Arts & Culture | Queer Life

We Barrio Boys and Our Papi Chulo Philosophics

Who are we if not kin through our deviations? Street hustler and femme queen, macho and maricóncito, variations on a chulo aesthetic.

Sidewalk strutting down barrio catwalks, like so many summers, in Loisaida and East Harlem and now in Washington Heights, this short-short wearing hustler that I am.

I give them body exposé and they love to hate me. I, freely unfree, sashaying down concrete runways, their bold negation. Give them something to talk about: like the thigh high swag in my step, the chunks of my body bouncing to step, the shoulders swaying in sharp angularity. This skin, darling, all this skin. Who cares what they think? Not me, girl, though I do occasionally have to worry of what they might do, how they might respond to my strutting with a fist to the jaw, a boot to the groin, a knife to th—

From across the street, “Oooooo que Papiii Chuloooooo.”

Who said that? There’s a crowd of them, boys and men, men still boys, boys not yet men. A passing car with windows rolled down, the neighborhood boys blasting beats on their way to someone’s momma’s houses.

Which one of them said it?

Keep strutting, don’t stop, who knows what they might do. Don’t look back, though you want to, though they wish you would, all of us hoping against hope the other will initiate our us, our being barrio boys, our momentary being.

*

The midday light against skinny musculature. Wide jawline converging to a chiseled point. Full set of teeth, the broadest smile. The torso and the hips and the groin a triangular continuity. Wanting to touch all his geometry.

What’s his name? He told me somewhere in our initial messages but I forgot. But can you forget what you really don’t care to remember to begin with?

J, the name started with a J, so Jesus or José or Juan. One of those. I know what needs to be known of him: his body, the photographic parceling of chest, face, dick, legs, ass, that he sent me; tell me what that tongue can do, I ask him, and he responds in detail, poetic prose of the body; a video sent giving motion to the body in gravity, its rotations, its gyrations, its penetrations; my descriptions in text of what I will do to him, how I want to do it, how I need him to be when my body is on his, in his, indistinguishable from his.

Call me shallow, girl, but I like it how I like it.

He’s here in the flesh, however, no longer a textual and visual erotic.

I have to reach out to touch him.

“You’re so sexy,” he says, still a few feet away, timid in the daylight darkness.

Who’s this boy before me? This boy who poses as a man on the street. A big and bad drug dealer, the wideness of walk as if masculine swagger were embedded into the marrow of his bones, his cruel, masculine indifference.

“You too.” I put my body in a more inviting pose.

He stands there looking. What is he thinking? Man of so few words when in person but of so many through text message. I think he is thinking on this distance between us. The inches from his body to mine, the differences of our body proportions, my mass in contrast. He knows if he walks across the room and lands on the bed it’s all over for him. We will be, and there’s no going back.

*

Their world happens on the corner of the block. Where my Jesus or José or Juan hangs out. The corner housed in scaffolding, scaffolding that will never go down because this neighborhood is not priority, because there is no fixing what never intended to be fixed in the first place.

The corner which houses a Dominican restaurant and a tenement building, where people struggle to make ends meet, struggling against the ever-increasing rents, struggling to remain in the neighborhood they fought to live in.

The corner where a subway stop is not too far, this stop which more and more everyday sees the likes of nice white families going to and from work, their bags of downtown groceries from big corporate entities imported in, their overeager hands ready and willing to call the police.

The corner of the block I pass by to get home to my apartment, to go to the bakery, to go to the park, to go and buy a pastelito or churro from the street vendor, to go down these streets for some fresh air on a long day, to walk down and feel nostalgic by the scents and smells and sights and tastes and touches of a family I left behind.

Their world is this corner of the block. As few as two of them, as large as fifteen. Some looking real young, seventeen or eighteen, and others looking much older, thirty-five or forty. They cluster, they congregate, they disperse: Some sit on the metal bars of the scaffolding, others lean against the tanned bricks of the building, some bring out lawn chairs on fair weather days, some even edge dangerously close to one another, shoulder to shoulder, mouth to mouth, man to man.

