As the first-born son, Joe had it worse because all my parents’ expectations got dumped on him. He couldn’t take it, and he acted out a lot. The be-all end-all was when he went and got a Gullah girl pregnant. When Daddy found out, he threatened to slice Joe’s neck open with a pair of gardening shears. He didn’t just say it, though—he had Joe’s neck jammed between the blades, his elbows cocked, about to behead his son easy as you would a dandelion. Joe reached for a monkey wrench and slammed Daddy in the face with it a bunch of times, breaking his jaw in five places.
After that, Joe couldn’t come back home, no way. He moved to New York and eventually got work as a recording studio engineer. I’ll never forget watching his white shirt fluttering in the dark as he rushed off down Romney Street. I thought I’d never see him again. Daddy curled into a heap at Mama’s feet, spitting droplets of blood and tooth fragments on the dirt front yard. For my parents, I made a show of caring for Daddy and hating Joe, but in my heart of hearts I reckoned Daddy had it coming. I secretly kept in touch with Joe through friends, but Mama and Daddy stopped even mentioning him. They talked like they only had one child and nobody but me would carry on the family name.
Thinking about all what Daddy and Joe had done, I turned to the stained-glass window, but I saw in the far corner the depiction of David aiming his slingshot at Goliath that I usually avoided looking at. Some Sundays I imagined myself stroking the clean-cut victor’s back, other times the hairy brute would attack me. That was a double whammy, that particular window.
Finally, fixing my eyes on the cross, I tried to understand the intense suffering of our Lord and Savior. Through His mournful eyes, I tried to feel what He felt. But He didn’t touch me inside. Silently, I begged His forgiveness for my phony revelation, hoping that He would take pity on me and bowl me over with His incredible power, or even change me gradually— I would have settled for anything. My salvation might have been bogus, but my plea for Him to make it real was completely sincere. That should have counted for something.
FOUR
With no job, a forced leave of absence from school, and no way to go home without shaming my family and getting a thrashing, I reckoned my life had bottomed out. But it hadn’t. I lost Annie, too. The last weeks of April she had finals; I’d see her twice a week instead of every day. When we did meet up, she’d greet me with a limp wave from two feet back—no more bear hugs. I would leave messages on her machine and smooth Post-it notes against her door, but she took her sweet time responding. I decided to wait and see how long it would take her to reply, but after three days of hugging and biting my stuffed animals at night and banging my head against the drywall by my bed hard enough to dent it, I caved. At 3 a.m. On May Day I put a comforter in the passenger’s seat of my car, drove to her apartment, and spread my bedding across her threshold. I lay down on it and slept uneasily. She couldn’t step over me—she’d need to move my fat body to leave.
Even still, the next morning Annie put a chair in the doorjamb and was fixing to jump over me, but a cross-breeze whooshed through the door and stirred me. I came to as she landed on my other side. She leaned over me, trying to push the chair back into the apartment and reach back in to pull the door shut, but I took hold of her ankle.
“It’s over, Gary,” she said. “Let go.”
“Why, Annie? What did I do?” I lost my self-control. Tears spilled into my nose. I wrapped my forearm around her shin.
She loooked a little bit ill. The skin on her face didn’t fit well, and the rest of her body had a downright unhealthy gray tint. I figured she was ashamed that we’d done it and angry with me about being a bad lover. I was ashamed, too, about the sin, but also a little proud in a manly way that made the shame bearable. But if she left me, I’d have to go through life alone—that I couldn’t handle.
“You didn’t do anything, Gary.” Annie met my wet gaze, then her face contorted and she rocked forward. For a second I thought that I’d disgusted her somehow, but in a heartbeat she turned to grip the iron rail of the balcony. I had to let go of her ankle and rise to follow her. She bent her neck over the railing and sent the contents of her stomach splattering to the blacktop on the ground floor.
“Are you okay? Annie? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m okay. I’m fine.” She coughed and spat until her throat went back to normal.
