Rap Star for Christmas

“All we have is tonight, Papi,” this playful Panamanian accent reminded me from out of the nearby closet. “So, you can either sit there on your ass and bitch about it or we can make good use of the little time we have together.”

I stayed tucked under the bed sheets with my back against the headboard and my arms tightly folded to my exposed chest like an angry child looking intensely at the opened door waiting for Carmelo Navarro to reappear. Carmelo was right. All we had was tonight, a week before Christmas, and I was sulking terribly because of it. If we didn’t make the most of right this minute, it would certainly be after next summer when I would be able to hold him and kiss him the way I would like.

“If it’s okay with you, I want to bitch about it a little longer.” I responded mockingly, feeling just a bit proud that I was making him feel just a bit guiltier for leaving me up here in cold Vermont snow.

Oh, sure. I could meet up with him every now and again while he’s out there on the road. Particularly on those long weekends when mi tias might make the long drive out of The City to see about their ailing brother to give me a break to freely live life.

“Fuck you.”

“I wish you would if tonight is all we got.”

A long silence followed by some erratic rumblings coming out of the large walk-in-closet. If we were back in the el barrio, back in our corner of The Heights, I could make an accurate guess. But because the closet it the size of a small efficiency I couldn’t imagine what he could’ve been doing other than fumbling around with the things on his side since I kept my side quite neat.

“You know it don’t have to be like this, Ivan. I don’t see why you won’t let me hire one of those twenty-four-hour nurses to come see about your old man. He said it better than anybody that you shouldn’t give up your life to see about him.”

“So I guess I should give up my life to see about you then, huh?”

“Stand by your man, Ivan Palacios. Stand by your fucking man.” Carmelo growled with his prideful ego beating his chest with more noise to follow, sounding like he was tossing off one of his black boots.

“I think you mean behind my man, his wife, his kids, and whoever else.” I said, adding fuel to my temper tantrum.

I knew that his love for his familia would always take precedence over me, especially when it came to his kids, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This wasn’t one of those typical situations where we were sneaking off behind his wife Marigold’s back. She knew about me and his extramarital activities with me, as he of hers, with her steady stream of drop-dead gorgeous women. Marigold has always assured me that if they had a normal existence or one that looked like it was slowing down any time soon that she would be the first to take her half of the money and grant him a divorce so that I could be the one to “wash his drawers” fulltime.

She was right if everything was normal. As it would be, it wasn’t. His career as a rap artist rose to meteoric heights in such a short amount a time that it gave nobody a minute to map out a plan. It only made sense in the immediate that they got married since they already shared two children together and knew that the other was bisexual. I would like to pretend that they didn’t have to go through with it, but if it wasn’t for Carmelo marrying Marigold, it was destined to be someone else. Not by his design, of course, but for the sake of the community that was going to be relentless in pairing him off with some hot chica or let his record sales plunge.

“So is that what it’s about now?” Carmelo asked hurtfully.

I knew I had gone too far for him to be sounding like that. His deep heavy voice crackling with hardened tears. I knew that was a sore spot for him because he considered me his family. I think sometimes to a fault replacing his wife (and sometimes his kids) with me.

“No,” I reassured him.

“’cause I consider you and tio just as much apart of my family as anyone else,” he defended, speaking of the old man that raised me.

“I know, Carmelo.”

“I never wanted to marry that crazy bitch.”

“Carmelo!”

I hated hearing him call the mother of his six children out of her name, especially after she had gone to great lengths to protect him when she could’ve easily capitalized on his secret while still sitting on hers.

But he plowed on. “I would’ve never married that woman if you and mama didn’t tell me I had too. You, of all people, should know by now that I’ve always wanted to be with you and only you. That’s all the fuck I ever wanted since I was fifteen years old! Fuck all this other shit!”

“Okay, okay, Carmelo. I know.” I said trying to calm him down while readjusting my position in bed, as if it was going to help.

