Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  We sat and smoked for a few minutes. I shifted uncomfortably, wondering what Dani was thinking, really. Perhaps she was visualizing me having sex with another dude and trying to figure out how that worked. She might be expecting me to start critiquing her flannel shirts a little more pointedly or showing up to our next outing dressed as a Sweet Transvestite.

  This was going to take some getting used to, the whole allowing-someone-else-into-my-previously-secret-life thing. I was standing on a stage with a brutal spotlight on me after announcing myself as a great stage performer, but I had no idea what type of performance I was supposed to give. A Shakespearean soliloquy? A PowerPoint presentation? Will simple jazz hands suffice?

  “Wait,” Dani said, clearly having arrived at a point of significant import that my recent confession had set in stark relief. “Does this mean I can’t tell gay jokes anymore?”

  “Oh, of course not!”

  “Oh, good. Wait, of course I can’t or of course I can?”

  “You can tell gay jokes. As long as they’re not about me.”

  “Awesome. Because did you hear about the gay electron?”

  “No.”

  “Went around blowing fuses.”

  That was a pretty good one.

  Our diabetic hero is quite the dancer. By that I mean that he likes to dance, not that he looks good while doing it.

  He’s also a mischievous little thing. His parents are out of town this weekend, so naturally he invited a bunch of miscreants over to listen to awful music, smoke weed, drink cheap beer and Boone’s Farm, and dance like the developmentally disabled. It was embarrassing to watch.

  Thankfully for him some of these miscreants are responsible and know to clean up after themselves in the morning before taking off. Dani is right now doing a bang-up job of washing all the dishes, and Julie is doing the more demanding and, perhaps, more rewarding chore of clearing away the seventy-two empty Milwaukee’s Best Light beer cans strewn throughout the house. This is no small task. It was a bacchanal last night, and folks were just hobbling around wherever they damn well pleased: in the rooms upstairs, out on the deck, in the bathroom, on the steps, in the bathtub, on the bathroom floor, everywhere. And now Julie is in the middle of an Easter egg hunt, except instead of colored eggs she’s searching for cans of really gross beer, often half-drunk and leaking into the carpet.

  Our hero is in the shower trying to wash beer out of his curly bangs while singing his secret favorite song, “Alone” by Heart. It is hard for him to do both of these things at once. He’s struggling with the lyrics, which is very unlike him.

  “I hear the picking of the clomp, I’m lying, dear, the roof’s in fark…” he sings. “I wonder where the stars tonight, no ants are on the telephone.”

  He usually sings this song impeccably, with full fake vibrato, but not today. It’s a powerful tale of longing, but he’s just mangling it. Yeah, we know what’s going on. He’s sniffing the soap, and, wow, he just licked it. Now he’s digging his front teeth into it and examining the imprint he’s made. OK, game on.

  Julie is taking a break from her beer can quest and is now drying the dishes that Dani has just washed, both of them enjoying the god-awful serenade coming from the bathroom just down the hall.

  “He’s got an amazing voice on him,” Dani has just said. “It’s angelic.”

  Yes, like an elderly, sick Shirley Temple.

  After a few minutes the singing drifts off, and a merciful silence takes its place. Suddenly the girls hear a big thud.

  “What the fuck?” Julie says. Dani turns off the faucet, and they hurry down the hall.

  “Tim? Are you OK?” Dani says, knocking on the door. “Tim?”

  The girls look at each other. “Shit,” they both say.

  “I’ll go in,” Dani says bravely, evoking the great alien-killer Sigourney Weaver. She opens the door into the small, steam-filled bathroom. “Tim?” There’s no answer.

  Dani’s face tightens into an expression of dread as she realizes she’s going to have to open the shower curtain and see what’s inside. Our hearts go out to her. We are all terrified.

  SWISH goes the shower curtain as she opens it. And there’s our hero. Naked, wet, and shaking.

  “Yep, he’s having a reaction,” Dani says back to Julie.

  “Should we call an ambulance?” Julie says, marveling at how pale their friend’s butt is.

