Crush (42 page)

We return home, to a life that mirrors the life before the attack.
Except that the phone rings several times a day with callers asking how Jamie is doing, and now and then, a caller who has nothing better to do than condemn us and call us hellbound faggots.
Except that Jamie is mute most of the time, with a fading scar above his right eye and a little gold band around his left ring finger that says, deep inside, in tiny, engraved fancyscript:

We’ve changed so much, but at the same time, we haven’t changed all that much. We’re like an old couple.After we come in from work, we spend our evenings cuddling in front of the TV, wrapped in Lloyd’s old quilt, the cats all around us, Mom sometimes snoring in one of the beige recliners, Stacy stretched out on the other. Sometimes we leave them to be alone in our room. Sometimes we just sit there, watching really old shows on Antenna TV and MeTV. Stacy thinks we’re ridiculous. She’d rather be watching
CSI
or
NCIS
or
Law & Order LA
or something made in the twenty-first century. Nope, Jamie has really been enjoying black and white episodes of
Bachelor Father
and
Dennis The Menace
while I’ve been into
Good Times, Sanford & Son
and
The Jeffersons
. Since Mom likes old stuff too (her favorites are
Maude
,
Three’s Company
and
Married, With Children
), it’s three against one.

In July, the jury gives Lydia, Ray and Cantrell each a sentence of twenty-five to life. Lydia will be going to the women’s facility in Chino. Ray will be incarcerated up in Susanville and won’t be eligible for parole until 2023. Cantrell will serve time in Corcoran, but his lawyer has appealed his sentence, saying that since he didn’t swing the towel bar, he shouldn’t be treated “so unsympathetically.” The D.A. reports that the judge told Cantrell that most of his sentence is based on his being a pornography touting pervert. Eh…Neither Jamie nor I care much at this point. Even if Cantrell ends up getting a lesser term in prison, we won’t worry. We’ll be long gone.

Yes, we’re leaving. We’re not sure when, but soon. Someone drives by a week after the sentencing, and shoots through our living room window. Acouple of days later, I find hate mail in our box, someone threatening to kill our cats. I keep all seven of them inside for the next couple of weeks. When I tell Jamie why I don’t want them outside, he’s mad.
You should have told me!

“I didn’t want to upset you.”
I’m not a baby!
I respond quietly and firmly. “No, but you’ve been through

As boring as the snowless California winters are, they’re preferable to the summers. It’s been so muggy and sticky lately that I feel like I need to shower five minutes after I’ve taken one. Thank God Jamie has central air rather than a swamper.

But the weather’s different one evening in late July. Jamie and I fall asleep on our couch watching one of our old VHS tapes, relieved by a pleasant San Joaquin Delta breeze coming from the south, wafting through the locked screen door. During
The Jack Benny Show
, Gisele McKenzie begins to sing, “Smile…though your heart is breaking…”

In his sleep, Jamie begins to sing, “Smile…” Not in the deep, croaking, broken voice he’s been using lately, but in his real voice, the one he lost seven months ago. “Smile….though your heart is breaking…smile…smile…”

“Baby, wake up,” I whisper to him. “You’re singing.” “Hmmm?” he asks sleepily.
“You’re singing…you’re
singing
, Jamie!”
“I’m singing…?” He blinks slowly. “I was dreaming of Gisele

McKenzie…that we were watching her on
Jack Benny
.” “We were…you were singing in your sleep!” I can’t stop the
tears. His voice is back. For real. I know it. It’s back!
“I was getting used to talking like Rochester,” Jamie says.

really
I blubber, “I missed you so much, Jamie…I feel like you’re
home
now…like you’re really back…I know I should have

been grateful that you lived through what they did…and I was…I am…but I missed your voice so much!”
“Tammy?”
“What?”
“Please, let’s have Ma move in with us. Ask her if she wants to…she’ll say yes…She needs us…I love her…She and Lloyd should have been married. They would have been perfect together…the perfect parents…”
“What?” I laugh.
“Theywould have…”
“I have absolutely
no
desire to be your brother,” I cackle.
“When we move to the coast, we have to take her with us,” says Jamie.
It bubbles out of me. “Jamie, why don’t we move there now? Let’s take Mom and the kids and just
go
! Let’s just move to our cottage! What are we waiting for?!”
His eyes are shining. “And Tammy?”
“Yeah?”
“Can we get married again?”
I cup his chin. “You want to get married again?”
“Yes,” he cries, tears beginning to shimmer. “I want to
say
my vows to you.”
“Oh, Baby,” I murmur, “you did perfect that day…”
“No,” he insists. “I want to do it right…I want to say them…it doesn’t have to be formal…we can do it at the coast, after we move…on the beach, with just you, me, Ma and Stacy. We don’t need a judge or anything…I just want to saythem to you…I
need
to say them to you…I mean it, Tammy…I’m serious…please, let’s
please
get married again…”
“Okay,” I smile. “Let’s do it.”

