A Kiss to Build a Dream On
by Cynthia Gómez
She is a writer and researcher. She writes horror and other types of speculative fiction, set primarily in Oakland, where she makes her home. She has a particular love for themes of revenge, retribution, and resistance to oppression. She has stories in The Acentos Review, Strange Horizons, the collections Antifa Splatterpunk, Bag of Bones: 206-Word Stories, and Volume Two of the Split Scream novelette series. You can find her on Twitter at @cynthiasaysboo.
Eddie knew it was a mistake to have left the drag show without changing his clothes. He’d been distracted, eyes glued on the beautiful young man with the lush mouth he’d been eyeing from the bar where Eddie sat on a stool, sipping his virgin Mai Tai. He’d felt the name of the drink stain his mouth and cheeks like a blush, as if it were announcing his status to every soul in the bar. Like Eddie, the slim young man was only half watching the show, and then he had finished his Old-Fashioned and slipped out the front door.
Eddie had followed, thinking only to watch him from a distance, just for a block or two. The tailored suit was dipping in and out of the patches of light from the doorways, neatly camouflaged, ready to step onto a streetcar and blend in with the late-night crowd. Then Eddie glanced down Telegraph, to where it met Broadway, and he saw them: two cops, leaning on a squad car, hatted and bored and looking for just the right kind of target. The young man must have seen them; the linen suit and shiny shoes were gone, headed down 17th.
Eddie felt his blood thump in his veins, felt his silky blouse stuck to him like a pink flag, the bulls practically pawing the ground in front of their car. His light jacket was hanging neatly on a coat rack inside Lola’s, and if he went back now he would lead the bulls straight there.
And then there it was, just in time, next to a shuttered bookshop: an arched doorway and a storefront that he could have sworn had been dark when he’d walked by just an hour before, the door swinging open and lights blinking weak and pale. He ducked inside, and a clerk in a flowered headscarf was straightening a display in dusty glass.
“Welcome! What can I find for you?”
“Yes, I need …” Eddie’s voice, the panic beginning to drain away, sounded too loud for this dusty place.. This clerk could have fit right in at Lola’s, Eddie was sure: the voice hovered somewhere between a man’s and a woman’s, and those thick eyelashes and rosy lips seemed to point in one direction, while the muscles straining at the arms of the silk shirt were arguing for quite another. The clerk’s eyes were a shade of dark gray, like the pavement after a rain, and the light seemed to follow the flowery scarf as the clerk slipped out from behind the counter. The place felt swirly and dim, a narrow space between here and somewhere else
“A jacket, perhaps?” And the clerk opened a beautiful Art Deco armoire and took out something in rich black cloth, slipping it over Eddie’s arms and buttoning it over his thin raspberry blouse, nearly smothering the bright pink. He’d been sure it would be too large for him, but the fit was perfect, like an embrace.
“And now of course a tie … ” Something silky caressed Eddie’s neck, the same gray color as those rainy eyes, and now the pink could barely be seen. The clerk smiled and tucked the brightness further behind the gray folds. “Don’t worry; it’s still there. Glad to help out; is it Mr. ….?”
“Eduardo.” Fascinating. Eddie’s family were the only ones who called him that, the ones who saw him before he combed his curls into a neat wave and shined his Florsheim shoes to a punishing gloss. But they never saw him when he dusted his eyelids with glimmering powder in tight canisters and brought his pounding heart into places like Lola’s, or the Hilltop Bar on MacArthur, where he would glance at beautiful men he couldn’t summon up the nerve to approach. Tonight was the closest he’d ever got to anyone, and look where that had led. He felt the stain of his lips, pale tan, aching with having never been kissed.
“You need just one more … a hat, perhaps?” And there at the clerk’s side in the swirly light was a hat tree, tall and tarnished copper, women’s and men’s styles all jumbled together in a wave of colors, from bright to dim. The second from the top fairly leapt into Eddie’s hand, a green deeper than forest and soft as new ferns.
