A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (38 page)

“Fine,” Dad said. “But don't come crying to me if it blows up in your face.”

One of Dad's great fears in life was me coming crying to him for any reason.

I didn't know how to approach Brandon, so I just invited him up to my place, sat him down on my bed, and told him.

He stared off into space for a minute, then said, “So … how were you born?”

“I—” I paused. That wasn't the response I'd been expecting. “Dad was married for a while. To a woman. I was born. It's not like every guy can just be who he is. Most guys take a while to come out, and sometimes, before they get there, they have kids. And some guys are gayer than others; some of them are into men and women both. That happens, too.”

“Okay,” he said. “That all?”

I took a deep breath.

“Not exactly,” I said. “Remember how I told you last December that my dad had been diagnosed with tuberculosis?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Not tuberculosis?”

“No,” I said.

“Okay. I knew. You know that, right?”

“I guessed. I just wanted to get it out there.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Any questions?”

“Nope,” he said.

And that was pretty much the last time we ever talked about it.

*   *   *

While Brandon could be exceptionally cool about some things, he pushed hard against the glass ceiling that relegated him to hapless dork status, and he wasn't picky about whose back he stood on while he did it. Midway through our sophomore year he started hanging out with a crew of girls at school who occupied kind of a weird social niche.

I didn't know them, but I'd noticed them around school. They generally hung out with guys who were on the chess team or in Latin Club. Some of them had some nerd chops of their own—they were in advanced math courses and physical sciences classes. Most of them were in marching band. Their clothes, body types, and hairstyles varied widely. Their most notable feature, from where I stood, was that they didn't seem to be able to keep their hands to themselves. It seemed like whenever I saw them, they were laughing and tickling some poor band geek, or wrestling him to the ground, or ganging up on him and putting makeup on him or something.

Brandon and Ethan were well networked with the pocket-protector-and-slide-rule set, but Brandon had shunned them for most of his first year of high school. Then, at some point, he leveraged those connections to start spending a lot of time with these geek divas. None of it meant much to me, except that sometimes when I saw the band geek girls mauling a guy, it turned out to be Brandon. And sometimes he'd drop off the radar for a few days.

“What do you do with them?” I'd ask, when he came up for air.

“You know,” he said. “We just goof around.”

“Like how?”

“A little making out. Whatever.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“It varies,” he said.

Then after a few months he started spending most of his time with a girl named Sadie. Sadie didn't look like someone Brandon would be into. One of the things he and I talked about when we went for walks was what we liked in girls, and Sadie didn't have a single item on Brandon's list, except maybe her vagina.

She was tall and broad-shouldered, with a flat face, a heavy forehead, and a nose like a veteran prizefighter's. She had terrible skin, and braces, and she generally dressed in oversize flannel shirts and jeans. I liked to imagine she'd undergo some kind of developmental transformation and turn out to be a future Miss America, because God knew she had something like that coming, karma-wise, but in the meantime she was not remotely Brandon's type. And yet, when he disappeared lately, he disappeared with Sadie.

Then, suddenly, he had all this free time again and I didn't see him with the geek girls anymore. I didn't think much of it. We went back to hanging out on weekdays—watching movies and going for walks around the neighborhood at night. And one day we were sitting on his front steps talking when Ethan poked his head out the front door.

“Brandon,” he said. “Phone for you.”

“Who is it?” Brandon asked.

“Sadie,” Ethan said.

“Tell her I'm not home,” Brandon said.

“Okay.” Ethan disappeared back inside the house.

I looked at the space where Ethan had been, then back at Brandon.

“Were you and Sadie going out?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said.

“But enough to break up?”

“I guess.”

“Why'd you break up with her, man?”

“She got too attached.”

“Hold up,” I said. “You just said she got too attached?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, that's funny. If someone else said that, I'd think it was because she put out, and he kicked her to the curb after he got what he wanted.”

He looked at me, but he didn't say anything. We stared at each other for a while, then I looked away.

“That's cold,” I said.

“She a friend of yours?” he asked.

