2C

There’s something about Grindr’s ability to make communication skills disappear that feels like magic.

I scrolled, I tapped, and scrolled some more before I saw his little box pop up. In the captivity of his box, he looked at the screen of his phone to investigate some little boxes controlled by other phallic thumbs. I wondered if he was making some sort of meta commentary, and then I wondered if my little box interested his.

I analyzed his statistics, listing all the keywords I had learned were useful to filter out my type. Bearded, professional, masc. I congratulated this online presence on passing its first round of scrutiny. But I made no promises that he could pass through the complex bureaucratic scrutiny of my heart.

As we chatted, we played our cards carefully because it was dangerous territory. If someone’s heart could be read clearly, they ran the risk of being declared the less fit male in a game where the victor and the prey both feel they have lost.

“Hey what’s up?”

Just trying to think of a response that’s long enough to keep your interest, but short enough to save me the embarrassment of caring too much.

“Same.”

So it went on. We stalled for time through our lukewarm conversation as we journeyed back and forth between pictures and chat bubbles, trying to make a final evaluation. As we continued this idle semblance of conversation, we warmed to each other’s intentions. Finally, someone made a sort of final decision and extended their courage a bit farther out and dared to suggest an encounter in a physical realm.

He said, he typed, why don’t we meet at my apartment.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I lay awake in bed the night before our encounter contemplating the abstract horror of approaching the building’s front door and pressing the wrong button. These buttons had weight and were tangible and produced more than an effect on a pixelated screen. Who was to know what sort of cascade of misfortunes would fall upon me if I made the wrong choice? It was imperative to be safe and double, triple check that my fingers knew they wanted this fate.

Nearing his apartment building, I scanned the control panel carefully, locating 2C precisely and pressing its corresponding button that would rise him from solitary confinement. I wondered if it would be a better choice to puff out my chest and look as big as I could, or if I should compress myself to signal docile malleability.

But then I was left naked in the translucence of my true skin, because the door said buzz and I had to enter without deciding which performance would be a better disguise.

I walked up the stairs in darkness, not realizing that the hallway, too, was controlled by a light switch, and could only help me if I knew to help myself.

I got to the second floor and watched a handsome man with a beard open the door between 2B and 2D, a smile placed on his lips to welcome a visitor. I entered the apartment, hoping it was him.

I looked at him more carefully than I could through the screen of my phone. I saw that he had travelled a few more journeys around the sun than me, spent under a sun that kissed and caressed his skin until it shined with Mediterranean luminescence.

He greeted me as he sat down at his living room table, and I followed his lead. He told me he would be done with his tasks in just a minute, if I could just help him to fill out an attendance sheet for a class he taught. I wondered if he was trying to ignite sparks by evoking a certain kind of professor-pupil relationship.

You, new visitor – read me those names there and I will input them into my number machine.

What kind of dynamic was that? Some nerve. If he wanted to use me, he was underutilizing my skills. If he wanted an assistant, I wanted to have a chat about my job responsibilities. And in that case, he should know that it was inappropriate for us to continue communicating through Grindr.

It came to my mind that perhaps he made me his new world scribe in order to receive the retribution his land deserved for having to forfeit its empire to North American neo-hegemony.

I read him names obediently off of a paper list so he could send this information up into the cloud.

As he inputted his students’ names, he told me about his complaints with the software. The program demanded one first name and one surname, compressing students into clean Anglo-Saxon files. It refused to recognize their humanity.

“This software was definitely created with a US audience in mind.”

Suddenly I felt a pang of guilt, as if I had given life to the software myself.

We finished this tedious task and moved on to the next one: getting to know each other.

I thought that if I spoke to him and expressed my reality in his native tongue, in the language custom made to describe life in his tiny corner of the Realejo in Granada, that he wouldn’t see my faults and he’d think I was cuter and we might be able to hear, over the lulls of our conversation, the crumbling of the globalizing hegemonic order.

Because some revolutions take place in the intersection of two mouths. You may call it mouth, or you may call it boca. But he’ll feel warm and fuzzy if you call it boca, and he might express this by kissing you on your lips. And then as your tongues enshrine themselves in one, in movements that produce no speech at all but speak volumes, you’ll feel that you understand him better than ever. Even if he doesn’t call it a kiss.

Luckily, his native tongue was Spanish, the favorite homogenizing myth of the Spanish nation-state, and not one of those pesky regional idioms that defied the tides of modernity.

He told me in crisp Castilian that he wore a lot of hats and did a lot of jobs. During his monologue, I made a first evaluation of our compatibility. Analyzing a string of data points, such as how much I fake laughed, how much I sought his eyes, and how close I was to him, I determined empirically that I was feeling interested. But my internal software was insufficient to differentiate between romantic interest, platonic interest and the other kinds of interest that fall unnamed in the spectrum between. So I just kept listening to him talk.

