Flannelwood

by Raymond Luczak

  I wanted in with those trucker-type guys who had fur on their bodies and who looked good naked in their unbuttoned flannel shirts and baseball caps. I couldn’t believe that those models, who reminded me of the guys I’d seen while growing up, could be gay. They’d even listed what they were into sexually along with their pictorials, and just knowing what they were into, even if it wasn’t all of what I was into at the time, was more than enough to get me stiff. But where were the local bears?

  I saw in the Gayze newspaper a small ad announcing the third annual OctoBear Dance at the VFW Hall. I couldn’t wait. For the occasion, I decided to wear a flannel shirt and jeans. I spent twenty minutes trying to decide how many buttons I should leave open at the top of my chest. I didn’t have a lot of chest fur, but I wanted to show that I did have some. I kept looking this way and that in the mirror when I buttoned one more, then unbuttoned two more. I wanted my friends to tag along, but none of them looked bearish. I was still a bit skinny, but I figured that as long as I didn’t hold in my flabby stomach, I’d pass. I knew I’d look ridiculous in my black sneakers, but I didn’t have the money for boots. I’d just graduated with a MFA the year before, so I was working full-time at Brewe Sisters, and I’d moved in with my lesbian housemates six months before.

  I walked the mile and half from my house to the hall. The orange leaves, as if lit on fire by the streetlights, fell around me as I walked closer. Everything was starting to feel like magic. And, frankly, I was horny. I had become more attuned to stocky guys on the streets and elsewhere now that I knew they had a name of their own. “Bear.” I couldn’t stop trailing my eyes after men in uniform, like bus drivers and cops. I didn’t know if I could hold a conversation with these guys, but if we couldn’t talk about anything, our bodies could speak perfectly in the same language.

  I remember this one bus driver. He was a bit wide in the hips, but he had the most angular jaw I’d ever seen. There was a star cleft in his chin. He was shaven bald with his thick mustache immaculately trimmed. His eyes were flint-gray when he took in all of me in the widescreen mirror above him as he drove. He gave me a slight smile, but that was more than enough to keep me looking at him. I craned to see if he had fur on the back of his hands, always a good indicator of just how hairy he could be under all those clothes. I listened to his quiet voice when he spoke to a customer swiping her fare card. I thought of him standing before me and unzipping himself in front of everyone to reveal a huge erection. I was thinking all these thoughts while I was sipping in the sight of that bus driver. If I had been in lust with someone before, this was different. This was a far more intense lust, mainly because I now understood there were indeed others who appreciated my kind of men, and these guys had to know how they could be appreciated so easily.

  I prayed that the bus driver would be at the dance.

  I prayed that the janitor from the building where I worked would be there.

  I prayed that all the construction workers I’d lusted after would all be there.

  It was ten minutes past eight when I showed up. The dance ran from seven to eleven p.m., but I didn’t want to seem too early.

  At first I felt intimidated by the beefy and brawny men standing around with their beers. They were in their lumberjack drag, and they were hot. Seeing so many men with beards all in one place was almost too much. I wanted to go into the men’s restroom and beat off. I was that horny.

  I must’ve looked forlorn with my beer in a plastic cup. I’ve never liked the taste of beer, but I wanted that badly to fit in with them. I wanted to be one of those guys who had beefy friends. I stood by the doors, debating whether I should bolt or not. The music was all disco, and all before my time. A lot of shirtless guys danced their bellies off. Some of them had really flabby pecs, and I was afraid that those obese guys would find me attractive. I tried to look cool—whatever that meant—whenever guys glanced my way, but because I was alone, I looked worse than uncool. I was never going to fit in there. I wanted to melt into the cement-blocked wall behind me.

  Then a short balding potbellied man strode up to me. I didn’t know that the bear community was developing their own jargon, but today everyone would’ve called him a “pocket bear.” He looked cute in his own way, but he didn’t do the lumberjack stuff. He wore a striped shirt and jeans and Reeboks; a complete dork. Still, I was happy that someone said hello to me. Even if he was only five feet tall.

  “Hi, I’m Craig Gorman.” He extended his hand.

  “Bill Badamore.”

