The Way the Game Is Played

“You should be very proud of yourself,” he says grabbing me as I try to get up from my bed to go and turn off my bedroom lights. It takes some effort, but I finally manage to get up from his arms and walk towards the door. On my way, I readjust my crumbled up boxers over my jeans.

“I don’t usually do this,” he says.

“Yeah, I love to wrestle in bed,” I respond, dimming the lights.

“No, I mean, hook up that often.” I’m confused. I had totally pegged him as a total player. The day I met him at a mutual friend’s BBQ, he had gotten in a fight with a drunken straight guy and called him an asshole. All while hopping around on crutches. He’d broken his left foot jumping down a fence and had to get a cast, but that didn’t stop him from provoking a riot. So I figured that the testosterone that muddled his temper also filtered down to his crotch and fucked up his libido – encouraging every impulse to “hit that.”

It had definitely fucked with mine. I was instantly attracted to this Potential Player and his straight guy-like bravado. And I refused to watch from the sidelines.

But playing with bad boys is a dangerous sport, and I didn’t want to end up getting hurt and calling foul. So I didn’t think much of this guy with the sexy dimples and messy hair who always wore his shirts wrinkled. I wasn’t even expecting him to call me, even though we did have an intense, shirtless make out session on my friend’s couch the night of the BBQ. With his foot in a cast, I had to lift him up and support him on my shoulders when we started to dance, swaying slowly to “Electric Feel.”

And then three weeks later, there he was: free of crutches and inviting me to his birthday celebration. Potential Player has this way of making every guy feel

like the only one on the team, which solidified my first impression that he would pitch to whomever was willing to catch. And that’s what caught me at the

beginning. He has the confidence of a Casanova, never mind that he prefers LMFAO to MGMT.

The night of his birthday, he brought about 25 guys to his party at Trigger. Impressive considering we live in a city often unwilling to commit. The sexy bartenders flowered him with even more attention in the form of drinks. But I kept sober. Despite the fact that it seemed as if I were playing Marco Polo in a pool full of men wanting to swim up the birthday boy’s trunks, I felt a little like Michael Phelps, for I had already won. I’d hooked up with Potential Player the night before. See, I don’t do sidelines.

So the next night at Trigger, I felt quite secure in my position as starting player on his team. A little past midnight, I gave him a hug and made up the excuse that I had to meet up with some other friends in the Mission. I didn’t want him to think that he was a starting player on my team. Before I exited the club, he gave my number to one of his friends, a tall, hunky blond. “My phone is about to die, and I forgot my charger,” Potential Player explained. “I’ll call you tomorrow on his phone.” And he did, and we hooked up again. But this time with the lights off. And I felt like the only one on the team.

Light My Fire

I have to tell him how I feel. And tonight is my last chance.

It’s gotten to the point where I don’t care whether he likes me back or if rejection is the only thing coming my way. We are moving out. Come tomorrow we won’t be living next door to each other anymore. It’s too late for serious us. I just need to know if what I have been sensing this whole time is real.

All of these feelings flushed in right from the very beginning. The week before senior year, I was walking around my front lawn after I’d just finished unpacking. I kicked off my flimsy flip-flops and began pacing barefoot on the cool grass wearing only a loose white v-neck and faded Levi’s. I wiped the few drops of sweat from my brow and took out my pack of Parliaments. I needed a cigarette to help me relax after my grueling moving-in. But September in Chicago is notoriously windy, and my lighter, like most things I owned at the time, was cheap and unreliable. I kept flicking it, cupped my hands around the flame and tried to keep it going long enough to cause some serious damage to my unlit Parliament, much to no avail.

I was starting to get frustrated when I noticed a boy plopping down the steps of the porch next door and slowly heading towards my direction. He was wearing a pair of forest green shorts and a white t-shirt similar to mine except wrinkled and with grass stains, as if he’d been doing cartwheels or wrestling on the grass. His dark brown wavy hair swayed in the wind and from his dry pink lips dangled a lit Parliament. It took me a second to recognize him.

“Hey there, I’m Boy in Color, your neighbor apparently,” he said looking at me and then glancing at my house. I shared a front lawn with the boy who had taken my breath away the minute I had first laid eyes on him at that party not so long ago. And exactly like before, the world went grey as he glowed in multicolor. Being next to me got me in some sort of visual trance.

