Simon Says

by William Poe

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 William Poe

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-0615559575

  ISBN-10: 0615559573

  Simon says

  William Poe

  CHAPTER 1

  After ten years on a spiritual journey, I was again living in the same old house in Sibley, Arkansas, where I grew up. As I lay on the familiar four-poster bed one afternoon, I recalled the time my childhood friend, Ernie, and I were caught fooling around during a sleepover. My mother told us that if we didn’t behave ourselves, we would grow up to be homicidal. Even then, we knew the correct word was homosexual, but the situation was no laughing matter. Mother’s eyes told us we were sinners. Our bodies told us a different story.

  A few years later, when he started dating girls, Ernie and I had a falling-out. He started acting as though we didn’t know each other. I felt sucker punched every time I passed him in the hallway at school. I knew Ernie was in pain—the look in his eyes told me that. During the eleventh grade, he began abusing heroin; he overdosed at age twenty-two. By then, I had converted to a fringe religion and was living in Chicago, but I managed to get back to Arkansas for the wake.

  The last time I saw Ernie alive was at a party, just after I graduated high school. Drug abuse had given him a sallow appearance. As I looked at him lying in his casket, I saw that death had restored the innocent look I wanted to recall. The pain was gone forever. When no one was looking, I bent over and kissed Ernie’s lips. I felt him there with me.

  Dating girls didn’t turn out any better for me than it had for Ernie. I truly cared about one girl, but when she wanted to be intimate, I couldn’t go through with it. The sense of failure, the feeling of shame, kept me from being comfortable around my friends. It was clear I wasn’t like them.

  For most of high school, I stayed at home and painted. Art had inspired me since I was six years old, when I first saw reproductions of works by Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning in our Funk & Wagnalls yearbook. I excised the images with a blade from my dad’s razor. I was precocious; no one else in the family ever looked at the encyclopedia. Mom had no idea where I found the pictures taped to the wall beside my bed.

  In my senior year, things began to change. The new art teacher was openly gay. I figured that out the moment I saw his plucked eyebrows and transparent fingernail polish. The teacher introduced me to the gay scene in Little Rock, such as it was at the time. Men gathered at parties hosted in turn by various friends. During a get-together at the art teacher’s house, I fell in love with Tony, a boy my age who attended high school on the other side of the county. Our relationship ended when he called one afternoon to tell me he had been saved by Jesus, and I was going to hell. I was only seventeen years old and took it hard. I raced my car up Lookout Drive in Little Rock and was ready to plunge off a cliff into the Arkansas River. At the last second, I stopped the car. Even so, a part of me was lost in the abyss that night.

  Many friends whom I had known since elementary school began smoking pot and dropping acid. Quite a few quit school and never graduated. After my breakup with Tony, and for a year while I was at the local university, I became the biggest acidhead among them. During one dramatic trip, I saw the face of God. A voice told me I was among the chosen, and that I should look to the clouds of heaven. A week later, I joined a religious group which, at the time, was known for the fact that its members lived communally, but which later became notorious for selling flowers on the street and for holding mass weddings, not to mention charges of brainwashing.

  I listened to the group’s lectures at the urging of a friend from the university. The theology attracted me, not least by offering high-minded justification for my self-loathing. The group’s founder, Sun Myung Moon, and his wife, Hak Ja Han, were together considered the embodiment of a god whose essence was both masculine and feminine. New members were instructed to remain celibate for at least three years until married in a mass ceremony to a spouse selected by Reverend Moon. Church elders still had to give permission before sex was allowed—even then, the first night was more ritual than lovemaking. Anything distorting the marriage relationship was satanic by definition. Homosexuality was evil itself.

  For a kid untrained in theology, the church’s beliefs were heady stuff. I thought the ideas made sense and found them far more compelling than what I had learned in Southern Baptist Sunday school. Those teachings had troubled me. I would ask questions, such as how God could ordain Jesus to die on the cross and then condemn those who killed him. I was told to quit letting the devil enter my heart. The new teachings, however, explained that the outcome had not been ordained—that Jesus should have lived and taken a wife. I felt vindicated.

  Church members called themselves brothers and sisters, and referred to the group as “the Family.” They weren’t hollow terms. I’d never experienced such congenial relationships. Leaving the group after a decade of deeply shared experiences was a soul-wrenching experience.

  People often ask, “How did you get away?” But it wasn’t like that. I was a trusted leader. Members respected the fact that I spent several years on the streets selling flowers before gaining positions of authority. In my last year with the group, I was a coordinator of legal affairs during a trial on tax evasion charges faced by Reverend Moon and a subordinate, who was my direct supervisor. As the trial progressed, I shuttled transcripts between the federal courthouse in New York and attorneys working for the church in Los Angeles.

  It had become obvious that no amount of prayer and fasting would change the fact that I was gay. As logical as the beliefs seemed, they had to be wrong. My adult life was built on sand that had slipped through the hourglass. I was not quite twenty-eight when I left.

