Spontaneous

by Aaron Starmer

  It was a Friday last fall and they were wearing their jerseys, as is the custom on game days. They were sitting together in the cafeteria when I walked by them and I heard Perry say, “Oh, what a glorious fag he was, the faggiest fag in all the land, and his fagginess will be missed, the fag.”

  Or something to that effect, give or take a fag or two.

  It made the two other guys burst out in laughter and made me immediately want to wring their necks. It wasn’t really Perry’s choice of words, which were more or less baby shit—gross, but juvenile and inconsequential. It was the target of his slurs. It had to be Mr. Prescott, our art teacher. He had passed away the week before and the school newspaper was planning to run an obituary. Perry was the editor and I had it on good authority (the authority being Tess, who worked on the paper too) that Mr. Prescott was gay. Not closeted, but not exactly advertising his lifestyle. The staff had been discussing whether to include this fact in his obituary. He was survived, they’d learned, by a partner named Bill. The two had been together for years, but they didn’t bother to get married, even when they were legally allowed. Maybe they didn’t care about marriage. I don’t know.

  Now, the death of Mr. Prescott was undoubtedly sad. But he was old. In his eighties, I think. Retirement was like marriage for him, I suppose. Never in the cards. Being an art teacher is a pretty mellow gig, after all. And it wasn’t like he was my mentor or even my favorite teacher. But still, there’s something about young men making fun of old men that really gets to me.

  Go ahead and make fun of people your parents’ age. Make fun of your peers. Make fun of babies, even. Old people, though? Completely off-limits. And recently dead old people? Please. Why would I even have to explain how fucked up that is? Which—flashing forward to my football date with Dylan—is why I wanted to see them lined up together on the bench. Harper Wie, Perry Love, and Steve Cox, in that exact order.

  Still don’t get it? Let me explain.

  Football players have their last names sewn on the backs of their jerseys, and it may not be the world’s perfect pun, but when you get Wie (pronounced We), Love, and Cox lined up and you snap a pic and post that shit on Instagram . . . well, it isn’t exactly justice for them being a triumvirate of homophobic, ageist pubes, but there’s a certain poetry to it. At least that’s what I was telling myself.

  So there we were, Dylan and I on a date—him watching football and me watching the bench. My phone was set to camera and resting on my thigh like I was a regular gunslinger. I couldn’t settle for Wie Cox, which actually happened a couple of times. Because while that might have played well in Scotland, I needed the bingo, especially since Perry Love was the ringleader of the bunch.

  During the moments my eyes weren’t poised on the bench, they were resting on Dylan. For most of the game, he was calm, studying the action and—when there wasn’t any action, which was most of the time—studying the coaches or the huddles. He seemed to be analytical about it all at first, subtly shaking or nodding his head as he dissected decisions. But as the game went on, and the crowd got more riled up, something changed in Dylan. He didn’t become the frothing-at-the-mouth chest-painter I imagined most rabid sports fan to be. He became something much more charming.

  He became a kid. Whenever our team made a big play, he’d lean forward in his seat, gripping the edge like gravity was going to give out at any moment. Whenever Bloomington snatched back the advantage, he’d clench his teeth and rap the seats with his knuckles and send little tremors through my thighs. And in the fourth quarter, whenever things got particularly tense, he’d reach over and grab my hand, and shake it gently.

  There had been chatting during the game. I had asked questions about what was happening and he had explained (in what were supposedly layman’s terms) about formations and strategies, though I don’t remember even a word of it. What I do remember was his tone. It wasn’t condescending. It wasn’t “let me explain some man stuff to this precious little doll.” Again, he was a kid. He was excited and proud. He might as well have been talking about his Legos.

  So every time he grabbed my hand, I was holding a kid’s hand and it was cute and innocent and it wasn’t at all like holding Dylan’s hand in my living room a few days before. The gentle shakes were the ones I recognized from my youngest cousins, the can-you-believe-that-we’re-at-a-water-park-and-there-are-waterslides-and-oh-boy-I-could-pee-my-pants-right-this-minute! variety of shakes.

