Message of Love (7 page)

Chapter 10

October 1980 

“You guys look fabulous!” Gerard cooed as we crossed through the Penn campus in our costumes.

I, however, felt nervous enough just being near Gerard, whose thrift-store tuxedo and make-up got more than a few stares all the way through the Temple campus, and particularly on the trolley to Penn.

Everett didn’t want to park the van in the dodgy neighborhood where we were headed. A side window had been smashed on a previous movie night and we still hadn’t had it replaced with more than a slat of cardboard and some duct tape.

So we waited at the bus stop, he and I looking normal to anyone else, at least compared to Gerard. My tan windbreaker, with a patch on the shoulder, my old dark-rimmed glasses and greased-back hair might not have raised an eye; the high-waters and white socks, however, were a bit off.

Gerard looked quite comfortable in his tuxedo and pale makeup accented with thick black eyeliner. “We’re fine,” he reassured me. “It’s Halloween season.”

I had yet to see anyone else dressed up as anything unusual, but I did get over my nervousness.

Everett’s suit and fake beard might have set off some of the stares at the bus stop. But as we ascended the ramp, as the beeper beeped, Everett didn’t seem to mind the sound. Under his plaid blanket, and under his sweatpants, he wore black mesh stockings, a pair of high heels in his backpack.

My frustration had started with our argument over how to get there. Everett wanted to take a crosstown bus, the only one with a lift. Gerard seemed a bit disappointed that we wouldn’t be using the van, and offered to splurge on a cab, but we let it slide.

It wasn’t about the fishnets. Everett wanted to test the public transport system. He was working on a paper for his Public Policy and Accessibility paper, which he’d been poring over for months, as his final paper for the class.

Daring us to take a late bus in costumes that appeared to be normal, at least he and I as Brad Majors and Doctor Scott, was his new idea of “an adventure.” After a bit of pleading, despite Gerard’s tickled joy at the prospect, Everett consented to wearing track pants over his hosiery.

His dare, and my caution, turned superfluous when we saw that half of the other people on the bus were dressed as other black-clad costumed characters just like Gerard. “Is this cool, or what?” he beamed.

Everett agreed. “I think we’ve found our people.”

Outside the Theatre for Living Arts, a slightly run-down art house cinema on South Street, more dressed-up fans crowded the entrance to the midnight screening of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. Assuming the role of tour guide, Gerard insisted on buying our tickets.

We won the Halloween costume contest’s second and third place. Since we were the only ones dressed as Brad Majors and Doctor Scott, we got to sit in the front row.

“We don’t have a Brad. You’ve simply got to help us!” squealed a tiny woman dressed as Janet.

Some people were missing from their little acting-it-out cast. Marlene was dressed as Magenta, but preferred to watch from her spot across the aisle. “Get up there,” she encouraged from her electric wheelchair.

An awkward recruit, I stole glances up at the screen to figure out what to do. ‘Janet’ led me around the aisles through the “There’s a light…” “Over at the Frankenstein place…” song. Along the way, about twenty people squirted us with water pistols.

As “The Time Warp” started, everybody in the theatre danced in place, even Everett, whose chair version made me smile. I started to dance a little, but Janet tugged my jacket sleeve.

“We don’t do that,” she said, nodding up at the screen.

After the song, my pants got yanked down. To be honest, I was asked first by the other Magenta. But when it happened onscreen, Everett and Gerard could not stop laughing and cheering for me. I just stood there, my stuff making a visible tent as I was shoved around by a girl playing a guy and a guy playing a…whatever.

The … person playing Frank N. Furter pulled open a red velvet curtain below the nearby EXIT sign, then danced around me like a temptress. To halt a nervous burst of laughter, I just smiled at Everett, which left the contents of my shorts a little too inspired. I bashfully dressed and returned to my seat.

“You quit?” Everett asked.

“Brad’s no fun,” I scowled.

“He loosens up later.”

