Three days after my father’s funeral, my brother and I arrived in Kyoto, Japan with blood-shot eyes, claim tickets for lost luggage, and memories of our Mexican father. At first, Julien wanted no part of the Japanese trip, arguing the idea was preposterous and disrespectful.

“We’re celebrating his life, not his death, cabrón,” I said, gripping his broad shoulders, feeling his muscles tense under my pressure. Julien had inherited our father’s boisterous laughter, cavalier swagger, and repugnance for anything less than macho; so, it made sense he inherited our father’s birthday gift as well. “Pops was supposed to be here, not you, Julien. It was supposed to be a surprise, understand, pendejo?”

Julien shrugged, inhaled deeply, and stroked his black moustache, taking on a pensive thousand-yard stare with welling, brown eyes.

“He surprised us instead, didn’t he,” Julien said, blinking back any tear that dared to escape. Real men don’t cry. Real men suffer in silence. Real men save face at all cost. These machismo ideologies were instilled the moment we became our father’s sons, and it was Julien who believed them without question; our father’s oppressive ideas, his constitution of real men, surpassed his lifespan and haunted me from his grave. “Fine, have it your way, Juanito. If Pops respected the Japonés, then I, too, respect the Japanese. Two Chicano vatos from L.A. in Japan, who would’ve thought?”

I had booked two standard rooms at the Hilton. My father snored louder than a freight train rumbling down the tracks, so a suite wouldn’t suffice. In the elevator, Julien mentioned that we should exchange our separate rooms for a single with double beds, arguing it was a better option. “You’ll save some dinero, and we haven’t shared a room since we were kids, Juanito,” Julien said, admiring his reflection in the mirrored elevator doors.

Swaths of premature gray hair streaked the sides of my brother’s temples like shiny chrome trim on his Chevy Impala, obvious reminders that we were no longer the same Spanglish-speaking kids that once shared a bedroom in our immigrant parents’ home, no longer the innocent, barefoot chavalos who played cowboys and Indians on a yellow lawn, stretching from a pink stucco house enclosed by a wrought iron fence. A dehydrated palm tree stood in the center of our brittle lawn and provided a pool of shade from a Southern California sun; it was our solitary sundial of sorts that counted away season after season and towered over a Virgen de Guadalupe statue that protected our home from the world’s wickedness. Julien and I were decades away from those adolescent years, decades from the first time, I suspected I was different from my father and brother.

“I’ll phone the front desk in the morning,” I said, knowing damn well it was a lie. I had no intention of sharing a room with my older brother ever again. “Goodnight, Julien.”

The next morning, we left the hotel and wandered down a narrow street into a small café and ordered a Japanese-styled breakfast. And of all things, Julien was most impressed with his bathroom, rambling about the stone masonry, pristine-white soaking tub, and of course, the multifunctional toilet, but he wondered why a person would need a three-legged stool and wooden bucket in a shower. “Nobody sits in a shower,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”

“Hey, did you know, Kyoto was once the capital of Japan,” I said. “And during the second world war, this city was spared from bombings.”
Julien stopped chewing and swallowed hard as if unaware Japan sided with Nazi Germany during the war. “Who spared them, Alemania?”

“No, pendejo, they were on the same side,” I said, watching confusion wash over his face.

“They tried to take us out, and we didn’t bomb them, is that what you’re saying,” Julien said, narrowing his sights.

“I said, this city was spared from bombings, Julien. The remarkable thing is, even during wartime, there were acts of compassion or understanding or, at the very least, tolerance for the opposing side, to some degree, until there wasn’t.”

“Whatever you say, Juanito,” he said, wiping the ends of his wet moustache. “Putasos, that’s what got the job done in the end. We won. That’s all that matters.”

Our immigrant father, however, understood the facts of the second world war and used American television as his learning tool, acquiring certain idioms, curse words, and historical facts during his leisure hours. He tried softening his Spanish accent, but was unsuccessful, which made assimilation into American society harder for him. And because of this, he constantly reminded Julien and I of our fortunate lives as Pochos, Chicanitos, Mexican-Americans. We were his half-breed sons, born in the United States, and termed Hispanics by the census bureau. He teased us, especially as kids, especially after he drank a few chelas. The beer liberated his suppressed feelings toward us; it was the indelible hyphen in Mexican-American, the small, yet very powerful line that differentiated how our immigrant father viewed his Chicano sons; I continuously wondered if his love for Julien and I slanted more toward the U.S. or Mexico side of the border— the border was yet another line of distinction. We were different, yet we were the same, like fingers stemming from the same brown-skinned hand.

