Namesakes

by Emery C. Walters

  Namesakes

  By Emery C. Walters

  Published by Queerteen Press

  Visit queerteen-press.com for more information.

  Copyright 2015 Emery C. Walters

  ISBN 9781611527094

  Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America. Queerteen Press is an imprint of JMS Books LLC.

  * * * *

  Namesakes

  By Emery C. Walters

  My name is Blaine. I’m almost eighteen years old and the Army has been calling me every week, wanting me to just stop down at the recruiting office for a chat. Yeah, right. No thank you. This has been going on about once a week since Christmas. I’m a senior, and I’ll be eighteen this summer; so they want to get me brainwashed good by then. It ain’t gonna work.

  They’ve stopped just short of saying how good I’d look in a uniform with my blond hair and brown eyes. If it were the German Army, I’d fit right in. I have ancestors who fought on both sides of WWII. It’s academic anyhow; no way am I going to go sign up.

  Since last October I’ve been going to one of the local churches to listen to the music. They have the best and biggest organ in town, and two pianos, a full sized harp and a music ministry. One day this guy noticed me and when he finished playing the organ, he came out to where I was and asked me if I played. When I said I could play the piano he asked me if I wanted to play theirs. I sure did, it was a Steinway Grand! He said his name was Frederick Maximillian and that he was now the junior music director, sort of a glorified internship. And he was really cute.

  Going over there as often as I could was the only bright spot in my whole high school career, except for a couple of months in my freshman year when I thought this girl named Sonia and I were going to be a thing. Then one day she told me she was sorry but she really liked girls. I tried to pretend I was horrified, but I couldn’t do it; so I hugged her and said that I understood. A couple times after that we’d hug in the hallway at school if someone had been picking on us and calling us names. It even worked for a while. Maybe it still would be working if she hadn’t been caught in the band room making out with a clarinet player named Lisa.

  School has sucked the entire last four years, and I’m pretty damn sure the Army would be just the same. School has gym and sports and tough guys posturing and beating their chests, and coaches and teachers all explaining how I’m wrong about this and wrong about that. The book says…and we do it this way here…and give me five/ten/twenty-five. Then there’s home, and it’s about the same way. My dad is always right. But then, so is my mom. That leaves me as always wrong, times two, so I just keep quiet. Don’t get me wrong, my parents are nice people basically, but they’re parents! They have no clue. I had to teach them how to use their new cell phones. They still can’t text, but they think they can; so that’s at least a source of amusement, and I try not to let them see that sometimes, yes indeed, sometimes they are complete idiots. I don’t want to be like them that way.

  There’s my sister Maggie, who is cool, and we see my grandpa sometimes, my dad’s dad that is, and both Maggie and I think he loves us best; so that’s kind of fun.

  Anyhow, I have no reason to think the Army would be any different from home or school, and probably even worse, as in probably just a continuation of the same old thing. My dad was in the Marines. His dad didn’t want to be in the service at all but got drafted anyhow, and his father, um, my dad’s grandfather, was shot down in WWII. And then on my mom’s side…well you get the idea.

  * * * *

  The guys at school who are the biggest bullies are all talking about the Army or the Navy. No way do I want to spend any more of my life with them or anyone else like them. If the draft were still there, well I’d go if I had to I guess, but it isn’t, and I’m not going to volunteer. I have other hopes and dreams. They involve music and any college with a great music department.

  Plus there’s this: I get sick easily. I catch every little thing that’s going around. Since I’m a good student and really don’t mind missing school, whenever I get sick my mom lets me stay home. If it’s for more than a few days, like the time I got chicken pox and when I had the flu and when I got mono (see what I mean?) she’d have someone bring my books over and I’d keep up with the work at home. I loved it. I really don’t have much stamina either, not like the rest of the boys at school. And I can’t track a ball. I can’t see me doing a hundred pushups or running six miles through the woods and trying to shoot a gun (I’m being sarcastic here). I really can’t see me sleeping in a bunk in a huge room with seventy or eighty thugs and jocks and tough guys, either, all sweaty and stinky. Ugh! Please, no. So, yeah I take advantage of being sick when I can; wouldn’t you? Because it’s a pure pain in the ass and humiliating scenario the rest of the time. There isn’t anyone who wants to be the whiny, not feeling well one who just can’t keep up. I laugh it off—in public. I have a bedroom closet I can cry in. It’s just one more thing about me that’s really not important, I mean, other than going into making me who I am. Do I love music because I can’t love sports and active things? Or is it the other way around? I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.

  * * * *

  So you already know that what I really love is, music, and composing music for the piano, organ and, especially, the harp. I know it’s weird and unusual, but I just love it. I only get to play it at one of the local churches, but nobody in my family or at school knows about it, and I want to keep it that way. (Sure we have a piano at home but it goes out of tune so quickly and it’s really just a vertical piece of trash and it seems like there’s always someone else in the room. I hate that!)

  Can you imagine how much the kids at school would laugh at me if they knew I played the harp? And how ashamed my dear old Dad would be? His idea of classical music is a march by Sousa or The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Heck, he still hasn’t forgiven me for getting rubella when he and I were going to go on a week-long fishing trip with his friends.

