There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  A miracle of this magnitude would take more time than your garden-variety sort, so I started early, in January, and enlisted my most gifted advisor, Micah. I will share our conversation with you almost verbatim so that you know there was much more to him than his cruelty, and more importantly, so that you know it is often queers who stand, invisible, between the bad world we have and the worse world we could have. You should also know that twenty-four-year-old me still preferred to avoid face-to-face communication and so, in this case, resorted to an online chat.

  ME: so how abt this

  maybe i should just put it out there

  on my own terms

  as a period of experimentation that i went through to find xyz

  and cope w/ xyz

  a period of experimentation that also delved into prescription medicine and liquor

  MICAH: i think this will require a phone convo

  ME: lool

  well it doesn’t have to be asap

  bc i just thought of it late last night on the plane

  MICAH: yea, it sounds like a late thought lol

  that i don’t think i could adequately engage via chat

  i see a feasibility so far re: putting it out there on your own terms

  but it’s the explanation that i’d have to hear more directly

  ME: yea

  i kinda feel that the only winning way (in the long term) is to put it out there on my own terms

  MICAH: I agree

  absolutely

  and i think u, with being who you are, could put it out there on your own terms

  which might also be new terms

  that require a person to judge from within, and not from a external judgement of a person from their specific association w/a certain group

  and not in an attempt to break any barriers, but just to be ur fucking self

  ME: right

  so i think b/w us, we can craft a really good piece/platform

  if i run, it has to be done

  bc worse than the risk of putting it out there in a big way

  is the risk of being seen as a sham

  in a huge scandal

  i just couldn’t stand that

  MICAH: and also, there are just many, many factors here

  a black male

  recognizably normative

  college athlete

  leader

  scholar

  saying something that exposes a truth, but a truth that is based on his own convictions

  and forcing others, regardless of how they want to categorize or view, to take into consideration a possibility

  that they never have to face in the public eye, except outside of scandal

  ME: exactly

  i refuse to be scandalized

  that’s just so low

  the impt thing is for it to be the second big hit

  the first big hit has to be all casey gerald as he is known

  the ideas

  the energy

  blah blah

  then casey gerald puts out a little deal on a new generation of americans—op-ed to essay length

  then casey gerald puts out a piece on his sexual experiences and what it means for him and for america

  with a sentence here and there abt prescription drug use

  and alcohol—drinking alone in the room and such

  really driving home the psychosocial

  “my mental maturity was lightyears ahead of my emotional maturity, so i struck out for love and affection wherever i could find it”

  MICAH: right

  ME: we need to start drafting this

  MICAH: right

  Micah seemed to have reached a point of fatigue and/or disgust, but his home training prevented him from being anything other than respectful, even in the presence of a monster. I took his respect to mean that I had a damn solid strategy, so focused on other matters until, by early March, the campaign was one decision (mine) away from being a go. I could not make that decision without ensuring that the message was battle ready, and there was only one way to know—test it—and only one test audience that came to mind: Brenda Cox.

  I have tried to find some complex reason as to why Cox serves the role that she does—the person I and many other young people before and after me have run to in crisis. But the more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that there was nothing to conclude. Nothing complex, at least. The woman is just there. Whenever you need her. Whenever you don’t need her. Before you ask her to be there. After you don’t want her to be there anymore. She can be a real son of a bitch, I’ll tell you that, and I would advise you to never cross her because she is willing to excommunicate absolutely anyone from her life—even more willing than me or anyone else I’ve heard of. Until such time, and though she will fuss and nag and cajole and talk louder than necessary and longer than necessary and tease you when you make a simple mistake—Boy, you don’t have not one lick of common sense—and get all up in your business when it has nothing to do with her, she will be there, in your worst moment, ready to listen, even to your worst idea, which I drove to her house to share.

  It was night. Her red front door was visible in the dark, as was the low-slung white house, though no weeds were visible in the yard, that night or any day, as was the case for most lawns in this neighborhood full of decades-old three-bedroom homes owned by people, families even, who did not make much noise unless the Dallas Cowboys were playing—and even then, not much. The house was empty, save her. She stood in the kitchen. I sat in a barstool across from her, leaning on the island, getting the message together in my head. I cannot remember whether my voice quavered because I was nervous or because I believed that quavering was the tone this performance required—I was, after all, confiding that years of psychological distress had caused me to turn, from sixteen to twenty-two, to the arms of strangers, of men, to love in sordid places. A troubled young man I had been, as are we all, and so on.

  Cox sighed. Smirked. Turned to the cabinet and pulled down two wine glasses. Opened the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of white wine from the door. Slid open a drawer and picked up a corkscrew. All this took about six years to accomplish. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. She placed a glass in front of me. One in front of her. Poured. Poured. We had never before had a drink together, that I remember.

