Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
—Marilyn Hacker
JAMES, make me your Saturday night cigar.
Snip one end of my paper-browned heart right here and see the dried innards of my soul rolled so neatly. Light me up with your match, and watch me burn hazily as you draw each flake of ash and flavor deep into your mouth, and breathe out my soul. Let my ashes cascade slowly like snowflakes on your shoulders on cold nights when you are in need of a man to soothe the chill of loneliness deep in your marrow.
For you I would give up my books.
For you I would give up my dead-end job.
For you I would give up my body, my heart, my soul.
Draw me into you again, and again.
Each breath of smoke rises like a coil of rope from the pit of your guts reaching down like a hungry hand into the pit of my stomach. Each puff of smoke is an umbilical cord that must never be severed.
We are a family of men and smoke.
You drift anywhere in the air everywhere.
This blood, made of ash and ether, shall not break.
I grew up on a farm just outside a small town. It’s the kind of place where parents resign themselves to the reality of losing their children to elsewhere for college and jobs. The kids who stay behind are the ones who get all the love from their parents, and the kids who return for visits are always wondering if they’d done their parents wrong. The people left behind in small towns can’t see beyond the periphery of their places even when they can see on television how much the world is changing. They don’t want to believe such changes are happening, because to do so would mean acknowledging that they had been wrong all along. What would that make them look like? Fools?
Right.
That’s why I haven’t visited my own family in years.
Each time I hear a woman cough, I think of Mom.
I don’t recall the times she must’ve kissed me, but the smell of her is woven into the tiny clouds of smoke I walk through where smokers stand outside the front doors of office buildings. Their days are numbered. Soon they will go underground and learn how to roll their own cigarettes, much like how marijuana users figured out how to grow better and more potent cannabis in the privacy of their basements.
How I long to draw again the aroma of you, feeling dizzy with desire.
I don’t know if you still remember all our weekends together, but our second night was extraordinary. Fewer orgasms, yes, but we together were a well-oiled machine. You’d studied my body carefully with hands and tongue while I studied yours. Inhaling you made me realize that I had been only sleepwalking all my life.
Do you recall what we did on our second night together? You smoked a fat stogie right there in your bedroom. You said you needed to relax a bit, so I watched you snip off one end of a new cigar. I was afraid that you would reek of those cheap cigars that I hated whenever I passed by some old men sitting on the stoop in my neighborhood. You caught the expression on my face. You said, “Don’t worry. It’s a great piece.”
Somehow that flame lit me up. The way it flickered across your eyes as you focused on drawing that first puff. The way you softened a little after exhaling. The way you rested on the bed, with your legs wide open. “Come here,” you whispered.
I crept close to you. I didn’t know what you wanted. I caught a sniff of the smoke that wafted from your cigar. You were right. It didn’t produce that sickly cough I’d usually experienced around cheap cigars. I was surprised.
You said, “Open your mouth.”
I did. I felt strange when you took a hit from your cigar and leaned forward to my face. You sealed my lips with yours and exhaled the smoke right into my mouth. The ether felt intense, and I coughed. “Sorry.” My eyes watered briefly.
“Let’s try again.”
“Why?”
“It turns me on, okay?”
I nodded.
When you were ready to exhale, I opened my mouth and closed my eyes. I felt your lips on mine, and a gentle puff tumbled into me. I still felt the urge to cough, but I squelched it. I felt strangely contented. The smoke had been inside you, and it was now inside me.
We exchanged puffs like that for a while. I noted the stiffness of your erection, and you moaned when I stroked you while you propelled another puff into me. I was taken aback when I felt the quiver of your cock spasming. The inhalation of your puffs didn’t turn me on at all, but I was surprised by your forceful orgasm.
Please come back into my life and light up that stogie again.
I was clean-shaven for the longest time. Of course, I’d always noticed men with scruff, but they always seemed to be from a different planet. Many of them intimidated me even when they blinked crazily on my gaydar. A few of them gave me the look of want, but I was too afraid. I didn’t think I was worthy of such hotness. But when I saw a few guys my age growing facial fur, I thought to do the same. Growing my first beard was surreal and exciting at the same time. I was morphing into someone I barely knew. Yes, there in the mirror was my face and its features I’d known all my life, but who knew that the fur growing like blades of moss could change the topography of my face so dramatically?
I thought of those guys I’d seen on tractors in the summer and snowplows in the winter where I grew up. They didn’t always know who I was, but they were never standoffish with me. I was a male, and that was more than enough for them to acknowledge me with a nod while on their jobs. In my adolescent fantasies I’d never thought of the possibility of having sex with any of them except for Larry Fruell. He was the closest I’d ever come to feeling the possibility of attraction, of sex. I loved how his fingertips and nails were cracked and embedded with traces of grease. His hands were thick with muscle, and his shoulders were rangy. His jeans slipped a bit below the waist because he’d never tightened his belt enough. He had the flattest ass I’d ever seen on anyone. But more than anything, it was the orange fire of his beard that drew my attention no matter where he was. He was the first bear god who’d inspired in me the notion of oral worship in the halls of my fantasies. Once I saw Larry up close in the bike shop for the first time, I forgot all about the kneeling-and-standing-by-rote rituals of Mass on Sundays. Men like Larry had become my new religion, and I worshipped them from afar all the time. I was the only disciple in the church of one, which had no name; I did not have a Bible nor did I know how to write such a holy book. I was filled with scenarios of being naked with them and touching them all over. I hadn’t then known it was possible to have anal sex. After all, I was only fifteen.
I wanted to cry out hymns of ecstasy there in my bedroom, but I had to learn the songs of silence every time I lay there on my bed and offered up myself once again to the heavens where beer-bellied truckers and squat tavern drinkers and solid-chested farmers lolled around the altar where I was to pay my respects. They weren’t always naked, and that was fine. I hadn’t yet seen enough variety of cocks to know the amazing moods possible with flaccid folds, growing thicknesses, and leaking hardness. All I knew then was that the cocks of my classmates in the showers after swim practice intrigued me, but I’d intuited that the cocks of men who’d worked hard with their bodies had to be different. All that physical labor had to have an effect on their dicks. I’d gauged the bulges of these men. I never saw the exact outlines of their genitals, but I could deduce from the way their jeans cupped them that they had to be far bigger than those of boys my age.
My bed late at night was my hallowed altar where I’d offered up the sacrifice of my milky blood in exchange for the slightest hello from them. Didn’t matter if they knew me or not. Boys my age lost my interest. Guys who weren’t fastidious and studious like my schoolteachers compelled my eyes. I still read books, but I was filled with longing for that otherness, that tenderness, that rawness of energy pent up not only between my legs but also between an experienced man’s legs. Wanting an older man because of his age wasn’t the reason I’d wanted him; I wanted someone who wasn’t a boy, who wasn’t one of those arrogant football jocks. I wanted to touch skin that had a hint of wear and tear in it, and seeing the abundant hair on forearms drove me crazy. What’s more, many of these men didn’t give me attitude. I was probably just a slightly bookish teenager to them.
When I saw you sitting at that table at the VFW Hall, alone that night, I felt as if you were my adolescence come to life. You were the daddy bear I didn’t know I was looking for until I laid my eyes on you.
Way up north where I grew up, all sorts of loners have chosen to live out in the country, so we have this laissez-faire attitude about folks who are a little odd. We don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us. At most they’d say hi to us in the checkout aisle in a hardware store, and we’d know nothing more about them beyond what they wore and what kind of truck they drove. This is the way things are up north.
My father was a slender man. The joke in my family was that we were all born like Dad, and that once we hit our thirties, we become like Mom, who was a bit heavy. I can see that happening to my own body, and that I look like her doesn’t make me feel masculine. I do have her lips and eyes, but I move just like my Dad. He walks quickly and nimbly, and he isn’t always patient with others. Of all his sons, I’m the most stubborn. If I make up my mind, that’s pretty much it.
Dad is the same way.
I knew it was pointless to argue with him once he banished me from his house.
Mom shrugged her shoulders. She knew that it was just as pointless.
When I came up north, she would come over to my sister Sally’s house. We’d talk, but it wasn’t the same. Mom acted as if she was committing a crime. Sometimes I got the impression she didn’t want to know me too well. I was too bookish, too smarty-arty for her. How do you explain to a woman who’s never gone to college that literature isn’t about being smart? Literature is reading about people’s lives and caring for them as if they were your own flesh and blood. It’s about appreciating the craft and the clarity that comes from telling a good story. It’s about seeing yourself in the characters and discovering things you hadn’t realized before. Which is exactly what we do with the people in our lives. Mom had never cared to read much. Dad never finished college either. They married right out of high school and started having babies right after. Same old story. No need to go into details.
After all, you’ve grown up with people like my parents.
Though Mom’s been dead for twelve years, not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. She is everywhere. When I see a woman walk with her child across the street from where I stand in Brewe Sisters, I think of her.
Mom had married a difficult man, and she bore him five children, four of whom didn’t move too far from home and gave her grandchildren. Being the youngest, I was the only one of her kids who went off to college, and I didn’t give her a grandchild. She was absolutely devoted to her grandchildren. I think they gave her a reprieve from Dad.
