Advocate

by Darren Greer

  Jeanette had piled the bristol boards with their sayings on the living room sofa and I had gone through them with Deanny while my mother and Jeanette had lunch. It’s a disease! Not a curse! read one. Judge not, lest you be judged! read another. Deanny was particularly proud of the one she had made. Cooties won’t kill you. Stupidity will!

  It was so Deanny-esque it made me laugh.

  Before my grandmother went upstairs, she pleaded with my mother and Jeanette. “You’ll ruin us in this town,” she said, bursting into tears. “I hope you know that.”

  “We’ve already been ruined,” answered Jeanette. “Look what they’ve done to us!”

  To this my grandmother had no answer.

  Afterwards my mother said she felt sorry for her. “This is the worst thing that has happened to her since Dad died.”

  When Deacon Harry showed up my mother asked him what Father Orlis thought about the whole thing.

  “He doesn’t say much,” said the deacon. “I think he believes the town is being hysterical, but he can see the point. In the twelfth century, priests and monks were afraid to give the last rights to victims of the plague. This is a very old scenario.”

  “What did he think about you coming out with us today?” asked my Aunt Jeanette.

  Deacon Harry looked at her sheepishly. “He doesn’t know. I thought it best to reserve the debate until after the fact.”

  “Right,” said Jeanette. “Do you want to carry the Judge not lest you be judged sign?”

  Deacon Harry, who had worn plain clothes — jeans and a white button-down shirt and high-top sneakers — shook his head and said he should carry something a little less “job related.”

  He eventually ended up with Compassion is the cure to all ills.

  My mother carried Hatred hurts more than sickness.

  Henry chose Judge not.

  Deanny took hers and Aunt Jeanette took It’s a disease.

  The young man from the reserve, whom I had never met and whose name was Darcy, had something written in Mi’kmaq on his card. Jeanette had always had friends on the reserve. The land we lived on, she often told us, did not belong to us but to the Indians. We had stolen it, and we would either have to give it back or pay mightily for what we had so blithely taken. Jeanette’s talk of Native justice made my grandmother furious. She considered Natives to be ne’er-do-wells and alcoholics who lived off the generosity of the state and contributed nothing to the town. There were many heated arguments about this at the dinner table when I was young. But so far, Darcy was the first Native to come to our house, and he seemed to come in peace. When Jeanette asked him what his sign said, he shook his head and said it was simply about joy.

  “Amen,” said Aunt Jeanette.

  Mine, created for me by my mother because I couldn’t think of anything to say, read God is Love.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  all in all, there were seven of us that day. A Native man, a black man, a deacon, two waitresses, a twelve-year-old boy on the cusp of puberty, and an eleven-year-old girl from the wrong side of the tracks. We were hardly intimidating. All of us were used, somehow, to being on the outside, and so perhaps it was fitting we were to represent the conscience of our town.

  I felt self-conscious, I remember, stepping out the front door, sign in hand, walking down Tenerife Street. Perhaps we all did, for there was very little conversation. Somewhere from the street behind a lawn mower brayed. There were no cars, nobody on the lawns. A breathless hush seemed to have gripped the neighbourhood. We imagined we were being watched through windows, though the truth is that no one had the slightest clue what we were up to. The sickness at the hospital and the cancellation of the parade had dampened the mood of the town. If anyone saw us walking the remaining few blocks of Tenerife Street towards Cornwallis, they did not rush out of their houses and scream at us.

  Jeanette, who was bristling for confrontation, was disappointed in the lack of reaction. She asked we hold our signs to the sides so people could read them from their windows. But there seemed to be no one in the windows. As we swung towards Main, the faint tattoo of a marching band could be heard. Jeanette cried, “The Orange parade!”

  “Yes,” said Deacon Harry. “It’s not cancelled. Didn’t you know?”

  “No,” said my mother. “We didn’t.”

  Jeanette looked as if she didn’t know what to say. The reality of the parade in motion across the river took some of the wind out of her sails. Prejudice in pockets is harder to fight than blanket intolerance. Obviously the Protestants were not giving in to the hysteria. Obviously they had thought the town safe enough to hold their annual march. Jeanette looked helplessly at my mother.

  “What!” my mother said. “This is good news, Jeanette! At least some people have their heads screwed on straight.”

  Jeanette nodded. “We’ll march down this side of the river,” she said. “This is the side we should be worried about anyway. God-damned Catholics.”

  She looked at Deacon Harry. “Sorry, Deacon,” she said.

  “No worries,” said the deacon. “I say it myself.”

  Henry Hennsey laughed.

  We held up our signs and continued down Cornwallis to Main. The usual traffic was there for a Saturday. Some stared at us for brief moments, then carried on their business. We marched through downtown in silence. There were no taunts or catcalls. My aunt was again disappointed. She expected active resistance. She expected Kent State. We couldn’t march in the middle of the street because of the traffic, so we stayed on the sidewalk. Anyone who met us politely stepped aside and let us pass. They scanned the signs and placards, but refused to meet our eye.

  Only one woman spoke as we passed. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she said.

  “For what?” shouted Jeanette. “For caring about a sick man? For having compassion, and love? It’s you that should be ashamed, lady.”

