Crush (13 page)

In spite of the nonstop non-boredom of working in a hospital setting, I’ve been fairlyambiguous about the wisdom of mycareer choice. That is, until a recent day when I take care of a fourteen year old girl whose father has been raping her for three years. We don’t know that at first. She is initially admitted as a suicide attempt. She’s taken twentyTylenol. We have to give her that awful Mucomyst, which smells like rotten eggs. The red flags go up when we find that she has PID, Pelvic InflammatoryDisease.

We do all we can for her. We call CPS, social services and of course, the police, who interview her in her room.
I take a Mylar balloon left over from a gift given to a patient who went home earlier and I write on a blank card, “I know what you’re going through. My dad hurt me too. Please don’t give up.” I don’t sign it. I wait until the others are doing rounds, and I leave the gifts in the girl’s room while she’s asleep. When she wakes, she stares at the balloon and reads the card. She doesn’t smile, but I don’t expect her to. I’m not sure the Head Sister would approve of a nurse giving gifts to a patient, but as long as I don’t call attention to myself, what’s the harm of letting someone know you care?
She reminds me of me.
She is the reason I am now one hundred per cent sure I went into the right field.

Stacy’s had a few boyfriends since that flake Ray, and she still begs me to go with her on her dates. I’m glad to have to work some of those nights. Myother excuses have been: “I’ve got a bad headache,” “Lloyd’s not feeling good,” or “I’m on call at work.”

We’ve been employed by St. Paul’s for about three years the night I feel generous enough to go to The End with her and this new guyshe likes but isn’t sure about.

While Stacy’s in the restroom and her date is hitting on another girl nearby, I am approached by a guy from U.C. Davis. He’s cute, wears glasses, seems nice enough, but I’m not interested. I try to be, and I talk to him for about fifteen or twenty minutes. He suggests my going home with him, and I tell him I have to use the john. Instead I snatch Stacy’s keys from her in passing and go hide in her car.

When I tell her that her new stud is a philandering swine, she begins acting weirdly. Suddenly everything I say is outrageously funnyor nauseatinglyendearing or fiendishlyclever. Her hugs last longer. Her kisses linger on mycheeks. She tries to hold myhand longer than is comfortable for me. One evening she coos, “Oh, Jamie, if onlyI could melt that ice around your heart!”

I’m taken aback, and I try to laugh it off without cruelty. She beams at me through shinyhazel eyes.
Oh dear. I’m forced to tell her that although I love her to death, I don’t love her like
that
, that I wish I could, and that if I could, I’d marry her in a heartbeat and have a litter of children with her and treat her like the queen that she truly is. She’s the best friend anyone could hope for. She’s stood beside me through everything, always there for me. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was anything that would make it possible for me to be her best friend without her falling in love with me. Then I realize that being a girl wouldn’t necessarily make the difference. By the time I’m done telling her the tragic truth, we’re both crying. She preserves herself by separating from me for a few weeks, then she returns. “I can’t be mad at you,” she says, and we blubber even harder as we hug our reconciliation.
“I guess it’s because of who you are, Baby,” Stacysays softly. “It’s easyto love you because you’re beautiful, inside and out.”
I pull awayfrom her, shaking myhead.
“Whether you believe it or not,” she nods firmly. “I don’t understand anyone who’s ever hurt you, who’d ever
want
to hurt you. I don’t understand Tammy. How could he just leave? How could he
resist
you? He must be nuts! I
know
he loved you.”
“Stacy,” I plead, “please
don’t
.”
She stops.

During mymid to late twenties, myopinions of myself and my particular station in life are amended every three or four months. I begin myself-exploration byadopting a peculiar half-hearted pride in my status as an asexual. I try to believe that being a virgin (a word I detest) at my age makes me unique, a rarity, a novelty. Sometimes the girls at work ask me point blank, “Jamie, are you a virgin?” And I blurt, “Of course not!” I’m too flabbergasted to rebuff them any better than that. “You just look so innocent,” one of my Filipina friends gushes at me. “You’re so pretty…you look like a little angel!”

