friday (ya te vas?)

For a week in LA I was the director of an art and antiquities gallery. I had gotten the job through my uncle and through my charming personality. Serendipity, my dinner mates from last week might have said. I didn’t know what a gallery director did, I didn’t bother to ask my friends who worked in galleries, I started on Tuesday and was asked not to come in on Friday.

Anyway one day, maybe Thursday, I ate lunch outside. There was nowhere to sit, no parks no benches, so I sat on the curb and ate a sandwich. Then I walked around the block. As I walked around the block, a generic man, he had black hair, a beard, bad skin, some kind of boring button-down shirt, drove by in a BMW. He slowed down and asked me where I was going and if I needed a ride. He said, you’re a handsome boy.

What would have happened if I had gotten into his car?

I am mesmerized by sordid underworlds but I’ve never really been part of any. Although I guess sordid is in the eye of the beholder - maybe all the trips I take to saunas and sex clubs, to nude hotels on naked beaches, maybe simply being a musician, going to basements and apartments or whatever, maybe all of this is sordid to somebody - “sor-did to sooooooome-body,” croons the ghost of Frank Sinatra in a cobwebbed basement in Dubuque, Iowa - anyway the point is that I wonder if I would have joined some kind of sordid underworld. Like, where would this guy had brought me in his car? Would he actually have given me a ride somewhere?

For a while I thought about where I would have asked him to go. Somewhere in LA? I was walking back to work I think, a distance of about one block. Maybe I would have made him take me to Sapp, my favorite restaurant at the time, or to, I don’t know, somewhere fancy. The wine place I worked at always had events at a place that starts with R, near the Grove, I remember the chef’s name is Walter, I think, he has a wide Midwestern face and bright optimistic eyes. We would host wine dinners in a private room upstairs for top clients. The manager would bring out rarities from his champagne collection to start and sometimes other treats. I will never forget the night he brought a ‘76 Krug. The carbonation had mellowed out completely, the wine was the color of liquid gold and tasted like it, too: slightly sweet, gently oxidized, round and deep. You know the feeling in your mouth of an egg that is just over soft-boiled? Like the yolk isn’t runny but isn’t solid either? The wine had that kind of feeling. The garbage truck that stops by my house here in Mexico City is covered in Krug stickers, I hope someday they try it or maybe they already have.

I also wonder what would have happened in the car. Would he have kidnapped me or actually dropped me off somewhere? Would he have touched me? He would have touched me, but where? What would he have tried? What would I have tried? I’m not particularly great at having sex with people I feel no connection with, or would the thrill of the moment provided me with the necessary connection, at least for a moment? Would the moment last long enough or would I get bored, would my body shut down like it does sometimes, like a switch turning off or rather like an appliance accidentally getting unplugged? What questions would he have asked me? What questions would I have asked him?

I would have wanted to know what he did, obviously some kind of showbusiness given the car, the bad skin and the rapey tendencies. Was he an agent? Was he Scooter Braun? Would he have promised to make me famous? I would have believed him.

These days it’s hot and humid in the morning. By three or four it clouds over and sometimes it rains, sometimes it’s just cloudy and muggy. I take my dog out early so it’s not too hot for him, but it’s been too hot for him anyway so we stop on the way back so he can rest a little bit. We stop at a place called Caravan where they make good Negronis. It’s amazing how many bad Negronis there are in the world, and luckily there are none at Caravan.

The other day we stopped there, I wanted to have a mineral water or something, he wanted to get some pets and a bowl of water. As I was walking to sit down a man asked, ya te vas? Are you already leaving? And I said, no, I’m just sitting down. His friends had a dog, we talked about dogs. They asked for my dog’s name. What’s your name, he asked. I ignored him and asked for the dog’s name. Nicolas was the dog’s name. A small white dog who occasionally wandered away from his people to explore the surroundings, ten years old like my dog. Ya te vas? asked the man again, dramatically looking me up and down. Ya déjalo, said his friends. I sat down at a table around the corner and ordered a strawberry kombucha.

There was a time where I had so little self-esteem and was so deeply in need of any kind of validation that I would have been thrilled to sit down with them and pretend like I wanted to be part of their conversation, or that I wanted to be the subject of their conversation. I wouldn’t have had to pretend, the situation would have made me feel shy but I would have loved it. Like, I didn’t get into the car with that man in LA because I had to go back to work, you know? Not because it was a bad idea. I remember in my 20s in New York I was at a friend’s house with a prominent gay musician in the scene. My boyfriend at the time was sitting next to me. The musician asked us to make out. I looked at my boyfriend and started leaning over, he didn’t look at me and instead said something like, “you think we’re whores for free? fuck you, pay us.”

I wonder how much he would have paid me, this drunk little man at the neighborhood cafe. He didn’t want to talk to me, I’m not sure he wanted me to fuck him either, it was something else, but not something innocent and definitely not something social. He wanted an exchange, he wanted me to be an unknowing vessel of desire, he wanted to feel the power of someone he was attracted to sitting next to him, all innocent-like, hopefully within reach of his sweaty palm. Like in Japan, there are those cafes that salarymen can go to and a woman will sit with them and listen to them talk but definitely not fuck, or here there is a tradition of ficheras, maybe I am getting this wrong, but they hang out at certain cantinas and will dance with you but probably not fuck. I wonder how he would have reacted if, when he asked me what my name was, I responded: how much?