Inclination

Mia

Kerick

Inclination

Copyright © 2015 Mia
Kerick

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CoolDudes
Publishing

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Published by
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64 Windsor Street,
Gerdview
,
Germiston
, Gauteng

South Africa, 1401

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Edition 1

ISBN

(13) 978-0-620-64556-0

To

Michael Bowler

for
showing me

what
it means to

be a
true Christian by

living
as one

Having gained a
measure of steadiness when I realized that all I wanted in the whole entire
world was to get as far away from St. Mark’s Church as humanly possible, I race
toward my car. But before I climb inside, I collapse against the icy metal of
the car door in an effort to catch my breath—because at the moment, I’m nothing
but a panting, wheezing mess. On the bright side, the relief I feel at being
out from beneath the spotlight of my youth group’s collective, not to mention
accusing, stare is so powerful it’s almost surreal, and it’s definitely one of
those things I’ll have messed-up dreams about for weeks to come. But the
distinctive sound of pounding footsteps on frozen pavement coming from the
corner of the parking lot suggests I’ve let my guard down too soon. I don’t
even turn around, though. I know it’s just my friend
Laz
,
who’s come up to the parking lot to
again
offer me a ride home. I mean, after what just went down in the church we
both
know I’m too freaked out to drive.

“Got
somethin
’ to tell you, Del
Vecchio
!”
The angry voice doesn’t belong to
Laz
, I realize, as
an image of the Incredible Hulk forms in my mind. It’s the enraged bellow of
the guy who I’ve long thought of as
the
gentle giant
,
Rinaldo
Vera. And he’s issuing his
heated demands before he’s even reached my side. “Shit man, you
gotta
swear to me right now that you
ain’t
gonna
be one of them faggots!” The guy is basically
ranting.

I turn around
slowly to see
Rinaldo
stalking toward me, and it hits
me that before today, I’ve never heard him raise his voice. Today, it seems, is
a day for firsts.
Rinaldo
has always been such a
quiet sort—a couple of notches higher on the stoic scale than me, even. Without
giving it much thought, which is totally uncharacteristic of my usual overly
cautious self, I blurt, “I can’t help what I am, Vera. I can’t change it,
either—God knows I’ve tried.” I’m totally off my game.

“No! Not
gonna
listen to that bullshit from outta you! I’ll
make
your ass change if I
gotta
—an’ you’ll thank me for it someday!” That’s when the
pain starts. The first punch to the right side of my nose spins me halfway
around so that I’m backed up against my car. Even when my body stops reeling
from the blow, my stunned brain continues to whirl. And since
Rinaldo’s
a decent-sized guy, I don’t think the
spinning-Anthony-around-like-a-top move took too much effort at all. Like I
expected, punch number one is followed by another more frenzied swing that
connects
Rinaldo’s
knuckles with the outer corner of
my lower lip. My hands are too slow to block the punch, and I instinctively
close my eyes, but not before I catch a glimpse of
Rinaldo’s
rage-twisted features.

After the second
blow I sway like a dizzy toddler, but even with the painful throbbing in my
head, I somehow manage to stay on my feet.

Quiet, sweet,
sensitive
Rinaldo
Vera….

I’m seriously dazed,
now, and all I can see in front of me is a blurry vision of the boy I’ve known
for so long. The boy I’ve liked…and trusted.

But it’s not that gentle version of
Rinaldo
who yells directly into my face, “Come on, fight
back,
asswipe
—be a
fuckin
’
man!” His deep voice is thick with passion—out of control even. From between
his two front teeth, a glob of spit spews onto my forehead as he barks his
agitated command.

I wipe the wet
spot above my right eyebrow with the back of my hand, as I whimper, “Stop it, ‘
Naldo
…stop it….” My voice sounds high-pitched and whiny,
even to my own ears. And for some messed-up reason I use my nickname for
Rinaldo
from when we were kids. It just pops out as I
plead.

“Fags like you
wrecked my family—you assholes don’t deserve to walk the face of God’s
fuckin
’ green earth!” With an enraged grimace I won’t soon
forget, he reaches forward and shoves me to the ground—the pavement greets
first my backside, and then the back of my head, with a couple of excruciating
thuds. Before I adjust to this fresh source of pain, though, he kicks me—just
once on my side—but he kicks hard. I struggle not to yelp like a mistreated
puppy, but maybe I still do, it’s hard to say under the circumstances. “I hope
you die, Del
Vecchio
, and you burn in hell with my
old man and his so-called husband!”

