Boy Erased (8 page)

•   •   •

M
Y
FATHER
wrote a note to God, left it in my desk drawer, and told me never to open it. Never to touch it, but to leave it there. It was the formal promise he made to God after the car explosion that he had folded into a tiny square and tucked away behind the scores of mechanical pencils I would chew in frustration when I couldn't get my journal entries to come out right.

That last summer I spent at his dealership, old enough for my curiosity to outweigh my reverence, I read the note.

Heavenly Father,

Thank you for saving me from literal hellfire. I have made a promise to you that I intend to keep. From this moment on, as for me and my house, we will serve You. I promise to raise my son in the church. I promise to be a God-fearing man and to bring others into Your divine flock. Please, spare my son from all that I have suffered, and from my mistakes. Spare him from the confusion of the world. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise. Let him rest in the truth of Your holy Word.

Your Servant

•   •   •

“W
HY
HAVEN
'
T
you answered any of my calls?” Chloe asked.

A week of silence had passed since our failed night. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, the PlayStation controller tucked into the triangle between my crossed legs, the phone nestled against my shoulder. “I don't know.”

“How do you not know? You either answer or you don't.”

After a minute of silence, she hung up.

Another week passed. Two. I opened the phone, thought about pressing speed dial for Chloe's number, snapped it shut.

“I don't know,” I said to the screen.

It wasn't relief I felt. More like fear: of the unknown, of myself. What kind of person was I becoming?

•   •   •

A
NOTHER
WEE
K
PASSED
. My parents were concerned. They wanted to know why Chloe and I hadn't been hanging out. Her mother was calling, people from church were asking, and nobody could believe we would end things so suddenly without any real explanation. I pretended I was sick on Sundays so I wouldn't have to see her again at church.

Another week. When I could no longer fake being sick, I volunteered to work at the projector booth at the back of the sanctuary, far from the congregants' questioning gazes. Chloe was sometimes there, sometimes not, but we made sure we never ended up in the same part of the church together.

Another week. It was almost time to move to the small liberal arts college where I'd been accepted. My mother and I took occasional trips to Walmart to buy what I'd need for the dorm, coming home with heavy sacks full of plastic storage containers, with jumbo packages of T-shirts and socks and underwear. Then, late one night, my father received a phone call from Chloe's mother. She was hysterical. Brandon had been caught with another boy in his bed, a close friend. They had been experimenting. She couldn't think of anyone else to call. She wanted to know if my father could come talk some sense into the boys. I sat in our living room for most of the night, trying
not to shake, waiting for him to return, my mother beside me on the couch.

“Why did you two really break up?” she asked. “You were so cute together.” I couldn't answer. There were no words, no clear explanations that didn't involve some terrible admission. I knew my sudden silence was hurting my mother, was hurting all of us. But in only a few months I had already managed to ruin everything. I didn't want to say anything else that might make things worse.

My father came home around four o'clock in the morning, his eyes red, his hair a mess. He wouldn't tell us much of what happened, just stood in the kitchen shaking his head. The boys had made a mistake, he said. He had explained to Brandon and the other boy that continuing their sinful behavior would turn them against God, expel them from the Kingdom of Heaven. Brandon would grow out of it, my father said. His voice sounded unconvincing, and I could tell he was shaken by the visit, that perhaps he suspected something about me that he hadn't suspected before. I turned away, walked to my bedroom, and shut the door.

Another week. Video games every night. I hardly thought about the next phase of my life. I hardly thought about anything other than what I would need to equip for my avatar's journey through the wilderness. In the few moments when I wasn't playing a game, I tried to ignore the fact that not talking to Chloe also meant that I would have to stop talking to
Brandon. That the only person who seemed to know who I really was would never again be part of my life. That whatever either of us decided to do about our
urges
, we would be alone.

A month before I was to go to college, I finally put down the PlayStation controller. I walked into the living room, where my parents were sitting on opposite ends of the couch. I invited them to follow me to the bathroom to view the corpse of my gaming life.

