The Town of Babylon Read online

  He curls his fingers up into a soft fist, and the ring disappears. “Yeah, few years now. We’ve been together like ten, but we got married after our second was born.”

  “She here?”

  “Here?” Jeremy’s face rises. “No. No way. The only people who bring somebody to our reunions are trying to show off. People who used to be real busted and lost weight or who ended up with someone out of their league or famous.”

  “Famous?”

  “Remember Janet McCardle?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Pale, freckles, lots of makeup, brown hair.”

  He’s just described 70 percent of the girls in our class. “Oh, right, right,” I say.

  “She married that weatherman from Channel Four. The blond one.”

  I don’t know who this is.

  “You know him, he’s been doing the news forever. Anyway, she brought him to a reunion. A while back. Then I heard they got divorced, and she didn’t come back after that. I bet you a million bucks she’s not here tonight.” Jeremy turns both of his palms outward in an exaggerated white-Jesus pose. “You can only really have fun at these things if you come alone,” he continues. “Sucks to spend half the time introducing and explaining.”

  This matter-of-fact wisdom was quintessential Jeremy—a Yoda in Cavariccis, with gelled hair. He couldn’t get through a book, but he could always read a room well. I was insecure and preoccupied with what everyone else thought of me, but he was casually observant, a young Tarzan swinging from vine to vine, surveying the jungle. And yet, he was the kind of kid who could blow his top, ostensibly from out of nowhere. I lost track of the number of times he kicked a desk or flung it across the room on his way to detention. This anger, just beneath the skin, was familiar to me. It was typical of my family. But Jeremy’s anger didn’t come from economic stress. He’d endured another type of violence. Without realizing or understanding what he’d survived, I was drawn to his tempestuousness and fragility—just as I would be with most of the boyfriends who followed.

  Right now, however, Jeremy seems incapable of anger. He’s mangy, middle aged, and mired in defeat.

  “Return of the Mack” plays—without irony, as far as I can tell.

  Jeremy won’t stop peering up at me. If it was 1997, and we were in his parents’ basement, I’d run my hand through his hair and pull his face close to mine. I resist an impulse to do so now, despite the absence of adolescent inhibitions. I don’t think anyone here would react aggressively to a public display of affection between two men. Tonight, most everyone who’s asked me about my wife or girlfriend apologized when I responded “husband,” before effusively listing all of the gay people in their lives—siblings, best friends, coworkers, neighbors. A few people changed the subject but weren’t excessively rude about it. In fact, everyone seemed more unmoored by my requests to be called Andrés instead of Andy.

  All night it’s been like this: traveling back and forth—a future inside of a past, or flashes of the past in this future. But Jeremy and I aren’t going to kiss because this is also the present, and only a few days ago, I resisted my husband’s kiss in the airport because of my purported aversion to PDAs. Making out with Jeremy wouldn’t only be a shitty thing to do, it’d be hypocritical.

  “What are you thinking?” he asks.

  “Not much.”

  Jeremy raises an index finger toward my face. “Doesn’t look like ‘not much.’ ”

  “You’re a psychic? I thought you were in the tile business.”

  “You know, we don’t have to stay here. We could go somewhere not so noisy.”

  “Is that your pickup line?”

  For a moment, I wonder if I’ve crossed a threshold, but Jeremy laughs.

  “Class of ’97, if I could have your attention for a moment.” Nicole’s amplified voice appears for at least the tenth time; it neutralizes the gentle tension between Jeremy and me and usurps our attention. “We have another latecomer. Please welcome Paul Kowalczyk! Also, if you’re the owner of a black Escalade with license plate D-O-N-T-M-E-S-S, you left the headlights on.”

  Paul.

  There was a period in middle school when Paul went by Pauly (pronounced: Pawh-lee). It didn’t stick, but in retrospect, the Goodfellas-style sobriquet was foreboding. All these years, Paul has been like an urban legend to me. I knew he was real, but he was also an extreme character, a personification of evil who couldn’t possibly live up to the sinister aura in which I’ve enveloped him.

  After college, after I’d watched the Harvey Milk documentary, after Matthew Shepard, after the Internet became the internet, I thought of tracking Paul down, of siccing the police on him for what he’d done back then, but I couldn’t prove that he’d actually murdered anyone. In truth, I don’t know that he did.

  “He’s a minister now,” says Jeremy.

  “What?”