“Nope. Don't even know the girl.”

“Then what do you care?”

Maybe he had a point. What would Han Solo do? Mind his own goddamn business, probably. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was letting someone down. Maybe it was Brandon.

 

61

The summer after my tenth grade year, the dentists at the free clinic where I got my teeth worked on finally replaced the tooth I'd lost in the car accident. That also happened to be the summer I started working out—and the summer my wardrobe improved, courtesy of the AIDS epidemic.

A lot of the gay men on Capitol Hill had been effectively disowned by their straight families when they came out of the closet so when they died, there was no grieving mother to sort through their stuff and dispose of it. The straight family didn't even come to the funeral a lot of the time. For the first couple of years, dead gay men's property typically went to their closest friends. But then those friends started to die or their apartments filled up, and suddenly there was this ominous surplus of secondhand rattan furniture, glass-topped coffee tables, posters for Broadway musicals—and clothes. Lots and lots of young men's clothes in a wide variety of styles. And, after about the time I turned fifteen, that was how I dressed myself.

Some of my new clothes came from people I'd known. I got a collection of really nice St. John's Bay button-down shirts that used to belong to Billy. The sleeves were a little short for me, because I was taller than Billy had been, but I kept them rolled up, and otherwise the shirts fit fine. I had some jeans and T-shirts I got from a guy named Mac, who was a friend of my dad's. The T-shirts were different than the ones I got on the cheap at JCPenney—they were tight, single-color shirts made out of some kind of stretchy cotton-synthetic blend. And I had a lot of other clothes I just picked up in alleys, when some landlord would have to throw an entire apartment full of stuff in the Dumpster—pants, shirts, and belts. I still didn't have enough underwear or socks, but I was all set for outerwear. My new look was topped off when Bruce gave me a leather bomber jacket for my birthday that year. He and my dad were still broken up, and he and I still didn't get along, but he was part of our network and he wanted to do me a favor. He used his employee discount to get it for me at the big downtown department store where he worked. Even with the discount, it was the most expensive thing I'd ever owned.

I undertook this makeover with no particular expectation that it would pay off for me, and it didn't seem to amount to much at school. On Broadway, however, the effect was immediate and in no way subtle. Or maybe there was a subtle component that was just drowned out by the guys who hooted at me from passing cars, came out of bars to yell things like “Gimme some of that!” and followed me home, got my name off my mailbox, looked my number up in the phone book, and called me to ask me out on dates.

I didn't think any of the guys who were cruising me realized that I was jailbait. I'd always looked older than I was, and I was already shaving. But I was still a little unnerved by the intensity of their interest.

The new attention was confusing in other ways, too. I couldn't talk to my dad about it. Even if he hadn't been stoned on pain medication night and day, he had too much of an agenda when it came to stuff like this. I could sort of talk to Brandon or my friends at school about it, as long as I kept it philosophical—as long as I talked about how over-the-top the men were being, and how inappropriate it would be for a straight guy to hit on a woman like that. But as soon as I started to take the conversation toward the thing I actually wanted to talk about, the reactions I got were so negative that I'd stop immediately, change course, back up, and cover. Because the thing I actually wanted to talk about was the fact that I liked it.

I liked the attention and I liked the affirmation. It made me feel good to be wanted, and it didn't matter much who I was wanted by, or what they wanted me for. The wilder the pass, the better it made me feel about myself. When a muscular blond guy with a chiseled jaw and a California tan drove his convertible over the parking strip and cut me off on the sidewalk across the street from Volunteer Park to ask me if I wanted to take him for a ride, I told him I wasn't interested. It was half true. I didn't want to have sex with him. But I'd absolutely been walking near Volunteer Park in the hope that someone like him would give me that little boost. I felt better about myself for the rest of the week.

Which was extremely confusing. I didn't have a single role model in books, TV shows, or movies to tell me what it meant to be a fifteen-year-old tease in one of the gayest neighborhoods in the country. Even the idea of a teenage boy basing his self-esteem on his looks or having people hit on him was uncharted territory for me. My dad and his friends had said some things that referred to it, but I'd never seen it anywhere in my own world—in my world of comic books and war movies, after-school specials and syndicated sitcoms.