  On top of it all, where I went wasn’t even the church Mom goes to. Anyhow, this guy Frederick is teaching me. I wouldn’t mind if he taught me a few other things too if you catch my drift, my drift being a really good reason to not join the army, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, notwithstanding. I’m not even ready to tell or not tell my parents. Maybe not even myself. But Frederick…let me freak out here a minute! He’s a God; well no, he’s only a human, but he’s the most handsome human I have ever seen. When he puts his arm around me to show me something on the harp, I just want to go all girly and faint or sigh, or to be honest, bite him and taste him. I focus in on the golden hair on his forearm and the back of his hand and just totally get lost. Music? Huh? Oh, yeah, yeah, I’m listening. Oh wait, I’m not listening, I’m thinking about the deep sea blue of his eyes, and the way his long eyelashes lie on his cheeks, and how when he’s showing me something or placing my hands right and his body is so close to me and I
can feel his heartbeat through our shirts. Remember, he’s sort of technically an adult and I’m almost there but not quite, plus he’s all responsible and ethical and shit and phooey. He’s only a few years older than me. And hot.

  I’m pretty sure he likes me too, but what if he’s only being friendly? I asked him once if he had a girlfriend, and he had said no. Then he blushed and patted my hand and then yanked his hand back as if he’d been burned. I smiled so hard I almost choked. I knew exactly what he was thinking, that I was underage and he didn’t want to get in trouble or take advantage of me. I think I fell in love with him right then. I mean not just ‘ohmygod he’s so hot’ like I’d already been thinking, but realizing he was tender and willing to be responsible, too. Oh hell, I don’t know what I mean! But it was deep, you know? And important, in a long-lasting relationship kind of way, the way that I wanted desperately to find.

  * * * *

  There again I guess I’m not like the other boys. Or most of them, and I don’t mean just the whole gay thing. I mean I don’t want to just screw around and have a new special (I almost said girl) friend every week. I want to find my one true love, if there is such a thing, or at least someone worth loving in a long, a lifelong, way. I needed to know more about Frederick, and I intended to find out. Like—what if he’s not gay? Oh my God! How did I not think about this before? Oh crap! Oh crap, crap! What if he doesn’t know I’m gay?

  Geez, I’m an idiot.

  Okay, I got sneaky. He already knew how old I was and when I’d turn eighteen, and I couldn’t get out of that. I knew I’d either have to trick him or do what the ‘normal’ people do—get people drunk. Well that wouldn’t work as I asked him if he drank and he said only communion wine. I couldn’t see that making someone as respectable and responsible as Frederick drunk. I tried some of it, and it wouldn’t work for me either, ugh.

  I tried looking sad and I tried wearing eye make-up. I tried sighing a lot and toyed with the idea of asking him to kiss a bruise I got one day. On my ass. But I didn’t have the nerve. How do you tell someone you’re gay? What if they hate you then?

  So finally I did what I do best. I wrote a song for him. It was one of my very first that I actually intended to let someone else hear. On his birthday, when we’d finished my lesson, I said, “I wrote something for you. I’ll play it if you like.” I almost fainted when he smiled and said, “Why thank you! Please do!”

  “It’s a pirate song. It’s—it’s about my great-grandfather.” I was hedging here, just in case. (Oh God, oh God, why did I do this?!) “Okay, here goes: ‘Me ship the Cagafuego, a beauteous ship is she, she’s never been untrue to me but there’s a secret, see; me being not a good old boy but a gay old pirate me, me ship she ain’t no lady, me ship she ARRRGH a he!’”

  There was a dead silence. I sat back in terror. I could hardly breathe. What—what if—what—he was smiling! He was grinning like an ape! What did that mean?

  “Fireshitter!” Frederick said. “It figures it would be a he! What’s the title?”

  I’d forgotten the most important part. I swallowed hard and said, “‘A Gay Old Ship Is She, I Mean, He’.”

  I managed, I dared, to meet his eyes. They were happy eyes. I almost drowned in them.

  “Come on in the kitchen,” he said. “There’s a birthday cake they bought me.” Frederick reached out his hand to me, and I took it, dying inside.

  We walked out of the church and through the parish hall, enjoying the afternoon light shining through the stained glass windows. It was a beautiful church; a beautiful place for a young man like me to have his first nervous breakdown. When we reached the kitchen nobody else was there and my spirits lifted, because while the room was mostly empty, in the back half were stacked some of the cots from the last time they’d housed the homeless overnight. For some obscure reason this made me happy, giddy even, and I grinned. He ignored me, but he blushed. We walked over to the table on which there were the cake and several plates. He cut the cake.

  In my new crazy mood, I sang happy birthday. I changed the lyrics. They were fairly explicit in a piratical kind of way. They told what I felt but in enough humor that it could be laughed off if necessary, by either, or both of us. All he did was blush some more. Then someone in the kitchen guffawed so I shut up and just smiled at him.

  “Oops!”

  “You have a bit of chocolate on your lip,” he said.

  And he leaned forward and licked it off, then dried it with his lips.

