by Gene Gant
Table of Contents
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
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Copyright
King Geordi the Great
By Gene Gant
Is there such a thing as caring too much?
Geordi never thought so. He knows he’s lucky to have progressive parents who support him after they discover he’s gay, but when his dad gets overzealous, things go downhill. Geordi’s friend Toff is not only hurt that Geordi hid his sexuality from him—he’s also been in love with Geordi for months. Rather than further damage their relationship, Geordi goes along with a romance he doesn’t feel. When things start to get physical, though, Geordi knows it’s time to be honest with himself and his friends, no matter what the consequences. A tragedy is about to strike, and Geordi, Toff, and their friend Jess will need each other more than ever. For Geordi to find his strength, he’ll have to first find the courage to chart his own course in life—outside the control of his parents or the pressure of his peers.
Chapter 1
DADS. YOU’LL find plenty of variation on that theme.
There’s Workaholic Dad, for example. He lives, breathes, boozes, woos, and screws his job, twenty-four seven. You often wonder how you and your mom ever factored into his life equation. He’s not there for the first day of kindergarten, the school play, the dance recital, the football game, bar mitzvah, quinceañera, graduation, or any other significant event in your life. Broke an arm and want your dad there with you in the emergency room? Sorry, the boss called with a special project and a deadline of yesterday. Boyfriend dumped you and you need to cry on your dad’s shoulder? Tough, he’s out of town for a three-week sales conference and can’t take your blubbering phone call.
There’s Indifferent Dad. He’s around and available when you need him, but the thing is he just doesn’t give a shit. He couldn’t care less that you made honor roll and the basketball team. Don’t think for one second he’s ever going to pat you on the back and say how proud you’ve made him. No, he won’t do that even when the mayor gives you a citation for meritorious service after you organize a car wash that raises almost a thousand dollars for the city’s homeless shelter. Hell no, Indifferent Dad just wants you to leave him alone.
There’s Strict Dad. He’s all about the straight and narrow. Veer off that path and he comes down on you like Batman on the Joker. Flunked a history exam? BAM! You’re grounded for a week. Complain to Strict Dad that you studied hard and being grounded a whole week is unfair? POW! You’re grounded for two. Open your mouth again and it’s straight to Arkham Asylum. If you’re lucky.
There’s Alcoholic Dad, perhaps the saddest of them all. When he drinks too much, which is far too often, he gets into loud, horrible fights with your mom that snatch all the joy out of the house. Ugh. Let’s not linger on this one.
Of course, there’s Good Ol’ Dad, also known as the Andy Griffith/Ward Cleaver Dad, beamed straight out of the 1950s. He works hard, yes, but mostly to ensure you have all that you need and everything you ever want. But no matter how hard he works, he always has time for you. Got a crush on a girl and don’t have a clue how to ask her out? Call Good Ol’ Dad at the office. He’ll put his all-important client on hold to dole out some quick pointers. Want him to take you bowling on Saturday? No problem, he’s right there, and you’ll even get pizza afterward. Need some cash for an afternoon at the movies with your friends? Good Ol’ Dad is your personal ATM.
Then there’s my dad.
God help me.
My dad’s in a category all his own.
LET ME say this up front. My dad loves me. Totally and unconditionally. No matter where I go, no matter what I do or don’t do, I know he’s got my back. Always.
Now my mom loves me too, of course. She’s there to pick me up and cheer me on when I need it. She’s a great parent. Dad, on the other hand, is an überparent. His heart’s as good as a box of Skittles, but his brain comes straight out of a Terminator. His mind has no filter and recognizes no boundaries.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Like a lot of kids, I didn’t really think much about nakedness and bathroom stuff when I was small. A baby can’t change a diaper on its own, and a toddler left alone in a bathtub is more likely to flood the room (or drown) than get himself clean. So your parents take care of those things for you, and it’s no big deal that they routinely see you in your birthday suit. Naturally, as I grew, I gradually took on the responsibility for my personal hygiene until my folks were out of the loop completely. By my eleventh birthday, I was paranoid about my body and didn’t want anyone to even see me in my underwear, let alone naked.
Mom got it. She always knocked and asked if I was decent before coming into my room. Once when I accidentally dropped my bath towel in the toilet bowl after climbing out of the tub, Mom kept her head turned when she handed me a replacement through the door. When she took me shopping for clothes, she stayed clear of the dressing room while I tried on different pairs of pants. Yay Mom!
Dad never got it. He threw a big bash for me when I turned twelve. Because my birthday is in June and my parents had just installed a gorgeous new in-ground pool, he decided to make it a pool party. Twenty-six kids showed up, including a bunch I knew from school. The festivities started at five that evening. The temperature hit the predicted high of one hundred degrees by midafternoon, and my parents didn’t want the fun spoiled by an inconvenient case of atomic sunburn or creeping heat stroke. Everything was great for about two and a half hours until the sun went down and night came on. The party started winding down, and with everyone out of the pool, I decided to show off a bit before my guests got away. I climbed up on the diving board and did a forward somersault with a twist. It was a dive Dad had taught me. Applause and shouts erupted while I was in the air, so I knew I’d nailed it. Oh yeah, I was absolutely badass!
