Mama's Boy

by Dustin Lance Black

  Marcus ran into the kitchen, where he began chasing a big brown blur from under one cabinet to the next, my mom pleading, “Just smash it, Marcus! Smash it!” But Marcus wanted this beast intact. So using his own shoe as a trap, he caught that twitching, flying, three-inch Texas cockroach from hell. He wound plastic wrap around his shoe, popped it all in the freezer, and a few hours later, the roach was as stiff as ice. He drove a pin through its guts, my mom typed up the label, and he had it: the most terrifying bug collection Judson High would ever see. He popped the lid on his display, and despite my mom begging him to move it off her dining room table, he left it there in its place of honor, ready for its trip to school the next morning.

  That night, Marcus marched about the house with an expression of pride I’d never seen on him.

  But the next morning, when I shuffled into the kitchen, I was met with a more familiar sight. My mom was upset, and Marcus had gone stone cold again. “Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all. Fuck the world.” He left the room. The lid was off his display. I crept forward and peeked into the box. Almost every bug was gone, some half-gone, and the rest had no legs or eyes left. Only the giant cockroach was still intact, the needle still through its guts, but very much alive as it clawed its way around the box looking for more to munch on. Overnight, it had thawed out, woken up, and made a meal of every other bug in Marcus’s once spectacular, hard-won collection.

  But that morning’s true heartbreak had little to do with the bad grade Marcus would now surely receive; the tragedy here was that he’d just learned a terrible lesson. No, not that he shouldn’t have included an apocalypse-ready cockroach; it was that he felt he’d once again made the mistake of giving a damn. Because once again, when he’d dared to care, a monster had arrived, and taken away what he loved.

  A few months later, Marcus got that job at McDonald’s, and soon after, he got third-degree burns up and down his forearms from a grease fire. With the pittance of cash his injury earned him, he bought gas for Merrill’s car and weed for himself and his friends, and he spent less and less time in our home. On the increasingly rare occasions I saw him, I couldn’t help but notice the letters FTW tattooed on his arm where the burn scars were. He’d done it himself with guitar string and pen ink. It stood for “Fuck the World.” He was finished with trying and caring.

  When I think back on that morning, what sticks out most is that when Marcus looked down into his bug box for the last time, he paused and then picked up that roach, pulled the needle out of its gut, and let it go. Most sixteen-year-old boys would have pounded it flat in revenge, and frankly, my mom would have preferred that. But Marcus didn’t. He had been ten when Raul took off, old enough to understand that his father knew him well. So Raul’s abandonment felt personal. Marcus grew to believe that something was so inherently monstrous about him that he was worthy of being left with two little brothers and a paralyzed mom who couldn’t feed them. He had in fact been left for dead. So Marcus wouldn’t blame this latest disaster on a bug. Capturing it was simply one decision in a long chain of bad decisions Marcus felt he’d made in life. The fault must have been his own. He now believed that he himself was the true monster. So on this day, he likely added “too fuckin’ stupid” to his long list of faults as he let that bug run free.

  * * *

  —

  I was six when Raul flew the coop. Yes, it took a terrible toll on my self-esteem, but unlike Marcus, I didn’t think I was inherently a monster. I was a bit more hopeful than that. I believed that I was filled to the brim with monsters and devils: my crippling shyness, my crushes on boys, my sensitivity, and my big temper at tiny injustices. My hope lived in a belief that I might one day conquer my demons and be worthy of love again. So unlike Marcus, who was off indulging his demons, I often leaned in to take a closer look at what I felt were my worst qualities, to see which needed changing or concealing the most.

  I had long ago proven myself no natural performer in the Jingle Bell Band, but the same year that Marcus tattooed FTW on his forearm, an advanced-placement history teacher at Kitty Hawk Junior High, who was concerned about my asocial behavior, referred me to the debate club. It was a club for nerds, and I fit that mold well, but as it happened, the head of that debate club had also been Marcus’s drama teacher. Hoping that some of his talent was in our blood, she set her sights on having me replace him. Picking up on my weakness, she explained that debate club meant I’d be up in front of audiences all by myself, coming up with lines on the fly, but drama class was more of an ensemble, and the words were provided.

  Drama class did me no favors. Unlike my butch big brother, who had chosen to avoid PE, I was actually on the junior high football team. I liked being pushed to my limits. I liked the anonymity a football helmet provided. I liked it when all the boys took off their clothes right in front of me in the locker room after practice. Even so, I now wanted to address my abject shyness, and so I chose to make drama my sixth-period class. The first requirement was to participate in a series of one-act plays that toured the local high school theater competitions. I was assigned Adam & Eve, and my Eve would be none other than the drama teacher’s popular, impossibly cute daughter. She had brown hair, light eyes, and a bashful smile that made most boys melt.