“There. May these serve you well and see you safely home. Hope to see you again, Mr. Eduardo.” The door swung open to a tinkle of bells and Eddie was back under the streetlights, tipping the forest-colored hat as he walked past and just caught up to a streetcar. He realized only after the car pulled away that the clerk had never asked for any money.
All that week Eddie found himself opening up the closet where he’d stashed the black jacket, marveling at the skill in its stitching, the sleek fabric finer than anything he’d ever owned. He thought to wear it to dinner with Melinda on Friday, but when he stretched it out on his bed the slippery fabric slid straight to the floor, and he picked it up but it slid directly back. As he held it up again he caught a whiff of a strange smell he hadn’t noticed before: a ghost of mildew, despite how pristinely clean he kept his closet. There was no time to air it out; he was already late to meet her, as he usually was.
When he got home that night, good and early – she’d blinked slowly when he said his stubborn headache had returned, and had been utterly silent in the taxi – he found himself standing at the entrance to the closet again, and pulling the sleek cloth from the hanger, this time not a hint of mold. Instead what came through was a faint whiff of bourbon and orange peel – both found in the Old Fashioned that the lovely young man had been sipping – and Eddie pulled the jacket’s arms around himself to breathe the richness all the way in.
Eddie’s parents both worked swing shifts at the Mother’s Cookies factory (no one lacked for sweets in the Murillo household). His cousin Lili was out on a date and his older brother Tomás had been killed at the Battle of Midway. So there was nobody home to see Eddie’s thin fingers start the ancient Victrola, and nobody to see his shining shoes glide across the worn linoleum of the kitchen floor, draped in the arms of the jacket that smelled of the lovely man, while Bessie sang about the sugar she wanted in her bowl.
The doors were quiet for once as he slipped through them, the floorboards calm and mute as his feet rattled the steps. The knot of the tie had almost tied itself, when ties had always vexed his fingers terribly; it puffed up as if in pride at his neck, a fussy, silky little thing; and the jacket hugged his chest, the scent of orange peel in the air, as he ran for the bus that would take him downtown.
He thought to pass by the shop on his way – how had he failed to catch its name? – and see if the dapper clerk would accept any money, but the only arched doorway on the block was shrouded in a metal grate, the windows covered in boards thick with what had to be almost three years’ worth of dust: a gap between the boards showed a stack of yellowing newspapers, headlines praising the storming of the beaches at Normandy. Perhaps the store had been one block over? Eddie knew that his nerves could be easily rattled and that sometimes this affected his memory, but he was still unsettled at the lapse. The tie’s knot felt tighter as he passed the dark doorway and the feeling did not ebb until he had passed through a set of double doors and down a winding hallway to a back room, and finally through a heavy metal door to Lola’s.
Something was different, and it wasn’t just the crowd; more women than the last time Eddie had been here (a poster advertised a Drag King show at 9). It might have been the lights catching off the perfectly tied little knot, or the way his jacket slid aside effortlessly to show his cranberry blouse, but as he sat at the end of the bar and glanced at the crowd in little sips, a few pairs of eyes glanced back. And instead of dropping his eyes instantly, Eddie found himself holding their gazes for a heartbeat, even two, every one of them spreading a warmth through his chest and up to his throat, warming the fussy knot of the tie. He slipped through the crowd and fed the jukebox a dime, and all three records were the swingy songs he loved: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, the Boswell Sisters.
“I thought I was the only one here who played that old-fashioned stuff.”
The voice was low and smooth and right at Eddie’s ear, and it belonged to the beautiful young man in a linen suit, that same lush mouth in a smile so beautiful Eddie actually found himself catching his breath. That smile was shy and open, and a tiny bit sly underneath. His eyes, now that Eddie could finally see them up close, were somewhere between hazel and green. The color was arresting against the richness of his brown skin, a shade or two darker than Eddie’s.
St. Elizabeth’s High had been a long time ago, yet as Eddie stood in front of the linen suit every bit of those seven years slid away, and there was his tongue feeling twisted in a knot the way it had for nearly every day of those four years, and the blood rushed hot to his cheeks.
