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It was odd, for a doctor’s office, but I’d grown accustomed to it over time. Spacious in height, the wall sconces lost most of their power to illuminate before their light hit the dark ceiling, giving the office a general glow. A huge fish tank divided the rooms and anchored areas of sofas, chairs, glass tables, and plants, its tropical inhabitants hovering around white corals and figurines.
The first time I’d walked in, I’d fingered both the violin and the viola suspended along the wall even before shaking her hand. They were the only natural wood in the room and they felt as out of place as I did. But that was months ago.
I had been seeing Dr. Jayne Haynes – her parents should be fined for that name – since the department referral sent me to her for ‘Intensive work’. The sessions were long and exhausting. However, when I told her my problems weren’t just psychological but real… and she believed me... I stayed.
"So," she asked once we settled in, “how was the long weekend?”
I think I chuckled in response. I mean – where the hell to begin?
Unlike Dr. Phillips, the department shrink whose files were once used in a court case to discredit my testimony, Doc Jayne was on my dime. Over the months of conversation, I had found myself talking to her about things. You know – things. The kind of things that even my best friend couldn’t get out of me. And he — my partner, Ricardo Tubbs — is an expert on my particular brand of bat-shit crazy.
Also, I liked her. She said she’d be more of a guide than a mechanic. She told me she’d use questions to show me direction and strength of the wind and how to get through the storms when they came up. Her use of metaphors aside, I was comfortable for the first time ever in a coldly modern office talking about the inner life of one carefully concealed James ‘Sonny’ Crockett.
With ten plus years of living as an undercover officer for Metro-Dade’s Organized Crime unit, I was an expert at concealment. Hiding behind a fake ID from everyone around me, I pretended to be the sleazoid-charmer, playboy drug dealer down at the marina with the yacht, the jet boat, and the flashy car.
Hiding in plain sight — I offered a constant stream of lies, half-truths, and fiction laid out to entrap the goons that brought drugs and guns to the streets of Miami. There was so much bullshit to the job that some days I couldn’t remember who the hell I was. Some days I forgot. Once, I forgot for months – and it almost killed both Ricardo and me. And even when I was sent for ‘professional help’ – I hid shit… from the hierarchy, from the doctors, from myself because some things were camouflaged so well – I couldn’t remember them.
This is where Doc Haynes came in – more like a sherpa than a psychiatrist – to show me where to go and how to navigate the rough spots by tugging my rope when I stalled. But today I was volunteering for the climb. I had never told anyone that I was bi-sexual, much less opened the topic up for general discussion. It had recently occurred to me that I had probably always been bi and was just now learning what that meant.
Is telling your shrink the same thing as ‘coming out’? Is cracking that office door the same as a closet?
“Fine,” I answered automatically before getting my head in the game. She was going to jump on that like Gina's cat on a dropped earring. ‘Oo – bright, shiny, dangling!' In an attempt to control this unveiling, I added, “Great, actually. We sailed down to Boot Key and back on the Vitus. It was really nice.”
“You were a bit vague on the phone.” There she went – this was the wind up. “Have you met someone new?”
I know I had an idiot smile plastered across my face, but I pulled myself together enough to answer, “No. No one new. Went with a guy I’ve known since ‘Nam.”
“Hmm,” Doc Haynes gets this look when she’s rifling through her head files. “So, relived a bit of the glory days with Robbie Cann?”
She was too damn good. Even though I’d been seeing her for a while now, I didn’t recall mentioning Robbie. It must have been part of Dr. Phillips’ file that she had sent over. It felt a little like being tattled on, but I shook my head and let it go.
“No. Not Robbie.”
She made a face, “Are you going to give today, or do I go fishing?”
I liked it when she talked to me like that – all normal and shit. Sometimes, when she ‘fishes’ things come out that I don’t expect. Sometimes I find things that I’ve been looking for in her fishing expeditions. She’s … okay – real low key – I don’t mind her fishing.
“Marty,” I confessed, “I went with Marty.”
“Your boss, Marty?” Her expression was perplexed. “Martin… Castillo? That’s why I talked to Chief Highsmith, then? Martin was with you.”
I could see the questions slamming into one another in the set of her jaw, her eyes narrowing in forced concentration – prioritizing topics, preparing her volley.
