by John Goode
The only person who knew I liked guys in high school was my best friend, Linda Stilleno. She had tried to go out with me my sophomore year and ended up figuring out my secret. At first, I was terrified because with one word she could end my high school life, but I soon realized having at least one person to talk to made all the difference in the world.
“You’re quiet,” Linda observed when I had said nothing for several minutes.
The Rodeo Club was a local bar a block away from the sporting goods store my dad had owned and run for forty years. When he and mom decided to retire to Florida, Dad deeded the store to me. Linda had dropped by the store at closing and asked if I wanted to get a beer with her. Since my options consisted of going home, changing my clothes and heading to the YMCA to work out, going home to my parents’ empty house and staring blankly at TV until I went to sleep, or just going home to watch some porn while I got off before I went to sleep, I decided to go with Linda.
This was what my life had boiled down to lately.
“My mom called me,” I told her and examined the label on my beer intently, not wanting to make eye contact.
“They want you to fly to Florida for Christmas?” She gestured for another round for us.
I shook my head. “No. Mom and Dad know how much money we make over the holidays. There’s no way I could afford to close the store for that long.”
“Are they okay?” Concern entered her voice, since she knew my parents pretty well.
“Yeah, they’re fine,” I said, sighing.
She grabbed the beer out of my hand to make me look at her. “I swear to God, Tyler, if you don’t tell me why you are pouting, I am going to shove this bottle so far up—”
“Okay!” I said, cutting her off before she could finish the sentence. “She called me to tell me someone is gay.”
That made her pause.
“Someone from Foster,” I added, hoping she would get it.
“Someone we knew?” she prompted patiently. She and I had pretty much hung out with the same crowd growing up. Since we didn’t as adults, she knew the person had to have been someone from the past. I nodded. “Who?”
The thought that maybe I shouldn’t just blurt out someone’s sexuality because my friend asked passed my mind way too late to do any good. Now that I’d started, I couldn’t not talk about it, so I just shrugged and said, “Matt Wallace.”
She stared at me for a few seconds before saying, “Um, yeah, everyone knows that.”
Now it was my turn to stare. “Everyone?” I asked, disbelieving.
She laughed and passed my half-empty beer back to me. “He went to Berkeley for college and ended up moving to San Francisco. If he isn’t gay, then he went an awful long way to be straight.”
The bartender put down two bottles and took her empty away. I waited until he was out of earshot before I spoke. “You know not everyone in San Francisco is gay, right?”
She took a long swig of her beer. “The ones who aren’t just can’t afford to move. Trust me, he’s gay.” Suddenly, all the light bulbs in her brain went on at the same time. Sitting up straighter, Linda seemed to think about it for a few seconds before asking, “Wait, how does your mother know?”
Now she was getting it.
“My mom talks to his mom.” I sounded like a condemned man. All I needed was a slow, deep drumbeat under my words.
“Oh no,” she said, finally realizing what I was so quiet about.
I’d spent most of high school going out with girls, trying to hide my true nature. Because I was on the football team and wasn’t a hideous chud creature, it wasn’t that hard to find someone to go out with. I never stayed with one girl because there wasn’t any way I could keep up the charade for any length of time. My game of musical girlfriends gave me a reputation as a player in town, not a bad player, because I never hit on them, but a player.
Which, of course, my mom defined as “Tyler just hasn’t found the right girl yet.”
My mother took it upon herself to be my own little matchmaker, a job she somehow changed into a crusade. Since I was too afraid to come out, there wasn’t much I could say so I just endured her efforts. And like any good mother, she took my silence as a sign of acceptance.
Then I got a football scholarship to Florida.
Once I had escaped moved out of state, the most my mom could do was ask me endless questions about my love life. The questioning was about as uncomfortable as you might imagine it. I went out with a couple of girls my freshman year. I had less of a problem selling my “player” vibe in Florida. People expected that guys on the team were going to sleep around. I really thought I was going to survive college without having to make a serious commitment to a girl. Then I caught a forty-three yard pass late in the fourth quarter against Virginia. I got hit so hard that I literally lost consciousness for a moment.
When I woke up, I was looking up at the sky and my left leg was twisted in a way the human leg was not designed for.
I lost my scholarship and had to relearn how to walk. That sounds painful, but it was nothing compared to seeing my dad’s face when he found out I was never going to play football again. It was a horrible moment and, in my opinion, one of the lowest moments of my life. Everything I had done up to that point had been steps on my path to playing football. When I woke up on the field that day and knew what had happened, I also realized I was lost with no idea what to do next.
I returned to Foster, learned how to walk without a limp, and tried to move forward.
Which was, of course, a cue for my mom to open her matchmaking service again.
My parents had planned for years to retire and move to Florida, leaving the store to me. So my mom knew the time she had left to get me married was quickly coming to an end. I kept trying to make excuses, but she thought I was retreating from people because I was depressed about my accident. She kept pushing, I kept dodging, and then one night I just snapped.
Which was how my parents found out I was gay.
