My closest friend freshman year was a woman named Joy. All the time I would have loved to spend with Russ I spent with her. She had curly blond hair and a wide smile, and she made herself available to anybody in need. I felt she could help me sort out my feelings. At Central I finally had a social life—I could never keep friends as a kid because I was “too friendly,” as one schoolmate told me—and I didn’t want to screw up.
On a kayaking trip into the Everglades, Joy and I shared a boat. She was a large person too, so we had an extra-large boat—it didn’t tip up out of the water at all. She rowed, and I sat behind her to keep the boat steady. We spent a couple of hours off on our own, rowing through the tall grasses, stopping to watch cranes take flight, looking out for gators and cottonmouths the whole time. The heat tired us out, and the natural setting put me in a peaceful frame of mind. I said to myself that I would tell her that day. She couldn’t turn around in the boat, so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye.
“Joy?” I finally said. “I have been experiencing some… un-Godly desires.” I was so nervous I just about fell out of the boat. It wobbled, and I tried to stabilize it by standing up, but that only made matters worse. I sat down and the water lapped up the side.
“Desire is not un-Godly, Gary,” Joy reassured me once we got set right again. “God intended for men to find women attractive.”
“But this is different—”
“Believe me, most boys have trouble controlling their lustful urges. That’s completely normal and natural, Gary.”
“This— but these are not—not for girls. The desires.” I’d said as much as I could, but I didn’t feel better. My hands shook. I’d come over pretty queasy and dizzy.
“Oh,” she said, puzzled. She plunked an oar into the water beside us and pulled it forward. The boat made a sharp right turn. “Then what are they for?”
The splash of the oars in the lake sounded as loud as a dam overspilling to me. Then Joy let out a little gasp, almost as soft as a regular breath, and let her oar drop before the next stroke. Russ appeared in my imagination—no pants on, as usual. No way could I say that this had anything to do with him.
“Have you acted on it?” she asked, turning around.
I downplayed my powerful cravings. “Well, it’s not a lot,” I shrugged. Also, I wasn’t sure what counted as acting on it. Truth was, eugene Mccaffrey, a kid I tutored in junior high, had kept daring me to play with him, and I did it once, but maybe not just because I wanted to—because of the dare, too. I’d stand by his bedroom door, upstairs from his parents’ burger-and-fish joint, Gizzy’s. The heavy smell of fried food would drift up from the shop. I was always fixing to run and never quite getting around to it. Euge would unzip his jeans and lower them down his chunky thighs to his sneakers. Then he’d peel off his drawers and sit down, his belly and his legs turning his crotch into a cave with a dirty blond brush sticking out of it. He’d spread his legs and massage his male part, bright white compared to the tan and red skin everywhere else. He’d touch himself for a while and then spit into his hand. I’d whisper that he should stop, that his daddy would come upstairs, and he’d only laugh.
“Touch it,” he’d say, or “Put your mouth on it.”
“I don’t want to get my clothes dirty,” I’d tell him. “My daddy doesn’t like me coming home all dirty.” Daddy often beat me and my brother, Joe, for the least thing wrong, like an unmade bed or a dish with a gravy stain. He didn’t just hit us with a switch—sometimes he did it with a dustpan, a broomstick, or his bony black fist.
Euge would laugh out loud, his mouth wide open. “You’re funny, Gary,” he’d say. “You ain’t like none of the other colored boys I know.”
I didn’t dare ask what the other colored boys were like. I didn’t like that there were other colored boys, and I didn’t like him thinking I was different from them.
The fourth time, he didn’t laugh. He’d just taken his pants down and his thing poked out from his round body like the wick on a short candle. Euge glared at me. “You can’t come over no more. I’m telling your daddy that you ain’t a real tutor.” He said snotty things like that all the time, but he meant it for once. Shaking, I shut the lights so Jesus wouldn’t see, and groped around in the dark for that wick. My nervous fingers found his big stomach, tickled their way down, and grabbed on tight. I milked his thing like a cow udder for a couple of minutes, until he groaned like somebody putting down a sack of lime. Once he got done, I kept my dirty hand still. I wished I could have unscrewed it and left it there. Euge found his shirt and wiped my fingers, and I ran out of the darkness into the bathroom and scrubbed both hands real hard with Lava soap.
