by Liz Miles
IN NINTH-GRADE Spanish, Patricio couldn’t say his own name. A wide-jawed redhead with skin the shade of moonbeams, he seemed stymied by his Anglo facial features. “Patrrrricio,” Señora Fuentes growled, modeling the correct roll of Rs. “La lengua. La lengua. Use the tongue!” But for all her urgent coaching, Pat still couldn’t introduce himself.
“Pat-dicio,” he spat earnestly, then shrugged and flashed his front-teeth gap, and even Señora had to forgive him.
Try to see him as I did that first day: on the room’s left side, over by the windows, so the sun sparked his cinnamon-sugar hair. It was kind of parted in the middle, kind of not, disheveled and perfect and winging over his right ear as though he’d just woken from a nap. He squinted in the glare, providing my first glimpse of the dimples that flickered at his nose’s bridge when he was frustrated or laughing or—instantly, I imagined it—having sex. He’d come to class as Pat Banner, the wrestling-team stud: cocksure, suave, untouchable; but as Patricio, stuttering his way through this alien vocabulary, he was thrillingly waifish and exposed.
I doubt Pat noticed me that day. He had to, though, in the following weeks, because if his accent was the worst in class, mine was the best. My father had been a cultural attaché in Bogotá, and my family lived there till I was three; by ninth grade, my Spanish knowledge had dwindled to sí and no, but the music of it lingered in my brain.
Señora Fuentes was a crusader for español. The most glamorous teacher at Lewis High School—impeccably coiffed and rouged, stiletto-heeled—she viewed our failures at fluency as ethnic denigration. With an Argentine propensity for drama, she latched on to Pat and me as examples.
“Patricio,” she demanded one mid-September Monday, strutting model-like before the blackboard, “Repite por favor: ‘A mí me gusta el béisbol.’”
Patricio tried to state his fondness for baseball, but it came off like a drunk saying the alphabet backwards.
“!No! Escúchame bien, listen close.” And then Señora, hands on her high, elegant hips, repeated the sentence at Sesame Street pace: “A mí me gus-ta el béis-bol.”
Pat scrunched his nose, the indentations at the bridge as dark as scars. He tried again, but the language was elusive.
“Ay ya yay,” Señora lamented. “Chicos, what are we going to do? Patricio tiene la lengua gorda. But maybe Carlo can say it right. Would you, please, Carlo?”
I feared offending Pat with my proficiency, but I couldn’t defy a teacher’s request. I spoke the words, my accent deft, impatient crispness balanced with lush exuberance.
“Perfecto,” Señora cheered. “Perfectíssimo!”
I hardly registered her praise. I was fixed on what she’d said about Patricio, that he possessed “la lengua gorda.” She’d meant it as stammery, tongue-tied. Literally, it translated that he had a “fat tongue.”
• • •
I was young for my class, having skipped the second grade. Sometimes I blame that difference for my trouble fitting in, but I suspect another year wouldn’t have changed things much. I just wasn’t good at being a kid.
I tried. I eavesdropped on the cool guys’ conversations, panning for nuggets about the trends of 1981. But the fickle logic of adolescence foiled me. I couldn’t have told you why The Knack was awesome and the Village People worthy of scorn, why Pumas were cool shoes and Stan Smiths for geeks.
On weekends, while other kids skated or watched cartoons, I marched on the Capitol. It was the first year of Reaganomics, and growing up in suburban Washington, D.C., the chances for dissent were plentiful: the nuclear freeze, Central America, handgun control. My jeans were speckled from painting protest banners.
The big rally that fall was Solidarity Day. Downtown swarmed with disaffected unionists. I joined the Liberation League, a group of college students, and we marched behind the thuggish Truckers for Justice. We got so near to Pete Seeger we could count his banjo’s frets. The real triumph was finding a T-shirt to add to my collection. (PREVIOUS HOLDINGS: BREAD NOT BOMBS; A MAN OF QUALITY IS NOT THREATENED BY A WOMAN SEEKING EQUALITY.) The new one was a green shirt shouting DEFEND ATLANTA’S CHILDREN, NOT EL SALVADOR’S JUNTA. Genius! Twenty-three black kids had been killed recently by a madman in Atlanta. Why was the U.S. propping up a murderous regime in El Salvador instead of stopping the slaughter here at home?
