Boy erased, p.13
Boy Erased, page 13
I closed my eyes, but the afterimage remained: pine-studded peaks, browning pine needles, the morning sun hanging like a heat lamp over it all.
My family made the pilgrimage to this town in 1999 just after we lost our cotton gin to a corporate competitor, long after the town had already transformed itself into a place for retired Chicagoans and Southern fundamentalists to buy cheap property where it was safe to keep and bear arms and brag about it. In the five years since we’d moved, my parents had learned how to fit in with some of the Northerners, talk with a slight nasal accent, smile less. People came here to change their lives for the better, to live at a different pace, though later I’d learn that a change of scenery would never change someone like me, that no amount of camouflage could hide the same-sex fantasies I’d been having since seventh grade.
“Are you ready?” my father said, his eyes flicking from the road to the nervous hands I kept wringing in my lap.
“I’m ready,” I said, my fingers freezing into a steeple. I remembered a rhyme my teachers taught me in vacation Bible school: Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open the doors and see all the people.
“It’ll be a different kind of education than you’re used to,” my father said. “Your college professors won’t teach you this.”
Much of my father’s work now involved educating people outside of the church’s doors. His increased ambition had led him to witness to an ever-increasing number of customers at his dealership, to walk the neighborhood streets behind our house to knock on doors in search of lost souls, and now, his greatest mission, to witness to the forgotten, the downtrodden, the inmates of the local county jail. This was my first time shadowing him on one of his early Saturday morning visits; I had never before visited the jail though he had come many times before, and I was still half-asleep, unaccustomed to the new schedule my parents had proposed after David outed me, which required me to drive back from college Friday afternoons and wake up early Saturday mornings to spend more time with my family.
After several minutes of silence, my father pressed the button for the radio. His Creedence Clearwater Revival CD replaced our silence with the nostalgic and happy light notes of a Louisiana bayou none of the band members had ever truly experienced. To anyone passing us on the road, we must have looked happy, off to see some roadside attraction.
I closed my eyes again, pressed the heels of my palms against my eyelids until the afterimages grew fractious and broke apart: an ice shelf descending into black arctic water.
• • •
THE IMAGES of what had happened the night of my rape stayed with me also, working their way into nearly every minute of my waking life: the blurry image of the younger boy David told me he’d raped; the sight of David towering over me, forcing my head down. One second I felt calm; the next I would recall some forgotten pocket of memory, and an uncontrollable rage would grip me, a rage directed toward me and everyone around me, a desire to destroy everything I saw.
After David called and outed me to my parents, my mother had driven me home from college, speeding through yellow lights to arrive at our house in record time. As she vomited in an adjacent bathroom, my father led me into his bedroom, the door clicking shut behind him, and explained that what I was feeling was wrong, that I was simply confused.
“You don’t know what it feels like to be with a woman,” he’d said. “There’s nothing else in the world like the pleasure between a man and his wife.”
I didn’t know what to say. I traced the pattern of the comforter with my index finger, followed its stitching along the yellow-brown bulb of a jonquil. If I could just keep moving my hands. My religious studies professor had noticed my restless hands one day in class, inviting me into his office to teach me some of his meditation techniques. Left hand, palm down. Turn left palm up. Do not say to yourself, “Turn the left hand.” Awareness is all. Though I’d experienced little success with these techniques, having something to do with my hands seemed better than giving in to the trembling.
“It’s so warm, so natural,” my father said, “being with a woman.” I felt the sudden urge to join my mother in front of the toilet, our disgust perhaps uniting us for a moment, though for different reasons. None of us had wanted to know about each other’s sex lives, yet here we were.
When my mother returned to the room, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, my parents sat me down on the edge of the bed and explained that they would find a way to cure me. They would talk to our preacher, see what options were available. There were ways, they said. They’d once heard a visiting preacher give a speech about counseling options. In the meantime, I would spend my weekends at home, two hours away from the sinful college-educated influences that had led me to this point.
Sitting there with my sneakers hovering above the carpet like a little kid, tracing my fingers along the comforter while watching my mother continue to smear pink lipstick on the back of her hand, I couldn’t find the nerve to tell them what my friend had done. David had trumped me: The knowledge of my homosexuality would seem more shocking than the knowledge of my rape; or, worse, it would seem as though one act had inevitably followed the other, as though I’d had it coming to me. Either way, our family’s shame would remain the same.
“You’ll never step foot in this house again if you act on your feelings,” my father said. “You’ll never get an education.”
