‘The Last Part’

I was invited by Dixon Place to read a piece of writing for their CovidSex Encounters themed virtual fundraiser on Wednesday, October 28th, 2020.
The only parameters I was asked to meet were to adhere to the theme and to fill 10 mins. I choose to combine ‘About Chico’ and ‘Sex + Covid-19’ (p.18) into one piece and write new material as well as change the form of the piece to better fit the Zoom format.

Line breaks are meant to signify places of pause in the reading of the piece.
Action, blocking, or descriptive notes in [italicized brackets] were added after the reading and may not directly reflect the taped recording that exists somewhere (idk, I don’t have it):

[The piece is meant to be read out loud and meant to reflect the form of hanging out with your friends and progressively getting drunk and/or stoned as you tell stories to each other. Following that form, a story within a story tends to develop. A story that leads to another one beginning and ending before looping back around and finishing the original story. The reader should nurse a drink and a joint during the process of this reading. Relax. Breathe. And tell the story. There is no rush for this piece. Enjoy the story. Enjoy the drink. Enjoy the joint.]

Back in the early days, I’d sit and stare out the windows into the streets of Brooklyn. They’d be empty except for those large vans that bodies were rumored to be stored in. The only times the streets weren’t empty were in the mornings and evenings when I’d watch a slow parade of black and brown bodies trudge by with gloved hands and mouths covered with medical masks, or a version of one made with whatever they found around the house.

The news and the internet were keeping tallies of the deaths, reporting the mounting numbers worldwide, by country, by region, by city, by neighborhood, by hour, by minute, spliced and diced to tell you that to be outside was a life or death risk. But bills and rent hadn’t stopped and mouths needed to be fed and the help that we needed and (still need) is in the hands of an incapable government.

As the days passed, I felt a savage envy for the slow parade. At least they were doing something that was getting them a steady paycheck, and (hopefully) some health insurance.

I had quit my job on March 13th over ethics and morals. It was a Friday, and my birthday.

The next day was March 14th, and New York paused.

Corona arrived, stopping everything and tossing my inconvenient little life high into the air. Ethics and morals don’t quite pay bills and no one was hiring so by June I had run out of money and was on a lonely terror of a plane ride back to California, wondering when I’d be able to go back to the place that I was making my home.

And thinking about Chico.

After 2 weeks of quarantining in an AirBNB, I finally moved back into my parents house and tried to get on with the business of life or something.

I scheduled a visit to the doctor’s to get a new prescription for my HIV meds.

Doctor’s love to ask new patients how they want to die, especially if you’ve got a chronic illness.

He was asking me what they should do if I’m lying in a bed dying and unable to feed myself, and if I would consent to a feeding tube.

I’m sure these questions are super important but I gotta be honest California Weed hit different and the munchies were starting to kick in.

Plus, I was still thinking about Chico. I hadn’t heard from him since I left New York at the end of June.

Probably because His Man doesn’t like me and told me that he can’t talk to me anymore.

Which is fucked up because when His Man was crying to me on the phone a couple weeks earlier asking me if I was fucking Chico

His Man said Chico called me his best friend.

And what? Best Friend gets the slow fade out instead of a phone call explaining what’s up?

Ima need an explanation for that one day, and I can’t get one if I’m dead, so yeah.

So I told the doctor yeah.

I do consent to a feeding tube.

Just in case.

[Tone change. The story becomes more complicated here.]

I wasn’t fucking Chico at the time, but Chico’s man probably wasn’t...wrong about not letting Chico talk to me anymore.

Evenings in Brooklyn during The Early Days were strange. There was nothing to wake up to so what was the point of going to bed at any particular time? By 5pm I was already a little drunk and a little stoned and a little glutted with tv, movies, books, porn, street watching, pacing, and whatever else I could do to distract myself from the abnormalness of it all. I would sit on the couch and watch the summer sunlight enter the window and move across the room until it set. Turning everything into amorphous shades and shapes of black and blue. Eventually I’d get up and turn on the lamps and light the candles around the apartment diffusing the room in a dim and warm glow that I loved so much.

During one of my last nights in Brooklyn, Chico came over for dinner.

He lived down the block and we had agreed to be quarantine buddies.

By the end we were wavy on our feet from alcohol and weed and the weariness of having the unpredictability of the world wreak havoc on us again.

We stood in the living room saying another version of goodbye that our.

[Hesitation]

Almost two year of.

[Trying to find the right words to describe.]

Entanglement, seems to be familiar with.

I leaned in and kissed Chico through the thin paper mask. And then my hand slid up along his neck and into his grown out curly hair to try and slip the elastic of the mask over his ear.

“Lemme kiss you forreal” I had said.

He was the first person I’d touched in weeks and this was the first time we touched like this in longer than that.

