That night, after I got off the phone with Weezy, I forced myself to come to terms with some things. Chester had done damage, but I wasn’t dead, just different. Not worse, just different. He didn’t deserve to die for what he had done, and I deserved to live in spite of it.
I had to learn to control my flashes of rage, to understand that gunshots created more problems than they solved, to decide that the ways of people on the west side of Gibsland were not necessarily the best ways. In the world beyond the train tracks and sweet potato farms, there were real rules and consequences. Self-righteousness wasn’t license to do a wrong thing. The just-in-case moments in life didn’t call for a gun, but guts.
I had to stop hating Chester to start loving myself. Forgiveness was freedom. Like my mother had done that Thanksgiving Day on the same interstate, I simply had to let go of my past so that I could step into my future.
Yes, the mark that Chester’s betrayal had left on my life was likely permanent, but blaming him for the whole of the difference in my peculiar sexual identity, while convenient, was most likely not completely accurate. Abusers don’t necessarily make children different in that way, but rather, they are diabolically gifted at detecting that kind of difference, often before the child can see it in him or herself, articulate it, and accept it. It is possible that Chester glimpsed a light in me, and that moved the darkness in him.
The male figures that sometimes came in the night were just a manifestation of a life lived in repression and pain and sadness, a part of me that lived in the shadows and on the fringes, because that’s where I had confined it. But I had to let that part of me step out of the darkness, where I could see that it wasn’t nearly as significant or as frightening as I had thought it was.
In addition to being attracted to women, I could also be attracted to men. There it was, all of it. That possibility of male attraction was such a simple little harmless idea, the fight against which I had allowed to consume and almost ruin my life. The attraction and my futile attempts to “fix it” had cost me my dreams. The anguish, combined with a lifetime of watching hotheads brandishing cold steel, had put me within minutes of killing a man.
My world had told me that there was nothing worse than not being all of one way, that any other way was the same as being dead, but my world had lied. I was very much alive. There was no hierarchy of humanity. There was no one way to be, or even two, but many. And no one could strip me of my value and dignity, because no one had bestowed them—these things came into the world with me.
I had done what the world had signaled I must—hidden the thorn in my flesh, held “the demon” at bay, kept the covenant, borne the weight of my crooked cross. But concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.
Daring to step into oneself is the bravest, strangest, most natural, most terrifying thing a person can do, because when you cease to wrap yourself in artifice you are naked, and when you are naked you are vulnerable.
But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being willing to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.
I had to stop romanticizing the man I might have been and be the man that I was, not by neatly fitting other people’s definitions of masculinity or constructs of sexuality, but by being uniquely me—made in the image of God, nurtured by the bosom of nature, and forged in the fire of life. I needed no cure because I had no infirmity. God need send no angel to trouble the water.
I had to summon the power that I believed Jed possessed—the power that was greater than all others. I had to stop running like the river, always wanting to be somewhere other than where I was, and just be the ocean—vast, deep, and exactly where it was always meant to be.
I had to start trying to live the Serenity Prayer, which Big Mama had hung by the door after Jed had coughed up the blood and gave up the ghost, the one about courage and change and acceptance.
I had to understand that there was no way to be a whole man without being an honest man. And I didn’t have to wait to be proud to be honest. In fact, pride was not my aspiration. It was honor that I was after, the kind I had lost during the fraternity episodes when I had refused to stand up for what I felt was right because I was afraid that others would look at me like something was wrong. Never again.
I had to find the courage, too, to be me in the whole, refusing to conform or compromise, resisting the push and pull of the world around me. I had to assume the centrality of my singular position in it, the position that made me who I was, regardless of community or politics, acceptance or rejection.
I had spent my whole life trying to fit in, but it would take the rest of my life to realize that some men are just meant to stand out.
Whatever had shaped my identity, it was now all me. Trying to deny or control that fact was self-destructive. I would have to learn to simply relax and be: complex, betwixt and between, and absolutely all right.
I would have to learn to accept myself joyfully, fully, as the amalgamation of both the gifts and the tragedies of fate, as the person destiny had chosen me to be—gloriously rendered, deeply scarred, magnificently made, naturally flawed—a human being, my own man.
I would slowly learn to allow myself to follow attraction and curiosity wherever they might lead. I would grant myself latitude to explore the whole of me so that I could find the edges of me.
That would include attempts at male intimacy.
The first time I tried ended disastrously. I had worked up the nerve to go to a gay bar, thinking that if male intimacy was something my body wanted, I might as well know it.
It was a world apart from the one I knew. Instead of feeling a sense of belonging, I felt apart. The bar was brimming with sameness—not the locker room, frat house kind I was familiar with, full of ego-measuring and distance-keeping, but a different kind, which to me was disorienting. And the rules of engagement were at odds with what I was accustomed to: men sending signals in probing stares and touching before they spoke.
I was the object of considerable attention. I was young and tall and fit and new. I was being watched. I knew it, and I liked it. So I sat alone at the end of the bar and took long sips of my drink as I soaked up pensive admiration.
