When I woke up this morning, the opening gambit was clear as day: “Your missing right foot was only a part of you, just like the fur that blanketed your body . . .”
I will pull back the curtain of shame and reveal all of you, including your missing foot. I will not hide that of you. I will display on your face the pride of being different from everyone else. I will not make you a saint or a villain. You just are.
I will render the details of your body so clearly that people unaccustomed to seeing raw sensuality will have to avert their eyes and accuse me of obscenity when you were merely standing there. Not even an erection. They will wish that you’d trim your mountainous pubic hair, that you should shave your chest so you can be smooth like a woman, that you’d just button up your shirt and hide the one thing everyone always zeroes on when they see a man naked.
I wonder how they’d react if you lifted your right leg up like an erection. Would they be repelled by the contours of your amputa tion, or would they still turn away and look at your cock instead, pretending not to have seen the very thing that was supposed to differentiate you from them? What you have left of your body is a gift. When you walk out in the world, you challenge them to consider the possibility that they too could end up like you. The fear is so great that they have to turn away from you. The ones who don’t are the ones you want to be friends with. They are the ones who get that you’re more than an amputee.
When you stand there like a giant up in the clouds of my dreams, partially lit by a raging fire, I fret that I’ll never be able to capture your mercury nature with my brushstrokes. You are so epic that I can’t just be Georges Seurat, applying tiny gobs of paint so patiently and placing them next to similar gobs of different colors to achieve a whole new color when viewed from the distance. Trying to paint you would be dizzying, like trying to take in a newspaper-dotted Chuck Close image up close while trying to connect the dots. I’d need to take many steps far back and absorb the big picture of you.
I feel so helpless when I wonder how I’ll ever measure up to the masterpiece that is you, but paint I must.
Start anywhere. The road I’ve taken has already gone past your house.
On the first day of winter, the warmth of summer had arrived.
In high school Matthew used to be a gymnast. He knew his way around the bars and beams, and he wasn’t afraid of velocity and gravity when he spun high up in the air. His sense of balance was perfect. Training was demanding, but he derived great pleasure out of aiming for grace in the air. Not a wasted movement, and all clocked to a single song. Just was. A blur, a moment of suspense, the stark realization of this is all it’s going to come down to. His tights were buff and blue, the high school colors, and he photographed well with his medals and trophies.
Then one morning he had a stroke just before he was to start another day of classes. The part of his brain that regulated his leg movements went dead. He woke up in a hospital room, confused, groggy, frightened, not realizing that a few days had passed. Then they told him: “We need to work your legs.”
But those muscular legs, the pride and joy of his existence, the way he executed his straight legs like scissors opening so precisely in air and while swinging between parallel bars did not want to work, wouldn’t work, couldn’t, can’t. He was seventeen years old, and his dreams of competing in the Olympics died with his legs. It was odd not to feel anything in his legs; they had essentially gone numb, and he couldn’t feel pain or warmth. He had to learn how to keep his legs warm even if he didn’t feel anything. He still needed physical therapy to exercise his legs to prevent atrophy. He was grateful, though, that he could still get hard, so that was good.
He hated sitting in his wheelchair, quite humiliating during his last year of high school, he had never hated the word “sorry” as much as he had in those days, so he fell into the habit of watching movies as a way of keeping his mind off things. That was how he decided to become a director. He didn’t know of any disabled directors then, but his former coach encouraged him not to worry. He went to Browell University, which he wasn’t crazy about as they kept giving him less interesting plays to direct, but in hindsight he was grateful. The so-called boring plays required him to make the direction more dynamic, more compelling. He had to look for fresh takes on the classics. He had to study actors on stage, and in rehearsal. The entire process was really no different from training for a competition, except that it wasn’t just one person swinging up in the air. A small army had to be there to catch each actor should she fall. He grew to love the theater, couldn’t stop reading stage plays, watching TV programs and movies on DVD, and he couldn’t imagine being away from watching the stage. He was helping to tell stories. More powerful than just another Yurchenko.
Matt is not a ghost. His spirit is of the flesh. The sex we have is not as blindingly intense as you and I had, but it is far richer, more lasting, and more emotional in a good way. We laugh, and we smile, and we hold hands. This is what genuine intimacy is about. He’s let me in, and his heart is an amazing ocean. When he kisses me, I feel the sky.
Unlike you, he loves to talk yet loves to listen. His observations are at times so profound that I simply have to hold his hand and kiss him. In that sense I’ve become just like Craig. I finally understood how he’d felt about loving me because at the time he overwhelmed me. I was sometimes annoyed by his PDA. I hope to annoy Matt with my PDA.
You see, when I met you, I’d forgotten I was worthy of reciprocation.
Hello guys!
Time to update my profile. I’ve met the most amazing man. He’s the guy on my left in the first three pictures. I’m very happily off the market. Asking him out for a second date was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. He’s a total badass.
Some have asked me how I was able to find such a hunky boyfriend.
Wanna find the man of your dreams? Just close your eyes and listen to your heart. He may not look like the stud you’ve always wanted, but he may feel the same way about you. Just close your eyes and stop judging each other on the basis of looks, cock size, etc. You can’t have selfishness in a relationship for it to work.
I saw this on my friend’s profile (hi Norm2231!): “You wanna have the best sex/orgasm ever? Try it with someone you love. All the sex in the world won’t fill an empty heart.”