That night, I made the quiet decision to agree to whatever they had in mind, the shame and rage settling in my chest, filling up spaces I had previously reserved for love, spreading beneath my skin like invisible bruises. Unlike my mother, I had no way of purging myself, no way of staring into my watery reflection and obliterating my features with sick. Instead, I could only cup my hands in prayer and make a promise to God that I would try harder, the carpet burning its twin pointillist patterns into my kneecaps. I could only stand before my bathroom mirror and rub the sharp edge of a pair of scissors against my Adam’s apple, back and forth, until the blade began to leave faint marks that would prove difficult to explain. I could only be like the sinful Narcissus I’d read about in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which was nestled in my backpack, too in love with the image of myself reflected in other men’s bodies, too haunted by what I saw to turn away. To prevent myself from drowning, I agreed to my parents’ plan. As the weeks passed and the next steps solidified, we would decide if I was to stay in college or if more drastic steps needed be taken.
Each night, the images arrived fully formed, as if by clockwork: David and the boy; David towering over me; my father’s lips moving as though independent of the sounds he was making; the look of fear that split the skin of my parents’ faces into fractals with increasingly smaller worry lines.
I had chosen to accompany my father to his jail ministry as a way of ending these images, as an alternative to the suicide I contemplated almost nightly, to the scissors I began to feel for in the middle of the night, running my restless hands along the lip between my mattress and box spring until reaching those twin metal tongues.
Perhaps, had I known how close I truly was to suicide, I would have kept away from the jail and its dank cells, its display of lives broken by bad choices and bad luck, of people who had been unable to change themselves when it most counted—yet it’s also possible that what I truly craved was the knowledge of how my father accomplished the impossible, how he reformed these men, gave them hope, brought them back to their best selves before God. “No sin is too great to be forgiven,” my father would often say, paraphrasing Exodus. Maybe that could apply to me, too.
• • •
I WATCHED the gaps in the trees slice by the window, my father accelerating through the curves in the road, and for a moment I imagined popping open the door and tumbling out of the truck the way I had seen cowboys do it in the Westerns my father watched every night. But where would I go? Where would I find a new self? I had walked down many of these forest paths in my free afternoons after high school, some of them opening onto bone-white granite cliffs, some rushing down to the dam of a man-made lake, all of them circling back to the town center with labyrinthine flourishes that never failed to take my breath away. In Mythology, I’d read about Ariadne, how she used red string to guide Theseus free of the Minotaur’s furry grasp. Yet in this town it seemed every path led back to the same dilapidated strip mall. In this town, it seemed the Minotaur would always find you.
• • •
I’D ALREADY learned that there were no simple, straight roads out of town. The night I’d been outed, after my father gave me his ultimatum, I ran a few Internet searches in my bedroom, straining the whole time to listen for my parents’ footsteps in the hallway outside. I ran an online credit check and found that I had almost no credit to my name. I queried message boards on how to file for independence, but all of the answers seemed much too complicated; there were too many forms to fill out, too many signatures, too much thought required. As it stood, my parents were paying for more than half of my education, and if I couldn’t change who I was, they were going to take this away from me.
Yet the thought of abandoning my parents, of joining a community of gay-friendly people and somehow continuing life without them—this seemed even worse than suicide. Cutting away my roots and the people I loved would transform me into a shell of the person I once was, an automaton stripped of all its gears. I somehow knew that leaving my family behind would destroy whatever love I hadn’t already thrown aside to make room for shame.
During the past month at college, literature professors who had sensed something of my family situation took pains to invite me to their dinner parties, ushering me into their discussions of critical theory, of Foucault and third-wave feminism, of the Neo-Cons who were busy robbing the country blind. Around this time, President Bush felt inspired by God to find WMDs in Iraq, and it seemed every dinner I attended featured a heavy dose of fundamentalist bashing.
My new friends, Charles and Dominique, two of the few black students at our college, were constantly teasing me about how the Baptists had all been slave owners, how my family tree was full of white supremacists. “Your family used the Bible to keep our folks down,” Charles said. “They probably beat us with all those Bibles they had lying around,” Dominique added. The thought of what King Cotton had done to Charles and Dominique’s ancestors made me suddenly shameful of my family. One moment I was terrified that my ancestors were all sitting up in Heaven and judging my same-sex attractions, and the next I would judge them for what I assumed they’d done to black bodies. Less than a year later at LIA, I would wonder why our genogram keys didn’t feature the sins of slavery or racism, why it seemed so much of history had been left out.
Sitting there in the midst of my professors’ intelligent conversations, I had felt like both an impostor and a traitor. I smiled at the appropriate moments, made droll comments about my upbringing, mocked the politics of almost everyone in my hometown. Yet it was also true that coming home often made me feel, if not proud of my heritage, then at least grateful for its familiarity. At home I was able to say an elegant prayer, offer a bit of wisdom about God’s grace, recite scripture at the appropriate moment, offer my best smile. At home, it was a relief to slip back into a world that was known, to deal in platitudes, quiet my mind. With each pilgrimage to and from home, the boundaries between the two territories grew weaker, and I grew more terrified of what would happen once I finally lost my footing.
