by John Goode
“Well, you did,” Kyle countered bluntly. I looked over at him and he added, “You did! All your mom is saying is that there’s going to be another gay person in Foster over Christmas. You’re the one imbuing it with more importance than it deserves. To be honest, that says more about you than it does about your mom.”
I had known he was smart; Linda couldn’t brag enough about her genius son when we went out. This was the first time I had been on the receiving end of Kyle’s intellect. I had always assumed she’d been bragging as parents tended to do. But looking at him staring back at me, I realized he was special. Jokingly I said to Brad, “You date someone this smart? You are a braver man than I am. But you’re right; my mom is just trying to be nice and I completely misread it.” I looked at Kyle and asked him seriously, “Do I seem that lonely?”
Without a second’s hesitation, he answered, “Yes.”
That took me aback, literally. I kicked back in the booth, not expecting that quick an answer. Was it that obvious? Was I that pathetic?
I really hated that the answer might be yes to both questions.
“Yeah. Maybe meeting this guy isn’t such a good idea,” I said after a while. “If I’m this wound up, I’m just going to mess things up.” Looking at Kyle, I grinned. “Good call.”
“Thanks,” he said, taking a drink of his tea. “Let me ask you something. Why not go out with Robbie?”
Oy! Again with Robbie. Looks like I am going to go over those memories no matter how much I don’t want to.
Explaining Robbie will take some time, so bear with me as I try to thumbnail it for you. When I came back to Foster after my accident, I was torn between two opposing desires. The first was to remain hidden so no one would know I was gay. The second was the crushing loneliness I felt when I lay in my bed staring up at my ceiling. At first, it was easy: just shut up, ignore it, and hope it would all just figure itself out.
Time passed, and all that happened was it got worse.
Shortly after my mini-meltdown when I came out to my parents, I found out about the Bear’s Den. It’s a small gay bar on the outskirts of town, the only gay bar for almost a hundred miles around. It’s where most of the gay people in the sleepy little towns around Foster got to socialize and meet. I heard about it when Riley, a friend of mine I went to high school with, came to the shop saying he was moving back into town.
Riley was one of those rare guys who was a jock but smart. And no one hated him for it. Everyone liked him, but no one ever felt like they knew what lay behind his hazel eyes. When people talked about him, I felt they were talking about me when they brought up the way he kept people at arm’s length. Riley was one of those people you wanted to know more about because he was a private person, and I could relate. I had crushed on him, as I had with every other guy I played football with, but never moved on it. So when he came to the store and told me he was moving back into town with his lover, Robbie, it kind of floored me.
Riley’s dad was into oil in some way or another, maybe distribution, maybe actual production, but something with a lot of money about it. The family had more than enough money to be considered wealthy around these parts, more than enough money to send their son out of state for college, which was where he met this Robbie guy. Riley explained all this to me over a Coke while he asked how my parents were and what I had been up to. We caught up on lost time as I resisted the urge to just blurt out “I never knew you were gay.” Instead, I sat there nodding and smiling, dazed. It wasn’t until he was done and said I should head out to the Bear’s Den to meet Robbie one night that I realized he knew. Somehow he knew I was gay and was throwing me a lifeline.
You know what? I was right. I’m not ready to keep going down that path right now. Let’s just say that Robbie and I do not get along.
“He isn’t my biggest fan. Besides, I don’t think we’re each other’s type,” I said cryptically.
Kyle leaned forward. “What type is that?”
I paused for a second, wondering how much he knew. “What did he tell you about me?”
“Kyle is working for him,” Brad interjected quickly. “At his store.”
“Oh,” I grunted, knowing that was a bad thing. “Well, then, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about me so far.” I was about to ask how much Robbie had told him when I noticed a couple of people standing in front of my shop peeking in the window. “Damn it, I knew I couldn’t leave the store for more than five minutes.” I got up. “We’ve been swamped, and I’ve had zero time to think about this.” I laid a twenty on the table. “That’s to make up for me eating all your food.” I was about to walk out when a thought hit me. Turning to Brad, I asked, “Hey, you need a job?”
