William J. Mann

by Men Who Love Men (lit)

  9

  MY BED

  Another night of strange dreams. Once more, I’m back in West Springfield. I’m wearing the orange-and-white polyester uniform of my first job—at Roy Rogers Hamburgers and Fried Chicken. On my head sits a little orange hat. In my hands I hold a bag of lettuce. I’m refilling the salad bar, much against my wishes.

  “I’m supposed to be on cash register tonight,” I complain.

  “No way, Henry. I’m on cash register tonight.”

  The bane of my job at Roy Rogers—indeed the bane of my entire existence—is my older sister Susan. She’s worked at Roy Rogers for two years now, every since she graduated high school. She acts as if it’s the most important job in the world, but I know better. She’s just pissed because I’m going on to college, and she decided against, preferring to stay here in West Springfield. Twenty-one and stuck in a low-paying, fast-food job. She knows I’m just here until graduation, which thankfully is not far away, and it just burns her up.

  “You have to put out the salad bar, Henry,” Susan is telling me. “I did it yesterday and I am not going to do it again.”

  My sister’s acne-enflamed face fills my entire frame of vision. There is nothing else: just Susan, bearing down on me, threatening to smother me.

  I hold firm. “I’m not going to do it.”

  “Oh, yes, you will!”

  “No!”

  Customers are listening to this. Four of them, to be exact: two women with a little boy in a booth and an elderly man up at the counter. They’ve all turned to watch the two Weiner kids fight.

  “So help me, Jesus, Henry—” Susan snarls.

  “Who are you to invoke Jesus, you Jewish frog face?”

  She hauls off and smacks me across the cheek. I suppose I deserve it.

  Paula, our manager, appears from the kitchen. She’s a heavyset, hard-eyed black woman with dyed red hair pulled back tightly in a hairnet. She glares at the two of us. “You both come on back in here,” she says.

  “Hey,” says the old man at the counter. “Can I get some service here?”

  “Just a moment, sir,” Paula says, trying to smile. Her lips are tight and coated with cold scarlet lip gloss.

  “I was supposed to be on cash register tonight,” I argue.

  “He was not!” Susan shouts.

  Paula is staring at me. “Henry, you will put out the salad bar because I say so,” she says, her voice hard but calm. “And don’t you ever use such language in front of customers again.”

  “What kind of language did I use?” I ask. “Which term are you suggesting is offensive—Jewish or frog face?”

  Paula narrows her eyes at me. “Henry, are you looking to get your ass fired?”

  Susan smirks.

  “And Susan,” Paula says, turning to her, “you wipe that grin off your mouth or I’ll do it for you.”

  She just might. I take great pleasure in watching my sister’s face fill up with fear.

  “Now do you hear me, both of you?”

  “Yes, Paula,” I tell her. “I’m sorry we got you all worked up.”

  No, I’m not. In fact, it felt good to call Susan a frog-face. A week ago, I wouldn’t have had the nerve.

  But so much is different in my life since a week ago.

  I stood up for myself, I think as I dole out the lettuce into the plastic bowls. Okay, so I’m doing the salad anyway. But at least I stood up for myself.

  “Why do you and your sister fight so?” my mother has asked, many times.

  Here my dream shifts again, to our kitchen table, my mother seated across from me.

  “You two act as if you hate each some times.”

  There’s pain in her eyes, and bewilderment, over the way her children act toward each other. I feel guilty, not for how I feel about Susan, but for how it makes my mother feel.

  “I don’t hate her,” I say.

  I don’t. Not really. But I think Susan hates me. Maybe because I’m the only boy, and I get to go to college. Hey, it was her decision not to go—even if, in fact, my parents didn’t work very hard to change her mind. Still, being the only boy is special, and Susan knows that. I’m the one everyone expects to follow my father in the insurance business. I’m the one they expect to carry on the name.

  If only they knew I had no plans of doing either.

  Especially not after what happened last week. I smile to myself, the cat who swallowed the canary, as I drop the tomatoes one by one into their plastic bowl.

  When we were kids, Susan had been my best friend. She was cool, because she was older, and so she could buy me stuff, like teen magazines. Handing me Teen Beat, she thought I wanted to check out pictures of Catherine Bach from The Dukes of Hazzard, but rather it was Duran Duran and Culture Club that had me more ensnared.

  Back in those days, this place where I work wasn’t a Roy Rogers but a local, family-owned diner called Higgie’s. My parents would take Susan and me to Higgie’s for grilled cheese sandwiches and cups of chicken noodle soup. Afterward, I’d always order a dish of strawberry ice cream and stir it until it had the consistency of soup. The memory makes me happy.

  I stir in my bed, the smell of grease and charred beef filling my nostrils. It’s the way my clothes would smell at home, when I’d come off my shift at Roy Rogers. My bedsheets began to smell the same way, because often I was too tired to shower and just fell right into bed. It seems my whole life began to smell like Roy Rogers: the deep, pungent odor of boiling vegetable oil. Even when I’d open my underwear drawers I’d get a whiff of grease, as if deep-fried mozzarella sticks were hidden under in my Hanes.