I padded over the comforter into the apartment, ran a cool glass of tap water for her, and delivered it as she stepped into the living room.
“Sit down?” I suggested, and she did. “Have you been to see the doctor?”
She made a noise in between a breath and a laugh and drank the water in one go. Even after the water had fallen into her stomach and cooled her down, I kept staring at her as if I was waiting to hear about her doctor visit. She didn’t say anything for a long time, and a tiny parade of very different thoughts marched across her face. The corners of her lips turned up, then one corner more than the other, then they both fell. Her eyelids flared. She sighed. Something dark came over her. She bit down on the rim of the glass. Annie’s expression finally rested in a plain, unemotional position. I thought she was trying to look a little dumb so I wouldn’t expect an answer.
I hadn’t peed all night, and the pressure in my bladder had built up pretty strongly. “I’m going to the facilities,” I announced, pushing myself away from the dividing wall between the kitchen and living room, feeling lucky just to have entered her apartment.
As I washed my hands after doing my business, my eye fell on a scrap of white paper sitting on top of the toilet brush. It seemed like it had fluttered down only to miss the garbage pail. It had small writing on it, like the directions you get with foot creams and wart medicine. I dried my hands on Annie’s face towel and reached down to toss the scrap of paper into the bucket, but then I got the notion that it might hold the key to Annie’s sickness and read the fine print. The paper said, “Dip the test into your urine.” It said, “A plus sign in the round results window means you’re pregnant.”
Instantly I remembered Joe’s neck between the garden shears. Daddy’s sweaty face and open, howling mouth. Joe’s bugged-out, fearful eyes, Daddy’s cocked elbows. Mama screeching at Daddy to let Joe go, trying to tear him off by the collar. I thought of the monkey wrench banging against my father’s face, the splintered bones in his chin. Of the many months Daddy spent with his jawbones wired shut, drinking liquid meals. Of all the curses he wrote down about Joe on scraps of paper. How they were so mean that I burned them in the backyard while I prayed to Jesus to forgive Daddy. But mostly my mind fixed itself on what his girlfriend Desiree had done, and how she couldn’t have children as a result.
I returned to the living room a zombie, still holding the pregnancy test directions. I sat myself down across from Annie, who had laid down on her couch to recover. Jewels of sweat collected on her forehead, so I found a paper towel and knelt beside the sofa to mop them up, leaving bits of fluff around her eyebrow. I put the directions on the coffee table. Her eyes traveled to the paper and then to my eyes.
“You’re not sick,” I said.
Annie groaned. “It’s not yours,” she said. I didn’t believe her but I accepted her version of the truth. A bunch of questions came to mind— Why hadn’t she told me? Whose else could it be? Was she planning to get rid of our baby?—but I kept my big mouth shut and let her lead the conversation. She turned her head sideways, locked eyes with me, and looked away several times. When she looked, I tried to let her know, without saying anything, that I was opening my whole life to her and putting it square in her palm.
“That doesn’t bother you.” It was an observation, not a question.
“You weren’t going to have an— Were you going to— Without—?”
She groaned again. “Okay. We’d better get married. Let’s get married.”
I was already kneeling, so I proposed and she accepted. We set a date and everything. It had to be before she started showing. I hugged her and there was a pause. “I do lo
ve you,” she said, like a cop letting me off with a warning. “And I lied. It is yours.” I well nigh grinned my face off.
A tense couple of months passed as we planned the ceremony, while I worried that Annie might change her mind, and tried to find a full-time job. Neither happened.
Four days before we were supposed to leave for my aunt Vietta’s house in Savannah, where Annie and I would get married, I interviewed at yet another company. The interviewer, a bald man with a red face and a loose neck, looked at my résumé and told me that I didn’t want to work there. I said that I thought I did, but he said I wanted a different job, in the mailroom, or as an admin. He didn’t ask how I felt about his opinions, and if he had, I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to contradict the man. So I asked about other jobs, but the bald fellow said there weren’t any that fit my experience. He slid his papers together and shoved them into his briefcase.
