by Tim Anderson
“‘Don’t worry, Tim, you’ll be just fine.’
But Tim never made it to the water-ski line.”
—Ruth Fulghum, “Ode to Tim,” 1993
CHAPTER 1
When I was fifteen, I had it on good authority that Jesus was the Son of God and that if you did anything like lose the key to your bicycle lock, your birth certificate, or your mom’s lipstick, you could pray to him and, if you put your faith in him, asked with all due respect, and were asking for the right reasons, he would show you that you’d left it in your Members Only jacket, which was currently being slept on by your cat on the living room couch.
In other words, someone was in charge up there, and he knew what and where all your junk was. I was still a firm believer in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and my personal savior as I wound down my freshman year of high school in 1988. Around the middle of the year I’d joined Young Life, a Christian fellowship organization that met once a week at a student’s house for powwows full of singing, refreshments, and friendly, wide-eyed testimonials about the power of Christ from the college-aged Young Life staffers. As a kid with few friends who barely made it through middle school alive, I was terrified of social situations, so I was drawn to Young Life because there was absolutely nothing threatening about a bunch of Christian young people singing songs, wearing baseball hats, and grinning like Shirley Temple.
But, though at the time I was certainly a believer, it wasn’t really a love of Jesus that compelled me to visit random students’ houses every week to sing along to weepy Christian rock classics like “Friends” by Michael W. Smith or “El Shaddai” by Amy Grant. It wasn’t the testimonials about how the love of Jesus can help you battle the pressure from your peers to give in to sex, drugs, and alcohol. (Even at that age, I knew my can’t-say-no impulses and understood very well that had any single boy on the face of the earth walked up to me and offered me any of those three things, I would have walked across glass to accept it.) Nor was I driven by a particular need to publicly declare my faith and commune with other young people who felt the same. No, I may have come to Young Life for the camaraderie and the feeling of belonging to some social group, however square. But I stayed for Brad.
Brad was one of the college counselors who, with his trusty acoustic guitar and completely and constantly lit-up face, led the singing every week at the beginning of the meetings. His songbook wasn’t terribly broad; lots of Christian rock feel-good-athons and some forays into the more squeaky-clean fare from the past thirty years of the American pop charts—the Monkees’ “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” and U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” for example. But he made up for the blandness of his song choices with a breathtaking display of muscular forearms, snug blue jeans, and elegant guitar strumming. Honestly, most of the time I was joined with everyone else in song I had no idea what I was singing, who was sitting next to me, what day it was, or what the name of the current president of the United States might be. I just knew that Brad was at the front of the room and that his velvet voice, bushy eyebrows, and lips curled into an electric smile were making us all better Christians. And that if you squinted just so, you could snatch a glimpse of supple man-nipple through his white T-shirt.
Many Tuesdays, Brad and a few other Young Life staffers would come to my high school and meet up with folks to remind them of the meeting that night at so-and-so’s house. On those days I was always sure to scramble out to the blacktop meeting point in front of the school as soon as humanly possible so I might get a chance to chat with him before all the other Young Lifers were able to cockblock me. I wasn’t always successful; often I would fight my way through the hallways of slow-moving, hip-swinging, shit-talking kids, bounding through them like a pinball, only to discover upon my exit that a bunch of folks had already overtaken Brad and I would have to settle for some friendly chatter with Brad’s buddy Todd, a much less alluring Young Life staffer.
Certainly, at age fifteen, I was not ready to admit to myself the real reasons for my obsession with Brad. He was just a dude I really really liked to hang out and sing songs with and who I would kill another human being to be able to see naked. And that was it. Sure, I did find myself fantasizing about how, one day, Brad and I would take our mutual love for Jesus and singing to the next level. We’d start hanging out, just the two of us: doing each other’s hair, wearing each other’s clothes, and going to the movies, the park, church, restaurants, bars, and, eventually, when we were drunk enough, the bedroom, or at least the couch. But all of that didn’t have to happen now. I could wait. For the time being, I just wanted to see him every Tuesday so that I could think about him the rest of the week.