Julien and I wandered aimlessly through the streets of Kyoto, passing a row of vendor booths in front of a temple; and beyond another row of vendors, plumes of white smoke rose from two, massive, golden bowls of burning incense that flanked the temple’s entrance. A breeze swept through the area and transformed the billowing smoke into, what resembled, a ghostly crane with undulating feathers ascending toward the Gion district, where shortly after we caught a glimpse of three geishas merging into a shifting crowd.

We continued our exploration through the streets of Kyoto, marveling at the cleanliness of the city and how storekeepers displayed their wares. Julien complained of our lost luggage and need for fresh clothes. On a whim, he suggested we duck into a clothing store and purchase some trendy attire. “To blend in with homies,” he said, eyeing a pair of baggy pants that flared from the waistline and tapered at the hem, then showed me a pair of split-toe, leather shoes; however, I opted for a nearby bookstore and pointed to a café as our meeting place.

The thought of coming out to Julien weighed heavy on my mind. I recited my opening lines of the conversations in silence, composing my words in hope of saving face, yet I quaked with fear, believing Julien would ridicule my honesty and ostracize me from his life. Was liberation from my lifelong machismo oppression worth losing my only sibling? Our father, our indoctrinator, would say no. “Nothing is more important than Familia, hijo. Nada.” My father’s words echoed in my mind as I selected a magazine off a shelf and opened it to a glossy page filled with beautiful androgynous models feigning happiness.

Across the street, Julien sat at a table, peaceful in solitude, admiring his trendy Japanese clothes. I imagined our vivacious father seated across from him, drinking a Sapporo and repeating the only three Japanese words he had ever spoken to me. “Domo arigato gozaimasu, Juanito,” he often said to me as a young child whenever I fetched his boots or placed his beer bottle on the table. In those days, our parents, God rest their souls, were poor, young immigrants in love, and they laughed whenever those Japanese words rolled off my tongue.

It wasn’t until later our father told me Domo arigato gozaimasu was Japanese, not Spanish. He had learned the phrase that translated to “Thank you very much” from a middle-aged Japanese coworker who had befriended him on a graveyard shift. These two immigrant men from different regions of the world, each with their broken English and undeniable foreign accents, found themselves working side by side with each other in America, exchanging pieces of their cultural backgrounds to honor their past and present days as they unloaded freight trucks while their families slept.

Julien handed me a lavender colored business card, embossed with gold kanji and an image of a cherry blossom tree. “It’s a nightclub,” Julien said, nonchalantly while stroking his moustache. “The shopkeeper said it’s a good place to get a drink. Let’s find out, Juanito.”
What was the point in debating his proposal? By the look in his eyes, Julien had already settled on the answer, and I knew any attempt to dissuade my brother would end badly for me, because brothers are supposed to share this type of adventure when traveling abroad, and our father would not have disagreed. What could go wrong when a stranger suggests visiting an unfamiliar address in a foreign country?

“Sure, Julien,” I said. “Let’s make a night of it.”

Julien and I returned to the hotel and discovered the airline had dropped off our luggage at the front desk. Julien insisted that we take inventory of our belongings, in case someone had sticky fingers. I unpacked my suitcase in the stillness of my room and found a wallet-size photograph of my father. His smiling face has been buried among my clothes since we departed Los Angeles. The metal frame felt cold; the glass pane was dusty, and my father’s brown eyes beamed with life while mine welled with tears, blurring my vision toward the past.

Days after my thirteenth birthday, after my father accidently caught me masturbating to an International Male fashion magazine, he decided a summer trip to Mexico was in order. The trip was announced to the family as a father and son bonding vacation. “Juan has never seen where I was raised…,” my father said with palpable pride. “Los calles de mi pueblo, the fields where I worked with my father, and la casa de mis padres. He needs to know where we came from and how hard it was to get here.” He continued with splendid tales of fishing, camping along the coastline under twinkling night skies, and walking the same streets as he did when he was my age. It sounded magical; and with each day, I grew more excited about our upcoming travels. But, it was nothing more than a false sales pitch to visit a whorehouse in Tijuana.

