My first week back at school was a little depressing. Not that I had anything against going to school, but the summer had been kind to me and I was sad to see it go.
Colorado is strictly a winter getaway, so a lot of summer trips took students out of state. They probably thought it was nice to get a break from frigid air and 5,000 foot mountains looming over every horizon. And, when all those students left, I practically had the whole town to myself. No lines at theaters, no waits for take-out and far fewer obnoxious customers.
I was still working at The Movie Dome but, with half our town’s expendable income out in Cancun or Orlando, business was slow and I spent most of my time immaculately organizing the DVDs on the shelves and reading Twelfth Night behind the air-conditioned counter. (James got me the complete works of Shakespeare for my seventeenth birthday and I had been tearing through the comedies like crazy. One time I took a stab at the tragedies, but could only make it half-way through Othello before throwing it on the floor and declaring, “Let me guess, he goes nuts and kills everybody then kills himself.” Even Shakespeare could be predictable, I guess.)
Business picked up towards the end of August when the other high-schoolers came back from their trips with golden tans and sun-bleached hair, but James was still in New Zealand. After breaking up with Crystal in June (a mutual arrangement, he insisted) he declared he needed to “get away from it all,” stuffed a backpack full of the all bare essentials and booked the next flight to Wellington.
He had sent post cards over the summer, sometimes with odd little gifts like a whalebone carving of a tribal warrior, but a return date was still his and his alone. Until then, the house and the Tacoma and the DVD player were all mine. I left the couch alone, though, out of some primal superstition that he would burst through the door at any second and judo-toss me onto the floor. Not that he actually knew judo, but a guy who liked tossing his brother around that much may as well have.
I did know Judo, though. Well, only five classes worth at that time. I had to stop Taekwondo because it was too much of a sport and not the art I had anticipated. I tried Kung-fu, but I nearly let it consume my life. I like judo, though. It’s simple, physically tasking, and practice consists of grabbing, throwing and restraining the other boys.
Other than martial arts, movies and the male gender, my focus had been on the foundation and implementation of the first gay club at my high school. Not that I was really “out” but I wanted to help other boys who were farther inside the closet than me.
Dawn was very out, though. He was the front man and likely president for the club, and holy crap was he gay. He was a scrawny flamer with bleached hair swooping over his face, a penchant for girl pants and immaculate posture. He had the delicate lisp typical of a queer and always had a detached look in his dark eyes, like he was thinking about what it would feel like to be breathing hot and heavy underneath the last cute gut he saw. He was kindhearted, but a big enough man-whore to really turn off people who weren’t patient enough to put up with him. And no, his given name was not Dawn. He was born Seymour Goldman. But, if you tried calling him that, you’d find out what it feels like to be slapped silly.
I met Dawn at The Movie Dome over the summer. He was given my old job when I became the assistant shift leader. In the course of conversations, mostly him pointing out all the “luscious” boys that walked into the store, we found out we shared sexual orientations as well as high schools. He was the one who came up with the idea to start the club and I agreed to help, on the condition that I take care of the paper work and he take care of recruitment and club activities. Since I was the only occupant at the time, we used my house as a base of operations. We had made a lot of progress, having held a few unofficial meetings, and we only needed approval from the Student Government to receive official recognition and funding.
But opposition didn’t come from student government or faculty or from a community outcry, but from the scribbling of a pretentious news hound who was brave enough to come upstairs to my study one afternoon.
“Kyle,” said Dawn in the singsong voice he used in pronouncing most everyone’s name. He opened the door to what had been Brian’s old room and leaned his head around the side of the door and asked, “Ya busy?”
I was sitting at the other end of the room with my back to the window behind a hardwood desk I had picked up at a yard sale. That and the bookcase next to it were my only contributions to the room. The bed, the dresser, the weights and verything else was just as Brian had left it.
I set Taming of the Shrew down on the desk and said, “No, what’s up?”
He sidestepped through the half-closed doorway and stood up straight with posture you’d expect to see in The Nutcracker Suite. That day he was wearing a white dress shirt with blue vertical stripes, the tails fluttering over his very slim-fitting jeans. “A reporter from the student newspaper came by asking questions about our club and I told him to talk to you.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
Dawn flicked the door open with his hand, stood aside and held his hands out in an effort to display a heavy-set young man on the other side of the door, all the while smiling like he had just pulled a dozen roses out of a hat.
The young man was trying hard to ignore the queer inferno standing next to him. He wore a grey suit jacket over a brown t-shirt and blue jeans and had a black satchel over his shoulder. He wore thick-rimmed, square glasses that were dark brown like his curly hair and he seemed as eager to see me as a snake is to see a mongoose.
“Are you Kyle Wilson?” he asked with steely-cold indifference.
“Are you the reporter?” I replied.
