Fire Shut Up in My Bones (29 page)

In Atlanta, my friend dropped me off at the job fair. At the door, a man told me that I couldn’t enter because I hadn’t applied beforehand, a process that included writing a sample essay and paying a fee. I asked for an application, found a corner, filled it out, wrote an essay, and gave the man the fee. He let me through.

I started on one side of the room, going to every booth for an interview. I explained to each of the newspaper recruiters my vision of combining traditional reporting with visual explanation, and got more than polite interest at almost every booth.

The
New York Times
representatives, however, had bad news for me. They said that I needed to have preregistered to be interviewed by them, and that all of their slots were filled. I politely said, “Oh, I understand. But, if you don’t mind, I’m going to sit right here until someone doesn’t show up.” I took a seat to the side, picked up one of the free newspapers they were giving away, and began to read it.

I was well aware that my little stunt had caught the
Times
people off guard, and that they were watching me out of the corner of their eye. So I was careful to mind my manners and my posture, sitting up tall, managing a smile and a nod at the other students as they came and went. I sat there for nearly six hours. At the end of the day, the
Times
staff began to pack up. I still had the newspaper open in front of me, by then having read the same articles over and over.

One of the women relented: “Okay, okay, we’ll interview you.” “Oh, thank you,” I said. I had watched dozens of other students be interviewed and overheard what the recruiters said when they left—what had impressed them and what had not—self-effacing cleverness and institutional reverence engaged them; boasting and deficient literary curiosity turned them off. It was invaluable opposition research that I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. Now that it was my turn, I showed them my work and told them about my then somewhat novel notion of combining visuals and journalism. When I was finished giving my pitch, the recruiter smiled a kind smile and told me that I was “very impressive” but that the
Times
just didn’t have a graphics internship. I thanked her for her time and left for the evening. The fact that the
New York Times
thought a boy from Gibsland was “very impressive” was enough.

The next day, I went back to the job fair to visit some of the papers I’d missed because I had spent all my time sitting at the
Times
’s booth. But then I heard that the people from the
Times
were looking for me. So I went back to their booth. When I got there, the woman who’d interviewed me told me that although they didn’t have a graphics internship, they were so impressed by me that they had called New York the night before and got the okay to create one.

I was going to New York in the summer to be the first graphics intern the
Times
had ever had.

I figured if I stayed busy for the rest of school and in my job in Shreveport, I could keep the depression—as I now knew to call it—at bay, and it worked. This would be a frame for much of the rest of my life: hard, focused, obsessive work to distract from a muddled private life. But still I had to go home and I had to sleep, and it was in that quiet time that the depression crept in on the backs of the male apparitions.

It was on one of those nights that the call came—Chester on the other end of the line, at my mother’s house, him saying, “What’s going on, boy?” like nothing had ever happened. That was the night the ball of pain in the pit of my stomach exploded in an uncontrollable conflagration, coming out not just in thoughts or words but with the ache of emotion and a flood of tears. That was the night I jumped in the car, grabbed the gun from under the car seat where I had kept it since my mother gave it to me because I refused to allow it in my house, and raced down Interstate 20 to kill Chester.

I had fired a gun only once before, on the Thanksgiving that Grandpa Bill took us deep into the woods to try his new pistol, the same day my mother and I raced down this same road, Interstate 20, trying to catch a woman who had slyly called on the phone and driven slowly by our house.

I thought then that I would never be able to shoot at a person, but now I knew that it was not only possible, but inevitable. This killing would be justifiable, in spirit if not in law.

I was about to kill Chester.

As I sped down the interstate toward my mother’s house, the heat of my anguish being released into the winter air, I reviewed my simple plan—I would calmly walk into the house, find Chester, and shoot him in the head as many times as possible. No arguing. No explanations. Done.

By the time I reached the Grambling exit, I was bawling. I thought about all the emotional energy I had spent bracing myself against Chester’s full-throated assaults and offhand insults. About all the times I had blamed myself for his betrayal. About who I was now, and who I could be. Seeing him lying in a pool of his own blood might finally liberate me from my past, but it would also destroy my future.

I had to make a choice: drive forward on the broad road toward the unspeakable or take the narrow highway exit. I don’t know which chose, my head or my hand, but I exited and drove through the campus, thinking about all that I had accomplished. Me. With my own mind and grit. I had reinvented and improved myself. I was a man—a man with a future. I couldn’t continue to live my life through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy.

I returned to my apartment and called a friend—not one of the Brothers but a girl from rural Arkansas whom I had befriended the semester before. We all called her Weezy because she looked so much like Isabel Sanford, who played Louise on
The Jeffersons.
She was big and brassy, sweet as pie but tough as nails. If I had a sister, I was sure that she would have acted like Weezy.

“Talk, Weezy. I don’t care what you say. Just talk,” I said.

She didn’t ask questions. She just talked, as was her wont, for hours. I called her for that reason, and because I knew I wouldn’t have to explain. The Brothers would have asked questions. That night, her ramblings helped save the life of a man she didn’t even know.

That night, after I got off the phone with Weezy, I forced myself to come to terms with some things. Chester had done damage, but I wasn’t dead, just different. Not worse, just different. He didn’t deserve to die for what he had done, and I deserved to live in spite of it.

I had to learn to control my flashes of rage, to understand that gunshots created more problems than they solved, to decide that the ways of people on the west side of Gibsland were not necessarily the best ways. In the world beyond the train tracks and sweet potato farms, there were real rules and consequences. Self-righteousness wasn’t license to do a wrong thing. The just-in-case moments in life didn’t call for a gun, but guts.

I had to stop hating Chester to start loving myself. Forgiveness was freedom. Like my mother had done that Thanksgiving Day on the same interstate, I simply had to let go of my past so that I could step into my future.

