How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  “A what?”

  “An experience?”

  “Are you talking about sex?”

  “Have you had an experience, Saeed?”

  “Mom”—I laughed, both embarrassed and frustrated—“are you always going to call it that?”

  “Saeed.”

  “Yes! Yes. I’ve had—I’ve had experiences. I’m gay. I know.…”

  “Do you use protection?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she said finally.

  “Okay?”

  “I’ve got to go, Saeed. I’ll talk to you later.”

  After weeks of rehearsing all the possible iterations of this conversation, it had finally happened, and my answers—I guess—had been enough. I’d been able to say exactly what I needed to say without having to tell a single lie, or exaggerate or diminish myself. I’d ambushed my mother over the phone and she had ambushed me in return. Her questions might have been blunt and awkward, but they were without judgment.

  My mother called me back before sundown. I had started to worry, feeling worse and worse for blurting myself out to her rather than finding a more proper setting for the conversation. I was at Rob’s house with other speech kids, trying to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible on cheap sangria.

  When her name showed up on my phone, I inhaled dramatically and walked out to the back porch.

  “I forgot to say that I love you,” she said, almost frantically, like she was racing to catch the comet’s tail end of our previous conversation. For a moment, it felt like we were both catching our breath.

  “I love you, Saeed,” she said. “And honestly, you sound happy. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

  After I hung up, her words seemed to hang in the air, hovering amid the fireflies. I stayed out on the porch, drinking the sangria, watching the evening shadows eat away at the light.

  I was happy, but the moment didn’t feel like I thought it would. It wasn’t final. It dissipated just as the dusk did, just as the fireflies fled.

  In retrospect, I think I didn’t feel as if a burden had been lifted because my being gay was never actually the burden. There was still so much I hadn’t told my mother, so much I knew that I would probably never tell her. I had come out to my mother as a gay man, but within minutes, I realized I had not come out to her as myself.

  12SPRING 2006

  BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY

  When the Botanist opened his door, the easy smile I had practiced during my walk to his house flatlined. The picture on his profile must have been a year old, maybe two. The “bored 30-something” who worked out “3x a week AT LEAST” and was “straight-acting and only into other STRAIGHT-acting MEN” was not the man standing in front of me. He’d even lied about the color of his eyes. His blue eyes were in fact brown like mine.

  While I stood there, in the elastic few seconds that stretch to contain two strangers meeting for the first time, as they decide whether they want to enter each other’s bodies, I didn’t think about my own body: more lithe and sinewy than his, not because I had worked to craft this body, but simply because I was young. I didn’t think about how I hadn’t worked to earn my better body. I just scanned him from head to toe in a single, condescending glance and determined that he had a body that would do, a body I could work with, a body I wouldn’t push out of bed.

  But if this was going to work, I couldn’t go in there alone. I needed to take a memory into his house with me. When he asked my name, I said, “Cody.”

  The Botanist’s head tilted slowly into a nod, as he decided my lie was one he could live with, or at least sleep with. He stepped aside to let me into his house. As I walked past him, I felt his stare glide from the back of my head down to my ass and on down to my calves. When I stopped suddenly and turned around just so I could catch him staring at my feet, he straightened his posture and smiled. We were circling each other.

  By now, I knew the ins and outs of names that were not mine and how to wear them like bodies. Every time I met a man for sex, a new name blossomed in my mouth like a flower I could pull out from between my parted lips and hand to the stranger standing in front of me. The names made me into whoever I needed to be for them.

  Everyone has a lie we’re quietly waiting to believe. Sometimes we just need someone to show up at our door, keep quiet, and let us do the talking. I gave one-word answers. I nodded and shook my head in reply whenever possible. I shrugged my shoulders in response to more elaborate questions. I made sure my facial expressions hovered vaguely between interested but not overeager and reluctant but not scared. Together, these nuances allowed me to think of myself as an FM radio that, if dialed just so, could go from white noise to the particular song this man had been waiting to hear all night long.

