For a long time I had a non-fraternal identical twin, born from different parents on the same day. Anthony was a confidence artist, a honey-tongue shoplifter, a smack-addicted hustler. He was pure charisma, I liked him a lot, that is, until I started making comparisons between my dear brother and myself.
I was in college, I worked part-time, I lifted weeks thrice weekly. I meditated and prayed.
(What was I doing, then, in that dead-end beached-whale alcoholic hustler bar, that bar where you could get arrested for just showing up and crabs just by sitting on a stool? I was slumming. Of course I was. Slumming and making some pocket money.)
Anthony, on the other hand, was clearly on The Wrong Road.
Other differences: Anthony had a warm animal in his walk, a better smile, his boyfriends were all rich or well-hung and they nearly ran each other down competing to rescue him. He wore beautiful clothes he stole fresh every day. Anthony had more friends. Of course he did. He was more fun to be around.
Maybe I was down on my luck, just scraping by, but I’d contracted Presbyterianism as a child and I was certain that this was not how things were supposed to work.
Late one night Anthony and I were sitting tucked behind a dumpster off 8th and Broadway. Anthony had a bottle of Peach Schnapps. I’d bought us nachos from the Circle K. He’d just gotten out of detox; I was supposed to take the GRE in Colorado Springs the next morning.
“I was raised in a good Catholic family,” Anthony told me. “I was raised to believe in Jesus Christ the Redeemer.” It was getting cold and we huddled close together. He smelled like schnapps and smoke, like the polyester and starch of that day’s stolen shirt.
“Anthony,” I said. “Let's suck each other off."
We’d never done that before. Of course not. We never had any money and we weren't, either one of us, free.
“Twenty bucks,” he said.
“I paid for the nachos.”
We looked around us at the narrow space between the dumpster and the wall.
Anthony had the most beautiful warm brown eyes. Those eyes he kept right to the end. “It’s not just the Holiday Inns I miss,” he said. “Sometimes I even get nostalgic for motels.”
He went along with it, right there in a corner of the parking lot. I suspect it was partly out of sympathy for me.
In this way our fates were cast together, two brothers tumbling in the dark behind a dumpster off Tenth and Broadway, until it was impossible to tell, who was lucky and who was not.
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