Chapter One: The Starving Resilient (Arturo)
He picks out each fabric by texture, feel, and color. Laying out each piece slowly and gently like it is part of a long-lost dream, he feels whole.
Arturo wrangles with the idea of how he imagines himself versus how he looks in the mirror, how he feels inside versus how he looks to a stranger. The clothing on the bed invariably validates his inner feelings, with the image not being wholly himself, but a part that creates the whole.
He doesn’t want to change himself physically, only to showcase the artful world in which he feels safe, to stretch his image outward into something intangible, and to shine within it. He wants to flow with and rein in every glittering moment he shares in private with someone who feels that wave as if it were their own heartbeat. Arturo places the separate pieces of layered fabric as he wraps himself in soft silks and sweet, light colors that feel like a warm embrace.
He knows he’s a man. Sturdy, strong, resilient.
He was taught by his father in Bogota and in the United States to fight and never surrender, to keep going even if you feel that you can’t take another step, to fill yourself with strength when there is none to gather. To be a real man.
He was taught not to dream, but rather to harvest the fruits of his father’s and his uncle’s labors, and build houses, and put on a never-ending expression of fearlessness and pride upon his countenance.
He was born in Bogota, Colombia, in a southern neighborhood where most working-class families resided. His mother, Mariana, had given birth to him at a nearby local hospital on November 23rd, 1993. His family, which consisted of his mother, father, and two older brothers, Jorge and Carlo, had moved to the United States when he was seven years old, leaving due to the increased bombings and attacks perpetrated by the FARC, a Marxist–Leninist guerrilla organization created in the early sixties. His father was staunchly against the “terrorist organization” and wanted his children to have a better life, a better education, and to feel safe.
Arturo remembers much of his early years, of riding bikes with his brothers and running around with the neighborhood kids through the city streets, especially when he was four and five, as he recalls vividly how they were so poor at first. He sees the ramshackle “apartments” throughout the city where they lived as he was young, and remembers how it slowly became a middle-class area, and how their old and shaky home became a sturdy and modern house–but, his father, who had been poor all his life, told them clearly one day, “Our family is getting too big for the squatter areas, and this is the day we will be something more than these places. We will evolve into something bigger than these crazy, small little shanty towns.”
He remembers much of those years, but mainly, he remembers how much he loved the vibrant smells of his birth city, the home flavors, and his deep appreciation of the street foods and the Ajiaco his maternal grandmother used to make for everyone when they’d visit – a soup of potatoes and chicken.
He vividly recalls the story of his birth, of how there had been a huge win of a Colombian soccer team in a play against the Argentinian one in Buenos Aires the same year. The final score was 5-0.
Arturo only knew this because his father had told him these specific details over and over, and how the event had caused a wave of riots all over the country.
“Your birth seems to have set off a bit of fireworks in our own little family”, his mother had said brightly, kissing his cheek, making him laugh softly. “And the nation seemed to catch on to it, too!”
Out of all those memories of being poor, he and his family had never felt the pang of true hunger. Still, he’s always had a deeply-seated feeling of something missing, something that is a lot more than anything physical. He feels as though a bit of himself is always hiding, always stagnant and crying out.
He has always loved the colors of the Colombian flag–yellowish gold, blue, and red–and seems to have a long-standing homesickness that never truly left.
He incorporates the colors of his homeland into his ensemble and crafts his light browns, yellows, and blues to match his own inner reflection, a deep-ingrained love of the earth that makes up Colombia.
Arturo lives in New York City now. Twenty-nine years old and dreaming of his youth. He has kept in contact with his brothers, but they’re living in different parts of the country now; Jorge in Seattle, and Carlo in Michigan, going to university to be a doctor. It is usually on holidays that they really talk and try to find opportunities to keep up with each other. His parents are in their late fifties and staying always inside, retired and living in semi-luxury in an apartment in Florida. Because of the pandemic, they have not had a full family gathering for at least two years now – not to mention how difficult it would be to get everyone to travel to one place and even to find the time to start up family events again.
And here he is, alone and quietly working remotely for a telecommunications company, now feeling the sting of his hidden, fervent passions and slight body dysphoria, dying to start his life.