What do they talk about for all those hours? The boxing matches? Baby momma drama? Their abuelita who’s sick in the hospital? It’s an open secret of what they do there on the corner of the block. The cops don’t bother them too much because the nice young white folks moving into the neighborhood need their pleasures. Just the occasional shakedown by the police, the being put against a wall and grabbed by their hands, the slamming to the curb’s edge, held at gunpoint.

Not as bad as it used to be, my vieja neighbor reminds me, not as bad as it used to be.

This corner of the block, this end point where avenue meets street, where the busyness of Broadway begins and ends, is their world. Theirs for now.

*

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?

But who, chulo lindo, is asking you to love?

“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.

*

It could have been me. What a selfish thought. Selfishly recurring as it has done for so many years of my life. I could have been a drug dealer, in a gang, in and out of the system, like my cousins, my uncles, all those countless relatives who have been in and out of prison.

But I didn’t. I finished high school, learned to talk real nice like a white boy, went to college away from my relatives, and am now about to be a doctor of philosophy. I’m it, darling. What the ancestors prayed for.

Except a bit too queer, a bit too mentally unwell.

What the ancestors could never have imagined.

I’m so glad you did things right, my mother likes to remind me when we hear of a new incarceration, a new “illegal” trade picked up by one of my cousins.

When she does this pedestaling she puts me against my cousins who sell drugs to get by, my undocumented father who has worked the farms across the Americas since he was six, her very self. All the criminals we have been through the centuries, all the lives lost to made-up criminality.

She puts me against them and I try to explain this to her. These linkages between racialization and incarceration and generational poverty and criminality, but to do that is to flaunt the white boy English I learned in school. To use my very expensive education, my thousands upon thousands of dollars of debt, against her, against my father, against my cousins, against those like me.

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you, because you went to school,” she says to me, out of anger, out of all the opportunities she did not have.

I don’t know how to explain myself. The things I have read about, my own experience of the world in relation to the ideas I have learned. I am an anomaly. A college-educated MexiRican, queer as all hell, living with my boyfriend, using words they don’t know, wanting to be a writer, an artist.

I am not meant to be because those like me, like them, are not meant to be such things, to be a writer, to be a thinker, to imagine other worlds besides this one, just not meant to be but instead meant to be dead, or dying, or somewhere in between, or something not at all.

*

Walking out of the subway ahead of me is someone like me: a flare to the walk, an attitude in the step; the tight pants, the spunky coat; the queerness in exuberance, atmospheric.

Nearing the corner of the block, where they are, one of the group members at the farthest edge looks at the approaching exuberance. I know that look. I have felt it. The stare, that stare. Where the eye has seen in its line of vision an aberrance, a deviation from the spatial regularity, an interest piqued with hostility.

This exuberance of a body nears the one on the edge, and, unexpectedly, against the narrative I thought would unfold, they clasp hands.

“Yoooo wassup. Long time no see.”

“I know, right? How you been, chulo?”

Cordial. Longtime friends? No hostility in sight. Out of place yet in place, not belonging though belonging, this person like me goes from body to body, hand to hand, chest to chest. Each enthusiastically saying hi, how you been, where you going.

How do they know one another? Did they share a childhood? Riding bikes near this corner of the block, kicking empty cans against the parked cars, shouting through tenement alleyways. Each has taken a path no one wanted for them.

Them, these street corner occupiers, peddling euphoria in dime bags. My fellow exuberance, strutting down barrio streets, pants a little too tight, feminine swagger in the walk, the posture, the look of the eyes. Who are we if not kin through our deviations? Street hustler and femme queen, macho and maricóncito, variations on a chulo aesthetic.

Little old me, still walking, wallpaper in stride, getting ready to pass them by—what of it?

*

Flowers and stuffed animals against the tenement wall near the corner of the block. In the center of this mass of plant and cushion, is a picture. It’s of a man. Well, a boy who has been a man for not too long. He’s standing upright, slouched a little, to the side. Durag on his head, a sly smirk on his face, hoodie and sweatpants. R.I.P in large, black, cursive-like typeface rests at the bottom of the picture.

When did he lose his life? For how long did he live, if he ever lived? Someone says it happened over a drug deal. Another says it was over a girl. All agree: it was a drive-by shooting. He was on the sidewalk, hanging out, philosophizing on the most importantly inconsequential matters.

