Читать книгу Boston Boys Club - Johnny Diaz - Страница 9

It’s amazing how snow can just get out of hand. At first, it’s cute, sprinkling down like the powder a baker generously dusts on a fresh-baked pastry. But then, the white stuff just keeps coming and falling and then coming and falling down some more. Two days later, I’m still wondering, how can it still be snowing? Mother Nature, what’s up with that?

It fills sidewalks, streets, even the insides of my shoes. I have to punch holes with my feet in deep mounds of Mother Nature’s dandruff as I walk from brick-paved block to block. The parking lots at the Daily and for my building in Cambridge look like icing on a vanilla cake, with the cars and us humans as decorative figurines.

Mikey laughs when he hears my winter observations because this is my first winter in New England and, well, I’ve still got my native Florida skin. You can leave Miami but Miami never leaves you. It stays in your blood. I wish I could say the same thing about the tropical weather. Why can’t I bottle up those tropical south Florida breezes and unleash them in my apartment whenever I feel homesick or supercold?

“Tommy, you need a thickah coat. That thin windbreakah won’t do,” he says, standing in the middle of my Cambridge studio as I ready to go out on our first date. I like how that sounds, our first date. Hopefully, it won’t be the last one.

“It’s thirty-five outside, not fifty-five. Heah, take my coat. I’ve got another one in the cahr,” he says, helping me put on his Navy-like black wool coat. “You Floridians know nothing about wintah,” he teases.

Yeah, it’s 35 degrees outside—again!—and the wind is whipping, again! All I have on is my Nike red sweatshirt and a black Gap windbreaker. I hate layering myself like a ball of yarn, just to go outside for a few minutes before hopping into a car.

“Okay, you’re the native heah,” I say, imitating his Boston accent.

As I put on his coat, he grabs a black scarf of mine and twirls it around my neck like a strand of pasta on a fork.

“Now see…that’s much bettah, cutie. Are you ready to go?”

“Sí, lead the way.” I smile back and open the door for him.

I only met Mikey last night but things seem to be going pretty smoothly. We seem to click, like matching ends of a pair of dominoes. So it’s only been one night but he just seems like such a good guy. He called today after work, just as I was about to watch an NBC Dateline episode about how everyone has gone carb crazy. We talked for a bit and he asked me if I wanted to meet up for dinner tonight.

I said, “Sure, that sounds like a plan,” tickled by the thought of seeing him again so soon.

After we hop into his Toyota Matrix, we dash off to Bertucci’s, my favorite Italian restaurant. Okay, it’s a chain-restaurant found almost everywhere in New England but Mikey doesn’t seem to mind. He is so easygoing. No fuss about where to go and what to do.

Fifteen minutes later, we walk into the red-bricked one-story restaurant in Harvard Square; the aroma of freshly baked dough fills every inch of this place, which is mostly frequented by families or students from nearby Harvard. It’s not the most romantic place, but hey, the food is good and so far so is tonight’s company.

The hostess escorts us to our table by a window that overlooks the subway stop and the trickle of cars on Massachusetts Avenue. Mikey pulls my seat out for me and I catch a trace of his cologne, a Tommy Hilfiger brand that smells of a clean powdery scent, like a newborn baby.

“You’re such a gentleman!” I compliment him. A brief smile flickers across his face as we both sit down at the wooden table for two.

He orders the pasta with chicken and sun-dried tomatoes and a nice cool Corona. I order the margherita pizza with chicken and Diet Coke, of course.

I ask him about his day and Mikey begins to describe helping a student at his school.

“There’s this one kid, super smaht but he can’t seem to focus. He’s been slipping in his grades. His teachah, Mrs. Berg, sent him to my office to find out what’s going on,” Mikey says in between sips of his cool tall Corona. The indoor lighting illuminates Mikey’s blue eyes more than usual, making them look turquoise, like two slices of a bright blue sky. “You wouldn’t believe what the problem was, Tommy.”

I put down my Coke and ask, “What’s his problem?”

“The kid hasn’t been getting much attention at home because his father has been working a double-shift at the Gillette plant. I figured it out because I had him draw a picture of his family and his dad was standing the farthest from everybody in the group,” Mike says, animated as he talks. His eyes seem to convey what he was thinking and feeling. Right now they show a genuine concern about this boy.

“When I asked him what he wanted most these days, the boy looked at me and said, ‘I miss my daddy.’ It broke my haht, Tommy. It broke my haht.”

