Taking Chances (3 page)

“So you were nasty to your mom.” Sophia prompted me out of my thoughts.

“I wasn’t nasty,” I lied, knowing I had indeed been nasty. “It was the yearly ‘Do I have to worry about my son dying single?’ phone call. Believe me, that gets old.”

“She cares.”

I sighed deeply. “She cares insomuch that she can’t find a way to control my life like she does with my brothers. It would be better if she would scold me for making Jesus cry because I’m having congress with the beast and move on, but she isn’t even that religious.”

“You having congress with anyone, much less a beast, would be a freaking miracle.”

“Shut up,” I snapped.

“I mean it! Walking on water seems pale in comparison to the Great White Matt getting his groove on.”

She was baiting me, but I didn’t have the energy to rise to it. “What are you and whatshisname doing tonight?” I asked in an attempt to change the subject.

“You know his name is—” Something I forgot the second she said it. Arthur? Lance? Clay? Harold? I just couldn’t keep it in my head. “I don’t know why you refuse to remember it.” Hearing annoyance in her voice was petty revenge, but it was all the justice coming my way for the night.

“Because in another four months you’ll find him in bed getting fucked by some guy from the gym, and you’ll say you had no clue he was secretly gay and I’ll have to hear it.”

She was quiet for so long I thought she might have hung up. Finally, in a soft voice she said, “That is a horrible thing to say, Matt.”

And instantly I felt like shit.

“Why do you automatically assume he’s a bottom? That is just cruel.”

Her laughter was like a witch’s curse.

“Good night,” I said, knowing I had been outplayed.

“Have fun in the corn!” she said before I hung up.

As I drifted off to sleep, my mind, of course, went to the past.

F
OR
the rest of that summer, I discovered and invented reasons to walk past his house every day—twice a day, if I could manage it. In reality, everything that counted in town lay one hundred and eighty degrees from the direction I headed, but I began taking the long way, which was pretty much two blocks up, pass his house, and then turn around back toward town, just for a chance I could see him. A right turn past his house, another right turn on Elm Street, and a straight line back into town, all of this just for a chance to see him.

Most of the time, I made the trip fruitlessly. I might as well have been looking for some kind of mythical creature. I only caught glimpses of him, never a full-on sighting like the one I’d had the first Saturday. I was pretty sure if anyone caught me, I’d be dead. The only logical reason to pass by his house was that I was a secret fag and wanted to commit unnatural acts on his body. “Secret fag” were the exact words that pounded through my head every time I passed by his house. They would be the exact words my mother would use when she explained to my father what I had been doing when I got picked up by the police. My father, knowing he had already raised two strapping young straight men, would realize he should have stopped at a duo and lock me in the basement.

All they’d have needed to do was tell anyone who asked that they never had a third son; it had been a neighborhood friend of my brothers, and people had just assumed he was related. Or I had been farmed out to do menial tasks by a cruel uncle, Theodosius, and had finally returned home to take over plowing the fields on the home farm, literally. I would have spent the rest of my life in the cellar, wondering what the real world was like.

None of that stopped me from passing his home as many times as I could.

The house wasn’t as large as ours, but it had a big backyard, surrounded by what looked like a homemade wooden fence that had seen better times. It was like a house that had given up on trying to be anything more than just a place to live. The cracks through the fence didn’t show much of the backyard. It wasn’t easy to see back there, but from what I could tell, they didn’t use the backyard for anything more than storage. The trees were overgrown, casting the entire area in perpetual shadows; toys discarded, a few bikes. It wasn’t dirty per se; it just wasn’t perfect like my dad kept ours. The only thing I could see clearly was the back door.

It was red.

More accurately, the door must have been red at one point. By the time I saw it that summer, time and use had worn the color almost away, and it was a door that had been red. Nothing about the door, the house, or the yard was trashy. Instead, everything looked worn, as if better days had come and gone. After more than a week of passing by his house, hoping to see him mowing the lawn or perhaps doing jumping jacks in just a pair of gym shorts—hey, it could happen!—I began to wonder if I had imagined him. That whatever sickness had taken up residence in my loins had used its powers to manifest erotic illusions of half-naked boys doing chores in hopes of driving me insane.

If that was the plan, it was working.

On afternoons we didn’t have practice, I would ditch my brothers and take my roundabout shortcut past his place, my fingers crossed he’d be there. If I couldn’t see him out front, I would move around to the side and check through the holes in the fence. Like a junkie scrambling for another hit, I would peer into the darkness of the backyard in hopes of just one more glimpse, one more image.

And one day, he was there.

If I hadn’t been so surprised and frozen on the spot, I would have given myself away. He was leaning up against the door, reading a book and looking so relaxed, he reminded me of stumbling across a doe grazing in a private glade that, instead of running, just looked up at you in curiosity. He had taken his shoes off and for some reason, seeing him barefoot was akin in my mind to catching him nude. He was so undeniably beautiful that the image was burned into my mind for the rest of my life.

T
HAT
image was the first thing that came to mind when I woke up the next morning and got ready to leave for Foster.

I checked into my flight early, not wanting to be caught in a random airport pat down that would make me miss my flight. I could be brought up on terrorist charges, and I know my mom would find a way to say I did it on purpose just to get out of coming home for Christmas. One of the few perks of reviewing high-tech gadgets for a living was the free stuff you got from people wanting to see their product on our site. The tablet I was using was one of those perks. I sat at my gate and checked my e-mail as I waited.

A short e-mail from Sophia wished me a good flight and said she was crossing her fingers for me to find a package of sex under the tree. She knew I was unhappy, had been unhappy, and was most likely going to continue being unhappy if nothing changed.