I missed the shape of his lips against mine.

[Play with the “no no no” with some sort of matching body

rhythm.]

“No no, no, don’t do that,” he said, taking the elastic from my hand and tucking it back over his ear.

[Play with the “aight aight aight” with some sort of matching body movement.]

“Ah, okay - so that’s all I get, aight, aight, aight,” my words dipped into each other.

Another version of the same rejection we’ve been circling for the past year.

We hugged again, while his dog sat at our feet looking at us.

[Fall into the sweetness of the memory. Wounded puppy dog.]

I held him tight against my body, trying to get him to understand the love and trust and desire I had for him in a way that my words had failed to do.

My lips pressed against the curve of his neck, greedily attempting to commit the shape of his body, his touch, smell, expanse of golden brown skin dotted with moles and freckles and scars to memory because we’ve done this many times before, but this time was different because the world was ending.

[Think cat that ate the canary. Cheshire cat. You definitely did something you probably shouldn’t have, but you’re not necessarily feeling guilty about it.]

So maybe His Man wasn’t wrong about not letting Chico talk to me anymore.

I had already failed at trying to be his boyfriend.

And I wasn’t even trying that hard to be his friend.

So maybe His Man wasn’t wrong.

[Tone change again.]

But. This doctor. This new doctor. After he figured out how I wanted to die, he asked me about how many sexual partners I had in the past 3 months.

Now...the appointment was starting to get depressing.

I told him 2 and he said I sounded disappointed.

Of course I’m disappointed!

Sex has been my confidence and not being able to touch anyone has really fucked with my sex life.

Both of these guys were the last 2 guys I had sex with in Brooklyn.

One was this White Boy. I stopped sleeping with white boys in 2018, but this White Boy still had privileges. He’s a psychologist, the sex is good, and we’ve been able to work out some verse things.

He came over two weeks after the first “you up?” late night text. We were feeling at least a bit more sure that neither of us had the ‘Rona be then. The night he came, I told him he wasn’t allowed to talk once he got to my apartment. Walk in. Get naked. Say nothing. And let’s go.

I think he thought I was being kinky, but really white supremacy was attempting to be dismantled in the streets and I really did not want to risk him saying anything to mess up our hook up. I accidentally gave him HIV a couple years ago and I’ve moved past feeling guilty about it to just feeling bad. I still get sexually rejected because of my HIV, so when he calls I still come. The sex is still good and that night he only broke the no talking rule once to say two words: “Oh. Fuck.”

The other guy is my Summer Boyfriend. He’s been my Summer Boyfriend for as long as I’ve had summers in New York. We know just enough about each other to know that sex is all we want. An understanding built from summer after summer of compounding conversations pushing the lines of our boundaries miles from where they started.

He came over a week before I left to California for 48 gluttonously slow and indulgent hours. Once I left Brooklyn, I didn’t know when I’d be having sex again, so I spent those 48 hours overfilling myself with pleasure.

It was a perfect way to end my era in New York.

After that I didn’t have sex again until September.

It was with this guy who I had been talking to on Tinder.

After a week or so of negotiating what each of us felt comfortable with … you know … amongst [gestures at the world] we met at this walking trail by the bay and had the most. Erotic. Hand holding experience.

I thought it would be a prelude to better sex, but when we finally did that it was.

Interesting…

I was distracted and wasn’t 100% there because at that point in September the wildfires were surrounding my little corner of the bay area and the skies were apocalyptic heavy and smokey orange.

[Big pause and consideration. Cheshire cat again. You’re about to admit the thing you probably shouldn’t have done but are glad you did anyway.]

And. Okay. I didn’t want to talk about this part but I was also distracted because I had called Chico’s man a couple days before…

I know! It was. A little crazy, I lost my mind a bit.

But, when the fires were at their worst and you couldn’t breath outside and there was a pandemic and all the other things that I can’t even list anymore and this election….dude this election…

[Pause.]

He wasn’t saying anything to me and disappeared off the internet and didn’t answer my phone call. Or my text messages. Or my twitter DMs. Or my Instagram DMs.

And.

[Pause.]

And I was worried.

So I lost my mind and I called his man.

He yelled at me. But I gotta tell you. He was yelling at me telling me he told Chico not to talk to me.

And he was probably right to yell at me.

But fuck, I was happy. He wasn’t dead.

That was bad. I know it was fucked up.

[Pause and tone change.]

Anyways. My new doctor is cool!

After we covered how I wanted to die and my depressing sex life he asked me if I had any questions for him.

I wanted to ask him when I’ll be able to have great sex again?

If he knew when I’d make it back to Brooklyn?

If I was gonna get to talk to Chico again?

When will my confidence come back?

But I don’t think he has the answers to those questions.

[End it.]