Crush

by Laura Susan Johnson

  Yeah, he teases me, but he can't pull the wool over my eyes. He wants everything I want, family: friends and love.

  We pick a day, and we all walk out beyond the Glass Beach, to a place where the waves are exploding against flattened rocks.

  "You're my friend, my lover, my husband and my soul-mate," I tell Tammy, raising my voice above the crashing surf, thrilled to have it again. It's my real voice, not the barking croak I'd grown accustomed to, the real thing, the smooth, soft, medium-deep tenor I haven't heard since that awful night last December. "You put up with things nobody else would ever put up with. You're the very definition of love, Tammy. You're patient, kind to me, long-suffering. And you never give up. You know what I'm talking about," I wink at him. "This began with a crush, but what we've lived through, what we've experienced together, makes it far more. I don't know why God gave you to me, but I'm so glad He did, and I'll never take it for granted, I promise."

  After we've renewed our vows, we walk back to the house, damp and chilled from the spray of salt and foam. We towel-dry ourselves, make hot chocolate, and chatter on the porch until the sun is down and we can only hear the faint roar of the ocean.

  Before we moved, I was shocked when Tammy had announced he wanted to give up his job as host of the college rock radio show. "Don't you have fun with that show?" I had asked in surprise.

  He said he had a lot of fun with it for many years, but now he wants to write full-time about the plight of mistreated animals. He begins travelling and conducting exhaustive research, his quests taking him (and me too, when I can go with him) as far away as rural France, to scrutinise the repugnant methods of factory farmers who provide ducks and geese for foie gras. I don't understand how Tammy can stand seeing the things he sees, how he can keep his sanity, and I worry about him.

  But it is a calling for him. When you're called, you have to go. No matter how hard it is. One night he sees images from an awful video of a man killing a little beagle puppy, and I've never seen Tammy so broken and torn to shreds. Just a glimpse of that puppy's terrified brown eyes and I scribble, How can you look at that?! Instantly I regret writing this, because I know he feels ashamed of watching the entire video of my parents hurting me. How can I let him know I understand why he watched it now? How can I let him know that yes, I realise he watched it to understand just how evil they had been? And that in some weird way, he forgot that I really wasn't being hurt anymore, that I wasn't that seven year old boy anymore?

  I feel an unholy presence wafting from those motionless images, and I write, Some people have no souls. It's like they've given their souls to Satan.

  Tammy turns to me and smashes me against him, crying so hard he blows a vessel in his left eye. I suddenly feel the burden he's carried with him for all these years. He clings to me, sobbing, "What I did to Cotton was nowhere near as barbaric as this. And I was a kid, right?"

  That's right, I tell him. You were a child, Tammy.

  "I can't forget what I did! I had no reason to hate him so! He was a tiny, sweet, little white dog. He never hurt anybody!"

  I feel the scald of Tammy's shame radiating off his skin. "I'm not a saint. I'm nothing. I'm just a reformed abuser myself."

  I have to tell him. We're all evil, Tammy, in some way or another. We all have evil in us. Because we are a lost, lonely species. Only God can bring out the good inside of us. We have to let God take control and make us as good as we can be. And you've done that, Love. You're not that angry boy anymore, Tammy.

  "No." He's shaking.

  You were a boy.

  "I wasn't little though. I was eleven, twelve, thirteen..."

  You were a tiny, lonely, lost little boy, Tammy. You were a baby. This person is no younger than thirty, twenty-five at the youngest! You changed! You'd never hurt a dog, or a cat.

  "I'd never hurt any living creature, not even a spider. I just can't!"

  You have to stop beating yourself up, Tammy. You have to. We can't change the past. I wish we could, but we can't. You're a good man. God helped you to change. He gave you the miracle you prayed for. Don't forget that.

  "He needs help too. He never got it, and now maybe it's too late for him."

  Maybe, I'm forced to agree. Maybe if we pray, he'll change. Maybe he'll see. Maybe he'll turn his life around. Maybe a miracle can happen for him.

  His arms tighten around me. "How did you live through what they did to you?"

  "Who?" The word pushes past my lodged airway.