W
HEN
I moved away from Foster, I’d been so sure that getting out was going to change everything. The truth was that there was no one to date in Nowhere, Texas. The only gay guy in town was the old man who ran the florist shop, and he acted more like a perv than an actual person. There was always talk by people of random hookups in the park, and once I even heard about a rest stop about ten miles out of town you could find sex at. Of course no one had seen this for themselves; like alligators in the sewers and people dying by saying Bloody Mary in front of a mirror, they were all just urban legends for Foster, and I needed more than that.

I had dated girls in high school for the same reason I wore white T-shirts and rolled up the cuffs of my jeans; because it was what my brothers did. I dated an average-looking girl who knew dating one of the Wallace brothers was a step up in our little social circle. Since my brothers actually liked girls, they had already picked out the best-looking ones they could score. I was like Mrs. Abigail, my third period English teacher, picking out a new car; I didn’t much care what it looked like as long as it was reliable.

And the girl had been reliable.

She also had thought I was the sweetest guy on Earth, since I never tried to paw her and was neater than any three boys she knew. I remember her kissing me at the dance and me wondering how it would feel to kiss the boy behind the red door. I had caught him a few more times after school, alone, reading, silently contemplative as a Greek god. I’d die to know what it was he read, why he was alone, and if I would ever know his name.

I’m not sure if this girl knew I liked guys, but she figured out quickly enough I didn’t like her. But she didn’t much care, and it became a
de facto
arrangement. She wore my class ring and said she was dating a Wallace boy. I had her ring on a chain so I could say I was dating a girl. We both got something out of it, but we both lost a lot more as it went on.

“Sir,” a voice said as I was nudged.

I opened my eyes and realized I had slept through takeoff and landing. It was just me and the nice flight attendant who, no doubt, wanted to get the drooling idiot off her plane so she could leave. She smiled and said, “We’ve landed sir.”

“Thank you,” I mumbled. I pushed myself to my feet and was snapped back into my seat; the seat belt was still doing its job. I almost knocked the breath out of myself as I struggled to free myself from the belt and the embarrassment. The attendant reached down and opened it with one flick of her wrist. I grabbed my bag and slunk out of the plane with what little dignity I still possessed.

After grabbing my luggage, I exited the terminal and was caught unprepared by how cold it was. Everyone likes to think Texas is a hot place, but no one who lives through a North Texas winter thinks that for long. North Texas is plains that run farther than the eye can see; and the winds cut across them and through clothes like a knife through butter. I half ran to catch the bus to the rental car lot and tried to breathe life into my hands as we drove. When I got into the car, I blasted the heater as far as it could and just waited for something that resembled warmth. By the time I’d finished shivering, the vents began to sputter out something that wasn’t cold air in my face. Still shivering because I’d grabbed the icy steering wheel, I put the car into gear and left the parking lot.

Driving to Foster was like driving back in time, except I didn’t have to go eighty-eight miles an hour or have that crazy guy from
Taxi
yelling at me all the time.

There were slight differences here and there, but you could have taken a picture of Foster ten years ago and transposed this image over it and not come up with many changes at all. The Vine had a new marquee, which looked a lot like the old one with more lights. I saw that they had put a stoplight in where Railroad Avenue intersected First Street but besides that, the same. I suddenly felt like a teenager again, the town closing in on me as my own private shame began to shrink away from the light. This was why I hated coming back. Not because my mother bugged me or because I didn’t want to see my family. Foster, the town itself, made me feel so damn bad about being gay, it was all I could do to stop myself from screaming out loud for people to get the fuck out of my face.

Sophia would have brought up that no one was even close to being in my face. And she would have been right. That was what made it worse. I knew that no one here knew a thing about me or cared about the person I actually was. But there was such a paranoia that they might that from the moment I touched down, I began counting the seconds until I left again. I had just gotten here and I already wanted to leave. I think that was a new record for me.

I passed Foster High, and I could see the football field from the road. I had spent most of my high school life on that field, training, running, playing, wishing I wasn’t on it. My junior year, the coaches from Foster and Granada decided that we should play a preseason game, which was really just a lame excuse for a grudge match. It was the only time we met on the field, since we both played in different leagues to prevent the rivalry from becoming even worse than it already was. I remember being torn between apprehension because their team seemed so much better than ours, and anticipation because I’d be seeing
him
somewhere else than behind his house. He was a running back, and I remember the moment I saw him in those football pants and pads, I nearly popped a bone right there on the line. Even though he never directly looked at me, I could tell it was him. I could see his eyes burning in his helmet as he surveyed us lining up against him. He didn’t look scared, he didn’t look nervous; if anything, he looked like he had been expecting more of us.

We lost that game 42-17, and my brother said I spent more time watching Granada make plays than actually stopping them. That was true in more ways than he could ever know. The boy moved like a panther out there. He was easily the fastest guy on either team, and he knew it. Even though he was as intense as any three players I had ever seen, I could see such joy in his face when he sat on the sidelines and watched his defense play. Even though we lost, I knew I had fallen in love a little bit more with him.

I remember the name on the back of his jersey was Parker, which seemed to fit him perfectly in my head. I heard he had gotten a scholarship, and the next year I read in the paper he had been accepted to Florida to play for them. One day he was there and the next he was simply gone, and my life had never been the same since then.

When I moved to the Bay Area, I had met a lot of guys looking to date. I wasn’t shy to use the Internet to find other guys who seemed to be like-minded, and more than a few were more than willing to meet a former Texas football player who was fresh off the bus, as they say. They were all great guys. Well, not great, but at the very least decent guys.

Each one, in his own personal way, tried to get me to adjust to gay life. And each one, in his own little fucked-up way, made me hate it even more. They weren’t masculine enough or weren’t monogamous enough or wanted to party too much or just weren’t him. At first, I simply thought there were just no decent guys out there. And then Sophia said the smartest thing that ever fell out of her mouth.