After living with Miquel for six months, though, I started thinking the Lord’s plan was working. The wild nights of September had cooled down a lot by early February, and my attraction to him had fallen off. We hadn’t had relations since month three, and now, when I watched him take his clothes off for bed, I could only think of how funny his thing looked soft, like a cigarette butt sticking out of a pinch of tobacco, and how strange it was that my lust had ever paid it any mind. Sometimes I found myself attracted to other men, though, and I couldn’t make head or tail of it.
Of course I also felt bad about not finding Miquel sexy anymore. To make up for it, I agreed to help build sets for Loco Motion, the dance/ theater troupe he worked with, thinking it would mean we could spend more time together and that might fix things. Gary didn’t have any interest in the arts, but August felt that dance/theater troupes were more necessary than football teams. At first I didn’t understand what to do, but building sets for dancers isn’t astrophysics. The dancers need to use most of the room, so you keep it real simple.
The piece we worked on seemed decadent to Gary, full of randomness and godless themes. I suspected that Satan enjoyed seeing the disorder that groups like Loco Motion called dancing. Laurice, the director, had a lot of avant-garde ideas about dance. But to me, the dancers appeared to be in pain or gesturing for help. I couldn’t figure out the point of it. People threw their arms and legs around like in the crazy-house. Cheryl could have choreographed it. But Laurice had studied at famous places for dance in Europe that made people raise their eyebrows and say “Oh.” So had most of the dancers, including Miquel, who went to North Carolina School of the Arts. A dancer named Dakota Wong had been at Temple University, and another named] ane Rosedale had gone to Sarah Lawrence College, which was almost as fancy as where Laurice had gone. August had attended the University of Wyoming, I decided. That was far enough away from everything that nobody would know or check up on it. It turned out I never needed to tell anybody, though. August Valentine adored modern dance, and when he heard everybody call Laurice “the next Merce Cunningham” he picked up on that phrase and repeated it a hundred times before he’d ever seen a picture of the guy.
As Gary, I felt that Christ would have rather seen stories like the ones in the Bible: easy to follow and with a moral at the end. He would have paired the men with the women and had them move together gracefully. And I knew for sure the Lord didn’t want dancers to perform for such small audiences. On one night, only four people came to see Kafka Dances, and one of them left. Hiding your light under a bushel was a sin.
Miquel always got home exhausted. If I had to go to a rehearsal, I’d come home exhausted with him. Usually I would have to go to one of my new office temp jobs the next day, too, so we would just kiss goodnight and conk out.
The weekend after Kafka Dances closed, we were sitting up in bed Sunday morning. A woodpecker outside knocked against a tree in the backyard. I got up and stared at it to make it stop, and I thought maybe it understood, because it stopped. But then it started again, so I tried to block it out.
Back in bed, Miquel demanded to hear my opinion of the show, which he had done several times before. I made a Frankenstein monster out of a few phrases I’d heard. “Laurice is the next Merce Callahan,” I said. “Her work is incredibly of the postmodern. In fact, it’s almost pedestrian.” I squinted; August could sometimes be extra serious.
“Cunningham,” he sighed. “You think it’s silly, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, Frosty,” I said, petting his arm. I called him that because of his hair. How had he heard the truth under my B.S.? He turned away and pulled himself out of bed. From my perch I could hear him knocking around in the storage closet. Soon I heard him in the living room, vacuuming the shag rug. He vacuumed to drown out everything unpleasant in life, especially things between us.
I wondered if Miquel was jealous-not love jealous, but work jealous. This kooky fellow named Rex Messina, who ran a theater company called Concerned Relatives, had asked me to be assistant director on his next show. In this world, manpower was short, so people changed jobs all the time. You built the set on one show and performed in the next. You didn’t hold auditions; you asked your friends or people you met at parties for help. My first impulse was to say heck no, but then I figured August would jump at the opportunity. So I said yes, even though rehearsals happened from 6 to 10:30 most weeknights and then for five hours a day on weekends. Rex was independently wealthy, so he paid his actors and crew, and I needed the extra income. Loco Motion had squat. They didn’t even have the nonprofit status that lets you apply for money from foundations and the government. During Kafka Dances, Laurice hosted a benefit party at a restaurant downtown with long breadsticks and calla lilies in glass vases, but none of the important people she invited showed up, and the company only broke even.
