Like during the summer months of cottonwood & cocaine, the lean & linger of front porches out past midnight. Tonight, I’ll rope the moon. My shirt shimmies up my arms and over my head, a ballerina’s fifth position, lifts me up 7th Street toward the funeral home. A left at the green frog: El Sapo Verde. I stop inside, drink another. Soon I’m back on the streets. Circling and circling. Listening now for the slowdown of Texas trucks with Mexican license plates. Coahuila. Tamaulipas. San Luis Potosí. Ranchers weaving up I-35 in search of family or work. Not where they’re supposed to be.
On the other side of the highway—my work, my school—stumble men like me. White. Entitled. Gay. Clusters of grapes. Dating each other. Fucking each other. Loving each other.
My body, I’m told, attracts attention. I believe it only when I’m drunk. So here I am tonight on the Mexican side of town full now with Hondurans and Salvadorans, shabby streets and houses bursting with Latin American men who for some reason, sometimes, notice me.
Like when a big Ford truck slows down, heads whirl (the driver’s & mine), and I can see he’s alone. Returns a few minutes later, tires squealed against the curb, the man’s arm circling down the passenger window. Black marble eyes over stab of moustache. Wears his sombrero like DNA. I lean in, take notice of his silver belt buckle and imagine pointy boots.
“How much?” he says, a question I’ve been asked before. He: soft flanks & fat rolling his thumb and forefinger through his goatee. I don’t answer but instead pull the handle and open the door, my nakedness now inside.
Like when my pulse sizzles. Wicked bulge beneath my blue jeans. Grab myself and squeeze. And then,
“Get out.”
He says it nicely—“Quiero que salgas”—as if I have the wrong idea. But I don’t want money, I tell him, glancing first at his eyes and then at my lap. He can have it if he wants. The man stares ahead at the flickering golden streetlight then slowly reaches across my lap and extends his arm to open the door. Tilts his hat and softly wishes me goodbye as if we’ve just ended our first date.
Like an hour later, bush tired & bare chested—nowhere to go but home. A car slows down, pulls beside me. It’s a cop, his head out the window as if he’s delivering mail. He points his big forearms toward a sidewalk where I should wait.
Next to me now, this cop, asking if I have drugs. I feel a light touch on my back and draw my hands up into the air. He asks if I mind, this thick cop whose soft hands swell me over. Perhaps he gets it, gets me.
“Not at all,” I answer, seizing my crotch as if handing a cantaloupe at H.E.B. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Soon his weight diminishes. His bald & brown head sinks down to slide something back into his belt.
“What the hell you doing,” he says, “in this neighborhood?”
I point past the old brick boarding house toward Chavez Street, catching his stare as my arms lower. “I live over there.” I don’t recall if he responds, but his eyes soften & sag. I pull my license from my back pocket. Tell him, too, that I’m in law school.
“Law school?” he says, looking up from my license.
I want to tell him why I’m here and what I’m doing. To ask him why he doesn’t already know. “I guess I’m a little wound up,” I finally blurt. “Wound up tonight.”
Now he’s laughing. “So you drunk?” My license slides from his fingers back to mine.
“I was—”
“Get in,” he interrupts, opening the door and pointing toward the front seat.
I want to shout: CAN’T YOU SEE? Or is that we can’t see past our first impression: a white boy in a sketchy neighborhood. He must be lost.
Inside, the car feels dull & denuded. A few blocks later we pull up to my little yellow house, the human-sized sunflowers no longer swelling in the daylight.
“You have to be careful,” he says, his eyes shifting from mine as I exit the car to the dewy green stalks beyond the open passenger window.
I wave him along and imagine walking up the steps toward my front porch even though I’ll do no such thing until the dazzling dawn.
Like when I’m not where I’m supposed to be.
