by David Leite
“Don’t you want to go out tonight after my shift?” Her tone was suggestive, vulgar even. Then more smiles and raised eyebrows. A drill of dread bore through my stomach. It was a weekend, so I had no excuse. But I made one anyway.
“Why don’t you like me?” Suddenly, she was a little girl. Her voice plaintive and bewildered. A look of hurt bloomed on her face, and it broke my heart. I said I did like her, very much. More than any girl, ever. “Really?” she asked. I nodded. I told her how I liked her eyes, and smile, and the way she always lit up when I walked in. My words tumbled out of my mouth, unplugged from any meaning, but I could see they revived her, and that was reason enough to say them.
“We’ll go out next weekend, I promise.” On my way out, I decided never to stop by again.
Then Paul called. My heart caromed in my chest when my mother yelled for me to pick up the phone in my room. I waited until I heard the thunk of the extension in the breezeway before I spoke.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“’Sup?”
“Not much. I was wondering if you wanted to go out Friday night,” he said.
Our old routine. “Sure.”
“Great. Do you know Lisa Lemaire?”
“Yes,” I answered cautiously. Lisa was a classmate of mine with crooked teeth and the corpulent red face of a newborn. “Why?”
“We’re dating. Why don’t we get together, and then we can swing by her house and pick her up?” I felt veneta, that unchecked, monsoon-like anger, rising. I wanted to scream, You’re just a skinny-ass faggot. I know that and you know that. And Lisa’s going to know that, too. But I was trapped. I couldn’t say anything about Paul to anyone or I’d implicate myself. Then I found the perfect way to get back at him.
“Well, let’s make it a double date. I’ll pick up my girlfriend.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. More was said in those few dead seconds than in all of our conversations. Without any words he expressed his hurt and pain, how he missed and wanted me, his regret over the mistake he’d made, and that, yes, he was like me. Exactly like me, and no girl, especially Lisa Lemaire, could change that.
“Um, yeah, bring her along” was what he actually said.
When I picked him up, he slipped into the front seat smelling of Joˉvan Musk, his favorite cologne. His expression was so familiar, as if I had seen it just days before. And then I understood: It was my girl’s expression: sly, sexy, suggestive. And this time it wasn’t my stomach but another part of me that reacted. He put his feet up on the dashboard, as he always did, and being with him felt as it always had. Nothing was different. But when I pulled up to Lisa’s house, it was as if a part of him, the part only I knew, had folded up neatly, like an old, worn letter, and been tucked away. He jumped out and opened the back door for her, and suddenly I was a chauffeur.
“Hi, Lisa.”
“Hey, Dave!” That was all I got the whole way. I had to watch them, tongues plunging into each other’s mouths, every time I looked into the rearview mirror. I didn’t exist until I picked up my McDonald’s vixen. She was far prettier than Lisa and, even I had to admit, sexier. Lisa didn’t seem to notice—she was too focused on Paul—but he did. And I liked it. As I drove, I caught him looking at me in the mirror while his mouth twisted toward Lisa’s.
That night there was no dinner, no conversation. Paul instructed me to drive out to a secluded spot by Lee’s River, far from any streetlights. And there, he and Lisa sank down in the seat. The smack of wet lips, hissing whispers, muffled giggles. I wondered how he could go at Lisa with such gusto, especially in front of us. It was almost like he was trying to prove something. To himself, perhaps, because I had proof to the contrary.
I, on the other hand, felt no compunction to prove anything. I wanted nothing more than a friendly chat with my date, but, as I expected, she had other ideas. When she slid over to kiss me, I was appalled to find her thick, grape-flavored stump of a tongue pounding its way into my mouth like a jackhammer. I knew what French kissing was but had never experienced it. Paul had refused to kiss, so up to and especially including that moment, I hadn’t kissed anyone romantically. Yet I endured, pounding right back, systematically, mechanically, emphatically, waiting for it to end.
