Boy Erased (14 page)

It was strange. As I watched him wheel the television to the spot beside Cosby, I felt a sudden pang of disappointment and I realized with a start that I missed Smid. At least Smid had been patient with me. At least Smid hadn't looked disgusted at the sight of me. Cosby and the blond-haired boy shared an expression between them that reminded me of all the judgmental looks I'd gotten from friends and acquaintances the minute they found out through David's gossip that I was gay. It was the
Stay away from my child
look, the
You're a pervert,
you're a monster,
you've got the wrong plumbing
look. “All those
perverts,” my next-door neighbor said one weekend just after my parents had found out, this little white-haired lady smacking her lips in a way that made me think she'd somehow heard about me. She'd been watching a debate on Fox News about gay marriage, had caught me as I was walking next to her yard. “They need to get their heads checked. Putting things in places where they don't belong. Plumbing the wrong pipes, if you know what I mean.” I half expected Cosby to start in on the metaphors. Bad wiring? Wrong gears? Loose screws?

“We'll be watching a documentary this afternoon,” Cosby said, pressing the power button at the bottom of the television. A high-pitched electronic wheeze spread across the room then faded into the background, joining the buzzing of the fluorescents.

I no longer remember exactly what the movie was about, aside from sports. What I do remember is the look of satisfaction on Cosby's face as he stood to the side of our group with his hands crossed over his chest. I almost envied him for his drug habit, for the masculine nature of his affliction. He had roughhoused with men in bars, gotten in fights. He didn't need this documentary to be straight. He just
was
. His straightness buzzed off him, inhabited the room. He was like an exotic animal in the midst of us, an instinctual being, with none of the self-consciousness the rest of us felt. When he didn't look disgusted with us, he looked amused, as though he couldn't possibly imagine what it must have been like to be in such a painfully distorted mind.

I had been wondering what it felt like to be in a straight mind
my whole life
, or at least ever since I discovered I was gay, when, in third grade, I'd first realized that my interest in our teacher, Mr. Smith, was much greater than that of my other male peers'. Though over the years I'd done my best to pretend otherwise, I'd had a string of male crushes that wouldn't go away, a constant guilty ache that ran through my body for so long that I came to believe the feeling was just a part of what it meant to be alive. The only moments when the ache became a sharp pain were when I allowed myself to imagine a happy life with these crushes, a rarity to be sure. As Cosby spoke, I wondered what it felt like to see yourself reflected in every movie, to have friends and family constantly dropping fun little hints about your love life, to have the world open up to you in all its magnificence. What did it feel like to not have to think about your every move, to not be scrutinized for everything you did, to not have to lie every day? In my most stubborn moments—the moments that must have accumulated to such a degree that the blond-haired boy distrusted me—I told myself that it must have felt really dull to be straight. When I was my most stubborn self, I thought,
This affliction is what makes me smarter. This disadvantage is what gives me my ambition. This is what first inspired me to write
.

But the handbook was clear on this subject, on the attitude of superiority that all gay people expressed, what basically amounted to an intricate ruse designed to hide their true inferiority: “When their manipulation fails, they become deeply
depressed and their self-worth plummets. Often their value is connected to their ability to control others.”
True enough
, I'd thought after reading this. It was clear to anyone around me that I was completely lost, that I wasn't in control, and that my self-worth was at an all-time low. After all, it was hard not to think that I was destroying my family, that its legacy would end with me, a dead end. Worse, it was hard not to think about all the money my parents were spending, the $1,500 they had to pay for only two weeks of therapy. Hardest of all was the thought of standing beside my father the next day during the ordination ceremony and lying to the two-hundred-plus people who would gather to celebrate his calling, beaming my fake smile to the crowd.

But was it wrong to think that I could be better than this blond-haired boy? Was it wrong to think that God would return to me, listen to my prayers once again, if only I worked harder? And even as I watched the documentary, smiling each time I caught the flash of pale flesh, the sudden motion of a player piling on top of his opposing mate's ass and taking the man down with the sloppy precision of the defensive tackle—was it wrong to think that I could play the game better than all of them?

•   •   •

T
HE
L
IVING
W
ORD
Lutheran Church was a conspicuous cluster of three A-frames surging out of this small suburban neighborhood with a string of narrow windows pinched at origami angles at each side, a sharp lotus flower of glass and concrete
that seemed at least partially inspired by the 1960s Brutalism of old public libraries and post offices. As we approached, our small group of Source teens packed together in LIA's van, all of us turned to face its façade.

“The church inside is
gorgeous
,” a boy behind me said, the adjective slipping into his sentence without pretense. Did certain words constitute FIs? “We
have
to see the sanctuary.” Certain intonations? During the last break, an ex-lesbian had come up to me and tsk-tsked at my akimbo stance. I had been standing near the doorway with one hand on the wall and the other on my hip. “I'm not going to report you,” she said, as if I was supposed to be grateful, to thank her in some way, “but you really need to change that FI before someone else sees you.”

We pulled into the asphalt lot, yellow lines whooshing by, slowing. Cosby slid open the side door and ushered us outside. Steep triangles overhead, the glare of windows: complicated geometry I hardly understood. Less than a year later, this building would become LIA's new headquarters: a cleaner, loftier space, where the long line of windows would bathe patients in a holier light. For now, however, LIA merely rented out a few rooms from the church for occasional afternoon activities, the strip-mall facility too small to accommodate both older and younger patients at once. It was important to keep afternoon activities separate, primarily because patients attended LIA for very different reasons. The Source and Refuge programs, both youth groups, most of us under the age of twenty, shared our afternoon classes together, and since most of us were dealing
with homosexuality, it made sense that we'd have similar stories to share during our activities.