Thinking about that scared the stuffing out of me freshman year. So I didn’t.
“Don’t you have any feelings for women?” Joy asked. I could hear a little disgust under her question, same as when kids at school would ask, “Y’all don’t got a TV at home?”
“Yes!” I blurted out. “Sort of. But something might be a little wrong.”
She tossed her hair and picked up the oars again. “Have you prayed?”
My nervous laugh burst out. “Have I ever.”
“Nothing?”
“Nope. Not yet. I did, and then Jesus stopped talking to me.”
“Jesus would never stop talking to you, Gary.”
I laughed, kind of bitterly. Joy took a deep breath and let it out. A breeze skidded across the water right then, like her sigh had done it. “You know, I had kind of hoped that we…”
A strange kind of happy sadness welled up in my chest. What a relief to tell somebody about my problem. And what a surprise for her to say that she liked me like that. Joy, a pretty white woman, who could have easily had a white man. But it was just awful that my confession had to disappoint my friend. I thought of saying that this didn’t rule her out, but that didn’t seem like a good idea.
“Will you help me?” I asked.
“I’ve heard about people who have overcome this.”
Joy thought that an exorcism might work. In the library, she looked up a special prayer to bind the demon and cast it out. We met in the chapel in mid-afternoon when nobody was there. Joy had copied the prayer down in her notebook. I read it first. It was addressed to a demon of homosexuality, but I asked her not to say “homosexuality” in case somebody heard. She began, and right before the end, she touched her palm to my forehead. “I cast you out!” she cried, ferociously but quietly. “Leave this man, demon of—!” Her mouth snapped shut and she hummed the seven evil syllables.
“Did you feel anything?” she asked, wiping my sweat on her long polka-dot dress.
“Yeah,” I said. But I had trouble saying what, aside from hot and worried.
To test whether the exorcism had worked, I went back to my dorm immediately. I wanted to see Russ, because if it took, he and I could be pals for real.
It was a muggy night, and he never liked the AC, so Russ was sitting at his desk wearing boxer shorts. A glass of water and a pitcher sat next to his books, sweating. He coughed up a flat hello. His tight chest had a shadow under it, a dark bird flying above his navel. With my eyes, I couldn’t help tracing the silky trail of hair in the middle of his stomach down to his waistband. Far as I know, there’s no name for the emotion that’s both intense sexual attraction and a whole lot of shame. But the first time I tried to ride a bike, I did it without anybody helping me for about fifty yards. I said “Hot dog, I can ride a bike!” Then I crashed into a car and fell and split my lip so bad I needed four stitches. Looking at Russ right then felt like reliving that whole experience.
Eight days later Joy and I tried exorcism again, in a more hidden room where she could say “homosexuality,” but I still didn’t change. I asked if she would marry me anyhow.
“I need to get married,” I insisted. “That’s the only thing that’ll stop it.” she said no.
“You need a real minister to solve your problem, Gary,” she said one morning in the chapel. Joy sound
ed tired of me now. “I’m only a freshman.” Behind her, next to a stained-glass window, I stared at a sculpture of Christ suffering on the cross. His eyes rolled up into His head, eternally going through the unbearable moment when He thought God had forsaken Him. The pain pierced my heart because the statue was very accurate—the crucifixion nails even went through Jesus’ wrists. If the Romans had nailed through His palms, I’d read, the nails would’ve sliced through the tendons and He’d have fallen off.
Later I heard from other people that Joy was tired of what she called my “lack of initiative.” When I saw her, I could tell she didn’t want to hang around, but we knew we’d have to see each other on camping trips, so we had to be polite.
By winter break I got sadder and more frustrated. Joy started avoiding me. I steered clear of my other friends and skipped lots of classes. Whole afternoons I spent hunched over in the TV room, watching inspirational shows that did me no good—they just reminded me of how far I had to go before I could be holy. I had the same problem with my weight. When I figured how much I’d have to do to get slim, I felt like somebody standing at the bottom of Mount everest with a trowel and a shoestring. My grades plummeted.