  “Paul. He’s a minister. Or some other shit that isn’t a priest. Alls I know is he’s not Catholic. He runs that church where Carvels was. You okay?”

  “What?”

  “You look woozy.”

  “I’m fine—Carvels?”

  “You joking? The ice-cream spot, right next to Chung’s. The strip mall a few blocks from here,” Jeremy says, pointing south. “Near where your parents used to be.”

  “They’re still there,” I respond without thinking.

  It feels suddenly as if I’ve dropped unnecessary crumbs. If Jeremy truly didn’t know that my parents live in the same place, I’ve missed an opportunity to remain unfindable. “So, it’s a church?” I say.

  “Yeah. Looks like a normal storefront, big window, but you can’t see inside because it’s all curtains. Carvels, man!”

  Of course I remember Carvel, the place where my parents would take us for banana splits lacquered in a marshmallow sauce, the place where we bought ice-cream cakes for our birthdays. I just lost my bearings for a moment, and it’s easier to let the current take me than to paddle backward.

  “How do you know all of this?” I ask.

  “Not sure. People talk, I guess.”

  “You keep in touch with everyone here?”

  “Not really. At these things mostly. Sometimes I go back to a basketball game. People go back for that kinda stuff. Homecoming a few years ago. I take my kids to spring carnival. You know how it is: word gets around. Hey, can you wait here a minute?” Jeremy asks.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I just want to make sure you won’t leave while I go take a piss,” he says.

  I nod.

  As he walks away, one of his eyebrows goes up. I don’t know what it signifies. Or if he’s just being dorky. Something about the way he said “piss” was sexy. It tempts me to follow him, but I tuck myself into a corner instead. I look over at Paul, who is shaking hands with the ceremony of a politician. Stiff-armed, firm grip. He looks like a wide-smile emoji. He’s wearing a boxy, cream-colored suit barely a shade darker than his own skin. His face is bloated, his torso inflated, and his head shaved. A skinhead and a Dick Tracy villain all at once.

  I met Paul in sixth grade, when we were both twerpy kids who shared a penchant for making everyone laugh. In high school, he grouped off with the other cut-ups who filtered in from the surrounding elementary schools. Paul’s humor, which had previously consisted of Beavis and Butthead references and manufactured fart sounds, became, in high school, elaborate pranks that angered teachers and destabilized classes. One of his more amusing tricks involved him asking the teacher a question but miming every third or fourth word, while another classmate, an accomplice at the other end of the room, filled in the missing sounds, creating an uneasy stereo effect that unnerved teachers and left the rest of us suppressing laughter. But Paul always took it too far, as if he were enjoying the discomfort more than the entertainment. At some point in high school, he started bulking up. Everything but his head got big, which made it look like he was wearing one of those padded muscle suits. He transformed, one day to the next, from a jovial kid
with a sweet, inviting face into a scowling, intimidating asshole. When he wasn’t being sent to detention for disrupting class, he was being suspended for fighting. Rumor was that he was on steroids. One time, he kicked the shit out of Tim Ramos in gym class because of a Polish elbow-slapper joke. (Poor Tim Ramos, the unheard-of mix of Afro-Puerto Rican and Irish, with light brown skin, tight, reddish curls, and a face colonized by acne, never bold enough to pick on someone all by himself, just to pile on after the fact, he went home with a knotted face that day.)

  It wasn’t until senior year that I realized how truly terrible Paul was. That was when he recounted, to a group of us sitting around a cafeteria table, a story that haunts me still. He and a friend, a guy from the neighborhood, who didn’t go to school with us, had driven to Steer Queer, the long-term parking lot by the interstate, which became a de facto cruising ground after dusk. Paul explained that a couple of nights earlier he and this friend had pretended to be gay and lured a guy to an empty parking lot not far from Steer Queer. Once they got there, they got out of their cars. “And as soon as that faggot got on his knees, we beat the shit out of him. When we were done, he looked like a fucking used tampon.”

  Paul told that story as if he were delivering a joke or recounting the plot of a movie. At first, I smiled, assuming there was a punchline or an unexpected twist imminent, but as he progressed, so did my horror and disbelief. I can’t for the life of me recall who was sitting around that cafeteria table, but I remember our collective silence amid the chaos. I think it was the shock. Sure, gay is gross, but why the fuck would you do all that? Paul was either unaware of or unperturbed by our lack of reaction, periodically punctuating his account with “sick faggot” and “motherfucking faggot.”