I never thought he could be considered abusive until years later. He never drank, but there were moments we were growing up, when he became frustrated with crops and bills and everything, that he used a hollow rubber cord to whip us. We kids had to stay in line, much like the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music. We never talked about it, even when we were completely alone in the house. We were afraid to whisper even in the dark. We intuited it was wrong, but who were we to argue with Dad?
To argue with him was to risk death.
My third oldest brother, Sammy, spouted off at Dad once because he didn’t like the curfew. He wanted to go drinking with his buddies on his last weekend of high school. Without a word, Dad moved quickly and slammed a nice one on Sammy’s chin. He fell backward against two kitchen chairs, which broke in parts. His head hit the edge of the table. He collapsed to the floor.
All of us stood still.
Mom rushed to Sammy’s aid.
Dad said, “When you’re feeling better, you can fix those damn chairs.”
He walked out of the room.
I couldn’t believe that no one had suggested he go to the hospital.
“Shouldn’t he see a doctor or something?” I asked.
Mom turned and looked at me coldly. “There’s no blood. See?” She looked at Sammy. “No blood. Don’t need to take him there. Just some rest, and he’ll be fine.”
Her dismissal was breathtaking.
Sammy seemed to have recovered well, but a few years later he slipped on a patch of ice on the sidewalk downtown and hit his head on a streetlamp. They did a X-ray or a MRI on him, and it turned out that he had sustained a permanent crack from that kitchen table.
He was never quite the same again. He had a mild form of short-term memory loss, and he had the sad habit of walking into a room and standing still for a few minutes, trying to remember what he’d come into the room for. But if you put him out in the fields, he knew what to do. He was a born farmer.
I wanted to remind Dad that Sammy’s condition was his fault, but I was afraid he’d hit me too.
Growing up, I came to link the smell of freshly brewed coffee with the snarl of cigarette smoke on those cold mornings when I got up early for school. When Mom wasn’t busy stirring oatmeal for us, she sat by the kitchen window and looked out on the road we lived on. I saw the ache of wanderlust in her eyes, but she never said anything.
One day, when I came home with a report card columned with As, she looked quietly into my eyes. “Keep doing this, whatever you’re doing, and then go.”
“What are you talking about?” I was fourteen.
“You’re too smart for around here. You need to go college.”
“I don’t want to—”
Her look of hardness silenced me. She coughed again after she took a deep drag on her cigarette. “Don’t you be making my mistakes, you hear?”
College seemed a lifetime away, but she insisted that I apply for it. It was important to her that I live in a big city. That had been her biggest dream while growing up on the farm, but she had been too weak to stand up to Dad. She loved him, but she didn’t know if she loved her dreams more. In that moment of weakness she married him and bore his children.
When I told her that I’d gotten into the university, she wouldn’t let me go as she cried into my shoulder. She kept crying into my shoulder. “Please don’t tell Dad yet.” She stopped. “Not for a while yet anyway. He won’t take it well.”
Once I filled out the financial aid paperwork, I had to tell Dad. I needed his signature on some forms, and I needed a copy of his income tax return for proof of his income. It was after dinner. It was barely spring, but the islands of snow were receding into the ocean of grass. The first wind of balm hadn’t yet arrived, but I was already feeling my chest fluffed up like a robin from so much pride, promise, excitement. Everything around me I knew I would leave after my high school graduation, and this I didn’t mourn. I knew many of my classmates would go to the community college two towns over, and a few would be going to the other university further up north. I think out of my graduating class of forty-four people, only three of us were moving south to the big city. I didn’t really like either one of them, but that was okay. I didn’t expect to remain friends with them anyway. The idea of my new university having over twenty-five thousand students, which was six times the entire population of my hometown, boggled my mind. And that number didn’t include the rest of the city itself! The city had three other smaller colleges as well.
“Dad,” I said. “I need to ask you about something.”
He looked up sternly from his pipe smoking. I’d rarely asked him for anything. I had been so afraid of him all my life, but I knew if there was one last thing I wanted from him, it was this: his signature. I needed to demonstrate that my parents hadn’t made enough to be forced to pay for my education. I needed a raft of scholarships and probably a loan to carry me through. I knew I’d have to work very hard, but asking Dad was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
“Um, I need you to sign some forms.”
“Well, I’m going to need financial aid for college.”
He turned quiet. It wasn’t the kind of silence I’d expected from him. This was a soft quiet. None of that hardness about him.
“I know you don’t make a lot of money, but they need to see proof. That way I can apply for loans and stuff.”
He spoke in a voice so soft I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him right. “So you’re really going away?”
I nodded. “I thought you knew,” I lied. Everyone had known, but we were all afraid he’d lash out at me for leaving him behind, for not proving my allegiance to him. I was surprised by his response.
“Well.” He looked into the cup of his pipe. “Bring me the forms.” I pulled them out of the big envelope and placed them in front of him.
I’d never loved my father as much as I’d loved him in that moment. With each gnarly John Hancock of his, he was freeing me from the prison of prairie I’d grown up in. I’d felt guilty many times about reading so many library books when he insisted that I join my siblings in weeding the garden in the back and helping out in the barn. I weeded, of course, but only in the early morning when the sun wasn’t so intense.
The next day I bicycled the six miles to the post office in town and sent off the forms the first thing for fear of Dad suddenly demanding that I retract them. He looked at me differently for a long time after that, and Mom smiled at me more and more behind his back.
One night, when Dad was out in the barn fixing a troublesome tractor, Mom exclaimed out of the blue in the kitchen when I was about to go upstairs to my bedroom: “So you’re really going away!” There was so much emotion in her voice: pride, fear, love, anxiety. “Please don’t forget about me.” This was the week before I bought the one-way bus ticket to the city. I was to attend the New Student Orientation the following week, and I had never been to the city. I was tremulous with excitement.
“I won’t.”
“Please. Don’t. I’m your mother, you know.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“I remember what it was like when I left home to move into this house. I was so full of hopes and stuff, and . . . You kids were the best thing that ever happened to me. Please just don’t be like me and look back, okay? Just go.”
“I’m not going to forget you, Mom.”
“You better not!” She broke into a laugh.
I didn’t know then that she was trying to explain that in the moment of departure, one leaves behind the shell of one’s old self for a thicker shell of one’s new self. She didn’t have the words, but knowing what I know now, I see how words had failed her. She had been a ghost all her life, and she wanted me to revive her from the dead the minute I climbed up the steps onto the bus. She would bless me with all her hopes and dreams, and anoint me with a single hand wave as I waved goodbye to her.
Of course, Dad wouldn’t wave. He would stand next to her, wondering what was happening now. I believe that when he was alone in the fields, he would wonder what he’d done to drive me away, never realizing that the way his own father had raised him wasn’t suitable for these modern times. Discipline cracked with the whip, which would inspire a great deal of fear in anyone’s heart, wasn’t the same thing as love. He’d never comprehend that just because he had fathered a child, he couldn’t count on undying allegiance. The connection from his sperm wasn’t enough; he had to prove himself worthy of that allegiance as well. This he’d never understood about fatherhood.
Hidden out in the prairie, he and I were on a wool blanket with bits of hay on it when we stripped down to expose ourselves to the sun, clouds, skies. Cars and trucks rumbled on the two-lane road in the distance. It was one of those afternoons when I suddenly didn’t have a chore that needed to be done right away. There he was: fondling himself by the cow stalls when he was supposed to be shoveling manure away from the barn. He didn’t seem surprised or feel the need to pull up his pants, as if he’d been expecting me to show up. He was a migrant worker, rather like a drifter, I suppose, but he had the most beautiful brown eyes. He looked up into mine, and I don’t know how he knew my most-secret secret. “You play with yourself over there?” He pointed to the fallow land of shoulder-high prairie grass across the road from my house. I nodded yes. I went inside my house and retrieved a library book and my wool blanket, which still had bits of hay, across the road. Minutes later, he followed the path of broken stalks and found me pretending to read. He lay down beside me. I was electrified when he touched me through my pants. He smiled so sweetly when we stripped down to our leaking nubs. I didn’t know that a man could be interested in touching another. I didn’t last long under his agile ministrations, and he didn’t, either. He was fired not long after, never found out why, but in those golden moments he had redeemed me with his power of touch.
Ah, the city! My city—certainly not Manhattan, the pinnacle of a teeming Gotham, overridden with people and cockroaches— stood tall no matter where I looked. It didn’t matter how far away the skyscrapers were from the campus where I lived. They stood taller, with sharp corners unlike the cylindrical silos, and shimmered mirrored clouds drifting across the sky. It was also a clear reminder that I wasn’t living up north, the great land of nothing but tall prairie grass if not corn and beets and potatoes. There was no land here, no sense of it at all, except in cultivated pockets of green that cropped up here and there throughout the city. It wasn’t the same. Land to me was a place where nothing felt too planned; just happened to be there. No one posted a NO TRESPASSING sign or a NO SMOKING sign. The sky was free of distractions; maybe a bird, but certainly not a horizon of tall buildings nudging the clouds away. The land of childhood was where I could push down tall grasses to make a bowl of sorts that I could lie down in and look up at the sky with my head resting on my hands. The buzz nearby didn’t have the sound of people; just the tick of insects, the swoop of birds, the whoosh of wind. The earth breathed easily beneath my body. Everything else felt temporary, even when plated over with sidewalk and pavement. Many buildings in town were old, but it was doubtful they’d last another century.
