June 1989, 25 years old
Dallas, Texas
KRISSIE
The very first one. We’re in the back of a pickup truck on the night we met, on our way to a Texas Gay Pride dance at the rodeo fairgrounds. She is smiling hugely, deep dimples like dark commas on her face. She is holding a cigar triumphantly up in the air, like the horse she bet on just won against all odds.
We’re wearing purple GLTF (Gay & Lesbian Task Force) t-shirts from the national library association’s conference. It looks good on her but mine is way too tight. I look like I can hardly breathe.
It happens so fast. We’re at the gay and lesbian conference social when this local guy comes in and invites us to a dance. Transportation provided, he says. I think he means a shuttle bus is waiting. But when we go outside, he says hop in the back, y’all. Everyone else is doing it, so I take a deep breath and get in. Alondra sits next to me.
It’s my first ride in the bed of a pickup truck; it feels so dangerous. No seat belts. My arms reach for something solid to hold on to, but I find only other loose bodies bouncing along with mine. If the driver has to make a sudden stop, we’ll all be thrown out into oncoming traffic. We’re so exposed, in the open air like this. What if a kid with a rifle shoots at us from an overpass? What if we’re set upon by a mob of Christians? What if cops pull us over to harass us?
Aiieeee, she yells out into the night, a kid on a joyride.
ALONDRA
She’s so scared of everything. That we’ll get pulled over for riding in the back of a pickup truck. Is that legal? she asks. I laugh. In Puerto Rico we do whatever we want. There are no rules. People build houses with no permits or plans, on land they have no deeds to. When you want to pull over for a picnic, you don’t look for a sign giving you permission. Official picnic spot, that’s so American. If you want to camp out in PR, you put up a tent, that’s it. You don’t pay someone for a numbered spot like they do in this country.
She’s scared of letting someone she doesn’t know drive her around. Come on, I say. It’s a fellow librarian, a gay guy. We’re family.
She’s scared of landing in a leather bar where fights break out. Scared of having to watch men fisting or other kinky sex stuff.
Instead we are watching men dressed in leather dance gracefully in a circle, two-stepping with delicacy and perfection, like synchronized swimmers. They take it seriously, these beautiful men with their big muscles showing, naked under their leather chaps and vests. After the men show us how it’s done, they break up their precise dance and hold out their hands to us. It’s a gracious offer. They’ll teach anyone who wants to learn.
I go out onto the rodeo ring dance floor to two-step with them. It’s not so different from dancing in PR. We dance everywhere there—on the sidewalks, in backyards, in schools, in cafes, in church basements. In California too, we go out dancing wherever there’s our kind of music--salsa, merengue, cha-cha, bomba, music that makes you happy, music that brings everyone, even grandmas and toddlers, to their feet.
Krissie watches from the sidelines, leaning on the rodeo ring’s wooden fence rail. She refuses the hand of the man who holds it out to her. He shrugs, smiles, goes on to try again with another librarian, a woman who towers over him, but who is game.
How did she get so fearful, so closed-up? But she did come out of the closet and she’s here, so she must have opened the door to a better life at least a crack.
The men are so gorgeous and strange. How do they survive Texas? How do they gather together and dance while surrounded by people with guns and Christians who think they’re the devil? Maybe they bring their own guns. Maybe they refuse to be chased off to gay ghettos in San Francisco and New York City. Maybe some of them marry women and leave them at home to come out on a Saturday night, dress up in leather, and dance the night away with other men.
How will we get back to the hotel, she worries. It’s the Dallas fairgrounds, not the ends of the earth, I say. I am full of this experience, the exotic strange place I’ve landed in. I want to enjoy the here and now, I don’t want to worry about later. But I do want to take care of her.
I’ll get you home, I tell her. And I see her relax a tiny bit. This is how our friendship starts. She trusts me. So I have to come through for her.
I hear Spanish being spoken by a group of men nearby, drinking Lone Star beer from bottles. I go over, light up my cigar, speak Spanish to them, of course—compliment their outfits, the party, ask them where they’re from, joke with them about the wild and crazy librarians who crashed their party. When they are all laughing and talking, I ask where are the lesbians? Don’t women two-step together in Texas?
They have their own parties, they say.
Where? Maybe we’ll crash that one too. I’m joking, but they take me seriously.
We don’t know where. Sorry, sorry, we don’t know. They are so apologetic for being bad hosts. This country hospitality thing is real. It’s time to ask about calling a cab.
No no, you don’t need to take a cab. You’re our guests. We’ll drive you back to your hotel, the guys say. We’re still speaking Spanish.
Are you sure it’s no trouble?
We take care of each other, the guys say. We’re all brothers and sisters here tonight.
So that’s how I get Krissie home, another ride in a pickup truck but this time in the back seat, properly buckled up. We listen to loud Mexican music, with the leather guy and me singing along.
She has to listen to us speak Spanish the whole way home. It’s the least I can do for the driver, a courtly young guy who makes me laugh. I ask him how it is for gay men in Dallas and he tells me funny stories about closeted cops and judges, some of them dancing with us tonight. He says there is a priest there who comes out every Saturday night and says Mass the next morning at 8 a.m., sometimes not even having time to take a shower to wash off the night’s sins before giving Holy Communion. If there’s a bad side to being a gay man in a macho culture like Texas, he doesn’t speak of it. Which is fine with me. It’s a night for fun.
KRISSIE
She goes on and on in Spanish with him, shutting me out. It’s so rude. I cannot believe they keep it up. They both speak English. Why are they rubbing my face in the fact I speak only English and a little high school French? I feel stupid enough without them rubbing it in.
And the laughing. The constant laughing. Is every story so hilarious? Does every sentence require a laugh response?
It’s like being in another country. Which I can only imagine for now but I want so bad I can feel it rolling around in my chest.
