The pounding on the front door was loud and unrelenting. It sounded like the person assailing the door was furious. And it didn’t stop. It went on and on. I didn’t want to open the door, but this was crazy. When the doorbell began ringing as well without the pounding letting up in the slightest, I sighed, gave in, and went to the door. Knowing I was making a mistake, I opened it.
“What the fuck, Tim!” Terry was standing there, his face red, his arm still raised, his hand still clenched in a fist for the next blow to the door. There was anger on his face and in his eyes.
I stepped aside and he walked in, even his stride showing his feelings. His anger was a presence of its own, an untamed force in the room.
I turned and walked upstairs. Whatever he had to say, I’d prefer it to be in my room. It had been my sanctuary for a long time now and I subconsciously thought I could bear his wrath better there than anywhere else in the house.
I sat on the bed and he stood in front of me.
“You’ve got to stop doing this! You’ve got to stop running away when something upsets you. You just left John, and he doesn’t know why. He’s wondering what he said. You were supposed to spend the afternoon with him. You’re talking, then suddenly—bam!—there goes Tim, off and running again! Why, Tim!? For God’s sake, why?”
I didn’t want to talk. Yeah, he probably thought he deserved an explanation, but that didn’t mean I wanted to give him one. And I wasn’t going to, I decided, it was as simple as that.
“Look, Terry. I told you before that there are some things I don’t want to talk about. You agreed with me on those ground rules when we first got together in this very room. You told me, if I don’t want to talk about something, just say so. Well, this is one of the things I don’t want to talk about. I’m not going to talk about this.” I looked up at him with some defiance in my eyes, as if daring him to continue.
That didn’t seem to be a problem for him at all. He simply ignored my defiance and what I’d said. “Tim, that’s not good enough!” He was still angry. “We were talking about things from your past then, and you know it! Now we’re talking about now! We’re talking about you and me and John! There’s nothing secret here! You were talking to John. A pleasant, stress-free, friendly conversation from what he told me, one he was not just enjoying but loving. You were talking about your story, and then you took off like a bat out of hell just out of the blue! For no reason at all!
“John doesn’t know what he did wrong but thinks it’s his fault. You don’t know him well enough. He comes across really strong and sure of himself, but he isn’t. He doesn’t have many friends because most kids are just uncomfortable around someone in a wheelchair. So when he’s making a good friend, you in fact, and then that friend runs away without a word, it hurts him. In this case, because he was starting to like you a lot and be comfortable with you, it hurt him a lot.
“I won’t accept that. Damn it, Tim, he’s been hurt too many times. He doesn’t deserve that, and I’m not going to let it happen. He deserves better. His life has been full of pain and loneliness, and now this; it’s just unnecessary! I don’t know what your problem is, but this just isn’t good enough! I want to know what’s going on with you. And I don’t want any run around. I want to know! Whatever it is, this has to end.”
He was glaring at me, and I had to come up with something. What I decided was weak, granted, but if you have a tall, angry football player in your face and yelling at you, you probably wouldn’t come up with your best stuff either. You go with the first thing you can think of.
“Why’re you acting like his personal bodyguard? Or is it his feelings-guard?” I said, and I said it strongly, trying to match at least some of his passion. “I heard you, you know, when you called John a cripple. You’re worrying that I might have hurt his feelings! What about you? I’d never say anything like that to him!”
He looked at me like I was crazy. At least he wasn’t shouting now. “Come on, Tim. You’re not dumb, and that’s simply dumb. You know I wouldn’t say something like that and mean it the way you’re saying. It’s a standing joke between us. The fact is, he calls himself that at times when he’s down, and I call him that to snap him out of it. In reality, we’ve talked about it, and he says, and believes, being a cripple is more a state of mind than a physical restriction. He says his problem will only get to him if he lets it. The fact is, John feels and acts like anything but a cripple. And by calling him that like I did at lunch, I’m acknowledging that.”
I thought about that briefly, and decided I needed to think about it again later when I had the time. It struck me there was something there that applied to me, too. If John could adjust his attitude to accept his circumstances, circumstances which were certainly worse than mine, maybe my attitude could be adjusted as well to relieve me of some of the burdens I was carrying.
But I was still facing off with Terry, and it appeared to me my anger was working to distract him. I quickly decided to expand on those tactics.