Soon a man sidled up to me and began making small talk. He was unremarkable in appearance and seemed slightly older than me. He said he was a shoe importer. He sounded smart and seemed kind, and he smiled a lot. He made it clear that he was interested in me, and invited me to his apartment for more drinks. I said, “Why not.” In my mind, the moment I had walked through the door of the bar, I had passed the point of no return.
When we arrived at his house, he poured a glass of wine, but I was too nervous to drink it. He talked more about his business and showed me shoe samples—ugly, rough-cut sandals that I couldn’t imagine anyone with even a dash of style deigning to wear.
Then, without warning, the mood shifted. The man disrobed, walked toward his bedroom, and beckoned me to follow. But the sight of him naked caused whatever attraction I might have had to collapse. His body looked sculpted, the way a body looks after years of proper eating and unstinting exercise, but I wasn’t drawn to it. My body went limp and cold.
I could in no way imagine us intertwined. Who was to be the plug and who the socket—not me!—and how was the spark to be made? I found the idea of it all immensely unsettling. I was surprised by my reaction—embarrassed by it—but my feeling was unambiguous: I wasn’t interested.
Instead of following him to the bedroom, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Inside, I paced back and forth in a panic, realizing that I had gotten myself in deeper than my desires. I tried to think of a way to excuse myself from the situation with the least amount of fuss and hurt feelings, but I could think of none. Soon I burst out of the bathroom, yelled an excuse at the open bedroom door, grabbed my jacket, and ran out of the apartment.
I figured then that if I could indeed go both ways, one way didn’t quite prefer to go all the way.
I would c
ome to know what the world called people like me: bisexuals. The hated ones. The bastard breed. The “tragic mulattos” of sexual identity. Dishonest and dishonorable. Scandal-prone and disease-ridden. Nothing nice.
And while the word “bisexual” was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself, in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate. It reduced a range of identities, unbelievably wide and splendidly varied, in which same-gender attraction presented in graduated measures—from a pinch to a pound—to a single expression. To me it seemed too narrowly drawn in the collective consciousness, suggesting an identity fixed precisely in the middle between straight and gay, giving equal weight to each, bearing no resemblance to what I felt. In me, the attraction to men would never be equal to the attraction to women—in men it was often closer to the pinch—but it would always be in flux. Whenever someone got up the gumption to ask me outright, “What are you?” I’d reply with something coy: “Complicated.” It would take many years before the word “bisexual” would roll off my tongue and not get stuck in my throat. I would have to learn that the designation wasn’t only about sexual histories or current practice, but capacity. Nonetheless, when saying the word, I’d follow quickly with details meant to clarify.
Few people would be open to the idea of men like me even existing, in any incarnation. To many, I would be something like the Bigfoot from Boggy Creek—a loathsome thing some believed was real but most did not. Even the otherwise egalitarian would have no qualms about raising questions and casting doubt. Many could only conceive of bisexuality in the way it existed for most people willing to admit to it: as a transitory identity—a pit stop or a hiding place—and not a permanent one.
Whatever the case, folks would never truly understand me, nor I them.
To me, their limits on attraction would seem overly broad and arbitrary. To them, I would be a man who walked up to the water’s edge and put only one foot in, out of fear or confusion or indecision. I would be the kind of man who wanted it all—clinging to the normative while nodding to difference.
But that’s not the way it works within me. I wasn’t moving, the same-gender attraction was. Sometimes it withdrew from me almost completely, and at others it lapped up to my knees. I wasn’t making a choice; I was subject to the tide.
I wouldn’t always get things right—I wouldn’t always find the courage to tell people the whole truth about myself, or do so before their love had already reached through my secret and touched my shame—but at least I learned to move in the right direction. I wouldn’t lay the weight of my shame down all at once, but a bit at a time over many years, like forks of hay pitched from the back of a pickup truck, until the bales dwindled and the load was made light.
I would get married fresh out of college—to Greta, the champagne-colored girl, the greatest love of my young life—after we both stopped pretending there was any other we would rather be with. I confessed to her my past and my proclivities, as fully as I understood them at the time, including the story of my encounter with the shoe importer, though not as soon as either of us would have preferred. We figured that our love was greater than my complexity. We had three beautiful children—an older boy and girl-boy twins—in rapid succession, but the marriage didn’t survive the seventh year. We grew apart. Still, the marriage confirmed for me that extended fidelity was in fact possible, not by focusing on denying part of my nature but on submitting the whole of my heart. Monogamy was a choice. That was a side I could pick.
After Greta and I split, I decided to give male intimacy another try. The male attraction was still there, running alongside the female one—not equal, but there. I assumed my first failure might have been the result of youth and nerves and a mixed match. But now, again, my body sometimes failed to respond. Other times I was able to engage more fully, but almost always with the aid of copious amounts of alcohol, me barely able to remember the encounters and often wanting to forget them. This felt fraudulent to me, and opportunistic, and it was dangerous.
Still, no matter how much I drank, no matter how altered my consciousness, I couldn’t completely rid myself of the unease of being intimately close to another man’s body, hard and hairy and muscular and broad by the shoulders, more stem than flower—too much like my own.