Both sides seemed to suggest the same efficient solution: cut ties. Either abandon what you’ve known your entire life and your family, or abandon what you’re learning about life and new ideas. I began to see strong evidence in favor of the latter, though I didn’t think it would be easy to forget the sense of wonder I’d experienced in my Western Lit class while learning about what the church referred to as a sinful pagan past. There had been a moment in the middle of our class discussion of the Odyssey, Odysseus stopping up his ears to muffle the siren call, when I sat up in my desk, unplugged my own ears, raised my hand, and asked to be untied from the mast.
• • •
“IT NEVER gets old, does it?” my father said. The truck had slipped beneath a canopy of yellowing trees. “God’s creation?”
“No,” I said, pressing my hand to the glass, watching the pale leaves slide through the gaps between my fingers.
“We’ll get through this,” he said. “I’ve talked with Brother Stevens. He has some ideas.”
Brother Stevens was the pastor of our church. After my father decided to become a preacher, the two of them grew very close, spending most of their free hours together on the paisley-patterned chairs in Brother Stevens’s church office. Though my father had yet to be ordained as an official preacher, he often substituted for Brother Stevens when the man was sick.
I hadn’t seen much of Brother Stevens since moving to college, and I was happier for it. There was something about his small close-set eyes that made me nervous. In high school, when I ran the church projector for him on Sunday mornings, I had felt as though he were directing every word of his condemnation against me, as though I were the Satan he warned us about, sitting up in my mounted booth above the rest of the congregation, mocking God with my fantasies of the straight-backed Brewer twins who sat in the front row. During sermons, he would sometimes speak of the prodigal daughter who continually made his life more complicated: her drug overdoses, her live-in boyfriends, her casual use of the Lord’s name in vain, her frequent incarceration. She was the typical preacher’s kid gone wild. As a result, Brother Stevens had developed a policy of tough love. He had left his daughter to fend for herself numerous times, though he’d often agreed to help foot the bill for rehab.
I knew that whatever advice he had to offer my father would be harsh. I had a hunch that inviting me to the jail ministry had been his idea, part of a scared-straight routine that the church employed when, for example, it invited ex–drug addicts to recount their horror stories in long-winded testimonies that took up the majority of the service, most of our congregants leaving teary eyed and feeling lucky to be alive in their own skin as they walked out the front door. Despite my hunch, I still believed Brother Stevens might be right. A strict, dark, new perspective might be exactly what I needed.
• • •
WE ROLLED to a stop in front of the main highway, and my father switched on his blinker. “It’s the difference between what’s natural and what’s not natural,” he said, the brakes hissing beneath us. “You’ve always been a good Christian, but you’ve somehow gotten the two mixed up. We’ll get you to the right counselor.”
I hadn’t felt truly natural since junior high, when I first saw my handsome neighbor walking his dog down the street: a moment that had me begging secretly for a leash. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“Your friend what’s-his-name didn’t have a problem talking about it.” Friend. The word sounded cavalier, without a trace of irony, landing smugly between the blinker’s ticking like a hard fact. It made me want to jerk the wheel in the wrong direction, slam the gas pedal to the plastic floorboard, drive us into the side of the nearest building.
“He’s probably told half the town by now,” my father continued.
I had been avoiding public places for this very reason. David didn’t live too far from our town, and odds were he’d already told several mutual friends I was gay in an effort to save face. I’d found out from one such mutual friend that he was on academic probation, that no one had seen him on campus for a month, that it was likely he’d moved back in with his parents. He’d probably exaggerated facts, made it sound like I was the pedophile. He’d probably told people I had tried to sleep with him. (My roommate, Sam, had already decided to move out of our room; I was now rooming with my friend Charles, and I suspected that the reason for Sam’s sudden departure was that he’d heard these rumors.) There was nothing to do now but hide, wait for the current to calm, and try to find a cure.
“I don’t care what he tells people,” I said. “He’s not a Christian.”
“I thought he went to church,” my father said, pulling onto the highway. “I thought you said he was a good kid.”
“Yeah, a Pentecostal church,” I said, remembering the old post office with its rusted metal beams and its brightly lit stage, its motor oil. “It’s not the same.”
The words came out of my mouth without my permission. Blaming, self-righteous in nature, they felt natural, marching into place somewhere between a truth and a lie, powered almost exclusively by rage. They leant themselves to a sense of conviction, of purpose. They snapped everything around us into focus: the double yellow lines, the strip malls along the sides of the road, the faces looking out from smudged windows. They carried with them the tone and lazy dinner-party logic of some of my professors, but with very little of the same content.
Months later, when first meeting the LIA staff, I would instantly recognize these hybrid words as my own, though I wouldn’t know the full extent of their power until they were used against me.
“They speak in tongues and use anointing oil,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”
“Judge not,” my father said, the blinker snapping back into place as he turned the wheel, “lest ye be judged.”
“Thou shalt not bear false witness,” I said. More than a decade of Sunday school lessons, and I could recite scripture almost as well as my father, use it just as easily to justify my means.
