Openly Straight

by Konigsberg, Bill

“I know!” I shouted, and then I covered my mouth because I was afraid I was actually going to do the one thing he told me not to do in his female car.

  He shot me a warning look.

  “I’m good,” I said. “I promise.”

  “My parents had no idea in the world Natick even existed. I did all this. Well, my uncle helped. He was pretty much my saving grace growing up. Unlike my parents, who don’t believe in talking about anything, he was a talker. He really taught me how to share my feelings, if that’s not too weird to say.”

  “Not too weird for me,” I replied.

  He glanced my way again and nodded. “Well, anyway, he understood why I had to get away. My dad’s a farmer. If it were up to him, I’d follow in his footsteps. But that’s not for me. So I put up with all this upper-class bullshit because you know what? I deserve a chance at a good education and a good life. You know?”

  I nodded and nodded and nodded. We had so much in common and I couldn’t even tell him. I also had done the footwork to get to Natick. I too had come here to shed a label, and been given another one that didn’t fit, and been okay with the mislabeling because at least it wasn’t negative. And I wanted so much to tell Ben my story, because he seemed like the kind of person who would be totally okay with it. But I also knew that doing that would change everything. And I didn’t want to change everything. So I said nothing. Well, nothing about that, anyway.

  “I know. I’m so tired of being a type,” I repeated.

  “Bryce and I, we always talk about that. He always says that if Natick is a microcosm of this country, we might as well still have separate but equal facilities. And it’s not just a black and white thing. Jock. Geek. Stoner. No one is considered just a human being, it seems like.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I turned to Ben and latched a hand on his shoulder. “I want to be just a human being,” I said, with great urgency in my voice.

  “You’re drunk off your skull,” Ben said.

  “No. Really. That’s what I want. I’m always trying on labels, and I want to be entirely label-free.”

  “Now that’s interesting,” Ben said. “But is it possible?”

  “I am going to find out,” I said as we pulled into the parking lot behind East Hall.

  “Let me know how it goes,” he said, and I felt a pang in my heart, because I didn’t want the conversation to end.

  “The main thing I need to stop doing is caring who likes me,” I said, and I wasn’t sure where that thought came from, but in my drunk state, it made a ton of sense. I flashed back to the spinning room and Spinnah, and I knew it was true.

  He turned off the ignition. “Ya think?” he asked.

  LIKE MOST MAJOR moments in my life, coming out was totally random. Spring of eighth grade. I was up in my room on a school night, thinking about Garth. Garth was this kid who also ran cross-country at the time. He’s since moved to California. We weren’t really close friends, but he was pretty chill, and we’d say hi, that sort of thing. But I totally liked Garth. And I was okay with that. I’d been thinking about Garth for weeks, and before that, Mason. And before that, Corey Westerly, who was the first guy in our class to lose his virginity, back in sixth grade. So it wasn’t like I was sitting up there and I had this epiphany: Wow! I’m gay! I had known that for a long time. I guess if there was an epiphany, it was like, I’ve got a feeling, and no one else knows about it. Maybe I should tell Mom and Dad.

  So that was it. No major breakdown, no thoughts about whether I’d be homeless. More like, I could enjoy chocolate ice cream, but I prefer strawberry. I should tell the folks so they stop buying chocolate. I walked down the stairs, not scared, exactly, but surprised. Because I didn’t wake up that day and think: Today I’m going to tell Mom and Dad I’m gay.

  I simply walked into the kitchen and told them.

  There weren’t any huge emotions on either side. Just a nice sit-down discussion. Mom, Dad? I want you to know I’m gay. Oh, sweetie, that’s wonderful! We’re so glad you told us!

  I wasn’t surprised that they weren’t surprised. But I did want to know how they knew.

  “Oh, sweetie,” my mother said. “You’re our son. We know who you are.”

  We hugged, and my dad cried a little. I don’t have a macho-type dad, who hunts and fishes and collects guns. He’s sensitive and caring. He drives me crazy most of the time, but I do admire that he’s not afraid to show his “feminine side.”

