How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  Flip-flops took in the scene. “Really?”

  When I said yes, really, he snatched the bill of his baseball cap and twisted it forward. He ventured into the fray, the sound of his flip-flops clacking in his wake.

  The trans guy sat down in the chair beside me and told me his name was Zeus. “You were about to say something else,” he said. “Right before you quoted the Bible—you stopped. What for?” He wasn’t smiling anymore. His face had twisted into a look of curiosity. I told him I hated public speaking. “Doesn’t everyone?” he asked. Tiny pockmarks speckled his cheeks, and there was a slight gap between his two front teeth. He gave off the impression of a used-car salesman. Someone who wanted to be liked, who was prepared to convince me he should be liked no matter what else I might want to think of him. I didn’t mind. I liked to be courted for my affections. I said, “My father—he was good at it. He was a preacher.” I normally told people my father drove a truck, the line of work he fell into after he left the church. My openness startled me. I didn’t know why I had confided in Zeus more truth than I normally told most people over a long dinner.

  “Cool.” He stared right at me when he spoke. “So Bevy tells me you’re coming to the thing tomorrow.”

  “Did she?” My attendance would be penance for my poor performance tonight. Our friendship, I realized, had entered a new phase where I constantly made up for disappointing her by agreeing to one commitment after another. Maybe this was her way of getting me out of the house more. “The fun never ends,” I said. He slapped me on the knee and stood. “She says we got a lot in common.” He barged through the clot of students to give Bevy a hug. Her eyes found mine over his shoulder, and she winked, confirming what I had begun to suspect: He was the person she wanted me to meet.

  —

  A day later, I stood in front of Cinema Station with Bevy and her girlfriend, Alix, and Zeus. A building made of glass walls and neon light, Cinema Station was nestled in the downtown area amid a slew of hetero bars and glitzy chain restaurants. A city ordinance required us to remain at least six feet from the premises during our demonstrations. The four of us gathered around a stone bench exactly six feet from the automatic doors. When the doors whisked open, we could smell the buttered popcorn and hear the chatter of excited moviegoers. As people passed us, we chanted slogans—“Homophobia is the real killer!”—and brandished handmade signs that echoed similar sentiments. Every half hour we tossed handfuls of glitter in the air while Bevy stood on the stone bench and hollered more slogans into a megaphone.

  Still, we made little impression on the passersby. We were halfhearted, gloomy at the poor showing of supporters. Bevy most of all. During lulls in the crowds, she and Alix bickered. The gist of their argument was never clear, but both of them wore these adorable tuxedo shirts, making their fighting somehow funny, verging on the adorable. Zeus and I were left to make conversation with each other. Once, during a lull, Zeus shook his sign at me, and said, “Revelations.”

  “What?”

  “Revelations 3:16—last night, the verse you spit out.”

  “Lot of good it did.”

  “Maybe you should have said what you wanted to—before you edited yourself.”

  I shrugged. I told him I hadn’t known what I wanted to say. “I sort of went blank,” I said.

  “That’s a lie.” He smiled, flashing his gap, and changed the subject. “Bevy says you’re working on a book.”

  “A dissertation—it’s academic.”

  “It’s academic,” he said. “What the fuck does that even mean?”

  I admitted I didn’t know. “Not really,” I said, flinching as I remembered Flip-flops’ poor verbal skills from last night. Zeus laughed loud enough that Bevy and Alix paused in their argument and looked our way. I added, “It’s about the movies—well, I don’t really know what it’s about anymore.”

  “Is that why you’re so wound up?” He tapped his sign against mine. “I get it. I write—Bevy thinks we can help each other.” He told me he was writing a memoir about his transition from a lesbian woman from Puerto Rico to a gay man living in the great Middle West.

  “Sounds complicated,” I said.

  A group of teenagers walked up, so we shouted, mimed anger and outrage as best we could, and after they entered the building, Zeus leaned over, and whispered, “Only to those who don’t understand.”

