They were already in Florida. They were already in the promised land, right the hell on time too, for the hotel reservations were tomorrow, and there was no point being early. They were already in the kingdom of bliss.
He heard his Aunt Cynthia declaring, “There is nothing like fresh caught fish. There’s nothing like it. Once you’ve had fresh fish how can you go back to that frozen crap you get in the Midwest….?”
Crab, lobster, cracked open like an undersea fruit, all in spicy butter. The acaca in banana leaves, more than a pudding, more than a tamale. Red snapper, worthy of the Gods, and now, late into the night, hanging around the house, hanging around the beach, smoking cigarette after cigarette. And there is a breeze in the air that’s like a kiss. It’s nothing like the rough winds of the north.
“Look at that water,” Ross says.
On the beach he is still in white, but he rids himself of the white. There goes the white shirt, the white trousers, now the v shaped white of his briefs, and they are gone. His brown body is almost black in the night as he plunges in the water, and memory doesn’t erupt in Jimmy, it soaks like water over a teabag, and he is in the chair and he is hearing the whir of the electric needle that will put Yemanja in his skin.
“How much will this cost?” Flipper ask, his cigarette burning nearly to the filter.
Carlos with hair curling like vines, shakes his head and pulls on the fat, pungent blunt.
“Don’t be talking about no cost,” his voice is less precise than it was. “It’s more things than money.”
They are laughing. Ross is laughing. His brown eyes look large in his glasses as they move from Carlos and Jimmy in the chair to Flipper crushing out a cigarette that is only a filter.
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
But when he tries to remember the needle of the tattoo, the hours it must have been in that chair, what he remembers now is the dark grey light of the morning, and a blanket beneath him, the light semi sweet smell of Carlos’ sweat and of weed as the Candomblé tattoo artists grips his shoulders and his moustache tickles his neck while Jimmy lies amazed and mouth open, under him, being fucked into the morning. When he looks deeper into this, tries to remember more, he sees the room he woke in and Ross in bed under Carlos, two different browns locked together as Carlos humps him hard. Ross’s face is turned to Jimmy, still on acid, still floating above them, but his eyes are closed and his lips are moving like he’s praying. He opens his eyes once, and as Carlos keeps fucking him, those eyes are unfocused in ecstasy.
It’s all out of order It doesn’t matter.
“It doesn’t matter when it happened,” Ross says, looking like his usual sensible self, his virginal self, the self he will never be again, doesn’t wish to be again.
“It all happened. It’s all happened.”
They arrived in Florida a day early cause they couldn’t stay away from that country raised up out of a swamp, a land that is further south than the South. And whatever brought them here, the orixas brought them here, God brought them here, Yemaya brought them here. The car brought them here, they remain for a second day, showering, dressing, this time waking in a bed with the brown Cuban Carlos.
Ross is sore from his attentions, surprised by his desire and need, almost afraid, not quite ashamed. He has been one person before this journey. Who the fuck will he be when he gets back? How will he tell these stories? Who would he tell them to? Sharing them seems like bragging, hiding them like shame.
They are alone on the beach, on a boat in the water, and the sun is eighty degrees and shines off of Carlo’s hair, and he is talking about Havana. And they are both smoking cigars. He talks about his mother and his brothers he left there and he says, “You’ll write me, right?”
When they are coming from the beach to where Jimmy and Flipper wait with the car, suddenly, Ross takes Carlos by the waist and Carlos kisses him, slanting Ross’s fedora. Ross walks back to the car, slowly with what Jimmy can only call a swagger, and Jimmy realizes he only knows a fraction of whatever passed between Ross and the tattoo artist.
It is a three and a half hour drive south to Miami and often they look over the jewel bright water. Behind them follow Carlos and Reynald, a taller, short haired, green eyed Cuban they must have met last night. They come through Fort Lauderdale, beaches, pastel houses, sunstruck white hotels.
“Lots of Jews,” Reynald points out. “Lots of old Jews,”
The road took them to Hollywood, and Ross was dazzled. The Cubans were dazzled by him, Carlos and Reynald on either side of him, clapping his shoulder and linking arms.