He gets us back to the hotel. I hop out quickly and wave my thank you. I don’t say muchas gracias because I’m afraid I’ll say it wrong and sound even more stupid than they already think I am. The driver is so nice, he smiles back and waves. But she doesn’t jump out. The talking continues, the laughing continues, the conversation goes on and on and on while I stand on the sidewalk waiting.
Finally she gets out, leans in his window, and then—incredibly—keeps on talking and laughing. Doesn’t she know he wants to go home? I wish I had the nerve to pull her away. How terrible to inconvenience him this way.
Finally she steps back and he drives away, tooting his horn and waving. What was all that about? I ask.
When you learn Spanish, you can join in. He was telling me about how it is to be gay in Dallas. He told me a bunch of great stories.
I feel bad. We kept him for so long. It was supposed to be a quick drop off, I say.
You don’t know how we are. It would be so rude to treat him like a cab driver. We are courteous to each other. We talk and listen. We connect, she says. She is making me feel like I don’t measure up, like I don’t act right, like I don’t know how to behave in a situation like this.
It is a long confusing night. I liked watching the dancing. I felt like I was in a movie. But it is ending strangely. She’s looking at me like she’s somehow in charge now, like she has the upper hand. That feels bad to me. I don’t know what to think of the night, or of her—my new friend.
It is not a good start to a friendship.
December 1990, 26 years old
Taos, New Mexico
ALONDRA
It is snowing on my head; my mouth is open to taste the flakes. We’re in an outdoor hot tub at nighttime, mist from the tub rising around our faces. The air is full of piñon pine burning in chimineas. Even my nose is happy.
This is my first snow, I tell Krissie. Her eyes open wide.
But you’ve been everywhere, she says.
I don’t go where it’s cold, I say.
But you came here in December, why? she asks.
Because my friend said use my timeshare in Taos before the end of the year and invite a friend. Because I’ve never been here. But mostly because you said yes, I say.
Another question hangs in the air like steam from the water.
She moves far away from me. I wish my girlfriend was here, she says. She’d like this.
Pendejo, I think but do not say out loud. Stupid of me to think that’s what this is. Sex is too easy. She’s right; this is not that.
KRISSIE
I don’t want her that way.
It is so quiet I swear I can hear the snowflakes landing on me.
ALONDRA
It doesn’t matter. I take shots, that’s what I do. I don’t think Should I pursue this woman or that woman? Is this a good idea? I don’t think Is she my kind of woman? Every woman might be my kind of woman. Every day might be my last. This might be the only night in my life I get to taste snowflakes on my tongue.
The clouds move away.
Mira, I say, pointing. The mountains came back. You know what they are called? Those are Sangre de Cristo, the Blood of Christ mountains.
She is silent, looking. I don’t know what she is thinking.
Then she jumps out of the hot tub, screams at the shock of the cold air, runs in to pour red wine for us and races back into the hot water, sloshing wine on the deck.
Blood of Christ, she toasts the mountains, raising her glass high.
I toast the mountains, I toast her, I toast us.
September 1991, 27 years old
Location unclear
KRISSIE
My hair is dyed blonde, permed into clown hair, puffed up big and hideously curly. I’m wearing huge red glasses, hot pink dangling earrings, a baggy green sweatshirt, khaki shorts, and stark white tennis shoes. I look mismatched and confused, like a child playing dress-up with random clothes off a thrift store rack. Alondra is wearing sunglasses, a Panama hat, a black-and-white checked shirt, and black shorts. She looks cool and chic.
She is grabbing me around the waist and lifting me off the ground with a big hug. I have one leg kicked up high in the air. I am curling one arm around her neck, holding on. I am laughing with my mouth open. It looks like she’s saying no, you can’t go, I’m keeping you here with me. I’m laughing at the surprise of it all.
What is unknown—where we are, what trip we are on, whether we are saying hello or goodbye.
What is known—we are now very comfortable with each other.
We go from unknown to known very quickly. We go from new friends to best friends very quickly. After the Taos trip, it happens on the phone.
Our calls are a lifeline between us, stretching cross country, full of hours of talking and laughing late into the night. She tells me anything that goes on in her life, like how she created an international incident in her family simply by going to the bathroom. Her cousin was visiting from PR with her five-year-old son. Alondra says to the cousin, you go out shopping, I’ll take him down to the beach behind my condo. How her cousin is overprotective of her son and how Alondra leaves the kid on the beach when she goes upstairs to the bathroom and how nothing happened, no bad man snatched him, but the cousin found out and took a fit. How the cousin was so mad she left two days early. How the kid didn’t even get to go to Disneyland. How the whole tale was relayed by telephone to relatives on the island and in California within five minutes. The cousin calls her mother, her mother calls Alondra’s mother, they both call Alondra, everyone is all involved and taking sides. You can do that in PR, but not in California, they say. The kid speaks English, what’s the problem? Alondra says. It’s not safe. Too many criminals. You put him in terrible danger, the mother and aunt say.
When Alondra tells me the story, she imitates her aunt and her mother, her cousin, the kid. It becomes a whole comic soap opera with shrieking and gesticulating.
I listen to her story unwind in my ear. She says it’s all about them letting me know they know more than me. They say I’m not a mother; I don’t know how to safeguard a kid. They say I have all these advanced degrees, but I can’t watch a kid for five minutes. They say I have a big fancy job managing international corporate libraries and a condo on the beach, but I have no idea of how to live right.
I think you know how to live right, I say.
We always say I love you now when we hang up. Not love you. It’s more serious, takes up more time, means more. In case I never see her again. In case she is hit by a car. In case she is smashed in an earthquake.
ALONDRA
I lift her up in the air to make her laugh. I know what she needs better than she does. She’s so hard and walled-off. Every time I make her laugh, I put a crack in that wall. I wish she would drink tequila with me when we see each other, that always helps soften women up. But she’s afraid of drinking too much, of losing that tight control. Instead we talk together every chance we get.
