“I guess, unless this really is a date?”
“Yeah. We can duck my parents after dinner. Besides, kids get in free, even though we’re not officially kids anymore. The tickets are two hundred bucks.”
“Oh. Then, no to the parents.”
“Okay. I’m guessing you don’t have a tux.”
“No. I have a suit.”
I’d rarely worn it; most recently at a funeral for a distant aunt I’d only met a few times. I had stared at it in the car on the drive to my uncle and aunt’s home as it swayed on a little hook over a side window. Like most teenagers, I was uncomfortable with the mere idea of a tie and suit.
An image flashed in my mind, a version of that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott movie we’d half-watched that night at Holly’s. Would Everett take me in his arms, whirl me around the dance floor, defying and shocking an entire community of Forrestville’s wealthy elite? Would he propose on bended knee?
None of that would happen, exactly, but we would rather clearly exhibit our affection, and with our bow ties still on.
Chapter 12
The Polaroid upset me.
He attached a note, calling it ‘an early birthday present.’
In it, Everett posed, arms and little biceps flexed, the biceps I’d kissed, licked, nibbled on.
The Polaroid.
In it, Everett grinned with mischief, wearing only white undershorts.
In it, the bulge in those shorts showed a level of interest; not rigidly excited, just turgid.
It’s a joke, I told myself. Someone took it and he knew I’d get off on it. I did, several times.
But that pleasure began to blend in with the mental burn from an unanswered question. If Everett was running around with a chubby getting his picture taken, then who took the picture?
Polaroids didn’t have time delay settings, did they?
While I, an hour away, longed and pined for him even more as Everett sent these letters and packages, some other guy got to be with him, underwear close, boner close, shirtless little biceps-flexing close.
I sent him some generic birthday card I’d foraged from my mom’s collection, but refused to mention the photo.
A few weeks passed, and I heard nothing from Everett.
School became actually more relaxed, despite the rumbling internal engine of wondering what he was doing, how often he thought of me, and when I would see him next. I let it settle into a sort of comfort. Adored by him, I would be again, I hoped. Perhaps having no prior romantic experience was my saving grace. Perhaps I was just a fool.
Seeing couples holding hands in the school hallways, all opposite-sex pairs, of course, no longer annoyed me. I have that, too, I told myself. But it’s so special it can’t be shared casually between geometry and gym. So what if its consummation required sometimes difficult and unusual locales?
Then, postcards began to arrive almost daily, each with one word.
SEVENTEEN
YOU
GOING
ARE
ON
The images weren’t unusual; pastoral Pennsylvania, Amish farmlands, a few depicting his school. They weren’t the point. It wasn’t until most of them arrived that I figured out, of course, that they had an order. Everett was cleverly doling out our cryptic secrets, displaying them for the world, or at least the postman. My mother, who had politely left them on my bedroom desk, barely withheld her own curiosity.
One of the postcards arrived on a Saturday.
“Why is there only one word on this?” Dad said that day as he handed it to me while sorting bills.
“It’s kind of a running joke I have with Everett,” I said as I glanced at another corny autumnal image, and written on the other side, BABY.
I’d pieced together that Everett had written the first lyrics from the song in The Sound of Music where the cute Nazi bike messenger and the older daughter get to sing and dance and make out in a gazebo on a rainy night.
I knew with every postcard Everett imagined just such a gazebo, except we were two cute little bike messengers, without the girl, or the Nazis, or even the bike, but definitely the rain.
Outdoors in the rain; we’d have to try that some day.
Chapter 13
“Hey, Reid, ya got a minute?”
Actually, I had half an hour, since it was lunch period and I was sitting alone at a table, eating.
“Sure, Kevin. What’s up?”
Kevin Muir’s kiana shirt, a wide-collared profusion of lime green and hot pink swirls, clung tightly to his muscled chest. His jeans, bell-bottoms wide at the cuff, held tightly to his waist, pressing out in the expected areas.
He sat down across the table from me with his tray of food. Like me, he had cut his hair short for fall training, but it had grown out to the typical long style similar to mine. Unlike me, Kevin was popular and knew it, but he didn’t lord it over anyone. One of the aforementioned cool dudes from the track team, he drove us in his van to the rock concerts (Kansas, Electric Light Orchestra, and Foreigner). A pretty amazing pole vaulter, and one of few guys at school who could get away with such daring outfits, Kevin Muir was beyond criticism.
“I was wondering if you wanna do distance for the track team again.”
“Oh. I don’t think so,” I said.
“Well, you know, Shot’s gone, so we’re short a man.”
‘Shot’ was Gary Hendershott, who had become a bit too intimate with his girlfriend, Tammy Krebs. He usually ran a good second at most distance events, did better in the two-kilometer races. He’d dropped out and gotten a GED since becoming an expectant father rushed into becoming a husband. His sudden disappearance, similar to that of a few other students each year, became the subject of a lot of gossip. The stories had left me more relieved than isolated for being the only gay guy I knew of at school, other than a few of the kids in the Drama Club.
