by Sam Lansky
I told Cassie that I liked Jerick. “You should,” she said. “He’s adorable.” She studied me. “Do you have a crush on him?” she asked. There was no judgment there, just curiosity.
“Maybe,” I said.
“That means you’re gay,” Cassie said, with a brusque authority.
And so, after some deliberation, I wrote my parents a letter—explaining that I was gay, or at the very least was attracted to boys, and I knew so because I was in love with a boy in my grade and also because Cassie had told me so. I left it in their bedroom for them to read.
A few hours later, the three of us—my mother, my father, and me—met in my mother’s office to discuss the contents of my letter. My mother told me that she understood and loved me unconditionally, and my father said it didn’t change anything at all. It was a nonevent. I told my friends at school that I was gay and they seemed unimpressed.
Jerick’s feelings for me didn’t seem to change one way or another after I came out, but we grew closer as time passed. I had large groups of friends over to my parents’ house, ostensibly to watch movies on the big screen in the theater room but mostly just to have an excuse to spend time with him. While friends packed onto the couch and spread out onto the floor, lips smacking on popcorn and jelly beans, I watched him watch campy movies—the way he tilted his head back when he laughed, the way Cassie rested her head on his shoulder affectionately. He was effete in a way that I didn’t know how to be. I’d had no sexuality crisis, no struggle with my own self-identification, and so being gay changed nothing more than who I was attracted to—but Jerick seemed drawn to a type of cultural gayness that I didn’t understand. He experimented with makeup, went to midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show dressed up in costume, talked abstractly about “camp” in a way that was precocious.
I still got along better with a coterie of boys from my old neighborhood who were straight but often stayed the night at my house on weekends. Quickly, we discovered Internet pornography—grainy, low-quality clips of women thrusting and moaning, their enormous breasts slapping wildly against their chests—which we watched together with a low-decibel mix of lust and curiosity. Then, for my benefit, we queued up gay porn, all waxy chests and spectacular ejaculations, evaluating its erotic quality together. Later, we retreated into separate corners of that big house to masturbate in privacy, armed with tissues and the instant replay of those sequences, then came back to compare notes.
But as I lay on the floor of my bedroom trying to will myself into a state of sustained arousal, those worked-out porn stars did nothing for me. Instead, I thought of boys twirling in endless ethereal ballet, leotards taut against flexing limbs. Same with the mornings when I awakened early and allowed my hands to explore my body, the tensing in my groin, the pressure and release—I thought mostly of Jerick. Afterward, sticky and full of self-loathing, when the weight of my budding sexuality was too much to bear and I couldn’t believe what a mess I’d made, I didn’t wish for him to be near me. I felt dirty and disconnected, shame descending all over me like a scratchy wool blanket, like the sheets I used to sweat and piss in as a child, hot and terrified, dreaming of Brooks. Masturbation made me want to molt. It made me feel like my body was a tomb, and I was desperate to get out.
No, sex was always better in theory.
Dean called me every day that I was in Portland. Instead of picking up, I wrote him emails.
“Sorry, handsome,” I said. “I have no cell service at my mom’s house.” (This was true—reception was spotty—but mostly, I didn’t want to talk to him.)
A few days before Christmas, I bought ten hits of Ecstasy—twenty dollars a tab—from a friend who sold it as a side hustle. I hadn’t taken it before but had always wanted to.
I took the first tab alone, walking downtown, which was often how I liked to experience drugs—to test the waters to see how I would respond to them, to know what to expect so when I did them with others, I could talk about it with an air of worldly confidence. I took the train up into Washington Park while the sun was going down and walked home through the forest. My heart was thudding in my chest, and I could feel the trees moving inside me, their branches crackling and snapping underneath my rib cage, and euphoria thundered up and down my spine. The sky was a field of grass and the stars were beneath my feet. I was in love with everything.
I texted a guy I occasionally slept with when I was in Portland. I had met him online when I was fourteen, right after I had first slept with Jim; he would drive up to the woods and park his pickup truck and we would fuck in the front seat or outside, on the grass, our clothes wet from the dew. He was older and swarthy, maybe Latino; his belly was a little round and smooth.
