| dewy decimal |
2004-07-23 - 8:38 a.m.
We follow a crooked stream in Manoa as directed. When caught behind mossy rocks, the stream splits and on it�s flatter shoulders can capture a lost Medaka with its thinning puddles. I grab Julian�s small hands for leverage while climbing over the rocks that stick out of the stream. Some are built like benches. Some irregularly shaped, and slippery with moss. Others as small as hats.
We make our clumsy way over the wind-fallen trees with unearthed roots caked in loose soil and under dense drapes of Lilikoi vine, all sheltered inside this thick, lengthy tent of rainforest that hides our nimble stream from the heavy, gray sky. The tight buzzing of mosquitoes fills our ears like a hand full of paper cuts, a head full of trivial pains and everything is perfect.
I watch Julian�s careful step leading me toward the stream�s unseen end. His small, womanly feet in kid�s sized Pumas jumping from stone to stone with the winged lightness of a skipping sprite.
On the sallow skin of his neck sinks a lust mark like merlot on white cotton. I dig my hands into my pockets to fight the urge of wanting to lick my fingers, paling the redness of our lopsided existential romance with a vigorous two-fingered rub that would erase Daryl, Michael and Kyle from MY day with Jules. To distract the physical urge to eliminate the upset of balance that sits so heavily below his chin, left of the center.
As the sky of trees begins to give way to a sky of gray cloud, I fold at my fatigued haunches, laughing as I manage to capture staggered breaths of the newfound air.
It begins to drizzle softly as Julian spots our destination with a level hand pressed above his brow. The pink building draws us nearer toward the green distances.
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We trespass through a backyard strung with fresh, but slightly dampened laundry, then wind along a modest taro patch being fed by our small, determined stream. Jules wants to drink from it and I tell him to go ahead if he likes the possibility of shitting out his vital organs for a week. He throws me this dim smirk, fucking smartass. He should be grateful
After ducking through a healthy bush of torch ginger, we find ourselves at a simple community pool where a fair, old Japanese man tirelessly slices and splashes from light blue end to dark blue end without rest. The drizzle glitters the pool soundlessly and something that was tight in me begins to unwind.
Have you ever seen a pool at rising tide? Felt your body yawn?
We duck underneath a small, covered stall where a children�s shower is cloaked in musky shadows and share a cigarette, watching the old man pull himself effortlessly out of the deep end. Blowing twisted smoke rings, we talk mad shit about the places and people that we hate, then return our attention to the swimmer as he zips up his duffle bag and throws a towel over the phantom whiteness of his neck, and vanishes into the wet, hazy air. Julian takes a drag and blows the smoke out hard through his pursed lips and hands me the last puff. �Do you think he was real?� he asks.
I don�t answer, being not so sure myself.
I�m sucking as the smoke sinks into my lungs. When I look up, Julian is stripped to his white boxer-briefs, mid air, before I hear the collapsing surface of the pool water. He doesn�t even ask me to join him cause he knows asking will turn me into a drag, but hearing the splash, I find myself wanting to duplicate its momentous sound. Julian knows that these wantings of sound almost always lead me into their doings.
Splash.
The drizzle even lets up for a second as an empty patch of sky sends twenty seconds of sunshine over my floating shoulders and onto his perfect, pouty face. Then the drizzle returns as rain. A pool surface wrinkled in pattern.
Chicken skinned, we dry ourselves with his T-shirt under a white tin roof, against a white wall with a sign and life preserver. The smell of chlorine breaks into a pale Easter blue. A chaff smile rises over Julian�s face and in that sunshine, a cock-a-doodle-doo.
I get horny and peel into Julian�s soaking boxer-briefs and find something cold and rubbery, fingers pruned, I make it warm and stiff, stiff but soft, and when he pulls mine out, we take turns trying to drop the spit from our lips onto our dicks. Pulling, spitting, giggles and saliva. Trace amounts of pre-cum, when a dragonfly chases us from the shelter of the white tin roof, as we scream into the vague whiteness where the old swimmer had disappeared.
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Shirtless with heavy, cold shorts, we gallop across a squishy field and laugh as loud and hard as we can before the cool turns into cold. Our pink building is now just a pop song away. Eyes shut, I take a concentrated breath of the rainy air that reminds me of altitude. Of other islands.