  Neither will I forget the epilogue of that story, a detail so vivid and chilling, and, I believed, telling. After Paul and his friend left that man groaning and bloodied on the pavement, they drove off, but when they were halfway home, they had to pull over. “I felt so sick about touching that queer, I had to puke my guts out,” Paul said, with flared nostrils and spit bubbling in the corners of his mouth. Then he folded over and pretended to throw up on the shiny, speckled floor of the cafeteria. When he lifted his head again, his face was reddened, and his eyes were ablaze.

  I was genuinely frightened. I recognized in Paul a tortured sanguinity, a kaleidoscope of the emotions inside of me: the push and pull of desire, belief, and self-hatred. I wanted to get up and leave the cafeteria, but I worried that anything short of approval might register as discomfort, which would signal to Paul and the others that the man on the pavement and I shared something. But I wouldn’t have been running away in solidarity; I was, in that moment, afraid of the world. Paul displayed the sort of unhinged hatred that I’d seen occasionally in movies or on the evening news, but never up close. A small shiver runs through me even now, as I realize that our world has contorted itself to confirm onto Paul even an iota of power. His little church is nothing, but I wish it didn’t exist. I wish it weren’t mere blocks from my family.

  * * *

  You want another glass of water?” asks Jeremy when he returns from the bathroom.

  “No, I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

  “I’m getting a water.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Jeremy strides with broken elegance to the edge of the bar.

  “Been sober for a few years now. I don’t touch anything,” he says as he hands me one red cup and sets the other on the floor beside him. “Except this.” Jeremy pulls a pen from his pocket. “Want a hit?”

  I do.

  He leads me to the back of the restaurant, then through an emergency exit that’s propped open. We’re surrounded by dumpsters, an old stove, and cases of beer. The scent of warm garbage suffuses the night air.

  “It doesn’t smell,” he explains of the pot. “I could smoke this inside.”

  “How does this count as sober?”

  “It’s medicine.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s medical grade, man. It helps with my back pain and with my cravings.”

  I’m all for decriminalization, but I laugh anyway.

  “For real,” he says, as if convincing me matters. “It’s not like the shit we used to smoke. There’s no paranoia, no munchies, no fog. Half the time, I don’t even remember I smoked. It’s super mild. But it works. I got the oils at home too.” He extends his arm to pass me the vape pen; a cloud of smoke leaves his mouth and thins out quickly between and above us. It leaves behind an intimacy. I pull from the flattened end of the thin cylinder, and a familiar combination of cigarettes and cologne appears in my nose and mouth.

  “Marlboro Reds and …” I cough. “Cool Water?”

  “Camels and Drakkar. A birthday gift from my wife,” he says.

  “Last week.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing, I—”

  “Good memory.” Jeremy’s face is now a permanent smile. Whether he’s high or happy, I don’t know.

  “I should get back inside,” I say. “It’s getting late, and I want to make another round before I leave.”

  “Leave? It’s not even nine-thirty.”

  “I’ve had enough to drink, trust me.”

  “Why are you drinking so much?”

  “I’m not drinking so much. It’s a party. And an open bar. I think I drank a reasonable amount considering the circumstances.”

  “I was just kidding. No big deal.”

  Just then, the door opens and someone steps outside. She has a drink and an unlit cigarette in her hands; she has a phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder. Her hair is swept up in a braided bun. Before I can conjure up a name or a memory, she says, “Andrés! I heard you were here!”

  It’s Rhonda Nelson. We used to sit on the bus together. She got good grades, and she played the French horn. Her father was super strict and Jamaican, and although his thick accent differed from my father’s, I drew comfort from the fact that my father had this in common with someone else. Rhonda wasn’t allowed to go to parties or sleepovers. She was one of the five Black students in my class in elementary school, and one of the twenty or so in our high school class. She’s one of three Black people here tonight. In high school, to everyone’s surprise, she dated a white boy from public school. He wore gold chains and track suits. Because Rhonda wasn’t allowed to drive, she and I only ever caught up when I couldn’t find a ride to school and was forced to take the bus. I remember one time, she had her face pressed up against the window, trying to hide her sobbing. It was poignant because Rhonda was as composed a person as I’d ever known, a somewhat anomalous presence during that hormone-heavy era of our lives. The tears were for her boyfriend, who was going to jail. She didn’t elaborate, except to say that he’d be gone for a year.

