eighteen
Family military tradition played no role in Cameron Harris’s enlistment in the Army in April 2009. Snead Harris never served, and while the Navy drafted Randall “Poke” Harris, Cameron’s grandfather, in 1952, going AWOL three times yielded him what was then called an “undesirable discharge.” Beyond this, the ancestral trail goes cold until we come to Rufus Little Harris, who seeded the Harris family in Stone County, Mississippi, after deserting the 15th Confederate Cavalry Regiment during a skirmish in Louisiana—a dubious antecedent. Patriotic zeal factored only lightly: Cameron was thirteen years old on September 11, 2001, old enough to feel horror and a jumbled kind of fury, but young enough that, by the time he turned twenty, the events of that day felt distant and dry and bore only the most oblique of connections to the war in Iraq, the fight Cameron was expecting to join. To his sister and his friends, and sometimes to himself, Cameron parroted his recruiter’s reasons for enlisting—job skills training, seeing what the world looks like outside of Mississippi, getting his body back in shape after three years without football. His true reason for enlisting, however, didn’t crystallize in his mind until the first time he stood alone in front of a full-length mirror dressed in his combat uniform. He found himself smiling at his reflection, suffused with a profound but secret peace. He was indistinguishable from everyone else, identical down to his fingernail length to every other soldier in his basic training unit. Not one thing set him apart. He was finally, and ecstatically, normal.
Cameron can’t pinpoint when normality became something elusive to him. The earliest difference from other children that he can recall involves his father, or his lack thereof. Many of his classmates had divorced parents, some seeing their fathers only on weekends, and a couple fathers were dead, but Cameron was the only one, so far as he could tell, whose father’s absence was willful—the only child whose father explicitly didn’t want him. Yet his mother and especially his big sister served to counterbalance that in his mind. When other kids bitched about their older siblings Cameron rarely had anything to add, less a difference in his mind than an advantage. Still, he disliked standing out. His report cards might’ve been different, he thinks, had that been otherwise: C-grade work was what he shot for, because C equaled average and therefore drew no attention. Scoring A’s could get you lauded, horrifically, in front of the whole class; D’s and F’s got you miserable conferences with school counselors; but C’s, almost magically, got you nothing.
Befriending Bucky Petz in the third grade triggered a seismic shift. Bucky—asthmatic and Jewish and chubby and black-haired, Cameron’s opposite in almost every regard—introduced Cameron to the board game HeroQuest and to obscure movies and most notably to theater. Cameron’s interest in the latter came as a smack of a surprise to his sister and mother. He recalls his mother, as she was nervously writing out the check for his after-school drama classes, warning him that he “couldn’t act my normal way up there, couldn’t be shy.” But drawing attention onstage, he found, was different than in life. You weren’t you up onstage, you were a character, and nothing you said or did revealed or betrayed anything inside of you—or at least that’s how it felt to him. Your character could be peculiar, foolish, a brute or a sissy, fiercely loved or bleakly unloved, yet beneath the mask you were wearing—be it actual or invisible—you remained you: as ordinary as you wished to be, operating your stage-self as if by remote control. Bucky Petz was Cameron’s conduit to this sorcery, and their attendant friendship was in many ways idyllic. When not filming movies about sand monsters and Civil War spies, they fished for croaker and teased girls and planted items on the railroad tracks for the trains to flatten. They watched Dukes of Hazzard reruns on TV, Cameron conscious only in retrospect that Bucky would lean closer when Daisy Duke appeared onscreen while he’d lean closer for Bo and Luke. Aside from what Cameron felt for his mother and Tanya and the memory of his dog, Lucky, his friendship with Bucky was the closest thing to love he’d known.