  “You’re smiling with your whole soul. I can see it in your eyes. I love—that about you.”

  And I could not speak for the happiness flooding through me.

  “Happy birthday, me,” he said to himself. “I got a taste of—what I want.”

  * * * *

  The week after his birthday was going well, so well I was actually floating. I swear my feet never actually touched the ground at all. Then on Friday, I went to gym class as usual. This is what happened. We were out running around the track, and when we got to the far back, someone tripped me. Track is my best—okay, only—sport, and I don’t trip. I may be sickly and weak, but I’m not clumsy when I run. I’m really good at it in fact. Right then, though, I almost wished I was clumsy—then I’d be more like the other guys, and not ‘graceful’ like the girls. So I was running around the back of the track, and these two guys tripped me and pushed me, making it look like an accident in case anyone saw them, and I went down in a crash. They stood there laughing, but I didn’t get up right away. Then they saw the blood. I know they hadn’t intended to hurt me that much, they were just goofing off and did something stupid. I felt like it was partly my fault because I was such a wuss. Maybe someone else would have rolled or fallen better. But of course, not me.

  I ended up with a mild concussion and a sprained wrist, on top of all the scrapes and bruises and two big cuts on my knees that required stitches. The two guys who did it, Josh and Jacob, denied ever touching me and called me a liar when I told what had happened. The principal, at the coach’s insistence, let it drop as a ‘boys will be boys’ thing. Yeah, just like the old ‘good old boys will be good old boys’ thing. The old boys club is alive, well, and recruiting new members. Tough, football-playing and going-into-the-army new members. I’m not puny or slender or anything, but I’m not big and husky either. Just—average built and average looking.

  So they called my dad and he had to come get me and take me to the ER. They really should have called an ambulance, according to my father, who proclaimed this loudly to one and all while running his hand through his hair and whining about what he should have been doing at work. The fact that I was bloody and my eyes were probably rolling around in my head like loose marbles didn’t seem to register on his ‘oh my God my poor son’ scale, though I’m pretty sure it was way up there on his ‘oh this is so embarrassing’ scale. I don’t think he has a scale to do with me anyhow, though he was really upset when I got blood on his leather car seats though. He was a Marine, remember; so he also probably had some ‘my son is made of steel like me’ thing going on, subconsciously, of course. But for all his strengths, he could not stand the sight of blood. He hated anything weak about himself, and my fall brought that out big time—like it was always All About Him.

  I really shouldn’t be so sarcastic about him; he’s not all that bad, but I wasn’t in any kind of mood for a ‘blame the victim’ manner or any other type of casual brushoff. I hadn’t even cried before he showed up, and I didn’t bother after either. Good thing my mom didn’t come or I might have turned about six years old again and bawled my eyes out. I was, frankly, scared and angry as well as hurt and embarrassed.

  I’d never been really popular in school, but after that, there was like a smear campaign and everyone started laughing or flapping their wrists at me whenever I was around. The sprained wrist thing seemed especially amusing to some people, and I heard the term ‘fag’ tossed about in relation to me all the time now. The joke wasn’t funny, for though they’d fla
p their own suddenly limp wrists and laugh, mine was still taped up and painful. I couldn’t have flapped it if I wanted to.

  If it had been done in fun and they’d stood behind what they did, I might have managed to join in, but it was done without a care in the world for my injuries or feelings, or the truth, or the fact that maybe I really was gay and so what? I felt like everyone else in the world knew I was gay before I did anyhow, but how could they? It was all very confusing.

  * * * *

  I had to drop out of track and lost any remote possibility of being on the team and thus, varsity this or next year. My dad was disappointed. He took it personally. I think he thought that now I couldn’t be a Marine Like Him. My mom was only grateful I wasn’t going to be ‘out there with those rough boys’ but it put her and Dad against each other, and I of course, felt like it was all my fault. It could also prevent me from getting a scholarship to college, which I really needed and wanted.

  Tonight at dinner was the worst yet. I was eating left-handed because of how much my wrist still hurt, so I’d already dropped potatoes and gravy on the clean tablecloth. You’d think it was a mortal sin. My sister Maggie snickered, but at fifteen she still didn’t have a mean bone in her body, and I was sure she never would. Of course she was blond and blue eyed and not clumsy and that helped. It just wasn’t in her, and I smiled back and would have laughed with her but right then Mom did her annoying ‘tsk tsk tsk’ thing and Dad cleared his throat and rolled his eyes. I looked from one to the other. If I could have just laughed at myself, which was hard enough to do anyway since it was so seldom I had the opportunity…maybe, I dunno, maybe it would have blown over. Apparently, though, both my folks had had shitty days or something and just couldn’t dig up a sense of humor right then. Or maybe it had nothing to do with me and gravy stains, but more to do with something between them that neither Maggie nor I knew about.

  Did you ever look at your parents and wonder how on earth they let you live to grow up? I mean if they acted like this when we were babies, geez. I didn’t want to think about it. I know they loved us, but it just didn’t seem like they were able to show it well, you know? Or maybe it was just me. Maybe I wasn’t able to receive love like I should have been.