She tells me stories of the library ladies she works with who fight with each other in the break room, stories about her neighbors who hate trees because they make too many leaves, stories about her friends’ breakups and affairs. Nothing much about her family. It’s a huge Catholic family, nine brothers and sisters, all with kids. But she keeps away from them mostly.
That girlfriend she lives with. Together since high school. I don’t think it’s too good between them. She doesn’t say much about her.
She says she loves her house. How when she hangs laundry on the backyard clothesline, it makes her happy all day. How she loves her little 1950s kitchen, how her kittens climb on the kitchen table to look out the back window at the leaves flying in the wind. She tells me what she’s reading. She tells me where she wants to travel someday.
Money is tight for them. She doesn’t make much working in a small-town New Jersey public library. I get the impression her girlfriend spends it all and then some. Once she told me her girlfriend took their car into the dealer for a small repair and came home with a brand-new car just when the old one was almost paid off. So no trips for her anytime soon.
She gets a second job she can do at home, indexing the city paper. She tags news stories with subjects like Homicide, Burglary, Rape. The obituaries take forever to index because you have to type each relative’s name into the database, not just the dead person’s. To do a perfect job of indexing takes hours every night, and she’s a perfectionist. She has it in her head that years from now, someone may really need that homicide story or that obituary and her index will be the only way they can possibly find it. She works very late many nights, so tired she cries while she works. But that’s her extra money, her trip money—so she keeps at it.
I tell her you better keep that money separate, girl. You have your own account, right? She says oh no, we have all our money together. I say that’s a very bad idea.
She doesn’t want to hear it. She’d never take money from me, she says.
You know how this old story turns out, right? Her girlfriend runs off with another woman and buys her new girlfriend a diamond ring and a trip to Jamaica—with Krissie’s credit cards. And when Krissie goes to the bank and to a lawyer about it, they all say too bad, it’s your responsibility. Your name was on that account. If she won’t pay, you have to pay those bills.
Krissie, mi amor, you need to listen to me. You’re like a baby wandering the world without a clue.
April 1993, 29 years old
March on Washington DC for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights
KRISSIE
We are sitting on the concrete steps of an ornate building, Alondra on the top step and me below her, watching the massive march go by, surrounded by people cheering on the marchers. I wear rainbow earrings under a new crewcut that makes me look like my oldest brother—the nice one. I’m holding a noisemaker. She has her legs wrapped around me and I am uncomfortable. She’s smoking a cigarette, looking straight ahead and blowing smoke out at whoever is taking the picture. I am looking off to the side, frowning.
People around us are paying us no attention. A woman is holding up a hand-decorated sign. A man with a fanny pack around his waist is standing behind us. A woman next to us squats on her haunches talking intently to a man wearing white socks and black shoes.
Alondra is always putting her body too close to mine in public. I feel crabby with her a lot because of things like this. She teases too much. She touches too much. She has an opinion on everything in my life, even my hair. My hair is too butch, she says. My lover likes my hair, I say.
Where are my lovers in all these pictures? Why am I always off on my own with her?
ALONDRA
She is always off on her own with me. The Queen of Serial Monogamy, she leaves her lovers at home and comes traveling whenever I invite her to. I do the same. I am always dating women who have no money, who are just scraping by. So I save my vacation days and fun money for Krissie and me. She does too.
Krissie and I talk about everything. How to live in this world. What we believe about relationships. What is funny in life, what is terrible to bear. How she watched her mother die. How I watched my father die. What we need to do before we die. All this philosophizing, I love it so much. I don’t talk like this with my lovers and exes. They expect me to be practical, to make decisions, to run the show.
I tell Krissie about my ex who went from California to Colombia to go to her mother’s funeral after having not seen her for 20 years. She went all that way to South America and then refused to go to the funeral after all. On the phone when she told me this, I said no, you must go, you’ll regret it every day of the rest of your life.
You always order her around, Krissie says. You’re not even together anymore and you’re still bossing her around. That’s her decision. You have no say in this.
Krissie sounds mad at me. She doesn’t understand.
I am only saying what I think, I say.
Who asked you? You should keep out of your ex’s business, she says.
But I tell her for her own good. Who doesn’t go to their Mami’s funeral?
Someone whose mother abused them, she says.
Everyone is abused by their mothers in some way. You told me your mother used to wake you up out of sound sleep screaming at you, accusing you of lying, calling you stupid and lazy. You told me she hit your sister, the fragile one who hardly spoke because she was so afraid of your mother.
My mother was mentally ill. She wasn’t in her right mind sometimes, she says.
I don’t care what you say. It’s not acceptable to miss your mother’s funeral.
You are not the boss of your ex. As much as you want to be, she says.
Krissie is wrong about that. I’m not trying to be in charge of my exes. But I need to keep them close to me because I’m an expat far from my home. I need to keep people I’ve loved in my life, even if we’re now exes.
Krissie asks how can you be an expat when you’re an American citizen?
Because I’m Puerto Rican, I say, rolling my eyes. This is not my country. My country was invaded, stolen by the US.
Then why do you stay here if you feel it’s not your real home? she asks.
I will not say bad things about my island. I will not tell Krissie how the queers there still live like it’s the 1950s; that lesbians get married to men to appease their families and then have women lovers on the side; that those who refuse to play the charade are kicked out of their families; that lesbians who are trying to be good girls live celibate lives doing charity work for their churches; that queers still live in shame; that once I came to California and saw the fierce proud queer people from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Argentina, Panama all living their lives dancing and partying, not caring what their families back home think, working as openly queer police officers, cashiers, teachers, lawyers, security guards, nurses, truck drivers, hair stylists, any job they can get—I knew I could never live in Puerto Rico again.