  “No, I think we can handle this. Can you get some juice or something from the fridge?” As Julie leaves to search for sugar, Dani kneels down to her friend as he tries to peel himself off the tile. She leans in and takes his head in her hands so that he won’t bang it.

  “Tim, Julie’s getting you some juice, just hang tight, OK?”

  Our hero is displaying no apparent self-consciousness about being naked in front of his friend, which is amazing, because look at him. He’s like a nude albino ghost.

  “Here you go,” Julie says, handing Dani a tall cup of juice. Dani takes it and lifts it to her friend’s face, struggling to keep his head steady so that the juice will successfully go into his mouth. Her friend isn’t cooperating.

  “Tim. Tim. Tim! You’ve got to drink this.” As Dani speaks, Julie reaches over her and into the shower stall to turn off the water that has now soaked the poor girl.

  The stubborn young lad finally opens his mouth and allows his friend to pour some juice in. He takes to it and awkwardly starts using his tongue to try to lap up more.

  After a few minutes, he is able to use human language. Well, at least one word.

  “Sorry,” he says. It’s always the first word out of his mouth when he comes to. And he should be. No one should have to see what we are seeing. He then irritably moves his head away from the cup, having had all he wants.

  But Dani knows he’s not out of the woods yet. He’s got to have more or he could slip back into the danger zone. Thankfully she’s been through this before. And even if she hadn’t, she’s seen Steel Magnolias. All she ever needed to know about dealing with a grumpy diabetic she learned from Sally Field.

  “Shelby,” Dani says to him in an admonishing tone. He looks at her blankly, still stubbornly holding his head out of reach of the cup. She looks back at him as if to say, “That’s right, we’re performing this scene whether you like it or not.”

  “Drink your juice, Shelby.”

  He scrunches up his face, looking nothing like Julia Roberts.

  “Cooperate, please. Drink the juice!”

  “Honey, drink, please!” Julie chimes in, channeling Dolly Parton.

  “Drink the juice!”

  “You need the juice!”

  “Drink it!”

  Dani takes hold of his face and begins forcibly pouring the OJ into his wet little mouth as he struggles against her. Some of the juice makes it in, though the dribbling is considerable. Finally the naked boy relents and, sitting on the floor of the shower stall looking like an alien amphibian, opens his mouth and allows his friend to pour more juice in.

  A few minutes later he’s once again a self-aware human. He looks down at his naked white body, which is splotched with pink from the hot water of the shower. Like Adam and Eve before him, he is deeply embarrassed—the very personification of the colors Shelby chose for her hilarious wedding: blush and bashful.

  CHAPTER 8

  We all have wild imaginings of the sexual adventures that await us when we go away to college and completely reinvent ourselves as seductive, hot-lipped Casanovas. This is what all humans want from college. And I was nothing if not flailingly, painfully human. So when I prepared to move away to Greensboro for my freshman year at a small liberal arts school called Guilford College, I got down on my knees and prayed to my lord and savior, Morrissey, to please, please, please let me get what I want.

  I was still gun-shy about spilling the beans about myself after telling Dani—my big coming-out party ended that night at Shelley Lake Park. Still taking baby steps, I wasn’t ready to bust open the closet doors—rather,
I was just busying myself rearranging the clothes in the closet, alphabetizing my cassette tapes, color-coding the polyester slacks, arranging the vests by degree of paisleyness, and intermittently pulling out a porno mag to do some reading.

  In preparation for the big life change, I made a bold decision: I would cut my trademark naturally curly bangs. Or rather, my hairstylist Debbie made a bold decision: She would cut off my trademark naturally curly bangs. I’d gone in and asked her to shave my head short all over, but leave the bangs. I was ready for a change, sure, but I still needed my hair to hang in my face, for God’s sake, come on.

  “You sure you don’t want me to do anything with these?” she said, pointing at my bangs with barely disguised disdain. She’d always hated them and had been dying to get rid of them for as long as I’d been going to her.

  When she asked, I made a split-second decision to give her permission to give them a slight tweak. A minor modification. A tiny clip.