I pulled him from the driver’s seat, dancing in the moonlight.
“Steve,” I said.
“That’s not my name,” he said, tugging me back toward his truck. I got in and pulled my pants down.
“I’m rolling so hard right now,” I said.
“Shit,” he said. “Got any more?”
I shook my head no. He unbuckled his belt.
“I’ve heard that once you fuck on Ecstasy,” I said, “it ruins regular sex for you forever.”
“Am I worth it?” he said.
“You better be,” I said, bending him over.
Walking home from where I’d met the man I called Steve, I thought about the times I had walked through those same woods with Jerick. By age thirteen, I remembered, he had become a rangy teenager, the oval circumference of his face indented with haughty cheekbones and a keen jawline. I was chubby, and I envied his growth spurt, his ability to become more in tune with his body. He had taken to dyeing his hair any variety of Manic Panic colors, bright neon shades that made him look like an alien, all translucent skin and otherworldly hue. Even if I hated this, thinking it deeply uncool, it didn’t matter: he was my best friend and my partner in crime. There were so many times I had stood with him in the foyer of that house, looking up at the black chandelier that hung from the ceiling and imagining it, as I always did, impaling us. I would touch his hair, the smalt of a fresh bruise or buttercup yellow. “You look like shit,” I’d say, mostly joking.
“You’re an asshole,” he’d say.
And I would kiss his forehead. “You know I’m just kidding,” I’d say. “Don’t leave. Take me with you.”
I told Judith that I thought I was in love. I could see it as a Venn diagram. I could almost draw it. Jerick and I were the only two boys in the eighth grade who had already come out—even though there were plenty of others who would soon, I was sure of it—and we were both precocious and hypersexual, prone to theatrics. We both liked it when things were “dramastic,” which was Jerick’s portmanteau of “dramatic” and “drastic,” which we found very droll at the time.
But we were different, too. Jerick had that pretty-boy bone structure, and I didn’t have that, but I knew all the answers to exam questions, even when I hadn’t studied. He ebbed and prowled in his body, like he was nothing but appendages, so relaxed in his skin. I envied him that. Checking my reflection was like looking into a house of mirrors. I would discover some distended ugliness I had somehow missed the day before, the bloat of how awful I’d been in eating so much; or, if I had been starving myself, my figure looked severe and attenuated. Jerick didn’t hate himself the way that I did.
If we could meld into one person, I thought, we would be unstoppable. Supergay, or something.
We shared a locker and five out of six classes. He was a middle school celebrity: pulling at his polo to expose the gooseflesh between his pelvis and navel, batting his eyes to the click-click-click of imaginary paparazzi. In ballet class, he always found a way to take center stage, waving to a multitude of adoring fans. We had a recital that year and he and I were choreographed to be the last two dancers onstage in our number; we wore purple leotards and black tights and, per the dance teacher’s instruction, made triangles on our bellies with our hands. We laughed about it for hours af
ter, how very gay it was, us alone onstage, bathed in yellow-white light, dressed like that.
But they were cheering for him, not me; he was the star; he didn’t usually share the spotlight. So when he pushed me up hard against the brick wall behind school one September afternoon, so hard I could feel my hot breath stinging at my tonsils, and he clasped my wrists in his spindly hands, the air was thick with significance. I looked up at the security camera, which swiveled in a robotic waltz above us. Finally, equal billing. Jerick opened his mouth, and I was distracted by the tooth that he’d chipped on a bottle of wine when he was twelve.
And when he kissed me, even though it was my first real kiss, I wasn’t there in the moment. I was thinking about how it was different from the tentative pecks in clandestine games of spin the bottle, from the touch of that blond boy from Texas the previous summer whose timidity made me afraid I might break him. Jerick’s kiss was strange and soft and wet, so I kept my eyes open and tilted my face to stare at his ear.
He intertwined his fingers with mine, a gesture that felt disconcerting. We didn’t usually hold hands. On the bus, once, locked beneath my backpack. Another time in the dim retreat of a movie theater, Jerick’s palm clammy from holding the cup of soda. My hesitation wasn’t a fear of homophobia—we were probably too young to get hate-crimed, anyway, although I worried sometimes for Jerick, who was so girlish. Sometimes when his limply gesticulating hands flicked I would think he was too ineffectual to love, even as I did love him.
