Flannelwood

by Raymond Luczak

  There by the house is a gravel driveway and a two-car garage that you’ve converted into a woodworking workshop. Inside sits a long lathe, an electric bandsaw, and a drill press. Off to the side are all kinds of wood pieces and unfinished pieces of furniture, and on the wall hang a hundred and one hand tools. The promise of stain and varnish awaits them all.

  There in the yard are the great woods knotted with low branches and trunks too close to each other.

  There through the woods is a path that your cigar-cock knows.

  There in the belly of the woods you will find me, waiting for you. Baby, don’t you know that I’ve got your favorite cigar right here? I’ve got the match right here in my lips. All you have to do is to strike-kiss it with your lips.

  Just. Combust.

  We’ll burn down the woods, the lands, the garage, the house. The smoke will cloud everything until we spasm from orgasm. Around us will be charred remains, but you and I will be untouched and alive and free. We will never turn into ash.

  From afar, maybe a half block away, stood a thin gangly man. Bright black curly hair. Slightly petulant lips. He wore a parka, ragged jeans, and Converse sneakers even though it was icy on the sidewalks. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that I’d seen him somewhere before. I was waiting for you out in front of Brewe Sisters, and I was too excited to stay inside even though it was starting to snow. I couldn’t wait to see you again.

  Your blue truck came right up, and I hurried inside. It had been one of those awful weeks at work. It was so bad that I couldn’t al ways concentrate long enough to read my newest Jeanette Winter-son novel at night, and I adore her writing!

  As you drove us past that man, I saw him give you an unexpected look of bitterness.

  “Did you know him?”

  You checked the dashboard mirror to see where he was. A flicker of sadness blinked from your eyes.

  “Oh, he’s just a nut. Don’t mind him.”

  That weekend I kept wondering about him. What had he done to you?

  My first hookup after you was horrible. He was one of those NSA-only guys from a hookup app, which suited my pressing need perfectly.

  I went over to his apartment, which was about a mile away. His place was messy and reeked of cat although I didn’t see the creature, but he didn’t seem to care about making a good impression. The minute I stepped into his place, he didn’t say anything. He pulled me right into his arms, and we immediately tongued each other. I felt his body. It was a shock to see how much smaller-chested he was. I’d been so used to the bulk of you that I felt thrown off balance, but he held on to me.

  When we finally ejaculated, I’d felt an enormous relief, but it wasn’t in a good way. I couldn’t wait to get the sex over with. He was too pushy, too grunty, too porn-star.

  Sex with him made me miss you all the more. That was the exact moment when I realized I wasn’t young anymore. I had become officially middle-aged.

  Somehow I don’t believe you when you say you got right on with the program after you lost your right foot. I don’t believe you when you say you didn’t cry after learning that they had to amputate the bottom half of your shin. I don’t believe that you lay there in your bed, thinking I’m gonna be a tough man today. I don’t believe you had an Oscar-winning moment of triumph. I don’t believe any of that.

  Here’s what I believe.

  You were angry as hell.

  You didn’t like having to use the walker to get around. You hated having to watch the miserable twig of your shin be rebandaged over and over again, having to wear a shrinker to push the swelling down. You didn’t like waiting in your bed and watching the bland soap operas on daytime television. You hated having to learn how to manage your pain and conserve your energy when moving around. You didn’t like weighing down on your prosthetic shin-and-foot when trying to walk. Felt too fake, effeminate, contraption-like; it still hurt even after much physical therapy. Maybe you thought about sticking to forearm crutches, but your doctor said that it wouldn’t be good for your body long-term. No matter. You’d show how tough, how made of flint you were. Your arms, hands, wrists killed with every gunshot you made with your crutches thumping across the sidewalk, pavement, anywhere. Didn’t matter what kind of floor it shot; your foot, sized at 14EEE, was the head of hammer that swung down on the anvil to bounce up the jolt of ball hitting the bell’s bottom, the ding that announced to everyone you were different, therefore demanding respect.

