by Saeed Jones
* * *
SHE STARTED COUGHING just as we loaded the last of the boxes onto the truck. Or maybe she had been coughing earlier in the evening and I had ignored her until I coughed a few times myself. Moving out of your longtime home means quite literally unsettling the dust of your past. Dust shimmers in the air, coloring rays of sunshine as they cut through the windows. Dust marks the outlines of where your childhood bed used to be. Dust collects in your hair. Your body unwittingly inhales your past and rejects it. As I watched my mother and waited for her to recover, I kept myself busy fussing over details about the move, hoping each cough would be the last. The end didn’t come. Around midnight, she struggled to stand up from the one chair we had left in the apartment.
“I’m going,” she said softly, “to the ER.” I was already walking toward the car keys on the counter. “No, you stay.”
“Mom.”
“You rest,” she said. “I’ll go and come back.” We had to be at the new apartment complex the next day before the rental office closed at 7 p.m. or we’d be stranded for the night. She was going to drive the U-Haul and I was going to follow behind in the car with Kingsley. But when were we going to leave now? Would she even be able to sleep first?
She took the car keys from my hand and walked out of our dusty, empty home. I curled up with Kingsley, on the floor of what had once been my bedroom, and lay awake.
Being the child of a parent with a heart condition meant living with a paradox. My mother looked and acted fine. Her heart, generally, had no bearing on her daily life. Sure, there were orange pill bottles all over the apartment, but the presence of those drugs paled in comparison to how forcefully she insisted on being herself. So, I had a mother who was sick but didn’t appear to be. The fact that I spent most of my time away from her now, talking on the phone or texting, only further reinforced the illusion.
In that way, we were just like each other. We both allowed too deep of a contrast between our interiors and our exteriors. We both clung to self-assured masks that actually allowed us to cause ourselves more unseen harm. My mother hadn’t even quit smoking. She had tried several times, of course. But cigarettes had crept back into her routine—my mother’s unspoken response to stress and depression. The first time she went out to the balcony to smoke when I got home for the summer, we both pretended not to notice her eyes were bright with tears when she came back inside.
And me. I couldn’t even summon the nerve to talk to her about any of the guys I’d dated or how much I secretly loathed myself, much less talk to her about men like the Botanist. A candid conversation about her health was difficult to even imagine.
* * *
SHE WOKE ME up around 4 a.m., only explaining the hospital visit by holding up a white paper bag of new inhalers and drugs before walking out of the room. Still half asleep, I got behind the wheel of the car while Kingsley fell back asleep in the passenger seat. Mom started the U-Haul and led us out of the parking lot.
For the first hour of the drive, the sun wasn’t out yet so there was nothing for me to look at but the darkness and the slightly swerving truck ahead of me. Reasoning that Mom was just as tired as I was, if not more so, and the roads were all but empty, I decided I wouldn’t call her on my cell until she veered across the white road lines. Then she did.
“Saeed, I’m fine, damn it,” she barked on the phone as soon as she answered. “We’ve got to go.” We had pulled to a stop on the edge of the highway, somewhere near the border of Louisiana.
“You’re swerving in a huge truck, Mom. It’s scary to watch,” I said. I tried to sound as calm as possible. “Maybe we should take a short break.”
She hung up and started her truck without another word.
It started pouring the moment we made it to Louisiana. The rain fluctuated between spitting, as my mom would call it, and thundering down in sheets so heavy Kingsley would start barking and try to sit in my lap while I drove. The weather relented only when we’d made it through to the other side of the state. In Mississippi, near a town named Meridian, we passed through a spot on the highway where trees leaned over both sides of the road to make a perfect bright, green tunnel for nearly half a mile. I didn’t realize I was crying until we reached the end of the trees and the bright sunlight dried the tears streaking my face. The car’s air-conditioning went out just past the state border. I rolled down all the windows, made a sympathetic face at Kingsley, and drove on. We took more breaks in Alabama, where I noticed that black- and white-owned gas stations seemed to alternate along the highway one exit at a time. In Georgia, it seemed that every stretch of highway was under construction and clogged with traffic.
After eleven hours of driving, we sat on the floor of Mom’s new apartment, eating Chinese food while Kingsley ran from one empty room to the next. Mom had already found the day’s copies of USA Today and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to read. She mentioned a story about the war in Iraq and I brought up an ex-boyfriend’s brother. Any excuse, I figured, to try to get to a conversation with her about all the questions I had—about dating and guys and why it felt like I’d already done everything wrong, before I’d even known what I was doing.
“You know, I dated a guy who has a brother serving over there. Or was; he injured his knee when an IED exploded near his truck.” Silence. With my eyes fixated on my plastic container of orange chicken, I kept going. “He’s okay, I think. He’s recovering in California but wants to go back soon.”
When I looked up, she was staring at me, wide-eyed, almost pleadingly—as if I’d led someone afraid of heights to the edge of a rusting bridge. And then I did exactly what I thought all people who love each other do: I changed the subject; I changed myself; I erased everything I had just said; I erased myself so I could be her son again.
