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The Love House

Jorges’s mother Carlotta was a beautiful prostitute. She had seven husbands and Jorges never knew who his father was. He had a macho homophobic brother Augusto whose mission in life was to see to it that Jorges would be straight. In fact, he used to bring over porn videos to him, hoping Jorges would get excited about the women. At that time, Jorges and I were seventeen. I don’t think Augusto particularly liked me.

I can remember the Saturday that I saw Carlotta for the first time through the black fringes of the Chinese style curtain trying to come on to me. The phone rang.

“Jorges, it’s Father Thomas, dear, on the other line. He wants you at church after your swim meet.” It seems the Father and the boy had met at the Y.

Augusto suspected something about Father Thomas when he started to call so often.

“What’s with him, Jorges?”

“Nada.”

“It better be nada, or I’ll beat him up in his ecclesiastical robe.”

I knew there was something to it; how else would Jorges have money in his pocket for whatever he wanted?

“Shall I tell Father Thomas you will call back, caro?”

“I’ll see him on Sunday.”

That was their day, I guess. Jorges played the piano beautifully. He had long thin fingers. We went into his bedroom and he showed me letters he had written to God. Later in life I understood they were Kierkegaardian in style and emotion.

Tonight was my night – anyway it was night time – and Jorges shut off the lights and suddenly took off his clothes, after having lit a candle.

He had the smooth rippling chest of a gladiator.

“I want to be naked before God, like David.”

“I’d like to be like Jonathan,” I said.

We slept curled in each other’s arms.

I’ve never forgotten to this, even to this day.

In the morning his mother made us eggs and bacon and gave us money. Then she retired to her room with a customer after the first one left, winking at us both.

One day another friend told me Jorges had caught Father Thomas with another altar boy and became angry and joined a cult. I could not contact him. He had been invited to one of the cult’s Wednesday night dinners and perhaps they had brainwashed or even drugged him. Later in life, Jorges told me himself that he had a form of frontal lobe epilepsy from trauma, like Dostoevsky, and a psychologist told him he had religious ideation.

Anyway, I hated to call his mother when I couldn’t find him, but I did anyway, and told her that Jorges was in a dangerous religious cult.

“But wouldn’t Father Thomas get him out of it?”

Carlotta was very naive about the religious life. Anyway, Augusto that very night managed to kidnap Jorges through his bedroom window, like a stolen bride, and brought him home.

About a month later Jorges and I were playing frisbee together in the park and Jorges looked at me and started to speak in a robotic manner, with measured speech.

“I must go back to God’s Avengers.”

“No, not that cult…”

“I can feel their prayers for me to bring me back home to them.”

I intuited that I was dealing with both the psychological and supernatural and I became afraid and felt powerless. Jorges gave me an eerie and dour look.

“I must be about my spiritual exercises.”

“Who are you, Jorges, a Jesuit?”

He was very serious in his reply.

“They taught us well. Maybe you are my enemy?”

Augusto came to the ballfield and took Jorges and I back to their apartment. He always was trying to rescue his brother. Carlotta, in a sexy negligee, greeted us.

“Father Thomas called up. He wants to help you, Jorges. He told me to tell you ‘all is forgiven.’”

“Listen, it was this priest who made Jorges crazy religious and not go out with the girls like a normal boy.”

“What do you know of the spiritual, Augusto? You’re like me, carnal.”

“Go to hell. I know what’s real and solid. That priest only wants to swim in the nude with our Jorges.”

Jorges did prefer nudity to being clothed. He associated it with love and being close to God in innocence or a state of grace.

He took me again into the bedroom and put the St. John Passion on the stereo. He wanted to make love. He didn’t care what Augusto might do to him. I felt embarrassed being in the house with the whole family home. I gave him a hug and left.

Soon Jorges would date girls, but he only chose plain ones.

Augusto told me, “Paul, he only thinks his mother is perfect, and that it would be sacrilegious to have sex with someone also beautiful.”

Jorges married a few times and was dropped quickly by each wife. He became a mental health social worker, and we managed to remain friends. But every time I hear the Passion, the memory haunts me that love could have happened if I had let go.

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