“You’ve never told me that you knew your commanding officer before he came to Metro-Dade. Did you serve together in Vietnam?”
She didn’t assume, ever. Her restatement or clarifying questions contained only the information given. It was a Detective’s style — Jayne would have been a good witness on the stand and a great interrogator on the force.
“No, Doc,” I said. As much as I would have liked to see where she’d cast her line in this murky mess, time was limited and I needed her opinion on a few things.
“We didn’t serve together. I met Marty in ‘Nam. One night, on leave. I was in the process of getting my green ass in a big jam and he stepped in and stopped it. He looked a helluva lot different – I didn’t recognize him when he first got here – it took time for me to put it all together. But his voice kinda kick-started my memories of…” I stopped.
Wordy. Too fucking wordy – and I realized I was nervous. Shit. This buzzing, crawling feeling was suddenly clawing its way up my chest. Damn it, I had a plan when I walked in, a list of things that I wanted to talk about. And it was gone. It felt like stumbling into the middle of an undercover op and not being sure who the players were. My fingers went to where they always go when I’m outta bounds – to play with the corners of my mouth. I looked up to see Dr. Haynes’ grey-blue eyes focused on my hand. She knew I was nervous, too, but she waited.
“It was a long time ago.” I stalled, not looking at her; I didn’t want to know if she would be shocked. With a small cough I continued, “I wasn’t quite nineteen. He’s, like, six years older… we spent the night together.” I tried glancing at her but couldn’t maintain eye contact – not yet – so I stumbled on with the story.
“It was just one night. Then, after he’d been with the department a year or so, I started to have these dreams and remembered what we…” I didn’t want to veer into the whole train wreck of my big epiphany but street poetry ain’t my style either so I stammered my way through an explanation. “When I remembered, we spent a few days talking about it at his place to… I don’t know… put it to rest? Figure it out? I don’t know.” I glanced over, finally able to look at her long enough to assess her reaction to this bombshell.
Jayne was in that state of receiving with her whole body. Leaning back into the corner of the sofa with her back against the aquarium wall, her arms across the cushions in comfortable moderation. Her expression was open, relaxed, encouraging.
When our eyes met, she nodded, “Wait, let’s go back. The two of you had a sexual encounter in Vietnam?”
“Yyyes.” My voice wasn’t as confident as I’d planned. “We met in ’Nam. We met after I’d lost a bunch of buddies. It was … I still can’t describe it.”
Dr. Haynes and I had never discussed my days in the Air Cavalry. This was the first time my current life directly overlapped with crap in Vietnam. Southeast Asia was not on my list of things to discuss either but here I was leaking like a bad head-gasket.
“It was like… well," and this is where I started to babble. Vietnam was a group of interlocking pieces – it was hard to move one without moving all the others. "I was talking to Chris, my buddy Chris Frack, and there was this metallic ‘PING’ and… there was a hole in his face and then there was nothing. It’s like his head shattered. His helmet had nowhere to go and it sorta tumbled backwards off his shoulders before his body fell.… it was… Man, I lost a bunch of buddies on that tour. I goofed up my bad knee carrying Robbie to the next drop zone. It was bad enough to be furloughed for four days.”
I didn’t want to talk about Vietnam, because that elephant grass was too thick and cut too deep. Besides, it just happened to be where we met… and I... had had a fucking plan, dammit.
I looked past the fish into the rear of the office. It was darker, being lit by a single table lamp. We never sat there, we never talked in the dim shadows. She always kept me out here in the stark modern chill.
“This put you into a position of meeting Martin, then?”
My attention snapped back to Jayne’s soft smile, she had watched me, had let me wander in my brain before reeling me in. Something I’d done or said had sent up the flare, warning her that I didn’t want to discuss the war – except where it touched Marty. With an encouraging nod, she gave me a way back.
“Yeah,” I grabbed onto her question. “I was supposed to spend four days taking care of my knee and … and I was stupid. I bought a bunch of Thai stick. Flashed too much cash and then had a nasty run-in with the dealers. They’d surrounded me in the back of a bar when this guy… this guy stepped between them and me and … and everything just changed.”