Almost every night on the phone Mama asked if I’d met any nice young ladies. The pressure went so high that I told her about Sareena, a Phys Ed major I’d only spoken with once. She had big bones, dark skin, and a quiet way about her—exactly the type of girl my mother thought I ought to marry. I let mama think that we’d held hands in church and played putt-putt golf on a date. “She’s a bougie gal from Atlanta,” I said. Sophisticated folks impressed Mama. “Her father owns a Christian record label, Clarion Records.” I made up that company, and lots of other facts, and pretty soon Sareena and I had a history so complicated I had to write it down to keep it straight. Then that February my folks invited her down for a weekend. I had to find out where she stayed and eventually caught her at home. She was a senior. As I told her about our history and my parents, she raised one eyebrow and folded her arms.
“You could have just asked me out,” she said. She was quiet but frank. “I’d have said no, but you’d have saved yourself a whole lot of effort.” Supposedly she had a boyfriend back home in Alabama, but it sounded like they might break up soon.
“Will you please come meet my folks?” I begged. “And there’s something else. I’d like to show them pictures. So if you don’t mind, can we make some pictures of us on dates?”
“What’s in it for me?” Sareena wanted to know.
Once I agreed to pay her, Sareena turned out to be a great sport. She memorized our history and came up with her own ideas as well. We took pictures on the beach, at putt-putt golf, and by the fountain in the Osceola Square Mall. Mama still has one of those pictures on her fridge. At supper sareena charmed my folks with her manners, and acted like an honest-toGod girlfriend. So when they went to bed, and we sat out on the veranda drinking sweet tea and listening to the locusts and the highway, I got my courage up, figuring our fake thing could turn true pretty handily and maybe even change me.
“So,” I said, smirking so I could backtrack if I needed to, “do you want to make it official?” Sareena burst out laughing, and I was hurt. “Why’s that a funny idea?”
“Because you’re a fruitcake, Gary.” She raised that eyebrow again, and it chilled me like the Evil Eye. “You need the Lord’s guidance. I’ve looked at you looking at what you look at.” She scratched a mosquito bite until a raw red dot opened on her biceps.
“A nice girl don’t make an accusation like that on a man in his own home,” I growled. “Especially just from looking at looking.”
The next weekend, around Valentine’s Day, I told Mama we broke up because she’d cheated on me. We only spoke again once (I slipped payments into her campus mailbox), but the aftermath of our fake relationship made me more uneasy, and curiously lovesick.
During this time of trouble, Annie, who I called superglue Girl in my mind, started talking to me more on the serving line. I knew that she thought I got more helpings because I wanted to flirt, but I was only dumping food on top of my problems. I did like her, though. She wore a hairnet, a sea-green smock, and glasses, but underneath you could see diamonds in her eyes. Her easygoing manner and the way her pudgy face glowed reminded me of the good parts about Euge. She had a special way of clinking the spoon against the plate when she served the mashed potatoes—three clinks, the second two closer together. Then she’d smile.
Before Joy, I had never considered that a woman might find me attractive. Mama had let me go on Christian group dates in high school, but that was different. After Joy, it became sort of a fun game for me to figure out if a girl liked me.
So when I saw Annie in the library one day, out of her dining-hall uniform, I complimented her flowery dress. Then I ran into her walking across campus late one morning and we decided to have lunch together. She wanted to major in Business, and I had started in Communications. We talked about how well the program at Central combined the principles of business and communications with Biblical laws. The conversation didn’t make much sense—it was the kind of dumb chitchat you make when you’re desperate to keep somebody near you. At the end of it, I asked for her phone number—in case she wanted to go to study hall together. It didn’t make me too nervous to ask; I knew she’d say yes. A month after my breakup with Sareena, Annie agreed to come on my next camping trip, to Lake Kissimmee. I began to feel like something of a ladies’ man.
