“My dad teaches at the Bible college in Belton.”
Kent glances over at me, and smiles. “So, we’ve got a lot in common.”
We talk and skate around the rink for a long time. He’s still holding my hand for stability. I keep my arm bent tensely at the elbow to give him some support. Slowly, but surely, he gets more comfortable on the ice. He stops looking at his skates and leaning on me heavily. Gradually, my arm relaxes.
But he doesn’t let go of my hand.
After another few laps around the rink, Kent looks up at the bar, and sees his friends in the window over the Zamboni garage waving him up.
“Guess I should go meet the girls,” he says.
I check my watch. “Yeah, I have to get ready to close up.”
“You should meet us up at the bar when you get done,” he says.
Then he lets go of my hand, skates effortlessly across the rink, and throws his hips sideways in an expert hockey stop, sending a spray of ice into the wall. He looks back at me over his shoulder with a mischievous smile.
“Thanks for the lesson, handsome.”
He disappears into the warmth of the lodge, leaving me in the middle of the ice. My heart is racing, but the rest of my body is unable to move.
Frozen.
“He seems like a nice guy.”
When I walk into the skate lodge, Carla says this with a smile, like it’s a statement, but there’s a question in her eyes.
“Yeah, he is.” I unlace my skates, put on the blade covers, and zip them into my bag.
“You should go upstairs and hang out with them.” Carla is pulling down the door that covers the window at the skate counter, and locking it into place.
“Nah,” I say. “I need to get home. My parents will wonder where I am.”
In the parking lot, I reach into my coat pocket for my keys. I pull them out, along with a folded piece of paper. It’s a corner torn from one of the bright pink ice rink schedules we keep in a brochure holder at the rental counter. I open it, and see a phone number scratched out in pencil beneath the name Kent Harris.
My heart is a Geiger counter ticking like mad over this radioactive scrap. I stare at the handwriting for what seems like a very long time; the sharp angle of the K, the hurried Rs, the graceful swish of the S. Finally, I fold it up, slip it into the hip pocket of my jeans, and get into the car.
I put the key in the ignition, my hands on the wheel, and my foot on the brake, but I can’t move. I sit in my parking space staring out the windshield. Frozen. Beyond the trees at the edge of the parking lot are the lights of the deserted ice rink, sandwiched between the skate lodge and the bubble that covers the tennis courts during the winter. Carla’s is the only car left in the lot. All is quiet, except the thoughts in my head.
Kent Harris gave you his number.
He called you handsome, and held your hand.
You thought he was handsome, too.
As if a dam has broken, an explosion of images bursts across my brain, and it all comes rushing in: Bradley in the hot tub, Megan on the water bed, Ashley up against the car, Dad’s masturbation talk, Derrick handing me a beer, the image of the guy at the gay pride parade leaning in to kiss the boy in the ball cap.
I rest my forehead against the steering wheel and close my eyes. When I look up again, the lights of the skating rink have gone dark. I turn the key in the ignition as I step on the clutch, then I put the car in reverse and drive toward home.
CHAPTER 24
When I walk in the kitchen door and see my dad holding the blue metal bin of tapes that should be under the front seat of my car, my first thought is a single word:
Crap.
I’m always so careful. I forgot to move the tapes out of Dad’s car after I drove it the other day.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Dad is sitting at the kitchen table. Mom is standing by the sink. The light on the ceiling fan in the kitchen bathes the room in warm light, and as I hang the car keys on the hook by the door, my dad says my name.
“Aaron.”
He says it almost wistfully somehow—like he remembers another son, the son I used to be before he found my secret stash of music.
“Son, are these your tapes?”
Something strange happens when I look at him. I feel so sorry for him and for Mom. For all of us. I feel tired. I feel like this is going to keep happening forever. That I’ll try to protect them from who I am for as long as I can, but eventually they’ll know everything.
They already know about the music. Maybe I should tell them about everything else: the movies, the making out, the drinking—get it all over with. Get it all out in the open. The idea of not hiding anything anymore slaps me in the face like a snowball, startling me back to reality. I can’t tell them about everything. I don’t know what would happen.
