Or: I knew a gay kid, once, in a group home upstairs from a McDonald’s, watched twelve guys hold him down in a locked room until the morning guy came at eight, saw him when they wheeled him towards the ambulance.
I shrugged. The motion of my shoulders shook his little body.
I fought sleep as hard and long as I could. I didn’t want to not be there. And when I knew I couldn’t fight it anymore I let myself sink into data—easy as blinking this time—felt myself ebb out of my cloud port, but instead of following the random data beamed into me by the nearest router, I reached—felt my way across the endless black gulf of six inches that separated his cloud port from mine, and found him there, a jagged wobbly galaxy of data, ugly and incongruous, but beautiful, because it was him, and because, even if it was only for a moment, he was mine.
Case, I said.
He twitched in his sleep. Said his own name.
I love you, I said.
Asleep, Case said it, too.
Kentucky Fried Chicken. Thursday morning. For the first time, I didn’t feel like life was a fight about to break out, or like everyone wanted to mess with me. Everywhere I went, someone wanted to throw me out—but now the only person who even noticed me was a crazy lady rooting through a McDonald’s soda cup of change.
Case asked, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a sexy beast?” On my baldness his hands no longer seemed so tiny. My big thick skull was an eggshell.
“Also? Dude? You’re huge.” He nudged my crotch with his knee. “You know that? Like off the charts.”
“Yeah?”
I laughed. His glee was contagious and his hands were moving down my arm and we were sitting in public talking about gay sex and he didn’t care and neither did I.
“When I first came to the city, I did some porn,” Case said. “I got like five hundred dollars for it.”
I chewed slow. Stared at the bones and tendons of the drumstick in my hand. Didn’t look up. I thought about what I had done, while clouddiving. How I said his name, and he echoed me. I dreamed of taking him up to the roof at night, snapping my fingers and making the whole Bronx go dark except for Case’s name, spelled out in blazing tenement window lights. It would be easy. I could do anything. Because: Case.
“Would you be interested in doing something like that?”
“No.”
“Not even for like a million dollars?”
“Maybe a million. But probably not.”
“You’re funny. You know that? How you follow the rules. All they ever do is get you hurt.”
“Getting in trouble means something different for you than it does for me.”
Here’s what I realized: It wasn’t hate that made it easy to talk to my mom. It was love. Love let the words out.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because. What you are.”
“Because I’m a sexy mother?”
I didn’t grin back.
“Because I’m white.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” he said. “Right. You see? The rules are not your friend. Racists made the rules. Racists enforce them.”
I put the picked-clean drumstick down.
Case said “Whatever” and the word was hot and long, a question, an accusation. “The world put you where you are, Sauro, but fear keeps you there. You want to never make any decisions. Drift along and hope everything turns out for the best. You know where that’ll put you.”
The lady with the change cup walked by our table. Snatched a thigh off of Case’s plate. “Put that down right this minute, asshole,” he said, loud as hell, standing up. For a second the country-bumpkin Case was gone, replaced by someone I’d never seen before. The lady scurried off. Case caught me staring and smiled, aw-shucks style.
“Stand up,” I said. “Go by the window.”
He went. Evening sun turned him into something golden.
Men used to paralyze me. My whole life I’d been seeing confident charismatic guys, and thought I could never get to that place. Never have what they had. Now I saw it wasn’t what they had that I wanted, it was what they were. I felt lust, not inferiority, and the two are way too close. Like hate and love.
“You make me feel like food,” he said, and then lay himself face down on the floor. “Why don’t you come over here?” Scissored his legs open. Turned his head and smiled like all the smiles I ever wanted but did not get.
Pushing in, I heard myself make a noise that can only be called a bellow.
“Shh,” he said, “everyone will hear us.”
My hips took on a life of their own. My hands pushed hard, all up and down his body. Case was tiny underneath me. A twig I could break.
Afterwards I heard snoring from down the hall. Someone sobbed. I’d spent so long focused on how full the world was of horrible things. I’d been so conditioned to think that its good things were reserved for someone else that I never saw how many were already within my grasp. In my head, for one thing, where my thoughts were my own and no one could punish me for them, and in the cloud, where I was coming to see that I could do astonishing things. And in bed. And wherever Case was. My eyes filled up and ran over and I pushed my face into the cool nape of his sleeping neck.
My one and only time in court: I am ten. Mom bought drugs at a bodega. It’s her tenth or hundredth time passing through those tall tarnished-bronze doors. Her court date came on one of my rare stints out of the system, when she cleaned up her act convincingly enough that they gave me briefly back to her.
The courtroom is too crowded; the guard tells me to wait outside. “But he’s my son,” my mother says, pointing out smaller children sitting by their parents.
I am very big for ten.
“He’s gotta stay out here,” the guard says.
I sit on the floor and count green flecks in the floor. Dark-skinned men surround me, angry but resigned, defiant but hopeless. The floor’s sparkle mocks us: our poverty, our mortality, the human needs that brought us here.
“Where I’m from,” Case said, “you could put a down payment on a house with two thousand dollars.”
“Oh.”
“You ever dream about escaping New York?”
“Kind of. In my head.”
Case laughed. “What about you and me getting out of town? Moving away?”
My head hurt with how badly I wanted that. “You hated that place. You don’t want to go back.”
“I hated it because I was alone. If we went back together, I would have you.”
“Oh.”
His fingers drummed up and down my chest. Ran circles around my nipples. “I called that guy I know. The porn producer. Told him about you. He said he’d give us each five hundred, and another two-fifty for me as a finder’s fee.”
“You called him? About me?”
“This could be it, Sauro. A new start. For both of us.”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I did know. I knew I was lost, that I couldn’t say no, that his mouth, now circling my belly button, had only to speak and I would act.
“Are you really such a proper little gentleman?” he asked. His hands, cold as winter, hooked behind my knees. “You never got into trouble before?”
My one time in trouble.
I am five. It’s three in the morning. I’m riding my tricycle down the block. A policeman stops me. Where’s your mother/ She’s home/ Why aren’t you home?/ I was hungry and there’s no food. Mom is on a heroin holiday, lying on the couch while she’s somewhere else. For a week I’ve been stealing food from corner stores. So much cigarette smoke fills the cop car that I can’t breathe. At the precinct he leaves me there, windows all rolled up. Later he takes me home, talks to my mom, fills out a report, takes her away. Someone else takes me. Everything ends. All of this is punishment for some crime I committed without realizing it. I resolve right then and there to never again steal food, ride tricycles, talk to cops, think bad thoughts, step outside to get something I need.