The Second Rate
Walter Siti | Translated by Brian Robert Moore | Tolka Issue Five, December 2023
First came the disappointment of Castro, in the sense of San Francisco. My friend who teaches at Stanford got a house just a few blocks from the famously gay-majority neighborhood – a beautiful two-storey place, with a sloping roof and uncultivated garden, separated only by a hill, and by a couple of traffic lights, from the Elysium I dreamed of in my youth, that miraculous quadrangle where powerful, half-naked athletes strolled around, kissing each other. The most beautiful ones made love the most and have therefore died; now there’s only an occasional old bodybuilder in overalls, a sick bison with a bottle of milk in hand, along the boulevard where small-town fairies walk looking lost like tourists on Via Veneto.
In Stanford’s Andalusian alcazar, Japanese couples go to get married on Sunday, while at the foul-smelling intersections near Ellis Street my naïve excitations, kept for too long at bay (‘a theatre where dilettante strippers pour in from Texas and from Kansas, and for a couple dollars you can be part of the jury!’; ‘Ask for Jerry, he’ll make sure to introduce you to the wrestlers who want to stay incognito!’), ended up fading in minor movie houses with listless patrons and little prey. But since the metaphysical is always the last to die, some not-half-bad Hispanic guy taking his clothes off on the stage (a new one every twenty minutes, on the dot) still managed, by looking elsewhere, to kindle primitive forms of envy in me. If a stripper rubs up against the audience member sitting in front of you, or next to you, and doesn’t deign you with a glance, it’s like when in an airplane the hostesses stop with the meal cart right before your row: for a second you can’t do without the cutlet with peas, more than hunger it’s desperation, and you lean over to invite him with gestures that inspire disparaging commentary among the habitués.
Then, with every beast at the mouth of his den, they show themselves again, nude, in front of the black rectangle of the dark room, and say to you ‘cien dólares’ – to do what, I ask myself, and I ask them, too, rudely. Dollars occupied the entire city’s grid, eased the wind of the uphills and downhills, granting the trip the rationality of economy and the consolation of it’s-not-worth-it. In the evening, in the hotel room, the only physical ecstasy was taking off one’s shoes to rest two swollen feet.
But a seed, a germ, a virus managed in the meantime to sneak its way in, while I was wandering through the shelves of the porno shops: in a specialised magazine – and then in a second one, for confirmation – I noticed that the escorts (or companions) always had two prices listed, no matter if it was by the hour or for the night: the rate for ‘sex’ and the rate for ‘love’. The amount for ‘love’ was roughly double the first. On one hand, it seemed natural to me, love is a rarer commodity; at the same time, I wondered what they’d do to you, to convince you that what they’re supplying you with is, in fact, love, and not sex?
The question followed me to Miami about a month later: less theoretical, more intimately shameless – maybe because it was already hot as hell (in late April) or because there were palm trees with smooth and greenish trunks recalling Belize, and that vague coffee smell typical of the tropics. As soon as I could, from the campus in Coral Gables, I’d take a taxi all the way to Miami Beach, where Batista’s Cuba seemed in full swing, with open-top and slightly dusty Buicks and Cadillacs cruising down Ocean Drive at walking speed, and the acid yellows and the pinks and violets of seaside deco, and the rice with black beans (‘moros y cristianos’) and fried bananas. I understand why Versace chose to live here: you’re in the most enchanting Third World but enjoying the security and comfort of the First.
During my haphazard exploring on Monday and Tuesday, I already pinpointed the Warsaw Ballroom, a night club for which my Spartacus guide proclaimed wonders; I found out later that it was precisely at the Warsaw that the ‘scouter’ Jaime Cardona used to go to recruit young men for Versace and his partner – he’d pick up five or six, bring them to the Palace Hill, talk with them for a half hour until directing the chosen boy towards the little back entrance of the Versace Mansion, with instructions to go up to the second floor, where he’d find the bedroom door open.
On Friday night, the posters said, the Warsaw would have a ‘go-go dancers’ show: that same Friday is the last day of the seminar at the Comparative Literature department. Like an old lionheart, at eight o’clock in the evening, I have myself driven to the entrance; the twenty-four-year-old Puerto Rican taxi driver says ‘okei, papa’ as he drops me off. The bouncers, sitting on the front steps, are still playing electronic poker – I kill time between a seaside restaurant and a walk on the beach until ten. Walking in at a quarter past, I have the impression of the usual club where I’ll have a terrible time and nothing will happen: groups of young people talk among themselves, close and intimate – I sit on a couch in the shadows, drown myself in martinis, and that’s it.
