God Says No

by James Hannaham

  We were playing softball. Before the game we had talked about our childhood experiences with sports, and especially how we’d failed to connect with our fathers through playing games. George said that the first time his father took him into the backyard to play catch and threw the ball at him, he let it fall to the ground. He stared at it and asked his dad, “Why did you do that?” His pop gave up then and there.

  We divided up into two teams of six. Nicky ended up on my team. He struggled to hold the bat and swing properly. Dropping it several times, he giggled at himself and smoothed back his hair. He said he still wasn’t used to the shorter haircut he’d had to get to enter the program. Everybody’s attention always swung over to him-or maybe that was just my impression. His true vulnerable nature showed in his boyish looks and gestures. When he put his hand on his cheek or slapped his head with his palm it always made him more attractive to me. Of course nobody said anything, but I sensed that many of the other men in our group felt the same about him as I did. Nobody volunteered to help Nicky hold the bat. I looked into my brother strugglers’ eyes and they all looked down or away.

  Telling myself that it was in the interest of testing out Dr. Soffione’s ideas, I took a breath, approached Nicky, and offered my help, reaching both arms around him to move his hands farther down on the bat. Raising his right elbow slightly, I instructed him to keep his eyes on the ball and hit as hard as he could. I smelled the faint odor of cologne or shaving cream around his neck. I caught myself breathing into his ear the way my father had done to me during my Little League games.

  My lips got close enough to plant a kiss on his cheek. A hot, tingling sensation spread from my groin through my entire body. Holding my breath, I allowed it to flow through me. But instead of acting on it, I tried to enjoy the sensation for its own sake. I closed my eyes and held my tongue tight, like I was sucking on a butterscotch candy. The Lord, I reminded myself, was showing me the joy in fellowship, the nice side of desire. No need to take it further. Except that I couldn’t control the stiffness in my crotch. I did my best to hide it and I think nobody noticed. That’s one advantage of a fat stomach.

  When Nicky’s turn came at bat, I patted him on the shoulder to give him confidence. After a couple of strikes, he hit the ball pretty far. He was so pleased with himself that he bounced on his heels a few times before realizing that he had to run the bases. As he ran, the outfielders fumbled the ball, so we yelled at him to keep running. The ball didn’t get to second base before he got to third, so everybody encouraged him to run home. Nicky got back safely and everybody shouted and rushed up to hug him.

  Pride-and a rush of lust-pushed me toward him faster than some of the other players. Thinking of Dr. Soffione’s words, though, I didn’t worry. But when I embraced Nicky and we hopped up and down with the others in glee, I found that I couldn’t let him go. It had been a while since I’d touched anybody. The warmth of his skin and his clean polo shirt increased my level of temptation. Even though he wasn’t a good athlete and he hadn’t worked out much, his arms and chest were naturally firm. Everybody swatted him on the butt like real baseball players. I looked around his shoulder and down his back. I meant to swat, but before I knew what I was doing, I squeezed him pretty hard.

  Well, you bet I pulled my hand away like I’d gotten an electric shock. Resurrection had real strict guidelines against lustful touch, especially grabbing. But I couldn’t take it back. I became extremely disappointed in myself. For the rest of the game, I could only focus on my failure to resist that urge. All three times I went to bat, I struck out.

  As the last part of Masculinity Repair, when the game ended, everybody always shared his experiences. I knew somebody had seen the squeeze and would report me if I didn’t confess. But I didn’t want Nicky to know how I felt and be uncomfortable in our dorm. So without mentioning the act specifically, I admitted to the group that the home-run moment had aroused me in a way that didn’t make me proud. I decided not to bring up the much more difficult moment of helping Nicky hit the ball.

  Keith, the pitcher, spoke up. He was average height and slim, with a round head and meaty lips, and he stuttered slightly. I couldn’t understand why the guys kept mixing us up. “That was a difficult moment for me, too, Gary. Just before it happened, I predicted that the hugging was going to be problematic for me. Nicky is a very handsome young man, I’m sure we can all agree on that.” We acknowledged everybody’s positive traits in public to make them feel good. The other guys nodded enthusiastically. “He’s got a great smile,” George said. Nicky rolled his eyes, but he blushed and held back that smile, too.

