Sprout

by Dale Peck

  Well. Even I knew what she meant that time.

  Kansas: the first state to officially mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design—i.e., Creationism—i.e., my God made the world, not yours.

  Kansas: the home of Rev. Fred Phelps, the founder of GodHatesFags.com and the guy who crashed Matthew Shepherd’s funeral with signs proclaiming that he got what was coming to him.

  Kansas: a pioneer of Defense of Marriage legislation. I.e., Straights Only. I.e., gays can design the wedding dress, photograph the ceremony, and cater the reception, but they can’t actually get hitched themselves. Kansas didn’t just pass a law to this effect: it amended the state constitution. Kansas was also the very first state to write a law making homosexual activity illegal, although that law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003.

  Oh, and Kansas: the first—and, to this day, the only—state in the country to make it illegal for two kids to have sex with each other. Yup, straight or gay, if they catch you having sex in Kansas before you turn sixteen, you’re going to jail.

  Kansas.

  This isn’t to say homophobia was, like, rampant at my school, or anything like that. I was less worried about roaming bands of gay bashers than some testosterone-charged football player feeling guilty about his fascination with, I dunno, Mario Lopez—not the bubbly Mario Lopez of Saved by the Bell, or the can’t-keep-his-hands-off-her-butt Mario Lopez of Dancing with the Stars, but the bubble-butted Mario Lopez of the Greg Louganis biopic. (“Gee, Mom, I don’t know how this could’ve ended up on our Netflix queue. I must’ve clicked the wrong thing.”) And it wasn’t like coming out was going to help me find a boyfriend. Even though statistics say there should be fifty budding homosexuals enrolled at BHS, half of whom are male, they don’t say who those other twenty-four boys are, let alone when they’re going to work their issues out (statistics do say that only 34% of Kansas high school students are proficient in math, however, so I’m not holding my breath). And, you know, I wasn’t even sure what boyfriend meant, at least not in this context. I tried looking it up in my dictionary, but it wasn’t a lot of help. A girl’s or a woman’s preferred male companion. That seemed to mean I could be a boyfriend, but I couldn’t have one.

  Then again, it was an old dictionary, and this is the age of the internet, right? I mean, it wasn’t exactly hard for me to realize what all those fantasies of Ewan McGregor were about (that would be the skinny jeans-wearing Ewan McGregor of Trainspotting and not the—ick!—bearded, bathrobe-wearing Ewan McGregor of the Star Wars movies, let alone the cheeseball-in-spandex Ewan McGregor of lameoid action flicks like The Island and Stormbreaker). All of which is another way of saying that coming out to myself wasn’t all that different to staying in the closet. I was still alone. Still living in my dad’s freakshow house and still going to my boondocks school. In a way, I was just like Mrs. Miller. I had a name for myself, for what I was. I just had no idea what it meant.

  By the time we pulled into my driveway, Mrs. Miller was so agitated that she hopped out of the car and marched straight for the door. Well, actually she marched straight for the house, but then she had to walk around it three times before she could actually find the door in the middle of all the vines. But she managed to make it look very intentional.

  She raised her hand to knock. Before she could the door swept open, and there was my dad.

  Mr. Sprout.

  Apparently he’d seen Mrs. M. walking around the house, and used the time to pour her a drink, because he was holding one in each hand. Either that or he was two-fisting it that day, which was an equally plausible explanation (although it didn’t explain how he managed to turn the doorknob).

  “Iced tea?”

  “Long Island?”

  I flashbacked (flashed back?) to the first day of seventh grade (“Long Guyland?”) but I learned later that Mrs. Miller was referring to the drink and not my dad.

  “But of course,” he said.

  “No thanks, I’ll pass.” Mrs. Miller whirled suddenly. She pointed at her car, only to discover it was empty. A look of confusion clouded her not-quite-sober face.

  I cleared my throat. “Over here,” I said from the shade of one of my dad’s stumps. What, did you think I was just going to wait in the car?