“Me?”
I laughed and pointed to Kyle. “Well, he already has one.”
“Um, yeah I guess,” he replied after a few seconds.
“Awesome! Come by after lunch and I’ll start training you.” I looked at Kyle and then back at Brad. “And you were right, this one is a keeper.” I saw Kyle redden slightly as I walked toward the door.
Kyle jumped up. “Mr. Parker, wait!” He hurried over to me. “Can I ask you a question?”
I saw Brad watching us curiously. I nodded. “Sure, what’s up?”
“Have you heard anything about Kelly Aimes?”
I paused and tried to connect the name with a face. Kelly Aimes sounded familiar but honestly, a lot a kids went through the shop and I never caught their name. “Which one is he?” I asked.
“Big guy, plays football. Friend of Brad’s? Dark hair?” he described.
And suddenly the name clicked for me. Kelly had been Brad’s shadow since junior high. Yeah, right—Kelly Aimes—big kid, played good ball. I shook my head. “No, what should I have heard?”
He just shook his head. “Nothing. I was just curious.”
I was about to press the point when I saw a couple more people walk up to the front of the shop. “Shit. I have to go. Everything okay?” I asked him.
He gave me a pretty good fake smile and nodded. “It’s all good, thanks.”
It was pretty obvious that “it” was all not good; but I didn’t have the time to dwell on Kyle’s question. I jogged across the street, and, within an hour, all my thoughts consisted of ways to get through the day. In fact, it was a couple of days before I was able to find enough time to hang out with Linda and ask her about it.
“So I had a talk with Kyle,” I said over our third beer.
She nodded. “I heard. He asked me how hard it was for you to be that cute and secretly be gay. He couldn’t understand how some girl didn’t figure it out.”
“And what did you say?” I asked, knowing she was setting me up.
“I told him some girl did figure it out. Me.” She gave me a bratty smile, and I stuck my tongue out at her. “So, you make a decision on the Wallace boy yet?”
“Your son seems of the opinion that I am overthinking it,” I commented between sips.
She chuckled. “My son seems to have nailed the problem in one. Admit it, he has, hasn’t he?”
I grumbled before I finished my beer. “He might have a small point.”
“Oh no! He is completely, 100 percent correct, and you know it.” She sounded so smug, it killed me because she was right. I hated it when she was right because it usually meant I was wrong since we didn’t agree on much. “You, as always, have that four-cylinder brain working overtime making a simple problem a thousand times more complicated. You need to decide if you are going to meet him or not, and then just stick with it, because if you keep thinking about it, a gear is going to burst out of your forehead and kill someone.”
“I am not going to kill someone,” I mumbled. I didn’t even believe what I was saying at that point.
“I didn’t say you were going to kill someone, I implied that you were going to get so frustrated that a literal cog would bust out of your head, fly across the room at terminal velocity, and strike another human being, doing serious injury and ending
their life.” I looked at her in disbelief and she added, “Just to be clear.”
I asked her sarcastically, “Have I informed you lately that I hate you?”
She shrugged. “It’s a given.”
I nodded as we finished our beer.
“So Kyle quit his job,” she said in the gap.
That got my attention. “The one with Robbie?” I asked, trying not to seem too interested.
“Yes, that one.” She rolled her eyes. “Are you happy now? One more person is on the ‘Robbie is an asshole’ bandwagon.”
“I never said Robbie was an asshole,” I informed her, wishing I sounded as if I really meant the words. However, Linda knew the truth.
“Oh please, you guys have never gotten along and you know it.”
In her eyes, that was how she had always seen things between Robbie and me, though the truth was something much stranger than fiction.
I HAD taken Riley up on his offer to visit the Bear’s Den and meet his new partner Robbie the weekend after he came to see me. The bar itself did not fill me with a warm fuzzy feeling when I pulled into the gravel parking lot, but I parked anyway. It looked like every bar in a movie where someone gets killed, raped, or both. I sat in my car for almost an hour trying to convince myself to open the door and get out.