By eleven thirty I’ve had enough and decide to make myself scarce. But while I’m heading to the exit, a real bodybuilder, the way I intend the term, with a zipper disappearing into incredibly blond, almost white hair, and a bag over his shoulders, crosses in front of me and starts walking up the stairs – the changing rooms are on the next floor, and signs state that upstairs is off limits. I manage to go up unseen, the bodybuilder is taking off his briefs and giving me a strange look, when an attendant arrives and kicks me out. I’m not feeling tired anymore, and the unexpected encounter gives me another hour of autonomy: around twenty minutes after midnight, the music changes and becomes cinematic, Star Wars or something to that effect, the strobe lights turn into blades cutting through the airborne dust, and ten superb aliens start dancing on top of the elevated bar. One is dressed as a barbarian with ropes and rags, another as a cowboy, another as an extraterrestrial with a silvery jumpsuit. They strip, gifting us memorable stills and silhouettes; especially two of them, the one who has nothing left on but a leopard-print thong, and the one looming directly in front of me, with a Texan hat and a bandana around his neck. Not the reincarnation, but the manifestation of Hercules: when dressed, he merely looked like a beefed-up athlete – and one expects that, underneath, the body will be a bit smaller than the clothes. With him, however, it’s exactly as if his costume were his own body turned to stone and painted; no, as if the stone inside the body exploded, tearing through the exterior of the fabric. So impossible and real that fantasy itself can’t even reach him. A drop of his sweat fell on my mustache; I’d like for one of my hands to be crushed underneath his boots.
OK, a pathetic and drooling old man, with a low income and so sex-crazed as to lose any good taste – but there I am! And with that extra shred of indignity, which saves me. For ten minutes, I’m a mouse in the Swiss cheese, or a sweet-toothed kid in a pastry shop; then I realize that you can slip dollars into their G-strings, that Hercules, too, stoops and smiles at you (and even mouths, at a doubting glance, ‘I am available’); but my hand shakes as when I thought of him as inaccessible.
Josh is his name, he whispers it to me while bending down once again to take the money (I’m the one giving him the most); he has the lightest blue eyes and newly sprouted peach fuzz on his cheeks – better than any Hollywood actor, even in terms of his colouring (olive skin, dirty-blond hair), and no famous heartthrob has such unscalable musculature. He dances off along with his companions, another ten come out, but I was just getting the feel for things; I miss him, though soon I learn that there are twenty of them and they alternate: sure enough, now it’s his turn again in a new costume. When the performances are over (four in total), he tells me about the Scottish-Brazilian mix from which he gets his genes. He specifies that two hundred dollars is his rate, but out of my mouth there unexpectedly comes ‘I want more’. I explain to him that I’d like nothing less than ‘love’, and I myself propose five hundred. But he’s busy that weekend, he’s going to the Everglades with a – I think he says – Republican congressman. He suggests Monday, but I have the plane Monday morning. I make signs of desolation. I’m about to leave when he runs after me and propounds, ‘Now?’ I look at my watch, it’s three fifteen, I’ll be too tired. I tell him it’s not a big deal, and I go take one of the many taxis waiting at the corner; I don’t have five hundred anyway. I come back to the hotel alone, where I lie awake until morning.
I call Sergio, who’s just gotten up in Italy: I tell him about my unusual night, he jokes about the white hair, et cetera.
‘I mean, at that point you could have brought him back to the hotel.’
‘He had already given me the best; after, he would’ve been just anybody . . . And besides, I wanted to honor our pact.’
‘You didn’t have to, you’re out of jurisdiction.’
‘Really, I was afraid: he was too beautiful, it wouldn’t have ended there.’
‘Right, you’d have brought him back in your suitcase . . . Whatever decisions you make, dumpling, you know I can only follow you up to a certain point.’
I breathe in his words that mix of compassion and respect which effectively corresponds to my current confusion, halfway between conformist prudence and an acute sense of alarm. I see him crouched down, Josh the Ironic, while he lets me touch his buttocks and testicles; I see him hesitate towards the exit, smiling at me with his eyes; why, dear god, did I tell him no? To not regress, after him I would have needed another. But regress to where? I know the answer: regress to my true source – age doesn’t matter, one is never too old to go back home.