  “So I had to take a deep breath,” Keith continued, “and think about what Christ would want for me in that situation. I also reminded myself of the big picture. Giving in to those gay impulses is a dead end. They lead you down a path that’s away from God. That’s how you can tell that Satan is the one who puts them in your mind.” The others expressed their agreement and added their own observations about the hugging. “Didn’t you think of your wife and child, Gary?”

  “You’re right, Keith,” I said. “I lost focus. That’s always what makes me real disappointed in myself. Even after almost a month here, I feel like I’m moving toward the heterosexual life that God wants for me, but sometimes I lose control and-” I couldn’t finish the sentence because I was becoming emotional. The possibility that I would never make progress opened in front of me like a deep cave. I shut my eyes.

  Bill clapped his palms on my shoulders and massaged them. Another tingle of erotic feeling went through me and landed in my crotch. To focus, I imagined Christ in pain, writhing in blood beneath His crown of thorns.

  “Gary,” Bill said, “you’re being pretty hard on yourself. You want your progress chart to be a diagonal line going right up to 100 percent straight in no time flat. But anyone here can tell you that it isn’t going to happen in a month, or even in a year, am I right? We all have good days and bad days. Days where we beat the demons back successfully, and other days when our cravings for physical intimacy with another man reach practically unbearable levels, am I right? But we’re here to repair the things that need fixing, guys. That means what?” Bill counted Dr. Soffione’s guidelines on his fingers. “Learning to express our feelings for other men in a productive, nonsexualized manner. Building bridges back to our father-son relationship, which will lead to what? A full expression of our true masculine nature, culminating in an increased desire for the female companionship God created us to enjoy. Yeah!” He pumped his fist in a masculine manner. “That’s a lot of work, guys. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, am I right?”

  We applauded Bill’s pep talk and started walking toward the house. “Tomorrow’s forecast is for rain,” Bill announced on the way, “so Keith’s suggestion is that we watch the Cubs game on TV in the rec room.”

  Nicky lagged behind as we walked back to put the equipment away. A strong wind bent the trees and then slowly released them. I thought lowed him an apology, so I slowed down and let him catch up to me. “Nicky, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  His face tensed. “Done what? Oh, that was you, huh? I was hoping it was Bernard,” he whispered. Bernard, the pastor, was the team’s MVP, a stocky guy with a neat beard, a gut, and thick hair on his arms and the back of his neck. Though his voice was kind of high, he didn’t act like he needed his masculinity repaired at all. He helped out a lot during those classes, too. “I guess I’m supposed to tell you that I feel violated and that your touch was inappropriate and whatnot? But when I was turning tricks for smack, a lotra them guys done much worse all the time.” He rolled up his shirt and pointed out a raised scar snaking up his side. It reminded me of the railroad tracks in North Charleston.

  “This ex-Marine dude did that with a broken bottle while I was high. I lost a lot of blood.” He turned and lifted up more of his shirt in the back. A bruise bloomed out from the small of his back almost to his waist, yellow at the edges, darkening into a horrible reddis
h black in the center. “That’s recent, from my ex. So I mean, don’t do it again, but it wasn’t that big a deal or nothing. Compared to.” I had seen his scars and bruises before, when he took his shirt off at night, but I didn’t want to let him know that I’d looked. Steady, I said to myself. Think on Christ.

  My eyes widened, even though by that time I had already heard about Nicky’s days in Chicago. Many of the men at Resurrection had medicated their homosexual longings, suffered at the hands of parents and strangers who didn’t understand, become alcoholics, drug addicts, and sex workers, gone bankrupt, and had wound up on the streets, on the wrong side of the law, or any combination of all that bad luck. Like me, many had attempted suicide, most more than once. Some had contracted STDs and would have to take huge pills with mysterious long-term effects for the rest of their lives.

  “For me it is a big deal. You’re more here for the drug problems, I guess,” I continued.