October 2000, 36 years old
Barcelona, Spain
ALONDRA
We’re in a piercing shop, waiting for our ears to be pierced one more time. It’s our tradition, a new ear hole for each trip we take together, a bloody little souvenir that lasts. We stand close together, posing in front of apricot walls covered with framed tattoo designs. There’s a white stretcher behind us as if we’re in a hospital.
She looks a little scared, a gringa on her first trip to Europe. She won’t talk to strangers. She covers her mouth when she eats. She’ll only have a sip of red wine with dinner.
After we leave the piercing shop, a bar plays wonderful music that spills outside and feels like it’s just for us. Come dance, I say, reaching for her hand. If you dance, your fears and stress will melt away like ice on a hot day. Stress will kill you faster than cigarettes and booze, you know.
She swats my hand off and walks away from me. She is a mute in this city, refusing once again to learn Spanish. My Puerto Rican Spanish confuses waiters and people on the streets, but I talk to them anyway until we all end up pointing and laughing.
Why won’t you at least try? I ask her.
I can’t pick up a language just like that, she says.
I’ll teach you, I say.
I don’t want to learn Spanish, she says. Why should I? I’m only in Spain for one week. And they don’t understand your Spanish. They speak Catalan back to you. Then you all end up speaking English anyway.
There’s a gorgeous woman over there, I say. Go get her. Use any words that work.
I’m crazy about my partner, she says. You know that.
She’s not here. You are. Take a shot.
Of course I know she won’t do it. She believes in monogamy. Over and over she tries to make it work, to make it last. She’ll die one day on the flaming ship of monogamy as it sinks her to the bottom.
Not me. All we have is the here and now, this day that I’m going to grab and suck the juice out of like a ripe mango.
KRISSIE
Your ear hole is bleeding too much, I say. Good thing I’m here to help you. But who will take care of you when you’re old, Alondra? Who will hold your hand when you die? You don’t believe in forever. You don’t believe in making a life with one woman.
Alondra laughs so hard that she spits out her wine. Monogamy doesn’t work, she says. You’re the living proof of that. How many times will you have to have your heart broken to learn?
May 2004, 40 years old
Florence, Italy
KRISSIE
I am posing with my bicycle at a plaza, pointing up at the stubby penis on a nude male statue and laughing, surrounded by other women cyclists on this all woman bicycle tour from Venice to Florence, gathering to take photos and say our goodbyes. If there was ever a perfect cure for heartbreak and rage, riding a bicycle with a pack of wild women through medieval villages and small towns—Chioggia, Adria, along the river Po to Comacchio, then Ravenna, Brisighella to Florence—is it.
I fling off the cruel blonde lover at home who is moving out of our home as I cycle. Every turn of the pedal is a handful of dirt thrown onto the coffin of that dead dream. Every mouthful of this perfect food and wine is my revenge. The only thing missing is Alondra. But I am here because of her.
ALONDRA
I love this photo of Krissie even though I’m not in it. It’s still our trip and it belongs in this album.
She’s always poor after a breakup. It’s only money. I have extra, she needs it. I couldn’t ride a bike if the 401 freeway was on fire and a bike was the only way to get out of LA. My back, my legs, my lungs, my heart scream no.
She thinks me sending her to Italy was a gift to her but it was really my gift to me. Her laughing again is necessary to me. I can’t fix the world but I can fix my mija.
June 2014, 50 years old
New Jersey
KRISSIE
We’re at my house, sitting in Adirondack chairs in my backyard. I have a sharp new haircut, shaved on one side of my head, long on the other. All my ear holes have closed up so I can’t wear my row of earrings anymore. My head is tilted and I’m squinting like a woman trying hard to see what is right in front of her. Alondra has big black circles under her eyes. She shows her little square teeth in a grimace, a not-smile I have never seen on her before.
I am very tired, she says. Then she goes to sleep. She sleeps for over 10 hours and when she gets up, she says accusingly, your house is so quiet, like it’s the house’s fault she slept so long. I make her breakfast food and she wants hot soup or rice and beans instead. She is full of cravings. She is mixed up in time zones, longing for food from home, wanting meat in the home of a vegetarian.
Alondra came because I had another terrible breakup, this one after eight years together. I can’t stop crying, I’ve hardly eaten in days, my chest hurts so bad, and I can’t sleep because I refuse to go near our bed, the bed where my love rolled away from me and said I’m not into this anymore, I’m leaving you.
Alondra is nice to me, as always. As I am nice to her when her lovers erupt in rage when she refuses to be faithful. She says—but I tell them right up front I don’t believe in monogamy; I’m in this full-force for this moment in time but I will not lie to you and promise forever. They have no right to feel humiliated, no reason to be furious. But they often are.
My lovers come and go. Her lovers come and go. She and I are always the only ones left in the end.
ALONDRA
When she calls me, I come. When I need her, she comes. That’s who we are, after all these years. We joke that we must have known each other in previous lives, that we are being reincarnated together over and over again.
I’ve trudged through deserts with you, I say.
I’ve been thrown off ships into the ocean with you, she says.
It feels so true I can almost feel the heat of the sun that killed us, hear the smash of ocean waves slapping us under.
March 2019, 55 years old
Los Angeles, California
ALONDRA
In Puerto Rico, very old ladies wake up from dreams of their death and tell their families they will die today. Everyone stops doing what they’re doing, in case it’s true. They sit with the old lady, holding her hand. They call friends and relatives all over the island so they can come over. They call relatives in New York and California and Florida so they can say goodbye. The relatives always laugh when they first get the call, because the old lady dreams this a lot and she never dies. We know that the call to really fear is the one out of the blue—the teen crashing the car into a tree, the uncle who falls off a roof, the best friend whose heart stops beating forever after very minor absolutely-nothing-to-worry-about surgery.
KRISSIE
The last photo, but we didn’t know it then. We’re standing under a restaurant sign and pointing up at it, laughing. The restaurant is called Mejores Amigos: Best Friends.