When it was over, I dropped off my date first, making a mental note to frequent Burger King from now on. Next was Lisa. She finally unlatched herself from Paul and got out. On her way to her front door, she kept twirling back, bending over to wave goodbye to Paul, who was now in the front seat with me. When she was finally inside, I pulled out and drove him home.
“You want to stay over?” he said, eyes straight ahead, when I turned into his driveway. I hesitated and leaned over, trying to read the expression on his face. “Look,” he finally turned to me. “I’m just saying come in—that’s all. Or not. It’s up to you.”
“Sure.” Following him up the stairs, I had to hold myself back from grabbing his ass—as I had done countless times before.
In his room, he stripped down to his underwear. I followed his lead and climbed over him to get to my side, nearest the wall. He grabbed me and pulled me on top of him. This time there was no need for lip gloss. There was something animal-like, intense about him. Aggressive, even. This was different from before. A thought spiraled up into consciousness: He’s jealous. He didn’t like that I was with someone else, which is what had fueled his backseat bravado. The pleasure I took in his being hurt was immense. No longer was I on the passive, receptive end of this. No longer was I the person who had to follow his lead. By mimicking Paul and going on that date, I’d succeeded in snatching my own independence, which made him all the more interested in me.
Ironically, when school started a few weeks later, Lisa and I had the same physics class, and when she saw me sitting at one of the back tables, she waved furiously and dragged over a stool while juggling a stack of books in her arms. As Mr. Smith droned, she wrote “Mr. and Mrs. Paul Estrela” and “Mrs. Lisa Estrela” with hearts all around it in the margins of her notebook. I was disgusted, but said nothing.
When Mr. Smith was facing the chalkboard, she whispered, “I think he’s wicked sexy,” a half–question mark in her voice, and then she paused, making it seem like I was supposed to answer.
“Mr. Smith?”
“No, silly. Paul.”
I rolled my eyes. Does she suspect something? Is she trying to trip me up? I’ve often wondered what she would have thought had she known that while Paul got to first base with her in the backseat of my car, he and I were winning the pennant in his bed. (I finally understood what all that baseball talk was about.)
Over the next month or so, Paul drifted away. No explanation, no last talk in the car, his sneakers scuffing my dashboard. He split with Lisa, too, which made me feel better. I could pretend he hadn’t left me; he’d just left. As if he’d moved or died. But without him as proof, as confirmation that what I felt was identical to, and as natural as, what those other guys felt for girls, I backpedaled. Shame and self-hatred seeped back in, like blood staining a handkerchief.
I had only one picture of Paul, a Kodachrome slide taken by his sister of us on the hood of my car, saturated with light and color. Him beaming, his head haloed by hair. Me to his right, chunky in a ghastly green shirt, my face blooming with acne. So many times I tried to summon that picture, to say, Look, it’s true. It happened. But the slide was small, no bigger than my thumb, and I only saw us projected large and sweet-faced once, on the wall of St. Sebastian’s Fellowship. It was while driving alone on long stretches of highway that I could conjure him the easiest. It was never that picture of us. Just parts of him: the pulsing divot at the base of his neck, the curve of his thigh, his tan growing lighter, his hair thinner and softer, until at his hips there was nothing but white, smooth warmth. And I’d feel myself grow and press against the crease of my pants. When he was most vivid, I would substitute an image of my McDonald’s vixen, wanting to overlay form on fee
ling. It never worked. I was jarred out of it, aware again of the hum of the road, of who I really was.
“Please, God, take this away from me,” I said, suddenly fervently religious. “I swear that if you do, I’ll be a wonderful husband and father.” I swiped at my face with the crook of my elbow, but no sooner had I done that than tears blurred the road again. I pulled onto the shoulder and laid my head against the headrest, staccato bursts of crying dying out. I closed my eyes and whispered, “Please, I can’t be like this.”
Jesus is sitting across a table from me. One leg is swung over the other, his big sandaled foot absentmindedly bouncing at the end of his ankle. He’s blond and has eyes as blue as lapis. A surfer dude.
“You’re not supposed to be blond,” I say to him.
“You make me over in your own image,” he says. “Haven’t you always had a thing for blond guys?”
