Roberto said they take everyone to see the geyser when they come to visit. Except it was just him and I in his parents’ SUV following the white arrows on road signs that read La Bufadora in Spanish. It was winter break of my first year teaching, and I was paying extra attention as my assignment had changed to English as a Second Language. My boyfriend of three months invited me on Halloween, while we dressed up as cowboys, to visit his family for two weeks over the winter holiday.
“Are they okay with that?” I asked. It felt like being invited to the moon.
My parents had been clear that no boyfriend of mine was welcome in their home since I came out. They blocked my first boyfriend’s phone number on the cell phone they paid for when I was living with them. My mom would grab my arm when she knew I was going on dates with him and try to stop me, “You don’t have to go!” she yelped as if in pain and sloshed her wine on the front tile mixing it with her tears.
A few years later and on my own, my dad said he was open to meeting a boyfriend. His guilt that he would never express openly led us to have semi-regular dinners together. He hadn’t met any of my previous boyfriends, and I usually didn’t mention them, but I felt like he and Roberto may have something in common. They both worked in similar fields and had a steady, even way of being in the world.
We scheduled dinner with my dad at a Tex-Mex restaurant, and he showed up. We were Texan, and Roberto was Mexican, it should be fine. And it was, at that moment, but later I was met with rolling texts, e-mails, and voicemails of problems and concerns and how my mother would feel, and how hard it was to make room for another person even though they so easily accommodated my straight siblings and their girlfriends, now wives.
At Thanksgiving that same year, he wanted to talk before I left to go home. I told him he would have to wait till after Christmas because Roberto had invited me to Mexico. I would meet his family there and not see mine until after Christmas unless he wanted us to stay over the night before to be closer to the airport the next day.
My mother didn’t respond, but she found me in the garage. She said she would miss me, and I told her to think about including the people I care about for family holidays. Then she started to cry because it was easier than having to listen to anything else she didn’t want to hear or to have to respond.
Not being home for the holidays sounded like a real bonus after that. We took a super shuttle from my apartment instead. We sat by strangers going to the airport who already treated us better than my parents did.
I’m not going to lie. It did feel strange to get on the plane with Roberto. I call it First Boyfriend Syndrome. You get all these dreams about your parents and family meeting your boyfriend and taking them to places you knew as a child. Really get to know you stuff like that next to the last date they have on The Bachelor where they both go to the girl’s hometown and meet everybody even though the guy is dating multiple women. For the record, Roberto is my only boyfriend but not my first.
Symptoms of First Boyfriend Syndrome include official boyfriend status, sexual experimentation, lots of public affection, saying I love you too soon, and meeting the parents and childhood friends after a very short time. His parents and friends just happened to be in Ensenada, Mexico in Baja California.
We got off the plane in San Diego from Houston on a sunny California Saturday. His parents stood like statues in the luggage area silhouetted by light gleaming through the windows. Palm trees stood sentinel outside. His mother waved, and Roberto pointed them out. Her love was evident to him. His father had a thin line where a smile should be. They mostly spoke in Spanish as they grabbed our luggage to take to the car.
When we went to an Italian restaurant on a hill for lunch before heading to the border, they paid for our meal. We both got pasta, but neither of us reenacted the Lady and the Tramp scene moving a meatball across the plate and kissing as we shared a single noodle.
Roberto didn’t come clean until the plane ride over. I kept looking over, ever the attentive boyfriend, trying to mask my concern. I had managed to keep it off my mind knowing I would rather spend Christmas in Hell than stay home alone. That’s where my parents thought I was going anyway. I turned off the music, took my earbuds out, and asked the question.
“What am I getting into?” I asked.
“My parents want to see me, and I want to see you, so we’re both going to see my parents.”
“Do they really want to see me?”
“They want to see me, and if they want to see me, they see you.”
“What exactly happened when you came out, anyway?
“My dad took me to the doctor. He asked her to order a test to check my testosterone and other hormone levels. He thought maybe that was the cause, but everything came back normal.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“He told my dad that maybe his son is just gay. That there is no medical explanation.”
“Does he still try to convince you otherwise?”
“Not since that day. My mom asks about you and has been reading some books.”
“What kind of books?”
“She handed me The Velvet Rage last time I came to visit. It’s not as angry as it sounds, and it talks about the harm homophobia and masculine ideals do to gay men. It doesn’t try to fix us.”
“Good, cause mine already think I’m broken,” I said shifting in my seat as Roberto rubs my shoulder and kisses my temple as I fall asleep.
It didn’t take as long as I thought to get across the US border after our Italian lunch. Roberto and I sat in the back seat. I hunched down as soon as we got across and hoped they drove fast through Tijuana.
