Skulking

[Editor’s note: On the balmiest of tropical Florida nights, Enrique roams the streets under the full moon, looking for….? Amazingly this essay appeared originally as a column in a daily newspaper—it’s a fine example of how Enrique ignored the “rules” of formula journalism—and got away with it because he was that good a writer.]

At night I go skulking around the suburban streets. Their purring silence intoxicates me, as do the silhouettes of the tropical foliage. If only a bolero were floating in the air, played by a big lush band of muted horns and soft drums. If only someone appeared. But I don't want anyone to appear, really. For it might not be like in an old romantic movie, but like in some modern gore flick in which suburban nights beckon the uninvited.

The Florida suburbs of my youth, the old rich ones that are still around, felt safe. Not much need for electronic protection and surveillance, and no special guards. I guess the regular cops made sure the rich and the comfortably middle-class were safe. The cops and a stricter class and caste system that kept folk quite literally in their place. Kept folk from skulking.

I skulked. Growing up in a poor-relation neighborhood of those suburbs, right next to them, I learned they were the best place for skulking. For no one could see or hear me. Unlike the poorer city streets of my childhood, these streets were totally free of people at night. Once these neighbors went in, they went in. They didn't hang their torsos out the windows, like the neighbors in poor Latin cities, looking at the outside, participating in the outside with everything but their hindquarters. They kept their whole bodies and all their senses inside, probably because inside there was fine food and drink, good record players and TV sets, comfortable furniture, maybe even art on the walls. No need to look out when all you want is in.

And the walls were thick. And the houses were air-conditioned. Skulking, I was silent, invisible. Like some unnatural creature.

I didn't skulk alone. Sometimes there was a girl. Sometimes a handful of friends. We skulked and took swigs of canned beer or the cheapest French wine. There was kissing between swigs, and some careless touching. Mostly talk: the soulful, silly talk of skulkers. If a good tree appeared it was climbed. I think once or twice there was a guitar and someone played some very bad flamenco or a stupid drinking song on top of a tree. As long as we did not become a big rowdy party no one knew we were out there, gentleman (and lady) songsters out on a spree/Doomed from here to eternity. Student werewolves.

Those streets look the same tonight. I move through them breathing the balmy possibility of romance that hangs in the tropical night. Like the romance of an old bolero that no one is playing, unless it's on the sound systems inside, far better than the good record players of my youth, as good as what you heard at the movies back then. But the thick walls, the sealed air-conditioned tightness, they would keep the bolero inside, like the people. No soundtrack for skulkers. Only the purring silence. I skulk, hushed and alone.

And what if I ran into a pack of werewolves? Would they offer me a swig of cheap French wine, a grape-besotted wet kiss, a song? Or would they tear my throat out?

I only skulk close to home these days. I haven't driven to a skulking spot in decades, packing a guitar and a bottle of cheap French wine. I wouldn't know where to take a lady skulker.

Still, on full-moon nights I step outside and breathe the glowing air. I don't go far - who knows what's out there? The silhouetted foliage purrs a name, someone is about to appear backlit by a street lamp, the imagination conjures a skulking presence, there's a glint. Who goes there? A fellow werewolf, aging and aching? A dance partner for a tropical bolero night? An image conjured by the memory of a dream?

On the balmiest tropical nights, the heart, that nocturnal creature, longs to skulk around the suburban streets, listening to the purring silence, blinded by the full moon, driven to kiss wine-stained lips, remembering when everything felt safe and only youth felt dangerous, whispering a skulking song, God have mercy on such as we.

[column from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 1998]