Destiny (Waiting for Forever)

by Mayfield, Jamie

  “You’re right, Dennis. If that’s what he did, it isn’t right,” he said in a calm, placating voice.

  “I didn’t, Father, I swear!” the other man said immediately. “I only took off my jacket. He’s out of his mind.” The priest looked at them both for a moment and then pulled Dennis out of line with him.

  “Come on, Denny, let’s get you some food and you can sit at our special table,” he said and led the man to the front of the line, grabbing a tray and filling it for the other man, who was crying. After loading the tray with spaghetti and bread and giving him a lot of salad with a small cup of dressing, he led the man over to a table away from the others, almost behind the tables set up with food. Only two chairs sat on either side of the table, and Dennis took the one facing out toward the room, almost as if he wanted his back to the wall. His olive-green army jacket stretched over his shoulders as he hunched forward and started to eat. Spaghetti sauce dribbled down his chin, and he sucked the noodles in like a child while his eyes darted around the room as if someone had him cornered there.

  “Start by giving them one each,” the priest told me as he took his place once again behind the trays of spaghetti and left me to hand out garlic bread slices. Another worker stood behind the giant trays of salad, and yet another one with drinks. I didn’t even think about arguing. Looking along the line of people waiting for their dinner, I knew if the priest wasn’t providing them with food, they might not be able to eat that night.

  It was humbling.

  Men and women filed through, some alone and some in small groups or families. Polite and quiet, they picked up trays from the head of the table and allowed us to fill them as they passed. Seeing children in the line shocked me. More than just the teenagers I might have expected, I saw elementary-school kids, even babies carried through the line. Each of the mothers who carried an infant also got an additional can at the station with the drinks. I hoped it was formula for their baby. I felt incredibly conflicted as I stood passing out bread. Seeing people come together to help one another comforted me; it made me think that maybe someone was helping Jamie wherever he got his dinner that night. The sheer number of people just at this shelter alone staggered me. What must it be like not to know where your next meal would be coming from, or how you were going to feed your children, or where you were going to sleep?

  After getting a promise from the priest that he would call if he saw Jamie again, and promising him that I would come back to help on Thanksgiving, I went home. The parade of faces from that line passed in front of my eyes when I went to bed that night, and sleep eluded me.

  NEARLY a week after I had visited the shelter where a desperate and frightened Jamie had stayed, I was sitting at the computer searching his name for the hundredth time when Leo walked by pushing a red dolly toward the stairs.

  “Do you need some help?” The house had become kind of a family to me, and I liked being a part of that. California was a chance for an entirely different life for me; all I had to do was try. Here, I wasn’t the foster kid freak or the fag. I was just Brian.

  “Yeah, I do, thanks,” he said.

  “Hey, pretty boy, what’s your name?” an unknown voice called out as we walked along the hallway on the first floor.

  “Shut up, Hunter, or I’ll put you to work!” Leo called, and then he smirked at me. Apparently, the guys in the house, whether they lived there or were just there for the… extracurricular activities, respected Leo.

  When we got out to the big white cargo van Leo said belonged to the center, I saw that boxes filled it almost completely.

  “Local donations to the center,” he explained. “They’re not heavy; it’s mostly clothes and blankets. You wouldn’t know it by the weather today, but it gets pretty cold at night when you’re sleeping on a park bench.” Looking at the boxes, I felt sadness fill me once again. One of those blankets could be destined for Jamie. I couldn’t stand the thought of him sleeping on the street.

  “Find anything on your friend?” Leo leaned up against the side of the van. It seemed the work had stopped, at least for the moment.

  “I found a shelter where he’d stayed the night, but he hasn’t been there in weeks.”

  “Kid, there are thousands of homeless living in San Diego, and almost half are eighteen or younger. A lot of them won’t go anywhere near a shelter except maybe to eat. They’re everywhere, but they’re invisible. People just walk past them, even the kids, and don’t give them a second thought. A lot of the teenagers turn to drugs and prostitution because they help them survive.”

  I started shaking my head. “No, Jamie wouldn’t—” I started, but he stopped me.

  “I’m not saying that he would, kid. I’m just trying to prepare you for what you might find, assuming you even find him at all. Riding in on your horse to try and find your lost friend is a big romantic gesture, but it doesn’t work that way in the real world. I just don’t want to see you lose yourself while trying to find your friend,” he said quietly and carried one of the boxes through the door and into the house.

  I considered what he said as we carried the boxes up the stairs and stacked them in the common room. Dropping everything and moving to California didn’t seem like some kind of romantic gesture to me; it was just what I had to do.

  After we carried the last two boxes upstairs, I walked back over to the computer. Leo followed.

  “Brian, I’m not telling you not to look for your friend. Obviously, you care about him very much. All I’m saying is that there is a very strong possibility that you’re not going to find him, especially if he doesn’t want to be found. I’m guessing he doesn’t even know that you’re here?” he asked, and I nodded. “Have you been anywhere besides the house, work, or a homeless shelter since you’ve been in California?” he asked quietly, and I just shook my head. While a real possibility existed that Jamie had no place to go, I couldn’t go out and party.

