“You gonna tell Jesse what happened?”

“Maybe tomorrow I’ll tell him. Right now, let’s watch that pretty black boy’s dance.”

Lonny

Lonny

Yo, man.”

“It’s Clementine, darling.”

“You with the lipstick.”

“Indubitably.”

“Get the fuck away from here. This is my corner.”

“I know. Tonight, I’m buying. Do you speak Italian or French?”

Shit. Just let anybody try to mess with me now.

Jesse

Jesse

The house lights dimmed. The audience settled back into place. In the darknesss I remembered what I had said to Rodney: “Things will be different now between us. I know these aren’t your steps. These are Metro’s steps. This dance is for him. You are Rodney, black and lovely. I am Jesse. Let’s be that to one another. It’s already quite a lot.” Rodney smiled and turned down the lights. I kissed his darkness and our dance went back and forth, step-leap-and-down. We danced to quiet music and to the applause of our own skin. There were no splinters in his coarse hair or in mine.

A murmur lifted from the stage. The curtain drew up like a big woman gathering her skirts. From my post in the wings, I imagined the first glimmer of light on the dark stage as a beacon from somewhere high revealing a room with an immense fourth wall. From the light came a sudden darkness, then blue, and two fluttering bodies in a dance.

The dancers moved and my body moved with them. Suddenly Metro came alive between the steps: freight train, caroom-boom-clack. Their sweat glistening was my sweat streaming out. Their muscles in a voice of trains moved with mine. And his, and his, my underground man.

I climbed the warehouse stairs two at a time. I was dressed as Metro would want. Two poppers waited inside my pocket. Our tickets to another time, another room.

“Jesse? Jesse? That you?”

It was early afternoon. The river smelled ripe and blue. The wood of the warehouse floor was soft and slimy on my feet. Nothing here except the shadows and the orange glow of cigarettes here, there, over there. Metro approached unsteadily, his eyes half-open, his underwear sagging from the waist. The smell of medicine seeped from him. River water gurgled and popped from the distant, swaying piles.

Male hands on a male waist. Wheels of legs spinning, leaping. Tiny runs ending in arabesque. Turn-two-three, plié-two-three. Relevé. Arms circling overhead. A reach for air. The bodies swallowed, one into the other.

I held him by the shoulders. No hug, no caress. I simply held him. He knelt on his own. His eyes commanded me. “Push harder,” he said. “Push.” His head hung lazily to one side. “My head aches. Maybe I’ve taken too many pills.”

“We can try it another way, baby.” My voice pleaded with him. I didn’t know what to do.