“I just like them,” Eddie stammered, hating the words as they stumbled out of his mouth. What a smooth way to feed a conversation.
But there was that smile again, the young man’s graceful hands sliding over the smooth glass surface where the record spun, the piano notes in time with the thumping of Eddie’s own heart.
“I love this record. My landlady complains when I play it late at night, but” – and here the young man lowered his voice, leaning in closer to Eddie – “I can sometimes hear her dancing to it in her kitchen.”
Eddie imagined the sweet freedom of a room rented from a stranger, and remembered his own solo dance in the kitchen, Bessie Smith singing about steam on her clothes, and the smile that took over his own face was like a dam breaking. In response, the man extended a hand.
“My name is Lawrence, and … would you like to dance?”
This couldn’t be real. Eddie must have stumbled into a dream days before, perhaps when he stepped into the arched doorway and the dimly lit store just inside. Any moment now he would wake up to find himself alone in his narrow bed, his new radio alarm clock waking him in time to spend all day in the City Clerk’s office, typing up neat columns of numbers, eating his sandwich on whole wheat, precisely at noon. “My name’s Eduardo, but everyone calls me Eddie.”
“What shall I call you?”
Oh, yes. A dream was exactly what this was. Eddie could even hear it in the song, as Louis Armstrong crooned about kisses to build a dream on. Well then, let this be a dream, a dream where Eddie extended his hand to a beautiful young man and let the young man pull him into a dance.
It was everything Eddie had ever imagined it would be. The faint smell of sweat coming from Lawrence, the muscles of his back under Eddie’s hands, his mouth lush and wet and so close Eddie could feel his warm breath. No more dancing with the empty air, trying to imagine what this moment might be like, the moment he was living right now.
The song was just reaching Eddie’s favorite part, the trumpet soaring joyful and high, the drumbeats building in time; but Eddie began to hear murmuring around him, and a few dancing arms dropped to their sides, eyes darting to the back of the room. He turned and a pink-faced, sweaty man pushed his way up to the bar and shouted something into Lola’s ear.
Lola sprang into action as if it were a well-practiced ballet. She pushed firmly through the crowd and cut off the jukebox with a yank of the cord. The bartender propped open the swinging doors that led to the hallway and opened a janitor’s closet to reveal a door to an alley. The crowd swelled out of the doors, clip-on earrings disappearing into coat pockets, rouge disappearing onto handkerchiefs, jackets buttoning over bright, jeweled tones.
“Get home safely! We’ll be back together soon,” Lola shouted over the noise, which was not the panicked rush Eddie might have imagined; this was hurried but calm, and he wondered that he wasn’t more afraid as he buttoned the jacket over his blouse and yanked his forest-green hat off the hook.
Lawrence grabbed Eddie’s hand and said into his ear, “Will you be alright?”
Eddie had never been closer to another man in his life. He was tempted to say no, to hold onto Lawrence’s hand and follow him out, but he had no idea what might come next. So he only nodded and watched Lawrence step out through the janitor’s closet door. Before Lawrence disappeared he turned back and called out to Eddie.
“Come back tomorrow night. Please.”
Eddie took the other way out, through the hallway and back out on Telegraph, finding at his elbow two women in matching suits hurriedly slipping on pairs of clip-on earrings and smearing on a layer of green shadow. The cop cars were just turning down the block, sirens still quiet, lights dark, and Eddie offered up his arm to the woman closest to him. Nothing to see here. A nice young couple and their friend out for the evening, perfectly normal. Three or four storefronts down, next to a bookshop closed for the night, Eddie saw an arched doorway, the lights shining bright and clear, and a door that opened wide for the three of them, and a smiling clerk in a shirt of robin’s egg blue.
“Good to see you, Mr. Eduardo! And these must be your charming friends. I’m glad to help you once again. I forgot my manners last time. Please, call me Leslie.”