“I want you to see something,” I said. I hardly knew what I was doing. I wanted to tell them everything: about why I broke up with Chloe, about how I was just like Brandon. I wanted to tell them, but I didn't have the right words. I wanted to let them know that something was wrong, that I had been trying to ignore a part of me but that I wasn't going to ignore it any longer. I was going to fix it.

In the center of the bathtub sat my PlayStation, its two controllers curled up beside it like sleeping cats. My parents stood in the doorway, wearing what-is-this-all-about looks on their faces. My father ran a hand through his thick black hair. My mother crossed her arms over her chest and sighed.

I slid back the clear plastic shower curtain and turned the knob for the shower. My parents and I watched the water rush over the console and swirl into an oval before disappearing with a hollow gurgle down the drain. I imagined the water trickling through the motherboard, following tributaries formed by the microchips. I kept the water running for a few
extra seconds than needed until I heard my parents shift uncomfortably behind me. I slid the curtain back in place.

“I'm done with games,” I said.

Whatever I would face after this moment, I would face it directly.

I
t was seven o'clock in the morning, but the air-conditioning was already at full blast in the Hampton Inn lounge. According to my schedule, I had two hours to shower, dress, eat, and travel to the facility, but my mother and I were drawing out the minutes, dragging our forks lazily through the scattered mess of cold eggs on our plates, my hair dripping dry, the varnished wood of the table machine-pressed, its edges sharp against my forearms. The world that morning seemed harder, as if overnight someone had removed a thin translucent film from the atmosphere, a soft focus I had taken for granted when my mother and I used to come to Memphis for weekends of shopping and movie binging, the city alive and glowing then, pulsing beneath our shoes. Two full days at Love in Action, and the city had already lost its shine, the back-and-forth trips between the Hampton Inn & Suites and the facility revealing only a gray
stretch of interstate, its traffic beaming hot in the sunlight, each of its oversize suburban houses yawning with their water-timed green tongues.

I had once heard someone call the city a trash dump, and I'd been offended at the time, but now I could see how they were right. It was the place where things came and went, home of the FedEx headquarters, the city with the most available overnight flights to other cities in the country, steel barges on the Mississippi floating right through the center of it—but the things that gathered and collected here, the things that stayed and took root, these were the things that gave the city its sense of abandonment. If you stayed long enough, you could see how it was perpetually reaching into its shallow past, hanging pictures of Elvis in its many diners, taping signed autographs to its walls, its many sex shops promising thrills that had once electrified the streets amid the buzz of jazz and blues.

“We'd better get going,” my mother said, though she made no indication that she wished to move, her small hands still flush against the table.

I unrolled my sleeves, the air-conditioning already freezing, my wet hair an icy helmet. Summers in this city meant freezing and sweltering temperatures, sudden changes of atmosphere that shocked the system, sent goose bumps rippling across the skin.

“Okay,” I said, not moving. We'd be late if we didn't leave soon. Though I'd intentionally left my watch in the room, hoping to lose track of time in the facility, I could see from the plastic clock above hotel reception that it was twenty to nine.

An odd mix of families and business types poured out of the elevator opposite our table: navy blue and black suits and tight pencil skirts, pajamas and hoodies and unsocked feet, a light slapping against the tile as children circled their groggy-eyed parents. It was strange to think of these people going about their daily routines, drinking their morning coffee, staring into the face of a day that must have seemed to them much like any other. CNN droned on in the corner of the room, a streaming canopy of monotonous words spreading across the dining area, seeming to connect the morning to all the ones before it, the syllables almost indistinguishable amid the clatter of plates and silverware—“any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the president”—people looking up from their tables every few seconds to anchor their gazes to the screen.

I felt lost in all of this, adrift, the daily patterns of life having come unstitched in only a matter of days, and so it seemed absurd to me, even at the time, that the “Guantánamo” written across the bottom of the screen even existed, all that senseless torture going on somewhere overseas while glittery-eyed newscasters debated its constitutionality. I felt crazy.
Wasn't it painfully obvious that we shouldn't be torturing people?
And yet, at the same time, I thought I could easily be wrong. Hadn't I been wrong before? Wasn't this questioning, liberal attitude what brought me to LIA in the first place? If I had managed to stay secure in the Lord's Word, unquestioning, I
might have stayed with Chloe, well on my way to a normal life by now.