  “Yeah,” I said, “why don’t you just trim them a little, clean them up?”

  She didn’t have to be told twice. She barely had to be told once. She clipped the rest of my hair with a number-two guard, then, with a little too much enthusiasm, she set to work on the bangs, her holy grail. As she completed this last bit of work, she stood in front of me, blocking my view of myself in the mirror. I should not have allowed her to do this.

  When she stood aside after applying some mousse, there was my sad face in the mirror staring back at me. My hair was shaven close all over, and dangling down in front, just above my eyeballs, were just three slender tendrils of hair, each about the thickness of a stick of incense. There was no getting around it: I looked retarded.

  “OK?” she asked.

  “Um, wow, you cut a lot.”

  “You wanted me to clean them up, right?”

  I should have been more specific. As she busied herself with brushing my neck and shoulders off and sweeping all the hair off the floor, I sat there in disbelief. What was I to do? This was the kind of haircut one got before going away to clown college or mime school. How can I expect to be taken seriously with this hairstyle? Heaving a slow, silent sigh, I closed my eyes and gave Debbie permission to snip those last three coils, the only remnants of my former hairstyle.

  “You sure?” she said, as if all was going according to plan.

  Eyes still closed, I nodded nervously. “Just, yes, do it. Please.”

  Snip.

  (Shit.)

  Snip.

  (Shit.)

  Snip.

  I opened my eyes. Wow. There was my forehead. I hadn’t seen it in forever. And my eyes. So bloodshot, so sunken. There was no hiding behind this haircut. It allowed for no dodging, no weaving, no ducking, no diving. God, I thought. I look like I haven’t slept in years.

  I paid Debbie and left, feeling nude as a newborn eighteen-year-old baby. When I got to my Plymouth, I dove in and searched for a plaid golf hat that I knew was in there somewhere. I finally found it in a nook under the seat, pulled it out, and covered my head with it.

  Driving home, I intermittently looked at myself in the rearview mirror, lifting the hat off a few times to make sure my hair was still gone.

  I would never trust a hairstylist again.

  I’d chosen Guilford because I was convinced I needed to go to a small school. There would be fewer students in each class, probably more one-on-one interaction with teachers, and, most importantly, a smaller number of people to know that I was gay. I wanted to start small, and this school of a mere 1,600 students seemed perfect. It had a charming little campus with lots of old brick buildings, it seemed to attract young men unafraid to wear earrings in their left ear (which I erroneously believed signified all), and it didn’t have a Greek system or a prominent sports program. But my choice of Guilford was based upon one overarching—and frustratingly faulty—assumption. Namely, that the city of Greensboro was ninety-nine percent gay.

  Greensboro was home to UNC-Greensboro, aka “UNC-G,” aka, to most of the kids in my high school, “UNC-Gay,” thanks to the university’s notable art and music programs. So, the word on the street was that UNC-G allegedly attracted a lot of gay folk, and this is what was constantly in the back of my head as I flipped through various college brochures. But I didn’t want to go to UNC-G. This scholastic snob thought that was for flunkies. But in my magical thinking, if UNC-G was a homosexual haven, then Guilford also must be, because it was in Greensboro, too. Because it was just down the road. Yep, that logic was airtight. I could definitely see myself attending this idyllic little college where the majority of dudes handsomely practiced the love that dare not speak its name, constantly standing shirtless in their drum circles on the quad between classes and manfully reciting Shakespearean sonnets declaring that love is not time’s fool.

  UNC-G did have quite a gay student body, that much was true. Sadly, Guilford College was a good twenty-minute drive down Friendly Avenue, on the opposite end of town. A side of town that had far fewer folks sporting pink triangles on their backpacks. But on the plus side it did have a very manageable student body population, so it was my intention to, in the most unobtrusive way possible, find the approximately two percent of these student bodies who were gay, bi-curious, sexually confused, aroused sometimes in the locker room, or had one time accidentally kissed a tranny. How was I supposed to find these people? Well, maybe my roommate would be of some assistance?

