17. Wolfe #2
“Here’s the thing.” I took a swallow of the tea and sighed. “Two years ago I lived in Cape Girardeau. I lived at home. Was working my way up the ranks at the local Aldi. Was a good church-going boy. Wednesday nights. Twice on Sunday. And I believed everything the pastor ever said.”
My hands were shaking. I put the mug on the carpet next to Blue’s knee, where it couldn’t get knocked over. Wiped my palms on my thighs.
“One Thursday, I went with some friends to the bowling alley. It was clean. A place where families could go.” I looked at Blue and raised my eyebrows to see if he understood that this was a nice bowling alley.
Not a front for the sex trade, which I had learned in prison they sometimes were.
Along with flower shops, for some reason.
Taking a deep breath, I told him the rest of the story. About three young men who were celebrating the twenty-first birthday of one of them. I knew this because they had little flags that said Happy 21st, and each of them was waving it.
There were rainbows on those flags. And temporary rainbow tattoos on their faces, and they were laughing. They were gay, that much was obvious to me, and among the congregation of the First Family Baptist Church, homosexuals were an abomination unto the Lord, a belief I supported with all my heart.
I believed in Do Unto Others. I also believed folks deserved to be happy and live their own lives, and that Jesus loved everyone.
And when those young gay men went outside, taking their flags with them, I noticed a group of older men, men from my church, following them, their hands fists, glowers in place. They did not look happy.
I followed, to this day not understanding why I did. But I did. I stepped between those two groups and got pummeled for my pains. Got arrested. Went to court. Testified. Got thrown in jail for assault and battery. It was my word against those men from my church and the owners of the bowling alley.
It was decided. The young gay men celebrating had started it, which I knew for a fact they had not. My family did not come to the court sessions. When I was incarcerated, they never visited me in jail. Never returned my calls.
Prison taught me how to trade for pleasure. Ramen noodles. Chocolate. How to find pleasure in another man, giving away bits of myself in the process. Struggling to find softness amidst cement walls and tangles of razor wire.
The Bible never mentioned anything about blow jobs in the dark, and how much you would give for one. How you would be willing to trade, to go on your knees on a hard cement floor, and open your mouth. Inhale another man’s scent, the deep, personal one between his legs.
How you learned to swallow, because if you didn’t, the deal was off. How you learned to live with taste. How you never talked about it, other than while making the deal.
When I got out and went home, to where my parents lived, reeking of the cleaning bleach the prison used, but that could never clean the stains from me, the front door to my home was locked, and nobody answered.
There were cars in the driveway. I saw a twitch of curtain.
They knew I was there; they’d heard my knock, and they weren’t going to let me in.
It was a shunning, an old religious pastime done to people who don’t fall in line. I was all alone for the first time in my life.
Standing on that front porch, a plastic sack with all my belongings in my hand, I was on the outside looking in, and everything I’d been raised to believe—that love mattered—was now all a lie.
Maybe it had been a lie all along, but either way, it shattered my heart, now a pulsing, buried wound that I feared would never heal.
“Nobody came to visit you?” asked Blue when I finally stopped speaking, his eyes wide, as though the ordeal had been his own. “Not even those gay guys?”
“No,” I said. “But that’s not their fault. They got run out of town.”
“I would have visited you,” Blue said. “Or gone out back with you at that bowling alley.”
I wiped my suddenly running nose with the heel of my palm.
“You wouldn’t have been stupid enough to hang out at such a place.
” Not that I understood why I said that, but as rich as Blue’s family was, they would have had better things for their golden son to do on a Thursday night than go bowling at a place so cheap, it was only twenty-five cents an alley.
“The point is, I was charged with a felony in the second degree. Which means I’m a felon.
Not somebody you ought to have an attachment to. ”
That was my speech, and the honest truth.
I looked away, across the room and out the back window where the sun was still shining and the world was white, and everything was pure and untouched.
Then I looked at Blue again, tracing the lines of his face, his slender shoulders, the hard edges of his knees beneath the sweatpants he’d yet to change out of.
I needed to make myself clear.
“When you come to remember who you are,” I said. “You surely won’t want to be associated with someone like me, a poisoned well.”
“No,” said Blue. He rose to his knees. “You’re exactly someone—” His voice broke beneath the words, and his mouth worked, eyes shining, his nose turning red. Then, on his knees, he moved between my thighs and wrapped his arms around my neck, hard. “You’re exactly the someone.”
The heat from his body jolted through me like a blow, warming me up from the inside, holding me steady.
My lungs juddered in my chest. His arms were tight.
My hands reached up, not to pull him off, as I ought to have done, but to hold him there, so I could feel that sensation, his skin against mine, his breath in my ear, the steady pulse I could feel beneath my fingers, fair curls drifting across the backs of my hands.
“Blue,” I said, whispering his name. “You don’t even know me.”
“I thought you were mad at me for kissing you,” he said, sounding on the verge of tears. “That’s why you went off today.”
“Not mad. Not at you. Just confused. At myself. You’re too sweet to be with the likes of me.” I kissed his cheek and breathed into this closeness. “You’ll regret me when you remember.”
“Then I won’t remember.” His words were fierce in my ears. “And I won’t care. Not as long as I have you.”
I dipped my chin, my eyes closing, shoulders relaxing as the weight of this, this blessing, draped itself all around me. He most certainly would remember and he might regret, but until then, I had this.
“Blue,” I said. I pulled back to kiss his cheek, then pressed my cheek to his, the warmest, sweetly pink cheek in all the world. “Blue.”
When he kissed me on the mouth, arms still around my neck, the world went white, pure white, soft, like the caress of an angel’s wing. Maybe love did exist. Maybe.