So now there were four of us at lunch. We had lots of laughter at our table, much of it pointed at each other but not in a derogatory way. Boys our age rag on each other, and we were normal boys. Tanner wasn’t at all sensitive to being teased. He knew who he was, had a mountain of self-confidence, and laughed along with us when we insulted him. He was never offended.
The rest of us were more sensitive. Maybe it was because we were all gay and had had to hide it at some point, and hiding who you are does something to you. It’s like you feel there’s something wrong with you, and you need to make sure no one else is aware of it. That plays havoc with your ego unless you’re one of those super-confident weirdos. So, while the gloves were off when we lambasted Tanner, he and the rest of us were more careful when it came to doing the same things with the other three of us.
Tanner and I were still meeting at my house almost every day. We’d finished the map. We had all the countries labeled, all the capitals located and named, some physical features drawn in, like major mountains and rivers, and we’d also entered the names of seas and lakes. We hadn’t been instructed to learn the physical size of the countries, but we made a note of them. The map would be too crowded if we wrote all these things in the space we had with each country. We were going to clip a separate piece of paper with this extra data to the map.
We’d spent a lot of time on the map and were expecting high praise for it.
Memorizing what we had to know for the test was still in progress. Tanner kept mixing up the capitals of Latvia and Lithuania—Riga and Vilnius—maybe because both Latvia and Vilnius had the letter V in them. I wasn’t having any problems with the capitals. My problem was with population numbers. Tanner seemed to absorb numbers and was able to spit them out easily. Not me.
Other kids in Mr. Montgomery’s class started bitching to him about learning all those population numbers, and he relented to the extent that we should know them approximately. We didn’t need to know them to the last individual. We could round them off to the nearest ten million for the countries that had that many people, and on the test, he wouldn’t put as much emphasis on populations as he would capitals and country locations. But he wanted us to have a general feel for how populous each country was.
We had our map done and spent what time we did on the project drilling each other. We were both going to get the countries and capitals all correct. I had no doubt about that; it was a certainty. Still, drilling on them was kind of fun. We were doing pretty well on populations, too. I asked him how many countries had fewer than one-million people, and he thought for just a moment and said, “Nine,” and then, without prompting, named them: “Vatican City, of course, then San Marino and Monaco; Liechtenstein and Andora; Iceland, Malta and Montenegro; and lastly, Luxembourg.”
He grinned at me and said, “Ask me something hard!”
“That was hard! But, okay, you want hard, you got hard. Which of those countries isn’t in the list of smallest-land-area countries?”
He grinned at me. “If you’d asked me to list in order the smallest-area countries, that would have been harder, but asked this way, it’s easy. Iceland!”
“Damn! You’re going to ace this thing for sure.”
“You will, too. Now, let’s talk about something else.”
The test wasn’t going to be given for a few more weeks, so we had lots of time. That’s why we didn’t spend all that much time studying it each time he was over.
It was November by now, and the days were much cooler. Luckily, Dad liked to use the pool year-round, so kept it heated to the mid-seventies. We were still using it and still swam nude when my parents weren’t home. It wasn’t as erotic doing that now than it had been at first, but still wonderful.
We were in my room, and he said he wanted to tell me something, so I sat in my computer chair and waited for him to start. He was on my bed. He seemed to like my bed; he spent a lot of time there. Was he teasing me? I couldn’t figure that out. There was much to Tanner that was unfigurable.
“You know Thanksgiving is next week.” He didn’t pose it as a question. He knew I knew. I’d invited him for our big dinner. My mother had called his stepmother and invited her family, too.
She heard the word ‘no’ and that Tanner wouldn’t be coming either, as he’d be eating with them.
I nodded, just to be doing something.
“Well, we’ve been sort of fighting over it. I want to eat here. I’m much happier here than at my house. There’s always a battle there about something or other. I can’t stand her parents. They want to get involved in every discussion, in every plan, in everything. And they’re racists and homophobes and tightwads and negative cynics and just awful people. That’s why I’m here all the time. This house, this family, feels like a family. That house feels like a war zone.”
“Oh. I thought you were here a lot because you loved me,” I pouted. I loved pushing his buttons. He’d never commit to anything like what I’d just said, but I kept pushing with a smile on my face and hoped someday he’d say something serious so I’d know where I stood with him.
He didn’t acknowledge my pout. He ignored me and continued. He was good at that. “I don’t want to spend Thanksgiving with them. They’re not even cooking; they’re going out for dinner. The one day of the year that’s really for families to get together, be close, celebrate their togetherness, with everyone helping cook and decorate, all feeling the love they have for each other—that day they choose to go out to a restaurant for dinner. That’s them.”