This I hadn’t realized when I first ventured alone off campus in my first month away from home. During the New Student Orientation, we students had learned how to take public buses and navigate the city’s downtown. I was quiet the entire week, just simply absorbed the organized chaos of so many people crossing the streets, waiting in line at the checkout aisles, and filling the buses. At first I was amazed. There was no such thing as a rush hour in my hometown. Most cashiers in town knew who I was because they’d known my father, brothers, sister, and mother. I was a Badamore, and that was all they’d needed to know when they gave me a receipt with my change. But here, I was only a college student with no name. Feeling like a nobody overwhelmed me, almost frightened me into staying put on campus. I overheard snippets of conversation about who’d gone where and done what the night before; it sounded terribly exciting, but I didn’t feel like becoming one of those eternally hip kids I’d disliked in high school. It was much better for me to get out there, on foot whenever possible, and discover the city on my own, and discover I did.
I didn’t want to go to the famous landmarks. Too boring. I had seen pictures of them, and riding by some of them on the bus disappointed me. That was all? What was the big deal? They didn’t seem all that large, or even interesting to look at. They looked better on the postcards, sad and lonely in their swivel pockets in the campus bookstore. No, no touristy landmarks for me. Instead, I went looking for neighborhoods that had no name, at least not the ones that appeared in Fodor’s. My favorite neighborhood of all was also the city’s most notorious. In Laronde, which lay west of downtown, the apartment buildings were squat; almost run down. You could almost smell the whiskey in the air when you walked by. The sidewalk gutters were clogged with cigarette butts and broken beer bottles and chicken bones. Some of the cars had a lot of duct tape holding up shattered windows. Old men clustered on stoops and carried on in loud voices with tiny bottles sheathed in flimsy paper bags. Some buildings had windows boarded up with plywood. I instinctively understood that this was not a safe area, but it felt real in a perverted way; poverty, drugs, prostitution were rampant here. I knew of some students living here and there as the rents were incredibly cheap. Some got mugged, of course, so I didn’t dare come here at night. In the stark glare of day, I saw glints of flint in everyone’s eyes whenever I happened to look up with a fleeting question of wonder. I asked, and they answered with their eyes. The city had been cruel to them, and I was to make sure that whatever happened to them was not to happen to me. This I understood.
The land up north still cast a long shadow over the city where I explored on weekends. I longed to see the sun set without a building in the way; felt a pang of ache when I realized it was harvest season. I was surprised. Harvesting is such brutal, interminable work involving many people for long hours. I rarely saw my father and brothers during that time, and Mom and other women always made meals that were easy to consume quickly out on the fields. They also canned pickles and other vegetables. Somehow the focus on food meant they were making the kitchen a home, even if temporarily as they bustled and bumped into each other with a laugh. Up north I was just a boy who loved to read, and what was I here now? Not even a Badamore.
When I went downstate for college, I looked in the local papers for anything to do with gay people. I didn’t have to try hard. There was a gay bookstore called Adam and Steve’s Bookstore on Speck Street. I bought a copy of Gayellow Pages. That guide opened my eyes to what was available in my new city and all over America. There were all sorts of interests ranging from Buddhism to photography, and all sorts of businesses that catered to the gay community. I felt I’d found a home of sorts. I felt saved. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t always get laid in the clubs. I was dazzled by the variety of men who mingled in the bars, and for a long while, that was enough. I was still frightened about catching AIDS, so I played very, very safely. I was always careful not to taste a man’s cum. I didn’t care if the guy assured me that he had tested negative the week before. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to end up in the hospital with an infamous disease and have Dad say, “I told you so.”
Seeing that I wasn’t alone for the first time was what gave me the strength to tell my parents about myself the day after Thanksgiving.
Mom said, “You need to see Father Clovis right away. Get that fixed.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need help.”
Dad said nothing for a moment. If you want to amass a lot of emotional power with anyone, say very little, and when you finally say anything, make it unforgettable. You will earn a lot of respect that way. “Well, as long as you suck dick, you can’t stay here. Get out.”
Mom gasped.
I went upstairs, packed my stuff, and walked out. I didn’t even look back. It would be quite a walk back to the bus station in town. Nevertheless I set off.
I was brimming full of emotions, helping me forget how far I had left to walk. I thought of everything, and I thought of nothing. I vacillated in the twilight of rage and sadness. I was grateful that it wasn’t too cold for November.
I heard a car slow down beside me.
I looked up.
It was Larry Fruell, now a heavyset man in his forties. I used to have a major crush on him when I was a teenager. I had prayed that my ten-speed bike would clutch and break down more often so I could see him, but he always did too good a repair job with my bike. His long hair back then was a mix of blond and orange, and he had a scruffy beard. Pale blue eyes, though. They were so gentle whenever I looked into them.
He was the first man I’d later recognize as a bear. He was married with three kids. What mattered was that I was afraid of having sex with anyone.
“Need a lift?”
I leaned down to look at him. His hair was shorter, almost a crew cut, and he only wore a mustache that looked like frayed toothbrush bristles. His belly seemed to rub against the steering wheel. But he still looked hot. “Uh, I need to go to town.”
“Sure. I’m headed thataway.”
I got into the car.
“You’re Billy Badamore, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, good to see you again.” He extended his hand.
I nearly melted when I felt the warmth of his thick hand, but I kept my cool.
“How come your folks aren’t giving you a ride?”
“It’s kinda complicated.”
We rode silently for a few minutes. The land looked more desolate with its thin blankets of snow.
He turned to me. “You sure you don’t wanna talk about it?”
“You can’t tell anyone, okay? My parents would kill me if everyone in town knew about me.”
“You’re gay?”
My jaw dropped. “How did you know?”
“Come on, Billy. You were looking at me all the time.”
I winced from embarrassment.
“It’s okay. I’m not gonna tell. I used to have a buddy who sucked me off on a regular basis. Then he moved away, and I met Sheryl, and . . . you know.”
“You’re bisexual?”
He turned to me. “God, no. Just that queers suck dick better than women do.” He groped himself. “Man. I could use a blow job right now.”
We ended up in the back room of his bike shop. It was closed for the season, so he kept the lights turned off. It was cold, but the pent-up desire I had for him made me feel warm as I knelt before him. I had always been wary of swallowing, but I figured that if he was straight, he would be disease-free.
I choked on it as I wasn’t used to doing that, and he laughed.
I felt embarrassed.
“Hey, Billy. I see you got a boner there. Take care of it.”
“Are you gonna watch?”
“No. I don’t get off on watching guys beat off. The toilet’s over there.”
I felt so dirty in that tiny bathroom with its broken mirror above the sink. The chill seeped deep into my bones, and I was too soft to shoot. If he’d allowed me to kiss him, or even hugged me, I’d have felt less dirty.
When I got out of the bathroom, he looked up from the counter. “Feel better?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“The next bus leaves in twenty minutes. I checked.”
“Thanks.”
“Anytime. Let me know when you want to—you know, okay?”
I nodded.
On the bus ride back to the city, I felt disgusted with myself. I would never do that again. I couldn’t understand the appeal of sucking straight men off without any reciprocation. Doing that would reinforce their hierarchical place in society. Once was enough.
In the mid-nineties, when I first saw the Bear magazine in the back racks in Adam & Steve’s Bookstore, I couldn’t believe the centerfolds. They were furry, somewhat schlubby, and usually older with a bit of wear and tear, and I got hard, which surprised me. Some of these guys had average-sized cocks. I couldn’t believe it. They were like anti-porn stars. I was in my mid-twenties, and it was the first time I’d heard of the bear community! I was so overjoyed with the discovery, but my gay friends gave me the eyes-rolling-whatever look when I tried to explain how important it was to accept your own body as it was and rebel against the twink body-fascist standards so prevalent in the bar culture.
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 naked, 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.
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 one 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.
I went up to see Mom at the hospital every other weekend, and then three people at work quit at the same time to protest the way my asshole boss was treating them. That was how I’d become assistant manager, and that meant I couldn’t go up and see Mom as often as I liked. Sally was the one who kept Dad away from the hospital when I showed up. He soon drifted further and further in the distance until I had only a few crunchy leaves of color in my hands. The tree had shorn itself of me.
The waft of freshly brewed coffee that I served my customers wasn’t enough to keep my listlessness at bay. Craig had been dead for a few weeks.
Those nights I felt his ghost drift through my room and evaporate. I was angry with him for keeping me awake for so long.
I discovered that the only way I could sleep was to forget all about him.
Must I do the same with you? I don’t want to.
James, you’re still alive.
I don’t want you to die in my dreams.
You can still come back.
I don’t want you to float slowly through the smoky halls of my brain, pausing to look back now and then. I couldn’t bear to see the desire aflame in your eyes again, not unless you were sure you wanted me back permanently.
