All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  “Don’t say anything to him,” Wally’s mother whispers. “Just go to your room and pray, Walter. Just pray.”

  Pray for what? For Shoe Town to get struck by lightning? For Jimmy Carter to resign? For the A-rabs to give us free oil? Wally closes his door and lights up a cigarette. Newports. His parents have begun to suspect he smokes in his room but can never prove it. He keeps the window cracked and aims the smoke outside, an incense stick burning at all times to cover up the smell.

  It’s raining. Or maybe that’s just how Wally will come to remember it, because his life is about to become a drizzly blur, a damp mist shrouding everything he does.

  “You’re going to end up like your cousin Kyle if you don’t change your ways,” his guidance counselor had scolded him.

  “What am I doing that’s so wrong?” he’d challenged back at him.

  “Wally, you once were the most promising student in Brown’s Mill. You could have had your pick of colleges. But you’re barely passing chemistry and sure to fail trigonometry. The only class you’ve got decent grades for is art history. Face it, Wally, you can’t make much of a career as an art historian.”

  And why not? So Wally breezed through his classes, sometimes stoned from a morning joint, pilfered from Missy’s house when she wasn’t looking. School sucked. He had no friends left at all: David Schnur had transferred over to Mayville after a particularly savage beating by a group of seniors outside the gymnasium. They claimed he was spying on them in their jockstraps in the locker room. Some of the teachers actually acted as if they thought David deserved what he got.

  “David Schnur was a cocksucking faggot,” Freddie Piatrowski told him. “I know. I caught him once with some kid out behind the bleachers.”

  “No way,” Wally said. “You really saw him with another guy?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sitting real close together. Him and some guy. Talking like they were little faggot girlfriends.” Freddie had scowled. “You ought to be glad he’s gone, Wally. Hanging around with him only made you a faggot, too.”

  Might he have stood a chance at that moment? Might there have been a opportunity for redemption? Later, Wally would remember that conversation with Freddie: did he miss his last shot at a normal life? With David gone, might he have regained his old friends, been accepted back into his old world?

  No, not so long as Zandy remained in the picture.

  For the moment, however, Wally remained too obsessed about the identity of the boy David had been making out with to really ponder anything else. So there was another gay kid in Brown’s Mill? Fucking David Schnur. He’d never admitted that he was gay. Sure, Wally had kept his secret from David, too. But David—clueless David—keeping a secret from him?

  It was good he was gone. What kind of a friend was he? Lying, sneaking around? What kind of a world had Wally fallen into for the last few years? They were all sneaks and liars, every single one of them—including Zandy. In a world of shadows and half-truths Wally had chosen to live, forfeiting his place among his peers.

  Once upon a time, Wally had liked school. But now he hates it, hates the snide remarks of his classmates as he stands at his locker, hates the mocking in the cafeteria, hates the fact that he’s a dreg, an outsider, a faggot. He dreads every morning that his mother comes in to wake him for school, raising the shades and calling out her cheery “Good morning, Walter!” as if she’s fucking Carol Brady. That’s where any resemblance to the perfect mother ends, Wally thinks bitterly. That stupid “Good morning.” It ends right there.

  “I want to go to the city now,” he told Zandy a couple of weeks ago. “I gotta get out of school.”

  “Like you could make it in the city as a high school dropout.”

  Zandy sounded like his goddamn father. Wally exploded. “I’m going to be an actor! I don’t need a diploma! I have talent! I did Look Back in Anger last spring!”

  “Listen to you, James Dean.”

  “James Dean was gay, too,” Wally said.

  “Like that has anything to do with all the tea in China.”

  Wally stood before him, defiant. “So what happened to all your great promises, huh? They all talk? Everything was gonna be grand, you said.”

  “Babe, you’ve got to have a little patience. You’ve only just turned fifteen.”

  Wally fumed. “My drama teacher told me she’d never seen a student with so much talent. To do Osborne at my age and make it convincing—”

  But Zandy wasn’t really listening. He was too intent on filling up his pipe with grass. Fucking zone head. Space cadet.