  "Your parents, Ray and Cantrell, all of them..." His body shakes and I hear an unspoken request for me to give him another crushing bear hug. He needs it and I use all of my strength to give it. "It's okay," I whisper roughly. "It's okay, Tammy."

  After that evening, he decides to take Dr. Halliday up on her offer to put him on antidepressants and anxiolytics. She tells him that she's concerned about the emotional damage that watching those terrible videos might be doing to him. She is kindly adamant in her explanation that she doesn't think the videos will turn Tammy into some kind of hardened wacko, but that rather, he is the owner of an especially sensitive heart, that he absorbs the pain of others far too well, and that the mental torture involved in investigating such heinous crimes could literally kill him. She urges him not to watch them anymore.

  I agree. He won't let me watch them, so I shouldn't let him either. He doesn't believe it, but he needs protection too. He's said before that he doesn't need to be emotionally rent apart by visual evil in order to be against it. Finally, he decides he can stand no more, and heeds our advice.

  In time, he will join the editorial staff of the Mendocino Vegan, an animal rights magazine based in Fort Bragg, and both of us, along with Stacy, who has also become a vegan, will be speaking at different functions on behalf of the animal kingdom.

  I'm soon on my way to being a vegan gourmand, studying under Stacy, who is a genius in the kitchen. After she moves into an apartment nearby, she talks about starting her own vegan restaurant, or at least writing a vegan cookbook. Either way, she wants to call it, "The Garden of Eatin'". We plant a big garden outside our kitchen window.

  In the meantime, Tammy and I have another issue we speak passionately and candidly about: being gay. It's not enough that I have survived being beaten three times and that we now live in peace. We felt forced to flee the town that we grew up in when it decided it could not accept us. We know there are others like us, lovers in hiding, people who, in spite of how civilization has advanced since the 1950s, do not feel free to hold the hands or kiss the lips of their beloved in public. Every time we see a heterosexual couple slobbering all over each other, Tammy and I sneak a soft, lingering kiss, and when we see the dirty looks given us, we get angrier still at the double standard. It isn't fair, how we're treated, and since meeting a lot of great new friends during the trial, we've begun frequenting gay and lesbian organisations in the Bay Area and throughout northern California, speaking, giving our testimonials, reaching out.

  We're not alone. We're loved. People come up to us after we've spoken about our lives together, and they tell us we're loved.

  Tammy begins churning out articles for several local gay publications about violence, legislation, and other issues that concern us. We both get a huge thrill when Out! Magazine publishes one of his pieces.

  We have family. So do Ma, Stacy, Sharon and Natalie, who have discovered countless new friends at the local chapter of PFLAG. At the Gay Pride parade in San Francisco, Natalie meets a couple from Idaho who married several years ago. She often visits them, and becomes such a great friend of theirs that they will eventually ask her to surrogate a baby for them!

  We get birthday, Easter and Christmas cards from Marilyn, Sylvie and Alice, Patti, Deanna, Tammy's old boss at the Davis station, Pete Bloom, Mrs. Cooke, Officers Lord and Howard, and even ol' Paulina Holstein, if you can believe that.

  We meticulously plan our cat sanctuary. All around the property, we build runs that allow cats to flee from the always possible coyote or
hawk and take shelter in a covered kennel, while letting them choose between sleeping or dwelling inside or outside. We stock up on food, litter boxes, medicines, beds, and catnip toys. We name the shelter the Lloyd C. Tafford Cat Sanctuary and we adopt every starving stray and condemned-to-death shelter animal we can until we have nearly eighty cats and twenty dogs within the first year. Tammy decides to write a book about our brainchild. His second book is a work of fiction based on our lives and the inspiration for our shelter: Lloyd.

  We all take care of the sanctuary during the day, and three or four nights a week, Tammy, Stacy and Ma take over while I minister to hospice patients with HIV and AIDS along the Mendocino coast. I have a pager on me at all times, and frequently, I find myself driving late at night to sit by a patient and their grieving partner until the sun is up and the patient is either feeling better for the moment or lying peaceful in his bed, his body still, his skin translucent. It's a job that leaves me sad on some days, but it's rewarding in ways I've never dreamed.