Miquel started using the time between shows to go on weekend-long antiquing or kite-flying trips without me. He liked furniture, I knew, but suddenly it became an obsession. He discovered faraway warehouses that dealt in sixties furniture like the hair chair I liked so much. A few times, I went with him to help move things. But lifting all that furniture left me with an aching back. “You don’t have to come with me,” he said. “Don’t do it out of obligation.” By the time we got home, he’d shout that my attempts to please him were “belittling.”
Despite my efforts, I couldn’t convince Miquel that I liked the dance/ theater world. He thought August was a phony who had gotten involved because of him. My new wardrobe made him doubt my sincerity. The starchy shirts, high-waters, and Hush Puppies from the Salvation Army that I used to clunk around in had amused him. Now I wore those only to my temp jobs. Those clothes made me seem naive, and I suppose naive people are easier to understand and love.
“You just don’t seem like yourself in those clothes,” he’d say.
I had a hard time believing that the clothes I wore could make somebody love me or not. “Are you serious, Frosty?”
Miquel didn’t like having to bring up all the emotions in our relationship, because he thought I should learn to do it, too. But his silence got too angry for me to fill. I couldn’t explain all the trouble I’d gone through to be with him-I still had to keep my whole life before I met him a secret. To me, a same-sex relationship had to be twice as strong as a straight marriage, because the whole world was against it happening-sometimes even other homosexuals.
Of course, not having sexual relations played a big part in our troubles. Even when we did go to bed, I wouldn’t do the thing gay men are famous for. It scared me to be either person. Getting it would hurt and giving it would be dirty. I wanted everything else a whole bunch before it happened, and during, but afterward it got me pretty sick. The smells of another person and the liquids coming out of them made me queasy and a little afraid. Probably it was all the sex diseases they talked about in the media.
Words from the Bible still rang in my head a lot, too. I could hear the preachers on WGWT and see a certain Reverend Rodney Pinckney in my memory. He was one of Mama’s favorites; we’d gone to see him when he came near to town. Rev. Rodney growled, shouted, and sweated, preaching against men with men, quoting Leviticus like they all did. “Both of them have committed a abomination!” he’d yell. “Praise God! They shall be put to death! Praise God!” With a little white handkerchief, Rev. Pinckney would wipe the sweat off his brow and then slip the cloth back into his pocket. “Death!” he would shout one more time, hopping on the balls of his feet as the congregation cheered.
These memories burst out powerfully, but I still had trouble thinking God would kill people for falling in love. In my new church, the Stop Suffering Center down the street from the Patriot Inn, a woman preacher kept repeating, “Dios es amor!” (I went to a Spanish church for a while to avoid running into people from my past. I didn’t tell Miquel, even though I needed him to translate, because it would have seemed suspicious and he wouldn’t have gone anyhow.) Th
e woman said Dios es amor so many times I had to nudge the lady next to me and ask what it meant. She said “God is love,” and nodded, in agreement with herself. I nodded, too, but I got to wondering. Now, if that was true, why would He make you fall in love and then strike you dead for obeying Him? Clearly, the Lord didn’t mind the love part of homosexuality. It was the sex part that got Him mad. If two men could love each other without giving in to animalistic urges, I bet they could still be good Christians. I took that as the main message for my year of free checking.
One morning during an intimate moment, right after I’d started working with Concerned Relatives, Miquel and I got into a fight about the famous thing. Desperate to avoid the issue, I commented on his anatomy in an immature way that I regret to this day. At first, Miquel didn’t react. But the next night he decided to sleep on the couch.