Leslie shut the door with a firm click and made sure the shades were pulled thoroughly down before ushering the women to a display of head coverings: cloche and pillbox and bonnet hats, scarves and snoods in bright scarlet and chartreuse, cloth flowers that could be pinned at a collar or clipped to a bun.
“Remember, friends: three articles of clothing each, from anything in this part of the store,” Leslie told the two women, ignoring the questions dancing across Eddie’s face and instead laying out a display of gloves, layer after layer in a rainbow of colors Eddie had never seen in leather: peacock blue, gleaming plum, a white like the neck of a dove.
“That one.” Eddie pointed to the very last pair, black leather fine and shining and impossibly slim. Leslie glanced at the array of colors and said nothing, sliding the pair out from where they hid, snipping a price tag away from the wristband.
“For you, Mr. Eduardo, I will ask $1.05. Young men should save their earnings for worthier things.” The silk shirt was a loose fit, but Eddie could still see the muscles under the robin’s egg blue, nearly the same shade as Leslie’s glittering eyeshadow, impeccably applied.
Eddie slid a bill and a quarter across the counter and waved away the change.
“Do you have a card? I’d love to come back to your shop when I have … more time to browse.”
“My hours vary, Mr. Eduardo. I’m sure you understand. But when I am needed, I am always here.” Eddie thought to ask further, but he didn’t know how to without being rude. Anyway, “not everything needs explaining” was one of his mother’s favorite phrases.
All the next day, as Eddie helped his mother with the breakfast dishes, as he and his father repotted an assortment of spearmint and aloe while his mother wrung out the laundry, he was remembering the feel of Lawrence’s hands, the joyful swaying as they danced, the gleaming cop cars at the end of the street. When his mother asked him to help fold the laundry that afternoon he knew something was on her mind; Lili, who’d been staying with them temporarily for nearly four years, was always the one she pestered for this chore.
His mother waited to speak until they were folding the quilts, a simple two-step dance that Eddie secretly loved.
“Liliana told me that you aren’t going with Melinda any more.” He had sent off his letter to Melinda only that morning--couldn’t his cousin have kept it to herself for even a day? He was glad he’d never told Lili where he went at night, to say nothing of last night’s almost-raid.
“I had hoped you could tell me yourself.”
“I didn’t want to worry you, Mother.”
The truth was that as long as there was a Melinda, there were fewer questions. She was better as a costume, like a jacket that covered a feminine blouse.
Except perhaps not like it at all.
“I hope I’m not stepping out of turn, but you didn’t seem terribly excited about her.”
“I’ll find someone else.” The quilt had patches of little yellow flowers, cheerful in the chill of the afternoon.
“Eduardo, you know that of course I want you to get married. Naturally, I want grandchildren to love.” He didn’t need to ask her if she was thinking of Tomás. He knew by the dip in her voice, the way the quilt slacked in her hands. When the War Department telegram came she’d collapsed right there in the doorway, as if she’d had no bones at all.
“I’ve never told you this, but when I was a young woman in El Paso, before I met your father, there was a man everyone expected me to marry. He was kind and honest and he cared for me, but he wasn’t the right man for me, no matter how hard I tried to pretend that he was.”
Eddie was very glad for the sound of the ice vendor making his way up their street; it gave him an excuse to turn his gaze away from hers.
“When did you realize that you were pretending?” Eddie’s eyes stayed on the departing iceman, his hands gripping the quilt.
“There was a night I was getting dressed for dinner with him and I imagined myself dressing up for our wedding, and nothing about it gave me any joy. And you know how much I have always loved to dress up. It’s such a fun thing when it’s… when it’s for someone we care for.” Her eyes met his and for a second he imagined she knew how often he slid her faux pearl earrings out of her jewelry box, always putting them back before she got home. Then she turned back to the quilt, and he could breathe. Surely she didn’t know.
“I still have no idea where I got the courage to call it off. He had money, you see, and we needed it. The store was barely breaking even. I was like you; I couldn’t stand to let anyone down, and I knew my parents would be very badly disappointed if I didn’t marry him. And they were. They didn’t answer my letters for years.” She slumped down onto their wooden bench, almost as if she had forgotten she was still holding her end of the quilt, the bright little flowers still in Eddie’s hands.