My dad went a little nuts, but not in a bad way. He just could not handle that his only son, his pride and joy, liked guys. I suppose he went through the normal stages every dad must when they find out their son is gay. Denial: There is no way you can be gay; you dated girls. Anger: How can you do that to your mother? You know how much she wanted grandchildren. More denial: Maybe it’s just a phase. Have you thought of that? Bargaining: Maybe you just haven’t found the right girl. There are lots more girls out there. A little more denial: But you seemed so happy with your girlfriends. Depression: Was it something I did wrong? Something I could have done better? The last bit of denial: But I saw you kiss girls.
It was my mother though who finally brought some kind of acceptance.
She had no male ego to overcome, no illusions that I was some überathlete. In her eyes, I was her baby and that was all that counted. She took Dad out one afternoon, and they had a talk. To this day, I have no idea what she said to him but when they returned to the house, Dad was changed. He would never be completely happy with me being gay, but he stopped complaining about it, and we went back to relating to each other through sports.
My mother didn’t even pause in her quest to find me a mate. She just moved to another gender. Every week there was another article about gay rights lying on the table for me to read. She began by zeroing in on the physical therapists who worked with me to rehabilitate my leg. While we did slow-motion quad extensions, she launched a series of completely unsubtle and exhaustive questions about their sexual orientation. After a month, the in-home agency began sending only girls to our house. I’m pretty sure some of the guys complained about sexual harassment.
Undeterred, my mom continued her search.
Which brought me back to my current problem.
“Does she know Matt Wallace lives out of state?” Linda asked, snapping me out of my stupor.
“She has to,” I answered miserably. “Which means she is either trying to get me to move or set me up with a hookup.”
I found no humor in that statement at all, but Linda seemed to find an endless vein of humor as she began to laugh louder than the music.
“Knock it off,” I said, trying to quiet her as I looked around the small bar nervously. “You’re going to attract attention.”
She wiped tears from her eyes as she swallowed her next round of mirth. “You do know it’s bad when your mom’s trying to get you laid for Christmas. A sure sign you are wound up too tight.”
“I am not wound up too tight,” I protested, but we both knew I was lying through my teeth.
I had tried going out with a total of three men in my life, each one worse than the last. I tended to end up being attracted to other men who were confused or in the closet or confused and in the closet, which made the already frustrating process of dating a complete and total car wreck of an experience.
When my parents moved away and left me the store, I hid behind the responsibility so I could give up on dating altogether. There was a small gay bar out of town, which brought up a whole series of memories I don’t want to get into, so let me say after a while, I just stopped going and gave up on the idea of dating someone and leave it at that for right now.
My mother, it seems, never did.
“So then meet him,” the woman who was quickly becoming my ex-best friend said to me from across the table. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
“I am pretty sure that every single bad idea in the world started with those words.”
I drank the rest of my beer and tried to push the thoughts about Matt from my mind, but they refused to budge. I spent the next few days in a daze as I worked the oncoming Christmas rush, trying to figure out how I could have missed the fact one of the Wallace brothers was gay all this time.
From the time I reached junior high, I realized that most of Foster, Texas’s school population looked on the Wallace brothers as living legends. By high school, I figured out that a lot of the adult population felt the same way. They were three of the biggest, strongest, and most athletic guys anyone knew. They always seemed to be together, which gave them the illusion of being bigger than any normal guys I knew; and though no single one of them was stunningly handsome, the three of them together somehow brought their best features out and practically eliminated any weaknesses, so each of them became even better looking. On the field, they were the very models of a modern day jock. Off the field, they were an erotic distraction I didn’t need.
I remember Matt was the youngest of the three and the one who made me the most nervous.
When I was a teenager, I had a bad habit of losing my keys no matter how hard I tried to hold onto them. The space in my brain was finite, and a majority of it was occupied with keeping up my straight pretense, or at least that’s how I saw it. Because of that, it was no wonder that other things, like house keys, tended to fall through the cracks.
Sometimes literally.
After the fourth time, my dad refused to make another copy, complaining that there were now more sets of keys to our house wandering around Foster than there were doors to and inside our house. My mother had taken to helping him in the afternoons with the uniform rentals, which meant if I got home and realized I was locked out, I had to wait for someone to come home. It was frustrating at first, but after a while I tried to make the best of it.
I stashed some books under the back porch and, when my keys went missing, I just leaned against the back door and read until someone came home. It was relaxing in a way my teenage mind couldn’t process at the time. Being alone was the only time I could be myself, even if it just meant reading a book with my shoes off. I’m not sure when he started doing it, but about a month into my reading, I noticed Matt peeking through my back fence.
At first I had no idea what he was doing there. I would watch him watch me as I waited for him to say something. It took me a few times to realize he was the guy who had been staring at me when I mowed the lawn. I had dismissed it as just another kid staring at the time, but once I connected the two events, I became nervous. Each time, he would wander away, leaving me more confused than before. This went on for a week, until the thought that maybe he liked me passed through my mind, which was the worst thing that could have occurred to me. It set off a paranoid set of dominoes that made me wonder if I was giving off some vibe he was picking up on. Those thoughts spiraled into themselves until I headed to my dad’s shop and waited for him to close rather than risk being seen gay.