Yes, the mark that Chester’s betrayal had left on my life was likely permanent, but blaming him for the whole of the difference in my peculiar sexual identity, while convenient, was most likely not completely accurate. Abusers don’t necessarily make children different in that way, but rather, they are diabolically gifted at detecting that kind of difference, often before the child can see it in him or herself, articulate it, and accept it. It is possible that Chester glimpsed a light in me, and that moved the darkness in him.

The male figures that sometimes came in the night were just a manifestation of a life lived in repression and pain and sadness, a part of me that lived in the shadows and on the fringes, because that’s where I had confined it. But I had to let that part of me step out of the darkness, where I could see that it wasn’t nearly as significant or as frightening as I had thought it was.

In addition to being attracted to women, I could also be attracted to men. There it was, all of it. That possibility of male attraction was such a simple little harmless idea, the fight against which I had allowed to consume and almost ruin my life. The attraction and my futile attempts to “fix it” had cost me my dreams. The anguish, combined with a lifetime of watching hotheads brandishing cold steel, had put me within minutes of killing a man.

My world had told me that there was nothing worse than not being all of one way, that any other way was the same as being dead, but my world had lied. I was very much alive. There was no hierarchy of humanity. There was no one way to be, or even two, but many. And no one could strip me of my value and dignity, because no one had bestowed them—these things came into the world with me.

I had done what the world had signaled I must—hidden the thorn in my flesh, held “the demon” at bay, kept the covenant, borne the weight of my crooked cross. But concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.

Daring to step into oneself is the bravest, strangest, most natural, most terrifying thing a person can do, because when you cease to wrap yourself in artifice you are naked, and when you are naked you are vulnerable.

But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being willing to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.

I had to stop romanticizing the man I might have been and be the man that I was, not by neatly fitting other people’s definitions of masculinity or constructs of sexuality, but by being uniquely me—made in the image of God, nurtured by the bosom of nature, and forged in the fire of life. I needed no cure because I had no infirmity. God need send no angel to trouble the water.

I had to summon the power that I believed Jed possessed—the power that was greater than all others. I had to stop running like the river, always wanting to be somewhere other than where I was, and just be the ocean—vast, deep, and exactly where it was always meant to be.

I had to start trying to live the Serenity Prayer, which Big Mama had hung by the door after Jed had coughed up the blood and gave up the ghost, the one about courage and change and acceptance.

I had to understand that there was no way to be a whole man without being an honest man. And I didn’t have to wait to be proud to be honest. In fact, pride was not my aspiration. It was honor that I was after, the kind I had lost during the fraternity episodes when I had refused to stand up for what I felt was right because I was afraid that others would look at me like something was wrong. Never again.

I had to find the courage, too, to be me in the whole, refusing to conform or compromise, resisting the push and pull of the world around me. I had to assume the centrality of my singular position in it, the position that made me who I was, regardless of community or politics, acceptance or rejection.

I had spent my whole life trying to fit in, but it would take the rest of my life to realize that some men are just meant to stand out.

Whatever had shaped my identity, it was now all me. Trying to deny or control that fact was self-destructive. I would have to learn to simply relax and be: complex, betwixt and between, and absolutely all right.

I would have to learn to accept myself joyfully, fully, as the amalgamation of both the gifts and the tragedies of fate, as the person destiny had chosen me to be—gloriously rendered, deeply scarred, magnificently made, naturally flawed—a human being, my own man.

I would slowly learn to allow myself to follow attraction and curiosity wherever they might lead. I would grant myself latitude to explore the whole of me so that I could find the edges of me.

That would include attempts at male intimacy.

The first time I tried ended disastrously. I had worked up the nerve to go to a gay bar, thinking that if male intimacy was something my body wanted, I might as well know it.

It was a world apart from the one I knew. Instead of feeling a sense of belonging, I felt apart. The bar was brimming with sameness—not the locker room, frat house kind I was familiar with, full of ego-measuring and distance-keeping, but a different kind, which to me was disorienting. And the rules of engagement were at odds with what I was accustomed to: men sending signals in probing stares and touching before they spoke.

I was the object of considerable attention. I was young and tall and fit and new. I was being watched. I knew it, and I liked it. So I sat alone at the end of the bar and took long sips of my drink as I soaked up pensive admiration.

Soon a man sidled up to me and began making small talk. He was unremarkable in appearance and seemed slightly older than me. He said he was a shoe importer. He sounded smart and seemed kind, and he smiled a lot. He made it clear that he was interested in me, and invited me to his apartment for more drinks. I said, “Why not.” In my mind, the moment I had walked through the door of the bar, I had passed the point of no return.

When we arrived at his house, he poured a glass of wine, but I was too nervous to drink it. He talked more about his business and showed me shoe samples—ugly, rough-cut sandals that I couldn’t imagine anyone with even a dash of style deigning to wear.

Then, without warning, the mood shifted. The man disrobed, walked toward his bedroom, and beckoned me to follow. But the sight of him naked caused whatever attraction I might have had to collapse. His body looked sculpted, the way a body looks after years of proper eating and unstinting exercise, but I wasn’t drawn to it. My body went limp and cold.

I could in no way imagine us intertwined. Who was to be the plug and who the socket—
not me!
—and how was the spark to be made? I found the idea of it all immensely unsettling. I was surprised by my reaction—embarrassed by it—but my feeling was unambiguous: I wasn’t interested.

Instead of following him to the bedroom, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Inside, I paced back and forth in a panic, realizing that I had gotten myself in deeper than my desires. I tried to think of a way to excuse myself from the situation with the least amount of fuss and hurt feelings, but I could think of none. Soon I burst out of the bathroom, yelled an excuse at the open bedroom door, grabbed my jacket, and ran out of the apartment.