![[PANK]](https://pankmagazine.com/wp-content/themes/pank/assets/images/pank-logo-large.png){kind=logo}
By K. Joffré
Early Winter 2002
The vagrants joked that the hostel was one stop away from the shelter—and when the college kids weren’t around—they would get real mean; “Jo’s headed to the shelter. Next stop: A cot downtown, then a cold park bench!” They cackled, flashing open mouths with missing teeth, wishing more misfortune on me, wanting me to fall with them. I landed among their unpleasant company because I arrived in New York earlier than scheduled, but a wild blizzard hit, and the boy who invited me to stay with him was stuck out of town. And so, my new life was waylaid. I ignored the howling men, set up camp at the local pay-per-hour computer, and started looking for an attractive mark. I hit up a kid named Ryan in a chat room, told him that I was from Los Angeles. He must have thought I was a traveling college kid, and I definitely let him think that.
I dragged my rolling luggage through the snow, creating a long trench from 137th street to 150th in search of Ryan’s place. I needed a bed and a computer to start my new life, to find a job, to get money, to find an apartment. Freezing water bit down my gloveless fingers and seeped into my shoes. I knocked on his door and an awkward white boy with shaggy hair answered.
“Jo?” he said.
“Ryan? If you have heat, I’ll kiss you.”
“Take your shoes off and I’ll get a towel for your bag.”
“Thanks, but I really just need a hot bath. Ya mind?”
Ryan chirped a little laugh as if to express reluctance but I ignored it and powered past him into his apartment. I stripped to my skivvies, grabbed a towel from Ryan, and wrapped it around my waist. I walked around the place until I found the nearest bathroom. It was painted a shade of yellow the color of sand on a bright sunny day at the beach, with a single window behind the tub where the gloomy blue grey sky peered in, and a mountain of snow made itself snug outside the window sill. There was grime you could probably carbon date to the 1800s. The tub was old-fashioned—downright ancient. Four little legs lifted the tub off the ground suspended like a large dirty hollow oval egg. I was used to communal showers so it was perfect.
I found the hot water valve and the drainer. I started filling the tub and the hiss of hot rushing water fused with the sound of the wind outside. When it was full, I let my underwear fall, dropped it right on the dirty floor, and my towel fell too. I slithered into that hot water like a snake in a swamp. My head was soaked in steam and my sinuses cleared up immediately.
“Ryan!” I called after a while.
“Y-Yes?” The kid was nervous.
“Get in here,” I commanded.
Ryan entered the bathroom and observed me. He was tall with lips bigger than I would expect on a white guy. He had a few pockmarks on his face like leftover scars from his high school years. His most striking feature were his sad blue forgiving eyes. I lifted my legs out and over the rim of the tub, and I let them hang.
“There’s room down there,” I said. And I slid mouth-first into the water, more awkward than sexy, but he got the gist.
He undressed and slid into the tub in the space between my legs. His skin floated up against mine and our bodies intertwined. Some more hot water fell over the tub. His fingers grazed my skin, and my hands guided him onto my body. One body was hungry, instinctively wanting to be fed, the other body giving.
I lifted my waist above water. He wrapped his fingers around my back and devoured my cock. I let him suck me off as I leaned my head to the side of the tub looking towards the door. I pictured his roommate wandering in, screaming in horror. This sort of stuff could only ever happen in secret, away from the prying eyes of polite society. Ryan vigorously jerked me off. My hips dipped underwater. I held his gaze and my sperm floated from the tip of my dick towards to the surface of the water, rising up like a white eel and blooming.
I felt a flush of embarrassment, so I unplugged the tub. It all hadn’t played out as romantically as I had hoped, but it seemed to have worked on him nevertheless. He sat up, hypnotized, and planted a kiss on my lips.
“Let’s go to your room,” I said, partially because I wanted to finish him off, but mostly because I wanted to see where I would be staying.
The ornate touch of the main hallway, with their primary colored walls and junk, gave way to Ryan’s minimalist bedroom, a mostly barren four-by-four square room. If you were to walk into that apartment you would think whoever owned the place had taken in a vagrant and stuffed him into a closet. He lay on his small bed, and I followed on top of him. I took his hard penis into my mouth and started probing him with my tongue and hand. Ryan moaned and held my head. After a few seconds of this he spoke.
“I want to fuck you but I don’t have a condom. Do you have one?”
“No,” I answered.
“Well…if you went downstairs and bought a condom, I could fuck you.”
