Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (6 page)

Curveball
An excerpt from a novel by Michael Angelo

Sam opened his locker and a giant black dildo fell out. Not that he’d seen too many dildos, but this one was enormous, and it was wrinkled and lifelike. A giant black cock.

When the dildo fell, Sam felt eyes boring into him from behind. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t acknowledge the thing. A burning filled his eyes, tears he willed away.
This is just locker room horseshit. I will not let them see me cry. I won’t.

But the tears were there. Sam had never felt so alone his entire life. Charlie, who had been a constant since the first day of orientation freshman year, had stopped speaking to him. Charlie slept at his girlfriend’s dorm room every night and wouldn’t look at Sam in class. Let alone the locker room.

And now, the dildo.

He could hear them snickering. But not a good kind of laughter. He heard the menace in it. Worse, he could feel a heat in the room. They may have been laughing, but they hated him. Like a flash of lightning striking the ground, an electric current seemed to pass from one guy to the other, and Sam could feel the heat growing.

He kept his back to them, but then he was aware two of them, his teammates—guys he’d spent three years with, on buses going to away games, getting drunk with, celebrating wins in the fall, and working harder in the hot days of spring following losses—were now next to him. Too close. In his space.

He could see them, sense them seething, from the corner of his eye. And then he was punched in the side of the head.

Sam had been in fights before. In seventh grade, he was jumped on the playground. But in high school, he had grown taller, developed his muscles, become a big-man-on-campus jock, and no one fucked with him. He was tough, but he wasn’t a fighter. He guessed his team was going to make him one.

He reeled from the shot to his head, crashed into his own locker, and then wheeled around, raising his fists and swinging, hoping to fight his way out of the locker room.

But there were ten of them and one of him. They kicked him and he remembered being pelted, full force, by baseballs hurled, he knew, by one of the pitchers who had a fast ball clocked at ninety miles per hour.

They were also hurling names at him.
Queer. Faggot. Homo
. Then he felt a bat land on his ribs and he heard a crack.

“No, no…” Charlie’s voice rose above the cacophony. “Off of him!”

The locker room was a total mess by now. Guys started pulling each other off of Sam. He was barely conscious, aware that he was slumped, unable to stand fully upright, blood pouring from his mouth. He could feel he’d lost a tooth. His nose was broken. He couldn’t breathe without pain. But mercifully, Charlie was going to stop this. So Sam had fallen in love with him, but they still were best friends. Had been best friends. That would win out over this insanity.

“Hand me the bat,” Charlie commanded to the one who’d struck him. “The bat is
mine.
” And with that, Charlie swung, as hard as Sam had ever seen him swing, and hit Sam, twice, in the gut. He didn’t know what was worse, knowing they were going to kill him, or knowing Charlie was capable of it.

Sam fell to the floor, his head against the cool locker room tile. Charlie tossed the bat on the ground, and the team filed out, leaving Sam there. They shut off the lights. He couldn’t even get to a phone to call an ambulance for himself.

Sam blacked out. His last thought was of Charlie. All he had done was fall in love with him.

Lily

J
ustin is Tara’s first love, and she is over-the-moon crazy about him. She comes home from their dates and tells me all the details—what he said, what he wore, that he held her hand or kissed her good-night. Tara and I have always been close, but now that she is fifteen, I am also subjected to her withering glares and her mercurial displays of temper. I was certain she would feel my getting cancer was a giant inconvenience to her social schedule.

Michael said he would tell Noah. I just felt emotionally beat-up, and agreed. But I had to tell Tara.

She didn’t hear my knock on her bedroom door the first three times, so I poked my head in. The music was deafening, but I smiled as I suffered through it. At least I could make out the lyrics, and thank God she doesn’t like rap. Whatever happened to Debbie Harry and Blondie? To the Rolling Stones? I know what happened to the Stones. They got wrinkled. Poster boys for what drugs, alcohol and groupies can do to your youthful complexion. For the thousandth time, I thanked my late mother for insisting on sunscreen when all my friends were slathering on baby oil and sunning themselves. I had the least-cool mom (heredity?) in the neighborhood—and now I had been the least wrinkled woman at my high school reunion two years ago. Except for Carol Lundt, who’d already “had work” done. She’d had so much Botox injected she looked like her face was frozen.