  But for me, that’s when the trouble started. I figured I’d come out to my parents, get my first boyfriend, and then just live my life. No. Instead, it was like this thing had happened, and now we all had to mobilize. (I should have known. My mom is a mobilizer.) Suddenly there were six books I had to read about what it’s like to be gay. I said to her, “Mom, can’t I just be gay, and not read about it?” But she explained — and Dad backed her up — that we need to know history. Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, blah blah blah.

  Do you know how you get the urge to clean your room, and it’s no big deal? But when your mom tells you that you have to clean your room, you don’t want to? That’s me, anyway. So maybe if I had found all this stuff on my own, I would have really enjoyed learning about it. But instead, I got a pile of books from Mom, and now it was like I had gay homework from my mother. I was like, Thanks for making this exciting new thing a chore, Mom. Awesome.

  So I read this book about the gay rights movement. And it was interesting, I have to admit. I didn’t know that being gay was this epic struggle, and that it came with all these “responsibilities.” My best friend, Claire Olivia, came over and read some of the books with me, or more like, we went through the books and read random parts to each other. One was about sex, and I was like, Please tell me my mom didn’t just give me a book teaching me how to give a blow job. But of course she did. Claire Olivia thought that was excellent. She was like, “This is so great, Shay Shay! Maybe one day you can send her pictures!”

  The next weekend, Mom and Dad were being extremely weird about going out to dinner. They wanted to go down to Denver. We almost never do that, but they wouldn’t let it go, so I just got in the car with them and off we went. We parked in front of this place called Hamburger Mary’s. We went in, and first of all there was this life-size cutout of a busty waitress at the entrance, winking and blowing us a kiss. Her picture was on all the walls and on the menu. It was way gay in terms of clientele, which was cool, but also there were Grandma Chloe and the rest of my extended family, and Claire Olivia, and her parents, and they were all wearing tacky cone-shaped birthday hats. On the hats it said: Yay! Rafe Is Gay!

  It was APPALLING. I would have slid right under the table if I could have done it without Mom saying something like, “Oh, is that what gay kids do nowadays?” or something equally humiliating.

  “You’re trying to kill me,” I said to her, and Mom’s face was so shocked that I started to laugh, because throwing someone a party is generally not synonymous with killing them. And I WAS laughing, but inside I was pissed because it’s like nothing is ever enough with my parents. Just one time, I’d like them to let something go, and not throw a big, outrageous party, or sing, or dance, or whatever weird thing they’re feeling. After a few minutes I loosened up a little. I even let them sing me “Happy Birthday” along with the waitstaff, even though it was pretty clear from the hats that this was no birthday party.

  There are definitely fun moments having parents whom you can’t possibly shock. But it’s a mixed bag. On the major plus side, I never for one moment felt like my parents were embarrassed about me or grossed out by me or disappointed in me. So who cares if Mom is more ready for me to have a sex life than I am? These are pretty minor concerns, considering.

  Rafe,

  So much interesting stuff in here! Yet as well-written as this is, I want to ask you about your process as a writer. Remember the E. L. Doctorow quote. Did you go into this piece knowing where you wanted to go, or open to uncovering new questions? Also, what do you
mean when you write “nothing is ever enough with my parents”? Would you really have preferred them to not mark the occasion of your coming out? I’m just asking for you to think about it. Good job.

  — Mr. Scarborough

  “Up for some scanner pong?” Toby asked when I got back to the dorm and placed my knapsack on the bed.

  It was a Friday afternoon, the end of my third week, and I was used to weirdness in my room by now. Toby was always there, at least when he wasn’t missing in action. In the past week, there had been several periods when he disappeared completely. Albie referred to these as alien abductions. It was pretty clear there was a guy in Toby’s life, but he wouldn’t share the details.

  On the positive side, our room was cleaner now. Albie was trying. A couple times I’d come back to find that he had actually swept. Miracle.

  “Say again?” I asked.

  Toby repeated, “Scanner pong. It’s a drinking game.”

