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  She broke into tears out of nowhere. She threw up her hands and wailed loudly. The tongues that she spoke in cursed her husband the reverend for who he was and how he was, and cursed herself for letting it be.

  She jumped up from the pew and stomp-danced in a circle, balled up her fists, and beat on her breasts. The nurse’s attendants came to her rescue and wrestled her down.

  And then Reverend William James Ellerbee called on the choir to make joyful noise.

  Chapter Three

  When Charlene Alexander opened the front door, her husband, Ramon, was still seated naked on the couch, his hand absently probing his balls and dick, eyes glued to the TV.

  “Where the hell you been all this time?” he said without looking up.

  “I told you I’m in charge of the nursery now, so I stay for both services.”

  “I don’t remember you telling me that.”

  “Told you last week.”

  “You ain’t told me jack!” he yelled at her angrily, looking up and glaring at her long enough to warn her.

  “Look, Ramon, I just left church and I’m in no mood to come down off my high.”

  “Yeah, you could use a little Jesus. Probably fuckin’ the minister. All you church bitches be fuckin’ the minister.”

  “Why aren’t you dressed?” It was bad enough Ramon never wanted to go to church with her, but blasphemy got to her, not as much as it used to, for she long ago recognized that her husband was going straight to hell. “I thought you were going to be dressed when I got back.”

  “Dressed for what?”

  “We’re not going to Roscoe’s?”

  “I ain’t feelin’ no damn chicken and waffles.”

  “I wish you would’ve told me when we first talked about it this morning. I could’ve gone there by myself straight from church.”

  “Yeah, to hook up with your preacher man?”

  “Gimme some money. I left my change in the collection plate.”

  “Use your Visa. I need my cash.”

  “For what? Where are you going?”

  “I’m hangin’ with Tyler. We’re going to the tracks.”

  “The way you two hang you’d think you were doing each other.”

  “Look, bitch, don’t be talkin’ that faggot shit to me.”

  “I’m not going to be too many more of your bitches, Ramon.”

  “I hate them mothafuckin’ perverts.”

  She walked over to the couch and sighed.

  “Ramon, what is this?”

  “What?”

  “You got cum stains on the damn couch.”

  “Ain’t this shit got Scotchgard on it?”

  “Why do you have to sit here naked, masturbating all over the damn place?”

  “ ’Cause I’m a man with a fuckin’ dick, goddamnit!”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You’re a—”

  But before she could get it out, he jumped up and knocked her to the floor. He stood over her, huffing; the slit of his dick was staring her down.

  “I ain’t no fuckin’ faggot and I ain’t no fuckin’ idiot. You understand me, bitch?”

  Her face was too swollen for her to speak. She trembled with anger and fear. She got up off the floor and pushed him aside, then marched into the kitchen.

  He sat back down on the sofa and grumbled profanities. Moments later, she was back in the room, a butcher’s knife in her hand. She came up behind him, grabbed a scrub of his hair, snatched back his head, and put the blade firmly to his neck. He froze…then he smiled.

  “One day, you gone actually have the guts to use that thing.”

  But today was not that day. She lowered the knife and let it drop from her trembling hand. She then ran into the bedroom, threw herself on the bed, and cried for all she had lost.

  He entered the bedroom and lay down beside her. She tensed when he touched her.

  “Why you make me do shit to you?” he whispered. And just for a moment he was that gentle bear of a man she had fallen in love with, had married, had seen go off to war, and who had returned a cold, heartless monster she now needed to leave, but couldn’t.

  Chapter Four

  At First AME Church, Brando hugged his parents after service and told them he’d see them later at dinner. He then circulated through the crowd of parishioners he had known all his life.

  Mr. and Mrs. Heywood found Everene Dempsey near the water cooler right outside the sanctuary door and chatted cheerfully with her and her newly divorced daughter, Dee, who had recently moved back to L.A. from New York. As usual, the Heywoods were selling their prized son on the gentle hush, pointing him out to the new divorcée with grinning pride. Although years ago they accepted the fact that their only child was gay, they still hoped that one day he might swerve against his nature and give them the grandchild they so desperately craved.

