God Says No

by James Hannaham

  I reminded myself of the Lord’s plans for my eternal soul and pushed the feeling aside. “What did you mean to happen?”

  “Oh, I’m kind of strapped these days, Augie. I guess you haven’t heard as much about me as I have about you. It’s nothing really, I’m just going through a rough period.” The elevator showed up and he held the door back with one hand.

  “You came here to ask for money? And behaved like that?”

  “You know I have trouble controlling myself in certain situations. I just thought it was funny. Y’all put so much effort into not being who you are. Wake up, honey! Those normal people you want to be aren’t so normal either! And you! Apparently you’ve never known what it’s like not to lead a double life!”

  Now I got it-Miquel hadn’t come only to ask for money. He was very upset with me. Maybe asking for money was only an excuse. He had heard that during our relationship I wasn’t the person he thought I was, and he wanted to let me know that I hadn’t made a fool of him. Right then I remembered what I’d done with the business card, too, and felt doubly stupid. I knew I owed him an apology, but I didn’t like that he had barged in on the meeting and made inappropriate comments. I couldn’t form the word sorry on my lips.

  As usual, Miquel couldn’t resist making a bad situation worse. “So once you’re straight, are you going to go for broke and try to turn white?”

  In the tense silence where I should have replied with anger, the elevator door tried to jerk closed and knocked Miquel off-balance. He pushed the rubber guard in the center and held the door open with his foot, then raised his chin and cut his eyes at me. “In a way, we’ve had it easier, haven’t we? Being gay saves us from having to be colored, and being colored saves us from having to be white. It’s really tough to be 100 percent anything, ain’t it? Well, I’m 100 percent faggot and 100 percent drunk! To thine own self be true, I say. Even if it kills you. And it always does.”

  I fished in my pocket and opened my wallet. “I’ve got forty dollars,” I said. “Take it.”

  “I don’t need your stupid money,” he spat. My patience for him had run out. I couldn’t keep back a growl at his unstable behavior. This was what it was to deal with an alcoholic. Miquel needed the healing love of Jesus Christ more than nearly anybody I’d known, but I feared it would be impossible for him to open up to it with his willful attitude. He had confused his illness for his identity, as Dr. Soffione would have said.

  I lowered my wallet, but he grabbed my wrist with one hand and tugged the bills out. “I mean, yes I do need your stupid money.” In one swift motion he took the cash between two fingers and slipped it into his pocket. There was something whorish about the way he did it.

  “Thanks,” he muttered, letting go of the elevator door. “It’ll go to a good cause.”

  “Good cause? You’re going to buy alcohol with it.”

  “That’s what I meant, Gary Gray.” He spoke my real name like a curse. The elevator door started to close again. He said “Keep in touch” in a tone that meant Go to Hell. My head filled with a mixture of anger, sadness, and repulsion, like some hot, dangerous mental swamp. Had I contributed in some way to his downward slide? Once I returned to the meeting, I couldn’t pay attention to anything. Mostly I was upset about the things Miquel had said about me. Try though I did, I couldn’t dismiss them, or him.

  I hadn’t stopped thinking about Manny from time to time during my recovery. He was the one man with SSAs I could think of who seemed not to conform to Dr. Soffione’s theories. I didn’t know about his history with his father, but he didn’t seem to have the sort of masculinity issues that Stand Up Straight said you had to have for the illness to take root. He had even gotten a job as a police officer. The fact of a gay man in a traditionally masculine profession made me awful curious. The words gay police officer sounded outside reality to me, like female bodybuilder or black president.

  Dr. Soffione said that men with my condition longed to be considered real men. They identified with their mothers and other women. They sexualized men because they thought of men as different from themselves. Difference didn’t just make procreation possible, like Smith had demonstrated in the meeting. Difference caused normal sexuality. But Manny didn’t seem to have this problem. He behaved exactly like a masculine man except for the sleeping with men part.

  On top of that, Manny wasn’t a large, beefy guy who lined up with my image of a cop. I’d never seen him wearing his uniform, so I daydreamed about this short man in the blue outfit and the stiff hat. When I ran across policemen in the street, I hoped that they would be him, but all the ones I saw downtown had larger frames than Manny, even some of the policewomen. Maybe they kept him at the precinct, answering phones. I had to find out.