I knew it wasn’t making sense. It was like trying to bring someone up to speed three quarters of the way through Apocalypse Now and starting with ‘and then they throw Chef’s head into his lap’. But I had been under Jayne’s care long enough to trust her to ask for what she needed about my fucked-up plot holes.
“He was… like Kato from Green Hornet… he moved like water, he just flowed into the space between me and those knives… and … they faded away.” My one hand made a small fanned-finger gesture of dismissal.
I shook my head, the memories of Pao, of the man that I would later know as Martin, standing in front of me, protecting me from the imminent attack with all that confidence, became something more. Half a world away, in a shrink’s office the memory solidified into something both real and symbolic.
From that first moment to that morning’s briefing, and all the time between — he never wavered. He was both shield and sword – and impassively persistent. He never questioned his ability to protect and he offered it readily. It was a confidence that ran through the entire team in his presence. It was palpable.
But this wasn’t about Martin - this was about me.
“He didn’t really do anything but they all looked freaked out and scattered. Then he turns around and tells me I shouldn’t be running around alone and he walked me back to my hotel.”
This was the easy part of the story. “On the way back, he was… real quiet. Seemed like everyone we passed bowed or nodded or just fled. It was – being in the presence of real power, ya know. And we got to my hotel and he turned to leave. I don’t know. I don’t know what I wanted, what I was thinking… I asked him up to my room. It took him a bit but then he finally said ‘okay’.
“Then, when we got upstairs he still didn’t talk much. He was…” I was wrestling with my memories.
It had been so long ago, the various versions of Pao and Martin had mostly synthesized into a single vision. In telling the events as a story to Doc I found a clarity that I thought gone. I suddenly remembered Pao before the brutal transformation that made him Martin. “He was ethereal. Had this long, silky black hair, huge eyes – I don’t know – exotic maybe. He moved like a cat. Came up to my room and sat there – like a leopard in a tree, just watching me. I jabbered on about crap, I can’t remember what. I finally got around to asking him why he’d stepped in. After a minute he said he wouldn’t let them have what he wanted for himself.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I mean… I was buzzy from the shots and a little high from the Thai and I thought … I thought he meant… ya know… sex. And suddenly it seemed reasonable. Come to find out later, he meant the Thai stick. He was there to take the Thai Stick away from me but – well – that information got lost in the shuffle.”
Without hesitation she prompted, “So, you had sex with this man that you’d just met in a bar.” Her voice was neutral. This was asking me to clarify what I had not been able to actually say. When I looked up, she simply nodded.
I felt a rush of heat course up my neck as my thirty-six-year old’s perspective judged my eighteen-year- old’s action. It seemed more than naïve, it seemed dangerous. No. It was dangerous. Focusing on the memory I tried to rein in my emotion.
“Yeah,” I finally answered, “I did. I told him I didn’t know what to do and … he said he did and then he showed me. Everything.” My dick had its own memories and using the cover of taking a drink from my water glass, I shifted into a less exposed position, repeating, “He showed me everything. And I woke up the next morning alone. And … it was everything I wasn’t supposed to want. And I knew that and I still wanted it. Again. With him. But he was gone and I was just this injured kid from the sticks, again, that didn’t have a clue.
“It was so hard to … pretend to be normal. But I got good at that game quick. I put more energy into being dangerous – but in a good way. I wanted to be the guy that walks down the street either making people feel safe or making shit-heads run. Got good at that, too. And when I got home, I married the girl I was supposed to and started a family.”
“Twice,” Jayne said, referring to Caitlyn, my second wife that had died the previous year. “You tried that path twice.” She stopped talking long enough to let me think. “You told me two weeks ago that you thought you and she wouldn’t make it either.”
Doc was always there with a mirror when you were the most honest or the most broken. I sat for a moment staring at the floor. It was true. I told her that I saw all the signs of failure: Catie’s heavy sighs when I told her I had to cancel plans due to work, my annoyance at the exaggerated wilted posture as she retreated up the stairs, her remaining on tour when I was shot in the chest, and my resentment at having to transfer departments to keep us together. They were all signs. All bad signs. And despite her pregnancy at the time of her death – we were on a course of destruction.
“Yeah.” I nodded at the floor. “Twice. I don’t know, Doc. I thought I wanted to tell you that I’m Bi – but am I just so far in the closet that I’m lying to myself?