  Craig and I stood by the wall. I listened while he did all the talking. All I had to do was to ask a question, and off he went. I didn’t know it then, but he had been extremely nervous about approaching me. He was a computer programmer, and he was quite excited that the Internet, which I hadn’t known much about then, was becoming more and more accessible to the masses. He was working for the company that ran CompuServe. He babbled about forthcoming changes in the tech specs for telephone modems. I thought “modem” was a very odd word at the time.

  He took my hand and stroked my palm with his thumb while he looked up into my eyes. “I like you.” Did you know how much that meant to me, James? So many people are so afraid of being direct with their feelings.

  “Thank you.” I squeezed his hand back.

  He lit up.

  Of course I had to go home with him that night.

  In his condo a few blocks away, we were all over each other. He wasn’t as furry as I’d hoped, but I didn’t care. I was making love to a bear. Soon, I thought, I’d be one of them. He’d introduce me to his furry friends, and among them I’d meet my future husbear.

  I ended up falling for Craig instead.

  All my life I slept in percale sheets until I met Craig. They scratched against my elbows when I turned over, so I wore long-sleeved pajama tops. I didn’t know that there could be softer sheets that my bare skin could luxuriate in. I’d always bought the cheapest sheets available.

  When I stayed overnight at Craig’s place for the first time, I couldn’t get over how gentle a bed sheet could be. Craig kept laughing at how I rubbed my body against so much flannel. I just couldn’t get over how loved I felt in that bed. Of course, Craig and I had wonderful sex, but the 400-thread count flannel surrounding my body felt like a blanket of arms wrapped around me. The flannel did not want to let me go, and I did not want to wake up. The wintry dreams I had were full of snowflakes and stars, and I scarcely noticed it when Craig snuggled up to me.

  The very next day I charged a new set of flannel sheets at Jaxson’s downtown. I didn’t care that they were so expensive, but I simply had to have flannel on my bed. I felt horror at the idea of having to wash them first, but I followed the instructions on the label. It was such a joy to pull the still-warm sheets over the corners of my bed, and right there, on my bed, were bright red sheets, precombed to prevent excessive pilling. I went to bed early and thought of Craig, and I fell asleep just like that.

  Later, when Craig died, I took all of his flannel sets except for the one still on his bed. I slept in those sheets for years until each set, one by one, turned thin in spots and ripped holes in the corner seams. My heart was feeling the same way when I first saw you.

  I needed a new set of sheets, a new winter, a new beginning.

  When I slept in your flannel-covered bed the first night, I felt right at home. I thought that you were perhaps the one to make the breath of Craig fade from my pillows. He was a wisp, and you were a redwood full of sunlight and shade. I wanted you to loom above all that I’d known. You were the Adam, strong and majestic enough to inspire love in the stoniest of hearts deep inside men, and you’d lead me into the great Garden of Eden where there was enough warmth from the sun to keep us fully naked without a shiver. I would walk with you, unashamed of my own body, and hold your hand while we walked among the trees and ate one fruit after another. Our cries of pleasure from making love would echo across the land. Your virility would awaken desire in the eyes of others equally nak
ed, and I would be proud to join others in those sudden fits of passion. Your kisses would redeem me from all those years of living death.

  I was a dead man who passed as alive when I met you. The magic of you was pure oxygen coming straight down from Mount Everest. Suddenly I could breathe the crispness of hope all over again. For the first time in years, I didn’t think about Craig or the fear of contracting it. You made me feel like anything was possible, especially with the orgasms we shared. You were fire in flannel.

  Craig and I never got around to living together. He wanted me to move in with him, but I was still in my mid-twenties. Each time I went out to bear events with him and met all his gorgeous friends, I felt more and more afraid to live with him. What if I cheated on him? I also didn’t understand how open relationships could work.

  Then he tested positive.

  I was shocked, hurt, angry, fearful—the whole enchilada.

  Then I became frightened. In those days it took a week to get the test results. I didn’t know whether to cry or bolt each time I saw Craig. I couldn’t sleep at all. It was the worst week of my life.

  When I called the clinic for the results, she said, “Oh, you’re negative.”

