But I don’t. Of course not. I’m sick to death of Henry Weiner’s self-pity party, so I just jut out my chin and let loose with everything that’s been building up inside me.
“You want to know what’s wrong?” I say, louder than I intended. “Okay, I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Here I am, traipsing out with you guys to pick your perfect little wedding spot, listening to you bicker about where and when and who, and meanwhile I’m reduced to getting blow jobs on the beach from some big old bear because I can’t find even one guy who I like who might like me back.”
Lloyd starts to respond, but it’s Jeff who moves forward. He’s not laughing anymore. He takes my hands in his and finds my eyes with his own.
“Buddy,” he says.
This is why I love Jeff. This is why, despite all his bullshit, all his narcissism, all his teasing, I love him with all my soul. It’s not the same kind of love I feel for Lloyd, but in some ways it goes even deeper than that. Jeff knew me when I was a scared, skinny outcast. He helped me become someone else—someone stronger, someone wiser. There are times, like now, when I forget that side of myself, that strong, confident person Jeff helped me become. But Jeff never forgets that version of Henry Weiner, and he’s always here to remind me of him when I need it. He doesn’t even need to say anything. He just holds my hands, looks into my eyes, and says, “Buddy.” I get emotional, biting back the tears.
Now Lloyd is at my side, putting his arm around my shoulder. “You will find someone, Henry,” he says. “Remember what we’ve said about trust.”
I look into his eyes, then back to Jeff’s. These are my two best friends in the world. The emotional sustenance I have with them is quite unlike anything most people ever experience, even with lovers of many years. I know I’m fortunate. So why do I feel so unfulfilled?
“You know,” I say, my voice thick with emotion, “Gale brought up an interesting point.”
“What’s that?” Lloyd asks.
“He wants a monogamous relationship.”
Jeff lifts his eyebrows. “Well, then, you’ve struck gold.”
“Not exactly.” I smile. “He said having this kind of emotional connection with friends—the kind we’re having right now—would be cheating on my lover if I had one.”
“That’s fucked,” Jeff says.
“Maybe, maybe not.” I look from him to Lloyd. “Why should we single out sex as the only thing we need to keep exclusive in relationships? It’s not even the most important thing.”
“Well,” Lloyd says, “the argument could be turned around to say why keep
anything
exclusive? Why not be as open as possible, sharing everything with the entire world?”
I laugh. “Then there would be nothing special in a one-on-one relationship, no point in even having one.” I give them each a smile. “Look, you guys. Be honest. You’ve been nonmonogamous for most of your time together. Sexually and often emotionally, too. But you’ve always held back one small but significant part of yourselves, a part that you’ve kept reserved only for each other.” I find Lloyd’s eyes. “I know. I’ve experienced that.”
“Henry,” Lloyd says kindly.
“It’s cool. It really is. Because I
want
what you have. Maybe I’d shape it a little differently, but the love you guys have for each other…” My words trail off, as the doubts I’ve had about the depth of their love resurface. But such doubts feel absurd right now, or at least beside the point. “Here’s what I want. I want to find someone who will love me enough to want to marry me, the way you guys are getting married. And sometimes I think…”
Again my words trail off. Jeff, still holding my hands, pumps me to finish. “Think what, buddy?”
I face him. “I think that maybe the closeness I have with the two of you prevents me from finding that one special someone.”
Jeff lets my hands go. I notice the look that passes between him and Lloyd.
I know what they’re thinking. “Javitz felt the same way, didn’t he?”
They both nod. Javitz was their best friend before I came along, an older mentor who they both loved and cared for as he died from AIDS. They’ve told me how Javitz sometimes expressed feelings very similar to the ones I’m describing now. He’d say that as close as the three of them were, their friendship just couldn’t completely substitute for a satisfying one-on-one lover—a lifelong dream Javitz never managed to find.
I can see Javitz’s experience helps them to understand my struggle a little better. “I don’t want to die without having found the One,” I say softly.
“Henry,” Lloyd says, “you’re only thirty-three and in splendid health. You’re not like Javitz, staring down the corridor of his mortality. Yes, we could all go at any minute. We could walk back out into the parking lot and get struck down by the shuttle bus. But you need to trust that you have the luxury of
time
, Henry. Why is it so hard for you to trust?”
I shrug. “I don’t know, but it is. Like Gale’s comment that he’d call me. You were right to laugh, Jeff. It’s the most-often-repeated lie in the world.”
