Page 41 of Boy Blue
“I know,” I said. Or at least my throat made the words, and my lips tried to move so I could stay that.
Blue pulled the toque off my head and peeled the scarf and parka from me. He’d built up the fire, but in my current state it was too hot, so I resisted his tugs to sit in front of it. Instead, I collapsed on the couch and let the warm air soak into me slowly.
“Not frostbite,” I said, mostly mumbling. “But damn close.”
He looked at me with sad eyes as he stood there, like he would at a dog who didn’t know any better than to run off in the middle of the night and had returned covered with leaves and burrs.
“Let me help,” he said. He knelt down, bare feet, tangled hair, and started unlacing my boots, which were caked with snow. I tried to stop him, thinking undoing my own laces was the least of my penance, but he batted my hands away and kept on going.
“Blue,” I said, looking at the top of his head.
“No,” he said. “Hot tea first. Then you can tell me what I did wrong.”
“It’s not you—” I started, and then stopped. “It isn’t. There’s just something I have to tell you.”
Blue took the boots to the door, clapping them together to shake off the snow. Then he filled the kettle and turned it on. Took out two mugs, the cherry-red teapot, and the tin of tea bags. Everything that I would do were our positions reversed. As though the cabin were his and I the visitor.
When the tea was ready, he brought the mugs to the couch, handed me one, put the other on the rug, sat down cross-legged, and picked up the mug again. I was thawing out. Felt almost human.
“Okay, so.” Blue sipped his tea and looked up at me with the sweetest eyes.
“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. Wasworking 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.”