And then,
poof!
Rinaldo
Vera’s gone.

And I’m left with
only the pain and the shock and the frigid night air.

I waste no time
lying there. “Get up, Anthony.” I speak out loud into the darkness, albeit
weakly. One thing I still have enough sense to recognize is that the rest of
the youth group can’t find me here, like this. They’ll all shake their heads, purse their lips, and say
that I got what was coming to me for being gay…
an abomination
. A person whose very nature is in opposition to
God’s natural plan for humanity. With a soft grunt, I drag myself up off the
pavement and unlock the car door, lower myself into the driver’s seat, and
soon, I’m pulling erratically out of the parking lot. “Not
gonna
let them see me… they can’t know ‘bout this.” The car jumps forward when I
first step on the gas, and jolts back when I stomp on the breaks, but I somehow
find my rhythm and keep going. It hits me that I shouldn’t be driving in this
condition but I can see no other alternative. So I continue to murmur senseless
phrases in an effort to calm myself as I drive. “You got this, Anthony…
everything’s okay….”

I’m not at all
sure how I do it, but I manage to drive a couple of streets away from the
church, and then I pull off to the side of the road, fully convinced that I now
understand the meaning of “side-splitting agony.” With a trembling hand, I
reach up and touch my mouth—my fingers return to my lap covered in blood. My
right eye is swelling up more as each second passes, and soon I won’t be able
to see well enough to drive home, but I don’t care.

I’m not ready to
go anywhere and…

I need to think
and…

I have to sort
this whole thing out.

It’s dark and
freezing cold in my car…and in my life.

I’m not one for
drama, but still I have several rather burning questions in my mind.

Oh God, what did
I do to deserve this? How did I end up
this way?

I crack open my well-used laptop,
and, with a degree of wariness, speak the words as I type them. “Roman Catholic
policy on homosexuality.”

This should be depressing.

But I have a strategy in place to
prepare me for what I’m going to see on the computer screen: before I so much
as glance at the results of my search, I take a quick look around my tiny
basement bedroom to fortify me—and my plan works, because I can’t
not
smile. Not a grin, just a smile—one
of those small smiles that means a whole lot because I’m all alone in my
bedroom, smiling at a freaking wall.

And how I ended up sleeping down
here is kind of a drawn-out story. I guess all that really matters is at the
story’s conclusion, Anthony Duck-Young Del
Vecchio’s
bedroom is set up downstairs in a tiny storage room that Dad has lovingly
converted into the family’s single
boy
bedroom,
so that my four little sisters can share the two upstairs kids’
bedrooms. My smile comes from seeing the kite-flying theme I’d so painstakingly
chosen to paint on my bedroom walls when I was in seventh grade and had to make
the big move downstairs. But moving down here had been all right with me then,
and it still is okay now. A teenage guy needs distance from four little girls.
And truthfully, I still kind of like the way my walls look like cloudy blue
skies, spotted with bright-colored kites soaring in the breeze. Sappy, but
true.

Before the first smile has even
dropped off my lips, I grin again, remembering the day Mom and I had covered
all of my child-sized furniture—all that would fit into my postage-stamp
bedroom—with sheets, broken out the paint and brushes, and created what would,
from that day on, be
my place
. In
fact, it’s the only place I can escape the terminally cheerful chatter and
intermittent bickering of my four little sisters and my rather outgoing—cancel
that (the SAT is right around the corner and I need to think in terms of
vocabulary in the Critical Reading section)—my
ebullient
parents.
Hehehe
….

I shift around in my tiny chair
and then choose a link: www.americancatholic.org.

“In Catholic belief,
"marriage is a faithful, exclusive and lifelong union between one man and
one woman, joined as husband and wife in an intimate partnership of life and
love….”
I read it aloud and then b
low out a weary gush of breath, as this is
pretty much what I’d expected. I decide to try another site.
This time I
choose
www.catholic.com.

Again, I speak the words.
“Homosexual desires, however, are not in themselves sinful. People are subject
to a wide variety of sinful desires over which they have little direct control,
but these do not become sinful until a person acts upon them, either
by acting out the desire or by encouraging the desire and
deliberately engaging in fantasies about acting it out.”

Great—I can be gay but I
can’t act on it. Or even imagine acting on it.