I didn’t connect the two events at first. “What are you doing putting all the sheets on the couch, Frosty?” I asked. I expected that if I started a fight we would make up before it could get too angry.
“I can’t sleep in there. All that noise from the space heater. Coño”
The winter had been a little chilly, but it didn’t get below freezing too often in Atlanta, so we had only used the heater once.
“We can just turn it off.”
“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“I won’t be. I like it a little chilly. You’re the one who likes it warm in there in the first place.” He said nothing. After a few more nights of backand-forth, I got the hint. But by then it was too late to bring up the real reasons for him moving out of the bedroom. Underneath what we said to each other, secret knowledge dripped like dirty water in a sewer.
The new arrangement made me sad and happy at the same time. I still loved Miquel, and now I had won. My intimacy problem was solved, and we could still live together until the time came to say good-bye. The transition would make our separation less painful. According to the schedule in my head, it would only be another three months.
August had held his ground pretty well, with only a few slip-ups. That Christmas, Miquel had given me a white terry-cloth bathrobe to match his own. After a burst of happiness and thanks, I thought of Annie and Cheryl, as I often did in my happiest moments. It was my first Christmas without Annie since we’d met. I pictured my wife and child sitting on our dark green corduroy couch, Annie’s shoulders hunched over in front of our miniature plastic Christmas tree and crèche.
“You’re probably wondering why Mommy’s crying,” I imagined Annie saying to Cheryl. My daughter lay next to her in a pink jumpsuit, sucking and chewing on a pacifier. “Christmas was such a special family time for me that whenever it comes around, I can’t help thinking of your daddy, honey. I miss him so much. I know God has a plan, but why did the Lord take him away from us?” Annie wept. I cried for real, wishing I could tell her about meeting Jesus, and all the stories from my new life.
A surge of doubt and regret hit me as I stroked the terry cloth of the bathrobe and pressed it to my cheek, and though I tried to force it out of my face, Miquel didn’t miss it. He tried to get me to tell him what was the matter. I shrugged off the seriousness of my mood swing, but he didn’t like that. Anger crinkled up his face. Smoking and sipping a glass of chardonnay even though it was 10 a.m., he started to tell me about a few of the problems he had with our relationship.
Miquel said it frustrated him that I wouldn’t share certain parts of my past and my emotions with him. The word withholding kept coming out of his mouth. That led him to talking about the new sex problems he had with me. First, I didn’t want to have as much sex as he did. Then, I didn’t want to touch him anymore.
This time, instead of the famous thing, he complained that I wasn’t comfortable kissing him. “You don’t open your mouth, and you won’t use your tongue.” I braced myself for him to open the discussion into talking about the famous thing. Even a person as thick as me could tell that he was working his way up to it.
But he didn’t. Since Miquel hadn’t told me he had any sexual problems with me other than the famous thing, I’d assumed that everything else was fine. At first, things had been fantastic, but somehow, getting to know him better made me more uptight. Now I couldn’t deny his accusations. I had never thought of myself as good in bed. But I didn’t think I was as bad as he made me sound. After this dressing-down, I knew I’d been mistaken.
Miquel talked about our problems for a while without stopping. I didn’t respond. Instead, as I watched his lips move without hearing anything, I thought about how nobody teaches you to make love. You’re expected to find somebody who has the same thoughts about lovemaking as you do, but if you want to be moral you have to fall in love and marry them before carnal knowledge. So why doesn’t anybody say anything about their likes and dislikes before they get into bed? They just make up the whole thing as they go along, like the herky-jerky improv dancing in Loco Motion’s rehearsals. There must be an awful lot of misunderstandings about that, I said to myself. For a second I thought about my parents in bed. Then I waved the thought away like a pesky fly.
Miquel paused, pursed, his lips and asked, “August, who are Annie and Gary?” He held up a wedding ring he had discovered at the bottom of my side of the sock drawer. We had engraved our names on the inside.