  He looked around to make sure we were alone in the common room. “Look, I’m going to tell you something that most of the other guys don’t know. I want you to listen carefully,” he said, a deep sadness suddenly filling his face as he sat down on the arm of the couch a few feet from me. “When I was your age, gay sex was still against the law in every state but one. Gay men lived in fear all of the time. But it was the late 1960s, and during that time, everyone seemed to be a revolutionary. I was arrested at a pro-gay rally just before my eighteenth birthday, and my parents were furious.” Leo closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his temples. “I ran away from home without any idea what the real world was actually like. At first, I stayed in New Jersey, trying to stay close to my family in case they changed their minds about me and wanted me to come home. My parents never did, but my younger sister and I talked frequently during that first year. The harsh northeastern winter drove me south and west until I eventually ended up in California. However, by then I had turned into an addict. Being on the streets, thinking that you’re wrong, knowing that your parents don’t want you, it does things to your head. The drugs helped me to forget those things for a while. At first it was just marijuana, but eventually I graduated to much harder drugs.” His eyes went blank for a moment.

  “My sister told me later that she felt responsible for me because she didn’t stand up for me against my parents when I left. Patty searched for me for years, ruining two marriages in the process. It took such a horrible toll on her life. Eventually she found me and helped to get me into rehab.” A long, quiet sigh rushed out of him, and he continued, his words coming faster. “She didn’t live long enough to see me finish. She died of breast cancer a month after they admitted me. Don’t waste your life, Brian, not like Patty did. Trust me, Jamie will hate himself for it.”

  I got the impression that he meant himself just as much as he meant Jamie.

  ARRIVING at the shelter early Thanksgiving morning, I looked around to see if I could do anything else to help besides pass out bread. The building that housed the shelter seemed pretty small, and I
assumed someone delivered the meals. When I walked through the large open area to the back, a large truck confirmed my guess. A couple of boys, maybe a little younger than me, pulled the trays from the truck and stacked them onto rolling carts. Another pair of boys rolled the carts in through the open door.

  “Can I help?” I asked, coming up to one of the boys unloading the truck. He turned and set another tray on the cart before looking up at me and smiling.

  “Nah, we’ve got this covered. You can find Father Matt and see if they need help setting up the table and chairs,” he said, pulling the next tray off the truck. I thanked him and went back inside to look for the old priest. I hadn’t gotten his name the month before when I had come looking for Jamie. I looked around the building, checking different rooms until I finally found him folding blankets and stacking them on a series of shelves.

  “Good afternoon, Father,” I said, peeking in through the door. “Can I help?”

  “You sure can, Brian,” he said, and his memory impressed me. We’d only met once, and I was sure since then he’d probably met a hundred more people in his line of work. Still, he remembered my name, just as he had remembered Jamie’s name and our shared accent. “Why don’t you start shaking out those blankets and pile them up for me here so I can fold them?”

  I grabbed one of the blankets off the old fold-up cot and shook it out. A small metal car clattered to the floor, and I picked it up.

  “They go in that box of toys right over there,” the priest said, pointing the blanket he’d just folded toward a box in the corner. I threw the little car into the box and set the blanket on an empty cot in front of Father Matt.

  “How are things?” he asked me as he picked up the blanket from the old cot and began to fold it. The room had the same faded beige cinderblock walls as the rest of the shelter, but it felt small and confining in contrast to the big open room. Shelves lined three of the walls, and there were blankets, sheets, and pillows. A few baby baskets sat on one of the high shelves, a reminder about the diverse nature of the shelter’s inhabitants.

  “Okay,” I said, shrugging. “I mean, I have a roof over my head, a job, and food, so I consider myself lucky.”

  “Food and shelter are important, but they aren’t the only factors in life.” Picking up another blanket, the priest continued to fold.

  “I’m not going to find him,” I said quietly and looked away.

  “That’s a very real possibility,” he said, his voice serious. “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  “It’s been a little over fifteen months.” I felt heavy, and the weight of my talk with Leo, of the decision that I knew I would have to make, felt like someone sitting on my shoulders.

  “What is the relationship with your parents like?” he asked, suddenly changing the subject. I looked over at him, and he was watching me.

  “I have a great relationship with my parents,” I said. “Why?”

  “You seem to have sacrificed a great deal in order to find your friend.” His eyes were kind and almost sad as he spoke.

  “I don’t really look at it that way. If I’d taken the scholarship and gone to college, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. He was more important.”

  “And now?” he asked.

  I sighed, and even to me the sound came out defeated. “And now I’m thinking about what my friends have been telling me, how I can’t keep my life on hold forever waiting for something that will probably never happen,” I said and threw the blanket I’d just shaken out toward the cot harder than I’d intended, watching as it sailed right over it and onto the priest’s feet. Looking up a little sheepishly, I told him I was sorry.

  “What do you think Jamie would tell you?” he asked quietly, picking up the blanket and folding it.

  “He would tell me to forget him and get on with my life. In fact, he did,” I said and told him about the letter, about how Jamie had told me that very thing.

  “It must have hurt to hear that,” he said after a minute. “I’m sure you would have much rather heard that he wanted you to find him, or that he was coming back to find you. Instead….”

