Missed Connections

by Brian Francis

  At first, my fantasies were innocent enough. Scenarios where I was the best friend of the boy in my class who I just might have had a crush on. Or all the popular girls would fall in love with me and the other boys would be jealous and wonder what magic I possessed.

  As I approached my teenage years, my fantasies began to border the edges of the forbidden, with darker, more sexual plot lines. I’d fantasize about other dads, teachers, and the husbands on my paper route. I couldn’t conceptualize having sex with them, at least not at that age, but I knew that I wanted to be the object of their desire. And because I had been taught to believe that desire between men was shameful, I had free rein once I cast myself as a beautiful young woman (usually taking the form of Brooke Shields in a miniskirt and white pumps). I would imagine various set-ups: My car breaks down in front of the house of my most handsome paper route customer. Or I’m babysitting when the father (played by Kevin Costner) unexpectedly returns home—without his wife and reeking of whiskey. Or I’m asked by the gym teacher to stay behind at school one day. “It’s time you and I got to know one another better,” he’d say with a glint in his eye.

  Sometimes, I’d bring those fantasies to life. When I was alone in the house, I’d rifle through my mom’s closet, pick out one of her dresses, squeeze into her highest heels, and attempt some makeup. I’d prance around the house, my heels clicking on the kitchen’s linoleum floor, carrying on like a sex goddess in a poly-blend dress from Sears. I’d sit in the living room and cross my legs, pretending to have conversations with men, being what I thought they wanted me to be: aloof, desirable, complicated, gorgeous.

  I was paranoid I’d get caught. The back door could open suddenly. There’d be no time to change or to wipe the blue eyeshadow smeared across my lids. And how would I explain myself? I was too old to be a ham by that point, and far beyond my “cute in the metallic dress” years. I always felt sick with shame afterwards, putting my beige boy clothes back on. What if my dad had come home? Or if the neighbours had seen me? What if someone at school found out who I really was?

  My fantasies were never just about sex. My yearning for approval and acceptance resided at the heart of all of them: from the jock on the football team, from my paper route customers, from the girls I wanted to like me, from the boys I wanted to be friends with, from my classmates and teachers. From my family.

  If I closed my eyes and concentrated hard enough, I could almost hear my dad’s cheers as I caught the fly ball.

  As I got older, the feeling that there was something wrong about me intensified. My fantasies, even when they bordered on the completely ridiculous, became the refuge I needed to get me through the day. Without my air castles, I had only the darkness of my reality.

  The layers of laughter.

  When your fantasy world is more fulfilling than your reality, what happens, inevitably, is that it becomes the shelter you continually circle back to. My parallel universe evolved to become more intricate, more nuanced, more necessary, even after I left high school and the pressures of living in a straight world grew heavier.

  When I was twenty-one and living in the house I shared with roommates, I used to dance around in my bedroom with my headphones on, pretending I was a go-go dancer. I’d imagine all of my friends coming to watch me dance on the platform, how they’d think I was so amazing in my hot pants and football jersey, cut midriff, of course. But in real life, my friends wouldn’t think I was amazing, because they were straight, and having a male friend in hot pants dancing in a cage at a nightclub wouldn’t have been something to admire. I knew this, but it didn’t matter. Neither did the fact that I couldn’t dance very well. Or that I didn’t have the body of someone who dances in a cage in a nightclub. But details, details.

  I had started to lip-sync, too, mainly to female singers. I related more to the songs of women. They were allowed to tap into their emotional cores in ways that male singers couldn’t.

  My favourite singer was Celine Dion. In 1992, she released her English-language eponymous CD (remember CDs, Sam?), and I’d put on my headphones and play those songs over and over again, letting the heartache consume me. I wasn’t pretending to be Celine—although with the right wig and a lot of chest-pounding, I could have done a decent job. In my head, I was singing the male version of Celine’s voice. When I lip-synched to Celine’s songs, I’d imagine myself in a nightclub filled with friends and family and anyone else whose acceptance and admiration I craved. Or maybe it was a release I sought. That could be it. Maybe I just wanted to escape my cage.

  All those years later, I was still desperate for cheers. Still trying to outrun those orange eyes.

  The lip-synching carried on for many years, longer than I’d care to admit. Between you and me, Sam, sometimes I still do it, though not nearly as often. I’ve long given up on the idea of being celebrated for a talent I don’t possess. But who cares about talent? What matters is that when I need to retreat, to take refuge from reality, my fantasy world is still there, perfectly constructed and custom-made, whenever I feel the desire to return.

  The odd time I do slip the headphones on, the mental set-up is different: I’ve withdrawn from the spotlight for many years. My fans have expressed concerns on Reddit, feverishly speculating if I’m dead or, worse, if I’ve become bloated. But I’m not dead. Or bloated. I’m just not hungry for fame anymore. I understand the futility of keeping yourself afloat on the opinions of others. But, on the advice of my manager and faced with the escalating panic of my fans, I decide to return to the stage for one night only. I’ll show all these tight-skinned wannabes how to belt one out. I’ll show them what real talent is. I’ll show them what it means to be a goddamned star.

