Body Language by Nicole Chung

Author:Nicole Chung
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646221325
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Lounging in bed, wisps of smoke curling upward from between his clenched teeth, he’s philosophizing. Using lots of hand gestures, double negatives, and rhetorical questions. He’s giving thorough rationales on why white guys tend to like extreme kinks, well-thought-out hypotheses as to why we have not yet come in contact with beings from a different universe, and so many other thoughts on this or that subject.

He’s more used to me now, so he’s showing me the intellect so few think a man like him would have. He, nothing but a drug dealer, they think. He, nothing but a criminal, they want to believe.

After some time philosophizing, there’s silence. Pigeons cooing on the fire escape, a woman speaking Caribbean Spanish in the next apartment, car horns in the distance, us together there on our sides of the bed.

Eventually, he breaks the silence by saying, “I have a girl . . .”

“Oh . . .”

“We’re not too serious, though,” he says, all papi chulo matter-of-fact.

She, whoever she is, doesn’t know he likes his thick boys, boys in general, I suppose. She does not know him like I know him.

“I like fucking with dudes. But I won’t ever love one, ya know? I can’t ever be in love with a man . . .”

But who, chulo lindo, is asking you to love? He imagines queerness in relation to love, a romantically inclined one. To have to love, a commitment, to have to live out the white picket fence, the dogs, the children. But let us take love out of the equation. What is this between us? The text message erotics. The riding and the sucking and the eating out. The passing glance on the street. Does this have to be identified with a noun? Does this have to be named?

“I like you, I like this. What we have, how we have it.”

It’s rather cute, even poetic, how he tiptoes around meaning, how he refuses meaning, to have to mean definitively. He, this boy and this man, who has run these streets for decades, this moment on 191st and then next on Dyckman, going and going in his day by day.

What does one make of a man who refuses to be captured by meaning? Him in the bed, lounging naked before me for this moment, the features of his body darkening as daylight recedes, the sharpening of the pelvic and torso lines, the curve of the phallus a hard and then soft horizon, our not needing naming, our just needing to be.

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