Who would I be if I wasn’t hiding from them?
“Be honest.” Mom’s voice isn’t angry. It isn’t anything.
“Yes, Dad. Those are my tapes.”
I say the right words, but the tone of my voice comes out all wrong. I meant it to sound tired and penitent. Instead, it sounds like I’m annoyed with him. This situation calls for “I’m sorry” not “I’m angry.” If I know anything, it’s how to get through moments like these quickly. The fastest way out is to be as contrite as possible as soon as possible, to act sorry, even though I’m not.
So I apologize. “Wait. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it, Aaron?” Dad’s voice is so sad. He looks at me wounded, bewildered. Something about it makes me want to explode.
“I meant, I’m sorry, Dad. I meant these are my tapes, and I’m sorry I like this music, but I do.”
“Aaron, this music is secular rock music by men and women who do not love the Lord.”
“Not all of it,” I say, grasping at straws. “Amy Grant is a Christian singer.”
“Aaron, you know there is no such thing as Christian rock. You cannot put God’s words to the devil’s music.”
I take a deep breath and try to stay calm. “It’s not the devil’s music, Dad. Heart in Motion is her crossover album, but she’s still a Christian singer.”
Dad shakes his head. “Son, I understand Amy Grant has crossed over, but I want to know this: Did she bring the cross over?”
Dad pulls each tape out of the holder and stacks them on the kitchen table one by one. “It’s not just Amy Grant, Aaron—not that she’s okay. What about this Bon Jovi fellow?” Dad holds it up and reads the title on the single. “ ‘Blaze of Glory’? This is hard rock, son. This is the music of rebellion.”
I lose my grip on my emotions. My voice turns snide and exasperated. “Dad, I’m sorry. Maybe when you were a teenager in the sixties, this music was ‘rebellious.’ News flash: Rock music is not the music of rebellion anymore. It’s just the music that is; it just exists.”
Dad lunges across the kitchen at me and I duck into the dining room door behind me so quickly that I stumble, off balance, across the chair at the end of the dining room table, knocking it over, and struggle into the living room. It happens so fast I don’t feel anything, or hear anything, or see my brothers and sister run to the landing over the entryway at the other end of the living room.
All I know is that suddenly, my dad is sitting on top of my chest and I’m lying on the living room floor. I’m not actually sure how we’ve gotten here. It happened so fast. One moment I was standing up in the kitchen. The next I am here, with his face in mine.
He is not yelling, but his voice is firm, and he’s grabbing me by my shoulders. Hard.
I don’t know what you’re saying. I can’t hear you even though you’re so close.
I can’t make out the words he’s saying, but I can feel his panic. This is a feeling I understand. Dad is desperate: desperate to save me; desperate for me to understand him; desperate for me not to want to listen to this music.
But it’s too late. I do want to listen to this music.
My brain feels all fuzzy, like when I was little, and he asked me to tell him what I did wrong before he spanked me with the paddle or his belt, or a switch off the weeping willow tree in Nanny’s front yard.
“Yes, sir,” I say, and I realize I am crying. “I hear you.”
But I don’t know what you’re saying.
Then I hear my mom. She’s calling my dad’s name. I look up at her, and only then do I realize how close Dad and I landed to the leg of the sofa in the living room.
It’s a good thing I didn’t hit my head.
Dad rolls off me. I lie there while he sits on the carpet for a moment, his head hanging down. We are both breathing heavily from the adrenaline of tumbling through the dining room from the kitchen. The noise of our clash has turned into a bottomless silence. Finally, he turns and looks at me with eyes full of hurt and remorse and confusion.
Once when I was in the fourth grade, when Dad was spanking me with his belt I broke away from him and tried to call the police. I raced into the kitchen and made it to the white phone hanging on the wall before he got to me. I had the receiver in my hand, my finger on the nine.
