How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  6SPRING 2002

  LEWISVILLE, TEXAS

  My English teacher interrupted the beginning of class just as we were taking our seats and digging out our books. In a few minutes, she said, the school’s theater department would be performing an abbreviated version of a play called The Laramie Project. It would be an all-school assembly and take up most of our class time. Smirks and pleased whispers at that last detail. The teacher raised her voice, reminding us to be mature and thoughtful, but she didn’t explain why the reminder was needed.

  I knew, though. Hearing my teacher say “Laramie” was like watching a grenade bounce across the floor of our classroom. I tried to read my classmates’ faces without changing the bored expression on my own. I did my best to mirror the easy shoulder shrugs and grinning relief I saw around me as we streamed out into the hallway.

  The Laramie Project was a series of monologues based on interviews in the weeks after the murder of Matthew Shepard. He was a gay twenty-one-year-old man who’d been brutally killed by two strangers he’d met one night in Laramie, Wyoming. I remembered the moment I’d heard about it, watching the news at home with Mom, only a few months after we had sat on the same couch and watched reports about James Byrd Jr.’s murder. A photograph of Matthew—skinny, blond, smiling—was displayed while the details of the case were discussed. I remember thinking he looked sweet, hopelessly gentle. The kind of kid I’d hang around with after school, but only when people I knew weren’t around. Realizing that this was who I’d been for Cody made me wince.

  Watching the news, I’d thought I could feel my mother turning to look at me, so I’d gotten up and walked out of the living room as if I were bored. She didn’t say anything about it that night. “Gay” was still an unspoken word in the house, an increasingly eloquent, encompassing silence.

  By the time Matthew Shepard’s life and death made it to the classrooms of my high school in 2002, my feelings about him and James Byrd Jr. had started to swirl and converge. I was walking through a dusty, fluorescent-lit hallway—halfway to the assembly hall, trying with every filament of my body to look cool—when the two truths finally collided:

  Being black can get you killed.

  Being gay can get you killed.

  Being a black gay boy is a death wish.

  And one day, if you’re lucky, your life and death will become some artist’s new “project.”

  * * *

  AS THE HOUSE lights dimmed, I sighed, relieved to be invisible again. Sitting in the dark just before the stage lit up, I heard or thought I heard a senior in the row ahead of me say something about a “dead gay boy.” He turned to his friend, maybe to deliver a punch line, or maybe not. Their backs were to me, so I couldn’t tell what they thought about this dead gay boy.

  Within just a few minutes, some of the girls on my row were sobbing. A few held one another’s hands. The monologues were heart-shattering.

  I envied the girls who felt comfortable enough to cry, how easily they breathed. All the boys near me looked indifferent. I would think, later, that maybe some of them were only pretending to be indifferent. Maybe some could only sit comfortably, whisper ironically, laugh audibly, with total effort. For me, it took all I had to sit still and silent. I wanted to be on that stage, speaking the words I still didn’t feel safe enough to say on my own.

  One of the last monologues the students performed was in the voice of Matthew Shepard’s father. He was speaking to the two convicted murderers during their sentencing hearing. Dennis Shepard, an oil industry safety engineer, offered them a stern mercy. Instead of the death penalty, he asked for a life sentence—as Matthew would’ve wanted, he said. He prayed for the killers—or perhaps cursed them—to think about Shepard every day for the rest of their lives.

  The girl sitting right in front of me let her head drop to her chest as if felled. She shook her head back and forth, crying softly. It repulsed me then, her freedom. The actor onstage continued his monologue. As best I could, I pushed the words away while keeping my eyes on him. The spotlight made his tear-filled eyes glimmer and I sat there in the dark, trying to ignore a second girl now sobbing right next to me. I tuned out the words he spoke for fear that if I let myself pay attention I would start crying too. I would start sobbing and not be able to stop, not until long after the houselights came up.

  But then the houselights did come up. And I slipped on the forcefully carefree posture of the other boys around me. The existential shrug of young men afraid to admit that they’ve been touched by art, and that they want to be touched in that way again.

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS later, I came home from debate practice to find Mom sitting in front of the computer. She was smoking a cigarette, staring at the front door as I walked through it. Mom rarely, if ever, smoked inside the apartment. And when she did, she would sit by an open window or go stand on the balcony. Even if I couldn’t yet feel her stare laying into the back of my neck as I closed the door behind me, the haze of smoke hanging in the air was proof enough that I’d stepped right into their trap.

  Walking over to the desk, I stared at the dark stain her lipstick left on the cigarette, then at the computer screen itself; anything to avoid meeting her eyes. The “Older4Younger” chat room window was on the screen as well as the message she’d written to the last man I’d spoken with. I’d been visiting gay chat rooms for months by then, because I had questions—so many questions—and urges that I decided had gone unanswered long enough.

  A few years before, Mom had recorded an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show about “sex education” and left it on the kitchen counter with a note telling me to watch it when I got home from school. It answered the questions I had mostly already figured out on my own, but that only made my other questions more inexplicable and urgent: What about boys who liked boys, what about boys who liked men? Who could we go to with our questions? What about our bodies? What were boys like Matthew Shepard and me supposed to do with ourselves before America had its way with us?

