?”
“Let’s just say I like to sleep with people I find interesting.”
“How many people do you find interesting?”
He didn’t answer my question. He grabbed his drink. “Michael. You—you’re interesting.”
“And you arrived at this conclusion by doing research?”
“Don’t need research. Sometimes I can just tell.”
He tried to sleep with me that night.
I turned him down.
“What? You have a boyfriend?”
“No, but I think you’re probably married.”
“Divorced,” he said.
Okay, so I let him kiss me. He was a good kisser, I’ll give him that. Not that kissing was a particularly difficult art. Any fourteen-year-old boy could master that art in one evening if he had a willing partner. And I wasn’t falling for Tom’s crap. He was used to getting what he wanted and I wasn’t about to whore myself out for a night just because the guy was a good kisser. Besides, I knew this guy was trouble. Sometimes you could sleep with a guy and that was that. But not this guy. This guy wanted more than a night. He wanted more than I was prepared to give. I knew that from the beginning. So I told him, “Listen, we need to have rules.” I think he liked the idea of rules even more than I did.
One day, he called me in the middle of the afternoon. I had a crying student in my office. He’d shown me the belt marks on his calves and thighs, on his back. I wasn’t exactly in a romantic frame of mine. “I’ll call you back,” I said. I stared into the hurt eyes of this boy, this boy who was more angel than I’d ever been or ever would be. For a second, I imagined myself grabbing the belt away from his father and giving him a dose of his own medicine. How do you fucking like that, sir?
This boy didn’t need revenge. He needed something more, something I wasn’t sure I could give him. But I wasn’t the kind of guy that backed off. I was stubborn and I hated bullies. I looked at the boy straight in the face, his hurt pale blue eyes fighting to hold back the tears. “Danny, you can cry,” I said.
“Do you?” he asked.
“Do I what?”
“Cry? Do you cry?”
“Yes,” I said. “There’s a lot of things to cry about.” I lied. What was wrong with lying when you were trying to help someone?
So he nodded and his lips trembled and he hugged himself and he began to sob. I put my hand on his shoulder—touching was tricky business. “He’ll never hit you again,” I whispered. “I promise.”
“My dad says he does it because he loves me.”
“Your dad doesn’t know a damn thing about love,” I said.
I waited until Gina, the social worker, came by to pick Danny up. I didn’t bother to call his father. I let social services take care of the matter. I gave Gina the report. I trusted her. She was as tough as she was beautiful—and, on the side, she was always willing to show me what I’d been missing. It was more of a joke than anything else.
Danny looked at me. “Where will I go? Where will they take me?”
“Wherever it is, you’ll be safer. Gina won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
“What about my dad?”
Shit, why was it that kids like Danny were always trying to take care of a parent who didn’t deserve to be taken care of, that didn’t deserve their love, that didn’t deserve to be called Dad? It was too common and too sad to talk about.
“I’ll call your father,” I said.
He nodded.
I didn’t call him though. The truth was I was afraid of my own anger. I knew about fathers—the bad apples anyway. In my business I didn’t get to hear about the good apples. Yeah, I knew about fathers. I’d had a father who loved me in exactly the same way Danny’s father loved him.
I called Tom. “Still want to have a drink?”
I met him at the Dome Bar, downtown. I got there before he did. I ordered a glass of white wine and stared up at the Tiffany dome. It was so perfect and intricate and it filled the lobby of the hotel with light. I felt, for a moment, that I was in a church. But wasn’t that what bars were—churches for people who’d lost their faith? Hell, I’m not sure I ever had any faith. I don’t even think I believed when I was a boy. I remember making my first communion and thinking, God can’t possibly taste like this. I looked up and Tom was standing there. “Hi,” he said. He looked calm and happy and I wondered about that. He was always hiding something—but I didn’t care about that. The part of him that was happy, that’s the part I wondered about. I wasn’t exactly sullen or morose or melancholy. But I wasn’t exactly happy either.
“Hi back,” I said.
“I wish I could kiss you right here,” he said.
“We should have met at a different bar.”
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t like the gay scene.”
That made me laugh. “You like it well enough in bed.”
“That’s not the gay scene, that’s two people touching.”
“Two men touching,” I said.
We sat and he drank and I watched him. He pointed at my glass of wine. “Still drinking those girl drinks?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
He smiled.
I took him home. It was comforting to be held, to feel another man’s hands on your body that made you feel, if even for an instant, that you mattered. It didn’t have to be love. It just had to be something that made you feel alive. “You’re quiet tonight,” he said as we lay in the dark.
“I don’t always have something to say.”
“You’re a mystery,” he said.
??
?I don’t mean to be.”
“You can’t help it. That’s just the way you are. That’s what I like about you. I could fall in love with a guy like you.”
“That’s a load of crap. You just think I’m pretty to look at.”
“That’s true, but that’s not why.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” I said. “You know the rules.”
“Okay.” He was quiet for a while and then said, “We make the rules and we can always change them.”
He was wrong. The rules were ingrained in both of us. He just didn’t know it. I took his hand and held it.
He spent the night. I made coffee in the morning and we took a shower together and I thought, This is nice. And, for a moment I thought that maybe—yeah, well, maybe.
I went to see Danny. He’d been temporarily placed in a foster home. He’d changed schools so his father couldn’t find him. He was living in limbo, though perhaps that’s where he’d always lived. Mr. and Mrs. Lucero, the foster parents, they were nice. Humble, good, decent, all of that. They doted over Danny as if he was their long lost grandson.
There was nothing fancy about the Lucero’s home, but they weren’t poor, not poor like so many people in this town were. The place was immaculately clean. Mrs. Lucero gave me coffee and she thanked me for saving this boy. That’s how she put it. I assured her I wasn’t in the business of saving anyone. She just smiled at me and condescendingly touched my cheek. I didn’t mind. If someone was going to condescend to me, they might as well be sweet about it.
Danny seemed calm enough—except when he talked about his father.
“My mom died,” he said. “My dad’s been having a hard time.”
“What about you, Danny?”
“I guess me too. He’s sad. And he’s mad. And he drinks.”
“Bad combination of things,” I said.
“My dad wants me back. He’s hired a lawyer.”
“Do you want to go back?”
He shook his head. “He says he won’t hurt me anymore, but I know he will.”
“You saw him?”