Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits

by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

  Kevin and I had planned to go hiking at San Angelo State Park the next weekend, so there were nine more days until I saw him again. I deserved to see him, damnit. Because I wanted to go hiking for a day, because a man deserved a weekend off after working sixty hours a week on school and the play, because I wanted to spend time with my friend. Because Kevin had reawakened something in me that had been slumbering, and I needed to make love with him. Or maybe this startling need I had for him was brand new, and he’d created it all himself.

  Christ. Why had I ever told George I’d help him out? Without Rent going on, I wouldn’t have to be worrying about anything except where Kevin and I would meet next. Now…

  I bit my lip and then released it immediately; the kids needed to see that the adults leading them were resolute. Besides, I was jumping the gun. If we were luckier than we deserved to be, Elder Tate would be called out of town on important church business and forget all about us. There might be no reason for my fears, and so I set about doing my job. All the years of hiding had given me plenty of experience in feeling one way and pretending that I felt another. I was probably the best actor in the school.

  “Do you know either of these people?” I asked, lifting the paper into the space between the three of us.

  “Nope,” Steven said, and Robbie shook his head.

  “I don’t either. Gunning has a lot of people in it, doesn’t it? Five, six thousand, something like that.”

  I watched as what I was implying sank in. The boys were standing side by side, close together, as if giving each other support. Steven had on jeans and a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, but Robbie stood out by what he was wearing, as he did in so many other ways. He had on brown pants with thin black stripes, and a black muscle shirt that barely conformed to the school’s dress regulations.

  “Here are just two opinions,” I said. “I think it’s important that we not make more of this than it really is.”

  “But he’s calling for a boycott, Mr. Smith,” Steven ventured.

  “That’s right,” I said as I folded the paper and tucked it under my bad arm. “Did you really think that a play like Rent wouldn’t get some sort of attention in our town?”

  Robbie had been looking truly distressed, but now he pushed his black hair away from his eyes and frowned. “But it won the Tony Award.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything in Gunning,” I said gently. “Broadway might be something you follow, but to most people here it’s far away, and maybe an example of how they don’t want to live. You’ve got to understand how others are thinking.”

  Steven snorted and swept his hat off his head. “Oh, yeah, sure, I understand. I understand that they live with their heads in the sand, and they don’t want to give anything new and different a chance. Trying new stuff is what life’s all about. They’re just a couple of homophobic bigots!”

  “Name-calling never solved a single problem in this world,” I said as mildly as I could.

  I’d been through my own period of wanting to call names, during the time when my family had turned their backs on me just when I had needed them most. If my brother Grant hadn’t helped the way he had—though we’d never talked about what was most important—I had sometimes thought I would have put a gun to my head. But what would it have gained me to scream at the people who were afraid of the differences I represented? I had pushed the angry words down so deeply that they’d never, ever emerged, not once in all these years. They were still there though, captured.

  “The people who might agree with these letter-writers are your neighbors,” I said, “your friends, and the people you live with every day in Gunning.”

  “Not my family,” Robbie said.

  They sure had been mine. It’d been years before my father had talked to me again. For half a second, I wondered about Kevin’s family. “Maybe not, but—”

  Steven interrupted me. “What should we do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  He scowled and scuffed a shoe against the institutional tile on the floor. “I want to shove the paper down their throats.”

  “Now tell me something realistic, because I don’t think you really want to choke a little old lady, do you? Besides the fact that you’d be arrested and go to jail for it.”

  “I want to—”

  “Mr. Smith,” Robbie butted in as if Steven weren’t talking, “you don’t think that Mr. Keating will cancel the play because of this, do you?” His voice was distressed-high, but it seemed even higher because of the contrast to Steven’s determined rumble.

  “Only Mr. Keating can speak for himself, but I certainly don’t think you need to worry about that. Just for a couple of letters? So tell me, how do you realistically want to respond to this?”

  “Keep going,” Robbie said right away.

  Steven gave him a disgusted look. “Well, yeah, Rob, sure. He means something else.”

  “I want to hear whatever you want to tell me.”

  “I want to write back,” Steven said. “I could tell them to go to hell.”

  Robbie shoved him in the chest. Steven didn’t even blink as he was forced back a step. “That wouldn’t help, numb nuts. Didn’t you hear what Mr. Smith said?”

  “Okay, okay. So I get sincere and tell them we’re, like, working hard, and it’s a play with a good message, that sort of thing. Just because somebody’s gay or a druggie or spreads her legs too easy doesn’t mean there can’t be a play about them, you know?”

  “Admirable sentiments, Steven,” I said. “Though maybe it would be wise to wait until next week and see if there’s any response to these letters, don’t you think? And consult with Mr. Keating. Remember, just two in the whole town.”

  While we’d been talking the hallway had cleared out, and now the first bell rang. The boys grabbed their backpacks, and Robbie slammed his locker shut, but I told them, “Come with me to my classroom so I can write you excuse slips for being tardy.”

  As they trailed along behind me, I heard Steven say quietly, “Don’t listen to that old lady. You aren’t a sissy.”