“Well, if he made out with Rocky instead, I’d be interested.” I nodded toward the husky blond sitting across the aisle from us. A black bathrobe covered what would be revealed as his mummified bandages and subsequent strip-down to a gold bikini.

Everett leaned forward, then offered a sardonic sigh. “Oh, Brad.”

By the time Everett/Dr. Scott entered, we had tried to echo the catchphrases, always a bit too late. But of course Gerard knew them all, and Everett knew all the lyrics for his song, singing along while spinning around on back-wheelies. People went wild. But he, too, was not up to acting out every line.

“Monkey,” I said to Everett as he returned to my side amid shouts and tossed pieces of toast. “You just got yourself a constituency.”

“Tenk ewe, Brad. Tenks for supporting my pre-campaign. Von schtep at a time.”

“Which will all be eliminated and turned into ramps.”

“Precisely. My evil plan foe rampire vuld domination vill be a suck-sess!”

Had we, like Riff-Raff and Magenta, a mansion-spaceship with which to magically transport ourselves back to Everett’s dorm room, the night would have ended well enough.

But Gerard’s insistent invitation to join a gaggle of hardcore
Rocky Horror
fans, all still in full costume, to invade a nearby all-night diner, insured that the festivities were far from over. And sadly, the adorable Rocky left with his girlfriend.

As we bid Marlene and her assistant-friend goodnight, I almost longed to hitch a ride, leaving Everett to sort out the inevitable stair and seating situation. But I remained by his side, until Gerard quickly squeezed himself between our seats, leaving me huddled in the corner of a cramped booth.

Declining the coffee everyone else seemed to crave, “It’s two in the morning,” I muttered, I instead ordered food. And while no one repeated the callback line tossed to Brad Majors, after the cheerful congratulations on my participation, I could almost feel my awkward disconnect with the more festive characters.

Gerard held court, spouting on about yet another club night, a new band, and a new vintage clothing store, while his friends replied in perky affected tones, as if always quoting some clever line or lyric whose significance eluded me.

The other Magenta sat across from me. “You guys simply must come back.”

Not if returning meant acting out a hump session with a drag queen alien, I thought. “Well, I don’t know if we can–”

“It’s so perfect, Everett doing Doctor Everett Scott.” She glanced at him, charmed, of course.

“Yeah, kind of a funny coincidence.”

“And him being…”

“A paraplegic.”

“Sorry.” She hunched her shoulders, wincing. Her heavy mascara almost completely blacked out her eyes.

“No need. He’s cool about it.” I glanced across the booth at Everett as he laughed at another of Gerard’s jokes.

“So, you guys are…?” She wagged her finger in a motion that implied a connection.

“Yeah.”

“That must be…different,” she said softly.

“Well, we kinda dated before his accident, before college.”

“You went to high school together?”

“No, actually–”

Distracted by Gerard’s question about some bit of movie trivia, Magenta’s attention returned to the louder group chat. I ate.

It was fun, for the first hour. But the others were not interested in geologic surveys or environmental issues, so I didn’t have much to say. Perhaps I should have brought up asexual plant reproduction. Instead, I listened, half-smiling and nodding. Everett ignored my repeated silent glances, so I dug into my omelet and hash browns, which were actually pretty tasty.

Long after my empty plate sat un-bussed before me, and the others continued to nurse their coffees amid relentless chatter, Everett finally noticed my silent smiling stare.

“We should get going, but this has been great,” he finally said.

Outside, a fuss ensued over who among the two people with cars would have the honor of driving Everett home, until one of the Transylvanians said, “I can fit him and one more.”

“Oh!” Gerard practically leapt forward.

“But I’m going with Everett,” I said.

“Oh, why?” Gerard asked.

“Because. I’m his boyfriend.”

“Well, I just thought you were going back to Temple.”

“No. Thank you.”

Visibly miffed, and his other potential ride already off in the other direction, he bid us an abrupt goodnight and left to chase them down.