Dallas, Texas
KRISSIE
The very first one. We’re in the back of a pickup truck on the night we met, on our way to a Texas Gay Pride dance at the rodeo fairgrounds. She is smiling hugely, deep dimples like dark commas on her face. She is holding a cigar triumphantly up in the air, like the horse she bet on just won against all odds.
We’re wearing purple GLTF (Gay & Lesbian Task Force) t-shirts from the national library association’s conference. It looks good on her but mine is way too tight. I look like I can hardly breathe.
It happens so fast. We’re at the gay and lesbian conference social when this local guy comes in and invites us to a dance. Transportation provided, he says. I think he means a shuttle bus is waiting. But when we go outside, he says hop in the back, y’all. Everyone else is doing it, so I take a deep breath and get in. Alondra sits next to me.
It’s my first ride in the bed of a pickup truck; it feels so dangerous. No seat belts. My arms reach for something solid to hold on to, but I find only other loose bodies bouncing along with mine. If the driver has to make a sudden stop, we’ll all be thrown out into oncoming traffic. We’re so exposed, in the open air like this. What if a kid with a rifle shoots at us from an overpass? What if we’re set upon by a mob of Christians? What if cops pull us over to harass us?
Aiieeee, she yells out into the night, a kid on a joyride.
ALONDRA
She’s so scared of everything. That we’ll get pulled over for riding in the back of a pickup truck. Is that legal? she asks. I laugh. In Puerto Rico we do whatever we want. There are no rules. People build houses with no permits or plans, on land they have no deeds to. When you want to pull over for a picnic, you don’t look for a sign giving you permission. Official picnic spot, that’s so American. If you want to camp out in PR, you put up a tent, that’s it. You don’t pay someone for a numbered spot like they do in this country.
She’s scared of letting someone she doesn’t know drive her around. Come on, I say. It’s a fellow librarian, a gay guy. We’re family.
She’s scared of landing in a leather bar where fights break out. Scared of having to watch men fisting or other kinky sex stuff.
Instead we are watching men dressed in leather dance gracefully in a circle, two-stepping with delicacy and perfection, like synchronized swimmers. They take it seriously, these beautiful men with their big muscles showing, naked under their leather chaps and vests. After the men show us how it’s done, they break up their precise dance and hold out their hands to us. It’s a gracious offer. They’ll teach anyone who wants to learn.
I go out onto the rodeo ring dance floor to two-step with them. It’s not so different from dancing in PR. We dance everywhere there—on the sidewalks, in backyards, in schools, in cafes, in church basements. In California too, we go out dancing wherever there’s our kind of music--salsa, merengue, cha-cha, bomba, music that makes you happy, music that brings everyone, even grandmas and toddlers, to their feet.
Krissie watches from the sidelines, leaning on the rodeo ring’s wooden fence rail. She refuses the hand of the man who holds it out to her. He shrugs, smiles, goes on to try again with another librarian, a woman who towers over him, but who is game.
How did she get so fearful, so closed-up? But she did come out of the closet and she’s here, so she must have opened the door to a better life at least a crack.
The men are so gorgeous and strange. How do they survive Texas? How do they gather together and dance while surrounded by people with guns and Christians who think they’re the devil? Maybe they bring their own guns. Maybe they refuse to be chased off to gay ghettos in San Francisco and New York City. Maybe some of them marry women and leave them at home to come out on a Saturday night, dress up in leather, and dance the night away with other men.
How will we get back to the hotel, she worries. It’s the Dallas fairgrounds, not the ends of the earth, I say. I am full of this experience, the exotic strange place I’ve landed in. I want to enjoy the here and now, I don’t want to worry about later. But I do want to take care of her.
I’ll get you home, I tell her. And I see her relax a tiny bit. This is how our friendship starts. She trusts me. So I have to come through for her.
I hear Spanish being spoken by a group of men nearby, drinking Lone Star beer from bottles. I go over, light up my cigar, speak Spanish to them, of course—compliment their outfits, the party, ask them where they’re from, joke with them about the wild and crazy librarians who crashed their party. When they are all laughing and talking, I ask where are the lesbians? Don’t women two-step together in Texas?
They have their own parties, they say.
Where? Maybe we’ll crash that one too. I’m joking, but they take me seriously.
We don’t know where. Sorry, sorry, we don’t know. They are so apologetic for being bad hosts. This country hospitality thing is real. It’s time to ask about calling a cab.
No no, you don’t need to take a cab. You’re our guests. We’ll drive you back to your hotel, the guys say. We’re still speaking Spanish.
Are you sure it’s no trouble?
We take care of each other, the guys say. We’re all brothers and sisters here tonight.
So that’s how I get Krissie home, another ride in a pickup truck but this time in the back seat, properly buckled up. We listen to loud Mexican music, with the leather guy and me singing along.
She has to listen to us speak Spanish the whole way home. It’s the least I can do for the driver, a courtly young guy who makes me laugh. I ask him how it is for gay men in Dallas and he tells me funny stories about closeted cops and judges, some of them dancing with us tonight. He says there is a priest there who comes out every Saturday night and says Mass the next morning at 8 a.m., sometimes not even having time to take a shower to wash off the night’s sins before giving Holy Communion. If there’s a bad side to being a gay man in a macho culture like Texas, he doesn’t speak of it. Which is fine with me. It’s a night for fun.
KRISSIE
She goes on and on in Spanish with him, shutting me out. It’s so rude. I cannot believe they keep it up. They both speak English. Why are they rubbing my face in the fact I speak only English and a little high school French? I feel stupid enough without them rubbing it in.
And the laughing. The constant laughing. Is every story so hilarious? Does every sentence require a laugh response?
It’s like being in another country. Which I can only imagine for now but I want so bad I can feel it rolling around in my chest.