The sad part was that I never once thought Matt might be gay also.
As I sat in the same shop years later, I felt ancient as I stared at Nancy’s diner across the street. I saw Brad’s car pull up in front and him and Kyle jump out and race inside. I had taken an interest in Brad ever since I heard he had come out as Foster High’s first gay athlete. Kyle and he had done what I would have never had the guts to do at their age, and the least I could do was try to support them any way I could. Brad was the path not taken, a younger me who hadn’t let his fear of being exposed stop him from going after what he really wanted. In Brad’s case, that was Kyle.
The two of them looked so happy, so freaking young, that I felt even more depressed. I suppose there is nothing in the world that reminds someone he is an old coot than seeing a young couple in love. All you can see is the potential, the energy, and the time. They have their whole lives ahead of them.
While mine felt like it was ending one second at a time.
I shook myself out of my self-decorated and catered pity party and decided to take advantage of a rare lull at the shop. I locked the front door and jogged across the street to the diner. It was overrun with the usual lunch crowd, but it wasn’t so big a place that I couldn’t see where they were sitting from the door.
Out of breath, I slid into the booth and announced, “I need some help.” My mouth was dry, and I realized I was so worked up I was close to having a panic attack. I grabbed Brad’s Coke and downed it, trying to calm down.
“Hey,” Brad said, scooting over to give me some room. “Um, help yourself.”
I nodded as I finished the drink. “Thanks.” I looked across the table and smiled. “Hey, Kyle.”
Kyle waved back, still half shocked that I had crashed their date.
“So what’s up?” Brad asked, probably wondering if I was having a heart attack or something.
I felt my mind start to lock up as the familiar fear of being found out came back full force. Before I was completely crippled, I blurted out, “My mom is trying to set up me with someone.”
Brad looked at me, confused. “Your mom? I thought she lived in Florida.”
I heard myself snap at him. “She does, but she still owns a phone.” I mentally berated myself immediately—he hadn’t done a thing to me. That thought was followed by the humbling fact that I was a grown man talking to two teenagers about my love life because I didn’t have any gay friends my own age.
I was truly pathetic.
Brad paused for a moment before asking me in a neutral voice, “Okay, so who is she trying to set you up with?”
“Matt Wallace,” I said, picking a piece of ice out of the glass.
“I don’t know him. He’s from here?” he asked, no doubt curious because he hadn’t heard the gay population of Foster had doubled overnight.
“He’s from here, but he doesn’t live here,” I corrected him. “We kind of went to high school together. He lives in San Francisco.”
“Your mom is trying to set you up with a guy who lives in another state?” Kyle asked.
I nodded. “Well, he’s coming back for Christmas; his parents still live here.”
“So she’s more setting you up for casual sex,” Brad clarified. Kyle and I just gaped at him. “What? It’s not like you’re going to date him for a week.” Neither one of us said a word. “Come on! Like I am the only one here who knows what a hookup is.”
I shook my head slowly. “I’m pretty sure my mom is not trying to set me up with a hookup.” Even though the
same thought had crossed my mind a few times.
He shrugged. “Okay, so then what’s your problem?”
“I don’t know if I should meet him,” I said as Gayle brought them their food.
“Oh! Hey Tyler, you eating?” she asked, surprised to see me sitting with them. Gayle had run Nancy’s forever. When I was Brad and Kyle’s age, I remembered her working the counter. The only differences between then and now were her hair was a little grayer and there were more lines around her eyes. She seemed like a fixed point that held Foster together. Even though I had never said word one about my sexuality to her, I was pretty sure she knew everything there was to know about my life, sexual preference included.
“I’m not staying that long, but thanks,” I said, giving her a smile.
“Okay. Guys, here are your burgers. Holler if you need anything,” she called over her shoulder as she walked to another table.
As soon as she was gone, I sighed. “I mean, you’re right, I can’t date him for a few days. But God, it sucks being gay here.” I picked at Brad’s plate, eating a fry and making an effort not to get too maudlin.
“Have you tried online?” Kyle asked, putting ketchup on his burger.
“Ugh,” I said, eating another fry. “Complete waste of time.”
“So then meet him,” Brad offered.
“But what if I like him?” I asked honestly.
“So then don’t meet him,” Brad suggested, grabbing his burger. I was pretty sure he thought I was going to eat it too.
“But, God, Christmas sucks when someone’s alone.” I sighed again. God, I sounded like a moping teenager.
“So then meet him, but as a friend,” Kyle suggested brightly. “There’s nothing saying you have to date or have sex with him. But you can make a new friend and see where that goes.”
“Yeah, that’s an idea,” I agreed between fries. “Actually, a really good idea.”
Kyle made sense, a lot of sense, actually. For some reason the option of just meeting Matt as a friend had never crossed my mind. All I had been focused on was “What if I fell in love?” and all that crap. What was wrong with me? “You know? I mean, who said it has to be all or nothing?”