tuesday (the boyfriend)
I tell Nacho, I’m going to have some lunch and buy some fruit. I’m starving. He looks at me. He’s been coughing since he got back from the doggie hotel, nothing serious I don’t think, I hope, and I think, I hope, it’s clearing up. It’s better today than it was on Monday, which seems like a good sign. The weather is heating up and the ground at the dog park is turning into a fine dust, which probably isn’t helping either of us.
The mixiotes stand that I like at the tianguis isn’t there for the second week in a row. The other antojitos places are packed, there are lines, I don’t want to wait in a line. I go to the fruit stand I like and point at a liter cup filled with plums. Do you want to try one? asks a vendor. I say sure and she hands me a plum. I spin it around and the opposite side is rotten. I throw it out and walk away.
The Yucatecan place a few blocks away is calm. I want a michelada and a sopa de lima and I get a couple panuchos, one salpicón and one relleno negro. I still don’t know what a panucho is, they’re different at every different Yucatecan place I’ve been. I mean, they are always a tortilla filled with beans with some kind of stewed topping, but sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small, sometimes they’re soft, and here they’re crispy. I like the crispyness. I order a cubana with a dark beer, they’re out of dark beer so I get a Victoria. La victoria de México, says the bottle. Ok, I respond, and pour it into my glass.
I don’t even taste the food, I’m hungry and thinking about other things. I had a trial class this morning that did not result immediately in being hired, given a thousand classes to teach, a base salary to build my economy on, finally, an opportunity to share what I know, finally. I think I bombed it, maybe I didn’t. The main guy interviewing me said, gran trabajo. I don’t believe him.
As I spill salsa on my leg I text former students, searching “trompeta” and then “clase” in my Instagram messages to find who had texted me, not realizing that this would result in reliving messages from various exes. Puedo cambiar mi opinión? wrote F at some point in 2025. Yes, I responded back then. Yes, I say quietly now. One former student deleted their Instagram account, another had texted me months ago about scheduling another lesson and I’d never responded. Sorry for the disappearing act, I write. It wasn’t a good one, they respond. I’ll get better at it, I reply, returning to my circus tent to plan a new act. Maybe if I add a second fog machine, a cloud of talcum powder, a flashing light, a loud bang or two. Maybe the circus will hire me back then. As I write this an ambulance is stuck in traffic outside my apartment, sirens blaring. My dog howls and doesn’t cough. That’s a good sign, I say. You look like you’re about to vomit, he responds.
The other day I finished watching The Boyfriend on Netflix, a great show about how capitalism poisons not only our most intimate relationships but also our ability to imagine how those relationships can be. I mostly just had it on for a few days, comforted by the voices in my living room speaking a language I don’t understand as I went about my day. I actually watched the last couple of episodes. In one scene, two of the contestants stare at a third one, appalled. They’d asked him: what would you do if you saw your partner having dinner with another man, laughing, having a good time? He replied: I’d think, it’s nice he’s having a good time, I’m glad to see him laughing. Later he and one of the two appalled men decide to become each others’ first boyfriend. I’m not sure I can live up to your expectations, he admits, not knowing what those expectations are. I just want someone to support and to support me, to confront the world together, says the other. I agree, I want that too. The show freezes, the contestant starts speaking English, looking directly into the camera. Maybe you should find that, then, he says. I can’t, I respond, and open a warm beer that I don’t want.
On Bumble I have seven conversations open. One is with a guy my age, I swiped right half because he’s cute, half out of curiosity about his job — he’s a performer with a touring act and I want to know what that’s like — and half because I want to go on a date with him so I can tell my neighbor, I went on a date with someone my age, happy now? I can see my neighbor rolling his eyes from here. That’s not what I meant, he’s saying. A few weeks ago I texted him, soy insoportable. He replied, sí lo eres bb.
If there’s anything good about The Boyfriend — there isn’t. I was going to say that it shows that unexpected attraction, even love, can sprout from residing with a small group of people you didn’t know before. This happened to me the last time I went to Zipolite, I was immediately drawn to someone I wouldn’t normally be drawn to and we spent a very lovely week together. This is, in fact, what I find beautiful about cruising, that in the dark and in the heat of the moment I find myself madly in love or at least in lust with people who are not “my type,” that in these moments I can feel how ideas like having “a type” are not real, are imposed on me, vacant demands to commodify sexual attraction or attraction in general, to freeze the heat of desire into something cold, stale, marketable. Now that you know your type, you can filter your apps to fit that type and not be bothered by a nagging sense that love and sex can be so much broader, stranger, more surprising, hotter, unexpected. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about Cruising Utopia by José Estebán Muñoz: things don’t have to be the way they are. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, said Ursula LeGuin. Now that the world is actually ending what can we imagine?
Anyway, none of that happens on The Boyfriend. The world is not ending on The Boyfriend. Nobody fucks. The impending ban on gay marriage in Japan, where the show is emphatically set, is never mentioned or even alluded to, neither by the contestants nor by the grotesque chorus of talking heads who watch the show as part of the show. I feel ambivalent about marriage as an institution but banning it tends to signal bad news for human rights, not only for gays but for anybody else who doesn’t fit into the filters. Of the three couples who walk out of the series, two had met each other before. They’d gone to dinner. In one scene, one of the contestants says the other, I want to think about our future together, whether we will have kids, how we will get married. The guy he’s talking to looks blankly at him, says, ok. The third couple is of one guy who was on the show last year and another guy who was a fan of that guy on the show last year. Of the three remaining guys, two are crying as they try to figure out how they’ll come out to their parents before the show airs.
I feel like I know the third. We were sitting at the gay bar in Kyoto, maybe it’s closed now. It’s called “Apple.” Of my eye? It’s Sunday evening and the bartender, the owner, looks tired and sad. I’m tired, the previous night I went to same the bar and a pair of twinks from Marseille picked me up. I didn’t realize what was happening until one of them squeezed my arm and said, wow so strong! We went back to their hotel, then my hotel. One of them was a dominant bottom and the other a, what, passive top? I forgot what the opposite of dominant is. Anyway as his boyfriend sucked his dick the dominant one looked in my eyes and said, he’s a good sucker. I found it really offputting, it was like a performance of dominance in place of actual dominance. A cover, an act. Earlier in the night his boyfriend, the good sucker, had said something to me that I still think about. He was smoking a cigarette, they both smoked like chimneys — I still have no idea how nobody noticed all the smoke in my explicitly non-smoking room. He blew a cloud of smoke and looked down towards the white bedsheets. I don’t think we were naked yet. His boyfriend was in the bathroom, douching maybe. “He’s afraid to grow up. Like really, really afraid.”
The next day I slept until four. The sun was going to set soon so I set out to a temple complex. Something about being hungover makes me feel spiritual. I found a frog shrine and felt like I was speaking to something, to spirits. At night I put on my white overalls and went back to Apple. The owner, as I mentioned, was tired but pretended to be happy to see us, me and the Chinese guy who had also been there the previous night. No one else came, I don’t think, or I don’t remember, except for a Japanese guy. He had strange mannerisms, a weird way of holding his head. Maybe he arrived drunk, maybe he was just crazy. We talked for a while via Google Translate because he pretended not to speak English. The guy on The Boyfriend reminded me of him. Or is him? Who knows.