  I unfolded the piece of paper and smoothed it out on our coffee table. Manny had jotted down his number first and his name below it in blue felt-tip marker. I wondered what the block print said about his personality. Did it mean natural masculinity? Wondering about something so minor made me think that I might be in love with him, like when I loved Hank’s coffee stirring. When I reached that forbidden point of fantasy, I would fold the piece of paper back up tightly, stick it into the secret compartment of the book bag, and push it underneath the sofa again, farther back every time. I reckon I did this as a substitute for masturbation.

  Aside from the things that happened with Nicky, I had remained celibate and kept my male yearnings from getting the better of me for almost a year. I was real proud of myself. Even when Gay left town, I had controlled the urges. I had asked her to call me every two hours and make sure that I hadn’t given in to the bad desires. In the area of self-control, Dr. Soffione’s therapy appeared to be working for me. The second-best option for recovery as a man with SSAs was celibacy. I supposed I could adjust my goals and shoot for that.

  But like he was making up for the physical discipline and submission to Christ that had served me so well, Satan flooded my mind with sexual thoughts about men. I had an erotic thought about nearly every man I encountered. But then stranger things happened. I started to imagine people naked in a way that wasn’t sexual. Men, too. If I noticed hair coming up out of the collar of a man’s T-shirt, the image of his wooly chest would come to me immediately. When a man standing in line at the post office in front of me had a flat behind, the skinny rear end in front of me became naked. I imagined children naked when I passed them in the street, but girls as well as boys. I wondered what Gay looked like when she got undressed in the next room or when she sat on the commode. I never told anybody about these thoughts, because they were even more unclear and puzzling to me than my erotic fantasies about men. Those hadn’t disappeared either. I just pulled in more than before with the same large net as my curiosity with everybody’s nakedness. Maybe talking about my struggles made me emotionally naked, and as a result I wanted to see everybody really naked.

  The pressure cooker boiled over the day before I took my first trip back home. Gay had gone running. Instead of folding up the piece of paper and hiding it again that time, I flattened it out with my palm. Each of the little squares in the folds seemed to wink at me, so much that I got up to look for the cordless phone. I bet myself I could interact with the world of secular gays without returning to their ways. I dared myself to find the strength. My first task in this quest to prove that I didn’t have to lead a double life at all times was to make contact with Manny. I could convert him pretty easily, I bet. He would have an easy path toward true masculinity, since he probably didn’t see males as his opposite as much as the SSA men I met at Resurrection did. Maybe Dr. Soffione’s theory didn’t apply equally to every homosexual.

  I located the phone under some of Gay’s laundry and brought it to the coffee table. Kneeling in front of the paper, I dialed the number. It was just a friendly phone call, I told myself. Just to talk. I had some questions for a gay police officer. But my stomach jumped with each ring. I held my breath to keep from hanging up in fear before Manny answered. I rehear
sed in my head what I would say to him. Nobody answered the phone, so I hung up and sat on my bed listening to an inspirational cassette tape. The woman’s voice told me to stand in my power, so I got up, and somehow a little of the guilt and disappointment left me, like a mean pussycat had jumped out of my lap. Twenty minutes later, as soon as I had put the event behind me, the phone rang.

  “Gary Gray,” I said.

  Somebody laughed. “Gary, it’s Manny! Did you just call?” I fell backward onto the bed.

  “Well, I’ll be. I did call. I just had this number lying around and I couldn’t remember whose it was so I thought I’d call. And 10 and behold. Nice to hear from you.”

  I spent a tingly couple of moments thinking about all we’d done back then. He wanted to get together, and when I said I was leaving town tomorrow, he said, “Then I guess we’ll have to see each other tonight.” I almost asked ifhe had a lover, but I thought that might make him assume I wanted sex. Maybe I did want sex, but didn’t want to realize that I wanted sex until all my defenses failed and it was too late-about four days after the fact probably would’ve been best.

  “Great,” I said. “Let’s go grab a beer. And talk.”

