How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  It shouldn’t have been that easy to un-become myself. The lies and omissions started to roll off my tongue and I got more confident; I stopped mumbling and stuttering. I began meeting people’s eyes, shaking their hands confidently, and introducing a person who I wasn’t exactly, all while smiling. It felt good, like the first sip of an ice-cold beer after a long, hot day. I could be this person. I knew exactly how to be him. The kind of man who always feels the need to make it clear he doesn’t swing that way. Lewisville had raised me well.

  There were so many freshman orientation mixers and icebreakers that by the time I strolled up to the cookout hosted by the neighboring all-girls dorm, I already had a sudden crew of very nice, corn-fed bros. Peter from Chicago was planning on doing Rush Week. Bryce from McCracken County was thinking about auditioning to be Big Red, the school’s mascot. Steven from Danville knew someone who’d make a run to the liquor store for us. These guys loved basketball. Everyone in Kentucky loved basketball, they said. They wore T-shirts with the sleeves unevenly cut off so you could see their farmer’s tans. They all had girlfriends or had left girlfriends back home or were eyeing girls at the cookout who could be fucks but never friends. I’d never thought of myself as “one of the boys.” I could’ve made an educated guess about where these boys would’ve sat in the cafeteria back at Lewisville High School, a table I wouldn’t have been invited to join, but here I was: an alternate version of myself in an alternate future from the one I’d been planning for years.

  Our RA persuaded a group of us to do trust falls, despite the fact that most of us had only known one another for a day. We paired up on the lawn in front of the dorm. It was just about dusk. The sun eased itself down behind the hills. Breezes actually felt comforting when they slid past you. We all smelled like fresh-cut grass and barbecue. Fireflies and gnats flitted about. And maybe it shouldn’t matter as much as it did, but every time I fell, hands were there to catch me.

  * * *

  I WOKE UP in the top bunk in my dorm room the next morning with my body pressed against the cool, white cinderblock wall next to my bed as if I’d been trying to spoon it in my sleep. The sound of my roommate’s heavy snoring dissolved the initial shock of not being in my bedroom back in Lewisville. I climbed down as quietly as I could and tried not to stare at him, sprawled over the edge of his bed. I had never shared a room with another person before. The bed almost seemed to rise and fall in time with his labored breathing. I got dressed and snuck out, as if I’d been an intruder in someone else’s room.

  Kentucky was green, furiously, vibrantly green. Only now, miles and many landscapes away from home, could I tell how parched Texas was by contrast. Even in spring, our greenest green still looked yellow compared with Kentucky. After just a few minutes of walking around, my eyes clouded and I couldn’t stop sneezing. Allergies chased me back into my room. From that morning on, I wouldn’t step outside without taking allergy medicine first. Even breathing in Kentucky had different rules.

  In the food court later that week, I finally met some other kids who’d also gotten speech and debate scholarships and would be competing with me on the team. Debate kids aren’t all that different from theater kids, except we’re more arrogant, tend to speak faster, and have a habit of constantly trying to outdo one another with stories and arguments. Just as I had code-switched my way into fitting in with the guys days before, I started throwing shade, lacing every other sentence with sarcasm, discussing poems and plays, bragging about my aspirations to make it to New York eventually. How many versions of myself I’d perform by week’s end was anyone’s guess.

  We finished our lunch and walked to our next session together. Once seated, I saw my crew of dorm guys on the other side of the auditorium. I waved and they smiled, waving back but staying put. I stayed put too. This self was just a little easier to wear. We were there to learn about peer pressure and the perils of getting too drunk at parties. And maybe it’s because all week long I’d been thinking so much about what I wasn’t telling people, I couldn’t help but notice the gaping absence in the middle of the presentation. Something was very loudly not being said.

  “You know this is all about that Autry girl, right?” whispered Maggie, one of the speech kids who happened to be from Kentucky. When I shook my head no, she gave me the kind of raised eyebrows that precede not gossip but real news.

  Melissa “Katie” Autry, a first-year student from nearby Pellville, Kentucky, went to a fraternity party in May 2003. She met two guys, Stephen Soules and Lucas Goodrum, and eventually snuck them past her dorm’s front desk and into her room. At one point in the evening, Autry called a friend who also lived in the building and said she had a guy in her room. The friend would later testify in court that a man got on the phone and said Autry had gotten sick in his truck and he brought her back to make sure she was okay. The friend heard another male voice in the background and the call abruptly ended.

  Several days later, Autry died in a hospital. She had been raped, beaten, stabbed, and set on fire using hair spray in her dorm room. Soules eventually received a life sentence. And Goodrum—who apparently had ties to the family who owns the Fortune 500 Dollar General Corporation—was acquitted. The case forced WKU to change its campus security policies, especially regarding guests visiting residence halls.