“So what did you do?” I ask, just listening to him talk as I rest my chin under my fist like I was hearing an old short story during a reading group in elementary school. I like the richness of Mikey’s voice, the sincerity that comes through when he talks about work. I could listen to him all night. He seems like he truly cares about these students and I find that more compelling than his sweet blue eyes and cute face.

Mikey puts down his beer and continues.

“Well, I told him that if his daddy is working so much, it’s because he loves him and his family so much. He wants to give them everything he can. So I told him not to worry, that I’m sure his father will make it up to him, but in the meantime, he could focus on his schoolwork and bring up his grades and that would make Daddy proud. The kid said he would try harder. I told him I’d speak with his father and mother about what we had discussed in my office.”

“So you deal with that on a daily basis?” I ask Mikey, who orders another beer from our waitress, Candy, a Goth-looking college girl with nails the color of coal.

“Yeah, some days are busier than others with office visits, but other than that, I end up filling out a lot of paperwork and coordinating with the teachers about student files and their progress. Like I said, we sometimes provide the most stability for these kids. We’re their other home,” he says. “Anyways, enough about me, how was your day, cutie?”

I tell him about my interview today with a local Santeria priest who is trying to promote the religion in Boston and bring it out into the mainstream by performing more public ceremonies like on a beach, even during winter.

“This afternoon, the priest had a ceremony in his house to celebrate his twenty-second birthday as a priest. He offered apples, bananas, and other sweets to the orishas, or patron saints. You had all these followers kneeling and praying to the shrines and offering fruits and sweets as gifts inside his living room. It was quite a show but that’s what I love about my job, writing about old things in new ways or discovering new things about old Boston,” I tell Mikey, who again is completely focused on every word coming out of my mouth. I can see why students at his school open up to him. He’s a great listener.

“I knew a little about Santeria while living in Miami and how it has parallels with Catholicism but nothing on this level because it’s always been such a secretive religion. I want people in Boston to feel enlightened about what I write. I want people to feel like they’ve learned something new or feel enriched by reading this story.”

“Well, Tommy, I’d definitely read that story,” he says, mixing up his pasta and chicken and sun-dried tomatoes in his dish.

“Thanks. It runs next Sunday in the City section of the Daily. Um, I can save you a copy if you want? But you don’t have to read it just because I wrote it. I write articles every week. It’s no big deal.”

“Well, I want to see what you do. It’s obviously important to you that you moved up heah to keep writing. That’s wonderful. You’re the first reportah I have evah met and the cutest by fahr. You should be on TV. I’ll definitely buy your article,” he says, gently reaching out to my hand and tapping it. “You seem to like what you do, which is great, Tommy. I like that.”

After we finish up our dinner, we head outside and walk around the outdoor-mall-like Harvard Square and marvel at all the two- and three-story buildings that ribbon the crimson university.

The wind has died down and there’s fresh snow on the ground, making Cambridge look like a winter wonderland.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about you the whole day, cutie,” he says, his icy breath curling from the cold weather. We walk side-by-side on the brick-paved sidewalk by the huge Victorian estates on Brattle Street, just on the outskirts of the square.

“Yeah, me too, Mikey.” I glance at him and then look down at my snow-covered brown J. Crew shoes. Whenever I look up, I see Mikey eyeing me, studying my face. He’s probably never met a Cuban before or someone from Miami. I wonder what progress report he will write on me tonight!

“Cutie, seeing you tonight made my day,” he says as we approach his car.

“Ditto,” I answer back. Butterflies begin bouncing around inside my stomach when I realize he was thinking what I was thinking.

We arrive at his car and stand outside for a moment. I look around before my eyes finally rest at his blue ones, the kind that soothe yet stimulate at the same time. And then we both move in closer to kiss, kiss, and kiss some more.

We fall into a strong embrace, my nose tickled by his straight hair tucked behind his neck. He gently grips the back of my hips with his hands. And we kiss some more like two lips that don’t seem to want to let go. I want to invite him back to my place but I decide to hold off. When guys hook up right away, they lose something, a sense of mystery, a connection with the other person. I don’t want that to happen with Mikey so I’m trying to be patient. So it’s just kissing, well, at least for tonight.

He drives me back to my studio and we hold each other’s hands the whole way. My fingers rub the insides of his palm as it rests on the car’s gear shifter. He plays his Sheryl Crow’s Greatest Hits CD.

I hear her crow, “The first cut is the deepest…” as he tickles the insides of my hand in return and smiles my way.