I laugh at her, “Honestly, Marilyn!”
When I get sick of the “I’m rare and special” bullshit, I believe it’s repression, an inability to express myself sexually. It’s that damage left in the wake of mychildhood abuse.
And it’s not just the violence of my birth parents. The pastor has had a hand in this too. Though I’ve never had sex (willingly) and I’m technically an “A,” I’m closer to gay than I’ll ever be to straight, and it’s been hammered into me at church that being gay is wrong, so I feel like I don’t
deserve
to be loved. That I
am
an abomination. Self-hatred flows as smooth and natural as my own blood. I believe that in order to be “good,” I must quell myfeelings, denymyself.
That is, until I become drained, and then fed up with myself. I consider the unspeakable thrashing I took at the hands of those “good, Christian boys,” and I become incensed with the selfrighteous bigots I hear at the pulpit, on radio, on television, in the White House. They
hate
gaypeople. I feel hatred in their words, in their actions. They don’t just preach against the gay community, the gay lifestyle, and laws providing gay equality, they
hate
gay people. And their inimitable hatred seems to say it’s okay for people to do what was done to me in high school. I was viciously attacked for “being gay” even though I’ve never done anything sexual with anyone (willingly). I was beaten because of what I look like. I’m small, I like to wear eyeliner and dye my hair and I like to wear stud earrings in my ears sometimes. But I’m a male so that isn’t allowed by“decent” Christian society, apparentlynot even the being small part. Pastor Sellers at the Baptist church has confirmed his abhorrence of me on more than one occasion over the years, and it’s left a prettybad taste in Lloyd’s mouth.
When Matthew Shepard is abducted, beaten and left to die in Wyoming, I keep my eyes fastened to the television, praying that he will survive.
He doesn’t.
Was that God’s will? Is God that hateful?
Our attendance at church has dwindled, but Lloyd and I still read the bible. My favorite scripture is from Phillipians,
He who hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.
I’ve come to rely on it so much when I feel bad about myself. About my smoking, burning myself with cigarettes, hating mydead parents …
…and hating myself…That’s a sin too. I don’t think God wants me to hate myself any more than he wants others hating me because of who I am (or who theysuspect I am) or how I look.
It’s not right that I should have to repress myself. Some of us men are just naturally smaller and daintier than the others, with personalities that people call “fey,” “femmie,” “sissy,” and several other terms, some of them derogatory, to describe us as “effeminate.” I like to cook (I especiallylike to make pies), and I’ve planted bright pink roses in our front yard.
I guess that makes me a pussy. Whatever.
Even after the rationale I’ve employed, I grapple with the fear that God is going to “get” me for being gay, or at least “believing” I’m gay. And Pastor Sellers’ outspokenness against homosexuality has indeed frightened me, even made me to feel that to question God Almighty is to invite a bolt of lightning or a chunk of flaming brimstone down to strike me dead.
Lloyd and I continue to withdraw from church, repelled by the idea of going among people who hate me. Most of them are people I have verylittle in common with anyway. I’ve become weary of them. They never really talk about God, or Jesus, or their happiness as Christians anyway. They’re boring. If they’re not boasting about their kids’ FFA competitions, or yammering on about So-And-So’s ugly shoes, they’re running each other down behind each other’s backs, having their perpetual “Who’s the Best Christian?” contests.
I don’t think I’m being arrogant when I say Lloyd, Stacy and I are evolved. We love God as much as those folks do, and we don’t have to assemble with them in order to prove it.
I have to fess up. I mayor not be gay, but I’m no different from anyone else. I long to fall in love, be married, have a family…I dream of living near the ocean, in a cottage, with kids, with cats…
…with Tammy…always with Tammy. With the words she spoke on Graduation Night, Stacy has impregnated my mind with hope. Wouldn’t it be perfect if it were true, that Tammy
does
love me the way I’ve always loved him? That he
wasn’t
playing with my heart, toying with my affection, that unforgettable evening at Ray’s house?

Around JulyFourth one year, Raycomes back to town to visit his folks (he’d recentlyleft Sommerville for the frills and glamor of Reno) and invites us to another bar-be-que. I love the scents and sights and sounds of summertime, of sizzling meat, sun-heated chlorine, happy chatter, blooming flowers. Ray’s Mom makes a reallycool jell-o desert in red, white and blue, the white part being gelatinized evaporated milk. Stacyand I have a wonderful daywith them, mainly because Yvette and Benny don’t get to come. It’s almost like old times.