  I watched as Toby pulled an open can of Budweiser out from under the desk.

  “Cool,” I said. “How do you play?”

  Albie bent down and pulled his own beer from under the bed, and then turned the scanner up. “You playing?”

  “Why not.”

  Albie leaned under his bed again and pulled out a third beer. He contemplated throwing it to me, and then opted to walk it over. It was warm; I didn’t care. I opened it and was about to take a sip when he gave me a startled look.

  “No!” he said. “You have to pick your word!”

  He explained the game. In scanner pong, you hang out and listen to the scanner, and anytime your chosen word is said, you drink.

  “So where does Ping-Pong come in?” I asked.

  “Ping-Pong?” Toby said.

  “As in pong?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” he said. “It’s a drinking game. Hence the pong.”

  I didn’t have the energy to explain to him the derivation of the phrase beer pong. Instead, I said, “So what’s my word?”

  “I pick! I pick!” yelled Toby. “Um … suspect!”

  “Good call,” Albie said. “I’m Caucasian.”

  “I’m suspicious,” Toby said.

  “I think you’re both suspicious Caucasians,” I said.

  Toby snorted. “You funny fella,” he said in a weird, fake Chinese accent.

  Since the channel we were on seemed to be coming from a low-crime area, there was a ton of sitting around in scanner pong. Which gave us a chance to talk, a lot. Toby finally talked about the mystery guy he was dating, and how annoying it was that they couldn’t be open about it, and Albie went on and on about some kid in his math class who dared to question a solution Albie had come up with in class on the board. The teacher had accepted it, and then, out of nowhere, this Joseph kid is all “Mr. Braddock! That’s wrong. The dy and dx are switched up. Look.” And the kid got up and corrected Albie, and in the end it turned out Albie was wrong. And then the teacher used Albie’s carelessness as a lesson to the class, even though he’d been careless himself.

  I realized there was a lot of talking in this game, not a lot of drinking. I mentioned that.

  “Yeah, we’ve both had one sip so far,” said Toby.

  I busted out laughing. “What kind of drinking game is this if you’re not drinking?”

  Albie shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better. I won last time.”

  “What word did Toby give you?”

  “Murder.”

  “What was Toby’s?”

  “Natick.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  I finally got them to just drink, and we each had a sip of warm beer. That’s when the voice over the radio came through, after a lengthy silence.

  “We have a naked Caucasian woman wandering around Bacon Street,” the female voice said. In response, two or three officers shouted, “I’ll take this one!” Then there was a lot of laughter while they decided whom to dispatch.

  Albie’s eyes lit up. “Mmm, bacon. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he said, looking at me.

  “That you need to drink? They said Caucasian,” Toby said.

  “Shut up. We’re going to find her. Let’s do this!”

  “At least one of us will get a thrill,” I said, and then I realized what I’d said and that it was too late to go back. Luckily neither Albie nor Toby were good listeners, because neither of them even reacted like they’d heard it, and I followed up with “I’m game.”

  We hid our mostly full beers beneath the beds and headed out the door.

  “We need aliases,” Toby said as we descended the stairs. “I’ll be Detective Pollard, the spiky-haired detective with the hidden identity not yet discovered.”

  “I’ll be Justin Auerbach, lover of wandering naked ladies,” said Albie.

  “Can I just be Detective Goldberg?” I said.

  “Boring,” Toby yelled from half a flight below me.

  “What? All Albie did was change his name. He is a lover of wandering naked ladies.”

  “So change your name,” yelled Toby.

  “Fine,” I said, putting on an accent that started out Indian and then, as I went on, somehow turned British. “Warren. Warren Wilson, visiting from London.”

  “Perfection,” Toby said.

  At that moment, I saw Ben starting up the stairs. I froze, afraid I’d just broken the dork meter. But then I remembered our conversation in his car, and I was glad that he saw me being something other than serious and bland. When he passed he smiled at me, and I smiled back. And by the time I’d done that, he was already behind me, and I couldn’t see his reaction.

