Spoons

Spoons

The sound of coffee mugs clinking, a diner at twelve-a-m, boys sitting at a bar in low rider jeans, showing the bands of their underwear wrapped tightly around muscular hips, as their feet rest on the foot stand of their stools, betraying their outward appearance of confidence with a nervous tap, their smiles so deceiving, and it seems that we’re waiting…waiting for the summer rain as over-shirts come off and we sit, ‘the guys’ in tank-tops, sweat forming around their necks and dripping down their backs and chests.

The lady behind the counter knows us all, she knows what we like to eat, she knows when we’re poor and she knows when we have a little bit of spare cash, it doesn’t matter…she feeds us. She knows when we’re hurting and when we need a little bit of faith…she pays attention and she prays. She gets angry when we don’t tell her if we’re leaving town for a bit and she always asks for postcards, always…she has hundreds, each one special to her, each one more than a name…each one a person talking to her…which she saves, tied in an old yellow ribbon so we’ll come home safe. She keeps them in her top dresser drawer, all of the love notes she never received from men who couldn’t see her beauty radiate from within, from foreign places she’ll never be able to afford to go…we call her Mom.

Sirens are heard off in the distance of another raid, Police seeking constant community support from the same community they attack each weekend, hoping that we’ll believe them when they say it’s just a few rogue cops, as they parade the one or two gay members of their department in front of us at each pride…as if that makes it okay for them to call us faggots when they harass us as we walk home at night…funny, the last one to call me faggot sucked me off three weeks ago in the stall of a club, but I only guess it makes you gay if you get caught with another guys cock in your mouth…straight until proven guilty.

I light up my cigarette, the third in what will no doubt be the string of many…another sleepless night of worry…thirty-six new HIV cases reported last weekend, constant baited breathe at the prick of a finger tip so you can call all your friends and tell them that you’re still negative…as if it were a contest, like a game of Russian Roulette, no idea who’s going to disappear next…one by one, my friends vanish as older activists pretend that they grew up in the hardest time ‘the eighties’, ‘the scare’…and no doubt it was hard…but at least then there were activists.

And Mom comes to the table to bring me two cups of black coffee so she won’t have to bother me in thought while I down the caffeinated substance to keep my buzz going as I run my hands through my hair: so many gorgeous zombies, so many who won’t be with us next year.

Another step forward brings with it ten steps back and as we repeat the same actions of the past, we move so far so quickly that it’s hard to keep track, as I look up at two boys as they move towards the back booth, where Mom doesn’t keep a light bulb hanging overhead, and they go there for privacy, as they lean in and kiss one another, his lips making contact with his lovers neck…because if they did that at home, the next day they’d be found dead…his father my next door neighbor with the stars and bars on his truck…I remember the first time I met his son who is now moving down to the lower territories of his male companion…it was three months ago when they were seen driving down the streets in Boys Town throwing rocks at the windows of the Gay Bars…if his father only knew how far self loathing went.

I get up and go to bring my cups to the sink, and try to remember how many years it’s been that Mom has known that I don’t need spoons with my coffee as I light my fourth cigarette and inhale and gently grin at the no smoking sign that Mom doesn’t enforce for me (she knows me too well) as I get ready to walk back to my apartment.

It’s starting to rain as mist rises from the city streets.