But I had allowed secular influences to shape me. The day before, one of the staff counselors, Danny Cosby, had asked us to take a long, hard look at our lives and draw a timeline that demonstrated our sinful progression into homosexuality, and I had realized, much to my horror, that most of my same-sex attractions had developed right alongside my love of literature.
Sideways Stories from Wayside School
: first gay crush;
To Kill a Mockingbird
: first gay porn search;
The Picture of
Dorian Gray
: first gay kiss.
It's no wonder
, I'd thought.
No wonder they took away my Moleskine
.

Reading secular literature was discouraged at LIA—patients could “only read materials approved of by staff,” our handbooks said, which usually amounted to only fundamentalist Christian authors—but even going a few days without reading had sent me into a nightly depression that made it difficult to sleep. During my high school years, I'd spent so much time and energy guarding myself against enjoying books too much, afraid that a compelling narrative might turn me into a heretic, send me rushing off on one of the sinful life paths I'd enjoyed seeing my favorite characters follow. My year of college had been so freeing, and reading so widely encouraged, that I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to suspect a book of literal demon possession, like I'd believed when first reading
A Clockwork Orange
. Burgess's electric language ran through my body so quickly my skin felt aflame, charged with what I could only
then describe as demonic power. I wondered if I would ever get the chance to read so freely again or if I would have to stay here at LIA for as many years as the counselors had been here, learning to live with the side effects of my sin, keeping the rest of the world at bay.

Lord, make me pure
, I prayed, looking through my water glass at the blurry newscasters, “Guantánamo” morphing to something like “Gargantuan.” I wanted to join all these other people in their obliviousness, in their laughter, in the casual flip of the newspaper, digest the morning the way I had so many other mornings. But the LIA lingo had already taken up permanent residence in my thoughts, and I had no room for the habitual comforts that usually quieted my mind and made the world seem like a normal place. The night before, lying on the foldout bed in our suite, my mind buzzing with the LIA handbook's rules, I'd wanted more than anything to take up the plastic Nintendo 64 controller attached to the hotel television and play a few levels of
Mario
or whatever—anything to stop my mind from its infinite blame loop—but this was forbidden as well.

•   •   •

T
HE
M
ORAL
I
NVENTORY
(MI), another piece of AA borrowed by LIA, took the place of my regular reading and writing schedule. Every night I was to focus exclusively on my sinfulness. Every night I was to find an example of sinful behavior in my past, write about it in great detail, share it with the therapy group, and put faith in God that I could be absolved of it.

MIs helped us recognize our FIs, the development of which we could now trace clearly in the
A
s and
Po
s and
$
s and
M
s of the genograms that were designed to chart our families' sinful histories. Though I'd barely revealed any of what I'd learned each day at LIA to my mother, the small amount of terminology I'd let slip through was already too much for her to keep track of—so much so that, speeding down the interstate as I tried to fill her in, she almost missed our exit, another set of numbers and symbols crowding her periphery, demanding her attention.

“Which step is the MI in?” she said, turning sharply toward the exit. A mall on our left, a shopping center on our right, morning light sifting through the leaves of an occasional tree.

“They use MIs for all twelve steps,” I said, the handbook open in my lap, my homework on top. I was rereading the page quickly, scanning to see if I'd written anything too embarrassing to share in front of our group—but, really, all of it was embarrassing. The whole purpose of the exercise was to realize how shameful these memories were and refashion them to fit God's purpose. My therapy group would provide the necessary feedback to help the transition go smoothly. The whole thing reminded me of a poetry workshop I'd taken in my second semester of college: how I'd felt as I listened to my peers' contradictory opinions, that the whole point of writing seemed to be to fashion a product that offended no one, supported nothing but the officially accepted dogma.

Perhaps this was the entry fee for the Kingdom of Heaven:
cleanse yourself of all idiosyncrasies, sharp opinions, creeds—put no false gods before Him—become an easily moldable shell, a vessel for God. The Bible speaks plainly of what is required. Concerning God's commandments, The Book of Proverbs says,
Bind them about thy neck, write them upon the table of thine heart
. If I could have done it myself, I would have already done it: pried open my ribs and etched the Word onto my heart's beating chambers. But it seemed my ex-gay counselors were the only ones with enough skill and experience to wield the scalpel.