“What do you need to know about me for, anyway?” I said angrily, dismissing his statement about John. “Why do you keep asking me things I don’t want to talk about? I told you I don’t want to talk about things. I didn’t define what things, just things. But now you want to set the rules on what I can decide not to talk about? Screw that! You won’t leave me alone, that’s the problem. Why is it always me we have to talk about? Why don’t you talk about your last football game? That’s a better topic of discussion for you, isn’t it?”
Okay, so that was a non sequitur, and it didn’t make much sense even to me. I was feeling pushed into a corner and the best thing I could defend myself with was anger, striking out at him. That’s what I was doing, but striking out at Terry wasn’t something that came natural to me. It was something that didn’t feel right, and maybe that’s why I was doing such a piss poor job of it.
Terry’s response wasn’t more and stronger anger. Instead, he just looked at me, and a pensive expression settled on his face. That made me try to act even madder and to strike out even more. I didn’t want him thinking, I wanted him not to think.
“So say something already,” I yelled. “What’s the matter, your jockstrap too tight? Cutting off blood to your brain?” Yeah, that was clever!
But it did get him to talk, and some of his anger was gone. “Tim, calm down. What’s this, you’re trying to insult me? You’re mad and you’re trying to make me mad? You sound like you’re saying you think I’m dumb. Is that it? You think I’m a dumb jock and you’re going to make me mad saying so? I don’t believe you really think I’m dumb. So, what’s going on here?”
Now that he was answering, I immediately pulled back, retreating to the safety of my self-imposed shell, the safety I’d built for myself behind my wall. I just looked down at the floor. Of course I didn’t think he was dumb. I was just trying to make him go on the defensive, and basically distract him from asking me about myself.
Terry continued to look at me. After a pregnant pause, he asked, “What do mathematicians mean when they talk about pi?”
“Uh, you use it when working with circles.”
“It’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Any circle. It’s always the same. Do you know the numeric value of pi?”
“Sure,” I said, no longer mad. I’d sidetracked him. I’d won. “It’s 3.14.”
“Can you go further than that?”
“Okay. How about 3.1416?”
“And then?”
“That’s all I know.”
“Then try 3.1415926535? And you know, don’t you, that it’s a transcendental number, continuing on infinitely without repeating itself at all?”
“I have no argument with that.” I was trying to be funny, to make us both laugh, but with the emotions that were still below the surface, fading but still there, I couldn’t bring it off, and the noise I made wasn’t even an approximation of a laugh. “I don’t know it that many decimals out.”
“And what’s the capital of Paraguay?”
“Uh, Montevideo?”
“No, that’s Uruguay.”
“Oh. What is it, then?”
“Asuncion.”
I looked at him. “So what’s your point?”
He didn’t answer, just continued, “Who said, ‘I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.’”
“I don’t know. Thomas Paine? Thomas Jefferson?”
“No. But those are good guesses. John Adams.”
I just stared at him, not bothering to ask him again his point.
He was relentless. “Who painted the picture named American Gothic showing a very humorless looking farmer holding a pitchfork, standing next to his wife?”
“I have no idea.” I was getting a little pissed again, but for entirely different reasons.
“Grant Wood. Should I go on?”
“I don’t know why you’re asking these things in the first place.”
“Because you suggested that I’m not too bright. That maybe I’m a little dense. That I’m just a dumb jock.”
Now what could I say? I couldn’t tell him I’d only been trying to get him to change the subject. I looked down at my feet. I blushed. “I’m sorry,” I said softly.
We fell quiet; I was looking down, and so I didn’t know where his eyes were directed. My faked anger was spent, and his anger, which had been real, was gone, too. I felt his hand on my arm, and I had to look up. When I did, I found him staring at me, and his eyes locked onto mine. His look was intense.
“Tim, answer me. Are we friends? Do you think of me as your friend?”
“Sure I do. I hope we’re friends.” His intensity made me nervous.
“Do you trust me?”
I thought about that and realized to my surprise that I did trust him. I wasn’t good at trust. Life had taught me if you didn’t trust anyone, you were a lot safer. But Terry was different. Ever since I’d begun spending time with him, the one constant with him was he was aware of my feelings and went out of his way to take them into consideration. He didn’t push me where I didn’t want to go and didn’t override my wishes to accommodate his own. I was very aware of that because I was naturally very self-protective, and with him I didn’t need to be. When you’re used to spending a lot of energy being alert watching out for yourself and then suddenly you don’t have to do that with someone, believe me, you notice.