The pink, two-story building was located on Revolution Avenue, nestled among dingy storefronts and various nightclubs. It was the kind of street where packs of dogs ran wild, sex workers waited on corners, and drunkards laughed and screamed into the neon colored night. My father had purchased a young woman in a short flower-patterned dress who resembled Frida Kahlo. Frida was my rite of passage into manhood: the Mexican sex worker hired to devirginize me and transform into a macho man.

My father watched as Frida guided me down a long, pink hallway lined with white doors. She opened a door with a 13 painted on it and led me inside the room. As the door closed, my father’s Spanish words rose above a cornucopia of sexual moans and groans. “Nothing is going to happen to you, son,” he said. “It’s time to be a man now.” Needless to say, my father was right: nothing happened to me. Frida and I laid on the bed, stared at the cracked ceiling, and talked about ourselves in the most intimate ways. Without provocation, she spoke on matters that would later become increasingly obvious to me. Frida held my hand, sensing I had no interest in her or any other female for that matter, and promised to assure my father he had spent his money well. At that moment, I wondered why this perfect stranger, who I had met less than an hour ago, volunteered to be my accomplice against my father’s wishes. She squeezed my hand and, in Spanish, whispered, “In this life, we can only be who we are, not what others wish us to be,” then gently kissed me and reached for her dress.

My tears fell and splashed on the wallet-size photograph. My father’s eyes still beamed with youthful happiness. “I love you, Pops,” I said, then slipped his picture into my blazer.

When it was time to depart the hotel, we stepped into a taxi, and Julien handed the lavender colored business card to our white-gloved driver. He scanned the kanji and, with his thick accent, said “Hostess bar,” then returned the business card and drove into the drizzly night.

The damp streets radiated a soft amber glow, as we passed storefronts and restaurants toward the center of the city. There was something peculiar about our driver; his precise movements mimicked those of a mechanical soldier and his deadpan stare darted from the rearview mirror to the street and back as he drove. Every sound was drowned out by the wiper blades beating against the glistening windshield. I turned away from Julien, believing I heard my father’s baritone voice call my name through the rear passenger window. I cleared the opaque glass of its film, creating a tiny portal to the outside world. Dark clouds, appearing like a herd of wild horses, raced throughout the night sky and eclipsed the pale moon; when the veil of clouds had lifted, Julien and I stepped out of the taxi and into the moonlight. The driver pointed to a drab colored building, and then drove off. “Was I supposed to tip him,” Julien asked, then shrugged without further concern and walked toward the building’s entrance.

A thin, tuxedoed man with coiffed hair and makeup greeted us with a smile; and within a minute, a row of young ladies appeared from nowhere and gathered before us, unifying into a wall of bright smiles and pastel colored gowns. It was somewhat surreal how quickly these ladies assembled themselves for display. They were so elegantly poised with their perfected smiles and longing gazes feigning admiration, as though we were nothing less than their long-expected prom dates. The dapper gentleman welcomed us deeper into the large sitting room; and with another smile, he bowed ever so slightly and, with a sweeping hand gesture, presented the row of waiting hostesses. It felt as though I had wandered onto the set of a Japanese game show. The room smelled of cigarettes and spun sugar; throughout the area, numerous white colored vases overflowed with pink, long-stemmed flowers. The host and Julien, each doing their best with the language barrier, conversed a moment before Julien turned and said, “I think we’re supposed to take our pick.”

“Then, what’s supposed to happen,” I said.

“No mames, guey,” Julien said, appearing somewhat confused by the situation. “Just pick a girl, Juanito.”

Like a drunken archer with cataracts, I pulled back my bow, aimed at a lady in a powder blue chiffon gown, and let my arrow fly. Julien, laughing boisterously, pointed to a girl in a purple gown then quickly changed his mind for another in a green gown with matching eyeshadow. The host walked across the room and presented our lounge area. Julien took on the spirit of our father without a hitch, ordered a bottle of saké, and laughed his way through the language barrier. He appeared relaxed and pleased with his selection, welcoming his obsequious hostess. I, on the other hand, fidgeted about and struggled with eye contact and conversation. My Frida in Tijuana had now shifted into my Japanese hostess, who equally arrived at the same conclusion. And yet again, I was guilty as charged.