  Those were the three sweetest words I’d ever heard all my life.

  I felt saved, redeemed, blessed.

  But watching your first boyfriend wither away into bones in the nightmarish days before protease inhibitors came along was the worst way to grow up. I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. I was an old man. He kept saying how much he loved me, how I should leave him, how he’d understand if I left him then. He didn’t want me to remember him as a skeleton, but I couldn’t abandon him. I hated hospitals, but I had to be there.

  When he died, I sensed it instantly. I was sleeping alone in my bed even though I had keys to his condo. I didn’t like the feeling of dread that permeated his place when he wasn’t around, so I preferred to sleep in my bed. At least I didn’t have to see reminders of his impending death—the insurance paperwork, the orange silos of pills, the constant piles of sheets that needed to be changed and washed. Death was the mysterious odor impossible to remove even with the toughest chemicals.

  The second he died in the dark of night, I jolted awake. I hadn’t known why. Two minutes later my phone rang.

  “He died, right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I felt him a minute ago.”

  James, I hate to say this, but I was so relieved when Craig died. I didn’t want him to go, but he was in so much pain and agony. He didn’t look himself at all. He looked like a skinny animal with buck teeth and kooky glasses. He’d become quite blind due to CMV.

  Anybody who can stand by their man as he dies is good husband material. I thought that’s what you were looking for. A man who’d never let you down: that’s the kind of fellow I am.

  The bed I slept in had turned into a flannel-lined coffin. It had only one pillow, and no room for you, Craig. You had been cremated and packed into a Mason jar. At first I didn’t want to look at it or leave it out in my room because its salt-and-pepper powder in no way resembled you. It was hard to reconcile my memory of your flesh and blood with the clinical dryness of ash sealed inside a see-through jar. I hid it far back on one of the shelves in my closet and kept the door closed. It felt creepy to think that remnants of your being could be locked up in that tiny closet, but it was the only way I could sleep. There, I lay in my coffin as I floated away. Everywhere was the smoke of factory where the masked men and women, wearing white lab coats, directed single files of men and women, pockmarked with Kaposi’s sarcoma and sagged with fleshy skin, one after another, into the black mouth. I knew where they were going, and the air was full of their deaths, rising and casting a white pallor across everything even on the sunniest of days.

  Craig, I thought of you joining these men and women, whose faces and names have been long forgotten, in that ceaseless puff toward sky. You couldn’t be contained inside the funeral home’s assembly line where your body was incinerated and your sizzling ashes brushed each way and then into that jar. You couldn’t have been reduced to a few mere pounds. Not possible. But there you were, in my hands. The jar didn’t have a face or a body, but I wanted to cradle it like the child you last were in my arms before you died. I wanted to put you in a swath of sun-warmed blankets and have you fall asleep on my shoulder as I stood in the sun and swayed slowly to let you dream to the music of my body reaching out to you, singing and aching. But the weight of you was the heaviest I’d ever carried. My shoulders got sore from the yoke of your memory. In the darkness you slept, the beautiful innocent baby that you were, and I slept too, or tried to, the awful daddy I was not to have cherished your sweetness more when you were alive in my arms.

  One night I tried to inhale marijuana for the first time. A friend of my housemates, Chloë and Veena, had brought a joint over because she thought it’d help soothe my jagged nerves. Everyone knew what a walking ghost I’d become in your wake. Craig, I tried my best to look cool, hip, whatever, but I just couldn’t. I coughed, sputtered. I tried to slow down my breathing, tried again. This time the smoke floated into my head, rising and roasting my brain as it spun. I didn’t know what I was feeling; was I keeling over? But I felt hands on my arms; I think I was guided back to the sofa, made to sit there. I don’t know what I said. All I know was that I’d felt quite light. Suddenly I thought the death of you was a big cosmic joke. I giggled at anything, riffed on the romantic things you’d done for me, went into great detail what you’d done, how foolish you were to do them for me . . . I think I dozed off. I don’t remember. I felt lethargic when I woke up an hour or so later. I was confused. I thought I’d died. I was so disappointed when I realized I hadn’t. The lesbians were playing cards in the dining room. I groaned when I tried to get up from the sofa. My head felt so heavy, almost like lead but worse than that when I realized how badly my head hurt, throbbed. I mumbled words like “fuckin’ headache” and “aspirin” and “water.” I don’t think I was quite coherent then, but somehow someone gave me an aspirin and some water. When I woke again, half an hour had passed. I was so hungry, I wanted so much to pepper the salt of you over everything I ate. I needed to eat more, fill out my chest, my belly, my ass so I’d never shrink into the skeleton you were when you’d died. I would be a bundle of fat so blubbery that I couldn’t sink no matter how much I wanted to drown.