As our Transylvanian led us to her car, Everett muttered, “You didn’t have to be so–”

“Apparently, I did; otherwise I’d be walking home.”

“I hope you had fun, at least.”

“Yes, but it’s four in the morning.”

Squeezed into the back seat with his wheelchair beside me, as we rode toward Penn, I ignored Everett’s pleasantries up front with our Transylvanian, wondering how many more times I would have to declare my connection to Everett, and how to do it without being, well, an asshole.

Chapter 11

November 1980

“Reagan isn’t going to change anything for the good,” declared Jacob. “It’s a lot of corny rhetoric.”

“Corny rhetoric that sells,” Everett said as he flipped through a stack of note cards strewn around him on the carpeted floor of his dorm room.

“Oh, right, like ‘It’s morning in America?’ That’s a breakfast sausage commercial, not a campaign slogan.”

“Well, it worked.”

Seated at his desk across his room, I looked down with an affectionate smile as my boyfriend and our new friend continued their seemingly endless conversational debate.

Comfortable in his new digs, Everett enjoyed relaxing in various positions on the carpeted floor. With a pillow under his chest, up on his elbows, he scooted himself, his legs dragged along a bit. One of his socks was coming off, but I wasn’t going to interrupt him.

Near him, our friend Jacob Isaac leaned seated against a wall and adjusted an overstuffed pillow on Everett’s bed. It was essentially one of our ‘date nights’ when I slept over, but it could wait. The fact that Jacob was on his bed might have unnerved me if he wasn’t such a nice guy; that and the fact that there wasn’t another chair.

“Carter’s being blamed for the oil crisis, even if he didn’t cause it,” Everett countered.

“But his policies were sound,” Jacob said, “and the Arab embargo–”

Everett cut him off. “The public is resistant to energy-saving measures, no matter how many statistics tell us that turning off a light bulb is going to do anything.”

“Citation, please,” Jacob scolded.

Although Everett encouraged me to accept invitations from friends to events that aren’t accessible to him, more often I declined. I never wanted to have any intentional reason to not be with him. But any invitation to meet up was welcome, even being the odd man out in their study session.

His first semester focused on Classics, then Public Policy classes took over. After auditing a few classes, he decided that he had no patience for Pre-Law.

While I enjoyed watching him at a few preliminary student debates, I at first shied away from accompanying him to out of town tournaments.

Everett caustically joked that he loved to watch his opponents squirm while “fighting with a cripple.” Besides, I’d endured enough of his superior argumentative skills the previous semester over amusingly petty topics like the arrangement of shirts in our dresser drawers.

The truth was, Everett’s real major was becoming a hybrid of arguing for disability rights and perfecting his innate charm.

People seemed to adhere to him, flirt with him, as if defying the prejudice of not considering him approachable would gain them some sort of status. I didn’t know what to make of it, usually ignored it or endured it when it was done in front of me without being acknowledged. Declaring us boyfriends seemed arrogant, defensive, in front of his new friends.

Jacob Isaac, however, was different.

The first time we met him, we were naked. Actually, we’d been swimming at the Penn pool. After letting himself be photographed for the
Daily Pennsylvanian
newspaper in the pool’s fancy handicap hoist, Everett got an unlimited guest pass when I accompanied him. Apparently the device had come at great cost, and Penn’s public relations department wanted to show off their ‘commitment to accessibility.’

Nevertheless, he refused to use the hoist afterward, preferring to wrangle himself out of his chair, to the pool’s edge and into the water on his own, diving in if the lifeguard wasn’t looking.

It was then that Everett told me of his glimmer of understanding about his mother’s pact with the school. We’d claimed a corner of the wider lane, circling each other. “Your boyfriend is a poster boy,” he’d said simply.

We’d been casually paddling back and forth, swimming around in lazy circles along with a bit of mild horseplay that no one else realized was our own form of foreplay. The combination of being wet and nearly naked together usually led us to return to his dorm for a different sort of exercise.