  “It was all over the news here,” Maggie added. “You didn’t hear about it in Texas?” She sucked her teeth when I shook my head again. Autry wasn’t mentioned directly during the one-hour presentation, a testament perhaps to the unique talent Americans have for talking all the way around exactly what needs to be said. I remember the orientation leaders continually emphasizing the perils of binge drinking; I don’t remember words like “rape,” “sexual assault,” or “consent.” Katie Autry was a specter between the lines. Her story haunted the room, all of us hearing and not hearing her at the same time.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, MAGGIE and I went to our first college party. The host, Rob, was looking me over from the other side of his house’s screen door, dressed in complete Catholic schoolboy garb, including knee socks, suspenders, and thick-framed glasses held together in the middle with Scotch tape. He was an upperclassman on the speech team and handsome as a good knife.

  “My name is Sebastian,” he said in an exaggerated lisp the moment he opened the door. “Can I suck your cock?”

  I can’t remember what I said in reply. Maybe I just giggled and slid past him with my friends, too embarrassed to admit that he could, in fact, suck whatever part of me he wanted. He pushed his glasses up his nose and dramatically bowed as we stepped into the house.

  The party’s theme was teachers and students. In slacks, tie, and a dress shirt, I guess I was supposed to be a professor, though my costume was hardly inspired. Some students showed up dressed as figures from throughout world history or as specific instructors who’d become notorious on campus for being too lenient, too harsh, or just too weird. The older students on the team hosted the party every year to kick off the fall semester.

  My first red Solo cup. My first pour from a plastic bottle of Burnett’s vodka. My first dark living room with an iPod hooked up to speakers. My first time hearing Talib Kweli’s “Get By.” My first time stumbling through the house from one room to the next room until I reached a closed door lit from the other side. I got curious and opened it. Clouds of smoke billowed out; heads turned to regard me as I was already apologizing, already closing the door and backing away when someone said, “Nah, let the kid in.” My first time realizing that I was, in fact, the kid. I was new again. I was green again. Whatever anxieties I’d been dragging with me all through high school, all the way from Texas to Kentucky, I didn’t have to drag them into this house. It was enough just to show up on the doorstep, my necktie poorly knotted, my slacks wrinkled, my eyes blinking as I stared at Rob. Newbie. Youngblood. Baby boy. My first time having a blunt passed to me and pretending to know how to smoke until someone had to show me how. Yes, that is exactly who I was su
pposed to be: the kid who couldn’t inhale, then inhaled too much, the kid who couldn’t stop coughing, the kid whose coughing fit made everyone laugh until they started coughing too.

  Another first: the door opened and Rob’s tall, slender silhouette filled the frame. “There you are, professor,” he said. The older kids—even the straight guys—nodded and smiled knowing smiles. The same way they’d smiled when other guys and girls had paired off and slipped through the smoke back into the house’s dark recesses. This didn’t have to be a secret. It was okay to be a man who wanted another man. We all had bodies, didn’t we? And it felt good. For the first time, it felt completely good to want this. No hurt or shame or shadows were tucked into this want. When Rob sat next to me on the bed, I leaned close enough to smell his cologne, a welcome contrast to boys in the dorm who seemed to prefer Axe body spray.

  “May I have a word?” he said, taking my hand and helping me off the bed. He’d been looking for me. He led me out to a backyard that, in the dark, seemed to go on forever. We climbed onto a huge trampoline and lay on our backs, staring up at the stars as they winked mischievously back down at us. I was drunk and high and I could hear crickets blending in with music drifting out from the house. Rob unzipped my pants and took me into his mouth. I realized a girl was sitting on the edge of the trampoline smoking a cigarette as she watched us. I didn’t mind. For the first time in far too long, I knew exactly who and where I wanted to be.

  11SPRING 2005

  BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY

  The dogwood trees on campus blossomed first that spring. The petals looked white if you saw them from a distance, as I did one morning while walking up the hill to class, suddenly caught midstride and unsure why. I crossed the lawn as if breaking some invisible boundary, marching toward one of the trees until I stood close enough to see that the blossoms were actually a ghostly purple.

  Stroking the petals with the back of my finger, I remembered. My grandmother used to have a dogwood tree tucked in the corner of her backyard. She had sold that house years before. But wrapped in the dogwood’s heady scent now, I remembered playing in her backyard when I was eight or nine. Her tree hadn’t been much taller than I was back then. I found the two branches that had held the most blossoms and ripped them from the trunk. The raw wounds were pale green and sticky to the touch.

  Carrying the branches behind my back, I high-kicked from one end of the yard to the other, in rhythm with a melody I hummed. Every time I twirled, I was both less myself and more. I wasn’t a little black boy playing pretend in his grandmother’s backyard in Memphis. No, I was a Vegas showgirl making her grand entrance in front of a packed house. I waved the branches like feathered fans, hiding then revealing my stretched legs and pointed toes, before whirling around to peek over my shoulder, making eye contact with one man in the audience as if a spotlight had landed on him.

  When my grandmother called me inside, I threw the branches down with force, as if I could also shove aside the rush of embarrassment taking hold. She stood at the door, her brows furrowed, as I slowly walked toward her.

  “Why did you tear down those branches?” she asked as I eased into the kitchen’s coolness.

  “I needed them for my show,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, even as I raced to come up with an answer to ward off whatever she was going to say next. A few weeks before, she had needed to cut me down after I got tangled in the backyard clothesline while pretending to be a trapeze artist. Every blade of grass had been an audience member witnessing my fall from grace.

