Epilogue

 

 

 

Julian

 

The first few weeks after the Queering, or whatever the hell we were supposed to call it, were pretty weird. Sad, actually. It was like something had ended, but without something else starting. Everybody just went their own way, which was fine, I guess, except I didn’t really have a way to go.

I didn’t know where Jacob was or what he was doing. I hadn’t heard from him since the intervention. Aaron and Ethan were off in their own little world, so I spent a lot of time alone. Well, not alone exactly, since I had Abraham Lincoln, but still. It was lonely. I didn’t know how to fill up the time. I thought about going back to work. At least that would give me something to do. But I couldn’t get off my ass to do it. Doing anything at all seemed to take more energy than I had. So I mostly did nothing. And the days are really long when you’re doing nothing. They just keep going.

I knew I was gonna have to move, but I couldn’t bring myself to look for a place. Being around Ethan and Aaron was even harder than it had been at first. They just kept getting happier and happier. I hated myself for being jealous, but I couldn’t help it. Seeing them so happy just ate me up. I guess that was when I realized what was going on, what it was I really wanted. It was Jacob.

We had spent a lot of time together in the days before the intervention, and I guess I’d kind of gotten used to it. He was real easy to be around, easy to talk to. I’m not so good at just hanging out with people. If I’m having sex with someone, it’s fine, but otherwise, it’s tough. It’s like I don’t know what to do with my body. I don’t even know how to sit. I feel weird, kind of prickly. Like I’m being stabbed with hundreds of little needles. But with Jacob, it was different. It felt easier somehow. I don’t know what it was about him that made that happen, but it allowed me to relax, to be able to just sit with him and talk. I found myself telling him things I hadn’t ever told anybody before.

I guess that was what I was missing after the intervention. That sense of ease. Of comfort. Not having that sucked, because now it was worse than before. Now I knew what I was missing. I didn’t know what to do, so I just wallowed in it.

I got into this routine with Abraham Lincoln that helped a little. He had a spot in the living room where he liked to sit. The sun hit it in the early afternoon, and he’d just lie there, staring straight ahead with his front paws curled up under him. Aaron called it his sphinx impression. I’d lie down on my stomach in front of him, my face just a few inches from his, and I’d stare at him. And he’d stare back, blinking in the sunlight. Eventually he’d start to purr, which is what I was waiting for, some sign that I’d had an effect on him without actually touching him. That felt great. His stinky breath didn’t even bother me. After a while, my breathing would match his and I’d feel peaceful, but neither of us would fall asleep. I was real alert and real calm at the same time. It was soothing. It slowed me down. I’d lie there for as long as Abraham Lincoln could stand it. Eventually, though, he’d get up, do that stretch that cats do that makes them look like a camel, and wander off. It was always him that quit first. Never me.

Every now and then, I thought about calling Jacob. I’d called him pretty regularly in the days before the intervention, but now it felt different. Before, we were building up to something. We were helping each other get ready for Paul. But if I called him now, he’d think I wanted something. He’d think I was interested in him. Now that he’d called bullshit on the Reverend, I was probably the last person he wanted to hear from. Why bring all that up again?

But then, I guess it was about a month after the intervention, he texted me and invited me over for dinner. He and his mom had moved out and gotten an apartment together. Suddenly everything was different. It’s weird what a few words on a little screen can do. It’s scary, actually.

 

* * * *

 

Margaret

 

Having a gay son makes shopping for furniture a lot more fun. In the past, Paul and I would simply go buy whatever big brown sofa was on sale. But Jacob taught me to despise big brown sofas. If you really opened your eyes, those sofas were hideous. A crime, actually. Particularly after Jacob got me addicted to the Home & Garden channel. We couldn’t afford any of the pieces on those shows, but they taught me how to see a room differently. So when Jacob took me down to Bennett Street, where all those antique shops are, I knew what to look for.