“When you and Tomás were born, I swore I would never repeat my parents’ mistake. I know I can’t protect you from everything” – and Eddie watched her right hand steal up to Tomás’ dog tags, which never left her neck – “but know that I am always your mother, no matter whether you give me grandchildren or not.”
She set the quilt into the basket with all the rest, and before she turned and carried it into the house she pulled a little envelope out of her apron pocket. She fumbled in a way that was so unlike her, nearly dropping it before she placed it in Eddie’s hand. It held a pair of her earrings, her faux pearl clip-ons, the ones he had borrowed so many times. As she squeezed his hands over them, he wished that he could memorize her face in that moment, the warring emotions written across it, so that he might untangle someday what they meant. She patted his shoulder, like she might do for a small child.
“Remember, Eduardo: pretending doesn’t work forever.”
Something in Eddie wanted to tell Lawrence all about the conversation with his mother, to determine what she was really trying to say, but when he walked into Lola’s that night, Lawrence leaning against the jukebox and holding out to Eddie a single red rose, he forgot all about it.
While Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holiday sang out from the jukebox, Lawrence swung the two of them around the tiny dance floor and Eddie’s clumsy tongue could rest and let the deep voice rumble along. Lawrence loved swing music, bourbon, and his job driving the Number 7 streetcar (“it goes from the Berkeley Hills to the snootier Berkeley Hills,” Lawrence said with a wry grin). Eddie didn’t ask him about what everyone already knew: that the streetcar lines would be shut down by the end of the year, turned into buses instead. The songs kept growing faster in tempo, like a challenge, and the two of them met every one: Eddie’s hands and his mouth might be clumsy and shy, but never his dancing feet. It was after two Cab Calloway songs that Lawrence leaned in, his hand on the small of Eddie’s back, to ask if perhaps Eddie was warm, and they might walk out for some fresh air?
The fog had rolled in while they had been dancing, and Eddie wrapped a scarf around his black jacket and slipped the leather gloves from his pocket.
Then they were standing in front of a little alley, one that Eddie had passed by before without a thought, and Lawrence was pulling them both into it, where it was almost too dark to see the smile take over Lawrence’s face as he gently—so gently—ran a single finger over Eddie’s cheek, over Eddie’s trembling lips.
The alley was flanked with windows, dark and smeared over with dust, nobody inside to look down and see Eddie’s eyelashes flutter as Lawrence reached out a hand to encircle his waist, nobody to hear the gasp of joy from Eddie’s mouth as the soft fingers pushed aside his jacket and the olive green of Eddie’s blouse to slide along Eddie’s ribcage, sending his blood rushing as Lawrence pulled him in for a kiss. Nothing, not the clearest water in the world, had ever tasted as sweet and fresh as this. Lawrence’s hands reached for Eddie’s, those weak things that had never before known what to do, and now Eddie’s gloved hand was pressed against Lawrence’s beating heart, and the feel of it was hot and electric, and he had never understood in his life how someone could actually do something that was both danger and peace in the same breath, in the same hungry kiss. Until this.
“Awwwww, ain’t this disgusting.”
The lights slid across their bodies, the headlights of the car neither of them had heard approaching, the cop car pulling into the alley, doors opening wide, blocking their way out. There they were, the bulls: their eyes practically glowing in the dim light, their nostrils wide with anger and disgust.
Lawrence was already pulling away, his arm stretched protectively in front of Eddie’s chest, and perhaps this was what so angered the cops, because it was Lawrence that they both swarmed on, pushing him up against the same wall that Eddie only a few seconds before would have called a magical place. The taller cop’s fist met Lawrence’s mouth, that beautiful mouth, and Eddie knew his own was next, and he knew that to the bulls pawing the ground in front of him every bit of his body, his very self, was a silky flag waving, waiting to be stained in red.
