Pa’lante,
Mami
SEPTEMBER 2017
SHORE ROAD
As day broke and illuminated the bedroom, the ceiling fan spinning above him offered Prieto a resting place for his eyes—a marked improvement from the hours prior where he stared, aimlessly, into the dark. No shadow could claim his attention, so instead his eyes flitted here and there, mirroring his mind and leaving him exhausted. Now he lay, naked and flat on his back, counting the rotations of the fan, feeling his dark olive skin begin to goose pimple in the cool morning air. He instinctively rested his hand on his dick thinking masturbating might calm his agitated nerves, but his mind immediately went from Jan to disease to his daughter. What the fuck would he tell her? His penis remained a soft sack of skin, and his body, instead of feeling release, was, once again, pumping fear and anger.
Where, he thought to himself, could he possibly go to get an HIV test without anyone recognizing him? He could hit up the Attending Physicians office, under the guise of a physical, but what if the result was positive? Who could he trust there not to leak? He didn’t even have a doctor in New York. And even if he did, how could he trust that they—or any doctor—wouldn’t be approached by one of the Selby brothers’ goons? One more thing in their arsenal.
To fucking have AIDS, he thought, would be the most fucking miserable, hijo de puta, piece-of-fucking-shit legacy he could imagine. After all he had endured in his life, all he had accomplished, all he had withstood, to be marked with the same stain that his fucking junkie father had ended up with was simply too much. Logically, he knew that his sister was right. People lived long lives with HIV now. But he felt fear anyway. And shame. He loved his father, but his end was hardly something Prieto had been proud of. And now, here he was, on the edge of the same.
He thought of Jan.
“Fuck you, Jan, you fuck!” he said out loud, to no one. The apartment was empty, Lourdes with his ex-wife, Mabel and her fat fucking fiancé sleeping upstairs. “Do you realize I don’t need this shit?”
Jan had been intensely sexy. Olga had always been surrounded by sissies, from grade school when she would stand up for the girly boys who would get picked on by the hard kids in the schoolyard. He had never allowed himself to notice these boys, not even as they aged and became men, often handsome. It was territory much too risky, too dangerous to enter, but somehow Jan had lured him in. They’d met at Olga’s birthday party. Jan had been there with his boyfriend, but the way Jan started flirting with him, Prieto knew they must have an agreement. At first, Prieto had thought he was fucking with him when he started asking him what Prieto was doing for his queer constituents. Prieto had given some sort of pat response about having supported same-sex marriage legislation, and then Jan very pointedly asked, “But what about all those men out there living double lives? What’s the street slang for that?” He had raised his eyebrows mischievously and Prieto knew he’d been seen. It scared him, but thrilled him, too, and as clandestinely as possible, they exchanged information and met up the next day. They had laid in bed for a long time afterward talking; Jan was funny as shit and bright. Prieto had imagined what it would be like for this to be real life—to go to a bar and meet someone and get to know them and just be. Together. To have someone like that in his life every day.
He smirked now, thinking of the machinations he’d gone through over the years to keep his secret when his fucking bitch of a sister had known the whole time.
He decided to go for a drive.
* * *
IN HIS CAR, the sound of his loudening stereo pierced the early morning quiet. A dick move on a Sunday, he knew, but in this moment, for once, he didn’t care. As he drove over to Fourth Avenue, Prieto thought how at no point in his life could he recall anyone in his family ever explicitly saying anything bad about gay people. Maybe the occasional observation about the way a neighbor’s son walked or speculation about a certain distant cousin who was still a bachelor. If they had an inkling, they certainly didn’t try to shame him into a closet. Not explicitly. No, he kept himself there not because he was told his feelings were wrong, but because he understood that they were not exactly right. That was made clear to him in ways big and small for as long as he could remember. His grandmother couldn’t talk about how handsome he was without immediately predicting how he would surely “drive the girls crazy” when he grew up. He was only in the first grade when his aunts and uncles started asking if he had any “little girlfriends” at school. Even his mother, the ardent feminist, couldn’t help but try and push the daughters of her activist friends on him. So, while no one said that “being gay is bad,” what he certainly heard loud and clear was that liking girls was good. Affirmation by female affection was a way to prove himself to his family, a way to live up to their ideal of who he was.