Mikey parks in an empty space in front of my building and I can’t get enough of his sweet lips. I feel the slight stubble of his chin rub against mine whenever our lips touch, almost like Velcro, but I don’t mind at all. He asks if I have plans for the following night.

“I don’t have any plans,” I answer. “I was going to stay home and rent a movie Saturday night. Nothing big or fancy.”

“Well, do you want to go out tomorrow night?” he says, lifting his eyebrows, which makes his forehead crunch up a little.

“Shoah,” I say, trying to mimic his accent again.

“Tommy, you have a horrible Boston accent. Let…it…go!” he jokes. “It would be like me trying to imitate a Spanish accent, not that you have one or anything.”

We both start laughing.

After one more five-minute kiss good night, I step outside the car and into the entrance of my building. I walk in and I look back and see Mikey looking back as well, as if he’s waiting to make sure I get in okay. Then he pulls away and his car grows smaller as if it were a Hot Wheels model in the distance. As soon as I head upstairs to my studio, I plunge into my head and hug my pillow as I was hugging Mikey.

Then a text message pops up on my phone, causing it to twitter electronically.

“Good night, Tommy. Sweet dreams, cutie!”

I can’t stop thinking about Mikey for the rest of the night, and I fall asleep reliving and relishing his kisses in my mind.

The next day about 8 P.M. Mikey comes over again and my stomach is fluttering with anxious anticipation. When he walks in, we tightly hug and kiss like it had been weeks since we had seen each other. It’s only been twenty-four hours but who’s counting? He looks so handsome in his royal blue, long-sleeved button-down shirt and blue jeans. Both make his eyes more intense, like the blue of the waters off Cape Cod. We did not make any big plans besides him coming over. So after he walks in, we find ourselves lying on my big blue sofa, giggling and enjoying each other’s company. He twirls one of my longer curls with his index finger as we talk about what to do.

“I love your hair, Tommy,” he says, stretching out one of the longer curls in the front. “You look so cute with it,” he says, his lips softly kissing my forehead, then slowly down to my nose and then finally reaching my lips. He caresses my cheek with his right hand.

It seems like we are going to stay here, just like this, which is perfectly fine by me until Mikey says, “Let’s go out and get some drinks.”

I look at him, wondering, “Hmmm. Again?” We drank Thursday when we met, and a little bit last night at the restaurant, and now Saturday, he wants to go out and get some more drinks. I know he is a counselor and that’s one of the most difficult jobs around, but so is newspaper reporting!

But then he looks at me with those beautiful, sigh-inducing blue eyes, sticks his tongue out, and bites down on it, which makes me lose my mind a little and surrender to him.

I say, “Sure, Mikey! Where do you want to go?”

Half an hour later, we stroll into Club Café. He says that some of his friends are going to be there and he wants me to get to know them and have them get to know me so I oblige. I can’t deny it, I’m curious about his friends.

There’s an old saying my mom would tell me in Spanish, “You are who your friends are,” or “Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are,” or something like that. She always has some sort of old school Cuban adage to share about any situation.

So on my third night out with Mikey, I meet his friends, a lovey-dovey couple in their early thirties named Patrick and Will; they seem really nice. Patrick is a physical therapist who reminds me of comedian Jon Lovitz because of the way he talks. Will is an accountant (so many accountants in Boston) with bright red hair and the freckles to match every strand. They immediately recognize my name from the paper when Mikey introduces me. We chitchat in the video bar, where Ciara dances and gyrates on the screen to her Goodies.

Things are going well until I notice the Jon Lovitz clone and the redhead growing drunker by the minute. They each make three visits to the bartender to buy drinks for themselves (mostly Cosmos) and Coronas for Mikey. Like watching a slow train wreck, I see what’s happening and I stop drinking after my second DCV. I have a feeling I am going to be the only sober one here, not what I had in mind for a second date. Patrick and Will are a riot but they’re bumping into other guys accidentally, slurring their words, and they almost break out into a fight with The Kyle, whose crisp chambray Izod shirt now sports a reddish splash from Will’s spilled Cosmo.

Kyle glares at him the same way a coiled-up cobra does before attacking its prey, which would have ruined everyone’s night. I step in and defuse a potential fight. No one wants Queen Cobra flexing her fangs right now. I try to keep him from wielding his verbal swords.

“Kyle, hey, it was an accident. If you go to the bathroom now, dilute it in water, and hold it up to the fan, you won’t be able to tell,” I explain to him as I try to play down the whole thing. “Haven’t you accidentally spilled something on someone? There are so many guys here tonight that it’s bound to happen.” The last thing I need is a giant diva arguing with two drunken guys and Mikey stepping into the fray.

