The Thunder in His Head

by Gene Gant

  Slipping out of my room, I went quietly downstairs. I plucked the key I needed off the little rack Dad had mounted on the inside of the pantry door. I eased silently out the back door.

  Outside, the air had gotten cooler, and the night was still. Thick gray clouds hung across the sky, obscuring the stars and threatening rain. I walked back toward the garage. Parked off to the side was the dark-blue Chevy Impala Mom had inherited when her uncle died last year. She had promised it to me, once I got my license. I climbed in and fired up the ignition. It was too late now for her to stop me, but I still hoped she wouldn’t hear the engine.

  I drove off, heading for downtown Memphis.

  Nineteen

  BEALE STREET was a living thing.

  It was a nocturnal creature, its long body thick and wriggling sensuously at 1:30 a.m. as groups of men and woman—black and white, young and not so young—moved from club to restaurant to club beneath bright-colored neon signs. Its heartbeat was the pulsing music, subdued and soulful blues here, squalling, screeching rock there. Its breath was the aromas of fried fish, barbecued pork, and open containers of beer, all blended together into a welcoming and pungent enticement.

  I had refused to let Stephanie pay for our snacks, and the last of my allowance had been spent at Chili’s. I didn’t have any money for parking or anything else, so I had to leave the car on an empty side street lined with dark, silent buildings. After making my way quickly to Beale, I strolled through the shifting, noisy crowd, my eyes scanning the area anxiously. A dude six foot six should be easy to spot. It would be a big, honking lie to say that I wasn’t scared. But as weird as it sounds, I liked the fear; it excited me and drove me on in search of GayGoon.

  I had tried getting him to give me his address and let me come directly to his house, but he insisted on meeting somewhere “neutral.” He suggested B.B. King’s Blues Club, but I knew I’d never get in because clubs carded. I had no ID except for my learner’s permit, which would certainly not gain me entry, and even if I got in, I couldn’t buy anything to justify holding a table. I suggested we meet outside the club, and he agreed. There was no point in meeting inside the club, anyway. I didn’t want to share drinks or chitchat with dude. I wanted him to take me somewhere and do every single exciting thing to me he had said he would do in his IMs.

  I kept scanning the crowd as I went, hoping to spot him. At the corner of Beale and Fourth, three women in their twenties stood holding plastic cups of beer, leering at guys and giggling loudly. As I passed, one of them said, “Uh-oh, ass alert.” She was blonde and pretty and somewhere close to being drunk. She reached out and delivered a hard, loud smack to the boxer-covered part of my butt exposed above the sagged waist of my jeans. “Oh, yeah, baby, those melons are ripe!”

  Loud laughter followed, and it came from more than just the three women. I felt myself blushing, but didn’t slow down or look back or say anything. The sting of the blow, the humiliation, felt good, as if it was necessary somehow.

  When I reached B.B. King’s Blues Club, there was a big, bald black man outside the door as expected, checking the IDs of anyone who looked shy of forty. A small crowd of men and women milled on the sidewalk in front, laughing and shimmying, some of them gulping beer. Cigarette smoke drifted on the air. I backed up into a dark little vacant spot between the club and the restaurant next door, leaning my shoulders against the wall and sliding my hands into my pockets, feeling the muted beat of the club’s music creep down my spine as I took in the sights.

  I had never been this far away from home this late at night, and certainly not by myself. Everything and everybody around me pulsed, as vibrant and playful as lion cubs. It was scary and exhilarating, and I was glad to be a part of it. Adults drifted by, most of them not even looking my way, and the few who did just smiled or nodded or simply turned away. No one saw a kid, or questioned his unaccompanied presence at this very adult hour, in this very adult place. Some of the men here were sexy. They were all with women, holding hands, or they strolled along with their arms looped casually around their ladies’ waists. I followed them with my eyes, mesmerized by the masculinity of their shapes and the loose, careless way they walked. God, the body of a guy really was a beautiful thing. I was staring hard after a particularly tall white dude whose sagging jeans showed the upper half of his bare, pink butt when a voice broke out of the cacophony.