Since the formal part of the interview seemed to be over, I asked, in a friendly way, if he knew about any jobs that did fit my experience, maybe at other places. He said no and left the room. I folded my résumé all neat and stuck it back into my jacket pocket as I walked out to my car. I sat in the driver’s seat with the door open and my legs outside and looked at the office. Because the blue glass building reflected the sky, it didn’t seem to be there. Maybe the whole experience wasn’t real and my life was truly Hell. I felt that I could not support my future wife and child, and the fight against my desire for males dragged on.
With my heart heavier than ever, I slid into my car and headed down I-4. I wished that Florida had more bridges, cliffs, and high buildings. I could drive or jump to my death from one of them. Suicide was a sin, I knew, but I was guilty of worse ones. I looked at the many tall signs along the highway advertising hotels and fast-food restaurants, wondering if I could climb one, leap off, and bring my suffering to an end.
It was typical of me that reading all those restaurant names made my suicidal thoughts fade into regular hunger. Pretty soon I pulled over at a Waffle House. In my mind, I already had an image of a thick brown waffle, dripping with syrup, and a scoop of butter on top that looked like ice cream. I passed the sign between where I parked and the actual restaurant. This was one of those super-tall poles you can see for miles back, seven or eight feet around and painted with black enamel. I walked over and hugged it, the surface rough and cool against my neck and chin. I looked straight up and saw how incredibly high it went, like an express lane up to Heaven. I was sorry I couldn’t climb it. Anyhow, it felt good to hug something, even something tall, black, and heartless.
Only one other customer was in there, sitting at the counter. She chatted with the staff like a regular. Business had died down after lunch but hadn’t yet picked up for supper. I sat down in a booth by the door. The waitress came over and called me Sweetheart and Honey, which I liked hearing even if she didn’t mean it. The friendly service improved my mood a little, and so did the fact that I could see the highway from my seat. It reminded me of my backyard growing up, right next to 1-26. All those cars rushing past, going somewhere, while I stayed still, barefoot in the crabgrass.
Waffle batter sizzled and spilled out from the sides of the hot iron as they filled my order. I ate too fast and got the hiccups.
A man in a jumpsuit walked in and sat down in the next booth, facing me. He was white, but kind of dark and hairy. His eyebrows connected in the center and his face was thin. The guy kept his mouth still but he looked around a lot. The fact that we were facing one another in the nearly empty restaurant connected our lonelinesses in a way that embarrassed me. Sometimes our eyes met. It made it so we had to nod and say a silent hi.
My hiccups made the whole thing even stranger. Every time a little frog sound hopped out of my throat, the man in the jumpsuit stared at me. I tried to get rid of the hiccups by drinking water and holding my breath—no dice. I even thought about scaring myself, but how do you do that? The tics stopped for a while, but as soon as I thought they’d gone, another one would jump up out of me. The silence got extra silent. I hiccupped. The waitress laughed and brought me another glass of water.
As I drank, I glanced at the man. It’s kind of hard to take a big gulp and look someplace else, so I think I spilled a little on my shirt. When I put the cup down, the man raised his lower lip and cocked his head like he wanted me to follow him somewhere. He raised his eyebrows, put his coffee cup to his lips, and slurped like he really meant to make a slurp sound. I looked out at the highway, but my eyes kept drifting back toward him. Every time I took a look over there, he’d look right on back. Then he made that same funny gesture. When we’d done a few go-rounds of this, I had a hard time pretending nothing was happening.
I leaned forward over my empty plates. “Excuse me, sir?” I asked.
He pulled back, put the coffee cup down, and peered at me like somebody trying to solve a math problem written on my forehead. He made that same gesture again, swallowed his coffee, got up, and walked stiffly into the restroom.