“My name is Barton White,” he said, striding out of the doorway, grabbing a chair from the end of Brian’s bed and pulling it in front of my desk. Taking a seat, he said, “I have been assigned to report on the new clubs that have been formed this year, of which the Closet Club is one.”
Feeling thoroughly out of the picture, Dawn turned on his heel and floated back downstairs, leaving me with the scowling Barton White.
“Have any trouble finding the place?” I asked.
“It’s a little off the beaten path, which I don’t mind,” he replied. “I’d rather not anyone see me here.”
“You don’t seem very excited by your assignment,” I said.
“Off the record, I think your gay club is an insult to our school,” he stated, staring me coldly in the eye. “You’ve managed to swindle the taxpayers out of school funding to promote deviance and promiscuity among students.”
“On the record,” I replied sharply, leaning forward and folding my arms on the desk, “one of the tenanets of our club is that it is not a dating service or a place for people to pimp themselves away. It is a safe place for gay students to be themselves outside of a society that seeks to purge itself of the unfamiliar.”
White’s eyes narrowed as he stared hard at me and leaned back in his chair, as if trying to come up with a way to tell me off without losing his interview. He conceded defeat and instead reached into his satchel and took out a small, gray tape recorder and placed in on the desk between us.
“Do you mind if I record our conversation?” he asked.
“No, just try to keep it professional,” I replied. “I don’t like arguing sexual ethics with people.”
White cracked a sinister grin as he took out a small notepad and flipped it open, clicking a pen in his other hand.
“The Closet Club seems to have an intentionally ambiguous title,” he began, reading his question from the notepad, “Why the secrecy?”
“We didn’t choose the name for secrecy, but because the school board wanted us to pick a title that wasn’t clearly a reference to being gay. The title is still clear to those who are culturally aware of what it means to be ‘in the closet’ but looks better on a business report than the Queers Club.”
“And why meet in a house instead of on campus like the other clubs?”
“Being gay is a big deal for lots of students and sometimes they don’t want others knowing about it. They’re still getting used to the idea themselves and need a chance to make sense of it all. Sometimes they are afraid of physical or verbal harm, sometimes they are unsure of whether or not they are actually gay. We want to protect them from real problems as well as from creating problems where there should be none.”
“You obviously don’t have any fears of proclaiming your own homosexuality.”
“Well, I don’t scream it from the rooftops, but I won’t lie about it either. I used to be very afraid of my sexual identity since no one else in my life was gay and I had no one to answer my questions. But, having found many answers and survived many embarrassments, I feel it only prudent to share those insights with students who may not know where to look.”
White crossed one leg over the other and tapped the coils of his note pad against his lower lip.
“Does any particular experience stand out to you?”
“Come to our weekly meetings, then you can hear my story and stories from different members as well.”
“Do you feel ashamed of being a homosexual?”
“Not any more.”
“Would you take it back if you could?”
“I can’t, and no. It’s not like I had a choice in the first place.”
I could feel his words probing me, like a crow testing the vitality of a carcass. His eyes kept staring into mine, trying to decipher a weakness. Then his lips grew deviously thin.
“What about the boys you say are ‘unsure?’ Do you ever feel guilty affirming such a lifestyle for people who still have a chance to be normal?”
He found it.
“Normal? What the hell do you mean? That I’m some kind of a freak?”
“Only in America. In Greece, I hear, it’s perfectly acceptable to ass-rape other boys.”
“Now that’s uncalled for!”
I leaned forward to turn off the tape recorder but his hand shot over and shielded the buttons, forcing me to recoil back into my chair. Our eyes never left each other’s malevolent gaze.
“Do you have it in your head that you’re exhibiting normal human behavior?” I growled. “Because you’re not. You’re acting like—-”
“I’m acting like a journalist and you’re throwing a tantrum over a question you were unprepared for. Though I do apologize for the last comment. It was unfair to the Greeks.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I demanded. “Did you lose a bet or something?”
“I told you, I’m here on assignment.”
“Then Chris is out of his goddamn mind. If you want me to answer any more questions, e-mail them to me. But this interview is over.”
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Wilson,” said White as he stood up, put his recorder and note pad back into his satchel and turned towards the door. “See you in the headlines.”
As he closed the door behind him, I gave an exasperated sigh and reached back for Sir Toby and Viola, making a mental note to tear Chris a new one for his dumb-ass reporter.
*****
The diner where I met Peter that night was one we had been going to once a week since the end of the last school year. It wasn’t too big or successful, being nothing more than a converted one-story house with booths and tables along the brown-papered walls where couches and cabinets used to be. But the greasy, starchy, diner-esque food made it a hit with the locals. I liked going there because of the friendly waitresses and the BBQ sandwich specials, Peter liked going there because I would pick up the tab.