Perhaps part of the reason I couldn't sleep well at night was that I'd never, before this moment, truly emptied myself of all sin. Without my Moleskine or my books or video games, stripped down and without distraction, I was forced to confront the ugliest, most shameful parts of myself. In order to be filled with the Holy Spirit, I had to be emptied of the human one. Sitting in the car with my shameful past open in my lap, I had no idea if this was even possible.

“How often do you have to do an MI?” my mother said, hands gripped at ten and two on the wheel. I'd never seen them stray from this, not in all her years of driving. Trees passing at perfect intervals; high-line wires dipping and rising; signs along the side of the road all at the same regulation height and width; my mother's hands never moving.

“Every night.” Despite how pointless I suspected many of LIA's activities were, I took pride in knowing them so well after just one day, in being the first of the newbies to memorize all
the steps. It was a role that felt comfortable, being the good student. It must have been comforting for my mother as well, seeing me act the way I'd often acted in high school.

“What happens if you don't have anything else to write about?” The whine of her lotion-scented skin against leather. She wanted to know what I'd written but was too afraid to ask. “What happens if you run out of material for your MI?”

MIs were designed to bring about personal awareness of an instance when you had sinned against God. In our group's case, an MI always explored a moment of sexual impropriety, either a physical act or a temptation. What my mother didn't yet know about being gay in the South was that you never ran out of material, that being secretly gay your whole life, averting your eyes every time you saw a handsome man, praying on your knees every time a sexual thought entered your mind or every time you'd acted even remotely feminine—this gave you an embarrassment of sins for which you constantly felt the need to apologize, repent, beg forgiveness. I could never count the number of times I'd sinned against God. If I wanted, I could fill out a new MI every night for the rest of my life.

•   •   •

“W
E
ARE
UNDER
the control of a sovereign God who reigns over all aspects of our lives,” Smid said, quoting the Moral Inventory Flow Chart in our handbooks, a page that featured two black-lined text boxes, one with the word “God” centered
in it, the other below it with the words “World,” “Flesh,” and “Satan” equally spaced at full justification. The idea was that, as Christians, we were all under God's control, but as human beings, we were also subject to Satan's temptations, a fact that Smid pointed out a few seconds later: “We are affected by a sinful world system, our sinful flesh, and the manipulative attacks of Satan.”

Smid continued reading the worksheet aloud. The MI was based on the following set of additional assumptions, ones I needed to swallow whole if I was to be cured.

1. We are constantly faced with various challenges in life.
   
2. We experience the consequences of our decisions as a result of the challenge.
   
3. We receive strength from God both to desire changes in our lives and to take action based on our goals to achieve these changes.
   
4. We can find a blessing and see God's goodness based on scripture for each aspect of our lives.
   

I was sitting on the far right of our group's semicircle, the kitchen at my back. I could hear someone washing dishes behind me, a steady stream of white noise followed by the occasional clatter of silverware, metal hitting metal, the rustling of a trash bag. J sat beside me. Every few minutes he would start chewing his pencil, white with a blue logo of his home church's name.
Something Something Something Calvary Baptist. Then he would stop midchomp through the church logo and hold the half-chewed pencil tightly in his grip, this wedge of cratered moon in his hand: a piece of the remote, floating world he'd broken off from all those late nights he told me about, hours spent in isolation and low gravity reading the clobber passages again and again. His hair, slicked back with wax, fell to one side of his face and covered one of his eyes. I was grateful for the shield between us. I kept my MI folded beneath my right thigh, dreading the moment when I would have to stand in front of this group and share my shame. I was especially worried about sharing this story with J, who seemed to have developed a great deal of respect for me in only a few days.

“I think you really get it,” he'd said during one of our patio breaks, scraping his shoes against the blinding concrete. “You get how difficult it is here. You can't just believe in change. You have to actually work through it, you know? If you want the treatment to last, you really have to allow for the doubt.”