Boy Erased (22 page)

I kept my head down. Charles, Dominique, and I could ignore almost anything. Once, after walking into a J. C. Penney to buy Charles a new pair of jeans, we were all but asked to leave, the white staff shooting us angry looks, staring us down, trailing us through circular blossoms of brightly colored dress shirts.
Why are you here with
them?
their eyes seemed to say. We left in a hurry, hardly talking on the drive back to campus, and when we got back to the room, we drank half a bottle of whiskey and watched one of the three idiot fraternities on campus recite its idiot creed on the idiot quad. You're too damn skinny. Drink up.

•   •   •

I
N
MY
SECRET
LIFE
, the counselor turned to me and said, “Can you tell me a little about your first sexual experience? The very first one?”

The question wasn't as shocking as it could have been, given
the circumstances. Still, I couldn't help but feel as though this man was overstepping his boundaries.
Bullshit
, I thought at first.
This is therapy. I'm not a person who needs therapy
.
I'm not a person who needs to tell my sexual fantasies to other people in order to feel better
. Besides, this man was a marriage counselor, someone whose job description didn't seem to provide the ex-gay cure I needed. But as the man began to ask more questions about my fantasies, as he continued to nod and suggest that I reveal more about my interests, my dreams, my porn habits, I began to settle in for the long haul. He didn't want to know all of this for personal reasons. He was a professional, a disinterested professional. I could see this in the way he nodded his head so casually. I could see this in the way his brows knitted with concern. Real concern.

“I guess my first time was with Brad,” I said.

“And who is Brad?”

“He was on all the sports teams in junior high.”

“Were you on any teams?”

I waited a moment. There seemed to be an implication in this. “No. But I did take tae kwon do for several years.”

“Tell me what happened with Brad,” the counselor said. “In nonexplicit detail.”

“In nonexplicit detail? Well, Brad was a close friend before it happened. I was staying over at his house, as I usually did on the weekends, and I remember Brad's house was being remodeled. It was already a beautiful house, a really big house with two stories—”

“What happened in the house?”

“Well, there was a part of the house that wasn't finished, and we went in there to get an idea of how it would look. His parents weren't home at the time, I think. We climbed the wooden stairs up to this loft, and Brad got this look in his eyes, and we pushed past the plastic sheet and headed into the loft and we both sort of—well, we both knew—”

“Mutual masturbation?”

I couldn't believe he'd said the word. It felt like a cold slap. The way he said it was clinical, but there seemed to be a slight hint of disgust somewhere behind the words.

“Yes.”

I looked out the window to the empty plot of land opposite the facility, and though there was no snow and there was probably never going to be any snow this season (I could see that now), I remembered how my grandmother used to dance with me down the length of her long shag-carpet hallway, reciting faux Native American chants, her wrinkled hand covering and uncovering her mouth; how the week after all that chanting it wouldn't stop snowing; how, in fact, this had been the biggest snow either of us had ever seen—so that now I could see how there might be some truth to that absurd magic of faith. The power of the mustard seed, the smallest snowflake: This is how therapy continued.

“Try not to think of this as therapy,” the counselor said. “We're just having a chat.” And with the addition of only a few words—“dependence,” “self-loathing,” “masking,”
“selfishness”—the story of my childhood and my developing sexuality took on new colors, new associations. Beneath my shame, the counselor suggested, a hidden ecosystem had been growing. It was my responsibility to put an end to it. Peer just beneath the surface, and I'd find the whole writhing, unconscious mess.
Earthworms
, I thought.
Basking on the surface of the wet soil
.
They weren't there before the rain, and now they suddenly are
.

“Have you filled out your application?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Let's get on that. I don't think there's any time to waste.” He leaned back in his chair, plastic casters creaking.

My gaze dropped to the wooden arm of the chair, to the swirl of its grain. It was a slice of some dead tree's years, all those wet and dry seasons stacked side by side. The tree had had no idea, when the ax fell against its bark, that I would make use of those years.

•   •   •

T
HE
CAT
-
O
'-
NINE
-
TAILS
was striking Jim Caviezel's exposed and bloodied back. Again and again, leather met skin.

“This is some bullshit,” Charles whispered.

“Don't say that,” Dominique said, her tone full of mock concern. “That's Jesus.”

“
That
is not Jesus.”

“How do you know?” Dominique said. “Do you have holy visions? Does He visit you in your sleep?”

“I study history. Anthropology. Whatever. Jesus was blacker than that.”

“You study
mu
s
ic
.”

“Among other things.”

I looked around to see if people were listening. A woman to my right was clutching her purse to her chest, jumping with each on-screen laceration, her eyes wet. People farther down the row were already on the edges of their seats, as if they had no idea what was about to happen next. This was the magic of Mel Gibson's directing, drawing so much suspense from such a familiar story like the Gospel. Each time the cat-o'-nine tails landed, I half expected Jesus to just die already, though I knew that that wouldn't be the case, that there was so much more to come. There was a drawing out of the violent act, a close-up on the details of violence, that made the violence itself fascinating, its universe of punishments populated with infinite gradations, infinite shades of red and pink that I had never before been taught to notice. During the first few frames of sudden violence, I had read no subtlety into it, the blood no more nuanced than the garish red droplets sometimes accompanying the Catholic stations of the cross or the ones splattered all over the painting of the bloodred gnarled Jesus hand my father had had commissioned for his jail ministry and pasted to the back of his truck, the words
CHRIST DIED F
OR SIN SINS SINNERS
bolded in red.
Bullshit
. Then, slowly, the blood became something else. Art. I wanted to find other names for it. I wanted to watch the movie again just to see how the Jackson Pollock blood fell.

