Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  “I’m going,” he said to his brother.

  “You’re wearing that?”

  Daniel was at once embarrassed by his brother’s attentiveness to his wardrobe and touched by his interest. Obviously Pete was too stoned to be sincere, but on the other hand he often turned surly-sarcastic when high, like the time he stumbled in from some party wrecked out of his gourd and Daniel had all these friends over and he invited Pete to watch James Taylor on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and Pete treated them all like they were hopeless squares for liking James Taylor.

  “Not like I have a choice.”

  “You threw up in that shirt, remember?”

  “Either this or this.”

  “Can I ask you a question about, um, that particular shirt? I mean, now that we’re on the subject and all.”

  Here it comes, thought Daniel: The end of their truce. The return of my surly, judgmental little brother.

  “I know what you’re going to ask. You want to know why I wear it.”

  “I don’t know man, to me it seems …”

  “I think it’s funny.”

  Pete shook his head. “Yeah, well. I don’t really get the joke.”

  “Of course Virginia isn’t for lovers. Of course it’s ridiculous for some state to go around claiming such a thing. But it’s also kind of wonderful, too.”

  “So do you wear it because it’s ridiculous or because it’s kind of wonderful?”

  There was a silence while Daniel considered the question with much more gravity than it was due. He thought of the one hand, the other hand. He thought of the torture of making false claims to the world, and of how this T-shirt, with its extravagantly happy message, meant something else to him—the worn feel of its stretched, soft cotton, the sloppiness of it compared to the usual buttoned-down Oxford or striped rugby shirt. Its charm, to him, had nothing to do with what it proclaimed. Therefore, he was wrong to think he was wearing it ironically. Or literally. He was wearing it because he liked the feel of it against his skin, a feeling which made him long to feel comfortable inside his body.

  “I wear it because it’s comfortable,” he said, a little frustrated that he could not explain himself to Pete, since they seemed so close now.

  “I can dig that,” said Pete, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wad of bills. “Be good.”

  “No way.”

  “Then be good at it,” said his little brother.

  Daniel thought of telling him not to wait up, that he would be gone awhile, but he did not want Pete to worry. He knew why Pete was here, why he had boarded that train behind him in Charlottesville: because he was scared. He’d never been away on his own; despite his affected cool he was a small-town boy. No, Daniel would be better off not alluding to the chance that he might find what he was after and come strolling in tomorrow afternoon, after a champagne brunch at some swanky restaurant where he and his new friend would lounge at a sidewalk table, the city and all its possibilities churning around him.

  Outside the city thrummed with traffic at an hour when the only people out in Trent would be the police. At a newstand Daniel picked up a copy of a free local paper he’d noticed on the bar earlier that afternoon, in the back of which was listed the places he was looking for. With some of the Galaxy money he hailed his first-ever cab, thinking as he waved his hand slightly that he was hailing it. “Hail Caesar,” he said and laughed as he slid into the crinkly vinyl of the back seat and gave the address to the driver and immediately fell into a pocket of bottomless gloom and fear, remembering what he’d done and how he had let everyone down. He remembered his father once pulling him aside and saying, Look, I know you and Pete have gone your separate ways, but Pete needs you, he really respects you, and he’s fallen in with some boys who, frankly, I would call them hoodlums, and Daniel smirked in a way that let his father know he was not interested in what was expected of him.

  Don’t you think you have a certain responsibility to take care of him? his father had said. If not, what’s the point of family?

  “Here we are,” said the driver. He named his fare, looked at Daniel with disgust. Daniel was glad to be distracted from thoughts of the meaning of family. He counted out the cash, slid out onto the street.

  Inside was all glowing lights. Strobes, twinkling prisms, the planets. Math and shit, Daniel chanted, smiling as he nudged his way through the crowd, which was 95 percent male and swaying to David Bowie’s “Fame.” There were three levels, a huge dance floor crowded with sweating, shirtless men in jeans and some in bikini briefs and one in a jockstrap, a black muscled god in nothing at all.