Her chuckle was a surprise and brought my attention away from the pink and green flecks in the carpet.
“If you’re by the pool and there’s a bunch of oiled body candy laying there in the sun – what are you looking at?” she asked.
Callie Basset immediately came to mind. A dangerous hottie in a Ceylon blue bikini, Egyptian bangles, and a cascade of blonde hair that had made out with an ice cube from my drink a few years back. I grinned at the memory. She was a complete and utter disaster – and she was serving a 25-year sentence in Tallahassee for Conspiracy to Commit Murder. My murder. Nevertheless, she was a vision of beauty and a decent kisser.
The chuckle turned into a light, pleasant laugh. “I think it’s safe to say – you are not Gay.”
“Doc,” I growled, “it makes me uncomfortable when you read me like a book.”
She shook her head, “Never fear. Occasionally you’re more transparent than normal. So… I don’t want to know who she is – I’m guessing she represents many, many others who shall remain nameless. But, even in the light of all that bikini tied oil – you want to talk about Martin Castillo. Because, ultimately, none of them matter and he does.”
Somehow Jayne had found my list in the conversation and tacked it on her clipboard. After me stumbling around in the afterglow of an incredible weekend of discovery, we were on target. Out of the blue, I had a crawling feeling of anticipation.
“No. None of them matter except that we had a good time. I think we liked each other.” I’d lost count of the women in my bed – or in their beds – or on the hood of the car. Once in a while one would stick around, there were a few I’d become genuinely attached to but, in the end, I always had to explain myself to them. And the explanation usually began with ‘I’m a cop’ and ended with a cool spot on the other side of the bed where I stashed my guilt.
“Were they a place holder for Caroline or Martin?”
Her question was a punt that bounced off my goal post. For a couple of seconds, I was confused. “What do you mean?” I asked a little too aggressively.
“I mean, if you met Martin in Vietnam before you paired up with your ex-wife, then your relationship with him is a primary figure in your sexual identity. Caroline was the next. Those are the templates that you will likely judge all the others by. Those are the maps you’ve used longer than anyone else.
“So, what I’m asking is - the women that you liked and took to bed - were you comparing them to the ‘perfect and forever woman’ in your playbook or the ‘dangerous, exciting savior’?
“I don’t like that question,” I grumbled at her.
“And yet, I asked it.”
In a blink it occurred to me why we stayed on this side of the aquarium. Doc Haynes sat quietly; her expression impassive as she waited for me… to run. She’d pushed before like this, using a tone that was almost sarcastic. Each time she did it she would follow up with a complete stillness.
I recognized the stillness now. This was Martin’s kind of stillness. When he threw out a piece of information to use as bait to see what he could learn from the reaction of his quarry. This was calculated for its effect - upon me.
The flash of clarity hit me so hard, I moaned, “Oooh!”
That punchy feeling that had been playing ping-pong between my stomach and chest stopped. It was replaced with an obstinate resolve. Leaning forward, looking directly into those gorgeous steely eyes I laughed, “You can forget it. I ain’t taking off, Doc!”
“Good man.” Jayne leaned forward, taking her glasses and notepad from the table. Standing, she gave her head a little toss in the direction of the aquarium. “Let’s go sit in the nest, then. You can tell me all about your weekend.” Weaving between the outer office sofas, she continued speaking. “Bisexuality gets a bad rap by my profession. As if people have ever been strictly one way or another. Sexual intimacy is dictated by social context of space and bio-social pressures.”
Settling into a chair beside the lamp, Jayne adjusted the note pad across her knee. “If you get hungry or feel snacky, let me know. We’ll order something. Now. Tell me what happened. I take it by your super-relaxed state upon arrival, there was a lot of sex over the weekend.”
There is an old-fashioned southern-boy inside me that makes talking about the vagaries of sex uncomfortable — and I mean, with anyone – really. But sitting across from Dr. Haynes, in the softly lighted womb of a space, hit me squarely in the junior-high-awkwards. Now I knew why the lighting over here was different; things can be talked about in the shadows that can’t be looked at in the light of day.
‘A lot of sex over the weekend’ – yeah, there had been a lot of sex.