He shook his head as though to clear the memory of that before going on. “Anyway, I finally did it. I called Dad. He had no idea what was going on here. This is the longest we’ve been separated, and it’s mostly because he’s now the color man for the NY Giants telecasts, and during the NFL season has no spare time at all. We do have phone calls about once a week, but I’ve never wanted to cause him problems, so I haven’t told him anything about how I’m not getting along with his wife’s family. Or with her. He didn’t know. Now he does. We spoke for a long time. The end result is, he’s coming down for Thanksgiving. He wants to see what’s what here. I’m sure he thinks I’m exaggerating. But I told him I wanted to eat Thanksgiving dinner with you guys. I’ve told him all about you and how much I love your family, about how I feel loved here much more than at home, and that I’d like him to come meet all of you when you’re here.
“I told him about them going out to eat on Thanksgiving and how that would be the perfect time for him to come here. I must have been persuasive or sounded panicky, but I got him to agree to have dinner here, too, if you’ll have him. I want him to meet your family, which is to me more my family than the one I’m living with. I love your family.”
Well, at least he could say that much: he loved my family. I could take that as a positive or a negative. If he loved my family, that included me, didn’t it? But if he loved me separate from my family, wouldn’t he tell me? So, did that mean he didn’t?
I could drive myself crazy with this stuff.
“Of course he’s invited,” I said. “But won’t that be a problem with his wife?” I never called her his mom if I could avoid it. Or even stepmom. He didn’t think of her that way. Recently he’d told me he now thought of her as his father’s wife and that she had no familial connection to him at all.
“He’s unhappy that I’m unhappy. I think he needs to see how things are for himself. I guess they’ve been talking on the phone some, and he says he’s noticed a difference in her. She’s even complained a little that I’m not being as obedient as I should. He thinks she’s being influenced by her parents. He says he never got along with them but hadn’t spent much time with them. Anyway, I got the feeling he just wants to see her in person with her parents, see the family dynamics there. We’ll see what comes of this. But I’m excited he’ll be here and that you can meet him. I want to see whether he likes you.”
See why he drives me crazy?! See?
≈ ≈ ≈
I’d written my latest column in the school paper about school holidays. Specifically, how some teachers love to give homework assignments for completion during those periods, making them due on the day we return to school. This, of course, meant we had to do schoolwork, sometimes quite a lot, while we were supposedly on vacation. Like they were.
I wasn’t in favor of this. I don’t believe a single kid in school was, either. So, I wrote a column. I suggested that every teacher should give assignments like this, how it wasn’t good to give our brains a rest for even a few days as they might get rusty. How those of us traveling with our families to visit relatives should have to work hard on their assignments so the relatives could see what studious teens we were. How those of us who’d got temp jobs where they were needed for the influx of people at malls and fast-food places during these times should learn how the real adult world is unfair and start, while young, learning to cope with this kind of scheduling problem; if they needed the money, well, tough. I wrote how it was good for us to stay home while the rest of our families were out and about visiting friends around town and otherwise having a good time without us because we were, after all, students and needed to be acting like we were. How we needed to put our studies before family or church obligations and certainly before anything as trivial as friends and fun.
It was bitingly sarcastic, obviously so, and made the point rather well, I thought, that teachers who pulled this stunt should be horsewhipped. I even used the word horsewhipped—carefully, of course. We’re not supposed to advocate violence against our teachers. The column received great approval from the students and got me a few glares from certain teachers. The best result came from Mr. Montgomery.
In our class before Thanksgiving recess, as the class time was nearing its end, he said, “Class, I was going to assign a two-thousand-word essay for you guys to hand in when classes resumed on Monday. But I got the impression from reading a newspaper that it might not be wise to do that, especially when I learned that the equestrian-supply store in town was running low because of a recent run on horsewhips. So, instead of assigning an essay, I’ll just say Happy Thanksgiving to you all, and you might pat a certain classmate on the back as you file out in appreciation.”
The bell rang, and I was attacked! Well, none of the pats were hard, and everyone was grinning, and it was all positive attention. I loved it!
≈ ≈ ≈
Tanner was nervous and got more so as Thanksgiving approached. Then he decided he needed to do something and got me involved, which was sneaky of him. It took some detailed arranging, but as I said before in my writing here, I’m gay, but that doesn’t stop me from being devious and sneaky and sly. I kinda enjoy that.