  Daniel felt his body grow warm. He threaded his way to the bar for a drink and caught the eyes of every man who looked his way. What he imagined with a sudden piercing pride as he crossed the bar was his little brother’s blessing, but he did not hold this thought for long as suddenly a slim, preppy, blond guy was beside him and after yelling at each other over the thumping bass the blond guy asked him if he wanted to dance, and then he was dancing so glad for the pot, which erased any self-consciousness he might have felt and allowed him to move with a fluidity unavailable to him when straight and lead him, this pot for which he had his little brother to thank, to a couch in the corner where the blond preppy guy whose name he did not even catch sidled close.

  While Pete read a Penthouse letter involving nurses who revived the victims of fender benders with their tongues.

  He had his pants off halfway through the first letter and had come into a handtowel twice by the time he finished it.

  And afterwards he lay there spent, imagining what he would say to his brother when he showed up later.

  Well? he’d say when Daniel walked cocky and somehow altered through the door, and his brother would say, Fuck you, none of your beeswax. And after a silence, passing a joint back and forth, Pete would ask, When did you knows and Daniel would say, Know what? even though he knew perfectly well. Pete would say, You know what.

  Forever, I’ve known it forever.

  And Pete said out loud now to his brother who was not there, “You can’t give up on school because of this, we got to go back, we’ll just tell the truth. Fuck Lee Tysinger, he deserves to go to jail for this, they’ll understand, we’ll just tell them we were scared of him.” I’m not scared of him I’m scared of me that’s who I’m scared of, Daniel answered, and Pete would feel queasy because he was scared, too, of his brother and of himself, and he said, because he was scared, “You can’t give up.”

  He imagined his brother’s voice growing high-pitched, bitter. Fuck it, let them have it, Daniel might say. You have no idea what I had to go through to get their stupid scholarship. Sit on that bench night after night and after every practice, hear idiots like your buddy Lee whisper fag jokes behind my back and the whole time he’s the one getting blown by Brandon.

  Pete said to the empty room, the slightly mussed bed next to his, the Penthouse open to a pictorial of a couple exploring each other in the overgrown gardens of some Southern California mansion, “So we’ll turn him in and they’ll send him off for life. That doesn’t mean you can’t get that scholarship still, you’ve worked your ass off.”

  You don’t get it, little brother. He was back, thanks to Pete, who had wished him back, retrieved him from the vast city night. All those times he’d rolled his eyes and sneered his brother’s way erased now by this overwhelming desire to have him back. That scholarship isn’t for people like me, said Daniel, and Pete said, “Bullshit, Danny, people like you are who the thing is for,” and Daniel laughed and said, Fags make good students, and Pete, because he was scared said, “Some of the smartest people in history were queer,” and Daniel said, What about you, you’re smart and you’re not queer, and Pete said, “I ain’t that smart, I’m a fuckup,” and Daniel said, Why is it not okay for me to give up but fine for you to waste your life? and Pete said, “Because, man, I already fucking blew it,” and Daniel said, Bullshit you’re only seventeen.

  Credits were rolling b
y the time Pete finished his conversation with Daniel in his head and returned to the empty room and the movie. The eleven o’clock news flashed on the screen, brash and dramatic. As some slick-haired weatherman charted a cold front on the screen, Pete drifted off to sleep in the blue buzz of the TV, went down thinking of lusty nurses but woke terrified from a dream in which he was hanging with a loose fist from the runner of a helicopter high above our nation’s capital. Sweat-soaked, terrified to be alone, he looked at the clock. 3:32. Where the hell was he? Pete lay in until the clock flashed 4:00 and finally he rose and struggled into his jeans and tossed the soiled handtowel into a trash can and rolled a joint and rode the elevator down to the lobby and headed for that bar they visited earlier.

  He remembered it being located on the same street as the hotel, only six or seven blocks east, and was thrilled to find it exactly where he thought.