  The abundance of streetlights washed out the stars and faded the sky purple. As the night wore on, my feet ached. I took regular breaks by sitting on the bench, but Zeus never sat down. He maintained the posture of a soldier at attention. During another lag, he lit a cigarette. American Spirit, no less. He held the cigarette to his lips as if he might flick it away at any second, the bud flaming on and off with every suck of air. I thought of Brando in On the Waterfront. Zeus’s swagger wasn’t stagey. I believed in his masculinity wholeheartedly, down to his dingy work boots and the way his eyebrows were left unkempt and fanned out from his face.

  He held the pack of cigarettes between us, and said, “Want one?” When I shook my head no, he shoved the pack into the back pocket of his Levis. He took one last drag from the one in his mouth and, exhaling smoke, said, “Bevy says you’re secretive, you know that? A big mystery man.” He dropped the butt to the gum-splattered sidewalk and stomped it out. “That you like to keep to yourself.”

  Throwing glitter had stained our hands, and his sparkled like magic as he moved them in the air while he spoke.

  “I’m just busy and live in my head.”

  He mulled this over, and during the next break, he got closer, and said in a low voice, “You’re just a tease—that’s what I think.” He tilted his head the way a dog might and put a booted foot on the patch of sidewalk between mine. He got in my face. Real close. His smoky breath made me dizzy, the smell of ovens and old men. Our conversation had taken such a swift and unexpected turn that I hadn’t any time to question it. Maybe that was the point. My cock, pressed downward against my thigh, began to thicken and jerk to the beat of my heart. The pain a kind of pleasure, too. “Are you a tease?” he asked. People were chattering nearby. Getting closer.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes. The look on his face—the look of a fox—stabbed me with longing. I wanted to say what he wanted me to, but I didn’t know what that was. Across from us, Bevy had dropped her megaphone and was saying, “Oh, shit, oh, shit,” into her cupped palms. When she removed her hands, strings of snot and blood leaked down her face. She was no stranger to these nosebleeds. They happened when she was agitated. Alix had come prepared, producing a roll of toilet paper from her bag. She waved us away when we tried to help. “Watch our stuff,” she said, and guided Bevy to the bathroom inside the theater to clean herself up. Not long after they were gone, an old couple walked by, stepping over the fallen signs, baffled by the glittered sidewalk. Once they were inside, Zeus said, “We’ll get the next group.” But we didn’t. Instead, we gathered up our belongings and piled them up by the trash can, out of the way. “Well,” I said. “This is the saddest Friday night I’ve had in a good long while.”

  He shook his head in such a way that I didn’t know if he was agreeing with me or not. “I think I need a drink,” he said. We sat on the bench with enough space between us for another person. The flirtation had cooled off as fast as it had begun, and we didn’t speak until Alix and Bevy returned. They were calling it a night, they told us. Toilet paper balled up in her nostrils, Bevy looked pale and miserable. Alix was already holding her keys. “A fucking mess,” Bevy said, and hugged me good-bye. They took the signs and the glitter and the megaphone with them when they left.

  No longer a protestor, Zeus went inside Cinema Station and rode the escalator up to the bar. I followed.

  —

  The Lost Ticket was an open-concept oasis of cushioned stools and low lighting right before you reached a hallway of doors leadi
ng to the big screens. Zeus and I were the only two in the establishment tonight, the absurdly priced well drinks scaring off the college and middle-aged patrons in equal measure. The house gin loosened up Zeus’s lips. He spoke openly about his failed love life—which I didn’t mind hearing about as long as I didn’t have to share mine.

  “Gay men,” he said, “are fickle beasts—once they learn I’m trans, it’s no-go.” He pulled his thumb across his neck in a slicing motion. “Then you get the ones who are just curious to take my pants off and see what’s there.” He thumbed away the lime on his glass, and asked, “Which one are you?” Blood rushed to my face, and he waved the question away, saying, “I kid—of course you are curious, yeah?” He placed a hand over mine, one of his fingers pressing gently into the groove of flesh between my knuckles. This is when he told me he had once been engaged to a woman. “Valeria, Valeria, Valeria,” he said, in a singsong voice. “She never cared nothing for no one but herself because she believed you have to be selfish in order to be true.”

