Mama noticed I’d made a friend at the Boy Scouts during one of the camping trips so she invited him over...Manuel. At the time there weren’t many houses in our area and most houses around were attached to a small farm. We were surrounded by plenty of empty land. Well, not exactly empty. To my 11-year old curiosity it was full: stinky beetles, lizard eggs, spider webs the size of my torso and snakes that looked like purple flowers.
Manuel was older by about a year or two. He’d been born in Venezuela, so his accent in English was thicker than mine. I was grateful he took mama up on her invitation. Not many people liked to come to our house. I suspect it had something to do with the lack of road. It was what they call a dirt road, except there wasn’t any dirt on it. South Florida is built on limestone, so the road was a limestone road, I suppose. It was dusty in the dry season and not quite white. Potholes as wide as trucks abounded and would always be filled with nervous tadpoles during the rainy half of the year. They’d dart away from car tires and passersby and the occasional heron’s shadow. Coming for a visit meant getting the bottom half of your car muddy and possibly caked with dead tadpoles, so most people avoided us. But Manuel came.
His mother dropped him off at the front gate and drove away quickly. He had his slingshot and I came out to greet him with my bug vaccum in hand. This was a contraption I’d made in school out of tubing, an empty plastic garlic-powder jar, a wad of cheesecloth, and a quarter-sized piece of beeswax that smelled like molten lilies. The vacuum was just that—you could suck a bug into it but without sucking it all the way into your mouth thanks to the well-placed cheesecloth, which I guess was a kind of vacuum filter. If you wanted you could soak a piece of cotton in rubbing alcohol and drop it into the jar. The fumes would kill the bugs. I was a little buddhist as a kid, so I didn’t usually kill the bugs because I felt sorry for them. Dad liked to point at me with a shaking finger and call me a sissy faggot for caring so much about insects. Mind you, I had no qualms about burning ants with a magnifying glass. Well, almost no qualms; I’d give myself a death quota—not more than twenty ants per session. This is a long way to come to tell you about a bug sucker that isn’t even a main part of this story. Really the important thing is that I had a friend that day, one who didn’t mind so much where I lived and was willing to hang out.
Off into the neighboring fields we trekked—Manuel with a slingshot and me with my vacuum and we also each carried a home-made bow with shaved baby sugarcane arrows. We were going hunting, although I just thought were pretend hunting. Manuel was actually intent on killing something.
We entered one of the fields of tall yellow grass, and I noticed Manuel staring at me. I stopped, looked him in the face, and then he remarked you need to walk more tough, like a man. Silence. A breeze. A mockingbird twittering. Whaddo you mean? He showed me you gotta walk like this, otherwise people will make fun of you. Kids did make fun of me, although I don’t think they ever mentioned my walk specifically. Still, Manuel was determined to tutor me. He lead by example and I repeated, trying to mimic the weight of his steps and the angle of his body relative to, well, everything I guess. He took up a lot of space for a skinny Venezuelan. I was skinny too, but shorter than he, and I didn’t take up much space at all.
It wasn't just Manuel's obsession with my gait that kept us from hunting, physics, nature and childhood interest were against us. The sugarcane arrows were too light to pick up any speed, and there weren't any animals to kill. Also, Manuel wasn’t as into bug sucking as I, so we headed back to my house. He kept coaching me the whole way there.
When we got inside, mama had a buffet of snacks ready for us: sliced ham rolled up around chunks of gouda, lard crackers spread with guava paste and cream cheese, and two tall glasses of Sunny Delight which cooled our insides fast. She was quick to ask how the hunt went and Manuel mentioned the Man-training he’d been doing with me. Mama said that was very good and got into a detailed discussion with Manuel about how to correct my stance and my walk, and also the way I talked. There was a lot of manliness missing from me, I guess, so the two of them excitedly coached me in unison.
Now, I wanted to fit in as much as any 11-year old freak, but I hated to be told what to do. Especially hated being told how to move my damn body. It was my body. Of course I didn’t think about it in those words at the time. And I half-heartedly followed through with what Manuel and mama asked of me...while they were asking it...but once Manuel’s mother came to pick him up, I was done. There was no way I was gonna invite that jerk over ever again, I didn't care how grateful mama was of his macho intervention.
For years these rehearsals went on, with mama and dad directing me, either alone or teamed up with occasional cousins and uncles: My steps weren’t heavy enough; I stood up straight but not straight like a man (what's the difference?); my hands were too delicate when they held knives, forks, cups; my wrists bent the wrong way; my voice swished up into inappropriate octaves; sports scared the shit outta me; and when I was sad I’d cry like a faggot.
All day long, everyday, for years, mama and dad tried to rectify these shortcomings. But I still suck cock, cry at movies, and my favorite toy is a ten inch dildo.
From the moment he got on the train I sensed trouble. I just picked up on his vibe. He was listening to music on his ipod—Rock from what I could here—and he sat across from me and Rey. I took one look at him and closed my eyes, thinking this is the type where if you make eye contact he starts gay bashing.