  But it was closed. Pete rattled the door, rapped on the glass. Stood frozen there as if someone would hear and come running, as if someone cared that he needed his brother now. He did not want to go back to the hotel room. The freedom he’d first felt after checking in and flipping through all the channels and switching on the heat for the hell of it and even jumping childishly on the bed lasted only until Daniel left, when the night-long city noises floated up from the street and his brother did not call and did not come home.

  He decided to wait there, by the bar, for Daniel. His brother would return there and the two of them could walk home together. Meanwhile, it seemed time to get high, and he retreated into an alley alongside the bar, pushed himself deep into shadows so that he could see the street but not be seen by passersby A street sweeper inched by as he sucked on the spliff, and he fixated on the brushes polishing the filthy pavement, sending clouds of debris and dust up the alley in a slow-motion billow.

  When he was down to burned paper and stem, Pete flicked the roach and took up his perch by the door of the bar. Any minute now his brother would bounce up the sidewalk. Let’s motivate, Pete would say, I’m bushed. He would not ask his brother where he’d been, with whom. He thought, as he often did when high, of his own cowardice, of the weakness he tried so hard to hide. The world was a secret he’d not been let in on. Everyone knew intimately his desperation and fear. Especially his family, who was too kind to allude to it. They preferred to think he’d come out of his troubles on his own, with no help from any of them.

  A half-second later his family’s faith seemed to him indifference. They were so self-involved that they did not even notice his obvious pain. When high, he felt so acutely everything and its opposite. The one hand, the other hand: pendulum seesawing heavily from light to dark. The darker truth always stuck. Pete wondered for the hundredth time if this was not just his general disposition, if getting high was not the problem at all but merely an attempt to escape the often intolerable pain of seeing clearly the far bleaker flip side. He convinced himself that life would be intolerable sober. Seconds later and he was wishing Stuart Romine had never gone searching for his brother’s porn mags, that Too Tall Paul had chosen to hide his stash in a less obvious place. It was easy enough now, standing lonely and terrified in front of a shut-tight gay bar, to think his life would be perfect if he’d played it straighter. But then he thought of his brother, who seemed now to blame all his problems on the fact that he was gay. Pete wondered if both of them weren’t oversimplifying things, searching out a lone scapegoat reason for their unhappiness.

  A light rain began falling on the pavement, and he was intensely aware of its smell, this city rain, pavement rain—metallic rather than dusty, acrid compared to rain back home, which sometimes, winging in across the miles of open fields surrounding town, smelled nourishing, as if you could survive, grow healthy even, simply by allowing in lungfuls.

  He and Daniel had it pretty good, really. Parents who loved them and tried as hard as they could to pay attention. What problems they had seemed as light and ephemeral as this rain, not substantial enough to require wipers on the slow prowling cars that, three or four times since he’d taken up his vigilant post by the bar, had pulled over to the curb very near where he stood, idled there for a few moments before pulling away.

  Pete had ignored them, lost as he was in his appraisal of this life. It did not occur to him that the cars were pulling over for him until the jacked-up Dodge Charger, silver and dented as if wrapped in aluminum foil, whipped into the parking space in front of him.

  Out of it spilled three guys, clutching tallboys. The largest hung back and smiled as the two smaller ones flanked Pete, too close, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and booze.

  “Hey, stud,” said the big one, whose left eye even in the dim streetlight was unfocused, filmy permanently half-closed.

  Pete focused straight ahead, at a cab singing along wet pavement. He tried to tame his terror into something that looked like boredom.

  “How much to blow all three of us, chicken hawk?”

  No, you got it all wrong, Pete started to say, See, I’m just waiting here for someone, I’m not… But he did not speak, for the truth felt a betrayal of his big brother.

  He understood, then, the prowling cars, why their drivers had idled there in front of the bar, casting glances his way. Waiting for his approach, a negotiation. It had never occurred to him as he’d never been anywhere near a bar like this, had never seen a prostitute in the flesh except those working Hay Street who were more objects of derision and amusement for he and his friends. He’d barely been to a city, only once to New York for the ‘64 World’s Fair, when he was six, and the faintly remembered tour did not include the seamier side of human behavior.

