I Can't Date Jesus Page 9

  Then he asked if I wanted to take a shot. I said sure, so we took a shot. And then another. And then another. And then another. Suddenly, it had become some sort of competition. In between the shots, we ordered more drinks. I lost count of how many we took, but I do know in between those shots, my body turned into a placeholder for his hands, and I responded in kind. He asked me if I had any plans afterward, and upon my saying no, he suggested we link up with his cousin and the guy she was with and all hang out. I agreed, but after tipping his brother and standing up, it dawned on me just how drunk I was. Keeping in line with a night of questionable choices, rather than take the elevator down to the car, I went down the steps, petrified of falling down and knocking out my two big, buck front teeth. Although Trevonte had driven himself, he noticed how drunk I was and said I could leave my car there and he would drive as we all hung out for a few more hours. By then, I would sober up, he would take me back to my car, and we could go on our merry ways. He didn’t seem drunk at all. That was probably because he had eaten food, drunk a lot of water, and behaved like an adult who wanted to have his cognitive functions working. I handed him the keys but told him to wait a second. I needed to pee. I didn’t go back into the restaurant, which was only a few feet away. No, I whipped my dick out in front of a closed Victoria’s Secret and pissed directly on it. Highland Village featured an upscale shopping center down the street from the Galleria, another upscale shopping center in Houston that was home to many fancy restaurants and a grocery store I would aptly describe as “the nice rich white folks’ grocery store to get meat from.” And I was pissing outside of it in front of the store where you buy nice panties and body lotions.

  As Trevonte was driving me to wherever we were going, he made a pit stop at a gas station. He told me that I needed to get some air, so I did. I sat outside on the curb for a few minutes and called one of my friends as he went inside to buy whatever. Unbeknownst to my drunk ass, I was sitting on a fire-ant bed. For several minutes. It didn’t hit me that I was being eaten alive by an army of ants until I started to feel them at the tippy top of my back as they raced to get to my neck and finish me off. I leaped up in agony and started to scream “What the fuck?” It was Trevonte who noticed the ants and told me to take off my shirt. In gentlemanly fashion, he took off his shirt and then took off his undershirt and started to try to knock them off me with it. I wasn’t certain that we got them all off, but I didn’t feel like I was a buffet offering anymore, so we got back into the car and ended up at some sort of motel.

  I wasn’t anticipating that we’d have sex on date number one. Sure, we did have chemistry and I was perpetually horny, but we hadn’t discussed that. Yet I was drunk and needed to spend a few hours sobering up. I had no idea whose room this was or what part of town I was in. As soon as I got there, I immediately got into the shower to wash off whatever ants might’ve still been on my body. Trevonte quickly joined me. He didn’t have a single ounce of body fat on him, whereas I was worried about whether or not I had done enough push-ups to make certain that I didn’t have man boobs. After the shower, we got in the bed. Moments later, his cousin and some Black man with locs joined us. They were on one bed and we were on the other.

  Was I at the intersection of a family reunion and a sex party? Yet despite the setting being primed for drunken sex, we did not have it. Between the shower, and the water I had started downing in the car and continued drinking in this spot, things were becoming clearer.

  So, did we roll around awhile? Yes, but we didn’t have any form of sex. He did try to slide himself into my mouth, but I had already put too many things down my throat that night, so I was tapped out. I let him finish on me as a compromise. It was the least I could do.

  By the time I looked around, I noticed that Trevonte’s cousin and her Black man were both gone. I put my clothes back on, grabbed my car keys, and left. Once I got home, my mom was already up getting ready for her 6:00 a.m. shift at the hospital. It was a good thing she was, because the pain that came from all of those ant bumps across my stomach and my back was surfacing, and it was excruciating. My mom looked at me in shock and horror, wondering how this could have happened. I left off the drunk part of the explanation. Regardless, ever the nurse, my mom pulled out some creams and other medication and told me what to do. While the pain went away, the scarring from all that scratching I was told not to do was setting in.

