Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover (6 page)

I studied the drawing a bit more. “You drew me better looking than I am,” I observed.

“No, I didn’t,” he answered.

“This is how you see me?” I asked.

“Yes. You’re a very good-looking guy.”

“Me? Were you out in the cold too long last night? I’m not good-looking.”

“You’re nuts. You look better than I do.”

Was the man absolutely off his rocker? Had he lost it totally? He was one of the most handsome men on the planet, and here he was telling me that I was more handsome than he was. The man was bonkers. I couldn’t resist—I had to try to understand this a bit better.

“Okay, I have to ask. What do you think it is that makes you less handsome than me? And you’re wrong, by the way.”

“Seriously? My eyes aren’t even. My ears are too big. I’ve got a scar over my one eye and on my chin. I’m too hairy.”

Before he could continue I interrupted him. “Okay. I hadn’t even noticed the scar on your chin. And it is tiny. The scar over your eye is 99 percent hidden by your eyebrow. Your eyes are perfectly even and very attractive. Big ears are a sign of virility and are very attractive. Face it, dude, you’re handsome. You probably have to beat the girls off with a stick. That cheerleader last weekend, for example, she was practically drooling over you.”

“She’s been chasing after me for weeks now, trying to get me to go out with her.”

“Why are you avoiding her? She sounds like a sure thing.”

“I’m just not interested.”

Strange. I would have pictured him all over her. The man had more layers than met the eye at first glance.

“But back to this drawing for a minute. You are really, really talented. Are you going to study art when you go to college?”

“No! I only doodle. I can’t practice at home.”

“Why not?”

“My dad thinks it’s too ‘fruity’. I keep telling him that that’s rude and inaccurate. He doesn’t agree. We just don’t talk about it anymore.”

“Well, I think he’s wrong. You’ve got real talent, and I’m impressed.”

He didn’t say anything else about the subject. I asked if I could show his drawing to my mother, and while he hesitated he didn’t refuse, so I quickly dashed into the kitchen to show her. She was as impressed as I was and immediately came in to tell him what a great job he had done.

While Bill was distracted talking to my mother, I quickly flipped through the sketchpad. Holy crap! The man had been sketching some male nudes—some really fine male nudes. Interesting. There were no corresponding female nudes. I would have expected a straight male to draw boobs and vaginas, not penises and pecs. But this one seemed to go against the norm.

I put the book back and said, “You do really good work.” I didn’t tell him I had seen some of his other work, since I didn’t know what it all meant and I needed some time to mull it over. Why was he drawing male nudes?

The morning slowly passed. My mother stuffed us again for lunch. In the afternoon I remembered that Bill was having some trouble with calculus, so I asked if he wanted to do a little work on that. He did, which pleased me since I was a math nerd and relished the opportunity to do anything related to my favorite subject.

We moved to the dining room table, spread out our books and a pile of blank paper, and started. It quickly became clear to me where he was hitting his brick wall. Brick by brick I helped him deconstruct that wall and get past his problem. After a couple of hours of talk and working equations, he seemed much more confident and relaxed about the subject.

“I understand this now!” He sounded genuinely excited, which made me excited too. “Thank you! I was worried that I was gonna blow this test so badly! I owe you again.” He paused for a second before adding, “I seem to be saying that a lot lately.” He looked up at me with those beautiful big eyes of his and smiled as he said, “I’m just sorry I didn’t get to know you sooner. I guess I should be glad for this snowstorm and for my car dying like it did.”

“No problem. I like this stuff, I like you, and I’m glad I could help.”

“You absolutely did, more than I can possibly tell you.”

“You seem like a nice guy, so I’m glad to get to you know you a little too.”

“Seems like I’m the big beneficiary here. A warm bed to sleep in, the best breakfast any man has ever had, phenomenal lunch, personal calculus tutor who lifted the veil and showed me how it really works.”

I decided to joke a little to lighten the moment. “And the truck. Don’t forget the truck last weekend.”

“I’ll never forget the truck, trust me. I had my guys all lined up to help. They promised me they would be there, and as you saw, not one of them showed up. I was so pissed. If you hadn’t shown up I think I’d still be working on unloading that damned truck all by myself.”

“The girls meant well….”

“No, they didn’t. They were just there so Sue could try to get me to go out with her again. That’s the only reason they showed up. When I wouldn’t agree they got more and more useless.”

“She’s beautiful. Why don’t you want to go out with her?”

“She’s not my type.”

“What is your type?” I asked, but he studiously avoided answering my question.

“Hard to say.”

“Well, what are some of the girls like that you’ve had sex with before?”

“Why do you think I’ve had sex?”

“You’re Bill—you are a Greek God walking among us mere mortals. If any member of the male species is going to propagate, it is most likely to be one of the pretty ones. You’re the most pretty, so that makes you most likely. I’ve heard some of the much less attractive guys talk about having sex, so therefore if they’ve had sex then someone like you who is ten times more attractive must have had sex.”

“Pretty?” he asked.

“All right, handsome. Better?”

“I still think you’re nuts. I just don’t see that when I look in the mirror.”

“Well, then, you’re looking in the wrong mirror. Sounds like you need a new cheerleader.”

“I told you I don’t want—” he started to say.

“Let me finish! It sounds like you need a new cheerleader to tell you how handsome you are, how awesome you are. There is no reason that has to be someone with a vagina.”

“Vagina?”

“Yes, you remember health class? Vagina?”

“Dude! Shut up! I don’t want to talk about such things!”