  “Spit or swallow, stud?” the leader was saying. He was slightly smaller than Tysinger—his hair was cropped, as if he’d just gotten out of the military, and he was not in shape like Tysinger, his belly rolling beneath a too tight Foghat T-shirt. But Pete looked at him and saw Tysinger. He remembered Tysinger’s defense of his maligned mama that night, remembered the unsettling sympathy he felt for someone he’d always hated. Obviously Tysinger had his own hardships to deal with and, like Pete, like the rest of the world, he dealt badly much of the time, but there was beneath the hatred and violence an essential goodness. Surely even this drunk—these three drunks—hid a similar light beneath their redneck insolence.

  Pete realized he was smiling. The leader noticed, too, and smirked.

  “Say something, faggot,” said the boy on his right. Maybe it was the word, and his realization that, buried goodness notwithstanding, these were the types his brother had complained about for the past two days, the ones who would not let him be who he was. Perhaps it was recognizing himself in those three—bored, drunk, out late trying to prolong an empty and diminishing high, willing to do anything to keep the excitement going.

  “Fuck you, losers.”

  The boys pushed in closer and their leader said, “No, sweetheart, fuck you,” and then they were half-carrying, half-dragging Pete down the alleyway where earlier he’d nodded into a mellow trance over a street sweeper.

  Once he tried and failed to scream. As he was being dragged farther into the shadows, Pete realized he should have stayed in the hotel room, that his brother was probably there now, waiting, worried about him.

  “Get him down on his knees,” said the leader, sliding his wide black leather belt from the loops of his filthy jeans. Pete’s knees grazed the pavement once before he surged up kicking, freeing his arms and managing to knee the leader in the crotch, and this is when the others attacked, pummeling arms and swift kicks from work boots.

  When he was stretched, retching, on the pavement they let up. He lay there thinking of something he sometimes chanted, silently, at night to help him sleep: I am a good person. Basically I am a good person.

  The leader bent before him, wheezing still from his groin kick. He started to talk but Pete, anticipating his words, told him again to go fuck himself. The leader spit words Pete’s way but Pete was watching his hand as he reached into
his pocket. Pete saw the black curved knife handle and remembered that summer-lush Saturday afternoon when he and Cozart were sitting on the black pipe talking their idle trash and passing a joint and scheming about what they would do when they finally got out of Trent, where they would go. They decided to meet in San Francisco, because there the mountains meet the sea and even though Pete knew this would never happen, understood that he and Cozart would grow apart after high school and in ten years he would have straightened his life out and gone to college and become more like his brother, Danny, whom his parents idolized and whom Pete secretly had always wanted to be more like, he allowed himself to participate in this fantasy and even agreed to slice his finger with a pen knife and mix his blood with Cozart’s blood.

  But there was way too much blood for a simple slice of a finger and it was pouring from his stomach and another place on his thigh and he saw that the knife was not a penknife at all but a longer blade, its handle black and curved and stained with more of his blood. He watched it as it disappeared dripping up the alley.

  When he was alone he called out weakly for Daniel.

  Who an hour later entered the hotel room on tiptoes so as not to wake his sleeping brother. He felt bad for leaving him there, even though he got it done, what he left to do, and it was neither fulfilling nor unsatisfying, it merely was. Now it was over and he could rest because he knew at least that this was who he was. Riding back to the hotel in the preppy guy’s car he decided what he and Pete would do in the morning: call home first thing and tell their father everything and wait for the police, and even though there would be hell to pay for both of them, and Daniel felt guilty for not setting a better example for Pete, who was troubled enough without any encouragement from him, Daniel felt that some things were accomplished on this excursion. He was closer to his brother now than ever before, for one thing, and that closeness, despite what had brought them together and what would happen to them when they returned to Trent, would never leave. No one could take it away from them. He felt like waking Pete to tell him so but decided not to, for in the dark room in the sleeping city his little brother was so soundly asleep he did not even seem to breathe.