But I guess he got tired of talking, or maybe he ran out of things to talk about, and had to make a split-second decision to avoid a silence loaded with ambiguity.

“Vemos algo en Netlix?”

Sure…but what to watch?

I thought about a boy I met the year before, in the domestic ennui of my home country, who introduced me to drag.

It was the first time that drag was presented to me as something to take pride in, not a shameful defiance of the laws of nature. I still remembered, trying to bury the feelings of shame and despondence, when I showed my friends the drag videos I found in high school and their reaction leaned more towards disgusted amusement than fanciful liberation.

I remember being so grateful. I wanted to repay him, kiss the mouth from where the suggestion came, hold the hands that lifted me up. But when I tried, it didn’t work. I found out that I didn’t like him, I just liked queer solidarity.

I thought maybe I’d pass the torch.

“Have you ever seen Drag Race?”

“No,” or as we say in English, no.

He liked it. When we saw each other again that became our routine, and sex did not.

Maybe he just liked my solidarity. Or maybe my solidarity was what inspired his lustfire.

I wanted to express to him that I wanted to take things slow, so that sex could be an extension of a bond already established instead of a precursor, because intimacy is hard and sometimes I change my mind or my mind changes for me. But I had no control over the message I was trying to craft. It came out as a simplistic tirade against all the guys who just wanted my flesh and nothing else, oversimplifying a message that I desperately wanted to convey, whose words I couldn’t find in Spanish, or in English, or in my wordless brain stew.

He commiserated, referring to and thereby contrasting himself with all those guys who just wanted to briefly fill an agujerito caliente. And so mentally he created a boundary between him and me, placed limits on his behavior so that I wouldn’t get scared and leave. He was too busy recalibrating his behavior to fit this gentleman role that he didn’t think to ask me for clarification. I was too busy engaging in the irreality of the moment to realize that maybe there was a rift in our understanding.

Because I was trapped thinking about the boy that I was when I began to flirt with the language that Cervantes used to enamor a nation. The boy who was trying to grasp the imperfect subjunctive, worried as he was that he may never be able to express the nuances of an unsure past in his new tongue. How curious he was to know if, one day, his language abilities and his emotional intelligence would catch up to each other, so that he could look his future in his face. Maybe he couldn’t imagine there might be a future, a future tangible in weight and feelings who would listen to him come to terms with his unsure past as he made sentimental use of frigid conjugations learned long ago. I wondered if he knew that, one day, his efforts would come to fruition, and a handsome Spanish man would teach him how to say “warm hole.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A couple of weeks passed by before we met again.

Maybe he was busy, maybe I was busy, or maybe it took him two weeks to gather the courage to say “come back”. But he mustered his courage, and I found myself on his couch once more.

He asked me what I thought of Granada.

I told him I preferred Madrid. I told him I liked the energy of the big city, the unbridled grandness of urbanity.

In his Andalusian pride, he refused to allow his land to be overshadowed by the cold capital. He asked if I had already visited the Alhambra, Granada’s ancient decadent fortress, whose pilgrimage would certainly change my mind.

Or maybe it wasn’t that complicated, and he just needed something to say.

He told me that, upon presenting proof of residence in Granada, like a water bill, one could gain free access to the Alhambra. But I didn’t concern myself with the messy aspects of residence in a foreign country like documents, bills and other frivolous details. My sterilized and pre-arranged life came in a tidy package that didn’t need government assistance to see the sights.

He lived in the Realejo, the old Jewish quarter of Granada, like the Judería of Cordoba. But this Old Jewish Quarter didn’t have the same clout as the Judería of Cordoba, which was a site whose appearance in all the respectable tourist guidebooks vouched for its value.

The Judería of Cordoba was a certified can’t miss, a Yelp-confirmed spectacle, a tour de force worthy of touristic gawking. The Realejo could only claim to be where the Jewish population of the city used to live, before they were expulsed from their land of Sefarad, more well known by its imperial name of Spain. And because it was so ungaudy and so anti-PR in its presentation, it was a snooze.

I lived in the Albayzín, which was Granada’s crowning achievement. The eggshell white of its characteristic dwellings, meant to dispel heat within the home, enchanted its pale visitors into leaving crumpled plastic water bottles in its winding alleyways to document their appreciation.

But my heart was in his Realejo, in all its sleepy residential glory. In its calmly unassuming streets, spreading themselves functionally along the topography instead of boasting as grand oriental staircases. I thought about the article I translated in class that praised the Realejo’s authentic wine bars and dining establishments, virgin and pure from the touch of Uncle Sam’s dollar. And as I made this information available not in the language of its residents but in the language of global commerce, I feared I was taking part in the same phenomenon that made me pause with melancholy.

