Does he notice the joy etched into the lines of my eyes? Can he feel the raised bits of skin on my arms, all the times I have ever felt that I was not good enough carved into me, the symbols of a lost language speaking my history across my thighs. If he can taste all the memories I am holding in my teeth. The music is too loud to hear the sound of it, but I can feel the pulsations in the vibration of his lips. This movement is exhausting, but the drugs are helping. But now, here, it is clawing inside of my aching belly and begging me to do something. The hunger of those first days after I ran away from The Mission was a dull, slow burn. I feel at home for the first time in my life, high on this dance floor. Beards and bellies and bears and all the things in between. There are people here from all over the world. I look around and study the faces of the men as I move my body like I am supposed to. Why not? It’s really no different, right? Just another city, full of lonely people just trying their best to get by. Maybe I could really build a life here? Cape Town. Like if anyone came for us, that we could lock ourselves in. I watch from across the room as a fat, hairy, and American looking man slips a five hundred Rand note into the panty string of the animatronic looking sex doll of a dancer on stage. Maybe I could be one of the go-go boys on stage? I wonder how much they get paid. Maybe one of the Afrikanners in town will hire me to mop the floors? Maybe I could even work here, at Beefcakes? What would I do, though? I could learn the bar. If my calculations are correct, I can last in Cape Town for three more days and then I will have to move somewhere new, unless I can find a job. I think about the fresh gust of hot wind that came barreling through Greenmarket Square around noon, knocking over a cart that was already chipping away at the hinges, blowing teasingly at our pickled necks. I wonder what would happen if I let Mahmoud fuck me and if there is a chance he will feed me afterwards. I can almost taste Mahmoud’s last meal on his tongue. His tongue probes me wildly and I wonder how many men he has kissed in this same spot, and more importantly, am I better? He takes me into a sloppy excavation of my mouth and I wonder if this might be the only thing I am good at. Mahmoud presses his hard cock against my abdomen, which bulges through his flamboyantly hot pink jeans. I have taken just enough ecstasy to feel like I am floating above myself. Over the cosmic thumping, Kwaito house beats vibrate our blood. Who would even care in the end? Who would even look for a kid like me? Maybe Pastor Adam will tell everyone I stole his money. How much had that been in rand? In any case, it is all gone now. When I finally arrived in Cape Town, I had just a hundred dollars. Would people be looking for me? And for how long? I am a nobody. In Bloemfontein, I threw away my missionary uniform and purchased fresh trousers and a button up. I was so afraid to look at the papers and tried my best to just keep moving south. I hope desperately that nobody recognized me on the bus from Gaborone to Johannesburg. People had given me strange looks along the way. The journey was arduous and felt endless. I still have no idea where to go, but I had my back to the wall and I did the only thing that made sense in the moment. If I should have just let Pastor Adam take the things he wanted from me. I wonder now though, in the darkness, if I have made a mistake in coming here. Klaus, the Afrikaans man at the front desk, who watches porn publicly and without concern, told me on the day that I arrived that his rate was the best deal I would find in town and I knew somehow that he was not lying. I sleep on the iron cot of a hostel that goes for ten rand a night. The ligaments of my spine crane with effort each night in my hostel, pointing my nose north toward the smell of fresh Chakalaka, which rises up from the kitchen of the good mother downstairs, who keeps her windows open, so at the very least I will have some hope to fill my empty belly. What was left of my stipend from The Mission has run dry and for weeks I have been walking around Cape Town like an omen. I wonder if Mahmoud can feel my ribs as he rubs his hands across my torso. I feel conscious of how thin I have become. He smiles and presses his body close to mine, mouthing something new into my ear that I can’t quite understand. I don’t know how to respond when people confess to a death like this, so I kiss him. I can’t tell which thing he is lying about, but I let him pull me in close, just in case. On the neon-lit dance floor of Beefcakes, a Sudanese man named Mahmoud, who is six foot four and smells of Shisa nyama and coconut oil, tells me that his father was murdered by the Janjaweed militia and that I have a really nice ass. Alexander Anthony Lopez Paradise Underground
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