That doesn’t bode well for my future…um…
satisfaction.

Maybe it’s time I try a source of information that’s geared toward
teenagers.
How much worse can the news be?
I select
http://christianteens.about.com.

I clear my throat and read.
“Despite his call for compassion, he (Pope Benedict) has not stepped down from
his stance that homosexuality is a moral evil. He stated that the inclination
toward homosexuality is not necessarily a sin, it can be considered a ‘tendency
toward an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as
an objective disorder.’”

Apparently, the news could be
so
much worse.

I shudder, and then, being the analytical type, I summarize.

If I act on my sexual
inclination, which is actually a disorder, I will be acting immorally as a
Catholic. I will be a sinner.

I’ve heard of cold sweats overtaking people’s bodies, but this is
the first time one has overtaken mine. My forehead prickles with heat as it
simultaneously drips with cold perspiration. I am a literal human paradox. I
turn around in my child-sized chair and grab yesterday’s T-shirt that’s hanging
on the side of my undersized laundry basket. I yank it over my head and it
sticks to my cold, but sweaty, chest.

I’ll keep searching. There has got to be more to the story than
this.

Sometimes when I’m on the computer, I swear that each of my
individual fingers has a tiny fingertip brain that acts without my permission.
As in, each finger types by its own free will…with its own little
finger-agenda. Cool, huh?
Kinda
creepy, too. In any
case, now is one of those times—my independent digits are typing furiously as I
basically sit there gawking at them. And finally, when my worn-out fingers rest
peacefully on my lap, satisfied that they’ve found what they want, I hear the
printer come to life beneath my desk.

"Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines
for Pastoral Care." I state the name of the document that is sluggishly
making its way into the world in the
paper form. Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak—or, from the mouths of
the participants of the 2006 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who
might just resent being likened to any part of a horse. But I’m not really up
for continuing to decipher my own sordid fate right now. I mean, how much
depressing news can a guy take in one sitting?

Yeah, I’m so very done for
tonight
.

There’s plenty of time for me to sort this out—it isn’t like I have
a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, for that matter, or any pressing need to get the
facts of my sexual life in order
tonight
.

I climb back onto my creaky twin bed, flop down on top of the covers
because I’m way too hot to get underneath them, and I lie there both shivering
and perspiring. In an attempt to quell my sudden panic, I focus on the familiar
clanking and churning sounds of my printer, and I
choose a comforting thought.

Aaahhh
, here’s one...
My best pal,
Laz
,
always calls me Duck-Young, which is actually now my middle name. It was the
name given to me at birth by the South Korean social services people who were
responsible for me from the time I was born until I “came home” to my adoptive
family in the Unites States.

Duck-Young.
Irony seems to follow me everywhere.

In Korean, the name Duck-Young
means eternal virtue—which is exactly what I’d recently started searching for
within my soul, and for all practical purposes, within the confines of my
church.
But, jeez, seeing “intrinsic moral evil” in print is so much more
real than wondering, “think it’s cool if I kiss a boy?”

Once again, I disembark (another stellar vocabulary word) from my
pint-sized bed, take one step over to my miniature desk, pull out my dollhouse
chair, and sit down. After grabbing my assignment notebook and a pen out of my
backpack, I turn to the notes pages at the end and make a list:

Stop thinking about guys
like that:

*Peter Norbert in tennis
lessons

*Front guy of Neon Trees

*All leading men in
movies

*Basically, any dude
wearing shorts

I will stop!!!!!

Priorities:

*Obedience to God

*Getting into heaven

Please God take
these unnatural feelings away from me.

Back to bed.

Try to sleep.

Exercise in futility.

Time for music.

When I was in sixth grade, Mom
picked up this old hymnal for me from a church tag sale in town. I’d wager that
no hymnal had ever been more leafed-through in the history of hymnals than
mine. Sometimes when I find a song I like, I search for it on YouTube and if I
really like the way it sounds I put it on a CD. I listen to homemade hymns CDs
in bed whenever I find my head spinning with too many maddening thoughts to be
able to fall asleep.

Like now.

I lean over to my bedside table and press play, knowing that one of
my “comfort-music” CD’s is in the player.

Lead me gently home,
Father,


lead me gently
home;



In life’s darkest hours,
Father, when life’s troubles come,

Keep my feet from
wand’ring
,


lest from Thee
I roam,

Lest I fall upon the
wayside,


lead me gently
home.