After knowing this bit of information, I swear I heard the gunshots while in my apartment. That sonic breaking, that obliteration of air. I didn’t know that at that moment skin and tissue and organ was being punctured, a body extinguishing. I thought it was merely a truck door banging shut, something falling from the sixth floor and crashing upon impact.

But it was, and it is, and it will be again, whether here in Washington Heights, or in the Bronx, or in Queens, or at the border between the United States and Mexico, Mexico and Guatemala, or in a little campo in The Dominican Republic or Honduras or Puerto Rico or El Salvador. Somewhere, someplace else, a gunshot is going off, and a life never lived is dying and is already dead.

He looks a little alike to my Jesus or José or Juan, my drug dealer papi chulo. They share that look in their eyes and smirking lips. As if they know the secrets to the universe, as if they and they alone can know anything at all. Will my Jesus or José or Juan be here next? Will his lean musculature be reduced to a flattened pictorial plane? Will he die before he has ever lived?

Who are we if not kin through our deviations?

My family did such a memorial for my brother when he died. His picture surrounded by flowers, a teddy bear, a cross, a Puerto Rican flag. He, too, wearing a durag, sweatpants, and a hoodie on his large body filling up the frames of the picture. Not gunned down like this nameless sidewalk hustler, but destroyed by a drunk driver. Not a bullet that entered the body, but the body compacted into half its size. A different kind of violence. The memorial is cared for by my family for a little bit of time, but the living keep living, and, like those that live, lay claim to being alive, their attention goes elsewhere, they find new interests, they move on, they forget.

And, one day—what feels like a Monday, or I want to recall it being a Monday—the flowers and the stuffed animals and the picture are gone. The days and weeks passing it by, slowing my speeding brain down, all over. Just like that. As if it were not enough time, as if he were barely there, as if I, a stranger to this dead man, nobody to this sidewalk ghost, did not mourn enough. As if we were never an encounter between the living and the dying.

*

He’s there on the corner of the block. Jesus or José or Juan, whichever name he gave me, doesn’t matter because I to him am just a pseudonym, too, just the loaded adjectives through text and the orgasmic glossolalia, the lounging on the couch or the fucking on the bed, these unreal things.

Does he think of my form when he’s with his boys there on the corner of the block? This femme and fat body as something fantastical, vivid, and alive as he goes about his day through city streets, this sheer barrio ordinariness?

That night, Jesus or José or Juan, whatever name he is in real life, if there is even a real life for men like him, texts me.

I saw you, he says. Oh, nice, I say disinterested.

Then, in his style, his adjectival excess, his up-front erotics, writes of how he misses my body. The way my body moves. The way he does things to my body. The way my body is. His textual seduction, the thought of him, his sparse prosody, his syntactical penetration—I jerk off to it.

He asks me if I am free. He wants to see me in the flesh, in real life. I say I’m busy though that’s a lie. I’m just here in bed, in darkness, with phone in hand. I don’t want to see him. I’m tired, I want my solitude. I want his words, I want his writing. There as unreal flesh, an erotic fabulation, a wild imagining, where I have him as I want him, at my pace, at my calling, at an emotional distance.

These glances on the street, the pictures and videos of dick and ass, the eyes and the smile in close proximity, the what we want to do to one another consolidated into the written form, our worded exchange. More real to me is his writing, more permanent than this papi chulo, this man who wanders the streets indefinitely, this boy who might be gone tomorrow, this disappearing act in the flesh.

So I place him within a structure of my devising. Walled in by language, limited by syntax, where he cannot get close to me, where he cannot entertain the idea of proximity to me, where we are nothing more than this intimate distance, these texts every now and then, little more and nothing less than this language.

This them and I. Them, hanging on the corner of the block, these pants-sagging Adonises. Them, in the bedroom, their silhouette nude and opaque. I somewhere in between, the null and void body. We who are always on the horizon. Untouchable, though solid, the unreal proportions, reaching towards an elsewhere, an elsewhere not having to be like this one.

What are they? The child riding their bike through barrio streets shouting liberation. The teenager breakdancing on the subway, limber and wild. The boys and the men hanging out on the corner of the block philosophizing on the matters of the universe. They who were me and are me and might be me and never will be me. Him and I, they and us, our text messages proving yes we are, whatever this being us even is.