“I
wasn’t
right to laugh, buddy,” Jeff says. “He’ll call you.”
“Do you
want
him to call you, Henry?” Lloyd asks.
“Of course I do. He’s hot. And smart. His ideas about relationships seem extreme, but I’m willing to work with that.”
Lloyd gives me a wan smile. “Well, if he had his way, the three of us wouldn’t be having these little powwows on the beach anymore.”
“I wouldn’t let a lover come between us,” I vow.
But even as I say the words, I wonder. Would I? If I found a man that I loved, who loved me back, who made me laugh and made me happy and wanted to marry me—would I turn away from Jeff and Lloyd if he asked me to do so?
“What about Luke?”
I’m startled out my thoughts by Jeff’s question. “What
about
him?” I reply. I can feel my defensiveness rising again.
“Do you have feelings for him? You guys tricked and now—”
“It was a trick, that’s all.”
“But you’re pretty hostile about him now,” Jeff continues.
Lloyd is looking at me strangely. “Why are you hostile? I thought he was working out well.”
I wasn’t planning to go into this with Lloyd, at least not yet. But there’s no way to avoid it now that Jeff has brought it up.
“I—I just have some suspicions about him,” I say, already certain that Lloyd is going to call me paranoid and insist it’s all about my difficulties with trust. But I forge on anyway. “I think Luke is kind of a schemer.”
Lloyd smiles. “I think you’re still intrigued by him.”
“I am
not
!”
“Come on, Henry. It’s obvious the way you watch him.”
“I watch him because he’s after something.” I look over at Jeff. “Like Eve Harrington in
All About Eve
.”
Jeff flutters his eyelashes comically. “And are you casting
me
as Margo Channing?”
Lloyd smiles. “Well, it
is
obvious that Luke’s hot for you, Jeff. That much is clear.”
“It
is?
” Jeff asks, in a tone I find sickeningly disingenuous.
“Yes, my love,” Lloyd says indulgently. “It’s your choice in how you respond, but remember he
is
an employee.”
I watch Jeff’s eyes. I remember his conflicts over having sex with other guys as he and Lloyd plan their wedding. Not that he doesn’t
want
to have sex with them—the drive is there—he just doesn’t feel it’s right. How long will he be able to resist Luke’s charms?
Now, see, for me, if I were waiting to exchange vows with Lloyd, the drive for other guys would not even be there in the first place. There would be no conflict. If I were planning to marry the man of my dreams—my soul mate—then I wouldn’t even be
looking
at another guy. No one but Mr. Right would even be on my radar screen. No conflict. None at all. All my love, every last bit of it, would be directed at the man I was about to—
A little voice suddenly says “Bullshit” in the back of my mind.
I’m stunned. I actually rock back a bit on my heels.
Bullshit.
How much have I been kidding myself? How much of my romantic notions are just that—rosy, idealistic dreams? Maybe, in fact, Jeff and Lloyd are as real as it gets, and what they have between them is the best I can hope for. Maybe true love—the way I’ve romanticized it—doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s simply about two people finding each other and making the best of it, the way Jeff and Lloyd seem to be doing. Because, in truth, part of me doesn’t believe they are really, truly happy. Part of me thinks they’re just glad not to be alone as they move into their fourth decade.
I look at them now—back to bickering about where people should stand, how many people to invite—and I wonder if maybe long ago they gave up the kind of romantic preconditions that I cling to so fiercely. If that’s the case—if they are, in fact,
settling
—how can I believe that they are really, truly in love with each other?
But then I spot Lloyd making Jeff laugh—something he says, a lift of his eyebrows, a shrug of his shoulders. They speak in shorthand: one word, one gesture can conjure up a dozen years’ worth of images and emotions. Instantly the tension between them shivers and breaks. Jeff reaches over and wraps his arms around Lloyd’s neck, pulling him close. They share a kiss, the sun glinting from between their profiles. I have to look away.
What the hell do I know about love?
“Uncle Henry.”
I look around. J. R. has walked back up from the water and is standing behind me.
“What’s up?” I ask the boy.
“Do you think me and you could walk back now?”
“Well, I don’t know if Jeff and Lloyd are finished here yet,” I tell him. But then I glance back at the two of them, shoulder to shoulder now, hands linked, strolling away from us toward the water.
I shout after them, announcing that J. R. and I are heading back. They lift their free arms to wave at us without even bothering to turn around. They’re probably glad to be rid of us.