The ordinary element of Hawaiian rain; what gets me the most is not only the smell of the rain itself, but the things that are being rained upon; the wet mango bark, the dripping blossoms of plumeria and oleander, the thick soups of mud and broken mulch. The olfactory illusion. The seeming simplicity, which occurs when the island�s body awakens, wearing its new coat of rain.
On such a day as this, in our pink building, like an upright tube with a white hat, my friend Duke had an experience that he will never, as a visualist, want to forget.
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It was late August of last year and me and Duke were sitting on the porch of his mother�s old house, passing a joint between the two of us. He flips through an issue of his mom�s Vanity Fair with a disinterested finger before putting it down and asking, �Hey Dusty, have you ever been to the roof of my apartment before?�
�No, why?� joint pinched between my fingers. �Amazing view?�
�No, no, no. I mean, yeah, but that�s not why I�m asking you,� Duke says as he strains to think of how he should put it, �Oh my God dude, this one time. Fucking amazing.�
Duke says that his friend Mizu had come over to critique a collage that he�d been working on for about thirteen weeks. Mizu brought over 2 bottles of Gatorade, an overdue Tom Verlaine CD that she�d borrowed from him, and some cat tranquilizers. �This was like mid-January,� Duke explains.
It had been a rainy day, which they spent the majority of walking on pillows within his tiny room, moving around his collage, commenting on his aesthetic devices, pointing out his failures, and wowing at his stunning patches of success.
�Mizu found this little patch on my collage that she kept coming back to and her face would just, you know, light up. And at first I didn�t recognize it and was like �Whatever Mizu, I don�t see it,� �You�re too high.� The area just didn�t confront me. You know?� Duke�s habitual usage of his signature �y�know?� in full effect.
�But Mizu insisted that the said area held some kind of, �promise in its character�.
It was a sparse area where there was this shuffling of color that became thicker at certain edges.� Taking another toke, Duke stares, almost cross-eyed, at the joint pinched between the pucker of his fingers and lips.
In a voice that is witholding smoke but sounds more as if belonging to a dying man, Duke says, ��She told me, 'Here is the poetry� and when I looked again, there it was. And THEN, I was like �aaaah�." Exhale. "It really took me by surprise cause I�d been looking at this fucking thing for, what, over three months. Y�know? Just working and reworking this thing till I was literally having dreams about its assembly.�
After Duke�s epiphany, possibly aided by the gushy effects of the tranquilizers, Mizu expressed that she had an inspired urge to escape to the roof of the building. Without question, Duke turned off Cat Power, mid-song, and led Mizu up through the stairwell where they ran the remaining five floors to the open rainy air. Up to the roof.
�So before I opened the door that would take us from inside to outside, I really wasn�t expecting anything crazy. You know? Maybe just some cartwheels and heavy rain." A blue ladybug flies onto his wrist, which I�m surprised he doesn�t notice. "So anyways, I open the door and the rain is much lighter than I expected. We take a few steps out and I feel a little disappointed with its lightness but I�m like, �fuck it� and I start romping in the puddles and my pants, knees down, are just soaked from the splashes when I hear Mizu laughing. And Dust, I�m talking about this really hearty laughter, this balloon of sound.� Duke looks down, and finally brushes the bug which has reached his forearm, �So , I walk around the stairwell where I see Mizu standing. Hands on hips. Head bent back. Just laughing upwards into the sky and the gravity is just washing her face with the rain.�
�And so what the fuck was she doing?� I ask, almost annoyed with the absurdity of her actions.
�I know, I know, right? But I look up and there is this perfect rainbow and oh my God,� he says, his eyes suddenly falling blankly onto his lap. �Dude, Dusty, this fucking rainbow wasn�t an arch. Above the circular building, above us, was a circular fucking rainbow. Roy-gee-biv, directly above us! See, it wasn�t a rainbow it was a...a rain halo. A perfect fucking circle, dude.�
�Get the fuck out,� I say, suspecting that he could just be fucking with me.
Duke shakes his head with resignation, �Fuck you, don�t believe me then, fag,� he says calmly raising his eyes. His left eye meeting my right and my right his left. In our stare, he writes and I read. In the ten second silence, I see the words that are burning themselves into his pupils:
THIS. IS. TRUE.
The sweet smoke winds in our quiet channel.
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Julian and I are close enough that we can read the address printed on the front of our pink building. Nothing is dry. My cold, heavy shirt is dark and drooping. I feel as though an ice cube is lodged in my throat.