The remaining days were spent exploring various shrines and temples and gardens. We even managed to find the bamboo forest, which was smaller than I imagined; but nonetheless, Julien and I were finding our way through Kyoto. When we reached the Ryoanji Zen garden, Julien and I removed our shoes and sat down, taking in the meditative scenery of the famous rock garden. Julien didn’t notice that I had removed the tiny picture from my blazer pocket. His mind was occupied with thoughts of visiting the hostess bar once more before leaving Japan, but I was lost in the straight lines that stretched from one end of the rock garden to the other— perfectly straight— without error. With help from neighboring maple trees, the afternoon sun casted shadows onto the west end, slowly and deliberately stretching with time. Everything in the garden was perfect, from scope to scale, free from lifeless twigs and fallen dead leaves, all precise and purposeful; most of all, the negative space between objects, which the Japanese refer to as MA, it’s the relationship between the beginning and end of something. The negative space had always been symbolic of my interaction with everyone in my secretly oppressed life: I was seen, yet unseen at the same time, forever minimized by the beauty of my surroundings, and relegated to my lesser role of little brother.

Julien jabbed his elbow into my ribs. His face, drenched in sunlight, appeared somewhere between annoyed and agitated. “Are you deaf or what, cabrón,” he said, furrowing his brow. “I’ve asked the same question, like, a million times, pendejo. Are you ready to go back to the hotel or what?”

“I have something to tell you, Julien,” I said, then squared my shoulders.

“Tell me over some tempura,” he said, preparing to stand.

“It’s better if you sit down.”

I placed the picture of our father between us; and within a moment, which felt like an eternity, my heart melted, broke into a million pieces, and resurrected itself as I confessed my lifelong secret: “I’m gay, Julien,” I said. “Please, don’t hate me.”
I had finally liberated my soul and held an unabashed gaze against Julien’s, until he could no longer look on. He turned away with practiced stoicism and unfolded his collar toward his ears. The wind howled and drew dead leaves from a crooked limb and scattered them across the shaded portion of the garden. In silence, Julien stood, looked over his shoulder at me as he buttoned his coat, and then walked toward the exit. The fallen leaves tumbled, then stopped, and quivered in place until another gust of wind carried them beyond the shade toward the sunlit portion of the garden; this celestial sign, so I believed it to be, was my father’s indication to follow my brother, but not without first leaving our father’s face glinting in the sun.

Some weeks after our return to Los Angeles, Julien grew increasingly distant, in the same fashion branches stem in opposite directions, slow and determined. At first, our estrangement came in the form of truncated communication; whenever I called or texted, he spoke with urgency in his voice as though he was in the middle of something more important than our conversation. He no longer had time for me, which left me perpetually questioning if I had made the wrong decision confiding in Julien. He feigned laughter and swore that was not the case, but my intuition knew better. He wanted no part of my sexually liberated lifestyle, fearing it would reflect negatively on him and his future family. Consequently, our communication diminished over the following months, reduced to emojis, memes, and fragmented phrases, which felt more like jokes exchanged with a coworker than a conversation between two fatherless brothers. During our last phone conversation, Julien blurted out the quiet part and said, “As men, we must pass our father’s name down to our children, to our sons, comprendes mendes? But, you decided that wasn’t in your pinché plan.”

“Wait a minute, you think I had a choice? Jesus Christ, Julien. You think I had a plan? My only decision was confiding in you, and my only plan was coming out to Pops, not you. That’s why I bought two plane tickets. He was supposed to be in Japan, not you; but sometimes, we don’t get to choose, we don’t get to decide, Julien. And, you know what, brother? As men, we must also accept whatever life gives us, even if we don’t like it, comprendes mendes?”

Since that day, that final conversation has replayed countless times in my mind, not like a scratched record, repeating itself over and over, but more like a fluid conversation with interchange phrases, examining and reexamining syntax and language or, perhaps, more like a foreign movie with alternative endings, Spanglish subtitles without cohesion, and dangling words at the end of sentences that become lost in translation. We circled and circled our attempts at understanding each other, which at times, brought on feelings of neurosis, as if I was no longer speaking to my older brother but instead a custodian of moral ethics and codes, who for the life of him, could not accept I was born this way. I had no choice in the matter, yet I continued sifting through the shouting, petitioning for my brother’s acceptance, his— at the very least, tolerance, for my need to live outside of shame-ridden shadows. “I deserve to live my life as openly and equally as any heterosexual….” I said with boiling anger. “What gives you the right to be my judge, jury, and executioner….” But in the end, when our voices had been reduced to raspy whispers and nothing remained but our goodbyes, I held the phone tightly in my hand, anticipating my brother’s next words; and after another long pause, Julien shielded his broken heart and said “Adiós, little brother.” Real men don’t cry. Real men suffer in silence. Real men save face at all cost.