  “I have beer at my place.”

  “Beer’s always better free, I say.” We laughed.

  At his apartment, I searched for signs of a boyfriend. Photos, shoes that wouldn’t have fit Manny, another name on the mail by the door. I saw nothing. I supposed he’d tell me on a need-to-know basis. I promised myself I’d only talk through my troubles, but then we brushed against each other in the hallway. I grabbed and hugged him. Then I held him. I stuck my nose in his ear and sniffed deeply. My large body towered above his small but strong frame, and when I leaned over to make him walk backward into the living room and onto the couch, he stepped on the arches of my feet so I did all the walking. Our motions turned frantic. Shirts flew off. I tugged his belt open and we removed the rest of our clothes. When we came back together, though, he slid his legs out from under me and walked on his hands to the other side of the bed where I couldn’t reach.

  “Listen. We can’t,” Manny said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I have a husband. He’s roughly your size, also in law enforcement, like me, and he may come home at a later point in the evening. You’re really a nice, upstanding guy, but I don’t want any drama.”

  I would have been angry, but the idea of two gay macho cops in love, living together-1 couldn’t wrap my mind around that. It almost made me snort through my nose. I tugged my shirt down as Manny circled the bed, straightening the comforter. I wondered if he’d had the husband the first time I met him.

  “No hard feelings,” I said at the door.

  He reached into my pants and raised his eyebrow. “Well, I’m feeling something hard!” He laughed and punched me in the arm like a straight guy friend would. “Hey, next time we’ll have an actual beer. As friends.”

  Like most folks, I don’t much enjoy rejection. Even less do I enjoy getting joshed by a fellow who has just given me blue balls. I reacted with a powerful urge to walk the streets alone and get off, the way I had during my year of free checking. But first I needed to calm my aching crotch and learn to walk again so that I could go home without arousing Gay’s suspicion. The bronco strength of my desire at that point, chained with a hot determination to satisfy myself, momentarily wiped out everything else. I passed a bar I recognized, a hustler joint called Trixx. I had some brochures from Resurrection in my jacket pocket; if anybody recognized me, I would say I meant to save souls. I ordered a cranberry and seltzer because it looked like a real drink, and stood watching a fortyish dude in tight jeans play pool. So few guys walked in that I took out the brochures and re-read them. On the final fold, a picture of Alec Braverman caught my attention. His arm held up, pointing, he seemed to rise up out of a field of trees near what I recognized as the Rictus Bollard Church. I held the photo to a nearby light. The color saturation of the print might have had something to do with it, but damned if Alec didn’t have the most intense blue eyes in creation, bright as glass cleaner and determined as an ambulance. He wore a flattering polo shirt and he seemed to walk forward in a way that showed off the curve of his thighs and butt. I wanted to touch him, be him, to bury my face in the hot flesh around his belly button.

  In a gay bar, fantasizing about a struggling brother-What could be more forbidden? As soon as I’d had any kind of freedom, the door in my head banged open and lust rushed in. But after a while, lust and guilt curled up together. One increased the other, and both got mixed up into a third emotion that made my body tingle from my toes to my temples. Even begging the Lord’s forgiveness gave me a sexual charge. When I asked for absolution, I surrendered my will and my body. Wasn’t that just like sex?

  A dramatic disco song on the jukebox sang, When I look back upon my life, it’s always with a sense of shame ... Everything I’ve ever done, it’s a sin. The singer sang the letter s in a way that sounded gay. Horrified, I shoved the brochure into my jacket and jogged out. Comparing God and sex wasn’t right. Everybody knew you could only have one. Soon I had to slow my pace, but I missed the last train and had to walk all the way back home.

  Gay had waited up; she wanted to know how far I’d slipped. She sat at her desk in a nightgown decorated with strawberries, her toenails painted a feminine shade of rose. I watched her chunky thigh as it moved toward her privates. If she’d shifted in the chair, I could’ve seen more. There were stories in the movement about ex-gay men and women becoming man and wife, but I had never heard of an ex-gay man having an affair with an ex-lesbian who wasn’t his wife. The thought was too strange, plus I didn’t like Gay in that way.

