Word has it that my last boyfriend, who was spirited away to Hollywood by a world-famous movie writer and director, is back in town. His name is Ulises, and he’s been spotted driving a brand new sports utility vehicle all around Vallarta. His sugar daddy Roland must be off somewhere, promoting his latest masterwork of pre-fab celluloid trash. I’m not sure how long Ulises has been here or how long he’ll stick around, but it has me on edge. The last few times I’ve seen him have been for the most part unfriendly and tense, though I’m certain it’s because he’s embarrassed about being kept. He knows how I feel about that sort of thing, and he must realize I’m none too happy about being lied to.

Truth be told, Ulises was never really my boyfriend, except in the strict etymological sense of the word. He was my friend, and yes, he was certainly a boy: sixteen years old. Not only that, he was my employee. Sure, I’m only ten years his senior, so it’s not exactly a pedophile thing; but the fact is that he was under my power to some degree and that made sex a non-issue as far as I was concerned. Not only that, he was a virgin, and I actually liked him—which ruled him out entirely from what passed for a boyfriend with me.

I met him before I opened up my café, in fact the first night we actually talked I ended up taking him to see it, before all the finishing touches had been put in place. I had just come out of a disco on the waterfront with some friends, and ran into him on the street. It was three in the morning but it didn’t strike me as odd to find him there, he was quite the ubiquitous young man and while I may not have spoken to him much before, I had definitely noticed him popping up practically everywhere I went. He was remarkably good-looking and craved attention, as was obvious in his tendency to dye his hair every couple of weeks—no color was too extravagant—and the milk-white contact lenses he was wont to wear, which rendered him a kind of demonic cherub. Normally his eyes were a clear, bright blue, and he was very fair. He could have been more handsome naturally which, I was to learn, he did everything to avoid. Still, Ulises was so desolately beautiful that I was unable to resist walking with him along the sea wall to my apartment.

He told me that he was gay. I was in fact surprised by this information; only because I had unconsciously desired him so much that I’d refused to admit the possibility that I might have a chance, (and, moreover, that this chance could be thwarted—I had learnt that there was too high a price to be paid for beauty) but also because his father had died the year before and it was clear that he was still suffering the consequences. It dawned on me that this boy was remarkable on deeper levels than the obvious; that it took a clear mind and a great deal of courage to admit to a truth as heavy as his homosexuality in the turmoil following the death of the most important person in his life. I told him that I had denied such a truth for as long as I’d been able, in my case until I was twenty-three.

“You actually believed you were straight?” he asked. “Did you think you were just asexual?”

I laughed because he was serious. “I was very sexual,” I explained. “It’s just that I didn’t want to commit myself to any particular sex.”

“So you slept with women?”

I nodded. “I wasn’t very convincing. From nineteen until twenty-three I was only with men, but then once in Madrid, I sort of had a relapse—I met a very assertive and beautiful woman who insisted on having her way with me.”

He told me about his one and only girlfriend, who I’d actually seen him with a few times in the past and secretly loathed. Nothing sexual had taken place between them and they’d recently parted as good friends, but even she was unaware that he was gay. I was touched that he chose to confide in me, especially after he told me that I had, for all intents and purposes, terrified him until that moment.

“I always thought you would be the type to look down on me,” he said, unflinching.

But that was not to happen for several months. Sitting alone with him under the dim spotlights in my unfinished café, I swelled with admiration and desire.

It never occurred to me to hire him to work there; when I met him and for as long as I’d known of him he’d been working in a gallery that belonged to a friend —and one-time boss of mine, and I instinctively preferred to keep my employees and friends separate. As it turned out, I betrayed my instincts more than once in that vein. One of the first people who worked in my café was a young and hyperactive queen named Ramses, who had been my occasional coke dealer and acquaintance in the party circuit. He lasted a week in the café, even when he himself had begged me for a job—which tended to interfere with his all-nighters—and I had unwisely conceded. Out of desperation I turned to Ulises, who quit his other job at the same time, confiding in me that he could no longer work for my friend in good conscience, as he believed that the man had fallen in love with him.

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Well, I wasn’t sure of it, until he caught me smoking pot with a bunch of friends in the gallery when it was closed,” he explained. “He didn’t even fire me. He didn’t even discuss it.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he’s just not uptight about stuff like that,” I suggested.