With you, I felt as if I was opening up like a wheat field, an ocean rushing in, when you entered me for the first time. I wasn’t tense or afraid. I couldn’t stop touching the sweat sopping your chest when you grunted away. I knew I didn’t exist, not in that moment when it was all about the thrusting, but I was alive. I felt redeemed.
Strange that I needed a tall and handsome stranger to show me a way out of that exhibition hall of ghosts. I’d thought all the doors to the land of the living were locked. I could see through the panes of glass the grass turning bright green and the buds blooming in a confetti of color. Inside, I couldn’t focus my eyes on anything long enough to render sharpness in my own vision. The dust of ash covered everything. If I inhaled, I choked on the acridity of death. My feet were heavy with the weight of the dead. I couldn’t move quickly enough. I had to be patient with myself. Some nights I felt as if I’d moved only one inch, but even that felt like a victory. I was a snail. I was afraid of letting light into the shell of my heart. If my first boyfriend could die within a year of meeting me, all the men would surely die after having sex with me. I was infected with fear and paranoia.
That’s why I knew it was quite all right to have you as my man. Didn’t matter that you had one foot. It meant that you were free of death, of illusions. It’s strange how I don’t remember specifically how you walked beside me. I must’ve floated with you because that’s how you’d made me feel.
That winter walk, the only one we’d undertaken after the snow came and stayed, is a chunk of dry ice left permanently in the freezer of my heart. I’d joked that we should try something different that December afternoon.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Hey, I know. A walk. We could take a walk out in the woods.”
You glanced out the back window. The sun was half-covered by clouds. It was ten degrees, but there was only a slight wind.
“Sure.”
You should’ve seen me stop myself from falling off the ottoman in your living room.
You walked to your bedroom and returned with a different prosthetic foot. “This is better for walking on uneven ground,” you explained.
I watched you take off your jeans and swap your prosthetic feet. It may sound strange for you to hear this, but I felt honored that you didn’t hide from me for the first time. I felt as if you knew I wouldn’t bolt from seeing you do such a thing.
I watched you button up your sexy red Union Jack as I put on my long underwear and tucked my jeans into my Sorel boots, a carryover from the days when I lived further up north. It took us fifteen minutes to get ready with sweaters, scarves, and mittens.
God, we couldn’t stop smiling at each other. Don’t you remember that?
The snow was a foot, a foot and a half, deep. It had fallen earlier that morning.
The whitescape was beautiful.
An occasional trail of bird prints crisscrossed each other, and rabbit pellets had rolled like marbles down the smooth inclines.
We didn’t say much.
I watched you perch your crutches forward, lift your foot, and bring up the crutches. You went ahead of me. I was in awe of the huge size of your footprints.
The clouds took to hiding the sun. It was as if the sun was cold too.
Up the hill you were like a shadow climbing further away from me, and you suddenly stopped. You leaned against a thick birch tree. You smiled at me as I grunted my way up toward you. I remembered that you used to be an avid hiker.
I was surprised when you pulled me into your arms, and I felt the hot cock of your tongue probe deep into the hole of my mouth. The tiny icicles of your beard bristles melted on my chapped lips. I couldn’t stop sipping the pearl drops of you. I slaked the sweetest thirst.
I held you for the longest time.
I wanted to cry from so much happiness, but I was afraid that my tears would freeze and zip my eyelids shut.
You kissed me again. And again.
I was so surprised. You rarely showed me affection outside sex.
The land beyond the birches was level so it was easy to walk. There wasn’t as much snow either. I heard birds flutter in the branches above us as they bounced from tree to tree. Maybe they were hoping we had seeds and crumbs for them.
The trees began to cluster closer and closer together until it was harder to navigate. I wanted to ask you where you were going. Was there a cabin hidden somewhere in the woods? I had hoped so. My mind’s eye danced with us cuddling fiercely against the dying fire inside the dank cabin. You would tell me how much you needed me, how much you wanted me, how much you loved me.
Instead you took me inside a small clearing. “Sometimes in the summer I come here, take off my clothes, and jack off while I smoke my cigar.”
You smiled at me as you held my hand, your glove in my mitten.
What happened that made you feel so cold toward me?
Sometimes when I’m lonesome, I like to remember climbing up on a haystack to look across the fields. The golden sun lathered honey all over my face. I felt all right with the world. I didn’t need a book at that moment to feel alive. All I had to do was close my eyes and feel the sun caressing my face. That’s why I understood your preference to stay away from the city and stick to the country.
When I wandered through the so-called “back forty” on your property, I felt as if I had entered a new world. It was calling back to the child I once was. How could I have abandoned him so? There was in you something like the father I’d longed to have in my childhood, and the eloquent silences you spoke made the child in me hum, more so when I saw how easily you wove among the birches and the cottonwoods that crowded your land. I wanted to have you embrace me in your solid arms so I could feel small again, like the boy I’d forgotten to say goodbye to in the middle of that mad rush to grow up and move away. That boy hadn’t known how loved he had been, and I’d neglected to tell him so.
When you caressed my face in the darkness that first night, I felt as if I’d been touched by the hands of the sun.
Mom went through a full round of chemotherapy only once; it was too much for her. It was enough to convince her to die. She didn’t want to fight anymore. Each round, lasting a few hours a week, was enough to zap her strength. She wasn’t anymore a woman of enough strength and stamina to keep the house clean, look after the chickens and the garden, and pay the bills. She wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. She hated feeling weak, unable to move when there were many things that needed taking care of. Sally told me how she had to vomit into the bucket next to her bed.
I never learned how Dad dealt with it, but I imagine that to him, it was just another crisis, like how a cow might be finicky with her newborn calf and didn’t want to be milked. Was she just another farm animal to him? I couldn’t help but wonder. Dad had grown up on a farm without the latest equipment, so he was used to doing things the tougher way. None of that fancy stuff was necessary if he could save money. All of us siblings worked the land with him, and my three brothers became farmers. Sally married a truck driver, so she didn’t see him much either. I think Dad had prepared us to expect a lot of silence from the ones we’d love. Anyone talking a bit was indeed too much for us.
I taught Composition 101 in exchange for my graduate school tuition. It was frightening at first to stand in front of fifty students at a time and explain the ins and outs of grammar and punctuation. Even though they were only a few years younger than I was, I felt old. Learning how to write essays, even if only two pages long, seemed too difficult for them.
They slothed back in their chairs.
They slurped sodas in their containers. Sometimes they were quite loud.
A few of them drifted off to sleep.
The smell of coffee was strong at the beginning of class, and evaporated by the time class ended.
For the first time I felt pity and compassion for my teachers. I had no idea how hard it was to make a lifeless subject interesting enough to keep anyone awake. But I figured that if I’d paid attention to what was hot in their world of music and movies, which was easy to do as I consider myself a pop culture aficionado to begin with, and peppered my talks with references to them, they might sit up and take notice.
One by one they did.
Not all, of course, but their sense of entitlement was occasionally breathtaking. Had they been that coddled in high school?
Their assignments broke my heart. They seemed so illiterate. How was it possible for them to have graduated from high school, let alone get into the university? I was stunned. I had always thought I was an average writer, or at least a writer with some promise, but grading their homework made me realize how much better I was as a writer.
I sought out published essays that were beautifully written and distributed photocopies.
I told them they had to copy each word in longhand. Yes, in longhand. They had to learn, to look at each word. I prayed that they too would take the time to think about what they were copying so it wouldn’t be entirely by rote.
No one liked me that first month.
I didn’t eat or sleep well. I couldn’t always concentrate on my own studies. I forced myself to crank out little stories for work-shopping in class. I didn’t like any of them, but my classmates oo-hed and ahhed over them. I was stupefied. They couldn’t be reading the same stuff I had written, could they?
No.
They had to be on some drug; no way anyone could rave on and on about how perfectly executed my sentences were.
“You’re very sharp. You don’t mince words when you write.”
“I don’t know about you guys, but I know I’m not going to see those haystacks the same way again.”
Oh, please.
Even though I used familiar locations from my childhood, I never wrote autobiographical fiction. I was afraid of coming off as mawkish, sentimental, annoying, self-serving. No. It was much better to observe everything as if through a pair of binoculars and write down what I saw. Since I was so far away, I wouldn’t be able to hear their voices so I had to imagine the stories unfolding through their actions. I felt like God overseeing his serfs, who were bad actors trying to pull off another decent show. They played characters who lived and died, and who were full of elegiac bullshit. I knew my work was bullshit, but I cranked it out anyway. I was already doubting whether I was cut out to be a writer.
It was heartbreaking when no one in Comp 101 seemed to care much about the craft of writing, let alone try to write more simply and clearly. Some of my students did work hard on writing their essays, but it was hard to grade them all. I knew I didn’t have the heart to be a teacher even though that’s what many Creative Writing graduates did once they got their degrees.
Each class session forced me to become someone else I hated.
After being held at arm’s length within my own family, I’ve always wanted to be loved. It hurts a lot more than it should when strangers who barely know you beyond your name don’t want to hang around and say hello. Yes, I was their teacher, and yes, they had other classes to attend, but I had become that tough asshole who was way too nitpicky about shit that nobody was ever gonna care about.