  But back in my dream, I’m liking the smell. I’m liking most everything about my life. I’m whistling, in fact, as I put out the salad bar: nothing real, just a made-up tune. I’m imagining the day, when I’m a famous musician, when I’ll tell the story of how I worked here, the way Chris Cornell of Soundgarden talks about working in a fish market as a teenager, wiping up fish guts.

  “How’s that salad coming?” Paula barks, snapping me out of my reverie. “The dinner crowd will be here soon.”

  “Almost ready,” I call back. The lettuce and tomatoes are all done. Now I’m chopping some onions, making my eyes tear up.

  “I’m going to be leaving soon,” Paula says. “I don’t want any trouble tonight. You and Susan better get along.”

  “Oh, we will, Paula, I promise.”

  It’s at this precise moment that I wake up. What was I dreaming about? Higgie’s? Strawberry ice cream? Roy Rogers and mean old Paula? I rub my eyes. People and places I haven’t thought about in years.

  Even dreaming about my sister is unusual. As adults, Susan and I enjoy a far better relationship than we did as teenagers. She’s got a couple of adorable twin girls who I wish I could see more frequently—yet the truth is, with all that consumes my own life, I rarely think about her or them. So why tonight?

  I roll over, drifting back to sleep. It’s only as the dream begins again that I understand where it’s taking me.

  My high school English classroom. In front of me sit my friends, Dale and Howard. Across the aisle from me sits Linda Santangelo, who’s had a crush on me since freshman year, but who became the very first person I told, just a few months ago, that I was gay. Since then Dale has revealed the same thing about himself, though Howard clings to the label of “curious”—a term I now find hopelessly self-delusional and self-loathing, despite the fact I’d used it myself not so long ago with Jack.

  Jack, of course, has attained a certain heroic veneer among us, having ditched school and taken off for New York. Occasionally we’ll wonder if Jack will ever be in touch with us, if we’ll ever learn what became of him. I expect one of these days to see his name in the credits of a movie or television show.

  But Jack is not the subject of my dream. Not tonight. Instead, my eyes move up from my desk to the front of the classroom to my teacher. Mr. Kelly. Mr. Patrick Kelly—a round, genial-faced Irishman with perpetually ruddy cheeks
who was generally held in high esteem by the student population. I say “generally” because, while Mr. Kelly often clapped students on the back if they were members of the football team or the National Honor Society, he tended to ignore those kids, like me, who weren’t so easily categorized. Those of us who wanted to be artists or musicians, or were simply rebelling against the lockstep of high school life. We were the ones trudging into school wearing our black T-shirts and Doc Martens, and we weren’t so sure about this supposedly student-friendly Mr. Kelly. Underneath that crooked Irish grin of his there was something we just didn’t trust. None of us could quite put our fingers on it, but something was there, lurking. Maybe it was in the way he made us start each class by reciting the Pledge of Allegience. Maybe it was in the way he smirked, rolled his eyes and turned his head when one of the jocks called somebody a fag in class.

  I didn’t get called a fag, but I could have.

  I’m slipping out of gym class now, counting on the astonishing obtuseness of the gym teachers, heading up the stairs to the library. I pull off a copy of the local alternative arts weekly from the newspaper rack and settle into a chair, hoping no one asks why I am here and not out on the soccer field. I flip through the newspaper to the personals. And there, in the pine-scented, hushed library, I read all about GWMs, GBMs, BiMs, GMMs—all looking for other men with whom to have sex. My mind can barely wrap around the thought. Some of the men here were into sadomasochism. Others just wanted cuddling, or long walks and candlelight dinners. Over and over, I read those personals, imagining myself answering every one—as the shouts of my classmates out on the soccer field seemed ever farther away.

  My dream moves along, to a cool evening night with the moon riding high in the sky. His name is Doug. A freshman in college. Nineteen, two years older than I. I think that’s why I chose his ad: the nearness in age reassured my trembling libido. Somehow I’d worked up the courage to send my home number, pleading: “Please, be discreet.” In my dream, my mother once again answers the phone, and I feel once more the chill when she says: “Henry, it’s for you. I don’t know who it is.”

  We meet at the Holyoke mall. Doug’s hair is big and curly, a white-boy Afro, and there are spaces between his teeth. But I find him beautiful because he’s male—a male who wants to have sex with me. We stand facing each other in front of Spencer’s Gifts, shuffling our feet and saying little. When he suggests we go for a ride, I’m all for it.

  We park and he takes out a joint. “Want some?”

  I nod, taking the joint from him.

  “You’ve been with a guy before, right?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I tell him, inhaling, suppressing a cough, as if to say: What a silly thing to ask.

  I will always remember two things as being the most thrilling about that night: holding Doug’s hand as we walked through the woods, and kissing him. “I’m kissing another guy,” I keep saying to myself.