The shock of hearing those names from his mouth was so great that I didn’t react at all outwardly, but my windpipe was fixing to twist itself into a knot. I sat in the fur chair and stroked away the sudden rush of adrenaline. “Oh,” I said casually. “That came from a pawn shop. It’s real gold. Probably worth a lot.” I waited for him to react, but he didn’t. I hoped he didn’t notice my shaking leg, so I wiggled it deliberately. “Why were you going through my stuff?”
“We live together. You’re a slob. Your stuff is all over my stuff. I can’t help it.”
“Why can’t we just accept each other as we are, Frosty? Without namecalling, like ‘slob.’ Don’t you trust me?”
Eventually he softened. “Oh, Augie Bear. I’m sorry,” he said, stumbling over the rug on his way toward me. “I didn’t mean to upset you, I just want us to communicate better.” He sat in my lap and we kissed a while. The cuddling hadn’t led to sex in a while, but this time it did. We wanted to prove that we forgave each other, and we did it by throwing our bodies at one another, eagerly, violently, like these bull elephant seals I saw on a nature show once. It always made sex good when you had a motivation. We needed to do something, anything, to keep from talking.
TEN
“Concerned Relatives makes silent plays that deal with universal struggles,” Rex, the director, told us on the first day. “Not mime.” Even though he’d hired me as an assistant director, I had to do what he called “the training,” so sometimes I’d wind up doing a theater exercise or two. In one of the routines, Isla Moroff, a short Russian girl with gray circles around her eyes, played a peasant woman, and two of the guys-tall, bigheaded boys from deep-country Georgia named Miles and David-played her sons going off to war. In another, I acted as the Everyman, who goes through all the events of a normal human life in a few scenes. Many of the things I had done for real, like growing up, falling in love, going to work, getting married, and becoming a father. While I did it, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somebody else should have played that part. For somebody black outside and damaged inside to do all those things felt wrong and not normal, even to me.
Other folks had trouble with the rehearsals, too, but none of it ever fazed Rex. In the middle of one of our marathon rehearsals, Dakota Wong, a Chinese American lady who had quit Loco Motion with me to work with Concerned Relatives, became frustrated with how much time the process took and quit in the middle of a rehearsal, tearing her plaster mask apart and storming out dramatically. Rex sat there for a moment without moving.
“This is good,” he announced, once her footsteps had faded down the staircase and we heard the door slam downstairs.
Erica, who hun
g on everyone of Rex’s statements, laughed and said, “Rex, you’re amazing. You could find the positive side of a fatal plane crash.”
In a calm voice, he replied, “Increased safety measures.”
Now, Rex had seen this documentary movie that he liked called Titicut Follies that you could only see at the Georgia State library. The movie showed a day in the life of a bad mental institution. I mean real bad. The inmates there were always naked and abused or wearing hats and singing show tunes. He showed us the movie and said that he wanted to use it as inspiration for a new piece. The theme would be madness in the individual and in society. I wasn’t too keen on the idea, seeing as I didn’t think the Lord wanted us to dwell on negative things like that, but I didn’t think I’d have to perform, so it didn’t make me any nevermind.
Rex called it The Titicut Project. Rehearsals extended far into the night, past 11 p.m. Miquel didn’t think this was fair, but I couldn’t confront Rex about shortening rehearsals. To satisfy Miquel, I tried to get home faster instead, but it didn’t work all the time.
One evening, two weeks before what all the performers hoped would finally be opening night, three more company members quit. Everybody paced around, fretting and twisting up their hair, except Rex, who fixed his eye on me.
“August,” Rex said, “you’ve done the training with us, and it’s too late to start someone new, so you’ll have to be in this show. I’m just going to redistribute the roles, as we did when Dakota left. Everything will be terrific. The show will be a huge hit.”
Panic stabbed me. In it? I was the assistant director, I couldn’t perform. I wanted to tell everybody that I couldn’t do it because I was too fat to be a dancer, or I was a devout Christian. But that would have made them either laugh or try to convince me that I was wrong. They would talk down to me with pity and I would look like an idiot.
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