  Mrs. Miller’s finger whirled in my direction even as her head turned back towards my dad. Since this had her hand going in one direction and her head going in the other, she looked a little like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

  “Are you aware . . . ?” she began, then trailed off, as if she’d forgotten how to say the word yet again.

  “Gay,” I called from the shadow of the stump. That’s me, always eager to help.

  Before my dad trashed the computer, I’d read a few stories online about what happened when kids my age told their parents they were gay. It wasn’t all bad. We were well into the new millennium, after all. Will and Grace had been in syndication for almost a decade. There’d been Brokeback Mountain and Queer Eye, and it was more or less a requirement since the second season of The Real World that every reality show had to have at least one gay guy in it. Even the governor of New Jersey turned out to be gay, and it seemed like some senator or rock star was getting caught in flagrante delicto every six months or so. But those were all adults. Things were different for kids, and they were especially different for kids in places like Kansas. There were still groundings-for-life, trips to shrinks, cult deprogrammers, and Christian re-education camps, not to mention a surprising number of beatings and, in some ways the worst of it all, simple rejection. Teenagers kicked out, locks changed, phone numbers too. Refusals to acknowledge the son or daughter when the rest of the family passed him or her on the street. Given the alternatives, I thought my dad and I handled it pretty well.

  That didn’t mean he liked talking about it.

  That didn’t mean I liked talking about it either.

  My dad looked down at the drinks in his hands, as if they might have the answer he was looking for (he often looked at drinks this way, so that’s not saying much). Finally he poured one drink into the other, set the empty glass on the table beside the front door (which table was really the seat of a chair, but whatever) and put his newly freed hand on Mrs. Miller’s shoulder.

  “Before I get too drunk to walk,” he said, “I’d like to show you my collection.”

  And, steering her rather more effectively than either Mrs. Miller or myself could steer a car, he led her into his stumps.

  Mrs. Miller’s hair fell down her back like a frothy blonde waterfall. As I watched, my dad’s hand disappeared beneath it, as if Mrs. Miller was a puppet he was taking over—as if, instead of talking to her, he was going to make her say the things that couldn’t come out of his own mouth. Of course, I hoped he would say something like, “I support my son no matter what his lifestyle is,” but I was afraid it was going to be more like “Maybe you and I can figure out how to fix him together,” so I went in the house instead. I kept my eye on them though. Watched through one window, then another, just as I’d watched my dad the day we first moved here. Living room, my bedroom, bathroom (I had to climb into the shower stall to keep them in my line of vision) then my dad’s room, where I kind of got distracted from what was going on outside by what was inside. The bed was unmade, the carpet hidden beneath a trampled layer of old clothes. Books and glasses in a roughly 1:3 ratio covered the dresser, and flies staggered drunkenly between the sticky bottoms of the latter.

  As I looked around the mess, I found myself wondering what Mrs. M. would think if she saw it. Take his pegboard. It covered one whole wall of the room. It was that nice dark-brown pegboard color, its soft, fuzzy-edged holes advancing left, right, diagonally from floor to ceiling and corner to corner. On this wall hung a tortoise-shell shoehorn with the address and phone number of

  ick’s

  arber

  hop

  printed in letters that had been worn away by who knows how many heels; a white rabbit’s foot keychain; an uninflated former hel
ium balloon, yellow and wrinkled like a scrotum, that said

  HAPPY

  BIRTHDAY

  IRENE!

  when it was blown up; a burgundy graduation tassel (not my dad’s); six keys (three brass, two silver, one translucent green plastic); a sand dollar with a hole in the center; the top half of a crow’s skull; a plastic American flag about the size of a Dairy Queen napkin; a Dairy Queen napkin; three feathers (one is definitely a peacock’s and one is probly a crow’s, and I think the last one’s from the ostrich farm on 69th); a policeman’s badge (#26703) from one of the Greenvilles in one of the states in this great nation of ours; a SIM card with

  BOB

  magic-markered onto it; a coupon for $5 off an oil change the next time my dad filled up* at the Kwik Shop (the * indicating that the fill-up had to be with Premium Unleaded); the scissors my dad had used to cut the coupon out of the PennySaver; the PennySaver; a long reddish-brown chili pepper; a Polaroid so sun-bleached that all you could see was a bluish-black circle that could’ve been an eye, or an oil slick, or the opening at the end of a gun; and then, all the way down on the floor, so that you had to lie down in the narrow space between the bed and the wall to read it, seven fortune-cookie fortunes that had been stacked on top of each other so that they read:

  He who throws dirt is always losing ground.

