If You're Not Yet Like Me
appear too eager. His apartment was at the end of a long, carpeted hallway that smelled of chicken soup and Doritos, and behind other doors came the occasional human voice and snippets of television: a basketball game, a telenovela, a decades-old sitcom. A baby cried somewhere nearby. I hurried along.
    I knocked once and Zachary opened the door. “Hey,” he said, almost breathlessly. He took a determined step forward and kissed me.
    “Hello to you,” I said, when he pulled away. We both laughed and he invited me inside.
    As it turned out, he lived in a studio, which is why, I deduced, he hadn’t wanted me over on the first date. If his bed weren’t made, or his couch cleared, the tableau would be too immediately personal. But whatever condition his apartment had been in the other night, it was now spotless. There was almost an ascetic quality to the place, with its white walls and neatly made bed, and thick black bars on the only window in the main room. I knew right off that he had no mold problem, that he had lied, to comfort me. It was husbandly behavior, I thought.
    “Do you want some wine?” he asked.
    “Red or white?”
    “I bought both,” he admitted. “Just in case.”
    “Red then,” I replied. “But I do like white, when it’s hot out.”
    He nodded, but before he could head for the kitchen, I said, “Explain those.”
    In two of the four corners hung piñatas. The first was a cartoonish pink pig, with wide, bewildered eyes and a short, curly tail. The other was black and oddly shaped; I couldn’t tell what it was. I had never seen someone hang piñatas as decoration, and I was still deciding if they were cool or stupid when from behind me, Zachary said, “That one’s supposed to be an old telephone. A rotary phone.”
    I nodded and walked beneath it. Yes, that much was clear now, although the design was pretty primitive, too bulky, the numbers on the circular dial difficult to make out.
    “Where’d you get them?” I asked. I pictured Zachary, his first week in LA, stepping into a Latino grocery store, raiding it of all its exotic specimens.
    “I made them,” he said. He seemed neither proud nor embarrassed. “It’s a hobby,” he explained, “though I guess that’s not the right word.” He gazed at the telephone. “I was into art in high school, but gave it up in college pretty quickly, when I couldn’t get into any of the classes. I went to Mexico after graduation—you know, traveled around, wore a bandana.” He shrugged. “While I was there, I took this workshop. It was for tourists, like me—or not, there were older people there, couples. Anyway, I learned how to make piñatas and other Mexican crafts.”
    “Do you have a thing for Mexico?” I asked. “Like some guys, they love Japan?”
    He frowned. “You haven’t been there, have you?”
    I realized I’d offended him and I felt myself losing the upper-hand. Just a minute ago, he’d answered the door like a five-year-old birthday boy.
    “I didn’t mean anything by it,” I said.
    “I know—I guess I’m just a little protective of them. Stupid, I know.”
    “It’s not,” I said.
    He said nothing.
    “What’s inside of them?”
    He shook his head.
    “Nothing?” I said.
    “No, they’ve both got stuff inside. But it’s a secret.”
    “You won’t tell me?”
    He smiled. “Nope.”
    Zachary’s refusal to tell me what was in the piñatas was what I now call Blow #1. The fact of the piñatas alone would have done very little to change my feelings about this man, who, I should point out, was wearing the exact same outfit I’d seen him in the first time we’d met. But the secret of the piñatas, the mystery of their innards—candy or money or balled-up washcloths—compelled me. With a single refusal, Zachary plucked the apathy off of me like a petal from a flower.
    For dinner, he cooked a box of spaghetti and a jar of red sauce. Over this entrée, we shook salt, powdered parmesan from a green cardboard
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