  In the old house that the Powell family had lived in for generations, I gazed out the window of my bedroom on the second floor and could see the swimming pool at Ernie’s house. There he was, racing across the field on his way to visit me. Just as the apparition neared the base of the trellis, it vanished behind a haze of tears. The memory kindled a terrible longing to see Lyle, a hustler I had brought to my hotel room in Los Angeles during Reverend Moon’s trial. Such things were forbidden, of course, but I took many liberties while working in Los Angeles.

  Reverend Moon held a mass wedding ceremony while the trial was underway. I had already been matched to a Japanese woman named Masako. We had gotten legally married so she could apply for a green card. The mass wedding made the marriage final in the eyes of the church. I should never have gone through with it—Lyle was waiting for me in the hotel room—but that is the virtue of denial. Surely, a last minute reprieve from heaven would transform me into a heterosexual.

  Psychologists use the term cognitive dissonance to describe a person’s ability to act sane while harboring internal contradictions. I couldn’t do it. The divisions in my heart were pushing me over the edge. I wanted Lyle more than I desired the wife chosen by Reverend Moon. She was sweet, kind, and personable, but I wasn’t physically attracted to her. The moment of decision had arrived.

  I took my possessions from the room I occupied in the church’s New York headquarters and returned to Sibley. When I got there, I realized that nothing had changed. I had simply been absent for a decade.

  CHAPTER 2

  My mother, Vivian, was not well educated, but she made up for her lack of book smarts with a keen intuition. Vivian would not have forgotten the incident with Ernie and me, but other than her misstatement at the time, she didn’t mention it again. Ernie continued to spend the night every now and then, but
Vivian never again came into my room unannounced. Did she actually think her admonition had set us straight, as it were, or did she just not care to know what might be going on when I closed the bedroom door for the night?

  Even though I left my religion because I could no longer deny that I was gay, I could not imagine standing before Vivian and my father and saying, “Vivian, Lenny, I have something to tell you. I’m a homosexual. The main reason I joined that cult was to run away from myself. It took the prospect of married life to bring me back to my senses. I’m a mess. I’m addicted to drugs, and as a substitute for true love, I sleep with hustlers.”

  Telling them that I was dropping out of college to join a “religious commune” had been easier than it would be to admit to my current situation. I was as sure as I had been as a child that the world—my parents, namely—would reject me.

  Lenny nearly died from shock when I told him I was leaving home. He’d been in and out of the hospital for years because of heart attacks. Finding out he had a queer son would be the final blow. It was clear how he felt. One night, Lenny almost kicked in the television when Liberace appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. “That damn faggot is queer as a three dollar bill!” Lenny had shouted in disgust.

  I could barely understand how much I needed Lenny’s acceptance. He had wanted a son who worshipped him the same way he worshipped his own father. But when I was growing up, we had never seen anything eye-to-eye.

  As a little boy, I wondered why Lenny didn’t play with me when other fathers were teaching their sons to catch baseballs. I probably would have resisted anyway, preferring to look at pictures in the encyclopedia, but Lenny never even tried to engage me. I recall only one time when he so much as put me on his knee. I must have been five. Lenny sang a song by Cowboy Copas that he remembered from a Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast. I don’t recall the tune, only the smell of Lenny’s Old Spice aftershave and the strong embrace of his muscular arms.

  No matter how hard I tried to forget the many bad episodes between us, they’d surface at odd moments nonetheless. Simply hearing a dog barking down the street brought up one of the most painful memories of my childhood, one that involved Sparky—the collie I got as a present when I was two years old.

  I grew to be a skinny little boy who got picked on most of the time. When neighborhood bullies taunted me, my only defense was to retreat into our yard. Sparky’s bared teeth told them not to follow.

  One night, when I was ten and Sparky was eight, Vivian and Lenny went to a party at a cousin’s house. Sparky started howling from the crawl space under the porch. I got a flashlight, and despite my grandmother Mandy’s scolding, shimmied through the dirt and cobwebs to find him. When he sensed my presence, Sparky began whimpering. He tried to find his way to the light, but kept bumping into support beams. Something had blinded him. I called out until he found his way to me. I wrapped my arms around his neck and led him into the house. Sparky’s eyes were glassy and his stomach was swollen.

  As she usually did when confronted with a difficult situation, Mandy began talking to herself and was of no help. I found the cousin’s phone number scribbled on a note under a refrigerator magnet and dialed it myself.

  “Sparky’s sick,” I cried when Lenny came on the line. “He’s going to die!”

  “Now, Bubby,” Lenny said. “It’s probably just something he ate.”

  “He’s all swollen up!” I cried. “He’s going to die! You have to come home.”

  “We can’t leave just yet,” Lenny insisted. “Sparky will be okay.”

  Mandy walked past while I was on the phone. She turned to the wall and said, “No, I don’t know why he’s crying.”

  When Lenny hung up, I took Sparky into my arms and held him tight.

  “I love you, Sparky,” I cried. A moment later, he was dead.

  When he finally came home, Lenny told me that I should be a man and stop crying. He pulled Sparky from my arms and took his body to a spot near the barn. By the light of his Coleman lantern, he dug a hole and unceremoniously put Sparky in his grave.