He gets us back to the hotel. I hop out quickly and wave my thank you. I don’t say muchas gracias because I’m afraid I’ll say it wrong and sound even more stupid than they already think I am. The driver is so nice, he smiles back and waves. But she doesn’t jump out. The talking continues, the laughing continues, the conversation goes on and on and on while I stand on the sidewalk waiting.
Finally she gets out, leans in his window, and then—incredibly—keeps on talking and laughing. Doesn’t she know he wants to go home? I wish I had the nerve to pull her away. How terrible to inconvenience him this way.
Finally she steps back and he drives away, tooting his horn and waving. What was all that about? I ask.
When you learn Spanish, you can join in. He was telling me about how it is to be gay in Dallas. He told me a bunch of great stories.
I feel bad. We kept him for so long. It was supposed to be a quick drop off, I say.
You don’t know how we are. It would be so rude to treat him like a cab driver. We are courteous to each other. We talk and listen. We connect, she says. She is making me feel like I don’t measure up, like I don’t act right, like I don’t know how to behave in a situation like this.
It is a long confusing night. I liked watching the dancing. I felt like I was in a movie. But it is ending strangely. She’s looking at me like she’s somehow in charge now, like she has the upper hand. That feels bad to me. I don’t know what to think of the night, or of her—my new friend.
It is not a good start to a friendship.
December 1990, 26 years old
Taos, New Mexico
ALONDRA
It is snowing on my head; my mouth is open to taste the flakes. We’re in an outdoor hot tub at nighttime, mist from the tub rising around our faces. The air is full of piñon pine burning in chimineas. Even my nose is happy.
This is my first snow, I tell Krissie. Her eyes open wide.
But you’ve been everywhere, she says.
I don’t go where it’s cold, I say.
But you came here in December, why? she asks.
Because my friend said use my timeshare in Taos before the end of the year and invite a friend. Because I’ve never been here. But mostly because you said yes, I say.
Another question hangs in the air like steam from the water.
She moves far away from me. I wish my girlfriend was here, she says. She’d like this.
Pendejo, I think but do not say out loud. Stupid of me to think that’s what this is. Sex is too easy. She’s right; this is not that.
KRISSIE
I don’t want her that way.
It is so quiet I swear I can hear the snowflakes landing on me.
ALONDRA
It doesn’t matter. I take shots, that’s what I do. I don’t think Should I pursue this woman or that woman? Is this a good idea? I don’t think Is she my kind of woman? Every woman might be my kind of woman. Every day might be my last. This might be the only night in my life I get to taste snowflakes on my tongue.
The clouds move away.
Mira, I say, pointing. The mountains came back. You know what they are called? Those are Sangre de Cristo, the Blood of Christ mountains.
She is silent, looking. I don’t know what she is thinking.
Then she jumps out of the hot tub, screams at the shock of the cold air, runs in to pour red wine for us and races back into the hot water, sloshing wine on the deck.
Blood of Christ, she toasts the mountains, raising her glass high.
I toast the mountains, I toast her, I toast us.
September 1991, 27 years old
Location unclear
KRISSIE
My hair is dyed blonde, permed into clown hair, puffed up big and hideously curly. I’m wearing huge red glasses, hot pink dangling earrings, a baggy green sweatshirt, khaki shorts, and stark white tennis shoes. I look mismatched and confused, like a child playing dress-up with random clothes off a thrift store rack. Alondra is wearing sunglasses, a Panama hat, a black-and-white checked shirt, and black shorts. She looks cool and chic.
She is grabbing me around the waist and lifting me off the ground with a big hug. I have one leg kicked up high in the air. I am curling one arm around her neck, holding on. I am laughing with my mouth open. It looks like she’s saying no, you can’t go, I’m keeping you here with me. I’m laughing at the surprise of it all.
What is unknown—where we are, what trip we are on, whether we are saying hello or goodbye.
What is known—we are now very comfortable with each other.
We go from unknown to known very quickly. We go from new friends to best friends very quickly. After the Taos trip, it happens on the phone.
Our calls are a lifeline between us, stretching cross country, full of hours of talking and laughing late into the night. She tells me anything that goes on in her life, like how she created an international incident in her family simply by going to the bathroom. Her cousin was visiting from PR with her five-year-old son. Alondra says to the cousin, you go out shopping, I’ll take him down to the beach behind my condo. How her cousin is overprotective of her son and how Alondra leaves the kid on the beach when she goes upstairs to the bathroom and how nothing happened, no bad man snatched him, but the cousin found out and took a fit. How the cousin was so mad she left two days early. How the kid didn’t even get to go to Disneyland. How the whole tale was relayed by telephone to relatives on the island and in California within five minutes. The cousin calls her mother, her mother calls Alondra’s mother, they both call Alondra, everyone is all involved and taking sides. You can do that in PR, but not in California, they say. The kid speaks English, what’s the problem? Alondra says. It’s not safe. Too many criminals. You put him in terrible danger, the mother and aunt say.
When Alondra tells me the story, she imitates her aunt and her mother, her cousin, the kid. It becomes a whole comic soap opera with shrieking and gesticulating.
I listen to her story unwind in my ear. She says it’s all about them letting me know they know more than me. They say I’m not a mother; I don’t know how to safeguard a kid. They say I have all these advanced degrees, but I can’t watch a kid for five minutes. They say I have a big fancy job managing international corporate libraries and a condo on the beach, but I have no idea of how to live right.
I think you know how to live right, I say.
We always say I love you now when we hang up. Not love you. It’s more serious, takes up more time, means more. In case I never see her again. In case she is hit by a car. In case she is smashed in an earthquake.
ALONDRA
I lift her up in the air to make her laugh. I know what she needs better than she does. She’s so hard and walled-off. Every time I make her laugh, I put a crack in that wall. I wish she would drink tequila with me when we see each other, that always helps soften women up. But she’s afraid of drinking too much, of losing that tight control. Instead we talk together every chance we get.
