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I FOUND RYAN SITTING on my steps on the afternoon I had played referee at school when two female students engaged in a catfight over some boy. By the way he hung his head I knew that something was wrong. I had often wondered if people got a premonition of death the day the Grim Reaper came calling. Ryan was usually all smiles to see me even after we had resolved that incident where I had punched him. We continued to share secrets – secrets about girls (he had more than I did), secrets about life ambitions, secrets about religious beliefs, secrets about everything really. My little brother had become my best friend and judging from the way he spoke I could tell that I was his too.
When all his pearly whites remained hidden that afternoon, I braced myself for the worst. I sat next to him and mirrored his actions. I had learned that in one of the empowerment courses I had done in my quest to become the ultimate human male. This was one of the times I felt that the twelve hundred dollars were well spent.
“What do you think of me, Clay?”
I wanted to say, “You’re all right,” as flippantly as I could manage but this was not a time to be joking. Instead, I said, “You’re one of the best people I know. I’m honored to have you as my brother.”
His head remained bowed. I was hoping for a big hug or something, or the sound of an orchestra’s crescendo. A nod would have been good acknowledgement. None of that came.
“How well would you say that you know me?”
Good. Twenty questions. I like that game. “Pretty good, I would say.”
“I’ve been wanting to tell you so much about myself – a side of me you know nothing about. I have my struggles, Clay, but when I am with you I feel like I can touch the sky. Being around you – your whole attitude to life is contagious. I wish I had you around more.”
“Well, we still have the rest of our lives ahead of us, right?”
He looked up and I saw the sadness.
“What’s the matter, bro?”
He took his time. “Would you go with me for an AIDS test?”
What the hell for? I didn’t even know you were sexually active. “Yes, of course. When do you want to go?”
“Tomorrow’s okay?”
“Sure. I will take the day off.”
He wanted to say more but the words were failing him. I put my hand on his shoulder and rubbed it. That seemed to do the trick.
“I broke up with Akeela. I could tell that things weren’t going well for us. She didn’t have the zeal to spend time with me like she did at the start of the relationship. And she was always short with me when I asked her a question. And she’s horning me.” By “horning” he meant that she was unfaithful to him.
Like a parent letting go of the bicycle for the first time when his child is learning to ride without training wheels, I sat back and listened to his story.
Ryan had met Akeela at a party. Not a smart move, I always thought, but I never said anything to him. When he had first seen her, a boy with whom he was acquainted was sitting on her lap.
“Darryl, get off that girl’s lap,” he said to the boy. “I really like her.” He was always direct, no beating around the bush. She whispered in Darryl’s ear and Ryan said, “Secrets in company is bad manners.”
“You’re not really company,” she said. “I don’t even know who you are.” She grinned, pushed Darryl off, got up and took the laser light from Ryan’s hand. She shone it on the crotch of his pants.
“So, you want to meet who is down there?” The boy was full of bravado.
“I’d rather just dance.”
Sparks flew as they danced that night, and they flew the other nights they would go to parties together.
They spoke regularly on the telephone and every Friday afternoon, without fail, Akeela visited Ryan at his home. And every Friday morning she called, usually more than once, to remind Ryan that she was going to visit later in the day. It was on one of those Friday afternoons that Akeela confessed her love for Ryan and they decided to “deal” – go steady for us older folks – and they sealed the decision by having sex in his room.
I did not want to appear to be judgmental to my brother whom I was sure was idolizing me, but I was disappointed to hear that he had succumbed to the sexual pressure around him. I was hoping that we would have been the poster boys for abstinence, that we would have been the last of a dying breed to boldly declare that good sex was sex you waited for. My disappointment turned into panic: had he used a condom?
That was when the story got worse: Akeela was not his only girlfriend. He was seeing someone else at the time he decided to deal with Akeela and even though he broke it off with the other young lady, he still continued to have sexual relations with her until she saw him and Akeela dancing the night away at one of those parties. That was when she realized that it was really over and she was just being used for sex.
My brother was beginning to look like a man-slut but I shoved the image out of my mind.
“You know, Clay, I could never be satisfied with one woman.”
“What do you mean?” I knew exactly what he meant but I needed to hear it from his lips. I wanted him to bare his soul. I did not want any more surprises after that.
