Come - Short Story

Literary Review, Spring, 2000 by Eric Gamalinda

Thank you, Luis Miguel, for your recording of Spanish ballads from the 40s and 50s. I mean the third CD of these recordings where you finally got rid of that irksome drummer and hired the infinitely more professional services of the likes of Alex Acuna, formerly of Weather Report, and Dean Parks, who played that stunning guitar solo in Steely Dan's Aja. Thank you also for a fine rendition of "Sabot a Mi," a tune I heard wafting over an infinitesimal tape recorder in a thrift shop on Amsterdam and 96th. It haunted me for weeks and nearly drove me crazy and that was how I met Anna, bronze thighs and bronze breasts and a kiss like a hot volcano, when I saw her at the laundromat on 105th and asked her if she knew what the song's title was and I hummed it to her and she exclaimed, "Sabot a Mi!"

And that was how Ben's story always ended and began, with Luis Miguel and Anna, everytime we talked at the laundromat where he met and lost the love of his life. And the punchline if you can call it that was this: he thought sabot a mi meant taste me and he called her bluff and tasted her. Things I learned about him while fluffing and folding: he was of Irish American descent, he was a filmmaker like half the population of New York City, he had closed his account for the umpteenth time to finish a short film he had been doing for the last five years, and that was when Anna walked out because she was sick of having to support him and also because she found out he had slept with the lead actress, a former girlfriend, but Anna was Latina and you don't do that to Latinas. Also: the little black child romping around with a plastic cast of Godzilla whenever he did his laundry was his son by God knows which number girlfriend, and there you have a complete picture of the heart of Ben: one broken love after another, like a cycle of Spanish ballads.

So one afternoon he tells me, My film's being shown at Sundance, and I congratulate him and he says come over that evening and we'll celebrate and the little Godzilla child asks me to come too because I just taught him how to write his name: Michael, but he writes the a the opposite way and I wonder if he's dyslexic. I wonder if Ben's aware his kid's dyslexic. And that evening I buzz their apartment and there's no one there. So I go back home and later I phone him and a cheerful Ben answers in Spanish, Hola digame, and I say, Ben, it s me, what happened? And he says, Oh sorry about that, it's just me and Gloria had to go somewhere and then one thing led to another.

So Gloria became lover number x and Ben's happy for a while and they do their laundry together, inseparable as a pair of mittens and little Godzilla minding his own business, hyper with M&Ms. Gloria's a nice girl, nice and gregarious and likes to giggle a lot, and once she confided to me, I like Ben because he comes a lot, which is very masculine, she says. It's funny she says that because once Ben told me he measured the intensity of love he felt for a woman by the amount of his come. Ben is a strange guy but he says it's true, empirical evidence proves the more he comes the deeper he feels for someone, but whether that feeling is reciprocal I wonder. Ben says if a woman doesn't scream and tear at his back when they make love she's no good. Gloria says, I like to eat him, and I imagine themselves eating each other, and having a great time. I don't know why people tell me these things.

Then one day he finds out something about her and that really turns his life around. Gloria tells him she likes someone like Luis Miguel. The singer, he asks? She's amused that he knows him. Yes, the singer. So Ben starts making himself over as Luis Miguel. The haircut, the tuxedo, and serious Spanish. But he's not a language person, he doesn't pick up words too easily. Gloria finds it amusing. When he starts fumbling with the conjugations, she finds him sexy. I don't see them for maybe a year or two and sometimes I wonder if his film did good at Sundance, which I hoped it would. Sometimes it's nice to think other people are happy even if you're not doing so well.

Then one day, what do you know, he's back fluffing and folding, minus Gloria and Godzilla. He's surprised to see me as if he expected an entirely new set of people in his old neighborhood and I ask him about Godzilla and he tells me his mother came back to take him. And he's very sad, as usual. And he adds that Gloria's gone too, realized he could never be Luis Miguel. Not even after he watched all the shows, bought all the CDs, everything. You know what she says? Because it's not in the blood. So he got rid of the tux and left, but that's how it's always been, and now he's threatening to go far away.

To where, I ask him. He says he'd like to check out the Philippines, once he was in the Navy and he liked it there, Filipinas were nice and they were almost Latino and they treated him well. Well, I said, what kind of Filipinas did you hang out with because if you were hanging out with the kind the Navy liked to hang out with, no wonder they treated you well. He gets offended and says he met nice girls too and they were nice to touch and nice to kiss. So he's going there, and that's that.