The other stripper, the one in a leopard-print thong, had a young blond guy waiting for him, carrying his books; they hugged in an embrace of love in full bloom, spoke intently to one another as they walked out and bumped into me, though as if bumping into a piece of furniture, or a trash can.
A stranger answer flashes through my mind, one that I don’t want to analyse: I told him no because I stopped myself before the blood.
Back in Rome, I rush to let loose on the internet; I find the site of a Russian weightlifter – living in Miami, of course – with the funny name of Yuri Breznev; he offers himself at a rate of $1,200 for the night and $3,000 for the whole weekend (obviously, the ‘love’ rate); I pretend I’m an Italian businessman who has to spend a few days in Florida and I ask if it would be possible to book him as a lover for two days: almost immediately, he responds that he’s free the weekend I’ve indicated. I up the ante, cutting to the chase: could I fuck him on a boat? Amused, he replies that he gets seasick, but for anything else ‘your wish is not a problem’. He suggests we first get some fresh air by taking a walk around the district: I take the opportunity to insinuate that we could then involve a third, to which he seraphically responds, ‘I do threesomes with my buddies . . . we can set something up’ – he attaches pictures of his two buddies, and I almost have a heart attack. Sure, let’s even take stock of the fact that we’re online and we’re talking virtually; but he is real, the muscles are plain to see, in America people are generally proper in commercial affairs. I start to fantasise about what it could be like with him. He comes to pick me up at the Biltmore, takes me to have a picnic breakfast in the Fairchild Garden; if boys wearing too-short shorts walk by he gives me little slaps over the eyes and pretends to be jealous. He hugs me tenderly, we roll on the grass. Since I told him I like plexiglass objects, once we’re back on Ocean Drive he comes up behind me and, giving me a kiss on the neck, ties around it a plexiglass pendant on a little chain.
Yuri, the real one (or the supposedly real one), isn’t stupid: he wants to clinch the deal, he asks me to pay him an advance seeing as he’s turning down other offers; he’d also like to know (just to have, as a reference) the number of my American Express card. He smells something fishy, suspects I’m a virtual voyeur. My poor dad comes in handy for the last time – I pathetically describe his death and Yuri responds with lines that are oozing with understanding: he’s sorry that we brushed past each other in such an ‘agonizing’ moment of my life, what a pity.
If I was really a rich businessman who had to spend a week every month in Miami, what would distinguish Yuri from a real love? The fiction could be perfect, and I don’t doubt that he could keep that up for three days. Like going to eat a plate of triple-butter fettuccine on Coconut Grove that’s tastier and more al dente than in Piazza Augusto Imperatore. With the dollar’s help, Americans construct feelings that are realer than the real and even impervious to the elements, just as they do with Venetian bridges and Breton castles; are feelings, too, a memory of the past? A man like that was the dream of my twenty-year-old self – and so it was easy, I only needed to become rich. In the mainstream of capital, dreams are the business of wretches.
I remember my last glimpse of Miami at night, while heading to the airport: lit in the dark, the skyscrapers (green and blue, cylindrical and L-shaped) looked like sleepless calculators running up a list of the names of God. More than the country of realised dreams, the US is the country of realisable desires: that is, of desire’s end. They’ve understood that, to quench said desires, it’s enough to have them approach satisfaction – so that you don’t have the time to formulate them, to nurture them, to elevate them into an ideal. The ideal is already there, more perfect than you ever imagined because it’s a result, obtained on the computer, of many possible ideals – it looms over you, crushes you, doesn’t leave you the space to process or re-elaborate it. They come from Russia, from Brazil, from Sweden – they immobilise you in their tautological patency, a body too perfect is a body too perfect, and as such, intransitive: ready to become desire once more in the nostalgia of losers.
Walter Siti is one of Italy’s most celebrated writers. His novel Paradise Overload, from which ‘The Second Rate’ is excerpted, was voted the greatest Italian narrative work of the twenty-first century in a survey published by L’Indiscreto.
Brian Robert Moore's translations include A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza and You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari. His translation of Mari’s Verdigris publishes in January 2024.
You can read an interview with Walter Siti by Brian Robert Moore here.
‘The Second Rate’ was first published in Issue Five of Tolka (May 2023) which can be purchased here. You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
