You and I at Never, Neverland

Peter doesn’t like to drive fast, I notice sitting in the passenger seat of his old Toyota. I don’t get it. He can just pump the gas, trust himself with the steering wheel a little more and zoom past at magnificent speeds. But Peter follows the speed limit and knows his way exactly to my house…. my parents’ house.

Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” comes on the radio right as he’s about to turn on my street. I turn it down. Peter turns to me a little unsure of what to say, so he thanks me for hanging out with him tonight. As if it were such a hassle on my part. I like hanging out with Peter. He’s bubbly but not bursting. Sweet but not syrupy. I know I should just say goodbye and call it a night. That’s what we strive to be: platonic friends who end the night with an awkward hug and a smile.

But I can’t do that with Peter. Maybe it’s the several drinks I had earlier at the bar or maybe it’s the trashy pop playing on the radio or maybe it’s that I love being in a beat up car with a gorgeous boy. It makes me never want to call it a night.

“You’re going to hate me for saying this,” and I can’t believe I’m actually saying it. “But I really want to kiss you right now.”

And here we go again.

“I’m not getting out of your car until you make out with me.”

17 Months Earlier

You could say that what Peter and I had was special. The minute we got introduced by mutual friends, we hit it off. And yes, I thought he was attractive. But I also thought he was straight.

It started the moment he discreetly placed his hand on my knee while we were watching Halloween at a friend’s movie night.

A week later he came over to my parents’ house, and I remember him telling me how hard his heart was pounding as he laid in my bed next to me. We listened to Coldplay’s XY album on repeat and made out mid-afternoon while my younger brother watched The Incredibles in the family room.

That whole summer, we continued our secret affair. It was really exciting at first, sneaking off together after hanging out at the bars and stealing kisses when we thought no one was looking.

The secrecy was arousing. We were like magnets, and the more time we spent together in public not getting on top of each other made our private attraction much more passionate. We had great chemistry under the covers and up against walls and on my living room floor.

At the end of the summer however, as I was getting ready to go back to college, something changed for Peter. I started to get the hint that he was growing more cautious about our indiscretions seeing the light. He was straight, after all. For me, all of this was an enthralling game. For him, it was top secret.

But we kept hooking up, rumbling on every flat surface whenever we got the chance (or carefully contrived a chance). Afterwards, he’d just turn to me and like a friend, confessed to me how he’d regret what had just happened. How he’d been regretting it this whole time and wished he could stop. It wasn’t what he did, who he was, he’d say.

And I, like a good friend, tried to console him every time, regardless of how degraded it’d made me feel. I knew I was better than some dirty little secret. So in order to cope, I made him the game just like he’d made me the mistake.

Seducing Peter then became (and even now continues to be) a challenging trudge up a foggy mountain. But I know that, if I want to, I will eventually get to the top.

17 Months Later

“Fine, Peter. I understand. Just look me in the eye and tell me that you don’t want to kiss me cause you don’t find me attractive…”

“You know that’s not it.”

“Tell me that I’m still not the best kisser you’ve ever had. Tell me, c’mon. And I will get out of your car.”

“I want to kiss you, but we can’t keep doing this. I don’t want to keep doing this. Why do you have to make it so hard? I just want us to be friends! Is that so hard to understand?”

“You and I will never be just friends, Peter.”

“Fine then. Let’s just get this over with.”

“No. Not if you’re going to be so cold about it.” And then I realize that I’m coming off kind of foolish. So I let it go. Game over. “This is silly of me. Let’s forget about it, ok? Goodbye.” But right as I’m about to open the passenger door of his Toyota, Peter grabs my arm, pulls me in closer and we start to make out.

I climb on top of him and pull back his seat so that he’s resting almost completely horizontal. He’s trying to mouth the words, “stop, stop” to pretend like he’s not enjoying any of this, like I’m crossing all boundaries, but I’m suffocating him with kisses. He’s kissing back.

I get off and sit back down in the passenger seat. Now I’m ready to call it a night.

“I hate myself for not having the strength just now to get you off me.”

“I hate you for not knowing what you want. Seriously, Peter? Grow up.”

Take the Pill or Die Plastic

Chico Rock’s wild tour of Madrid continued for the remainder of my study abroad stay. Every Friday night, I would climb across to his room through his balcony, and we would pregame in his room before heading down to Chueca to explore yet another gay bar or club. Or several.