We put Lloyd’s and Ma’s houses up for sale, and in the autumn following the trial and convictions of Lydia Rocha, Ray Battle and Steven Cantrell, we move to the coast, to Fort Bragg, where my beloved Lloyd’s ashes were scattered. We all go, Tammy, me, Ma, her cat Tillie, and our seven kids, Ginger, Sam, Misty, Tigger, Wonka, Pepper and Teddy.

We find the sweetest old farmhouse, painted a soft gray-blue with a strange but not unpleasant dark coral trim, four bedrooms and two bathrooms, sitting on nearlytwelve acres of gentle, rolling, hills covered in waving golden grass. It’s everything I imagined and more. Everything is delightfully old. The kitchen has one of those old fashioned sinks that you have to bend down to get to. The hardwood floor is beautiful and shiny. Even the doorknobs are old, round, with old fashioned keylocks that require skeleton keys. It sits about a half mile from where the water crashes against the edge of California.

A few days after we’re settled in, Stacy comes up to visit, along with Tammy’s Aunt Sharon and cousin Natalie.
They like this town. My sister hasn’t been here ten minutes when she announces she’s moving here too. Aunt Sharon and Natalie saytheymight just do likewise. I love it.
I’m not sure if Tammy or Ma has ever really talked with Sharon about what her husband did, but Sharon’s a lot nicer to everyone than she was when I first met her. I wonder if her daughter has discussed Uncle Price with her. They both seem lonely.
“Everyone’s lonelyto
you
!” teases Tammy. “You’d love it if the Blooms and Old Mrs. Cooke came up here, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d probablylove it, yeah,” I admit.
So Tammy and Ma urge Sharon and Natalie to join us. They’re overjoyed, smiling huge, eagerly gabbing and making plans, and under that thrill, I can see the exhaustion in the dark circles under their eyes, the gladness that Price is prettymuch out of all our lives. He’s staying in Sacramento forever, and we are going to be here on the coast, a family. I can feel the same “new lease on life” euphoria in Sharon and Natalie that I had when Lloyd gave me his heart and home, and again when Tammycame home to me.
Yeah, he teases me, but he can’t pull the wool over myeyes. He wants everything I want, family, friends and love.
We pick a day, and we all walk out beyond the Glass Beach, to a place where the waves are exploding against flattened rocks.
“You’re myfriend, mylover, myhusband and mysoul-mate,” I tell Tammy, raising my voice above the crashing surf, thrilled to have it again. It’s my real voice, not the barking croak I’d grown accustomed to, the real thing, the smooth, soft, medium-deep tenor I haven’t heard since that awful night last December. “You put up with things nobody else would ever put up with. You’re the very definition of love, Tammy…you’re patient, kind to me, longsuffering…and you never give up…You know what I’m talking about,” I wink at him. “This began with a crush…but what we’ve lived through, what we’ve experienced together, makes it far more. I don’t know whyGod gave you to me…but I’m so glad He did, and I’ll never take it for granted…I promise.”
After we’ve renewed our vows, we walk back to the house, damp and chilled from the spray of salt and foam. We towel dry ourselves, make hot chocolate, and chatter on the porch until the sun is down and we can onlyhear the faint roar of the ocean.

Before we moved, I was shocked when Tammy had announced he wanted to give up his job as host of the college rock radio show. “Don’t you have fun with that show?” I had asked in surprise.

He said he had a lot of fun with it for manyyears, but now he wants to write full time about the plight of mistreated animals. He begins traveling and conducting exhaustive research, his quests taking him (and me too, when I can go with him) as far away as rural France to scrutinize the repugnant methods of factoryfarmers who provide ducks and geese for foie gras. I don’t understand how Tammy can stand seeing the things he sees, how he can keep his sanity, and I worryabout him.