There was no doubt in my mind that he was quite genuine when he said that he didn’t need his career to validate him anymore. Surely, he didn’t need the money since his wife and I both worked on getting him the most competent advisors we could find. He could easily go back to the barrio and live a peaceful existence in one of the low-grade tenements he purchased a few years back. And for awhile, he might be okay. Or so he would think. While he may be in a better position to breathe better, if that meant no longer hiding our relationship, I knew him best to know that he had to get performing out of his system before he was ready to turn off his mic. Because I refuse to spend the rest of my life letting Carmelo tell me that I held him back from sharing his talent with the world. He would never come outright and say it, or even blame it on our relationship, of course, but the undertone would still be there. Simply because he would curse the living daylights out of anyone that say that because he is so open with us that he had nothing to contribute to the Latin voice.

“Forgive me.” I pleaded. “I’m just talking out of my ass right now. Nine months overseas is just a long ass time.”

“You act like I’m never coming back or duck in and out every now and then.” He said still hiding out in the closet.

“And you think doing as many shows that you’re going to do over there, jumping from this tour to that tour, that when you bring your ass home that you’re going to want to drive all the way out here when you can stay home?”

Carmelo stuck his head out of the door and asked, “Don’t you trust that your nookie is just that good anymore? Age do that to a chico.”

I threw a pillow at him as he quickly hid behind the wall.

“Ah-ha, that’s why you missed,” he chuckled, staying behind the wall. “Like I said before, if I have to get an extra tour bus and strap it down with every piece of equipment that your uncle need so that you’ll come with me I will.”

“And you think that an ailing sixty-seven-year-old in extremely bad health will want to trek throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia?”

“It’s a great way for him to see the world.”

“He’s been around the world twice, remember?”

“Oh,” Carmelo mouthed, sticking his head out again, only this time shirtless showing off the freckles that dance across his shoulders and the light dusting of black hair seeded across his wide chest showing. “Then what about the nurse thing?”

“I told you already.”

“Just making sure,” Carmelo said ducking his head back into the closet.

It was actually because of mi tio Andrujar Gubicza that I even met and fell in love with Carmelo. I was about eleven or twelve when I had to move from Spanish Harlem to Washington Heights after my mother passed away from cancer. My siblings were split amongst our aunts while I was sent to live with her only brother. It baffled everybody in the family because he was one of those confirmed bachelors that always had a pretty girl on his arm. It was widely rumored that my being sent to live with him was my mother’s way of getting him to settle down. If it worked, he never let on. Considering that when I got old enough not to be babied anymore we were like two ships passing in the night.

I was about thirteen when I allowed The Heights to be my own. I was no longer the kid from the other side of town. I was home. I can’t remember the day and the time when Carmelo and I met. It was like he was always there, and I was always there, and we couldn’t stand each other much. I would be minding my own business, walking home from school or science club when he found something about me to pick on. I would ignore him long enough until he would make me mad enough to throw my book bag down on the ground and fight with him on one of the side streets. I think The Heights was floored that I would win. The quiet geek beat out the neighborhood tough guy two years his senior. After a few riffs of revenge or retaliation or whatever that you want to call it, we fell into a friendship. Where I would go over to his apartment, and he would come over to mine when my uncle wasn’t known to come home if he was on a winning streak or trying to bang some cheap babe that wanted a splice of his winnings. Carmelo and I were at my place one afternoon when my uncle Andrujar came home to catch us listening to one of his Fania All-Star records. I don’t know what my uncle Andrujar saw or what he thought he saw that day, but he said something I thought was quite odd. He said Carmelo and I couldn’t hang out in the apartment together unless he was there, and even then, we would have to stay in the living room and dining room, sounding as if I had ever had him in my bedroom. It was weird too because my uncle was a laidback kind of fellow. The kind that seemed like it wouldn’t bother him in the least if I had some girl in my room. I sort of kind of believed that seeing that he swiped me some rubbers from the free clinic. On the off-chance I would run into my brothers, they would tell me that my aunt would tell them the same thing if they tried to bring a girl to the house. Of course, with them living with my cousins, it wasn’t a high likelihood of that happening.

