Play It Forward

by Frederick Smith

  Deacon worried our relationship away, thinking that every time I had a planning meeting for LADS, it was really a secret rendezvous with someone else. Once, he said he liked us working together so he could keep an eye on me and my schedule. So paranoid and threatened by my dream. But it turned out his paranoia was an indication of his own guilt about his own secret flings outside our relationship. That is another story for another time, but the words he spewed to me when I found out about his cheating stung forever: “Sorry, Malcolm, it just be’s that way sometime with us guys from the ’hood.”

  I regularly tell the young men in LADS this: If you’re doing something positive—and really working at it, not just daydreaming of it—and he’s not supportive because he’s thinking only of his needs, while it can hurt to call it quits, you’re better off. Better to be single and alone than alone in a relationship. I hope they listen to me, because it’s the truth.

  Something I knew I wouldn’t get from Deacon.

  “Deacon,” I yelled outside his apartment door. Well, his new young boyfriend’s apartment, where Deacon moved after we split up. “Open the damn door, you loser.”

  It was just off the swimming pool courtyard of the complex near Vermont and the 101 freeway, in a very working-class neighborhood. Like where people rode bikes and buses more than their own cars. I’d helped him move his few garbage bags of belongings here after the “it just be’s that way” conversation so he could be with his boy toy.

  I wasn’t usually a fan of causing a scene, but knowing my sex life was now fodder for any voyeur around the world with a computer warranted one. A young couple and their toddler looked up from their pool-wading session to watch the commotion I was causing. I knocked, well, BANGED on the door continuously for two minutes until Deacon answered. I knew he had to be there. His bike was chained to his front porch railing, and that 1999 Maxima he just had to have, and I bought for him, was still sitting on cinder blocks out front—a reminder that Deacon the social-program loser never did follow up on anything, including fixing and repainting the car to sell at a profit.

  When he opened his apartment door, I could see he was still living in luxurious bachelor-pad splendor. Pitiful, being twenty eight years old and being sprung by a twenty-two-year-old with no decorating taste. And if twenty-two did have taste, he most certainly didn’t have the ability or means to act on it. Bricks and cinder blocks served as a bookcase with no books, and a coffee table used more as a footrest than for coffee or knickknacks were the largest pieces of “furniture” in the room. Incense burned, irritating my eyes. An old tan futon, one that was in the spare bedroom of my apartment when I let him live with me, sat against the living room wall and was pulled out as a bed. I could hear Sade playing in the background. Clearly he was setting the mood for a romantic night with his new man, or maybe yet another man, who knew?

  “What the fuck is your problem, Malcolm?” Deacon asked angrily. His do-rag strings flung side to side as he yelled. He was dressed in plain white boxers only and was happily dangling left down there. Yes, I looked. He looked good as always. Dark brown, lean, and lovely, in that way that non-gym-going guys from the ’hood look who don’t have to work out or watch what they eat. “And why are you here?”

  “I’m here to fuck you up,” I said and did something I wasn’t raised to do. I socked him across the jaw. So much for the hand of God calming me or my tongue. Lord knows where that came from.

  “Aww, snap,” he said. He rubbed where I’d hit him and stood stunned. I expected a return hit to come any second. So far, nothing. “Where you learn that move?”

  “Chris Brown,” I said.

  “Damn, boy,” he said. “You getting a little street cred from the boys, huh?”

  “And you’re gonna get a lot more if you don’t take those videos down from GayClick,” I said.

  “Get in here.” He grabbed me inside the apartment and yelled outside to the happy family by the pool, “It’s cool, y’all. It’s cool. He don’t know what he talking about.” Slammed the door behind us.

  “They already know you’re gay,” I said. “Stop the DL act. That’s so 2005.”

  “You’re sexy when you’re mad, Malcolm,” Deacon said and smiled, attempting to be charming. He moved in closer to me, rubbed his face against mine, and whispered in my ear. “You make me wanna bend you over a chair and take you from behind like I used to.”