We would take the booth in the back corner that he insisted was our “regular spot.” If someone was sitting there when we arrived, he would make us wait at another booth until “ours’ was empty. The waitresses thought it was an obnoxious habit, but Peter was cute enough to get away with it. (He really filled out over the summer from his warehouse job at FedEx. 6’2”, 180 lbs of sexy brunette. And he knew it. And he knew that I knew it. And he never let me forget he knew that I knew.)
“Hey, hey, I’m up here,” he said, pointing to his blue eyes as we sat across from each other at our booth. “Sometimes I swear I’m just a pair of biceps to you.”
I had been staring absently at his arms as they bulged out of his blue tank top. Not that they weren’t especially fun to look at, but I was using them as a distraction from my afternoon with Barton White.
“Why don’t you just lick one and get it over with?” he asked, seductively raising an eyebrow.
I sighed and put my head down on the table. He put his head down next to mine and said, “It doesn’t smell any better from down here. What are you doing?”
“Decompressing,” I replied.
“What compressed you?” he asked, his head still on the table.
“Some asshole named Barton White from the student paper.”
“Really? I had him in a speech class in 10th grade. He gave his final presentation on how America is the only country entitled to handle nuclear arms responsibly.”
I turned my head and looked at him, his nose bent flat and a sublime grin on his face.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Doesn’t have to. He can take any idea he wants and reason his way around it, like that lobbyist in 'Thank You for Smoking.'”
“Ahem,” said the waitress, looming over us with a cheeseburger platter in one hand and a bowl of chili in the other. “Not that you need to move, but heads don’t make good placemats.”
We both sat up and moved our drinks to make room for the food.
“You can go ahead and put that bowl right here,” said Peter, slowly pointing to the table in front of him and flexing every sexy, smooth muscle in his arms. Partly for her, mostly for me.
She rolled her eyes and set the food down in front of us. Peter smiled and thanked her for the service as she walked back behind the counter then thanked me preemptively for paying the bill.
“When are you going to get one of your own?” I asked, pouring ketchup on my burger. “A girl to tease and flirt with, that is.”
“You don’t understand, they’re all mine to tease and flirt with,” he replied. “Why? Are you getting tired of being my favorite victim? I can stop any time.”
“No you can’t,” I said, munching on a French fry.
“No, I can’t,” he conceded. “But did you have someone in mind or something?”
“No, I’ve just been thinking about dating and romance and stuff. You know, wondering why a boy as attractive as you hasn’t found a girlfriend yet.”
Peter dropped a handful of crumbled crackers onto his chili.
“Don’t give me that. You already know why I’m single.”
“But seriously. We’re seniors. We have to go to college soon, make a life for ourselves, all that jazz.”
“You’re using transference again.”
“Goddamnit! You took one psych class and now you think you’re Sigmund-freakin’-Freud.”
“You make it too easy. Helen Keller could analyze you, Kyle…if she didn’t have to become a zombie first. Can you imagine that? ‘Tell me about your childhood, but first hold still while I eat your brains.’”
He smiled like only a proud idiot can smile. I tried to glare back at him, frustrated by his ability to see through me, but ended up cracking a smile myself.
He stole a French fry and dipped in his chili then asked, “So what’s really on your mind? Feeling lonely, I take it.”
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have people I care about. There’s James and you and Chris, and I guess Dawn. But…”
“But you want a boy who can flirt with you and keep a straight face. Well, maybe not that straight…”
I ignored his pseudo-clever joke and absently stirred a pool of ketchup with a fry.
“Look,” he continued, “you’ve done the whole ‘lone wolf’ thing for a while now. It’s been close to a year since William broke your heart…and got you kidnapped…and got you shot...”
“If you were going to encourage me to get a boyfriend, you’re off to a bad start.”
“So you were bad at picking boys. But you’re a different person now. You’re assertive, you’re confident, you’re actually far more handsome than before.”
“You have no idea how much that means coming from you.”
“Sarcasm is not an adequate defense tactic, mon ami. All I’m saying is this: you don’t need to worry about getting back on the saddle again. You’re a different rider. It’s like you never fell off to begin with. So don’t keep yourself up at night with what-ifs and if-onlys. The only question that should keep you up at night is, ‘Did Peter have a Desert Eagle in his pocket tonight, or was he just happy to see me?’”
“Desert Eagle?” I replied, nearly snorting ground beef out my nose.
“That’s right,” he said, sporting another pleased grin. “Eight inches of steel loaded with fifty-caliber shots.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“But a sexy idiot! And they’re the best kind.”
We spent the rest of the night shooting the breeze about the coming school year. We were both going to be in an astronomy class together. We each needed one more science elective to even out the year and he said that nothing could be easier than looking at the stars. I asked him if he could name the planets in order and he asked me what planets had to do with astronomy. I hoped he was joking, but I’m still not sure.
I guess he had more important spherical objects orbiting around his mind. If there’s anything I can say to his credit, it’s that he was the most articulate horndog I would ever know.
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