  Maybe a rap song would come on and I’d become a college athlete, a track runner who had a girlfriend and didn’t really know what he was doing here but liked it anyway. Or a song by Otis Redding and I would become a preacher’s son looking to break some rules before going back home to repent. Or some sad country song and I’d become the guy the Botanist knew in high school and still fantasized about now and then. I could hear the man I was pretending to be as he spoke in a slight Kentucky drawl. I’m married now with two little girls and a boy on the way, finally. Got a picture of his sonogram right here in my wallet. The doctor even showed me where his pecker is. Said I should be proud. I stopped over to have a beer, catch up on good times. And, you know, well… I don’t really know how to say this, but—shit, I’m blushing like a— Listen, I wanted to tell you this years ago.…

  When I met men like the Botanist, I said “Huh?” and “What?” more often than usual, leading them to find me a bit dumb—which was fine. In my mind, there was a thread connecting “dumb” to “more manly.” But the real reason I said “Huh?” so much during these hookups is that I was listening to what the man I wanted to be was whispering in my head.

  * * *

  THE BOTANIST HAD the potted trees installed throughout his apartment. Huge, waxy-leafed tropical trees were grouped in every corner of the living room, and in between were clusters of oddly placed statuettes. It was like he’d decided to re-create a statue garden inside his home. The kind of stone lion you might expect to see guarding the gate to a large mansion was instead sitting beside his coffee table. Christmas ornaments were hanging from his Tiffany lamps. It was almost beautiful, this space, just a few blocks down the hill from campus. I probably passed the apartment twice a week and never would have guessed there was a jungle in 2B.

  Still, though, Cody couldn’t be interested in something as feminine as flora. I picked up a magazine that was leaning against the stone lion’s stomach. The Botanist never sat still for long, constantly finding statues to nudge one inch to the left and picture frames to adjust ever so slightly. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that Cody hadn’t said a word beyond his first name. The Botanist walked over to a set of glass decanters and fixed himself a drink. When he was walking back to the couch, he realized that he had forgotten to ask me if I would like one as well.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. How rude of me. Would you like a cocktail?” he asked, his hip resting against the side of the couch while he looked down at me.

  I hated the way he enunciated the word “cocktail” into an obvious joke, and the way he held his martini glass like we were in a penthouse apartment in New York City and not a jungle-themed two-bedroom walk-up in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Cody nodded without looking up from the magazine. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him struggle to interpret whether that meant whiskey neat or vodka cranberry. I leaned back on the couch, absentmindedly rested my hand on my dick, and watched as the Botanist poured me a Jack and Coke I didn’t actually want.

  After he handed me my drink, he plopped down beside me on the couch and put his arm around my shoulder, like a high-school jock trying to be cool with his new girlfriend. Cody wasn’t into that kind of move, so I scooted away from him.

  “So,” he said, picking up a
conversation that had never really started, “you’re a student?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded, waiting for me to say more. I gave him nothing; the restraint and forced reticence were turning me on.

  “Athlete?”

  “Yeah.”

  I decided to change pace, so I took a break from the magazine long enough to take a swig of the drink and noticeably appraise his body again with a cold look. I didn’t want him to think I was shy so much as looking to be persuaded. In order for me to get what I needed out of this night, he needed to want Cody more than Cody wanted him. That, I realized, was why I was sitting on this stranger’s couch. I wanted a man to ache for me.

  “I figured you were an athlete,” he persevered. “Those legs of yours. Track team, right?” He stroked my thigh, his hand gliding between my knee and groin. I made myself stay easy and still.

  Taking another swig, I spread my legs just wide enough and reclined so I was staring up at the ceiling. The Botanist actually licked his lips.

  “Did you find something you like?” My first complete sentence of the night.

  He nodded, too eagerly, and pressed his face into my lap. He inhaled deeply, giving me a squeeze with his hand, then sat back up to face me.