  I pushed him away from me. Maybe I had developed some street credibility since working with the young men at LADS. I’d certainly heard and seen it all since starting the work.

  “I’m not playing…and I’m not here to sleep with you. Where are they?” I asked as I looked around the living room. Opened up the nearest hallway closet. “Where are the cameras?”

  “Huh? What cameras?”

  “The ones you used to videotape our sex life, you dumb fuck,” I yelled. “The ones you kept hidden in my apartment to record us…doing things.”

  “Dang, Malcolm. Active imagination,” he said. “What story you been watching?”

  “This isn’t a game. It’s my life.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Videos of what we used to do when we were together,” I said. “Some in your old apartment. Most from my bedroom. If I had known you were taping us, I never would have consented. Didn’t our time together mean anything to you?”

  “Of course you meant a lot, Malcolm, but how do you know about any cameras or videotapes?” Deacon said. “That was my own private collection…for memories.”

  “It was our sex life, and it was meant to be private.”

  “And it is private, Malcolm,” Deacon said and opened his laptop. “I keep them all in a password-protected file, just for me to get off on once in a while.”

  Once the screen lit and Deacon accessed his videos, I saw my secret and dirty past come to life. He’d saved almost two hundred videos, videos I never knew he was making. Filed, very simply, with each of his previous boyfriends before me, with easy-to-understand headings: ass, jack, oral.

  I was disgusted.

  When we were together and I loved Deacon, I had no problem sharing or showing him how much I loved him. We did it safely and we did it often. That’s what couples are supposed to do when they’re in love and like each other. But they don’t videotape without permission.

  “Who else has access to your computer?” I asked. “What about the kid you live with? Has he seen these? You videotape him?”

  “I never showed him. He has his own laptop. Yes, I make movies of us.”

  “Well, someone has or had access to your computer, or else I wouldn’t be all over the Internet looking like a…never mind,” I said. “I need you to think really hard…a computer repair person, your little boyfriend, one of your or his friends?”

  I asked Deacon to get up so I could see the evidence of our past together. He did, and I pointed and clicked at random video files. Just to see the Deacon and Malcolm show. In a way, I was ashamed of the video archive. I’d always been the good boy, the good son, the one who made everything right and did the right thing. I was trying to teach gay young men how to live their lives with dignity and esteem, including their relationships and sex lives. Seeing myself acting like a porn star, albeit with my at-the-time boyfriend, was something I couldn’t quite reconcile. I felt like a living paradox.

  “Deacon, I have never been more disappointed than I am right now,” I said. “Why would you do something like this without my consent? Do you want to go back to almost-on-probation life?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll delete everything with you in it. Is that cool?”

  “The damage has been done,” I said. “Oh, and by the way, whoever uploaded those videos only put the ones where I’m visible and you’re not. Pretty slick and deliberate move, I’d say.”

  “I’m sorry, babe,” Deacon said and tried to reach for me. So sexy, but I wasn’t falling. Not this time. “Can I make it up? Break you off some before he come
s home?”

  “You’re duplicitous,” I said. “I have lost the last bit of respect I had for you, Deacon.”

  “What?”

  “Look it up,” I said.

  “Snap.”

  “I guess we didn’t mean anything to you?”

  He stood silent.

  And then I said the words I vowed never to say to anyone and that most Black men I know never want to hear, especially from someone they were or are close to.

  “You ain’t shit, Deacon. You’ll never amount to anything.”

  He put his hands around his face and nodded in disagreement. Like he was trying to figure out something. Like there was any way to fix my soon-to-be damaged reputation. Like he really cared anymore. I had to remind myself that Deacon left me because he was threatened by my latest career move with LADS.

  “I’ll be right back. Gonna run to the bathroom.”

  “Fine, I’m out,” I said. “You didn’t keep any backup files or videos anywhere else?”