  When I asked him if this Valeria had been his fiancée, he gave me a puzzled look. “Don’t be silly,” he told me. “Valeria was me.” His fiancée’s name was Jaylene. They met at university in Río Piedras and had similar ambitions: Both wanted to be nurses and leave Puerto Rico once they had completed their degrees. “No jobs on the island,” he said. “Much worse than the papers say.” Once on the U.S. mainland, Valeria began taking testosterone injections; she knew a doctor who sold them to her on the sly. Jaylene did not approve of the treatments because she feared they would change Valeria from the person she’d fallen in love with. “And seeing how things turned out, you could probably argue they did,” Zeus said. “But the hormones, you see, helped me become more of the person I knew I was all along.” Jaylene stuck by him during the transition. They even continued to plan the wedding; Jaylene, a confirmed lesbian, resigned herself to marrying a man. But Valeria, in the process of becoming a man, came to a realization—one neither Valeria nor Jaylene could have predicted. After a year of treatment (and countless hours of therapy), Valeria understood that he was not only a man, but a gay man. The same day he came out to Jaylene, he moved out of their apartment. He thought a clean break would be the easiest. Jaylene never spoke to him again. “I’m sure she felt betrayed,” he said. “And I don’t blame her. The danger of becoming the person you are is you run the risk of hurting the people who love the person you were.” He sipped on his drink, then added: “I took the name Zeus after I left her. It is a bold name, a strong name, yes? And you have to be both if you want to take the life that is yours.” He raised a glass. “Dios del río!”

  “Amen,” I said.

  The gin and tonic had pulled me underwater, my head tipped back and forth by a slow invisible current. Zeus glanced down at his drink, and drunk or not, I recognized the sadness on his face. The kind of low-level gloom that stays with you even when happy. I wanted to cheer him up. “You’re a good storyteller,” I said. “I can’t wait to read your book.” He said that we’re all eloquent in the telling of our own stories. “A famous writer said that; I forget who.” He removed his hand from mine. “You do sort of just let people go on, don’t you?” he said. I told him I liked to listen. His eyes narrowed. “I think I just figured out why you don’t like to talk about yourself.”

  “Oh?”

  “Too cliché.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Zeus proceeded to tell me his theory on queers and their life stories. “It’s like this: The world allows us only so many narrative trajectories that don’t end in tragedy. Our lives often conform around one or another of them.” My story, he said, was probably your typical migration to a metropolitan area. “Let me guess. You left a small town for the promise of the big city, where your identity could be fully expressed.” He’d used air quotes when he said “identity.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or sarcastic, maybe a little of both, but I let him go on because we were drinking and my brain was beginning to misfire and he was partly right in what he said. At eighteen, I couldn’t have articulated this sentiment so clearly, but the impulse to leave had been imprinted on me nonetheless. I knew (or thought I knew) that I must escape to the metropolis if I wanted any chance at happiness. Now, after living away from my home for so many years, I understood the result of leaving was perhaps more complicated than I had originally imagined.

  Zeus left for the bathroom, and when he returned, he placed a pair of tickets on the bar, and I laughed when I read the movie title. “Now hear me out,” he was saying. “I think it’s wrong to dismiss a movie we’ve never seen.”

  I told him I needed to smoke before I saw the film. “And something stronger than those damn American Spirits.” There was no time to smoke: Proud Flesh began in ten minutes. Zeus produced a tiny pillbox, and said, “But I have these.” Valium. We downed two pills apiece with club soda. I said, “This is crazy.” He took my hand and pulled me off the bar stool.