Something in his life is missing, he acknowledges.
Wearing the full outfit, the silky crisscross camisole top, the long pencil skirt, the canary yellows and deep indigos – and the red – he loves how it accentuates his slender body, his hips and long legs. He looks at his bare face and sighs, gently applying a bit of eyeliner and blush, his soft brown eyes widening and then closing.
He dreams of finally being himself–though it all suddenly feels so terrifyingly real, so achingly close, that he can’t even begin to explain just how painful it is to keep up the facade of being tough and resilient with his family, the public–and then, with…
Danny.
That cop.
The slightly taller, a bit overweight in the gut, almost always angry-looking officer he sees practically every weekend at the café.
He only knows the man’s name because he saw the coffee cup with it written sideways as he waited patiently for his own coffee order.
“It’s Dan, next time!” The man with the green eyes and a blue uniform and badge had yelled, leaving without waiting for a response.
Arturo tugs subconsciously at his frizzy brown and blackish curls, wondering why the usual flash of the estranged officer’s scowling face near his own face makes him feel flushed.
An overwhelming anxiety runs over him. Arturo feels this way especially when he’s alone, but in a crowded space. The intensity grows. It is a shared hunger. A starving collective that needs to reach out for something ineffable.
The starving ones, Arturo supposes, are all dying a bit more every day. Hiding and dreaming while finding the impossible ardor so hard to keep under wraps. Waiting to finally breathe and truly have someone understand this lonely suffocation.
Arturo longs for this moment.
To start living and breathing and moving freely–to have that someone by his side to share this dream with. That same dream.
He slowly undresses from the fine fabrics of artful, dreamy colors and textures and dresses again like his father, feeling a bit mummified, suffocated, and lonely.
Chapter Two: The Emotional Illiterate (Dan)
Danny Franklin Johnson, a thirty-seven-year-old veteran police officer born in Queens who has just gotten his tall, black coffee from the corner café where he always goes, is dog-tired and feeling a bit discontented at the moment.
He has been working over fifty hours a week for three weeks straight without much of a break in between.
He has been a police captain for the better part of his career, spanning all the way back from when he graduated from college and got all his training completed when he was twenty-four years old.
His dad, George, had also been a cop… A beat cop who went over and beyond what the definition of duty meant, and tried to accomplish something more than just cracking down on criminals and low-level thieves. George was Irish and German but didn’t drink or smoke. Dan’s mother, Carol, however, drank like a ‘damn mermaid–or a shark, whichever could put down more’, which was the witty comparison of her husband. She had mermaid hair, Dan often mused as a child, a deep red and always frizzy. Almost as though it was always affected by the salty brine of the deep. She was a mystery to him as her squinting, blue eyes often evaded him, a deeper conversation they never had – the kind mothers often have with their sons.
Dan looks most like his father: robust in the upper body, tall, green-eyed, and cursed with a sailor’s mouth.
He spent a six-year stint feeling as lonely as he had felt with Lisa, as he feels that being single is his death sentence. Three years of hell with Lisa; six years, and counting, of utter loneliness, after her.
It didn’t help that the last woman he was seeing hated cops. This was a short time after Lisa, and in hindsight he realized it was a rebound relationship that was never meant to last.
She had said her daddy got beat up by some “seriously overreacting cops” and landed in the hospital because of it. Brain-dead and barely alive at all, passing away when she was thirteen–leaving her more alone than ever, as she only had her mother who was inattentive and unaffectionate.
Dan asked in turn what her daddy had done to get beaten up so badly.
It didn’t end well.
She had slapped him hard on the face and grabbed her things, leaving his small apartment in an angry huff. He didn’t argue for her to stay–he knew he didn’t handle trauma or pain well. Especially his own.
It also didn’t help to know that the last time he had been intimate with a woman, that time being a one-night stand with a very sweet lady met at a bar, he couldn’t even get off unless he pictured something else.
He closes his eyes, shutting them tightly, picturing something… picturing someone that makes his heart palpitate and his blood turn red hot.
A light, brown-skinned man whom he has seen many times, yet whose voice he has only heard once.