  “Let me take this call, and I’ll look for you inside,” Rhonda says, the phone pressed against her chest. Then she walks away from us.

  “I’m sorry if I was rude,” I say to Jeremy. “It’s just, I wasn’t expecting to be here. And I haven’t had a drink in a few days. My parents don’t keep any alcohol at home anymore because of my dad’s new diet. If it weren’t for some super flaky bud I found tucked inside an old textbook in the attic—”

  “You need weed?”

  “No, I—”

  “I can set you up while you’re here.”

  “It’s alright, I—”

  “I mean it. Give me your number.”

  I don’t say anything, and I don’t reach for my phone. I hope Rhonda will end her call soon and interrupt us, but she’s pacing around the trash bags and crates of empty beer bottles, telling someone, likely a child, not to give grandma a hard time.

  “I could just swing by your parents’ after work tomorrow,” Jeremy says.

  “No no. It’s okay. Let’s talk first.” I give him my number.

  “I’m calling you now,” he says, “so you can save it.”

  I smile. Then I pull at the door. He holds i
t open until I’m inside. “Andy”—the din eats away at his voice, and he overcompensates by yelling—“I’m glad you finally showed up to one of these!” His hand appears on my shoulder and squeezes me gently. It’s a harmless gesture made by several others tonight, but his touch is unique in its weight and dexterity.

  “Honestly, I’m surprised you’re here. I’d never have pegged you for a reunion junkie.” As soon as I utter that last word, I regret it.

  Jeremy doesn’t appear to mind; he’s too busy taking unabashed liberties with his stare. He puts his hand out. It’s rough and warm; the sensation, familiar and erotic. It lasts only a few seconds, but they’re long seconds, minutes in another context. I let go and walk into the party.

  * * *

  I grab a beer from the bar and make my way through the crowd of sleeveless dresses and stiff-collared shirts. I greet everyone with the same enthusiasm and stories, like a well-fed parakeet. Midway through each of the brief conversations, I recall all of the pertinent details—street and sibling names, trips, teachers, parties, pets. I don’t interrupt; I listen attentively and give everyone a recap of the last twenty years—college, work, grad school, work, marriage, travel. Through it all, I keep an eye out for Simone. Rhonda, who was one of Simone’s closest friends, doesn’t know why she isn’t here tonight. “Call her mom,” she says. “Phyllis will know. Do you have her number?” I tell her I do and that I will, knowing full well that I won’t. Rhonda lives in Texas. She’s a patent lawyer. She has a six-year-old daughter, and a husband in the navy. She’s in town for the week to leave her kid with her parents for the month. Something she does every summer. The boy from high school—Dennis—cycled in and out of jail for years. Not long ago, he sent her several messages through Facebook, but Rhonda ignored them. She likes the heat of Texas, even if her town is incredibly conservative. “This place,” she says, referring to our current location, “feels like liberal fantasyland compared to where I live.”

  As I travel through the room, I make an effort to keep a distance from Paul, whose lips are moving, but whose voice I haven’t yet heard. Occasionally, I sneak a look at Jeremy; his eyes are, each time, trained on me. He smiles whenever he catches me staring, which I find subtly infuriating at first, but then funny. Right now, he’s talking to Sal, Alex, and Greg, the trifecta of cool boys. Salvatore, a stout, soft-spoken first-string defensive tackle with a thin goatee, was my freshman-year crush. One night sophomore year we got high, and he said he wanted to have a staring contest, during which he inched close enough for our lips to touch. I flinched, and he punched me in the arm. Then he laughed and called me a fag. The pain in my arm did nothing to lull my erection, which I could only conceal through an exaggerated pantomime that involved me lying face down on his bedroom floor. Earlier tonight, Sal and I chatted briefly. He’s a manager at the nearby Costco. He’s dating one of his coworkers, but he doesn’t want to marry her: “She has two kids already. They’re great kids, but I’m not sure about an insta-family.” Sal is boxy and sturdy, like the cars in the lot, but he’s mushier than he used to be, best evinced by his mildly droopy jowls and the tautness of his shirt across his shoulders, biceps, and midriff. He voted for McCain in 2008, Obama in 2012, and Trump in 2016—“Women don’t know how to drive. How was she going to run a country?”