My friend Robert is going to drop off his old AC unit Sunday.  I have mild mixed emotions about installing it.  But having lived without AC most of my natural life, I think I've earned a few freon credits.  I might as well light my little sparkler at the End of The World Celebrations.  Everybody else is shooting off fireworks. 

The truth is, I'm not doing it for me.  I have had some new gentlemen callers lately, and while I love getting hot and sweaty, most of my VIP FBs are hitting heart attack age.  I don't want it to happen on my watch.

On a day like today — low humidity, highs around eighty — it's obviously not necessary.  But the way it was last week — with the stifling humidity and highs in the nineties — you're tempting fate getting too hot and bothered.  So my plan is to use AC purely as a courtesy to my guests.  I'm also planning to invest in one of those coin-op vibrating beds and an ice machine in the hall.

Yes, I seem to be hitting my summer stride.  And in the very nick of time.  Having just entered the last year of my thirties, my summers seem to be growing ever shorter.  Despite not having AC, I wanted to usher 38 out with a bang and 39 in the same way, though not necessarily with the same bang.  That's the tricky part.  Logistics. 

There were obstacles.  My Marine was unavailable. And I'm pretty choosy. And this was a special occasion.  So I picked up the red phone and called in the Brazilians.  Brazilians love sex like they love soccer, and they play with the same athletic zeal.  Because of the demographics of Boston, I'm fairly well acquainted with Brazilians' bedroom manners and mores.  If you can get over the bitchiness of Brazilian bottoms and the brash machismo of Brazilian tops, they're great in bed.

I don't know if it's the Italian in me, growing up in a house full of machos, but the macho thing doesn't faze me.  And with Brazilians I've known and loved, it's definitely worth enduring a little machismo.  You're amply compensated.  It's an act, anyway.  They're preparing for what both of you know will be their complete and utter surrender in the end.  I know their secret, see: they're all mama's boys. 

As such, they're mostly harmless, but like all addicts they can be a little tedious once they're hooked.  And they have a tendency to get hooked faster than trailer trash after a hit of hillbilly heroin.  I had only just met Sebby (well, "met" in the gay sense of the word, if you know what I mean), a gorgeous curly-headed hunk of Brazilian beefcake, and he was already calling me his "bitch," and ordering me to fix him breakfast and do his laundry.

OK, I did it, but not because he called me his bitch and told me to.  I happened to have a load ready to go.  Anyway, Sebby was special.  He was my first Brazilian, and we carried on for years (he returned to São Paulo in 2006).  He taught me everything I wanted to know but was afraid to ask about machos. 

Despite falling for him — it's easy to have that instant connection with Latins — if you're a good kisser, it's love— I did try to quit him a couple of times.  He was here illegally, and he had a lot of issues on account of that.  He'd show up on my doorstep asking me to help him get out of this or that little fix he'd got himself into.  He was smart.  He didn't call ahead, and he'd burst in, guns blazing, kissing me (with that mouth!) and groping me (with those hands!) all the way down the hall, and making me promise between kisses and gropes to help him out. 

If I didn't, he would stop just short of the bedroom, and it would be: "why you so mean?  You don't love me.  I going back to Brazil."

"After," I'd say.

"Now," he'd reply.  "I don't want to make love with you if you don't love me."

I'd shrug.  "You up for just sex, then?"

"Disgusting!"  He'd exclaim.  "Are you a whore?"

"With a heart of gold," was always my reply. 

Of course we would tumble into bed and afterwards I would call one of my other VIP FBs, an immigration lawyer, and arrange a threeway.  The things you do for love.

The next-to-last time Sebby dropped by for a little "push-push," as he called it, it'd been awhile since we'd hooked up.  It had gotten to where I'd sort of realize I'd missed him when I was with him, but otherwise, not so much.  You know how it is.  Love-making is a different place.  It's another country. It's like two travelers who bump into each other in a far-off foreign land only to discover they're both from the same home town.  Sometimes they can be friends in another country, but not in their own. 

So we're cuddling, and he asks me about when I said, way back when we first met, that I "knew" him. (Hey, we all have our little lines — I learned this one from Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux.)

"How you know me?" He wanted to know.

