I’ve been thinking about my first adolescent crush, who he might’ve been among the rough-neck, drug-dealing fuckboys posted on street corners like traffic signs in the Lonsdale projects where I grew up, an older blackboy dropped out of high school who kept a low profile with his crew in the alley across from Sam E. Hill Primary, sitting on the hood of a broken-down car in a wife beater and low-hanging jeans, boxers bunched around his waist, passing around joints and 40s of malt liquor, getting his jollies bragging to his homeboys about all the women he’d fucked or the niggas he’d shot, before they all migrated to Pascal Drive to circumvent, if not outright test, the community’s moral convictions by selling dope too close to First Calvary Baptist Church like a pack of sacrileges. Though I’ve failed to conjure a name, a face, only a composite figure of the many blackboys who once entered into my waking and dreaming consciousness like relics of a bygone past that even then they were already becoming. I’m curious to know who he is because I want to recreate some romantic notion of what might’ve been between two blackboys dramatically different in age and experience after having watched Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name for what has to be the seventy-fifth time, rewinding the scenewhen Oliver says to Elio: “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” the two of them lying together in bed, their skins pale in the powdery light of a bright moon so that it appears to be the blue hour before dawn, yet it is still the night of. Oliver and Elio face one another nose to nose. Oliver whispers to him his instructions. Elio looks at first taken aback, but he capitulates and says his name—“Elio”—and points to Oliver as if to say, Like this? Oliver reciprocates, “O-li-ver,” heavy with the breath that speaks it. They say their names again; Elio grabs Oliver by the chin to kiss his lips; they roll away together out of frame before the scene dissolves into the next.
***
You’d think this was my favorite scene in the film, but it isn’t. My favorite is actually a sequence. It begins with a series of crosscuts that show Oliver and Elio performing separate actions that happen simultaneously. The crosscutting creates tension that is at once suspenseful, intimate, and awkward. The first cut is of Oliver arriving to Elio’s family’s villa after a bicycle ride. It is late morning or early afternoon; the sunshine is so bright, who can really tell what time of the day it is? Oliver dismounts, jumping backward off the bike as it continues traveling forward, but quickly he grabs the seat to stop it. (It’s an extremely skillful move.) He wears an unbuttoned, blue oxford shirt, which bares his hairy chest and billows with each stride he makes toward the villa. Cut to Elio alone, lying in bed; he checks his watch; a book is discarded beside him as if out of boredom. He places a hand behind his head, the other slides inside his boxer shorts. Cut back to Oliver, who is now using the shirt to swab the sweat from his body as he approaches—even closer—the villa’s entrance. He is almost out of frame when we cut to Elio again. In three separate shots (taken from three different angles) we see him slide his hand in and out of his boxers, staring into space as if conjuring an image. The camera lingers on the third shot of Elio, a closer view of him with his hand inside his underwear, massaging…Suddenly, there’s a knock at Elio’s door and Oliver barges into the room, perhaps in time to see Elio yank his hand from his boxers and pick up the book he struggles to open. Elio braces himself on an elbow; he props up a leg to hide his crotch.
“Elio, what are you doing?” Oliver says when he clearly sees Elio staring at a book in his hands.
“Reading,” Elio says.
“How come you’re not with everyone else down by the river?”Oliver says.
“I have an allergy,” Elio says, gesturing around his mouth and nose to indicate he has an allergy.
Oliver looks intently at Elio. “Yeah, me too. Maybe we have the same one.”
