God Says No

by James Hannaham

  “Please deposit fifty cents for the next five minutes,” said a mechanical voice. I popped two quarters into the slot. The phone rang. It continued to ring. I counted the rings. When they got up to fifteen I started to wonder if Miquel owned an answering machine. After twenty-five more, I gave up and put the phone down. The woman in the blue hat put her fist to her hip and eyed me, and I walked away down the plaza.

  After dialing Miquel’s number a few hours apart at various pay phones during the rest of the day, it dawned on me that he might have given me the wrong number on purpose. I kept on calling anyway.

  Calling so much almost made me lose my fear of dialing the number. At eight I told myself I would try one last time. Then twice. Then three times.

  On that last time, at ring number twelve, a voice answered. I nearly leapt away from the phone booth, I was so surprised. He answered! My tongue failed me. I felt like I’d bent over and ripped my pants.

  “Hello? Hello! I can hear you breathing! For God’s sake, what do you want? If you’re gonna send a fax, send a freaking fax already!”

  “Miquel?” I breathed.

  “Who the hell is this? How do you know my name?”

  “It’s August. You gave me your number the other night.”

  He adopted the tone of a detective who thinks you’re lying to him. “Oh yeah? Where did I meet you?”

  “At Nutz the other night?”

  “Really? Well, I haven’t been to Nutz since-since-”

  “Friday night! It’s Augie, remember?”

  “Augie? ... of course! You’re the tall short fat thin guy with the dark light hair and the brown blue hazel green eyes!”

  “Still funny,” I laughed.

  “Listen, I’m in the middle of something. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “I’d like to see you again.”

  “Again. That would be interesting.”

  “So, ‘Yes’?”

  Miquel hemmed and hawed on the line for a couple of moments. “I suppose it isn’t like I’m pouring boiling oil on all the suitors trying to break down my castle door with their battering rams ... Come to think of it, I could use a battering ram.” He muttered. Static fizzed on the line. “Can you hold on a moment?”

  The bang of the phone being put down on a hard surface filled my ear. Then I heard Miquel’s voice in the background, too far away to understand, but near enough to make it clear that an argument was taking place. His tone had changed.

  Two or three more minutes passed. A door slammed. Fortunately, I had enough coins to feed the phone. I listened to what sounded like someone walking around on creaky floorboards. Every so often I heard Miquel mutter something angry. All of a sudden he gasped, I think, and I heard his footsteps getting louder.

  “You’re still there?” he asked, as if only a strange person would have waited.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Who was that?”

  “No one. No one at all. A void where a real man ought to be. So are you free tonight?”

  I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I had been sure that he wouldn’t want to continue talking to me. But now-I wanted to think that I had done something to cause this change of heart, but I couldn’t imagine what could have impressed him so much, other than my waiting so patiently. Maybe that was another August quality, staying power.

  “I think I can fit you in.” As far as I knew, I had nowhere to be for the rest of my life.

  “Oh, I remember,” Miquel blurted out. “You’re BenJonson! You’re the fat black guy with the Ben Jonson book!”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll leave it home tonight.”

  We agreed to meet at a restaurant near Piedmont Park, in the neighborhood where Miquellived. In order to save money, I walked there. It was far, but not too far. The early evening held a bit of a chill for Atlanta in June. Light sweater weather. The overcast sky was a blue so light you could pretend it was sunny, except there were no shadows on the ground. I got to the restaurant before Miquel, so I read the menu for a while.

  Twenty minutes later, he arrived. I realized that I found him handsome, especially his eyes-always so active. He was shorter than me by about a head, but taller than Annie. He hadn’t shaved. A light brown beard sprouted in different spots on his face. The hairs made his pale cheeks look like sand dunes with reeds coming up here and there. His mouth was a little red crab apple, and his forehead had a musical staff of wavy lines across it. You could tell he had been unhappy a lot. But along with the grief, anyone could see his true sweet nature and honesty. When he approached to say hello and hug me, he stared up with an openness that made my body tingle.