  I already knew you were gay, boy. She laughed. I was just wondering when you were going to tell me.

  Standard straight person drivel. But Brenda Cox is not the standard straight person.

  I figured when you were in high school— Boy, you never had any girls, and that was odd. But then Tashia came over here . . . It was late one night I didn’t know what was wrong . . . Maybe you were a sophomore or junior. She had walked in your room and your computer was up and she saw something, can’t even remember . . . whatever. That girl rushed over here all worked up and she say “Ms. Cox Ms. Cox what should I do???” And I said well, girl, just leave him alone. Just leave him alone he’ll be okay he’ll say something whenever he’s ready. She took a long sip of wine. Oh! Then she called me after the prom. Hmph! Couldn’t find your ass . . . and she calls me when you come back, talking about you went to some college party in Carson. I said okay, Tashia. All right, girl. But I got off that phone and said to myself, Bullshit. Ain’t nothing in Carson but a nigga.

  She launched that loud country laugh and drew another sip. This is the other element of Cox’s magic: she is, often at precisely the right moment, rude and inappropriate. I wonder if I looked, to her, as foolish as I felt, or as relieved as I also felt. Sometimes the weight of lies is not apparent until somebody snatches the lie sack from you. In its place was not the truth, per se, but I wasn’t there for that, just the message, which I now had. Gay. Simple enough. Cox was sure to warn me that the people were not g
oing to be as open to this as I’d imagined. I was sure to remind her that they might be open to me and, besides, that this is what campaigns were for: to open the minds of the people.

  So what are you gonna do, boy?

  Dunno. I’ve gotta talk to this guy who might manage the campaign, tonight.

  * * *

  —

  It was a fifteen-minute drive from Cox’s house, probably less since there were few cars on I-35 leaving Oak Cliff, driving north toward the beautiful if garish Dallas skyline. I made it to my apartment, on the edge of downtown in what was once and still is, despite the marketing, skid row, and carried my phone and notebook to the kitchen table, to call this guy. He had come recommended by Franklin, who hardly recommended anybody who was still alive. You should get Jonas Stein to work on your campaign when the time is right. You seem to share a lot of ideals and he’s the best researcher and get-things-done guy I know.

  The time had become right. We had already synced our ideals. He had already gotten things done and begun to research. We now had one call to make a final decision and this was it and he was ready, as intense and Boston as always, even at this late hour.

  Okay, my friend. Let’s get down to it. Your story is incredible . . . Don’t have to say that again. You know I’ve gotta ask, just to get it out of the way—is there anything I need to know? Gotta tell me before I quit my fucking job, ha.

  Well . . . you should know that I’m gay.

  I had never said this before, for many reasons, most bad, but one being that it seemed strange to call myself with pride something most had called me, since childhood, with scorn. This was the message, though, so my personal feelings were not relevant.

  Hmm, I see, he said, as if he had found a shiny penny or a dead baby bird on the ground. I’m glad you told me. Of course it doesn’t make my job any easier . . . I mean, you are in Texas, ha! . . . But it’s not impossible. Not impossible.

  We held the phone. I said nothing.

  But, Casey . . . tell me this . . . I mean . . . how are you gonna feel when somebody—say, at a rally, you know . . . calls you a faggot? And . . . I mean . . . let’s just be real, okay? You do understand that somebody might want to, you know, physically harm you? I sure hope not. But . . . it could happen, you know? Are you really ready for this? That’s all I’m asking.

  I cannot remember saying anything in response to Jonas’s questions. I know we didn’t stay on the phone much longer. I know that I went to lie in bed because I can still see twenty-four-year-old me on top of the sheets in the dark with his computer. I know that I sent Jonas a message around midnight:

  It’s a bit like that last stanza of dover beach, huh?

  For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night

  I am not sure where or when I learned this poem. Nor was I sure, when I first recalled this night, why the words that came to me would be so hopeless. After all, the boy I was at that time would have leapt, despite his fears, at the chance to be harmed—with luck, assassinated—to sacrifice everything, even life, for a cause, a cause greater than himself. There was something shocking, however—not that there should have been, but there was—in the notion that he might be harmed, killed even, for nothing more than being himself, which he had not even tried to do in the first place. Not only had this thought never crossed his mind, but it was heresy. Not plausible. My silence on the phone with Jonas was due, most of all (as far as I can tell), to this shock, this new information. But the shock began to fade not long after we hung up. Was gone by the time I sent that message.