  The sex is basic: we lie in the grass and perform 69 on each other. I guess what they say is true: gay men do know how to suck cock instinctively. It comes pretty naturally for me. At the very least, Doug seems convinced that it really wasn’t my first time.

  After we both come, we lie there looking up at the moon. Doug speaks, breaking the silence. “It’s so beautiful here,” he says, “being with you, with the moon up above.”

  In my sleep, I stir. My erection is spearheading my underwear.

  For all my dreams of romance, that night I wasn’t interested in lying there and looking at the moon. I just wanted to get home. We hadn’t been caught—not yet, anyway. To stay there any longer would be pushing our luck.

  In the days to come, however, that night with Doug would take on an incredible glow, a powerful patina of love and self-expression. I whistled my way through work, inexplicably cheery to my friends at school. And here’s the really important part: I wrote it all down.

  “I will not read your journals,” Mr. Kelly promises, standing in the front of the classroom. “You have my word on that. But I will collect them at the end of the semester, just to make sure you’ve kept them.”

  Our journals were a requirement in our English class. We were instructed to record our interpretations of life around us during our senior year. Now, after Doug, life around me seemed to suddenly blossom into unexpected beauty, and I wrote it all down. I wrote about how long I had wondered what making love to another man would be like, and I mused over whether in fact I wanted to continue on this particular journey, if being gay was really who I was.

  I concluded, gloriously, that it was.

  And even as I wrote, I knew Mr. Kelly would read it. Good, I thought. I want him to know. I trusted in his warped sense of honor that he would not ever reveal to me that he had actually read my passage, that I would in fact be safe from whatever retribution he might normally inflict on faggots. Perhaps it was a naive trust, but it proved accurate.

  He looms over my desk, handing me back my journal with the hardest expression on his face. I perceive the look as anger—his eyes clamped onto mine, his lips tight and white. For several seconds he will not release my journal into my hands, but I don’t waver in holding his gaze. For as long as he stands there I look him straight in the eye. I do not back down. Finally he lets go, giving up on his attempt to seer off my face with the power of his eyes.

  I had stood up to him. And won.

  “I need a bacon double cheeseburger, Freddie,” Susan calls into the kitchen. “Plain. No pickles, no mustard, no anything.”

  My dream has returned me to Roy Rogers. The smell of grease once again consumes me. I’m through with the salad bar, and now I’m wrapping burgers. I watch as Freddie the cook plops another patty onto the grill.

  “Do you know who’s here?” Susan asks me. “Your teacher.”

  “What teacher?”

  “Mr. Kelly.” Susan seems eminently pleased with herself. “I always liked him. He was always nice to me. But I can tell by how you talk about him that you hate him.”

  “So?”

  “So,” she says, grinning evilly, “he’s the one that ordered the special bacon double cheeseburger. And I’m going to make you bring it out to him.”

  “You bring it out to him!”

  She smirks. “I’m on cash register. You have to do it.”

  Freddie flips the burger onto a roll and slides it over to me to wrap.

  I look down on it.

  I remember that scene in Roots where Leslie Uggams spits into Sandy Duncan’s water.

  Of course I don’t do it. I just wrap the burger and place it on a tray.

  “Excuse me,” I say to Susan.

  I’m pleased she’s given me this opportunity.

  “Hello, Mr. Kelly.”

  He looks up at me from the booth with some surprise. His wife and three kids are already chowing down their food. I make sure I give him a big shit-eating smile as I hand him his burger.

  “Enjoy,” I tell him, knowing he won’t.

  A man like him would never eat something a faggot had touched.

  I head back into the kitchen. “What do you have against him?” Susan asks as I return behind the counter. “All the cool kids always liked him.”

  “Apparently, Susan,” I tell her, “I’m not cool.”

  She doesn’t know what to make of this new Henry, who seems so pleased with himself, who seems unable to be rattled about anything. In my mind, I know I have just a couple more months. Then summer will be over, and I’ll be off to college. U-Mass isn’t far away, just an hour up Route 91. But there I will, in fact, be a world away from all this. And my life will begin.

  In my sleep, I grab hold of my pillows. That young Henry Weiner had so many dreams. So many plans and hopes and expectations.

  He was strong. He was confident.

  I’m glad I’m dreaming about him.

  I need to remember him, now and then.

  10

  FRONT DESK, NIRVANA GUESTHOUSE

  Four days. That’s how long it’s been.<
br />
  And I was right. Gale hasn’t called.

  I’ve seen him twice at the gym. Both times there’s been a big smile and friendly greeting. But no kiss, and no mention of a second date. He just flips that fucking hot little torso round and round on the bar and I pretend not to notice as I struggle through ten reps on the incline press.

  “He doesn’t like me,” I say to Lloyd, turning the computer on. It makes a small ping. “That much is obvious.”

  Lloyd sighs. “Look how you automatically draw negative conclusions,” he says as he arranges black-eyed Susans in a vase, backed by tall sprigs of purple sage.