  He apologized for being late, and we sat down to eat. In the booth, he squeezed in next to me instead of across. I didn’t know what to make of that. But once we got settled, he took my hand real naturally and pressed our sides and legs together. He rested his ear on my arm and shared the menu with me. “Try the chicken strips, Augie,” he said.

  I was uncomfortable with showing gayness in public. I asked him to sit up straight. So that he wouldn’t get upset, I asked him if he could hold my hand under the table so the waiter and the other customers wouldn’t see.

  “Everyone here is gay,” he informed me. I peered at them for a spell. I knew about gay bars, but the idea of a gay restaurant sounded ridiculous to me. There wasn’t any such thing as gay food. Nope, I wasn’t convinced. Most of them looked normal.

  “These folks don’t look gay,” I said. “I don’t want them getting ideas about me.”

  Miquel put both elbows on the table and examined his own menu. “You’re with me. They’ll just assume. It’s called guilt by association.” I took my hand away from his to unfold my napkin onto my lap.

  When we finished eating, Miquel invited me to his apartment. I refused. “We don’t have to do anything,” he pleaded. “We can just hold each other.” It wasn’t him I didn’t trust, though. I knew that if I went to his room, I’d touch him no matter how much I wanted to control myself.

  “Let’s please not,” I said. I thought about how August Valentine would ravish him in the evening, again in the morning, and move on to the next man. Maybe I’d do that with the next fellow. Instead we made plans to see each other the next day.

  As we started to date, I found that Miquel was a sensitive person. Sometimes he thought people were talking about him when they weren’t. On one date I said that I didn’t like people who told lies. When I had talked in negative terms about liars for a while, he shouted, “Why are you saying this? I’ve never lied to you!” Afterward it took a long time to convince him that I hadn’t been trying to send him a message by bad-mouthing liars.

  Of course, though I hadn’t told the whole truth about myself, I wouldn’t have considered myself a liar at the time. As far as my background, I avoided answering most of Miquel’s questions too specifically. If it came up, I said very little. When Christ had guided me to leave, the past had to disappear for a while. When Miquel asked where I grew up, I said, “Down South. Sorta near Florida.”

  Why did a fellow always have to dodge and feel bad so he could love another fellow? My vague responses seemed to satisfy Miquel, but I wished I could have opened up. Like a whole lot of things in life, my friend Ralph ]. says, love is half illusion and half real. But for the whole thing to work, you’ve got to make like it’s all real or it washes away, quick as a sugarcube in a hot shower.

  After our fifth date, Miquel dropped me three blocks from the Patriot Inn, as I always asked him to do at the end of our nights. I walked back to the hotel, took my shoes off, and lay back watching television. Klaus Rassmussen’s torso glistened on the screen, lighting up the dark room. I stuck my hand into my pants and stroked myself. About fifteen minutes had passed when I heard a feeble knock on the door. I sat up instantly, afraid that somebody had found me out. Was it the maid? Or Marilyn? I owed money on the hotel bill and she had kindly let me stay for a while, but now I had to avoid her.
r />   Without making a sound, I went over and peeked through the keyhole. It was Miquel. He had followed me. I growled like a grizzly-he’d invaded my privacy. For a moment or two I thought about keeping the door shut and letting him think he had come to the wrong place. But crime in the area had hit a record recently, and I didn’t want anything to happen to him. I slid the chain off the door and opened it part of the way.

  “Augie, what is this place?” Miquel asked, like I had moved to the

  moon.

  “A hotel.”

  “Hotel? More like a shooting gallery! And that woman downstairs!” he shrieked. “I have nothing against freaks-some of my best friends, blah blah blah-but putting them in service professions is creepy.; Que horror!”

  “Marilyn is a nice lady. Why did you have to follow me?”

  “I couldn’t help myself, Augie. You’re so mysterious. I just had to know. And once I found out, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep my trap shut about it, so I came to let you know that I know.” He tried to step in but I kept the door rigid.

  “You shouldn’t have spied on me. I asked you not to.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Can I come in?” He stepped forward more aggressively.

  “I can’t be with a spy.” I held the doorknob tighter.