I refused to move.
I knew if I got out of my car and walked in to the Bear’s Den, everything would change. I was no longer curious; I was no longer confused. If I walked through that doorway, I would no longer be some homosexual version of Schroeder’s cat—is that right? Wait. Schroeder was the character from Peanuts. I meant Schrödinger’s cat, which is some weird thought question they ask in physics. I have no idea what it really means, but my roommate in college tried to explain it to me once. You put this cat in a box with a vial of poison and close the box. Now as long as the box is closed the cat is not dead, which sounds crazy but it goes like this—the cat is alive until someone sees it is dead, so the second it is observed it is made real. Until then, you can just guess that the cat is dead.
I think.
Anyway, getting out of the car was like that. If I never got out of the car, then I was never actually gay, but the second I opened the door, my gayness was a fact. I know that sounds like an incredibly stupid and cowardly way to look at it, but I still wasn’t ready to say the words “I am gay” out loud. So I sat in my car in the parking lot and tried to tell myself it didn’t matter if I walked into the bar or not, but my mind refused to play along.
Turns out nothing I said made a difference and after an hour, I started my car. Which, of course, was the exact moment Riley and Robbie pulled up in their car. I swear to you, I can’t make this shit up. Fate just has too much time on her hands if she has time to set up things like that. They of course saw me, which meant if I left, I would have to explain to them why I left, which would lead to me explaining that I was so far in the closet I had hanger marks on my back.
Instead, I took a deep breath and got out of my car.
“You were going to chicken out, right?” Riley asked as I slammed my door. “You were just thinking about burning rubber out of here like a little girl.”
“Shut up” was all I could manage as a comeback.
“Right,” he said, stifling a laugh. “So Tyler, this is my partner, Robbie. Robbie, this is Tyler.”
If you had asked me before that night if I could tell if someone came from Texas only by looking at them, I would have told you the whole idea was stupid. People from Texas are not stereotypes with big cowboy hats, boots, and faded jeans with a ring worn into their back pocket from where they kept their Skoal. We don’t all speak with a drawl or use the word pardner, just for starters. When I see someone in a movie or on TV acting like that, I just roll my eyes.
But one look at Robbie, and I knew he was from nowhere near Foster or, for that matter, Texas.
I don’t say that to put Robbie down; he was handsome, in a city way, with his hair gelled up and a pair of skinny jeans that could have put my best pair of Wranglers to shame—hey, I didn’t say that those stereotypes were all wrong; I just meant all of us aren’t like that all the time. He looked gay, and again, not in a bad way. He wasn’t acting like a girl or carrying himself effeminately. Robbie was obviously gay and didn’t care who knew.
Frankly, it scared the shit out of me because it was everything I was not.
“Hi,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Tyler. I went to school with Riley.”
He paused for a second before shaking my hand. “Of course you did.”
I looked at Riley, confused; he was shaking his head and laughing. “Robbie is under the impression they put something in the water around here.”
Robbie hit Riley’s chest and looked back at me. “I’m serious! I feel like I’ve walked into a goddamned Abercrombie and Fitch commercial. Were there any normal-looking guys in your high school?”
“Um… yes?” I said, not sure how to answer.
“It’s no wonder half of you are freakin’ gay,” he said, stomping off toward the bar. “You guys look like you’re all underwear models on a break.” He swung open the bar door and music spilled out into the night. The parking lot was almost too quiet after he slammed the door behind him, closing the music back in.
“Well, he’s nice,” I said hesitantly.
Riley laughed and slapped me on the back and walked alongside me, shepherding me toward the door. “He’s still adjusting to Foster. I call it the Green Acres syndrome. I so wanted to find someone to pretend to have a talking pig, but no one would play along.”
I had known Riley all through high school. I mean, we weren’t best friends, but we hung around the same crowd so I thought I knew him pretty well. But this guy was someone completely different. He was open, expressive, laughing….