What our new apartment lacked in architectural interest—it was just a two-bedroom box inside a larger box—it more than made up for in a certain…what did Jacob call it? Edginess. I loved being there. I loved being there with Jacob. There wasn’t a bit of clutter in the whole place. We’d stripped down, leaving the overdone farmhouse motif behind. This place was all clean lines and hard angles, surfaces with nothing on them, except a rabbit glazed a hard ceramic red we placed on the console table behind the couch. We found it in the last shop we went into, and when Jacob saw it he shrieked. He was right. It was perfect. It set the tone for the rest of the apartment, and for our new life together. My gay son and I lived with a red ceramic rabbit, and that tells you just about all you need to know about how different my life had become.

But I’ll admit that I was a little taken aback when Jacob asked if we could have Julian over for dinner. Did Jacob like him? I mean, like like him? If so, could I handle that? Would I be able to explain that to my friends? “Hi, this is my son Jacob and his boyfriend Julian. How’d they meet? Funny story, actually. Julian’s a male prostitute, and my husband hired him for a week of long-strokes, and it turns out my husband had long-stroked Jacob when he was a kid, so they were simply made for one another.” But when I remembered that I didn’t really have any friends—apparently friends flee when the troubles come—I stopped caring. I had only the rabbit to impress, and he was easy.

“Of course,” I said. “Invite him over. It’ll be fun. I’ll make that gay salmon recipe we saw on the food channel.”

When Julian showed up, the first thing I noticed was the bow tie. I never would have imagined how quickly a simple red bow tie can turn a male prostitute into somebody’s son. That was what he looked like, somebody’s son. He seemed nervous, but not as nervous as Jacob, who barely spoke the whole evening. Somehow we got through the dinner, Julian and I talking about everything except the elephant in the room. It took him until dessert to ask about Paul.

“Well, we left him,” I said, “and I’ve filed for divorce. And New Revival has, how did they put it? ‘Severed ties’. Paul made one too many trips to Piedmont Park. He ended up in the bushes with a deacon, and the deacon’s wife found out and told the board. That was it. I guess they could accommodate a male escort, but a deacon in the bushes was a bridge too far.”

“When was this?” Julian asked.

“Just a few days ago,” I said. “The word’s not out yet, but it will be soon. It’ll probably bring up all of the unpleasantness with you again, so you might want to avoid your phone for a while.”

“What do you think’s gonna happen to him?” Julian asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t see any good options.”

“How do you feel about that?” he asked. “I mean, are you worried about him?”

Clearly Julian was. After all this, after everything that happened, he still worried about Paul. He couldn’t help it. It was sweet, and for the first time I let myself imagine a future, one in which he and Jacob would like each other. One in which they would be together. Were there other ways of being this way, of being homosexual? Maybe it didn’t have to be about lies and dark shadows in public parks. Maybe this boy with a bow tie was someone I could trust with my most precious thing.

“I worried about him for so long,” I said. “I gave him every chance. But it’s time for me to worry about other people now. Maybe even myself.” I looked over at Jacob and he smiled at me. It was forced. Meant to reassure me. But it reminded me of what he used to be like when he first came to live with us, back when he was a little boy. That boy was still in there somewhere, unbroken by all that had happened. That was all I needed for the moment.

“You kids go do whatever it is that people do,” I said. “I’ll clean up.”

But they wouldn’t let me. We cleared the table and did the dishes together. Yet another benefit, apparently, of having a gay son.

 

* * * *

 

Jacob

 

The night Julian came over for dinner, I could barely eat. My stomach felt weird, and it was hard to get the food down. I was sweating. I was afraid I was going to throw up, and the thought of throwing up in front of Julian made me even sicker. Why was I putting myself through this? Why had I invited him? This could have been another quiet evening watching television with my mom, but instead I was sitting here with Julian, not knowing why, not knowing what I wanted.

Ever since the intervention, I had been thinking about Julian a lot. The way I felt at dinner shouldn’t have been a surprise, because that was pretty much always the way I felt when I thought about Julian. Ever since that first night when I went over to his apartment, he did something to my stomach. At first I thought it was because of him and the Reverend, what they did together, what they had. But that was only part of it. Sitting there at dinner, watching him and my mom talk while I tried not to puke, I realized that the really scary thing was something else. It wasn’t simply that I was attracted to him. I had known that ever since that night in his apartment, when I wanted to put my finger in his mouth. No, it was that I was actually thinking of doing something about it. Before, I had seen him as this beautiful object, and, like everybody else, I had admired it. He was a portrait of himself. But in the past few days, I’d started seeing myself in the picture. With him. Doing stuff. It had been a long time since I had imagined anything like that.