There wasn’t a real moment that I can say that I fell in love with Carmelo because I couldn’t even call it that then. We were good friends for so long that we always had some sort of love for each other. But if I had to give any real turning point, I would say the night I came home late from a house party in The Bronx and I found my uncle sitting around the table drunk as a skunk. This was one of the handfuls of times I had seen him in this state. It was more memorable because it was different from any of the other times. He wasn’t surrounded by any drinking buddies joining him for a sip and a laugh. No drinking buddies to cry with him when he told me through liquid courage that I needed to get me some pussy. This was nothing new because his answer to everything was to get between some legs. The thing that stomped me was him telling me that I had no chance of getting some running with that boy because he was too busy plotting to get into mine. He said that while Carmelo was one of the hardest nails in the neighborhood bar none, he was still a fucking puto trying to pass himself as a true wolf. He knew a few boxers like him, my uncle sneered, hard like a real man for years, wouldn’t have dared called him anything else otherwise, and then one day that same dude decided to parade down the street in a dress like the real puto that he was. I didn’t know what to think. This was so far removed from the truth that I didn’t know where to begin because it was well-known around town that my best friend was one of the best skirt chasers around. He was still waiting on a blood test to see if he had fathered a child with some black girl over there in Jersey and another one out on Long Island. Then, if that wasn’t enough, my uncle finished off by warning me that if I let him, Carmelo would ruin me like some puto ruined him so long ago.

Again, I didn’t know what to make of it. My uncle was player around the neighborhood, one of the best known. He was a true soldier for singlehood. I couldn’t fathom a puto touching him much less making it with one. And even though my uncle called himself warning me about Carmelo, it forced me to look at myself more. I had girlfriends, sure. But they were all fleeting compared to my friendship with Carmelo. It was always Carmelo. The more I thought about it there were many of times I would knock an easy girl off my lap if it meant hanging out with my boy just a few minutes more. Some days I was sure about my feelings about Carmelo and other days not so much. A lot of it had to do with me being conscious of the unconscious, like something would come over me when I looked at him. Sometimes as we talked and sometimes no words were needed. I tried to convince myself that it was a fleeting thing. Then we would get out there and play B-ball, and it was like everything in the world to me to bump up against his sweaty body and I would spend the night relishing unwashed in his scent.

We found ourselves in his room one day. We were sitting around laughing and joking, talking the usual shit, when I brushed up against him a second longer than I should have. I looked at him a second longer than I should have. Before long, something came over me. I was leaning in with puckered lips and I kissed him. I was surprised more than anything that he kissed me back as he held onto the side of my face like it was the most natural thing in the world. Looking back in hindsight, I guess we were always in love in some way. It was just that it was innocent as well as curious on our dirty tip of Manhattan. When I pulled away, he looked back at me like he had flown up to heaven and when I saw his face turn like it did it looked like he was crashing to hell, when I saw his fist fly into my face. I was flat on my back when he started whaling on me, calling me a few choice words as I ran from his apartment with a bloody nose.

I didn’t see him for a few weeks after that. I got deeper into my schooling, and he stopped going. He got in with the wrong crowd, started drinking and started selling drugs on the corner just like everyone else. I avoided him like the plague. I wasn’t worried about him or what he could do, as I was all these dirty looks he would shoot at me.

After I heard that Marigold was a few months pregnant with his baby, I got friendly with another guy from another borough. Carmelo got jealous. Beat the guy up and pleaded with me that I find some girl to get with. I found myself telling him how sorry I was and that if I knew that moment was going to change us like this I would not have done it. He looked at me tearfully and went off in another direction holding onto his bottle of beer.

I was in my senior year of high school when I learned that he was writing poetry on the sly. I caught him at a spoken word event. He later turned his words into lyrics for others and into a rhyming career for himself. I tried not to think about him, but the more I thought about him the more I was weighed down by the unknown possibilities of what we could have been, listening to my virile uncle and his new “friend” through the thin walls.