  I also work one weekend a month as a telephone counsellor for gay youths who are suicidal. Tammy feels the call and comes aboard a short time after. We collaborate on everything, Tammy and me, and we're doing God's work. We both feel the call to help, to reach out to people who are going through what we've been through.

  We're accomplished. We have love and purpose.

  I wake up every morning with a reason to get up and out of bed with him.

  He's my strength as much as I am his.

  I've finally learned to harden myself against those who hate me and Tammy and everyone like us, spewing their scriptures of damnation. I've learned to use their own tactics against them. "Well, some religions don't believe in eating shellfish", and "Some churches are against blood transfusion and life-saving surgeries", and "What about hermaphrodites? They are both male and female. What if a hermaphrodite went to one of those churches that don't believe in cosmetic surgery? What if a hermaphrodite had surgery to become a man and later discovered "he" feels more female than male? Is he going to hell too?". And, "We're all female at the beginning of gestation... can it be possible that some of us men still have 'female' brains?". The dogmatics I try to talk to won't listen, but I'm not going to keep silence. I'm tired of being bullied, and I'm tired of being lied about by people like James Dobson, Dubya and the charming people behind California's Proposition 8.

  I've learned that sometimes anger can make me stronger, if it's the right kind of anger. I get mad at the way some people think they know more about God than the rest of us, the way they think they're more entitled to God's love than others. Tammy and I are like any family. We pray. No, we don't get down on our knees together and pray for hours, but we do pray, almost every night before bed. We know God listens, and that He/She cares.

  I've quit smoking, so needless to say, I've quit burning myself. I've replaced tobacco with red liquorice. And I blow bubbles. I take a little bottle of bubbles with me wherever I go. The clean scent and the white film of soapy dish bubbles permeates our home.

  I've become accustomed to eating more than just one small daily meal. I've gained a little weight—maybe seven pounds or so—Tammy seems to like it, a lot. He can't keep his damn hands off me!

  And he's been wanting something new from me that I haven't been too comfortable about. One night, he asks once again if I'll "top" him.

  "Trade places with me," he whispers.

  "Oh, Tammy. I can't. It seems too mannish for me."

  "You are a man," he reminds me with a smile.

  "I know," I sigh. I've just never felt like I want to do that. A while back (actually, it was during a little excursion to the coast, before we moved there for good, a badly needed getaway after Tammy's horrified reaction to those terrible photos), I appeased him by using my fingers. It was wonderful, watching him, feeling that little gland swelling as my fingers grazed against it. He began to touch himself, and I grabbed his hand, gesturing, "Let me."

  I do that again tonight. One hand caressing him in front, one hand manoeuvring my fingers, I watch him writhe and thrust restlessly, wordlessly begging me for more. I love the faces he's making. "You're so beautiful, Tammy."

  He smiles, closes his eyes, and watching his amazing, erotic dance, watching his soft lips parting as sighs of pleasure float past them, watching his dark green eyes open halfway... my heart beats harder in my throat, so hard, I can barely speak as I pull my fingers away and cry, "Tammy, I want to be inside of you..."

  "I want you inside of me," he answers desperately.

  "I don't want to hurt you!"

  "I don't care if you hurt me," Tammy moans. "All I care about is whether you love me."

  "I do love you, Tammy."

  "I know you do."

  As I put on a condom for the first time in my life, I'm so scared I'm going to be clumsy and hurt him, and the old terrible fear that I'm turning into my own father tries to snatch the moment away from us, but I rebuke it, like I always have to, and shove it away.

  As I gently enter my husband's body for the first time, I watch his face below mine, feel his body around me. He's the most beautiful, selfless person on earth. I feel so safe, so warm. I feel so loved, within him. His body belongs to me as much as mine belongs to him. I know that so acutely at this moment... Does he have any idea how much he's given to me? How much he's giving to me now? Does he know what he's sharing with me?

  Of course he must know, because he loves me, and wants me to feel what he feels when he's inside of me. I do. I feel it... Does he know how much I love him? Does he know, really, how important, how utterly priceless he is to me?

  There's nobody like him, nobody in the world. He wanted me to feel what he feels, and now I know. "You're so beautiful," I tell him. "You're so wonderful."

