I figured I had all the time in the world to figure out what made my dick wet. Because, you see, when I started training to be a swimmer I was 9 and it immediately formed this intensity for bodies in my mind that couldn’t be explained off as attraction. My mom understood how much better my brain worked in isolation so she never forced me to work as a team and instead my coach’s bloated, marked abs decided for me the uselessness of beauty. It was the opposite of cynicism though, that this focus on my body and its delight as the water curved faster around me year after year meant that the need for affection only came to me near the supple, thin bodies of my girl friends, because I never worried about how fast they ran or how deep their voices.
I was a bullet in a one-boy gun held by the Poseidon whose hairless body took me under his fin. Oh yes, maybe if I had been a water polo goalie I’d be straight now. But I couldn’t possibly have looked at another man’s body and felt safe, only resistant, and compared. There is nothing homoerotic about five boys in speedos all watching each other work out. Nothing. In fact, during the outdoor competitions I couldn’t stand to watch the other boys get slathered in sunscreen by their own coaches. We always had aerosol, and after the butterfly races when my skin burned and the pain melted the muscles off my bones, even then I only let my coach massage me a little bit; I knew it wasn’t sexual because it didn’t turn me on.
You know, when you’re young, we’re all guilty of acting like the crowd does because it’s just easier to say oh yeah, that Camila came back from Brussels with her tits blown in even though what I felt for Laura fit perfectly on her flat chest. The first time I went to her house was after training because we realized she lived across the street from the Tequendama Sports Club, and we had to learn the choreography to Summer Nights from the movie Grease to teach to our dance class. I couldn’t tell if she liked me or if I was simply the only American boy who could move his hips, and maybe the song after 40 times just gets that sickening that we had to move the romance to her room, where she went around showing me the relics her parents sent her from all the countries they didn’t take her to. She’d only been to Venezuela, once, and said it was too much like Colombia. In there, she didn’t have to touch me to make me sweat, and when she did, it was with these colorful, scented markers; You smell too much like chlorine, I hate it. She drew banana stars on my arms, blueberry clouds on my stomach, and a big, strawberry sun on my chest. Man, for the first time I was wet there, not just hard. Then she pulled her neckline down where I placed my hand, and I traced it with an orange.
After four years I finally quit swimming because it had made me aggressive and strong. The more intelligent and effeminate I got, the more the school counselor would call my mom telling her I needed to make friends with boys. The thing was, most of my friends were boys! They just would call me shit like marica and then dare me to kill them, and training three times a week meant that I could. I wasn’t afraid of them, this massive piece of crap Carlos always forgot that his fat wasn’t a shield and that if he was jealous enough that my legs looked buff in Rothko jeans, I’d make his belly button kiss his diaphragm.
There was one boy in my class I never had to wrestle with because I honestly would’ve lost. Alejandro was the tallest kid in the class, and he had this muscular body, too muscular for a seventh grader. Unlike me though, he was docile and sweet, like a gentle giant. We got along inexplicably well, I would help him with language homework and he’d help me with math, he’d race me when the school’s pool was open, and his mom would sometimes pack me an extra sausage with his lunch. Some Sundays we’d meet at Tequendama and play any sport we had a ball for, but now I realize it was mostly volleyball, which we stayed in our speedos for after a swim. I don’t know if he looked at my body but I have to confess I loved his. Loved, not resented, or envied. One time we laid in the sand drenched in chlorine-sweat with our torsos drumming the sound of our breathless bodies, pointing at clouds. Each time our arms moved they touched, his sweat dripped onto my chest when he raised his finger, drawing cool lines, oh man, it felt like having a body I didn’t want as my own. Drying out in the sun like that made me realize that it was the pools that didn’t let me feel the wetness in my speedo-- so I quit. That summer Alejandro’s parent’s switched him to a German school to prepare for the recession, and I moved back to New York.
1/7/2020 4:44PM