Unbeknownst to me before deciding to study for a semester in the Spanish capital, Madrid is well-known around Europe for its gay quarter. Despite being an overwhelmingly Catholic country, gay marriage is completely legal in Spain. Gay lifestyle and culture is prominent, sometimes preposterous.

Named after the Spanish word for “crooked” (or “not straight”) centuries before Stonewall, Chueca has been through more transformations than a desperate pop star trying to cling on to relevancy. All up until the 20th century, Chueca housed the city’s outcasts—criminals, freaks and other social pariahs, certainly homosexuals and sexual deviants. After the authoritarian dictatorship of Francisco Franco ended with his death in 1975 the area became one of the epicenters of La Movida, a liberation of creative expression, disregard for traditional aesthetics and a new breed of popular culture. The equivalent of New Wave but with far more transsexuals and recreational drug use. I once heard that during the mid-80s you could swipe your finger through one of the sidewalk creases in Chueca and accumulate small residues of a certain white powder, just enough for a bump. The streets were literally littered with cocaine. Then came the 90s. Chueca got chic with designers like Diesel and Custo Barcelona opening up boutiques in the now quaint but quirky neighborhood. And today, the quarter is home to more yuppies and young couples than criminals. I’m pretty sure that if Pinkberry ever made it to the European continent, the first location in Madrid would be in Chueca.

But after dark if you turn the right (or wrong) corner, you can travel back to a reformed version of Chueca’s old days of debauchery, partying until the sun comes up. That’s what Chico Rock wanted me to experience. He was adamant about having me be a part of his outrageous nightlife stunts: sex clubs and dark alleys, unknown substances and after parties. He kept saying how this was how young guys partied in Madrid, every night. He kept pushing me, challenging me almost, to stay out later and keep drinking, or keep flirting with strangers, see how far I could go down the rabbit hole. Nevermind waking up at 3 p.m. the next day, missing all my morning classes, hungover and with blurred memory of the night before.

The thing was: it was just him and his friends engaging in these excessive habits. He just didn’t want to feel like the only one, so he made a big deal about how common and ordinary it was to be so erratic, but deep down he was all alone.

I was madly attracted to him, so I kept playing the game, trying to impress him and turning into the party boy I thought he wanted me to be. I didn’t realize how self-destructive his lifestyle was until one night. November 9, 2006, three weeks before I had to come back to the states. The night I thought I was going to die.

We end our night at Royal Cool, but that’s where the story starts. The largest gay club in Madrid, the club is a neon institution that thrives on the bass thumping loud, men sweating hard and inhibitions plummeting to a new low. This is what it takes to be Cool.

As soon as we walk in, a friend of Chico Rock’s walks up to him and offers him something. I’m guessing it’s either coke or poppers since I see them snorting it. Chico Rock asks him if he knows where he can get more, looking back at me and raising his eyebrows with anticipation. The friend says no. Chico Rock calls him a liar. The friend laughs and says he’s serious. So Chico Rock drops it.

About twenty seconds later, the friend turns back, waits until we both make eye contact with him and then signals us to follow him.

The three of us walk back into a brightly lit room behind the bar. It takes a minute for my eyes to readjust. The friend introduces me to a guy with dreadlocks I recognize from going out. He asks me if I want pills, assuming that I’m the one looking for drugs, that it’s my deal to be made. I look back at Chico Rock. He nods.

“Si” (Yes).

“Cuantas?” (How many?)

“Cuantas necesito?” (How many do I need?)

The dealer laughs and tells me they’re five euros each. I tell him to give me one. He leans closer to me as if going in for a hug and puts the pill in my hand. He whispers something in my ear, but I can’t understand it, something about this being on the house. Even behind closed doors, the music from the club resonates.

I open my hand and see that he’s given me two pills. I take one and hand it over to Chico Rock, but he shakes his hands and says, “They’re all yours.”

So I take them both.

I walk out of the room and realize that: I just swallowed not one, but two pills. I just swallowed not one, but two unknown pills. I just swallowed not one, but two unknown pills from a complete stranger. I just swallowed not one, but two unknown pills from a complete stranger at a random club overseas. I just swallowed not one, but two unknown pills from a complete stranger at a random club overseas and really, I’m all alone. I just swallowed not one, but two unknown pills from a complete stranger at a random club overseas and really, I’m all alone and I don’t even have my phone.