“I dunno, Kevin. I’m kind of focusing on my SATs and college, you know? I mean, I’m training a bit for the half-marathon in May, but that’s just for fun.” Actually, encouraged by Everett’s upcoming visit, I had been training on my own more than usual. I wanted to place well for him to witness.
What I didn’t say was that while the track team’s distance runners were an okay bunch, some of the others, sprinters and field guys, thought of themselves as rock stars, and acted like it.
In my sophomore year, I had joined the track team the spring after my previous meager success in the fall cross country season. I didn’t consider the track antics, mostly comprised of homophobic names and swearing, to be any sort of threat, just annoying.
With the guys on cross country, there wasn’t any locker room banter because we usually just went home to shower, at least at home meets. We didn’t travel as a pack on school buses, just a few cars. Distance runners had nothing to prove. We were usually too exhausted to bother anyone else.
Kevin was an exception, one of the most casually popular guys I knew from the track team. His father owned the largest car dealership in the county. Muir Autos billboards welcomed drivers to Greensburg at each of the town’s major entry roads with the catchy phrase, ‘Get More at Muir!’
Yet Kevin wore his elite status with a cool resolve, always greeting me in the hallways if he wasn’t too distracted by his latest girlfriend. His family lived in Forrestville, just down the secluded street from Everett’s family. That Everett had mentioned being his childhood friend made me see him in a new light.
“Come on, you’re good,” Kevin said. “Besides, you’re getting a bit chunky, doncha think?”
It was an old joke, how the loosely knit clan of rangy runners would complain about gaining an ounce or two, as if we were supermodels.
“I’ll have to think about it. When’s training start?”
“Two weeks. But we got some indoor training goin’ on at the college.”
The local branch of Penn State had open days at an indoor track. The ramps and humming florescent lights annoyed me. When I had trained there as a sophomore, I toyed with
lapping straight-aways with my eyes closed, just so I could pretend I was running outdoors, which was my original reason for joining cross country.
“I’ll think about it.”
“I’ll teach ya how to pole vault,” Kevin teased.
Part of our coach’s spirited early training my sophomore year had involved his encouraging all new guys to try events they hadn’t done before. The only requirement for attempting pole vault was putting on a smelly old scraped communal football helmet. Despite the advantage of using pole vault as a way of befriending him, I passed then as well.
“No thanks. I prefer my skull in its original shape.”
I couldn’t deny that watching Kevin compete in pole vault was fascinating. What beguiled me, and no doubt a few others, was the frequency of his jock strap bulge –and occasionally some of its contents– popping out of his shorts mid-leap.
Kevin talked about some other things, but those memories of him stuck. Under the table, I furtively adjusted the pronounced tightening in my pants. I wondered if he actually wanted to strike up a friendship, or if any of that was just a ruse to get me to join the track team.
I wanted to mention Everett, but knew that our little romance would at least be deduced by him, if not admitted by me. But more important, the mere mention of our connection, there in the school cafeteria, felt out of place.
Instead of parting ways, we chatted until the bell rang. As we left, Kevin added, with an oddly affectionate shoulder pat, “Think about what I said.”
Up until then, I hadn’t thought much about deception, or false intimacy, or any kind of second-guessing of people. But with Everett in my life, or at least in my memory and mailbox, I had begun to consider the ulterior motives of other people.
Chapter 13
Spring, 1979
You are cordially invited on behalf of
The Forrester Family
To attend the Greensburg Annual Spring Fling!
Saturday, March 24
At the Forrestville Country Club
Formal Attire
Send RSVPs to:
A phone number and a mailing address followed. Even though Everett said I was already invited, I figured this was a formality, it being a formal event. I cautiously checked the ‘Yes, I Will Attend’ line and inserted the tiny reply card into its tiny envelope.
That had been a few weeks before my trip downtown to try on a rental tux. Everett had sounded a little snippy when I’d again asked if I could just wear my dark suit. “No, a white dinner jacket. You can get one at Troutman’s downtown.”
Fortunately, Mom agreed. She’d also eventually agreed that on the night of the benefit, she and my father would decide to have other plans.
Troutman’s was out of white dinner jackets, there being a rush on them in advance of the gala. The polite saleslady on the phone suggested Lapels, “A Fine Men’s Clothier,” on South Pennsylvania Avenue. I’d been to the Sears down the block several years before with Mom to buy my black suit. I discovered upon trying it on that it had become clownishly short on me.
With five crisp twenties in my pocketed running pants, I donned my hooded sweatshirt and headed out to take Mom’s car downtown. Her enthusiastic cheerfulness took an annoying turn.
