When I was a young man, a beautiful, stupid, and completely honest animal, I was a goddamn hummingbird. I jumped from one open flower to the next, a quick, fast, and completely unapologetic blur of motion. My Tijuana days, Christ. I was all over the place. I never believed in protection. I never thought about it. The idea of a disease, a quiet, creeping rot that you could pick up in the dark, it was an abstraction. A ghost story. I’d seen the videos in the Navy, of course. The ones with the syphilis-eaten cocks, the gonorrhea drips. A beautiful, ugly, and completely ineffective piece of propaganda. It haunted me, sure, but it didn’t stop me.
Because I wasn’t worried about a disease. I was worried about a goddamn pregnancy. That was the real monster under the bed. So I lied. I changed my name, I changed my story. I was a ghost, a beautiful, phantom hummingbird, taking what I wanted and leaving nothing behind but a fake name and a quiet, desperate hope that I hadn’t planted a seed in the wrong garden.
Was it karma? Was there a price to be paid for all that beautiful, ugly, and completely selfish deception? I don’t know. Sometimes I think about it. Sometimes, when the world takes a shit in my hat, I wonder if it’s just the universe, that old, patient, and completely unforgiving bookkeeper, finally collecting on an old debt.
But the real irony, the real punchline to the whole goddamn joke, is that the gift that keeps on giving, it doesn’t come from the whores in Tijuana. It comes from the good girls. The ones with the clean houses and the sad, honest eyes.
I remember this one, a beautiful, broken thing I met at the Four Seasons. She attacked me on the couch, played a wild, beautiful, and completely desperate game of “little pony,” and we spent the whole night in a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest mess of sweat and cheap whiskey. I came back the next day for more, of course. And after the fifth or sixth session, she finally gave me the confession.
”I have a confession,” she said, her voice all soft and full of a beautiful, phony shame. “I have herpes.”
”You have herpes?” I said. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me sooner?”
”Well,” she said, “that’s what I’m confessing now.”
A beautiful, perfect, and completely useless piece of logic. “So,” I asked her, “should I be getting tested? How many other poor bastards have you given this little party favor to?”
And then she gave me the line, the one they all give you. “Well, I was with this one guy for three years, and he never wore protection, and he never got it.” Like it was some kind of goddamn magic trick, a selective, beautiful, and completely bullshit curse.
And it kept happening. In Hawaii, I was with this woman, Halia, a swimmer, with a strong, beautiful, and completely honest body. We were like rabbits, fucking in the car, on the beach, in her house, in mine. Forty-minute drives to each other’s side of the island, just for a few hours of that beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary animal connection. And then one day, while she’s sitting on top of me, in the middle of it all, she gives me the same goddamn speech.
”I have a confession,” she says. “I got this from an asshole who didn’t tell me. I just wanted to share it with you, because you’re a good guy.”
A good guy. As if the bad guys, the assholes, they deserve it. As if a disease is a goddamn moral judgment. “So what do you do with the bad guys?” I wanted to ask her. “Do you just spread the love?”
And then there was the Filipina, the one I was with for three years. I forgot, in a drunken, beautiful, and completely honest moment of stupidity, that she had mentioned something about it once. She was a quiet, gentle, and completely manipulative woman, and I was enjoying the game. Three times a day, sometimes. And then she tells me, “My body is changing. I’m in bloom.”
”In bloom with what?” I asked her.
And I remembered. The drunken confession, after the tenth or twelfth time we’d been together. “I have the kiss that keeps on kissing,” she’d said.
So who the hell do you trust anymore?
I was with this older Spanish woman, a real intellectual, a prude. She was smart, older than me, and her resistance was a beautiful, ugly, and completely intoxicating challenge. She was always complaining that all men ever want is sex. And then, finally, she caves. And we’re hummingbirds and flowers together, a beautiful, poetic, and completely bullshit description of a good, hard fuck. And she keeps asking me, “Have you ever caught an STD? Do you have any STDs?”
At first, I thought it was a normal question. But she kept at it. A quiet, persistent, and completely suspicious line of questioning. So finally, I turned it on her. “Do you have an STD?” I asked. “Are you just projecting on me?”
She wouldn’t answer. She’d just look away.
So I asked her again. “Seriously. You’re not serious, are you?” We’d been doing this for weeks, no protection, a quiet, stupid, and completely reckless game of Russian roulette.
And then she finally admitted it. “Only you and my doctor know this,” she said. “But yes. I have the gift that keeps on giving.”
And I just looked at her. A prude, an intellectual, a woman who acted like her shit didn’t stink. And she was a goddamn liar. She felt “ashamed,” she said. “Dirty.” But not ashamed enough to tell me before I put my dick in her.
So I took her back to her house. And I fucked her like she’d never been fucked before. A quiet, brutal, and completely honest transaction. “You owe me this,” I told her. A beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary act of revenge. If I was going to get the gift, I was at least going to get the goddamn story that went with it.
And that’s the whole damn show, isn’t it? The beautiful, ugly, and completely honest truth of it all. You can be a hummingbird, you can be a goddamn saint, but in the end, we’re all just a bunch of sick, beautiful, and completely human animals, passing our quiet, secret poisons back and forth in the dark, and calling it love.