  “Read it,” she said, standing up. “Before I press Send.”

  Dear Pervert—

  Your profile says that you are in your mid-30s. I’m informing you that you have been communicating ILLEGALLY with my son who is a MINOR. I am his mother. If you ever try to contact him again, I will report you to the police. You are sick. STAY AWAY FROM MY CHILD.

  My face burned. “Mom, it’s not like that,” I said. Or at least tried to say.

  She moved so quickly I almost lost my balance. Her face now hovered less than an inch from my own. I could smell the cigarette smoke curling between her lips. Standing nearly forehead to forehead, it was the first time I registered that I was taller than my mother. Some shade of this realization must have flashed across my face, because she locked eyes with me right then and took another step forward, knocking me back onto the computer desk. My butt mashed against the keyboard, adding a jumble of letters to her message.

  “Hit Send,” she whispered.

  I obeyed without a word, jumble and all. Then I slid out from between her and the desk, avoiding her gaze. Kingsley was sitting on the couch, staring at us both. He whined, ever the cocker spaniel, and the interruption seemed to call my mom back to herself. She lit another cigarette and went over to pet him. She had slipped into a new mood, a sudden key change. I waited until she started speaking before I dared move again.

  “You’re growing up and you have… feelings. Everyone has them; everyone has questions. But, Saeed, this”—she pointed her cigarette at the screen—“this is dangerous. There are men out there who would…” She trailed off, looking at the dog, then at the living room window as she took another drag. I could almost see the effort whirling behind her eyes. The strain of having to push through the exhaustion of a long workday only to come home to the job that didn’t pay: raising me. “Did that man—did any of those men—ask to meet you?”

  “No. Well, yes—but I knew better. I mean, my profile said I was eighteen.”

  She sto
od up again. “Saeed!”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You think you know.”

  She let out a puff of smoke, grabbed her ashtray, then started walking toward her bedroom as if to announce that she had persevered as far into this conversation with me as she could. Kingsley hopped off the couch and followed her. She waited for him to make his way into the bedroom then closed her door.

  Only after I was back in my bedroom, behind my own closed door, did I realize how much I wished we had kept straining through that conversation together, how little I understood of what she had said. Did she mean that when she was growing up she had feelings and questions about other girls and that this was normal? Did she mean all men who were attracted to men were dangerous or only the kind of men I found in that chat room? And even if that were the case, I was in that chat room too. I hadn’t been tricked or seduced; I had sought those men out. Did that mean I was one of those dangerous men or on my way to becoming one of them?

  The older I got, the more frequently my mother and I would push each other to the precipice of what we actually needed to say, only to back off just before either of us was forced to get more specific than vague allusions to “feelings” and “questions.” But this only meant that the unanswered questions became ever more loaded.

  7SUMMER 2002

  LEWISVILLE, TEXAS

  I can’t picture the face of the first man I tried to kiss. The memory refuses me, just as he did when I lifted myself up from between his legs and brought my teenage body to its full height before him. He looked like he could’ve been the father of any number of the boys I passed in the hallways every day at school: men who had calluses from gripping footballs and hammers, the ones who sent gravel flying every time their trucks ripped out of parking lots, the ones I tried to study without getting caught staring. And here I was, staring up at him, my mouth just inches from his. I remember noting how neatly his beard framed his lips. The beard itself was well trimmed, in contrast to his faded Texas A&M polo shirt, worn Levi jeans, and work boots. His lips were gently parted in that moment, waiting.

  * * *

  LATELY, I’D BEEN visiting the library as frequently as ever. I even applied for a part-time job as one of the teens responsible for reshelving books; my application was rejected. Having exhausted what I had decided were all the library’s “gay” books, when I visited now, I’d quickly decide on a book or two and then stake out one of the computers with a screen facing away from the librarians’ desk. The filters on the computers intended to block out adult content were good, but my persistence made me better. I was in the midst of one of these computer searches when the man in the study carrel next to me leaned over in his chair and looked at my screen as if I weren’t sitting there. He turned to look at me.

  “Are you into that?” he asked.

  His voice was vague, hovering somewhere between curiosity and slight revulsion.

  My hand, still on the mouse, double-clicked the exit icon as if without me. The rest of my body couldn’t decide how it was going to survive whatever was about to happen.

  “What?” was all I could say.

  “That,” he said again, nodding toward the screen. “Are you into that stuff?”

  A sudden and forced stillness. Then, a thin stream of sweat slipping down my back. The heart’s pulse whispering in my ear’s inner chamber like a coconspirator. Get up and walk away. He can’t hurt you here with all these people around. Walk away, no matter what names he calls you, just keep walking. This is a Saeed-shaped trap.

  “I like stuff like that too,” he said, almost sheepishly.