“Tara, honey?” I cooed, poking my head in her door. Her long brown hair was pulled up in a ponytail, and her green eyes had just the slightest hint of mascara on the lashes. She has a runner’s build, thin and muscular. She ran the 100-meter and 200-meter for her high school this year.

“Mom! Have you heard of
knocking?
” she shouted as she sat on her bed doing her nails.

“Tara, have you heard of
headphones?
” I shouted back.

She rolled her eyes and turned down the music.

“How’s Justin?”

“Perfect,” she grinned, and put the top back on her nail polish. She wears blue, which I find hideous, but as a mother of a teenager, I have learned to choose my battles. Blue nail polish, belly shirts, the occasional experimentation with pink streaks in her hair, the four piercings in her ears—but not in her belly button, thank God—the messy room…these I back off on. I even stopped caring when she opts for a Diet Coke and a Pop-Tarts pastry for breakfast. But drugs…alcohol…she knows where I draw the line.

“Sometimes I wish I was your age and falling in love for the first time.” I felt myself well up. If I was fifteen, then I wouldn’t be forty with cancer.

“Tara—” my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest “—I have to tell you something.”

“What?” She waved her hands in the air to dry her nails.

“You know how I had to have that mammogram from my column and then get that cyst removed?” I sat down on her bed. It had a comforter that was the most hideous shade of deep purple with pink beading on it. “Choose your battles” was my constant mantra. The comforter matched the grape-colored walls.

“Yes…” she said slowly, warily. Maybe she was willing me not to tell her, because I am sure in that instant she knew what was going to follow as surely as I knew when Dr. Morris put his hand on mine.

“I have cancer.”

She looked away from me. I longed to take her hand, but I knew in her teenage way she would have just yelled at me for smudging her nail polish.

“Shit!”

“Don’t say shit.”

“I can say shit, Mom. My mother has
cancer.
”

Choosing my battle, I just nodded. In the grand scheme of things, what’s a “shit” when you’ve got cancer? Fuck, I should let her get the tattoo and belly piercing with that reasoning.

She rolled her eyes, which were filling with tears. “How bad? I mean…are you going to die? Is it that bad?”

“I don’t think I’m going to die, no. I don’t plan on it. But I can’t promise. I mean, I could walk outside tomorrow and get hit by a bus.”

“Sure. Like this is a high-speed bus zone, Mom.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re very sarcastic?”

“I wonder where I get it from?” she snapped. Then I heard her inhale deeply a few times. “I can’t believe this! It’s not fair. It’s not fair, Mom. Everything seemed to be going fine. Great. Track team this year, Justin, getting to go to Homecoming. Why do you have to have cancer? Why? What did this family do wrong? Huh? First, my father leaves us and doesn’t even bother to write or call us. He’s the world’s biggest dick…and now my mother gets cancer.”

It was like a verbal slap, but I knew she was just venting what I felt. I could accept that life wasn’t fair. I mean, I’d been accepting it since I was Tara’s age. My mother refused to buy me Jordache jeans and insisted I wear Sears. Might as well hang a Social Reject sign on your kid. I told my mom it wasn’t fair and got the first of thousands of “Life isn’t fair, Lilianna Elizabeth.” Of course, I had rebelled against her and spent every spare dollar I got babysitting on cool clothes. But I didn’t imagine there were enough babysitting dollars in the world to level the playing field when it came to cancer.

“I wish I had an answer, Tara. But if I go down that path, down the not-fair path, I’ll never get off of it. Life isn’t fair.” Christ, my mother emerged from my mouth again.

“Please. Uncle Michael tells me that all the time.”

“You should listen to him for a change.” I smiled.

“Look, the rosary bead routine is fine for Noah, but I have a lot of questions for the Big Man Upstairs. Like why
my
mother? Why you? When everything seemed to be going so perfect?”

