Las Mentiras de la Juventud

The Castro Theater has been having an Almodovar retrospective in anticipation of his new movie coming out, Volver. I've seen more than a few. I've also been teaching the inquisitive and adorably un-Latino Froggie the bits of Spanish that I do know. All this Spanish has been flooding my brain, and bringing back memories of my first boyfriend, mi primer novio.

I was 18 and nervous, tapping my converse continually against the red-painted curb while capturing Pokemon on my Game Boy Color. Tap-tap-tip-tap. Every boy with dark features that walked by I looked at with watery and hopeful eyes, making eye contact and then looking away and wondering each time if they kept walking because they didn't like what they saw.

I was waiting to meet a boy I had been talking to online for a couple weeks. He was Mexican (the Catholic kind), let's call him J-Lo. He lived in Santa Ana and I was from Brea, and for those unfamiliar with Orange County politics, this was the equivalent of the "other side of the tracks." Brea is decidedly upper middle class, it's clean sidewalks were peopled with blondes, Mormons, and the upwardly mobile Christian Korean families. Santa Ana was "dangerous" and solely because Mexicans lived there. Police patrolled incessantly, stopping lithe tan boys in sagging black jeans and long wallet chains because of suspicious loitering. The houses did not have pebbled lined beds of begonias and perfectly mowed lawns--they had lawn chairs, and families laughing and drinking beer. I found this liveliness refreshing, and knowing that my parents would flip at my being there made it all the more enticing.

He was late (which I would later come to expect), and when he finally came over and tapped me on the shoe with his steel-toed Doc Marten boot I had already begun to gather my things with a sigh. He was wearing a baseball cap, 6'3" and stocky, he had distinct dark features similar to mine, big lips, and a scar on his forehead that bisected his right eyebrow. He had a couple piercings and wore plaid button down shirts. I grew hard, I felt inadequate.

We dealt with our shyness in different ways. I grew quiet and looked intently at anything but him while he spoke incessantly of mundanities. J-Lo considered himself bisexual without having ever touched a penis other than his own, and hadn't told anyone in his life that he was attracted to guys. I found this comforting and arousing. We met up with a girlfriend of his that he had broken up with only a month earlier and went to his apartment to watch a movie.

Ione Skye was on his little television, the ex-girl had left to go to class, and we were all over each other. I still remember his smell, syrup-musky and sweaty. Our lips clumsily sliding across each other's teeth and tongues. We made out until it grew dark, never even taking out clothes off. We rubbed our aching bulges together until we came. It went without saying, we were boyfriends. I remember going home that night on the bus listening to Blur and feeling like I had been given a gift that no one else could see.

We became inseparable. We were playing the part of the couple as we had imagined it would be. It was playing house and it was very real at the same time.

I learned what it was to know another body. He was so hairy that I nicknamed him Pooh Bear (because I was hairless and shy he called me Piglet), and he had a beautiful uncut cock. It was my first experience with someone uncircumcised, and I remember marveling at it for long stretches of time, pulling on the foreskin gently while sliding my tongue around inside it. It was like a whole new dimension of sexual ability, and I grew jealous of how much pleasure he got out of it. Perhaps that's why I would tease him so much the few times he hadn't cleaned it well enough and I found myself with a taste of smegma.

While driving home from his 20th birthday bowling party with a couple of his friends, we held hands under our jackets. Some drunken thugs threw beer bottles at our vehicle as it drove away, and a shard of glass left a thin slash of blood on his cheek. He trembled and his eyes asked me if it was because we were gay.

That night we fucked each other for the first time, and it was the first time either of us had been fucked. We didn't use a condom. It never even occurred to us. I sat on his thick uncut cock smeared in vaseline and it slid inside painlessly. I rode him until sweat was falling from my hair onto his straining face. I felt him shooting deep inside me and without even touching myself I came too, deep strands of cum flying onto his still bleeding cheek. Later, while sitting on the toilet, I felt repulsed at having to shit out his cum and still I thought: "So this is why people have sex."

He moved back into his parents' pool house after his roommate found us fucking one night and almost beat us up, but not before I caught scabies from their couch. It was like everything we tried to do doomed us, and we loved it. The secrecy of our relationship was enthralling.