  When had it changed?

  The very last completely happy time Wally could remember with Zandy was a night shortly after Halloween, when they’d hiked up into the orchards and filled two baskets with the picked-over apples.

  “Miss Aletha taught me a secret a long time ago, when I first came to Brown’s Mill,” Zandy said—and it struck Wally that he hadn’t known that Zandy came from anyplace else. Why anyone would choose to come to Brown’s Mill was beyond his grasp, but Zandy seemed happy enough.

  “What secret?” Wally asked.

  “The secret is in these apples.” Zandy was picking off the misshapen fruit from the branches. “Everybody leaves them behind. But they’re the sweetest of the bunch, and they’re free.”

  He was right: they were sweet. They picked as many as they could find, stumbling in the dark, shivering and laughing and biting into the hard sweet fruit, oblivious to the threat of worms or the chance of being discovered. They went back to Zandy’s house and baked Miss Aletha a pie and Wally still remembers how she cried, the mascara running down her cheeks, and that was the last completely happy time he ever had with Zandy and his friends.

  He exhales his cigarette smoke in rings, watching them float out the window. His mother thinks he’s praying in here.

  His mother is a fool.

  “Why aren’t you in any sports?” his father would shout at him. “Why don’t you have any girlfriends? Why are you always hanging around with the riffraff in Dogtown?”

  His father knew the answers to those questions. Wally could see it in his eyes. And his mother’s face simply went tight, abandoning Wally to anything his father wanted to imagine.

  “Sometimes I want to forget it,” he told Miss Aletha.

  “Forget what?”

  “Being gay. Just forget all about it.”

  She laughed. “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Why not? I’m an actor. I can be anything I want to be.”

  “I suppose you could.” She gave him a look that said he was being foolish but that she loved him anyway. “You could act anything but sooner or later you’d get tired of acting, I suspect.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I never get tired of acting.”

  “You’re in high school,” she said, leaning in across the table at him. “I understand what’s going on for you, Wally. I went through it myself. Figured what the hell, I’ve got a penis—or what’s left of it—so I might as well try to live as a boy. I figured it was easier to do that than to keep squawking about it, trying to get the damn thing cut off, getting my parents all riled up and the kids in school all in a dither, picking on me, beating me up.” She sat back in her chair. “You’re tired of being an outsider. You want to fit in. Who doesn’t, Wally? Who doesn’t?”

  He stares out the window. When the flamers get picked on or pushed around in school, he never says a word. He hates those kids; he isn’t like them; they really do deserve what they get. Even David Schnur, out there snuggling under the bleachers with some boy—who? Fucking who? Wally really wants to know. It’s just as well now that he hadn’t intervened during David’s beating. Why implicate himself? He’s glad David is gone. Being friends with David had ruined him in the eyes of his old friends. Once he’d had lots of friends. He remembers how it used to be: sleeping over Freddie’s, hanging out with him and Michael and Philip, sneaking peeks at slimy old issues of Penthouse in the abandoned factories. This gay stuff had
cost him everything. And David—duplicitous David—was hardly a friend worth defending. So Wally’s glad he did nothing. Instead, he’d just leaned against the gym in his tattered denim jacket, smoking his cigarettes, watching the jocks kick his former friend around as if he were a soccer ball.

  “He deserved it for being such a flamer,” Wally says now, peering out the crack of his window and watching it rain.

  A pouring, driving rain.

  At least, that’s the way he’ll always remember it.

  “I knew my father would follow,” Wally would tell Miss Aletha, years later. “It’s like I wanted to blow up my whole world—my parents, Zandy, myself.”

  On the day after his father lost his job, Wally finally can’t stand being pent up in his room any longer and strides out of the house into the rain. When he passes his father in the living room, the older man stirs from his position on the couch, like a bear awakening from hibernation. He follows his son outside, watching as he heads down the road. Wally watches him out of the corner of his eye. He sees his father get into his car and back it out of the driveway. His father drives very slowly and deliberately, because Wally walks all the way to Zandy’s house—bikes were for faggots, after all—and yes, it definitely is raining, because Wally will always remember how cold and damp he is when he finally arrives.