That Bucky’s move to Florida coincided so precisely with Cameron entering puberty seems like a cruel twist of fate in a short life over-riddled with such twists, its arc shaped like a spring. Almost overnight, it seemed, Cameron found himself not just alone but equipped with a deep new voice—and deeper new feelings—that he didn’t recognize. Many if not most people look back upon middle school with cringing, but Cameron’s climb was particularly steep. “Are there any girls at school you like?” he recalls his mother asking, striving to be casual and cool, when he was in eighth grade. He told her no, that he didn’t really like girls in that way. Cameron intuitively understood the reason she greeted his answer with such festive relief—despite his tufted armpits and baritone voice, his lack of attraction to girls meant he was still her little boy, her miracle baby, that he’d yet to be stricken with the goatish desires of men. He allowed her to think this, of course, all the while knowing how much more complicated his answer was. The reason girls didn’t attract him was because boys did.
Cameron grumbled and pouted about his mother thrusting him into football the following summer—until discovering it provided him an ideal distraction. Soon he was throwing all his energy into it, exhausting his body so thoroughly as to deprive it of the scant vigor required for sexual urges. More importantly, he says, football furnished him an identity. You couldn’t be a faggot and a football standout; that’d never happened, not in Mississippi or anywhere else. And game by game, catch by catch, Cameron Harris was quickly becoming not just a standout but a junior varsity star.
Something about playing football, he says, was akin to acting onstage: Out on the field, suited up in his helmet and pads and red-and-white uniform, he felt detached from the person inside—as though transformed into the uniform itself, an avatar speaking in a language of passes caught and yardage gained, his every line scripted in a whiteboard pattern of x’s and o’s. His on-field successes allowed him to project a resemblant character off the field, but still, he says, he was obsessively cautious. Some teachers, coaches, and especially fellow students thought him slow-witted because of his sluggardly delivery and his ceaselessly furrowed brow. But his wits were fine—he just dripped them through a thick, heavy filter. “I’ve heard Tanya say I don’t got any gut instincts, that the way I decide everything is like a cow chewing cud,” he says. “But that ain’t really it. I always had a gut, everyone does, but mine couldn’t be trusted. Whatever my gut was telling me had to be checked. Most of the time it had to be resisted. Everything below the neck was always conflicting with what’s above.”
Cameron knew he was attracted to boys and not girls but also felt certain he wasn’t gay. This might strike some as an absurdly semantic distinction, but for a fifteen-year-old football player in south Mississippi it felt neither semantic nor absurd—it felt like the difference between life and death. He knew he wasn’t gay because he didn’t act anything like the gay men he listened to his teammates imitate or saw on television—not the urbane and compulsively dowdy Will on the sitcom Will & Grace, certainly not Will’s swishy friend Jack. He hated dancing and was bad at it anyway. He liked sappy country ballads, yeah—George Jones could make him cry almost on command—but club-pop and most show tunes left him cold. He was tough—and that toughness felt essential to him, not as a cover but as an intrinsic and defining aspect of who and what he was. “It was almost like certain black dudes I knew growing up,” he says, “who’d look at these other black dudes, you know, the ones with their shorts dragging low, riding around in their hoopties, all that gangsta shit, and be like: Man, I’m black, but I sure ain’t that. But that’s kinda how it is when you’re fifteen, sixteen—you don’t know what you are so you start drawing these crazy lines everywhere, you know, saying I’m this but I ain’t that. So, for me, liking guys instead of girls, that was one thing. That was this below-the-neck thing I could maybe tune out if I tried hard enough. But being gay? Man. I mean, just listen to how that sounds: being gay. Being. That was going all-in. That
was…” Cameron shivers his head. “That just wasn’t anything like an option.”
To Cameron’s knowledge there were no openly gay students at Biloxi High School while he was there (other students say there was a quietly out lesbian), but, as with any high school past or present, there were plenty of students suspected of being gay. Some of these fell into the obvious-suspects lineup, their supposed orientations deduced via the age-old tea leaves of stereotype: the more debonair boys in drama club, the square-shouldered members of the girls’ sports teams. Others fell into a murkier zone: boys whose masculinity measure failed to meet some other boy’s or boys’ standard. One of these was a new student, one of the so-called military brats who pass in and out of Biloxi’s schools because of Keesler Air Force Base. He was a member of the tennis team, Cameron recalls, and an occasional but peripheral presence at the beach parties the school’s athletes held at the Biloxi piers, seen usually in the company of girls.