I was not a local but an American, and if I had learned anything from my father in our heated conversations leading up to this point, is that my nationality had value to him even if my sexuality didn’t. My Mexican boyfriend was leading me into a trap to get kidnapped and appear on Fox News as a missing white gay man who should have known better and dated a demure white woman from church as his parents wanted, “We knew this would happen,” they would say into one of those spongy microphones outside their suburban home.
After we passed through Tijuana and the sun went down my body loosened. Roberto grabbed my hand in the middle seat in the comfort of darkness. The view from the backseat was a mixture of modern and abandoned buildings. It was like the time I visited the Prada store in the desert near Marfa except that was some conceptual art. This was a town, peoples’ homes, or what was supposed to be.
When we got to their home, Roberto got out of the backseat and opened the metal gate in front of the driveway. It mirrored my sense of Mexico so far. If you wanted to keep something nice you had to protect it yourself, build a fence around it.
Roberto grabbed my bag as we went up the stairs to his parent’s home. He found my room in the far corner of the house and dropped my bag on the nightstand. His childhood bedroom was just across from mine, but we wouldn’t be sharing a bed. Maybe that was part of the rules.
“There’s no AC, but if you want your room to be cooler, you can always open the window. We are in California now, not Texas,” He looked to see if his parents were nearby the open bedroom door, smiled, and kissed me before leaving the room with a soft goodnight.
Laying in bed in my boyfriend’s parents’ home felt like a miracle. Even mentioning this idea to my own family turned into an accusation. It fell hard like a rock in the empty well of my soul that used to be filled up with so many feelings for them. It knocked against the walls and echoed in the space where what I thought real love used to be as my father opined after I asked if we could stay just one night before we went to the airport nearby a few weeks later. I wanted some hospitality in kind so that I could say, see, my family can do it too, but then he says,
“What if he plays with the children?”
“You mean, like LEGOS?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, he just looks at me, eyes bugging out of his red, angry face. I finger the handle of his King Ranch truck. Why do I choose to have these conversations in an enclosed space like the cab of a truck that speaks royalty but just means money, leather seats and a vanity logo for a famous Texas ranch its wheels have never trodden on. I might as well have entreated my father as he sat on a golden throne.
It was the act of being transported, the gall of me to think maybe we could get a ride to the airport when they lived so close, that we wouldn’t have to get up so early. That they would do even a little thing for my relationship when I had seen them support my straight brothers and their relationships in so many ways.
Then I realize it wasn’t LEGOS but something more sinister. My parent who claims to love me also claims that my boyfriend is a pedophile. That instead of building silly cars and planes out of multi-colored blocks, he would groom my toddler nephew in a matter of a few short minutes to do something inappropriate with him.
“What the fuck, Dad. My boyfriend is not a pedophile.”
“I’m just saying. We don’t know him.”
“Did you have the same concern for my sisters-in-law?”
“No, but…”
“You are more likely to be a predator toward your grandchild than a stranger, and we’re leaving days before they even come over for Christmas. Quit acting like we didn’t both see that video on child predators year after year in Boy Scouts,” I said struggling to open the door and dreading the long drop from the cab to the concrete driveway. I fell asleep that first night remembering my feet hitting the ground.
Bufadora means geyser in English, but it sounds like the name of a birthday party clown. La is just a feminine article. Somehow words in Spanish and other romance languages have a gender. I remember this from Spanish classes, but I still don’t understand it.
Nor do I know how much of the language I will need when I get back to the US after the break and must teach students from Mexico and other parts of central and South America English. On the drive over, I tried to name some of the names of the towns on the road signs we passed. Roberto was laughing hard at my pronunciation by the time we pulled into the gravel parking lot. The entrance was nothing like I expected.
The Grand Canyon was the only other place I’d visited that fell into the natural wonder category, and I thought La Bufadora would be similar: stark, undeveloped, dusty nature. Instead, I found myself walking into a market full of souvenir shops, restaurants, and discount pharmacies shouting at us in broken English and full-throated Spanish to eat, drink, or buy.
There is too much to see, and I don’t know where to go. Roberto grabs my arm and points to a path I didn’t see before. I am glad we are here together. The night before we went to hang with his college and high school friends. Mexican niceties require gender expressions straight American men might appreciate, but I had never kissed a woman except for my mother before. You were expected to kiss the cheeks of women you met as a greeting. I longed then for a simple touch from Roberto like this one.
Roberto and I met at a crossroads six months ago. I was just about to move into my first apartment of my own in a residential area of Houston’s gayborhood using my newfound salary as a school teacher in a small town forty-minutes away. I could work anywhere, but I wanted to live in the city. I’d been on enough bad first dates to know this is where the queer community congregates.