  Dee sympathized with the Heywoods. Yes, their son was a handsome and seemingly upright gentleman that any woman would want to have, but as Dee observed him chatting with friends on the other side of the sanctuary, her gaydar kicked in.

  Not that Brando gave any physical indication, but Dee, with many gay friends in the entertainment industry on both coasts, and an openly gay brother with whom she was very close, had a sixth sense. She was rarely ever wrong.

  She watched fondly as Brando and his friends talked. She perceived that they were all gay, albeit unreadable to the average observer, except for the older gentleman who appeared to be dominating the conversation with elegantly effeminate hand gestures, an occasional finger snap, and a breezy flamboyancy that caused an usher gathering songbooks nearby to shake his head before catching himself in a temporary state of political incorrectness.

  “Now, the invitations to my winter supper are going in the mail tomorrow and I expect each and every one of you to RSVP instead of just showing up, like some of you are known to do,” Senior Father Lacey Cannon said, eyeing Cedric Warfield beneath an arched eyebrow. All his gay friends called him Senior Father because of his history. Having been one of the rioting patrons who stood up to the police at New York’s Stonewall bar back in 1969, an act that ignited the gay revolution, Lacey Cannon was a bona fide pioneer of the movement.

  “Why are you eyeballing me, Senior Father?” protested Cedric.

  “Because I know how you are, chile. And it’s for you and a guest,” he reminded them all. “A as in one. And I don’t want to see any of you draggin’ no triflin’ ghetto trade up to my house either. That goes for everybody except for Brando.”

  “Huh?”

  “You can bring whoever you want, baby doll. Po’ thing ain’t had a date in a month of Sundays.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be coming alone,” Brando said.

  “You are such a waste, chile. A gorgeous piece of work like you? You don’t even need to be alone.”

  “I’m fine, Senior Father. Thank you for your concern.”

  “And what’s up with you, Shane?” Senior Father scolded lightly. “Why you got your lip all stuck out?”

  “Omar,” Cedric volunteered. “He hasn’t seen him all week.”

  “Well, where is he keeping himself?”

  “Ask his man,” Shane answered with a snarl. His Puerto Rican accent added a sting as he stared hard at Brando with accusatory eyes. “He know better than me.”

  Shane Santos did not dislike Brando—on the contrary—but he was jealous of him and the time Brando and Omar spent together. And anyone who knew the two knew that Omar had feelings for Brando that went beyond friendship, feelings Omar tried hard to mask.

  “Oh no.” Brando stared back innocently. “I’m not in that.”

  Cedric chuckled. “You’re not into anything these days.”

  “Isn’t Clymenthia Teager signing at Eso Won tonight?” Senior Father asked. His well-known messiness was beginning to surface.

  “Yes,” Brando answered tentatively, knowing where this was going.

  “Clock his beh
ind there,” Senior Father said to Shane with a sweeping hand.

  “What time?” Shane was dead serious.

  “Seven,” Senior Father offered with delight.

  “This oughta be good,” Cedric mused.

  “See, y’all are not right,” Brando said, walking away and giving them the hand.

  “No, yo’ best friend the one ain’t right,” Shane called out to his back.

  From across the room, Dee noted the gentle drama with amusement.

  Chapter Five

  At the Lucy Florence Coffeehouse on Degnan Boulevard, in that quaint part of the city known as the African Village, Omar and Brando met at exactly a quarter past one. They found their usual table on the upper level overlooking the stage. They ordered coffee and sweet potato pie from one of the identical-twin owners.

  The night that Omar’s grandmother died, the night he spent crying in Brando’s arms, was the night Omar fell in love with Brando. And after more than twenty years, it was a love that remained undeclared and unrequited, though often hinted at.

