All Over Him

by Ronald L Donaghe

  He was really stoned by then, and a little drunk, too. But he smiled and moved into my arms and plastered himself against my body. It was the closest I had been to another guy besides Uncle Sean since Lance and I had kissed each other good-bye in San Francisco. I even pulled Charlie’s head down on my shoulder, so he couldn’t see the tears in my eyes, and I thought of Lance and pretended that the body against me was his.

  Chapter Four:

  Mama’s House

  As I said, Uncle Sean and I usually have Sunday dinner at Mama’s house there in Dripping Springs. It seems like each week she has added something new to the house, either a piece of furniture or some bush or plant in the yard. Or she has discovered something new about the house, itself, and shows me and Uncle Sean. It is an old house built of wood frame and a stone exterior, in a turn-of-the-century style that Mama said was how a lot of the houses in the hill country were built. The house has high peaked roofs, with several hips and gables, and the face of each hip has attic windows. Uncle Sean had found the house for her when we were all getting ready to move to Texas. He told Mama that it reminded him of the house where they had lived in Louisiana with their family, though Mama was already married by the time Uncle Sean was old enough to walk. She loved it, though, when she saw this house. And she likes Dripping Springs because it’s just a hair bigger than Animas. Her property is even away from the town of Dripping Springs, so that it’s in the country, but not nearly as isolated as our farm was. The house sits on nearly forty acres, and Barton Creek runs through part of it. Trinket loves it because, unlike Daddy, Mama has allowed her to have a horse. Rita likes it, too, and she has actually turned into an outdoors girl in a short time. She is attending the Dripping Springs High School and will graduate in May.

  So when we show up, the house is filled with laughter and all their excited voices, each trying to tell me or Uncle Sean something new. During those visits, Uncle Sean’s sadness seems to dissipate, and for a time he just looks beautiful. I’m happy, too, and by the time we leave, my cheeks actually hurt from grinning so much.

  The most startling change in the move out here was in Mama herself. If I didn’t know her age, I’d say she looks ten years younger than her fifty-something years. It’s as if the thirty years on the farm in New Mexico had turned her into an old woman; while here, she seems to have bloomed again. She’s even colored the gray out of her hair, so that it’s now a kind of reddish brown, and with the touch of makeup she’s begun to use, her green eyes sparkle. She has always been thin (mainly because I think she smokes too much in lieu of eating sometimes), but she doesn’t seem as dragged out tired, the way she used to on the farm. I think she’s less worried about things here than she was there. And it’s no wonder. Back home, she had to deal with Rita’s wild period of dating unsavory boys, Daddy’s illness, and the shock I gave her when I found Lance.

  I’d like to think that she has a lot less to worry about these days, and maybe it’s even the moisture in the air, here, and less scorching sunlight, because even her skin seems to be less wrinkled. There’s a true radiance around her, now, and I think I’ll call it happiness. She sure deserves to be happy.

  Rita and I even got off to the side one time and talked about how we’d feel if Mama remarried.

  “You ought’a mention it to her,” I told Rita. “Don’t you think she probably gets lonely sleeping by herself? You and even Trinket aren’t going to be around much longer, and then what’ll Mama do?”

  Rita agreed with me. We decided that we wouldn’t care if she found a new husband. Then we laughed until our stomachs hurt, because neither of us had the guts to mention it to her.

  In thinking about Rita, I also have to mention that she’s changed a bit from our last days on the farm. I thought she’d up and leave the way our two oldest sisters, Marsha and Julianne, did right out of high school. I thought sure that as soon as she graduated, she’d want to leave and have some kind of adventure. But she has settled in and is looking at various schools and interests. She has actually seemed to lose that frantic need to date. Maybe her experience with Rick Zumwalt, and the way he beat her that one time, changed her outlook. She’s a blonde, like me, and even though she’s a knockout in makeup (I have to admit), she hardly ever wears it the way she did. So as we were talking about Mama and how we both thought Mama should one day remarry, I wondered about Rita. But that day, I didn’t ask her much about herself. I just enjoyed the way she seems to have settled down and how she has taken an interest in being at home for a while.

  Although the house is made of stone, it’s light and cheerful. The living room and the two bedrooms on the lower floor all have fireplaces, while Trinket’s room, upstairs, has a floor grate that lets in the heat from below. Lance would have been flattered to see that his paintings of Mama and Rita, which he’d given them on Christmas in 1972, were hanging on the walls in the living room, each above a wall table, where Mama keeps pretty vases and knick-knacks she’s bought at a crafts shop in Dripping Springs. She has decided against curtains in the living room, to show off the French windows on either side of the front door. She bought a matching sofa and loveseat, and a bentwood rocker, and a hook rug of rich browns and orange to fill up the center of the room. She keeps the hardwood floors gleaming.

  The kitchen is also the dining room, and in a way it reminds me of the kitchen back home. And just like back home, the kitchen is where everyone lives most of the time. So when Uncle Sean and I arrive, usually around eleven o’clock, we go immediately to the kitchen and sit at the table. Mama has begun dressing up for our family get-togethers, even putting on a little makeup. She either serves roast and mashed potatoes or fried chicken and mashed potatoes with different kinds of vegetables for each meal. She raves about the farmer’s market, here, and she has put in a vegetable garden now that the weather has warmed up.