  Build your house on solid rock, not shifting sand.

  Judge not according to appearances.

  Failure is the mother of success.

  Your mother has the answers you need.

  The truth is slippery, but lies are sticky.

  THAT WASN’T CHICKEN!

  This pegboard had always seemed like a pretty accurate diagram of my dad’s life. Kind of random, kind of boring, kind of crazy. But random and boring and crazy in a very specific kind of way, and so describing exactly how limited and repetitive his life was. But what would it look like to someone else? Would it look like he couldn’t tell the difference between junk and things worth holding on to? Or would it look like nothing at all? Like my dad wasn’t really a person anymore? Wasn’t capable of making his presence felt in the real world, but could only scavenge from it, let the world know how he felt through tattered, second-rate symbols and the occasional drunken outburst? And why was I thinking about all of this now, when all I’d ever thought about was getting cash out of him, or the car? Why all the sudden did I want him to be, I dunno, happy?

  The next thing I heard was the sound of the front door opening. There was one of those giggles followed by one of those expressions (“Don’t I just know it!”) that made me wonder what my dad had just said. By the time I got to the living room Mrs. Miller had sat down in the chair beside the front door. There was a lopsided but still sort of triumphant grin on her face, and at first I thought it was related to the leafy garland my dad had wrapped around her forehead (not itch ivy, phew) but then I realized it was just her body that was lopsided, the left side being slightly higher than the right. My dad stood half beside, half behind her chair, looking at the top of her head so intently that I wondered if maybe he was checking for ticks.

  “You’re sitting on a glass,” I said to Mrs. Miller.

  For a moment Mrs. Miller looked like she was trying to figure out what I meant, like maybe “sitting on a glass” was some new teenage slang she hadn’t heard, possibly a dis. Then, realizing I was speaking literally, she reached her left hand under her left thigh and came up with the glass my dad had set there when he first opened the door.

  “Why, so I am.” She looked around for something to set it on, but basically all there was was the loveseat and the floor. After a moment she handed it to my dad. It seemed to me we’d gone full circle, save that now the two glasses in my dad’s hands were empty instead of full, and we were all trapped inside the way too cramped confines of our living room.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure I’m not drunk enough for what’s about to happen. Excuse me, Janet, while I freshen up our drinks.”

  I’m not really sure why my dad said “Excuse me,” since the bottle was on the dining room table, which is also the kitchen counter, which is also the end table for the loveseat, which was all of five feet away from where he was standing, but Mrs. Miller waited until he was symbolically out of the room before she said, “So. Sprout. You really want to write about being gay?”

  Her voice had calmed down, but it wasn’t the calmness of alcohol, which usually made her confused. She’d worked something out while she walked around with my dad. She’d come up with—cue scary organ music—A Plan.

  “Why don’t you get him to write about all the time he spends in the woods?” my dad suggested from the kitchen, which is to say, from the other side of the room, which is to say, from about five feet away. “Or, you know, that hair.”

  “It’s not really a good story,” Mrs. Miller said without taking her garland-shaded eyes from me. “Sprout wants to write about something more . . . interesting, doesn’t he?”

  It’s one thing to talk about something with your writing coach when you’re alone in a car and you don’t have to look her in the eye because you’re driving. It’s another to talk about it when she’s sitting in your living room and your dad’s five feet away pouring her a Long Island Iced Tea.

  “C’mon,” my dad said, walking over to the chair with the drinks. “Four years, the same color. One whole quarter of his life. You gotta admit, that’s pretty interesting.”