Each week, when I graded, I sought out the smallest signs of improvement, of comprehension in their homework. They did appear, but I had to hunt for them. When I found them, it felt like a little victory, and when I read other writers for the classes I was taking, I nearly cried at their mastery of language. It was such an exuberance to drink in such clarity. Semi-colons and colons were used correctly, and the Oxford comma was used consistently. Sentences were carefully strung together to achieve a certain effect. Paragraphs had stanzas of rhythm, and each page was like a pop song captured perfectly in the mind’s ear. They were fearless with expressing themselves in quietly startling ways. Such music was manna from the heavens. I could listen to it nonstop.
Did I ever talk about any of this with you? No.
See, I knew that you weren’t a reader; you’d told me so.
I’d never seen you as less equal to me because you didn’t care for books. Oh, no. Growing up on the farm has taught me the value of common sense that a lot of book-smart people don’t always have. I know what it’s like to work the land. There’s no romance in mind-numbing repetition.
When I spent weekends with you up north, I felt a reconnection to my past and to the family I’d lost a long time ago when I escaped to the mountain of books for safety. You didn’t pass judgment on me. You gave me hope, however fleeting, that my own family would welcome me back with open arms.
Earlier today I thought of Craig. It was the seventeenth anniversary of his death. Had it been that long? Have I gotten that old?
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror at work. I saw something I hadn’t quite noticed before. I leaned closer. There were a few gray hairs in my beard. Fuck. I wasn’t expecting that!
I knew that day would eventually come, but I never thought it would come so soon. Time has a sneaky way of doing that to you.
All that day, when I wasn’t busy serving cappuccinos and chai lattes, I prayed that my beard would turn a crisp salt-and-pepper color like yours. Now that I’d met you, I’ve developed a major weakness for such beards.
With each accidental glance in the mirror behind the counter, I tried to imagine how I would look at fifty, fifty-five, sixty. I couldn’t imagine myself that far into the future.
Would I be still aching for the unattainable you?
Would I be happily married to someone else?
Would I be still alive?
I never thought I’d survive this long after Craig.
At his memorial service, I wasn’t strong enough to read the poem I had written to remember him by. My friend Ted took the poem out of my hand, and I kept my face to the floor as I heard him try to read it with an even voice. He had met Craig a few times, but they didn’t know each other well.
To Ted, he was just the boyfriend of his college friend.
Ted salvaged me. I’d lost my voice, but when he finished, a sudden beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and filtered through the stained glass window of St. Sebastian’s.
Everyone looked up with surprise.
It was a sign from the heavens. It had to be.
Afterward everyone agreed that Craig had just said goodbye to everyone.
It was not the kind of goodbye I wanted.
I wanted him to say goodbye to me when we were too old to move around much. I wanted to feel his gnarly liver-spotted hand wrap around mine and hear his age-gruffed voice before I faded into my eternal slumber.
When Craig died, Mr. Death shadowed me everywhere. I didn’t know what he looked like, but I knew he was there. He was transparent as air, and I didn’t like that at all. I need to see something first before I can sense how I can control it. But no, he breathed down my neck each time I gazed too long at a man. Would that man give me the same kiss that Mr. Death had longed to give? I showed up at bear events because at least the men weren’t skinny. They didn’t have AIDS, or at least they looked like they didn’t. They made me forget for a short while that Mr. Death hid like a hangnail lost inside a shadow. They wouldn’t lose massive amounts of weight so quickly that they’d fade away like the legs of the Wicked Witch of the West under Dorothy Gale’s house. Their weight meant they were vibrantly alive. They had been inoculated against Mr. Death’s contagious kisses.
Mr. Loneliness shielded me from Mr. Death.
He and I had committed to stay together until one of us cheated with Mr. Death.
Mr. Loneliness whispered many things in my ear.
Things like: “You don’t need to find anyone special because you already have me.”
“Craig wouldn’t want you to die. You can count on me to keep you alive.”
“You don’t want to die young and hurt your mother, do you?”
When I saw Mom after Craig’s death, she said, “What happened to you?”
I tried to explain, but my voice was a croak. “He died.”
“Who?”
“Craig.”
She didn’t ask any more questions. His name was enough.
Each time I went to see Mom, she floated further away. Her coughing echoed between us. Soon she had wires attached to her body, and she pounded the hospital bed with her fists. She was so angry. She had to have one more cigarette, dammit. She still smoked. She’d figured that as long as she was going to die, she might as well enjoy another cigarette. I didn’t know what to say to her on these last few visits.
She was too busy coughing up pellets of blood.
I tried to fill the air with idle conversation about my job.
She was too busy trying not to crave another smoke.
I waved the air and tried to tell her that I loved her very much and that I would miss her when she was gone.
She stopped and stared at me. “Don’t tell me that crap. I don’t wanna hear that.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to see me again?”
“You always say the same old things. You’re so full of yourself, that’s what you are.”
“So are you.”
She looked mortified at me.
“You don’t love me. That’s what this has come down to. Your fucking cigarettes. You don’t love me. Go ahead and die.”
I stormed out of the room.
Sally gave me a major chewing-out over that, but I didn’t care. She didn’t seem to appreciate the fact that I was spending what little money I had left on the bus fares for up north.
It was the last time I saw Mom.
Mom, I saw you standing and wavering in the great forest of white birches, except that when I came closer, the trees weren’t what they were. They were the white poles of huge cigarettes staked into the cemetery grounds. They splintered the stone and marble tombstones into flaky crumbles, and out of the smooth trunks came the spidery skeleton branches flapping in the wind, trying not to lose the tantalizing leaves of tobacco already turning red, orange, yellow, brown, the very colors of fire. Yet each time I tried to enter the forest, I found myself hitting an invisible wall. You were inside a box of no oxygen. It was the only way you could survive without nicotine. I longed to shatter that wall and have you smoke my lungs inside out so you could breathe again, and easily too.
When my phone rang in the middle of the night two months later, I was pissed. It had taken me such a long while to fall asleep this easily, and then this damn phone call. It was Dad. I was quite surprised. He never called me for anything; it had been years since I’d heard his voice.
“Oh, hi. What’s up?”
“Mom died.”
“What?”
“She died. Thought you should know.”
“Oh, wow. Um, um . . . wow. Um, when’s the funeral?”
“Three days from now.”
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
Fuck.
I couldn’t sleep the rest of that night. I felt sad that I hadn’t felt her presence when she died. It was so different from when Craig died.
When Dad picked me up at the bus station, I couldn’t read his wizened face. It had been so long since I’d seen him last. He didn’t say much.
I didn’t either. I was afraid of scaring him away, much like years later when I would be afraid of doing the same thing to you. When he dropped me off at Sally’s, I knew that he’d still thought of me as unclean, that dicksucking orphan. He was too set in his ways. How can anyone convince someone so stubborn as him, or as you? Would I need to strike a match under the candle of you so that you’d jump from the intense heat of my scrutiny and melt like wax into my arms?
You are the flame, and I am only beeswax.
My brothers and I are men, but we are masters of awkwardness when we meet rather by accident. We’d never admit this to each other’s faces, but if we had a say in choosing our brothers, we would never have picked each other. They are men of the land. They are well-versed in the encyclopedia of soil, water, and sun. They know how to fix gardening equipment and tractors and trucks. They inhale the poetry of the weather even when its count-the-syllables-on-the-fingers verse turns bad. With each day in the fields, they write books that will never be edited and published and read. Each moment is a sheet crumpled up and tossed in the wastebasket of nature, never to be seen again and lost to the worms of forgetfulness. They sit with their laconic observations that sound as if translated from a foreign language I thought I’d understood while growing up only to find that I’ve forgotten how to speak it. The land still runs deep in my bones, but the words are the true chlorophyll of my soul. With the sun of truth illuminating each row of seeds I sow, I find the crops of words easy to harvest. Survive easily on such ample feasts I do.
These men are masters of their own little domains, and I have yet to master my own. They know this, and they keep their distance from me. They know I haven’t come anywhere near the amount of hard labor they’ve put into their own lands, for where are the crops I’ve yet to harvest from my years of so-called laziness with seeding so many words in the soil of my brain? Writers aren’t meant to be gardeners, and yet they are asked to justify themselves over and over again with more than words. Words aren’t tangible, but food on the table is. But these men forget that if it weren’t for writers, they would not have movies to entertain them in the evenings after a long day of toil and soil. To tell a story well takes talent, and because they are men of the land, they find such storytellers easy to dismiss. After all, writers are supposed to be the ones with megabucks, therefore derided. Books are even worse crimes, filled with language of nothing to do with the earth and yet so much to do with the lives of others. I want to tell them otherwise, but how could I if I didn’t have a man like you in my life? They’d see that not all gay people are like me, or like drag queens on television, or muscular men in full leather regalia on motorcycles in pride marches televised so heterosexuals could gawk at us as if we were zoo animals put on display for their pleasure. My brothers would’ve sat quietly in your presence, right there on the veranda looking out on the lonely road in the distance, for they’d realize how wrong they had been about me. I think Dad would’ve liked you very much. He would’ve been shocked to learn that you were gay. But then again if you were very masculine, he’d have felt threatened. Only straight men were allowed to be masculine, because if they weren’t, how would anyone know who was queer? That wouldn’t faze you at all. You would light up a cigar, and you’d be one of them in ways I could never be. I don’t have a face that could hide so much feeling like yours does. I’m not a stoic man. I’m not one of those gruff guys who’ve seen it all and speak in laconic sentences while they drink beer and watch the news on the TV in a rundown tavern. I’m not macho enough.