  On my housing application I had hinted that I would prefer that they stick me with someone who would not be averse to seeing hot nude and Speedo-clad lunkheads hopping out of my bed in the mornings and making me coffee. I got Jeff from New Jersey.

  Jeff was a meek, sickly, painfully shy guy from Princeton who had been driven, kicking and screaming, by his parents to North Carolina to get a good Southern education. He never left the room when he wasn’t in class, if he went to class. When he was in the room, he spent all of his time at his desk talking on the phone to a high school friend back in Princeton and drawing comic book characters on his sketchpad. His favorites were Pogo, Calvin and Hobbes, and the Little Mermaid. He had a full color wall-size poster of little Ariel on his side of the room, which I’d lobbied against unsuccessfully.

  His drawings, especially of Calvin and Hobbes, were dead ringers for the original characters. I knew because I would look through all of them while he was in class or in the shower or at dinner, and they gave me quite an insight into his unique take on the world. Here was one of Calvin being dropped off at school—the College of North Carolina, in this particular picture—holding on to the door of the family station wagon for dear life as his mother, pulling and tearing at his legs, tried in vain to disconnect him. Here was a sad scene of separation in which Calvin, screaming and crying, was saying good-bye to Hobbes, who, in this drawing, had been renamed New Jersey. And here was a very touching/troubling one of Calvin and his mother at a nice restaurant, with Calvin reaching for the check and patting his mother’s hand. Dear God.

  His crippling Oedipus complex notwithstanding, Jeff was very approachable, and, though he was immensely antisocial, he had a friendly demeanor and a soft countenance. We started getting to know each other after both of our families had left us in peace. I tested the waters by disclosing my diabetes affliction and its implications for his life.

  “I’ll keep some candy bars or whatever in this drawer, OK? So if I get all twitchy or something, or if I’m unresponsive or really sweaty or stupid or flailing around, just force me to eat something from the drawer.”

  He looked as if he wasn’t sure he was up to this responsibility.

  “Just, like, point it out to you?” he asked.

  “Yeah, or, you know, if I’m not responding, just unwrap it, pull off a piece, and force it into my mouth. Just, you know, shove it in. My reflexes will kick in, and I’ll just start chewing. Just, you know, don’t shove it all the way down my throat.”

  He nodded his head as if to say, “I can’t handle any of this, please don’t ma
ke me.”

  “Or, better yet,” I said, sensing his discomfort, “you know what? I’ll get some tubes of cake icing, so you don’t even have to worry about choking me. That way you can just put the tube up to my mouth and squirt it in.”

  This conversation was more homoerotic than I was intending, and way more homoerotic than he was prepared to deal with. And I hadn’t even brought up the gay thing yet.

  We sat in an awkward silence for a few seconds until I finally put us out of our misery by saying, “It probably won’t happen, don’t worry.”

  After a few weeks of witnessing his utter misery at being away from home—his nightly phone conversations with his mom, his best friend, one of his brothers, or, if absolutely necessary, his dad—I asked him about his relationship with his mother one day while I sat on the edge of my bed and he sat penciling a new drawing of Calvin beating his head against a brick wall labeled “Work Study.” I asked in a roundabout manner, so as not to let on that I was sitting in judgment or that I’d rifled through his drawings.

  “So, do you miss your mother?”

  He gave me a sheepish grin, and his freckles started to glow.

  “Yeah, don’t you?” was his answer.

  “Sure,” I said. “Well, not your mother. My mother. And my dad and my cat.”

  He smiled and nodded.

  “You don’t like it here, do you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said without missing a beat. “I hate it, actually.”

  “Where would you rather be?” I said, bending forward, hands and index fingers poised Oprah-like in a triangle at my nose.

  “I wanted to go to school in New Jersey, but my parents thought it would be better for me to get away from home.”

  “Um-hmm. So, what are you going to do?” Might you want to move out and allow me to put up the rest of my Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cocteau Twins posters? You know I have five more.

  “Well, I don’t want to stay here. I think I might transfer out after this semester.”