“Do we even need to see Miami?” Ross wondered.
“I fuuken hate Miami,” Reynald declared. “All you need is Hollywood.”
“All you need is the Keys!” Carlos declared. “We go to the Keys, conch fritters. Margaritas.”
“I want to go to Cuba,” Flipper said.
“You don’t!”
“No, you don’t!” Carlos agreed after Reynald, the both of them shaking their heads about the island they love, but left.
Away from the crowded beaches and hotels there is, on a strip that looks like every ragged strip in very ragged town, a little botanica that looks like its about to fall down, and in it Ross buys candles and herbs and an eleke, black and red beads, white and blue, and Jimmy says, “What should I get?”
“You don’t have to get anything.
“But I need to.”
“Then get what’s speaking to you.”
Rows of patterned beads hang from before the store keeper’s station. Green and yellow, blue and gold, red and white, many colors.
“These,” Jimmy says. He takes white beads and blue and clear beads, lays them on the counter before the store keeper.
“Those is Yemaya’s,” Carlos says.
And so, though it seems garish and out of place, though people will wonder why the white boy has it, when Ross offers to go halves with him, says that sometimes he will keep her in his room, they buy the statue of Yemaya, the beige skinned woman looking half like Mary and half like the Fairy of the Sea, and gently the storekeeper wraps her, and gently she is placed in the trunk and away they go.
“Ross Allan, Ross Allan?” Flipper is singing when they arrive in north Miami. “What are you thinking?”
They have been in Flamingo Gardens. The world is pink and blue and yellow and green.
Ross is thinking how a thousand years have passed since six days ago, when he was in his aunt’s apartment with Anigel and he knew all manner of things were happening to his friends, but he was still waiting for something to happen to him. All he had known was a kiss. When he gets back to Saint Alban’s who will he be? In Walter, Michigan, next time he sees Mike Wheeler, what will he tell him. Well, what is Mike doing right now? Having his own adventure? Maybe?
He is thinking about the monastery where he and Jimmy sat and Jimmy told him things, and then he followed his impulse and got on his knees. Jimmy’s cock filled his mouth and his mouth became the whole world. And then he lay down for Jimmy and he’s been lying down for men these last few days. He remembers being humiliated in that chapel in the truest of words, bring brought low and made smaller and rejoicing in his holy smallness, and then returning to Flipper, high on lust and high on need and the two of them fumbling in the bed, the infinite pleasure of Flipper’s muscular body and Flippers star bright smiles that turned into night dark sorrow, Flipper ass up, round and white as two eggs, Flipper drawing him in like an expert. The freedom they felt that morning as the sun rose fueling the both of them so that when Jimmy returned it didn’t matter. They weren’t ashamed. Ross remembers crying out and dissolving into nut as he spilled in Flipper, absorbed by every crevice of him, spilled into his arms and into his laugh, reborn in Cocoa Beach making out with Carlos, asking Carlos, what was his price for a Yemaya tattoo, asking him what he wanted.
Whatever they did with others, when they are together on that beach it is only them, and after sex, they strip and come out of the water, and Ross watches the water drip off of Carlo’s lean body, the concaves of his ass, the small of his back, off his curling hair, in rivulets, and though he has been afraid of his own body in the past, Ross is not ashamed as he swims in the sea and comes back up. He does the same thing tonight.
There is a nude beach in Miami. A fat Puerto Rican tells them when the sun sets people get up to all sorts of things, so stay away then. This is just when they go. Jimmy and Flipper, Reynald and Carlos. They don’t go under the cover of night, cause night really provides not much in the way of cover. The night is quite open, but they don’t care. They are swimming. They are carefree. Ross takes Reynald by the face and kisses him, and Carlos too. While the Atlantic pulls at them and the waves roll over them, Carlos says:
“I have to get back to the damn hotel and be at work at seven.”
“In Cocoa Beach?”
“Si!
“The hell?”
“I know!”
“Then why did you travel all this way?”
“Cause what the fuck good is life if it can’t be happy? You come and see me on your way back?”