That fake note I wrote to Julian was mostly the truth. I had never done anything with another guy, not counting the Reverend. After the Reverend, I’d kinda stopped imagining that stuff. Desire had gotten me in trouble before. It had ruined everything. If I had learned anything, it was that my body was not to be trusted. So I’d figured I’d be one of those gay guys who never have sex. It seemed easier that way.

But as I was trying to force down the salmon, something shifted. Maybe it was the way Julian was talking with my mom. Maybe it was the bow tie. Whatever it was, for the first time since the Reverend, I wanted someone to put his hands on me. I wish I could say that something lifted inside me. That something that had been closed suddenly opened up. But that wasn’t what it felt like. What it felt like was cold and clammy. What it felt like was scary. So, I tried to focus my attention on Julian. Not on flesh, but Julian.

I felt sorry for those guys who looked at him and could only see Walter. Walter was the least interesting thing about him. Why focus on Walter when you could think about the fact that Julian never smiled? That he smelled like fresh-cut grass? That his left hand twitched like a leaf on a windy day? And yeah, I know, those things don’t exactly sound like the start of a healthy relationship. But what about any of this was healthy? I was a mess. Julian was a mess. Maybe together, we could cancel some of that out.

 

* * * *

 

Aaron

 

After the intervention, Ethan and I spent most of our time watching movies about crazy women. We had graduated from our seventies disaster film kick to something much more satisfying—the Lifetime Movie Network’s nonstop onslaught of films about women scorned, spurned and put-upon. There was, of course, the Godfather of the genre, A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story, starring a terrifying Meredith Baxter Birney. Ethan and I had great fun charting the lesbian subtexts of this hetero revenge film, since Birney had recently come out as a dyke, having been spotted by a gaggle of very excited Family Ties fans on a lesbian cruise. Most of these films involved some sort of secret identity—‘I didn’t know my husband was a sex-addict’—followed either by therapy, rape or murder. We were drawn to the combination of narrative predictability and crazy-lady variety, and we would watch them for hours. Our favorite was She Woke Up Pregnant, which involved a woman who was impregnated by her dentist while having her teeth cleaned. We tried to get Julian hooked, but he was acting weird. He was either hiding out in his bedroom or stretched out on the floor with Abraham Lincoln, involved in some sort of attempt to communicate telepathically with his befuddled cat.

After a couple of weeks of the crazy ladies, however, we both began to feel disgusted with ourselves. I think we needed that time, a kind of decompression after the stuff with Drucker, but enough was enough. The film that put us over the edge was What’s That?!?, a sweet little tale about a syphilis pandemic at a high school.

So, we started to talk about next steps. Ethan was thinking about going back to school. He had a couple of years of credit at Georgia State, but had dropped out to piss off his parents. He said he wanted to go to veterinary school, which happily explained the fact that I’d caught him groping Abraham Lincoln on more than one occasion.

Ethan’s school plans had me thinking about my own. I finally admitted the obvious and announced that I was done with the Apatow penis project. It just seemed too silly after everything I had been through, after Drucker, after Jacob, after Neil. It was easy to bail on Apatow, because I’d realized what I wanted to write instead. I wanted to write about ex-gay ministries. My experience at New Revival had given me a good start, and another church in Atlanta was making a name for itself in the de-gaying business. I was thinking about spending some time there, not as a pretend self-hater, but maybe as a member of the office staff. I wanted to learn this culture from the inside and to write about it in a way that might actually help people. My advisor thought it was a great idea. He called it ‘a sexual ethnography of America in denial’, and he admitted that he had always thought the Apatow project was ‘the worst kind of bourgeois navel gazing’.

Oh, and the big news—Ethan decided that he’d rather live with me than with his parents. He said the sex was better at my place, which was very good to hear. We knew we were rushing things, but we’d both gotten a pretty late start on romance and figured we had some time to make up. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t terrified. Okay, I was a little bit terrified. But mostly it just felt right.

