One Man Guy

by Michael Barakiva

  “What time do you think your folks’ll be back tomorrow?” Ethan asked.

  “Late—they’re driving back in one shot.”

  “Sweet.”

  “We’re playing tennis today,” Alek decided, putting down the newspaper.

  “I love it when you take charge.” Ethan grinned.

  “Let’s see if you still feel that way after I’ve demolished you.”

  When he and Ethan got to the courts, it became clear that Ethan wasn’t a tennis player; he just enjoyed trying to get the ball over the net. So Alek held back. Even then, Ethan was impressed.

  “I gotta tell you, dude, when you told me that tennis was your jam, I didn’t really believe you. But you really got game!”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “Really?”

  Encouraged by Ethan’s admiration, Alek began playing his best game, reclaiming his two-handed forehand, slamming the ball down the line for winners, and approaching the net like he had at the peak of his game last year.

  “I like playing tennis with you, Ethan,” Alek told him as they toweled off after their match.

  “Why, because I look so hot on the court?”

  “No, you look like an idiot running around trying to return my shots. I like it because it’s nice to do something I’m better at.”

  Ethan playfully flicked his towel at Alek, who playfully flicked his back.

  * * *

  “What’s taking you so long?” Alek asked, walking into the kitchen. He surveyed the piles of laundry, unwashed dishes, and bags of garbage, wondering how much time it would take him to restore the house to Khederian-acceptable order.

  “One sec!” Ethan called back.

  Ethan stood holding two glasses of water, staring at the refrigerator door. Alek took the glasses out of his hands and put them on the counter. Standing behind Ethan, Alek wrapped his hands around Ethan’s waist, nuzzling his face against his neck. “What’re you looking at?”

  “Grim, isn’t it?” Ethan was reading the black-and-white photocopies of two newspaper articles taped to the Khederian refrigerator. One headline read, Tales of Armenian Horrors Confirmed, and the other read, Exiled Armenians Starve in the Desert. A photograph of a caravan of emaciated Armenians on a forced desert march hung next to the article. Since Alek couldn’t remember a time when the articles hadn’t been on his refrigerator door, his eyes often passed over them.

  “These are from the New York Times?” Ethan asked.

  “Yup—the first article is from 1915. The second one with the photograph is from 1916. That was just the beginning of it.”

  “I thought you said that some people still deny this ever happened.”

  “They do,” Alek replied simply.

  “How? I mean, if people were writing articles about it at the time, how could anyone possibly deny it?”

  “And that, Ethan, is the crux of the incredible pain-born-of-injustice that Armenians carry around with them.” Alek found that the stories about his family’s past were there when he reached for them, like ingredients in a well-stocked pantry. “My parents didn’t want us to take what we had for granted, or to forget the atrocities that were inflicted on our people, so they put these articles up here.”

  “I’ve got no idea what it must be like to carry that stuff around with you. I’m a European mutt. My dad’s Irish, French, and German, but none of it means anything to me.”

  “What about your mom?” Alek asked.

  “What about her?”

  “You know, you never talk about her,” Alek probed gently. “What does she do?”

  “Pot,” Ethan replied.

  “And does she get paid well to smoke pot for a living?” Alek joked back.

  “I’m not kidding. She was a hippie who became a lobbyist for the marijuana industry. She’s one of the reasons that it’s becoming legal in all of those states out west.”

  “That’s not a job you think of someone’s parent having,” Alek said.

  “Well, she’s not your average parent,” Ethan admitted. “She just wasn’t cut out for the whole stay-at-home-mom thing. Or even the go-to-work-mom thing. That’s the reason she bolted.”

  “Do you miss her?” Alek couldn’t imagine his parents separated, or what his childhood would’ve been like with just one of them.

  “All the time. But I’d rather be giving it to the man the way she does than a slave to the system. Anyway, even if she were around, I don’t think I’d have a connection to her oppressed Hungarian ancestors the way you do to yours.”