  I won’t dive too deep into the details of our performances. She was great, I remembered my lines, and we won an honorable mention in two competitions. And when our forward-looking theater teacher chose to stage a production of Sometimes I Wake Up in the Middle of the Night, a collection of monologues and scenes about adolescent drug use, love, sex, and suicide, our principal must have failed to read the script before approving it. I was given a role in the play with that same drama teacher’s daughter. It seemed she and her mom thought I had some talent. But here’s the thing: these performances didn’t help my self-esteem. They were performances stacked on top of performances. The only achievement here was that I had succeeded in fooling them into believing I wasn’t terrified of being in front of an audience. I did take a little pride in this ability. If nothing else, I thought, I might survive my truly monstrous, unlovable self as a passable fraud. A fraud. That’s what I would aim to be in this life, and for now, that was fine by me.

  I began making lists of other things I might acquire to fool people: name-brand clothes (namely, a collection of Izod polo shirts), a new haircut and products that might tame my cowlick, a flip comb like Eric Peterson had in his pocket in case of emergencies, and perhaps some actual muscles to boot. My list continued to grow, but I knew my mom couldn’t afford any of the material things on it, so I looked for substitutes and begged her to scour the discount racks for fake polos while I counted down the days until the junior high dance of 1986. There I would attempt the ultimate fraud: I would ask that drama teacher’s daughter to dance with me…with the entire student body bearing witness…and to a slow song. If I was successful, this would prove to be my most spectacular fraud to date.

  The night of the dance arrived, and I pulled on the baby-blue Izod polo shirt my mom had found on a defectives rack at Ross Dress for Less. It had a bleach stain on it, but low enough that it would mostly be hidden if I tucked the shirt in, and my mom said it made my eyes look like gemstones. Done and dusted. Then I squirted out a handful of Marcus’s green hair gel and tried my best to smash down my cowlick with it. I let it dry, and repeated the process.

  My mom offered to drive me, but I said I’d prefer to ride my bike, thinking that was what a cool kid would do. But when I arrived at the school, sticky hair gel sweating down my face, I realized that every well-adjusted kid had let their parents drive them. The bike rack was completely empty. So instead of ruining my performance in the first act by locking my bike to an otherwise empty rack, I ditched it between two landscaped hills out front—nothing to lock it to, just the hope that it wouldn’t be stolen.

  I made it inside and found a gaggle of boys from the debate, math, and drama clubs all dancing together. Not one
-on-one, of course—they were in a big, no-girls-allowed but decidedly heterosexual circle. No one was facing each other: all of them were side by side, grooving out of rhythm and with little style to Boy George’s “Karma Chameleon,” then Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” and UB40’s “Red Red Wine.” I wouldn’t describe this circle as fun, but I did manage to shuffle from side to side just enough not to stick out as terrified.

  At least three slow songs came and went, and during each, our circle of dorks broke apart and I looked out across the auditorium for my drama teacher’s daughter. She was nowhere to be seen. I was running out of time. Soon I worried that I might have wasted all of my efforts, Marcus’s hair gel, and my mom’s money. But then Madonna’s “Live to Tell” took over the auditorium. In it lived a treasured lyric:

  Hope I live to tell the secret I have learned, till then, it will burn inside of me.

  My good gay God, it was the perfect song for this charade. A song about secrets with a music video featuring an impossibly cute young actor named Sean Penn. I had leaned my head against the school bus window many a time when it had come on the radio in the morning, letting my tween heart beat faster, dreaming of my own secrets and forbidden loves. Now I would ask a girl to dance to it in my greatest performance yet. If only I could find her.

  I told two of the boys near me that I was going to ask the drama teacher’s daughter to dance. I needed witnesses. That was the whole point. I made my way from the front of the auditorium to the middle, but I still couldn’t find her. Then I dared to step toward the back of the room, even though a good teacher’s daughter surely wouldn’t be there. The back was for kids with black clothes and jackets that smelled like smoke, kids like my big brother. But as I crossed into this no-man’s-land, there she was: cute as can be, wearing a lovely pink dress, standing on her tiptoes, her chin tilted up…carving a circle with a tall, strong, thirteen-year-old Latin boy who looked like he already had to shave. His strong arms were around her back, pulling her body up next to his. She was consumed by it.

  I stood there, quite still, knowing full well I had no chance of pulling them apart, that all of my preparation, sweat, and terror had been for nothing. Though minutes earlier I would have thought it impossible, I now felt even less like a man. And then that muscly Latin boy’s lips touched hers, and my heart broke. Even if my plan had worked, I would never have experienced what they were—young though it was, right there in front of me, in the plain sight of others, and with no fear of judgment…was love.

  I raced back to the front of the auditorium, to the land of kids from proper academic clubs, and found the boys I’d been dancing in a circle with, now assembled in an uncomfortably loose clump, none speaking to one another, all looking at the floor. And then, without a thought, with only the aim of burying my pain, I turned to one of the math club kids who absolutely wasn’t my type. I suppose that was why I thought it was less than insane to ask him…

  “Do you wanna dance?”

  It wasn’t a romantic invitation. It was a miscalculation of epic proportions. He looked at me like I’d just asked to eat his pet gerbil. Only then did I realize that “Live to Tell” was still playing.

  “It’s a slow song,” he pointed out with disgust.

  I raced to recover. “It’s not that slow.”

  I’ve just listened to the song again thirty-plus years later, and honestly it’s not the most romantic slow song, but he was right, it’s slow.