  The woman refused to give in. She stood on the sidewalk, a safe distance away, and told my aunt this was all her fault, she had brought my uncle here, and the entire town was sick, and it was a plague upon our house. Jeanette wanted to stay and argue, but my mother and Deacon Harry talked her out of it.

  “Let’s just march,” my mother said.

  “Show them solidarity, Jeanette,” said Deacon Harry. “Let God deal out the punishments.”

  It was an unsatisfying affair. Once we had marched the length of Main Street, with just that single comment and no protest, we turned back. Jeanette was disheartened. “Apathy,” she said.

  “What did you expect?” my mother asked. “Cheers?”

  “I want them to notice us!” cried Jeanette. “I want them to acknowledge!”

  “That’s not how it works,” said Henry, speaking from experience. “You become invisible. That’s the Brutus cut.”

  Darcy, the Indian, nodded. We could have marched up and down Main Street all day and not elicited more responses. We saw a number of Closed signs in the window of shops that would have normally been open on a Saturday. Jeanette wanted to go over to the Protestant side and try our luck there in the midst of the celebration, but my mother wouldn’t let her. “They’re keeping up the tradition and doing the right thing,” she said. “Why would we protest them?”

  “We should protest all of them,” said Jeanette. “They all need to hear the truth.”

  In the end we went home, more defeated by the lack of response than anything. Deacon Harry said we should take comfort from the fact that we had tried. “The point was made,” he said. “That’s the best we can do.”

  Jeanette wanted to put the signs up against the house for the neighbours to see. She actually did it, but my grandmother went out and removed them as soon as she got the chance. Jeanette couldn’t find them again. She suspected my grandmother had burned them in the fire pit out back. The next year, after my uncle had died, she made up new signs. We marched in the Lemon Day parade with them. No one commented on them then, either. Even my grandmother ignored them. It was a meagre attemp
t at change, but at least it was an attempt.

  The Monday after the parade, while the infection was still ravaging the town, Jeanette went to the grocery store. No cashier would wait on her. Whenever she stepped up to a wicket a Cash Closed — Use Next Cashier sign was set down. When she went to another, the same thing happened, until all the cashes were closed and she was left with a cartful of unpaid groceries. When she complained to the manager, he said it was a coincidence that all the cashiers were taking a break.

  “And no one is checking through customers?” asked Jeanette. “Surely you don’t expect me to believe that.”

  “Believe what you want,” said the manager. “I’m only telling you what I know.”

  When Jeanette asked him what she was supposed to do with all her food, he told her to take it and go. “You can send us a cheque,” he said. “Or pay us later.”

  “I have to handle a cheque,” said Jeanette. “You might get it that way too.”

  The manager scurried away from her, with more speed than she would have expected if the building had been on fire. Jeanette did not send him a cheque. She kept the food. After a few tries over the next while, with similar results, she had to send Henry to the store for us. The situation was ridiculous, as bad as the divisions between the Protestants and Catholics when the town was founded hundreds of years ago.

  All that week, we continued to receive updates of people in town who believed they had contracted aids from the air — even after they had been sent home from the hospital, cured from their poisoning. The weekly Advocate Gazette carried a story about the epidemic, full of factual errors and supposition. I still have the article cut out with the headline Strange Contagion Strikes Town. It was published after they had been informed it was bacterial infection.

  My grandmother felt the effects of the shunning, too. When she went to the meetings of her auxiliary or sewing circle, the doors were locked against her and no matter how much she pounded on them, she was not let in. “I know you’re in there!” she cried. “I know what it is you are doing.”

  The only place people did not prevent her from was Mass. A lot of people stopped going while the sickness gripped the town. Those who went gave my grandmother a wide berth. No one wanted to stand in line for Communion with her, and for a while, Father Orlis, likely because he was afraid to touch my grandmother’s mouth, even stopped giving it. She was horrified that her hallowed traditions were being uprooted and upended, and was incensed she was no longer receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. She complained about it to Orlis, who told her when things settled down again in Advocate everything would go back to normal. “For now,” he told her, “we have to take precautions.”

  Even I felt the sting, because when I went to the corner store on Main Street the proprietor would see me through the window, flip the Open sign to Closed and lock the door.

  Other shopkeepers did the same.

  Our alienation was complete. The hysteria and calumny had reached an apex, and our popularity and once assured respect had reached its nadir. We could have fought it, but we didn’t. We were too exhausted and disheartened, too shocked at the blatant prejudice and blind ignorance to do any more than shake our heads and try to get on with our lives.

  The weekend following the parades, Aunt Jeanette wanted to have another march, but she could get no one except Deanny to go with her. They marched down Main Street alone, eliciting no more response than they had before. Jeanette said she would march every Saturday if need be, until people finally got the message.

  She stopped eventually. My uncle got sicker, and she was needed at home. Deanny wanted me to go, but I refused. And even if I wanted to, my mother wouldn’t have let me. “That part of it is over,” she told Deanny. “We have to get ready for this next part.”