  “I bet you see a lot of guys’ dicks when you’re in the locker room. Bet they’re not as big as you, though.”

  The Botanist watched too much porn. That sentence was right out of a scene from a ’90s Falcon video. I knew because I watched too much porn.

  I took his hand and put it back on my lap.

  When he leaned in to kiss me, I could smell his cologne and so I turned away, forcing him to kiss my neck instead.

  Yes, I thought about the man who turned away when I went to kiss him in the men’s restroom back in high school. I remembered the abrupt sting of his stubble, and the more permanent sting too. But there were rules. You put on cologne for dates, not for what we were about to do. And anyway, it turned me on, just like the forced silence: being somehow unavailable even when I was in another man’s hands.

  I stood up then and started walking toward his bedroom. The fact that the Botanist let me lead him through his own house, even though it was my first time there, told me everything I needed to know.

  The porn playing on his small television cast his bedroom in a blue tint that made us both look slightly more attractive than we were. The blue hit my brown skin and highlighted Cody’s bones and sinews. The blue gave the Botanist the body he had promised me.

  The TV’s volume was turned down low but the video was already playing, which meant that it’d been playing since I first got to the apartment. The bedroom and its blue-lit trees—yes, there were trees here too—had been patiently waiting for us. Three condoms and a bottle of lube were on the nightstand. There were even some tea candles lit.

  I shoved the Botanist backward onto the bed and started to peel off my T-shirt. Instead of staying put, he got back up. I wasn’t trying to put on a show exactly, but I wasn’t rushing either. He decided to help me. With my arms awkwardly above my head and the shirt covering my face, he tugged too hard and the fabric gave a small rip.

  Taking another step away from him, I threw the shirt to the floor and sneered. The television’s blue tint lit up his eyes and all he could see, standing there in the half-dark, was Cody. I had disappeared right there in front of myself.

  The Botanist climbed onto the middle of the bed and got on all fours. He looked back at Cody and growled, “Come on, man!” with a sudden bass in his voice.

  I hesitated for the first time all night.

  “Let’s do this!” he shouted, slamming his hands down on the mattress for emphasis.

  I climbed onto the bed, thinking about how quickly our lies can get away from us. This naked, barking man wanted Cody more than I did. The Botanist took over, shouting about how he wanted me to wreck him, to gut him, to breed him. I shoved into him with a thrust that made him arch his back with a loud gasp.

  I thought Cody and I had proven our point. But the Botanist shouted, “Come on.” He was even louder now, as he backed into me. I didn’t like the way he was fucking me even though I was fucking him.

  Pulling up my hips, so his back was right against my chest, I wrapped my arms around him and started to put one hand over his mouth. I could feel the words rising in his throat and wanted to dam the breach before—

  “Come on!” he shouted, his spit coating my hand. He shook his mouth free of my grip. “Fuck me with that big black dick!”

  That sentence had been in his head since he first saw my profile online. The words flickered when he first opened his door to me, flickered again when I spread my legs on his couch, again when my ripped shirt fell to his bedroom floor.

  In that blue-lit bedroom, my black dick was all I was. I couldn’t even be Cody anymore. That sentence, screamed out by a white man on all fours, was bigger than me and Cody combined. And I was still inside him.

  “Yeah,” he growled, “you like that white bitch ass, don’t you?” The water is always deeper than it looks. “You like it! That nigger dick likes it!”

  * * *

  AS I WRITE, I want to pull myself out of him and out of that room. But outside the Botanist’s bedroom is the Latino man who, years later, will look back at me while I fuck him—not hard enough, apparently—and sneer, “Aren’t you a black man?” Outside of that bedroom is the dating profile of a handsome twentysomething living in Brooklyn who notes in all capital letters “Not interested in Black, Mexican, or Asian cuisine.” Then there is the younger black gay friend who will confess that someone told him once “I just don’t find black men beautiful, but I love you as friends.” I still don’t know what to say to the men outside the Botanist’s bedroom. There are so many of them, so many rooms where they are waiting to wound one another with their bodies and their preferences. However many masks we invent and deploy, in the end, we cannot control what other people see when they look at us. Lower your voice, change your posture, call yourself Cody, dress differently if you want. A man might still decide that when he looks at you, all he sees is a nigger, a faggot, or both.