  Lenny thought it was ridiculous when, the next day, I planted an oak sapling on the soft earth where Sparky was buried. It is now the tallest tree on the property.

  Vivian and Lenny came to New York when I was married to Masako in the mass wedding. Not long after that, the doctors told Lenny to take it easy, because he was close to having another heart attack.

  The doctor’s words translated into further misery for Vivian. Already, she had become more nursemaid than wife. One afternoon, after I had come home, Vivian was outside raking sweet-gum balls into a pile before mowing the lawn. Lenny sat in a lawn chair, pointing out areas that she had missed.

  I watched from behind the screen door before going outside, waiting for the right moment to rescue Vivian from Lenny’s criticism.

  “Hi, son,” she said, taking a long-overdue break.

  Lenny growled, “You’re not done yet, woman. Get to work.”

  “Not in front of Simon,” Vivian said.

  Lenny didn’t realize that I was standing beside him until I placed a hand on his bony shoulder. Even then, it took a moment for him to recall that I had come home.

  Vivian threw up her arms, exasperated by Lenny’s forgetfulness. “Let’s get you inside,” she said, taking the oxygen tube from around his neck and helping him out of the lawn chair. “Will you take the tank?” she asked me.

  When we got him settled into his recliner, Lenny fell asleep. Vivian set his oxygen tube in place.

  “Will you help me upstairs?” Vivian asked.

  She and Lenny had moved into a room on the ground floor, but most of her personal belongings were still in the upstairs master bedroom.

  Vivian took my elbow. “It didn’t used to be so hard,” she said, pausing halfway up.

  When we made it to the landing, she pointed to a small gash in one of the doors, about eight inches from the floor. The room had once belonged to my sister, Connie.

  “Remember that?” Vivian asked.

  “I was six, wasn’t I?”

  “That’s right. You had just started school.”

  During a slumber party, Connie and her friends had locked themselves inside the room. I got mad when they wouldn’t let me in, and hearing them whispering to each other, I lost control and kicked the door. More than thirty years later, the hole I made was still there

  .

  CHAPTER 3

  Vivian worked at the local grocery store, starting out as a checkout clerk and eventually becoming the bookkeeper. She could have retired already, but work gave her an opportunity to escape being at Lenny’s beck and call.

  Before I came back home to Sibley, my sister Connie took care of Lenny while Vivian was at work, but now I took over. I stayed upstairs most of the day, coming down only to administer Lenny’s medicine or check on the oxygen tank.

  Lenny hated having the tube in his nose and never hooked it up properly when left to his own devices. One afternoon, I found him dozing in his chair. The tube hung loosely around his neck with the nosepiece dangling down his chest.

  “You’re supposed to use that oxygen all the time,” I warned, lifting the tube.

  “To hell with doctors,” Lenny grumbled.

  “Doctors or not, you don’t look well. Did you take your pills?”

  “Those horse pills would kill me for sure if I took them all,” Lenny complained. “And what about that crap I’m supposed to drink? It smells so bad it would gag a maggot.”

  When I insisted, Lenny took the horse pills and swallowed the foul liquid medicine. As I repositioned the oxygen tube, a rosy hue came to his cheeks. He went back to watching his nature show on television without the smallest word of thanks.

  Just after lunch—tuna fish straight from the can with a little mayonnaise, just the way he liked it—Lenny announced that he wanted to go out. He asked me to drive.

  I was nervous about taking him out of the house and made sure I had the doctor
’s phone number. Lenny first had me take him to a hardware store, where he purchased a band saw, a planer, and several canisters of caulk. He also picked out some lumber, which the owner of the store loaded into the Econoline van, a relic of Lenny’s days as a plumber. Then Lenny directed me a few miles down the road to a different store, where he bought rakes, hoes, a shovel, and a pickaxe, as well as a post-hole digger.

  “What’s all this for?” I asked on the way home.

  “I’m going to set up a workshop,” Lenny said. “The house needs repairs, and I want to fix the fence out by the barn. I’m going to buy a horse.”

  I was sure that Lenny had lost his mind.

  “Did you go out, son?” Vivian asked when she returned from work. “It looks like the van’s been moved.”

  “Lenny wanted to go shopping, so I drove him.”

  Vivian set down a sack of groceries and rushed to the den. “You didn’t spend more money, did you?”

  “What I do is my own business,” Lenny fired back.

  “Where did you go?” Vivian demanded to know.

  Lenny remained silent.

  “Where did you take him?” she asked, turning to me.

  “He bought a bunch of tools and stuff.” I hoped to avoid getting in the middle of the argument.

  Vivian let out an exasperated sigh as she studied Lenny’s expression. “You’re hell-bent on breaking us, aren’t you?”

  Lenny drew his lips pencil thin. His mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. “I can’t take it with me,” he said, “but I sure as hell ain’t leaving it behind.”

  Vivian was beside herself, red-faced and ready to explode. “Just what do you expect me to do when you’re gone?”

  But she knew the answer. Lenny didn’t care what happened to her.

  Vivian grabbed a dish towel and held it to her eyes as she headed toward the bedroom. She slammed the door with enough force to shake plaster from the ceiling.