  If not for the power of cocoa butter, who knows what would have become of my stomach. As for Trevonte, we never had a second date. We texted each other about having had a good time, but it quickly fizzled out. That was probably for the best. I would leave for Los Angeles in the coming months, but more importantly, on a first date with him, I had gotten too drunk to drive, peed on a fancy panty store, sat on an ant bed, and then let him bust on me. And in hindsight, it was likely that Trevonte wasn’t his damn name and I was being fetishized. The thought had crossed my mind at one point because he did try to use “nigga” near the end and I immediately said, “Oh, we’re not doing that.”

  I had scars for months across my abdomen. Bless my heart.

  II. 2007.

  Months after Trevonte, the dark scars across my stomach began to fade, and I met Michael, who worked at one of the nicer grocery store chains in Houston. They were nicer because they were all primarily located in white neighborhoods. I lived in a Black neighborhood, and directly behind my neighborhood was another neighborhood largely populated by Latinos. The grocery stores nearest both our hoods at the time were fine, but one could easily gauge who was blessed and highly favored when it came to food. We shopped at all of them, but more often than not, my mom would pick up meat from the nicer stores (unless she fried catfish and shrimp and we went to the store near us that had live seafood, like the real ones they are). She never directly made mention of it, but one thing I learned from her shopping habits was that simply living in an area considered to be the “inner city” did not mean we had to be eating food of lower quality. As I got older, I noticed the price points between the grocery stores weren’t all that different. What was different, however, was the quality of meat. The meat at the grocery stores in white neighborhoods was better than the meat found in the Black ones—once I bought ground turkey at one of the Black ones and was keeled over in pain for three days—so I tried to shop there instead. The grocery store Michael worked at was about a fifteen-minute drive, very little driving time by Houston’s standards, so if the difference was between meat I could trust and meat that could have me dying decades before I intended to, I went with the former.

  Judgmental folks have scrunched up their faces when I say this, but I have found grocery shopping to be relaxing, because it provides me with the perfect opportunity to turn on my headphones and twerk down the aisles while looking for discounted tortilla chips. (The kind that either say “blue corn” or “multigrain” so you’ll have less guilt about inhaling the entire bag while watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta because you’ve convinced yourself that because the chips aren’t fried, they’re healthier for you.) When I go to a grocery store, I normally zone out, bop aggressively, and rummage through the chicken to find the perfect package of wings: bountiful but not so pricey that you end up saying, “Fuck this. I’mma get Popeyes because it’s the same price with less work. Shit.” The grocery store, much like the gym, constituted me time. I was back in Houston and feeling defeated, and when I wasn’t working and plotting to move the hell away all over again during most weekdays, I’d down way too much caffeine, hit the gym, and follow that with a trip to the grocery store.

  I noticed Michael a few times before we spoke to each other, but I didn’t pursue him. He looked young. Not young to the point that if I spoke to him, an undercover police officer would jump out of the meat freezer and tackle me, but still. Alas, while I was stripper-kicking in the chip aisle, he asked me if I needed anything. Despite being sweaty as hell and a bit perturbed that he had interrupted me during my favorite part of Crime Mob’s “Rock Yo Hips,”
I thanked him for offering to help but noted that I was fine. He apologized for “bothering me,” though after noticing his name tag, I told him that my name was Michael, too. The Michael that wasn’t me smiled about that, but considering this Michael hated small talk, I told him to have a good night and went about my way. I turned around, and sure enough, he was still looking at me. I left the grocery store without the chips and went to Taco Cabana, located in the same parking lot as that grocery store, and proceeded to blow my workout.

  Once you meet someone, you tend to keep running into them—especially if, you know, they work there and shit. I ran into Michael multiple times over the next month. I would speak to him, but I kept the conversation at minimum. Gradually, the length of our conversations extended, and we started to learn a few things about each other. He had just finished high school and was planning to go to college in Louisiana. I told him that I had just finished college. I wasn’t sure what prompted it—a hand motion or some other mannerism from me—but he felt compelled to randomly note that he liked women.