  I bet you were just an oversized muscular man in his late thirties who screamed and snarled at anyone who came into the room. You hated the tasteless meals on the tray. You spat out curse words at your physical therapist. You did not want to swim in that water for “exercise” or “therapy,” because it meant exposing yourself as an amputee. You bawled long after the visiting hours were over. You wondered how you were going to walk again. You thought about how painful it would be to feel the grip of the shin brace holding your prosthetic foot. You hated it all, and you wanted to die.

  But something inside you told you to live.

  I’m grateful that you listened. You learned to adapt and adopted your prosthetic foot after all.

  You are the most beautiful man alive.

  You are at your most eloquent when you speak silences. I’ve listened to you speak in that rarest of tongues, and I’ve learned that it’s not the words that matter but the unstated intent. In that you are a master poet.

  I am just babble.

  Your eyes sang poetry.

  I don’t know how you did that, but you did. Each time when I looked up into your eyes, you let loose a sly grin. I couldn’t speak your tongue, but I understood it momentarily, a peculiar dialect among men who’ve had to hide their own feelings. They may sit around and jabber away with beers in their hands, but they do not ever speak it in front of others. That would be too sissy. Once in a while, when they feel as if their souls are dying, they speak poetry and they feel magically restored.

  It is indeed hard to know a man on his terms.

  He is taught early on to be tough, and if he can’t be tough, he can expect a lifetime of teasing. Children cannot fathom a life as adults where they won’t be teased, so the scars run deeper than rivers until they turn permanent as marrow.

  I couldn’t be tough. I knew I was different, but that was all.

  You’ve never mentioned whether you felt different from the others while growing up.

  You were a quarterback. Were you interested in guys then?

  You told me you hung out in public restrooms, but you never told me what happened your first time. How did you know you liked guys?

  Stories like that are important. They tell the story of you.

  I thought I’d told you the story of me, but I realized that I never told you anything all that important. I was afraid you’d laugh at me.

  The true story of me is filled with embarrassment, humiliation, and shame.

  I’ve never told you how Dad whipped me every time I cried until I learned to cry into the suffocating arms of my pillow.

  I’ve never told you how kids used to call me Fairy Badamore. I was surprised that the nickname hadn’t traveled to my family.

  I’ve never told you how I had to escape to the public library with every intention of hiding in there until the day I died. Mr. Loneliness proposed marriage to me, and I accepted. The best part of our marriage were the children he gave me, and they all had names with grand family histories I couldn’t get enough of: Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and Emma. I felt intimate with each child, and I felt sad when I had to let each one go. The words on the pages were the same as a best friend whispering into my ear: “You’ll be all right.”

  I long to whisper in your ear: “You are more than all right.”

  We two wouldn’t have to be ghosts anymore.

  Disabled people roam everywhere in this city.

  Of course, they’ve always existed, but I’d never paid them much attention. Once you’ve seen one wh
eelchair, you’ve seen them all, right? Same thing with walkers and powered strollers and canes and so on.

  But after you hung up on me, I started seeing you everywhere. It was as if your prosthetic foot had transmogrified into something else. I saw you sitting there in a powered scooter going down an aisle in a food co-op. I saw you waiting by the counter with your cane as a salesclerk pulled out a book from the shelves for you. I saw you wearing bicyclist gloves and pushing your wheelchair along from one street corner to another. Then I saw you ambling along with your walker onto the public transit bus I was on. Everyone seemed disgruntled when they had to wait for the driver to flip out the small lift plate in the entrance and hoist you from the curb onto the bus, but I didn’t mind. I thought of you, and I just about cried.

  But I didn’t. I figured that you didn’t seem to have cried for me, and therefore I shouldn’t cry for you either. I had to be a man just like you.

  Those six months when I was with you I had to butch it up. You never asked me to, but I felt I had to. I had seen your masculine friends. I had also seen your small town, and it didn’t seem gay-friendly. Yet you were very comfortable where you were, and you said that everyone knew you were gay, but no one talked about it. Sure, everyone talked about their spouses and kids, but not you. Look what a tough fucker I am, you seemed to be saying. You were just a beefy tall man with a beard and a machismo attitude. You swaggered a bit even with your crutches.