In Miranden’s Funeral Home, Mom lay perfectly composed with her arms crossed on her bosom. She looked a bit thinner than before, but I couldn’t look at her embalmed face for long. Too freaky. It didn’t look like her at all. It was as if the embalmers had found a mannequin, propped it inside the casket, made it up to look like a photograph of her, and called it a day.
I knelt before her. I didn’t know what to say, what to think, what to pray. It had been a long time since I was inside a church. I’d stopped believing in the lies the Catholic Church had tried to feed me while growing up. I closed my eyes and mentally counted to fifty before I decided I was done with praying.
I went through the motions afterwards. I saw faces from my past file past me, and they seemed impressed that I was living in the city. They didn’t know that city living wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. I didn’t own a house, and I didn’t have a car. Everyone up north owned their houses and trucks, and they didn’t always have jobs.
As I nodded the whole time, I kept thinking of how I’d knelt before Mom’s body; what do you say to a dead mother if you were already a ghost among her children?
The house where I grew up is a stranger.
There’d been a time when I knew its name and its moods very well: the four-bedroom house called home. Mom and Dad slept in one; two bedrooms were given to us boys, and the fourth one went to Sally. It sat centrally between the garage, barn, pasture, and the farmed fields a bit beyond. On the other side of the road was prairie land that had been left fallow for a number of years. Mrs. Marshall, the woman who owned the property across the road, didn’t want anyone to touch it after her farmer husband died. I loved the wide open feel of that prairie land. Just grasses growing tall and reedy. I loved slipping away with a library book and a blanket across the road and furrowing among the grasses. Some of them were so crooked like roofs that they shielded me from the sun as I read. The word and the land were one and the same.
Nights when the moon came out to check the land below were pale and quiet. I liked looking through my bedroom window at the way the moon caressed the few clouds before falling asleep. I liked knowing that the prairie field would always be there. When Sammy moved out of our bedroom, I felt freer to stay up and watch. I used a flashlight to read my books. Sometimes the moon was so strong I didn’t need it.
When I saw my father’s house after years away, it was a shock to see the prairie land across the road filled with a sea of corn. It wasn’t just my mother who’d died; Mrs. Marshall did too. Her kids sold the land for a very good price as the land had been made extremely fertile after having lain fallow for so many years.
Then the house of memory itself: it was no longer a pale blue. It had been repainted white. The garage, too. The barn was still a rusted red, but it wasn’t old or anything; it was still in good shape. I didn’t see any cows grazing in the pastures. Maybe it was too hot out. I saw some men working the fields, but they seemed to be of darker skin. I wasn’t surprised. I had heard about more and more Mexicans migrating up north where there was hard farm work to be found, and I suspected that many of them were illegals. It seemed that hard physical labor was no longer solely the domain and envy of white young men.
I stepped into the house. The kitchen counters and table, and dining room table too, were overflowing with casseroles and . . . so much food. Dad said, “That’s for after the funeral.” Wow. I wouldn’t taste Mom’s cooking ever again. I held back my tears and walked throughout the house. So much had changed, and yet not much had. I was the one who had changed. I couldn’t possibly see the house where I grew up the same way again.
When someone doesn’t change but you do, who do you think is the ghost here?
The house where I learned to love you has become a stranger too.
On the day I left after Mom’s funeral, I felt more hollow than ever. I was an empty shell moving through time and space for no reason at all. There were things I had to do, which I didn’t want to do, but society in its illogic had dictated that I must. I’d observed the day before how my brothers held back their tears at the service and the burial in the cemetery on the edge of town, but Sally couldn’t stop sobbing. It was as if she’d been burdened with the task of crying for all of us Badamore men. I felt badly for her, and the detachment I’d experienced from it all worried me. Did it mean that I was a bad son, a traitor who’d turned against his own blood? Did it mean that my lack of emotion over the last few days was my way of punishing Mom for choosing cigarettes over me? Did it mean that I’d lost the ability to feel anything? Had I died too?
On the bus I sensed Craig’s presence in the empty seat next to me. I looked out the window, watching the farms and fields roll on by. I wanted him to hold my hand, but the air conditioning was warmer than the chill of him breathing the kisses I’d so craved, and I’d longed for them to be disease-free. Of course, I knew that being positive wasn’t the death sentence it used to be, but still. What Craig had gone through was forever tattooed on my heart.
In the first winter after Mom died, I took a bus to the farthest stop north in the burbs and walked a few miles beyond the outlet mall into the woods. I didn’t know if I was trespassing on private property, but I didn’t care. I needed to go deep into the gnarly and rickety thicket of saplings and trees. Maybe I’d find her barely alive, her face blue from negligence and her hands frostbitten from a lack of affection. Out of her breath would be her last puff of cigarette smoke. When I found her, I’d bend down and perform CPR on her. I’d jackhammer my oxygen right into her mouth, and she’d cough back to life. She’d look up into my eyes with such wonder. She wouldn’t be Mom, but the child she used to be before farm life ruined her enough to accept the ministrations of my father. Her hair was long and flowing like the river she used to play in when she was young. Her eyes were full of the sun I’d rarely glimpsed in her while I was growing up. Her laughs were simple as a cowbell echoing across the pasture. She didn’t know who I was at first. Then she recognized me. “Why did you save me when I was supposed to be dead?”
“You never saved me when I was alive,” I said.
“That’s because you never needed any saving. Of all my kids you were the strongest. You got out while you could. Go. Go be free.”
I shook my head no. I unzipped my jacket and wrapped its front flaps around her. She had shrunk small enough that I could barely cradle her inside my arms. She rested her chilled face against mine, and together we trudged through the woods. I didn’t know where we were going, or where we should be going. I wanted to take her to a warm cabin, but there was none to be found.
As the early evening overtook my steps, I realized that in my arms was nothing but a dead body. It didn’t belong to my mother.
It belonged to me.
I dropped it out of repulsion.
As my other body crashed into the snow, I felt the jolt of ice hit the same spots that the body of me had touched in the snow. I screamed. The body didn’t move; just lay askew like a Raggedy Andy doll. I touched my own face to confirm that I was still alive.
Yes, I was.
I turned away, and the longer I moved toward the brightly-lit parking lot outside the outlet mall, the sharper I felt his breath seep into the blood circulating through my body. I’d been emotionally dead for a long time, especially after Craig and now this, but this was ridiculous. I was still alive. I was moving toward my bus stop, and cars did stop to let me through. This meant I wasn’t a figment of imagination. I existed.
By the time my bus arrived, I sat by the fogged window. People boarded with their overflowing bags of designer bargains.
As the bus pulled away, I saw in the distance a flicker of shadow. I knew what it was. My dead half was barely alive. Losing Craig had caused him to die, and losing Mom condemned him to the cemetery of my dreams. He needed more than ever my oxygen, my blood. He needed to draw the cigar of my entire soul into himself so he could live. For that to happen, I’d have to die.
Sometimes I felt so drained from the experience that I’d jolt awake to find Mom sitting in an old coat and a wire cart with wobbly wheels filled with all her belongings stashed into a garbage bag. The stench of her smoking addiction would pervade the entire bus, and all of us would be resisting the urge to touch our twitching noses. She turned and stared defiantly at each one of us until we each had to look away and pray that she’d get off the bus soon.
Ghosts are everywhere if we forget how to look for them, and there they rise, from the crypts of our dead memories. When we try to remember their faces more clearly, they crumble into ashes in our hands.
Mom, when you died, your lungs exploded like a balloon pricked with a pin. Its many leaves turned into sheets of paper falling out of spines thickly veined like men’s hands being forced to release against their will. The wings flitted high above us until they, full of coos and woos, turned into white doves beating their wings. They filled the sky so much I couldn’t see the blue behind their fluttering bodies. When I called out your name, Ida Jean Badamore, the birds whooshed right into a single textbook weighing heavily in my hands. I looked at its cover, which was all white save for the title, Woman, in lipstick red. All around me was endless prairie in autumn, in that cusp between harvest and fallow. No road, no tractor, no barn in sight. Not even a lone tree. I opened the book and saw its inner folds of flesh opening wide to fire a thousand and one sperms of fury at me. I felt scalded, and I shivered when the wind turned icy. I felt robbed of speech. I wanted to explain, Mom, that I wasn’t the enemy. You were the reason why I’d chosen to minor in Gender Studies, as I felt unable to understand you as a woman. I wanted to understand why you’d long felt inferior, powerless enough not to act on your dreams. I wanted to comprehend just how society had indoctrinated you against the pox of equality. I looked at the book and found its pages blank.
Did you want me to write in it?
Stop saying that I can. I’m not a writer.
No, Mom, I can’t. I’m a man.