I looked down at my hands feeling the palms empty, the fingers slack, remembering how they felt wrapped around his erection, running fingers down the cleft of his ass before sliding into him. Shifting into the soft cloud of a chair, I felt a tug in my lumbar from being curved into fucking, my legs wrapped around his torso, his dick pressed into me balls-to-cheeks.
“Yes.” I didn’t look up at her. “A lot.”
“Is this the first time you two have been together sexually since the war?”
“No, not exactly.”
This was my intention when I made the appointment. This topic right here. But the brakes had been slammed on and that awkward feeling was hammering at my brain. Maybe it was the way we got here – her casual ‘a lot of sex? tell me about it’ approach. Maybe I hadn’t thought this whole thing through and telling one person wouldn’t be enough and I’d start puking joy in the office (as I have been known to do). Maybe Tubbs was right when he teased — Brother wants everyone to know he’s in love. It didn’t matter. I was in my Shrinks office, thinking about fucking my boss, and suddenly too shy to talk about what I came to talk about.
“Those days you mentioned — when you realized who Martin was — you did more than talk?” There was a ‘ah-ha’ in her tone that made me look at her. She wasn’t smiling. If anything, she had a hard sincerity in her eyes and in the tilt of her head.
“Yes.” I couldn’t tell you why I suddenly sounded like my twelve-year-old son – but it was his voice that squeaked an affirmative.
“Have there been others as well?”
“A couple, over the years.” Evidently, Billy gets that soft whininess from me, too. “But no one else since, like, May of 85. I mean – there was a guy when I came back from Nam – before I got married. And a couple after Caroline left me. To be clear, Doc, we’re talking oral stuff not… not the other. I thought, maybe one of the reasons she left me was because I was Gay.”
“In some ways that would have been easier than the truth. Hmm?”
I couldn’t look at her anymore. Suddenly that outer office, with its lights and its viola hanging off the wall and its door seemed really appealing. “Yeah,” was all my dry mouth could manage.
“But you’re not. And there’s Martin.”
“Yeah,” I said again. “He’s the only one I’ve ever …” the words caught in my throat as my brain whirled with the choice of spilling vulgar words in this pristine space.
“Go on. Tell me.”
“Fucked… and the only one I’ve ever let fuck me.” In for a line — in for twenty kilos.
Haynes simply nodded – and I suddenly wondered about her other clients. She was unphased by my curses and the various horror stories previously laid out in our sessions. How many other ‘complex clients’ did she guide through the shit-storm of living?
“So, the relationship is reciprocal?” Doc was deep sea fishing now. Her pen on the tablet in her lap swept across the page when I nodded the answer.
I had a plan when I walked in. I had a few ideas by the time we moved to this room of shadow and dark. I had a thought before she pointed out that I thought being Gay would somehow explain my failure to be the husband I had planned on being when I said ‘till death do us part’. And now I had nothing.
I had let my first wife go to save her life. When I didn’t let my second wife go and didn’t change my ways, death did part us. And Marty was there through it all. Marty was still there. He had always been there.
“This past week was a re-acquaintance then?” Jayne asked, “Did the two of you come to an understanding? Do you have a plan?”
Focusing on the lionfish fluttering in the tank across the room, I let her question play through. Did we? Kinda. In a moment of true exasperation Marty had said “guess we’ll redefine circumspect… I said ‘gotta move past this the last time’. Honestly, he’d tried putting us off twice: once in Saigon and once in Miami… but I kept coming back. And every time I did – we went a little deeper.
“I think so,” I said, staring at the big flashy defensive spikes of the lionfish. They were bright, predatory, poisonous creatures of saltwater reefs – but they were beautiful, compelling, and difficult to resist. If you were careful, if you were cautious with their environment and handling – everything was fine. If you weren’t, you were in for a world of hurt.
Marty – Martin – Martín Castillo was markedly careful and cautious – and had his own kind of defensive armament. And, though he wasn’t poisonous, if you messed with him, you were in for a world of hurt. IF he defended you, you were completely safe.
“There’s something about Martin. I feel like I… I … don’t know how to describe it.” But then, like a trawler deck after pulling the cod end rope on a net of shrimp, the rest just spilled from me. “I want what we had on the boat. I want to... be... together. Lay in the dark until the words run out then wake up with him and his tea. We spent the days working ... ya know... together – talking, not talking – either way it was fine. I like watching him do Tai Chi in the mornings and I found out I can make him laugh. And... yeah... the sex is always great. Straight forward. No hoops to jump through, no not-tonight-I-have-a-hangnail.