  “It’s not like I think about it all the time, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s like this,” Alek continued. “You’re gay, right, but you don’t go around thinking to yourself, ‘What am I going to wear today, since I’m gay?’ or ‘How would a gay person react in this situation?’”

  “Course not. Sometimes I go an entire five minutes without thinking about my own gayness.”

  “I’m being serious. How often do you really think about it?”

  “I guess certain situations make me think about it more than others. Like when Remi and I used to hold hands in the mall and get looks. But when I’m walking down the streets of New York City, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Same with being Armenian. Most of the time it’s not the top thing on my mind. But I remember Nik coming home from school last year practically in tears because his Modern European History class spent a week on World War I and the teacher never mentioned the Armenians. ‘Armenian Genocide’ wasn’t even a listing in the index at the back of the textbook. When something like that happens, you’re forced to figure out what it means to you.”

  “So that’s what it means to you—pain and suffering and loss?”

  “Well, that’s part of it, sure. But there’s lots more, too.”

  Alek led Ethan to a glass cabinet on the opposite side of the kitchen. He carefully opened it and handed Ethan a large, framed photograph. “This portrait was taken almost a hundred years ago. It’s my mom’s side of the family, when everyone lived in Van. Van is in Turkey; my family had lived in the Armenian quarter there for almost three hundred years.”

  “How come they’re making those crazy faces? Usually everyone in old pictures has those depressingly serious expressions and are standing totally still.”

  “You see this?” Alek pointed to a corner of the photograph.

  “It looks like a cat’s tail,” Ethan guessed.

  “That’s right. You see, the Van cat was this very special thing—they were supposed to be good luck, because they have one blue and one green eye. The second this picture was taken, Sarma, the family cat, leaped in front of the camera and startled everyone. They took another picture, but because this one was considered ruined, they gave it to my great-grandfather. You see him, he’s the one in the back row, all the way on the right.”

  “He looks like he’s our age.”

  “Yeah, he was fifteen,” Alek said. “He’s the only one who survived the genocide.”

  Ethan looked at all of the Armenian faces in the photograph—laughing, surprised, annoyed. “Let me get this straight—everyone else in this picture was killed?”

  Alek nodded. “I think all the time how lucky I am to be here—how lucky I am that my great-grandfather, against his parents’ wishes, picked up and left after things got bad. And took this picture with him, because otherwise, I’d never know what those relatives looked like. But there are lots of other things that come with being Armenian,” Alek said, taking the picture back from Ethan and returning it to the glass cabinet. “Like this.” He held out a large, round, flat piece of pottery, the size of a dinner plate. Ethan held it up, inspecting the images painted on the surface.

  “This was made by the Balian family in the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem. This signature,” Alek said, flipping the plate over, “is how you know it’s the real thing. They’re the only ones who make this stuff anymore.”

  “There’s an Armeni
an quarter in Jerusalem?”

  “Sure. We were the first country to convert to Christianity, you know.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Ethan said, admiring the two intertwined fish painted green and brown, framed by an intricate blue border.

  “All of the images on Armenian pottery have a meaning. Sometimes they tell a story, or sometimes the image is symbolic.”

  “What do these two little guys mean?” Ethan asked.

  “It means miasnut’yun.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t know exactly how it translates into English. Unity? Togetherness? The image means two whole beings, complete unto themselves, that together form a new thing. Something bigger and better.”

  “Sounds like a good translation to me.” Ethan leaned in and kissed Alek.

  * * *

  Later that night, Ethan and Alek sat on Alek’s bed, limbs entangled.

  “Your room is so neat,” Ethan said, somewhere between admiration and disgust.

  “We clean every Sunday after church.”

  “And did your parents choose this puke green for the walls?”

  “It’s ‘moss green,’ and my mother says it’s calming,” Alek said, nodding.

  “Our next project should be this room. We should make it over the way we did you,” Ethan said.