“Did I mention that the gallery was supposed to be open?”

I nodded gravely. “He’s head over heels. But let me just warn you that if I ever catch you doing anything like that here, I’ll not only fire you, I’ll slit your throat.”

We shook hands, and I hired him on the spot.

I managed to deceive myself into thinking that my feelings for Ulises were strictly platonic, and I attributed their intensity to the fact that he was brilliant, funny and extraordinarily artistic. We spent eight hours a day together in my café without ever becoming bored, and we spent virtually all our time together outside of work as well. We understood each other perfectly and had so many ideas and feelings to share; the inspiration was reciprocal and unwavering. I encouraged his painting as much as possible; I gave him the impressive collection of artist’s materials that had been gathering dust at the back of my closet; I allowed him to use one of the café tables as his workplace, I made him countless cassettes of ambient music to listen to on his walkman as he painted. I took him out for lunch and dinner every other day and even hung out with him in gay bars. I was honestly surprised when people wondered if we were lovers, and indignant that they were blind to the purity of our friendship.

His paintings were mostly fantastical and surreal. I pressured him to find his own perspective, to paint his own reality, because it seemed to me that, much like his appearance, his art was contrived to shock and disgust in lieu of anything more sublime and meaningful. But he never stopped painting grotesque anthropomorphic creatures with tumescent, worm-like appendages and spiny orifices, against blood-and-milk skies with mushrooming clouds or grass that was often, literally, blades.

“Reality is boring,” he’d say.

“Fantasy is too easy,” I countered. “Sometimes a message conveyed with subtlety has a far more powerful effect than being banged over the head with it.”

“You say that’s more honest but it sounds like a trick, to me.”

And so on.

Somewhere I have stashed away a series of black and white photographs that we took of each other on a day hike near Mismaloya, the place where John Huston, Ava Garner, and Richard Burton had made ‘The Night of the Iguana.’ Ulises invited me along after a girl friend of his supposedly cancelled at the last moment; he commanded me to take pictures of him in his underwear, on stilts, wearing a black mask over his eyes and huge metal platform shoes. Some of the photos, staged by Ulises, are zoom-ins on his crotch and the arm of a doll reaching out of it. Others, staged by me, portray the illusion of Ulises grasping at long, parched grasses as he slides over the edge of a cliff to the rocks in the churning water below. Ulises took pictures of me with my shirt off, highlighting my overworked abs, or an individual calf and a Puma bowling-inspired shoe. The photographs are erotically charged, to be sure, but I steadfastly refused to perceive them as such even long after the fact. Nor did I ever dare imagine that they were evidence, however slight, of Ulises’s attraction to me.

The thing I remember most about Ulises, and what impressed me the most of the things he said, happened one day when I got to the café after I’d had a bizarre vision. I had been at my sister’s house for lunch and had lain down for a nap on the couch in the study. I didn’t actually fall asleep, but I entered a kind of trance, and all of a sudden I had a very vivid and lucid series of dreams that nearly traumatized me. I knew I could describe them to Ulises without having to justify or rationalize them.

“There was a voice,” I told him, “or maybe a group of voices. They showed me things, they were trying to make me understand something. Only I didn’t understand them. At all.”

“What did you see?” he asked, patiently.

“First the ocean, waves crashing on the shore repeatedly,” I said. “And though no words were actually spoken, what they told me was that my life was a mere wave in an infinite series of waves, that there was nothing…to hold onto.”

He nodded, and waited for me to continue.

“After that, they showed me a whole galaxy, it was sort of panning out, like a camera pulling back, farther and farther, until the galaxy was just a speck in something even bigger—a huge universe. And then further and further back, forever, immense, endless. I saw it. I can’t think it, but I saw it. And I don’t understand what it means. I don’t understand why I was shown that.”

Ulises seemed to take it all in stride.

“I think about stuff like that all the time,” he said, after a moment. “I see things like that sometimes, at night, when I can’t sleep, when I’m all alone. I get really freaked out too.” He shrugged, then laughed. “But then I remember that I don’t even exist.”

I think he got up then, to get a coffee or something, and I just stared at him for a while, thoroughly amazed.