Monday was misty and cool—windbreaker weather—but I wore just the T-shirt anyway, the goose flesh on my arms a badge of pride. At the bus stop, kids stared quizzically. By school time, the stares turned to sneers.
Before Spanish, Tim Jeeter challenged me. “Junta?” he said, pronouncing it with a hard J, seedy and suggestive. “What the hell’s a junta?”
“Not ‘djun-ta,’” I corrected him. “‘Hoon-ta.’ It’s a military government.”
“I still don’t get it. What does Atlanta have to do with El Salvador?”
Other kids joined in the jeering. “Defend hooters?” one snickered.
I shrank.
And then, in sauntered Patricio, all smile and squint lines and casual backhand swipe of the nose. He glanced at my shirt, seemed to sniff the air like a danger-sensing dog. “Hey, man,” he said. “Dig your shirt.”
They were the first words he’d ever said to me. In those early lonely weeks of school I’d hoped for acknowledgment, but I’d never dreamed of such deliverance. He had swooped me from the fire, untied me from the railroad tracks.
For the whole of class I stared at Pat. When Señora asked him to conjugate poder and querer—irregular verbs he flubbed for the hundredth time—I attempted a reciprocal rescue. “Queero,” he guessed, and I mouthed, “Quiero,” but he never thought to look in my direction.
After class I tailed him to his locker. “Hey,” I said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
Pat’s brow creased in the same pattern as when Señora stumped him. Then he looked at my chest. “Oh. No problem.”
I spun the numbers on the neighboring locker’s dial. “No offense,” I said, “but with the trouble you have in Spanish, I was kind of surprised you even know what a junta is.”
“A what?”
Then it hit me: Pat couldn’t pronounce junta, let alone argue why El Salvador’s was evil. He had no clue what my T-shirt meant. Why, then, had he shielded me? Maybe he had a soft spot for underdogs in general. Maybe his soft spot was more specific.
• • •
I spied on Pat, pestering mutual friends with questions. I didn’t find out much, but in my imagination the bits of story bloomed: Pat was adopted; he was allergic to walnuts; he had never lost a wrestling match.
I’d been attracted to guys before, but that was all skin and quickened breath. This was deeper. My toes curled when Pat said my name. I got teary at the thought of his hairline. When I pictured something as innocent as holding his hand at the movies, my brain’s folds seemed to unfurl and snap back into a new design.
In Spanish, we learned rule-flouting verbs, exceptions that were listed in our textbook. “Don’t question,” Señora told us, “memorize.” But no one had ever given me a primer for my passions. Could I trust the broken grammar of desire?
In my fantasies over the next few weeks, I spent so much time with Pat that, seeing him in person, I’d forget we weren’t best friends. I concocted excuses to approach him. I’d found a pen on the floor—had he lost one? His surfer shorts were rad—could he tell me where he’d bought them? Pat generally greeted my buddyness with a “Wait, I know I know you from somewhere” look. I should’ve been angry or disheartened, but I was grateful to be granted an audience.
Then, just when I thought all hope was lost and that our brief connection had been a fluke, he astonished me with a show of thoughtfulness. In October, Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated, and Pat brought me The Washington Post. “I know you’re into politics,” he said. I’d read the paper already at home, but I studied his copy, every word, unable to keep from grinning despite the grim and bloody news.
A week later, a Friday, Pat followed me when Spani
sh class let out. “Carlo,” he called. “Wait up, Carlo.” After a pause, during which he seemed to search the air for subtitles, he wished me a good weekend in not-too-badly butchered Spanish: “Tienes el bieno fin de semana.”
“Tú también,” I managed. “That means …”
“I know,” he said. “You too.”
• • •
Around Thanksgiving, our entire grade was bussed to the Smith Center, a nature retreat in western Maryland, for an overnight of hands-on science. I was nervous about rooming with my classmates. They’d see me get dressed; they’d hear my bathroom noises. Who knew what secrets they might guess? But my fear was balanced by the prospect of being close to Pat: hearing his noises, watching him get dressed.
The teachers split us into groups, and Pat and I were separated. All day we bushwhacked, collecting specimens. We poured plaster casts of possum tracks, brewed sassafras tea. Dinner was army-style in a giant mess hall, where we then watched movies on a sheet hung from the rafters. The entertainment was supposed to sedate us, but the main selection —M*A*S*H, with its buxom Major Houlihan—only fanned our hot, hormonal flames.