“Hi,” I said staring straight into his juvenile eyes as he continued to approach me cutting through the grass. “You got a lighter? Mine’s a piece of shit.”

“Here, let me show you a trick,” he said taking my lighter from my hands. “Put the cigarette in your mouth, and pull your collar over it to block it from the wind.” I was skeptical and pictured my white shirt engulfing in flames, but I followed his instructions. “And now light it from underneath,” he said and reached under my shirt, gently gracing my happy trail as he made his way upwards with my lighter in his hand. It tickled, and the sensation stretched from my belly to my back and down my spine.

He got the lighter up to my chest and lit my heart on the very first try.

And in the nine months that followed, our entire senior year, the flame between us continued to flicker in the wind, never dying down. During our late night conversations sitting on the rackety bench on his porch, our knees touching while we waited for the sun to come up, I’d lean on him slightly and feel him applying pressure back on me; while watching cheesy scary movies on rainy Sunday afternoons, he’d turn to me with and flash me a soft smile whenever I made a clever comment no one else understood; or after the brief, silly friend fights we’d get into for pretending not to care, we’d hug as a sign of peacemaking, but our hugs always lingered as a sign of something else.

During all of this, I made sure to guard our flame while he kept fanning it. Because whenever we’d undergo a cold front, it’d only take a longing look, a tender touch or a few words to bring us right back to the warm sentiment I felt we shared.

And now on the last night I’ll be seeing him before we both jet off into opposite sides of the country, and I can’t believe I never got close enough to confess how I feel. I have been so afraid of getting burned, thinking that in this fire, a friend is the worse thing to lose.

But I have to know if this is real. Because I feel like I’m burning, and if Boy in Color can’t save me, he has to let me cool.

I have to tell him how I feel. And tonight is my last chance. I think again as I walk out my front door, light a Parliament under my collar and make my

way to the sports bar our entire senior class will be at on our last night of college.

[To be continued…]

Enséñame

1. teach me

2. show me

The neon green lights shining right outside his hotel room window gives his shirtless body the same soft glow I imagine he has all year round when he’s in Miami. I take off my jacket and shoes and join him in bed, caressing his chest and pecking him gently on his neck and jaw.

“I’m waiting for you to show me how much you like me,” he whispers, as I reach over and pin one of his arms down on the pillow. I smile, and we start kissing.

Chico Boricuo has a subtle accent. Not a Puerto Rican accent; he didn’t get it from his parents. He got it growing up and going out in Miami. It’s a cocktail of Latin intonations, all blending smoothly under the Florida sun. His skin tastes like coconut, but I’m pretty sure it’s his cologne. No wonder he chose to stay at “The Tropicana Hotel,” he informs me immediately after insisting on paying for my second vodka tonic at the Café.

That’s where our night started, where we first met, at the Thursday night gay Latin extravaganza: Pan Dulce. Chico Boricuo was standing right in front of me at the bar as I waited to order my first vodka tonic. He was there by himself… which is usually a pretty big turn-off, but his baby brown eyes and dimples exposed him as nontoxic, a far cry from my well-documented attraction to cocky crooks, bad boys and un-dateable delinquents. Chico Boricuo looked straight out of one of Johnny Diaz’s novels: warm smile that lit up his entire face, dark chocolate chest hair inching out from his tight forest green v-neck and about 27 or 28.

I turned around to ask my girl friend what she’s drinking, but instead of giving me a response, she widened her eyes as she motioned repeatedly with her chin towards the Chico.

“I’m not exactly sure what you’re plotting,” I tried to set her straight, “but let me tell you right now: it’s not gonna happen.”

Two drinks with a squirt of confidence later, and it looks like it’s definitely gonna happen. Chico Boricuo and I are talking intimately up against the windows that look out towards the twin gas stations on Castro.

“I don’t know where the Tropicana Hotel is,” I resume the conversation we started earlier as I check a text I’ve just received from my girl friend saying she’s found a cab home.

“It’s in the Mission. My brother picked it out for us.” Chico Boricuo and his brother are visiting San Francisco for the week. Every six months, his brother, who a few years ago moved to Panama, has to return to the States to fulfill his Visa obligations. But instead of going back home to Miami every time, his brother chooses and pays to meet up with his brother at a different destination. Earlier this year, it was Denver. This time, it’s San Francisco. And the Boricuo brothers are leaving tomorrow.

