May 3 

So this boy just walks in smelling of Lip Smacker, Matterhorn cigarettes, and sex sweat. He doesn’t tell me his name and I don’t ask for it. Not that I gave him mine, but he didn’t ask for that either. Fine. 

Be one of them people. Don’t catch anybody’s name until proof that they have a name worth catching, but two can play that game. So, at the beginning his name was Yo. My sister said to me last week, “Eddy, your superpower is that you always read people right, from one sentence, one word, even over the phone.” Which is what she said to me last week when she handed me the phone in the middle of a call with Robbie Lindo because between telling her who she is prettier than and why she needs to check out his bedroom because he have him own video player she couldn’t tell if he was too cool or just some asshole trying to pull down her panties. 

As for this hombre, he is more concerned with flinging himself into the armchair onstage, a prop for the play I suppose, throwing his right leg over the red velvet arm and spreading as wide as possible. Brown Levi’s 501 jeans, hard to find even in America. But his smell: Lip Smacker or candle wax maybe, although his lips look like he licks them too much. Matterhorn cigarettes because that is one of three that I know, and only because it was a menthol, meaning that it could have been any fucking cigarette. And fuck sweat, yes mos def. With this sort of homo gay is what he does, not who he is, and he was gay only an hour ago. 

He’s first here other than the stage manager, who introduces himself as the stage manager. No Christian names for this bunch, but they sound like they know each other, which is likely in battyboy circles. Stage manager’s lips smile but the rest of his face couldn’t care less. On the brown jean boy’s shoulders is a Stüssy or Gap T-shirt. Somebody’s daddy can afford flights to Miami. Loose because this brother is no friend of fat. Vegetarianism, meaning “greens without the Rasta,” took off like a kite at the university but I’ve never seen this one on campus. 

I wouldn’t call it an afro, but there must be a name for high, loose, curly hair that you neither cut nor style. Skin darker than me, darker than the stage manager, but lighter than chocolate. Toffee? There’s another name for that which don’t sound like it come from a four-year-old. Caramel? Now I’m starting to sound like a poem from primary school with snow in it. He is pissing me off. Mostly by being sort of cute. I mean, dimples, but screw him because he is giving this fuck-the-absurdity-of-it-all smile, which I see on every boy who graduated five years ago but still roams campus. Every time he looks at me he raises his left eyebrow. Big eyes, the kind that make you think a brother is friendly. No, not friendly, interested. No, not interested, curious. A neat beard wrapped around his chin, and a mustache over the thick lips that he keeps on licking reminds me that I am eighteen and only recently grew shit to shave. Wild hair but tame beard, who knows what that means. I try to stop myself from doing what I always do, which is to match him to somebody on TV. Okay, Michael Warren from Hill Street Blues. Shit, there I go again. 

Sometimes I wish that what I wrote sounded like Prince lyrics. Instead I sound like a high school English lit student with a teacher who when he said he remembers the war, meant World War Two. For real. I wanted to tell him that nobody singing ’bout war no more, Bruce Springsteen has a song called “War,” but it’s not him who sang it first, and I’m only writing about it because Bruce is wearing jeans in that video, and Jeeeeeeesus man, them trousers acting like they been waiting from the day they were just cotton balls to run up the length of his legs to hit-and-run the biggest boss bulge in rock and roll where those two thighs are only too happy to meet, so happy that if he turns around to show his backside, right above the crack will be a patch of sweat in a perfect V. 

The rain just spent the whole afternoon beating Kingston into a gray that stays that way even when it gets dark. There is this thing about Jamdown, which I never notice in foreign, that by evening even the city starts to smell and sound like country. Crickets and dewy grass and car tires rolling over what sounds more like mud than road, and mosquitoes that think they sing like birds, and won’t leave you alone. And just this, I don’t know, sadness. I love it.