  My grandmother just sighed and walked back over to the lunch she had prepared for us. We said grace over our plates of baked beans and hot dogs and ate in silence.

  My answer had been enough that day. I was young enough, innocent enough, not to raise her ire. That had to be it. That had to be why my grandmother had seen me without seeing me that afternoon. Eight years old. If I had been even a couple of years older—sauntering into her kitchen like a Vegas showgirl, delivering the same half-answer—I might’ve earned a slap instead of a sigh.

  * * *

  AS THE SEMESTER went on, punctuated by road trips to Nashville, late-night rounds of Never Have I Ever, and rooftop smoking sessions where my friends and I opened up to one another, I felt the heady rush of another wave of firsts: the first time I felt comfortable asking a friend if she thought the boy who sat across from us in class was cute, the first time I went to a drag show with friends my age, the first time that cute boy from class took me out for dinner. It was my first real date with a guy my age, my first time dealing with the awkwardness of trying to figure out who should pay for what, who should decide where to go for dessert. My first time waking up next to a man whose name I couldn’t remember, my first time feeling embarrassed and thrilled by the hickey on my neck after a night of sloppy kisses, my first time surprising myself with how loudly I moaned when I came. I didn’t realize how much I had denied myself, or, rather, how much I had been denied by growing up in a time when being an out teenager in the suburbs of north Texas seemed impossible. Well into high school, I had even avoided talking about pop music because I was afraid of what would happen if my friends realized just how much I loved Whitney, Janet, Mariah, and Brandy.

  The ferocity with which I seized upon my newfound sense of freedom occasionally baffled friends and classmates. And sometimes it seemed to grate on them, to push them away. Now and then, I got the sense that it was one thing on campus to be an out gay man and another to be an out gay man who liked to have sex, who wanted to fuck.

  “Never have I ever…”

  “Yep, I’ve done that.”

  “Never have I ever…”

  “Mhmmm.”

  “Never have I ever…”

  “I did that today.”

  “Jesus, Saeed. What the fuck haven’t you done?”

  At times, I was proud of my sluttiness. I liked to think that it was radical, as if the act of fucking another man and then bragging to my friends about it was a form of protest against the shame I’d grown up with, and against the shame I felt silently radiating from the new people in my life. But just as often, I found myself pushed to wonder, by the wide eyes around me, whether something was wrong with me. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel accepted by my friends; rather, I was beginning to worry that I was being welcomed into the fold in spite of some flaw everyone had already decided to forgive. “What the fuck haven’t you done?” was the kind of question that shadowed me on my walks back to campus after the hookups I was learning not to talk about with friends. It followed me into the shower where, just as often as not, I’d feel like I was trying to scrub away much more than the smell of sex.

  It was as if I’d tripped into a gap between the floorboards: none of my friends on campus were willing to talk, but neither was anyone back home.

  “I still haven’t come out to my mom,” I’d occasionally remind my friends.

  “Wait, really?” one of them might say.

  “I just kind of assumed… ,” someone else might respond on a van ride back to Bowling Green from a speech tournament.

  “Assumed what?”

  “I don’t know. That you’ve just always been this way.”

  * * *

  MOM AND I would call each other once a week, sometimes more. If I managed to let more than a week lapse, I just felt vaguely off and unsure why, until I realized that I hadn’t heard her voice in however many days. That’s what people in our family liked to say: “I just wanted to hear your voice.” We’d say it once at the beginning of the call, and then again at the end—“Well, it was good to hear your voice”—as a signal we were ready to get off the phone. We didn’t talk about anything important during these calls, really. The further I went into my studies, the more sensitive I became to surpassing the extent of my mother’s own college experience. I thought I risked embarrassing her by accidentally referring to an author or term she hadn’t heard of, so I steered conversations away from my studies, except to say that I was doing well.
But focusing on life outside the classroom meant having to navigate leading questions about my dating life. When she went this far, I quickly shout-stuttered, “Well, it was good to hear your voice,” and ended the call.

  When I tried to imagine the conversation I would need to have with her in order to come out, it was like watching a melodramatic silent film without the captions. I cried whenever I thought about it. She had to know already. Even with our gift for stalwart denial, there was just too much evidence for her to ignore the fact that her son was clearly attracted to other men. Coming out to her, then, became such a daunting prospect because I knew I would have to lie in order to tell the truth. I wasn’t innocent, a naïve boy admitting that he had been wrestling with complicated feelings he didn’t really understand. My feelings were clear as daylight. I had passed the moment when I could’ve innocently confessed myself out into the open.

  I talked myself in circles trying to find the perfect phrasing, before I realized there was no way around it. I called home one day while walking up the hill to class. I stared at the mimosa trees while my mother and I chatted aimlessly, until the word “gay” finally dropped out of my mouth.

  She was quiet for a moment then asked me to repeat myself. I had started with a joke that my friends on the speech team had been saying about me: Not even his clothes are in the closet anymore.

  “What does that mean?” she said.

  “I’m not in the closet anymore, just like… my clothes aren’t in the closet.” More silence. “You know, because my closet is really messy?” Silence. “I’m gay.”

  “Have you had an experience?” she asked.