“Come on,” I say to J. R., dropping my arm around his thin shoulders. “Let’s go home.”
We move off down the sand.
“You okay, buddy?” I ask the boy.
“Yup.”
“You sure?”
The boy just nods, adjusting the volume on his iPod.
“If anything is bugging you,” I say, loud enough so that he can hear, “you know you can talk to me. You can talk to Uncle Lloyd or Uncle Jeff, too, of course, but in case, for whatever reason, you don’t want to, you can talk to me. I promise to be cool.”
J. R. barely nods.
I sigh. What I wouldn’t give for an older, wiser uncle to drop his arm around my shoulder and offer to help me with my problems. I wouldn’t be so tightlipped as J. R. I’d tell him exactly what was troubling me.
That is, if I could figure it all out myself—which, at the moment, seems impossible to do.
I make a conscious effort to leave all my doubts and confusions behind me on the beach, to refuse to carry them back with me to the guesthouse. Forget about Jeff and Lloyd. Forget about Mr. Right. Forget about what’s real and what’s not and what falling in love really means.
But there’s one question I just can’t seem to leave behind.
Who the hell blew me at the dick dock last night?
A
nother night of strange dreams. Once more, I’m back in West Springfield. I’m wearing the orange-and-white polyester uniform of my first job—at Roy Rogers Hamburgers and Fried Chicken. On my head sits a little orange hat. In my hands I hold a bag of lettuce. I’m refilling the salad bar, much against my wishes.
“I’m supposed to be on cash register tonight,” I complain.
“No way, Henry.
I’m
on cash register tonight.”
The bane of my job at Roy Rogers—indeed the bane of my entire existence—is my older sister Susan. She’s worked at Roy Rogers for two years now, every since she graduated high school. She acts as if it’s the most important job in the world, but I know better. She’s just pissed because I’m going on to college, and she decided against, preferring to stay here in West Springfield. Twenty-one and stuck in a low-paying, fast-food job. She knows I’m just here until graduation, which thankfully is not far away, and it just
burns her up.
“You
have
to put out the salad bar, Henry,” Susan is telling me. “I did it yesterday and I am
not
going to do it again.”
My sister’s acne-enflamed face fills my entire frame of vision. There is nothing else: just Susan, bearing down on me, threatening to smother me.
I hold firm. “I’m
not
going to do it.”
“Oh, yes, you will!”
“No!”
Customers are listening to this. Four of them, to be exact: two women with a little boy in a booth and an elderly man up at the counter. They’ve all turned to watch the two Weiner kids fight.
“So help me, Jesus, Henry—” Susan snarls.
“Who are
you
to invoke Jesus, you Jewish frog face?”
She hauls off and smacks me across the cheek. I suppose I deserve it.
Paula, our manager, appears from the kitchen. She’s a heavyset, hard-eyed black woman with dyed red hair pulled back tightly in a hairnet. She glares at the two of us. “You both come on back in here,” she says.
“Hey,” says the old man at the counter. “Can I get some service here?”
“Just a moment, sir,” Paula says, trying to smile. Her lips are tight and coated with cold scarlet lip gloss.
“I was supposed to be on cash register tonight,” I argue.
“He was not!” Susan shouts.
Paula is staring at me. “Henry, you will put out the salad bar because I say so,” she says, her voice hard but calm. “And don’t you
ever
use such language in front of customers again.”
“What kind of language did I use?” I ask. “Which term are you suggesting is offensive—Jewish or frog face?”
Paula narrows her eyes at me. “Henry, are you looking to get your ass fired?”
Susan smirks.
“And Susan,” Paula says, turning to her, “you wipe that grin off your mouth or I’ll do it for you.”
She just might. I take great pleasure in watching my sister’s face fill up with fear.
“Now do you hear me, both of you?”
“Yes, Paula,” I tell her. “I’m sorry we got you all worked up.”
No, I’m not. In fact, it felt good to call Susan a frog-face. A week ago, I wouldn’t have had the nerve.
But so much is different in my life since a week ago.
I stood up for myself,
I think as I dole out the lettuce into the plastic bowls. Okay, so I’m doing the salad anyway. But at least I stood up for myself.
“Why do you and your sister fight so?” my mother has asked, many times.
Here my dream shifts again, to our kitchen table, my mother seated across from me.
“You two act as if you hate each some times.”
There’s pain in her eyes, and bewilderment, over the way her children act toward each other. I feel guilty, not for how I feel about Susan, but for how it makes my mother feel.
