I was driving down the highway in the opposite direction from home when I noticed something under my windshield wiper. The Chinese/ Japanese restaurant and the optician in the strip mall next door would often leave flyers on our cars, so it didn’t surprise me to find something there. But this looked like a piece of notebook paper. Not thinking, I accidentally engaged the wiper. It slid up the glass choppily, and nearly released the piece of paper. When I noticed that the paper had handwriting on it, I quickly shut off the wipers. Was it a personal note?
I pulled off to the side of the road into the gravel there. The page dangled off the edge of the windshield and flapped in the breeze made by a passing semi. I swung the door open, got out, and pulled the note from under the wiper. I smoothed the paper out on the hood of the car, which was pleasantly warm, and read it. In block letters, somebody had written FAGGET.
The feeling that came over me as I read the note does not have a name. My chest hurt when I inhaled. My throat got so tight that it could’ve been twisted into a knot. Weakness spread through my legs like scum across stagnant water and raced up into my head.
My thoughts crisscrossed over each another. I couldn’t think who could have written the note. At first I tried to force myself to believe that the writer didn’t have any proof of my desires. I knew the word faggot didn’t always mean a man with my problem. But I couldn’t help thinking that some evil person had decided to torment me about the exact thing that was already ripping my life and soul in two. Though I could hardly see through my moistening eyes, I read the note again. The word grew and grew until, at twenty feet high, it fell over on me.
This note had to be destroyed. I knew I had to get rid of it before I went home. I tried to memorize things about the handwriting, so that if I saw it again I would know the culprit. The block lettering didn’t look unusual, except for the capital A. I vowed to keep my eyes out for anyone who made A’s shaped like triangles.
I got back into the car and put the paper between me and the steering wheel. I ripped out the part with writing on it and crumpled up the rest. Carefully, I pulled tiny pieces away from the note and placed them on the seat next to me. I tore the tiniest pieces I could, with the smallest part of my fingernails. If I could have separated every atom of that sheet of paper from every other atom, I would have done it. I sat there for so long that a man with a goatee pulled his pickup truck off the highway and stuck his head out the window to ask if I needed help. At least I think that’s what he wanted.
“I’m fine, sir, thank you!” I yelled back. He waited a moment and then drove off.
In a few more minutes I had created a pile of shredded paper that a hamster could have called home. When I got done, I jumbled all the pieces together. The paper hadn’t mentioned me by name, but if anybody saw me throwing it out, I didn’t want there to even be a possibility that they could put it back together and get the idea that I was a homosexual. It didn’t matter to me whether they believed it or not. I wanted to make sure that the thought itself could never cross anyone’s mind at all, because I wasn’t a homosexual, I just had same-sex attractions, and I did guy stuff sometimes, but I could sort of perform with my wife sometimes now, so that was that. To make absolutely sure, I separated the pieces of paper into four piles. I stopped at four different city garbage cans along the side of the road. Checking to make sure nobody saw me, I threw a cottony lump into each of the four trash bins. Only then did I start to relax.
The note had been planted near my workplace, so I worried that somebody at work wanted to expose me and ruin my career. Hank, my coworker crush, never wrote with block letters, so that relieved me. A few of my other colleagues sometimes talked trash about fags, but I always agreed with whatever they said, and sometimes added my own comments. Eventually I decided that Chester must have lashed out at me for discovering his own activities. I didn’t think it through—my panic-stricken brain jumped right to the conclusion and stayed there. Why had he responded so hatefully? I wondered. To keep people from figuring him out?
Annie greeted me at the door with a white plastic device in her hand. “I bought a deionizer,” she announced. She had a habit of adding to my worries by going on shopping sprees for Cheryl. My anger from work was at its peak, and she made it worse by preventing me from getting inside.
“A what?”
“It was only $260.” Finally I made it around her, into the kitchen, and poured myself a glass of ice water. I tried to hide my fury.
“Do we really need that stupid thing?” I held my hand out and Annie placed it in my palm. To me it didn’t have $260 of weight.