One swimmer adjusting his goggles between laps, then gave us more than the usual curious stare. It seemed one of recognition.

We had been joking about the continuance of horseplay of a different sort at our lockers when Everett made a playful grab for my crotch. A giggle, a cautious glance between us, and there stood the curious swimmer, toweling off, his light brown curls damp and glistening.

I stole a brief glance at his wiry muscled body, his smaller lean frame and the fascinating fan pattern of his chest hair, along with the perky, almost friendly way his penis bobbed as he rubbed his back with his towel.

“I’m right behind you,” he said apologetically. Everett made a move to back his chair away, but it bumped into the wooden bench that ran between the rows of lockers.

“It’s okay,” Jacob had said, as he hopped up around us and opened his nearby locker.

As we dressed, he introduced himself, quickly revealing his knowledge of who Everett was.

“You won state in forensics last year. Pinecrest, right?”

“That I did,” Everett smiled as he dug in his locker for his clothes. Jacob introduced himself to Everett, reminding him of some prep school debate where Everett had trounced Jacob’s team at some other private school in Western Pennsylvania.

I dressed quickly, so I could make myself available for any assistance. But when I leaned in to help him, Everett returned my gesture with a scowl. In public, he preferred to perform such basic tasks on his own. I’d forgotten again.

“Thinkin’ about joining the debate team?” Jacob asked as he shucked on a pair of boxer shorts.

“I don’t know. I’ve got a big course load,” Everett said.

“We could really use you.”

Jacob offered his phone number, scribbled on a notepad which Everett always kept handy in his backpack. As an afterthought, before leaving, he also introduced himself to me.

“You interested?” I asked after we’d left the locker room.

“I’m not sure. I’d have to look up what the topic is this year.” College debate teams followed a national schedule, choosing pro and con sides according to some obscure regulations whose rules eluded me, despite Everett’s explanation.

“He’s pretty cute,” Everett said.

“You think?”

“I saw you checkin’ him out.”

“Well, he was kind of showing off.”

“You think we were being hit on?” he feigned shock.

“I think you were being hit on.”

It turned out we were both wrong. Jacob, while okay with us being gay, and a couple, had not been hitting on us, despite being naked when we’d met.

Now, more than a month later, their informal debate continued in Everett’s room. I glanced up from my chapter section on monocotyledon and dicotyledon plants. Leaf veins, flower petals and other parts had subtle differences. I noted an amusing ‘Did You Know,’ that banana trees were actually large grass plants and not trees at all.

Jacob shifted forward to grab a cookie from a bag on the floor. He joked about having narrowly escaped one of many group activities in his dorm, Stouffer Hall.

Jacob’s rapid speech, his talkative nature about everything from his Jewish family heritage to local cuisine, combined with what he called, “our mutual cultural history of oppression,” made him one of our few shared friends at Penn. He never asked questions about Everett’s disability, but listened if the topic was brought up. His studies in social justice paralleled both our interests.

So when he and Everett spent an evening in his dorm room at least once a week discussing politics, even while veering off course from their topic and what Everett called his Notes and Quotes card box, I enjoyed listening in while doing my own work.

“What do you think, Reid?” Jacob crumpled the bag of cookies, tossed it into the trash can, and licked off a coating of crumbs from his fingers.

“Me?” I’d been poring over a half-assed chart on plant cell walls, coloring in a mimeographed drawing to differentiate the cellulose from the hemicellulose.

“You’re obviously into the environment,” said Jacob. “What’s your solution to the energy crisis?”

I glanced at Everett for assistance, but he merely offered a coy grin, his chin resting on his palm.

“Uh, well, solar and wind power, for starters.”

“Okay, but what about fuel?” Jacob asked. “Diesel, petroleum?”

“Well, we need to cut off dependence on foreign oil, of course.”

“Catch phrase,” Everett muttered.

“Hey, I’m just answering his question,” I shot back.

“And I’m critiquing the argument structure, not the emotion of the presenter,” Everett tossed off his reply.