But it is a calling for him. When you’re called, you have to go. No matter how hard it is. One night he sees images from an awful video of a man killing a little beagle puppy, and I’ve never seen Tammy so broken and torn to shreds. Just a glimpse of that puppy’s terrified brown eyes and I scribble,
How can you look at that?!
Instantly I regret writing this, because I know he feels ashamed of watching the entire video of my parents hurting me. How can I let him know I understand whyhe watched it now? How can I let him know that yes, I realize he watched it to understand just how evil theyhad been?And that in some weird way, he forgot that I reallywasn’t being hurt anymore, that I wasn’t that seven year old boyanymore?

I feel an unholy presence wafting from those motionless images, and I write,
Some people have no souls. It’s like they’ve given their souls to Satan.

Tammyturns to me and smashes me against him, crying so hard he blows a vessel in his left eye. I suddenly feel the burden he’s carried with him for all these years. He clings to me, sobbing, “What I did to Cotton was nowhere near as barbaric as this…and I was a kid, right?”

“I can’t forget what I did! I had no reason to hate him so! He was a tiny, sweet, little white dog…he never hurt anybody!”
I feel the scald of Tammy’s shame radiating off his skin. “I’m not a saint…I’m nothing…I’m just a reformed abuser myself…”
I have to tell him.
We’re all evil, Tammy, in some way or another. We all have evil in us. Because we are a lost, lonely species. Only God can bring out the good inside of us. We have to let God take control and make us as good as we can be. And you’ve done that, Love. You’re not that angry boy anymore, Tammy.
“No.” He’s shaking.
You were a boy.
“I wasn’t little though…I was eleven, twelve, thirteen…”
You were a tiny, lonely, lost little boy, Tammy. You were a baby. This person is no younger than thirty, twenty-five at the youngest! You changed! You’d never hurt a dog, or a cat.
“I’d never hurt any living creature…not even a spider…I just can’t…”
You have to stop beating yourself up, Tammy. You have to. We can’t change the past. I wish we could, but we can’t. You’re a good man. God helped you to change. He gave you the miracle you prayed for. Don’t forget that
.
“He needs help too…he never got it…and now maybe it’s too late for him…”
Maybe
, I’m forced to agree.
Maybe if we pray, he’ll change. Maybe he’ll see. Maybe he’ll turn his life around. Maybe a miracle can happen for him.
His arms tighten around me. “How did you live through what theydid to you?”
“Who?” The word pushes past mylodged airway.
“Your parents, Ray and Cantrell, all of them…” His body shakes and I hear an unspoken request for me to give him another crushing bear hug. He needs it and I use all of my strength to give it. “It’s okay,” I whisper roughly. “It’s okay, Tammy.”
After that evening, he decides to take Dr. Halliday up on her offer to put him on antidepressants and anxiolytics. She tells him that she’s concerned about the emotional damage that watching those terrible videos might be doing to him. She is kindlyadamant in her explanation that she doesn’t think the videos will turn Tammy into some kind of hardened wacko, but that rather, he is the owner of an especially sensitive heart, that he absorbs the pain of others far too well, and that the mental torture involved in investigating such heinous crimes could literally kill him. She urges him not to watch them anymore.
I agree. He won’t let
me
watch them, so I shouldn’t let him either. He doesn’t believe it, but he needs protection too. He’s said before that he doesn’t need to be emotionally rent apart by visual evil in order to be against it. Finally, he decides he can stand no more, and heeds our advice.

In time, he will join the editorial staff of the
Mendocino Vegan
, an animal rights magazine based in Fort Bragg, and both of us, along with Stacy, who has also become a vegan, will be speaking at different functions on behalf of the animal kingdom.

I’m soon on my way to being a vegan gourmand, studying under Stacy, who is a genius in the kitchen. After she moves into an apartment nearby, she talks about starting her own vegan restaurant, or at least writing a vegan cook book. Either way, she wants to call it, “The Garden of Eatin’.” We plant a big garden outside our kitchen window.

In the meantime, Tammyand I have another issue we speak passionately and candidly about: being gay. It’s not enough that I have survived being beaten three times and that we now live in peace. We felt forced to flee the town that we grew up in when it decided it could not accept us. We know there are others like us, lovers in hiding, people who, in spite of how civilization has advanced since the 1950s, do not feel free to hold the hands or kiss the lips of their beloved in public. Every time we see a heterosexual couple slobbering all over each other, Tammy and I sneak a soft, lingering kiss, and when we see the dirtylooks given us, we get angrier still at the double standard. It isn’t fair, how we’re treated, and since meeting a lot of great new friends during the trial, we’ve begun frequenting gayand lesbian organizations in the BayArea and throughout northern California, speaking, giving our testimonials, reaching out.