  “Nah, once I finally got them all on my computer, I destroyed everything. They take up too much space. There’s nothing else.”

  “Fine.”

  Deacon disappeared from the living room. I waited until I heard the bathroom door close behind him before I got started. Knew I had to work quickly, before Deacon returned and before his new boyfriend caught me.

  I removed the cord attaching the laptop to the wall plug. I picked up the laptop and carried it to the front door. The young family that was wading in the pool when I arrived was nowhere to be found, which relieved me. Deacon and I probably scared them off. Good, no risk to them.

  And with an ease that surprised me, I, the good boy, the good son, the one who made everything right and did the right thing, did something not so right.

  I tossed Deacon’s laptop into the swimming pool, watched it sink to the bottom, and gave a friendly hello to Deacon’s new, young, and cute boyfriend as we passed each other through the apartment complex gates.

  Chapter 4

  “Yes, I really did throw his computer in the pool,” I said.

  “Oh my God, Malcolm,” Kyle said. “You’re crazy. I really mean it.”

  It was Monday morning, and I was in L.A.’s stop-and-go traffic going about twenty miles an hour. Days like this I thanked God my Prius was good on gas. My Bluetooth was perched on top of my left ear, both hands on the steering wheel, except for occasional bites of my morning McMuffin. I hadn’t had time to fix anything for breakfast. The drivers to the left and right of me were also having Bluetooth conversations. Always something to be done or talked about in L.A. For me, it was catching up with Kyle before I got to LADS and before he got to the television and film lot in Culver City where he worked as an executive.

  “I will admit it’s a little out of character for me,” I said.

  “A little?” Kyle laughed. “Good boys from Indiana don’t do things like that. Psych!”

  “And yes, I feel a little bad,” I said. “I know he probably can’t afford another laptop right away.”

  “Fuck that, Malcolm, he owns cameras small enough to videotape you when you don’t know it,” Kyle said. “He’ll figure it out. These young bucks always find ways to afford stuff they shouldn’t.”

  “True,” I said. Kyle did have a point. “Fuck that.”

  “Aren’t you worried he’ll call the police or something?”

  “And say what?” I said. “Hmm, ‘Officer, my ex tossed my computer in the pool because I was secretly videotaping our sex life for two years without his knowledge.’ Yeah, right.”

  “Point taken, girl. You’re a mess.”

  “I’m not a girl, but a woman,” I said and laughed, trying to make a heavy moment light. “But what still pisses me off is how nonchalant Deacon was about the whole thing. Like it’s a normal, everyday thing to make sex tapes without your partner’s consent.”

  “He was really that chill about it?” Kyle asked. “Wait, all the kids are whatever about technology.”

  “I mean, he said ‘sorry’ a few times,” I said. “But he didn’t offer to help get the videos removed from the website. He didn’t even have any idea how anyone got the files off his computer, though I think his little punk boyfriend did it. Or maybe Deacon did it. Who knows?”

  I grabbed my McMuffin when traffic came to a complete stop again.

  “No doubt. People will do anything these days. No shame.”

  “He didn’t even apologize for videotaping me without my permission,” I said. “The whole thing makes me sick. I’m just hoping the website honored my request and took the videos down. I emailed and called the site administrator last night and this morning. I don’t want to have to explain this to the people at work. If the kids at LADS, not to mention the advisory board…”

  “No doubt,” Kyle said. “But just so you know, I have no desire to check the website. You and your sex life…T-M-I, you know?”

  “Gee, Kyle, thank you for not being a perv.”

  We laughed. Brought some minor relief to my situation. I knew as soon as I got to work, I’d check my email and see a message from the website administrator confirming that my sex tapes would be off the Internet. Though I had no idea how long the videos had been online, in my mind I prayed-hoped-wished that guy from The Abbey, Compton and his group of friends, were the only ones to see them. Unlikely. But wishful thinking nonetheless.