And then it hit me.
“You’re happy, aren’t you?” I asked him before we walked in the door. “This whole coming-out thing, it’s made you that happy?”
He stopped and thought about it for a moment. “You know, I am,” he answered with enthusiasm. “I don’t know how much of it has to do with me being head over heels for Robbie, but a weight lifted off me once I came out. I don’t look over my shoulder. I don’t edit everything that comes out of my mouth. I mean, I don’t feel like I’m acting different; I just know I can be myself.”
What Riley said surprised me, because I was expecting him to say he was happy because he was with someone, but I could tell it was more than that. This was who Riley was, the real Riley, and that was somebody no one but Robbie had met or talked to or known before he’d come out. Riley was happy.
Those three words were like a cold bucket of water being thrown in my face, dispelling the multitude of fears that hovered around me.
Which, of course, made me think: who the hell was the real Tyler?
LINDA pushed her empty toward the center of the table. “Well, if you don’t think Robbie is an asshole, I’d hate to see how you react to someone you really don’t like.”
I ignored the barb, knowing she was fishing for me to comment more on the subject, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready to go there yet, not even in my mind.
“So what is the final decision on Matt Wallace?” she asked, getting up and putting her coat on.
“Oh, leave me alone,” I whined and then instantly hated myself for doing it.
“So that’s a typical Parker ‘I refuse to make a choice until my back is up against a wall with no time left and even then I will find a way to make a half choice instead of just doing what I really want to do anyway.’ Got it.”
“Go away,” I said, folding my arms and collapsing toward the tabletop again.
I felt her mess my hair up. “Cheer up, pretty boy. If none of this works out, you can rent yourself out as an escort for middle-aged women who like to have nonthreatening gay men over for dinner.”
I looked up. “So then, I can use you as a reference?”
She flipped me off and walked o
ut of the bar.
The next week consisted of a blur of people coming in and out, buying every sports-related present they could think of. Oh, and occasional food and less-occasional sleep. Even with Brad’s help, I was overwhelmed by the amount of foot traffic walking in empty-handed and staggering out with at least one piece of equipment or clothing in a bag. The only good thing about that was I had little time to think about Matt and what I wanted to do about him. In fact, I had almost forgotten him entirely in the haze of exhaustion the Christmas rush creates.
Then I got a call late one afternoon from Linda.
“Is this my monthly call from Dial-a-Bitch?” I asked, tossing a load of uniforms into the washing machine. Brad was out front dealing with customers while I tried to catch up with all the back work we had.
“He’s here” was all she said.
“Who?” I asked jokingly. “Jesus? Does he look pissed? Does he still have those abs?”
Her voice got even sterner, which was saying something about Linda’s voice. “Matt. Wallace. Is. Here,” she whispered into the phone. She was at work, which meant she was using her cell at the register, something she could get fired for.
I felt my stomach clench up.
“He just walked in the door. If you want to run into him casual-like instead of being hooked up by your mother, then you better haul ass down here.” She hung up, leaving me standing there dumbfounded, staring blankly at my phone.
I dropped the uniforms balanced on my other forearm and rushed through the front of the shop. “He’s here,” I yelled at Brad as I passed him. “Lock up for me!” I’m not sure if he understood what I said, but I trusted him to handle the shop in my absence.
The Better Buy was just on the edge of town, part of the new shopping complex they opened up a few years ago. It seems a development company came into town wanting to build one of those gigantic mega mall complexes with the Better Buy as the corner store. The city council had turned down their request to build it off Second Street, saying it would have disrupted the flow of the city proper. I didn’t know what they meant by that, but I assumed it was something along the lines of “We don’t like change!” so the idea went away, but the mall didn’t. The parking lot was crowded as usual this time of the year, but “crowded” for Foster is probably like a Tuesday anywhere else. I rushed past the Toys for Tots Marine just inside the front door, doing my level best to ignore the hot, uniformed man who was way too young for me to be looking at.