  * * *

  I FLIPPED THE Botanist over, clamped one hand over his mouth, and kept thrusting. Even when he bit my palm and I backhanded him, he moaned, then laughed, looking up at me with wild eyes as a red handprint bloomed on his cheek. I kept my eyes on the tree beside the bed, which shook in rhythm with our bodies, each waxy leaf shifting in the blue light.

  “Harder,” he shouted, “harder, harder.” And I went harder, realizing that I wanted to use my body to ruin his body. I wanted to be the black savage he saw when he looked up at me; at least then I could make use of myself. I grunted, shoving myself into him again and again. Fucking bitch. You like that, don’t you? I thought the words were coming from one of the porn actors on the television, but the video was playing on mute and my throat was raw.

  “You whore,” I shouted right into his ear. “You deserve this.”

  I tried to fuck my hurt into him, but he just writhed beneath me, moaning that it felt “so good.” I wondered how many black men had been in this bed surrounded by trees; I wondered if he had made this jungle just for us.

  We came within seconds of each other and I fell onto him, exhausted, spent, used, disgusted by the body right under me. I slammed my open palms onto his back as hard as possible, making him cry out as I raised myself off him.

  Standing up, I put on my ripped shirt and the rest of my clothes without another word. I didn’t ask to use his bathroom. There was a mirror in there, of course, and I didn’t want to see my reflection locked inside this man’s glass. My body was shining with sweat, his and mine, but I would have to wait until I was back in my dorm to take a shower.

  At the front door, I stopped to look at this man I knew I would never see again. The forest in his living room was candlelit behind him.

  “Delete my number,” I spat.

  He let out a sharp laugh, running his hand down th
e front of the silk robe he had put on. He locked the door as if I were an unwanted guest finally being kicked out.

  13SUMMER 2006

  LEWISVILLE, TEXAS

  I went back to Lewisville for the summer to help Mom pack up the apartment. She was moving into a one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta, where she’d lived in her twenties before becoming pregnant with me. This move felt like a circle completing itself; a single mother had gotten her son into college on a full scholarship and now she was moving back to one of her favorite cities as a single woman. To say that my mother was still beautiful would mean overlooking the fact that she’d actually become more beautiful with age. Most people don’t survive being pretty; it never lasts quite long enough. But my mother somehow had made it through to the other side of “pretty” and sauntered right into “elegant.”

  “You’re gonna meet a man in Atlanta,” I said, only half teasing her, while I taped up a box.

  “All right, you,” she replied, her version of “that’s enough now.” It was what she said when she agreed with my jokes but wanted to at least pretend to tell me to stop. She grabbed the tape and stooped over another box.

  “Just make sure he’s okay with having a gay stepson,” I said. I was still mostly joking, and there was a laugh in my throat that I was ready to share with her. She coughed then went silent. I stood up from where I’d been crouching and watched her rip a length of tape, smooth it down, and move on to the boxes in her room as though she hadn’t heard me.

  “We’ve got to pick up the U-Haul before the place closes for the day,” she shouted from the safety of distance. “Maybe we should go now.”

  Just over a year since I’d come out to my mother, it was like that hard-earned conversation hadn’t happened at all. We both slid back into the hazy silence we’d inhabited before I went to college. Maybe I was pushing her too far, I wondered. People need time and parents are certainly people, right? Still, I wanted—needed—to find a way to tell her that I was… I didn’t even know where to begin. Maybe it was best that she kept avoiding me. I grabbed the keys off the kitchen counter, put Kingsley on his leash, and waited for Mom to meet us out by the car.