I had spent the last year and a half since leaving my parents’ hell house living rent-free in a home that didn’t belong to me for a family overseas. The house was large, but I lived in the smallest room at the top of the stairs as a kind of punishment. I had already internalized a lot of my parents’ homophobia by then and being away from it almost made it seem even stronger. I felt exiled, but I was punching through those walls every time I kissed my boyfriend, or we went to the movies or talked about moving in together in our own place even though it made me uncomfortable. It didn’t last, but I did end up teaching my first year in my ex’s hometown.
I knew better than to live there unless I wanted to languish. He was always looking for external validation that didn’t exist in that place. He proposed to me beside dumpsters outside movie theaters, in a dark and stormy parking lot and, lastly, in an empty apartment he’d bought for us. He always wanted signs of love instead of the actual love I offered. I wasn’t ready yet. I was still processing all of the trauma of being. We broke up.
My new apartment was far away, even if I would be commuting there for work. It was a garage apartment, lime green exterior with yellow trim, walking distance to Poison Girl, a bar I frequented for monthly readings, nursing a hard cider while I let the words wash over me like a balm.
I found Roberto there drinking his beer and looking at his phone. He didn’t even know there was a reading there until it started. He just wanted to be with people, didn’t want to be alone. He said he was here from Mexico and had just taken a new job as an engineer. He said he was hungry, so I walked him over to the taco truck in front of the Hollywood convenience store on West Alabama, and he said they tasted like home. He walked me home from there, we exchanged numbers and kissed. Just like that, he told me a few weeks later; I became home too.
Roberto pulled me forward into the crowd. He tells me to look forward, don’t look at them or they’ll approach you. I already know the good vendors to go to, and these are not it. We continue to follow the path. His hand moves from my wrist to my hand. We slow down, the sun shines on us, and we laugh.
Souvenirs are one thing, but I am intrigued by pharmacy and medicine in Mexico. It’s amazing to me what is available over the counter here. Outside of a pharmacy that looks like a silver bullet trailer is a statue of a superhero with a pointed blue head, a yellow leotard, hands akimbo, and a giant boner. There’s a V on his chest. I stop and stare at this erectile dysfunction superhero. Roberto let go of my hand and returned with a sweet drink inside of a hollowed-out pineapple. He took a sip and handed it to me.
“Robbie, take a picture of me,” I said holding the pineapple like a prop next to the off-brand Viagra hero. He pulls out his phone, and I hear the mechanical shutter sound. I look at it on his screen, and he says he will send it to me. We continue walking and drinking, and by the time we are almost at the viewing area he does. I’m about to pull out my phone when it pings in my pocket, but I see signs for the viewing area ahead.
The market opens up to nature into a panoramic scene: a waist-level stone wall overlooks a steep drop and jagged rocks leading out to the Pacific Ocean. A mother stood with her baby hanging its legs off the wall. We are one of many people in a crowd looking out, waiting, for what I don’t yet know.
“Where is la bufadora?” I ask in my silly American accent looking back at him. Roberto is putting on his sunglasses looking across the ocean’s horizon.
“You have to labufa-wait,” he said in his lilting Spanish accent. He reached forward and held my waist, my face reflected in his sunglasses.
I imagined a rock pit with a recognizable hole in the ground. It looked like a regular California coast that you could fall off and impale yourself on sharp rocks by accident.
“Don’t look away,” he said pointing to the dark rocks below. I watched as the tide rolled in and seemed to disappear into the rocks below.
We were all watching. The mother with her child. Older children who had placed themselves precariously on the rocks across the way. Roberto and I stayed safely on the walled platform. Some people started pointing, a gurgle, water seemed to bubble up below. Then a large spray shot out as a diagonal angle across the cove in front of us. The sky burst into a rainbow as the sun shone through the water. Roberto grabbed my waist, pulled me into the water spraying down on us, and kissed me.
“I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“You’ve kissed me before,” I said.
“But not here, under a rainbow.”
I looked around, and all the other couples I hadn’t noticed before were kissing too. We were the only gay couple. The rainbow dissipated, and I asked, “So, all your friends from last night have done this too?”
“A long time ago,” he said, “but I never had anyone I wanted to kiss.”
“Well then,” I said taking a sip of our watered-down pineapple drink, “I consider myself lucky.”
We walked back down the path toward his parents’ SUV holding hands through the restaurants and souvenir shops. I didn’t buy a single souvenir, but I remember the geyser and the rainbow it made — a natural true thing worth the effort of becoming.
