![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the pieces don’t fit together so good ][ narrative
Alex is fourteen when he begins dating Chelsea Montgomery. She’s pretty with wide brown eyes and curly brown hair and freckles; her father is black and Mexican and her mother is white. She develops earlier than all the other girls in her class, and by virtue of genetics or luck or both, spends an entire school year teased and sexually harassed and pushed around and (though she’d never admit it), molested.
One day while she’s at the bus stop, smoking a cigarette and valiantly refusing to wipe the sticky lines that her dried tears have made on her cheeks, Alex asks her if she’d like to be his girlfriend. She looks at him with hate until he explains. It’s not about sex or her bust line; it’s about a mutually beneficial socio-political arrangement. Chelsea is smart; not the most street-wise and not the most book-smart, but she has a knowledge of people and she understands. They go to all the school dances that year, and the next. Peter never speaks to Alexander again.
He’s sixteen when he loses his virginity. It’s good but it’s numb; he wants it to fill a void in him but it doesn’t. Men love him because he looks so, so young even though he’s tall – his fake ID says he’s barely eighteen, and bar tenders and bouncers alike give him nervous looks (it’s a good fake, it cost nearly a grand). He speaks with such knowledge and gazes with eyes so ancient that people don’t argue, just whisper in awe that he can’t barely be real.
He hates it. He hates the men who want to keep him like a pet – they try, and he lets some of them, but they end up terrified. (They can’t ever say why. It’s something in his eyes.) None of them are good enough, none of them are worth him, but he goes to clubs and gyms in West Hollywood anyway, aching and lonely.
It’s the other boys he hates the most, though. He doesn’t want to be classified as one of them, he doesn’t want to be near them. Filthy disgusting glitter-covered man-children speaking in forced-high voices and painting their faces in garish colors; it mocks his memories of copper skin and black hair dancing in the firelight – even he knew the value of his own birth.
It’s an insult. It burns inside him, refusing to settle. They mock Dionysus and women and lower themselves and propagate everything people hate about homosexuals. One night, a Korean boy in a black leather vest and a mini-skirt calls him a stuck-up faggot for refusing cocaine from a greasy closeted Hollywood producer. Alexander breaks his nose and his eye socket before security can tear him away.
He’s not quite nineteen when he has his first real boyfriend, a twenty-three year old Indian Tamil medical student at USC with a delicate Indian-English accent and beautiful eyes. It’s with Adhi that he comes out to his parents; they don’t meet him, but he explains himself with the prideful calm of someone who has known for an eternity and has simply been waiting for them to be ready. His father thinks on it for a week and then carries on like nothing has changed; his mother slaps him and shrieks and threatens to kill herself in hysterical grief.
Adhi cries when Alexander breaks up with him. It’s nothing personal; he’s a great guy. Smart, beautiful, warm, head over heels in love. Alex is just tired of pretending.
He waits until he’s twenty-one to move out of his parents’ home, despite owning his own properties in six states and three countries by then. For his birthday, he goes to Las Vegas, and becomes intoxicated by more than the liquor. He drops far, far too much money on the tables in the Bellagio, and is given a standing invitation to the villas behind the resort. They face the mountains, not the strip, and he likes it better than his penthouse at Caesar’s (which he always found funny – the sculptures are pretty, but not quite right).
He gets back into clubs, here. He shouldn’t. It’s 1998 and he does cocaine and spends too much time with beautiful Russian Cirque de Soliel dancers and charming casino escorts. He’s in over his head, but it’s an hour flight away, so he doesn’t care – it’s like another world that he can step in and out of and just forget.
When Gennadi shows up at his door in Los Angeles crying and begging to be taken back, the only thing Alexander feels is a cold annoyance that he’s going to have to re-do his entire social circle in Nevada, now.
“Please, please, I don’t know what I did, I love you so much Alexander, I can’t—I can’t—”
“Stop it,” he says, and though his voice is quiet, the other man falls silent immediately. Gennadi is beautiful as always – strong and tall and dark-colored, the sort of man Alex dreams of whenever he closes his eyes. “You’re a wonderful person, but I’m just not interested any more. Don’t do this. Is it—I told you, you can keep the apartment. I gave you the papers…”
“It’s not the apartment! It’s not any of that! It’s not your money, damnit—”
Alexander drinks that night. He gets so drunk he doesn’t remember what he screams at the heavens, but he dreams of Dionysus and walking in India.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No.” Alex yawns and rubs at his eyes. It’s early and he’s in a hotel room in Kuwait. Stupid, yes, spending the night with an attractive journalist. But it’s an attractive, closeted journalist, so he doesn’t give a shit. They get along and they see each other all over the planet and neither of them want anything out of it besides smiles and kisses and ill-advised sex in bad hotel rooms in countries that would execute them in a heartbeat if they’re discovered.