Ulises developed a crush on an American medical student from the University of Guadalajara, who came to Vallarta regularly to tan his perfectly sculpted physique and cruise the same uptight men who rejected him back in the big city. In Vallarta, known throughout the country as Mexico’s own Sodom and Gomorrah, everything was allowed, nothing was inappropriate, and David almost always scored. He was attractive, though not to me; he was too American and a little bit too plastic. I was wary of him, in part because he openly made advances to my own lovers more than once. In all, David did not coincide at all with my construction of Ulises as a paragon of physical and spiritual beauty. Ulises, on the other hand, did everything in his power to coincide with David whenever possible. In short, he stalked him.

Ironically enough, David, who would eventually become one of my best friends, never noticed.

It must have been about six months after we’d met that Ulises developed an obsession with surfer Dave, the first one he’d ever developed as far as I know, and the first to seriously disturb me. Even then I was blind to the simple jealousy that the situation inspired in me. I chastised Ulises for squandering his attentions on someone who, as far as I could see, was obviously unworthy of him or of any serious amorous ideals.

“How can you say that to me?” he finally snapped. “If anyone is squandering their attentions, it’s you. It never ceases to amaze me how you go through men like candy wrappers. The prettier and stupider they are, and the farther they live from Vallarta, the better.”

Stunned, I could only answer that I had expected better for him than I did for myself.

“That’s exactly my point.” He was suddenly furious. “Why don’t you sort out your own shit before you start dictating mine?”

After that I decided that I should help Ulises get what he wanted rather than criticize or judge him. In a truly demented fashion I went out of my way to introduce him to David and orchestrate meetings between them in bars and parties. It soon became clear that David wasn’t at all interested. Afterwards I tried to ‘help out’ with other men that Ulises lusted after. For all of them, he was just too young and inexperienced, a kind of emotional liability. And in a world where the majority wanted easy access, strings-free sexual relationships, Ulises was by no means a tempting option. He was too different and too intense, for all his youth and beauty. And the ideal in this circuit was someone like David—someone who was handsome in a completely generic and innocuous way, with a body perfected for energetic sex.

Eventually Ulises did meet someone who reciprocated his desire, a boy from San Francisco who was only in town for a week. I was away somewhere when the affair took place, and when I came back, it was all that Ulises could talk about. I was forced to suffer through explicit details of Ulises’s first sexual encounter and praise of his lover’s mythically proportioned anatomy. I continued to play the patient listener, withholding judgment, no matter how much my insides might churn. This went on for two or three weeks, until Ulises started to pine over the boy, who had gradually ceased to answer his emails. It was when that Ulises began conspiring to get himself to San Francisco—which for someone like him was utterly impossible—that I finally broke down.

We were walking to my apartment one night after we’d been to Paco Paco, Vallarta’s biggest gay club, when I finally told him that I was in love with him.

“Ever since I met you I’ve been fighting this,” I said. “You’re my best friend and I don’t want to do anything that would change that. But I can’t hold it in anymore, and I can’t go on watching you make yourself miserable over men who aren’t worth your little finger.”

The street in front of my apartment was empty and silent at this hour. We stood facing each other under the dark canopy formed by two trees.

“Please don’t think that I expect anything different from you,” I stammered. “The love that I feel for you is different from anything I’ve ever felt, it’s beyond demands or obligations. I don’t know what to do with it at all. The only thing I know is that I can’t lie to you any longer.”

He was looking into my eyes with a solemnity that made my heart race with fear. For a moment, he was quiet, assimilating the shock of my confession. “How long have you felt like this?”

“From the start,” I said, mentally reeling at the extent of my self betrayal. “But I made myself believe it was something else.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m twenty-seven and you’re seventeen, because I’m so fucked up about love and sex, because I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to become vulnerable to any man and I tend to attack first when it starts to happen.”

He looked away, furious now. “I can’t believe you never said anything. You should have said something long ago.”

“I’m sorry for being so dishonest. I said things and acted in ways that were meant to keep you at a distance. We spend so much time together, everything between us is so intense, I didn’t know what else to do… I was trying to protect you, and I was trying to take control of my feelings and change them into something else.”

He glared at me. “It’s really too bad, Alex. But it’s too late now. You have made me lose trust in you, and what’s worse is that you’ve confused me so much, ever since we first met. You scare me. You really do. I never know what to think…” His eyes had welled up with tears. Abruptly he turned away. I was paralyzed and speechless.