Not only do I not know if these pills are laced (certainly they are), but I’m not even exactly sure what I’ve taken.

I ask Chico Rock how many he has taken before and he says something like, “a half,” but he could’ve said, “one and a half.” It’s so loud in the club, and I hate repeating myself. Regardless of his answer, two definitely breaks the “take only half the pill” rule—a rule I’ve tried to ingrain in my head ever since I started going out when I was 16.

So get a little worried, and decide that if I start feeling funky (a.k.a. like I’m about to die), I’m just going to rush to the restroom and vomit the pills out. Who says drugs aren’t glamorous?

The dealer with the dreadlocks told me that he worked at the club. He was an under-the-table drug dealer employed by the very own venue to keep the dance floor busy until the early hours of the morning, to have people come back Saturday after Saturday after Friday after Wednesday, to get them addicted to Cool.

So I’m waiting for the damn pills to hit me, to see what’ll take to control my body’s reaction to them.

20 minutes. Nothing.

I keep imagining me overdosing and being taken to a hospital. The whole university institute there, my mother flying in to see me.

Then all of the sudden, I’m totally calm. I think, “If I’m going to die, I might as well die dancing my heart out, right?”

Then the pills hit me: the music starts to penetrate, the songs expand and the whole ambiance changes—the realization that every one there is exactly on the same drug you’ve just taken.

So I dance and talk and flirt with new friends. My hands start getting really cold and then really hot, and then I start to perspire. Random groups of people are approaching us and talking to us. But to me, these guys are just mannequins, looking for colored pills to bring them back to life.

It’s 7 a.m., Royal Cool is about to close, so I say good bye to my minute friends and head out the front door, grabbing a “come back next time” glossy flyer with a picture of well-toned, blue-tinted torso on my way out.

But it’s on the metro that the pills, these drugs, whatever the fuck I took, really start to hit me. I sit there and just start thinking, and then I get paranoid and wonder if the people riding with me on the train can listen to my thoughts. “Am I saying these things out loud?” I ask myself. Of course not, you idiot. Or wait?

Then I get super nervous. I get off my seat, look around, looking confused. I feel like I’ve been riding th
e metro for hours. Surely I’ve missed my stop. Surely I’m somewhere far, far away past my home stay. The train stops at the next station, and I realize that it’s only the first stop. I’ve been on the train for two minutes.

I sit back down and take a look down at my hands. The glossy flyer I’d been carrying has been twisted and crumbled almost beyond recognition. The toned body now deformed. As soon as I start involuntarily grinding my teeth, the light bulb goes on: Speed!

I swallowed not one, but two speed pills from a complete stranger at a random club overseas and really, I was all alone and I didn’t even have my phone.

I get to my house and realize that Chico Rock has my keys. The light in his room is off; he’s not home yet. I can’t even remember the last time I saw him. It starts to rain, and I start to feel like shit.

But I head back out into the night to try to find him.

To be continued…

Paris Is Burning (Part II)

I can’t fully focus on making out with Paris Boy #1 because I’m worried about my small black bag, the only luggage I’ve brought with me to Paris, getting stolen or stepped on. Or who knows what other things can happen to an unattended bag in a gay club in Europe…

I step back and feel another body right behind me. I turn around and see a tall boy with thick, wavy, auburn hair and wearing a loose, black silk button-up. Paris Boy #2. He walks over to Paris Boy # 1, puts his arm around him and whispers in his ear. He slowly rests his forehead on his friend’s head and turns to look at me. He smiles, and I’m almost sure he flashed his tongue. Paris Boy #1 takes a sip of his drink and comes over to talk to me. I’m assuming that Paris Boy #2 doesn’t speak English so #1 has to step in as translator.

“This boy here, he is my boy friend,” he says to me, placing emphasis on the last two words. He wants to make me understand that Paris Boy #2 is not his friend who happens to be a boy; he’s the boy he happens to be fucking. Not a boyfriend. But a boy friend.

I give Paris Boy #2 a genuinely smile, then try to make a joke in my bastardized French. I’ve realized that playing funny is a sure way to show my non-threatening disposition. It’s my last night in France, I’m not going to get involved in a coup d’etat.