Scott left his wife. We learned this from Jonathan, who had spent quite a bit of time with Scott in the days following the intervention. Scott had some stuff to work out, and Jonathan was more than happy to help him. We were worried about Jonathan. We thought he could do so much better than Scott, but eventually he figured that out. As he put it, “decades of sexual repression had made Scott dynamite in the sack, but it hadn’t made him interesting.” Last we heard, Jonathan was obsessed with some baggy-panted skater kid named Marcus.

Frankie-Frances got back together with her girlfriend, Marla, who had been ‘stumbled’ by one of the ladies in her church’s Sexual Healing Support Group. The church lady didn’t last, but she gave Marla enough of a taste of what she had been missing to bring her back to her old team, and to Frankie-Frances. I’m sorry to say that this made Frankie-Frances much less fun to be around. Her desire to punch people was gone, her bitterness a thing of the past. I was happy for her, but a butch who can’t stop smiling is just wrong, if you ask me. It spoils the effect.

Then there was Drucker. Not long after the intervention, he was caught in the bushes with a deacon and the local news had a field day with it. RentBoy Reverend Caught With His Pants Down. Reverend Long-Stroke Bush-Whacked. Word around the university was that he had taken ‘an unpaid leave of an unspecified length’, which was about as close to firing as you can get with a tenured professor.

I thought about him less and less since the intervention, though I could still see him standing all by himself in a shower of glitter, as his wife, his son and a merry band of queers got on with their lives. It would have been easy to feel sorry for him, to see him as a victim, but I couldn’t do it.

One day, a couple of weeks after the intervention, Ethan, Frankie-Frances, Jonathan and I went out to the Bethune Baptist Church to visit Neil’s grave. I didn’t want to go. I was pretty sure seeing the place where Neil was buried would ruin the denial I had been working on ever since his death, just like that empty chair in Drucker’s basement but worse. When I first heard about Neil’s death, I went right to rage. Looking back, my rage was clearly a defense mechanism against grief. Grief would have been messier, and I didn’t want messy. I wanted raw, clean hatred. But now, with Drucker out of the picture, the anger was gone, and I had an empty space inside me. I was afraid of what might fill it if I saw where Neil was buried, if I pictured his beautiful body lying in the ground. But Jonathan was insistent. He said we owed it to Neil to pay our respects. Maybe he felt guilty. Maybe he knew I did.

It was just a few days before Thanksgiving, and the season had finally started to turn. The trees were bare and the wind had a bite to it. We went on a weekday so we wouldn’t run into people from the church or, worse, Neil’s family. The first headstones in the cemetery dated way back, some to just after the Civil War. But as we walked on, the stones got newer, the dates more recent. At the edge of the far section, just before the cemetery swooped down to the river, we found the stone we were looking for—Neil Allen Robinson, 1987-2009. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. He was all by himself. I figured his parents and siblings were still alive, but wasn’t there at least a grandparent to keep him company? Or was the family plot elsewhere, far away from Neil’s disgrace?

It was a beautiful spot. It caught the shade thrown by an oak that must have been a hundred years old, and the cold November sun glimmered off the river down in the valley. I had always loved graveyards. They were so peaceful. But the quiet here was maddening.

“Somebody should say something,” Frankie-Frances said. Everyone looked at me and waited. As I stood staring at the slight rise in the earth where Neil lay buried, trying to figure out what to say, the rage came back. All I could think of was Drucker. Drucker, who had done this. Drucker, who had helped make a world in which people like Neil couldn’t live. I wanted to strangle him, but since he wasn’t there, I wanted to hurl stones through the stained-glass windows of the church.

But when I looked up from the grave down toward the river, I saw the bridge that Neil had jumped from. That brought me back to Neil and to how much had been lost. The rage seeped away and all I was left with was sorrow. Sorrow, and shame. Whatever I might say felt utterly hollow, utterly false. Consolation had no place there and politics would be an insult. So I said the only thing that I knew to be true.

“He shouldn’t be here,” I said. “This shouldn’t have happened.”

Ethan stepped forward and pulled a little wooden box out of his jacket, and he placed it at the foot of Neil’s headstone.