Kyle turns to me. “Tommy, your friends are as drunk as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. They’re making a scene and a mess here. If he bumps into me ONE MORE TIME, he will pay for a new shirt,” Kyle says just before he struts toward the bathroom in full diva mode while Will and Patrick laugh away and venture to get yet another round at the bar.

I notice Mikey seems to be getting tipsy as well, cracking jokes that really make no sense.

“Tommy, is Fidel Castro a long-lost relative of yours?” he asks in his slurred speech and laughs back.

“Um, no, Mikey. That’s not funny. If he was a relative, he would have been disowned a long time ago,” I snap back.

“Are you like Puerto Ricans and Mexicans?” he follows up with a laugh.

“Um, no! We just share a common language, but no, Cubans are not like Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. We’re all Hispanic but from different cultures and nations.”

He hangs off my arm whenever he laughs. He now wears the Corona like cologne. I smell him from a few feet away.

I look around the bar, and to my surprise, I spot Rico in the corner about to order his own drink.

“Dudette, what’s up with you? I just got here. Any hot guys tonight?” he says, peeling off his coat and showing off the tight green shirt that hugs and defines his body as if he were an anatomy textbook. The shirt brings out his green eyes even more than usual.

“I’m here with Mikey. It’s our second date or well, our third time hanging out if you count Thursday. He’s so sweet, Rico. We’re here hanging out with his friends over there by the veejay booth,” I say, pointing in their direction.

Rico looks around and sees Mikey with his drinking chums. A few seconds later, he tells me, “Your guy Mikey looks a little wasted. So do his friends. They’re all slumped up against the wall over there, getting rowdy and singing. Is the dude drunk?”

I feel embarrassed for Mikey and a little for myself.

“Yeah, they all had a bit to drink and Mikey seems pretty buzzed,” I tell Rico, looking down at my virgin Diet Coke on the rocks.

“That’s not cool. He should be having fun with you on this date, not with his pals. Be careful is all I’m saying. I don’t want you to get hurt or something. He should be sober and enjoying your company, bro. You deserve that, not him trashed like this,” Rico says before grabbing his beer from the bartender.

“I hear ya, Rico, but that happens to everyone. Let me get back to these guys before they bump into someone else and create a bar fight the likes of The Dukes of Hazzard. They already splashed Real Life Kyle with their drinks.”

“Oh no, God forbid that queen gets wet. It might ruin his Cover Girl close-up!” Rico fires back, unleashing his trademark devilish grin.

“See ya later, man,” and I head back to the other side of the bar.

Rico pats me on the back in his rough but affectionate way. “Have fun and be careful! I know I will!” Like a shark, he must have picked up a cute guy with his sonar, or gaydar.

It’s 2 A.M. and the three amigos are now definitely the three drunks. Patrick and Will stumble outside. I get them in a taxi back to Patrick’s apartment in Charlestown, once he finally fessed up his address. Now I have Mikey to deal with, telling really unfunny jokes and talking gibberish. He wants to drive home, which is 28 miles south of Boston in the town of Duxbury or what people here call Deluxebury because of its grand estates, homes on hills, and somewhat snobby attitude. But I know what a trek that is after I got lost there once on my way to Plymouth, which borders it. The snow-covered roads and the fact that Duxbury’s back roads have no streetlights make the idea of Mikey driving even more unappealing. The only lights you see there on the snaking, curvy roads are from other oncoming cars.

And besides, Mikey lives with his parents, both educators, and his younger sister, a realtor. I can’t let him go home like this. I have to rescue him.

“Mikey…Mikey…focus for a second. We’re going to 7-Eleven to buy you some water. I’m going to get some water, too, okay?” I say to him outside the club, trying to be patient, logical, and reassuring. I hold his hands and I make sure he looks straight at me.

“Yeah, that’s fine, TOMmy b-b-b-boy! Damn, you’re such a cutie.” He beams his incandescent smile at me. Although he is talking to me, I sense Mikey isn’t really here with me. It’s as if another person possesses his body. He’s not the sweet and sober Mikey I met two nights ago or even the guy from last night. He has a glazed look in his eyes like one of the drunken characters I’ve seen on one of those ABC after-school specials when I was younger.

Outside the 7-Eleven, I make him drink the bottled water. Minutes later, he is still lit as the streetlight above us. Then he becomes all apologetic. Where is all this coming from?