Later, in the boys’ bunkhouse, the air was galvanic with arousal, as though sex was a gas seeping from hidden vents. Tim Jeeter expounded on the merits of big tits versus small. Then Keith Rosen took a poll as to whether pussies smelled like tuna fish or burritos. No one would admit to first-hand knowledge.
I don’t remember who brought up the Smurfs, the tiny blue gnomes that were the latest cartoon craze. Did they have gnome-sized privates, someone wondered? If they had pubic hair, was it blue?
I had claimed the bunk below Pat’s upper berth. Now the springs creaked, and Pat leaned his head over the rail. “Forget the Smurfs,” he said. “You know what grosses me out?” Silence shrouded the room. “Red pubic hair. Fire crotches. They’re nasty.”
Giggles of assent!. Mock upchucking.
A teacher knocked on the door and warned us to settle down. Within minutes phlegmy snoring could be heard.
I lay awake, confounded by Pat’s remark. He himself had such lustrous red hair—pelirrojo, Señora Fuentes called him. Was he saying that he grossed himself out? (I knew the feeling; my body betrayed me, too.) Or could his pubes be different from the hair on top of his head? He might be blond down there, or brown, or Smurf blue.
The next day, on the ride back to school, I was devastated to learn that Pat had hooked up with Stacy Stokes, a girl known for her bouncy, precocious breasts. While I was tracking mammals, they’d gone to third base.
I was miserable, and envious, and turned on. For days after I would jerk off to the vision of them doing it, then get so fraught I couldn’t finish, then finish anyway, pretending I was Stacy.
Spanish class was both comfort and punishment. Pat sat, as always, by the windows, mullion shadows like prison bars on his face. Señora Fuentes continued her crusade. As beginners we were condemned to the declarative: I am, I go, I say, I do. But Señora hinted at tricks we’d later learn. “It’s really the subjunctive,” she said once, when asked to translate a phrase. Then dismissing the thought, she offered a more simplistic version.
The word “subjunctive” goaded my curiosity. I asked Señora after class what it meant, and, gratified by my interest, she revealed the tense of contingency, of what if? In Spanish, she explained, verbs took different forms when referring to fantasy. She taught me key words—quisiera, pudiera, tuviera—plaintive, vowelly cries for help.
For weeks, while the rest of class tackled the simple future, I filled up my notebook with a more advanced endeavor: if I were to tell Pat, to kiss him, if he were mine …
• • •
After New Year’s, a surprise: Pat invited me to his home. It felt like extra credit for my efforts.
Pat’s small house sat off-kilter on its lot, as though it had been wide-load-trucked there and the driver, in a rush for his next job, never bothered to position it correctly. Shrubbery choked the yard. The neighbors must have thought the place an eyesore.
When I walked in, that Friday afternoon, I tingled with a tourist’s edgy thrill; Pat’s house was the shocking opposite of my own. The furniture was chintzy and undusted. Trinkets adorned the walls. No books.
His room was up some stairs, tucked into an unfinished loft. Actually, the loft itself was the room. There was no door, no clearly marked boundary, just a bed plunked amid a space of splintery wooden studs. I couldn’t decide if the rawness was sad or hopeful. Pat said his dad, for years, had promised to finish the room.
He elbowed a heap of dirty laundry from the bed, kicked off his shoes, and lay down. I lay down next to him, in the skinny space he left, and finally, for the first time, we really talked. School stuff at first, petty gossip: who’d been caught smoking in the bathroom. Eventually we steered toward the personal. Pat asked about my dad—“He was an ambassador or something, right?”—and the lesser truth didn’t dim his awe. I asked Pat about being adopted. He said sometimes he wished he were an orphan. His folks, when they bothered to be around, got on his case. They hated Stacy. His dad called her a slut.
“So, do you guys …” I ventured, unable to help myself.
“Me and Stace? I really shouldn’t say.”
As let down as I was not to hear the nitty-gritty, I was relieved by his secret-keeper ethos.