I stopped and looked at him.
“You don’t have to do me any favors.” I said.
I peered around his room while doing the old deed. The only thing on the barren walls was a poster of Rufus Wainwright who looked down at me like some benevolent God. It didn’t look like he approved of what I was doing, or maybe how I was doing it. A modest book case stood in a corner of the room taking up far too much space full of musician’s biographies, sheet music, and playbills. His only other possession of note was an electronic keyboard near us with a stool in front of it, ready and waiting to be used.
Ryan blew his load in the air and between my fingers. There was a great display; hip thrusts, moaning, and a flush of red on his face. I thought to myself that I might have swallowed had he not selfishly suggested I go out and find condoms in a snowstorm.
He got up to dry himself with a washcloth which he tossed to me. I dried my hands and excused myself to go to the bathroom, but I used that time to snoop around instead. The only other bedroom was painted a deep lipstick red. The furniture in this room was different than the rest of the apartment; every inch of it had a gold tint trim and tacky old decorations like a large golden phonograph. I opened the first drawer I saw next to the tall bed. A folded five-dollar bill and some loose change lay inside. I felt an intense guilt as I took some of the money and closed the drawer.
Five dollars could buy a lot of things; toothpaste, hand sanitizer, hell–even toilet paper, but most important of all, it bought time. I had a checking account with money to last for two months if I was as cheap as possible. I re-entered the bathroom and placed the five-dollar bill into my pants that lay next to the egg tub. I washed my hands, and dried my wet black hair back into its natural curlicue state, and returned to Ryan’s room with my clothes in my arms.
He was sitting up on his mattress, and I joined his side. He started to ask me if I liked Rufus, Tori Amos, if I knew about Sondheim, and I told him I had no clue what he was talking about, that I was from the hood—a slip of the tongue—his eyes narrowed and I figured he started to suspect that I was no traveling college kid. He stared at me, put his fingers on my face, and told me that one of my eyes was bigger than the other.
“Never heard that before,” I said.
“It makes you look like you’re always up to something.”
“Now that one I’ve heard.”
I thought Ryan would take advantage of me, but turns out he was a nice kid, not too pushy. In fact, I started to feel bad about the situation. He didn’t expect more sex, and he graciously made room for me in his small bed for the next two days. Each night we slept with our arms around each other like brothers and in the morning, he showed me a compassion that I hadn’t earned.
“I love this album, listen.” Ryan put on Poses by Rufus Wainwright. A doleful voice filled his little room and drifted through the old apartment. Ryan played some tracks for me on his keyboard, mimicking the tracks on the album, and he sang. His voice was light but rawer than the recorded song. He wasn’t singing to impress me, or to charm me, he was just singing to sing. People in New York just liked doing that, oftentimes with no expectation of feedback or reward. It was joyous but also melancholy, because I knew Ryan was a struggling singer-songwriter wasting away in a closet, and I wanted him to win, but everything seemed so dour about his life. I felt like barnacle attached to his room buying some time until I’d be swept off into a deep ocean current, but together we made the room warm, and he at least had someone to sing to.
When Ryan left for his day job, I left with him, to explore a New York buried in snow. I enjoyed wandering with my hands in my pockets, watching my breath turn to steam like smoke stacks out of a dragon’s mouth. Deadly black ice formed on the sidewalk and I learned how to jump over pools of ice water from watching the natives.
In South-Central LA I couldn’t get around like I could in New York. The wealthy in Los Angeles had left us a long time ago, left behind a mess of broken fences and fields of weeds and dust. In New York the rich couldn’t move away, it was too compact. I could walk into their neighborhoods and their stores—harass them if I wanted to—pretend to be them, and then just as quickly run back to a more modest part of town without them knowing who I was.
I got home earlier than Ryan the next day and found his copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. Ryan caught me thumbing through the book, told me it was his favorite, and asked me if I liked it.
“Yeah…” I said, briefly wondering if I could lie to that face of his, but I settled on telling him the truth: “…Never read it.”
He looked uneasy. I felt an almost instinctual urge to protect him from my own opinion.
“Reading books wasn’t my thing. I preferred music.” I said, and that was a lie, because I had preferred nothing.
“Well. That’s interesting; I always thought books and music were the same. Both have rhythm and revelation.”
Ryan smiled, and I mimicked his smile. He went on to play a song without hesitation. I liked Ryan, but more importantly I couldn’t afford to reveal anything about myself that would cause him to not like me.
