“I don’t know why I did it. It was years ago, 2004 Austin, where ‘keeping it weird’ meant more than California techies wearing shorts to work. I’d graduated law school without a job, and I was still fastening suspenders to work at my summer (now full-time) bartending gig at TGI Fridays. I hadn’t travelled overseas in three years. I’d met few gay men in a city supposedly filled with them, and I wondered one day after the gym what it might be like if men who had sex with men marked themselves in some way.”

_ _ _

“Like during the summer months of cottonwood & cocaine, the lean & linger of front porches out past midnight. Tonight, I’ll rope the moon. My shirt shimmies up my arms and over my head, a ballerina’s fifth position, lifts me up 7th Street toward the funeral home. A left at the green frog: El Sapo Verde. I stop inside, drink another. Soon I’m back on the streets. Circling and circling. Listening now for the slowdown of Texas trucks with Mexican license plates. Coahuila. Tamaulipas. San Luis Potosí. Ranchers weaving up I-35 in search of family or work. Not where they’re supposed to be.”

_ _ _

“Some days I cross the border into Mexico. Watch movies. Drive around. Drink snifters of brandy at the Paradiso hotel or shuffle roadside pork tacos into my hungry mouth. Anything to get away from tests and lesson plans and assigned parking spaces; from the Texas women waiting to get married and the men I’m uncertain how to approach; from the perpetual feeling that I’ve done something wrong, ended up in a place I don’t belong.”

_ _ _

“Outside the Mexican hospital door you see a man, the blue trim of his white uniform like a halo, a man who hovers over the speckled floor and circles you, lifts you with his falcon’s wings and floats you off the bed in his arms.

‘My head is broken,’ you say, but in Spanish: Se quebró la cabeza.

‘Ya lo se,‘ he answers. ‘I already know. ‘ “

_ _ _

“Nobody sits next to me on the bus. Boarding passengers of slender girth or impressive
heft—even those with an enviable and unbounded sexuality—ignore, overlook, or simply slide
by the apparent barrenness of my soul. Today I’m in no mood. I’m nearly forty, and I have a date
for the first time in months. I will make myself approachable if it’s the last thing I do.”

_ _ _

“I pointed at the street again. She nodded, and I drove to the corner and waited. I knew that in Mexico they sometimes impound cars after traffic accidents. Did my insurance cover damage over the border? A few more seconds passed. To my right an old woman shuffled by with a cane and tiny purse. I took another sip of my beer. What would I tell the nicely-curled young woman once she rounded the corner? What would I do?”

_ _ _

“Instead, I’d make myself invisible after middle school. I’d carry my books to my side instead of swinging them over my chest. I’d spend that summer practicing my walk and listening to my voice on my sister’s boom box. I’d cut my hair like the other athletic boys and listen to Motley Crew or Guns N’ Roses. I’d become like Adam or Michael. For now, though, I continued alone on the shores of the canal beneath the Southwest Florida heat. . .”

_ _ _

“I don’t know what the finch wants to say, but she’s splashed herself atop the flat-headed hedge and summoned me. I’m on the couch, Lucky’s heavy flank along my arm, the earth-crumb bird songs fetching him out of slumber. Lucky wanders toward the window as the chaste leaves watch me rest. Forgive my lyrical mood this morning—it’s Saturday and for once I have nothing to do.”

_ _ _

“I eventually missed an easy backhand volley and felt my partner’s racket tap me on the butt. I could sense his smile behind me, his gesture like that of Coach Nelson the year before. Did he already know what I didn’t? That I would soon grow muscles and shave off the hair on my legs and arms? That one day I would look in the mirror and feel proud of the young man I’d become? That my mom would happily remarry, and I’d come to love my father again? That I’d find my way – and love – along the shores of the Caribbean Sea, or that my younger sister would lose herself to drugs?”

_ _ _

“Will the orphans eat? Will you get laid? How bad must the asthma become before you pass out on the street? These are some of the questions you may answer during the semester. Finally, you will leave the course with an appreciation of all things Latin American, but heartbroken for “’ttle girl[s] in blue pigtails wandering into restaurants for food or into [your] unlockable hotel door for something to cover up with in the cold,’ just one of the unresolved tensions that eventually bring you back to the region as a volunteer, study-abroad student, vacationer, immigration attorney, research professor, and lonely single man.”

_ _ _