Mundo Cruel Read Free Page A

get home I see, parked right in front of the house, Carlos’s car. I go and peek in the studio and there was Carlos with the guy, eating pizza and smoking pot. Fucking queen, I thought, but I put on a serious face and said to the kid:
    â€œDude, I don’t want any trouble with the neighbors. If you’re going to smoke, fine, but with the door closed.”
    The motherfuckers laughed right in my face, high as kites. La Carlos hugged me around the neck and said:
    â€œYou jealous, papi? Look, he’s yours, no worries, right, papi?”
    â€œCourse, man, sure. All yours,” the kid said, humoring me.
    Those words remained engraved in my brain like Bergman’s movies: “All yours, papi, all yours.” But “all yours” was that he was friends with la Carlos and they went everywhere together.
    I did what everyone would have done: I called my ex, the one who cheated on me in Santo Domingo, so that he’d tell me that, after me, he never met anyone as special. That’s why it’s good to stay on good terms with one’s exes, especially if they treated you bad.
    Time passed and Santurce went back to being its usual paradise lost. The same calm from Monday to Wednesday and the same hyped enthusiasm of its publicized weekends. I took advantage of all this and went to the museums—MAC, MAPR, Bellas Artes—and to all the movies they were showing at the Fine Arts and the Metro, except the one with Mel Gibson, who I can’t stand because he’s homophobic.
    I felt defeated. If there’s one thing I am and have always been it’s a sore loser. It makes me angry and even makes me feel invisible, incapable of entertaining any delusions. Now Carlos no longer even bothered to greet me when he’d come to the studio, and from my balcony I’d watch my Adam come and go looking more and more handsome and more and more distant. One night I had one too many beers at the bar and as two hustlers came over to offer me their eight and nine inches, respectively, I quickly came down from my high spirits. I always get depressed when a trick propositions me: I feel old, or what’s worse, I feel I must look old and pathetic for these creatures to consider themselves objects of my desire. I said to myself “fuck this” and went home. Once there I saw la Carlos’s Tercel and I went over to the studio and looked in the window. The kid and Carlos naked in the bed I had bought, with the air conditioner I had bought, and between the sheets I had bought. And that was the stud of studs, the big macho, I said to myself totally pissed, and suddenly the kid gets up and I step back from the window. After a short while I look again and when I see what I see I start to add up all my expenses and I realize that this little Adam of Moca owes me and plenty: Carlos was fucking him.
    I sat on the balcony to laugh at myself and Carlos and all of us gays, eternal denizens of Santurce, who have polished these sidewalks like crabs back and forth and sideways looking for machos, watching out for machos, or simply drunk out of our minds, out late, arm in arm, laughing jubilantly at the cars passing, shouting at us: fags! And us, raising our arms up high like beauty queens, shouting back at them: cocksuckers! And off we go to oblivion, holding hands, swishing all along Ponce de León. And I laugh at Carlos, who spent so much gas, the poor thing, coming and going from Moca, buying pizza and fried rice, and bumming reefers in La Colectora. La Carlos, like me, was thinking “now this is a real man,” and as far as I could tell he’s the kind who’d bend over in bed. Not that it’s bad that he gave him his ass; it’s just that us chumps give anything to charm them and to put them on a pedestal: handsome, male, virile, and one 100 percent tops. And I say to myself: “When that big queen Carlos comes out I’ll invite her to Junior’s Bar ’cause tonight