But Jerick touching me still made me uncomfortable. Moments into each embrace, my skin began to crawl. I wasn’t old or mature enough to face my cognitive dissonance. He loves me; I am unlovable. He finds me attractive; I am disgusting. If I concentrated hard, I could try to spin the paradox into something more digestible. I am broken; he wants to fix me.
My face was still wet with his kisses when, on the walk to the bus stop, a homeless man asked if we could spare a little change.
“True change comes from within,” I sneered with the same derision as always, thinking myself very clever. I looked at Jerick for approval. But he fingered his worn jeans, then fished out a fistful of dimes and nickels. I always noticed the ways we were different: the reduced-fare lunch card courtesy of the school office; the strips of cardboard Jerick’s mom had glued to the inside of his shoes so his socks wouldn’t get dirty; the constant allusions to the long-delayed check from the car accident that left his mother’s coupe all busted up, one shattered headlight like a black eye. The money was coming soon, Jerick would say.
We sat together in the back of English class, scribbling notes to each other in the margins of young-adult paperbacks.
“My parents are going to Washington next week,” I wrote.
“Love is like bumper cars,” Jerick wrote. “No, it’s like swimming. It’s better if you aren’t afraid to get wet.”
After school let out, we rode the train to my house. In the cool, still air of the underground station, Jerick touched his fingers to my lips and paused, listening for the clarion whistle of the train through the tunnel. The one long, high note.
At the front door, I looked at Jerick.
“You know, my parents are gone,” I said. I let that hang for a moment.
“Let’s go inside,” Jerick said.
As he went down on me, I thought of Brooks, and it didn’t feel like it had before—velvety damp, that wriggling sensation like I was going to wet myself, the emptiness of a phrase as stupidly sincere as “bad touch.” No, with Jerick, it felt warm and intimate. I just wanted to be close to him, and for once, I really was.
It felt like I couldn’t belong to my family anymore. I loathed the sparkle of clean silverware, the hum of C-SPAN left drawling in the living room, my mother’s idle conversation. I lived for the weekdays, which hurtled forward madly. Jerick and I spent most of our time in the second-floor boys’ bathroom. Time never knocked on the bathroom door; it passed by in a haze as we stood for hours, glued to the wall of a toilet stall. I traced the ellipse of Jerick’s mouth with one hand and shaped it with the other, listening for the groans of pleasure, Jerick’s fist slamming lightly against the spackled wall.
“We’re so lucky to have found each other,” Jerick said. It was a stupid thing to say, I thought, and it sounded familiar—like I had heard it in a movie somewhere. I didn’t say anything back.
On the afternoons when someone interrupted us by entering to wash his hands or urinate, Jerick’s eyes darted mischievously, firecracker glances going off on the Fourth of July.
Where will I fall, I wondered, that place, when the sparks are all gone?
I criticized him endlessly—for the way that he dressed, for how effeminate he was. I slapped his hand away when he reached out for mine in public. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to know that these things would push him away: I wanted to mold him in my image, make him clean-cut and presentable, but I also wanted him to stay exactly as he was. I wrote him love letters and poetry in the dim light of my computer screen, in my bedroom late at night; then at school I was chilly to him until it was time to pull him into the bathroom to make out. My mother didn’t like him; she objected when he stayed the night, probably because she knew that we were sleeping together, but I convinced myself that it was because his family was poor and he had dyed hair and strange clothes; it made it easier to be angry with my mother.
Then, after some fairly mundane quarrel with Jerick, a friend from school called me and told me that Jerick had spent the night with two other boys from school, and things had happened. Sex things.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“He told me himself,” she said. “I’ll call him again and you can listen in.” And so we did, and I sat there numbly on the other line as Jerick told my friend, in more detail this time, about what had happened.
After several hours of planning my speech, I called Jerick to announce theatrically that I knew—I knew about everything, and it was over. And it was.