  “Oh, cool. That’s nice.”

  Translation: I don’t want you, dude. Calm your dick and delusions of grandeur.

  Was he cute? Yes.

  Is that why I talked to him when I spotted him in the grocery store? I considered it a bonus. An aesthetic treat as part of my karma for being a polite Southern man.

  Did I go to the store sometimes hoping to run into him? Only once, so it shouldn’t be held against me. Shut up.

  Regardless, as nice as he was to look at, I didn’t care that much about him. If had I never seen him again after that evening, I would have been perfectly fine. (I hate when seemingly straight men do that. Not every gay man is concerned about you. We often do not care, and can be just as tribal as the breeders.) So, I didn’t need the disclaimer that he had a girlfriend because I wasn’t in the grocery aisles cruising.

  As fate would have it, it turned out that he did have some nominal sexual interest in men that he had not yet explored. This was confirmed the next time I saw him at the grocery store, when he found me and asked for my number. My immediate response was that I was a little old for him. He was eighteen, about to turn nineteen (I asked for ID because you will not catch the kid slipping), and I was a smooth twenty-three years old by then. That wasn’t a big gap in actuality, but it was in mind-set. I had already finished college, and he was about to start at some school in Louisiana playing basketball. No matter my age, since coming out, I’d noticed that I tended to attract younger men. Part of that was people tending to assume I was younger than I actually was. The other and more indicting part of this pattern was that my apparent youthfulness could also register as sexual immaturity. Or maybe because I was older, he assumed I was more experienced and could help him figure his own self out. Whatever the case, I didn’t think we would have much to talk about. But this didn’t matter, since conversation wasn’t at the center of either of our interests.

  After texting for a few days, he told me that he was getting off work soon and asked if I wanted to link up. His car was in the shop, so I picked him up from work and we “hung out.” He didn’t live far from the store, so he suggested we drive around a bit before making a stop in some park. After parking, we took off our seatbelts and engaged in no more than two minutes of empty conversation before he reached for my dick. Once he was finished, he asked me to return the favor.

  Now, there are some people in this world who love sucking dick. I am not one of them. That’s not to say I can’t perform well (’cause someone fine as hell could be reading this) when duty calls, but I can be selfish as shit when it comes to blowing other men. Most dicks are ugly; therefore I reserve going down for people I sincerely care about (or if you’re really really really fine and that spurs my generous spirit). This was not the case for Michael, whom I did not know and who had already proven to be a bit of a liar. He made the most pitiful face in the world, and I guess since my dick was the first one he had ever had in his mouth, I begrudgingly returned the favor.

  “Damn, my girl don’t even do it like this.”

  Your who, nigga?

  Why was I not surprised that he had a girlfriend? I didn’t know the young lady, of course, but apparently she didn’t give good head, and I imagined she didn’t touch his ass in a way that prompted further internal inquiries about his primary sexual attraction.

  The tryst ended abruptly as some police officer drove into the parking lot, presumably to check out why some random car was there that late at night. Not trying to pay tribute to George Michael’s arrest record, I told Michael to zip up and then took him home. He texted me that he had had a good time and that we should link again soon.

  The next morning, I woke up and saw various scrapes across my dick. The lil’ bastard had braces! Was this karma for the scrapes I had left on Jordan years before? I took myself to CVS to get some triple antibiotic ointment.

  There was no next time. Funny; after those months of always seeing him at his job after leaving the gym, I ran into him one Saturday morning at the gym. He was with some older man, and while I knew better than to run up on him like, “SO WE GON’ FUCK NEXT TIME OR NAH?” I did at least try to say hello. I couldn’t even reach the “o” in “hello” because younger Michael sprinted like hell away from me. If he hadn’t gotten his cardio in before that, he for sure got it racing away from me.