  Everything would have been perfect in our new lives here—Mama’s and the girls’ in Dripping Springs and mine and Uncle Sean’s in our apartment in Austin. Except Lance is not with us. So at times, in the middle of laughing or listening to Mama’s latest discovery about the house, like finding she had a root cellar, or discovering post cards up in one of the attic rooms from many years ago, I suddenly feel sad thinking about Lance. Sometimes, I slip off into the living room and give him a call, hoping to catch him in the apartment house at the art college.

  “I can’t wait until you see Mama’s house, Lance,” I told him during one of those calls, resisting the temptation to ask him to come out for the summer, knowing that he would be taking on art projects to help keep up his bank account.

  “Mama sent me some snapshots,” he told me, “and I’ve tried to imagine how all the pieces fit together. So you draw me the floor plan. Maybe I could do a painting of ‘Frisco’s cityscape. Do you think it’d fit into the décor?”

  So Lance shares in the family vicariously, and after we’ve made small talk, we sometimes share a good cry with each other, and describe how we are each hugging ourselves, pretending we’re together, and cry some more. Then I hang up, so I won’t run up Mama’s bill too much and, that night, I pour my heart out in a letter to him, but keep my fears about him being out there to myself, trying to always sound upbeat.

  The other great thing about Mama’s house are the rest of the buildings and the land itself. There is an honest-to-goodness red barn, though much smaller than the one back home, with a cozy stall for Trinket’s horse and a space large enough to park two cars. The driveway from the house to the barn is made out of stone, so old and worn down that the tops of the stone are rounded and nestled into the reddish dirt. One part of the property is filled with oaks and trails that run along the creek bank, where Trinket and I walk and gather wild flowers or sit and talk next to the running waters of the creek. Another part of the property opens up with meadows of Savannah grasses, more wild flowers, and vistas of the rolling away hills, where Trinket rides her horse. And still another part of the property falls toward the shallow valley where we can se
e some of the town of Dripping Springs a few miles away.

  The good part about all this is that Mama had plenty of money to purchase the entire property outright, and still had a good amount of money left over from the sale of our farm. She had given each of us several thousand dollars apiece, had put money into funds for Rita and Trinket, and put most of the rest of the money into savings. In a way, Daddy’s hard work has provided for Mama after his death, because he had been careful and tight with expenses on the farm. Now, Mama can live a comfortable life with a few luxuries, too. Only Mama has decided that she needs to work, though I really think it’s part of her recent budding into a ‘younger’ woman. She works at a greenhouse three days a week, where she can get fresh flowers for the table for our Sunday dinners.

  We all pitch in with the dishes and cleaning up after dinner is over, then we sit in the living room and visit, catching up on news. When I knew we were about to leave the farm in Hachita, and I stood in the kitchen, there, looking around, feeling sad as my old life was about to disappear, I couldn’t have hoped for a better life for Mama and the girls than they now have.

  Only two problems still lay heavy on my heart. One of them is missing Lance and hoping that we will remain true to each other and will one day be back together. The other is how to help Uncle Sean out of what seems like his long emotional illness. After all these years, he still misses his one true love—Theodore Seabrook—whom he had only known for a few weeks before he was killed by ‘friendly fire’ in Vietnam. Uncle Sean finished college and now has a good job near Austin in Georgetown; and yet, I often see the ghost of his ‘Teddy’ haunting him.

  That his sadness lifts a little when we go to Mama’s house on Sundays for her home-cooked meals, is like the sun occasionally breaking through the clouds on an otherwise stormy day full of rain.

  * * *

  There are so many thoughts I’d like to put down in this journal, now that I’m back to writing in it regularly. So far, I’ve been trying to get caught up, and I’ve been jumping back and forth between what it was like when I first got here in January of this year and how I feel now, finally feeling settled in. But all of it, including writing in this journal, has been about starting over without Lance in my life. If I were religious, I’d pray that in the future Lance and I will get back together; but for now I can only hope we will. Even though I sometimes think I’m becoming an adult, I still have a kid’s sense of time, because two years without Lance seems as if it will be forever. That’s what he and I have decided will be the extent of our separation, since that’s how long his art program lasts. But in an adult’s sense of time, it seems as if the year and a half we lived together on the farm in Hachita lasted only an instant.

  In a way that frightens me the most, I suppose, because the two years he will be in San Francisco will be longer than the time we were together. He had a sparkle in his eyes when we moved him to San Francisco. I could tell that it appealed to him. And now that he’s been there for these several months, he has been embraced by the city and the men there. His extra-curricular art projects have been successful just as Uncle Sean predicted.

  For the first time in his life, Lance is not being abused by someone or living every day with dread that someone’s going to beat him up or otherwise make him miserable. He lived in hell as a child and young teen with his stepfather, who used him as a punching bag. But even during the time he and I were together, I couldn’t protect him. I recall that night when he almost got castrated in the girls’ locker room at the football field. I still break out into a sweat thinking how close he came, recalling the blood running down his legs when I found him, and discovering the slice that had been made in the skin behind his ball sac. It turned out to be a superficial cut, but the fact that someone was actually going to sever his balls with a knife never left me completely. To this day I don’t think he knows how close he came, because I just never could tell him.