  His body contracts around me, bear-hugs me, crushes me, loves me.

  "I love you, Tammy," I gasp.

  "I know you love me, Baby," he whispers.

  He knows...

  We're one flesh...

  He calls me, "Baby," and I call him "Tammy", or "Sweetie", or "Honey". Now, unbelievable as it seems, I can play with him, and call him "Daddy", without feeling guilty or dirty or disgusting, without giving my biological sire more than a perfunctory mental blink.

  I can play with my husband, because I know he loves me, and he knows I love him, and what we have is honest and beautiful and healthy... We're part of something wonderful.

  We're happy. We're happy at last.

  We're on a journey that will never end.

  This is part of the testimonial we give to our community.

  No, it's not perfect every single minute. When you're a victim of hate, it's never easy to sort through all the shit and recover yourself. You're in pieces and it takes the whole rest of your life to find each one and bring it back into you. Unlike in fairy tales, true love cannot totally erase everything I've suffered. I still have nightmares, but not as often now. I still struggle with bitterness and doubt. I still have trouble with that pesky shame I've known all my life. It pops up when my guard is down, and Tammy helps me with it, and I help him when his guilt rises out of nowhere and tries to slap him down.

  I stopped asking my parents, "Why?" after my wedding night. I actually stopped.

  Because there is no why. I have to accept that.

  And I have to forgive them.

  Forgiveness. It took nearly dying for me to realise that I have to forgive those who have hurt me, that only forgiveness can free me of my hatred. It's for me, not them.

  It's taken a long, long, time, but I finally realise my parents had something terribly wrong in their souls. I loved them so much... then I hated them. Now I simply pity them. I have a life. They don't.

  As for forgiving Yvette, Benny, Lydia, Ray and Cantrell... well, I'm still working on it...

  Tammy often says he feels that Lloyd is looking down from heaven with love and pride and happiness, and sometimes I find myself almost believing it, believing that our loved dead watch over
us as we struggle through life. The day I married Tammy in Vancouver, I wondered if indeed Lloyd was up there watching us, overjoyed, knowing that we're both safe, and happy. And I wondered if, at last, my dad was able to breathe a sigh of relief before retiring to a silver cloud he now calls his bed.

  But I keep remembering that passage from the Bible about the dead knowing nothing, and it gives me solace when I ponder the visions I had of Lloyd, as I fought for life in that orange grove. The apparitions of Lloyd and of my attackers and my parents, well, they might have been real, in their way, who knows? And naturally, I'd love to believe Lloyd was there to comfort and encourage me as I tried to find my way in the dark.

  But when I think of him actually witnessing the gruesome, indefensible way in which I was beaten, the nefarious things that were said and done to me, the long, frigid night I spent in that orchard, when I imagine how helpless and angry and terrified he felt while he beheld the events of that horrible night, I truly prefer believing that my visit from Lloyd was a mirage, a reverie, completely hallucinatory, and that in actuality, he's asleep, safe in God's arms, blissfully unaware of the course of my life since his death, even if I am happy now.

  To be absent from the body is to be present with God. And years from now, when Tammy and I are separated by death, whoever dies first will float in that warm, welcoming womb of darkness, asleep, oblivious to the world below, in the presence of a loving and merciful God. When we're both deceased, I don't want us aware and missing each other. I don't want us wandering in the dark, calling for each other, receiving no answers, lonely, traversing the universe alone...

  I think we'll be sleeping.

  And waiting.

  My voice did return, for good, that breezy, twilit July evening during The Jack Benny Program.

  On the blackened, industrialised coast of downtown Fort Bragg sits a warehouse-turned-bar and grill. It's called The Wharf, and now we, Old Reliable, Stacy, Natalie, Tammy and I, have found a new place to indulge our karaoke fetish. In the dimly-lit room filled with drippy white candles and waitresses who wear hairnets and smell of fish and frying grease, Ma and Aunt Sharon sit at a table in the front, munching on garlic bread and crispy French fries, falling off the wagon and dipping them into the most delicious non-vegan buttermilk ranch dressing in the world, using almost an entire bottle until there's barely any left for the big green salad.