  “What next part?” Deanny said. My mother wouldn’t say, but Deanny knew. I knew, and I was much slower picking up on verbal cues than Deanny. Act III would be the deathbed scene, and we all had our particular roles to play. The time for worrying about the town was over.

  PART III

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  ■

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  EIGHT

  ■

  that fall i began, unbidden, to think about men.

  It is surprising to me now I didn’t think about them earlier, that some glimmer of my own sexuality had not shone through, either in dreams or waking fantasies, before that year. I have a theory my psychological sexual development was delayed by the arrival of my uncle into our lives. I had refused to give it mental room. Given his own sexuality and what had resulted from it, I did not allow myself the possibility I too might be like him. I even had dreams sometimes in which I caught what he had, in which I was thin and had to be helped to the bathroom by my mother and Jeanette.

  I had begun the process of puberty before my uncle arrived. My mother and Jeanette schooled me in what to expect. Sudden growth spurts. Occasional breaking of my voice into a higher register, the eventual lowering of it. Growth of the testicles. Pubic and armpit hair. Frequent erections. Wet dreams. Masturbation. They held nothing back and informed me fully, to the horror of my grandmother.

  Initially, I found the whole thing distasteful, and then when it began to happen I fell into a sort of existential wonder. How could my body undergo such a radical set of changes in such a short period of time and still retain my own personality?

  Sex would be of an interest to me, my mother said.

  Girls would become an issue.

  Despite having gone through this odious process for months — checking the volume of hair under my arms and on my groin every time I showered — girls had not become an issue. The size of my penis grew, but my desire for women was not commensurate with it. The only woman I knew well besides my grandmother, my mother, and Aunt Jeanette was Deanny. I certainly felt no desire for her. She had already gone through puberty and, when she was in a mood, she said she was “on the rag.” She had the beginning of breasts. And though I’d not seen her naked I suspected she also had hair on her groin.

  The thought revolted me.

  This alone should have been enough to tell me where my tendencies lay, but I missed all the clues. I often had erections, but I didn’t masturbate. I had no sexual fantasies. I convinced myself what I felt was not desire, but simple physical stimulus. My cock rubbing against the fabric of my jeans if I had neglected to wear underwear. Mistakenly brushing my hand against it while rolling over in bed and causing it to sit up, a dog at attention. It is unfortunate, perhaps, all that desire came roaring to the surface at precisely the time my uncle was dying in our house, with a disease somehow related to his sexuality. If I could have stopped it I would have. If I could have delayed it until some other time, I would have done that also. But biology is insistent. It does not consider niceties and it has its own immutable sense of timing. If it wants a thing it takes it. It took me.

  It started with a dream.

  I was standing before an older boy in my school. I was in my underwear. He was in his also. He pushed his down, took my hand and put it on his engorged penis. I came in my sleep. The sensation was so glorious and powerful I woke up gasping for breath, my whole lower body convulsing with the ejaculation as my erect penis emptied itself of sperm. My heart beat madly. I was confused, frightened, wildly exhilarated. My sheets were a mess. There was spunk everywhere. Guilty, but still feeling that golden aching release in my cock and balls, I got up and gathered the sheets in a ball. I replaced them with fresh ones from the hall closet and started the washer in the basement in the middle of the night. My grandmother asked the next day what on earth my sheets were doing in the wash.

  I had already prepared a lie.

  “I peed myself,” I said. “Too much milk I guess.”

  “Jacob!” cried my grandmother. “You’re twelve years old!”

  I shrugged. I would rather my grandmother think me a bed-wetter than a pervert. I was afraid, I think, she would be able to tell the content of my dream simply by looking at the
issue of it. The dream troubled me all day. I wasn’t supposed to dream of men. My mother said it would be girls I would be interested in. I couldn’t tell Deanny, and I told Deanny everything. I was miserable. But that night in bed, I found myself masturbating over the memory of the dream. Again I came, not as powerfully as the night before but still gasping, and convulsing. And once again I felt depressed and hopeless. I had done it again, this time consciously and so twice as guilty. I did not think of my uncle then. I swore to myself if I did it again I would think of girls. But whenever I did there was no lustre to the hand-motion. I threatened to wilt. Substitute with an image of a naked man and I was off to the races, coming sometimes in less than a minute. Night after night, I performed this desperate experiment on myself, always with the same results.

  During the day I wallowed in self-pity.

  At night I jerked off to beat the band.

  I was your typical teenager, until it occurred to me if I did this with any men in reality I could end up with what my uncle had.

  This sobered me.

  For weeks I didn’t masturbate.

  My body tempted me cruelly. My cock stood up every night in eager anticipation but I would not give in. I wasn’t going to be like that. I wasn’t going to incur the wrath of God and the contempt of the world only to die a miserable death. I would deny it. If my body wanted to be that way, then let it. I wouldn’t.

  The body won, as it always does.

  I did it again.

  After that I stopped fighting. I took a box of Kleenex to my room to spare the sheets and masturbated as often as I could. Sometimes three times a day. But I swore I would never touch a real man. Never fondle him, or kiss him, or take the chance of catching something in our passion.

  Many gay men make this promise to themselves when they are young — this I’ve learned from counselling. As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s ever kept it.