I’m taken aback. “That’s not very Jesus-like.”
“What can I say, I’m your creation.” He smiles. “So, you have a little issue with your sexuality, huh?”
“You could say that.” I’m unnerved by his candor.
Suddenly, game-show music fills the room, and two big red buttons appear on the table between us. One is labeled “HETERO,” the other “HOMO.” Jesus tells me, with a smile more out of Teen Beat than my catechism book, that whatever button I press, I’ll be able to live that lifestyle without regret or guilt.
I take a deep breath and contemplate the “HOMO” button. I see myself toddling down a street in New York City, in a pair of red high-heeled shoes and black fishnet stockings. I lean over and see a hole in the stockings, and I curse while I poke at it. I weave over to the front steps of a church, drunk, which is curious because I don’t really drink. A handsome man smiles at me, and I call him over, but he just laughs and walks on. I try to change the scenario, imagining different possibilities—entertaining in a penthouse high in the sky; walking down a sweet-smelling autumn road with a lover; being a guest on a 60 Minutes segment about successful gay men of the seventies—but I always come back to bad drag, alcoholism, and rejection.
“No,” I say. “I’m not going to make this decision. You are.”
Without checking my mirrors, I jammed the gas pedal and wrenched the steering wheel to the left, bucking the car into traffic. Kill me now or let me become who I am, but it’s not my decision. My car seamlessly zippered into rush-hour traffic. I took that as an omen that things would sort themselves out on their own.
14
DAVID LEITE SUPERSTAR
Only two things were certain about college: I was going, and I’d pursue something arty. Everything else was an accident.
Sometime that autumn, the door to our senior art class opened, and a guy I barely remembered from the previous year’s graduating class walked in. Our teacher, Peggy Grimes, looked up, her giant hippie glasses resting on the tip of her nose, and broke out in a huge grin. They whispered together for a long time at the front of the room, until she dragged over a gray stool splattered with paint and caked with pottery clay.
“Hey, guys,” she said, wiping her hands on her filthy hip-hugger bell-bottoms. “Eyes up front, please.” She introduced the guy, whose name I forget, saying he was going to talk to us about art school. I looked up from my work—a pen-and-ink drawing of some still-life in the corner with bowls and bottles and cloth that Peggy would change every so often in the name of art.
The guy still sported a head of greasy hair, his bangs little squiggled arms that seemed to hug his forehead like a life preserver. He explained that he was now a freshman at Rochester Institute of Technology, and that his major was communication design, “CD for short.” He showed us his portfolio, of which I remember nothing, and described his days in class, of which I likewise remember nothing. But it was this forgettable guy with an unremarkable portfolio who cocked my life in a new and unexpected direction.
That night as I was rushing out to rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet, I announced with some fanfare to my parents that I was going to Rochester Institute of Technology and I was going to “study CD.”
“What’s that?” my father asked. My mother, who was standing at the sink, had the dishrag already clenched in her fist, in case she needed it.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, in a patronizing way that made it clear they weren’t part of the in art crowd. “Communication design.”
“And exactly what’s that?” she asked, knuckles glowing yellow.
How I relished that moment. I paused for maximum effect and said, “You would know it as ‘commercial art.’” I watched as my mother’s fist relaxed, and my father nodded a relieved smile.
We’d been locked in a cage match for almost a year over my future. Since I was a kid I’d loved art, a passion I got from my mother. I had stood by her side night after night as she painted that big plywood Santa Claus that stood in our front yard every December, and leaned over the snack bar to watch as she drew leprechauns, witches, and Easter bunnies. My mother was fond of holidays. It was because of her that I’d asked for private art lessons, which I took for several years. So naturally we all assumed I’d become some sort of artist, although my father had drawn the line at fine arts. “No money in that,” he said over the whining of his table saw in the garage one afternoon.
In my early teens, my interest had drifted to photography. I begged them for a thirty-five-millimeter camera, which, after months of torture as my mother sighed melodramatically over their supposedly dwindling bank account, I got for Christmas. I was churning with so much excitement that in the middle of church service, I banged through the doors and barfed up my breakfast over the railing, careful to miss the life-size Nativity. When I was a junior and informed them of my true calling—photojournalism—my father just shook his head. “Not practical, Son. I thought you wanted to be an artist?”