I was barely twenty when I would know something similar. I was just coming out of community college when I was still faced with the same problem as I had going in. I was accepted to all these prestigious schools with no money to go. I had scholarships, but not enough to cover everything. And I made too much working in midtown at the bank to put up a poormouth. Carmelo had just inked his first deal with some off-the-hip record label. We had found our rhythm with each other. No kisses, just pure friendship. But despite our best efforts, it certainly was flaking away, and the kisses slowly came rushing back. This time I tried to fight it because I couldn’t escape the two children that he had with his then-girlfriend. We both knew that as much as I resisted, I was bound to give in, especially the way he burned of heat grinding on top of me and pulsed through those flimsy basketball shorts. Who in the hell knew that a few hours later that he would have me against that cold cement slab? That it would be my chilled hands down his pants fishing for his warm doughy dick as if his rap career and his advance couldn’t be flushed down the drained if we got caught? I was ready for it, but when I saw it, I got a little scared. I knew enough about what I wanted to do with him to know that it looked like it was going to hurt with it being so fat and so curvy. But I found a little humor at the fact that even hard it still had the foreskin covering the head. I pulled back on it to see everything. He groaned. I got down on my knees and put it in my mouth, and he moaned.

Being that it was my first time I could only imagine that I was incredibly clumsy compared to the many valuable lessons I learned later. Though, if anyone was listening to my man whimpering that morning, I don’t think anyone would’ve gone out of their way to believe me. I don’t think it mattered much to either of us either because we were finally together in this. Even to this day, I don’t know how we made it from down there back to his apartment unnoticed. We had to have been one walking ball of lust pawing the daylights out of each other.

I don’t remember much from the outside going in, but I do remember hitting that bed. Carmelo was trying to undo my jeans while I was trying to kick off my shoes. It didn’t work like it was supposed to, but it worked just the same with him stripping off his clothes between our heavy bouts of kissing. I was in bliss. I was soon having hiccups of reality as we worked our way to that moment. It wasn’t that I started to have second doubts as I began to wonder what kind of lube he had. I had made it up in my mind that for my first time I was going to use this particular lube that said it was going to help ease the pain taking it up the chute. I stayed quiet while he squirted some out of this bottle onto his hand. I felt shamefully easy with my legs spread wide like that, cupping my knees and allowing him to finger me ready. I could see that he was reading for my reaction to his touch, like he knew what to do which led me to believe he had done this before? I was a little hurt, yeah. I soon forgot all about it the way he looked me in my eyes and smiled. Molesting this spot that made me feel like I was going to pee all over myself. He then did something that I never would’ve even thought of. Looking at him it seemed like it was sort of a light bulb idea for him too, grabbing my foot and licking the length of it. I was too busy concentrating on not peeing on myself with his fingers jabbing my hole than on his tongue scraping across the inners this odd body part when the tide shifted within me when he started sucking on my toes. It was like I had the wind knocked out of me. It was like I was trying to catch my breath because I forgot how to breathe anymore. I knew that I wanted him, but this was like I wanted him. I needed Carmelo to be inside of me more than anything in the world. I needed him deep, and while he was at it, more personable and more intimately than I had ever known before. While my thoughts were flooding like a broken damn, my lips betrayed me and unbeknownst to my conscious I was begging to be fucked.

I wish I could say that he entered me slow and gentle, but he was caught up in my words. He pulled me back to the edge of the bed and just slid in me like he had been taking me like this a million times. I felt wonderful for the first couple of seconds and then my hole gripped him like vice. It was hurting like hell, but it looked like it was hurting him more. Looking at his face it looked as if my butt hole was ready to snap his dick off.

“Relax, Ivan,” Carmelo breathed stiffly. “Just relax.”

I tried really hard to follow his advice, but it felt like every small move he thought about making was like pure friction with powerful electrical sparks flying off in my insides. He would get upset and start hollering at me because I couldn’t relax with this thing stuck my butt, and I was sweating like I had a fever, not believing that my first time would go as badly as this.

Fifteen minutes into this tug of war, Carmelo looked down at me and smiled like the goofy kid I remembered. He looked like he was happy, at peace. “I’m sorry for yelling at you. I want to be with you, but I don’t care if you don’t care if we don’t get this right…just as long as you know that I love you and you’re safe with me. I ain’t planning on going nowhere without you.”