  In time Omar had somehow learned to accept an oblivious Brando as a platonic friend who, perhaps, would never know that once upon a time he had inadvertently broken Omar’s heart with an offer of friendship when romance was the secret caller on the line.

  Omar and Brando had different occupations in the same industry. Brando was an entertainment lawyer who represented a disparate group of clients, from rappers to literary writers. He had just signed Clymenthia Teager to a high-six-figure three-book deal on the strength of her current best-selling award winner. Omar Stevens was a showbiz writer and journalist.

  In the two years since his and Collier’s breakup, Brando found himself running the streets and hitting the clubs with Omar more often than he’d liked (although he did get off on shaking his booty on the dance floor of Boy Trade, the first-Friday-night-of-

  the-month disco throwdown for L.A.’s black and Latino gay crowd. At Boy Trade Brando and Omar were usually the oldest folks in the house).

  “His name is Thomas,” Omar reported on his latest side piece while the other twin served their coffee and pie. “He’s a track runner at San Diego State. Comes up to L.A. every other weekend. Calls me at the last minute. Tells me to be at such-and-such motel, and I’m there, ‘cause the boy is no joke. I cry it’s so good. Ass sweeter than wine. Dick melts in your mouth. Just thinking about him gets me hot enough to wanna fuck you.”

  “I don’t know why you’re always trying to shock me.” Brando laughed.

  “Rattle yo’ borin’ ass up.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So anyway, he’s back in town now, for good. He’s living with his mother in Compton. So what am I supposed to do? How am I going to juggle him and Shane?”

  “I don’t know, but you need to do something,” Brando said. “I’m the one getting shade from Shane.”

  “He’s jealous.”

  “Jealous?” Brando asked innocently, as if he didn’t know.

  “Yeah. Of you.”

  “Why?”

  Omar chose to ignore the question.

  “He called this morning. Left a message on my voicemail. Said he missed the sound of my voice. Damn. Now see, that’s a good boyfriend. Not lover. We’re not there yet. We just crossed over from fuck buddies.”

  “Does he know this?”

  “He knows, but you know how he is. He’s one of them anal-possessive New York Negro-Ricans, with his phine-ass self.”

  “I guess.”

  “We have an arrangement.”

  “Okay.”

  “While we’re seeing each other, we can see others, too. We just don’t need to talk about it.”

  “And he agreed to that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Damn, bro, what you got down there?”

  “Oh, so now you don’t remember, huh?”

  Brando remembered, all right. And he smiled at the long-ago memory. It had happened right before Brando headed east to college. They had been celebrating at Omar’s place, the house his Grammy had left him. And they had gotten pissy drunk. Prince blasted through the speakers of the stereo and the two eighteen-year-olds, toned by youth and high school athletics, laughingly danced around the living room in their tight white briefs, playing matching air guitars like a pair of chocolate Tom Cruises in Risky Business.

  The drunken performance accelerated into a fierce dance-off, which soon became a spastic wrestling match during which white briefs were clumsily shredded and ripped off and two drunken young he-men found themselves tumbling nude and sweaty, grabbing buff biceps and stiff nipples, being beat in the face with hard dicks and moist assholes, humping each other like yard dogs in heat, biting and sucking on everything they had, fucking each other with their dicks and their tongues, exhausting each other with a pleasure so nasty that they fell dead to sleep in the damp funk of their teenage pungency.

  They woke up the next morning with big hangovers and deliberate amnesia.

  Over the years they would never speak of the event directly, only in innuendos, giggly asides, and rhetorical questions. They were both afraid to explore too deeply the wild sexual intimacy they enjoyed that one and only night, an intimacy Brando thought could breach the sacredness of their friendship, an intimacy Omar longed for but was afraid to ask for. For the time being, Omar was content with Thomas the track runner, Shane the boyfriend, and all the other stand-ins for the man he had been in love with for more than two decades.