Two more days passed and Ryan and I carved out a mock domestic routine. He would work, I would tidy his room, pillage his roommate’s room, take change, loose bills, small jewelry, and then I’d go out, enjoy the day, and trade some stuff at the pawn shop. The money went back to us, to supplies, food, maybe some gifts for Ryan’s barren shoebox room. He assumed I bought everything with my own money, and I let him assume that. I figured I’d be out of there before she arrived, and she owned so much junk that I was sure she wouldn’t miss the few things I took. I was telling myself it would be alright, but the longer I stayed with Ryan, the more apparent it was that I was only fooling myself. He never asked where I came from because he knew the story, we all did; you get run out as soon as you don’t fit into someone’s picture. It’s why I never asked about Ryan’s past because I knew it; all stuffed into his box a little too excited about his piano and his Sondheim. New York was a city full of runaways.
The door handle sprung to life one late afternoon while Ryan was at work and I was using the living room computer to message my original host. In walked a statuesque young woman, long flowing blonde hair falling over her face and everywhere like dangling coils, wearing black gloves that held onto books and binders, and a nice-looking coat in the fiercest shade of red. From the photos in her room I gathered she was a part-time Barbara Streisand impersonator. We had a brief staring competition that she won.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m a guest of Ryan’s, who the hell are you?”
“I live here.” She said this with a natural authority, and I clucked my tongue at her to dismiss it.
She let the door slam, and started wandering around the place as if it was full of bugs. She raced to her room while stomping her heels, and from there she asked no one:
“Has anyone moved my stuff?”
And all I could do was lean back in my chair and smile: Points for perceptiveness. I could hear her rummaging through her stuff in her room, and when Ryan arrived, she sprang into action.
“Ryan! I go on tour just one time—chrissakes—and now stuff in my room is missing. What the hell is going on? Who is this?”
But before Ryan could answer, I jumped out of my chair.
“I told you who I was, lady, are you deaf?”
“Are you kidding me?”
I kept Ryan to my back, waving a hand to his face, because it seemed like he wanted to say something, and I could only guess it was to grovel, to promise we would pay her back. I wasn’t in the mood to play victim.
“You own an awful lot of stuff, are you overcharging Ryan for staying here? Doesn’t seem like a fair split.”
“Whoever you are, you’ve been stealing my shit! You’ve been using everything in the bathroom, my shampoos, my toothbrush! If you don’t leave, I’m calling the cops!”
“Real original lady, call the cops on the brown guy.”
She stormed off, fuming, and I could hear her dialing 911 on her phone in the bedroom. That was my cue. I packed my only belongings back in Ryan’s room; a set of self-help books I stole from my uncle, all black clothing, and my mother’s Spanish bible. I zipped my bag, and bounded out. Before leaving I told Ryan to tell the police the truth, that he didn’t know anything about my stealing.
I skedaddled; out into the early winter night, with my rolling bag scraping cement and water. The snow was starting to melt in Harlem and it was a great struggle to reach the subway without slipping on ice.
“Jo!” I heard behind me. I looked back and saw Ryan running down the block.
“Jo, I wanted to give you something before you left.”
He handed me an old Walkman of his, dented and scratched, along with some headphones and a blank CD. I wondered why he was being so nice to me on account of how much trouble I’d put him through.
“What’s this for?” I said.
“I was always planning on giving you this. You told me you liked music…Consider it a thank you for sticking up for me back there. She does overcharge me on rent. I know it.”
He hugged me, and I was paralyzed, only able to move a few moments later after he was gone and the sound of police sirens shook me awake. I bounded into a nearby subway station with visions of the old men in the hostel howling in my head, taunting me, telling me I’d end up back there and eventually on the street.
I put my headphones in my ear and put Ryan’s CD into my Walkman. Sweet familiar music started playing, Rufus Wainwright started singing. Ryan had burned the album Poses for me.
I listened to track seven, Grey Gardens, on repeat while the train hurtled downtown. My host had returned the night before but I didn’t leave immediately when I heard the news. I don’t know exactly what kept me with Ryan, but whatever it was it was gone now. I could never go back, not to Ryan, not to the hostel and the faces of the leering men, not to California, and not to that awful place that I once called home.
K. Joffré is a gay Guatemalan-American writer happily married in New York. He has non-fiction published in Slate and fiction published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Spectacle, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. He hosts a podcast called “Writing Is Annoying.” He is currently on the hunt for an agent. You can find him on @kjoffre_ and at kjoffre.com