  I told her about the bar. Worrying had kept her awake. She feared that some toughs had cornered me in an alley and beaten me up, the way they’d done to Enrique in the middle of the program just for walking down the street. When we visited him in the hospital, Enrique had said the attack was a warning from the Lord. He said it through bloody, scabby, fat lips, with an eye swollen shut.

  “I’m going to have to report this,” Gay told me. “If you’re going to represent the new chapter, we can’t risk your being spotted publicly cruising in a gay bar.”

  “I wasn’t cruising,” I corrected.

  “Well, just in one. We’ve had trouble like this before. The gay-positive people find out and use it to undermine our efforts. It looks bad.”

  “I had brochures.” I slipped them out and waved them as proof.

  “This wasn’t an official mission. It could be very serious, Gary. I don’t know what Bill and Charlie are going to say about your leadership ability after this. I’ll tell them that you’re praying for guidance. But maybe you should speed up the process of moving your family to Atlanta. That’ll keep accountability high for when I’m gone, and it’s a great method of improving the image of the program.”

  We kneeled on the rug with our hands touching and prayed. She had warm, chubby hands, and her nightgown barely contained her very full bosoms. Imagine my confusion when I thought of squeezing them during our prayer, and some blood began to swoosh into my agonized private area. No! I thought. Not now. Not here. Wrong.

  As Gay and I talked to churches farther outside Atlanta, we found more people receptive to the Resurrection philosophy and mission. Gradually, folks started to trickle in. In general that was a plus, but it also meant added responsibility for me at a time when I felt insecure. That put worry on top of worry. When I talked to Annie on the phone, in the days before my visit, I’d had trouble concentrating. I forgot how to bring up new subjects. But if Annie noticed, she ignored my distracted attitude. She would ask about what happened in our meetings and whether lots of new people were signing up. Douglas, one of the waiters in her restaurant, turned out to be gay. Instead of shunning him, she’d decided to befriend him first and wait to encourage him to get treatment. But he didn’t seem to want help, and they were having too much fun-going to theme parks and
restaurants and babysitting Cheryl, who loved him. She kept putting off bringing up his damnation. I felt jealous and confused. My wife was replacing me with a gay man.

  I boarded the plane to Orlando in a real weird mood, like somebody had tied my feelings to four different horses and fired a pistol. The night before, I had needed release so badly I’d doubled over with pain, sweating and hyperventilating. I felt I had no choice but onanism. I began thinking of female images, but they took so long to arouse me that I broke my skin and had to keep from touching a raw red patch as I continued. I gave in and peeked at Alec Braverman’s brochure photo, then thought of Manny. In my mind, I returned to his apartment. His wiry naked body didn’t slip out from under me this time. Our motions turned frantic. He disappeared under me, then our fingers and thumbs and tongues disappeared inside one another. I aimed into a tissue. When I came, I saw stars.

  Gay had informed Bill about my bar episode-it felt piddling to me now. I hoped he would go easy on me, knowing that I hadn’t taken it to the level of sexual relations. I feared what Dr. Soffione might say. I pictured him shaking his feathery white hair from behind his desk and sighing to himself, “Another weak homosexual,” as he marked my employment papers with a big black x and tossed them into the trash. This scene played over and over in my head as I boarded the plane. I hoped Bill and Gay would give it their best. The job mixed my faith, my social ties, and my path to recovery with my means of support. How would I live without it?

  Staring at the ground through a porthole streaked with rain, I hoped that the plane would crash so that I could die a hero.

  But once we passed above Florida, I thought I might have actually gone to Heaven. We flew through a high-pressure system. Florida’s whole landscape spread out below, the biggest golf course you’ve ever seen. The clouds all had flat undersides and huge puffy plumes like explosions of pure joy. When we flew in between them I could see down to the ground through steep white tunnels, and that made me dizzy. The green hills curved around every which way, and all those lakes shimmered like new coins. No wonder old people came here to die. Going to Heaven from Florida, you wouldn’t notice the change. I spotted palm trees as the aircraft flew down, then I saw Disney World just before landing and thought, I am returning to paradise. Not even Adam and Eve got to do that.