The onlything missing is Tammy
So everything is missing.
Ray tells us about stumbling onto Tammy on late night

college radio. Even though Tammy’s show is onlyon Universityof California stations, Ray found the Davis channel in Reno, and statickyas it was, he recognized Tammy’s voice.

It’s on from nine o’clock PM until midnight Monday through Thursday, and I become his most faithful listener. Every single evening he’s on, I’m right there, in my room, my earphones sealing awaythe outer world. Lloyd wonders whyI’m not out there watching movies with him. “Only from nine to midnight, Lloyd,” He understands as soon as I tell him whose show I’m so interested

Tammy…his voice still makes me melt, and with this new radio show, I’m newlyin love.
“He sure is a sweet boy,” Lloyd says softly when Tammy talks about dogs and cats at an animal shelter who need forever homes.
“I know,” I half lie.
Time hasn’t eroded it away. Every night, we listen. In the winter, we eat cookies and drink hot chocolate, snuggled cozily under our beat-up old quilt. In the summer, we take the radio out to the back porch and crank the volume as we sip on lemonade or iced tea.
And his voice just isn’t enough to satisfy me. I punish and delight myself by keeping his magnificent face fresh in the shrine my mind by looking at pictures of him in the yearbook every few nights. I keep my hopeless hope alive by remembering how he laughed and smiled whenever something funny happened to us, byremembering those wistful looks he gave me, byremembering the wayhe helped me after those guys beat the tar out of me.
He never mentions where he’s from or his life before he became a radio host.
I’ll never learn.
I refuse to learn.
I still want him, and if I can’t have him, I don’t want
anyone
.

I’ve long since stopped worrying about seeing my parents in mymirrored reflections. Being a nurse gives me little leisure time, and after I initially chopped my hair off to get rid of the bright red dye so that I would be hired, I let myhair grow back, long, golden, ignored. I continue wearing mascara, until I learn that myexertions on the job onlycause it to leak onto mycheeks and make me look like I’ve got two new raccoon shiners.

I navigate the following years using a brave front. Every day I try to find a reason to be happy, and it’s increasingly difficult. On September 11, 2001, I feel like the world is ending. Everytime they show the videos of those skyscrapers crumbling into flaming piles of rubble, I cryso hard myeyes hurt. I begin calling in sick at work. I feel drained. All I want is to sleep.

A few weeks after September 11, Miss Halliday decides to increase my dosage of Zoloft. I end up with bad headaches. She switches me to Effexor, but that stuff scares me, because if I run out and don’t take a dose within twelve hours, I have these seizures, like electric shocks, up and down my arms and into my neck and head. Next, we try Lexapro, but it makes me nauseous. Celexa and Paxil do absolutely nothing. Finally, she tries Prozac, which she had been avoiding because it has a tendencyto cause patients to lose their appetite for food. “You’re alreadyso thin,” she says dubiously, “but we’ll go ahead and tryit.”

In 2004, a big tsunami devastates the countries in the Indian Ocean. Less than a year later, Katrina wipes out the Gulf Coast. I want so badlyto travel over to these places, help these people, but Lloyd isn’t feeling verywell anymore, and I’m afraid to leave him.

I go out of mywayto make people laugh, to make them cheer when Stacy and I sing. I fill my time with taking care of Lloyd, our cats, and mypatients in the hospital. I exist in the now, but I
live
for what I dread is an impossible future. The longer Tammy stays gone, the older I get, the more I realize that love is simplynot in the cards for me. But I refuse to admit to anyone how lonelyI am, how I stubbornlydream that Tammywill come home someday.

The years zip bytoo fast for comfort.
On September 11, 2001, America falls under attack by terrorists. I keep seeing a couple, holding hands, jumping to their deaths from one of the Twin Towers.
What if that happened to me? What if I died and everyone I love never knew just how much I cared about them?
Like tiny fish, time slips through my fingers. I put great importance into myyouth and beautyfor so manyyears, and youth is escaping me. Bootsy, who had a long life with me, is gone. On

silently admit to myself that I’ve never been attracted to any of the women I’ve hooked up with, but at least I’m no longer out to seduce and destroythem. I simplytell them that I’m single and not looking. Myone night stands are kinder and gentler.