"Also, there's the trust – I know he’s got my back. I feel like – I don’t have to be on guard all the time. I don’t have to constantly worry about… shit. I don’t have to explain shit all the time, like what it means to be a cop. I don't have to apologize for being... me. And sleep – I mean – I actually sleep through the night when he’s there. I just want… I just…”
“Sonny,” Jayne’s voice was a soft hush of encouragement, “say it.”
For a few seconds I stared at her. What the fuck did she want? I’d said it, hadn’t I? I said that I trusted him with my life – and then dumped the rest of the b-movie bullshit out for her to pull apart. And what? What more did she want? What did she see?
Then, she nodded. No more hints – just a nod. And I couldn’t look at her anymore. Instead, I scanned the glowing aquarium. Obscured by coral the lionfish no longer had center stage and I realized there were other fish in the tank. A few blue tangs schooled in the bottom corner and a flat yellow and black-spotted fish hovered languidly near the bubbler.
“Is that a panther grouper?” I asked, squinting through the darkness.
“Yes.”
The thing about a saltwater tank filled with predators is that you had to choose your fish carefully. These guys will eat anything smaller and fight anything in their territory. There are only a handful of species that can make it together in a limited space with a lion and not be poisoned or consumed. The panther was one of the few.
“They get along?” I was stalling, Jayne knew it but let me play on the line.
“Yeah. Yin and Yang have been together for years. The Tang trio are newer and their own group; they ignore the big guys.
“So, you’re not ready to admit it?” she pivoted without a breath. She jerked on the line and began reeling in. I was caught.
“What? That I’m in love? That I love Martin? That I’m sunk and we live in a world that makes that impossible.”
“Yes. That. I mean all of that.” She took a moment to write notes – letting me flop on the deck awhile.
There were only so many relationships in life that clicked – that really made a difference. Caroline and Billy were everything to me. Everything. But I was poison to them. There could never be a stable flow to our lives as long as I was a cop. We tried over and over but my attentions were always pulled away. And then the day came when a hired gunman forced Caroline to the floor, covering our son’s body with her own while I traded bullets with the hit-man. There was no coming back from that. Ever.
After that, I reached for someone who understood. I ruined a friendship by reaching out to Gina. Gina Calabrese and I had been close friends, but we never crossed the line until my marriage was all but over. The day Caroline drove away with Billy from our bullet ridden house was a bad day for my friendship with Gina. She understood the job. She understood me. And despite her telling me that I was on the rebound, I drew her in and damaged our friendship with self-serving demands. It took us years to find our way out of that mess.
Catie? Caitlin was a weird-ass fairytale. She annoyed the fuck out of me for the first week that I was assigned to protect her. Then hit-men came after her… then we were fucking in the boat. Then … then all I could see was her. Too fast – we had moved too fast. I was married and juggling the cop/wife divide again, only this time it was a musical. It was doomed. I was doomed. And she died because a gunman wanted to make me pay for his sins.
Teresa? A hard lesson that I wasn’t the only one who could hide shit. Brenda? A fancy distraction. And on and on – the list grew steadily until I lost my mind and became Burnett.
I spent years wanting, always reaching for something, never finding a finger hold on the slippery faces of love and reason. Years playing the game, until Martin was weak enough to need me. And that's when wall came down… and he stopped saying no with every action, every look, every growl.
The morning Marty stood on the deck of the St Vitus Dance and said, “I don’t want to go back. — not yet” had thrown me into a giddy spin. I’d kissed him. He let me kiss him. I’d had my arm around him to keep him from falling off the gunwale and just… tightened my grip and he curled into me. I remembered the way his dark eyes bounced from my eyes to my mouth and back. He was hurt. He was an injured cat. And it was me that he came to for shelter. He came to me… and I loved that. I wanted that. It was glorious.
But by every rule I had ever been taught, by every code I lived by - it was forbidden.
“I love him,” I whispered. “But that’s not allowed.”
The tears - that I refused to let go, ever - exploded. A bomb of shadow and a flood of shame choked me and I couldn’t breathe.
I still can’t.