My mother knew what was happening, I had already come out to her. I came home one morning with my neck covered in hickeys. She looked me over like she didn't recognize me and later, while laying on my bed watching anime, she came in and nearly spit out the words: "You're disgusting."

His father was a gardener who didn't speak English and eyed me suspiciously every time I spent the night. J-Lo locked the door to his little house every time I came over because he was terrified of his parents finding out. I woke up one early morning to his father looking over us while we slept in each other's arms. He saw me see him. His deep brown eyes were mournful as he shook his head slowly and turned around and left. I never told J-Lo, his father never said a word.

We were together for a year, but looking back, the relationship should only have lasted those first few months. We weren't suited for each other. He needed someone much more attentive and domestic, I needed someone goofier and grounded. I would tease him constantly about his taste in music, he would call mine boring. As I grew more comfortable with my sexuality I realized that I preferred the dominant role, and he was endlessly trying to make me more submissive. He began to realize his attraction to burly older men, and I found myself drawn to quietly neurotic, artistic guys. But for a short time, we were perfect for each other.

It ended badly. A long conversation in a mall parking lot. Blinking lightposts made my stony face even more unreadable as I lied and told him I had cheated on him several times. I wanted it to be over and I wanted him to hate me. He cried and punched the steering wheel and when he dropped me off at my parents I felt like I was returning to my real life. I had dropped into someone else's life a complete blank, and the voids that were created in that life taught me what I needed to be happy. I had such a low sense of self those first few years of young adulthood that it took knowing someone else intimately for me to realize that I had one.

What a strange, messy time in a life! To be a stranger to oneself and yet so full of curiosity. I could have become anyone at that time, and I could only have become myself.

We used to go to Tijuana and Rosarito with his friends often, being underage. We would drink tequila out of water bottles the whole way there. I would get teased by everyone for being only half-Mexican, but it was the first time in my life that I appreciated the part of me that wasn't white. Growing up, this had been a huge point of shame for me. Despite being raised for years by my Mexican grandparents whom I loved very much, I would lie if people asked, saying I was French, Italian, Jewish. Anything but Mexican. Because where I was from, Mexicans did the gardening. They did the jobs no one wanted to do. Still, I never felt like I truly belonged with J-Lo and his friends. They're strong mothers and Catholic upbringings, their strong sense of family and pride, I did not understand.

So J-Lo and his friends and I were in Mexico, speaking Spanish to the vendors on all sides. A little girl came up and begged me for money, I gave her 5 dollars, which only brought ten more kids out of the shadows. I got yelled at for doing that while we eat steaming carne asada tacos, the most delicious I have ever tasted.

The ecstasy was rolling through us as we danced at a gay strip club that had a name I swore I would never forget but can no longer recall. I ran my hand over the smooth taut curves of a stripper with angry eyes and his cock grew hard in his shiny g-string. J-Lo pulled me away from the stripper angrily and I wanted to ditch him instantly, I wanted to have sex with every guy in the building, in the city, in the world. Feeling attractive for the first time in my life, I wanted more than anything to know that I could have what I wanted, not only what I had. When he took me in the bathroom and started sucking my dick I felt like I was going to be sick, I asked him to stop.

J-Lo's best friend M met someone that night, and we all stayed in a hotel on the San Diego border. I had a massive crush on him for his shaved head and lip piercing, he enjoyed pinching my ass when J-Lo wasn't looking. Before long, J-Lo was snoring. I laid in the dark and watched him fucking the boy and touched myself. In the dark, M saw me and our eyes locked. He smiled. With one hand on one of the boy's upraised legs and the other on a pillow covering his face, he fucked him hard and kissed the air in my direction. I lifted the sheet off and jacked off in front of him, our eyes never moving. We both came silently, and I quickly turned over and went to sleep. The next morning his trick was gone, and we pretended it had never happened.

It was in the car on the way back to Orange County, hungover and reeling from the post-E depression, that I realized that the void created in that hotel room on the Tijuana border with J-Lo snoring was my life, a life created on my terms, and one that had a long way to go. The first step was in that mall parking lot, and began with a lie.

And like the transvestites and transsexuals and women and criminals that fill Almodovar's films, in a difficult world that doesn't seem to have space for you, sometimes that's the only way to begin to find out who you are.