It was like he said “open sesame” because I quickly loosened up for him to lean over and kiss me with no real pain at all before making this slow beautiful stride inside of me. It became everything I thought it could be and more. My legs opened to received with a shower of kisses that covered my face and neck as I stroked his back and nape to my pleasure. I couldn’t believe how good he felt. Like his dick was finally at home. I wanted him to stay inside of me like this forever. Mumbling out his name and how good he felt. I didn’t know how wild these words were driving him because he got more aggressive with his style without getting rough with it, telling me that that he loved me more than anything and that he was sorry for every rotten thing he had ever said or done. It was like he was at confessional between my legs, adding that he needed to cum. I beg him to cum. I begged and begged, and soon he answered my call. He unloaded into me the likes I don’t think any man in history had ever come before, as I felt my rectum slowly getting full and heavy with all of his slimy baby-making cream.

For the next couple of days, I felt like I was leaking of it with every step I took. I would be walking down the street, and I could feel something wet slime down my inner thigh. The first few times I felt it necessary to duck into some alley and check. Of course, there was nothing there other than the sweat collected from my pants. After he felt that I recovered from the ordeal, Carmelo pressed and pressed for one more go around that I conceded to just about every time. But when he was in the studio working on his album or promoting his first single, I began to miss him more.

It wasn’t long after Carmelo released a couple of singles from his album that it was apparent that he was well on his way. He may not have ever meant that much to the “mainstream”, but he soon became everything to Latin America. The interviews started coming in, profiles of the neighborhood, and everybody started ask him about having a special lady in his life. He was handsome and successful with great promise of touching the stars. And after a few other celebrities worked hard to derail him, I told him to get married and in return he sneakily paid for my schooling at MIT under false pretenses.

Fast forward fifteen years later and I’m back in New York living on the other end of Manhattan. I just happen to be visiting my uncle back in the old neighborhood when we stumble across Carmelo throwing a free concert in front of his alleged father’s convenient store. He did his thing on stage, bringing back intelligent flow back to the art of hip-hop. He spotted me out of the crowd and got his wife to seek me out.

It didn’t take long to get back under the other’s skin, replacing raw lust with toying conversation over a nice expensive dinner. I wasn’t comfortable crossing that line, knowing that he had a marriage certificate attached to his soul. Ironically, the icebreaker came from the person I least expected—his wife. She said that she could see in his eyes that he wanted to plow me for all eternity. Even with her permission, it felt weird because it felt like I was given permission to share somebody I always thought was mine.

On a side trip through Southern Vermont on a cheese excursion, Carmelo let me know that he felt the same way, too. He promised after he finished raising his kids that we were going to move up here and live on a huge farm. He wasn’t sure if it would be operational, but surely it would be ours. I smiled and laughed, knowing that nothing like that was going to happen. I thought it was a nice dream, though. Surprising to me, he kept his promise. Bought a hefty chunk of land on the side of a mountain and had me work close with the builder to build this luxurious log cabin with our names exclusive to the property with Marigold signing off any and all claims she ever had to it. Meaning that if he died tomorrow, it was mine free and clear.

*          *          *          *          *

“How’s the old man?” Carmelo asked from behind the wall in the closet.

The old man that he spoke of, my uncle, Andrujar was supposed to be on the other side of the house sound asleep. More than likely though, he was standing nearby trying to listen to our sex through the door. I don’t mean to make him sound like a pervert. It was just that sex was a part of life and he had stopped really living it after his friend died and his health declined and he like listening in. I thought I would have problems with it, but the more I thought about it I thought it was a nice payback for the many nights I had to helplessly listen to him through the walls with his lovers.

“What do you think?” Carmelo asked, his words preceding him as he made his way out of the closet in a Santa hat and a red thong that showed off his hefty package.

I noticed as he stood still that he let his moustache and beard grow in for me before shaving it off for the rest of the world.

He was a cute and awkward looking teenager and young adult, but after he jolted passed the age of thirty-five, he filled out quite nicely. He grew into his own, the old jokers would say.

As I look on at my Christmas gift that will possibly last me until the end of next summer, I can’t help but to think that good things come to those who wait for a really great gift.