Nonetheless, the Realejo continued to stand proudly, mindlessly indulgent in the pleasure of its simple existence, just as he and I continued to enjoy each other, the end on the horizon never present in our minds.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the passage of a few several weeks, our “one of these days” turned into a “now or never,” and on our last date, we rushed through a series of unknown and unexpected developments.

The day after, I would take my last exam and say my goodbyes, and the day after that, my existence in Spain would be limited to the memories held by those who could still remember me.

Los que todavía se acordaban de mí.

An awkward back and forth over WhatsApp proved to be a communicative experiment to see how long it would take for one of two conversation partners to state what they were really thinking.

Finally, he said it would be a shame if I left before we could meet again. I asked him if he wanted to go to a vegan restaurant, a restaurant I had walked past every day and hoped to visit before I left. He agreed that we would combine one first and one last.

I arrived early, as is my tendency, so I got us a table and wished I wasn’t sitting alone.

He arrived, and the energy was off.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

Oh no. I guess our expiration date came sooner than expected.

He seemed distracted by his phone. I acted like I was distracted by anything other than the disappearance of our subtle romance.

He told me that, before the separate ancient lands of Europe decided they would be happier together, he grew up using a dreamy old currency: the peseta.

He told me that, because he grew up in faded sepia days, he still found it easier to think of the the price of houses in pesetas, not euros.

I wondered how many pesetas it cost to build the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María, how many pesetas one needed to buy milk in an ancient Madrid, what kind of astronomic sum of pesetas one would need to procure to exchange nostalgia for the value of the vegan hamburger in front of me.

I thought about our conversations becoming relics that existed only in the unreliable chambers of the mind.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After a series of conversation empty but loaded like old shoeboxes full of photographs from days already passed, we left the restaurant, and arrived at his apartment. But shortly after, both of us felt a craving for something sweet to clean our palate of the sour taste of ambiguity, and to celebrate the time we had spent together.

We went to a small convenience store on the corner, lovingly referred to by the Spaniards as a chino based on the nationality of their owners, and carefully eyed up the various dessert options, as if a wrong choice would send us right back to square one.

I stood slightly behind him, accompaniment, as we greeted the woman in unison, and he presented to her his euros. Her eyes floated down, then up as her lips opened in a friendly gesture to assure us our exchange had been a success.

After a few steps, an interaction with his door and a climb up the stairs we returned to the couch in his living room, where the night’s fate awaited us with muggy anticipation.

Like a pleasant host, he got us two spoons so we could consume ceremonially. Smiling, his eyes fluttering with the irony of a failed mission, he told me that the ice cream was freezer burned. I told him I didn’t mind, but I didn’t tell him it was because our bodies had neared each other on the couch, where our typical distance was his signal that he didn’t want to take advantage of me.

“How are you feeling about your exam tomorrow?”

What exam?

“I’m not worried, it’s not a big deal.” He didn’t know that my classes were pretty undemanding. I didn’t know how I had managed to spend time with him without trying to get to know him the way the Bible told me I couldn’t know another man.

The minutes passed, the clock hands completed their revolutions, and we continued to talk.

And as our mouths continued engaged in our conversation, our seated positions started to near each other slightly and more slightly until the heat produced by our mutual attraction began to burn.

Finally, after an awkward stare reminiscent of the first time I met another boy’s lips, he kissed me and I kissed him.

I thought once more of the boy I was when I started to learn Spanish, I thought about how little he knew. He barely knew to acknowledge his past in his new tongue, much less his future. He lacked the capacity or the vocabulary, in English or in Spanish, to fantasize about this Spanish boy he would one day meet, and he never imagined that the stoic content of his textbooks would one day be animated here in the arms of someone who thought he was worth getting to know.

I thought about that room in the back of his apartment, always hidden in the background of our living room platonics. He must’ve read my mind, because he asked me a question to which he knew and I knew I would answer yes, and we disappeared into his bedroom.

There we lay shy, delving into new territory. He held me from behind. He touched, I touched, we touched. As our lips shoved together, we created the bodily friction we no longer contained. After all was said and done, we were tired from the efforts of releasing our ghosts, and I fell asleep by his side.

We awoke, sober in the reality of our imminent division. He wished me luck on my exam as I got dressed, and I said a sweet goodbye that I closed with a kiss. I walked back into the hallway, turning on the light. In my sweet sorrow, I looked back and thought that, turning back time, I would choose again to enter 2C.

I walked to my translation exam and began my journey out of the Realejo and across an ocean. As I walked, my scent still reminiscent of the aftermath of bodily union, I grinned, wondering what 14-year old me would think of this moment.