She tells me stories of the library ladies she works with who fight with each other in the break room, stories about her neighbors who hate trees because they make too many leaves, stories about her friends’ breakups and affairs. Nothing much about her family. It’s a huge Catholic family, nine brothers and sisters, all with kids. But she keeps away from them mostly.
That girlfriend she lives with. Together since high school. I don’t think it’s too good between them. She doesn’t say much about her.
She says she loves her house. How when she hangs laundry on the backyard clothesline, it makes her happy all day. How she loves her little 1950s kitchen, how her kittens climb on the kitchen table to look out the back window at the leaves flying in the wind. She tells me what she’s reading. She tells me where she wants to travel someday.
Money is tight for them. She doesn’t make much working in a small-town New Jersey public library. I get the impression her girlfriend spends it all and then some. Once she told me her girlfriend took their car into the dealer for a small repair and came home with a brand-new car just when the old one was almost paid off. So no trips for her anytime soon.
She gets a second job she can do at home, indexing the city paper. She tags news stories with subjects like Homicide, Burglary, Rape. The obituaries take forever to index because you have to type each relative’s name into the database, not just the dead person’s. To do a perfect job of indexing takes hours every night, and she’s a perfectionist. She has it in her head that years from now, someone may really need that homicide story or that obituary and her index will be the only way they can possibly find it. She works very late many nights, so tired she cries while she works. But that’s her extra money, her trip money—so she keeps at it.
I tell her you better keep that money separate, girl. You have your own account, right? She says oh no, we have all our money together. I say that’s a very bad idea.
She doesn’t want to hear it. She’d never take money from me, she says.
You know how this old story turns out, right? Her girlfriend runs off with another woman and buys her new girlfriend a diamond ring and a trip to Jamaica—with Krissie’s credit cards. And when Krissie goes to the bank and to a lawyer about it, they all say too bad, it’s your responsibility. Your name was on that account. If she won’t pay, you have to pay those bills.
Krissie, mi amor, you need to listen to me. You’re like a baby wandering the world without a clue.
April 1993, 29 years old
March on Washington DC for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights
KRISSIE
We are sitting on the concrete steps of an ornate building, Alondra on the top step and me below her, watching the massive march go by, surrounded by people cheering on the marchers. I wear rainbow earrings under a new crewcut that makes me look like my oldest brother—the nice one. I’m holding a noisemaker. She has her legs wrapped around me and I am uncomfortable. She’s smoking a cigarette, looking straight ahead and blowing smoke out at whoever is taking the picture. I am looking off to the side, frowning.
People around us are paying us no attention. A woman is holding up a hand-decorated sign. A man with a fanny pack around his waist is standing behind us. A woman next to us squats on her haunches talking intently to a man wearing white socks and black shoes.
Alondra is always putting her body too close to mine in public. I feel crabby with her a lot because of things like this. She teases too much. She touches too much. She has an opinion on everything in my life, even my hair. My hair is too butch, she says. My lover likes my hair, I say.
Where are my lovers in all these pictures? Why am I always off on my own with her?
ALONDRA
She is always off on her own with me. The Queen of Serial Monogamy, she leaves her lovers at home and comes traveling whenever I invite her to. I do the same. I am always dating women who have no money, who are just scraping by. So I save my vacation days and fun money for Krissie and me. She does too.
Krissie and I talk about everything. How to live in this world. What we believe about relationships. What is funny in life, what is terrible to bear. How she watched her mother die. How I watched my father die. What we need to do before we die. All this philosophizing, I love it so much. I don’t talk like this with my lovers and exes. They expect me to be practical, to make decisions, to run the show.
I tell Krissie about my ex who went from California to Colombia to go to her mother’s funeral after having not seen her for 20 years. She went all that way to South America and then refused to go to the funeral after all. On the phone when she told me this, I said no, you must go, you’ll regret it every day of the rest of your life.
You always order her around, Krissie says. You’re not even together anymore and you’re still bossing her around. That’s her decision. You have no say in this.
Krissie sounds mad at me. She doesn’t understand.
I am only saying what I think, I say.
Who asked you? You should keep out of your ex’s business, she says.
But I tell her for her own good. Who doesn’t go to their Mami’s funeral?
Someone whose mother abused them, she says.
Everyone is abused by their mothers in some way. You told me your mother used to wake you up out of sound sleep screaming at you, accusing you of lying, calling you stupid and lazy. You told me she hit your sister, the fragile one who hardly spoke because she was so afraid of your mother.
My mother was mentally ill. She wasn’t in her right mind sometimes, she says.
I don’t care what you say. It’s not acceptable to miss your mother’s funeral.
You are not the boss of your ex. As much as you want to be, she says.
Krissie is wrong about that. I’m not trying to be in charge of my exes. But I need to keep them close to me because I’m an expat far from my home. I need to keep people I’ve loved in my life, even if we’re now exes.
Krissie asks how can you be an expat when you’re an American citizen?
Because I’m Puerto Rican, I say, rolling my eyes. This is not my country. My country was invaded, stolen by the US.
Then why do you stay here if you feel it’s not your real home? she asks.
I will not say bad things about my island. I will not tell Krissie how the queers there still live like it’s the 1950s; that lesbians get married to men to appease their families and then have women lovers on the side; that those who refuse to play the charade are kicked out of their families; that lesbians who are trying to be good girls live celibate lives doing charity work for their churches; that queers still live in shame; that once I came to California and saw the fierce proud queer people from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Argentina, Panama all living their lives dancing and partying, not caring what their families back home think, working as openly queer police officers, cashiers, teachers, lawyers, security guards, nurses, truck drivers, hair stylists, any job they can get—I knew I could never live in Puerto Rico again.