  When I first met you, I was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and boots. That was the de rigueur dress code for bear events. Guys who came wearing shirts that were ironed and who had moisturized their faces were looked down on. They were too faggy; couldn’t be bears at all. I felt sorry for some of them. They didn’t ask to be skinny or smooth at all, and yet they were accursed with a fetish for a certain body type. Most bears sleep with other bears; they rarely slept with others outside their community. I was grateful for aging in this regard. I was able to gain a bit of weight; not intentionally, of course, but it helped me achieve something of that bearish look. James, would you have been interested in me if I were still skinny?

  After I met you, I stopped wearing button shirts on weekends. I simply wore T-shirts and jeans. I wanted to be the kind of bear you’d want. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to have me behave like a cub. I was never sure. You never said whether you liked this or that shirt on me. The more I think about it, the more I realize that you’d never complimented me again after our first night.

  You said you loved our amazing sex.

  You couldn’t wait until we could fuck again. You said so on the phone.

  But not once in our six months together did you say again that I was cute or handsome or hot.

  I told you over and over again what an amazing looker you were.

  Anytime when I was impressed by what you’d done with your woodworking, I said so.

  And you did have a killer smile!

  Maybe you thought I was being charitable because you were disabled. Not really. I know what it feels like not to have your work noticed. Call it the Golden Rule or even good karma, but I’ve tried to treat you the same way I’d hoped to be treated.

  Was I not worth a single compliment?

  Please understand that I don’t need a lot of praise, but a well-placed compliment could do wonders.

  Just call me and tell me how much you’ve missed me. That would be the greatest compliment you could give me.

  To the sacred ground we shall return, ashes to ashes. We shall be absolved of any and all misunderstandings once so rife in the hollow caskets of our hearts, and we shall spread our fierce wings like angels, blessed at last and freed to be fully ourselves without fear, toward the heavens from where we make mad love without shame or hesitation and pray that others after us will learn the difficult lessons far more quickly than we did.

  I happened to watch a badly shot clip online of two shaggy-looking men, fully clothed in T-shirts and jeans, wrestling in a mud pit. There weren’t a lot of details; it was just so fuzzy with bad sound. It was probably shot on VHS. They rolled and twisted with sudden bouts of humping against each other. I wasn’t sure what to make of the spectacle. The more I watched it, the more I envied them. They were absolutely joyous about letting go, not caring what others might think, feeling the taboo sensations of mud pushing up against patches of their skin exposed between their clothes. I couldn’t tell if they’d uttered cries of orgasm. There was so much motion in the shimmers of shadow.

  A moment later the video cut to the same men standing. They were so covered with mud that you couldn’t tell if they were naked at first. They waded into a creek and pulled each other down into the shimmering water. They pushed waves of water over each other and brushed clumps of mud off each other’s backs. They burst out laughing, but I couldn’t hear what had been so funny. Didn’t matter. These two men were bathing together, and they were happy. They had undergone the grunge of passion, and they were rewarding themselves with the baptism of each other.

  In that moment, I felt waves of peace wash over me. These men had worshipped each other, gods no doubt in each other’s eyes, with holy love and respect in a way that made sense only to them. It was the most spiritual ritual I’d witnessed in a long time.

  How I’d sorely missed our Friday night revivals, and how we’d spoken feverishly in incoherent tongues until we both exploded in the same language. No matter where we are, no matter the age we live in, we must seek the spiritual. Even if it’s just a ghost. It’s better than living without a dream.