“Go ahead, call the police,” he said when he saw me. “They’ll send social workers who aren’t Christians here, and they’ll take you away from us, and put you with a family who doesn’t love Jesus. Is that what you want? To live with a family who won’t follow the Bible and discipline you when you sin?”
I felt so scared at the idea of going to live with a family who didn’t love Jesus, I hung up the phone. Loving Jesus meant we were doing the right thing. It meant we believed the right thing—that Jesus was coming back to take us to heaven. It also meant Jesus was on board with my being spanked with a belt. If I wanted to go to heaven, I had to accept that Dad was doing what God told him to do.
Dad has strict rules about spanking that he teaches to other parents. He quotes lots of Bible verses from Proverbs, which direct parents to teach their children the fear of the Lord by using “the rod.” Dad calls these passages “the biblical basis for spanking.”
“Be sure to use an inanimate object to spank,” he teaches. “You should use a paddle, a belt, or a switch.” Dad explains these items will sting your child’s bottom but not leave a permanent mark. “Hands are made for loving,” he says. “You don’t want your kids to flinch when they see your hands coming toward them to give them a hug or a caress.”
Dad used to warn us that we were going to get a spanking if we “crossed the line” as kids. As I lie on the floor in the living room, I think of the argument over my boat shoes so long ago, when he told me to put on socks or he’d have to “blister my bottom.”
I consider this phrase: blister your bottom. I imagine the heat and intensity of a spanking that would cause actual blisters to rise on a child’s bottom. I never had an actual blister from a spanking, so it must be a figure of speech.
Dad was usually so loving when he spanked me.
“Son, I don’t like to spank you,” he’d say, often with tears in his eyes. “But the Bible commands me to discipline you. I have to break your will so you can grow up to love the Lord and be more like Christ.”
He’d make sure I understood what I’d done wrong; then he’d make me bend over his bed, and he’d give me swats with a paddle or his belt. As he hit my bottom, he’d talk over my cries.
“Cry quietly, Aaron,” he’d say as he swung his belt. “When you cry out loudly because you’re angry you’re being spanked, I know I haven’t broken your will. I’m going to spank you until you cry quietly, son. Cry quietly, Aaron.”
Sometimes Dad breaks his own rule. Every once in a while his anger over what one of us has done wrong will get the best of him. When this happens, the worst part isn’t his fury; it’s the apology that always comes on its heels.
Like now.
Dad crawls over to where I am lying on the floor by the couch. “I’m so sorry, son,” he says. He wraps me in his arms and squeezes tightly, as if he’s trying to keep something from slipping away. “I shouldn’t have tackled you like that. I was wrong to discipline you in anger. Will you please forgive me?”
The last time Dad asked my forgiveness for his spanking me in anger I was in eighth grade. Sitting here on the floor, his arms around me, I can’t recall why Dad spanked me with his belt that day four years ago, only that the strokes came hard and fast, and later he returned to my bedroom to apologize.
I’m so sorry, son. I shouldn’t have spanked you in anger. I should have waited until I had cooled off to discipline you. Will you please forgive me?
That day, I looked him right in the eye, and for the first time I said no.
Dad fell to his knees and, as he did, took off his belt. He handed it to me. Then he bent over the bottom bunk in my bedroom and began to plead with me.
Oh, Aaron, I’m so sorry. I’ve sinned against you and against God. I don’t deserve to be your dad. Please, hit me, Aaron. I deserve to be hit. Discipline me, Aaron.
I was crying and wanted him to get up and leave. I told him I didn’t want to hit him; that I couldn’t. It felt like the house had turned upside down and was flinging me in all directions. Please get up, I’d said over and over. What are you doing?
He continued to beg and plead. Please, Aaron, whip me. I’ve been a bad, bad father. I deserve to be whipped.
Did I take a half-hearted swing at his backside before I threw down the belt and ran out of the room? I don’t remember now.
Dad is still holding me close to him while Mom goes back into the kitchen. I can hear her righting the chairs we must’ve knocked over as we wrestled across two rooms. Something about Mom picking up chairs causes my chest to tighten, and I feel an old hopelessness—the one I feel each time Dad breaks his own rules and my heart.