  ON THE night before I was supposed to meet Kevin in the parking lot of the San Angelo State Park, I sat in my kitchen with my cell phone in front of me on the table. I needed to pick up that phone, dial him, and tell him I couldn’t make it. The past three issues of the bi-weekly Gazette had each printed letters against the play, with only one solitary supporter. The cast and crew were understandably upset and restless. A reporter from the paper had left a message at the school that she wanted to interview George, but George hadn’t answered her yet.

  Principal Watts hadn’t said a word to us; I suspected he was waiting to see if the school board stepped in. Teachers stopped me in the hall, wanting to talk about the play and asking whether I thought it should be staged. Even a former student who was working at Safeway had asked me about it the night before in the produce section. He’d specifically wanted to know if there was going to be same-sex kissing onstage. At least he’d had the courage to put the question into words. Everybody else wanted to ask the same thing but had gone at it sideways, and I’d been able to slip away from answering.

  I was trying to look at the situation rationally, not go overboard, and trying to take the advice that I was giving to the kids. But I’d developed a lot of knee-jerk, self-protective habits since that Saturday night long ago—my face raised to the night sky, the sound of an engine revving, “Faggot!”—and they told me to make this call to Kenneton and cancel.

  I hadn’t seen Kevin in two solid weeks, since we had kissed goodbye in his garage after coming back from our sex-drenched weekend in Abilene. I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to get it up for days after that, but the next night in my own bed all I’d had to do was think of him licking wetly at my ear, re-imagine the slippery sounds of our bodies moving against each other, remember the force and salty taste of his come flooding my mouth, and I’d reached for my aching cock.

  I half-groaned, half-laughed right there in the company of my m
icrowave and my toaster. How had I ever managed to go without sex for months at a time? I couldn’t imagine going back to that self-imposed celibacy.

  I’d been shocked at how much I’d missed Kevin the past weekend. Maybe I didn’t have the body of a twenty-year-old anymore, but I wanted Kevin as much as I had wanted Sean back in college: night after night, quickies between classes, during study sessions, and even after wild college parties when we’d been drunk out of our minds.

  What was I going to do? I was flat-out spooked by the letters to the editor and all the talk they’d stirred up, and the safest thing to do was to go back to my simple, hidden life. The only problem was that I didn’t want to.

  Sitting staring at my phone wouldn’t solve anything. I got up and wandered through the living room, ending up over by the sliding glass door to the patio. I pushed the curtain aside and looked out into the night, but I couldn’t see much. It was drizzling and overcast, and the lights behind me reflected against the glass so that it was my own image that stared back at me. Sandy hair growing a little too long, prominent, narrow nose that only a mother could love, thin lips that didn’t smile enough. Eyes that I knew didn’t look straight at people the way they used to.

  Somehow I’d gone from my solitary life to wanting Kevin all the time. He’d found my “ON” switch, flipped it with just a touch, a kiss, a few words—“Spend the night with me, please”—and kept it turned on now for weeks. I’d jerked off like a teenager the weekend before when Kevin had been out of town, feeling as if I were being deprived of something that was my right. But even more than the sex, I’d missed the sudden, vivid color he’d brought to my days.

  I reached out and touched the glass with my fingertips, drifting them across my lips. It made no sense, my feelings about Kevin. I didn’t love him. How could I love him? Gay men like me didn’t traffic in the softer feelings.

  But I could love him. I could.

  “You really like this, don’t you?” George asked as we went out to the parking lot late one Wednesday night.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Directing, working with the kids for the play.” He shrugged as he pulled open his car door and threw his briefcase on the front seat. “Lately you’ve been a lot… a lot happier. I can really see a difference in you. You should do this with me every year.”

  The image of a man in the glass shook his head. No, George, it isn’t my delight in working on your misguided, dangerous pet project. You see, I’m different—happier? definitely happier—because of this guy I picked up in a gay bar, who has this way about him of listening to what I say, who understands my life, who’s got this gravelly voice that I still want to listen to all the time, whose touch makes me hungry-crazy for more, who’s handsome and intelligent and is the best company I’ve ever had. Ever. He’s brave, too, trying to make changes in his life that I can only dream about—am I dreaming about those changes? And he wants me.

  “Wants me,” I whispered against the window. Out of all that was most improbable in the world, he did. This thing between us: it was a two-way street.

  But I wasn’t just happier. I was scared now too. I was worried about the controversy over Rent. Where would it lead? Straight to the assistant director, who had more knowledge of what the play was about than anybody supposed?

  I stood mired in my indecision for a long time, long enough for the drizzle to end and then start again, and for the moon to peep out from behind the clouds and then disappear. I was in the middle of an impossible situation, propelled there by my own wants, my own decisions, and I couldn’t blame anybody else. Thinking for years that I’d had myself under control: what a joke. All it took was the first man to come along and really test me, and my control disappeared.

  Well, maybe not the first man. I’d danced with plenty of others, had sex with them. But that first breakfast with Kevin at the IHOP in Houston, that had done me in good. I remembered how he’d looked eating pancakes and sipping coffee as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, and as if every second of that meal were somehow meaningful.