The idea of that voice in his ear, whispering things, secret things… sweet, secret little details, creating a warmth he can feel… makes him feel that spring has blossomed in his very soul. Warm and cool mixed together, shielded by a real embrace, those brown eyes half-lidded…
He feels like he’s drowning in his own hidden feelings, hearing over and over that smoky and sensual voice. A dusky, breathy, deep voice, ordering his drink, the same drink in the same way every single time: “One venti flat white, extra hot. Extra shot of espresso, please.”
He has pictured the lithe and androgynous Latino man with his beautiful hands on his face, holding him close, and those big brown eyes, and his heart leaps out of his chest every time before he can even cry out his real physical pain and feelings.
Dan feels like an emotional illiterate, calling himself that way too often. The same kind of understanding for human connections and lack of emotions (or too many intense emotions) portrayed in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage–the bleak understanding of true emptiness and the visceral sarcasm taking over every interaction, as though keeping that social sword at the ready would protect Dan’s fragile heart. His mother would often watch Bergman films, and Dan would often sneak in the living room to watch them, pretending to be doing something else. His mother wouldn’t interact much with him unless it was about cooking, but usually would seem emotionally distant. Dan knows that his lack of reasoning in relationships is beyond his comprehension because he never witnessed healthy relationships growing up. It is easier to say he can’t deal with people than to try.
Better than avoiding the catastrophe that is his love life, he is always open to a brief “connection,” without a real interaction of trust and honesty.
Instead of trying to resolve his social anxiety, he delves into old comics and superheroes, wishing he could be one, a real hero, and wishing more than anything everyone would see him as such. He wants to make a difference, to be a gentle source of change for the better–but that’s the dream of his entire life.
He doesn’t have siblings. His father passed away five years ago, and his mother followed.
Dan is ready to either explode or cry, but in general, he knows one thing for certain: he sure doesn’t have the guts to get what he really wants in life.
He was taught to be as far from being what it means to be a human–a man–as possible since his youth. His parents didn’t show affection to each other. They never held hands.
More importantly, he never saw a problem being solved with open dialogue and respect between his parents. Just yelling and screaming and cursing, no voice control, just hysteria and madness. Having feelings for another, especially a man, would be so far removed from how his traditional family perceived love, too. This is a strange feeling for Dan who never really came to terms with the idea that he had been attracted to men before. This is something he has pushed deep down inside his heart and mind.
He drinks his black coffee; he plays music from his radio. The lyrics feel like they’re drawn out of his racing mind.
The music helps him to relax, as his pulse is very strong. The panic is deep in his lower body, rising slowly like a balloon.
Panic about what he was imagining is creating doubt and fear in his mind. He has only ever been with women. He doesn’t think he’s gay, but the intense feelings of attraction to that man at the café make him lose control.
After the song ends, another one begins, and Dan imagines lying on a bed with the curly-haired man, holding him tight. The idea fills him with warmth–even though the thought of intimacy with anyone hurts him. Terrifies him, to be blunt. But it makes him feel hopeful to think that someone would stay in his life, maybe even the dark-eyed stranger at the café, and that maybe he is not as emotionally illiterate after all.
He writes a poem as the song lulls him into a dreamlike ambiance, the first one he ever creates. He scrawls it out in blue pen on a piece of lined paper.
It is for someone. The man with the curly dark brown hair and the deep brown eyes.
It begins:
I think you stepped into my thoughts,
You went into my brain like a surgeon, and overlapped
A memory into your own dream, making us feel each other’s fear.
I steep in your eyes like coffee, the richest color ever created
I steep and I long, drinking you in.
Then, of course, he slowly rips the piece of paper in half. And calls himself dramatic.
Another song starts after a brief commercial break.
He feels hungry all of a sudden, grills himself a double cheeseburger, and has a glass of beer.
He finishes both in four and a half minutes and feels nauseated, yet strangely content.
He realizes that his gut would rumble whenever he feels weak and lonely.
And then he realizes that he wasn’t really hungry–he just wanted to fill the void of having no real guts.
He tapes up the piece of paper with the poem, and takes another look at it, wondering why he wants so badly to give it to that stranger at the Salty & Sweet café.