October 2000, 36 years old
Barcelona, Spain
ALONDRA
We’re in a piercing shop, waiting for our ears to be pierced one more time. It’s our tradition, a new ear hole for each trip we take together, a bloody little souvenir that lasts. We stand close together, posing in front of apricot walls covered with framed tattoo designs. There’s a white stretcher behind us as if we’re in a hospital.
She looks a little scared, a gringa on her first trip to Europe. She won’t talk to strangers. She covers her mouth when she eats. She’ll only have a sip of red wine with dinner.
After we leave the piercing shop, a bar plays wonderful music that spills outside and feels like it’s just for us. Come dance, I say, reaching for her hand. If you dance, your fears and stress will melt away like ice on a hot day. Stress will kill you faster than cigarettes and booze, you know.
She swats my hand off and walks away from me. She is a mute in this city, refusing once again to learn Spanish. My Puerto Rican Spanish confuses waiters and people on the streets, but I talk to them anyway until we all end up pointing and laughing.
Why won’t you at least try? I ask her.
I can’t pick up a language just like that, she says.
I’ll teach you, I say.
I don’t want to learn Spanish, she says. Why should I? I’m only in Spain for one week. And they don’t understand your Spanish. They speak Catalan back to you. Then you all end up speaking English anyway.
There’s a gorgeous woman over there, I say. Go get her. Use any words that work.
I’m crazy about my partner, she says. You know that.
She’s not here. You are. Take a shot.
Of course I know she won’t do it. She believes in monogamy. Over and over she tries to make it work, to make it last. She’ll die one day on the flaming ship of monogamy as it sinks her to the bottom.
Not me. All we have is the here and now, this day that I’m going to grab and suck the juice out of like a ripe mango.
KRISSIE
Your ear hole is bleeding too much, I say. Good thing I’m here to help you. But who will take care of you when you’re old, Alondra? Who will hold your hand when you die? You don’t believe in forever. You don’t believe in making a life with one woman.
Alondra laughs so hard that she spits out her wine. Monogamy doesn’t work, she says. You’re the living proof of that. How many times will you have to have your heart broken to learn?
May 2004, 40 years old
Florence, Italy
KRISSIE
I am posing with my bicycle at a plaza, pointing up at the stubby penis on a nude male statue and laughing, surrounded by other women cyclists on this all woman bicycle tour from Venice to Florence, gathering to take photos and say our goodbyes. If there was ever a perfect cure for heartbreak and rage, riding a bicycle with a pack of wild women through medieval villages and small towns—Chioggia, Adria, along the river Po to Comacchio, then Ravenna, Brisighella to Florence—is it.
I fling off the cruel blonde lover at home who is moving out of our home as I cycle. Every turn of the pedal is a handful of dirt thrown onto the coffin of that dead dream. Every mouthful of this perfect food and wine is my revenge. The only thing missing is Alondra. But I am here because of her.
ALONDRA
I love this photo of Krissie even though I’m not in it. It’s still our trip and it belongs in this album.
She’s always poor after a breakup. It’s only money. I have extra, she needs it. I couldn’t ride a bike if the 401 freeway was on fire and a bike was the only way to get out of LA. My back, my legs, my lungs, my heart scream no.
She thinks me sending her to Italy was a gift to her but it was really my gift to me. Her laughing again is necessary to me. I can’t fix the world but I can fix my mija.
June 2014, 50 years old
New Jersey
KRISSIE
We’re at my house, sitting in Adirondack chairs in my backyard. I have a sharp new haircut, shaved on one side of my head, long on the other. All my ear holes have closed up so I can’t wear my row of earrings anymore. My head is tilted and I’m squinting like a woman trying hard to see what is right in front of her. Alondra has big black circles under her eyes. She shows her little square teeth in a grimace, a not-smile I have never seen on her before.
I am very tired, she says. Then she goes to sleep. She sleeps for over 10 hours and when she gets up, she says accusingly, your house is so quiet, like it’s the house’s fault she slept so long. I make her breakfast food and she wants hot soup or rice and beans instead. She is full of cravings. She is mixed up in time zones, longing for food from home, wanting meat in the home of a vegetarian.
Alondra came because I had another terrible breakup, this one after eight years together. I can’t stop crying, I’ve hardly eaten in days, my chest hurts so bad, and I can’t sleep because I refuse to go near our bed, the bed where my love rolled away from me and said I’m not into this anymore, I’m leaving you.
Alondra is nice to me, as always. As I am nice to her when her lovers erupt in rage when she refuses to be faithful. She says—but I tell them right up front I don’t believe in monogamy; I’m in this full-force for this moment in time but I will not lie to you and promise forever. They have no right to feel humiliated, no reason to be furious. But they often are.
My lovers come and go. Her lovers come and go. She and I are always the only ones left in the end.
ALONDRA
When she calls me, I come. When I need her, she comes. That’s who we are, after all these years. We joke that we must have known each other in previous lives, that we are being reincarnated together over and over again.
I’ve trudged through deserts with you, I say.
I’ve been thrown off ships into the ocean with you, she says.
It feels so true I can almost feel the heat of the sun that killed us, hear the smash of ocean waves slapping us under.
March 2019, 55 years old
Los Angeles, California
ALONDRA
In Puerto Rico, very old ladies wake up from dreams of their death and tell their families they will die today. Everyone stops doing what they’re doing, in case it’s true. They sit with the old lady, holding her hand. They call friends and relatives all over the island so they can come over. They call relatives in New York and California and Florida so they can say goodbye. The relatives always laugh when they first get the call, because the old lady dreams this a lot and she never dies. We know that the call to really fear is the one out of the blue—the teen crashing the car into a tree, the uncle who falls off a roof, the best friend whose heart stops beating forever after very minor absolutely-nothing-to-worry-about surgery.
KRISSIE
The last photo, but we didn’t know it then. We’re standing under a restaurant sign and pointing up at it, laughing. The restaurant is called Mejores Amigos: Best Friends.