Until I hit the water. My trunks were oversized, which was the way all the guys I knew wore them. Somehow the force of the plunge ripped the trunks right off me, and suddenly I was skinny-dipping. Fortunately no one else was in the water, and neither the pool nor patio lights were on yet. Unfortunately my wayward trunks went on a deep-sea dive, and it was too dim for me to see the bottom of the pool.
Dad was standing by the diving board, watching for me to come up. After a quick, frantic, futile search for my swimwear, I surfaced and swam over to him, my face burning with embarrassment.
“Great dive, Geordi!” Dad said, grinning at me. “You hit the water perfectly.”
I didn’t have time for his compliments. Covering my private parts with one hand while treading water with the other, I whispered, “I lost my trunks, Dad. They’re in the pool somewhere. It’s kinda dark… I can’t see them.”
His face twitched a bit but the grin never wavered. “Oh. Okay. Hang on.”
Dad headed for the house. I figured he was going to get another pair of trunks, which he would subtly pass to me, and I would discreetly slip into, thus sparing myself death by utter embarrassment. Unfortunately, several friends were hurrying my way, whooping about the dive. Once they got close enough, they’d see a lot more of me than anybody wanted, especially yours truly. I sucked in a deep br
eath, went under, and swam as fast as I could for the opposite end of the pool. With distance, the shadows apparently hid me well enough that no one could tell the direction of my swim. When I surfaced at the end of the pool, no one else was there. Fantastic. A huge shrub grew just a few feet away. I thought that, under cover of deepening darkness, I’d be able to climb out of the pool and duck behind the shrub before anyone saw me.
I hauled myself out of the water and made a dash for the shrub. After I took two steps, the lights went on in the pool and over the patio, along with the landscaping lights scattered across the backyard. The whole place blazed bright as day. There were my trunks, drifting lazily through the deep water below the diving board. There was my dad—and all my party guests—standing just a pool’s length away. And there I was, frozen in place with my little jewels and my skinny butt lit up for all to see.
For a moment all the kids at the other end of the pool were frozen too. Then the hoots and howls started, and the cell phones came out, camera lenses aimed at me with YouTube only a thumb tap away, and I jumped behind the shrub as if my life depended on it. About a minute later, I heard Dad call out to me.
“Okay, Geordi. Now that I’ve got the lights on, I see your trunks right here, just a few feet from the diving board. Come get ’em.”
A merciful God would have let me die behind that bush.
After the party I thought my name had changed to Saw-You-Naked.
The next day, for instance, I was taking a shortcut through the park when I ran into the Baxter triplets, Trina, Rina, and Ina. (If you’re thinking their parents should be arrested for that, I’m with you 100 percent.) Here’s how that went:
Me (my face feeling as red as a stop sign): “Uh… hey Trina, Rina, and Ina.”
Trina (smiling wickedly): “Saw….”
Rina (ditto on the mean smile): “…you….”
Ina (evil grin in triplicate): “…naked!”
Then all three of them giggled as they walked away.
And later that day, when I was headed to the movies with Toff—who is my best friend and would never laugh at me, at least not in such a bad way—I ran into Carson Meyer. Carson had a rep as the best basketball player in the neighborhood, until yours truly started playing the game. That began a longstanding, not exactly friendly rivalry between us, and Carson was always looking for some way to one-up me both on court and off. Here’s how the day-after encounter with him went:
Me (not so embarrassed because Carson’s a guy, and surely a guy wouldn’t make a big deal out of seeing another guy naked): “Hey, Carson. What’s up?”
Carson (nasty grin borrowed from the Baxter sisters): “Saw you naked when you got out of the pool. That water must’ve been hella cold.” To drive the point home, Carson went for overkill and held his hand up in front of my face with the tips of his thumb and index finger about a half inch apart. I was a wee bit small down there, sure. But a half inch? Really?
This was way worse than the Baxter trips. A couple of kids I didn’t even know pointed at me and burst out laughing. Three-pointer for Carson. Dag! It was literally and figuratively a low blow. I mean, what do you expect a twelve-year-old guy to have down there? I couldn’t even think up a comeback to blast on Carson. The only thing I could do was slink into the theater with my head down and hope the whole saw-you-naked thing would blow over soon.
It went on for a whole, entire, miserable, and very long week.
All thanks to my dad.
Oh, but there was worse to come. A couple of months later, on a quiet Saturday morning at home, I was shut away in the bathroom at the end of the hall. It was the bathroom I always used because it was the one closest to my room. Football season was starting, and Dad had gone out to the store to pick up some new gear for us to wear to the first game. I heard the garage door go up when he returned, followed by the sound of his footsteps moving through the kitchen. “Where’s Geordi?” he asked.
“I think he’s in the bathroom,” Mom replied.
Dad’s footsteps sounded in the hall, quickly coming my way. I got the impression he had something urgent to tell me. Now a normal father, confronted with a closed bathroom door, would have just knocked and delivered his message through the door, or waited until his kid emerged. Dad’s mind didn’t work that way. Instead of doing the reasonable, courteous thing, he shoved the bathroom door open and barged right in.
