Diary Exerpt: November 1998
by Emil Keliane
He seemed to be my age. Good-looking.
I was drunk. I was horny. I was alone in the city and perhaps lonely. I was in an evanescent world, in a dangerous mood.
In San Francisco I am always offered a drink, a smile, a wink, a complement, a new mood, a different name and I go for the lights and sounds, its faces and colors, the drink and the costumes. I go there because I can, because I am.
I go to the city for the mirrors without reflection. I go for the deceptions.
We passed each other on the street where our eyes met amidst the haze. I'd already been walking for a while. Cruising the asphalt wave.
I turned and followed him and for three blocks he turned intermittently to check if I was still there. He was eating a slice of pizza from a paper plate. There was so much fiction in the air that the very buildings we passed might have been constructed out of paper. An origami city…
We turned up one of the darker side streets off of 18th, where the stranger paused under a massive branch of a tree that grew onto the sidewalk from the shadowy grounds of a local church. And turned to me.
I stood before him.
He only said, "Hey." And we kissed.
No conversation. No drinks. No foolish romance. No days spent awaiting the phantom call. No superfluous flirtation. No drunken exchanges of warm words and coquettish glances. No smart retorts. No wispy gestures. No intellectual tangos. No excursions into the woods. No sightseeing. Just hunger for a freedom I can never have without feeling as though I am laying my life on the murderous line… stroking our erections on a street that slanted so severely I kept losing my balance and had to tug at his cock to keep from falling over.
Earth moved beneath our feet, our jeans rolled down to our ankles. I turned away from him so that his erection could slip between my legs where he moved in and out… as if fucking.
"Do you have a condom?" I whispered.
"No. Do you?"
"No…"
And yet despite all my fears, all my paranoia, or maybe because of them and my desire to outsmart them, we continued.
We continued even as a car passed on the dark street, or when a pedestrian strolled quietly by, momentarily putting away our erections, impatiently shuffling our feet, then resuming.
He spit on his fingers and wet the tip of his cock, which was substantial. But I placed my hand against his pelvis preventing him from penetrating, and heard him breathe into my naked ear, felt him exhale upon my neck.
There we were on the street, against the world. Not hidden in an alley or doorway, a shoddy bathroom stall or motel room, but on the sidewalk, with the cars and the people. Clothed and fucking.
We did not bother exchanging names or making any up. We had no identity, no ulterior motives, no dowries or illusions. We were autonomous.
"Don't come in me," I forewarned him.
He promised he wouldn't and pulled me closer by the hipbones. I kept watch as the occasional headlights of a passing car lighted the sidewalk where we fucked. The homes across the street seemed to sigh.
Suddenly, he pulled away, moved next to me, and in the darkness I saw quick white flashes that shot and spilled onto the concrete. I too came.
Nothing was said.
When he had zipped up his jeans he searched in the dark for something—keys, I thought to myself. He bent down and picked up the now empty paper plate, which he carried away with him as he faded into the darkness, up the hill. There was something very reassuring about this, about a man who does not litter…
Driving home across Golden Gate Bridge, the city's skyline fading in and out of view through the fog reflected in the car's mirrors, I felt as though I were running from a painful release for which I was not ready. The bay roared, the hills howled, the bridge swayed, and the cold mist choked an animalistic bellow that seemed to reverberate out of the darkness. I only realized the distant wail was my own when I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror where I saw the indignation of a creature whose sexuality had long been taken from him-an endangered animal who'd yet to take pleasure in sex, galloping through the mist, across the bridge, and disappearing into the black hills of Sausalito.
Emil Keliane is a Chicago-based queer Assyrian diarist who has published work in the anthologies Male Lust: Pleasure, Power and Transformation and Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology. His inspirations include Anais Nin and Kahlil Gibran. A less edited and more copious version of his diary may be accessed at (www.emilsdiary.com)
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