“You can have a short break,” Cosby said, leading us inside. “A quick look around if you want, and then we'll meet up in the hallway.”

Several of us entered the sanctuary. It was quiet inside, the carpet absorbing the sound of our steps. Sun-drenched wooden aisles, all with little crocheted tissue boxes nestled on the ends, about thirty rows, three sections facing the pulpit. I could feel something dark looming somewhere behind me, and I turned sharply to face a low balcony, impressive to me because I had never attended a church with a balcony. I imagined having to walk down the aisle in such a place, all of those eyes looking down on you from above. During my baptism, all the staring had come from one direction, and I'd been able to look above the congregants' heads to the blank white space at the back of the church, devote myself to God as much as I could in such a public moment. But in here it seemed like you'd never be alone with God. Here it seemed like you would always be under the spell of someone's watchful gaze.

I walked up the aisle, my feet treading softly on the carpet. How many times had I seen my father do the same? How many times had I seen his face wet with tears, shaking all the way to the altar? It was strange to think of the picture I made now: walking ahead of the group, my face placid, free of emotion.
The walking dead
, I thought, squaring my shoulders. I didn't feel. I wouldn't feel. I wouldn't let them see me feel. I wouldn't
be weak like my father. I wouldn't give that ex-lesbian another chance to “correct” me. By the end of my stay here, I would be the one correcting her. I was stronger than all of this, and I would prove it no matter the consequences, no matter how much feeling I had to sacrifice in the process.

The windows ahead were impressively unstained, as if the architect had made the bold decision to leave the beauty of the sanctuary up to nature, to God. No stains, no fragmented depictions of biblical scenes, no sharp colored light. Sometimes it was what you left unsaid or undone that drew you into a state of wonder. And as Nothing drew me closer to the altar, as I mounted the stage and looked out at all the empty aisles, imagining the crowd I'd have to face during my father's ceremony the next day, I wondered if this was what God was doing. I wondered if God was letting me go for a short time, cutting the connection, so that I could grow stronger and straighter by myself. Though I worried that God might choose to stop visiting me altogether, that I might have damaged our relationship beyond repair, I also knew that there was no going back. I was committed to becoming stronger, though I had no idea what that really meant. Could I even become entirely straight? And even if I could, would that mean that my relationship with God would be the same? Or did the process of becoming stronger entail losing my previous way of life? Whatever form that strength was going to take, I would have to accept it. I would face tomorrow's crowd with the stone-cold glare I'd seen in J's
eyes today—the glare of a martyr—even if that was the furthest thing from what I truly felt myself to be.

•   •   •

“F
OCUS
ON
YOUR
FEELINGS
,” Cosby said. “I really want you to focus.”

We were in one of the church's classrooms, the light different here, darker, with only one window looking out onto the parking lot. Cosby was at the front of the classroom, looking like a high school coach who also doubled as a math teacher, brow furrowed as if thinking of something else: the next day's game, the next equation.

“I'd like you to turn to the General Tools section of your handbook.”

The fluttering of paper. Licked fingers. I found the page: five columns and six rows of cartoon faces, each face with a label beneath it.
CONTENTED, DEPRESSED
, FRAZZLED, FRIGHTENED
, HAPPY. THOUGHTLESS, S
TARRY-EYED, DISGUSTED
, SHOCKED, ENRAGED
. All of the faces a simplistic rendering of each emotion.

“I want you to think about how you feel right now,” Cosby said. “It can be a combination of several faces. Choose carefully.”

On the table at the front of the classroom were several white posters. Next to them were colored markers and pencils. There were also feathers, beads, and multicolored string: various
crafts a middle schooler might keep in a caboodle. Cosby explained that we were to craft masks symbolizing the two halves of our personality: the one we show the outside world, and the one we show only to ourselves—one mask on one side, the other on the back.

I slid my finger down the page, trying to find a word for what I felt.
Dead inside, but weirdly determined
. “Apprehensive” came the closest. Or perhaps “out of sorts.” I followed the others to the table at the front of the room, picked up a poster and some markers and a few cotton balls. When I sat back down to work on my project, J sat next to me. We both got on our knees. I smoothed my poster out on the seat cushion.

“Could you pass me the red?” J said, coldness in his voice.
Red
, I thought.
The color of passion
. I would soon watch that passion turn into drops of blood on his poster—Jesus's blood. Not passion, but sacrifice.

I looked around for ideas. S began gluing cotton to her poster, making some kind of pale smiley face. I watched her for a long time before turning away to work on my own poster. She was creating clouds painted dark blue—rain clouds—a bright orange sliver of sun barely visible, with no signs of fur or peanut butter. I was happy for her.

“Looking good so far,” Cosby said, walking past me, head bent, reverential. He sounded like he meant it. He sounded like the kind of person who had done this activity many times, learned how to forge only one face from his divided selves.

I uncapped a blue marker and scribbled a series of lines, then
turned those lines into the outlines of waves, connected them with the cotton balls so that the tops of the waves looked as though they were cresting. A violent whirlpool. A great swirling mess with no direction. On the other side: the long-forgotten eroded city
beneath.

M
y father and I barely talked on our ride to the jail. It had been a month since my parents discovered I was gay, and now it was almost Thanksgiving break, the week I would spend mostly at home, feeling there was very little to be thankful for. I sat beside my father in the passenger's seat of his red F-150 Lariat, watching the trees advance and retreat along the edge of the snaking road, the mountains folding around us, leading us into the center of what a state governor had declared would one day become the “Mecca of the Ozarks.”

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.

•   •   •

T
HE
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.

•   •   •

“I
T
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.