  “Kinda, But I also hate being gay, so I thought while I’m here I should take care of that, too.” He giggled. “Two birds with one stone.”

  “If you really wanted Bernard to touch you in an ungodly way, why didn’t you speak up during the talk-back? You know you’re going to be held accountable.”

  “Oh, I was just kidding. Please don’t tell nobody. If you tell anybody I said that, I’ma tell ‘em you grabbed my sweet little butt. I’m really trying to live for Christ, I swear on a stack of Bibles.” Bernard reached the top of the steps on the patio and stretched in a way that was almost provocative. Both of us couldn’t help turning to watch him. “But before I lived for Christ, I lived for trade like that.”

  Hearing the strain in his voice from trying to lower his tone, I almost laughed in despair. The men and women at Resurrection had such wide gaps between who we were and what God intended for us. It broke my heart to think what a long road Nicky had ahead of him, from a terrible past of abuse in the streets to a confident, strong family man. But as we climbed the steps and spilled into the hallway, jostling for the water fountain and dropping our baseball caps on the multicolored chairs in the hallway, our past-life difficulties crumbled away. It gave me a thrill to think that retracing the negative stuff in our boyhoods could undo the terrible things that had gone wrong in our lives and turn us normal. I really did feel like a kid again, or at least a young guy with a second chance.

  Keith saw Nicky and me speaking in twos as we climbed the steps to the main building and scrambled over. “Hey,” he warned, “you guys are out of phase. Mind if I join you?” Being in phase was mostly meant for trips outside the complex, but Keith wasn’t completely joking. Nicky and I brought our conversation to a halt.

  Unfortunately, my desire for Nicky shot way up after our talk. Just when I thought it had reached its highest level, it always went farther. After our heart-to-heart, I understood that by praising Bernard, he had rejected me. This was Russ Part II. How could I not have seen it coming? To control the spike in my sexual appetite, I took a deep breath and concentrated on my future goals. In Group the previous Thursday, we’d drawn an image for ourselves of what our lives would be like once we learned to manage our same-sex drives. With the set of colored pencils, I had made a picture of Annie, Cheryl, and myself holding hands, standing in front of a colorful house with smoke coming out of the chimney. Angels and Jesus flew above the smoke, watching over everything. Gay told me to think on that picture whenever I thought I might slip.

  Nicky ran ahead of me down the hall to the water fountain, his feet thumping the floor and ringing out with a slapback sound. I couldn’t imagine going through the kind of experiences he had, but even those terrible times hadn’t erased his youthful spirit. I concentrated as hard as I could on the picture of my wife and daughter in my mind and bit down hard on my tongue.

  “Oh, Gary,” Annie said to me one night as we ended another half-silent conversation, “I hate to think about us not being together anymore.” She was more tired than angry.

  I stood up in the phone booth. “No! We’re going to work this out.” Jake knocked on the glass to say that my time had run out. I waved him away.

  “You think so? You don’t believe in divorce, but you believe in running off to join the circus of sin.”

  “Annie! Don’t you still love me?”

  “Of course I do-but you have really tried my patience, Gary. Any sane woman would have thrown up her hands and said aloha.”

  “I thought you’d be overjoyed when I came back a changed man.”

  Annie sighed. “You have no idea what I went through. Everyone thought your body had burned up in the fire. In the back of my mind I held out a tiny hope that something bizarre had happened, because at first they didn’t find anything at all. That you had hit your head and gotten amnesia and walked away from the accident. But then they found your wallet and I began to grieve. I bought five pillows and wrapped them in a sheet and clung to them every night for a while. After a few months, your mother and I decided to hold a funeral, so that we could start coming to terms with what had happened. At the service, we buried the wallet. That was your mother’s idea. She wanted it to be buried in South Carolina, but I knew you’d want to be near Disney World, so we did it down here.

