He wanted to say more, but Cleshun seemed to get it.
“You remember the times you guys razzed me about that geeky team picture I got on the wall? When you come back to school, we’ll play a little game, but you don’t tell anybody else, okay? You have to pick out the guy who never dated girls, the one who’s goin’ to those Gay Olympics in New York.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Oh, um. . .” He didn’t want to make it so obvious, the connection, so he pretended to be changing topics. “Is um, Fiasole gonna be at school next year?”
“Oh, no. He graduated. Got a job at Montclair State.”
“Oh. Cool,” Joe grinned. So much for choosing a college. He imagined himself and Fiasole together having a beer sometime after Joe graduated from college in 2000-something.
He held the door closed, watched through the glass as his coach walked down the steps and along the sidewalk.
He didn’t tell Cleshun he’d gotten the name of Gay Games wrong. Joe’d already found out which days wrestling would be at the NYU gym, and asked for those days off from work. He still had to figure out how to ask his dad to take him, since they’d never let him go into Manhattan alone. He wasn’t so much worried about going as he was worried for his dad. How would Dino react if there were drag queen cheerleaders, or guys kissing? How would he react if Joe liked it?
He was still trying to figure out how to properly ask Mr. Khors if he could spring Donnie for a day. Maybe he’d like to go, too. Joe wanted to create Father-Son days, like a corny commercial. He had a picture of them all in the Bronco, driving back home at sunset, the sky a brilliant orange and pink behind the George Washington Bridge, dads up front talking, boys in the back, holding hands, everybody seatbelted, safe. Safer.
It could happen. Heather told him positive imagery was very helpful. Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe it was time to cut back on the happy pills.
The kitchen smelled oddly dormant. Nothing was cooking. Then he remembered: pizza night. He grabbed a sandwich, but felt anxious. He had to move. “Ma, where are my clean sweat pants?”
“The team ones or the blue ones?” she shouted back from somewhere in the house.
“The blue ones!”
“In your drawer!”
“Thanks!”
“You’re welcome!”
He found them, changed, stepped off the porch and under the warm baked air of a June day bouqueted with little fluffy clouds. Spread out on his lawn, breathing, he rolled and flexed. His body greeted him with tiny rips and tears hello as he stretched quadriceps, hamstrings, snortissimus dorsi.
Jim Provenzano is the author of the novels PINS, Monkey Suits and Cyclizen, the stage adaptation of PINS, as well as numerous published short stories and freelance articles. The curator of Sporting Life, the world’s first gay athletics exhibit, he also wrote the syndicated Sports Complex column for ten years. An editor with the Bay Area Reporter, he lives in San Francisco. www.myrmidude.org
Pins: A Novel Page 33