  Kids grow up, though, and the kid version of Dylan went through puberty in the final seconds of the game. The scoreboard read Bloomington 38 and Covington 33. We had the ball at the fifty-yard line. Twenty seconds left on the clock. I’d seen enough movies to know that this was why people loved sports. Underdogs making good and last-second scores. Everyone on our team was wearing two black armbands, for chrissakes. Emotion to spare, my friends. To spare.

  And Bloomington wasn’t taking it easy on us out of sympathy. They were snarling, punching, and gouging. “It’s a sign of respect,” Dylan explained. “No true athlete wants to be a charity case. This is the way it should be.”

  The crowd was singing the alma mater, which pretty much never happens because it’s a creepy bit of propaganda about “merging together as one, for the honor of mighty Covington.” Still, in this context, it was appropriate. We had suffered together and together we were fighting through it, one throbbing mass of cheers and tears. We didn’t need to win this game necessarily, but we needed people to remember this game. Even a girl who doesn’t care about sports can be on board with that.

  Our quarterback, Clint Jessup, was doing a hell of a job, but with twenty seconds left on the clock, he buckled over and started puking on the field. I’m not sure if there are rules about such things, but I think that even in football, puking puts you on the sidelines for a play or two. Because that’s exactly where Clint headed. Helmet on the ground, head in his hands, he stumbled to the bench.

  “They don’t have any timeouts left, so they gotta go with Deely,” Dylan said with a groan. “Deely has never even taken a varsity snap.”

  Deely was Malik Deely. From pre-calc. And support group. The one cool head in our woeful bunch. He was the team’s backup quarterback, which, from what I could gather, meant he stood around holding a clipboard all game until the last twenty seconds when he was expected to come in and save the day because our number one guy was too vomity.

  “Don’t worry, Malik can handle pressure,” I assured Dylan and Dylan gave me a you-better-be-right look, and it was that exact moment that he changed, that the hand-holding changed, that the charming became charged. He squeezed my fingers—a little too hard at first perhaps—but when he eased up, he soothed things by stroking them. He ran a fingertip over my palm, almost as though he were writing a message on it.

  Maybe it was the crowd pulsing around us or the sweaty anxiety all over the field, but it was an unbearably sexy moment, at least for me. And when Malik Deely lined up behind his teammates and started barking out the play, I was basically at a point where I wanted to pull Dylan in and stuff my face in his neck and nuzzle, nuzzle, nuzzle. Weird, I know, and may not seem all that hot to you, but when you want something at a certain moment and you’re not sure whether you can have it, but you know that it’s within the realm of possibility if only you have the courage to go after it . . . well, I don’t care who you are or what that thing you want is, the simple fact is this: It’s fucking hot.

  Problem this time was that I didn’t go after it. It didn’t seem right to distract Dylan. Because as Dylan ran that fingertip over my palm, and I thought about scorched convenience stores and dancing triplets and infinite nuzzling, Malik Deely took his first varsity snap.

  I’m not exactly a sportscaster, so I’m not sure the best way to describe what happened next, but here goes.

  Malik had the ball, raised up like he was ready to pass, and he moved left and right, looking downfield to see if there was anyone open. Tw
o of the defenders from Bloomington pushed past the guys who were supposed to be blocking them and they closed in on Malik.

  “Jarowski!” Dylan yelled, as did almost everyone else in the crowd, because the lumbering lunk named Jared Jarowski had broken free. But it was too late. The defenders were pouncing on Malik and Malik was bringing the ball to his chest and curling into a fetal position.

  A collective gasp. And then . . . a collective cheer. Somehow, Malik slid out from under the two defenders without being tackled and there was an open patch of grass in front of him.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Dylan hollered, tapping my hand with each go!

  Malik went. He burst forth with the ball tucked under his arm. He reached the forty-yard line, then the thirty-five, then the thirty.