  I had started to ease my chair back from the desk. I stopped. A voice in the back of my head spoke, This is how it goes: a truck pulls up to a gas station and the men inside smile. “Need a lift?” they ask, and James Byrd Jr. considers his answer, while the men inside the truck watch him. This is how it goes: two guys walk into a dive bar and see Matthew Shepard sitting alone. They strike up a conversation, a few more drinks, and then one of them nods toward the front door and the truck waiting in the parking lot. There’s room for one more if he wants to join them.

  He stopped looking at me, shifting his gaze out past the study carrel like he was keeping an eye on someone in another part of the library. “You know the restroom out in the lobby, right?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait a couple of minutes and then meet me in the last stall.” He got up and walked toward the lobby without waiting for my answer.

  One minute. I could just sit there for another hour until I was sure he had given up on me and then leave. The librarians were just feet away from me. I could tell them a stranger had tried to lure me into the restroom to do unspeakable things. There was a script I could perform; I knew it. Everyone knew this play and its ending.

  Two minutes. Cody, the construction worker, the track coach, the senior in the school play, the football quarterback. I’d been looking for this man, or a man like him, for a long time: someone who saw what I saw whenever he looked at the bodies of other men. I couldn’t be afraid or innocent, knowing what I knew about myself. I’d been looking for trouble, and I probably deserved whatever happened to me when I finally found it.

  Three minutes. I stood up from my chair and walked right through the question hovering in the air between my body and the body waiting for me in that restroom stall: What exactly did he see when he saw me?

  When he had first walked into the library, greeted by the automatic doors’ electric sigh and a blast of cool air, he would not have seen me. He would have had to walk past the circulation desk, the children’s books section, and turn at the fiction section, before finally arriving at the four study carrels and computers. Maybe the carrel to the right was the only one available, so he sat there without much thought. Had he then happened to glance at my screen and catch a version of what he himself had been looking for? Or maybe, approaching the carrels, he had hovered behind me, just long enough to see my screen. Had he looked down at the back of my head, trying to picture my face?

  I wonder if I looked like a grown man from where he was standing. In reality, I was a lanky, black, obvious teenager, obviously effeminate too, if given an opportunity to move or speak. But from a distance, maybe my body transformed, as the bodies of young black men are wont to do when stared at by white people in this country. Maybe my spine stretched itself into a basketball player’s posture, this stranger’s gaze giving me something I could never quite seem to give myself: the sense of being a real man, strong, even intimidating. Or perhaps he saw a black boy’s silhouette, a high-school-aged frame, and didn’t care, or cared even more. Maybe my exact body—limp wrist, fade haircut, brown skin, and all—was the sum total of the kind of body he had been building with piecemeal stares and stolen glances. Maybe he saw me and sighed, relieved to know that the universe had in fact been paying attention, had responded to his call. Or maybe I was just what was available, a slim picking on the way to the grocery store, in a suburb of some 80,000 people, twenty minutes north of Dallas. A body—no, a mouth.

  * * *

  I WALKED INTO the lobby and hesitated for a moment. To the left were the glass doors to the parking lot. On my right was the door to the restroom.

  I walked right.

  The third and last stall was the only one closed. It opened as soon as I stopped in front of it.

  The man stood tall with his hands on his hips, the look on his face written in a language I couldn’t read. But I took the boxers and jeans bunched around his knees as an invitation. I tried awkwardly bending forward while still standing, then kneeling on one knee. Then I finally decided to kneel, on both knees as if praying. The floor was cold and unkind. Still standing with his hands on his hips, he merely glanced down a bit as I strained to give him head. It looked easier in the pictures of gay porn I’d been hunting for online. I didn’t remember seeing people breaking a sweat in those pictures, but my shirt was already sticking to my lower back. Focus, I thought. Think about
how much you’ve wanted this. I willed the entirety of my being to my mouth. Beads of sweat dotted my forehead.

  I didn’t want what we were doing, what he was letting me do to him, to be over; it’s just that kneeling on the linoleum tiles stung my knees like a punishment and made me feel so far away from him. So I stood, intending just to angle myself into a more comfortable position. But standing directly in front of him, my mouth just inches from his mouth, lips parted in what looked like the beginning of a question, I realized I had never stood quite this close to another man before. Close enough for the front of my tennis shoes to tap the front of his boots, close enough for the jeans, boxers, and belt he had shimmied down his legs to press against my knees. And what had been starting to feel like work just a moment before was hotly dizzying again: the reality of his body—not another wet dream, or daydream—right in front of me. It was almost too much, too intense and long delayed and so, just like in all the dreams I’d been dreaming, I leaned in to kiss him.

  He yanked his head away, leaving my mouth to grate against the soft sting of his beard.

  Embarrassed, I ducked my head down and noticed, for the first time, his gold wedding band.

  “I’m not into that,” he said. He laughed a bit, as if he were alone and had just remembered an inside joke. Except we were the joke. A fortysomething-year-old man getting an awkward blow job from a sixteen-year-old boy in the restroom stall of the Lewisville Public Library, just a minute’s walk from the police department, the courthouse, or the city council office. I kept my eyes on the wall to spare myself from the look on his face. I couldn’t bear to watch him transform back into a real man and leave me standing there, still a faggot, someone who swung that way and got stuck.