“I don’t hate her,” I say.
I don’t. Not really. But I think Susan hates me. Maybe because I’m the only boy, and I get to go to college. Hey, it was her decision
not
to go—even if, in fact, my parents didn’t work very hard to change her mind. Still, being the only boy is special, and Susan knows that. I’m the one everyone expects to follow my father in the insurance business. I’m the one they expect to carry on the name.
If only they knew I had no plans of doing either.
Especially not after what happened last week. I smile to myself, the cat who swallowed the canary, as I drop the tomatoes one by one into their plastic bowl.
When we were kids, Susan had been my best friend. She was cool, because she was older, and so she could buy me stuff, like teen magazines. Handing me
Teen Beat
, she thought I wanted to check out pictures of Catherine Bach from
The Dukes of Hazzard
, but rather it was Duran Duran and Culture Club that had me more ensnared.
Back in those days, this place where I work wasn’t a Roy Rogers but a local, family-owned diner called Higgie’s. My parents would take Susan and me to Higgie’s for grilled cheese sandwiches and cups of chicken noodle soup. Afterward, I’d always order a dish of strawberry ice cream and stir it until it had the consistency of soup. The memory makes me happy.
I stir in my bed, the smell of grease and charred beef filling my nostrils. It’s the way my clothes would smell at home, when I’d come off my shift at Roy Rogers. My bedsheets began to smell the same way, because often I was too tired to shower and just fell right into bed. It seems my whole
life
began to smell like Roy Rogers: the deep, pungent odor of boiling vegetable oil. Even when I’d open my underwear drawers I’d get a whiff of grease, as if deep-fried mozzarella sticks were hidden under in my Hanes.
But back in my dream, I’m liking the smell. I’m liking most everything about my life. I’m whistling, in fact, as I put out the salad bar: nothing real, just a made-up tune. I’m imagining the day, when I’m a famous musician, when I’ll tell the story of how I worked here, the way Chris Cornell of Soundgarden talks about working in a fish market as a teenager, wiping up fish guts.
“How’s that salad coming?” Paula barks, snapping me out of my reverie. “The dinner crowd will be here soon.”
“Almost ready,” I call back. The lettuce and tomatoes are all done. Now I’m chopping some onions, making my eyes tear up.
“I’m going to be leaving soon,” Paula says. “I don’t want any trouble tonight. You and Susan better get along.”
“Oh, we will, Paula, I promise.”
It’s at this precise moment that I wake up. What was I dreaming about? Higgie’s? Strawberry ice cream? Roy Rogers and mean old Paula? I rub my eyes. People and places I haven’t thought about in
years
.
Even dreaming about my sister is unusual. As adults, Susan and I enjoy a far better relationship than we did as teenagers. She’s got a couple of adorable twin girls who I wish I could see more frequently—yet the truth is, with all that consumes my own life, I rarely think about her or them. So why tonight?
I roll over, drifting back to sleep. It’s only as the dream begins again that I understand where it’s taking me.
My high school English classroom. In front of me sit my friends, Dale and Howard. Across the aisle from me sits Linda Santangelo, who’s had a crush on me since freshman year, but who became the very first person I told, just a few months ago, that I was gay. Since then Dale has revealed the same thing about himself, though Howard clings to the label of “curious”—a term I now find hopelessly self-delusional and self-loathing, despite the fact I’d used it myself not so long ago with Jack.
Jack, of course, has attained a certain heroic veneer among us, having ditched school and taken off for New York. Occasionally we’ll wonder if Jack will ever be in touch with us, if we’ll ever learn what became of him. I expect one of these days to see his name in the credits of a movie or television show.
But Jack is not the subject of my dream. Not tonight. Instead, my eyes move up from my desk to the front of the classroom to my teacher. Mr. Kelly. Mr. Patrick Kelly—a round, genial-faced Irishman with perpetually ruddy cheeks who was generally held in high esteem by the student population. I say “generally” because, while Mr. Kelly often clapped students on the back if they were members of the football team or the National Honor Society, he tended to ignore those kids, like me, who weren’t so easily categorized. Those of us who wanted to be artists or musicians, or were simply rebelling against the lockstep of high school life. We were the ones trudging into school wearing our black T-shirts and Doc Martens, and we weren’t so sure about this supposedly student-friendly Mr. Kelly. Underneath that crooked Irish grin of his there was something we just didn’t trust. None of us could quite put our fingers on it, but something was there, lurking. Maybe it was in the way he made us start each class by reciting the Pledge of Allegience. Maybe it was in the way he smirked, rolled his eyes and turned his head when one of the jocks called somebody a fag in class.