One Tuesday, after we had finished the jovial sing-along that always opened each Young Life meeting, Brad, Todd, and the other staffers showed us a slide show about a Young Life camp up at Saranac Lake in upstate New York near the Canada border, the location of an annual retreat that they wanted everyone to try to go to. Strapping young high schoolers were pictured, and damn, were they having a great time—splashing each other in the lake, climbing trees, cooking out, holding hands and praying, doing a rope swing, eating hot dogs, and parasailing. It looked like heaven on earth, the kind of celestial paradise where the boys never had their shirts on, where showers were possibly communal, and anything—absolutely anything—could happen. I couldn’t help but look at the slide show and imagine Brad and me in every picture, rubbing suntan lotion on each other’s backs, feeding each other hot dogs, reading Leviticus under the sun while sharing a big beach towel.
The trip was expensive—a few thousand dollars. And God knows my parents and I didn’t have that kind of cash. Thankfully, my man Brad had ideas for broke white boys like me.
“Listen, guys,” he explained in his dulcet tones after the slide show, “if you want to go but you’re worried about money, let me know. We’ve got some programs for raising money that we can tell you about, and usually it’s pretty helpful.”
I talked to Brad after the meeting and let him know that I, for one, really wanted to go because it seemed like a great opportunity to commune with the Lord and learn to parasail and, you know, renew my faith and meet lifelong friends and finally finish the Book of Revelation and, I don’t know, get a suntan. He nodded and smiled, and said that he would call me this week and we could talk about raising the funds. Could he get my number?
I think we all know the answer to that.
“Have you ever parasailed?” I asked my girlfriend Dawn. Did I not mention my girlfriend Dawn? Terrible omission. Dawn had curly blonde hair and loved her jean jacket more than anything else in the world. Like most girlfriends of young gay boys, Dawn went to a different high school, and I mostly just saw her on weekends. And though she was a big-hair metal fan, she was also chaste, for the most part. Sure, upstairs in her room there was French kissing, there was boob groping, there was a little bit of grinding. Yes, she ventured downward with her hand a few times to inexpertly grasp and jostle my male parts. But we would invariably get bored after a while, stop, and put on a cassette tape or something.
“Oh yeah,” she answered in her deadpan way, laying back on her pillow, draping her jean jacket over herself, and putting on her aviator glasses. “It was fun, I guess. If you like getting soaked and being knocked around on a big raft with a bunch of people screaming in your face.”
“That sounds like white-water rafting.”
“Yeah. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”
“We’re talking about parasailing.”
“Oh, I haven’t done that.”
“Huh. Well, I might be doing it this summer, at Saranac.”
“What’s that?”
“A Young Life camp up in New York.”
“Oh yeah. Maybe I should go, too,” she offered. “There’s a Young Life at Millbrook.”
“Ye-e-es!” I said with effusive and completely counterfeit excitement. “That could be fun.”
“When is it?”
“Oh, but…music camp.”
“Oh, you can’t miss music camp.” I was very very concerned about her missing music camp.
“No, I’m a counselor this year.”
Dodged a bullet there.
“God,” she continued, “if they make us do one more Simon and Garfunkel song this year I will throw up so hard, for real.”
Thank God for music camp. It was only a day camp, but it lasted for the whole month of July. If not for it and my visit to see my aunt and grandmother for the month of June, Dawn and I might have to go to third base, because what else were we going to do all summer?
“But ‘The Boxer’ is an awesome song,” I suggested.
“No, uh-uh. Predictable. Why can’t we ever do some Heart or Prince or something?”
I laid my head down on the pillow next to her.
“They’ll probably make us do some Beatles or Beach Boys shit. More kids know it.”
Dawn repositioned herself under her jean jacket, slapping me in the face with the sleeve.