  “One thing at a time,” Alek responded. He wondered how his parents were going to react to his new hair and clothes when they came home tomorrow. “What do you want to do tonight?”

  “We could watch TV, I guess,” Ethan said.

  “As long as we don’t watch anything with Kim Kardashian. You have no idea how many hours Armenians around the world spend complaining about how she, out of everyone, was chosen to represent us. I actually heard my mother say she missed the good ol’ days when Cher would skimp around in inappropriate outfits.”

  “Did she tell you why she had to get off the phone in such a rush?”

  Alek laughed. “I’m guessing she found out that the milk at the hotel’s continental breakfast wasn’t organic and locally sourced. She called back when we were on the courts, but didn’t leave a message because she never does. Then I tried her, but it went straight to voice mail, so I left a message at the hotel. I had to spell ‘Khederian’ three times.”

  “What’s Cher’s last name?” Ethan asked.

  “Sarkisian.”

  “Sarkisian, Khederian, Kardashian—do all Armenian names end in ‘ian’?”

  “Indeed they do. Or ‘yan’ sometimes, but it’s the same thing. It’s the patronymic. You know,” Alek said, responding to Ethan’s quizzical look, “the equivalent of ‘son’ in English. You have Johnson and Anderson, we have Hovanian and Boghossian. It just means ‘son of’ in Armenian.”

  “You’re a treasure trove of facts,” Ethan said.

  “Of useless Armenian trivia,” Alek replied. “We should probably get a head start on cleaning the house.”

  “You guys don’t have a cleaning lady?”

  “Are you kidding me? We tried that when my mom started working full-time, but my parents spent so much time cleaning the day before she arrived because they wanted to impress her with what a clean house we kept that they figured it wasn’t worth it.” But when Alek thought about the energy involved in actually detaching from Ethan and then taking out the garbage, loading up the dishwasher, wiping down the counters, vacuuming the carpets, and mopping the floors, it just seemed impossible. “I guess we could just do it tomorrow.”

  “Nosiree. We have one more NYC trip planned.”

  “Ethan, my family gets back tomorrow! We don’t have time to get into the city before then.”

  “But you said they weren’t coming back until late, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So leave the rest to me. Just meet me at the station in time for the 10:17 and we’ll be back by dinner. Or better yet, I might just spend the night and we can head out together tomorrow.”

  “You can be very persuasive, Ethan.”

  “Tomorrow is a surprise, so don’t even think about asking what we’re gonna do, okay?”

  Thousands of possibilities spun around in Alek’s mind like a slot machine. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when my parents get back. The idea of not being able to get into New York whenever I want and being stranded in the suburbs again is so depressing.”

  “You know, I don’t think the suburbs are that bad,” Ethan said.

  “How can you, who introduced me to the city, think that? There’s nothing to do here. Ever. Even if you were old enough to have a license and we had a car, then what? We could drive to the mall? Unless it was after eight p.m., of course. Then our only option would be the diner down Route 130. But if we were in the city, we could walk the High Line or get paletas or watch the sun set over the river or get lost in Central Park. We could even play gay soccer with the Ramblers! That’s why I hate it here so much. It’s like the sun sets and everything dies.”

  “You really think the suburbs suck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you think that’s a bad thing?”

  “Well, how can it be good?”

  “Let me show you.”

  Ethan slid out from behind Alek. He plugged his phone into Alek’s speakers, and a Rufus song started pumping out: “You can go out, dancing…”

  “‘Between My Legs,’ right?” Alek asked.

  “Righter than you could guess,” Ethan responded. He turned the volume up, until Alek could feel the bass pulsing in his bones. Ethan closed the door and dimmed the lights until the room was so dark, Alek could barely see him.

  “Ethan!”

  “Shhhh.” Ethan whipped off his shirt, then walked to Alek and put his finger on his lips. Alek kissed the finger lightly. Ethan reached out and put his other hand on Alek’s knee. He leaned in, kissing Alek on the face, mouth, and neck, slowly making his way down his body. His hand climbed up the side of Alek’s leg, until his fingers rested at the top of his pants. Then they slowly started fumbling with the button. Alek closed his eyes and leaned his head back.

