Taking Chances (2 page)

I realized I had moved from being a misfit in a culture I wasn’t a part of to being a freak in the culture I was supposed to be in. I didn’t believe in casual sex; I didn’t like to get drunk. Bars were too loud, smoky, and sad for my taste and frankly, I had never met a man who could measure up to the ideal I had in my head.

“He means he’s not cute compared to the boy with the red door,” Sophia said with a wicked smile.

“I hate you,” I said, meaning every word.

“The guy with the red what?” Whatshisname asked.

“There was this boy that lived down the street that Matt here was in
llloooveee
with when he was in high school.” Her laughter chewed my eardrums like the sound of nails on a chalkboard. “Of course, being Matt, he never once talked to him. Matt only stalked him from afar and now judges every man he meets against that guy.”

Whatshisname looked over at the barista and back at me. “This guy with the red thing must have been hot.”

“Okay, honey,” Sophia interjected, quietly patting his arm. “Little too much sharing.”

She was right. I did judge everyone against that one boy. Of course, because he was a figment of my imagination, and, therefore, perfect, everyone else I met over the years was found wanting. That probably makes little sense, so let me try to explain it a bit better.

When I was growing up, there was a boy who lived two blocks down, and he was the reason I knew I was gay. Foster is an odd place; we are still small in terms of an actual town, but in population, there seemed to be more people than was ever seen. We were the closest thing to a real town within seventy-five miles, so Foster ended up being the hub for a few dozen towns that were too small to support a high school, and who also depended on us as a means of existence. I remember thinking at the time that the idea of people who came to Foster for fun didn’t compute in my high school mind, but it was the truth. There were enough people that we supported two different high schools, and there was no pattern on who should go to which one.

My brothers and I went to Foster High, the school that was an odd mix of yuppie kids combined with those from the wrong side of the tracks. Its buildings were aged, its textbooks and computers ragged, its uniforms were worn, and the band had trouble marching in a straight line. In every way, Foster High was and is looked down on by the students at Granada, the newer school. That made our rivalry that much fiercer. The Boy went to Granada, and because he went to Granada, he automatically became a Capulet to our Montagues.

He was a jock just like my brothers and I were, playing a variety of sports much like we did. Everyone knew him, walking down Main Street in his letterman jacket, easy smile, tattered white T-shirt that looked so soft you just wanted to touch it. He was always with friends and was always surrounded, as if the entire town wanted to touch him, be near him, draw what warmth they could from his presence. If he was comfortable with the attention, he never showed it. Instead, he always had a nervous smile on his face and unconsciously ran his fingers through that golden hair, which made the T-shirt ride up. Like a comet, that brief glimpse of skin between his shirt and jeans was worth waiting for weeks to appear.

Sophia snapped her fingers in front of my face, breaking me out of my stupor as I remembered him. “Okay, back to Earth. So how long are you staying?”

“As little as humanly possible,” I said, looking at the time and realizing I was close to being late. “Shit, I need to go.”

“So does his family still live in town?” she asked as I pulled on my jacket.

“I’m not seeing him.” I grabbed my messenger bag and darted for the door. “I’ll call you later.”

“Bye!” the cute guy behind the counter called out. I turned to see him waving at me.

I’d started to wave back when I slammed into the front door and fell onto my ass. He covered his mouth in horror as I shook my head and realized the entire place was staring at me.

“Fucking Christmas!” I cursed as scrambled to my feet and fled the scene.

For a long time I had secretly blamed The Boy for making me different. As far as I could see, it had been his fault that something in my mind switched from girls to boys when I saw him for the first time. I might have had thoughts before, might have wondered, but it wasn’t until the day I saw him mowing the lawn that I knew, I knew for sure. I wanted someone who looked just like him. And if not, as close as I could get would do.

I
T
WAS
a Saturday afternoon, one of the few he wasn’t roaming free across our small town with his pack mates like they owned the town. It was obvious that he had been resigned to mowing his lawn instead of running free, and it was that day as I walked by on my way to First Street that I knew… I was never going to be the same again.