For dinner we fried corned-beef hash and gobbled it in front of the TV. During a commercial break, I called my mom and told her not to worry, that I was at a friend’s and I’d probably stay the night. She asked if adults were present, and I promised her they were. I figured Pat’s parents had gone away for the weekend, or maybe worked the night shift.
We watched sitcoms untilmidnight, then retired to Pat’s loft. I hoped at last to solve the riddle of his pubes. He ducked behind the plywood that separated his “bedroom” from the john. I heard the gurgle and then squirt-squirt of his peeing, followed by an agonizing pause. I sat on the bed’s edge, picturing dead babies to drain my hard-on. When he came back he was shirtless but wearing baggy full-length pajama pants.
“You can take the bed,” he said, and burrowed into the laundry on his floor.
Not having pajamas of my own, I slipped under the covers wearing my jeans. I nuzzled the pillow—Pat’s pillow—and numbed myself with his scent’s anesthetic.
• • •
Saturday we woke late and wolfed huge bowls of Count Chocula cereal. We lounged in front of the TV again, then napped the way only boys can do just after sleeping ten full hours. Eventually we walked into town. We killed time. We did “stuff.” I was so lost in telling myself to memorize every moment that I didn’t notice much of anything.
At day’s end, Pat didn’t ask if I wanted to stay again, and I didn’t ask if I could. I just did.
His parents still hadn’t shown. No one watched us. We could have been on the moon. Again I slept in my clothes, wanting badly to strip bare, but petrified. Pat sprawled on the floor below me, his limbs twitching all night like a puppy’s.
Sunday brought the same aimless bliss. We didn’t need the crutch of “activity.” Being together was all: ¡Compañeros!
When night came, I sank into depression. We dined on corned-beef hash for the third day in a row, but this time the routine sagged with nostalgia. Would things ever be this good again?
I was lacing my shoes to go home when Pat stopped me. “It’s late,” he said. “Stay another night.”
“What about school?”
“We’ll go together. We’ll take my bus.”
And the teetering earth was righted on its axis.
We stayed up till two, listening to records I pretended to know. I confessed to feeling different from the other guys at school. Friendships were important to me, I said. His friendship.
Pat understood. He was different, too, he said. And as he yawned his way to sleep, he mumbled something cryptic about a “special school for people like us.”
My brain sizzled. I dreamed of a vast classroom ful
l of Pats: chisel-jawed redheads with winning smiles. We’d study love poems in all the world’s languages!
I sucked a breath. “Te amo,” I almost said.
In the morning we rode to school together. I was a mess in my four-day-rumpled clothes, but I relished my classmates’ stares, proud of each wrinkle and stain. That afternoon, in Spanish, we couldn’t talk; Señora Fuentes sprang a pop quiz. I caught Pat’s attention, though, when he handed in his answers, and he knighted me with a secret smile.
I burned to ask about the “special schools” comment. And kept burning for weeks. Then for months.
Pat never invited me home again.
He wasn’t cold—when we passed each other in the halls, he punched my shoulder and called me Carlito; we ate lunch together when we could. But on weekends he was busy. His father had grounded him to help around the house; Stacy booked his Saturday nights. “Maybe Sunday,” he sometimes said, then didn’t call.
Had I murmured something in my sleep that put him off? Or was he terrified, like me, of wanting more?
• • •
Spring shed its grace on Washington, D.C. The city flushed pink with cherry blossoms, pollen optimistic in the air. The first day warm enough to wear shorts, Pat saw me and called, “Hey, hombre, nice legs.” I convinced myself I could do it, I could ask him.
I picked the day before Easter break, reasoning that if things backfired, I wouldn’t see Pat for a while. I set the date on my calendar and counted down.
When the day arrived, world politics intervened. Argentine troops invaded the Falkland Islands, overtaking a squadron of British marines. Señora Fuentes canceled her lesson plan to expound on imperialism’s evils. She insisted we say “Islas Malvinas” instead of “Falklands.” She lectured the full hour, past the bell. And then Pat sprinted out; I couldn’t catch him.
By the end of vacation, ten thousand Argentines occupied the Malvinas. The British navy sailed south at full alert. Because ofmy activist’s reputation, I was expected to take a stance. Loyal to Señora Fuentes, at first I supported the Argentines. But Tim Jeeter accusedme of hypocrisy. “Defend Atlanta’s children,” he mocked, “not Argentina’s junta.”