It came to me that maybe the fellow didn’t speak English and he had a hiccup remedy he wanted to show me. So I followed him without thinking too much about it. In order to do what I wanted, I always needed to tell myself a cover story. That way my desire could stay mysterious to my own self, like some kind of weird music coming from the far side of a hill. When I got over there, I’d be surprised to find out that the music was coming from inside my head all along.
At first I didn’t see the jumpsuit man when I got in there. Just my own big body in the long mirror over the sinks. The area by the urinals was empty. The doors of the stalls gaped like open mouths.
“Sir?” My voice rang out against the bathroom tiles. I went a step farther. Suddenly I noticed the man’s reflection in the mirror. He was standing in the last stall, not moving a muscle. I heard him breathing. “Sir?”
On tippy-toes, I went back there.
But before I could say one word more, he took me by the arm and tugged me into the stall. He grabbed the back of my neck and stuck his tongue in my mouth. He pushed me backward so the stall door closed and then let out a long moan, like somebody in a TV commercial enjoying a rich dessert. Outside in the dining area, he had seemed trapped inside himself. Now he came alive. He was an animal clamped to my face, kissing me.
But I had the opposite reaction. I was kissing an animal! I panicked and shoved him away. He lost his balance and fell backward, catching himself against the toilet paper dispenser and the tile on the wall. I tried to turn and run but he held my wrist.
“Hey,” he said quietly. In English and with a Southern accent, to my surprise. There was a gentle part to his voice, and it sounded like he had something else to say, so I stood there a moment.
“What are you doing?” I asked. He let go of my wrist and stood there for a minute, breathing, staring at me like I was the next one down the food chain. The longer he took to answer my question, the stupider my question got. Blood rose to my face. The fellow zipped the jumpsuit down real slow, studying my face like a snake charmer. At first I worried that somebody would follow us in and get a look at what was going on, but everybody outside was a female. I stared right back. Just how far down did he intend to unzip that garment? Zipper noise echoed through the room.
Now, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he had no drawers on. But at the time, I didn’t know that people could just decide not to wear drawers. The man straddled the commode and the jumpsuit flopped down like shed skin. Once he got to the end of the zipper, he opened up both halves of the suit. His man part swung free and swayed from side to side right in front of me. Then it kind of twitched and stuck straight up like a tree branch. Underneath, his sac hung there like a pair of pantyhose with a couple of eggs in them. He put his hand around the base and pumped it a couple of times.
I wanted to run, but I had to stay put. Reaching behind me and fumbling with the stall door, I figured I couldn’t open it without stepping so far forward I’d have to touch the guy�
�s pecker. My need to do sexual things and my agony at the thought of doing them slammed together in my head like two semis on a one-lane highway. A long, sour blast of guilt, disgust, and unspeakable lust wailed in my head. All I could think was Annie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Annie. I’m sorry for this disgusting thing I think I’m maybe gonna probably do.
“You can’t turn this down,” the guy whispered, with perverted pride sparkling in his eyes. “Look at you. You ain’t never seen a hog like this ’un. C’mon now.” After a tense moment and a silent plea for forgiveness, I reached out and touched him with the back of my hand. The skin felt real hot to the touch, and much silkier than I expected. My knuckles slid up and down. Then I curled my palm around the shaft. To my surprise, my fingertips didn’t touch my thumb. I flicked at the edge of the helmet. “That’s it,” he said. “Yeah.”
In my head, I was already bargaining with myself that this one sex act would purge all the years of pent-up evil thoughts. My senses caught fire, and I squatted down between the door and the toilet. My mouth opened wide, partly out of astonishment—this fellow had a real monster down there. I didn’t do all that much, but pretty soon he got done.
Spinning paper off the roll, the man said his name was Dickie and apologized that he couldn’t shake my hand. He said he had a special machine at home that you could put on yourself and your friends, like a sucking machine. He didn’t know it, but during puberty I had once used our old vacuum to pleasure myself and pulled a groin muscle. So when he suggested we go to his place and use the machine, I got offended, because he’d come pretty close to discovering the evil I had done in total private.
God Says No Page 4