She lay there silently, probably considering what magic the flutes could do with Van Halen’s “Jump.” Then she sat up.
“Wow, if you go on this trip we’re not going to see each other very much this summer.” She said this emotionlessly, in the same tone she might tell a stranger on the street the time. Never the most passionate of girls, Dawn had a way of sounding constantly bored, unless she was excited about something, in which case she sounded sarcastic.
“Yeah,” I sighed dramatically, way overcompensating for her lack of an emotional stake in this conversation. We were quiet after that, just listening to the Def Leppard song coming from the crackly speakers on the floor of her room.
The lead singer crooned the opening line—something about love being like a bomb, so c’mon, let’s get it on, shall we?—and Dawn was soon singing along.
“Pour some sugar on me,” she sang, sighing listlessly.
Mmm, sugar, I thought, giving her ambivalent invitation no further thought.
Brad called me to give me the scoop on the magic method for raising money for the trip. It was an insult to human dignity: I would have to sell magazines and candy bars to the public like a common street urchin.
“Oh, OK, I can do that,” I said as I rolled my eyes and resisted the temptation to gouge one of them out with a spoon. I was a terrible salesman. Could never sell anything to save my life. I hated to impose on people and always preferred that they just give me money for being young and adorable. Unfortunately I was way too old now to get money for nothing, so I was forced to wander the lonely streets of suburban north Raleigh like Oliver Twist begging folks for their Christian charity. “Please, sir, can I interest you in a subscription to Teen Beat?”
I ended up raising only $300 for the trip after selling as many chocolate bars and magazines as I possibly could door to door and at school. Predictably, I ate some of the goods and had to pay myself back, because they were chocolate bars and they were in my backpack just sitting there not being eaten, what the hell was I supposed to do? So I had to resort to asking family for money. I got a hundred dollars here and fifty dollars there until, with the money I made from working extra hours at my job as a cashier at Kerr Drug, I had enough cash to commit to the trip. Paradise would be mine, and I would finally get to see Brad without that dang shirt on.
I continued attending Young Life meetings every week for the rest of the school year, doing my best to become Brad’s favorite—laughing at all of his jokes, screaming “Encore!” whenever he started to put down his guitar, standing next to him in uncomfortable silence as he engaged in a discussion with another Young Lifer after the meetings. What was I doing, with all my shenanigans? I have no idea, but if the fifteen-year-old me were available to answer that question he would probably say I was laying the groundwork for what would be an affair to remember, a passionate pairing for the ages. You know, eventually, sometime in the future, when we were ready. It didn’t matter that Brad had an irritating habit of mentioning his girlfriend a little too often. That was OK. When you’re fifteen and in love (though you dare not speak its name), these kinds of obstacles are easy to ignore because your will is strong enough to bend metal, set a forest fire, or unbuckle a leather belt. It will just take time.
The trip up to Saranac Lake would be in July, and I was spending most of June visiting my aunt and grandmother in Jamestown. It was a perfect summer vacation: I was getting wined and dined by the Golden Girls of Jamestown, with plenty of time to rest up and prepare myself physically, mentally, and spiritually for what would hopefully be the Cabaret of Christian camping trips.
I’ve already mentioned the one door I walked through up in Jamestown that summer that I would never be able to, er, back out of: I’d seen photographic proof that it is possible for two hot, sweaty young men to strip down, lube up, and get it on with each other, out in the open, with the lights on, gleefully, on a kitchen counter. This was in direct opposition to the way I imagined real-life homosexuals did their dirty deeds—hiding in a bathroom stall while constantly checking to see if the cops are coming, holed up in an out-of-the-way motel where folks usually go to get murdered, or weeping uncontrollably while tugging on a dude’s balls in a public library janitor’s closet. I can’t overestimate this breakthrough. Sure, the guys in the pictures may have been lisping their ABCs while receiving their blow jobs, but here’s the thing: If anyone cornered them in the hallway of their high school and called them, oh, I don’t know, “Tinkerbell Tim,” these dudes looked like they could and would punch back. Or whack them in the face with their rock-hard cocks, whichever.