  Every inch that Ethan went down made Alek’s heart thump a little harder. A few days ago, when Ethan had joked about this right before Becky walked in, Alek was more scared than anything else. He still felt scared, but now he felt like he might be ready, too.

  Ethan’s hands had succeeded in freeing the button. Alek let Rufus’s lyrics wash over him. The song had never made more sense to him. If the world were coming to an apocalyptic, cataclysmic end, this is exactly where he’d want to be: with Ethan.

  Alek opened his eyes and found Ethan’s looking up at him. He knew the question being asked. Was he ready? Did he want Ethan to do this?

  But before Alek could decide, the door to his bedroom swung open violently. A figure holding a golf club above its head, poised to strike, leaped into the room.

  “Call the police!” Ethan screamed as he lunged, knocking the figure down to the ground.

  Alek jumped over Ethan and the assailant to reach his desk, fumbling with his password-protected cell phone.

  “9-1-1,” the operator stated crisply in Alek’s ear. “What’s your emergency?”

  Screams erupted as two more people appeared in the doorway, one holding a baseball bat and the other wielding his mother’s favorite Le Creuset cast-iron skillet, the one she kept hidden in the front closet. How would these intruders know how to find that? Alek wondered. Unless …

  “Stop! No one move!” Alek screamed.

  Everyone in the room froze.

  “Sorry, ma’am, there’s no emergency,” Alek said into the phone, hanging up. He flipped on the light, revealing his brother and mother standing in the doorway and Ethan, his fist raised, pinning Alek’s dad on the floor.

  “Ethan, stop!” Alek yelled, grabbing Ethan’s arm before the punch could land. Ethan looked down and quickly scrambled off Mr. Khederian.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Alek’s dad. Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay,”
Alek’s dad replied indignantly, rising to his feet. He looked at Alek. “Are you okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Alek asked.

  “When we got here, the front door was open, and the house was such a mess, I assumed it had been ransacked,” his mother explained, putting the skillet down. “We thought we had arrived mid-robbery.”

  “So you snuck up here to apprehend the burglars?” Alek asked incredulously.

  His mother nodded.

  “God, you’re so baroque! Why didn’t you just call the police? What if one of these imaginary robbers had a gun?”

  “We did call the police. But we were worried about you,” his mother said.

  “Why is the house such a mess?” Alek’s father demanded. “And what were the two of you doing up here with all the lights off and…” His father trailed off. Alek felt his cheeks sting bright red. Everyone in the room stood in awkward silence as Alek’s family realized what they’d walked in on.

  Everyone except for Ethan, of course, who just sat back on the floor and started laughing.

  “You think this is funny, young man?” Alek heard his father say in the low voice he reserved for the worst situations.

  “Well, dude—”

  “I’m not a dude. I’m an adult. You can call me Mr. Khederian. Although after what I’ve seen tonight, I doubt you’ll ever call me anything again.” Now it was Ethan’s turn to freeze. Alek had seen Ethan charm himself out of situation after situation, but even his most winning smile was a powerless trinket in the face of an enraged Armenian patriarch. “What’s your name?”

  “It’s, uh … uh…” Ethan stuttered.

  “His name is Ethan Novick,” Nik volunteered nervously. “He’s in my class at school.”

  “Mr. Novick, I imagine the police will be arriving within a few minutes. If you’re still here by then, I have every intention of telling them you’re a trespasser.”

  “I wasn’t trespassing. I’m a friend of Alek’s,” Ethan protested.

  “Unfortunately for you, this is not Alek’s house. It’s mine. And if you remove yourself from it in the next sixty seconds and I’m confident that I’ll never have the displeasure of seeing you here again, there’s a chance you won’t spend the evening in jail. Am I being perfectly clear?”