With that, Tara dissolved into tears and flung herself at me, smudging her nails and not caring, crying and clinging to me. I held onto her, enjoying having her in my arms for this moment, smelling her hair, and feeling a surge of mother-love that only other mothers can understand. Michael has taught me so much about music, and I think of it as a crescendo, this mountainous rise and swell until you feel as if your heart will burst. It reminds me of the chorus in Beethoven’s Ninth. That she needed me because I had told her I was sick made the moment bittersweet, but I would take it. The hug, the holding. For the moment, she was my baby again.

After a minute or two, she pulled away and wiped her eyes. “Damn, my nails. Figures. Nothing is going right. Shit.” She glared at me as if willing me to pick a fight over the word.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“What?”

“The cancer.”

“No. I
hate
that word. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to call Justin and pretend I am an ordinary kid, not some girl whose life is like a movie of the week, you know?”

I stood up and kissed her cheek. “I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I turned and stepped over the piles of laundry on the floor, and walked out of her cluttered bedroom and down the hall into my own. I had installed a private phone line in Tara’s room six months before or I’d never be able to talk on the phone in my own house.

I called up Michael, who had moved to the ’burbs himself two years ago, and had Noah for the night.

“Hello?”

“Hey Michael, how’s Noah?”

“Sleeping. God I love them when they’re asleep. They’re a lot less work then, you know?”

“You’re preaching to the choir, gay choirboy.”

“You know I don’t wear anything under my choir robes, right?”

“Yet another visual I don’t need…. So did you tell him yet?”

“Yeah. He cried, but you know, I think he took it pretty well. He asked if Mom was going to die and all that. I told him, ‘Noah we all die someday.’”

“You know, one of these days we’re both going to have to come up with some new lines.”

“I know. My credibility is lagging.”

I grew silent.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing. I was just thinking I wish we didn’t have to spout lines like ‘whoever said life was fair’ and all that.”

“Yes. I would like to not have to come up with all the answers. It’s difficult being brilliant, you realize.”

“And so modest.”

“Certainly. And so fucking good-looking.”

“Thanks for telling him. He idolizes you, though Lord knows you don’t need anyone else worshipping you. Is that woman from the gym still calling you?”

“Yes. Seems like ever since she found out I was gay, she’s determined to bed me and change me. Why can’t she think ‘what a waste of gorgeous manhood’ like the rest of them?”

“You are impossible. Anyway, thanks for telling him. I just…I feel like I’m on my last raw nerve right now. And thanks for keeping him overnight.”

“Anytime, Lily. Has Spawn called by any chance?”

“No. I got a card today. He sent me an extra hundred dollars in his child support check and told me to buy them each something they wanted for their birthdays.”

“Does he realize he missed Tara’s by three months?”

“I’m sure Child Bride didn’t want him sending anything extra at all. Have I told you lately how much I hate them?”

“It’s their loss, Lily.”

“I know. Funny thing is the kids just don’t seem to care anymore.”

“Well, they have you.”

“For now.”

“Stop talking like that. You’re going to beat it.”

“I can’t even picture losing my hair. I’ll never complain about a bad hair day again.”

“We’ll take it day by day.”

“Oh…I meant to tell you thanks for the flowers today. They were a great pick-me-up. You’re perfect in every way but one, darling.”

“I know. You’d marry me in a heartbeat if I wasn’t gay.”

“No. I was thinking about your obsession with the Yankees. It’s a sickness.”

“You know, I just cannot stand it when you emotionally batter me this way. Next thing you know you’re going to tell me Don Mattingly shouldn’t be on the greatest team ever.”

Michael has this little game he plays for every sport. He compiles a list of the “greatest team ever”—thus Mattingly could play with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle, despite the fact that they were not contemporaries.

“He can be on your greatest team ever, but I find your whole greatest-team-ever thing a tad high schoolish.”

“Well, you know my emotional maturity level….”

“Yes, I do. My very own Peter Pan.”

“I better get going, Lil. I need to finish grading these horrible term papers. What are they
teaching
them in high school? Certainly not how to write in complete sentences.”

“’Night, Michael.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I hung up the telephone. Now my secret was less of a secret. Tara and Noah knew…and little by little, I’d have to tell other people. My parents were no longer living—and I was an only child—so my friends were my family. Crabby Joe was my family. I had to tell other people soon, though. I felt my hair. My soon-to-be-bald head was going to be like an announcement to the world. I have the c-word.