Oliver is either (1) telling the truth, (2) indulging Elio so as not to humiliate him, or (3) using very subdued sarcasm to imply that yes, he has the same allergy as Elio if Elio was indeed reading that book when he entered the room. Whatever his intentions, Oliver says to Elio, “Why don’t you and I go swimming?” (But what about your allergy?) Elio says, “Right now?” because right now he has an erection. Oliver clasps Elio’s forearm. “Yes, right now,” he says, and tries to pull him out of bed. “Come on,”Oliver insists. “Let’s go.” Elio relents and waits for Oliver to take two steps through the Jack-and-Jill bathroom that joins their rooms before he looks down, dismayed at his crotch, and slams his body repeatedly against the mattress as if Oliver couldn’t possibly hear the ruckus of squeaky coil springs, and what it might imply. Elio undresses and shows off his I-definitely-have-a-seventeen-year-old-whiteboy-booty, then peeks into Oliver’s room, nearly gagging—as if he’s never seen such things—when Oliver pulls a pair of red trunks over the curve of his firm white ass. “See you downstairs,” Oliver says, leaving Elio to stare at his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
In Call Me by Your Name, revelations take the form of innuendo that must often be read between the lines. A simple question asked at the top of the scene (“Elio, what are you doing?”) isn’t an instance of small talk but rather a point of tension, a turn in the plot that baits us as we anticipate what comes next, maneuvering through the crafty flirtations and shifting power dynamics until we are brought ultimately to the end of the scene where Elio and Oliver are picking apricots from one of the trees, yet with all the space in the world to give them ample room to select from an abundance of fruit, Elio decides to home in on the lower-hanging apricots. He uses his forearm to (t)ease Oliver out of his way to reach them, slowly pushing Oliver the maximum distance that still allows his touch to linger on Oliver’s body. But this is no rebuff. Elio wants to regain the control he once had. Or perhaps Elio has decided to answer Oliver’s question—What are you doing?—in a more tangible way by finding communion with his body, by saying to Oliver, in effect, I’m letting you know.
***
In the novel on which the film is based, Elio compares at some length Oliver’s ass to a peach, and I was no different in the admiration I had for those older blackboys in sagging jeans, basketball shorts, or sweatpants exposing asses that sat high on their thighs, not like pieces of fruit but like a pair of globes stretching the fabric of boxers or tighty-whities.
But what adolescent blackboy growing up in the projects has the audacity of an “Elio” to openly marvel at another blackboy’s physical attributes, much less know what to do with them?
If an adolescent blackboy in the projects recognized this attraction, it became essential he learned to tend to his blooming carnality carefully.
Except, the older blackboys probably never noticed they’d become the object of a young blackboy’s fantasies, so they paid him no mind. And soon enough, the young blackboy would realize this as well, and transference would become his enemy as, naturally, he would start to harbor feelings for blackboys his own age. And being in such proximity, it became difficult to hide those feelings from them.
And what happened if the other blackboys were to find out? He might become a victim of the cruelest majority: bullied by his own peers. And what exactly might he do to draw their wrath? It might have nothing to do with whether he was crushing on one of them or not.
Perhaps he was overly fond of singing.
Perhaps he had a little twist in his step.
A lisp in his talk.
Perhaps the hallways would become crowded with sneers and jeers, someone tripping him every chance they had, flicking narrow fingers against his skull, nicking his head with clippers they’d brought in from home, intending for him to resemble a mangy dog.
Perhaps they’d call him that, among other names: bitch, faggot, dicklicker.
Perhaps it’d be stenciled on his locker as if protest graffiti, bringing him to his knees, elbow deep in suds scrubbing off the words, filtering all his whys and what-did-I-dos through wrung out rags and sponges.
Perhaps he’d avoid them by walking home after school each day, even in the cold months, bunched up in his winter coat, shivering for miles with his head bent to the wind, cinching his coat tighter, adjusting the soreness from his shoulders each time he switched his book bag from one side to the other, struggling to make it home—because all he wanted was to make it home—and meanwhile those boys would pass by him on the school bus, hanging out the windows screaming “Shake the gay away!”, so uncontrollably content in their miscreant joy they might not ever recover from it.
And then what.
Perhaps he grew up and went away to college, where he thought it might be safe(r) to allow his adolescent attractions to mature until he eventually allowed another blackboy into his bed and, after some time, they began to feel something like love for one another, a new sensation neither could quite explain, though each of them understanding it must be experienced in secret.
And perhaps the bullying had followed him there, to college, and his not-yet-understood emotion was discovered and shared across campus, which shamed him back into those middle school hallways, back onto the long road he walked home alone, back to where he felt there was nothing he could do to keep out the cold.