  “With the track runner back in town for good,” he continued his tale, “when he called this morning I went; skipped right on over there and did the brotha’s cookies. He had just dropped his mother off at the mall and wouldn’t have to pick her up for a couple of hours, and he was hot; wanted me over there ten minutes ago. So like a trained show dog I went and did tricks and got me my biscuit treat—”

  “While Shane sits up in church giving me the evil eye.”

  “Evil is where evil lives.”

  “Watch it, man. Respect.”

  “Sorry, Bran, but you church children really get me.” Omar suddenly thought about his mother and stifled a cringe.

  “Omar, you’re a godless heathen,” Brando half joked.

  “I just choose to fear my God outside the temples of commerce and haughtiness.”

  “And how old is he again?”

  “Who?”

  “Who we talkin ’bout, Willis?”

  “The track runner?”

  “Yes. Thomas the track runner.”

  “Twenty-three; something like that.”

  “That’s pretty damn young, Omar.”

  “Pretty damn young for who?”

  “Pretty damn young for your forty-one-year-old ass.”

  “Look, when I go, I want that scene right out of The Color Purple when Whoopi asks that young girl, ‘How’d he go?’ and the young girl looks up from her hanky and says, ‘On top of me.’ That’s how I’m going, on top of something young, dumb, and full of cum.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “And you’re a prude, my brotha. How you been able to go without sex for two years is beyond me.”

  “Everybody wants sex. Nobody wants love.”

  “Yeah right. That’s some shit fat ugly dudes with bad teeth be talkin’ over in the corner.”

  “Be talkin’?”

  “You must be beatin’ that meat like crazy,” Omar slipped.

  “You don’t have any self-control, Omar. Face it. You’re a sex addict.”

  “Why you always gotta be sayin’ that to me?”

  “Because it’s true. You need to really check yourself.”

  “Nah, you need to really check yo’self.”

  “Hey, I’ve been celibate for two years.”

  “That’s what you need to be checkin’. That ain’t healthy, cuz, building all that shit up inside. And no intimate contact? People ain’t built that way. People are built to touch. People are built to fuck.”

  “Twenty-four-seven?”

 
; “Wish the fuck I could.”

  “See? Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “You know something, Brando?”

  “What?”

  “You one prudish mothafucka.”

  “Okay, okay, okay. I’ll tell you what.”

  “What?”

  “Go a month without sex and I’ll let you make love to me.”

  “What?” Omar stopped midgulp, not believing what he had just heard.

  “It’s been a long time. We’ve been friends a long time. I think we have a pretty good lock on some of our…wants, discussed and otherwise. So yes. You go a month without sex and I’ll let you make love to me. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Man, git the fuck outta here with that!”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Wassup with you, Brando? Talkin’ this shit. This ain’t you, man.”

  “Of course it’s me. Who else could it be?”

  And that’s when Omar realized he was dreaming; daydreaming, right in his best friend’s face; fantasizing and wanting so badly he could hear “yes” as clear as wind chimes in a silent breeze. Who was he fooling? Certainly not himself. He still hadn’t gotten over Brando.

  Brando laughed and shook his head at his hopeless and lustful friend, although he was not fully aware, or did not let himself be fully aware, of what his friend was lusting for. After all, he, Brando, had feelings of his own, suppressed feelings that he didn’t always understand.

  And that’s when he could feel it again. The eyes, so fixed that they burned. No. Warmed. Eyes that had found him again this week, just like last Sunday and the Sunday before. Eyes he had caught in the midst of a stare quickly averted; eyes from across the other side of the room.

  She was almost as beautiful as the man that she sat with. It was a beauty that was storybook-like, enhanced by the glow of sunshine that streamed in from behind her through the side picture window, bathing her in sepia and gold, dancing lightly, iridescently, amidst her church curls.

  And with her eyes she flirted like the delicate lady it was clear that she was—her high-collared blouse, her ever-so-slight smile, her legs that gently crossed, then uncrossed, underneath her soft linen skirt. She turned slightly away as she conspired with her handsome companion with a sad laughing whisper that made him blush with a deep dimpled smile and a nod that was not meant for her.