Three members of the varsity football squad, a senior and two juniors, took Cameron aside at one such party during the spring of Cameron’s freshman year. They liked his skills, they said. Coach Necaise was talking him up for varsity. Mumbling thanks, Cameron felt his chest swelling into something like a pigeon’s plenteous breast, his feathers fluffing.
But he wasn’t playing varsity yet, they told him—not without passing his initiation first. With a gulp, Cameron asked what that was. “You got to smear a queer, for real,” one said, the others nodding gravely. Cameron stood blinking at them, not understanding what they meant—“smear the queer” was a playground game from elementary and middle school; he remembers a PE teacher saying the game’s name wasn’t nice, jokingly telling the kids to rename it “Tackle the Alternative Lifestyle”—but also feeling terrified by this huddled mention of queerness.
“You see that fag right over there?” They were pointing to the tennis player. “Just walk up to him, tell him he’s a faggot, and take him out.”
“Punch him?” Cameron asked, the three of them falling out laughing. Yeah, they told him. Drop that mother.
He wonders, in aching retrospect, whether their suspicions were really about him—whether this ostensible initiation might’ve been a version of that classic movie scene in which a suspected spy is ordered to kill an enemy prisoner in order to prove his fealty. The situation felt, to Cameron, just as fraught as that scene. To say no to them meant more than scuttling or risking his chances to make the varsity squad; it meant outing himself, on some level—sympathy for a fag equal to being one, in Cameron’s read of their eyes. “The solution seems so simple,” he says now. “You just say, dudes, I’m not hitting that guy. I don’t even know him.” But that escape didn’t even occur to him then, blotted out by fear. So much—the identity he’d constructed, his football future, his quivering sense of manhood—felt precariously balanced upon obeying this order. He looked over at the tennis player, awash in a sea of girls, and went shuffling toward him through the sand.
He couldn’t bring himself to do it out in the open, the way they’d instructed him. “Hey man,” he muttered to the boy, “wanna talk to you about something,” leading him down to the surf’s edge, a dark distance away from the party. He told himself this was to spare the boy humiliation, but it was also, he admits, to protect himself from shame and scorn. He was too afraid to glance back but felt sure the three players were following, positioned a little way up the beach; he sensed their eyes zapping his back like cattle prods.
It occurred to him to quickly explain his dilemma to the boy and ask him to take a stage fall, but then why would the boy grant him that bizarre favor—and what would stop him from telling people about it? And how could Cameron divulge to the boy that a committee of upperclassmen had branded him a fag? That seemed a more lasting cruelty, an injection of slow-acting poison. They were standing alone at the lapping edge of the water, a frothy black tide coming in, a sliver of moon casting just the faintest blue glow on the boy’s quizzical and expectant face. The boy was hiding his braces behind plummy lips, a timid curiosity peeping out of his dark eyes—and he was beautiful, Cameron saw, more beautiful even than that thin white hook of a moon. Footage from an alternative universe flashed onto the screen of his mind, Cameron seeing himself leaning in for a kiss, draping a hand on the tennis player’s shoulder, the shorter boy hoisting himself up on his toes in the foamy tide to meet Cameron’s lips with his own…
But this was not the universe Cameron inhabited. He didn’t know if it ever would or could be, nor did he know if he truly wanted it to be. He bunched his hand into a fist and drove it into the boy’s stomach—not nearly as hard as he could have, but hard enough for the boy’s breath to fly from his mouth and for his body to jackknife and for him to collapse to his knees in the shallow surf. Cameron tried not to look at the boy, glancing up the beach to make sure the varsity players had just witnessed it, frustratingly unable to make them out in the gloom of the distant crowd, but Cameron did catch one searing glimpse: the boy clutching his belly and staring up at him with a shapelessly stricken look, less pained than disillusioned. “Just stay down for a while,” Cameron whispered sharply, adding, as he turned to walk away, “I’m really sorry.”