“Okay, purely for the sake of argument,” I aimed that last word at Everett before going on full attack. “We cut off OPEC, halt all logging, subsidize hemp for fiber and paper production, offer tax incentives for all new housing that includes solar and wind upgrades, and, and fine polluting industries into extinction, before we’re extinct.”

Everett sighed as he rolled himself over onto his side, then yanked one leg up a bit, pulling it into a forced stretch. “And there you have it. The liberal approach taken to its extreme is isolationist, anti-business and totalitarian in its basic ideology.”

I shook my head as if stunned. “Well, he asked for my opinion,” I muttered before returning to my stupid little cell cartoon.

“You’re lucky you’re just his boyfriend and not his debate opponent,” Jacob joked as he stood. “We’ll have to solve the entire world’s problems some other night.” He gathered his notes and books.

Everett rolled over. “Hey, we were thinking about going to movie night at the quad tomorrow night;
Escape From New York
. Wanna come with?”

“Actually, I have a date. Marcy; freshman and very blonde.”

“Girlfriend material?”

Jacob stuffed his papers in his backpack. “More like a hot shiksa who’s slumming before getting her emarress degree.”

“Her what?” I asked.

“M. R. S. Missus. You know, girls who aren’t really getting a degree, just husband-hunting, and I don’t think I qualify, or want to.”

Everett chuckled. “That’s something we don’t have to worry about.”

“No, what with you two already being practically married,” Jacob joked. He offered a low-five as Everett shifted to sitting on the floor, folding his legs in front of himself. “Don’t get up on my account.”

Everett laughed. Jacob offered a quick hug as I led him to the door. “Stick to your guns, Reid. We’ll save the world from these dirty imperialists one day.”

I watched him trot down the hallway before closing the door, almost afraid to be alone with Everett. Jacob seemed to provide a buffer between us, and now he was gone for the night.

After closing the door, I returned to his desk. “You didn’t have to skewer me in front of him,” I muttered.

“Reid.”

I didn’t respond.

“Giraffe.”

“Yes?”

“Debate is the attempt at objective argument. It’s not about personal feelings.”

“Fine.” I closed my books as if I might leave. He knew I wouldn’t.

“Come ‘ere.”

I hesitated, then relented, walking across his small room, his little universe, then settled down on the floor next to him. He wrapped an arm around me, offered a light kiss to my forehead.

“Nobody else knows how much you love the planet, and trees in particular.” He grinned, knowing that remark spoke volumes, not just about my hopes, but our own intimate past.

“I know,” I whispered. “It’s just … you get so …cold when you argue.”

“It’s not cold. It’s practical.”

“So, you’re like your parents. You’re a Republican.”

“No. I’m not defining myself by them.”

“But you’re conservative.”

“Not in the way you think.”

Everett held me closer, but then gestured with his arm, waving above us. “The argument is outside us. That’s how it works. The emotion,” he pressed his hand to my chest, “stays inside. It’s fragile.”

I kissed him. He tasted of the cookies we’d been eating. I shifted my mouth across his jaw. His beard stubble sent a surge of desire through me. We adjusted the pillow, but I could sense his discomfort as I moved to lay atop him.

“You wanna move up to the bed?”

“No, let’s do it here,” he grinned. “Just get a few more pillows.”

I stood, tossed a few from the bed toward him, which he caught. “And a towel.” I walked to the bathroom.

“And some lube!” he called out.

“Anything else? Dessert? Coffee?”

“Your butt.”

“Coming right up,” I replied, as I stripped off my clothes, and helped him yank down his sweatpants.

As we jostled and repositioned ourselves, kissing and licking, we gradually ended up in one of Everett’s other preferred positions; me straddling his chest, teasing him by flapping my erection toward his mouth, his eager tongue darting toward it, then me finally succumbing to his grunting moans of pleasure as I plunged in and out. It seemed strange, feeling a surge of lust at the sight of my own body distorting his cheeks, that perfect face.