You can’t expect me to write the authoritative text about the female experience because I’m a man; after all, heterosexual male privilege has destroyed you. You need to change that way of thinking.
Go haunt not me or another male writer with your stories of woe and wing; go whoosh your wings among the women who know what it feels like to be treated as a second-class citizen yet blessed enough with the compassion for those less than them without romanticizing them with the gift of first-class writing. Let them channel you and impregnate your memory with the music that will outlast your collaborators. The prairie is pure woman, and men have been trying to force it into submission.
You have wings. You are a goddess among the clouds.
Situated on the edge of Laronde, the Eagle used to be a saloon for the down-and-out back in the forties, but it was oddly overlooked during downtown’s aggressive urban renewal in the sixties. It stayed shuttered for decades until the mid-eighties when a gay couple bought the building and turned it into what it is today.
During my college years I heard a lot about the Eagle. It was filled with skanky old men in leather outfits, and they were all ugly with saggy tits. It was so filled with cigarette smoke you couldn’t breathe. It was a dump with a dingy rainbow flag in front. That’s all what it was supposed to be, but I never saw the inside of the place until Craig expressed surprise that I hadn’t visited it.
He paid my admission, took my hand, and pulled me into the noisy darkness. It was technically our first date.
Once my eyes were acclimated to the dimness, I saw that it looked like any other tavern I’d seen growing up north. A long mirror behind the counter? Check. A long bar counter with bar stools screwed onto the wooden floor? Check. A TV showing closed-captioned games at both ends of the counter? Check. A CD Wurlitzer jukebox with floating neon pipes throbbing out country songs? Check. But that was where the similarities ended.
No woman was anywhere in sight.
They were all men. They weren’t young snobs trying to fit in with designer label clothes or expensive haircuts. They weren’t trying to be hip with the latest club music. They weren’t dancing just to show how hot and lithe they were. They didn’t reek of cologne. Sweat, and the promise of even more, underlined their every movement. They wore T-shirts and jeans. Some of them looked like truckers, scruffy and tired from a long day on the highway. Their boots were lived in, caked with age and abuse.
Others wore leather harnesses across their naked chests and jeans tucked into chaps. Some of them puffed away on cigars. They kept their eyes slightly hidden by the brims of their leather caps. This was in the days before the city passed an anti-smoking ordinance for bars and restaurants.
So much testosterone was packed to the rafters I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. These guys had come from the comic books of my adolescence, but with the novelty of leather accouterments. That, I didn’t understand.
“Some guys wear leather because it makes them feel hot,” Craig said. “It’s like they go into a different mind zone, and they get to be what they really want to be.”
He caught my look of puzzlement.
“Look, it’s like a cigar. It’s big, thick, and manly. You can be a short guy just like me, but when you light one up, you get noticed. They see right away that you’re a man. You’re sending off signals to everyone that you’re man enough to smoke a cigar. Being man enough can really turn some guys on. Leather, cigars, jeans, boots, whatever—it’s like an addiction sometimes.” He smiled at me. “But me? I’m addicted to you. You’re so sweet-tasting.”
That night I met some of Craig’s friends at the Eagle. I still didn’t like the taste of beer, but I hung out on Friday nights once in a while.
Then Craig got sick and died.
I never went back. Just couldn’t. Not for a long, long time.
There are still moments in the Eagle when I have those split-second flashbacks of Craig talking with his buddies while I return from the restroom. He was surprisingly easy to spot as he was so short. You don’t know truly how much you love someone until you feel how much you miss him.
James, I don’t believe in organized religion, but I’ve prayed to God many times to bring Craig back. Even for just one hour so I could tell him all the things I’d been so afraid to utter out loud when he was alive.
Please don’t be so proud like me. You’ll regret it to the end of your days.
For Christmas I decided to buy you a few cigars known as the Perdomo Edicion de Silvio. I had noted that seemed to be your favorite, so I went down to The Aroma, a fairly large cigar shop six blocks away from work. The front area had comfortable leather chairs and a pile of newspapers. Men of a certain age sat in them and puffed away while they read the papers. My gaydar didn’t flash on for any of them, but I liked how they enjoyed their smokes. They seemed wholly at home with themselves.
The silver-haired guy behind the counter was quite debonair with a thick ‘stache, its ends curled upward like Frank Morgan’s in The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t know how to pronounce the name of the cigar, so I brought along a piece of paper. “Ah, yes. It’s over there.” He pointed to the humidor room off to the side. It had wide windows so you could see the shelves of merchandise inside. Up close, I was surprised to see so many different kinds of cigars available. I had no idea. All I’d known was the occasional cigar puffing away in movies, and the kind you’d smoked.
“I don’t speak Spanish at all, but could you pronounce the name of the cigar?”
“Perdomo Edicion de Silvio!”
“Per-domo Edicion de Silvio!”
“No. Perdomo!”
I tried again. “Perdomo.”
“Yes. Is this a gift for someone?”
I nodded. “It’s for my boyfriend.” I hadn’t meant to say it that way, but James, if a guy is going to spend forty bucks on some cigars on a guy he’s having the most passionate sex of his life with, his heart is already hoping to call you “boyfriend.” You may not like my line of reasoning, but most people would agree.
The man stepped back an inch.
I didn’t smile, but I knew I’d scored a minor triumph. Do you know why, James? He’d assumed that I was straight, so he has to learn that we gay people are everywhere. Money doesn’t have a sexual orientation; people do.
“He said that this was his favorite cigar shop, so.”
“That’s . . . good.”
In that moment I wish I had taken a picture of you with my iPhone so I could show him what a hunk you were.
As he rang up the sale, I turned to look closely at the sitting area. There were six plush chairs, three facing the other three. Each had an ashtray set on a knee-high stand, and a reading lamp arching from behind the chair. The side tables had the day’s newspapers. Above us were huge ventilators, but they were fairly quiet.
An older man sat with his cigar by the window. The winter light made his skin look quite pale, the haze of smoke from his mouth enveloping his face for a moment such that I couldn’t see what he looked like; just his body. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had a pronounced belly that strained against his Oxford shirt. For a moment I thought it was you sitting there, not as you now, but as you twenty years from now.
I glanced around the cigar shop and realized that in twenty years, it wouldn’t be a big deal for straight men to be smoking their favorite cigars and having amiable conversations with gay men, talking about their women and their men in equal measure. No one would feel threatened. Straight men of a certain build and bulk would take to calling themselves bears, and straight women would identify themselves as bear chasers. Young girls would oooh and ahhh over teen idols labeled as otters. Straight men would realize how much hotter they would be if they stopped shaving their faces every so often. College girls would say they wanted a cub boyfriend, and everyone would know what they meant. And it wouldn’t be such a big deal in high school if two football players slow-danced with each other at the prom.
Only time will tell.
Do I believe that ghosts exist? No. There’s been much talk of people experiencing visions of spectral beings, but I think it’s a figment of their imaginations. Sometimes they experience something so intense that words fail them, and the concept of an apparition is the next best description. Ghosts appear and reappear, revealing the state of our minds at the time like a mirror back to us. We feel the chill of recognition, and we say we’ve just seen a ghost when it’s always been us all along.
Craig still haunts me from time to time. I know that if he were alive, he would be sleeping right here beside me. He was a major cuddler, and I liked that about him. He may have been very short, but he felt of the right height when he wrapped his arms around me. His legs draped all over my thighs, leaving my feet free. I liked that. Those nights when nothing moved except the sighing of our chests I felt as if our arms, hands, fingers would burst forth into vines budding and expanding and weaving in and out of each other until we were inseparable. It was scary to feel that, and yet so wonderful.
When he died, my entire trunk was chopped apart and left to rot. I had no branches, no roots. I was a stump ripped out and wood-chipped into pieces. My heart was squished with slugs that couldn’t get enough of the pit blackness of rage at the injustice of death. I was no longer a young man with a worthless MFA; I was an old man with nothing to show for his heart and his art. I flitted like a plastic bag in the wind, hoping to hook a tree branch so I could hang on and not float away to the cemetery of the forgotten stumps. But no one was having me. I was good enough for a fuck, but too ethereal to keep.
I said I was grieving.
I said I was a widower.
I said I wasn’t ready to date.
I said I wasn’t ready for a relationship.
What I never said was: Mr. Loneliness is my husband, and I can’t divorce him right now. Just can’t.
Then you appeared and beckoned me into your truck, house, bed. It was the most wonderful affair of my life. Not once did I miss my husband on those weekends. I saw how miserable he was, but I didn’t care. I was tired of being miserable. He was always annoyingly right whenever we argued.
I cheated on my husband so recklessly that I was due for payback.
Did he tell you that he’d never divorce me as long as I lived because he’d married me first?
Then I realize Mr. Loneliness is the biggest bigamist alive. He will marry anyone who’ll have him and break their hearts. Divorcing him will be the hardest thing they’ll go through. Remember, he’s your husband too.
The wind of loneliness is what propels ghosts to sing silences and suddenly vanish. The gusts of chill play tricks on the mind’s eye of our bodies until we think our bodies are seeing what we were afraid to see in our own mirrors. We are transparent; we float; we sigh endlessly. We turn into oceans that are smaller than a drop of rain, and we are perpetually falling from the sky, waiting to splash on something concrete but the earth below is too far away. How we long to crash and feel the lightning jolt of pain, just to know that we aren’t figments of our own imaginations. Let us bleed so we can exist.