"Some people you know, some people you don’t. Who knows how you know them, you just do."

He said: "But if you always known me, why you wanna close the door on me?"

I said: "Sebby, I know you. It doesn’t mean I have to like you." 

"You think maybe we together in a past life?"

I said: "like you were a rabbit and I was a wolf? Like that?"

He scoffed.

"Like I was a tiger..." he said.

"And I was... an antelope?" I ventured.

"No," he laughed.  "A little bird."

Hmm.

Later, after he had unloaded about a gallon of skeet in my ear (this unfortunate incident, which necessitated an ear-wash later in the day, was the result of my expressing doubt about his claim that he had given up tossing off for Lent, which we were then two weeks into) he asked me, if I knew him, what did I see for his future?

I said: "Well, that’s the thing.  When I look at your future all I can see is the present.  You have to get yourself sorted."

I mean, he was well into his thirties, had some education, and had been working as a busboy at some roadside greasy spoon for the past three years. 

He said, yeah, he knew he'd have to sort himself out, because who else would if he didn’t? Not his little bird.

I said: "Little birds aren’t there to help big tigers out of their troubles. Little birds flutter from tree to tree and sing from the highest branches."

He said, but this little bird should watch out because the tiger could eat him!

I said: "This little bird is not worried, because the tiger has gotten a little, shall we say, um, paunchy, lately."

And the truth is, he had.  I don't mind a little paunch on my macho, mind you, but for the sake of the argument...

Sebby was special, though.  All my subsequent Brazilians have paled in comparison, paunch or no. But with all their macho complications — all the tough talk and love whimpers — they are a special breed. 

Nicco's my newest.  Another curly-headed cutie.  Calls me "gato".  Great smile.  Very agile.  One thing about Brazilians: you're bouncing all over the bedroom.  The beauty of Nicco is that he, too is heading back to Brazil at summer's end.  That means that our affair will have that tinge of Latin love and death that brings the passions to a boil.  The tragic ending is built-in, which makes every kiss a sip of nectar.  And hopefully I won't have to arrange any threeways.

8 a.m. the morning of my 39th, I had a visit from Matty, a lean little Italian originally from Upstate New York.  Again, the demographics of my neighborhood are at play.  Somerville and Medford are Italian-American and Portuguese/Brazilian strongholds.  

So my 39th started pleasantly enough.  After Matty left, I went to work, myself, for a couple of hours, and then dropped by the garden.  The weather was impeccable, and after the rain we've had, the gardens are looking lush...


I'm starting to get some color, with the zinnias and the twee Calendula joining in...


And, of course, the Rudbeckia and Echinacea unfurling all around us...


Dinner with a friend, and then a movie — we watched Jarhead, which has been somewhere on my Non-Urgent Movies With Gratuitous Partial Male Nudity viewing list since it came out in '05.  Like the war it depicts, the movie goes nowhere — but has some very fine performances...


That scene reminded me of a little Czech bar I spent one fairly miserable Christmas Eve in some years ago.  I was in my mid-twenties, and thought it was just a regular old, run-of-the-mill eurotrashy gay bar, but it was one of these places where all the cute guys are hustlers who actually work for the bar.  They don't tell you that when you walk in, you just have to figure it out on your own.

I was kind of green.  It was my first time in Central Europe.  And the scenario for the evening dawned on me in stages.  The first clue was that all the cute young guys were with much older men.  The second was that when one who was about my age finally approached me it was to ask me to buy him a drink.  The third was that the drink, though nonalcoholic, cost about a month's wages in those parts at that time.

But the punchline is that you can buy these boys drinks all night, and you'll never get laid!  HAW HAW HAW! Pretty hilarious, huh?  I have a pretty sharp sense of humor, and got the joke after the third or fourth drink, after which little Sasha's solicitations lost their charm.  There is nothing more boring than a hustler on the hustle, except maybe waking up to the fact that he's hustling you.  It may sound exciting, but, trust me, the moment I realized, it was like, "oh."  And that was it.  I took the last train back to the Convent where I was, appropriately enough, staying.

Not this time, baby!  Still frisky at 39!  It's all free love and flowers!  At least for one more year!