  “GamePlaya?”

  My heart jumped right up into my throat, beating so hard it felt as if my whole chest was vibrating. For a second, I couldn’t move. Then I turned my head, looking to my right.

  He stood about ten feet away, in the middle of the sidewalk. As described, he was six foot six, as tall as my dad, and he had a smooth, mean, muscular build that was prominent even beneath the loose turtleneck and jeans he wore. He was dark-skinned and bald, with a thick black mustache and beard. His smile was tentative, but his eyes were bright and questioning. “Hot Doc?” he asked.

  If my voice was anything like the rest of my body at that moment, it would come out shaking, so I didn’t say anything. I nodded once. He was tall enough, big enough, to really hold me and make me feel cuddled, comforted.

  The man threw back his head and laughed. “Well, get the hell outta here. For once, a guy looks exactly the way he described himself online. I can’t believe it.” He stepped forward into my shadowy spot, extending his hand. “I’m GayGoon. What’s up, man? My name is Lorne.”

  I stuck out my hand and cleared my throat. “I’m Kyle.” His thick hand swallowed mine, squeezing hard, not in a show of one-upmanship but out of sheer excitement. I could see that in his grin.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, releasing my hand. “This is great. Half the time, you set up a meeting with what seems like a nice guy, and he doesn’t show. The rest of the time he shows up looking nothing like he said he would. Why can’t people just be up-front with you? I’m not looking for perfection, I just want to meet somebody who’s not afraid to be himself. You know what I’m saying?”

  I nodded again, followed by another throat clearing. “Nice to meet you, man.”

  “Same here, same here. It’s good to put a face to that hot online persona.” Lorne spoke loudly and boldly, seemingly unconcerned with the people flowing past us. “You know, I wasn’t too sure about meeting you at first. Your screen name kind of scared me off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘GamePlaya4Life’?’” Lorne rolled his eyes. “That’s all I seem to run into these days. Players. Guys playing games with my head. When you popped up in the gay superhero chat room with that screen name of yours, I thought, ‘Well, here comes another one.’ I had to give you credit, though. At least you were up-front about it.”

  “That’s not why I came up with the name,” I said, feeling a bit annoyed. “I’m not about playing games with people’s heads. I’m into video games. I’m crazy about video games. Get it?”

  “Ohhh.” He laughed. “Well, excuse the hell out of me, okay?”

  “So what about you? Why did you make ‘GayGoon’ your screen name?”

  “When I was a kid, I was always taller than everybody else my age. The other kids called me Lurch.”

  It took a few seconds for me to recall where I had heard the name. “Oh, yeah. That tall, ugly goon butler on The Addams Family.”

  Lorne nodded, laughing. “That was me, except for the ugly part. I felt like a goon.”

  For an instant, I felt a sharp affection for the guy. I smiled at him. “Yeah. Me too.”

  Lorne waved toward the club entrance. “Come on, Kyle.” He said my name with relish. “Let’s go in and grab a table. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  I pressed my whole back against the wall, shaking my head. “Oh… uh… thanks, man, but I don’t drink. Sorry.”

  He looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh, I get it,” he said, breaking out with a smile again. “It’s a med school thing. You’ve been reading up on impaired liver function and all that, right?”

  “Yeah, s
omething like that.”

  “Well, I’ll get you a cranberry juice or something. Come on.” He gestured toward the club entrance once more, stepping in that direction.

  “Nah, man,” I said, the sharpness of my voice stopping him. He stepped back toward me, and I said, “I don’t want to go to any club. I don’t want to be… in public right now. You know?”

  Lorne caught my meaning. His eyes filled with hesitation. “Okay. Well, what exactly do you want to do?”

  “Can we go to your place?”

  He shook his head emphatically. “Not gonna happen, man. Not tonight.”

  “Well, can you get us a motel room or something?”

  “That’s not the way this works, man. I’ve got to get to know you, first.”

  I frowned, frustration rising through the swirl of fear in my stomach. What the hell was wrong with this man? From what he’d said online, he was going to rip the clothes off my body the very second we met. “Get to know me? Why? Why can’t we just go somewhere and get to it?”