�I love you Julian,� I say with the words carrying themselves out densely, unaffected by the infinite pattering. He looks at me for a moment, my black bangs pouring over my eyes, white teeth in my mouth. I don�t realize what I�ve said. I don�t care.
He grabs my hand and we hop over a red, winding curb into a silty puddle and stammer across the lawn before opening the swinging door, inhaling the warm curling air of the lobby.
No one is in the lobby except for a girl at the front desk, eyes closed, her cheek pressed against the inside pages of a thick schoolbook. The post-it that flutters beneath her face lets us know that she is alive, probably dreaming.
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Inside the cemented stairwell a warm pressure rises from the floor. I feel it on my palms, under my chin. I look upward and Julian is already two flights above me so I rush up the stairs and almost eat shit. I feel the urgency of my misplaced balance and by the time I catch up, he�s almost at the top and still, his breath is as steady and as light as a metronome�s empty tick. As if he�d caught an elevator instead of just embarrassing me on our unofficial race up the stairs.
I am expecting �the rain halo.� Counting on the spectrum of color to be circling above us like a psychedelic UFO. I feel the nausea of anticipation or maybe it�s from the one too many cigarettes combined with the two thousand too many stairs. I wrap my arms around Julian�s bare back and follow him as he proceeds toward the heavy door that will take us to the rainy outside. As we are walking, I press my cheek to his back like a kid burying his face into a pillow on an early Monday morning. I pull his body into a crooked embrace that feels deceptively balanced. Then something in me stops, and I plant my Nike soles so that we are forced to stop a mere foot from the door.
Julian turns his head toward his shoulders, looks behind, my face still pressed against his back. �What�s up Dusty?� I let go. He turns around to face me and I can sense that he already knows what I am wanting so bad to say. I can tell by an overly attentive and insincere display of interest that lifts his eyes and voice to an unconvincing arch and pitch.
�I love you,� I say in a monotone voice that surprises and betrays me.
�You think you love me Dustin,� he says with cruel tenderness. �No Dusty, don�t cry.�
Suddenly a small laughter finds its way out of the sobs that were heaving in my cupped hands. �I do Julian,� which comes out like a surrender. But inside I�m afraid and eager. Upset and satisfied. Feeling that there are too many people living in this string-bean body of mine, and they�re all swelling and contracting, not in unison, but by mere coincidence.
�Dustin, I don�t love you like that. I love you, but you aren�t the one for me,� his hand grabs the back of my neck with the intention to soothe, �Hey, you don�t even know it but I�m not the one for you either. You�re a fucking dynamite motherfucker. Beautiful! Inside and out and someday�� That�s when I start shaking my head, which stops him, mid-sentence. His hand drops.
�You�re right Jules. No, you�re absolutely right,� I�m not the boy for him and my mind knows that he sure isn�t the one for me. But I love�m. I love that motherfucker so much that my heart is in my throat, that my dick is in my heart, and my hands are all upside down. And a feeling that the diagonal, outside rain has somehow been translated from the lunacy of these emotions that are tipping my guts from side to side.
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A kind, warm light settles into us. We hear the heavy door behind us shut. What felt like sleet in our veins begins to move as blood. We look to the rainy, overcast sky and find ourselves situated under a pocket of pure light that is cookie-cutting its way through the dense mass of dark cloud. All around our small pocket of light, nothing but the steady rain.
We spread our wet clothes on the toasted cement floor to dry out. Julian sprawls out naked in a thoughtless smile. His arms and legs make a slapping noise as he stretches them over the ground, under the white light and I duplicate the momentous sound before lighting another cigarette in sheer disbelief of the situation.
Looking into the sun and seeing rain.
Julian tells me a story that he�s already told me twice, but just seeing his enthusiasm, I let him go for thirds. He talks as I watch his body. Through the round, sliding shadows of his movement and the silky bends of light, I can feel without touching. I can recall the distinct softness of Julian. Realizing that I�m not listening, he decides that he doesn�t care and finishes his story anyway, knowing that my thoughts are taking snapshots of him as he speaks.
In the sun with my legs ajar, I let him fuck me. An unexpected breeze moves the canopy of clouds as the sunshine begins to fill with the descent of rain. With the impossible ecstasy of water and light. Of coming and going. Of Julian and me.