* * *
AT THE END of the summer, I made an excuse about needing to be back on campus early to help with orientation for the new speech and debate team members. The truth, of course, is that living in a one-bedroom apartment with my mother, our dog, and all that was still left unsaid was exhausting. I went back to Kentucky and threw myself into the rhythm of what college life had become: poetry workshops in the morning, afternoons practicing for speech and debate tournaments, reading in the library before dinner, then finding a guy to fuck and forget in the same night, or to fall in love with that week, or to “date” that month.
Every man’s body reminded me of another man’s body. Some guys I slept with just because they resembled a man I wanted but couldn’t sleep with. I hooked up with a frat boy just so I’d have an excuse to see the inside of a frat house. I dated a British college student long distance because he said he loved me within the first two weeks of knowing me and because I liked hearing him speak in Welsh on the phone. I fell in love with a straight friend. We wrestled on the bed in my dorm room; he let me suck him off after parties. Then he got a girlfriend and I wasn’t in love anymore, just incredibly sad, so I started having sex with another straight boy instead. I dated a guy who went to school in Virginia—my friends called him Robot—because I wanted to prove to myself that I could be normal and boring like everyone else. On a charter bus headed to a debate tournament in Florida, I broke up with him on the phone for reasons I can’t even remember. The guys, the boys, the lovers, the men, this one and that one, oh and that one too. Everyone became someone else. And I wasn’t green anymore. I wasn’t new. I wasn’t ashamed of my sex life, exactly, but this didn’t feel like enlightenment either. Sex was simply what I did between classes or debate practice to get by, or at least buy some time. I buried myself in the bodies of other men so I could feel something other than the depression that was rolling in like a fog bank.
If I wasn’t in class or a stranger’s bed, I’d pack a lunch and go to the deepest reaches of the library stacks, weaving through one room after another until it seemed I was the only person around. I’d stay down there for hours, reading poetry collections, eating, taking naps, reading some more, before I had to go back to clas
s or practice. My favorite room in the stacks had one tiny square window revealing people’s shoes as they unwittingly walked by. It felt good to be a secret, waiting to be unearthed.
I had mostly excellent grades. I called home once a week, and texted with Mom at least once a day. By this point, I had won several national championships for speech. I was thriving in my first few creative writing workshops. My regular trips to the library meant that when I said I’d read Lucille Clifton’s work, I didn’t mean just a few poems; I’d read every single volume available. If the university president happened to pass me while walking across campus, he greeted me by name. To all appearances, I was the sunny, shining model of a college student. I’d contorted myself into the image of the young man I hoped my mother saw when she looked at me.
None of this had any bearing, though, on how I felt when I was alone. Standing in front of the mirror, my reflection and I were like rival animals, just moments away from tearing each other limb from limb.
And on days when even hiding in the stacks didn’t work, I’d go back to the Botanist. I’d told him to delete my number, but I hadn’t deleted his. Given his lack of surprise the first time I texted him about hooking up again, I guess he’d expected this from the moment I stormed out of his house. Maybe, a decade older than I was, he knew what I would eventually learn: it’s possible for two men to become addicted to the damage they do to each other.
I’d fuck him roughly, almost brutally, taunting him until he’d lash out and finally scream racist slurs, which sent me into a vicious loop, my worst fears about myself echoing back to me in a white man’s voice. It wasn’t enough to hate myself; I wanted to hear it. On all fours with this awful man was the only way I could sever the divide between how wrecked I felt on the inside and how put together and dependable I appeared.
The Botanist and I settled into a routine of seeing each other once or twice a month, until one day I walked into his bedroom to find a young man with a Herculean body waiting on the bed. He was so handsome, he looked surreal. I thought, for a moment, that perhaps the Botanist had put something in my drink.
The Botanist answered the question on my face with a lurid smile. “I want to watch you fuck him with that black dick of yours.”
I shrugged, took off my clothes, and climbed onto the bed. He was a beautiful man, there was no denying it. Tall with a football player’s physique, he wore his brown hair long and wild. In the Botanist’s blue-lit bedroom full of potted trees and ferns, he looked—well, he looked like Tarzan. The Botanist’s ability to create a scene was disturbingly skillful.
And this stranger wanted to be used, so I obliged.
I fucked him hard, then harder, until he started moaning, then growling. Soon, we were both shining with sweat. Just when it was getting hot enough for me to forget that the Botanist was sitting at the foot of the bed, I realized something was off. The guy hadn’t cleaned himself out well. Shit was all over the sheets. All over him. All over me. Disgusted, I jumped off the bed and ran to the shower.
With the water running, I started sobbing. The dam in my chest unleashed everything I’d held back for months. When the Botanist climbed into the shower with me, ignoring my tears, or satisfied by them, he grabbed my dick. I was too defeated to stop him. I felt like my body wasn’t mine when it was in another man’s hands. When he got me hard again and guided my dick inside him, I pushed in from behind. If the Botanist noticed that I was still softly crying as I pressed my body against his, he didn’t say a word.
14SEPTEMBER 2007
BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY
Let’s call this one Dane.