  “Come on, now. Are you kidding me? You’re a big, mean-looking dude. You could beat me down and rob me. I don’t take off with guys I just met.”

  “No, what you’re really saying is, I’m not your type. Is that it?”

  “No, that’s not it. I like what I’m seeing here. You are one fine son of a bitch. I just like to take things slow.”

  I frowned again, feeling the anger boil up. “What about all that stuff online? The stuff you said you were gonna do to me and you wanted me to do to you. You didn’t mean any of that?”

  Lorne squinted at me, just for an instant. “That was just porn talk. Fun to do online, but this is the real world. I’m picky about who I lie down with.” He paused. “Let’s talk. Give me a chance to see the real you, and show you the real me. I have to feel comfortable with you, but once I do… well, then we’ll see what happens.”

  Jesus. This wasn’t going at all the way it was supposed to. Talking was exactly what I didn’t want. I was too wired up, ready to break. If I kept standing there, I was going to start screaming or something. I pushed forcefully off from the wall, surprising Lorne. “Come on,” I said over my shoulder, heading down the street.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, following.

  “We can’t talk out here.”

  I walked fast, weaving through the crowd, determined. Lorne caught up a few seconds later, walking alongside me.

  “You know, you look good walking away,” he said with a wolfish grin.

  What the hell did that mean? “I do?”

  “Yeah. That’s a nice rump you’re showing off back there, but aren’t you a little too old now to be sagging your jeans?”

  “Oh. Yeah, maybe. I guess.” I picked up my pace.

  Lorne caught up again. “So. First-year med student. You must be attending UT?”

  “Uh… yeah.”

  “What college did you go to?”

  “University of Memphis.”

  “That’s where I did my undergrad. Funny that I never ran into you.”

  Uh-oh. “U of M’s a big place.”

  “Yeah, and you were a couple of years behind me. But big guys like us tend to stand out. Fraternity?”

  “What?”

  “You in a fraternity?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “No.”

  “I was an accounting major. And you were what? Chemistry major? Biology?”

  This was getting way too complicated. I should have been a high school dropout online. “Biology.”

  “Well, I’m doing my graduate work part time at the University of Arkansas. I took a job in the UA Hospital’s accounting department to pay for it. Plus, it was time for me to get my own place. I lived at home with my parents while I was in undergrad, but it’s kind of hard to entertain a guy when your folks are in the next room. You know what I’m saying?”

  I faked a laugh. “Yeah. I know what you mean, man.”

  “Well, what made Kyle decide to become a doctor?”

  “Um… I had to become something.”

  Lorne gave me that little squint again.

  I turned away from him. We cleared the last of the open businesses on Beale, leaving the crowd behind, and I veered off onto the empty side street where I had parked.

  Lorne stopped. “Where exactly are you taking me?”

  I stopped, looking back at him. “My car’s right up there.” I said, pointing.

  He looked wary.

  “Look, I’m broke, okay? I couldn’t pay to park in one of the lots. That’s why I had to park out here. But it’s okay, see? There are other cars parked up here. And if you don’t want to go to my car, we can go to yours. I don’t care. I just want to have a quiet place for us, okay?”

  Lorne stared at me as if he were running calculations in his head, his face grim. That went on for what seemed a very long time. Then one corner of his mouth went up in a crooked little smile. “You know, if you didn’t have that innocent little boy face on you, I’d be walking the other way right now.” He stepped forward.

  Lorne followed me up the street, walking a pace or two behind and to the left of me. His head craned vigilantly the entire way. At the car, I pulled out the key and electronically popped the locks on all four doors. We slid into the car pretty much at the same time, me behind the wheel and he taking the front passenger seat. I stuck the key into the ignition, turning it to the alternator to power down the windows.

  Music from Beale Street drifted in faintly on the cool night air. Lorne was looking me over in a sort of appraising way that made me even more uncomfortable. Just to give myself something to do, I turned on the radio, scanning down to K97 and filling the car with rap.