By the time we went to the lake, Annie and I had developed a special bond. During the drive out there, we sat in the backseat, real close, and said silly private things to one another that Joy and her new boyfriend Steve couldn’t hear. The next morning we left Joy and Steve sleeping in their separate tents at the camp and went on an early hike.
Annie came from a place called Samoa, in the South Pacific. I had never heard of it, but I supposed it couldn’t be too different from Hawaii. I knew a little about Hawaii because one of the preachers on WGWT broadcast from there. It surprised me to hear that Samoa was part of the United States. Right when I opened my mouth to compare it to Hawaii, she told me she didn’t like for people to compare it to Hawaii. Samoans had a bunch of interesting folktales about brothers who turned into mountains and volcanoes with spirits in them. They sounded kind of satanic to me, but nobody took it serious anymore, Annie said, and most Samoans were good Christians.
Joy and I got a moment together on the second night of camping, when Annie and Steve decided to go fishing. The day was winding down. A hot breeze hung on from the sweltering afternoon. Hot as a goat’s butt in a pepper patch, as Euge used to say. In a clearing, Joy and I gathered sticks to make a fire. We tried to find oak because that and hickory made the best-smelling smoke, and it would seep into the food.
We stooped down like slaves. Joy wasn’t used to bending over and gathering things, so I teased her about how her people couldn’t handle hard labor. A plane left a long, beautiful streak of smoke across the sky, and our conversation got quiet. Crickets chittered and frogs croaked. Twigs broke under our feet.
“Have you told Annie yet? About yourself?” Joy asked.
“No,” I admitted. I was enjoying myself so much with Annie. The way I figured it, saying something might destroy the whole relationship—the way it was doing with Joy, really. “I suppose I will when the time comes.”
“As I become more intimate with Annie,” Joy warned me, “this knowledge puts me in an awkward position. The longer you wait, the more I feel it is my obligation to let her know.” Joy had never spoken to me so stiffly, like a second-grade teacher. She talked real proper for a Texan because she came from money. But she’d never seemed quite as nasty to me as right then. In that moment, I felt good about our friendship falling apart.
Angry blood rushed into my face. “But Joy, it isn’t really your business.”
“If I didn’t know, I feel I could agree with you, Gary. But by helping conceal your problem, I’m helping you deceive
Annie. It isn’t Christ-like.”
“But Joy—” I said. Annie and Steve’s rowboat came into view. We wouldn’t be able to keep the conversation going. In a rush, I agreed to tell Annie as soon as the trip ended.
But I didn’t. After Lake kissimmee, Annie and I spent so much time together that I never had to officially ask her out. Everybody assumed that we were dating, though we looked a comical, mismatched pair. We dressed in thrift-store clothes. She wore nerdy-looking glasses and I sported a pair of generic sneakers with a hole in the toe. She stood 4’11” and I was 6’1”. We were both overweight, but Annie carried her extra pounds like my mother. Her cheeks glowed like full birthday balloons. If I kept her smiling, the same way I did with Mama, I could make her life perfect.
Once or twice I thought about telling Annie, and I wondered if I was giving in to Joy, who thought that keeping a secret was the same as lying. It didn’t feel that way to me. I had to share my trouble with Annie in my own time, not because Joy wanted me to hurry up. My attraction to Annie would make me normal soon—I could feel it. Why bring up the past?
On our first trip to Disney World, I pulled Annie right to the teacups. She loved spending a day there almost as much as I did, so it hadn’t taken long for us to end up there on a date. On the ride, Annie made up for her short size with strength and stubbornness. She spun our teacup faster than I’d ever done by myself. When we got off, we stumbled in a zigzag and held each other up and laughed. We bought burgers and Cokes and sat in the picnic area. In the middle of the snack, she said, “I wish my whole life could be like this. Just fun. Only pleasure.”
I breathed in, tasting the warm air, full up with the smell of sugar and grease. Delicious. I tingled all over and smiled. “Me, too,” I said. She stared into my eyes and blinked and giggled and looked away. I gently stepped on her toe with the ball of my shoe.
God Says No Page 2