And what if this became too much and he disappeared himself miles away from anyone who knew him, where he found himself on a bridge on a day when the sky turns mauve at dusk, the way it sometimes does when fall approaches, when the wind is a trifle breezier, when clouds stretch into one long brow along the horizon.
What if he placed one hand over the other to balance his knees on the rails, but struggled with his footing because he couldn’t see, because he was crying so hard.
What if he rested a hand at the nape of his neck, felt in his palm a greasy veneer of sweat, an oil slick of fear and ambition sliding down his back.
What if he breathed with the insistence of a gymnast about to take on the pommel horse, which was how he might’ve composed himself before lifting one leg then the other over the rail to ease his heels onto the margin, his toes pointed perpendicular to the water below.
What if there was only enough room to wipe his face without falling, just yet, so that he might gather his wits, to do this with dignity.
What if, when he was nearly ready, he cloistered in a nook he’d sidestepped several paces to find.
What if he thought of his mother sweeping the floors of the house as she did every day at that time, how he’d wanted so much to make her proud.
What if, more than anything, he wanted to do this better than all those who’d failed before him.
What if he’d considered how the wind might gather inside his shirt, make him aerodynamic when he didn’t want to fly, so he removed his shirt.
What if he was deliberate even through the tears in his eyes, figuring how to wrap his body around a pole that plunged to the bottom of the river, inching his way methodically to the top as if he understood the minute particulars of geometry, physics, and calculus, climbing and climbing until his way up equated with how he would end up below.
What if he wondered if the river would shatter when he broke the surface, if he’d crumble like an ancient cathedral or sink in slow motion while fish circled him like a maypole.
What if, before he leaped, he assured himself the world would be just fine without him, and he without it, and that things would get back to their normal course in due time, the way, once he crashed through the water, the surface of the river would appear as if it had never been anything but this peaceful wrinkling.
***
Perhaps the reason I can’t recall my first adolescent crush is because he didn’t exist in the same way that we witness Elio and Oliver crushing on, then falling in love with one another. Even when I longed for it. Perhaps, for a blackboy growing up in the projects like me, the stakes were too high for it to be possible. Not so in Call Me by Your Name. No one is threatened or bullied. The only nemesis is time. We are meant to thirst over Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer—that is, “Elio” and “Oliver”—performing their slow-burning love affair over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1983 somewhere in the bucolic countryside of northern Italy. For two hours and twelve minutes, beginning with the opening credit sequence set to John Adams’s dueling pianos (“Hallelujah Junction”) and Elio’s waggish remark (“Usurpateur!”) upon Oliver’s arrival to the Perlman family’s Italian villa in the film’s first scene, we sit enthralled until the very last frame, when we are overcome with solemnity watching flickers of a crackling fire flash across Elio’s face as he crouches before the flames, quietly fighting back the tears that will eventually fall, thinking of Oliver who is an ocean away, and, we are to presume, of a love that is equally as deep if not tragically possible but once in a lifetime, or an ephemeral summer. And even the film’s final music—“Visions of Gideon”—doesn’t forewarn us that their (our) story is over until the title card displays and the credits begin to roll—white letters against a black screen—and we are gutted, yearning for love, and to be loved, like in the movies.
Darius Stewart holds MFA degrees in poetry and nonfiction from the Michener Center for Writers and the University of Iowa. Essays from his manuscript “Call Me When You Get This: A Lyric Memoir” have been published in Salamander, Gargoyle, Gertrude, Fourth Genre, and others. His first full-length collection of poetry, Intimacies in Borrowed Light: Poems 2002-2016 is forthcoming from EastOver Press. He is currently a Ph.D. student in English Literary Studies at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with his dog, Fry.
Jocelyn Ulevicus is an artist and writer with work forthcoming or published in magazines such as Cathexis NW, The Free State Review, The Petigru Review, Blue Mesa Review, No Contact Mag, The Santa Ana Review, Humana Obscura, Dewdrop, and elsewhere. Working from a female speculative perspective, themes of nature and the unseen; and exit and entry are dominantly present in her work. She resides in Amsterdam and is currently working on her first book of poems. You can contact her on Instagram at @jocelyn.ulevicus or via her website: www.jocelynulevicus.com.