“Listen, Geordi, I went to five stores and couldn’t find those Titans caps we wanted. I did find a Cowboys cap and a Bengals cap. We both like those teams, so I thought you could pick one and I’ll take the other. How’s that sound?” He held the two caps out in front of me.
I glared at him so hard it felt as if my eyeballs had turned to rock.
He blinked at me. “What’s eating you?”
“Dad, I am sitting on the toilet.”
“Oh, that’s okay. Go ahead and finish your business. What do you think about getting jerseys to match the caps?”
Sschhrrriiippp!
That was the sound of me tearing out my hair.
But wait! Believe it or not, it got even worse.
A couple of months before I turned thirteen, puberty hit me with both barrels. My voice started squeaking, my clothes stopped fitting, hair sprouted in the weirdest places, and my nipples got tender and lumpy. To this day I freak out when I remember that last one. I thought it meant I was going to need bras. On the plus side, my junk got bigger. Yes!
The downside to the plus side was that my penis also developed a mind of its own. It would get hard without any provocation, and at the oddest damn moments. Like when I was standing in the serving line at the school cafeteria and the lady with the hairnet behind the counter dished up my favorite food, tater tots. Or when I was helping the mother of a very close friend unload groceries from her car. For a while there, I worried I had a thing for middle-aged women. I mean, how sexy is flinging tater tots?
With all that swelling testosterone, I quickly discovered the joy of jacking off. I jacked off a lot. You’d have thought I was in a masturbating marathon. I did it in the morning when I woke up, in the afternoon when I got home from school, before dinner, after dinner, just about every chance I got. A few weeks after my thirteenth birthday, I was home alone on a late Thursday afternoon while my parents were next door oohing and ahhing over the neighbors’ new baby. It was a perfect opportunity for me to do a little gland-handling. I went into my room and closed the door—but didn’t lock it as I usually did when my parents were in the house. After that bathroom conference with my dad over NFL caps last autumn, I’d started locking doors when I wanted privacy. I was so eager to get hands-on with myself, however, I didn’t even want to lose the extra seconds it would take to turn the lock. Which should have been no big deal since my parents weren’t home.
So there I was lying on my bed, my jeans and tighty-whities shoved down to my knees, staring at one of my favorite provocative movie sequences on my TV screen while I worked away in an ever-increasing frenzy. Things were getting really heated, the intensity building by the second, my face scrunching with passion. The magic moment was getting closer… closer… and then—
Dad waltzed in.
“Geordi, have you seen my cell phone? I can’t—”
“Aaarrrrhhhh!”
That was me, screaming like a girl. (Seriously, how long does it take a voice to change?)
I snatched the pillow from behind my head, used it to cover my shriveling private parts, threw myself off the bed, and took cover in the closet. “Dad, get out! Get out, get out, get out!”
“What’s all the fuss about, Geordi? I’ve seen your penis before. And you’re thirteen. You’re just doing what thirteen-year-old guys do. It’s not like your mom and I don’t know, son.” And then he laughed.
Yes, you read that right. He laughed. I was in the closet burning up with shame, so humiliated I didn’t think I’d ever walk in daylight again, but my invasion-force dad was having himself a good ol’ time.
“Go
d, Dad, just get out!” I yelled for something like a minute, but Dad didn’t budge. I could sense the man was still standing there. Then I noticed something odd. He wasn’t saying anything, and that was highly unusual for him. Dad always had something to say. So I stopped yelling, opened the closet door, and peeked out to see what he was up to.
He was staring at my TV screen, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. In fact, the expression on his face was sort of stunned. Then, with my heart sinking like a torpedoed battleship, I realized what he was looking at.
There was a movie I kept in my Netflix queue, Nurse 3D. I didn’t know anything about the movie’s plot because I’d never watched the whole thing. I just knew that Corbin Bleu was in it. Corbin Bleu was an actor who featured very prominently in many of my fantasies and wet dreams. I’d fast forwarded and paused the movie on a scene where Corbin was naked and having sex with a woman, presumably the titular nurse. You could see the actress’s legs and high-heeled feet, but if you were interested in naked lady parts—and I wasn’t, not one bit—nothing of the kind was on display. The emphasis of the shot was clearly on Corbin’s body. His paused-in-action, very round, very smooth, very fine, very masculine butt filled the screen.
Dad turned from that image, looked right at me, and gasped, “Geordi. Are you gay?”
Looking back, I realize now this was more than just another turning point in my family’s history. It was the moment my dad went from merely driving me crazy to actively destroying my life.
SEVERAL SECONDS passed with the two of us just staring at each other. Dad seemed tense, but I couldn’t tell exactly what he was feeling, and I started getting afraid.
Then he turned away. “Pull up your pants and come with me,” he said as he walked out of my room.
Fastening the jeans at my waist, I followed him up the hall to the living room, where he pointed me to the sofa. Just as I sat down, Mom returned from visiting the neighbors, humming happily as she let herself in through the front door. She looked at me and smiled. Then she looked at Dad, and her humming fizzled to silence.