  How did I expect this to end? Happy ever after wasn’t in the cards. Happy for a year wasn’t in the cards. I knew that. Hard reality, Tom Smith, face it.

  Hard reality was wanting to see Kevin this weekend even when I knew I shouldn’t.

  I’d told the kids to have faith. I had to try to have the same.

  HIKING IN west Texas wasn’t anything like walking through a lush, green, picture-postcard park. San Angelo was on the edge of the arid, almost-desert Trans-Pecos region where rain was a stranger, the dirt was a hard-packed yellow-brown that resembled puke, and the flat land could fall into a cutting, dangerous gully at any time. What vegetation managed to live under the haughty sun didn’t dare lift its head very high; the trees and timid bushes pulled in on themselves. Green wasn’t the green of golf courses or rose gardens here. It was an almost-green, an off-color green with lots of brown and even a hint of blue to it that reflected the cloudless skies. And it was still hot here. Even in early November, hiking out into the backcountry of the park brought out sweat on my forehead and across my shoulders.

  Kevin and I walked along the Horny Toad Trail to start because he’d insisted. I’d protested that it was out of our way, he’d asked me where was my sense of adventure and fun, I’d told him he was acting like one of my students, and he’d raised his eyebrows and said that no student had better think about me the way he thought about me or he’d knock them down with his good left hook. Or right jab. Or maybe a two-by-four.

  “Oh, shut up,” I’d said, but I was smiling.

  We’d met at the park at nine that morning, and it had felt awkward and just not-right to shake hands instead of embrace. I suddenly and deeply resented the fact that I couldn’t act naturally with Kevin. I wanted to kiss him, and from the look on his face, he wanted to kiss me. Maybe in Massachusetts I could have, or in the gay neighborhoods of some big cities, but for sure not in west Texas. It would be a cold day in hell before Texas joined any other states in tolerating the public expression of affection between men, and it’d be the end of the universe as I knew it before I’d ever be able to marry….

  I shut that thought down and released Kevin’s hand.

  After putting on hiking boots and suntan lotion—even with the long sleeves I was wearing, I needed it with my fair skin—we set out at an easy pace. One of the park’s simple cabins was reserved for us for the night, and we had nothing to do and nothing to prove between now and then. We’d walk as far as we wanted to and then turn around and go back, and that was it. My worries about the Sunday edition of the Gazette that would be waiting for me when I got home faded with every step. This was the alternate version of the real world, at least on Saturday it was, my time-with-Kevin that stood apart from everything else. I’d been insane to consider canceling. What had I been thinking? Here, with Kevin, I could drop the act and just be myself.

  We encountered more than a few people the first hour on the Horny Toad trail, but when we took the turnoff by the sign that said Desert Loop Trail, Primitive Camping, No Fires, we left the other hikers behind. For a solid hour we passed no one and no one passed us, and that was fine with me. The farther away from the world and the sudden complications of my life in it, the better.

  “Hey,” Kevin called from behind me, “wait up.”

  I stopped by a prickly pear cactus, and he came up with long strides. There was a line of sweat down one side of his face, but that didn’t suppress the little jump my body gave at the sight of him. He looked good enough to eat in his lace-up boots, shorts, and gray T-shirt that said Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost. “I thought you said you weren’t in good shape,” he protested.

  “I’m not. Sorry, I guess I was thinking about getting away,

  and—”

  “And off you went racing, leaving me in the dust. Come on, let’s walk together.”

  Most of our hike so far had been single-file because of the trail, but here it wandered across a wide,
flat expanse that was mainly sagebrush and cactus, and side-by-side was possible. I took a swig from my Ozarka water bottle, Kevin sipped from his Camelbak, and off we went.

  “So, professor,” Kevin said, “you’ve been quiet. What’s on your mind?”

  I tucked the bottle back in my pocket. “Oh, the play. I’m worried about this boycott.”

  “If all the proposed boycotts actually happened, the whole world would have come to a screaming halt years ago. Don’t let it get you down.”

  “It’s not me. I don’t care. I never wanted this play to begin with. It’s the kids.”

  He looked at me almost quizzically, as if he were trying to figure me out. But he knew me, didn’t he? “It’s always about the kids with you, isn’t it?”

  “What? No, it isn’t.”

  “I think it is. All kids and no Tom.”

  “They deserve some consideration, don’t you think? This last round of letters, some of the kids were really upset and crying.”

  “Was Channing?”

  I was sorry that I’d mentioned it, but I wouldn’t lie to him about his daughter. “Yeah, she was. Sorry.”

  Kevin hitched up the straps of his Camelbak, settling it higher on his shoulders. “She’ll get over it. Time for her to grow up and face the real world. Not everybody will like what she wants to do or what she believes in.”

  “That’s a hard approach to take, coming from her father.”

  “I want her to be tough. The world hasn’t exactly been easy on you and me, has it? Channing’s almost old enough to be on her own. It’s about time she learned nothing’s going to be handed to her, and that the good guys don’t finish first.”

  “That’s for sure. If they did….” I kicked a rock out of my way and watched it roll through the sandy dirt. “If they did, you’d be president of some big, multinational bank somewhere.”