That was when the hat tightened on Eddie’s head, and the jacket’s buttons opened, all of a piece, freeing up Eddie’s racing heart, and Eddie could feel the gloves heat up against his hands, those things that all Eddie’s life had been gentle and meek.
Eddie’s gloved right hand reached out and pulled the shorter cop off of Lawrence and swung the cop onto the brick wall. The cop’s hands were already taut and poised to strike, and so they braced him as he slammed into the dirty brick, and the wall only shredded his pink knuckles, instead of perhaps snapping them, and only two of his snarling teeth popped out of his mouth and onto the ground. The taller one was already reaching for his gun, but the black gloves were quicker and against the warm leather the shiny metal shattered in pieces on the ground. The cop pulled out his own fist, still swollen from the work of beating Lawrence, and swung it towards Eddie’s chest, but the instant it touched the fine stitching, the empty alley echoed with a high-pitched scream, a cheated howl, and the hand erupted in a fine mesh of red. The jacket’s fabric had scraped away a layer of skin. Blood ran down the policeman’s hand and onto his nails, and he looked like he’d just visited one of the fussy little salons that Lola’s performers loved.
The shorter cop was fumbling at the clunky hand-held radio at his belt, but Eddie’s gloved hands grabbed the crackling thing and smashed it into a heap of metal at the policeman’s feet. Eddie wasn’t even breathing hard. The knot of fear that forever coiled inside his chest had disappeared, and in its place was hot rage, from all the times he’d had to cover up parts of himself, at having to hide whenever the bulls drew near, his fury at them for fouling the sweetest moment he’d ever known. It had all tightened into a leather fist, had poured from his chest and into the woven cloth.
May these serve you well, Leslie had said.
The shorter cop was now scrabbling, his scraped hands reaching for the police radio in the car, and Eddie’s black-gloved hands were steady as they closed over it, cutting off the crackle and static that might summon more punishing fists, and then they slipped over the shiny metal until what sang out was something altogether different.
Nobody was standing at the dirty windows to see a brown-skinned man and his gloved black hands picking up two cops, one taller than the other, and standing them both upright and facing each other. Nobody saw the gloves press a set of raw knuckles around a uniformed waist and lock a dripping red palm around one scraped pink and white, an embrace that would not release, no matter how much the two cops pulled and strained to escape. Nobody saw their eyes widen like a trapped animal’s, or their mouths open with an angry roar that Eddie pressed into silence with the touch of his glove. Nobody saw their kicking feet begin to dance to the boogie-woogie now blaring out from the police radio: the Boswell Sisters, their sugary voices in perfect harmony singing “Cheek to Cheek,” while the feet had to dance and dance, and the hands had to hold each other, and the two bloodied bodies swayed to the tune.
Only the walls and the windows saw Eddie pull a frozen Lawrence from where he had stood utterly still watching the impossible, and stumble with him past the cop car’s open door. Eddie took a breath to say something, though he had no idea what, and Lawrence kissed his open mouth, a short spark, a flash.
“We were never here,” Lawrence said, his lips already beginning to swell.
“And this never happened,” Eddie finished, as if supplying the lyrics to a familiar song, and they headed along an empty Telegraph Avenue to catch the streetcar—the streetcar that would shut down at the end of the year, the bright metal sawed into pieces and turned into scrap. They passed the closed bookshop and next to it a window display covered in dust. The arched door was shut but ready to swing open again, the lights ready to wink on, whenever they were needed.
Eddie pulled off the black gloves so he could feel the heat of Lawrence’s hand against his own, and the two of them moved along under the glowing streetlights. They left behind them two terrified dancers, their feet waltzing and tangoing and swinging all night, in a puddle of the blood they’d shed.
Author’s note: there was no bar in Oakland in the late 1940s called Lola’s; the only two gay bars that I could identify that operated in that time period were the White Horse in Berkeley and the Hilltop Bar in East Oakland, which opened sometime in the 1950s. Lola’s is an invention for the purpose of this story, very loosely based on the real Mona’s in San Francisco’s North Beach, which opened in 1936.