It was sure empowering. And I empowered myself a lot over those June weeks in Jamestown, releasing years of sexual confusion and frustration in at least twice-daily batches. As my aunt and grandmother sat in the living room watching Peter Jennings on World News Tonight, I could be found in the bathroom jerking off with the sweaty terror, passion, and desperation of a fighter pilot landing a B-52 that’s out of fuel and nose-diving into the Pacific.
About a week after my theft of the magazine, I began walking over that other threshold from which I would never return. As I said, the first indication that I’d entered a brave new world of sugar-free living was when I started waking up at night needing to go to the bathroom. On the first night, I thought maybe I had just had too many sodas during our card game or maybe hadn’t peed before going to bed. The second night, I woke up at around the same time needing to pee again, and I started to think that something was weird. The third night I started to really worry that something was going wrong with my body. And naturally, I assumed it had something to do with all of the…B-52 bomber landings I’d been engaging in recently. After all, the same part of my teenage body was in operation. Plus, there was the fact that I was sinning like a filthy heathen acrobat twice a day. Sure, I was asking for God’s forgiveness immediately after cleaning myself up each time, but if you fully intend to commit the same sin again in a few hours or the next morning at the absolute latest, does God really even take you seriously?
I’d heard those urban myths about too much masturbation leading to fuzzy palms, but I’d never heard one thing about it leading to an overactive bladder. What was going on? Was I being punished for tainting my formerly pristine Christian soul with all of my recent indulgences? After a few more nights of the same thing, I knew what I had to do: Throw away the porno mag, stop giving in to temptation, and allow myself to once again sleep through the night. God would maybe release me from his baleful gaze, I would have fought and tamed an unchristian urge, and, most important, I wouldn’t have to tell anyone that something wasn’t right. I grabbed the magazine, opened it to my favorite spread, and came in for one last landing, after which I cleaned up, got dressed, stuffed the magazine in a paper bag, told Aunt Sue I was going for a walk, and took it out to the garbage.
Nevertheless, the multiple nightly trips to the bathroom in the early morning continued unabated. I w
as at a loss. I’d done the one thing I thought would take care of this problem. I’d cast the magazine out of my life and turned my eyes back to all that was good and pure, like watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! in the sitting room with my aunt and grandmother or reading the Jackie Collins book I’d checked out from the library. And praying mightily, with very sweaty palms.
But the fact remained: For the next two weeks I had to get up multiple times every night. My body was malfunctioning, and persistently. I didn’t know why it was happening or what I could do about it, but I did know one thing: If it wasn’t going away, this physical manifestation of my own moral weakness—well, I may as well go back to the newsagent and try my luck at bagging another porno mag, no?
So that’s what I did. I snuck into the same newsagent one day while my aunt was at the Quality Market picking up popcorn, Hormel wieners, and ginger ale for gin rummy night. Sweating bullets, I sauntered back to the adult aisle after a few quick glances at the cashier, knelt down, and remained perfectly still to avoid detection via the all-seeing convex mirror hanging from the ceiling in the corner. My eyes roamed freely inside my perfectly still head: Honcho, Inches, Colt, Jock, Blueboy, Torso, Stallion, Stroke. Some really great titles, to be sure. But the options were so overwhelming that I couldn’t choose, so I just closed my eyes, grabbed one, shoved it under my shirt, and scrambled over to the music magazine section, where I seized upon the latest copy of Billboard and flipped to the Hot 100 listing. Wiping my sweaty brow and trying to exhale without sounding like I’d been holding my breath for ten days, I smiled to see that “Alone” by Heart was still number 1. Because that song was awesome.
The remainder of my days in Jamestown that June were spent jerking off and peeing, jerking off and peeing, jerking off and peeing. I returned to Raleigh with a sinking sense of my spiritual doom and also with a profoundly exhausted crotch.