“Even though Akeela was my girlfriend, my personal, I was still having sex with other girls.”
And in that moment I truly felt sorry for him. He was searching for something and I just did not know what. I never could understand why men were unfaithful to their women. Sex was sex and a vagina was a vagina so why the need to run around with different women? Why couldn’t they just be satisfied?
“All the other girls meant nothing. They were just convenient for when I got horny. There was Lori, Sherisse, Deandra and Mary-Ann. Yes, and there was Katrina too but Akeela was my girlfriend.”
“So what changed it?”
He twisted his fingers, got up and walked a little distance from me. “She came crying to me telling me that she could not carry on like this anymore. She wanted us to be just friends.”
Friends. That was the death blow. I had heard enough stories of girls wanting to be “just friends.”
“I told her I was horning her and she told me that she too had been horning me with two other guys. One of them I had suspected from the way she used to talk about him.” He was getting agitated. “Just so that she would not feel like she had won, I told her about the other girls too. And it felt good. I got even.”
Ryan turned to face me and I could see the pain on his face. I stood up to be at his level, just like I had been coached in one of the psychology courses.
“Then she told me that there was one more boy. She wasn’t going to tell me but I guess that I had hurt her too much and she had to have the final word. She was having sex with my best friend.”
The tears flowed and my big, macho brother crumbled like a baby in my arms. I led him inside not wanting the neighbors to see the afternoon theatre being played out in my front yard.
We sat at the kitchen table and after the sniffling stopped I put a hand on his shoulder and told him that everything was going to be all right.
“Sean was my best friend. I never expected anything like that from him. I almost knocked her down when she told me and if I see him anytime soon, I really don’t know what I will do.” More silence.
“I wasn’t looking for a wife or anything, but I didn’t expect it to hurt so much. Being unfaithful just doesn’t make sense right now.”
While Ryan went to the bathroom to wash his face, a niggling question tugged at my mind. I tried to distract myself. I got started on dinner: a macaroni casserole with a layer of minced beef inside. When he returned to the kitchen I asked in the most casual of tones, “You used a condom, right man?”
“Only with the other girls. Akeela was my personal. I trusted her.”
“But she was creeping. You don’t know what you could have gotten from her.”
He was not fazed at the thought. I on the other hand just wanted to bash his head in – with love of course. “Give me a hand with the salad?”
He obliged. As I topped the macaroni with cheese, I heard him snicker.
“What?” I asked, hoping that he was laughing at how silly the whole affair was. That would have meant that he was getting out of his earlier depression and that he was on the road to healing.
“You know how you’re always telling me that I should not do anything rash when I’m hungry, angry, lonely or tired?”
“Yeah. HALT.”
“I wish I had remembered that before I went with Josephine.”
“Who’s Josephine?”
“A girl in my class.” I felt a chill in spite of the thirty degree heat. “We were having a very racy conversation and, well, she challenged me and you know that I’m not one to back down from a challenge.”
I knew that so well. When one of the workmen at his mother’s house, who was twice his size, challenged him to a boxing match, he rose to the occasion. If I were a gambling man, I would have lost my money that morning for I would not have bet on my little brother to win the fight. Whenever I told him that he could not do something, he was always determined to prove me wrong, which he often did.
“What was at stake?”
“She said that I could not stimulate her orally until she reached orgasm.”
I was glad that his back was turned to me so that he did not see the look of pure disgust on my face.
“Did you? I mean, did you try?” I really did not want to hear the answer.
“I felt like such a fool, trying so hard and she did not even get close to climaxing.”
Oh dear God. What has my brother done?
“When I was done, I told her that she should stick to big men and to leave schoolboys alone.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. She has stopped talking to me since.”
I said very little over dinner and Ryan noticed. He seemed to be his old self again, lighter now that his brother was helping him to carry his own load. I, however, was being weighed down by the burden of my brother’s indiscretions. I wanted to carefully tread the line between concern and condemnation.
“I don’t know if you expect me to comment on what you shared with me this afternoon, but I must say one thing. That part where you had oral sex with the girl, I really did not like. It just seems so nasty and I hope you won’t do that again.”
“I hear you.”
After dinner Ryan went home and I promised to pick him up to take him for his HIV test the next day. The results came back negative.