He wore a pair of blue jeans that had been old the previous year. They were frayed and faded to the point of distraction, with the band of his white boxers just hanging out, almost daring someone to comment on them. He pushed the lawnmower around as if it owed him money, he was so angry. Two white headphone wires trailed down his back as he ignored the world around him and took it out on his chores. His hair was matted from the heat and drops of sweat trailed down his face. The world stopped spinning while I watched the sun reflect down the tanned perfection that was his shirtless form. I paused in the street, completely floored by the Adonis in front of me. And there, in the middle of the explosion in my mind, he looked up at me. Our eyes met, and if he knew what or why I was looking, he gave no indication. His eyes blazed under the green John Deere hat as he kept moving across the lawn… looking away slowly as if he hadn’t seen me gaping at him.

My brothers, of course, had nothing good to say about him when I asked them if they knew who he was. He went to Granada, which meant he was obviously the enemy. They explained how he and his friends were the bad guys and that I was to tell them if he even looked at me wrong. We were teenage boys, and most of us just waited around looking for a reason to get into a fight. As the youngest, I had sworn to hate him; but seeing him there, alone for the first time, things had changed.

I had always known I was different. My brothers and their friends seemed to live for spitting, farting, and endless competitions to see who was better than the other. They would talk endlessly about girls and what they had done, what they would do, and then finally what they would settle for if they ever had the chance to be with one. Their various comparisons left me cold, though I went along with them because the alternative was sitting alone in my room longing for something I couldn’t explain. I never had a name for what was inside me. No, to be honest, I never wanted to name it. I came from the old school of superstition that if you didn’t give an evil a name, it couldn’t quite possess you. So I never said the word out loud, never thought it to myself. I knew I was different and left it at that, but inside I craved to be like my brothers and their friends so bad, I just ignored it and hoped one day it would pass. But seeing him there, shirtless, sweat pouring down every muscle he had, the feeling inside me suddenly received a name, and it wasn’t one I liked.

B
Y
THE
time I walked into work, all I could think of was The Boy. I wondered if his family still lived in Foster. The whole morning, if I had more than thirty seconds to myself, my attention would drift back to that day when I knew I was sexually attracted to him, and not in a small way. After that, I thought I was so obvious that everyone in town was just being nice to me while laughing behind my back the whole time. They had to have noticed the way I stared too long or looked away too fast. The way I got too loud when the conversation turned to sex or the way I seemed to have no interest in girls at all. Everything I did and said was under a veil of self-scrutiny, looking for any hint that I was less of a man than the rest of them. After a while, I began talking about girls, loudly and awkwardly. I tried drinking beer in the back of whichever pickup I was riding in on our way to the lake; and I even asked a girl to the Winter Formal.

None of it made me any straighter.

My phone rang in my office, dispelling my memories for the moment.

“Matt Wallace,” I answered, trying to dispel the Ghost of Adolescence Past from my brain.

“Matty?” my mother’s voice asked through the phone. “Matty, is that you?”

“Hi, Mom,” I answered, silently groaning because I knew what call this was.

“Are you busy? I know it’s the afternoon.”

My mother comes from the generation that believes the afternoon is for work and work only. It means you were either busy working or busy trying to avoid work. She didn’t understand how I could sit in an office every day wearing a suit and dealing with computers and still have more than enough spare time to talk on the phone and not get in trouble.

“I’m fine, Mom, what’s up?” I assured her, knowing without it she would never get to the reason she called.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m at work, Mom; you called me,” I said, trying to keep the shortness out of my voice.

“Well, I don’t know how this thing works!” she complained, meaning she was on the cell phone I had bought her last year. “I’m afraid I’m going to break it sometimes.”

“I’m at work and it’s fine, Mom,” I said, trying to focus her before she went off on a tangent about technology today being purposely overcomplicated.