  Albie drove a light blue ’93 Toyota Celica that he had nicknamed Sleepy because of its tendency to not want to start up in winter. I hopped in back, Toby took shotgun, and off we sped to Bacon Street.

  On Main Street, Albie turned on his right turn blinker, and we yielded to oncoming traffic on Central.

  “Okay, now what do we say when we’re about to merge?” Albie asked.

  Then Albie hit the gas, and the two of them screamed: “MERGE!”

  And once we were merged, nothing more was said about it.

  “We have rules,” Toby explained. “For instance, if Albie drives through a yellow light, you have to kiss the ceiling.” He put his fingers to his lips, kissed them, then touched the ceiling.

  “I wonder what you’d do if he went through a red light. Would you have to fuck the ceiling?” I asked.

  Both Albie and Toby laughed. “Yes,” Toby said. “Yes, you would.”

  As it turned out, Bacon Street in Natick is fairly long. We turned left onto Bacon from Marion, and by the time we were at Park Avenue several blocks later, we still saw no sign of a naked lady. Toby was looking left, I looked right, and we had to keep telling Albie to keep his eyes on the road, because the car veered several times as he looked for Wandering Naked Lady.

  As we passed Tyler Street, Toby yelled, “There she is!” Albie slammed on the brakes, I turned to my right, and there, sure as shit, was a woman, sans clothing, running down the street. She was not young. She was, in fact, older than my grandmother, with gray hair and pasty, white skin. Albie pulled the car up so that we were right in front of her, and then slowed down.

  “Perv!” I yelled. “She’s, like, ancient.”

  “We should help her,” Toby said, and before either me or Albie answered, he was rolling down the window. “Excuse me, ma’am, can we help you? Are you okay?”

  The woman looked at the car, an expression of panic across her face.

  “Stop harassing me, Buzz!” she yelled, and then she put up her middle finger at Toby.

  Toby tried to explain. “No, ma’am, I’m not Buzz. We’re here to help. Are you lost?”

  The woman knelt down and scooped up some red, brown, and orange leaves piled along the sidewalk. “Stop it, you!” she yelled, throwing the leaves at us. They barely traveled two feet before fluttering to the ground.

  “We should just go,” I said.

  “Wait
,” Toby said. “She needs help.”

  “Not from us she doesn’t,” I said.

  Albie hadn’t moved the car, and I noticed I was easing up on a pretend brake pedal at my feet. If I could have made the car go myself, I would have.

  “Can we drive you somewhere?” Toby asked.

  That’s when the woman charged at our car, screaming at us. “Traitors!” she yelled. “You’re all traitors. Buzz sent you!”

  That’s when Albie realized he probably ought to drive. He started to pull away, and the woman started smacking the back window. Her face was creased like a witch’s, and she looked directly in my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I screamed.

  “Traitors!” she yelled. “Evil traitors!”

  Albie peeled off, and we sped down Bacon Street, away from the crazy woman.

  We drove in shocked silence for a few minutes, and then Albie glanced back at me.

  “You scream like a girl.”

  “I know,” I said back. “It was totally innate. She looked like a Disney witch.”

  “I like that,” Albie said. “You’re a jock who screams like a girl.”

  Yes, it was a stereotype. But it was also true. One time last year, I ran over to Claire Olivia’s house early one morning to tell her what had happened. Basically, this cheerleader girl from school I barely knew had chatted me up on Facebook. We talked about normal things for a while, and then she was like, “If you let me, I could switch you.”

  I was like, “Switch me?”

  She said, “Yeah. It’s cool you’re gay. But I could make you bi.”

  It was way awkward and I said my own version of thanks but no thanks. But then I went to sleep and had an honest-to-God sex dream about the girl. And it kind of worked for me. Or at least it wasn’t frightening. So I was running over to tell Claire Olivia that maybe I was bi.

  Her parents let me go upstairs, which was pretty normal since I slept over a lot. I knocked gently and opened the door, and Claire Olivia was sleeping on her back. When she saw me, she sat up, and the sheet dropped, and there were her tits, staring at me.

  So I screamed like a girl.