In the months after that, I spent a lot of time in bed, my face suffocated deep in a mass of pillows, and I listened to emo music and smoked clove cigarettes, and I watched bad television and cried a lot, from the sting of rejection, from the perverse satisfaction of having pushed someone I cared about away, from getting to be right about the fact that I was unlovable. My mother knew that I was in pain; occasionally, I would awaken to the sound of her precise voice, reading poetry out loud to me. Khalil Gibran, or Rumi. I pretended to keep sleeping, but sometimes I would sit up, wrap my arms around her middle, and sob.
It was my first heartbreak: I didn’t know that it could hurt so deeply.
One spring afternoon, I sat outside after school, on the playground where my sneakers had dragged in the beaten sawdust, by the field where I had tripped like a coward during a game of capture the flag, choosing to lie motionless, inhaling the smells of grass and rain rather than playing along, across from the basketball court with the ragged hoop where Jerick had first kissed me in streaks of summer light. I hated that place, hated all my memories.
Monkey bars squatted behind the portables, adjacent to the chipped clay tennis courts that had been abandoned decades earlier. I cornered Jerick there, shielded from sight by a wall of ivied fence. The physical proximity to him made me hard, and also angry.
“I miss you,” I said. My thumb grazed his waist, tiptoeing across the band of exposed skin.
“You know, Sam, I guess there are times when, I mean, I miss you, too, but now I’m sorry,” he said in clipped breaths. “I just don’t love you anymore.”
I pulled closer, wanting to kiss him, wanting to punish him, to grab his full lower lip and sever it from his face with my teeth. He pushed me away.
“No,” he said. He sprinted off, across the blacktop to the field. His movements were elegant, like he was in slow motion, his long strides forceful and deliberate. I heard a distant thumping as a basketball was dribbled across the cement, rhythmic as a drumbeat.
My mother and I had C
hristmas dinner at a steakhouse downtown, all twinkling candlelight and the smell of cedar in the air.
“What will you do for New Year’s?” my mother asked.
I shrugged. “Probably go to Marquee,” I said. “I dunno. Everyone’s away.”
“What’s your dad doing?” she asked, in a way that was so casual it felt practiced.
“He and Jennifer are going to the Caribbean,” I said.
“When?” she said.
I shrugged again.
“Surely he’ll be home by the time you get back,” she said.
“No,” I said. “He’s gone until the second week of January, I think.”
She looked incredulous. “So he just . . . leaves you alone there?” she said.
I nodded. I knew that I was fanning the flames, but I didn’t care.
“Oh, honey,” she said, as if to say: That explains everything.
“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” I said to Kat later that night, emptying another baggie of cocaine out onto the mirror on her center console. She laughed, even though it wasn’t funny. Quickly, I chopped up lines and we snorted them. Some of the coke blew onto the thigh of my jeans and I wiped it off with a finger, then smeared it on my gums. We were getting sloppy.
She locked the door and we headed down Ash Street. It was cold outside in downtown Portland, and I was moving fast, walking quickly, sucking down a cigarette and then tossing it onto the asphalt, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the sparks spray like a firework, and I paid the guy at the door and we went inside. It was a terrible club, just like all the clubs in Portland, but I was high and it didn’t matter because everything felt good when I was this high, except when it didn’t.
I don’t like it here, I thought, my teeth chattering involuntarily, my nose running. I wiped away a gossamer film of pink snot. The dance floor smelled like sex and apple juice, and the hardwood beneath my feet was chintzy, scarred with age. Men stood on the periphery, and they looked like clowns with leering smiles and hungry eyes. A boy in a cage, his body provocatively bent, snapped the elastic on his jockstrap. His skin was waxy with sweat. His face was frozen in some pose of grief, I thought, although I was probably projecting. I wondered if this was the seedy underbelly of the city. I wondered if people who found themselves in the seedy underbelly of something were ever able to identify it as such, or if that delineation could only come later—but if this city had a seedy underbelly at all, I thought, it had to be there, in the black-walled amphitheater of that nightclub where the strobe light was elongating each second like a flip-book, where everyone was blanketed in darkness.