After we finish our drinks, he was drinking a Manhattan by the way, I grab his hand, and lead him towards the recently-remodeled dancefloor. But apparently, his Latin hips are unable to shake it to Kelly Clarkson, so he just stands in front of me, como un pez fuera del agua.

“How can you dance to this?” He asks me seconds before the chorus to “Since U Been Gone” is about to blast through the entire club.

“Just jump!” I shout. And he does. And I join. And Kelly belts. And we smile.

He gets a call from his brother, who has been hanging out right by their hotel in the Mission all night.

“My brother, he’s bored. Wants us to meet up for a drink or something.”

“Alright… let’s go!”

“You want to come? And meet my brother? Won’t that be a little weird for you?”

“Not, unless it’s not weird for you. C’mon, this is your last night seeing your brother. I want to meet him.”

We leave and meet up with his brother outside of the Make Out Room. They give each other a sturdy hug, and then I get introduced as a friend, but his brother, who is older, can read between the smiles. The three of us then head into a really tiny hookah bar across the street. It has a sign saying, “Members Only,” but we just walk in, and I order a hookah for us.

“So my brother wanted to see if we could go find an after hours place tonight,” Chico Boricuo says to me before taking a deep drag off a rose-flavored hookah.

At this point, I’m playing the part of local nightlife connoisseur, even though I’ve only lived in San Francisco for, like, six weeks. I walk around the hookah bar, mindlessly starting conversations with the strangers lounging on the couches and laying on the cushions, trying to get the insider information. But they’re all drained from partying, or foreign, or underage. So I give up, but not without a consolation prize.

“Ok, so… it’s really hard to find an after hours here, especially on a Thursday night,” and then I think of a place that might work: “Unless we want to dance like zombies until 8 a.m.,” but then I reconsider. “Never mind, we’re not going to the End-Up,” I start rambling. “But I did meet this really cool girl from Italia. Her name is Valentina, and she gave me a leftover blunt.”

Chico Boricuo’s brother is talking to some of the underage girls, and they totally love his luscious Latin look, so we step outside and light the joint.

“I had a lot of fun hanging out with you tonight,” Chico Boricuo says. His feelings start pouring out like Pina Colada, thick and refreshing, just sweet enough for my taste. “First, when you got me dancing at the club,” he starts recollects after his first hit. “I’ve never danced like that before! And my brother, he loves you by the way. The way you just go up and start talking to everybody, like it’s no big deal. And you always find a way to get what you want,” he says lifting up the blunt and passing it over to me.

I take a small hit. Inhale, exhale just long enough to think of a response, but all I can come up with is, “I really liked hanging out with you too.” But I guess that’s good enough. He pulls me in closer, and we start making out up against a fence on 22nd Street.

After a few minutes, I pull back, but keep my arms wrapped around his lower torso. “I can’t really show you here… show you how much I like you.”

The next thing he says to me, we’re in his hotel room. He’s lying warm and shirtless on the cool, clean, white sheets, and he says:

“I’m waiting for you to show me how much you like me.”

I kiss him, and take off his boxers and let him take off mine. And we fool around for hours, naked and drenched in the neon hues that are radiating from outside the hotel room window.

But I don’t show him how much I like him. Because to do so, I’d have to show him everything: me dancing alone in my room to Kelly Clarkson, making a fool out of myself just to make friends. I would have to show him how jealous and territorial I can get and the humiliating ways I have failed trying to be fabulous. I would have to show him all of that. I would have to show him this blog.

And we only have one night at the Tropicana. Because when morning comes, no matter what happens between us, underneath the sheets, he still has a flight to catch.

The truth is, I don’t always get what I want. In fact, I rarely do. And it seems that the guys closest to my heart are the ones already halfway on to somewhere else. And it sometimes feels like self-sabotage. Like I push myself to fall for these men who are miles and miles away. Keeping everyone, including myself, at a safe distance.

Because I’m not ready to show you how much I like you. Because there’s too much of me to show.

Playlist: Don’t Say Goodnight

http://8tracks.com/mixes/69334/player_v2

Dull to Pause – Junior Boys

Leaving You Behind – Amanda Blank feat. Lykke Li

Swimming in a Flood – Passion Pit

Runaway – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Call It Off -Tegan and Sara

Be the One – The Ting Tings

It Can’t Come Quickly Enough – Scissor Sisters

I Could Say (Dr. Rosen Rosen Remix) – Lily Allen