Charles and Dominique had already stopped their bickering and were now watching, incredulous, as each one of Jesus's features was systematically reduced to bloody shreds. The message of this film was clear: Violence had replaced all other considerations. It no longer seemed to matter whether the man on screen was black or white. Here was a horror that seemed to belong to people of all races and creeds.

“I can't watch this,” Charles said, shielding his eyes with his palms. “This is too much.”

“It's almost over,” Dominique said, tossing back another handful of popcorn. “The good part's coming up.”

“Father, forgive them,” Jesus said, his voice muffled by blood, his teeth chattering, his eyes fixed on a future no one else around him could possibly see. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

A tear-tracked Mary dug her hands into the ground and gripped two fistfuls of dirt, her features distorted by grief, by disbelief. Critics were saying the movie was supposed to be more accurate than the Bible, that Gibson had spent a great deal of time and money making the crucifixion seem real, but as I watched Jesus's flayed torso struggle with gravity, I couldn't believe that the human body was capable of sustaining such violence. There had to be some limit, some point at which the Roman authorities checked for a pulse. Or perhaps we all had different limits. Charles and Dominique had sometimes spoken of their ancestors, born into slavery, who would receive extensive whippings for no reason at all, and yet many of these same
ancestors had lived long lives of servitude, their wounds healing over, their skin becoming tougher, the nightmare proceeding on as planned.

Compared to the on-screen pain, my pain felt pointless, a thing of no significance. I hadn't been whipped or beaten. I hadn't suffered for my goodness. It was certainly true that since the moment David had outed me some part of me had still been lying in the backseat of my mother's car, watching the milky ribbon of stars and waiting for the blows to come—but even as I knew more of them would surely come, I also knew they would never add up to what I was seeing in the theater. I didn't have the right to complain. I would go through with the therapy. I would complete my application.

•   •   •

T
HIS
WASN
'
T
the first time I'd made a decision based solely on guilt. My first fantasies of martyrdom arrived the day I turned sixteen. Chloe had gifted me her copy of
Jesus Freaks: Martyrs
for my birthday, suggesting that it would draw us closer together if I read it. “It changed my life,” she'd said. “I'm not afraid to follow Christ now, no matter what happens. I don't care if someone holds a gun to my head.”

I had felt special, reading those stories, a series of gruesome deaths at the hands of unbelievers serving as examples of the kind of extreme devotion required in these End Times. I would read the book for hours in my bedroom, the door locked, and imagine armed SWAT teams bursting through
every lock and hinge to interrogate me. I would imagine how proud Chloe and my parents would be if they heard me speaking into the barrel of a machine gun, biting down hard on the muzzle, mumbling: “I will not renounce Jesus Christ as my personal savior.”

But in truth, I worried about what I would really say when the Apocalypse finally arrived. I worried mostly because I felt I was evil somewhere deep inside, in the same place I had stored my fantasies of older men—some of them men from the dealership, some from the church, though their features hardly mattered. Pressed tightly beneath my fear and shame, their faces and bodies swirled into one ominous mass that threatened to rear up and expose me.

Focusing on the violence, even taking pleasure in the fantasy of it, actually did manage to draw Chloe and me closer together. It made it easier for me to ignore my temptations, focus on doing the right thing, imagine a future as a husband to a kind and beautiful Christian wife. And for a few years, we were united in our love of Christ, in our love of martyrdom.

I felt this strong undertow once again while watching
The Passion
. I had come to this theater to mock what I should have known could never properly be mocked by someone with my background. I wanted to run away, hide my face in the cleft of the rock, as Moses famously did in God's presence. As the canned theater lights brightened, I turned away from the white-haired deacons kneeling at the front of the theater, but only after a tentative look back.

•   •   •

T
HE
AIR
OUTSIDE
was cold, and a low, lonely wind accompanied us to the Explorer my father had bought for me just before college. Only a few scattered cars dotted the parking lot, some of them no doubt belonging to the kneeling moviegoers. It was strange to see them there, to see my car alone at the other end of the lot, to see all of the buildings and factories that had brought us to this point in history, two millennia removed from the world we'd seen on screen. A canopy of fog had lowered in the distance and seemed to be spreading over the length of our small city. It was going to cover everything, put a blanket between us and the stars.
What's the point of all of this
, I thought,
once everything goes?

“Where are you going?” Charles said. Charles and Dominique were already standing in front of the Explorer, waiting for me to unlock its doors. I had walked past them without realizing, headed some place I didn't know.

A few minutes later we were sitting in McDonald's, the only well-lit building for miles around. I wasn't certain how we'd gotten there, oblivious as my mind had been since we'd left the theater. It was a wonder I hadn't wrecked us. Driving under these conditions was just another stupid thing about that evening.

“You look like you've seen a ghost,” Dominique said, dipping a greasy fry into a paper cup she'd filled to the brim with ketchup. The clock above her head was drawing close to
midnight, but I had no place to go, tomorrow was Saturday, and we all seemed a little restless.

“I can't get over it,” I said, unwrapping my Big Mac. These burgers never looked how you wanted them to look. I tried pushing the second patty back beneath the bun, but the sandwich began to fall apart, so I took a bite as quickly as I could.

“It's just a movie,” Dominique said. “None of it was real.”

Charles snorted into his Coke. “I've seen worse.”

“Maybe it was worse than what we saw,” I said, feeling the burger glide slowly to my stomach. The bite was too much, I realized. “Maybe we'd lose our minds if we saw how the crucifixion really looked.”

“Maybe,” Charles said, standing up. “Maybe we'd lose our minds if we saw a lot of things.”

Dominique slapped the table. “Try watching someone get shot in your own neighborhood.”

“Have you seen that?” I said. The burger was stuck in the middle of my esophagus. I was going to be sick.