  “Instead, he put my happiness before his own,” I finished. “The problem with that, though, Father, is that he was part of that happiness.”

  “And you feel guilty being happy without him?”

  I thought about that. It did make me feel guilty. Jamie had always been there for me, loving me and supporting me. Two years ago, he had been everything to me. But since then I’d found friends. I’d found a life, and that life didn’t really have Jamie in it. I also felt guilty because while I had a life and friends, Jamie was alone, probably without a roof over his head. Going on with my life felt like abandoning him.

  “Yeah, I do,” I admitted.

  “If you found out that Jamie had gotten a job and had a place to live, that he was safe, but he’d moved on with someone else—would you want him to feel guilty?” he asked, and I knew that it was a trick question, but it made me think. I’d be hurt and angry if Jamie found a relationship with someone else when I had given up everything, but then he’d never asked me to give up anything. I’d made my choices, so I guess I couldn’t be upset with him for making choices of his own.

  “I don’t think I would want Jamie to feel guilty about moving on with his life.”

  “Then you shouldn’t feel guilty either. You did not cause what happened to him.” He put the last blanket up on the shelf. “Come on, kid, let’s go have dinner with our guests.” Father Matt put an arm around me and pulled me from the room.

  Later that night I told the guys that I was tired from helping out at the shelter and went up to bed. Once I lay under the blanket with the lights off, my mind settled on Jamie. I had been searching San Diego for months and hadn’t come up with a clue as to where he might be. I’d been to every shelter I could find, sometimes hitting three or four a week, my hope fading a bit more with each depressing place I saw. That day, each of the shelters like Father Matt’s would have had a Thanksgiving dinner for people with no other options. Had Jamie been one of the thousands eating a cafeteria-style dinner, not for the joy of the holiday, but just to survive?

  Guilt bubbled like acid in my stomach. If I hadn’t begged Jamie for that night together, his parents wouldn’t have moved, they wouldn’t have forced him into that place, and he would be safe. Deep down, I knew I would never forgive myself. However, for the first time in nearly a year and a half, I considered the possibility that I would have to let Jamie go.

  The sobs went on for what felt like hours, stopping only when I fell into an exhausted sleep, dreaming about our tree house.

  Eight

  AS NOVEMBER turned to December, Leo and Emilio brought Christmas decorations down from the storage side of the fourth floor, and we all helped to put them up around the house. At first, I really enjoyed hanging the little cardboard decorations and garlands throughout the first two floors. We even swapped out the bowl that held free condoms with a bowl shaped like Santa’s head. When we started to assemble the tree in the common room on the second floor, I couldn’t help but think about how Carolyn and I used to do that every year. We didn’t have very many presents under the tree, but she went all-out every year cooking and decorating. I didn’t understand it then, but those were her ways of making sure Richard and I knew we were loved. Never again would I take her attention or her love for granted.

  “I hate Christmas,” Mike said quietly as we strung the lights.

  When I was growing up, I didn’t really have an opinion about Christmas. It reminded me to be thankful for what I had with Richard and Carolyn because I could have spent the day in the Hudson House, eating a Christmas dinner I was sure would rival any homeless shelter’s. The problem came when I went back to school after Christmas break and all the kids around me bragged about all the cool stuff they’d gotten. I wanted to tell them there was no Santa Claus and everything could be taken away from them at any time, but I never did.

/>   I didn’t ask Mike why he hated Christmas. After living with the guys for a while, I knew some of them had horror stories about how they’d ended up at the boardinghouse. Mike seemed to know Leo really well, so I got the impression he had been there a very long time, and on his own even longer. Instead, I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist. He stiffened in surprise but relaxed back into me, putting his hands on top of mine. Mike and I were friends, and he looked like he needed a hug.

  “Thanks, baby boy,” he said in almost a whisper and turned his head to kiss me on the cheek. I felt my face flame at his affection, and I pulled him a little closer.

  “You guys aren’t getting very far on those lights like that,” Leo said as he came into the room, and I jumped back. Mike and Leo both laughed.

  “Calm down, kid,” Leo said and tousled my overgrown curls. “If that’s the worst thing I walk in on, I’ll be thankful.”

  “BRIAN!” Leo called as I crossed the common room on my way to the third-floor stairs. My damp shirt clung to me as sweat poured down my neck and back from working outside all day.

  I stopped in his office doorway. “Yes?”

  “You got a package, but I’m not sure I want to give it to you,” he teased, holding up a shipping box. The box wasn’t big, about a foot long by about two feet wide, but it made me insanely curious because I’d never gotten a package before.

  “Oh, it feels heavy. It’s probably expensive,” Leo taunted, and I tried to grab it, but he laughed and pulled it out of my reach.

  “You are the most amazing person, and you don’t look a day over twenty-five,” I said, smirking at him. He snorted and handed me the box.

  “You’re learning, kid. Here,” he said, handing me his pocketknife so I could cut the tape. A piece of paper lay on top inside of the open box, a handwritten note: Because we miss seeing our son—Merry Christmas! Love, Mom & Dad