I didn’t get called a fag, but I could have.
I’m slipping out of gym class now, counting on the astonishing obtuseness of the gym teachers, heading up the stairs to the library. I pull off a copy of the local alternative arts weekly from the newspaper rack and settle into a chair, hoping no one asks why I am here and not out on the soccer field. I flip through the newspaper to the personals. And there, in the pine-scented, hushed library, I read all about GWMs, GBMs, BiMs, GMMs—all looking for other men
with whom to have sex
. My mind can barely wrap around the thought. Some of the men here were into sadomasochism. Others just wanted cuddling, or long walks and candlelight dinners. Over and over, I read those personals, imagining myself answering every one—as the shouts of my classmates out on the soccer field seemed ever farther away.
My dream moves along, to a cool evening night with the moon riding high in the sky. His name is Doug. A freshman in college. Nineteen, two years older than I. I think that’s why I chose his ad: the nearness in age reassured my trembling libido. Somehow I’d worked up the courage to send my home number, pleading: “Please, be discreet.” In my dream, my mother once again answers the phone, and I feel once more the chill when she says: “Henry, it’s for you. I don’t know who it is.”
We meet at the Holyoke mall. Doug’s hair is big and curly, a white-boy Afro, and there are spaces between his teeth. But I find him beautiful because he’s male—a male who wants to have sex with me. We stand facing each other in front of Spencer’s Gifts, shuffling our feet and saying little. When he suggests we go for a ride, I’m all for it.
We park and he takes out a joint. “Want some?”
I nod, taking the joint from him.
“You’ve been with a guy before, right?” he asks.
“Sure,” I tell him, inhaling, suppressing a cough, as if to say:
What a silly thing to ask.
I will always remember two things as being the most thrilling about that night: holding Doug’s hand as we walked through the woods, and kissing him. “I’m kissing
another guy,”
I keep saying to myself.
The sex is basic: we lie in the grass and perform 69 on each other. I guess what they say is true: gay men
do
know how to suck cock instinctively. It comes pretty naturally for me. At the very least, Doug seems convinced that it really wasn’t my first time.
After we both come, we lie there looking up at the moon. Doug speaks, breaking the silence. “It’s so beautiful here,” he says, “being with you, with the moon up above.”
In my sleep, I stir. My erection is spearheading my underwear.
For all my dreams of romance, that night I wasn’t interested in lying there and looking at the moon. I just wanted to get home. We hadn’t been caught—not yet, anyway. To stay there any longer would be pushing our luck.
In the days to come, however, that night with Doug would take on an incredible glow, a powerful patina of love and self-expression. I whistled my way through work, inexplicably cheery to my friends at school. And here’s the really important part: I wrote it all down.
“I will not read your journals,” Mr. Kelly promises, standing in the front of the classroom. “You have my word on that. But I
will
collect them at the end of the semester, just to make sure you’ve kept them.”
Our journals were a requirement in our English class. We were instructed to record our interpretations of life around us during our senior year. Now, after Doug, life around me seemed to suddenly blossom into unexpected beauty, and I wrote it all down. I wrote about how long I had wondered what making love to another man would be like, and I mused over whether in fact I wanted to continue on this particular journey, if being gay was really who I was.
I concluded, gloriously, that it was.
And even as I wrote, I knew Mr. Kelly would read it.
Good,
I thought. I
want
him to know. I trusted in his warped sense of honor that he would not ever reveal to me that he had actually read my passage, that I would in fact be safe from whatever retribution he might normally inflict on faggots. Perhaps it was a naive trust, but it proved accurate.
He looms over my desk, handing me back my journal with the hardest expression on his face. I perceive the look as anger—his eyes clamped onto mine, his lips tight and white. For several seconds he will not release my journal into my hands, but I don’t waver in holding his gaze. For as long as he stands there I look him straight in the eye. I do not back down. Finally he lets go, giving up on his attempt to seer off my face with the power of his eyes.
I had stood up to him. And won.
“I need a bacon double cheeseburger, Freddie,” Susan calls into the kitchen. “Plain. No pickles, no mustard, no anything.”
My dream has returned me to Roy Rogers. The smell of grease once again consumes me. I’m through with the salad bar, and now I’m wrapping burgers. I watch as Freddie the cook plops another patty onto the grill.