The kisses we shared have turned into gray curls of smoke. They float away, sometimes dropping back to tease me, and they rise up just out of my reach.
When Craig died, I felt I couldn’t love again. I didn’t see the point. And what’s more, one night at the Eagle some years ago I overheard three guys standing by the wall over there, right near where I saw you for the first time. I didn’t know who they were at the time, but they were all very hot. Each one of them was a veritable stud; they wouldn’t be lying if they said they were VGL in their online profiles. Most of them wore leather armbands on their left biceps to show that they were tops. They wore leather caps, and they groomed their facial hair. One man in particular had a beard that was so black one wondered if it was actually dark blue. I couldn’t tell, but his eyes were brown as chestnut. I was in lust.
Of course, he didn’t know I existed. He acted as if most of us didn’t. He was there to revel in his own hotness and to remind everyone that he was too hot for them. It’s an ego trip of the worst kind. Still, I couldn’t tear myself away from looking. Until I met you, I thought he was the most perfect specimen of manhood I’d ever laid my eyes on. I never overheard his name. I stood over there, unsure whether I should ask for another glass of ginger ale, when I noticed him talking with his buddies. They were pointing out this and that guy lining the bar and elsewhere while talking with each other.
He said, “Had him, had him, had him . . .”
The other said, “Had him, had him . . .”
I felt sickened. What was this? Had the bear community become an arena of sexual sports where it was all about statistics?
I didn’t want to be just another number, another notch on someone’s bedpost.
Uh-huh.
That’s why I didn’t come back to another bear event for a long time. Years, actually.
I went online instead and discovered that many bears had felt rejected at bear events. It was no surprise that a few bear events were cancelled in recent years when there weren’t enough RSVPs. The bears do not treat their own kind very well.
Bears online told me stories. Oh, a lot of stories.
One told me how he went to a bear party at Jolt, a bar that used to be on Speck Street. He was of Scandinavian descent, so he was naturally blond. He had been so excited to learn about the bear community, so he showed up. He didn’t know anyone there, but within five minutes of his arrival, he overheard two guys shouting into each other’s ears over the loud music: “Look at that Swede! We gotta fuck him first before anybody does!”
He turned around, and he never went back. He hangs out online because he feels safer. I don’t blame him. Do you? What kind of a community are we if we keep rating each other on fuckability? Quite astonishing, actually, when considering that so many of us were often overweight growing up. I’m sure we’ve been picked on because of our weight, and we have to turn around and reject anyone we deem unattractive, or reduce them to potential cum receptacles? Are they remotely aware of what they’re doing to each other and to themselves?
You shrugged every time I brought this up. “So?” you said. “It’s just the way things are.”
Oh, really? What about your missing foot?
Surely people had to have freaked when they saw it. Did they ever make an effort to maintain their distance from you? Did they avert their eyes from yours in the elevator? Or did they tell you how amazing and inspiring you were to move around with your prosthetic foot, which was really a passive-aggressive reminder of how superior they still were to you?
Did you ever want to tell them to shut the fuck up?
Did you ever want to look them in the eye and say, “Well?”
Did you ever want to shout at everyone to stop looking at you like a freak?
One of the reasons why I loved you so much was the fact that you didn’t want pity. You didn’t become an alcoholic or a junkie when you lost your foot. It must’ve been a hard adjustment, but you were a man. You were still that tough quarterback out on the field, and you were playing the last home game of the season. You were set on winning, and you did. You scored a lot of touchdowns with me, many more than you’ll ever know.
You taught me not to pity anyone because they were different. They were still people. I’ve never forgotten that.
All I want is one more chance to tell you all the things I’ve always wanted to tell you but had felt too scared to share. I’m tired of dreaming the conversations we will never have.
I will never forget the taste of your sweat and smoke. Some nights, when I’m not thinking of anything at all, it all comes back. I inhale as much as I can, which is ridiculous since the memory is not contained anywhere in my nasal cavity, but embedded deep somewhere in my brain. I only have to close my eyes and gently pull in the draw of you until I breathe nothing else. I jack off this cigar of mine right here on this lonely bed of mine, and when I finally smoke out, I know it’s because it’s the only way my body can grieve for you.
Each puff of cum is a tear, a pearl.
Sometimes I wish I could move like an invisible spirit through the Eagle on Friday nights, but I’m afraid to join the army of ghosts still floating inside, overhearing the animated conversations of their friends, still alive, as they drink their cheap beers. For them it’s always Happy Hour.
I don’t want to hear what these ghosts want more than anything to say, because I know that they’ll say the same thing: I still love you I miss you so much I can’t bear to leave here and say good-bye to all my friends. Even though I know the bar is air-conditioned when I step inside on hot summer nights, that initial chill always makes me think of those whose names I’ll never know. They’re still crowding the place even on nights when it’s dead. I feel their eyes everywhere, but I don’t mind that actually. They are men who’ve had sex with other men, so they know what it’s like to want to just fuck this or that hot stranger, to explore boundaries of kink, and to ache for a deeper connection with someone who’s unfortunately chosen someone else. And of course, there’s the camaraderie. They don’t judge each other for what they like to do with their cocks and balls. They just are: bar buddies, platonic good friends, potential tricks, and married but not dead husbands in open relationships.
The living have so many possibilities to choose from, and the dead have only one possibility. They simply don’t want to leave. They are too in love with the memory of their younger selves. Doesn’t matter that the men they’d loved back then have gotten old, or that a few of them now require pills to sustain their erections. They snuggle against these beautiful men, who will remain forever young in their doomed eyes, and try not to weep from too much happiness. When these dead men were alive, they hadn’t wanted much else, and now, here in the chapel of the Eagle, they can continue to pay their respects.
James, you must’ve known how badly I wanted to pay my respects to you. I wanted to stand next to you on that barstool and rest my head on your sturdy shoulder while you shot the breeze with your buddies. Sometimes you would give me a kiss on the lips when you caught the look of expectancy in my eyes. Everyone would know that I was yours and yours alone, and that would make me feel so proud.
What have I done to make you feel so ashamed of me?
What?
Tell me.
I dreamed I was a somnambulist, walking with eyes closed and yet never bumping into walls or tripping over curbs. Somehow the further I walked, the more my clothes melted and faded away from my body as I walked the miles and miles along the cinder-filled shoulders of a loud highway until I turned right and right again until up the hill and down the road was your house. Awakening, I was startled naked as a skeleton. Chill snapped at the very flesh inside my bones. Moonlight, caked of embers, lit the deep indentations of my ribcage. There on the road was a half-finished cigarette. I shivered; I thought I was going to topple over, but I picked it up. It still had a faint glow, emitting my mother’s death breath, as I inhaled. Just then you opened the door, a shadow beckoning me into the fireplace of your house. Felt like centuries before I finally arrived on your steps, but arrive I did.
Sometimes I dream of being a cigarette.
Isn’t that funny, James? You said you were a cigarette smoker for twelve years until one night a buddy offered you a good cigar of his to try. Cigars eventually weaned you off cigarettes altogether.
I want to be the last cigarette you missed. You’d light me up and inhale me, storing each puff of memory deep into the cham ber of your lungs. I would stuff each bronchiole of yours with cotton balls of want and need to the point where the only way you could breathe would be through me, my perfect set of lungs.
I am pure scent. I am the weight of smoke sinking into each fiber of fabric and seeping into your skin.
Each inhalation and exhalation is a confession of love and lust.
You make me confess so easily.
I am a puff, a poem.
You would never see me as a poem, but I am one. It’s a question of mastering each puff for the most intense release. I will hold off as long as I can until the last line will make you erupt so many times you’ve lost count.
Our first night together was the most sublime poetry reading ever, and no one was there to hear us. How so beautiful is that, and how that is so beautiful.
I don’t write poetry anymore. That stuff feels so juvenile now, but each time we kissed and made love, I felt as if I was writing a new poem, only to have it disappear, and to find it rewritten in startling ways. Then they all evaporated into thin air. No recordings, no applause.
You didn’t just make a man out of me.
You made a dream poet out of me.
Of you I shall sing in my dreams, and only you will hear my songs when I play the lyre of your cock. Your sweat is honey, and your cum is milk. On both I shall subsist, for they are the stuff of nicotine most sublime.
Come inhale me while I’m still alive. I am that flame flickering in your breath before I touch the tip of your cigarette. Let me light up the dark recesses of your soul. Let me cast aside shadows to find the most brilliant coals and free yourself of darkness. Let me blow songs into your lungs so you can find the power of wind coursing through your veins.
Come exhale me when I’m dead, and you would know that you have been loved. You would know that each night when you sleep, and each morning when you jack off, someone has loved you. You would know all this without knowing why.
I am both ash and wind, but I’m still here. Come blow me away in that polar vortex of your tentative affections, and I will return in the spring with my dandelion whiskers. I will sow my seed everywhere, and when my children burst forth in yellow, you would know that I have never forgotten you.