“Sure… If I can.”
“You come and see me,” Carlos says.
“I will.”
“You got my number, so that’s taken care of.”
Under the water, Carlos cups his ass, and tall bronze haired Reynald says, “You come and see Reynald too.”
“Yes,” Ross says. “Si.”
Carlos’s hand is still on his ass, and under the water Ross takes his penis, and he takes Reynald’s penis, and he feels them both lengthen, unrolling, hardening in his hands and he strokes them slowly and their mouths open in an O while the waters lap over them. He thinks of kneeling in the water and taking them both in his mouth, of kneeling in the water, and being fucked by one, mouth fucked by the other, Reynald and Carlos taking turns to sate his newly awakened lust.
He doesn’t do this though.
Ross is still thinking, “I can’t do whatever the fuck I want to. I can’t just be this uncontrolled thing, touching everyone, climbing into bed with every man in the world! What the fuck am I? When in my whole life have I been like this?”
It is only as Carlos and Reynald drive away, back to Cocoa Beach, that he realizes he will never regret the things he does, just the things he doesn’t. He wishes he’d been the whore in the water. Well, then he’ll be the whore here. He’ll be the whole whore. He’ll be the whole everything and take up all of life and all desire.
The vacation that has led to the vacation has exhausted them, so they return to the hotel room, Jimmy, Flipper and Ross, three kings come to the orient they are. Yemaya is set up, then the rooster. Incense is set up. They settle down to a silent TV screen and the music of the night outside is all they need. Now and again Jimmy goes to the balcony, pushing back its thing white curtain. They smoke a little, and Ross washes the sea off in an ordinary shower. He almost regrets it. It’s sad to see the grains of sand swirling away. He doesn’t dress. He lies on the bed. In the blue light of the TV he air dries.
Ross smells weed. Does no one in this hotel care? No one cares. He’s already mellow with the fig cookie Carlos gave him. Jimmy comes to him and offers him this great blunt again, and he takes a very long inhale that raises his hair, makes his skin prick, and sets him coughing a little. Then Jimmy goes back, presumably, to sit down by the window like he was before.
When Jimmy returns, he is grinning a little lopsided, and he stands over the bed naked, and Ross takes his penis in his hands, and now Flipper removes his rugby shirt and jeans in scramble to get undressed, and Ross sits on the bed while the two white boys stand naked before him, and he tugs on both of them, and their mouths open like baby birds while their bodies buckle with desire. He reaches behind them, cupping Flipper’s full ass, Jimmy’s narrower one, thrusting in fingers, taking them in his mouth, pressing the boys close to each other and they open their mouths, and their hands fly up in desire as they moan and…. at last… kiss.
VALEDICTION
The curtains were open enough to let in a great rectangle of blue sky, and the remains of Cuban music on a tinny radio came from the balcony outside along with the afternoon breeze.
Virgen de regla hoy es tu dia madre de agua
diosa mia yemaya la reina eres es para ti estos
cantares que te brindamos o madre mia madre
mia madre mia madre mia
Yemaya
Ohhhoho viva yemaya
Yemaya hee oloto aboyo yemaya
Yemaya hee oloto aboyo yemaya
Eee yemaya hee oloto aboyo yemaya
On a table by the balcony, the sunlight shone on white gowned Yemaya and the little the little clear star in the crown on her head. The light dodged the figures in the bed, Jimmy Nespres and Flip Sanders, both long and tall, one narrow with wiry limbs and sandy hair, the other black haired and thicker limbed with the bunched thighs and limbs and chest of an athlete. Both of them were half splayed, half curled up like milk and ivory babies, like rivers of boy, around the brown, solid figure of Ross Allan, Flipper’s arms around his waist as if he were wrestling him for love and sleep, Jimmy’s mouth open on Ross’s nipple, seeking another kind of nourishment.