“And that’s practical?” I shouted. I knew he had said it because he was friendly with a few commercial artists at the grocery chain where he now worked as a maintenance man, and they were able to support families. Keeping snotty-faced rug rats clothed and fed equaled “practical” to my father.
He pounded his fist on the snack bar, making the plates jump. “Dammit!” The junkyard dog was back.
“Manny!” my mother bleated.
“Sorry, sweetheart.” He lowered his voice and looked at me. “Son—you’ll be the first in our family ever to go to college, and your mother and me are not going to pay for something you can’t make a living at.”
For months I pleaded my case. When that didn’t work, and photography was a nonstarter, I tried to figure out what kind of art I wanted to study: fashion (I could still draw one hell of a kick-ass dress and sexy pumps), illustration, or animation. But the answer finally came in the form of a ratty teenager with a dust mote of talent. So what if I wasn’t exactly crazy about my intended major? I was certainly hep to the idea of getting out of Swansea and being on my own some eight hours away by car.
I grabbed my script for Romeo and Juliet and kissed my parents goodbye. “Ma banse, Dad banse.”
“God bless you,” they said.
“Son,” my father said, “we’re happy for you.”
“I know, Daddy.”
As I drove to rehearsal, I knew there was no way in hell I could ever tell them that I could sense my interest—that unfaithful bastard—wandering yet again, and that this time it was sidling up to the most seductive and forbidden of all the arts: acting.
It wooed me for the first time in the spring of my junior year, when I was cast as a waving party guest in The Sound of Music, and continued unstintingly in senior year during Romeo and Juliet, in which I played the pugnacious Lord Capulet. (People marveled at my ability to cry on cue. What they didn’t know was I had a small Baggie filled with diced onions that I squeezed in my eyes every night before keening over the body of my dead daughter.)
But it was during the spring show, Carnival!, in which I played the magician Marco the Magnificent, that I experi
enced that electric, addictive high of performing. In a number titled “It Was Always You,” I helped my assistant and on-again, off-again paramour, Rosemary, into a trick box, with just her head poking out. While I crooned about how she was always my true love, I plunged swords through the box—taking out my aggression by jabbing along to the rhythm of the song. At the end of the number, I gingerly slid a sword straight down in front of her face and pulled out a note that in a previous scene she had tidily tucked into her cleavage. As I held that sword and skewered note triumphantly over my head, the auditorium erupted. Cameras flashed. I could see the jocks pumping the air full of fists, classmates laughing and catcalling, and, somewhere in the middle of the center section, my parents beaming. I was hurtled back to those worn side steps on Brownell Street, where I was always waiting to be discovered, to be found.
As I stand there, arms still raised, someone walks out from the wings and tucks up behind me. “Hello, gorgeous.” The voice is unmistakable. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”
I nod, speechless.
“It’s what I felt every night in Funny Girl,” says Barbra Streisand. She walks to the lip of the stage, the lights setting her A Star Is Born Afro on fire. She cups her hands over her eyes and nudges her chin to the audience. “They don’t know it yet, but you’re going to be famous. Huge!” She looks back to see how her pronouncement has landed. I just nod again. “Ya know, for a big mouth, you don’t have much to say, do you?” It’s her Fanny Brice cadence—staccato-fast and drenched in Brooklyn.
I shake my head, agog.
“Well, take it in, because all this—” She sweeps her arm out across the screaming auditorium. “It’s fickle.”
I understood in that moment that what I wanted—had wanted for all those years—was to be acknowledged, to be seen. With an ice-water slap of clarity, I knew I was leaving behind any aspirations of a career in art. I was going to be an actor. My only problem? By that time, I’d been accepted to RIT, and my first term’s tuition and room and board had been handily paid by bank check—my parents didn’t believe in personal checking accounts—with “Jesus Loves You, Bursar” written in the memo field.
