Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

too early to know. I had to phone home, but I made more in tips than in salary and had to finish my deliveries first. I twisted the radio dial, searching for more news. Over the next few hours, assessments of the disaster were becoming graver and there were urgent pleas for rescue teams and international donations. As soon as I returned to the store, I stood in the middle of the floor telling everyone about the earthquake in Guatemala and my family, repeating the news I’d heard on the radio, my voice rising with emotion and even panic. Why this public display? I suppose I wanted Steve and Howie and also Megan, who worked the cash register and the shop floor, to realize that I was also from this other place, the same country that some of our exotic flowers came from, where now an earthquake had snuffed out thousands of human lives in seconds, maybe including some from my family. But I also wanted to prove to myself that this forceful emotional connection I’d felt to Guatemala and my family in the van hadn’t been spurious, that it was real, and so I didn’t try to hold back the tears spurting from my eyes and rolling down my cheeks.

Of course Steve said I could phone home, even though it was long distance. My mother answered and said that she’d gotten a telegram from Tío Memo that our family was safe and that she was more worried about me than about Guatemala. I’m doing great, I told her. I have a job, maybe I’ll go back to school, I don’t know yet. But, Frankie, you got A’s on your report card, she pleaded. Yeah, they’re not called report cards in college, Ma, just trimester grades. She said, Frankie, we’re so proud of you. Daddy wanted to take you out to a good restaurant in New York City and celebrate your wonderful grades. Listening to her go on, I felt angry. I wished she’d accuse me of being an ungrateful brat for having left school after my father had paid for it, then I could speak the words I had ready: I’m not going to cost him another cent ever again. I have to go, I said curtly, I’m at work. I remember the expressions of apprehension on Steve and Howie and Megan as they waited for me to finish my call and their smiles of relief when I told them my family was okay. What good, kind people they were. Years later, during one of my returns from Central America, I would drop in to the store and learn that Steve had died of AIDS and that Howie had gone to live in Hawaii.

Down in the basement in the mornings, while I sat on a tall bucket turned upside down, snapping thorns off rose stems, Howie would often tell stories about his extreme nighttime fun in the gay bars, such as offering himself through a hole in the wall to the room full of anonymous men on the other side. If Steve was there, he’d smile sadly with what seemed a Buddhist resignation meant to suggest, I think, that he’d done that, too, and mostly hoped he wouldn’t again. Gross, you guys are so fucking disgusting, I’d exclaim, which, of course, made them laugh uproariously. It struck me as a mystery of human temperament how Howie could seem almost always so robustly cheerful, until I decided it was his bravery that fueled the joy he took in his dementedly horny, brazen sexuality, however inconceivable it seemed to someone like me, who until just a few months before had still been sleeping every night in his boyhood bed. Who was more admirable? Howie or Ian Brown, the most brashly sexually individuated person I’d known until Howie? Howie, by a long shot. Steve and Howie may once have been lovers, but now they were good friends. Girls who went out with Ian ended up despising him. I’d decided that Howie the Cheerful Fat Slob Master Flower Arranger, even among the heaped blossoms and plants of his basement worktable, sat atop a kind of Sex Mount Olympus; like a novice monk setting out on a long apostolic journey, all I had to do in order to experience the lowest lowlands was walk around Times Square and stop into any of those peep show or live-sex places. I’d take my place in the daytime parade filing briskly in and out, mostly men in business suits and ties—“fake rich,” I’d heard black teenagers taunting some of those business guys out on the sidewalk, mocking their cheap suits and overcoats, even their shoes—but all sorts of other types, too, once inside rarely acknowledging each other’s existence for even a split second while at the same time casting hungry eyes all around. Put a quarter in a slot, a window or shutter would open, and you could watch a man and a woman doing sixty-nine or a woman eating out another woman; after about ten seconds the window would close, then you could put in another quarter and the window would open and now the woman’s midriff would be quaking in orgasm. Some of the window portals let you poke your hands through, and I got to touch the pale breasts and pebble-like nipples of a girl about my own age, such a nice smile; she told me she was from Honduras and that she liked the way I touched her. I bet you make your girlfriend happy, she said. Even if she’d said that only to get me to drop more quarters in the slot, I left walking on air and also trying to remember exactly how I’d touched her so that I’d be able to do that again. I wondered what would happen if I dared to ask the Honduran girl out on a date. It’s not like I went to those places every day, every couple of weeks seems more like it, and