During, Before, After | Alexander Chee | 9.1.04 |
|
| DURING I'm in a pool with nine naked men. Pool glows like a giant moonstone, night makes a roof. I feel like I'm in a science fiction movie but there's no lasers or space ships. In the house more people walk back and forth, some have clothes on, some don't. One boy is wearing only a coat. Earlier he was wearing only pants. I'm on E and mushrooms both. I wasn't sure what it would be like. I didn't remember much about having done E the last time, and mushrooms, ditto. My normal feeling about them is, why bother? This is what it feels like, though: The other moments of the days previous to this have caved in and I feel like I'm right inside myself finally. Not in the future, not in the past, just in a heated pool in the desert. No swirlies, no pictures floating in and out of my mind. No dizziness. Just plugged in deep, a smile on the face of the pool. Drugs will show you the face of God, my yoga teacher told me once. But they don't teach you how to stay there. I never liked Palm Springs but now I love it, says one naked man. He's the most physically beautiful boy there. 6'4”, Korean, he reminds me of the lifeguards at Inchon that I fell in love with as a teenager. He looks like he could save your life. Looking at the long smooth gold legs, the slim torso with the pierced nipple, this is all the sex I want right now. Not true for others. Out past the pool in the rooms of the house people are making other decisions. Walking through to get a beer from the fridge means seeing the other decisions. Three, four, seven people, all making decisions. I have two beers lined up for me, waiting in the green light out of the pool. Sometimes I like to watch but not unless there's something to watch. If I don't know the story, I don't want to see the sex. Later the birthday boy, the reason we are here, has me squeezed into place with the Korean, who I am calling Cousin. We are on a lounge chair and just lying there, the birthday boy telling him how we know each other. He doesn't tell me how he met Cousin. This is one of the ways of telling each of us which of us is old and which is new. Birthday Boy makes occasional humping motions. The two of them are side by side, under me. He will have most of the people in the pool. Some who are in the rooms. Most won't escape giving him at least a kiss. You get one kiss for your birthday, I tell him. You get to decide where. Droit du Seignur, is what it was called in France, the ancient right of the king to have sex with the ladies of the court, no matter their married status. A girl in a straw cowboy hat comes out of the house. Naked. Goes back in. BEFORE I take a cab out to JFK too early for the flight to LA, after getting off work. In the airport my cellphone charge is low. Only a few calls to make. I call the birthday boy. Hello Rascal, I say into the phone. He is making splashing sounds. I know there's a house he's rented for the weekend. I don't know who's there. He sounds happy. Where are you, he asks. JFK, I said. Delta terminal. We exchange the necessary information. I am to arrange a ride in the middle of the night. An old friend of his is in LA as well, driving out, and so we make arrangements before my phone dies in the LAX arrivals terminal, not before it plays the message to head to the birthday boy's empty LA apartment and meet the friend's crew there. From the air above, Los Angeles looked like a part of the sky that had fallen. As if we were headed down into outer space. What's here is a lonely Super Shuttle guy who takes me to the apartment, and at 3AM I am driving to Palm Springs with the friend and another in back, another car of people behind us. I throw Cokes down to stay awake and we arrive after the house has gone to bed, though soon it is awake again. A boy in his underwear greets us at the door. I'm not sure who's sleeping with who and how long it will last, and then I am shown my room and bed. The birthday boy has been trying to get me interested in his friends---this one has a big dick, this one's a giant bottom---but it all makes them sound like those weird sex toys, a disembodied plastic orifice or genitalia repro, and those have never interested me. I take a beer from the fridge. At the pool people are swimming naked. I haven't been to a party like this in years. We drink, swim naked, fall asleep finally, wake up, swim naked, drink, eat, and by the next night I am remembering how much I can drink when I do lines. I do one when it's passed to me. It is chunky. I haven't done this in 6 years, but I remember that right chopping makes it all last longer. So I chop a line and do it. Superbeermachine friendguy, my tee-shirt should read, I think. To make them laugh I balance a beer on my trucker hat and kneel, sliding across on my knees to the front of the birthday boy. So talented, this one, he says. Later I just want to be an anime character. I have been wanting this for a while. I want to be one of those kids from Robin Witch Hunter. In the last episode I saw, Robin, whose witchpower is to control flames, meets a girl witch with the same power. Her flames are white, though, where Robin's are orange, and they have a firefight. The witch girl has just burned a man to death who killed her sister, who also had these powers. No one else has these powers, the girl keeps screaming until she's shot. No one else has these powers. I worry that it's true but so far so good. I go to sleep in the birthday boy's bed. He goes to sleep in his roommate's bed with an ex and another ex. The roommate and his boyfriend are in my bed. I am with a lesbian. I am almost asleep when the door opens, the birthday boy naked with a comforter in front of him. He's never looked so beautiful. I don't know if anyone has. He looks long and hard at the bed. Before I can react or say anything, the door shuts. AFTER I wanted to be sure you had a bed, he says to me the next afternoon. In Palm Springs we stagger down the sidewalk, exhausted: me, Birthday Boy, Cousin, and two friends. 7 bags of bottles for 3 days. The food trash bags were heavy with grapefruit skins from the approximately 100 grapefruits we juiced in making greyhounds, grapefruit mimosas, and margaritas for the thirty or so gathered folks. The citrus grove in the garden saw much use. Five people had sex there, together. I could see their butts rising and falling from the pool chair. BB and Cousin check into the All Worlds resort to take a nap and I drive BB's car back, a BMW station wagon he calls the Hollywood Wife car, with his two friends sacked out. On the way out of town the wind turbines spin, collecting electricity out of the air. I am struck by the inherent wisdom of this. Take power where you can get it. Don't look for it anywhere it isn't. I call BB from the car when I am almost into the city. No traffic to speak of, I say. We're still napping, he says. Back to sleep with you, I say, and flip the phone shut. In his apartment I make arrangements to see a friend in Laguna and extend my ticket. I arrange to do all work from here. I cancel everything. I am moving to Los Angeles in a few months anyway, and when I am not here it just feels like I'm traveling, My New York apartment like a borrowed one. I am taking a Caltrans down to Laguna, the last Surfrider of the night. The friend is a surfer. He's AA sober, young, knows what I've been doing. I called him the night before after hiding from the remaining revelers. He laughed. And then we talked about other things. I wasn't going to go but it felt wrong to not go, and so I made all the changes and now am in the station. I call BB again to tell him. You're where, he asks. Union Station, I say. I love it, he says. When do I see you? Let's have dinner Thursday before I leave, I say. Kiss Cousin for me, would you? He's right here, he says. Will do. In the station and then on the train through the night, I am thinking of being in the pool the day before when the sun was still shining and the E had just been passed out on a tray. Before the mushroom tea, though. BB had his dick out on the tray beside all the chopped pills. Some did a half, some did one and a half. He was mopping out the tray with his finger and jammed some of the powder in my mouth, laughing. Take it, he said. And then he began insisting we all be naked, we all get in the pool. And then we were, though I held out. I hate being told what to do, I said. If you do that, even if I want to do it, I don't want to. He smirked. I took the clothes off. Every few years he and I agree, it would never work. Afloat in the pool he came up to me. You said one kiss, he said, and slid down to where I stood, his mouth over mine.  |
|
|
|
| |
| ©1997-2005 |