He had never thought much of himself. He was fat, he was short, he was myopic, even after the first two were no longer true, Ross had felt it. He was certainly sexless. Where he had grown up, his first hints that boys were beautiful were with boys who did not look like him, boys with sandy hair, red hair, green and blue eyed white boys, for there were others in Catholic school, tall and thin they rose to meet the air. And the boys who did look like him he knew he didn’t measure up to. There had been a lot going on there. There would be a lot going on there, but virginity had meant sacredness. God understood him. God loved him. And so the fact that you could hide awkwardness, confusion, dislike of yourself in virginity didn’t matter.
“We could write a book on it,” he murmured, turning and twisting to sit upright. He thought of how he should shower, thought of last night when the Florida day had been on him, and he told Flipper he should bathe, but his friend had told him no and spent the late afternoon kissing the inside of his thighs like they were holy ground, kneeling at the blessed sacrament between his legs as it rose to glory in his mouth.
Ross reached over Flipper, whose hold loosened, who looked like a marble Michelangelo, and took up the cigar that Flipper had begun smoking when the three of them walked South Beach, laughing, arms thrown over each other, Flipper in a sand colored fedora with a red band, a black and white double pocket Cuban sports shirt hanging from his well made frame. The earthy, ancient scent of tobacco, almost too much scent, touched the air as Ross puffed on it a few times, almost ceremoniously. A white smoke rose into the air. He was a virgin. That old thing called virginity was indeed an old thing, and un unwelcome one. This was the new thing, this rejoicing in his boys, in the thickness of his thighs, the roundness of his ass, the deep brown of his own skin. This was the virginity, and when he stood under the shower and washed all of the previous day from his body, he would be virgin too.
In high school and even now, Ross had been so embarrassed of his body, almost afraid that anyone would see his penis, and he’d wondered before it this was because it wasn’t big enough, but now he remembered something. There had been this boy at his high school, big eyed Brandon Bollin, and for four years people called him Woody, which it turns out was because he’d gotten an erection in the shower. Now Ross’s penis rose bigger and bigger, harder as he smoked in the middle of the bed and ashed. It had been Brandon’s penis, getting bigger and bigger, visible to all, no longer a private citizen, which had branded him, and Ross, touching himself, wondered if that had made him afraid as well, not simply the chance of being seen hard, but being seen at all. And seeing meant being seen, wishing to see meant wishing to be seen. Last night, leaving the hotel pool, he walked naked through the locker room and thought of when he was younger and wouldn’t let himself be seen at all.
In the warm mid morning, while Flipper was sleep on his back, Ross lay on his side and saw Jimmy, cigarette hanging from his hand, stretching long and naked at the window, his little buttocks like an upside down V pointing to the small of his back. The voice that told him to stop watching, to look away, was silenced. There was no shame here. Jimmy turned looking to him , smiling and smoking, and at last coming back to bed.
Ross remembered a conversation they’d had one night when Jimmy, whose penis hung like an innocent sausage from his cloud of light brown hair, had come into his dorm room and lamented
“There’s just something about sex, though,” Jimmy said. “I’ve been fucking since I was fourteen and sometimes it scares me a little.”
“Scares you?”
“It’s like….. have you ever heard people say once you have it, you wont be so crazy and horny. You’ll get over it.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it seems like that’s true for most people. But not for me. I feel like I never get enough, like I’ll do anything for it. Sometimes I feel like my dick is in complete control and its exhausting. Sometimes I feel like I just keep getting dragged into shit and I’m always… What do drug addicts say? Chasing he dragon. Sometimes I just feel so worn out and so tired and I’m like, this is what a slut feels like. And then sometimes it’s like I hate every girl I’ve been with. Like…. They’re all sluts. But…. What does that make me?”
Hag ridden, or desiring to ride hags, this had literally been him. Exhausted. And when Ross sat down beside his skinny friend and wrapped an arm over his shoulder, and Jimmy placed his head against Ross’s, he’d wanted to ask: What about Flipper? What about those times with him?
Now he asked the question in a different way as Jimmy climbed back on to the bed and stretched across him.
“How do you feel? How does this make you feel?”.
“Peaceful,” Jimmy said, falling back into sleep, his long hand reaching around Ross and gently touching his ass.
“Such peace.”
June 13, 2025
Friday in the Week of Pentecost
3:46 am