“I’m so sorry,” Dad whispers again, and I know he is telling me the truth. I am sorry, too. I hate feeling like it’s my fault when he gets upset over things like finding tapes in the car. This is why I lie to him: to protect him from who I am, and to protect him from who he becomes.
Dad helps me to my feet and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Will you forgive me, Aaron?” he asks.
I look into his eyes, and as I say yes, I feel determination best my hopelessness. Let’s get through this. “It’s okay,” I say quietly, with all of the sincerity I can muster. “I’m sorry I hid my music from you.”
“Aaron, we need to destroy these tapes.”
“Sure,” I say. “Throw them away.”
“No, son. I want you to go to the garage and get a hammer.”
“A hammer?”
“Yes, son. I want to go out back with you and we’re going to smash these tapes.”
“Really?” I am confused. “Why can’t we just… throw them away?”
“We are going to smash these tapes as a symbol of you smashing your rebellious will.”
“Isn’t that a little… dramatic?” I ask.
“Aaron, it’s a very dramatic, fearsome thing to commit yourself to God’s will for your life. It is not something to be taken lightly. It’s the most serious thing that you could ever do.”
“And that’s what I’ll be doing by smashing these tapes?”
Dad looks at me with tears in his eyes. “Son,” he says, “I can only tell you what to do. You can answer to please me, and still carry your rebellion in your heart. Or you can answer to please Almighty God who knows your every thought and hears your every word.”
I walk under the balcony landing where my brothers and sister are watching wide-eyed. I walk down the stairs to the garage. I open Dad’s gray metal toolbox and take out the hammer. Dad meets me at the door with all of my tapes in the box.
Without a word, I take them from him and walk out the back door of the house. Then I kneel down on the concrete sidewalk next to the garbage cans, and reach for a tape.
Amy Grant’s Heart in Motion is the first one I grab.
This is the first album I ever bought, when Jason drove me to Walmart in his sports car one night. I raise the hammer over Amy’s picture on the cover. She is looking down at a heart-shaped locket she clasps in one hand. I can hear her voice singing the song “That’s What Love Is For,” and my eyes well up with tears as I bring the hammer down.
Crash.
Suzy Bogguss is next.
Crash.
Bette Midler.
Crash.
Wilson Phillips.
Crash.
One by one, I bring the hammer down on the plastic cases and paper liner notes, sending splinters of clear acrylic showering over the sidewalk, ricocheting off the nearby steps. The pounding hammer creates its own rhythm.
Crash.
One day…
Crash.
I will listen…
Crash.
To anything…
Crash.
I want.
Crash.
I will…
Crash.
Not live here…
Crash.
Forever.
As the beat of the hammer holds steady, a melody rips through my chest and blends with the roar of the rage in my stomach. This new harmony swells into a raucous symphony of resolve.
Finally, each tape is smashed to smithereens. Dad helps me collect the shards of plastic and spools of black magnetic tape—the guts and organs of my love songs. He holds the dustpan as I sweep up the final pieces, and when they are deposited in the trash can, he hugs me close and whispers, “I love you, son.”
I understand he is doing what he thinks is best for me, but I also know it will not accomplish what he wants. There will be more music. There will be a day I no longer have to hide it. My tapes may be crushed, but my will is not broken, and I have finally learned not to give myself away. I make no move to break from his embrace. Instead, I stand and let him hold me while I cry.
Quietly.
CHAPTER 25
The Mid-America Association of Christian Schools Fine Arts Competition was held on a beautiful spring day fraught with nerves and tension. Besides performing with the high school choir, the high school band, and the senior high select vocal ensemble, I sang a vocal solo, played the Khachaturian Tocatta in E-flat Minor in the classical piano competition, and performed a humorous interpretation called “Before a Bakery Showcase,” in which I played four different characters reacting to what they see behind the glass at a bakery. These included an obese woman and a four-year-old boy.
Rapture Practice Page 24