“Stupid? Are you so cheap that you’d let your daughter get sick to save money? Don’t you love her more than that? Or did you drop her on purpose? Oh, I shouldn’t have said that.” Annie covered her mouth.
Suddenly the rage inside me came to the surface, and I broke the tumbler in my good hand—the one without the splint—against the kitchen counter. Glass, ice, and blood went everywhere. I opened a big gash in my palm.
Annie gasped. Grabbing my wrist and saying my name many times, she plucked out the big pieces and washed the wound, but I still needed a doctor.
In the hospital, Annie sat in the room while the doctor stitched my hand. As he pulled the thread through my flesh, she gently mentioned that I had slipped away from God’s word. She said she had noticed that I seemed like a zombie in church, like I was just going through the motions of loving Him. She encouraged me to turn to Christ again.
“He will not desert you,” she said. The doctor left the room for a moment to attend to another patient. The room hummed. The silence between me and Annie hurt almost as much as the cuts in my palm.
“Look at me, Annie,” I said, raising my hand. “He deserted me long ago. This isn’t stigmata. This here is my own foolishness.”
“But you’re saved, Gary.”
“No, I’m not. I tried so hard. But Christ won’t come into my heart the way He’s in yours.”
“But I was there with you.”
I chuckled hopelessly. “Oh, I walked up to the pulpit, all right. But in my heart, I felt nothing, Annie. I’ve tried hard all my life. I’ve done everything! Should I have prayed harder? Louder? Why, of everybody we know, am I the only one Christ won’t touch?” I came very close to telling Annie about my homosexual desires then, but instead I decided to leave that last statement alone, an unfinished bridge she would have to complete and cross by herself.
“This is called a crisis of faith, dear. But you’ll get through it and you’ll be stronger than ever in Christ. You need to talk to minister mike. I’ll call him for you myself. Would you like that?”
I didn’t say yes or no—I couldn’t imagine talking to him. How could I tell him what had happened? Annie took my silence for agreement. The doctor came back in, so the conversation had to end. Keeping my mangled hand raised for the doctor to continue his work, I crumbled into the crook of my elbow. I would have sobbed, but my sadness was too vast, too nameless for tears.
Annie arranged the meeting with Minister Mike. They scheduled it two weeks in advance, and as the date approached, I got real jittery. I tried to watch my car from the window of the building at all times, but my designated parking space was on the opposite side of the lot. I’d need to be in Hank’s cubicle to get the best possible view. I was in agony, obsessing over whether the note had been a random event or had been from somebody who wanted to blackmail me and ruin my life.
The next time I saw Chester at church, he turned his eyes away, even when we neared each other head-on. That was all I needed to prove my hunch. One time I said his name, because I had a conversation in my head that I wanted to have with him even though I was scared to, but he acted like nobody had said anything. Finally, one Sunday, Annie went to use the john right after services, and when I went outside to get the car, I discovered Chester standing on the church steps. He had his face turned up to the sun, drinking it in. He turned his eyes to me for a second and then turned away fast.
Nobody else stood near us.
“Chester,” I asked in a hush. “Why did you do a thing like that?”
To my surprise, he chuckled, with a hint of a superior atittude. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Same reason you did. Let’s not talk about it. Especially not here.” There was a long pause, and he took a step down and away from me.
“Wait. What do you think I mean?”
“You know. That.”
“Oh,” I said, scared out of my wits. “I meant the—the other thing.” I couldn’t tell him what he’d done, because he’d just deny it. See, I had to get it out of him that he knew what I meant in order to prove he’d done it.
“Other thing?”
“With the car. On my car.”
He turned his neck but not his body and screwed up his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But Daddy’s almost done in there,” he said flatly.
At that point, I started to feel a little crazy. Like most new dads, I hadn’t been sleeping through the night much, and that made things worse. I thought maybe the note thing hadn’t happened, or I’d dreamed it. Maybe somebody put it on my car by mistake, or it said something other than what I thought. In my head, doubt and certainty took each other by the forearms and twirled around, laughing, until they got dizzy and fell down.