  Without knocking he walks into the little red brick house. Zandy comes into the room wearing just his boxer shorts. He’s freshly showered, the hair on his chest all alive and shiny and not at all matted.

  “Hey, babe, what’s up?”

  That’s when Wally hears his father behind him. He’s shouting, “We’re going to have you arrested, you pervert!”

  “What the—”

  “You filthy pervert! You filthy stinking pervert!”

  Wally’s father grabs his son by the back of the shirt. Wally doesn’t try to break free.

  “Hey man, let him go!” Zandy cries. “Don’t hurt him—”

  “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do with my own goddamn son!” His father drags Wally out of the house, pushing him down Zandy’s front steps. He looms over him, thrusting his finger into his face. “Tell me the truth! Have you been having sex with that pervert?”

  Wally feels curiously detached, as if this is all a movie, a fantasy in his head. “Yes,” he says, “I’ve had sex with him.”

  His father smacks him then, right across the face, right there in front of Zandy’s house, in front of a gathering group of kids. Zandy tries to stop him, but then Wally’s father hits Zandy too, and Wally will always remember Zandy’s mouth bleeding and Bertrand running out of the house and down the street, his hands fluttering, his parakeet escaping. Wally’s father grabs his son by the hair and shoves him into the car. Wally is unemotional as his nose begins to bleed and his father starts the ignition.

  “Don’t hurt him!” Zandy shouts, running after the car. “Don’t you dare fucking hurt him!”

  And that’s the last glimpse Wally has of him: running after the car shirtless, in his polka-dotted boxer underwear, with a bleeding mouth and wide-open eyes.

  He doesn’t have to face Zandy in court, because he’s just fifteen and isn’t required to testify in person. All he has to do is go down to the police station and tell Officer Garafolo the whole story, watching him eat his egg salad sandwich as he writes it all down. Then, when they get home, his father makes him repeat the story for his mother. Wally throws in a few extra details just for her, like how his ass bled when Zandy fucked him the first time and how she’d seen the blood in his Fruit of the Looms. Her face turns green, then white, and finally she passes out on the floor. Wally’s actually glad about that, that he’d managed to get that much of a reaction out of her.

  “Are you smoking in there?”

  “So what if I am?”

  “Open this goddamn door!”

  “Fuck you. Bust through it if you’re so goddamn strong!”

  It feels amazing, taunting his father. Talking back, not being afraid. The other night his father had tried to smack him and Wally had caught his arm. Held it tight and twisted it a bit. He was nearly as tall as his old man now. He’d forced his father to back down.

  “What’s the matter?” Wally had spit at him, making Dad’s knees buckle as he twisted his arm. “You only hit people weaker than you? You only pick fights with little boys and women? If a guy’s too big, you back down. Is that why they kicked you out of the fucking navy? That why, big man?”

  His father had made a lunge for him, breaking free, but Wally had slipped past him, getting to the safety of his room and sliding the lock into place, laughing all the while.

  He clamps his earphones over his head and cranks up Zeppelin. Of course there’d been a scandal. The Brown’s Mill Reminder wrote a huge story using Zandy’s name and picture, and although Wally’s identity wasn’t revealed, everyone knew it was him. “You are a fucking fag,” Freddie had said, cornering him in the cafeteria at school with a bunch of his friends from the track team. “You really are a fag, Wally Day!”

  “Fuck you, Freddie.”

  Fuck ’em all, Wally thinks.