“I’m going home,” he said finally. “Thank you for telling me the truth. I’m going to think about it, okay?”

I didn’t know what else to say.

I nodded. “That’s fine. Anything you want to say or do is fine, Ulises. I’ll always be your friend, no matter what happens.”

I walked up the stairs and lay awake in my bed the rest of the night.

Ulises quit the café shortly after. He claimed that a friend of his who owned a graphic design company had offered to train him and give him a job. I panicked at first, thinking that if he left the café I would lose an important asset to my business—it was true that he attracted a younger wedge of my clientele and lent the place a good deal of color. Really what I was afraid of was losing my hold on him, which is precisely what happened. Even though he continued to come to the café practically every day and spent several hours there, he was no longer dependent on me, either psychologically or financially. Eventually he reverted back to being an interesting but largely unimportant child in my eyes. I even forgot the extent that I’d pined for him on certain sleepless nights, and when I realized that Roland the big-shot Hollywood director was spending a good deal of time with him, I attributed a Peter Pan syndrome to the man, which was bolstered by his ridiculous movies, largely sensationalistic, cartoonish, and utterly without depth.

But when Ulises told me that Roland had offered to pay for him and two of his friends to travel through Europe, I was alarmed.

“You can’t possibly accept that,” I said to him. “How could you ever pay him back?”

Ulises frowned. “He doesn’t expect us to pay him back. He’s a multi-millionaire and he’s our friend and he’s just being generous.”

I thought it utterly creepy that a forty-something foreigner was throwing money at young, poor Mexicans who, while they might not have had much of their own at the time, stood to earn it—through their personal efforts and creativity as they ventured into responsible adulthood. I told Ulises that I’d had a few offers of money and holidays (including the promise of half a million dollars from a deluded old man who’d thought he could buy me as his lover, a house in Madrid from a Basque lawyer who wanted to stop me from continuing my travels when I was twenty-two in Europe, and an all-expense paid trip to the Hamptons from an American naval officer), and had always politely declined. “I would never accept a favor that I couldn’t repay somehow,” I told him. “And anybody that knows that you can’t repay something they offer you is deliberately putting you into their debt.”

“You are cynical and perverse,” he snapped.

“And you are naïve and willfully blind,” I returned.

But I tried to put myself in Ulises’s place, honestly trying to discern whether I was against the gift of the European tour on principle or whether what I considered to be principle for me was in fact only the privilege of being able to refuse charity. I had noticed Roland and his entourage out and about town, a group that was mainly comprised of teenaged Mexican boys who I knew to be unemployed for the most part, and some of whom survived by plying the sex trade with older tourists, or selling cocaine. Naturally I was suspicious of his motives in putting someone as young and innocent as Ulises into his debt.

It had been the boy’s dream to travel to Europe, a dream which I had inadvertently encouraged with tales of my own unforgettable adventures through the Old World, the first time when I was twenty-two, for four months, and the second, three years later, for three months. Even though I accepted the fact that Ulises came from a poor family and was unlikely to coming into an inheritance in this lifetime, I still thought he should pay his own way through Europe. After all, he was only seventeen, and had only worked for a year. Even I, who did receive an inheritance that I wasn’t able to spend until I was twenty-three, had been put to work in Canada by my mother during high school. I didn’t see why Ulises should be exempt from paying his dues, and certainly not just because some depraved old man thought he was pretty and had cash to spare.

I’d had the occasion to meet Roland a few times, but he showed no interest in my friendship and seemed to respectfully maintain his distance whenever we were in the same club or restaurant . Ulises would usually be obliged to trek back and forth between us. Roland was mostly stationary, always surrounded by people I would have instinctively repelled. He didn’t appear to have much to say, and was more often than not content to keep his lips pressed to a beer bottle. One night when I found myself alone with him, and completely at a loss for anything to say to him, I introduced him to my good friend Martha from Mexico City (and one of the wealthiest and snootiest families in the country). She hissed in my ear once we’d left him, “He smells bad.”

I told her who he was, and the movies he’d written and directed.

“I don’t care who he is, he smells horrible.”

“He has a rotten soul,” I snickered.