  “Well, I’m about to pull into the studio lot,” Kyle said. “Another day of trying to find America’s next big television hit.”

  “Cool, thanks for listening to me vent,” I said. “I appreciate it, best friend.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll hit you up later this morning.”

  “Maybe I can meet up with you and Bernard after work?” I said. “I have a few days before my ‘single’ days are over. My nephew’s coming this weekend.”

  “That’s right, Blake, the gay rapper,” he said.

  “Yes, Blake,” I said. “That’s a whole ’nother story. But we’ll talk.”

  “We’ll talk,” Kyle said. “I’m at security check-in. Bye.”

  I continued my trek west on the 10 freeway. So close to the Crenshaw exit, yet so far, traveling five miles an hour now. The perfect speed for people watching my car neighbors on the freeway.

  Wondered if any of them had seen my sex tapes on GayClick. Somewhat relieved that soon the videos would be removed from the Internet, if they hadn’t been removed already.

  Chapter 5

  There are days when I think my friends and family might be right and that I’ve gotten in over my head with LADS.

  Being on call has its trade-offs, and you never know what you’ll deal with next—a young man gets put out of the family home or gets beat up outside a club or on the gay ho-stroll in the middle of the night, and you’re required to be there if you get the call.

  Sometimes you wonder if the stat—is it one in four, three, or two?—is in fact true and that it’s not a question of “if” but “when” the young men you’re working with will be diagnosed HIV-positive.

  Sometimes you wonder if they’ll end up in jail or prison for some nonviolent crime of survival.

  Sometimes you wonder if you, alone, can do what the community-at-large and politicians have not done.

  Sometimes you wonder when LADS will be self-sustaining and you’ll no longer have to dip into reserves or sink your own money into it. Even though it’s a nonprofit, the budget still needs to balance by the end of the fiscal year. The board of directors the city requires you to have makes sure you have a balanced budget and that you’re operating within city and state regulations for a community organization.

  You know that every day brings you another piece of anonymous hate mail or an “article” full of religious quotes and human interpretations of your impending doom, debates from local clergy, telephoned threats of violence, a stinging newspaper editorial that you’re airing the dirty laundry of your community, or disapproving looks from the underemployed men
who sit at the pay phone outside your office all day or the church secretary who strolls by at noon for her lunchtime walk.

  I pulled into the parking lot of LADS and willed myself to put all those negative and worrisome thoughts out my head. Put on my game face. Big smile. Optimism. Keeping a refreshed look. Being the leader my community and constituents at LADS wanted and needed me to be. I called it putting on my “Hillary,” whom I admired greatly, and who I figured went through a lot privately but still got up and fought for that 2008 campaign and those causes that mattered to her.

  After all, my name is Malcolm. Malcolm Martin Campbell. Talk about high expectations, being named after two of the most prolific and well-quoted leaders of Black community politics—Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Makes me wonder what my mother envisioned for my sister Marlena, with her being named after my mom’s favorite soap opera character from Days of Our Lives, Dr. Marlena Evans. Did she want a doctor? Or did she want a long-suffering heroine?

  When I entered the lobby area of LADS, I was not greeted by my front desk assistant, DeMarco, who was wearing the oversized sunglasses I’d told him not to wear inside while working. He called them a necessity. For what, I didn’t know, because he was far from being the Jackie Onassis fashionista he thought he was, and he definitely was not visually impaired. I’d told DeMarco that if he needed this job, like I knew he did, then the shades were a negative.

  DeMarco came to LADS after a violent relationship with a possessive man old enough to be his father, who left him on life support and without any of the material goods he’d collected during his time with the man. Penniless, with no clothes, no shelter, and no real marketable skills. I found DeMarco to be very energetic with a fatherly wit beyond his twenty years. An old soul, as they call the type. Found a family to take him in for a few months, put him in training for office managerial work, and offered him an entry-level job at the front desk of LADS.