  In my thoughts … I have seen … rings of smoke through the trees

  And the voices of those who stand looking …

  When things with his father got too bad, when they had a knock-down fight where Wally smashed his father’s nose and his father knocked out a couple of Wally’s teeth, Wally finally took off. He headed to Miss Aletha’s. She was the only one Wally could go to. She accepted him in, no matter what he’d done, and somehow she got Wally’s father to agree that he could stay with her for awhile, even though having his son staying with a transsexual probably only made things worse for him around town. But it was clear his father had had enough of his faggot son. Faggots belonged with freaks, he said. His father even started insisting that Wally wasn’t his, that his real father must have been some guy named Sully, apparently a figure from Wally’s mother’s past that he had never heard her speak about. Then again, his mother had never spoken about much.

  As for Zandy, he went to jail.

  You little ballbuster, you.

  Over the years Zandy would come and go from Wally’s thoughts. A zoned-out hippie with a big furry chest and gnarled hands. It was wrong what he did, Wally would think, making love to Ned, his body so smooth, so young, so much like his own. I didn’t know what I was consenting to. I was too young. I was so fucked up. I didn’t know who the fuck I was. It was wrong what he did.

  Long stretches of time would pass when Wally never thought of Zandy at all. After all, things happened so fast after he left home: he got accepted at drama school, his father hanged himself, Wally left Brown’s Mill at long last for the city. The first day he arrived, he did think of Zandy, stepping out of the train station and looking around at all the people and the tall buildings and the flashing lights. You’ll see, babe. It’s gonna be so different. It’s gonna be like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

  And he thought of Zandy again the first time he and Ned went out to a gay bar and stayed out all night, dancing and fucking with strangers in the back room, smoking way too much dope and even snorting his first line of coke. He thought of Zandy then, wondering if he was still in prison or if he’d gotten out by now, trying to imagine for just the briefest of seconds what he looked like now, and if he’d gone back to live in the little red brick house.

  Yet most of the time he never thought of Zandy at all. Wally was living his life. There was too much to do—too much to see, taste, and feel—to waste time sitting around, thinking about the past.

  But Zandy had been right.

  It sure as hell was grand.

  20

  COLIC

  The baby is crying on the living room floor. Regina’s trying to make a phone call but she keeps dropping the phone. Her hands go to her hair and she starts to whimper. She bends down and once more picks up the phone.

  She’s trying to call Bernadette.

  “Oper
ator. May I help you?”

  Yes, help me. Help me please!

  “May I help you please?”

  “Yes,” Regina manages to say. “Diamond. Diamond 64352.”

  The baby is screaming. He hasn’t stopped crying since Robert went away.

  Bernadette will know what to do. Bernadette has a baby the same age and he’s a good baby. He never cries. He’s a perfect child.

  Why can’t Walter be more like Kyle?

  “I’m sorry. There’s no answer.”

  Regina drops the phone again.

  Oh, dear God—why won’t he stop crying???

  “Excuse me, might I have this dance?”

  Regina looked up into the dark eyes of a handsome man in a blue navy uniform. His gold buttons were shining. Was he asking her? She blushed. No, not possible. He was so much younger than she was, and so handsome he could have any woman in the room. She looked over her shoulder, but there was no one behind her.

  “He means you, Regina,” Sully said to her.

  “Me?”

  “Yes,” said the man in the navy uniform, smiling such a pearly smile of straight, even teeth. “I’m asking you.”

  “Oh, but—” Regina was caught by his eyes. “I’m here with Sully.”

  “Go ahead, Regina,” Sully told her. “It’s okay.”

  “Are you sure?” Regina asked. But the question wasn’t posed to Sully. It was posed to the man in the navy uniform who was asking her to dance.

  Sully was Betty’s brother—Betty, her coworker from the mayor’s office. Betty, who’d been trying to get her hitched forever. Betty, who was certain she and Sully would make a splendid pair. And they might have, Regina supposed, many years later, remembering the earnest fellow with the rosy cheeks and full lips. Nearly three hundred pounds Sully weighed, but he had a certain grace all his own.

  “Sure, go on ahead,” Sully had urged Regina, even giving her a smile. “Dance with him. It’s okay by me.”

  Why does he cry so?

  I’ve fed him. I’ve fed him and burped him and laid him down in his crib. But all he does is cry.