  But now he’s living in a place where he doesn’t have to worry about being gay. It’s San Francisco, after all. He lives in Mecca. He can practically go all day without running into a straight person. He can shop in gay grocery stores, eat at gay cafes. He’s got gay admirers creaming in their pants, and he’s even becoming famous. He is starting over, remaking himself without me in his life there in the city. He’s got art and culture and stimulation of his mind and spirit, and it’s a wonder to me how he ever thinks seriously about leaving all that behind to be with me again in our little ‘marriage.’

  Yet he says that’s what he wants.

  I’m living in a kind of neat place, too. Austin has dazzled the farm boy from nowhere. Every day of this past semester has stretched my mind. Even the required courses have intrigued me. My history class blew me away, and so did biology. All of my freshman courses are like repeating high school, but in greater depth at a quicker pace.

  Even more intense has been my job in the geology department. Going to work there was like landing on the moon. I thought it would be kind of interesting to be a lab assistant and to find out about all the different kinds of rocks there are. I’m laughing at myself as I write this. The Department of Geological Sciences at UT covers subjects from carbon dating rocks to studying the great tectonic plates of the planet, from marine geology to paleontology. It’s a world within itself, and worlds within worlds. And that’s only the beginning.

  Austin is like a Mecca, too, at least to someone like me—coming from nowhere in the desert where a handful of people dredge out a living by working themselves to death and early old age like Daddy did—and coming to a city where there are so many gay men and women. My eyes have been opened and my mouth hangs open at the intensity of life here.

  Yet I feel just as strongly as Lance does about getting back together, because I would give up everything to rejoin him. I’m glad I got us rings. They’re like talismans that link us together over the distance, like Ted Seabrook’s dog tags are for Uncle Sean. I’ve noticed he keeps them by his bedside next to the photograph of him and Ted—the same photograph I first saw in his room at the farm five years ago when he came to live with us.

  And so I wonder how things will turn out for all of us. I have much less to worry about with Mama and the girls at home in Dripping Springs and apparently loving it. For us guys, though, things are still a little unsettled. I need Lance, Uncle Sean needs a mate so he can get over Teddy, and Lance needs to finish his schooling and to come home to me, but just as important, home to Mama’s house.

  Chapter Five:

  The Parade

  The semester was grinding to a halt, and although I was tired of studying and worrying over grades, the GPA group was going strong. We had been meeting regularly—us and other Austin-wide gay and lesbian groups, trying to plan for the first-ever gay pride parade in Austin. It was wearing me out, but I was committed to the idea of marching in it, though I wasn’t all that keen on the politics. I understood that the idea of a parade and even gay ‘pride’ itself had come about because of the Stonewall Inn riots of June 1969, but that whole thing was just a vague notion to me, one that I could only imagine as some amorphous event. In a way it was neat that it had happened in 1969, because that was the first year I had realized my own homosexuality. Of course, back then I had no idea it was called that, and it would be quite a while before I had a clear notion that that’s what I was. Still, as we met in our room over the drug store as June approached, I could feel the anticipation for the parade rising in all the guys I hung around with. I remembered that during the first meeting, some of the guys were reluctant even to put their phone numbers down on a list or to use their real names; and yet, as this first gay pride parade approached, we bolstered each other.

  We were going to be ‘out’ in the streets, and the whole city of Austin (if it cared) could come get a look at us.

  I wasn’t sure about it at all—not that I was afraid. After all I had come out to the students in my English class and had weathered the hysterical attacks against me from some of the straight g
uys. But Charlie was excited enough for both of us.

  “You ought’a go in cowboy drag, Will. You’d drive the crowd nuts!”

  “I’m not a cowboy.”

  “Okay...farmer, then. Just wear your boots and hat and jeans, and one of those wild shirts you wore when you first came to school.”

  “I don’t have any wild shirts.”

  “Yes you do. Those cowboy cut, pearl snap, long-sleeved, Roy Roger shirts.”

  “Roy Rogers?” I was playing with him. I knew exactly what he meant, but it was secretly thrilling to see how cute he was when he was excited.

  “Or better yet, go shirtless!”

  “And who are you going to dress up as?”

  And so we planned for the parade, or march, or whatever it was.

  I even kept my English instructor, Troy, caught up on our plans, too. We had become rather friendly over the course of the semester.

  “But I won’t be writing a theme about it,” I told him as we met for coffee one last time in Union South before the semester ended.

  “Because the parade’s in June, right?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, and I do think I’ve earned that ‘A’ without it, haven’t I?”

  He smiled back. He looked wistful. Even with the turn toward hotter days, he still wore a turtleneck shirt and a sports jacket. He was still as thin and pale looking as ever. “You have, Will. I haven’t taught all that many students, you understand? But you are the best student I’ve ever had. I’m going to miss you. Even if you weren’t gay and hadn’t livened up my classes, you’d still be the best.”