  —

  At first I couldn’t focus on the screen, or on the previews for other movies, or on the long roll of opening credits that harkened back to an earlier era of filmmaking, or even on the eerie music—which was nothing like Mother Maude’s singing, for which I was thankful, but it was still frightening. Most of my attention was on Zeus. The armrest between us remained pushed back out of our way. We kissed. And it was like burying my face into an overripe fruit: messy but sweet. We pawed at each other’s bodies, too. Our hands brave in the dark. His cupped my crotch, pressed deep into me, digging his fingers into my denim jeans, lifting me off the seat. Mine explored his body more carefully. He’d told of having his breasts removed four months ago, and I worried about his soreness. I traced his rib cage through his shirt, slowly working up to his nipples. They were as hard as pebbles. When I leaned forward to lick one through the fabric, he cried out. I pulled away, afraid I’d hurt him or that somebody had heard. But no. He put a hand on my chest and held me against my seat as his head sunk down to my lap.

  There was a lush field on the screen. Hot air steamed up from the ground. Hollywood’s version of vague countryside in Mississippi. (I’d read that the film was actually shot in Georgia for tax reasons.) Soon the camera centered on a solitary figure in the middle distance walking down a gravel road that wound into the trees. The figure was a woman—late thirties, white, wearing a pair of ratty jeans. She left the road and climbed up a hill into tall weeds. She was making her way to a watering hole. The camera showed her face in a close-up: She was searching for someone, her brows scrunched up with worry. She noticed a nearby hammock strung up between two pines. A flash of arms drew her closer, then the sound of moaning. The camera panned over a pile of clothes in the dirt, then flashed to the two bodies in the hammock, both teenage boys, nude. Though the camera revealed very little, the suggestion was the boys were doing to each other what Zeus was now doing to me.

  His head popped up. “You okay?”

  “What? Why?”

  “You’re shaking.”

  I tried to speak, but all that came out of my mouth was a sob. Zeus sat up and put his arms around me. Shh, I heard Father Drake say. Just be still. I pushed Zeus away so hard he fell off his seat. Embarrassed, I zipped up my jeans and stumbled into the lobby, my arms groping air. People gave me startled looks as I ran to the bathroom. I reached a toilet in time to empty out my stomach with several deep heaves. When Zeus appeared in the bathroom, I had relocated to the bank of electric hand dryers. I was patting my mouth with a wet paper towel. He said, “I didn’t think I was that bad at giving head.” He moved closer. “This was a bad idea. Jesus.” I told him that I couldn’t hold my liquor anymore. He put an arm on my shoulder, and I forced myself not to pull away. “You don’t have to lie,” he said. “Please don’t.”

  —

  Even though my apartment was within walking distance of Cinema Station, Zeus insisted on driving me home. Along the way, we listened to the Mountain Goat
s on his iPod and didn’t speak. He parallel parked in front of the Victorian, killed the engine, and said, “Look.”

  “My apartment’s a mess,” I told him. “So I’ll invite you up another time, okay?” He put both hands back on the steering wheel and jerked it right and left the way a child would when pretending to drive. “I don’t have to know,” he began, but paused when a large red truck cruised by, Kanye West’s manic voice blaring out the windows. “I just want to say,” he said, as the truck turned at the stop sign. “That it helps to talk about our bad days—I know, I know”—he held up his hands—“it sounds like cheese, but I got bad days, too, you know? Enough to fill up a whole fucking calendar, I got so many. But it’s like lifting—the more you do it, the more you tell it, the stronger you get. Bevy thinks you’re hurting. And just from the time I’ve spent with you, I think you’re hurting. Understand?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, man.” Then he told me I wasn’t alone. The pureness of his voice rankled me. I preferred him when he acted more aggressively. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” And I tried really hard not to sound like a bitch, but I knew I did anyhow. He got out of the car, intent on walking me to my door, the poor bastard. The night had turned brisk, so we kept our hands shoved in our pockets as we stepped over the broken pieces of concrete that hadn’t passed as a sidewalk since before either of us were born. From inside the Victorian, the Great Dane barked madly at our approach. Elementary Ed screamed for him to shut up. At the stoop, Zeus went in for another kiss, and I gave him my cheek. He frowned. “I really fucked up, huh?”

  “My breath—I smell like puke.”

  Walking back to his car, he yelled over his shoulder, “Bevy gave me your number! Expect a phone call.”