“Tommy, I’m sooo sorry. I drank too, too much. This will never happen again. I’m so, so sorry. You are so nice to me. I don’t know how this happened. The guys kept buying me drinks,” he says, wrapping his arm around my neck, leaning in for a kiss as his words slur some more. He looks at me with his deep blue I-need-you eyes.

I look at him and take a serious tone. “You had six Coronas. It will take six hours to get that out of your system. And you drank them in two hours. You can’t drive home. I won’t let you drive home. I know you don’t know me that well but you can trust me. I’m a good guy. We’ll go back to my place, I will make you a turkey sandwich, give you more water and some Tylenol, and you can sleep this off. I promise you, nothing will happen. I just don’t want you driving home like this. You’ll feel better in the morning. Now give me your keys.”

We walk slowly to his Matrix (he drove tonight from my place) parked on Berkeley Street, around the corner from Club Café. In the passenger seat, Mikey looks at me, lifts his eyebrows like a pensive little boy, and says, “Tommy, thank you. You’re such a sweet, sweet, sweet guy. I had a good feeling about you when I first saw you. I’m so, so sorry about this.”

“Shhh. Don’t worry about it,” I say as I start the car, which has a really cool futuristic-looking dashboard with all the circular knobs and buttons. It’s so different from my bare-bones Wrangler.

“You overdrank. It happens to people sometimes. Don’t worry about it. What matters now is getting you sober and feeling better. We’ll be at my place in about fifteen minutes. Just relax. You’ll feel better tomorrow morning, I promise. Okay?”

I turn the radio on, and just by luck, I hear Olivia Newton John singing “A Little More Love,” her 1979 song on her Greatest Hits CD. I love that song and play it almost every day in the Jeep. It tends to put me in a good mood, even though the song is about a woman who can’t seem to say no to a toxic man in her life.

“And it gets me nowhere to tell you no, and it gets me nowhere to make you go…”

It’s Sunday morning and the sun slants through my red window shades, warming my face. I wake up to the aroma of bacon. I turn to my side and Mikey’s gone. I prop up in my bed and rub my eyes in circular motion to wake them up. I look around and I see Mikey walking toward me with a plate and a big grin.

He hands me the plate, which has two eggs positioned like two yellow eyes and a curved bacon strip underneath them as if it was a smile. It’s a breakfast happy face. How adorable! I smile back at the smiling plate.

In his other hand, he carries a nice tall glass of lemon-lime Gatorade.

“Cutie, I made you breakfast. I thought this smile would put a smile on your face. All you had was wheat bread, Diet Coke, and Gatorade in the refrigerator so I went to the store down the street and bought some bacon and eggs while you were sleeping,” he says, sitting beside me on the edge of my queen-sized bed and running his hands through my curly hair, which probably looks like a giant Chia Pet right about now.

“You didn’t have to do this. That is so sweet of you. No one has ever made me breakfast in bed before,” I say, breaking off a piece of the bacon with my fingers and shoving it in my mouth. I don’t like eggs or bacon but I can’t tell him that. So I fake it and just eat them up.

“Well, you were so good to me last night when I got trashed. I acted so stupid. I’m sorry if I said anything obnoxious. I wanted to thank you for taking care of me. Thank you, Tommy, or as they say in Spanish, gracias,” he says, plopping a kiss on my bacon-smeared lips.

“How are you feeling?” I ask, washing down the bacon with the Gatorade.

“Thanks to you, I feel great. The turkey sandwich and the Tylenol helped me a lot. I feel fine, cutie. So do you want to go to Providence today? It’s only a fifty-minute ride. I’ll drive!”

I couldn’t resist. I have always wanted to take a drive down to Providence, ever since I began watching the NBC show of the same name on Friday nights at 8 P.M. When I lived in Miami, it reminded me of Boston and inspired me to try my best to get hired at the Daily. Now I meet this incredibly sweet and supercute guy who wants to show me around the city I’ve always been so charmed by, at least on TV.

“Yeah, that sounds like fun but let’s go in the Jeep. Let’s give your Matrix a break for the day.”

“You got it, cutie!”

As I finish up breakfast and get out of bed, Mikey, wearing a Miami Hurricanes white T-shirt of mine and my orange boxer shorts, looks my way and holds my hand.

“You know, Tommy Perez, I like you,” he says with a gentle squeeze.

I turn to him on my bed. “I like you, too, Mr. Breakfast-in-Bed!”