  “Of course not,” he sighed. He didn’t take his eyes away from mine, and they started to glisten. We stood in silence. Miquel’s foot moved back behind the threshold. “But you shouldn’t have to live like this,” he said.

  “I’m okay here. Everybody’s friendly. It’s nice.”

  “Nice,” he repeated. His eyes were rounder than I remembered. His skin flushed and his lips glowed. Miquellooked right sexy to me when he was upset. I kissed him. But in private, it’s well nigh impossible to kiss somebody you like once and leave it at that. So I kissed him again, and then I had a hard time not kissing him more.

  When I did stop, Miquellooked up at me. He leaned over and I let him into the room to kiss me and I kissed him deeper, tasting the garlic bread that had come with his fettuccine Alfredo. He drove his tongue into my mouth like a corkscrew. We wound up on the bed, and pretty soon we were naked together for the first time.

  Miquel really enjoyed my big body, romping all over it like a kid on a muddy hill. His hands went everywhere, squeezing and twisting my flesh, holding my belly in his hands and stroking it, kissing and biting my soft chest. I was real surprised that anybody could like the way I looked. He even kissed my kneecaps and licked the soles of my feet. Then he put his face between my legs. He worked his thumb up into a place that I’d rather not say. His tongue went other places that I didn’t know you could go legally. Come to think of it, not much of what we did was legal in Georgia at the time.

  For a good while I lay there. I had never had sex lying down with a man. I thought it would be strange, and that I wouldn’t like it. It was, but I did. By and by, the hill started to move. For the first time in my life, the freedom door opened up inside me, and I found a fire blazing behind it. I matched all of Miquel’s licks and caresses with two of my own. He gripped me by the root, and I took his root in my hands and squeezed it with a kind of pulsating motion that I invented on the spot. We ground our faces together so hard that the next day the inside of my upper lip was raw. At the time, I remember comparing what I felt to the first time I ever had a real hot hot sauce, one I couldn’t handle. It was like the top of my skull flew off. I panted like a husky dog in August and worked my jaw open and shut. My eyes watered, and all the tender parts of my face burned. Miquel stared into my eyes real seriously, without any of his usual joking manner, and I stared back, and I swore I could see the whole universe in his pupils. When I reached my climax, I accidentally got Miquel in the eye. He said it stung, but he laughed, and I laughed, and we fell into each other’s arms, and somehow everything outside that room felt like nothing at all.

  Afterward, Miquel dozed off. I watched the lights and shadows play on the ceiling of my hotel room as cars went by down in the street. I felt lucky. I thought, I hope it stays like this. But then Annie came to mind. I don’t even wish to recall the bizarre idea I had about keeping them both in my life. In the breeze from the open window, Miquel’s two-tone hair fluttered, and his wet lips parted to snore. I had become August, and I would bring the lessons I’d learned from him back with me into heterosexuality one day.

  Miquel’s apartment sat on the top floor of a cream-colored house with green trimming. The floors and doorjambs had gone all lopsided with age. But it had a porch almost the size of a veranda. He’d filled the living room with movie posters, books of modern plays, knickknacks from the fifties, and an incredible collection of painted seashells. On the wall in the kitchen he had hung a big scallop shell that had been turned into a clock. He had salt and pepper shakers shaped like dice and hula dancers and a pair of monkeys wearing fezzes and a teapot shaped like a dragon. You poured the tea and it came out of the mouth.

  By the window in the living room there was a chair lined with orange fur. I liked to sit in it and stroke its arms while having a beer from the wet bar. On Miquel’s nightstand there was an ashtray in the shape of a girl in a bathtub and a ceramic lamp with a leopard-print shade that Miquel said came from 1955. The comforter on his bed had a whimsical cow pattern.

  What a thrilling place! Annie and I had never paid much attention to furnishings. We didn’t realize that we could change our home into a place of delight and happiness. We only went to Disney World.