  Are you still in good with your siblings, Sam? That’s what’s most important in the real world. But now that I think of it, there’s something to be said for keeping our imagined worlds flourishing as well. There’s room for both. And maybe one helps us to survive in the other.

  I hope you’re still walking runways, even if it’s only within the perimeter of your mind.

  Sincerely,

  Hello Georgeous.

  This is in response to your newspaper ad. I have short, brown hair and have a trim beard. I stand 6 foot 4 inches with a lean build.

  I am reasonably attractive and consider myself to be an optimist. I am a teacher and I like to think this has given me a youthful outlook on things. There might be one problem though. I’m 45.

  I’m interested in meeting and I hope you feel the same. I’m giving you my phone number. I have an answering machine so leave a message if I don’t pick up. And not to worry. I live alone.

  CRAIG,

  Dear Craig,

  You were a teacher and you spelled “gorgeous” wrong. I hope you didn’t teach English.

  Maybe you were under some tight timelines while you were writing your letter to me. Or grabbing a few rushed minutes on your lunch break. Or maybe you were in between writing report cards.

  I’m inclined to think you had a secret life, being a gay teacher. When I look back on my high school years, I can now zero in on the teachers I’m pretty sure were gay. Mr. Rand, the business teacher with the perm. Ms. Doucette, the butch gym teacher with the bowl cut who wore track pants and polo shirts. (I know it’s a stereotype, but stereotypes usually have their origins in truth, don’t they?) There were other teachers, too, although I can’t one hundred percent confirm anything. I just have inklings of an undercurrent below the surface, a rippling of rainbow-coloured waves. But no teachers were out at my high school. They may have been out in their personal lives, even out within the walls of the staff room (although I’m doubtful of that), but certainly not out in their classrooms. Not in the eighties. Not in Sarnia.

  What might it have meant for me to have had openly gay teachers in high school? It’s an interesting question, and one that I’m not sure I’ll ever know the answer to. I suppose having visibl
e gay role models in my teenage world might have lessened the secrecy and stigma, and reassured me that being gay wasn’t the catastrophe I believed it to be—even if I wasn’t prepared to receive the message at that time.

  I don’t doubt that having an openly gay teacher would have left an impression. Many years later, I might look back on him or her with new-found respect and admiration, once I was old enough to understand what it would have meant to walk proudly down those noisy hallways, to claim your space in the staff room, to stand in front of your class, with all those eyes on you, and be unapologetically yourself.

  * * *

  —

  The summer before I started Grade 9, I got a job corn detasselling. If you don’t know what corn detasselling is, I don’t blame you. It’s the process of pulling the pollen-producing tassels from “female” corn to prevent self-pollination. And if you think that sounds glamorous, try walking through a cornfield wearing a garbage bag so the dew doesn’t soak through your clothing. Or under the heat of a midday sun while the cornstalks lash your legs and arms. All this for $3.50 an hour.

  But it was my first real job, outside of the paper route I’d had for four years, and I could only think of all the money I’d be making, the freedom I’d enjoy, the clothes I’d buy to start my high school career in style.

  Every afternoon, a yellow school bus would pick up our teenaged crew at a high school parking lot and drop us off at a cornfield until the early evening. We truly were the Children of the Corn. While the kids were a mixed bag, I’d venture to say that some of them were “hard living,” as my mom might say. In other words, there were a few badasses on the bus. One of them was a kid a couple of years older than me who I’ll call Rick. A few days after I started, Rick and I ended up walking side by side between the rows of corn. We were making small talk and he must have sensed something odd about me and decided to zero in. The conversation took a menacing turn.

  Had I ever gotten laid?

  Had I ever gotten a blowjob?

  Had I ever eaten pussy?

  The cruder the questions, the more uncomfortable I became. I didn’t know how to answer him, and with each cornstalk we passed, it became clearer that I was being targeted. It wasn’t long before a couple of Rick’s friends joined in with the questioning. I tried my best to ignore them, realizing my best option was to say nothing at all. But this only egged them on. I was trapped, alone with them in a cornfield with no adult supervisor anywhere.

  Eventually we made it out of the row and I took off as quickly as I could for the far side of the field. But on the bus ride back, Rick and his friends cajoled a girl named Angie to sit on my lap and ask me sexual questions. The crowd around us roared with laughter. I managed to get her off me and went to sit at the front of the bus, amid a chorus of boos.

  I felt sick with dread. What had I done to provoke these kids? What had they seen in me that I hadn’t seen myself? And how could I face the prospect of being left with them in a cornfield again?

  Although I wasn’t often bullied, I can understand the effect it can have on kids to have to deal with this sort of teasing and torment on a daily basis. How tall and overwhelming those shadows must seem. How hopeless, if every day brings another unyielding hammer blow.

  I was terrified of getting on that bus the next day, but I asked my sister’s boyfriend to drop me off at the school parking lot. I thought the sight of me stepping out of his Pontiac Trans Am would give me some edge and credibility. I don’t know if Rick or his friends noticed, but they left me alone on the bus ride to the fields. Maybe they had changed their minds about me, I reasoned. I almost believed I’d managed to escape their wrath. But at the end of the day, Rick cornered me and told me I was dead if I didn’t go on a date with Angie.

