RelinqWish

We were already staring at him at the gate. He was chatting with the uncomfortable flight crew about the fires in California, his hands touching the counter while the women behind him smiled hesitantly, looking downward at his hands and then grinning politely, while the passengers lined up to board their flight.

He was tall, though it was hard to tell because he moved so much. He was wearing a black t-shirt that looked like it had been out in the sun too long, its inside seems outward and paint stains speckling the greenish-gray background. His pants seemed like they were leggings, black in the same way his shirt was, and over them were inside-out red nylon athletic basketball shorts with the waistband down to the middle of his buttocks, the seat of his pants smudged with white like he accidentally sat on a newly-painted bench, wiped it off, and decided to just turn it inside out so it wouldn’t look so bad. As if his hair didn’t already give it away. It was a dirty brownish yellow color, I think they called it “dirty blonde” but I wasn’t sure, to me his hair looked like the color of a walis tambo, mustard-colored brooms of my youth, matted, greasy and down to his shoulders with a thinning spot the size of a yarmulke on top. He looked like a homeless person, and maybe he was one. This was probably what the rest of the passengers were thinking as he greeted the people around him, all but him were aware of the thick, uneasy air created by our collective stare.

Maybe he’s lost, was what I thought, and so I boarded the plane with everyone else, thankful he wasn’t in line with us. I was very ready to board this flight, having waited for seven hours on a layover because I was too cheap to get “real plane tickets” and not discounted ones online. I had already done my contemplating while sitting on a cold marble floor by the electrical outlet at LAX where I’d plugged in my laptop so that I would have enough juice to watch a movie during the flight, which later on I learned I didn’t have time for, because I became pre-occupied with pretending to read my book while secretly staring at the passenger in front of me in between page turns.

I had taken the earliest flight to California a week prior to see my friend Anton, who had his heart broken again, most likely finally, by the same white boy from Kankakee, Illinois, named Barry. Anton and I spent three years together in Manila in our early twenties, getting undergrad and graduate degrees at the nearby university over cigarettes, beers and lots of Tang Grape Juice made by their family’s servant Deborah. His mom didn’t mind, she was one of those really cool moms who embraced all of her children’s friends and “adopted” them indefinitely. Ten years later, in a whole new time zone, far away from our homeland and native tongue, I had made the trip to his home in West Hills to help him out of the hole made by his stubborn, determined but often deterred, passionate and borderline obsessive, heart. Which was in a hundred pieces when I arrived.

There was a smell to his misery. It was brought about by weeks of laying still and letting time, people and events pass him by. It was the stench of the bottom of a years-unwashed ashtray, pillows and sheets smelling of old and rancid sex and manly musk, mattresses not laid out in the sun to dry like we were taught in the tropics, to rid beds and pillows of urine odors, bedbugs and mold. Anton gave me bedcovers for the pullout sofa after I had kindly refused to sleep beside him, but the fabric felt like there was a film of grease on it. I imagined oily un-showered faces and oily hair on the pillowcases and thought that the dog hair on the couch and the pee stains on the rug were the least of my problems, because Anton sat in the corner staring at me, saying at midnight on my first night, “Salamat at andito ka,”

Thank God you’re here.

In bed that night on the sofa bed, I tried to get my mind off the humanness of the situation and pretended it was merely biology. Like visiting the pen of the studs at the pig farm when I was young. It had a musky odor like armpits, like men, it’s a smell you can only describe to vegans who recognize the stench of meat. I could smell a man’s presence even after he’d gone, being without one for very long. I made an exception for Anton because we were both gay, and because he held one of many keys to my past, maybe even to my chest whose ribs were bars like those of jail cells, inside which were my secret stories that only Anton knew of, desired and longed for.

I wondered why our common past as adolescents in our middle class world did not manifest itself in another country. I had moved to New York and he had moved to California a few years apart. I did it for love, while he did it despite the quickly-realized absence of it in this country. As I scrubbed his filthy toilet clean and cooked his favorite dish of adobo and ginisang toge the next day, if only to create a superficial sense of order in his life, I felt a little better even if I came to California to find direction in my life but found him struggling to find a single reason for it.

“Kain na tayo.” Let’s eat. I served him hot rice, pork and bean sprouts on his plate, cooked in the traditional Filipino way I learned in college when I asked our family cook how these meals were actually made. Anton grabbed his spoon and fork, dove in, eating like he had been walking in the desert and this was his first glass of water.

“This is my first real meal in weeks,” he said smiling, grains of rice peeping from the gaps between his upper and lower teeth, “I feel like I should wash my face with this food.” I smiled, putting more food on his plate.

For five days, I emptied ashtrays, threw out the garbage, and scrubbed the sink of the annatto and saffron stains of my daily cooking. While he was at work I would walk to the local Safeway to buy meat and vegetables for dinner, knowing that home-cooked meals were few and far-between for him. Jeannette Winterson was right, that to completely immerse oneself in somebody can be a very cleansing experience.