Another night at the club, Ulises was trying to drag me over to Roland’s table, but I refused, even though I was standing by myself at the bar. One of his movies had just been released to a huge audience turnover and unanimous critical disdain. Ulises told me excitedly what Roland had told him about the contract he’d signed with Sony for a number of future projects based on the financial success of his current film.

“I’ve seen his movies on television,” I said, “and they bore me. I realize he’s a master salesman, but his films are trash, and they offend me by their blatant appeal to the basest instincts of the masses.”

Ulises was outraged. “You’re just jealous because Roland makes more money than you do,” he spat.

I glared at him, and replied in the iciest tone I could muster, “If I were the kind of person who measured people in those terms, I wouldn’t be here talking to you now. Excuse me.”

He was stunned. “Wait, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said wearily. “I think it’s better if we give each other some space, okay? Go and sit with your friend, have fun. I’ll be fine.”

Ulises called me as soon as he was back in Vallarta. I was surprised that he came back, having heard that Roland had offered to put him up in art school as soon as his tour of Europe was over. I was more surprised that he called me. My new best friend Lulu, an eccentric artist from Mexico City, wanted to come with me to see what all the fuss was about. We rendezvoused with him and his friend Ivan (who Roland had also sponsored through Europe) at a small martini bar owned by a Canadian lesbian.

Ulises’s travel stories were mainly comprised of drug-induced experiences in the Old World, being banned from hotels he was staying at because of his appearance, and most excitedly of his side trips to Sydney and Tokyo. “We wanted real sushi,” he explained, “and Roland put us on a plane to Japan.” I inwardly groaned. “The weird thing was that there was no sushi to be had.”

No, I thought to myself, that’s not the weird thing.

Ulises showed me some of the expensive, new-fangled gadgets he’d bough in Tokyo on Roland’s allowance. Lulu was not amused, and suggested we head over to the then trendy club, Revolucion. Somehow I ended up alone there with Ulises, listening enraptured to Finary Binary’s 1999, which I told him was my favorite song at the time. For a moment I felt the old bond between us again, and it seemed that he felt it, too. He hugged me violently and told me that he’d miss me terribly while in L.A.

But he never wrote and he never called. I got news of him through mutual acquaintances: he was driving a Mercedes all over Hollywood, he went to the same gym as Keanu Reeves, and Roland arranged for his new pornographic, computer-generated ‘art’ to be exhibited in a gallery. The few times that I ran into him in Vallarta, he would pointedly avoid me. Our former mutual friend and boss told me that Ulises had told him how much in love he claimed to be with Roland. And finally, I could no longer deny the reality of the arrangement. I understood why Ulises no longer wanted anything to do with me. He knew perfectly well that I would be disgusted with him for selling himself.

So these days I’ve been sort of hoping that he’ll stop into my restaurant to see me; he’s been visiting everyone else. I keep my eye out for his silver X-terra when I’m running on the sea wall. I never see him.

I wonder what I would say if he did appear. Is it true that I would look down on him? Or would I feel the same old pathos that came over me whenever we were together? Would I see a shallow, selfish boy or someone who simply took advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime? Would I warn him that Roland will eventually trade him in for a newer model a few years, and that he’ll be left with nothing—no high school education and no job training, yearning for the glamorous life?

Or will I listen to his crazy stories and his convoluted ideas, forgiving him for being a boy and giving into temptation, rather than bearing the torment of his impossible desires?

Ulises has been back in town for the past six months (after an absence of four years). After I emailed him the story I wrote about him, he came to see me at the café. He informed me that he’d phoned Roland and asked him to give him money to go to school, and that, in the process, he’d called him a ‘fucking pedophile.’ At first I laughed. But after he left I realized that Ulises didn’t even know the meaning of the word. A pedophile doesn’t give his prey a choice of whether or not to enter into a sexual relationship with him. Ulises entered the relationship willingly, despite my warnings. A pedophile doesn’t pay for his prey and two friends to travel the world. A pedophile doesn’t buy his prey an X-Terra. A pedophile doesn’t leave his prey a two million dollar home in Conchas Chinas. A pedophile doesn’t buy his prey’s mother a house in Patzcuaro.

I told Ulises that I hadn’t meant for him to like my story.

He said, “I know.”

And for all the money that Roland paid him after he found another pretty replacement, Ulises has yet to invite me out for lunch.

 

© 2006 - Alex Gomez Contributor's Bio