“What’s in that?” Frankie-Frances asked.

“A Calvin Klein ad with Taye Diggs,” Ethan said. “He’s kind of naked in it.”

“Isn’t that racist?” Frankie-Frances asked, “assuming that a black dude would only like another black dude?”

“It’s not racist to assume that a homosexual would be hot for Taye Diggs,” Ethan said. “It’s just common sense.”

“But Neil’s family might find it,” Jonathan said.

“Exactly,” Ethan said. He reached his hand into his jacket pocket, pulled it back out with a flourish, and we were once again surrounded by glitter. We just stood there, watching it dance and sparkle over Neil’s grave.

 

* * * *

 

Paul

 

I’ve been looking at old photographs recently. When Margaret and Jacob moved out, it kind of unsettled the house. Boxes were everywhere, and I spent a lot of time in the attic, going through old things. And I found this box of photos. They weren’t even in albums, just scattered loose in a shoebox. Some I remembered. Photos of Margaret and me in college, of the two of us in our first apartment in Columbia, of days spent together at the lake. We were so young and so happy. She really was beautiful. Even in a black and white photograph, you could see the energy just radiating off her.

Other photos I had never seen before, or at least didn’t remember seeing. My mother must have saved them. A lot of them were of my father when he was a young man. He looked so sure of himself, so absolutely confident. You could see it in his smile. You could see it in the way he let himself be examined by the camera. The way he enjoyed being seen.

My brother and I showed up in some of the later ones. In these, my father was older but still handsome. I was just a kid, maybe five or six. My brother lurked in the background of these shots, just approaching his teen years, contemptuous of the camera. I was simply oblivious to its presence, interested only in my father. Wherever he was, I was, particularly in one group of shots taken at the beach. My father was wearing a tight-fitting bathing suit and I was this scrawny little kid in his arms or on his shoulders. In one shot, I was clinging to him as a wave threatened to wash me away. In another, I was crawling on his back, climbing him like a mountain. We were one flesh, he and I, bone of bone.

Why couldn’t I remember any of this? Why couldn’t I still feel his hands on me? What was it about becoming a man that cut me off forever from the pure touch of another man?

All I wanted for Jacob was that he would never feel that loss. All I wanted was to make him happy and whole. I didn’t want him to spend his life looking for something that he couldn’t remember, much less name.

Now he’s gone from me, lost in sin. And there’s nothing I can do to save him.

But I will not wallow in self-pity. I will not be anyone’s victim. Victimhood is for the weak, and I will not be weak.

Besides, I still have Jesus. His love is all I need. Who needs the touch of another man when I have a love that outlasts the body and its certain degradation, a love that will never let me go?

 

* * * *

 

Julian

 

“I think Abraham Lincoln might be a Chinese communist.”

This was Aaron, off on one of those rants of his that never made sense.

“What do you mean?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“It’s the way he meows,” he said. “It’s not like most cats. Most cats say ‘Meow’, like they’re supposed to, but with Abraham Lincoln, it’s more like ‘Mao’. He’s crying out for the Chairman.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“We ought to put him on YouTube,” he said. “We’ll go viral with the ‘Commie Cat’.”

“We’re not putting Abraham Lincoln on YouTube,” I said.

“If we could teach him to say ‘Zedong’, we’ll never have to work another day. We’ll be rich.”

When I was in the right mood, Aaron could be better than television. But I wasn’t in the right mood. I was freaking out a little bit. Jacob was coming over.

We’d been hanging out a lot since that dinner at their new apartment, but this night was going to be different, or at least I hoped it was. Up until then, we had somehow managed never being alone. We were with his mom a lot—Jacob was worried about her, didn’t want her to be lonely. The three of us went to the movies or just stayed at their apartment, watching TV or playing cards. Turns out Margaret had a pretty brutal poker face. She once bluffed me off a full house with nothing but a pair of deuces.

Whenever we did find ourselves alone, everything suddenly felt different and awkward. Jacob would try to look me in the eye, but then he’d blush and look away. Which was probably for the best, since that little bit of eye contact did something to me that I wasn’t used to. It was like I felt it all over my body. How is that even possible? What is it about somebody’s eyes that can light you up like that? Anyway, it was new to me, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. It felt like too much somehow. It felt like more than there ought to be.