Except that there was too much cleansing to be done at Anton’s house.

**********

When I got situated in my sad middle seat on my flight home from California, I thought about how lucky the people in front of me were that they didn’t have a person sitting in between them. This seemed odd, because at the check-in kiosk I had tried to change my seat assignment and it said that there were no other seats available. I was right, because I looked up from my novel and saw Mr. 14E himself, in full force, the man at the gate with the clothes paint-stained and inside-out, standing at the aisle by the row in front of me, exclaiming, “Hello, everybody!” to the crowd. The lady sitting at the aisle seat stared at us with bulging eyes as if to say, “Oh my lord. Oh my…,” but she was interrupted by her new seatmate, who extended his hand while she pulled hers back, waved hello instead, how are you, to which he answered with much excitement, “Very wound up, as usual, we are being cooked like sausages in here!” He pointed all three air vents at himself, turned it up to the maximum, and fanned himself profusely, dust and dandruff flying all around him, most of it falling back onto his scalp, now right in front of my eyes as I stared curiously. My own row was petrified, stealing glances through the gaps in between the seats with wide eyes, half cursing their luck and half thanking it, that they had me instead of him.

When the plane took off he extended his head and leaned over the passenger on his right, trying to get a glance at the view by the window. Unsuccessful, he leaned the other way, trying to look out the window on the other side. He noticed that the lady beside him was scribbling in her notebook something that looked like an outline for a presentation, so he asked her for a piece of paper which she gladly obliged but carefully handed for fear of touching him. His hands through the seat gaps looked like they had been working on a car engine all day. They were black like a mechanic’s hands and looked like they smelled of motor oil, but we all knew the smell would be more unpleasant than that. His nails were yellow, brittle and curling upward. He didn’t smell from my distance but there was no doubt that he was weeks from the last hand-washing, months from the last shower. That, or he was just a gay, disheveled and obnoxious car mechanic who met an accident with a lot of paint or didn’t have any other clothes for his flight to New York.

“Are you working on something?” he asked the lady on his left after he took the piece of paper from her. “I’m trying to,” she replied curtly, but still contained, as she turned her back against him, covered her right side with the airline blanket and worked on her laptop instead. The lady on his right pretended not to hear him crumple and de-crumple, fold and unfold, raise up and raise down, the piece of notebook paper he was given as an attempt to appease the unappeasable.

Again he pushed all the vents towards him and made sure they were open all the way. The tiny specks of dust and skin still flew around him, but by this time his immediate surrounding had started to slowly accept his presence in their five-hour flight. The seatbelt sign turned off and the Chinese flight attendant rushed passed our aisle, but the man yelled, “Excuse me!” She stopped, and he continued, “Are you going to serve coffee or something in this flight?”

“We’re just about to do that, Sir.” When she did he asked for coffee, “One cup black, the other one decaffeinated, half-milk, half-cream, it doesn’t really matter.” While the flight attendant was serving him, he started to make conversation.

“Hey, did you guys ever find the ‘Donna’ you were looking for earlier?”

“I’m not sure which Donna, you’re referring to, Sir. There are a lot of Donnas who work here.”

“No, the flight attendant Donna, one of the people at the gate asked the other person if Donna was here. Did you ever find her?”

“I’m sorry Sir, I don’t know which one they meant,” the other attendant was getting annoyed at the delay in serving everyone else.

“Really, you don’t know who Donna is?” he asked again, so the Chinese flight attendant, out of helpful custom, decided to tell him that she’s been with the airline for nine years, and there are many Donnas who work with her, but the last time she was in a plane with a Donna was eight weeks ago…

“Oh it’s okay, you don’t have to find Donna. Maybe they meant Madonna! Haha!” he laughed, his brown teeth showing, spittle on the side of his mouth, tiny droplets of saliva floating up to the reading lamp.

It was like the Statue Dance, but in reverse. When I was a child there was this party game they played where you had to stand still like a statue when the music stopped and the last one left standing still was the winner. Flight 28’s new source of entertainment, the one that I had front row seats to, seemed to be in a contest of who can keep on moving the most. It was as if a bomb would explode inside him if he sat still for just one second.

By the time the captain had announced the plane’s descent, the people in front of me were shaped like a trident, a devil’s fork, with 14E in the center standing tall and the two other passengers beside him trying to keep as far away from him as possible. He grabbed the newspaper from his seat pocket, furiously leafed through its pages, raised it up in the air and flapped it like a bird’s wings as the plane’s wheels hit the ground. When the plane started taxiing, for one last time he adjusted the vents and made sure they were on, but at this time the air had been turned off, so he stood up, his pants falling down his bare ass, covered by panty-hose like material, as he picked his wedgie. When we stopped at the gate, he walked out, leaving the cabin in a state of withdrawal from the annoyance he caused, and yelled, “Adios, Amigos!”