In the darkest moments of those next few days, when I thought most of confessing to Annie and bringing on a divorce—always for her sake, since nobody deserves a relationship with somebody who doesn’t want them sexually—I always changed my mind, thinking how bad I wanted Cheryl to have a father—a good father, nothing like mine.
When the day came for my meeting with Minister Mike, I insisted that Annie let me go by myself. She stared at me with doubt. Watching her with Cheryl, I thought of Mary nursing the baby Jesus and felt damned.
At the sight of Chester’s sports car in the church parking lot, I drove past the building and kept driving. I drove and drove. Driving pacified me. I flew up 1-95 to a truck stop outside Daytona beach. If I’d taken a right turn, I could have gone to the ocean. I pictured driving the car into the surf and drowning myself.
Minister Mike’s kind, sympathetic face appeared in my head. At that moment he must have been sitting at his desk, waiting, checking his watch. I invented an excuse to tell him later. Wild with lust, I parked my car and found the men’s room.
Cheryl turned two and a half the week that Mr. Price sent me to three snack-food conventions in a row. The Philadelphia Pork Rinds and Cracklings Expo was the first. Hank had a wedding in Asheville to attend, and Brian’s hotel room was on a higher floor, so I had plenty of time alone. Walking around town that night, I stumbled on the city’s gay area. It didn’t dawn on me that I’d found it until I saw two men walking a poodle. I put my good hand out for the dog to sniff, and he touched his wet nose to my knuckle and licked it hungrily with his big old slippery tongue. The eagerness of the dog’s licking embarrassed me, so I pulled my hand away and looked at the owners to apologize. They were two men with mustaches, and they were holding hands. I excused myself and hurried away.
I skulked around that part of Philadelphia timidly, peeking into card shops with rainbows pasted to the windows to see what the men looked like. They wore faded jeans, leather jackets, heavy boots, long hair, and goatees. There was something satanic, I thought, about their style choices. Some of them really tried to look like the Devil.
Eventually I found myself in front of a coffee shop, pretending to read the menu while I watched men—gay men—biting into croissants, sipping hot drinks, and chatting. I moved to leave the storefront and realized I had been standing by the glass door of a gay community center. In the hallway, a staircase led up to the office above the coffee shop.
I peeked up the staircase. It was almost 9 p.m. On a Thursday night, but they had their lights on. Before long, a person who could have been a man or a woman walked down the stairs and left, almost touching me. The door was unlocked.
For the next hour I circled the building. Even after all the guy stuff, I still believed that homosexuals were evil people who risked eternal hellfire by defying God’s law, as stated in Leviticus. Homosexuality was punishable by death. Take a step toward it and Christ, the Bible, and your family would condemn you. If one of the sex viruses didn’t kill you, loneliness would. But a community center didn’t seem as threatening as a bar. The phrase made me think of chat groups and bake sales, things I already found familiar and safe.
I’ll go in at 9, I said. But 9 turned into 9:05, 9:10, 9:15. At 9:55 I took a bunch of full-lunged breaths from across the street. All that stood between me and revealing the truth about myself was a light green door with a square window in it. I started across the street, but the horn blast from a truck blew me back. I squatted for a moment between two cars and caught my breath. Strangely, the adrenaline rush gave me the extra courage I needed to walk up that flight of steps. I checked up and down the street for oncoming traffic, crossed, and pulled the door open with exaggerated confidence.
I bounded up the steps and found myself in a lobby. A man—definitely a man—rushed around closing folding chairs, double-locking doors, and chucking paper cups into the trash. I wanted to talk, to unburden a life of suffering on him, but he didn’t seem interested. The man had a blond bob and a silk shirt with Eiffel Towers and French breads tumbling all over it that flowed over a pair of tight orange jeans. Taking tiny steps, he wiped crumbs off different folding tables. We were the only two people in the room. I wondered if something would have to happen between us sexually before he’d help me.