  I texted to ask if there was a problem. Radio silence. I tried to text him a few days after that. Again, no response. Then it hit me: oh, this dude truly is conflicted. That fear in his eyes looked familiar. He enjoyed me, but he wasn’t ready to face what that meant. At the time, I thought it was my fault. That once again I had repelled some man. But that was not the pattern to be concerned with. The pattern that required my real attention was my turning to sexually confused men for sexual exploration. It was like my turning to someone who can’t figure out “there,” “they’re,” and “their” to edit your essay.

  I would have had sex with Michael if the opportunity had presented itself, but it didn’t because he was afraid. His fear of me made me more fearful about my own sexual exploration. God, what if he had hit a vein with that metal contraption wired to his mouth? Could I have bled to death? Can you imagine my funeral?

  We lost our wannabe whorish but nonetheless Christian brother Michael Joseph Arceneaux to an adulterous act performed by a curious sodomite. I don’t know if he went to hell, but let us pray that God had more mercy on Michael’s soul than that other Michael had on his penis.

  Several years later, I saw Michael at a gay bar called Bayou City. I was home for the holidays, and while I love my straight cousins, I wanted the company of other sissies dancing to music I could only hear at a club back home. Michael looked older and, to me, much better. He didn’t notice me until a little later. I was leaving the bathroom and going back to the bar, because more brown liquor felt necessary. Then our eyes met. He didn’t look afraid anymore, and from the looks of it, had a boyfriend with him. All we did was give each other a nod as a greeting. As much as I had resented watching someone literally run away from the sight of me, I understood it. With age came experience.

  Speaking of, now that he was free of braces, no funeral would have to be planned.

  III. 2010.

  We met outside the Abbey. It was 2:00 a.m., so Los Angeles had effectively shut down because the city’s nightlife was useless without alcohol unless you had weed and access to an after-hours spot worth your time. That night I was in possession of neither, so it was time to drive my ass to Jack in the Box, devour a Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger value meal with curly fries and a Coke (each jumbo-sized), shower, and take my ass to sleep. As I was walking out, I locked eyes with a guy whom, a few hours prior, I had seen while in the midst of complaining to my friends for the umpteenth time that I missed the gay bars in the South because techno music made me question the existence of God. He was incredibly attractive. If I were an A & R exec, I would sell him as a man who had the appearance of a heart
throb R & B singer but lacked the talent to be one: we could sell him to audiences as a semicompetent rapper who could get girls and gays to monetarily support his musical career for a few years. A light-skinned version of Chingy, if you will.

  His name was An’toine. (I’m not for sure why the name needed to be separated with that apostrophe, but I don’t want to disrespect the man’s mama, so I’ll leave it alone.) He went by that name, his middle name, and a hyphenated last name that consisted of both his parents’ last names. I applaud the progressiveness there, but one of his parents had a last name as long as the space between New York and Los Angeles. I bet he took all day to sign shit.

  He was waiting outside with his friends when we made eye contact for a second time, but as always, it was up to me to do the approaching. So I did, and although he was warm to me, you got the sense that he could be cold to those he didn’t want in his periphery. My concerns were heightened once we started to communicate via text. There was a strong whiff of jackass emanating from his messages. The same could be said of the clear signs of stupid. I am no grammar nazi. I don’t anticipate anyone writing in complete sentences. I accept people using “u” for “you” or “ur” for “your,” and whatever instances of shorthand folks like to use sans the following: “HBU,” “WYD,” and “HBD.” With him, it wasn’t so much how he typed but what he said, or was trying to say. You could tell he was more into the superficial than the substantive. It was all too apparent he was more invested in optics than anything else. No wonder he would wriT3 lYk3 tHis. God, a simple “How are you?” from me invited a bowl of alphabet soup in my BlackBerry Bold. It was as if his texts were trying to reach through the screen to warn me, “Don’t do this, Arceneaux.”