Looking forward to hearing from ya.
Thanks for reading, guys!
Bill
LAST UPDATED ON OCT 11, 2014
When I did see you again, it was at the OctoBear Dance a year after you and I met. Matt and I were there to meet up with some friends of ours who were entertaining guests from New York. You sat by yourself at a table by the dance floor, and you looked the same in your baseball cap, flannel shirt, and jeans.
This time I wasn’t hoping for you to kiss me again. I was too busy feeling shy with Matt’s hand holding mine. I was still skittish with the idea of loving someone who was emotionally available. How could I have been so lucky? It’s truly astonishing how afraid people are of loving others who are different from them, and how easy it is to love when you listen to only each other’s heart.
When the DJ switched over to Moby’s ethereal ballad “I’m Not Worried at All,” Matt pulled me onto the floor for a slow dance. I knelt before him and closed my eyes as I rested my head on his shoulder. He wasn’t as tall or beefy as you, and he had never cared for wearing flannel shirts, but I didn’t care anymore about any of that. I had to stop rejecting people on the basis of their looks. So many of us are born with bodies we don’t want because society is always telling us that we need better bodies. Period. This way corporations can make money off our insecurities. The only security they can bank on is our deep sense of insecurity. What mattered was that Matt wanted to hold me in public. Unlike you, he wasn’t ashamed of being seen with me in public.
The song ended.
You were gone.
I smiled at Matt.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’ll tell you l
ater. You’ll read about it.”
Funny thing was, I had never told Matt about you; I didn’t want to. I didn’t want the toxin of you to poison Matt and me. Besides, we had better things to talk about.
Through the feverish act of writing the story of us, I had exorcised the ghost of you from my body. In my heart, it’s always summer.
Are there things of the day here in the room of night? Do they shimmer like glowworms? Or do they sigh and give off the faintest light? Day is the forbidden creature of night; it is a foghorn of clarity and happiness against the fog of obfuscation and obsolescence. It is the worst kind of drug; once tasted, the addiction is impossible to break. Day is heat, fire, love. It is a dog curled up next to your feet, contented that you are nearby and not going anywhere. Day is the powder of fingerprints difficult to remove; once touched, we turn instantly into hooligans. We want to break into houses of dark moods and swing anchors of death through the window so the zeppelins can let go and float stately like the ships that they are. Our eyes are bright as flashlights sweeping like spotlights, showing the rigor mortis of dead objects no longer dusted with meaning. History has been erased from their skins. No archeologist will ever be able to decode its many mysteries. The walls of Pompeii need to be cleared of ash, its stories overlapping each other until they echo songs freed of history. If night be ghost, then day must be angel. Fly, fireflies, fly and startle.
This dream shall not be dreamed again.
Years later at the Eagle, a buddy of yours will take you aside and point at me while I’m standing with Matt by the bar. I’ll probably wear a favorite T-shirt, the latest being CAREFUL, OR YOU’LL END UP IN MY NOVEL. “You know that guy with glasses standing next to the guy in the wheelchair? That’s Bill Badamore. He wrote this interesting book . . . wait, what was the title again? Oh, right: Flannelwood. Anyway, it’s about a disabled bear. Have you ever heard of it?”
You will shake your head no, but you’ll search online for my book later that night and order a copy. The hot daddy bear on the cover looks suspiciously just like you.
In the darkness of your den with your lonely lamp peering over your shoulder, you’ll find my nonlinear writing not your style. You’ll think that my story was fancy-schmancy hooey with a lot of unnecessary poetic asides. You’d roll your eyes at how I’d changed details of our relationship and your disability; how much of you I’d gotten wrong yet how much more of you I’d gotten right. As you know, I’ve even changed the geography of the city where we met; I made it rather generic, a city almost anywhere in the Midwest. All of this may be a work of fiction, but my heart has never lied.
When you’re at last done with Flannelwood, you will take off your reading glasses and weep with only the rickety arms of darkness comforting you in that windchill of lonesomeness. No one has ever written a book about you, just for you. Here is this book with your initials at the very end, on its last page: “for J.A.S.”
It’s my epitaph for the lichen-covered tombstone honoring our memory. You are love’s tree gone hollow, an elegy.
Of course, James, you’ll never tell me any of the above because you’d know just then what a damn fool you were to hang up on me in the first place. This you will mourn until the end of your days, and this you will remember with each puff of cigar you exhale with the latest weekend trick. Nothing will ever be the same.
I am paper. Crumple me up and throw me into the fireplace, but I will never fade into embers. I’m a brick.
I am not a cigar stub you can toss away. I will burn so brightly long into the night that I become an everlasting day. I am the diamond that illuminates each snowflake from within.
Too much pride can be a disability, you know. A little humility may be your best course of rehabilitation.
Love is hard, but it doesn’t have to be a country song. You can start by calling your daughter Annie and ask for forgiveness. Wel come her back into your life. You’re a grandfather now. Absence does not love make. Think about that.
Start anywhere, and there you are.
All it takes is one phone call.
Really.
By then I’ll have long hung up on you and married Matt.
And, oh, what of the night? I think you already know the answer.
for J.A.S.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of twenty-two books. Titles include The Kinda Fella I Am: Stories and QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology. His Deaf gay novel Men with Their Hands won first place in the Project: QueerLit Contest 2006. His work has been nominated ten times for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He can be found online at raymondluczak.com.
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