“Well, I just got off the phone with Teresa”—that was my oldest brother’s wife—“and she was checking in for Christmas, and I realized I hadn’t heard from you yet. You are coming, right?” She asked in the same way a mob boss would ask if I understood that we were family and family had certain obligations.

“Yes, Mother,” I said, trying not to sigh. “I e-mailed you my itinerary.”

“Well, this thing doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to!” she exclaimed, which was her way of saying she had received my message but had been unable to decipher it.

I bit my cheek to keep from explaining it was a brand new computer running Honeycomb 7, which I knew because I had bought it for them for my father’s birthday. I knew the words would fall on deaf ears. She no more understood that the computer was top of the line than she understood what I did as a tech editor for a blog. There were simply too many words in that sentence that just made no sense to her. It was easier to blame the machine and use it as an excuse to call me and ask what she was after instead.

“I fly in Thursday,” I said, checking my own e-mail to make sure I had the times right. “I arrive around 4:00 p.m. your time.”

“Do you need us to pick you up from the airport?”

“I’m renting a car when I land, Mom.” I was getting snippy, because she was drawing the call out longer than usual.

“Okay! Don’t snap my head off.” We were quiet for several seconds. She waited for me to give her an opening to ask me “the question,” and I waited for her to realize I wasn’t. Finally, she gave in. “So are you coming alone?”

And there it was.

I could never figure out if she was asking because she was concerned I was alone or that she was worried I would bring a guy with me one year. Either way, the question annoyed me, and I was unable to keep it out of my tone. “You know I am, Mom.”

“Well, fine,” she said, obviously exasperated. “I was just asking.”

She was prying and she knew it.

“And I answered.” I tried to end the call before it became an actual thing.

“You know, my friend Frances has a son who is….” She paused, still unable to say it out loud. “…too. Maybe you know him?”

I was done. “Yes, I do know him. I saw him at the last Gay Men with Pushy Mothers meeting. He’s a nice guy; we’re getting married next month.”

Now I could almost hear the irritation radiating from of her. “Well, excuse me for trying to understand your life! I’ll go now and stop bugging you.”

“Mom, you’re not…,” I began to recant.

“See you Thursday,” she said as if I’d never spoken and hung up.

I slammed the phone down and tried not to scream. “
Fucking Christmas!
”

From the way people stared at me, I’m pretty sure I failed.

The rest of the day sucked. I tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on the work at hand and not about a boy I had seen a decade ago and had never forgotten. It wasn’t until I got home and called Sophia to tell her how my day had gone that I had time to actually take a breath.

“Going postal at your job?” Sophia quipped. “They’ll all say you seemed like such a nice boy.”

I was lying on my comically undersized couch with my calves resting on the edge. I had bought it in a fit of “trying to be metropolitan” and paid the price for it. It cost too much money, was out of style the second I got it home, and it barely fit a man half my size. I was what Sophia called corn-fed, which sounded dangerously close to fat. Sophia assured me that it meant “hot.”

I didn’t feel hot.

“And you’d show up at my funeral looking like what’s-her-name from
Fight Club
: black makeup, shades, chain-smoking up a storm. And they’d wonder where I ever met such an ugly drag queen.”

“Fuck off!” she shrieked in my ear. “And it’s Helena Bonham Carter, you jackass. She is in, like, every other movie we watch.”

“Every movie you pick, you mean.”

She paused, mock outrage in her voice. “I’m not the one who wants to see every single sci-fi or cartoon piece of shit that comes out! It’s like being friends with a twelve-year-old. At least I try to interject some culture into your hick ass.”

It was true. I had no culture.

I’d remained largely unchanged since I moved from Foster, the only difference being that I now knew where gay men were but was still single. The gay scene was too loud for me; it was boisterous and rowdy and every weekend seemed to be an excuse for someone or other to throw another idiotic party. None of it made any sense to me. What was a White Party and how was it different from a Red Party? I was pretty sure the difference had to do with sex, but there was no way I was going to ask anyone to find out for sure.