Whether the varsity players actually saw him do it was never clear. They acted pleased and surprised that Cameron went through with it, shepherding him to the more central, upperclassman zone of the party and forcing an acclamatory shot of Everclear on him. Cameron never saw if the boy returned to the party, and for the next two years, until the boy’s family decamped to another base town somewhere, Cameron couldn’t bring himself to meet the boy’s eyes when passing him in the hallway or while in the two classes he ended up sharing with him. Mostly from shame, but also from fear: Packed into Cameron’s fist, and transmitted in that brute snap of contact, had been Cameron’s deepest secret. It didn’t matter if the boy couldn’t decode it. He possessed it now, and that possession gave him immense, even immeasurable power over Cameron. With a single dark-eyed stare he could’ve broken Cameron in two.
Cameron tried one other thing, that following autumn, to fend off his heart’s and body’s cravings: He let a senior cheerleader take his virginity. Little besides terror flowed through him the entire time. He felt sure that something he did or didn’t do would give him away, that at some point the cheerleader would suddenly freeze the action and with a look of scowling appraisal say to him, “Wait, are you gay?” To maintain his pelvic focus he concentrated on the parts of her that were least female, bestowing inordinately rapt attention upon her shoulders and clavicle bones. When it was over he felt not just emptied but empty, as though, like Sisyphus in the myth he’d been studying in school, he’d just pushed a boulder uphill only to watch it roll back down. His unease was palpable enough that the cheerleader, reputed to be wise in matters sexual, pressed a fingertip of concern against his cheek and asked if he was okay. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m great,” but realizing how untrue this was, and how clearly the cheerleader could see that, he devised a quick explanation (casting a flashlight beam of irony toward future events): “It’s just, you know, us not being married and all…maybe I’m just a little wigged out about the whole religious thing.” He can still hear her laugh today: so feline, so sugared, so tender, so generous, so unbearably scalding.
* * *
The text messages started coming in May of Cameron’s sophomore year, the first one popping onto Cameron’s phone a day after the football team’s spring intra-squad game. It was just a nondescript feeler, Cameron says—what’s up, or something of that nature.
He tapped a response: Who’s this?
Cameron’s phone was a Cingular clamshell handset his mother had bought him for his birthday two months before. A green glow pulsed slowly from the top screen when messages came in.
Christy, came the answer.
Christy who? How’d you get my number?
I saw you play yesterday. You’re awesome.
Thanks.
Can I put something out there?
I guess?
A few minutes passed before the phone glowed green again: I have a seriously massive crush on you.
Cameron wasn’t terribly interested, not at first, for reasons extending beyond his sexual confusion. This had the makings of a come-on from a certain variety of girl—derided by his teammates as jersey chasers or jock suckers—that didn’t just cozy up to standout athletes but tried to collect them, as flesh-and-blood playing cards, some of them more spookily fluent with a player’s stats than he himself was. Even for his straight teammates, these girls held limited appeal. As Cameron understood it, you hooked up with one of them after exhausting all other options and come Monday acted sheepish about it, as though explaining that every other movie was sold out to justify why you were spotted exiting a Jennifer Aniston rom-com. Still, Cameron didn’t mind the compliments and gushing flattery, the random little flashbulbs of attention—enough to play along, anyway. As the texts continued, though, he began doubting his presumption of a jersey chaser. Christy was way too coy for that—wouldn’t divulge her last name or where she lived or attended school, and said she couldn’t talk to him on the phone, could only text, but wouldn’t say why. Once she let slip an offhand reference to a boyfriend, adding a low-voltage current of something illicit to the exchange.
The texts came at all hours, usually in unpredictable bursts. Most of them, Cameron says, amounted to mundane chitchat. I’m bored, Christy would often begin. What are you doing? Gradually, though, a picture began emerging: Christy’s parents were divorced, and she hated shuttling between her mom’s house and her dad’s; she loved the show Grey’s Anatomy but was put out with the book Wuthering Heights, which she was reading for school; she had an older brother in college at the University of Alabama, which was where she thought Cameron should play football (as if, he texted back); and the love of her life was a little dog named Maybelle whose greetings to Cameron she sometimes playfully transcribed as yips and barks. Cameron told her he loved dogs but after losing Lucky his mom was afraid to get him another.
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 31