  I got a special thrill from opening Miquel’s windows; the honeysuckle vine in the downstairs neighbor’s garden made the air taste sweet. He teased me about how much I liked the orange chair and refused to visit me at the Patriot. The place disgusted him and he also didn’t want to relive the memory of barging in on me. Instead, without bringing it up, he let it make sense for me to want to move in with him. The passion did the work. I would say, “Are you coming over?” and he would say, “I’m exhausted,” so I’d volunteer to go to his place, because going over meant guaranteed bootknocking. I’d rather have stayed with him than alone. So with very few possessions, and dead broke despite getting August an office temp job, I joked, “I could just throw everything into a box and get on the MARTA.” An interested look crossed his face, but he didn’t encourage or discourage me.

  Two months into our relationship, I put my things in a cardboard box and a thrift-store suit bag, left the Patriot Inn, and moved to his place.

  In spite of God’s plan, I’d fallen for him. I thought I’d only stay until the sand ran out of the same-sex hourglass, that I’d break up with him then. (Or rightly, August Valentine, who could handle emotional situations, would.) But maybe Miquel would get tired of me before that had to happen. From what I’d heard, male-male relationships didn’t last long. Anyhow, I didn’t think much on how it might complicate things.

  I borrowed some money from him to help payoff my hotel bill and had nothing in my bank account for a while. When I said “Good-bye, Marilyn,” to the desk clerk on my way to Miquel’s place, she didn’t look up from her paperwork. Because of her face problem, she always talked out of the left side of her mouth. “Oh, you’ll be back,” she croaked. “No one leaves here for long.” Marilyn raised her head, looked me in the eye, and cackled.

  Miquel and I had a dinner date that evening, and I showed up early, before he got home from work. He had given me his keys after a few dates, in case I wanted to use his apartment when he wasn’t around. I put my cardboard box of belongings on the kitchen table where he’d see it and sat in the fur chair watching television, waiting for him.

  When Miquel got home, he went to the fridge for a glass of water and saw the box. He came in and wrapped his arms around me from behind. He kissed me on the ear and rested the cold sweating glass on my chest. I flinched but I didn’t mind. “Oh, Pookie,” he cooed. My body stiffened. Annie’s pet name flooded me with regret. I forced a smile.

  For a while, our life together was like that moment when the waiter sets a
creamy dessert in front of you, long before you have to pay. When he wasn’t working on a show, Miquel would fix fancy suppers for us, grilled chicken and salmon. He would dust them with chili and sgueeze a wedge of lime over the plate to add flavor. Every salad had at least one plant I had never heard of, arugula or pine nuts or daikon. I got a lesson in botany every time I sat down to eat. August memorized all the names.

  On warm weekends we would drive to Tybee Island and spend hours strolling down the flat silver beach. Miquel flew kites as a hobby, so he would bring a box kite or his rainbow bird and we’d stay out until the sun faded behind the marshlands.

  Savannah was too close to Charleston for comfort, though. My aunt Vietta lived there. Tybee was mostly white folks; I didn’t worry about running into her there. I’d switched my wardrobe to the kind of thing that lots of gay men wore in those days: acid-wash jeans, a black polo shirt, a black belt, and Doc Martens shoes. A leather jacket didn’t suit me, though. If it got cool out, I wore a denim one with a tan corduroy lining. Even with my disguise on, I’d sometimes think I spotted somebody from my past, usually a kid from high school or college. I would have to turn away without letting Miquel see.

  Sometimes, in my horniest moments, I thought maybe I shouldn’t go back after the year of free checking. Then I’d quickly remind myself that Christ Himself had personally made this strange bargain possible so that I could eventually live the normal life He wanted for me. My dog-eared Bible said that fornicators, adulterers, effeminates, abusers of themselves with mankind, thieves, coveters, drunkards, revilers, and extortioners would not inherit the kingdom of God. But I trusted that the Lord wiped the slate clean once you repented and gave up the behavior-what you’d done in the past wouldn’t count.

  When I saw my family again, I’d tell them the honest truth-that I had wrestled with my demons for a year and conquered them. Even so, I longed to get back in touch with my mother to tell her that I was alive and that I hadn’t deserted her. I didn’t like to think about how upset she must have been about my death. I had a quiet celebration of Cheryl’s birthday for myself, sticking three candles in a cupcake at a Denny’s in Decatur and blowing them out.