Fonsi awkwardly cradled his cell as the Acela train pulled into the station. He was the last in a short line of people making their way to the car’s exit. The ebony-skinned man he spoke to on his screen walked down 125th in Harlem. A mob of kids on bikes raced ahead of him and shouted profanities as they whizzed by.
“Okay, hon-eey, we will talk,” Matteo said in a Brazilian accent. “Be safe, let me know when you check in. Besos, love you.”
Awkwardness settled into Fonsi’s skin whenever Matteo said those particular words. “Thanks. Um, I’ll let you know when I get to the hotel. Bye.”
Fonsi mouthedI love you, too, as he stepped off the train, as he zoned out to the surrounding world of intercom announcements and concrete platforms and decaying stone columns that made up DC’s Union Station. The words felt clunky on his lips and tongue.
He was a thirty-eight-year-old who hadn’t said “I love you” to a man romantically for more than thirteen years. The last time, when he was dating Larry, a scarecrow-thin 5 train subway conductor in his early forties with perfectly parted cornrows, rich chocolate skin, and a long, curvedpenis that he knew how to use when he worked Fonsi through the night and still managed to get to his 6:30 morning shift on time. After several trysts, Fonsi, mindful of being a broke twentysomething, thought he could have nice nocturnal dickandfree Metro cards for the rest of his days if he sealed the deal by saying those three magical words over the phone. Three words that caused Larry to lose his voice mid-conversation and hang up. He never called Fonsi again.
Fonsi grew older. With age and tiny spurts of wisdom came a better understanding of the power of language. He’d never uttered the words to his most recent ex, Raphael, and vice versa, despite the two seeing each other for over seven months. He figured that they both knew deep down inside,Naaaah… that’s so not what we have going on here, let’s not play ourselves. And Fonsi had never uttered the words to his silent ghost paramour, Amede, though he’d felt it in his heart.
Matteo was significantly less endowed than Larry, though much shapelier, a beefy Carioca comfortable in his skin, whether leading peaceful warrior poses in the yoga classes he ran or teaching samba / Afro-Brazilian dance workshops. Fonsi had been a trooper and taken a couple of the workshops, which did nothing to improve his deplorable dance skills. Several students ogled him with disdain, ready to take away his Black folks’ card.
After the Equinox, having learned about the integral role Fonsi had played in stopping the ghost invasion, Matteo had started to visit Fonsi’s botanica to check up on him. Fonsi was grateful that he could talk openly about who he was as a medium, how he thought his divine role as a clairvoyant was to help his clients connect with their recently departed who were still holding on and help them find peace in the afterlife. Matteo had family members who practiced Candomblé back in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, and so he patiently listened and learned. Romance blossomed in an organic, unassuming way between Panamanian-American and Brazilian.The two texted and called and went over to each other’s place continuously. The warmth, care, and interest Matteo showed when it came to Fonsi’s work and abilities, the questions and attentiveness, all like a plush blanket that made Fonsi feel… profoundly uncomfortable. Such levels of devotion were disconcerting. No one had ever showered him with such unrelenting earnest attention, not even his mother.
As with any courtship, there were annoyances. Matteo’s penchant for breaking out into Milton Nascimento or Marisa Monte or Liniker tunes at the top of his lungs during morning showers, no matter the hour? Un-freaking-believable. And the palms of his hands and soles of his feet had a texture akin to coarse sandpaper, the result of years of construction work back in Brazil. Any type of hand-holding or footsies meant immediate exfoliation.
Yes, his new guy wasn’t perfect, but their time together, overall, felt solid. Disconcertingly good. But was it what Fonsi wanted? After his promise that he would take some space for himself after his time with Raph and Amede, getting deep and heavy with a dude wasn’t on the agenda. He didn’t want to overthink it, like he did so many other things.
His mind drifted back to the present, took in Union Station’s long, narrow concrete platform. Only a few people had disembarked. At first Fonsi wondered if it was because of the time of his arrival, late afternoon during a weekday. But he knew what was really going on, especially when he made his way through the station’s primary hub. Lines of travelers snaked through the terminal, preparing to board trains headed south to Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Roanoke, or back north to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Haven. Folks were getting the hell up out the district, the discovery of two more demon eyes last night causing a mini exodus. Fonsi experienced a wave of déjà vu, remembered when the skies above the Big Apple turned crimson, how so many residents left town as well.
He walked to the curb on Union Station Drive and spotted the gray sedan that the Lyft app indicated was waiting for him. The driver was silent as the car crawled through the city. Traffic was tight. They slowly made their way to southeast DC. Fonsi surveyed the landscape, took in how terrain changed from hotels and monuments and municipal buildings to scraggly row houses and fast-food joints and liquor stores. Specific memories resurfaced, as was the case whenever he returned to the district.
When Fonsi was a junior at the School of Visual Arts, he opted to visit the nation’s capital with his school buddy Ritchie, who was originally from the neighborhood Takoma. Fonsi had made assumptions about what he could expect, thought that the district wouldn’t have much to offer in terms of excitement, considering he was from New York. Ritchie was game to do the tourist thing with his guest, and so they visited standard fare like the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. But Ritchie also made a pledge during their sightseeing. “Wait till tonight,” he said. “I’m gonna show you gay DC.”