But unlike American boys, the French don’t get off on competing with one another, marking territory, claiming possessions. Fucking with each other leaves everyone empty-handed. French boys are more about teamwork and alliance. At least, this is the conclusion I come up with to explain how I went from making out with a boy, to telling jokes to his boy friend to trying to make the couple forget my trespass to what’s happening now: me grinding with both of the Parisians in the middle of the dancefloor. Paris #1 is in front of me with his hands on to my hips and putting his nose up against my cheek. Paris #2 is behind me, grabbing on to his boy friend’s torso and pressing our bodies closer together. Paris Boy #1 is eyeing me like he wants a kiss. So I kiss him, while playing with the back of his neck. I hand him my drink, turn around and place both of my hands on Paris Boy #2’s shoulders, to regain my balance. Then I go in for his lips, slightly higher than mine. I bite his lower lip and then smile while he’s still caressing my mouth with his tongue. I run my fingers through his thick, wavy hair and pull a little.

It’s starting to get really hot, and I can feel my shirt sticking to my sweaty back. The boys and I go over to the bar to get a drink. Paris Boy #2 turns to me and says something in French, something I shouldn’t be able to understand. The sentence is too complex, and the vocabulary is nothing they’d teach me in school. But maybe it’s his body language, getting closer to me with every syllable uttered, or his facial expressions, how his eyebrows rose with excitement after certain words, or his eyes, the way he looked at me and then down at my jeans. I don’t understand what he says, but I understand what he means.

I look over to Paris Boy #1, my original partner, and notice that he too is eager to learn of my response. Yes, these boys are sweaty, sexy. Yes, it would be electrifying to keep playing with them. Ah, a threesome in Paris, every boy’s bubbly daydream.

But no. I have a flight to catch. A flight I can’t miss (again). There will be other sweaty, sexy boys, other electrifying nights, other times to get fully drenched in daydreams. But now, nothing screams reality like starting to get sober and a feeling your watch ticking all the way down on your wrist.

I write down my e-mail address in a wet napkin, and fair the fine boys adieu. My black bag is still where I left it hours earlier.

I wonder if how far we would’ve have gone last night…

“Excuse me, sir? I can’t find your reservation in our system.” And just like that dream is over. The airline attendant at Charles de Gaulle is condescending and British. She’s been having trouble finding my return ticket back to Madrid. But I assure her that she’s oh, so wrong. I mean, how else did I get to Paris.

“I’m sorry, but at this point the only thing I can do is suggest you purchase another ticket,” she tells me.

“But I have a ticket. Here, I have my printed out reservation.”

“Well, it looks like the ticket has been cancelled. I can’t do anything about it here, you need to talk to customer service, I’ll direct you.”

So there I go again– trying to talk my way into a flight back home. The customer representative is even less helpful and way bitchier. She is not going to give me a break. She lives for moments like this. She tells me that since I missed my original, non-refundable flight that my return ticket had been cancelled, and I had no choice but to purchase a new one if I wanted to return to Madrid. The price? 875 euros.

My friends have already boarded their respective flights, I have no one with me, my phone has just died and I have about 35 euros in my bank account. And I’m stuck in Paris.

I go get some coffee to regain my compusure and figure out an escape plan. I have to get on that flight. Boarding is going to commence in a few minutes. No mom, no friends, no money. All I have is this piece of paper stating that I purchased a flight. It’s all on me. I down my coffee, look at the clock above my head, think about the cute Parisian boys, grab my Kenneth Cole bag and stand up. “I’m getting on that flight,” I think and give myself no other option.

With collected bravado, I walk up to the security guard, and flash my reservation and passport. He looks at it, marks it with his red sharpie and lets me through. No questions asked. I wait until the original British girl who denied me my ticket takes her break and find another. She’s brunette and a lot cuter. I give her all my details, and she smiles and says, “Madrid?”

“Si,” I say with the biggest good boy smile I could muster this early in the morning after having my tongue down two cute guys’s thoart (almost at the same time).

“Oh wait…” she says after she catches an indiscretion on the screen, probably a big sign reading: DO NOT LET THIS BOY OUT OF PARIS. And I think, “shit.”

But then she gets distracted by an Italian tourist, bitching and yelling about something. So she steps out for a minute to try to help her co-worker deal with irrational Italian.

And that’s when I see it, my boarding pass. Dangling, freshly printed from my machine. My ticket out. So close, within grasp. I don’t even look around to see who’s watching. I just snatch it and run away.

It’s not until my flight takes off, with me sitting comfortably in my seat, that my hearts stops pounding. I feel like… Matt Damon! I’m a spy.

[Paris Is Burning (Part I)]