“Are you sure you want to wear that?”
“Mom, I’m renting a tux, not interviewing for a job.”
Like a lot of mid-sized Pennsylvania towns, Greensburg is nestled around a set of hills that give it a cozy feeling, while also making for frequent flooding. Several days of early spring rain had let up, but a clammy dampness clung to the wet streets.
Almost every building, from the train station Clock Tower to the rows of shops, and most of the department stores and banks, were made of red brick, with fixtures done in Romanesque or Italianate Revival style. It’s actually quite pretty, like a middle-aged librarian who might still someday get a date.
My mother had been right, in a way. The stout clerk took a glance at my tracksuit, a bit too quickly greeted me inside Lapels, almost determined to shoo me away to the Sears down the road.
“May I help you?”
“Yes, I, uh, called about renting a tux; a white dinner jacket.”
“And when would you need this?”
“The Saturday after next. The Spring Fling at the–”
“Oh. Oh, yes, certainly.”
That changed his attitude. He must have assumed I was the indolent son of one of Forrestville’s wealthy locals. I more clearly understood Everett’s behavior, how he just expected things to go his way, and how they usually did.
After taking a few measurements of my arms and shoulders, he sorted through his rental tuxedos from a rack toward the rear of the shop. I tried on a few of his suggestions, not knowing what to look for.
“The cuff is still a bit short. Here,” he fussed, and a third was offered.
While it looked a bit odd over my grey T-shirt, as I glanced at myself in a full-length mirror, I began to see the illusion of elegance taking place on my lean frame.
“Yeah, this is good, right?”
“Certainly.” He fussed about me, brushing off my shoulders, tugging the sleeves down just so. I felt a flush of embarrassment at his touch, and made a sudden realization that there were quite possibly other gay men in Greensburg, other people who longed for a guy with a charming smile. While certainly I had wondered, I’d never clearly realized the actual possibility.
“Will there be anything else?”
“Yes,” I said with a newfound assuredness. “Some black pants, a white shirt, and a black bow tie.”
My parents had made good with their ‘other plans’ by hightailing it to a movie. Everett had called the night before when he arrived from school, more concerned about my apparel than making plans to meet before the gala (“Sorry. Family time.”) or on Sunday afterward (“Hopefully”).
Finally dressed for the night, alone in the house, I felt awkward, like an albino penguin, afraid to lean back in the chair. Why was I doing this, just to please Everett? To impress his parents as he had done mine? Couldn’t we just sneak off to the woods?
The doorbell rang. I nervously jumped up to open the door.
Everett looked absolutely dashing in his own white dinner jacket, perky black bow tie, and a smile that dazzled. I finally understood why girls at school became so starry-eyed over a prom date.
“Giraffe!”
“Hey, Monkey,” I smiled.
“You look great!”
“Thanks. You, too.”
“You ready?”
“I guess I’d better be.”
“Our ride awaits.”
With the introductions and handshakes made in the car, Everett and I sat in the back as Carl and Diana Forrester behaved most unlike a divorced couple, in fact downright cheerful. My ‘date’ and I furtively held hands in the back seat, occasionally finger-fighting like mating spiders.
Our hands abruptly parted when Mrs. Forrester turned to give me a speculative glance.
“I’m so sorry your parents weren’t able to attend tonight,” she said.
“Yes, um–”
“I’ve been planning this event for simply months, and this little detour isn’t a bother, but still, if I can allow myself a moment of immodesty, it is the event of the season. Do you dance?”
“Excuse me?”
Everett rolled his eyes.
“Dancing. There are so many young ladies your age who would so appreciate it. It is the thing to do, especially since you’re without … female escorts. Have you been to the club?”
“Uh, just in the winter, Ma’am; sledding.”
“Oh, yes. It’s so nice that the staff shares the property on occasion.” As she continued on about the event’s history, she turned back to check her appearance in the passenger seat visor’s drop-down mirror.
I felt a playful finger poke at my side. Everett’s comically contorted face forced me to stifle a burst of laughter.
The event proved to be everything Eve
rett described, a somewhat old-fashioned wedding reception, but without the wedding.
The white tux made my black-rimmed glasses more noticeable. Some older guest told me I looked like Buddy Holly. That probably had more to do with the movie about the singer having been released the year before. When I decided to joke, “Actually, I was going for Elvis Costello,” it fell flat, and the gentleman turned away with a vague smile.
Grandfathers danced with young girls and mothers danced with their sons, but mostly the kids hung around the edges of the ballroom while their parents cautiously partnered through rumbas and waltzes. Fragrant floral displays at each table gave the room a festive air and a heady scent.
As dinner was served, the band on a small stage in the ballroom took a short break, leaving one lone pianist. He tickled out a medley of songs, the tunes of which were all familiar but unnamable to me.
Every Time I Think of You Page 8