When the two visited the northeast spot Delta Elite that night, Fonsi propped himself up in a corner with rum and Coke and watched everybody else have a great time, too self-conscious about his dancing skills as Ritchie busted out moves like a future Les Twins understudy. A few guys checked Fonsi out even though he was holding up the wall. There was something different about DC guys, he realized. It took him years to understand that the district’s urban culture was far more influenced by the South than the northern metropolis he called home.
The dudes at Delta that night seemed less aloof than New York heads. More prone to smile, look his way, and be a bit more goofy than brothers back home. Wielding sharp urban edge as a show of force? Less important. Some of the Delta guys even wore outfits that Fonsi thought markedthem as poor when so many NYC dudes went out of their way to sport styles that implied wealth, often far from the truth.
After Delta, he and Ritchie headed south to Ziegfeld’s/Secrets on Half Street SW, the two-level building that was both a drag queen venue and strippers’ joint. Fonsi learned that the original Ziegfeld’s on Half Street SE was the victim of eminent domain, forced to close along with a host of other gay nightlife spots because of the push to build Nationals Park baseball stadium. But Ziegfeld’s had managed to reopen a few years later.
Ritchie was way more into the drag shows downstairs at Ziegfeld’s while Fonsi lost his mind when he realized that there were exotic dancers upstairs at Secrets. Fullynakedexotic dancers. Naked men hanging overhead on the bar. Naked men on strategically placed podiums. Naked men in a special shower to the side.
Once Fonsi sussed out how things worked, he ordered his third rum and Coke for the night and asked the bartender for fifty dollars in ones and fives so he could stuff them into the tube socks most of the performers wore. Fonsi’s favorites of the night: a buffed Indigenous guy who smiled as he swung his long tresses and pierced penis in Fonsi’s face. The sweat that flew from his body, a benediction that Fonsi didn’t realize he craved. His other favorite, a smooth, slender, tattooed African American guy, hat to the back, who bent down, opened his oiled-up cheeks after Fonsi placed wads of dough in his socks, and whispered, “Beloved, come closer, sniff it.”
They returned to Ritchie’s house that night at about two in the morning. Fonsi showered and tried to relax but found he couldn’t fall sleep where he lay in Ritchie’s parents’ guest room. He went to his overnight bag and placed a wad of cocoa butter lotion in his hand. Then he lay back down and touched himself, something he hated to do when he was staying at someone else’s place. But he couldn’t get Secrets out of his mind. To be immersed in wall-to-wall flesh, to be surrounded by men who looked at him alluringly,as if he were a juicy prize. (He had enough wherewithal to know they really just wanted to be tipped.) The state of unending arousal he found himself in… even when he sat in church the next day with Ritchie and his family… something he hadn’t thought possible. To be so alive and electric and connected to his body.
And thus began Fonsi’s DC ritual. He would visit a couple more times with Ritchie over the next several months before Ritchie pursued his master’s in museum studies and moved to Chicago. Over the years, Fonsi made it his business to get down to the district if there were a special art show or something major like the opening of the Smithsonian’s African American museum. His visits eventually became fewer and farther between, especially when he took over the botanica and had to deal with the demands of running a business. Still, didn’t matter how busy he was, Secrets was always on his Washington itinerary, singles ready.
And then COVID arrived. In 2020, the bar permanently closed, unable to maintain cash flow to keep its doors open. Fonsi’s full-of-pleasure DC, which in the back of his mind he thought would be around forever, gone. The decadent, pleasure-principled oasis that thrived right under the federal government’s nose, no more.
Fonsi’s driver crossed the intersection of Marion Barry and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenues. The whiteANACOSTIAneon sign perched above a bank on a terra-cotta facade swished by. In less than five minutes, he got out the Lyft on the corner of Sixteenth and V, where Linda said she would meet him. She was standing near the curb in black slacks and a windbreaker. She wore shades even though the sky was overcast. Several three-story houses were spread out on a long block behind her.
She extended her hand. “I’m Linda Villanueva. Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Harewood.”
“Call me Fonsi,” he said. Linda was compact, Fonsi the taller of the two, though she was more muscular. He was nervous. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Right. From Estelle, I imagine.” She cocked her head. “And what exactly did she say?”
“Uh, just… just how formidable you are.”And that you’re no-nonsense, all business, which Fonsi immediately discerned.
“I speak to Estelle when I can. We can discuss her another time, maybe.” Linda began to walk up the block and gestured for Fonsi to follow. “You understand why you’re here?”
Fonsi nodded. They’d already gone over everything yesterday morning on the phone. “To help determine if there’s any sort of presence in the house. To test out your theory that Pastor Samuelson is possessed.” He remembered Linda’s questions and instructions from when she’d first called him, wanting verification from his lips to her ears about how exactly his medium gift worked. He suspected she already knew.
“Right. We’re going to do a walk-through, see what you sense. How close do you need to be to objects for you to do your thing when it comes to detecting spirits?”
“Um, it varies. If there’s any sort of entity on the premises, I can usually detect something pretty quickly. Maybe soon as we walk through the door, maybe before that. But honestly… no guarantees.”