  “I couldn’t hear the word Disney World without becoming emotional, you know? I thought about leaving Orlando, because I couldn’t watch TV or read the newspaper or drive down the highway or leave the house without seeing Disney World signs, and they made me so sad. Every day on the way to work I would pass a billboard of Mickey in his costume from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and I’d think, Mickey, please use your magic to bring back my husband! And I would weep a little, because I knew that if Jesus couldn’t do it, Mickey certainly couldn’t.” Annie chuckled at herself and coughed before going on.

  “I quit my job at the travel agency. Every time I went to church, I begged your forgiveness in my prayers and consoled myself with the fact that you were saved, and you were with Jesus. I got a loan, started the restaurant, and tried to move on. I even looked at a few other men here and there. But then Lisette’s friend, the Chinese girl, found me and said you were alive, living a homosexual lifestyle.

  “It hurt me that you hadn’t wanted to share the problem with me. I wished we could’ve worked on it together as husband and wife. But I knew that it must have tormented you a great deal if you felt you had to keep it hidden for so long.”

  Jake started yanking on the phone booth door. I had jammed my fingers into the handle and positioned my foot at the bottom so that he couldn’t move it. I gestured to him to leave me alone, but his face became redder and more insistent. “Everything takes time, Annie,” I said. “And this is a terrific opportunity. We’ll work it out. No divorce.”

  “I’ve been through a lot,” Annie sighed, “but I’ll stand by you for as long as I can.”

  “Till death do us part?”

  “I don’t think I can do that again,” she said, with a little sad laughter in her voice. We sort of made up, or at least stopped talking angrily, and she agreed to send some of my possessions on, including my Jesuses. We said good-bye and I stepped out of the booth. I apologized to the line of four people waiting for the phone. I knew I would be penalized for going over my allotted half hour. I was late for Group Share, too, and would probably be docked from phone privileges the next day.

  Annie was right, I thought as I hurried down the hall. I wanted too many different things that didn’t work together. I fought just as hard to up my desire for women as I did to get rid of my longings for males, and I wound up nowhere, failing at both. I had pretended to be the person Annie needed me to be and messed up royally. I wanted to try again, but without the risk of repeating the same blunders.

  THIRTEEN

  Two months of learning to put language on my inner struggles and cope with my past improved my attitude a whole bunch. Resurrection Ministries taught me the right words to describe everything that had happened to me. The language was like a cage where I could put all the namel
ess fears that had roamed around inside me from my earliest memories. A few weeks into the program, Bill gave us an assignment to write down a ten-page autobiography. Up until then, I hadn’t understood the logic of my life story. I’d never taken the opportunity to reflect on the choices that I had made over the years, and how one thing had led to another. How had I fallen so far from what Christ intended, and how could I get on the path to righteousness?

  In school, I’d hated writing. Ten pages seemed like an awful lot. But once I started the autobiography project, I couldn’t keep away from the computer in the communal area. Truth be told, there were a number of nights when I snuck downstairs after lights-out and continued writing. Bill told me he knew I did it against the chain of command, but the sight of me tapping away on the keyboard, lost in memories and lit by the bluish glow of the computer screen, renewed his belief in his mission so much that he decided not to stop me. The positive, encouraging responses I got from my peers in Group also inspired me to continue working. Several of them started to expand their testimonials, too.

  Writing triggered my memory. In Group, we had talked a lot about the broken places in us where homosexuality could get in. A lot of the other men told stories about childhood sexual abuse, but I had only suffered physical abuse from my father. Still, something dawdled in my mind, a blurry piece of a memory that I had not thought on in some years. While sitting at the terminal and trying to coax it out of my head, I suddenly sat up and remembered about the Black Witch.

  Magic Harbor on Myrtle Beach. Folks nicknamed it Haunted Harbor because a bunch of robberies and accidents had ruined its reputation as an amusement park. It started out as a Wild West theme park. The summer I turned twelve, the Stage Coach ride crashed and killed a man from Charlotte. The park changed management, but bandits held up the office the next summer-some said they did it with antique pistols. The next managers owned an amusement park in England, so they made the place all British. The barmaids at the restaurant called you “Luv” and said “Bloody this!” and “Bloody that!”