“Yes, Terry, I trust you,” I said, breaking my eyes away from his and looking down again. I don’t know why saying this embarrassed me, but it did. Maybe I felt I was taking my shield down, opening myself up too much, and looking down was a silent plea for him not to take advantage of my vulnerability.
He was silent, and I felt he was intentionally using silence to acknowledge his awareness of the significance of what I’d said. Perhaps it was to show he understood the importance I placed on trust.
As the pause continued, I slowly raised my eyes back to his. Our eyes locked again. Then he started talking, and I had to listen.
“Tim, if you trust me, that means you know I won’t do anything that would hurt you. You know I’m here for you. You know I won’t embarrass you and will support you. You know anything you say is safe with me. You know you can rely on me. That’s what trust is. Those are a lot of big, important, vital things. That’s what trust is. You’re my friend, Tim. I like you and even more important, I respect you.
“You just said you trust me. That’s what friends are for, and how they act with each other. And friends can’t be real friends unless they really do trust each other. Without that trust—and without standing up for each other, not only up for but behind each other, too—they’re not really friends, not as I use the word. ‘Friend’ is a word that’s important to me. I’m friendly with lots of kids, but not a true friend to very many. I think of you as one of my friends, even though we haven’t known each other very long. The more time we’ve spent together, the closer we’ve become. Do you agree with this?”
By now I was looking down again. I wasn’t used to this much emotion. It was difficult to meet his eyes when he was speaking so passionately, with such intensity. So, without lifting my eyes, I answered his question by nodding.
“Tim, will you be my friend,” he asked, maintaining the intensity he’d been speaking with. The same intensity that said, ‘this matters, this is important.’
What that meant was, when I answered, I’d better be telling the truth. I was putting our relationship on the line; I was accepting him as a friend, and accepting what he meant by that.
“I want to be,” I said softly.
Another pause. Then, “Tim, tell me why you ran away from John today.”
It had come to this. Well, I thought, I guess I could tell him part of it. Keep it simple. Maybe that would be enough.
“We were talking about my story. He had read it. But from what he said about it, he saw too much. He saw something I didn’t think anyone would see. Something that was true but wasn’t meant to be seen. It scared me. It made me wonder what else he could see that I thought I had hidden. I have secrets. You know that. The more I thought about John discovering things I want to keep secret, the more scared I got. So I left. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I wasn’t thinking about him, only about protecting myself.” As I said that, and thought about John, my eyes watered and I turned away.
Terry watched me closely. He thought for a moment. Then he asked what I thought he’d ask. He asked what I’d been waiting for him to ask, what I’d been dreading and anticipating and wanting him to ask.
“Tim, can you tell me about what happened before you moved here? I know it scares you, but talking helps. Can you find the courage to tell me what you’ve been hiding?”
I was scared. I’d been private for so long. I had kept to myself. I had isolated myself. It was safer. Remaining safe had become part of my life. Maybe not a good and healthy part, but one I felt was important. I’d built a wall and lived behind it. And now, here was Terry, a friend I desperately needed, asking me to give up that safety, break down that wall.
He was a rock. I knew that. I could lean against his strength with no fear it would crumble, no fear he would fail me. But he didn’t know what I was hiding.
He wanted me to go further now than I was comfortable going. But I did trust him. I knew I could. Still, I was scared. Now he wanted to know what I’d never told anyone. What I’d sworn to myself I never would tell anyone. And he was asking in a way that meant I had to tell him or not be the type of friend he wanted me to be, that I myself wanted to be.
I wasn’t sure I could trust him that much, but I knew I wanted to. I thought I could. I needed to for several reasons that had as much to do with me as with him.
So I answered him as truthfully as I could. “I don’t know if I can,” I said in a voice so low I could barely hear it myself.
“I think you can. I think you need to. That’s why I’m asking you. Because I think you need to. I’m not asking for me. For you.”
There was a long, silent pause. My emotions were in turmoil. I’d been keeping them down for so long. But, I thought, he was right. I did need to.
So I told him.
END OF PART 1