  “When you mentioned your car, man,” Lorne said abruptly, “I pictured something sportier.”

  “This is like a hand-me-down from my great uncle,” I replied.

  “Okay. That explains that. Well, Kyle, what do you like to do with your spare time, aside from exchanging dirty talk over the computer with strange men?”

  “Play video games. Go to the movies. Play basketball.” My hands felt clammy. Staring through the windshield at the white Buick parked on the street ahead of us, I rubbed my palms vigorously over the thighs of my jeans. “That kind of stuff.”

  “And you read superhero comics.”

  “Not really. I like watching superhero movies and television shows.”

  “That’s the only exposure you’ve had to superheroes? Oh, man, I’ve got to turn you on to my graphic novel collection. Most of those movies don’t get the superheroes right. They stray too far from the source material.” He held up a hand, stopping himself. “Hang on. That’s not really what I wanted to ask about. You do this much? Come out to hook up with guys you meet online?”

  “This is my first time.”

  “Well, this is my fourth time. Hope that doesn’t make me sound desperate, although I am. It’s just so hard to meet decent guys. I’ve tried the bars, the community center, the U of M’s LGBT alliance, and even gay-centric churches. None of the dudes I’ve met has been genuine with me—”

  “Lorne?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I kiss you?”

  His face showed surprise at the question. He didn’t answer. Instead, he shifted his weight so that he was sitting closer to me. He put his hand on my knee. Then he waited. I stared at him, marveling at how a guy could have a face like a teddy bear and still be so manly. He smiled and closed his eyes.

  I cupped the side of his face with my right hand, leaned forward, and kissed him. His lips were thicker than Dwight’s but just as soft. The bristly hairs of his mustache and beard tickled against my face. The scent of his cologne tingled in my nose, light and airy. Out of the blue, a sense of wrongness struck me about this, the same way kissing a girl would feel fiercely wrong to me. Rather than stopping the kiss, I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to shut the feeling out, concentrating instead on the crush of Lorne’s lips to mine. Something despe
rate and wild began to uncoil within me. My kiss became hungry, devouring. The fingers of my right hand dug into the smooth, chilled skin on the back of Lorne’s bald head, urgently pulling him closer.

  “Wait, wait…,” Lorne mumbled against my lips. He reached up, took my right hand, and peeled it away from his head. He sat back, breaking away from the kiss with the look of someone whose head had been violently thrust under water. He ran his fingers gently over the bandage on my right hand, an obvious effort at distraction. “That looks serious. Hope you don’t mind my asking, but what happened to your hand?”

  “Nothing,” I replied absently. “I got into a stupid fight after school.”

  I was going to resume the kiss, but a shift in Lorne’s expression stopped me. His eyes were guarded, as if he was trying to keep the whole range of whatever he was thinking from writing itself fully across his face. They were open enough, however, for me to see that he didn’t like what he was thinking one damn bit. He frowned at me. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty… twenty-one.”

  “Try twenty-two. Online, you said you were twenty-two. Remember? What year were you born?”

  I tried to do the calculation quickly in my head. “Um….”

  “I don’t believe this.” He smacked himself in the top of his head. “A high school kid. I’m out with a damn high school kid. Smart move, Lorne, you’re really coming up aces these days.” He shoved the door open, fuming at himself.

  “No, wait….” I opened my own door as Lorne bolted out of the car. He went marching quickly down the street toward Beale, his fists clenched in anger. I rushed after him. “Lorne, stop. Don’t leave!”

  “Take your butt home, boy,” he said without looking back.

  “Listen, I need this. It’s not like you’re making me do something I don’t want to do.”

  “Lorne doesn’t do kids. Give me a call in four or five years, sonny. Maybe we can talk then.”

  “I won’t say anything. Nobody will know.”

  Lorne whirled, grabbing a fistful of my sweater. His face was twisted with fury. “Didn’t you hear me, boy?” he growled through his teeth. “I’m looking for a man, a partner. That’s not you. You got nothing I want. Now get the hell out of my face.”