  Defenders pursued. Malik spun out of danger and kept running. He stuck an arm out and knocked a guy over. He hurdled another guy. He was at the twenty-five, then the twenty.

  I’ll admit it. Football wasn’t entirely boring. I could see the clock was in the single digits. I was as wrapped up in it as anyone else. A few of the guys on our team made some amazing blocks, throwing their bodies in front of Bloomington players who were nipping at Malik’s heels.

  “Please no flags, please no flags, please no flags,” Dylan chanted as Malik hit the fifteen and then the ten.

  It was almost too good to be true. A touchdown would win it for us. We didn’t even need to make the extra point. Get the ball into the end zone, spike the thing, dance a dance, and call it a day. But when Malik reached the five-yard line, it happened.

  He dropped the ball.

  The crowd howled. The ball bounced once. Almost everyone within a five-yard radius dove for it. Malik didn’t need to dive though, because on the ball’s second bounce, he caught it. A shuffle, two leaps, a dive, and he was in.

  Touchdown!

  Nuts is not the word for what the crowd went. Psychotic is more like it. The stands shook as Quaker fans threw themselves on each other, over each other, and into the field. The band tried to break into the fight song, but the pandemonium sent their trumpets and tubas flying and the only sound they made was the clang of brass on bleachers.

  I was hugging Dylan. I hardly realized it. Our hands were now clutching at each other’s sides and we were hugging and hopping up and down and I was laughing myself to bits and it was magnificent in so many ways. The noise. The vibrations. The feeling of his chest pressing against mine.

  Down on the field, teammates were surrounding Malik and howling in his face like a bunch of Vikings, as players from Bloomington lay scattered on the grass, collapsed with exhaustion or doubled over and head-butting the ground in frustration.

  In the stands at the opposite sideline, where the collection of Bloomington fans were either sulking or politely clapping in appreciation of our perseverance, I spotted two familiar faces. Special Agents Carla Rosetti and Demetri Meadows, dressed like they were on the job, stood side by side, intently watching something. But it wasn’t Malik.

  Rosetti raised her arm and pointed while Meadows raised his phone and tilted it sideways to take a picture of our team’s bench. I figured our bench had cleared the second Malik had scored, but I was wrong. There were two players standing in front of it. Frozen.

  The backs of their jerseys read WIE and COX. But there was a gap between them, an open space. Scanning the remaining players on the field, I realized I had missed my moment. So had Agent Meadows. Because a few seconds before, Perry Love had been standing in that open space.

  WIE LOVE COX.

  Terrible, terrible joke. I can’t believe I thought it would be funny, or suitable revenge. But whatever it was, it would never happen again. Because Perry Love was now splattered all over their jerseys.

  and wouldn’t you know it?

  Perry Love was gay.

  Not the going-on-Grindr-and-meeting-some-businessman-for-a-midnight-tryst-in-the-dark-corner-of-a-Panera-parking-lot variety of gay. Not even the get-drunk-at-a-party-and-make-out-with-Kylton-Connors-on-a-pile-of-coats-because-Kylton-Connors-almost-looks-like-a-girl-and-Kylton-Connors-is-discreet variety of gay.

  No, Perry Love was the variety of gay where his parents probably sat around every Christmas, scratching their chins and saying, “What should we get for our gay son, Perry, this year? He’s not into those typical gay things like pocket squares and Pomeranians, but that boy of ours is as gay as they come. Let’s at least get him a gift certificate to a coffee shop and maybe he can finally meet a nice fella and take him out for a chai. He deserves a nice fella . . . and a chai, don’t you think?”

  Perry Love was out, in other words. So out that you didn’t even know he was out. Well, other people did, obviously. Just not me. The football team knew it and was cool with it. To be clear, there was never some big coming-out in the locker room, never an inspiring video online about how a young man’s bravery is supported by progressive teammates who look beyond the petty prejudices, and simply see another comrade in the noble pursuit of concussions, no shared links saying: Your Faith in Humanity Will Be Restored as Soon as You Find Out What Happened When This High School Football Player Told His Teammates That, Yeah, He Probably Has the Hots for at Least a Couple of Them.