I caught myself inventing excuses to touch him. I had done this with clients. I knew all the tricks. The hand on the arm. The hand on the knee. The knee on the knee. The arm draped over the back, with the hand on that place on the neck. What do you call it? The nape. Yeah, the nape. But with Jacob it was different. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. We’d be walking through a door, and I’d let him go first, trying to sort of guide him through with my hand on his back, but my hand felt tentative, unsure of itself. Afraid to touch him. Or, when we were playing cards, I’d find a way to touch his fingers, but it just came off awkward and stupid. Say what you will about me, but when it comes to touching people, I’d never been awkward and stupid before. Touching people was my thing. I’d lost it with Jacob.

I didn’t even know what it was I wanted. In the past, I’d see a guy and know I wanted to fuck him. It was that simple. I could see myself doing it. But with Jacob, it was different. I was definitely attracted to him. But it wasn’t so simple as wanting to fuck him. When I tried to picture us together, I couldn’t. I didn’t know what it looked like. I just knew that I wanted something and that it had something to do with him.

As for what he wanted, I had no idea, really. Yeah, he gave me the occasional glance that might have meant something, but mostly he was nervous around me. Jumpy. And those excuses I found to touch him? Most of the time he’d flinch, like I had burned him. Who could blame him? How could he ever feel my hands on him and not know that those same hands had been on his father, whose hands had been on him? The kind thing would have been to leave him alone.

But I had to know. I couldn’t keep feeling like this and not do something about it. So I invited him over on a night when I knew Aaron was going to be out—he and the others were going to play gay laser tag. I spent thirty minutes changing from one shirt into another and another thirty circling the apartment. Kitchen to dining area to living room to kitchen. When Jacob rang the doorbell, I about jumped out of my skin.

He looked cute. He was wearing skinny jeans and a light blue oxford with a dark blue pocket, the kind of thing that looked like a mistake, but wasn’t, since it had probably been designed by somebody famous. He seemed really nervous, and I know I was, so I got us a couple of beers and we sat on opposite ends of the couch. Abraham Lincoln looked at us like we were idiots.

We talked for a while about nothing at all. Stupid shit. His new job working at Starbucks. His mom’s new obsession with that guy on House. The weather. We actually talked about the weather.

When we finally ran out of stupid shit to talk about, he did the eye thing. And this time he held it. I could tell he wanted to look away, but he didn’t, even when he started to blush. I held it too. It felt like somebody had sucked all the air out of me.

“Come here,” I said. He hesitated, like he knew this was a terrible idea. But then he put his beer down and he slid over toward me. I still don’t know exactly how it happened, but after some awkward fumbling, he was lying in my lap, looking up at me. I was supporting his head and shoulders with my left arm while my right hand rested on his chest. Suddenly, it hit me. We were in the holding position. I was at a ninety-degree angle, connected to God. Jacob was horizontal, ready to receive God’s love through me.

I saw Jacob realize this, and his eyes got hard. Hard is the only word for it. Like they were suddenly made of glass, like they were about to shatter. His breathing changed. His chest started to rise and fall, faster and faster. He was terrified. He was scared to death. I wondered what he was seeing when he looked up at me. Was it me, just as scared as he was? Or was it the Reverend, looking down at him with eyes no eleven-year-old boy could understand?

“Breathe in,” I said. It looked painful, but he did it.

“Breathe out,” I said. He did this too, but he was still panicked, his eyes quivering.

“Breathe in,” I told him. I could feel his heart going a mile a minute.

“Now, breathe out,” I said, and his lungs stuttered, like he was freezing.

“Breathe in,” I told him. This time it came a little easier, and he was able to focus on me, his eyes less scattered. I kept my eyes locked on his.

“Now, breathe out,” I said. I felt his muscles let go, the weight of him in my lap changing. I took his hand in mine, and I asked him for one more breath. And the breath he took was deep and full. I watched his chest swell, his ribcage expand.

“Now hold it,” I said. And time stopped, both of us waiting for it to start again.