In those moments I was acutely aware that I missed the primal tug of the female form, the primary sensation and the peripheral ones. The look of soft features and the feel of soft skin. The graceful slopes of supple curves. The sweet smells. The giggles. The thing in me that yearned for those sensory cues from a woman wouldn’t quietly accept a substitute.
I once even found myself trying to imagine that a man who was interested in me was in fact a woman, so that I could get over my unease. That, to me, was going too far.
I had to accept a counterintuitive fact: my female attraction was fully formed—I could make love and fall in love—but my male attraction had no such terminus. I didn’t think of men as romantic interests, and I would come to see my inhibitors around same-sex intercourse—whether congenitally imprinted or culturally constructed or some combination of those forces—as so high that I would quickly tire of trying to overcome them. To the degree that I held male attraction, it was frustrated. In that arena, I possessed no desire to submit and little to conquer. For years I worried that the barrier was some version of self-loathing, a denial. But eventually I concluded that the continual questioning—and attempts to circumvent it—was its own form of loathing, or self-flagellation. I would hold myself open to evolution on this point, but I would stop trying to force it. I would settle, over time, into the acceptance that my attractions, though fluid, were simply lopsided. Only with that acceptance would I truly feel free.
Furthermore, I’d come to understand that I sometimes confused the need for attention with a desire for sex. For much of my life I would crave attention with a carnal intensity. From anyone. From everyone. That feeling of being chosen. I would flirt with anyone who was congenial and amenable—a ravenous, indiscriminate flirtation, or a feather-light, barely-there one—or allow myself to be flirted with, by women and men alike, to cover the emptiness I felt or to fill in the hole, the desired culmination being not so much physical intimacy as emotional affirmation. The boy who had once felt invisible would forever ache simply to be seen.
But that would all come later. That school year, in the winter after Chester called and I raced down the highway with a gun before laying my burdens down, after the holidays were over and just as 1991 began, I left the just-in-case pistol in Gibsland, never to handle a gun again, and packed the car with clothes, some books, and a radio. My mother, the only woman I was sure truly loved me, waved goodbye, and I struck out for an internship at the Wilmington News Journal in Delaware, which was quickly followed by the summer internship at the New York Times.
I was finally headed up north, away from the places between places. As I snaked around the railroad track crossing arms, which were malfunctioning again that morning, I realized that I—the poor boy from the middle of nowhere, thrice betrayed—had made it, survived, rescued myself by dint of determination and the settling of my spirit.
After graduating, I took a job as a graphic artist at the Detroit News, where I practiced my own brand of visual journalism: combining reporting and writing with charts and diagrams. I would stay there one and a half winters—that was the way I counted it, because Detroit winters were the coldest this Louisiana boy had ever seen—before the New York Times hired me as a graphics editor. And, a few weeks before my twenty-fifth birthday, the Times put me in charge of the graphics department, making me the youngest newsroom department head the paper had ever had. I would leave the Times briefly for a stint as art director of National Geographic magazine before returning to the Times for a novel role created for me, producing charts and offering my written opinion about what they meant and why it mattered—a “visual op-ed columnist,” th
ey called me. By a twist of fate, I found my way back to writing.
At Grambling, my fraternity was suspended after more hazing a few years after I left. The suspension would last until all the current members had graduated and the chapter could start anew. Chopper went on to become a prominent corporate lawyer, Clay became a successful banker and the godfather of my oldest son, and Kaboom a television producer and the godfather of my daughter.
In Gibsland, my mother became a pillar of the community even as the small town contracted around her. She continued her learning and teaching. In retirement she volunteered as a teachers’ aide and substitute teacher before running for a spot on the local school board, and winning.
Gibsland as I remember it has almost vanished, leaving not much more than another wide place in the road. All but one of the one-of-each-thing stores have shuttered their doors. The sweet potato farms have ceased production, and the upholstery shop is gone. The House with No Steps has been torn down, and my mother purposely burned Papa Joe’s house to the ground rather than maintain it.
White folks in town slowly moved away or died off, and black folks began to buy the vacated houses, a kind of integration by attrition, but the chain link fence separating the white and black cemeteries remains.
My four brothers stayed in the South, all within driving distance of my mother, and they have all become devoted fathers, like I have tried to be, although only Nathan, James, and I ever married, and only Nathan’s marriage survived.
Big Mama and Grandpa Joe have died. Aunt Odessa and Mrs. Bertha and Sun Buddy and all the old people with whom I spent my days are gone. Uncle Paul also has died. Folks have told me that Evelyn married a man named Loved a few months after leaving Gibsland with her baby. I never saw or heard from Chester again.
My parents have moved gently into old age. My mother has become the kind of grandmother who is quick to let her feelings show, saying “I miss you,” “I’m proud of you,” and “I love you” unguardedly. My father has become a doting grandfather—one who gives hugs and rides on his knees and who takes the grandchildren to the store to buy more candy than we parents allow. And he’s become a Bible-toting deacon at the church where I was baptized.
Fire Shut Up in My Bones Page 23