  Let us go down, you and I, to the big circus not of today but of the yesteryear when cell phones existed only in the most farfetched science fiction of the day. We are still in the age of loud-racketed machine caught in the yawp of clopping horse and carriage. Up ahead is the big awning of blue, the tired wooden poles stretching the burlap skin across the sky, the rickety and paint-peeled train cars locked onto their tracks. We can still smell the manure clumped across the hay-strewn road to the box office, the lurid posters, the blare of promises to see things never seen or heard before: FREAKS. We have come here to see the creatures, the ones who are too short, too tall, too far removed from all we’d thought possible with the human body. The barker, tall and wiry with a Van Dyke that flaps in the wind, exhorts us to come this way, it’s only five cents, see the boy with no legs, look at the lady with a full beard, gawk at the pinheaded Cinderella in her sad Miss Havisham dress. You are wearing a tank top and a pair of gym shorts, so there’s no mistaking the missing foot as you hop along with your crutches. The music of a calliope tweets notes out of tune. We file past disfigured bodies lit by kerosene, their eyes hidden in shadow as they watch us suppress our gawks. Others near us are silent, grossed out; a few, gasps of horror as these creatures, their faces immobile from years of being laughed at, remain mute. Strange that no one has stared at your missing foot; not even these creatures have shown a flicker of acknowledgment, a possibility of brotherhood with you. You are an amputee; yes, a FREAK. Stranger that no one has noticed my naked body, tattooed with words like FAIRY QUEER FAGGOT COCKSUCKER WRITER; it’s as if everyone is seeing right through us. Are we too much for anyone, or are we good enough as fodder in the ongoing war for equality?

  Oh, do let us go down, you and I, and join those FREAKS parading before all. They are the brave ones, but let’s not be of the audience clapping politely out of discomfort. Let us hold hands, embrace each other with our bulges touching, and tongue each other’s mouths like a serpent wrapped around the body of Eve pulling her into itself, swallowing the placenta of tongue deep within her womb into its own alimentary canal consuming the last of her innocence until she turns evil, all-knowing with a what-the-fuck-do-you-want sneer. The smell of sawdust masks the dung of horse and elephant in the distance as the aerialists spin around velvet ropes and twirl between bars swaying to meet, but our spotlighted presence below them will strip everything, their dearly held misconceptions of us whatever they are, that even our rank-ness will overpower the sickly
scent of caramel popcorn. Let them all shriek at how horrifying we are, how dare we offend their sense of propriety, how we are making them sick with showing them the very thoughts that feel absolutely normal to us. Let’s give them what they want because they’re so afraid to see how abnormal they truly are inside. Why else did they come here? They don’t have the strength to look deep inside the funhouse of mirrors deflecting the uglies oozing from the pits of their souls, but we do. We mirror more than they, and they know it. That’s why we are more powerful than they’ll ever be, damnably so. Why else would they pay to gawk? Pity may be cheap, but compassion is more rare than gold vaulted in the annals of Fort Knox. I call myself a FREAK, though not physically disabled like you, because it’s the only way any one of us will ever stop feeling like one. We are all FREAKS inside. I say, FREAK on, baby. Let’s FREAK, let’s all be FREAKS. Let them gaze their ableist eyes on us and die from the nuclear explosions of our strength. We are da nuke bomb.

  Chatting online with disabled guys from all over the country was an eye-opening experience. I had no idea how cruel and denigrating able-bodied men could be toward them. Yet there was no trace of bitterness in the way they shared their stories. Sometimes I cried for them without them knowing it, and I was grateful that I wasn’t on webcam. I didn’t want to seem like one of those people who got off on inspiration porn or felt sorry for them. They’d simply wanted to be treated as equal to anyone else, especially on dates. I didn’t know what to think or feel when a few of them lamented the fact that I had lived so far away. Ah, the curse of the Internet!

  I didn’t think I was that handsome, but they said I truly was. They gave me their phone numbers and email addresses, but I never contacted any of them outside the gay disability groups online. I was afraid to hear desperation in their voices, and that would’ve made me feel guilty if I realized someone wasn’t for me. Nothing to do with his disability, but . . . let me give you an example. I once talked with this nice-looking fella who had been a wheelchair user since he was seven years old, and he was still living with his parents. He had full use of the upper half of his body, and he was thirty years old! He’d never had a chance to live independently on his own. That prospect scared me a lot more than the reality of his wheels.