  Mrs. Miller touched one of the leaves in her own hair, as if she could feel the green. “At first, when I saw the vines on the house, I thought he was trying to express a connection with you. But now I think it’s just his way of indicating that he feels different on the inside. But, since he doesn’t have any other way of expressing it, he has to find a way to let the world know what’s going on. It would be different if he’d actually done something. But you haven’t yet—or have you, Sprout?”

  If you could take that squirmy feeling you get when you have to pee at a packed movie theater, but you’re sitting in the middle of a row and plus on top of that the pseudo–teenaged lovers on screen are just about to either do it or else get done by the knife- or axe- or flamethrower-wielding bad guy, and then multiply that feeling times, I don’t know, a supernova, then you’ll just sort of be at the lower edge of the please-God-let-me-melt-into-the-ground panic this conversation was giving me. I couldn’t even nod this time, let alone speak. Mrs. M. took my motionlessness as a yes, rather than assuming I’d been turned into a statue, which is what I was thinking had maybe happened. She took the drink my dad gave her, then plucked one of the leaves from her garland and put it stem first in the glass like a garnish.

  “So, what?” my dad said. “You’re saying that when he starts getting cornholed he’ll stop dying his hair?”

  “You don’t know,” Mrs. Miller said in the lightest, most reasonable voice you can imagine. “He could be the one doing the cornholing.”

  I was starting to wonder if maybe it was true. Maybe homosexuality really was a sin, and these weren’t my dad and my writing coach, but a pair of demons masquerading as them, and just getting started on a torture that was going to last for the rest of eternity.

  My dad shook his head. “I thought the young ones were always the ones who, you know—”

  “I think the term is ‘passive,’ Bob. Or ‘receptive.’ ”

  Great. Before she couldn’t say the word “gay.” Now that my dad was around, she knew all the vocabulary. Although I bet none of these definitions was in my dictionary.

  “And anyway,” she continued, “what if there are two young guys? Someone has to be, how do they put it, Sprout? The top? And someone has to be—”

  “I HAD SEX WITH IAN ABERNATHY!”

  My dad’s drink slipped out of his fingers and fell to the floor. Short fall; shag carpet; the glass already drained; nothing broken or spilled: i.e., as a reaction, it was pretty superfluous. I, by contrast, took the two steps to the square of linoleum that marked the kitchen, took
the coffee cup I’d filched from Mrs. Miller’s cabinet out of my pocket, and smashed it to the floor.

  Mrs. Miller looked at the shards for a moment, then brought her own glass to her lips, sipped, and returned it to her lap.

  “I’m guessing the coffee cup was supposed to be a distraction.”

  “Did it work?” I said hopefully. And then: “Um, yeah,” I answered myself. “I didn’t think so.”

  There’ll be no dirty parts in this chapter, so don’t get your hopes (or anything else!) up

  It happened the first week of seventh grade.

  Oh, and then it happened again in eighth grade, sometime during track season.

  Then three times in ninth grade.

  In tenth grade . . . well, in tenth grade it became kind of a thing. Not a regular thing, but not really an irregular thing. Not after four years. By then we’d discovered the janitors’ closet on the first floor, between the cafeteria and the gym. The door had a lock on the inside, and Ian came up with the plan of smoking half a cigarette before we got started, so that even if we were discovered we could pretend we’d just gone there to smoke, and then of course afterwards we had all the supplies we needed to clean up any trace of what we’d done. We never did get caught, although one time Ian got busted for bringing cigarettes to school, and was given detention, which is pretty damn funny if you think about it.

  The cigarette should’ve been my first clue, I guess. That Ian was thinking about what we were doing, even when we weren’t doing it.

  . . .

  It seemed like he followed me everywhere that first week of seventh grade. Part of that had to do with the fact that our lockers were about six doors away from each other, and part of it had to do with the fact that he followed me everywhere that first week. Every time I turned around, there was Ian’s Yankees cap and Josh Hartnett smile.