  Perry was nothing more and nothing less than a mediocre and gay football player and he had been so since day one of high school. Apparently he came out in the summer after eighth grade to a handful of friends, Harper Wie included. Impeccable timing, it turns out. We were all redefining ourselves that summer, adding or stripping off layers before we plunged into high school. So when Perry slipped quietly into the deep end of gay teendom, it didn’t make a splash. I suppose I was too busy gossiping about obvious transformations. Back then, I was discussing Greyson Hobbs’s shrinking waistline and Diet Dr Pepper addiction, Poul Dawes’s sudden skater-dude awakening, and Tammy Hartwell’s shift from a bog of dour and frump to a volcano of smiles and cleavage.

  Perry was never flamboyant, never had a boyfriend. He might never have even kissed a guy, but he was out and he was white and his last name was Love, which is a good American name and makes for especially sad headlines, such as, HOPES DASHED BY THE DEATH OF LOVE. (Those words actually graced the home page of JerseyReport.com the morning after his demise.) And because of all these factors, discussions of the spontaneous combustions took a sudden turn. If there were no bombs and foreign-flavored folks to blame, then what the fuck were we dealing with here?

  what we were dealing with

  It’s been covered ad nauseum, but I think it helps to go back to the moments after the latest spontaneous combustion. What had been a private phenomenon, experienced and recounted by a few unlucky kids, was now a public event, experienced and, more importantly, recorded by many.

  When the flood of videos were uploaded to YouTube that night, there may have been an ethical dilemma among the bleary-eyed gatekeepers who have to sift through all the gore, porn, and adorable hedgehogs. Was this exploitative? Nothing but snuff? Or was it news, a necessary document to help us understand this fucked-up world, like images of burning buildings and rhinos with their horns cut off?

  The official verdict was “News! Glorious and bloody news!” Yes, we are a world of Zapruders offering up death from a variety of angles and aspect ratios.

  What’s remarkable about the videos is the lack of awareness on display. It didn’t go down at a string quartet, after all. Since the place was full-on pandemonium already, most didn’t notice what happened, including many with their phones pointed at the field. Chances are, some of them even drove home minutes later, saw the stream of police cars headed the other way, and wondered, “What’s all the hubbub?” as their images of Perry Love’s exploding body finished uploading to the cloud.

  I’ll spare you the details of the scene because you can watch the videos and, frankly, it’s hard to know whether my perspective is an honest one. Ecstatic flailing and terrified flailing are actually pret
ty similar, and depending how I’ve felt on particular days, I’ve pictured the atmosphere differently. I do remember Rosetti and Meadows fighting their way through the crowd and rushing the field with everyone else. I remember the hollering and the whooping. I remember Meadows diving on Steve Cox and I remember Harper Wie fainting. And, of course, I remember Dylan whispering in my ear.

  “Did something happen?” he asked. “Did everything happen?”

  My response was to grab his hand and lead him to the side of the bleachers. An older couple, who had chosen not to enter the fray, noticed us holding hands, and smiled the smile of approval as we slipped by.

  Like that, we were a couple. So said the elders.

  We slid off the bleachers and I pulled Dylan away from the field, in the opposite direction of the kids who had heard the booming announcement of “TOUCHDOWN!” and emerged from their cocoons of cuddling and parking-lot hot-boxing to become one with the tribe.

  “We need to be there!” Dylan shouted. “We need to experience this!”

  “We need to go!” I shouted back. “We need to get the fuck out!”

  I sped up and our hands broke apart. I was in the wide open—past the reach of the lights, past the throb and the thump—sprinting, the chill of the autumn cutting through my shirt, my cardigan flapping and threatening to break free.