“Let’s play a game,” I announced. I was sitting in the passenger seat, locking and unlocking my door out of boredom. Dane raised his eyebrows. He was up to play. So I told him the rules of the Question Game, which were, of course, just my rules.
“We take turns asking each other a question and we have to answer the question, no matter what. I’ll go first.”
I waited a second. I wondered how far ahead Dane could see into what I was doing, whether he could guess that whenever I decided to play this game it was because I already had a very specific question in mind.
“We’re almost to my apartment,” he stuttered.
“It won’t take long. Okay, first question. What are your favorite kinds of tits?”
Straight guys loved this question. They always laughed the same kind of laugh when they heard it, and usually gave a little sigh of relief as if to say, “Shit, man. I thought you were going to ask some kind of fag question.” Sometimes that’s what they actually said.
Dane had already launched into a passionate monologue, about why size was overrated, how natural perkiness was what really mattered once the bra came off, and don’t even get him started on the rarity of evenly shaped tits, or how nipples are just so unpredictable—I wasn’t listening. I was deciding my next move, which questions I would need to ask before we got to his apartment in order to get to the only question I cared about. I figured it would only take two more questions, maybe three.
“Okay, okay, I’ve got one,” Dane said. “What does it feel like… you know, fucking a dude?”
I had to give him credit. I hadn’t expected this one until we got a little further along. Looking out my window, as if we were talking about great deals on gas prices, I gave my stock answer. “It feels so fucking good.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah.”
His posture had changed. We were pulling into the parking lot of his apartment complex now. Dane looked up at the lit windows of his two-bedroom. His roommate must have been home; I was losing him. I skipped ahead. “My turn. Have you ever done anything with a guy?”
“I—well, hmm.” He fingered the lock button on his side of the car. “I’m gonna need another drink if we’re gonna keep playing this game. Let’s go upstairs, man.”
He slinked out of his car before I had a chance to read his face. I wanted to see it in his eyes—in the eyes of every straight man I’d marked as mine that season—that I was right, right about how slippery gender, sex, and want really are, to prove that I could shame one straight man after another. And by shaming them—in a way—own them. However temporarily, however falsely. Or maybe I just wanted a distraction from how I felt when my body wasn’t pinned against another man’s body. It didn’t even feel like lust, really. It had a tinge of meanness to it, what I was doing. Spite, even. Like I was teaching one man after another a lesson he maybe didn’t need to learn.
Dane walked up the steps to his apartment and I followed, tracing my eyes along his shoulders, then down the back of his T-shirt toward the striped boxers peeking every time he took a step. When he unlocked the door to his apartment, the Notorious B.I.G.’s voice throbbed in surround sound.
“Surround sound, my man!” he shouted, dropping his keys on a glass stand. “Let’s do some shots.”
He was back to himself. All the work I had done in the car seemed to have vanished, and then there was a bottle of Bacardi 151 in one hand and shot glasses in the other. Then one shot and another shot, and two more because we were tired of feeling our legs, and another two because his roommate had joined us.
I swam to the kitchen sink to pour myself a glass of water, but by the time I got there, I couldn’t remember why I was alone in the kitchen of a brightly lit apartment that wasn’t mine. The bottle of Bacardi, which mere moments ago had been full, sat on the counter empty.
When I found myself back in the living room, Dane and his roommate were on the couch, playing a basketball video game on a huge flat-screen television. The graphics and sound were so impressive, I fell into a lull amid the sounds of cheering fans, sneakers on polished wood floors, referee whistles, and Dane and his roommate heckling each other as they played. I watched them for a moment, both errant frat boys, elbowing each other, mashing thumbs down on their controllers. I closed my eyes and eased back into the folds of Dane’s leather couch. Then a silence struck the room, as violent as feedback fr
om a stereo. Biggie was still playing, but the game was on pause.
I blinked and sat up, confused by the interruption. Dane and his roommate sat with their controllers in their hands, eyes wide, shocked by something. They kept looking at each other, then back at me. Just before I opened my mouth to ask what was going on, I played back the last bit of conversation in my head. An “err” sound. Why would a conversation end with an—
“Did one of you say ‘nigger’?”
They both sprang back into action, pointing at each other, blaming each other like two little boys trying to escape the blame for a broken vase.
“Why would you even say ‘nigger’?”
They both winced each time I said the word so I said it again, not angry, exactly, but not amused either.
“What does ‘nigger’ have to do with anything that’s happening here?”
“A player on my team messed up a play,” Dane finally confessed, with the bashfulness of a nine-year-old Klansman.
His roommate got up and walked toward the kitchen without another word. I watched him walk out of the room. All the basketball players on screen, most of them black men, were frozen in place. One player looked like he was about to crash into the floor face-first. The orange ball hovered in midair, refusing to fall.
“Let’s go,” I said, standing up and remembering, suddenly, that I was wasted.
“Where?”
“Away.”
We swam back through the living room and out into the evening. Inside the car, Dane started the engine and off we sped.
“I don’t want to go back to campus. Let’s just keep driving.”