The man kicked a rubber doorstop to close an empty conference room. “Can I help you?” he asked. His voice was feminine and impatient. He pushed his hair back into place and stood with the other hand on his hip. Gay, I thought. Gay gay gay. I couldn’t stop thinking Gay. He’s gay. He knows about me! If I ever told anyone, I knew, I wanted people to be able to look at me and think other thoughts than that I was gay. The words He’s gay kept repeating in my head.
“I…” He’s gay, he’s gay, he’s gay. He knows. He knows.
“Listen, I don’t know if you’re gay or whatever, LGBT, Lesbigay—BLT for God’s sake—maybe you’re looking for a drop-in—heck, I don’t know if you’re about to firebomb the place—alls I know is I have to get out of here toot suite.” The man swung his head around in order to fix his bangs again. He dragged his vowels out when he spoke. He’s gay, I thought. Gay gay gay gay.
“I’m already fifteen minutes late for my physical therapy,” he sighed. I noticed he had a slight limp. “Drop-ins happen every second Thursday of the month in Room 216 … okay, thanks!” He held the door open. I didn’t even have time to grab a flyer. I bumbled out into the street, not knowing where else to go. I walked and walked and eventually found myself on a park bench, sitting by a little statue of a goat. Fog came up the river and muffled the city.
On the next night, June 11—my wedding anniversary—Hank showed up. His cousin had postponed the wedding, he told us, because she came to her senses. But a reservations glitch had left him without a hotel room. The tall ships were in town, so our hotel had no vacancies and neither did any others. I didn’t speak up about it, but Brian remembered that I didn’t have a roommate on account of my snoring and volunteered me to let Hank spend the night in my room. However, my room didn’t have double occupancy. I pretended not to think anything either way about that. But when he piled his stuff in, the exhilarating smell of his hair quickly filled the tiny room. At such close range, I knew I would give myself away. I wished I could give myself away. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his arms. They were as solid and strong as steel-belted radial tires.
“I’m putting the game on,” he announced, just after sliding his bags up to the edge of the bed. He settled down into the recliner. At the desk, I found a copy of the morning paper and skimmed the sports section so I could have a conversation with him. Talking to him meant I could look at him. Out of the office, Hank’s hair fell casually over
his forehead. His honest round eyes peeked out from behind his disobedient bangs. Even though he liked cheap beer and could talk your ear off about race car drivers and turkey shoots, he was soft-spoken and easygoing. He’d read books by philosophers and knew the names of artists and the parts of plants. It made me like him more to find out that he wore boxer shorts with pictures of trucks on them and the words FILL ’ER UP written around the waistband. “Don’t laugh,” he said with a bashful smile. “My wife got them for me.” I made a dumb comment about wives to stomp out any suspicion. Man, I could have looked at Hank until I died.
The game was baseball. As we chatted, I made sure that I looked at the TV screen sometimes instead of staring at the sprouts of hair growing out of Hank’s boyish chest. I wanted to stroke them, to move my hand across the gentle curves there, then down his side, to grasp his love handles. And then.
Annie called. I apologized to her again for the untimeliness of my trip and wished her a happy anniversary. To soothe my guilt, I guess, she said it couldn’t be helped. We talked about celebrating the following Monday. She asked me how my meeting with Minister Mike had gone. “Good,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask for details. “I feel sorta better.” Cheryl got on the phone and yelled that she loved me before she went to bed.
The orchids I sent had arrived, Annie told me. Annie said Cheryl couldn’t stop pressing their velvety petals between her fingers. I got up and moved to the chair near the window, staring at the downy fuzz on the nape of Hank’s neck as he shook his head, watching the Phillies trounce the Braves. I bet the fuzz felt like the orchid petals. Annie talked for a long time, longer than the Phillies played the braves. But I wasn’t paying very much attention. Once or twice the line went silent and she asked if I was there.
“I’m listening,” I told her, but by that time Hank was slipping into the bed we would share that night. He rolled over on his side, facing away from me, and turned out the light beside him.
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