“Someday, my boyfriend is going to notice one of these fucking hickeys, and I’m going to kick your ass, you prick.”
Alexander just laughs.
One day while she’s at the bus stop, smoking a cigarette and valiantly refusing to wipe the sticky lines that her dried tears have made on her cheeks, Alex asks her if she’d like to be his girlfriend. She looks at him with hate until he explains. It’s not about sex or her bust line; it’s about a mutually beneficial socio-political arrangement. Chelsea is smart; not the most street-wise and not the most book-smart, but she has a knowledge of people and she understands. They go to all the school dances that year, and the next. Peter never speaks to Alexander again.
He’s sixteen when he loses his virginity. It’s good but it’s numb; he wants it to fill a void in him but it doesn’t. Men love him because he looks so, so young even though he’s tall – his fake ID says he’s barely eighteen, and bar tenders and bouncers alike give him nervous looks (it’s a good fake, it cost nearly a grand). He speaks with such knowledge and gazes with eyes so ancient that people don’t argue, just whisper in awe that he can’t barely be real.
He hates it. He hates the men who want to keep him like a pet – they try, and he lets some of them, but they end up terrified. (They can’t ever say why. It’s something in his eyes.) None of them are good enough, none of them are worth him, but he goes to clubs and gyms in West Hollywood anyway, aching and lonely.
It’s the other boys he hates the most, though. He doesn’t want to be classified as one of them, he doesn’t want to be near them. Filthy disgusting glitter-covered man-children speaking in forced-high voices and painting their faces in garish colors; it mocks his memories of copper skin and black hair dancing in the firelight – even he knew the value of his own birth.
It’s an insult. It burns inside him, refusing to settle. They mock Dionysus and women and lower themselves and propagate everything people hate about homosexuals. One night, a Korean boy in a black leather vest and a mini-skirt calls him a stuck-up faggot for refusing cocaine from a greasy closeted Hollywood producer. Alexander breaks his nose and his eye socket before security can tear him away.
He’s not quite nineteen when he has his first real boyfriend, a twenty-three year old Indian Tamil medical student at USC with a delicate Indian-English accent and beautiful eyes. It’s with Adhi that he comes out to his parents; they don’t meet him, but he explains himself with the prideful calm of someone who has known for an eternity and has simply been waiting for them to be ready. His father thinks on it for a week and then carries on like nothing has changed; his mother slaps him and shrieks and threatens to kill herself in hysterical grief.
Adhi cries when Alexander breaks up with him. It’s nothing personal; he’s a great guy. Smart, beautiful, warm, head over heels in love. Alex is just tired of pretending.
He waits until he’s twenty-one to move out of his parents’ home, despite owning his own properties in six states and three countries by then. For his birthday, he goes to Las Vegas, and becomes intoxicated by more than the liquor. He drops far, far too much money on the tables in the Bellagio, and is given a standing invitation to the villas behind the resort. They face the mountains, not the strip, and he likes it better than his penthouse at Caesar’s (which he always found funny – the sculptures are pretty, but not quite right).
He gets back into clubs, here. He shouldn’t. It’s 1998 and he does cocaine and spends too much time with beautiful Russian Cirque de Soliel dancers and charming casino escorts. He’s in over his head, but it’s an hour flight away, so he doesn’t care – it’s like another world that he can step in and out of and just forget.
When Gennadi shows up at his door in Los Angeles crying and begging to be taken back, the only thing Alexander feels is a cold annoyance that he’s going to have to re-do his entire social circle in Nevada, now.
“Please, please, I don’t know what I did, I love you so much Alexander, I can’t—I can’t—”
“Stop it,” he says, and though his voice is quiet, the other man falls silent immediately. Gennadi is beautiful as always – strong and tall and dark-colored, the sort of man Alex dreams of whenever he closes his eyes. “You’re a wonderful person, but I’m just not interested any more. Don’t do this. Is it—I told you, you can keep the apartment. I gave you the papers…”
“It’s not the apartment! It’s not any of that! It’s not your money, damnit—”
Alexander drinks that night. He gets so drunk he doesn’t remember what he screams at the heavens, but he dreams of Dionysus and walking in India.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No.” Alex yawns and rubs at his eyes. It’s early and he’s in a hotel room in Kuwait. Stupid, yes, spending the night with an attractive journalist. But it’s an attractive, closeted journalist, so he doesn’t give a shit. They get along and they see each other all over the planet and neither of them want anything out of it besides smiles and kisses and ill-advised sex in bad hotel rooms in countries that would execute them in a heartbeat if they’re discovered.
“Someday, my boyfriend is going to notice one of these fucking hickeys, and I’m going to kick your ass, you prick.”
Alexander just laughs.