I was pretty sure Han Solo wouldn't approve. Though, really, who knew? He had a certain swagger. Meanwhile, I just had to find my own way with it, and I had no intention of forgoing all that attention just because I liked girls.

*   *   *

Living in a gay neighborhood, dressing in the clothes of dead gay men—and trying to get live ones to hit on me—did yield other kinds of attention. During my afternoon walks around the Hill, guys with mullets and trucker caps would sometimes slow their cars down on the street next to me, roll down their windows, and yell “Faggot!” at me. Or “Faggots!” to everyone on the street, depending on where I was. At first I just thought it was funny; the fact that these redneck assholes drove out of their way to cruise through my neighborhood and shout insults from passing cars, like a bunch of cowards. But then one day a pickup truck with two guys in the back stopped about twenty yards ahead of me and one of the guys yelled, “Hey, faggot!”

And I yelled, “Come over here and say that shit to my face!”

I was pretty sure he'd be too chickenshit to actually do it.

But then he said, “All right,” and jumped out of the back of the truck, followed by his friend. The driver got out and watched over the cab of the truck.

In spite of my wardrobe upgrade, I still carried a lot of odds and ends in my pockets, so when they got out of the truck I took my sharpened chisel out of one pocket and an expandable club out of the other pocket. The expandable club was a cheap version of the kind police carried: it was made of three steel tubes, one inside the other, that could be extended and locked into position to form a club about eighteen inches long. I'd bought mine at a martial arts store in the International District, Seattle's Chinatown, for twenty dollars. It was a piece of junk, but when I snapped it to full extension the two guys coming toward me slowed down.

I wanted to say something tough, but I was so scared I was afraid my voice would crack and give me away. I had six inches on either one of them, and I had my little weapons, but two on one was bad odds no matter what. Three on one would be a massacre, if the driver got into it. Even assuming he wasn't just staying near his truck because that was where he kept his gun or his baseball bat or whatever.

“The fuck?” one of the guys said, eyeing my club.

“Come on,” said the first one.

“Naw,” said the second one slowly. “He ain't worth it. He's probably got the AIDS or something.”

“Ronnie!” said the driver. “Let's get going, man!”

“All right,” said the one who'd started it. “Let's go. Leave the faggot alone.”

They went back to their truck and drove away.

My hands were shaking so badly it took me five or six tries to get the telescoping club closed up and put away.

A few months later I was out on one of my late-night walks with Brandon when a car came out of nowhere and jumped the curb to block us in. Someone shone a spotlight in our faces. When we put our hands up to shield our eyes from the glare, a voice called out over a loudspeaker.

“Awww, what's the matter? Does the light hurt your eyes? Too much time in the closet?”

“What?” I asked.

“No faggots on the streets after midnight!” barked the voice. “You've been warned!”

Then the spotlight went off, and the car slammed into reverse and disappeared around the corner, while Brandon and I were still blinking the spots out of our eyes.

“Was that a cop car?” I asked after a minute.

“Yep,” Brandon said. “Sure was.”

*   *   *

Ironically, the self-esteem boost I got from being cruised by hot guys on Broadway led pretty quickly to dating in high school. I still didn't have any real friends in school; just my few acquaintances, Ryan, my weekends-in-Ballard buddy, and Brandon as my invisible at-home-only friend in my own neighborhood. But I started getting looks from girls—looks I probably wouldn't have understood if I hadn't seen a similar expression on the faces of a few dozen guys over the preceding year. I had a girlfriend by the end of the year, which made me a late bloomer compared to everyone else I knew, but I felt like the king of the world. Dad being in a drug coma so much of the time meant I could even bring my girlfriend, Alexis, back to my apartment for extended make-out sessions. My room still wasn't very clean, but Alexis had lived on the streets of the University District for a few months, so she had a pretty wide filter when it came to housecleaning and personal hygiene.