  I lay there in the dark, on top of my bedsheets. What happened next had never happened before, and rather than rely on my memory of that first time, I will recount a similar, recent episode—one that took place not long after I began to tell you this story. I had gone to New York to celebrate Micah’s thirty-fifth birthday. We went out, had some drinks, a good time. We walked back to his apartment—stumbled back, really—and before I entered his front door I felt sick. Too much to drink. Too much of a good time. I scurried to the toilet, put my hands around the bowl and my head above it, sent my drinks and my good time into the bowl. I kept vigil there, kept retching. This went on for a few minutes, maybe ten, I don’t know. Micah appeared at the bathroom—You all right? C’mon, drink some water—and knelt on the floor next to me. I pulled myself into the doorway and took the glass of water. Drank most of it. Placed the glass on the parquet floor, then laid my head on the floor next to the glass. All of a sudden, I began to cry. Micah thought I was laughing at first and so he laughed, too. Then he noticed that I was not laughing, I was crying—though I did not know and still don’t know why; it had been a great time and it was his birthday—and I could not stop. I cried so hard, with such abandon, it would have been embarrassing if I had thought about it, but I could not really think of anything. And for some reason—again, I did not really have a reason—I began to mumble, to confess . . . to myself or to Micah or nobody in particular, I’m sorry, I just don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. Micah didn’t say anything but It’s all right, okay okay, it’s okay and patted my back until I began to whimper and then sighed and lay there on the floor until he helped me up and into bed to sleep.

  I still don’t understand why that happened—maybe just so I could tell you more precisely what I did and how I felt there in my bed after I sent Jonas that message, and the next day when I woke up crying and brushed my teeth crying and drove to work and sat in the parking lot to cry and closed my office door to cry and locked myself in a bathroom stall to cry and drove back home after work to lie again in bed in the dark and cry and wish that I was dead.

  I cannot say that I wanted to commit suicide, if only because I was, perhaps more than anything, a coward. An unprepared coward at that. No gun, no razor blades, no sharp steak knives. My balcony was too low. Cheap belts would break. And what if I did have these instruments and still failed, I wondered. I thought of pills, which would have been decent if no one caught me in time to pump my stomach. But where could I find that many pills, and what kind of pills, anyway? I suppose I was too lazy to kill myself. All I wanted to do, really, was fall asleep and be dead. I did not want to die. That required effort. I simply did not want to live. I did not want to be here, in this world.

  That, too, was odd. I had done so much to earn this world, to win this world and fit into it. Began early, somewhere around nap time, from what I can remember. It was wrong to stay awake while everyone else took a nap, so I took a dozen ruler strikes in my palm instead. And though I did not go to sleep, I did not bother anybody, either. Stayed real quiet and wrote my words in the dark and walked softly, on my tiptoes, which I always did, just didn’t want dirt on my feet, but this bothered people who then bothered me and so I concentrated, and at some point, I could walk, most of the time, on my heels, like a normal person. I wanted very much to be a normal person. Those heels, Shon’s heels, had been a problem, too, and once she yelled at me I never played with them again; and once my sister tried to take my notebook I never drew a dress again, didn’t even think about them, really. I did what I was supposed to do, and did not do what I was not supposed to do—at least that’s what I tried to do. Even in the nighttime, while I slept, when they said I moved around too much, I tried to stop moving and quickly learned to lie still for six or seven hours through the night, could lie real still for however long I needed to, even when I had a cold, when my cough was keeping people up, and they said I’d have to sleep on the couch if I could not stop my coughing; I tried and sure enough, I could stop that, too. Well, actually, I could not stop coughing all the way, but I did learn to cough so soft, so
low, that no one hardly noticed. I could stay so quiet that no one had to hear me if they did not want to hear me. And when they did want to hear me, when they wanted me to speak, I learned to speak so they could hear exactly what I said. Enunciate! they told me, and that’s exactly what I did. I spoke loud and clear and when they warned me that I fidgeted, which was not okay, I stood real still and kept my hands still, too, unless it was the right time to move them, with purpose. It took some work to speak and stay still and move my hands with purpose—to hold those hands like a real man, not behind my head like I was getting arrested, not limp-wrist like a little girl. I already sounded like a girl, of course, but that was just my voice nobody told me how to fix so I did it on my own, or tried, or waited, and soon enough I sounded like a man or nearly, and that was good, it seemed. Everything was good, all good. I took it all in stride, or silence, whatever. I saved my tears for bathroom faucets. I worked the muscles of my face so it looked as if I smiled. I was good to the program. Whatever the program was, I was good to it. Tried to be, at least. I kept my ass low and kept my eyes open and ran for my life, I really did, just kept on running, threw my hats away and switched my jeans and changed my voice again so nobody needed a translator on the practice field. Fixed my résumé and bought new dress shirts and acted like a lawyer, like a banker, did that well enough, learned my story, told my story, got the right perspective on it all, I was grateful, I moved on, I got over it—stayed up late, ran away from men in nightmares, worked to be the best and brightest, be the president, be somebody AT THE TOP. It had taken nearly every day to turn the boy that I had been into the man that I became, a dead man.