  Then a kind of angry laugh came vomiting out of him, and with it, “What kind of faggot are you?!” He was genuinely asking, and loud enough to make sure that everyone heard him say it, so that no one doubted his manhood in our exchange.

  I don’t remember what kind of shit-poor lie I might have spun. All I recall is a sickening panic rising up inside of me—my monster suddenly laid bare.

  The next thing I remember is searching through the rolling hills in front of the school for a bike I would never find, tears streaming down my face. I was a failure even at being a fraud. I walked all the way home. It must have taken over an hour, but that was a gift. The long walk got me to my front door right when I should have arrived if I’d actually enjoyed the whole dance, and by then, my tears had had time to dry. Walking in and past my mom, I gave a decent performance. She said something about how sweaty I was, and I lied about how much I’d danced. She seemed happy for me.

  That night in bed, I thought back to the play we’d put on in drama class, back to the series of monologues about kids who had considered hurting themselves in this way or that, and how they’d managed to reach out for help when those thoughts arrived. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of a single person who might help me. I was a sinner in my church, a criminal to the law and my community, and a pervert and a freak to everyone else. And so, that was the first of many nights I would lie in bed contemplating taking my life. I thought about how I might do it in a way that no one would know I’d been a coward. I thought about how I might make it painless and quick. But then I thought about how my death would hurt my mom, and honestly, even thirty years later, I can say that’s likely the only reason I didn’t do it. I was ready to hurt myself, but I couldn’t bear to hurt her.

  So that night I made a pact with myself. If my mother ever died, or was taken away, yes, that pain would surely be unbearable, but it wouldn’t be my last. My final pain would come soon after, the price of ending my own life, and with it all of the horrible, hungry monsters and demons I’d been taught lived inside of me—by a father’s rejection, by a state’s laws, by a military culture, and by my own church. All those devils would finally go. But until that day of great sadness and relief, I would have to watch my big brother try and prove to the world what a monster he really was—despite the truth of his tender heart, and I would have to survive all of my own devilish monsters slowly eating me alive from the inside.

  And so starting that night, I stopped making lists of lies I might sell, I stopped trying to achieve much of anything, I stopped putting on my little fraud shows, and I got down to the soul-swallowing business of disappearing.

  CHAPTER 10

  Deliverance

  I

  In the five years since she’d started at Fort Sam Houston’s Brooke Army Medical Center as a government service employee, Anne had quickly moved up the ranks from a part-time GS4 (General Schedule 4) working out of a broom-closet-sized shipping office to a GS7 working directly with doctors as a microbiology lab tech, helping diagnose sick soldiers and vets. A GS7 was as high as this hospital would let her rise without the college degree her mother had tried in vain to convince her to complete. Still, the hospital’s most senior doctors often slipped past higher-ranking lab techs to find her, their secret weapon: my powerhouse of a mom.

  My mother was determined to never again be a patient in a hospital, but she was equally passionate about working in one—helping doctors get ailing soldiers and their spouses and children back home as soon as possible. She understood the trauma of being a patient better than most. The doctors respected her for that and more. When she moved down the long, slick hospital hallways, she often did so gripping heavy metal test tube racks with two fingers, her remaining eight digits holding her swinging crutches. Hoping to be heroes, new doctors would leap to her aid, only to be shot down. “I’ve got it, sir,” she’d tell them. She’d then give a disarming, flirty wink. “I’ve been doing this dance a long time. Haven’t lost one yet.” She’d smile, then swing her way to the next lab, unaided, independent, and with one more doctor’s admiration in her lab coat pocket. Second only to her sons, her work was her pride and purpose. And in these five years, us boys and her work had made for a full enough life.

  But when Merrill was shipped off to South Korea, our home began to thaw, and things began to break up and shift beneath us. You couldn’t see it yet, but I could feel it.

  * * *

  —

  Sitting on her qu
een-size bed, her legs folded beneath her and a map of San Antonio spread out on her floral comforter, my mother held a well-sharpened pencil between her teeth as she traced a finger along a road leading out of Fort Sam to a public park beyond it. She considered the location, drew a circle around it, then hunted for another. When her finger found a far smaller park, she compared the distance of the two drives, and drew a circle around it too. Four other parks were already circled—all of them just off the base but much closer to her work than our rented home in Live Oak or our Mormon church in the Randolph Ward.

  When she heard the front door burst open and her boys’ messy racket, she quickly but carefully folded up the map and slid it into a bedside drawer. At nearly forty years old, my tough Rose of a mom was planning a new, illicit, top-secret mission.

  My first clue came that same day, when she asked me to bring her the biggest encyclopedia volume from the bookcase. It was an odd request. In our collection, the A volume was the thickest, so I brought it to her, but as it often still does, my curiosity got the best of me.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “I just need something heavy.”

  “What if I need to find something that starts with A?”

  “Then I’ll let you look it up.”

  “Well, why an encyclopedia?”

  “Because it’s stiffer than the phone book,” she said casually, as if that should have been obvious. And she gripped all those A words by their spine with her right hand and started doing curls with them. Actual bicep curls.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Exercise. What does it look like, Lancer?” As if that too should have been obvious.