Bill had to make a timely trip to the bathroom, which gave me a few minutes to reflect on the morning. I had been so sure that a god like Bill was straight, but he sure had been sending some mighty liberal messages. Didn’t he know that he was a jock and that jocks were by their very nature uptight and conservative and hated all the things that I was and represented? Jocks hated nerds. And jocks especially hated faggot nerds, and I had both bases covered.

The real question was simple: how much did I dare to push him to get some more information, some more data to support the hypothesis I was beginning to establish? If I pushed too hard or played it just slightly wrong I would drive away a really great guy that seemed to like me. If I played it right, though, the rewards could be far greater than the risk. Still….

After our calculus tutorial, both Bill and I took showers and got changed. My mom had washed our clothes from yesterday, so we both were able to get dressed in something more substantive than sweatpants, which was good because Bill was a little taller and heavier than me so my clothes didn’t really fit him very well.

The wind outside continued to howl ferociously, occasionally knocking branches off trees and onto the house. I was worried that we might lose our power if the wind took down lines somewhere, or blew over a tree onto power lines. But so far so good.

“You like Wii?” I asked Bill when we were both cleaned up and dressed.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Never played it.”

“You an Xbox man instead?”

“I don’t have any gaming systems,” he said somewhat shyly.

“None? Dude!” Clearly this was a problem that needed to be addressed. I decided we’d start with the Wii. I picked something I thought he might like, got everything set up, and showed Bill how it worked. He was a jock, so I thought that something vaguely athletic might be good. He picked up on how everything worked almost immediately and really got into the game. I was pleased with my idea since he seemed to get totally wrapped up in playing the game and seemed to be loving every minute of it.

After an hour I asked if he wanted to switch to something different. I described the few games I had, none of which he knew since he didn’t have a Wii system. Well, it turned out that my second choice was as good as my first—maybe even a little better. The man loved these interactive games and did really well at them. He grasped the system quickly, he seemed to have an inherent understanding of how things worked, and he had incredible hand-eye coordination. I was pretty good, but he wiped the floor with me on the second game.

“Damn!” I complained. “I’m pretty good at that one, but you just kicked my butt! You’re playing me, aren’t you? You’ve played this a few thousand times, haven’t you?”

He shook his head. “No. Never. This was my first time. You were my first time,” he joked. “Was it good for you?” he asked in a low, sultry voice.

“You just wiped the floor with me, so not so much.”

“I’ll just have to play with you again,” he said.

“Anytime,” I said, and I meant it.

S
INCE
we had been starving all day (right!) my mom had made a feast for dinner. She had roasted a big turkey and fixed all the trimmings to go along with it: roasted winter squash, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, several kinds of bread, peas, and more stuff that I’m probably forgetting at the moment.

We all sat down together and had a good time over the meal.

My mother, being my mother, apologized to Bill. “I know this probably isn’t as nice as what you usually have, but I thought turkey was a good meal for today. It sounded like you made some serious progress on your calculus issues, so that’s something to be thankful for.”

“This is way better than what I would ever get at home,” Bill said, although I could tell he regretted saying the words almost as soon as they were out of his mouth.

“What do you usually eat at home?” my mom asked, one because she didn’t entirely believe him, and two because she was curious about how other people lived.

“Most nights I make a sandwich if we’ve got anything in the house. Sometimes I bring home an apple from school lunch and eat that.”

“
And that’s your dinner?
” she asked incredulously.

“Why don’t you eat what your mom cooks?” She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which a mom didn’t cook or provide in some way for her family’s welfare.

“My mom doesn’t cook. I don’t think I’ve seen her do anything in the kitchen except heat up some water for instant coffee.”

“She doesn’t cook dinner? What do you eat for breakfast? What about cookies? Snacks? Cakes for parties?” Okay. She was on a roll now.

“She doesn’t cook anything. She never has. She doesn’t bake. I’ve never seen her bake anything and probably don’t want to.”

“So who makes your birthday cakes?” she asked, incredulous.

“No one,” he said, his eyes cast downward in obvious embarrassment. “I don’t think I’ve ever had one.”

I was as shocked as my mother. I couldn’t conceive of a family, even a screwed-up family, that didn’t at least try to celebrate their son’s birthday.

My mother was in shock. My father rescued the conversation by changing the subject. “The news said that this thing might finally blow itself out overnight tonight. The last of the roads should be opened up by tomorrow morning. Bill, since the school has probably plowed your car in by now, I was thinking that tomorrow morning the three of us could go and start to dig it out and see what’s going on with it. Would that be okay with you?”

“More than okay,” he said with a big smile. “But I can’t ask you to do that. That’s a lot of work, and you shouldn’t have to do that.”

“You didn’t ask. We volunteered. And if we didn’t want to do it we wouldn’t have volunteered. And we don’t
have
to do anything. We
want
to do it because it will help you. That’s what people do for friends—they help one another out. That’s just the way it works.”

Pretty much the same speech I had given him the other night when I rescued him from the school parking lot. I guess I realized now where I had picked up that speech. Hmmm. While no kid wants to grow up to be his parents, on this part I wasn’t unhappy—they really were good words, and I believed them as much as my dad did.

“You folks have been so good to me. I can’t believe all that you’ve done. Some total stranger waltzes into your house in the middle of a blizzard after keeping your son out on the roads for hours and you just opened your house to me. You’ve cooked some of the best food I’ve ever eaten in my life. You’ve helped me figure out a calculus concept. You’ve… you’ve just made me feel so welcome. I cannot begin to thank you enough.”

“No thanks required,” my mom said. “You’ll see—that’s just the way we are. We’re all connected in more ways than we realize. You help others because it’s the right thing to do, and sometime in the future it will all work around full circle and someone else will be there when you need help. And face it—we all need help at some point in our lives. That’s just the way it works. We take care of one another.”