  I had escaped nothing.

  The threat of being alone with those kids was too much, and I quit the next day. I told no one, not my parents or my friends, about what I’d experienced. I was too ashamed. If I called attention to it, I’d be calling attention to myself, inviting speculations about why I’d been targeted. I spent the rest of that summer afraid to go anywhere, convinced I’d see Rick or Angie wherever I went.

  By the time the end of August rolled around, I started to feel less anxious. And there was high school to look forward to—a new beginning, with new friends who didn’t know me or anything about what had happened that summer. During Frosh Week, an assembly was held in the gymnasium for the Grade 9s. I was seated in the crowded bleachers when I heard a male voice behind me.

  “It’s that queer from corn detasselling.”

  I froze but pretended I hadn’t heard him. This was followed by a punch to my back. I turned around and saw it wasn’t Rick but two other guys from the bus. My worst fears had come true. The cornfield had followed me. I turned back around, ignoring them, terrified of what they’d do next, but equally terrified that other students had noticed. That was all it took to become a target, for one other kid to see that I was worthy of getting punched.

  A second punch hit my back, followed by a third. I turned around again and, in my toughest and deepest voice, told them both to fuck off.

  That brought the situation to an end, but not the constant threat I felt from that day onwards. Every time I turned a hallway corner, I held my breath, afraid I’d run into them. They had no doubt told Rick what school I went to. Maybe one day I’d walk out the main doors to find him waiting for me. It was only a matter of time.

  All I wanted was to disappear from my own life.

  * * *

  —

  I haven’t told many people this, Craig, but I’ll tell you. I never ate in my high school cafeteria until Grade 13. The reason I didn’t was that I didn’t have any male friends to sit with and I was afraid that sitting at a table full of girls would draw the wrong kind of attention to myself. I had become an expert at that—understanding the difference between good attention and bad attention. In many ways, my entire life had been spent learning to navigate that distinction. On the one hand, I longed for the validation of my peers—someone simply to say, “I like you, Brian. You’re cool.” But I couldn’t ever be guaranteed of that because I also understood there was a side of me that I wasn’t in control of. It would be easy for me to slip up and to have people notice something peculiar about the way I acted. And once they grabbed on to that, once they had made up their minds about me, there would be no escape.

  To be honest, I’ve never really dwelled that much on the cafeteria thing. It’s just (another) weird piece of my life, but now that I stop to consider it, that’s a lot of lunch hours. In fact, if my math is right, between Grades 9 and 12, it amounts to about eight hundred lunch hours. I don’t remember what I did for all that time. In the early days of high school, I walked home for lunch, which felt like a further failure. Nothing screams “loser” more than eating a bowl of Alpha-Getti while sitting with your mom, both of you aware that at that same moment other students are sitting with their friends in the cafeteria, eating their prepacked lunches.

  I remember walking back to school one lunch hour and picking up an acorn along the way. I wrapped an elastic band around it and told myself it was my good luck charm. So long as I had it on me, no harm, no bad attention, would come my way.

  An acorn and an elastic band. People usually get far more elaborate with their good luck charms. And it makes no sense: Why an acorn? Why an elastic band? But it wasn’t the items themselves that mattered, Craig. It was the need for them. I was so desperate for protection, I believed an acorn would save me.

  Eventually I started to worry that if word got out that I was going home for lunch, it would only fan the flames I felt nipping at my heels. I decided it was better to hide, to tuck myself away somewhere. I’d walk to the nearby convenience store. Or find a quiet spot in the library. Sometimes, I’d sit on the floor at my locker with others, but not if there were too many girls around. There was a church across th
e street from the school, and when the weather cooperated, I’d often sit behind it and eat my lunch there. Sometimes, I’d be with one of my girl friends. Most often, I’d be by myself.

  A couple of summers ago, a friend from high school and I were talking about our teenage years and I offhandedly told her about how I never ate in the cafeteria. I realized, as soon as I said it, that I’d never told anyone that before. I remember the words leaving my mouth and instantly wanting to swallow them back down into my chest, where they had been for all those years. What made it worse was the expression on my friend’s face. It started as shock, then concern, then melted into sadness.

  “I didn’t know you had gone through that,” she said quietly.

  It was one of those moments that almost made me cry. And I say “almost” because I’m not someone who gets emotional over things like that. I don’t deny those events happened, but I somehow manage to bury the feelings associated with them. Or I separate myself from the feeling. Or I believe, in part, that the way others treated me was my fault. Maybe I had brought on those punches in the gymnasium.

  I never want to be someone people feel sorry for. There were plenty of students who had it worse. And I never saw myself as someone to pity. I saw myself as someone to admire. I was a survivor. I knew how to protect myself from my peers, from their opinions and their judgements. I knew what I needed to do to make it through my teenage day and not cross any boundaries.

  Not that those boundaries were easy to discern. Time and time again, I’d slip and let my guard down. And time and time again, I’d be reminded of my difference.