  Craig, the weight of you was the weight of my heart.

  Of course, I didn’t gain that much weight and eventually lost most of it. I didn’t do pot again. The headaches and the munchies just weren’t worth it, but the looks that I got from my housemates bothered me a little. It was as if I’d said things, sacrilegious things really, about Craig; that I’d become truly evil deep down inside, mocking Death in its face with my laughter. I’d kicked the loving memory of you into the dustbin of my history, and banged its lid shut loudly in case no one knew that you, my little lamb, my little love, had died. A few years would pass until my housemates told me what I’d said about you. I was so shocked, mortified; I desecrated your memory with my angry pissings. I’d pulled down my pants and squatted, figuratively speaking, of course, in front of your tombstone, and I did so with a mad glee they’d never seen in me before. In that moment, they’d thought of asking me to move out, but I’m glad they didn’t.

  They are the truest family in my life, and I can’t bear the idea of never having them in my life. But my own family? They might as well be smoke from a factory.

  In those bleak months after Craig died, I thought I would go crazy. I was seeing him everywhere. Didn’t matter what the guy looked like as long as he was short. Sometimes I wanted to call out to the guy across the street and shout his name, but he’d turn to look at something else. Then it wasn’t Craig anymore.

  He had spoiled me. No one in my family paid me much attention, so I felt quite overwhelmed by his affections and constant fretting over me. I didn’t think I was worthy of such attention. He was the on
e who told me, “What your family taught you was stupid. They told you weren’t worthy of love. Well, I’m here now, and I’m telling you that I love you with all my stupid heart.”

  “You’re not stupid,” I said.

  “What part don’t you get?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t get that I love you very much?”

  “Oh, that I do.”

  “Then kiss me and say thank you, dammit.” He looked slightly hurt, but he seemed better when I took his hand and didn’t let go when we walked down Speck Street. I felt scared at first to be holding a man’s hand in public, but we were in a gay neighborhood. I still felt apprehensive.

  I had never seen him look so happy. It was as if he’d won a major award, and no one knew why. People walking past us didn’t seem fazed by our PDA. I was relieved.

  But when he got sick, I felt scared. I withdrew my hand from his, but I saw in his eyes how much he understood. I felt bad. Still do. If I’d known back then what we know now about the disease, I’d have held his hand and never let go anywhere we went. Wouldn’t matter if he was frail-looking or not with his walker. But stupid me, I didn’t give him what he wanted the most of all—my pride in being his man.

  After Dad banished me, I didn’t go back until I graduated from college four years later, and only when the foliage was in autumnal riot. I stayed with my sister, Sally. Of all my siblings, she was the most understanding, and even then, she didn’t want to know the particulars of my love life. She didn’t want to know anything more about Craig once I mentioned his name. The fact that he was a man was upsetting enough. I never stayed long at Sally’s house. Her kids were loud and noisy, and their Pomeranian yapped nonstop at sounds that we couldn’t hear from the outside. It was not a restful place.

  Mom never told me much about Dad. “The same,” she said.

  Until Sally told me about her lung cancer, I’d never thought much about Mom’s smoking. She’d always smoked. I was used to hearing her hacking coughs in the morning before she lit her first cigarette of the day. I had gotten used to the whiff of smoke in my clothes, but when I went away to college, so few people smoked that I got used to not having the stink in my clothes. When the city passed an anti-smoking ordinance for bars and restaurants, I started feeling more alert. I hadn’t realized how much secondhand smoke had affected me. I had felt slightly dragged down, but I thought that was because of the loud music and the strobe lights. Suddenly I could see everything clearly.